#was trying to figure out how to stylize them. we barely had translations at the time I think

[crimsonbits]

oh my god I rediscovered this sketch I did back when Unconnected Marketeers first fully released that I never finished.

Man if only I had time for my 1000+ drawing ideas but I'm too busy w my full time job to draw all the touhous I want :(

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach  -Name Games

I did Rose’s sword because it’s super cool and elaborate, but I figure I can’t leave the other Visored out to dry, even if most of them don’t have a lot going on with their zanpakutou.

In general I tried to go over the Visored’s personal names already a while back.  (I actually feel like I did a disservice by trying to cram them all into one, and looking back on it it was a sloppy assessment, but oh well...) And I’ve covered Shinji’s Sakanade in that old post and Hiyori’s KubikiriOrochi recently...  Mashiro and Hacchi never even released their swords... So, that really only leaves Love, Kensei, and Risa...

In Kensei’s case it couldn’t be more straight forward Tachikaze(断地風) is written as  断:”Sever” 地:”Ground” 風:”Wind,” and Viz rightly translates it as “Earth-Severing wind.’   The release call, Futtobase(吹っ飛ばせ) means to “Blow off” as in “to Blow on + to Scatter,” Viz called this “Blast away” which is a little off base, but has a certain double play that I’m actually super surprised they caught,  because Futtobase(ふっとばせ) and Buttobase(ぶっとばせ) are super close and Buttobase(打っ飛ばせ) is “to send flying” or “to knock down/off (their) feet” which is in line with Kensei’s brawler delinquent demeanor.  But this way “Blast off” sounds both like wind scattering something like dust, as well as a blast knocking someone off their feet.

So, the name can be taken pretty literally, but as far as references that Kubo might have been making; Tachikaze was a class of naval Destroyer in operation during the 1970s (Vietnam War), as well as the name of a specific Minekaze class Destroyer operating the 1930s(Sino-Japanese war).  In general Destroyers are typically fast moving and used as escort ships for larger, slower ships as part of a convoy.  In the case of these ships, and in the case of other media that have used the name, typically Tachikaze(太刀風) is actually written  太: “thick” 刀:”Sword” 風:”Wind,” where Tachi(太刀) is also a specific type of Japanese sword.  The name evokes a great cutting wind like a gale or a hurricane.

I think, if anything, the name might be a nod the 1970s Destroyer class ship, because of Kensei’s initial outfit having a vaguely modern miltiary style about it: Combat boots, tactical cargo pants, short cropped hair, and his sword even having a rubber grip and finger loop like a combat knife rather than any kind of traditional Japanese weapon --even though he later swerved more toward a bosozoku gimmick.  He also has a move identified in the UNMASKED databook as Bakudan(爆弾突き),  爆弾:”Bomb” 突き:”Thrust” which has a bit of a military weaponry vibe.

I also tie it to the Vietnam war in particular because in general the Visored all had specific outdated styles of dress when first introduced, which seemed super deliberate on Kubo’s part but never really got elaborated on.

Shinji’s Brit mod look, Kensei’s Vietnam War fatigues, Mashiro’s Himitsu Goranger tights, and Rose’s shoujo bishonen look all tie them to the 1970s. I’m not super sure about Hacchi’s look... He almost looks like a host?  A tacky lounge singer?? a bad prom tux???  And Risa’s sailor-fuku is kind of broadly attributable to anywhere from the 1920s to modern day. (although sailor-fuku as school uniforms have seen substantial decline as school uniforms since the open sexual fetishization of them in the 1980s.)  Also both Love and Hiyori just have a kind of slacker/mountain hick sweatsuit/tracksuit aesthetics, which aren’t exactly era specific...  Although if we assume Love’s afro is actually a punch perm that was very much a 70s-80s trend.

Anyway... that was a big tangent, but the point was that maybe Kensei’s sword is a reference to a Vietnam War destroyer ship because of the 1970s.  Kensei’s bankai adds Tekken(鐡拳) to the name, and just like the videogame series it means “Iron Fist.”  There’s really not a lot to that one.

Love’s sword is a simple yet weird one.  The name Tengumaru(天狗丸) is just Tengu(天狗) and the suffix -maru(丸) which really just serves the function of making it a name.  I would imagine the Tengu is a pretty well recognized bit of Japanese mythology, even outside of Japan by now.  There’s a neat history to them and how they got their name, and the way they look in art, and their shifting role in folk lore and mythology from antagonistic bringers of war to benevolent, if still dangerous, protectors of the mountains and nature, as well as their association with the Japanese religion of Shugendo in particular...  But none of that seems to be referenced here.  In fact there doesn’t appear to be any actual reference to the Tengu at work at all....

Love’s mask is a pretty stock and standard Oni or devil mask, and the giant iron bludgeon weapon is a stylized kanabou(金棒) which is also associated with oni imagery, but not Tengu.  If anything, the general shape and size of his giant club might be a play on the shape of a humanoid Tengu’s iconic long nose, while the long nosed Tengu’s red face might be the influence for the fire powers, but the Tengu itself doesn’t have any particularly strong direct associations with fire...  and moreover neither the tengu nor the oni seem to have anything to do with Love’s whole “love” theme in his name.

His release call is uchikudake(打ち砕け) which is just a pretty straight forward action for an iron club, “Crush.”  He uses a technique called Hifuki no Kozuchi(火吹の小槌): “Little-Mallet/Gavel of Fire-Breathing” but I feel like the “Little Mallet” bit is a reference to the Uchide-no-Kozuchi(打ち出の小槌).  In the Issun-boshi myth, where the little hero retrieves it from an oni he defeats; the magic hammer allows him to grow to regular human size.  Similarly in the myth of Momotaro, the hero obtains the mallet from the oni-island.  I only get this impression because if it’s not a reference, then it feels really weird to call a massive club “little-hammer“ as if that were a literal description.

On second thought, I forgot that tengu nose is pretty commonly used as phallic image, so it’s entirely possible that that’s the link to the “Love” theme.

Lisa’s is a real weird one though...  Her shikai is called Hagurotonbo(鉄漿蜻蛉), which is the name of the Calopteryx atrata damselfly.  And I guess the generally bodyshape of a dragonfly could be seen as reflected in the shikai being a polearm, but that feels kind of weak...  The specific kanji used here for Haguro(鉄漿) means “Iron Drink” and refers to Haguro(歯黒) “Tooth-Blackening” which was a kind of fashion trend in Japan prior the the Meiji restoration, primarily among married women of some courtly status, although it did eventually spread into general public style as well.  The "Tooth”+”Black” writing is fairly obvious, but the “Iron”+”Drink” form refers to the fact that the tooth dying concoction included dissolved iron powder.

So in Lisa’s case it’s kind of weird...  Is it just a reference to the species of black-winged damselfly?  Is it some kind of evocation of the old fashion of a married noble woman?  Her shikai is a strange blade shape that could be either an exaggeratedly broad yari spear, or some variation the Chinese Monk’s spade.  And her mask is a diamond with a cross slit that doesn’t appear to be related to the shikai form or name at all...(if anything it just kind of randomly looks like the head piece of the Zeon mobile suit, Gyan)  her release call is tsubuse(潰せ):”to crush/flatten,” which also doesn’t seem related to anything other than paddling something with the broad end of her spear.

In fact if there’s anything that actually seems to suggest a real theme it’s the random technique she has named Nijuuichijou Tonbokudari (二十一条蜻蛉下り): “21 Clauses Dargonfly Descent,” which she technically used fighting Gerard Valkyrie, but we barely really saw.  It looks like a super specific direct reference to Taika Nijuuikkajou Youkyuu(対華21ヶ条要求): generally known in English as “The 21 Demands” referring to the terms of surrender Japan made of China in their conquest of Manchuria during World War 1.  The demands were ultimately negotiated down to more favorable terms for China, minimizing Japanese expansionist gains, but the signing resulted in massive distrust between Japan and America, Japan and Britain, and of course Japan and China.

But all together these elements don’t seem to have any kind of cohesive theme behind them all...

Anyway, that’s the Visored swords, it’s really weird to think that Kubo basically had to come up with all of these names and designs at basically the same time yet the level of thought and investment in them seems to be all over the place.

[ruddcatha]

Chapter 2 of The Guardian has been posted, find it now at Ao3 and FFN

Kagome stirred, trying to rouse herself from her dreams and the golden eyes that seemed to see into her very soul.  The sound of her alarm barely broke through her daze, she had never felt so exhausted before.  She looked at the offending object, grumbling when she realized that it really was 7 a.m. already, and they had to leave for the site at 8:30.  She stumbled into the kitchenette of her dorm, muttering to Sango who laughed and handed her a cup of coffee, knowing Kagome was NOT a morning person.  Kagome shot her a glance, her chocolate eyes full of worship and thankfulness as she took her first sip of the life sustaining liquid.  Two and half cups of coffee and a piece of toast with orange marmalade later, she felt human enough to shower and prepare for the day.

Kagome caught Sango’s attention and nodded towards the bathroom.  “Go ahead, I’m already done in there…. Unlike SOME people I don’t need an injection of caffeine in the morning” was the teasing response. Kagome gave a joking growl, shaking her head at Sango as she entered the bathroom.  Sango was her best friend from High School, they had been in the same class. Sometimes Kagome wished she had followed Sango’s footsteps and gone straight into Grad School after graduating from university, but she had taken two years to travel to various shrines and museums, learning on her own about different cultures.  She had almost wiped out her savings traveling from Japan to Australia and China to broaden her own knowledge base before applying and joining the archeology program with Sango.  Sango was the sister Kagome never had, and Kagome would gladly trade her younger brother Souta to officially claim Sango as kin.  

Kagome sighed blissfully as the hot water from the shower cascaded over her body.  Her muscles were still sore from the previous day, and she knew it was important to get the knots worked out before going back.  She turned the temperature up even more as she relaxed, lathering, and rinsing her long hair.  She reluctantly turned off the shower, she had not realized that the bathroom had filled with steam.  She frowned and thought ‘I didn’t think the temperature was that hot.’ The bathroom had disappeared in the white haze, she was not able to make out any of the fixtures, it was as if she had entered a dream state, separated out from the rest of the world.  She bent down, trying to find anything to help her get her bearings, for some reason she was desperate to find her towel.  Even though she knew she was by herself, she felt exposed.  She tried to call out for Sango, but the mist around her seemed to absorb the sound. She closed her eyes in both pain and relief as her right hand connected soundly with a solid surface.  She quickly moved towards the surface, reaching out to trace the edges to identify the counter and catch her bearings.  As she moved closer, she began to see her outline in the mirror, distorted through the haze.  She stopped dead, feeling as if all the blood in her body had turned to ice as she looked at her reflection… and the glowing red eyes that seemed to be behind her.  Keeping her hand on the counter, afraid that if she let go, she would be lost in the mist, she quickly looked to see who… or what… was there.

“HEY KAGOME” Sango yanked open the bathroom door “we have to get going or we’ll be late.  What’s keeping you?”  Kagome’s vision instantly cleared, the mist vanishing, the red eyes no more than a figment of her imagination.  “hey you ok?” Sango asked, seeing her friend’s death grip on the counter. Kagome shook her head, trying to ease the fear and tension “yea San, just lost track of time.  Give me a minute and I’ll be ready.”  She dashed to her bedroom, the tension in her easing as she covered herself with a pair of cargo pants and a black tank top. Remembering the chill the day before, and still feeling chills from earlier, she grabbed an old army jacket that she had found in a thrift store.  As she left the bedroom, she grabbed a stack of papers off her printer to bring with her.  Sango raised an eyebrow at the ensemble, Kagome just shrugged, lifted the corner of her mouth “the pockets will come in handy.”  Sango laughed, agreeing with her, heading towards the door of their apartment.  As they made their way to the parking lot, Sango tossed Kagome a bag with two slices of bacon and a sausage link “toast is not enough for today, who knows when Totosai will let us break for lunch.”  Kagome gratefully ate the offering, climbing into the back of the first jeep with Sango, Jaken had already claimed shotgun with Totosai driving.

As they drove to the shrine, Kagome began to review the limited information she had been able to pull from google and obscure legend sites, looking to learn more about the Inu Yokai.  She tuned out the conversation around her as she scoured the pages, frustrated with the limited information she had available.  She wanted actual useful information, damnit, but none of the information she had found seemed in any way credible or explained the statues in the shrine.  She allowed herself to listen to the conversation around her, Sango teasing Jaken over his fascination with frogs and toads.  “I will have you know, there is a very big dist….” Jaken said, about to go into a lecture when Sango leaned over and smacked his forehead “WE KNOW WE KNOW; YOU HAVE TOLD US A THOUSAND TIMES!” Kagome and Dr. Totosai laughed, used to the banter from classes.  Kagome felt the tension from the morning easing with the familiar routine with her friends and classmates.  A sense of calm came over her as they drew closer to the shrine, a smile teasing her lips as the last vestiges of fear faded from her memory, forgotten in her excitement.

The two jeeps made their way carefully through the forest, the modern world disappearing around the team. Soon the two flags that marked the entrance to the underground shrine were visible, and Totosai brought his vehicle to a halt.  The air around the shrine smelled cleaner somehow as Kagome took in a deep breath, the smells of the forest barely detectable.  Sango and Kagome collected their gear from the back of their vehicle before walking to the entrance, waiting to receive their locations for the day.  “Alright” Dr. Totosai exclaimed, looking over his notes “Jaken and Hojo, I want you two in the first room on the left, you made good progress there in identifying the markings and offerings that were found.  Sango, I would like you and Akitoki to take the second room on the right. That room has not been touched yet, and I want you to begin your survey, marking off any artifacts you find and noting them in the logs before you begin recovery.  Kagome, you will be with me again in the main room, I want to see if we can continue to translate the text we found.” Totosai looked at his watch “it is now 9:00, let’s reconvene at 12:30 for lunch and to discuss the afternoons assignments.”  He looked around at his five assistants and saw everyone nod before turning on their lanterns and descending into the entrance.

