Did you learn to love alone? Or was it presented to you with bedazzling lights on a Disney TV show?
Spun into some reminiscing aunt's yarn?
Lamented and hungered on an ordinary girls' night out, with a few too many soda pops?
What if that's all it ever was? Just another sensory phenomenon?
Eschew. Weak.
Something we, by design, tailor into a great -- the greatest -- strength.
That we use as a digestible learning utility. To teach us in our need, in our passion, we uncover shockingly efficient self-mobility. It drives us to erect bridges, flatten nations, reach a distant lattice of untouchable sky. Overcome every obstacle that dares belittle it.
As such, is it not just as destructive, as superficial, as illusory and chemical as lust? As hatred?
Is it not simply appetite in another skin?
And yet we love to love most of all. We love to love because it is as sweet as a melting fringe of cotton candy on our tongue. It echoes the soft and smooth cheek of an infant. A dressing of lavender across the nose. It soothes us. It's peace. It whittles the chaos into something we can weaponize, instead of be threatened by. We turn the world into our sandbox with love.
With it, we can wash hell in the blanket of an infinite hanging garden.
....Or is it because a rose chooses to grow, hell makes room for others to dot the flower bed?
I think the one thing about Saya no Uta (aka: Song of Saya) that most prominently, most garishly fades in with clarity through the horror of its so-called 'Lovecraftian visual novel romance story', can be gleaned from its original classification as an H-game (aka: adult game, porn-ish thing, with boobies and stuff and very NSFL sex scenes with questionable ages in the equation). Something that has, some (including myself) may say, thankfully been cut/censored from the official Steam page that it was granted this August. Not to say it makes the game any less nauseating, or grim and gory.
Nothing about Saya no Uta is right in the head, it can appear.
The reason it has such a cult following, however, stems from the itching notion that it might just know that itself.
Gen Urobuchi has a fetish for deconstructing the sugar coating. Of revealing the rotting innards that reside within, only to peel that layer away and present something that, like many truths, exist somewhere in the middle. Because the truth, he proposes, doesn't just hurt. It slices you up, gouges your eyes while forcing your loved ones to watch, and then breaks your dreams into an unrecognizable puddle of festering sulfur. And yet it is there. We will never want to live without it. We just wait for it to come to us. And somehow, in some way, we can control what we make of it. And in that locus, there isn't paradise -- in many cases, there is not even a hint of hope; but there is definitely a story to tell, with a beginning, middle, and end.
And one thing we've been shown stories can do when told well: force us to look them in the eye and not blink until the credit crawl.
In this case, Saya no Uta is story; it is all story. Being of the Visual Novel genre, (Japan's equivalent of an adventure game), it directly riffs on the stock 'romance visual novel' arsenal. It stars an attractive male protagonist who stumbles into a relationship with an innocent-looking girl, and slowly becomes infatuated with her. So the star-crossed spool begins to unfurl.
Only one thing: he has just been in a vehicular incident which killed his parents and left him for dead. He should have joined them if not for an operation that, conveniently, saved his life, but bestowed upon him a peculiar neurological disorder.
In his perception, the physical world has been warped into a fleshy, devilish canvas of grotesque and monstrous imagery. It is an alien landscape built on undeniably familiar foundations: people, facilities, machines -- all of them, somewhere within pinpoint-able and he can faintly make out, but transformed into carcasses that hiss and bubble and reek of lurid organs and a loathesome absence of any fathomable humanity. Left in the wake of his debilitating accident and miraculous tango with death is a vacuum of pus-ridden, feeler-teeming tumors claiming to be people that seem borne from some godless night sweats. His eyes painted over with an accursed ointment, tainting his world and replacing it instead with demonic aberrations stalking the porous cityscape, squawking spittle at him, and cold, damp slabs of bloody enamel oozing iridescent membrane where a bed, or sofa, or chair used to be.
All of this, all its miserable, irreversible, lonesome glamour; it's all he has, now. It is his life.
So why, then, is this girl somehow, through the haze of it all, in his midst?
A living, breathing, doe-eyed, porcelain-skinned, slender and perfectly human girl, untouched by this utter dreck of a world?
To be clear, the original may be more 'sexually explicit'. But no matter how you present it, it is always going to be a twisted romance story. This does not take anything away from that essence; that of descent into madness. For many people, the Steam version of Saya no Uta makes it actually playable -- and with valid reason. The nature of the titular character's age already accounts for that.
