#fakir's already become his own man

[mibexe]

I believe my favourite may be a bit obvious... Fakir, despite past regrettable experiences, is still easy to fluster, especially when you're someone so kind as Kuras. Looks certainly help too.

[dragonrajafanfiction]

Yamata-No-Orochi (Part 2) Princess Tutu

Princess Tutu is a must watch if you haven’t seen it. It’s a bit after the MCs time though so she wouldn’t have been able to see it.

The throbbing bass from the speakers sync with the flashing lights of the dance club at Takamagahara. The crowd is thriving today. You can see glimpses of the masses of people in the pulsing of light. They appear like brief colorful snapshots on the floor below your center platform table.

The Romanceable MC contest continued despite the tragic death of Chance. The official narrative was that Chance died bravely defending you from street hooligans, which is horribly ironic, because that was something that you specifically told him not to do. Now Club Takamagahara was holding another Princess Night with the theme of Knights in Shining Armor. Men walked around like living walls of muscle wearing silver helmets, silver studded leather straps and bronze colored leather subligacula.

It was the exact opposite of what Chance’s life was. He was no knight. He would have been the first to admit that. He was on the underbelly of the world as a gang member, the lowest of his kind as an unstable hybrid and even then he lowered himself further, running sex dungeons for money to maintain the balance between his humanity and his raging dragonblood. And he still smiled and he still dreamed of a Hokkaido winter wedding.

Your chest constricts involuntarily.

“Are you going to be alright? You don’t have to be here.” A voice murmurs in your ear. Diamond is the only contender next to you. As a cowboy style performer, he has no need to dress up like a knight. Cowboys, like handsome knights, are just another font of masculine charm and marital fidelity. They work hard out on the lonely trails, wrangling sheep and cattle but they are true and come home to you, their sweet prairie wife. As sheriffs, they run out the outlaws in the town. “

You look up at him, his eyes are a welcome distraction. “You don’t have to be here either.”

He huffs. “Well, you can’t hurt too bad, if you come up with a sweet comeback like that.”

“Why are you here? Armani and Calypso have backed out.” Rumor had gone around that Chance's killing was related to an out of control fan who had fallen in love with you and had used his yakuza ties to put out a hit job and kidnap you. The other suitors didn’t mind losing a little dignity if it meant living another day.

“I used to work at Bliss Hall, also known as the Paradisio. I knew shady stuff went down. And when the gang war came there, I looked down the barrel of five guns while they interrogated me and patted me down. They determined I wasn't involved and let me go. So… if I was going to die of gang violence I probably would have already.”

“So why are you here?” You reach for the glass of champagne in front of you. Even though you were underage, you were already accustomed to the taste of drink and the smell of tobacco. Your high level of dragonblood didn’t let you get drunk easily as the men found out on your first day as the Main Character on this show. Chu Zihang checked the records on that night, and you had drunk two full bottles of vodka before you even felt the slightest bit tipsy.

He reached for his own glass. “I'm still a competitor. And I'm curious how Chance won three star-hearts in a single night. Is giving up your life the way to your heart? It’s a high price to pay and a lonely existence for you.”

Your mind flashes back to Renata and Chance. “I can see why you're second in the ranking. You dress much flashier than Kazama. But you’re no less of a sharpshooter.”

He presses his hand to his chest and bows.

“I don't need riches or beauty. So if you offer me those things, I'm not attracted. When I first came to Japan,  I didn't care about anything.  I felt my life was over. I was just trying to wait until the end and I wanted my life to end. But every time I reached for the end, there was a man who kept telling me no. I should not try to end my life and, even if it looked like my life was over, I shouldn't just take that conclusion at face value. His final lesson was I shouldn't just accept the inevitable death of others. It took a few times to accept those three lessons, but it was what I needed.”

“What happened to that guy? He sounds like a real keeper.”

You huff. “He was very happily engaged when we met.”

Chances eyebrows lifted. “I bet.”

“But I never forgot what he taught me. Chance helped me to speak those words from my own heart and my own experience. It's one thing to learn a lesson. When you teach that lesson to others, then you know it's part of your life. To see him listen to me and put what I learned into action because he loved me? How could my heart not overflow? Chance didn’t just accept his fate. He didn't just give up his life for me. He fought for us to be together. He… he wanted to live. I needed that in a person.” You run your hands over the empty glass in your hands imagining his smooth childlike face, so peaceful in the rain. “How many people are there out there who can look fate in the eye and say… ‘How about no?’”

Diamond reaches over with a champagne bottle and refills. “Oh You need someone who can rewrite the script! Like in Princess Tutu.”

You blink. “I’m sorry, did you just say ‘Princess Tutu’?”

“Oh come on, don't tell me you've never heard of Princess Tutu. It's just the best anime ever!”

You’re speechless. It was like this suave handsome Ikemen had suddenly turned into Lu Mingfei. “No, please fill me in.”

“Okay, hear me out. Once there was a writer named Drosselmeyer, who had the power to make his stories come to life. He especially loved to write stories with tragic endings! But he died before he could finish his final tale, called The Prince and the Raven, leaving the two title characters locked in an eternal battle.”

“After many years, the Raven managed to break free into the real world, and the Prince pursued him. To seal away the Raven's evil, the Prince shattered his own heart with his sword, causing him to lose all his memories and emotions. Without his emotions, he is reborn as Mytho.”

“Drosselmeyer, now a ghost, decides the story must have an ending. He finds it in the form of a little duck, who has fallen in love with Mytho. He gives her a magic pendant that can transform her, first into an ordinary human girl, then into the graceful ballerina Princess Tutu, another character in the story. As Tutu, it's Duck's job to find all the scattered shards of Mytho's heart and return them to him.”

“What's more, Duck learns that part of Princess Tutu's story is that she can never confess her love to Mytho, or else she'll turn into a speck of light and vanish. However, it becomes clear that Mytho wants his heart restored, so despite interference, she persists. She finds a friend in Fakir, a man who is the son of Drosselmeyer who also has the ability to bring his stories to life.”

“After most of Mytho's heart is returned to him, the seal trapping the Raven begins to break. Finally able to feel love again, Mytho realizes he loves Rue, another character – not Duck. Duck also discovers her pendant is the final shard, meaning she must give up her life as a human to return it. She eventually finds the courage to do so, and becomes a humble duck again.”

“Mytho and the Raven battle once more. When the fight turns bleak, Mytho considers shattering his heart to seal the monster away again. Duck begins dancing to show him he must not give up. As she does, this guy named Fakir writes a story about how she never stops, no matter how many times the Raven's minions attack her. They make that story a reality! This gives Mytho hope, which gives Mytho the strength he needs to rescue Rue and defeat the Raven. Mytho asks Rue to be his princess and they return to his kingdom inside the story. Duck and Fakir continue their relationship, even though she's stuck in her duck form. With nothing left to do, Drosselmeyer departs in search of another story.”

“The point is, you're Duck and you need someone like Fakir who can defeat Drosselmeyer by rewriting the script!”

When thinking about a ghost behind the scenes writing a script, it was clear who the Drosselmeyer in your life was. Z had rescued you and taught you to fight so your life could continue even though you didn’t really understand why. You were just like a duck receiving the pendant. But Z also had plans for you. He'd also forbidden you from confessing her love to Ruri Kazama before you even had feelings for him, only for you to meet him and suddenly he’s a potential contender for your heart with a clear connection with your past?

Z had a script.  And falling in love with Ruri Kazama didn't fit. Why was your love interest so important? Who are you supposed to fall in love with? Caesar asked that in a roundabout way. Why did the person you fell in love with matter to him, if he wasn't your boyfriend?

Chance said that Izanami loved Izanagi on a whim, as a hobby, while she used him to help her live forever.  She loved him and turned him into a monster. She needed him, and consumed him.

Z appeared and kissed you after you entered the MC contest. “I want to get to you before those idiots.” He’d said.

He entered the competition only after you nearly gave a star heart to Ruri Kazama. “I know how the story ends.” He’d said. 

Pursuing Ruri Kazama or anyone else would defeat his script! Whatever script Z wrote required that you love no one but him. 

Your hands tighten on the wine glass and Diamond massages your back. It's not that you had no feelings for Z at all, but Z was acting like Izanami, hiding his true intentions while making overtures of affection.  There's only one way to be sure you weren't going to end up a duck or a monster at the end. Force a confession out of Z!

You look up at Diamond. “Thank you.” Your eyes are sparking with something like anger. You felt fierce and wild inside realizing that you’d been led along by this stranger, assuming that ‘keeping you alive’ was good enough of a good ending to your story. But Izanagi was ‘kept’ alive… as a sacrifice to the White King. Until you understood Z’s intention, there was no telling where he was leading you.

You stand up and lightly tap your glass. The host of the Takamagahara lowered the music and all faces turned to your center platform. “I would like to thank you for coming out tonight. I’ll let you get back to your dancing in a moment, but first I would like to award 3 star hearts to Diamond, for opening my eyes to the truth tonight.”

You spoke looking down on your audience like royalty. Standing in your sparkling silver cheongsam, you looked like royalty. Diamond’s eyes opened wide and he hastily swallowed his Champagne before he could choke on it. He had been kicking himself for speaking so foolishly to this woman. She’d fallen into a deep silence and he figured he’d just killed all his chances of a win. But she liked it!

“And I would like to announce the winner of the MC Romance contest. He knows who he is. He has a deep connection to my past, and I would like to explore that connection further. If you’re listening.”

You raise your eyes to the cameras that broadcast your face to hundreds of screens around Takamagahara. Spectators pushed each other to get a good view and the loud hall descended into a deep silence.

You didn’t remember the tune, but you would always remember the words and you speak them, closing your eyes and placing your hands on your heart. “All happiness may be a fleeting blossom in the shadow of the moon, but I am in that shadow waiting for you in a field of those flowers. Won’t you join me? Together we will dance in the depths of Yomi!”

The hairs rise on the necks of every patron of the Takamagahara. Eyebrows knitted in confusion, hushed puzzled whispers were uttered involuntarily. Your words sounded nothing like a love confession, more like a forbidden incantation written in secret by a practitioner of black magic!

The flashing lights suddenly go dark, every large display screen clicks off in a successive wave. You turn around in horror as those screens replace your face with the words “GAME OVER” in bright burning red text!

The words were on every screen in the room. Your eyes scan the room and immediately spot Caesar moving towards you on the left. You quickly descend from the platform and hurry to him. He covers you, sweeping over you with one arm. “Get downstairs. Now!” 

His eyes meet with someone else's, likely Chu Zihang’s. “Don’t take the elevators, he can probably control those. We’ll take the stairwell.” He said.

You enter the beige corridor of the stairwell. It’s also pitch black. Not even the emergency lights are on. The basement is only one flight down and you can see to the bottom. A lone shadowy figure staring up at you with furious red gold eyes. You leap back and try to pull Caesar out, back to the crowd. “No! Caesar! Run!”

Caesar’s eyes blaze gold and he levels the Desert Eagles in the direction where you’re fearfully looking, but then he lowers them. He didn't hear anything, or see anything.

“Don’t! Don’t hurt him!” You beg.

“Z’s here?”

You gasp. “Yes. He’s mad.”

“Then we can talk?”

Your eyes swivel to and fro from Caesar’s eyes to Z’s eyes which apparently only you can see. Caesar still held his Desert Eagles but there was no fear there. “Yes.”

“Alright… Z. You’re running Takamagahara. The MC love contest was your idea right? What are your plans for MC?” Caesar asks. “I get the feeling you don’t have her best interests at heart.”

Z chuckles from the bottom of the well. “This conversation will have to wait. I’m a bit busy with another client.”

You’re shaking so much you hold on to Caesar’s arm to just keep yourself upright. “He’s gone.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he’s busy with another client.”

The door opens, scaring you both. Chu blinks at both of you in the dark stairwell but then he looks at Caesar and holds his questions. “We’ve got a problem. The Uesugi girl and Lu Mingfei have run into trouble. The whole area around the Robuchon restaurant is blocked off and it’s complete chaos. We’ve got to find Lu Mingfei and make sure he’s alright.”

Caesar gathers his arm around you and together you leave the stairwell. “MC, come with us. I don't want you and that Uesugi girl to meet, but until I figure out what Z is… I don’t think you should be alone.”

[princesstutufandemonium]

Rapsblüte no Yoru (Princess Tutu epilogue skit) and my thoughts

Or: Why a bitch is still salty after 9 years

So, as previously mentioned on this blog, there was a skit presented at a Princess Tutu convention in 2004 by series creator Ikuko Itoh and chief director Junichi Sato called “Rapsblüte no Yoru.” It takes place about a year after the anime’s ending and serves to wrap up some loose ends about the characters and their feelings - particularly Ahiru and Mytho.

So I’ve talked about it before, but now more time has passed, so I thought I’d let the raging monster out of its slumber to REALLY address the epilogue and my own uncensored thoughts and feelings about it. Half of this ended up reading like a rant, really, but I just had to get it all out there. 

Here is the skit, as recited by Japanese blogger Goma and translated by LiveJournal user csakuras, along with my reactions and thoughts, which are indicated by the blockquotes.

"Quaack.." Ahiru seems to be swimming on the river during a night with a beautiful moon It's been a while since then, and every day I'm happy. It's fun talking with my bird friends, and Madam Pelican is a little noisy, but...it's fun. And besides......whenever I look up, Fakir is always there.

So Ahiru has returned to life as a bird and has settled in well. Good for her.

Ahiru: "I've come all the way to Gold Crown Academy....somehow I feel like dancing." Saying that, Ahiru climbs onto the bank and is surprised to find the whole surface covered with rape blossoms. Ahiru: "Gwak!!" Autor: "Oh? What's this?" It seems he stepped on Ahiru.. Ahiru: "Gwakgwak!!" Ahiru protests. Autor: "Oh it's you, Ahiru-kun...isn't Fakir with you?" Autor backs away as Ahiru tries to talk to him. Autor: "Sorry, but could you not get so close? I'll start sneezing from my bird allergies." (The mystery of his dislike of birds is solved.) Ahiru: "Charon-san and Raetsel-san had a child so Fakir went to the celebration."

