You Can't Save Her

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Two friends, separated by competing orthodoxies, now violently pitted against each other because somehow these orthodoxies are more important than interpersonal connections.

What a ridiculously unrealistic concept.

Completely unrelated and by the way, anyone watching US domestic politics?

This is a work where you bounce back and forth (helpfully and satisfyingly cued with color) between two perspectives of a tragic collision between former friends. The setup is a religious/sci-fi setting where young acolytes respond quite differently to forbidden knowledge, and it develops tragic consequences. I mean, it’s right there in the title. They are both awesome fighters, with anime powers, though that is the least interesting part of the work. Certainly the central tension, with some flashback time devoted to how it got here, is the primary narrative aim.

It is a pretty fraught subject, no? There’s two ways to go about this. One is to contrast each perspective and portray it as a tragedy of the universe. The two variations of this are ‘both are right’ and ‘both are wrong.’ The second way is to double down on the tragedy by showing one side is right, and the other wrong, and the tension still unavoidable. Kind of a ‘My Nazi Best Friend’ situation. The details of the ‘sides’ really matter a lot here, what their tenets are and what they demand of their adherents. Where do we fall on that spectrum?

Well, the work definitely paints the ‘blue’ side as wrong, both in its tenets and demands. We spend most of our time exploring this through the dual protagonists’ eyes. What the work is either less sure about, or does not convey clearly enough, is the ‘rightness’ of the pink side. There is of course the inevitable charge of ‘opposing bad = good,’ but this conclusion seems consistently undermined by the sparse, suspect details we are given. By story’s end, I was convinced both are wrong, largely on the strength of their shared sanctioning of righteous murder. The challenge to this kind of two-sides narrative is to give equal dignity and empathy to the ADHERENTS without necessarily transferring implicit approval to their DOCTRINES. Man does that take a deft hand, and probably quite a bit of table setting.

I found YCSH to be both too shallow and too short to accomplish this. I rejected both doctrines as presented, and could not figure out why the protagonists determinedly did not. I had no true understanding of either adherents’ motivations. That’s not exactly true actually. Indoctrinated intertia and fear v. self-important rebellion are clear enough motivators. Importantly, what they are NOT is a deeper relationship with their orthodoxies. How do these characters respond to the tenets of the faiths they are willing to kill for? We don’t know. Are those doctrines humanistic or self-perpetuating hate machines? We don’t know. What about the underlying doctrines appeals to these characters, and convinces them they are actually the ‘better way?’ Unexplained. Those details are CRUCIAL to aligning the reader on the proceedings and understanding the protagonists. The work is not concerned with those things though, only in setting up the dramatic confrontation. It’s just, short that understanding the tragedy of their opposition is hollow. A narrative manipulation with opaque justifications.

There is a read of course, a deeply cynical read, that not only are those tenets vague, and maybe not even UNDERSTOOD by the protagonists, they are completely unimportant to the conflict. Ideological conflict is its own self-perpetuating feature of human experience, and is its own force independent of the purported ideologies involved. This is a statement for sure, but one that I find unsatisfying and unappealingly fatalistic. Perhaps if the work spent more time convincing me of this thesis I could at least engage it as a disturbing but worthy observation. Here though, it is seemingly asserted too shallowly to convince me.

By story’s end, I’ve got a ‘both sides are bad’ conflict where the core conflict is earnest but superficial. Superficial ‘both sides’ narratives are kind of poison for me. “Both sides are equally bad” is a patently bad take when one side blatantly denies reality, commits sexual assault, treason and insurrection and still demands and gets abject fealty. Just to pick four inarguably bad examples out of a hat, completely at random and not related to reality at all. HA HA. Ha.

Ha.

So this work’s somewhat muddled thesis did not land for me. Like, at all. Without clarity there, the characters never sung for me either, so their conflict was unmoving. This made for a Mechanical (nearly Bouncy) experience with a seamless, kind of attractive implementation.

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 15m, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless