The new season of “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf” animation “Brave into the Four Seasons City” launched in 2023 is at first glance an adventure story in another world similar to other Yangcun Guardians (hereinafter referred to as “Yangshou”) series. Go to other areas to complete the scheduled action of “Save and Protect”. But in the first episode of the story, this work hints to the audience through “playing drama” that this adventure is not generated, but traversed, not narrative, but game.
“City of Four Seasons Bravely” not only has the city of four seasons with stitching maps, but also has a quadruple memory maze of role-playing games, database reset, modern city and dreamy nostalgia, putting oblivion, death and rebirth into it. In the last Uhespace, the brave as identity politics are reborn time after time.
Before entering the Four Seasons City, the game master Xiao Mo created a game mechanism with a high degree of character development for the guardians of Yangcun: a limited number of guardian stones, skill combinations of different occupations, and upgradeable weapons locations, and tasks to be accomplished.
The first three are numerical reproductions of role-playing games, with very standard rebirth accessories, character attributes, level upgrades, and experience acquisition (including memory recall) forming a cyclic process. From a mechanical point of view, the Pleasant Goat and his party are not taking a brave adventure, but are growing cyclically under the Stratified Progression System game. However, during the second week of the adventure in Four Seasons City, the missions of the city master that the group faced were deliberately parodied: Finding the Princess in Chunhua City, Two Suns in Qingxia City, Lost Elf and Cold Winter in Fengqiu City The snow monsters in the city seized power, and they were all set up with a rather playful (plaisanterie) attitude, which was highly inconsistent with the traditional cave adventure prototype. It was not until the third week that the traditional DND (Dungeon and Dragon) mode was restored. This setting is not random, but constantly hints at the profound impact of the subsequent memory mazes on the story itself.
According to Wang Hongzhe’s theory, playing a game also means that the memory is reset while the identity is being played: on the one hand, it is because the character temporarily replaces the player’s subject identity, and on the other hand, the ultimate purpose of the adventure is to retrieve the memory, that is, “one The process of restoring what has been broken and passed away is a process of going back in time, so it is also a process of fighting against death.” [1]。
Due to the particularity of young animation, “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf” has never had a large-scale scene involving death. Since the Yangshou series, the most touched is the near-death experience. “Bravely Entering the Four Seasons City” uses the characteristics of the game mechanism to shroud the whole season in a sense of death. Memory reconstruction appears in three aspects in the game, the traversal of the maze map, the loading of branch options, and the life of the protagonist of the story. The reversal of these three faces corresponds to the three ways of death of the characters in “Bravely Entering the Four Seasons City”. They alternate to form a circular narrative: the brave who is defeated after exhausting the guardian stones will petrify into the check-in landscape of the Four Seasons City, making the game The map becomes more and more abundant; the hero who faces the Shadow King without using up the guardian stones will be emptied of memory and becomes a resident of the Four Seasons City, making the branch plots more diverse; “Dragon” (become the new shadow king), let the game mechanism open repeatedly.
So in Zhou Mu Speed Pass, everyone did not pass through the Four Seasons City, but arrived at the Monster City by means of cheating (direct access to the back door). Pleasant Goat defeated the Shadow King seemingly by accident, and lost his original identity and memory. , became the new movie king. At this time, Ying Wangxi and Xiao Mo formed a staggered Greymas symbol relationship. Ying Wangxi (A) has the identity and ability of the Shadow King, but has no memory of the Shadow King (not A); Xiao Mo (anti-A) has the Shadow King The king’s memory and process, but lost the identity of the shadow king (not anti-A). The appearance of Yingwangxi also added a new two-line task to the adventure, that is, memory recall. The obvious line is that everyone purifies Yingwangxi through specific fragments and actions, and retrieves the original memory of Pleasant Goat (and completely erases Yingwangxi memory subject); the dark line is that Xiao Mo awakens the memory of the True Shadow King through the process of the action itself.
