#third essay I’ve had published!!

[pemberlaey]

if anybody cares my essay on may welland / the systemic infantilization of young women in old new york high society was finally published <3

[k4vehrtz]

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE YOUNG, YOUNG LOVERS? dom ! nanami kento / sub ! m. reader

content warnings. nsfw content / hybrid au ergo predator - prey dynamic where applicable / bunny hybrid ! nanami & reader / explicit mentions of and allusions to social anxiety / age gap (reader is 25 + nanami is 45) / satosugu cameo / self - degradation (brief, nanami) + mild degradation (r receiving) / fingering (r receiving) / spontaneous sex / ‘bunny’ & ‘little rabbit’ used as a pet name / doggystyle / ass‐to–mouth / overstimulation / heat cycles / nipple play / explicit consent / reader is shorter than nanami but there is no explicit description of a body type / virgin nanami ergo loss of virginity

word count. 3K

notes. i’ve had this bunny ! reader req in my inbox for a while and it has been on my mind so i decided to explore a couple ideas :) i’m dyslexic so any errors just give the fic personality

nanami had, over the course of his life, nurtured a particular distaste for other human beings.

he’d grown up in a city — one that never slept; a city that hummed to the tune of debauchery. busy days pre–empted busier nights. and he’d always remember two things: one, that the winters were cold, but the people there were always colder and two, he’d stuck out in a crowd.

hence, at the age of forty–five, he’d decided to leave.

“… so let me get this straight,” satoru, who’d made it his mission to mimic a koala, says as he untangles himself from suguru after having concluded that this was, in fact, a serious conversation. “you’re moving to a small town to avoid human interaction more efficiently instead of addressing your underlying social anxiety?”

satoru naturally spoke faster than the average individual, but his pace increased near the end of his sentence. nanami pretended not to notice (something he’d become exceptionally good at).

“real subtle, smart ass,” suguru hadn’t though, narrowing his eyes at his partner before turning his attention back to nanami, “i think it’s a good idea, better environment to write and all.”

writing, yes. he’d gotten in the habit during high school. it was nothing more than a hobby — something to pass the time between classes. being a loner by choice (as he’d liked to call it), he’d had a lot of time to get lost between the lines of an empty notebook. and being a creature of habit (in the self–proclaimed ‘right’ opinion of the startlingly blue–eyed man sitting across from him), he’d made a career out of it.

“i…suppose,” he responds almost nonchalantly, lacking the energy that his two closest friends possessed.

he hasn’t written since his last work — a collection of essays on how one’s perception of their surroundings is impacted by one’s perception of oneself — was published two, almost three years ago.

he’s embarrassed, a sensation that sticks to his skin uncomfortably and the silence that falls between them only exacerbates his discomfort.

“i’ll see you two, then,” he speaks up after the silence proves to be too much for him, standing to his full height in a bashful sort of way that can only be described as endearing — typical for rabbit hybrids.

the two fox hybrids, long since accustomed to the abrupt end of get–togethers, exchange their goodbyes as they stare at his retreating form with sympathetic eyes.

and nanami, instinctively observant of his surroundings to a fault, doesn’t have to turn around to know the expressions that colour their complexions. he can feel it — the eyes of predators following his every move.

he exhales slowly through his nose: once, twice, and then a third time before the intensity of his heartbeat subsides. they’re his friends, not a threat.

his stride resumes, albeit awkwardly, with full awareness of the fact that he has a problem. he’s had a problem for a long time. but running comes naturally to prey animals.

designated ‘safe spaces’ for prey animals had become the norm in recent years following a series of unfortunate events. the café you worked at was one such establishment.

“…i’m so sorry for the delay, my co–worker called in sick so i’ve been on my own and today is a lot busier than—”

nanami clears his throat, his intention crystal clear, and your ramble comes to an abrupt end.

warmth gathers beneath the surface of your cheeks as you raise your gaze to his, though he swiftly looks away, “what can i get you?”

without looking at the menu, he responds, “a croissant,” and you interject, “so you’re the croissant guy!”

he stares at you for a moment before slowly repeating after you, “the…croissant guy?” and when you smile at him, he can’t help but think that he’d need sunglasses if you were to do that again.

you apologize for the second time before continuing, “you should know by now that there aren’t that many people that live here and, between you and me, even fewer people that buy our croissants,” a distinct warmness to your tone.

nanami nods thoughtfully, responding curtly with an indifferent, “i see,” as he pays for the pastry before finding himself someplace to sit with his laptop.

it’s been a week since he’d first arrived and he considers himself familiar enough with his new surroundings. all that was left to do was to write but, as it turns out, a change of scenery only goes so far.

as he stares at the empty document on his screen, his thoughts wander back to a few minutes ago. you’re a new face — he presumes the co–worker you’d mentioned was the barista he’d met before.

but his thoughts wander so far before you appear at his side, croissant in hand, “i heard you were an author, that’s pretty cool,” and your seemingly perpetual smile curling your lips.

you mean no harm; it’s merely an attempt to be polite, making small talk is perfectly normal. but nanami isn’t normal, he feels strange, a surge of anxiety materializing seemingly from thin air.

“you heard?” he repeats after you, stumbling over his words, and he feels stupid and embarrassed.

you tilt your head to the side, your overly large ears flopping as you do so, before taking it upon yourself to sit across from him.

“isn’t it great to have places like these to ourselves?”

he raises a brow at the sudden change of topic but you continue nevertheless, “i think it’s great, ‘cause you get to meet people who understand you. there’s a book club at the library down the street this saturday, i think you should stop by if you have the time to spare,” before excusing yourself, leaving as fast as you came.

nanami lowers his eyes to the croissant, not entirely sure of what had just happened. while you stare at him from behind the counter, a complex mixture of emotions colouring your expression.

“i think you should go; it won’t hurt to get out of the house.”

satoru’s voice echoes through his laptop’s speaker and nanami falls into contemplative silence.

“besides —” suguru interjects, “you’ve been seeing that therapist, right? i bet she’d agree that this is a step in the right direction,” moving into the camera’s frame as he settles down on satoru’s lap.

they’re not wrong; he, deep down, knows that they’re not wrong, but he hesitates all the same.

“i don’t know,” he breathes out after a moment of silence, pushing the pickled vegetables around his plate with his reusable chopsticks absentmindedly.

the line of communication falls silent once more and then suguru responds, “whatever you decide to do, we support you,” before ending the call.

and nanami exhales slowly, staring at his reflection on his laptop’s screen. he’s aged (of course he has), baby fat no longer rounds his cheeks, and crow’s feet round the corners of his eyes.

but, even now, he stands out — and nanami hates standing out.

he’d stood out among his peers; other prey animals were shorter, always shorter. there was always ‘too much’ of nanami — it made him easier to spot and made his movements awkward. he never fully knew what to do with himself.

rabbit hybrids were meant to be small and cute, two things nanami wasn’t.

you, on the other hand, were the epitome of society’s expectations; smaller and sociable. at least, that’s what he’d observed over the past four days. and he doesn’t hate you for it — ‘hate’ is too strong of a word to describe how he felt.

‘envy’, however, leaves a bad taste in his mouth, it ruins his already depleted appetite, and he pushes the ceramic plate of pickled vegetables away from him when the thought crosses his labyrinthine mind.

he doesn’t envy you; that would be absurd. but, isn’t that what this world is, absurd?

‘it is’, he decides as he changes into more suitable clothing for leaving the house — abandoning his pyjamas for a white shirt tucked into the waistband of black slacks. it was plain, nanami liked plain; he liked uniformity.

but you, you again, you were anything but plain.

as he rounded the corner of the library after receiving directions from the librarian, a sweet elderly woman, your brightly coloured sweater caught his eyes first. it stood out amidst the piles of books of all different shapes, sizes, and colours that surrounded you.

his gaze flickers to the watch around his wrist, an all too familiar sensation creeping up on him. he’d come too late. but the sound of your voice drags him out of his thoughts before he can spiral any further. hell, he hadn’t even noticed when you approached him.

“you should get out of your head sometime.”

he narrows his eyes at you, not entirely because of what you’d said (though it played a role) but because of how you said it. now that you were in such proximity to one another, he can’t help but acknowledge that you look terrible.

you sound as though you’d just run a marathon, your chest rising and falling in quick succession. without thinking he presses the back of his palm against your forehead, beads of sweat dampening his skin but he doesn’t mind. you’re burning up.

“christ,” he grimaces as he gives you a once–over, adrenaline coursing through his veins as his own body begins to heat up in a similar manner.

so, this is not a regular fever, duly noted.

“i don’t consider myself a believer but each to their own,” you grin, a lopsided type that nanami swore could give him cavities. but now is not the time for that.

he clears his throat, making the conscious decision to ignore the growing strain of his cock against the fabric of his slacks, and asks carefully, “do you need a ride home?”

nanami’s studio was a blank canvas; untouched white walls, and brand–new furniture (some still encased in its plastic wrapping) in different shades of grey. even in your heat–induced haze, you could tell that this was a ‘house’, not a ‘home’.

he doesn’t comment on it though, so you keep your thoughts to yourself as he gently guides you to his designated bedroom.

the mattress sinks under the combined weight of the two of you. your chests rising and falling in sync as you stare into each other’s eyes, your oversized ears touching in a way neither of you knew could be so pleasurable until now.

“i look old enough to be your father,” he murmurs, his voice breathier the longer his body hovers over yours. and your response comes between laboured gasps, “i’m—oh shit, you’re big—twenty-five, don’t worry, i’m a big boy.”

you can feel his growing erection through the fabric of his slacks against your own. and the air between the two of you feels charged, igniting as he lowers his lips to your throat, his warm breath feeling like miniature needles against your sensitive skin, “do you or do you not want this?”

it’s the question of the hour and you nod eagerly but he pauses, holding your chin between the soft pads of his thumb and index finger as he tilts your head upwards, “i need words, bunny, think you can use your words f’me, bunny?”

your lips part, a low, open–mouthed moan cascading down your tongue before you manage to form a coherent response, “i want ‘you’, not ‘this’.”

and your choice of wording is not lost on him, he hears you loud and clear.

“i’ve never done ‘this’ before,” he blurts out, embarrassed by his lack of cleverness when compared to your confession only moments prior.

it is the truth though; something he prides himself on being to others — truthful. although it’s up for debate how forthcoming he is with himself.

he had, however, every intention of taking you back to your place wherever that may be. but as the distinct floral scent indicating the arrival of your heat enveloped the confines of his car, he had to make a decision that was for the best of both of you. driving while approaching his heat was no better than driving while intoxicated; thus, the choice was clear.

“i can teach you,” comes your response, sounding as though it took a great deal of effort to say whilst pushing yourself up into a seated position, unintentionally bumping your forehead against his in the process.

“it’s so warm,” you both groan in unison as you pull away from each other, removing all articles of clothing deemed ‘unnecessary’ which truthfully rendered you both nude.

your state of undress mattered not, though, as nanami promptly leaned to the side, rummaging in the upper drawer of his nightstand for a moment before retrieving a lubricant specifically designed for rabbit hybrids (a gift he’d received from the ocean–eyed freak) and handing it over to you.

which you happily accept, coating both your own and his fingers in a considerable amount of lubricant before leaning against the headboard and spreading your legs.

you carefully guide his palm between your legs, gently nudging the tight ring of muscle with one of his fingers.

“i haven’t done this in a — fuck fuck fuck, your fingers are thick,” you hiccup, your breath catching in your throat as you rapidly descend into a string of curses as his finger breaches your entrance. the sudden intrusion hurts, but in the midst of your heat, it’s enough to send you over the edge, your toes curling as ropes of cum erupt from the head of your cock.

and there’s that bad taste in nanami’s mouth again, clinging to his bones and invading his muddled thoughts: ‘you just have to be perfect, don’t you?’ but with it comes the realization that he’s the reason why you’re like this and it fills him with an odd sense of satisfaction.

determination renewed, and perhaps in tandem with his desire to experience such relief, he cautiously adds another thick finger whilst you come down from your high.

“is penetration all it takes to send you over the edge, little rabbit?” he questions, curling his fingers towards what he presumes is your prostate, and you can’t help but whimper.

it’s strangely degrading when you think about it; nanami, a rabbit, a prey animal like yourself taking on a dominant role. a role that isn’t in his nature thus his tone remains mild–mannered whilst his words and actions, while cautious, are the exact opposite. 

 another finger is added — the total amounting to three now. you’re stretched around three of his thick fingers as he memorizes the layout of your insides, curling his fingers in such a way that he grazes your prostate with precision.

instead of teaching him, you’re rendered speechless as he maintains a steady pace with his fingers. the sound of your gasps, moans, and whimpers creating a symphony in the otherwise silent studio.

by the time he retracts his fingers for the final time, you’ve already climaxed two more times, your cum splattered across your bare abdomen.

“you’re so easy, little rabbit,” he whispers as his lips ghost yours before fully enveloping them in a heated exchange of saliva. there’s no real heat behind his words but you shudder nevertheless.

when nanami pulls away from your lips, it’s solely because you both need air. a string of saliva, however, remains connected to both of your lips, a testament to the heated kiss.

as you both catch your breath, you take it upon yourself to reposition yourself so that you’re on all fours, gleefully presenting yourself to nanami who obliges you.

your thighs tremble in silent anticipation of what’s to come, your loosened ring of muscle winking invitingly. but it’s not his cock — no, when the wet muscle breaches your entrance you squeal, almost losing your balance had nanami’s hands not been on your hips.

it’s a strange sensation — his tongue in your ass, his warm breath wafting across your most sensitive region. but you slowly adjust as he ravages you, lapping at your puckered entrance as you subconsciously clench and unclench.

and in a matter of minutes, you’re climaxing once more, the muscles in your pelvis twitching convulsively as your erect cock spurts ropes of cum onto the sheet beneath you. 

nanami pulls away from your ass with a ‘pop’, aligning himself with your entrance before easing into you and savouring every spasm of your gummy walls. he doesn’t move until he’s buried to the hilt, angling his hips as he thrusts into you with a steady pace, his balls colliding with your sensitive skin.

you’re overwhelmed by a sense of euphoria, having experienced multiple orgasms. so much so that salty tears roll down your cheeks as you feel nanami throb inside of you, the angry tip of his cock bullying your prostate relentlessly.

he truly is brutal, desperately chasing his high as one of his hands wanders up to your chest, taking your nipple between his thumb and index finger and teasing it.

nanami’s thoroughly bullying you but you can’t even protest, ‘uh–uh–uhs’ tumble past your lips in rapid succession along with the overwhelming urge to please him rearing its head.

thus, you endure his assault on your body until you fall limp on his mattress in a puddle of your cum as his leaks out of your entrance, some cascading down your inner thighs.

you’re still asleep when nanami wakes up the next morning, golden rays filtering into his apartment through the blinds. and he takes it upon himself to wipe your unconscious body with a damp towel from head to toe before taking a shower and heading into the kitchen.

a sense of dread settles in the pit of his stomach as he ponders the various directions the conversation the two of you are bound to have may go. but with it comes a new perspective.

