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dumbbiidiot · 6 days ago

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Yotsugi Doll - An Analysis

We begin our march into the Final Season with an arc that feels both inscrutable and incredibly straightforward at the same time. Take the name, for example - typically the titular oddity is the one affecting our arc character, but in this case Yotsugi herself is the doll.

In terms of comparable naming conventions, I would bring up Tsukihi Phoenix and Mayoi Snail - both characters implicated in this arc, one by her presence and the other by her very notable lack thereof.

Hachikuji Mayoi is not the one afflicted by an oddity, I wrote back near the start of this project, but I think recently it’s become evident that this isn’t quite true. She was afflicted by the Snail - the role of the Snail that she was forced to play.

Looking at it that way there’s a question of how voluntary Yotsugi’s dollness, her emotionlessness, her lack of personality and ease of influence by others is meant to be. We know that she doesn’t actually lack emotions, she’s just incapable of expressing them, which is an important distinction. At the same time, she’s empty enough to fill and be filled by the roles of others, as a specialist’s shikigami & supernatural proxy.

Tsukihi is a character in a similar boat, so far as the core of her nature lacks stability and seeks it out from others. Is she, too, afflicted by the phoenix? She certainly doesn’t embrace the role of an oddity, unless we’re to say that her role is acting exactly like a human. Instead, she takes up the role of an Araragi, a Fire Sister, and in her deliberate attempt to become one etc etc we all know the quote.

That being said, there’s a question of how her life is impacted by the phoenix. Koyomi is certainly worried, in this book. In the scene where they get in the bath together her extremely short-term thinking is demonstrated in numerous ways as she fails to conserve conditioner, easily forgets what she was talking about upon being splashed with water, and of course proceeds with the whole plan heedless of the consequences of Karen’s inevitable return.

Tsukihi is stuck in the present, neither looking back to the past or looking forward to the future, and there’s no better representation of such than her frequent hairstyle changes. It’s the regenerative power of the phoenix that lets it grow so easily, allowing her to ignore consequences and return to the same, default state.

Koyomi is the opposite, his hair growth also evidence of his vampiric abilities, but in the sense that he keeps it long to hide the marks on his neck. He puts off cutting it over and over again, saying he’ll do it ‘after exams’. We might say that in opposition to Tsukihi his hair is evidence of him being stuck in the past, unwilling or unable to move on from the effects of his vampirism.

Both of them, though, need to move into the future, Koyomi thinks. But by the end of the bath scene, we’re getting the sense that Tsukihi already is. She hasn’t cut her hair in a while, she says, because she has a ‘wish’ she wants granted.

If Tsukihi is capable of developing as a person even despite the nature of the phoenix, then we might question whether Yotsugi is not also capable of change, becoming more human-like.

But is that true? Right at the beginning of the story, we’re treated to Shinobu and Koyomi discussing Yotsugi’s position. Shinobu says that while Yotsugi is an oddity, she’s an oddity whose role is imitating humans. Not to be or become one, Shinobu clarifies, but to be with them, to blend in alongside them. In that sense, she exists the way she does for the benefit of humans. She was created by them, serves as their shikigami, and acts similarly enough to them that you could almost believe she was one. She just isn’t quite there, her convenience located in the fact that you don’t actually have to treat her in the same way you’d treat a person, when it comes down to it.

This convenience, this privileging of the human perspective, is fundamental to oddities in general. They exist in the forms that they do because those forms are the most sensical to humans. The animals they draw their appearance from, the puns that make up their names, their sources in old myth - all are symbols that allow people to observe them, speak of them, and tell stories of them.

After all, in a sense they cannot exist without these stories. Koyomi, who has been telling them all this time, knows this better than anyone. The oddities are found in the gaps between reality and his narration. I don’t say that to suggest there’s some objective reality where they don’t exist, though. How could there be any objective version of the narrative when the whole series is fictional?