However, as the leader of Monster City, the Shadow King has more than that, he is the embodiment of modernity being disciplined. The work that the early Shadow King (Shadow King Xi) needs to complete is highly similar to that of a worker in modern society. He has to stamp and sign day after day (also the first screen of the ep), and he needs to create a new life for the newly born monster. Naming, identifying and demolishing illegal buildings, and cutting the ribbon for new stores. The late movie king (playground movie king) still can’t escape from the rut, and he has to take photos with tourists day after day until next summer vacation. These one-dimensional behaviors all show that the story of Four Seasons City is not a traditional “giant hole adventure”, and the Shadow King was forced to become a running part under the microscopic power of capillaries from the very beginning.
Animation “Brave into the Four Seasons City” EP stills
2. The identity maze of database reset
In the middle of the story, the guardians of Yangcun who exist as brave people follow the requirements of the game map and obtain the customs clearance gems of different city lords sequentially in the form of linear narrative blocks, and finally open the gate of the monster city. The energy in the ring materialized and became the real shadow king, resetting the identities of the brave and his party. The previous “warrior who turned into a dragon” with the same origin as the enemy and the enemy was revealed as an illusion, and the King of Shadows represents the database consumption itself. Only then did the audience discover that the adventure maze described in the first 40 episodes of the animation is just one of many traversal options.
“Bravely Entering the Four Seasons City” also shows the essential difference from other works in the Yangshou series: this is not “the only adventure maze”, but the Four Seasons City that has been reset many times, and the political identities of the guardians of Yangcun There are also cracks in the legitimacy crisis. All those who lost their status as warriors were reset to Four Seasons City and became part of daily life.
The core memory tree of Monster City is equipped with the memories of all residents of the entire Four Seasons City. Its form is exactly the tree-like (projective) model constructed by Hideshi Otsuka when he described the “big narrative”, which puts the political identity of the residents when they were brave men on the surface world, and forms the current adventure cycle of Four Seasons City into a deep structure. But what the memory tree reveals is the database (reading) model all over the rhizome: the heroes who are reset as residents of Four Seasons City become the setting for the next adventure, and the petrified heroes become tourist attractions, plus Defeating the King of Shadows online will become the new King of Shadows, and the three intertwined periodic histories have become Klein bottles with negative theological significance.
The continuous value-added of database consumption makes the works more biased towards human design than narrative, until the era of double speed (はやおくり) comes. In Big Big Wolf’s eyes, Sanzhoumu Four Seasons City has become an “island-cosmic” existence, and he has long been familiar with the relationship between the characters in it, so he is not afraid of misunderstandings.As he inherits the experience value of the second week, he also has the advantage of being able to show off (マウントを取る) [2]. So Big Big Wolf of the third week led the amnesiacs into the City of Four Seasons. In order to save time, Big Big Wolf also chose to “skip” the plot commentary, and started to forcibly advance the plot at double speed. Although Big Big Wolf would have saved more time if he had completed the game in strict accordance with the second-week program; but as the host, Xiao Mo had long been absent. It’s an adventure, but a fight.
The second layer of memory maze makes the adventure game completely turn into a video game by constructing a circular narrative of daily repetition, “from a way for players to achieve a heroic journey, to become the purpose and process of the player’s game” [3]. Because the essence of the three-week goal is to “swipe”, which is a gameplay that was not available in previous role-playing games.
The commonalities between games and life form repetitiveness. In this process, the narrative function of memory is constantly eroded, and the individual’s anxiety about repetition is also forgotten in structural amnesia. Memory, in turn, is appropriated, becomes the outline of a pattern outside the grand narrative and gradually becomes routine (routinization), and finally becomes the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte). Four Seasons City (and its residents) has become a vassal of Monster City (and Shadow King). Four Seasons City, as a peaceful area, has instead become a pre-set for the adventure ending. And those seemingly subjective city lord dialogues and weapon upgrades are just arranged game mechanics. The cave adventure was originally intended to fight against death and memory, but was deprived of memory when it reached the end. Pleasant Goat and his party in the third week also lost their brave status and professional ability in the second week, completely regressing from the game participants to ordinary (kleine Leute) tourists.
