#it's thematically resonant with the rest of the text

[rawliverandgoronspice]

given that seems to be the new popular take in the fandom at large since totk got out: let the record show that I'll gladly let myself get repeatedly manipulated by the wind waker speech and be foolishly moved by its implications over rejecting space for humanity and vulnerability in the monstrous and the dispossessed, and then feeling weirdly smug about severing that fleeting attempt at connection and deem it obviously insincere

[dedalvs]

When will humankind learn the lesson of its hubris and begin to heal itself? Also can you recommend any undergraduate or graduate level resources (textbooks etc.) for learning about fiction? I already read Writing Fiction by Burroway. Thanks in advance

January 14, 3182. Make a note of the date and return to this post when it comes.

To your second question, I've never read anything on writing fiction, only writing in general. I've found something valuable in every book on writing, even if there were things in the book I found less valuable. For example, I read Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, and while there was much of it I didn't care for, there are some passags that have stuck with me 22 years later. When it comes to writing guides, I think the best thing to do is read what interests you while understand that what you are really doing is building your own writing guide inside you. You're absorbing what you find personally meaningful and using it to create your own personal styleguide that, like it or not, you'll be following for the rest of your life. Rather than rejecting that, and trying to decide which text will be the text that tells you how to write, embrace it, realize that you are going to do what you're going to do, and then try to work within that framework. That is, if that's what's happening, how will you approach a styleguide? What will it mean to you to read a very didactic text (i.e. "All serious writers must do x; no serious writer every does y") vs. a loosey-goosey one (e.g. "Dance naked in the garden of your creativity and allow your flowers to bloom!")? What are you looking for in these texts and what will you do with information or strategies that you find valuable?

Returning to Writing Down the Bones, I have to say I found the book to be mostly woo. It was more a kind of self-help/empowerment book than a book on writing, in my opinion. But there is something in there that I'm sure I'd heard before but which finally resonated with me. Specifically, it was the way she articulated that it really, truly doesn't matter what you put on the page when you're drafting. Drafting is not the time to reject. Even some idea comes to you that you find absurd, illogical, thematically inappropriate—whatever. It's not the time to push it away. Indeed, it's wasted effort. Editing and revising is the time to question. If you're writing, you shouldn't let anything stop you—even your own brain.

Why it took till then for this idea to take root, I don't know. It could be how she worded it. It could be that it came at the right time. Perhaps I was more open to new ideas when I was reading this book. It may also have something to do with a transition that had taken place for me in writing. After all, when I started high school, I was not regularly using a computer (we'd only just gotten a computer that stayed at home). When I started writing, I wrote by hand—on paper. It's a much, much different thing to edit and revise when you're writing on paper than it is on when you're working on a computer! I mean, digital real estate is cheap. When you're writing by hand, it can literally hurt to write seven or eight pages—and then to discard them in editing! Right now I'm working on a novel draft where I've decided an entire section needs to come out. If I'd written that by hand?! I can't even imagine.

I guess the tl;dr of it is I don't have a specific text to recommend. Rather, I encourage you to look around and grab anything that interests you. In doing so, though, I encourage you to approach it differently, focusing on what in it you find valuable, without either wholly rejecting it or feeling you have to follow it to the letter like an Ikea manual. I even found something valuable in C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which I honestly can't believe I read.

If you'd like some fiction advice that may be generally useful no matter what you're writing, this is what I can offer:

A valuable skill to hone is being able to read your work as if you have no other knowledge of it. In other words, you need to be able to read your work like a reader. One of the most difficult things to do with fiction is to cut. You usually have a lot more characterization, a lot more plot points, a lot more detail, etc. than end up on the page. The important question is if you cut something, will the reader notice? Will it actually feel like something's miss it, or will a reader never notice? Mind, I'm not saying that as a writer you can't tell if something is superfluous, or that anything you cut will be superfluous. I'm saying sometimes even if you cut something important a reader will still get the impression that what they are reading is whole and unedited. That isn't a good thing or a bad thing: it's a neutral thing. The question you'll have to answer is what is this whole that the reader is getting, and is that whole something you're satisfied with?

Get multiple rounds of feedback from many different readers. I say this not because it's vital, because beta readers are important, because you have to have multiple perspectives on your work, etc. None of that. Getting feedback from many different readers is a form of self-care on the part of the writer. I was deathly afraid of feedback as a young writer. I welcomed praise, sure, but anything else felt too painful to bear. This changed when I took a short fiction class at Berkeley. Suddenly a short story of mine wasn't getting one round of feedback: it was getting fourteen. And not just from the professor, but from fellow students. This was a minor revolution for me in terms of accepting feedback. If I were to take, say, one round of feedback, certainly there would be some praise, but there would also be notes like "awkward phrasing", "why did x character do y?", "this is unclear", "too much description", etc. These things would burn me. I would seethe reading them, and it would hurt so deeply. But! Imagine that one of them circles a paragraph and writes "too much description" and then the other thirteen readers say absolutely nothing at all about that paragraph—maybe one even puts a smiley face next to it. THAT puts the criticism in its proper context. Maybe your writing isn't too bad! Maybe there isn't too much description. Maybe that particular reader just wasn't vibing with it, and maybe that's okay. And then let's look at it from the other perspective. Say thirteen out of fourteen papers have a sentence marked and all of them say things like "huh?", "what's this mean?", "confusing", etc. Guess what? The sentence is probably confusing. And for some reason if everyone's saying the same thing it hurts a lot less. It means, yeah, you probably made a little mistake, and that's okay. It's not one person singling you out, and it's not the case that they don't know what they're talking about. I can't emphasize enough how freeing it is to look at reviews of your work if you have a handful or more to draw from rather than just a single good friend.

It's okay to write the fun part first. You may have a plot device you're really excited about, but to get there, you have to introduce your characters, have them get together, have them go to a place, meet someone else, etc. And it may take time and energy to write all that. You may feel pressured to get through that before you get to the part you really want to write. You certainly can, but you do not have to. I don't know if younger writers can appreciate exactly what it means to have a computer. You can write a little bit now and literally copy and paste it into some other document later. Try doing that with a typewriter! You can write something like "Insert paragraphs later of characters traveling to x location". You can even drop a variable in there so it's easy to find with the search function later (e.g. "ZZZZZ insert scene description here"—now you just need to search for "ZZZZZ"). You can put it in a different color on the screen so it's easy to find when scrolling. You can paste a freaking photo into your document! It's extraordinary what you can do with a computer that you couldn't do in years past. You've got a ton of options. But most importanly, when your work is done, no one will know what order you wrote it in.

In fiction, nothing has to happen. Villains don't have to be punished; heroes don't have to win; characters don't have to have a specific arc that comes to some conclusion. Honestly, one of the tropes (if you can even call it a trope) that I find most frustrating in sequels for movie franchises is after the characters are introduced, they take a few character and assign to them the major story conflict, and then for the rest, they give them a mini arc. It's like, "Mondo 2: Exploding the Mondoverse sees our hero Larjo Biggins take on new villain the Krunge as the very core of the Mondoverse is threatened with destruction! Also, Siddles Nuli learns its okay to be left out sometimes and she shouldn't get her feelings hurt, and Old Mucko learns that even though technology is advancing, sometimes good old fashioned common sense is just what the doctor ordered!" If you get to the end of your story, and you feel it's done, you don't have to panic if you suddenly realize we don't know whether Hupsi ever made it to Bumbus 7. It's okay if Story A is resolved but Story B is not.

I don't care if you used Trope A in your new story even though you used Trope A in your past seven stories and neither should you. Seriously, you think anyone was complaining when Agatha Christie put out another mystery novel? "Oh. Mystery again, huh? Gee, we were all hoping you'd write a book about the struggles traditional fishing villages are facing in the wake of industrial modernization." No we fucking weren't!

I hope you find some of this useful. Whether you did or not, though, be sure you enjoy what you're doing. If you are, you're doing the right thing.

[girlfromenglishclass]

Homeric hot take: I think The Iliad is an inherently more interesting story when Helen did not go to Troy of her own free will.

The primary reason why it that it is more thematically in-keeping with the rest of the story. It allows her to not just set the war in motion but also to set in motion the questions of the narrative: What is the worth of honor? What is the worth of a life?

If Helen goes to Troy because she's just so in love, and the war is fought so she can live happily ever after, that doesn't really have anything to do with the themes of the Iliad. However, if Paris steals her, and Troy fights because they are not willing to give her back, can't admit to a crime, they'll look like cowards, it's a matter of honor, then we have something. Agamemnon kills Iphigenia because if he doesn't, the war is over, they'll look like cowards, it's a matter of honor. The armies attack after Paris flees the duel because if they don't, they'll look like cowards, it's a matter of honor. Finally, when Briseis is taken, Achilles stops fighting, demanding her return. She's his war prize, what is he, a coward? This is a matter of honor. This way, it echoes Helen's kidnapping. The war is being fought because honor demands it, and this directly parallels one of the central questions of the text: What is the worth of a life?

When Achilles considers going home and abandoning the forces, he tells Agamemnon that he has no real quarrel with the Trojans; they did nothing to him, but he came here for the honor of the Atreides, which now he doesn't even care about. We're meant to ask ourselves - has this been worth it?

When he returns to fighting, it is not because of honor, but because he personally wants to kill Hector in revenge for Patroclus. However, this is where the framing of the narrative becomes important. The story doesn't end with Achilles killing Hector. It doesn't even end with the fall of Troy. It ends with Hector's body being returned and buried honorably because that's the most thematically resonant ending to these questions. Achilles could have easily refused Priam, not gone back on his choice, like everyone else in the narrative has. But instead, we're given a show of true honor (returning the corpse of your enemy) vs honor of obligation (going to war and killing your enemy) It represents an answer to the question asked by the narrative; honor does matter, but not more than life.

Having Helen kidnapped and having the Trojans too prideful to return her allows her story to matter not just to the plot but to the themes of the story. She's an echo of Briseis and a symbol of stolen honor, not a sad love story.

