#except one specific situation i describe in the linked rant

[antikristvs]

Like I already said on my other blog, I'm tempted to watch AHS Apocalypse. Just Apocalypse, which would probably be confusing without having seen previous seasons. I don't know... The pull is really strong. It's been there ever since I dreamt of Michael Langdon's face.

[saints-who-never-existed]

Rereading The Terror

So I decided to start re-reading the novel just for a laugh. I can’t imagine I’ll have the energy to post about every single chapter but thought I’d at least rant and rave about the occasional titbit that jumps out at me. 

Chapter One: Crozier. 

“Crozier was surprised they hadn’t named some major piece of geography after the ship’s cat. They named nothing after him.” Though to the best of my knowledge, this wasn’t strictly true in real life, it still says a lot about how Novel-Crozier sees himself - less worthy than an animal. Also, what does that tell us about his In-Novel relationship with James Clark Ross? That Crozier’s worth being friends with but not worth the courtesy of being given a geographical namesake?

On a lighter note, it’s mentioned specifically that “Crozier has learned to tell all fifty-nine of his surviving officers and men apart, even at a distance outside and in the dark” which I just find very sweet. 

Not only do Crozier and Hickey interact very early on - only four pages in, no less - and not only do they meet at “an altar of ice and snow” but there also happens to be a shotgun - a potent symbol of potential violence - propped against this altar at the time. 

They speak specifically of hearing a gunshot and a scream out on the ice. This is then linked back to the ship itself, anthropomorphised in the sounds it’s making under duress, as well as back to Crozier’s own childhood - his mother crying before she died and tales of “banshees wailing in the night, predicting the death of someone in the house”. 

We then meet Lieutenant Irving, mooning over Lady Silence elsewhere on deck. Most interesting to me is the fact that he’s described as standing far far closer to her than propriety would typically allow - “not quite touching, but closer than an officer and gentleman would stand to a lady at a garden party or on a pleasure yacht”. Yet in the very next paragraph he’s shown jumping to cling to protocol and propriety - still insisting on saluting an approaching Crozier despite being told repeatedly that it’s not needed or appropriate in the situation. 

He’s also described as jumping “as if poked by the point of a sharp blade” which is just delicious to me. 

Last but not least, there is this fantastic little quote ostensibly about the rats in the Dead Room but not really -  “Rats, as Crozier knows from the sad experience of thirteen winters in the ice, tend to eat one’s friends quietly and efficiently, except for their frequent screeching as the blood-maddened and ravenous vermin turn on one another”. 

No doubt I’ve strayed into “the curtains were blue” territory with some of this but it was still a fun endeavour and I’d love to know if anyone else has thoughts. 

[meichenxi]

Hey! I hope you feel better soon

We haven't had a good long linguistics rant from you in a while!! How about you tell us about your favourite lingustical feature or occurrence in a language? Something like a weird grammatical feature or how a language changed

If this doesn't trigger any rant you have stored feel free to educate on any topic you can spontaneously think of, I'd love to hear it :D

ALRIGHT KARO, let's go!! This is a continuation of the other ask I answered recently, and is the second part in a series about linguistic complexity. I suggest you check that one out first for this to properly make sense! (I don't know how to link but uh. it's the post behind this on my blog)

Summary of previous points: the complexity of a language has nothing to do with the 'complexity' of the people that speak it; complexity is really bloody hard to measure; some linguists in an attempt to be not racist argue that 'all languages are equally complex', but this doesn't really seem to be the case, and also still equates cognitive ability with complexity of language which is just...not how things work; arguing languages have different amounts of complexity has literally nothing to do with the cognitive abilities of those who speak it.

Ok. Chinese.

Normally when we look at complexity we like to look at things like number of verb classes, noun classes, and so on. But Chinese doesn't really do any of this.

So what do Chinese and languages like Chinese do that is so challenging to the equicomplexity hypothesis, the idea that all languages are equally complex? I’ll start by talking about some of the common properties of isolating languages - and these properties are often actually used as examples of why these languages are as complex, just in different ways. Oh Melissa, I hear you ask in wide-eyed admiration/curiousity. What are they? By isolating languages, I mean languages that tend to have monosyllabic words, little to no conjugation, particles instead of verb or noun endings, and so on: so languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and many others in East and South East Asia.

Here’s a list of funky things in isolating languages that may or may not make a language more complex than linguists don't really know what to do with:

Classifiers

Chengyu and 4-word expressions

Verb reduplication, serialisation and resultative verbs

'Lexical verbosity' = complex compounding and word forming strategies

Pragmatics

Syntax

I'll talk about the first two briefly, but I don't have space for all. For clarity of signposting my argument: many linguists use these as explanations of why languages like Chinese are as complex, but I'm going to demonstrate afterwards why the situation is a bit more complicated than that. You could even say it's...complex.

1) Classifiers

You know about classifiers in Chinese, but what you may be interested to learn is that almost all isolating languages in South East Asia use them, and many in fact borrow from each other. The tonal, isolating languages in South East Asia have historically had a lot of contact through intense trade and migration, and as such share a lot of properties. Some classifiers just have to go with the noun: 一只狗，一条河 etc. First of all, if we're defining complexity as 'the added stuff you have to remember when you learn it' (my professors hate me), it's clear that these are added complexity in exactly the same way gender is. Why is it X, and not Y? Well, you can give vague answers ('it's sort of...ribbony' or 'it's kinda...flat'), but more often than not you choose the classifier based on the vibe. Which is something you just have to remember.

