hello charlotte episodes 1 and 2 should be played not just to be caught up on the story, but to watch a developer gradually learn to express what is at their core. this also means that hc is a series with some growing pains, including but not limited to how it can be: hit or miss in its sense of humor, unevenly paced, and full of puzzles that even if thematically fitting are largely forgettable. i'd put hc1 as a little bit above average for an artistically inclined tumblr user's first rpgmaker game--plus i think its very funny in how eager it is kill you--but i can understand not liking it. hc2 is actually quite good and a very compelling leap forward from 1, and sows some very important seeds that make it ESPECIALLY crucial to be paired with hc3, but its still just shy of excellence on its own. they can still showcase etherane's specificity and intelligence pretty well, and having some of the context for what she's informed by and responding to--which is to say not just rpgmaker in general but that filtered thru tumblr fandom--lets you understand some of where she's coming from. but these two games alone do not exactly feel like fully confident and complete works.
by contrast, etherane's first game after hello charlotte, tomorrow won't come for those without ██████, has a more experienced and steadied hand guiding it. it's standalone and more concise, but this has its advantages over the relative bulk and bloat of the series etherane worked on previously. it's partly because its more contained and wastes less space that the fog of all the tensions twc suggests to us feel so dense, making it like a short story that invites rereads to find something new each time. its more distanced tone and tighter writing also brings a weight and sobriety to it that hello charlotte did not have as consistently. basically it's more "perfected" in what it aims to do with its narrative than any hellchar, and i would call it a capital G Great game for that. only the puzzles still feel hc-tier but that's not a big deal. i do wonder what i could have gotten out of this creator's oeuvre if i had started with hello charlotte and then built up to twc, but i think playing it first was a good way to assure me that ane is the real deal, enough to want to see their first series through to the end. even with the growing pains or whatever other superficial hangups i may have had as i went through it.
then there's hello charlotte episode 3, sitting between the amateurish but inspired explorations of the series before it and the more fully developed twc. childhood's end fits as a subtitle, a sign of not just the finale of hello charlotte as a series (mainline, at least), but also an assertion of itself as the break from the artistic immaturity of previous entries that's now been outgrown, so to speak. this may sound like i'm saying this is where etherane finally reached their potential of greatness, and my answer to that is, essentially, yes! but 3 has more of an adolescent energy to it; even as its subtitle declares being done with childish things, this can be taken not as an objective assessment of itself but coming from a sort of teenage urge to prove that they can overcome their past, by any means necessary. these means are often bratty and practically asking to be disliked. it diverts hard from the last 2 entries, sabotaging the mostly harmless and maudlin cringe for more provocative cringe that at times, tbh, can be offputting for the wrong reasons. at a glance, its lack of subtlety in its belligerence at points can make it seem like it amounts to little more than an overly hammy, bridge-burning heel turn. all these rough and serrated edges often do the opposite of bringing greater coherence that hc2 hinted at, making for an even more unbalanced experience than what came before.
alot of this is done to address a realization that the previous two games, even with their own strengths and self-awareness, lent themselves to being taken as scatterbrained misery entertainment; stories of a soft nice and easily likable character getting her shit kicked in constantly to “become relatable to the max", as a character puts it. fandom attaches to this easily and often uncritically, and as this attachment informs their own interpretations as told through fanart and fanfic, the work itself and characters within get untethered from the creator's control & intentions. many such cases of rpgmaker games--or rpgmaker-ish ones too--that this applies to, and hellchar practically speaks directly to that context it’s situated within. frustrated with the shallow regurgitation of angst back and forth, ashamed of having played into it previously without bristling at it enough, paranoid towards giving a personal story up for voyeuristic dissection (especially for this audience's expectations for authors to unload their traumas and neuroses in a correctly consumable manner), hc3 lashes out in order to separate itself from this and take the narrative back. the guro danganronpa nietzsche-pilled "this is LITERALLY 1984" theatrics, cringe they may be, have a sincerely felt anger and pessimism underlying them. it's painfully aware it's entrenched in a juvenile world and only knows juvenile means to escape it, writhing within what feels like a meaningless feedback loop.
