#in part because he identifies with natsume and sees his past self in him

[winepresswrath]

please ms midorikawa drop the extra anecdote please please please. also yes the contrast is interesting! it's impossible not to feel for Matoba when he's out there making his little overtures even if he is a real dick about yokai and defaults to presenting as self-interested and calculating (different problems). it is so fun and juicy to me that as Natori became more of a friend/ally/person-who-sometimes-needs-protection midorikawa was like ok we need a new shady older man trying to lure natsume onto team terrible exorcist. for the narrative. and he should be somewhere in the neighborhood of the natori to natori's natsume and the darcy to natori's elizabeth. also for the narrative.

[captainkirkk]

🦇🎃 WEEKLY FIC ROUND-UP 🎃🦇

All the fics I’ve read and really enjoyed in the past week-ish. Reminder: This list features any and all ratings and themes. Please look at tags and warnings on ao3 before reading.

Merlin

The Hunt for Red Emrys by darkbluedark

King Arthur sets out to keep his promise to the spirit of the Druid boy by repealing his father's ban on magic. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, for reasons including but not limited to the following:

(1) He can't change the law until he understands magic better, but no sorcerer is willing to explain magic to him until he changes the law;

(2) The sorcerers all have some strange obsession with Merlin, which is awakening all sorts of feelings in Arthur that he really doesn't fancy examining too closely;

(3) He is starting to feel like the butt of some Druid-population-wide inside joke involving the mysterious phenomenon called Emrys; and

(4) Oh yeah, Morgana is still trying to kill him.

Thus he embarks on a journey of discovery, diplomacy, accountability, and self-improvement, and maybe even falls in love along the way.

Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-Kun

Kalego-sensei is...dead? by IcyPheonix

The Misfits come to school one day to discover that they have, a substitute teacher. They decide that this can only mean one thing; Kalego-sensei, has died.

He hasn't but that's not gonna stop them from pretending he has of course.

SVSSS

The Moon's Beloved Shadow by mofumofu

Shen Qingqiu is a man who hides his twin brother from the world with the ferocity of a phoenix-eyed mother crane.

Shen Yuan is a helpless transmigrator who wishes Airplane-bro had given even a single bit of backstory for this side character he's inhabiting!

Luo Binghe isn't doomed to face the Endless Abyss, but he is forced to confront something infinitely more frustrating: an overly protective brother.

Natsume Yuujinchou

What Colors Do You See In This Monochrome World by mermorgie.

Natori's voice brought him back to the present. "You alright there, Natsume?" The look the exorcist was giving him was warm and a tad concerned. Natsume gave him a small, but earnest smile. "I'm fine, Natori-san. Just a bit nervous." This was the truth. He had no idea why the head of the Matoba Clan invited him this time, but he was sure that the man was up to no good.

Or: Natsume gets invited to an exorcist meeting. He is not too happy about it, but at least the view is great.

Harry Potter

Three's Family by darkbluedark

It’s May 1979 and the Order has just apprehended a pair of mysterious wizards who look remarkably like a Potter and a Malfoy. Naturally, James Potter and Sirius Black are called in to identify the strangely familiar strangers and determine their backgrounds and loyalties.

(This would be a lot easier if their captives weren’t convinced everyone they talk to is dead. It would also be easier if they didn’t spend half their bloody time bickering.)

-

“Just ask them questions only they would know the answer to,” Malfoy suggests.

“There’s not a single thing that I know about either of them from the first war that any old Death Eater couldn’t find out.”

“How is that possible?” Malfoy huffs. “He’s your father!”

“Am I or am I not famously an orphan?” Potter snarls.

Once More Unto The Boggart by darkbluedark

Professor Lupin let out his breath very slowly. “So this is why you think you’ve been struggling to make progress with the Patronus charm? Because a part of you wants to let the dementor close, in a way, in order to hear your parents?”

Harry nodded again, though more guiltily this time. “I want to let the boggart out, just once, and, er, not cast the charm."

Those Who Have Seen by darkbluedark

Only those who have seen death can see thestrals.

It turns out, thestrals look different for those who have seen Death.

[fatehbaz]

“It seems telling that the American icon of the cowboy, realized so strongly in Reaganite cowboyism, the quintessence of the maverick reactionary, should form the central heroic iconography in cyberpunk.“ -- Yellow Fever and American Sinophobia in the 21st century reminds me of how Nicola Nixon describes anti-Japanese racism of the 1980s in Canada and the US, when East Asia was framed similarly as a threat and nonfiction/fiction narratives invoked “intellectual property” and the concept of “American innovation” to accuse East Asia of “stealing our ingenious technology.” (Nicola also describes how cyberpunk literature, despite positioning itself as “radical” still often celebrated Ayn Rand-ian arrogance and Reagan-era cowboy culture.)

