#and the motifs! so many motifs! don’t know what they all mean yet but there’s so many motifs!

[raavenb2619]

“Musical about a green magic girl who's totally alloaro, trust me, where are you going she's alloaro, I have a whole powerpoint presentation stop backing away from me I have proof she's alloaro just listen to me” - Things I tell my friends to try to get them to watch media I like

[crocs-simp]

One underrated aspect of Benrius I haven’t seen talked about: the soundtrack

I don’t know how many musical nerds are there in the camp cretaceous fandom, but if you’re like me then you’ve likely noticed that Darius and Ben are the only main characters to have their own leitmotifs:

No other campers get this treatment, not even Yasammy (they do get a joint theme though which is super cute in its own right)

So why is this a big deal? Well, a character’s leitmotif is basically their trademark, the thing that instantly brings their faces to mind when you hear that specific tune. Think Darth Vader and The Imperial March. It embodies their soul in a sense, shifting in keys and tempos as their journey takes them through joy and sorrow, but never straying from the core signature melody.

A character’s leitmotif often plays when they enter a scene, subtly telling the viewers that hey, this is their moment now, pay attention to them. So what happens when two leitmotifs meet? Well, it could mean many things, but mostly it is meant to imply a significant connection between the two characters they represent. The connection could be antagonistic, friendly, or...

Intimate.

Hear how both their leitmotifs flow seamlessly from one to another, lifting each other up and cornily accompanied by an angelic choir no less. Notice how despite Ben being the one speaking, it is Darius’ motif that plays, because Darius is the star of the scene, the receiving end of Ben’s attention and love. And then, as Darius returns the affection, the score shifts in turn to reflect it, playing Ben’s theme as Darius redirects all of it back to Ben, physically too I might add.

Musical storytelling is an oft underrated aspect of TV and movies, yet when done right it conveys just as much as visuals and dialogues, as any LOTR or Star Wars or Hamilton fan would happily point out to you in much more eloquent words than I can. The story of Darius and Ben is one of subtlety, of stolen glances and longing nights, reflected in the music of their hearts.

[foursaints]

ok the topic of barty crouch jr and the bone motif came up, but his specific phrasing here is what really sticks in my brain & is the basis of my stance on barty’s story as an allegory for bodily autonomy. yes there is something obviously satisfying in a character who spent 12 years under imperius, his body used a puppet, choosing to murder his abuser through transfiguration rather than a more conventional method like the killing curse. this is the only instance of death-by-transfiguration in the series. but i think the way he phrases this (became a bone, not ‘turned into’) belies a deeper understanding of barty’s relationship to having a body in general.

barty crouch being denied bodily autonomy goes far deeper than the imperius curse. i see it as sort of a haunting refrain that characterizes his entire life actually. he goes from servitude, to imprisonment, to switching bodies with his mother, to the imperius curse (kept under an invisibility cloak— he can’t even see himself), to the polyjuice potion, to that ironic “death” by the dementor’s kiss; his body goes on without his soul. it’s worth noting that the only time barty appears on-page as himself his body is controlled (yet again!) and forced to speak under veristaserum. do you think there was a strange comfort in that, for him? i just mean that he’s never known anything else.

i want to look at this through a hypochondriacal lens, where the experience of having a body (or being embodied) is a contestatory relationship wherein the mind strives for order/structure/immutability but the body is inescapable— it brings disorder, change, and a continual loss of control. the body is both fundamentally unknowable and hurtling towards death and illness: the hypochondriac seeks to rationalize & control this, but it’s ultimately an exercise in futility. i see these anxieties really present in barty crouch jr’s character: someone whose body has been puppeted or transformed into a different shape more than it has actually been his own.

i’m not saying that barty IS a hypochondriac (he’s not), but that his character arc functions inside the same epistemological framework: one where the unruly body is a prison because of how it’s subject to/harbinger of continual change. but this relies on a really clear division of the body and mind as separate entities. or even, like, a division between the body and this more ephemeral idea of “the self”— a soul that resides in the body but is somehow separate from it (and we know the soul is canon in the world of harry potter). barty crouch collapses this dichtonomy in a really interesting way with his statement: his father became a bone. as in, he is no longer himself and he is just that bone now. barty is introducing the idea that the soul doesn’t really matter or even exist, and that once your body takes the shape of something you fundamentally are that thing, for better or worse.

and i don’t know! this strikes me, especially coming from a man who has lived twelve years as an empty vessel— why would he believe in a soul if his has been erased and overwritten so many times? his own sense of self is too stifled and warped and stunted. this is the same character who was able to embody moody so fully and convincingly that it was impossible for even dumbledore to tell the difference. i think this was possible because of barty’s weird relationship to embodiment, where his actual “self” is hazy and loosely defined— perhaps the result of so many years having it denied, stifled, or unable to develop— but he becomes whatever shape his body is taking. (it’s interesting to note, too, that barty didn’t say that he transfigured his father. rather, he “transfigured [his father’s] body”, and this was enough for his identity to dissipate and him to become something else). to barty, the “self” is not an independent entity that is subject to the body’s change and disorder— his “self” is the very body itself, and all the fear, and change, and loss of control that comes with it.

this is why the ending with the dementor’s kiss gets me so bad. if the body is all he really is, then this fate is the perfect closure. barty is finally reduced to all he has ever been: erased. an empty vessel. just the image of himself, with nothing inside it. what’s really changed?

[lotus-tower]

Why do we talk like that about Gintama?

So this is something I've already talked about a lot here and there, but I thought I would condense my thoughts on the topic in its own post.

We've joked a lot about math zeitgeist, but why in the world are we furiously mathposting about Gintama? Why did I write 28 pages of actual essay for it? Where does kraniumet get all those images from? (I've always wondered this.) Essentially, what's driving us to analyze these themes and motifs over and over again... and why can they be analyzed over and over again?

When I first wrote My Orochi Stood Up, I made it clear that this was an original framework made for the same purpose as all analytical frameworks and models: to enable me to gain certain key insights about the series, to account for all of its innumerable bits and pieces, and to arrange their relationships to one another in a cohesive, legible way. In short, as I wrote in my essay, it provides me with symbolic technology.

In the same vein, when I wrote my spontaneous math post, I said that so much of math is about things that don’t exist and yet become real, not just because they help you articulate something but because they help you arrive at a solution. This is the purpose of things like imaginary numbers--or negative numbers for that matter.

I know that we should never live life in accordance with the fake hater in our heads that we imagine saying stupid things to us so that we can respond to them in smart, cool ways. I'm sure Zura lives like that though, and we all think he's charming, so maybe we should reconsider this idea. What I mean to get at is that I've never once tried to claim that Sorachi literally intended any of what I describe in my ouroboros framework. I don't think he sat down one day and planned to make his motifs compatible with western alchemy, I don't think he had the creation myth of the island of Japan in mind, and I don't actually think he read Barthes.

But what's undeniable is that there is something so bizarrely consistent, coherent, and plentiful about Gintama's thematic flourishes--even though in many, many ways, Gintama is filled with bad, and worse, mediocre, writing. What sets Gintama apart from other series isn't the inherent quality of its writing (which has stark ups and downs). If you'll forgive the confusing and somewhat contradictory wording, what makes Gintama distinct isn't a quantitative difference (as in, more goodness), but a qualitative difference. What does this qualitative difference boil down to?

First is structure. This part we've gone over a lot, so I'll try to keep it brief (or novel?). Gintama is a series with basically just one favoured literary technique, and it uses it again. and again. and again. and again. and again. Parallels upon parallels upon parallels--and there are only a few key thematic ideas that Sorachi is interested in exploring. You can describe it as consistency, or, if you want to be uncharitable, repetitiveness. But it is, frankly, absurd the amount of parallels--or rather, the degree of parallelism--this series contains. What's interesting about it is its effects on how we engage with the story.

By making it obvious that this is a conscious and explicit writing decision (through various means, mainly dialogue), any characters with suitable parallelism to a prototypical character A are all connected to one other--let's call these the A-sided characters. This holds even if they're all a bit different from each other. Imagine all these A-sided characters spread out in line, like hostages tied to each track of a train track or the rungs on a ladder. They lose similarity with each rung, like loss of clarity in a game of telephone--let's call this "reflection lossiness." Even though characters in the top rung and the bottom rung may not have much in common, they may both be within "lossiness range" (<- I just made this up) of a character in a middle rung, and therefore able to communicate indirectly with one another.

Moreover, because the prototypical character A has a foil in prototypical character B, all A-sided characters are also connected not only to any individual foils they may have, but potentially to all other B-sided characters. Since it's easier to identify characters' thematic affiliations through their interactions and dynamics with other characters, the consistency of the A-B foil formula, when combined with the fact that animanga foils are generally made very obvious, helps us perceive these diagonal relationships. Thus, the reader can squint at the interactions of almost the entirety of Gintama's enormous cast with valid suspicion, with less difficulty than in other works with more complex structures. The series' sheer length also ensures that there is an abundance of material to comb through, so much so in fact that this careful inspection, through rereading again and again, becomes necessary.

For instance, the interactions between any given pair of characters may not seem directly relevant to our protagonist at first glance, but once you know the magic A | B schema, you may notice that that pair's interactions resonate with that of a different pair, one involving an A-sided character with less reflection lossiness from the top and who therefore reflects much more of what happens to them onto Gintoki. In this way, the original pair, who are probably just a couple of minor side characters who appear once in a weird arc and then never show up again, can make you go, "hey wait a minute. what if?"

What if?

Let's look at a concrete example. Housen and Utsuro don't seem to have much to do with each other at first glance. However, because we know that he parallels Kamui, and that Kamui | Kagura parallel Takasugi | Gintoki, who in turn can be mapped onto Utsuro | Shouyou, we can arrive at a Housen-Utsuro connection that wasn't previously obvious. What is the utility of this connection? For one, it sharpens our ability to articulate how the hole-sided flee from the things they fear and yearn for by adding Housen's infamous avoidance of the sun into the analysis. It also provides new ground for exploring potential ideas comparing, say, Kamui choosing to leave with the Harusame and walk in Housen's footsteps, with Oboro's resigned embrace of the Naraku and Utsuro. Additionally, since Housen was defeated in Hinowa's lap, this also helps us draw a Hinowa -> Kagura connection, which helps us arrive at a Hinowa-Shouyou connection, which helps to reify that Shouyou is a milf.

By inserting one or two blatant instances of foreshadowing and parallelism early on in the series, instances that are impossible to pass off as coincidence, Gintama primes the reader to suspect that similar nuggets might be hiding anywhere, to check every garbage can we encounter from there on out like in the Pokemon games.

Whoops. In attempting to explain the math zeitgeist I succumbed to using math in my explanation. It's irresistible.

But that's structure. Let's move on now to something arguably even more important: motifs.

It's undeniable that for a shounen series that's half gag-manga, Gintama has a strange amount of analyzable motifs, and a clear loyalty to them. Regardless of how extravagantly people on tumblr dot com may want to overanalyze their favourite Shounen Jump series, their efforts are usually restrained to theme and characterization. Their ravings do not usually resemble the ravings of the Gintama Salon. If you've read this far, I don't think I need to explain this to you, or what Gintama's most prominent motifs are. But why is Gintama so motif-ful? The sword's importance is obvious, expected even, but what differentiates Gintama from, say, Bleach, where the characters' swords also literally represent their souls in a way?

In the end the answer is what I already discussed in My Orochi Stood Up, the foundation of my entire framework, in fact its very title: the dick joke.

Sorachi's immature sense of humour is the glue holding the entire thematic and narrative structure of Gintama together. Why do we search obsessively for meaning in the flotsam of Gintama's less narratively charged moments? Because, quite frankly, many things are phallic. The sword is no longer simply a sword--by being imbued with the spirit of the dick joke, it becomes not only valid but textual to associate it with the head of the nation (shadow juice squirt), the motif of the dragon (thank you Elizabeth), and castration. What I mean is not whether the sword can be read as a dick--obviously, phallic logic has been prominent through all of human history--but the way in which Gintama's sexual humour gives us--and itself--an impetus to equate motifs in the first place.