[acasualcrossfade]

Balcony Kisses

Written for @steddielovemonth Day 26

Rating: T | Cw: mention of underage drug use | Words: 1240

Tags: established relationship, established Steddie, Steddie dads, making out

Prompt: Love is a fire that never goes out. @sidekick-hero

Steve and Eddie share a moment during their daughter’s graduation party.

--

Steve leaned against the railing of the master bedroom balcony, letting out a slow exhale. The balcony rails were wrapped in lights, still up from when Eddie decorated for Christmas, but their glow added a nice touch for their daughter’s graduation party. 

The party still continued in the backyard below and Steve could still hear the sizzling sounds of Hopper’s famous burgers on the grill, the faraway laughter of teenage kids and their friends, and the pulsing beat of some party music Dustin had chosen. 

The balcony was quieter than the party itself, and from here, Steve could hear the droning buzz of cicadas as he took in the blue-purple color of the summer evening sky. 

In the glow of the fairy lights that hung across the backyard, Steve spied their daughter, Sienna, at a table with her friends. Sienna turned her wrist every now and then, showing off her charm bracelet, sure to point out her newest charm, a gift from both him and Eddie. It was tradition to give her a new charm for each milestone: graduating middle school, first theater performance, first band performance, and most recently, her first published work. Her piece on the importance of music as a way to capture time and memories won the state essay contest earlier that year, and it was hard to imagine that she would be off to the University of Chicago next week. She’d been invited to their summer writing program before the semester started. 

It was exciting, but it meant Sienna left in a week instead of in a few months. Anxiety hummed between Steve’s ribs at the thought of Sienna on her own. The air was thick with the bittersweet taste that came with moving on.

Summer was just beginning, and yet, everything was ending.

“Thought I’d find you up here.”

Steve turned at the sound of Eddie’s voice as the man stepped out onto the balcony. Eddie looked as good as always, even with his long hair that he’d fussed over that morning now thrown in a messy bun, and his suit jacket abandoned hours ago for a UChicago sweatshirt. Steve spotted the tell-tale taquito grease stain on his sleeve.

“Thought you said you’d leave the taquitos for the guests,” Steve chuckled, loving the way Eddie’s arms laced to embrace him from behind.  

“Couldn’t resist,” Eddie murmured, kissing Steve’s neck softly. “They’re almost as delicious as you are.”

“And here’s when I’d say something about your cholesterol and–”

Eddie gave him a playful squeeze, cutting Steve’s sentence off with a surprised gasp. 

“I’ve been in the mood to indulge tonight. Guilty as charged. But I did take my medicine this morning,” he assured.

“Guess I’ll let you off with a warning,” Steve replied. He turned to face Eddie, leaning against his husband’s chest as Eddie’s arms wrapped around him. Steve couldn’t help but snuggle in closer.

“So, is the party better from up here?”

Eddie’s voice came at Steve’s ear, as Eddie’s hands rubbed the back of Steve’s neck. Instantly, Steve’s shoulders dropped, and Steve hummed in relief.

“Just needed some air.”

“Mm, and what else, sunshine?”

Steve almost hated the way Eddie could read him like a book. Still, the words stuck in his throat as he spoke. “Sienna. She’s leaving us, Eds. We get her for another week, but then…she’s gone.”

Eddie stroked Steve’s cheek, nodding along. “I know. I can’t believe it, either. Feels like yesterday when she was nervous for her first day of school.”

Steve hugged Eddie close as he continued to watch the party downstairs. His eyes drifted across the yard to Max and Nancy chatting excitedly to Erica, no doubt about their publishing company, who’s third office would open in Brooklyn next week. They already had locations in Chicago and Seattle, and Brooklyn was their biggest move yet.

“Everyone’s moving on. What are we even going to do with her out of the house?”

Eddie nibbled Steve’s ear in reply, earning another hum from Steve. “I can think of a few things, starting with you bent over this—”

It was Steve’s turn to surprise Eddie with a playful squeeze. Eddie’s sentence dissolved into laughter as leaned in and connected their lips, taking Steve in slowly with intention.

Steve’s mind went hazy. Eddie tasted like burgers and beer, and everything home and Steve responded by pulling Eddie’s hips impossibly closer, closing every centimeter of space between them. He felt a smile tug at his lips as Eddie’s hand moved down his neck and back to curl around the curve of his ass to give it a squeeze.

Steve let out a breathy moan; even after twenty-five years together, that move still made Steve’s entire body tingle.

“Of course they’ll be plenty of that,” Steve whispered against Eddie’s lips. “Might have to get a head start tonight. Clearly, we’ve got a lot to cover.” 

Steve moved his hand from Eddie’s hip to Eddie’s ass, glad when Eddie’s moan heated his lips. 

Steve had many plans for what he wanted next, starting with pushing Eddie back into their bedroom, but the moment was cut short with a Hey! shouted from the backyard.

“We can still see you up there, lovebirds,” Robin crowed from the backyard in her best sing-song voice. 

Steve broke apart instantly as he felt his ears heat, but Eddie, as always, took it in stride and flipped her the bird as he laughed and pulled Steve in for another deep kiss.

Eddie’s lips made him dizzy and this time was no different. The world went fuzzy in the best way, and Steve threw his arms around Eddie’s neck to tangle in his hair.

Ripples of chuckles, whoops, and whistles came from the backyard, and when they broke apart again, Steve caught Sienna laughing as she playfully gave them both a thumbs down.

“I think we’re embarrassing our daughter,” Steve chuckled. 

“Well that just means we’re good dads,” Eddie winked. 

The party picked back up as attention shifted back to food and socializing. Steve leaned against the railing, glad to get more time with Eddie.

“You think….we did okay?” Steve asked, turning to glance again at Sienna. She’d moved across the yard to join Nancy, Max, and Robin. “She’ll be okay, right?”

Eddie’s arms wrapped around him again, carrying the same safety and love as always. “She’ll be okay,” Eddie assured, pecking a kiss on Steve’s cheek. “Besides, she’s been doing her own laundry for years, so at least we’ll know she’ll be in clean clothes.”

“I guess that’s a relief.” 

“And she knows to call us about anything, too. And she has,” Eddie reminded. “Remember when she was at that awful 70s party and everyone was trying weed?”

“Oh god, yes.”

Their daughter hadn’t partook, but called them instead to have them pick her up because everyone was freaking out and acting weird. 

Eddie was right; Sienna knew to call them for anything. 

Steve leaned into the familiar love and safety of Eddie’s arms. “I’m gunna miss her so much.” 

“We both are,” Eddie hummed. “But we still have a week. We’ll make the most of it.”

Steve nodded in agreement, melting into Eddie’s touch as the man pressed gentle kisses into his neck. 

Although the taste of everything ending was still tangible in the summer air, Steve felt the beginning curl of desire in his abdomen as Eddie kissed him, knowing that some things never changed. 

[superlinguo]

Research Data Management. Or, How I made multiple backups and still almost lost my honours thesis.

This is a story I used to tell while teaching fieldworkers and other researchers about how to manage their data. It’s a moderately improbable story, but it happened to me and others have benefited from my misadventures. I haven't had reason to tell it much lately, and I thought it might be useful to put into writing. This is a story from before cloud storage was common - back when you could, and often would, run out of online email storage space. Content note: this story includes some unpleasant things that happened to me, including multiple stories of theft (cf. moderately improbable). Also, because it's stressful for most of the story, I want to reassure you that it does have a happy conclusion. It explains a lot of my enthusiasm for good research data management. In Australia, 'honours' is an optional fourth year for a three year degree. It's a chance to do some more advanced coursework and try your hand at research, with a small thesis project. Of course, it doesn't feel small when it's the first time you've done a project that takes a whole year and is five times bigger than anything you’ve ever written. I've written briefly about my honours story (here, and here in a longer post about my late honours supervisor Barb Kelly) . While I did finish my project, it all ended a bit weirdly when my supervisor Barb got ill and left during the analysis/writing crunch. The year after finishing honours I got an office job. I hoped to maybe do something more with my honours work, but I wasn't sure what, and figured I would wait until Barb was better. During that year, my sharehouse flat was broken into and the thief walked out with the laptop I'd used to do my honours project. The computer had all my university files on it, including my data and the Word version of my thesis. I lost interview video files, transcriptions, drafts, notes and everything except the PDF version I had uploaded to the University's online portal. Uploading was optional at the time, if I didn't do that I probably would have just been left with a single printed copy. I also lost all my jewellery and my brother’s base guitar, but I was most sad about the data (sorry bro). Thankfully, I made a backup of my data and files on a USB drive that I kept in my handbag. This was back when a 4GB thumb drive was an investment. That Friday, feeling sorry for myself after losing so many things I couldn't replace, I decided to go dancing to cheer myself up. While out with a group of friends, my bag was stolen. It was the first time I had a nice handbag, and I still miss it. Thankfully, I knew to make more than one back up. I had an older USB that I'd tucked down the back of the books on my shelf (a vintage 256MB drive my dad kindly got for me in undergrad after a very bad week when I lost an essay to a corrupted floppy disk). When I went to retrieve the files, the drive was (also) corrupted. This happens with hard drives sometimes. My three different copies in three different locations were now lost to me.

Thankfully, my computer had a CD/DVD burner. This was a very cool feature in the mid-tens, and I used to make a lot of mixed CDs for my friends. During my honours project I had burned backed up files on some discs and left them at my parents house. It was this third backup, kept off site, which became the only copy of my project. I very quickly made more copies. When Barb was back at work, and I rejoined her as a PhD student, it meant we could return to the data and all my notes. The thesis went through a complete rewrite and many years later was published as a journal article (Gawne & Kelly 2014). It would have probably never happened if I didn’t have those project files. I continued with the same cautious approach to my research data ever since, including sending home SD cards while on field trips, making use of online storage, and archiving data with institutional repositories while a project is ongoing.

I’m glad that I made enough copies that I learnt a good lesson from a terrible series of events. Hopefully this will prompt you, too, to think about how many copies you have, where they’re located, and what would happen if you lost access to your online storage.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jackie Hajdenberg

An authors’ panel at an Albany book festival Saturday has been canceled after organizers said two panelists refused to share a stage with the “Zionist” moderator.

Elisa Albert, who is Jewish, was set to moderate a panel at the Albany Book Festival on Saturday called “Girls, Coming of Age.” But on Thursday, she received an email from a festival organizer informing her that the event had been canceled: Two of the three panelists — authors Lisa Ko and Aisha Abdel Gawad — objected to sitting on the panel with Albert because they did not want to appear with a “Zionist.” The third panelist was to be Emily Layden.

Albert said the cancellation is of a piece with her experiences since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Albert told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “I’ve been really vocal from the get-go, and I’ve lost many friends. I’ve seen my whole professional life wildly altered. I’m not surprised at all. I’ve seen all kinds of people behaving in all kinds of ways that are on the spectrum of this exact same kind of bigotry, complicity, fear — all of it.”

Albert, who lives in Albany, first learned about the panelists’ objections on Thursday afternoon, when she got an email from Mark Koplik, the assistant director of the New York State Writers Institute, which is organizing the festival.

“We have a crazy situation developing and we’d love to talk on the phone,” Koplik wrote in a message that JTA obtained.

“Basically, not to sugar coat this, Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’” he added. “We’re taken by surprise, and somewhat nonplussed, and want to talk this out.”

By Thursday evening, Albert had been notified by Paul Grondahl, director of the Writers Institute, that the event had been canceled.

“We regret this situation, which was out of our control,” Grondahl wrote in an email obtained by JTA. “It is unfortunate for everyone involved.”

Grondahl added, “I wish this were otherwise. We will find a way to air these issues we have discussed in a deeper, more considered, more carefully planned event with intentionality and context.”

The cancellation of the panel is the latest in a long series of literary events to be upended or nixed because of disputes over the Israel-Hamas war and Zionism. Activists have sought to hinder the careers of authors they deem “Zionist,” many of whom have Jewish heritage.

In one notable recent instance, a launch event for Jewish journalist Joshua Leifer’s new book, “Tablets Shattered,” at a Brooklyn bookstore in August was canceled because one of its employees objected to the event’s “Zionist” rabbi moderator.

Some of those facing the criticism have not expressed public support for Israel. Gabrielle Zevin, who wrote the bestseller “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” for example, has faced calls for cancellation despite saying nothing publicly about Israel or the war.

Albert, on the other hand, has been an outspoken advocate for Israel since the outbreak of the war nearly a year ago. On Instagram, she has posted aggressively and frequently in support of Israel and against Hamas and those she perceives as supporting it, including pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States, whom she has called “terror apologists.”

On Friday afternoon, following the cancelation, she appeared to embrace the cancellation, posting an image of her latest book — “The Snarling Girl,” a collection of personal essays published last month — with the text, “Now’s as good a time as ever to promote Zio lit!” She later added a selfie with the text “Friendly local Zio bitch” over it.

[tamamatango]

My Project Revealed: The Fabled Fanfiction Come to Fruition

Crossing an item off the bucket list before the dopamine gods give out on me. (Yes that’s the story link in case you want to just go there and skip the whole me not shutting up part)

Back in my most active period in the Keroro fandom, I tried and failed multiple times to write a fanfic; might’ve even talked about it here at some point. But for one reason or another, it just never panned out, and I ultimately fell out of it for a few years before I managed to publish anything. However, I got back into the practice with my next hyperfixation, so now that I’ve returned to frog hell again, I knew I had to do what teenage me could not.

I can’t say this is “the fanfic I always wanted to write,” because I ended up scrapping whatever I had started all those years ago. When this started to come together in my head, it initially seemed way too ambitious given the limited time I have and where my strengths and weaknesses lie as a writer…but I got possessed by the artsy demon or something and started to write it anyway. Whoops.

To Chase a Butterfly asks one simple question: What if Kururu actually failed to save Saburo at the end of episode 229? Okay that’s not really a simple question, considering it leads to a whole emotional and physical journey about grief and companionship and space-timey shenanigans. But basically, Kururu goes “bet” and attempts to bring him back to life. Naturally, the deuteragonist of such a story is…Dororo? Yes, at the central conflict of the story is Kururu’s friendship with Saburo, but it’s Dororo who serves as his confidant/partner in crime over the course of the story, and so I consider this to double as a KuruDoro fic as well—though I will make it clear now that it’s not conclusively romantic, so you can decide if that’s the direction they go in or if it stays platonic, and it works either way.

As of the latest update from. Uh. 15 minutes ago at the time of writing, the fic currently sits at about 60-65% completion and is divided into two parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–6) is the angst/drama-heavy half, which I uploaded in full as a batch drop. Part 2 (7+) is more action/adventure, sort of in the vein of what you’d expect from one of the Keroro movies, and I am updating it chapter-by-chapter, since it was getting too unsustainable to try to dump it all at once. AO3 has the most robust features, so that’s where it’s hosted for now, but I know people have very understandable problems with that site, so I’ll consider porting it elsewhere if that’s something anyone is interested in.