Regardless, in-universe there’s a shared common sense where oddities don’t exist and all the events of the story have a reasonable (or simply unknown) explanation. Koyomi and his friends have their narratives coloured by a different perspective, and the series takes care to not present this as them uncovering some kind of concealed truth, but merely stepping ‘backstage’ and looking at things in a different way.

A deeply human way, perhaps. The temptation to see animals, inanimate objects (and of course, especially, dolls) as possessing feelings or intentions is extremely common. An oddity, Shinobu says, is a ‘deep attachment’, a strong feeling, and I can’t help but think of Nadeko here, whose attachment to Kaiki’s charms was so deep that to her they became a snake constricting her entire body.

Her knee-jerk rejection of others’ affection, the shame of being perceived, the inability to speak up about her pain, these feelings coalesced into a form, a name, a word that made sense to her. She tells herself a story about snakes, so later, when she can no longer maintain a pretense of loving Koyomi, what form would her hatred towards both herself and the world take but a white snake hiding in her shoebox? She tells herself a story about snakes because it’s more convenient for her, makes things a little easier to bear if it’s not her fault.

Hitagi’s attachment is to her mother, and she conceptualises it as a weight around her neck, so of course when she casts it aside it suits her purposes to tell a story where it was taken away from her by someone else.

Mayoi’s attachment is to life itself, and as a young child from a broken home, of course she conceptualises it as something she’s only allowed to have if permitted by an authority figure, so she makes it a plausible excuse. She’s just going to her mother’s house. She’ll be back as soon as she’s done.

Suruga’s attached to her own attachments, things she could have been good at if she tried, things she could have had if she tried, people she could have saved if she just tried. She conceptualises them as still attached to her, a reminder that everything’s her fault, for wishing or not wishing or not wishing enough.

Tsubasa, despite everything, remained attached to herself, to her own identity and ability to lead a normal life. She conceptualises herself as a cat and as a tiger, and it’s only by telling their stories that she’s finally able to tell her own.

Koyomi was so thoroughly unattached to anything that he told the story of his own death. He no longer wanted to be a human, no longer felt like one, and he conceptualised that as a being with sharp fangs and a thirst for blood. Then he saw that being, really saw it for the first time, and in all his infinite selfishness decided he’d rather that she was human. He was attached to Shinobu, so he told a story where she was small and moe and a big fan of doughnuts. And she was attached to him, so she told a story where-

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Ononoki Yotsugi was born without memories of her past life. Zero attachments. So people are free to attach whatever they want to her. She’s a bit like a lego piece. Hell, her limbs are even detachable. Rearrange them as you like. Turn her upside down and check what colour her panties are. She exists entirely for your convenience.

Yotsugi is a difficult character, for me, because I still don’t really know what she wants, how she feels, why she’s attached to the people she is. This arc doesn’t get into it much, either. Yotsugi’s dollness isn’t explored as a personal struggle. Rather, I think the question being asked is how different from her the other characters really are.

If Yotsugi is forced into the role of a doll then the whole cast of this tale is in a similar boat, ‘finagling [their] way through life’ as she puts it, trying to be ‘right and proper’ at their assigned role.

That being said, what it means for an oddity like Mayoi to be ‘right and proper’ (according to the darkness, according to Ougi) is made evident enough, but what exactly are the roles of the characters in this “Possession Tale”, and how do they differ from them in reality?

Tadatsuru is easily the most confusing here, a character we’re first introduced to here, who (we’re told) seems to materialise just as he’s needed by the plot. I, myself, don’t quite see the need for him, the thing that makes him a perfect opponent for Koyomi, apart from in the fairly shallow sense that his being a specialist confronts Koyomi with his newfound vampiric condition.

Ironically, despite appearing as an antagonist, Tadatsuru does actually provide some clarity on the situation in exactly the way you might expect from a specialist. Koyomi’s vampire problem is only the first layer of the mystery here. The second layer, and one that won’t be fully peeled off until much later, is the fact that these events were orchestrated in their entirety.