Secondly, many classifiers actually have the added ability to modify the type of noun they're describing. These are familiar too in languages like English: a herd of cattle versus a head of cattle. So we have 一枝花 which is a flower but on a stem ('a stem of flower'), but also 一朵花 which is a flower but without the stem (think like...'a blob of flower'). Similarly with clouds - you could have a 一朵云 'blob of cloud' (like a nice, fluffy cloud in a children's book), but you could also have 一片云 which is like a huge, straight flat cloud like the sea...and so on. These 'measure words' do more than measure: they add additional information that the noun itself does not give.

Already we're beginning to see the outline of the problem. Grammatical complexity is...well, grammatical. We count the stuff which languages require you to express, not the optional stuff - and that's grammar. The difference between better and best is clearly grammatical, as is go and went. But what about between 'a blob of cloud' versus 'a plain of cloud'? Is that grammatical? Well, maybe: you do have to include a measure word when you say there's one of it, and in many Chinese languages that are not Mandarin you have to include them every single time you use a possessive: my pair of shoes, my blob of flower etc. But you don't always have to include one specific classifier - there are multiple options, all of which are grammatical. So should we include classifiers as part of the grammar? Or part of the vocabulary (the 'lexicon')?

Err. Next?

2) Chengyu and 4-character expressions + 4) Lexical verbosity

This might seem a bit weird: these are obviously parts of the vocab! What's weirder, though, is that many isolating languages have chengyu, not just Chinese. And if you don't use them, many native speakers surveys suggest you don't sound native. This links to point number 4, which is lexical verbosity. 'Lexical verbosity' means a language has the ability to express things creativity, in many different manners, all of which may have a slightly different nuance. The kind of thing you love to read and analyse and hate to translate.

But it is important. If we look at the systems that make up the grand total of a language, vocabulary is obviously one of them: a language with 1 million root forms is clearly more 'complex', if all else is exactly the same, than a language with 500,000. Without even getting into the whole debacle about 'what even is a word', a language that has multiple registers (dialect, regional, literary, official etc) that all interact is always going to be more complex than one that doesn't, just because there's more of it. More rules, more words, more stuff.

Similarly, something that is the backbone of modern Chinese 'grammar' and yet you may never have thought of as such is is compound words. We don't tend to traditionally teach this as grammar, and I don't have time to give a masterclass on it now, but let me assure you that compounding - across the world's language - is hugely varied. Some languages let you make anything a compound; some only allow noun+noun compounds (so no 'blackbird', as black is an adjective); some only allow head+head compound (so no 'sabretooth', because a sabretooth is a type of tiger, not tooth); some only allow compounds one way ('ring finger' but not 'finger ring': though English does allow the other way around in some other words), and so on.

You'll have heard time and time again that 'Chinese is an isolating language, and isolating languages like monosyllabic words'. Well. Sort of. You will also have noticed yourself that actually most modern Chinese words are disyllabic: 学习，工作，休息，吃饭 and so on. This is radically different to Classical Chinese, where the majority were genuinely one syllable. But many Chinese speakers still have access to the words in the compounds, and so they can be manipulated on a character-by-character basis: most adults will be able to look at 学习 and understand that 学 and 习 both exist as separate words: 开学，学生，复习，练习 and so on.

I'm going to sort of have to ask you to take my word on it as I don't have time to prove how unique it is, but the ability that Chinese has to turn literally anything into a compound is staggering. It's insane. It's...oh god I'm tearing up slightly it's just a LOT guys ok. It's a lot. There are 20000000 synonyms for anything you could ever want, all with slightly different nuances, because unlike many other languages, Chinese allows compounds where the two bits of the compound mean, largely speaking, very similar things. So yes, you have compounds like 开学 which is the shortened version of 开始学习, or ones with an object like 吃饭 or 睡觉, but you also have compounds like 工作 where both 工 and 作 kind of...mean 'to work'...and 休息 where both 休 and 息 mean 'to rest'...and so on. So you can have 感 and 情 and 爱 and 心 but also 感情 and 情感 and 爱情 and 情爱 and 心情 and 心爱 and 爱心 and so on, and they all mean different things. And don't even get me started on resultative verbs: 学到，学会，学好，学完， and so on...

What is all of this, if not complex? It's not grammatical - except that the process of compound forming, that allows for so many different compounds, is grammatical. We can't make the difference between学会，学好 and 学完 anywhere near as easily in English, and in Chinese you do sort of have to add the end bit. So...do we count this under complexity? And if not, we should probably count it elsewhere? Because it's kind of insane. And learners have to use it, much like the example I gave of English prepositions, and it takes them a bloody long time. But then where?

Ok. I haven't had a chance to talk about everything, but you get the picture: there are things in Chinese that, unlike European languages, do not neatly fit into the 'grammar' versus 'vocabulary' boxes we have built for ourselves, because as a language it just works very differently to the ones we've used as models. (Though some of the problems, in fact, are similar: German is also very adept at compounding.) But as interesting as that difference is, the goal of typology as a sub-discipline of linguistics is to talk about and research the types of linguistic diversity around the world, so we can't stop there by acknowledging our models don't fit. We have to go further. We have to stop, and think: What does this mean for the models that we have built?