Well, that’s enough yammering from me. If you like the idea, please do check it out. Things are starting to heat up as the climax approaches, especially with the introduction of a surprise third major character who very longtime Kirb fans miiiight faintly recall. And if you’re already following it—it’s been up for a while now, just waited to discuss it here to temporarily save myself from potential embarrassment—thanks for your support, and I hope you look forward to the rest! Part 2 is very research/planning heavy and has been pretty challenging to write so far, but I intend to see this all the way through damn it. And yeah, this is what’s been pulling my focus away from the blog, but there will still be posts here whenever I feel like putting energy into an essay and/or next real info drop about the new anime (BNP gimme something soon please I’m parched).

[calaisreno]

Point of View in Fiction: Some Observations

I did a poll on point of view in fanfiction a while ago. The results didn't surprise me; I knew that some people just don't read 1st person stories, and most people don’t care about POV. I was more interested in the reasons people gave for their preference.

It's a personal thing, how someone tells you a story, and if you don't like the narrative voice, you will associate it with other things. Readers don’t often think about voice, but it is one of the most important ways a story draws you in, or sends you to the back button. I suspect it's narrative voice that is affecting some readers more than POV.

I’ve never hit the back button on any fic because of the POV. I have hit that button because of format, paragraphing, and a few other issues. I’m an English teacher who taught creative writing for many of those years. Now I don’t read things that feel like student writing-- simply because I can’t enjoy reading something if it feels like I should be grading it. If there are spelling errors or common grammar mistakes that I see over and over in student work, I don’t read it. It might be a good story, but I can't put myself in the right headspace to appreciate it because it feels like work.

Judging from the replies to the poll, some people associate first person POV with bad writing, but there are many other things that flag a story as badly written. And a badly written story isn’t necessarily a bad story. (Barbara Woodhouse assured us that there are no bad dogs; this may be true for stories as well, but choice is an individual matter. There are some breeds I would not choose as a companion.)

I was given the task of teaching creative writing because the admin in charge of the schedule at my school needed another English elective and I had a hole in my schedule. I was an avid reader and had written a lot of original fiction at that point, and thought having students write poems and stories might be a nice change from essays and book reports. My feelings about it were not relevant. Nobody cared whether I was qualified; it was either Creative Writing or Study Hall (i.e. Purgatory) for me. I did not hesitate.

The reality: I loved it and hated it.

Many of my young writers were reluctant, having been placed in my class to fill a hole in their schedules; they did not enjoy writing in the least. A hundred words was an accomplishment for some of them; if they could break this barrier, they got smiley faces and exclamation points. Others were wildly enthusiastic, producing pages of badly spelled and punctuated narrative, a chaotic jumble of scene and dialogue with random flashes of brilliance.

Grading a story is not like grading an essay. The fledgling writers who are serious need to know that spelling, punctuation, and grammar matter: it’s the suit you put on for the interview so you get the job. The ones who dislike writing need encouragement to see that it doesn't have to be punishment. It can be play.

A few observations from my years working with student writers:

Inexperienced fiction writers tend to use POV 1st person more often. Most of these writers are also enthusiastic readers. First person POV helps them find the camera eye focus they realize fiction needs. However fantastic, the story they write is their story, intimate and personal, and 1st person feels most comfortable to them. They need encouragement and a few friendly suggestions, not a paper bloodied by my red pen. In writing process, first drafts are allowed to be horrible.

The non-readers in my class were the most reluctant writers; they often failed to understand POV and wrote from an outsider third-person POV which ended up being more of a summary than a story. My job was to show them how to pull scenes out of the summary. People talking, doing things.

We all start somewhere.

Publishers note that first submissions are often written in first person. It is not that they reject these stories because of that; the stories have other amateur flaws and the POV is just a flag for other issues. First person is not bad, it’s just harder for new writers to pull off well.

Several novels I’ve recently read use first person narrator to good effect: Piranesi comes to mind, The Rule of Four, and Moriarty. The Left Hand of Darkness is a story I can’t even imagine in third person-- and it has two narrators! The original Sherlock Holmes stories (all but a couple) are written in first person, with Doctor Watson narrating.

There are choices even within a first person narrative. The main character doesn’t have to narrate. Watson isn’t the main character in ACD’s stories, Holmes is. Watson is an involved/interested observer (a common use of first person); he stands in for the reader, seeing the mystery unfold, not understanding what all the clues mean until— surprise!— Holmes reveals the solution. I have read mysteries where the first person narrator turns out to be the murderer; the shock value of this fades if you use it every time, but it’s effective on some stories. First person is not bad, if chosen for a good reason.

And third person has its own set of problems. The multiple “he” and “his” that need clarification. The accidental wandering out of limited point of view into semi-omniscience. Even a close, third-person limited narrative provides some distance from the viewpoint character.

Second person is rare and considered gimmicky. I wrote a story in second POV once; the only comment from my most admiring reader: NO. Just, NO. Since that horror, I’ve used first person with second person address in a couple stories (Blessings and The Story of Us, if you’re curious). It’s not a choice I’d often make, but sometimes it’s the right one.

Several of my favourite fanfics use the first person brilliantly. (Pointing to ivyblossom’s The Progress of Sherlock Holmes and The Quiet Man.) When reading, I generally don’t notice point of view unless I think about it; if the narrative flows, the choice obviously works. I don't read much in other fandoms, but think that the Sherlock fandom has a lot of really talented and experienced writers, better than many published stories I’ve read.

I use first person in some of my stories, usually because I’ve found a narrative voice I like. I’ve also rewritten stories after the first draft, changing POV (first to third, or third to first) because I thought it would work better. My feeling is that neither is better in general; in a specific story it should be a deliberate choice, not an accidental one. It’s one of many things to think about when writing a narrative. Voice is one of the most important.

My conclusions:

Reading for pleasure means that the best story is the one you love. It’s a personal choice, not a debate.

Writing well develops over time, as a product of many things. If you’re writing for pleasure, not pay, you should write what you love. Do not change your story because of what a poll says.

If you’re unsure or unhappy about what you’ve written, find a beta reader. Ask them questions. Pay them in adoration. Return the favour; it’s a great way to learn.

Polls are useful only for provoking thought. My thanks to all who participated!

[nyxshadowhawk]

The Red Book, Liber Primus: Part One

This is going to be a long series of posts in which I interpret Carl Jung's Red Book! Jung has been a cornerstone of my mystical practice for basically as long as I've been practicing, and a major inspiration for my creative work, so imagine my surprise when I learned that Jung had his own grimoire of mystical experiences! This is maybe the most important book I've ever read.

Introduction

I owe a lot to Carl Jung. I read one page about him in a book about symbols that I received when I was about twelve, and something just clicked. In particular, the idea of the Shadow Complex really stuck with me, and has absolutely defined the last decade of my life in terms of my personal spirituality, my approach to interpreting media, and my creative writing. It’s kind of hard to overstate the impact that Jung has had on me, but despite that, I haven’t actually read that much Jung. You all know how much I care about primary sources, so I was uncomfortable with the fact that I was using Jung’s ideas as the basis of my own work without being intimately familiar with his.

I’ve made some missteps. I originally really loved the idea of interpreting gods as archetypes, and claiming that all of humanity worshipped the same gods under different names. I saw that as a beautiful uniting feature of humankind. But the concept did not hold up under scrutiny, for a long list of reasons; the short version is that I was ignoring nuances that distinguished gods from each other, dismissing some of their defining qualities as cultural quirks, as if entire human cultures were “hats” that gods put on and not the thing that makes them what they are. I didn’t start having real relationships with gods until after I started viewing them as individuals, rather than archetypes. And then there’s Joseph Campbell, and his whole “Hero’s Journey” idea, which seemed extremely profound until I actually read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and realized how flawed the Hero’s Journey framework really is. (Spencer McDaniel has a great article about that over on her site, so I recommend you check that out.) So, that was all another strike against Jungian ideas. The third strike is that people like Jordan Peterson use his ideas a lot. That in particular has made me afraid that I’ve been misinterpreting Jung this whole time.

There’s also the fact that Jung’s ideas are difficult to understand and apply, and frequently misunderstood. Clinical psychology has mostly disregarded Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes as more mystical than empirical, despite Jung’s efforts to prove his ideas empirically. Fans of Jung will sometimes downplay his mystical leanings to try to lend more scientific credibility to his ideas. But to me, Jung’s mysticism is a feature, not a bug. Turns out, Jung was a mystic. Jung had mystical visions and prophetic dreams since he was a young child, and his entire brand of psychoanalysis was developed specifically to explain said mystical experiences (which honestly explains a lot). Not only was Jung a mystic, he was basically the William Blake of his day! He chronicled his mystical experiences in what is basically a personal grimoire, written in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript, with stunning illustrations.

It’s called The Red Book, or Liber Novus, and it was published in 2009 (translated by Sonu Shamdasani). I got the really expensive version that’s about two feet tall and contains a facsimile of the actual illuminated manuscript. To call it an eye-opener would be an understatement. Reading it is infinitely more valuable to my spirituality and my writing than reading any of Jung’s psychological essays. The Red Book is the real source of most of Jung’s ideas and theories, and the purely mystical nature of them explains why the concepts themselves resonate much more for me than the psychoanalytic application of them does. Reading it is immensely validating, because it proves that I was right all along! Not only were my interpretations of Jung’s ideas spot-on, but my UPG aligns with his — though some of that alignment is undoubtedly a result of his influence on me, I’ve also come to many of the same conclusions entirely on my own.

I hope that the field of modern psychology will eventually do mysticism its due diligence using modern methodology, but until then, Jung’s attempt to ground all of this weirdness in psychology is the best we’ve got. I’m no psychoanalyst, so I’ll interpret Jung as a fellow mystic, because that is what I am most familiar with. I can compare his own experiences against my own, and hopefully get something valuable from my interpretation of them.

Disclaimer: These are mostly my notes and impressions; I’m not responding line-by-line (because that would take forever), I’m responding to what stood out to me. This is my interpretation of The Red Book based on my own mystical experiences and mystical knowledge, not based on Jung’s other writings. I’m using Jung’s name as shorthand for “the person writing this” or “the dreamer” — I don’t mean to suggest that what Jung expresses here is indicative of his personal spiritual beliefs. I know he had a complicated relationship with mysticism, science, and religion, so I won’t even touch that here. I’m going to be looking at this from a strictly mystical angle, and everything that follows is subjective.

The Way of What Is to Come

Jung began by introducing two spirits. One is “the spirit of this time,” a literal translation of zeitgeist (Jung’s manuscript is in German), which represents the conscious mind and conventional thought. It’s a reference to Goethe’s Faust: “What you the Spirit of the Ages call / Is nothing but the spirit of you all, / Wherein the Ages are reflected.” It’s called “the spirit of this time” because the times that we live in influence what and how we think, and form the foundation of our conscious faculties. I might define the Zeitgeist as the set of assumptions we make that defines our base-level interpretation of the world around us. So, when I complain about “latent Christianity,” I’m calling attention to the Zeitgeist. To put it in my own mystical terms, the Zeitgeist is the part of you that thinks like a human, instead of thinking like a god.

The opposite of the Zeitgeist is what Jung calls “the spirit of the depths,” which represents the unconscious mind. The Spirit of the Depths is both a personification of and Jung’s guide to the unconscious. It is something like a collective Shadow combined with a chthonic god, that encompasses all of the hidden and buried parts of humanity (or at least of Jung) that can be accessed through dreams and mystical visions. It operates independently from the Zeitgeist, and therefore can introduce Jung to secret information and concepts that fall outside of the Zeitgeist’s purview. A lot of what it tells Jung is harsh, but he understands that it’s necessary to listen to the Spirit of the Depths and internalize what it tells him.

Only a page in, and we’ve already got a mention of the Shadow concept. Since everything has a Shadow, God also has a Shadow. Jung defines God as “supreme meaning,” so God’s Shadow is lack of meaning — nonsense, void. The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung to notice the small things in life, which is pretty banal spiritual wisdom for most of us nowadays, but it’s very hard for Jung to accept. He writes, “It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting.” Everything has their own thing that they’re working through — I have to work through issues related to power and sexuality, and what Jung has to work through is issues relating to meaning vs. meaninglessness, greatness vs. mediocrity, sensibility/respectability vs. foolishness. The Zeitgeist of early-twentieth-century Germany insists that only great deeds, great men, and great ideas are the ones that matter. Jung was taught to think that things must be “glorious” and “heroic,” larger than life, for them to matter. The Zeitgeist encourages Jung to dismiss the little things as part of God’s shadow. The Spirit of the Depths informs him that the small things are still part of God and not God’s Shadow because they are not nonsense. The mundane is still divine, because it is not nonsense.

The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung, “all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away lie in you.” It’s a big deal to be one of the people of this time who can experience the Mystery the way the ancients did, or near enough. Actually, wait — Jung isn’t quite a person of this time. There’s a solid century between Jung and me, which is enough time for the Zeitgeist to have changed considerably, but not that much time. He’s essentially my immediate ancestor, the most recent entry in my mystical tradition. It is absolutely wild to be reading the Mystery filtered through a specific, named person who lived only a century ago, as opposed to ancient mystics of Antiquity who didn’t write everything down so I have to blindly guess at what they might have experienced or how they might have interpreted it. But there’s enough time in there that I keep wondering, am I in the time that is to come? Is Jung receiving this information so that I can be primed to receive it?

Jung says, “It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.” Yeeeeah! We’ll get back to divine madness, but I love that it’s being brought up this early. However, it’s a lot harder for Jung than it is for me to admit that these words or visions might come from a place of madness, because Jung is a person who really likes for things to make sense. On that note:

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning [God] by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

Hmm, this doesn’t sound like any god I know at all… I love that phrase “a bloody laughter and a bloody worship.” That’s Dionysian worship in a nutshell, right there.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words. I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

That checks. Mystical experiences often come as floods of insights and images, but few words, I think because words are literally processed differently by the brain (don’t quote me on that). Putting it into words literally requires a translation, and it can be very difficult to find the right words to do it justice or record every aspect of it. I’m also reading an English translation of Jung’s German, so that’s another degree of separation, but two degrees of separation is relatively little.

Jung has a vision of a sea of blood blanketing Europe, which is obviously a premonition of WWI. He also dreams that he returns to his homeland (Switzerland) from a “remote English land,” to find it covered in frost in summer; he makes wine from iced grapes, which he shares. The first part of this is a premonition — he was in Scotland when WWI broke out, and hurried home. As for the second part, “…I found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.” Not sure exactly how to interpret this, but it’s a striking image, especially to a Dionysian like me.

Reassuringly, Jung insists that he is relaying his own experiences, not mine or anyone else’s:

It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws, Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.

Thank the gods for this! It’s too common for mystics to assume that their own personal revelations apply to everyone else, because mystical experiences really do make you feel like you have all the answers to life, the universe, and everything. Hearing straight from Jung himself that he is only speaking for himself, and that what he says here need not apply to me or anyone else, ironically makes his words more validating. Also, my biggest criticism of Jungian psychoanalysis is that it seems to apply the same symbols universally (the gender essentialism in the anima/animus concept comes to mind), so I assumed that Jung was extrapolating from his own mystical experiences. It seems as though he actually had the wisdom to admit that these symbols apply only to himself.