[lotus-tower]

the orochi revisited: the takagin edit

the digital version of yaoizine vol.2 has been out for a while, so i thought i'd finally post my essay on here! some of the jokes don't work as well without the context of the zine's cover but lol. hope you enjoy anyway. a very brief overview of the takagin relationship in relation to my first essay's framework

The following paper is a commentary on and tribute to My Orochi Stood Up: A Draconic Response to "eat shit and die” (1948), in celebration of its 75th anniversary. Though much has changed in the anal-ytic landscape since Orochi was first published, much is still the same. As the pioneer of ouroboros theory, a now interdisciplinary framework that has made many valuable contributions to the study of literature both anally inclined and not, My Orochi Stood Up is a foundational work that has remained relevant and resonant across years and disciplines. However, in this text I will be focusing on Orochi’s roots first and foremost as a piece of Gintamaology.

To begin, we must acknowledge that it is impossible to discuss My Orochi Stood Up without also accounting for the work it was written in response to, T. S. Hirt’s eat shit and die (1938), or the original unnamed poem where most of its ideas first took shape (1944). Unfortunately, providing a commentary of the former would be beyond the scope of this paper. Readers interested in anality are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with this watershed text in Gintama escatology, as it lays the groundwork for everything that follows. As for the poem, it is referenced at length in My Orochi Stood Up, but I have decided to omit mention of it–among many other things–owing to this journal’s physical constraints. While I regret the necessity of this, there is simply too much to say on the subject of “the pole and the hole” in Gintama–particularly the pole, which Gintama explores with endless fascination. The sword, the pillar, the Terminal, the gravestone, the tree–with its fondness for substitution as well as its love of dirty things, Gintama’s collection of treasured motifs has no shortage of things that stand erect. 

Both pole and hole are equally important to the cycle of self-fertilization first described by My Orochi Stood Up almost a century ago. Yet Orochi was, understandably, primarily preoccupied with explaining its ouroboros thesis, leaving it with limited room to discuss in-story logistics beyond the conceptual framework and Gintama’s broad thematics. As you may have guessed, this paper will attempt to do so–and for this purpose it would be more efficient to start from the bottom up, so to speak. So this essay is dedicated instead to the hole, that gaping void named as Gintama’s ultimate antagonist. Let us now revisit the holeistic framework of the serpent swallowing its tail while examining one of Gintama’s most fraught relationships: Gintoki and Takasugi. 

______________________________________________________________

First, it cannot be overstated how much Gintama relies on duality and parallel structures. The Gintama cast and narrative is constructed like a hall of mirrors, parallels upon parallels upon parallels organized on each side of a central divide. This intersecting line, as shown in Figure 1.1, is what creates the reflection in the first place, allowing characters to be mirrors (or, in the prized language of fandom, foils). One could consider it the glass of the mirror, or the organizing force of the narrative itself. The creation of this dividing line provides structure to the characters, the world, and its temporality–but it is also an act of violence. See Fig 1.1.

Fig. 1.1: ⭩🢥⮀🢛❑⮅⮡🢜

On a diegetic level, bad things happen to the characters because life is difficult, and mostly similar bad things happen to everyone because the series rests upon the Joui war and its related conflicts the way a world rests on the back of a turtle. But perhaps more relevantly, Gintama’s central conceit is that one’s ultimate enemy is always oneself, so naturally all enemies can eventually be conflated. It is an efficient tautological loop. 

What separates the characters on each side of the dividing line, then, is not the degree of suffering they undergo but their response to that violence. My Orochi Stood Up terms these unfortunate souls who end up on the wrong side of the divide “hole-sided.” Their lack is caused not by their injury, but by their own response to it, by their failure, for a time, to live up to their own humanity. This is the position occupied by the antagonists (and, intermittently and continuously, yet somehow always away from the reader’s eyes, our protagonist Gintoki), those who have failed to fill the lack in their souls like responsible adults. 

That which Gintama prescribes to fill these naturally and unnaturally occurring holes in humans is dirt: the debris accrued from a lifetime of living, brushing shoulders with other people, becoming stained by them, becoming dirty and worn as you mature, subjecting yourself to the deeply humiliating and humbling experience of being alive. Of course, as both eat shit and die and My Orochi Stood Up illuminate, in Gintama “dirt” is also a synonym and euphemism for “shit.” We are thus not talking about just any dirt-filled hole, but specifically about the anus. The vulgarity of Gintama’s framing of bonds–as shitting onto and into each other–and its use of shit as a humanizing trait is highly characteristic of both the series’s general sense of humour and the ways in which it mixes gags and serious delivery of narrative to create a densely layered non-linear experience in which absurdity and tragedy are forcibly, jarringly concomitant. 

As T. S. Hirt wrote in 1948, “the anus—the dirty human things—is the home for the phallus—the ideals we hold, the source of our power.” Indeed, were Gintama not so irreverent about its most valued symbol, the sword, due to its fondness for wordplay and for low-hanging fruit, perhaps the nationalistic bent of the series would be more questionable. But as My Orochi Stood Up argued, Gintama’s emphasis on wordplay and its fearless decision to call itself the equivalent of “Ligma” are integral to a thematic understanding of the series, and are key to the ouroboros thesis in particular.

But perhaps the singularly most important example is the -tama in Gintama, with its plethora of potential meanings, each of them just silly and dirty enough that you have to take it seriously. Beyond the obvious joke on kintama (balls) and the “silver soul” direct meaning, we’ve seen that tama is also easily conflated with atama (head), and even with tamago (egg). This is clearly demonstrated with the series’ fixation on beheading leading to the salvation of the soul and the bodyswap arc hinging on the pun between soul and egg. [...] The fact that the characters end up turning into giant turds, likening the soul-egg-balls to an asshole, only drives the point in further. (My Orochi Stood Up, 1948)

To return to the unfortunate hole-sided, these are the characters who lack dirt, who could not withstand the mortifying ordeal of being alive. The natural assumption to make here would be that Gintama then juxtaposes opposing forces, setting “desiring-pairs” of head and hole, sword and scabbard in conflict with each other. Indeed, Gintoki is stabbed again and again, with all kinds of blades–but the villains do not want to stab him as much as they want him to stab them, with his much more meaningful sword. Yet those who are hole-sided do not seek to be filled.

[...] But this is a different process than emptying yourself, which is what the antagonists are doing. All Gintama villains are hole-sided, desperately trying to destroy themselves while pretending, as hard as they can, that they don’t know that you can’t destroy a hole–only make it bigger. (My Orochi Stood Up, 1948)

Takasugi desires Gintoki, not because he believes Gintoki can make him whole again, but rather because he knows he cannot ever be whole again, and that is because of his love for Gintoki. Moreover, the series’ consistent use of language such as “broken” versus “unbroken” swords implies that those who cannot be filled are also those who cannot fill others. Just as the serpent cannot swallow its tail without filling its own mouth, its mouth cannot be filled without having a tail to swallow. As My Orochi Stands Up makes clear, the process of self-creation and other-creation are effectively one and the same in Gintama.

All Gintama antagonists are in parallel with each other and in mirror with their counterparts, who in turn contain echoes of our protagonist, Gintoki. In this way, the entire story can be folded in on itself, side over side, into the shape of Gintoki, the microcosm, like a piece of carefully designed origami. One of the most popular endings of the anime, ending 25, “Glorious Days,” demonstrates one half of this as Gintoki stands unmoving and unchanged as the anime’s large roster of antagonists replace each other before him in quick succession, different times and places flashing past without emphasis. “Nothing has changed,” Gintama constantly claims, while simultaneously showing us how the world has entered a different era, a different century, a different genre, in the span of ten years.

In the ending, Takasugi and Gintoki haunt each other’s footsteps. Takasugi’s feet in Gintoki’s reflection in the water lag one step behind, unable to keep up with him but unable to stop chasing after him, while Gintoki’s ghost is not even visible in Takasugi’s reflection; instead, Gintoki’s presence is indicated by Takasugi’s own reflection stopping and looking back.

Gintoki and Takasugi are the most important pair of mirror selves in Gintama, and inarguably the most yaoistic. Rather than homoeroticism, however, what they have could perhaps be termed a sort of homothematicism. Whereas Gintoki has filled himself with dirt and debris from the series’ overflowing, enormous cast, learning and re-learning how to be human, Takasugi is caught in an incandescent storm of rage and grief, a serpent futilely trying to swallowing itself in the literal sense. But he can never succeed, because he has nothing to fill his belly with other than himself; there is nothing he values in the self he is trying to destroy; thus, he can never satisfy his desire to hurt himself.

Takasugi’s immortality is of the same kind as Utsuro’s, which is to say, hole-sided. It is not that they cannot be killed, only that they cannot die. Takasugi therefore turns to the same drastic final resort as Utsuro: destroying the world in order to destroy themselves. Again we can observe Gintoki’s role as the microcosm in comparison to Shouyou and Utsuro’s exaggerated, macrocosmic style. My Orochi Stood Up details how Utsuro as well as the eponymous Orochi’s identities blur into that of their respective planets, likening them to world snakes. Tied to the Earth itself, Utsuro’s existence cannot end independently of it; his only recourse is to destroy Earth, and perhaps take the entire universe with it.

To Takasugi, however, the world is synonymous with Gintoki. 

Takasugi’s doomed love for Gintoki affords him an interesting position in the narrative, where his conflation between Gintoki’s sword and the pillar of the world aligns with the story’s folded structure centered around Gintoki. Takasugi is Gintoki’s shadow, Gintoki’s “other self”, as Gintama terms it, but weak, diminished, unable to carry the burden of living or live up to Shouyou’s teachings. Gintama’s villains–and its weaklings–are those who will recklessly hurt others in order to harm themselves; its heroes are those who will fight themselves in order to become better versions of themselves. Conveniently, in this cast the villains are the heroes are the villains–and so in defeating the villains, the heroes overcome their own shadows, while the villains knowingly throw themselves into this process out of desperate hope that this will finally end their miserable roles in this story.