I suppose in that sense he also highlights how many of the people precious to Koyomi are oddities, or oddity-adjacent. Perhaps, building from Kagenui’s assault on Tsukihi in Nise, we’re supposed to consider whether Koyomi is really in the right for protecting these people. That’s kind of nonsensical though, we already know he’s right, and in any case Tadatsuru isn’t particularly invested in morality in the same way Koyomi is.

He has, we’re told, no ‘ideology’, but rather ‘enmity’ and an ‘aesthetic sense’, an appreciation for the beauty of undead abominations that leads to him working in a related trade, much like how an artist might work as a collector or curator. Who exactly he holds ‘enmity’ towards, then, is left rather vague, but to imagine it for a second, we might talk about someone like Koyomi, who’s at once both dead and alive. Who’s almost in the opposite trade to Tadatsuru, with how often we see him humanizing (‘twisting’, as Ougi puts it) immortal oddities.

His issue with Koyomi isn’t moralistic, but it could very well be aesthetic, a complaint about how he ruined a vampire by turning her into a little girl, ruined a ghost by making her stick around past her time, ruined a phoenix by letting her believe she was his sister, and maybe even ruined a doll by making her want to be an actual person instead of just a facsimile of one.

If this is his role, he doesn’t embrace it. He lets himself be killed, expressing regret for the changes that have already occurred in Yotsugi rather than trying to keep her the same.

He already lost the fight over her a while ago, it seems.

Kagenui Yozoru is almost as confusing, a character who finally starts to get fleshed out in this book only to invite further questions as to her history and the history of all the specialists. She’s Yotsugi’s sister seemingly by Yotsugi’s choice rather than hers, and it’s that choice which drove a wedge between her and Tadatsuru. We’re told that the difference between them is his focus on the immortal dead, (because he appreciates them aesthetically) while her focus is on the immortal living (because she wants to kill them).

It’s a little difficult to say which ones are which. Tsukihi, at least, is clearly in the alive category, and I’d argue Shinobu and Koyomi are too, but Yotsugi seems more on the side of the dead, which is presumably why Tadatsuru wanted her. On the other hand, if her human-like nature makes her a living oddity, then Kagenui’s conflicted feelings about it become more clear.

If she’s a living immortal, then, much like Tsukihi, it would become part of Kagenui’s justice to destroy her. This might be the ‘lesson ten years in the making’ that she learns in Nisemonogatari, when Koyomi argues to her that a sister who isn’t related to you by birth is still a perfectly valid sister.

We’ve seen a few takes on the role of a specialist now, and they all seem to come back to balancing the books in some way, returning things to their ‘right and proper’ state, even if they differ in interpretation of what that is. Kagenui’s attempts to resolve the contradiction of Tsukihi’s existence by force are mirrored here in her attitude towards Koyomi. You can’t be a human and a vampire. If you keep swapping back and forth I’ll just kill you.

For all that this places her on the side of humanity, it also makes her a singularly inhuman character, at least from Koyomi’s perspective. She rarely varies her tone or expresses emotions, her most violent declarations given the same weight as her pleasantries. It’s reminiscent of how Tsubasa’s human persona is characterised, almost, with the aggressive normalcy, lack of strong preferences, failure to understand those weaker than her. ’The little things that make us human’, Koyomi thinks.

He’s also wrong. She shows sympathy for Koyomi a few times, he just dismisses the possibility out of hand. He only gets it when she finally finishes unravelling Tadatsuru’s paper cranes that she expresses a little closeness to the guy, sounding ‘protective’ of his practice of folding all the cranes by hand. ‘She’s human after all.’

If her role as a specialist is to be an uncompromising wall between Koyomi and inhuman oddities, she’s already failed. She failed in Nise, and she fails now when she encourages Yotsugi’s friendship with Koyomi instead of letting this book end with them splitting apart permanently.

