Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Recent Updates | Tagged:

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #64: Storytelling Lessons From Type-Moon

Or, the world of visual novels, part 4

The current buzzword in the media business is 'Transmedia'. Producers, Hollywood studios, comics publishers are all about owning and controlling the rights to franchises that they can then exploit across different media: print, TV, movies, toys, games, merchandising. The way Western companies, especially comics publishers, go on about it now is as if they're only discovering all this for the first time, even though DC and Marvel have made the bulk of their earnings from licensing their characters for merchandising for decades now, though I guess the 'synergy' bit where they hit the sweet spot of a coordinated campaign for their properties where products in different media are released in tandem, usually with a movie release, to encourage fans to pay for them all.

Type-Moon, while a relatively small company, has succeeded in a way big companies in the US dream about. TSUKIHIME may be out of print, but the manga adaptation is still going, posters and action figures of the fan-favourite characters are still selling, and they feature in the loose sequel/spin-off fighting game MELTY BLOOD, which has already gone through several incarnations from the PC to ports to a arcade and Playstation 2 versions, not to mention a manga adaptation of the story mode, which was removed from the arcade and PS2 ports. FATE/ STAY NIGHT has spawn its own range of spin-offs, including a bestselling quasi-sequel FATE/ HOLLOW ATARAXIA, music CDs, the usual toys, and a light novel prequel series FATE/ ZERO, co-published with Nitroplus, which tells the story of the previous Holy Grail War that was fought by the parents of FATE / STAY NIGHT's main characters and how virtually all of them ended up dead by the time FATE / STAY NIGHT begins, leaving their kids – and the surviving warrior spirits – to resume and finish the fight. FATE/ ZERO in term spun off into music CDs and audio drama CDs. Unofficial fan translations of the novels can be found online.

The spin-offs are only possible because of an elaborately thought-out mythology and backstory, and that's a mark of Type-Moon co-founder and writer Nasu Kinoko's desire to be an author rather than just a visual novel scenarist. TSUKIHIME and FATE/ STAY NIGHT are set in the same universe, a 21st Century world where supernatural factions battle in secret, but each game is self-contained so you don't need to know the other for crucial information. This world is presided over by various factions: the Catholic Church lurks in the background as a harsh, fascistic body policing the various factions. The Magi Association is the authority that all magicians, sorcerers and alchemists have to answer to and plays a big part in FATE. There are various supernatural creatures like pure-born True Vampires, their victims/ descendents the True Apostles and other non-human creatures. There are upper-class or aristocratic families whose bloodlines grant them special abilities that obliges them to be guardians, assassins and hunters protecting the innocent from supernatural creatures like vampires and demons… and rogue members of their own families gone bad. Shiki Tohno's family in TSUKIHIME and Shiki Ryougi's family in KARA NO KYOUKI are amongst them. Mages are also descended from long-running aristocratic families, as represented by the likes of Rin Tohsaka in FATE/ STAY NIGHT.

Then there are two pivotal characters who weave through both TSUKIHIME and FATE/ STAY NIGHT, a pair of estranged sisters named Aoko and Touko Aozaki, both powerful witches who have existed in Nasu Kinoko's imagination long before he even wrote those visual novels. In TSUKIHIME, it's Aoko Aozaki who teaches the young Shiki Tohno that killing is wrong and gives him the special eyeglasses that block his death vision and enable him to live a normal life. Much later, we find out the glasses were made by Touko and Aoko stole them to give to Shiki, though neither sister appears in the story after its prologue. Arcueid the vampire also tells Shiki she knows of the sisters and dislikes them intensely, that they're extremely powerful, extremely dangerous, there are only about six others like them left, and should be avoided whenever possible.

Touko Aozaki isn't as gifted a mage as her sister and has a public persona as an acclaimed artist and sculptor who creates life-like puppets that sell to rich collectors. She also secretly runs an unofficial private investigations business specialising cases involving Magick or the supernatural. She's much more cynical and sardonic than Aoko, chain-smokes, likes like an educated MILF and, when she takes off her glasses, is described as "the most malicious-looking woman you've ever met". In that respect, she's like a female, Japanese John Constantine, especially when she's rarely seen working any magic at all and usually just tells people what they need to do to get out of deep shit. In a later moment in FATE / STAY NIGHT, the maimed hero has a replacement body built for him by an unnamed "puppet-maker" who's on the run from the Magi Association who's almost certain Touko.

Touko is a key character in KARA NO KYOUKAI (rough translations: BORDER OF EMPTINESS or GARDEN OF SINNERS), a prose novel Kinoko wrote before he even began writing visual novels, that was partly serialised online, and contained the seeds of the ideas and mythology he would refine in TSUKIHIME and FATE/ STAY NIGHT. The complete novel, running nearly 1,000 pages, was finally published as a book in 2004, after FATE/ STAY NIGHT was released, and went on to sell 500,000 copies. The heroine of the novel, Shiki Ryougi, is an heiress of an upper-class warrior family who wakes from a coma with some of her emotions gone and the same Mystic Eyes of Death Perception that the male Shiki Tohno would end up with later in TSUKIHIME. While trying to recover her sense of self and emotions, Shiki's default mood alternates between pissed-off and murderous, so she decides to work as an investigator in Touko Aozaki's agency. Since she's already a trained swordswoman, she makes a deadly avenger. As she says, "My eyes can see the lines that are the death of all things. That means I can kill anything, even a god." The novel follows Shiki's path to recovery and redemption with the help of the man who loves her, Mikiya Kokuto, the prototype for Kinoko's male heroes, a pacifist regular guy who earnestly tries to save everyone through kindness.

