Clair de Lune

Coldfire FST

2009-12-25T05:30:48Z

Sacrifices of Erna

a Coldfire Trilogy FST

"The efficacy of sacrifice, the Prophet had written, is in direct proportion to the value of that which is destroyed."

Black Sun Rising

1. Sacrifice
Leonard Cohen - Song of Isaac
"The sacrifice is not of your body," he explained. His voice was cold in the darkness. "It is... of my humanity."

2. Nights of Erna
Dead Can Dance - Black Sun
Never sleep through the true night, Damien's master had taught him. Whether you mean to use its power or not, you should be awake to observe its passage. There are too many things in our world that draw their life from that ultimate Darkness, too many evils that can only be worked when all sunlight is gone. So be awake, and take your enemy's measure.

3. The Sight
Sufjan Stevens - Ya Leil
"See what?" she managed.
"The night. The beauty of it. The power. The so-called dark fae, a force so fragile that even the moonlight weakens it - and so strong in the darkness that death itself falls back before it. The tides of night, each with its own color and music. An entire world, child! - filled with things that can't exist when the light in the heavens is too strong."

4. The Hunter
Tori Amos - Blood Roses
His minions hunt the shadows of the eastern cities for suitable preys, to take back to the Forest to feed to him. Women, always; mostly young, inevitably attractive. It's said that he hunts them like wild animals there, in the heart of that land that responds to his every whim.

5. Ciani
Angels of Venice - Within you and without you
Whatever it was that had caused her to devote her life to the acquisition of knowledge, that instinct was still intact and thriving. They had taken the facts from her mind, but they couldn't change what she was.

6. Karril
Marilyn Manson - Sweet Dreams
“My domain is pleasure - human pleasure, in all its manifestations. There are few kinds of pain that I can tolerate, fewer still that I can feed on. But apathy is my true nemesis."

7. Allies
Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil
“For you I’ve become the most subtle creature of all: a civilized evil, genteel and seductive. An evil you endure because you need its service - even though that very endurance plucks loose the underpinnings of your morality. An evil that causes you to question the very definitions of your identity, that blurs the line between dark and light until you’re no longer certain which is which, or how the two are divided. That’s what you fear most of all, priest. Waking up one morning and no longer knowing who or what you are.”

8. Demon Hunter
Dead Can Dance - Chant of the Paladin
“When all this is over - when our enemy has been dealt with and we’re safely out of the rakhlands - I will kill you, Hunter. And rid the world of your taint forever. I swear it.”

9. Senzei
Mirah – The Light
Every few earthquakes some tormented soul took that chance, and added his dying scream to the siren’s din. Ciani couldn’t understand why - but Senzei could, all too well. He understood the hunger that consumed such people, the need that coursed through them like blood, until every living cell was saturated with it. Desire. For the one thing on Erna that Senzei might never have. The one precious thing that Nature had denied him.

10. Hesseth
Garmarna – Eucharie
There was a feeling of rightness about the creature, of completeness, such that the xandu didn't think to fear. It had sought food, and here was food. It would soon need warmth, and here was a creature who commanded fire. It would ache with loneliness… and here, in this creature, was a companion for its winter, who would brave the ravages of ice-time by its side, and then release it to seek out its own kind when the spring came again.

11. The Rakhland
Incus - Dead Wood
Senzei looked out over the seething waterfall, toward the Serpent. He could see nothing but clouds - white clouds, silver clouds – rising like steam from the water's surface. And perhaps, ever so elusive, sparks of liquid illusion that shimmered in the air like sea-spray. The Canopy. This close?
He turned back, and found Damien watching him. When the priest saw that he was all right, the concern in his eyes gave way to wry humor; the grimace of tension softened to a smile.
"Welcome to the rakhland," he told him.

12. Bad Dreams
Jan Garbarek, Anouar Brahem & Shaukat Hussein - Ramy
And nothing responds. Absolutely nothing. The planet is dead, unresponsive to his will. He feels the first cold bite of despair, then, a kind of fear he’s never experienced before. Danger he can deal with, death he’s confronted on at least a dozen occasions, but there’s never been anything like this before - never such absolute helplessness in the face of human suffering, such sudden awareness that his will doesn’t matter, he doesn’t matter, he has no more power to affect the patterns of fate than the dismembered limbs on this field, or the cooling blood that turns the dry earth to mud under his feet.

13. Earthquake
Muse – Hysteria
This wasn’t just a hunger for vision, like Senzei had known, or even an obsession with power. It had gone beyond that - far beyond that - into realms so utterly corrupted that barely a fragment of her human soul remained, clinging to the flesh that housed it as if somehow the two could be reunited.

When True Night Falls

14. Another Continent
Delerium - Terra Firma
This land. This continent. Bound to the Earth (if he read it right) by the same type of symbol that his Church would use to signify the One God, the One Faith… what else could that flag be, but a symbol of his calling?
A fervent prayer echoed in his soul, one he had never dared voice in all the long months of their travel. Oh God, let this land be Yours.

15. Miracles of Faith
Jonathan Elias - Faith
He wanted to respond to what they had accomplished. He wanted them to see it through his eyes. He wanted to give them the gift of his vision, to help them draw back from their day to day life and see - really see - how great their triumph was.
And more. He wanted to put all that in context, so that they knew how hard western man was struggling to find a similar peace. And - most of all - he wanted them to know what it would mean to the west when he brought home word of their triumph. For word of their success would surely spread, until all of Erna was inspired to devote itself to the Prophet's dream. At last.

16. Jenseny
Conjure One - Tidal Pool
Deep within the Protector's keep, in a chamber with no windows, Jenseny played with the fringe of her gown and savored its rhythm with her fingers. She's tried to explain that to her father once how all the tiny threads hanging there together were a kind of music and how she could feel it through her fingers when she stroked them, but he didn't understand. He couldn't hear that and he couldn't hear other things: the fall of rain on waxy leaves, the screech of living gibers as they were ripped from the earth, the beat of the spindle and the soft shuffle of the loom as it wove, wove, wove…

17. The Terata
Joanna Newsom - Swansea
Children. Like her. They wouldn't hurt her, would they?

18. The Fire
Delerium - Relics (Song of the Deads)
And then it seemed to her that one of the soldier-priests turned to her. Eyes of liquid flame, brilliant as the Holy Fire, fixed upon the space she occupied. His shield and sword were molten gold, and his banner-glass tinkled in the wind. He was too bright to look upon, too beautiful for her to look away. His voice was like the wind.
Some things, he whispered, are worth dying for.

19. Priest
Jan Garbarek & the Hilliard Ensemble – O Lord in thee is all my trust
Why did he become a priest? Because the One God was a living expression of man's optimism. Because his Church was man's greatest hope - if not his only hope - on a wild and hostile planet. Because only by devoting his strength and his passion to God did Damien feel he could justify his own existence. Any other profession would have been an exercise in futility.

20. Gerald
Dusty Springfield - The windmills of your mind
"You're trapped by your own intelligence, you know. A simpler man would have found his way back to God long ago."

21. Temptation
Enigma – Hell's Heaven
The figure smiled; the cold eyes gleamed. "I can make you a god." it pronounced.

22. The Waste Land
Yann Tiersen & Shannon Wright - Dried Sea
It was vast. It was lifeless. It was utterly dark. A land as black as the thick night which enshrouded it, all but invisible from their vantage point. Valley bled into mountains bled into the night sky, and even the illumination of Prima's slender crescent failed to distinguish between them. In such a darkness it was impossible to make out any details of the land before them, or to estimate its dangers. It was there, black and forbidding; that was the sum total of their knowledge.

23. The Undying Prince
David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World
"He said that the Prince of the south never dies. He said that the Prince is very, very old, but you can't see it because he makes his body young again whenever he needs to. He said that he'll do it again soon. He'll make his body young, but he'll also make it look different so that he looks like a different person every time, but he's really still the same."

24. Jenseny's Death
Death Can Dance - Persephone (The Gathering of Flower)
While he explored the nooks and crannies of her mind, she wove and wove and wove with all her strength, using every skill that Hesseth had taught her and every ounce of power that the tides made available. Tidal power didn't work that well on material substance, the rakh-woman had told her, but in matters of spirit it was unequaled. She prayed it was so as she bound them together, forging a bond with her fledgling sorcery to support that which he had conjured, a bond which – she hoped – might never be broken.
Then she struck.

25. Calesta
Wax Audio - Whole Lotta Sabbath
Quickly the humans learned their weaknesses, and the rakh who had once terrorized small human villages now cringed in terror as their victims rose up, their souls filled with fury, their hearts set on vengeance. And all the while Calesta fed, Calesta inspired, Calesta rejoiced, as a holocaust of epic proportions took root in the Church's most blessed lands.

26. Prophet
Sarah McLaughlan - Building up a Mystery
"In my lifetime," he said solemnly, "I created only one thing of lasting value. One thing of such beauty and promise that long after I had committed my soul to darkness I still reveled in watching it grow, in seeing what turns it would take and what new paths would open up for it. Your Church, Reverend Vryce. My most precious creation."

Crown of Shadows

27. Andrys
Nirvana - Lithium
Those dreams ... they were pain and ecstasy almost beyond bearing, a catharsis so terrifying and so necessary that on the nights when Calesta did not answer him he wept, helpless and hopeless as a lost child. The dreams were all he had now. The hate was all that was holding him together.
That and the drugs.

28. Narilka
Beth Orton - The Devil Song
How could she explain to them that she had already faced the greatest evil of all, the well of terror in her own soul? How could she explain the way in which that confrontation had transformed her, smothering the helpless child who so needed protection, giving birth to someone older and stronger and far more adaptable. What did the petty evils of this world amount to, when compared to the Hunter's Forest?

29. The Iezu
Ikarus – Praying to Different Gods
But today it was not art that drove her here, but need; need for the kind of reassurance that only a god could offer. Would Sari respond? She was a minor goddess, as such beings were measured, and her domain was a limited one. Was it right to bring these problems to her, when there were at least a dozen other gods dedicated to that kind of turmoil.
You are the patron of my soul, she thought, gazing upon the gleaming temple. Even now, tormented by doubts, she felt the sense of serenity at the sight of the familiar building.

30. Prayer
Goran Bregovic - Elo Hi (Canto Nero)
He had prayed for nights on end for some new insight, but none had come to him. It was so tempting, those dreams of triumph. But if he obeyed his visions and started a war, how would he end it? Violence begets violence, he despaired. How could he encourage it among his people, and then expect it to disperse at the campaign's end? What kind of act or symbol would be powerful enough to disrupt such a cycle?

31. Through Hell
Faith and the Muse - Chorus of the Furies
It was bodies. Human bodies, stretching ahead to the horizon and beyond. Women's bodies, strewn across the landscape like discarded refuse, gathered together in such numbers that in places they were stacked in mounds, like heaps of living garbage. As he watched, they twitched and shivered, and their combined motion gave the illusion of waves passing across the surface.

