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whatisonthemoon · 2 years ago

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What the Class Politics of World War II Mean for Tensions in Asia Today (2015)

▲ Benigno Aquino Sr. — the grandfather of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III and a collaborator with the Japanese occupation — is taken into custody by U.S. troops in Osaka.

Walden Bello Foreign Policy in Focus (September 21, 2015)

In the Philippines, the grandson of a despised collaborator has endorsed the remilitarization of his country's former occupiers — by the grandson of a war criminal, no less.

This commentary is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com.

This September marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Yet even seven full decades since Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945, fallout over the bitter conflict continues to shape politics the countries that fell under Japanese imperial rule.

The war left its mark not only on the relations between Japan and its neighbors, but also on class politics within these countries. How each country handled its collaborator classes, in turn, has had a considerable impact on how they’ve responded to the current Japanese government’s push to revise the country’s “peace constitution” into irrelevance.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Philippines, where postwar U.S. authorities helped rehabilitate erstwhile collaborators with the Japanese occupation in the name of fighting communism. Generations later, it’s led to the grandson of a despised Philippine collaborator endorsing the re-militarization of his country’s former occupiers — by the grandson of a war criminal, no less.

History certainly works in mysterious ways.

Horrors of the Occupation

One month before this year’s anniversary, one of my favorite cousins passed away at 100 years of age. During the war, her husband left their house in Manila to serve as a medical doctor in the Filipino-American army, which retreated to the Bataan Peninsula as invading Japanese forces advanced. She never heard from him again.

It was only three years later, after Manila was liberated by General Douglas MacArthur’s troops and Filipino guerrillas, that she learned her husband had been summarily executed, along with three other doctors, while trying to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. Many of his comrades suffered the same fate upon their surrender to the Japanese. During the weeklong Bataan Death March alone, the Japanese killed 18,000 of their 72,000 Filipino and American prisoners — a mortality rate of 25 percent in just seven days.

My cousin was left with three young children to raise alone, a situation shared by many women during the Japanese occupation.

The Japanese military regime in the Philippines was unrelentingly brutal. Innocent people suspected of aiding the guerrillas were routinely tortured and executed. My uncle was bayoneted and left for dead when he refused a Japanese officer’s order to take down the American flag at his school. My father was beaten with a baseball bat in Fort Santiago, the Spanish-era fortress in Manila that the Japanese converted into a prison and torture center. He was lucky to survive.

Young women and girls, some as young as 11 or 12, were rounded up to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops. Nobody knows for certain how many Filipinas were forced into sexual slavery, but historians estimate that up to 200,000 women from the Philippines, Korea, China, and other countries occupied by the Japanese suffered this fate. Some 400 of these “comfort women” have surfaced in the Philippines since the 1990s, but this figure is probably only a fraction of those who were actually forced into sexual service. Many others preferred to keep silent.

Overshadowing even the Bataan Death March as a war crime was the indiscriminate killing spree that Japanese naval infantrymen unleashed in Manila as the war drew to a close. Filipino author Joan Orendain has rightfully asserted that the “Rape of Manila” rivaled the better known Rape of Nanking in its brutality, with “100,000 burned, bayoneted, bombed, shelled, and shrapneled dead in the span of 28 days.” Unborn babies “ripped from their mothers’ womb provided sport: thrown up in the air and caught, impaled on bayonet tips.” Rape was rampant, and “after the dirty deed was done, nipples were sliced off, and bodies bayoneted open from the neck down.”

Abe’s “Apology”

With this record of atrocities, one would have expected that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent remarks on the war — in which he admitted that Japan had caused “immeasurable damage and suffering” but asserted that “generations to come” must not be “predestined to apologize” — would elicit the same negative reaction in the Philippines that it did in China and Korea.

Abe, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement, should have “made a sincere apology to the people of victim countries, and made a clean break with the past of militarist aggression, rather than being evasive on this major issue of principle.” South Korea’s ruling party, for its part, criticized the Abe statement “because it did not directly mention remorse and apology for Japan’s past history of aggression, but only expressed them in a roundabout way in the past tense.”

In both China and South Korea, resentment and suspicion of Japan continue to boil just beneath the surface.

On the contrary, remarks by top Philippine officials were positive. “Japan has acted with compassion and in accordance with international law,” said a presidential spokesperson, “and has more actively and positively engaged with the region and the world after the war.”

Contrasting Trajectories

The different responses stem from the unique political and economic trajectories of the three countries. Three considerations are important:

First, for China and Korea, the anti-Japanese struggle was a central element in the forging of their nationalist identities, or what Benedict Anderson famously termed their “imagined community.”

The Chinese Communist Party has projected itself as the central figure in the victorious “patriotic war” against Japan (though many historians are of the opinion that it was the Communists’ rivals — the Nationalists — that did most of the fighting and dying). Both Korean states see themselves as emerging from the anti-colonial struggle against Japan, which annexed and colonized the peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

For the Philippines, in contrast, the official narrative puts the elite-led revolution against Spain in the late 19th century as its nationalist centerpiece — with the subsequent American annexation of the country painted in largely positive terms and the Second World War depicted as a violent but brief episode on the way to independence.

Second, the three countries have contrasting economic relationships with contemporary Japan. For China and Korea, Japan isn’t just a former military overlord but a contemporary economic rival. Trade and investment relations with the Japanese are seen as a necessary evil to acquire the needed resources and technology to beat them.

In the case of the Philippines, Japan was never seen as an economic competitor but a source of development aid, investment, and jobs. Japan’s image as a wartime enemy was transformed beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Japanese corporate investments starting producing local jobs in appreciable numbers. Meanwhile, Philippine migrant workers in Japan’s entertainment and sex industries sent back remittances to their families that enabled not only their survival but their social mobility.

Elite Collaboration, Popular Resistance

But perhaps the main factor explaining the different attitudes toward Japan is the class factor.

In Korea, the politics of remembrance was boosted by the destruction of the pre-war landed elite that collaborated with the Japanese — the Korean civil war of 1950-53 and the subsequent land reform all but wiped these elites away. In the Philippines, in contrast, the politics of forgetting was facilitated by a post-war whitewashing of the elite’s role during the occupation.

Once the pillars of U.S. colonial rule, after the Japanese invasion most Philippine elites swiftly switched sides and collaborated with the Japanese. A complex kind of class war ensued, in which the national and local elites worked closely with the Japanese while the masses for the most part hated the invaders and waited for the Americans to return, as promised by MacArthur.

Scores of guerrilla groups formed, the best known and most effective being the communist-led Hukbalahap, which chased away the hated landlords in Central Luzon even as it fought the Japanese. But aside from the “Huks,” there were other, less ideological outfits that were headed by lower-class or middle-class figures — like the charismatic Marcos Villa Agustin, or “Marking,” a former bus driver whose units operated from the Sierra Madre mountain range in Luzon to terrorize not only Japanese soldiers but also local elites.

The end of the war saw impassioned calls from the resistance to try the elite collaborators as traitors. Among the most hated servitors of Japan was Manuel Roxas, the director of the Rice Procurement Agency, who’s described in an authoritative study as having “organized the extraction of rice from peasant farmers to supply the Japanese military” and “was thus the collaborator most clearly identified in the minds of peasants with the betrayal and abuses suffered during the occupation.”

However, the returning General MacArthur intervened to save his pre-war friend Roxas from hanging, an act that anticipated Washington’s rehabilitation of the reviled elite in order to contain the communist-led guerrilla forces.

Laundered and provided international respectability by Washington, Roxas bribed, intimidated, and terrorized his way to victory during the presidential elections of 1946. Shortly before his unexpected death in 1948, Roxas issued the infamous Proclamation No. 51, which granted amnesty to accused collaborators. Reflecting the acute class enmities triggered by the experience of the occupation, one of the reasons cited for the decree was the fact that “the question of collaboration has divided the people of the Philippines since liberation in a manner which threatens the unity of the nation at a time when the public welfare requires that said unity be safeguarded and preserved.”

The first decades of the post-war era were thus marked by a contradiction in the popular mind between the memory of legendary resistance to the Japanese and the reality of continuing domination of national politics by a largely collaborationist elite — one that had been whitewashed by Washington in the name of the anti-communist struggle with the dawning of the Cold War.

So unlike the Chinese and South Korean governments, the Filipino political elite soft-pedaled war damage claims against Japan; extended a warm welcome in the 1950s to Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, a class A war criminal and the grandfather of Shinzo Abe; and did little to help Filipino comfort women in their struggles for an apology and restitution from Tokyo.

Japan Re-Arms

This history informs the Philippine response to Abe’s drive to subvert Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution — the so-called “Peace Clause” that prohibits Japan from engaging in offensive warfare — in order to promote his strategy of “Collective Defense,” which would deploy Japanese troops in offensive operations outside Japan.

China and South Korea have sternly condemned Collective Defense, seeing it as part and parcel of a comprehensive right-wing program to deny Japanese war crimes, refuse restitution to Japan’s sex slaves, bring back old-style Japanese nationalism, and erode the Japanese people’s still dominant pacifism. Philippine President Benigno Aquino III’s reaction, on the other hand, could hardly be more different.

While acknowledging that “there’s been some debate on the Japanese government’s plan to revisit certain interpretations of its constitution,” Aquino asserted during his state visit to Japan in late June 2014 that “nations of good will can only benefit if the Japanese government is empowered to assist others, and is allowed to come to the aid of those in need, especially in the area of collective self-defense.” He added that he did “not view with alarm any proposal to revisit the Japanese constitution.”

This was, at the very least, inappropriate meddling in Japanese domestic politics, one that some analysts say was calculated to influence Japanese public opinion at a time when the majority of Japanese had come out against the country’s remilitarization. A poll released at around the time of the Aquino visit found 56 percent against collective self-defense and only 28 percent in favor. Yet on July 1, 2014, fortified by support from the visiting Aquino, Abe gutted Article 9, resorting to a cabinet decision to skirt parliamentary approval and the requirement for a referendum.

The drastic endorsement of a move opposed by the majority of Japanese as well as Japan’s neighbors is difficult to explain as stemming solely from the Philippine government’s desire to gain an ally in its territorial disputes with China in the West Philippine Sea. Other countries in East and Southeast Asia, even those directly threatened by China’s moves, have been careful not to endorse Tokyo’s new doctrine of power projection beyond Japan — Vietnam being a prime example. Most are worried that the Abe doctrine is intended not so much to assist allies against China’s moves but to support the Japanese leader’s strategic aim of developing a nuclear weapons capability, exercising a more aggressive posture, and rewriting history.

Grandfathers and Grandsons

One element that hasn’t been adequately examined, but which is likely to have played a role in Aquino’s endorsement, is his class memory.

Aquino comes from a class whose experience of the Second World War was very different from that of ordinary Filipinos. Aquino is better known as the son of two icons in the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship, Cory and Ninoy Aquino. But he’s also the grandson of Benigno Simeon Aquino, Sr. — who is chiefly remembered as the Japanese-designated speaker of the National Assembly during the puppet regime, and earlier as the director general of the country’s only political party during the occupation.

