#datedness

[mcmansionhell]

the motel room, or: on datedness

I.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

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[thatscarletflycatcher]

Every year that passes The Lizzie Bennet Diaries ages more and more poorly in my mind while most people seem to like it as much as when it came out, like some sort of very personal Portrait of Dorian Gray.

[lastavenged]

KAREN + ADDICITION + SOBRIETY

I am probably gonna rewrite this post and go more specific with details for both 616 & mcu verses, but in general for both settings and Karens, and kind of wanna grab some panels and quotes from Karen about this topic.

Since one of things to kind of note first, is the like the wikis, the comics, and the show (and the show I even think s1 and s2 they didn't even plan or intend to cover her addiction which maybe wasn't necessary but has the effect of being like the comics) all act as though and treat this as something she was "cured" of which to be clear, is not a thing. There is no cure, there is recovering and battling and it's always something that she'd have been, and something that yes she could be sober and clean for years without any issue but that doesn't essentially equate to cured and.... that's a nuance that isn't really covered with Karen.

Anyways, as this stands experiences during the pit of her addiction include. Being suicidal, especially so in the comics, where she contemplates an attempt and walking out of a high story window. And it is something that she really felt amd said thar she lost her soul, sold it is specifically her words in the comics as she does sell daredevils identity for one fix. Karen's experienced homelessness as well doing the pit of addiction problems, this is another thing shown in the comics. Physical assault and implied sa as well. There's a lot of experiences from this time of her life that stick with her.

Now onto more the point of this post, and in the comics they do show, at least to some extent, her detoxing and becoming clean and sober. It's an uphill battle for her, and in general you can assume for her portrayal. That she does attend meetings some evenings, and we do at least in comics and in both novels, that her own addiction and associated demons, specifically lead her to wanting to be an advocate as well as specifically focus on helping people who are struggling with addiction themselves as well as those struggling with suicidal thoughts.

Now here is my own gripe with the show, is that none of this gets presented as part of Karen's character, until season 3 which kind of shoots karen a little in the foot, and it does kind of act as a bottle episode and gloss over that drinking was a larger issue for this karen; and kind of treats her addiction as cured, that's it.

Anyways, that is going go be more apparent here, as one of things she does is still attend meetings, she does work with support groups and volunteer opportunities, such as specifically like in the comics she opens a drug and suicide hotline that's paried with matt's free legal advice clinics.

In general, Karen is clean and mostly sober; as heroin was her specific fix. she only takes very specific medications and painkillers, if she were hospitalized she specifically requests not to be given morphine, and as for drinking, she keeps a social only two glass moderation with herself, so she can be tipsy and giggly, but mostly still has her wits, will remember the evening, and won't be hungover the next day. She additionally smoked cigarettes, nicotine, which in the comics there is an implied point in which she quits smoking as well, but picks it back up again (trial of karen in the comics; matt makes a note of that when he sees her again). It's to be noted that she does not originally quit cigarettes when first going sober/clean.

So all of that is being brought to both 616 and mcu, specifically bringing into mcu, is all of that. Specifically what sobriety/being clean looks like for Karen, and how it is quite important for her to help others of similar struggles to her own, and in general, relapse is a much trickier idea for how that applies to Karen given all of what factors into her "vices" for both 616 and mcu; I do not see a total relapse or relapse with specific drugs happening for her, but picking up smoking cigarettes again may be something that has evidently happened at least in 616, and maybe possibly mcu with smoking; since my mcu karen is in line of 616 on that, and mcu with drinking.

But in general, the point and idea, is that one of Karen's pillars is aa meetings or various support groups that she attends for herself, as well as working toward helping those of similar struggles and being an advocate on that, and having generally a sharper and kinder understanding on that. Being some volunteer work here and there and speaking out about these kinds of problems, more than what is present in the mcu and such considering that is a focus on her karen in 616 post born again (now some of that is somewhat dated in its treatment given the 80s war on drugs and porn; but you get the idea).

