#I also have been fixating on a couple key classical pieces that have certainly been played during the writing of this

[sexynetra]

13 for boxer au <3 wanna commit to the vibe hehe

13. What music did I listen to while writing/what do I recommend people listen to

Okay here’s the thing. I made a playlist for rawnsyf a long time ago. That became basically the only thing I listen to anymore? So more likely than not I listened to that. But I also do a lot of my writing at work which means that I’m listening to bad workout remixes of pop songs that were big in like 2019 😭 do NOT recommend listening to that it’s annoying as shit. But I should make a boxer au playlist. The universe is big enough to deserve that 😂

For now here is the rawnsyf playlist which absolutely has songs on it that have informed boxer au scenes, but keep your eyes peeled for a boxer au playlist sometime soon now that the idea has entered my brain!

[canmom]

flashbacks

Thinking about the character establishing flashback since i have been noticing a lot in, well, mostly a certain subset of Japanese media but that might just be sampling bias.

Still, the more I encounter the more it seems that a lot of manga-adjacent storytelling has this curiously earnest, direct, perhaps you might say theatrical quality. Like, it doesn’t seem to hide its artifice, how the pieces are arranged to set up an emotional payload.

I think it’s most apparent in earlier works like Ashita no Joe. In the first episode of Dezaki’s anime adaptation (I haven’t read the manga), we are introduced to Joe, a drifter who’s good at punching, and Danpei, a former boxer and boxing trainer who has met with little success but fixates on Joe as a chance to live vicariously through success at sports..

Soon after establishing our characters and premise, Danpei intervenes to protect Joe from the yakuza, getting severely beaten up in the process. In Osamu Dezaki’s anime, the interactions in this scene are not at all interested in being naturalistic: everyone’s loudly declaiming their intent (“You’re my tomorrow! Tomorrow’s Joe!”), and cuts are generally short and very direct.

The next episode, as Danpei recovers in the hospital, we get an extended flashback in which we see the backstory that led him to this point, explaining his motivation with Joe. In a work like this, lines will be repeated such that they become a kind of recurring motif or catchphrase, and the whole cadence of dialogue has a kind of very deliberate ‘beat, answering beat’ feeling.

Nobody would talk like this, of course, but that isn’t a failing, any more than the fact that people don’t break out into song like they do in musicals.

I’ve seen similar devices deployed in a lot of other settings. and I guess my curiosity is in how best to deploy it. Especially since it seems to cut against the general sentiment I’ve received that artful writing should be indirect, heavily use elision and implication, write dialogue naturalistically, and avoid contrivance.

Kunihiko Ikuhara and his protégé Tomohiro Furukawa certainly seem fond of such flashbacks - and it’s worth noting both are highly influenced by Dezaki. we might note a couple of accompanying devices here. one major one is an object associated with a key character establishing moment which becomes symbolic of the relationship. take for example Karen and Hikari’s two hair pins in Revue Starlight:

Likewise, episode 7 is - in classic kishōtenketsu mode! - a full backstory episode changing our perception of Nana. (More on kishōtenketsu shortly since it’s a key piece of the puzzle.) Revue Starlight also showcases another very common element of this structure: a promise made years ago, often a minor thing but imbued with great significance since it becomes, once again, symbolic of those characters and their devotion.

Its predecessor Utena is built heavily around such flashbacks, at least in its first half. each duellist confronted by Utena will be introduced with an episode setting up their particular conflict before returning to the present where they fail to defeat Utena and the matter is resolved. Utena meanwhile is gradually given various flashbacks of her childhood where she fixated on the whole ‘prince’ ideal.

I recently started rewatching Attack on Titan after Thursday’s Animation Night, and the impetus of this post is seeing this device crop up there also. In episode 6 of Tetsurō Araki’s anime, we get a flashback to Mikasa’s childhood. Her parents are murdered, and she is kidnapped with the intent to sell her into sex slavery - those handy anime rapists who show up whenever someone needs some justified violence done to them I guess. A young Eren tracks down the kidnappers and stabs two of them, but a third one grabs him. Mikasa comes to a realisation, accompanied by a flashback within a flashback: essentially that the world is cruel and the strong will always prey on the weak unless stopped by force, accompanied by a montage of bugs eating other bugs. She stops crying and stabs the guy holding Eren.

Afterwards, Eren and his father offer to take her in, and Eren presents her with a scarf, which she wears ever since, a symbol of her devotion to him. We return to the present where Mikasa is a cold force of violence, reminiscing on these events.

