#((I did watch that one episode recently for the Cross Guild reveal because I wanted to hear Ryuuzaburou's voice))

[moongothic]

Oh wow, did you see new anime eps? Young Dragon voice is different and kinda 😳👌

Did not watch the episode but I checked and

Young Dragon is literally voiced by

(Kazuhiko Inoue is a great VA, it's just that based on the emojis I did not expect him at all lmao)

[garden-ghoul]

it’s Jingo! a book about xenophobia, racism, imperialism, and how being a cop makes you immune to the rules. here’s the article I reference at the end, about the 1914 Christmas Truce.

transcript under the cut.

Hello and WELCOME to episode 3 of my newly named podcast, It’s Critical Analysis All The Way Down. This time I pulled the number 21, so we’re reading Jingo. The title is a reference to ‘jingoism,’ which is sort of patriotic bullying on the national scale. I’ll go ahead and sing you the chorus of the 1877 pop song it came from, which is actually directly referenced verbatim in the book:

We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

Anyway, I don’t remember this book very well because I never liked it much. As I recall it has a lot of tongue-in-cheek racism that’s still… well, it’s still racist. So if you’re not interested in hearing a LOT about racism, this isn’t the book for you! But let’s take a look.

Before we start, I’ll briefly explain Ankh-Morpork, which is sort of a cross between 1800s London and New York City, but rather than being the capital of anywhere it’s just a citystate. They own a lot of people’s debts. Then there’s Klatch, which seems to be an entire continent loosely representing the Middle East, originally named for a joke about coffee klatches, so the name is a German word weirdly enough. There’s also a place called Klatchistan, and I don’t know what that’s about.

We start off in the classic Pratchett style with a bit of a mystery. This one involves squid. We have a squid fisher and his son having a bad time in the sea precisely halfway between Klatch and Ankh-Morpork because it feels like a storm is coming though there’s not a cloud in the sky. Then that damned foreign bastard shows up, who we gather is a functionally identical squid fisher from Klatch. Note that although they’re equally mean to each other, we are solidly in the point of view of the white guy. Anyway the lost island of Atlantis rises up out of the sea and the two fishermen immediately start trying to claim it for their respective citystates. Their two sons would like to de-escalate, and seem to regard this as normal embarrassing dad behavior (?!) but their fathers aren’t listening. They both want to be the first back to land to declare to everyone that they own an island.

Now it’s time for a bunch of jump cuts that introduce our main cast.

First: back to Ankh-Morpork, where we find our protagonist, Sam Vimes, commander of the city Watch, striking a match on one of his sergeants. Yeah, his introduction is him being lowkey racist to a troll, although Sergeant Detritus makes nothing of it because it really isn’t worth the effort it would be to try to change his commander’s mind. Vimes and Detritus are listening to a ship captain yelling about how Klatchian pirates made off with his cargo (which he’s clearly lying about). Vimes knows everything and everyone in the city, so he quickly demolishes the guy’s argument, and he slinks off in embarrassment having been revealed as a liar. But this doesn’t change the fact that everyone on the street wanted to believe him. As Vimes and Detritus walk they see a lot more people doing street harangues about the same thing.

Second, the city Patrician, Vetinari, is having a meeting with some heads of guild, which Vimes drops in on ‘cos I guess the Watch is also a sort of guild. They’re all having a good old being racist party, except Vetinari is being ironic about it. Vetinari patiently explains that Ankh-Morpork’s history of slaughter and imperialism means they don’t really have any foreign allies and thus it would be pretty stupid to go to war. Also they don’t have a standing army. And absolutely none of the rich pay their taxes so the entire citystate is bankrupt. ‘We’ve got no ships, we’ve got no men, we’ve got no money too,’ Vetinari says. He can’t prevent the peerage from forming private militias, but his official stance it that he’s going to rely on diplomacy.