[number-one-toku-robot-lover]

everything I learn about Stronger convinces me that upon reaching it I will feel like a peasant being handed a some form of religious text in the 1890’s

Well, it will certainly make you feel some kind of way! I hope you have as much fun with it as I did :)

Do it for them!

[wifegideonnav]

why did we stop writing group chat fics. they were poorly thought out, no plot just vibes, entirely ooc in ways previously thought unattainable, plagued with endless formatting issues on every level, stupid, often way longer than you could ever imagine them running, so reliant on current memes and slang that they were doomed to cringy datedness from the second they were posted, and a complete waste of time to both write and read. and. i miss them.

[performing-personhood]

Excuse me but have you seen the top of my skull around here anywhere, I seem to have lost it when this post blew my fucking mind

So, in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds timeline, NOBODY knows what Romulans look like...

... except CHRISTOPHER PIKE!!

[artbyblastweave]

On another note It’s interesting to think about the gray area of Bronze Age Marvel where "comic book time" was only barely starting to be necessary. Spider-Man aged in real time for a while, through high school and then out of college. When the All-New -All-Different X-Men debuted, the members of the original lineup who stuck around were mentioned to be.... about as old as they'd have been if they'd been aging in real time from their first debut, maybe with a little compression? Ten to twelve years or so, which roughly works- 1963 to 1975. In issue 97, set in what I think is supposed to be December of 1975, Jean Grey mentions last having fought the Sentinels in 1969- it would eventually become extremely rare for them to nail their own asses down with a specific date like that. This leads to an interesting thing early in Claremont's run, I'm talking really early, like Banshee is still a full-time member of the team early- there was one arc where the ANAD lineup, from an outside perspective, just drops off the face of the earth for a year. They get brainwashed and abducted and put in a carnival, then Magneto abducts them from there and drags them to a facility in Antarctica, and then they get stuck in the Savage Land for a few months, and then they get waylaid and stuck in Japan when their boat crashes and then they have to deal with a bunch of bullshit in Japan before they can finagle a way back to the States. By the time they get back they're all missing persons cases and the Professor thinks that they were killed.

This arc is fascinating to me because it was told more-or-less in real time, taking the better part of a year with the monthly releases, and apparently taking the same amount of time in-universe. Moreover it's a storyline that's incredibly dependent on the political and technological situation in the late 70s when it was being published. It's a conflict that vanishes the second they get to Japan if the internet exists, if cell-phones exist, if 24 hour news cycles exist. (To say nothing of the datedness of the now-rarely deployed supervillain Moses Magnum.) But it's still technically in continuity, unless someone's said something to the contrary that I missed. It's still the arc where Banshee got permanently benched from the A-list X-Men Roster due to blowing out his vocal cords countering a Japan-wrecking Earthquake machine. They still spent like a year dealing with all that bullshit. One year out of the supposed 15 or 20 that they've all been at this- and it has to be roughly in the middle, to accommodate the veteran hero status of the O5 team members that were involved. That was actually a reasonable time allocation when this came out, when the setting was still pushing forward from the outer edges of realtime. It's so much weirder now.

[gtunesmiff]

Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writing with style:

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.  It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way - although 1 would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won't ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.  ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do. Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.’

4. Have the guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child.  English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench. All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue. I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean to say

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledly-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood. Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years. So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists.  Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

8. For really detailed advice… go read The Elements of Style

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, a more technical sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. E. B.

~ from How to write with style: 8 non-obvious insights from the master of personality || Nathan Baugh

[randomly--accessed--memories]

I talk a lot about how Alastor isn’t satisfied by what he made Vox into, but that’s actually more of a mid-/late-game development. For a while, he derives quite a bit of enjoyment from what he’s done to Vox, at least until the novelty starts to wear off. His favorite methods of torment include:

Purposely giving Vox incorrect or upsetting information, just to see what he’ll do.

Forcing interactions between Vox and Husk or Angel.

