Saihate no Ima Video Update #3: Brain Worms and Memes in the Vaccines (or: Tanaka Romeo Predicted the 2020s)

Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing well... or, as well as you can. What a year, huh?

captain, it's only the first week of January--

Anyways. In the few weekdays bridging Christmas and New Years together, I was able to take the time to finally finish the subject of the last few blog posts and upcoming video, Saihate no Ima. If you haven't read the last two blog posts, you should do that before reading this one, because I'm going to be building upon them pretty heavily here.

I should also note that, like the last post, this is going to contain incredibly massive spoilers for the game that re-contextualize the entire experience. I'm not sure that matters for Ima because of how batshit it is and how many subjects it covers, but if you do intend to read one of the hardest Japanese-only VNs any time soon, you should stop now. If you are still interested, please scroll past the Hot Topic looking motherfucker right below.

I said in the last post that, despite being 2/3rds of the way into Ima, I could not tell you what the 'elevator pitch' of the story is. Having read every single bit of text in the game now, I can safely say that Ima's plot is, roughly, 'a bunch of friends with traumatic pasts get roped in varying ways into an internet war that will determine the fate of humanity and our ability to exist as individuals with free will.'

Those may sound like two very disparate things, and indeed, they somewhat are. Saihate no Ima can be divided into distinct parts: as outlined before, the game consists of three Scenarios: 1, 2, and 5. S1 & S2 is set in a nebulous time following our weird group of misfits in their personal private 'sanctuary (聖域)', and S5 is somewhere in the before?/middle?/after? where a war occurred that irrevocably changed how they interact with each other, and who they even interact with. These, in turn, can be divided into even more distinct segments.

Scenario 1 and 2 both have individual characters routes, and each route consists of a hodgepodge of scenes that, in turn, take place in some mysterious place on a rather unclear timeline. People are missing and mourned in one scene, and then another 3 minutes later, they're shooting the shit with the bros. Someone might be convicted of being a serial killer in one moment, and the next, they're sipping tea with everyone.

Saihate no Ima is a supremely non-linear story for these scenarios, and while you can assemble a rough idea of where things go in Scenario 1 through notetaking and creativity, Scenario 2 is the B-side that removes scenes and adds new ones that completely fuck up any sense of a timeline you may have had. This is without getting into how the ending recontexualizes EVERYTHING, but... we'll get there.

Despite and because of this complexity, Ima's first two scenarios are some of the most evocative and fascinating writing that exists within the visual novel space, and really all of Japanese fiction. To try and elaborate on everything that they go into would be a herculean effort I'm not even going to dare to attempt in this post, so I instead want to focus on a key aspect of the story: the vibe of shootin' the shit with your neurodivergent friends.

With the plot being so challenging to follow at this point, a lot of Ima's early charm comes from lead writer Tanaka Romeo's incredible ability to make characters and worlds come to life. While you're wracking your brain and slamming your keyboard feverishly typing confused notes to keep track of everything happening, the game provides scene after scene of everyone interacting in scenarios ranging from vaguely gay sex joke exchanges to dialogues about whether death or being the last to die is more horrifying.

Because the game drip feeds you enough bits of logic to maintain hope that you might make sense of the story with enough intensive thinking sessions (and you most certainly can) without making you get lost, these moments feel less like distractions from the weird mysteries building up and more like welcome reprieves from Romeo's Wild Ride. It's an absolute joy (and at times horror) to watch the cast and crew interact with each other, as you slowly learn more about how they are, what they wish for, and what their dynamics are.

Of course, following his own example from Cross Channel, none of these characters are perfectly good or particularly healthy in the brain. Everyone has some sort of struggle that colors their interactions: the main character Shinobu suffers under the traumatic weight of an isolated childhood in the "facility," genki girl Azusa is a victim of severe abuse by her mother and classmates, the Tsukamoto siblings grapple with the weight of being from a suffocatingly traditionalist home, Fueko's parents have pretty much left her alone to care for her likely disabled sister, and Shouji... I dunno, he's probably the only normal one of the bunch?

