#kensuke

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Corpse Party

Takeru: Seriously, what do you see in that guy?

I read the Erogamer sort of as it was coming out, and then again last year. I guess I'm not sure whether you want a brief review here, but I'll give it:

There are a lot of ways in which I think the Erogamer ends up being less than the sum of its parts, but the thing is, those parts tend to be really good. It's a story with a high density of ideas, and it's clear that the author really enjoys thinking about things, and having the audience think about things too. When I say "less than the sum of its parts" I mean something like ... it often feels like it's lurching from one scene to the next? Like it's a set of things that the author found interesting and worthwhile, which I also found interesting and worthwhile, but they feel like they don't quite point in the same direction, or belong in the same novel. I'm going to attribute most of this to the fact that it was a forum quest that wasn't written with any grand plan in mind, and where the author only cared a little about trying to tie everything up together.

It also wears its authorial interests on its sleeve in a way that I tend to find charming. Not just the sex stuff (which I actually find the least charming) but the metafiction stuff, the parkour subplot, the conspiracies within conspiracies, the obsessions with psychology and math. This is A+ writing, it's one of the Authorial Virtues, every author should be writing about the stuff that they find super interesting and want me to find super interesting.

Kensuke actually diverges from that in a lot of ways. I'm not finished writing it, and haven't shown it to many people yet, but I think it's more "one thing" than Erogamer is. I think that you can draw a thesis from Erogamer (something about coercion and systems of control and power) but I don't think that this is something that permeates the whole work from top to bottom, and there's a lot that muddles it, probably because it was written with the themes coming together over time.