Because that, of course, is the role that Yotsugi was supposed to be cast in, here. Koyomi himself cannot defeat Tadatsuru, because he cannot transform into a vampire. He’s human. Yotsugi, on the other hand, is an oddity. Killing humans isn’t unusual for her. It’s right and proper. What isn’t right and proper is her friendship with Koyomi, his treating her as someone he can treat to icecream instead of a convenient object for disposing of his enemies.

Is that really how it works, though? As Yotsugi points out, there’s nothing particularly ‘right and proper’ about being undead. Her whole existence is thoroughly unnatural. The contradiction of an oddity made in the shape of a human is that she must necessarily stand on both sides. Being able to treat her as a tool of murder would be convenient to Koyomi in one sense, but I think far more convenient for him is her ability to act like she isn’t one. To let him forget the inherent danger of oddities, because in his mind he’d much rather they just be little girls.

This is something he’s gone through before, with Shinobu and with Mayoi, and I suppose I’m starting to see why these three get grouped together so often. I mean, really he puts every girl he meets on a similar pedestal, but these three full-blooded oddities are unique in the amount of direct influence he’s capable of exerting on their nature.

Shinobu is of course the root of it all. Koyomi was punished severely for his initial misapprehension of Kiss-Shot as weak and harmless, but his resolution to the situation made her weak and harmless in reality. In a horrific violation of her agency, Koyomi forced Shinobu to conform to his image. The gravity with which he treats this, though, is precisely the issue - his perception of Shinobu as a victim, his victim, is what leads him to neglect her feelings and their relationship through most of Bakemonogatari. He thinks he has no right to ask anything of her.

We see a similar thing going on with Mayoi, in Kabukimonogatari, as he takes on the mission of ‘saving’ her by removing himself from her life, only questioning whether Mayoi herself prefers her current state at the very end.

There’s a part of Koyomi that wants to see Yotsugi as human, that finds it more convenient, but I think there’s another part that views himself as self-indulgent. That wants to enforce a harsher line between humans and oddities. Not because he despises oddities, but precisely because he finds them too convenient. He doesn’t think he deserves to be able to get along so well with them, deserves to make use of them so easily.

As Ougi puts it, he prefers it when things feel a little bit bad. Subconsciously, it just makes more sense to him that way. The story Koyomi Araragi has been trying to tell, his Bakemonogatari, is one where he suffers for his successes and nothing comes without a price. Where he gets his guts ripped out over and over again in a kind of ritual purification of his sins. One where nobody can help him and nobody can save anyone else, only themselves.

It’s a bit of a breath of fresh air to realise he’s mostly gotten over it, by this point.

He still feels on a subconscious level that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with all this, that he’s in violation of natural law, that with all his activities lately he’s selfishly exploited his relationship to Shinobu. You know, like some kind of. Undead creature. That drinks blood. Like yeah dude, of course you’re going to get too used to transforming into a vampire if you conceptualise both vampires and yourself, in the act of transforming into one as fundamentally self-serving entities! Oddities are what you make of them!

Nonetheless, he acknowledges Kagenui when she says all of that is just self-satisfaction. He only thinks this way for his own convenience, to put the universe in a kind of order where its repeated assaults on him make logical sense.

Ougi ends up being the one that embodies the universe’s viewpoint, congratulating him on his character development. Haven’t all his failures been learning opportunities? All of his suffering heading towards some noble goal? Now, he has once again been blessed by failure & an advanced warning to get his shit together in the form of his reflection not showing up in the mirror. The message is clear. Stop relying on Shinobu. Don’t be friends with Yotsugi. Oddities will ever betray you. They might be convenient, they might appear when and because they’re called for, to fulfill human desires and meet human expectations, but that doesn’t mean they’ll help.

Koyomi of course says ‘I feel astonishingly unrepentant’ and ‘I would’ve done exactly the same thing’. Bad things happening to you are in fact bad, not good. We’ve been over this already. He starts out as thinking of Shinobu as a victim, but by the end of Bakemonogatari he’s accepted that she actually wants to help him, that accepting help doesn’t make him a bad person. Whether it’s Shinobu or Yotsugi or Mayoi, it’s been clear for a while now that whether they’re human or not has nothing to do with whether he considers them a friend.