The idea of this seems to negate all of Raetsel’s development, but okay then.

Autor: "I see....by the way, did you come to see the Night of Rapsblüte too?" Ahiru: "Rap..Rapsblüte?" Ahiru asks curiously. Ahiru: "Rapsblüte are rape blossoms, right?" Here, Autor goes Hnph! with his nose as if making fun of her. Autor: "The Night of Rapsblüte is when once every 50 years, all the rape blossoms bloom simultaneously on a night of the full moon. According to what I've researched in the library, in the records of a student from 50 years ago, there is an eye-witness account." Ahiru heaves a sigh (lol) Autor: "And tonight, the weather, the date, everything matches with the past data!" Autor is full of confidence. "Besides that, you're in the music department so maybe you should be studying piano instead..." Ahiru mutters. Autor: "Did you say something?" Ahiru: "Huh? Autor can understand me." Hnph, he laughs at her with his nose again. Autor: "Anything can happen tonight and it wouldn't be strange." Ahiru: "The moon is so pretty..." (Here, a man wearing a mask of the moon appears from behind..it's a great hit in the assembly) Autor: "What's that? An onion?" Ahiru: "!!" Uzura: "Ho~ Ahiru zura~" *Tototon* (her drum) Ahiru: "Uzura-chan!!" Ahiru: "Uzura-chan! Where were you?" Uzura: "I've been wandering the interval of time with the old man zura."

WHAT does that even mean?! What is the interval of time?! Considering Uzura’s previous life as Edel, it’s surprising that Uzura chooses to stick with Drosselmeyer. He’s the one who put her Ahiru and Fakir through so much trouble, after all. Then again, Uzura is a child and probably has no memory or idea of the role Drosselmeyer played and the evil things he did. Uzura also isn’t human, so maybe human morals don’t bother her as much.

Ahiru: "By the old man do you mean Drosselmyer-san? Then where's Drosselmyer-san?" "Drosselmyer?!!" <--(Autor's switch is on) Uzura: "The old man is busy with updating the site zura, sorry he's so irresponsible zura." (Here, Director Satou is rolling with laughter.) Autor: "Why didn't you bring him with you?!" Clearly, his Drosselmyer otaku switch is on lol

I hate you, Autor. I try not to but I do.

Uzura: "One more is coming zura." Autor: "One more?" Mytho: ".......Tutu." Ahiru: "Mytho!!" (I can never forget Ahiru's sad voice here)

Ah, and here it is. The agony.

You know, I could possibly stomach the whole damn ending of the show if the epilogue doesn’t go on to make it entirely clear how heartbroken Ahiru still is. I mean, if Ahiru is actually happy, there’s nothing more you can want for her. But this here kind of ruins it. Like, why?! How am I supposed to be content with her situation when she’s sad at the mere sight of Mytho?!

Mytho: "It's been a while...." Uzura: "He was dancing on the balcony so I brought him zura." (....At your own pace as usual, Prince.) Autor: "Prince Siegfried from the story!! Myu...Mytho-san." (He sounds as emotional as if he were meeting Drosselmyer.) Mytho: "Are you Fakir's friend...?" Autor: "I'm Autor!" Mytho: "You were the one who helped Fakir? Thank you..." (How does he know..)

How DOES he know? Well, there was a tiny time skip between the defeat of the Raven and Mytho and Rue’s departure to the story. Perhaps things were explained a little during then.

Autor: "No! It was an honor." (only dimly remember) Mytho: "If I remember correctly, during our ballet lessons you were asked by Neko-sensei to accompany us on piano." Autor: "Yes, I was asked to accompany you on piano by Neko-sensei 11 times, and I passed by you with Neko-sensei in the hall 27 times." (Jeez, Autor's in high spirits (lol)) Mytho: "Fakir sometimes sees cows and alligators flying in the sky, so I'm worried. Could you take care of Fakir?"

 Mytho seems to naturally be a little bit of an airhead. It’s funny to see that qualities of him that we saw in the anime can be attributed not to his lack of a heart and common sense, but just to how his personality really is. Cute.

Autor: "Yes!! Mytho-san, please leave him to me." (He's been left to him without having a say, Fakir's in a pinch (lol)) Ahiru: "Mytho? How is Rue-chan?" Mytho: "Rue is doing well." Mytho: "It seems Rue is good at singing too and she's a popular princess among the people." Autor: "Rue-san?"

So Rue is a true lady of the arts, not good only at dancing but at singing too. Interesting that she’s so popular, considering that she honestly doesn’t seem to be the most sociable person. Polite, but not going out of her way to be friendly. Perhaps her time in the story with Mytho has defrosted her even more. What is the new Rue like, I wonder?

Uzura: "Mytho is rabu-rabu with Rue zura~" Autor: "Could you be quiet for a while..." His voice is lacking energy and sounds like he might cry (He knows they're rivals in love..is that okay?)

WHY is Autor so torn up over Rue still?! He never even really spent time with her. Foolish kids, I tell you. She was hardly more than a pretty face to him.

Ahiru: "Thank goodness... Mytho. "The Concluding Volume of The Prince and the Raven" got published. It's not a story without an end anymore." Ahiru: "And also, soon Fakir's going to dance an all-male version of La Sylphide with Matthew Bourne-sensei's choreography!"

Soooo this part is confusing. The concluding volume… So The Prince and the Raven was a story published in installments? The show made it look like it was just a single novel. Unless they mean that they simply published an official ending… But if the story was given an ending, wouldn’t that affect the storybook world? And who wrote the ending and got it published, Fakir? A couple of questions that remain here.

Mytho: "Fakir....I always feel like I'm connected with Fakir..the more my country becomes peaceful, I can feel him close by." (It's...mostly dim recollection. Just the nuance of it.)

Yeah, don’t act like you didn’t just up and leave him AND Ahiru once your business was finished, Mytho. Anyways, skipping the salt, does this mean that Fakir’s conclusion to the novel made things more peaceful in the story world? That’s what it sounds like to me.

Actually, isn’t it kind of scary that Fakir can still wield influence over Mytho’s world? What if he got pissed off at him? yikes

Ahiru: "Mytho...." "You should meet Fakir! He's coming back tomorrow..so then.." Mytho: "I can't..I can only come here because the interval of time is connected tonight..see, the moon is already sinking this much." (The man playing the moon sinks down (lol) The assembly bursts into laughter again) "I see..."

WHAT is with this ‘interval of time’ nonsense again! Someone explain it to me!

Also, fuck Fakir, apparently.

Mytho: "Princess Tutu.....thanks to you, I can be like this. Thank you." Ahiru: "I wanted to see you smile, so my wish is already granted." (only dimly remember)

 AND THERE IT FINALLY IS!!!

“Thank you, Tutu, for risking your life to save mine and restore my happiness and holding your tongue about your feelings for me so I could do nothing for you in return and leave hours later.”

No, I’m not salty. Anyways, the abrupt ending to the show without much dialogue was due to time constraints, not necessarily a true display of Mytho’s character, which I guess this epilogue was partly written to fix. It does seem pretty heartless when you watch the anime, though.

Mytho: "Princess Tutu, I wanted to be with you longer. I wanted to talk with you like this longer....to me, you are the light....because you are someone very special..." (?? Mytho/Ahiru?)

See, this is why I just can’t do it. Like, Mytho, are you fucking kidding?! You leave her alone as a duck and now you want to sweet-talk her?!

But actually, all bitterness aside, this is really sad. They obviously care for each other, but because of circumstances and plot, never once did they have the time to really just… talk.

And he still sees her as the light. I saw some people kind of making fun of this, but of COURSE he does. There was a considerable period of time when she was the only person vouching for him, keeping him safe, acting as his voice… and ultimately saving him in every way. He can only be a real person again because of her, and she never faltered in her mission. That’s INCREDIBLE. Of course he would hold her in high regard.

Mytho: "But, I have to protect Rue. Rue needs me...." (I'm sorry, it's completely out of memory...because I was so overwhelmed..(lol) I should take my reeling in moderation)

And here’s the dagger. After talking about how highly he thinks of Ahiru/Tutu… he backtracks by saying Rue needs him.

And you know why this is REALLY fucking sad? He doesn’t say that “But, I really enjoy being with Rue” or “But, I love Rue.”

He says he has to PROTECT Rue. Rue NEEDS him.

I don’t think I need to dive too deep into the implications of his wording to spell out why this is upsetting, but I’ll sum it up quick. Instead of saying he likes being with Rue, he says Rue needs me. That’s the first thing that comes to mind.

And if it means what I think it means, that’s just fucking harsh. That’s not fair for Rue. That’s not fair for Ahiru. That’s not fair for Mytho.

I mean, we all know the prince has a savior-complex, but the implication that he chose Rue because he feels a sense of duty to protect her instead of romantic affection is kind of… tragic. That’s not a happy ending at all, really. Does Rue have any idea?

I think this is why I have an issue with Ruetho, because no matter what you can’t escape the fact that Mytho will always view her through the lens of what she suffered. It’s just in his personality as a heroic, selfless prince. Doesn’t Rue deserve someone who sees her as… more than someone to protect?

Whatever, can’t be changed now.

Mytho: "Tutu...you have done so much for me, but I couldn't do anything for you." "Is there something I can do for you, Tutu?"

WHAT on Earth could he possibly expect to be able to do for her?! I mean, short of turning her human again, but I’m guessing that’s out of the scope of his abilities. Don’t be so bait-y.

Ahiru: "......Mytho! I.........." "No, nevermind..." (Ahiru sounds incredibly sad)

AUGHHHHHHHH

What was she going to say? You know what, probably doesn’t matter anyway. We know what she wants… she can’t have it, though.

Mytho: "It's almost time..." "See you again....Tutu...." (Jeez..I don't remember any of it) Ahiru: "Can we meet again?" Mytho: "Surely we will meet again..." Mytho (or is it Yanagi-san? lol): "We can meet again, when Sakurai-kun is here." (The assembly explodes with laughter)

NOOOOOOOO

No no no

No, do NOT meet again. This is just asking for trouble. Ahiru clearly isn’t over Mytho, and Mytho… clearly does not have his priorities straightened out. If they keep meeting like this…

Well, as the anime shows, it wouldn’t be the first time they put themselves through the wringer for love. Mytho recites something in German. "Waaao!!" <--(Uzura)

What did he say? I’m curious.

Here, Mytho says his never-ending feelings for Tutu (if someone remembers this part please tell me~) And at the end, Mytho: ".......Ahiru."

 ……..Yeahhh, probably not a good idea to meet again.

Like, I get that this epilogue is to ‘tie up loose ends’ including the torched remnants of Mythiru that were dropped so abruptly at the end, but...

Why, oh why, Mytho, did you choose Rue if you’re still hung up on Tutu?

Additionally, we see that Mytho DOES now know that Tutu is Ahiru. That’s bittersweet too, but in more of a good way. He finally knows that the little passionate goofball was the princess all along. I wonder who told him, or how he found out. Did he just figure it out on his own? Like, the duck that was once Princess Tutu must be Ahiru because Ahiru = duck? Maybe Uzura told him? I doubt Fakir would’ve, simply because once she was back to being a duck again permanently, there was really no reason to tell Mytho. Couldn’t much matter anymore, right?

Ahiru: "I get the feeling I heard Mytho's voice at the end." I am a duck....I can't wear toe shoes, I can't dance.. (I'm sorry, I don't remember) But inside my chest there is a sparkling gem that will never be broken. The end.

And that’s it.

Sooo a lot of conflicted feelings coming at me from this, if you couldn’t tell. I guess first is the question of whether or not this could be considered canon.

Honestly? I think so. Both Ikuko Itoh and Junichi Sato, the people behind Princess Tutu, worked on this and presented it. They even had some of the Japanese VAs present to act it out. Additionally, as I’d mentioned previously, it addresses some questions that were left open due to the somewhat rushed ending of the anime’s finale. And nothing presented in this skit goes against the show’s canon or really comes out of left field (aside Charon and Raetsel man tf). It’s short and sweet.

Moving on, the first time I read this I was really happy, simply because it makes it clear that YES, Mytho does return Ahiru’s feelings. Which I guess was clear in the anime too, but this skit makes it undeniable. It’s nice to feel validated.

But as time goes on and I’ve had the chance to chew over and really digest it… It’s kind of a really crappy situation for our heroine and hero. Like, so they are in love, and they want to continue seeing each other… but Mytho is SUPPOSED to be spoken for with Rue, and Ahiru is a duck. Not to mention that Ahiru is Rue’s FRIEND. C’mon girl, chicks before dicks. Of course, they could still interact platonically, but the confession from Mytho in this skit kind of shot that possibility dead. And what about Fakir in this mess? Granted, Fakir isn’t stupid – he’s known that Ahiru loves Mytho from the beginning, and it’s not exactly like he can be in a relationship with a duck. But still.

Maybe I’m just looking too far into things, but with a piece this short and direct, I don’t know how deep you can really dive.

Anyways, my final thoughts are: Mythiru is canon but in the most tragic way possible, Rue deserves better, annnnnnd I’m still left unsatisfied.

[an-aura-about-you]

One Little Push

I don’t even know why they let me write fanfiction because I’m just gonna do stuff like this. And I started this during ptonic week, which is SUPPOSED to be a celebration of platonic friendships in Princess Tutu. (I then wrote about 40 pages to catalog my media collection so this has been put off about as long as it can be.) That said, I’ve gotten this as done as I want to get it, so let’s post it. Warnings in the tags.

Autor spends so much of his time thinking. So much that it’s become an art, staying up three days in a row with nothing but his thoughts. It’s getting to the point that he can do it without trying. He can do it when he doesn’t want to. He can’t sleep at night.

