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marshmallowprotection · 3 years

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WARNING! VERY LONG! AND ALSO TALKS ABOUT ABUSE AND MANIPULATION AND ALSO MENTIONS OF ALCOHOL.

Please don't read if that triggers you!

ALSO MAJOR AND I MEAN MAJOR SPOILERS FOR DRAKENGARD 3 AND POSSIBLY EVILLIOUS CHRONICLES TOO. — Submission

It has been like a millennium since I have sent you any sort of things about a character (or in this case, characterS) but as I recently revised the story of this very fucked up pair of twins, I decided to show them to you. They are specifically characters in an RP of mine with my friend Jade which is a crossover between Evillious Chronicles and Drakengard 3.

Here's a bit of context:

The Intoners are beings that can use the power of song, but their true purpose is to destroy the world. The original Intoner was Zero, who became an Intoner after the Flower, some sort of being that the Gods created to destroy the world, took root inside of her corpse and effectively 'revived' her as an Intoner; also, Zero wasn't always called Zero, previously she was named Rose (which wasn't her birth name, as she has no birth name), but she changed her name to Zero after she became an Intoner (it's unknown why). After Zero tried to kill herself when she realized that she'd eventually be forced to destroy the world by the Flower, the Flower, sensing her hostility towards it, birthed five beings from her as sort of 'backups' in a sense to ensure it would succeed in destroying the world: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. These beings are all in some way like Zero, as they were created from fragments of her memories, personality, and resemble people from Zero's past; e.g. One resembles a rebel girl who Zero was tied up next to as she was left to die in town's square of some village as punishment for her crimes of murdering hundreds of people; Five resembles a nun who Zero had killed at some point before she became an Intoner; etc. The Flower did this on purpose to make Zero hesitate in killing them, which...on paper it would seem to be a good idea, but Zero's not the type to hesitate in killing anybody, unless it's someone she cares about (which, the only people she cares about are not even really 'people', their dragons), and she don't give two fucks about the other Intoners at all, so, yeah.

'HERS' is a acronym for 'Hereditary Evil Raiser Syndrome' and its a fictional disease in Evillious that when your infected you become compelled into doing violence, as the goal of anybody whose ends up with HERS is to destroy the world and everybody in it; well that's an oversimplified explanation of it.

The Climb One is a ship that the last Earthlings from the Second Period used to escape their dying planet.

The First Period was the very first world in Evillious, which heavily resembled our world; the Second Period was a virtual reality created by the people of the First Period which also heavily resembled our world. At some point the First Period died (it's implied that a nuclear war happened there which is why everybody there died) and thanks to Behemo the Earthlings on the Climb One were taken into reality and they found the ruined First Period planet and on its ruins was built the Third Period (which was a world of its own). Oh and the humans from the Second Period are referred to as Earthlings in order to differentiate them from First Period/Third Period humans as they were originally not even 'real'.

Sickle is a robot built by an Earthling named Luna Hazuki and eventually he becomes a god and takes the form of a bat who observes the people of the Third Period.

Medora is another OC of mine from my RP with Jade. Her story is a story for another time ^^'

Aurende is an original kingdom of mine, not a country that's canonly in EC.

Why are Lumina and Eliora Romanian? I dunno I found out Lumina means sunshine in Romanian and just went with it; it's an insignificant detail anyways that's not exactly very relevant to Lumina and Eliora's stories but is just there.

Alright the context dumping is done with ^^''''' go onto the Evillious Chronicles and Drakengard wikis, they can give you a lot more less simplified context for this stuff but I think I told you the bare minimum you need to understand whats going on? I hope I gave you enough context to understand ^^'

But anyways on with th character info and Lumina and Eliora's story!

Name: Lumina

Aliases: True God Twins (With Eliora)

Lumi (By Eliora)

Lumina Ardelean (Full Name)

Hypocritical Strawberry (By Sickle, Mockingly)

Age: 1,045+ (On 499 E.C.)

Looks 18

Height: 163 cm/5’4’’

Weight: 49 kgs/110 lbs

Cup Size: C

Bust/Waist/Hip: 84/59/85

Sex: Female

Gender: Female

Classification: Human (Till 529 B.T.)

Earthling (Till 528 B.T.)

God

Race: Romanian

Hair Color: Strawberry Blonde

Eye Color: Gold

Born: 546 B.T.

Died: Varies

Status: Varies

Sexuality: Bisexual/Demiromantic

Relatives: Unnamed Mother (Deceased; Died In Childbirth)

Unnamed Father (Deceased; Died of Alcohol Overdose)

Eliora Ardelean (Younger Twin Sister)

Flower (Creation)

Zero (Flower’s Host)

One (Creation Via Flower)

Two (Creation Via Flower)

Three (Creation Via Flower)

Four (Creation Via Flower)

Five (Creation Via Flower)

Medora Aurende (Prototype Intoner)

Occupation: Creator of The Flower And Intoners

Affiliations: None

Favorite Food: Chocolate-Strawberry Sundae

Loves: Eliora, Revenge, Inducing Suffering In Others, Chocolate, Sundaes, Sweets, Strawberries

Hates: Alcohol, Her Father, People Who Hurt Others, People Calling Out Her Hypocrisy, Faeries, Her Father’s Girlfriend, Five

Weapons: Magic

Background + Personality: Lumina is a prideful but vengeful girl, whose been irreversibly scarred by the events of her and her twin sister’s childhood. Her mother died giving birth to her and her sister, which caused her father to blame her and her sister for their mother’s death, giving him an excuse to constantly beat her and starve her and her sister. Lumina did her best to protect Eliora from their father, taking most of their father’s beatings. Due to their father being an alcoholic and his alcoholism only causing her and Eliora to be abused even more horribly and brutally whenever he was drunk, Lumina developed a hatred of alcohol, especially beer and wine, which her father drank often. Her father eventually got a girlfriend, who also often abused the two girls, and ironically, this girlfriend heavily resembled Five, the youngest Intoner sister, which caused Lumina and Eliora to often be uncomfortable whenever she is in Five’s presence later on.

Lumina one day discovered her mother’s diary and found that her father had in fact heavily abused her mother when she was alive, like he did to Lumina and Eliora, and that her mother had been a way for him to take out all his anger and pain, and her mother believed that that was ok, because this way she had a meaning, this way her ‘worthless’ life had a meaning. Lumina realized her father was not upset about her and Eliora’s mother’s death because he was in love with her mother, he was upset because he had lost his main coping mechanism to deal with all of his problems, and so had replaced her mother with her and Eliora. Lumina became enraged by this revelation and confronted her father about it, but only found herself battered to near death.

The next day, her father died of an alcohol overdose, and she and Eliora ran away and ended up on the streets. From there they were constantly beaten yet again, except not by their father, but by people they had never even met before.

Lumina continued doing her best to protect her sister from the abuse and often took care of her, leading to the two sisters becoming starkly different in their world view;

Eliora’s world view will be stated in her info, but nonetheless here is Lumina’s world view:

Lumina, sick and tired of all of the pain she went through because of the world, developed a hatred of the world and a desire to destroy it all and start again, as well as to punish humanity for being ‘sinful’ creatures, believing that starting from zero again was the only way to end the cycle of abuse. Ironically, Lumina found herself also enjoying watching other people suffer, as she believed that other people deserved it for being ‘cruel, sinful humans’, which made her no better than her abusers and only showed she was a hypocrite in what she believed, as she began actively inflicting harm upon others just like how she had been hurt.

Eventually, Lumina and Eliora by unknown means managed to sneak into the Second Period, where Lumina ended up unknowingly being infected by HERS, which only served to make her desire to destroy the world stronger; Eliora, however, remained uninfected. Lumina and Eliora then snuck onto the Climb One, where they would then end up in the chaos somehow reincarnated into Gods and trapped inside the Climb One with Levia and Behemo, who questioned who they were until Behemo recognized them as the two homeless girls he saw often wandering the streets. Lumina and Eliora would manage to escape the Climb One within a few years thanks to their bodies being intact, and they soon found that they had become gods, which gave Lumina an idea; they enact a plan to destroy the world. Despite Eliora’s hesitance, Eliora went through with it and so the two sisters began their experimentations which would eventually lead to the creation of the Flower and the concept of Intoners.

One of their prototype Intoners was Medora Aurende, a princess of the Kingdom of Aurende, who was later deemed a failure due to not being strong enough to destroy the world, and so the twins disposed of her, leaving her for dead in a forest in the Beelzenian Empire.

Eventually, the Flower was finally complete along with the concept of Intoners, and the twins enacted their plan to destroy the world. They went to the city of Alicegrad in the country of Holy Levianta and infected a human who had been left for dead in the city square named ‘Rose’ with the Flower, and she was soon revived and turned into an Intoner. Rose changed her name to Zero soon after. Eliora began to become more and more hesitant and concerned with Lumina’s plan to destroy the world, but in response, Lumina slapped her and told her

“I’ve protected you for your entire life, you know. It’s time you repaid me a bit by helping me destroy the world that hurt me so much. And this will only serve to benefit you anyways; after all, this world hurt you so much too, despite my attempts at protecting you. Why wouldn’t you want to destroy it as well, Eli?”

