[Slow Reading] Seabed, part 2 (Goldfish Scooping)

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

Before we start, there's something I'd like to comment on, since it likely won't come up in the text:

Destination: deeper

This is the chapter/scene selection menu. As you can see, a reader can jump to individual scenes within a chapter, which is a finer granularity of choice than many other VNs. I definitely appreciate this -- one of the issues with VNs as a medium, as opposed to books or film, is the lack of ability to quickly 'flick' to the part you want. A skip or turbo function helps with that, but fundamentally it still takes more time than flicking through a book or dragging a slider on your video player. This helps to replicate that ease of access, and is very welcome.

It's also going to inform the format of these little articles. Since the game delineates itself into scenes, I'll follow suit and split up these articles by scene as well. That should keep them bite size and ensure that I'm not intimidated by the amount of work necessary for the next piece. So far there's been a lot to talk about, but in the event that a particular scene doesn't stand out a lot for me, I'll maybe do two in the same segment and reflect that in the title.

(For anybody wondering why I'm going into detail on the formatting: the form of a media is as much a part of its quality as the content, and an author can often achieve or enhance a desired effect by using formatting well. Terry Pratchett, for example, preferred not to use chapter breaks because they broke up the flow of the story arbitrarily, and to this day, the Discworld books are some of the ones I'm most likely to read half or more of in a single sitting. For my part, I break up my OJ stories generously because 99% of the time, they're slice of life, which feels like it really ought to be in slices. Likewise, I don't keep them in a numerical order unless they're explicitly connected, because most episodes in life aren't specifically connected to each other.)

So, back to Seabed. Last time, we left off to the sound of a clock ticking against a black background, and as the scene starts, it's accompanied by a somewhat distorted music track. (To be honest I wondered whether it was intentional or I had broken my game somehow, but no, the distortions are the same when the track loops). What it puts me in mind of, honestly, is Melody Of Lute, the song that Edward plays as part of the story in FFIV, which itself reminds me of Lester's song from Sword of Mana. Neither are particularly happy songs, and if I'm honest, the distortion here is a bit unpleasant to listen to. Immediately, I'm a little uncomfortable.

Takako, still narrating, seems to be half-awake, half-asleep; her eyelids are half-closed, and she sees Sachiko's jet-black locks flicker in her vision. Sachiko's black hair seems to be a minor fixation for Takako, because she mentions it again in the next line, again specifying the colour. This is a little redundant, honestly, but redundancy is another persuasive technique that writers often use -- although it usually comes in groups of three, which make it seem less unintentional. Here it doesn't appear again.

Takako extends a hand to her companion, and Sachiko 'gave me her hand in response'. This is interesting to me, although it's hard to put my finger on exactly why. There's a lot of reasons. For one, Takako is quite literally reaching out to her friend, which says something about the interpersonal relationships between them; just as Takako seemed to be the one to follow Sachiko when she disappeared behind the building as a child, she's also the one seeking closeness now. A second factor is the raw imagery -- when I see two people reaching their hands out towards them, either one of them is in immediate danger and is being saved (situations this is usually associated with involve falling and, well, drowning), or it's two lovers or family members who are being separated and are reaching out desperately to try to stay together.

A third factor is just the way the English language is -- she 'gave me her hand in response'. In English, language about love and relationships is intrinsically linked with language about business and commerce, as your English teacher will no doubt tell you if you dare glance at a copy of Romeo and Juliet. The nature of commerce is that, for something to be given, something must be exchanged; it is, by nature, a reciprocal thing. Is this just Takako giving her hand to Sachiko, and receiving hers in turn, an equivalent exchange? Or is she giving something else in exchange for Sachiko's hand? Given the watery, distorted music, it's difficult to be sure. Given the game's watery theme, I wouldn't be all that surprised to find allusions to mermaids or sirens, and I already had reason last scene to be thinking of fairy stories...

As they hold hands, Takako describes the warm, moist feeling of Sachiko's palm. Sweat, perhaps? It seems an odd thing to pick up on. (I have a small writer's nitpick with the next line: 'Even without looking, I could feel her familiar, slender fingers intertwining with mine'. Well, yes, typically you do not need your eyes to experience a tactile sensation.)