Possibly the only reason Aquino Sr. escaped death at the hands of Philippine partisans was that he spent the closing months of the war in Japan. Brought back to the Philippines one year after the cessation of hostilities, he was arraigned on charges of treason at the People’s Court before being released on bail. However, he died before he could take advantage of his friend Manuel Roxas’ general amnesty for local quislings like him.

Did psycho-biographical factors play a role in Aquino’s unquestioning endorsement of Abe’s moves? It’s inconceivable that one whose parents or grandparents suffered under the Japanese occupation would have provided such enthusiastic support for Abe’s quest to project Japanese military power. True, Filipinos have generally become more positive towards Japan, but few would cross the line that Aquino did.

So one is left with the question: Was it more than coincidence that a dangerous new course for the region would be launched by the joining of hands of Aquino, the grandson of a despised collaborator, and Abe, the grandson of a war criminal?

- - - - - - - -

Walden Bello

FPIF columnist Walden Bello is a former representative in the House of Representatives of the Philippines. An earlier version of this column appeared at Telesur English.

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suchacomet · 2 years ago

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i appreciate your baseball commentary so much, i understand very little abt baseball bc i stopped playing when i was like 9 but everything you’ve said abt it has made me appreciate the show so much more.

stopppp omg i’m so glad people are enjoying my rants abt this show!! aloto is such a perfect amalgamation of my interests (softball/baseball, film/tv, lesbians, the 1940s/WWII-era historical fiction) that i really truly feel like this is a piece of media where i am the exact target audience in a way that i don’t think i’ve really experienced before! so i’m thrilled that me talking about what i love about the show inspires other people to love it more too :)

and to be honest i haven’t played the sport in years, but i actually signed up for a rec league for the first time since 2018 because i was inspired by aloto! i talked about this before but i stopped playing softball bc #homophobia and i’m so glad this show came into my life to inspire me to remember how much i fucking love the game and give me the courage to return to it! it showed me that despite my bad past experiences, there are teams out there where i could belong :’) so if my little rambles give anyone else half the feeling the show gave me in that regard, that makes my heart swell ❤️

#literally this show could only be more me-coded if they went to space. or there was magic.#i’ve said it before but this show was literally truly made for me specifically #aloto #tofuapathy

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sanstropfremir · 3 years ago

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I've become a fan of Ateez and recently started to watch Kingdom (super late...but at least I can binge most of the show this weekend). This is mostly because I'm such a fan of your blog and saw some of your old reviews! I really enjoy your perspective and thoughts on set design, costumes and the overall stage presence of idols. I used to build sets for my high school plays so I'm living vicariously through people like you lol! Anyway, there are some clear flaws with Kingdom that I saw you pointed out in your reviews. I think the way the show relies on fan-based ranking system is silly but I do appreciate seeing how groups really go for it and use up the space given to them. If you were given the role as producer for a similar style show that combines girl groups and boy groups who would be your dream cast? Any specific concepts/themes you'd love to see this "cast" tackle? Thanks again for offering such insightful commentary!!

omg anon this is so cute!! i can't believe there's a whole era of people who found me after kingdom now!!

honestly and unironically i'd probably bring back half the original kingdom cast. i really liked having btob sf9 and ateez on the show, they really stuck their landings and made really good stages even if they very rarely were rewarded for it. i also really like the queendom lineup, it's for the most part very strong. so there are some repeats here but i went for groups that are good allrounders with good creative directing. i also decided on six teams per, because even though this is supposed to be a co-ed show i couldn't whittle it down to less. but that's fine, this is a fake scenario anyways.

for the boys:

btob

forestella

oneus

ace

onf

ateez

and for the girls:

brave girls

wjsn

hyolyn

purple kiss

dreamcatcher

exid

ok yes i know forestella is not an idol group but i do not care. we all saw their lazenca stage for immortal songs, look me dead in the eyes and tell me they would not absolutely wreck a kingdom type show. also yes hyolyn is the only soloist BUT i'm implementing a guest artist round and she's bringing in junsu to do a redux of coming of age ceremony, because you know who's a messy bisexual? me. is this team-up unfair to every other group? yes but i don't care. i'm also keeping the team round because i think that we deserve literally any combination of these people doing collab stages. i also think it would be fun to do some kind of challenge round where groups have to exchange one (1) member and do a stage. like wife swap but with more singing and dancing. other challenge rounds include: remake of a FIRST GEN ONLY song, one round that has to use alternative lighting effects/be partially in darkness, and one round where the get assigned a 'theme word' and a random object they have to incorporate in some way, decided by drawing out of a hat. i'm tired of mnet softballing challenges i'm going to give them limitations whether they like it or not.

i'm not super picky all in all what concepts come out of this but i have a few that i would like to see:

ace does a cyberpunk smash of vixx's error and toppdogg's topdog

oneus does greek myth mixer, preferably based on dionysus. i think ravn could pull it off. OR second option: guest spot is for dongmyeong and cast him as apollo opposite xion as artemis.

forestella does a stage based on fritz lang's m

btob does something water based. i think we deserve to see minhyuk wet. whether or not he's a mermaid is optional

purple kiss does a stage as 80s movie high schoolers who kill monsters à la stranger things. ireh gets a baseball bat with nails.

brave girls does a stage of after we ride. they can literally just recreate the mv for all i care, i'm just pissed there are NO stages of it. bonus points for a live band and double bonus points if the band is onewe

dreamcatcher does some crazy entirely mirrored choreography for the partial darkness stage. maybe it's marionette and/or shadow puppet themed

previously mentioned hyolyn and junsu stage. they could even do a different song if they wanted, i just need them to collab again.

ateez does the concert version of take me home. they don't even have to change anything if they don't want to.

wjsn steals the comic theme from that one skz stage and goes all the way with it.

ok i gotta stop now this is making me too wistful......mnet you should hire me as a producer

#idk what even to tag this as lmao #kpop questions #also yes changmin is still the host. except he has to actually interact with the groups more #because i think it would be funny for him to get bothered all the time #this is in an ideal world where enlistment isnt real #i dont wanna talk about it #there's a couple other stage ideas floating in my head but these are enough for now #plus hanya is going to have some too #text #answers #i also used to build sets in high school that's how i got started! i just took it very far lmao

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plaidbooks · 3 years ago

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Nicknames and Slumps - “The Big Leagues” baseball AU

(moodboard by @witches-unruly-heart)

A/N: Here’s chapter 2 of the Baseball AU! I know I mentioned some chapters going towards the Summer Bingo--and they will--but I wanted to establish Sonny in this universe a little bit, first. This chapter takes place in the off season, and the beginning to Sonny’s second season of pitching for the Mets. Like before, feel free to DM me any questions you have about baseball/the AU!

Also, shoutout to @thatesqcrush and her husband for answering my arbitrary Mets questions!

P.S. Aquafresh is a brand of toothpaste

Tags: yelling, otherwise none

Words: 1803

Taglist: @witches-unruly-heart @beccabarba @thatesqcrush @itsjustmyfantasyroom @permanentlydizzy @ben-c-group-therapy @infiniteoddball @glowingmess @whimsicallymad @lv7867 @storiesofsvu @cycat4077 @alwaysachorusgirl @glimmerglittergirl @joanofarkansass @redlipstickandblacktea @reading--mermaid @averyhotchner @mrsrafaelbarba @detective-giggles @crowleysqueenofhell @dreamlover31

Sonny’s first year in the majors was almost flawless. Outside of his perfect game in his sixth start, he was dominate; he kept his ERA hovering around the low 1.00’s, and he was still undefeated. He did, however, have a few no decisions, only two of which were his fault. But besides that, he was the star everyone talked about. He even won the Rookie of the Year award; something almost unheard of with pitchers. The Cy Young award shocked no one, and the Mets were frantically offering him more money, trying to keep him. As if he’d go anywhere else.

Even with his spectacular pitching, the Mets didn’t make it to the post-season. But as the Mets watched the World Series from their homes, all anyone could talk about was the kid, Sonny Carisi.

He had gained notoriety among sportscasters and journalists for his outstanding performance on the field. But the fans adored him for his off days, and for how he conducted himself off the field. Not only did Sonny donate most of his time in the off season—not to mention his money—to multiple volunteer organizations, but he also offered to do signings at small, struggling mom and pop shops for free. He’d bring in huge crowds, spending hours at these events, taking pictures, signing autographs, talking to kids and adults alike.

While in the ballpark, on days he pitched, he would do his workouts in the trainer’s room, coming out of the dugout just to throw in the bullpen. He was focused, working on his mechanics. But on days he didn’t pitch, he was one of the first out on the field. Sonny had a penchant for hanging out right next to the dugout, signing autographs and taking pictures. He never declined—unless the umpire was yelling at him to get off the field so they could start the game—and he had a blast. And when he was in the outfield, shagging balls during batting practice, he’d toss them up to the crowd, or give them to kids with a huge smile.

Sonny’s trademark smile earned him his first nickname: Aquafresh. He threw his head back and laughed when he first heard it, loving it. He wasn’t as fond of his other nicknames that sprung up afterwards: Stringbean and Earthworm Jim being his least favorites. But there was one that apparently was going around that he didn’t hear from the crowd.

*************************

It was early morning, and he was watching the postgame wrap from the night before while he ate breakfast. Normally, Sonny didn’t watch the pre- or postgame commentary. But since he started dating you, he made it a point to watch if you were on. He smiled as he saw you wearing his jersey, thinking you were too damn cute, and wanting to cuddle with you on the couch.

The conversation slowly shifted from the game that happened to Sonny, as it normally did…not because you forced them to talk about him. In fact, you did your job as normal; it was your cohosts that would change the subject to him. And now that they knew—the world knew—that you two were dating, he almost wondered if it was on purpose, to see if you slip up on some personal info about him, or you two together.

“Speaking of Carisi, have you heard the new nickname? I heard the Staten Island Little Leaguers came up with it,” one of the guys said.

Sonny watched your face light up. “I have! They call him Peanut Butter Cup, right?” you asked, though he knew you didn’t need to; you never said anything that you couldn’t back up.

“Peanut Butter Cup? Where did they get that from?” another of your colleagues wondered out loud.

You smiled, and Sonny felt a swell of pride at your knowledge. “From his last name. They went from Carisi to Risi, then to Reese, then Reese’s and bam! Peanut Butter Cup,” you explained.

Sonny laughed, flushing with embarrassment, his heart warm. Children called him Peanut Butter Cup. Not for the first time, he felt an intense longing; Sonny wanted children, wanted a family. He was only 22, but he had known most of his life that he wanted to be a father. He made a mental note to bring up the prospect of children with you. It was still early in your relationship; you’ve been dating about five months, but with your jobs, you rarely saw each other. Hell, you saw each other more at work than off the field. Your relationship was mostly over text or phone calls, but he still felt deeply about you. He wasn’t sure if it was love yet, but he was hoping to get to know you more in person in the off season.

Once he finished breakfast, Sonny sent you a text: I saw your show from last night.

