An Insane Person's Thoughts on Tsui no Stella
Recently I finished the latest Key title (that is available in English), Tsui no Stella. This was a fairly enjoyable experience the whole way through; with beautiful art, a pleasant soundtrack, and a scenario written by Romeo "God of Art" Tanaka, it's safe to say that this is a real meritorious work with much to appreciate. I mean, of course it's going to be an amazing product, it's developed by Key after all. However. I came to this work not for the brand name Key, but to chase after the unique experience of a work written by Romeo Tanaka, and oddly I felt that here that wasn't really delivered
To get it out of the way, I did still really enjoy Tsui no Stella, I think it's great, but when those credits rolled after the closing sequence and I looked at Tanaka's name it came to me that his presence in this title felt very subdued. While I understand that it was a product developed by a whole team and not just him, its odd, considering it just didn't have the same feeling or Tanakisms (Tanakino?) present in his other works, even Rewrite, which was also produced at Key. Rewrite felt very different to other Key works, while Tsui no Stella blends right in with the rest of their catalogue, if that makes sense. What I'm most interested in is trying to understand what Romeo as a person may have been attempting to express through this novel, not just what it means thematically.
Unfortunately, my 日本語 is not good enough to parse other Romeo works at the moment, so the selection I have to try to view this from is rather limited to Rewrite, Jinrui, Girls Beyond the Wasteland, and Aura (spoiler warning for ALL of these except Aura which is irrelevant). Luckily for me, besides that last one which we can ignore the rest are pretty relevant to this work as they align with Tsui no Stella either thematically or came out around it. The greatest loss may be that I cannot see how Trianthology or 和香様の座する世界 fit into this puzzle. Though I am sure this topic would be very fun to revisit when I further my studies and have greater access to Tanaka and see how that may change my reading on this.
His earlier works do not seem to be very in line with the themes of environmentalism and the decline of humanity (I think Cross Channel is concerned with this but from a different lens and is less concerned with technology and physical/ecological factors of this, though I may of course be wrong i am just hoping they aren't super relevant to the ideas present here). As I see it, Jinrui, Rewrite, and Tsui no Stella are the primary explorations of these themes, where his initial premise is that humans once wielded great technology but fell into collapse, the world's dominant species becoming the fairies with even more advanced technology. Yet their species did not collapse nor was it showing any signs of doing so, they treated their similar developments with a different attitude entirely which made them the "superior" species. Rewrite has a similar premise that technological development in coexistence with humanity will lead to ruin, Tsui no Stella more deeply explores the intricacies of how exactly this could take place.
In Jinrui, humanity's shortcomings are revealed through the satire of mass production, big corporations, consumerist culture, and bureaucracy; these are things that are inherent to our development as a species but also a product of our human nature. The fairies who do not seem to possess these same flaws or systems in spite of their technological advancement, and as a matter of fact are thriving with it as humanity is on the brink of ruin. Though Tanaka does not seem to lament this down-scale in technology, rather, he's quite the environmentalist, which is further expounded on in Rewrite.
I think his environmentalism is most clear in the conclusion to Akane's scenario (the best one), where the world lived in a pocket dimension succeeding world ending conflict brought about by the ugliness of human nature, in this world there was great emphasis placed on lack of technology and a romanticized rural, hands-on mode of living. Even the use of fire was limited, and what replaced technology was a kind of "magic" that used human life as an energy source (he's telling you to do shit yourself and not rely on conveniences and amenities). It is of course also apparent in Lucia's route where technological development pollutes and kills everything and the earth was rendered a toxic uninhabitable wasteland.
All in all, he feels pretty misanthropic and skeptical of technological development. A core idea of Rewrite after all is finding balance between yourself and the natural world, which he holds in a sort of reverence. But to make it clear, I do not think Tanaka has a particular issue with technology. I think his greater issue is its development in relation to human nature, not discounting what we are capable of (negative) and how technology may negatively impact the human experience, this latter point being greatly addressed in Tsui no Stella. What he critiques in Jinrui is ultimately the systems surrounding technology, and in Rewrite it is primarily Guardian's usage of their technology that is problematic; technology is shown to be used for good things in the closing to Lucia's scenario and also in her Harvest Festa scenario. Yes, Ryukishi wrote those routes, but Tanaka was the main scenario architect and set many of the themes in motion and I also refuse to believe the Rewrite dissenter nonsense agenda that "the writers worked completely separately and had no communication about how the story was going to progress" and that the work is "incoherent babble" which I think is clearly false. Only Moenovel’s Cross Channel team would work like that.
Anyways. These tracks are recovered in Tsui no Stella, where humanity in spite of great advanced technology collapsed entirely and the remnants are practically homeless. The novel goes into how this collapse happened on micro (relative) and macro levels, how in some cities technological advancement perpetuated disparity which then led to civil war, obliterating the city. In other cases it was famine; many possible avenues for our fall were explored. In terms of how everything fell apart, humans became entirely dependent on AI to take care of their needs, and after many centuries of evolution the AI ceased to recognize the people populating the Earth as human and accordingly stopped taking care of them. The reason provided in the narrative was natural genetic changes over a long period of time, but the subtext is humans lost sight of what they were and changed to be unrecognizable to what they once were.