Excerpt:

Indeed the Yakuza is the paradigm for all the other Japanese megacorporations which appear regularly in Gibson’s texts  which formed the subject of endless documentaries and business-magazine articles throughout the ’80s because their corporate practice [apprently, in pop culture] presented [a] substantial threat to American-style capitalism [...].

American xenophobia and isolationism, particularly with regard to the Japanese scientific and economic invasion, manifested itself in the media through such scare tactics as Andy Rooney’s piece on 60 Minutes (Feb. 5, 1989), which portentously identified various historic American monuments as Japanese owned! And 48 Hours presented a piece called "America for Sale" (Dec. 29, 1988), in which various reporters, including Dan Rather, emphasized American objections to Japanese ownership of American real estate and industry. Amorphous Japanese collectives clearly posed a threat to the land of the free entrepreneurial spirit. This is surely the fear underlying the (defensive?) mockery and ridicule attending representations of Japanese tourists, traveling in tightly-knit groups, sporting extremely expensive, high-tech photographic equipment. If Canada as a whole did not reflect precisely the same degree of anti-Japanese paranoia being played out in America, British Columbia, Gibson’s home, betrayed more conflict about Japanese investment than most parts of the country. In the early and mid-’80s, in the midst, that is, of British Columbian Premier William Bennett’s open-door policy to Pacific Rim investment, reactions to Japanese tourists and potential investors were mixed: their infusion of capital into the flagging B.C. economy was indeed welcomed, and yet their actual ownership of luxury hotels, real estate, and various natural-resource companies (the forestry industry in particular) was both attacked and feared as being, ironically, merely a reenactment of past American practice.

If we examine Gibson’s texts within the context of such conflicting interests, we see the degree to which he deliberately avoids any form of simplistic anti-Japanese paranoia or its attendant racism and ethnocentrism. And yet Gibson’s Japanese conglomerates, in their collective and familial practice, nevertheless form the implicit antagonistic counterpoint to the individualist heroes. The bad guys in Gibson are, after all, the megacorporations -- Ono Sendai, Hosaka, Sanyo, Hitachi, Fuji Electric. The good guys are the anarchic, individualistic, and entrepreneurial American heroes: independent mercenaries and "corporation extraction experts" like Turner, console cowboys like Case, Bobby Newmark, Gentry, Tick, and the crew at the Gentleman Loser who jack in and out of the global computer matrix with unparalleled mastery. In Williams’ Angel Station (1989), Bossrider Ubu traverses the galaxy, roping in black holes. In Sterling’s Islands in the Net, American Jonathan Gresham, the self-styled "post-industrial tribal anarchist" (388), rides his "iron camel" through the "bad and wild" African Sahara—one of the few places free of the global Net—and eventually saves the hapless but earnest Laura Webster. The cowboys in Gibson, Williams, and Sterling are heroes who represent, as Williams suggests in Hardwired, the "last free Americans, on the last high road" (10). It seems telling that the American icon of the cowboy, realized so strongly in Reaganite cowboyism, the quintessence of the maverick reactionary, should form the central heroic iconography in cyberpunk. [...]

Cyberpunk’s fascination with and energetic figuration of technology represents the American cowboy as simultaneously embattled and empowered. In ’80s America the Japanese megacorporations did dominate the technological market, but the cowboy’s freedom and ingenuity allow him to compete purely on the level of mastery. The terms of such a competition -- Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity  -- seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding. In Interview’s special "Future" issue (1988), almost adjacent to Victoria Hamburg’s interview with Gibson, there appeared an article titled "Made in Japan," which confirmed for the American readership that the Japanese did not "initiat[e] new ideas" (Natsume, 32) and reassured it about the benign nature of the new products coming out of Japan: micro-thin televisions, special low-water-consumption washing machines, camcorders with RAM cards, auto-translation machines—non-essential but nice, unthreatening appliances. Computer and technological innovation would still come from American silicon valleys, would still be, by implication, "Made in America." In Gibson’s novels the console cowboys use expensive Hosaka and Ono Sendai cyberspace decks, but such mass-produced technology is always customized and enhanced, its performance and capabilities augmented by the cowboys’ more inventive, finer ingenuity. [...]

In effect, the exceptionally talented, very masculine hero of cyberpunk, with specially modified (Americanized) Japanese equipment, can beat the Japanese at their own game, pitting his powerful individualism against the collective, domesticated, feminized, and therefore impenetrable and almost unassailable Japanese "family" corporations. After all, in the world of the microchip, small is potentially powerful.