This is where we get into theoretically rather boggy ground. We weren't before?? No, like marsh of the dead boggy. Linguists don't know it...they go round, for miles and miles and miles....

Because unfortunately there isn't a clear answer. If we dismiss these things as 'lexical' and therefore irrelevant to the grammar, that is a) ignoring their grammatical function, b) ignoring the fact that the lexicon is also a system that needs to be learnt, and has often very clear rules on word-building that are also 'grammatical', and c) essentially playing a game of theoretical pass-the-parcel. It's your problem, not mine: it's in the lexicon, not the grammar. Blah blah blah. Because whoever's problem it is, we still have to account for this complexity somehow when we want to compare literally any languages that are substantially different at all.

On the other side of things, however, if we argue that 'Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, because it makes up for a lack of complexity in Y by all this complexity in X' (and therefore all languages = equally complex), this ignores the fact that compounding and irregular verbs belong to two very different systems. The kind of mistake you make when you use the wrong classifier intuitively seems to be on another level of 'wrongness' to the kind where you conjugate a verb in the wrong way. One is 'wrong'. The other is just 'not what we say'. It's the same as the use of prepositions in English: some are obviously wrong (I don't sleep 'at my bed') but some are just weird, and for many there are multiple options ('at the weekend', 'on the weekend'). Is saying 'I am on the town' the same level of wrongness as saying 'I goed to the shops'? Intuitively we might want to say the second is a 'worse' mistake. In which case, what are they exactly? They're both 'grammar', but totally different systems. And where do you draw the line?

Here's the thing about the equicomplexity argument. As established, it stems from a nice ideological background that nevertheless conflates cognition and linguistic complexity. Once you realise that no, the two are completely separate, you're under no theoretical or ideological compulsion to have languages be equally complex at all. Why should they be at all? Some languages just have more stuff in them: some have loads of vowels, and loads of consonants, and some have loads of grammar. Others have less. They all do basically the same job. Why is that a big deal?

Where the argument comes into its biggest problem, though, is that if a language like Chinese is already as complex as a language like Abkhaz...what happens when we meet Classical Chinese?

Classical Chinese. An eldritch behemoth lurking with tendrils of grass-style calligraphy belching perfect prose just behind the horizon.

Let's look at Modern Chinese for a moment. It has some particles: six or so, depending on how you count them. You could include these as being critical to the grammar, and they are.

A common dictionary of Classical Chinese particles lists 694.

To be fair, a lot of these survive as verbs, nouns and so on. Classical Chinese was very verb-schmerb when it came to functional categories, and most nouns can be verbs, and vice versa. It's all just about the vibe. But still. Six hundred and ninety four.

Some of these are optional - they're the nice 'omggg' equivalent of the modern tone particles at the end of a sentence. Some of them are smushed versions of two different particles, like 啦. Some of these, however, really do seem to have very grammatical features. Of these 694, 17 are listed as meaning ‘subsequent to and later than X’, and 8 indicate imposition of a stress upon the word they precede or follow. Some are syntactic: there are, for instance, 8 different particles solely for the purpose of fronting information: 'the man saw he'. That is very much a grammatical role, in every sense of the word.

The copula system ('to be') is also huuuuuuugely complex. I could write a whole other post about this, but I'll just say for now that the copula in Classical Chinese could be specific to degrees of logical preciseness that would make the biggest Lojban-loving computer programmer weep into his Star Trek blanket. As in, the system of positive copulas distinguishes between 6 different polar-positive copulas (A is B), 2 insistent positive (A is B), 19 restricted positive (A is only B), and 15 of common inclusion (A is like B). Some other copulas can make such distinctions as ‘A becomes or acts as B’, ‘A would be B’, ‘may A not be B?’ and so on. Copulas may also be used in a sort of causal way (not 'casual'), creating very specific relationships like ‘A does not merely because of B’ or ‘A is not Y such that B is X’.

WHEW. And all we have in modern Chinese is 是。

I think we can see that this is a little more complex. So saying 'Modern Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, just in a different way' leaves no space for Classical Chinese to be even more complex...so....where does that leave us?

Uhhhhhh. Errrrrr.

(Don't worry, that's basically where the entire linguistics community is at too.)

The thing is, all these weird and wacky things that Classical Chinese is able to do are all optional. This is where the problem is. Our understanding of complexity, if you hark back to my last post so many moons ago, is that it's the description of what a language requires you to do. We equate that with grammar because in most of the languages we're familiar with, you can't just pick and choose whether to conjugate a verb or use a tense. If you are talking in third person, the verb has to change. It just...does. You can't not do it if you feel like it. There's not such thing as 'poetic license' - except in languages like Classical Chinese, well. There sort of is.

The problem both modern Chinese and Classical Chinese shows us to a different extent is that some languages are capable of highly grammatical things, but with a degree of optionality we would not expect. Classical Chinese can accurately stipulate to the Nth degree what, exactly, the grammatical relationship between two agents are in a way that is undoubtedly and even aggressively logical. But...it doesn't have to. As anybody who has tried anything with Classical Chinese knows, reading things without context is an absolute fucking nightmare. As a language it has the ability to also say something like 臣臣 which in context means 'when a minister acts as a minister'...but literally just means...minister minister. Go figure. It doesn't have to do any of these myriad complex things it's capable of at all.

