This review contains spoilers
i unfortunately lack the motivation to write a coherently structured review of this one given the amount of Thoughts i have, so instead im going to present this as a series of notes:
- the quickest summary of my fata thoughts is that i really don't like the first 3 doors and like all of the doors after, but the lows of doors 4-8 are REALLY rough. i like the core of fata morgana a lot and at its best it rly does nail the intensely romantic and sublime affect it's going for. i don't love all of the banter between michel and giselle but their romance overall is pretty moving, and the VN is rly great at turning it into spectacle while maintaining its emotional meaning. it's easy to see why it's emotionally resonated with so many. but unfortunately when it comes to the specifics i find fata fumbles on so many things. it frustrated me more than nearly any piece of fiction in a while, but i'll admit it also kept my interest because of that. it stayed on my mind as i was reading and i rly liked discussing it with ppl (both fans and haters). everyone knows what's great about this VN - the romance, the music, the emotional ambition, etc. and because of that it's a bit easier to complain than to sing the same praises that everyone else has. so while the tone of the review overall is negative i do wanna stress i liked a lot of fata and def don't regret reading it. whether i'd recommend it is another matter. if you're invested in VNs and have a lot of free time as i do then i think it's worthwhile, but if you don't have either of these things i don't know if it's worth the time investment.
- i think an issue throughout all of fata is that it feels far too emotionally externalised. fata is 100% a melodrama and on one hand emotional externalisation is what melodrama's all about - it's about letting go of realistic presentation and human behaviour to bring as much emotion out as possible. i love a lot of melodramatic works but in fata i think this externalisation becomes an issue because it makes everything so clear cut to the point that the emotions can feel simplistic and overly laid out. a lot of melodrama also externalises through form and the best examples of this can get away with emotionally simplistic writing. on this level fata is kind of a mixed bag - the soundtrack is obviously the highlight and carries a lot of sequences to be far more emotionally meaningful than they'd be on the page. fata's strongest sequence ("reclaim yourself") also uses formal elements specific to visual novels for excellent dramatic effect. but the prose itself doesn't feel like anything more than a middling imitation of the gothic novels it's clearly inspired by. the translation also has the awkward mix of period-accurate terms and modern colloquial speech. i dont mind the latter at all in period fiction but it feels so awkwardly employed here.
- in particular i think the portrayal of suffering and tragedy in the VN often places too much emphasis on what is happening rather than the characters' response to it. tragedy as a literary genre is a rly tricky line to ride because it builds a kind of entertainment out of suffering - not necessarily entertainment in the sense of being fun, but in the sense of an intense emotional engagement that leads to a cathartic release. i love tragic fiction but it's not hard to argue that the genre is inherently distasteful for these reasons. i think this is why the tragedies that interest me most are ones which are more invested in the circumstances that create suffering + how the characters react to their/other people's suffering than the actual event of suffering. i think when you take these into account you're closer to being able to examine suffering as an actual human experience and not an awful thing in the abstract. which isnt to say that direct depictions of suffering can't be shown at all, but that i rarely see that much value in depiction alone. i want the sense that the author isn't just using suffering for shock value and that they have a sincere investment in that human experience. there are times where i feel fata rly does want to give justice to its subjects and others where it feels half-hearted. so much of the story is just kinda there to set things in place, and when tragedy is brought into that uninterested setup the results rly fall apart. this is most evident in the sequence with the villagers in door 5. i just cant rly see this sequence as anything more than a way to get giselle and michel to reunite. it speeds through giselle's relationship between the villagers and their relationship with her but indulges in her torture, with little point other than "wow people sure are cruel!" and yet once giselle and michel reunite the resulting scene is a rly strong one that sensitively portrays giselle's experience as a SA victim. in that scene there's a sense of true emotional investment on the author's part and an astute idea of what shouldn't be shown. these elements just arent there in the previous torture scene. these contrasts are what make fata such a frustrating work for me, and i wish it could have reached its highs without twisting itself in contrivances and indulgent suffering to get there.
