Tsukasa is back at the spinning hoop gate
thing, trying to log out. Nothing happens. Mimiru shows up and he is,
again, initially afraid at the arrival of a new person. When they
see that they've bumped into each other again Mimiru offers a smile
and Tsukasa turns his back on her.
Mimiru sticks out her tongue. I'm not
sure that there's a lot of point in trying to work out how the
control scheme works, but I think that the most logical conclusion
based on what we see and hear said in the show would be that it
actually makes use of the player's facial expressions unless told not
to. The player sticking out her tongue makes the character stick out
her tongue. This could be accomplished by pointing a camera, or
something like those sensor things for the games where you have no
controller, back at the player's face.
Which would give the possibility for a
lot of non-verbal communication in the game. A smile, a narrowing of
the eyes, sticking out one's tongue, basically expression, really,
could be communicated through the game.
The alternative is that doing these
things requires keystrokes which I don't really buy, though it does
make for an interesting image of someone who is so practiced in the
game that when they try to make faces in real life their face remains
the same because instead the impulse makes them move their fingers as
if punching the appropriate keys.
Tsukasa looks back, catches her
sticking her tongue out, and smiles for a short moment before going
back to walking away. Then he stops and asks her if she can log out.
First off, this is a good question on
his part. It's like when your power goes out. Before you go through
the effort of trying to find and fix a problem in your house, you
first might want to take a look to see of the other houses on the
street have power. If the problem is for everyone, then you'll never
fix it by assuming it's just you.
Second, this might be a good time to
point out that the show has a lot of conversations where the
participants aren't facing each other. When BT and Bear spoke it
started out over his shoulder and ended up with him looking away from
her. When Subaru was talking to Silver Knight the conversation
started with her facing in the opposite direction. Here Tsukasa
decides to ask Mimiru something, but he's still facing away from her
when he does.
Mimiru points out that not only can
she, she has. She's only been logged back in for a few minutes.
Tsukasa walks away without offering an explanation for his question.
-
When Mimiru catches up with him he's
sitting on a cliff looking down both literally and figuratively.
She asks if he really means he can't
log out, he says it looks that way, she wonders if he might have done
something wrong. Something like cheating perhaps. The beetle has
returned, he knocks it over with his staff.
He can't remember, which is pretty
troubling to him. He ends up repeating it several times with a fair
amount of desperation.
Mimiru points out that if all else
fails, all he has to do is reset his terminal. At which point
Tsukasa notices something is strange and goes into full blown panic
mode. When he tries to run away Mimiru stops him by grabbing him by
his clothes and basically throwing him back where he started.
She's trying to get him to calm down,
it has the opposite of the intended effect. There's a reason that
Mimiru thought that was a reasonable thing to do. There's a reason
that it wasn't. We'll get to those reasons but since they're very
much tied up with what happens next, we'll go there first.
Tsukasa jumps up and angrily shouts,
“Leave me alone!” which catches Mimiru off guard. And she
responds with anger of her own.
This is the third time that Tsukasa has
tried to rudely exit a conversation with her and, since she saw what
happened with the Crimson Knights, the fourth time she's seen him do
it. The last time he did it he first hit her with an out of nowhere
statement that he didn't like her. Then, when she tried to make a peace offering by smiling when she met him this time, he turned his back.
I don't think she hears, “Leave Me
Alone!” I think she hears him claiming the right to totally control
when and how conversations begin and end. I don't think she's
hearing it as a request to be left alone so much as staking claim to
being the one in control. I think she sees him as saying that everything has to be done on his terms.
Regardless of exactly what her thought
process is, she gets angry. Tsukasa gets scared. I'm pretty sure
Mimiru doesn't notice this, I didn't notice myself the few times I
saw it. Mimiru shouts at Tsukasa, the important bit being:
I don't want to be the one to say
this, but the net is the same as the real world! There are certain
manners you have to observe when dealing with people, and you won't
be treated with respect if you behave badly.
That's not wrong, but it's not right
either. It isn't the same. She wouldn't have thrown him to the ground in the real
world, but as I said, we'll get to that.
Tsukasa has managed to calm down, and
he no longer appears to be afraid. He simply says that he knows
that but he would like it if she would leave him alone. She says she will but
first brings up that he said he didn't like her and says she doesn't
him him either. Or, in the dub, “I hate your guts!”
I don't know if there is a good way to
respond to such a declaration, but I do know that Tsukasa's way
wasn't good. He thinks that's great, they agree, she'll leave him
alone, he'll ignore her ... and slap.
Mimiru smacked Tsukasa in response to being told he'd ignore her, and then there's confused silence.
Neither of them really understands what just happened.
For Mimiru this is all just a game, she
thinks that you ought to behave with a certain level of respect, but
in spite of what she said she doesn't think the game is the same as
real life because if she didn't she wouldn't be acting the way she is
acting. She'd be saying the same words in all probability, but not
doing the same things. Because it's a game. It doesn't hurt. You
can slap someone without hurting them, you can grab them without
violating their personal space.