32. Damien
Sting - It's probably me
"Gerald." He waited until the Hunter was silent, then said sharply, "Don't be a fool. Of course I'm going."

33. Channel
Tricky - I Sing For You
"Only once in my long life have I offered this bond to another man… and that one betrayed me."

34. The Forest (Amoril)
Rasputina - Bad Moon Rising
And as she dared to reach out with her hopes and her fears into the heart of the Forest itself, struggling for some fae-borne sense of Andry's passage, the presence that she sensed within that realm of shadows was enough to make her draw back, sickened. Not a human presence, that. Not the clean demonic signature of the Hunter either, which she knew so well from their two brief encounters. This was something less than human, something so unclean that the Forest itself would surely vomit it up if it had the power to do so. What was going on here?

35. Mount Shaitan
Conjure One - Redemption
"You must understand, Vryce. I honestly believed that somewhere, somehow, I could find an answer. I believed that in the month remaining to me I could discover a way to break my compact and survive, and ultimately cheat death anew… and I chose this instead. This sacrifice of life, made in the very face of Hell." He held out an arm to Calesta, and it seemed to Damien that he smiled. "Come share it with me, demon!"

36. Mother of Iezu
Bjork - Oceania
She would see where their restlessness led them. If it proved that their transgression were serious, then their lives might be put to better use as fodder for a new generation. For there must be children. There must always be children. Living and learning, dreaming and needing, playing their parts without knowing they did so, in the hope that one of them might glimpse the greater game that controlled them all.

37. The Hunter's Death
Sting - Why Should I Cry For You
In the silence of the Forbidden Forest, in the darkness that the Hunter had called home, Damien prayed for God's forgiveness, and for the peace of his friend's soul.

38. The Patriarch
Sufjan Stevens – The Tower of the Seer
The efficacy of sacrifice is in direct proportion to the value of that which is destroyed. Or so the Prophet had written. What could possibly be of more value to this Patriarch, whose greatest dream had been to live long enough to see his world change.

39. New Dawn
Dead Can Dance – Ulysses
Such power, he saw, could change Erna forever. The Hunter had already paved the way, establishing a new channel for currents to follow. He, with his death, would confirm the Pattern, and set it upon the face of the planet forever.
Self-sacrifice.

40. The Stranger
Emiliana Torrini – Serenade
In the dawn of a new world, Damien Vryce smiled.

Notes: Like all FSTs I've done so far (err, all two of them ^_^) this is literally years in the making (and I'm still not happy about a couple of picks, but I was getting annoying with having this FST lingering on unfinished)
Anyway, I had two angles for this :
1/ Really trying for a soundtrack feeling, with a lot of songs picked for the atmospheric mood and how they suit the character/scene/themes I wanted them for. As a result there's a lot of lyricless songs there. And a lot of Dead Can Dance ^_^
2/ Trying to represent as best I could the religious and spirituality themes of the books, whether with earnest or critical or tongue-in-cheek ways, following the thread of the sacrifice thematic.

Anyway, hope you enjoy. Comments very much welcome ^_^

Download

etrangere @ 2009-12-23T04:13:00

2009-12-23T03:13:51Z

I need to remember to post an entry about stuff I did lately, and stuff I failed to do, reviews of anime I watched, and fulfilling memes. For now:

ANON CRUSH MEME

interview meme answers

2009-12-17T12:17:17Z

for tomboy_typist

1. ASOIAF: Your top five pairings. Gushing is a bonus.
Sandor/Sansa : hit me hard from reading the book. It's an interesting mix of creepy and sweet and a great execution of the classic Beauty & Beast archetype. I remember when I first finished read CoK I went back to re-read all their chapters together ;)
Jaime/Brienne: they're so adorable and snarky together! Also love the reverse Beauty&Beast and the way it works on several layers (the honour as well as their appearance).
Theon/Jon: probably my favourite crack hatesex pairing for ASOIAF. Besides the hot hatesex appeal, it's an interesting pairing to explore their respective daddy issues and feeling of not!belonguing (which is exactly why they hate each others so much ^^)
Jaime/Loras: Well that scene where Jaime is all "Loras is minime!" and they are all cocky and snarky at each others is pretty awesome, thus pairing created. Yummy.
Cersei/Sansa: soooo messed up, but an excellent pairing to explore mindfuck and fairytale archetypes.

2. Do you write at all in French? If so, is there a difference in what you write/how you write it? Speaking of which, is French your first language?
Well, I'm capable of writing in French, and it is my first language, but I seldom write fiction in it, at least not for a long time. I never wrote any fanfic in French (though my first Buffy fanfics got translated back in the days).
I think there' a difference in how we wrote any languages because of the inherent differences between languages lol so yes. They have their own rhythm, sonorities, structures, so of course it influences how we write. I find writing in English helps me not feeling like it "sounds false" when I write fanfiction.

3. If you could change just one thing about the world, what would it be? Discuss.
I'd like to make people more aware about issues of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. not just the way they seem obvious, but the way they seep in everywhere unconsciously.

4. Dancing with the Wolves or Singing in the Rain? Why one and not the other?
Errr, one's a racist overly long movie with Kevin Costner and the other is a charming and fun musical. I think I'll take Singing in the Rain!!

5. Just very randomly, your opinions on Tolkien? I don't remember whether or not you're involved at all with that fandom etc etc.
I'm not in the fandom, though I read Lord of the Rings many times when I was younger. I don't have any particular opinion (especially since I haven't read it in a loooong time). He's a good writer with a lot of qualities, but neither do I think he's the best ever; I find accusations of manicheism etc. levelled at his writing are very unfair since his work was much more nuanced and his characterisation contained many grey areas. Anyway if you wanna know, my favourite part of the book was the return to the shire, my favourite character Faramir, and my favourite pairings Legolas/Gimli, Merry/Pippin, Faramir/Eowyn; and I had a big soft spot for all the almost-mostly-evil characters like Saroumane, Gollum, Grima & Orcs who captured Merry & Pippy #1 & 2. I never liked Gandalf.
I liked the movies but mostly for opposite reasons to what I liked in the books.

etrangere @ 2009-12-17T00:57:00

2009-12-16T23:59:58Z

I have a new layout! etrangere etrangere etrangere

I had gotten soooo tired of the previous one! (almost one year of it).

Also I need a Friend Only banner now that my journal is basically semi friend only, might as well make it official. I never use to save FO banners!! I thought maybe this one, but it might just scare people away XDDD

hilarious meme

2009-12-04T23:46:52Z

stolen from tomboy_typist

In 2009, etrangere resolves to...

Overcome my secret fear of slayers.
Cut down on my shipping.
Spend less time on anarchism.
Give up reading.
Volunteer to spend time with manipulative bastards.
Get back in contact with some old religions.

... and for my writing journal:

In 2009, la_mer_allee resolves to...

Find a better etrangere.

o_o you are so right my writing journal.

row row fight the power

2009-11-29T19:08:34Z

Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann

Humanity lives (pretty miserably) underground in small villages, the existence of the surface being reduced to a myth. Only Kamina, a teenager with more attitude than brain insist it exists and repeatedly tries to reach it. One day, Simon the digger, Kamina's best friend and younger brother figure, finds a weird machine shaped like a human head; later on, a redhead girl with a big gun falls from a hole in the ceiling; quickly followed by an aggressive mecha and they fight it using Simon's new-found mini-mecha... and soon reach the surface. Sadly the surface is populated by beastmen piloting mechas who will hunt down and kill any humans who dare to live on it.

TTGL doesn't do a whole lot of thing, but what it does, it does very, very well. TTGL is a reconstruction of the mecha genre, with a lot of homage to old shows and lot of things working on trope, literally, (tropes like the Rule of Cool and Hot Bloodedness, especially) and whole fucking lot of EPIC AWESOME. Also a lot of silly. And a lot of things so silly they cross the line twice and go back into AWESOME. It would be an understatement to call TTGL over the top. TTGL is flying far, far over over the top. Even the sky isn't the limit for TTGL, for it knows no limits (or common sense). It will frequently make you OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK THEY DIDN'T? THEY DID! This is made particularly winningly entertaining by the utter lack of shame and amused self-consciousness the storytelling shows.

Stylistically, the art is aggressively shounen and very dynamic, frequently sketchy and with some notable daring art-shift to suit narrative moods. There's pretty much always something racing, bouncing, drilling, popping or exploding on screen. Fanservice is also endemic, with most of cast - including male characters - wearing stripperific outfits. As a machine in creating enthusiasm, TTGL is a thing of beauty, helped along by an earwormy soundtrack ("row row fight the power") and many judiciously repeated catchphrases. In a way its a bit scary how good this show is at creating rabid enthusiasm amongst its fans. It's just... very, very catchy. Like a virus.

In pacing, TTGL also pushes beyond all limits, with a virtually absent status quo. Events don't just happen, they rush in rapid succession of topping over previous events; yet still in a way that is easy to follow and distillates the mood perfectly. This does have the bad effect of having a bunch of secondary character who have very little development besides showing up and being named, although TTGL rests very knowingly on tropes to be confident the audience still knows what those characters are about.

Those aside, most characters are very endearing and sympathetic. Simon's character journey is very well told and I found him much more interesting than your average shounen lead, not due to originality but simply to the quality of the storytelling. Kamina is... pretty much indescribables, but very hard not to love. Yoko and Nia, the female leads, are both pretty awesome and likeable. Relationships between those four (and the few other regular secondary characters) are also pretty rich and compelling (also frequently very, very slashy).

Thematically, TTGL mostly works around the idea of the importance of self-confidence, guts and actually trying things and not letting yourself stopped by anything; a theme it pursues relentlessly with the use of the "Spiral" motif, which is embedded (and drilling) everywhere in the series from art to narrative to theme to the show's very structure (also drilling). If you want a show to cheer you up and motivates you, you could do worse. It also addresses shallowly themes of idealism vs pragmatism and in the third arc (my favourite ^_^) also perhaps without fairness enough to make it work fully.

Gender dynamics wise, TTGL is... not very good. Asides from copious amount of male fanservice and the existence of a couple of very cool female protagonists, it relies way too much on putting those female characters in weakened or dangerous situation for the express purpose of making male characters look cool, especially by the ending. Otherwise, there's one flamingly gay character whose campiness is played for laugh, although he's portrayed as very awesome and competent.

In conclusion, an extremely fun and entertaining show, thanks to clever and bold storytelling and stylistic mastery, especially if your taste runs to AWESOME and over the top.

my old Buffy S4 essay

2009-11-24T00:07:41Z

For archiving purpose...

In the Beginning: Themes of Season Four: Or how there were a lot of good ideas to begin with that weren't too well executed
Etrangere - June 11 2002

Thanks to Lady Starlight and Wise Woman for correcting the translation mistakes and general copy editing.