Takasugi, then, tries to destroy Gintoki because it is the only way he can destroy himself. On one level, part of him possesses the same general meta-awareness that all Gintama characters have about their allotted roles, and knows that if they were to clash, Gintoki would be the one to successfully devour him. But for the most part, Takasugi’s motivations are painfully earnest and straightforward: harming Gintoki simply hurts more than harming himself can ever hope to accomplish, and if Gintoki were to die, so too would Takasugi’s world crumble to nothing. 

What is interesting is Gintoki’s response to these violent advances. Gintoki, of course, understands full well what kind of story he is in at all times. “Too bad,” he tells Takasugi, scraping himself back up from the ground. “I won’t fall. Until you stop, I’ll keep standing back up.” Here Gintoki himself is positioned as one of those things that stand erect. The Gintoki in Takasugi’s memory that is invoked is “a figure that stands before Takasugi”–or, put another way, Gintoki understands his duty in their relationship as that to keep standing, for as long as Takasugi needs something erect to throw himself against.

Thus, when Takasugi says that the world will not end as long as Gintoki’s sword remains unbroken, while Gintoki says that the only way to stop Takasugi is to stop his breathing, Gintoki becomes the immovable object and Takasugi the (un)stoppable force. However, in a fascinating inversion of the usual connotations, here the object is presented as something the force has chased after all its life, something unattainable and unreachable and yet no less immovable. Meanwhile, the force traps itself in a circular, looping motion, its unstoppable momentum doing nothing to help it escape its labyrinth. But in their battle, Takasugi and Gintoki do manage to reach each other; not because of Takasugi’s desperate violence, but because Gintoki’s interiority is as vast as the story they are in, and he is able to take Takasugi into himself. 

My Orochi Stood Up’s ouroboros thesis is famously anchored in western alchemical and philosophical concepts. It frames Gintama’s mission of human-becoming as the enacting of the Great Work, viewing Gintama’s parallelism through the lens of the individuation process. On the ouroboros as a symbol of two becoming one, it quotes Carl Jung:

In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This 'feedback' process is at the same time a symbol of immortality since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself, and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he, therefore, constitutes the secret of the prima materia which ... unquestionably stems from man's unconscious. (The Collected Works of Carl Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1977)

Gintoki’s assimilation of his shadow, of his other self, is best represented by the moment where he finally visibly attains “a human’s sword” at the end of the series. Takasugi’s reflection in Gintoki’s blade bequeaths upon him the honour of being the face of Gintoki’s “human’s sword.” This is a similar use of the reflection as in Ending 25. What is made clear by comparing these two moments is the same obvious truth that Gintama has impressed upon its readers all along: Gintoki is capable of containing Takasugi within him, but Takasugi is not capable of the reverse.

Or, more accurately, Takasugi is chiefly defined by the fact that he carries Gintoki’s ghost within him–and was driven insane by it. Gintoki was able to quietly shoulder the knowledge that his actions caused Takasugi’s descent into madness, but Takasugi was never able to inure himself to the sight of Gintoki’s tears. Takasugi is hole-sided primarily because he hollowed himself out in a vain attempt to scrape the image out. But dirt, as My Orochi Stood Up states, is what remains. 

Takasugi’s crushed left eye has ever been his most obvious hole. Indeed, confronting Gintoki again made him aware that the image of Gintoki’s face that he had been carrying around in his eye like a grain of sand was in fact a speck of “dirt.” And of course, Takasugi was never empty: though the Kiheitai are sparse characters, they serve quite clearly to illustrate that Takasugi had never stopped being surrounded by people who trusted and depended on him, people who could participate in Gintama’s dirty gags and absurd comedy in the ways he could not, and people who, on multiple occasions, physically emulated Takasugi in order to inject his likeness into the series’ gags even when he was not present. People who, in short, supplied him with dirt.

The linkages between the gross and vulgar nature of Gintama’s preferred jokes and the double entendre in the meaning of “dirt” are an intrinsic part of both Gintama’s vision of life and the ouroboros framework. As T. S. Hirt explained, “the persistence of those dirty things marks the permanence of one’s relationships. something clean would never stick so.” Gintama posits that living is mortifying, humiliating, and while not shameful, certainly full of shame and debasement. To be a character that clings to dignity–or to whom dignity clings to–in Gintama is to accept an unfavourable life expectancy. Takasugi, while participating in a few gags, was never thoroughly embarrassed by them. His friends’ actions thus helped to tether him to the world of the living, even at his most ghostly. 

Holes do not need to be completely empty to be deemed holes. Such a proposition would be absurd. Holes are identifiable even when filled partway with soil–even, perhaps, when brilled to the brim. No one is truly empty. My Orochi Stood Up makes clear early on that “head vs hole” is not a false dichotomy, but a misleading one: 

You can reduce everything in Gintama to essentially two things. Shouyou and Utsuro. Gintoki and Takasugi. Humans and monsters. [...] Those who take in and those who are taken in. Those who keep struggling and those who don’t. And then you can also always reduce these two things to one thing: Shouyou/Utsuro are, after all, the same being [...]. You can’t pick yourself back up if you never lost in the first place. We know that Gintoki has managed to become “a splendid human” by the end of the series–so what was he before that? Was he really a monster? At what exact point in the series did he become human? Was it while he was on-screen, while we were looking, but without us noticing? Was it off-screen, while we were flipping the page, or in the space between the panels? The answer, of course, is that he was learning to be human every day of his life [...]. And so “which one is the head and which one is the hole?” is the wrong question. Even if you assigned one to each half and managed not to be wrong, since they’re collapsible into one anyway, they’ll always be both. (My Orochi Stood Up, 1948)

To be hole-sided is not to be the hole. It is to be stagnant, to be trapped in a state of needing to be filled without being able to carry out the process of self-constitution with the dirt that is received. In the end, Gintoki, the “reluctant hole” as T. S. Hirt iconically termed, is the one who takes Takasugi into himself. My Orochi Stood Up quotes philosopher Bernard Stiegler: “The I is essentially a process, not a state, and this process is an in-dividuation [...]. It is the tendency to become one, that is, to become indivisible.” This is, I argue, the climax of their homothematic relationship. Not coincidentally, it is also the climax of Gintoki’s personal quest to become human, the individuation that Jung and Stiegler speak of. 

My Orochi Stood Up capitalizes on the ouroboros’ nature as a symbol of fertility to liken dirt not only to shit but to seed, and the hole to the womb where the tama (egg/soul) is fertilized. It is an intentionally paradoxical and anachronistic framework, where one must have an unbroken sword to be able to be fertilized by the dirt of others, yet it is only through that fertilization that one’s sword can be forged. This is simply another iteration of the classic chicken-or-egg dilemma, as befits the motif of the ouroboros. But for the characters of Gintama, this paradox reflects their continuous responsibility: the task of becoming human is a Sisyphean one that will span their lifetimes and beyond.

In other words, as Takasugi was folded into Gintoki, he found that he was already there; that his lack was filled by Gintoki because he was filling Gintoki; and that being a ghost did not preclude anyone from being human.

I have spoken at length about holes and serpents up until this point without mentioning the eponymous dragon, Utsuro. This is partially because this essay was focused on Takasugi and Gintoki’s relationship, and partially because practically all insights regarding Utsuro are contained within the framework of the ouroboros thesis itself. As the world snake, his body and bones were used to construct the theory we have been discussing, his lack identical in essence to the other hole-sided. It is worth noting, however, that for Gintoki, Utsuro represented the unreachable object. Gintoki’s deepest anxiety was over his blade not reaching Utsuro, because he had been told that he could only reach him with a human’s sword. In the end, as we have seen, he does indeed manage to reach him, with Takasugi’s soul in his hands. 

Takasugi, too, manages to reach Gintoki in the end. Cradled in Gintoki’s arms, he is brave enough–and selfish enough–to ask for a fleeting smile. My Orochi Stood Up argues that the moment Gintoki’s tragedy was revealed to us through Takasugi’s eye was the one that broke Gintama’s own narrative cyclicity. This was, of course, the original bit of dirt flung into Takasugi’s hole that he could not cope with, that halted his process of individuation. As previously mentioned, the ten years that separate the end of the Joui war from the present day span an entire age. At the very end, this eternity spent wandering, too, ruptures, and Takasugi finally finds his way out of the labyrinth, only to look back and see a clear and straight path through the trees.

______________________________________________________________

This essay has been a brief exploration of Takasugi and Gintoki’s relationship in the context of My Orochi Stood Up’s innovative ouroboros framework. In the seventy-five years since it was first published, it has been transformed in diverse and exciting ways. However, I thought it only fitting that for this major anniversary, the focus be brought back to the Gintama characters that first inspired it. Rather than the iconic dragon, Shouyou/Utsuro, this piece has chosen to focus instead on his two most intertwined disciples. While not necessarily treading any new ground, I hope to have presented an interesting snapshot of this relationship known for being simultaneously transparent and opaque.

As we have seen, this relationship is one made possible by the intense parallel structure it embodies. Just as Takasugi serves as Gintoki’s shadow, their journey and the cannibalistic nature of their duality echo the conflict represented by their teacher, and in many respects parallel the shape of the narrative itself. In this way, the position they occupy in relation to these other draconic structures–micro- or macrocosm–is perhaps a reversible one. 

In short, though Gintama “cannot resist the phallus,” as T. S. Hirt said, it is also singularly concerned with holes: how they are filled, what results from them, what constitutes them. The only question it does not ask is what creates them. It is instead implicit that human beings naturally possess holes, that they are a natural part of the anatomy of both our bodies and souls. And thus, it is natural both to fill them and to fail to fill them; the fertile infinity of the ouroboros guarantees that should one fail, there will always be tomorrow.

[glomofnit]

Hey! I really want to get into Discworld because I love seeing you post about it- can I please get a rec of maybe the first three books I should read? I've heard that most fans have a preferred order lol

Omg, you have no idea how excited I got when I saw this ask, I'm so glad my love for this series is proving infectious! Unfortunately by asking this of me you have in fact activated my trap card, so please buckle in because I'm incapable of being normal about this topic.

Alright so in terms of where to go next, there are these sort of thematic arcs throughout the series that are like threads you can follow, each with their own starting point. Obligatory flowchart incoming:

I won't go into them all in detail, but I can give you a few key recs and then you can pick and choose your reading order from there based on what interests you.

