Review of Saya no Uta
| Subject | Saya no Uta The Song of Saya ~ Saya no Uta - Download Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 8SammyTheWitch on 2024-11-04 |
| Review | Saya no Uta ended up winning me over in a way that I didn't quite expect by the end. Funnily enough I actually haven't engaged with all that much that Gen Urobuchi has made, but I do quite love Madoka (ESPECIALLY Rebellion) and I remember loving Fate/Zero the last time I watched it being years ago at this point. So with the Halloween spirit, having wanted to read this for years, the visual novel kick I'm basically starting with Va11-Hall-A and now this and getting this as a part of JAST's Halloween sale on their website, I decided to finally take the plunge. I guess you could say I'm a sucker for stories like this, stories about isolation, that feeling of loneliness in a world you feel like you don’t know how to engage with, the slow unraveling of a person looking for any connection and testing the limits for what a person would do to avoid the dread of feeling completely alone in a world they can't tolerate on any level. How that twists both the mind and the soul to self-justify the actions of someone who absolutely doesn't want help out of it or sees no point in trying to get help since nobody can really do much to help or alleviate much of it. I now completely get why this is so divisive and so love it or hate it. This absolutely goes for shock in what it's trying to do. The way I read it honestly is sometimes it works out and sometimes I do think it goes too far in pretty major ways that hurts the story and makes what it's doing feel overly indulgent. Like Yoh is not really a character, she exists to become a victim in multiple aspects, a character for the narrative to be extremely cruel to as multiple character moments for both Fuminori and Saya that I do find interesting in a victim victimizing another innocent person kinda way, but the way the scenes that play out end up feeling like cruel extensions to things that are already cruel enough and feel like either because Gen is getting off to it or because they wanted to make sure they sold more copies on the shock value. Either way it absolutely brings aspects of it down even if I do think it manages to use that and the assault on Saya before it to springboard into this idea of cruelty and cruel acts perpetuating further cruel acts due to not knowing how to process that trauma within the throes of a violent, unhealthy and most importantly sick relationship. But I get torn on how this overall handles assault as a topic. Because on one hand, the use of it feels forced as hell either as a way to make you hate a character, a way to spur on a character to become colder and crueler, or a way to show a character has immediately snapped in such a cheap and out of pocket move that really makes zero fucking sense (yes I know his neighbor lost his mind and that’s the justification but it really is just a bad scene that feels so out of nowhere and really feels like a “in madness people will act on primal urges” type thing which I frankly just don’t agree with at all and feels like cheap shock) but the way the story takes that idea of perpetuating cruelty that happened to you as a concept especially for Saya is really interesting, but it feels mixed in with, again, scenes that just feel gratuitous on top of it and dilute the point a bit. Like Saya and Fuminori's relationship is fucked up from the get go. Bro is having relations with what he perceives to be a child which is very clearly supposed to be disgusting and obviously a bad thing, but I feel like the way a lot of the h-scenes especially are handled it ends up feeling like the writing is reveling in each moment too much even if the point is to make you feel disgusted with what you're seeing and reading, even if Fuminori himself lampshades this in the beginning. But having said that, it does end up playing into what I love so much about the way Saya and Fuminori's relationship is depicted in general. This unhealthy codependency they have with each other within a world neither of them truly feel that they belong in. So Fuminori indulges Saya and his worst tendencies while propping her up as his only ray of light in a world that he can barely stand, treating everybody and everything around him like total shit or dismissing their concerns by just lying through his teeth unless it’s Saya. Every conversation is something to get through, every moment is something to get past, anything and everything to get back to Saya, to get to the end of the day and get back to Saya. The mask he's barely containing slipping away in real time day by draining day without her. And this is where Saya no Uta got me, at the core of it all, a seemingly average person giving up on social norms and becoming a monster in the throes of the madness consuming him and a monster trying to understand humanity and having said man becoming monster she’s with reinforcing those awful values until all they have is each other. They feed each other in the worst ways possible, they reinforce behaviors, they congratulate and coddle each other's worst tendencies because they're all they have. Like Koji later on, the more I saw of it, the more I wanted it to stop, the more I couldn’t bear to see this person spiraling and lashing out at the people around them. While I think you can make more excuses for Saya in the beginning given she genuinely doesn’t have the capacity to fully