I want to write about something I thought was very lousy and yet managed to have a strong impact on me. My experience with this anime has changed my understanding of how we experience stories and other media.
The description for this twelve episode show on Netflix had me quite excited initially. It seems like an obvious set up: a real life dysfunctional family of four unknowingly create a loving family within a VR MMO. It has all the potential to be a saccharine, heartstring-tugging, pseudo-slice of life J-drama. I was here for it. However, it turns out to be a high concept sci-fi serial with family-drama boots, stomping around in the family’s life with thrilling gimmicks. The members of the family, each with their own minor role, saves the day and ultimately reunites, plus or minus a few, in the real world.
The main character, in the final episode, is given the key to completely annihilating his loathsome father and thus saving the world. He’s wanted nothing more than to be rid of said parent, but instead of pressing the button, he rushes off to save his father. He fails, ultimately, but his refusal to kill his father, and in fact attempt to prevent his father’s death even at the expense of the world, hooked its proverbial claws in me.
I think an unstated motivation of Tachi’s attempted saving of his father from effective martyrdom was the idea that his father didn’t deserve death. He had consciously failed his family so devastatingly that he deserved only life, the perpetual punishment he’d continue to inflict upon himself for his crimes. I resonated with that. And part of me thinks I invented that interpretation. That it was not an intention by the authorship of this show (based on a manga), is something I think is likely. At some level, it feels as though this is not okay. It feels like a rejection of truth in someway, to posit what it meant to me to the ivory face of confirmed canon.
There’s a controversial idea named by Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” that suggests authorial intention does not deserve primacy in terms of interpretation. Personal interpretations are just as, if not more valuable, than what a creator meant to say or what their identity can tell us about the expression of a work.
An anecdote of several ironic layers
The Wikipedia article says a satirical essay by J.C. Carlier argues that Barthes’ idea is ironic itself. But I have to interpret the wikipedia editor’s syntax to determine whether Carlier invented an interpretation of Barthes’s argument based on his identity or on Carlier’s own interpretation of the text, and whether or not Carlier agrees or disagrees with such an argument. Was Carlier presenting a genuine interpretation of Barthes to knock it down or an ingenuine one upon which to assert it? Sometimes modern internet culture feels such to me: the layers of irony run so deep that I have no idea where it stops; where the truth begins. It’s turtles all the way down, they say.
But bringing up Barthes is just credential signaling. Know you, reader, that I am smart enough to spend time considering the possibility of my own fallacy before I risk proving too brashly my incompetence! Consider my capacity for superficial Wikipedia scans and intertextuality! Because I think my reading of Good Night World was a valid one. Or at least, my presenting it as the cumulative personal experience of watching it is a valid reason to write. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the internet contains so many opinions. Opinions may not always be interesting to read, but it means, to me, at least, that there are people out there who aren’t dead inside, who have things that are important to them, important enough to contract web hosting so that they can immortalize said opinions in hypertext. People who hope their ideas make a difference, that others will see these ideas and reconsider their own lives.
Now it’s your story
To retell and pass on
Because an idea is only relevant
If it’s being thought upon
— “The End and the Beginning” Razia’s Shadow
In the Carlos Rojas’ translation notes to The Day the Sun Died, he quotes author Yan Lianke’s acceptance speech for the Kafka Prize. Specifically he draws attention to Lianke’s likening himself to a blind man with a flashlight helping people find their way in the dark. He cannot see the beam he creates but others can, and it illuminates small parts of the world. Audiences will take from a work what they see, not always what the author believes there is to be seen. Not to mention, unresolved personal issues will often distort our understanding of the world. I liked this quote in part due to its reinforcing my own experiences analyzing my purpose of publishing things here. In one of my final travelogues from 2023/2024 I wrote that my purpose was basically to share for the sake of sharing: maybe it would prove useful to someone else, maybe not, or maybe it would even prove useful to me in the future. And look here: it has! It allowed me to expand on this essay, padding out a nice concluding paragraph that reminds you I got here via Lianke, and before that was Barthes. All of it was to justify my interpretation of an anime that otherwise wasted my and now your time. You don’t get this kind of turd polishing outside of writing. Top tier medium of thought. Top tier tedium.
I really can’t recommend this series, but for autobiographical purposes it has managed to have a significant emotional impact on me. What was the creators’ intent? I’m certainly not one to care, because prior to this singular event and my not-terribly-canonical interpretation thereof, I had thought the series mid, that it had squandered its potential. Assessing it as a work, my opinion has little changed, but assessing it as a journey, as an experience of my personal confrontation with feelings of paternal failure and loss, the final episode of the series will stick with me for years to come. If we have to argue the merit of Barthes’ idea, this is a perfect example of its merit: texts don’t have to be important in the context of art or history in order to have personal, even transformative power. Readers give books their power, not authors. Casting thousands of articles quietly and anonymously into the void of the Internet will not give meaning to my words, but a single reader may.