-while im still on the topic of door 5 - one of the strongest chapters in the game and prob the most crucial one since the rest is extremely dependent on you believing that the michel and giselle romance is deeply powerful. their initial dynamic is pretty standard but effectively endearing, and once it gets into the territory of a bond from shared trauma it becomes pretty powerful. i'm not made of stone! but there's one scene which annoys me so much because it's actually written excellently, but the choice of CG kind of ruins the whole thing. this is a scene late into the door where giselle shows her scars to michel, wanting both to display what michel's father did to her, but also to see if michel can still desire her. one of the door's most interesting threads is how giselle still maintains erotic desires while knowing that she still hasn't recovered enough to be able to consummate them - this tension also existing within michel. the scene shows that giselle still hasn't resolved this tension, but she can reject the idea of her body as undesireable and trust michel enough to let herself be desired again. the scene as it's written works because the eroticism is not for the reader - it's explicitly between the characters. however, the CG's depiction of giselle's body prominently displays her breasts, and shows nothing of her scars. by including a CG at all the body is being displayed to the third party of the reader, which already diminishes the power of the scene. but its framing makes it even worse by explicitly objectifying giselle and making it appear that the depiction of her body is for an imagined reader to gaze at.
- another part of fata which im conflicted on is door 7. on one hand i commend the developers for writing a story about a transmasc/intersex character in 2012 with sincere investment in depicting the experience of dysphoria, writing him as a morally complex character and leaving absolutely no doubt that he should be seen as a man. i'm not qualified to say how accurately it portrays both of those experiences, and i'd be happy to read any critique of the portrayal from transmasc and intersex individuals. but i feel at the very least that novectacle cared about the portrayal. that being said there's one sequence in this chapter which gets far too indulgent in the suffering, even for fata's standards. obviously it's acceptable for a trans story to get depressing - the portrayals of outing and rejection from family/love interests are pretty rough but reasonable to show especially for the time period. but i don't think there's really any justification for the extended sequence of aimee physically, psychologically and sexually torturing michel while he's kept imprisoned. in this case it's less that it's careless as a result of the story needing to rush itself, and more that you could just remove it from the story without making a difference. michel's trauma with aimee is already perfectly justified by her forced outing and cruel rejection of him. i don't find it believable that she basically becomes john jigsaw. the sequence would be more justified if michel's sexual abuse was referred to back in door 5 - given that door's portrayal of a bond emerging out of shared trauma, you would think michel being sexually abused would have had some impact on that chapter. but i think even if it were more prominent to the overall story, there isn't any need to depict it in such strong detail. higurashi didn't have any sequences explicitly showing satoko's abuse in detail because it wouldn't actually add anything that we don't already understand through the depiction of the after-effects. fata really could have used a similar sense of restraint if this element was going to be included at all.
- another issue fata has is its obsession with reveals/twists to the point that it unnecessarily withholds information or kinda cheats the reader in its presentation. michel being trans is something that i dont think rly needed to be a twist, and door 5 would have honestly been even stronger if we were able to engage in his perspective more. i think the reveal is relatively tasteful because it's explicitly from his perspective, and the horror of the reveal is in the horror of being outed rather than the horror of his body (as most trans reveals tend to be played, unfortunately). a case that i find more frustrating is in door 3, which i think would have been much more engaging if it were told from maria's perspective rather than revealing her as a villain halfway through and then keeping her motivations vague until the end. idk if it'd fix that door's main problem which is that the level of cruelty she inflicts upon the white haired girl just doesnt rly align with the rest of her motivations, but it'd make the chapter much less frustrating than having a reveal which is obvious yet poorly justified in the text itself.
