#girlie absolutely cannonballs into the Situation

[cowboybrunch]

it's friday... where are the new chapters of Burden of the Reluctant Death?

since we wrapped act 1 last week, i decided to pause for this week and get ahead on editing/get set up for my november writing challenge so. no new chapters today

BUT! chapters 10 and 11 will be out next friday! in the meantime, here's a snippet from chapter 10 (Rosalie POV):

"Twenty three steady heartbeats, not including your own." He tilts his head. "Ms. Miller has a murmur, though. Might want to get that checked out." My pulse is anything but steady, but if he notices, he's kind enough not to mention it. "Then why are you here?" "For you," he says like I asked if a snake has knees. In a dizzying exhale, I realize that I'm alone (Jeremy is probably upstairs, but how quickly could he make it to the lobby if I screamed?) with a strange man (a man that claims to be a supernatural entity, so double strange and half man). Reading my expression, or more likely the increase in my heartrate given the previously offered information, he shows me his palms. "Not like that." He flinches. "Or like that." He's been forthcoming enough, so I wait. "It must get lonely," he explains, gesturing to the room, the linoleum floors and plastic plants, "being here all night by yourself." "I manage," I say, and it's true. I manage, badly. This, apparently, is the wrong thing to say. His throat jerks as he swallows hard. "I'm only offering company." He lowers his hands but keeps his distance. "If you want me gone, I'll go." "Company," I repeat, incredulous. He nods, casting a glance over his shoulder and then back at me. "The grim reaper wants to keep me company." Fitting, if nothing else. "A grim— " He shakes his head. "Yes."

good morning taglist!

@vyuntspakhkite-l-darling @autism-purgatory @rosesonneptune @cartoonghosts @dyrewrites

@whoevenknowswhatimwriting @jev-urisk @mrbexwrites @saturnine-saturneight @gioiaalbanoart

@tragedycoded @sableglass @the-golden-comet @wyked-ao3

@deanwax @leahnardo-da-veggie

[some-triangles]

PART 2

We’re back. Utena’s still unpacking.  She has more dresses than you might expect, suggesting that her commitment to rolling the gender dice is a relatively recent development.

Further underscoring this is a photo of a girly-as-all-get-out Utena hanging off Touga’s neck, set in a novelty frame decorated with an intaglio prince and princess embracing amongst the stars.  Utena sets it on a high shelf and regards it dubiously.

Then there’s a knock on the door and Anthy walks in like she owns the place.  Utena says that she was about to go to bed, and anyway she doesn’t invite people into her room, as a rule.  Anthy gets up to leave.  Utena pulls a Move.

This move falls into a special category of moves, which I could describe as “that probably went better in your head” moves, or “only actually acceptable under fictional circumstances” moves, or “much less cute if het” moves.  (It’s almost a Kabedon variant.)  Regardless, they’re on the bed now, and the lights are out. Anthy wishes Utena was this smooth - therefore, in this universe, she is.

Utena asks about the ring and Anthy explains the whole tiresome shebang.  A complicated bit of business ensues in which Anthy lets Utena believe that she’s only coming on to her because the rules of the rose say she should, just to see how she’ll react.  (Negatively, is how.)  

Unsure which side of her gender coin would do what in this situation, Utena attempts to kick Anthy both out of bed and out her room.  Anthy goes and has a rummage through her closet instead.

Why is Utena OK with being the perpetrator of aggressively seductive behavior but not the target? We’ll find out later, because we’re off to the Ghost Zone now.  Dead people are talking.

Touga and Shiori engage in dead couple activities and tell dead stories.  Touga gives the “Utena is still fixated on the prince” routine a whirl. Shiori breaks out the drowning girl story and says it’s all the girl’s fault the prince is dead.  (Anthy has a self-portrait specially prepared for this iteration of the rose bride slander.)

But Shiori thinks Juri was the drowning girl, and so wants to punish her by making her be a prince?  It’s all very confusing.  The ghost zone is where the remains of the stories from the old academy go to echo and molt and twist around each other.  It’s a place where Anthy can examine her anxieties, hang parts of her identity on different people, make and break actions and motivations like a child playing with dolls.