So first of all we've got Small Gods, which is one of the more popular starter recs, and for good reason. It's more or less a stand-alone so it's a good way to dip your toe in and get a feel for the series as a whole, which is slightly less relevant here since I know you've already read The Colour of Magic, but it's still quite good and worth mentioning up front. It's about the god Om who goes to manifest himself in the world to address his latest prophet, but winds up stuck in the form of a small tortoise because despite having this huge religious institution in his name, it turns out this prophet is his only remaining true believer. Said prophet then gets swept up in some political intrigue, all the while being yelled at by an irate tortoise whose voice only he can hear. It's a good indicator of the style of comedy and general vibe of the rest of the series, and it's where I started reading so it's got a special place in my heart.

I also recommend Monstrous Regiment, which is one of my all-time favourites. It's about a girl who dresses up as a boy to enlist in the army so that she can find her brother, and ends up part of this sort of ragtag underdog regiment. It's surprisingly queer, although no specific labels get used so a lot of the characters just have a sort of nebulously not cis/not straight vibe, but there is an actual canon wlw relationship, and at least one character who based on the text I would argue is a trans man even if those exact words are never used. A lot of the Gender™ in this book really resonated with teen Rowan for reasons that wouldn't become clear until several years later lol. By modern standards of representation it does stumble a little bit, but you can tell the overall intentions were good and it still feels very queer-positive. It's also just a fun read, all the characters are really endearing, there's a vampire who has sworn off blood and is instead obsessed with coffee and I love them with my whole entire heart.

My other biggest rec is Going Postal, which is another of my all-time favourites and where the reference in my url comes from. It's about a conman who's been caught and is about to be executed, but instead gets put in charge of the city's failing postal service. It's another really fun read, and it's got two direct sequels (Making Money and Raising Steam) wherein said conman gets put in charge of other public service institutions as a form of enrichment to keep him out of trouble.

This is already long so I'll just quickly cover the other main arcs. The Watch books are all extremely good, probably my favourite arc overall, they've got more of a police procedural crime mystery vibe so if you're into that Guards! Guards! is the starting point for those. If you're interested in the witches I'd recommend skipping Equal Rites and starting with Wyrd Sisters, it's a parody of Macbeth and it's very good. The other two Industrial Revolution books are stand alones that can be read whenever; Moving Pictures is a parody of the golden age of Hollywood, and The Truth is about the invention of the printing press and the Disc's first investigative journalist looking into a conspiracy to frame the patrician for murder. The Death novels are good but not the best starting point imo, worth coming back for at some point though, and parts of Night Watch make more sense if you've read Thief of Time first but it's not required. Rincewind is also worth revisiting eventually, he is one of my favourite characters, but maybe wait until you're already hooked before going back for The Light Fantastic and the rest of his books.

Ok, that's it, I'm cutting myself off here lol. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to infodump, I hope at least something in here is helpful! Please keep me post on what you end up reading next!

[1yyyyyy1]

Before you leave this account, you should take the time to tell us why you like Dishonored so much. The pictures and gifs you reblog are mesmerizing in aesthetic. I am contemplating watching a walkthrough/playthrough of either that or one of the Assassin's Creed games, and an advertisement would do wonders to help me decide. :3

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about Dishonored is that it is extremely immersive. I fell in love with it when I was still a kid and much of my enjoyment can be attributed to nostalgia, but, having replayed the game, I understand why I liked it back then and have come to appreciate it even more as an adult. Thematically, the story has a lot going for it: technology, magic, religion, the occult, assassin syndicates, covens, dystopian themes, gods and people trying to comprehend godhood (and failing which is both realistic and funny). Dishonored has one of the most interesting and aesthetically pleasing deity characters I've personally seen in a series, the rest of the cast is well-written as well and makes the game feel like an interactive book more than anything. What I like about this game is that it has a "show don't tell" kind of storytelling where you get bits and pieces of the worldbuilding through dialogue, books and radio announcements, the zones feel organic to explore and the story is not in your face with huge walls of quest text. The environment is responsive to the player's decisions and your choices matter a LOT, it has a stranded feeling to it where you are left to fend for yourself but never alone with how lively the questing hubs are. It is also designed with both combat and stealthy playstyle in mind so you can choose to play it in a way that you want. This is just me listing my positive impressions before getting to the actual gem of the series - its visual design, because it is amazing. Every frame deserves recognition, it is even more relevant to the second installation which, in my opinion, a rare case of a sequel surpassing the original. To say that architecture in this game is impressive is not to say anything, the Clockwork mansion alone has beaten all of my expectations when it comes to level design. The same can be said about the game's soundtrack which is memorable and at times eerie, a perfect fit for a grim world like Dishonored's. It is an engaging universe with interesting characters and balanced storytelling, so I definitely recommend playing this game if any of this resonates with you.

[diogenescynic2288]

Sunday Sermon One: Be Chill and maybe nice to people

Greetings all. Welcome to my first Sunday sermon. Currently people in the real world call me JustiN in my day to day life, I'm trying to decide how I feel about that. You can see my screen name for this platform up there. But, I think my most relevant identifier here is my Discordian Papal name; I am Pope Orion Orangutan Omnibenevolence Kosmos, Yes; call me POOKY.

Some of my earliest memories involve attending church of a particular Christian denomination. My mom and my late former stepdad who was dad around the house during my youth were both ordained clergy members of this denomination. I haven't been back except for a few weddings and funerals in years. At the moment, I identify as an Ecumenical Heathen, which is largely synonymous with an Eclectic Pagan but the words are cooler. I am probably the only person following my particular syncretism, and despite the fact that I'm about to sermon, I don't proselytize.

I think I like the work that is called The Gospel of Thomas, which is often characterized as a Gnostic gospel. I like the way that it's entirely or mostly sayings without a surrounding narrative, which makes it quite different from the gospels canonical to modern orthodox Christian communities. It feels like the Dhammapada, which was the first religious/philosophical text that really resonated with me when I was a younger being. There are even sayings in Thomas that sound similar to the philosophy-religion ways of Asia like Buddhism or Taoism.

For instance, Rabbi Yeshua tells the disciples to chill. Saying 91 by my version of Thomas:

They said to him,

Tell us who you are that we may believe in you.

He said to them,

You examine the face of Heaven and Earth

But you have not come to know

The one who is in your presence,

And you do not know how to examine this moment.

Now consider section 63 of the version of the Tao Te Ching that I'm working from:

Do nondoing,

strive for nonstriving,

savor the flavorless,

regard the small as important,

make much of little,

repay enmity with virtue;

I'm going to intrude here with a tangent: I think that one line might be the seed of a future sermon on the topic of forgiveness. Let's just say that forgiveness seems to be a core idea that keeps civilization working and shows up in most religious ways somehow.

Do nondoing,

strive for nonstriving,

savor the flavorless,

regard the small as important,

make much of little,

repay enmity with virtue;

plan for difficulty when it is still easy,

do the great while it is still small.

The most difficult things in the world

must be done while they are easy;

the greatest things in the world

must be done while they are small.

Because of this sages never do great things;

That is why they can fulfill their greatness.

If you agree too easily, you'll be little trusted;

If you take it easy a lot, you'll have a lot of problems.

Therefore it is through difficulty that sages end up without problems.

I will admit that the end kind of contradicts the rest of the passage, but that's a thing about the Way of the Way. It uses paradoxes. But I'd feel wrong chopping it up just to seem to have a consistent message without contradiction.

So, the version of the Dhammapada that I'm working from starts with a part called the twin verses, I like this bit and hope it thematically coheres:

“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me” – in those who harbor such thoughts hatred will never cease.

“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me” – in those who do not harbor such thoughts hatred will cease.

For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.

The world does not know that we must all come to an end here; – but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once.

So, the theme I'd weave together out of this is examine this moment; strive for nonstriving, and cease quarrels. Chill out. And maybe be nice to people.

So, to reiterate, my message for the day is Rabbi Yeshua, Buddha Gautama, and Lao-tsu all want you to chill out and maybe be nice to people. Have a blessed day. Happy Day of the Sun unto you all. Chill be with you.

[allgather]

one liberation begets another: the uchiha & jewish themes of resistance i was thinking a bit today about how historically jewish people have used the celebration of our holidays as a guise to gather in order to hide the fact that they were planning rebellions against their oppressors in the present. and this is interesting to me bc jewish holidays are largely thematically about uprisings by jewish citizen's militias who were able to defeat the large military forces of their oppressors ( best examples are jewish people winning their freedom from slavery in egypt which is what passover is about and the maccabees, which were a very small militia of jewish people who successfully fought to take their temple back from the roman emperor, which is the story of hannukah. these and other holidays commemorate actions jewish ppl took to reclaim their freedom and liberation ).

there is a passage from the passover text, the haggadah, that explains this and gives a historic example that really resonates with me:

A tale is told of five rabbis who were holding a seder in the town of B’nei Brak, and talked about Pesach (passover) until dawn broke, when their students had to interrupt them saying,“Rabbis, it is morning and time to recite the morning prayer.”

This story takes place during the rule of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who ordered that the Temple be moved so he could put a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount. In the year 123 of the Common Era, a guerilla insurgency began, which resulted in a crack-down by the Roman authorities. B’nei Brak was the headquarters of the rebellion against Roman occupation, a rebellion of which one of the Rabbis was a leader. Because of rebel activities, the Roman authorities had forbidden gatherings of Jews, on pain of death. The seder described in this passage was used not only as a chance to discuss the liberation from the story of passover—but also to plan a strategy of resistance against current Roman occupation. The students were standing guard, ready to caution the rabbis to disband at daybreak, lest they be caught.