The basic premise of KARA NO KYOUKAI isn't that much different from that of HELLBLAZER, with the heroes as investigators up against perpetrators of magic, with the main villain turning out to a rogue Mage awakening latent abilities in tragic figures who go on to wreck havoc before they end up before Shiki's knife. Coupled with Touko's cynicism, Shiki's lust for killing and Mikiya's struggle to keep her from becoming a murderer, this could have formed the dynamic for a long-running manga or anime series, but Kinoko seems to have stuck to the integrity of the novel as a complete story with a beginning, middle and end told in seven long chapters. When Shiki's left arm is shattered in a battle, she gets rid of it with her knife and nonchalantly asks Touko to build her a new one later, to which Touko equally nonchalantly agrees as if that was the kind of thing she did all the time.

KARA NO KYOUKAI remains untranslated except for its first chapter, serialized in the US edition of the Japanese prose anthology FAUST vol. 1. Del Rey had announced plans to translate the entire book but it may have been dropped since there was no news since 2008. Each of the seven chapters has been adapted into a theatrical anime movie and they've finally announced a blu-ray boxset with English subtitles to be released next year, but it's priced at 55000 Yen, which is about US$620. For that price, I would hope it comes with a knife that can kill anything, even a god.

Type-Moon's next visual novel, MAHOU TSUKAI NO YORU (translation: THE WITCH ON THE HOLY NIGHT) is scheduled for release this Winter, and will depict the teenage Aoko Aozaki's coming of age as a witch and her relationship with another witch and a boy, and might provide some answers to what makes her tick, and even possibly the cause of her falling out with her sister Touko, who will appear in the story as a supporting character. The plot is adapted from an unpublished novel Kinoko wrote while in school, and would signal the origin of the Type-Moon universe. I've been told it's not a porn/eroge game, which suggests again that Kinoko's ambitions were always to be a literary author and not a writer of porn or eroge. This also indicates how long these characters and mythology has been floating around in his head, and the Aozaki sisters are the lynchpin of the mythos, moving through the world as meddlers and manipulators of events for their own moral and ethical reasons. In TSUKIHIME, there's a final epilogue that unlocks after every single ending in the game has been played, set years later after an all-out war between the Church, the Mage Association and the vampires, where an older Shiki Tohno meets Aoko Aozaki one last time and finally gets to say the words he wanted to say to her when she saved him as a child.

CANAAN is another franchise from Type-Moon that began as a scenario written for the Wii and PS3-based live action visual novel 428 FUSA SARETA SHIBUYA DE. It's not set in the Type-Moon universe and is instead in a contemporary world filled with black ops, genocide, conspiracy, bioterrorism and illegal human experimentation. The project is now best known as a 13-part anime series where a terrorist plot is played out against the chaste love story between two girls: a naïve photographer and a Middle-Eastern war orphan-turned-assassin named Canaan, who in turn is a target of lust and hate by the female leader of the terrorist organization who was the original owner of the codename Canaan. Here lesbian subtexts and S&M undertones are pushed so far to the surface that it unsurprisingly has a huge following amongst pervy blokes and lesbians. It will be released on US DVD and Blu-ray this October.

The women characters from TSUKIHIME, FATE/ STAY NIGHT, KARA NO KYOUKAI and CANAAN are now the face of Type-Moon: Arcueid, Saber, Rin Tohsaka, Shiki Ryougi, Canaan. What's striking is that they don't have insanely huge boobs or go around in unrealistic skimpy costumes but practical clothes, not counting the swimsuit special posters – Arcueid in a white sweater and long brown dress, Saber in her formal blue dress and silver armour, Rin with her red tunic, black miniskirt and black leggings, Shiki in her noblewoman's blue kimono combined with red leather jacket and black combat boots, Canaan in a red sleeveless top with pistol holster, practical cargo pants and running shoes. Clearly-defined visual character designs. That's pretty clever branding, in my book.

Type-Moon's identity is thus founded on Kinoko's vision and voice as an author and co-founder and artist Takeshi Takeuchi's sense of design that makes all the characters instantly recognisable and therefore easily merchandised and marketed. They've certainly been more successful in creating a coherent continuity and fictional universe to unite their stories than Marvel, DC or Dark Horse have, but that comes down to keeping them manageable and not forcing characters and stories into a mythos. To me, they're the perfect example of the little transmedia company that could.

Compulsively researching at lookitmoves@gmail.com

I've begun the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed. Follow me here for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!