Third, Captain Carrot of the Watch playing some wholesome street football with a couple of urchin gangs who despise each other, in a clear metaphor for Klatch and Ankh-Morpork that foreshadows the finale. And under Carrot’s watchful eye they get along! Carrot’s brand of diplomacy relies on supernatural earnestness and narrative armor that causes people not to want to disappoint him. We follow him to a hostage situation that seems only to have the purpose of introducing Corporal Angua, who is a werewolf (both of them are foreign, in case you were interested, although the story doesn’t treat them as such because they’re assumed to be white).

Fourth, we have Vimes and Carrot skulking around in the rain at 3AM when they hear screaming and find that a Klatchian family’s house has been firebombed. Vimes reflects on the fact that he’s picked up quite a bit of dwarf and troll language but zero Klatchian and knows Mr. Goriff’s family only as food service people. In fact, in gratitude for saving them Goriff brings a bunch of food to the Watch, which is RIGHT nice of him, and someone does the old “oh no they’re the good sort of Klatchians” thing.

And finally, Vimes has got to go to a big fancy do the wizards are throwing and meet the Klatchian ambassador. The ambassador is Prince Khufurah, who is in the way of all ambassadors ready to play some mind games. He’s experienced quite enough racism already since he arrived in Ankh-Morpork and keeps pretending to try to buy people’s wives. I’m not sure it’s really a good joke if no-one else gets it. He also has a bodyguard named 71-hour Ahmed who is JUST a gross Arab murderer stereotype, but we find out later that this is a façade he likes to project to put people off.

And then we have the wizard parade, where the wizards remind everyone that they COULD turn them all into clams if they wanted, but don’t. The wizards basically have their own private enclave in the city, don’t pay taxes, and do absolutely whatever they want, and it’s yet another in the long list of parallels this book has for international politics.

During the parade someone is seen in an off-limits zone trying to snipe the Prince and Vimes has to go chase them because of course he does, he is rightly referred to as a terrier throughout the book. And when they get there they find a single clove, such as 71-hour Ahmed likes to chew. At this point in the book I didn’t actually remember the resolution of this plotline but I assumed someone was using racial stereotypes to try to frame him. But in fact we later find out that this is an intentional clue Ahmed has left to keep Vimes interested in him. No, I don’t know why he needed that. Maybe he’s just having fun.

But then they discover a Morporkian bowman who is being framed for taking Klatchian bribes to kill the Klatchian ambassador so Klatch has an excuse to go to war with Ankh-Morpork.

Meanwhile there’s a mob, supposedly because Klatchians have been killing people. Someone did get hurt, because Mr. Goriff’s family are really paranoid after the attack. Vimes escorts them to the watchhouse for their own safety, which is a little bit like arresting them. Some people come round to the watchhouse demanding the family’s release but it turns out Klatch is enormous and the rescuers are a different ethnic group and they get into a huge blazing row. In summary, everything continues to be extremely complicated and political.

SPEAKING of complicated and political, the Patrician has resigned and Ankh-Morpork is officially under military law. The entire command of the Watch quits because they don’t want to have to act as soldiers under the idiot aristocrats like Lord Rust who are forming private militias. And we get a little war gossip from Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs, who apparently very much enjoyed being soldiers in the low-stakes wars of Western Europe—I mean the Sto Plains.

I think it’s interesting that both of them seem to have served in multiple wars—they aren’t that old, probably not too much over forty, which means that the peace we see in Ankh-Morpork in the Watch books is VERY recent. Overall there are constant mentions of other wars in this book; Vimes’ wife Sybil also talks about how her aristocratic ancestors made sure to ALWAYS be fighting someone. And yet this is the only book where we see Ankh-Morpork actually at war, presumably because Sir Terry wasn’t as interested in writing about it as he was in writing about civic development.

This book also wants to emphasize that the peerage would rather most of their soldiers get killed, and that fighting is mostly carried out to engender patriotism. I don’t know that in real life commanders want their people to die, but I certainly agree with the second part.

And I want to read this good bit about Vimes thinking like a cop to avoid having a bad opinion of humanity, which is one of the main themes of the book:

Someone's behind this. Someone wants to see a war. Someone paid to have Ossie and Snowy killed. Someone wanted the Prince dead. I've got to remember that. This isn't a war. This is a crime. And then he realized he was wondering if the attack on Goriffs shop had been organized by the same people, and whether those same people had set fire to the embassy. And then he realized why he was thinking like this. It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people.

