friday the 13th
Well! It’s certainly been a hot minute since I’ve last updated the blog - but so much has happened since the beginning of summer. Wrapped up my summer internship, started reading “for fun” again, made memories in New York and Austin, and so much more!
As much as I want to detail every single event in the bursting color they exist as in my mind, I actually want to just discuss some more nebulous themes: memory, emotion, and ambiguity. This is mostly inspired by my recent playthrough of Omori as well as reading Almond by Won-Pyung Sohn, since both these works center on dark traumas experienced through unique character perspectives - namely, detached grief and dissociation. It’s not so much the content of these pieces of media that I want to touch on (I highly recommend experiencing Omori with as little background knowledge as possible), but more so the execution of these stories that inspire me to reflect on what it means to remember, interpret, exist.
Without going too deep into spoilers for either works, I seek to plumb the empty spaces left in their narratives. And it’s through the mediums themselves that ambiguity shines best as a story mechanic. In Omori, it’s the open-ended true “good” ending - as well as the many bad/neutral endings that occur if you pursue ignorance. In Almond, the bare prose given the narrator’s condition leaves space for your own interpretation of the events that transpire. One of my freshman year classes at Berkeley - I believe it was ComLit 20C with a title like “The Divine in Western Literature” - talked about how darkness embodies ambiguity in literature, and how it’s in uncertainty that divinity exists. Not in broad daylight, but in the elusive and mysterious blanket of night. The dark, primordial waters of space and the womb are where miracles lie. All of this to say: I like ambiguity because nothing is as earthbound as the present.
Here’s where my thoughts on memory and emotions come in. Memory is inherently suffused with emotions. What we feel in any given moment can then expand the scene in our mind upon reflection, give it a greater narrative weight and significance within the story of our lives. At the same time, present emotions and experiences can alter how we view said memories - making it so that the past becomes murky or rose-tinted or twisted. In both Omori and Almond, the story mechanics lead us to continually question situations - what does one deserve in this life? What place does emotion have in this scene, and how would it change what this event means to you? As a spectator of a story’s events, I think it’s easy to draw immediate conclusions or answers because, regardless of how open-ended a work is, there at least exists some sort of message that you can pull out. But it’s when you turn that observing eye inwards that crystallizing those answers from the dark feels impossible.
At the time, I had taken that ComLit class for granted - just some random “useless” breadth class - but in retrospect…a lot of the themes we explored are ones I still use to analyze media. I think about that a lot. It makes me more cautious about assigning anything as “useless” just because they have less tangible functionalities, less social currency. Even though I’ve taken countless more “applicable” classes, I’m always taken back to those precious, sleepy hours in a warm, sunlit room.
Anyways - this whole ramble has no right answer! Yay for ambiguity! I like thinking that even as you permanently mark words to white space, the nature of language will always make room for the receiver hehe. I actually fully intended to make this update about the events from this summer, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot on what it means to record parts of your life. Bo Burnham mentioned something along the lines that social media has made it so we live our own lives through spectating - there’s an expectation that present moments will be immortalized by the camera and by how you choose to publically portray them. After playing Omori and reading Almond, it only further cemented my desire to treasure my memories as fluid, bright, vulnerable to the present…at least, for now.
Some other pieces of media I’ve been enjoying lately: read the All for the Game trilogy, One Last Stop, Cemetery Boys, and the Hair-Carpet Weavers! I’ve also been meaning to get back into finishing my playthrough of Hades as well as Stardew Valley :’) (Tempted to do another Fire Emblem: Three Houses run through as well) On the manga/anime/donghua/webtoons front: really loved watching 86 and Link Click; caught up on Tokyo Revengers, Ajin, Chainsaw Man, Vanitas no Carte, and Pond Snail Robber. All in all - lots of content I’ve enjoyed these last couple of months!