Comparing very serious things to dicks is funny--the more abrupt, the more shocking, the more mood whiplash, the funnier is. Therefore, for Gintama's toilet humour to be as effective as possible, tone dissonance is ideal, pushing it towards the intermingling of comedy and tragedy that we know it so well for today. This in turn validates and reinforces the meaning-making role that these phallic jokes play in the story as a hole. It is not only that we cannot separate the dick jokes from the serious delivery of the plot, but that in many arcs important information is given to us through ridiculous gag devices (ball gags?).

The logic of basic sex jokes is extremely simple, intuitive, and easy to understand. The prominence of the pole necessarily implies the presence of the hole. I've talked about that enough in my essays, so I won't go into detail here, but the reason that I wrote my essays in the first place is because of how easy it is to map a procreative framework onto a series filled from beginning to end with phallic gags. As much as I may joke about it, the underlying logic of "the pole and the hole" is powerful and compelling, providing connective tissue to seemingly disparate motifs with ease. When combined with the "sorting" power of the A | B structure, the ability to associate any particular character with any particular motif easily gives us the ability to analyze how a given set of characters interacts with a motif; equally, where the motif sits in Gintama's playing ground of phallicism can inform a given character's dynamic with others.

I've already written at length about the role that wordplay plays in this as well. To save on time, I'll just quote from My Orochi Stood Up:

Gintama’s insistence on wordplay enables interesting meaning to be derived from these dirty jokes and their interaction with other motifs in the story. After all, the name of the series itself elevates the spirit of the balls joke, even if unintentionally, to the same level as the other metaphor in the title: “silver."

But perhaps the singularly most important example is the -tama in Gintama, with its plethora of potential meanings, each of them just silly and dirty enough that you have to take it seriously. Beyond the obvious joke on kintama (balls) and the “silver soul” meaning, we’ve seen that tama is also easily conflated with atama (head), and even with tamago (egg). This is clearly demonstrated with the series’ fixation on beheading leading to the salvation of the soul, and the bodyswap arc hinging on the pun between soul and egg.

In short, it is the comedic aspect of Gintama that fuels the series' own willingness to conflate and play with its motifs, and that validates--provokes--our mad efforts as readers to draw unlikely connections and dig through dirt. Though it may seem more ridiculous on the surface to be taking such a magnifying glass to such a profoundly silly series, it is in fact more justified for Gintama than it would likely be for a more serious series, one where the paths between motifs are not pre-paved, let alone lubricated with shadow squirt juice.

I was recently introduced to a theory of comedy where comedy was posited as an interplay between excess and lack. How this maps on to Gintama is obvious; but one thing that comes to mind now is how easy it would be to characterize our scholarly efforts in examining Gintama, a series one could humorously characterize as "lacking", as a kind of excess. Which is to say, I think Gintama has pulled its penultimate trick on us (because it's still coming out with more stuff for the anniversary. I believe it.) by making us part of its comedy.

[specialagentartemis]

ah i see. so becky chambers has fallen into the “you don’t owe anyone anything = the bonds of community/the social construct are pointless oppressive structures” and “self care = doing whatever you feel like” traps huh.

also irt the person asking for antidotes to becky chambers: CANNOT recommend a memory called empire and a desolation called peace enough. The author is so so invested in exploring her alien cultures and iirc she has a linguistics/history/anthropology background so she can actually pull it off. And the main characters are all well developed and complex and deeply flawed while still being likeable! (Hopefully artemis you haven’t already read and hated these books lol)

Hah I simply haven't gotten around to reading those yet, no... they are On my List... 2 many books

“self care = doing whatever you feel like” is definitely there, but it's not even so much that the bonds of community are pointless, it's more... it's okay if you do nothing, because the Bonds of Community mean that other people will be okay with it and pick up your slack no matter what you do. Sort of? A Prayer for the Crown-Shy was so muddled in its themes that I wasn't fully sure what, exactly, she was going for by the end. Mosscap is on a quest to determine what humans need, and nobody can articulate anything in particular that they need or want, because they don’t know, because everything they need or want is provided by their perfect society. In this perfect society, nobody wants for anything, which means nobody wants anything. Except Dex. Who can't articulate what it is they want. And it almost seems like that's treated as a problem with Dex, something Dex needs to get over.

A surface motif of “I’m OK you’re OK we’re all OK and that’s OK” and “you deserve a chance to rest, you don’t need to know where you’re going in life, and that’s OK” is all well and good, I can support that, but the presentation was all over the place. At the end, she even seems to recognize it, and try to address it. Mosscap reveals that when it asked "what do humans need?" the most common answer it gets from people is "a feeling of purpose." But it just kind of makes everything more muddled. Do humans need a sense of purpose? Or is trying to find your Purpose just making you unhappy and you need to just, stop caring if you have a Purpose or not? Mosscap treats Dex's search for a Purpose In Life as almost disordered, like something they just need to reframe their worldview and then get over and be happy doing nothing and going with the flow. Dex's deep longing is almost addressed, but then just... not. Mosscap's position is that Dex should basically just get over it, embrace doing nothing, and hang out with it on the beach. And so they and Mosscap blow off their obligations to have fun on the beach.

[geodetojoy]

Collection of wisdom saga thoughts:

(None of these are in chronological order it’s just whatever pops in my head :P)

- Athena calling ody her friend in we’ll be fine vs ody calling Athena his mentor in monster????? That compared to my goodbye???? Fucking brutal. They’ve both changed so much after losing each other bro. OW

- LOVE that in little wolf the suitors are always using the chorus as like a taunt, bit it never fits into their dialogue it just kinda interrupts it but then Athena comes along and the chorus ties directly into what she’s saying, like “don’t go down without a- fight little wolf fight!” It’s really cool how it shows his opposition vs his allies I love it

- also just. so many shrimp emotions brought out during legendary and we’ll be fine. guh

- the video game aspects were so cool!!!!!! Love the one on one with Telemachus and antinous with the mortal combat-esk animation that went along with it!! And in god games how every time Athena convinced a god it played like a level up sound effect!!! Suuuper interesting :D

-CALYPSO!!!!! HER!!!! The first time ody has faced an enemy that doesn’t mean him any harm (harm as in like. trying to kill him, obvi she still did some fucked up shit to him) but might actually be the worst one out of all of them because he just misses his wife so damn badly. Don’t even get me STARTED on the fuckin “ody” and “open arms” shit bro that HURT

- Did I mention I love Telemachus? I love Telemachus. He’s so ambitious and so so kind and has such a good heart I adore himmmmmm <3 Despite never really being able to meet his dad aside from as an infant, he looks up to him so much and respects him and wants to be like him, and I’m sure that’s all Penelope’s doing <333 the wife and husband ever, actually. they invented heterosexuality and true love

-GOD GAMES!!!!!!! While I’ve seen plenty of understandable criticisms, like it being too short or fast-paced, I think jay did the absolutely best he possibly could with it!! It’s so fun and gives us such a good glimpse into the thoughts and priorities of all of the gods and ATHENA!!! WHAT A QUEEN!!! UNMASKED WITTY AND QUEEN OF THE BEST STRATEGIES WE’VE SEEN FRRRRR!!! Also I’m fuckin obsessed with ares’s voice it sounds so coollllll AND ZEUS’S GROWL BROOOO it’s so impressive I wish I could do that. I’m also gonna have the way they say Aphrodite and hera in my head forever I owe them my life

- I know jay talked about it in a short, but I actually really enjoyed the differing perspective!!! Don’t get me wrong I miss my boy ody and I’d love to know more details about his situation but I’m so incredibly happy we got an Athena pov I have so much more appreciation for her she might be my favorite character now

- I’ll never get over all of the unique character motifs and just how unique they sound. Like how Circe and calypso sound so similar yet so incredibly different, just like their stories!!! Jay you legend

Ok that’s all for now back to listening on repeat

[zahri-melitor]

League of Shadows: Detective Comics #951-956

Wow. Just wow.

I knew Tynion IV was working overtime to try and get a level of normality re-established in Rebirth Batman, but he has so many moving pieces going on here.

First up: this is the Cass and Shiva story, so it’s rehashing and re-exploring the most vital elements of Perfect For A Year and Destruction’s Daughter.

It’s not a perfect blend, for a bunch of reasons, but I respect the effort involved.

The bit that blew me way however? Tynion brought in Carolyn.

Cass content where she is given inspiration by her aunt’s words??? I mean. I am listening.

Kate Kane gets to approximately play Babs’ role in the push-pull over what Cass needs against Bruce.

Cass in the Mud Room obsessed with winning fights and working through her problems of course perfectly reflecting Cass in Babs' equivalent holoroom doing exactly that as a way of dealing with her emotions.

Cass gets two fights with Shiva, and she of course loses the first and wins the second.

Cass running around with swords? Some people might say that’s not Cass, I say hello Kasumi and BatO 2008 references!

(Tragically Cass didn’t get to stab Kendra and keep that motif running, but alas no Justice League appeared in this book)

Cass and David together flashbacks still don’t feel entirely on target: previously when Cass has gone to David to answer her questions he would eventually give her what she asked for, not deny it to her. But David Cain was left in a horrible state post B&R Eternal so any writing even slightly more on track was helpful.

It's also fascinating to me that we go to this very heavy Cass story, leaning into her growth as a person and moving from being a lurking shadow who is a vigilante only to someone who is making civilian friendships and connections and doing things outside of simply being a vigilante (going to the ballet in person with Bruce and Kate escorting her) happens in a period when Steph has left. This is echoing Cass' Bludhaven arc! Argh Tynion knows the whole of Batgirl 2000 so well.

And Shiva. Oh, Shiva. I have to say, as always, I’m not thrilled when Shiva is directly linked to Ra’s Al Ghul, but admittedly we were redoing Destruction’s Daughter, so Shiva being called in to train League assassins is on target (though it was Ra's this time, not Nyssa), as was Shiva not actually working with Ra's ordinary troops so much as the set he was using for the League of Shadows.

What I also liked: Ra's trying to manipulate Shiva using what he knew of Cass, and Shiva not being fully on board with what Ra's was selling but synthesising it in her own way.

I don't love Ra's being more involved in Shiva's backstory, but I did enjoy her arguments with him, and the way Shiva, despite herself, became compelled and interested in Cass as a fighter more than as her daughter. (Daughter? raw material, boring. Fighter with that skillset who happens to be my daughter? deeply fascinated).

Just picking out a few scenes here, but I feel this does add an additional layer of depth to Shiva's motivations? That she knows she burnt everything away in the fire of Shiva, but also she has a level of regret over it all.

And then that being reflected in part of what gave Cass the understanding of how to defeat the League and Shiva was the words of Carolyn and her message of how to act as a shadow yet still find yourself? A message Sandra has lost but Carolyn protected even in her death, because Shiva has worked to slough off Sandra, but that is still a loss.

On top (on TOP) of this storyline being a synthesis of Batgirl 2000 into 5 issues, Tynion was just packing in the references.

The atomic bomb to open a faultline under Gotham and *checks notes* make the city fall into a cavern below? Is that Cataclysm, 'Quakemaster' (aka Ventriloquist) holding the city hostage over an even worse earthquake I spy? Because. The vibes were very much there. But on top of that, it's also a version of the Batgirl story of Alpha hiding a fusion bomb in Gotham and Cass needing to track him down to work out where that bomb was.

Shiva and the League of Shadows having a special technique of stabbing people with swords through their chest in a way that doesn't damage any organs. Shiva, is that you saying The Widower was bad at his job? Because most of those sword wounds were similar in location to Tim's one from The Widower but specifically on the other side of the body to avoid the spleen.

Ulysses Armstrong continuing to be the creepiest kid absolutely obsessed with Tim as Robin and trying to 'get into his skin'? Ulysses being in the military now via Jacob Kane's secret organisation yet still completely and utterly hung up on Tim and trying to prove himself is commitment to Tim's Robin run.

And then we get to this: to Ra's telling Bruce that inside the League of Assassins he has a secret League of Shadows, which he has concealed from Bruce and forced him to forget.

But the important bit here to me is Ra's saying Bruce has uncovered them three times before. And we get this series of pictures.

