Caption / ISLAND
Paying attention to the individual needs of the "crosser" is to pay attention to the changes in the mood of the reader/audience.
Two-dimensional fans always hate and love otherworld animation. In the January new fan broadcast, several otherworld animations rely on different settings, and once again become the main source of traffic in the new fan area of station B.
When you have seen these works, you will find that the brave people who have crossed to the other world in this new fan are almost not doing the right thing.
"Adventure with friends who have become beautiful girls in other worlds" tells the story of an uncle who travels to another world and becomes a blonde girl who is not a brave person. In the second season of "The Re-establishment of the Kingdom of the Realist Braves", the braves who crossed the battlefield ignored the demon king and played a simulated business game that recruited talents to revive the kingdom. Although "The Genius Prince's Deficit State Rebirth Technique" has not crossed, this other-world prince is not thinking about rich countries and strong soldiers, but thinking about how to destroy the country so that he can live a leisurely life without having to worry about government affairs. The second season of "Ordinary Occupation Makes the World's Strongest" may be the most serious person in this crosser, but his counterattack path has nothing to do with the word "brave".
Turning the timeline forward, we can still catch a lot of similar Japanese cross-genre works. These light novels that "just look at the title to know what the story is about" and their adaptations have a characteristic, that is, the brave are no longer obsessed with fighting the demon king, but try their best not to do serious things. Why has this kind of impropriety crossing become a popular Japanese comic theme today, and what kind of group mentality is reflected behind it? This question also begins with the era when "brave" became a profession.
The beginning of the crossing
Looking back at history, it is difficult to say who japan's earliest crossers were.
Close-ups like Dinosaur Mega Class (1978) that travel 60 million years ago to save the planet are works heavily influenced by American science fiction. In contrast, the female works represented by "The Coat of Arms of the Royal Family" (1976) give up the entanglement of crossing the "scientific method" and let the heroine cross to another world in a simple and violent way, taking this as an opportunity to get rid of the shackles of the real world and let go of her hands and feet to experience a completely different life. The crossing allows the reader to no longer follow the work from the perspective of a third party, but can replace himself with the protagonist, achieving a far more extreme experience than before. Crossing has also become a popular genre for women to work, giving birth to many classic works such as "The Game of Inconceivable", "The Sky is the Red Riverbank", "Magic Knight" and so on, which have continued to this day.
Gamification of crossing
As women begin to travel to the work, the boys are still immersed in another world constructed by board games. Mizuno's "Rhode Island Battle" is a novel derived from the "Running Team Battle Report" of the board game "Dungeons and Dragons" at that time. "The Legend of the Demon God Hero" (1988), which has become the collective memory of the post-80s generation, can be seen as a successful appropriation of the cross-genre by the original animation. Although many people may have forgotten that this anime has a traversal element, there will be many details in the film that remind the audience of the connection between the other world and the real world, such as the master Sabalaku (Takeichiro Kenbe) who needs to use a public telephone every time to contact his mech to come to "work".
Don't underestimate such details, it is these audiences familiar with small objects that make the other world seem less strange and distant, which can greatly narrow the distance between the work and the audience. Such a small technique has also appeared repeatedly in subsequent works on the theme of crossing, such as the classic image of Ge Wei in "InuYasha". Both her sailor suit and her bicycle symbolize the material civilization of contemporary society, always reminding the viewer of her identity as a modern person. And this is the most effective way for the work to build a bond with the audience.
In fact, both "Legend of the Demon God Heroes" and "InuYasha" have a clear gamification tendency in the worldview setting, such as having to attack the region in order, numericalizing the boss, collecting item fragments in a similar way to doing tasks, and so on. According to Prince Hiroi, the producer of "The Legend of the Demon God Hero", this worldview setting can firmly grasp the hearts of the audience and let them continue to watch it. This mentality is very similar to the mentality of gamers constantly leveling up, and crossing becomes the best means of connecting players/viewers with other worlds. When works like Sword Art Online came out, the author simply stripped off the cloak of the other world and let the player directly cross into the game. However, this game does not provide offline functions for the time being.
Gamification and anti-gamification
The first novel of Sword Art Online began serialization as early as 2002, but it didn't really become a household name in two-dimensional circles until a decade later. Sword Art Online is waiting, waiting for a group of children who have played games since childhood to grow up. When children who grew up playing the game of saving the world by the king's way grew up, when they found that there was no demon king in this world, and they were not the "chosen child", they naturally no longer looked forward to the "Dragon Quest" story, but turned around to find other alternatives.