This flashback serves several functions. It’s a direct statement of the themes of the work: a rather familiar meditation on power and ‘necessary’ violence, although more commonly found in the mouth of a villain (c.f. dracula) - honestly I have no idea why anybody was surprised to find out the author had nationalist politics lol. And in more immediate terms, it answers the crucial ‘why’ question - coming after Mikasa confronts a merchant endangering a group of civilians, it answers the question of why is Mikasa like this? - and sets up some dramatic irony: at this point it seems Eren is dead, but Mikasa is saying she can do anything as long as he’s at her side. Soon she’ll find out and we’ll see the fireworks.

So what exactly makes up a character? We may write down a great deal of stuff about visual design, habits and personality traits, but the crucial element as far as having a story is concerned is a desire or intention - the thing that pushes them to act. And, to me, a great mystery of life is where these motive forces come from. The character-establishing flashback serves as an illustrative case: a precise encapsulation of where a guiding principle forms.

Final Fantasy XIV actually makes this kind of flashback an explicit event in narrative. The main character has a power called the Echo, which causes them to receive sudden visions of the memories of people nearby, always at dramatically appropriate times. This is associated with certain visual and audio cues, and it allows the player character to relate information received in such flashbacks to the others. As such, FFXIV uses this storytelling device in just about every storlyine. (It doesn’t even always use the Echo; sometimes it just runs a flashback cutscene as is.)

The recent Shadowbringers and Endwalker expansions found some clever ways to make these kinds of flashbacks playable, without breaking from a linear story. In Shadowbringers, you visit an elaborate simulacrum of a past society created by the expansion’s villain, which serves to considerably flesh him out. In Endwalker, you actually time travel into the past and interact with the same characters (with a convenient memory wipe at the end!), and later, the arch-villain of the series has you fight through another constructed tour of her motivating experiences.

Another series heavily constructed around such flashbacks is Ranking of Kings. This series drops a tragic character backstory almost every episode, starting with the characters immediately around Bojji such as Kage, whose backstory is delivered as early as the second episode. (In fact, this flashback is moved forward in the anime compared to the manga!) These flashbacks are typically surprisingly dark for such a cute show: Kage’s flashback sees him survive a genocide followed by poverty and mistreatment, establishing his cynical attitude when he meets Bojji; his subsequent arc sees him become fiercely devoted to the kind prince who he initially sees as a total rube.

What’s fascinating about Ranking of Kings to me is that it goes out of its way to give basically all of its characters relatively sympathetic motivations: gradually we get to see the contours of a complex web of loyalties and obligations. Characters who at first seem simply cruel may turn out to be acting out of a warped kindness, characters who seem kind may be traitors, and a lot of the time a recontextualising reveal is followed by an extended flashback.

Another example is of course NieR Replicant/Gestalt. From playthrough B onwards, you are introduced to flashbacks concerning nearly every enemy explaining how they came to oppose you, and also for your own companions. This begins, naturally, with one of my favourite points in the game, Kainé’s prose section where we see her childhood with her grandmother. The remake adds a similar scene for Emil right after he blows up the Aerie, and the short stories in Grimoire NieR arguably add even more, each one seemingly designed to add more pathos to scenes in the game. Automata uses this device in a similar way, filling in the stories of characters like Simone and the King of the Forest.

(Both games also feature a significant flash forwards. This happens relatively early in Replicant (the first half with the younger Nier is never revisited) and quite late in Automata, but in both cases, the conflicts and relationships set up in the first half pay off in the second.)

All of these flashbacks serve as a new element which recontextualises what came before, which brings us to...

Kishōtenketsu

OK, so I said I’d go into the subject of kishōtenketsu, which is said by some commentators to be the underlying structure of the vast majority of Japanese storytelling. This divides a story into four beats: an introduction (起 ki), whose consequences are developed (承 shō), then a twist (転 ten) is introduced, and finally it is brought together by a conclusion (結 ketsu). This might be applied to fiction, but also to arguments in a debate or indeed jokes.

The universal applicability of anything is always questionable, and in Japan kishōtenketsu is applied sometimes to Western fairytales as well rather than being seen as some kind of unique national character: we might want to ask how far you’d have to push a story for it to be possible to not fit its elements into this rubric with a little effort. Still, it definitely seems to very naturally apply to examples like yonkoma manga, with the four panels typically mapping to the four stages.