I remember having read an explanation of the name of the Initiative based on the irony to apply such a word to people that didn't know much but who simply followed orders. I propose another one: Initiative comes from initiare, the Latin for "to begin." That word of beginning is the one that starts a well known book and gave its name, in the Hebraic tradition, to the first chapter of this book, Bereshith, or in English, Genesis. A Season Big Bad isn't named Adam by coincidence.

One of the problems with the way the story arc of season 4 worked is that there was too few episodes about it. In every other seasons (except S1) there's a dozen episodes more or less directly about the Story Arc and its Big Bad. Season 4 has only 5: The Initiative, The I in Team, Goodbye Iowa, the Yoko Factor and Primeval. Plus Restless, somehow. So we have to check on the other episodes too. Usually, even if they're not about the Story Arc directly, the other episodes support it thematically. (For example in S2, a dozen episodes deal with a boy- or girlfriend being a danger for their date, or people whose dark side is discovered)

By analyzing the themes of each individual episode of S4 and their title, we've got three principal themes that appear clearly:

A act of creating / naming a new humanity

A state of primordial wilderness, amoral and happily ignorant

A rupture with this state brought by an awakening to conscience

One of the rules of fairy tales are that we find, at a smaller scale, the same story told several times that is the story of the whole fairy tale. And the story that tells Season 4 is very clearly the one of the creation of man and its expulsion from the garden of Eden for the discovery of Good and Evil. The crucial point of that Season and of this theme (like Innocence was for Season 2) is Goodbye Iowa.

I - To Create the Human, to Name the Man

If we have a look at the titles and themes of the episodes, we find a handful of them dealing with the idea of renewal of Man. The Freshman, A New Man, This Year's Girl, and even Who Are You, Living Condition, Superstar, New Moon Rising. The Initiative is at the source of the creation, or the recreation, of three important characters from this season: Adam, Riley and Spike (Five if you count Forrest and Graham, but they have probably more value as Riley's doubles). The evolution of these three characters is contrasted, one against the other(s) all along the Season, sometimes in parallel, sometimes in opposition.

The similarities are quite clear between Adam and Riley, Professor Walsh's two "babies". During the first confrontation between those two characters, Adam says to Riley: "But after you met Maggie, she was the one who shaped your basic operating system. She taught you how to think. How to feel. She fed you chemicals to make you stronger. Your mind and body. She said that you and I were her favorite children. Her art. That makes us brothers. Family." (Goodbye Iowa) This helps us to Define what it is that creates man: to form someone, his mind, his body, his feelings. It's not only about makes him exist, but to determine his way of dealing with existence, the terms of one's interaction with one's life.

Spike being an almost accidental result of the Initiative, his case is more ambiguous. The Initiative probably didn't mean to keep him alive very long, and it's only because of his evasion that his re-creation was really made. (Spike is probably too much of a self-made-man to let himself be remake without a word:) But Initiative's intervention by implanting him the chip is still enough to force him to redefine what he is and to change totally his behavior. We do see him put in parallel with Riley first in The Initiative, Something Blue, Doomed and Goodbye Iowa, then with his alliance to Adam in the Season ending. Restless puts him back in parallel with Riley.

The last case of human recreation in Season 4 is Faith, through the double-episode This Year's Girl / Who Are You. She is even symbolically reborn for the occasion, coming out from a grave in the dream before her awakening.
Of course it concerns also, at least a little, the heart of the Scooby Gang; who through their first year in College have the occasion to reinvent themselves, to redefine their identities, their role in the life they look forward to, this definition leading them to the dispersion that marks their relationship in the Season. But as it this has already been analyzed, I tried to see where else it applied. So what does characterize the action to make Man? Keeping in mind what Adam said, I think it is the idea of definition, hence of name.

Genesis describes the creation through word, God says, and bam, so it is.

BUFFY: She pieced you together from parts of other demons.
ADAM: And man. And machine. Which tells me what I am. . but not who I am. (Goodbye Iowa)

Giving a name to something, it means giving its origin, its role, it singularity. It's giving it a function. (Remember Anne: "I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you are?") Paradoxically it's from the mouth of a child, once out of the Initiative, that Adam discovered the answer to this question: "You're a monster." Yet he seems indeed to refer to Walsh's plans and to try to follow them: "Mother wrote things down. Hard data, but also her feelings. That's how I learned that I have a job here. And that she loved me." And this is more important about what is Adam than what he is made of.
This idea of name comes back, in a way that struck me in Restless: "RILEY: Buffy, we've got important work here. A lot of filing, giving things names." That's probably a reference to the moment when Adam gives name to every animal of the creation. By doing this, he removes a part of the wilderness, of the unknown intrinsic that is a part of them. In short, he gains control over them.

"RILEY: Baby, we're the government. It's what we do." Names give control: remove the speech from a town, and it falls in anarchy. But it's also a restriction of possibilities: "WALSH: So this is what it is.. talking about communication talking about language... not the same thing. It's about inspiration... Not the idea, but the moment before the idea when it's total. When it blossoms in your mind and connects to everything. It's about the thoughts and experiences that we don't have a word for." (Hush)

Freed from words, the couples of Anya / Xander, Buffy / Riley and Tara / Willow are able to communicate more easily than with them. And in Fear, Itself, the fears once named, identified, taken in the light, do not seem so threatening anymore.

Changing one's name, is it changing one's being? Can you be freed from what you are by changing your identity? That's the question of Who Are You. Playing Buffy's role seems indeed to allow Faith to reinvent herself, but Sanctuary proves one can not escape to the consequences of one's identity.

As for the First Slayer, she has not even a name ("TARA: I have no speech. No name.") and Buffy shows how much it's a limit. The answer is probably somewhere in a balance between the freedom of the absence of name, and the responsibilities that goes with the power that gives the name.

II - The Garden of Eden: an Amoral Paradise

According to Maggie, "These are the things we want - simple things. Comfort, sex, shelter, food. We always want them and we want them all the time. Id doesn't learn. Id doesn't grow up. It has the ego telling it what it can't have, and it has the super-ego telling it what it shouldn't want, but the Id works solely out of the pleasure principle. It wants. Whatever social skills we've learned, however much we've evolved, the pleasure principle is at work in all of us. - So, how does this conflict with the ego manifest itself in the psyche? What do we do when we can't have what we want?" (Beer Bad)

This is the state in which Adam and Eve are in the origin, devoid of a moral conscience, they do not know what they should do. What they want, everything they want, is at reach in the Garden of Eden. Heaven is the absence of guilt. (Ironic when you think about Angel)

The best advocate of this state of nature (Cave Buffy not being too clear on vocabulary:)) is indeed Veruca in Wild At Heart: "I can help you, Oz. You're scared. I was, too. But then I accepted it. The animal, it's powerful, inside me all the time. Soon, you just start to feel sorry for everybody else because they don't know what it's like to be as alive as we are. As free." What she proposes Oz to join, this is it. Freedom from moral principles, from society's rules, a return to a primordial and animal state. Veruca isn't bad per se; she'd be more properly called amoral. "You're an animal. Animals kill." She has no cruel intention; she just doesn't care about what she does. What she wants, she takes. For her it is only about obey her nature, and that nature is wild. She thinks any ethical rule is equivalent to an artificial prison, and she can't understand the idea that it's being internalized by Oz, which is the reason why she blames Willow for his behavior. "She's the reason you're living in cages. She's blinding you. When she's gone, you'll be able to admit what you are."

If almost everything is said in this episode, the seductive character of a wild state that doesn't care about humanity's rules is yet again underlined in Where The Wild Things Are (another indicative title) in Spike and Anya's nostalgia for their killing days and the guilty pleasure taken by Buffy and Riley in their forced sexual prison. Adam too describe with a certain skill the wild and ferocious part of the Garden: "ADAM: You feel smothered. Trapped like an animal. Pure in its ferocity, unable to actualize the urges within. Clinging to one truth. Like a flame struggling to burn within an enclosed glass. That a beast this powerful cannot be contained. Inevitably it will break free and savage the land again. I will make you whole again. Make you savage." (The Yoko Factor) It's ironic to see how Adam, who in appearance is so self-controlled, is in reality such a slave of his murderous impulse, just like any demon. He shows that technology used wildly isn't so different from nature in its amorality. The Initiative is thus another figure of the Garden.

Concerning the three principal creations of the Season, their Garden of Eden are quite present symbolically: Riley brings Buffy in a picnic in Something Blue, Spike attacks Buffy in a park of the campus in The Harsh Light of Day ("SPIKE: Birds singing, squirrels making lots of rotten little squirrels."), Adam kills a child in the wood in Goodbye Iowa. And also for Faith, who has an idyllic picnic with the Mayor (which allow us to get a traditional snake in the garden:)) before her awakening. For each of this characters this moments stands for a time of happy ignorance and unchallenged obedience to their nature. Something Blue is the one moment when Riley goes out with Buffy without their mutual secret identities going in the way. Harsh Light of Day is the only moment (with the brief apparition of Wild at Heart) when Spike is free of his chip, free to revel in his predatory vampiric instincts. For Adam it's oddly his one moment of freedom before being defined as a monster and the moment that defines him as a monster. As for Faith, her picnic with the Mayor represents the only time when she was feeling accepted, happy, without having to repress her most savage impulses, before Buffy came, spoiling that. This Garden of Eden, which is equivalent to the law of the wild jungle, we have a few representations of it all along the Season: Two picnics, the parks of the campus (which by the way means plain), a house invaded by plants, Iowa. a state of innocence, of simple and natural pleasures, of uncomplex wildness and a freedom from the usual laws and what they imply. But if this state is always looked at with nostalgia, it's because it doesn't last.

III - Out of Heavens, Science and Conscience

I said before that Goodbye Iowa was the crucial point of this season's theme, it is because it crystallizes exactly the moment of the fall of man out of heavens for the three concerned characters who are Adam, Riley and Spike. Hence its title by the way, Iowa and its fertile plans will there be our Garden of Eden, and this is the time to say goodbye to it.

Riley's case is the clearest. In The I in Team, he bites the apple given by Buffy-Eve. It's in response to this that Maggie Walsh acts. But behind this, it's of course because Buffy stands for the power to think for oneself, in short an internalized conscience and not authority, a knowledge of good and evil. (Knowledge was analyzed in sexual term as early as The Freshman: "WILLOW: It's just in High School, knowledge was pretty much frowned upon. You really had to work to learn anything. But here, the energy, the collective intelligence, it's like this force, this penetrating force, and I can just feel my mind opening up--you know?--and letting this place thrust into and spurt knowledge into... That sentence ended up in a different place than it started out in.") The betrayal and the death of Walsh causes Riley's tearing away from his Garden: he doubts the Initiative's authority, or as you could put it, he thinks for himself. "RILEY: I thought I knew. But I don't. I don't know anything." (Goodbye Iowa) So it's about rejecting the prejudiced knowledge given to him by the Initiative, the identity made by Walsh (he refused to listen to Adam's files about him) so as to forge his own.