You responded almost instantly, unsurprising to him; your whole livelihood was on your phone. And? Did I do well?

He smiled, heart fluttering; he liked that you valued his opinion. Fantastic. Just one thing.

What??

I hate peanut butter.

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Sonny Carisi was named the Opening Day starter for the Mets, shocking absolutely no one. He had just turned 23 and was already the best pitcher for the club, maybe even in baseball at the moment. Or so he, and everyone who watched him, thought. But that first game, the Cubs lit him up. Sonny gave up more runs in that game than he had in any other start combined. His manager took him out in the 4th, something that’s never happened to him before. When Sonny pitched, he was normally a shoo-in for at least 7 innings.

Frustrated, Sonny sat hard on the bench, not letting anyone outside the pitching coach talk to him.

“It happens to everyone eventually, Carisi. Just gotta let this roll off your back, come back strong your next outing.”

But that next outing, he did worse. He didn’t know what was happening to him. His command was perfect, his stuff great. It’s like everyone he faced suddenly could see right through him, knew every pitch he was going to throw before he threw it. It was infuriating. His ERA ballooned up to the 5.00’s, and he wondered dimly if the Mets would trade him.

Sonny eventually started shutting everyone out. He even stopped watching the pre- and postgame shows, whether you were on it or not. He stopped reading the articles you wrote, and he stopped reaching out. He even stopped being the first out of the dugout, stopped signing things by the dugout. On his days off, he spent it hiding in the locker room until game time. He didn’t want to field the questions about what was wrong with him; he didn’t have an answer, for them or himself.

************************

“Sonny, please open the door,” you called, knocking on the front door to his loft. He’d been avoiding you, and you worried about him.

You heard the latch unlock and took a step back. Sonny opened the door, looking annoyed. “What do you want?”

“I want to make sure my boyfriend is okay. Can I come in, please?” you asked. You knew he was frustrated, and that this may be something you’d have to deal with while dating. And you planned to force yourself into his life, to help him as best you could, whether he wanted to shut you out or not.

Sonny scoffed, turning and walking into his home. But he left the door open, and you followed, closing it behind you. “Of course, I’m not okay! Haven’t you been watching?”

“You know I have been. So, you’re in a slump; it happens—”

“Not to me!” he yelled, throwing his hands in the air.

You took a breath, staying calm. “It was bound to happen, babe.” You tried to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged you off.

“So, what? You’re going to side with those other analysts? Calling me a fluke and writing shitty articles about me?”

You flinched at the accusatory tone in his voice. “Of course, not—”

“Why not? Everyone else is doing it; I’m sure your bosses would eat it up.”

You sighed, trying to shove down your own defensiveness. “Would you please just listen to me for a moment?” He shot you a glare but didn’t speak up. “You know I analyze pitching for a living, right?”

“So? I’ve tried to make my fastball faster, tried to make my curve drop more, but I can’t—”

“Sonny,” you said softly, making him stop his rant. “Instead of trying to blow pitches passed batters, you should be working more on your mechanics and command. If batters are making contact, then make that work for you. Force grounders or popups, trust your defense to back you up; they’re there for a reason.”

His eyes scanned yours as he took in your words. “Th-that’s a great idea, actually….”

“I’m glad you think so,” you replied, smiling.

Sonny returned your grin. “I—I’m sorry for snapping at you,” he sighed heavily. “I just…I don’t know what’s changed between last season and now—”

“You’re not new anymore; teams can break down your pitching style. You won a Cy Young and Rookie of the Year; they’re all so threatened by you that they all probably studied the hell out of you.”

He nodded, feeling a little better with your praise. “Y-yeah….”

You reached up, cupping his face, making him look at you. “There’s nothing wrong with you or your pitching. The batters just stepped up their game. So now, you have to answer back, okay?”

He lifted a hand, placing it on top of yours, and turned his face in your hold, pressing his lips to your palm. “Thank you, doll. And again, I’m sorry for yelling—”

“It’s fine, Sonny. I understand that you’re frustrated,” you said, smiling.

He squeezed your hand. “It’s not fine; you’re just trying to help. I should listen to you more; you’re so smart, and not to mention beautiful. I promise to never snap at you again.”

Your smile grew, and you lifted to your tiptoes, giving him a tender kiss. He leaned down, deepening the kiss. He wrapped his arms around your back, pulling you flush against him, and you hummed into his mouth. Slowly, he pulled back, leaning his forehead against yours, rubbing his nose with yours.

“Just so you know, I’ve never, and will never, write a shitty article about you, or call you a fluke, Stringbean,” you muttered against his lips.

Sonny let out a chuckle. “You know, you’re the only person who can call me that to my face, and not have me get annoyed.”

You giggled, pressing your lips to his once more. And sure enough, his next start had him looking back to normal, except instead of striking out double digits, he forced grounders for eight scoreless innings.

#sonny carisi x reader #law and order svu #law and order svu fanfic #fanfic #my writing #the big leagues au #baseball!au #baseball!sonny

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bokunoheroanalysisforthefuture · 4 years ago

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Horikoshi: This will probably not be super popular, but it’ll be fun!

Us: Oh, well that sounds nice!

Us, 290 chapters later: This Isn’t Fun Anymore Horikoshi

Horikoshi: :)

Anyways, welcome to the beginning of - hopefully - a long term and engaging project. I am basically aware of all of canon, and am up to date with the manga, but I haven’t actually read from the beginning of the series, and I’ve only watched the series up to the Deku v Todo fight in the sports festival. However, I’ve been curious as to how the manga portrays stuff that I’ve seen in anime gif form, and so I figured, hey, make this a project!

If you have questions or anything, the ask box is open for now. Meanwhile, I am going to head into the first chapter proper!

[No. 1 - Izuku Midoriya: Origin]

Wow, you’d almost think this kid would grow up to be a villain or something, with that kind of attitude, huh? No way that this kind of attitude would ever come to bite him in the ass and force him to reevaluate his entire character and kickstart his character development.

(Before you say anything, I like Katsuki as a character, but DAMN did he have to do a lot of growing up. I suppose when one is at the bottom, the only way to go is up… unless you have a pickaxe.)

One thing I actually noticed right away, and I dunno how much it’s used in other manga (seeing as I currently am not reading any other manga and the last ones I read were… a long while ago…) is the shape of the text boxes in order to convey emotion! It’s actually hella neat and a little detail I wouldn’t think about adding if I were in his position (not that I can draw all that well, but that’s not my point). You can practically hear the warbling in Izuku’s tone and the rougher edges in Katsuki’s!

(Also, question for the English sub while we’re at it, why the fuck does Katsuki sound like he’s a goddamned adult when he’s fourteen. What the fuck.)

Interesting little thing here, Katsuki not actually using his quirk here against Izuku; his hand is trailing smoke from his explosion, but it’s not a direct burn wound. Not that he should be doing this at all, but with the number of fics I see where Katsuki literally gives Izuku second or third degree burns, I think this is a reminder that canon Katsuki has some modicum of restraint, even this early.

Before I forget, hello winged kid who definitely has no plot significance whatsoever. No siree.

(If you are new to the manga/show and are reading this as among your first introductions to the fandom, first off, I am so sorry. Secondly, expect me to be… definitely making a lot of sarcastic quips to things in the future.)

Onto the second/third page, which is supposed to be a full spread, but is split up into two pages on the online reading site. RIP, but I will not complain about free access to the whole manga.

Lookit this green bean. I love him so much. I can’t wait for him to suffer.

Izuku: wait, what?

Anyways, a few things to note:

Who the fuck is this guy? I looked into the wiki but he apparently doesn’t warrant a page or even a mention as one of the background faces of the series, but look at that fucking claw, man! And those boots and jets! He’s very obviously themed after a baseball catcher, so I’m going to guess that he has some kind of quirk that deals with either drawing projectiles to him, or perhaps in throwing projectiles… in either case, it’d be something like Snipe’s quirk, so maybe this is his less howdy-happy sibling.

Oh right, the chapter. The other heroes we see on the scene in this two-page spread are Death Arms, Air Jet, and Kamui Woods.

Also, something I want to point out that I’m sure others have but just struck me while looking at this spread - multiple people are recording / taking pictures of this. I wonder if part of the reason for the villain industry to be as strong as it is is because the villains, even if they know they’ll lose, still get their own sort of fame in being in the news? That… might explain a lot about how there can be enough villains to even run an entire damn industry.

(Well, that and a lot of sociopolitical commentary on BNHA society, but we don’t need to get into that now. Maybe wait two hundred or so chapters first.)

Not gonna lie, I had to double take because I was like ‘wait, what is Ochako doing here?’ but then I realized it was just a random civilian; she doesn’t have those side bangs Ochako does. But now I almost wonder what sort of world we could have had, if they’d met a bit earlier.

Onto the fifth page (fourth is just a filler page, nothing on it), and we get treated to this gem:

Tag yourself I’m the guy who’s slackjawed because his kid is fucking glowing.

The first four examples of quirks shown in this flashback are the luminescence, telekinesis, ice, and that flame-headed(?) mutation. Of them, we actually see hints to the fact that quirks have drawbacks, as the girl with ice is drawn with the same frostbite backlash as Shouto, while the flame-headed kid is… well, I have no idea, but they do not look to be happy.

Also, I love the nod Hori does to the heroes of our era as silhouettes! This is just more evidence to me, along with the fact that the first quirked kid is born and presented in a modern hospital, that this series takes place sometime in the future. I… even calculated the years it could technically be, based on information we get in a few chapters, but I’ll save that for then.

Onto the sixth page! A nice shot of Kamui Woods getting into position, and man is that giant quirk unnerving.

What the fuck is with those feet, Hori. Those aren’t feet.

Next we see how the crowds are reacting, basically with no panic or concern. One guy is just casually letting his boss know he’ll be getting in late. And Backdraft! That is some serious water manipulation, but it seems like it has to be the water they’re in contact with? Also, is it just me or is that a portable pressure hose on their back?

And of course, Izuku being excited over hero stuff, as one does. He’s so babey faced, going back to current chapters after this is gonna be fucking wild.

Onto the seventh page, and here we are with the ‘you’re pure evil’ speech to someone who’s… just a robber. Seriously, dude? I get that you’re still fairly new to the scene (I think he might not be from a hero high school, but a late join program, but that’s another post), but like. You can’t just call random people ‘pure evil’ and correlate petty crime with like, actual mass murderers, or else people might start to see things in black and white and, you know, create the idea of ‘villainous people’ and so push even more innocents down the path of desperation and criminality.

Wait, sociopolitics later. Izuku being a hero fanboy now. Even able to utter Kamui’s attack call as he’s calling it out, with some seriously cool visual effects-

And on the eighth page, we have Mt. Lady crash the scene. Literally. She just fucking shows up outta nowhere and fucking leaps up and delivers a kick right to the villain’s chin, throwing him back through the train bridge wall and sending debris down to the ground below. Sure hope there weren’t civilians there!

Also, hello to that random guy on the roof watching this. I think in Smash they made that guy her manager or something.