Stills of the memory tree of the animation “Bravely Entering the Four Seasons City”
3. The Labyrinth of Discipline in the Modern City
The structure of Monster City does not stop at appropriating/retrieving memory, but has a metaphor in a more architectural sense, that is, the modern city and the stripping of memory.
Just like before the Yangshou series, the Wolf Castle where Big Big Wolf lived assumed the metaphor of modern life for adults, Monster City and Four Seasons City also formed a symbolic structure of modern society and pre-modern society. There are almost no modern buildings in Four Seasons City. Although the area is named after “City”, it is still unfolded as a complete map world. The Monster City is a veritable “city”, and its area is formed by the aggregation of Western fantasy castles and vertical cities formed after the Industrial Revolution.
Monster City has mastered a more important modernity tool, that is time. The cornerstone of time and space for the operation of modern society is the accuracy of the time scale. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, with the continuous development of the industrial revolution, the Clock Tower (the Clock Tower), as the most important monument, became the most important landmark of the city.The sublime sense of the clock tower endows the contract with continuous political power in modern society, and “transmits the standardized official time to the people” through telling the time and timing (timing), and finally forms a plan that is confirmed by the government. Timeline of Recurring Events [4]. The same is true for “City of Four Seasons”. There is nothing related to precise scales in City of Four Seasons, and the life of residents depends entirely on the judgment of day and night. In the monster city, there is the sound of the time chime throughout the city, and it forms a commuting setting that only exists in modern society.
Under the influence of time difference, the lifestyle of the residents is also completely different, which affects the external image. Although the residents in Four Seasons City are brave in their political identities, their social relations after being brainwashed and reset by the Shadow King are obviously pre-modern (medieval) lifestyles, whether it is the family of the lord of the city (royal family) or the occupation in the city (flower farmers, fishermen, restaurants, etc. ), are blurring of work and living space. But there are only monsters in Monster City, and there are no residents. They abide by the time order brought about by modern mechanical civilization. As soon as the off-duty time comes, they will give up their monster status and leave Monster City to no longer face the challenge of the brave.
At the same time, the “residents” in Four Seasons City conform to the appearance of “normal characters” in the Yangshou series, with standard facial features and a two-headed body. The “monsters” in Monster City are all highly distorted, reminiscent of the existential beauty of being transformed into beetles in Kafka’s novels. This leads to the fact that in “City of Four Seasons Bravely”, only the monsters in Monster City are not political identities, but social identities. Because the identities of these monsters are not given by the adventure narrative, but by the characters who play them.
However, the third memory maze is not an ideology formed through metaphor and structural operation, but a clearly visible image, which is the core memory tree of Monster City. In the game, the end of the memory ball appearing in the adventure cave is the process of retrieving the fragments; for modern cities, the separate preservation of the memory ball has a far-reaching impact, because it means that the personality of the person is dismembered , memory not only did not get the continuation in life, but was stagnated in a closed sphere.
What modern life reveals is apparent memories, not real memories. On the one hand, with the increasing development of the media, over-explosive information (representation) continues to enter people’s visual experience and be woven into their own memories (for example, childhood was spent with a certain animation); on the other hand, One-dimensional modern life (reality) is itself closed (verborgenheit), “an alibi without participation in the world, unbearable” [5], is a phantom that only has the sense of being in the event but is not there. In this sense, the residents of Four Seasons City whose memory has been deprived of their memories by the memory balls have become peacemakers in the true sense; the monsters commuting to and from Monster City live a coherent life like “philosophical zombies”. The daily life endowed by a modern city is mediocrity and repetition as a system of interpretation.
To continue to maintain such a tranquil vertige, a near-permanent consumer violence is required, which is exactly the original power of the Nightmare King who appears in the form of Cthulhu in the ring. It becomes the hinge (hinges) between the historical narrative of the Brave Fighting Shadow King and the repeated event narrative of modern life. It can grow automatically without absorbing the “negative energy” of the brave and monsters, and it cannot be controlled by a single pure individual. Defeat, because the Nightmare Lord is the folded ideology itself.
