[Slow Reading] Seabed, Part 1 (Before Prologue)

There will be spoilers contained within. Read at your own risk.

One of my great regrets, as a writer, is that I simply don’t read enough fiction. It always seems like there’s more research to do – more books and articles to read about bears, baseball, the boozing habits of British politicians… It seems like the things I need to know, or might want to know, stretch out in front of me, infinitely. Even when I do read fiction, I don’t so much read it as consume it, thoughtlessly, word after word. I hope I’ll learn by osmosis, and lately, it feels like osmosis isn’t quite enough.

That’s the frame of mind I was in as I started to read Seabed, the yuri visual novel developed by Paleontology and published by Fruitbat Factory. To help me think more deeply about what I’m reading, I’ll be writing about it – in my own voice, which by itself is something of a rarity nowadays. These little articles won’t be reviews, or even really an analysis, but rather a record of the journey, and whatever I can pick apart along the way. That also means there’ll be spoilers aplenty; it’s up to you if you want to go any further.

They say we know more about depths of space than the depths of the ocean; likewise, I know nothing about Seabed prior to starting it. There are character descriptions on the steam page, which I haven’t read in any detail, because I’ll prefer to meet the characters and measure them for myself.

The title screen

The title screen opens to an image of two women, playfully hugging in the ocean. For a while, I just sat there and listened to the music, what sounded like a solo pianist. The melody didn’t really stick out for me. That’s not to say it’s bad, at all. I don’t claim to be anything other than ignorant about the inner workings of music; I know that amongst professional orchestras they will describe music in terms of colour and of texture, but beyond that, I lack the education to do anything other than listen. What did stand out to me was how the piano seemed to echo, and how no other instruments accompanied it. A lonely kind of piece, then, in contrast to the closeness of the two girls on the title screen. Without being told, I’m expecting a bittersweet kind of story.

Another reason I let the music play is that I’m aware – keenly aware – of a sense of commitment. How can I explain it? When I was younger, I would dive into new media without thinking, but as I grow older, that seems harder and harder to do. Time is precious, and the emotional energy I devote to things is also precious. To start to read or watch something you feel is good, but then turn away because you just don’t have the time or energy to enjoy it properly, is an unenviable feeling. Seabed is, reputedly, 20~ hours long; for me, in the course of writing these thoughts and taking it in, it will be longer.

Still, with a name like Seabed, I guess you really do have to dive in at the deep end… (The name of this game gives a lot of opportunity for aquatic puns, and I’ll probably indulge here and there. Maybe that makes me shallow, but I’m just going with the flow.)

When we begin, the background is pitch black as more lonely, ringing piano music accompanies the opening credits. Opening credits, by themselves, are an interesting choice – easily ignored and quickly forgotten on a first viewing, since the reader’s mind will naturally be on the media. Even if they do take note, who made the media doesn’t really mean anything yet, because they’ve yet to draw an opinion, good or bad; the names have yet to acquire a colour. Opening credits, to me, seem like something for a second reading/playthrough, when the reader’s experiences will have made the creators meaningful to them. An expression of confidence, maybe.

The first thing the game describes is the moon. Of course, in a game called Seabed, that’s significant – the moon, after all, influences the tides, and like the seabed in real life, is often well out of our reach. But then, the moon also symbolises femininity in many cultures and contexts. Considering that the main characters of the story are all female, that may also be significant.

The narrator – unnamed, as of yet – describes the feeling of her head being empty as like being ‘submerged in water’; her eyelids are heavy, as is her whole body. She feels as though she is sinking into the bed. The symbolism here is easy to pick up – drowning, a sleep unto death. But, equally, the ‘heaviness’ is interesting; it brings to mind being waterlogged, as if just rescued from the water, and so we can read it in a more hopeful way.

Beside her is her childhood friend, Sachiko, who she’s known for 23 years. The narrator goes on to mention that she’s 28 currently, so they met when they were five, but what’s interesting her is the sequencing.

Writers, with astounding frequency, arrange things in groups of three. It’s a common persuasive technique. But the order is important. Psychologically speaking, there’s something called the serial position effect, which says that we, as humans, are more likely to remember the first thing in a given sequence and the last thing in a given sequence (the primacy and recency effects, respectively), while we’re more likely to forget the middle. When applied to writing, and in particular the groups of three that writers love to use, we can say that the first and last pieces of information are more important, because they’ve been put in a situation where we’re more likely to recall them. What does that say about our narrator? The 23 years of friendship are significant; herself at age 5 is significant; her own current age is not significant to her.

She also says she can tell Sachiko is there, even in the darkness. Maybe this is alluding to a deep trust, but it’s also worth mentioning that one of the (many) problems with real-life deep sea exploration is that, as light passes through water, the molecules scatter and absorb it, which means that after a certain depth, the sea becomes an absolute pitch-black. Even lights brought by a submarine or submersible won’t penetrate the ocean very far. The sea bed of any deep ocean is naturally too dark for humans to understand what’s going on.