He pushes his cuff out of the way and checks the time. The train isn’t late, but it sure feels like it with how crowded the platform is. He even gets an elbow jab to the back, only just managing to catch himself before he runs into Fakir.

“Do you mind?!” Autor throws over his shoulder. “You aren’t the only one trying to stand here.”

It does little good. It’s hard to tell who’s who with so many bodies pressed together. It could have been anyone.

He resumes waiting for the train, letting his thoughts stab at his brain. They’re only going part of the way together, Autor to meet with his father in a nearby city and Fakir to go on past that to meet with a publisher taken with his fairy tales. It’s disgusting. He’d probably vomit if he had managed to eat anything.

If it wasn’t for him, Fakir wouldn’t know anything of their lineage. About their gift. Fakir wouldn’t be squandering Autor’s inheritance on fairy tales if he had just kept his big mouth shut. It’s all he’s been able to think about for weeks. He forces his jaw to loosen when he realizes he’s grinding his teeth.

The train whistle blows in the distance.

The crowd shifts, forcing Autor even closer to Fakir and the end of the platform.

What if Fakir wasn’t here? he asks from the cold edges of his mind. Everything could be mine if Fakir wasn’t here.

Is it really that simple? He can still write his own stories. They might not take the same shape, but he can still change the world with his words.

The train chugs closer to the station.

Maybe my stories aren’t shaping reality because Fakir is here. This has gone too far.

The crowd shifts again as the train whistle blares loud and clear.

He has too much influence. He’s too dangerous.

For the first time in a long time, Autor stops thinking completely and pushes Fakir in front of the train.

Everything after that happens too fast.

Whoever had elbowed Autor before shoves into him at the same moment, making things look plausibly accidental. Autor sucks in a breath at Fakir’s terrified scream of realization, instinct demanding that he try to hold on to the man he just pushed. Fakir’s hand grips Autor’s arm, but there’s enough shock at the whole thing that he doesn’t try gripping Fakir back. He blinks at the moment of impact, and his arm jerks along for a horrifying second until the force of the train detaches Fakir’s arm from the rest of his remains.

Autor wrenches the dead man’s arm off of him in fright and joins in as the entire station erupts in screams of panic. His unrelenting exhaustion makes for good tears, and he doesn’t try to stop them. His heart constricts, but it does so around a cold, black pit of satisfaction.

---

Autor’s default expression is pretty dour, and it serves him well at the funeral. Or as well as it can surrounded by so many people crying over a mostly empty casket. Even Autor’s parents, his own parents. Did they even know him outside of a classmate Autor’s brought to visit a couple of times? Are they even aware that he’s family?

Everyone is understanding about Autor’s mask of numb shock. No one else in this gathering was there when it happened. No one besides him saw Fakir’s last moments. They’re not picturing a disembodied arm clinging to their sleeve, can barely even imagine it the way he can see it.

Best of all, they’re understanding about the fact that he might not want to talk about it. It’s perfect.

---

“I was wondering when I’d meet a grandson who truly took after me.”

Autor rubs at his eyes, unsure if he’s dreaming or just meditating. He’s never heard that voice before, and yet he instantly knows who it is.

“Quick, brutal, and straight out of a tragedy,” Drosselmeyer says as he steps out of the dark corner of the room, each word holding the affection of an indulgent grandfather and hands together as though he’s going to applaud at any moment. “And you did it all on your own. I couldn’t be prouder, Autor.”

He presses his mouth into an unsure line and says, “I want you to be proud of me for my writing.”

“As long as you write what you know, I’m sure I will be.”

---

“Autor, I want you to put your writing on hold.”

Autor looks from his work to his mother, only slightly bemused by her request at the moment. “What?”

“Please, stop writing,” she says.

“For how long?”

“Indefinitely.” Lore holds up a hand. “Please, I know it’s a lot to ask, but things have changed.”

He puts his quill down. “They haven’t changed that much, Mother, which makes it more important for me to write.”

“Not when the changes might be caused by the Bookmen,” she counters, her mouth pressing into a line. “Don’t be reckless, Autor.”

He turns in his chair towards her. “I’m not naive. The Bookmen are always going to be a-”

“Autor, stop and think about it!” Lore insists, taking hold of his shoulders. “Fakir’s death might not have been an accident! What if the same thing happens to you?”

Autor stares at her, mouth agape in protest but not making a sound. What can he tell her?

“I’ve already asked your father to take it into consideration,” she continues in his silence. “You know how he is, being more prone to storyspinning the way he uses it. He’s even thinking about retiring.”

“What?!” he replies to the news, getting to his feet and disoriented from suddenly being at the same level as his mother. “Surely Father would be all right.”

“That’s just it: we don’t know,” Lore says, squeezing his shoulders. “We don’t know what they’re going to do or if they’re even behind it. If it is them, it’s not the first time they’ve considered doing whatever it takes to stop a storyspinner. It’s not even the first time they considered killing Fakir if they were the ones responsible for his death.”

“It was an accident,” Autor says, but he closes his mouth right after.

“I know you didn’t mean to, but whoever shoved into you might have had other intent. You might have been hit by that train yourself if whoever was behind you thought they could get away with it.”

Lore pulls him into a tight hug, doing her best to restrain a sob as she does.

“I just don’t- don’t want to lose my family,” she tells him, her voice hitching in the middle.

Autor gingerly puts his arms around her, doing his best to keep the bile from what he plans to do down. “Mother, do you trust me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then trust in what I choose to do.”

“But-”

“Mutti,” he interrupts, squeezing her a little. “I know you don’t want me to be reckless. I promise I won’t be. Do you trust that?”

He can hear her swallow as she thinks about it.

“Yes,” she answers.

“Thank you,” he says, hoping the words don’t sound as dry and brittle as they feel in his mouth.

---

“So nice to see you again, grandson.”

Autor gasps and whips his head to look behind. His hair is loose, and he has to take his glasses off to attempt fixing it. He doesn’t bother with fixing anything else like his loosened cravat, his sleeves slipping from their rolled up state, or the ink stains on his his hands. “Drosselmeyer!”

“You looked like you were having trouble,” he says, idly picking up a page from Autor’s disheveled stack of writing. “Not writer’s block, is it?”

“It’s not working!” Autor replies, snatching the paper back. “Please, I need to keep my attempts in order.”

Drosselmeyer tsks at him. “Now how am I supposed to help if I can’t read it?” He takes Autor’s work up again and looks it over. The more he reads, the more he shakes his head. “Oh Autor, did you really think you’d be able to influence all of Goldkrone like that in your first worthwhile attempt at storyspinning? And all because you still have some thread of yourself that can’t let your mother know what you really are.” He drops it on the desk again.��“You really should just start smaller and concentrate on her.”

“And make myself more suspicious by having her memory the only one altered? I have more brains than that.”

“Even so, most of the town already thinks it was an accident without you trying to rewrite it in everyone’s minds. Why waste time trying to get away with a murder you’ve already gotten away with?”

Autor frantically shakes his head. “If it’s not an accident, a complete accident, then she might stop my writing! I have to write! Surely you understand that I have to write!”

He grins wide. “Of course I understand that. If you’re having that much trouble with it actually happening, why don’t I help you?”

“Please,” he answers without hesitation, almost before Drosselmeyer could finish his offer.

Drosselmeyer covers Autor’s eyes with a gloved hand. (Or perhaps just a glove as he doesn’t see a wrist.)  “Then close your eyes, and I’ll take it from here.”

---

Autor can write in his sleep.

Every writer’s dream has become his reality. All he has to do is sit at his desk, take up his quill, and he’s gone. When he comes back, the story is there. It’s as if the story wrote itself. He’s blacking out for longer and longer. Autor can’t stay awake when he writes.

---

Logos strokes his beard in contemplation, a look Autor’s often seen his father wear when he’s turning the words over in his head. Like all blood relations of Drosselmeyer, he knows just how important it is to choose your words carefully, even more so with how he’s chosen to use their gift. It itches at Autor, prickles the back of his head. Whatever he wants to tell him apparently couldn’t wait until dinner, couldn’t be said around his mother.

He sighs against his hand and says, “Autor, I understand there are different ways to process trauma, but your mother and I think it might be time for you to speak to someone about what happened. Professionally.”

Autor frowns in befuddlement. “What? Therapy?”

Logos nods. “We won’t force you to go. We know that won’t do any good. But ever since the accident with Fakir, you’ve been less present. All you seem to do is write about what happened.”

Autor sits up straight, back stiff as a board. “You’ve read it?”

“Autor, you’ve left seventeen versions of the same story littering the office. It was inevitable.” He leans forward. “Writing to get it out isn’t a problem by itself, but now that it’s the only thing you’re doing at all, it’s becoming a problem. And besides that, you need to grasp the limits of what we can do.” He shakes his head once. “You can rewrite the accident a thousand times if you like, but you won’t be able to use our abilities to change what happened. Don’t blame yourself for Fakir being gone.”

Autor makes a reflexive sound that he thinks is a laugh but might sound like a sob and covers his mouth. Even he’s not sure which one it was.

Whatever it was, Logos doesn’t find the noise surprising or out of place. “Your mother and I have found a good doctor, and we both think you should at least meet her.”

“You think I’m crazy,” Autor says, dropping his hand away from his mouth.

Logos looks at him as though he had just been slapped. “I think you’re hurting. And we just want to find some way to help you.”

Autor gets to his feet and holds his arms out in a helpless shrug. “And what would I tell the doctor? Make her a confidant to our storyspinning? You seem to think that’s what I’m doing. Why don’t we just tell the whole city? The Bookmen already know anyway, so what’s a few more people in on it? We’ve really thought this through.”

Logos likewise stands, still a good head taller than his son. “Why are you acting like I’m stupid? I know you’re writing a story, but you can’t do storyspinning on the past. You have to move forward for change, and you’re stuck.”

He gives Logos an incredulous look. He can tell, but he’s still acting like Autor’s innocent? He thinks back to all of the times he’s heard his father sing, trying to recall if he can tell when storyspinning is taking place or not. Is it something he just has to develop? With that thought, the truth of the matter crashes into him and he bolts out of the room.

---

Autor locks himself in the office, hands over his mouth and fingers meeting over the bridge of his nose.

“Back to work, I see,” Drosselmeyer says.

“I’m not a storyspinner,” Autor responds.

“Oh, you are. A weak little thing, but that doesn’t matter. A quill is a quill, a hand is a hand.”

“You’re using me.”

“You’re using me, grandson,” Drosselmeyer retorts, though his tone is surprisingly jovial. “I may be giving it more influence than you can manage, but the stories are all you. Not that I mind for now since they’re my favorite genre.”

“They’re not my stories if I don’t know what I’m writing.”

“We didn’t set any terms, grandson. If this is going to be a problem, then we can end our partnership.”

Before anything could be said, a hand from behind grabs Autor and he knows nothing else.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Ellison’s Law

Even for the early 1960s, Burke’s Law was a silly gimmick show.

The gimmick?  Millionaire Amos Burke, despite inheriting fabulous wealth, always wanted to be a detective so he joined the LAPD and worked his way up to captain of the homicide bureau.

Basically Batman without the trauma or costume.

And like Batman of a few years later, an exercise in camp.

The show was rigidly formulaic, but for practical reasons.  It relied heavily on stunt casting celebrities as suspects or witnesses and as such it had to be flexible enough to handle rewrites and re-castings in the middle of production.

The typical episode began with someone found murdered or shown getting killed in some unusual manner, cut to Amos Burke flirting with a lady only to be called away by his police duties.  Cue the opening title as Burke and his driver hurry out of his relatively modest Beverly Hills mansion to his Rolls-Royce (actually producer Aaron Spelling’s car which he rented back to the production) as a sultry female voice incants:  “It’s Burke’s Law” then after the first commercial break Burke arrives at the scene of the crime and finds clues pointing him to four or five suspects.

Said suspects are the celebrity guest stars, recruited either to give them some manic scenery chewing time or -- more rarely -- an intense dramatic scene.

After three more commercial breaks, Burke intones one of his “laws” (“Burke’s law:  Never ask a question where you don’t already know the answer.”), pulls a rabbit out of his hat / solution out of his butt, and fingers that episode’s duly appointed murderer.

The problem with the series as a whole is that it could never quite decide on what tone it wanted to take and stick with it consistently.  The British series The Avengers found the perfect balance of tongue-in-cheek / derring-do but Burke’s Law bounced all over the spectrum, frequently in the same episode.

So why bring up this mediocre TV show at all?

Two words:  Harlan Ellison

. . .

I’ve posted many times before on Harlan’s career and the impact of his writing and friendship on me.

He was in the mid 1960s at his zenith as a TV writer, and while his writing career as a whole encompasses so much more than that, his brief run as one of the meteors streaking across the Hollywood sky only lasted 4 years.

Oh, he kept writing for TV after that, but the old zing was gone.  He supplied stories for other series, created and fought hard to keep The Starlost on track but eventually had to walk away from that heartbreak, adapted several of his own short stories to a Twilight Zone revival, as well as numerous development deals that went nowhere (including two great ideas for The Name Of The Game, another Gene Barry series, that would have fit perfectly into that show’s oeuvre).

If you find his second book of TV criticism, The Other Glass Teat, check out his first draft for “The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs” episode of The Young Lawyers (not to be confused with his short story of the same title).

It’s one of the most powerful / gut wrenching things you’ll ever read…

…but by the time the studio and the network got through with it, the final product was virtually unrecognizable…and unwatchable.

Such was Harlan’s fate after 1967 in Clown Town (as he referred to it).

But from 1963 to 1967, he was golden.

. . . 

Harlan’s rocky personal history went through many highs and lows before coming to Hollywood in 1962.

Harlan’s first breakthrough as a writer was with his series of stories and essays on juvenile crime in New York in the early and mid-1950s..

Drafted in 1957. following his discharge, he settled in Chicago with his second wife and her son, editing Rogue magazine, a  Playboy imitator.