There is nothing real here.

The arrival of the ghost zone marks the beginning of the mind games portion of proceedings, the part where back in the real world Anthy would go and play mean tricks on people to get them to fight each other.  In this academy, though, she has no reason to do that, so Shiori and Touga do the work.  

Touga kicks things off with Akio’s “which one of us are you really jealous of” routine, to rapturous response:

Then, back in the ghost zone, the conspirators get a call from the ghost of Akio himself.  It turns out that when he’s not in control of the story he doesn’t get to have that manly baritone.  He’s kind of vague and fussy instead.

That’s because he’s being played by this guy:

Mitsuhiro Oikawa, a pop star known as “The Prince.”  Jokes!

We’ve heard his version of the story before, so I won’t bother recapping it.  I’m honestly more interested in this painting, which appears when Touga says that he’ll take the bride’s magic for himself.

Anthy is straddled by a prince with no face.  Where his face should be, there’s a blue window, and sitting in that window is another woman, who looks not unlike the Venus of Willendorf.   The prince, animated by the primordial magic of the feminine?   Called into being by the sin of Eve?

No time to think about it, because suddenly Miki and Kozue are taking a bath together.  We are getting motivation and character development for the entire supporting cast within the space of about five minutes, because, to Anthy, none of them matter very much.  I’m sure she finds this image of a brother and sister arresting, though.

There’s barely time to reflect on how all the participants in these scenes are grooming each other – thinning eyebrows, painting nails, cleaning ears – and to wonder if the double meaning even works in Japanese before Touga decides to go ahead and render the implicit explicit, as is his wont.

What do we do with this scene?

Consider: a young boy is chased into a cabbage field by his adoptive father, who has purchased him from his birth parents for use as a catamite.  As the boy is raped, he fixates on the white wings of a cabbage moth and imagines that it is a beautiful fairy.   Consider also: a woman is sucked into a kind of malevolent washing machine and transformed into a sports car, after which she must navigate a cannonball run type situation and escape from a giant fairy tale castle on tank treads.

These are scenes from the same movie.  They would both be much easier to contend with if we were not forced to evaluate them as elements of a single piece of art.  

Viewing the piece as Anthy’s creation helps a little.  Shiori and Touga are here to let Anthy work out her abuse and her feelings of complicity in it.   Shiori plays the part of the backstabber.  Touga, in an extraordinary turn for him, plays the victim.  Anthy relives her pain through him.  She watches those wings unfold –

Then we’re in the basement with the tank drone brigade.  We go right from the cabbage moths to the cars.   This film is merciless in its rapid-fire conflation of the beautiful, the horrifying, the tragic and the ridiculous.  

We get the setup for the first Juri duel (same as the old academy but compressed into about thirty seconds) and then we’re suddenly back on the roof of the world.  Movie Anthy doesn’t go visit Akio at night, but she does go stand on the edge of her OSHA-uncompliant rose garden and think about jumping off.

Utena comes to visit. Anthy remorselessly waters her shoes.

Utena wants to know if Anthy was the one who turned Touga “strange”.  The bride, as always, bears the blame for the absence of the prince, but in this incarnation she is whole and well enough to be generous and help Utena through her pain.   She cradles Utena’s head in her arms.  Then she quietly rises to her feet and gets an axe.

This is your poisoned cookie moment, folks:

And we absolutely cut back and forth between the axe and Utena’s head a couple of times before the blow lands to let the implication sink in. Anthy’s sense of humor has not changed.

Here’s what the axe is actually for: Utena was sad about not getting to watch the stars with Touga, so Anthy cuts a water main and destroys her entire garden to create a giant mirror so they can dance together in a galactic panopticon bestrewn with floating roses.   This is a Move. 

Anthy’s moves, unsurprisingly, are better moves.

I will never be able to fully separate the ensuing scene from this one time I hella made out to it in my freshman dorm room so we’re just gonna call this one here.