#like. riffing on a culture isn't necessarily Bad—

[aeide-thea]

god i forgot abt this but seeing hands of the emperor fic on my dash just now reminded me of like. learning abt māori pepeha and how you pronounce whānau and having the sudden realization 'oh you just fully appropriated that for your book, didn't you'

[grenade-maid]

Man, I think what makes me so sad about Guilty Gear is just knowing that there won't ever be anything quite like it. The cultural soup that spawned it just doesn't exist anymore. The edgy 90s counterculture boom can't really be replicated. Doom is something you run on thermostats and microwaves, Mortal Kombat is something your brother's friends played in college, spiked leather and heavy metal are things anyone might be into, arcades have been dead longer than they were alive, everyone is aware of JoJo. Everything that was shocking, transgressive, and exciting then is now pretty normal (if still beloved--nay, more beloved, even). They even made a new Matrix movie about this feeling. And the thing is, there were a lot of fighting games tapping into the same things as Guilty Gear was. They all died in obscurity, and Guilty Gear is the lone survivor, carrying the DNA of a cultural moment but unable to propagate, being the last of its species. Sol Badguy is a perfect protagonist for it, in that sense.

At the end of the day, there's just no real analogue. The genre of musclebound blood soaked anime it was drawing from like Fist of the North Star, Bastard! and Ninja Scroll don't really exist anymore. Rockstars of the hotel thrashing middle finger waving hard drinking hard partying variety don't really exist in the same way, either. Very few recent album covers would make for good stage backgrounds. There isn't really an "underground" subculture or counterculture--we're all just in different niches that are one online search away from each other. Nobody has to "introduce" you to metal, you don't have to know a guy, just look up a few whole discographies and listen on your commute. Fighting games themselves are a firmly established genre with it's own self selecting population--in the 90s it was pretty common for basically anyone to casually try a few rounds of Tekken or have some version of street fighter at home. That's not really the case anymore, and, as such, fighting games need to be designed differently and more thoughtfully than they used to be.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!None of these are bad things!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But it does mean that any attempt to do something in the same vein as Guilty Gear will necessarily be a pastiche. Hell, even Guilty Gear itself was pastiche by the time of XX. This isn't a bad thing either--I'm loving Little Goody Two Shoes, for example, which is the most lavish and loving throwback to 90s shojo and 00s RPG Maker horror games. But it would still be different. Because even the most loving reference or recreation, even the ones that surpass the quality of the originals, can't replace the spirit of expressing something quintessential to your current moment, whatever that moment is.

The moment that I cherish cause I grew up in its shadow is long gone. I don't know if there's anything in the current moment that could speak to me in the same way. Most of my favorite all time games, manga, anime, etc etc all came out in the last few years, so this isn't about old shit being better. I guess most of what I love that's currently being made just didn't lend itself well to riffing on in the same way. Unfortunately, high passion rock operas screaming your feelings just lend themselves perfectly to kickass games, and those aren't in vogue like they used to be. And, ultimately, on a strictly personal level, I'll never be 15 again, being shown the sickest shit I've ever seen before a D&D game for the first time.