Forrest stands for the part of Riley that keeps on blindly following the Initiative, who doesn't leave the Garden. (Thus, it is not a coincidence that his name means forest) He prefers to reject the responsibility of his problems on Buffy-Eve over doubting of what he's been told, and he considers the demons as mere animals. It is thus normal that he ends on Adam's side.

For Spike, Goodbye Iowa marks definitely his reject from the demonic world when he's seen being thrown out of Willy's bar, which here plays the role of the Garden. Of course, Spike has not yet a true knowledge of good and evil, it's the chip that plays this role for him. However, it leads him to choose the side of "Good", beginning with Pangs, then in Doomed, by his own choice, even if for it was lead by purely selfish reasons. Pangs is already a little mirror of this expulsion from the amoral paradise: the title can be seen as a pun, meaning both hunger pangs (when we see a starving Spike wandering) and moral pangs, or qualms. Can we associate the two of them is the question his case asks. Is the incapacity to feed, to kill, enough to create a moral conscience ? Probably not. But I think Spike stands here, in a quite ironic way, for most of humanity who most of the time doesn't act for the good because it's the good (which is the hero's mark); but because it's what they have an interest to do so in society for purely selfish reasons. Of course, once could say he goes on to redemption's road after that.

Concerning Adam, his case is more ambiguous. Out of room 314 ( Out of curiosity, I've checked what verse 3.14 of Genesis is. It's the one describing the snake's punishment to walk in the dust. I'm not sure it's relevant, but if it is it's quite interesting. The Mayor was already in S3 an authority figure associated with a snake, that the Initiative is another take on the theme. It's also coherent with Walsh acting through jealousy against Buffy, made me think that the snake is sometimes seen as an incarnation of Lilith, coming to take revenge on Eve for her rejection by Adam), despite his "design flaw", Adam doesn't reject Walsh's plans, quite the contrary, he accepts totally her definition of him and decides to set her plans up: "ADAM: I have a gift no man has. No demon has ever had. I know why I'm here. I was created to kill. To extinguish life wherever I find it. And I have accepted that responsibility. (Who Are You)"

Adam seems totally deprived of moral conscience, incapable to think for himself. "ADAM: I'm aware. I know every molecule of myself and everything around me. No one - no human, no demon - has ever been as awake and alive as I am." It's because Adam KNOWS already everything there is to know about himself and the world that he is unable to LEARN anything, to develop an internalized morality. "ADAM: I've been thinking about the world. I wanted to see it. Learn it. I saw the inside of that boy and it was beautiful. But it didn't tell me about the world. It just made me feel. So now . . . I want to learn about me. Why I feel? What I am?" (Goodbye Iowa) Adam's tentative analyzing can not allow him to understand this 'why', by default he chose Walsh's file as a guide, losing thus the occasion to think for himself. Paradoxically, ignorance is thus a path toward a more complex knowledge than the Initiative's "science sans conscience".

Tara is therefore right to stop Willow's spell to find demons around her: "With your knowledge may we go in safety. With your grace may we speak of your benevolence." Yes this knowledge from Thespia would allow security, but the time of security is passed, they must walk out of the Garden and know good from evil, humans from demons by themselves. Because knowing who's the demon and who's the human isn't indicative anymore of good and evil.

If we go back to the other case of expulsion from heaven of the Season, apart from Pangs that I've already talked about, there is Faith in Who Are You and Jonathan in Superstar. In both this cases, the characters were trying to reinvent themselves, to recreate a new identity using magic. If both this cases are failures in appearance, they however allow them to discover a knowledge of good and evil that makes them go out of the Garden. Indeed both of them make the decision, after a bad beginning, to assume the responsibility that comes with their new identity and act for the good / save lives. And it's this decision that lead them to the failure of their initiative. But the journey they've made here is far from a failure and allows them to actually discover themselves anew. If they don't forget this knowledge: Faith showed then in Five by Five and Sanctuary that staying on the path isn't that easy.

Conclusion: Nature or Culture?

The use of the theme of the fall from the Garden of Eden allows ME to articulate with a certain nuance the dialogue between Nature and Culture. Despite its amoral aspect, the Garden isn't totally condemned. On the contrary, Where The Wild Things Are shows how much with too much repressing of it (censoring the children's sexual ideas) we only makes it stronger. Chase the natural, it chases back.

The case of Oz in New Moon Rising seems also to show this: the more he tries to control his inner wolf, the more it's uncontrollable. Pangs condemns the occidental invasion of America, but it refused to consider that it justifies revenge on the present American society. Buffy and the Scoobies use their own primordial energies to defeat Adam, before having to submit this primordial energy in Restless. The Garden has its place, which mustn't be too repressed, or too accepted.

Culture is also presented with ambiguity. The out of control technology of the Initiative is not in the end so different from the barbarism of the Garden. Nothing very original with the idea that knowledge should go in pair with ethical conscience, of course, but to show that knowing too much can inhibit learning is an interesting way to condemn prejudices and false opinions.

I'll end with the theme of Names which seems the most enigmatic of this season and is also what encircles the relation ship between Nature and Culture: Names is an acknowledgement of what is, of Nature, yet doing so, it makes it a cultural fact.

Now to decide if it's worth archiving my old Buffy/Spike shipping essay given how much the pairing makes me wince nowadays XDD

Anime reviews

2009-11-23T17:26:36Z

Enough with the procrastination ^_^

Le Chevalier d'Eon

In mid 18th century France, d'Eon de Beaumont is a young man who decides to join the secret police when his sister Lia's dead body is found drifting on the Seine filled with mercury. He quickly meets with a sinister and esoteric conspiracy that uses the Biblical Psalms for magical misdeeds, many tales of his sister's awesome accomplishments and is joined by three companions : Robin, a young page boy for the Queen, Durand, a mysterious and sarcastic knight, and Teillagory, his old fencing instructing and famous old knight of the previous King. Then Zombies happen. And then he gets possessed by the spirit of his sister in order to fight them. Woo.

Le Chevalier d'Eon is filled with a lot of interesting thematic and plot ideas, perhaps too many, and they make it a dense and often very intriguing story despite some flaws of pacing. The main discussion regarding absolutism and divine right of kings versus more revolutionary criticisms is pretty interesting, as well as the cruel dilemmas of loyalties and honour it creates for the protagonists. Sometimes it felt that the story was trying to do too many things at once, creating some confusing genre shifts, between tales of occult conspiracies, Dumas-esque swashbuckling intrigue, and political drama. Eventually you get the impression that the plot collapsed under its own weight when the resolution rests on a couple of very WTF revelation from out of the left field. Despite this, I'm still impressed by some of the core ideas of the end game, like SPOILERY DETAIL the image of the divine right of king as written in the Psalms getting replaced by the written words of the Declaration of Human Rights which is made of win. END SPOILER.

Character wise, both the protagonists and antagonists are pretty fun and interesting, although I could have lived with more character development overall. D'Eon as a kind hearted young man who is determined to be up to his sister's legacy in order to avenge her but also redeem her vengeful spirit is nice enough; and all three of his companions have their own story arcs which are worked well and take some surprising turns. There's a couple of very charismatic and fun characters amongst the antagonists (I never though Robespierre could be so bish, and Cagliostro & Lorenza are endlessly amusing) but some of the others, like the Marquise of Pompadour, are much too thin and badly used.

The character design is realistic and interesting; the animation fluid and beautiful (this is a Production IG show after all) and uses a lot of CGI, in particular to show the opulence and ornamentation of Versailles & similar places which gives a overladen style to the anime which suits the baroque and rococo period perfectly.

Le Chevalier d'Eon plays very fast and loose with History - many characters, including d'Eon, are historical ones and have their real life warped in strange and interesting ways for the sake of the story. If the History of France, Russia and England is well known and dear to you, prepare to be somewhat surprised. On the other hand, perhaps especially if you know the references, it's kind of funny; although it's probably problematic to use a historically transgender character to make her into a guy possessed by his dead sister.

Erasure of Historical transgender characters aside, the series doesn't deal too badly with gender. Despite the lack of female characters amongst the main protagonists (save Lia if you want to consider her as such), many female characters in the story are pretty awesome, in particular the various Queens, and there's the way Lia is treated, not as a Dead Little Sister justifying the male hero's angst and badassery, but as the exemplar model of awesomeness he's vainly trying to achieve - a narrative role I'd never seen given to a female character before. From the whole genderfuck aspect, d'Eon having to progressively learn to cope with Lia's personality sedimenting into him and having to take up a female role at several times is pretty fun and nicely done, although fairly aimless. On the other hand, it's once again at the ending that we get some WTF revelation that kind of stink on the gender front.

In conclusion, Le Chevalier d'Eon is pretty flawed and has a high WTF-factor, but is worth checking out for some brilliant ideas and if you like swashbuckling and cracky takes on History.

Kemonozume

In contemporary Japan, some humans are really big monsters who feed of human flesh. The Kifuken's, the martial school who's always been taking upon themselves to kill those monsters to protect people, current head is an old man, and his two sons frequently bicker about which direction the Kifuken should taken. The older son, with more traditional ideas, meets a beautiful young woman and falls in love with her, not knowing that she is one of the flesh eating monsters. Ooops. But why is the number of flesh eaters really increasing?

Kemonozume is a pretty odd anime, both in animation and storytelling style. It comes across as strangely adult, especially in the way it depicts the main romance (people actually have sex!), in mood it alternates between darkly funny and horrific gore, with small doses of surrealism. The art is sort of sketchy and wildly dynamic in a way that fits perfectly the "claw" motif. Add a lurid jazzy soundtrack, and you can say that stylistically this show is really brilliant.

The storytelling starts pretty awesome as well, with a tense undercurrent of secrets from the past affecting current events, great use of each individual episode to focus on different characters or issues of the story; and the hilarious (in a grim humour way) pre-generic sequences... sadly the ending amps up the surrealist elements, gore and tragedy to the point of nausea and just doesn't feel quite up to the excellent beginning.

The characters are well done enough, although this is the sort of show where there's always some kind of ironic distance to them so you never feel like you can properly like them as characters.

Thematically, the story deals a lot with desires... anger, envy, greed, and especially lust, as monstrous cravings when they are taken too far, and part of this commentary is pretty interesting. It was pretty refreshing to see a couple where the Monster/Beast character was the female character (and monstrous form is not sexy at all, just monstrous!), which is explored in a few fun and creative ways, although too easily folding back to old sexist tropes and missing opportunities along the ways.

So another flawed series, but interesting if you like anime which have a very different feeling to them.