Just like in “City of Four Seasons Bravely”, awakening lost memories must be done through physical means (breaking memory balls) rather than psychological means (similar to words and deeds stimulation). To completely defeat the Nightmare King, it must be done as a hybrid, that is, the “happy wolf” formed by the real fusion of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf.
“Wolf of Joy” is not only the inevitable result after the call of the visual spectacle, but also a signifier for the two in a binary relationship to transcend their meta-settings. It transcends many barriers such as race/generation/school council, and finally becomes a realistic The trompe-I’oeil ends the hyperpresence created by the Nightmare King.
Stills of the animation “City of Four Seasons” “Wolf of Joy”
4. The Narrative Labyrinth of Dreamy Nostalgia
However, after the “Wolf of Joy” defeated the Nightmare King and began to rebuild the Four Seasons City, the story neither resolved the modern impasse of the city, nor continued to discuss the ethical significance of dark energy, but gave a completely different story from the previous one. end.
The ending does not choose one of the conflicting endings of cyclical history (adventure game reopening) and linear history (brave re-living), but directly extracts it, through highly theatrical methods such as storytelling, narration, and curtains. The performances in the first episode of this season’s animation form an intertext, and finally build a high narrative layer, declaring that all previous experiences are performances.
At this time, the audience outside the animation and the audience on the Qingqing Grassland have the same perspective, and the characters of Pleasant Goat and his party have also changed from the horizontal narrative of the map of the Four Seasons City Warriors to the vertical narrative of the commentary of the Four Seasons City performance. A serious and grand narrative adventure is instantly disintegrated into an insignificant identity dislocation, and the audience is deceived by the illusion of transparency (Illusion of transparency) and “suddenly transforms tense expectations (Adventure in Four Seasons City) into nothingness (poor stage play)” .
However, this comedic disintegration did not end there, but was further upgraded to dreamy nostalgia. In “The Future of Nostalgia”, Boym divides modern nostalgia into two types, restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. The former emphasizes restoring the old to the old (periodic history) and uses space to show time; the latter reflects on the ruins (linear history) and uses time to show space. No matter what kind of nostalgia, there is a parallel continuation of the irreversible history, repairing a kind of virtual reality defined by Bergson with the plasticity of the possible world, that is, “the past can and will be realized by inserting itself into the feeling of the present.” play a role” to construct multiple encounters.
But dreamy nostalgia (postmodern nostalgia) breaks this shackle, because dreamy nostalgia has no history.In dreamy nostalgia, history is a commercial memento, created artificially (elan vital) and woven into a tense dream experience, endowed with collective memory through ACG works as a viewer rather than an experiencer Holy Land tour, the most typical of which are Disneyland and Hollywood DreamWorks [6]。
At the end of the story, “Bravely Entering the Four Seasons City” has built a new high-level narrative. It is still convinced that the Four Seasons City and the Monster City are real, but it has long been transformed into an amusement city that is popular with tourists: almost all adventures Landmarks have been converted into amusement facilities, and the core building of Fengqiu City, the Tree of Life, has even been transformed into a revolving lantern; Monster City has been completely rebuilt into a theme park, haunted houses, VR equipment, etc. have been introduced, and tourists can take photos with the movie king at the end.
The fourth memory maze presents the face of the carnival (dream nostalgia), using “real scenes and digital virtual illusions to provide tourists with a new experience of safety and adventure” [7]The method re-echoes the hyperreality of video games. In the “Brave” game formed by Four Seasons City and Monster City, the travel and adventure of each city can be regarded as a deliberate imitation of the Yangshou series. Residents of the cat and dog country that frequently appeared in the previous work are once again pasted into the game as the background. The hyper-real world is directly connected to the fractal stage of value, mixing the order of all simulations, and building a structure that can be restarted repeatedly. nostalgic paradise.