Refinding the Soul

Jung feels distanced from his soul, because surprise surprise, 20th century patriarchy is spiritually bankrupt. At the time he had the bloody-flood vision, Jung was forty years old and had accomplished everything that patriarchy says you should want in life — he had honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and happiness. He succeeded. He won the game of life. All he was left with was abject horror and the question of what to do with himself, a midlife crisis. (From a quotation in the footnotes, Jung defines the midlife crisis at the moment at which the Shadow first asserts itself: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of going down to death.” Buddy, I’ve gotten way past that and I’m not even twenty-five!)

Jung thus came to the realization that he had dedicated his life to the wrong things:

I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off, and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.

“A dead system” is a great way of putting it. It reminds me of the Fight-Club-esque dissatisfaction of having ticked all the boxes within the system and done everything you’re supposed to, and receiving absolutely no real fulfillment from it. (I bet Fight Club also owes a lot to this.) It also reminds me of my new favorite Terry Pratchett quote, from Small Gods, “People start off believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.” A structure by itself is completely hollow — what’s scaffolding for if it doesn’t support anything? I also like that second line. You exist through your soul, by means of your soul, and not the other way around… That suggests that it’s more real than you are.

Jung explains to the reader that if you seek external things – money, success, validation from other people — then you will not find your soul, and will enter midlife crisis. The soul is only found internally. So go inward, and do the work. Pretty self-explanatory at this point, but must have been earth-shattering back then because he spends a lot of time justifying it. It’s the Spirit of the Depths who tells Jung to look internally and reconnect with his soul:

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

I think it’s interesting that Jung uses feminine pronouns for his soul. That makes sense, since I use masculine pronouns for mine. I’m not sure how this relates to the anima/animus concept, whether it’s the same thing or a slightly different thing. It’s probably the same idea, because “anima” is the Latin word for “soul.” I checked, and Jung uses “seele” and not “anima,” possibly because he hadn’t developed the concept yet.

I interpret Astor as my Shadow and associate him with my repressed personality traits, but Jung would say that he was my animus, because I’m a woman and Astor is the man that exists in my mind. Jung conceived of the Shadow and anima/animus as separate figures — the repressed aspects of the personality and repressed femininity/masculinity, respectively — that need to be integrated separately. For me, they’re the same figure. The anima/animus is one of the concepts that I think hasn’t aged well, not because the concept is inherently bad (internal repressed qualities that one associates with the opposite sex) but because the way it’s presented and describes falls along strictly gender-essentialist lines. This is especially because the anima/animus is less personal and less “universal” than the Shadow, which inevitably means projecting Western gender norms (such as “women are more emotional and men are more logical,” which Jung expressed as Eros and Logos) onto everyone in the world and calling it an inherent psychological feature of humankind.

I think it’s is one of those concepts that was progressive for its time but regressive now with our more nuanced interpretation of gender. For example, the anima appears in men’s minds as a sex symbol, but the animus apparently does not appear as a similar sex symbol in women’s minds: In Man and His Symbols, Marie Louise von Franz says “…the animus does not so often appear in the form of an erotic fantasy or mood [as the anima does for men]; it is more apt to take the form of a hidden “sacred” conviction.” Yeah, that’s bullshit. I’m willing to bet anything that this interpretation is the result of women being sexual objects from men’s perspectives (as the “anima”) but denied any access to or expression of sexuality within their own minds. Women aren’t culturally allowed to desire men, so the animus is the unsexed voice of her father giving her very judgemental advice and rigid solutions, instead of a seductive incubus. That doesn’t check. Astor is basically a sexual fantasy with a mind of his own, and if Lestat, Rhysand, Edward Cullen, and Azhrarn exist, I’m clearly not the only woman who has a relationship with this specific archetypal lover.

Actually, I also have the “nightmare woman,” a separate entity from Astor that is a textbook example of what Jung would call a “negative anima”… if I were a man. Maybe having an opposite-sex Shadow and same-sex anima/animus is another sign of my gender identity being a bit screwy. Or maybe the reason why Jung’s soul is female is because his gender identity isn’t that straightforward, either. Either way, I think the anima/animus concept needs to be redefined to make it less cishet. It’s not universally applicable to say that your Shadow must be the same sex as you or that you have repressed femininity/masculinity. That was probably true back in the early twentieth century when anyone would repress any inclination towards cross-gender expression for fear of social disembowelment, but now? “Hey, turns out men/women have feminine/masculine traits, too” is not an archetype.

I digress. Back to The Red Book.

I came upon an interesting revelation while reading this section — if Jung’s soul is feminine and he has to “refind” her, then that’s why the hero of every fairy tale gets his princess at the end of the story. The princess is his soul, which he is given a right to by having completed the self-actualization process through the events of the story. The “half a kingdom” part of the Standard Hero Reward could represent control over part of the unconscious mind. I got a prince and half a kingdom from this process (maybe it’ll be a whole kingdom if I ever finish a version of the map that I’m happy with). It’ll quickly become apparent that this whole book chronicles Jung’s own Hero’s Journey. That means… in a manner of speaking… the the Hero’s Journey isn’t based on Jung’s ideas – Jung’s ideas are based on the Hero’s Journey. Because the Hero’s Journey is the ancient mystical process of self-actualization.

[Edit: I was getting ahead of myself here. Pretty much all of this will be addressed later when we get to Liber Secundus.

If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing. The image of the world is half the world. He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul his poor and has nothing. The wealth of the soul exists in images. […] My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

I interpret this as meaning that in order to “possess” the world in full, to have our princess and half-a-kingdom, you have to have both the internal and external aspects of it. To put it in alchemical terms, unite the fixed and volatile. (Unification of opposites is going to be a big theme throughout this book.) If you don’t “nourish the soul,” then it festers like a wound and you start projecting unaddressed Shadow aspects on the external world. (We’ll get back to that, too.) Without your Shadow or your unconscious mind, you’re half gone.

[joyce-stick]

Adachi and Shimamura's Second Season

An essay by Audrey of the joystick system

Revealing and analyzing the plot of Adachi and Shimamura's never-yet-released second season of anime.

TL;DR

Adachi and Shimamura, the yuri light novel series by Hitoma Iruma, is extremely good. The currently serialized manga adaptation by Yuzuhara Moke is also good. The anime is good too, but not finished.

The novels go some rather surprising places, and this essay is about those surprises and how Adachi and Shimamura, quite unexpectedly, proves itself a very unique series quite unlike many others in the yuri genre.

Mainly because it's secretly also science fiction.

Video version:

Text version under the cut. Feel free to watch or read or read along while listening to the video version!

[cohost version]

Future video essay/transcript: Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

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Prologue: Triviality & Psychology

Despite not having read a single word that Hitoma Iruma has written, I think I’ve been convinced, with relative certainty, that he’s probably a pretty good writer.

The English versions of his work that we have read, which are written by other people, based on his novels written in Japanese, that we haven’t read, give the impression that his novels are pretty good.

Of course, the specific work we’re here to discuss today is Adachi and Shimamura, but of what little else we’ve read of his work, mainly the first chapter of the Bloom Into You spinoff novels, there’s a consistent focus on introspection and careful characterization and articulation through all sorts of details, both trivial and otherwise.

This may sound arrogant, but I knew early on that I was talented.

When I say “talented,” I mean that I can get results when I work really hard and that I can maintain those results, too. I think I understood the value of those two things much sooner than the other kids.

Thus, I didn’t mind that my after-school schedule was full of lessons. There were ikebana classes, calligraphy school, piano, cram school, and once I was a third year in elementary school, swimming lessons, too. I was considering taking on English speaking classes next. I pretty much took anything available to me. As a kid, I felt lucky that I was even allowed those choices.

Even a child could see that that my house was a respectable one. We had a lacquered gate, a side door for the help on the left side, and many tall trees in our garden. The surrounding walls were tall enough to prevent anyone from peering inside. Our house was bigger than the entirety of the light-green apartment complex across from us. In addition to my parents and I, my grandparents on my father’s side and their two cats lived there. It was quite a lot of space for so few people.

Growing up in that house, I knew I had no choice but to be talented. No one actually said as much, but I knew instinctively that it was true. As long as I kept moving with purpose and produced good results, my parents never seemed upset. What parents wouldn’t be happy to have an exceptional kid?

[Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Vol. 1 by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda

Published in English by Seven Seas in 2020]

The first pages of the Sayaka novels open with Sayaka describing her school curriculum and extracurricular activities, her awareness that she’s a gifted student, and that she’s incredibly committed to being one, so much so that she rarely quits something. She is devoted.

And this characterization informs the rest of the work quite readily, as Sayaka finds herself first annoyed by another girl at her swim practice, who to her, appears not devoted.

Devoted perhaps, not to swimming, but to Sayaka herself. And then her first lesbianic encounter with that same girl results in panic, in her running away, in her quitting.

Quitting for the first time she can remember.

And her quiet surprise when her parents just accept that.

All this is told to us, in prose, in monologue, it’s delicate and psychological and intriguing and it leaves us wanting to know more.

And yet somehow, we read all this, were fascinated, and then our attention span burned down around it and we forgot about it for a year or two.

So, yeah, that happened. And we also forgot about… until one day very recently I, Audrey, decided to wrangle this mess of a brain and have us settle down to read it… Adachi and Shimamura.

Part 1: The Adashima-daptations

1.1 Anime vs Manga vs Light Novel

Most of y’all know Adachi and Shimamura for being an anime. And, that’s fair, I guess, it is an anime after all. But it’s also an adaptation, as most anime are. And specifically an adaptation of a novel, or a series of novels, the first four of them at least.

Those four novels are only the first act of the story. There’s now ten, with at least two more planned, and we’ve read eight of them, and I have opinions. So you’re going to hear them, because someone has to. Unless you don’t want to, and then you can leave, I guess. We are fine with people leaving. Anyway.

Concerning the anime, we have some feelings about it. Our overall opinion is that it’s good. It’s a pretty good anime, it’s a competent adaptation, and we don’t really have a lot of complaints as to its quality in either of those respects.

It’s not a particularly lavish production, nowhere near as technically impressive as Bloom Into You (which is one notable example of “probably about as close as you can get to a KyoAni level work without being from KyoAni”) but it’s pleasantly storyboarded, elegantly scored, and overall perfectly watchable.

It’s good enough to recommend as an entry point into the story (although the Moke manga is the far better adaptation), but woefully insufficient as a substitute for it. Partially for the obvious snag that it ends before the relationship gets going, and there’ll likely never be a second season.

But there’s also some speedbumps that have, somewhat unavoidably, arisen from adapting the story to a visual medium.

1.2 Shimadensity

When the anime aired, the thing I most remember is people being confused as all heck why Shimamura was so… dense.

That is to say, blind. A blind blonde, an unnatural blonde at that, being blind to the obvious homosexual before herself, being extremely homosexual towards her in her presence and drinking mineral water, which, as anyone who’s seen the film Heathers knows, is a universal signifier of homosexuality.

And, well, you see, there is an answer to that. Shimamura is not blind whatsoever.

She knows something is up with Adachi, and it’s not as if she’s not pretty nearly drawn the conclusion that Adachi is attracted to her, but she’s just sort of averted her eyes from it.

She’s decided, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that thinking about Adachi being gay is troublesome. Answering the question of “why Adachi wants to hold my hand, wants to be so close to me,” and all that, isn’t a path she’d like to take, and so she just ignores it.

Shimamura’s gotten through life this way, by not thinking too hard about it. Just going with the flow, letting everyone around her take her wherever, putting up a path of least resistance through life. She finds forming genuine, lasting connections with people difficult, and doesn’t really feel very strongly about most of her peers.

But she also feels that she needs people, anyway, so she masks through it, politely smiles, and lets her relationships just happen, come and go like the waves. This does bother Shimamura, if for no other reason than that she finds it tedious and tiresome, but she just kind of rolls with it anyway.

Meanwhile, Adachi is explicitly an introvert to the extreme, and not in the Bocchi kind of way, where she wants to make friends but can’t; no, Adachi straight-up doesn’t want friends. She finds friendships burdensome, to the point of being soul-crushing.

An anecdote in the novels has Adachi describing how, in elementary school, she made an honest attempt towards being more socially active, but found that each new friend she made felt like another chain on her soul.

But these forced friendships weighed down on me, suppressing my emotions, erasing all my imperfections. Whenever one of them spoke to me, I had to craft a fitting response and keep the conversation going. No part of this was genuine; I just parroted whatever I heard other people saying.

Every time I repeated this process, I grew restless. And every time I gained a new friend, I boxed myself in further, closing off my exits.

But then one day I threw it all in the trash and walked off without them…and that was the day I noticed just how freeing it felt. All I needed was a single breath of fresh air to finally realize that I was meant to live my life alone.

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 4 (Chapter 3: The Moon and Courage) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

Eventually coming to accept that, at least in her view, she was not built for close relationships with other humans.

To put it simply, it’s not a skill issue. She just doesn’t care for the grind.

1.3 They Who Don't Remember Your Name

In middle school, she comes off towards her peers as an ice queen, and there’s this really really interesting chapter- the first chapter, in fact, in the fourth novel, where Adachi is described from the perspective of someone else. An unnamed fellow student, with whom she is delegated to work the school library counter, who tries and fails to form a connection with her.

And this student’s description of Adachi is fascinating. Adachi is described as someone who, in step with her desire to eschew friends, is seen by the student body as seemingly unattainable. And this student is startled, then elated, to have the opportunity to even sit near this person.

But Adachi, unconscious and undesiring of her semi-celebrity status within the school, deflects all attempts to break her shell, and so there this unnamed student stays, stays looking, stays admiring.

And then one day this girl, this unnamed student who we never again hear of, who has no significant characterization to speak of, no importance to this story other than to be a lens through which we see Adachi- happens to run into Adachi once again at the beginning of their high school’s second semester, and takes the opportunity to say

“Thank you.”

For something that Sakura Adachi didn’t know. Didn’t see. Couldn’t feel. Didn’t realize. Something so incorporeal to her, yet so powerful to this one peer of hers, as having been allowed to be in proximity to her, to have a memory of her that none else can claim to have.

And Adachi doesn’t get it, and can’t possibly have it explained, and it’s just… that’s it, really. That’s just that chapter.

It was gut-wrenching to read, because it tapped deeply into a specific desire that’s been stuck within us for a long time, that we’ve previously found it… really hard to articulate without sounding weird, or creepy, or wrong.

The desire to know how we were seen, the impact we’ve made on people we crossed paths with whose names we don’t know, whose faces we’ve forgot, or whose lives just briefly overlapped with ours at one time or another

to know if they’re okay, to know if they even remember us, or, the person who we used to be, whoever that was, to be able to affirm that those connections, however tenuous, were important.