 This tale may be read as a story of how one liberation begets another.

and i've always been really taken with the phrase "one liberation begets another" when we got to this part in passover because it is the gathering and speaking about a historic liberation that provides the opportunity, the cover under which to plan to fight for a present liberation.

so i was thinking about this in the context of the uchiha ( and whether you view these practices as actually the customs of jewish people or if you understand this more as an allegory to the uchiha as outsiders with their own customs that the people of the leaf are unfamiliar with, and see this all as a sorta allegory or common theme, that is up to you! and i’m happy either way! )

so the uchiha are an ancient clan with practices the rest of the leaf are unfamiliar with, who are viewed as inherently different, as outsiders, who are kept siloed away in their own section of the village. and i can see so clearly how they would use these holidays or cultural practices/festivals that no one really understood as a guise to gather all the adult members of the clan together to talk, without suspicion, about their circumstances in the leaf and to plan their uprising against it. who use the fact that they are viewed as outsiders with a strange set of customs to use those gatherings in order to have non-suspicious meetings to plan their rebellion and insurrection right under the leaf's nose.

and i can see it so clearly, the clan gathered in dining rooms, by the candle light and all the customary table settings of the holidays. from the outside it looks like every other observance. but this time their prayer books are lined with maps of the leaf and surrounding area which they study and mark up together. and perhaps they speak in their own language, one spoken ancestrally by their clan but not shared by the people of the leaf ( and in the case of judaism, perhaps it is hebrew or yiddish ) and it sounds like all the other old prayers they speak in that vaguely sing-song way. but they aren’t, not this time. they are planning, discussing tactics, organizing themselves in a tongue only they are familiar with. using celebrations about rebellion as cover to plan for their own rebellion. one liberation begetting another.

[erza-scarlet791]

The process of my typography project

To create my typography project using InDesign, I combined specific design choices and techniques to reflect both the visual impact and the thematic resonance of a well-known quote from “The Hunger Games”: "May the odds be ever in your favour."

In Chapter One, I started with a clean, minimalistic approach using Bodoni 72 in Smallcaps and in blue. I opted for a classic “book” style layout with a second layer shadow effect, blurring text slightly, giving it a 3D quality. Font settings were carefully manipulated to create two distinct text patterns. The first pattern has a 10pt font size with 10pt leading, kerning set to optical, tracking to 200, and the horizontal scale at 125%, giving the text a stretched look, ideal for capturing attention. The second pattern, also 10pt, has a more standard 100% horizontal scale, offering a subtle contrast with its condensed layout, optimized by setting the kerning to metrics. This chapter focuses on a layered approach with shadows and placement.

For Chapter Two, I introduced contrast by pairing one size with two styles using the Athelas front. Each “M” in the text was styled in bold italics in big caps, with the rest in small caps, creating a sense of continuity and power. Two distinct text styles are used: bold italics for most parts and regular for separating those main parts, enhancing the reader’s focus on specific phrases. I set the leading to 5pt, making the text more compact and conveying urgency. All this is to create a pattern, using repetition and placement.

In chapter three, I used the Skia in red, symbolizing danger, intensity, and rebellion like in the movie. I aligned and spaced the two styles in a playful arrangement. Most of the quote text is sized at 40pt, designed to be visually striking. I utilized a 75% horizontal scale to condense the text, enhancing the sense of containment. To creatively modify the iconic line, “May the odds be ever in your favour,” I lowered the opacity of “May,” “be,” and the letter “y” to 50%. I also used and layered the quote in front size 4pt to create the words "are" and the letter "N". This allows the words “the odds are never in our favour” to pop out while reading. This inversion of the original quote subtly communicates rebellion and hopelessness as shown in the movie.

In Chapter Four, I continued with the colour red to maintain visual continuity and intensity, but this time I used a mix of two font styles within the Chalkboard SE typeface: light and bold. Both styles appear in small caps, which gives the text a uniform, clean look, while the difference in weight between the light and bold styles adds a subtle contrast. I set the font sizes at 36pt and 55pt. I applied a shadow effect behind the text using InDesign’s Effects panel. This shadow reinforces the layered feel of the composition, adding depth.

In Chapter Five, I transitioned to the Acumin Variable Concept typeface to introduce a bolder, more direct visual style that combines strength with minimalism. Using a blend of black and red colours, I used the extra-condensed black style in all caps, which helped to create a strong and impactful presence on the page. I arranged the letters in a unique way to form the shape of an arrow. The letters like “Y” and “V” were strategically placed to represent the arrow’s tail and head, respectively. To complete the arrow’s form, I used the Line Tool to connect the elements, creating the middle shaft of the arrow. This directly references the archery theme and the symbol of resistance in the movie. 

In Chapter Six, Avenir in black plus one accent colour sets a modern, sleek tone for the iconic phrase. The Layer and Transparency tools in InDesign allowed me to experiment with overlays. The high-contrast black background enhances the red arrow, symbolizing determination and finality.  

[realdemonslovecats]

No honestly I can see Ed being autistic actually. Or at least, he has the thematic potential?

Mostly I think this is stemming from the Weston/Cricket arc because that is where it highlights that his “superpower” is being able to single mindedly devote himself to honing one craft and to use others talents as inspiration rather than reason to give up or see himself as worth less. None of which are specifically autistic traits.

However this does resonate with hyper focus/special interest, with Ed’s special interest being sports or knighthood.

A lot of autistic people also struggle with fine motor skills, which, while Ed is often going up against some supernaturally skilled people, is somewhat reflected in his need to train a lot harder than others.

There’s also his lacking social skills tbh. He is kind and polite most of the time but when he perceives someone as being even slightly rude or impolite he has a tendency to go off the rails and yell at them very publicly when most would know to not engage like that.

Social anxiety or just struggling to connect with others socially, is also a thing. He doesn’t actually have that many friends tbh. He clearly gets on well with Greenhill but that relationship did have a beginning in a highly structured environment, and Greenhill had reason to engage with Ed as his superior/mentor. The rest of the P4 and their fags could easily be attributed to circumstances rather than real friendship, as Ed rarely seems to talk to them either.

His thing with Lizzie could also be autism related. As above, he doesn’t have many friends, but Lizzie is his sister and they’ve grown up together so their bond is more secure. We also know that he looks up to her at all times so she might be a sort of guide for him as to how to behave or she may even support him behind the scenes, and his protective nature could be a reflection of that treatment as he tries to return the favour by doing or saying things that she as a lady might not like to say.

Idk he’s a side character so there’s a lot of room for exploration but there is enough in the text to justify that headcanon as far as I’m aware. 🤷‍♀️

Why do ppl keep saying edward is autistic 😭i dont see it at all sb pls come educate me

[veliseraptor]

Crime and Punishment in Mo Dao Zu Shi

So I've finally finished the essay I've been threatening to write for more than a year. A hearty thank you to @paradife-loft for early editing eyes and a coherence check, and @neuxue for further editing as well as last minute bonus translation.

First of all, a big ol’ disclaimer: I am working from a translated text where I do not have access to the original language. That generates a gap where potentially a great deal can be lost or altered in translation; hence, I’m going to avoid as much as possible attempting to do a close reading or lean too hard on language or word choice in my assessment of the novel, speaking in broader strokes. 

Additionally, I am coming at this from a perspective where I am predisposed to feel sympathy for villains/antagonists in a story, and I recognize that potentially creates a bias in my assessment. That being said, I think it’s a fair reading at the very least, if not an authoritative one. This essay will include spoilers for the entirety of the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (MDZS) novel, as well as The Untamed (CQL), and minor spoilers in footnotes and a brief additional section for MXTX's other novels.

I will be touching on CQL in an appendix at the end, though to a lesser degree because analyzing visual media is less of my strong point. Nonetheless I think it is relevant that, despite the alteration of story details to arguably make the morality of the story more black/white, certain thematic resonances remain. 

All that being said, my point here is: MXTX (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu) as an author, and MDZS in particular, is at best skeptical of punitive justice; to put it more bluntly, the concept of characters “getting what they deserve” is, if not directly repudiated, then certainly not the point. To put it even more bluntly, MDZS doesn’t want to punish its villains, it just kills them, which (importantly) isn’t the same thing.

[READ THE REST, IT'S LONG AND HEAVILY FOOTNOTED]

[louisinart]

so i’ve been getting a lot of asks from people who don’t know about the Great Katya Debate and so I just wanted to clear this up for those who are just getting into the fandom now: Quick context anyone who hasn’t seen Goncharov (watch it!) here’s some context: during the Boat Scene Katya is gravely wounded. She makes it out alive but then later dies of causes that aren’t made explicit in the text. Some people believe she succumbed to the injuries she got on the boat and others have theorized that there was an unrelated cause (an illness she was hiding, offscreen attack etc.). Andrey is with her when she dies, and is the one to tell Goncharov of her death during their final confrontation. This news drives him further down his path of unraveling and ultimately contributes to his eventual demise.

But here’s the thing: some people don’t think she actually died.  There are a number of subtextual clues that imply Katya faked her death in order to find freedom from the mob. The biggest piece of evidence towards this theory is the fruitstand scene where she tries to talk Sofia into running away with her. From what we see in the rest of the film, Katya knows that there’s no way she could walk away from the mob. Her marriage to Goncharov has her so deeply entangled that she’d be tracked down and killed almost immediately. Hell her brother leaves Russia just to find her in Naples within weeks, and he’s not even trying that hard. The most text-aligned read of this scene is that Katya is fantasizing, imagining a future neither she nor Sofia believes in (hence why Sofia brushes her off so casually), but more radical fans think she was hinting at a broader plan -- to fake her death and finally free herself from The Life. There are other hints to this, best found by analysing things like her leitmotif and the way Andrey discusses her death.

Fans of this theory really have fun with it, devising how she might have done it, who might have helped her (a personal favorite of mine is that she got help from icepick joe before he died), and what might have happened after her escape.

However it’s deeply controversial with those die-hard fans who are attached to the text of the film. I’m ultimately more of this camp, because the thematic resonance of Katya’s character arc really gets thrown off if she actually gets away in the end. Other critiques include: her survival damages the film’s credibility as a tragedy, it’s a modern-day/corporate-feminist/’girlbossified’ reduction of a complex and deeply flawed character, it would leave too many plot holes for a Scorcese project, etc. (There are also some other, more bigoted, reasons people don’t like the theory but i don’t endorse that bullshit and therefore won’t be talking about them here)

This got further complicated when Gonchorav ii: Katya’s revenge was recently announced. Where those who believe Katya lived cheered the announcement as absolution, the katya-died fans immediately got up in arms. There have been claims that Scorsese is selling out what was once his magnum opus, and bending to the will of the newer fanbase. Fans were losing their minds on twitter in all directions, but it didn’t get that much press bc it was the same week daddy musk started burning the place down.