The most distinctive step for me though is the ‘twist’, ten. In Western storytelling a ‘twist’ is usually applied to an ending: a new piece of information which causes us to reevaluate what we saw in the story so far, commonly used in horror (surprise: this character was really a ghost). This can sometimes be very effective, but I think its popularity waxes and wanes; a propensity for twist endings can become a joke as in the case of M Night Shyamalan. In these cases the ‘twist’ doesn’t really require explanation or further resolution: it’s obvious as soon as we see it what it means for the rest of the story and that’s usually where it leaves off.

In Wikipedia’s examples of kishōtenketsu, the ten generally serves as introducing a third, seemingly unrelated element which the conclusion then links to what came before. Here’s an example attributed to Confucian philosopher Sanyō Rai:

Ki Daughters of Itoya, in the Honmachi of Osaka.

Shō The elder daughter is sixteen and the younger one is fourteen.

Ten Throughout history, daimyōs killed the enemy with bows and arrows.

Ketsu The daughters of Itoya kill with their eyes.

The ten step at first seems like a non-sequitur, but then it’s brought back into relation with the other elements. by the conclusion.

Within fiction, we can see that this backstory flashback is arguably a fairly natural way to set up the ten step in an arc, and naturally often seems to come fairly late in the story: we take a brief break from the main flow of events in order to introduce a new element, and then when we return to the ‘present’ we’ll see how these past events are finally resolved.

The ‘twist’ isn’t necessarily going to be a non-sequitur here, but it may recontextualise what happened before and change our expectations for resolution. Let’s take Puella Magi Madoka Magica which follows a very clear kishōtenketsu structure: Homura enters the series as someone aloof and mysterious, acting with violence against Kyubey; the characters get gradually drawn into magical girl battles and realise that they’re getting exploited by Kyubey, and a large threat draws near; these might be assigned the ki and shō steps although they have their own smaller kishōtenketsu arcs within them.

Then, we get a whole episode flashback where we learn that Homura is a time traveller who keeps resetting the timeline in order to save Madoka, which completely changes our view of the story so far; this could be attributed the ten step. Finally we return to the present and find a resolution to the timeline in which Madoka uses the built up karma to change the rules of the universe, but abandons Homura in the process, the ketsu.

Kishōtenketsu is often called storytelling ‘without conflict’ or at least deemphasising conflict, but instead based on causality. For example, on tofugu Rudy Barrett writes this about kishōtenketsu:

Instead of having goals and subgoals that carry the plot from beginning to end, the classical Japanese story grammar is guided by a series of actions and reactions that lead a character to a thematically significant resolution. Causality, rather than conflict, is the vehicle in this type of storytelling. These stories move based on character actions (or often actions outside of the control of the characters) and the motivations are often irrelevant or not elaborated upon. Matsuyama posits that the lack of a goal structure is due to the traditional Buddhist value of eliminating worldly desires, which is in direct contrast with the very goal-oriented ideas of the West. Japanese protagonists tend to be unmotivated by an initial goal in the interest of making them more classically “good” in a Buddhist sense.

This seems... honestly seriously overstating the case to me; rather both seem to be more like interpretative frames than different types of story. Causality and conflict are both the basic ingredients of a story; it is possible to dispense with one or other of them but it’s a major restriction. And to say Japanese characters are usually unmotivated just doesn’t accord with much fiction I can think of, nor is it uniquely Japanese - c.f. the endless discussion of a passive hero awakened to adventure by an inciting incident caused by the villain.

So by the same token I disagree with this video, in which a youtube anime critic attempts to describe how Your Name (Animation Night 44) is a kishōtenketsu story based on causality rather than conflict, noting primarily that the major event - the meteor strike and the link across fate - is 'well outside’ the main characters’ control and can’t be prevented. It seems like a huge stretch though to suggest that there is no conflict as a result, and a misunderstanding of the nature of dramatic conflict. The film is full of conflict (which we could mostly put in the ‘person against nature’ and ‘person against society’ bins if we wanted): conflicts manifest whenever characters want things which are not easy to achieve, or characters have conflicting desires.

The characters wish first of all to figure out whose body they are swapping with, and then when the mystery reveals that they are actually linked across time (Taki lives several years after Mitsuha’s death) and there is to be a meteor strike that wipes out Mitsuha’s town, the second half of the film is concerned with their efforts to evacuate the town and rewrite the timeline against obstacles like Mitsuha’s overbearing dad.

