After I made a post yesterday about Anime News Network's .hack//Quantum review and my impressions of it, I started thinking. In my post, I agreed with the ANN reviewer that .hack has recycled the same plot several times. However, what I began to ponder afterwards was, "Is that really true?" I've subsequently been debating it in my head all day, and I will now present my conclusions.
What I'd like to address in this post are the following two questions:
1) Does the .hack series really recycle the same plot over and over?
2) If yes, is that even a bad thing?
A lot of people, both fans and non-fans, will agree with the statement that the .hack series is repetitive and recycles the same plot. First off, we need to identify what "plot" we're talking about here. My impression is that it's the "friend falls into coma because of 'The World' and protagonist must fight the Big Bad to fix it" one. Basing our discussion off this assumption, we can better tell which of the .hack products falls into the "recycled plot" category. Here's a list of what I think matches up with this description:
- .hack//IMOQ
- .hack//Another Birth
- .hack//Liminality
- .hack//Legend of the Twilight (anime only)
- .hack//Roots
- .hack//G.U.
- .hack//Link
- .hack//Quantum
- .hack//The Movie
That's nine entries out of thirty plus total. However, it should be noted that in the total, I've counted the retellings as separate entities, such as G.U.+ and XXXX and so on. Yet I chose not to place those as separate in the above list. My reasoning is that, although retellings, things like .hack//G.U. Trilogy still essentially tell the same story as G.U.; as retellings, they can't deviate from the story of G.U. too much. I felt it would be unfair to add them to the list when of course they would use the so-called "recycled plot" that they're based on. But, in that case, if we don't count the retellings as separate in our totals either, then our new result is nine entries out of roughly twenty-four. So we can say about one third of the time, .hack uses a recycled plot.
(As a quick aside, although I've included early works like IMOQ in the list, the truth is they're not really recycled. They were considered fresh at one point; it's when future works appeared that people began decrying the series for its repetitiveness precisely because that plot had already been established by a previous title. But, for the sake of my own argument, I will keep IMOQ and others in our category and the analysis as a whole.)
Now, one thing some people may be asking is why didn't I include .hack//SIGN in the above list? After all, .hack//SIGN is arguably one of, if not the, most well-known .hack title out of any in the series. To me, .hack//SIGN doesn't quite fit the model I have in mind, although it's close enough to be worthy of note. It does feature a character who is stuck inside "The World" and their real world self is in a coma (a plot we see used again later in .hack//Link, which I included in my list). In a way, it is about saving said character by getting them to log out. However, .hack//SIGN is much more about introspection; the power to log out ends up lying with the character, not as much with the Big Bad. And more than defeat the Big Bad, the anime develops them and builds them up. We know that the Big Bad is a mofo by the end of the show, but they're not even close to defeated yet. These things are presented and explored more thoroughly in the subsequent IMOQ games. For this and other reasons, I chose not to include .hack//SIGN in the recycled plots list, although I wouldn't blame others if they counted it as such.
Continuing with the discussion about retellings, I think that's a large part of why people get this feeling that .hack keeps recycling the same plot; because, in the case of retellings, that's exactly what they're doing. Consider .hack//G.U.; the story is told through games, novels, manga, and even a movie. That's four different ways of seeing or reading the story. I'm not here to argue which is better, but I'm merely pointing out how this sort of thing can flood the .hack "market" and make people think this way. Even so, retellings (not including the so-called "source" material) account for only about eight entries out of thirty plus in the .hack franchise.
Then there's cases like .hack//Legend of the Twilight, where the manga and anime have completely different endings, to the point where I'm hard pressed to call the anime a retelling; rather, an adaptation would be more appropriate. (All the same, I only counted LotT once towards the derived twenty-four total.)