So...what does this mean? What does all of this mean, for the question of whether all languages are equally complex?

Whilst I agree that the situation with Classical Chinese is fully batshit insane, the fact is most isolating languages are more like Modern Chinese: they don't do all of this stuff. And whilst classifiers and compounds are challenging, they're not quite the same as the strict binary correct/incorrect of many systems. I'm also just not convinced that languages need to be equally complex. However.

HOWEVER. In this essay/rant/lecture (?), I've raised more questions than I've answered. That's deliberate. I both think that a) the type of complexity Chinese shows is not 'enough' to work as a 'trade off' compared to languages like Abkhaz, and b) that this 'grammatical verbosity' and optionality of grammatical structures is something we don't know how to deal with at all. These are two beliefs that can co-exist. Classical Chinese especially is a huge challenge to current understandings of complexity, whichever side of the equicomplexity argument you stand on.

Because where do you place optionality in all of this? Choice? If a certain structure can express something grammatical, but you don't have to include it - is that more complex, or less so? Where do we rank optional features in our understanding of grammar? It's a totally new dimension, and adds a richness to our understanding that we simply wouldn't have got if we hadn't looked at isolating languages. This, right here, is the point of typology: to inform theory, and challenge it.

What do we do with this sort of complexity at all?

I don't know. And I don't think many professional linguists do either.

- meichenxi out

[baconpal]

talkin bout fire force

shit boys it’s been too long time for another unprompted juvenile rant about manga, click keep reading if you’re insane and keep scrolling if you aren’t 

So Fire Force anime starts in just about a week and I decided to just read it all instead of waiting for any anime. It took a while to read all of it and now I just kind of have a lot to say about the manga, the anime, and the author. So here we go. 

I actually have a lot of good things to talk about, but I’ll get the bad shit out of the way first:

THE WRITING

idk his name it doesn’t really matter since he’s made like 2 things he’s just the soul eater guy; his art style has always been charming and the action scenes keep improving but his actual narrative writing is real bad. I’ll talk about the characters themselves since I actually think FF’s characters are a ridiculous improvement from soul eater, and the setting/aesthetic are on point as well but the plot is just as bad if not worse than whatever soul eater was.

The story is riddled with what should obviously be throwaway characters that keep being brought back and doing something evil and unexpected because it’s a shounen manga and if you aren’t being betrayed then the plot isn’t moving forward, or someone introduced as an obviously villainous character just kind of agrees to be friends in a couple chapters. This is used as a constant cycle of introducing both a set of “evil” and “good” characters, then one of the old “good” sets of characters does something evil and the newest “evil” guys turn out to be good. It’s not interesting or shocking to have a character you can’t even remember come back and act like they’re important, especially if it’s repeated over and over.

FF pretends to have some kind of politic overtones where religions and businesses and such act as their own entities and betray each other and prey on the civilians, but you see absolutely none of the impact anybody’s actions have on the world despite ridiculous things constantly happening and world shaking truths being brought to light over and over, nothing happens. Villains will also  have ridiculous unbeatable abilities but then just be ignored, such as making zombie apocalypses or controlling minds and such. This is also likely a concession of being a shounen manga, where you can’t expect readers to read every single chapter, and usually on a week to week basis, so every chapter needs to have its own big shit happening, even if there’s no plans to follow through on anything. 

The worst part about the writing is how much stuff that the reader didn’t know about and has no idea what it is is passed of as some shocking twist when it’s introduced. This mostly happens with powers and with new factions. There’s a ridiculous amount of times where a new group steps in as the bad guy like mentioned earlier. But for the powers, there’s so many things layered on top of an actually acceptable power system that just seem to cause a DBZ type of escalation of power without the fight scenes actually becoming that much crazier at all. On top of the simple 2nd/3rd generation fire fighter powers, the main character is meant to utilize the adolla burst, the adolla link, the preacher’s divine protection, the okay hand emoji that makes you go fast, the breath of life, and superfire fighting. None of that means anything to anyone and are just used as “MC needs to be better at something but only temporarily” over and over. It’s similar to Maka and Soul’s deals with the devil in soul eater except much more common and with absolutely no downsides.

Also not the fault of the writer himself but there is not ANY good translation of this manga out there holy shit. There’s so many incredibly obvious puns and connections and choices of words to be made that are just entirely ignored, the typesetting is always awful, and no name for moves, characters, or even the title are ever agreed upon. It took until the official release titled “Fire Force” before people stopped trying to call the manga “Burning Firefighter Squad of Fire”.

THE ANIME

Just a bit more bad to say before I go into all the shit about this manga i actually like. The anime looks awful. A lot of anime does right now, very little of note has been coming out or seems to be coming in the future, which is usually the case but its not getting better and that sucks! 

But specifically the fire force anime, following up after soul eater, has absolutely none of the visual charm translated from the manga to anime, the voice casting is absolutely abysmal, and there’s nothing to give me hope in it, not enough to even give it an episode most likely. People might try to defend David productions because woah man I love jojo!!! but they’re pretty fucking bad at animating anything. The choice of color is gross and the visual effects are bland, which is a bad place to start for a show that will contain tons of fire and other bombastic effects. Big shame.