Dangling Vox over the Vees heads, reminding them of how helpless they are in this situation and how Vox has no desire to ever see them again.

Maneuvering Vox into semi-public situations and watching him “humiliate” himself.

Watching Vox happily eschew modern culture and embrace out-datedness, as well as commanding him to do menial labor that Vox used to see as beneath him.

Following Vox around, both openly and covertly, and watching him struggle with basic tasks.

Reveling in the total control he has over Vox and how he’ll instantly, eagerly agree to whatever Alastor says, even if it’s against his own best interest or personal preference.

[bettyweir]

@bettycooperpics <- new account with a few posts in the queue!

Might make a side blog 2 post all the betty cooper fits I like since its Barely mbav related

[cyberbun]

An anon asked me what my top 10 favorite anime are and I agonized over this question for months but I think I have an answer. Then I accidentally published this without finishing it so I have to write it again

In no particular order:

Gatchaman Crowds (2013) and it's second season Insight (2015):

Hands down, my favorite anime of all time. As a fan of the superhero genre this has to be the best deconstruction/reconstruction of it I've seen in terms of how it reevaluates the concept of heroism in a digital society and how well it handles its themes of futurism along with personal identity and construction of the self in virtual environments. It is a series with a central thesis about the inherent goodness of humanity expressed through the language of superheroes and social media, and it's one of those stories that really gets the way people engage with the internet in a way that other similar sci-fi stories about fully online societies fail to do even to this day.

The first season's almost naive optimism is then thoroughly torn apart by the second's darker, more introspective tone, which makes the entire show play out like a series of political essays arguing back and forth with the backdrop of colorful superhero action. What makes it particularly good, though, is how it handles this darkening of the narrative, as it asks tough, incisive questions of its own story and still comes out parading genuine optimism about the future of its world and ours.

Because, at its core, it's a superhero story about how everyone has the capacity to be a hero and better themselves and each other. It's a truly transformative experience and, while a lot of its themes can seem... tragically over-optimistic, its datedness almost makes it feel like a time capsule of a time where we were at the cusp of using mass internet penetration to better ourselves as a society, and perhaps remains a reminder of how these technologies may still have the potential to make us all into heroes. Also Rui is a hot gender black hole and I want to be them so badly.

Samurai Flamenco (2014)

In a lot of ways, Samurai Flamenco is sort of the anti-Gatchaman Crowds; it's a straight deconstruction of the tokusatsu genre that's less interested in analyzing the role of superheroes in a society and more about using its own genre to examine the ways fiction allows us to project ourselves as something greater than what we are, while also commenting on said genre's iterations over its history; so ultimately it comes across as both a tribute to it and a deep examination of what exactly makes its fans tick.It is also bat fuck insane and I can't tell you a single thing that happens in it because it goes places. Watching this as it aired was an incredible experience.

Slam Dunk (1993-1994)

The best sports anime ever made. Dead serious. Not only is this a love letter to the game of basketball as a whole that manages to capture the intensity and adrenaline of every single thought that goes through the head of a player in the final minutes of a game, it is also a touching love story with one of the most compelling central casts of characters I've ever seen.

The anime was largely inferior to the manga for a long time on account of it being left unfinished, while the manga remains largely remembered for having one of the most bittersweet endings ever put to page; an equal parts tragic and triumphant culmination of the main character's journey from delinquent layabout to passionate athletic prodigy. Then, last year, we finally got one of the best looking anime films I've seen in my life adapting the final volume of the manga while also expanding the backstory of one of the secondary protagonists of the series.

Part of my love for this series is highly personal. I grew up watching this on TV back in the old country, and seeing it finally be finished after 20 odd years brought me to tears. A lot of it might be outdated by now, but there is yet to be a single anime I am so comfortable watching over and over and over again. I will go to the grave singing its praises.

