#lost his family in the hiroshima bombings

[canmom]

Three animated films about children in the war

So, I have finally seen Grave of the Fireflies! (And watched Totoro for the... not even sure, n+1th time.) For comments before the film, see Animation Night 111.

Anyway, what a fascinating range that was. I went into Fireflies not know much more than the premise - two children die in the war - and to expect an extremely sad movie. So, let me talk about some things that stood out to me, compared to that expectation. And then, I want to lead into a comparison to some very similar films, namely Barefoot Gen and In This Corner of the World...

So. The first surprise - perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, given we’re talking about Takahata here - is how understated it is. It does use music, but only sometimes. In contrast to the exaggerated emotions and stretchy faces of Totoro, characters are mostly quite stoic. It’s not to say that characters do not emote at all, as in many of Mamoru Oshii’s films - indeed, the film may be the first to contain the iconic Ghibli tears running down a character’s face - but a lot of the time, we are led to infer the emotional context from the characters’ actions, the scenario, and the framing of the scenes.

Grave of the Fireflies opens with the death of the boy Seita. He is one of a number of starving, listless children in what I think is a train station. Even before his death, he barely responds to interaction or offers of food, and before long he dies. A uniformed man finds his body, but does not seem to find it remarkable - children dying here is a regular occurrence. He finds a sweets tin, and can’t work out what’s inside it - it is only much later that we find out the tin contains ashes of Seita’s sister Setsuko, who starved to death under his watch, and the tin becomes a symbol of their relationship through the rest of the film. Seita and Setsuko’s ghosts rise from the tin; the rest of the film is a flashback, showing the circumstances in which Setsuko died.

The film is based on a short story written in 1967 by Akiyuki Nosaka. It is semi-autobiograpical; in reality, Nosaka lost three family members during the war: one sister to illness, his father to the firebombing of Kobe, and then his younger sister Fukui to malnutrition; the story is framed as an apology to Fukui for her death. So in a most direct sense, Seita represents Akiyuki Nosaka, and Setsuko represents Fukui. The story is written in the tradition of ‘double suicide’ stories, more typically about lovers. It is in a way quite abstracted: Nosaka spoke of writing about an ‘idealised humanity’ in an ‘idealised situation’ in contrast to his feelings about the culture of 1967.

If you read the wiki article there, almost all of what we read is Takahata’s interpretation; it’s safe to say his film has heavily overshadowed the original story in memory. So let’s look at his connection to it.

Takahata was born in October 1935, so he would have been nine, approaching ten years old when the war ended. He had also survived a US air raid, on Okayama in June 29, but it seems he did not lose family to the war. However, as his later films would show, he is very concerned with cultural memory, and things being lost: the protagonist’s memories of her rural childhood in Only Yesterday, or the tanuki forest being cut down in Pom Poko.

So, by the time of Grave of the Fireflies being released, Takahata was already 53 years old. In the context of the 80s economic boom, he evidently saw himself as belonging to a different era; there’s something of a ‘kids of today!’ angle in how he spoke about the contemporary generation in the 1987 interview that forms the basis for most of that article..

There are two other obvious films to compare this one to - both dealing with children living through the war, and the time afterwards. Historically, the most relevant one is Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン), which we watched back on Animation Night 26. This is based on a manga by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, but it’s equally concerned with the brutal period right after the war, serialised from the period 1973-1987. The manga began serialisation in Weekly Shōnen Jump but stayed there only one year where it proved unpopular with readers, before moving to leftist publications like Citizen’s and Cultural Criticism; it was enjoyed a lot by Art Spiegelman of Maus fame. You can read it here on archive.org.

In the introduction, Nakazawa writes that many of the awful scenes in the story are directly autobiographical; he says:

1966, after seven years of illness, my mother died in the A- Bomb Victims Hospital in Hiroshima. When I went to the crematorium to collect her ashes, I was shocked. There were no bones left in my mother's ashes, as there normally are after a cremation. Radioactive cesium from the bomb had eaten away at her bones to the point that they disintegrated. The bomb had even deprived me of my mother's bones. I was overcome with rage. I vowed that I would never forgive the Japanese militarists who started the war, nor the Americans who had so casually dropped the bomb on us.

Barefoot Gen was adapted to two anime films by Madhouse in 1983 and 1986; at the time the mighty Osamu Dezaki had just departed in 1980, and so under Masao Maroyama, Madhouse was becoming much more auteur-driven studio with an increasingly diverse output with figures like Rintaro coming into their own. The two Barefoot Gen films are directed by first Mori Masaki and then Toshio Hirata.

Compared to Grave of the Fireflies, the approach taken to animation in Barefoot Gen therefore comes from the Mushi-Pro/Dezaki lineage rather than the Toei lineage. It’s much less concerned with realism in character animation, taking a more exaggerated approach to motion with a lower drawing count that at least to my eye calls back to the Kanada school, but also the Dezaki visual language and drive towards going all-in on presenting emotion seen in works like Ashita no Joe. Which is certainly not to say that Barefoot Gen is completely lacking in moments of subtler animation, like a doctor washing his hands after taking care of a patient or Gen carving wood; it’s just not the overwhelming focus of the film like Takahata’s work. Despite the harsh circumstances, most of the early parts of the film end with the characters laughing and a fade to black.

Then the bomb drops.

When it comes to the Hiroshima bombing Barefoot Gen does not at all hold back on detail; it is not exactly realism but it clearly draws heavily on nuclear bomb test footage. The moments leading up to the bombing are excruciating anticipation: the characters dismiss the ‘spy plane’ and talk about the weather, and then we cut to radio chatter in English between the observation planes and the Enola Gay discussing the weather in a horribly different light. The planes are drawn in exacting detail, and we’re shown supernatural omens like ants crawling inside. Then, we see the bombing through the scope of the plane; the pilots are drawn in a heavily hatched style with realistic proportions reminiscent of an American comic. The bomb drops, and the mushroom cloud rises silently as an expanding circle; then we see a series of shots abruptly switch into harsh black and white shadow shapes. Like in Grave of the Fireflies, they are using the techniques of cel shading to show form through shape, but with the contrast pushed up to maximum.

In the 80s OVA era, Madhouse would become experts at drawing monsters, but Gen actually predates most of these well-known works. Nevertheless, it delivers a huge amount of grotesque imagery: a chain of shots showing characters we have grown to like over the course of the film being melted away, their eyeballs falling out, etc. All of these are drawn with a low framerate, and there isn’t too much concern for realism, but that might be the point. All of these scenes are shown in vivid, hypersaturated colours against a swirling paint background.

Following this the rest of the film is a series of further horrors as Gen loses his family trapped in a burning building (an event directly experienced by Nakazawa) and stumbles alone through the city, witnessing the injuries of survivors (who stumble out of the ruins like zombies), and then the effects of radiation poisoning. It is a harrowing film; it never looks away. The focus on rubbing our face in horror and gore could feel voyeuristic, especially in the context of later OVAs which are pretty gleeful with their violence, but here - perhaps because of how it is framed by narration - it achieves an appropriately sickening effect. After all, even if it didn’t look like this, this really happened: there was an instant in 1945 where thousands of people had their flesh melted like this all at once. Animation here is used to slow down time and show the effects of the bomb in even more excruciating detail than live action could manage.

The focus of the first Barefoot Gen film is therefore the horror of the Hiroshima bombing. This wasn’t a completely unprecedented subject in film, with prior Japanese examples including the Japan Teachers Union funded Children of Hiroshima (1952) and Hiroshima (1953), and Barefoot Gen had already seen a live-action adaptation in 1976, but as I understand it was still at least something of a taboo subject; later in the 80s would come films like Black Rain (1989). The manga goes much further, telling the story of Gen’s life in the aftermath of the war, but the first film (reasonably) makes the decision to spend its runtime on Gen’s life leading up to the bombing and its immediate impact.

The second film adapts later parts of the manga, following Gen’s life in the years after the war - but if the first film was hard to acquire, the second is essentially impossible. So sadly I can’t comment on this one.

Grave of the Fireflies also has scenes of bombing, primarily at the beginning, with the firebombing of Kobe. Waves of firebombs fall like seeds and bounce off buildings to scatter in the street - in contrast to the expected explosions, it is a surprisingly quiet scene which gradually builds up into an emergency. There is one brief aerial shot, but for the most part, planes are seen from a distance.

Compared to Seita, who is caring towards his sister but quietly very proud, and who idolises his sailor father (who is fighting at sea and implicitly dies offscreen), Gen is a lot more energetic and playful. Gen’s father is also a completely different figure: the film is at pains to show that he is opposed to the war, which reflects Nakazawa’s real father, who was arrested and imprisoned for his involvement in an anti-war theatre troupe. Without knowing this context, the film can come across as somewhat idealised, painting the father as opposed to the war to make it easier to sympathise with him. But no, that’s real.

(please forgive the off-centre subs; it is almost impossible to find a good encode of this movie and the alternative is subs that are bright purple!)

In contrast, both Grave of the Fireflies and much later In This Corner of the World portray how much of the population did indeed hold nationalist sentiments and hope for Japan’s victory in the war. Seita acts as as a synecdoche for the forgotten children starving to death in the station, but he also represents a certain stupid stubbornness: rather than swallow his pride and return to his asshole aunt, he starves to death along with his sister. In one striking sequence, sitting in a hole in the ground, Seita sings to himself a patriotic song about Japan seeing off invaders near and far, and imagines a sequence where his dad sails past on a huge warship bedecked in lights, mingling with the symbol of the fireflies. It is a child’s view of the war, but he is after all a child. And sure enough, his dad almost certainly dies at sea; we do not find out for sure, only that he never returns Seita’s leters.

The archetype of a brother struggling to protect a sickly sister is a classic one - in recent years we’ve seen characters like Nier and whatever the kid from Demon Slayer is called - but here, Seita completely fails to live up to this. He can’t save his sister, and the failure kills him too.

Food is a huge concern of both films: because it is in such short supply, what little is available is all the more important. The loving rendering of food that Ghibli is known for began in Castle in the Sky, but it attains special significance here, with items like fruit drops and white rice becoming treasured items. Similar is true in Gen: a major plot point concerns Gen and his brother stealing a fish to give to their sick mother, and a kind fisherman letting them keep it.

And, for the most part, adults in Gen are kind, and proud of the children. This is absolutely not the case in Grave of the Fireflies. Here, the adults are just about universally indifferent to Seita and Setsuko’s plight. Their aunt berates them as other mouths to feed who don’t work in return, sees Seita’s decision to buy a stove as a stubborn refusal rather than an attempt to accommodate, and simply lets them go when Seita decides to leave to an unknown destination. The local farmers soon run out of rice to sell, and so Seita resorts to theft, which gets him beaten. The doctor diagnoses Setsuko’s malnutrition, but has no suggestion of where she’ll get food. About the only time they do receive a gift is after Setsuko’s death, where one of the farmers has a ready supply of charcoal to burn her corpse.

Since Grave of the Fireflies is adapting a short story rather than a long-running manga, it has generally fewer events to cover, and can proceed at a slow pace. The story is simpler: it is not trying to show all the horrors of the bomb, but merely make us bear witness to the story of these two children.

The final image of Grave of the Fireflies shows Seita and Setsuko’s ghosts looking out on a modern Japan with new high-rise buildings - implicitly one that has completely forgotten them. The painfully beautiful but short-lived fireflies are a recurring image; early on, Setsuko crushes a firefly by accident, and the title of the film refers to a point where the children capture a number of fireflies and release them to light their shelter, but by morning they are dead; Setsuko digs a small mass grave and puts the fireflies in it. Later, Seita will burn her corpse, and the grave marker comes to correspond to her as well. The symbolism is very direct, but the way it is executed - that fascination with light - makes it work.

In This Corner of the World (2016) comes much later in this lineage. Unlike the previous two films, it is not based on anyone’s direct experience of living through the war. Instead, the impetus comes from mangaka Fumiyo Kōno’s editor, who asked her to write a story about the Hiroshima bombing. Kōno is a resident of Hiroshima born in 1968, but none of her family are bomb survivors; she was not initially moved by the suggestion, but changed her mind after realising how the bombing had become a taboo subject, not even remembered by many people in the city. This led to her manga Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (夕凪の街 桜の国, 2004). WP writes:

According to Fumiyo Kōno's afterword, she was prompted to write Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms when her editor asked her for a Hiroshima story. She was initially reluctant because, while she was born in Hiroshima neither she nor anyone in her family was a survivor of the atomic bomb, and growing up she found the subject upsetting and had tried to avoid it ever since. She decided to tackle the subject because she felt it was "unnatural and irresponsible for me to consciously try to avoid the issue." Living in Tokyo, she had come to realize that people outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't know about the effects of the bomb, not because they were avoiding the subject but because it is never talked about, and so she attempted the story because "drawing something is better than drawing nothing at all."[9]

Kōno described "Country of Cherry Blossoms" as "what I most needed to hear two years ago, when I still avoided anything to do with the atomic bomb."[9]

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms is a two part manga, about two generations of descendants of bomb survivors. She followed this manga up in 2007-2009 with In This Corner of the World (この世界の片隅に), following a young artist called Suzu who lives in Hiroshima and nearby , during the war.

Kōno credits a series of inspirations, many of them old school manga artists:

She feels that Osamu Tezuka and Fujiko Fujio were among her early influences, but then she was inspired by Sanpei Shirato's literary style and at present, she takes inspiration from Yu Takita's versatility.

Tezuka needs no introduction. Fujiko Fujio is the pen name of a pair of manga artists who started writing in 1960, notably creating Doraemon. Shirato is a pioneering gekiga artist who frequently contributed to Garo magazine. Yu Takita was another Garo mangaka, known for autiobiographical manga, though I can’t find much more than this.

In 2016, this film received an adaptation directed by Sunao Katabuchi, known for Princess Arete (Animation Night 74). The animation was carried out at Mappa, who are funnily enough an offshoot of Madhouse, as well as outsourcing to Madhouse proper and DR Movie - however their approach calls to mind much more Takahata. The character designs are not nearly so solid and detailed, instead going for a more abstract and simplified style that follows the manga, but the approach to movement is very much in the realist school, with lots of carefully observed, subtle everyday actions.

Many scenes seem to draw heavily on Grave of the Fireflies, such as when the characters witness an enormous ship come into port and slide gradually past the camera, elaborately animated food preparation, a scene where a character ducking for cover in a field sings a patriotic song, a precious supply of white rice. Other scenes, such as aerial shots of bombs falling, step closer to Barefoot Gen. Actually all three films have a scene where a plane strafes the ground where a character is running and they have to dive for cover!

Compared to the other two films, In This Corner is less concerned with foregrounding the horrors of war and death, though it is absolutely interested in the emotional experience of war. There are certainly plenty of scenes where the main character has to duck from air combat; she loses her drawing hand and narrowly escapes death from a burrowing bomb. But it’s also deeply concerned with the romance plot, and the longer arc of a life. It wants to show not just the experience of the war, but the experience of moving past it.

One key moment not explored in the others comes with the announcement of Japan’s surrender. In Fireflies, Seita hears about this from a man in a queue to withdraw his mother’s money at a bank - he demands to know whether his father survived and flees but that’s really the end of it, since it leads right into the death of Setsuko. By contrast, In This Corner shows the whole family listening to the radio as the surrender is announced, and explores how Suzu is appalled to realise that everything she went through was for absolutely nothing; this is soon followed by the revelation that her parents are respectively killed by the bomb and dying of radiation poisoning.

The film continues after the end of the war for some time, heavily compressing time now, following Suzu adopting a child and gradually regaining a will to live. In a flashback scene it does show the bombing, and the child holding the corpse of their mother crawling with maggots and pierced with broken glass, but even here the drawing of injury is much less meticulously detailed than in either of the other films.

As far as depicting warfare, In This Corner uses CGI for some of the scenes of planes and bombs; it’s not especially jarring but it is a little noticeably different, and actually quite elaborate. There are some interesting bits of stylisation like the colourful bursts of explosions. Ships, on the other hand, are hand-drawn, and there’s an interesting balance between the detailed accuracy to the historical vessels and a certain sketchiness. The backgrounds have noticeable brushwork texture - they’re very strong in general, both more stylish and more detailed than Mappa’s TV backgrounds.

The most noticeable difference in aesthetic brought by 30 years is the use of digital ink and paint, and the looseness of shapes. I think the designs are quite closely based on the manga, which uses rough lines and watercolours; what it means in practice here is simplification and abstraction of shapes.

Oh, and of course... In This Corner is a much longer film than the other two, which both come in sub 90 minutes while the extended cut of In This Corner (which I haven’t seen) is literally the longest animated film ever made at 168 minutes; even the original cut more than two hours. This is in part perhaps reflecting different production conditions (making Totoro and Fireflies side by side strained the resources of Ghibli as it is, while Mappa are a large - if incredibly overworked - studio in a totally different era), and norms about how long a film should be. The longer runtime gives In This Corner time to do more, but it also makes it less pointed about any one thing.

In terms of the emotional tone of the three films, Barefoot Gen is a very angry film: it wants you to be confronted with the full horror of what happened and share in the author’s furious disgust towards the Japanese government and American bombers. But it’s also, perhaps surprisingly, a hopeful film that wants us to believe none of this is inevitable - as Spiegelman’s intro the comic describes it, an expression of the worldview that let the author carry on after going through a literal nuclear bombing.

Grave of the Fireflies is more a film about remembrance. Seita is a tragic figure, but we’re invited to understand him much more than condemn, and see what could lead to a girl dying in a hole in the arms of her brother. Its gaze is cold, almost clinical, precisely absorbing every detail. There is no living on after the war: just two ghosts watching a world become unrecognisable. There is very little that is hopeful to be found here; at best the wistful thought that all these people lost to time and entropy might live on as ghosts. But that is what gives the film its force.