None of these characters feel like they're given harsh backstories and challenging realities for the sake of making the story 'dark' or '2deep.' All of it factors in to the present, and all of the things that happen to them - both wonderful and fucked up - come back in incredible ways as the story progresses to ultimately paint portraits of people who feel very... real.

I think part of what helps realize all of this is the fact that the story is so non-linear at this point. Because events occur extremely out of order, you're forced to put the whole 'assembling a coherent story' thing in the background as a task to hack away it, and instead focus on the interactions as they occur. Every new scene is a new fragment of the life of these characters, a new chance to learn something about them as they are, rather than as part of a clear narrative with a beginning and end. Even the most irrelevant scene one may consider filler no longer feels as such: it's just friends shooting the shit.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of early Ima, and ties into something I've thought about a lot since my video on Suisenka: how we envision characters and stories. Suisenka advocates for authors to think about how they marionette characters by considering them as whole people with agency, and for readers to not reduce them to mere figures and examples in service of a grander narrative. When we strip characters of their agency by forcing them to act out of character, or when we expect them to perform an arbitrary task simply because it satisfies what we desire out of a story, we dehumanize them.

There's immense subtlety in the argument Suisenka I believe makes that avoids falling into the god-awful trap of 'characters are like people, and therefore if author makes bad things happen or reader fantasizes bad things, author/reader is abusive.' What I understand is more like a rebuttal to people saying Tomino's characters in Gundam behave in erratic, unpredictable, weird, obnoxious ways, and actually they should do this or that or etc etc because it makes more 'sense.' Tomino, I think, has a similar vision to Suisenka's writer: people are weird unpredictable gremlins that behave in complicated ways, and characters ought to reflect this, even if this may mean characters behaving in ways that defy genre convention or what's most interesting.

I don't believe Ima has any characters behave in particularly absurd or 'ridiculous' ways, though it certainly has moments of crazy shit happening. But I bring all of this up because Ima's non-linearity forces you to seriously take these people as they are, how they behave in these moments, as honest representations of a person rather than devices to move a plot forward. All of the greater machinations leading up to grand moments such as Fueko breaking down and wishing to die, or Youko Tsukamoto screaming out at random "I WANNA BE A HUMAN ALREADY!" are way more effective because you're primarily seeing them as moments of a person feeling potent emotion, and plot/character beats second.

This non-linear, disjointed form of storytelling and character building, actually has a diagetic reason too. It's revealed much, much later on (as in, the last hour or two of this 50 hour game) that all of Scenario 1 and 2 are a series of fragmented memories in our main character Shinobu's mind, and that we've been witnessing them out of order as an enigmatic figure known as Ima (literally 'Now') has been sifting through them while Shinobu is, in reality, in some sort of comatose state following a war. The two, of course, are linked together by the internet... ...actually, it's the chemical net which is like the internet but biological and aaaaaahhhh we'll GET THERE.

You can take this a lot of ways, and it has pretty huge implications for what's actually happening in these two scenarios. Particularly, with the context of what happens in Scenario 5 (which is all about the war with brain worms and meme vaccines), it becomes possible to reassemble Shinobu's fragmented memories into a coherent timeline. I am not nearly big brained enough to do that, but some absolute hero did many years ago, and I intend to reference that when making the video in order to to not drive all of you insane with my attempts to vaguely tie the story together.

What I think this adds most to the story is the feeling of exploring a life in a way that's not too dissimilar to how we look at lives now on the internet: disconnected, fragmentary segments, that we as random onlookers view in an indiscriminate order. We see little microblogs, large videos, substantive posts, unsubstantial vacation photos, and so forth, and assemble a life, an idea, of someone through all of this. Whether or not that's accurate, it's hard to say without knowing more from the person themselves, if the person themselves can even really give you an accurate recount. After all, memory isn't quite linear or reliable.

In these ways, Ima's first two Scenarios perfectly capture what existing in the modern day feels like, particularly as a fucked up little neurodivergent gremlin. Our memories are fractured, our experiences are fractured, and though they are filled with pain, they're also filled with great joys, too.

