Myriad Colors Phantom World is a collection of allegoriesThe following is a shitpost coming from a subjective viewer who's all too bullheaded and opinionated. Feel free to burn this to the ground and never return. Yes, there will be a TL;DR at the end. Yes, some of this is because Digibro is a condescending twit.Okay, a lot of this is because Digibro is a condescending twit who doesn't fully understand the material he's watching, but this is been building up over time so I'm using him for some of the structuring of this. If you haven't watched his video on Musaigen no Phantom World, its here. If you haven't watched Musaigen no Phantom World, well.. I tried to spoiler tag this submission.To start with one of Digi's comments and issues with MCPW: "Changing the way that the brain works and causing it to perceive something totally new is pretty much besides the point, and does not effectively tie into the motif of illusion." (Copying this right from his script.)Of course it does. This series is a compilation of allegorical tales to help explain philosophical thought experiments more than anything else. What's more famous of these than Plato's "The Cave", which depicts and discusses a life lived knowing nothing but shadows dancing upon cave walls, and how mindblowing it might be to find out the source of those illusions. It follows this string of thought by asking "What if everything we see is merely shadows dancing on cave walls, and what would we think if we made that discovery?"So to follow up on this, episode 2 even starts with a conversation about Kant's idea of the Noumenon. The cliff notes version is that a noumenon is an object. It gives off phenomenon that we can perceive, be it taste, touch, smell, sight, whatever. We can never, however, directly interact with the noumenon itself, we lack the ability to.I cannot say how excited I was when they started talking about this, because I was curious if it would tie in to the story at all. I know I made some number of exclamations because this is why changing the brain matters. Because if we are somehow forced to gain additional senses, now we change the way we interact with the world around us. This is why phantoms are even a thing. They were imperceptible to us before, but now we can actually interact.The tricky thing about the idea of noumenon is that if you lack the ability to perceive its phenomenon, you can't interact with it. Kant was a religious man and thusly stated the reason we can't interact with God was because we lacked the ability to detect the phenomenon he gave off.This is why the change in brain chemistry matters. If this is where the story starts to lose you, then yeah, its probably just not for you. That's fine, you're totally entitled to drop it based on that, but continuing forward he discredits the "Jamais Vu" portion of the episode as having no relevance, but its clearly got some importance. It stresses that phantoms are able to affect the world around them in more than just a physical way, like the red oni fighting against Mai at the start of the episode, and that some of these are more metaphysical.Further ahead in the video, he makes some comment about the drama feeling hollow. While I agree the drama isn't played out the best, he chooses to pick on the relevance of the end of episode one. I mean, who cares about the damn telephone poles?To that I'd say that clearly society, in some way, cares about the phantoms around them. Its a new world and they have to interact with them. To those people who have grown up around phantoms, they're no different than animals. This moment is no different than someone showing respect to an animal who's grown to a point where they might eat it for sustenance. It shows a respect for the world around them, and I think that's important.Let's step forward to complaints on Episode 3: "but again, I don’t get how Mai herself manages to add anything to this theme. You could’ve done this idea with any of the characters without really changing anything." (Again copied from his script.)Yeah, you could have. But we have Nozick's Experience machine with Reina, who's struggling with her parents in episode 4 and that's far more interesting to see. The loner Koito gets brought in to the cast because she's temporarily disabled, and that's pretty fitting.It was done with Mai because, out of the cast, she's the most energetic. We could do this with Reina if we changed her backstory, because its very clear she's a sheltered child. We could do this with Koito but we basically get that her backstory is that she got shunned for being too awesome. We could do this with Kurumi but, she's still young. We get it with Mai because as a kid, she doesn't understand how rough she's being. Looking back on it, she thinks she was just being nice and playing, but she was really just beating kids up. Phantom kids but whatever. Some kids play rough, yanno?Episode 4 was pretty fantastic for me. Reina's drawn into a hypnotic state and lured into an iteration of Nozick's Experience Machine. The concept of this thought experiment is that you're able to be plugged into a machine. While connected, you will experience pleasureable sensations that are indistinguishable from those you would have apart from the machine. Most examples or allegories of this will have some visual representation of this. Imagine a utopian version of The Matrix, where everyone's wealthy and has a great time.That's all this phantom is, really. Its preying on Reina's displeasure and offering her a happy family life. The end of the episode is basically verbatim the argument placed at the end of the