In This Corner of the World expresses a different generation’s attempt to dig into a war that predates our births. It is the view of someone who cares a lot about portraying it right, and Katabuchi certainly excels at portraying wistfulness and loss of motivation, but it is also inevitably a view from afar, and to me that means it feels like it ends up being less bold in its artistic choices than the other two - though that could simply be because it reflects the tastes of this era, and not a past one! 'Less bold’ absolutely does not mean ‘bad’; it’s still a moving and truthful picture, and it was definitely the film I needed to watch after Gen and When The Wind Blows two years ago. As much as it’s rooted in history, its story is ultimately a personal one, about the course of a life, and I suppose about committing to a future despite incredible adversity. 

Taking all three films... like, this isn’t about trying to pick a ‘best’ one. They all complement each other, and it is deeply fascinating to see how many different ways you can effectively approach the same period and even the same subject matter, and also I suppose a case study in seeing how 30 years changes the way we tell a story about one of the worst periods of history. By this point, the number of people who remember WWII is dwindling; we are left with artworks to get a sense of how they understood it, and then if it is relevant we try to connect to that history with our own artworks.

Perhaps it would be worth digging into other significant manga that deal with this period - I think for example Suehiro Maruo wrote quite a bit about orphans in the aftermath of the war. But that’s a discussion for another day...

(If you read all this... thank you. This isn’t really going to be a regular feature or anything, I just had a bunch of thoughts I wanted to write down after that movie, and I wanted to give it a more detailed treatment than I could in a couple of hours before the film!)

[redsamuraiii]

My Japanese Books To Read List

I have been browsing some Japanese Books to read and here is a list of what appears to be interesting based on the plot, reviews and recommendations from my fellow Tumblr followers. If you have some to recommend, please do tell me! :D

1. Soul Lanterns by Shaw Kuzki

The haunting and poignant story of a how a young Japanese girl’s understanding of the historic and tragic bombing of Hiroshima is transformed by a memorial lantern-floating ceremony.

Twelve-year-old Nozomi lives in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. She wasn’t even born when the bombing of Hiroshima took place. Every year Nozomi joins her family at the lantern-floating ceremony to honor those lost in the bombing. People write the names of their deceased loved ones along with messages of peace, on paper lanterns and set them afloat on the river. This year Nozomi realizes that her mother always releases one lantern with no name. She begins to ask questions, and when complicated stories of loss and loneliness unfold, Nozomi and her friends come up with a creative way to share their loved ones’ experiences. By opening people’s eyes to the struggles they all keep hidden, the project teaches the entire community new ways to show compassion. Soul Lanterns is an honest exploration of what happened on August 6, 1945, and offers readers a glimpse not only into the rich cultural history of Japan but also into the intimate lives of those who recognize–better than most–the urgent need for peace.

Review by Penguin Random House

2. How Do You Live by Genzaburo Yoshino

Anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s favorite childhood book, in English for the first time.

First published in 1937, Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? has long been acknowledged in Japan as a crossover classic for young readers. Academy Award–winning animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle) has called it his favorite childhood book and announced plans to emerge from retirement to make it the basis of a final film.

Copper, fifteen, who after the death of his father must confront inevitable and enormous change, including his own betrayal of his best friend. In between episodes of Copper’s emerging story, his uncle writes to him in a journal, sharing knowledge and offering advice on life’s big questions as Copper begins to encounter them. Over the course of the story, Copper, like his namesake Copernicus, looks to the stars, and uses his discoveries about the heavens, earth, and human nature to answer the question of how he will live.

This first-ever English-language translation of a Japanese classic about finding one’s place in a world both infinitely large and unimaginably small is perfect for readers of philosophical fiction like The Alchemist and The Little Prince, as well as Miyazaki fans eager to understand one of his most important influences.

Review by GoodReads

3. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age.

Tsukiko, thirty–eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei,” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.

As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time’s passing is marked by Kawakami’s gentle hints at the changing seasons: from warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms. Strange Weather in Tokyo is a moving, funny, and immersive tale of modern Japan and old–fashioned romance.

Review by Penguin Random House

4. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. 

In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction ― many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual ― and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action… A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.

Review by GoodReads

[sayuricorner]

Transformers Animated prompt idea: Earth raised bots AU: More Earth Bots profiles

Here’s some other profiles and headcanons of Earth bots from the “Earth raised bots AU”! ^^

Warning: References to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(UPDATE: New oc added)

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->Browning:

-Is the tiniest of the Earth Bots.

-”Birthdate”: 13 september 1988 in japan

-Was took in by a young japanese man in Osaka.

-Has a kansai japanese accent.

-Is a warframe(?) gun.

-Alt mode: browning gun

-He was named browning because of his alt form.

-Was named Browning because of his alt mode.

-Despite his size, Browning is a bot who didn’t let others step on him and know how to voice his opinion.

-Is very resourceful and is capable to put up a fight.

-Since he is so small this make him undetectablesecurity systems making him a very good spy.

-Is a little shit with a heart of gold.

-Call Jadwiga “boss”.

-Hang on most of the time on other Earth Bots’s shoulders to avoid being step on.

-Love mecha, kaiju and sentai animes/TV shows.

-His favorite tv show is Kamen Rider.

-He is a fan of Godzilla movies.

-When Wasp brough to the Earth Bots community and was given political asylium, Browning voluntered himself to become his “emotional pet support”, an idea that Rung liked ‘cause he noticed that Wasp became very uncomfortable and anxious when around bots bigger than him and could badly trigger him so having a very small bot as an emotional support would be very good for Wasp.

-Is protective toward Wasp and help him to calm down when he is badly triggered.

-(Fun fact 1: Browning is originally a decepticon character from the anime “Transformers: super-god masterforce”).

-(Fun fact 2: His “birthdate” in the AU is the airdate of the episode in which hr got introduced “The Autobot Warrior, Sixknight?!”).

->Sakura:

-One of the oldest Earth Bots

-Birthdate: 30 March 1930 in japan

-Was found and adopted by a family in Nagasaki.

-Had a japanese accent.

-Was named “Sakura” ‘cause she appeared at the start of the cherry blossom season.

-Is a civilframe motorcycle.

-Alt form: motorcycle

-She and her adopted siblings lost their parents in atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sakura and her siblings didn’t get caught in the bombing as their parents send them to Yamaguchi days before to extented family for a small vacation, unfortunatly the parents stayed at Nagasaki and end up victims of the bombing.

-Since this tragedy, Sakura looked after her siblings and their families through the years.

-When Sakura met Jadwiga and the other Earth Bots, she was very hesitant at first to go live in the community in Detroit and leave her family behind but her adopted family convinced her to go.

-Is a hard-working femme who’s always ready to help others.

-Had anxiety problems.

-Had PTSD due to the trauma of her adopted parents’s death.

-Had regular therapy sessions with Rung.

-Is one of the scientists of the community.

-Had interest in science since the first times of her existence.

-Like to sudy technologies, science theories and biology.

-Develop technologies and equipement for the Earth Bots.

->Skyfire:

-Is a cybertronian shuttle who was burried in the ice of the Artic for hundred of years.

-Was found by the Earth Bots during the TFA events and was traited and woke up by Knock Out with Ratchet’s help.

-Was shocked to learn how long he have been buried in the ice and that there’s a conflict on Cybertron.

-Is also extremely worried ‘cause he had a conjunx who was his science partner and Skyfire is very worry about what happen to him while he was trapped in the Artic.

-Don’t want to be involved in the Autobot/Decepticon conflict as he is a scientist and not a soldier and was offered to become member of the Earth Bots who are also neutral in the conflict, an offer that Skyfire accepted.

-Skyfire’s objective: Find out what happened to his conjunx and reuniting with him.

-Act as a mentor toward the Earth Bots scientists.

-Share with the Earth Bots stories about how were Cybertron he had knew before his accident.

-Is a gentle giant.

->Pele:

-One of the youngest of the Earth Bots

-Had appeared in a volcano in Hawaii.

-Was adopted by an hawaiian family.

-Birthdate: 22 April 2008(or fifty years before the TFA canon)

-Was named Pele after the hawaiian godess of volcanos and fire.

-Is considered as one of the baby siblings by the community.

-Is a warframe seeker.

-Her frame had the ability to resist the highest temperature, she can even take a swim into lava if she wanted.

-Alt form: A jet.

-Is a playful femme who’s very curious about things.

-She like to observe things and people to learn how things around her work.

-Is a passionate of hawaiian fire dancing.

->Mulan(OC by StephanieNolmans  on Wattpad):

-One of the oldest Earth Bots.

-"Birthdate": March 01, 1928 in China.

-Was took in by a Shaolin temple.

-She was named after the legendary chinese heroine Hua Mulan.

-Is a civilframe motorcycle.

-Alt form: Motorcycle.

-She became a disciple and was taugh martial arts by the master of the temple along with the other disciples.

-She was one of the first Earth Bots Jadwiga met when the latter decided to travel around the world in hope to find others like her after WWII.

-After she left the temple to go live in the Earth Bots community, she learnt other martial arts.

-Her favorite martial arts are kung fu and karate.

-She love peace and calm, especially when she meditate.

-She's a disciplined femme who like to had a structured and organised life.

-Since she lived in a isolated temple most of her life before becoming a member of the EarthBots community, Mulan had difficulties to socialize and because of that she is rather shy with people/bots she just met, making her a bit of a loner.

-Bumblebee one time told she was like a "Prowl 2.0" as a joke.

-She use as a weapon a shaolin sword she forged herself.

-She's a good fighter and train everyday.

-Thank to her shaolin training, she cultivate the cybertronian equivalent of Ki which make her develop abilities which shock bots from Cybertron as normally no cybertronian motorcycle is able to do the things she could.

-However, she still working on developping her "ki abilities" and on learning to had a perfect control of them.

----------------------------------------------------------

Tag list:

@wassupbroseph , @astridkolch

[dylanfarqwar]

Barefoot Gen

Barefoot Gen is a story about death and hopelessness and the hell created by the United States dropping the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. It is also a story with a surprising amount of hope considering the subject matter that it’s focused on. Barefoot Gen is such an enduring tale because of how enduring Gen is himself. When he loses most of his family in the explosion, he devotes himself to protecting his mother and his unborn sister. When he sees a soldier collapse and begin to cough blood, he builds a makeshift stretcher and drags him to the hospital. Barefoot Gen is filled with more injustice than anything we’ve watched yet, especially because all of it is real. It is tear-jerking how much optimism the story tries to bring to its audience in spite of that fact. 

When a Japanese couple is despairing at the announcement of surrender, Gen’s mom only utters “Tell me, why now? Why not before?” For me, it was one of the most powerful lines in the film. Why now? Why does it take so many deaths and hell on Earth to end a war? It feels even more futile with the now modern historical context that Japan had sought out the Soviet Union to open negotiations with the United States before the bomb was dropped. Was all of this worth the prospect of “unconditional surrender?” The question is not rhetorical. Of course that many human lives weren’t a worthy price to be paid, and yet they were paid nonetheless. It’s hard to not feel some indignation at the politicians and soldiers who waged the war that cost so many lives.

Even Gen’s father sees their folly before any bombs are dropped. He knows he is in the minority, but disapproves of the war and those choosing to wage it. Barefoot Gen has to be one of the most powerful anti-war pieces I’ve seen and it’s power is only magnified by the fact that the original author lived through the Hiroshima bombings himself. To witness such horror and still write such optimism into this story speaks volumes. It can be very difficult to fight war with anything other than war and it is certainly not the approach that the United States chose to take upon their entry into World War II.

Barefoot Gen ends with Gen building a ship. It is a ship just like the one he gave to his younger brother at the beginning of the film... before both it and his brother were lost to the fires of war. The rebuilding of the ship is a symbolic act and Gen lights a candle on it before setting it sail on the river. It is a symbol for rebuilding and moving forward in spite of all the losses they have all incurred. Losses far greater than any of them should have had to bear.

[jimhair]

I was raised by my maternal grandparents; my grandmother a Welsh coal miner’s daughter, and my grandfather a farm boy from Illinois who joined the US Navy to get as far away from the farm as he could. After twenty years service he retired but was asked to return in 1937 and was responsible for the catapults on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I asked him about Pearl Harbor but he only told me the ship had left harbor on patrol the day before the Japanese attack, and when they returned he couldn’t, and wouldn’t describe what he saw. He survived the war and retired as a L.C.D.R, and within a decade took over duty as my father. From Wikipedia: “On 6 August, a Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, to which Prime Minister Suzuki reiterated the Japanese government's commitment to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on. Three days later, a Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki. Over the next two to four months, the effects of the atomic bombings killed between 90,000 and 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000 and 80,000 people in Nagasaki; roughly half occurred on the first day. For months afterward, many people continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, and injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. Though Hiroshima had a sizable military garrison, most of the dead were civilians.” My grandfather lost friends during the war in the Pacific, and endured the constant threat of death from the Japanese military. From childhood I remember waking to find him in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and lost in his thoughts looking out over the Pacific, or silently tending his garden with a statue of Buddha in meditation beside a koi pond, beneath the red torii he had built. Logged Hillside, Mt. St. Helens, July 2022 🇺🇦💔🌎💔🌏💔🌍💔🇺🇦 #earth #america #human #family #photographer #tree #landscape #photography #mediumformat #120 @hasselblad #camera #bnw @ilfordphoto #film #blancoynegro #blancetnoir #Hēiyǔbái #siyahbeyaz #白黒 #shirokuro #blackandwhite #istillshootfilm #photojournalism #pdx #portland #nw #northwest #oregon 22077011/12 FP4 Hasselblad 500 c/m 50mm Distagon https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg7OyaZlsiK/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[writers-blogck]

Brand New Day ( Exorcist!Kageyama Tobio x Demon!Reader )

Warning(s): If you know what this is inspired by, then you my friend also pay for something you never thought you would actually pay for before.  This does have mentions of WWII, Hiroshima, and homicide but nothing too in-depth.  Title: Brand New Day Pairing: Exorcist!Kageyama Tobio x Demon!Reader Fandom: Haikyuu! Word Count: 1,962

        The candles were flickering in the night's cold air, the whispers of their smoke disappearing in the dark. Everything felt like it was going through you. You flattened out your palm before hovering it above the flame. Even though the fire was interrupted by your hand, you couldn't feel a thing. Your skin didn't burn, you didn't even feel a hint of the warmth that the candle was emitting. A scream slipped past your lips as you hit the candle off of the table, toppling the small item to the ground. Before it could spread, a foot was already stepping on the fire to put it out. 

        "I told you, there's a spirit in there!" A shrill woman's voice trembled, refusing to move any closer than the entrance of the room. This had been your house years ago and yet it now held different lives. If you had it your way, you would have burned the building to the ground until there was nothing left but the ash of your memories. This family could learn to live somewhere else, you didn't want to have to share. 

        "Let me do my job. Take your family out to eat and when you come back, it will be dealt with." The boy with blue eyes spoke, setting his bag on the new bed. This used to be your room and they went and got rid of everything! How was any of this your fault?! It was their fault! Their fault! The flames of the remaining lit candles grew to ten times their size with your anger to fuel them. The woman yelped and was gone in a moment but the boy didn't react. Did he look....bored? You had never met anyone like this before. You didn't like where this was going. 

        You moved to push yourself in the corner of the ceiling, trying to put as much space between this new intruder and yourself. He was bringing out beads and vials of water. Some were clear while others seemed to hold a strange carmine color liquid. Wine, perhaps? The bottles were corked which kept you from smelling anything, though you wouldn't be able to smell anything anyway. You had lost that ability. How many of the five senses had you lost? 

        The first to go was touch. Whether the cold ice that resided in the icebox or the sharp blade of a kitchen knife, nothing could make you feel anything. You could no longer smell anything and while you didn't have the need to eat anymore, you believed you had lost the sense of taste as well. Would the other two disappear with time? Which would go first: your hearing or your sight? Which would you prefer? Would you be nothing but a mass of cells come next birthday? 

        "Now, we can do this the hard way or the easy way." Your eyes trailed over the boy's clothing, taking in what looked like a priest's attire. With how young he seemed to be, he couldn't be more than a trainee. He couldn't be older than sixteen. You had been that age....how many years had it been since then? You had died in the early morning, only having lived fifteen years before your own father decided to cut it short. While the rest of your family seemed to have moved on from the tragic house, you felt stuck. If you had to do something you pass over, you had no clue what it was. There wasn't a handbook for the dead or anything, though that would be helpful. What was the year now? It had been 1946 when you had passed, the bombing of your country having been the year before. 

        You had an idea as to why your father did what he did. Your country had lost the war and was forced to surrender. It wasn't in the code of honor to surrender, no matter the odds. That was something your father had believed strongly in. He was never the same after he came back from the war. It was coming up on the first anniversary of the day that Japan surrendered. It was a time to reflect and mourn those who had lost their life. For your father, it just reminded him of what he called his 'personal' disgrace. It all came boiling over and was done before your mother or any of your siblings could know what was happening. You had been the last to fall under your father's knife before he turned it on himself. Was that why you stayed? 

        It was strange to watch the boy in front of you. His eyes had passed over your form quickly, could he not see you? You wouldn't be surprised. No one seemed to be able to see you. There had been fleeting moments where a child's eyes may have lingered for too long or a dog sniffed at your feet but nothing substantial. It had been a lonely existence ever since that day. The house had gone unsold for decades. It wasn't until the history of the house began to fade into nothing but distant memories when they began to try to sell it.

        "Who are you?" You asked, more for yourself than anything but the boy seemed to hear it as he whipped his head in your direction. You were just as surprised as he was, the two of you just staring at each other in silent curiosity for what felt like centuries. 

        "You're just a kid...." His voice was softer than before, the cogs turning in his head in an attempt to understand the situation before him. He hadn't been trained for this. Demons weren't supposed to look like this...He shook his head, forcing himself to remember that demons can make themselves look like anything. They would pull any trick that they had to if it meant they could feed. 

        "I am not a kid! I'm the same age as you! Are you a kid?!" 

        "No!" 

        "Then that means I'm not one either!" 

