#[Japanese Magic] - Spectre x Blaze

[phantom-vs-agents]

"-- I do hope I'm not interrupting."

The doors to the court room are practically barged into by the feline-- a reminder to herself- and everyone who bore witness- that Blaze was royalty, and that her time and presence would be respected as such. She might be young, but in a courtroom, she would ensure her word were viewed as nothing but equal.

"Blaze. Princess of the Sol Dimension. I was summoned here." Its said with the same sternness, scroll drawn and in hand for all to ensure. A brief glance is given to the cell that Spectre was currently encaged in, and her brow does soften for a split second--

Sympathy wouldn't get her far in this place... She clears her throat, hands placed on her hips.

"... And... I would appreciate if I was caught up to speed on the matter at hand?"

[bvrningblazes]

@bvrningblazes

"Of course, Princess." The Magistrate gave a small, respecting bow of his head as he watched the cat emerge from the doors. As soon as she was a few feet away from the great doors separating the court from the hall, they slammed shut, the air rushing into the room from behind Blaze. "For our second witness to the accused's crime, we bring in one Princess Blaze the cat of the respected Sol Dimension." The Magistrate bows his heads to the seemingly empty benches of the court, before turning his attention to the purple cat once more. "As for a list of charges, I do believe it was listed on the scroll. However, such a list may have been shortened to make it. . . Digestible." Spectre stood nearby, having been teleported back into the cage used for when he is not at the podium. A black veil was put over his face- Courtesy of one of the Kuroko silently tending to things in the background. "But, as for the progress of the Trial, we had already gotten the despicable rogue's master to testify, and we have all learnt, first hand, his motive for deserting his clan and breaking the vow he took on the first day of training. Heinous crimes, and not ones to be taken lightly, dear Princess." The Magistrate was clearly being respectful due to her status... But there was a clear subtle animosity to his words. Anyone who wasn't swept up in his stirring speeches could clearly tell he had it out for the Rogue Ninja. "The Court will now hear the testimony from you, dear Princess, of how a commonfolk traitor ended in your presence; Something we as a clan should have prevented long before you should've even seen him. . . But I digress. By all means." With that, he leaned back in his bench, allowing Blaze to speak her piece.

[corvidcall]

I posted 18,037 times in 2022

That's 1,739 more posts than 2021!

401 posts created (2%)

17,636 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@sassytail

@omgitsseddie

@blazing-spectre

@starlit-mansion

I tagged 3,204 of my posts in 2022

#anime life - 339 posts

#hermitcraft - 176 posts

#iswm - 127 posts

#homestuck - 106 posts

#fnaf - 96 posts

#ofmd - 88 posts

#deltarune - 80 posts

#markcu - 75 posts

#disco elysium - 60 posts

#splatoon - 54 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#yucky but its fine for other people i guess. good in other things but gross as a primary condiment. yummy!!!! i love mushrooms. yucky and gi

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

i had a dream last night where i was in a high stakes game of magic the gathering, and even though im very bad at magic the gathering, i was extremely winning because WotC just came out with a new set of cards for like. Pride i guess? and they didnt want to seem homophobic so they were very OP.

anyway heres my best recreation of two of the gay mtg cards

(the lyrics on the lesbian card are from Dodie's song "She" - I don't remember exactly if those were the lyrics on the card but i DO remember looking at it and going "oh i guess they got Dodie involved in this? ok")

110 notes - Posted April 16, 2022

#4

i think it's really funny when people criticize something they don't like by calling it "soulless". saw someone say that about squishmallows, and said that instead of buying that soullless crap, you could spend the same amount of money buying a real stuffed animal

now, i don't care if they do or don't like squishmallows, but i am fascinated by the premise. squishmallows dont have souls, but other stuffed animals do? is toy story real? are beanie babies going to christian heaven?

319 notes - Posted September 19, 2022

#3

None Of You Know What Haiku Are

I'm going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is... really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.

If you ask most English-speaking people (or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it's a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That's certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since... idk elementary school when I learned that, I've learned that that's actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of... dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?

Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!

First of all, Japanese doesn't have syllables! There's a few different names for what phonetic units actually make up the language- In Japanese, they're called "On" (音), which translates to "sound", although English-language linguists often call it a "mora" (μ), which (quoting from Wikipedia here) "is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable." (x) "Oh" is one syllable, and also one mora, whereas "Oi" has one syllable, but two moras. "Ba" has one mora, "Baa" has two moras, etc. In English, we would say that a haiku is made up of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables in them, 17 syllables total. In Japanese, that would be 17 sounds.