Eliora afterward meekly nodded and never questioned Lumina again out of fear of what she’d do to her if she dared to question the plan again, even though Eliora could tell the Flower was slowly growing out of their control.

Lumina’s overall a very hateful, vengeful, hypocritical woman who at this point constantly contradicts herself, claiming that she wants to break the cycle of abuse whilst continuing to harm others. Yet deep in her heart, it seems she does genuinely still care for her sister, although it appears as time passes she slowly becomes more and more obsessed with hurting other people and punishing humanity for its sins as she gradually succumbs to her HERS instincts, and her care and empathy slowly wither away; even her love for her sister and feelings of kinship with Zero is slowly dissipating; until all that remains is her hatred of the world and humanity overall. Sickle mockingly calls her a ‘hypocritical strawberry’ due to her hypocrisy and strange obsession with strawberries.

Name: Eliora

Aliases: True God Twins (With Lumina)

Eli (By Lumina)

Eliora Ardelean (Full Name)

Pitiable Strawberry (By Sickle)

Age: 1,045+ (On 499 E.C.)

Looks 18

Height: 161 cm/5’3’’

Weight: 48 kgs/108 lbs

Cup Size: C

Bust/Waist/Hip: 83/58/84

Sex: Female

Gender: Female

Classification: Human (Till 529 B.T.)

Earthling (Till 528 B.T.)

God

Race: Romanian

Hair Color: Strawberry Blonde

Eye Color: Gold

Born: 546 B.T.

Died: Varies

Status: Varies

Sexuality: Bisexual/Demiromantic

Relatives: Unnamed Mother (Deceased; Died In Childbirth)

Unnamed Father (Deceased; Died of Alcohol Overdose)

Lumina Ardelean (Older Twin Sister)

Flower (Creation)

Zero (Flower’s Host)

One (Creation Via Flower)

Two (Creation Via Flower)

Three (Creation Via Flower)

Four (Creation Via Flower)

Five (Creation Via Flower)

Medora Aurende (Prototype Intoner)

Occupation: Creator of The Flower And Intoners

Affiliations: None

Favorite Food: Chocolate-Strawberry Sundae

Loves: Lumina (Or So She Claims), Dancing, Chocolate, Sundaes, Sweets, Baby Animals, Children, Dragons, Books, Reading, Singing, Zero, Strawberries

Hates: Seeing People Suffer, Her Father, Her Father’s Girlfriend, Five, The World (To A Much Lesser Degree Than Lumina), Alcohol

Weapons: Magic

Background + Personality: Most of Eliora and Lumina’s backstory was covered in Lumina’s info, so most of it will not be stated here except for any parts unique to Eliora.

Eliora is a meek, weak-willed girl who does as her sister tells her, secretly wishing to deviate from her sister’s will but being unable to as she is blinded by her ‘love’ for her sister and by what Lumina constantly tells her about their plan with the Flower and Intoners being “for the best”, that it’s “better for them to destroy the world here to stop humans from continuing to sin and hurt each other”, that “humanity is a sinful, malicious race that should be annihilated along with this cruel world they created”, even though Eliora knows deep inside that Lumina is merely manipulating her and forcing her to go along with what she wants.

Eliora’s world view is vastly different from her sister’s, as Eliora, who often could only watch as her sister was beaten and hurt constantly, found herself believing that revenge didn’t do much but perpetuate the cycle of abuse that she and Lumina suffered from, and so believed that the only way to end the cycle was to help abuse survivors not repeat the actions of their abusers. But Lumina heavily disagreed with her and forced Eliora, whether through physical harm or threats, to go along with Lumina’s plans and act the part of an ‘evil god who wants to destroy the world’.

Eliora also feels as if she’s indebted to Lumina for her protecting her from most of abuse of their childhood, and so feels obligated to help her even though she really believes that what Lumina’s doing is wrong.

Sickle pityingly calls Eliora a ‘pitiable strawberry’ due to her strange obsession with strawberries just like Lumina and because she’s a person who is very pitiable.

Whenever Eliora is able to, she often spends her time dancing, singing, or reading, loving all three activities immensely and secretly wishing she could have become a dancer or writer or singer or something of the sort rather than a mere instrument in her sister’s plans to destroy the world, and hopes that in some other life she could go follow her dreams rather than be forced to help her sister.

Also unlike her sister, Eliora is a very empathetic person, and despises killing and hurting others, although pretends as if she does enjoy such activities in order to please her sister.

So yeah, that's Lumina and Eliora's story. *me torturing my characters again and again goes brrrr-*

For reference here's their official designs (btw I probably should redo their arts considering their older as I made them back in April so yeah- oof) as well as sketch I made of them I may never finish but who knows:

Left girl is Lumina, right girl is Eliora ^

Oh, wow.

Okay. You’ve really edited and revised a lot of the story. The girls are looking really good, too. Angst can be a good device to help you channel your emotions in a healthy and constructive way. I think you’re building a really fun universe that just works for you and all of this design, planning and care takes a lot of time and effort. Never discount that work you put into it.

They are foils of each other.

They suffered but they handled it differently. That makes for an interesting arc for the both of them as they try to make sense of reality.

#submission #littleghostlyrose #not mm #ask #mod kait

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digitaldreams0801 · 4 years

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Alitia Character Info Dump

I feel like doing another one of these, so here’s more Alitia character stuff since I love talking about this cast of characters in particular:

- Tanith hates sitting still. She can’t do it since she feels unproductive when not doing anything. She gets really jittery when forced to stay in one place for a long time. To remedy this, Jin decided to buy her fidget toys, and he keeps them all over his office. Zylphia has a few in her office that managed to travel between Angelwood and Alitia. Tanith keeps them in specific places around her room and plays with them often. Her favorite is a spinning disk that she keeps perpetually moving with her air magic.

- Luce’s secondary weapon of choice is the bow. Lewith taught her how to fire a bow over break between her first and second semesters at Alitia, and Luce is getting better quickly. She has the natural talent for using weapons that Altina does without the manifestation and can pick up nearly any weapon and learn how to use it after a few weeks of proper training. She can also use daggers and gauntlets, though spears and axes are taking some extra time for her to master.

- Fromir is terrified of Minerva because of his rocky relationship with his father. His father was the previous head of Sierra, and he passed down the position of headmaster to his son. Fromir’s father was incredibly intense on him, constantly pressuring him to be perfect, and it took a physical and mental toll on Fromir over time. Minerva’s occasional anger issues remind Fromir of him, and he hates it when she grows snappy as a result.

- Minerva’s anger problems are the result of her wings being torn out. When her magical core was disturbed by the forceful removal of her wings, she became somewhat unstable, and her magic is somewhat volatile because of it. Minerva’s hair catching fire is the primary outward symptom of her wing loss, though she is far more snippy than she ever was before due to the forceful removal of her wings screwing with her magical flow.

- Minerva and Leviathan have a sister named Brynn. Minerva is the oldest (older than Brynn by two years and Leviathan by four) with Brynn falling in the center of her and Leviathan. Brynn is a passive aggressive and manipulative person, wrapping everything behind a seemingly perfect smile. Brynn and Minerva have never gotten along due to Brynn’s petty nature clashing with Minerva’s stubborn attitude. Leviathan tends to avoid Brynn, not having enough time for her toxicity.

- Leviathan used to attend Sierra. He entered the freshman year just after Minerva graduated, though he had to clash with Brynn a few times due to their being in school at the same time. Minerva entered a year early at Sacred Heart (she was sixteen) while Brynn entered early two years later at Alitia. Leviathan was the only one to enroll on the regular timeframe, and he saw Brynn often because of it.

- Brynn is a magical elitist, for lack of a better term. She strongly believes that wings belong on women while they shouldn’t be with men, a traditional belief on their planet of Pyre. Minerva was cut off from the family after the removal of her wings after years of rocky arguments with their parents. Leviathan asserted his position after being accepted into Sacred Heart and left of his own free will after creating his own wings with his shapeshifting magic and leaving.

- Dawn hates feeling better than everyone else. After years of being treated as superior to most people, she grew to resent those who placed her on a pedestal, believing that she should be treated as all others are. She also hates blatant manipulation after years of people wanting to get close to her for the political power she possesses.

- Octavia gained her radical beliefs regarding leath equality from a revolutionary leader named Briyana Frazier. After sneaking out of the palace, Octavia met Briyana by chance, and Briyana told her about the horrors leaths endure each day. Octavia immediately decided that she wanted to help and began planning for revolution when she was given the throne while still maintaining a facade of perfection that her grandfather would approve of.

- Many things about Magia society closely resemble Earth because of where Starlight and Moonlight came from. They were born on Earth before creating Magia as a place for all magical or misfit people. The calendar year is the same because of this, and the sun remains called the sun. The same applies to the moon.

- The birthdays of the Second Camaraderie members are as follows: Luce (June 19), Iris (December 13), Sophia (June 21), Sylvia (May 7), S.M. (October 21), Helena and Carys (November 11), and Tanith (December 16). All of these birthdates are known to be accurate save for Tanith. Instead, her birthday is the day she was adopted by Zylphia and Jin since the true date is unknown. In honesty, the day is in September, though nobody is aware of such.

