This chapter fascinates me, not because of any especial achievement in the telling of its tale, but in a regard entirely and enthrallingly contrary- namely, the shuddering, keening intensity with which it unravels toward the conclusion that it ended before it began and so arrives at the cradle-grave of a million ruined images, striving in the wreck and waste of it all to scream something, anything that is not immediately swallowed up by the sprawling refuse. Oh, that most swampish and desolate of formats, the comical highschool 4koma, propped up by the crossbeams of a million shallow panels, constructed by the groaning labor of innumerable teenagers who pile gag upon tired gag with all the strength and misery of archetype, smiling and screaming with blob-stitched faces the dull history of their hyperreality! They squirm and stagger through suffocating worlds, staring with empty eyes at the white skies that web between their windowed cosmoses, more colorful in their emptiness than their own stories so filled with echoes of voices that never said a valuable word, piling an anti-Babel in a singular and sordid tongue that swallows the sound of its own meaning, and is so reduced to shapes and silhouettes, suggestions eternally unbuilt and sourced indeed from some miserable chips of what may have been personality- the Genki papered onto yon wall, the Stoic hung out to dry by the eaves, the Relatable Introvert peddling breakdowns by the yard, the Popular Girl propped to provide an ambient glow, the Prankster juggling seven nothings to upkeep some pretense of activity, the Nerd poring over fictive textbooks more lively still than her own story, and none of these being themselves, but only so expendable as to erase their own origins and destinations, swapped out in the blinks of an eye that never saw anything worth recalling in the first place. Certainly, one might witness in the distance some striking towers upon climbing to the peak of one such bloodless gimmick-heap, some glittering obelisk in the fashion of grand Machikado that did achieve great glory and touch the stars, orienting a tired wanderer of moepocalypse toward the hope of succor yet, toward some dream of fulfilment even in these deserts of saccharine insubstantiality, toward the swell and warmth of a memorable experience, of fleeting Authenticity. And yet to those who've tasted such delights, the surroundings are crueler still, all the more abject in how far one needs to go discover some shade of life, how many schoolgirl-shaped homunculi one must step over in pursuit of a human horizon, more empty in their featureless fullness than the carcass of some fellow wanderer lying skeletal upon these circuitous throughfares. How then do those tasked to work in this sugary sewage construct something that is, if not enduring, then at least striking, leaving upon a passer's hoary heart some semblance of an impression? How then, does the artist of the highschool 4koma, inheriting a tradition of idols each hollower than the last, afforded for their workspace the slightest scum of a setting, achieve anything at all, and prevent their labor from sinking below the crust of a genre that so frequently lacks a core, preserved only in the arid amber of publication? One suspects the author of Rutou-san ni ha Kanaimasen has no easy answers before them, and can only attempt to sublimate the existential artistic dread of creating a 4koma into the appeal of their work, subsuming the horror of it all into a haunting scream, heightened in its uncanniness by the mode in which it is hollered- the giggle of a high-school golem slapped together from the riverine mud of a thousand choked streams.
One sees a portent of this all in Wamura, lamenting as she does the thinness of her turmoil, impoverished by a comparison in a hellish realm that values its residents absolute in stock taxonomies, played off in endless collisions of cliché as particles in a collider, only less material still. But it is through Rutou that the author truly lets loose a howl of profound and poignant dismay, cracking open in the heights of their despair the facsimile of form, blowing from Rutou a petrifying excretion of scripts and enactments that manages in utter incoherence and tumult to pierce in a movement as heroic as it is monstrous this fog of forgettability, to score upon me so faraway a reaction, an identification, if only with the unattainability of identity. Rutou is the figuration of the ultimate dysfunction, the shape of a crack in the weightless edifice of her genre that allows it the rare moment of character, if not personality. She's a Popular Girl, but actually quite Weird, but actually a Prankster, but actually Interested in our Bland Protagonist, but actually a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but actually Just Playing a Role People Expect of Her, but actually a Secret Friend, but actually a Troublesome Demander, but actually a Blackmailer, but actually Self-Aware, but actually a Dork, but actually Obsessed, but actually a Bit Playfully Mean, but actually a Doting Puppy, but actually Unpredictable, but actually but actually but actually but actually There is Nothing Actual, actually, even the Assertion of Actuality. At the end of her beginning, at the filth that roils in the sphincter of modernity, at the pits and wombs of this industry of contorting spectacle, at the edge of the flat-round earth that is the deceptive never-culmination of the conveyor belt of the comic highschool 4koma feed, Rutou demands what the Fucking Point of it All is, and receives no reply at all, and must so fill the silence with a million suggestions of meanings, a billion appointed purposes- none convincing, but she must speak on, must try and plug the hole that is in fact the seam-fabric of her unreality, because She's Already Here, and what else is there to do? Teetering on the brink of a collapse that threatens to expose there is no difference between construct and creation, chattering and babbling the firmament of her calamities, oracle of the tragedy that is an unamusing comedy, Rutou is in her profound incoherence and dissolution a model and expression of her age and medium, of the environment that demanded her barely-creation, misshapen scream of a weeping god on a schedule. Existing only in this moment in the syrupy scatology of her industry, pressed between countless packages of formlessness on Aisle Archetype, Rutou-san opts in a move of cunning desperation, of inspired insipidity, to dynamite this pallid procession, to say in its soulless screaming more than it could in any streamlined script, to say indeed anything at all, even if one hears only the clank and rattle of the grave, feels in the rush of it all the final breath of one that never lived, and Wonders.
I'd say it worked.
%20(1)%20(1).jpg?1654150865)
.jpg?1666791381)