Soul Eater (2008)

It's Soul Eater, you know Soul Eater. Probably the single most stylish show I've ever seen, visually; and to me still at the peak of the shonen genre as a whole. It's got both some of the best action ever put to animation and some of the most engaging core casts of characters I've seen despite how small its ensemble is. If it seems like I have less to say about it than others in the list it's mainly because it's already popular enough I don't feel like I can contribute much to the conversation; everyone likes Soul Eater. You like Soul Eater. Explaining why Soul Eater is good is like explaining why it is good to eat. Every time I watch Crona's episodes I cry a lot.

RahXephon (2002)

Talking about RahXephon is difficult because conversations surrounding it are usually centered around its relationship to Evangelion; and this is partially because it is, in many ways, a response to it and a reformulation of a lot of the questions that it asked about its story. This is not wholly unfounded, as director Yutaka Izubuchi is a longtime friend and collaborator of Anno's who did do some work in Evangelion prior to this, so the influence is definitely there. For a lot of people, this was rebuild before rebuild. I personally prefer the adage "Evangelion on antidepressants".

I do, however, overall feel this is unfortunate, because taken outside that context, RahXephon is one of the most complex and deeply layered reconstructions of the mecha genre I've ever experienced, with a beautiful score and haunting visual design propping up a story that's equal parts impenetrable as it is deeply layered; made up of so many small character arcs woven into each other completely seamlessly that you always feel like you're watching but a tiny fragment of a large tapestry of stories coming together into a single complete whole. It makes the world of the anime feel simultaneously small and huge, which fits the melancholic post-post-apocalypse visual aesthetic of the narrative It's one of my favorites not because of what happens in it, but because it is one of the most enriching experiences I've had with an anime or any other form of visual storytelling; I always feel like rewatching it makes me take something new away from it that I didn't notice before.

Ergo Proxy (2006)

Part of me has to admit I like Ergo Proxy less as a story and more as an aesthetic. If I had to put a name on how it feels to watch this show it'd definitely be "contemplative"; it's a slow going, compounded puzzle of a narrative which at times borders on self-indulgence with how many layers of things happening at once you're keeping up with. To give you an idea; the seemingly random text crawls during the opening of the show are key pieces of understanding what exactly the plot is by the end of the story. Peel away those layers, and you get a much simpler narrative than it might first appear, with one of my favorite one-sentence summaries: "what if three different Ends of the World crashed into each other at once".

While that seems reductive, one of the things that makes Ergo Proxy feel rewarding to watch, then rewatch to fully understand, is how it does ultimately completely nail the landing with the story it's trying to tell, despite having a complete non-ending that somehow manages to feel satisfying all the same. It's a story that explores themes of identity and human nature through the genre of ecological horror with one of the most stylish depictions of a bleak, dead world I've ever seen put in any narrative. So long as you're okay with a story that doesn't give you a full sense of narrative closure and one where a single watching won't give you all the pieces of the story, it is one of the most rewarding experiences to go back and pick apart, in my opinion. Like a puzzle, you will be left wanting to put all the pieces together by the end.

Ouran High School Host Club (2006)

Don't fucking look at me like that. I watched Ouran at an impressionable age and now I'm bigender. It has a place in my bunny heart. It is foundational to the person I grew up to become.

Cardcaptor Sakura

I watched this dubbed into Spanish back when I was young, and admittedly I don't remember 60% of it, but that doesn't mean I don't think fondly back on it moreso than any other show I ever saw back when I was a child, and one that I've had a lot of joy in going back to it as I've grown older.

I don't have as much to say about it as I do some other shows, and like with Soul Eater, it feels like everything there is to be said about it has already been said elsewhere and better; it is one of the foundational texts for the modern magical girl genre, it is one of the most beautifully animated and designed shows I've ever seen, and the best at keeping the distinct house styles CLAMP is recognizeable for intact in animation as far as I'm concerned. It's my personal choice for what other people would call a "comfort" show; but I do not wish to diminish the story or reduce it to an aesthetic the way a lot of people do for shows like this, considering just how strong the character dynamics and their progression throughout the story are, and the wealth of emotional depth that can be found in just about everyone's arcs.

