#it almost feels like I have a duty

[strawberry-jan]

Back in late 2022, I started working on a long story about Ishin: a tale of two dummies whose weird one-night stand blossoms into a surprisingly caring relationship even as a (mostly) canon-compliant series of tragedies plays out around them. It’s a now-complete series in approximately 125,000 words and three parts, and you can read the whole thing right now on AO3: The Glorious and Bloody Deeds of Okita Soji, Volume 1: Okita Soji Versus the Scoundrel Saito Hajime; The Secret History of Saito Hajime, Volume 2: The Shiraume Incident; and, finally, Brief Notes on the Domestic Life of one Saito Hajime.

Taken as a whole, it's a story about identity and history and the stories that people tell each other and themselves about those things. And it's a story about one guy getting way too into weird Edo-era egg dishes, and another guy finding himself embroiled in an extended detective sequence, and a third guy composing a series of corny haiku that (almost) nobody wants to read. And, of course, it's also a story about people who are shamelessly and sometimes explicitly in love (so you probably shouldn't read it at work).

This whole big, sprawling thing has been a labour of love on my part: it turns out that I adore writing historical fiction and finding excuses to read books and journal articles in order to write it better. In addition to making not one but four little illustrations to celebrate the fic's completion (and please look at them up-close; I hand-inked all those kimono patterns), I've drawn up a list of some of the sources that I consulted for my writing, and you can find those under the cut.

This is not an absolutely exhaustive list of sources; I don’t think it’s super useful to catalogue the extremely nitty-gritty stuff, like that time that I felt compelled to find out what the state of strawberry cultivation was in 1860s Japan, or when I needed to picture exactly what it looked like when Haruka was repairing Ryoma’s kimono. That being said, I’ve added a couple of things that are really particular to my stories but that I thought were cool enough to share.

Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. U of California P, 2015. (This one was a really fun read – it combines a short history of yokai in folklore with a little catalogue of yokai.)

Jansen, Marius B. Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration. Stanford UP, 1971. (Super useful as an introduction to the Bakumatsu era and for biographical details about Ryoma and the figures around him.)

“Japanese Wiki Corpus.” https://www.japanesewiki.com/. (This is a machine-translated collection of articles on the Japanese side of Wikipedia related to Kyoto. As with a lot of things on Wikipedia, the citations on these articles tend to be poor or nonexistent, but it’s a useful starting point for information on figures and events that don’t have an English wiki equivalent. Definitely more useful if you can then head over to the original wiki articles and parse them out yourself.)

“Kabuki21” and “The Noh.” https://www.kabuki21.com/section.php, https://www.the-noh.com/en/plays/index.html. (I’m lumping these two together because I tended to consult them in tandem. Without getting too much into my personal details I am – among other things – a non-practicing theatre scholar, so whenever I wanted to have characters in my old-timey fics refer to something cultural, my first stop was old plays. These sites have, respectively, summaries of kabuki plays and full texts of Noh plays available for you to browse. If you’ve read my other fics you will probably have seen that I referred to the kabuki play “Fuwa” in 亀が如く.)

Katsu, Kokichi. Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai. Translated by Teruko Craig. U of Arizona P, 1988. (A book that needs to be taken with a grain of salt because it’s an autobiography written by a guy who sounds like a real blowhard, but it’s still a really fascinating look into the daily life of a low-ranking samurai.)

Leupp, Gary P. and Tao, De-min. The Tokugawa World. Routledge, 2022. (Of particular interest is Kimura Sachihiko’s essay, “The Shinsengumi: Shadows and light in the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate” [1104-1124], which gave me a bunch of incidental details about the Roshigumi that I incorporated into the sections of this series that were told from Inoue and Hijikata’s perspectives.)

“Old Photos of Japan.” https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/. (Pretty self-explanatory. Very useful as a resource for picturing scenes!)

“Shinsengumi Archives.” https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/. (A long-running tumblr dedicated to cataloguing resources about the Shinsengumi. There’s an absolute wealth of information collected here, and best of all, the creator cites their sources and even provides links to the original texts. Although it’s focused on the Shinsengumi, it’s impossible to overstate how useful this site is for prospective Bakumatsu-era fic writers in general. The collection of Hijikata’s poems with links to others’ translations and commentary is here: https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/post/683071924948058112/hijikata-toshizos-haiku-poems. The creator of the blog also links to a translation of Nagakura’s and Shimada’s diaries, and while the document is machine-translated, it’s still a great source of historical details: https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/post/678083336614428672/where-can-you-read-the-memoirs.)

Smits, Gregory. “Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints.” EASTM 30 (2009): 9-31. (Okay, this one is highly specific to my fic – it comes up in Part 2 when Okita tells his story about Kashima and again a couple of chapters later when his pile of remedies includes a crudely-drawn picture meant to ward off indigestion – but I love little details like this so I did want to make a point of sharing it here.)