.--

Nicola Nixon. “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” July 1992.

[fatehbaz]

The current fear of China’s rising tech industry closely evokes the villainous depiction of Japan in ‘70s/’80s popular magazines and cyberpunk media; the tonally consistent tradition of American xenophobia against East Asia

As a sort of hobby interest, I do a lot of reading about Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Shanghai - three mega-cities and critical economic powerhouses that the Chinese establishment has used since the ‘90s as, essentially, experiments in rapid urban development with the basic intent to create hubs for computer technology industries to rival Silicon Valley. These three cities were essentially minor cities with rural agricultural hinterlands in the ‘80s, but today rank among the Top 20 most populous cities on Earth, with truly massive GDP’s, booming tech industries, thousands of start-up operations, and sophisticated architecture and transportation infrastructure. These cities - especially Shenzhen - have succeeded in rivaling the Bay Area.

There’s a lot at play - politically and socially - in how these projects were achieved (and especially fascinating is how Chongqing’s success is closely related with the city’s adoption in recent years of retro Marxist-Leninist communitarian ideals and programs). But today, I wanted to talk instead about American xenophobia and how these rapidly-growing tech hubs terrify Americans.

This week, I was watching a short-ish small-budget documentary on YouTube, which specifically explores how Shenzhen has become the “Silicon Valley of China.” Shenzhen alone hosts over 12 million people (greater than all of Chicago-land), but the city is physically contiguous with a greater urban area of 45 million people (three times metro Los Angeles-Anaheim) surpassing Tokyo and making it the most populous urban area on Earth; Shenzhen’s GDP is higher than Hong Kong, which happens to be just across a narrow strait from Shenzhen. Anyway, this YouTube documentary focused a bit on how the low-income residents of the otherwise highly-gentrified Shenzhen have become famous in Asia for their extremely passionate entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for re-purposing used and discarded tech parts to create homemade off-brand computer tech to sell at street markets. The narration also mentions how these tech wizards - and the more wealthy tech start-up workers - are able to establish themselves partially because they are not prosecuted for (re-)appropriating American inventions. Many jealous American tech workers allege that Shenzhen start-ups are “infringing on the intellectual property rights” and patents of American corporations.

And let me tell you, these (what I assume must be) young white American guys in the comment section are livid. Just, there is a stunning amount of comments that look like “Shenzhen only has a high GDP because they’re STEALING American intellectual property” or “yea, maybe they’re good engineers, but it was GENIUS AMERICAN MEN who came-up with the code” and “Americans did the hard part, the Chinese are just good at mass-production and cheap knock-offs.”

That last accusation is important: the concession that “China is good at mass production and efficiency” but “Americans are the real innovators who made it possible.”

“It’s not fair that China gets to profit off of technology that American heroes like Mr. Zuckerberg-Bezos McPeter-Thiel came-up with first!”

And these same tropes - “East Asians are frighteningly efficient, but Americans are smarter” - should sound very routine to anyone familiar with American xenophobia in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

So, this is all to say that I was reminded of a nice passage from one of my all-time favorite pieces of cultural commentary, which is Nicola Nixon’s classic “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” Nixon’s 1992 article discusses how all the hype that cyberpunk as a literary genre was receiving for being woke and “revolutionary” was not totally justified, at least for parts of the genre; a lot of cyberpunk at the time celebrated the Ayn Rand-style American, individualistic “cowboy-ism” of its male protagonists and included a lot of half-assed women characters. These shallow tropes were especially emphasized in the parts of the genre made for mainstream, popular consumption. Nixon, in the article, also clearly traces how radical feminist utopian science fiction of the 1970s paved the way for the kind of social wokefulness that cyberpunk would later claim.

Nixon’s article takes a momentary aside to address American (and Canadian) anti-Japanese xenophobia during the ‘70s and ‘80s, and how popular cyberpunk stories pitted American exceptionalism and rugged individualism against Japanese corporations. Nixon even suggests that Japanese congolmerates were subtextually conflated with “femininity” to make them even more threatening.