understand that what she’s doing at first is evil, I have less sympathy for Fuminori from fairly early on even if I do pity him at the VERY start. Reaching out is a two way street and I can understand not wanting to in a world you feel is so cold and alien to you, but at the end of the day I do think Fuminori actively rejects anything his friends try to do and his friends are too focused on their own shit to even consider the horrible shit Fuminori is dealing with, instead trying to just jump back to where they were when he can’t really do that which IS cruel in itself even if that cruelty is not really their intention. But intention doesn’t matter when someone’s world has gone to shit. Neither side here makes enough of an effort at all and Fuminori slips more and more into the logic of Saya's world, away from what humanity would consider right. He feels pushed into it in a way that nobody can understand while also viewing himself as above them as the beasts he sees them as and their, to him, lousy and stupid concerns. I think one thing I especially love about Fuminori’s shittiness in particular as the narrative goes on is how mundane his issues with people are but how his repulsion to them sets him off in such a cruel and truly inhumanely awful kind of way. It was annoying that his friends tried to make Yoh and him an item like they were both toys to be used for their amusement, which is fair to be annoyed about in a friend group especially if ya really don’t view the other person like that, but he takes this out completely on Yoh who genuinely was interested in him. Endlessly and breathlessly berating her and treating her like shit. All these petty grudges about friends being annoying, school being annoying, people not just leaving him alone and having concerns, his revulsion to the world only growing as more time passes and more things happen. To me where at first I pitied him, even before what I think is some of the worst things he does within the first few hours alone, I couldn’t stand him. Maybe this isn’t fair right? He got into an accident, his perception is completely fucked. He didn’t ask for this and maybe I’m being cruel for rejecting his want to survive and live as best he can in a world he is terrified of. What would I do in a situation like that? I probably wouldn’t be the greatest or friendliest person either. But I feel like I’d try to do what I could to manage in a way that didn’t hurt others, in a way that didn’t perpetuate those cruel feelings. I like to think that even if I saw everybody as monsters, even if I was deeply terrified, even if I was more than willing to cut people off, even if something completely changed me that I would still try to reach out for help from the people that I know care/cared about me. Maybe that’s me comforting myself, or maybe I believe in a better humanity then the Gen that wrote this story at that time does. I'd like to believe that at least, I don’t buy into the view that when people lose themselves, they’re just all gone and they become evil purely or devolve into some kind of beast willing to hurt anybody they can around them even if mental health can be a massive bitch. Like perception does absolutely affect your reality and I do feel for that, I don’t think if you aren’t doing well you’re like beyond help, but it’s a two way street and it’s a struggle and it’s a process. Though maybe that’s cruel of me to say, I’ve majorly dealt with Agoraphobia as something I can find semi comparable to the conversation of perspective coinciding with mental illness. I’ve felt separated from other people, isolated and alone, like I felt the world hated me, I’ve felt like I don’t deserve to be out among other people, that others will hurt me or I’ll get embarrassed because I feel like I failed some social expectation I didn’t get. I can feel paranoid and frankly panic myself into not going out as much as I really should. I say I have my reasons, but really I don’t, I’m doing this to myself due to things that happened to me, due to conditions I lived within and I don’t know how to deal with that in full. But despite all of that, knowing what I know, as self aware as Fuminori is with his condition, I think I still can get help, that even within this loneliness, even within this solitude, that it’s not over, that a Saya isn’t the answer to those problems, to that harm, to those issues. Though Agoraphobia isn’t really the same as something like Schizophrenia or Agnosia, but even so I do think it affects my perception of the world, how I feel I struggle to understand others and others understanding me and my fears and concerns. I do think that it’s important to have people in your corner who will push you to get better, and not doubling down on behaviors that will worsen your conditions. To me I feel like Fuminori never truly cared about anyone else in any real capacity and was looking for some kind of excuse or reason to eventually isolate in some kind of way due to what he says about the people he seemingly used to like. Even if things never got this extreme, I feel like he would’ve spiraled in some other way, shape or form. Like I would feel worse for him if he didn’t so adamantly constantly do the worst thing he possibly could in pretty much every situation he could. I think that aspect actually makes the fact that you never see his relationship with anybody before the accident more compelling even if it does cause the side effect of under-developing Yoh and Omi and not fully