I kinda really liked the OP, btw:

one of the weirdest kind of rec I've ever done

2009-11-18T17:42:49Z

At RPG.net there are frequently Where I Watch [fill in blank name of series/movies/stories] threads about someone recaping a series as they go at it, which is often very fun. There's a guy named Shadowjack doing this with Sailor Moon and it's been a thread of EPIC AWESOMENESS so far (he's just finished S1). Okay I'm not sure of his characterisation of Rei as Latina because she fits the hot headed stereotype, but that aside, it's awesome. Now this is noticeable to me because I never even watched Sailormoon (much, I mean, I caught an episode or 2 on TV when I was 13, of course, but I pretty much hated it) yet it actually sort made me want to watch it O_O. A fact that beyond surprises me. Anyway even more awesome than the WIW thread itself is the recap cartoon of his recap Shadowjack has been doing. Judge for yourself:
(a_white_rain, you want to look at this especially. You'll know why when you reach it ^^)

You can find the WIW thread here and its sequel there.

Oh, and bonus pic, for something completely different:

What if Matrix was shot in the silent films' era

2009-11-11T18:04:05Z

This fanfilm is made of win:

etrangere @ 2009-11-02T00:09:00

2009-11-01T23:09:14Z

Back home safely (if frustrated by the fact I wasn't able to watch You can (not) advance due to a technical fuck up that made it so I couldn't watch the ending if I wanted to watch my train back. Grrrrr.) Had fun overall. Tired.

etrangere @ 2009-10-29T05:59:00

2009-10-29T05:00:37Z

I'm off to that French SFF convention I always go to that time of the year, see you next monday <3

etrangere @ 2009-10-26T16:29:00

2009-10-26T15:30:40Z

thank you tomboy_typist ^^

You post a "Top Five" topic, list, category, whatever, in my comments section (ie; "Five Times Littlefinger Lost An Argument" or "Five times Robing Goodfellow Didn't Bring Up His Sex Life"). Then, I'll post answer-drabbles to all your Top 5 ideas, according to me. Serious or fun! Feel free to post as many lists as you want, I'll use the ones that inspire me.

(you know there's a bunch of request I never fulfilled in previous years, and I still feel awfully guilty about them so 1/ no promises on this one 2/ my formal apologies to the people whose request I never wrote)

Utena essay

2009-10-18T21:13:26Z

Back when I first finished watching Utena and joined the utena usenet group, I wrote a short essay on some of the themes in Utena. Anyway at some point I decided I wanted to repost such things on my journal so I searched back for it, but when I reread it it looked all horribly vague and badly written, so I ended up rewriting it entirely and it thus became much, much longer. Some of the stuff on this essay are of the painfully obvious variety, and some are me reaching a bit. It's definitely written for an audience of people who have watched the series and is quite spoilery. Anyway I hope you guys will like it. If someone feels like correcting my bad English, I won't resent it and will be quite thankful instead.

Utena's Revolution or la Fin de l'Ancien Régime Romantique

One of SKU's most fascinating feminist critique is the study of the role of power and inequity in human relationships – especially but not only romance between me and women – and the harms it cause to people. Some of it is explored through the core political concept of Princehood and Revolution.

The Prince

"This device paints the illusion of fairy tales for those with naive wishes in their hearts who say they wish something eternal existed, who say they wish the power of miracles existed. But, there's no place higher than this room. This room is the summit of Ohtori Academy, and of the world." – Akio Ohtori

We are given two images of what being a Prince means in SKU.

On the one hand we have the ideal symbolized by Dios, the Prince that was, and which Utena aspires to become. This is a romantic as well as noble figure : the Prince is both a knight in shining armor, a rescuer of damsel in distress, and even a savior who selflessly sacrifice himself to save others (at which point note that he's at his most childlike); but he's also the representation of the male love interest, the Prince Charming that sweeps a young woman off her feet and makes her into a Princess. SKU comments on how this romantic fairytale which is very much the narrative given to young girls and boys in mainstream culture ties the gender to those roles. A princess is by definition female, passive and in distress. A prince is by definition male, active and saving her. Every time people comment on Utena's desire to be a Prince by saying that she cannot because she's just a girl, the show problematize it. That's not all, Utena's Princely role is also challenged because she also desires her own Prince, which means she should be a Princess, and therefore passive, in that pink Rose Bride dress that Akio gives her in the Upside-down Castle. As if a girl cannot both be a heroine and a (heterosexual?) sexual and romantic being at the same time. This Prince however is an ideal, belonging to the realm of archetypes and stories. In the real world, there was never such a Prince.

On the other hand, we have Akio, fallen Prince, who embodies the Prince as a creature of power. Like the ideal Prince, this realist Prince is dual. Akio is both the highest authority on the campus – the Acting Chairman – and a seducer whose capacities of sexual manipulation seem endless. A Prince doesn't only refer to a character in a fairytale, it's also the figure of the autocrat, reminding us of Machiavel's essay on pragmatic statecraft. A meaning that is also underlined to us by Anthy's mention of cantarella, the poison said to have been used by the Borgias. Cesar Borgias – the historical figure that Machiavel's Prince is centered upon – and Lucrezia Borgias are a pair of siblings that is not difficult to parallel with Akio and Anthy.

The topic in SKU, however, isn't government, so this political lexicon is used in order to convey the concept of the role of power – concrete, pragmatic and abusive power – in romantic relationships, and how it is tied even at the heart of our fairy tale ideals. So the Prince isn't just the idea of a romantic savior, he's also the suzerain that demand obedience of all – a Prince knows no equal. If he wins a Princess hand in marriage, it is not just because she's beautiful, it's also because half of her father's kingdom goes with this marriage – much like Akio is Kanae's fiancé in order to wield her father's power on the campus as Acting Chairman. Our concept of romance, of personal relationship and of sexual desires, are highly unequal – even as ideal. And this inequity is, in many ways, what spurs the Duelist in action, to seek to revolutionize the world.

The Duelists : On the Origin of the Inequality of Men

"I understand. I suppose you have no choice but to revolutionize the world." – Souji Mikage

We can analyze the reasons why the Duelist fight in many interesting ways, for the purpose of this essay I want to especially look at the way it is rooted to their relationship with one important person. For Saionji his on-and-off best friend Touga; for Miki his sister Kozue; for Juri her best friend, betrayer and secret subject of love Shiori; and for Nanami, her brother Touga. In SKU all those relationships, regardless of whether they are romantic in nature, are sexualized and therefore interesting to look at from a perspective of a problematic Romantic Ancien Regime.

All of those relationships have suffered a degradation in time from a moment the Duelist remember with rose tinted glasses; and because of that are a cause of much frustration. They feel like they lack power, control on the other person who are so dear to them. One of the main reason they fight in the Duels is to try to get back to power to be equal – or superior – to this person.

This is most clear with Saionji, which outright tells us he needs Anthy and Eternity in order to catch up to Touga and sooth his inferiority complex. Nanami also clearly feels that Touga is escaping her and that she needs to duel to maintain a close relationship to him and continue feeling superior to all the girls Touga sleeps with. And despite her own impressive standing and usual self confident, Juri also doesn't feel like she is up to even confess her love to Shiori. Miki never quite avows himself that he's searching for a Kozue substitute in Anthy, but the fact that Kozue's sex adventures are outside of his control and disapproval, and the fact he decides to duel in order to prevent Anthy from being similarly outside of his control certainly fits the theme.

The frustration from inequality in relationship is even more obvious in the Black Rose Duelists. They all (aside from Kanae) have a relationship to one of the Duelist who are clearly, to them, special, superior people they cannot quite reach. Kozue cannot maintain a close relationship to her brother so turn to antagonizing him on purpose in order to retain his attention; Shiori feels inferior to Juri which is the reason why she tried to get a man she thought Juri wanted in the first place, and finding out Juri actually was in love with her doesn't help out; Tsuwabuki is too young compared to Nanami and not quite to the comparison with Touga; Wakaba never feels quite as special as Saionji, Utena or Anthy; Keiko is just one of the girls in love with Touga and constantly humiliated and used by Nanami.

Mikage as well, fell in love with Tokiko, but found out she was out of his reach when he witnessed Akio kissing her. As for Ruka, he clearly knows he has no chance with Juri and mainly wants to even the field for her by releasing the power Shiori has over her.

We're left with Touga, who's he one character whose reasons for dueling are never really explored. In the Shadow Girls Play his reasons are merely given as 'the Power of Revolutionize the World'; power, nakedly and without delusions of it being anything else. I'm inclined to see the part of the SKU movie which shows Touga as a child raped by his adoptive father as canon for the SKU series because it ties in interestingly with Touga's later attitude to sex as a mean of power (both in how he expresses his power over the girls in the campus, and how he seeks more power from Akio by sleeping with him) as well as his being already so cynical as a child when he finds Utena in the coffin. In any case, Touga's quite clear about wanting power, more power, regardless of his already quite elevated status, whether it is because he feels entitled to it or some kind of inner wound.

So the Duelists fight for power, for control, and the Prize they all seek would be for them a mean to regain the power they feel they've lost over this one person, a way to rekindle a more equal relationship. Many of the problems in inequity in their relationships can also be rooted in problematic gender and romantic models : for example Saionji never feels as strong and in control as the traditional male role assigns him to be, which he overcompensates by being so aggressive and abusive to Anthy. All the Duelist in their various ways, project this desire for power onto Anthy. The Rose Bride, because she is submissive to the Victor and because she is the key to unlock the Power of Dios.

The Rose Bride

"Girls...girls are all like the Bride of the Rose in the end." – Anthy Himemiya

a. Princesses & Witches

The figure of Anthy the Rose Bride is probably the most fascinating and complex of SKU. Like the Prince, the Rose Bride is a dual creature, but unlike the Prince, she isn't divided between a fairytale and a realistic role, instead her two aspects reflect the contradiction of the role of women as it is constructed by society, Madonna and Whore : idealized as long as she complies to a specific submissive role which does not allow conflict, reviled as a manipulative temptress anytime she tries to claim agency for herself; and always defined through the lens of the sexual desire men feel for her.

On first aboard, the Rose Bride is like a princess – except without any of the perks – she is the damsel awaiting rescue, the prize to be won by dashing Duelists, she is passive, polite, obedient and quiet in demeanor, beautiful of course, bonding with plants and animals like a Disney Princess, good with cleaning and keeping the room tidy but not, the one exception, good with cooking – probably because cooking is even more strongly a reminder of the role of the Witch always at her cauldron so that when Anthy cooks she unleashes a curse. The Rose Bride however doesn't enjoy any respect for her status and doesn't have any authority of her own like a princess would. She is a mockery of the role of Princess. This is both because Anthy herself is mocking the Princesses that used to take the Rose Prince away and because Anthy is ever to be punished as the Witch.

