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Dead Mount Death Play Gaiden: Kaijin Solitaire no Shinsen Gijutsu
Dec 12, 3:25 AM
Reading
5/?
· Scored
9
All Comments (10) Comments
The thing that "Fujimoto is not upholding here" would be, as you said, those surprise plot twists, the biggest being the two explosions at the centre of the narrative. But these are very much intended to be surprising, so the fact that they are is already the wrong point of criticism. You can still critique weather Fujimoto uses them in a meaningful way, but the fact that they are surprising is not a negative, unless you believe that there literally can never be a functional surprise plot twist, even in a meta-narrative about this exact question. The fact, that you attack the one-shot for this style of story telling means, that you did not understand what it was trying to say. This story is first and foremost about socially constructed norms, in this case the norms of narratives, and when you critique it for its surprise twists you are just restating the norm. Fujimoto doesn't deny these narrative norms outright, if he did, his one shot wouldn't follow a normal narrative structure, he just questions a singular aspect of how we perceive stories to function, this being our understanding of a set-up and a pay-off. The thing about this, the thing that makes your criticism so strange, is exactly this, because its thematic structure actually turns these "surprise twists" into perfectly plotted reveals. If you make a narrative about how a twist doesn't need built-up, the fact that your narrative tackles this question already functions as built-up. This is why, while the first twist is unexpected and is rightfully being criticized for it (the students that shit on Yuuta's work), the second explosion is a masterful pay-off to this previously built up dysfunctional element. The fact that you fail to see how this is very much the point, means that you more or less completely ignored what the one shot tried to say. In other words, you did not engage with the narrative and then blamed it for being nonsensical, even though it is perfectly foreshadowed. You don't have to like this story and you sure as hell can critique it, but if that piece of criticism is flawed, others also have the right of critiquing you and when it comes to your review, it very much is flawed.