- jacopo is just a disastrously written character. the attempts to make him sympathetic are so misguided. i love when characters who are awful people are humanised, but i think to humanise someone doesn't necessarily mean that it should justify their actions. in both door 3 and door 8 fata doesn't quite absolve jacopo's actions but it gets very flimsy in trying to justify them. with door 3 he basically does a 180 as soon as the reveal with maria happens. the problem is that he starts off as a fucking cartoon villain and there just isnt any development to him gaining any kind of conscience. door 8 is even worse in that his actions are so monstrous that the game rly has to go hard in figuring out any kind of sympathetic motivation and the one that it comes up with is "okay so what if he was a pedophile". and even if we just ignore that it's still like bro locked up a girl in a tower and had the blood drained from her to be sold to a whole town as a fake miracle cure and it was all because he was just too anxious to communicate properly. i just find it frustrating how the story treats his and mell's actions as equivalent when mell was literally threatened with death if he didnt partake in the whole thing. it wouldn't be as big of a problem if the level of his actions was scaled down before his sympathetic turn.
- the way the first three doors are tied into the story as a whole feels kinda disappointing, both on the basic narrative level and the metafictional level. part of my dislike for the first three doors is the sense that they're just setup and there isn't rly that much investment in these characters beyond their ability to suffer. in the metafictional context you could justify this by saying that there's an intentional contrast between giselle telling the stories and michel experiencing them with a detached spectatorship, and that part of the point is that we can more easily detach from suffering that isn't our own. fata implies this direction but doesnt rly commit to it, and its metafictional position in the end becomes very different. in door 8 michel is able to understand everybody because of his spectatorship, to the point that he understands them better than the characters themselves do. it doesn't rly have much of a sense that some things can only be understood through experience, rather than simply witnessing. ryukishi07's works have similarly empathetic conclusions, but i find his portrayal of empathy more interesting because it acknowledges that empathy's fundamental limitations. there's a sense that we can't have a complete access or understanding - empathy brings us closer to it, but to empathise takes work and a recognition that you can still completely misunderstand the other. fata's portrayal of empathy feels a lot simpler because it feels the need to explain everything and not leave enough about the characters inaccessible to michel and the reader.
potentially more notes to come later, though im fairly satisfied with what i've written for now!
- the quickest summary of my fata thoughts is that i really don't like the first 3 doors and like all of the doors after, but the lows of doors 4-8 are REALLY rough. i like the core of fata morgana a lot and at its best it rly does nail the intensely romantic and sublime affect it's going for. i don't love all of the banter between michel and giselle but their romance overall is pretty moving, and the VN is rly great at turning it into spectacle while maintaining its emotional meaning. it's easy to see why it's emotionally resonated with so many. but unfortunately when it comes to the specifics i find fata fumbles on so many things. it frustrated me more than nearly any piece of fiction in a while, but i'll admit it also kept my interest because of that. it stayed on my mind as i was reading and i rly liked discussing it with ppl (both fans and haters). everyone knows what's great about this VN - the romance, the music, the emotional ambition, etc. and because of that it's a bit easier to complain than to sing the same praises that everyone else has. so while the tone of the review overall is negative i do wanna stress i liked a lot of fata and def don't regret reading it. whether i'd recommend it is another matter. if you're invested in VNs and have a lot of free time as i do then i think it's worthwhile, but if you don't have either of these things i don't know if it's worth the time investment.
- i think an issue throughout all of fata is that it feels far too emotionally externalised. fata is 100% a melodrama and on one hand emotional externalisation is what melodrama's all about - it's about letting go of realistic presentation and human behaviour to bring as much emotion out as possible. i love a lot of melodramatic works but in fata i think this externalisation becomes an issue because it makes everything so clear cut to the point that the emotions can feel simplistic and overly laid out. a lot of melodrama also externalises through form and the best examples of this can get away with emotionally simplistic writing. on this level fata is kind of a mixed bag - the soundtrack is obviously the highlight and carries a lot of sequences to be far more emotionally meaningful than they'd be on the page. fata's strongest sequence ("reclaim yourself") also uses formal elements specific to visual novels for excellent dramatic effect. but the prose itself doesn't feel like anything more than a middling imitation of the gothic novels it's clearly inspired by. the translation also has the awkward mix of period-accurate terms and modern colloquial speech. i dont mind the latter at all in period fiction but it feels so awkwardly employed here.