As the sound of footsteps entering the hallway echoed, a pair of golden eyes snapped open, the owner’s attention drawn towards the stone doors that separated the intruders from his resting place.  In a blur of movement, the figure leapt off the ground, landing with ease in an alcove that had been carved into the upper walls of the room, hidden from view by clever carving, allowing a perfect vantage point.  The light from the lanterns did not reach the alcove, but the individual did not need any additional light to view the two figures as they entered the room. A young man moved silently, hidden in shadows.  He turned his head, listening to the voices below, trying to make out any recognizable words, as the figure looked over the edge, curious but cautious. He knew that they were speaking Japanese from the few words he could make out, but it was a dialect that he was unfamiliar with, and while words seemed familiar, they were also strange, as if the language had changed.  He saw them approach the tallest statue in the front of the room, his eyes narrowed, waiting for any sign of aggression.  He relaxed when the two seemed focused on the legend inscribed on the wall, growling in disgust at their attempts to pronounce the words.  

The man had no idea how long he had been sealed, or who these people were.  He knew his mission, but until he knew that they could be trusted, he would keep out of sight, trying to learn more about them and why they were there.  His eyes were drawn to the young woman below him, and he felt his breath catch as her face was caught in the light.  Despite the distance between them, he could see her features as clearly as if he had been standing next to her, the tilt of her nose, the shade of her eyes.  He was entranced by her, the light dancing off her reflection as she moved, concealing then revealing her features as if choreographed.  Her voice was soft, and he felt his ears move to try and catch more of the sounds.

“Professor over here!” Kagome exclaimed softly.  When Totosai looked around, she had moved to the back corner of the room.  As he made his way to her, she tilted her head, looking at the empty pedestal before her.  “This is the only open pedestal in this room” she whispered as Totosai came near “and look here.”  Totosai leaned down to the base of the pedestal, looking where Kagome pointed. None of the pedestals in the room held any characters or names, but this one was different.  At the base of the pedestal was a stylized carving of a dog, surrounded by a circle.  While a dog carving was not unusual in Japanese art, this carving was designed like the ancient depiction of a demon dog, with a lightning bolt marking on each side of its face.  Kagome tilted her head in curiosity, recognizing the markings.  She looked back to the singe statue in the front of the room then back to the pedestal, confirming to herself that they did, indeed, look almost identical.  She wondered it this was the demon form of the Inu no Taisho.  Looking around the room, it seemed strange that only one pedestal had the marking, while the others were plain.  Lost in her own thoughts and musings, she did not notice her professor going still, his right hand moving to rub his left forearm as he stared at the image.

Kagome reached out an arm to touch the symbol, yet a sound made her pause.  A low growl seemed to echo through the room, so faint she almost thought she was imagining it.  She turned, looking to see where it was coming from, but the sound faded as if it had never been.  She turned to Totosai, about to ask if he had heard it as well, but was interrupted “Kagome, it is 12:30, let’s go get lunch with the others, we can come back after.” She sighed then nodded, grabbing her lantern as she left the room to join Sango.  Totosai watched her leave, then moved to the center of the room, rolling back the long sleeve that covered his left arm. He held his arm up above his head and lifted his lantern with his right hand.  A mark on his arm began to glow silver in the light, the image of a demon dog surrounded by a circle.  He looked up towards the top of the walls, his soft voice echoing in the chamber.

 “Yōkoso hogo-sha, Welcome Guardian.”

A soft sound from behind him made Totosai turn around.  He watched as a figure of a man unfolded, his red kimono a striking contrast to long silver hair that flowed over his shoulders.  Two ears stood atop his head, flicking at the sound of footsteps retreating from the shrine.  His golden eyes stared straight into Totosai’s before turning to look at the mark. Totosai lowered his arms, tilting his head towards the figure in reverence.

 “Welcome back...Lord Inuysha.”

@heavenin--hell​, thank you again for the inspiration!

[apparitionism]

Run

This is a pointless AU, a little idea from elsewhere that’s in the process of turning into a story-esque thing, not a comedy or a drama as such, just a “here’s another way two people might find their way to each other” tale. Also I’ve never deployed a Giselle character, really, and I figured I might as well try. She’s not a bad guy, mind you, nor even an obstacle; the only obstacles, at base, are misunderstandings and circumstances. Conventional ones. They might accurately be called clichéd. Anyway, this is some kind of starting line. Bang. (That’s meant to be a starter’s pistol, by the way; don’t be getting any ideas.)

Run

At four in the morning, Myka Bering sat three steps from the bottom of the dark staircase in her apartment’s foyer and pushed her feet into new running shoes. They looked like nothing special: a standard navy blue faux leather, with their manufacturer’s stylized “Z” logo embossed in silver on the sides. The pristine white of both the slim soles and the no-tie laces pleased her, despite the fact that their just-out-of-the-box luster would of course start graying at the first exposure to the city.

Myka stood up in the shoes and bounced on her toes, her ritual commencement of every day’s run.

The instant her heels left the ground, she understood just how difficult her life was about to become.

For this decidedly unspecial-seeming shoe—the Deceit—represented the latest attempt by the Zelus athletic corporation to gain an insurmountable advantage in the sport of running.

Myka’s job was to stop them.

*

At her desk at work later that morning, Myka revised, for accuracy, her overly dramatic thought of the morning: a small part of her job was to help stop them. Her actual job was to co-direct certification and compliance for Athletics Authority International, the globe-spanning organization that governed running, jumping, and throwing events. The organization regularly dealt with issues of equipment inappropriately boosting performance; thus Deceits, understood one way—nondramatically—were just the latest technological challenge to the idea of a level playing field.

But based on her morning’s run, Myka did not think Deceits could be understood nondramatically.

“Did you try the Deceits yet?” she asked Pete Lattimer, her co-directing partner. They had taken to joking that in their area, he was the “athletics”—an Olympic-team-alternate decathlete—while she was the “international,” for she’d got her job based largely on her wide-ranging language fluency. Myka suspected that today, athletics aside, his answer would be “no”; they’d received the shipment of test shoes only a few days ago, and Pete was focusing more on language than sports lately anyway, Duolingo-ing his heart out in Spanish so as to one day be able to impress Kelly Hernandez, head of Latin American outreach, such that she would first agree to go to lunch with him and then, swayed partially by his language skills but mostly by his charm, acknowledge that they were destined to spend their lives together. Myka wasn’t at all sure Kelly was going to persuaded by Pete’s bilingual (or “bilingual”) flirting... though he was also concentrating heavily on vocabulary related to sandwiches, so he’d probably end up with at least a food-related happy ending.

“Nah,” he said, confirming her prediction about the shoes. “I’m guessing you must’ve, though. They as crazy as those trials records make ’em seem?”

“Crazier,” Myka said. “To me. But I want to know how they really feel. To a real athlete.”

“Somebody needs a real athlete? I see why Lattimer’s not up to it,” remarked a tall woman as she approached Myka’s desk. Myka looked up and smiled.

“Same goes for you, Giselle,” Pete said, but with cheer. “How’s communications?”

“Turn those children over my knee if I could,” Giselle replied, equally cheerful. “That’s where you can help: how’s your javelin these days?”

“Why don’t you just run away? I thought you were supposed to be fast or something.”

Giselle Wade was fast—Myka knew it, and she knew Pete knew it too. Giselle was a legend in East Texas, where she had shattered high school track records, particularly at the longer distances. She’d done the same to NCAA times, placing some out of reach for what would probably be generations. U.S. bests had fallen to her too, though worlds had been elusive... but she had some impressive Olympic hardware all the same.

“Outran you,” Giselle said, which was true; her 1500-meter times were faster than Pete’s had ever been.

They would have gone on for a while before they wound down, but their jabs gave Myka the opening she needed. “Speaking of running,” she said to Giselle, “did you try the Deceits?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And exactly what you think,” Giselle said. Before Myka could get her to clarify, she went on, “And this very morning I heard Zelus wants to push a version with spikes for sprinters.”

Myka objected, “But the thin soles!” Sole height was a major issue. The Deceit’s predecessor shoe, the Zelus Induct—which had also given runners a clear advantage—had been recognizable due to its oversized sole, packed with lightweight foam, that effectively lengthened a runner’s legs. The sole contained within the foam a carbon plate that acted as a spring, enabling a stride that used less leg energy and thus translated into distance runners having more kick over an entire race. AAI had rapidly banned that shoe, but the Deceit upped the ante because it somehow managed to do all the Induct’s dirty work, and apparently even more, in a standard-sized sole. Sprinters’ soles were basically flat, though, so how could the foam and plates fit? Not to mention: “Why would Zelus want to start a fight on another front?”

“Some other company rolls out skinny little cheat spikes first if Zelus doesn’t get on it? Old story about the toothpaste and the tube? You know.” Giselle shrugged. “All we can do is try to slow it down.”

“Ha!” Pete barked. “I see what you did there! Slow it down! Fast shoes!”

Giselle shook her head and murmured “that man” mostly to herself, but a little bit to Myka, who nodded in sympathy a commensurate little bit. Then Giselle said, “Thank sweet Jesus I don’t have to run in Deceits or against them. Glad I’m out of that part of it now.”

“I’m glad I was never in it,” Myka said.

“You know you got the discipline,” Giselle said. She’d told Myka this before.

It was a real compliment, but: “I don’t have the gift,” Myka responded, as she had in the past.

“Discipline counts. Makes up for a lot.”

“Those Deceits do too,” Myka said. “I barely even broke a sweat this morning.”

“That’s a shame.”

Myka offered a “huh?” expression, though she was pretty sure she knew what was coming.

“You, all hot and sweaty?” And Giselle sighed, a parody of infatuation. “Yes indeed...”

Myka rolled her eyes, and then they both laughed. It was a ritual: Giselle “flirted,” Myka “suffered,” they laughed.

*

Some months ago, not long after Giselle had been brought on board by AAI, she’d asked Myka out.

“I have a boyfriend,” Myka had said, because that was what she almost always said, as a learned reflex, in situations like that.

“Well,” Giselle said. “Look at me, getting the wrong impression. Sorry, Myka. Guess we’ll keep it professional.”

Giselle tended to put a drag on the last word of every sentence, a vocal habit that kept a listener hanging: would she say more? It might or might not have been intentional, but it was effective, particularly when combined with her linger of a Texas drawl. Thus her “professional” came out “pro... fess... io... nal.” Myka half-expected her to follow up with “or not.”

“Well,” Myka said back, when it became apparent that no more was in fact forthcoming, “not totally professional. We can still get coffee, right?” Because she did like Giselle.

Ah, there it was: Giselle gave her a still-flirty head toss and said, “Not to make the same mistake twice, but I did ‘get coffee’ with a lady one time and it turned into three days in Monaco. So we’ll see...”

Myka rolled her eyes, but then she laughed, and Giselle did too: the start of the ritual.

That should have been that.

But an international athletic governing body was apparently like every other semi-hermetically sealed social environment: a school, a team, a lab. Things got around. Mere hours after that conversation—which, granted, had taken place in the 40th-floor elevator lobby, the transit funnel for every employee of AAI, which occupied the entirety of that skyscraper level—Pete had marched back into their area from lunch and confronted Myka with, “I heard Giselle asked you out.”

Myka had tried not to respond, because really, what was there to say?

He went on, “And I heard you told her you have a boyfriend, which is what you said way back in history when I asked you out.”

“History? That was less than two years ago.”

“Anyway, I heard she believed you. Just like I did.”

“That was the idea. With her and with you.”

“I still don’t see why you didn’t just say ‘Pete, I don’t want to go out with you.’ It would’ve been fine.”

“I’d barely met you. I had no idea if you’d be a decent guy about it.”

“But I am a decent guy. About everything! So it would’ve been fine.”

“But I didn’t know you were a decent guy.” She had barely started at AAI; all she’d known about Pete Lattimer was that he’d been a decent decathlete. And that was no help at all, for every new coworker she met was a former Olympian or member of some national team or at least a famous ex-coach. It all made her feel as if she had no business working for the organization in the first place. They should have said that “athletic” was a requirement... each successive introduction seemed to drum with more force into her that a law degree and several languages were nothing against a sub-four mile.

Given that insecurity, she hadn’t needed any additional inputs or variables, so when Pete had said, “We should get dinner after work sometime,” she’d said what she almost always said, as a learned reflex, in situations like that. It had become a reflex because regardless of any other complicating circumstances—such as a new job where her body itself didn’t belong—it was easier. It was almost always easier than whatever might follow her saying anything else.

Pete said, “You didn’t know I was a decent guy, so you lied about having a boyfriend. And now you’ve lied about it again.”

She’d winced at the word “lied.” It was accurate, but she didn’t like it. Then you probably shouldn’t do it, her conscience told her. She told it to shut up. Then she told Pete, “I know that and you know that. Giselle doesn’t need to know that.”

“But you already like her better than you would’ve ever liked me.” At that, Myka started to protest, but he waved her off. “You know I mean because she’s a lady. Why didn’t you say you have a girlfriend?”

Speaking of what was easier: “boyfriend” was easier than “girlfriend.” It raised fewer questions, and it raised fewer... thoughts. And that was easier too.

It was supposed to raise fewer thoughts, anyway.

Fortunately, Pete hadn’t waited for an answer, or for Myka to start thinking any thoughts, instead moving on to what he clearly found most important: “And lady-wise, don’t you think she’s hot? I think she’s hot.”

Myka sighed. “Yes, I think she’s hot. In fact I know she’s hot. I have eyes.”

“So go out with her. She’s hot, you’re hot. Sizzle!”

“I just don’t want to.”

“Then why didn’t you go ahead and tell her that? Do you think she isn’t a decent guy?”

“Pretty sure she’s not a guy at all,” Myka had said, trying to joke him into just... stopping.

She didn’t want to get into the complicated conversation that would have ensued if she’d admitted to having genuinely, if fleetingly, regretted her reflex—because he certainly wasn’t wrong about Giselle being a woman, and he double-certainly wasn’t wrong about her looks. She was stunning; she’d had that wildly successful athletic career, then transitioned with seemingly no friction at all into modeling, at which she was even more wildly successful. Her legs were as long as the miles she used to run, and Myka was certainly, in that sense, human.

