Mar 10, 2024
I WAS CLOSE KAORUKO NOT KAORI THO FUUUU.
Anyway, since this feels like the end of Act 1, I'll summarise some of my overall thoughts in a less shitposty manner.
I'll begin by saying that I really enjoy the thematic areal you're targeting here. Using clothes as an exponent of gender expression and having a first act that's basically a build up (albeit a quite obvious one) to a rug pull is very nice, and especially interesting to pull off within the context of Japan's social conservatism. I think the progression helps with that too. It's not rushed, nor is it dawdling, and that impression is greatly aided by the dialogue. It gives me Sally Rooney vibes, in a way, though it's far from her naturalness. That being said, the stilted quality of some of your lines does work in your favour, both contest-wise and style-wise. It grounds it into a more silly story, which the animeisms also help with. That way the message above doesn't come across as heavy-handedly.
The style, for me, is kind of a mixed bag. Whilst I can appreciate the difference in doctrine, I can also appreciate that there are places where technique can be used to mask some shortcomings. The tagless dialogue, for example. There are some instances with huge paragraphs of monologue, which can be broken up. Not with a tag, but maybe with another short paragraph, an impression, a quick gesture at something, so that the pacing remains. Otherwise the pauses in speech are very hard to infer. Similarly, I think sometimes the more stream of thoughty bits feel half-hearted. There was the scene at the beginning, when Tyler first meets Kaori, then the scene at the bar when they guzzle their drinks. I think those bits work fine enough, but I feel like they could be elevated if exaggerated. I think both of those bits could, in my opinion, benefit from non-sequitur comments, distractions, prosodic sleight of hand if you will. I posit that because I believe our minds naturally go haywire, wacky-arm-inflatable-tubeman style whenever we are emotionally short-circuited, so it reasons that we'd just print our thoughts - all of them - out in our internal monologue.
As for the characters, I'll admit, Kaori feels like the protagonist so far, whilst Tyler is the perspective one. She's a lot more well-rounded than Tyler, whose main driver thus far seems to be 'I wanted to weeb out in Japan.' I can appreciate that he might have other reasons - hinted at during the prologue - though I hope it can also be appreciated that a gesture towards a goal isn't always enough to herald a goal on its own. I suppose what I'm moaning about is that I wish Tyler could've been a little more explicit about his interests. (Side note: it's early morning, and I might've missed this, but did his brother die? Was that the 'covid casualty' mentioned, or was that just metaphoric?) Not something on the nose, like, "I'm trying to preserve my brother's memory," but rather a philosophy-adjacent comment about purity of expression and what-not. Alternative clothing being a means to preserve our individuality in a world that's increasingly less layered and more 'normalised', tapered down, matte'd. Obviously, I can glean this being the overarching message from now, but that's mostly from me interacting with you and seeing your creative doctrine unveiled (via the event), rather than from the book itself. And that being said, this is me extrapolating Kaori's comments to lend Tyler some more depth - which I will, sadly, retain he hadn't had too much of it, backstory and all.
I suppose I'll curb my matinal ramblings here. Still a very solid piece, and I'm happy it won, sad as it might be it's taken me so long to get around to reading it.
Cheers,
Bub.
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