The scene shifts, and the narrator is finally tagged as Takako, reminiscing about when she was five years old. The background, pitch black until now, shifts into a blurry, almost watercolour interpretation of what seems like a suburban apartment complex. The effect is pretty similar to the one used by the Higurashi VN series, at least in their steam releases. As I understand it, it’s probably a way to use photographs of real places a way that obscures telling details. But, since I’m going all in on the analysis, it could also signify that the memory – like the picture – is hazy, or that lines are being blurred. I’ve also seen it used to signify how boring mundane reality is, in contrast to any supernatural elements the story might have – notice that the colours are drab, mostly greys and dull greens. Certainly, the only other image we’ve seen (the title image) is much sharper and more defined, which makes a fairly firm contrast. But it’s too early to be sure; if other backgrounds are obscured in the same way, we can safely conclude it’s probably just a technical decision or has only minor significance.

Blurred memories?

The event Takako is remembering is moving house – an event that’s full of subtext in fiction. It’s a forcible break from old routines and familiar environments, an experience of leaving things behind and moving onwards yourself. Her new home is a small town by the sea, which seems huge to the eyes of a child, but which Takako’s mature narrative voice realises was not the case.

I’ll quote the story directly here, since I feel like this excerpt has a lot to unpack:

“Initially, we took the same road we did to reach my kindergarten. But, once we had passed it, the roads turned fresh and alien. And seeing how we kept driving along the river, I somehow thought that perhaps I could make it back to the countryside on foot. Not that it mattered. As I lost myself in thought, I barely even noticed when we finally reached our destination.”

There’s a lot of experiences condensed down here. The idea that the road to kindergarten, if taken just a little further, opens up to something ‘fresh and alien’ brings to mind the process of ageing, of moving away from childhood and beginning a journey towards maturity. This is reinforced by the idea of the river, and Takako noting (with perhaps a little bitterness – “not like it mattered”) that her thoughts of how to go back were fruitless. A river flows in one direction, not both ways; to go back would be to push against the flow, of the river and of time itself. That desire to go back, to push back into childhood and the past, was always futile. Furthermore, we might say that the river here is pushing her towards fate or destiny; a river, symbolically, always flows towards the sea, and the sea is presumably of great importance.

If we view the river as time, then: “As I lost myself in thought, I barely even noticed when we finally reached our destination”, is a commentary on how we can easily get swept up in the events of our life and not even notice the way that time is passing around us. It’s also worth noticing that the child Takako can’t be undergoing this journey under her own whims – she’s being, quite literally, swept along by forces beyond her own control, unable to resist the flow of events around her.

As she describes her new home, Takako takes particular care to note that the parking lines outside the apartment are slanted. The narrative draws attention to them, by positing that it makes cars easier to park in reverse. Maybe this is just worldbuilding, but it could also be significant – a commentary on how it’s easier to look back than to look forward. Metafictionally, it could also be tipping us up that, just like the lines of the parking space, the story itself will not be straight forward.

Time for another quote: “That’s our new home,” said my mother. To me, this feels strangely impersonal, due to the ordering. If it was ‘ “That’s our new home,” my mother said.’, I feel like it would be a little more intimate. It’s hard to explain why I feel that way, because I don’t actually have any meaningful education in English; it’s easy to ‘feel out’ subtle changes in the way sentences read, because I’m a native speaker with some degree of practice, but less easy to describe exactly what’s causing that effect. Ordinarily, I never have to. Right now, I’d chart it up to stresses – saying “That’s our new home,” said my mother out puts the stresses on That, new, and said, whereas in the other configuration, they fall more on that, new, and mother. That’s just what I’d put it down to.

Either way, the result is that there’s a certain implied coolness from Takako towards her mother, which might hint at a troubled future relationship (since the incident is being related by a present-day Takako who might have her opinions coloured by experiences that haven’t occurred at the time of the flashback).

Takako then goes on to describe her first sighting of, presumably, Sachiko – a girl with a red bucket and a trowel, who circles the building and then disappears behind it. The red bucket and trowel are pretty obvious seaside imagery, but I also feel that the ‘circling the building’ before disappearing thing brings to mind a whirlpool – an inescapable pull, felt by the narrator as well. A young girl, viewed at a distance, being sighted and then swiftly disappearing also strikes me as a common motif in fairy and supernatural genres of stories, and it might allude to that.

The scene ends with Takako running towards the child (and the park behind the house), leaving her mother behind. On that note, the scene fades; with the sound of a ticking clock in the background, the title Prologue: Clover Design Office pops up.

Well, it seems like as good a place as any to leave off for now. Although this is perhaps a little short, and we didn’t even get into the prologue (!), I did promise myself that I would take it slow and proceed at a pace that’s comfortable for me. I’m a little surprised at how much there is to pick apart, honestly. I can tell I’m in for a bit of a ride.

Until next time!