While the overarching plot and the world of the story aren't as interesting as some other shows of its type, its strengths lies in how it uses that as a solid foundation through which to explore a distinct aspect of the human condition through each of its characters - love, grief, loneliness, devotion to another and many others.

Kekkai Sensen (2015)

This is one of those cases where I feel like I'm going to repeat myself. Take everything I said about Soul Eater, put it here. It is stylish, it's got a strong central cast of characters that are all equally fun and contribute the same amount to the narrative. It's got some of the most intense, lovingly rendered large-scale action scenes I've seen, along with some of my favorite small, touching narratives; thanks to one of the best urban fantasy settings ever put together.

The first season's storyline is a blend of manga chapters with an anime-original plot, while the second season mostly adapts the manga much more closely so it doesn't come together as tightly as the first does, but it is more of the best show of its type of the past decade as far as I'm concerned; and nothing takes away just how incredibly tight that first season feels, even if the final episode was months late and had to go double length while the animation melted a little. And yet, it all comes together beautifully in the end.

Angel Beats

What a surprise this show was. I'll always feel a little bittersweet about it, due to the circumstances that led me to see it, but I'm forever grateful I did. Angel Beats' greatest strength is the way that it disarms the viewer by presenting a fun, albeit somewhat dark supernatural comedy about kids in the afterlife, letting one get comfortable with the silliness of the world before really taking the "children in the afterlife" premise to its logical conclusion: This is a story about death, trauma, tragedy, and moving on- Quite literally, in this case- from the things that weigh us down.

I make no hyperbole when I say that this show has the single strongest emotional climax I've ever experienced, and every time I watch it again I am moved to tears, sometimes more than last. I can't say much, since a lot of what makes this show fun is experiencing it, and realizing the depth of the world along with our point of view character; but the biggest endorsement of it I can give is how gracefully and tactfully it deals with complicated subjects such as abuse, disability and addiction in stories where you know how they all end, and yet give you a satisfying emotional conclusion while also keeping the mood balanced between cheerful when it has to be and heartbreaking, with the latter becoming more and more common by the end of the story.

It's a story about growing up, as much as it is a story about dying. It knows the tragedy of its premise and it chooses to ask the viewer to find joy in the time they have with its cast - a beautiful metaphor for life itself woven deeply into the narrative and never once stated out loud. We know where this story is going, but we're here now, so we might as well have a little fun along the way. That is ultimately what youth is about.

[juney-blues]

the datedness of the 4:3 aspect ratio flat-screen computer monitor speaks to me

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Have been sick with a stomach bug, and taken the opportunity to go through some of the books I downloaded from Project Gutenberg in my last couple of raids. I read through Amelia E. Barr's The Squire of Sandal-Side. It was okay (besides the casual racism at a few points and an unmasked hatred and disgust at Italians that would give Charlotte Brontë a run for her money in her feelings for the French), but it kind of drove home the ridiculousness of calling Elizabeth Gaskell a minor novelist. There is such a distance between what a novelist like AEB could produce, and the datedness of it, even if done with skill, and what Gaskell gave us and the permanence it has. Truly baffling.

[une-sanz-pluis]

Hey, hope you're having a good day. For a good while now I've been intensely fixated on the House of Lancaster, but I feel as though there's a major gap in my knowledge when it comes to John of Gaunt, Henry IV, and Henry V. Could you possibly suggest some further reading/research on them? I've got Red Prince by Helen Carr and I haven't read all of it but I think it's pretty good so far, same with Chris Given-Wilson's book on Henry IV

Hi! I can definitely do that for you - if there's any specific areas of their personality, relationship, life or reign, please let me know so I can be more targeted in my suggestions. I'm just going to focus on books to keep this manageable. All books are given in order of publication, not in order of preference.

