#so for an immortal supercomputer hes pretty young

[snickeringdragon]

okay i doodled him real quick so i can post him hiii. this is freedom of forests hes a rain world self insert.

[thenightling]

Weird dream I had during a nap

I laid down for a nap tonight and I had a very weird period dream.   Some of you may know that when you have a dream on your period they can be very strange and also very detailed.   The film The Company of Wolves is inspired by this revelation.

Anyway, the dream felt a bit like a fairy tale and I’m going to try to write out every detail as best as I can.

I dreamt I was traveling with some friends, one of which was my own cousin, Nicole.  In real life I haven’t seen Nicole in many years, probably not since 2006 or so.  This version of Nicole was more a combination of my cousin and a former friend of mine, an Asian woman who lives in Boston.  In fact I believe this Nicole was more based on her than my actual cousin.

Anyway, we were traveling, on some sort of modified bus, like a hippie caravan bus.  And we somehow ended up in some American suburb.  (We’re all American but I felt the need to note this for how strange the dream gets.)

Somehow we ended up at this very nice, large, suburban house (Not a mansion, just a large house) but it was actually owned by a faery, or more precisely a “Tree Elf.” He seemed very proud of this distinction.  We didn’t meet him immediately.  We met his “children.”   Now in this suburb it was slightly after dusk, Twilight.  The sky was dim.   And when I woke up I remembered this detail because that’s how Neil Gaiman describes the sky in the realm of Faerie.   

Anyway, the children were human (or former human) who “belonged” to this Tree Elf.  He had collected them over the centuries and they were all still quite young looking and behaved it too, for the most part.   We met them first.  And they showed us into his house.  The house was a Smart House with a feminine A. I.

And I forget what we needed but we needed some things and The Tree Elf (who had a name but I lost it somewhere in the dream.  In fact near the end of the dream he had deliberately made me forget his name.  I think it started with an R but by the end I was calling him Mister E.  Get it? Mystery.  But not like the DC Comics character of the same name, who I kind of hate.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be the folkloric Rumplestiltskin.

Anyway, he came to my companions and myself one at a time.  I’m pretty sure one of my companions was my friend Lorie and a boy who was likely my little brother, Jeff.  There were a few others.  We were all portrayed as a bit younger than our real ages in this dream.  Jeff, especially, was a teenager again (He’s in his thirties, only six-years younger than myself and I’m thirty-eight.). 

Apparently Mister E. was very interested in Nicole because she was working for Disney (Disney theme parks).  Note: My cousin never worked for Disney in her life. But my former friend had, this is partly why I think the dream character was more based on her.   Mister E. listed off all these famous corporate figures he had dealings with but never Walt Disney.  He kept confusing the Disney company with Walt Disney himself.   I don’t think he even realized Walt Disney was dead.  

But here, let me describe Mister E. When he appeared in the dream he was small of build, but not inhumanly so.  He was just a little short, and thin.  He had shaggy, curly black hair.  Not at all what I’d imagine for Rumplestiltskin. He looked a bit like a Goth nerd.  

What he ultimately wanted from Nicole was her collection of vintage video games she had on data discs or CD-Roms.    Though it was a Smart House and he had a large PC it had a large 1990s monitor and some of the “tech” was 1990s.  And at one point he palmed these games, each on a different colored CD disc.  By the way, my real-life cousin, Nicole, does NOT collect vintage video games.

Mister E.  had a small room with a large desktop PC (with an old but large looking monitor) that could just see down a small corridor after you go straight out of a dining room where some of his children were hanging out at a round wood dining table, with a lit electric chandelier over head.      

I remember, in the dream, being very creeped out by him.  Though he wasn’t cruel to his children at all (and they actually seemed happy to be with him and in his house) I felt like dealing with him was a very bad idea and three was a tension and hostility between myself and him.  

His children (which I know weren’t biologically his) were a diverse hodgepodge of of different ages, and one disturbing baby that I knew was far older than a real baby and far more intelligent and aware than a usual baby.     These children did not want to leave.  They liked where they were.  They did not want to be rescued even though I know they were claimed (they didn’t seem to like the word “owned” though that is technically correct) by him.       

 I managed to get everyone from my little group back on our caravan-bus and we were about to leave when we remembered our cats.  We wanted him and his supercomputer house (which I don’t think was even really a house but just looked like one, magically) to help with our cats.  Apparently they needed to be fixed and one of them had a mind illness that he could cure.

The caravan bus, by the way, was wide on the inside and had sofas instead of normal seating, and throw rugs on the floor. It was like a small apartment on the inside.