Going back to addressing my first question of this post, other than the various retellings, another thing that ends up influencing this notion of recycled plots is the prominence of certain titles over others. Looking at our list, one thing becomes clear: besides .hack//Another Birth, which itself is based off the story of IMOQ but from BlackRose's perspective (not a retelling in my mind), everything is either a game or an anime. Not just games and anime, but some of the most advertised and most popular in the series. They make up what you might consider the "core" of the .hack universe; although there's plenty of side material that does not fall into this recycled plot category, what does is where a large chunk of the main plot line comes from. Novels like .hack//CELL and .hack//AI Buster almost expect that their audience has already seen or played the major titles; or, if they don't expect this and their audience hasn't, then they certainly try to influence people to want to do so.
So, by this point, we've identified two reasons why people would think that .hack has a lot of recycled plots: the prevalence of retellings and the prominence of certain titles. Adding on to this, we have reused character designs. I won't be debating here about whether reused designs are a good thing or not, but I think that they do tend to make people feel as if they're seeing the same thing again. It gives an impression of a lack of originality.
What about the titles that don't fall into the recycled plot category? The tendency we see here is that they are mostly novels, manga, or more minor anime works. Certainly, stories like .hack//AI Buster and .hack//Legend of the Twilight deal more with AIs in "The World" and how they can have a human-like consciousness, which is an overarching theme in the .hack series (R:1 in particular). AI Buster and Legend of the Twilight also reference other titles a lot, namely the major ones such as SIGN and IMOQ. There's .hack//Alcor, a story that's ultimately about the background of a minor character from .hack//G.U. So again, although these stories do have their own originality, they're also inexplicably tied to the more major titles that are identified as recycled.
So to answer our first question, I would conclude that it is a mix of yes and no. According to raw numbers, only about one third of the total titles uses a so-called recycled plot (notwithstanding that there could possibly be more than one recycled plot). However, if we take into account popularity, then we see a lot of the titles from our list are the most well-known .hack entries in the franchise. Although the novels tend to try different, more introspective things (similar to .hack//SIGN in fact), their influence isn't as widespread.
With all the above being said, now it's time for our second question: is a recycled plot even a bad thing?
Let me preface this by saying that the answer to this question is fairly subjective; some will think that it is a bad thing, others won't. But allow me to provide an example of something else that has repetitive plot lines. The Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro created about fifty films between the 1930s and 1960s, up until his death in 1963. He went from producing silent movies, to black-and-white with sound, to color by the end of his career. With each progressing era, more aspects to toy with were added, while others were lost. So his films changed in a way. However, Ozu is also known for reusing plot lines over and over again, especially in his postwar films; a good number of his movies concentrate on the middle class Japanese family, and quite often there is a plot about marrying off a daughter.
Ozu is considered a very famous Japanese director, right alongside Akira Kurosawa. His style is quite distinct, such as his low camera angles and crossing the 180 degree line. A lot of people love and respect his work; despite the fact that Ozu frequently reuses plot lines, he also manages to do so in a different way each time, and even manages to say something unique while also carrying the same theme of ephemerality. He also chose to remake some of his earlier 1930s films later in his career. Certainly, there are people who don't like Ozu's work, due either to his repetitive storytelling or to his weird cinematography, or whatever other reason.
There are a couple points I'm trying to make here by using Ozu Yasujiro as an example. First, in the same way that Ozu's films communicated a story in three different, evolving ways (silent, black-and-white, color) throughout his film career, .hack too uses several means of telling a story, through anime, games, novels, and manga. The way someone enjoys a novel is different from a game, and so on. In this way, someone can see and enjoy .hack in a very different way depending on the method, even if the plot is similar.
Second, someone can create quality work while still using the so-called "same" story repeatedly. This isn't just a phenomenon unique to .hack and Ozu; it's said that every story there is has already been told, but the fun is in how it's told.
That is the key here. How is each .hack being told to us every time? Is it fun to discover how the characters will react to the circumstances around them or is it just predictable and boring? Is there something new to find in each title that makes it unique from the last or do they simply blend together? In the end, the answers to these questions will depend on the person. But, what I would like to say in conclusion is that there are people who say yes to these questions. There are people who like and enjoy .hack for what it is, despite whatever flaws they may see. And at the end of the day, that's what's important. That you enjoy yourself. That you get something out of it, even if it was just a few hours of entertainment. That is what I personally get from this series.