I did say there were mysteries being hinted at in all this and, indeed, Ima builds up to a lot in the midst of its philosophical rambles and gags about vibrators. There's constant mentions of some sort of war that took place, mysterious entities called "Users," references to increasingly bizarre forms of the internet, and something called the 'facility' that Shinobu spent his early life at.

All of this goes on a collision course and comes to a terribly elongated head in Scenario 5, also referred to as 戦争編 (Sensou Hen/War Chapter). If you're wondering where the other two Scenarios went -- as mentioned in prior posts, they don't exist. Ima was infamously released with them missing, and despite having a version of the game hilariously named 'Saihate no Ima Complete,' they were never added in. Tanaka Romeo doesn't remember what they were actually going to consist of. Pretty much the only thing we know about them is a small flashback within Chapter 5's prologue to Sayaka being hospitalized, and references to a few quotes in the game.

This isn't as much of a hamper to the experience as you might think. Definitely, it causes problems -- for example, the main villain of the first two Scenarios was presumably intended to reappear in Scenario 3 and/or 4 with more development, but he pretty much gets BTFO'd in Scenario 2 and disappears from the story until the last 30 minutes or so where he gets put into a metaphorical gay baby jail. It's very bizarre and funny. But for the most part, the core loop and premise of the story is established within Scenario 1 & 2, and so is everything you need to know for Scenario 5 going into it.

Which is very little about Scenario 5.

Scenario 5/Sensou Hen is where Ima goes off the rails. It takes place at some point in the story that's hard to pinpoint, but it's seemingly well after Shinobu's friend group has started to shatter, and some if not all of them are dead due to varying plot events (Sayaka is hunted for being a witch and goes sicko mode on people, Fueko loses her mind and kills at least Souji, etc). As if things weren't bad enough for Shinobu, he ends up having to go back to the mysterious "facility" that so horribly traumatized him in order to fight a war for humanity.

As it turns out, the 'facility' that the game was hinting at in Shinobu's past this whole time is a research facility aiming to, at least in part, study a group of people called "Users" -- people with the ability to connect to the Chemical Net; more or less the internet but entirely biological, and I believe powered through the presence of (and please don't laugh) meme particles floating in the air (okay you can laugh). Users can do all sorts of crazy shit depending on their rank, from the lowest of Class D (Disarrayed Children) to the highest of Class S (Selected Children). Some are effectively human bombs, while others can hack into brains.

Shinobu was intended to be the creme of the crop, the User who would rule all other Users: the King Unit, Aurelius. Having a demigod like him to rule over the Chemical Net was important to the Facility, because one of the key projects the Facility wanted to advance was the Global Village Plan -- a plan developed by the US and Japan, initially advanced with help of the UN and WHO, wherein all of humanity would be connected to the Chemical Net to create a collective consciousness that could be weaponized and controlled in varying ways. To accomplish this, they'd put the meme particles into people through varying means.

Realizing at some point this would be a horrifying violation of human rights - particularly after a scandal involving vaccines filled with memes (you can still laugh) - the UN and WHO backed out, but the US and Japan at the least continued the project. People who knew about the project were told it was for the sake of fighting an enemy, but a select few were planning to use it for mass population control, as it turns out having everyone connected to a single network is a pretty easy way to manipulate humanity. Especially when being in touch with the network has a non-0% chance of leading you to encounter evil brain worms that drive you insane.

These brain worms are the mysterious enemy of Sensou Hen, and what the people who are good in the facility want to use the GVP for. Ideally, having everyone interfaced with the Chemical Net would allow Shinobu to leverage the collective power of humanity to defeat the brain worms, and afterwards, have a convenient means of connecting to one another.

As ideal as that might be, it's obviously not a practical plan. There's people in the Facility, and of course world governments, who want to initiate the GVP just to enact mass surveillance and control of everyone weaker than them. It might even arguably be good for them to let the brain worms keep infesting the internet, because they're pretty good at making people lose all reason.

