Mizurui Mass Psychogenic Illness

I’m also insane about Waiting for Godot, the play about waiting that Rui mentions a couple times, and I frequently post about it in relation to Rui and Mizuki. The quote in my blog description is from it, as is any dialogue attributed to Vladimir and Estragon, it’s what I’m referring to with any mention of Godot or waiting or “nothing to be done”.

Organizational tag directory (look here if you want to find a specific kind of thing I post or know what MSMS or Bitter Almonds are referring to):

LMAO uncharitable to who???? Tsukasa isn’t real and doesn’t exist outside of the writers writing him, if they write his story misogynistically then his story is misogynistic, which obviously reflects on his character like everyone else’s. Do you think Project Sekai: Colorful Stage Feat. Hatsune Miku is a documentary and the writers are the biased documentarian team warping the True Image of Tenma Tsukasa or something? Everything they write about him is what makes up his character. I was talking about Tsukasa specifically because I read Phoenix and was talking about Phoenix and Sakurako’s role in Phoenix and Phoenix is a Tsukasa event. What.

1) I don’t feel that Tsukasa has been meaningfully shown to see Nene as someone to catch up to, certainly not as a motivating factor in his own event, whereas I feel that a lot of time has been given to showing Nene thinking of Tsukasa as someone to catch up to. Nowhere did I imply he hasn’t called Nene a rival, I did imply that I don’t feel like I’ve been meaningfully shown that being true through story structure, and I maintain that opinion.

2) As well as Kazamatsuri, Byakkomachi, Futaba, various rival bands and idols in Leoni and MMJ stories, there are female NPCs that are looked up to, but the people who look up to them are only girls. Whereas there’s a slew of influential male thespians and fathers and relatives and street musicians and executives and the like that have quite a bit of relevance to the stories of boys AND girls. I said that. It’s bad that no men look up to any women! It’s frustrating that Phoenix felt like it was set up as if it might prove a meaningful exemption to that by giving focus to a fun, voiced, animate, and established female character who’s really good at her job and has some meaningful similarities to Tsukasa, and then the actual climax is pinned on a man who doesn’t have a voice or face. Structurally, the bait and switch sucks.

3) I understand the sequence of events, I understand the story shown, I understand the logic of Tsukasa’s actions, I’m not calling it a plot hole or other failure of internal logic, I don’t like it. I read the story. I was posting about it because I read the story. I think Tsukasa’s figurative unreachable Phoenix in Phoenix not being the diva of the Phoenix stage who he acknowledges as significantly more skilled than him who is playing the Phoenix his character in the play can’t reach was unsatisfying. The character who is his figurative Phoenix being a man who is nothing more than a name and text in a visual novel is unsatisfying. I don’t care if him not having a voice or model is symbolic of Tsukasa’s inability to reach him being so wide a gap that he can’t bring his image to sceen or something similar, I think that’s a fair interpretation (that you didn’t offer) and I think it doesn’t cancel out how unsatisfying it is. You’re not gonna rephrase it in a way where I suddenly like it more, I understood it fine the first time.

Also that post was way less uncharitable and way less about Tsukasa’s interiority than the ones I made literally immediately before? The one where I’m like “I found Sakurako’s place in the narrative structure of Phoenix as a woman wild and unsatisfying in the context of a game that doesn’t have any men look up to women, cause it made me believe that’s what it was setting up” is the one you’re nitpicking about being discharitable and not the ones where I’m like “I don’t like reading Tsukasa events cause he’s stupid (HYPERBOLE)”?? You have some interesting priorities.

Mizuki doesn’t have any flaws, she’s perfect.

In terms of what hurts herself and others the most, the stubbornness of her belief that her story only has bad endings. Mizuki takes her catastrophizing as what a situation concretely is; she buys in on her terror and pessimism and defeatism as being the realistic and sure outcome, she believes it when her fears and self-hatred speak for the the people that love her in her head. It’s a very understandable and tragic coping mechanism for the routine loss and abuse she’s endured her whole life, if she expects the worst it won’t hurt as much when it comes, but it means she gives up on trying for anything more because it feels out of reach to her, regardless of whether it’s actually attainable. She’s always had to be on guard against attacks coming in between the lines, she doesn’t know how to handle love said straightforwardly. There has to be some condition, there has to be a limit in scope or time, there has to be some unflattering comparison, she knows she’s just fundamentally fucked and dispensable. Even if she could believe the love shown to her is real, they’ll all find something better eventually, and she’ll be left behind, she’d just drag them down by clinging, she’d be stupid to believe anything else.

She lives with a sword of Damocles hanging above her neck, knowing that in any instant, if the wind blows the wrong way, she’ll be beheaded. And this leaves her flighty, it leaves her thinking she knows better than all the people around her, she thinks she knows that no matter what they say or do or promise, they don’t really mean it. She retreats to her own world, never sharing anything with the people who want to know her, who want to know her joy and despair, who want to be there for her through both, who want to give her as much as she’s given them, who want to connect with her, who want to stay with her, she shuts all that down.