Overthinking the apocalypse

Based on my unreasonably obsessive dives into the themes of Asellus from 1997 SaGa Frontier, background lore, prototype concepts, multiverse ideas from gatcha games etc. etc. (1, 2), this is how I'd make a more fleshed out Asellus chapter as a SaGa Frontier mod, if I was able to make mods. Of course this is tailored to my personal interpretation of the texts, but I do not mean it as purely creative fanfic; everything is motivated by my understanding of abandoned concepts and underlying themes.

I thought I would make an analysis of how SaGa Frontier uses a lot of kendō terminology, but Sevon already did most of the job. I still have a few remarks and I sent them as a comment, but I'm saving a copy here in case Wordpress spam moderation silently eats my comment or something.

Fig. 1: Kirikaeshi, a kendō exercise (＊写真はイメージです).

Assorted mysteries that passed my mind while writing the analysis of lesbian themes in Asellus' plot. Heavy spoilers for everything in SF1.

White Rose: Look, Lady Asellus! It's the new T-shirt for Asellus' chapter! Isn't it cute? Asellus (internally): Dammit, right on her squishies… Red Turnip: Girl you look great in this! Very fresh! Asellus (internally): Red Turniiiipppp…!! (Fan comic: Sugiyama Daria (Dah) on Pixiv.)

I've been drawn to the yuri scenario in SaGa Frontier (1997) for almost three decades. I realise my strong feelings about her are in part because we had so little going on back then—Asellus was a formative experience, and not just for me; finding some actual representation for our confused experiences was a landmark for many a young lesbian gamer. But I do think this story is a landmark for more reasons than mere nostalgia; for one thing, it's one of the first sapphic scenarios ever written by a woman in this medium, in an era when much tamer stuff was heavily tabooed both in Japan and abroad; it was written as a direct challenge of sexist tropes in videogames, 17 years before Gamergate; it discusses the psychology of sapphic desire, beyond the dehumanising trope of “the pure-hearted bond between pure girls of purity who love purely”; and I am fascinated even by the twists and turns of mask-and-signal in this game, by the way a super obviously overtly sapphic character is still prevented from stating it out loud, the way the game must come up with an excuse for plausible deniability—despite this very type of queerbaiting being called out in the game itself (Zozma MVP \o/), many years ahead of when yuri culture collectively took to question the implications of “Class S” relationships.

Asellus' drama as a half-Mystic is that of being the only one of her kind, and here in the real world, too, she's an alluring anomaly; like the gothic court of Château Aiguille, she stands as a piece of liminal art, outside the flow of time.

So when I was writing the brief history of early yuri in console games, the Asellus analysis section grew more and more and accrued author quotes and etymological footnotes and whatnot, until it was way bigger than the entire rest of the post. I have therefore given Asellus her own glass coffin… I mean, her own entry in the blog series.

The other day I was reading The Yuri-ika special issue on yuri culture (Yuri-bunka no Genzai; #12, December 2014), and thinking of how there was a period when some people cared a lot between distinguish pornographic vs. non-pornographic pop-media, and in the West “yuri” was used for the porn side of the divide, while in Japan “yuri” was the non-porn side.

Later I found online a Japanese list of yuri movies, and included is Queen Crab (2015) by Brett Piper, which focuses on the relationship between a woman and her giant killer crab. Which I concur, it's totally a yuri movie. But that made me think of how many different definitions of “yuri” I've seen, usually trying to delineate a specific feeling by contrasting it with some other type of sapphic fiction.

Stardew Valley is a Harvest Moon fangame but it superseded Harvest Moon in every aspect, plus it's finally gay so it wins by default. But I don't like how maximalist it is. Now the Bokumono series itself had already become a spreadsheet game when Stardew came out, so I don't exactly blame it for that. But looking now at the original SNES Bokumono, I am impressed by how much much it manages to evoke the feeling of idyllic farm life with minimal elements; a perfect hit of good pixel art, moody seasonal themes, tight little gameplay mechanics, and just enough little things to discover to keep you hooked until marriage or so. It achieves a whole lot with very little, because the very little is well-placed; as a result I feel like I can wrap my head around the game, in a way I can't with Stardew and most farming games, including later Bokumono.

I have a lisp on /s/ that comes out only occasionally. It's not the common one where it sounds like the English “th” in “think” (/θ/), but some darkened, wet variant. Probably a lateral lisp ([ʪ]), but who knows.

Like I can't know because I can't do it on purpose, it’s both unconscious and sporadic. Worse yet, when it does come out, I’m completely unable to hear it—unless I'm recorded doing it by accident and listen to it later, then it becomes obvious. And that's the story of how my speech dysfunctions taught me important lessons about phonology.

Continuing from the topic of “if not Duolingo then what”, we have discussed comprehensive voluntary reading. The Reader may well be thinking, “but I don’t know a single word in Arabic; surely you can’t expect me to pick up lesbian smut in Arabic and learn the language from scratch? No matter how much I’m addicted to lesbian smut, I wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it”. Yes, dear Reader, I feel you; who among us hasn't lamented our inability to enjoy Lebanese yuri fanfics in the original Levantine vernacular?

Acquiring a language from comprehensive input is a highly effective approach, but it assumes you’re already done with a “bootstrap” period, where you've gathered enough basic vocabulary and grammar to be able to understand the gist of the input. But if you're starting from zero, how are you are supposed to complete the “bootstrapping”, then? There are many methods, but I want to talk about one of my favourites: tandem learning.

Today’s news was about the stock market crash of Duolingo, and I was talking about how this is one of the few positive things about “AI”: It accelerates the enshittification cycle so much that it may end up killing stuff that is detrimental to society in the first place. Speaking as a linguist who has read the literature on second language acquisition and understands 4 languages, I’ve always maintained that Duolingo is a trap; it will keep you spinning on wheels and feeling as if you’re learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours on it and fully gold a tree and you’ll get nowhere. You would have progressed way more if you had spent the same amount of effort with any other method of language learning, including old-fashioned pen-and-paper grammar drills from textbooks. And the grammar drills suck, too. It’s just that Duolingo sucks ass.

Which brings us to the topic of which methods are actually good. And a commenter gave me the perfect answer: warrior cats.

Continuing from Part 1, we're now in the 1990s and will take a look at the videogame boom of home consoles, at a time when it was still difficult to find games where you could be a girl at all—let alone a girl who kisses others girls. Nonetheless, there’s a few early cases of lesbian feelings portrayed to varying degrees of overtness, and in fascinating ways; I ended up writing an entire essay about SaGa Frontier in particular, now split into part 3.

It is a curious consequence of marginalisation that it’s much easier to find lesbian characters in porn stories than in non-erotic content. Without the titillation appeal, all you're left with is human relationships, and homoexclusive affection is a bigger taboo than sex; straight people can conceive of queer sex as a sort of fetish or deviancy, but to marry a woman and be happy without a man? Why, this threatens the very fabric of (a shitty) society! On the one hand, this dooms most of 90s console GL to the realm of mask-and-signal, not unlike old Hollywood movies, never able to put into words the love-that-shall-not-be-named. (One of the first console games to have an overtly lesbian-identified character whom you can date is, meaningfully, the Utena game from 1998). On the other hand, the focus on relationships puts emphasis on emotional issues that didn’t feature at all in the earlier, sex-oriented games. However, we do not have in these games any representation of actual Japanese queer culture or how real-life queer people live; rather, we have fantasy-world explorations of gender expression and sapphic attraction beyond normative boundaries, many of which struck a chord with queer gamers at the time—and still today.