Yamamoto: Story 5 (Sam Lindsey)

Date: 5/21/18
Author: Sam Lindsey
Topic: Story 5

I think the most interesting thing about this story for me was that it took a while for me to figure out what was actually going on. Many contemporary stories, it seems, take too much time explaining every detail to the audience and not relying at all on their ability to infer and figure out what is going on. By doing this they are actively taking away the experience of creating your own unique story and filling in the blanks with what you think might have happened in the past or in the future or in the part they intentionally left out.

Take Memento, for example. It is a story told completely in reverse... You don't really know that at first, but when your about half way through the movies you start to piece things together! It's satisfying for both the audience and the director to make a movie that way. The director gets to have fun creating a new sort of flip on the classic "story arch" and we get the satisfaction of going "Oooooooh! I know what's going on now." The discussions that may take place after such movies are also really interesting (Interstellar, Arrival, and others do this too) where we contemplate and discuss plot twists and shifts we noticed and are able to take a different look, a different approach of critique comes with a different way of story telling.

Additionally, I thought the whole premise to this story was interesting (even if the anime trope was a little funny). The idea that to these characters and people "stuck" inside this world that death is normal and that repetition is normal and that everything weird that happens is just normal is super cool. The protagonist notices that she gets urges not to go certain places or do certain things, but that's because it's just the way the world works (and how it's always worked). Makes you wonder if there are things like that here that are sort of like that... What really is gravity? Why do we see the colors we see? How big is the universe truly? Questions like this that sort of are just "there" make we wonder if we are in a simulation of our own....

Who knows?!