Keeping that in mind, it is this framing (that of a romance story) that spins the aching narrative on a head. After a certain point, the themes it explores almost reflect upon the game's genre roots themselves, by addressing the nature of sensuality; of carnal stimulation, and how it eventually, inevitably, translates into raison d'etre. Everything the main character becomes is largely a result of the surfaces he can no longer see past -- the entire world is now one big heap of revulsion, all save for a single girl, his sole source of visual pleasure, happiness. Comfort.
In psychology, analogously, one can parallel this to the splitting conceit: reducing mental categorizations to absolutes. Your mind is unable to handle the load of an ambiguous or complex set of nuances, and splits everything into two: the best and the worst, the fastest and the slowest, the smart and the stupid. Suddenly, everything is black and white, because 'everything' had become too much.
Naturally, in a world where there are only monsters and angels, you would be resigned to extremity. To raw emotion. This override of rationale, of systemic morality, is borne from the necessity to live despite everything pointing you down a road that favors giving your life up to whatever projectile or encroaching flatbed would take it. There is no rather. No 'as opposed to'.
What is the point of living if you hate everything, and, soon to come, yourself?
A simple hook ready to spill out the mouths of homework-resenting teenagers, everywhere. Yet Saya no Uta strives to make it resonant through its high-concept premise, one that tackles the conceit with keen visual diegesis and a mostly consistent sequence of narrative contrasts which grate and blend together to horrifying, heartbreaking effect.
If hatred will destroy us, then certainly, that means only one thing can do the saving.
And it is near. Its net will surely catch us.
Soon, it will be the only thing in the universe.
Whatever the universe is, it becomes only if we let it.
So, too, will lust settle only if we receive it.
Fear, likewise. All emotion. 'Good' and 'bad'.
What can drive a person, some may wonder, to kill another? To kill oneself?
Where does it come from?
It may not be too far-fetched to say it comes from somewhere familiar. It comes from the same place that allows us respite; solace in the heat of passion; pleasure.
Saya no Uta plays with the trappings (though doesn't exactly break free of them) of the realms of sexual indulgence through media such as video games (and even books) by centering its narrative on the "overwhelming" power of sight, one of the most expansive and busiest of all senses. Its entire premise revolves around one's 'vision' of the world being corrupted, and it evokes this through immaculately wretching, belching SFX and appropriately uncanny CG art; when it counts.
But when does 'vision' become something more?
Though primitively a channel through which the material world is given shape and form, vision also exists within us; the power of perceiving feelings, contexts, illusions and beauty out of otherwise meaningless, conjoined patterns. Is it not such vision that lends us the ability to empathize? To 'imagine'? To picture ourselves in the place of another, and how that would smell, taste, feel?
Through vision, we view the world and all abstract concepts in a neatly defined diorama.
Would it be fetching, then, to propose that, by tainting such vision, so too will everything else follow?
The taste of cotton candy. The feeling of a baby's cheek. The smell of lavender. The way a bed presses against us.
Who knows if it is this 'vision' that transforms our perception of the world, or if it is something wedged, something taken from our capacity to perceive and confer to goodness, that transforms our vision. As put via a standard psychological bite, "I am trembling. Therefore, I am afraid."
At the end of the day, this employment of the contorted eye works towards an interestingly physical interpretation of human nature; after all, if we can be driven to the sky from beauty, then we can be driven to the ground via ugliness.
When discussing Saya no Uta, many refer to it as a 'Cthulian dating sim', in jest. Though (a-hem, MARY MARY, QUITE) I'd call that a bit contrary in practice, on paper it takes one leg from the beast quite visibly: that of insanity, and how man, when driven to it, derive it from horror they see and yet cannot understand.
One reason some individuals choose to play something like a dating sim, to get every CG screen, woo every girl/boy, see every secret ending and easter egg and cheat code, is in loneliness.
It is well acknowledged how ignorance and alienation can give rise to unhealthy cycles; obsessions. Alcoholism. Drug addiction. Porn addiction. Self-harm. Escapism.
When you believe the world, the future, is stripped from you, you tend to resort to either turning everything off, or keeping one thing endlessly on. In the case of the latter, this may give way to instincts that are amoral, primal in nature. The easiest, most vivid stimulus becomes substitute to all imprinting of logical, moral thought you once possessed. This can progress until, eventually, the person you were is no longer living inside your body. They died in there. But somehow, the shell is still moving.
