[Essay] The 'trapped in an MMO' cliche (isn't as bad as r/anime thinks it is!)

Shitty title, shitty topic. But hear me out.It's hard to watch anime without having watched something set in a video game. SAO may have started a 'craze', or just confirmed the pre-existing desire of the market. But when we consider the market and the history of how popular art works, is there really anything to criticize?Let's go back; quite a while back. The 19th century, Victorian England. The popular theater was booming, and fans would go for a programme full of plays to suit all dispositions. The melodrama was one common, predictable genre that we could translate today into any 'turn your brain off', over-the-top action shows full of special effects (the special effects in the theater back then were rather incredible. Wanted a mob of hundreds of people on stage? Sure. Set fire to the set, bring on a fire engine? No problem). But another popular genre was the 'drawing room play'. Quite simply, a play set in a drawing room, where drawing room stuff happens. Comedy, drama, social angst. You had ones that embraced it and ones that 'deconstructed' it.Today, no-one with any consideration for the Victorian period calls out this 'drawing room' genre, this cliche of a setting, as a problem. There were good and bad versions of it, and once the public became tired of it, the theater evolved. Later plays were far more often 'deconstructions' of the type, and then they morphed into all sorts of other things and stopped being called 'drawing room plays' at all, particularly once the theater-going public stopped having drawing rooms to relate the setting to.Fast-forward to today, and one of the world's popular theaters, anime, has its own 'drawing room play' - the 'trapped in an MMO' story. Why link the two so completely? Because they're the same thing, essentially. Both are, sociologically, set in 'third places' - accessible places we go to that let us socialize freely and relatively cheaply - that also feel like part of the home while also separate from it (the drawing room is literally part of it but is its own sphere of social rules and dynamics, while an MMO is played in the home and likewise involves a different 'self' to the one you'd perform to your mum as she walked in). They're comfortable locations that the viewing public, as a whole, are going to connect with, and the familiarity of the setting allows for humour and themes using the setting to be more succinctly delivered. They also both involve some extent of 'performance' as separate from your 'real' self. The way Nishimura meets his friends online in Netoge is tantamount to how the middle and upper class of Victorian England used to meet their friends in each other's drawing rooms. In short, they're born from our habits as an audience, and will die with them too.As with the 'drawing room play', shifts are noticeable. World of Warcraft once had its day, but now the most popular collaborative online games are more confined multiplayer arenas - MOBAs, multiplayer shooters and card games - or far more player-constructed settings like Minecraft. With the MMO cliche attracting more and more criticism, and MMOs themselves fading away from the playerbase like the drawing rooms of Victorian England no longer became a thing, the genre may be moving on through the same pattern every popular theater goes through. More and more MMO shows involve self-aware commentary, good or bad, displaying an attempt to pull apart at the trope.The 'trapped in an MMO' cliche is just like any popular fad based on what 'third place' the public associate with the most, and it's noticeably starting to fade. KonoSuba watched as more of a stab at traditional RPG, Dragon Quest-esque tropes. Rather than pan the whole genre as an irritating, over-abundant cliche, it may be really worth looking into how it's changing and evolving in such a short space of time. We ought to be getting more and more interesting commentary on it in its future iterations. Poor 'self-aware' MC's like (arguably) Re:Zero's are just the baby steps towards, hopefully, some great deconstructions along the way.That's why, no matter how bad many 'trapped in an MMO' stories may be, the whole cliche isn't as bad as r/anime thinks it is.TL;DR: generic executions of a popular theater fad generally lead to more interesting commentary on it as the fad passes. The 'trapped in an MMO' story is and will be no exception.edit: for more on 'first/second/third places', check out Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term. It's a very versatile and interesting way of thinking about how we relate to setting in fiction and art, from cat cafes to Durarara!!'s chat room. http://ift.tt/1qwHsc0