And just like… yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if what I’m saying even makes any sense, but those many little encounters, those small moments that made us who we were

have left us conscious of dozens if not hundreds of possible branches in this life, that could have butterfly effected us somewhere completely different from where we currently are, and we can’t know, and we can’t say

but it’s just it, that basic feeling of I wonder how you’re doing, I wonder how life could have been if we’d followed after you, I wonder if you think about me too.

And that desire to achieve closure, something articulated, actualized, in this unnamed girl saying thank you, and at the same time, saying goodbye. To another Sakura on the wind.

1.4 Adachi Recollection

These events are not adapted in the anime. They are not adapted in either of the manga adaptations.

But there is such significance to this anecdote, such immense weight that is given to this random no-name and her view of Adachi, a story about Adachi to which Adachi herself was nearly entirely oblivious.

But then later in one of the most pivotal moments of Adachi’s character arc when a shady fortune teller convinces her to do something about her friendship with Shimamura before they drift ever further away, and she remembers that girl,

Every now and then, I thought back to this one time in junior high when I worked as a library assistant. There was this girl—I couldn’t remember her name or even what she looked like, but she asked me if I had any friends. At the time, I told her I didn’t, and that I was fine with it…but looking back, I couldn’t help but wonder why she asked me that. Was she going to offer to be my friend?

Even then, my answer would have remained the same. I would have told her I didn’t need any friends. But part of me regretted how that interaction played out. Part of me felt that we should have talked it out first, like actual human beings, instead of me one-sidedly slamming her with rejection.

With that in mind, I didn’t want to add to my list of regrets. I couldn’t keep sticking my head in the sand. No, I was going to take action. And if I ended up regretting that, then so be it.

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 4 (Chapter 3: The Moon and Courage) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

And this is such a hugely emotional payoff. Adachi did remember. That girl did affect her life. Even despite Adachi’s efforts to refuse connections, still, such a trivial interaction still made her who she is, still contributed to altering the course of her life, and that’s just… y’know, like, gosh.

This is so fucking cathartic to think about, y’know? Even if that person you remember, you wish you could have known, isn’t thinking about you, barely remembers you… you still were there. You still did something for them. Even if it was just being there, even if your feelings didn’t reach them right then, even if even if even if.

The fact that you crossed paths with them, alone, is significant.

It’s that affirmation of that fact that I see in this small, insignificant seeming novel-only plot beat, from which I feel so much meaning is exuded, and, why it's a shame it was excluded.. It may have seemed trivial, seemed unimportant, and seemingly that’s why every adaptation adapted this out,

but that triviality is precisely what is so important about it.

I cannot exaggerate enough when I say that I feel something essential is lost by this piece of story being discluded from every other version.

And that’s really the curse of adapting Adashima, in general. There are so many other details of the characters and story, too numerous to list, that the prose takes time to explore and develop and clarify, that would be tedious to elaborate on in an anime or a manga, and are thus cut.

And rightly so, for the sake of telling the story economically in those mediums, but what is lost as a result is the essential psychological depth of this narrative. And yes, it is a psychological narrative. A cerebral one, even.

Yes, it’s true. Adachi and Shimamura is a calmer, gayer, Kaguya-sama.

And that’s why

Shimamura is so

fucking

dense.

And why Adachi and Shimamura, is so, fucking, dense.

Part 2: A (mostly) calmer, gayer Kaguya-sama

2.1 Cold War of Gay Panic

Once you’ve read deep enough into Adashima, there is absolutely no way around it, this is a deeply psychological conflict. The characters’ mental states and attitudes, the things they won’t say, say so much more in this story than anything else. Which is why I think, although the adaptations are pretty good:

The Moke manga adaptation is actually really good, it does a much better job visually illustrating the psychological aspect of the story than the anime does, and, I think, if you’re really allergic to prose but really want to read Adashima, you should read the Moke version.

It’s not a perfect 1 to 1 recreation of the story, no adaptation ever is, but it’s pretty damn up there. Nonetheless, the adaptations are still limited in how far they can go in elevating their versions, and Adachi and Shimamura, the anime, is good.

Just good.

It’s a competent slice-of-life anime and an incomplete romantic drama. And it’s nice to have a visual companion to the story. But as a standalone piece of media, it’s not all that much more. It doesn’t get the time to develop things further, or to get to the things that make Adachi and Shimamura, as a story, something truly unique.

So, I mentioned earlier that Adachi decided she can’t do relationships, of any kind, and you might be thinking, well that sounds like a terrible protagonist for a romance story, and oh gosh you have no idea. Adachi is a total disaster of a human being. And just to drive that point home quite clearly, I want to read this particular quote from volume 5:

Besides Shimamura, the current me had nothing. I was empty.

Were you to peel back my skin, you'd find not flesh and bones, but her. Shimamura.

And yet. And yet. I felt like I might start tearing out my hair soon. Simply allowing my mind to wander caused my eyes to grow wet with tears.

The fantasies I'd indulged in were not based on anything. I knew that. Even so. Even so.

Was it really that wrong, wanting to be rewarded? Wanting your efforts to pay off?

[From Adachi and Shimamura, volume 5, "Shimamura's Sword"

Written by Hitoma Iruma

Translated and published unofficially by sneikkimies]

To be quite exact: This particular bit of text is from the fan translation of Adachi and Shimamura volume 5. I do not know what the original Japanese says. I do not know what emotional connotation the original Japanese carries. The official translation from Seven Seas, meanwhile, rather says:

Outside of Shimamura, I had nothing. Cut me open and I would bleed Shimamura. So how could she do this to me? Every time I let my guard down, tears welled in my eyes. I knew my feelings were one-sided, and yet…was it so wrong to want her to return them?

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 5 (Chapter 4: Shimamura's Blade) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

The official translation is quick, concise, sharp. It cuts thick, as it says, like the slashing of a knife across skin. In this version, Adachi hardly lingers on this emotion, her mind races, her thoughts tear through her.

But in the fan translation, the feeling is mulled over, gradually peeled away, as it says, revealed slowly, with intense deliberation.

The chapter from which this comes, Shimamura’s Sword- or, Shimamura’s Blade in the Seven Seas translation, is perhaps the most psychological chapter contained within the entire series. It is a chapter that, knowing Adachi, you know is coming from the very first few pages, when this illustration of one of the upcoming chapters is shown.

It is Shimamura and Tarumi, her childhood friend who has tried to rekindle their connection after years apart, and Adachi, working a food stand, watching as Shimamura goes out with a girl- a girl who she doesn’t know, a girl who isn’t her.

We knew this was coming from this very moment, and yet, it still smacked, it hurt, when we got to this chapter. Adachi pondering, stewing in this jealousy, after days of depression, as her mental state reaches a boiling point, before erupting straight into the receiver of her cell phone, in the form of her screaming crying voice, transmitted straight to Shimamura’s ears.

Our pulse had steadily begun to quicken as we read this on our own cell phone, our heart in step with Adachi, as she began to speak these words, and we stopped reading, almost too afraid to turn the page.

We did eventually go back to it, of course.

It was not too long after that I realized why this chapter had tripped us up like it did. We saw ourselves in this. No, it’s quite accurate to rather say that we were worse than this.

We too, when we were Adachi’s age, had a crush who saw us as a friend, to whom we had limited access. We too, grew depressed and jealous and angry at being away from them, as a result of us having few other friends and no one else particularly on our mind or in our social life. We too, were bitter about our negative home life.

But we didn’t stop quite at where Adachi stopped, at airing our grievances, at assaulting our crush with our undue anger- no, we made a specific threat.

I won’t be repeating that here, but needless to say, we never followed up on it. It’s been nearly a decade since then, and we haven’t ever not regretted it whenever that memory resurfaces.

While the things we said up to that point, the emotions we aired, were probably not as bad as the things Adachi says here… the threat kind of compensated for that. I’d say, in the end, we were just about as bad as Adachi at her age.

We were not ready for a romantic relationship with anyone, at that age. We probably still aren’t, and personally, I don’t want one. I have doubts that it’ll ever go well. My headmates feel different, but, they’re not talking right now, so…

Anyway. Shimamura is annoyed, doesn’t even follow what the fuck Adachi is on about, hangs up, and Adachi thinks she’s thrown away their friendship.

But then she works up the courage to call Shimamura again, or, perhaps more accurately, lacks the emotional maturity to let it go, and they reconcile.Although weirdly, Shimamura doesn’t seem bothered.

And then, although Shimamura tries to get Adachi to make more friends, it doesn’t really work, one of the most FUCK YOU I’M AUTISTIC AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS scenes ever, happens

And then the next volume, Adachi tearfully confesses to Shimamura for a second time after a first time blundering it and passing out while gripping her close in the bath while they’re both wearing swimsuits, gosh that’s also the most fucking hilariously cringe scene, just imagine how embarrassing it must be to pass out from telling your crush how you feel about them, and

THEN Shimamura accepts Adachi’s feelings, and then they are officially girlfriends.

2.2 "Problematic" Yuri

And the whole time I was reading this. The whole damn time, I could not stop thinking. I can fucking see it. The thinkpieces, the ones going, “How Adachi and Shimamura exploits queer teenage girls, by depicting queer teenage girls realistically.”

The twitter threads going, “is Shimamura right, for not taking Adachi’s shit right then, or was she being an asshole, instead of, y’know, it being revealed that her patience has limits but also she later feels like maybe she was a bit too cold and made a mistake…” or like, “is Adachi a womanizer, or a yandere, or a dangerous abusive codependent manipulator”.

Were the arcs of volumes 4 through 8 to be adapted to a second season of anime, there’d be plenty of fuel for opportunistic media criticism weirdos such as ourselves to say… “is Adachi and Shimamura problematic?”

And, no, it’s not. It’s dramatic. This is a psychological romantic drama about a deeply emotional neurodivergent teenage girl who has human flaws. Like, yes, Adachi is jealous and controlling and even a bit mean, and she knows this.

And we’ve seen these articles and twitter threads about Adashima, about Yagakimi and about other queer media in general, floating around, that are just like, is this lesbian relationship between two mentally ill teenagers dangerously codependent or abusive?

We sometimes even floated around to that idea ourselves, reading all the yuri stuff we read- we read a lot of yuri stuff, and, a lot of the time the answer is just, yeah, maybe.

Is that wrong? Is it wrong to depict these things as part of a normal story with stakes and drama? Don’t these people need to have issues in order for the story to have somewhere it can move up from?

There seems to be a subset of the queer leftish internet and hell, pop cultural media criticism internet in general, that just doesn’t want things to happen in narratives

And like, Joyce sort of had this phase herself, in reaction to her breakup last year, where, she wanted to believe that the fact that she was a fan of Love Live was the problem. The fact that Love Live occasionally features shots of teenage girls’ legs, that would’ve been the issue, not that she had a difficult personality or overinflated expectations of her partners.

She just stopped reading yuri for a while, because she just thought, maybe the fact that I was reading yuri stories that just pretend these issues don’t exist, maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe the fact that these stories have male gaze, because they’re targeted at men, is the problem. Maybe I’m actually a man, is the problem. And y’know, this is all just bullshit. This is all just self-directed homophobia as an excuse for happening to be a bit of a fucked up person who is queer.

And that’s really all that is. People don’t criticize straight romance stories for characters having realistic relationship issues. People don’t even criticize straight romance stories for being exploitative or fucked up or weird or anything.

Well, some people do, but y’know. No chance would the average online anime fan be having such takes on like, I don’t know, oregairu. But even the most like, reasoned takes on Yagakimi from very smart people online, have to acknowledge, oh yeah some of these characters check off all the boxes for the “predatory lesbian” trope.

That sentence says everything, doesn’t it? There is a predatory lesbian trope. Is there a “predatory heterosexual” trope? Is there heterosexual shipping bait? We sure could pretend there is one, as a bit, but like, no. The answer’s no.

And like, yes, the depictions of queers as uniquely specifically unhinged and dangerous by straight people is a thing that is a thing because of queerphobia, itself, and maybe it makes us look good or better somehow to paint ourselves as not having awful personalities or issues with relationships so that bigots have less rhetorical ammo against us.

But somehow the more I think about all this the more I think that, maybe, the predatory gay tropes in straight media aren’t just straightforwardly to make queer people look bad, but to make us afraid of ourselves. And to make us afraid of art that depicts us as human beings and not just soft uwu girls.

Maybe the reason was to make us afraid of Adachi.

Anyway. I’m just going to say it. There is no problematic media. Fictional, and especially animated or drawn media, cannot be declared immoral simply on the basis of what it chooses to depict. And it’s high time we stopped deluding ourselves into thinking it can be.

And I know this is all very much an extremely online discourse, and most normal people offline don’t tend to think of media quite that way, but it still pisses us off, y’know? It pisses us off that this stupid problematism bullshit around fictional media had us brain poisoned for like half a fucking decade. So we’re really rather ticked off by that.

…That’s not the point of this essay. Maybe it’ll be the point of another one.

2.3 Drama Lesbian Queens

So, yeah, to sum it up, a lot of yuri things that the average concentration of yuri fans like tend to be free of too much conflict, and quick to gay. And Adachi and Shimamura fulfills the former requirement, most of the time, at least, and especially in all the material adapted by the first season.

Past volume 4, however, things start getting more intense, because, well, Adachi, first of all. Adachi is a whole person. Tarumi is also a whole person, although we don’t get to see too much of her, it seems pretty clear she’s going through her own general turmoil away from the center of the story, and yeah.

Yashiro also. What the hell is with her? Well, it turns out, she actually is an alien, or at the very least her being an alien is a much more plausible explanation than anything else. We’ll get to her in a bit, maybe.

The relationship happens, with Adachi and Shimamura, being girlfriends, and that’s just adorable the way that works out. Shimamura isn’t a hundred percent certain she loves Adachi, but she doesn’t dislike Adachi, she’s certainly not indifferent to Adachi, and she’s open to trying Adachi out, so, she accepts.

Adachi is at first her usual jealous self, taking this as license to be even more aggressive about not wanting Shimamura to speak to or even look at any other girls in the world. Adachi’s literally never had any other relationships, not even with her own mother, so, that just makes sense, she thinks of being together as special itself.

Which prompts Shimamura to try to think of ways to raise Adachi’s bar for things being special, by such things as… making Adachi lunch. Kissing Adachi’s forehead. And that’s where that stays for a little while! The third base of lesbian, homemade lunches and forehead kissing.

And that’s all really cool and satisfying, cause there’s not a lot of yuri stories, hell, not a lot of romance stories, period, that actually depict the work of the relationship. Most yuri just rush to have the girls kissing, and that’s that. It’s a lot of casual fluff, with not a lot of particular focus on how the relationships develop, or anything.

In devoting her time to doting on Adachi, Shimamura neglects Tarumi, and the distance between them widens again. She one night thinks in a dream, ominously, that Adachi, in her quest to have Shimamura all to herself, has ruined Shimamura’s relationships. But Shimamura’s not sure that bothers her.

And Adachi continues to have her personality issues, but, she and Shimamura are both happy for now, and so not too much active drama ensues- just anxiety, just tension, just slow development.