        The silence blanketed over the two of you once again, this time a feeling of tension joining it. Kageyama was confused and didn't know what to feel. He had to exorcise you, you were bad! Yet, at this moment you looked like nothing more than a scared kid, someone his age. He imagined himself being a demon, it didn't seem possible! Then...what about an evil spirit? You could just be a spirit-filled with malice and spite. Still, you were like a scared animal pushing itself as far into the corner as possible. You could have tried to hurt him when he walked in but you didn't.         

        The owners of the house didn't say that they had been hurt in any way. You had been destroying their property and making a mess of things but you hadn't attacked them. Kageyama had been taught about exorcising spirits that would scratch up the living and attempt to bash them with whatever items were around. Still, was it his place to question the situation? He was here to exorcise you and that was it. He needed to get the job done and return back to Oikawa, the exorcist he was apprenticing under. 

        "Are you going to kill me?" 

        Kageyama's eyes widened at the quiet whisper that barely made it to his ears. He had never heard anyone talk about exorcism as if it was death before. It was always a good thing but hearing the fear in your voice, he was beginning to doubt his own profession. He wanted to be the best exorcist and yet here he was, heart breaking at the sound of one tiny question. This wasn't his first exorcism and yet it felt just as hard. 

        "No..." He whispered out, not even noticing his own words. He had been told this was going to be an easy job, just one to give him some more experience. It wasn't supposed to present him with a moral conundrum that had no easy answer! He was still just an apprentice. 

        "Then why are you still here?" 

        "This is my house, by the way." You continued on, bringing his attention back to the issue at hand. You were slowly lowering yourself to be level with the boy, allowing him to look at you up close for the first time. Kageyama remembered the creatures he had dealt with and you looked nothing like them. They had been so ugly and you were so...Ah! He couldn't be attracted to a spirit! 

        "Well, new people are moving in and living here now." He cleared his throat, wrapping his beads around his hand in a silent prayer for God to help him during these trying times. He had been a faithful servant, hadn't he? So why was he being put in such a terrible position? Perhaps this was meant to be...Maybe Kageyama was supposed to discover the existence of nonviolent spirits. A new breakthrough...

        "Well," You copied the tone of his voice, nose crinkling up in annoyance, "I was killed in this house so I think that means that I get to stay here." 

        Killed? Kageyama had read about angry spirits who were victims in their past life but they had all been dangerous. They were fueled by the anger and rage in their final moments which caused their soul to stay. Strong emotions were the only thing that could keep a spirit on Earth and so far, the only one that had been successful so far was anger. The need for revenge. Why had you stayed? 

        "I can't let you just keep living here. You need to leave." 

        "Why?" 

        "Because this isn't your house."

        "It was."

        "But it isn't anymore."

        "But it was!" 

        "Yeah, but another family has moved in!" The two of you were going back and forth at this point, each raising your voice more than the last time. The flames of the candles were flickering as if a strong wind was present in the room, your emotions affecting the world around you. 

        "So what am I supposed to do?"

        Kageyama pulled his book out of his robes, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Sometimes creatures were too strong to be exercised by one person which then meant it would need to be transported somewhere else. This spell was able to change whatever the demon or spirit was binding itself to. He could bind you to one of his items which meant he didn't have to exorcise you just yet. 

        If you weren't a danger to anyone, shouldn't they try to find a way to help you? That was what he was telling himself, ignoring the fluttering of his heart when your face was inches away from his. You were hovering behind him, watching his movements, and try to read what was written in the book. He was doing this to help you dammit, not because he thought you were super cute! 

        You were going to be the end of him. He could no longer go on with his training as he had before. You had added doubt into his small world. Exorcists weren't supposed to let a spirit stay and they especially weren't supposed to bind them to themselves! Yet, spirits were only supposed to be violent creatures, and yet here he was with a living (or not living) piece of proof. His superiors would have just exorcised you without a second thought. This wasn't how exorcists were supposed to deal with hauntings....Oh well, there was always a first time for everything. 

        "There is something that I can do but we are gonna have to set some ground rules first." 

        Oikawa would have to just deal with it.

[hydrasweapon]

@weaponizedembrace gets the longest starter in history for our thing

            Howard doesn’t find Steve. Even after days, after months, he doesn’t find Steve. He keeps on searching, though – maybe because he cannot stand Bucky’s face whenever he comes back empty-handed. In the meantime, Bucky’s injuries heal up. Way quicker than should be possible, he’s as fresh as a daisy – minus the arm, of course. They want to send him home. He tells them very sincerely fuck you and that’s it. He guesses it’s also Carter’s and maybe Colonel Phillips doing that they leave him alone, but he doesn’t care. To be honest, Bucky doesn’t care about a lot of things anymore. VE-day comes and goes and he toasts with the other Howlies but then he walks back to the barracks, surrounded by screaming, partying people, and he feels nothing. The war in Europe is over and he has never felt more lost, not even in the trenches with shells detonating right next to him. 

          He reads about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wonders what Steve would have said to that. Then he has to put the newspaper away because it feels like his heart is going to give up on him. He gets a lot of letters from his family but doesn’t know how to respond, so he only puts them in his duffel or sometimes in the pocket of his jacket and feels bad for never finding the right words. 

           In late August, Carter tells him that she’s going to go to New York City to continue the SSR’s work and also that there’s going to be an official state funeral for Steve in Arlington. Nobody, not even a super-soldier, could survive months without food or shelter in the icy, windswept wasteland of the Arctic. Bucky listens and doesn’t answer but he turns up the day Carter and Stark leave for the States in Stark’s private plane. 

          The ceremony is pompous. The Arlington National Cemetery is bursting at the seams because every politician wants to say goodbye to a hero and hopefully get some good publicity while doing that. Bucky has to puke three times behind a tree before he is able to walk up to President Truman to get his own Purple Heart medal and receive Steve’s Medal of Honor because there is no other family member left to take it for him. They even conjured a fucking statue up out of nothing. They want to take photos in front of that statue. Bucky is glad his stomach is already empty or he would have puked on the shoes of the President himself and wouldn’t that be something to put on the front page. 

          He doesn’t stay longer than it takes to get the medals, do some hand-shaking and take some pictures. There is a speech. The President said some words, too, but the real speech is by Colonel Phillips himself and Bucky can’t listen to that, he just can’t. They will think he’s rude but he’s pretty certain Phillips understands. He leaves the cemetery and promises himself to never come back to this place.

          Bucky takes the train up to New York. After half an hour, he feigns to be asleep because people keep thanking him for his service and welcoming him home and it makes his already empty stomach roil again. His parents and Becca are waiting for him at the train station. It’s when Winifred Barnes wraps her son up in her arms, that something breaks inside him. Bucky takes a deep, shuddering breath, and now the tears, finally, come. They stream down his face, soak his mother’s blouse, and he cannot get enough air into his lungs, everything is hurting, the pain squeezes his chest, his insides, his heart, and he falls to his knees and Winifred sits down next to him on the cold, hard ground, and just keeps him close and rocks him back and forth like a child, but he will always be her child, won’t he? No matter what.

          Bucky doesn’t manage to get a grip on himself for half an hour. All the time, his mother’s tight embrace doesn’t waver; Becca shields his vulnerable left side and his father’s hand is heavy and protecting on his shoulder. George Barnes glares at every passenger even thinking of making a stupid remark concerning this scene on a public station platform. 

            Then, somehow, Bucky manages to stop crying, or maybe he is just – empty. His father bundles his family up in the car and they drive through Manhattan and back to Brookly, home. Bucky is too tired and exhausted and falls asleep with his head on his sister’s shoulder. He doesn’t even notice when George picks him up carefully and carries him inside as he used to do back when he was a young boy and drifted off listening to the wireless in the evening. His and Becca’s child room changed into Winifred’s sewing room years ago but there’s still his old bed and when his father puts him down there and covers him with a warm quilt, he curls up and sleeps for hours.

            During the next couple of weeks, neither Bucky nor his family knows how to treat each other. Winifred bakes a lot, George urges Bucky to play cards with him in the evenings. Becca comes over whenever she can. Bucky visits his grandparents' grave; they had died while he'd been overseas. Apart from that, he doesn't really leave the house: There are always people on the street he knows. They welcome him back and either tell him how sorry they are for his loss or ask where Steve is (if they didn't put 2 and 2 together yet).

            He stays in his family home and stares out of the window and lets his mother put some meat on his bones and wonders what on earth he is supposed to do now, without his best friend and without a left arm besides.

            It’s shortly after Christmas (a rather silent affair) that Margaret Carter knocks on his door and kind of bullies him into joining the SSR once more. She knows all the perfect words for him to agree -- that Steve wouldn’t want him to spend the rest of his life this way, that he cannot live off his parents forever, that he is still a useful member of society. He agrees just to get her out of his room because she makes him feel scraped raw. Shortly after New Year’s Day, Bucky starts to work for the New York office of the SSR.

            The years pass. They are -- mostly a dull succession of days. His sister marries in 1949, a guy called William Proctor, who works for a shipping company and never saw the European Theater due to really bad eyesight. Dancing with Rebecca on her wedding day is one of the few memories Bucky will cherish for the rest of his life. She is so happy. 

           Unfortunately, being a married woman seems to mean that she absolutely has to marry her brother off, too. She introduces him to friends at least once a month and invites him over for dinner with -- what a coincidence! -- single ladies all the time. She also makes him visit the dance halls with her every other week. He doesn’t mind the last one -- it’s really nice to watch all the couples dance, learn this new Boogie Woogie thing. He is not interested in the gals, though. He simply cannot bring himself to think of love again.

            He's no longer working for the SSR but for an agency Carter, Stark, and Phillips formed of its remnants: the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. The acronym makes Bucky want to both puke and cry. It doesn’t change much, workwise, though.

            1954 is a big year. He attends the weddings of Dum Dum Dugan and Jim Morita and it’s almost as if the Howling Commandos are back together. Even Falsworth comes to the States for the occasion, him and Gabe sharing pictures of chubby Montgomery Junior and little Steven. Gabe looks a little sheepish when he tells Bucky the name of his son and Bucky might be a little choked-up but he’s certain Steve would have loved this little, full-faced namesake. Only Dernier doesn’t make it.

            1954 is also the year Bucky has a vocal dispute with Peggy Carter and quits his job quite aggressively. But what else is he supposed to do when he’s down in former Camp Lehigh for a work thing and crosses paths with Arnim godfuckingdamn Zola? It’s only due to three coworkers that he cannot bash Zola’s face the moment he spots him in the corridor. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about Operation Paperclip. Carter’s words are like poison in his ears. He doubts she believes them, herself. But she has the greater good in mind and was probably overruled in Zola’s case. Bucky does not care. He will not work for an agency hiring this piece of dirty shit. He has nightmares for weeks, always seeing that grubby little face with its evil smirk in front of his eyes. 

            It’s complicated to find another job. Nobody wants to hire a cripple. Labor work is impossible for him, too. Shortly before Thanksgiving in 1954, Bucky notices for the first time that something is off. That he is -- wrong. When he asks for a job in a nearby factory, the boss asks him how he lost his arm. He doesn’t believe the war-story. “Look at you, you’re too young to have been in the war, son.”

            That evening, Bucky stares into the mirror. The guy is right: He looks like he came home from Europe yesterday. He looks like a guy in his mid-20s, not like a man going on 40. His younger sister looks older now. There’s not a single white hair. There are no wrinkles. He drinks a whole bottle of whisky and tells himself he’s having excellent genes. 

Shortly before Christmas, he gets a new job thanks to his brother-in-law and works as an accountant in the same shipping company as William Proctor.

            1958 is both a joyful and terrible year. Becca gives birth to her first child after years of trying to get pregnant. Little Emily Sarah is the cutest thing on earth and Bucky loves her with every fiber of his being. He tries to ignore the women gushing at him ‘being such a young, handsome father’ when he takes her out for walks. He turned 40 two months ago. He should not look like this.

            In late August, George Barnes dies. The doctor speaks of a heart attack. Bucky cries late at night, in his bed, when he doesn’t have to be the strong one anymore. He moves in with his mother again to support her -- so she can keep the apartment she lived in for nearly 45 years already, and so she has company and someone to watch over her. She, too, is getting older and frailer. Bucky could be her grandson, now, given his looks. When their old neighbor Mr. Lowenstein mentions this, Bucky cannot ignore it any longer. He calls Howard Stark.

            The passage of time manifested itself in a lot of wrinkles in Stark’s face. That’s how a man his age should look like. That’s what Bucky wants to see when he’s standing in front of a mirror. Stark looks taken aback at his sight, then explains in great detail that he’s an engineer and usually doesn’t do biological stuff but he draws a vial of blood either way and looks at it under a microscope and then tells him that he could be mistaken but the last and only time he ever saw cells like Bucky’s was shortly after they shot Steve up with Erskine’s serum.

            Bucky thinks of Zola and his countless injections and fire in his veins and pukes right across Stark’s workbench. Stark says there’s nothing he can do. That was Erskine’s area of expertise, not his. He really doubts Bucky is immortal but he will probably live to see his 150th birthday. Bucky could ask Zola, of course, Zola who’s working for S.H.I.E.L.D. now. But he’d rather cut his remaining arm off than ever seeing him again.

            He doesn’t tell his mother nor his sister. He tries to live on as if nothing happened but it’s hard. He notices now that he heals way quicker than the average human being. He gets bonuses because he never calls in sick for work. On a sleepless night, he walks through Brooklyn and over to Manhattan and back to the docks for work and doesn’t feel tired at all. He’s----he’s like Steve now. Or rather, was since that factory in Kreischberg. He just chose to never notice.

            He sees his mother age and little Emily Sarah grow up and his own face doesn’t change at all. Sometimes he wonders if everyone he knows is going to die and he will end up alone in this world. It’s a terrifying thought. More often than not he finds himself standing on the docks after work, staring into the muddy water. Steve is down there, too. A cold, dark grave. He wouldn’t want Bucky to off himself. He would be furious. That, and maybe whatever Zola did to his body would prevent him from dying, anyway. So Bucky thinks about it but never acts on it.

            In January 1961, Winifred Barnes dies. Bucky, confused he doesn’t find his mother in the kitchen as usual in the morning, goes to check on her. She looks like she’s still sleeping but her hands are cold. Bucky sits down next to her for three hours and cries and hides his face in her neck that still smells like her. It’s only when his brother-in-law pounds on the front door because he didn’t turn up for work that Bucky gets up and calls his sister.

            They bury their mother next to George Barnes. Bucky brings flowers every week.

            One year later, shortly before the assassination of Kennedy, Howard Stark pops up out of nowhere, looking mad and excited. He talks a lot of gibberish Bucky doesn’t understand, but he gets the gist either way. Howard invented the prototype of a mechanical prosthesis that will work like a normal arm made of flesh and bone does. It’s absolutely batshit crazy. The surgery needed to implant the sensors of the arm into one’s brain will probably kill the test subject. Bucky agrees, anyway. First of all, he doesn’t mind dying. Sooner rather than later (which means in over 100 fucking years). Secondly, having only one arm sucks. He has gotten used to it, over the years, but it’s still crap. And, in the end, if Stark manages to develop a working prosthesis far superior to what they got now, all the other poor cripples will benefit, too.

            Bucky doesn’t tell his sister because she would try to stop him. She’s mad as hell at him, though, and refuses to speak to him for one month when he comes back with a metal arm (because of course, he did not die). Emily Sarah thinks her uncle is absolutely amazing. 

The arm is better than any prosthesis he had so far. It’s not a real arm but he doubts anything will be like the real thing. He keeps it covered up whenever he goes outside. According to Stark, there’s nobody else who would survive such extensive surgery. He puts the blueprints away for later generations. ‘Now is just not the time’, he says.

            Then there’s another war. Bucky wonders why on earth the United States engage in whatever is happening in Vietnam. 20 years later and everyone seemed to have forgotten about Europe. They probably think now that there’s a wall dividing Germany and thus Eastern and Western countries, they have to do their bombing and shooting somewhere else. He’s getting more and more nightmares just reading the newspapers. Steve didn’t sacrifice his life so humans could fight on another continent. But nobody cares about Captain America anymore save perhaps for stupid comics and stupid movies and stupid biographies they want to interview Bucky for.

            His mood, never back to being cheery and humorous after the war, turns even darker. There are no more mirrors in his apartment. He’s sick of seeing his young face. He knows Becca and her husband noticed, too, but they don’t say anything. Some ghosts you just cannot explain. Some ghost you just cannot understand if you didn’t see them yourself.

            His only glimmer of hope is little Emily Sarah. He lets her dance on his feet. He lets her play with his metal arm. He picks her up from school if his job allows it. He tells her about a guy named Captain America he met in Europe who was really brave and heroic and saved them all. Those stories are her favorite. Unfortunately, she also notices the comics and thinks it’s absolutely hilarious that Captain America has a young friend whose name is also Bucky. Neither Bucky himself nor her parents tell her the truth.

            Then, on a rainy day in April 1966, Bucky gets the worst message imaginable. Car accident. Slippery road. No survivors. 

            He breaks down when he has to pick a coffin small enough for a child. 

            He lays them to rest next to his parents. Carter is there, too. She puts a huge bouquet of lilies in front of the headstones and squeezes his arm. Her cheeks are wet. Bucky doesn’t thank her, cannot open his mouth because he fears he wouldn’t be able to stop screaming. She knows, though.

            Bucky has to clear out his sister’s apartment the next day. When he stands in front of the big mirror in the main bedroom and sees his youthful face, chestnut hair, the skin free of wrinkles, he puts his fist through the glass. There’s a sharp-edged shard embedded in his wrist. He pulls it out and stares at the blood oozing out and then sits down and hopes. 

            Two hours later, the wound is scabbed over and the dizzy feeling has vanished. He takes the photos and other mementos and leaves the apartment.

            Stark does not seem surprised to find Bucky visiting his Estate in Los Angeles. ‘I tried to, you know,’ he tells him. ‘To reverse the effects of that serum. But I did not succeed. Maybe smarter minds in the future will be able to.’