In the Rose Tale we are told Anthy is the Witch because "women who can't be princesses have no choice but to become witches", in other words, all women who are not wanted, desired, seen as good enough by men, are to be seen as dangerous, spiteful, malevolent creatures. All women who do not comfort to the role that patriarchal society would give to them as women, are to be rejected and punished, aren't worth considering for anything else. A Witch is still seen as powerful, but in fairy tales she only ever uses it in jealous way against the younger princess; she never uses power in order to rule the land like the dark aspect of the Prince, only to deprive others of what they think is legitimately theirs – like the Princesses think the Prince is theirs. She has power, but only as a threat – so that the people are justified to punish her endlessly. Anthy being the Witch in SKU, is an expression of her being the ultimate scapegoat. She's the Witch, she poisons wells and cast curses. Everything that goes bad is always her fault, and she's always, endlessly being punished for it, slapped by almost everyone on Ohtori and suffering the pain of the Thousand Swords of Hatred. Anthy isn't innocent, she does act in small and big acts of malice to get back at the people she doesn't like. She targets Nanami, especially, who is so Princess-like and similar to Anthy in many ways; and she manipulates the Duelists in order to orchestrate the duels alongside Akio; but most of the hostility she receives goes well beyond and happens before any of her petty acts. For women, as well, if they sidestep outside of the role society give them, they are punished way beyond the harm their infractions may have caused. And when something wrong happens to them, society is quick to ask 'what did you do to deserve it?' instead of blaming the perpetrator.

b. Exchanges of Women

Alongside those dual aspects of the Rose Bride, what is the most unique, specific aspect of the Rose Bride is that she is won in the Duels. In other word, the Rose Bride is constantly passed from Duelist to Duelist, without stated regard for her own will, to become Bride of whoever is strongest this time.
This also is a reflection of the role women are given in society. In the field of Anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship talks about how one of the universal structure of culture is defining how women are exchanged by family groups along specific rules creating kinship systems. The necessity to exchange women is the origin of the taboo of incest : women need to be unavailable to their own brothers so they can be free to be given as wives to another family group. And by creating those ties, other things, ideas and goods, dowries and bride price, are exchanged between family groups : alliances of power and wealth are thus created. Historically, this has been especially true amongst members of the class of power, aristocrats and princes.

Thus the Rose Bride is always given, by Akio, to the Duelist with promise of a luxurious dowry in the form of the Prize they hope to win, in order to help him manipulate them. Like Lucrezia Borgia, who was betrothed twice before she was thirteen and wedded three times in order to advance the political ambitions of her menfolks. Many rumors also cast Lucrezia in a very Witch-like role, with suspicion of poisoning her husbands; and many rumors of incest also surround her.

The way men are exchanging women for their own profit and power is underlined a few ways in SKU through the series : as already mentioned, there is Kanae, who is given by her father to Akio, resulting in Akio's position of power in the Campus. Nanami also, when Touga plays the role of giving her the ring to make her a Duelist, pimping her to Akio's games in order to advance his goal of winning against Utena. The way Saionji's rivalry with Touga expresses itself by focusing on Anthy, also, is a reminder of this objectification of the Rose Bride as a prize : Saionji seeks to win Anthy because she's a proof of status and power.

Obviously the tie to the incest taboo isn't to be taken literally with Anthy, who plays the role of Rose Bride at the same time as she is still sexually involved with her bother unbeknown to her Victor. However the role that the motif of incest in SKU can still be better understood by this idea. In all three pair of incestuous or pseudo-incestuous siblings, the natural bond between the two siblings precludes on them joining with other people. Anthy prevented Dios from risking himself for the Princesses. Nanami looks up to Touga as the ideal man, and therefore no other men can compare; and in return she shows herself very possessive of Touga. Kozue is jealous of Miki as well, and uses Miki's own less conscious jealousy in order to maintain some control on him while all her boyfriends have no importance to her heart. Only if they let go of this sexual possessiveness toward their sibling can they start forming connection with other people in society. This is formulating in a very Freudian way, the girls fixate on their elder brothers as an ideal of manhood – of Princehood – to play with the idea of romance before moving to the real thing, at least with Nanami, the least truly incestuous of the sisters. For Kozue, who rejects her parents' authority and the idea of society ("we're wild animals"), this is a more difficult step to make. This also echoes the imagery of the chick and the egg, and of the necessity of growing up into adulthood that also underlay a lot of the thematic of SKU, although this is a bit beyond the scope of this essay.

c. Goddess of fertility

In general, women's sexuality must be controlled by men, whether it is her father, brothers or husband, in order to control the flow of power that comes from them. In SKU, sex is never just a cigar, it's always a mean to gain power onto someone. All manipulations in SKU are heavily tied to seduction, from relatively innocent ones, to more nefarious power plays. Touga, Mikage, Ruka, Kozue and Akio especially all use their sex appeal in order to control both women and men, and seduce characters or taunt them into doing what they want them to do. So does Anthy, of course, under order of Akio.

Anthy's power as sexual, and the Power of Dios tied to her, is reinforced through the series in many ways, but the most frequent one is the entering the Duel arena sequence, which is a series of symbols about female sexuality. The Forbidden Forest looks like an inverted female pubis; the gate which must be open by turning it wet; the spiral stairs reminding us of a strand of DNA (especially obvious in the second ED); and the dual arena which is suggestive of labia seen from profile. All the roses and the many motives of roses in the series are also, of course, a symbol for female sexuality and genitals. In many ways this indicates that under the guise of Dios, Eternity, Shining Things, Miracles that the Duelists get distracted with, the real goal of the Duels are the Rose Gate (and the Gate requires water, no phallic sword, to be opened), Anthy, the power of women's sexuality.

Woman's sexuality is a source of power because without it there is no reproduction. A Prince is one because he is born from another Prince, and he seeks a Princess so they'll live happily ever after and more importantly, will have many children one of which will one day inherit the kingdom. Without childbirth, there is no dynasty of Princes, and in an anthropological vision as well, the system of inheritance, determining who's a legitimate heir for wealth and status is essential to society's structures. Therefore men must control women's sexuality, much like Akio must control the Rose Bride in order to keep playing everyone like puppets on the campus.

In SKU this is only hinted at, the most direct way in which the story addresses the idea is the episode Nanami's Egg, a lengthy metaphor of a girl's first menstruation which also addresses girl facing the responsibility of motherhood in the way Nanami deals with the egg, considering both nurturing it with joy and care, and abandoning it when her brother reacts negatively to the possibility of her being a teenage mother. Actually Touga's reactions in Nanami's Egg – besides hysterically hypocritical – very much address the way men seek to control women's sexuality as capacity of reproduction : forbidding Nanami to express a lesbian sexuality that would prevent her from the reproductive role assigned by Patriarchal society; but also forbidding Nanami from reproduction outside the norm of a marriage-alliance decided by the men. The episode also ties the whole event to the idea of reincarnation, which thematically opposes the idea of Eternity, the stasis of the coffin that the Duelist seek to maintain and escape from at the same time and which, in the end, we learn is Anthy's punishment : eternal pain. In the entering the duel arena sequence, also, while the images are of yonic symbols, the lyrics talk mainly of the idea of reproduction, birth and death :

Birth records
Baptismal records
Death records
[…]
My own birth,
Absolute birth,
Apocalypse
A wet-nurse and a midwife in a dark desert

Beyond the Rose Gate is Anthy's own power of fertility, in other word, her power of growth. Growing roses and growing beyond an egg into adulthood. Not the Eternity of immobility, but the continuity of cycles of evolutions and revolutions.

Revolution

"It's alright now. Please go on playing make-believe 'Prince' in this comfortable little coffin forever. But I must go." – Anthy Himemiya

Like 'Prince', revolution is a word with a highly political tonality. Unlike 'Prince', it does not remind us of anything related to fairytale and romance, so it stands even more at odd in the context of the series, mystifying the viewer and begging for an explanation. The French frequently used in SKU, as well as the 18th century style of the Student Council uniforms, and even the rose and gender bending motifs all play to bring in mind the famous old manga Roses of Versailles set during the French Revolution of 1789. Thematically, Roses of Versailles also plays onto the problem of love between people of different social standing, and the way that women are alienated and oppressed in society and either forced into alliances not of their choosing for dynastic reasons, or forced to discard the role of a woman altogether with their desire for love along the way. The main characters eventually love in spite of societal barriers they face, but all die tragically in the revolution that destroys the old order of the world.

With this in mind, I believe that Revolution in SKU refers to the idea of unmaking the romantic ideal of relationships based upon the conceits of Princes and a Princesses; and forging a new, more equal ideal for romantic relationships and friendships. The concept of Prince is revealed as an utter failure, both in ideal and in reality. It was a failure in Dios because people overly relied onto his capacities as a Prince to solve their smallest problems to the point of driving him near death with exhaustion whereupon Anthy had to step in to remove him. It is a failure in Akio because no matter how seductive he is, he is manipulative, selfish and abusive. It is also a failure in Utena. Her initial attempt at Princedom, she eventually admits was conceited : in order to feel noble and cool as a Prince, she needed Anthy as a Rose Bride, as someone subservient and needing rescuing, but without realizing Anthy's real need and pain throughout. When she really steps up selflessly to be a Prince to Anthy and manages this way to open the Rose Gate, she still fails to grab Anthy's hand.

Yet Utena succeeds, not as a Prince, but as a Revolutionary, by inspiring Anthy to step up herself out of her subservient role as the Rose Bride and save herself. Thus, together they destroy the archetype of the Prince and the Princess and are on their way to create a new, more equal ideal as friends and soulmates. Their example also manages to help all the Duellists break from their fixation on their idealized memories and move on toward smashing their own coffins. This is the Revolution in SKU.

-- All quotes and screencaps from the Empty Movement website.

Books I read (not so) recently

2009-10-16T02:17:02Z

I'm gonna be fast because I read most of those books ages ago

Rusalka by CJ Cherryh
Russian flavoured fantasy: a cynical party boy / dilettante must flee the city when he's accused of sorcery when the husband of the wife he was seeing dies suddenly; and enrols the help of a young hotel stable boy who has a reputation of ill luck and fears being a sorcerer himself. Out in the forest, they encounter quite a bit of sorcery.
There's some great ideas and flavours to the story, and I liked the characters' dynamics. I thought the pacing and plotting overall was much weaker though. Anyway, if you like Cherryh's other fantasy story - especially Forterss series, you'll probably like this one.

The Sharing Knife: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold
Fawn, Dag and Fawn's brother go on a boat trip.
This volume has more plot than the previous ones, and as a result I rather liked it more. I also liked the setting, the use of the river, and the new characters of this book (especially the female boat captain who had a name which I forgot). On the other hand, I still don't like Fawn and Dag all that much and consider this series one of Bujold's weakest, so you know...

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
When his family gets murdered, and toddler escapes to a cemetery and gets adopted by the ghosts who live there, as well as the resident Undead. Each chapter cover a different stage of his childhood as he grows up.
Very nice story about growing up, transformations and the relationship to death. Great writing, pacing and characterisation.