“Tamago Hyakuchin” and “Tofu Hyakuchin.” http://codh.rois.ac.jp/edo-cooking/tamago-hyakuchin/recipe/, https://toyama-tofu.jp/tofuhyakutin.html. (These are collections of Edo-era egg- and tofu-based recipes. They’re two of the sources cited in Cookpad’s collection of modernized Edo-era recipes: https://cookpad.com/recipe/list/14604664.)

Vaporis, Constantine N. “Linking the Realm: The Gokaido Highway Network in Early Modern Japan (1603-1868).” Highways, Byways and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World. Ed. Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 90-105. (Some of the works cited in this article also sound interesting, but I didn’t have a chance to dig any deeper as I just wanted to know a bit about the Tokugawa-era roads. Also interesting in this vein is Jilly Traganou’s book The Tokaido Road: Travelling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan [2004].)

Wert, Michael. Meiji Restoration Losers. Harvard UP, 2013. (Not directly useful as a source for writing about Ishin – it’s about later events and it mostly tracks the posthumous construction of one specific Tokugawa magistrate’s history – but it was an engaging read and I found it interesting as an exploration of how people continue to look back on the Bakumatsu era and the Meiji Restoration, which is something that the game is, of course, also doing.)

Yamakawa, Kikue. Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life. Translated by Kate Wildman Nakai. U of Tokyo P, 1992. (Another one of those bits of essential reading on everyday life for low-ranking samurai, this time with a focus on women’s lives and households more generally. I didn’t use a lot of from this book in my fic, but it has everything from translations of songs to records of families’ financial transactions, and it’s fascinating to read about all the turmoil in Mito playing out in the background of these families’ lives.)

“Yokai.com.” https://yokai.com/. (The creators of this site make a point of not going into detail about their sources, and they’re very careful to state that they don’t intend for the project to be “the final authority” on yokai, but I enjoyed browsing the site to get some ideas for Okita’s stories – and once you know the name of a particular yokai that you’re interested in, it’s easy enough to go look up other sources on them.)

[petricorah]

zuko alone pt 2

lovingly inspired by this [ids in alt]

[torgawl]

i keep thinking about how “is this what justice means to you, answer me neuvillette”, despite having been used in a case all those hundred of years ago, was probably a question that haunted - and still haunts - neuvilette during the entire time he has been chief of justice. i keep thinking about how they highlighted his struggles through time with both carole and wriothesley's trials. how guilty and powerless neuvillette must have felt for not being able to support and save those he recognised as vulnerable and victims before a system that corrupted their fates but that he wasn't able to change despite his position. the theme of being a casualty of a system no matter if you're the victim or the perpetrator in its eyes. the way neuvillette took, in both cases, things into his own hands. even if it was too late to fix the hurting carole and those who cared for her went through, even if it was too late to save her life; even if it was impossible to change wriothesley's past, his verdict and subsequent imprisonment; neuvillette went above and beyond, making use of his influence, to allow both melusines and wriothesley the opportunity of a better future - to melusines by making sure they weren't discriminated, to wriothesley by supporting his attempt at a second chance in life. i think part of the reason he's so intriguing is our awareness that this internal conflict he's bound to have is so complex. you have a chief of justice, or a judge, that is supposed to be imparcial and follow the law stictly confronted with situations of social injustice, unable to protect those who rely on him. you have someone who understands better than anyone what it means to be an outcast, being able to relate to those who are ostracised and have their pain weaponise against them. you have, in vautrin's case, a friend who cannot even showcase his own pain and is still expected to fullfil his juridical duties despite being personally related with those involved in the case. someone who people constantly turn to but whom he feels like he has no right to turn to himself. it's about the conflict between his feelings and his duty, between what's expected of him and what he can actually do. i think that's why the end of his story quest is so emotional and why it's so heartwarming to have him realise he isn't an outcast anymore, that he has a community there for him too. because a system is a system and he will probably never be able to save everyone, because yes he isn't human, but it doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to belong or that an active demonstration of love towards individuals and people he can relate to rather than the theoretical concept of humanity isn't meaningful. in fact, i'd it's a lot about that, about finding ways to be kind and how community gives meaning to life; how personal relationships and targeted kindness can shape society, or at least i think so

[dairyfreenugget]

(Going insane boinkinh one AU in my head)

Hey hey hey

May I interest you in

(Slowly slides my FaaF AU towards you but void just Disappears without a trace one day before the accolade)

Teehee

[shadow0-1]