The first is an underground cavern lit by an orange glow (this looks very much like an orange Lazarus Pit in the background: references this resembles include Son of the Demon, any of Nyssa's pits, Matt Wagner's Trinity and a bunch of others).

The second is Bruce standing shirtless on a frozen lake, surrounded by mountains. (Can you say Batman Begins? But also technically you could map this to Bride of the Demon I guess by the art team not realising Antarctica doesn't have trees. Or frozen lakes like that. His first shirtless duel with Ra’s is Batman #244 but that’s in the desert. The various Nanda Parbat and Himalaya fight scenes I reviewed don't look much like this)

The third is Bruce being taken down in what looks like a fancy office (my first thought was possibly Tower of Babel & Dependence, but this again could be a lot of occasions).

And the focus here on Ra's having concealed Bruce's memories and forced him to forget events, in Rebirth stories where we are pushing at the timeline to extend it out again and backfill it with post-Crisis content? A genius way of focusing on there being stories that n52 Bruce doesn't know.

I've been trying to work out exactly which stories Tynion is claiming these three 'discoveries' of the League of Shadows occurred during, and I can't quite pinpoint three specific occasions. But they are so very, very familiar. I do wonder which he was specifically thinking about.

[various-spirit-animals-brackets]

How I'm thinking it's going to work (for now, subject to change):

General:

THIS BRACKET IS NOT ABOUT WHICH CHARACTER IS THE MOST MORALLY GOOD! MORALLY SHITTY CHARACTERS CAN STILL BE WELL-WRITTEN AND INTERESTING, WHICH IS WHAT MAKES A CHARACTER A GOOD CHARACTER. I just want everyone to understand that going in.

I am doing my best to collect every single canon character in this entire series. I will release the full list soon. Having said that, I am only human. It's possible I'll miss someone. If you have an attachment to a very minor character that I happen to miss, send me an ask, either to here, or to my main @dark-night-star-light. Anon asks are always on!

You can only submit canon characters. No OCs allowed, sorry. But you can submit a canon character regardless of how irrelevant or minor they are.

Voter fraud* and bribery** are not allowed. I know, I know, other fandoms allow them. I'm not, because the small-scale size of this fandom means that could actually make a dent in our results. I won't actually know if you do it, but if I find out you did, your vote will be eliminated.

This is meant to be fun! Try not to get too butthurt if your fav gets eliminated in the first round. I know a few of mine will, since they're such minor characters.

The unique tag is #best spirit animals character 2024. So if you want to participate, but don’t follow this blog, you need to be checking that a lot. Everything will be also tagged #spirit animals, #spirit animals books, and #spirit animals series. If you want to campaign, I recommend using the unique tag.

If you have any questions, or disagree with a rule and want to take it up with me, both my asks and DMs are open, both here and on my main.

Propaganda:

I am allowing propaganda. I am going to put it to a vote whether to allow anti-propaganda or not. Stay tuned for that.

I have still not created the full list of characters yet. That may take a while. In the mean time, you may start to submit propaganda to me. Ask box is open!

I will accept your propaganda if you make it about a ship (ex: Vote Shane, he’s so in love with Abeke!!!), but I don’t recommend it. In fact, I discourage it. But it’s allowed.

You can submit headcanons about a character as propaganda. Propaganda doesn't have to have any basis in canon (giving the more minor characters a fighting chance).

You are not allowed to submit links to analysis posts (or any kind of post) as propaganda, even if it's yours. Everything submitted needs to be something you wrote specifically for the bracket. If you send me a link to a post, it's an automatic delete.

Other than the above, there are no restrictions on what can be submitted as propaganda. It can be as short or as long as you want and as serious or ridiculous as you want (you could literally submit, like, "Vote for Rollan, he's so funny and he needs a hug" as propaganda and I would accept it, or you can go deep and start talking about his parallels and arc and motifs and backstory and personality and hardcore analysis stuff, and that would also be fine).

If you're unsure what to write, I'm going to release a piece of Shane propaganda I'm writing soon. Hopefully it inspires you. But again, there are no restrictions! Your propaganda doesn't have to resemble mine.

If I allow anti-propaganda, there will definitely be restrictions. More on that later.

If multiple people submit propaganda for the same character, I'm keeping them all. My goal is to have most characters have at least one piece of propaganda, so in the interest of that, as we approach the beginning of the tournament, I'll make a list of every character with how many pieces of propaganda each currently has. This is so that if a character has no propaganda, it would be a warning to everyone that it's your last chance to submit for them.

Propaganda is submitted through asks or DMs! You can submit for as many characters as you want. You will be allowed to be anonymous or not. If you choose not to be anonymous, you're signing up to be tagged in the poll that features the character you submitted for. So be aware of that. I may decide to open up a Google Form if I'm not getting any submissions. But we'll take it as it comes.

You will be allowed to submit propaganda throughout the tournament! If you decide to submit propaganda during the tournament, it will be added in the next round. Unless the character gets eliminated, in which case it won't be added at all.

This isn't really a propaganda thing, but it's propaganda-adjacent: campaigning. Campaigning is 100% allowed. There are no restrictions on campaigning except "Don't be rude". You will be allowed to campaign, and light-heartedly bash your vote's opponent (just make sure it doesn't get out of hand). You're allowed to spam the main tag or the poll with "Vote for [character]!" posts and reblogs. You're allowed to send people asks begging them to vote for [character]. In the end, it's their choice, but you can campaign as hard as you want. In fact, if you go into a poll and don't immediately know who to choose, because you like or dislike both characters equally, I recommend not voting for a while. The campaigners may be able to sway you to one side or the other.

I will submit propaganda for multiple characters. I may or may not choose to credit myself, it all depends! I will definitely be campaigning for some characters. Hopefully, this will encourage other people to campaign, too. That's half the fun of best character brackets.

Format stuff:

There may or may not be comeback rounds. It all just depends on where we're at and if I need characters to come back to create an even number. Don't count on them, but don't count them out, either.

It seems some people here haven't read the entire series, but I would still like them to be allowed to participate fully. So, I'm going to put an official description for every character, maybe a sentence or so long. This is meant to be objective, canon, and not propaganda (ex: Rollan is the Amayan Hero of Erdas that summoned Essix the Falcon).

Every poll will last one day, then we'll move onto the next for the next day and so on.

There will be preliminaries, because or else we are just going to have too many polls. The preliminaries will cut out the majority of the characters, probably including mostly minor characters.

I'm going to do my best to save the polls I feel will divide the fandom for last. So we won't see any Rollan vs. Meilin polls right off the bat. This might make the first few polls boring, but it'll get more interesting later on. Trust.

*Voter fraud is enlisting non-fandom mutuals or friends to vote for your fav, or voting from two different accounts. (Like I accidentally did in the interest poll. Whoopsie. I promise it won't happen in the real polls!) If you happen to do this by accident like I did, tell me and I will remove the extra vote(s) and you will not be penalized.

**Bribery is where you go to someone, either within the fandom or not, and offer to draw or write something for them (or do some other favor) if they vote for the character you want.

[mario-art]

HELLO, you made such an interesting point in the tags of my post:

You know what’s funny? Is that Thrawn is really being turned into a “Machiavellian” type of villain, but what’s even funnier is that Machiavelli himself received this type of treatment. Now idk how much familiar you are with the 16th century author, but just know this: Machiavelli and “Machiavellian”, and whatever people can take from him, is heavily misunderstood (I actually really hate the use of the adjective, but perhaps that’s a story for another type). Now I know that Zahn wrote Thrawn based on a certain extent on the Machiavelli archetype (I remember reading it somewhere, pardon if I have no proofs), but I’m actually laughing hard thinking that as characters they are having the same treatment by popular media. Lemme explain: Machiavelli wrote the Principe not because “oh he cynic!1!🥶He mad!1🤬”. No. Machiavelli wrote what he wrote because he wanted to save Italy dalla Ruina, from its ruin. Machiavelli dreamed of a more compact and unified Italy. He had a vision and just as much as Thrawn, he wished to serve his people, Florence (in Thrawn’s case, the ascendancy) and Italy (which didn’t existed at the time).

And now, with Thrawn being reduced as you said in a villan without complex motifs, I can’t help but think how poetic is to be doomed to the same narrative as the figure who inspired your existence. Maybe this was planned all along, I don’t think so personally, but Thrawn is being oversimplified by Filoni the same way Machiavelli gets reduced as just a “pragmatic person” and “the ends justify the means” by everyone (don’t let me start on how wrong the quote is).

To sum up: Thrawn and Machiavellian are rhyming in the same direction in popular mainstream media.

This was my Ted talk, sorry in advance for possible writing mistakes, I just woke up✌️

Hiii! Thank you so much for the spontaneous Ted talk 😄😄 Your parallel between the Ascendancy and Florence+Italy is sooo on point, it blew my mind for a second. Now I have to delve deeper into it

Actually there was a period of time when I was really invested in this topic, I read his 10 letters, history of Florence +the Prince obviously and almost fell from a chair when they put him into Assassins Creed game, but now there're just small bits that I remember. Maybe it's time to refresh things

I didn't know that Zahn was actually inspired by Machiavelli. I'm new to this part of the fandom, so I haven't read anything about him or his working process, but after you mentioned it I'll take a note for the future. I must confess I learned who Thrawn was only during the Ahsoka show and due to the fandom. Like there were so many memes about him here on Tumblr, there's no way fans will hype some basic dude so much. And then my friend recommended the new trilogy

So yeah, it's such a pity that not 1, but 6 books of new material got completely ignored and the character simplified to what we've already seen so many times literally everywhere. You phrased it beautifully

I haven't read the old trilogy yet, heir to the empire, only know the plot in general, but I'm curious what exactly motivates Thrawn to rebuild the empire. And how the characterization of him differs between these trilogies. Is he mostly the same or did Zahn change the character after so many years like Terry Pratchett's Vetinari evolved from the very first version of the Patrician to his later works (I can't help comparing them after yesterday, though I hadn't done it before idk)

So yeaah... At least I'm happy that there're so many talented fans here and we can happily ignore whatever happens on the screen 🙃

[heda-heather]

:nervously off anon: So I watched the Anti-Hero video for the first time yesterday (I know, I know...SO behind the times), and I'm so curious how Swifties are interpreting the very clear symbolism. Like, Taylor is two selves. One of them (the "villain") is her exact presentation out in the world right now. Taylor's lyrics match up with her real self. Her public persona doesn't match up with her lyrics. Swifties don't acknowledge this contrast?

Also, what do they make of the bottle she's drinking from? The one with the Lover video's family crest. Do they not wonder WHY that crest is in a video that is otherwise not about romance? Like, I feel like with close attention to lyrics + close attention to videos + an ounce of attention to how her persona changes from album to album + THE ENTIRE LOVER Era = AT THE VERY LEAST that she is not who she seems (and is most certainly under the queer umbrella).

An even deeper dive will lead you to "she is with Karlie; that crest is signaling Karlie; her songs signal Karlie; Taylor is likely identifying as a lesbian now." Yet somehow they don't see any of it that way, and I wonder how. Maybe willful ignorance. Maybe selection of detail to support their own thesis. Maybe it's the English major in me that makes me pore over this stuff.

My assumption is that many Swifties center their listening experience on how they relate to what Taylor's talking about, so it's more about their own experience and projection than what is actually being written. I know they'd say the same about gaylors, but there are CLEAR motifs in this discography. It's all fascinating but also driving me mad. LOL

Anyway, sorry for the novel. I am still a whole n00b to this fandom and mostly choose to engage with Taylor's world via this corner of Tumblr and through her lyrics. The wider fandom seems like actual hell. LOL

Whew ok I needed a minute to read and process before responding 😂

1. Swifties see the anti-hero more as her battle with fame I think, kinda missing the deeper meaning of her being a completely different person underneath that fame.

2. I doubt they think about the crest at all. I never noticed it until a Kaylor blog pointed it out and showed all the times it’s been displayed. They probably assume it’s just a random design.