I love how Izuku and the other guy are like ‘what the fuck’ while the press just shows up out of nowhere and is like. Hyperfocused on her. (I’ve heard some issues with the portrayal of media/reporters in the series, but since I have no experience with that sort of thing, I can’t say much on it.)

The last panel of this page shows that, fortunately, there were no civilians on that part of the street (even though it being rush hour and the huge crowds on the other side of the bridge should have suggested otherwise… but what do I know?)

With page nine, we get to see our first case of villain apprehension, which to note does not include any sort of quirk suppressors. Because those don’t exist. Otherwise Aizawa and the Eight Precepts’ erasure bullets would not be such huge deals to everyone. I mean yikes, though, the guy is fucking muzzled. And you can see the damage done by Mt. Lady in the background, both physical and emotional. Not to mention…

What the fuck is that face.

But yeah, this notes that performance in heroics determines not only what they’re paid by the government, but also how much fame they get. No way a system like this could backfire in any capacity, right? Right? (cough).

I love how Hori uses Izuku’s muttering habit as the border for the text bubble when the kid zones into his little world. Also, gigantification is noted to be a common and strong quirk, so we really should see more OCs with size altering quirks in fics in the future, you hear me? Honestly, with it being common, I would almost expect there to be entire buildings, or maybe even neighborhoods / blocks dedicated to catering to size shifters… wonder what those places look like.

Also aww, the guy saying good luck on the heroics dream to Izuku and Izuku just sparkling. What a cutie. Can’t wait for him to suffer. :D

Izuku: No seriously, what-

Anyways, I’m cutting off here since we then transition into the next ‘scene’ and this is a long chapter - 55 pages! Besides, this has already surpassed 1700 words, I don’t need to ramble on too long in one post.

Lemme know what you think, and I’ll be back with more soon!

#opening arcs #chapter 1 #readthrough #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #midoriya izuku #bakugou katsuki #kamui woods #mt lady #1800 words and only nine pages #buckle in this is gonna be a long project folks

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flowerslut · 5 years ago

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TWILIGHT

an updated, slightly more modern take on the original soundtrack.

note: I’ve been casually working on this playlist series for most of the year, analyzing thousands of songs, and then sorting through hundreds after that. I mainly focused on finding modern, beat-for-beat replacements of each song, with exceptions here and there. This has been tons of fun and I hope you enjoy! (I’ll be posting New Moon’s playlist later this week.)

(NEW MOON) (ECLIPSE) (BREAKING DAWN)

spotify link

[track list and commentary under the cut:]

Supermassive Black Hole — Muse ➼ ➼ ➼ Machine — Imagine Dragons

Machine was the only song I even considered for this. There aren’t many songs that you can hear and think “vampire baseball”, but I think Machine is one of them. And let’s be real, if Imagine Dragons had been putting out music between 2008-12, they would’ve absolutely ended up on one of these soundtracks.

Decode — Paramore ➼ ➼ ➼ Out of My Head — Digital Daggers

Decode was easily the most difficult song to duplicate on this soundtrack, and probably on all five of them put together. I’m still not 100% content with this choice, but it was still the best contender. (It was between Out of My Head and seven other songs.) Decode is an impossible song to duplicate, but Digital Daggers has the high energy rock-like, ‘fuck with me’ attitude to their music that late aughties Paramore encapsulated.

Full Moon — The Black Ghosts ➼ ➼ ➼ Free at Dawn — Small Black

This replacement speaks for itself once you give it a listen. Just visualize panning over those foggy mountains as you listen to Free at Dawn. Go ahead. It just works.

Leave Out All The Rest — Linkin Park ➼ ➼ ➼ One More Light — Linkin Park

Okay, listen. Even if I had wanted to I would’ve never been able to replace with Linkin Park with anything other than Linkin Park. Call me a sentimental fool, but I’m still sore over Chester’s passing. I don’t care if it’s too sad of a song. I don’t care if, lyrically, it doesn’t really work. This was my #selfishchoice of the soundtrack. Linkin Park stays.

Spotlight — Mutemath ➼ ➼ ➼ The Deadroads — The Rural Alberta Advantage

Fun upbeat poppy guitar strumming? Sign us the fuck up. Another song that just works.

Go All the Way (Into the Twilight) — Perry Farrell ➼ ➼ ➼ Bright Whites — Kishi Bashi

No offense, Perry Farrell, but I never liked Go All the Way. It was always the main one on the soundtrack that I skipped when I was younger. Now, Bright Whites? Try putting that as your soundtrack’s orchestral banger, and now we’re talking.

Tremble For My Beloved — Collective Soul ➼ ➼ ➼ Song For Zula — Phosphorescent

Both songs here have a great otherworldly love song feeling to them. This was another fairly easy choice. Song For Zula is a little more upbeat and happy sounding than Tremble For My Beloved, but eh. It’s fine.

I Caught Myself — Paramore ➼ ➼ ➼ Mind over Matter (Acoustic) — PVRIS

Replacing Paramore was hard, and having to do it twice seemed like some sick joke I was playing on myself. But not many artists out there can replicate or even match the power of Hayley William’s vocals. Well, I’ve apparently been sleeping on PVRIS, because those vocals? Top tier, y’all. Once I heard Mind over Matter, it was clear it was the winner.

Eyes on Fire — Blue Foundation ➼ ➼ ➼ Unfair — The Neighbourhood

Eyes on Fire is another song nearly impossible to duplicate. I stuck with a moody The Neighbourhood instrumental to keep things dramatic without messing up the mood of that tense scene.

Never Think — Robert Pattinson ➼ ➼ ➼ I Take All the Blame — Vivek Shraya

Don’t worry. I have another Robert song on a later soundtrack replication. (I won’t tell which one.) This Tegan and Sara cover by Vivek Shraya was the obvious choice to replicate Pattinson’s acoustic hit that I still listen and fight back tears to all these years later.

Flightless Bird, American Mouth — Iron & Wine ➼ ➼ ➼ New American Classic — Taking Back Sunday

And behold, (what I believe is) the biggest change made to the soundtrack. And also an older song than anyone probably expected. (The album Where You Want To Be came out in 2004.) I tried other modern-day acoustic dudes. Sorry, but they don’t match up to Iron & Wine. (And don’t freak out about lack of Hozier, he’s coming. Be patient.) A classic was the obvious choice, and a New American Classic ended up winning this one. I think it’s perfect, but that might just be my high school emo phase acting up again. Doesn’t matter if that phase ended up overlapping with my introduction to Twilight...

Bella’s Lullaby — Carter Burwell ➼ ➼ ➼ Rêves — Nuit Pluie

Not much of a reason for this. I wanted a lullaby-esque piano melody. That’s what we’ve got with this one.

Now, a lot of the time the soundtracks for the Twilight Saga would add a song or three to their lists depending on the country, the edition, the purchase location, etc. (This is my own version of giving myself a Free Space.) For Twilight, I gift you two bonus tracks:

This Is For Keeps — The Spill Canvas

The One Fell Swoop album by The Spill Canvas was a Twilight-era staple for myself and a lot of people who were in their mid-to-late teens during Twilight’s release. I mean, listen to the song. The lyrics, the melody, the mood. It’s like the song was a collab with Stephenie Meyer herself. (And with it’s release in 2005, the same year of Twilight’s publication, who really knows...)

Monsters — Matchbook Romance

I know it’s another mid-00 song. I know this is supposed to be a ‘modern take’ on the soundtrack. I know, I get it. This song is only added just because I was really bummed about 15 Step by Radiohead being left out of the actual Twilight Soundtrack back in the day. Like, how are you going to have them play during the credits and not supply us with it on the soundtrack? So here’s a slightly-harder rock jam that, lyrically, just screams paranormal banger.

#the twilight saga #twilight soundtrack #WHEW!!!#im honestly so excited about this #this is my favorite non fan fiction project I've completed in any fandom TO DATE!!!

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jasonfry · 4 years ago

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Winter rolls along! No baseball! That means catching up with more classic movies everybody’s seen but me!

The Sugarland Express (1974)

This is Steven Spielberg’s first big-screen feature (1971′s Duel was made for TV), and it’s amazing to think it arrived just a year before Jaws, which would change American movies forever.

It’s impossible to watch The Sugarland Express without analyzing it in terms of Spielberg style, which is too bad, because it can be enjoyed perfectly well if you don’t know who the director is. Yes, there are some trademark long takes and inventive camerawork -- the most famous bit is a tricky 360-degree shot inside the getaway car that’s particularly impressive because it’s so easy not to notice -- but this is also a great character movie.

Goldie Hawn’s Lou Jean is simultaneously conniving and childlike, ruthless and clueless, and Hawn brings a frantic intensity to the part. Her husband Clovis is doomed the moment Lou Jean puts her half-assed plan in motion, and William Atherton (of Die Hard fame) does a superb job with an understated role, in which Clovis’s real tragedy is how timidly he navigates the constrained possibilities of his life. They’re joined by Michael Sacks as a kidnapped state trooper, and the three make for a compelling ensemble -- people who understand each other and grasp that their circumstances could easily have been switched around by a chance here or there.

The movie’s ambitious and thoroughly modern -- it’s a chase movie and a marital comedy and a slice of social commentary, and it switches lanes with skill and self-confidence. Maybe it doesn’t quite stick the landing -- there’s a little too much movie blood and the sun-soaked last shot feels like a stylistic departure -- but the ending is gripping even though it unfolds the only way it could, and that’s a hard trick to pull off.

Extra credit because even a relatively uninformed movie fan like me will have a blast moving both forward and backward from The Sugarland Express -- it wouldn’t exist without Bonnie & Clyde, but Raising Arizona wouldn’t exist without it, to identify just two beads on an intriguing string.

Rio Bravo (1959)

Westerns are my comfort food -- give me the right proportions of dusty streets and swinging doors and cacti against sunsets and I’ll overlook a fair number of cinematic/narrative sins. And Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo whips up the classic ingredients with the nonchalant skill of a veteran short-order cook in a beloved diner -- a tumbleweed even rolls into one of the leads in the first reel, as if to say, “What? It’s a western!”

Rio Bravo is usually framed as a rebuke to High Noon and 3:10 to Yuma, which Hawks and John Wayne despised because those movies dared to depart from the western tropes of flinty-eyed, self-reliant sheriffs and frontier folk banding together. The film Hawks and Wayne made in response is rock-ribbed in its values, unfolds at a languorous pace, and is often mawkish. (It also jerks to a halt for back-to-back duets with Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, while Wayne stands there and smiles.) It shouldn’t work -- and, to be clear, I don’t think it’s nearly as interesting as the movies it’s arguing with -- but it does.

For one thing, there’s immense skill brought to the storytelling and filmmaking. There’s a self-confidence behind that languor that draws you in, and while the characters are hoary stock figures, their interactions rarely if ever ring false. The actors are solid, too: Martin is a lot better than you might guess as Dude, the deputy with an alcohol problem; Nelson holds his own as a young gunslinger who doesn’t want to get involved but of course eventually does; Walter Brennan has a grand time bouncing off Martin and Wayne in their shared scenes; Angie Dickinson brings some shade and nuance to the role of a gambler’s widow trying to extricate herself from a checkered past; and the bit players are all threatening, comedic, hapless and helpful in the proportions you expect and want.