John of Gaunt

There are only four book-length biographies about John of Gaunt that I'm aware of:

Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (1904)

Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (1992)

Helen Carr, The Red Prince (2021)

Kathryn Warner, John of Gaunt: Son of One King, Father of Another (2022)

To be completely honest, I've only read Goodman's in full though I've looked at the others in passing. Goodman's is on the academic, political biography side of things, which is reflected in the price (if you're looking to own a copy, I'd definitely recommend getting it second-hand rather than new) and language (it can be quite dense). If your interest is in Gaunt's personal life, Goodman doesn't spend much time on that (though I felt like I had more of a sense of Gaunt's personality when I finished reading it). It is a bit dated, obviously, so you'll have to keep that in mind. If you're interested in Gaunt's Castilian campaign, this was really impressive on that score - I feel a lot of English-centric histories tend to gloss over it.

Armitage-Smith's is from early 1900s so if you do read it, be aware that there's going to be some information that's out of date and the considerable risk of some Victorian/Edwardian attitudes seeping in. Despite the datedness, this does seem to be the standard biography on Gaunt (Goodman's being a more academic study, focusing heavily on the practice of power). From what I've seen, Armitage-Smith doesn't focus too much on Gaunt's personal life. It is also, helpfully, free to read on the Internet Archive.

You've already got Carr's biography so I won't talk about that except to say that Carr is heavily biased towards Gaunt, always presenting him in the most favourable light (I also heartily disagree with her opinion on Richard II). Kathryn Warner's biography is the most recently published and her intention was to focus more on Gaunt's personal life rather than his politics, military career or religious interests but while it is lacking on those fronts, it's still a straight forward biography. I have several issues with Warner as a historian and find she's much stronger on Edward II's reign than on later figures. I'd say it's probably worth reading if you're still wanting to know more about Gaunt but it wouldn't be my top pick.

If you're looking for work specifically on Katherine Swynford, there are three non-fiction books (or rather one 30 page booklet and two books):

Anthony Goodman, Katherine Swynford (1994)

Jeanette Lucroft, Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress (2006)

Alison Weir, Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster

If you're really interested in Katherine, I'd say all three are worth looking at. I haven't read Goodman's myself (it's out of print and secondhand copies are expensive) but he's an academic historian whose work I've got a lot of time for. I really loved Lucroft's book but it's more of historiographical approach to Katherine than a biographical, so if that doesn't interest you, it's skippable. Alison Weir is Alison Weir so the scholarship underpinning her biography is seriously lacking and because so little is known about Katherine, there's a lot of filler, so it's more "Katherine and her world", but it does have value in that it centres Katherine and her life and is the only in-print, straight-forward biography.

Henry IV

Ian Mortimer, The Fears of Henry IV (2007)

Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (2016)

There are a couple of older biographies of Henry but these two are ones most referred to. If you just want one, you've already got my top recommendation. Given-Wilson's is the most recent and far and away the most scholarly of the two, and he incorporates all of the new research Mortimer did while filtering out the bullshit and over-interpretation Mortimer fills his biography with. I personally find Given-Wilson very readable and even-handed. I am very, very impressed by his coverage of Mary de Bohun, Henry's first wife, too.

I don't like Ian Mortimer as a historian and I've talked about my issues with his work and attitude to history in detail on my personal blog here (it is a very long post). But Mortimer's biography is pretty well regarded and does sometimes include more detail than Given-Wilson, so if you end up wanting another biography of Henry, I'd pick up The Fears of Henry IV. However, while Mortimer's research is generally sound (though there are errors and gaps in his work), his interpretations are often heavily, heavily skewed towards his thesis that Henry IV was The Greatest Man Ever To Exist, Ever.