But Giselle had already developed a reputation at AAI, despite her brief tenure, for what could charitably be called a... short attention span. Maybe it was the inevitable result of her having been able to have just about anything—and anyone—she wanted, in not one but two elevated realms, or maybe it had always been Giselle’s personality as a romantic socializer, but while Myka had no trouble observing it from the outside, as a characteristic of her friend Giselle, she didn’t particularly want to be subjected to it. What if she slipped and overinvested? Exactly the kind of difficulty she didn’t need, regardless of any other complicating circumstances. Exactly the kind of difficulty she had never needed, and if she had slipped and fallen into it in the past? Well, that was the past, and she certainly didn’t need to revisit any part of that, much less repeat it.

These months later, however, some days Myka had a vague sense that a day should come when she should talk herself into telling Giselle she didn’t have a (nonexistent) boyfriend anymore. A day, that was to say, when she should ask for Giselle’s attention, if only for a short span. It seemed normal, human, to think that a short span of time, even if it led to a complicating slip and overinvestment, might—should?—be better than nothing, and so some days, Myka tried to want to talk herself into that.

But on different days, she’d think, definitively, I don’t want to. Because talking herself into it felt dishonest. Even if Giselle subscribed solely to Pete’s “she’s hot, you’re hot; sizzle” theory of the case, even if both of them might have enjoyed much of that short span of time: dishonest. Inauthentic. Deceitful.

“You’re not very good at having fun, are you?” Pete had asked her once, when she’d told him, in response to his sincere inquiry, that she had never actually dreamed of having Disneyland all to herself for a day. She’d agreed that no, she really wasn’t very good at having fun, and he’d said, “You need to get out more. Maybe not to Disney, but you need to get out more.”

You need to get out more. She’d laughed at him, because the most out she ever got, away from work, was for her 4am run. That, she could talk herself into without feeling dishonest at all. Far from it: she reveled in the discipline required for that strict self-persuasion every day, which was probably why she’d found that she could, ultimately, work well—reasonably well—with athletes. Athletics at its highest level was discipline, and Giselle and Pete and most of the others could see that Myka got that, even had that, as Giselle kept telling her.

But as Myka always told Giselle in return (not that Giselle needed telling), for real athletes, that discipline had to be kissed by the divine, and Myka had no access to such physical divinity. None at all. She was an exercise runner, lowest of the low in terms of athletic esteem. She knew because that was how the athletes said it, with a twist of pity: exercise runner. That was what she was, and she knew it.

Until she ran in the Deceits.

They were named, of course, for their unassuming look and for the illicit advantage they gave the world-class athletes. But for Myka-the-unesteemed, they were differently deceptive: they made her feel like A Runner. Giselle and her peers had been born with the kind of legs these shoes changed Myka’s into, springing from the ground with power, creating a feeling of “this is my body; this is what it can do, and if I push, still more,” and miraculously—deceptively—there was still more it could be pushed to do. Myka felt like her body before the Deceits had been Clark Kent, like it had been waiting for the chance to reveal that it wore the suit and had superpowers, like this had always been how she could run.

It wasn’t real. But it felt real.

So she understood why Deceits were breaking records—speed records now, but eventually, they would break sales records, too.

She also understood, very clearly, that they should be banned.

Even for exercise runners like her: deceiving oneself, Myka felt, was worse than deceiving others, regardless of whether they were fellow competitors or the outside world in general. Just as she didn’t want to talk herself into Giselle, she didn’t want to run every morning in those shoes. If she did, that self-deception would become a habit of mind, and Myka deep-knew that being clear-eyed about oneself was essential. A moral duty, her inner rector told her, and even though she would probably have been happier to not live her life quite that ramrod-straight (to, for example, be better at having fun), it had been her thought as she’d begun that first run in the Deceits. She’d kept on thinking it, throughout her entire route, as she devoured the miles with her newly athletic strides. Clear-eyed, mor-al, du-ty. Right-left, right-left, right-left.

*

Administratively, the world of athletics moved at a speed inverse to that of the track. The relatively “rapid” ban of the Deceit’s predecessor had taken six months to work out and implement, so it was no surprise that several weeks elapsed before AAI even scheduled negotiations with Zelus reps over the new shoes. They would be delicate, the negotiations, for Zelus money was essential to the sport. It was imperative not to make any penalties too prohibitive or too “insulting” to the company or its affiliates. Could already-ratified world records set in Deceits be voided? Would that lead to Zelus-sponsored athletes boycotting competitions? Could Deceits be banned? Would that be at all enforceable?

Myka knew that Dan Badger, the president and CEO of AAI, would be scrutinizing everything she and Pete and their team proposed. Newly appointed to show that AAI was turning a regulatory corner, he had made clear that his watchword was “integrity,” and that applied not only to the sport as a whole, but to every athlete who participated in it, every piece of equipment they touched, every employee under his purview, every official action they took. Unofficial actions, too: there was, as far as Myka could tell, no ethical give in Badger’s worldview. Where prior heads might have made a handshake deal of some sort with Zelus’s own CEO with regard to the Deceits—and Myka suspected something along those lines had occurred for the Inducts, most likely involving a wink-nod to the already-in-the-pipelines Deceits—Badger would have considered the mere suggestion of such a thing a personal affront.

“Why doesn’t Badge like you more?” Pete once asked Myka. “You’re exactly like him.” Myka wasn’t, in fact, exactly like him, for Badger was an athlete’s athlete, a hurdling champion from a decades-ago golden age of British track and field. That gilded aura was a carapace around him, deflecting whatever might have been directed his way from beings he considered lesser, including nonathletes like Myka. It wasn’t actively insulting or cruel, just... clear. The athletes called him “Badge,” among themselves and to his face, while Myka had the sense that if she uttered that collegial syllable, no one, and certainly not the man himself, would even perceive that any sound had escaped her lips.

Pete wasn’t entirely wrong, though; Myka had enough consonance with Badger that she couldn’t quite bring herself to resent him. His absolutely unimpeachable reputation was supplemented by the fact that he looked exactly as an athletic lion of his age and era should: face appropriately tanned for health and creased for character, hair silver and full, height calibrated as if to the millimeter to be imposing but not incongruous. He was the ideal figurehead for an organization that wanted to burnish its standing as a virtuous guardian of all that was competitively good in athletics.

In the end, Myka’s own inclinations aligned with her need to fulfill Badger’s expectations, yet neither she nor he could change the underlying economics of the sport. She might have been moved, under other circumstances, to restore her single-run-sullied Deceits to their silver Zelus box and push that box to the back of her closet, but instead she spent an inordinate amount of time looking at them. Was there any way at all to tell, just by looking, that they could do what they did?

Enforcement was a matter of measurement and testing, but these shoes were a drug for which no test existed. AAI had hired a group of materials engineers to take them apart, so Myka now knew how they did what they did: even newer foam, plus two carbon plates, set at angles to each other. They really might as well have been springs—invisible to the outside-shoe naked eye, but springs all the same.

AAI could nominally ban double-plate soles, but it couldn’t possibly dismantle every Zelus runner’s footwear at every event to ensure that the ban was being respected. Myka saw no way out other than to ban Zelus shoes across the board (for she’d been thinking, too, of what Giselle had said about spikes), but that brought her back to financial impossibility. And around she went again. And again. And again.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the rest of athletics administration proceeded without heed for Deceits, no matter how long Myka stared at them, no matter how many negotiating scenarios she tried, unfruitfully, to game out. Meets and championships and trials all continued, requiring level upon level of authorization and accompanying paperwork...

One morning, Myka was concentrating, squint-eyed, on a spreadsheet when she felt a tap on her shoulder. “Pete,” she began, still squinting at her screen, “I told you if I don’t approve the new certification tables for posting this morning—”

“I’m so sorry,” said an English-accented female voice, “but I’m not Pete. And I seem to be lost.”

Myka looked up. No, you’re not, was her first thought, which resolved into: You’re not Pete, and you’re not lost. You belong right here.

TBC

*

A few notes, just because:

I made up the governing body; it’s intended to be vaguely like the real organization World Athletics (formerly IAAF), which determines what’s allowable in track and field competition, but I’m not trying to replicate its structure at all. Further, the actual organization maintains that it doesn’t consult with shoe companies before making regulatory decisions... whether you believe that claim is of course entirely up to you.

Two passages from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents are in some sense guiding my thinking here (because I’m like that). The first is this: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” He’s talking about cars and eyeglasses and such things, but obviously the idea is applicable to athletic tech. An idea from a little earlier in the book seems relevant as well: “What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon.” Right? We’ll see about that latter part though, Dr. Freud.

Finally, as that rude anon suggested some months ago, I’m obviously speaking to a community that’s mostly inactive now. But I’m a keeper of faith: one of the things I do best is wait. So one point of this story is that it exists. I’m waiting. C’mon and wait with me, if you like.

[atamascolily]

An Appointment in Sawarra, 7/?

In which Luke has an adventure with Space Customs.

(earlier: one two three four five, six)

Luke had barely disentangled himself from the X-wing's cockpit and put on his translator when a half-dozen figures arrived on the scene. All wore colorful robes in vibrant eye-catching patterns, along with black stiff hats half a meter in length, ornately carved wooden masks, and neon-orange gloves that clashed violently with the rest of their ensemble.

It was hard to see much of the Sawarrans themselves under the voluminous swirl of coverings, let alone many details of age or gender, but their silhouettes and voices were conspicuously human, as was their presence in the Force. What little skin he could see was the darkest shade Luke had ever seen: a rich, deep black with the faintest hint of blue in it. All of the agents were taller than he was, although some of that extra half-meter was due to the elevated bases of their sandals, some of which were impressively high.

The translator itself turned out to be unnecessary, as all six informed him in heavily accented but comprehensible Basic that he was entering sovereign Sawarran territory and as a foreigner, he was required to declare himself at customs before being permitted to enter the station.

Luke groaned inwardly, and sighed. Customs. Right. No escaping bureaucracy. Maybe he should have taken Leia up on her offer of an official diplomatic position instead of coming as a private citizen.

It was tempting to wave his hand and order them to let him pass. Too tempting. Luke gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore the impulse. Luke had grown uncomfortable with using the Force to manipulate others since his time with Joruus C'baoth on Jomark. This unease had only deepened when C'baoth tried to make Luke, Mara, Leia, and the twins his living puppets, molding their wills to his own. His plan hadn't worked, but the slack-jawed, blank look of his own face on C'baoth's clone servant had impacted Luke deeply. Ever since then, he'd been especially reluctant to touch anyone's mind so intimately, let alone for his own casual selfishness.

Besides, he thought sourly, for the trick to work, the target had to be willing to go along--easily distracted, bored, already primed to go along, or  just plain stupid and easily manipulated. Judging from the earnest zeal of the customs agents, he wasn't going to get anywhere with them with anything less than a cudgel--which was far too much like C'baoth's tactics for his taste.

He let the customs agents, led by a tall, stately figure in a wildfire mask, briskly but politely usher him into a sterile but functional waiting room, with a row of cubicles off to the side. Through a thin window-slit in the far wall, custom agents were swarming the X-wing, scanning it for contraband. Luke was glad he hadn't brought Artoo along; the astromech wouldn't have stood for such manhandling of his beloved X-wing and someone would have gotten hurt.

Luke himself was also scanned for illegal substances. He held his breath for a moment when they paused over the bag of uneti seeds at his waste, but the scanner only beeped when it got to his lightsaber, registering it as a weapon. It was duly confiscated over Luke's protests as the agents pointed and whispered among themselves as they passed it from hand to hand, too quiet for his translator to pick up their meaning. Finally, their leader--his wildfire mask expressionless--shrugged and returned the lightsaber to Luke with a bow.  

Satisfied there was nothing harmful in his ship or on his person, Luke was presented with a hard-backed chair, three stylo-pens and a clipboard, along with a four-centimeter high stack of paperwork. Three of agents excused themselves, while the other two retreated to their cubicles and busied themselves with their datapads, shooting surreptitious glances at Luke through their masks when they thought Luke wasn't looking. One of them sported a mask in the shape of a stylized lizard with horns sprouting out of the eyes and nostrils in all directions; the other some sort of fish, surrounded by bright blue waves.

The reason for the sheer number of forms became apparent as Luke examined them more closely. The bottom half of each page was in standard Aurebesh, but the top halves were in a pictographic calligraphy he couldn't even begin to make sense of without an ocular add-on to his translator.

The Sawarrans wanted to know everything about him, from the exact make and model of his ship, the precise length of his planned visit (which Luke left blank), and the purpose of his trip in the first place, which was multiple choice. There were a dizzying array of options, but "tourist" wasn't one of them, and nothing else even remotely applied to his situation.

An entire page was taken up by a stern warning against smuggling contraband, which was defined as "any organic or non-organic substance not approved by the Access Station Sovereign Port Authorities". Luke thought of the uneti seeds in his pocket, undetected by the scanners, but decided he didn't need to declare them since he had no intention of staying here for long. Besides, he couldn’t risk the Sawarrans confiscating them.

"I'm here to deliver a message to a professor at the university on Sawarra, not offload cargo," Luke complained to his minders in annoyance. "Why do I have to do this?"  

The pair shook their head, their expressions unreadable behind their masks, and informed him in unison that he must follow proper protocol and complete all sections of the appropriate forms in order to have his visitation permit approved. Sensing a grim stubbornness in the agents to rival his own, Luke sighed and went back to work.

In the end, he wrote "Jedi Knight" as his occupation, trying and failing not to feel like an imposter. He'd called himself a Jedi many times before, but there was something bald and impersonal about seeing it on written out on the page that didn't come out in casual conversation.

Lizard-head bowed when Luke presented the completed pile of paperwork, and took the stack away with him. Luke sat in the uncomfortable chair and did his best to meditate to calm his frazzled nerves while Fish-face twitched nervously and pretended not to stare at him.

After about twenty minutes, Lizard-head returned, solemnly informing him that there would be an unfortunate delay in processing his paperwork. In the meantime, Luke would be issued a temporary visa and permitted entry to the rest of the station.

"Great," Luke said, taking the little seal the agent offered, and striding for the door. Depending on how fast he could get a message to Dr. Mendoza, maybe he could be on his way back to Coruscant by the time the bureaucrats had finished.