For an example of the difference, the word "haiku", in English, has 2 syllables (hai-ku), but in Japanese, はいく has 3 sounds (ha-i-ku). "Christmas" has 2 syllables, but in Japanese, "クリスマス" (ku-ri-su-ma-su) is 5 sounds! that's a while line on its own! Sometimes the syllables are the same as the sounds ("sushi" is two syllables, and すし is two sounds), but sometimes they're very different.

In addition, words in Japanese are frequently longer than their English equivalents. For example, the word "cuckoo" in Japanese is "ほととぎす" (hototogisu).

Now, I'm sure you're all very impressed at how I can use an English to Japanese dictionary (thank you, my mother is proud), but what does any of this matter? So two languages are different. How does that impact our understanding of haiku?

Well, if you think about the fact that Japanese words are frequently longer than English words, AND that Japanese counts sounds and not syllables, you can see how, "based purely on a 17-syllable counting method, a poet writing in English could easily slip in enough words for two haiku in Japanese” (quote from Grit, Grace, and Gold: Haiku Celebrating the Sports of Summer by Kit Pancoast Nagamura). If you're writing a poem using 17 English syllables, you are writing significantly more content than is in an authentic Japanese haiku.

(Also not all Japanese haiku are 17 sounds at all. It's really more of a guideline.)

Focusing on the 5-7-5 form leads to ignoring other strategies/common conventions of haiku, which personally, I think are more interesting! Two of the big ones are kigo, a season word, and kireji, a cutting word.

Kigo are words/phrases/images associated with a particular season, like snow for winter, or cherry blossoms for spring. In Japan, they actually publish reference books of kigo called saijiki, which is basically like a dictionary or almanac of kigo, describing the meaning, providing a list of related words, and some haiku that use that kigo. Using a a particular kigo both grounds the haiku in a particular time, but also alludes to other haiku that have used the same one.

Kireji is a thing that doesn't easily translate to English, but it's almost like a spoken piece of punctuation, separating the haiku into two parts/images that resonate with and add depth to each other. Some examples of kireji would be "ya", "keri", and "kana." Here's kireji in action in one of the most famous haiku:

古池や　蛙飛び込む　水の音 (Furu ike ya　kawazu tobikomu　mizu no oto) (The old pond — A frog jumps in The sound of the water.)

You can see the kireji at the end of the first line- 古池や literally translates to "old pond ya". The "ya" doesn't have linguistic meaning, but it denotes the separation between the two focuses of the haiku. First, we are picturing a pond. It's old, mature. The water is still. And then there's a frog! It's spring and he's fresh and new to the world! He jumps into the pond and goes "splash"! Wowie! When I say "cutting word", instead of say, a knife cutting, I like to imagine a film cut. The camera shows the pond, and then it cuts to the frog who jumps in.

English doesn't really have a version of this, at least not one that's spoken, but in English language haiku, people will frequently use a dash or an ellipses to fill the same role.

Format aside, there are also some conventions of the actual content, too. They frequently focus on nature, and are generally use direct language without metaphor. They use concrete images without judgement or analysis, inviting the reader to step into their shoes and imagine how they'd feel in the situation. It's not about describing how you feel, so much as it's about describing what made you feel.

Now, let's put it all together, looking at a haiku written Yosa Buson around 1760 (translated by Harold G. Henderson)

The piercing chill I feel: my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom, under my heel

We've got our kigo with "the piercing chill." We read that, and we imagine it's probably winter. It's cold, and the kind of cold wind that cuts through you. There's our kireji- this translation uses a colon to differentiate our two images: the piercing chill, and the poet stepping on his dead wife's comb. There's no descriptions of what the poet is feeling, but you can imagine stepping into his shoes. You can imagine the pain he's experiencing in that moment on your own.

"But tumblr user corvidcall!" I hear you say, "All the examples you've used so far are Japanese haiku that have been translated! Are you implying that it's impossible for a good haiku to be written in English?" NO!!!!! I love English haiku! Here's a good example, which won first place in the 2000 Henderson haiku contest, sponsored by the Haiku Society of America:

meteor shower . . . a gentle wave wets our sandals

When you read this one, can you imagine being in the poet's place? Do you feel the surprise as the tide comes in? Do you feel the summer-ness of the moment? Haiku are about describing things with the senses, and how you take in the world around you. In a way, it's like the poet is only setting a scene, which you inhabit and fill with meaning based on your own experiences. You and I are imagining different beaches, different waves, different people that make up the "our" it mentioned.

