Theatre

July here.

So we watched the Takarazuka Revue Castlevania performance that they're streaming in the west a little while ago. We've mentioned that part. We've only seen a few of their shows so this probably isn't the first time it's been true, but the thing about making a show around Symphony of the Night is that you just wind up having way more fight scenes than the majority of stage stage productions we've ever seen. Like a lot more. Not even close. And the really wonderful and hilarious thing about the fight scenes in this production is that they are completely abstract. The actresses just swinging weapons while standing nowhere near each other. It rules. It's so good!

Obviously, the difference here when compared to playing the actual game, or even watching a movie, is all tied up in the fact that it's a live stage production. If we're making fiction then there's some level of abstraction: if my script calls for someone to be shot to death, we're not actually going to kill someone because it's not real and that's ridiculous. We'll fake it. Maybe it's taking the form of animation; a depiction. Maybe we use some camera cuts in our movie. The stage is just a format which increases the amount of abstraction required. But it still works. Suspension of disbelief is fine with even this level of abstraction. So this got us thinking.

There's this video on Youtube, well over a decade old now, from a channel called Every Frame a Painting. (This one about Jackie Chan and action comedy.) Formative for us as it gave us some of the language to understand why watching recent action movies was so infuriating. In short, a ton of camera cuts all over the place were attempting to disguise that none of the actors actually know how to fight, nobody is actually hitting each other etc. So of course we have to ask ourself: why is that so annoying and the other one so fascinatingly effective?

My current answer is this: everything is about the vibes. The drive in everything to be 'realistic' means cutting the emotion of the action off completely. When we allow ourselves, as creators, to force the audience to meet us halfway, then the important feelings we want can be conveyed more TRULY and the audience will experience the satisfaction of being INVESTED. This used to be understood on some level. You've probably seen the Return of the Jedi clip where Luke kicks the space kinda in a similar area to the other guy's gun to knock it away. That's funny, but we got to see the god damned kick.

RPGs, tabletop and video game, were actually doing this all along in their turn based and die roll combat. It may or may not work for an individual, but it's there. The clear abstraction into something that only kinda represents what it is but transfers the idea cleanly. I am out of line here but I'm right. Games need to stop trying to be movies and start trying to be theatre. For a bunch of them, they're closer to the musical than even the good Jackie Chan movie.

I just seek the human in art. I want to see the process. I ache for the soul of the creator and its rough edges, stripped away by capital.