The station itself was small and surprisingly crowded, but that was due more to the cramped conditions than an abundance of visitors. There were more Sawarrans than foreigners, all easily distinguished by the vibrant colors and patterns of their robes, though apparently only the customs agents wore the masks and gloves (for quarantine, Luke realized belatedly). Most of the Sawarrans appeared to be men, though there were a few women who he thought might be prostitutes--they had the same dead-eyed stare he'd seen in other ports of call. Yet if they were prostitutes, they didn't make any overtures or meet his eyes when he passed, which struck him as odd.

He made a beeline for the nearest message kiosk, only to be sternly informed by the veiled attendant who examined Luke's seal that his temporary visa would not allow for messages to the main planet, let alone the university. No amount of cash would convince the vendor to change their mind. Like the agents, the vendor was too stubborn to budge without a major intervention in the Force that probably--<i>probably</i> wasn't worth the effort. Luke sighed and continued on his way.

After three similar exchanges with three different kiosks in succession, a frustrated and confused Luke retreated to the back corner of a dimly-lit bar that appeared to cater entirely to foreigners who appeared as annoyed by this place as he was. His drink was watered-down and tepid, but it dimmed the headache that was threatening to overshadow him and calmed his frazzled nerves.

He didn't understand the rules here, but that was fine, he'd figure it out. His visa would be approved soon enough, and he'd do whatever he had to do to get a message to Karrde's contact. He'd find a way. It was just going to take a little longer than he thought, that was all.

As if on cue, the door to the bar was flung open with a shout as a robed and veiled Sawarran stumbled through in agitation. It was Lizard-head the customs agent, tottering to keep his balance on his raised sandals as he ducked through the doorway.

"YOU!" he shouted in Basic with a dramatic flourish, pointing directly at Luke. "YOU ARE A JEDI?"

So much for keeping a low profile. Everyone in the bar was staring at them, and he didn't like it. He sat up, careful to keep his hands in plain view the entire time. "That's right," he said, and braced himself for... what, he didn't know.

"<i>Come</i>," the agent ordered, and gestured to him. "We must go, go. You are wanted immediately!"

Luke left his half-finished glass on the table, along with what would be a hefty tip if New Republic credits had any value here. That was fast, for processing paperwork, but maybe, just maybe he was in the clear--

Either that or he was in deep trouble.

[asterinjapan]

Peach cental

Good evening from the city of peaches!

Today was a travel day, but it was the least cumbersome of all my travel days, so I still had time to Do Stuff. So I’ve been busy, and I’m definitely going to bed early considering I have already reserved a train ticket for tomorrow at 8:30, haha.

So, from Fukuoka to Okayama! Here we go. As it turns out this entry got long, so apologies in advance...

I got up early to have breakfast in peace, had a very quick check-out, and proceeded to make my way to the station. I think this might be the first day my legs are legitimately protesting, and that’s mostly because I had to drag my suitcase with me. Thankfully, my hotel is pretty close to the station, and the entrance for the shinkansen trains is nearby as well. Of course, I was way too early, so I watched the Nozomi (the fastest of the shinkansen, which I can’t use with m JR pass) come and go before my train showed up, the Sakura.

It was a little under two hours to Okayama, passing Hiroshima and Fukuyama on the way. Fukuyama castle is a literal stone’s throw from the station, but I noticed the main tower was partially covered, so I’m glad I went to see that one last year already!

After a smooth trip, I arrived at Okayama station and all but went deaf upon exiting, because there were all kinds of events going on. Today is a national holiday (Health and Sports day I think), so I guess that had something to do with it. Also, it’s hot! I was already regretting my warm pants, but what can you do.

I’m staying in the same hotel as last year, which is very easily found from the station anyway, so that was only a quick trip. In the lobby, I took out the necessities for my ‘daily backpack’ and then asked if I could leave the rest of my luggage here, as I was too early for check-in. Thankfully I could, haha, because I had Plans that would be significantly troublesome if I had to drag my suitcase with me.

So, out of the hotel I went, following the Momotarou street down to Okayama castle! Okay, two things: Momotarou is everywhere here. He’s a character from a folk tale, in which an elderly couple found a giant peach in the river and upon cutting it open, a boy jumped out. They raised the boy as their own and he ended up becoming a hero, as he teamed up with a dog, pheasant and a monkey and went on to defeat ogres. His name is Momotarou, which basically means ‘peach boy’. The story is more or less set in the region – there’s a prince called Kibitsuhiko whose story might have inspired Momotarou, and the shrines dedicated to him can be found in Okayama. I talked about this for a bit last year too, when I stayed in Okayama for the first time. Anyway, this has a predictable result: peaches and Momotarou everywhere. So down from Peach boy Road, onto the castle!

I visited the castle last year with my friend, but there was a little something we didn’t get to do, so I was taking this chance to rectify that.

Upon arrival however, it turned out there was a festival of some kind going on. Fun atmosphere, but it did mean it was pretty busy, hmm.

Into the castle I went anyway! They want you to start the tour on the top floor, so I meekly followed that advice and made my way down. The Thing I wanted to do would start again at 1 PM, so I took my time exploring the different floors and reading the Japanese signage (not a lot was translated except for titles, but I found the general guide boards pretty easy to follow). There was also a special exhibition with works by Masago Kimiya, who has an affinity for drawing historical figures from the Three Kingdoms and Warring States eras. I had no idea what to expect, but these works were beautiful! They look more like glamorous photos than the stylized portraits from back then, and to top it off, the hall told the story of Ukita Hideie, who completed the castle after taking over from his father. He was a big name, actually. (History lesson to follow!)

The little states making up Japan until 1600 were at constant war with each other, called the Sengoku (Warring States) era. Attempts to unify the country were made by Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideie sided with them and ended up being one of Hideyoshi’s five counselors, along with a guy called Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yeah, there he is again, That One Guy. Anyway, after Hideyoshi was assassinated, Ieyasu took control and two camps emerged: the one on Ieyasu’s side, and the loyalists to Toyotomi, including Hideie. At the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu’s side won, unified Japan, and Hideie was to be punished. He fled to what is now Kagoshima until he was eventually betrayed and exiled to the island of Hachijojima, Tokyo, where he lived out his life until his 80s (!). His wife, princess Gou, stayed loyal to him and kept sending him support (like food, since rice barely grew on the island) until she passed away.

Later the castle went to the Ikeda clan, and it was being maintained until the Meiji Restauration in 1869. The Meiji government wanted to break with the samurai era and actually tore down a lot of castles, although it left Okayama castle alone, filling the outer moats and leaving the rest as it is. In 1945, bombers destroyed the castle as yet with the exception of the Tsukimi Yagura (watch tower for moon watching), and so the current reconstruction is from the 1960s. The lion-fish on top are gilded now, but in the old days, the main keep had gilded roof tiles too. It was thus also known as the Golden Crow castle, since the exterior is mostly black.

Whew, so far for a lot of history, haha. Can you tell I really like this castle? I definitely do. So much so that I read up on it, haha, although the exhibition hall was also very informative and had information in English.

On the second floor, there were some photo spots and the Thing I wanted to do: dressing up as a feudal era princess! Okay, look, the kimono on display is really pretty and the dress up is free, come on, I’m not gonna pass up on that opportunity. I had to hang around here for quite a while, as I was about an hour early, but once it was time, I was first in line! And wow, they’re not playing cheap here even though this is free. I got dressed up in a fancy kimono, got to pose all over the special room, got a wig on, got dressed up in another fancy kimono, and overall really got to make the most out of this experience. I checked my camera; there are literally a hundred pictures on there! One hundred! Wow.

So that was a really fun activity and I’m really glad I came back for it. I got a castle parfait at the café (with peach, of course, I was surprised they even offered strawberry as a different choice), and then went back outside again. I think the festival had a stage for a Momotarou something or another, geesh…

I made my way back to the station, foregoing checking into my hotel as I had another destination in mind: nearby Kurashiki!

You might remember last year’s floodings which hit Japan hard. Kurashiki was one of the cities hit, and so we didn’t end up visiting despite how close it is. So now for a second attempt, I took the local train bound for Kurashiki, which took like fifteen minutes. Told you it was close, haha.

Kurashiki is mostly known for its Bikan historical area, which is the old merchant quarter from back when the city became a river port and was so important it was placed under direct control of the shogunate. Many of the buildings are 17th century style wooden warehouses, now filled with restaurants and shops for the most part. There are also some curious museums nearby. (There was also a little shop with a board outside for figure skater Daisuke Takahashi, and that’s how I found out that both he and Keiji Tanaka hail from Kurashiki, haha. The more you know!)

I mostly went for the views, which were definitely a treat once I found the Bikan historical area: the description ‘Venice of Japan’ is surprisingly apt. There are tourist boats going through the canal area and they’re beautifully framed by the willows here. It’s also apparently a very popular backdrop for cosplayers, since I saw a TON of people dressed up as their favourite characters and posing for pictures here, haha. Guess that’s what I get for going on a holiday. It was fun to see though!

Nearby was Ivy Square, also aptly named as it contains buildings overgrown with ivy. It was the area where the first modern cotton mill of Japan was built, and the company from back then is actually still active.

I only wandered around here for a short bit though, and then found one of the little museums I mentioned. I hopped into the Momotarou Karakuri museum! Yep, peach boy strikes again. Karakuri apparently refers to a type of doll, which I did indeed see here, but the museum itself as a strange mix between optical illusions and a museum of Momotarou memorabilia. Not the first combination I would have thought of myself, but the staff was enthusiastic and led me through the illusions (all Momotarou/peach themed of course), encouraging me to try them out and taking a picture with my head through a giant peach, so now I can pretend I’m Momotarou myself, haha. Granted, the illusions weren’t super new, but they were very open about that (‘trick first invented 150 years ago’ listed), and it was still fun going through them. Next was a delightfully trippy little maze full of ghosts and ogres, since Momotarou had gone on a quest to defeat the ogres after all. I got better scares out of this one than out of the self-proclaimed haunted house in Huis ten Bosch, Sasebo some years ago, haha.

I was then led upstairs, which was very interesting as this was the museum part, showcasing all knids of Momotarou goods dating back hundreds of years in some cases. There was also a little English book with the story on display, and apparently they made a Mickey Mouse set at one point with Donald, Goofy, and Chip and Dale as the animal companions, haha.

This was a nice little break. Parts of it were definitely aimed at kids, but that didn’t make it any less fun.

 I had another museum planned, but I was getting rather tired, so after a quick round on Ivy Square, I walked back to the station. This time just taking the main road, because I had tried to take the shopping street route on my way here, but I somehow managed to – uh, mess up on going right ahead and had to google Maps my way out, oops. So the walk back to the station was significantly shorter, ahem.

After a matcha latte at the station, I went back to Okayama and decided to reserve some tickets for trains. Of course I had to secure my one-way trip to Tokyo, as that one will take about 4 hours, yikes. I should arrive at Shinagawa station around 12:30 now, plus half an hour added to get to Ikebukuro, so at least that’s not the entire day wasted on trains, haha. Although the shinkansen are super nice. There’s enough space for me to put my luggage in front of me, although it can get a little cramped for hours on end.

And then my second ticket: tomorrow, to Matsuyama! This is also quite the trip, over 2.5 hours, but it’s just one train, so I can hop on, doze off, and hop out at the terminal station, haha. I wanted to visit Matsuyama last year, but due to the same floodings, it was impossible at the time. And so I wasn’t going to wait much longer and made it my first daytrip from Okayama this time.

Anyway, after checking in to my hotel, I went back to the station for dinner, lamented the fact that one of my favourite restaurants from last year was closed for renovations along with a big part of the food court, found a different restaurant, and promptly ordered their super cute Halloween plate, haha. And now I’m back at the hotel for tonight!

 I suspect my report and photos will be up a little late tomorrow, ahem. Have a good evening, see you!

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Episode 1 Review, Part I: Welcome to Maljardin

{ YouTube: 1 | 2 | 3 }

{ Synopses: Debby Graham | Bryan Gruszka }

{ Screencaps }

What to write about the pilot? How should I begin the introduction to the first real post on this blog? I don’t wish to write a detailed synopsis, because other people have already done so, and I feel neither the need nor the desire to comment on everything in this episode (or, indeed, in any episode). Also, funnier writers than I have already written detailed reviews of it, and I don’t feel I can compete with them, especially if I focus too hard on trying to be funny. So this will be a different kind of review series, focusing on analysis of what I think is important/interesting instead of recapping everything. And I promise that my other posts won’t be as long as this one. There’s just a lot to cover in this first post.

One of the main questions that I intend to explore in this post series is what makes a TV show “bad.” Obviously, this is purely subjective, and most of what I write will be my silly personal opinion, but we are dealing with a show that many people consider “bad” and that, arguably, is “bad” by most mainstream TV watchers’ standards nowadays. Today, we live in an era where TV dramas have increasingly higher budgets and production values, where viewers expect realistic acting and special effects, where streaming and binge-watching are increasingly the norm, and where making a single continuity error or retcon will inspire scorn from your entire fanbase (and God forbid one of the actors forgets to throw out their Starbucks cup). TV today is almost the polar opposite of TV in 1969, when shows were much lower budget, special effect failures were far more acceptable, and streaming on demand probably sounded more absurd than using science to bring a frozen woman’s body back to life. As such, people today expect different things from television from the soap opera viewers of fifty years ago, and are quick to dismiss a show as bad.

I agree that continuity errors and retcons are signs of mediocre writing, but do high production values and good special effects really matter? Is realistic acting necessary for drama, or can drama be just as effective with artificial, stylized, hammy or campy acting? How do we separate a genuinely bad show from one that is merely dated, or that has a few minor problems? If you ask me, the answer lies in the writing and the effectiveness of the acting--and it is the writing that will be the primary focus of this blog.

