Re: The Once Sentence Challenge!
Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 2:12 am
“Lemme answer for yipyapper: OH GAWD MAH DRILLS!!!” - newnar, renowned literary critic.
“Heres my sentence: Wahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha~!” - A Humbled Fan, short-sighted cynic who obtusely praises bland literature such as Faulks’ ‘Birdsong’ and the pretentious abstraction of Chuck Palahnuik.
“Curves and Din Dins” - an ignorant cretin.
‘Katawa Shoujo' may at first glance appear to be little more than a nostalgic nod, a vintage throwback to the crisp, clipped satire of the anime era. Certainly, this trend of verbose lampooning seems der Produkt des Zeitgeists, rising from the murky depths of the community's reclusive intelligentsia and spreading inexorably into the mainstream. The developers' latest oeuvre deals thematically with Katawa Shoujo's current bête noire, flirting with the very core of the litigious anathema that is anime.
Never before has the evolution of a genre been as conspicuous as this. The developers embrace the reputation that once was shunned and becomes the flagrant enfant terrible with reckless, hedonistic urgency, not unlike a neglected teenager in the throes of unruly adolescence. They face the world with unsettling, anarchic defiance, the explosive yang a stark contrast to the subtle, subversive yin that preceded it - smug in their tangibility, yet internally, furiously voicing the deafening-yet-silent torment against the established ogliarchy.
That is not to say that the developers seek some quid pro quo, appealing to a wider, more interactive market with the shallow, self-serving audacity of our Emins and our Hirsts. This is not solely an exercise in catharsis or a homiletic response to the protagonists themselves, but an allusion toward the evanescent hypocrisy of the wider Gestalt. ‘Katawa Shoujo...’ is in itself a sensitive exploration of the dichotomy of anime's dual purposes, insofar as the authors becomes a farce in and of himself. Cpl_crud stands within the Roman coliseum of our own fretful perturbation, the proverbial Russell Crowe resplendent in battle armour and eagerly awaiting his fate at the temperamental hands of a baying and blood-thirsty audience. He is Brutus, blade in hand, as he looks on dispassionately and proclaims, “None are safe.”
‘Katawa Shoujo’ is at its core a physical representation of the author's inner dialectics, juxtaposing vivid language and a playful predilection toward the thesaurus with the cold, utilitarian steel of a compromised moral landscape. It is something self-referential and stochastic, recherche yet not entirely beyond our reach, and the discordant, coarse recitations of the main character and the eidetic language revel in the abhorrence of humanity: the grotesque, the lewd, the obscene and the visceral. Immediate parallels can be drawn with the Dadaists and the warped surrealism of Salvador Dali. Like his aesthetic predecessors, the developers take what we as mere mortals consider objective truths and metaphorically melts them across the branches of great, bare trees - symbolic of our own twisted Schadenfreude - with the emblematic candles of our own fickle subconscious.
“Heres my sentence: Wahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha~!” - A Humbled Fan, short-sighted cynic who obtusely praises bland literature such as Faulks’ ‘Birdsong’ and the pretentious abstraction of Chuck Palahnuik.
“Curves and Din Dins” - an ignorant cretin.
‘Katawa Shoujo' may at first glance appear to be little more than a nostalgic nod, a vintage throwback to the crisp, clipped satire of the anime era. Certainly, this trend of verbose lampooning seems der Produkt des Zeitgeists, rising from the murky depths of the community's reclusive intelligentsia and spreading inexorably into the mainstream. The developers' latest oeuvre deals thematically with Katawa Shoujo's current bête noire, flirting with the very core of the litigious anathema that is anime.
Never before has the evolution of a genre been as conspicuous as this. The developers embrace the reputation that once was shunned and becomes the flagrant enfant terrible with reckless, hedonistic urgency, not unlike a neglected teenager in the throes of unruly adolescence. They face the world with unsettling, anarchic defiance, the explosive yang a stark contrast to the subtle, subversive yin that preceded it - smug in their tangibility, yet internally, furiously voicing the deafening-yet-silent torment against the established ogliarchy.
That is not to say that the developers seek some quid pro quo, appealing to a wider, more interactive market with the shallow, self-serving audacity of our Emins and our Hirsts. This is not solely an exercise in catharsis or a homiletic response to the protagonists themselves, but an allusion toward the evanescent hypocrisy of the wider Gestalt. ‘Katawa Shoujo...’ is in itself a sensitive exploration of the dichotomy of anime's dual purposes, insofar as the authors becomes a farce in and of himself. Cpl_crud stands within the Roman coliseum of our own fretful perturbation, the proverbial Russell Crowe resplendent in battle armour and eagerly awaiting his fate at the temperamental hands of a baying and blood-thirsty audience. He is Brutus, blade in hand, as he looks on dispassionately and proclaims, “None are safe.”
‘Katawa Shoujo’ is at its core a physical representation of the author's inner dialectics, juxtaposing vivid language and a playful predilection toward the thesaurus with the cold, utilitarian steel of a compromised moral landscape. It is something self-referential and stochastic, recherche yet not entirely beyond our reach, and the discordant, coarse recitations of the main character and the eidetic language revel in the abhorrence of humanity: the grotesque, the lewd, the obscene and the visceral. Immediate parallels can be drawn with the Dadaists and the warped surrealism of Salvador Dali. Like his aesthetic predecessors, the developers take what we as mere mortals consider objective truths and metaphorically melts them across the branches of great, bare trees - symbolic of our own twisted Schadenfreude - with the emblematic candles of our own fickle subconscious.