"As I absentmindedly gazed at her, she parted her lips." This line is pretty telling. Not only does Takako's gaze naturally fall on her companion when she's not actively looking at something else, but she focuses on her lips. In terms of body language, that's a shorthand for romantic or physical attraction. I feel like 'besotted' might be the best word to use her to sum up Takako's feelings about Sachiko, given the context established so far. Our girl Takako's in deep.

At this point the blackness is lifted, and we're treated to a vision of what the mysterious Sachiko looks like:

A smile of quiet amusement

Well, this is interesting. Ignoring the girl wearing what looks like a babydoll, take a look at the top right corner of that image. Have you ever seen sunlight refracting against the wall of a pool, underneath the surface? That's immediately what it reminds me of. I'm also going to point out that, with her long hair and her legs hidden, the mermaid imagery of this girl is very strong. Even her posture seems to echo the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, with her legs curled up.

Sachiko being in lingerie (and having sweaty palms) in bed with Takako next to her hints quietly at a post-coital scene, which would explain quite a bit. But with the unsettling distorted music in the background, I can't help but think that it might not be a good thing.

Another thing to note is that this image is very crisp, unlike the distorted backgrounds we were shown earlier. Whether this is significant will become clear in time.

"What are you thinking?"
That's Sachiko's first line, and it is what we in the industry call a 'humdinger'. What a question to start us off with! There's a lot of things that communicates or can communicate. To start with, anybody who -- like me -- has played through Rin's route in Katawa Shoujo is wincing right now. One of the main conflicts of that route is that the main protagonist, Hisao, genuinely loves Rin but fundamentally cannot understand the way she thinks or what's going on inside her head. She herself is incapable of making him understand, despite her best efforts, and the wedge it drives between them very quickly gives their relationship a destructive tone, even though they are, at their core, two characters who are reaching out and trying to understand each other. Hisao asking and wondering what Rin is thinking says that he doesn't know what she's thinking, and doesn't understand her enough to even guess.

However, on the flipside, the question can be read as what it is: an honest attempt by one person to understand another. And actually letting somebody know what you're thinking, when asked point-blank, can be a surprising declaration of trust; after all, you are essentially letting them into your head, which is the only space in the world that is truly private.

[Side-note: Astute readers might have noticed that the theme discussed above has surfaced, in a much more benign form, in my stories with Sora and co. The difference is that, unlike Rin, Sora is in no particular hurry to be understood, and has faith that her friends will get there in the end.]

Takako, to her credit, answers the question. Or does she? One thing I'd like to comment on is that, as a result of the formatting, it's honestly kind of difficult to keep track of who's speaking. Here's a screenshot of the conversation playback, which is pretty close to the formatting the game keeps:

As you can see, no speech tags or script names. Occasionally Sachiko's expression will change in the background, but it's very quick and easy to miss if you're clicking through to read more. Right now, I'm assuming that Sachiko was the first person to speak, since she 'parted her lips' immediately prior to there being speech, but crucially, that does not necessarily mean she's the one who's speaking. The scene, and what it says about the characters, reads very differently if we assume that Takako is the one who spoke first and Sachiko is the one responding.

While this might be confusing, I'd like to note that it is, by no means, bad. Similar to what I discussed before, things like formatting and grammar are, in the hands of a professional, not a set of rules to abide by, but tools to help achieve a desire effect. Right now, the game -- which in the description on the steam page, is billed as a 'yuri-themed mystery' -- is trying to create uncertainty, and is using the tools at its disposal to do so. It's far from the only example of it around, even if we just consider the oeuvre of popular Japanese fiction -- in the Haruhi Suzumiya series of light novels, for example, Kyon's narration seems deliberately set up to make it difficult to differentiate when he's thinking and when he's speaking out loud.

Anyway, for the moment, I'm going to go with the cue that the game has given me and assume Sachiko is posing the question to Takako. Her answer is that she's thinking about a festival, the memories of which come 'flooding' into her mind. (Aquatic theme words counter: +1.)

Notably, she seems very fuzzy on the timeframe, vacillating between kindergarten and elementary school, which is not in-keeping with what little we know of Takako so far. In the pre-prologue scene, she seemed to remember things very clearly, and mentioned very specifically how old she was at the time of the incident and how many years had passed in the interim. Obviously, we can't draw solid conclusions for so few data points, but as as the scene progresses, her memories seem muddled on a few different counts -- the time period, the number of fishes, whether she bought a caramel apple.