Feeling his personal life becoming untenable, he called in favors from a friend, drove out to California with his soon-to-be ex-wife and stepson (aware the marriage was over, she also wanted to relocate away from Chicago), made his first sale to TV (his short story “No Fourth Commandment” to the TV show Route 66), then briefly found a sweet spot with Burke’s Law, writing four teleplays for their first season.

Burke’s Law is a good crucible for examination because of its silly, gimmicky nature and rigid format requirements.

These scripts represent a pivotal point in Harlan’s writing career, but more importantly, they mark the only sustained run he enjoyed on a non-anthology show, and as such make a good benchmark in comparing his growth as a writer and how his unique perspective played out in in relation to the constraints of episodic television.

While a couple of Harlan’s better science fiction / fantasy stories were written before 1963, the meteoric rise of his career in those genres began with his classic short story “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Ticktockman” in 1965, followed by a host of other groundbreaking short stories and novellas, and his original anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions in which he recruited other science fiction and fantasy writers -- many of them already well established pros -- to follow the path he blazed in the genre.

His experience on Burke’s Law occurs squarely between what he once was to what he was becoming, and as such is worthy of attention.

SPOILER: There are no great hidden gems here.

There’s a lot of amusing writing, and a few flashes of the emotional intensity Harlan could provide, but by and large this is journeyman level stuff:  Better than most, but not the best.

. . .

”Who Killed Alex Debbs?” was his first script for the series, and he pitched it to producer Aaron Spelling at a cattle call after a screening of the show’s pilot episode.  

Harlan jump started the pitch process by improvising an idea off the cuff at the end of the screening, and Spelling took him to his office to hear how Harlan planned to resolve it, then hired him on the spot.

It’s unclear if Harlan was actually a staff writer on the series or simply hung out at the studio a lot, but he used his skills as a quick study to start working his way up the food chain.

His first script fulfills all the requirements of a Burke’s Law episode and shows off two of Harlan’s main strengths:  An ability to hone in on intense emotion and a keen eye for the culture around him (in this case, very specifically Hollywood of the early 1960s).

On the downside, logic gaps render this story more implausible than most -- and as noted, Burke’s Law as a series wasn’t famous for its plausibility.

A flaw of almost all Burke’s Law episodes is that the victim is typically found dead under mysterious / bizarre circumstances, and the impression we get of them is constructed entirely through the words of suspects and witnesses.

It’s not an unworkable approach, but not the best suited for episodic television.

In this instance. victim Alex Drebbs is a Hugh Hefner-like men’s magazine publisher and monarch of a mini-empire of key clubs ala the Playboy Clubs of the era.  Harlan captures that milieu well but here’s where the logic gaps hit hard:  There’s no way a Hefner-like figure would be alone long enough for someone to kill him without being noticed, there’s no way his disappearance wouldn’t be immediately noticed by employees needing his attention, and it sure as hell wouldn’t have happened in a deserted club on the afternoon of its big opening.

On the plus side, there are some great character scenes including Arlene Dahl as a bitter ex-investor in Debbs empire now reduced to licking saving stamps to keep her decay mansion in repair, Burgess Meredith as a men’s magazine cartoonist who is nothing but a  bundle of neurotic twitches and tics, and finally Sammy Davis Jr as Cordwainer Bird, the humor editor for Debbs’ magazine.

This was at the Robin Williams stage of Davis career, when all you had to do was point a camera in his direction and let him go.  Harlan supplied the corny gags but Davis launched them over the top with his antics, and while he brings the proceedings to a complete disruptive halt, his brief scene is the most entertaining in the entire series.  (Harlan later used Cordwainer Bird as his WGA pseudonym when he wanted to indicate displeasure at what had been done to his scripts.)

By his own account, Harlan had less luck with Diana Dors -- “the British Marilyn Monroe” -- and treated her condescendingly during the shoot.  (By comparison, William Goldman in his memoir Adventures In The Screen Trade shows a much more sanguine / roll-with-the-punches attitude, and that might explain part of the reason his screenwriting trajectory was far different than Harlan’s.)

All in all, an uneven example of both the series and Harlan’s abilities.

. . . 

”Who Killed Purity Mather?” was Harlan’s second script for the series and one of the few that played with the rigid format of the series insofar as the victim is seen alive for a few moments before being killed in a rather sadistic and spectacular manner (splashed with acid then trapped in a burning house, and the high angle shot used to show her demise must have been incredibly risky -- and thus costly -- to film).

It also drops a very subtle clue that I’ll reveal in the footnote.*

This is Harlan going so far over the top he emerges on the other side.  Plotwise it features more logic gaps than his first script, but the whole thing is so silly it’s pointless to complain about it.

Purity Mather is a professional witch (!) who speeds up the investigation into her own demise by mailing Amos Burke a recording saying she’ll be killed along with a list of five possible suspects (that she doesn’t mention them by name in the recording reflects the show’s desire for standalone scenes, enabling them to recast and rewrite plotlines more easily; the scene where Burke reads the names to his team was doubtlessly shot after the guest cast was locked in).

Burke & co. start shaking down suspects, including Telly Savalas as Fakir George O'Shea, a Muslim holy man / cosmetics chemist (!!); Charlie Ruggles as I. A. Bugg, an eccentric elderly millionaire who likes to chase -- but not catch -- prostitutes around his apartment while dressed in lederhosen(!!!); Wally Cox as Count Carlo Szipesti, vampire for hire (!!!!); and Gloria Swanson as Venus Hekate Walsh a fright wig bedecked self-proclaimed goddess of free love (!!!!!).

The episode might as well have had a laugh track.  It’s amusing with several daft touches only Harlan could provide, but the daftness comes from his take on Hollywood culture of the time.

I’d go so far as to say elements of Cox and Swanson’s characters were based on real life people living in and around Hollywood at the time, in particular some science fiction fans Harlan had come in contact with.

It’s a romp but a disappointing one.  The logic gaps are too big in this one (case in point, if you’re the captain of the homicide bureau and you come home to see a masked figure climbing out of your second story window in broad daylight, you don’t simply shrug and let them run off) and the ending is one of those annoying ah-yes-now-that-you-caught-me-I-will-admit-everything-even-stuff-you-don’t-know cappers that Joe Ruby and Ken Spears would have rejected for Scooby Doo.

In short, a script whose parts are better than the whole.

. . .

”Who Killed Andy Zygmunt?" is another slight story that pays off with an insight into Hollywood pop culture of the era.  The victim is “a pop artist” (no, he’s not; he an assemblage sculptor) impaled on his own artwork.

He’s also revealed to be an extortionist who acquires embarrassing evidence that he affixes to his assemblages then blackmails his victims into buying the art to keep their secrets safe.

Once again Burke is conveniently handed a list of suspects, in this case the people who bought the last five pieces of art from the exhibit.

This is one of the few times the series had more than one suspect in the same scene as there’s a big gathering in Burke’s office midway through the story (it also includes Michael Fox, a semi-regular on the series playing the coroner, so it represents a pretty sizeable filming day for the show).  The suspects include Macdonald Carey as Burl Mason, the star of a popular TV detective show (Harlan gives his scenes what we would now call a meta-fiction touch by playing off Barry’s fictional TV detective dealing with a fictional fictional TV detective); Jack Weston as Silly McCree, a kid’s show host who destroys his career with an on air anti-child rant; Ann Blyth as Deirdre DeMara, a rival “pop artist” who creates her art by spraying women with paint and having them roll around on giant canvases (a gimmick later used in the bizarre 1966 Ann-Margaret comedy The Swinger); Aldo Ray as Mister Harold, former pro-wrestler turned poodle groomer; and Tab Hunter in a surprisingly well done scene as a sky diving playboy.

Hunter’s scene in particular shows Harlan getting his hyperbole under control, much more laconic and evocative than other characters he wrote for the series.  As mentioned above, Burke’s Law occurs just on the cusp of Harlan’s huge success in print; he’s beginning to harness the lessons learned to maximum effect.  (He would have some setbacks, too, in his screenwriting career, and to be honest part of that can be attributed to his failure to consistently apply the lessons learned, part of it can be attributed to his reputation preceding him, and part of it can be attributed to just bad luck.)

The motives this time are fairly edgy for a 1963 TV series, and combined with the slices of Los Angeles life Harlan provides give a fair example of the cultural zeitgeist of the era.

. . . 

”Who Killed ½ Of Glory Lee?” can be explained as Benjamin Glory, half owner of Glory Lee Fashions, with Gisele MacKenzie as the other half, Keekee Lee.

After breaking the budget with his spectacular demise of Purity Mather, Harlan staged this murder as an inexpensive off camera elevator plunge.

This time the plot is a wee bit more plausible, with control of a profitable business being the apparent motive for the murder.

But Harlan loaded up this episode with a more powerful emotional punch than most of his others, and while the dénouement may feel a bit farfetched, it certainly rings true emotionally.

He certainly gave Nina Foch and Anne Helm plenty to work with regarding their characters’ complicated mother / daughter relationship, yet at the same time found room for a playful scene in which Buster Keaton pantomimes his answers to Burke’s questions.

Yet at the same time one senses an impatience behind the keyboard.  The opening scene has a squad of female elevator operators (yes, once upon a time there needed to be somebody in the elevator to push the buttons for you) discussing pop culture references of a generation before -- Harlan’s generation.

And while the key emotional conflicts are played out well, several of the other scenes feel rather perfunctory…yet at the same time this is probably the most cohesive whole of any Burke’s Law script, whether written by Harlan or not.

It’s as if after a brief but profitable run on a network series, Harlan realized he’d absorbed as much of the practical end of the business as he could and his next moves should be into broader, edgier territory.

   © Buzz Dixon

   * SPOILER: Purity Mather is the murderer; she connives a career nudist (!!!!!!) to participate in a magic ceremony then disfigures and kills her, leaving evidence that she hopes will convince the police the body is hers.  The subtle clue Harlan drops is the victim, wearing a long black negligee, complaining about how she doesn’t like the feel of the clothes.  A nice touch, but undercut by Purity then going to the nudist camp her victim operates and waiting in the buff by the front gate for the police to show up and question the career nudist -- whom Purity has mentioned as a suspect in her faked murder.  While it works insofar as Purity doesn’t try to pass herself off to anyone else at the camp as the career nudist, it doesn’t scan that she would know when the police would come to investigate or if they could be easily convinced at the gate and not come in to question other patrons.

[opalescentegg]

‘Princess Tutu’ and the Absent Fish:  An Informal Essay

Anyone familiar with Princess Tutu will recognize and appreciate its masterful melding of diverse fairytale and sometimes mythic elements --- may the record show that I’m no different.  Nevertheless, there is one particular sequence in Ahiru’s heart-shard-hunting quest that never felt quite right: the heart-shard of Curiosity (alternatively, the Desire for Knowledge).  Or, more precisely, it’s the River that always bothered me.

As a one-off magical narrative conceit there’s really nothing wrong with the River having the heart-shard.  Thanks to the episode regarding the heart-shard of Affection, it was already established by that point that non-human(oid) entities could become bearers of pieces of the Prince’s heart.  So the River as heart-shard-holder was at least consistent within the narrative’s internal logic.  What I think I was recognizing through my dissatisfaction with the River, though without even fully comprehending it, was instead a sudden break with what I will term the “chain of motif.”  To put it another way:  every other heart-shard, up until the final five from the town gates, is connected is some way to a recognizable fairytale motif and/or structure; all except for the heart-shard of Curiosity.

For an illustration of heart-shards and their associated motifs, with the specific elements that identify the motifs (where sources give different translations for the known heart-shard emotions I will provide both), I present the following:

1. Disappointment/Bitterness  --  Swan Lake: admittedly, this is mostly in the music and “set design” of the episode which, along with the short-lived (one-sided) dancing rivalry between Anteaterina and Rue, are probably mostly meant to serve as a introducing the central motif of the show.  Additional possible foreshadowing of the thematic conflict between Ahiru/Tutu and Rue/Kraehe later on, though this claim is much more tentative.

2. Loneliness  --  Hansel and Gretel: a house in the woods, a story revolving around food, fear (though here ultimately unfounded) of being eaten

3. Sorrow/Sadness  --  Giselle: taken directly from the ballet, which itself draws from the folklore of willis/vilas that, depending on the tradition, are variously described as ghosts, fairies, nymphs, etc.  I’d also like to point out that the design of the willis fulfills the visual requirements of the White Lady of so many European (and Euro-influenced) countries.

4. Affection  --  Not a single tale-type, but calls upon a conglomeration of magical light folklore, i.e. will-o’-the-wisps (leading people astray, as the Lamp’s riddles led Ahiru not so much astray, but certainly to where the spirit wanted her), the genie in the (oil) lamp, etc.  (I also recall someone once posting about an Andersen tale in which an old street lamp reminisces on all the things it’s seen in its life, much like the Lamp-spirit.  However, while a strong argument can certainly be made for this story being the inspiration for the Lamp, it’s a pretty obscure one from HCA’s repertoire, so I believe the strength of the lamp motif comes mostly from the examples I have highlighted.)

5. Fear  --  Sleeping Beauty: for obvious reasons.  (There are also shades of the Grimms’ “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” but that’s a real stretch to fully justify, even for me.)

6. Curiosity/Desire for Knowledge  -- ??????

7. Devotion  -- “The Red Shoes,” Andersen: since the magical black pointe shoes Rue slips into seem to have a similar unsettling degree of autonomy to Andersen’s eponymous footwear.  The fact that they cause a transformation that slashes at Rue with thorny vines is also a nearly sadistic inversion (intentional or not, who can say?) of the Anderson story, wherein the sinful girl is at last relieved of her suffering when an angel, carrying a branch blooming with roses, finally grants her mercy and takes her up to Heaven.   I can also see possible shades of Pygmalion in Malen’s obsession with drawing Rue, though her fixation may be argued as serving more to highlight the themes of lack of control and destructive self-sacrifice implicit in the HCA tale, which I still see as the overriding motif here.