The pilot, like the 43 episodes that follow, was written by Ian Martin, an actor-turned-writer for soap operas and later Gothic romance and horror. He is most famous for writing over two hundred episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s. (While I only recently discovered CBSRMT and therefore haven’t listened to most of the episodes yet, I can say that those of his that I’ve listened to are very good. I particularly recommend “And Death Makes Even Steven” and “Time and Again.”) For the plot of Strange Paradise, Martin seems to have drawn on his own life experiences: namely, the tragic early death of his first wife, the actress Inge Adams. According to Curt Ladnier, “Though no one can claim to know what was going through Ian Martin’s mind as he wrote the scripts laying the groundwork for Strange Paradise‘s basic plot, it’s not hard to conceive he may have felt some familiarity with the story of a man who lost the love of his life to an untimely death.” His grief shines through every speech that he has Jean Paul give to Erica. Indeed, his episodes have far more heart in them than later Maljardin episodes or Desmond Hall, and most of my favorite episodes were his work. They also have a lot of snarky humor and better dialogue than most of the later episodes, so, if you imagine a sliding scale going from “good” to “slightly so-bad-it’s-good” to “David Wells,” most would be on the “good” side. (Most of Desmond Hall, in contrast, is decidedly on the other--which is a given, considering that David Wells plays a prominent role in that arc, and most of the time he’s hilariously bad.)

This is not to say that Martin’s writing is perfect. Some of his episodes drag and he is not exactly subtle about many things. He has characters (especially Raxl) repeat themselves perhaps more than is necessary. Also, many of his episodes contain a certain subplot that I find boring and pointless and that the show could have done without. (More on all these things when we get to them.) The early Maljardin episodes are not masterpieces, but they’re a hell of a lot better than most of what came after. And it’s clear that Martin was trying to do its own thing, rather than copy off Dark Shadows.

So, anyway, enough about Ian Martin and onto my thoughts about Episode 1, which is what you presumably came here for:

The obligatory first-episode title card screencap

The show opens on the fictional Caribbean island of Maljardin, which roughly translates to “garden of evil.” Jardin is French for “garden” and mal for “evil (noun).” Mal can also be used as an adverb to mean “badly,” but it is not an adjective. “Evil (adjective) garden” would be Mauvaisjardin, which doesn’t sound half as cool. The exterior shots are of Casa Loma, a mansion in Toronto surrounded by trees that look nothing like anything in the Caribbean, but I can forgive them because the Château de Maljardin is awesome both inside and out. I would say I want to live on Maljardin, but I don’t like the heat and I’m sure the air conditioning costs for the château are extravagant--and, although they never mention it on the show, you know that filthy rich and frequently overdressed Jean Paul Desmond would have had air conditioning installed.

Jean Paul Desmond (Colin Fox) is the master of Maljardin and he is grieving the death of his wife Erica (Lara Cochrane), whose body he is preparing to freeze in order to bring her back to life at some point in the future. Erica has apparently only just died, and he is already having his servant Quito (Kurt Schiegl) carry huge blocks of dry ice--with his bare hands (WTF?)--to line her coffin. Jean Paul must have spent a while preparing for this, and one wonders how far in advance he had to decide to do this, especially since he has already arranged for the Cryonics Society to professionally freeze her and they state in the first episode that he does not have a phone on his island. I’ve watched this episode three times and, each time I watch it, the whole situation seems a little more suspicious. But maybe he and/or Dr. Menkin (Joe Austin) predicted her death far in advance and planned accordingly? Surely a man as besotted with his wife as Jean Paul couldn’t have murdered her, right?

I love the scene where he makes his grand entrance carrying Erica. It's so extra. He's so extra.

I’m not speculating about all this because I don’t like Jean Paul, but rather because of certain clues in the narrative that might reflect a once-planned plot twist that writers after Martin ignored. (The keyword is might; I have no evidence that Martin was planning one, but one can always speculate.) In fact, I adore Jean Paul. His actor, Colin Fox, is the main reason why I’m obsessed with this show and can’t stop watching it. I have a huge crush on him thanks to this show, even bigger than my previous #1 crush, which was on King Henri III of France. Jean Paul is exactly my type: super-tall (he looks about 6′6″/2 meters), dark, handsome (more so when he’s not brooding), graceful, elegant, and very, very extra. He also has a beautiful voice, and I love listening to him talk. Yes, I know I’m attracted to him for mostly superficial reasons, but Jean Paul’s a fictional character, so does it matter? There are only a few problems with him, most notably some megalomaniacal tendencies:

I suppose, though, that it’s inevitable to become somewhat of a megalomaniac when you own not just an isolated private island, but “a brokerage house, a department store, three newspapers, a football franchise, motion picture and television interests, and real estate holdings,” to quote another character. Jean Paul thinks that he can bring Erica back to life by spending millions of dollars on cryonics, which other characters--most notably his housekeeper Raxl (Cosette Lee)--insist is playing God. Only one other character approves, and he even applauds him for it:

This is Jacques Eloi des Mondes, Jean Paul’s identical ancestor from the 17th century and my favorite character on this show. His surname literally means “of the worlds,” which I think is an awesome name for a character in an urban fantasy/horror series. According to Raxl, who is highly knowledgeable about both the des Mondes family history and the supernatural, Jacques Eloi des Mondes was THE DEVIL. (It is never clear whether she means this literally or figuratively.) He is also, in my not-so-humble opinion, the single hottest male character in the history of television. No exceptions. If you gave me the choice between Jacques and the entire cast of every other show in existence, I would choose him. He is charming, charismatic, seductive, and hilarious, at least in Ian Martin’s episodes. Most of the writers after Martin, however, ignore his superficial charm and focus instead on his evil, which Martin mostly only hints at. Anyway, Jacques talks through this portrait--a surprisingly good one compared to other “period” portraits from other shows and movies--which glows when his spirit talks to Jean Paul in this episode and which disappears when he (mild spoiler alert)

possesses him.

Jean Paul realizes that he and Jacques have a lot in common, including both having lost their wives at a young age. It is implied that he may even be a reincarnation of Jacques, who calls him “the man you are, the man you might have been,” before making him have a flashback to Jacques’ wedding reception three hundred years earlier. I will cover the flashback in another post, because, despite being only a minute and a half long, there is a lot to unpack and I want to critique the costumes in addition to analyzing the content. But I will say this now: Martin has Jacques mention “the cliff heights at sunset” in a rather ominous way, followed by a glance at the camera that suggests a much darker intent than just showing them to his bride:

This is the face of a very handsome man who is contemplating murder.

After this flashback, Jean Paul finds a glass of brandy in his hand that wasn’t there before: something which only Debby Graham’s synopsis mentions, but which is the first of many instances of Jacques literally making him drink. Jacques offers to resurrect Erica in return for Jean Paul setting him free, which involves finding his effigy in the crypt in the basement and removing a silver pin from its head. Jean Paul does this in a scene interspersed with clips of a singer performing a bad cover of “That Old Black Magic” (somewhere between slightly so-bad-it’s-good and David Wells on the sliding scale), and, as soon as he removes the pin from the doll’s head, Raxl freaks out because she senses what has just happened:

Jacques: *bows* “Bonjour!” *smirks as show cuts to brief shot of blank portrait* “The voodoo spell is broken.” *taps on doll’s head with pin* “I no longer have any need for you. Now...”

Raxl: "YOU DEVIL OUT OF HELL! OH! YOU FOOL! HOW DID YOU EVER BREAK THE SPELL THAT BOUND YOU TO-" *stops in archway and gasps*

Jacques: *in both Jean Paul’’s body and clothes now* "Why, what's the matter with you, Raxl?"

Jacques Eloi des Mondes, THE DEVIL, has possessed Jean Paul and is loose on Maljardin! And the episode ends shortly after.

While not one of the best episodes, the pilot is definitely interesting. The acting is somewhat campy and cheesy, especially in the flashback and in all of Raxl’s scenes, so this episode is definitely so bad it’s good. If you have read any of the synopses I linked to earlier in this article, it will be obvious that I didn’t write about everyone and everything in this episode (notably, I didn’t cover Alison and Dan’s scenes), but that is out of a desire to focus on Jean Paul and Jacques rather than a lack of interest. I do wonder, though: is this the first time that Jacques has spoken to Jean Paul? And just what is the true, original story behind Erica’s death?

{ <-- Previous: Introduction   ||   Next: Episode 1, Part II --> }

[individuationfic]

Seeking to Seize Chapter 2

AO3

Igor calls him a Wild Card

Yu knows he should have more issues with this whole situation than he does. He’s sitting, immobile, in a limo he’s never seen before. The interior is covered in blue velvet and barely lit, making the whole thing even more mysterious than it already is.

He signs, ‘What does that mean?’

The pretty blonde woman holding a book relays this to Igor. There’s a pause, and Yu assumes Igor is speaking, though he can’t tell. It’s similar to the Teddie situation—Igor’s mouth doesn’t move normally, so Yu can’t read his lips. He’s grateful for the interpreter.

Igor replies with, “Your power will come from your heart. To strengthen your heart, you must establish bonds.”

‘Bonds?’

“Connect with the people around you. Force meaningful relationships. These relationships will translate to benefits.”

That sounds kind of artificial to Yu. He doesn’t think many people would want to be friends with someone whose opening line was, “Hey, I want to be your friend for my own benefit!” But somehow Yu gets the feeling Igor knows more than he’s letting on, so he keeps those thoughts to himself. ‘How will I know which relationships are the right ones?’ he asks instead.

Igor says, “You will know.” Then, before Yu can ask another question, he says, “My assistant is Margaret. She will be of invaluable help to you on your journey. The Velvet Room is open to you whenever you have need of it.”

The world lurches, and Margaret and Igor look up. Igor says, “It’s time for you to leave us for now. I look forward to seeing you again.”

Yu closes his eyes, and when they open again he is in his room, having been shaken awake by Nanako.

For a while, Yuu wonders how much of that encounter was real. Then, while he’s walking through the shopping district, he sees an ethereal blue door that everyone else ignores. The key in his pocket grows heavy.

Yu runs into Hanamura on the way to school. He’s a little surprised when Hanamura holds his hands out and bends his index fingers towards each other, mimicking a bow. “I looked up how to say hello!” he says, proud.

For the first time in a long time, Yu’s smile feels genuine.

Despite Amagi’s disappearance hanging over their heads, Yu and Hanamura still meet on the roof at lunch for a JSL lesson. Yu starts off easy, teaching him how to finger spell, and suggests a basic conversation as practice.

Slowly, his hands moving in a way Yu can only describe as a stutter, Hanamura signs, ‘How did you learn to sign?’

‘I’m mostly self-taught. After I got out of the hospital, I got a bunch of books about JSL and practiced in the mirror. I also watched a program on TV where people would play news headlines and sign along with them.’

Hanamura looks like he wants to ask something else, but he suddenly stiffens and his head swings towards the door. Yu, feeling a pull in his chest, does the same, and is only mildly surprised to see Yuk-senpai standing at the entrance to the roof. The third year raises a lazy hand in greeting and says, “Yo.”

Yu and Hanamura both scramble to their feet, lesson forgotten.

Hanamura and Satonaka do their best to relay Teddie’s information to Yu while he nurses his injured hand. He whips his phone out and types, So he doesn’t know if Amagi is in there?

Hanamura shrugs. “That’s what it looks like.”

Satonaka frowns. She looks nervous, and she’s bouncing from one foot to the other in an anxious dance. “I’m going to go to the inn and warn Yukiko.”

“It’s going to rain tonight, right?” Hanamura asks. “Let’s make sure to watch the Midnight Channel. We can decide on our next move from there.” He looks to Yu, his eyes searching for approval, and he only relaxes when Yu nods in agreement.

Chie absently agrees and takes off.

Amused, Yu types, She should just confess to Amagi already and shows it to Hanamura, who turns red.

“You think she—?”

Yu nods.

An odd look crosses Hanamura’s face, like he’s never thought about that before. Maybe, Yu thinks, he hasn’t.

The thing that surprises Yu the most about the Midnight Channel is the subtitles.

They’re stylized to match the absurd get-up Amagi is wearing, pink and bubbly and sparkly, but still clear enough for Yu to read, even at the speed at which they crawl across the screen. He’s pretty sure whatever is causing the Midnight Channel is connected to the Velvet Room, so Yu tells himself to ask Igor about it next time he’s there.

His phone buzzes.

[Hanamura Yosuke]: Did you see that?

[Hanamura Yosuke]: That was Yukiko-san for sure!

[Hanamura Yosuke]: And she looked like she was on some low-budget TV show…

[Hanamura Yosuke]: What’s going on?

[Narukami Yu]: You should try to contact Satonaka.

[Narukami Yu]: She said she was going to see Amagi, right?

[Narukami Yu]: Maybe she saw something.

[Hanamura Yosuke]: That’s a good idea.

[Hanamura Yosuke]: Meet at Junes in the morning?

[Narukami Yu]: Sounds good.

[Narukami Yu]: Try not to worry too much.

[Narukami Yu]: We’ll figure it out.

[Hanamura Yosuke]: Yeah.

[Hanamura Yosuke]: Thanks, Narukami.

[Hanamura Yosuke]: Good night.

As Yu plugs his phone in to charge for the night, he hears Izanagi’s voice in his head. You’ve grown closer to your Magician. Well done.

Why do you keep calling Hanamura a magician? Yu asks. Does this have something to do with those bonds Igor was talking about?

Izanagi sounds amused when he says, Yes, it does. Each of the important links you can forge are associated with the major arcana. Hanamura Yosuke is your Magician. The closer you get to him, the stronger your bond with that arcana will be.

Yu sighs. Looks like I have some more stuff to research.

He falls asleep to the sound of Izanagi’s laugh. Traitor.

In another house in Inaba, four sets of eyes stare at a now-blank television screen. “Well,” the younger girl says, voice deceptively light, “that means it’s starting, doesn’t it?”

The boy next to her huffs. “Those guys have even more problems than we did. All we had to do was deal with a tower and some cancer patients. They have a serial killer.”

The older woman, with platinum blonde hair and piercing yellow eyes, says, “Margaret will take good care of the new Wild Card. He has nothing to worry about!”

The older man stays silent. His only response is to tighten his hand on the younger girl’s shoulder. She doesn’t know if it’s to reassure her or himself.

Good luck, Narukami-kun.