And this continues through volume 7 and 8, but Iruma makes a very interesting creative choice to capture the totality of the narrative. Starting in volume 5, certain alternate contexts for the beginning of Adachi and Shimamura’s relationship are depicted.

In the first chapter of that volume, Adachi and Shimamura first meet as small children in preschool, during which Yashiro introduces the basic concept of an alternate timeline to us readers.

Then in volume 7, we get vignettes where Adachi doesn’t decide to close the distance between herself and Shimamura, and instead continues hiding on the second floor of the gym. Where Adachi and Shimamura never meet in high school, and instead find each other as adults. Where Adachi and Shimamura encounter each other at the end of the world. Where Shimamura is an alien- or perhaps, I should more accurately say, a foreigner from space, whose language Adachi spends years learning just so that they can talk.

And all of this is written from the perspective of Adachi and Shimamura feeling as if this is random chance, a simple coincidence, luck of the draw, the one twist of fate that changed their lives forever.

But then in volume 8, Iruma skips ahead a decade.

2.4 Ending the Second Season

Adachi and Shimamura are now living together, both 27 years old. Is Adachi still clingy and jealous? Less so, apparently, but, it’s not explored fully. How are Hino and Nagafuji- I’m just realizing I’ve barely if at all mentioned them in this entire essay. How’s Tarumi, is she okay? I don’t know.

But regardless, adult Shimamura goes and says hello to Yashiro, the small child-shaped alien who’s taken up an unofficial position as the Shimamura family pet, and Yashiro says something very interesting.

Shimamura and Adachi meeting is not chance whatsoever. It is in fact, destiny. According to Yashiro, anyway.

In every timeline and reality, she says, they are fated to encounter each other- not because they’re special, not because the universe is eyeing them closely or anything, but simply because they are. Because, apparently, reality likes being consistent, or perhaps finds it too exhausting to get particularly creative. Adachi and Shimamura just meet each other because, the code for reality gets copy pasted. Or something.

Yashiro has no answer for this, particularly, other than that it just is, and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Shimamura doesn’t think too much of it either, and then she and Adachi go off on their overseas vacation and reminisce as a framing device for the rest of the novel, which is about the school trip they went on in their second year.

And, about how Adachi is horny, but, doesn’t know what the hell to do with that. And about their classmates who are grouped up with them for the trip noticing that they’re a same-gender couple, and surprisingly, supporting them! At least, one of them does.

Well, it was surprising to us, and surprising to Shimamura, who expresses in her internal monologue that she was afraid of facing a much less nice reaction after Adachi, in her lack of care for how she’s seen by others, basically outed them.

But it’s also not that surprising, because in the Reiwa era of the yuri genre, it’s pretty normal for there to be more straightforward acceptance of homosexuality and less “just a phase” framing, that there is.

This is a thing that our friend @studentofetherium went into in a tumblr post, well, volunteered to go into it rather, after they mentioned this fact to us and I told them that I was writing this. Also, they take credit for coining the term “reiwa era yuri” so if there’s another term I guess someone might tell us, but otherwise we’re just gonna continue using this one.

So, the school trip happens, things happen on the school trip, and the whole time Shimamura is wondering, do I really love Adachi? Is this relationship going to go okay? Will we have a future together? And when her classmate asks her these things she just… doesn’t really know.

And then, in a twist of an ending to the eighth volume that feels custom fucking made for the hypothetical second season of the anime to end here, Shimamura has an epiphany. As she’s stumbling through the fog that’s emerged around their school trip bus, she realizes that she’s looking through the fog… for Adachi.

Because Shimamura really does love Adachi, really does care about Adachi, want to live with Adachi, and they find each other and meet each other’s eyes and it’s just this entire love magic cinema moment

and then that night they sleep together.

By which I mean, they just sleep. The idea that one or both of them want to have sex is floated, but neither of them are emotionally ready for that. So they just lay down, and they chat about how their future is going to go, how they want to one day go even farther than there- and the last chapter cuts ahead to them, in the future, again, going home from their overseas trip, from whence they've gone farther.

And it’s just like.

Huh. Neat.

Part 3: The Trouble With Life

3.1 The Improbability of Endings

Most yuri, most romance, stories just kind of end at, they dated, they kissed, they’re together now. The end.

Even Bloom Into You, a romance story that we like so much that Yuu Koito literally infected our brain, just gets its two leads together, has them fuck, and has an epilogue going, “yeah, so they got married, they’re fine now.” And it’s not out of a lack of care, or consideration, or laziness, or anything, that so many romance stories end this way, it’s more that human relationships are kind of metal as fuck.

So metal, in fact, that they take years and years and are fickle as hell and, no matter how much work you put into them, will constantly collapse under the slightest pressure, like a run of your favorite roguelike, or some kind of massive long-term jenga tower of social pressures and favors and feelings that you just cannot stabilize.

And this is something Shimamura and Adachi are both very conscious of, that Tarumi is conscious of when she encounters Shimamura again after all those years, that everyone in this story is painfully aware of- human relationships are not built to last. Especially not in a world like this, in an economic system like capitalism that’s seemingly hell bent on tearing us all away from each other at every turn.

Dealing with all that is hard to do within the framework of a traditional narrative. So, a lot of romance stories do end with the couple getting together, because, that’s economical. It’s easy. It’s satisfying. You don’t need to think about it too hard, don’t need to think about how most relationships just kind of fizzle out and fade and everything.

And Adashima does ponder the fragility of relationships so much more than most other romance fiction we’ve read, and it takes its time to try and make the relationship between its leads special, to make it believable that this will last. The fact that Iruma puts so much time and thought and effort into this relationship and its development and strengthening makes it come across, in context, as just a little bit off when the story just

Skips the rest of them.

The reveal that Adachi and Shimamura are literally bound by fate is not handled as cheaply as you might think, or, really, cheaply at all. It doesn’t ruin the story, Shimamura doesn’t really have any regard for it, she’s just kinda like, yeah, well, our relationship happened and it’s fine regardless, I don’t need to understand all the fate stuff.

And its y’know, it’s good. It’s good that it’s working out. But I still have so many questions. Adachi’s personality. Shimamura’s devotion. Is she devoted, I don’t know. She doesn’t seem devoted, so how’s that working out? How’s it going to work out if and when Adachi asks for something that Shimamura can’t or won’t give, and then that’s the point at which the relationship is truly strained?

Tarumi. Do they stay friends? Will Adachi ever meet Tarumi? Will Tarumi be upset that someone else likes Shimamura? How’s Shimamura going to take all that? And everything, and everything else. How are their parents going to take it? It seems that it’s fine in the future, but was there drama, was there difficulty? Or did they just not care that much? I don’t know.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see the future stuff more, it’s nice to see a more thorough exploration of an adult couple’s life in a yuri story than we’ve previously really gotten. We all want that sequel to Bloom Into You. Cause it’d be nice to capture that experience in an art piece.

But the way it’s paced, well, it feels disappointing because I don’t really like the way that it kind of arbitrarily makes the story end, before it, keeps going, but also I can’t really criticize it for that because, well, I can’t think of a particularly better solution. I know we all want answers to these questions, we all want to see more of this, and Iruma would probably like to write more of it, but they have other things they want to write and unfortunately aren’t immortal.

In the eighth of Iruma’s afterwards, which consistently fail to convince us that they are not writing their autobiography here, it is explained that volume 8’s flash forward to the future is the ending. Or at least, an ending. You could say, a contingency, so that if Iruma stops writing the novels prematurely, then there will have been an ending.

There’s currently eleven total volumes, and there’s going to be two more, or so says Iruma, with the eleventh one having come out while we were working on this essay. So, yeah, that’s the reason why this feels so weird, so much like a forced ending to the series at the expense of the larger plot’s pacing. Because this one person can’t spend their entire life writing the life of a fictional cast of characters.

And that’s just the tragedy of our finite lives, isn’t it, that we can’t spend all our lives chilling out, eating food, and making art. Hopefully one day someone’ll have that figured out. But in the meantime.

Reading this, and considering both the conclusive way with which volume 8 ended, as well as the fact that there was a change in illustrators starting with volume 9, and the thought that this would be the ending of the hypothetical second season of the anime… Which is our own original thought, I should clarify. We decided it’d make the most sense to treat it as a clean break in the story, and read volume 9… later.

After reading… the Anime Special Novel. Which is also quite interesting, for some different reasons!

3.2 The Time Lord Cat

Just in case you’ve never heard of this before, I probably need to explain what the hell it is. So, when Adachi and Shimamura, the anime, got a blu-ray release, the publishers wanted to include some incentives for buying the thing even if you’d already seen the anime on TV or wherever.

As such, they asked Iruma to write them something to include as a bonus. And so, four new light novel chapter-sized pieces of writing from Iruma were distributed in the first runs of each of the four blu-ray volumes. And these stories, which, otherwise have seen no official release, got translated into English by the same people doing the fan translations of the main novels.

So it might be more accurate, technically, to describe these as four different discrete novels, but that’s a huge linguistic nuisance. It’s four chapters, that’s only about a chapter or two smaller than the average light novel, so I’m just gonna describe it as a four-chapter novel, because it basically is one. Anyway. The Anime Special Novel is about Yashiro, and how she is an immortal cat.

Did I already explain who Yashiro is? I don’t know. Anyway, Yashiro is best explained as an alien and corollary to Shinobu Oshino, anime’s other mildly famous non-human immortal child, who one day waltzes into town and sweet talks all the humans into giving her food. And we say, “Wait, an alien, really?”

While the anime provides no real answer, the novels eventually get around to clarifying, “Yes, an alien. Really.”

Yashiro is most definitely not a human, and not a documented Earth species, so she’s probably an alien. Her pockets are bigger on the inside. She can read minds. She barely ages after ten, seventy, and then thousands of years. She can apparently time and space travel all by her lonesome, and she loves humans and apparently favors spending time with them far more than her own species, who she is ignoring. She can fold to comfortably fit into spaces smaller than herself.

Therefore, Yashiro is indisputably a Time Lord. Or, Time Lady, Time Maiden. Whatever.

Taken in context, the most questionable claim Yashiro makes is that she is 680 years old. It is later shown that she is terrible at keeping track of the time, so much so that later, she views the difference in time between three thousand years or thirty thousand, as something trivial, that it doesn’t matter if she flubs up a bit. She’s just like that.

Yashiro is an extremely interesting character, who, very curiously, perceives herself as the least interesting thing in the entire world. She claims to have come to Earth for a rendezvous with her fellow aliens, but she never treats this task with any degree of urgency.

While she’s never specific about the details of this plan, my guess is that she, like Adachi and Shimamura, only decided she wanted a piece of their slice of life because she was playing hooky. At least that’s how I’d prefer to think of it. The idea has thematic resonance, so as far as I’m concerned, that’s canon. But the other thing is that, unlike Adachi, Shimamura, and basically every other human in this story, Yashiro has only one emotion.

She is happy all the time.

Yashiro is never bothered by anything, whatsoever. She always has what she wants, and she’s never bothered by not getting what she wants- if she doesn’t make her goal, she moves the goalpost. Yashiro does not seem to have any worldly concerns whatsoever; she eats all the time, not out of an apparent need to sate hunger, but rather for the simple pleasure of doing so.

She doesn’t face much opposition, either, she’s such a cute child that everyone just wants to pet and feed and pamper her, and Shimamura’s family takes no issue with her just chilling at their house for ten years. The only thing Yashiro is ever described as not liking is baths, and even then she’s never really angry about being made to take one. In her internal monologue, Shimamura consistently describes Yashiro as being like a cat.

And she really is, isn’t she? She eats and sleeps all day, she doesn’t like water, and she is happily accepted as a freeloader for years in the homes of human strangers. And that’s just normal, even though Yashiro… is… well, humanoid, at the very least.

But the bizarre factor of Yashiro’s character is increased exponentially when Iruma takes her out of Adachi and Shimamura, and plops her right into Girls’ Last Tour.

3.3 Yashiro's Last Tour

Girls’ Last Tour, if you aren’t aware, is an anime (AND MANGA) about Girls on their Last Tour. It’s a survival kirara where moe blobs have a picnic in a dying world full of remnants of a fallen civilization. It’s all moody and pensive and about small girls who do not seem particularly bothered by the inevitably of their death. One of them is into vore.

Relevant here is that one of these two moe blobs is named Chito. And, coincidentally, the protagonist of the Adachi and Shimamura Anime Special Novel, who is also touring a dying world full of remnants of a fallen civilization, is also named Chito.

Did Iruma do this on purpose? Probably not, but there’s an excuse to recommend Girls’ Last Tour without needing to make a video about it. Go watch it. Uh, probably go read it too. We haven’t read it, but it’s probably really good. Both forms. It’s great.

Anyway, Chito Number Two is also hanging around Yashiro on another planet, not Earth, which we’ve never seen before, that at some point was colonized by Chito’s ancestors, but then it turned out that the planet sucked at sustaining crops and so everyone fell ill and/or starved, and unfortunately died.

Which sucks.

So, Chito is just wandering this basically dead civilization, aware she could be the last human alive for all she knows, but not really caring much. Yashiro is here, accompanying Chito and chatting her up, because she finds it fun I guess. She doesn’t really seem to care very much about the whole humanity dead thing, but she’s very eager to tell Chito this one story she has about these two very nice girls who gave her a lot of snacks to eat some thousands of years prior.

Yashiro tells four separate stories to Chito, which are each set at different points in Adachi and Shimamura’s adult lives together. All the typical things, really. Going shopping, going on onsen dates, kissing- well, no, they don’t directly kiss, but Shimamura does reminisce about their first bloody kiss. And also, Shimamura dying.

Yes, Yashiro confirms, in canon, that Adachi and Shimamura died. But she’s not particularly bothered by it. She’s just as cheery as ever. It’s not like she’s happy about them being dead, but she’s not especially sad, either- no more troubled than she’d be if Shimamura refused to give her candy.

And common sense, common familiarity with tropes about immortal people, says this should be existentially terrifying, shouldn’t it. A living creature that is only ever happy, that never dies or grows old or grieves. This is the basic setup for some lovecraftian horror story or another, or several, isn’t it?

And it is, on a basic level, kind of unsettling to see Yashiro just… not being bothered by living thousands of years, by the people around her dying, and just remaining a child forever, but… It’s not really, is it? Look at her! She’s too cute to be scared of. She’s a human shaped cat! Isn’t it adorable?

Humans typically live longer than cats, I know. But if a cat lived longer than humans, do you think it would give a fuck?

One of the most interesting parts of Adachi and Shimamura is the middle part of volume 6, where, as I think I already said, it’s revealed that up till now, the love of little Hougetsu Shimamura’s life has been not a girl, not even a human, but the other Shimamura family pet.

The dog that lives at her grandparents’ house, Gon. Gon was Hougetsu’s best friend, Hougetsu’s only true friend, the only living creature she ever loved, and for a time, the only reason Hougetsu wanted to come back.

And it’s only just now that Shimamura is really realizing just how strange this is, though, she’s come to accept that she’s really rather strange, that she doesn’t particularly care. And now, she’s coming back for the yearly Obon visit to her grandparents’ house, to see Gon for what is probably the last time.