8. Regret  --  Cinderella: the episode musical motif, plus the element of the “ball,” or at least a gathering of multiple people (and crow demons?) in a single location.  Charon even plays the part of, first, the “step-parent” who refuses to let his ward attend that event, but eventually transitions into the role “fairy godmother” who furnishes the ward with the physical necessities he needs to go out and do what he wants.  (Amusingly, this makes Ahiru either a bait-and-switch/red herring Cinderella, OR makes her and Fakir a kind of composite Cinderella, each one fulfilling different aspects of the motif -- possible foreshadowing for later partnership, courage described as “two hearts as one,” etc.)

9. Love  --  The title of the episode introducing this heart-shard is “La Sylphide,” though it doesn’t have much in common with the eponymous ballet.  What it does have is the first very recognizable instance of full-on witchcraft in the show, which is undeniably a strong and instantly identifiable fairytale element.  The curse Rue places on this shard also positions her as the “false bride,” from such tales where one woman either kills, curses, or brings low and supplants a “true bride” in order to take that woman’s lover for herself.

10. Pride  --  The Flying Dutchman: In which a man is punished for his sins usually implied, and sometimes outright stated, to be a slight against God performed in a bout of hubris; and cursed to wander and/or continue their mortal duties without rest for all eternity.  Whether they were cursed with immortality or simply exist as spirits unable to enter Heaven or Hell varies between tellings, but the framework is essentially the same.  (This is almost certainly a later variant of a story type I would prefer not to call by name, but involves “Wandering”; though since that protagonist is always cursed with immortality and never becomes a spirit, it’s a tale-type that is at best tangentially related to the motif I’ve chosen anyway.)  

11. Hope -- Swan Lake; The Little Mermaid; The Ugly Duckling; etc.: for obvious reasons again.

Fairy tales and folklore rely heavily on patterns.  In adopting and adapting these stories to craft its own narrative, PT also inherits those formulas.  But the heart-shard of Curiosity does not fit the pattern --- in fact, it seems not to have parallels with any recognizable tale pattern at all.

What is particularly strange is the presence in the episode of many of the building blocks of a very famous folklore motif, and one made all the more conspicuous by its absence from the narrative.  That is: the motif of the ring in the fish.

As far as age is concerned this motif goes back a long way, along one of two variant branches.  One: the ring that is lost, despaired of, and miraculously returned to great joy (and often used as a token of recognition).  Two: the ring that is the catalyst, lynchpin, etc. of some undesirable future event, which the owner tries to throw away in an attempt to dodge destiny and which inevitably comes back to him, the ring here being a tangible reminder of the inescapability of fate.

Of these variants the first is by far the most common.  Arguably the most internationally famous tales of this variant is that of Solomon’s ring, which provides the basic structure many later tales of the branch: King Solomon’s (magic) signet ring was stolen by a demon and cast into the ocean, whereupon it was swallowed by a fish.  Years later, a fisherman caught a fish which was then cooked and served to Solomon, who cut it open to find his ring in its belly.  (The ring here also acts as an indisputable identifier of the true Solomon, who had been reduced to a pauper by the aforementioned demon after losing his ring, since the demon could shapeshift and had assumed the king’s form.  The retrieval of the ring restored Solomon to his true form, allowed him to vanquish the demon, and retake his rightful place as king.  Many ring-in-fish stories conclude with the ring acting as absolute proof of a character’s identity, often in a “recognition” or “reveal” scene.)

 In contrast to this story is that of Polycrates and his ring.  On the advice (and possibly prophecy) of the king of Egypt, Polycrates the tyrant of Samos is told to cast away that possession which he values post, lest his overabundance of success raise the ire of the gods and cause them strike him down.  Polycrates attempted to do so, casting into the sea his prized emerald ring, which caused him much grief.  However, not long after a fisherman brought a fish as tribute to the tyrant; when Polycrates had it gutted his ring was found in its belly, proof that he could not escape his disastrous fate (indeed, he was eventually overthrown and assassinated, possibly by being impaled and his corpse then crucified).

The object cast into the water (typically a piece of jewelry) varies depending on a story: a ring, a necklace, a bracelet, and anklet, etc., though I think the particular emphasis on encircling jewelry is an important detail.  Sometimes the object is simply a gemstone --- also important in this discussion, given the curiously jewel-like appearance of the heart-shards.  

In any case, the basic plot of “[thing] in water  -  [thing] in fish  -  capture of fish  -  [thing] back in hand” (or, even more simplistically: a valuable object lost in water and found later in an unexpected place), is found in sources ranging from Sanskrit dramas to Irish mythology.  Even Hans Christian Andersen famously refurbished it in his “Steadfast Tin Soldier.”  And speaking of Irish mythology, the Fenian cycle famously includes a tale about culture hero Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Salmon of Knowledge.  

(For the uninitiated:  A salmon ate nine hazelnuts that fell into the Well of Wisdom, gaining all the world’s knowledge, and the first person to eat of its flesh would likewise gain that knowledge.  The poet Finegas/Finn Eces, to whom Fionn was then a servant, caught the fish after many years and told Fionn to cook it while he attended to other matters, but not to eat it.  Fionn (surprisingly) followed this directive, until he poked at the fish to check its doneness and burned his finger in the hot fat --- a finger which he immediately stuck into his mouth to soothe, only to thereby ingest the drop of the salmon’s fat and gain the knowledge contained therein.  Upon learning of this, Finegas gave Fionn the rest of the fish to eat, and Fionn gained all the world’s knowledge.)

The motif of a fish associated with great knowledge lends itself well as a base element for a hypothetical holder of the heart-shard of Curiosity, especially when combined with that of the ring in the fish/returning ring.  The latter motif is essentially part of the episode anyway.  After all, there’s a clear instance of jewelry being cast into water --- when Ahiru throws her pendant (an encircling necklace) into the River so that she’ll no longer have to act as Princess Tutu and bring pain to Mytho.  While her necklace is never miraculously returned to her, she nevertheless recovers it, and so fulfills the bare-bones conditions of the tale type.  

The fact that this outcome was exactly what Drosselmeyer wanted would have paralleled the theme of inescapable fate we find in the story of Polycrates’ ring.  In doing so, it would have raised the stakes of one of PT’s central conflicts (do these people even have free will, and if they do can they exercise it successfully to escape tragedy?), making the push and pull that much more dynamic and the tension even more taut.  Because the returned ring motif would have (seemingly) implied an early answer:  No.  The “ring” always returns, and the fate it symbolizes is therefore set in stone.  It’s a pattern we’re all familiar with, even if our recognition of it isn’t always conscious.  But therein lies the problem.  For seemingly no reason, in this episode PT decides to disrupt the pattern.

These are the fairy tale element building blocks we have to work with in the episode:

Water

Something lost (two somethings, in this case: the necklace and the heart-shard; one is lost purposefully in the water, the other by happenstance)

The return of things lost

Later on (continuing into a couple of the following episodes), we are even given:

A recognition scene, brought about by the thing lost in the water

The heart-shard, once recovered and then stolen by Kraehe, leads to Rue’s eventual “recognition” of herself as Kraehe.  It keeps asking her who she is and why she wears black feathers, forcing her into a psychological conflict lasting two episodes.  Unlike a returned ring the heart-shard is not itself hard proof of her identity, but it nonetheless forces the question of identity to the forefront of Rue’s consciousness from the depths of her denial --- it is the catalyst of revelation, if not its direct agent.

(This isn’t even touching on Ahiru’s pendant becoming the element by which Fakir later identifies her as Princess Tutu, and which was also retrieved from the water.)

But, curiously, no fish to be found anywhere.  Very odd, considering that the fish is most often the narrative element that ties all the others together.  It’s the device that keeps the plot from stopping dead after the valuable “something” is lost.  

The closest we get is, well, Ahiru herself.  She is the one who retrieves her necklace from the River, after all.  One could say it’s also when she’s at her most fish-like, since it’s one of the few times we see her fully submerged in water.  But I find this an unsatisfying answer for the absence of the fish.  If nothing else, it lacks the gestative image of a shining ring (or necklace or jewel) sitting quietly in the cold of a piscine belly, generating all sorts of connotations relating to rebirth, fertility, protection, and so on.  While not strictly necessary to the function of a returning ring story, the image nevertheless strikes me as wonderfully evocative and symbolic, which may well account for so many returning ring tales coming down to us as ring-in-fish tales.  

No aquatic creature of any type is part of the encounter with the heart-shard of Curiosity.  (Unless we again count Ahiru, though her being in her mostly-human Tutu aspect --- the one most removed from her aquatic duck form --- strains this interpretation past the point of credulity in my opinion.)  Perhaps the most perplexing thing about this heart-shard is how the River itself is what holds it.  Not even a personification of the River, i.e. a nereid, nymph, kelpie, undine, rusalka, or a few dozen other types of aquatic folklore creatures.  Other aquatic animals were eschewed as well, though if the writers didn’t want to use a fish is would have still been a good opportunity to include a frog, already associated with retrieving golden balls from wells (speaking of valuable round things lost in the water).  And as far as I know, there just aren’t that many stories which feature sentient, non-anthropomorphized bodies of water; the element is obscure at best if it exists at all, certainly isn’t part of any recognizable tale types.  It does not fit the pattern presented by the other narrative building blocks.

It’s a conundrum I can’t quite parse.  If the writers were already including so many of the elements of a common and well-known tale type, why the glaring omission of the element second in importance only to the lost object itself?  The truth is, I don’t have any good answers.

I mean, I can still theorize of course.  For example, it’s entirely possible that the heart-shard was swallowed and held by an ordinary fish at some point (the show establishes that regular, non-anthropomorphic animals live in the town as well), but then the fish simply died and the heart-shard then reverted to the River.  The only problem with this theory is that there is absolutely nothing within the text of the show to support it, and in no way impacts the story we see play out in the show.

And so, what are we left with?  There’s a hole in the story structure with nothing to fill it; a fish story that, like all those tall tales that inspired the idiom, never produces a fish.  But perhaps that, itself, is the best conclusion we can draw from this incomplete tale; the definition of the colloquial “fish story”: a great big lie.  Whether as intentional foreshadowing or just a glitch of human error, by omitting the fish the show writers tipped their hand.  If a ring-in-fish story can so conspicuously become just a variety of “fish story,” then the credibility of all the fairytale structures we see in the show must be called into question.  If the fish is missing from its own tale type, what else might be missing?  If essential elements are missing from certain established story structures, how are those stories still progressing beyond their natural lifespan?  If fairytale plots, with all their adherence to patterns and formulas, are the “truth” of this reality, what might it mean when the pattern is so obviously disrupted?

If Drosselmeyer meant to trap a town in a fairytale for all eternity, he overestimated the sturdiness of traditionally oral story structures.  The tales they produce are narrative bricolage, held together with the spit and chewing gum of predictable conventions and the skill of the storyteller.  Lose one key element, and unless you can convincingly slot another in post haste the entire fabric of the story will unravel in your hands.  Drosselmeyer cast his Story’s net wide and strong, but I suspect even that turned out to be subject to degradation and decomposition.  Holes were inevitable.  This one was just big enough for a single fish to slip through, and with it the first hint about the truth of the Story, carried like a ring in its belly.

[ehmerapunjab]

Raiding the Raiders...

Sikhs warriors of the 18th century adopted guerrilla tactics. They offered tough resistance to the invading Afghan armies of Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali by looting them and freeing those enslaved by them.

Banda Singh Bahadur shook the foundation of the nearly 200-year-old mighty Mughal empire in seven years, from 1709 to 1715. Thereafter, the Mughals could never reassert their authority in areas north of Delhi.