Now free to latch onto the unthinkable.
The sensory. Which eventually, inevitably, translates to (see above, ya).
How a genre with an audience fueled by notions of good company becomes the subject of Saya no Uta's ruminations is, deceptively, quite simple: when you indulge yourself in a story crafted to realize some deep-down fantasy, you are indulging, in part, in an aesthetic. How this aesthetic shapes your understanding of the world and your own emotions is ironically complex, because it is ultimately all external information (the story's) coalescing with pre-existing information (yours) that in turn creates a fleeting, temporary sustained sense of passion, but underneath are just triggers and levers. How Saya no Uta conveys this is through telling a forbidden-love story in the ero guro aesthetic, an old Japanese art 'style' and theme rooted in combining elements of erotica and body/gothic/decadent horror in one dissonant whole. In result, it is presenting the mystery of the human condition, contrasting the erotic with the horrible, the shock-and-awe moments with the serene, the sane with the mad, and what we see with what is actually, truly there. Communicating this through the conventions of a 'romance fantasy', it mixes desire and repugnance into an odd, never quite right concoction.
It insinuates that our lust for life, our lust for beauty, our lust for self-validation, is innate, and prone to paradoxes. To the inherent conflict between what exists on the surface, and what lurks below.
And yet, it is little different from the nugget out of which spews, flourishes, and charges something like love.
What happens to a person if that spew is all they have left?
"A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love."
- Stendhal
Spun into some reminiscing aunt's yarn?
Lamented and hungered on an ordinary girls' night out, with a few too many soda pops?
What if that's all it ever was? Just another sensory phenomenon?
Eschew. Weak.
Something we, by design, tailor into a great -- the greatest -- strength.
That we use as a digestible learning utility. To teach us in our need, in our passion, we uncover shockingly efficient self-mobility. It drives us to erect bridges, flatten nations, reach a distant lattice of untouchable sky. Overcome every obstacle that dares belittle it.
As such, is it not just as destructive, as superficial, as illusory and chemical as lust? As hatred?
Is it not simply appetite in another skin?
And yet we love to love most of all. We love to love because it is as sweet as a melting fringe of cotton candy on our tongue. It echoes the soft and smooth cheek of an infant. A dressing of lavender across the nose. It soothes us. It's peace. It whittles the chaos into something we can weaponize, instead of be threatened by. We turn the world into our sandbox with love.
With it, we can wash hell in the blanket of an infinite hanging garden.
....Or is it because a rose chooses to grow, hell makes room for others to dot the flower bed?
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
I think the one thing about Saya no Uta (aka: Song of Saya) that most prominently, most garishly fades in with clarity through the horror of its so-called 'Lovecraftian visual novel romance story', can be gleaned from its original classification as an H-game (aka: adult game, porn-ish thing, with boobies and stuff and very NSFL sex scenes with questionable ages in the equation). Something that has, some (including myself) may say, thankfully been cut/censored from the official Steam page that it was granted this August. Not to say it makes the game any less nauseating, or grim and gory.
Nothing about Saya no Uta is right in the head, it can appear.
The reason it has such a cult following, however, stems from the itching notion that it might just know that itself.
Gen Urobuchi has a fetish for deconstructing the sugar coating. Of revealing the rotting innards that reside within, only to peel that layer away and present something that, like many truths, exist somewhere in the middle. Because the truth, he proposes, doesn't just hurt. It slices you up, gouges your eyes while forcing your loved ones to watch, and then breaks your dreams into an unrecognizable puddle of festering sulfur. And yet it is there. We will never want to live without it. We just wait for it to come to us. And somehow, in some way, we can control what we make of it. And in that locus, there isn't paradise -- in many cases, there is not even a hint of hope; but there is definitely a story to tell, with a beginning, middle, and end.
And one thing we've been shown stories can do when told well: force us to look them in the eye and not blink until the credit crawl.
In this case, Saya no Uta is story; it is all story. Being of the Visual Novel genre, (Japan's equivalent of an adventure game), it directly riffs on the stock 'romance visual novel' arsenal. It stars an attractive male protagonist who stumbles into a relationship with an innocent-looking girl, and slowly becomes infatuated with her. So the star-crossed spool begins to unfurl.