There are a few other books about Henry that are worth looking at, though some are based on more specific areas of his reign and if their subject doesn't interest you, I'd consider them skippable:

James Hamilton Wylie, The History of England Under Henry the Fourth (four volumes, 1884-1898)

Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (1987)

Paul Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (1998)

Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime (essays, 2003)

The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival (essays, 2008)

Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (2007)

Wylie is by far and away the most detailed and painstaking exploration of Henry IV's reign, though as the title suggests this is less of a focus on Henry but on the events of his reign. Wylie is not the most careful with his sources and he was writing in the Victorian era so it is very old work but there's still a lot of value there. The two essay collections are well worth looking at, covering a broad array of subjects. McNiven's is a good overview of the response to Lollardy (a heretical movement) in Henry's reign and Strohm and Nuttall focus on the propagandistic efforts of the Lancastrians to legitimise their claim to the throne.

There isn't any book-length biography on Mary de Bohun, Henry's first wife (and I'm not sure one could be written), but for Joan of Navarre, Elena Woodacre's Joan of Navarre: Infanta, Duchess, Queen, Witch? (2022) is highly recommended.

Finally, the Penguin Monarch for Henry IV (Catherine Nall, Henry IV: The Afflicted King) is due out in late 2024 and I've been eagerly looking forward to getting my hands on it... for several years. They keep pushing back the publication.

Henry V

There are a lot of books about Henry V so I'm going to try to be as concise as possible and only list the "must reads".

Biographies

Christopher Allmand, Henry V (1992)

Anne Curry, Henry V: From Playboy Prince To Warrior King (2015)

Allmand's biography is the standard academic biography. Like Chris Given-Wilson's Henry IV, it's part of the Yale Monarch series but it's from an older run where the book was divided into two sections, the first being a chronological biography and the second being a thematic study on elements of their kingship. It's very much worth the read but it's dense and heavy going and very much skewed towards the political, not personal. Because it's from the nineties, there's some outdated information (the birthday debate is gone into, Henry's wounding at Shrewsbury is very briskly dealt with) too. Anne Curry's biography is probably the best starting place. It's a solid biography with scholarly underpinnings without being too scholarly, and as part of the Penguin Monarchs series, it's short (under 150 pages) and was published very recently. There's some compression, obviously, but Curry also has insights about Henry's life that you won't find elsewhere. So I'd read Curry first, pick up Allmand if you want more later. If you want another biographical treatment, I'd say John Matusiak's Henry V (2012) orTeresa Cole's Henry V: The Life of the Warrior King and the Battle of Agincourt (2015) are worth looking at with caveats (Matusiak's writing is pretty dense and he dabbles in misogyny, ableism and fatphobia; Cole is the first biography I read of Henry and I loved it at the time but looking back, there's some outdated information that's obviously because she hadn't read the more recent research on Henry IV and Henry V).

Kingship

James Hamilton Wylie, The Reign of Henry the Fifth (three volumes, 1914-1929)

Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (essays, 1984)

Henry V: New Interpretations (essays, 2013)

Katherine J. Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity In Late Medieval England (2013)

Malcolm Vale, Henry V: The Conscience of a King (2016)

Vale has written my absolute favourite book on Henry. It's not a biography so much as a study of Henry and his kingship with the intention of looking beyond the image of the warrior king. It's the perfect riposte to the revisionist studies that vilify Henry and incredibly revealing but not the best introduction to his life and reign.

The Practice of Kingship has the same problem that older works have but it's a very solid, very insightful collection of essays that I keep turning back to; New Interpretations is also very good. Lewis's Kingship and Masculinity is a study of Henry V and Henry VI through a gender-studies lens and is another of my top recs.

Wylie's The Reign of Henry the Fifth is very similar in approach to his work on Henry IV's reign - it's not about Henry V so much as his reign - and the same strengths and weaknesses apply, with one extra caveat. Wylie died in 1914 with the third volume unfinished so it's not as complete as it should be, but still well worth the look.

Agincourt

Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History (2000)

Juliet Barker, Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England (2005)

The Battle of Agincourt: Sources & Interpretations (2009)

It's hard to discuss Henry V without talking about Agincourt, of course. Curry is the foremost expert on Agincourt and did a lot of groundbreaking, new research that shifted our perception of the battle and cut through some of the legends; this is published in Agincourt: A New History. This is a dryer, more scholarly read than Barker's but very much worth looking at. Barker's a very readable account in the pop history style that does tend to be recced by scholars as a very readable account. She incorporates Curry's new research but doesn't wholly agree with it so it's very interesting to see the two in conversation with each other. I'd personally start with Barker and then move onto Curry if you want more Agincourt.