After Banda Bahdur’s execution, the Sikhs went through extremely difficult times, suffering brutalities at the hands of Mughals. The hard core of Banda’s army retreated to inaccessible areas of hill tracts, jungles and ravines to continue their struggle. The Sikhs developed and practised skilled guerrilla tactics. Denying the rulers vast resources of Hindustan formed an important strategy of Sikhs. Looting government treasuries, rich landlords and goods-laden Mughal convoys became favourite targets. Rattan Singh Bhangoo, in his Panth Prakash, which is based on oral evidence, sums ups the military implication of resources denial — “Mughals could not get enough land revenue, peasants refused to pay on the grounds that they had already been robbed by the Sikhs, there was little money to pay to the soldiers who deserted.” To undermine the government authority further, Sikhs introduced the ‘Rakhi System,’ which offered protection on payment of a nominal fee; it ensured double protection because the Sikh bands restrained themselves and also protected people against marauders. They took over police functions. This made them saviours and seriously undermined government’s authority. Nadir Shah and his successor, Ahmed Shah Abdali, repeatedly came to India not to rule but to loot. These raiders were ruthless; mass killing, rapes, abductions and enslaving of thousands of slaves were the results of these raids. The Sikhs were the only ones who relieved them of their booty, and freed slaves. Nadir Shah, after plundering Delhi, was returning to Persia in the summer of 1739; he was moving close to the foothills of the Himalayas to avoid the heat of the plains of Punjab. The Sikhs, who were already there and were well-versed with the terrain, found Nadir’s loot-heavy army carrying goods on elephants, camels and horses, an easy prey. They started to raid and plunder the baggage train as soon as the returning Afghan army entered Punjab and continued to do so all the way to Indus. Thus, the Sikhs relieved him of most of his looted wealth and managed to free the Indian youth, including women, who had been enslaved. Nadir Shah was surprised at this dare-devil acts by Sikh raiders. He inquired from Zakariya Khan, Governor of Lahore, “Who are these mischief makers? Zakariya replied: “These are a group of fakirs, who visit their Guru’s tank (at Amritsar) twice a year and after bathing in it disappear”. Nadir Shah wanted to know where they live. Zakariya said: “Their houses are their saddles; they can last long periods without food and rest. They are known to sleep on horseback. We have put prizes on their heads, but their number keeps increasing. They are never despondent, but are always singing the songs of their Pirs…A drop of nectar from their Guru transmutes a coward into a lion — so wonderful is its effect”. Nadir Shah remarked: “Take care, the day is not distant when these rebels will take possession of your country”. Ahmad Shah Abdali, who succeeded Nadir Shah, raided India nine times between 1747 and 1769. Like his predecessor, his aim was to plunder India’s wealth and carry it to Afghanistan. The Sikh army was determined to frustrate his motive by “robbing the robber”. Sikhs shadowed the Afghan army, lurking around the ‘soft spots’ and flanks, often taking an opportunity to raid, kill, plunder and free enslaved men and women. During one of the raids, in March 1761, Sikhs freed over 2,000 young women, meant for Afghan harems, and escorted them safely to their homes, some as far as Delhi and beyond. They robbed Abdali during eight of his invasions. With each raid they got more resources and strength, and became bolder. Tired and exhausted battle-weary Afghan soldiers, eager to return home, were no match for the battle-hardy, highly motivated Sikhs: “Fifty of them were enough to keep at bay the whole battalion of King’s forces”. Abdali made his ninth and last attempt to conquer Punjab in1769; the Sikhs blunted his invasion at Jhelum itself. Abdali returned to Kandahar, a defeated and broken man. Rattan Singh Bhangoo, describes the Sikh guerrilla tactics: “Hit the enemy hard enough to kill, run, turn back and hit him again; run again, hit and run till you exasperate the enemy, and then melt away”. This guerrilla tactics is summed up in two words: Dhai phat (two-and-a-half injuries). The approach to battle with total surprise is one phat, a sudden shock action throwing the enemy off balance is half phat; successful speedily and orderly withdrawal after the attack is the remaining ‘one phat’. Qazi Nur Mohammed, who accompanied Ahmed Shah Abdali, was an eye-witness to all engagements. He was no friends of Sikhs; his strong hatred is obvious when he refers to them as dogs, pig-eaters, accursed infidels, dirty idolaters, and so on. Despite his strong dislike for Sikhs, he could not help describing their excellent conduct, their valour in the battlefield, their values, agility and grand physical appearance. In his own words: “Do not call the Sikhs dogs, because they are lions and are brave like lions in the battlefield. When they take the Indian sword in their hands, they traverse the country from Hind to Sind…None can stand against them in battle, howsoever strong he may be…When their battle axes fall upon the armor of their opponents, it becomes their coffin… they come to the field fiercely springing and roaring like lions and immediately split many a breast and make the blood of many others spill in the dust. The body of every one of them is like a piece of rock…Every one of them is more than 50 men…At time of peace, they surpass Hatim” (in goodness and generosity).” They retained their mobility by staying on horseback, without allowing to pitch classical battle to the enemy. They would cunningly draw a small contingent of the enemy from the main force, luring it to chase them, thus isolating it from any possible help, then encircle and annihilate this isolated contingent. After the skirmish, the Sikhs would retreat quickly, carrying with them much-needed horses and weapons. Qazi Nur Mohammed describes the technique: “If their armies take to flight, do not take it as an actual flight. It is a war tactics of theirs. Beware; beware of them the second time. The object of this trick is when the furious enemy runs after them; he is separated from his main army and from his reinforcements. Then they turn back to face their pursuers and set fire even to water”. Beside raw courage, supreme fighting skills and missionary spirit to die in the battle, which the Khalsa had in plenty, they also had a major force multiplier in their favour — the local support of Hindus and Muslims, both helped them, especially the peasantry. This was achieved by the exemplary conduct of Sikh solders during battle. Sikhs never forgot –“Soora so pahchaniye jo lare deen ke het, purja purja kat mare, kabh hu na chhade khet”.

By Maj-Gen Kulwant Singh (Retd)

[myteaguy-blog]

Gonfu Tea Ceremony: Origin Stories, Legends and Myths

Back when I was a younger man in my 20’s, tea had already become my drink of choice.  While most of my friends ordered coffee with their desserts, I would ask to see the tea selection. I am referring back in time to the 1980’s, so the selection was always standard tea bags such as Twinning’s Earl Grey, Harney & Son’s English Breakfast or Lipton’s Orange Pekoe.  Although I had no idea what orange pekoe meant at the time, I would drink it with milk and sugar and… I enjoyed it.  As the years passed on, the tea selections improved with the addition of green tea, jasmine tea and herbal teas. I continued drinking and enjoying those teas for years, ignorant of the exciting world of teas which I was soon to discover.

During a visit to China back in 2012, my friend Lester asked me if I enjoyed drinking tea, which I proudly answered, “Yes, I love tea!”  He proceeded to take out his gonfu set, and asked me what type of tea I enjoyed drinking?  As I was a little confused and a bit intimidated by the gonfu set, which I had not seen before, I told him, “Oh, whatever you like is good, I like all tea.”  Well, we ended up spending several hours just drinking tea.  It only took him a few minutes to realize that I had never drank tea in this fashion before, however, he still delighted in telling me the tea origin stories and any other relevant details about the tea, as he proceeded to brew them.  He truly enjoyed watching me light up with an eagerness to learn more and more about tea.  We spent the next few weeks tasting different teas such as tieguanyin, wuyi yanchas, aged and sheng puerhs. All of which, I was tasting for the very first time, and all of which, he had fascinating stories for.  Sometimes the stories were the terroir details or the processing method, sometimes the stories were imaginative mythological legends passed down through the generations, sometimes he just shared his own personal experience with the specific tea.  Whatever the story was, it was what made the entire experience of gonfu cha more interesting and unique than any other social experience I had encountered.   When we visited Hangzhou together, we were invited to drink some longjing green tea with a local farmer family.  As the 70-year-old head of the household brewed our tea, her grandson shared the origin story of longjing tea, as well as the story of how his family came to possess the farm and the house which we were now on.  The tea was fantastic, to say the least, but it was the stories he told us which made the entire experience unforgettable for all of us present.

I came to realize during this trip that gonfu tea is not just about drinking a beverage.  It is so much more!  Gonfu tea service is a gateway into a social connection leading to the exploration of many other subjects including culture, society, environment, meditation, moral values, and of course tea and tea ware.  Every tea that Lester offered me had a back story.  Every gaiwan or yixing pot that he used had a back story.  Every utensil he used in preparing the tea had a back story.  While drinking tea with Lester, I learned about the many different dynasties of China. I learned about the differences between western and eastern cultures. I learned how to relax and enjoy the moment. I learned how to appreciate nature. I made new, lasting friendships!  Whether the stories which he shared with me were true or not, didn’t matter, but the stories all became just as much a part of the tea memory I had formed as the aroma and the taste.

My experience with gonfu tea service in China lit a desire within me to come back to the states and share my tea experiences with others.  I gathered a bunch of friends together in my home, not knowing how they would react, since none of them were tea enthusiast. I was pleasantly surprised to see that even people who do not take tea as serious as I do, truly enjoy a gonfu session as a social gathering, when it is filled with fascinating tea tales about the teas being brewed for them.

The more I got involved with serving gonfu style tea to my friends, the more I realized that almost every tea legend which I had heard, I would hear retold slightly different on another occasion, by a different gonfu server. It was refreshing to hear the personal touch added to the storytelling.  It wasn’t about the accuracy or the truth behind the stories, but rather it was more about the connection being made with the people present.

In the following pages of this essay, I will be retelling some of the stories which I have come to learn.  I have referred to online websites to gather the stories, however I have altered the stories slightly in accordance to my own memory of how the stories were told to me. It is quite common for the version of the story which will be told to you at a gonfu session to alter in accordance to where the story teller is from.  

We will begin with three different versions of the ‘origin of tea’ legends as told by Chinese, Indian and Japanese cultures;

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THE ORIGIN OF TEA (CHINA)

Version 1

Emperor Shen Nong set up camp with his entourage in the shade of a large tree. A fire was made and a pot with boiling water was prepared. The heat of the fire brought some of the leaves of the long branches of the tree to dry out. Suddenly, a fierce wind got up and blew some of the leaves into the pot with boiling water. The water turned golden and a delicious scent appeared. The emperor tried the drink and was delighted by the scent and delicious taste. Being immediately aware of the refreshing and invigorating effect, the emperor let out the sound "T'sa", meaning godlike so that, until today, "cha" is the name for tea in Chinese.

Version 2

In ancient times, people knew little about plants.  To determine which plants were edible, poisonous, or medicinal, Shen Nong tasted various kinds of plants every day.  Fortunately, Shen Nong had a transparent belly, making it possible for him to observe the reactions in his stomach caused by the plants he had eaten.  When he tasted tea leaves, he found that the tea leaves passed through his stomach and intestines, checking for poisons in the stomach and cleaning the intestines.  Shen Nong referred to these leaves as Cha, which has the same pronunciation as “checking the poisons” and it became the plant’s current name (tea).

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THE ORIGIN OF TEA (JAPAN)

Bodhidharma made a pledge of 7 years of meditation, in which he vowed not to sleep.  One night he fell asleep and upon awakening, he was so angered by his failure that he cut off his eyelids and threw them to the ground to prevent himself from falling asleep again. As soon as the eyelids touched the soil, they grew roots which soon developed into a large tea bush.  After picking some of the tea leaves and chewing them, he felt energetic, and he concluded that the tea helped him to stay awake. Until today the Japanese language uses the same character for eyelid and tea.

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THE ORIGIN OF TEA (INDIA)

Fakir Dharma took a vow not to sleep for 7 years. After 5 years, it appeared that he could no longer fight the need to sleep. Full of desperation, due to knowing he would not be able to keep his vow, he grasped a couple of branches off the tree where he had made his camp. He put a few leaves into his mouth and chewed them. Immediately, Dharma experienced a refreshing and invigorating effect, his tiredness evaporated and he could keep his vow.

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As you can tell by reading the preceding stories, each story varies greatly.  The stories told by a gonfu tea server can be creatively imaginative with very little truth, embellished truth or very straightforward facts.  In any case, the stories all serve the purpose of helping the listener to both be entertained and to create a lasting memory.

I will continue with a collection of some well-known and some not so well-known tea stories which have amused tea drinkers for years, decades, and even centuries.  While reading them, keep in mind that you may have heard some of them already, told in a different way.  This is the beauty of Gonfu storytelling!  Each gonfu tea server can retell the story in his/her own way.  The stories are told to make a connection with the guest being served.  If you can tell your story with emotion, sentiment and passion, you just might create in your guest an unforgettable memory and a desire to learn more about tea and tea culture…as it happened with me.

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LONGJING:

In the year 250 AD, there was a drought that took hold a small village in Hangzhou.   The local priest told the villagers that if they prayed to the Dragon who lived in a nearby spring then perhaps he will bring them rain.  They believed that this spring led to an underground sea where the Dragon lived.  It seemed only plausible that this creature could bring them the water from the sea.   The villagers prayed and prayed until finally the rains came.  In honor of the Dragon, the villagers named the village Longching (Dragon Well).

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DA HONG PAO

During the Ming Dynasty, the emperor’s wife had grown gravely ill. He sought the advice of every doctor in the land to try and save his wife, however, nothing could be done to save the dying empress.  He then offered a reward to anybody in the land who could save his wife.  A farmer came to him with a tea which he had made from the leaves of a bush that grew on a high and steep cliff near his home.  As soon as the tea touched the lips of the empress, she began to regain her health.  The emperor was so pleased that he honored the farmer with a gift of his imperial red robes.  In response, the farmer named the tea Da Hong Pao (Red Robe Tea).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TIEGUANYIN

There was a man named Wei Yin in Anxi County who worked diligently in his tea farm and believed in Buddhism. He always offered a cup of tea to Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, in his shrine at every sunrise as well as every sunset for several decades. One-night Guanyin appeared to him in a dream and showed him a unique tea plant between the gaps of rocks. The next morning, Wei Yin followed his dream walking along the creek side to the rocky place and found the tea plant between the rock crevices that he saw in his dream.  With a great excitement, he brought the tea plant home, put it in an iron tripod, and began to cultivate it cautiously.  He treated the tea as a family treasure and brewed the tea only for his important guests. A literati scholar came to have the tea with Wei Yin one day and asked: “What is this great tea?” Wei Yin told the scholar the dream and the discovery. He also told the scholar his intention to name the tea after “Iron Rohat,”, the enlightened Buddhist Dharma protector, because the rocks where the plant was found looked like Rohats, and the plant was cultivated later in the iron pot.

Shaking his head, the scholar said: “Some of the Rohats look too wrathful. How can you name such a precious thing like that? Guanyin appeared in your dream and directed you to the tea, it only suits its elegance to name the tea Tie Guanyin (Iron Goddess of Mercy).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TAI PING HOU KUI

A mother monkey died of grief after losing her child.  A local farmer kindly buried the monkey on his land. The farmer soon dreamt of the monkey guiding him to a place, deep in the forest, where a tea garden was. Upon awaking, he retraced his dreaming steps to verily discover a hidden garden of tea bushes which he plucked to make this tea.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

JASMINE DRAGON PEARL

An orphaned brother and sister lived on the outskirts of Fuzhou. One winter, the brother got very seriously sick and no doctors could help him. An old woman told his sister about a magic dragon who was always helping people in need. The girl decided to go to the dragon’s cave and ask for his help.  The cave was surrounded by jasmine bushes of amazing beauty. She told the dragon about her problem and he promised to help her. Soaring into the sky, the dragon made an ominous cry and a beautiful pearl appeared on his neck, glittering on the sun. A small drop fell from the pearl and onto the ground, where a beautiful tea bush sprouted and started immediately growing. Dragon said to the girl that she should take care of the bush and he disappeared. It rained hard the whole day but the girl looked after the bush not leaving its side even for a moment. Finally, small long leaves appeared on the bush. The girl gathered from the most delicate leaves from the top of each branch, dried them next to jasmine flowers, and made delicate beads, like the one that hung around the neck of a dragon. Returning home, she brewed some tea from these magical leaves and their house was filled with the wonderful aroma of jasmine. Having tasted the miracle drink, her brother quickly recovered.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BI LUO CHUN

The name Biluochun literally means "Green Snail Spring". It is called so because it is a green tea that is rolled into a tight spiral, resembling snail meat, and is cropped early spring. The original name of Bi Luo Chun is Xia Sha Ren Xiang, meaning "scary fragrance". It was so named when a tea picker who ran out of space in her basket, put the tea between her breasts instead. The tea, warmed by her body heat, emitted a strong aroma that surprised the girl.