These things are not being done to the
player, but to the character. The player sits at a safe distance far
away somewhere. People will misuse that distinction and do things to
characters that actually seem to be intended to traumatize the
players, but that's not what Mimiru is doing here. She doesn't
expect Tsukasa to respond with such immediate anger to being thrown
on the ground because as far as she knows that's not what she's
doing. She certainly doesn't think it's a violation. She doesn't
expect the slap to hurt him because it literally cannot do that and
she is blissfully unaware of the fact that impossible things are
happening.
For her she's in a world where you can
slap someone without being abusive, it would be on the level of
trading insults perhaps, nothing more. She has no idea that Tsukasa
isn't in that world. As far as she knows what she's done is nothing
more than going low level nuker at the end of a discussion with
someone who has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for her.
To look at it in a completely different
way, she thinks she's in NCIS. The parallel isn't exactly right
because Gibbs never slaps people in the face, but if you've seen NCIS
you probably know that I'm talking about. The Gibbs-smack is a
literal blow to the back of the head that, because of the unreal
qualities of that setting, somehow manages not to be abusive but
instead a simple wake-up call. More like a harsh word than a
realistic portrayal of slapping someone in the back of the head.
Gibbs doesn't have to worry about his hitting people being a problem, because he's living in a semi-slapstick world where things are different and that's ok. Slap people all you want, it's safe.
Yet here Mimiru has done that to someone, in
a place where it's not supposed to hurt, and he's reacted like he
really did get slapped and it really did hurt quite a bit and it
really was a violation and Mimiru has no idea what to do as a result.
At first she's confused, then, as his
reaction deepens and he is on the verge of tears, she moves to
concern. But then she shakes it off, turns up her nose, and leaves.
She has no idea of the pain that she's caused.
Once you get to know Mimiru, once you
understand the character and realize that if she had even the
faintest inkling of what was going on she never would have done any
of this, the scene is pretty heartbreaking. Someone,
someone who takes the feelings of others pretty damned seriously,
just caused physical pain to someone else, someone already in real distress, because of a
misunderstanding. They were playing by different sets of rules, and
she didn't know about it.
She threw an imaginary blow and Tsukasa really got hit with it.
It's always bad when someone gets hurt but, for me at least, it's so much worse when it's all because of misunderstanding. At least when someone sadistic is hurting someone (or hurting you) you can channel your emotion into something like anger or hate, but when a good person is hurting someone because they don't realize what they're doing is causing harm, all you're left with is sadness.
We never see what happens when Mimiru
finally realizes what happened here, but I think it's worth
mentioning that we never see her doing these things again. Not even to people whom she knows with absolute certainty wouldn't feel it.
-
Tsukasa is closer to understanding
what's going on. Unlike Mimiru he's had indications aplenty that
something was wrong. When we first see him he's in lingering pain
after being knocked unconscious and left on the ground. The only
part of the previous sentence that shouldn't set off, “That's
impossible,” bells is “left on the ground.” He can't remember
how he got there, soon after he can't remember about the
anthropomorphic cat the knights are interested in beyond that he's
seen it, he can't remember if he cheated (though he is convinced that
he didn't).
The reason he tried to log out the
first time was that he had an unpleasant, never elaborated on, feeling that
caused him to stand up in the middle of a conversation and head
straight to log out. That failed. Now he's failed to log out again.
And what he's just realized was enough to send him into utter panic,
he is coming to realize more and more that something is very wrong.
But none of it came with quite the
force of a slap to the face. As he's left standing there, on the
verge of tears, he can't understand why it hurts.
Unless you follow the dub instead of
the subtitles, then he can't figure out why him. I've actually
written a post addressing that subject already, but I'm waiting until
I'm done with episode one to publish it. The short answer is that
he's been chosen by a force he doesn't understand to fill a role that
he is singularly unqualified to fill. He was chosen because his
emotional state is fragile enough that the one who chose him believes
that he can be manipulated into abject failure.
In fact, the one who chose him doesn't
even intend to tell him what it is that he is supposed to be doing.
-
This is a good post, but not in such a way that I have anything to say in response. I'm just commenting to point out that it's tagged "Skewed Slightly to the Left" for no apparent reason.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good post, but not in such a way that I have anything to say in response.
DeleteAnd I was so looking forward to reading what you had to say.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up. It's fixed now. It was because "Skewed Slightly to the Left" was right next to "Slow Reading" which is my term for something that I don't really think qualifies as a deconstruction, but is done at a similar pace. Because, “not-deconstruction” would probably be unhelpful.
Normally I type in the tags but the option exists to simply click on them which should be quicker, so I figured I'd do that this time. And apparently clicked on the wrong ones.
I don't have much to comment on but that I love this post. It's such an important moment in the episode and you nailed it on breaking down Mimiru's character.
ReplyDelete