But unsurprisingly, Wayne is the secret weapon -- the story treatment for Rio Bravo didn’t bother giving his character a name, just calling him “John Wayne.” Imitations of Wayne focus on the swagger and the tough-guy talk but miss that his performances turn on the moments when his characters’ weaknesses undermine their strengths. Wayne’s Sheriff John T. Chance is gentle with Dude’s struggles, knowing well-chosen nudges are the best way to keep his troubled deputy on the right path, and he’s utterly at sea navigating his feelings for Feathers, Dickinson’s character. The Wayne-Dickinson pairing is yet another of those May-December romances that movies of the era were always foisting on actresses, but Wayne wisely leans into the problem, letting Chance be tongue-tied and awkward as the more confident Feathers steers him through uncharted emotional terrain.

Wayne became more cranky and reactionary as he aged, but he never lost the insight that strength is only interesting if paired with weakness. That dynamic sells Chance and Rio Bravo wonderfully. And hey, the Martin-Nelson duets are actually pretty good.

Hawks and Wayne would essentially remake Rio Bravo two more times, first as El Dorado and then as Rio Lobo, and while I’ll tell you now that I don’t feel the need to see either one, jump ahead a couple of years to a late night where I think, “a western would be fun right now,” and I’ll probably wind up watching one of them. Because I bet they’ll work.

That Thing You Do! (1996)

The story of a one-hit wonder band, written and directed by Tom Hanks. The cast is terrific, particularly the luminous Liv Tyler; the title song (written by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne) is not only good but also pitch-perfect for its era; and the giddy whoosh of the Wonders’ sudden rise to fame carries the movie along effortlessly for quite a while.

There are only two problems -- but unfortunately, they’re pretty big ones.

First of all, the movie jumps the track completely in its last 20 minutes or so. Tyler’s big speech to her self-obsessed boyfriend feels completely out of character; Tom Everett Scott’s drummer hangs around the most accommodating studio in music history and has a miraculous chance meeting with the jazz musician he idolizes; the hotel’s magical concierge uses the same gag twice and then breaks the fourth wall ... and all of this happens in such rapid succession that I thought I’d hit my head. The movie’s humming along pleasantly enough and then WHAM! everything stops making sense and it never regains its footing.

Second, after a couple of hours it’s already fading from memory, leaving behind the title song, the fun of life on the road and Tyler. I think that’s because while That Thing You Do! is invariably pleasant, it’s also utterly bloodless.

Nothing is played for any stakes. Giovanni Ribsi breaks his arm and loses his spot in the band to Scott, but never seems bothered that he missed out on his friends’ rocket ride. The Wonders’ first manager excuses himself with nary a peep once Hanks arrives to take over. The veteran bands on tour with the Wonders brush the newcomers off at first, but pretty soon they’re all friends. The Wonders’ bassist is infatuated with a Black singer, which would have raised eyebrows in 1964, but the relationship barely makes a ripple. Despite ample warnings that it’s coming, the conflict in the band is mild at worst. Even the love triangle involving Tyler is resolved simply and with no particular fuss -- the Wonders�� lead singer breaks up with her, the drummer takes up with her, and all is well.

The movie presents an attractive surface -- despite all of the above, when I heard there was an extended cut I thought, “I’d hang around with these characters for 40 more minutes” -- but there’s absolutely nothing underneath it. Given the talent on both sides of the camera and the obvious care with which it was made, that’s a shame.

#movies

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raifuujin · 6 years ago

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MK Treasured Edition Commentary

From here, here, and here.

Volume 1

Hello, it's me, Aoyama.

In the course of the republication of Magic Kaito I take the liberty to show my memories of this time straightforwardly. (grin)

The Revived Phantom Thief The memorable first chapter! Actually I became a Mangaka because I wanted to write about a high school phantom (grin) and so I drew it under great tension! Well and back then I was short of money which is the reason why his hatband around his tophat isn't shaded with screen tone…

The Police Are Everywhere The original title „Keikan ga ippai” referred to a movie... „Taiyou ga ippai”, a movie with Alain Delon („Purple Noon”). Detective Doron is an allusion, too, because „Delon” is written as „Doron” in Japan. (grin) By the way! The words „When you bend them, they...” Kaito announces the light-emitting diode were literally written on the package of one of those things I purchased on a public festival as a kid. (grin) Appearantly they're actually known as „glow stick”.

The Clockwork Heart A science-fiction-thriller! A rarity for Kaito (grin). I recall that I perceived it as really exhausting to draw all the parts of the robot and that I had no computer, so that I had to write Kaito's farewell letter by hand (Haha!). By the way! In the panel the robot says „I'm Kuroba Kaito... Haha!!” Kaito's pupils look kinda strange (?). There I mimicked Akemi Matsunae of which I was a big fan back then. (grin)

Kaitou Kid's Busy Day Off Back then, the 3D movie „Captain EO” starring Michael Jackson was being played in cinemas and has been satirized in this chapter, although I never thought 3D movies could have been revived because of „Avatar”... (grin) By the way! When I read the closing scene today I think that the phrase „But, ice cream... still tastes great!” is my most embarrassing quote ever (grin).

The Pirate Ship Unsurfaced A sea adventure with Kaito? This is a rarity, too! (grin) I can't remember at all why I wanted to draw this story, but maybe I wanted a confrontation between a thief from the mainland and a thief of the seas...? (Ha!) Well, and so Kaito brought his costume of Kaitou Kid even to this place...?! (grin)

The Scarlet Temptress There she is! Mistress Akako! To be honest, she, as practitioner of black magic, is the reason who drove me into the corner the most during Kaitos appearances in Conan. Well, you just have to accept these works as parallel universes. (grin) By the way, Kaito Kuroba is written on the handkerchief, this probably was a prank done by his mom (Chikage)... (grin)

Aoyama Kid ♥

Volume 2

Stay Away From Him Although it's more of a romantic tale than a thief story I really like this one ♥ Especially the panel with „Well, excuse me for being an idiot...“ is a real gem, because of how often I had to redraw it! (laughs) Additionally, Superman and Top Gun appear... which is according to my taste! It's also revealed in this story that Aoko is flat-chested. (laughs)

Japan's Most Irresponsible Prime Minister A story I used one of my then-favourite actors Hitoshi Ueki, who has passed away in the meantime, as model! I also dared to use the Japanese prime minister - this was probably really audacious... And then characters appear who look like the past leaders of the USSR and the USA, Gorbachev and Reagan... (sweating). By the way, did anyone notice the „Akako balloon“ in the night sky? (laughs)

I Am the Master! This story was purely written because I felt like it! Anyway, I really wanted to draw how Kaitou Kid makes a balls to the wall ride down the facade of a building... (laughs). I would be nice if they one day made an Anime out of it ♫ Oh well, even if Cleopatra's Vanity case should really exist, two thousand years later one probably couldn't use it anymore... (laughs)

Would You Grow Up If I remember correctly, the hang-glider associated with Kaitou Kid lifted the first time in this story. Well, one could also say that Kaitou Kid could have fled from the get-go with it, instead of stretching a rope to the Tokyo Tower first (laughs). I'd really like to bring the motorized roller skates again.

The Boy Who Bet on the Ball It has also been really daring to take real professional baseball player as a model... (laughs). I think the story was created after I talked with my editor in charge about how thrilling it would be if Kaitou Kid appeared on a pole in Tokyo Dome. Well, the Yomiuri Giants are working together with Conan in several ways anyway, so I hope they can turn a blind eye to this... (fierce laughter)

Ghost Game If I remember correctly, I was frantically busy because I had to draw „Tantei George no Minimini Daisa-kusen“ („Detective George's Mini-Mini Big Strategy“) three weeks in a row for the Sunday magazine, so I finished this chapter in a very short time... (laughs). Directly afterwards my series „Yaiba“ started, because of which „Magic Kaito“ had to pause for a while. Hard to believe that the series is continued until today...! (laughs)

Hustler vs. Magician Originally this was the true second chapter of „Magic Kaito“! But... it was rejected! Since my debut in „Sunday“ there was never a story before or after it that was rejected. It's real luck that it made it into this volume! (laughs)

Omake „Magic Kaito“ was the first Manga I was allowed to publish as a Mangaka, which could be the reason I drew this story with zest and high motivation... Oh well, this probably was my youthful enthusiasm... (laughs)

Aoyama Kid ♥

Volume 3

Star Wars The first „Magic Kaito“ story I drew in the Heisei era (since 1989 -editor's note). There are several stories in which someone tries to gain profit from using a false Kid, but this is the shining first one! At the crime scene Kid announced a lot of Kid fans have assembled and shout "Kid! Kid!". Pretty clever idea, huh? Because this has developed to a classical element until today.

The Great Detective Appears!! Entrance of Saguru Hakuba! No, not only that, the chief inspector also shows his face...! Perhaps the junior was just worried because the top policeman never appears at the crime scene? (grin) By the way, Kid is so bad at ice skating because I'm so lousy in it myself.

Kaitou Under Scrutiny The skirt of Aoko's school uniform is so long and Kid's television is so big! From this you can tell the time! (Haha!) Apropos, the newspaper appearing on the last page is called „Oshima Daily Paper“ in the original version. Most of the newspapers shown in „Magic Kaito“ were named after my then editors. I beg your pardon. (grin)

Akako's Delivery Service Kaitou Kids measurements, 1.74 m (~ 5'9") and 58 kg (~ 128 lbs), naturally are my measurements from back then! The same goes for his blood type! (grin) Back then I thought it's really cool that it's possible to figure out skin colour and age of a person just by a single hair, but today, with DNA analysis you can figure out the whole identity of the person the hair belongs to. The progress of science is frightening... (Haha!)

(Extra Chapter) Yaiba vs. Kaito! I was told to draw a short, self-contained story and this dream sequence is the result. Back when I was a kid I already loved collaborations like „Mazinger Z vs. Devilman“, so I wanted to draw something like this. This is also the reason Kaitou Kid appears in Conan... (grin)

Blue Birthday The first time the gem Kaitou is after is the name origin for the title! Because this was the first „Magic Kaito“ after a very long time I debuted Kaitou Kid's arch-enemy and I can remember how much this motivated me... but it's also a story about a nightly firework in the midst of the city which must have made a lot of trouble in the surroundings... (grin)

Green Dream Oh well, this story is nothing special, but to be honest, it's this story which grew dear to my heart. (grin) What should I say about it? The rhythm is felicitous. This story was the first time I drew Kid's „signature“ we've grown so accustomed to. You can also tell from the name of one of the persons appearing that I really loved „Furuhata Ninzaburō“ back then - a japanese police detective drama.

Aoyama Kid ♥

Volume 4

Hello, it's me, Aoyama.