So begrudgingly I went back into the house and though there was some hostility between Mister E. and myself that stopped abruptly when he realized I was pregnant.  Yes, pregnant.  (I am not pregnant in real life, by the way.)   He tore open his own magical baby (that was like the youngest sibling from A Series of unfortunate events) with his own sharp, claw-like nails and pulled out some intestine to use in some sort of magical porridge potion that I knew was dark magick.  The magical immortal baby creature healed as if nothing had happened, the organs regenerating.   

And Mister E. gave me this whitish, chunky cold or room temperature chowder that used his magical baby’s intestines as an ingredient.  He insisted I eat it.  He seemed very concerned.  He said it would prevent miscarriages.  And for some reason, as horrible as the source of its ingredients were, I did eat it even though I felt like it had to be some kind of taboo.  I mean it was made with baby intestine.  Sure it was a magical immortal baby but still...

He seemed to warm up to me after that.  And yes, he allowed his A. I. to fix our cats (there were two of them, one white cat that I knew to be Isis, a cat I had that passed away in real life three years ago), and the other was a black and white one.  The odd thing is this is the second time I’ve had a dream about traveling with supernatural creatures, and having a black and white cat on the road with me.  Also, I have no idea who had been driving our bus caravan thing.  

 This is around the time he took away my memory of his name, which I feel started with an R (Rumpelstiltskin / Rumpelstilzchen?)  and I started to know him as Mister E.   He didn’t ask for anything for helping our cats though I felt like there was a price.

[phoenixblogproject-blog]

Volume 2

Jumping very far forward in time to the year 3404 AD, the second volume of Hi no Tori differs greatly in setting from the first. Mankind has been pushed into 5 remaining Eternal Cities, underground hubs where humans live to escape the harsh, dying surface of the earth. In it, Tezuka explores the distant and depressing future of humanity as well as themes like technology, evolution, and cycles. 

In this volume, the people of the future rely heavily upon technology. It has wound its way into the everyday life style, and has even become somewhat of a religion. The people of the future treat technology as equal to gods while they live underground and have neglected the land, their lives being dictated by what appear to be super computers (for example, Hallelujah in the Eternal City Yamato). The super computers run algorithms and calculate what the “best thing to do” would be, and the people blindly follow as if they don’t have brains of their own. Laws are decided based off of what the computer does or doesn’t think the people should do, like when the officials want to pass a law in order to regulate the dress code, but the mayor of the city voices his opinion that it would be an infringement on a person’s right to self expression. 

Ultimately, mankind’s reliance on computers and technology to run their lives backfires. Two different supercomputers from two different cities disagree on what should be done, and instead declare war (something that hadn’t been done in 500 years), which then leads to the bombing of all 5 remaining world cities and the demise of mankind. I thought that this might be a commentary about post WWII Japan/the world, especially because the cities were all blown up by nuclear bombs. Nuclear bombs were a big influencer in the war, especially in Japan, and I think this might be Tezuka’s way of conveying the fragile balance that the world holds. This seems to be a warning that with the rapid evolution of technology comes the responsibility of man to handle that technology wisely; to not let it run OR ruin our lives. 

I also found this volume particularly cyclical. The volume was largely centered around evolution, which in itself is a cyclical process. Throughout the volume, the scientist Dr. Saruta and the main character Masato tried to revive mankind and life itself through artificial processes. However, as hard as they tried they just could not create a stable living being. It was then discovered that the only way Masato could revive mankind would be to trigger the evolutionary process naturally.

This shows that only natural, earthly processes will work; anything unnatural (i.e. the entire way of life that mankind had adopted) was not the true way of the cosmos. 

After Masato has become a being of the cosmos and begins to watch man evolve, he notices that they are no different than the old mankind--any force beyond their comprehension they call god, and the same patterns are repeated. Sometime later (after Masato has lost his shape and become one with the universe and phoenix, while also reuniting/fusing with Tamami), the volume cycles back to the setting of the first volume where the primitive people are hunting the phoenix and queen desires the blood of the phoenix to stay young.

(SIDE NOTE: I thought it was very ironic that in Volume 1, the queen wanted the phoenix’s blood so that she could be young forever, but we see in this volume that even thought Masato is immortal, his body still ages. It’s also a direct contrast to the first volume because in the first one, everyone was after the phoenix’s immortality, but here Masato is given immortality pretty much against his will.)

This timeline cycle helps deepen the meaning of the cosmos explained earlier in the volume. By connecting events and returning to the beginning, we are able to see the cycle of life and the connection of all things. The phoenix remarks that she has seen the rise and fall of man countless times, and it always goes awry; “no matter how advanced his civilization he seems to bring about his own doom” (285). However, the volume ends on a positive note with the phoenix having hope that this time, man will succeed.