OKAY ONTO THAT GOOD SHIT

CHARACTER DESIGN

The visual designs in soul eater were cool if a bit janky, and the actual concepts for characters were far from astounding, usually being able to fully describe characters in single words and not having much development outside of combat abilities. But Fire Force has some of the most tight characters I’ve seen in a while, they’re all simple and focused with strong thematic elements.

Ya’ll know me, hopefully. I really appreciate simple designs and simple characters. Complicated does not equal deep, and simple does not equal shallow. The characters in fire force will usually embody a concept, or a concept and its exact opposite, and be never waver from their design. I’ll talk about em for specific characters when I get to em but even lots of minor characters are very well focused and I appreciate it.

SHINRA

The main character, and while his grocery list of special abilities and “chosen one” kinda shit is annoying, he starts of as a very strong introspective of the weight of your actions vs the impression you give of in the eyes of society. The easiest way to describe it is through the very obvious identity struggle he goes through of wanting to be known as a “Hero” but instead being “The Devil”. All Shinra ever does is selflessly save peoples lives and put himself at extreme risk, he tells everyone and their grandma that they can call on him when they need a hero, and yet his visuals consist of a dark haired punk who constantly smiles a sharp toothy smile, his ability that he uses to fly in and do kamen rider kicks with spews fire from his feet in the shape of pointy wings, and this fire puts a heavy shadow over his face, giving him a monsterous siloutte. It’s not at all subtle that he just looks as evil and menacing as possible, and so his reputation is constantly negative no matter how kind he is. It’s not explored all that deeply but it is still a strong contrast.

ARTHUR

What a fucking idiot. What an absolute buffoon. This stupid fuck functions as a very simple gag character by being nearly too dumb to function and living in a made up reality as a fantasy knight, but is also able to exist as one of the strongest characters in combat. His ridiculous power is handled in a much more engaging way than Shinra’s. As instead of layering multiple chosen one abilities on him, he becomes weaker or stronger depending on his suspension of disbelief. The more in character as a powerful knight he becomes, the stronger he is. It’s a clean way to make a funny delusional characters struggle actually mean something to the people around them, instead of being left to his own devices or constantly told to fuck off. And while I said the plot isn’t very good, the smaller character beats can be very powerful. For example, It was already pretty easy to just accept Arthur as he was, but his family situation is explored late into the manga, and it’s shown that he began to live in fantasy to escape from his families arguments and poor living conditions. His parents take advantage of his disconnect and abandon their home with him in it, leaving all their responsibilities to him with a note saying he’s now the king and has inherited their castle. This pushes him to an even more absurd degree of fantasy in order to just live out his life knowing he was unloved and unwanted. It very understated how you can make a character that’s mostly used for jokes still be very easy to connect to and empathize. 

TAMAKI 

This one is likely to be the hottest take made from me here today, but this is the most interesting character in this series for a variety of reasons. 

Visuals out of the way, the fire fighter outfits everyone wears already look cool as shit and big puffy coats just get me goin, this girl absolutely rocks it on top of having twintails and a cute face. That’s not objective in anyway this is just a character designed to bait specifically me and its fucking working, okay? The writing is the actually interesting part.

So something that’s usually not even worth talking about is fan service. Show of a girls titties cus its what dudes in their teens want to see, its free (You)s for shounen manga, and soul eater was full of it. It was pretty bad in soul eater and could come at jarring and unneeded times for characters that didn’t seem to exist for any sexual reasons. It was a very poor way to include fan service. 

Fire Force also begins in a similar spot, the 3 main girls that are around in the beginning chapters are occasionally seen changing or in a bath or covered in water or whatever, with one particularly bad spread of them with the classic no nipple no vagina bodies all standing together in a shower. Its awkward and stiff and even as a fan of anime tiddie it just wasn’t worth having. 

But then that wildman just does it. He creates one single character to put literally every single ounce of horny energy in to. A character who exists to fall over and get her tits pushed into someones face, but pushed to a cartoonish extreme. It sounds silly to try to pass off fanservice as funny, but it is. It’s so ridiculously intended and impossible and always varied that its actually fun to see her do something stupid and for something to happen. Sometimes its just her ass landing on a dudes face (god i wish that were me) or her body being exposed and drawn in pretty high detail. Sometimes instead they get an entire dude stuck in her shirt after just tripping in a way that is not not being sexual to the reader at all since you see absolutely no skin. She’s simply destined to be put into lewd situations in universe, not in regards to the manga itself. For an example, here she is just standing completely still, and suddenly becoming naked, drawn in a distant, goofy way: 

It’s stupid. It’s definitely still fan service, but it’s just ridiculous. And that’s way more interesting than having every girl in your series randomly get naked at some point. Despite being insane it still works on boys, as Tamaki is the most popular girl in the series by far, ranked as the second most popular character consistently. 

Tamaki also leads to the single best chapter of the manga where a horribly designed throw-away assassin who was beaten by her returns for revenge, but just ends up as a short, self contained, well paced comedic story of love. 