This dog, who was once young and spry, once quite literally bounced up and down at the sight of little Hougetsu, has now grown old and frail, barely able to walk. This dog, who Shimamura loves more than her own mother, is dying, and Shimamura finds this prospect… What’s the word? Disquieting, perhaps. Disquieting.

Shimamura is disquiet with thoughts of age, thoughts of love, thoughts of death. As she still finds herself puzzled over what Adachi’s feelings are, what Adachi wants out of her, knowing what Adachi wants but not really able to admit it to herself, wondering about her own life, about if she’ll have companions in her future, about if it’ll suck, and it’s just…

I don’t know. Shimamura thinks about a lot, and I don’t have words for a lot of it. The main thing I remember is her speaking to the odd old man who’s her grandparents’ next door neighbor, and it being firstly really funny because he just is walking around with a teacup that his granddaughter made and bragging about how great of a potter she is. Just because he can. Just because he’s a weird old guy, and people will let weird old people get away with these things, and he can.

And he gives Shimamura a fishing rod, as such, so he says, because he can.

Yeah, so just to repeat what I said, Shimamura runs into this weird old dude on a family trip, he says, “hey, my daughter’s real damn good at pottery and that’s why I’m toting her special teacup around, how about you go fishing with this fishing rod,” refuses to elaborate further, leaves. And that’s just great.

Well, he does elaborate a little further before he leaves, says she should enjoy her childhood while she can, and then gives her some fishing advice, I guess. And that’s all very nice of him.

And then Gon shows up, walking all slow like he does, and Shimamura asks the old man,

“Is it tough growing old?”

His answer wasn’t going to affect anything. Things were going to continue the same way as they always had. And yet, despite all of that, I just couldn’t help but ask.

Mumbling to himself, the man shook his head slightly. His turban shook as well.

“I see. So, your questions too have a hint of philosophy to them, huh? I guess that only makes sense, given your name and all.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean…”I hadn’t meant to grumble that out loud. No, it was simply my instinctual reaction to the situation; if I had to call anything here philosophical, it would be his needlessly obtuse answer.

“It’s not tough for me, no. Why? Well, I got this teacup from my granddaughter, that’s why. Haha. Does that answer your question?”

You could see the man’s eyes sparkle as he said that.

“Hmm, I guess.”

It really didn’t. Apparently, I’d picked the wrong person to ask.

[From Adachi and Shimamura, volume 6, "Home Town Dog"

Written by Hitoma Iruma

Translated and published unofficially by sneikkimies]

And that’s just sort of… mellow, and funny, and surprisingly sage. Well, maybe not that surprising. I don’t know. It’s just an entire moment. It’s also a little surprising, just a teensy little bit, because...

This is a kirara, isn’t it? This kind of story doesn’t usually go there. Like, according to Iruma, the editor’s prompt that resulted in Adashima was “write something like Yuru Yuri,” and Yuru Yuri is a stupid and silly nonsense comedy about immortal lesbians violently assaulting each other both physically and sexually, which is really funny, because they’re literally a bunch of gay Looney Tunes.

Or maybe that’s just the anime, I don’t know, I guess the manga might be different, but even still, the manga’s never aged these characters a single day as far as I can see. Really the only kirara I know of (other than Girls' Last Tour) that addresses the fact of the cute girls eventually dying is School-Live, but like, that’s an edgy one isn’t it? It’s literally set in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not exactly subtle.

You don’t really want to think about, say, the keions getting older and dying, do you? I mean, maybe you do, and if you do you’re probably a little weird, and that’s fine. So like, this is just kind of… I don’t want to say weird, because in the context of the story, it isn’t.

But I’m quite sure that people who’ve only seen the first season of the anime aren’t really expecting this, y’know? It’s certainly a place to have gone, and be going.

It’s so comical, so caustic, so casually morbid, to see the cast of Adachi and Shimamura reflect on their life, their future, their love and their relationships and their families and drifting apart from their friends and peers as the rivers of life all take them all the different places they’re going to, towards their eventual deaths, and all these very difficult human things to be thinking about, and Yashiro just… is happily prancing around eating donuts.

But it’s also not… that weird, really. Although Yashiro is so transfixingly childlike as she is, she’s also so pure and straightforward and earnest as any sentient creature can plausibly get. Although she doesn’t share in the complicated feelings of the humans around her, she’s never unsympathetic to their emotions, and to their needs. She’s always happy and childish, but she never forces that on people- she just accepts people as they are, and she does her best to do right by people.

Which is unsettling, not because it’s undesirable, exactly, but rather because it’s impossible. But if it were possible, and, hey, maybe it is possible for Yashiro, a non-human, to be emotionally stable and pleasant and good, but it’s not possible for us humans all the time to be that way, just the same as it’s not possible to live immortal and ageless as Yashiro does…

…

I guess the conclusion that I just came to is that Yashiro IS the part that’s like Yuru Yuri! Yashiro is the immortal gay looney toon! But given new meaning by being placed in a world of actual people dealing with gross human problems like jealousy and unfulfilled desires for affection and burgeoning sexuality and age and work and family and death!

And Yashiro is, Yashiro is just great! Um. She’s a great child, and a great cat. Like, probably the best cat! Okay, and now I have to explain why she’s the best cat.

Final Part: The Lesbians of All Time

So, the last story. In the second chapter of the Anime Special Novel, Chito and Yashiro run into another girl- a girl named Shima, described as having black hair and feeling like Chito already knows her, and then you turn the page and THERE’S THE ADACHI CHIBI THERE IT IS THERE’S ADACHI

and they keep exploring the desolate deserted planet and then in the fourth and final chapter, Shimamura dies.

The story that Yashiro has to tell. Is about Shimamura. And told to us from the point of view of Hougetsu Shimamura, age 85 ish, who describes her relationship dynamic with Yashiro as having gone from little sister to daughter to grandchild on account of Yashiro still not having aged a single day after all these years.

And up till this point, knowing that Shimamura was already dead in the future, I’d been thinking, oh gosh, oh fuck, it’s gonna absolutely SUCK if Shimamura dies first and then Adachi is all alone and miserably depressed for the rest of her life- and thankfully that doesn’t happen.

No, it’s Shimamura who is all alone, and literally everyone else who is dead. Adachi, Hino, Nagafuji, Tarumi, Shimamura’s little sister, everyone she knew is dead now. And Shimamura, now, too, is also dying, of old age.

Shimamura thinks she might be seeing Adachi’s ghost, because she’s evidently gone and introjected Adachi after Adachi’s death, but she’s also not quite sure about that whatsoever, and she’s just tired and lonely and reflecting on all her life up to this point and how fondly she remembers her high school years with Adachi and her only other thought is

Damn. All my friends are dead, and being old is boring.

To relieve her boredom, Shimamura takes her sister’s games console, which, no longer works with modern TVs, because it’s the future, so she goes out to an electronics store and gets an adapter. Also, because it’s the future, there’s been alien visitations and humanity is looking into space traveling more. But Shimamura’s been born too soon to care.

So she goes back to her home, boots up a JRPG on her sister’s old games console and makes a party of characters which she names after Adachi, Hino, Nagafuji, Tarumi, and her sister, and then finds out that video games are good. So Shimamura decides that her life’s goal, for the rest of her life, is going to be to finish Dragon Quest.

Does she finish it? Who knows. No idea. The story ends.

But before Shimamura dies, she asks Yashiro, her immortal alien child house cat, if she will ever see Adachi again.

Yashiro says yes. She will. For it is destiny.

And Shimamura’s dying request of Yashiro, is for Yashiro to make absolutely sure that every Shimamura across the universe finds their Adachi.

Yashiro promises earnestly.

And thus, here, in the present of the future of the end of humanity in a dying civilization Yashiro looks at the two last known living humans on this planet, says, “My job here is done!” And then shortly thereafter fucks off, assured in the knowledge that she’s fulfilled her promise to Shimamura:

Play matchmaker for her most recent reincarnation and her destined wifey.

So, yeah, that’s what happens. It might be just about a wrap on humanity, or at least this particular humanity, but The Lesbians of All Time are still gay.

There’s several Things About this particular chapter.

One, it’s, unintentionally, a particularly stark distillation of the classical American millennial slash zoomer fantasy of having the economic security to retire at an appropriate age and spend your last years in dignity, after a good life of living well with a good partner who you were happy with (or, multiple or no partners, if that’s your preference), and then dying peacefully of old age playing video games.

Yeah, uh, oof.

Two, it’s a particularly stark distillation of the perhaps not as common but particularly appealing fantasy of being assured that you and your partner will reincarnate and get together again, by your cat, who promises to make extra sure that that comes to pass all throughout every time and place and timeline. Because your cat likes you, and is a Time Lord!

Yashiro is good!

And three, um, yeah, it’d be really nice to know that you’re going to reincarnate with your soul mate. Like, that’s just convenient. For some people. I’m sure.

Okay, so, anyway, do I have anything to say about this story? Yeah, I probably do, probably a lot. But I don’t know if I can coherently say very much of it without repeating a lot of what I already said. It’s melancholy as all hell and it’s also just not something I expected at all from this series when we started reading it. Iruma even reflects on that fact directly in their afterward, saying,

“Anyway, yeah. That's the sort of story this became.

Death approaches!”

Heh. I guess it does. I guess it does.

There’s a lot else I feel I have to comment on. If I had infinite time, I’d also add on analyses and comparisons of the two Adachi and Shimamura manga adaptations. I’d read volumes 9 and 10 before finishing this video, and talk about my feelings on however Tarumi’s arc gets resolved- if it gets resolved. I barely even began to discuss or analyze Hino and Nagafuji’s relationship and their additional flavoring of the story as a side couple. And did my tangent on Adachi’s jealousy really go anywhere, did I have an answer? Well, no, but the volumes that I read up to didn’t really have an answer, either. Do I want to try to pretentiously psychoanalyze Iruma and his writing more based on the incomplete information I have from these English translations?

There’s another series, also, Iruma’s apparent debut series, where a girl and a boy who fall in love have childhood trauma about being kidnapped a long time ago and are being retraumatized by a serial killing incident in a small town and that has some HELLA TAGS on the site’s it’s listed at- does this psychological horror crime fiction have some connection to Adachi sometimes thinking a teensy bit like a serial killer? Is the electric child in Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl, another thing I haven’t watched nor read, a proto-Yashiro? Is Yashiro really a corollary to Shinobu? Did the Saeki Sayaka novels contain secret Adashima foreshadowing? Did Iruma say something super interesting in an interview somewhere that someone translated on Twitter maybe? Can I get answers to any of these questions without knowing how to speak Japanese?

Are we just going to have to learn Japanese and read all the rest of the things Iruma has written ourselves?!

And this has now just about broken ten thousand words, and I cannot answer any of those questions just yet. So, much like Iruma and Adashima volume 8, I’m going to arbitrarily force an ending to my unfinished work despite these loose ends and hope it’s good enough in case we never get around to writing a sequel.

In lieu of a better wrap-up, I guess I can just say, and as such,

ANIME GIRLS CAN DIE TOO.

The end.

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[contemplativereading]

Introducing The Prophet

Dear Friend, We close out our third season of The Contemplative Reading Project, and this year’s spring reads, with a book I’ve had on my “to be read” pile for so many years:The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I’ve selected the 2015 Vintage Books Edition, with the author’s original illustrations. Publisher’s description: The Prophet is a collection of twenty-eight poetic essays that contain powerful…

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: July 2023

Summertime! Full of good vibes and a bunch of good movies I’ve yet to see. Here’s how I spent the month of July.

……….FILM……….

Barbie (2023) Just incredible. As an artist who works with existing properties overseen by a lot of people, I was amazed at just how deep, critical, and weird this movie was able to get. I truly had no idea where it was going. Funnier and sillier than I expected but am so thrilled that this wasn’t a generic cash-in.

Lupin the Third: The Mystery of Mamo (1978) Years ago I saw a poster by Sam Bosma and that was both my first introduction to Lupin and the reason I wanted to check him out as a character. Going in mostly blind (aside from knowing the main character is a master thief), this movie was weirder, hornier, and way more avant garde than I was expecting! Some really cool animation on display and while the pacing is up and down, I can’t recommend it enough. The main villain reminded me of a mix between Akira’s espers and Paul Williams and turns out Swan from Phantom of the Paradise was an inspiration! So wild.

……….TELEVISION……….

Jury Duty (Episode 1.01 to 1.04) The premise is fun and just when I thought it was starting to dip it turns out the fictional case is compelling too so I’m BACK! Very keen to see how the season ends and what Ronald makes of this in the end.

Mashle (Episode 1.01 to 1.12) This series seems to answer the question: what if Harry Potter was a meathead with no magic? It didn’t really hooked me and the characters are kinda thin but it has moments of wonderful goofiness that I’m glad I finished out the season.

The Bear (Episode 1.04 to 1.08) Just when I thought the show was getting less stressful, the characters pointed out that fact! Then the following episodes ramped up the stress again. But it never feels contrived or unnatural. Everything, from the humor to the stakes to the character interactions, feels wholly organic. Like we’re watching real people live out real lives. I dunno I guess what I’m saying is it’s really good.

……….YOUTUBE……….

Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [ST03] by Not Just Bikes VIDEO (Title if needed) I’ve been watching a lot of videos about transit lately (like this series by Vox) but the above video is probably the most important one you can watch. His entire Strong Towns series is great and succinctly explains why north american cities suck and keep getting worse. Vote for elected officials that push for density.

What if We Had a GREAT X-Men Game? by The Cosmonaut Variety Hour VIDEO Real shift from bikes and cities but I keep thinking about this video. Speculative stuff rarely hits for me but this is really great and hits all the right notes for the series. Really wish this sorta stuff could get made.

……….READING……….

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (Complete) I think it was a mistake to keep the original article/essay that inspired this book at the beginning. I found the points made were clearer and more succinct in the condensed version and the book’s tone seems to waffle. There are some good ideas in here but I think it needed more time in the oven. If anything, read the article and the last chapter and I think you’d be good.

……….AUDIO……….

Lofi Covers of Popular Songs (Playlist) I’ve been writing a lot lately so I haven’t been engaging with a lot of music. HOWEVER this playlist on spotify has been on in the background and offers the perfect balance for me: not distracting but engaging if I focus on it.

……….GAMING……….

Oz: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting (Andrews McMeel Publishing) The Mof1 Crew is currently on the run after the retiring couple they kidnapped escaped but I’m sure everything will work out just fine.

Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting (Andrews McMeel Publishing) The group is still navigating a group of elves on the island and seeing what happens now that they’ve let their star-collecting duties slip. Big trouble. You can read about it here.

And that’s it. See you in August!

[richincolor]

[Image is of the two book covers. The Cartographers features a young woman sitting on an escalator facing the reader. For Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling, the two main characters are sitting on the ground and leaning into each other. Her head is on his shoulder.]

Shining a Light on Some Early 2023 Books

Out of solidarity with HarperCollins workers, we held off on promoting or reviewing books during the strike, but we want to re-visit those titles now. Two of the books that were published in January caught my eyes and they are worthy of a first, second, and even third glance.

