12/19/2023 0 Comments Sword art online meta memes![]() More and more MMO shows involve self-aware commentary, good or bad, displaying an attempt to pull apart at the trope. 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 can be said to be moving on through the same pattern every popular theater goes through. 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. Especially once those habits themselves start being scrutinized under the microscope of fiction.Īs with the ‘drawing room play’, shifts are noticeable. In short, they’re born from our habits as an audience, and will die with them too. 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. They also both involve some extent of ‘performance’ as separate from your ‘real’ self. 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. 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. Why link the two so completely? Because they’re the same thing, essentially. Later plays were far more often ‘deconstructions’ of the type – see Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and her suicide as the crux of that – 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.įast-forward to today, and one of the world’s popular theaters, anime, has its own ‘drawing room play’ – the ‘trapped in an MMO’ story. There were good and bad versions of it, and the more it endured onstage, the more theater evolved. Today, no-one with any consideration for the Victorian period calls out this ‘drawing room’ genre, this cliche of a setting, as a problem in itself, like people are nowadays with the MMO setting. You had ones that embraced it and ones that ‘deconstructed’ it. Quite simply, a play set in a drawing room, where drawing room stuff happens. ![]() But another popular genre was the ‘drawing room play’. Set fire to the set, bring on a fire engine? No problem. Wanted a mob of hundreds of people on stage? Sure. ![]() And the special effects in the theater back then were rather incredible. The melodrama was one common, predictable genre that we could translate today into any over-the-top action shows full of special effects. ![]() The popular theater was booming, and fans would go for a programme full of plays to suit all dispositions. In fact, Subaru’s suffering is in keeping with the history of every popular fad of genre and setting based on social convention, as those social conventions, through the settings they manifested into, came under attack by the critics of their time. Re:Zero, now in its second cour, is taking anime communities by storm in its outcry against escapist, wish-fulfilling stories and the people indoctrinated through them. Either way, because of the poor quality of many of its iterations, some people have become certain that the ‘trapped in an MMO’ setting/genre is dead and devoid of potential.īut the genre’s progress is being marked in its destabilization. Sword Art Online may have started a ‘craze’, or just confirmed and satisfied the preexisting desire of the market. It’s hard to watch anime without having watched something set in a video game. ![]()
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