- The Sealed Ones in the Starlight Camaraderie are all connected to given zodiac signs, a tradition for Sealed Ones. Dawn is Tauros, Cryon is Capricorn, Jin is Leo, Minerva is Scorpio, Fromir is Aquarius, Altina is Gemini, Zylphia is Virgo, and Caius is Sagittarius. This leaves Cancer, Pisces, Libra, and Aries unoccupied. They are the first generation to not have a Keeper of Moonlight due to Ragnor’s treachery in starting the War of Starlight causing him to be deemed as impure and unfit by the gods.

- Nebula has an uncle figure by the name of Omen. He and Karver have been friends for years since the two of them both attended Sierra the same year as the Starlight Camaraderie. While Omen isn’t related to Karver or Nebula, he is fiercely loyal to them both. They never associated with any members of the group since Fromir was a few years younger than them, instead keeping to themselves.

- While he was attending Sierra, Leviathan was nothing short of a terror. He constantly played pranks on Fromir’s father using his magic, gaining him something of a reputation as a troublemaker. However, there was never enough evidence to prove that Leviathan was behind it, so he never got in trouble for it. He graduated at the top of his class, though Fromir’s father was not happy about it in the slightest.

- Leviathan would later learn about Fromir’s father treating Fromir poorly after the two of them got together. Leviathan expresses often that he does not regret his pranks in the slightest, claiming that Fromir’s father fully deserved everything Leviathan gave him. Fromir laughs such off to hide his silent agreement.

- Leviathan grows somewhat close with Nebula after he and Fromir begin dating. Both of them love to prank Fromir, so they became fast friends when they realized the prank potential of shapeshifting and illusions. Fromir has not had a moment of peace since they began to tag team with their already impressive prank skills.

- Originally, Minerva had scholarships to both Alitia and Sacred Heart. She had already earned her Isolis as a dark mage by that point, but she still considered Alitia until she learned Brynn had plans of going there. As soon as she learned that, she jumped aboard the Sacred Heart train. This was for the best given that Brynn would grow up to harass her endlessly when they crossed paths at the Millennium Six.

- Dawn is very good at persuading others. She likes to pull out huge puppy eyes when she wants to get others to agree with her, and nobody is immune to it. The first time she tried those ideas on Cryon, he immediately caved despite his stubborn nature because he couldn’t stand to see her looking so sad, even if it was an act.

- In order to properly communicate with each other through language barriers, all mages and leaths are given a long-lasting translation spell at birth that allows them to understand each other in a common language. This prevents misunderstandings by giving everyone a common ground to start a relationship from.

- Fromir was unanimously decided as the precious child of the Starlight Camaraderie. He’s two years younger than the rest of the group, but they all would do anything for him. Even Minerva, who still intimidates him some, would light someone on fire if she thought it would keep him safe and happy.

- Cryon grew up on Amity with his single mother. She was a leath who escaped the grasp of Iago shortly after his birth, and she did everything for him. Cryon loved his mother dearly leading up to her death. She died a year before he set out to attend Ridgeview, and he vowed to press on for her sake. This was when he took up mercenary work, getting him noticed by a teacher of Ridgeview who offered him a scholarship.

- Michaela also attended classes the same year as Minerva, Cryon, and the rest of the Starlight Camaraderie. She tended to run with a different crowd and didn’t openly associate with them often, preferring to keep to herself due to her introverted nature.

I think that’s all I have in me for now. That was a lot of facts, after all. Anyways, stan Alitia, thank you very much.

#alitia #ocs #original characters

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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INTERVIEW: The Best Mecha Anime of 2020 is a Podcast

It begins with a heist. As the conniving nobles of Stel Kesh marshal their forces against the war machine of Stel Apostolos, the hapless scion of empire Clementine Kesh makes a cunning plan. With the help of prisoners under her control — a pirate, a soldier, a former revolutionary — she plots to infiltrate and commandeer the mobile battle fortress Fort Icebreaker. Not for the good of her Stel, as her brilliant and cruel mother expects. But for her own use, to seize control of a house she has always revered and resented. Miraculously, Clementine and her prisoners succeed, taking Icebreaker for themselves. But fog rolls over the hills, and with it come monsters: the Divine Motion, living holy machine of Apostolos, and its cursed army of immortals known as the Black Century. Can Clementine and her squad of chained misfits, skilled as they are on the field, overcome a swarm of undead giant robots?

You might think from this description that we’re talking about the new Gundam, or a fan-made scenario for the videogame BATTLETECH. But no, this is a podcast, the PARTIZAN season of long-running actual play podcast Friends at the Table. Each week, the cast work together to flesh out the story of a crumbling empire, the lives of its distant subjects inhabiting the planet Partizan, and how these subjects change as their world does. It is a no-holds-barred giant robot drama at a time when mecha anime is a rarity. A tale that synthesizes the melodrama and intense battles of Mobile Suit Gundam, the political debate of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and just a bit of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s shocking bio-religious imagery. There’s sadness, hilarity, amazing fights, and scene after show-stopping scene where members of the cast commit fully to their characters to make impossible choices.

Just like anime is a team effort, PARTIZAN is collaborative content. The guiding hand of game master and games critic Austin Walker, the music of composer and Fallen London contributor Jack de Quidt, Ali Acampora’s sharp editing, and their excellent roleplaying together with the talents of Sylvia Clare, Art Martinez-Tebbel, Janine Hawkins, Keith Carberry, and Andrew “Dre” Lee Swan. Every single one of these people commits to the world, their character, and whatever choice would be the most “interesting” for the story, rather than for power-gaming. Just like Yoshiyuki Tomino’s work on Gundam would be nothing without the input of industry luminaries like Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Kunio Okawara, and Ichiro Itano, PARTIZAN is made what it is through everyone’s input. That is, a fantastic story composed by folks at the top of their game worthy of comparison to any of its influences. The best mecha anime of the year is a podcast.

With this in mind, I reached out to the Friends at the Table crew after the end of its recent Millennium Break arc to better understand their creative process. Their game master, Austin Walker, was kind enough to answer my questions via e-mail, with a few other players pitching in, as well. The following questions and answers are lightly edited for clarity and content. They are as follows:

Which anime served as an influence when creating the world of PARTIZAN? How does its focus differ from COUNTER/Weight, Friends at the Table’s first season featuring mecha? Are there non-anime giant robot stories (like BATTLETECH) that served as an influence?

Austin: At first I thought that this would be a tough question: How do I even start to list things like this? Then I remembered that a full year ago now, when I first started planning the season, I started a brainstorming doc by listing a set of inspirations (which were of course added to over the course of pre-production). The anime on that list were Legend of Galactic Heroes, Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, 08th MS Team, the first season of Code Geass, and the good parts of ALDNOAH.ZERO. Harsh but fair, I think. [Ouch! You’ll make Slaine cry if you aren’t careful. -Adam]

The list also includes references to games, art, philosophy, and historical events, including The Imperial Radch Trilogy, A Memory Called Empire, Valkyria Chronicles, BATTLETECH, Armored Core, Legend of the Five Rings, Tie Fighter, Crusader Kings 2, the character art from Coup, Jakub Rozalski’s 1920+ series, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Pride and Prejudice, the 30 Years War, the Warring States Period(s), and the Westphalian Peace.

BATTLETECH skyrocketed up that list after the 2018 game came out and solidified so much of the vibe I wanted, especially with the incredible cinematics and music. I think I must’ve linked the game’s incredible intro to the cast of the show ten times.

youtube

There are also a ton of things that became touchstones once the whole crew was talking about the season, or which have become inspirations along the way. Evangelion obviously came back into the public consciousness last summer, so elements of that were on our minds in some ways. I’ve been rewatching Mobile Suit Gundam Wing thanks to The Great Gundam Project and that’s definitely squeezed its way into the season, too.

And you know, the times we’re living in. How could that not shape anything right now?

With the exception of Gundam, giant robots have fallen out of fashion in the anime industry over the past few years. This is due to a combination of factors: the rate at which skilled mechanical designers are retiring, the industry’s difficulty in training new animators in these skills, and the changing tastes of audiences. Do you believe that the genre’s fate is deserved, or that mecha shows deserve another shot in the spotlight?

Austin: I don’t think that any genre’s fate is “deserved,” in that I don’t think success or failure in a market is some objective mark of quality. Many things fail to find an audience for reasons that have nothing to do with the artfulness on display, the effort of the creators, or the relevance or depth of thematic content.

Likewise (and as you said in the question), the reason for success is multifaceted and overdetermined. There is not one reason why, for instance, isekai seems ascendant right now. (Or, I should say, a particular type of isekai). Nor does something being in or out of trend preclude the ability for breakout works or shows that will one day become influential or critical for the development of new material.

All of which is to say that despite being a big fan of the genre, I’m not too put out by it not being the center of anime fandom’s collective attention right now. The wheel turns, and I expect that mecha shows will have their time in the spotlight again in the future — and hell, that might be because of a show (or animation technique or technology) that I don’t even like!

There’s a phenomenon that former anime blogger ghostlighting referred to as “remembering love” —when anime pays homage to earlier works so as to honor the past. Some examples might include how the Renton Runs Away storyline in Eureka Seven subtly reworks the arc where Amuro runs from White Base in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, or how the flame dragons in Promare riff on animator Yoshinori Kanada’s love of dragon-shaped effects animation. PARTIZAN (as well as earlier seasons of Friends at the Table) argues that clinging to past glories is futile and that imagining a new future is not only important but necessary. But are there ways that PARTIZAN (and its Tomino-esque naming sense, begun in earlier seasons of the show) “remembers love” as well?