[paulisweeabootrash]

Series Review: Read or Die (R.O.D. the OVA)

Welcome to another episode of Paul is Weeaboo Trash! Today’s topic is a show I’ve previously seen one episode of, so long ago that I’m almost going in fresh: the OVA (what we in the US would call a “direct to video release”) of Read or Die (2001–2002)! I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where education and fun were not portrayed as opposites, and we had the means to find plenty of fun educational things to do.  My parents searched for all kinds of potentially interesting activities, and living in southern New Hampshire, the Boston area was not prohibitively far to go for them.  And so I was signed up for Splash, a program one weekend per fall in which MIT students teach middle- and high-school-age kids seminars on a wide variety of topics.

What counted as topics worthy of education was quite broad, however.  I ended up in a "class" that consisted of watching one episode each of several anime that the student running the class was a fan of.  This was back in the days where anime fandom spread person-to-person by recommendations and there was more emphasis on developing a background knowledge of "classics" among the more informed and/or snootier fans.  (I still feel this way a bit because certain tropes and references are so common or influential that being familiar with the original sources can make newer shows suddenly make a lot more sense, but I disapprove of the gatekeeper tendency to look down on people who don't yet know the things "everyone knows".)

I don't remember how many shows we sampled there, but the two that made an impact were Hellsing, which in retrospect was at best questionable for the age of the audience, and was very much not my thing because I have a low tolerance for gore, and the topic of this post, Read or Die, which was very much the kind of thing I wanted to see: a nerd being a badass in a fantastical way.  Especially since I was also really into James Bond at the time, so I was probably primed to eat up other media involving a British spy fighting a mysterious secret organization.  Since I'm incredibly averse to media piracy and had no clue where to buy anime, though, I never followed up to finish watching it, and eventually it faded from my mind.  Until I stumbled across the first volume of the manga for super-cheap at Saboten Con last year, and it flicked some nostalgia switch that reminded me how much I'd enjoyed it at the time, although I barely remember any actual details, so I am practically going in fresh here.

Read or Die follows Yomiko Readman, a teacher, obsessive book collector and reader, and superpowered secret agent who can manipulate paper in nearly any way.  Any paper available, from money to ribbons to a briefcase full of blank looseleaf she apparently just brings with her.  She uses this power in the course of her service as a secret agent, codename The Paper, working for the British Library?!  Along with Miss Deep, who can selectively phase shift, and Drake Anderson, a gruff and dismissive military type (and apparently potter in his cover job), she is assigned to a plan to save the world in a way that vaguely involves collecting books.  Saved from whom?  The I-jin, clones of historical geniuses with superpowers related to their areas of expertise, such as... knowing stuff about insects, or... uh... spreading Buddhism to Japan... who are going to flashy and violent lengths to steal books the British Library is trying to acquire legitimately.  Trust me, it eventually gets explained, and the Big Reveal, although pretty goddamn weird, fits in with the rest of what has been established.  Suspend your disbelief enough to accept the I-jin at all, and it’s fine, although still a bit ludicrous.

And I submit that all that is still less weird and ridiculous than your typical superhero or spy movie, and this show does after all have elements of both genres in one.  Or, well, more and more superhero and military action as it goes on.  Although the theme music uses 60s guitar sounds, chromatic chord changes, and blaring brass hits that are virtually guaranteed to evoke the James Bond theme, and our main cast do work for a secret intelligence agency, they are in quite open military-style conflict with the I-jin -- with the approval of the UN -- and very little that’s actually covert occurs, with the notable exception of something I can’t spoil that happens at the end of ep. 2.  And because of the superpower angle, some of the instances of weirdness are not flaws at all but pretty creative implementations of the characters’ powers (using a paper airplane as a lethal weapon?!).

This last point didn’t really fit in organically, but I'd also like to mention a couple of things about the art that I love but don't see often.  The very first shot of the series uses multiple flat backgrounds at different distances moving in relation to each other to convey the camera moving across the scene, which I have seen in other animated works (at the moment, I can only think of examples from very old Disney movies off the top of my head), but not in recent ones.  I don't know whether it's simply out-of-fashion or this is a result of the shift to CGI so animators figure "why would we do this when we can actually render a city with realistic perspective?"  This show also has a particular kind of fluid motion in characters that I’ve seen in many reasonably-high-production-value shows from the 90s and 00s, but rarely in newer shows (Space Dandy being a notable exception).  Maybe I'm watching the wrong recent shows, maybe it's just a stylistic choice that's out of fashion, maybe it's harder to pull off convincingly when you're not animating by hand.

I’m glad I finally got to watch this.  It’s even better than I remember.  Now to get to work on the rest of the manga and the other series.  Oh yeah, haha.  The abbreviation "R.O.D." stands for both "Read or Die" and "Read or Dream", which are different parts of the same larger series.  The Read or Die manga (4 volumes), this OVA series, the Read or Dream manga (also 4 volumes), and a 26-episode TV series all take place in the same narrative universe, rather than the usual model of the anime being an adaptation/retelling of the manga.  There is also a light novel series I know nothing about, but it sounds from the Wikipedia article like that is the single ongoing series that is the source for the two manga and two anime.  (There is also apparently a barely-related future side story manga.)

-----

W/A/S: 1/3/3

Weeb: I don’t think there’s much, if anything, in here that would require explanation to a typical Western audience and which isn’t also explained in the dialogue.

Ass: There is a single implied nipple in the opening sequence.  Gasp!  And Miss Deep's costume design is pretty fanservicey, but only barely more explicitly so than you're likely to get in American media deemed suitable for older children.

Shit: Until the Big Reveal, it's just unclear why anyone involved other than Yomiko should be this interested in acquiring the specific books that serve as the show’s MacGuffin, nor is it clear that the I-jin’s plans extend further than searching for them in a very destructive way, leaving me baffled that the Library immediately makes the connection that the books are key to saving the world.  There are a few minor errors in the subtitles and a visual glitch (Blu Ray remaster, please?), and a couple of places where faces just... don’t... look right.  Oh, and if you’re watching the dubbed version, add another half point of Shit for Crispin Freeman’s British accent.

And for the first time I feel the need to add a CONTENT WARNING.  Usually, I think the review is sufficient to give you the idea whether there is anything likely to be disturbing in a show, but this is different, because the first two episodes have the sort of over-the-top stylized combat you might expect from other action anime or Western superhero media, where even a death comes off as un-shocking.  But in ep. 3 of this, there is a shocking pivot.  There are several short instances of graphic and sudden violence of kinds that are quite a bit more disturbing and distressing (even when they involve the use of powers) than anything that occurred previously.

-----

Stray Observations:

- Yes, those of you who know a little Japanese caught that joke: "Yomiko" could be loosely translated as "read girl".  Her name is "Read Girl Read Man".  Because she likes to read.  Get it?  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!

- In the manga, Yomiko is also established to be a literal bibliophile.  As in "books, regardless of content, turn her on".  I'm kind of glad this is not a plot point in the anime.

- The “secret” operation in the last episode, which is conducted with UN approval and involves an actual military attack with an actual goddamn naval fleet (and collaborating with North Korea to keep the US too distracted to notice it, even though this is a British operation against an organization that literally burned down the White House in the first scene of the first episode) might actually beat the first few episodes of Full Metal Panic! for “worst undercover operation ever”.

[othercat2]

fic: (they flow from form to form) 15/?

==>Karkat: consider the possibility that the dragon is metaphorical

He doesn’t really know what to do with himself once Ms. Pyrope leaves. Is he just staying put, out of danger? Is he technically babysitting Terezi who “isn’t doing too well?” Probably not babysitting, he thinks, even though Si seemed to be implying that when they’d spoken. Latula had been so careful about letting him know that he didn’t have to stay if he didn’t want to.

The Pyrope living room is stuffed full of bookshelves with furniture and an entertainment center shoved in as an afterthought. The books are a mix of mythology, criminology, sociology, mystery, history, fantasy, science fiction novels and roleplaying manuals. He grabs a book at random and settles on the couch. The book turns out to be about a prince who goes off to rescue his boyfriend, also a prince, and has various adventures while trying to unlock his Untapped Powers of Magic. Karkat’s up to the part where the prince rescues a fire elemental from a rainstorm when he feels that he isn’t alone in the room.

He doesn’t see anyone at first. It’s the same nebulous not-quite-there “shape” the other Gods assume when they aren’t bothering with a human form. There’s a sense of presence, limbs and dark green eyes arranged around a central column. His brain kept trying to make sense of what he wasn’t really seeing. One moment he saw a tree with eyes, the next he saw a winged lantern shaped like a skull with coiling tentacles.

Karkat set his book on the arm of the couch, open and face down to mark his place. “Hope,” Karkat says. “Hello.” He might have said “hey,” but he wasn’t sure how that would go over. He’d seen and spoken to Hope before, but only briefly. (And the last time he’d been pretty snarky so it might be a good idea to tone that down a little bit this time around.)

“Hello yourself,” Hope says in a voice that sounds like a smile. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your reading. I probably shouldn’t have been watching you so closely. I only meant to take a peek.”

“Why were you?” Karkat asks.  

“I could hear you being uncomfortable and unhappy,” Hope says. “And well, you’re here.”

“Is that a problem?” Karkat asks, frowning.

“Oh no,” Hope says, brightening in an uncomfortably literal way. Karkat feels a sense of cheerfulness radiating from Hope, as if all the morning people in the world hopped out of bed and flung open the curtains and wished all of the songbirds good morning. “Quite the opposite, really. It’s good that you’re here, though the reason leaves much to be desired.”

“Yeah,” Karkat says. “So you’re here because I am?”

There was another sense that Hope was smiling. “That should go without saying. I may not be as forward as other members of my family, but rest assured we are all much taken with you, Mister Vantas.”

“As usual I have no idea of what to say to something like that,” Karkat says. “It’s kind of terrifying.” Karkat was willing to admit to something the Gods probably already knew.

“Due to circumstances, we weren’t able to reveal ourselves in a more gentle way,” Hope says. The column-shape pulses and contracts, then folds up into a dark haired boy with glasses wearing a yellow long sleeved shirt and green short pants with suspenders. Hope’s feet are bare and strangely shaped, more like paws than feet, with sharp claws.

“Circumstances involving me being chained up in a freezing cold cave,” Karkat says.

“Not the most romantic first meeting,” Hope says, sitting on the other end of the couch. “I would have preferred, oh, to be some strange and mysterious creature you followed into the woods or a stalwart chap drawing you into strange adventures.” He smiles. “Or you brought to Us as an offering instead of for judgment.”

Karkat can see what He means; Hope is showing him what He means. A gaudy and brilliant temple, and Karkat in gold chains and not much else, chained to an altar. The Gods appear in almost human forms to surround him on the altar. They bend to kiss him, Their hands sliding over skin that feels heated, electric as an aching urgency begins to build within him. He can’t stop himself from arching up, from making soft needy little sounds, begging for more.

Then he’s out of it, back in the living room and shivering with left over sensations and a sense of acute embarrassment. He’s breathless for a second, the sound of his heart beating loud and fast in his ears. “Is that how the wedding thing usually goes?” Karkat snaps when he can speak. It feels as if his entire body is blushing; a rush of embarrassed and aggravated heat.

Hope laughs. “No. But it might be fun to play at.”

“I think that’s a little too kinky for me just yet,” Karkat mutters. “Holy shit.”

“The marriage would take place in the Temple, that part’s true,” Hope says. “You walk to the altar, which is up on a little stage. You say your piece, and the High Priestess says her piece, and then there’s a party.”

“Do You say anything? Any of You?” Karkat asks. No one had really brought up the wedding yet. Not in any kind of detail.  

“Not really. The ceremony is acknowledgement and blessing for the people, not the part that binds.”  Hope wiggles his eyebrows. “We’re there for the wedding nights of course.”

“Nights?” Karkat asks, not able to help himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know about “wedding nights,” plural. At the same time, if he didn’t it would just be kind of lurking there in the background.

“Nights,” Hope says. “At least eight. Maybe more. Like a honeymoon!”

He can’t help wondering how that would go. Would it be one of Them each night, or all at once? He’d really like to ask Kanaya or Si about what it was like. (This was in no way going to happen. He’d die of embarrassment before a word got out.) Where exactly would this “honeymoon” be taking place? His face heats as he thinks of the “temple,” image Hope showed him. The “temple” reminded him of old sword and sorcery movies from the eighties; villains with slave girls hanging off of them, or lounging around on cushions.

Then he finds himself in a big room with fountains, huge arched windows and a bed that’s mostly pillows and furs that he’s lounging in the middle of, naked except for an elaborate gold and ruby necklace, gold bracelets, and two panels of bright red fabric embroidered with gold thread, held in place by a jeweled belt. There’s also something resting on his brow, wrapped around his head. He takes it off and sees it’s a circlet set with diamonds and rubies, the Blood symbol suspended from thin beaded wires between the arches of stylized thorny branches. He blinks and he’s back in the living room. “The hell?”

Hope gives him a look that would be almost innocent if not for the thin, wicked grin that stretches his mouth a little too wide. “People who make virginity sacrifice and harem jokes shouldn’t be surprised to find that their words were inspirational.”  

“So my honeymoon is going to be on the set of Conan the Barbarian?” Karkat asks, face heating up.

“It could be on the moon, if you wanted,” Hope says with a brilliant smile.

“What if I don’t want a honeymoon, or a wedding?” Karkat asks. “What if I don’t want any of this?”

“I’m afraid you’re a bit stuck with us,” Hope says. “As We’re a bit stuck on you. You could leave, but we’d follow after you.”

“That kind of showed up a lot in the spell Dad cast,” Karkat says. “You following us if we managed to leave.”

“Even if you wanted nothing to do with Us, never spoke to Us again, never touched Us or allowed Us to touch you, We would follow you,” Hope says.

“Is that even an option though?” Karkat asks. “The no contact thing.”

“It’s an option, though it would be unpleasant for both sides,” Hope admits. “Is that what you want?”  

Karkat thinks about it. It wouldn’t be as if everything had gone back to normal. They’d still be there, and he’d be aware of Them. There’d still be figuring out his “Blood” powers. “What I want is that we hadn’t gone camping in the crow woods,” Karkat says carefully.