And guess what, she’s still interesting outside of being funny and having fan service. Her cartoonish luck is essentially treated as her actual power, and her fire cat abilities aren’t explored too deeply during most of the series, but this is done for a greater purpose of essentially spitting in the face of high stakes. Tamaki easily witnesses the most deaths in the series, and most of them are cruel and unusual. She witnesses children being killed by a man who inspired her, she sees people she just met be beheaded in some gruesome shots that aren’t anywhere else in the series, and she gets involved in all sorts of life threatening situations. She still just falls over and gets naked. She’ll have fairly serious fights where she tries her hardest or the people around her are completely serious, and without bringing any direct attention to it she still ends up showing skin. There’s a point where every single character is at risk of dying at once to a trap set by the enemy, and Tamaki quietly laments over how she’ll be the only one to survive. She is completely aware of her ridiculous luck and her complete immunity to stakes, which is honestly just great.

Even beyond that, Tamaki is slowly being built up as more and more of an actual character, she has a short backstory section where her own hard work and effort is basically ignored by everyone around her, as if her success in life is only a result of her good luck, which is a feeling that hits very close to home to me (fuck you if you’ve ever discredited someones hard work because they’re “””””talented””””). And in the most recent couple of chapters, shes made an active effort to train alongside Shinra and Arthur, who both value the improvements they can make to themselves through hard work. No other characters in the cast make conscious efforts to improve from their status in the way Tamaki does. She moves up from a joke character to now trying to stand along side the main character as a useful and though out character. It’s a genuinely wonderful character to have been developed and the best thing I’ve gotten from this author.

VISUALS AND COMPOSITION

Okay enough about the characters, the last little thing I wanna touch on is just some of the absolutely bonkers kinds of compositions in this manga. One of the villains has an ability that is explained incredibly poorly. Pretty sure it’s just a time slowing ability that has nothing to do with fire but whatever. The pages where he uses the ability have this absolutely sick warped look to them that plays with the panels in a way that couldn’t be depicted in any other medium. Just look at this shit.

Every panel has a different background and yet still describes a single cut in time. It might not really mean anything, but that’s fucking sick dude.

Another pretty interesting one is this one kid named Nataku, who has an ability forced onto him by a maniac with a motif of stars for eyes, who dies immediately after. This event is shown to have absolutely traumatized him not because its directly said, but because this dead character appears constantly in panels with this kid, sometimes taking up the entire background to yell at him, or being an almost impossible to see spec lingering behind him. Nataku is also drawn in this strange sketchy style where he seems to be melting, and sometimes melds into shapes that resemble this dead character, such Nataku’s mouth becoming the fucking eyeball of the dead guy, star pupil and everything. It’s just such a specific and horrific way to depict that kind of identity trauma and it really stuck out to me.

I’LL SHUT UP NOW

And ye that’s about it. It was a lot of rambling and there are still lots of little things i like about the manga, good designs and cool fights and stuff but i just wanted to talk about the things that were really noteworthy to me. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve spent 4 hours just typing about stuff but if you actually read any of this, on this dead website of all places, you’re cool. Hope you found something interesting too.

[xtremedespair3d]

To Write Or Not To Write Something

I always have a feeling like I want to write something on a specific topic but I always fail miserably on achieving that.

I wanted to write something about “How Re:Creators Depicts A Situation Where Anime Characters Are In Real Life” but I really had no idea what would I really say about that, like I don’t know how would I describe them and something like that.

My main problem is that I’m always aware on my grammar, I don’t want to sound repetitive because I repeat a lot of words all time because I wanted to make things more understandable instead of leaving readers questioning what am I talking about or something like that.

At this point, I want to use Tumblr again because I haven’t used it in a long time, it was nothing but an excuse for putting the link on my Twitter profile and there has something to do here.

Since December 2016, I decided I would start making a series of Microsoft Word documents called “Best And Worst Of The Year” (The 2016 document was initially “Best Of” but then I decided I should talk about the worst for 2017), where I rank the best of my personal favorite or least favorite movies, games, anime, etc., with really simple reviews like little comment. Why? Because I really don’t have the brains for trying to be more detailed about what happened on some media, except when I reviewed Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy on my Best And Worst Of 2016 document where I explained like almost every episode in almost full detail.

As of writing this, I started thinking I should at least continue my Best And Worst Of 2017 document with depending on what activities I do, for example, moviegoing, because that’s the more frequent thing I do nowadays. Anime or live-action TV are something that it’s best I would wait until they end, although there could be important plot points or plot holes that needed to be written instantly or something, I don’t know.

Websites like Screen Rant inspired me to do all of this, they always write rankings of facts of characters, stories, films, etc., all with detail and they’re all well-written, while at the same time delivering good and occassionally mediocre posts.

For a comeback to this website, I would like to write write extended reviews, fan theories (Although I would do this more on Reddit or 4chan than Tumblr), rankings and other things like some Lost Media stuff I probably know about and no one would really talk about or something. I really hope I could achieve all of this sometime.

Thanks for reading.

Twitter: @HKomaeda.