Austin: Ironically, I think you’ve identified the biggest way in which we “remember love.” How better to engage with the work of Tomino and Gundam than to argue that “imagining a new future is necessary”? What is at stake in Tomino’s Gundam is how we imagine better futures, what we are (and aren’t) willing to do to achieve them, and how possibility is restricted by systems of power.

The core of the (often complex and contradictory) story of the newtype is that we are born into the world with the capability to overcome difference and connect to each other through a power of collective understanding. This is then drilled out of us so severely that the only thing that can make it return is trauma, technology, training, or the luck of history. (This is why children are the center of so much of Gundam, and why despite its bad reputation, Victory Gundam is so essential in understanding his work writ large).

I think our work owes a lot to Tomino’s in that regard, and likewise, I think both Gundam and Friends at the Table (and countless other things) are in dialog with the concerns of politics and philosophy since the mid-century. How do we do better? How do we ensure society does not charge further into fascism? How does power function? These are big questions that undergird Gundam as much as Macross as much as Evangelion —though each offers different answers, for sure.

Beyond all of that, there are lots of other examples of “remembering love” in our show, too. The idea of the poetic cipher system that shows up in the Orzen arc is a nod to Arkady Martine’s novel A Memory Called Empire. There are unconscious or ad hoc references, think about all the Hideo Kojima stuff we’ve stumbled into throughout PARTIZAN. The improvisational nature of Actual Play podcasts lets the mind wander, and you end up reaching toward things you might not ever choose to reference if you were working in a more iterative medium.

According to Matt Alt in his recent book Pure Invention, several members of Mobile Suit Gundam's creative staff were veterans of Japan’s '60s student movement who filtered into the anime and manga industry. PARTIZAN has a clear political stance that speaks to the present in the same way that Gundam spoke to its own audience. Accepting that all media is inherently political, what opportunities do you believe giant robot stories grant to speak to the world we live in?

Austin: If I did a full list of the ways that giant robot stories could speak to our world, I’d need another hundred pages. “Here is a mechanical, humanoid body of incredible strength” is a potent, but malleable metaphor. Instead of re-litigating this, I’ll defer to this tweet of mine from last year which lays out just some of the questions that mecha stories bring the table:

Whether you're telling a hard sci-fi story about military mechs or the most cartoonish super robot tale, both will involve big mechanical chassis doing actions the human-scale characters aren't. And that raises all sorts of questions! Here are a handful: pic.twitter.com/mxaVhGOW4x

— austin walker (@austin_walker) February 24, 2019

How a show answers those questions — and trust me, I could seriously keep going all day on this — contribute to a show’s thematic and political meaning, and those answers differ wildly across the genre. Even just inside of Gundam, the answers are all over the place. Think about how different something like Mobile Suit GUNDAM Iron Blooded Orphans is compared to some other shows in the series. And I don’t even mean Mobile Fighter G Gundam, the endless outlier, I mean Mobile Suit Gundam Seed or MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 00 or even 08th MS Team.

Each new mech story is an opportunity to play with these ideas. I don’t think there’s a “right” answer for any of these questions, even if I have my preferences and tastes. Storytellers who want to play in this genre have a wide and varied palette of ideas to engage with. If there is any reason why I hope we see an uptick in mecha stories, it’s because I’m eager to see what a new generation of storytellers, artists, and animators could do with the genre.

Something I’ve appreciated about Friends at the Table since its first episode is how much every member of the cast brings to the table — not just in the character they play, but in their dedication to shaping the narrative. Many of the show’s best moments come about not because of a single person’s ideas but through the creative alchemy of many different talented people playing off one another. In your opinion, how does the collaborative nature of actual play influence the development of PARTIZAN? What unique challenges are present compared to more "singular" works such as manga or novels? (Or considering that manga artists often use assistants and novels are also the product of editors and other collaborators, is all art collaborative to some degree?)

Austin: In some ways, it’s very similar to working with co-writers on any other type of creative project. You bring your expertise and background and ideas to the table, they mesh in unique and interesting ways, and the final product represents a range of voices and perspectives.

But it’s also a unique medium, in a way that I think is even distinct from working with a direct writing collaborator or in a TV show’s writer’s room. Everyone has a great deal of autonomy over their characters, which immediately means that as a showrunner or a creative lead, my role isn’t about “controlling” the story. Even if I might have idea A in mind for their character, they might have idea B or C or X, who knows. Because the show is at its best when people are engaged with their characters, the best thing I can do in a situation like that is to play in the narrative spaces that the cast is interested in, even if it diverges from my own expectations about where the season’s plot or themes might be going.

Plus, both their and my ideas are also shaped by the dice! So many of the big, memorable Friends at the Table moments are arrived at via dice, using them either to determine an outcome or to help prompt us to set up certain stakes or consequences. The absolute best storytelling we do is when all of us let go just a little bit, meld with the game rules, and see what happens.

Janine: The way we collaborate doesn't feel like it's about surrendering control in the way a lot of people would believe it does? At least from a player POV, if we feel strongly about how a story should go, especially regarding our characters, that's still encouraged and we often work to try and make those things happen. But there's also an advantage in the fact that every player has their own background, their own influences, their own style of storytelling, that no single individual no matter how broad their own background could replicate. Someone else at the table can come up with ideas that just may have never occurred to me, and the end result will almost certainly be stronger for it.

Andrew: I would second Janine's answer, and say having everyone to build off of and collaborate with makes me feel more confident and competent in doing this. A big part of my personal anxiety is thoughts of "wait what if I'm doing a bad job??" and working in a group like this helps to combat that by 1) seeing other people immediately go "OOOOOOOOH" and get that positive feedback and 2) knowing that if I do have a half-baked or just not great idea that needs work or is better off getting binned, I also get that constructive feedback.

What is your favorite anime, personally? Would be glad to hear from any member of the crew who would feel comfortable answering.

Austin: All-around: Paranoia Agent. Mecha: Zeta Gundam.

Janine: Petshop of Horrors.

Jack: Gundam 0800 War in the Pocket.

Dre: Laid-Back Camp.

Ali: Revolutionary Girl Utena. [I agree with Ali. -Adam]

Sylvia: Ergo Proxy. (Two and a half hours pass.) Actually, I need to be honest my favorite anime is Death Note.

Keith: I thought most of the night about this and I've got to go with the English dub of Yu Yu Hakusho. It's got to be specifically the dub or something else would win, probably the 2011 Hunter x Hunter.

One more thing: if every member of the PARTIZAN season was entrusted with creating their own spin-off of PARTIZAN (in the vein of, say, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's Gundam: The Origin manga, or the weird Votoms spin-off Armored Fighter Mellowlink) — what would they come up with?

Austin: This is unfair because if I was desperate to do something, I’d figure out how to just do it, whether through a one-shot or a short fiction episode or something else. Because anything I say might be taken as a hint of what is to come. I’ll say that I’d love to fill in more of the blanks of how the setting of PARTIZAN got to be what it is: an anthology series telling even more stories about the long arc of the empire’s rise, told from the perspectives of ordinary people across space. This is already just The Road to PARTIZAN that we did, but more of it.

Janine: A story about Kesh housekeepers in the vein of Kaoru Mori's Emma: A Victorian Romance.

Jack: A story about a squad of Hyphan commandos who have been besieged in a square mile of forest.

Dre: A sports anime about another pilot who entered the Mech Sumo contest at the Kingdom game.

Sylvia: Alise Breka presents: Among Sharks. The story of a Nidean captain escaping from an Apostolos base with the help of the very soldier who shot him down.

Ali: A slice of life story of Apparatus Aperitif, the night mayor, learning the ropes of the job.

Art: I want a Lambic House adventure story. Going out and getting fancy beer ingredients from weird places.

Keith: Not to be self-serving but of course the anime I want is an Equiaxed pirate anime. But what I really want isn't an anime spinoff, it's a podcast spinoff. I want the concurrent Pod Save America podcast of, like, what a bunch of power serving dudes think about politics on PARTIZAN set during the events of the show.

That's it for now. In the meantime, do you listen to actual play podcasts? What is your favorite podcast? What is the best Gundam and why is it Turn A Gundam? Let us know in the comments!

Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't listening to podcasts, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at: @wendeego

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

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ftkrotec · 5 years

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Millennial Entitlement

Preface: I apologize that it has been so long since my last post. However, I want to make sure that my posts are well thought out and are important, at least to me. I could easily pump out one post per month or probably even post biweekly. However, I know that those posts will either consist of irrelevant nonsense or be rushed and underdeveloped, which would just add to the ignorant noise with which we are already overly saturated and contributing to the ignorance problem I highlighted in my first post. Assuming somebody actually reads these posts. For those who actually do (if you exist), thank you for your patience.

Given the buzz around the term "Millennial" and noise circulating about their hypersensitivity and entitlement, I wanted to provide some thoughts that would hopefully cut through the noise and help illuminate the realities of Millennials. Before I start, I will provide a disclaimer. Being born in the late 1980s, I am a Millennial. I do not take any particular pride or shame in claiming that title. It is a title that has been ascribed to my generation, and I accept that. Although being a member of this group certainly presents the potential for bias, it also provides me with a particular insight to provide my thoughts below.

