why so meta? ***CW

**this blog examines topics surrounding suicide***

(my caps lock key broke so i gave up capitalizing half way through the blog. apologies.)

my friends keep disappearing as i gain more power

love story

The first finale we encounter is Sayori hanging herself, and my character (Mister) blaming himself, agonized in the realization of a life-long guilt to come. Although this is often talked about as a twist in plot, it was actively awaited in my experience. It was anticipated, touching, and lured out the prepubescent me who understands love to be pushing away, precious because it's untouchable and eternal, immutable when sealed in death.

Such notion is very much the fruit of overdosing classical romantic novels such as Dream of a Red Chamber and Wuthering Heights, where the story transcends dimensions of life and death, and what is real/love necessarily transgress the border between the earthly and the above. the novel of transcendence has to flesh out some sort of metaphysical envisioning.

literature

As you stare at Sayori at the end of her life, the background turn into "noises" and "glitches", and then warning that "an exception has occurred". her death first allows you peak at what is behind the facade. unlike the metaphysics in novels where some structure of heaven and hell, a system weighing salvation or reincarnation, the codes expresses a logic that governs life and death in the game.

but you'd be a fool if you think you can really meddle with it, or even believe that's real. Even after you delete monika's file, her voice haunts this world from text boxes and protects you from where the dark, from a place in the source code you cannot locate. In fact, the game clearly tells you that what it's presenting as the metastructure is pure fiction. Sayori's death scene is supposed to expose an error, but the zooming in on her face and the rhythmatic flashes are so cinematic that the whole bit feel insistently orchestrated.

it should not be a coincidence, then, that the game has to take place in a literature club. literature is creative in the sense that it does not seek to capture the objective real, but to engender a possible world. doki doki points out the contrived order (character types) in the visual novels universe, but more so points to the fictionality of all created worlds, whether they be political, literary, or digital.

upon this epipheny, there is not much you can do beside to think, realize, psychoanalyse, and try as hard as you can to understand (decode the files) this digitally generated world--but isn't your metathinking about the game also part of the game? is the "real"---the folders, the computer directory---not just another layer of game design, of fabrication and fiction? is the graphic representation of your trash bin crumbling files more real than the graphic of monika staring into your eyes? where do you have to go, to find the real reality?

dude, that's so meta

so why bring you here then? what is point about being meta?

as @ihna suggests in their blogpost, there could be an "inherent narcissism" in this. the abnormality only reinstate the player has a correct and vast understanding of the normal, and what is supposedly world-turning only returns to affirm the subject's sense of self assurance and accomplishment. and a game that caters to that is a game popular.

i think betrayed is an important distinction between the modern and the postmodern? subject. the former is constantly on the edge of neurosis, the second has developed a system which stability relies on constant neurosis. one can talk more about normalization process capitalism general equivalent culture appropriation s1e3 black mirror etc etc to illustrate this, but that's not my quest.

often when we utter "this is so meta dude" "damn" "mindblowing", or the professor's most resented word "interesting", that is the end of the conversation. in daily life, "that's so meta" comes very often with the "stop before my brain explodes" or just cries of "woow", as seen in many youtube videos. i'd argue that this is in line with other colloquialism such as "i feel like", which uses the unarguable (feel) and the agnostic, metaphoric (like), to situated what you're going to say as not very real. by calling something meta, we are pinning down the anomaly.

the content never merges without its form. perhaps doki doki has to be a metagame because it's about suicide, depression, loneliness, grasping reality, since so much of the depression of this age comes from the loss of belief and a self that's lost.

but ok boomer, whatever. maybe sksksksk is praxis.