[1989: pp. 128–131]
[2003: pp. 132–135]
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MOTHER Literary Magazine
'80s AMERICAN LITERATURE SEEN IN MOTHER
Kids Will Have Fun, But Adults Will Have Even More
Gen'ichirou Takahashi
高橋源一郎 Born 1951 in Hiroshima prefecture. After being expelled from Yokohama National University, he moved from site to site working construction. His unexpected debut as an author, which came in '81 with Sayonara, Gangsters, was the arrival of who would be a longtime big-name novelist. First winner of the Mishima Award.
The First RPG Where the Characters Live in Modern Times.
I had certain misgivings before starting up MOTHER. By its nature, the RPG falls into that category of games well-suited to period pieces, that is to say, stories set in the Middle Ages. I had some concerns about whether or not changing that up into a modernized version would be fun or persuasive. But when I did give it a try, my honest impressions were that it was super fun.
The game starts off with poltergeist phenomena. Until now, RPGs have had a predetermined theme of looking for a missing princess or searching for treasure. As far as modern things go, there aren't any princesses or treasures, so it's hard to give the player a solid reason for heading out.
But in today's world we do have a trope called the adventure novel, the theory of modern juvenile literature where a youth goes on a quest for something.
It was incredibly thrilling to watch this thing go on from its beginnings and turn seamlessly into a game before my very eyes.
To be specific, let's take enemy characters. In a medieval setting, you face demons and monsters, but if you're wondering how to do that in a modern setting, that takes the form of facing aliens, middle-aged men and women, as well as animals, all manipulated into a fearsome frenzy by some unknown thing, so that even modern-day trucks and bicycles turn into realized characters.
The "No-Kill" Concept Has that Great Aftertaste of a Good Adventure Novel.
Also, what impressed me above all else, was the "no-kill" basis when you fight enemies. In everyday games, you go around on a merciless killing spree, but this used to be an indispensable part of gaming, as if it unleashed our sadistic bloodlusts. But in MOTHER, they "go back to normal". The author's ways of thinking and feeling make excellent use of this right to the game's core, and it just feels great.
It's not like we ever feel bad sadistically beating our opponents, but there's no way we don't feel some amount of a bad aftertaste, either, after consuming a splatter film or novel.
But when we read things that have the goodness of juvenile literature, we're left with a wonderful aftertaste. That's what this is. I've realized a lot of specific care was put into this game along these lines. This had a persuasiveness. I think MOTHER is an example of how to succeed at introducing the juvenile adventure novel trope into a game.
Horizontal Travel Along a Vast Plane is THE Characteristic of American Novels.
There are two novels in modern American literature that are strangely MOTHER-esque: The Talisman, written by Steven King, and Greg Bear's The Infinity Concerto. And even more interestingly, according to Concerto's afterword, after finishing his own novel, Bear read Talisman, and all he could say was "Whoa, it's just like mine!" This coincidence could also be said of MOTHER. I imagine this means we've reached an era where high-quality storytellers can't help but write these kinds of stories.
They're settings where a young boy, the protagonist, ventures into and back from a magical country, despite living in modern times.
A boy venturing out and coming back a man is a key theme of American literature. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and to speak in more modern terms, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, are as American as they come.
Every country has Bildungsromane¹ and coming-of-age novels, but I feel as if American material is big on tales of somewhat younger boys roaming the wild and coming back a man. In Europe's case, the youth suffers through love and gains a different perspective. This has a slightly different texture to it.
America has a wilderness. Originally the country was frontier land, with an unknown world to its west, and by journeying thenceforth a boy would become a man. Happily there's plenty of that concept to go around. Romance was also an element of the journey.
In Europe, the travel is all vertical. It can be a descent into a magical demon land, or an ascent into Heaven. It's the vertical travel of life and death.
In contrast, America has horizontal travel. Even when you go to the demon world, while there may be something of a European scent on the air, you're still moving along the map. It's sideways travel, and that's RPGs. Even Huckleberry Finn goes up and down the Mississippi for several thousand kilometers. For an American, this provokes a longing.
The "Rebirth of the Family" is an '80s American Theme.
The theme of the "rebirth of family post-breakdown", another characteristic of modern American literature, also shows up in MOTHER.
These post-"family breakdown" stories are in a lot of American novels from the '70s. For an American, there's this feeling that the '50s were a golden age, the '60s were a time of disturbance and unrest with son rebelling against father, and that the '70s bore the scars.
Then we get to the '80s, and there's a recovery from these scars. In other words, there's a process of Gold to Unrest to Scars to Recovery. Specifically, your father's generation, or rather that of your older brother, were veterans of the Vietnam War. Those who died or became disabled fall under one generation, and their little brothers and sisters are the current generation writing American literature.
