12 - On the Topic of Creative Entropy (2) / Opening Titles

I sit down on the bed. "… So it's all hopeless, then? People will like what they like, and that's the end of it?"

Alex shrugs. "Pretty much. Look at how long F*rtnite has been a thing. In the 90s we went from 2D M*rio to 3D M*rio. In the same timespan, the current generation of gamers went from F*rtnite to … more F*rtnite."

I don't say anything for a while.

I poke my head back into the previous chapter, and look again at the bold text headers. "You know, those were all really niche, geek examples."

"… I mean, where do you think we are?"

"So what happens now?" I ask.

"Well—the shotgun-approach to jokes in the first few chapters is probably unsustainable, so I expect the humor to kinda relax somewhat. And the narrative pace will probably move faster, in contrast, as we still have several arcs—"

"No, I mean, like, diegetically."

"Oh. Uh … I dunno?" He shrugs. He holds up the controller. "Wanna play some more Kami Hand?"

I stare at the TV for a bit. Then I turn back to Alex. "… Hell yeah I do."

And that's what we do, for the next few hours. I make it through the next level. And the next. At some point in the game there's a poison chihuahua.

We talk about our past lives. Anime we liked that never got a second season. We think up more examples of creative entropy in effect. We laugh about isekai some more.

I learn a lot about my roommmate, who I probably should've at least made an attempt to speak to, these past few months.

He was a writer back in the real world. Not professionally, though—Alex was a NEET, through and through. He rarely left his room at all, only going out late at night, to the corner store and back. He says he spent 12 years working on the same novel before he died. Never showed it to a single person. Never even posted anything he wrote online. He says he only ever finished the prologue. ("It was—It was a really long prologue, though. Like 44K words long. My longest sentence weighed in at 1079 words.")

He says he likes long books with long sentences that require significant mental effort to untangle. He tells me his favorite authors but I've never heard of any of them. He says one of his biggest pet peeves is when people call very long sentences run-on. He says it's imperative that I acknowledge that they are not necessarily the same thing. ("That 1079-word sentence was completely, idiomatically, grammatically sound," he says, with a chef's kiss.)

He says he likes the idea of light novels, but is turned off by prose he considers too simplistic and therefore un-engaging. He'd rather just watch the anime adaptations, in most cases. Har*hi, the anime? A bonafide masterpiece in every respect. Har*hi, the LN? Ehhh …

(Me: "Masterpiece? Even Endless Eight?" Alex: "Of course! Disappe*rance wouldn't be the same without it!")

He wishes someone would write a fusion of his two loves: demanding literature and VN-like plots.

"I long to read a plot like M*v-L*v, written not only in traditional prose, but in a style that's engaging. That makes me work for it. Goddamn, VNs are good. You know—nothing in the Western canon can approach the sheer scope on display in the best works that came out during that early-to-mid 2000s VN boom. It wasn't just that several very good works came out during that time—they were works that literally redefined the way fiction can even be. And we were getting one almost every single year. Do you understand how unprecented that is, for any kind of creative medium!?"

To be honest, I don't always get what he's talking about. But I pretend like I do anyway, by changing the topic and steering it toward some of my own favorite works, even if they have nothing to do with each other.

Is this—is this what a conversation is supposed to feel like?

Am I … actually having fun talking to someone, for once?

We even miss dinner, which is fine because it's not like we need to eat.

When I ask him if isekai bothers him, the way it bothers me, he says, "Not really." Then he pauses for a long time, and shrugs. "… Things do be what they be."

And at some point in the evening, one of us—I honestly forget who—brings up the idea of starting a club in Point Parallax. Maybe there's others like us here on the island. There's gotta be.

He likes the idea, but we can't seem to agree on what the club should focus on.

I think it should focus on taking down the isekai-industrial complex.

He thinks we should be staving off creative entropy.

… Of course, it doesn't really matter either way, because neither of us has any concrete idea on how to go about accomplishing our goals anyway.

But we agree to start forming the club.

A club, at any rate.

… Eventually. But not right now.

Right now we're busy playing video games.

"I can't believe this thing's considered a retro console," says Alex, shaking his head.

"Deal with it, gramps." (You see, it's funny because my hair is thinning, while his is not. Get it? It's supposed to be ironic. It's really funny, right? How funny? Rate it. Rate my joke. Tell me how funny my joke is on a scale of 1 to 10. Do you like me? Please tell me you like me. How much do you like me? Tell me how much you like me on a scale of 1 to 10.)

"Hey," says Alex, "this is probably a really good place for the opening titles. Where the opening theme starts playing in the background? While we have this conversation? While I'm saying this line?"

"Yeah!" I exclaim, eyes wide. "You know what did that the best? K*miN*zo. Where the twist happens, and then you hear the intro to R*mbling He*rts start to play? And then the beat drops and you get that title card slam??"

"Yooo! Hell yeah, dawg! I know exactly what you're talking about! K*miN*zo fucks so hard, dude!"

"Speaking of … Opening credits where the main heroines are naked. Why did they stop doing that?"

"I mean, for obvious reasons."

"What, modern sensibilities? But even NGE had them. And the post-2020 nu-anime crowd eats that up."

"Well … NGE is special. It's strangely immune from a lot of things. It persists. It's a constant in the genre."

"Yeah. … Yeah, I guess so, huh?"

"Oh, yeah, one more thing. I've been afraid to ask all this time, but …"

"… Yeah?"

"Have your fucking socks gone missing lately? I've lost like three dirty pairs in the past week."

"YOU TOO!? I thought it was just me!"

"What the hell's going on?"

"Fuck if I know."

I S E K A I

W A I T I N G

B L U E S

A reverse-isekai webnovel

Told in ? routes

by Hype