3. Her persona changing from album to album actually gives them fuel to say she’s NOT part of the queer community because “the lover era was her activist era, just showing her support, then she moved on from it”

4. They’re NOT looking for signals to Karlie. And they take what she shows them (hanging all over football guy) at face value

5. Projection is a big piece of it. “Loving in secret” to us, is such an obvious flag to the experience of realizing you’re queer in a heteronormative society. I think a lot of them romanticize this instead. They see it as finding a love so special, you want to keep it to yourself. I think a lot of them are obsessed with her work because she describes this intense, earth-shattering love. It gives them hope to find it… but they don’t realize it’s a queer love. And the fact is… 2 women loving one another do share a different experience than a man and woman, because of how women express themselves and understand the universal female experience. Add that to the experience of being queer in anyway. So… they’re kinda holding onto false hope they’ll find a love like she describes. But also there is no other Karlie Kloss in this world 😍🥰

Anyway, my thoughts. Thanks for being brave enough to come off anon! Always love a good chat.

[zorbs]

《XƎTЯOVerthink》 Kaleidoscope Analysis

Remember those funky little toys called kaleidoscopes you used to play with as a kid? The ones you'd twist and look into it to see shifting reflections with pretty colors? Yeah, yeah these guys.

Well I noticed the new Link Click MV heavily incorporates a kaleidoscope as a visual motif. Throughout the MV there’s imagery involving mirrors and rainbows and repeated patterns and rays of light, all qualities of a kaleidoscope.

The most direct references are this frame which illustrates the mirror physics of a kaleidoscope:

And this frame illustrating the repeating patterns displayed within a kaleidoscope:

Seeing all this imagery got me thinking as to why it’s all there. The clock and camera imagery within the show make more obvious sense to their meanings, but kaleidoscopes don’t have anything to do with anything we’ve explicitly seen in the show before. However, after some thinking, I believe the kaleidoscope motif is a lot more relevant than it may seem.

The word “kaleidoscope” itself comes from Greek roots, which translate into “observation of beautiful forms”. To me, this MV seems to be painting Red Eyes as the current observer in control of the kaleidoscope.

The aspect of a kaleidoscope being a toy causes me to think about the line from Vortex, “But Imma win this silly game / until then I will never leave”. During those lyrics is when we see Red Eyes appear.

From what we've seen of the two different Red Eyes (likely siblings/twins), they appear to be children. With that info, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Red Eyes we’ve seen take control of Qiao Ling and Liu Min still views this whole thing as a game (toy), especially after being lured into the “game” set up by CXS and LG. Red Eyes is just playing with power to entertain themself, the same way a child would play with a kaleidoscope for entertainment. 

Additionally, CXS, along with other characters throughout this MV, appears to be trapped in the kaleidoscope with the way the reflected colored light and fractals or glass are displayed around them. It even seems like Qian Jin is trapped, possibly implying he’s a mere pawn in this game as well.

What I find most intriguing though is the fact that the tiniest rotation of a kaleidoscope creates drastic changes regarding what is seen inside the toy. There’s a seemingly infinite display of patterns. This idea parallels the visuals that show multiple (infinite?) versions of CXS. Some of which are dead, others distraught or gravely injured.

I think the kaleidoscope motif is yet another metaphor for time. Those that have the power to control it with slight changes, the unthinkable number of possible outcomes…thinking of it in this way all starts to make sense. The ones trapped in the kaleidoscope are all at the mercy of time and the ones who control it. Thus, this narrative must rely on “the ones aren’t in control”.

Many have already been speculating this, but I’m also getting the sense that there have been multiple timelines that have been manipulated way before the events of Season 1 began. And those events all involved a sort of engineering of CXS’s fate.

Which leads me to…what the heck is Lu Guang hiding??

One of the first visuals we see is LG falling during the line “When I’ve sunken so low”.

This lyrical imagery can be paired with the line “Knowing it all, am I destined to fall / Like once you did for me”. I feel like these are implying LG has had transgressions of his past. He’s undergone mistakes that have caused him to fall. Again, multiple people have raised this point, but there must be a reason LG is so strict about the time travel rules. Is it because he’s learned them first-hand the hard way before? 

What if LG previously manipulated the timelines in order to save CXS over and over again?

Immediately following the “like once you did for me” lyric is a montage of the way LG came into CXS’s life.

This visual and the coupled lyrics add to the idea that LG saved CXS and his past actions led to the moment in time we’re currently watching as an audience.

I also want to point out the line of “Where do we end up when we save the world?”. What if LG already disrupted the timeline enough by saving CXS and has now sworn off any further timeline changes in order to protect the current present, leaving Red Eyes with complete authority over its manipulation. He’s already completed his past objective but is now left dealing with the adverse effects.

Anyways, this is just a theory, a LINK CLICK THEORY.

[girl4music]

“Like so many of the stories that we’ve done, many many different elements came together to create a script. Mehndi was one of them and it’s something that I was a little aware of. I’ve done a little bit of reading on it. Not a lot. I believe Rob was the one who came to me, however, and said ‘Wow, this is fascinating’, ‘this is, you know, really great, what can you do with this?’

I had already wanted to grab a hold of the reincarnation idea and there are a few elements that fuelled this. One I’m going to have to reference is a song by Paul Williams, which was in The Muppet Movie. And there was a line in this one song that I felt, and I’d always felt this way, described the two characters perfectly. The line was ‘there’s not a word yet for old friends who have just met’. And I thought you know something? They are old friends. They just met. But they’re old friends. So in my mind throughout history and throughout destiny, these two characters’ souls have existed and have met, parted ways, met, intertwined, parted ways. And that fit in perfectly with the reincarnation theory but what was important for these two characters is that those two souls have throughout history intertwined, they’ve come together, they’ve parted ways, they’ve come together again, they’ve intertwined, they’ve parted ways. This has happened continuously and every time it happens in their lifetimes, they recognize each other. Not like ‘oh, you’re Xena, oh, I’m Gabrielle’. No no, they say ‘I know you. I know you and I have to be with you. I don’t know why but I do’.

Now bringing the Mehndi into it. Mehndi was perfect symbolism to this because when you think about it, Mehndi, um, if you’ve done it and if you’ve read up on what Mehndi means, it’s not just drawing. Mehndi has an entire meaning behind it. There’s a whole philosophy and spirituality based on Mehndi. The simplest part of it was the fact that Mehndi has a lot of lines that run parallel to each other and they will intersect, they will form beautiful designs, then they will part again and run parallel. Well, that’s lives. Xena and Gabrielle - those are the lives. Those are the threads of their lives. They run parallel to each other, they intersect, form beautiful designs. Then they might part but they still run parallel to each other. And what really counts is what’s between those lines. There’s the title; ‘Between The Lines’.”

Half the reason why they ended up taking the soulmates motif so seriously and literally was due to Steven L. Sears and his reincarnation idea and understanding of Xena and Gabrielle’s soulmate connection. So, in my view, half the reason why the love story is so damn profound is because of him.

Now he would be the first to scoff at that and say that I’m giving him far too much credit. But that is exactly why he is amazing and deserves that much credit.

‘Between The Lines’ took the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle to a whole other level because we do learn that they actually are true to life soulmates and all of what that informed and involved for them as individual characters as well as together as a couple. And so everything leading up to this episode now felt so much more intense and deep and poignant.

Substantial. And I wouldn’t have been able to write my character study thesis without it. Even though I don’t directly mention it - it’s sort of just embedded within the insightful interpretation that I’ve made about it because this episode doesn’t just tell a one-time storyline about the characters. It essentially informs EVERYTHING about them. Who they are and why - and especially how they are such a great team that navigate their soulmate connection to be just that.

It’s like these two people who seemed to be total strangers until this episode was seen were actually destined to meet and travel together and fall in love because their very soul that they shared fated it so.

And by the gods - I have yet to see or know a relationship that is that damn EPIC on-screen.

Xena and Gabrielle are the WLW representation you expect to be provided - considered canon or not - because this level of storytelling between female characters that can be interpreted as romantic just doesn’t happen anymore. There’s no time or room for it to in the TV art/entertainment industry apparently.

[tamelee]

Hii tamelee! If I remember correctly, you’re studying storytelling, is that right? I wondered if you could explain in details what kind of school you’re going, or just what exactly you are doing in your studies? If it’s okay with you of course 😊

Have a good day :)

Hi~! Yeah, sure! 

I did marketing, (communication and entertainment), but then finished audiovisual and graphic design because I liked that much better than learning about how manipulative the industries are tbh. Unfortunately, I found out quickly, that pretty much every job in that industry has been taken over by AI and that even me learning how to draw wasn’t going to help me with that anymore either 🥲. Then, I continued doing Storytelling in the communication sector (where, yet again I learned about all the ways people are being manipulated -.-) because it’s quite a new official study. And then, I was accepted to apply for the program that focusses more on fiction— and got in. Which I’m doing right now (though I’m almost done).  

In short, what I learned about Storytelling in business is that organizations use the elements of fictional storytelling combined with science (both internally and externally) in order to influence and convince the attitude, knowledge and behavioral patterns for the right audiences that are targeted by a certain communication goal. That goes so far that even the science about our brains are dissected to figure out the best ways in which the organization can redirect your neurotransmitters and hormones to benefit the storyteller. Even if you know you’re being manipulated, (for example, through a commercial that’s shamelessly stomping on your morals through a guilt-trip, or a product in the store that’s obnoxiously being shoved in front of you), often it’s still about targeting your subconscious and trust me when I say that if you enjoy spending time on the internet, it happens to you all the time and you don’t even know it :D 

And yes, companies like shueisha/VIZ are masters in this as well— hence me disappointingly complimenting that skill at times.  

So, imagine my joy when I crossed the bridge toward fiction. 

Fictional storytelling is where I dissect not the science of a human brain exactly, but the story that’s being told. I have to figure out all the elements and literary devices that are being used and what they mean in the story. Not what it means to me, but finding meaning through the Theme the author/creator has used, and why. It’s about how a story is structured and what impacts people on an emotional level for their benefit (mostly). Why a story works and keeps you up all night, why others are usually almost always forgotten quickly. It’s not as subjective as people may think. Interpretation doesn’t mean much unless there’s intentionally room for it. (And when something is intentional or when it’s not.) There’s also science in its logic, but that’s not something most authors/creators focus on. And they really shouldn’t have to imo. It’s also knowing about character arcs and how to implement symbolism and motifs effectively. I have to write essays on movies and books or even TED talks. It’s using knowledge to figure out the why, what and how. 

I think it’s awesome as a study, but other than some creative writing lessons, it won’t help me with great prose. It’s hard for me to connect with my own emotions and body which is something a lot of great authors can do really well. Either naturally or having to have practiced the connection with their personal emotional intelligence in order to write their Truth in their own authentic way through their characters. I read many books outside of my study from scriptwriters as well which were helpful. None of it is any reassurance I’ll be able to write my own story effectively though. It’s more a guideline of sorts with knowledge and structure which a neurodivergent like me (yes, I’m diagnosed officially) really needs xD. I still have to practice a lot! ^^  Hope you have a good day as well 🌷!

[imminent-danger-came]

LMK Story Motif

Tang: “The thing you need to understand about the old legends, is that the story is never finished. There maybe be no more pages left to turn, but there’s always more to the journey. “

(1x00 A Hero is Born)

-

Tang: “It’s nice to know someone is taking in all these stories—pearls of wisdom, DRIPPING from my lips.”

(1x00 A Hero is Born)

-

Mirror MK: “UGH, stop that! Listen- every time we get in trouble, we turn to Monkie King or our friends or SOMEONE. They tell us a story, and we find that smidge of motivation we need. Well! Now we’re on our own. It’s just you.”

(2x00 Revenge of the Spider Queen)

-

MK: “Wait! I am worthy, definitely worthy! I’m Monkie Kid! Basically the new Monkey King—might have heard of me? You know, the next chapter? I’m totally worthy!”

(2x01 Sleep Bug)

-

Totally Not Macaque (TNM): “Haha, what would you like to hear—the Hero suddenly remembered his beloved friend the Warrior? That they lived happily ever after?”

MK: “No! Nah no no no- well uh, yeah! Maybe. Um. Okay, I don’t know why I’m telling a complete stranger this but, I guess...I kind of feel like the Warrior in the story. A little. Is that dumb?