The Kangxi Emperor visited Lake Tai in the 38th year of his rule. He enjoyed the tea very much and decided to give it a more elegant name, Bi Luo Chun (Green Snail Spring).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

JUN SHAN YIN ZHEN

The Fujian province were experiencing a dry spell which was threatening the lives of the villagers. It was believed that a celestial plant was growing in the Taimu mountain which was guarded by a black dragon. This plant is believed to be able to cure many kinds of illnesses and it will bring up water when the juice of this plant is dropped into the river. Many villages went looking for this special plant but failed and were magicked into rocks in the mountain. A young lady, whose two brothers also went there but were both dead, decided to risk her life. When she reached the mountain, the black dragon attacked her viciously but she cunningly managed to kill the dragon. The young lady then plucked the celestial plant and dropped its juice into the river and onto the people who had been turned into rocks.  They were transformed back into human beings. Thanks to her courage and effort, the villagers were very grateful. They transferred the plant from the mountain and planted it widely in their villages. Due to its silvery white color and needle shape, it was named Yin Zhen (Silver Needle).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

KEEMUN

The name Keemun comes from Qimen county in southern Anhui province, where almost all the mountains are covered with tea bushes. Qimen county produced only green tea until the mid-1870’s. Around that time a young man in the civil service lost his job. Despite being totally heartbroken and completely embarrassed by his shame, he remembered what his father told him – ‘A skill is a better guarantor of a living than precarious officialdom’. Following this advice, the young man packed up his courage and his bags to travel to Fujian Province to learn the secrets of black tea manufacturing. Upon his return to Qimen in 1875 he set up three factories to produce black tea. The black tea method was perfectly suited to the tea leaves produced in this warm moist climate with well drained sandy soil. Before long, the superb flavor of Keemuns became very popular around the world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MILK OOLONG TEA

The moon fell in love with a comet passing through the night sky. The comet, passed by, burned out and vanished. The moon, in her sorrow, caused a great wind to blow through the hills and valleys, bringing about a quick drop in temperature. The next morning, local tea pickers went out to collect their fresh leaf. To their surprise, when the tea was processed it had developed an amazing milky character, which was attributed to the motherly character of the old moon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EARL GREY

The Earl Grey blend is named after Charles Grey, the British Prime Minister in the 1830s.  In 1831, one of Charles Grey’s men rescued a Chinese man from drowning. As a token of his thanks and appreciation, he gave Charles Grey this unique blend of tea as a gift. The Prime Minister enjoyed this unique blend and asked his tea merchants, then headed by Richard Twining II to make it for him and his guests. Everyone was intrigued and delighted by the distinctive hint of bergamot that gave this tea a unique taste, something his guests were not accustomed to. The tea was so popular that when it ran out, Richard Twining agreed to produce and sell this sought-after blend. In those days, it was called, Earl Grey’s Mixture, and later came to be known as Twining’s Earl Grey. However, crucially, Twining omitted to trademark the blend enabling others to enter the market.

I strongly encourage anybody who is interested in serving tea to guest in a gonfu style to spend some time reading the origin stories, the legends and the myths of the teas they will be brewing for their guest.  When combined with your own personal experiences, which you will accumulate throughout the years, you will soon find your guest sitting on the other side of the tea table, utterly intrigued as they watch you brewing the tea, explaining the intricacies of it, the terroir, the age, the cultivar…and then you will take the whole experience to the next level, leaving them with a lasting impression, while they intensely listen to the story of the tea…as only you can tell it!

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” ― Rudyard Kipling

[onerudeflowers]

GM Diaries: Flesh of the Wattle

Write-up for a Chronicles of Darkness RPG session I ran publicly a few days ago! The game is set in 1981 Malaysia with plenty of scares and pulp horror. Players & Characters: Jie Ren as Joanne Luqman as Adam Samwise as Tah Piau Three freelancers are hired by a local magazine to investigate and document Tanjung Kepayang, a kampung located in the Malaysia west coast near Port Dickson where rumors say its people are haunted by a curse. Recent reports say 11 people have disappeared from its nearest highway over the past year. Most of them are written off as runaway teenagers and superstition so the magazine wants material on this story.

While passing by a palm plantation half an hour away from Tanjung Kepayang, the players are viciously tailgated by another car behind them. Although Adam tries to maneuver out of the way, a stray black cow on the highway forces him to brake, collide with the car behind them, and spin out of control. When they wake up, they find their car totaled in a ditch and begin to crawl out. While surveying the damage, a police car from Tanjung Kepayang arrives to help. Two officers offer to bring them back to the kampung and bunk in a guesthouse before they tow the car out in the morning. After grabbing their supplies and tools from the trunk, they agree to follow the police.

After a check-up from the local doctor at the police station, the players are directed to a house owned by a woman named Mah. The house is badly lit and the players notice a strange dark patch growing on a part of her neck, almost like a very bad rash. Mrs. Mah offers her son's former bedroom for the night. Already suspicious, Adam and Tah Piau search the bedroom while Joanne uses the shower.

Adam finds a pair of old postcards and a notebook under some blankets, revealing that Mrs. Mah's son would return on January 1981 contrary to his absence. Meanwhile, Joanne spots something shiny underneath a clump of hair in the shower - a coin covered in disgusting red mucus-like material. Staring at the coin causes her to enter a trance but her willpower fights off the fog right before she is compelled to swallow it. When Joanne looks back at the coin in her hand, the mucus has disappeared. The group share what they found with each other before turning in.

Past midnight, the group hears multiple footsteps running up the stairs towards their room. Alerted, the players reach for whatever is closest to them: Adam grabs his parang, Joanne finds her crowbar, and Tah Piau readies a broken wok from their car. Minutes pass by when the footsteps stop and Adam hears mumbling behind the door before a loud smash rings through the house. The players react quickly in the darkness, a dresser and cupboard is pushed to block the door when they notice a parang slammed through the wood. The lights are turned on to reveal a trio of individuals wearing ghastly chicken suits. In the ensuing fight, one of the chickens are stabbed in the eye and runs away, another dies from a lethal stab, and the last attacker offs himself before any info can be taken from him. Later, Adam finds the runaway chicken dead on the porch from too much blood loss. Frightened and paranoid, Adam stabs the corpse in the heart just in case.

After the skirmish, it's revealed their attackers were Mrs. Mah and two men with more severe versions of the rash on her neck. Among them, they find a note - "Get the tourists at Mrs. Mah's" and a diary belonging to someone named Musa Bin Osman. The diary details a mysterious sickness taking over the village, disappearances, increasing violence and paranoia among the folk. Musa's last entry says that he found safety at the Lee household but things are becoming worse over time. While searching through Mrs. Mah's house for more clues, two police drop by wielding batons in hand. However, Tah Piau's silent intimidation makes them hesitate and drives them away. Other discoveries include a small gold chicken statue beneath a crude filthy altar in the house, dirty clothes and a basket of coins like the one in the shower.

When morning comes, the group follow directions from the diary and make their way towards the Lee household. On their way however, they attract the attention of several neighbours with the same rash on their necks. As they walk, the neighbours exit their homes and gather into a mob on their tail. When a boy shouts for them to hurry in from the Lee household, the group decide to make a final run for it. The mob behind them is angered and break into a run as well. At the last moment, they make it behind the gates while the mob stays outside, unable to get closer. The teenager reveals himself as Musa and says his diary was taken away when he threw it at one of the sick villagers who came too close to the gate. He explains both Mr. Lee left to find help a month ago but never returned, and Mrs. Lee left the house when she got the rash.

After some talking and observations, the group theorises that the sick mob cannot get closer because what controls them fears the Taoist shrine inside the house. There is also a jeep in the porch which is low on fuel. With directions from Musa for the village's gas station, they decide to put the shrine's deities in the back of Mr. Lee's jeep, pile in and escape. Just as the mob returns with a fuel barrel and fireworks to breach the house, Adam reverses right through the gates and guns for the station. Once the jeep is fueled up and far away enough from the mob, the players must make a decision: either drive away and get help, or go directly into the palm plantations where Musa says the sick have disappeared. After a rousing speech from Tah Piau about heroics and the power of nationalism, Adam is able to overcome his avoidance towards any more violence and makes the final vote for taking the evil head on.

Deep inside the palm plantation, the group eventually arrive at a clearing where an old abandoned British bungalow was built. In the clearing, a man dressed in a ruined suit is accompanied by three more chicken-suited individuals. Each of them is seen with their hands outstretch towards a towering black pillar near the middle of the clearing, chained at the base to large industrial machinery near the treeline. The men chant and shout, and the tower begins to transform - the black surface rumbles and bubbles in some grotesque organic mockery. Before the ritual can be completed, Adam orders his colleagues and Musa off the jeep, speaks a prayer, and rams the jeep right into one of the chains. By crashing the jeep, the chain is snapped and the pillar falls on top of the cultists. Above, black smoke billow in huge dark plumes from the shattered pillar into the sky.

---

Several months later, the players gather in a mamak to meet their contact from the magazine. After an ad for drinking stout, the news reports a village on the west coast infected by a deadly disease, and the rise of dangerus highway pranksters who force passing cars into ditches by tailgaiting them. The magazine's contact, one Zainol Fakir arrives and negotiates with the players a way to run their story anonymously in their new 'human interest stories' section. The header reads MASTIKA.

[thessaliah]

rue/krahe

First impression: "She's beautiful and graceful, I hope she's not a very nasty villain."

Impression now: My daughter, I'll kill for you. When you see those "villainess" heroines of the latest fad, they are just Rue done wrong. Rue broke the fated "storytelling" and got the Prince already. She also followed up on her role and defied it. Rue is a quintessential abused child starved for love who does a lot of bad things influenced by her upbringing, the raven blood she was fed as a child, her fear of being left alone, her "father's" threats of violence, but she's unable to take it too far. She half-assed it because she can't commit to her role as villainess even if she was the one with the raven's tainted blood since she was a baby.

Favorite moment: Rue's dramatic love confession to Mytho to stop him from giving his heart to her "father." It was such an amazing build-up, the VA totally nailed it.

Idea for a story: Rue's struggles after becoming Mytho's princess, slow-burn romance for two broken "not so perfect" prince/princess. Rue searches for her biological family.

Unpopular opinion: I’ve been out of touch with this fandom for ages. But just in case: Mytho/Rue isn't unhealthy. They were both in unhealthy circumstances, under the influence of something supernatural that made them act abusive to each other. They metaphorically defeated their abuser together and released each other from their darkness through their love for each other. That Mytho's love for Rue makes him want to be selfish to want to prioritize one person over the other isn't bad, it shows he's more than a perfect prince now, but also a man in love who is becoming aware of this (and this is probably a love of his missing emotions fixated on Rue). Rue overcame her selfishness and possessiveness and went from trying to stop Mytho from recovering his heart in fear of losing him, to try to bind him to her misunderstanding his relationship and under the influence of the Raven, to selflessly sacrifice her own life for his sake.

Favorite relationship: Mytho. But I absolutely adore her friendship with Ahiru and I'll also ship it a bit if I wasn't absolutely satisfied with Fakir/Ahiru and Mytho/Rue. Don't mind an OT4.

Favorite headcanon: I kinda dig the fan-theory Fakir and Rue were siblings. The one that Fakir was trying to write a story to recover his younger sister who was stolen by ravens and this backfired and his parents died as result, scarring him mentally to forget he had a baby sister and only barely recalling the incident.

[saiorgseo]

chennai to shirdi flight packages

Valuable Lessons of Sai Baba

 Beyond the miracles of Baba, there is one bright, marvelous fact, worthy of people’s adoration and that is, his golden heart of love with its message of universal love.  Baba loved all - Hindus, Moslems, Christians, and Buddhists, the learned and the illiterate, the poor and the rich, the priest and the criminal - alike.  His message to all his devotees is ‘Love ye, one another, as I love you all’.

 Baba declared that if people hated one another, his heart was smarting with pain and sorrow and if persons forgave enemies and endured the ill-treatment, he was highly please.  This is the most valuable lesson for this day and for all time.  A story is told in Bhagavatha of the world going as a cow to Brahma, groaning under  the weight of the cruel Asuras harassing innocent people.  That is just the spectacle all over the world to day. Hatred, destruction, plunder, and absolute disregard for truth and virtue, are the   chennai to shirdi flight packages   predominant features in the daily history of the world to-day.  Man’s claws and teeth are red with the gore of brother man; and the criminal is not apologetic but blatant.  Civilisation is in imminent danger of being submerged in pools of human blood and devastating fire leaving the human form a fossil to be discovered within some rocks by some later race.  Sri Sairam Subhayatra offers you. The only thing that can avert this doom is love, a revival of the very ancient message to Asuras from God ‘Dayadhwam’ i.e., ‘Be merciful’.

 Baba’s whole life was an illustration of how this divine message could be carried out in life, and the more Baba’s message is heeded, circulated, and preached, the greater is the hope for humanity avoiding the threatened catastrophe.  

 One species of miraculous achievements wrought by Baba for the benefit of his devotees is the blessing given for issue.  Whenever Baba blessed anybody and said that there would be issue, invariably the lady brought forth the child, either male or female, in twelve months, exactly as stated by Baba.  