There’s a subplot where Angua does some inadvisable spying and gets stuck on a ship headed for Klatch, which I mostly mention because I want to tell Vimes off for stealing someone’s fucking boat to follow her. He is, really, SUCH a cop all the time. He tells the guy “oh the city’s under martial law and I have a militia so I can do whatever I like.” Yeah he threatens to drum up a mob and stone this boat captain to death if he doesn’t donate his ship and the weapons he was shipping. Sorry SIR what happened to serve and protect? Yes, he throws ALL of the captain’s cargo overboard and completely destroys his ship in a storm because he refuses to take precautions. I am really starting to dislike Commander Sam “Copaganda” Vimes!!

Due to a bunch of shenanigans he and his men end up being taken as prisoners-slash-guests by some D’regs, an ethnic group that is violently opposed to the idea of a united Klatch. And we get some fun Klatchian politics, which is all I have really been craving.

The D’regs release Vimes to the care of 71-hour Ahmed, who is famous for violating the three-day hospitality rule one hour before time to execute a person who poisoned an entire village, and turns out to have been educated at the Ankh-Morpork Assassins’ Guild. He and Vimes have kind of a cool conversation about being officers of justice:

Your beat is a city you can walk across in half an hour. Mine is two million square miles of desert and mountain. Oh, the towns and cities have their guards, of a sort. They are uncomplicated thinkers. But it is my job to go into the waste places and chase bandits and murderers, five hundred miles from anyone who would be on my side, so I must inspire dread and strike the first blow because I will not have a chance to strike a second one.

And Ahmed reveals that Prince Khufurah’s brother is the one who tried to have him killed: there is nothing that unites people like having a common enemy, and he thinks it will be easier than trying to ‘pacify’ outlying areas of Klatch. Vimes is being a bit of a hypocrite here about how awful it is to kill people as an officer of justice, just because he personally doesn’t have the stomach for it—he beats a lot of people up and threatens to kill people all the time.

Let’s take stock of how things stand, because this book has actually been extraordinarily complicated and I’ve been leaving out a lot of what seemed at the time to be fragmentary comic relief.

Lord Rust saw that Vimes was launching an expeditionary force and he has established an extremely ill-advised beachhead. His soldiers are about to start fighting a Klatchian force six times their number. Lord Rust is sure songs will be written about this. What? Everyone will die? But we shall have songs, so who cares!

Vimes is now allied with a small company of Ankh-Morpork soldiers led by his butler and a company of D’regs who are friendly with 71-hour Ahmed. For some reason this is presented as Carrot being in command of the D’regs through force of charisma, even though the books makes fun of “they’re fine men as long as they have a white commander.”

The Patrician (who has stepped down to make way for military rule of Ankh-Morpork) asked some of the more incompetent watchmen to help him get to Klatch for diplomatic reasons, and they have been posing as street performers. The Patrician is a very good juggler.

And so we’re up to date. Prince Khufurah’s murderous politicking brother is having a polite breakfast with Lord Rust before he totally destroys his forces, when up come Ahmed and Vimes to arrest the Prince. Vimes decides to round it out by declaring his intent to arrest the entire Morporkian army for behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace. VERY cute of Sir Terry to be so glib about the fact that in any reasonable legal system war is one of the worst possible crimes. I aaaalmost had some respect for him and then he turned right around and said that if he killed the Prince it wouldn’t be murder because their countries are at war. The sheer HYPOCRISY.

Captain Carrot goes outside to read the arrested armies their rights and, yes, in a lovely little callback he starts a football match. I think this is also pretty clearly a reference to the possibly apocryphal Christmas football match between German and British soldiers during WWI.

Anyway at this point the Patrician shows up with a treaty of surrender and sends Vimes outside to the kids’ table while the grownups commit complicated legal crimes. Vimes sulks and Ahmed gives him a bit of a pat on the shoulder as they commiserate about their inability to stop the government from committing crimes.