            Bucky stares at him, feeling all the pain of the world settling on his shoulders. ‘I can’t wait that long. I can’t. Put a bullet through my head or reverse the effects, I don’t care.’

Stark is silent for a long time. Then he says: ‘Maybe there’s another option.’ And leads him down to the basement.

            The thing that looks like an iron maiden from the Dark Ages is supposed to freeze a person like you’d put a piece of steak into the freezer for eating it later. Little does Bucky know that Howard’s idea for it comes from Arnim Zola himself. Having received a terminal diagnosis, there is absolutely no idea too crazy for Zola to extend his lifespan or survive until more advanced medicine will save him. Stark toyed with the idea himself. What if he would get sick? What if he wants to go to a future where he isn’t limited by his own time and state of research? He doesn’t tell Bucky any of that. He only says: ‘It might kill you. It will kill every normal human, that’s for sure. If you don’t die, though, maybe scientists can help you in the future.’

            Bucky needs a week to take care of his belongings, money, and the apartment. He never felt more alive in the past 20 years than this week. He only keeps what reminds him of his family and Steve. It fits in two suitcases. He offers Stark all the money he’s got and the billionaire looks affronted. It’s probably only peanuts, for him. He takes it anyway, ‘to make investments. Gonna need money in the future, pal.’

            Then, on a Sunday evening, Bucky unscrews the metal arm, undresses, and steps inside the tank-like machine. The metal is cold under his bare feet. 

            ‘Do you really want to do that?’ Stark asks one last time. Bucky looks at him, all the tiredness of the world in his eyes. Then he closes his eyes. He doesn’t feel the cold at all.

[belareaderfmp]

FMP Evaluation

For my final major project I chose underground/overground as my flipside theme. I thought that this would give me a good opportunity to explore light with overground and dark with underground. This stark contrast would make an eye catching piece of work. I chose war as the topic within this flipside theme. This enabled me to explore wartime underground bunkers which led me to look into the cold war with the nuclear explosions and the effects of nuclear war. This has a personal resonance as my dad’s godfather, my great grandfathers cousin (Uncle Ken) was the pilot of the plane that dropped Britain’s first h bomb.

Out of all of the artists I researched during this project, there were three that impacted and inspired me the most. I researched Kathe Kollwitz who was a German artist during the war who did wood block prints studying people who have been affected by war. From this artist I have taken the stark black and white effect from her work. I think it is very effective and fits with the flipside theme. I also admire the way she managed to convey the strong emotion and the horrors of war in such an apparently simple way. This influenced my final three pieces. Shown above is one of her works. Secondly the artists Iri and Toshi Maruki who lived in Japan throughout the world wars and cold war who were both personally effected by the Hiroshima explosion. This husband and wife artist duo created ‘The Hiroshima Panels’ which are a series of fifteen painted folding panels which they completed over a span of thirty two years. I admire the intensity and emotion that their works convey. Their work is mainly black and white images with the blurry coloured background of the flames which I have done something similar for my final outcomes with the black drawings and the background coloured. Shown below is part of their work ‘The Hiroshima Panels’.

The artist Henry Moore also inspired me with his series of wartime drawings which are displayed at the Tate, more specifically his piece ‘Tube Shelter Perspective’ which shows lots of people almost looking lifeless all lined up sleeping in an underground tunnel. This inspired me for one of my final outcomes where it has a tree and underneath it is people sheltering in the London underground. The people in this are hard to make out a bit like his work.

I was really excited to look further into ‘Operation Grapple’ for my wider world research. This was the operation for testing Britain’s first H-bomb, it was interesting to explore the sense of pride that a member of my family was involved in a recent part of this country’s history with the flipside of being horrified that a relative was involved in the creation of a weapon of mass destruction. For research I read the book ‘Operation Grapple’ which was written by Uncle Ken (Group Captain Kenneth Hubbard). It was amazing to learn some of the behind the scenes of the RAF and their operations and I can personally relate to some of the things he is talking about with flying these planes as I just started having flying lessons myself last September. Below is a picture of uncle ken’s plane during the operation, as well as picture of the mushroom cloud from the H-bomb.

In researching wartime bunkers, I was interested to find out just how many were created and could be lying undiscovered under the countryside. A man discovered one in his garden under what he thought was a drain cover, which was left forgotten. This is what inspired my image of the bunker underneath the tree. It is also interesting that many bunkers are used for displaying artworks/turned into galleries. There was one German bunker in the Channel Islands that was excavated a couple of years ago after being filled in in the 1960’s and they uncovered some purple painted flowers on the wall done by one of the soldiers. Shown below is the picture of the flowers in the German bunker as well as the hidden bunker under the Middlesbrough back garden.

In this project I have experimented with new techniques, processes and materials. For example Line drawings/pen scribble drawings, layered tracing paper images, making boxes/3d work, woodblock prints, mandala designs, 2 handed symmetrical drawings, using the layout app to mirror images, collage, images with light – using photographic paper, taking photos and learning how to use photoshop more. As I chose to do layered tracing paper images for my final outcomes, I have been using tracing paper a lot. I really like this style because it allows you to try out the images in lots of different ways because each image is on a separate layer. Also in doing this technique I have become more confident in experimenting with colour, as for the backgrounds of my outcomes I used neon pastels which worked really well for the explosions.

For the FMP, because I work in black and white a lot, I have learnt to use it in many different and interesting ways to convey thoughts and feelings. But also adding hints of colour to give depth and feeling. Looking back now at all of the work I have done, the ones that I feel were the most successful are the pen scribble drawings. I like the freedom of the marks in contrast to my final outcomes that were made with more careful and defined lines. Most of my work is done very precisely and with clear lines, this was my favourite workshop in college as I wasn’t worried about messing up (which I do too much with my work).

My initial outcome idea came from a drawing that I did in my sketchbook having brought ideas together from different workshops for example Hannah’s layered tracing paper workshop with the idea of a floating world. My first outcome, building on from my ideas from the sketchbook, developed into an image of Birmingham cathedral in ruins following a bomb attack. I am fairly happy with the overall image, I like how the mountain being upside down can form a floating world, but I feel like the flames were dulled down too much as just a block colour from being scanned in. I went onto develop two other pieces with a similar idea, I think that the one with the mushroom cloud worked well but again the colour of the explosion was dulled down, so the image lost some of the detail. The third outcome I don’t like as much, I like the images but I think that it is too plain in the background. I also developed these outcomes further by taking sections of them showing more of the detail up close and changing the hues/saturation of them in photoshop.  

1. Thoughts, experiment, man-made

2. Destruction, historic, devastation

3. Inferno, senseless, ruin

4. rumble, beauty, rock

In this project, I have learnt new techniques like the photographic workshop outcomes and also the pen scribble drawings. From this project I feel more confident with starting my pieces and making bolder marks. I am now more open minded with trying new styles, techniques and thinking of new ways to look at art and what it is. In my proposal I said that I wanted to do layered tracing paper images for my final outcomes as I thought that they make strong, bold images and I think that I was quite successful in doing this. I succeeded in producing larger scale images, my final outcomes were produced in A3. This project has taught me a lot of new things both creative and technical skills, which I will definitely take further and I am looking forward to what new things I will learn next year. 

[asiaberkeley]

Afghan is beautiful

I am a half Afghan woman. An Afghan-European American. An Afghan American.

Admittedly, it took me awhile to offer up this information in the aftermath of 9/11 when Afghanistan became synonymous with terrorism in the eyes of many Americans. Taking pride in my heritage suddenly and painfully became controversial.

People didn’t know about my Afghan-ness though because I had my mother’s surname and not my Pashtun father’s: Hotaki. Also, I didn’t wear any kind of head covering because I was raised Catholic. It was easy to hide and pass for completely White.

My late father, an aspiring doctor and med school student who spoke six languages, left Kabul with his family before the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan as a child. They were the lucky ones. He spent most of his life in Germany where many Afghans have sought refuge. One of my fondest memories is flying kites with him and my Irish-Swedish-French American mother in the Munich Public Gardens as a child. There was no wind that day and we dragged the kites in dizzy circles…laughing together...just as I imagine him now when he was a boy: kite flying in the streets of Kabul.

Since my father died when I was six, I returned to my mother’s hometown of Boston with her in 1996. I was later left to contemplate what it meant to be Afghan in a place with very few Afghans compared to Virginia, California, and New York. In college, as an Asian Studies major at Wellesley College and later at the University of California, Berkeley, I often corrected people who said that Afghanistan is in the Middle East and not in South-Central Asia. I wondered why it seemed that no one had received much education on this country’s history or people outside of reading the popular Khaled Hosseini novel, The Kite Runner, especially since we have been at war—fighting together with the Afghan forces against the Taliban in the longest war in American history.

Many Americans don’t realize that the attackers on 9/11 were not Afghan. The attackers did seek a hiding and meeting place in Afghanistan, however. But those facts shouldn’t matter. Because it doesn’t matter what ethnicity, race, or nationality someone is if they commit a crime and it doesn’t matter where they were hiding. The guilty party does not represent all people of their background or country just like Hitler does not represent all Germans or all of Germany and El Chapo does not represent Mexico or all Mexicans. Similarly, the latest mass shooter in El Paso doesn’t represent all white American men.

After former President Trump pondered out loud the mere possibility of a concocted plan to kill 10 million Afghans and wipe the country off the face of the earth – presumably through the use of nuclear weapons – I have thought more about what it means to be Afghan American today. And it’s not because of those unimaginably cruel musings which add insult to injury in the homes of all Afghans traumatized by decades of war. Indeed, nearly every person who is not a white man has been made to feel worthless, subhuman and criminal under the rhetoric of the former Trump administration...so Afghans are not alone.

But Afghans were alone in the discussion of their genocide in 2019. I have contemplated my identity even more because not one leader or politician in America of any background spoke out formally against those disturbing statements. (And it doesn’t matter if this was an actual plan of his or just an imaginary scenario dangling in the recesses of his mind.) What does the national silence mean?

After 9/11, Afghan American author of West of Kabul, East of New York and Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary, went viral with an email he sent.  In it, he wrote:

“The Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity, they were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it…Some say, if that’s the case, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated.”

After 2001, my family warned me that just telling people I was Afghan may offend or anger them because they may have lost a loved one on 9/11 or they may have had a son or daughter deployed to Afghanistan. In middle school, a classmate told me I was from the land of the terrorists after I proudly showed her an autographed book I received from an Afghan British writer, Saira Shah, called "The Storyteller's Daughter." My American cousin, a veteran, was later deployed to Afghanistan and brought back a burqa which I showed to my classmates in high school to teach them about the Taliban’s oppression. Contrary to what they may have assumed, what they saw was not traditional Afghan clothing. Traditional Afghan clothing, banned under the Taliban, is colorful, intricate, deeply hued, bright and beautiful. Google it.

A year has passed since Trump discussed wiping Afghanistan off the face of the earth. After it happened, I regularly checked Twitter and the news to see if any of our nation’s leaders denounced those remarks. I called my Governor, Congresspeople, and many others asking if just one would put out a statement to support Afghans and Afghan Americans against talk of our annihilation. The Governor’s office simply said that he did not put out a statement. I still haven’t found any. However, some Americans did speak out on social media. Thank you.

We have studied the long-lasting horrors of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our classrooms. I thought we concluded as a nation that something like that could never happen again. That not a single person in power thought it worth it to speak out against the possibility of the U.S. committing another nuclear genocide bewilders and frightens me. Is it controversial to say out loud that Afghans civilians do not deserve to die en masse? Are Afghans so vilified in our society that it’s a public risk to defend us?

If you still blame the Afghan people for 9/11 even if only on an subconscious level, think again. Many of the Afghan people are suffering in ways you can only imagine in your worst nightmares. They are not responsible and took no part in this. Like the poor souls who were killed in the Twin Towers, Afghans are survivors and casualties of terrorism as well. Afghan women have lost their entire families. They have been abused and pillaged. Men, women, and children have been bombed and maimed. Their history, including the rich Buddhist Silk Road history of Afghanistan, has been destroyed by the Taliban and others.

Discussing our nation's capability to conduct nuclear genocide of an entire people and country is an affront to all humans.

So I suggest to all of our nation’s leaders who have remained tight-lipped in the face of the unspeakable: Take time to learn something you don’t know about Afghanistan. Perhaps that could start with the story of progressive Afghan Queen and feminist Soraya Tarzi who asked, "Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset only needs men to serve it? Women should also take their part as women did in the early years of our nation..." Or it could be about the life and death of iconic Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir. You could learn about the courageous resistance of Afghan women and girls throughout history or visit that Afghan restaurant you were too timid to enter and try a sweet pumpkin kadoo dish.

As the war in Afghanistan, a war based on lies and deceit, may be coming to another tragic end with even graver implications for the women left behind who have fought so hard for equality,  maybe it’s finally time to read another book that is not the Kite Runner... and most importantly, time to look deep inside of ourselves and question the possible anger, hate and bias that has developed towards the Afghan people after the catastrophic and traumatizing events of September 11, 2001.

*See the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers which deemed that the American military did not know what it was doing there and that the war was based on lies and deceit. Government officials misled the American public about the war. The war has cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers with many more wounded as well as 100,000+ Afghan civilians killed or hurt. Many of the American troops have returned with PTSD. 30% of the Afghan casualties were children.

Sources

https://apnews.com/a2a8d7a4f89ec0515379dc4d4a38b56a

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/

[davidshawnsown]

COMMEMORATIVE  MESSAGE ON THE 75th ANNIVERSARY OF THE JAPANESE DECLARATION OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER AND THE END OF COMBAT HOSTILITIES IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC THEATERS OF OPERATIONS

Ladies and gentlemen, to all the people of the United States of America and Canada, to all our remaining living veterans of the Second World War of 1939-1945 and of all conflicts past and present and their families, to our veterans, active servicemen and women, reservists and families of the entire United States Armed Forces and Canadian Armed Forces, and to all the uniformed military and civil security services of the Allied combatants of this conflict, to all the immediate families, relatives, children and grandchildren of the deceased veterans, fallen service personnel and wounded personnel of our military services and civil uniformed security and civil defense services, to all our workers, farmers and intellectuals, to our youth and personnel serving in youth uniformed and cadet organizations and all our athletes, coaches, judges, sports trainers and sports officials, and to all our sports fans, to all our workers of culture, music, traditional arts and the theatrical arts, radio, television, digital media and social media, cinema, heavy and light industry, agriculture, business, tourism and the press, and to all our people of the free world:

Our greeting to the millions who today celebrate such an important day in our history.

On this very day in our history, in 1914, the Battle of Cer, the very first Allied victory in the First World War against the Central Powers, began.

On this day in 1920, the Polish Land Forces inflicted a heavy defeat on the Red Army in the outskirts of Warsaw in one of the greatest battles of the Polish-Soviet War, the Battle of Warsaw, more known as the “Miracle on the Vistula River”, today marked as Armed Forces Day in this great country.

On this day 73 years ago, Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing offensive for the liberation of Southern France, began with the landing of a multinational Allied landing force along the Provence coast thus starting the liberation of this part of France, helped by members of the French resistance movement in the region.

On this very day, the world marks the following national independence days:

Indian Independence Day (1948),

Republic of Korea National Day (1948),

And the National Day of the Republic of Congo (1960).

On this day 78 years ago in Liberty Field, Fort Benning, Georgia, just as the flames of war were striking the western half of the European continent, a test airborne platoon made one final jump and therefore, with their qualification achieved, these pioneer paratroopers jump started the formation of the airborne troops of the United States Army which will have their baptism of fire later on in this great conflict.

And today, August 15, as we continue to endure the greatest health crisis of our time, in solidarity with all the millions of medical workers and professionals who are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries across the world, and in remembrance of those who have fallen due to this virus and in prayer not just for the recoveries of those who are ill but also for the success of the vaccines against this virus and its effects on the human body, on this day of the Great Christian Feast of the Dormition and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, we today mark from our homes a very important anniversary – the historic diamond jubillee of the historic declaration of unconditional surrender by no less than Emperor Hirohito of Japan formally stating his country’s unbearable acceptance of the terms of unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers by the whole of the country, government, people and the armed forces as proposed during the Postdam Conference in the spring of the victory in Europe and Northern Africa, just days following the twin American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the declaration of war against Japan by the Soviet Union followed on the Soviet military offensive against the Japanese armed forces in northern Korea and Manchuria, bringing to a close all the combat operations in the Pacific and China-Burma-India Theaters of Operations, effectively signalling that after 6 long, painful and bloody years in which millions perished in the battlefields in land, air and sea, and in the concentration and labor camps, in which millions fought the Axis Powers with bravery and courage and millions more in the home front helped with their labor and work towards the goal of victory over the aggressor, the Second World War, which began 81 years ago in Europe, in the midst of the regional war fought in China and Korea, has today, 75 years ago in the Asia-Pacific, been set towards its conclusion. Indeed millions of lives were lost in honor that this day would come at long last, the day that all combat operations finally ceased and hope began to spring up after years of war and tragedy that befell upon the world. Upon hearing this announcement mixed emotions filled the hearts and minds of the Japanese people, Korea rejoiced at the end of 4 decades of Japanese administration that caused a lot of suffering among its people. For the historic address to the nation, pre-recorded by no less than the Emperor just days before, indeed marked the beginning of the formal end to such a tremeous period in human history.

Millions all over the world indeed rejoined on this very day that brought the war to the end of all combat operations in the Asia-Pacific, signifying the end of the long years of sadness and destruction and the beginning of a new era of peace in our planet, while honoring the millions who never lived to see this day come. Indeed today is a day of commemoration and celebration of the end of all combat operaions in this part of the world and the great victory won on this day by the millions of men and women of the armed forces and paramilitary forces of the Allied Powers, who, following the spring victory in Europe, forced the end of years of Japanese rule over parts of the Asia-Pacific, that brought suffering and death to millions of people.

