I’ve found myself playing an old dating sim while trying to wake up in the morning and reading a “cozy mystery” trying to fall asleep at night and that makes sense for this week’s unexpected but somehow thematically appropriate pairing to write about in a way that suggests I plan any of these.
My girlfriend recommended A Cornish Recipe for Murder (Fiona Leitch), a light-in-tone murder mystery taking place during filming of Legally Distinct From Great British Bake-Off (hosted by a drag queen, so it actually sounds like an accidental huge improvement on Great British Bake-Off), which is the sixth book in the Nosey Parker Cozy Mystery series. We did not read the first five books. It’s honestly perfect not having read them. I also got the ebook rather than the audiobook which turned out to be ideal because it was the charming, light read that would’ve been ruined by actually committing to all of its words.
I know I’m saying a lot of “I didn’t read all of it, it’s great” and that does Kind Of sound like I’m saying it’s not actually good, but there’s something relaxing about a story you can just kind of pop into the middle of, about lived-in characters, like when you’re a kid and you first wrap your head around the concept of TV show reruns, just piecing together the entire narrative of Friends or Boy Meets World nonsequentially like it’s chill Pulp Fiction. There’s also something nice about just skimming over long descriptions of baking or synopses of events from previous books and just kinda getting the gist of it. Maybe the secret to a relaxing read is: not reading. Although this kind of makes sense in a late capitalism/“all we want is less content” framework, where it’s good enough to not feel like a waste of time, but light enough to delicately detox the subconscious demand for Content. Do you ever have a day that you accidentally end up filling entirely with Content, flitting between show and book and podcast, and then you lay down in bed and it’s the first time you’re not doing something all day (or, worse, you put on a podcast you only kind of like and sometimes fall asleep to) and just feel the weight of this day you’ve turned into a landfill? I try pretty actively to not end up having days like this, and I spent a long time slowly working my way through this book. There’s something extremely nice about books, as a medium, for the “I can’t fall asleep, I give up on falling asleep” moments, and it’s nice to find a book that asks nothing of you, that has shortcomings but they’re sort of why it works, that seems built to turn off your critic brain.
On the opposite end of the cozy spectrum, I am slowly working my way through the fan-translation of Tokimeki Memorial for the SNES for kind of opposite reasons: dating sims get too overwhelming for me very quickly. In a strange quirk of my social anxiety, projected onto a game about dating in high school, I don’t enjoy long sessions of the game, instead enjoying picking it up for a few minutes and then putting it back down when something cute happens, somewhere between feeling genuinely overwhelmed and not wanting to overstay my welcome and ruin a nice (fake, scripted) moment.
I of course started playing Tokimeki Memorial: Densetsu no Ki no Shita de (which can be translated as something along the lines of Heartbeat/Heartthrob Memorial: Beneath the Tree of Legend) because I’ve been obsessed with it since Tim Rogers’s 6-hour video review for Action Button (about a different, fuller version of the game that is apparently considerably more difficult to program a translation patch for). It’s an early dating sim taking place in high school, notably a charmingly chaste one. You juggle self-improvement activities and hobbies and date women for about three years, and because nothing can ever Get Serious you’re encouraged to date around for those three years and slowly get to know people. Rogers’s analysis suggested that while the pitch of the game is “get to live high school all over again”, a sort of obvious wish fulfillment game, the real trick of the game is getting to live high school “all over again all over again”. I abandoned my first playthrough of the game after realizing that studying and joining the school baseball team was actually of no interest to me at all and started over doing what – I suppose – I really wished I could’ve done in high school: focusing exclusively on playing guitar and being hot. I joined the art club (which is oddly actually school band in the game, it turns out) instead of a sports team (neither of which I did IRL because lol). I focused on my fashion stats. I have basically never looked at a book. Instead of staying up to 2 am every night for 4 years doing homework and studying only to end up a B student, there is a fictional joy in what on the surface looks like not caring about your grades and just becoming hot, but digging a little deeper, what the game is actually doing is encouraging you to make your character a more interesting person, a lesson I didn’t learn in real life until I was over halfway through college.
Of course, this is also wish fulfillment. Because I can’t talk about literally anything on ReadOnly without bringing it back around to the evils of capitalism, there was obviously a real-life purpose to IRL grinding homework at the cost of not knowing how to talk to people. I am, now, in my early thirties, able to spend the bulk of my free time the way my fictional high school boy in Tokimeki is (playing guitar and being hot). In real life, your free time isn’t really “free”.
It is an embarrassingly nice exercise in poking away at something consistently a little at a time. I despise my inability to do one thing for only either about twenty minutes (usually if it’s entertainment) or seven straight hours (usually if it’s a creative project). On the one hand, this means that books and games will just sit around in-progress for months, years, forever, but then I will also be unable to tear myself away from feeling like I have to write an entire book right then and there. Although it is probably optimistic to think, yes, and then when I stick with playing a little bit of a video game consistently, then I’m really gonna start knocking out writing a page of this screenplay every single day. I’m just hoping it matters that it got me to think about that.
I think I also wanted to poke at the concept of “cozy” a little bit here, because it does have a cultural overbearingness at the moment, in that there’s a certain cringe element to so much as describing something as “cozy”. (The cringe response to the cringe response to cozy seems forthcoming.) The pursuit of “cozy” can come across as forced or basic, which is just a little wacky when you think about the mission statement of cozy as just abstracting the concept of hanging out somewhere. Games often lend themselves to a certain “hang out here” quality; you’d think that’d be because of the interaction and immersion of the medium, but really it’s more so just because it has so much more focus on downtime in a lived-in setting than a book or a movie does.
Tokimeki Memorial’s cozy/hang out qualities are sort of grasped at by Tim Rogers describing a creative writing class he took in college:
“[The professor] told us to never, ever set a story on a college campus. One student immediately asked, ‘what about a high school?’ And the teacher immediately replied, ‘high school is good!’ … High school is such a weirdly game-designed period in just about every civilized person’s life experience. In addition to studying for tests and earning scores that get you ranked against your peers on a big board, you’re also in a position of your human biological maturation process wherein adults start expecting you to also act like an adult. No game ever feels quite so game-y as it does during that phase where you’re still learning the rules.”
Re-reading that I start to forget what my connection was, although it’s certainly somewhere in the hang-out-ability of learning the rules, whether the rules be how to study, how to date people, how the people in the middle of a slow, episodic story know each other. I enjoyed hanging out in A Cornish Recipe for Murder’s syndicated sitcom vibes of a lived-in, low-stakes (despite literally having a murder in it) world with characters who sometimes just have to go on an aside for a page or two to tell you about a thing that happened in another book (which might also have been crime-adjacent). The stakes are there, but they feel secondary. It’s nice to just vibe for, like, ten or fiften minutes.