World of boats? World of warships? Worship warships. Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe describes boats or something, and that big old swirly boi in Norway: before this year AD 2022 I'd never heard of this story, but now the first two books of the year I’ve read have both referenced it. Not only does this confirm the Mandela effect as real but that it specifically targets Norway! Gothic themes! And liminality! as its textual mediums.
Last night I got back from fetching a rich and succulent slice of my brownie to find two friends engaged in the debate that had defined my understanding of modernity: anime ye or nay? Silently I press my face to the door of this conversation and peer in. one argues it’s good init, and that they like it; the other argues that it’s kind of got some awful tropes and is generally problematic, so they avoid it.
Corithians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
I was once a weeb, a long time in a galaxy far far away.
This debate was one I had found myself pondering from time to time. It is my
Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. I sit on the swirling edge of an
infinite abyss that reaches far down into the underland. I must throw myself
from my heavy boat and cling to a barrel to survive.
As a woke cuckold with weebish tendencies I am in the
perfect position to spear this debate. But I find myself unkeen to pick apart
this we(e)b in all its intricacies. So I hold my silences and boot up the world
of warships.
The game is about boats and bots in boat and they do shooty
at each other and you grind for new boats to shoot at each other with. The
phrase “lead your shots” has been said to me in excess of fifty times.
What is problematic? It’s generally raised as a synonym for
questionable, more specifically, the question is one of moral integrity and the
discomfort a piece of media causes in its representations.
I fired a salvo at a boat, and some of the shots hit. The
aiming was fairly intuitive, it made sense to me; I realize I am unsatisfied
with any experience that is too convenient. I consider driving nails into my
hands to increase the challenge.
When they spoke of anime, I’m not sure they meant all of the
animated media japan produces; maybe they did? But if i was willing to whittle
down to a more streamlined interpretation: the epicentre of the problematic
weeb shit is in the shounen genre. It is here in that matrix of adolescence
that the world holy trifecta of violence, lust and emotional immaturity comes
to hang its hats.
The boat I'm in is hit by a string of shots, she’s on fire
and taking on water. I press R and now that’s not a thing apparently, cool.
The seinen genre is the next age bracket up from shounen.
It’s still fairly fightly fighty, but tends to have less horny and more complex
themes: don’t get me wrong it’s still probably problematic. Berserk is the stand out of the genre and
it’s got some pretty nasty allusions to sexual assault; as to whether it’s just
for shock value or if it adds to development of the text is largely up to the
readers judgment… it is a question, and causes discomfort and… fuck it’s
problematic
My positioning is piss poor, a pair of cruisers flank me on
either side, as I chase one the other fires a volley of torpedoes into my
stern. A third ship is peppering with me and my health is whittled down fast. I
go full send on the throttle and prepare for a desperate ramming manoeuvre.
It occurs to me that only a hardened weeb bothers to dissect the shifting attitudes in weeb sub-genres, only someone who had immersed themselves into the genre could split hairs as such, and that only someone who acknowledges the flaws in the genre could then give an appraisal of their impacts. To bring up berserk’s shittyiness is almost sacrilege. I am not in a perfect position at all. I am alien to both parties here. I am too critical of the genre to relate to the causal enjoyer, but too steeped in my crusty weebism to relate my understanding to an outsider.
I feel my ship pulled into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. it’s slick oily abyss coats the surface of my person and I sink down, and down. Pulled under into the crushing pressure, alone and isolated. In Disco Elysium there is an empty land in the world, called the pale yonder; it is a stretch of white abyss and coats much of the surface of the world.
It occurs to me that
whether a blackened sea or white desert, anything so unbroken and absolute is a
void which threatens to consume all. The interplay of voids now are like the
pages in a manga, but is there a true synthesis going on? Or does each void
only serve to bring the other into sharper relief: the Maelström by Edgar A
Poe?