Simultaneously, the '60s saw a drastic change in the family. You had mothers who were divorced or unwed, what we call the single-mother household. Or maybe you were in a household who lost their father in the war. Add to that the sexual revolution, and you had an era where family was dismantled to mean all kinds of things.
The little brothers and sisters also suffered attacks from a different direction — the AIDS virus, or an actual wound within a family, which strengthened a desire to fulfill that need, and the reconsideration of family began.
It feels like, instead of dismantling the family, going back to it after leaving it.
"Let's not do that stuff anymore."
"The '50s were great, weren't they?"
That's why, on the other hand, the story of a young boy is a bond where he ties his family together. A boy leaving on a journey and coming back has become a metaphor for a return to the goodness of the family itself, family by nature.
Even in King's case, you can catch a faint glimpse behind his work of the boy being depended on by the father. In other words, rather than being all by his little lonesome, the boy has warmth in that thing called family, and this coincides with that feeling where one wishes to return to that kind of steadfast '50s family.
Doing a Back to the Future and Heading for the Golden '50s.
MOTHER is also filled with 1950s nuance. Both the music and the pompadour-sporting young men belong to a time where family holds steady.
In the same sense that the Middle Ages are a perfect fit for RPGs, for modern American literature the '50s were a golden age, a time when there was a father around.
Huizinga had a masterpiece of a book titled The Autumn of the Middle Ages, which brought back a medieval revival. Pointing out our error of viewing the time period as the "Dark Ages", he wrote that it was actually a golden autumn age where people's feelings were, in a sense, in full bloom.
Americans have the exact same feelings about the 1950s. The High School, the First Kiss, the Graduation Party... you guessed it, it's the world of American Graffiti. It has a hardworking mother and a father who keeps a firm hold on his dignity. The Goonies and American Graffiti are part of this, ideologically. For a child raised in the era of Kramer vs. Kramer, it's no time for adventure after his family is split up. But once the boy grows up and the '80s hit, he feels like simplifying things, and does a Back to the Future and heads for the '50s, a stand-in for his own memories. You get over your differences by fighting it out with a young pompadour head. This is the '50s. When you try to create a universal trope for the current day, you end up with 1950s America.
Psychic Powers are the Game's Weapon, Linking Together the Past and Present.
Psychic powers are a new key component tying together the "1950s" past and the present. The '80s are a mechanical age. When the system is robust, you've got a lot of things in your personal belongings that make it difficult to time travel. You have to make up for that with something. For Americans, the '50s fall under the same category as the Middle Ages, and if that's the case, you're going to need weapons that came about in the Middle Ages. There's something about psychic powers that fill that role.
Psychic powers as a metaphor become abilities from the past, hidden abilities that have been sleeping inside oneself. They then go on to represent the act of going somewhere both modern and ancient. I'd say King's Carrie is representative of that. If we assume this connects to a lost time period, I think there are two sides to this: Giving boys and girls psychic powers also becomes the principal factor, or the key, establishing the RPG itself as a game.
Presently, America has an issue where its frontier is dying out, but the country still wants a frontier as its image. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial are in fact frontiers to an American. The people of that country are always looking outside themselves and broadening their boundaries, so in that sort of sense, wouldn't that make aliens the natives?
And in the modern times, psychic powers will be indispensable toward communications with the unknown.
MOTHER is a Well-Enough-Furnished Boys' Adventure Novel.
And, as far as British and American literature is concerned, there's fantasy, the key genre. C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia count, but the major key that connects juvenile and fantasy literature is in fact Magicant.
The modern day has a place that links directly to the fantasy world. And the frontier can be found simply by traveling through that fantasy world. Whether it's the Chronicles of Narnia or The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, the secret passage to the fantasy world is the door of your house.
Looking at it that way, MOTHER has components of both 1950s-callback juvenile adventure novels and Narnia-style fantasy books, and it's equipped with all the components of a well-enough-furnished story for young boys. Americans would be fired up if they read a tale like this.
I guess you could say there isn't a single reason MOTHER wouldn't sell in America.
- (end)
[Photo: Cover of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.]▲A classical masterpiece of boys' adventure novels
[Photo: Cover of The Infinity Concerto by Greg Bear.]▲'80s adventure fantasy
[Photo: Cover of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub.]▲An adventure world on both sides of the door
[Photo: Cover of Carrie by Stephen King.]▲An occult masterpiece, whose movie was a hit too
[Photo: Cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.]▲The Chronicles of Narnia series
[Photo: Cover of The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum.]▲The girl Dorothy's adventure tale in the land of OZ
¹ Bildungsromane: Plural of Bildungsroman, a term built off the German words bildung ("education") and roman ("novel"). As defined by Wikipedia: "a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important."
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