We cannot forget the fact the great heroism and sacrifices of the millions who belonged to the so-called Greatest Generation, whether they be armed forces servicemen and women, policemen and women, border control agents, firefighters and first responders, and personnel of paramilitary formations and police auxillary organizations of the Allied Powers, shown in either the battlefield or in the communities in which they served, together with the patriotism and service shown by home front workers and those in the entertainment industry and in sports, helped pave the way for the victory that today will be celebrated as well as in this coming September 2, the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of this long and bitter global war. The heroism of those heroes of the past are the inspiration behind the huge efforts of our heroes of today who are currently fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in many parts of the world, and whose sacrifices in one of the greatest health crises of our times will be remembed generation upon generation.

The historic announcement marked the formal termination of all military operations fought in the China-Burma-India and Pacific Theaters of Operations by the Allies, formally setting the stage towards the end of this long war and the beginning of years of peace. We cannot think that this day indeed would have not been possible if not for the sacrifices of these millions of servicemen and women of the armed forces and paramilitary organizations of the Allied Powers and the lives of the servicemen and women who perished in the fields of battle. So high was the casualties the Second World War had left with millions of perished civilians, law enforcement, emergency response  and military personnel, as well as huge losses in infastructure, agriculture and fisheries, health, culture and the arts. Today, only just thousands are left of the millions who on this day 75 years ago served with dignity, determination and dedication to their country, knowing that this day would truly come in their lives that the war will soon be over and peace will soon blossom in a world that had been ruined by the fires of conflict. In remembering such an historic moment that led to the conclusion of the Second World War, let us continue to hope that thru our simple acts and actions we can work to honor the legacy left behind by these millions of men and women who won the victory against the Axis Powers and help in building up a better world and just society for our future generations.

With great happiness and respect in our hearts, we remember of such a great day these millions of heroes, who with their lives helped win the war against the Axis Powers and secured the future of this planet and of all the human race, as their sacrifices helped in the all-out effort to win the war against the forces of evil. Without a doubt, they are the principal cause of such a great victory that we honor on thus very day, and promise to forever remain dedicated in upholding the legacy of the victory won by force of arms with the help of the home front for generation after generation.

We will forever never forget and always remember the millions of heroes who helped in the great victory won against the Axis Powers, whose immortal legacy will remain in our hearts as long as we live. For the legacy of these the millions who served in the uniformed services during one of the more tragic periods of our history, we pledge to forever uphold their memory and work towards the victory of peace and democracy all over the world, hoping for the day that the joys of peace will resound in all the countries of the world.

Today, as one united people of the world, with joy and gladness, we mark once more the anniversary the end of a long conflict that forever changed our world, and the beginning of the days of peace in which we enjoy. As one people may we honor this historic day in which all combat operations concluded in the Pacific and China-Burma-India Theaters, it is with great appreciation that we once more honor the memory of the millions who fought and died in their commitment to the Allied cause and for the total victory over the Axis Powers in every corner of the world.

As we also prepare for the upcoming 75th anniversary of the conclusion of this war, may we also today and forever uphold the legacy in which our greatest generation brought into the world and for their efforts to defeat the forces of international fascism. May we forever remember the sacrifices made by these our millions of men and women in the armed forces and paramilitary organizations, national intelligence agencies, businesses, film, radio, television, music, visual and theatrical arts, sports and many other sectors of our society in the victory in which we celebrate today and for generations to come. And may we all who today celebrate the very anniversary of the announcement of the Japanese unconditional surrender always work hard to honor the legacy of this great victory and to fulfill their lasting wishes for us to work hard towards a brighter world of our tomorrow.

ETERNAL GLORY TO THE MLLIONS OF THE FALLEN AND THE HEROES AND VETERANS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE, NORTHERN AFRICA AND THE PACIFIC FROM 1939-1945, WHOSE LEGACY WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN BY ALL THE GENERATIONS TO COME!

ETERNAL GLORY TO ALL THOSE WHO GAVE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE OF OUR WORLD AGAINST FASCISM, NAZISM AND IMPERIALISM IN THE FIELDS OF BATTLE, THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS, AND IN THE HOME FRONT!

LONG LIVE THE VICTORIOUS MEN AND WOMEN IN THE SERVICE OF THE ALLIES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE, NORTHERN AFRICA AND THE ASIA-PACIFIC!

LONG LIVE ALL THE ALLIED MILITARY LAW ENFORCEMENT AND EMERGENCY SERVICES VETERANS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR!

LONG LIVE THE INVINCIBLE AND FOREVER VICTORIOUS PEOPLE OF THE FREE WORLD AND ALL OUR SERVING ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN AND VETERANS OF THE ARMED SERVICES OF ALL THE COMBATANT ALLIED COUNTRIES THAT HELPED WIN THIS GREAT WAR AGAINST FASCISM, NAZISM AND IMPERIALISM, AS WELL AS ALL OUR ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICE PERSONNEL, CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES AND VETERANS OF THE POLICE, FIREFIGHTING, FORESTRY, BORDER CONTROL, CUSTOMS AND RESCUE SERVICES AS WELL AS OUR YOUTH OF TODAY AND THE CHILDREN OF OUR TOMORROW WHO WILL CARRY ON THE LEGACY OF ALL THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE THEM, ESPECIALLY TO THE MILLIONS OF MEN AND WOMEN WHO TOOK PART IN THIS GREAT WORLD WAR!

LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS 75TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN THE PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS AND THE GREAT VICTORY OVER THE FORCES OF THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN AND THE AXIS POWERS!

GLORY TO THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, CANADA, THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AND FRANCE, TOGETHER WITH THE ARMED SERVICES OF THE OTHER VICTORIOUS COMBATANT COUNTRIES OF THE ALLIED POWERS, GUARDIAN DEFENDERS OF OUR DEMOCRATIC WAY OF LIFE, OUR FREEDOM AND OUR LIBERTY AND GUARANTEE OF A FUTURE WORTHY OF OUR GENERATIONS TO COME!

TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND CANADA AND TO PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD, A VERY HAPPY 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TERMINATION OF HOSTILTIES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC AND VICTORY OVER JAPAN DAY!

And may I repeat the immortal words of the Polish National Anthem:

Poland has not yet perished, so long as we still live!

CURRAHEE! AIR ASSAULT! ARMY STRONG! SEMPER FI!

Ooooooooooooooooooraaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

1900h, August 15, 2020, the 244th year of the United States of America, the 245th year of the United States Army, Navy and Marine Corps, the 126th of the International Olympic Committee, the 124th of the Olympic Games, the 102nd since the conclusion of the First World War, the 81st of the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, the 79th since the beginning of the Second World War in the Eastern Front and in the Pacific Theater, the 75th since the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the victories in Europe and the Pacific, the 73rd of the modern United States Armed Forces and the 53rd of the modern Canadian Armed Forces.

Semper Fortis JOHN EMMANUEL RAMOS-HENDERSON Makati City, PH

(Requiem for a Soldier) (Honor by Hans Zimmer) (Slavsya from Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar) (Victory Day by Lev Leshenko) (Last Post) (Taps) (Rendering Honors)

[scifigeneration]

The deep influence of the A-bomb on anime and manga

by Frank Fuller

At the end of Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian Japanese anime film Akira, a throbbing, white mass begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo. Eventually, its swirling winds engulf the metropolis, swallowing it whole and leaving a skeleton of a city in its wake.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It’s no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music and in art.

The finale of Akira is only one example of apocalyptic imagery in the anime and manga canon; a number of anime films and comics are rife with atomic bomb references, which appear in any number of forms, from the symbolic to the literal. The devastating aftereffects – orphaned kids, radiation sickness, a loss of national independence, the destruction of nature – would also influence the genre, giving rise to a unique (and arguably incomparable) form of comics and animated film.

The directors and artists who witnessed the devastation firsthand were at the forefront of this movement. Yet to this day – 70 years after the bombs – these themes continue to be explored by their successors.

An iconic filmmaker paves the way

We can see the lasting images of the firebombings and the atomic bombs in the works of artist and director Osamu Tezuka and his successor, Hayao Miyazaki. Both had witnessed the devastation of the bombings at the end of the war.

Osamu Tezuka would go on to influence scores of Japanese animators. Wikimedia Commons

The bomb became a particular obsession of Tezuka’s. His films and comics both address themes like coping with grief and the idea that nature, in all its beauty, can be compromised by man’s desire to conquer it.

His stories often have a young character who is orphaned by particular circumstances and must survive on his own. Two examples are Little Wansa, about a puppy who escapes from his new owners and spends the series looking for his mother; and Young Bear Cub, who gets lost in the wild and must find his own way back to his family.

Misuse of technology

The tensions of technology are apparent in the works of Tezuka and his successors. In Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a scientist attempts to fill the void left by his son’s death by creating a humanlike android named Astro Boy.

Astro Boy’s father, seeing that technology cannot replace his son completely, rejects his creation, who is then taken under the wing of another scientist. Astro Boy eventually finds his calling and becomes a superhero.

Astro Boy is one of many characters symbolizing the fusion of technology and nature, and the tension created by its capacity for both advancement and destruction. TNS Sofres/flickr, CC BY

Like Tezuka, the award-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki witnessed some of the American air raids as a child.

Miyazaki’s work often refers to the abuse of technology, and contains pleas for human restraint. In Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the radioactive mutants populate the land; at the beginning of the film, the narrator describes the strange, mutated state of Earth as a direct result of man’s misuse of nuclear technology.

In the postwar years, Japan grew into an economic superpower. Possessing a fascination with technology, the country became a world leader in the production of cars and electronics. Yet in characters like Astro Boy, we see some of the tensions of the modern age: the idea that technology can never replace humans, and that technology’s capacity for helping mankind is only equaled by its capacity to destroy it.

Orphans and mutants

There were also the aftereffects of the bombs, some of which are still felt today: children left parentless, others (even the unborn) left permanently crippled by radiation.

For these reasons, a recurrent theme in anime films is the orphan who has to survive on his own without the help of adults (many of whom are portrayed as incompetent).

Akiyuki Nosaka relayed his personal experiences as a child during the war in the popular anime film Grave of the Fireflies, which tells the story of a young boy and his sister escaping from the air raids and the firebombings, scraping by on whatever rations they can find during last part of the war.

The trailer for Grave of the Fireflies.

Meanwhile, there are often young, powerful female orphans or independent female youths in Hayao Miyazaki’s works, whether it’s in Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, or Castle in the Sky.

Likewise, in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, the adults are the ones who squabble: they jockey for power, and their lust for control of the strange, alien technology of Akira causes the atomic-bomb-like catastrophe at the end of the film. The teenaged characters, on the other hand, display common sense throughout the movie.

The message seems to be that adults can be reckless when man’s desire for power and ambition outweigh what is important on Earth. And the children, still untainted by the vices that overtake humanity in adulthood and innocent enough to the point of thinking rationally, are the ones who end up making the most practical decisions overall.

Many families were orphaned by the war, and the bomb as well, so a number of children were also mutated or affected by the bomb. In anime and manga, this is seen in the form of radioactive mutations or having some extraordinary powers, in addition to taking on more adult responsibilities at an early age.

A number of films feature characters who display special powers or abilities, with radiation often being the main cause. Several films exploring the idea of unusual events or experiments resulting in young persons having exceptional abilities include Inazuman in the comic of the same name and the character Ellis in the comic El Cazador de la Bruja (The Hunter of the Witch).

Additionally, the manga series Barefoot Gen tells the story of a family wiped out by the atomic bomb, with a young boy and his mother the only survivors. Author Keiji Nakazawa loosely based these comics on his own life: growing up, Nakazawa watched a sister die several weeks after birth from radiation sickness, and witnessed his mother’s health quickly deteriorate in the years after the war.

Death, rebirth and hope for the future

Osamu Tezuka believed that the atomic bomb acted as the epitome of man’s inherent capacity for destruction. Yet while Tezuka commonly referenced death and war, he also believed in the perseverance of mankind and its ability to begin anew.

In a number of his works, both a futuristic and historic Japan are seen, with the themes of death and rebirth being commonly used as plot devices to symbolize Japan’s (and the lives of many Japanese) wartime and postwar experiences, including the aftermath of its destruction after the bombs fell. But much like the Phoenix – the mythical bird that sets itself on fire at the time of its death, only to experience a rebirth – Tezuka’s Japan experiences a resurrection, which mirrors Japan’s real-life postwar ascension to world superpower.

In fact, Phoenix was the title of Tezuka’s most popular series, one that the artist considered his magnum opus. The work is a series of short stories dealing with man’s search for immortality (given or taken from the Phoenix, which represents the universe, by man’s drinking some of its blood); some characters appear several times in the stories, mostly from reincarnation, a common precept in Buddhism.

Other filmmakers have repurposed this theme. In Space Cruiser Yamato (also known as Star Blazers), an old Japanese warship is rebuilt into a powerful spaceship and sent off to save a planet Earth succumbing to radiation poisoning.

In essence, what we have seen is that the atomic bomb indeed affected Japan to the point that the works of Tezuka and later artists inspired by him reflect on the bomb’s effects on families, society and the national psyche. Much like the cycle of life, or the immortal Phoenix in Tezuka’s case, Japan was able to reinvent itself and come back strong as a powerful world player capable of starting anew, but with the idea that mankind must learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating history.

About The Author:

Frank Fuller is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Villanova University

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[kathrynethegreat]

@random-emerald-thoughts​ asked: Hello, hope you are doing well. I have to say I am beyond fascinated with your Hannibal Au and was wondering if you might divulge some extra info about what you imagine season 1 would entail...Basically, anything you’ve got.

 Oh boy, do I have more info. 

 While I did not write full episodes, I do have a lot of details for them – some more than others. Season 1, and actually this whole series direction came about when I read Hannibal Rising for the second time. I wanted to see if I could use flashbacks from Hannibal Rising to run alongside the story I was telling. Since Rising has so much Japanese influence, I set the majority of season 1 in Japan to further bring that theme forward.

Below the cut is the following information:

Additional Information about each episode and the real crimes that inspired some of the stories

Artwork featured in each episode

A couple pieces of Fan Art that didn’t make the cut for the Season Rundowns.

Flashbacks featured in each episode

General Season Arcs / Information / Themes

 General Clannibal info (Will they kill each other or kiss each other? Who knows?)

A full summary of the absolutely bonkers season 1 finale (scroooolll to the bottom)

These notes in some instances assume you have read the four novels. If you have questions pertaining to anything you’ve not read, let me know.  The notes also sometimes specify how a scene may be viewed – because this is envisioned as a TV show and not a standard fan fic.

If anyone has questions about any of the below, want more info on season 1 or the other three seasons, just let me know and I’d be happy to provide. I’ve had all of this information sitting in my head for the last eight months, and I am glad to get it off my plate, as it were.

OVERVIEW

SEASON 1 SUMMARY | SEASON 1 DETAILS

SEASON 2 SUMMARY | SEASON 2 DETAILS

SEASON 3 SUMMARY | SEASON 3 DETAILS

SEASON 4 SUMMARY | SEASON 4 DETAILS

Season 1 General Notes / Arcs / Themes:

The main case Clarice is working on is the Gardner case, which spans all four seasons. However, in each individual episode, she is usually solving other cases along the way.

 Hannibal Lecter's background will unfold to help us better understand his attachment to Clarice Starling. Over time we come to understand how they are the same.

Flashbacks with regard to Hannibal and his esteem for Lady Murasaki will run parallel to the episode’s events and hopefully mirror Hannibal’s feelings for Clarice Starling. All flashbacks in general try to mirror some element of the present-day story.

This season focuses heavily on Hannibal Lecter's background, with heavy flashbacks from Hannibal Rising, with the big reveal essentially being that Mischa was eaten. There are a few Silence of the Lambs flashbacks as well.

This season also focuses on the growing relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Precarious, with an undeniable attraction at its core.

Hannibal Lecter's affection for Hiroshi Soah's youngest child mirrors his affection for Mischa

Emphasis will be put on the effects of WWII, specifically on Japanese art and culture. 

Please note this season takes place in 1990. No internet, no cell phones. Clarice Starling knows Lecter because she’s recently met him several times for the Buffalo Bill case – but our other characters have never seen him. American characters may have seen a photo in a newspaper, but would someone really remember?  Characters in Japan would have heard of his name, but almost certainly would not have seen a photo. He would not have been front page news in Japan. For this reason, we must suspend our disbelief and assume even the F.B.I team (except for Clarice and Ardelia (who is not yet on Clarice’s team)) is pretty clueless that Dr.Fell is Hannibal Lecter. Plus, they simply aren’t looking for him…he’s not on their radar.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 1: The One-Eyed Dragon of Ōshu

DATE: April 1990 FLASHBACKS: 

 Hannibal - Short bursts of young Hannibal sheathing Date's sword

Hannibal - Short bursts of young Hannibal painting with his uncle

 Hannibal - Short burst of young Hannibal seeing Murasaki in her bath

Clarice - Speaking with Hannibal Lecter at the Baltimore Asylum about The Flaying of Marsyas painting (broken into several different flashbacks)

ARTWORK FEATURED:

The Concert by Vermeer - Gardner Museum

The Rape of Europa by Titian - Gardner Museum

Storm of the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt - Gardner Museum

Sheba by Robert Lecter  - Murasaki's Estate Sale, Hiroshima, Japan

Starling on a Branch in the Japanese Style, Signed with Infinity in Eight Strokes, Hiroshima, Japan, Painted by Hannibal Lecter, but attributed to Robert Lecter - Murasaki's Estate Sale, Hiroshima, Japan

Armor of Date Masamune, and 3 of its 4 pieces of weaponry - Murasaki's Estate Sale, Hiroshima, Japan

Flaying of Marsyas by Titian - National Gallery, Washington D.C., USA

NOTES:

The title refers to Date Masamune’s nick name.

 The episode opens with the Gardner Heist in Boston. We do not know the robbers. From their conversation, it is clear they have been hired by someone. We will not find out by whom until season four. They work quickly. One of the two men stops in the dining room to admire Titian's The Rape of Europa. "No." says the other robber, "He said he didn't want that one." 