Ultimately this is one of those fandom debates that people get seriously worked up about and will run in circles over with seemingly no end. I have my opinion but all the infighting realllly turns me off so I try to stay out of it. It’s also worth noting that most of the Katya-lives camp are younger fans who saw the movie in recent years, while the Katya-dies camp are more likely to be film buffs (the good and the bad) who saw the movie either when they were young or when it released.

[wastrelwoods]

it IS funny seeing posts from the nbc hannibal Aesthetical Cannibalism As Purely A Metaphor In Fiction bloggers as a person who is not super into horror at all but HAS spent a lot of time hearing about the actual historical practice and the xenophobic philosophical origins of the relevant terminology and corpse medicine and specific instances of survival anthropophagy and the custom of the sea etc etc etc bc said blogger will be like 'wow the thematic resonance of children or parents eating one another in horror text...like saturn devouring his son' and i have to stop myself from poking my head in the window to be like 'the academic term for eating a member of your own family is gastronomic incest HAVE you heard this account from a skyhawk crash in 1979 that made me sob' wait hold the phone what the fuck somehow i just now realized while making this post that there's a third season of casting lots podcast that i entirely missed that came out at the end of last year. i know what i'm doing for the rest of the week i guess

[passionate-reply]

In this installment of Great Albums, we’re back to talking about albums nobody’s ever heard of! You might not know who Zaine Griff is, but you’ve probably heard of a guy called Hans Zimmer, and Zimmer is the real mastermind of this record: a masterpiece of New Romantic synth-pop made long before he made his name composing for the big screen! Not to mention contributions from Ultravox’s Warren Cann, YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi, and even Kate Bush. Find out all about it by watching this video, or reading the full transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today’s installment is going to feature an album that is most definitely towards the obscure side--but, like most of the more obscure artists and albums I’ve talked about, I think this one is every bit as good as the classics. Zaine Griff’s Figures is not only a forgotten album that I think deserves more acclaim, but also an album that, in many ways, feels like it could have been a huge success in its own time.

Zaine Griff grew up in New Zealand, and moved to Great Britain in the 1970s in the hopes of pursuing a career in music. His debut LP, 1980’s Ashes & Diamonds, would mark him as one of the many artists straddling the musical landscape in the aftermath of glam, in the long shadow of David Bowie. With keen visual panache, a suave way of slurring when he sang, and the requisite killer cheekbones, Griff fit in perfectly with the so-called “New Romantics,” as stylish and sophisticated as Visage, Ultravox, or Japan.

Music: “Ashes & Diamonds”

The real turning point in Griff’s career was his being “discovered,” so to speak, by Hans Zimmer and Warren Cann. Cann had already become a figure of some renown, as the percussionist for the aforementioned Ultravox. Despite his tremendous fame today, Zimmer actually had much less to show for himself at this point, aside from a somewhat dodgy stint in the Buggles. While geniuses in their own ways, neither of them were necessarily natural frontmen, and Zaine Griff seemed like the perfect missing piece to fit into their pop ambitions.

Even setting aside Zimmer and Cann, Figures is actually full of recognizable talent, and I think it may have the single most stacked list of album credits I’ve ever seen in my life! You’ll also hear contributions from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yukihiro Takahashi, backing vocals from Linda Jardim, who was also the soprano on the Buggles’ famous “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and a guest appearance by none other than Kate Bush. That’s really a lot of clout going around, which is one of the reasons I’m so surprised this album went nowhere. Anyway, that aside, the most dominant sonic footprint on display here is certainly that of Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is credited with producing the album, and his dynamic, expressive, perhaps “cinematic” work with digital synthesisers is surely the driving force behind Figures’s sound.

Music: “Fahrenheit 451”

It’s easy to imagine “Fahrenheit 451” is the thumping theme to some delightfully 80s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel. Its theme of lustful but dangerous romance is a constant throughout the album, most notably on tracks like “Hot” and the haunting closer, “The Beating of Wings.” The song’s tense and dramatic mood is well bolstered by those soaring synths, courtesy of the Fairlight CMI. One of the most distinctive sounds of mid-80s synth-pop, the soft, breathy tones of the Fairlight hadn’t yet reached full saturation when Figures was made--Zimmer was an early adopter of this particular musical revolution. You might be surprised to learn that “Fahrenheit 451” only saw minor distribution as a single, exclusively for the French and Belgian markets. I think that sort of mismanagement on behalf of Polydor really shafted this album. Its lead single was actually its title track.

Music: “Figures”

The title track of Figures isn’t the worst song I’ve ever heard, but I do think it just might be the worst song on this album. With a strident, stabbing synth riff and a somewhat sparse and anemic soundstage, the title track is not particularly exciting, and also not particularly representative of what the rest of the album sounds like, with no indication of the lush and vibrant textures that dominate tracks like “Fahrenheit 451.” It also has less lyrics than the other tracks, and offers Griff little opportunity to demonstrate his pipes. Thematically, though, its imagery of wispy and mysterious personas, flitting in and out of substance in a world where appearance and identity are trifling and ephemeral, is something that resonates strongly with the album as a whole, as one might surmise from its title also being used for the album. “The Vanishing Men,” another song that easily feels like a better single than “Figures,” handles the same sort of subject in a more playful and upbeat manner.

Music: “The Vanishing Men”

The titular “vanishing men” are quite clearly the life of the party here, and in the world of this track, the insignificance of true identity is portrayed as an invitation to experiment and have fun with it--though not without a slight hint of danger as well. Perhaps it’s a good metaphor for the curated aestheticism of the New Romantic movement, decried by some as “style over substance.” New Romanticism really didn’t have much time left by the time *Figures* came out, being so strongly associated with trends in fashion that were on their way out by this point. Even Ultravox would find themselves pivoting towards more of a pop rock-oriented sound for their final classic lineup LP, 1984’s Lament. I can’t help but think that the changing landscape of musical trends is part of the poor reception of Figures, which is such a consummate New Romantic album, which basks in the full flush of the movement’s prior penetration into the mainstream. As stated above, “The Vanishing Men” is all about the glamour of mutable identity, but other tracks on the album seem to assign this theme a bit more weight, as in “The Stranger.”

Music: “The Stranger”

The titular character of “The Stranger” is described as “a stranger to himself,” but also “no stranger to anyone else.” This track seems to be more focused on the negative aspects of fashionable persona-play: losing the dignity and security of a true form, the people around you seeing through your charades, and becoming trapped in an existence defined by arbitrariness and artificiality. I’d also be remiss not to mention this track’s winsome pentatonic synth riff, which helps create a mercurial and ambiguous mood. It might be interpreted as a nod towards the rampant Orientalism of New Romantic music, which ran with the early 80s verve for all things Asian, and wasn’t shy about appropriating “Asiatic” musical motives like pentatonic scales to evoke mystery and wonder. Griff and friends’ use of such here is relatively subtle, though, and perhaps a bit more tactful than how many of their contemporaries approached other musical ideas associated with the East.

The unforgettable cover of Figures is as dramatic and infused with capital-R Romantic sentiment as the music contained within. Above the text relating the artist and title, which uses a V for a U for a touch of the classical, we see Griff splayed dramatically in a pond of lilies. With sharp makeup that emphasizes his lips, and a diaphanous, blousy top that turns translucent in the water, he seems to be the perfect tragic hero of some lost work of Shakespeare’s--complete with another flower stylishly pinned to his chest. As I mentioned before, Figures is an album that rides the wave of New Romanticism particularly hard, and I think its cover is yet another symptom of those sensibilities.

Speaking of Shakespeare, I can’t help but want to compare this image with a famous painting of one of Shakespeare’s best-known characters: Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais. Painted in the early 1850s, Millais’s Ophelia depicts the moment where Ophelia, driven mad by Hamlet’s romantic rejection of her, drowns herself in a river. It’s exactly the kind of story of wild, passionate, and doomed love portrayed on tracks like “Fahrenheit 451.” Ophelia is also associated strongly with flowers in the text, and features in a particularly memorable scene where she doles out various symbolic blossoms to members of the royal court. Besides the affinity of subject matter, even the composition of Millais’s work resembles the cover of Figures, contrasting its subject’s pale skin with the dark and murky natural surrounds, and emphasizing the drapery of their wettened attire. Ophelia is often considered the definitive masterpiece of the short-lived art movement, the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” who, as their name implies, sought to recapture the intuitive, colourful, and emotive power of art created prior to the High Renaissance. Not unlike New Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelite movement would crumble after only a few years, but not without leaving behind a trail of masterpieces that would continue to inspire future artists and admirers, far removed from their own time.

After the release of Figures, Zaine Griff remained involved with Hans Zimmer and Warren Cann, and, as the supergroup “Helden,” they embarked on an even more ambitious musical opus together: Spies, a sort of synth-pop oratorio about immortal Nazi super-spies falling in love in a futuristic dystopia. Spies is about as out-there as it sounds, and brings the flamboyant musical excess of Figures into a suitably theatrical setting. It’s also got nearly as star-studded of a cast as Figures, featuring not only Zimmer, Cann, and Jardim again, but also Eddie Maelov of Eddie & Sunshine as a mad scientist, and the enigmatic French electro-cabaret chanteuse Ronny, in the role of a super-computer with a sultry female voice. Griff portrays one of the titular immortal spies, known only as “The Stranger”--which, of course, begs comparison to the track of the same name on Figures, and prompts the question, to what extent was Spies already in the works when *Figures* was being written and recorded?