The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia McKillip
Many years ago, on a battlefield at the gate of Pelucir, something horrible rode in and spread death because of the magic of the great wizard Atrix Wolfe, although nobody knows it and he has been hiding since, and the ghosts of the event still haunt the area. Nowadays, the young prince of Pelucir is studying magic when he finds a strange book written by Atrix Wolfe.
This is a gorgeous, wonderful, subtle and awesome book and you should read it.

The Two Pearls of Wisdom by Alison Goodman
In a chinese flavoured fantasy world, Eon is, despite a lame leg, a candidate for the position of Dragoneye, one of the 12 people channelling the powers of the Dragons of the Chinese Zodiac in order to ensure prosperity and good weather to the empire. Eon is also a girl in disguise, a secret which would cost her direly if it was discovered. But when the ceremony when the dragon of the year, the Rat one, chooses which candidate will connect with him, nothing happens as Eon and her master had foreseen.
A pretty good story, with nice plotting and solid characterisation. I really liked Eon as well as one of the main secondary character, Dela, a transwoman and Emperor's favourite, and who is pretty kickass. The book ends on a cliffhanger for a second volume which is not yet out.

Night Shift by Lilith Saintcrow
Boring by-the-number paranormal romance. I think that was the last chance I was giving to this genre.

The Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
Third volume after Night Watch and Day Watch, this is probably the best of the series so far, with all three stories of the volume being very solid and well tied with one another. Excellent plotting full of twist, tying threads in unexpected ways, and many interesting ideas as well as many interesting characters, both old and new. One of the things I love about this series is how the writer sets up a very manicheist world in theories, then keeps on playing with the concept of Light and Dark thus defined in ways that bring a whole lot of greys and ambiguities until they are near undistinguishable.

Jhegaala by Steven Brust
Vlad Taltos walks into an Easterner village, trying to find out about the background of hi mother's family. The villagers eye him warily. Then the bodies and mysteries start piling up. Poor Vlad Taltos.
A very good Taltos story in the style of Taltos stories. I was missing the sarcasm, it had been too long.

House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones
Tied to the Howl & Sophie stories, but not really a sequel. Young book-loving overprotected girl is charged with looking after the house of her distantly related Great Wizard of an uncle. Hijinks ensue.
Not my favourite Diana Wynne Jones story by a lot. Not really bad either, but the beginning was fairly slow and I kinda got annoyed at all the awkwardness, but not a bad story overall.

Icon meme

2009-10-15T22:21:29Z

stolen from queenofthorn

Tell me:
1. Your favorite userpic of mine
2. Which one you wish I'd delete immediately
3. Which one you think needs explaining
4. The userpic that makes you laugh
5. Two userpics that you think should mate
6. The one you think is the most beautiful
7. The one you think has the best cropping
8. An icon that you think I should use more

My lj pics

etrangere @ 2009-10-15T23:26:00

2009-10-15T21:28:28Z

Someone's making a documentary movie out of the whole whitewashing Avatar the last airbender controversies. Which, to me, looks like an awesome idea:

http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi1733100057/

Vampires

2009-10-12T01:34:54Z

When I was 10 years old, I watched Coppola's Dracula, which convinced me of two things: #1 Winona Ryder was fucking hot; #2 antagonistic love stories with reincarnation and a bit of eros/thanatos aesthetics were really fun. Like, really, really fun.

When I was 12 year old, I watched Interview with the Vampire, which convinced me of two things: #1 Brad Pitt was fucking hot; #2 vampires were okay. I mean, immortal life and powers to do whatever you want? Sounds neat.

So it was the early 90's, and I was primed to love vampire stories.

Fast forward to the night of Halloween 1998; after a couple of false starts I have managed what have been one of my goal for the last two years : find a role-playing game club which I could join and play with. The game? Vampire:the Masquerade. They explain the premise of the game, and the setting of the chronicles (Los Angeles, and one of player is The Prince of the setting) and help me make a character (a Toreador street artist - you can laugh, they did - neonate) in between a whole lot leering and sexist jokes. Upon a few minutes into the game we were stuck into a gunfight and I was realising that #1 all other characters were rather powerful, I was not #2 This was apparently a game about amoral superheroes in trenchcoat fighting with katanas and shotguns who happened to live by night even though they had explained it to me as a gothic punk game of personal horror. During the next couple of years which I spend a this rpg club, playing a wide selection of games, Vampires was without question the most popular and frequent game - whether I wanted it or not. I made a ridiculous amount of characters for it (my default archetype became the Gangrels with anarch leanings, mostly cuz of the claws ♥); and soon came to utterly loathe Vampire the Masquerade. It wasn't just the whole superheroes by night thing. I had loved Highlanders the TV shows when I was 14, I could deal with katanas, and a few years later I would love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including the vampires. VtM was a game which concept appeared to be about a bunch of immortal people who are so fucking bored than instead of enjoying their powers and immortality to enjoy stuff from the world, they would waste their time and energy in endless meaningless and frequently mind-numbingly boring power struggles, with a result of crushing hierarchy being out to bore to death or outright your average new vampire and their player. About as fun as dealing with my university administration. And sadly, my loathing for VtM soon became a disgust for vampires in general

But wait a minuted, in between 94 and 98, I spent the years of life where I was reading the most fucking ratio of books a weak, a period of my life where I was pilfering the SFF shelves of the local public library to fill my absence of social life. There were no few vampire book in those shelves. Between Ann Rice, Poppy Z Brite, King's Salem's Lot and classics like Carmilla. Honestly I forgot most of them. Actually that's my point : the majority of them were utterly forgettable. Derivative variation on the theme. Sure, the conceit of vampires appeal from a baseline aspect to my kinks and are a powerful fantasy. But could they be interesting in the face of the near parodic triteness of the thread bone cliché that they most often were? Not really. Vampires qua vampires do not do it for me. Oh, but give me vampires with a twist? Give me vampires reinvented with imagination and flair? Then I'll love it.

My favourite vampire novels : Tim Powers' Stress of her Regard, where vampires are half stone half reptile creatures which inspire poets and artists while feeding of their vitality. CS Friedman's Season of Madness, which mixes vampire with aliens invasion of earth and symbiotic energy vampires on a medition on change and memory. CS Friedman's, again, Coldfire Trilogy, in a gothic fantasy SF blender exploring sacrifices and a vampire that prefer to feed on fear. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust with a visual feast mixing gothic to cyberpunk and western aesthetics.

Yet most of the time when I read about the new cool vampiric story in town (or the new uncool one which everyone loves to hate) screaming for my attention they always seem to fall back to the same old boring tropes. Bo~ring. So most of the time when I'm sold something as vampires, I won't even give it two seconds of my attention. I already gave Charlaine Harris a chance, must I really try the TV Show? Even if everyone tells me it's better than the books, exactly what does it have of new and original to bring to the vampire show? And why does Bill always look so constipaded on pictures?

Okay, but sometimes, you get lucky. Like Setona Mizushiro's Black Rose Alice, in which she appears to be trying to out Yuki Kaori Yuki Kaori, and in the two volumes of her manga I've read so far, actually comes close. Vampires as parasitic plants that seed into people. Dual personalities in a same bodies. Feeding by using insects and arachnids. Sex as death. Brilliant. Why is it so fucking hard to get that sort of stuff?

I leave with you with a fun AMV :p

Anime I watched this summer

2009-10-08T18:42:24Z

In order of 'liked it most' to 'liked it least', no spoilers unless marked & whiteouted.

Aoi Hana

Fumi, a tall shy easily crying girl, goes back to the area of her childhood in time to start a new year in highschool, where she meets again with her cheerful and energetic childhood friend Akane who goes to another school, and forms a crush on an older girl who seems to flirt back.

Aoi Hana is a very subtle anime, which makes it hard to sumerize. Not a whole lot happen, but what does is shown with exquisite delicateness and grace, helped along by a beautiful animation and round, watercolour-like visual. The characterisation is especially very deft, with a lot of finesse and small contradiction that really make the characters - even the more secondary ones - pop out. A theme of the series is the contrast between characters' outward appearance and their inner personality : it's quite obvious, for example, that Fumi doesn't have a personality very fitting her tall appearance, but despite all her reserve she's nevertheless and rather strong and emotionality mature girl, in contrast with Akira who despite her outgoingness is still a bit childish about romance.

As a story about lesbian romance, the anime strives for realism. No 'everyone is gay', and there's a contrast between the homosocial crushes many girls have on their cool, handsome female upperclassmen and with Fumi's more real feelings. I haven't watched a lot of Yuri anime, but Aoi Hana is easily the best I've seen so far and will raise a high bar for any further I'll watch along the lines. Although if I can make a criticism of it it's that it's yet another yuri anime where there's SPOILER: no happy lesbian couple at the ending, although of course that's because the anime only adapted about half of the manga. (I haven't read the manga yet, it's on my to-do list).

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

Mirai is a sullen 13 years old girl on the beginning of summer vacations, taking her little brother Yuuki to a robot exposition when a earthquake of magnitude 8 strikes Tokyo.

Tokyo Magnitude starts on a very high note, with excellent characterisations, realistic display of a catastrophe and how it affects people and great animation (another anime where I love how round the character design is)... then somewhere in the middle, it falters a little too much into melodrama while still managing to be very good overall. Obviously the story is very well informed, and this helps not making the series into a cheesy disaster story, going rather for the understated and usually being much more efficient and scary for it, and being also much more moving by focussing on a few characters and the people they meet along the road.

Mirai is really a great character, unhappy with her family dynamics and lack of communication; stuck at an age between childhood and more responsibilities where you're satisfied with nothing and especially not how people deal with you - she's almost antipathetic in the beginning but is also very relateable, determined and capable. Yuuki is an adorable, cheerful child who also has his own personality and stubbornness. The other major character is a Mari, a brave, responsible and ressourceful woman and single mother who, crossing the path of the siblings, decides to take care of them while still worrying about her young child left alone with her mother during the earthquake.

The overall storyline is a bit uneven with the strong beginning, a couple of weak episode in the middle, and an ending which, while poignant, squirts a little too much for easy pathos for my taste, coming a little bit short of the high expectation I had built for it. Mind you, I still loved the series.

Spice & Wolf S2

The second season follows in the footstep of the first, with a similar level of quality, enjoyable banter, fun economics of the middle age plot; while deepening the relationship between Lawrence and Horo and exploring the consequence this has for them. It ends with the expectation of yet another series coming after it to complete their quest, which I look forward to, whenever that may happen.

Taishou Yakyuu Musume aka Taishou Era Baseball Girls

In Taishou-era Japan (1925 to be precise), well bred young girl Akiko decides, with the help of her best friend Koume, to set up a female baseball team in their high school in order to challenge the baseball team of her fiancé, who told her to her face he didn't approve of all the modern, unseemly things girls got to these days.