[gordonsmith142-blog1]

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[erinkappeler]

Apostrophe, Animation, and Aeroplane

At some point between Jeff Session’s and Rex Tillerson’s confirmation charades and the preliminary votes to gut the ACA (we finally got our death panel!), after a night of informal group therapy/ranting with some beloved friends, I found myself lying on their kitchen floor, asking sincerely and hopelessly the question so many of us have been asking lately: what the fuck do we do? We’re powerless in so many ways now. Innocent people are going to die just from the ACA repeal alone. 

I’m still committed to pragmatic action (keep calling your reps! sign up for Wall of Us!), but I am also overwhelmed. This is of course the intention of the GOP; you don’t rush confirmation hearings and push to dismantle protective legislation like this unless you’re trying to suppress dissent by opening all these fronts at once. Knowing this doesn’t make it easier to cope. 

My kitchen floor breakdown happened in Boston. I also spent a lot of time in bookstores there, and I realized at some point while packing a suitcase to go back to the Midwest that I have been building my own protective wall out of books, as I’ve always been wont to do. 

These are my recent purchases:

In the immediate aftermath I wanted the planning books, the ones with clues about effective organization. But I’m in a crying-on-the-kitchen-floor phase right now, and I want the ones that remind me of how many times authoritarianism has won, and how people kept living anyway (when they weren’t murdered). The ones that acknowledge how many losses we’re going to have to deal with. The ones that remind us that we’re not exceptional and our country has in fact created this same situation in other countries time and again. The Sympathizer is one of these books; it wrecked me in so many ways. I don’t know how to talk about it coherently yet. I haven’t finished Going to the Dogs (about life in Weimar Germany), but it’s giving me an odd sort of comfort, especially in the author’s preface to the 1950 edition, where Kästner describes the rise of the Nazi party:

“People ran to follow the Pied Pipers, following them right into the abyss in which we now find ourselves, more dead than alive, and in which we try to make ourselves comfortable, as if nothing had happened. 

The present book ... is no poetic photo album, but a satire. It does not describe what things were like; it exaggerates them. The moralist holds up not a mirror, but a distorting mirror to his age. Caricature, a legitimate artistic mode, is the furthest he can go. If that doesn’t help nothing will. It is not unusual that nothing should help, nor was it then. But it would be unusual if the moralist were to be discouraged by this fact. His traditional task is the defense of lost causes. He fulfills it as best he may. His motto today is as it has always been: to fight on not withstanding!”

The Sympathizer ends in a somewhat similar place, actually: 

“We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. . . . We cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”

I feel hopeless about the immediate future but I still believe in fighting on notwithstanding for our scandalous thoughts and extravagant hopes. A way out of this mess doesn’t exist if we can’t imagine it into existence.

But we also can’t live through this without mourning what we’ve already lost and what we’re going to lose. I find myself circling back again and again lately to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult classic album, in my ongoing attempt to reconcile loss and hope. In the Aeroplane is a concept album, a sort of palimpsestic narrative about an adolescent boy in the late nineties falling in love with Anne Frank (as much as it’s about anything – the lyrics are famously opaque and the narrative logic isn’t exactly linear). The songs seem to be about young love, sex, family trauma, and the Holocaust. They’re also about art’s ability to reanimate the dead and to help the living keep living. (In all of these themes it reminds me quite a bit of H.D.’s epic World War II poem Trilogy, another useful piece for coping with the persistence of human cruelty and our seeming inability to remember the lessons of the past.) 

I think part of what I find comforting about this album is the way it insists on the presence of the past, both as inescapable burden and as an incitement to ethical action and imaginative creation. Historical traumas aren’t described at a remove – they’re part of the fabric of life in the present. “Two Headed Boy,” for instance, overlays an erotic encounter (Anne and Peter in their hiding place? the contemporary adolescent boy and an imagined Anne? the boy and one of his contemporaries?) with bodies in the Nazi death camps:

We will take off our clothes

And they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine

And when all is breaking

Everything that you could keep inside

Now your eyes ain't moving

Now they just lay there in their climb

The eroticism of these lyrics – taking off our clothes, exploring the shape of a body, the flickering image of eyes rolling back in an orgasmic moment – is inseparable from the absolute horror of the past – the starving body that makes notches in a spine visible, the struggle to hold on to something internally while being slowly murdered, the eyes that can no longer move, the inevitability of becoming another body cast aside. It’s a grotesque pairing, but it’s also beautiful in its desire to breathe life back into the lost and in its will to look fully at historical suffering and to count it part of our present experience. 

This is also an album that understands the complications of giving voice to the dead in a particularly nuanced way. Apostrophe is the technical term for speaking directly to a dead person; Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness” (30). In the Aeroplane flirts with and thematizes but never exactly uses apostrophe in a sustained way. The title track, for instance, describes the voice of a dead girl but does not throw words into her mouth; she is left present and absent, inescapable but untouchable. The desire to reanimate her makes the song, but the song stops short of presuming it can speak for her:

What a curious life we have found here tonight

There is music that sounds from the street

There are lights in the clouds

Anna’s ghost all around

Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

The usual direction of apostrophe is reversed – Anna’s/Anne’s ghost voice moves through the living speaker, making him into the ventriloquist’s dummy. And yet we don’t hear what she says through him, just that it sounds “soft and sweet.” It’s a dream of contact that can’t exist; the words we want to hear are left just out of reach. Leaving the content of Anna’s words a mystery is a beautiful solution to a literary problem: even if we imagine Anne Frank’s actual words here, some of which we have access to, being channeled through the living speaker, it is still the living speaker’s mouth that frames the words. We can’t hear Anne speak any longer, no matter how closely we listen. The next verse takes up this problem:

Now how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

This verse foregrounds the necessary violence in speaking for an absent other. It makes the figure of apostrophe fleshy and grotesque, describing the speaker as the ventriloquist who forces a corpse’s muscles to move through physical manipulation. It notes the fiction of speech at work here – the muscles in the corpse once made its voice smooth and sweet, but they don’t now. Now it is impossible for that murdered voice to be heard except through a brutal and clumsy approximation of what it once was.