Music: “The Ball”

We all know the rest of the story for Hans Zimmer, who began working with music for film in the mid-1980s, such as the queer cult classic My Beautiful Laundrette. But Zaine Griff obviously never became a household name. Despite being finished in 1983, Spies never got to see an official release, as it was a bit too out there for a label to take a chance on at the time, and it would probably be lost media today if it weren’t for a vinyl bootleg that’s thankfully fairly easy to find online. Griff decided to retire from music shortly after this, and recounts a story of having walked past an extremely talented street musician, and having a sort of epiphany about just how hard it was to make it in music. After all, if a true virtuoso could end up busking on the street, how fair and rewarding could the industry possibly be? Disillusioned with the world of pop, Griff returned to his native New Zealand and got a day job as a golf instructor. More recently, though, he’s also released several new solo albums in the 2010s, surprisingly enough, and attempted to push forward into some very contemporary-sounding pop rock. The world is, of course, a very different place nowadays than it was in the 20th Century, and particularly in the world of music distribution, so perhaps it makes sense that our brave new world has room in it for someone like Zaine Griff to return.

My overall favourite track on Figures is probably “Time Stands Still,” which I think is perhaps the most accessible, pop-friendly track to be had on the album, and the one I would’ve released as the lead single had I worked for Polydor. With a big hook and simple, repetitive lyrics, it’s a true pop song through and through--though, if an artist releases a commercial-sounding album in the woods, and nobody is around to buy it, is it still really “pop?” Anyway, I also love this track’s delightful outro, imitating a skipping record to represent a freeze in the flow of time...though I admit it’s a lot less harrowing to hear when listening digitally! That’s all I have for today--thanks for listening.

Music: “Time Stands Still”

[radramblog]

Radiohead Retrospective Part 9: Hold me, hold me

We’ve arrived at the final Radiohead album to date. The only one to come out since I became a fan, and as such the one I can actually remember listening to for the first time. On a cold winter morning in Perth (so not that cold), releasing on a Monday, I excitedly ran up to buy the album on iTunes and download it before I had to catch the bus to uni. The last time I think I will ever have bought music on that platform, at this point. I remember listening to the opening two tracks, the two that had dropped with gorgeous videos over the weekend, before diving into the album proper.

And then a mate showed up at the station when I was transferring buses so I ended up talking to him instead of listening to the second half, and I didn’t get to do that until the afternoon.

I think it’s fitting that this album be the one with such a story attached, considering how personal an album it is compared to the previous few. A Moon Shaped Pool is a clear reflection of the events surrounding it- Thom’s divorce from his partner of 25 years, Rachel Owen, and her subsequent early passing from cancer, and the death of producer Nigel Godrich’s father during the recording sessions. There’s a deep loneliness and tragedy in the album, and one that seriously resonates with the times.

With that in mind, Burn The Witch is kind of an odd fit for the album. Themes of mob mentality and moral panic, images of medieval plague houses and witch hunts don’t quite suit the tone A Moon Shaped Pool generally conveys. Which is why it’s probably for the best that the song appears at the very start of the album, somewhat separated from the bulk of the work.

This might imply that I don’t like the song. Far from it, for a while, Burn the Witch was my favourite track on the entire thing. I adore strings on rocky music, and in this case, they almost chug, like the guitars on a System of a Down song, with the electronic elements being such an excellent subtle contrasting part of the music. Thom’s vocals are all-encompassing in the chorus, and the timing of the strings getting that little psychotic edge to them at the same time is so perfect.  

As much as the album is separate from this song, it’s still an excellent choice for an opener, both in the tracklist and the promotion. Because like a fair few other songs on this album, Burn the Witch has been a Radiohead song without a home for a very long time, as early as the Kid A era, with early versions of its lyrics showing up in the Hail to the Thief art and website. It was something hardcore fans had been clamoring for for more than a decade, especially after one live show where Thom responded to the cries by playing the first few bars- and then saying “alright for the rest of it you’ll have to wait until we get the orchestra” (paraphrased). And get the orchestra they did, with its majesty in this song being a statement.

Daydreaming is an extremely different song from Burn the Witch, as one would imagine from what I’ve said previous. Piano driven and muffled with allusions to Plato’s Cave, it’s a song that sounds like giving up, and all the pain (and all the comfort) associated with it. The song is a slow, slow build to an emotional climax who’s lyrics are incomprehensible on account of being backmasked. For the record, it’s commonly believed that they’re “Half of my life”, a reference again to Thom’s relationship with his late wife.

The song is relaxing for its majority, the soft pianos and vocals a cold comfort to the defeated emotion the song portrays. This is sort of shocked out of the system 5 minutes in, as the strings are louder and clearer, and the backmasked vocals get more distorted, and loud, sounding like snoring, drowning out the gentler electronic sounds. This does eventually settle, with both strings and vocals lowering to more of a rumble, everything else fading out until they are all that remain. The note the song ends on is kind of disturbing, frankly.

It’s somewhat awkward that the two songs with music videos are at the very start of the album, leaving the rest of this to be a wall of text. I’ll find something.

Track 3 presents an interesting parallel with OK Computer, with both Decks Dark and its Subterranean Homesick Alien using UFOs as metaphor for the human condition. Instrumentally, of course, they’re completely different, but the thematic tie is there. Decks Dark has also at some point vied for the place of my favourite track on the album, the very fun, rhythmic delivery of the vocals in the verse something I’m fond of singing along to, and that absolutely killer backing choral giving the song a haunting feel.

Decks Dark effectively has four distinct sections- Chorus(?) 1, Verse, Chorus 2, Outro. The first chorus is this very mysterious thing, light on instrumentation aside from an electronic drum beat and a simple piano line (with heavily panned noises that I’m pretty sure are only in the right ear). The verse, as I mentioned, has the haunting choral and fresh bars, a heavier piano laden into its airy instrumental, a quiet but killer bassline that gets to kind of show up in the second chorus. Chorus 2 feels like a reflection of the first, a bit more grounded, the mystery explored, and the outro is… I mean the bass and piano are great but I always forget about this part of the track, like I could take it or leave it. Fortunately for said outro, the song is very much more than the sum of its parts, and it’s an excellent fit for the album.

Speaking of being able to take or leave things, I’m not particularly huge on Desert Island Disk. A low acoustic guitar-based track, with a distant echo of an electronic piece playing only in your left ear for like, half of the track, with less subtle electronic sections following up, panning between ears, that (and I mean this as a compliment) remind me of the Spore soundtrack. Christ that’s a weird comparison.

There’s an interesting moment where a new acoustic riff comes in right as you’re getting lost in the haze, cutting through the electronic fog (as it becomes the only instrumentation present), which is honestly a very precise bit of musical timing. I do enjoy the lyrics to the song as well, what with its final line probably not deliberately being an LGBT+ affirmation but sure working as one. The song is, basically, pretty okay, but don’t be surprised if I skip it on my next (less thorough) listen-through.

Ful Stop is a track that often convinces me I’ve fucked up my headphones or something, because of how quiet and how slow the buildup for its introduction is. It’s probably the angriest track Radiohead has put out in the last decade, harsh electronics and accusatory vocals kind of a surprise after the chillness of Desert Island Disk. The bass is killer in this song’s first half, and the almost cyclical presentation of its various elements as the bass and drums are still slowly getting louder and clearer is excellent until it breaks into its second half. I…forgot how long the first section of the song was, frankly.

The second section is really interesting, with its twin vocals making like the instrumentation as “Truth will mess you up” slowly gets quieter and quieter to the point of inaudibility and “All the good times” rising into clarity, all while the instrumentation just keeps chugging. I understand this one is one of the songs that predates the album (and unlike Burn the Witch was actually played live), and I’d like to see exactly how that particular one panned out before A Moon Shaped Pool took it’s approach to it. Good track!

Glass Eyes somewhat reminds me of Faust Arp, in that it’s a much quieter, shorter, and vocally driven track than what surrounds it. And just like Faust Arp, I really enjoy it. This track is distilled, purified anxiety, brutal yet familiar lyrics and a soft, hesitant piano line to accompany it. The strings are absolutely beautiful on this song, rising and falling with the lyrics, and especially with the second verse.

This song feels intimate, particularly with its last two lines. “I feel this love to the core” is a great illustration of how, when surrounded by harsh reality and anxiety, positive feelings like love can be amplified in context and touch deeper than they otherwise would. Of course, it’s followed up by “I feel this love turn cold”, as this album is, in fact, about tragedy- what do you do when that source of comfort goes as icy as everything else?

Track number 7 is Identikit, and no I don’t know what that means. Actually I don’t really know what any of this song means, to be honest, but it is kind of a jam. It’s also the track where the album’s title, and this post’s one, come in, in a nigh-incomprehensible background refrain in the first section that I’m pretty sure we only know the words for thanks to the lyrics booklet. The first half of the track is fairly simple, vocals (+ that refrain) along with a simple drum loop and guitar line.

And then the bridge comes in. Larger-than-life, especially as the electronics and backing vocals come in for its second section, but it’s always briefer than I recall. Most of the song stays in the relatively relaxed mood of the first verse, with the second being basically the same as the first instrumentally, though the guitar is doing some really fun noodling and there’s some electronic stuff going on in the other ear. I kinda forgot how much panning there was in the album in general- not the type of album for those with only one working headphone. Identikit is a track for which my feelings are a lot more muted than they used to be- not a bad one by any means, but I used to like it more and I’m not sure what changed.

The Numbers opens with n o i s e s and this luscious piano section, experimental and jazzy but ethereal and vague, before its main guitar and drums kick in. It’s a very folksy track by and large, still having the feel of the rest of the album but with a twangier guitar and more consistent percussion, grounding the more airy elements of the track with this very real instrumentation.

Speaking of Very Real, this might be surprising for people who only follow Radiohead’s music and not their politics or people, but The Numbers is actually a climate change protest song. It gets a bit more obvious in the second verse, as the strings come in with this very determined mood, and the lyrics get a bit less subtle about the whole thing. I can’t say I know if anyone’s played this track at a climate rally I’ve been to yet (but they should), but it’s kind of interesting that it took this long for such a song to get made, considering how long Thom in particular has been a staunch supporter of, well, not having oil companies burn the world down.