“Not ‘I wish’?” Hope asks with a grin. “I’m not a monkey’s paw, you know.”

“Yeah, I’m not taking any chances,” Karkat says understanding the reference after a second. He read the story in junior high. Wishing seemed to be something that was inherently dangerous. At least it was in stories.

“‘I want’ could be just as dangerous,” Hope says. “And we would have noticed you eventually, even if you hadn’t gone camping and stumbled onto an initiation.”

“Yeah but it would have been a completely different pile of bullshit. Not the pile of bullshit where--” Karkat breaks off, voice shaking. He scrubs at his eyes, which were watering now. “Someone I’m friends with leaves me tied to a rock so I can get ‘judged.’ She just left me. Like that was an okay thing to do. Like we weren’t friends at all.”

There’s a noise from the hallway then, a sound like a sob or gasp, and then a couple of thumps. Terezi. She had heard him, had been listening for who knows how long. Karkat scrambles off the couch, heart thumping away in his ears. It’s half guilt that she heard him, and half embarrassed that she heard him almost start crying that makes him head for the hallway. He gets there just in time to see Terezi running for her bedroom door in a blur of white robes and bare feet. She slams the door behind her, and shouts something incomprehensible, a series of sounds that he can’t chop up into individual words.

“She says, well, it would translate loosely, ‘he shouldn’t be here, why did you bring him?’ ” Hope says, coming up behind Karkat.

Karkat feels a chill at that, like ice down his spine. He knows how careful and respectful the Believers are about their Gods from what he’s studied so far. A flat “why did you bring him?” like that should have been unthinkable. Karkat glances back at Hope, more than a little worried about Terezi.

“She’s a bearcat, isn’t she?” Hope asks cheerfully. He doesn’t sound angry or the least bit insulted.

“So, no smiting?” Karkat asks cautiously. “Could smiting be a thing that doesn’t happen?”

“Why would there be smiting?” Hope asks with a sort of wide eyed innocence Karkat immediately doesn’t trust.

“It seemed kind of blunt. And from what I’ve read that kind of blunt usually results in someone becoming a greasy smear on the pavement,” Karkat says.

“There are a few who can get away with being ‘blunt,’” Hope says, a spark of amusement in His green eyes. “Or even irascible!”

Karkat stops himself before he can respond to the teasing. Hope is talking about him, Karkat’s pretty sure of that. He’s also pretty obviously hinting at something. It isn’t hard to figure out what He’s hinting at. Who generally gets away with being blunt? “Is.” Karkat pauses for a moment. “Is Terezi like me? A chosen bride or whatever?”

“You’re a bridegroom, not a bride. Well, if you identify as masculine you’re a bridegroom,” Hope says.

“How do you acknowledge transgender identity and still use the term ‘mongoloid’?” Karkat asks, distractedly.

There’s an odd sense of confusion coming from Hope, paired with a frown. “What you wear doesn’t have much to do with whether you’re masculine, feminine, both or neither. It’s an Outsider notion that Our People can’t help but be at least a little influenced by, but really it doesn’t matter.”

Karkat rubs his face with one hand. He had a strong feeling Hope was conflating terms, and if he tried to explain (when he wasn’t exactly an expert) things would just get more confusing. “Okay,” he says.  “Is Terezi a bride?”

“We’ve been courting her,” Hope says. Hope looks toward the closed door, radiating affection and concern. “She and my priest found you, you know. She was ready to grieve, but you were alive, surrounded by flowers and marked by Our Favor.”

“Ready to grieve,” Karkat echoes. He remembers Terezi and Eridan taking him to the Temple. The way they talked about what was going to happen to him. Eridan trying to be sinister and the matter of fact way Terezi made sure he knew he couldn’t escape. He remembers hoping that Terezi would help him, and her saying, “You committed a spiritual crime, and the only way your soul can be cleansed is through sacrifice and the blessed intervention of the Gods.”

“You were friends, and she had to send you to judgment,” Hope says. “She did what she had to, and blames herself for what happened.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Karkat says immediately.  “It’s the fault of whoever set me and Dad up.” It felt strange to defend her so automatically. He was still angry--still felt the sting of betrayal--but he couldn’t help defending her. It wasn’t her fault, and she hadn’t come to school or said anything to him since, but he hadn’t said anything to her either. Hadn’t tried talking to her, hadn’t even called her up to yell at her. (He wasn’t going to feel guilty about that. He wasn’t.)

“You could tell her that,” Hope says. (Hopefully?)

“I don’t think she wants me to talk to her,” Karkat says. Despite his words, he finds himself moving toward the closed door. Hope follows after him, silent now. As he gets closer to the door he can sense where Terezi is, in the room. She’s sitting on the floor in front of her bedroom door, leaning against it. He puts his hand on the door. “Hey Terezi. Um. Dad tried to cast a spell and it kind of backfired. Si sent me here while he and your mom fix things. Ms. Pyrope didn’t tell you?”

There’s a silence, stretching into several minutes. “I was asleep. I didn’t know you were here until I heard voices,” Terezi says, her voice muffled by the door.

“Yeah,” Karkat says. “Are you okay?” It was a stupid question to ask. Obviously she wasn’t okay. “I mean, do you want to talk, or should I go away?”

“You want to talk to me after what happened?” Terezi asks in return.

Karkat presses his forehead against the door. “Yeah. I mean, I’m still talking to Sollux after all.”

“Sollux didn’t leave you chained up in the dark,” Terezi says.

“But if he’d been there instead of you, he would have done the same, right?”

Terezi says “yes,” so quietly Karkat almost couldn’t hear it.

“Sollux was pretty sure I’d hate him, you know? Just because he was one of you guys. But I didn’t. I told him were still friends.”

Karkat hears a soft thump against the door. “But I actually did leave you for judgement, which could have killed you or worse,” Terezi says.

“Worse being hallucinations, dementia and permanent brain damage, which you don’t really try treating. Give me a minute; I can come up with a Dad-style rant about ableism,” Karkat says.

There’s another thump, a little louder against the door. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Karkat sighs. “Yeah, I’m not sure I could really manage it. I’m tired and apparently had a really weird Groundhog Day weekend.”

“Groundhog Day?” Terezi asks, as if she can’t help herself.

“Have you seen the movie? The main character keeps repeating the same day over and over. Dad tried some kind of ‘scrying’ thing I guess? It didn’t go so well. Breath pulled me out and I called Si and he sent me to get your mom. I could have gone to Sollux’s house I guess but…I wanted to see you.”

“Even after what happened?” Terezi asks.

Karkat swallows, throat suddenly dry. “Yeah.”

“That’s not what you said before,” Terezi says. “I heard what you said.”

“I figured,” Karkat says. He thumps the door. “Let me in? I don’t want to talk to the door.”

There is a pause, and then he could hear Terezi get up. Karkat steps back as the door opens with a click. Terezi looks pale, her eyes bloodshot and tired, her hair tangled and sticking up. She is wearing the same kind of clothes that Feferi had worn when she’d gotten back from the Temple, and her feet were bare. She stepped out of the doorway to let him in.

Karkat enters and looks around. Terezi’s bed is unmade, and her room was a mess of schoolbooks and looseleaf paper and binders. Karkat sits down at her computer desk, and Terezi sits down on the edge of her bed. Hope enters as well, a diffuse sort of presence that somehow seems to indicate both concern and a desire to not interfere. (Terezi’s shoulders hunch, and her fingers tangle and twist as she stares down at her feet.)

“I’m sorry I didn’t come see you sooner,” Karkat says after a silence that felt long, but might have only been a minute. “I was angry, and then I was trying to figure things out. There was too much happening all at once, and then psychic kaiju are looming over me and crows are screaming ‘Blood for the Blood God,’ at me.”

Terezi chokes on a thin little laugh. “So you’re okay with me almost getting you killed?” Terezi asks, her voice tired and brittle.

“No, that was pretty messed up,” Karkat says. “But it wasn’t your fault. You got set up.”

“I should have seen it,” Terezi says sharply. She look up, and her blood shot eyes are vivid, tear bright teal-green. “I should have seen you! I should have known!”

“You got set up, Terezi,” Karkat repeats. “Me and my Dad got set up. Neither of us blame you for what happened.”

“You should,” Terezi said. “I didn’t See anything about you. Even if a more powerful priest or adept interfered with the ritual and set you up, I should have known about you.”

“About me?” Karkat asks, a little surprised.

“If I’d known, if I’d realized what I was sensing from you, I would have told Feferi and she would have made contact, and this wouldn’t have happened,” Terezi says. “You and your Dad wouldn’t have gone up to the crow woods, and I wouldn’t have had to leave you for judgment.”

“Feferi’s enemies would have just done something else to try discrediting her,” Hope says. “They would have set someone up who wouldn’t have survived judgment at all, and that would have been worse.”

Terezi hunches her shoulders again and the words But I wouldn’t have hurt Karkat! ring in Karkat’s ears. For a moment he sees the line connecting him and Terezi, it pulses with a rapid, almost painful beat. She’s twisting it, it’s hurting her. (It’s hurting him.)

Karkat  touches the line--

--he slips out of the chair settling on his knees between Terezi’s feet. He reaches out and catches Terezi’s hands. “Terezi,” Karkat says. “You know I’d be just as freaked out as I was when you left me.”

“I thought about it. I thought about it a lot,” Terezi says, her voice broken into pieces and full of tears. “I could have made it work. You wouldn’t have known.”

“Want to bet I wouldn’t have?” Karkat says. “I’m seeing a lot, just from here.” There was so much. Terezi’s mind was ticking along in tightly wound circles, trying to figure out where she went wrong. She saw him, over and over again, in the Temple, taking him to the Chamber of Repentance. In her mind she had ruined everything, destroyed the sacred marriage before it could even happen. Karkat would never come to love the Gods (the way she did). She had done the unforgivable; she was a false Seer, a false Beloved. She tried to pull away from him, wanting to escape him (her thought).

“Terezi. Terezi no,” Karkat says. “Terezi, stop it!” His throat ached with the force of the words. Terezi froze, wide eyed, staring. (There’s a sense that she’s fighting him. He has a sense that teeth are bared and wings mantled at him, a fierce and terrible something-that-is-her-and-not-her.)

“Please, Terezi, it’s okay. Stop beating yourself up. You already did all the penance crap. You don’t need to do more.”

Terezi drew in a breath to start protesting, but Karkat squeezes her hands--

--and runs right over her with his own words.

“I mean it Terezi. You don’t need to fix me. You don’t need to fix whatever mess you think you made between me and your Gods. I probably would have been just as freaked out if Light gave me a tentaclehorror Valentine’s Day card, or I don’t know Hope put Green Mansions in my Netflix queue. I don’t hate you, I don’t hate Them, okay? What happened was fucked up and weird and I am not okay with it but I am also not okay with you holing up in your room like this because of me. I mean, you can hole up if you think you need to, but it’s been a long time and I’m worried and confused and I can feel how bad you feel about what happened.” He tries a spell, a small one, sending calm through the connection while he talks, half begging half bullying. He shows her how he feels. He visualizes the frantic pulse slowing, the tangles coming out smooth and straight. It was slow, very slow going, but he saw/felt the tension and misery fade, go hazy and blunt.

“I’m so sorry,” Terezi says finally in a small, miserable voice.

“I know,” Karkat says. He rises to sit beside her on the bed, and pulls her into a hug. “You want to get something to eat?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Terezi says.

She doesn’t move to get up, and he doesn’t move either for several minutes.

<==

==>

Books referenced: I make a reference to Karkat reading Diane Duane’s The Door Into Fire. It is a very good book.

I also make a reference to Green Mansions which is a book that has been thrown across the room because the ending is sad and I want to kick the protagonist in the balls until he walks with a permanent stoop for the rest of his miserable life. It’s also a movie. I have not seen the movie due to my antipathy for the novel. (And the protagonist. Who I despise.) Hope would like the movie because it’s ~~Romantic~~

I have a Patreon! If you like my writing, please consider becoming a patron! Or you could buy me a coffee! Donation links are in the sidebar of my blogs! I am having a Continuing Financial Crisis and could use the help as being homeless = no writing.

[its-btrz-blog]

Shades of Magic (by V. E. Schwab) Series Review

Shades of Magic is a fantasy trilogy by author V. E. Schwab (a.k.a. Victoria Schwab) published by Tor Books between 2015 and 2017. The three books are A Darker Shade of Magic, A Gathering of Shadows and A Conjuring of Light.

[The author has stated that she uses Victoria Schwab to publish YA books, and the V. E. Schwab is used for adult releases. However, I'll list it as YA in my review index, since to me these books aren't on the adult category. There's a barely explicit sex scene on the last book and that's about as far as “adult” themes go.]

What made me want to read it:

Fantasy books with great ratings and possibly the most gorgeous covers I've seen lately. Synopsis promising four alternative, color-coded Londons and traveling between them. There isn't much to dislike.

What is it about (no spoilers):

In this universe, four parallel Londons exist (or existed, in the last case): White, Grey, Red and Black. Only very powerful magicians, called Antari, can travel between them. Kell, one of the last Antari, is the ambassador from Red London who delivers messages to the dangerous White London and the Grey London who lost its magic.

As a side occupation, Kell smuggles little trinkets from one London to another, which he finds out, can have dangerous consequences. As he escapes from one of these transactions he is forced to take Delilah Bard, a thief from Grey London, to his own London, where she will help him set wrongs to rights.

What I thought about it (no spoilers):

These books have one of the most interesting concepts for world building I've seen lately. And it actually translates well into the story. Each London, aside from it's color, has characteristic smells and the color isn't just for “oh it's Red London because the buildings are red”. It's associated with life and magic and power and the value placed in each of those. In that, I think the concept was well used. I was also happy to see that, although each city is named London, the world around them is completely different in each dimension. So there really is only London in common. There aren't four Frances, the kingdoms of London are different, only one being located in Great Britain. We only see something of the world of one of the Londons, but it's still good.