- in particular i think the portrayal of suffering and tragedy in the VN often places too much emphasis on what is happening rather than the characters' response to it. tragedy as a literary genre is a rly tricky line to ride because it builds a kind of entertainment out of suffering - not necessarily entertainment in the sense of being fun, but in the sense of an intense emotional engagement that leads to a cathartic release. i love tragic fiction but it's not hard to argue that the genre is inherently distasteful for these reasons. i think this is why the tragedies that interest me most are ones which are more invested in the circumstances that create suffering + how the characters react to their/other people's suffering than the actual event of suffering. i think when you take these into account you're closer to being able to examine suffering as an actual human experience and not an awful thing in the abstract. which isnt to say that direct depictions of suffering can't be shown at all, but that i rarely see that much value in depiction alone. i want the sense that the author isn't just using suffering for shock value and that they have a sincere investment in that human experience. there are times where i feel fata rly does want to give justice to its subjects and others where it feels half-hearted. so much of the story is just kinda there to set things in place, and when tragedy is brought into that uninterested setup the results rly fall apart. this is most evident in the sequence with the villagers in door 5. i just cant rly see this sequence as anything more than a way to get giselle and michel to reunite. it speeds through giselle's relationship between the villagers and their relationship with her but indulges in her torture, with little point other than "wow people sure are cruel!" and yet once giselle and michel reunite the resulting scene is a rly strong one that sensitively portrays giselle's experience as a SA victim. in that scene there's a sense of true emotional investment on the author's part and an astute idea of what shouldn't be shown. these elements just arent there in the previous torture scene. these contrasts are what make fata such a frustrating work for me, and i wish it could have reached its highs without twisting itself in contrivances and indulgent suffering to get there.
-while im still on the topic of door 5 - one of the strongest chapters in the game and prob the most crucial one since the rest is extremely dependent on you believing that the michel and giselle romance is deeply powerful. their initial dynamic is pretty standard but effectively endearing, and once it gets into the territory of a bond from shared trauma it becomes pretty powerful. i'm not made of stone! but there's one scene which annoys me so much because it's actually written excellently, but the choice of CG kind of ruins the whole thing. this is a scene late into the door where giselle shows her scars to michel, wanting both to display what michel's father did to her, but also to see if michel can still desire her. one of the door's most interesting threads is how giselle still maintains erotic desires while knowing that she still hasn't recovered enough to be able to consummate them - this tension also existing within michel. the scene shows that giselle still hasn't resolved this tension, but she can reject the idea of her body as undesireable and trust michel enough to let herself be desired again. the scene as it's written works because the eroticism is not for the reader - it's explicitly between the characters. however, the CG's depiction of giselle's body prominently displays her breasts, and shows nothing of her scars. by including a CG at all the body is being displayed to the third party of the reader, which already diminishes the power of the scene. but its framing makes it even worse by explicitly objectifying giselle and making it appear that the depiction of her body is for an imagined reader to gaze at.