The parallels of all of this to the modern internet age are pretty apparent, especially if you're willing to sub-in for a few details that Romeo got wrong, or, not entirely right. The prediction that the government would be seeking to connect everyone to some sort of super-platform was definitely not on the money (even if some governments have their hands in those super-platforms), but indeed: massively powerful forces worked to bring people into centralized platforms under ostensibly humanitarian goals but truly for mass control, and the internet has become the dumping ground for all of our brain sludge which collectively drives us apart.

There's two common themes that come up throughout all of this as well: the lie of community within this conglomerated network, and the systematic destruction of smaller spaces and networks. The former is a major point in Sensou Hen, with the characters ultimately realizing that the GVP is a godawful horrific idea because trying to create a singular infrastructure to connect all of humanity together can never, ever work.

Human groups are too diverse and complicated to be ruled under a single entity. Individual people need freedom and free will as much as they need other people. Groups of individuals need to be made of people who understand each others needs. And these groups need the ability to connect to spaces on their own time, and foster the community and connections they desire. They do not need singular platforms managed by mega-corporations and governments, who decide by their whims what is best for groups who all have different beliefs and needs - in fact, these are quite hostile to human socialization and connection.

This, I think, is what Romeo tries to convey to the reader, and pretty explicitly at points. Not only on the macro of human socialization, but for the micro of the internet, too. Romeo is one of the few people at that time (besides perhaps academics and some leftists) who really understood just how corporate the internet was, and knew that it was going to get worse. It was going to homogenize into a select few "platforms" and spaces, not heterogenize into more community-run interlinked spaces ("sanctuaries"). That heterogeneity is contrary to corporate profit and civilian control, after all.

And he was right on the money. Major corporations do what they love to do and squash every community endeavor they can they can. Companies like Facebook and The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter attracted mass audiences and enshittified themselves knowing that people wouldn't leave, while bastions of hope like Geocities were slaughtered by the corporate overlords.

I think it's very easy, then, to fetishize the old internet, but I must reiterate that the internet was never particularly "good," and even Ima acknowledges this. It talks about how radicalization through extreme content always existed, it recognizes cyberbullying as a phenomena (particularly against young women), and it spends extensive time talking about how the internet has allowed the most misanthropic, cruel people to become Gods of domains simply through owning people on imageboards.

If anything, I think now is as good a time as the days of ARPANET to decentralize and create sanctuaries on the internet. Perhaps even better because those prototypical days of the internet still had great ties to the military origins of the whole project. We have Neocities, absurd amounts of open source software for hosting/designing/managing websites, decades of design language to build off of, and perhaps most importantly, we're all fucking tired of this. We are SO MUCH more tired of what the internet is than when all of its flaws were tucked away in the shadows in the 90s and early to late 2000s.

There's so much more I could say about Ima that I'm going to save for the video. I have many more thoughts about the romanticizing of the past internet, the sludge of hatred and garbage underlaying the most dominant platforms, the destruction of safe spaces/sanctuaries, the horrifying surveillance committed without our knowledge by both governments and corporations, the brutal radicalization of the internet, and so much more...

But I want to end this blog post by circling back to what I more or less started talking about: the fact that this game does, ultimately, still have lots of weird friends shooting the shit together. And if I might be a bit saccharine for the sake of not losing my mind any further, this is still something I believe the internet can be good at. It still has the potential to connect like minded people together, and to allow us to build sanctuaries. We just have to be willing to disconnect from the brainworm hivemind, lay bricks ourselves, and reach out to others that already escaped

...

I'll try to get another post out before the end of the month, with at least a progress report on the video script. Preferably I'd like to have the whole script done, but I don't think it's likely because I'm going to take a slight break this month. I'll be out of town and seeing the in-laws from the 12th to the 20th or so, and I'll have an orchiectomy happening sometime this month which will put me out of commission for a few days. And then cram school will be starting in early February, so I'm going to go from working 8 hours a day to 4 hours a day until November.

My hope is that school won't change my output speed too much, but we'll see what I'm able to pull off. I intend to shoot for some smaller projects after this video because the To Love-Ru video got out of hand real fast, and this one has been a LOT to make. I've downed three books already and have something like three more to go before I'm ready to start writing.

Anyways! See y'all again soon. o/