In Japan two men bid against one another for the armor of Date Masamune at the estate sale of the recently deceased Lady Murasaki. We are introduced to Dr.John Fell and Hiroshi Soah. Those who have not read the book will not yet know that Dr.Fell is Hannibal Lecter. Clarice’s The Silence of the Lambs flashbacks throughout the episode will show Clarice talking to Lecter, but the viewer will be standing inside of Lecter’s cell, looking at Clarice. We will only see Lecter’s shoulder. During Clarice’s last Silence of the Lambs flashback at the end of the episode, we finally switch views to see what she sees. We see inside Hannibal Lecter’s cell, and we realize that Dr.Fell and Dr.Lecter are the same person.

 Both Dr.Fell and Hiroshi Soah bid on a piece by Robert Lecter. They both lose to someone over the phone. The viewer, Soah, nor Lecter knows who the anonymous bidder is. This will be revealed later in season four.

The Samurai armor comes complete with 3 of its 4 original weapons. Soah and Fell begin talking about the lost Tanto sword, and when Dr.Fell mentions he may be able to track it down, Soah is intrigued and understands that Fell means this may not be through entirely legal means. They quickly build a rapport, and ultimately Fell is hired by Soah to curate a new museum Soah is opening in Hiroshima. 

 Hiroshi was young when the bomb went off in the city, but he is still haunted by the war, and wants to create a world-class museum to showcase the culture of Japan, which Dr.Fell will help him with. In addition, Dr.Fell will work to track down the Tanto sword, as well as help to acquire pieces for Soah’s own private art collection – sometimes through legal means…sometimes not. Soah is aware Dr.Fell is a criminal with a decent background in art – but he has no clue he has hired Hannibal Lecter.  

 Clarice has a somewhat embarrassing meeting with Noble Pilcher's family. They are wealthy and educated and it is obvious that they look down on her. She is mortified. While she is more determined than ever to show that she has class, it is for her own self, not to fit in with his family, as she does not see her relationship with Pilcher as going anywhere. The incident is none the less formative. 

Miranda Pilcher, Noble Pilcher's mother is the Curator at the National Gallery. While Clarice and Miranda are frosty at first, ultimately Clarice trusts her judgment in art and will begin going to her for art-related advice in the future. In Miranda, she sees the kind of well dressed, well educated, classy woman that she wants to be. 

  Miranda mentions over dinner that she helped negotiate the sale of The Fall of Phaeton by Rubens for the Gallery in January of 1990 

  Clarice is devastated when she is put onto the Gardner case instead of being able to join Behavioral Science. Paul Krendler is shown to clearly not be a member of her fan club. None the less, she starts to do what she can, going over old evidence and trying to look deeper into the situation than those on the case before her.  They are expensive pieces of artwork - they were stolen by someone who appreciates them, and understands them. She knows in order to find the culprit, she too will need to learn to understand and appreciate these pieces too. 

 Clarice goes to visit the National Gallery to speak to Miranda and to see The Flaying of Marsyas. Miranda tells Clarice it is headed back to Czechoslovakia soon, but she is worried about the painting - she doesn't know if there will even be a Chzechosolovaia for it to return to.  This begins a deeper conversation about art that will carry through all four seasons.  Yes, museums are filled with stolen art from pillaged civilizations – but what about instances where art is put into museums for its safety? Where is the moral line?  The show doesn’t aim to give answers – as there are no easy answers – but it will aim to show that the questions are complicated.

 Miranda asks Clarice how she heard about the painting, and Clarice merely says "He told me to come to see it."  Miranda understands that "he" means Lecter. Miranda does not ask further questions. She does, however, mention she was also trying to purchase a piece by Robert Lecter from Murasaki's estate over the phone several days before but was outbid. Clarice asks if there is any relation to Robert Lecter and Hannibal Lecter. Miranda says she is not sure, but this gives Clarice an idea of where Lecter might be, and she is the first to understand that he is not in South America, but perhaps in Asia. 

 An event happening in the background is the fact that Lithuanian independence was restored in March of 1990. A recent development that Hannibal Lecter would be following closely, and would be bringing up very strong feelings.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 2: A.A.Aaron

DATE: May 1990 FLASHBACKS:

 Hannibal – Young Hannibal meeting Robert, Murasaki and Chiyoh

Hannibal – Young Hannibal awakes at night in the Chateau screaming. We know something terrible has happened to him, but we don’t yet know what.

Clarice - Hannibal in his cell in Baltimore, talking to Clarice about wanting to give her what she craves most - advancement. 

ARTWORK FEATURED:

An Experiment on a Bird In An Air Pump, by Joseph Wright - Hanging behind Paul Krendler's desk

Ancient Chinese Gu, unknown artist - Gardner Museum 

SUMMARY:

Hannibal Lecter leaves a clue for Clarice in the China Mail. He has seen that she is looking for the Gardner pieces, and he lets her know some information about the Chinese Gu that was stolen. He addresses Hannah, but does not sign his name, though Clarice pretty much figures it's him. She realizes her hunch that he is in Asia and not South America must have some merit to it. 

Paul Krendler has never forgiven Clarice Starling for catching Buffalo Bill. Krendler made sure Clarice was put onto the Garnder case, knowing all evidence that could be found, had already been found. Clarice takes this opportunity to create the F.B.I.'s Art Crime Team, which can not only work on the Gardner case, but other important art cases as well. Clarice trying to make the best of a dead-end case, and actually make progress further enrages Krendler. 

Clarice assembles her team – herself, plus four other agents.  Clarice asks Miranda to help educate her and her team about the ins and outs of Art and Art History.

Hiroshi Soah is recently widowed with three daughters. He is a patron of the arts, and very generous - but also suspected to be very dangerous, and a possible Yakuza (Spoiler, he is). He owns a very successful motorcycle business that he started just after the war with his brothers. Both brothers died of mysterious causes.  His sister-in-law, Chiyoh also recently windowed, has moved into his home to care for her nieces. She is suspicious of the sudden death of her husband and is fairly certain that Hiroshi had something to do with it. Chiyoh's husband was head of the Yakuza in Hiroshima, as well as the head of the board of the Motorcycle company.  With his death, Hiroshi's position as head of the Yakuza and head of the company was assured. She meets Hannibal when Hiroshi hires him on as curator. She has not seen him in years - not since Hannibal and Murasaki put her onto a train in France years ago. She is vaguely aware of Hannibal's past, but since she has lived for years amongst the Yakuza, his crimes don't really phase her. Turning him in does nothing for her either - she chooses to wait and see if he might be of any use to her at some point. They were good friends once - so she confesses to him her suspicions about the death of her husband. He shares with her how things ended with Murasaki and she confesses that she knows and that she and Murasaki met again after she moved back to Hiroshima. 

SEASON 1, EPISODE 3: Eternity in Eight Strokes

DATE: June 1990 FLASHBACKS:

 Hannibal - Robert teaching Hannibal to paint

 Hannibal - Murasaki teaching Hannibal Calligraphy, specifically Eternity in Eight Strokes

Hannibal - Mischa laughing in the garden in her bathtub

Clarice - Clarice's sitting on her father's lap, looking at his badge

Clarice - Clarice and Mapp discuss Johnny's tattoo 

ARTWORK FEATURED:

Eternity in Eight Strokes - Symbol

Three Beauties of the Kansei Era by Kitagawa Utamaro

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Ruth Benedict, being read by Clarice 

NOTES:

Since Hiroshi is recently widowed, his sister in law Chiyoh has been teaching the girls, but he asks Dr.Fell to augment their education in art and culture. Natsu, the eldest daughter, is about 18 years old and very impressionable. She very quickly falls in love with the charming and mysterious Dr.Fell. The middle daughter, Aneka, is about 10 and she is a complete smart ass and tends to not have a filter. She’s the comic relief. Emiko, the youngest is about 6 years old, and very sweet, and reminds Hannibal Lecter very much of his sister, Mischa. 

 When confronted with the Symbol Eternity in Eight Strokes, Clarice consults Jack Crawford’s extensive library on symbology. She finds that many past works by Hannibal Lecter were signed with this symbol.

Very quickly finding that the art theft rings she is dealing with are often dark covers for far dirtier crimes, with art often being used to help with the laundering of money, Jack Crawford decides to send Johnny Brigham to join Clarice and her team of agents.  Johnny is tasked specifically by Crawford to watch out for Clarice’s safety. 

Johnny has always liked Clarice and she has always liked him. His presence constantly alongside her begins the whole “will they or won’t they?” situation between them. He very quickly becomes smitten.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 4: The Provenance of Dr.Fell

DATE: June 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Clarice - "Clarice, your case file." The touch in Memphis before Lecter’s escape. The crackle in Hannibal's eyes. A shock runs through Clarice's body.

Clarice - Watching the news just after Hannibal Lecter's escape

Clarice - Ardelia asking Clarice if she fears Hannibal will come after her 

ARTWORK FEATURED:

Jade burial suit of Liu Sui

NOTES:

 Clarice uses her alter ego, Elizabeth Chase for the first time. Elizabeth Chase was the name of an art student and the wife of Robert Hecht, a man who dealt in smuggling antiquities illegally, and the name is an intentional selection on Clarice's part. Her whimsy is showing, and Hannibal Lecter would take notice.

 A discussion of art provenance and its importance in authenticating art leads to the idea that people also have their own provenance that gives them their value. This is a major theme that is unfolding, as we essentially see flashbacks from Hannibal and Clarice showing us their own “Provenance”

 Clarice does not yet know Hannibal Lecter is in Hiroshi Soah's employ, though she suspects he is somewhere in Asia. She goes undercover as Elizabeth Chase - an art dealer - at a private party at Soah's house celebrating the purchase of the Jade Burial Suit of Liu Sui. When she is dancing with Hiroshi Soah, he tells her about his new curator for the museum he is building, and that he would like to introduce her. He takes her over to Dr.Fell, whose back is turned to her.  When Dr.Fell turns around, Clarice is shocked.  "Do you two know one another?" Soah asks.  "Do we madame?" Dr.Fell asks, taking Clarice's hand and kissing it. She touch sparks again for both of them, and they are aware of it. "I feel if we had, I should not forget.”  Clarice is not amused, but cannot cause a scene, as there are several hundred people present, and doing so would endanger them, as well as ruin her cover and her mission.  "Not to my knowledge, Dr.Fell." She finally says reluctantly.  Dr.Fell asks Clarice to dance, and again she is hesitant to do so. When he sweeps her out onto the floor, they both begin to negotiate, talking quickly through gritted teeth as they both try very hard to smile and not let on that anything is wrong. There is a very real tension between them - both sexual, as well as a heightened feeling of danger. Lecter reveals that he has a good deal of insider information and that he can help her with her case, if only she will not reveal his identity. She agrees – for the time being.

Hiroshi and Johnny both watch Dr.Fell and Elizabeth Chase - Hiroshi is unaware of either Clarice’s and Dr.Fell’s identity, while Johnny also has no idea that Dr.Fell is Hannibal Lecter. What they do notice, however, is that there is clearly undeniable chemistry between the two. Natsu also witnesses the clear chemistry between Elizabeth Chase and Dr.Fell. Both Natsu and Johnny Brigham find themselves feeling jelous.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 5: Sadako and the Thousand Cranes

DATE: July 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Murasaki, Young Hannibal and Chiyoh fold paper Cranes for Chiyoh's cousin, Sadako

 Hannibal - Murasaki mentions her home, Hiroshima, being destroyed

Hannibal - Deserters approach the lodge, killing Jakov and Hannibal's parents

Hannibal - Authorities yell at Lecter in his cell, he folds an origami chicken

Clarice - Clarice speaks with Lecter and pulls the origami chicken out of her purse

ARTWORK FEATURED:

The Children's Peace Monument by Kazuo Kikuchi and Kiyoshi Ikebe - Hiroshima, Japan at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Traditional Origami

NOTES:

One of the major art pieces in Heroshima is the Children's Peace Monument, which memorializes Sadako, said to be Chiyo’s cousin. The monument helps to emphasize the absolute horrors of war.

Though many of our characters are rather villainous – they have all been impacted by an actual war or a terrible hardship in their life. Soah had his home destroyed, Lecter lost his family, Johnny finds being back in Asia brings back memories of his time in Vietnam, something he doesn’t like to think about.  Clarice, though not affected by war, has had terrible hardships and is also learning about the horrors of war via the art she is studying.

Traditional Origami is used to link Sadako, Hannibal Lecter's past, and Clarice's experience with meeting Hannibal Lecter for the second time (When she rescued his origami chicken from a trashcan) - A clue to the Chinese Gu is uncovered in the Yakuza crime ring, and Clarice believes it may be in China

 Chiyoh and Hannibal come to an agreement - Chiyoh will not reveal who he is to authorities, and in exchange, Hannibal will kill her brother-in-law, Hiroshi Soah in retaliation for her husband's death. He agrees to do this in his own time.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 6:  Kyū Bon

DATE: July 15, 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Murasaki mending young Hannibal's finger and asking him to arrange flowers

Hannibal - Hannibal defending Murasaki from the butcher

Hannibal - Robert's death and funeral

Clarice - Hannibal asking her worst memory of childhood

Clarice - In the hospital with her dying father as a visitor recites Thanatopsis

Clarice - Cleaning hotel rooms, Clarice's mother tells her she must move to Montana

ARTWORK FEATURED:

Thanatopsis, a poem by William Cullen Bryant read as a v.o. in the last scene

The Tale of Genji, a novel by Murasaki Shikibu

Kokin Wakashū by Court Poets Ki no Tsurayuki, Ki no Tomonori, Oshikochi no Mitsune and Mibu no Tadamine

NOTES: 

 This episode deals heavily in family and their impact on us

Clarice disregards the festival, but ultimately changes her mind in the end, and winds up going back to the U.S. to visit her father’s grave.

Hannibal Lecter gives Clarice Starling Chinese Lantern flowers

SEASON 1, EPISODE 7: Honjō Masamune

DATE: August, 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Clarice - Hannibal asking if she thinks he is evil, Typhoid and Swans discussion

Clarice - Hannibal telling her they are going to be partners

Hannibal - Butcher being killed with a sword

Clarice - The Screaming Lambs Confession in Memphis / Clarice escapes in the night as a child

Hannibal - Very quick, flashes of Mischa screaming, an axe, Hannibal's hand reaching for Mischa. We still can’t see what happened.

ARTWORK FEATURED:

Honjō Masamune, a famous sword

Homicide Investigation: Practical Information for Coroners, Police Officers, and Other Investigators by LeMoyne Snyder, being read by Clarice

David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio

NOTES:

August 26–28 – In Gainesville, Florida, police find five murdered college students, apparently killed by a serial killer. Clarice is pretty gutted to not be able to work on this case.

This episode is inspired by the real life sword. When Japanese weapons had to be surrendered in 1945, it was given over to a Sgt. Coldy Bimore. Unfortunately, no record of such a Sgt. has ever existed. This has never been solved, but this story tells a bit more about how Hannibal and Clarice uncover the sword at the hands of a man who falsified his name. The American Sgt.’s family had been killed by the Japanese during the war, and thus he took their sword from them.

This adventure takes place over a series of several days, and both Hannibal and Clarice must keep up their identities of Elizabeth Chase and John Fell. They speak a lot during this time.  Lecter wakes Clarice from her nightmare during this time.

Clarice experiences her nightmare during this time and heavily begins to question if what she is doing is enough - she’s rescuing art - not people (The Florida serial killer weighs heavily on her). Hannibal Lecter holds her in the dark and tells her that what she is doing is very important and noble. She says, "I was in the barn" she says, to which he replies, "I know." "I was so cold and afraid." she says, and he says "I know." again. He closes his eyes and we understand he is speaking of more than just her dream - that he knows from his own experiences. She is disturbed to realize that she feels very safe with him.

 Season 1, Episode 8: The Hall of Two Truths

When eighteen carefully chosen treasures are stolen from the Cairo Museum, the Minister of Antiquities enlists Clarice’s team to help find the culprit. Clarice suspects that a wealthy private collector may be responsible, but soon finds that the truth is far more complicated than she could have imagined.

DATE: September 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Inspector Popil arrives and says that organs of the butcher were removed

Hannibal - Murasaki tells Popil she and Hannibal are moving to Paris and that Hannibal is to enter medical school

Hannibal - Hannibal helps a doctor sketch dead bodies in order to remake De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, which was lost during the war

ARTWORK FEATURED:

 Bust of Neferititi

 Book of the Dead: The Weighing of the Heart Ceremony

 Canopic Jars

 De humani corporis fabrica libri septem,

NOTES:

The title references the Egyptian "Hall of Two Truths" where the human heart is weighed against a feather in the Egyptian afterlife. For our purposes, of course, the feather represents Clarice (bird imagery) and the heart represents Lecter (burning heart imagery, organs, etc)

The scales also represent the changing feelings and conflicting emotions going on with Clarice Starling.

Inspired by a 2011 Cairo Museum heist, which was never solved, but likely the pieces were stolen by a wealthy businessman who picked out specific pieces that he wanted.

The removal of organs in Egyptian mummification will be compared against Hannibal Lecter removing the organs of his victims. 

SEASON 1, EPISODE 9: Kintsugi

DATE: September 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Flashes of Dog tags hanging around the necks of the men in the lodge

Hannibal - Flashes of Mischa screaming

Hannibal - Flashes of Hannibal and Mischa with the deserters

Hannibal - Mischa is taken away “to play”

ARTWORK FEATURED:

- The Terracotta Warriors of Emperor Qin

- Japanese art of Kintsugi

NOTES:

 Kintsugi refers to the art of mending broken vases / pottery with gold

September 12 – Cold War: The two German states and the Four Powers sign the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany in Moscow, paving the way for German reunification.

- A major theme is brokenness. Hannibal's brokenness, Clarice's Brokenness, but her scars ultimately making her more beautiful in Lecter's eyes. He also seems to be intrigued that her brokenness has not managed to destroy her. When Soah's daughter breaks a priceless vase, Lecter discusses with her the art of Kintsugi and discusses with her how one's damage is important to their overall history. Together they repair the vase, as Lecter thinks of Clarice and of his own scars.  