Only one thing: he has just been in a vehicular incident which killed his parents and left him for dead. He should have joined them if not for an operation that, conveniently, saved his life, but bestowed upon him a peculiar neurological disorder.
In his perception, the physical world has been warped into a fleshy, devilish canvas of grotesque and monstrous imagery. It is an alien landscape built on undeniably familiar foundations: people, facilities, machines -- all of them, somewhere within pinpoint-able and he can faintly make out, but transformed into carcasses that hiss and bubble and reek of lurid organs and a loathesome absence of any fathomable humanity. Left in the wake of his debilitating accident and miraculous tango with death is a vacuum of pus-ridden, feeler-teeming tumors claiming to be people that seem borne from some godless night sweats. His eyes painted over with an accursed ointment, tainting his world and replacing it instead with demonic aberrations stalking the porous cityscape, squawking spittle at him, and cold, damp slabs of bloody enamel oozing iridescent membrane where a bed, or sofa, or chair used to be.
All of this, all its miserable, irreversible, lonesome glamour; it's all he has, now. It is his life.
So why, then, is this girl somehow, through the haze of it all, in his midst?
A living, breathing, doe-eyed, porcelain-skinned, slender and perfectly human girl, untouched by this utter dreck of a world?
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
To be clear, the original may be more 'sexually explicit'. But no matter how you present it, it is always going to be a twisted romance story. This does not take anything away from that essence; that of descent into madness. For many people, the Steam version of Saya no Uta makes it actually playable -- and with valid reason. The nature of the titular character's age already accounts for that.
Keeping that in mind, it is this framing (that of a romance story) that spins the aching narrative on a head. After a certain point, the themes it explores almost reflect upon the game's genre roots themselves, by addressing the nature of sensuality; of carnal stimulation, and how it eventually, inevitably, translates into raison d'etre. Everything the main character becomes is largely a result of the surfaces he can no longer see past -- the entire world is now one big heap of revulsion, all save for a single girl, his sole source of visual pleasure, happiness. Comfort.
In psychology, analogously, one can parallel this to the splitting conceit: reducing mental categorizations to absolutes. Your mind is unable to handle the load of an ambiguous or complex set of nuances, and splits everything into two: the best and the worst, the fastest and the slowest, the smart and the stupid. Suddenly, everything is black and white, because 'everything' had become too much.
Naturally, in a world where there are only monsters and angels, you would be resigned to extremity. To raw emotion. This override of rationale, of systemic morality, is borne from the necessity to live despite everything pointing you down a road that favors giving your life up to whatever projectile or encroaching flatbed would take it. There is no rather. No 'as opposed to'.
What is the point of living if you hate everything, and, soon to come, yourself?
A simple hook ready to spill out the mouths of homework-resenting teenagers, everywhere. Yet Saya no Uta strives to make it resonant through its high-concept premise, one that tackles the conceit with keen visual diegesis and a mostly consistent sequence of narrative contrasts which grate and blend together to horrifying, heartbreaking effect.
If hatred will destroy us, then certainly, that means only one thing can do the saving.
And it is near. Its net will surely catch us.
Soon, it will be the only thing in the universe.
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
Whatever the universe is, it becomes only if we let it.
So, too, will lust settle only if we receive it.
Fear, likewise. All emotion. 'Good' and 'bad'.
What can drive a person, some may wonder, to kill another? To kill oneself?
Where does it come from?
It may not be too far-fetched to say it comes from somewhere familiar. It comes from the same place that allows us respite; solace in the heat of passion; pleasure.
Saya no Uta plays with the trappings (though doesn't exactly break free of them) of the realms of sexual indulgence through media such as video games (and even books) by centering its narrative on the "overwhelming" power of sight, one of the most expansive and busiest of all senses. Its entire premise revolves around one's 'vision' of the world being corrupted, and it evokes this through immaculately wretching, belching SFX and appropriately uncanny CG art; when it counts.
But when does 'vision' become something more?
Though primitively a channel through which the material world is given shape and form, vision also exists within us; the power of perceiving feelings, contexts, illusions and beauty out of otherwise meaningless, conjoined patterns. Is it not such vision that lends us the ability to empathize? To 'imagine'? To picture ourselves in the place of another, and how that would smell, taste, feel?
Through vision, we view the world and all abstract concepts in a neatly defined diorama.