TNM: “I take that as a complement young man.”

TNM: “The tell-tale sign of a good story—that you resonate with it so personally. But I think maybe you missed the point.”

(2x07 Shadow Play)

-

Macaque: “Ah MK, you really are dense, aren’t you. Haha, you saw a story about a hero who got handed everything, who didn’t have to work for anything, and you thought you were the other guy? The second the hero got real power, he couldn’t care less about his friends. That’s you bud.”

(2x07 Shadow Play)

-

Tang: “Now, any chance at hope lies in the hands of a monkey, and a kid who wishes he was a monkey.”

MK: “Ugghhhh Mr. Tang! Would you quit it?

Pigsy: “You’ve been reading your diary out loud LITERALLY all day. You’re bumming everybody out!”

Tang: “Hey! It’s not a diary, I’m writing the next chapter!”

(3x01 On the Run)

-

Sun Wukong (SWK): “Okay! Gather round everyone, it’s Monkey King story time!”

(3x01 On the Run)

-

SWK: “Kid, why did you...?”

MK: “Uh, well yeah- I- I was trying to do you in- in the omelet story! Do the weird impulsive Monkey King thing and escape the bad guy!”

SWK: “Well, I mean- Ne Zha ain’t really a bad guy but, did you forget about the part where I got really hurt?”

(3x01 On the Run)

-

(3x05 Amnesia Rules)

-

(3x06 The First Ring)

-

Tang: “But...compared to the great monk, I’m not so...great.”

Pigsy: “You’re pretty great to me tang. Besides, you’re story ain’t over—not yet.”

(3x12 The Corrupted King)

-

Tang: “MK, from the moment you picked up the Monkey King’s staff, their stories became our stories. It’s our responsibility to write the final chapter, no matter the outcome. If we do this, we do it together.”

(3x13 Time to Be Warriors)

-

Tang: “The curious thing about legends is the way we can continue to be moved by the same stories. We’re comforted by familiar tales of friendship, courage, redemption. At times, the path of the hero might seem unclear, and the stories chaotic and directionless. Sometimes it may seem as though we’ve ended back where we began, but it’s clear to see how much we’ve grown on the journey—for although the story is over, there’s always room on the shelf for another.”

(3x14 Destiny Fulfilled)

-

MK: “I wasn’t really gonna slice ‘em and dice ‘em you know, I just- I just thought we looked cool and edgy! But like, what if this is the point in our heroes journey where things get a little bit...darker.”

(4x01 Familiar Tales)

-

MK: “You’re telling me that I’m holding THE Journey to the West legend in my hand right now?”

Azure Lion: “That and a great many other tales I’m sure."

(4x02 New Adventures)

-

MK: “Alright! Find our friends, defeat the curse, and get back to the good old fashioned story of the week!”

(4x03 The Great Tang Man)

-

Tang: “L-listen you! Stop holding onto the past, it’s time to go!”

“Aah! What did I say before—earthly connections can only weight you down? Well, I don’t believe it! Your time with your family was precious, and nothing will ever take that away. The memories we make with the ones we love—they’re what lift us up! Your time here is over, but that doesn’t mean your story is finished—you’re not being cast out or pulled down, you were being lifted up!”

“The next chapter is calling you to start a new adventure, it’s time to answer the call!”

(4x03 The Great Tang Man)

-

Tang: “That’s it! This Tang has had it! We’ve been through a bajillion chapters from Monkey King’s Journey to the West, and I feel like we’re no closer to finding Pigsy, Sandy, or Monkey King!””

(4x04 Pig Napped!)

-

Subodhi: “A simple creature, with no past, no family, and no name. There is a reason you were at the center of these stories—a reason you can harness the power of the Monkey King himself!”

“Without question, you were not born from the stone as he was! Who or what you are, even I do not know the answer; but, of one thing I am certain, fate has plans for you—great plans, or foul? Time will tell.”

MK: “I- I can’t be! I’m just- I’m just MK!”

Subodhi: “The Monkie Kid?”

(4x06 Show Me the Monster) (Isn’t it so funny that he’s named MK? Like the initials of Monkey King? Haha. It’s so funny isn’t it? HAHAHA. YEAH. I’M HAVING A GREAT TIME. THIS IS SO FUN.)

-

Curse MK: “Hey no no I get it man—you want to get back to our monster of the week adventures, get back to our simple missions with Mei, mastering all of Monkey King’s powers and delivering noodles for Pigsy. Right?”

MK: “Yeah. Yeah actually, that’s exactly what I wanna-”

Curse MK: “-But we can’t. Not after all we’ve seen. All we know and all we don’t—*sigh*, right friend?

(4x07 Pitiful Creatures)(THE HERO’S JOURNEY INTENSIFIES. MK IS NOT RETURNING WITH THAT ELIXER)

-

MK: No matter what I do, it’s going to lead to pain. It’s like the Lady Bone Demon said—it doesn’t matter if I want to help people or NOT, everything I do it just- it just makes things worse!

Mei: “You’re all stuck up in your own head! None of this is your fault-”

MK: “It’s ALWAYS my fault! Ever since I picked up monkey king’s staff, I-”

(4x08 The Brotherhood)

-

Ne Zha: “We should have stood and fought till the end.”

MK: “We didn’t stand a chance against them, if we'd stayed, it wouldn’t of made a difference.”

Ne Zha: “So you’re just gonna stand aside and let Azure become the new Jade Emperor!?”

MK: “There’s only one person who ever stood against the Jade Emperor and lived to tell the tale.”

(4x10 The Jade Emperor)

-

Stories, Legends, and Tales.

[lotus-tower]

My Orochi Stood Up: A Draconic Response to "eat shit and die"

tshirt3000’s seminal essay, “eat shit and die,” illuminates the fact that in any sillyserious discussion of Gintama, there is a recurring tension–or overlap, or slippage, or push-and-pull–between the motif of the anus and the motif of the phallus. Far from being contradictory, however, this dynamic conceptual tug of war has the potential to be not only meaning-generating, but fundamental to a thematic understanding of Gintama. In this essay, I aim to illustrate how applying a certain homebrewed framework of mine can help make sense of these interwoven concepts and provide symbolic structure to their analysis. I’m talking, of course, about the ouroboros–also known as the snake eating its own tail.

As we all know, Gintama is full of phalluses. The sword is basically a matryoshka doll of motifs all on its own (or, to invoke tshirt invoking Barthes, the beginning of a chain of images, or significants). But the same vulgar toilet humour that leads to Gintama being chock full of dick jokes (and balls jokes, which for many reasons can be conflated with dick jokes, a primary one being that the Neo Armstrong Jet Cyclone Armstrong Cannon, practically a mascot of Gintama in its own right, stands strong, beautiful, and trinitas) also leads to plenty of hole jokes. Guys like Sorachi thinks it’s funny when the protagonist gets something stuck in his butt, or when gay sex exists, or when a guy is a sub. But there’s no need to discuss this part in depth–just read tshirt’s essay.

There’s a saying among my friend group: “all there is in Gintama is head and hole.” 

Why do the sages say this? First of all because it’s funny. Second of all because it’s true. You can reduce everything in Gintama to essentially two things. Shouyou and Utsuro. Gintoki and Takasugi. Humans and monsters. Those who swing the sword right and those who swing it wrong. Those who take in and those who are taken in. Those who keep struggling and those who don’t. And then you can also always reduce these two things to one thing: Shouyou/Utsuro are, after all, the same being, even if they’re not; Gintoki; simply people, Gintoki once more; Gintoki yet again; and struggling itself. Because losing is part of struggling too. You can’t pick yourself back up if you never lost in the first place. We know that Gintoki has managed to become “a splendid human” by the end of the series–so what was he before that? Was he really a monster? At what exact point in the series did he become human? Was it while he was on-screen, while we were looking, but without us noticing? Was it off-screen, while we were flipping the page, or in the space between the panels? The answer, of course, is that he was learning to be human every day of his life, and if you were to assign him a static, general status to put on a wiki profile under ‘“species”, it would be: “becoming human.” And so “which one is the head and which one is the hole?” is the wrong question. Even if you assigned one to each half and managed not to be wrong, since they’re collapsible into one anyway, they’ll always be both.

In my ouroboros collage, I used western alchemy to stylize this struggle. This forging of the soul into a precious metal, language used by Gintama itself. Chrysopoeia–the making of gold. Or silver, as it were. But the ouroboros isn’t just a major symbol of alchemy. I chose it because, simply put, it’s the It girl. It does it all. It’s a snake. It’s a dragon. It circles the world. It represents eternity. It’s a loop. And while the ouroboros, alchemically, is a western symbol, the snake eating its tail is not. As I noted in my collage, the ouroboros and the world serpent are images that appear in traditions around the world.

I’m going to state the obvious: yes, the snake eating its own tail is the head and the hole. After all, the snake eating its own is also a symbol of fertility: the snake’s tail is phallic, its mouth yonic. Male and female, yin and yang–these are all things the ouroboros represents, because it ultimately embodies the cosmological interplay of complementary forces necessary to sustain a truly endless cycle. Now, tshirt’s essay could not be more clearly about the anus most specifically. But in this essay? Love is love, hole is hole. Sorry tshirt.

In all sillyseriousness, as tshirt details in their essay, the anus “following hocquenghem, normally stands in for the individuating function which itself gives root to desiring within the social sexual system, and the means by which we might therefore transcend the phallus.” Note the term “individuating function.” In my ouroboros collage, I included the following idea from philosopher Bernard Stiegler about the individuation process: “The I is essentially a process, not a state, and this process is an in-dividuation — it is a process of psychic individuation. It is the tendency to become one, that is, to become indivisible.” Indeed, Carl Jung (yes, that Jung) saw the ouroboros as the ultimate symbol of the “paradox” at the heart of the individuation process. Many of the lines in the second half of my poem are from him. Specifically, they’re from this one key paragraph from his Collected Works, vol. 14:

The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This 'feedback' process is at the same time a symbol of immortality since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself, and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he, therefore, constitutes the secret of the prima materia which ... unquestionably stems from man's unconscious.

I believe the relevance of these quotes to Gintama is clear at this point. Because as I said, everything in Gintama is reducible to two opposing forces, which is then reducible to one. The ouroboros fundamentally embodies the paradox of Two, Yet One. And through the style and language of alchemy, it turns this paradox into the preeminent human endeavour, the Great Work of human existence. tshirt’s identification of Gintoki as “a reluctant hole” (very queer I agree) positions him perfectly here as the poor, tragic hero who, despite everything, Is Doing It–who is both recipient and victim of his own wisdom about the undertaking he must choose to embark on. It is a task that will last forever, even after he’s already succeeded. (In Gintama, therefore, to be a reluctant hole can denote both a noun and a verb.) And yet, there can be traced a definite “before” and “after.” In its literal shapes and features, the ouroboros forms an imperfect circle–it is a cyclical figure that necessarily depicts a break in the cycle, where mouth meets tail, where there must be an opening. A gap that must despite the snake’s best efforts exist, because a mouth is not a tail at the end of the day. Something that may seem like an insignificant smudge in the great flow of time, but that was nonetheless enough to shatter Utsuro’s “eternity.” 

Though in some depictions, including the most iconic one, you can see the gap full well. Look. Does it seem like it’s smiling to you?

(We know Shouyou smiled right before he died–do you think that severed head of his still held a smile?)

There are a lot of other things I could say about hole. Like a hole being a sort of lack, something to be filled–a void, perhaps, one that gets artificially filled with all kinds of detritus as part of the process of person-making in Gintama. Or I could say something about the displacement or potential conflation of one kind of hole with another when your protagonist is male, cis, virile (alleged), and obviously straight in a way that makes anal sex jokes funny, and PIV jokes only too racy for Jump. Alas, this isn’t an essay on Gintama hole theory, so while there’s still much to be said about head and hole, I think it’s time we move on to one of the most important elements of the ouroboros thesis: 

The dragon.