this is the set up for one of the most scorched and restless reconfigurations of identity i've found. hellchar may have gotten so wound up about the subculture it's within, but it doesn't turn its back on it completely in the end because it remains, just as it had been previously, a vector for speaking on its specific preoccupations and troubles. idolization of creators, the ways presumptions about others reflect yourself, fear over losing some cultivated idea of purity from contact with people, having your own life dictated through your psychosis...these are things it wants to express that are inextricably tied with this world it has so much friction with. it comes to understand that even art that is embarrassingly derivative (figuratively and literally) or selfish projection can reveal something, if the author is really willing. its critique of stories that hand out catharsis like its nothing wouldn't mean much if it wasn't so committed to reaching an actually useful catharsis of its own. it strains itself to go further and deeper into its pain, despite all the nihilism it talks up, to eventually finding meaning within its own efforts to change, to keep moving on. here was when etherane showed what true vulnerability is: letting you in on something that would otherwise be kept secret, not hiding behind subtlety--its genuinely smart and incisive in its opaqueness--but also not oversharing or self-flagellating for cheap sympathy. anyone can speak honestly, but very rarely do you see someone really understand that you aren't just speaking in a vacuum. after pulling back all the layers of failed perceptions that attached onto it, being frank about its perceived failures to form attachment before, it's then that hc3 finds a space to hit more directly than anything else it could be compared to.
this game is a mess but it's also a maelstrom, one that's craftily and furiously and courageously leaned into to find where truth really lies. tomorrow won't come is technically a more respectable effort, but in retrospect it is the collected sigh after the panic attack that hc3 was. an extremely fraught but incredibly observant moment of soul searching that haunts what comes after, whether it's heaven's gate or twc or probably the freshly released mr rainer's solve-it service (haven't got to it much yet but i trust post-hc3 ane with my life so it will be the greatest gaming sensation of this week, at the very least). the big bang, scattershot as it may be, of etherane's full voice, and it's the instability specific to it that makes this my favorite game from them. with all its entropy and fevered tantrums in the background, it managed a connection and communicated something invaluable to me. it knows that anxiety of leaving yourself defenseless to others seeing the rear of your head, hating to imagine what their eyes see and doing that despite yourself--and also knows the desire to crane your neck backwards in the hope you'll see it for yourself. it will look grotesque and humiliating and idiotic to go through all those contortions, but don't you want to get one good glimpse for once? and if you can't do it, you might as well try to impress how hard you're trying to anyone who dares to watch.
by contrast, etherane's first game after hello charlotte, tomorrow won't come for those without ██████, has a more experienced and steadied hand guiding it. it's standalone and more concise, but this has its advantages over the relative bulk and bloat of the series etherane worked on previously. it's partly because its more contained and wastes less space that the fog of all the tensions twc suggests to us feel so dense, making it like a short story that invites rereads to find something new each time. its more distanced tone and tighter writing also brings a weight and sobriety to it that hello charlotte did not have as consistently. basically it's more "perfected" in what it aims to do with its narrative than any hellchar, and i would call it a capital G Great game for that. only the puzzles still feel hc-tier but that's not a big deal. i do wonder what i could have gotten out of this creator's oeuvre if i had started with hello charlotte and then built up to twc, but i think playing it first was a good way to assure me that ane is the real deal, enough to want to see their first series through to the end. even with the growing pains or whatever other superficial hangups i may have had as i went through it.
then there's hello charlotte episode 3, sitting between the amateurish but inspired explorations of the series before it and the more fully developed twc. childhood's end fits as a subtitle, a sign of not just the finale of hello charlotte as a series (mainline, at least), but also an assertion of itself as the break from the artistic immaturity of previous entries that's now been outgrown, so to speak. this may sound like i'm saying this is where etherane finally reached their potential of greatness, and my answer to that is, essentially, yes! but 3 has more of an adolescent energy to it; even as its subtitle declares being done with childish things, this can be taken not as an objective assessment of itself but coming from a sort of teenage urge to prove that they can overcome their past, by any means necessary. these means are often bratty and practically asking to be disliked. it diverts hard from the last 2 entries, sabotaging the mostly harmless and maudlin cringe for more provocative cringe that at times, tbh, can be offputting for the wrong reasons. at a glance, its lack of subtlety in its belligerence at points can make it seem like it amounts to little more than an overly hammy, bridge-burning heel turn. all these rough and serrated edges often do the opposite of bringing greater coherence that hc2 hinted at, making for an even more unbalanced experience than what came before.