This, to me, is fascinating. Let's take a moment to talk about the human memory. Memory has been a keen point of interest for psychology, and in particular, how memory and long term memory relate to eyewitness testimony. The basic conclusion that research has drawn is that eyewitness testimony, realistically speaking, is not nearly reliable enough to use in a court of law as convicting evidence.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. One would be the weapon focus effect, which says that a human being who has a weapon pointed at them is usually looking at the weapon, and is not registering other things that happen in the background -- even if they would usually attract attention. Another is things like the Loftus and Palmer (1974) study, which demonstrated that people's memories are flexible enough that their judgement can be swayed by something as small as a different choice of vocabulary when being questioned. (There are, of course, limitations in these studies, but for now that's beyond the scope of what I'm talking about.)

But, from a common-sense point of view, the number one reason why long-term memory might not be reliable is because of our own brains, which are both constantly lying to us and very good at doing so. Many people will be familiar with the idea that we can only experience the world through the information gathered by our various senses; some might be familiar with Plato's cave, which is somewhat tangentially related. However, the truth is that our senses are not entirely trustworthy. A great example of this is the human blind spot -- there is just a part of our field of vision that, physiologically, we cannot see. But people with healthy eyes don't actually experience this blind-spot in their vision; instead, the brain 'fills in' the blind spot with the image that it expects to see from visual data in the surroundings. It does this in every waking second of every day, feeding you 'data' that doesn't actually exist in your senses.

The brain is quite happy to do something similar with your memories as well, substituting or even completely making up details as it expects them to have been through context clues, both in the present and at the time -- even if you didn't actually note those details at all. It's difficult to tell that it's happening, and it happens with amazing frequency.

Back to the topic at hand, then. Armed with what I know about human memory, my first readthrough of this scene was very different, because I was tricked into thinking Takako was the one who first asked what Sachiko is thinking. In that scenario, it looked like Takako was reaching back into her memory about the festival... and Sachiko was helpfully suggesting 'details', and prompting Takako to essentially re-write her own memories in a subtle way to match Sachiko's version of events, which would have been pretty sinister. If we assume Sachiko is the original speaker, the sequence becomes much more benign.

I want to mention how fitting it is that the theme of a faulty or unreliable memory happens to coincide with a discussion of goldfish.

I won't get too far into quoting what's in the screenshot, since I've taken us quite far off the beaten track already with my psychology tangents, but I did want to draw attention to the line "I'm pretty sure that wasn't the last time we held hands." This line, to me, is very suspicious in how it's treated -- not confirmed, denied, or even acknowledged, the subject is changed immediately afterwards. To begin with, Sachiko is probably right -- she's clearly adult or at the very least late teens in the picture, not kindergarten/elementary age, and given that they seem to be sharing a bed in their underwear, we can guess that Sachiko and Takako's relationship is close enough that they might have held hands in the interim. But if so, why does Takako's mind go straight to the festival? It feels like they're having a divergence of experience here. And I also don't like the phrasing. "[...]that was[n't] the last time we held hands" , while not the entire sentence, feels like a sequence of words you'd say about a loved one who died in an accident or something. It's past tense, too. There's something up with that.

Well, on with the story. The two discuss goldfish scooping technique, and Takako mentions that that patience is important for the game, which might give us a window into her personality later. She also mentions that they were only allowed to bring up to three goldfish back with them -- at which point Sachiko interrupts and says "Well, that really was a waste of time, then," with a smirk on her character sprite. Is that just playful and impish, or genuinely somewhat mean-spirited? Hard to tell. But it shows that Sachiko seems to think more about the results than the experience, that time spent without profit, or making excessive effort for no additional gain, is not time spent well.

Takako refutes this, saying that it was worthwhile because she got to choose the 'cutest and most energetic ones' -- Sachiko's response is 'good for you'. Again, that seems mean-spirited, or almost bitter. I definitely feel like the comment is hiding something, and that the many goldfish might represent something later on down the line.

Takako mentions that one of the goldfish lived a very long time, into middle school for her, and that she gave it a name. Sachiko's response:
"Was it Bell or something?"
"Was it?"
"Didn't you say it reminded you of a temple's bell?"