Now, the terms ryuumyaku and ryuuketsu were not invented by Gintama. As mentioned in my annotation part one (I now understand why Final Fantasy XV gave out crucial information about its story in disparate chunks spread across multiple mediums instead of behaving normally), the concept of “dragon veins” is part of real life Japanese traditions, and is tied to feng shui. The idea of concentrated life energy, or natural power, flowing through the earth along certain paths, like ley lines, is a rather common one across the world, and thus a basic building block of fantasy worlds. In my poem I highlight the geo-somatic aspect of this, how it conflates Utsuro with the planet that birthed him, effectively turning him into a world snake that walks on two feet. The tendrils of his re-knitting flesh resemble strands of hair, or perhaps the whiskers on a dragon, his blood is a river is Altana is precious oil to be extracted and hoarded by intergalactic powers, his heart is a deep, blood-red stone that denies that his blood was ever liquid, and smoke rises from him when he regenerates as though the fire that Shouyou’s body was thrown into was never truly put out.

What’s notable, though, is the person who delivers the line that draws these comparisons most concretely:

Yes, I’m cannibalizing part 2 of my annotation here. Very sad. But I’ve always said I wished Gintama had more cannibalism. So let’s press on.

Umibouzu is uniquely positioned to make this observation here because he’s the only character to have fought… well, to have come into, shall we say, “fighting range,” with both of the series’ immortals. And as uninteresting as he may be as an individual character, it’s through him that we finally gain access to a straight-on view of Kouka–specifically, Kouka on Rakuyou, before she left her planet to die femininely. 

I won’t rehash too much of what I’ve already said in my collage and annotation. The Orochi on Kouan is a world snake much like the blurry dragon-vein-Utsuro-Shouyou package on Earth: a serpent with innumerable heads, both singular and plural, this time in a more literal way than Utsuro’s multiple selves or the image of a river flowing into countless streams. It’s wrapped all around planet Kouan like… well, a world snake. Or��� a world tree. Because as much as it’s clearly a serpent of the Orochi archetype, it’s described in both animalistic and vegetative language (e.g., it has “roots” that spread into the planet’s core, where they soak up the Altana… but the planet is its “nest”). Kouan’s dragon is thus a mutated beast that defies easy categorization, part mythical symbol, part serpent, part plant. Kouan, after all, is no longer capable of supporting normal life, its atmosphere and soil too toxic for anything but mutants. The Orochi, then, is an animated, aberrant substitution for the Lifestream, one whose roots have replaced the planet’s veins, one that can express aggressiveness and loneliness, and whose fleshy corporeality allows Umibouzu to…

…make a bad dick joke. Naturally.

Kouka and the Orochi aren’t conflated the way that Utsuro and the dragon veins are. The Orochi is not her body: being its own creature, it appears much more separate from her than the formless glowing green Sephiroth energy does from Utsuro. But interestingly, they are mistaken for each other through the title of “Master of Kouan,” which the Orochi acts as a decoy for before the story “reveals” that it refers to Kouka. And Sorachi makes clear: the Orochi is lonely. The planet is lonely. Kouka is lonely. The Yato are lonely.

Rabbits can die of loneliness, you know, etc. etc. And as Kagura delivers to us early on in the series, the only way out of this endlessly repeating, and yet endlessly diminishing (sort of like reverse infinite tumblr chocolate) cycle, is to change.

Umibouzu’s dick jokes return us to the self-explanatory phallic-ness of the snake. I don’t think I need to explain the overlap between snakes and dragons, especially in an Asian context. So if Umibouzu is the phallus–the new arrival that introduces change to planet Kouan–then does that make Kouka the hole? Well, yes, but no. Because Kouka is the one associated with the Orochi. Kouka is the immortal, living her life frozen in time until she decides to leave the dragon behind. And in the end, when Umibouzu convinces her to leave with him, he tells her: “You and I are the same. No matter how busy a planet I’m on, no matter how surrounded by people I am. Without you, I’m lonely.” A hole, as we said earlier, is a type of lack. And neither Kouka nor Umibouzu at this point have dirt that can fill that lack–the dirt that, as tshirt put it, “marks the permanence of one’s relationships.” Because only dirt can stick enough, can stain enough to leave an imprint.

Now, in another world where Sorachi isn’t a coward and a boring misogynist, here is where I would be digging into juicy insights into Shouyou|Utsuro’s milfhood, the genderisms of being an Altana immortal, the obvious implications of Umibouzu having been a failed parent unable to deal with Kamui’s situation due to living in the same (shall we say, hole-sided) world as Kamui, which loops back around to Kamui inheriting eldest daughter female hysteria his body isn’t capable of processing a la Oboro, and Kouka’s relationship to the phallus-as-transmissive-samurai-spirit–but given that we sadly don’t live in that better world, there isn’t much I can add to this enumeration that wouldn’t be self-evident.

As an aside, it does have to be said: the nature of the snake swallowing its own tail as a simultaneously self-fellating symbol and an established motif of macrocosmic heterosexual (re)creation of the universe perfectly encapsulates Gintama’s relationship to sexual jokes and the linkages it creates using vulgar wordplay. And it’s also the sort of thing my friend tshirt would love to quote Freud on. Another way of looking at it is that the microcosm of the universe in Gintama is a queer human, who is probably a pervert. Which seems glaringly obvious when you think about it outside of the context of this essay for two seconds. 

Anyway, as Jung said, the ouroboros is not just self-sustaining, but self-fertilizing. Or perhaps self-sustaining is a potentially misleading term, because by nature it cannot remain static. It can only slay itself, and give birth to itself once more. Utsuro was never the same person twice. But what does it mean to be self-fertilizing? It means, above anything else, that in the end people give hope to themselves. That Shouyou put in the work, and that what Shouyou gave birth to was, in essence, the same as himself. 

An endlessly replicating chain of Shounen Determination.

Of course, this goes both ways as well.

Shouka Sonjuku, then, is the embodiment of Shouyou’s self-fertilization–a motif taken up by Gintoki, our illustrious shounen protagonist enacting the genre-typical inspire and change everyone you touch. At the same time–or, you could say, anachronistically–Gintoki is enacting his own self-fertilization, fertilizing his own soul–or tama, or egg–with pieces of everybody that touches him. Because, though the hole is a lack, it is simultaneously where the crux of this self-transformation takes place. As tshirt puts it so succinctly, “the anus—the dirty human things—is the home for the phallus—the ideals we hold, the source of our power.” The scabbard for the sword of one’s soul, so to speak, but that metal for that sword is made up of fragments from many sources–as the Rakuyou arc anime illustrated for us so memorably.

In the Shinsengumi Crisis arc, Kondou (whose status as butt monkey for the crassest of Gintama’s jokes positions him in a unique way for these things) says something similar: nobody is being dyed in another’s colour. It’s hard to even say what colour other people’s souls really are, if everyone’s soul is made up of broken off bits and shards and dead things (positive) from all over the place, like beach sand. What Itto has mistaken as a form of influence over others, as the level of dominance of one’s soul, is really just:

“Because it’s something annoying that you can’t get rid of, in the end it becomes troublesome when you start to care about it.” Or something like that. The translation here is probably at least a little suspect, but you get the gist of it. tshirt’s analysis of gorillahood is potentially interesting and relevant here as well, but I’m afraid I have to move on for the sake of keeping things on track. 

It’s worth noting that even as, from Gintoki’s perspective, Shouyou smiled at him right before he died, from Shouyou’s perspective (and of course, from Takasugi’s)–Gintoki smiled back. 

Incidentally, the chapter two chapters before this one was named “The Two Utsuros.” Later on in this scene, Sakamoto refers to “the two Yoshida Shouyous.” And on this page, we see two Gintokis. Isn’t Gintama fun?

What of Kouka, then? I think her situation is clear. She created literal children of the flesh rather than of the spirit–and there is unfortunately little else to say, because even this is quite obviously a cliche of the dead anime mom. The context of Gintama’s story is enough for us to assume an implication of her having transmitted something to her children, of them carrying on her legacy in some way… but her character is too woefully undeveloped for me to say anything particularly interesting about that. What little I can say is essentially what I depicted in my annotations. When Umibouzu wants to whisk her away from Kouan, Kouka asks him–why did you remind me of these emotions? At the end of Silver Soul, it becomes clear that Utsuro’s professed “void” is not so empty after all–just like Kouka, he had simply been denying that he felt anything that ran contrary to his driving force, i.e. the power of his great resignation (“eat shit and die” terminology intended). For a long time, Kouka was resigned to staying on her planet–on her dragon–as its heads multiplied. In the end, she chooses to leave the planet behind, willingly sundering her eternity, and the planet watches her go. She dies because she became alive–just like Shouyou. It’s also worth noting that, when Kouka initially tries to disappear from Umibouzu, it’s the Orochi that points Umibouzu to her location, blending them into a sort of phallic comrade-in-arms, even as the Orochi is, as I said earlier, attached to Kouka’s existence. So in this ouroboros reading, Umibouzu simply becomes a device for her self-fertilization. Yayyyyy. 

Here we can see the relevance of wordplay and dick jokes to any sillyserious analysis of Gintama. The motif of self-fertilization, in particular, is a rich arena for the conflation of sex and shit that tshirt notes is enabled by Gintama’s beloved [BLEEP]: “connected by dirty things can implicitly stand in for shit, sex, or the penis itself.” In the ouroboros framework, both sex and shit ultimately denote that which gives birth to others and that which gives birth to yourself. Your legacy is made of the same stuff as you, is you, and you are finally brought into being by your legacy, in a process that transcends linear time. The ouroboros is literally connected to itself by its own tail–or head, depending on how you look at it. It’s all one snake, after all. I suppose you could say this is one reading in which Takasugi’s ambiguously alive-yet-dead state at the end of the series makes sense–he was always a shadow that could be folded inside Gintoki’s body. But I don’t like it, so it’s actually very bad.

In any case, the procreation of the universe, yourself, and other people happens interdependently and simultaneously, yet something has to happen first. It’s a chicken-or-egg scenario, an endless cycle that needs an initiating key moment–or, to be Utena-esque for a moment, a shell-cracking moment–for life to exist. If Utsuro’s eternity was an egg, then the moment of Shouyou’s birth as a human, itself undefinable in time, was what cracked it (Utsuro egg cracking moment). Of course, I think all Gintama fans innately understand that the moment of Shouyou’s beheading is the single most pivotal moment in the series. But after speaking of head and hole for so long, I think it’s finally time to address the obvious:

Gintama is about severed heads. A lot of them. (Shoutout to oomf’s severed head collection.)

The importance of beheading as a motif throughout the series interacts in a very interesting way with the ouroboros thesis. Some heads in Gintama need to be cut off. Others resolutely need to stay on. But even for the ones that need to be severed, it needs to be done right–or watch out. Or, as I once said:

“gintama is like. sometimes people die when they are killed. but this is not guaranteed. and sometimes people survive because they are killed. among the cast are people who need to die and people who need to survive. choose wisely” (me, 2022)

Within the stylized aesthetic framework of the ouroboros, this is where the metaphor of the hydra becomes useful. Cut off one head, and two more will sprout in its place. If you don’t swing the executioner’s blade right, the monster will remain a monster–or grow even more monstrous. Even worse, you will have failed to possess a human’s heart while swinging that blade–so what does that make you? Failing at being human in relation to the sword, then, puts you in danger of falling into the neurotic failure state described by Freud described by Hocquenghem described by tshirt. 

Gintoki didn’t fail, though. He just wasn’t able to succeed yet, without the rest of his story having unfolded yet. And so, within that paradoxical instant, the very heart of the ouroboros, Shouyou was saved and Utsuro was born. There is a persistent, and I would argue intentional, analytical ambiguity to this moment unless you allow for the paradox within it, represented by the moment of duplication where Sorachi likens Gintoki to Utsuro and presents both as the “one” wielding the sword. If Gintoki killed Shouyou with a human’s blade, then why was Utsuro born? If Utsuro killed Shouyou with a monster’s sword, then how did Shouyou’s humanity crystallize? If Gintoki became human throughout the course of Gintama, then how did he possess a human’s sword ten years ago? If he didn’t have a human’s sword and do the right thing back then–how could he have been the bottomless mirror standing unbreakable and infinitely reflective in front of Takasugi, Hijikata, Kamui, Nobume, and so many others?