Lord Rust apparently considers the Patrician’s surrender to Klatch a crime as well, because when everyone gets back to Ankh-Morpork he’s apparently to be tried for treason. At the trial, however, it comes out that the Prince traded a valuable military installation for Atlantis, which has since sunk under the sea again. This is portrayed as something the Patrician arranged specifically to effect a coup against the Prince rather than something that will bring Ankh-Morpork future military advantage for some baffling reason. Anyway, now central Klatch has a leader the Patrician is happier to deal with. Sorry, what? Deposing heads of government in desert countries to install governments we prefer is one of the most classic imperialist tactics?

 And that’s the plot. Now, because this podcast isn’t just ‘I tell you the plot of a Discworld book and you go oh good that saves me the trouble of reading it,’ I have another thing I want to discuss here, which is the Nobby-has-to-disguise-himself-as-a-woman subplot. It’s intended to be nothing but comic relief: Nobby is so ugly people always add a caveat that they’re not sure he’s human, and throughout the book we hear about him trying to figure out why girls aren’t into him. The moment he experiences gendered ill-treatment he begins to fully inhabit the role of a woman, going so far as to say that men can’t understand what he’s going through. He hangs out with a bunch of Klatchian women who like him a lot, mostly because his being foreign allows him to express opinions they’re too polite to express. I find it difficult to interpret this as the transmisogynistic joke it is probably intended to be, only because I so earnestly like the idea of Nobby as trans, relating to women as a woman. We see Nobby’s male perspective bundled into the foreignness of being from another country: this willingness to speak your mind and attack men in defense of other women.  I’ll always be wistfully thinking, what if Nobby just hung out with the ladies forever instead of going back to being a watchman? Probably be more likely to finally get a girlfriend, too.

 SO. Themes of Jingo.

Nationalism is bad. I can agree with this one.

Racism is bad… but ooooonly racism against humans. Sir Terry definitely does have certain kinds of racism he considers acceptable.

Brown people aren’t stupid, they have their own politics, and they’re just as capable as anyone else of being real fucked up bastards.

BUT… if the right circumstances present themselves, people of very different cultural backgrounds can get along.

I actually want to go on one last little diversion because I was just reading a very cute article on the 1914 Christmas Truce, which I’ll link in the notes. According to this article, the high command of both the German and British armies was desperate to keep the fighting going on Christmas because they were aware that men from two Christian nations would find common ground in their most important holiday and they did NOT want soldiers to start to think of the opposite side as human. So that declaring a truce on that day was actually an act of insubordination. There’s an account in the article of one location where Germans started singing Christmas songs to signal that they didn’t want to fight, and then met the British in no-man’s land to offer to give them some beer as a gift. The Brits reciprocated with plum pudding. No, I have no idea why they had plum pudding in the trenches. But what this story illustrates is the contrived nature of animosity in war, and the fact that putting in the effort to see all humans as people is a radical act when jingoism is king.

 That’s all I have for you tonight. Be well, and remember to consider the humanity of your neighbor. Bye.

[moontheoretist]

Choujin Koukousei isn’t the first isekai anime I ever watched, thanks to what I can compare it in my head to any other series I watched till now. 

From them all Choujin Koukousei has the best foundations for storytelling lied down, because even though it is about seven genius teenagers whose abilities and knowledge are far beyond anybody else in their world it doesn’t lose focus and always lies down the storyline in a way which makes you realize how deeply author focused on all topics mentioned in the series. It doesn’t though mean that this anime doesn’t have flaws. One of them at the start was portraying fatter people as evil and only recently we got more slim evil people to balance it out. There is also blatant sexualization of women and fanservice made for young boy audience, which I could live without off. The third though happened to rise its head from a place I didn’t expect it to even appear. 

