#holy carp she's 60 now

[marithlizard]

Listening to my anime playlist and thinking all over again: "Lithium Flower" is the only - they're not lovesongs, really, what do you call them? Infatuation songs? I-am-thirsty-for-this-awesome-babe songs? The only one of those that I can think of that has nothing to do with physical beauty. What do you sing about when you're pining for a woman with a full-body prosthetic, who could change it up as casually as we might change the kind of car we drive? Yoko Kanno rose to the challenge by getting metaphorical and yet keeping the thirst: So matador, so cold, so oil on fire She's so good, so good, so goddess lithium flower So sonic wave

And the lyrics keep coming back to surfing. Surfing the net, her ability to move through information networks being admired as something sensual and skillful and reminiscent of old Beach Boys songs. As torch songs go, it's very classy, neither creepy nor sad. (The only GitS I've seen is Stand Alone Complex some years ago, and I don't feel any particular need to see more, but I really liked Batou's affection towards the nonhuman robots and his patient devotion to Mokoto, who likes him as a colleague and friend and never in a million years. There's a bit I remember near the end where he risks his life to retrieve her cheap-looking watch, and when she asks why, he answers that he realized she doesn't wear that watch because it fits her wrist. She's always chosen to wear a female body with a small wrist that fits that particular watch. (It's implied, I think anyway, that he's thought about how if the watch wasn't so important to her she might well choose a male body for a while and how that wouldn't change his attraction to her.)

[fixomnia-scribble]

HOLY CARP it has been a long time.

Pros: Many, many.

Cons: Very few people to natter with about an “old” show.

Once again, a newly-discovered show has turned into needing ALL THE BACKSTORY. I’m now deep in researching Cal Lightman’s various allusions to Belfast, Yugoslavia, MI6 and a military dad, and how a scrappy Cockney kid raised in the 60s and 70s ended up with a Harvard PhD and a Secret Service/Pentagon career that he somehow escaped from at the top of his game. It sounds a bit like the CSI time-dilation effect, wherein everyone has multiple specialties that would take a whole career to master just one of - but in this case, it might just hang together in a unified timeline if I can find the thread. The 80′s and 90′s were a hell of a time in global politics and conflicts.

I just wanted to bang out a 2k one-shot! Don’t make me do homework on my break...

And don’t even get me started on Gillian’s totally elusive backstory. Girlfriend is a fog bank before her career at the Pentagon. How could a person emerge from that scene and still be so damned nice and enabling? It’s a little eerie. Could she have been directed to accept Cal’s partnership offer so she could keep a close eye on him? Did the Pentagon “let” the uniquely talented, highly useful Cal leave their payroll to start a cushy consultancy because he’d be ten times more troublesome if they hadn’t?

Hmm. That’s got possibilities. We know she’s veiled truths from him about their relationship, under orders. And she barely blinked when her DEA boyfriend broke deep cover, and then got himself whisked away for his troubles, for all she was emotionally affected by it. She’s got more spycraft than she lets on. I was so annoyed that they presented her inner life primarily as a grieving childless wannabe-mother, the romantically minded wife of a troubled addict. Now I gotta wonder if The Powers That Be were responsible for rescinding her adoption of Sophie, to keep her on-task and even more inclined to obsessive overwork.

Ooh. What if she found out that her handlers engineered the failed adoption? Even if Cal wouldn’t have the first clue about it, Gillian realizing that she’d unwittingly sacrificed Sophie for him, to keep him safe, would trip her switches. She’d be beyond conflicted over what she felt about him. And he’d probably be the only one who could stop her doing something drastic.

But first: what to do with Little Cal, getting beat up again on his way home from school for being the smartest boy in class...