Our next song is Present Tense, one which I think currently sits as my favourite from the album, but boy does it shift. It’s a very groovy piece, almost liquid in its presentation, one I can’t help but jam to a little bit when listening to. There’s some really surprising elements in the track, a…shaker, or whatever you call those things that aren’t quite maracas, as well the echoing vocals feeling like backing singers, whispering almost as they’re layered on top of each other over and over.

The lyricism in the song kind of speaks its own mood- “As my world comes crashing down, I’ll be dancing, freaking out”. It’s a dance of rejection, of denying reality and shutting down to avoid the world and its pain, but you know, while groovin’. There’s a duality to them, with the verses presenting this anxious spiral and its avoidance, as the chorus’s one line- “in you I’m lost”- suggests a lifeline for the person experiencing this scenario. All in all, it’s an excellent track.

Our penultimate track is one with a total so long that Spotify really doesn’t want to show it all, Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief, which I’m not going to repeat because this post is already super ridiculously long. Fortunately, I have surprisingly little to say about this song. The majority of the track is pretty much fine, good vocals, a relatively basic instrumentation that gets more luxurious for the second verse/chorus, with a second clearer piano line and drums overlaid on their electronic substitutes from the first.

And then the final minute and a half happens, and it’s incredible. There’s no way they could have kept this up for the whole song, but the orchestral section in this part of the song is utterly mindblowing, a beautiful crescendo that serves as the album’s climax, more and more things and strings adding on as the progression of the song just goes and goes until it just…ends. I do wish it was longer, frankly, because there is a whole like half minute of outro that I just wish was more of that instrumental.

The final track on A Moon Shaped Pool is True Love Waits. But to talk about True Love Waits, we need to talk about True Love Waits.

That is to say the live version of the song from a 2001 Oslo concert, present on both I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings and Radiohead: The Best Of (the closer for both and the concert itself), since along with other tracks from the album this was one that had existed for a while before it finally got put to vinyl. It’s a lovely but surprisingly simple acoustic love song, depressing lyrics and wavering vocals aside. The chorus of the song is “just don’t leave, don’t leave”, a desperate plea for companionship that, in this case, seems to have succeeded. The track genuinely feels happy despite itself, a hopeful end to what was surely a melancholic concert. The video above isn’t that version, it’s from a different performance, but it’s close enough.

But of course, in reality, she eventually did leave. And then she died not long afterwards. This tragedy is reflected in the A Moon Shaped Pool version of True Love Waits, an utterly crushing piece of music. Those same lyrics over a simple piano version of the instrumentation, one that feels almost empty, or hollow, echoing into the void with only itself to answer. Those same lyrics that now feel so much more pained, an awful reminder of what was. The line “I’m not living, I’m just killing time” is so much harsher when the song doesn’t have that bright undercurrent to keep it going. While there’s a lot of emotion packed into the rest of the album, True Love Waits is the sonic equivalent of weeping.

It’s…hard to listen to. I believe it was literally scientifically determined, as far as something like that can be done, to be the most depressing Radiohead song. It’s basically not a song I ever listen to as a result- I really don’t need that energy in my life, honestly. Grieving is hard, obviously, but it’s not really a zone I want to deliberately put myself into.

And that is, ultimately, how A Moon Shaped Pool, and Radiohead’s current album legacy, ends. Not on a whimper, but something kind of like it. It’s a very good album, clearly, but there are moments from it I’d rather pass on most of the time- hence I don’t think it’ll ever be, like, top 3 for me.

At this point, Radiohead’s future is kind of uncertain. The members of the band took a break after this to work on solo projects and the like, but at this point, all of those have pretty much wrapped, and so the rumblings of LP10 are likely on the horizon. There’s no way of knowing what another album would look or sound like at this point, so we’ll just have to see. The band did release a 20 year anniversary edition of OK Computer, though, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one for Kid A/Amnesiac within the rest of the year. It would, uh, have to be within the rest of the year.

The future of this series is of course similarly unclear. While I could and probably should end it, move on to talk about other albums and bands, some part of me does want to go back and take a look at some other Radiohead stuff. There’s B-Sides, there’s solo projects (which I really haven’t delved into personally), theres TKOL RMX 1234567, the list goes on. I guess you, and I, will both have to see next Tuesday. I hope to see you then, whatever it ends up being.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

book blogging #3: is this book, you know... gay?

I’ve been vaguely aware of Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker for some time, and had the vague understanding that it fit somewhere in the genre of “warm and fuzzy queer coming of age graphic novels” that seems to be happily proliferating these days, and while I’m very much a fan of that development as a whole, I wasn’t in any particular rush to seek it out.

then the pandemic happened, everything closed, my reading started to consist mostly of whatever my friends can lend me, etc. we’ve had this conversation before. 

textually, no explicit identities are ever claimed in this graphic novel; no one uses the words “transgender” or “gay” or “bisexual” or “queer.” that’s understandable, especially is a pseudo-historical setting like this one when those words weren’t have been used or understood the way they are today, although Wang is hardly trying to write historical accurate fiction and time period is deliberately vague. it’s a fairly significant plot point that Paris’ first department store is opening up over the course of the story, and in the real world that occurred in 1852. however, the titular prince is Prince Sebastian of Belgium, and since absolutely no such prince existed in 1852, it seems that this story is taking place in an aesthetically pleasing alternate history. neat!

unfortunately, like many fictional worlds, this one isn’t exempt from real world ideas about gender, and Prince Sebastian is very, very worried about what will happen if anyone discovers that he, the sole heir to the Belgian throne, really enjoys wearing dresses. the only people he trusts with his secret are a faithful servant and Frances, the dressmaker who catches Sebastian’s eye with a particularly daring and controversial design. to boil down the plot very small, Frances becomes Sebastian’s secret designer, constructing avant-garde costumes for him to wear out on the town under the alias Lady Crystallia.

so, how are we - the worldly queer readers of 2020, with our nuanced understanding of the many ways gender, gender presentation, and sexuality can interact - meant to understand Sebastian? 

right off the bat, I think it’s fair to say he’s certainly not meant to be a representation of a trans girl coming into her identity. Sebastian’s doesn’t seem bothered by being a boy, only by the limitations that societal expectations have placed upon his wardrobe. he is certainly happier and more confident when he’s dressed up in wig and heels and introducing himself as Crystallia, but that primarily seems to come from being able to shed the expectations usually placed upon him and being permitted to dress as he likes. one gets the impression that Sebastian would be perfectly happy to use his real name and he/him pronouns while wearing his dresses, if only he didn’t have to worry about someone learning his secret.

it seems most accurate to say that Sebastian could most accurately be compared to a baby drag queen, which made it extra surprising that (spoiler alert!) he ends up having feelings for a girl.

more specifically, he ends up developing feelings for Frances, and she likes him back, and they have some truly adorable little moments of falling in love. by the end I was really rooting for these kids to overcome their inevitable third act misunderstanding and get back together. and even as I was rooting for them, I was wondering: wait, so is this gay at all? 

despite Sebastian fitting many tropes often associated with young gay men - he loves traditionally feminine clothing, he doesn’t relate to his father’s love of sports or like physical labor, he’s extremely nervous about his parents expectations that he will find a wife - he never actually shows any particular interest in men or, indeed, anyone but Frances. while that certainly doesn’t rule out that he could be bi or pan or an asexual who experiences romantic attraction, going purely by what’s on the page it doesn’t seem implausible that Sebastian is... a straight, cisgender teenage boy who happens to really like wearing dresses. I’m not saying that’s definitively what he is - I think there’s a strong case for Sebastian being genderfluid or nonbinary - but there’s also no categorical proof that he’s not.

what about Frances? while Sebastian initially tries to hide his identity from her, including that he’s a boy, she finds out the truth before their first meeting is over, meaning she’s under no false impressions about who exactly she’s falling in love with. the first time we get a hint of blossoming romance is a classic scene of Frances watching her crush while he’s unaware, then catching herself staring and looking away while blushing. this happens to take place while Sebastian has his long red wig on, lovingly brushing out his hair, looking pretty femme. later on the two of them spend a night together that is clearly a date, complete with an adorably awkward goodnight, all of which takes place while Sebastian fully presenting as male. truthfully, none of this tells us anything about Frances’ orientation(s) either, except that external presentation is absolutely no hurdle for her.

so this could, quite feasibly, be a cisgender, heterosexual couple, with nothing in the text to either strictly confirm or refute it. if you’re looking for canon LGBT rep, you might be a bit disappointed. but is the book queer?

there is a difference, after all, especially if we go looking for queerness in the academic sense, the kind that’s less concerned with exactly quantifying identity and is much more interested in playing around to see exactly how far ideas of gender and sexuality can be warped, distorted, and otherwise used like so much Play-Doh. at very least, there’s an absolute treasure trove of gender nonconformity on Sebastian’s end, which I don’t think exactly needs spelling out. Frances is a more subtle rebel for falling in love with Sebastian in all his skirts and glitter; without going too far down the gender theory rabbit hole, heterosexuality is traditionally construed as an attraction between masculine and feminine opposites.

obviously I’m not coming at you to argue that Sebastian as a cis, straight boychild who likes dresses is more radical than a Sebastian who is explicitly not-straight or not-cisgender. but as someone who personally doesn’t jive well with the impulse to neatly label each and every facet of identity, there’s something about this very sweet book that hits like a breath of fresh air. sure, Sebastian worries about being known as a boy who wears dresses, but he never seems to worry about what his clothing preferences mean for his own gender or sexuality. likewise, Frances has a lot of concerns about the pressures of keeping secrets and trying to build her own career, but she’s spectacularly untroubled by the implications of having a crush on someone with such a wildly fluctuating gender presentation. 

Frances and Sebastian know what they like - wearing/making spectacular dresses, and each other - and don’t worry about the rest, and I think there’s something really simply but powerfully sweet in that ability to simply embrace and explore what makes them happy without spiraling into an existential crisis about it. the problem is always external, always in the form of outsiders who don’t understand, never grappling for internal understanding. thematically that’s all pretty queer, so my ultimate grade is this: if nothing else, this book is one hell of an ally, and I think it has a lot of potential to resonate with folks across a wide variety of queer identities. it certainly made my heart all warm and tingly :)