I think perhaps I was a bit hasty to assume there’s some kind of dichotomy between humans and oddities going on here. That we have to slot Yotsugi into one or the other, that she’s only worth considering a person if she’s secretly a human.

Bakemonogatari ends with Koyomi reflecting that there is darkness in the world, and things live in that darkness. That darkness lives in him! It’s his shadow! He can’t ignore it, can’t forget it, and he can’t make it go away. That’s just how Shinobu lives, but that doesn’t mean he can’t live alongside her. It doesn’t mean Yotsugi can’t live alongside humans, even if she isn’t going to become one.

It’s a pluralistic view that I appreciate and maybe should have expected from a series marked by characters who consistently choose third paths between either abandoning their humanity or eliminating the inhuman entirely.

Perhaps you’ll allow me to end on some hair-based reflections (or lack thereof). I mentioned how Tsukihi growing out her hair may be evidence of character development on her part, but Koyomi not cutting his was evidence he’s still stuck in the past. The trope of a character development haircut is of course common throughout this series, with Hitagi, Tsubasa, Suruga and Nadeko all showing the changes they’ve undergone through their hairstyle. Karen and Tsukihi are deliberate subversions of this, as they’re shown cutting their hair for no particular reason at all, remaining largely static characters.

Koyomi is one of the few characters that doesn’t cut his hair over subsequent appearances, but I’m not so sure it’s evidence that he doesn’t change at all. The changes just build up so slowly we don’t really notice them, until we’re met with an absolute mop in Hanamonogatari’s peek at the future. It feels like an obvious rejection of the idea that anything about this arc was a wake-up call, the idea that something bad must happen to Koyomi, or to Tsukihi, to allow them to grow in the future.

As always, he makes his way through life kind of half-assedly. He himself, at least, never feels as though he’s gone through significant enough changes to become a different person. But in holding on so tightly to the past, the person that he is now becomes clearly evident.

#araragi koyomi #ononoki yotsugi #tsukimonogatari #monogatari

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dumbbiidiot · 27 days ago

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Babes I'm new to chess, why do we hate the Danny strong book?

So this my personal opinion; other people have historically loved the Danny Strong book! Thus far, I have not.

I do want to preface my opinion by saying that thus far, the Strong book has only been seen in workshops. I love Beetlejuice the musical; had I encountered the D.C. workshop first instead of the Broadway remount, I would not have believed it could be good. Long history of musicals absolutely sucking in workshops and then turning out okay on Broadway.

For me, I have hated the Strong book so far because of its its characterization choices, dated political jokes, efforts to make the show a political thriller, and its absolutely abhorrent and offensive depiction of mental illness. For ease, I refer to the 2018 Kennedy Center production as Kencen, and the 2022 concert as Choncert.

For starters, characterization in Chess has always been mutable. There is no such thing as OOC when it comes to Chess, only choices I like less than others. However, I do think the characterization choices in Strong Chess make the show weaker. Freddie ends up coming off as the most sympathetic character, which Should Not Be. Anatoly struggles with depression and paranoia in this book, which could be really interesting, except he's a boring dick. He has no charm; it's just all paranoia and depression. He tells us in the first act that his wife was spying on him, which turns out to be a lie, and he refuses to believe she loved him even as she is begging him because their children might get sent to the gulag. Florence describes him as sweet and kind and thoughtful, and this is not evident in this slightest. Florence is very girlboss emotionally mature which is...very not Florence or especially interesting. She is the caretaker for Freddie, and in Choncert, she does something that immediately tanks all sympathy for her.

She steals Freddie's psychiatric meds, causing him to spiral and lose the match. The show does not dig into this, nor bring it up again. It's just a baffling choice to give your supposed sympathetic female lead.