Since Magic Kaito is being republished I allow myself to show my memories about the past without further delay. (grin)

Crystal Mother This is the Kaito-train story I always wanted to draw! Including some allusions to "Lupin III" or "Sherlock Holmes" it became a story during which I could live it up... (grin) Snake, who got severely hurt in the tunnel returns in the following chapter completely unharmed. That's what I call "tough“! (Ha, ha!)

Red Tear Back when this story was published the first time, the thre first pages were in color! In fact, this created a mystery: „The gem on page 1 is blue, but the one on the cover page is red... Why oh why?“ Great that we can revive this mystery in all its glory! (grin) By the way, the closing scene in which all the photos containing the fondest memories are projected against the wall is an homage to the closing scene of the movie „Cinema Paradiso“. ♪ I used this highlight again in „Detective Conan – The Last Wizard of the Century“. (grin)

Black Star The first confrontation with the one and only Shinichi Kudo! In this story, Kaito says: „The inspector couldn't catch him even if he used a satellite system!“ But really, it's kind of surprising that he hasn't caught him before, isn't it?! (grin) Shinichi is firing a pistol? Akako wants to use magic to get rid of Shinichi? Little Kaito is flirting with Aoko? What a crazy story! (grin) Well, the scene in which Akako uses her magic powers was cut from TV syndication, but it was restored for the DVD, so everyone who wants to watch it, can do so now. ♥ Oh yeah, the title „Black Star“! I believe there are some readers who ask themselves why this gemstone served as the namesake of the story even though it's just mentioned in passing at the end. That's because Kaitou Kid himself is the "Black Star" after all ★ – hence the title! ♪

Golden Eye The first duel of the phantoms! (... maybe.) Catherine Zeta-Jones was the model for the character Ruby Jones. ♥ Well, they don't look very much alike... (Ha, ha!) In this story it's made clear that Kaito was born in June and Aoko in September! Exactly... Kaitou Kid may be a thief, but he is also a magician, so it really delighted me to slip in the name of the grandiose real-life magician Harry Houdini. (grin) There are a lot of tricky moments that show how much Detective Conan "poisoned" this story... (Ha, ha!)

Dark Knights The mask Nightmare is wearing is based on one I bought during a vacation in Spain, because I really liked it. It now hangs at the wall of my living room. (Ha, ha!) Again, in this story is a lot to analyze and moreover, it ends in a thought-provoking, grim mood, which isn't very typical for „Magic Kaito“. On the other hand, this isn't bad either, isn't it? Superintendent Chaki, an old acquaintance from Detective Conan, had his origin in this story. Further on, Hakuba's nanny „Baaya“ has her very first appearance in here! Actually, it's said that there is another nanny for him who has a more docile personality, but that's a different story altogether... (He, he...)

Phantom Lady (Preannouncement) This story revolves around how the original Kaitou Kid obtained a wonderfully beautiful jewel for the first time. ♥ It will be the first in Volume 5... I wonder when it will be released? (grin)

Volume 5

Hi, it's Aoyama ! Since a new volume of ''Magic Kaito'' came out, I have to delve into my memories from the past. PHANTOM LADY I wrote this story about Kaito's parents four years ago. I had stopped writing Magic Kaito for Conan and I thought : ''Wow, so much time has passed ?'' (laughs) If I recall correctly, his mother mutters ''Kaito, it's time for you to know'', and the story's finally here ! It's this story that finally revealed that Kaito's mother's name is ''Chikage''. It was my first time digitalizing a manuscript, I was glad I managed to portray the security sensor similar to phantom thieves stories so cooly, but I had to drew one night scenery after another, and that took time and so I almost didn't make it in a deadline. By the way, this story leads to Conan's Ryouma case, in volume 70. Read it if you're interested ! MIDNIGHT CROW When it was decided to animate the series, I had a meeting with the animation staff. We asked ourselves ''How are we going to finish the story ?''. So I suggested : ''Why not do one about a black Kaitou Kid that would be published in the Sunday ?''. And that's how I wrote Midnight Crow. I will never forget the staff's face when I told them ''Actually, Touichi is alive'' (laughs) Ikeda-san, Touichi's voice actor, had difficulty saying the line ''When you come in contact with an audience, it's a scene of duel...'' quickly ! <3 The ''sucker trick'' line comes from Kaito Kid's anime screenwriter Kunihiko Okada, who I thank very much. In the Phantom Lady chapter, Kaito's work as Kid was given by Chikage, but in Midnight Crow, he's supposed to quit because a lot happened in Las Vegas... but it's another story (laughs) SUN HALO This chapter was written to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Magic Kaito, so it had to be a love comedy <3 When I drew the chapter, Kaito's bike is a Suzuki GSX 250 R. I had forgotten that it was supposed to be broken, so I had Jii-chan say that a ''doctor friend'' helped him... I leave that to your imagination (laughs) Speaking of characters, Lucifer appears again ! As I thought, Akako uses red magic ! (Fortunately Akako doesn't exist in Conan's world (laughs)). The entrance hall in the chapter is based on Tottori's entrance hall, so please go there if you visit Tottori ! By the way, in Sun Halo, Aoko rides the bike with Kaito ! NONCHALANT LUPIN It's a short story I sent to a shounen magazine, and I got an award for it. As you can see, it was a prototype for ''Magic Kaito'' (laughs) The forms are different but there's no card gun. I drew this because the editor I had at that time told me : ''Show me a story you want to write''. It's my second work ! Now that I look back, I'm embarassed because it looks bad. (laughs) Anyway, the hero's name is Lupin, and the name of the story ''Nonchalant Lupin'', but I don't know where he's nonchalant... (laughs)

#reference #These are the ones that bug me the most about the translations honestly #Because these are the comments where people like to point and say 'DC and MK aren't the same world'#When the terms used only really indicate that their stories are separate; not their worldds #They're more separated into 'DC world' and 'MK world' in extremely loose terms that don't actually mean 'separate universes'#More just things like 'Akako is only going to be in MK because she can't appear in DC'#Which. Really gives more argument for their universes being the same; if there can't be a 'DC version' of Akako without breaking DC #Means if Akako were to appear in DC; she's implied to have magic; which could only be if she's the same Akako as MK #...Anyway; last post about this; unless more MK stuff comes up or I missed some #Which is possible; there's a lot of random information everywhere

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jamsque · 6 years ago

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Bitterness in the Age of Fighting

I was excited when the first episode of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness appeared in my youtube feed last Monday, I’m willing to watch anything Jon Bois puts his name on right now. Most of his content is centered around American football and basketball and baseball, which is great, those are all sports I have watched at least semi-regularly at some point in my life, but for the past few years I’ve followed Mixed Martial Arts more closely than any of them. Felix Biederman, the writer and narrator of the show, was a new name to me: I know Chapo Trap House by reputation but the most I have ever heard of it is a few clips out of context.

That first episode did some strong establishing work to set the tone and context for the series, and then got to work telling the fascinating story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Gracie family. It’s a story I know decently well, I think Felix did a good job of picking out the interesting characters and especially the moments of class struggle, and of course his words are backed up by the datawave audiovisual stylings of Jon Bois that we have come to know and love. The political ideas were more familiar and less interesting to me than the bits about fighting but I was curious to see how the show was going to try to draw connections and parallels between the rise of MMA as a spectator sport and the socio-political environment in which that rise took place.

I was engaged and I watched each episode as it came out through the week and by the end of episode four on Thursday I was starting to turn a little on the series. In this era of Youtubers with healthy Patreon support and good microphones I’ve gotten used to clear, smoothly edited, well recorded voice work and for me Felix’s narration falls short there, especially for a project with a major media company behind it. More than that, though, I was no longer on board with where the show seemed to be going, and I was worried that it would end on a sour note. I found myself agreeing with Felix’s political commentary but disagreeing more and more with his thoughts on MMA and the way he was choosing to frame the history of the sport.

The final installment disappointed me more than I had feared it might, enough to motivate me to make some kind of response to or critical reading of the whole series. Re-watching it with that in mind I (unsurprisingly) found more things I disliked. Fighting in the Age of Loneliness does an excellent job of telling the story of the ancestry, birth, rise, fall, second rise and anticipated second fall of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but along the way it makes some pretty big missteps and takes some positions that I strongly disagree with. I’m not going to break down each episode individually but I do want to lay out the issues I have with the series and in particular dig in to the problems with the last episode. Towards the end I think I might even call Felix Biederman a fascist.

First, I want to provide some context for my own thoughts about MMA, and make some inferences and assumptions about Felix’s history with the sport that I think go some way to explaining why we see it quite so differently.

I am absolutely not a long-time hardcore Mixed Martial Arts fan, until relatively recently I didn’t have any interest in combat sports at all. Growing up in the UK around the turn of the millenium I was aware of boxing but only from a distance, it was already well on its way to fading from the forefront of the popular sporting consciousness, and my pacifist socialist middle-class parents certainly weren’t watching Mike Tyson fights. The first contact I had with what I would later know as MMA was a grainy video I remember watching on some pre-YouTube video sharing site as a teenager: a highlight montage of a man wearing black, red and white shorts kicking various different people in the head in various different boxing rings, with the same concussive effect each time.

I became more aware of the modern sport of MMA when I started noticing the UFC in mainstream sports media headlines around 2014. Three names kept appearing in those headlines: Jon Jones, for running into things with cars, Conor McGregor, for running his mouth, but most of all Ronda Rousey, for running through every challenger the UFC put in front of her. I suspect that there are a lot of newer MMA fans who, like me, were swept up in the hype surrounding Rousey and McGregor during that time, and stuck with the sport after they finally broke their respective winning streaks and came back down to earth.

Three years later even though I watch MMA most weekends and even though I have become almost as fascinated as Felix Biederman seems to be with the history of the UFC, the people who have fought in it, and the things that they have done to each other, I still consider myself a ‘casual’ fan. This is at least partly because when I think of ‘real’ or ‘hardcore’ MMA fans, I think of people like Felix, who have been around the sport for a lot longer and are, at best, skeptical about the results of its most recent jump in popularity.

Felix doesn’t explicitly talk about the genesis of his interest in the sport but there are hints in the text. The general tone of the piece goes from being detached and historical in the first episode to personal and emotional in the last, which I think is both a deliberate choice on Felix’s part and a reflection of his own experience. The third episode, when his narrative reaches the mid-2000s, is when I think it transitions from learned history to memory, and it’s around here that Felix starts making frequent references to goings on in MMA fan culture. If I’m correct then Felix Biederman has been following MMA for at least a decade longer than I have really known what it was. He has had the time to become emotionally invested in fighters and even the UFC as an organisation in ways that I am not, and of course his initial views on the sport were formed a relatively long time ago. MMA fights in 2018 don’t look all that different than they did in 2005 but the UFC has certainly changed a lot in that time, as have public awareness of and attitudes towards a new generation of combat sports stars.