What it means to be human is a focal point of the novel, where Philia, who is an android, developed into the only entity that the AI systems would recognize as human while modern humans like Jude and Willem became cyborgs and abandoned empathy, while others completely devolved morally and civilly becoming akin to animals throwing rocks and sticks around. Since the artificial creation is what was identified as human, Tanaka posits that it's more of an innate spiritual quality. So far, it seems that Tanaka's views on technology still align with his previous ones, that technology is not innately reprehensible and that human nature is to blame (though he actually may have softened up on it even further and gotten more misanthropic in the process), however, there is much more to look at with the context of all these works: the lack of Tanakisms in this production, and the timely release of Girls Beyond the Wasteland.
Girls Beyond the Wasteland is the immediate succeeding visual novel penned by Tanaka after his initial work experience at Key with Rewrite, and it follows a group of people working together to make a visual novel. In this work, he airs out and explores many of the frustrations of this team process, including writers butting heads and other staff members restricting creative freedom and imposing themselves on others in the team. This follows the longest gap in visual novel releases in his entire career, he didn’t release anything between 2012 where he wrote for Rewrite’s Fandisc, and 2016 when Girls Beyond the Wasteland (which was first delivered as an anime in January) finally came out. Sure, it could be said he was busy finishing up the light novel for Jinrui but that never slowed his releases in the prior years it was still publishing. He was still cranking out works like a (very eco-friendly) factory with it on his plate
And here we are once again, we are at another 4-year gap from him, as Tsui no Stella released in 2022 and we are yet to see another Tanaka title in the holy year of 2026. His other longest breaks, which were three years each came after his work on Rewrite concluded. It is possible that his output has simply slowed down over the years, but this can perhaps be explained by the many controversies in the production behind these titles at Key. Rewrite was a work that was rather poorly received in Japan and perhaps held in slight contempt by Maeda, who after its release forced the artist and original concept proposer, Itaru Hinoue, out of the company. Of course this was not a statement outright given by the company but its alluded to in an interview, such workplace toxicity would definitely have a negative impact on Tanaka’s mental health, probable cause for his venting in his subsequent work about visual novel production which just supports this happening even more. Another supporting detail about Key's poor perception of Rewrite was Tonokawa, who was supposed to succeed Maeda as the Studio's lead writer, resigned after how poorly it did.
This brings us back to his subdued authorial presence in Tsui no Stella, which was probably a necessity for his work at Key this time around due to Rewrite’s poor reception. He pretty much had to play it safe, stick to what works, and play into the much joked about “Key formula.” While still interacting with the themes of his prior works, it’s doing so in a completely different way; Watashi is much more an observer of the issues plaguing humanity and is not an active participant in these negative aspects of humanity, she’s rather detached from it. Whereas Kotarou actively seeks harmony with nature and to fix many of these issues (in some heroine routes after periods of detachment and denial, at least), most notably in Terra. In the case of Tsui no Stella, Jude is an active participant and the epitome of the “declined” human; he is cold, pragmatic, he suppresses his feelings, he treats his fellow men with little empathy. While he does at time use technology to help communities, it’s mostly for his own profit and he keeps most of the useful stuff for his own use.
While unmistakably still intellectually a Romeo Tanaka work, it lacks the unique expression and identity present in the other works from him that I’ve seen, and I think Romeo himself is conscious of this and internally struggling with the restrictions placed on him in this work, expressing that through Jude. Jude possesses the same critical nature towards humanity Romeo expresses in his other titles, but he possesses a fear of them and aversion to other humans that is a new take. Jude is a character that is resigned to his helplessness and humanity’s decline in a way that completely contradicts the actions of prior characters like Kotarou, and more reverting to the pessimism of Watashi, though still more involved and less of an interested observer who acts as a third party. He thinks “that’s just the way it is” and goes about his life, doing his job in a robotic fashion, suppressing his real dreams and refuses to express his feelings towards Philia, all while doing a job he is growing increasingly opposed to carrying out, risking his life the whole way through.
Now I’m not making the claim that Tanaka did not want to write Tsui no Stella, but I feel that his lack of authorial presence relative to other works was derived from an external factor relating to the project itself, and that that had an effect on how the narrative took shape. It was of course still thematically consistent with his preceding works on the topic, with the ending being a characteristically hopeful plea that his feelings, like Jude’s, may carry on into the future in the shape of his work even if the steps taken to get there were not ones consistent with his ideals and wishes. At least, this idea makes sense to me; it is still ultimately conjecture. He already had to shift styles for Rewrite and fit into Key’s identity which I would say he didn’t really align with prior, and I feel that was even more the case with Tsui no Stella. In the end, I couldn’t find any interview material of Tanaka’s thoughts on any of his experiences at Key, try as I might, so I’ll let the closest thing, Girls Beyond the Wasteland, speak for itself. That’s a whole lot of words for me to ultimately be unsure of this reading, who am I to say how an author feels about their own work.
Sidenote: I realized post-writing that Japanese business conventions pretty much render the existence of such interviews and negative recountings impossible. Just like how there would be no official statement as to why Hinoue was no longer with the company.