In addition, Florence/Anatoly falls completely flat in a new, unique way than previous Chesses. In Choncert, there is a whole scene about them having an affair in Rome a couple years before canon (while Anatoly was married and Florence was with Freddie) and they sing YOU AND I LIKE THIRTY MINUTES INTO ACT ONE??? INSANE??? YOU DO NOT DESERVE THAT SONG YET. This further tanks my liking of these characters, as they've both been carrying on behind their partners' backs for years. Here is a video of One Night In Rome.

https://www.tumblr.com/hellyrigs/703512439768121344/the-new-scene-in-chess-dec-12-2022-one-night?source=share

Because of these changes, Freddie comes across as the most sympathetic main character??? Somehow?? He's explicitly struggling with mental illness here, either schizophrenia/bipolar depending on whether it's Kencen/Choncert (we'll get to that.) He's introduced singing A Taste of Pity by himself while struggling from a panic attack, and Florence shows up and tells him "You have to take your pills, Freddie." His paranoia is actually objectively correct here, as the Soviets ARE using underhanded tactics to get him to lose, and Florence IS cheating on him with Anatoly. You should never, ever make Freddie justified and correct in Chess. When you've done that, something has gone wrong. I don't think it's a coincidence that when Kencen sparked a little surge of Chess content, it was disproportionately about Freddie. This was definitely because of Raul Esparza's charisma, but Ramin Karimloo has an even more rabid fanbase, and there was very little Anatoly content. He's also not as horribly misogynistic and abusive here as he is in other Chesses (you can even read it as Florence abusing him, which. What. What is happening.) Yet, despite the fact that he's softened, the other characters are even WORSE to him than usual. Florence is extremely aggressive and non-sympathetic about his mental health issues from the very start of the show (the pill stealing is just the icing on the cake) Florence straight up tells him in act two that "You're incapable of love. You can't even love yourself," which is just. In a Chess where Freddie is properly an asshole, sure, say that! In THIS? It just all hits really bad.

I also haven't dug into how Svetlana's depiction makes Anatoly even worse. He says she was spying on him, accuses her of brainwashing his children to hate him, yet when we see her, the first thing she talks about is how much of a nightmare life for the past four years has been. Molokov threatens to lock her children in an orphanage and send her to die in a Siberian gulag if she fails to bring Anatoly home. She tries so hard--and all Anatoly does is call her a liar and say she never loved him. It makes him extremely unsympathetic.

I haven't even begun to dig into the dialogue yet. Dialogue in Chess has rarely been its strong point (in all my dealings with Florence, I never once made one good move) but it's rarely been boring. Tim Rice has a very distinctive awkward janky style to his dialogue that is kinda charming, even if it's not good. Richard Nelson, the Broadway libretto writer, is genuinely excellent at expressing character with dialogue. Chess pa Svenska, which had a new Swedish libretto written by Björn Ulvaeus, Lars Rudolfsson, and Jan Mark, has a scene so good it could fully stand alone as a ten minute play. Danny Strong's dialogue however...does not work for me. Here are a couple of actual lines from Strong. These were all painstakingly transcribed by me.

The Arbiter: Welcome to the the first -- and depending on how tonight goes -- last Cold War musical. On this very stage you will encounter chess grandmasters, CIA operatives, Thai prostitutes, and Ronald Reagan. Not necessarily in that order. At times our story may seem ludicrous. Sometimes it is. After all, this is a musical. But I should warn you some of this crazy shit actually happened.

"He was a child chess prodigy by the age of eleven. Which may or may not have lead to clinical narcissism and undiagnosed bipolar disorder."

Freddie: Where have you been? I need you. I love you, and I need you. Florence: Yeah, til you're feeling normal, now take your pills! Freddie: No!

Freddie: By superior training, I'm assuming that you're referring to fact that they're snatched from their families as little kids? Then trained like rats in a cage their entire childhood? The Communist system is as cruel to its chess players as it is to its people. Florence: Come on Freddie, let's go. Freddie: No, I'm fine, I'm fine. With Anatoly Sergievsky, the KGB is going to make him disappear just like Boris Ivanovich. A grandmaster vanishes off the face of the planet, and you don't even care about it because you're too busy bashing me! (Music stops) Freddie: Sporting? Are the Communists sporting? And you call me crazy! Well fuck you! Fuck you all, big and small.