selling his friendships and the decline with them to the audience the best it could like I feel like Gen’s later works are much better at developing. Fuminori’s shallowness comes out in full force at multiple moments, his seeming care for anybody has been crushed. Which again, the loss of your parents and the changing of how you view the world around you absolutely is something that will do that and I do get and can extend empathy to that, but even when he gets a legitimate chance to heal and fix things and at least do the right thing in regards to what he HAS done and been involved in, and even if you decide to do that he regrets it because he’s so wrapped up within his codependency to Saya, his codependency to escaping these systems and ideas and people he clearly hates. He’s looking for a reason to continue forward into hell, even if somewhere in him he wants to do what he feels is right and kind of wants some semblance of “his old life” back. Which makes sense as to why that isn’t anywhere near being what could be considered a “true” end. That to me, that conflict, that dissonance, that’s that real toxic love shit. That kind of love that becomes coddling of each other's awful shit, that finds normalcy in the really awful ways both of you act. It’s horrible and every second of it is hard to see. It’s selfish, it’s cruel to those around you, to those left who do still care about you, it’s throwing it all away for this one person. Not that finding understanding doesn’t matter or is a wrong thing to do or want. Living lonely in what feels like an empty and lonely world is rough. Obviously finding someone you can relate to within difficult low moments is important, having true understanding is a precious and good thing. I just feel like you have to at least try and have someone in your corner who will encourage you to try, try to work with people who want to help you, try to reach out, try to find some way to deal with all of this that isn’t constantly hurting others and indulging in the worst shit you possibly can. Even if you’re alone in it, finding the salvation that you can where possible with people who want to be there for you. You can’t give up and then just succumb to your worst tendencies just because someone is feeding you what you want to feel, just because of that desperation. Hell, by about the halfway point I quite hated both Fuminori and Saya a lot due to a lot of this on top of the majorly horrible shit they are constantly doing by this point in the story too, which made the perspective shifts from then on fairly great to see and kept things even more interesting. Even if Yoh and Omi didn’t get as much as I wanted them to at all, seeing other characters like Koji and Ryoko dealing with the comprehension of the madness around them, the hatred and regret that bubbles up from their hearts, who and where they think they failed, how they feel they have to set it right after seeing the results of the madness of those involved up close. Really discussing that matter of perspective, of that thing that alters your perception of the world in a permanent way, your way of viewing life, the innocence of staying in the dark and keeping to the world and the warmth that you know even if it means abandoning someone lost to it. How they find a kind of solace in each other given their experiences, how in chasing madness you yourself lose a bit of yourself to it as well even if you don’t fully intend to. I genuinely loved every single bit with both of them from the second Ryoko became far more of a major player. Their own perception and lack of seeing Saya and Fuminori as anything more than monsters given everything they’ve done, their own insanity rising to the top as they refuse to begin to try to understand the other party any longer, as the other party refuses to try to understand the former. It all just spirals and spirals and spirals. It all led to the ending choice too, which I definitely personally prefer one over the other, partially due to who I cared about by the end but also due to how much I genuinely feel that specific ending fits better with what the game is doing overall, how that empathy that could’ve helped earlier could’ve been reached if maybe Ryoko had stepped in sooner, or had Koji checked in more directly on his friend, or had Fuminori had said something, anything maybe before this love had started to bloom and he spiraled into the worst version of himself he could be. But it’s all thoughts, nightmares, ideas, wants, wishes and the current moment, however you find comfort and safety becoming the #1 priority and how the line will constantly move, once you have that anxiety lurking in the back of your head. When it could happen again, when it could come for you, how you could’ve done more, who you failed, their ghosts haunting you in and out of your reality until those ghosts and that guilt becomes your complete reality. Part of me wishes I read the Steam version because maybe I would’ve liked the pacing more or maybe the scenes I had the most problems with maybe at bare minimum would’ve been at least more tolerable even if the writing issues wouldn’t have been fixed. But what’s done is done and even despite my issues, I can’t say I’ll be forgetting this anytime soon at all. Scariest ever? Nah. Masterpiece? Nah. A fascinating ride that by the end pulled me in and captivated me despite my issues with it? Yeah. Originally published on Backloggd |
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