As a scientist, I know that defining terms and base assumptions is vital to understanding analysis. So, I am starting with some definitions. Before talking of Millennials, one must, first, know what a Millennial is. When it comes to labeling generations, there is always a bit of fluidity when it comes to declaring specific start and end dates. However, the most common model of generational cohorts divides all currently living peoples into six generations, stemming back to the turn of the 20th century. These generations are typically characterized by the combined experiences common to the formative years of that generation. The oldest generation, often called the Greatest Generation, is those who came to age during the Great Depression. Then, there is the silent generation, who spent their formative years in the context of WWII. Growing up in the aftermath of WWII, we, then have the Baby Boomers, aptly named to the spike in birth rates following the War. The next three generations were assigned letter designations. Generation X's childhood was defined by the end of the traditional family dynamic, as divorce rates increased and the number of women in the workplace also increased. Next, there is Generation Y. Generation Y, aptly named the Millennial generation, had their childhood defined by the start of the new millennium, and the technological revolution that coincided with it. Finally, Generation Z are those born in the new millennium having their childhood defined by a post-9-11 America and the vast interconnectivity afforded to us by the prevalence if the internet and social media. With these definitions in mind, let me clarify something. This means that in 2019, contrary to some indications, Millennials are schoolchildren or teenagers. Rather, Millennials are, for the most part, adults in their 20's and early 30's.

Now that I have defined what a Millennial is, I can now focus on the "buzz." Over the past few years, the term "Millennial" has become synonymous with entitlement and hypersensitivity. Terms like “snowflake” and “the Me Me Me Generation,” complaints about their lack of work ethic, and other similar disparagements of Millennials are now commonplace among the conversations. So much so, that many people, my generation included, assume it to be true.

As a Millennial, one would assume that I would come to my generation’s defense and explicate on all the reasons those labels are untrue and unfounded. (Millennials are more inclusive, diverse, and educated). Perhaps, I would shift the blame on the issues being attributed to my generation to the problems created by previous generations. (Millennials reached adulthood in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession). Maybe, I would even explain that every generation had opinions and disparaging remarks about their successors. (Gen X’ers were lazy, directionless slackers; Baby Boomers were pampered, godless, drugged-out, long-haired hippies; the Silent Generation was rude and undisciplined; and the Greatest Generation was selfish and indulgent).

However, I have decided to not take that approach. Instead, much like my acceptance of the label of Millennial, I will admit that we, Millennials, are entitled and hypersensitive. Further, I assert below why my generation’s entitlement and hypersensitivity is both an appropriate and necessary response to our circumstances. My claim of appropriateness and necessity stems from three bases.

My first basis is based on Human nature. An often referenced theory in human developmental psychology is the hierarchy of needs. Without going into a lengthy lecture, this theory can be summarized such that human needs can be divided into 5 categories and are interconnected, in that motivation to pursue the “higher needs” is dependent on the satisfaction of “lower needs.” Admittedly, there are many criticisms of this theory, including and not limited to the lack of empirical evidence and the variance of how needs are categorized. This theory and model are still often used and relied upon in various areas of study and training. Following that lead, I assert that this model can be applied to human society and its development over time. Specific to the topic at hand, I see many of the generational differences in recent American history relate to the generations’ differing needs.

Unlike the previous generations, Millennials, for the most part, are not plagued with the “lower” need deficiencies, with which the previous generations struggled. That is, the Greatest Generation was not guaranteed base needs like food and shelter, due to the Great Depression. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, called into question the physical safety and security for the Silent Generation and the Boomers. With much of the threat of war behind them, the Gen X’ers were able to focus on the social needs, like connectedness and acceptance. With these lower needs satisfied, Millennials, following the hierarchy theory, should be motivated by the self-esteem needs, the psychological needs for respect, recognition, and the like. So, this entitlement and emotional neediness are simply the manifestation human needs for recognition and respect. So, if the hierarchy of needs is to be believed, then Millennials are simply following the natural progression of the satisfaction of needs.

The second basis refers to the fact that our entitlement and hypersensitivity were instilled in us as children. Please do not construe this as me blaming our parent’s generations for our problems. In fact, previous generations raising us Millennials with these expectations are precisely what they, as ancestors, are supposed to do. It is said that each generation works to make the world better for those who come after. That is precisely what they did. They grew up in a world with less safety, security, opportunity, etc. So, they instilled in us a desire for better things. How did they instill this? They did so in many ways. My generation was promised, for lack of a better term, that financial success and security would come to us by simply obtaining higher education. My generation was counseled to consider personal feelings when interacting with others. My generation was asked to focus on what makes us similar, instead of what makes us different. My generation was told to true to ourselves. My generation was if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. Being raised on these tenets, is it really surprising that, now as adults, we expect and are demanding things like a living wage, acceptance of the world's diverse cultures, respect for one's own life decisions and personal identities, and continuing to make the world better? What many see as hypersensitivity is merely hyperawareness of these cultural and personal issues. What is seen as entitlement is merely expecting the opportunities and togetherness for which previous generations fought and died. What some suggest as taking our freedoms for granted is actually the realization that, though things are better than they have been, there is still more to achieve.

Despite all the differences stated above, Millennials are not that different than the generation that came before. This brings me to my third and final basis. Since the turn of the 20th century, America has made many strides when it comes to social justice. In fact the past century and or so, we have seen women and racial minorities given the right to vote. We have seen affirmative action and desegregation assist in lessening the racial and gender disparities in opportunity. We have even seen the right to marry extend beyond racial and sexuality constraints. Whether championed by the Greatest Generation or most recently by Generation X, the past century or so has seen virtually every generation push social norms and expectations to create meaningful and, with the benefit of hindsight, deserving change to the sociopolitical landscape of America. Now, Millennials have taken up the fight, furthered by the generations before them, to demand the correction of certain social injustices and societal norms. What is being seen as hypersensitivity and entitlement is just the Millennials highlighted and demanding the changes that see are necessary for a better future. The same desire the led the Greatest Generation to strike and demand safe and fair working conditions. The same desire that led Baby Boomers to walk on Washington and demand the freedoms and rights of all people regardless of race or gender. Decades from now, I am certain that some of these causes being championed by Millennials now, will be looked at as the triumphs of social justice just as those successful causes championed by previous generations have been, therefore, justifying much if not all of this entitlement and hypersensitivity for which Millennials have been criticized.

So, Millennials are entitled and hypersensitive. As you can see, this entitlement and hypersensitivity are both natural and inevitable. Further, if the entitlement and hypersensitivity leads us to a better world in the future, then is that really a bad thing? I do not think so. At least, that is the way I see it.

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smartphone-science · 5 years

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The life of Galen is a unique opportunity to look at Roman history from the perspective of a prestigious doctor who became the most influential voice in medicine for a millennium.

People fight for a variety of reasons. We’re intrigued by it when we’re on the receiving end of the news and not of a nearby fist. It fuels our desire for daily drama. In Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, a beautiful tension blossoms within the family when the patriarch Fyodor and his son Dmitri fight over the affection of a lady named Grushenka. Conflict ensues. Sometimes people fight not to break hearts but inertia. When Melkor got bored of the song they were playing in the Silmarillion, he fought against the wishes of Elu Iluvatar and played a wicked out of key guitar solo that drastically altered the music of creation, paving the way for a bunch of small folk to save the world. We can survey the annals of literature all day to look for more examples, but we might never find samples as rich as those found in reality, and perhaps there’s no better place to look for conflicts than in one of the most martial cities in history, Rome.

Most interesting for a historian of ideas is when people fight over convictions, be it philosophical, economic, scientific, religious, political, and to the interest of this blog, medical. Rome had plenty of medical fights, some having great importance to the history of medicine. Reasons varied: people fought over correct interpretations of medical (usually Hippocratic) texts, the existence of a particular bone, the cleanest surgical stroke, the best possible cure for a certain disease, or whose teacher was the best. To drive home their points, the contestants used orations and blades, not swords, but their miniature cousins, scalpels. Soldiers and gladiators didn’t have a monopoly on combat in Rome, doctors had their fair share of battles as well.

No need to go to the battlefield for a bloodbath.

The medical culture of Rome was a microcosm of the empire: it was simultaneously brutal and beautiful, like Madame Guillotine dressed as Sailor Moon — beheading monarchs by moonlight, winning revolutions by daylight. Roman doctors lived in a highly-competitive society where success wasn’t simply the result of medical talent. Fixing Flavius’ fractured femur wasn’t gonna cut it: you had to tell others that you were the best at fixing broken thigh bones. An amazing ability to announce your achievements was a must. Mastery in the arts of oration, debate, and, sometimes, pugilism were important implements in a doctor’s medical kit. But aside from having the right tools, developing a committed character was also important. Arriviste physicians needed to be charismatic and convincing in speech, have sound philosophical minds, and possess tenacious spirits to survive and prosper. And in the pages of history, no other doctor in the Roman empire embodied all three than the Greek doctor from Pergamon, Galen.