- another part of fata which im conflicted on is door 7. on one hand i commend the developers for writing a story about a transmasc/intersex character in 2012 with sincere investment in depicting the experience of dysphoria, writing him as a morally complex character and leaving absolutely no doubt that he should be seen as a man. i'm not qualified to say how accurately it portrays both of those experiences, and i'd be happy to read any critique of the portrayal from transmasc and intersex individuals. but i feel at the very least that novectacle cared about the portrayal. that being said there's one sequence in this chapter which gets far too indulgent in the suffering, even for fata's standards. obviously it's acceptable for a trans story to get depressing - the portrayals of outing and rejection from family/love interests are pretty rough but reasonable to show especially for the time period. but i don't think there's really any justification for the extended sequence of aimee physically, psychologically and sexually torturing michel while he's kept imprisoned. in this case it's less that it's careless as a result of the story needing to rush itself, and more that you could just remove it from the story without making a difference. michel's trauma with aimee is already perfectly justified by her forced outing and cruel rejection of him. i don't find it believable that she basically becomes john jigsaw. the sequence would be more justified if michel's sexual abuse was referred to back in door 5 - given that door's portrayal of a bond emerging out of shared trauma, you would think michel being sexually abused would have had some impact on that chapter. but i think even if it were more prominent to the overall story, there isn't any need to depict it in such strong detail. higurashi didn't have any sequences explicitly showing satoko's abuse in detail because it wouldn't actually add anything that we don't already understand through the depiction of the after-effects. fata really could have used a similar sense of restraint if this element was going to be included at all.
- another issue fata has is its obsession with reveals/twists to the point that it unnecessarily withholds information or kinda cheats the reader in its presentation. michel being trans is something that i dont think rly needed to be a twist, and door 5 would have honestly been even stronger if we were able to engage in his perspective more. i think the reveal is relatively tasteful because it's explicitly from his perspective, and the horror of the reveal is in the horror of being outed rather than the horror of his body (as most trans reveals tend to be played, unfortunately). a case that i find more frustrating is in door 3, which i think would have been much more engaging if it were told from maria's perspective rather than revealing her as a villain halfway through and then keeping her motivations vague until the end. idk if it'd fix that door's main problem which is that the level of cruelty she inflicts upon the white haired girl just doesnt rly align with the rest of her motivations, but it'd make the chapter much less frustrating than having a reveal which is obvious yet poorly justified in the text itself.
- jacopo is just a disastrously written character. the attempts to make him sympathetic are so misguided. i love when characters who are awful people are humanised, but i think to humanise someone doesn't necessarily mean that it should justify their actions. in both door 3 and door 8 fata doesn't quite absolve jacopo's actions but it gets very flimsy in trying to justify them. with door 3 he basically does a 180 as soon as the reveal with maria happens. the problem is that he starts off as a fucking cartoon villain and there just isnt any development to him gaining any kind of conscience. door 8 is even worse in that his actions are so monstrous that the game rly has to go hard in figuring out any kind of sympathetic motivation and the one that it comes up with is "okay so what if he was a pedophile". and even if we just ignore that it's still like bro locked up a girl in a tower and had the blood drained from her to be sold to a whole town as a fake miracle cure and it was all because he was just too anxious to communicate properly. i just find it frustrating how the story treats his and mell's actions as equivalent when mell was literally threatened with death if he didnt partake in the whole thing. it wouldn't be as big of a problem if the level of his actions was scaled down before his sympathetic turn.
- the way the first three doors are tied into the story as a whole feels kinda disappointing, both on the basic narrative level and the metafictional level. part of my dislike for the first three doors is the sense that they're just setup and there isn't rly that much investment in these characters beyond their ability to suffer. in the metafictional context you could justify this by saying that there's an intentional contrast between giselle telling the stories and michel experiencing them with a detached spectatorship, and that part of the point is that we can more easily detach from suffering that isn't our own. fata implies this direction but doesnt rly commit to it, and its metafictional position in the end becomes very different. in door 8 michel is able to understand everybody because of his spectatorship, to the point that he understands them better than the characters themselves do. it doesn't rly have much of a sense that some things can only be understood through experience, rather than simply witnessing. ryukishi07's works have similarly empathetic conclusions, but i find his portrayal of empathy more interesting because it acknowledges that empathy's fundamental limitations. there's a sense that we can't have a complete access or understanding - empathy brings us closer to it, but to empathise takes work and a recognition that you can still completely misunderstand the other. fata's portrayal of empathy feels a lot simpler because it feels the need to explain everything and not leave enough about the characters inaccessible to michel and the reader.
potentially more notes to come later, though im fairly satisfied with what i've written for now!