Would it be fetching, then, to propose that, by tainting such vision, so too will everything else follow?
The taste of cotton candy. The feeling of a baby's cheek. The smell of lavender. The way a bed presses against us.
Who knows if it is this 'vision' that transforms our perception of the world, or if it is something wedged, something taken from our capacity to perceive and confer to goodness, that transforms our vision. As put via a standard psychological bite, "I am trembling. Therefore, I am afraid."
At the end of the day, this employment of the contorted eye works towards an interestingly physical interpretation of human nature; after all, if we can be driven to the sky from beauty, then we can be driven to the ground via ugliness.
When discussing Saya no Uta, many refer to it as a 'Cthulian dating sim', in jest. Though (a-hem, MARY MARY, QUITE) I'd call that a bit contrary in practice, on paper it takes one leg from the beast quite visibly: that of insanity, and how man, when driven to it, derive it from horror they see and yet cannot understand.
ღ꧁ღ╭⊱ꕥ
One reason some individuals choose to play something like a dating sim, to get every CG screen, woo every girl/boy, see every secret ending and easter egg and cheat code, is in loneliness.
It is well acknowledged how ignorance and alienation can give rise to unhealthy cycles; obsessions. Alcoholism. Drug addiction. Porn addiction. Self-harm. Escapism.
When you believe the world, the future, is stripped from you, you tend to resort to either turning everything off, or keeping one thing endlessly on. In the case of the latter, this may give way to instincts that are amoral, primal in nature. The easiest, most vivid stimulus becomes substitute to all imprinting of logical, moral thought you once possessed. This can progress until, eventually, the person you were is no longer living inside your body. They died in there. But somehow, the shell is still moving.
Now free to latch onto the unthinkable.
The sensory. Which eventually, inevitably, translates to (see above, ya).
How a genre with an audience fueled by notions of good company becomes the subject of Saya no Uta's ruminations is, deceptively, quite simple: when you indulge yourself in a story crafted to realize some deep-down fantasy, you are indulging, in part, in an aesthetic. How this aesthetic shapes your understanding of the world and your own emotions is ironically complex, because it is ultimately all external information (the story's) coalescing with pre-existing information (yours) that in turn creates a fleeting, temporary sustained sense of passion, but underneath are just triggers and levers. How Saya no Uta conveys this is through telling a forbidden-love story in the ero guro aesthetic, an old Japanese art 'style' and theme rooted in combining elements of erotica and body/gothic/decadent horror in one dissonant whole. In result, it is presenting the mystery of the human condition, contrasting the erotic with the horrible, the shock-and-awe moments with the serene, the sane with the mad, and what we see with what is actually, truly there. Communicating this through the conventions of a 'romance fantasy', it mixes desire and repugnance into an odd, never quite right concoction.
It insinuates that our lust for life, our lust for beauty, our lust for self-validation, is innate, and prone to paradoxes. To the inherent conflict between what exists on the surface, and what lurks below.
And yet, it is little different from the nugget out of which spews, flourishes, and charges something like love.
What happens to a person if that spew is all they have left?
"A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love."
- Stendhal
If this thread necessitates closure due to the contents of said game, as well as worry over the discussion it may generate (or devolve to), then all the power to the moderation team to do so. Regardless, I've already shared my rambly two cents on the game in public form, which is all I primarily set out to do. :P
For those who are interested in similar games or VNs, check out Silent Hill 2, Higurashi: When they Cry (and its sequel episodes, Umineko), Steins;Gate, and A Serbian Film.
Just kidding. That last one's a movie.
[Saya no Uta's Steam release version has been cleaned up of its original, harsher sexual material for a more standard, albeit still dark, playing experience. Worth noting it is not for the faint of heart, but short enough to be finished in one sitting, and the titular character, Saya, is still depicted as a teenaged girl.]
Happy New Year!
For those who are interested in similar games or VNs, check out Silent Hill 2, Higurashi: When they Cry (and its sequel episodes, Umineko), Steins;Gate, and A Serbian Film.
Just kidding. That last one's a movie.
[Saya no Uta's Steam release version has been cleaned up of its original, harsher sexual material for a more standard, albeit still dark, playing experience. Worth noting it is not for the faint of heart, but short enough to be finished in one sitting, and the titular character, Saya, is still depicted as a teenaged girl.]
Happy New Year!