For being so, Galen rightly deserves his own segment in this series. It is even important to do so. Partly because the life of Galen is very interesting as it is. But most important is its exemplary typification of Roman medical culture. Galen best exhibits the values of Greek intellect and Roman vitality, thus giving us the best possible example of what this partnership looked like when wed. That is to say, he was the living embodiment of the central idea developed in the previous essay, Roman Medicine Was Nurtured by Greek Doctors.

But we can get more from him than just the flavour of medicine in his time.

The life of Galen is an excellent study for the student of Roman history. It is an open window with a wide panoramic view of the empire, starting from the exotic luxuries of Asia minor, to the teeming markets of the Levant, to the busy ports of Egypt, and to the cobbled streets of Rome. To study the life of Galen is to illuminate Roman history from within and without, to make visible Rome’s complexities and confusions (why did the conspirators kill Julius Caesar in their bid to protect the republic when all it did was endanger it more?). Scenes, voices, faces, colours, scents, and diseases from the empire are again animated by the power of his words, for he was not only a tireless doctor, but he was also an incessant writer. Galen wielded a philosophical pen that was as sharp as his medical blade, able to cut through the thick epidermis of everyday Roman life. Every page of Galen’s texts is a dissection of the empire’s political underbelly; an investigation of the invisible social veins that channelled life and energy throughout the empire. Like a master surgeon to anxious juniors, Galen makes the initial incision to start the laparotomy, he then reaches out and hands us his tools: he tasks us to complete the investigation.

Before doctors make a diagnosis, they first need to analyse a patient’s case history. A case or medical history is basically a rundown of things that have happened to a patient that might have led to or caused the complaint. Last Tuesday’s accidental Lego up the rectum explains Friday’s severe gastrointestinal bleeding. So in order for us to really know what Galen was all about we first need to know his history, otherwise we might falsely identify our headaches as casual brain throbbing caused by intense knowledge acquisition.

The story starts in the city of Pergamon, in what was then a Roman colony found on the western lip of modern-day Turkey kissing the Aegean. Long before the Romans held the city’s reigns, Pergamon was home to its own homegrown kingdom. Its monarchs had the bright idea of turning the city into a centre of learning, so they built a large library. Indeed, it was large. It was also excellent. So large and excellent in fact that neighbouring kingdoms wanted one for themselves. In On Architecture, the Roman engineer Vitruvius says that the fifth instalment of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemy V Epiphanes, “actuated by zeal and great desire for the furtherance of learning” decided to make “a similar one for the same purpose at Alexandria, about the same period.” That later turned out to be the famous and much bigger Library of Alexandria, which was loved by both scholars and arsonists. Though Pergamon’s library was upstaged by its Egyptian counterpart, the city nonetheless maintained its prominence and prestige. Pergamon was “by far the most famous city in Asia” says Pliny the Elder in Natural History. This is the affluence and influence that Galen was born into.

The privilege of Pergamene upbringing didn’t stop there.

Subjugation under Roman command didn’t diminish the Hellenistic tastes of the Pergamene aristocracy and bureaucracy. They carefully cradled it like overprotective parents. Pergamenes were proud of their Greek lineage and tongue. Galen exclusively wrote in Greek despite making his fortune in the Roman empire. Not once did he quote any Latin passage or author. It’s tempting to accuse him of the good ole xenophobia, but proper historical context says that Galen was standing on reasonable ground because Greek was the intellectual language of the empire. In this regard, Pergamon wasn’t unique since widespread Hellenism was felt across the empire. But the privilege Pergamon bestowed upon young Galen wasn’t its uniqueness, but the collection of favourable circumstances that it had developed which altogether conspired to shape the destiny of Galen.

One favourite pastime of the Greeks was to glorify gods. And the Pergamenes, true to their Hellenistic heritage, loved worshipping. Among the gods that they chose to venerate was Asclepius, who, from earlier essays we’ve learned to be the Greek god of healing. They also built him a temple to house his attendants and the sick seeking to be cured by him. Though there is no direct evidence, leaving us to solely rely on speculation, we can suspect Asclepius as the divinity that designed Nicon’s dream.

And dreams were serious business in the ancient world.

Galen’s father, a Greek architect known to posterity by his Romanised name Aelius Nicon, supervised Galen’s education, starting when the boy was very young. When his son reached the age of 14, Nicon hired the best minds around to tutor young Galen in philosophy. His teachers came from various philosophical schools: of those present were a Stoic, a Platonist, a Peripatetic, and an Epicurean. This early introduction to the many branches of philosophy played a pivotal role in the formation of Galen’s unique mind. He would later write in On Anatomical Procedures that this exposure moulded in him an attitude of “never professing myself an adherent of any sect, making rigorous investigation of them with all diligence”.

One night, when Nicon was sleeping soundly, the god Asclepius paid him a visit. The sleep was deep, so there was no resistance on Nicon’s part. To thank him for the easy welcome, Asclepius made Nicon dream of his son: Galen will soon become a successful and popular doctor, if only you’d let him. Nicon woke up, flustered. In the ancient world, gods communicated with mortals through dreams. To discard dreams as rubbish was to deny the gods their will. Nicon wasted no time and told his son about it the following morning. Sweet dreams of expertise. Galen approved, himself now driven to become a medical expert. Who were they to disagree? Nicon was set to make his son a doctor, and he had all the finances to fund Galen’s education.

Galen didn’t choose the medical life, the medical life chose him.

His first foray into medicine happened under the tutelage of Satyrus, a student of the popular Roman doctor Quintus. It was also around this time when Galen first saw the devastating power of disease in wrecking human life, something that he would again, to an even greater extent, face when under the payroll of the Roman royalty. Between 146-148 CE, Galen beheld the spread of what he called “anthrax”. But instead of being deterred, Galen showed early signs of his rash and dauntless character: he faced the disease headlong and recorded everything that he observed. Risque, yes. But it was driven by a desire to know, risks notwithstanding. The outbreak was not a pretty sight, for “many patients were stripped of skin, and some also of the very flesh” (ibid). This was just the first of many unpleasant experiences Galen endured for the sake of knowledge.

A sudden segue to via tristitia happened in the life of Galen when his father died in 148 CE. Galen was just 19 years young and by all accounts had all the rights to sulk and abandon his father’s augury. But giving up was not his wont nor want. Throughout his life — if we’re to base his feelings on the mood of his texts — Galen rarely revealed his emotional state, consistently maintaining a calm and almost detached demeanour, even in the middle of severe situations (like when he first observed anthrax). This is not to say that he felt indifferent to his father’s death. On the contrary, he always held his father’s memory adoringly, peppering his texts here and there with praises for his father’s determined efforts to educate him (he only mentions his mother once in a scathing passage).

With his bag on one shoulder and his father’s dream on the other, Galen headed to Smyrna in 150 CE to start his education abroad. His first stop was the doorstep of the physician Pelops. From him Galen would learn a lot about making drugs (he would cite him as one of his primary sources). However, Galen felt Pelops was keeping away a lot from him, especially the notes and findings of Numisianus, Pelop’s teacher (who was also a student of Quintus, the mentor of Galen’s former teacher Satyrus). Pelops hid Numisianus’ documents from prying eyes, because, according to Galen (ibid), Pelops “preferred that certain theories, as yet unknown, should be attributed to him”. To put it simply, Galen accuses Pelops of plagiarising Numisianus’ works. Needless to say this relationship was in dire need of an immediate amputation.

So Galen removed himself from Smyrna to look for the lost master. He gives a detailed rundown of what happened thereafter (ibid): “Next, I was in Corinth on account of Numisianus, who was himself the most famous of the students of Quintus, and in Alexandria and some other places in which I learned that Numisianus . . . was living”. But despite the many steps taken, Galen never found Numisianus. Perhaps he had died without Galen knowing of it. A huge opportunity missed.

The loss of Numisianus presented chance gains for Galen as it allowed him to mingle with the other medical minds in Alexandria. In his time, Alexandria was the centre for anatomical studies, as it was one of the few (if not the only) cities in the ancient world where human dissection was not considered taboo, (sources say vivisection of criminals were also carried out). The Egyptian practice of mummification made the opening of cadavers a routine operation, devoid of the unnecessary spiritual baggage attached to it by other cultures. This openness to human anatomical explorations was probably what convinced the Greek anatomists Erasistratus and Herophilos to settle in the city and establish their famous anatomical school. So it is not surprising that it was in Alexandria where Galen learned to better his knowledge of anatomy and skills in surgery. “When I first returned from Alexandria”, writes Galen in Compounding Drugs by Kind, “I really and truly learned the treatment of those who were wounded in the tendons.”

When one door closes, don’t fret, look for open bodies instead.

Galen’s adamant search for the best medical education from the best teachers around, even at an early age, shows the strong and lasting influence Nicon had on him, and it is something that would guide Galen all throughout his life. This lifelong dedication to study has its roots planted in Greek intellectual culture, where men of learning devoted their whole lives to the study of philosophy and even natural history, as was the case with Aristotle. Through Nicon’s nurture, Galen was able to pick up the torch of Greek intellectual fire and lit the dark crevices of medical knowledge. What he revealed wasn’t always very nice though, and Galen was at times burned by his own fire as we shall see later.