That decade and a half of change in the UFC is the real focus of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, but it presents itself as something much broader. The first episode is titled ‘The Invention of Fighting for Money’ and in it Felix makes a lot of sweeping statements about the past that don’t hold water. He very much tells the winner’s version of history, the narrative favoured by the UFC and the Gracie family, who would have you believe that they invented not only the modern sport of MMA but somehow the very idea of fighting itself. Felix remarks on the marketing and promotional skills of Rorion Gracie in the second episode without seeming to realise quite the degree to which he has himself fallen prey to them, and he also comes across as having the slightly fetishistic attitude towards East Asian martial arts that has become common in the USA over the past half century or so.

As he transitions out of the prologue, Felix says “the true catalyst for MMA as a sport, business and spectacle go back to Japan”, and when he goes on to describe the spread of Jujutsu from Japan to Brazil he says “after hundreds of years, Martial Arts had finally broken containment.” At the end of the series he proclaims that the “fourth era of fighting itself” is currently beginning and that the previous two ‘eras’ only lasted a handful of years each.

These generalisations don’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. The history of Martial Arts or combat sports or fighting or whatever term you care to use goes back much farther than feudal Japan, and some of the other things Felix says imply that he is at least partially aware of this. As he is giving his starry-eyed take on the life of Judo’s inventor he says “As long as there are people, they will at some point want the ability to keep someone from kicking their ass, no matter how unlikely it is that they will ever get into a fight.” It strikes me as particularly American that his argument in favor of combat sports being inherent to human society is based on the concept of self-defence. I prefer a line of reasoning that is similar but based on competition: As long as there are people, they will at some point want to test their wits and skill and strength against each other.

Indeed, the story as we know it of unarmed combat sports is as old as recorded history: there are images of wrestling in four thousand year old Egyptian tombs, and the classical Greek Olympics included an event called Pankration, which could be roughly translated as ‘fighting with all of your power’, that had an almost identical ruleset to early Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

Felix oversimplifies the history of fighting as a whole, but even if we just look at what he says about Mixed Martial Arts he gets it wrong. In episode one he says “The entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts owes its existence to Mitsuyo Maeda” and then in episode two he alleges that “A world where proto-MMA existed outside of gymnasiums in Brazil seemed pretty unlikely in 1976.” A corollary of my earlier statement might be that as long as there are people testing their wits and skill and strength against each other, there will be other people who think they can do it better. People have been pitting different schools of fighting against each other and amalgamating them long before the Gracie clan existed.

A decade before the date when Felix claims that mixed martial arts were confined to Brazil, Bruce Lee was blending Wing Chun with other styles to formulate Jeet Kune Do. A decade before that a Japanese Karateka was devising a ruleset which would eventually become Kickboxing to facilitate competitions between karate and Muay Thai. In the 40s the Kajukenbo school was founded in Hawaii with the goal of rigorously testing multiple fighting styles against each other to determine which elements of each were the most effective. In the 30s a Czechoslovakian Jew was refining the boxing and wrestling he had been taught in gyms into Krav Maga in brawls against anti-semitic thugs.

In Victorian London the Bartitsu school taught gentlemen a blend of five different fighting styles from around the world, while in the music halls exhibition matches pitted boxing against Savate. Savate was itself developed over the preceding century by efforts to find a middle ground between the heavy-booted street fighting style spreading from French ports and the Queensbury rules boxing that was popular in England.

Even the legend of the birth of Muay Thai, a fighting style which has had arguably as much influence on the modern sport of MMA as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a story about mixed martial arts: when the Konbaung Dynasty of Burma captured a famous fighter during their battles with Siam in 1767, they offered him the chance to win his freedom if he could demonstrate the superiority of his Siamese boxing style against the Burmese school, which he promptly did by knocking out ten Burmese opponents.

Felix contradicts himself on this topic in the first episode when he describes Jigoro Kano studying western wrestling and sumo to augment his Jujutsu training and develop Judo. In the second episode when he says “In 1993 no one knew anything, and most people still thought that if you did karate the right way you could blow up somebody’s heart” he is obviously being facetious but he is also projecting his own ignorance outwards. There has always been fighting, all over the world, and there have always been evolving schools of thought about the best ways to fight and the best rules for fighting as a sport. The story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Ultimate Fighting Championship is captivating but it is not, as Felix presents it, the only story about fighting. In this regard, as with others, he seems to have internalized the some of mystique that the UFC has cultivated around itself and its history.

Once the history lesson is over I think Fighting in the Age of Loneliness hits its stride and Felix’s passion for the Pride FC and UFC fights and fighters that drew him into the sport shines through in the writing and the narration. His criticisms of the ways that the UFC continues to underpay and otherwise mistreat its fighters are spot on and if anything he could have gone into its anti-union policies in more depth. Before I get to the final episode, there are a few smaller criticisms I want to get out of the way.

Firstly, I would like to have seen more about modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts in the show. I largely chalk this up to the difference in perspective on the sport between Felix and myself: a female fighter was what drew me to watch the UFC in the first place so my image of the sport is one that has always included women, whereas Felix got his start watching Pride, which had no female fighters, and an all-male era of the UFC. There were women competing in MMA at that time and a few exclusively female promotions but if Felix ever watched any of them he doesn’t mention it. In the end, Ronda Rousey gets a minute and a half, Joanna Jędrzejczyk gets about 30 seconds and Cristiane Justino gets a name check.

Rousey is the only female fighter to be mentioned outside of the quarantined WMMA portion of the show, and she comes up during a rather odd accusation of nepotism that Felix levels at Dana White, one which I have heard from other longer-standing UFC fans. I am no supporter of Dana’s and I’m not seeking to defend his character, but it seems far more likely to me that the reason the UFC put so many promotional resources behind Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor is not, as Felix supposes, simply because Dana White personally liked those two fighters, but rather because he saw the opportunity to make a lot of money off of them, which he did. Dana is a fight promoter, he is notoriously fickle in his affections and the warmness he displays towards any given fighter is directly correlated to their ability to drive pay-per-view buys for his promotion.

I also think that there are some more straightforward explanations for the UFC’s success than the poetic ones that Felix understandably focuses on. The ideas of the UFC as a refuge for outcasts and the alienated, both as fighters and as fans, and the honesty of single combat in an age of uncertainty are clearly very thematically important to Fighting in the Age of Loneliness as a project. For me the series places too much importance on the role those things played in the current popularity of the sport and doesn’t put enough emphasis on, or even mention at all, some more mundane but more significant contributing factors.

The vacuum at the top of combat sports that was created when boxing all but collapsed under the accumulated weight of decades of corruption and promotional malpractice, and the brief but significant success that the WWE had with a grittier presentation of professional wrestling in the late 90s both set the stage for the rise of modern MMA in the USA. That rise was helped along by things like the value of the walk-off head kick knockout and the fourteen second armbar victory in the age of the highlight clip and the animated GIF, and the mix of astuteness and good fortune that led the UFC to put out a reality TV show featuring actual physical conflict at a time when programming was being dominated by reality shows based on exaggerating and continually re-hashing interpersonal squabbles.

At the end of episode four, titled “As the world fell apart, the only magic was in the cage”, Felix’s rhetoric about the things that happen during UFC fights reaches its most florid, mythological heights. Against a montage of post-fight embrace photographs he says “The magic that we wish we saw everywhere else was in the cage [...] At least there was one place where unthinkable things actually happened, at least if you put two weird people with incredible abilities in front of each other their combined experiences and opposing martial abilities would create a beautiful, maddening story.” I am not criticising Felix for being more captivated by the emotion and passion of fighting than I am but the praise and reverence which he lavishes upon his favourite period of the sport’s recent history at the end of the fourth episode clashes brutally with the way he starts the fifth.

“No-one is ever content to just like something, especially not nowadays”, he says. “We’re not just fans of things any more. We declare our media consumption habits to determine the types of people we are [...] now if someone doesn’t like something we like they hate us” These lines and the visuals that accompany them are presented as a barb aimed at the legions of TV personality and pop star fans bitterly defending their territory on social media. Although there is a hint of self-deprecation about this segment I don’t read much self-awareness here, mostly just old fashioned middle-class punching down at the popular culture of the working class.

In the way he frames what he views as the best period of the UFC’s history, Felix is himself engaging in, as he puts it, “battles that our millionaire entertainers will probably never give a shit about or even find out about”. He has taken to the field of the culture war to defend his memory of a past version of a massive, sinister entertainment company against the changes that he perceives to be ruining it.

Here is where the bitterness begins to creep in, and build. Felix starts talking about the insecurity of modern MMA fans and the sport’s image problem, but then he abruptly dispenses with those concerns and starts arguing that MMA should remain insular and niche. A this point he also waves a huge screaming red flag by describing Jon Jones as a “weird person” who is “actually pretty fascinating once you get to know him” and who has “more depth than most would know”, but we’ll get to that later.

“Who gives a shit if we don’t have hundreds of millions of people watching with us every time, and why do we care if people think we’re fucked up or weird for watching it. We know what our sport is, and we know who we are [...] It’s our stupid violent insane spectacle sport for freaks and assholes that’s as legitimate or illegitimate as any other sport in the world. Well, at least it was ours at some point.”

I recognised this argument the moment I heard it. It sounds almost word for word like an insecure gamer defending video games as an art form and as a hobby that is just for real nerds and not the masses. I know that argument very well because I have been that insecure gamer in the past. In complaining that MMA is not “ours” anymore he has jumped from “if someone doesn’t likes something we like they hate us” to “if someone likes something we like for the wrong reasons they hate us”.

This is the tone that Felix adopts for the entire final episode, and he proceeds to decry three recent changes he thinks the UFC has made in an effort to bring the sport into the mainstream, changes that he declares as already being “to the detriment of the viewers, the fighters, and ultimately, [the UFC] themselves”.

The first is the Fox TV deal, of which his criticism is that it has led to too many fights and therefore too many fighters, but he doesn’t present any reasons why more fights has been a bad thing. He talks about how poorly the UFC compensates its rank-and-file fighters, which is a great argument for better fighter pay, but is not an argument for fewer paid fighters or fewer fight cards.

The second is the UFC’s apparel deal with Reebok, which he accurately assesses as a disaster for their fighters.

The third is drug testing, and for me this is where Fighting in the Age of Loneliness goes completely off the rails. The first thing he says in this segment is probably the only part of it I agree with: “the vast majority of your favourite athletes use steroids.”

Felix is right that the UFC asked the US Anti-Doping Agency to start testing its fighters more to provide an image of legitimacy than because they actually care about fair competition, but his main problem with the policy is that performance enhancing drugs are in fact cool and good. Earlier in the series he celebrates the way that Pride FC’s “loose medical oversight” and “pro-steroid policy” allowed its fighters to “consistently break laws of god and man,” now he gleefully exclaims that “Steroids are actually kind of amazing.”

“The human body is absolutely not designed to fight for 15 to 25 minutes, but steroids help make it work”. Felix provides no justification whatsoever for this claim, and it’s a ridiculous one that springs from the same myopic view of the history of combat sports that he expresses in the early episodes. To present just one counterexample, fighters in classical Greece did not have the benefit of modern nutritional science and training methods, let alone anabolic steroids, but the only time limit on Pankration bouts was sunset. Fights that last more than 25 minutes might not be the most fun to watch but they’ve certainly been happening since long before the steroid era.