Moving on to the characters: we have Kell, an Antari; Delilah, or just Lila, who is from Grey London, the one without magic; and Rhy, Kell's foster brother and crown prince of Arnes, the empire in which Red London is located. There are more, but I'll focus on these, since I could say they are the most important throughout the three books. I'll say right away that, by the time I got to the end, I felt like the main characters were exactly the same as in their first pages. We got them, and we kept them until the end with little to no development. Some angst in there sometimes, but it didn't seem like they took any great lessons from their trials.

OK, Kell first. He is, supposedly, the main character. And in the first chapter I thought he looked really promising. Unfortunately, he turned out to be one of the more washed out characters I've seen in a main role. He has some problems with acceptance and with his foster family and his role as a power figure, but other than some switches between “I'm only their tool” and “They're my family and they love me” we get little depth. I feel this could have been more explored, other than the angst it occasionally provides.

Then we have Lila. For all the focus she gets, from narrative and other characters, she is, in my opinion, the real main character. And I don't feel the story gains from it. See, she is a type of character I keep seeing everywhere and that type doesn't work for me: orphan with tragic past, cool loner, only cares for herself, obviously coolest/toughest around. Add it to the “emotions are weakness”, and “I'm too cool for rules” tropes and you have Lila. I'm tired of these types of characters. They disregard rules and others' emotions and needs, don't care for consequences and want to be feared by everyone. Of course, in the end they are the reluctant good guys, acclaimed by everyone, although we never really get their motivations (Lila wants freedom but then she just decides to help Kell because… I don't know?). The narrative also tries too hard to make her likable and something she isn't. It's shoved in your face how cool, bad ass, strong and independent she is, in an obvious effort to make her some paragon of female empowerment. What I see, is a childish and selfish character, who never learns from her mistakes or thinks about consequences (which is understandable since, you know, she suffers none from her rash actions) and who only wants to do whatever she feels like while looking cool. If you think I'm being repetitive, well, wait until you read the books. In short, her character irritated me.

Finally there's Rhy. He's a prince, he's somewhat spoiled and sometimes only seems to be there to have lots of lovers and be an object of Kell's worry and brotherly affections. Still, you can kind of like him, because he knows what he is and seems to be able to sometimes ground Kell. It's also through him that you can get a feel of international politics and of what's at stake for the kingdom, so he's not a useless character.

As for the plot, you can see clearly this was intended to be a trilogy. The first book has an interesting story that stands on its own and leaves room for it to continue, despite it being obviously a preparation for the series. It has no romance so the focus is entirely on its world and characters. With the second book, the quality diminishes. It is very, very obviously, nothing more than a preparation for the third book. Some stuff happens, but you never feel like you are progressing towards the end of a book or reaching some sort of conclusion. It is merely an introduction for what is to happen next. Personally, I found it hardly memorable. There's a stunning (not) revelation that's been made obvious since the first book but hardly anything more. The third book, I found dull and only in the last 150 pages, more or less, did it feel like things were progressing. For the rest of the book well, I'm not sure. There's also this use of convenient magic artifacts that happen to do exactly what you need them to do. It allies with the magic here, that doesn't seem to have many definable and tangible limits because on the main cast you are either the most powerful magic user alive or have no magic. It's mostly… according to convenience of plot.

The stylized prose (I have no other name for it) works well a couple of times, like shorter chapters with a lot of dramatic effect or with some cinematic effect, but it grows tiresome fast. After three books you're saturated of it. It's overly repetitive and dramatic and it hinders me. Honestly, you don't have to write like you're writing for children, but at the same time, there is a point where it's too much. There needs to be some balance between simpler writing in most scenes and using the stylistic effects when they actually do something for the reader.

Finally, I have to mention. Why does every YA series need a forced romance? I like books for what they are. If it is a fantasy, give me a fantasy. And it was working well in the first book. But then we have the predictable, boring and artificial romance of the main characters. It really feels forced, out of place and just there for the sake of it or because it was expected. All it added were some boring and irrelevant flirting/kissing/sex scenes. The romantic entanglement involving Rhy, although sort of an already established fact, had some tension and conflict in it and thus it was somewhat interesting. Two boring characters in a forced relationship are not interesting.

Conclusion:

For the series as a whole, my rating is of two stars. It's not a bad series but it's also not all that it is made to be. Maybe the low rating is a way to show my disappointment for a hyped-up series that didn't live up to my expectations.

It is a decent fantasy book, YA/New Adult, that knows what story it wants to tell and has its own distinguishable world. Considering what I've read, I find it a solid read in the genre, perhaps a bit more mature (this is a good thing) than the average. (There are no love triangles! No petty girl rivalries because of men!)

[Reviews for each book are here, here and here.]

Note: I’ve seen some good things about Vicious and This Savage Song. I’d like to know if they’re worth trying.

[theworstbob]

the thing journal, 5.28 - 6.3

capsule reviews of the pop culture things i took in last week. in this post: from a room, chi-raq, the intervention, all the beauty in this whole life, bone tomahawk, spades and roses, souvenir, spin, brooklyn nine-nine, blue velvet

1) From a Room, Vol. I, by Chris Stapleton: My thing with Chris Stapleton is, I have enjoyed his two albums, I have thought they were both Very Good, I think they're both fine examples of what country should sound like and understand their importance in keeping country music vital. I'd fall just short of calling either of them classics. Which is a weird space to be evaluating an album, where your main critique of an album is that it isn't an all-time classic, that you agree the songs are good and that a lot are great (and there's some great fuckin' songs, "Either Way" is just, yerrrgh, that's a toughie), but sometimes, it feels like there's some ingredient missing from the mix. I think it just feels too perfect. This man has a perfectly tortured voice, capable of translating any sort of pain and misery he feels, and he's using it to craft perfect country songs about country things like drinking and being in jail. It feels like he's content to do great things within the confines of the genre when he could be reinventing it, which, hey, fair enough, Chris Stapleton making really good country songs is a thing in this world I'm not complaining about, and if he never unlocks the potential I believe he has and only ever makes songs like "Death Row," I'd be cool with that choice.

2) Chi-Raq, dir. Spike Lee: Because I am ignorant of any piece of media that was made before 2003, I did not know what the Greek drama this was based off was about, so when I realized it was a film about women withholding sex made by the dude who made She Hate Me (this is an unfair comment because I haven't seen the film, but I'm pretty sure that's an unpleasant movie), I kinda prepped myself for an uncomfortable experience. And then the film ended up being fucking fantastic. The fact that the "no peace, no pussy" protest elicits a reaction of "Well, we have dicks. They love our dicks! Surely, if we just remind them of the fact of our dicks we'll put an end to this nonsense" is not just what would obviously happen should a similar protest occur in reality, it calls attention to the fact that so many problems facing the world are being caused by dudes who can't see past the apparent power of their dicks. (I will bring to the grave the belief that, if all the Republican presidential candidates held a joint press conference to tell Donald Trump he had a large penis, Donald Trump would have suspended his campaign and receded into the background.) But more importantly, this film has things to say about this country. It hits on everything, and it hits it hard. It calls out gang violence for bringing strife to black communities, then calls out the people who would use that strife to undermine causes like Black Lives Matter. It's a film stylized all the way to hell that remains grounded in reality because, what with the lists of names the film brings up (multiple lists, and nary a name repeated on any of these lists), it's impossible to fully escape reality. It's an astonishing film from a master director on a subject he's had to explore too often. (Also, Samuel L. Jackson having the time of his life as a Greek chorus.)

3) The Intervention, dir. Clea DuVall: I can never remember which character from Parks & Rec elicited this Perd Hapley line that has stayed with me forever, but all the same, some character asks Perd Hapley "Do you know what I mean?" and Perd responds, "I don't! But it had the tone and cadence of a joke." I have used that line to describe so many things where I respect the attempt at humor but don't ever laugh. This film is an example of what I'd use that line to describe. There's a lot of funny people in the cast, and there were plenty of comedic set-ups, but nothing like an actual joke. I think the film wanted to be a serious meditation on the relationships between these people (who were related in some convoluted way or another), so it tried to distance itself from the comedy, but it never took anything serious enough for the emotional moments to land with any impact. I wouldn't attribute this to the cast -- Melanie Lynskey is fantastic, and I completely forgot but Cobie Smulders can do goddamn work y'all -- more to the point that, hey, there's a low ceiling and low floow for movies about upper-middle-class white folks who only share quiet and emotionally difficult moments with other upper-middle-class white folks, and this film lands somewhere in the middle. I saw this the same day I saw Chi-Raq. Y'all tryna get away with pointin' a camera at some randos, and that's not gonna cut it.

4) All the Beauty in This Whole Life, by Brother Ali: On my personal Top 20 list for the year, I have this ahead of DAMN. It's 10% contrarianism, 20% homerism, 65% this is an amazing record by an amazing man, 5% no one at any point shouts KUNG FU KENNY. It's easy to make an angry political record. I think Rise Against is releasing an album this year, and it's already getting an A- and barely missing the Top 20, because times are shitty and it's easy to be angry. It's hard to look at the world as it is today and find things to defend, reasons to keep going. The most profound political statement to be made is that the world is fundamentally good and needs to be protected from those bringing it ruin, and Brother Ali makes that statement with authority. We'll have plenty of time and reasons to get angry in the coming days/months/years/decades. This is a record advising you to take a second to reflect on what's good in the world, the reasons hate came to be, what we can do to bring out the beauty, to explore what peace we can find before we start a war. It's powerful, amazing work.

5) Bone Tomahawk, dir. S. Craig Zahler: Not gonna lie: took a catnap in the middle of this one, very short, not even sure I was asleep, but definitely let the ol' eyeballs have a rest for a couple seconds. Didn't feel like I missed much plot-wise when I woke up, though. Probably missed a lot of beautiful shots of the Western hills (ok, THIS film is how you break in an HD display, I feel, nuts to Interstellar), but hoo boy, this film moved slowly! On the whole, the film was pretty great, I loved the way it built that town's community in just the one emergency meeting scene ("Look at the mayor when you're addressing him." "Yeah! Look at me!"), but there's a lot of time spent with gruff Westerners speaking softly about the great and terrible things they've done, and impeccably composed as those shots were, I can only be so interested in the things Matthew Fox has to say. (Also, hey there, central romance between a dude and a woman 22 years younger than him.) The film builds to the conclusion well, it picked up the pace a few scenes after my nap most regrettable, and I typically can enjoy a glacially-paced film now and then without sleeping, but if you have a worse attention span than me, this ain't rhe film for you.

6) Spades and Roses, by Caroline Spence: i do not remember how i came to add this particular indie singer-songwriter's ablum to my queue, but here we are, and this was fine! This was fine. I liked it. I rode on a bus and listened to this album, and I thought the young woman sang soft and sweet though potentially dark songs over gentle acoustic guitars. I cannot say I regret listening to this album, though I find myself unable to say much beyond that, because it was fine.

7) Souvenir, by Banner Pilot: I listened to this pop/punk album from an act I understand to be local after Spades and Roses, and one thing I should learn to do is try to pair albums better so that I'm not dealing with a change in mood this intense, so that there's a logical flow to the albums, some thematic link, not just "I added some shit to the library and I guess I'm listening to these today." Figuring thiis sort of stuff out is kinda hard, y'know? Like, I don't want to feel like I'm adding stuff to the library just to get it out of the way three weeks later, and maybe that colors my experience with albums like this or Spades and Roses, where they're fine but not necessarily something I feel I need to listen to twice, but if I come away from an album thinking I don't need to listen to it twice to get the full story, I'm not sure I'm being completely fair to the album. ...This review isn't so much a review of the album itself as much as it's a review of how I listen to music. C-. Needs a lot of improvement.

8) spin, by Tiger's Jaw: OK so I can tell ya right now I fucked up listening to this one. I was distracted, I had connection issues, I went grocery shopping and spent the majoirty of the grocery shopping twist asking myself what groceries I needed instead of what this album was doing for me, I did the thing where I treated music like background noise and not the thing I should be paying attention to. I thought the album was OK, but I could tell that it came to me on the wrong day, that maybe I should have put on something I'd heard before, and saved this one for a time when I could give this what it deserves. Bad week for me and my listening habits. Like, I do the thing with movies where I put the film on full screen and only check my phone to check the time, I need to find the thing for music that gets me to pay attention to music for more than one song at a time.

9) Brooklyn Nine-Nine s4, cr. Michael Schur & Dan Goor: I'm beginning to think this show would be the rare half-hour sitcom to benefit from a 13-episode order. This does action-comedy so well, but you can't really sustain the intensity of the action-comedy aspects of the show over 22 episodes, but then they have to fill the rest of the episodes with hangout-sitcommy bits that are very hit-and-miss for me. Once the show has a plot, it sings, but when it's doing its mystery-of-the-week thing what with A, B, and C plots so the entire cast has things to do, it can feel unfocused. I mean, hey, I watched every episode, I think the show is hilarious (I will sing Andre Braugher's praises until they can hear me from the moon), but I had to learn to deal with its inconsistency. Maybe not a Hall of Famer, but so many All-Stars never make the Hall of Fame, y'know?

10) Blue Velvet, dir. David Lynch: I saw this on Saturday night, and I'm still trying to process it. I'm actually not sure right now that I've seen a David Lynch movie before, which might explain why I feel so off-sync with this film; I've seen season one of Twin Peaks, but I'm otherwise unfamiliar with what he does, beyond a David Foster Wallace essay about the director. Perhaps I've become too desensitized to violence to understand what's shocking about the violence in Blue Velvet, or too many films derivative of Lynch to see what's uniquely Lynchian about Blue Velvet. I do see the central point and believe it's fascinating -- the only think keeping Jeffrey Beaumont from actually being Frank Booth is a sense of decorum, that Jeffrey needs to be Jeffrey to live in civilized society, but the only thing Frank does that Jeffrey only does reluctantly is Violence, and now I'm realizing this is Hannibal, that's where I saw this movie, was Hannibal, OK, OK, cool cool cool, but also, that theme of the darkness within, of people like Frank being everywhere, it resonates, because now we live in a world where we can remove ourselves from a sense of decorum and be Frank. To see Frank Booth in 2017 is to see the manifestation of a Twitter egg. So in the course of this review, we discovered that we are on this film's wavelength, and that the distance we had to bridge was created by seeing Lynchian works and living in the end times.