 In 1886, Baba died his first death.  One day when sitting along with his devotee Mahisapathy in the Dwaraka Mayi (as his mosque was named by him), Baba said that he was going to Allah and that consequently for three days his body was to be looked after for, after that period, he might return to the body, and that in case he did not do so, the body should be interred near the mosque.  Presently Baba’s body became a corpse.  An inquest was held over the same and the officer holding the inquest insisted on Mahlsapathy burying the body.  But Mahlsapathy vehemently opposed the proposal and succeeded in preventing the internment.  On the fourth day, Baba’s body revived and for thirty-two years thereafter, Baba worked through that living fleshy case and finally left it on the 15th October, 1981, with the same prescience and clear control over all the circumstances which he showed in 1886.  This leaving of the body at will and returning to it at pleasure is an art, a siddhi, described in the Yoga Sastras; and Baba’s exercise of such powers convinced and would convince many of the truth of the Sastras.  

 One noticeable feature of Baba’s life after his return to the body was that he began to encourage the arrival of bhaktas to his feet.  Evidently the object of his return to his body was to carry out his mission more fully and for a longer period on earth, especially with reference to the devotees and others bound to him by former ties, rinanubandha.  

 Baba’s own miraculous personality surviving his release from his physical body has however been the principal reason for the success of all this propaganda. His power is still working and by reason of that along, myriads in Madras and other Presidencies have become firm adherents to, and worshippers of, Baba.  The faith is well grounded in the experience showered upon them now as liberally and miraculously, as they were showered before Baba’s passing away.  Baba’s figure is occasionally seen by, and his wondrous powers are manifested to, those that have the necessary faith, at any place, as Baba has no partiality and his grace cannot be the monopoly of any person or place.  All of us like to go to shirdi to visit Sai Baba. Best is organized by Sri Sairam Subhayatra. Wonders are being worked by him today at various places and therefore Sai Mandirs have sprung up in many of them.

 Real Facts of Sai Baba

 Baba, however, is not a mere worker of miracles.  He is a Samartha Sadguru.  He applies miracles or miraculous means to fill with faith and gratitude the hearts of devotees.  Gratitude soon turns into love and then Baba’s real work is seen.  Baba purifies the hearts of all of the dross of low attachments and their consequences, and gradually raises the devotees’ souls to loftier and still loftier states of being, till they finally merge into himself. People begin with the notion that Baba is a kind provider of all that they need and in fact resort to him to have their temporal needs satisfied.  But they discover (at least many do) that Baba is after all their Ishtamurthi, their own Rama or Siva, the God of their fathers who has now taken a new shape to carry out the ancient divine plan of the Universe, and that ‘God fulfils himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world’.

 Baba’s antecedents as mentioned already were revealed by himself.  Even after they are fully considered, still the question must be deemed doubtful whether he was a Hindu or a Moslem.  But (Janma or Jathi) by actual birth, he was of Brahmin parents, and hence by a very large number of persons, he is considered to be a Brahmin.  But according to Baba’s own statement, he was handed over in his very infancy to a fakir who brought him up for about five years according to Islamic faith.  After the death of the fakir, Baba was handed over to a Brahmin Guru by name Sri Gopal Rao Deshmukh of ‘Venkusa’.  The stay of ten years under this Guru and the marvelous initiation into divinity by the Guru’s purna kripa, ought to clear all doubts, and establish that Baba was Brahmin or at least a Brahmin.  

 But as fate would have it, the Guru after conferring upon Baba his purnakripa and raising him to divinity, directed him to go westwards and Baba had to spend the rest of his life in a mosque moving with all alike as an ativarnasrami, i.e., one beyond all caste rules.  We do not know what an expert lawyer would conclude as to Baba’s caste in these circumstances.  But whatever that may be, to those who considered him a Moslem, he responded as a Moslem and to those who cared to treat him as a Hindu, he responded as a Hindu; and he expounded the Koran to the former and the Sastras to the latter. By the Hindus, he has been worshipped as Ramavatara or Sriman Narayana for so many decades while others treated him as merely human.  This reminds us of an incident about Krishna.  When Sri Krishna went with Balarama and others to a yagasala and wanted food, the Brahmins were wondering whether they could offer the food prepared for gods to Krishna, who appeared to have been born in a Kshatriya family but brought up among (Vysias) cowherds.  He was regarded as God by many, but the Brahmins were doubtful about his caste.  By reason of their ignorance (ajanna) they offered no food at all to Krishna.  Then Sri Krishna sent word to the ladies, who ran up all at once with great devotion and gave up all that they had prepared for the Gods to him whom they considered as the God of Gods.  Exactly the same  chennai to shirdi flight packages  thing happens now.  Our gives comfort feel, safe and happy journey. Persons whose pious leanings render they easily attracted to such great souls as Baba run up to Baba and never bother their heads over questions of his Jathi or caste, and like the Brahmin ladies, deserved and obtain the highest blessings while many doubting Thomasses (samscyatmas) even of the highest castes, go on debating endlessly about the question of the caste to which a holy man belongs and lose their chance of benefiting themselves here and hereafter.

 It depends a great deal upon once’s poorva sambanda or rinanubhanda whether one is attracted by Sri Krishna or Sri Sai; it may be noted that persons wish to discuss this question of caste only when their feelings have not been roused. But when one is in intense pain or great trouble, his heart leaps out with the request, ‘Baba, help me’, never minding a brass pin as to where Baba was born or how he was brought up; and once he receives innumerable and miraculous benefits, he gets perfectly convinced that Baba is God to him, whatever he may be to others and he cares not for discussions as to the legal position regarding Baba’s caste.  Baba himself used to say at times to such Hindus as considered him a Moslem: “I am a Moslem, don’t come to me” and to persons who regarded him as Sad Guru or Guru-God: ‘I am a Brahmin.  Give me dakshina.  This place wherein I am sitting is not a mosque; it is a Brahmin’s mosque; it is Dwaraka Mayee’.  He was everything to everyone.  

 Apart from Baba’s caste, some persons raise the question whether he was a Brahmagnani and if so how he happened to perform miracles.  

Sai Baba’s leelas were purely unmotivated by desire.  His whole life in the flesh was one continuous self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity.  In serving Man, he was serving God; and he advised his devotees to do the same.

 chennai to shirdi flight packages

[saiorgseo]

shirdi flight packages from chennai

Valuable Lessons of Sai Baba

 Beyond the miracles of Baba, there is one bright, marvelous fact, worthy of people’s adoration and that is, his golden heart of love with its message of universal love.  Baba loved all - Hindus, Moslems, Christians, and Buddhists, the learned and the illiterate, the poor and the rich, the priest and the criminal - alike.  His message to all his devotees is ‘Love ye, one another, as I love you all’.

 Baba declared that if people hated one another, his heart was smarting with pain and sorrow and if persons forgave enemies and endured the ill-treatment, he was highly please.  This is the most valuable lesson for this day and for all time.  A story is told in Bhagavatha of the world going as a cow to Brahma, groaning under  shirdi flight packages from chennai  the weight of the cruel Asuras harassing innocent people.  That is just the spectacle all over the world to day.  Hatred, destruction, plunder, and absolute disregard for truth and virtue, are the predominant features in the daily history of the world to-day. Man’s claws and teeth are red with the gore of brother man; and the criminal is not apologetic but blatant. Civilisation is in imminent danger of being submerged in pools of human blood and devastating fire leaving the human form a fossil to be discovered within some rocks by some later race. Sri Sairam Subhayatra offers you. The only thing that can avert this doom is love, a revival of the very ancient message to Asuras from God ‘Dayadhwam’ i.e., ‘Be merciful’.

 Baba’s whole life was an illustration of how this divine message could be carried out in life, and the more Baba’s message is heeded, circulated, and preached, the greater is the hope for humanity avoiding the threatened catastrophe.  

 One species of miraculous achievements wrought by Baba for the benefit of his devotees is the blessing given for issue.  Whenever Baba blessed anybody and said that there would be issue, invariably the lady brought forth the child, either male or female, in twelve months, exactly as stated by Baba.  

 In 1886, Baba died his first death.  One day when sitting along with his devotee Mahisapathy in the Dwaraka Mayi (as his mosque was named by him), Baba said that he was going to Allah and that consequently for three days his body was to be looked after for, after that period, he might return to the body, and that in case he did not do so, the body should be interred near the mosque.  Presently Baba’s body became a corpse.  An inquest was held over the same and the officer holding the inquest insisted on Mahlsapathy burying the body.  But Mahlsapathy vehemently opposed the proposal and succeeded in preventing the internment.  On the fourth day, Baba’s body revived and for thirty-two years thereafter, Baba worked through that living fleshy case and finally left it on the 15th October, 1981, with the same prescience and clear control over all the circumstances which he showed in 1886.  This leaving of the body at will and returning to it at pleasure is an art, a siddhi, described in the Yoga Sastras; and Baba’s exercise of such powers convinced and would convince many of the truth of the Sastras.  

 One noticeable feature of Baba’s life after his return to the body was that he began to encourage the arrival of bhaktas to his feet.  Evidently the object of his return to his body was to carry out his mission more fully and for a longer period on earth, especially with reference to the devotees and others bound to him by former ties, rinanubandha.  

 Baba’s own miraculous personality surviving his release from his physical body has however been the principal reason for the success of all this propaganda. His power is still working and by reason of that along, myriads in Madras and other Presidencies have become firm adherents to, and worshippers of, Baba.  The faith is well grounded shirdi flight packages from chennai   in the experience showered upon them now as liberally and miraculously, as they were showered before Baba’s passing away.  Baba’s figure is occasionally seen by, and his wondrous powers are manifested to, those that have the necessary faith, at any place, as Baba has no partiality and his grace cannot be the monopoly of any person or place.  All of us like to go to shirdi to visit Sai Baba. Best is organized by Sri Sairam Subhayatra. Wonders are being worked by him today at various places and therefore Sai Mandirs have sprung up in many of them.

 Real Facts of Sai Baba

 Baba, however, is not a mere worker of miracles.  He is a Samartha Sadguru.  He applies miracles or miraculous means to fill with faith and gratitude the hearts of devotees.  Gratitude soon turns into love and then Baba’s real work is seen.  Baba purifies the hearts of all of the dross of low attachments and their consequences, and gradually raises the devotees’ souls to loftier and still loftier states of being, till they finally merge into himself. People begin with the notion that Baba is a kind provider of all that they need and in fact resort to him to have their temporal needs satisfied.  But they discover (at least many do) that Baba is after all their Ishtamurthi, their own Rama or Siva, the God of their fathers who has now taken a new shape to carry out the ancient divine plan of the Universe, and that ‘God fulfils himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world’.

 Baba’s antecedents as mentioned already were revealed by himself.  Even after they are fully considered, still the question must be deemed doubtful whether he was a Hindu or a Moslem.  But (Janma or Jathi) by actual birth, he was of Brahmin parents, and hence by a very large number of persons, he is considered to be a Brahmin.  But according to Baba’s own statement, he was handed over in his very infancy to a fakir who brought him up for about five years according to Islamic faith.  After the death of the fakir, Baba was handed over to a Brahmin Guru by name Sri Gopal Rao Deshmukh of ‘Venkusa’.  The stay of ten years under this Guru and the marvelous initiation into divinity by the Guru’s purna kripa, ought to clear all doubts, and establish that Baba was Brahmin or at least a Brahmin.  

 But as fate would have it, the Guru after conferring upon Baba his purnakripa and raising him to divinity, directed him to go westwards and Baba had to spend the rest of his life in a mosque moving with all alike as an ativarnasrami, i.e., one beyond all caste rules.  We do not know what an expert lawyer would conclude as to Baba’s caste in these circumstances.  But whatever that may be, to those who considered him a Moslem, he responded as a Moslem and to those who cared to treat him as a Hindu, he responded as a Hindu; and he expounded the Koran to the former and the Sastras to the latter. By the Hindus, he has been worshipped as Ramavatara or Sriman Narayana for so many decades while others treated him as merely human.  This reminds us of an incident about Krishna.  When Sri Krishna went with Balarama and others to a yagasala and wanted food, the Brahmins were wondering whether they could offer the food shirdi flight packages from chennai   prepared for gods to Krishna, who appeared to have been born in a Kshatriya family but brought up among (Vysias) cowherds.  He was regarded as God by many, but the Brahmins were doubtful about his caste.  By reason of their ignorance (ajanna) they offered no food at all to Krishna.  Then Sri Krishna sent word to the ladies, who ran up all at once with great devotion and gave up all that they had prepared for the Gods to him whom they considered as the God of Gods.  Exactly the same thing happens now.  Our gives comfort feel, safe and happy journey. Persons whose pious leanings render they easily attracted to such great souls as Baba run up to Baba and never bother their heads over questions of his Jathi or caste, and like the Brahmin ladies, deserved and obtain the highest blessings while many doubting Thomasses (samscyatmas) even of the highest castes, go on debating endlessly about the question of the caste to which a holy man belongs and lose their chance of benefiting themselves here and hereafter.

 It depends a great deal upon once’s poorva sambanda or rinanubhanda whether one is attracted by Sri Krishna or Sri Sai; it may be noted that persons wish to discuss this question of caste only when their feelings have not been roused. But when one is in intense pain or great trouble, his heart leaps out with the request, ‘Baba, help me’, never minding a brass pin as to where Baba was born or how he was brought up; and once he receives innumerable and miraculous benefits, he gets perfectly convinced that Baba is God to him, whatever he may be to others and he cares not for discussions as to the legal position regarding Baba’s caste.  Baba himself used to say at times to such Hindus as considered him a Moslem: “I am a Moslem, don’t come to me” and to persons who regarded him as Sad Guru or Guru-God: ‘I am a Brahmin.  Give me dakshina.  This place wherein I am sitting is not a mosque; it is a Brahmin’s mosque; it is Dwaraka Mayee’.  He was everything to everyone.  

 Apart from Baba’s caste, some persons raise the question whether he was a Brahmagnani and if so how he happened to perform miracles.  

Sai Baba’s leelas were purely unmotivated by desire.  His whole life in the flesh was one continuous self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity.  In serving Man, he was serving God; and he advised his devotees to do the same.

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