Noelle Aman
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December 2025 Update + Q&A: Weirdly Prescient Media Edition
🕑 Added 2025-12-05 20:30:54 +0000 UTCHi everyone - I hope you're all as well as can be! It's time again for another update on how things are going. And I'm going to start labeling these general updates by the month they come out in, since that frankly makes more sense than "mid-video update" now.
First, I'm sorry it's been a few weeks since I've said anything. I sorta crashed right after finishing the To Love-Ru video, and directed all my attention to working on music commissions to get some money in the bank for school next year. Because indeed, next year I'll be going to a cram school (cursinho) to prepare for entering university!
Accordingly, video production may get a bit slower, but I don't think it'll be by too much. School will run from 7:30 to 1:30, so my plan is to work from 2:00 to 6:00 daily. I already start to get a bit unfocused after 4 hours on a single task anyways (except for video editing because it's like constantly alternating between 15 tasks), so I think it'll work out perfectly.
At any rate, I don't have too much else to say about my private life, so let's move onto future video projects.
Saihate no Ima: During my tiny break to focus on getting music done, I was debating what I wanted to do after the To Love-Ru video. I bounced a couple ideas off my husband and some close friends -- maybe I could do Sweet Pool and see what it has in store, maybe I could do a video about a nukige and discuss sex as communication, maybe I could talk about Tsuki ni Yorisou after 5 years of putting it off, maybe...
Suffice to say I had a lot of ideas in my mind, but one core thread kept me hesitating on just about everything: 'whatever I cover, I don't want to make my life the focus.' And what I mean is that I don't want to do another video where the crux of it centers around deeply painful and difficult things for me, because I feel as if I have pretty thoroughly mined my suffering for the time being, and it's become somewhat draining.
Philosophy Tube mentioned in one of her recent videos that it is very exhausting to talk about yourself constantly, and to be vulnerable constantly, or something to that affect. For whatever reason, the To Love-Ru video really made me feel this. I think it was the combination of some personal events in my life, combined with taking a longer time on this video, as well as starting therapy, that made parts where I talk about my difficulties with my family or my sexual traumas become actively agonizing to work on. Hearing myself discuss my pains on repeat while refining the video to the extent needed for public release was, well, exhausting.
Another thing that has been bouncing in my head is the desire to talk about things I haven't talked about before. Obviously that coincides with the desire to not centre my suffering as the secondary subject of the essay, but it also means trying to find works that challenge me to think about things I haven't before, or find radically different angles. Despite the very low viewership on them (and sometimes mediocre phrasing of things in the first video), I think my Biman/Bishoujo Mangekyou videos are some of my best for this reason. Those games really pushed me to learn about new subjects and find new perspectives.
So, these two points combined threw out a lot of ideas. Sweet Pool looked as if it was going to hit a lot of very painful points for me. Tsuki ni Yorisou may not necessarily be painful but it does feel like it may hit similar points I've touched upon a lot in the past, and I need more time before I work on something like that. Discussing sex as communication would be cool, but I can't think of a unique or even especially well developed angle to go over that for. I need to read more...
Which, finally, led me back to one game which has sat on my list of titles to play for years: Saihate no Ima. If you're a Japanese learner then you might be feeling chills, and if so, I am not sorry. If you don't understand why, a very quick briefer is this: Saihate no Ima is a visual novel about the internet, about socialization, about subcultures, about the future of technology we were promised and never given, about the stratification of people. It is often regarded as a masterpiece... but Saihate no Ima is also hilariously unfinished with entire important chapters missing from it, with everything arranged in a confusing order, and it's all written in a way that flows between completely comprehensible one moment and as if someone randomized five Wikipedia articles together in the next.
I have heard countless things about Saihate no Ima, and I have to say, it definitely had capital-V italicized bolded Vibes when I tried reading it about a year ago in my spare time, owing to its wide-reaching subject matter and bizarre structure. It's also led me to read some literature that's periphery to it, such as McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy: a book which is both a very intelligent exploration of how mediums shape our comprehension of the world, and also unabashedly horrifyingly laughably racist. After 150 pages it's finally gotten interesting and significantly less racist, but unfortunately, it's still a disorganized mess that's often very racist.
I'm going to finish this book and begin going through the game next week, and once I make significant process in it, I'll post an update with more thoughts about both. Probably much more about Ima than about Gutenberg Galaxy because, again, THIS BOOK IS EXTREMELY RACIST AND KIND OF A MESS. No amount of interesting points or musings about human perception can take away the fact it is a meandering slog to read, which makes so many points that it's really hard to get McLuhan credit for being prescient in any way. Monkeys on a typewriter, etc.
Anyways, I've had a lot of feelings about everything with the internet, social media, and social stratification as of late, especially as I've spent more time offline, less time on social media, and been more tuned in to the world around me in ways both major (attending social gatherings, seeing friends regularly) and minor (using public transportation). I haven't quite figured out how to verbalize those feelings in anything but a sludge of "companies are evil and phones are bad," which I suppose is not quite wrong, but feels very under-developed. I'm looking forward to actually thinking on this more.
Future videos: I guess what comes next will really depend on how I feel after the Saihate no Ima video. If it's enough of a breather for me, I might try and shoot for Sweet Pool next, because 'cosmic horror mpreg' is too much to pass up. If it's not... I got told Remember11 is pretty much video essay bait with a very literal cliffhanger ending. That's hard to pass up too.
THE LIST: As always, feel free to suggest more games to cover. I'm always open to suggestions, even if it'll take a long time go through em all! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WF_2ADCa5UY63yygiElEyGr35UPCf-jfGivuHAeaiqs/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Okay, I think that's all for now. Feel free to leave questions for the Q&A, and once again -- thank you all for your continued support! See you soon. o/
Comments
Melody Haren Anderson
I think you should do what feels right, and honestly, being vulnerable all the time would be exhausting to anyone. Just take your time, hopefully enjoy it, and share when you can.
LucineBlue
Cripes, diving into McLuhan's work... I was curious about what you meant about the racist stuff so I went to wikipedia and --clued preeetty quickly. Always about dismissing how other 'lesser' cultures communicated and recorded their ideas, huh? >__> Either way, I get what you mean about not picking over your own trauma for your work and trying to find what to talk about instead. I'm a chronic oversharer (YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT!!), so I was constantly bringing up/relitigating my own stuff sometimes. I'm really excited about your thoughts on social media and subcultures though :3