Not only that, but this kind of dreamy nostalgia continues to build a labyrinth in narrative, thus erasing authenticity. Judging from the narrative level of “City of Four Seasons Bravely”, Pleasant Goat and his party undertake multiple narrative functions. They integrate adventurer/gamer/narrator into one, thus creating a self-referential paradox. Just like “the narrative act cannot write itself”, the authenticity of the Four Seasons City Adventure, the Four Seasons City Performance, and the Four Seasons City Amusement Park also appear to be mutually exclusive. Finally, these narrative layers together constitute an unreliable narrative superimposed by the Rashomon Structure and the convoluted cross-layers. The audience’s sense of dream is also further activated, forming a more psychedelic meta-narrative.
In addition to the story, the official account reproduces dreamy nostalgia in a generative meta-narrative way. During the screening of the feature film, the official account of station B “Big Big Wolf Office” will broadcast the plot of the next day in advance by means of secondary editing; the official account of Zhihu “Pleasant Goat and Gray Taro” also uses the method of repeatedly revising the same answer to add content (Zhihu Almost the log shows a total of 21 modifications). Among them, of course, the content of local stations “sneaked away” in advance [8]The reason is more to achieve the effect of Cyberworld (Monster City) Dreamland. Because during the daily update period, the official account of station B is still absorbing Internet buzz, performing desensitized animation characters, and directly making meta-drama a way of presenting comedy.
Stills of episode 60 of the animation “City of Four Seasons Bravely”
Under the superposition of the four memory mazes in “Bravely Entering the Four Seasons City”, the meta-setting that runs through the entire Yangshou series is successfully suspended, that is, the origin and changes of dark energy. This ideology is not unrealized, but even though the Shadow King and the Nightmare King take turns in the works, the discussion of identity politics is frequently mentioned, and even once became a similarity to the confrontation between sheep and wolves in the “pre-sheep guard era”. But instead of being further discussed, they were resolved into a dual model of simulacra and simulation: Four Seasons City and Monster City are simulacrums of the world of Yangshou, which cover up the more “real” world of dark energy.
As Baudrillard said in “Simulacra”:
“They (Four Seasons City) instead belong to the order of hyper-reality, to the order of simulation. This is no longer a matter of false representation (ideology) of authenticity, on the contrary it conceals the fact that the real is no longer true, so authenticity Principles are saved.” [9]
The reborn braves step into the Four Seasons City game again and again, and collage and reset their memories to obtain a dreamy experience like a kaleidoscope. The Yangshou series IP also uses a more mature type The globalization map is constantly expanding itself.
References:
[1] Wang Hongzhe. “Giant Cave Exploration” and the Transmedia Origin of Video Games[J]. Reading, 2022 (4): 11.
[2] Hitoshi Haida. People who watch movies in fast-forward[M]. Kobunsha Shinsho, 2022
[3] Xu Minghuan. Wang Hongzhe. From “Improvisational Drama” to “Adventure in the Giant Cave”[J]. Literary Theory and Criticism, 2022 (3): 172.
[4] WU HUNG .“Monumentality of Time: Giant Clocks, the Drum Tower, the Clock Tower,” in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, eds., Monuments and Memory: Made and Unmade[M]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 107-32.
[5] Baudrillard. Consumer society[M]. Liu Chengfu, translated by Quan Zhigang. Nanjing University Press. 2000: 12.
[6] Wei Zhou. In modern society, why do people become more and more nostalgic[OL]. Tencent everyone. https://view.inews.qq.com/k/20181231A0Q0EJ00
[7] Zhu Dake. Cultural Practice from Utopia to Heterotopia[M]. Historical Theory Research. 2016 (4): 17
[8] Handjob wiki. Bravely enter the Four Seasons City Wiki 10 data collection[OL]. https://xyy.huijiwiki.com/wiki/Bravely enter the Four Seasons City
[9] J.Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation[M].The University of Michigan Press,1994：l2Return to Sohu to see more