Diegetically, of course, the answer is that Gintoki simply did the best he could, lost everything, and then picked himself back up and un-lost everything. Shouyou, too, just lost to Utsuro, because he was a human, and humans lose all the time, no matter how wise and gnc they might be. But he came back; or he survived; or the world survived without him–it doesn’t matter. Of course, I don’t believe Gintama is a series where you can really separate the “diegetic” from anything else (if you tried to explain anything that happened in it that way, the result would be not only very dull but hardly accurate). In a blend of shounen inspirational metaphor and absurdity, the series’ main themes are simply delivered through the mouths of various characters, without care for either subtlety or compromise. This is, after all, the series where our protagonist was given strength to keep going through a little girl telling him, don’t worry, mister, when I grow up I’ll become a splendid executioner and cut your head off for you! You could say that Gintama is full of a sort of “head anxiety” that only Gintoki is aware of. Oh man, I cut my teacher’s head off. Oh man, what if I did it wrong, that was so scary. What about my head, is my head weird? I bet it’s weird. Is it coming off? Is it stuck on too tight? Is this normal? Is my head too small for my body? Man, I can’t show people this. When is it coming off? Asaemon’s words also link the promise of death with the promise of life, or redemption–he must live so that he might die, and it’s only through death that he can truly live. Very ouroboros-esque. 

One thing I’d like to point out here is that Gintoki was imprisoned after Shouyou’s death. He hears Yaemon’s crucial, This Is A Surprise Tool That Will Help Us Later speech about beheading only after he’s already gone and beheaded someone. This is both straightforward foreshadowing and also unintentionally funny. But what I’m going to argue here is this: the fact that the Reaper Arc comes before Shogun Assassination for us makes it true enough for Gintoki as well. Because the moment Gintoki sliced Shouyou’s head off was the moment Shouyou’s humanity was affirmed, and thus the moment Utsuro’s “eternity” could be confirmed to have shattered. At the same time, it’s the moment of Utsuro’s birth into the world. In other words, it’s where the ouroboros ends and where it begins–a moment isolated in time and space, located, if anywhere, in the time of monsters. And this is mimicked by the Gintama narrative itself, as Shogun Assassination marks the end of the structure the entire series existed in prior. A two-year timeskip would never have been possible previously, as the series’ time circled on in endless loops, one anniversary after another, one Christmas season after another, without the characters ever aging, even as they grew wiser. The moment of Gintoki’s tragedy, finally fished out from within Takasugi’s eye, shattered Gintama’s “eternity,” too. 

I’ve already gone and used the hydra, so I’m going to be exceptionally silly here and invoke another piece of ancient Greek mythology, as a homage to hole and to Gintama’s dedication to bad puns: Uranus. According to Hesiod’s account of Aphrodite’s birth, when Uranus’ balls were cut off by his son, the goddess emerged from the white foam that flowed into the sea. You might be asking, am I really going to compare ball removal to decapitation? (This is a rhetorical question. No true Gintama fan would question this.) As I hinted at earlier, Gintama itself already provides the grounds for this kind of comparison through its ideological commitment to balls. It is, after all, Gintama. Phallic or yonic is largely irrelevant here, as this isn’t really about castration (sorry tshirt). Instead I want to emphasize the “head” in this case being the symbolic object imbued with transmissive and procreative power. This interpretation is, in the spirit of Gintama itself, built on playful punning between tama (ball) and atama (head). In the series, Shouyou and Gintoki are the characters who embody the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm most substantially–with Utsuro’s geo-somatic embodiment of Earth juxtaposed with his dominion over the forces of space, while of course also being the premier “dragon” of the series; and Gintoki enfolding the entire story within himself, both the silly and the sad. And so when Gintoki cut off Shouyou’s head, it was the birth of a universe, the “seed” spilling out from that severed neck and setting in motion the story we know and love. 

(Incidentally, the magic sci-fi spark that gives Tama, who ended her introductory arc as a severed head in Otose’s snackhouse, the ability to be human is called “the Seed.” Did you know that Fuyou means lotus?)

(I just thought that was interesting.)

Incidentally, while Japanese mythology sadly doesn’t feature any testicular cosmology, it does offer a rather interesting tidbit. According to the Kojiki, Izanagi and Izanami were tasked by the other deities to create land together using the heavenly spear Amenonuhoko. This is described thus:

Granting to them a heavenly jewelled spear, they [thus] deigned to charge them. So the two Deities, standing upon the Floating Bridge of Heaven, pushed down the jewelled spear and stirred with it, whereupon, when they had stiffed the brine till it went curdle-curdle, and drew [the spear] up, the brine that dripped down from the end of the spear was piled up and became an island. This is the Island of Onogoro.

…I think this account speaks for itself. The island of Onogoro became the first piece of Japan (and thus the world), formed out of briny white water, reminiscent of the white foam that Aphrodite sprang out of. Izanagi and Izanami then erected a pillar on the island and built a palace around it, then moved in and started making children. There’s more I could say about Izanagi and Izanami in relation to the ouroboros, but I think that would be too much of a digression. In any case, it takes little effort to imagine why multiple peoples long ago might have looked at sea brine and seen in it an intuitive symbol for creation and genesis–especially a people for whom the sea was a literal source of life. But what I’d really like to draw your attention to is the translator’s footnote on the translation of “jewelled spear”: 

The characters translated “jewelled spear” are [], whose proper Chinese signification would be quite different. But the first of the two almost certainly stands phonetically for [] or [],—the syllable nu, which is its sound, having apparently been an ancient word for "jewel" or "head," the better-known Japanese term being tama. (Unfortunately, the characters can't be displayed.)

And there you have it. Is a “spear” really that different from a sword when you think about it, especially when it’s a spear carrying that kind of symbolism? Or, as tshirt put it, “the pole and the hole.” And I’d like to remind you that Utsuro’s body is likened to the land of Japan itself through the very-much-Japanese concept of ryuumyaku, not just my own artistic derangements. His blood is the life-bringing sea, his flesh the earth of the archipelago. When he fell back into the mouth of the earth at the end of Silver Soul, he was falling back into his own mouth, the serpent devouring itself once again. 

Unfortunately for Utsuro, within the confines of this essay the mouth is akin to the asshole. Hole is hole: this I did solemnly swear to you at the start of this essay, and I intend to uphold my vow. Utsuro, then, falls back into Hole, and the earth spits him back out–hydra head clumsily cut off, having sprouted into two once more. You could compare, perhaps, Shouyou only re-emerging after having been thrown back into the dragon vein and shaken around a bit to Gintoki’s soul’s own instinct to fly towards buttholes when knocked out of its proper container. In the bodyswap arc, Gintoki gets hit by a truck and sadly survives, though his soul is shaken loose and part of it breaks off (no wonder, when it’s made up of so many little bits), and ends up entering the asshole of a dead cat. Gintoki is essentially a dead-eyed catboy, so this is an easy mistake to make. Additionally, in one of the most memorable gags of  the final arc, Gintoki gets swallowed by Sadaharu and pooped back out, but missing two-thirds of his body that, again, accidentally came apart from him while he was in there. They need to be recombined in Sadaharu’s guts, which through his connection to Altana as an inugami constitutes a makeshift dragon hole, until Gintoki finally exits hale and whole from his dog’s asshole.

What did he mean by this?

Well, first of all, it seems like you have to be gentle with Gintoki, despite appearances. He’s made up of so many bits and pieces and people that parts of himself will break off without him even noticing. Second, these gags link the idea of plurality to dirt to the anus as the site of the reconstitution of the self. Or, as Jung said, the “integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow.” Gintoki’s shadow can be represented by Takasugi. Or it can be represented by a naked, hyper-muscular Hello Kitty monster made up of his memories of war and his gambling addiction. They’re both missing an eye and have PTSD, so close enough. What’s fun is that in the Sadaharu gag, the punchline, “Gin San,” is about Gintoki’s name–the “Gin-san” identity he must take on once more to be able to face Shinpachi and Kagura. The joke faintly echoes the tonally very different scene on Rakuyou, where Gintoki told Kamui that Kagura and the others filled his emptiness, giving him the new name of “Gin-chan.” Asaemon, of course, also echoes parts of this, as her primary narrative role is to not-so-subtly provide guidance for the reader to understand and resolve Gintoki’s thematic journey, a parallel made more digestible through her distance from Gintoki as a feminine, vulnerable, indecisive character whose past is totally illuminated to us. At the end of her arc, she kills herself, and gives birth to her new self, like any healthy Gintama character.

Indeed, Gintama’s moral is to “fight yourself,” so naturally all the characters who haven’t given up yet are constantly in the process of devouring themselves. But this is a different process than emptying yourself, which is what the antagonists are doing. All Gintama villains are hole-sided, desperately trying to destroy themselves while pretending, as hard as they can, that they don’t know that you can’t destroy a hole–only make it bigger. I emptied myself on purpose, Kamui insists. I did it intentionally and edgily, so it’s different and your criticism is void. He truly is an 18 year-old boy. Kamui and Takasugi were unable to accept themselves as the ultimate fruit of Kouka and Shouyou’s transformations–their magnum opus. It’s interesting that in their very last snapshots, both of them are bodily changed, taking on younger forms invoking a sense of renewal; Takasugi literally being pooped out of a dragon hole as an ugly infant. While I don’t subscribe to Altana immortal Takasugi theory, in a literal sense Shouyou died and Takasugi was reborn–or, to be more precise, Shouyou returned to the macrocosm, to the lands and grasses and waters of the dragon’s earthly body, and Takasugi re-emerged in his micro (short joke) place. After all, the ouroboros always gives birth to itself, and Takasugi was never expelled. He has always been a part of Shouyou. As Sakamoto said, it’s only natural. 

As for Kamui… I originally had a section here discussing his case, centered on his tag-team battle with Kagura against the Eldest, that one-off Silver Soul villain who is first presented to us almost like a strange, low-budget imitation of Utsuro. 

However, as much as this guy does end up being a living dick and balls joke, I’ve decided to reserve this material for a future essay where I can delve into the question of blood more fully. So consider this a teaser. This essay has gone on long enough, I think.

So what can we conclude from it? As tshirt observes, Sorachi cannot resist the phallus (or the balls), even beyond the obvious “sword” metaphor. Viewed from the lens of the ouroboros framework, however, Gintama’s insistence on wordplay enables interesting meaning to be derived from these dirty jokes and their interaction with other motifs in the story. After all, the name of the series itself elevates the spirit of the balls joke, even if unintentionally, to the same level as the other metaphor in the title: “silver.” In “eat shit and die,” tshirt notes the important role that conflation plays in both Gintama’s humour and meaning-making, a role we’ve seen repeatedly in this essay with the purposeful blurring of person and dragon and planet, and its deliberate use of paralleled “other selves.” 

But perhaps the singularly most important example is the -tama in Gintama, with its plethora of potential meanings, each of them just silly and dirty enough that you have to take it seriously. Beyond the obvious joke on kintama (balls) and the “silver soul” meaning (which the series could not be more explicit about), we’ve seen that tama is also easily conflated with atama (head), and even with tamago (egg). This is clearly demonstrated with the series’ fixation on beheading leading to the salvation of the soul and the bodyswap arc hinging on the pun between soul and egg, which English translators very impressively retained using “egg” and “ego.” The fact that the characters end up turning into giant turds, likening the soul-egg-balls to an asshole, only drives the point in further. In this essay, I took things one step further in mapping these different motifs onto the phallic and yonic/anal (the holeic, if you will). After all, the tension between the phallic and the anal is fundamental to the ouroboros’ symbolism. It is this tension, and this complementarity, that leads to both destruction and creation, death and renewal. One of the reasons I chose the ouroboros as my stylization of choice is that Gintama perfectly encapsulates that central concept of death as rebirth–while throwing in the seemingly contradictory case of the main villain, who is very much Rebirth, But Bad. The ouroboros, then, supplies the symbolic technology to convert the inherent contradictions and sometimes difficult to navigate ambiguities of Gintama’s thematic structure into a more legible, metaphorically potent form.

