what does a decade mean? to you, to me, to a piece of media?
it's been a full ten years since I posted a piece of games crit that is probably one of the reasons my life is what it is now. this silence is not mine, a short piece musing on the role of silence and protagonists restricted by it, named in contrast to this silence is mine from the drakengard 3 soundtrack, was written as I picked at dragon's dogma. (I don't think you need to read it but my fiancee would disagree.)
2015 was a pivotal year for me. 2014 brought gamergate and its associated scumbags, ne'er-do-wells, and shitheels to bear on the very idea of the games criticism I had become enamored with; the leadup to that shattered my relationship with one of my closest friends, who was also one of the few people I knew online who I could talk with about Tales games, and JRPGs in general.
the year of 2015 started with me trying to continue to care about saying interesting things about games loudly, fighting imposter syndrome the entire way, and supporting those who needed it. I posted back and forth with others, as you did in those optimistic days of blogging, and eventually found people who I could chat with about this stuff. that spun up into what became dead genre chronicles, and now, here I am, a decade later, an entirely different person, but also just the same as I was then in so many ways.
also important in 2015 for my personal development was the second season of the anime adaptation of my teen romantic comedy snafu (yahari ore no seishun love comedy wa machigatteiru.), a followup I wasn't sure was going to happen. for a show like that, which had gripped my heart during the worst throes of my depression after dropping out of high school, to see a second season, felt unduly kind. for someone who had felt seen by the bitterness of the protagonist there in the first season, a boy turned cynical by his idealism being betrayed, who had now recently felt the bite of a real betrayal in my own life, it was bittersweet commiseration.
snafu season 2 began airing five days before this silence is not mine was posted, though surely I worked on the post before the show began. I did not grasp the degree to which it would obliterate me and make me need to be something new.
episode eight, titled "even so, hikigaya hachiman.", aired on may 22, 2015. the day prior, I had published the transcript of a piece of games crit that led to another rally of game crit blog tennis with future associates. precisely one week later, I would post a call for people who cared enough to write about JRPGs without irony or pretense, to try and network, and to make something together.
insert dominos meme image, I'm engaged to one of my best friends and also I'm a woman now.
episode eight of snafu s2 is the peak of the series, the knife's edge of emotion upon which the rest of the season balances and the rest of the series is bound by. in it, the main character, hikigaya hachiman, admits to the two people he most wants to connect with in his life that he is tired of the cynicism and the irony he has spent their entire relationship cloaked in. he wants something genuine. he wants to understand, even if he doesn't care to be understood. he cries in front of them, fully discarding any sense of pride, for the sake of showing his earnestness. his weakness. his heart.
I took this beat like anyone who was "probably not cis but I'm not going to think about the ache in my brain even if I do have trans friends" a boy would: I sobbed my eyes out. I still tear up when I hit this scene on rewatching the series. I watched people in my social circle at the time mock the episode for this scene and I felt my patience wane as I saw the frailty of masculinity in their tones. this wasn't the first crack in my egg, but it was damn well the first one that was visible to me.
snafu spurred me into caring, firmly and without doubt, about communicating with others. "you won't always come to an understanding by talking things out," says snafu, "but you owe it to them and yourself to try anyway." I've changed a lot since that episode aired, but that message has stuck with me, etched in my heart, and it's guided my attempts to write, to make games criticism relatively accessible, and now, in my more fortunate years, my relationships with my lovely partners. this lack of silence is definitely mine.
a thing I haven't noted about my time with the game is that dragon's dogma is, I think, the first game I played where I made the choice to play as a woman. up til then, custom characters skewed 100% dude. adelaide, my arisen, became the first, even predating my warrior of light by a few months. raizha, my ffxiv character, would then become what I based most of my other character creations on for a long while. 2015 was a busy year.
revisiting gransys with an earnest intent to overcome its introductory speedbump of a power curve and explore the world some more was a really nice time, honestly. it's a small enough world that I remembered basically the complete layout, but it's been long enough that I forgot so goddamn much of the little details of the paths between the main points of interest. these cliffs, these hills, these harpy-strewn mountain paths, they all feel like a walk through a particularly aggressive park that I haven't been to in a long while.
I'm writing this ahead of our podcast episode on it, so I don't wanna sit here and spew too much about it, but it's been really charming to come back to it after a decade. there are so many fiddly things about it, but sharing the road and the world with pawns of all sorts has been lovely. it's exceptionally rude at times, but half the fun of the journey is the inconveniences with games like this. looking forward to being baffled by the sequel, which also happened in the last decade.