Here’s the fun passage:

Indeed the Yakuza is the paradigm for all the other Japanese megacorporations which appear regularly in Gibson’s texts: a collective construct which conflates the tight familial bonds of the Italian-American mafia with the equally tight employer-employee bonds of the frighteningly efficient Japanese industries. It is the latter which formed the subject of endless documentaries and business-magazine articles throughout the ’80s because their corporate practice presented the most substantial threat to American-style capitalism America had yet experienced.12

American xenophobia and isolationism, particularly with regard to the Japanese scientific and economic invasion, manifested itself in the media through such scare tactics as Andy Rooney’s piece on 60 Minutes (Feb. 5, 1989), which portentously identified various historic American monuments as Japanese owned! And 48 Hours presented a piece called "America for Sale" (Dec. 29, 1988), in which various reporters, including Dan Rather, emphasized American objections to Japanese ownership of American real estate and industry. Amorphous Japanese collectives clearly posed a threat to the land of the free entrepreneurial spirit. This is surely the fear underlying the (defensive?) mockery and ridicule attending representations of Japanese tourists, traveling in tightly-knit groups, sporting extremely expensive, high-tech photographic equipment. If Canada as a whole did not reflect precisely the same degree of anti-Japanese paranoia being played out in America, British Columbia, Gibson’s home, betrayed more conflict about Japanese investment than most parts of the country. In the early and mid-’80s, in the midst, that is, of British Columbian Premier William Bennett’s open-door policy to Pacific Rim investment, reactions to Japanese tourists and potential investors were mixed: their infusion of capital into the flagging B.C. economy was indeed welcomed, and yet their actual ownership of luxury hotels, real estate, and various natural-resource companies (the forestry industry in particular) was both attacked and feared as being, ironically, merely a reenactment of past American practice.

If we examine Gibson’s texts within the context of such conflicting interests, we see the degree to which he deliberately avoids any form of simplistic anti-Japanese paranoia or its attendant racism and ethnocentrism. And yet Gibson’s Japanese conglomerates, in their collective and familial practice, nevertheless form the implicit antagonistic counterpoint to the individualist heroes. The bad guys in Gibson are, after all, the megacorporations—Ono Sendai, Hosaka, Sanyo, Hitachi, Fuji Electric. The good guys are the anarchic, individualistic, and entrepreneurial American heroes: independent mercenaries and "corporation extraction experts" like Turner, console cowboys like Case, Bobby Newmark, Gentry, Tick, and the crew at the Gentleman Loser who jack in and out of the global computer matrix with unparalleled mastery. In Williams’ Angel Station (1989), Bossrider Ubu traverses the galaxy, roping in black holes. In Sterling’s Islands in the Net, American Jonathan Gresham, the self-styled "post-industrial tribal anarchist" (388), rides his "iron camel" through the "bad and wild" African Sahara—one of the few places free of the global Net—and eventually saves the hapless but earnest Laura Webster. The cowboys in Gibson, Williams, and Sterling are heroes who represent, as Williams suggests in Hardwired, the "last free Americans, on the last high road" (10). It seems telling that the American icon of the cowboy, realized so strongly in Reaganite cowboyism, the quintessence of the maverick reactionary, should form the central heroic iconography in cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s fascination with and energetic figuration of technology represents the American cowboy as simultaneously embattled and empowered. In ’80s America the Japanese megacorporations did dominate the technological market, but the cowboy’s freedom and ingenuity allow him to compete purely on the level of mastery. The terms of such a competition—Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity —seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding. In Interview’s special "Future" issue (1988), almost adjacent to Victoria Hamburg’s interview with Gibson, there appeared an article titled "Made in Japan," which confirmed for the American readership that the Japanese did not "initiat[e] new ideas" (Natsume, 32) and reassured it about the benign nature of the new products coming out of Japan: micro-thin televisions, special low-water-consumption washing machines, camcorders with RAM cards, auto-translation machines—non-essential but nice, unthreatening appliances.13 Computer and technological innovation would still come from American silicon valleys, would still be, by implication, "Made in America." In Gibson’s novels the console cowboys use expensive Hosaka and Ono Sendai cyberspace decks, but such mass-produced technology is always customized and enhanced, its performance and capabilities augmented by the cowboys’ more inventive, finer ingenuity.

In effect, the exceptionally talented, very masculine hero of cyberpunk, with specially modified (Americanized) Japanese equipment, can beat the Japanese at their own game, pitting his powerful individualism against the collective, domesticated, feminized, and therefore impenetrable and almost unassailable Japanese "family" corporations. After all, in the world of the microchip, small is potentially powerful.

From:

Nicola Nixon. “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” 1992 - Science Fiction Studies. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/nixon57art.htm

This right here:

The terms of such a competition—Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity —seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding. 

In this passage, you could replace mentions of the Japan of 1992 with the China of 2018 instead, and you’d be describing exactly the comments of and contextualizing proposed by American xenophobes criticizing current Chinese tech development and mass production.