The study of medicine necessitates actual practice to measure how well a student carries out the instructions and theories learned in the years of study. It was the same for Galen. After years of study in Alexandria, Galen went back home to Pergamon in 157 CE, probably in the hopes of practising there. Did he actively apply for medical positions or endorse himself to the public, there is no telling, for no evidence surfaces. But in 158 CE, Galen tells us of a remarkable development. He says (ibid) that the city’s archierus, or high priest, “decided to entrust to me alone the care of the gladiators, although I was still young as to stage of life.” What prompted the high priest to hire him, even Galen “does not know”. Perhaps he had already cultivated a reputation as a medical prodigy while he was still studying. Or maybe he had found success when he practised in Pergamon. Most likely both.

The high priest made the right choice. Almost immediately, Galen reversed the rather terrible outcomes of his predecessors. The doctors before Galen recorded an impressive sixty gladiator deaths under their care. In Galen’s five year tenure as doctor to the gladiators, he only had an underwhelming two deaths to his name. All the more impressive was the fact that Galen worked alone at a relatively young age for a doctor. “Although, at that time, I had not yet completed thirty years of my age”, recounts Galen in On the Examinations by which the Best Physicians are Recognised, he was already handed the responsibility of treating “all the wounded men who had fought duels in combat.” This was in stark contrast with the medical organisation before his arrival. He continues: “Before my time, two or three of the Elders were in charge.” The confidence and trust bestowed upon him by the authorities is highly indicative of how his skills were appreciated and admired by the Pergamene elite.

Gladiatorial games were mainly conducted to entertain. Fights were carefully choreographed to ensure that no real harm was done to the gladiators. They were what athletes are now, expensive to keep and beloved by the public. Accidents, however, were inevitable. So was grudge and the avante-garde attitude of not sticking to the script. With the arrival of Galen, the realm of entertainment was further stretched to include the operating table. He used his privileged position as a platform to publicly demonstrate surgical techniques learned and innovated by himself. One such demonstration was the case of a wounded “horseman” with a very long laceration “going very deep into the frontal and lower sections of the thigh” and a wide gape “one edge torn upward, the other pulled downwards toward the kneecap”. Galen “attempted to proceed from the so-called lateral joint, and bring together little by little the sundered parts of the muscle with stitches” (Compounding Drugs by Kind). The wound was closed without any complications and infections. Another successful operation added to his fast growing résumé. But like his combative patients, he also dealt with non-human subjects.

Public demonstrations of surgical and medical skills on animals were a common spectacle in the empire. Physicians readily carried out these performances to showcase their skills, dazzling the crowd with precision cuts, popped veins spraying blood in every direction, eviscerated innards, and erudite speech, just like a regular TED Talk but with an extra element of gore. A sanguine theatre where doctors enjoyed prominent roles and elaborate lines while colouring the town red. Who needs gladiators when you have doctors to satisfy your blood lust? It was admittedly lopsided against the animals, as they couldn’t fight back, but the crowd was still captivated. They either cheered or jeered. Despite the obvious disregard for the ethical promise of primum non nocere, Roman physicians were eager to conduct these exhibitions for these had the positive effect of hauling in curious students to study under their influence, thus increasing their sphere of influence and popularity. It also served as a powerful stage to silence your critics in public. This was the case when Galen, on his free time as a doctor to the gladiators, vivisected a monkey. Galen started by disembowelling the monkey, then challenged “the other physicians who were present” to safely return its viscera inside its body before the poor screaming creature lost its life. When none would dare take up the task, Galen, ever the showman, showed them how and easily succeeded in doing so, “making it clear to the intellectuals who were present that” whosoever had abilities like his “should be in charge of the wounded” (On the Examinations by which the Best Physicians are Recognised).

This was Galen’s favoured tactic in proving that he was right: aggressively prove that others were mistaken. Galen garnered a reputation for being stringent and arrogant, always believing himself to be the paramount authority in medicine, second only to Hippocrates. But who could blame him? He had a great education and was able to prove himself correct time and time again without anybody able to prove otherwise. With today’s sensibilities, this may display a lack of class, but Galen’s attitude was perfectly in sync with the class he belonged to. Arrogance, vigour, and a relentless drive for argumentation were currencies flaunted by the intellectual elites of his time. And he was unabashedly one of them.

Having spent the better of five years as the premiere physician in Pergamon, Galen then moved to the biggest ward of them all, the eternal city of Rome. There is no telling what prompted him to do so, and he also doesn’t tell us whether the high priests terminated his contract. Perhaps it was his lust for challenges that drove him to Rome. After all, it was in the notorious streets of Rome where Quintus, the teacher of his own mentor, Satyrus, plied his trade. He may have wanted to get a feel of what it was like to be a doctor in the most famous city in the ancient world. There were also no reasons to stay in Pergamon. All the signs pointed to Rome. His years of education and training had prepared him for the spotlight, and he had everything going well in his favour: he was wealthy, popular, intelligent, and so far, had been mostly lucky.

Galen made many brief stopovers along the way to stock his supplies of drug ingredients. Some of the materials he gathered have been clinically found to immediately raise modern eyebrows, like “black crustaceous rocks and rocks which, when exposed to fire, emit a meagre flame,” (On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs) which he collected in what is now Palestine. His search for medicament also exposed him to the working and living conditions of rural peasants, an experience that he was proud to recall in his books. Whether he was inside ore mines, sharing tables with farmers, having fortunate encounters — since it was an invitation to study human anatomy — with unfortunate carcasses on the road, or enduring long sea travels, Galen always recorded every bit of information that he accrued, increasing the riches of his mental medical treasury.

Finally, in his 32nd year of his life, Galen arrived on Rome in the spring of 162 CE.

Roman interest in the medical arts slowly snowballed after Julius Caesar set the motions for the republic’s collapse. Greek doctors, who were mostly slaves, comprised the majority of healthcare providers in Rome. Caesar, before being murdered and subsequently turned into a vegetarian option, was the first to inject some sense of healthcare professionalism in Rome with an important edict: Caesar granted Greek doctors Roman citizenship in 46 BCE. Not to be outdone by his adoptive father, Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, blessed doctors with certain tax exemptions and gave them special privileges. Vespasian further enhanced their station by allocating state money for the salary of doctors who were in the business of teaching future physicians. The state and public support enjoyed by doctors in Rome made the city an enticing venue for medical practice. By the time he arrived in Rome, Galen was just another name in the long list of doctors testing the limits of their luck. All roads lead to Rome, indeed.

However, while recent developments improved life prospects for doctors, the local populace lived in constant peril from diseases, infectious or otherwise, thanks to imperial priorities. Augustus and Agrippa may have turned brick to marble, but later emperors spent much of the empire’s energy and fortunes on wars abroad, largely neglecting the marble-lous grandeur of Augustan Rome. As the military was expensive to keep, funding for better public housing and sanitation measures were kept to a low. So people had to make do with what little the state provided them with. They were cramped in very tight horizontal and vertical spaces. Dense was the city, which made pathogens and vectors very happy. There were so many people and so little space that even proximal contact with neighbours was blurred. “One peculiarity of Rome, which is not shared by other cities”, writes Galen in On the Examinations by which the Best Physicians are Recognised, “is that not even neighbours, let alone other inhabitants, know how a patient has died, or by whom he has been treated. This is because the city is great and populous.” It was so crowded that deaths hardly mattered. Dead tenants were easily replaced by other warm bodies looking for homes.

This was the Rome Galen found himself in. It was definitely wealthy but hardly healthy.

To be new in this highly competitive medical environment was difficult. Lonely neophytes were set up against a drove of desperate elder doctors. Luckily for Galen, some Pergamenes preceded him in Rome, so he was not without welcome and support. A compatriot named Teuthras helped butter the way for Galen’s smooth entry into Rome’s medical throng. He was Galen’s first level of support that allowed Galen to build an initial following. Teuthras also served as a wellspring of good advice, which came in handy almost immediately.

Galen was aching to get his career up in running in Rome, so shortly after arriving, he found himself in the middle of a medical snafu. Treatments in Rome were usually a public event, as it was an outgrowth of the Greek practice of conducting lectures out in the open. One day when he was roaming the streets, Galen saw a gathering of people and heard that they were discussing phlebotomy (drawing blood). It was one of his favoured treatments so he joined the fray eager to know what others had to say about it. Conducting the discussion was a sect called (by Galen) the Erasistrateans, who boasted a record of avoiding phlebotomy in their repertoire. Upon hearing the offending group express their reluctance to bleed their patients, Galen immediately engaged them with his preferred mode of dissent: direct confrontation. With obvious disdain and intensity in volume, Galen politely reminded them that they were wrong for omitting phlebotomy from their services. But his was an unfamiliar voice in an unwelcoming environment, and he failed to convince the participants of his gospel. Unable to sway attending opinion to his side, Galen quickly got riled up. But Teuthras was with him and pulled him away from the crowd. Now in safe distance from the more established and well connected rogues, Teuthras offered Galen a sound advice: “You will never influence these men; they are too stupid to remember the patients who were killed by Erasistratus. For what other reason did the patients they are citing now come to die, if not that the remedy of phlebotomy was omitted” (On Venesection against the Erasistrateans at Rome).

Teuthras’ words had an immediate and profound effect, for Galen changed his rather tactless urgency into a well structured (and probably choreographed) demolition. When the second occasion for a showdown occurred, Galen produced a very articulate refutation of the Erasistratean method which won him the reinforced ire of his newfound enemies as well as some fresh followers.