Kisses - Back

[thronealigned]

we're on astrai lockdown this weekend i guess. i've been working on their backstory some.... completely ignoring the (vaguely implied?) timeline implications of [SPOILERS] i've decided they grew up in nerosyan during the fourth crusade (they're like 25 in 4715, which i think explains a lot of their cringefailism, they're really very young). so i've gotta re-evaluate their dynamic with galfrey a little bit now because they should definitely have Some sort of emotion about her beyond just "my boss that i often disagree with but variably respect" - originally all of the emotional weight & tension there was wholly on galfrey's end, there was Something almost vaguely there but wholly unreciprocated (this train of thought/angle on their relationship coming entirely from one specific dialogue exchange in iz that i'll go back to grab a screenshot of eventually), but hmmmmm! she's such a mythologized idolized figure, in nerosyan even more than the rest of mendev... obviously their opinion on her as a leader/authority is completely tied to their pre-KC opinion of the crusades (then the actual plot of the game also, and the, hm, shit she pulls throughout) (i mean that affectionately), but their opinion on her As A Person (as much as they're ever even capable of viewing her as such?)........ i'm not sure!

actually i have scraps of backstory writing from last night that probably summarizes some of this (under the cut):

Most vividly, they remember the noise– they never liked crowds. The queen's speech in front of the capital's wardstone, two bright holy objects painful to look at in the unrelenting light of noon (both, they come to learn, equally fallible).

This is the way the world is; this is all it will ever be; the stalemate will continue forever. The demons won't win. The crusaders won't lose. People die and are replaced by the endless stream of boats sailing up the West Sellen. There is no hope nor hopelessness. There's simply eternity. The fixed state of the universe.

already a little bit of that aeon-ish mindset there, right... also notable is the lack of belief in victory & loss both. mostly they just can't conceptualize it ever Ending, or anything ever changing in any meaningful way (yknow much like galfrey can't envision an After either!). obviously their time as knight commander and mythic evolution changes that outlook in dome way but i need to think about that progression more...

anyway essay over. i Am actually committing to ocposting i guess!

[sparklestheunicorn]

I can see you is so pen and kelsea coded

[zanderism]

realistically when i die i want my body to be donated to science, in hopes that further research is done on transgender bodies so that future generations of trans people have more information to go off of, and hopefully with said studies on my body we can reach an age where trans people are less polarized, more accepted, and things like surgeries and hormones are much more accessible.

i do not want a funeral. i do not want to be buried. i do not want to be cremated. give me to science.

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: December 26

"Decay" by Kxllswxtch

[constellationcrowned]

((It makes me sad that (especially coming from Roui) the severity of Kariom's duty is greatly diminished in both severity and importance. He's not just a star-reader he was chosen by the King to decipher them for all Tsourai. When he calls himself a savior it isn't entirely out of pride or hubris; he's telling the truth. It's a duty that can (and will, and has) potentially destroy him, even kill him, but one that he can't back down from or falter in because if Kariom makes a mistake?? Even one??? It's, to his understanding, completely over and he wouldn't be able to handle it. He cannot disappoint them, nor can he abandon them, and to fail in the slightest would be doing just that. It would be detrimental to the people that he loves and that, to say nothing of wider consequences, is unfathomable.))

[bogfroggy]

hmm had a nap and woke up feeling horribly lonely. feeling very Alone On A Friday Night

[fortes-fortuna-iogurtum]

area retail worker called in to tell her boss that she’s feeling terribly and probably won’t be able to come in to work today, 41 dead 113 injured

[kii2me2ii2]

omori's inclinations towards self isolation is so realistic and similar to my own it's almost disturbing and very nearly triggering... very. nearly.

[starbound-tactician]

It's not ok for it to nearly be 2023 and we are still fighting for women's rights and black rights and lgbtq rights and NOW WE ALSO HAVE TO FIGHT OVER THE RIGHT TO HAVE AN ADVERTISEMENT FREE SKY? ON TOP OF ALL THAT *AND* THE FACT THAT MOTHERFUCKERS ARE STILL POLLUTING THE PLANET?

Maybe this is why people can't see themselves living to be old anymore. Maybe it's because the longer we live the more outrageous things get fucked up until we just can't see a future where we can live in anymore. What the fuck. This is so fucked.

[karinyosa]

if i ever played jesus he would be the slimiest most decrepit doesn’t shower or sleep neurotic unwell emotional roller coaster dissociated from the human form motherfucker ever and if i ever played judas he would be a smarmy twink.

[amarillokidding]

Shoutout to my Dad's inversion table that he left in my room and takes up too much space. I covered it with my old ass Barbie blanket so my cats don't scratch at it and I'm hoping to sell it at some point for AT LEAST $300 it's super strong, nicely padded, hasnt been properly used for like 2 yrs, and is almost like new. Hopefully I can use that money to pay my way back from that college ordeal LOL