First a warning : this series is redoubtably adorable.

The cuteness, it burns! It burns!

I didn't really think a show that moe could be interesting and good, but I had to revise my assessment. I found Taishou Yakyuu Musume very entertaining, occasionally quite clever, as well as funny and, well, adorable. Thankfully, the moe never gets of the fanservice variety, and the focus is mostly on girls' daily life as they negotiate playing baseball, their friendships (and a few homosocial crushes) as well as the complicated relationship between males and females in a sexist society. The latter is what really makes the show shines : while it's never deep or challenging enough to be properly be called a feminist series, it really handles the complexity of relationships in those circumstances in a clever and deft-handed way. Add the pleasure of a historic setting, and it's not the anime of the year, but it's a pleasant if light-hearted watch.

Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom

When a young Japanese tourist witnesses an assassination done by Phantom, the elite female assassin for the organised crime syndicate Inferno, he shows enough resource and survival instinct to be kidnapped, brainwashed, renamed 'Zwei' and apprenticed to the same assassin, 'Ein', instead of just being killed. With no memory of his past nor real name, he continually has to make the choice : kill, in order to avoid getting killed.

Phantom is a story divided into three arcs (it's also the only full-season of 20-so episodes of this post although I only caught up to it during the summer). The first arc is a bit slow to start, but very well plotted. The second one is the most entertaining and even quality wise. The third one is a bit too over the place, with a few good ideas but never quite finding its step so it was the one I appreciated least despite the presence of Drei which I really enjoyed watching because I always love that type of characters.

As a stylised story about assassins, Phantom is pretty well done : it's well plotted, well paced and with dark themes exploited skill fully and a Noir atmosphere set up adequately. The action scenes are entertaining, and while it's not ever realistic by any stretch, there's a good sense of a realistic texture to them (like the scene in which our main character is shown how to shoot a gun : it's just not point and shoot, there's some good way of giving details about it). One of my favourite thing about it was how the plot was the result of the crossing agendas and machination of different characters : there's a good sense of the agency of various secondary characters and that creates a good story. I also like that in the middle of this, our main characters, Ein, Zwei and later Drei are mostly pawns who don't really affect greater events, as they merely try to find their own free will and survive. This, of course, is both a theme and a somewhat overlaid motif (see all the puppet imagery) of the series and what gives it its Noir credential up to the ending (which is fitting, but could have been realised a bit better).

The last thing I really liked about the series was some of the secondary characters, in particular Claudia and Lizzie, who are both very cool in themselves and have an awesome, interesting relationship which allowed the series to often pass the Beichdel test:

The main reason I was watching this series

On the other hand, Phantom has many flaws. To be frank, I often find stories about assassins, especially as they are very stylised and unrealistic, pretty silly, and this story didn't escape that (obviously, that's more a matter of taste). There's a few really unrealistic events such as SPOILER: a couple of characters surviving when they really shouldn't have, which didn't work well with the atmosphere set up otherwise and obviously done too much for the sake of melodrama. Owing to its hentai visual novel adaptation root, it's got something of a harem quality, focussing too much on the way various women interact - and obsess - with our main character, which was frankly annoying. Add the creepiness of the villain which really love the female assassins he trains to be young pretty girls objectified with near ritualistic precision, and I got squicked a few times watching it; Also I'm getting really tired of Emotionless Girls as a trope.

So overall an entertaining series with a few good points, but which appeal with depend a lot of people's taste and tolerance for certain tropes.

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi S2

It's sort of tough to talk about this season of Haruhi (also I never wrote a review for the first season), truncated as it is. It's got some good parts, a few of which are as good as the original season, although even the 'Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya' arc is a bit over long and weak in the middle; and it's got some, ahem, repetitive parts. Which you probably do not want to watch, at all. And, that's about it, really, so there's not all that much to review @_@.

That's all for this batch. Will review Bakemonogatori (if i feel up to it because I have some very mixed feelings about this one) and Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood when they are actually finished.

etrangere @ 2009-09-19T00:23:00

2009-09-18T22:25:49Z

Shana Tova! Best wishes for the new year to everyone ♥

anime review

2009-09-14T23:31:27Z

Mushishi

In early 20th century Japan, but in rural areas where the time period isn't quite obvious, Ginko is a wandering Mushi-Shi, a man whose job is to deal with the creatures known as Mushi when they trouble the lives of people. What are Mushi? Invisible to most people but those who are sensitive to them, they are very much like supernatural faeries or ghosts, yet they are also described in very organic terms, as part of the natural world rather than part of the supernatural world. Mushi are also frequently just phenomenon, and few Mushi show intent and personhood in a way understandable to humans, and those few that do are still very alien, and come across as very differently than creatures from a yokai story. Yet they are forms of life, not beings either good or evil, just life that seeks to live its own life, and the ways they cross human beings' path is never simple, and never entirely good or bad.

Adapted from a seinen manga series, Mushishi is a thoroughly episodic anime, working on cases basis each time. In 26 episodes, only one character asides from Ginko is seen several times. Despite this, it manages some of the best characterisation and most beautiful storytelling I've ever seen. Seriously, this anime is sublime, utterly captivating in its melancholy atmosphere, quietly understated yet poignant, beautiful in its animation and gorgeous in its detailed natural landscapes. Each story makes splendid use of the 20-so minutes of an episode to be told fully, with a beginning, a middle, an end and often an epilogue, at a serene, deliberate pacing, yet with a storytelling alchemy and a fullness of conclusion that leaves you under its charm long after it's ended. Each story develops its characters with nuance, subtlety and a unique character design that let them be fully realised.

Thematically, Mushishi is also very strong and mature. Most mushi play as a metaphor for something of nature - not only nature as the wilderness, but also nature as the natural laws that affect human beings, from the things we use to survive and prosper like agriculture to the thing that plague us irremediably like diseases and aging. Some mushi are wonderfully beautiful. Some mushi are terrifying and horrible. Some mushi are useful. Some mushi extremely harmful to humans. Many mushi are both, to some extent. The solving of cases isn't ever a given, and frequently quite difficult. (Some of the episodes aren't about cases, as such). Most of the times, it's a matter of how you can live along, live with the problems caused by the mushi, or live without. A lot of stories have bitter-sweet endings. Several of them have sad endings. Some only end many years after the case. Some are up in the air.

I especially love how the anime focus on very ordinary people. That are several very varied range of mostly rural work and crafts underlain by the story, and there's something very refreshing in that kind of focus, and in the variety of ways people made their life, as well as the naturalistic treatment to storytelling.

Ginko himself is an interesting lead. He's not quite the cypher that the Medicine seller is in Mononoke, for example, he's got his own personality as a sardonic man who has his own ethical ideas about things yet is fairly cynical about people. Yet he's not at the forefront of most of the stories (there are several stories in which he appears very little) and is a rather quiet man. There's a handful of episodes dedicated to developing his character and his backstory, but not much. Of course, Mushishi is a great example of the less is more kind of storytelling.

In conclusion, this is easily one of the best anime I've ever seen. Watch it.

etrangere @ 2009-09-08T03:16:00

2009-09-08T01:19:15Z

I've just finished watching Mushishi. After having tried to stretch it to max by watching an episode only now and then in order to lengthen the pleasure as long as possible. Now I'm sad.

I think I'm more of a racing through something when I like it, but there are exceptions when I prefer to watch/read it slowly. Of course the nature of the work influences that, the pacing may be more suited to waiting and pondering between episodes. But generally speaking, I prefer to have the whole of something before my eyes before starting, and I prefer to go through it quickly. For example there are few manga I read as soon as the scanlations go up because I'd rather wait for a whole volume before reading it, otherwise I feel like the story is in shattered pieces. When I really anticipate something, too, I'd rather wait to be in the proper mood, and right moment to properly concentrate on it. What do you guys think? When you like a story, do you prefer to race through to get to the end, or to slow down and savour it?

reccity rec

2009-09-07T15:49:28Z

curtana & skyclearblue have teamed up to create a series of drawings & verse for ASOIAF à la Edward Gorey. As you might imagine it is made of PURE AWESOME.
Check it out!

A Very Gorey ASOIAFabet

vid recs + asoiaf stuff

2009-09-02T02:01:26Z

First two fanvid recs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLqUPwErz8Q&feature=player_embedded
for Ponyo which is very cute and funny.

And a Buffy vid: Bachelorette by obsessive24 on Bjork's song which is an awesome summary of the feminist thematics of the series and a mesmerizing vid.

On the awesome westerosorting community, in the newly created westerostamping subcom, I was stamped as

& !
Fun stuff! I adore Sandor, of course, and Sarella's been a great character for the little we've seen of her so far, so I can't say I was displeased by the result ^^ Other votes I received were Arya Stark, Brynden Tully, Tyrion Lannister, and Aemon Targaryen.
Join the comm to get stamped as well, the stamping applications are AWESOME. (srsly)

So anyway, casting news for the HBO ASOIAF series are starting to really come now, and I've been pretty happy so far. Most actors picked actually fit my mental image of the characters (which was rarely the case in fans' casting lists I had seen so far XD), and I'm impressed by how much most them seem to be good actors. I'm pretty happy about the guy they have for Jaime and the guy that's almost certainly for Sandor (a bit too old, though, but the guy's hot in just the right way and, yum Scottish accents ♥) Latest news is that Lena Heady appears to be (not quite official but almost certain) cast as Cersei, which LOL. Not to long ago, misstopia had picked Lena for Catelyn in the design of the stamp for westerostamping, and I was very fond of the idea, I'm sure she would have made a great Cat. So it's awfully ironical to see her picked for Cersei XDDDD of course given my love for her performance in SCC, I'm far from disappointed although I've got a hard time envisioning her as Cersei just yet (she's so... not blond. She's certainly hot enough though).
I kinda wonder how that works with the recent rumour of a SCC continuation I've seen the other day...

Two links

2009-08-29T10:03:30Z

Shoujo Kakumei Utena Friending Meme

If Black Women Were White Women

What if suddenly, instantly, the power of white femininity were transferred to black women?</span>

The answer is clear – Black women would represent value, purity, and based on their natural traits; be worthy of protection and instantly become the objects of universal desire. White women would represent the opposite.

“Beauty tar potion” would become globally popular to get the “black look”. “Dove” would be replaced with a black soap called “Raven” to help exfoliate the skin and bring out subtle hints of melanin.

White female features would be declared violent. Their “jagged” thin lips, “knife sharp” noses, and “harsh” jaw lines would be nature’s way of declaring why men have a natural preference for the soft features of black women. Soft lips, soft cheekbones, and soft round noses would be proof of natural femininity.
Full pink lips and large dark eyes would become associated with virginal black girls, whose purity must not be compromised. Black female features would thus be said to represent youth.