But it would be a mistake to think of Galen as someone like today’s internet trolls. Galen didn’t poke his head around every discussion ready with ornate obloquy and belligerent burns. Despite his rashness, Galen only reserved his contempt for corrections. To right wrongs – the very essence of medicine. Being doctors meant being intellectually responsible for pointing out the medical errors of others, which also required a willingness to wear a bulls eye for the scorn of wrongdoers — Galen wore that to the best of his abilities, for he was duly recognised as the best. He expressed unwavering allegiance to accuracy, but hated the consequences that came with it. In fact, he disdained the benefits of having enemies as it gave him unwanted press and attention. Gossip and defamatory hearsay against him spread like pestilence, forcing his early exit from Rome: “I wanted to escape the slanderous tongues,” Galen writes in On My Own Books, adding that he also planned to refrain from “[saying] anything beyond what was necessary among the patients” and “teaching in public, as before, nor performing demonstrations.” Rome had a sickness unto itself that sucked the life out of its doctors, and not even the great medical mind of Galen could deal with it.

But perhaps it wasn’t a social ill that he ran away from. There is reason to believe that he was only trying to escape the wrath of a virulent disease that had set afoot in the far reaches of the empire. Galen recounts in On My Own Books, “When the great plague began, I immediately left the city and travelled to my homeland.”

Wait a minute, if he was such a good doctor then why did he run away from duty? That’s something salacious journalists might munch for dinner — saucy and trite yet containing no gram of truth. Historian Susan Mattern argues that Galen had no intention to distance himself from the plague, but his motivation to leave Rome was driven by a desire to confront it as per his responsibility as a doctor. She writes in The Prince of Medicine (an excellent biography of Galen from where many of the quotes here are taken from), “Galen fled not from the plague, but toward it —motivated, perhaps, by worry about his hometown and a desire to be there for his people.”

There is no telling what Galen’s true intentions were but he did leave Rome in 166 CE and went back to Pergamon. Retreat from Rome didn’t mean resignation from medicine. It was business as usual in Pergamon: Galen admitted patients, argued here and there, conducted anatomical experiments, and edited some of his books. Life was going well, so Galen thought, until a letter arrived in 168 CE. It was an imperial summon. Apparently, it wasn’t just slander and malice around his name that circulated in Rome, but news of his talents also went viral. The message was simple: the royal household wants you back in the capital. To this there was only one possible reply: compliance. Galen soon found himself taking the trip back to the place he dreaded.

All roads led to Rome, yet again.

In the second season of The Life of Galen in Rome, the drama continues and heats up as even more poisonous tongues lash their malice at Galen’s enviable position. Galen achieved what only a few doctors have and would ever reach: the coveted title of archiatros, physician to the emperor. Along with the honour came financial security as well as the insecurity of others. It was a trade off that was unavoidable, but was Galen now more capable and mature to deal with it.

His appointment came in a unique time in the empire when the first co-emperors sat on the throne of power. However, Lucius Verus died of the plague in 169 CE on his way back to Rome. At that time, Galen was still in Aquileia, tending the sick and infected Roman soldiers, which meant two things: first, Galen couldn’t supervise the treatment of Lucius Verus which could’ve saved the co-emperor’s life; and second, he only served the other co-emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Galen’s sophomore spell turned out to be a period of prolific productivity and mastery. Marcus Aurelius was often abroad fighting on the German front, leaving Galen with enough time to write more books and seek more enemies. His one great task as archiatros was the care of the sickly Commodus, son and heir of Marcus Aurelius. This proved to be a wise decision on the emperor’s part, but a generally frowned upon move by the Romans and later historians: Wise because when young Commodus suffered an intense fever, the best doctor Galen was there to the rescue; damned because Galen cured him and put him back to good health. A positive medical outcome seen by many as a net negative for the empire because Commodus turned out to be a fine emperor of bad taste and abandon.

When Marcus Aurelius did return to Rome in 176 CE, Galen was there to meet him. Included in the arriving imperial entourage were three other doctors who were presumably military medics or personal physicians. Galen met them too. And they were immediately set against each other in a battle of medical alacrity and wisdom.

The emperor brought back with him a medical complaint as a souvenir for all his troubles. He felt ill and convulsive, so he summoned the three doctors and Galen to check up on him. The first to do their examinations were the three, leaving Galen the unenviable task of being last. When it was Galen’s turn to inspect the pained emperor, he didn’t. In On Prognosis, Galen describes the event in full:

“Three doctors had already examined him at dawn and at the eighth hour; they had taken his pulse; and they agreed that this was apparently the opening of an attack of an illness. When I stood by in silence, the emperor looked at me and asked why, when the others had taken his pulse, I alone had not done so. I replied that since they had already done so twice and the peculiarities of his pulse were probably known to them through their experiences on their travels abroad with him, I expected that they could obtain a better diagnosis of his present condition than I. On hearing this, he commanded me to take his pulse. It seemed to me that his pulse, compared with the general norm for each age and constitution, was far from showing the onset of an attack of an illness, and so I said that there was no attack of fever, but his stomach was overloaded with the food he had taken, which had turned to phlegm before excretion, and that this was now quite clear.”

At this point, it’s safe to say that we’ve already established Galen’s superior dexterity and guile over his competitors, so it’s predictable what happened: he was right once again. The emperor ecstatically received his diagnosis, remembering that, indeed, his stomach was a bit upset from all the meals that he had taken. Galen’s accurate medical judgement instantly set him apart from the three doctors, leading the emperor to claim “we have one physician only”, which of course meant Galen.

From this story, two major medical themes arise to serve as important reminders to posterity on how to properly conduct medicine and science.

Opinions always vary: some are patently false without any hope of redemption, while others are true yet incomplete. The task of science is to collect the bits of scattered truth and use it to build structures of knowledge supported by verifiable reality. But to know which fragments are genuine, a rigorous process of sieving the grains of truth is and should always be observed. Nowadays we call this peer review. In medical consultation, this can also mean seeking second opinions. Aurelius asking Galen his opinion on the matter is evocative of this ideal design. To ask for a consensus regardless if ideas and opinions clash with each other, for what matters is that the best ideas from the best minds are canvassed. But what truly stands out in this story is something of the heroic: this episode would have waned in poignancy had Galen been unwilling to challenge his seniors. Reviewing and revising means to test ideas and concepts against extremely high standards — this requires a disposition of strength and fortitude able to withstand the might of authority. Did not Galen exhibit this early on when he challenged the Erasistrateans? And this aforementioned episode is just one of the many fracas where Galen stood up against authority to wave the banner of truth. Galen’s argumentative flair wasn’t indicative of a rebellious tendency nor vagrancy, it was all part of the Hippocratic spirit that Galen passionately embodied in his public and academic life. Thus, while it wasn’t unusual for Galen, his boldness to declare the truth against the more established elders in front of the emperor, in the biggest stage at that time, serves as an example of correct scientific virtue and consequently a crucial lesson to today’s doctors and medical students.

The second and most important tenor in Galen’s diagnosis of Marcus Aurelius was his high valuation of case histories. Galen’s reluctance to examine the emperor after the three doctors have done so exemplifies the Hippocratic demand to view health as the total outcome of a person’s unique history. That is to say, health concerns vary from one person to another as per their life experiences. Galen knew well that he was unfamiliar with the emperor’s day to day life as he was practising in Rome while the emperor was off fighting on foreign soil. He had no insight to the daily regimen of the emperor, leaving him with little to no information about the factors that led to Marcus Aurelius’ complaint. Now, this leaves us with the question: if Galen didn’t have the emperor’s case history as a reference to base his judgement, then how was he able to diagnose Marcus Aurelius correctly and save the emperor’s life? The brilliance of Galen shines through when he read the emperor’s pulse, only after being urged, and matched it with what he had observed from other people of the same age (the case histories of others), which led him to conclude correctly that there was nothing inherently wrong with the emperor. By comparing Marcus Aurelius’ pulse with that of others, Galen ensured that his judgement was informed by research – research that could only have been possible with the study of case histories. This strategy allowed him to prove that the methods of the three doctors were wrong, leading him to devise another stratagem: to look at the events that transpired before the complaint, that is to say, analysing Marcus Aurelius’ case history. The emperor had a lot to eat. His stomach was complaining. Galen said that was causing the pain. Marcus Aurelius agreed. Job done.

It may be tempting to abuse the character and name of Galen for intellectual anarchy. True, there is an element of romance in Galen’s struggles against the doctors of his time that is tempting to emulate, a delectable tale of the underdog succeeding against the odds by virtue of wit, wisdom, and intelligence. But to believe this genre is to remove Galen from the reality of Roman life. The whole truth is hard to know, since we can only dissect the texts left by Galen himself. But it is thanks to his extensive corpus that we are provided with an opportunity to travel back in time and have a closer look at the dynamics of Roman medical life, an institution that Galen dominated and developed so effectively that his importance and impact lasted for a millennium. The life of Galen is a genre of its own – a medical and philosophical odyssey along the august steps of Roman history. But in whatever mode you might read it in, what stands out are his fights, for Galen fought them to bring medicine to the forefront of intellectual life. And, despite all the drama that comes with it, that was and is a fight worth fighting for.

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