thought experiment. Reina wants to go with the bunny family because she's happy. In fact, the only reason she doesn't go is because she's reminded that its not real, that she has a family, and family members who would miss her if she was not there, despite its tumultuous and unpleasant nature. She's reminded that she has people that she cares about and, despite the bunny family being the perfect family, its not real, only simulated.That's literally the third answer as to why you wouldn't plug in to Nozick's Experience Machine.Is the art meant to represent a cute girl's psychological hang ups? No. Its meant to represent a perfect world with a level of 'story book perfection.'What's episode 6? I don't know? A representation of a waking dream? The idea of lucid dreaming in a world where your thoughts can impact the world around you? I don't understand episode 8 either. Or 9. They were kind of amusing, though.But Episode 7? Episode 7 is almost brilliant. It took me till I was excusing it as an indefensible fanservice nekomimi episode before I figured out how it was brilliant, but let me explain.Haruhiko outright mentions that Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment meant to point out the issues with Quantum Mechanics, that a cat can't be both alive and dead, but because Atomic Decay isn't present until observed, the cat is technically both alive and dead unless observed. It's in a superposition where both realities are possible.This is where I break out the fantheory crack. I apologize. I've got very little actual knowledge on Quantum Mechanics, but...At some point in Quantum Mechanics, if it has to relate to reality, a defined state has to occur. It cannot remain in a superposition once interacted with. So the phantom Schrodinger's Cat creates a super position by its existence. It states that within this superposition, the entire student body is cats.And then it begins to collapse the superposition into its defined state through interaction.One of the first things that changes are small things, not so noticeable, subconcious ticks. The cat food smells really good. The feather toy Ruru waves around is something they want to pounce out. They stretch. They nap. Eventually, they start to change physically. Some people change faster, but the fastest is clearly Kurumi, who's impact on this reality is far less than any other character. She's even the first to lose her capcity for speech, devolving into a series of meows. Or...I guess...Nyas? Idfk.And if we suggest that the phantom is able to do this, why can't it do some trippy bullshit with the building its in, creating superpositions that extend the number of floors, modifying time and space because quantum mechanics is fucking stupid to begin with. Or way over my head.Its really just over my head.To round things out, and to not make this entirely about disecting Digibro's video, I'd like to diffuse any complaints about it being a generic highschool setting as best I can.And I know I can't.Why? Because i know they could have picked any point of Haruhiko's future to pick this story up, but they chose Highschool.So why would I defend that? Because its a logical point to start with if you're doing a longer running series.I would argue that the reason the new generation has developed these special abilities is due to brain plasticity. For those not in the know, plasticity has to do with how quickly the brain adapts to and accomodates new information and skills. Its why we've, over several many years, pushed for elementary school students to have harder and harder curriculum. At the end of the day, they can handle it, they just need a little extra push. They'll come out all the smarter for it.So what happens when your new generation of students has suddenly evolved the ability to interact with noumenon that have never been touched on before? Perhaps, if some of the phantoms are wholly created by the imagination, then their special abilities are simply an extension of this if we follow the rules of the universe.Why wouldn't you develop them, starting in school, to fight against a nuisance that has cropped up thanks to the technological advancement that made them able to harbor these abilities in the first place.TL;DR Musaigen's like a 7/10 or something for me. I definitely don't think its bad. I think it has a lot of content if you're willing to get engaged with the concepts it has to offer and have the ability to recognize what its doing with its themes. I think most of the disappointment for this is because people were expecting something deeper, even though its just a ...silly comedy slice of life, really. I would have watched this even if it wasn't Kyoani because the concept seemed interesting enough to me and its ability to give some extra form to concepts I knew about tickled my fancy. /tl;drA word to the mods: If I did something wrong in making this post, let me know. I think this is like, maybe my third or fourth post on here that isn't a comment, and some of those comments are toxic. I'm not always fully aware of the rules either. I'm just an idiot getting triggered who thinks their opinion is above others. SomeMore than anything I'm upset that the Kyoani hype had people expecting more out of this. Hyouka was boring as shit but still good. I can't tell you much about the characters in that other than Oreki is lazy af, Chitanda is curious, that one girl is somewhat energetic and tsundere, and the friend of Oreki is a bit of a spaz intentionally. .-. Those characters aren't any deeper than Musaigen's, I swear. I'll fight over it. http://ift.tt/1PP4xvt
No comments:
Post a Comment