3 Comments
the heck is this other comment.
i'm transfem so even my perspective on this is rather limited but I'd like to address that Michel's story feels like it was done with much care like you said, but this being a queer story in some aspects that focuses on trauma it wouldn't make sense to out Michel at any point other than his horrible outing. I get the part with Aimee being a bit fetishistic (most of the game deals with this), but I feel like overall this is a tale of broken people and novectacle just really likes to press the point as much as they can, which may be a bit too much, but it also shows that Michel has a bit more than "trans body horror" going on with him.
I'm curious however, due to the many nods to ryukishi, how do you view something like Kaleidoscope which clashes horribly against this game. I understand it doesn't invalidade his earlier works, not at all, but in retrospect it becomes really jarring
i'm transfem so even my perspective on this is rather limited but I'd like to address that Michel's story feels like it was done with much care like you said, but this being a queer story in some aspects that focuses on trauma it wouldn't make sense to out Michel at any point other than his horrible outing. I get the part with Aimee being a bit fetishistic (most of the game deals with this), but I feel like overall this is a tale of broken people and novectacle just really likes to press the point as much as they can, which may be a bit too much, but it also shows that Michel has a bit more than "trans body horror" going on with him.
I'm curious however, due to the many nods to ryukishi, how do you view something like Kaleidoscope which clashes horribly against this game. I understand it doesn't invalidade his earlier works, not at all, but in retrospect it becomes really jarring
oh dw about the other comment, that's my friend being silly and using a copypasta. can absolutely understand being confused by it out of context lol.
on michel i'm not suggesting that he needed to be outed earlier within the events of the story. what i'm thinking is more about having his internal monologue/PoV in door 5 address trans experience. it can still be kept a secret to the other characters while being known to the reader. i wouldnt rly consider something like that "outing". on ryukishi i haven't read Kaleidoscope and actually only heard about it the other day. all i can say is that even with the most charitable possible interpretation it sounds REALLY rough. ultimately it's something he wrote while drunk and mainly for the money, but it still kinda sucks that he'd publish and profit off of something which is so dubious with gender stuff. it's pretty disappointing to hear about. though my general position on empathy in art is that empathy is valuable but imperfect, and that it's very easy for artists can be deeply empathetic in one story and fail completely in another because of those limitations. so while it sucks i'm not necessarily surprised either. not so much about trans stuff but you could argue that contradiction goes back to higurashi, a work which is meaningfully empathetic about child abuse yet still contains several sequences that sexualise children (one of the reasons why i can never consider higurashi a complete masterpiece even though it's one of my fave pieces of fiction).
on michel i'm not suggesting that he needed to be outed earlier within the events of the story. what i'm thinking is more about having his internal monologue/PoV in door 5 address trans experience. it can still be kept a secret to the other characters while being known to the reader. i wouldnt rly consider something like that "outing". on ryukishi i haven't read Kaleidoscope and actually only heard about it the other day. all i can say is that even with the most charitable possible interpretation it sounds REALLY rough. ultimately it's something he wrote while drunk and mainly for the money, but it still kinda sucks that he'd publish and profit off of something which is so dubious with gender stuff. it's pretty disappointing to hear about. though my general position on empathy in art is that empathy is valuable but imperfect, and that it's very easy for artists can be deeply empathetic in one story and fail completely in another because of those limitations. so while it sucks i'm not necessarily surprised either. not so much about trans stuff but you could argue that contradiction goes back to higurashi, a work which is meaningfully empathetic about child abuse yet still contains several sequences that sexualise children (one of the reasons why i can never consider higurashi a complete masterpiece even though it's one of my fave pieces of fiction).
yikes_gayming
8 months ago