This seems very suspicious to me. Why does Sachiko remember the name of Takako's fish, and the reason behind the name, when Takako herself doesn't -- despite considering the fish remarkable and remembering how long it lived? What exactly is going on with Takako's memory? And the imagery of a temple's bell is also interesting. It could mean different things, depending on what kind of temple is being mentioned -- given that the setting is Japan, it's presumably Shinto, Buddhist or Taoist. Of the three, the Buddhist temples are the ones I really know for their bells, what with the 108 bell rings to eliminate earthly desires. But there's also the Oban festival, where supposedly the bell is placed above a well -- again, a source of water, which is a big theme, and the goldfish is mentioned in the context of a festival of some kind, so I'm leaning towards this interpretation -- and rung to summon the spirits of the dead. Another is rung at the end of the festival to send them back.

The eventual fate of Bell the goldfish, it seems, is a sad one. I'll quote:
"[...] did it get sick?"
"I think it was mold or something. One day I realized it had some sort of weed growing from its scales. I tried plucking it out, but..."
Sachiko knitted her eyebrows.
"They grew right back. I think it suffocated in the end."
"Is that really mold?"
"I found a book about goldfish diseases sometime later. It said the weed doesn't grow on a live fish, but in the case of goldfish, it can grow on the mold that gets stuck between its scales. The book even explained how to fix it."

I feel like this is setting up symbolism or foreshadowing I won't fully understand until later. But a few thoughts on this sequence: the fish suffocates underwater, which is damn near as close to drowning as a fish can get. There was an attempt made to save it, but it failed because Takako didn't understand the fish's situation at the time and the opportunity was lost. Is there a hurt/illness plot coming in the future? It looks a lot more likely now.

Again, I'm going to quote a little bit, because I feel like it's important:
"Do you think that goldfish resented its master for being unable to cure a simple disease like that?"
"I don't know. What do you think?"
"I don't know either. I loved that goldfish, though. I haven't kept another fish since."

Again, Sachiko's response seems not super comforting in this conversation, but the way Takako talks about this fish -- which, initially, she couldn't remember the name of -- really makes me think it represents something else. My guess is that the fish -- and the other goldfish earlier -- represent romantic partners, and that having lost one, she'll refuse to take another. After telling Sachiko that Bell was always elegant and different -- something Sachiko seems quietly pleased with -- the scene fades to black...

...and the next line is "The usual spasm woke me up."

So, this entire sequence was a dream -- which would explain the way the memories are foggy and inconsistent. Back in the present, we're treated to the lovely sound of TV static, accompanied by the echoey sound of a ticking clock. Even Takako says 'my ears were ringing'.

A rude awakening

Just like before, the backgrounds are blurry. My earlier supposition -- that the blurred backgrounds might represent drab reality as opposed to the clarity of magical or dream elements -- seems to be correct. According to Takako, it's only been an hour since she went to sleep, which strikes me as somewhat odd. I very rarely recall my dreams, but when I do, I'm always amazed by how long seems to have elapsed in real time during the course of what felt like a very short dream, whereas Takako seems to have it the other way around (as well as a bad case of insomnia).

Reaching for the light

As she reaches for the light cord, the screen cuts back to black and what can only be described as an absolutely horrible static plays -- a representation of a noise Takako calls 'even more unbearable' than the ringing in her ears. Side note: my ears were ringing as well by the end of this scene. For a game that's just starting out, it really doesn't treat the reader very kindly on the auditory front.

"I closed my eyes and covered my ears, stiffening my entire body, waiting for the storm to pass."

Close your eyes, and cover your ears... Given the hints of illness/death themes we've been given so far, I'm tempted to interpret this as denial, stage one of the grieving process. If it is, anger should logically pop up next in the chain, so we'll see how it shakes out.

Desperately, Takako recalls a trick to fall asleep instantly -- she has to imagine herself floating on an empty sea. "Yet right now, a storm was ravaging my personal sea, making it a less than ideal place for relaxation.

I felt sick. Tremendously so."

And the scene, unceremoniously, ends. Something is definitely wrong in Takako's mind -- but the question is, what?

A fleeting moment of calm...

Until next time!