Freddie: I don't blame my father for leaving, but I still hate him for it. Anatoly: He doesn't deserve Florence, she's too good for him. Freddie: I really do love her, I just don't know how to show it. Anatoly: I wish I could feel warmth. I wish I could feel anything at all. Freddie: I'd give it all to just not have my blood race all the time, to not think the walls are being bugged, to not think the KGB is trying to blow up my plane, I can't trust anybody. Anatoly: I've been a prisoner of chess all my life. I never had a childhood. I don't want to go home because I have no home. I have no identity. Freddie: I'm not evil, she [???] I'm not a human being. Anatoly: I can't beat him, he's too good. Freddie: He can't beat me, I'm too good. Molokov: Yes Anatoly, play with his mind. Freddie: Don't fall for his cheap mindgames. Florence: Don't fall for it Freddie, he's desperate Walter: Cue the light buzzing. Freddie: Ignore the light buzzing. Anatoly: I dream of home and freedom. I dream of defecting, but I'm too much of a coward to defect. Freddie: I was the US champion at age eleven. Probably should have locked up my chessboard. I hate chess. I hate life scratching me. I wanna die. Anatoly: I wanna die. I don't know my children nor my wife, I never have, just as my parents knew me. Walter: Louder! Freddie: Buzzing. Florence: Damn it! Molokov: He made a mistake, it's working Anatoly. Walter: Louder!

Florence: I don't know, baby, I have a bad feeling about this interview. You should pull out. Anatoly: If I don't do it, it will look like I'm afraid of him. Florence: He's gonna come after you. He still wants to be in the game, even if he's not playing you, he still wants to play you. Anatoly: We both know why he's here. He wants to get you back. Florence: The last thing in the world I want is Freddie Trumper. You don't have do this interview to prove anything to me. Anatoly: I have to do this interview to prove to the world that I'm not here by a forfeit. Florence: Oh God, it's happening again! Anatoly: What is? Florence, continuing to make Choices: My life is being destroyed by chess, why can't I love a banker or a gardener or anybody else. Anatoly: You're all I want. I promise. Anddddd the championship Florence: Of course.

I just find this dialogue to be very bland, boring, and at times like a bootleg Joss Whedon. It's all kinda like this--too jokey and cynical and not genuine. I find it very jarring. Whatever Chess has been throughout its history, it has always been genuine. I feel like all these lines are written for the most immediate reaction, for the punchline, as opposed to building something true and beautiful.

Let's compare two similar sections of dialogue, one from Danny Strong, one from Richard Nelson.

Walter: It's not what I want, it's what I have to give. A video! I think you'll enjoy. Freddie: Unless it's lesbian porn, I'm not interested. vs Reporter: What a beautiful suite! What do you think of Budapest so far, Mr. Trumper? Freddie: Anyone with legs like that can call me Freddie. (She uncrosses her legs.) That’s a joke, okay? (He gets up.) Jesus Christ, you been here how long? A couple of days! And already you’ve lost your sense of humor. See what Communism does to you?

One of these is a punchline. It's a quick quip that doesn't really tell you anything more about the character. It doesn't come up again. Freddie harassing the reporter tells us a lot about him. He wants her to like him, he wants praise, he wants to be puffed up. He wants her to laugh at his jokes, and he wants to be told he's funny. He wants proof that he can get a woman after Florence walked out on him. Meanwhile, I don't think the lesbian porn moment tells us anything other than that Freddie watches lesbian porn. A lot of the moments in the show are like this. Quips are not inherently bad--but the whole show is mostly made out of quips.

I also really really really hate how this show handles politics and political humor. The 2022 Choncert leaned really hard on (now dated) political humor mostly from The Arbiter, including jokes about Freddie's last name. It had a big imbalance of jokes over drama, and they again, never felt genuine.

