Thread by @_bonaventurian

I've been toying with this idea of common nature, contraction and the characters of visual novels in my head, which Higurashi gave clarity to, for a while I'm going to try and give it some structure right here and now.

Basically, the thought is a following:

I'm going to use Furude Rika from Higurashi. If we just take her cgs, her sprites and the dialogue/text of the novel insofar as is relevant to her character (which practically includes the entire thing) what do we have?

We have a common narrative, we have a certain degree of characterisation, we have an arrangement of colours and shapes in images to express emotions in general ways.

Now take a common nature in a metaphysical sense. I'm going to use 'equinity' which is just short hand for what-it-is-to-be-a-horse. Between equinity and a given concrete horse, say Bucephalus (Alexander the Great's horse), which has more reality content?

Bucephalus is a contracted entity with all sorts of determinate properties and not just that he is an actual individual. Bucephalus is the 'ultima realitas entis'. So between the common nature and the haeccity, it is in the latter that ontological perfection is reached.

Ultimately the common nature of 'equinity' he shares with say Phar Lap or some other horse is more underdetermined than the individual horse that equinty is contracted to.

Equinity has all sorts of formalities which are likewise as underdetermined towards an individual horse as they are to other things: animality, corporeality, fourleggedness etc., and so on. None are particular to Bucephalus.

The point is this. The cgs. The sprites. Even the text are all like formality that comprise the common nature of 'Furude Rika'. And honestly Rika is the greatest example.

With only these elements alone Rika shares them with Frederica Bernkastel and certain formalities with Erika Furudo from Umineko. But if that's the case, these formalities (cgs, sprites, text) and/or common nature (their unity) isn't enough to determine Rika's individuality.

What I've left intentionally unmentioned is the key ingredient that I'm going to pose as that which contracts the 'common nature' of a visual novel character to an individual substance: voice acting.

This is plainly obvious with Rika. When Rika has to be Rika, her voice is that of the 'meep', 'Nipah ~☆', 'nanodesu' etc., but text alone doesn't carry her personality through here as Yukari Tamura's voice acting is able to.

The Seiyuu contracts a visual novel character from being a common nature of formalities into being a concrete, and thus more ultimately 'real', entity. A great case study for this would be Kizuna AI and her voice actor swap.

While it was never initially made public all her fans complained that something was "off". That she'd been "replaced". There was something eerie about it. Of course that's because we quite literally had a totally different seiyuu contracting the 3Dmodel Kizuna to individuality.

It's also why (one of the multitude of reasons really) the dub of beloved characters of a given anime usually feels so wrong when you've come to know them in their original Japanese voice.

Rika Furude without Yukari Tamura is too underdetermined. Saber without Ayako Kawasumi does not reach 'ultima realitas entis'. Atri without Hikaru Akao is less real than otherwise. Without their seiyuus, they cannot reach ontological perfection.

I mention Fate and Atri here now for good reason. If a visual novel character is ultimately given more reality content by having a voice actor, then it is undoubtedly the case then that -Realta Nua- is the finished product.

Obviously, this is the case, and we know this from the Japanese re-release of Fate/Stay Night -Realta Nua- on iOS, as it is described as the "origins of Fate" by Nasu himself. Likewise with would for the PSVita release for FHA.

Perhaps more controversially, for something like Tsukihime, this would make the Switch remake (and its upcoming sequel) and its characters "more real" by way of said contraction to individuality of the characters than the originals.

But this isn't to say that leaving out voice acting doesn't have creative possibilities. Atri ~my dear moments~ is the stellar example of this. Atri left the main character without voice acting, while providing every other character with it.

What this meant is that the reading experience allows the inner monologue of the reader to mould the main character's individuality. You contract the main character by way of yourself while the rest of the world, cast, narrative, is already formed.

Because there is an existing form given outside the protagonist, yet the protagonist is formless, the reader's internal monologue works as wax being impressed by a seal's form yet it is up to the reader how far the nooks and crannies of the seal are filled by him as he reads.

Of course, in the case where there is no supporting contraction in the rest of the cast, there being no voice acting at all, this task becomes far more demanding on the read to then create 'ultima realitas entis' for the entire novel.

It ultimately fails as a liquid without containment takes upon no shape.
But conversely:

It's no wonder people complained say, with the release of Fallout 4, over the addition of the main character's voice acting: it detracted from the immersion! But unlike a sandbox open-world RPG, visual novel protagonists aren't designed to be *that* formless typically.

So intentionally leaving on the mc unvoiced was probably a slight gamble. I reckon it paid off. This might have proved necessary: I doubt many weebs would easily be able to project on the super hi-IQ amputee depressed protagonist living in the ruins of the modern world.

Of course, this means that something like manga and comics offers perhaps the least concretely real characters, film offering the most concrete. The caveat: that's reality content as intrinsic to the given piece of media.

These were all just kind of off-the-cuff musings as opposed to my more formally structured syllogisms or effortposts. There are probably quite enough holes to poke in this idea and more interesting directions to take it.

I guess this ended up being a weird prologue to the St. Edith Stein and Individuation thread that has been in the works for a while.

I'm gonna tag everyone I know who might find any interest in this thread this sorry for the spam in advance

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