Sources and Interpretations is, pretty obviously, a sourcebook for the battle itself from medieval (contemporary and near-contemporary) and early modern accounts. It's concerned with the battle only, not the broader campaign (so there's nothing on the Siege of Harfleur) but it's very valuable for collecting all the various accounts together and also providing an overview about the reliability of each source.

Michael Livingston published Agincourt: The Battle of the Scarred King this year which I haven't gotten around to reading though I'm looking forward to it. He does seem to be interested in cutting through the mythology of the battle, most notably arguing that the traditional location of the battle is not where the battle was actually fought.

Miscellaneous

T. B. Pugh, Henry V and the Southampton Plot (1988)

This is out of print but the best overview of the Southampton Plot (the plot that was led by Richard, Earl of Cambridge and occurred just before Henry was due to sail to France for the 1415 campaign). It's obviously old so some information is out-of-date and I don't always agree with the conclusions but if you want to know about the plot or the plotters, this is the book to pick up. There is another book, 1415: The Plot by Bryan R. Dunleavy, but that one skews heavily away from Henry and his reign to anticipate the Wars of the Roses.

Paul Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (1998)

Strohm is a literary scholar that is looking at the processes of legitimisation the Lancastrians used. Obviously, this focuses a lot on Richard II's deposition and Henry IV's response to it but he also explores Henry V's efforts to legitimise his own rule, including his patronage of Lydgate and Hoccleve, responses to the Oldcastle rebellion and the Southampton Plot, the reburial of Richard II and his patronage. There are things Strohm says that I don't find believable or likely, such as his oft-cited assertion that the Southampton Plot was a "mock-up" invented by Henry V to give the conspirators something to confess to, but that doesn't detract from his wider points.

As Prince of Wales

Because Henry played such a prominent role in his father's reign, pretty much all of the recommendations I gave for Henry IV also have a lot of information about Henry V as Prince of Wales. I'd ignore Ian Mortimer because he treats Henry V very strangely in relation to Henry IV (I have a blog/rant about that) and is very weird about Henry V in general (if I had a hall of shame section on this post, his book on Henry V would be there). I think Peter McNiven's Heresy and Politics is very much worth reading, since he goes into some detail about Henry V's responses to Lollardy as Prince of Wales.

Catherine de Valois

The best biographic treatment of Catherine is Katherine J. Lewis's chapter on her in Later Plantagenet and the Wars of the Roses Consorts. The entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is also quite solid.

The Sister Queens by Mary McGrigor is the only book-length biography written about Catherine is the one she shares with Isabelle de Valois, her eldest sister and fellow Queen of England. I absolutely do not recommend this. It reads like the most trashy and melodramatic novel about Catherine, this time written by an author who seems most invested in the invention of new love interests for Catherine and Isabelle (she claims James I of Scotland was actually in love with Catherine, not Joan Beaufort). It's also chronologically confused, full of typos and unsourced quotes. Isabeau of Bavaria's depiction is a replication of the outdated misogynistic stereotype, as is the depiction of Eleanor Cobham (bizarrely called "Elizabeth" on several occasions).

[turnways]

I get that people dislike homestuck and the fandom and a fair amount of that is warranted lol

but I think it's a liiiitle unfair to use the date of its first page as a reason to dunk on it

Like, 2009 was just when the comic started, it continued through to 2016. And even after that that there were epilogues that ended in 2019 and it's technically still ongoing (?)

Also people are into all kinds of outdated "old" pieces of media (often because of their out datedness) so it's a little silly in my opinion to act like homestuck fans are uniquely interested in an "old" piece of media when it's, relatively, a modern piece of media

[plaktasen]

Ne var yani first datede damatlık giydiysem