To return to Madoka, there is a clear conflict between Madoka and Homura’s desires, with both wishing to sacrifice themselves to protect the other (and in Madoka’s case, magical girls at large). There is also the conflict of the magical girls vs. Kyubey, and the broader hostile world they find themselves in. And every character has their own driving conflict in their particular arc, all full of thwarted or misguided desires. It’s brimming with all the ‘classic’ conflicts: magical girl vs society, magical girl vs self, magical girl vs magical girl, and these conflicts are how the plot unfolds within the ‘causality’ of kishōtenketsu.

Nevertheless, the kishōtenketsu concept is hardly irrelevant: in its most basic form it reveals a pattern we can deploy to create a satisfying story. We introduce one thing, develop it a bit to get people invested, introduce a second thing, and then tie them together in a conclusion.

Back to flashbacks

Plenty of Japanese examples; what of the West? My lens will mostly be limited to animation,

A couple of examples of a similar mode of character-establishing flashback appear in Avatar: The Last Airbender. A key one, delivered in the second season, concerns Prince Zuko and Princess Azula: we see how their treatment as children set up their conflicts in the present. This helps change our view of Zuko from ‘antagonist’ to ‘deuteragonist’, and renders tragic his obsessive pursuit of Aang from the first season; not surprisingly, the concluding arc of the second season which pays off several of these flashback setups is considered one of the high points of the series.

The third season offers one of Katara’s childhood, and the death of her mother, leading to a question of whether she’d take revenge in the present, but this strand is fairly quickly dropped. (We might also see this season as a kind of failed implementation of kishōtenketsu: the Lion Turtle represents an unexpected new element, but rather than recontextualise what we’ve seen so far in a new light, it offers merely a convenient ‘out’ to the moral dilemma the show set up.)

A couple of more or less recent science fiction books, such as Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie) and The Fifth Season (NK Jemisin, who I have beef with after the Helicopter Story incident, but her book does serve as a good example lol) have taken on a kind of two- or three-stranded structure. We’re introduced to a character in one period, and then a parallel story about the same character in a second period.

It may not immediately reveal that these are the same character (Jemisin’s book waits til the very end of the book to tie her three strands), but ultimately this structure serves a similar purpose: we see events play out and the motivation driving them side by side. By spreading out the motivating flashback across a whole book, it has a lot more space to breathe, and we also get the payoff of the final inciting incident (e.g. the death of Lieutenant Awn) and its consequence (Breq attempts to assassinate Anaander Mianaai). For both books, their sequels took on a much more straightforward linear structure, and I would say this might be part of the reason they were so much weaker.

So, suppose I want to deploy a character-establishing flashback... actually, looking at the stories I’ve written, it seems I’ve ended up doing this without really conceiving this as a definite technique. In chapter 3 of VECTOR, I establish CORAL’s motivation in this way; in Pocket Healer (soon to be finished?) I seem to have landed on the same two strand structure.

Actually I think a large proportion of my stories have that ‘introduce a premise, flashback, resolve’ approach at least somewhere in them? Funny to realise! I tend to write my stories a lot like film anyway, with frequent POV changes serving a similar role to a scene cut, and a wish to describe strongly impactful images for each ‘shot’. So perhaps the character-establishing flashback emerges as a kind of natural consequence of writing for a visual medium, or perhaps it’s just a certain familiarity with this device making it come naturally to me.

Still, what if I want to make it stronger? The key element is of course how strongly the flashback relates to the present events. We should leave the flashback with a new understanding and sense of impending tension to be resolved, and the information received in the flashback should continue to shape everything else we witness.

I could also probably stand to take advantage of the element of indirection. A promise or an exchange of a gift acts as an indirect (and visual!) way to talk about the relationships between two characters. There’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple - in fact, making it a simple gesture imbued with great meaning by context can do a great deal. We recently watched a backstory arc from The Ancient Magus’s Bride in which we met a wizard who had promised to return a book to a former crush; when he dies, he asks the protagonist to carry it through in his stead. The simple act of returning a book allows the recipient, now an old woman who’s clearly on her deathbed, to reflect on the whole relationship. Call it sentimental perhaps, but done well, this kind of device is undeniably effective (for many readers at least!).

I rarely give my stories much planning (mostly writing by intuition; for better or worse, this seems to best suit my adhd), but I think recognising such a device is perhaps valuable because I’ll know it’s in the mental ‘toolbox’ and I can deploy it consciously. And, I don’t know, it’s always interesting to see how storytelling devices evolve and cross-pollinate.