Felix doubles down on this position. While he acknowledges that steroids “have their side effects” he asserts that “it is impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without some chemical help.” This is another absurd claim, he does try to back this one up but in doing so he immediately undermines it: “Talk to any retired fighter, and they’ll give a number anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of their former training partners juicing.” Rather than proving his point, this statement suggests that it is not at all impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without chemical help because at the very least ten percent of fighters are doing it. This scaled-back version of his original pronouncement does make the prospects of success seem pretty bleak for clean fighters, but Felix doesn’t care. He is happy to accept that if most fighters are doping then fighters need to dope to compete and therefore it is OK for fighters to dope.

USADA testing in the UFC has, in Felix’s opinion, fucked things up. There are a lot of very valid criticisms that he could make about the inconsistent way that the policy has been applied to different fighters or the odd ways it has conflicted and overlapped with state athletic commission testing policies or the lack of fighter engagement in the process of rolling out the program leading to confusion and uncertainty about the rules, but he doesn’t. Instead of talking about the massive unregulated supplement industry in the USA and the habit that some supplement brands have of ‘accidentally’ slipping a bit of the good stuff in their products to make sure that their customers get the gains they crave, he complains that fighters are being punished for “by-products of over the counter substances”. By-products and contaminants are not the same thing, I’m not sure if Felix just misspoke here or if he genuinely doesn’t understand the problem he is talking about.

He goes on to moan that the punishments for breaking the rules of the sport are longer under this new program. He doesn’t say why the longer bans are bad, just that the UFC has been ‘capricious’, and it seems obvious to me that the reason he disagrees with the longer bans is that he thinks PED usage is a good thing. Let’s address that idea.

There are two main reasons why I think performance enhancing drugs should be banned in almost all sports. The first is that PED use is bad for the long term health of athletes. We know that there are permanent negative effects associated with the use of anabolic steroids, and there are scores of other widely used PEDs that simply haven’t been around for long enough for the consequences of their use to be properly understood. It is possible to argue from this position for the regulation and standardisation of PED use in sports, and although I disagree with that line of reasoning I do think it has some merit, but there is no hint of this argument in Fighting in the Age of Loneliness.

I think the most practical way to prevent athletes from being incentivised to gamble with their future health for short-term gain, especially in a sport like MMA which already carries so much physical risk, is to ban the use of PEDs and enforce that ban with testing. Felix talks about steroids helping fighters to recover quickly from serious injuries, but I don’t think that is a worthwhile tradeoff to ask them to make, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing for the health of fighters if less prevalent PED usage meant that fewer of them had to endure the accumulated physical toll of fighting four or five times a year.

The second reason is a purely sporting one. The rules of all sports are arbitrary, but they usually constitute an attempt to delineate a competition that tests one particular set of skills and abilities in its competitors and excludes others. Chess is not designed to be a test of split-second reflexive reactions, 100 meter sprinting is not supposed to challenge your ability to predict the strategy your opponent is going to employ and prepare a counter-strategy, and as far as I am aware there is no sport that seeks to test its competitors ability to improve their bodies through medical intervention. I want the sports I watch to be fair competitions that are about what they are about, and Felix does too: he repeatedly praises the “truth” and “honesty” and “earnestness” of “what goes on in the cage,” but he fails to see how this contradicts with the idea of allowing the outcomes of fights to be heavily influenced months ahead of time by means of one fighter having access to less scrupulous, less restrained doctors than the other.

There is some nuance here around where you draw the lines between sports nutrition, necessary medical assistance and doping, but again Felix does not adopt a position so sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated in almost every popular sport that athletes with the help of an organised and scientific doping program have a significant advantage over clean rivals with similar levels of experience and training, and that’s not a contest I was ever interested in watching. Fighters shouldn’t use steroids any more than match sailors should use outboard motors, it is contrary to the very concept of the sport.

Felix isn’t just mad about USADA testing because he thinks steroids are nifty, though. He’s also mad that they took away one of his favourites. “At the absolute highest level of the sport, no-one was derailed by this as much as Jon Jones” This is another part of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness that emphasises the gulf between Felix Biederman’s perspective on the UFC and my own. He watched Jon Jones’ rise through the ranks and his multi-year reign as the consensus best fighter in the world, and was apparently completely captivated by it. In describing him Felix returns to the hagiographic tone of the third and fourth episodes, describing him as “a giant, freak athlete who did moves that he learned off of youtube to humiliate fighters we grew up with”, comparing him to Napoleon, calling him “a genius who can destroy world champions with stuff he saw in a movie, the equivalent to those savant kids who can hear a song once and instantly play it on a piano perfectly”

By the time I was starting to watch the UFC, Jon Jones had already sabotaged his career fairly comprehensively. I don’t know Jon Jones as a legend or a genius or the greatest fighter in the world because I’ve never seen the fights that earned him that reputation. Here are the things that I do know about Jon Jones, things that have happened or that I have learned about since I started following the sport:

Jon Jones is a homophobe. In 2012 Jon Jones crashed his car, plead guilty to driving under the influence, and received a slap on the wrist. In January 2015 Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test and was issued a token fine. In April 2015 Jon Jones ran a red light and caused an accident involving two other cars that left a pregnant woman with a fractured arm, then ran away only to turn himself in after an arrest warrant was issued and eventually plead guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident, receiving 18 months of probation. In 2017 Jon Jones was given a one year suspension after testing positive for banned hormone and metabolic modulators, which turned out to be contaminants in an erectile dysfunction pill he had been given by a training partner. In 2018 Jon Jones tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was suspended again for 15 months.

On the front steps of courthouses Jon Jones is humble and apologetic, and in the immediate aftermath of being caught doing something he shouldn’t have he often talks about how hard the experience has been for him and how much he has learned from it and grown as a person. At all other times he acts as though the bad things that happen to him or around him are never his fault, that he has no responsibility to ever change or even reflect upon his own behaviour, as though in all these struggles he has been the victim of cruel circumstance and conspiracy.

The Jon Jones that Felix describes is not someone I recognise, and the way he describes him is concerning. “As we got to know Jon more, we saw his personal foibles, like his DUI arrest and rivalry with Rashad Evans” I don’t think that having a heated rivalry with a competitor is comparable with drunk driving at all, and in framing the incident this way Felix trivializes it. He does this again with Jones’ hit-and-run conviction, mentioning it in passing but quickly moving on to quip about how awesome Jones got at powerlifting in his year off. He calls Jones “a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, got pissed off and said incredibly cutting things to his opponents”, reinforcing the impression that Jones’ main character flaw is simply being too fierce a competitor, instead of calling him, say, a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, took drugs he shouldn’t and crashed cars.

Felix is constantly making excuses for Jon Jones in this part of the episode. When he gets to the second failed drug test, he says Jones “got popped by USADA”, a turn of phrase that subtly reinforces Jones’ own narrative of victimhood, especially since Felix has already established USADA as the bad guys who are fucking up the UFC. He wraps up the Jones segment with a ‘boys will be boys’ defence couched in another appeal to the glory of days gone by: “It used to matter less if you acted like an idiot. Everyone was a bit of an idiot in one manner or the other in life, but god forbid you now embarrass the sport”.

From here, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness whines to a messy conclusion. The segments get more disjointed, it’s at this stage that modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts gets all of two minutes of consideration, and then there is a rather reluctant summary of the UFC career of Conor McGregor, who Felix seems not to like. He certainly doesn’t describe him with close to the same kind of exaltation that he deploys earlier for fighters who had similar trajectories like Mauricio Rua, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones.

After that, Felix goes back to behaving like a fan of an indie band that has started making top 40 hits. He doesn’t like that the one of the UFC’s new part-owners is an asset stripping firm, even though in his golden age one of the UFC’s part-owners was an Emirati war criminal. Back in the first segment of the first episode he references “this modern era of fighting, where all of the things that used to make the sport unusual are mostly gone,” and now he returns to that idea and calls the supposed new “fourth era” of fighting “sanitized and oversaturated,” contrasting it with the “honesty of a fist-fight” and the “cultural haven for strange people” that the UFC offered ten years ago. He complains that there aren’t enough knockouts any more. When he brings up the recent long-anticipated fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov he says “sometimes the dam of normalcy breaks and we get momentary bursts of how things once were,” which strikes me as a rather ‘what have you done for me lately’ attitude to take about something that happened the month before this video series came out.

Things drag closer to an end and Felix keeps returning to his golden age. “What was once a weird refuge for those who needed it is now eroding into just another thing that’s as formless and indistinct as everything else. Fighting has rid itself of so much of its magic. It does not transcend the world any more.” The way that he constantly makes references to a bygone era when everything was simple and pure and good and as it ought to be, and wishes dearly that we could return to that era instead of continuing to face the injustices of this current moment in time, reminds me a lot of an ideology that has has a big resurgence in the USA recently.

The episode wraps up with one final spasm of bitterness. “This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn’t just our problem in our idiotic bloodsport. You’re fucked too.” He’s not wrong about the commoditization of entertainment and sports-as-entertainment but he sounds once again like a whiny gamer stereotype or a disillusioned popstar fanboy of the kind he mocks at the start of the episode.

And then the episode doesn’t actually end. The sort-of epilogue about Donald Cerrone fighting Nate Diaz seven years ago is a good little segment, but it doesn’t do anything here. It doesn’t serve to illustrate or emphasise any of the things Felix has been talking about in the minutes leading up to it, it doesn’t follow from them in any kind of narrative. It feels like a piece that some combination of Felix Biederman and Jon Bois just liked too much to cut, even though they couldn’t find a place to put it, so they stuck it here at the end. Maybe it is intended to provide some sense of denouement after Felix’s angry ranting. Regardless, it comes at the end of such an unpleasant half hour that its attempt at poignance failed utterly on me.

Felix Biederman likes different fighters than I do, he has a perspective on the sport of Mixed Martial Arts that often seems parochial and outdated to me, and I am puzzled by his obsession with the idea that combat sports athletes are all strange, broken people, but none of these things would bother me if Fighting in the Age of Loneliness did not present itself as an authoritative, comprehensive history of fighting, instead of what it is, which is the story of Felix Biederman falling into and out of love with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Together with Jon Bois he certainly tells that story well, their collage of tales of societal fracture and political indifference with images of single combat is a powerful one, but in pursuing its thematic goals the series fails over and over to justify or interrogate the positions it puts forward.

If the UFC disappeared tomorrow, or if it had never been created in the first place, fighting would still exist, Mixed Martial Arts would still exist, the “one two path of a punch to a guy snoring on the ground” that Felix claims to adore will still exist. Fighting is exactly as magical and exactly as mundane today as it it always has been and always will be, even if Felix Biederman doesn’t enjoy watching it as much as he used to.

#Fighting in the Age of Loneliness #Felix Biederman #Jon Bois #SBNation #UFC #MMA #Chapo Trap House #Jon Jones #PEDs #Fighting #Combat Sports #Ronda Rousey #Conor McGregor

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