As I noted in the beginning of this essay, every character in Gintama is ultimately both head and hole, both the beginning and end of the serpent, as the two belong to a single entity. If the head demands the cold bite of the executioner’s sword, the void inside of people also needs to be filled with the essence of others before they can be properly human. You can’t behead yourself–you need someone else to swing the blade. And yet that person is also, in some way, you. The one restoring you to humanity is yourself, the one slaying you is yourself, the one you give birth to is ultimately yourself.

The serpent eating its own tail’s self-fertilization schema is the key tying together the draconic motif of the ouroboros with the tangle of messy metaphors, tautological themes, and fraught relationships that make up Gintama. Naturally, the throughline running through it all is dirt–of the dirty joke variety, but also dirt as that which clings to others, dirt that fills, dirt that stains, dirt that, in short, remains. If the phallic is what inseminates and transmits (as the sword that releases and crystallizes, as the heavenly spear that leads to genesis), in other words tama as “balls,” then the anal is the scabbard for the sword, the vessel that receives and holds on to the seed that is dirt, the cradle where our soul is fertilized–in other words tama as “egg.” Tama as “soul,” then, is simply the combination of these things, the result of this self-fertilization: it is ourselves. When all is said and done, this is reducible to a rather simple message that Gintama has always had: you cannot make yourself alone, but that is hardly a problem or an excuse, because you are never as alone as you think you are.

Let us end on the question of Gintoki’s wooden sword, or as tshirt put it so insightfully, his “prosthetic phallus.” In the end, in Gintama all souls are artificially–yet organically–created through the process of chrysopoeia. tshirt’s argument that Gintoki’s wooden sword is made all the more transgressive for not being a “real” sword highlights the fact that even in the most surface-level reading, Gintoki’s wooden sword is more sword-like exactly because it invokes the idea of one without the technical reality. The “human’s sword” that Gintoki attains at the end of the series is airy and abstract, but more than readily understood by the reader because that is the kind of sword he’s been wielding all along.

As I noted before, even if Gintoki has become human, his task has not ended. The Great Work will continue forever, even after it’s already been accomplished. If the human is the microcosmos and the stuff inside them is, as Jung says, the prima materia, the formless base element of the universe, then it is not only the fruit but also the process itself that creates the world. And though this essay has not been about queer theory, let it be said that the profundity with which Gintama treats the act of self-transformation, along with the nuances and textures of Gintoki as a “reluctant hole,” make him a captivating protagonist on more levels than one. And of that desperate struggle to produce a human being, of the base substance inside of people that is their only natural material, let me quote the 17th century Theatricum Chemicum, on the subject of the prima materia:

They have compared the "prima materia" to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself.

Emphasis mine.

Appendix A:

[prophecyofwinter]

Nemophilist

;One who is fond of forests or forest scenery

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x Stark!Reader

Summary: You are the childhood best friend of Aemond Targaryen. As children, the two of you made a promise that you two would Wed, no matter the cost. But would a war, a dance perhaps, cause issue with that promise?

Warnings: 18+, Smut, Death, Trauma, Toxic Sibling Dynamics, Cannon typical violence.

Notes: Girl time Girl time

Last Chapter - Next Chapter

Chapter 6: Lone Wolf amongst Dragons, Lions, and Stags

You and Aemond had entered the banquet hall with arms connected and he guided you to the head of the long table with many of nearby lords who had come to swear to Aegon who had sat at its head. The last time you’d seen Aegon, Aemond still had two eyes, he looked disheveled and drunk to high hell and food hadn't even been served yet.

This man, no, this boy was not fit to be king…

Sat on the left and right of Aegon was Otto and Helaena, Helaena looking as radiant as you remember, even staring off into space as you remember her doing normally as children she’s still immaculate. Otto was there too you suppose.

Next to Helaena was Alicent, wearing her usual Green and Gold ensemble. Next to Otto were 2 empty seats, which was of course for you and Aemond.

Most of the guests had already arrived and taken their places. You could feel their eyes burning into you as you walked with Aemond along the table to take your seats.

You had rarely dined with so many people before, you normally ate all meals by yourself in your room, feeding leftovers to Snow and Smoke.

Even when you did eat in the dining hall you sat at separate tables from Cregan and his wife, sitting with them would just cause an argument you couldn’t win. Occasionally you were forced to attend banquets with Cregan so he could show you off to other lords of the North as a suitable bride.

Perhaps that’s why you were clinging to Aemond like a lost child like you had as children. Aemond pulled out your chair for you and pushed you in before taking his own seat next to you. He sat across from his mother so that means you were sat across Jason Lannister, you wouldn’t have been able to guess who he was exactly if he had not been wearing lion motifs.

Your hands were folded tightly in your lap, not sure where to rest them. No one here was from the North, you were the only one. Not that you expected them to be, the North goes where the Lord of Winterfell goes.

Now you sit, a Lone Wolf amongst Dragons, Lions, and Stags. You don’t know why your reality was hitting you right in this moment, of where you were and how you got here.

You sat in colors that weren’t yours. A dress that wasn’t yours. With people that weren’t yours.

Is this the price to be free?

Would this be the freedom you were hoping for?

You were broken out of thought by a hand on your clothed thigh, it was Aemonds of course. Thumb caressing gently as he leaned in.

“Are you alright? We can go back if this is too much for you.”

“No no! It’s alright, I'm fine, it’ll be fine.”

Aemond hums and leans back into his chair but does not move his hand. You scan your gaze across the room looking to see any, any familiar face. But there were none, none that mattered to you anyway. Aemond was engaged in a conversation with his Grandsire, Alicent was trying to pull Aegon out of his cups lest he drown in them.

All eyes seem to be preoccupied.

Besides one pair.

Helaena gazes at you underneath her eyelashes, you aren’t sure what emotion she’s feeling right now. She twirls her food on her fork slowly before opening her mouth.

“A Winged Wolf sees four cornered Dragons but she cannot save them all.”

You were caught off guard to say the least, what did that mean? Before you could think of a response Aegon drunkenly cut you off.

“Gods, you’ll scare the girl all the way back to Winterfell with your ramblings before I can even get a good look.”

Aegon slurred before downing his whole cup of wine back and relaxing back in his chair after his drunken outburst. The ones of you close enough to hear were knocked silent by his flurry of comments.

Helaena sunk back into her chair, embarrassed by Aegon shutting her down.

You felt terrible for Helaena for such a mistake of a husband, she deserved greater than what she’d been given in this life. She’s a Queen now is she not? And this is the respect she gets from those around her?

Aegon's ramblings made Aemond grip your thigh tighter with rage, he didn’t think he would have to keep an eye on Aegon. He had his whores and booze, how dare he make comments to you and at the same time disgrace his sister, his wife at the same time.

Without thinking you stood up, the squeak of your chair making the people around you turn to look. Shit. You’d done this without thinking, but you felt what you wanted to do.

Swiftly, as if your legs didn’t ask permission from your mind to move, you move around the table to Heleana’s seat. You bowed down a little to her level and held your hand out for her to take.

“Would you like some fresh air my Queen?”

———-

“Sometimes I forget that I am Queen… No one calls me such.”

“That’s blasphemy! You are the most Queenly looking woman the mother has bestowed upon the realm.”

“You are too kind really, I could say the same about you Y/N. You carry yourself in such a way, even when we were children.”

“You flatter me too much Helaena.”

You and Helaena stood by the balcony, the cool air feeling nice on your heated skin. It was far more humid than Winterfell so a nice breeze was exactly what you needed.

“… Hel, what exactly did you mean by what you said earlier?”

“Oh, well, nothing really. I just do that sometimes. Don’t worry yourself over it”

She smiled at you, you suppose you wouldn’t push it bc it was Helaena of course. She doesn’t have an ill bone in her body so you’ll take her word for it.

“Do you wanna see something fun? I brought my sword with me, the only thing I brought!”

“Really? The boys would really like that, Jaehaerys has taken an interest in swordsmanship…”

“I’ll bring my sword by later tonight and I can let him and Maelor take turns holding it!”

You link arms with Helaena pulling her close, you were excited to finally have another woman to chat with around your age. You didn’t have anyone to talk to when you weren’t with Aemond occasionally. Definitely not any other girls. You think Helaena would feel the same way.

“Y/N? My Mother suggested I should show you to your personal chambers early. Sorry to steal her from you, sister.”

“No worries Brother, she’s your wife. I’ll be seeing her later anyway.”

You and Helaena share a tight hug before she returns to the banquet hall leaving you with Aemond. He gives you a questioning look.

“I haven’t seen her in almost a decade, Aemond, I just want to get to know at least one other girl my age.”

“Very well, No judgment here. Maybe I just want you all to myself, hm?”

——————

Aemond held onto you posessively as he guided you to your personal chambers. As if you would fly away if he’d loosen his grip any further.

“You won’t be living in the room for long, Mother just thought it would be inappropriate for us to be sleeping in the same bed while unwed”

A smug smile creeped up on your face.

“Hm? Is your mother worried for you, or for me? Because the last I remember you couldn’t even control your hunger hundreds of feet in the air. Perhaps she knows how twisted you are?”

“Watch yourself, you’re only safe for so long. Once the gods make it official it would take 500 men to pry me off of you as I take you on the sept floor.”

He dug his hand into the fabric of your waist and pressed his nose into the side of his head pressing your body against his where you felt something hard pressing against your ass. Your face turned bright red as you suppressed the moan bubbling , you didn't know this Aemond, so depraved and you liked it…

Once you and Aemond reached your temporary room he wasted so little time he almost forgot to open the door first. His lips pressed into yours in a mush of teeth tongue and spit. Dry humping into each other giving small bits of pleasure but never enough.

“I can’t, I need to taste the real thing.”

Aemond picks you up by your waist and throws you down onto the bed and is under your skirts before you even processed you were thrown down to the bed.

“Aemond! Mmph~!”

“Gods, you sit there all dinner in this sinful fucking dress. I’m gonna absolutely devour you.”

Aemond rips your underwear open and helps himself to your cunt. Holding your thighs open and digging his tongue into your folds, giving you no mercy.

He grasps and pulls at your hips forcing you deeper into his tongue, all you can do is pull at the bedsheets and whine.

“Aem- please I can’t! Gods have mercy-“

Your hips moved on their own, your clit rubbing against Aemonds nose as his tongue was buried in your walls. You could feel your peak approaching rapidly, he was eating you out like a man starved and deprived.

He’s wanted you like this all his life, he’s never stopped thinking about you. He begged and pleaded with everyone he could when he was a boy to let them have you, but he’s a man now. So he took you as he wanted you, and asked no one.

Your cunt was like ambrosia to him, he wanted this so fucking badly. He was so dehydrated and his grip on your hips was like he was scared someone would take you away at this very moment.

“Aemond please I’m not going to make it! I’m I’m-!”

Your head snapped back and your eyes rolled back as you hit your limit and your legs trapped Aemonds head in place, not that he was going to stop of course. His tongue unstopping takes you through the rest of your high.

He came up from your core with pupils wide with desire and his mouth glistening with your juices. He says nothing before he jumps up and attacks your neck. You yelp at your own sensitivity being attacked and he all but tears your dress off your form.

He starts unbuckling his pants and freeing his cock, you surprisingly have never seen it before.

“Aemond you know I can’t-“

“Your thighs aren’t off limits, you little tease.”

Aemond spits into his hand and rubs his length sensually. Moving into position squeezing your thighs shut around his cock. Aemond shutters at the sensation, being right up against your cunt but not being able to enter you.

“You are eating this up aren’t you? Can you feel what you do to me? Huh? Fuck-“

Aemond starts to move his hips at a feral pace, his forehead pressed to yours. This is the first time his cock feels the softness and the warmth of your body. His movements cause you overstimulation making you whimper and whine under him.

“Please Aem, I’m all yours! I love you so much!”

Aemond was so pent up he didn’t last long between your thighs, the compression, the warmth. He came between your legs with a shutter of his hips, pumping absentmindedly until they gave out on him.

“I love you too!”

You both laid there panting and catching your breaths, wrapped in each other's arms. Aemond pulled out of your thighs and you both winced at the sensation.

“That’s a preview for our wedding night, believe me.”