This show is also just extremely extremely MURICA in how it handles the Soviet Union, far more than the actual original American production literally written during the Cold War. The Soviet Union in this production is a CARTOON--Anatoly is frequently threatened or worried about being killed if he loses at chess. The Russian chess champion before him, Boris Ivanovich, is heavily implied to have been killed for losing to Trumper. Strong. Buddy. You can look up what happened to the famous 1980s Russian chess players. Most of them are still alive in Russia! Even the ones who defected didn't get disappeared! They didn't get sent to the Chess Player Vat!

The stakes also just become RIDICULOUS in this version. We begin with chess players getting murdered for being bad at chess, and we end with RUSSIA MOBILIZING THEIR MILITARY BECAUSE ANATOLY WINS THE CHAMPIONSHIP. In this universe, the outcomes of SALT II and the 1983 nuclear weapon crisis are explicitly impacted by fucking chess!! SALT II falls apart because Anatoly defects!!! It's so stupid!!!! It ends up making it so that the Soviet Union is willing to nuke the world because they lost at chess. A large part of the second act involves the US doing training exercises that the USSR see as a threat, so they demand Anatoly lose at chess, or else they mobilize. It is so stupid!!!! Just such bad history!!!

The timeline and characters of the show are also negatively impacted by the increased focus on politics! We now have a four year time gap over intermission, from 1979 to 1983, and it sure doesn't feel like it with the characters. It's jarring because with the emotional state of the characters, it feels like it's been a couple months, not four years. And a couple months can work in Chess! But not if it's really four years, and we haven't put in the work to understand how the characters would necessarily change because of it. Molokov is now really high up in the KGB, and he's just a cartoon. Walter comes across as a better person because he is the one in the Waltokov relationship going "holy shit let's not blow up the world because of chess." The dynamic of the KGB and CIA being equally bad is utterly lost. Politics take focus over people in this Chess, and not for the better in the slightest.

Especially because Florence gets her dad back??? It's so so so jarring because it's a really out of place happy ending, and her father was not a focus for this Florence. Long Beach Chess made Florence getting her dad back work, but that was with very specific choices. This Chess has not made those choices. We also just do not have any emotional attachment to her father, so this big happy ending just falls utterly flat.

Now we get to the part of the show that makes me actually angry. The depiction of mental illness with Freddie Trumper. Everything else, I do not like, but it just makes me roll my eyes. The mental illness stuff makes me blindingly angry. By giving Freddie a diagnosed, specific illness, now it comes across like his asshole behavior is exclusively because of that illness, that Florence is right to leave her mentally ill partner who can barely function without her. He loses the first match because of sensory issues (he can't focus with the lights buzzing.) His medication is treated as a magic trick that automatically fixes him (he takes his pills and instantly calms down.)

And again!!! Florence steals his pills!!! She takes his vital medication from him!!! Here is a video of that.

https://www.tumblr.com/hellyrigs/703555453692624896/another-bad-moment-from-chess-dec-12-2022-no?source=share

Also the two productions thus far have alternatively described him as bipolar or schizophrenic, and they write him the exact same with both, so they're just flat up conflating two different mental illnesses without any care.

Danny Strong won an Emmy for Dopesick; listening to his Chess, it's hard to believe he knows how drugs work.

There are a few things I like in Strong Chess. Opening with US vs USSR is a striking choice, certainly better than starting with Story of Chess. Freddie hitting Florence with "Do you wanna fuck him?" right before Budapest is Rising is effective. Florence risking getting deported if she doesn't keep Freddie in line has the potential to be compelling.

However, I just hate it. I don't like it. I wish it wasn't the book for the revival. Again, they could fix it, it could be better. But here are my reservations as of now. I also worry that this will become the New Fandom Chess, or that this version could replace previous productions in licensing. I doubt those things would happen, but I still fear them.

But fundamentally, we'll just have to see what happens!

#Chess #Chess the musical

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