Dr Keine, the genius surgeon of the group was revealed as yandere type of character, whose desire is to make humanity perfect. The yandere trope is nothing new in anime as a medium, but in this case yanderism isn’t the problem. The problem is why she yanders in the first place and where she comes from. Even though I disagree with everything she stands for as a person who once wanted to be perfect myself and realized it’s not worth anything I still understand her frustration with human race. I just  do not subscribe to anything she wants to do in order to change humanity. I also never believed in God myself, so it’s not weird for me that she came to the conclusion that “if just God made everybody’s minds and bodies proper and healthy there would be no diseases or wars”, hence why he is responsible for humanity’s suffering and should be despised. I very much feel that as an atheist. 

The problem with Keine’s attitude and beliefs is that our flaws are exactly what makes us human. The potential to dehumanize others, start wars, murder and hurt other people just lives in us all, but it never just comes out of some evilness or improperness. It all comes from the place of unity and compassion inside the group. One group tends to despise and dehumanize other groups, especially if their values or look differs from theirs. That concept is called “otherness”. We can murder other people for the sake of our own goals, desires and loved ones, which means that empathy is our greatest strength but also the greatest flaw when we do not direct it at anybody else outside our own group. It is also exactly what makes people into terrorists. They all feel empathy and desire to protect what they and the people like them believe in. And to top it all, all of those people are also completely sane. They aren’t mentally ill, which excludes the idea that only mentally ill people are prone to violence. That’s bullshit, we all are dangerous and prone to violence, because it’s just how we are as a species. 

So even though I understand Keine’s desire I cannot really stress enough how wrong she is about everything she does to achieve that. There are better ways to make people stop dehumanizing others, eradicate wars and violence than messing with someone’s brain, which was all on its own violation od someone’s human rights, because Keine manipulated a person, took their autonomy and flipped a switch inside their head to make them as she desired them to be. It’s very much an abusive technique pushed to the extreme and tossed into a jar with a nameplate “surgeon”. It’s interesting though that her inner face was revealed in the very same episode in which Shinobu showed Jeanne the evilness behind Azure Brigade. I think it’s supposed to convey that even Seven Lights Faith has a dark side and this dark side is military power (supposedly atomic bomb which Ringo made) and Keine.

The Healer Angel isn’t a machine though. She is a person, not much different from everybody she targets, because just like them she will cross the line and do morally ambiguous things in order to achieve her goal - help others. It though doesn’t make her much different than the guy she threatened, who did bad things for his Guild, for something he built, for his own goal - business. Yes, she did something horrible for a noble cause, because she did it to ensure that nobody else will suffer because of guy like him, but in the process she lowered herself to the same level on which he was and became the exact same. She may not want to murder people as she is a doctor and her work is to protect people, but she still did something unforgivable to another human person – changed them by force. Squashed their human rights and made them “proper”. 

That is though not only problem with Keine as her desire to change humanity and make everybody into perfect proper humans is even worse. It’s worse all on its own, because it’s inherently ableist.

There are stereotypes, generally inaccurate, associated with either disability in general, or with specific disabilities (for instance a presumption that all disabled people want to be cured, that wheelchair users necessarily have an intellectual disability, or that blind people have some special form of insight). These stereotypes in turn serve as a justification for ableist practices and reinforce discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward people who are disabled. Labeling affects people when it limits their options for action or changes their identity.

Keine is a person who wouldn’t be able to live in a world in which disabled and mentally ill people exist and are happy as they are, because it’s against everything she stands for. It would be impossibly hard pill to swallow for her as  her desire basically boils down to eradication of disabilities, mental illnesses and “evilness” of humans by curing them by force and all due to the fact that she assumes it will make all human kind not only happy, but also flawless. The problem is that she doesn’t take into consideration the idea that she may be wrong and it’s not what those people truly desire. 

It is just naive and narcissistic of Keine to think that she can change everybody, mold them to be as she envisioned them to be and reach perfectness of human kind in the process, because that’s not how world works. Changing people to achieve such a goal is also cruel all on its own. 

Perfection of human kind means no flaws, which we can equate to the world in which only good, healthy and “proper” humans exists. It also means that humanity as a whole would never have to learn how to not look down upon disabilities, because they would just not exist. It just screams “I care too much about other people” at best and “Eugenics is great and just” at worst.