 On the other, much darker end, it is the shattering of one of the terracotta warrior sculptures reveals that they are fake, and their insides are filled with drugs. The art world is using them as a cover for a much larger drug smuggling operation.  Inspired by the movie True Lies, as well as multiple drug busts - hiding drugs in sculptures is fairly common. 

 There should be a discussion that each Terracotta warrior represented an actual person should tie in to Hannibal thinking about the dog tags, and that they are also tied to an individual. We don't know if this is actually true or not - I've read articles that confirm and deny this, but for our purposes the statues are indeed individuals.

The youngest of Soah's daughters likes the Ninja Turtles (popular in the 90s). Dr.Fell is confused as to why these cartoons are named after painters from the Italian Renaissance.

The episode would either open or close with the quote by Rumi, "The Wound is Where the Light Enters You."

SEASON 1, EPISODE 10: The Three Sacred Treasures of Japan

DATE: October 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Hannibal tries to remember the faces of the men who killed his sister and draws their faces in medical school

Hannibal - Uncovering the Dog tags in the lodge

Hannibal - Hannibal kills Dortlitch and puts the tag around his neck

Hannibal - Murasaki asks Hannibal to stop. He refuses.

 ARTWORK FEATURED:

Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, a sword

Yata-no-Kagami, a mirror

 Yasakani no Magatama, a jewel

NOTES: 

October 3 – Cold War: East Germany and West Germany reunify into a single Germany.

The three Sacred Treasures do exist, though very few people know where they are kept, and even fewer people have seen them.  Clarice and her team must figure out how to find something without even knowing what it looks like. This is paralleled with Flashbacks of Hannibal Lecter not knowing what his sister’s killers look like...

Not knowing what the 3 Treasures look like, and the search for them can bring flashbacks to Hannibal Lecter not knowing the killers that he seeks revenge upon for Mischa's death.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 11: The Last Emperor

DATE: October 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Hannibal sees Kolnas daughter's bracelet and flashes back to Mischa

Hannibal - Kolnas daughter puts his dog tag in the offering plate

Hannibal - Hannibal kills Kolnas with a Tanto after he is given information on Grutas

ARTWORK FEATURED:

Ancient Chinese Gu, unknown artist - Found in China, to be returned to the Gardner Museum

The Forbidden City

NOTES: 

When looking for a stolen Chinese Puzzle box, long lost, Clarice ultimately finds herself in search of a theif who it turns out has purchased the Chnese Gu from the Gardner museum. At first she thinks he may be the original theif, but she realizes the piece has changed hands several times.

The Chinese Gu has yet to actually be found.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 12: The Idol Thief 

DATE: October 1990

ARTWORK FEATURED:

Natarajan Idols

NOTES:

 This episode is based off of Subhash Kapoor is a New York-based art dealer on trial in Chennai for allegedly running a $100 million international smuggling racket.[2] He was previously the owner of the Art of the Past gallery in Manhattan. His sister business, Nimbus Import/Exports, specialised in selling antiquities from across the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia to major museums around the world.

Natsu looks into Dr.Fell’s past and manages to uncover who he is. When she does, she also sees a picture of Clarice Starling and realizes that she is the same woman she knows as Elizabeth Chase.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 13: Yuanming Yuan

DATE: November 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Murasaki and Hannibal put Chiyoh on a train and discuss her fiancé, a man with two brothers who is starting a motorcycle business

ARTWORK FEATURED:

A variety of Chinese vases and bowls around the world

NOTES: 

This episode is inspired by several thefts of Chinese pieces that were stolen around the same time. The case has never been solved, but it is most likely a Government inside job.  Clarice - if she finds it’s a Government job - can’t really do anything when up against a Government. 

There is a discussion about theft. If the pieces were stolen from China...and China steals them back - is it stealing?

SEASON 1, EPISODE 14: Teacups and Time

DATE: November 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Hannibal searches for Grutas

Hannibal - Grutas confirms Mischa's fate

 ARTWORK FEATURED:

Japanese Tea Ceremony

Chinese Yixing Teapot

A Brief History of Time, a book by Stephen Hawking

NOTES: 

November 19–21 – The leaders of Canada, the United States, and 32    European states meet in Paris to formally mark the end of the Cold War.

Lecter reads A Brief History of Time. The broken teacup is mentioned. When he is at the Japanese tea ceremony, a teacup is broken, and his calm exterior falls away for a very brief moment. Clarice seems to be the only one to notice.

Clarice has found the Chinese Gu in a previous episode. This is a huge break in the Gardner case. However, since it appears all of the items that were stolen were dispersed to different people, the other items have not yet been found. Still, she has decided that though it is a great break in the case, they will keep its discovery a secret so that it does not compromise the rest of the case or her secret identity as Elizabeth Chase.

SEASON 1, EPISODE 15:The Tantō Sword of Date Masamune

DATE: December 1990 FLASHBACKS:

Hannibal - Grutas tries to shoot young Hannibal. He is shot in the back. He appears to be dead, but he pulls the Tanto sword out from the back of his shirt. It has deflected the bullet.

Hannibal – Young Hannibal asks where Grentz is and is told he is in Canada. Hannibal then kills Grutas and puts his dog tag around his neck. Murosaki has been witness to all of this.

Hannibal - Hannibal confesses his love for Murasaki. She rejects him.

ARTWORK FEATURED:

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by Hokusai, on loan to the Hiroshima Museum of Art from the British Museum, in conjunction with an exhibition called "Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art"

 Starling on a Branch in the Japanese Style, Signed with Infinity in Eight Strokes, Hiroshima, Japan, Painted by Hannibal Lecter, but attributed to Robert Lecter - found in Dr.Fell's studio

Clarice with a Lamb by Hannibal Lecter, found in Dr.Fell's studio

Armor of Date Masamune, and 3 of its 4 pieces of weaponry - Hiroshi Soah's private collection.

Tanto Sword of Date Masamune, 4th piece of weaponry - on Hannibal Lecter's person

Tessen, Japanese War Fan - on Clarice's person

FULL EPISODE SUMMARY:

We open the episode in the newly opened Hiroshima Museum of Art, opened and funded by Hiroshi Soah in an attempt to help replace heritage lost to the Hiroshima bomb, as well as an attempt to make Hiroshima a center of culture for the nation – a Phoenix from the Ashes, as it were. 

Clarice stands in the Hiroshima Museum of Art’s newest exhibition on Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, which was Curated by Dr.Fell (this is a real exhibit that would not happen until 2013/2014 at the British Museum). She stands before The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife and considers it, waiting. Johnny appears and stands beside her. He too considers the painting. He wrinkles his nose - he does not care for it. After a few moments of silence, Johnny hands Clarice some paperwork and tells her that they have enough information, and they now officially have permission from both the American and Japanese government to raid Hiroshi Soah’s private collection and arrest him. They have to be smart about it, as they do not think Soah will go quietly. His home is highly guarded, and even with a warrant, his thugs are likely to put up a fight.

Due to the museum opening, as well as some new private acquisitions, Soah’s private collection has been in constant movement. His renovation on his own personal gallery means there is lots of construction in the home, and it’s agreed that the FBI will disguise themselves as workers. Clarice will need to go in first and assess the situation to make sure to determine the important pieces currently are so that nothing is damaged during the raid, as that would defeat the purpose of the entire mission, which is ultimately to keep the artwork safe and back where it belongs. They agree that Elizabeth Chase will go during the day to assess the situation, giving some other art related reason for being there – offering up a painting she has recently acquired in the hopes that she could walk with Soah through his gallery and tell him exactly where she thinks it should go, meanwhile noting specific placement of everything.

Clarice Starling is mildy concerned and plagued with guilt, however. Several months before she had sent warning to Behavioral Science that she had found Hannibal Lecter. However, Lecter has not betrayed her identity, and has not only been helpful in uncovering information for her, they’ve also begun to confide in one another. She worries that if he discovers her betrayal that no one will be safe from his wrath.

Clarice Starling arrives for her appointment with Hiroshi Soah and is asked to wait in the garden. She sits and drinks tea and hears laughter in the background. She looks to see on the far side of the garden, Dr.Fell teaching the three girls about Japanese Weaponry. He has a long sword, and he two eldest Natsu and Aneka have shorter swords, while Emiko being very young has a fan. She is rather put out that she is not allowed to play with big knives.

Clarice goes closer to watch and she and Lecter acknowledge one another with a nod and a smile, but say nothing. Natsu, who has a big crush on Dr.Fell notices this, and her jealousy flares again – for she has found drawings of Elizabeth Chase in Dr.Fell’s studio. 

Dr.Fell assures Emiko that the fan she has is just as important as a sword, and he reveals to her that the spokes of her fan - a tessen - are pointed and indeed very dangerous. 

We see a short flash of young Hannibal Lecter fighting with Grutas. Dr.Fell, mildly disturbed by his thoughts, steadies himself back in the present and then teaches Emiko how to deflect a sword using the fan. She is placated. 

Clarice playfully mentions “When you taught me how to use a sword, you never mentioned the fan to me.” She then tells him that she has seen the new exhibit he curated at the museum, and she is not entirely sure what to think. Dr.Fell covers Emiko's ears, and seductively begins to talk to Elizabeth about how the West tends to find pleasure and sex sinful, but the east has no such reservations, etc. 

Natsu is further angered that Dr.Fell is very clearly entranced by Elizabeth. A servant comes for Elizabeth Chase and leads her into Hiroshi Soah’s study. Clarice and Hiroshi speak for a long time, and then walk down his gallery. Elizabeth mentions the piece she has just acquired from one of her customers who has passed away and pulls out photos from her purse. Soah isn’t sure, but they continue their walk, and she tells him she has a few other pieces that she thinks he might like. She also asks him how the restoration on the sword that she and Dr.Fell managed to find several months ago is going. He takes her over to a new portion of his gallery where he has many pieces of Japanese Weaponry on display – several swords, fans (Tessen) and of course the Samurai suit is the centerpiece.. He mentions that Dr.Fell did the restoration on the sword himself. He also mentions Dr.Fell is close to finding the lost Tanto sword – might Elizabeth be able to help with that as well and she and Fell worked together so well on finding the other sword? 

She mentions she will keep her ear to the ground about it. As Hiroshi, very polite and charming, escorts Elizabeth from the house, says goodbye and goes back into the house.

Chiyoh and the three girls are on the terrace folding origami as Elizabeth heads to her car. When Elizabeth asks where Dr.Fell has gone, Chiyoh mentions that he had been called to the museum to consult on the layout and hanging of several paintings. 

Emiko goes to Elizabeth and hands her a paper crane before she can descend from the terrace. “Doctor Fell asked me to give this to you.” She says. Elizabeth thanks her and moves put it into her purse when she hears Hiroshi Soah calling her name. He walks out onto the terrace and says he’s re-considered – would she be willing to leave those photographs of that painting with him for a couple of days? She says, of course and digs into her purse and sets them down beside the paper crane. He thanks her, and she turns again to leave, forgetting the crane. 

When Elizabeth is gone and the others have all gone inside, Natsu takes the paper crane and unfolds it to reveal a note written on it. It is addressed to Clarice and it indicates that he knows what she is up to, and that he does not advise a raid tonight, as security has just been doubled. It is signed “H.” 

Clarice assembles her team and discussed the layout, the plan, and where certain pieces of art are. Some they will take, some they will not, some have been illegally aquired, some have not. She also mentions where Soah will most likely be able to be found in the home. She alerts the men to the bedrooms of the three daughters as well as their aunt Chiyoh and makes sure that everyone is well aware to be very careful around the women, not to scare them, harm them, etc. 

Her team asks if Dr.Fell will go along with the law, and she confirms that she has made sure there will be an “urgent call” from the museum an hour before they enter in order to get him off the premises in case he comes back to the house.

Later, Lecter returns only to be called back to the museum on an emergency.  Clarice’s team watch and confirm that Dr.Fell has left. Dr.Fell, of course, knows it is a ruse, and later sneaks back in disguised as one of the construction workers, alongside the FBI.

Clarice goes in the back way to secure the inside of the gallery before the raid begins. The men outside await her go ahead via an earpiece, but it is dropped when she is grabbed by one of Soah’s security men who drags her into the newest part of the gallery containing the Japanese weapons, where Soah and Dr.Fell stand. Dr.Fell remains calm and betrays nothing until it looks like Clarice really is going to be killed by one of Soah's men who has a knife to her throat and is just waiting for Soah's command.

Finally, Dr.Fell lets in a sharp intake of breath, which causes Soah to make his men pause while he turns to Dr.Fell and asks if he likes Elizabeth?

 “I do believe my daughter is rather jealous of the two of you.” Soah confesses. “It was her jealousy that caused me to find out about you, miss Clarice Starling.” 

Fell admits Clarice Starling is very lovely. Perhaps they could make it look like she has gone missing? Soah considers. Fell has given him 100s of millions in stolen goods and has done a great job over the past year. It is clear that though Soah knows Clarice’s identity, he does not know about Fell’s… He agrees to let Dr.Fell have the girl. 

Clarice spits at both their feet and says she'd rather die. 

Soah says that can be arranged and gives the order for his men to kill Clarice. Just before the knife slits her throat, another knife is thrown through the air and strikes into the henchman’s neck.

 It is clearly a match for the Tanto sword of Masamune.

 We see a quick flash of young Hannibal Lecter getting up from the floor of the boat after having just been shot and pulling the Tanto sword out from the back of his shirt. We realize suddenly – he’s had the knife all along. We learn Mischa was eaten.

Hiroshi Soah’s eyes grow wide at the realization that it is the knife he’s been looking for. He turns to confront Dr.Fell, but Lecter has grabbed a sword from the armor and takes Soah’s head clean off. He then throws Soah's sword to Clarice, who catches it, midair, while he goes over to the wall and removes the sword he and Clarice tracked down together several months before. 

Together they are surrounded on all sides by member’s of Hiroshi’s Yakuza, and they must fight together to kill them. At one point Hannibal Lecter is almost taken down - there is a knife to his throat and he has no weapon. Clarice shouts out his real name to him as she tosses him a weapon that he uses to kill the man holding him back. 

All the henchman pause at hearing Lecter's real name - they only knew him as Dr.Fell. There is a new level of fear now that these men know they are fighting Hannibal Lecter. 

There is a quick flashback of Hannibal Lecter killing Grutas in front of Murasaki, and then confessing his love for her. She tells him there is nothing left of him to love and leaves him. 

Back to reality, the man standing closest to him is now frozen in fear, and Hannibal grabs him and rips out his throat with his teeth. Blood dripping from his mouth, he spits the contents onto the floor, reaches out, and grabs Clarice, kissing her fiercely before they go back to taking down the remaining men. 

While fighting, Lecter tells Clarice he didn't betray her. Clarice does not mention that she, several months earlier, had betrayed him. Clarice grabs a Tessen fan from the wall and uses it to deflect a sword and spike another henchman in the heart. Lecter makes a crack about fighting in her good shoes, at which point Clarice takes off her shoe and spikes the heel through one henchman’s eyes.

Lecter is delighted with both her resourcefulness and ferocity. Once all the men are dead, they are surrounded by bodies and covered in blood, breathing heavily. Standing inches apart, they grab one another and kiss hungrily, angrily. When they part he asks her to come away with him. She is upset by this and asks that he turn himself in. Again he asks for her to come with him and promises that he will give her everything she ever wanted. Again she begs for him to turn himself in. 

He says he won’t – and that she doesn’t want to turn him in either or she would not have tried to make sure he was off the property during the raid. She hesitates. 

Suddenly there is the sound of crashing glass as the FBI come in from the long side of the gallery, and Soah’s backup from the other side. Clarice rushes towards her men, while Lecter heads in the opposite direction. 

On his way out of the house he encounters Natsu, who has heard the commotion and come running. She is crying and tells Hannibal Lecter that she did not betray his true identity to her father – only the identity of Clarice Starling. Chiyoh comes up from behind Natsu and takes her arm, calls her a foolish girl and says that she would have been wiser to betray them both. 

Hannibal Lecter tells Chiyoh that their agreement has been settled, and she knows that Hannibal Lecter has killed her brother in law for her in retribution for Soah having her husband killed. 

Chiyoh lets Hannibal Lecter go, and later is seen speaking with the police. She is shown ascending to the head of the board of Soah's company - as well as becomes the head of Soah's Yakuza clan.

Ultimately the FBI is successful and manages to secure the pieces that they need, and arrest several of Soah’s men. 

Dr.Fell cannot be found, but all of his paperwork checks out beautifully...Chiyoh makes an agreement with the Japanese government, and Dr.Fell is not persued.

When Dr.Fell’s studio is found in the attic of the house, the FBI is surprised to find several drawings and paintings of Clarice Starling. Nobody yet realizes that Dr.Fell was Hannibal Lecter.

[dixiesbizarreadventure]

Barefoot Gen

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

-Ernest Hemingway

This film had me completely floored, from its visceral scenes to its accurate depiction of human behavior in time of crisis, perhaps one of the worst crises mankind has yet to face. I have trouble commentating on Barefoot Gen, simply because it feels like it isn’t my place. Not because of anything like nationality or generation; the film just left me stunned silent. I had never seen this film before, I thought it would be a cutesier film about a family overcoming the hardships that war brings. I expected it to be nice, but not have much substance. I couldn’t be more wrong, as Barefoot Gen doesn’t pull any punches. 

The Second World War was around 70 years ago, however, it has left a scar that still haunts many countries today. In terms of numbers, we had never before seen such widespread death and destruction. The finishing blow to half of this war was the atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When one hears about the 100,000 lives lost when the bomb dropped initially, one of course knows that this is a tragedy, for even if you come from somewhere where Japan was a fearsome enemy that had done deplorable things themselves, such sudden, terrible loss of life is naturally not deserved. Barefoot Gen had a lot more graphic scenes and imagery than I would expect, but it all serves a purpose, it isn’t just for some cheap “shock value”. That purpose brings home the fact that the Enola Gay didn’t add up numbers, but took lives away. You see the nightmarish imagery of people irradiated beyond recognition, ambling in pain before their minds have realized that they are dead. However, what makes it so frightening is that it’s not a nightmare, it all truly happened, as Barefoot Gen is an autobiographical piece. Not only does it show us what happened, but the viewer is reminded, through Gen’s actions, that this innocent civilian child is forced to witness it all. 