alot of this is done to address a realization that the previous two games, even with their own strengths and self-awareness, lent themselves to being taken as scatterbrained misery entertainment; stories of a soft nice and easily likable character getting her shit kicked in constantly to “become relatable to the max", as a character puts it. fandom attaches to this easily and often uncritically, and as this attachment informs their own interpretations as told through fanart and fanfic, the work itself and characters within get untethered from the creator's control & intentions. many such cases of rpgmaker games--or rpgmaker-ish ones too--that this applies to, and hellchar practically speaks directly to that context it’s situated within. frustrated with the shallow regurgitation of angst back and forth, ashamed of having played into it previously without bristling at it enough, paranoid towards giving a personal story up for voyeuristic dissection (especially for this audience's expectations for authors to unload their traumas and neuroses in a correctly consumable manner), hc3 lashes out in order to separate itself from this and take the narrative back. the guro danganronpa nietzsche-pilled "this is LITERALLY 1984" theatrics, cringe they may be, have a sincerely felt anger and pessimism underlying them. it's painfully aware it's entrenched in a juvenile world and only knows juvenile means to escape it, writhing within what feels like a meaningless feedback loop.
this is the set up for one of the most scorched and restless reconfigurations of identity i've found. hellchar may have gotten so wound up about the subculture it's within, but it doesn't turn its back on it completely in the end because it remains, just as it had been previously, a vector for speaking on its specific preoccupations and troubles. idolization of creators, the ways presumptions about others reflect yourself, fear over losing some cultivated idea of purity from contact with people, having your own life dictated through your psychosis...these are things it wants to express that are inextricably tied with this world it has so much friction with. it comes to understand that even art that is embarrassingly derivative (figuratively and literally) or selfish projection can reveal something, if the author is really willing. its critique of stories that hand out catharsis like its nothing wouldn't mean much if it wasn't so committed to reaching an actually useful catharsis of its own. it strains itself to go further and deeper into its pain, despite all the nihilism it talks up, to eventually finding meaning within its own efforts to change, to keep moving on. here was when etherane showed what true vulnerability is: letting you in on something that would otherwise be kept secret, not hiding behind subtlety--its genuinely smart and incisive in its opaqueness--but also not oversharing or self-flagellating for cheap sympathy. anyone can speak honestly, but very rarely do you see someone really understand that you aren't just speaking in a vacuum. after pulling back all the layers of failed perceptions that attached onto it, being frank about its perceived failures to form attachment before, it's then that hc3 finds a space to hit more directly than anything else it could be compared to.
this game is a mess but it's also a maelstrom, one that's craftily and furiously and courageously leaned into to find where truth really lies. tomorrow won't come is technically a more respectable effort, but in retrospect it is the collected sigh after the panic attack that hc3 was. an extremely fraught but incredibly observant moment of soul searching that haunts what comes after, whether it's heaven's gate or twc or probably the freshly released mr rainer's solve-it service (haven't got to it much yet but i trust post-hc3 ane with my life so it will be the greatest gaming sensation of this week, at the very least). the big bang, scattershot as it may be, of etherane's full voice, and it's the instability specific to it that makes this my favorite game from them. with all its entropy and fevered tantrums in the background, it managed a connection and communicated something invaluable to me. it knows that anxiety of leaving yourself defenseless to others seeing the rear of your head, hating to imagine what their eyes see and doing that despite yourself--and also knows the desire to crane your neck backwards in the hope you'll see it for yourself. it will look grotesque and humiliating and idiotic to go through all those contortions, but don't you want to get one good glimpse for once? and if you can't do it, you might as well try to impress how hard you're trying to anyone who dares to watch.
2 Comments
talk your shit!
ghost_girl
2 years ago