In the Aeroplane’s simultaneous desire for and distrust of sustained apostrophe links it to Diana Fuss’s discussion of what she calls “historical corpse poems.” Fuss argues that twentieth-century literature is filled with poems in which corpses speak, but that,

the Holocaust appears to mark the historical limit beyond which the corpse poem hesitates to venture. The point is clear: after the unthinkable event of genocide, no fiction of the living dead can possibly be sustained. … The few Holocaust poets who do employ the voice of the dead tend to adopt neither an individual nor a collective persona but a unique voice that is both at once. “‘I am I’ -- /thousands of slaughtered I’s,” Jacob Glatstein declares in a poem that reveals not the poet’s desire to revive the dead but rather his own profound identification with the dead. Recent trauma theory reminds us that one might survive an unthinkable atrocity like the Holocaust and yet still not feel alive. (Fuss 64-65)

Anne Frank becomes Anna in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” doubling her presence, making us think of a specific individual and of the mass of individuals simultaneously (how many individual Anne’s and Anna’s died in the camps collectively?). The song participates in the necessarily confused subjectivity of the Holocaust corpse poem. It also speaks to a belated survivor’s guilt – the guilt of one who wasn’t alive in 1945 but who recognizes that this is due to the simple accident of birth; the final line of the song is “Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.” Why is the speaker here to imagine Anne’s voice? How can he do that, and how can he not?

Fuss argues that a poet who attempts to write corpse poems about the Holocaust “tentatively seeks to reverse the depersonalization of mass murder by lending to the unmourned victims of genocide his own individual voice. These singular poems do not presume to resurrect the dead, only to memorialize them from the respectful position of writers confronting the enigma of their own uncertain survivals” (65). This is the delicate project at work in “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” where the speaker acknowledges the need and the impossibility of giving voice, and the way this act is and is not for the dead:

And in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying

As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet

Rings of flowers ‘round your eyes

And I’ll love you for the rest of your life when you’re ready

The necrophiliac insistence on eroticizing the ventriloquism of apostrophe – now it’s not just words that move through the dead girl’s mouth, but also the male speaker’s body – is both disturbing and yet part of the impossible project of memorialization. Fuss distinguishes “political corpse poems” from “historical corpse poems,” but these are in many ways one and the same. Fuss notes that,

[i]n political killings, the corpse is intended to function as a sign – a message (and most often a warning) to the living. … Political corpses are killed simply to make a point; deprived of subjective voice, these corpses do not so much convey a political message as become the message. The violent reduction of a person to a sign literally kills the messenger, stripping the body that remains of any meaning of its own. By giving voice to the cadaver, political corpse poems belatedly seek to undo this semiotic violence by multiplying the ways in which the dead body might signify and by complicating the terms of both its utterance and its address. These poems ventriloquize corpses not to perpetrate upon the dead another kind of profanation but to make manifest the violence of turning any physical body into a form of political speech. (61)

Anne Frank has of course become one of the most overdetermined symbols of the Holocaust. The potentially profane act of imagining an erotic encounter with her in this song becomes a way to work against the “violent reduction of a person to a sign”; Anne Frank the symbol becomes Anne Frank the individual, engaged in a radically singular and personal experience. It’s an invasive imaginative act, but it’s also a way to de-signify her death and to return her to an imagined personhood that exists apart from or in spite of state violence. Like so many of the images in these songs, it’s awful and gorgeous, heartbreaking and stomach-turning. It succeeds and it fails in its desire to reanimate the dead and to somehow make individual deaths both less symbolic and even more meaningful.

Fuss argues that “[h]istorical corpse poems offset the cultural process of forgetting with the literary work of remembering” and “invent[t] paradoxical new grammars to articulate the terrifying new realities of modern death” (66-67). As part of this tradition, the songs of In the Aeroplane invite us to remember as part of a way to resist future acts of violence. In “Holland, 1945,” Jeff Mangum sings,

And here's where your mother sleeps

And here is the room where your brothers were born

Indentions in the sheets

Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore

And it's so sad to see the world agree

That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies

All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

We are not currently facing anything like the scale of death we faced at midcentury. But it’s hard not to think of that moment now, as our elected officials look their constituents in the face and tell them they would rather let those constituents die than support the ACA. I don’t know how to deal with people who’d “rather see their faces fill with flies.” I only know how to keep the dream of white roses alive, however fleetingly and imperfectly. And so I put In the Aeroplane on one more time and get ready to march and protest and call and write…

  Works Cited

Diana Fuss. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Duke University Press, 2013.

Barbara Johnson. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 28-47. JSTOR.