Furthermore, the suffering depicted in the later parts of the movie couldn’t contrast more sharply with the beginning parts. Gen and his family are joyful, despite all that they lack, and ready for the future, the end of the war, and they are taken from him in a matter of minutes, as we watch them burn to death. The point that his mother brings up is crucial to the piece, the fact that Japan surrendered too late. With this, we are reminded of the futility of war. Gen’s father lost his life in a war he didn’t even believe in, Eiko and Shinji died in a war they didn’t even understand. One of the most unfortunate of all was Tomoko. She didn’t even get to die as a result of war, but from the strife that comes afterwards, something most people forget about. We see a parallel between the war ending after Gen’s family dying, and Tomoko dying after Gen and Ryuta are able to get the milk. Yes, the things that the characters wanted were able to happen, but when it did, it didn’t matter anymore. If Japan was able to hold out longer, and achieve its imperial goals, it wouldn’t matter, as their people would have been beaten down along the way. 

We don’t see the American pilots portrayed in a positive or negative light in this movie, and that’s important in correctly interpreting what Barefoot Gen has to say. It doesn’t take a woe-is-me attitude about what these people experienced, nor does it downplay any of the suffering they experienced. The people who perished in August of 1945 were victims, but they are not victimized in Barefoot Gen. The story gives a wider scope, telling a story of what happened to a family, consequences of a chain of events that shouldn’t have even happened in the first place. But like the grain his father spoke of, Gen, representative of the people of Japan, would rise again, his suffering would not be everlasting. Nowadays, Japan is one of the biggest advocates of peace in the world, so those who suffered would not do so in vain. 

I feel that Barefoot Gen is a true work of art, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

[koisuru-mijinko]

Levi, in His Corner of the World

Isayama-sensei stated in an interview that the recently decided ending of SNK was inspired by Guardians of the Galaxy and In This Corner of the World and it got me thinking...

I saw In This Corner of the World about a year ago. It is a beautifully animated film focusing on the everyday, civilian life in Japan during WWII. The heroine, Suzu, leaves her hometown of Hiroshima to be with her arranged husband’s family in Kure. As she struggles to adapt to her new family and life, she must also learn to survive the effects of war. I will be spoiling the movie for this comparison, so consider yourself warned.

When Isayama-sensei said that this film influenced him, at first, I didn’t understand the relevance. Unlike “Corner”, SNK focuses on the soldiers - those who fight on the frontlines - rather than the civilians. Additionally, the overall tone is rather upbeat and hopeful and most of the cast lives through the war, which is a highly unlikely case for Yam’s story. However, I think Ch115 can finally provide a hint. In This Corner of the World may have influenced not the main story, but Levi’s character arc.

Suzu is a natural artist. She sees the world through her lines and colors. Quite the klutz, Suzu seems to believe that drawing is her only forte. Throughout the movie, she uses her talent to express her emotions, invoke feeling in others, and even comfort her terrified niece during an air-raid.

Levi is a natural soldier - literally bred to be the ultimate weapon. He has dedicated his heart to the cause. It is doubtful whether Levi views his worth to humanity beyond utilizing his superhuman abilities to fight. Kenny even questions him: “What are you, a hero?” To be the hero, to be the one who avenges the dead and the weak - this is what keeps Levi trudging through Hell, again and again.

One afternoon, as Suzu walks along the aftermath of a bombed city, holding the hand of her little niece, they stumble upon a dud and it explodes, taking her niece and her right hand with it.

She awakes to the screams of her sister-in-law, survivor’s guilt, and a deluge of regrets. If only, if only, if only...

Her despair worsens when it is announced that Japan has lost the war. She throws herself on the ground and sobs. No, not because they lost. But because it was all for nothing. Her hand, her sole gift to give, her niece, countless of dead and dying people - the weight of all that was sacrificed, only to be utterly defeated in the end.

“I was prepared to lose everything..! I still have my left arm and my two legs! ...Now, all that we’ve done is slipping away. The reasons we’ve endured it all... If only I could’ve stayed distracted and oblivious until I died!”

She feels helpless, useless, a complete burden and she wishes that it could’ve been her who died in that explosion. She questions her existence: Why is she still alive? Why did the bomb, the war, choose to leave her broken and back at the starting line? She was prepared for death, not life after loss.

So, how does this relate to Levi?

Levi is about to awaken to a life that will never be the same. With possible blindness in one eye, deep gashes across his face, and two missing fingers essential in wielding a blade, Humanity’s Strongest will face a brutal truth...

Yam’s can go two ways with Levi’s arc. 1) Fueled by vengeance and an overwhelming sense of obligation, Levi will disregard proper healing and force himself to join the final battle. Where this irrational decision will lead is a mystery, but death is a likely conclusion. Or 2) No longer the hero, unable to fulfill his promise to Erwin, Levi will be thrown into the deepest pit of his personal Hell, greater than anything he has ever faced. A realization that “the reasons he was able to endure it all” were for nothing. And, like Suzu, he will have to accept it.

Action-wise, #2 sounds pretty anticlimactic. However, I think this route is absolutely essential for Levi. Think about it: Literally, ever since he was born, Levi has had to fight to survive and survive to fight. The man has never actually lived. Does he even know how?

Levi has been through so much already. Many survivors have a higher risk of depression and suicide afterwards during times of peace. They become so disconnected; they can’t function in a world without trauma. Let’s say that Levi does kill Zeke and plays a part in liberating Eldia. Then what? Again, he’s always been prepared to die for the cause, but is he ready to live without it? It’s hard to imagine a “happily ever after” for Levi.

Wars do end, storms will calm, and gradually, amidst pains and frustrations, life slowly fades to normal. The true message of In This Corner of the World is found in Japan and Suzu’s gradual realization that a modest happiness can still be found through acceptance. Harumi is never coming back, Suzu's art will never be the same, some dreams will never be fulfilled, some wounds will never heal, and yet, life moves forward. It’ll be okay.

Is Ch115 leading to the same conclusion for Levi? Possibly. I would hope so. While the world yearns for peace, Levi needs it within himself (many of the characters do) and vengeance doesn’t seem like the proper solution to me. Like Suzu, he needs to recognize that he doesn’t need to live for a cause. He doesn’t have to die a hero. It’s okay to just live. And hopefully, there will still be people around Levi to help him find his little corner of the world.

[80yrscap]

The day Captain America lost his innocence

The United States dropped one atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and a second one on Nagasaki on August 9. These two weapons together killed between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians. One day later, between the attack on Nagasaki and V-J day, this comic book hit the newsstands.

A young American chemist develops a terrifying biochemical weapon that can be dropped over a city and annihilate the population. He does one successful field test (he and his sister take a plane up over their own farmland) and concludes that the weapon is too awful to be used. He destroys all his research.

On his death bed (he had a long term illness (caused by his work? maybe)) the chemist admits to his sister that he hedged just a bit: he wrote down the formula and hid it in the family vault. He makes his sister promise to give this information to the US War Department ONLY in the event that defeat is inevitable, and otherwise to leave it buried with him for all time.

Spies for Japan find out about the field test, and the fight is on to keep the formula out of their hands. In the ensuing struggle the paper is burnt to ashes. Now the weapon can never be used by either side. 

Steve assures the children of America: 

“It’s just as well, we’ll never be in such dire straits that we’d have to use a thing like that against our enemies”

.

Captain America #50, on sale, in the bitterest of ironies, on August 10, 1945.

[the-desolated-quill]

A Stronger Loving World - Watchmen blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t read this comic yet, you may want to before reading this review)

When people read Watchmen for the first time, I’d be surprised if any of them expected the story to end like this.

A Stronger Loving World opens with the aftermath of the fake alien arriving in New York and slaughtering millions. Three splash pages of harrowing artwork by Dave Gibbons. Corpses littered everywhere. Blood in the streets. Giant tentacles wrapped around various landmarks. It’s an extremely unsettling opening and lets the reader know that Gibbons and Alan Moore are not fucking around here. Doctor Manhattan and Laurie arrive to see the carnage and deduce that Adrian was behind it before heading to Antarctica to confront him. After several confrontations involving Manhattan getting disintegrated again and Laurie pulling a gun on Adrian, it’s revealed that Ozymandias’ plan has worked. The nations of the world have put aside their differences and decided to cooperate for fear of an impending alien invasion.

This then leads to the big moral dilemma. What Adrian has done is despicable, but he has succeeded in bringing about world peace, and revealing the truth behind the giant squid runs the risk of dooming the world all over again. So what would be the heroic thing to do?

Well there’s no point asking these characters because as the graphic novel has been emphasising again and again, these guys are not heroes.

This is an extremely complicated moral conundrum with no real right or wrong answer, and I very much appreciate how Alan Moore doesn’t try to shove one down our throats. I also like how each character comes to their decision. Doctor Manhattan is of course a godlike being who sees beyond our world and so shares a somewhat similar view to Adrian’s. That the deaths were justified because the end result is peace. Rorschach on the other hand cannot square what just happened with his own rigid morality, and refuses to keep the secret, vowing to tell everyone the truth, which leads to Manhattan killing him. Nite Owl meanwhile, being weak willed and pathetic as ever, decides to go along with Adrian’s plan, but it’s less to do with him agreeing with Adrian and more to do with the fact that the moral implications are so hard to comprehend that he doesn’t even want to try, instead taking the path of least resistance. Finally Silk Spectre, so shocked by everything she’s learned and witnessed, clings to the one stable thing she has. Dan. The two then have sex, serving as a dark inverse of the sex scene in A Brother To Dragons. In both instances, sex is used as a metaphor for power, but whereas the motivation in the first was Dan overcoming his own inadequacies, the second is both Dan and Laurie desperately trying to retain whatever shred of power and independence they have left after such a shocking and twisted act of mass murder.

It’s great because it demonstrates just how well Moore understands his own characters and how well we’ve come to know them. They behave exactly as we would expect them to and there’s something oddly satisfying about that despite the moral ambiguity of their decisions.

In fact lets discuss Rorschach for a bit, considering he’s the only one that refused to keep the secret. Bit surprising considering the horrid things he’s done throughout the graphic novel. What’s so different about this? Well it could be the sheer scale of it. Could be that he didn’t believe those who died truly deserved it according to his own strict moral code. Except I’m not entirely convinced. In the extra material provided in The Abyss Gazes Also, there’s a letter written by a young Walter Kovacs about his father. Or rather the person he imagines his father to be because he never actually met him. Apparently his parents split up because ‘he liked President Truman and she didn’t.’ Interesting in and of itself that Rorschach, a right wing bigot, was fathered by a Democrat. But wait, it gets more intriguing. He then goes on to write about how he believes his father was an aide to President Truman before talking about the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the US dropped atomic bombs, killing millions. Except here he expresses that he believes that Truman did the right thing because it ended the war and saved millions more lives. Curious, wouldn’t you agree? So, in Rorschach’s mind, what made the nukes in Japan morally justifiable while Adrian’s giant squid in New York wasn’t? We can only really speculate at this point. Some think it’s because Rorschach has realised that there is no place for him in Adrian’s new world order, which I guess is kind of true, but I think it runs the risk of romanticising the character again. It could be that the nukes were a last resort whereas the squid was preemptive... maybe? Personally I think it’s just good old fashioned racism. Rorschach had no issue with the millions of Japanese lives lost because they were Japanese. The enemy. This is different. This time millions of American lives have been lost. To him, this is more than just mass murder. It’s an act of treason.

We may never fully know the reasons behind Rorschach’s actions, but it’s nonetheless interesting to discuss.

I also appreciated that we do get a moment where Adrian questions whether he did the right thing, expressing his doubts to Doctor Manhattan, to which he receives a cryptic response about how ‘nothing ever ends.’ (does Manhattan know what happens in the future? We’ll never know). It’s a nice moment that helps to humanise Adrian a little bit and remind us that he’s as flawed as all the other characters. The arrogant bravado he displays when he succeeds in achieving world peace could easily have slipped into pantomime villain territory if there wasn’t just this small moment near the end, possibly as the scale of the things he’s done dawns on him. Like the pirate captain in The Tales Of The Black Freighter, Adrian means well and his intentions are noble, but his actions are either highly questionable or just downright villainous. This is basically what Watchmen has been talking about since the start. Once you start taking more frequent steps outside the bounds of what is legally and morally acceptable, it’s not long before you’ve effectively joined the criminals yourself.

There’s a lot to like about A Stronger Loving World, however I do have a few complaints here and there. Yes, lets talk about that giant squid.

If there was ever a moment where Watchmen jumped the shark, this is it. And quite frankly I have no idea what Alan Moore was thinking at the time. So Adrian wants to unite the world together using an outside force that will encourage everyone to put aside their differences and team up with each other. Okay. Makes sense so far. But the plan itself requires so many leaps of logic, it kind of loses all credibility. Take for example the idea that it was cloned from a psychic’s brain. Well that came out of nowhere, didn’t it? Yes this is a world where a giant naked blue guy can manipulate atoms, but the story explained to us how this was possible, allowing us to suspend our disbelief. Now suddenly we’re supposed to believe that human psychics exist with no build up whatsoever. It’s just dumped on us, which makes it feel more like a convenient excuse than an explanation. Yes they do kind of foreshadow it with Adrian’s pet lynx Bubastis, but it’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it? It’s one thing to genetically alter an existing animal. It’s another thing entirely to create an all new creature with psychic abilities as though this was Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Not to mention, in order to explain how in God’s name someone can go from inventing electric cars to creating aliens, Alan Moore has to resort to a gigantic infodump in order to make sense of the bloody thing. The initial teleport incinerates people, then the psychic ‘death throes’ or whatever cause others to go mad and start killing each other, and then those even further away have bad dreams or something. Presumably the person furthest from ground zero probably has a moment where they forget where they put their car keys and leave the gas on. It’s just overly complicated and way too daft.

Also I can understand Adrian kidnapping scientists, but why artists and writers? And why tell them the creature is for a movie? Was no one a tiny bit suspicious of the amount of work, resources and effort being put into this supposed ‘special effect’? What about the fact that they were taken from their homes and put on a tiny island? Don’t they have families? Are any of them concerned about how ridiculously secretive this film production is? And more to the point, why let the rest of the world believe them to be kidnapped? If you’re going to go with the Hollywood movie cover story, why not just tell people that’s what they’re doing? I guess you could argue that Adrian was concerned this would draw unwanted attention to his plan, but... what?... them getting kidnapped wouldn’t have drawn attention?!

And then there’s just the sheer randomness of it. Why aliens? He doesn’t even plant the seeds for this anywhere. Maybe have some fake UFO sightings or something. He just dumps a dead alien on New York’s doorstep. Also, if genetic engineering is common knowledge, why would people assume it’s aliens? Surely government scientists testing the thing will discover it’s of terrestrial origin. Which leads to the biggest flaw. Would this plan really have worked? Killing millions of people in one city? Would that be enough to unite the world? Perhaps in the short term, but there’s no way you could possibly sustain that lie for so long. Plus, call me cynical, but considering how quickly Russia mobilised when Manhattan left the planet, surely it’s more likely they would take advantage of the situation while America was reeling from this act of carnage. If Adrian is supposed to be the smartest man in the world, I’m amazed he didn’t consider any of this. Maybe he has contingency plans in place, but I don’t know. It all seemed pretty final to me. He genuinely believes that this will fix everything. It just makes him look a bit stupid.

The whole giant squid plot has got more holes in it than a colander. Which is why (and I know I’m going to get some flak for this) I much prefer the version in Zack Snyder’s adaptation than I do the graphic novel. I don’t want to go into too much detail because I’d rather save that for when I review the movie, but I do honestly think Adrian’s plan in the movie makes more sense than the source material does.

Another side effect of having to explain the alien is that Silk Spectre’s story never gets proper closure. There’s a moment where Laurie confronts her mother over the fact that the Comedian is her father, but it all just feels a bit rushed and unsatisfactory. Especially when she starts talking about wanting to change her costume and start using guns, implying she’s going to be more like the Comedian in the future. It’s just too big of a leap in my opinion. One minute she’s distraught that her father was her mother’s rapist, the next she’s following in his footsteps. It’s such a sharp turn, it practically gave me whiplash.

That being said, I did like the little detail of Dan taking Sally Jupiter’s porn magazine, which I think implies how superficial their relationship is. They’re together because of the power and sexual rush they feel in their superhero identities, not because they actually love each other. Maybe that was what drew Sally to the Comedian despite everything he did. Who knows?

I also really like the ending. I haven’t been talking about the New Frontiersman in these reviews because it’s largely been inconsequential up until now, which is kind of the point. Seymour, a downtrodden, inconsequential man working a soul sucking job at a right wing newspaper, is suddenly given the power to change everything. Will he reveal the contents of Rorschach’s journal and thus expose Adrian’s plan or keep quiet in the name of peace? I want to believe it would be the latter, but considering his livelihood depends on his racist editor having material to rant and complain about, it would seem the world is truly doomed. 

As Doctor Manhattan said, ‘nothing ever ends.’

Hey guys! Thank you so much for reading these blogs. It took longer than I thought to write them, but honestly I think it was worth the extra time because there is just so much about Watchmen to unpack and I really enjoyed analysing this story. I’ve been wanting to review Watchmen for ages now and I’m very proud how these have turned out. I personally think it’s some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. Next I’m going to be reviewing the movie adaptation directed by Zack Snyder and then after that the HBO TV series. In the mean time, please feel free to like and reblog and share your own thoughts and feelings about Watchmen. Which character did you find most interesting? Do you think Adrian did the right thing? What would you do in Seymour’s shoes if you found Rorschach’s journal and discovered the truth about the giant alien squid? I’m genuinely curious :)