"Do I HAVE to include all these things when I write haiku? If I include all these things, does that mean my haiku will be good?" I mean, I don't know. What colors make up a good painting? What scenes make up a good play? It's a creative medium, and nobody can really tell you you can't experiment with form. Certainly not me! But I think it's important to know what the conventions of the form are, so you can appreciate good examples of it, and so you can know what you're actually experimenting with. And I mean... I'm not the poetry cops. But if you're not interested in engaging with the actual conventions and limitations of the form, then why are you even using that form?

I'll leave you with one more English language haiku, which is probably my favorite haiku ever. It was written by Tom Bierovic, and won first place at the 2021 Haiku Society of America Haiku Awards

a year at most . . . we pretend to watch the hummingbirds

Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

Further reading:

Forms in English Haiku by Keiko Imaoka Haiku: A Whole Lot More Than 5-7-5 by Jack How to Write a Bad Haiku by KrisL Haiku Are Not a Joke: A Plea from a Poet Who Has Had It Up to Here by Sandra Simpson Haiku Checklist by Katherine Raine

964 notes - Posted October 17, 2022

#2

there's a post (possibly a genre of posts?) that i see frequently where OP is mad about self care posts that are like "it's okay if you didn't brush your teeth today uwu" and op is mad because they didn't brush their teeth for a long time and now they have huge dental bills and i take umbrage with their idea that it was tumblrs fault that they didnt brush their teeth and if only people had been less nice to them, they would have known to brush more

listen, i didn't brush my teeth for many years. feeling bad about it didnt make me brush more. knowing that people thought it was gross didn't make me brush more. being shamed and guilted about it didn't make me brush more.

what DID help was figuring out what was actually the barrier between me and doing it, and then removing those barriers, even if they felt silly and like they shouldn't be barriers at all

for example:

PROBLEM: my toothbrush is too big to fit in the cabinet and I can't leave it on the counter, so I have to keep it in my bedroom and remember to bring it with me to brush

SOLUTION: buy a new, smaller toothbrush. i know i already have a perfectly good one that's nicer than the new one i bought, but a cheap toothbrush i actually use is a million times more valuable than an expensive brush i dont

PROBLEM: i dont want to brush immediately after i wake up, it feels gross and makes me gag

SOLUTION: i set an alarm for a few hours after i wake up and do it then. the teeth dont know the difference!

PROBLEM: i hate mint and i hate cinnamon. most toothpastes are mint and the ones that aren't mint are cinnamon

SOLUTION: start buying kids toothpaste. this has the added bonus of i think it's fun and whimsical

Being mad at yourself for not brushing isn't going to help. You KNOW you should be brushing your teeth. People who don't brush their teeth aren't UNAWARE that their dental hygiene is important!!! Posts that say "if you didn't brush your teeth, you don't need to feel ashamed about it" aren't hurting people, because shame and blame don't help people form healthier habits, and frankly, it's weird to pin the consequences of your unhealthy habits on people for not shaming you more!!!

27,908 notes - Posted February 26, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

for the record. i dont post cringe to keep the twitter users at bay. i do not post cringe at all. if you cringe at my posts, thats on you, not me. i am simply having a good time on this webbed site and if that makes you cringe, i am sorry for whatever you see in me that shames you so.

29,443 notes - Posted November 8, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[phantom-vs-agents]

It doesn't take her long to find him again. She grabs Spectre, yanks him down to her height, and gives him a quick revenge peck on the face! ...Admittedly, it's over the mask-- she wouldn't take that off without permission, and there's no time to ask... But he's not getting away with that little stunt.

But she's very quick to scarper off again! She's skipping out on her royal work for this, and there's no time to waste. [bvrningblazes]

To say that Spectre's mind was moving a mile a second was an understatement- The rate at which synapses were firing off in utter panic and confusion would probably put the blue blur himself to shame. Even if there was no contact with his actual face, it was less the act and more what it meant. This was... Platonic, right? I mean, she was put up to it by others like he was. Right? Right. Definitely. I mean, he definitely only did it before because he was totally dared to by the others. That's the only reason. There are no others. Definitely. So, it's gotta be the same with her! Therefore, there's no romantic feelings in it. Spectre watches as she scampers off, relieved. He was glad she got that dare done and over with like he had, and that there was no strange feeling between the either of them. . . . He's still gonna hide in this bush, with his scales a dark red with light pink heart patterns across it.