Sword Art Online, including the later Overlord, became the first works to be selected by the audience. Travel to the game world to achieve peak experiences that are impossible to achieve in reality, and even break the "rules" of the game world and make yourself a rule-maker. Such a different world fits perfectly into all the fantasies of gamers, and the large number of player groups naturally transforms into a readership pool for such novels.
Re: Life in Another World from Scratch is a unique way to evoke collective memory from another perspective. Resurrection from the dead is not unusual in any fantasy work. But what is special about "Re0" is that it uses time backtracking to cleverly simulate the "S/L Dafa" of video games, leaving countless readers instantly intoxicated and unable to extricate themselves. Therefore, the mass base of Re0 still comes from the game. It evokes the collective memory of the majority of single-player players for "save play", and presents this memory in a dramatic way, successfully.
Since "Re0", the creators who have found the methodology have begun the process of opening their minds.
"About My Rebirth into Slime" believes that although there is no one in the hundred players who pass the level, each player must have fought with the lowest monster slime outside the novice village, so it decided to let the protagonist reincarnate the slime to awaken the players' memories.
"I was expelled from the brave team who was not a real companion, so I decided to live a slow life at the border" perfectly responded to the voices of the "Link" who did not go to the novice village and traveled around the mountains and forgot to save the princess, and let the princess take the initiative to find the door to live a different life with the protagonist.
"Cautious Brave ~ This Brave Man Is Obviously Super Strong but Too Cautious ~" captures the hoarding psychology of hamster-type players who are never willing to use recovery drugs, and creates a story of protagonists with similar mentalities who open up and hang adventures all the way.
Flag! Works such as "The Way of the Beast" and "The Re-establishment of the Kingdom of the Realist Brave" open up another path. The protagonists are obviously summoned to the world of RPG games, but they do not play cards according to the script, but play RPGs as simulated business games, open shops in other worlds, and have pets.
The one that goes the furthest in this regard is The Horizon of Record. This work simply allows players who have crossed into the game world to exert their various abilities in the real world, from futures trading to marketing business battles. Since then, many works with this as the idea have also emerged, such as "The Battle of young girls" that uses the thick black science in the workplace to mix in other worlds.
In these new era cross-over works, the protagonist is no longer obsessed with constantly getting stronger or defeating the demon king, but instead tries to do something improper in the other world. If "becoming a brave" is the real world's expectation of every child to grow up, then the other world created by these cross-over works is more like a haven, allowing people who are growing up to at least temporarily abandon the burden of courage in the fantasy world and find some comfort. This is also the reason why more and more "uncles over 30 years old" in similar themes are becoming crossers, and this trend is a subtle echo with the rise of "son-in-law" texts in China in recent years.
epilogue
Ever since Dragon Quest became a national game in Japan, "Dragon Quest" has unwittingly become a profession. The world needs brave people to save, tasks also need brave people to complete, and the brave professionals have also become tool people. As the number of players playing brave increases, they have established a strong referential relationship with the brave profession, but at the same time, they want to try to get rid of the burdens imposed on the brave. More and more traversal works are no longer focused on saving the world, but instead focus on the individual needs of the "crosser", reflecting the care for the emotional changes of readers/viewers.
Borrowing from Derrida's deconstructivist point of view, what the current traversal work does is to dismantle the heroic narrative of "the brave man defeats the demon king to save the world". For example, if the crosser becomes the demon king himself, there is no longer a need for the brave to overthrow anything, and the crosser can decide whether to save the world or destroy the world by his own will. The core of deconstruction is to allow the reader to define his own identity, no longer trapped in authority or tradition.
However, if you take a closer look, the current traversal works do not really deconstruct the gamified otherworld. At the same time, the work subverts tradition but is highly dependent on tradition. The crosser is not a brave person at the same time just another way to open and hang, and the various "plug-ins" used to arouse the audience's resonance are still derived from the rules of the game. In the end, the reader/audience fell into the cycle of "either being a brave to defeat the demon king" or "being a demon king to defeat the brave", and the identity exchange did not jump out of the traditional prison behind it.
It is conceivable that in the near future, when everyone is tired of seeing the crossers who do not do the right thing, the crossing theme may return to the traditional heroic narrative, and eventually cycle between deconstruction and anti-deconstruction, gamification and anti-game. Only works that really have enough accumulation or connotation can penetrate this cycle and become classics.