The Cartographers by Amy Zhang also @Theamyzhang on Tiktok

Struggling to balance the expectations of her immigrant mother with her deep ambivalence about her own place in the world, seventeen-year-old Ocean Wu takes her savings and goes off the grid. A haunting and romantic novel about family, friendship, philosophy, and love.

Ocean Wu has always felt enormous pressure to succeed. After struggling with depression during her senior year in high school, Ocean moves to New York City, where she has been accepted at a prestigious university. But Ocean feels so emotionally raw and unmoored (and uncertain about what is real and what is not), that she decides to defer and live off her savings until she can get herself together. She also decides not to tell her mother (whom she loves very much but doesn’t want to disappoint) that she is deferring—at least until she absolutely must.

In New York, Ocean moves into an apartment with Georgie and Tashya, two strangers who soon become friends, and gets a job tutoring. She also meets a boy—Constantine Brave (a name that makes her laugh)—late one night on the subway. Constant is a fellow student and a graffiti artist, and Constant and Ocean soon start corresponding via Google Docs—they discuss physics, philosophy, art, literature, and love. But everything falls apart when Ocean goes home for Thanksgiving, Constant reveals his true character, Georgie and Tashya break up, and the police get involved.

Ocean, Constant, Georgie, and Tashya are all cartographers—mapping out their futures, their dreams, and their paths toward adulthood in this stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding the strength to control your own destiny. [Read a Sample Here]

My Thoughts: I've always loved maps and the idea of exploring the world so the title already had me from the start. Zhang delivers on the exploration, but while they do journey around the city, more of the journey is within. Ocean is trying to figure out a path for herself and is stumbling about a bit inside and out. She's having growing pains and trying to find her footing, but loses her way more than once. The story is so full of emotions and wonderings that a reader almost has to start wondering things too. There are many struggles and tears to be found on the pages, but there is a little hope too.

Reggie and Delilah's Year of Falling by Elise Bryant

Delilah always keeps her messy, gooey insides hidden behind a wall of shrugs and yeah, whatevers. She goes with the flow—which is how she ends up singing in her friends’ punk band as a favor, even though she’d prefer to hide at the merch table.

Reggie is a D&D Dungeon Master and self-declared Blerd. He spends his free time leading quests and writing essays critiquing the game under a pseudonym, keeping it all under wraps from his disapproving family.

These two, who have practically nothing in common, meet for the first time on New Year’s Eve. And then again on Valentine’s Day. And then again on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s almost like the universe is pushing them together for a reason.

Delilah wishes she were more like Reggie—open about what she likes and who she is, even if it’s not cool. Except . . . it’s all a front. Reggie is just role-playing someone confident. The kind of guy who could be with a girl like Delilah.

As their holiday meetings continue, the two begin to fall for each other. But what happens once they realize they’ve each fallen for a version of the other that doesn’t really exist? [Read a Sample Here]

My Thoughts: This book had me smiling so many times. There are cute interactions all over the place and it was just what I needed to cheer me up. Reggie and Delilah are both trying to impress each other and avoid being truly vulnerable so of course there are issues, but nothing life or death level. They ultimately bring out the best in each other. This one made my heart happy and I'd hand it to anyone looking for a sweet read.

[foundress0fnothing]

Writing update, because life and school slowed me down for a while but…

The next chapter of Sweet Secret (feysand) will be published soon—see Rhys undergo his third test and make a bargain with Feyre, sealed with a kiss (and maybe more…? 😏)

I’m also writing something for the acotar writing circle that @azrielshadowssing organizes! I’ll keep the pairing a surprise for now, but some of our faves are going to be having a bad time together on their company’s team building exercise in the woods.

I’ve outlined a gwynriel college choir AU and a nessian medieval times AU (think the dinner theatre extravaganza, not the historical period) that I had hoped to do for some of the past theme weeks but had to set aside to make time for school (UGH ���), so those will be coming soon too.

But! None of this today because I have to grade 45 student essays on Keats that I’ve been avoiding all week before life starts back up tomorrow. RIP.

[paulinedorchester]

We Followed Our Stars, by Ida Cook. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950; rev. ed., Toronto: Harlequin, 1976. Reprinted, as Safe Passage: The Remarkable Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis, with a new foreword by Anne Sebba, Toronto: Harlequin, 2008; reprinted again, as The Bravest Voices: A Memoir of Two Sisters’ Heroism During the Nazi Era, Don Mills, Ont.: Park Row Books, 2021.

Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan That Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars from the Third Reich, by Isabel Vincent. Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2022.

As soon as I learned of Isabel Vincent’s book, I knew that it would need to be read with great caution. That feeling was reinforced when I read the “about the author” blurb on the book’s dust jacket. Then I looked at the bibliography, and wondered if I really needed to read it at all. (Here I must stop and thank the collection development, acquisitions, and cataloguing staffs of the Chicago Public Library. This is the second time in less than three years that they’ve purchased a book at my request, and in both cases they’ve managed to put it into my hands in less than a month.)

Why the unease? To begin with, Regnery Publishing’s stable of authors includes Ann Coulter, Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, David Horowitz, Sarah Palin, and similar types.

Second, it turns out that Isabel Vincent isn’t a historian: like Lynne Olson, she’s a journalist writing about history. Not only that: Vincent is an investigative reporter for the New York Post! One has to wonder what the phrase “investigative reporter” actually means in the context of that truly filthy tabloid, a jewel in the crown of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. On the other hand, I must say that Vincent seems far more comfortable using primary sources than Olson does — her research for Overture of Hope included examining 33 archival collections in seven countries. As well, the book carries an endorsement from the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, who is not exactly a darling of the right.

Finally, the Cook sisters’ story is far from untold. I’ve known of them for at least the past several years, although I’m no longer sure how I learned: I could swear that there was an article about them in Opera News four or five years ago, but I can’t locate it. In any case, as early as 1950 Ida Cook wrote a memoir of their exploits (revising it in 1976), which is why this is a review of two books, not just one. She was the subject of a 1956 episode of This is Your Life. In 1964 Yad Vashem honored the Cook sisters as Righteous Among the Nations. They were interviewed in McCall’s in 1966 (the article was reprinted the same year in The Australian Women’s Weekly). They also inspired an essay in Granta in 2007, and I found a goodly number of other newspaper and magazine articles about them while searching for image files to use in this post.

Ida (at left; 1904-1986) and Louise (1901-1991) Cook seem to me slightly too young to be classed with the hundreds of thousands of British women for whom marriage became, if nothing else, a simple numerical impossibility in the wake of the First World War and the influenza pandemic that overlapped it. Nevertheless, that’s where Vincent situates them. The daughters of a Customs and Excise officer, they had both entered civil service themselves by the end of 1920, as typists. They were then living with their parents and younger brothers in Wandsworth, London, but the family had moved several times while they were growing up. During a stint in Alnwick, Northumberland, they attended The Duchess’ School, where music was one of their exam subjects: Louise was a pianist and Ida was a violinist.

Their passion for opera seems to have come about more or less by accident. One day in 1923 Louise, who worked for the Board of Education, wandered into a lunchtime lecture on music being given on the premises, returned home in a daze, and announced that she simply had to have a gramophone. She proceeded to buy one on an installment plan, along with ten records. (These would have been 78rpm discs, with a single track, three or four minutes long, on each side.) They were mostly of instrumental works, but also included recordings by two sopranos, Amelita Galli-Curci and Alma Gluck.

These quickly eclipsed everything else for the Cook sisters, who pooled their savings to buy the cheapest available tickets to three performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden: they saw Tosca, Rigoletto, and La Traviata, all excellent ways to get started with opera. I was startled to learn that the Covent Garden opera season was only two months long in those days; apparently, the opera house was used as a dance hall during the rest of the year.

When the Cooks learned that Galli-Curci was to give five concerts in London in late 1924 (her first appearances in the U.K.), they bought tickets to all of them. After the first one they wrote her a fan letter, enclosing a handkerchief that Ida had embroidered, and received a letter back by return post, inviting them to come back stage and say hello after the last, which they did.

Having learned in the meantime that Galli-Curci confined her operatic engagements to the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, the Cooks decided that they would travel there to see her perform — and figured out it would take them two years to save up the money that they would need in order to do so. They wrote to Galli-Curci about their plans, and she urged them to contact her when they had an itinerary. She would reserve seats for them, she said. (Galli-Curci's behavior wasn't unusual at the time, at least for singers who could pick and choose their engagements. As late as the 1970s, Dame Janet Baker was appearing in opera only in England, while continuing to tour all over the world as a concert artist.)

And that’s exactly what happened. Their arrival in New York, on January 4th, 1927, attracted the attention of The New York Times; and when they went, as instructed, to Galli-Curci’s agent’s office they found main-floor tickets to several performances waiting for them, along with Galli-Curci’s husband, Homer Samuels (a composer and pianist who was her recital accompanist), who invited them to dinner at their apartment a couple of nights later. They asked the Cook sisters to visit them in Autumn at their home in the Catskills, north of New York City — and that happened as well, though it took another two years of saving to bring it about. Ida’s account of this visit in We Followed Our Stars is not to be missed. She makes it sound like Downton Abbey on a smaller scale. (I feel compelled to add, however, that her description of Catskills social life has absolutely nothing to do with my understanding of what went on there, as recounted by my mother, who spent many summers at Catskills resorts during the 1930s and 40s. See also the films Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon.)

They paid for all of this fun by scrimping and saving, skipping many lunches, and getting up before dawn to join the queue to buy cheap tickets at the Royal Opera House, where they made many like-minded friends and had the opportunity to meet world-class artists arriving for rehearsals. As we’ve seen, they were very outgoing — or at any rate Ida was outgoing and Louise was nearly always willing to follow where her sister led — and by 1934 they had befriended, and been befriended by, Galli-Curci, Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg and — most crucially, in view of what was to come — Viorica Ursuleac and her husband, the conductor Clemens Krauss.

As the years went on, however, a new source of income emerged. Ida Cook was clearly a born storyteller. She had written articles for The Duchess’ School Magazine as a student; in 1928, as an old girl, she sent in an account of her and Louise’s trip to America, which was published, along with an article in the Daily Mail. After the Catskills visit, she sent an article on that experience to Mabs Fashions, a magazine that published sewing patterns, romantic fiction, and non-fiction on whatever topics seemed likely to interest their audience, including travel. This, too, was published, and the editor, a Miss Taft, invited Cook to lunch. (Vincent refers to the Mabs Fashions article, but doesn’t quote from it, as she does from the Duchess’ article, or even supply its title. From this I surmised that Mabs Fashions is poorly documented, and sure enough, WorldCat shows only scattered holdings in fewer than half a dozen libraries in the U.K. I can tell you that it was a monthly, and that it seems to have run from 1924 until some point in the mid-1930s, but much of its contents appear to have been lost to history. That’s a real pity, as it sounds very interesting.) Miss Taft asked Cook to write additional travel articles for the magazine. “Apart from the American journeys, a very short trip to Brussels was the full extent of our foreign travels,” Cook recalled. “But I said, ‘Yes, certainly,’ bought a series of guidebooks and set to work.”

A year or so later Miss Taft offered her a job at Mabs Fashions, as fiction sub-editress. This was a big leap — Cook had a responsible job in the Law Courts, with an assured pension when she turned 60, and in fact had just been promoted — but she decided to take the offer, even though she didn’t know what the position entailed. Her account of this experience is very funny, and I won’t spoil it for you, except to quote her about one part of it: “On press day I was faced with ... adding perhaps five hundred words to a story, without altering its sense, and so that no one could detect the ‘joins’. This was the only part of my work at which I became adept.”

Indeed, she became so adept that after several months the long-suffering Miss Taft asked her to write a story of her own. And then another, and so on. One of them grew into a novel, Wife to Christopher, which appeared in 1936 and was the first of Ida Cook’s more than 120 romantic novels, written over the course of 50 years, all under the name Mary Burchell.

(Above, from the Daily Mail, August 6th, 1936, left, and the Aberdeen Press & Journal, August 12th, 1936. Images ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.)

In short order, she was earning as much as £1,000 per year. That money was going to prove very useful. (All of her novels were published by Mills & Boon, which later became an imprint of the romance giant Harlequin, thus explaining We Followed Our Stars’ reprint history.)

“I realize now that, even though we were in our late twenties, we were not entirely grown up,” Cook wrote of the plans she and her sister had been making during the first half of the 1930s. Indeed, when Englebert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor, was assassinated on July 25th, 1934, their main concern was that this might disrupt their planned first visit to the Salzburg Festival. (It didn’t.) They were no more politically aware when, during a visit to Amsterdam near the end of that year, Ursuleac asked them to “look after” a friend of hers: Mitia Mayer-Lismann, a German pianist and educator, who was soon to visit London to give a series of lectures. The Cooks assumed that this meant showing her the sights, which they did. When she asked whether St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were Protestant or Catholic, they wondered if she was a Catholic and shouldn’t have been taken to see a Protestant church — so they asked.

What they learned was that Mayer-Lismann was Jewish, and it was she who explained the Nuremberg laws to them. Her other purpose in visiting the U.K. was to see if there was any way of moving there with her family. The Cook sisters offered to do what they could to help. The U.K. wasn’t making things easy for would-be refugees from the Nazis (nor was any other country), and half of the Cooks’ work as the decade went on would consist of cutting through reams of red tape. Word of their willingness to do this spread through the Jewish communities of Germany and, later, Austria, keeping the sisters active until just days before war was declared.

The other half of the task was helping those for whom they were able to secure visas to smuggle out whatever portion of their assets hadn’t been seized by the authorities, which by this time consisted mostly of furs and jewelry. This was a genuine cloak-and-dagger operation, if only because it involved making repeated visits to the countries in question at a time when the authorities there were beginning to view British visitors with suspicion. It was at this point that Clemens Krauss got involved: he kept the Cooks informed about when and where he was conducting what, so that when they were questioned at the border they could say that they were going to hear Krauss conduct this opera in that city on that date.

As a side note, Ida’s new prosperity allowed the Cooks to buy a long lease a one-bedroom apartment in Dolphin Square, which had just been built (and where their neighbors included politicians, spies, and Oswald Mosely). Ostensibly, this was so that they would have a crash pad in central London after late nights at the opera. In reality, it served as a dormitory for newly-arrived refugees. Ida recalled that at one point there were twelve people sleeping there.  

While Ida seems to have been the family dynamo, Louise’s contributions shouldn’t be overlooked. One of her hobbies was teaching herself languages; she learned German at top speed in 1937 in order to facilitate the sisters’ work. She also put all of her (apparently quite generous) allowance of vacation time during that period into the rescue effort, and also seems to have been the uncredited co-author of, or at least an essential consultant on, Louise’s novels.

At this point I’m going to stop summarizing the Cooks’ story and tell you that if you’re going to read either or both of these books, you should begin with Ida Cook’s memoir, if only because it’s a primary source. It’s also a very useful insight into how an opera buff’s mind works.

Both authors provide their readers with excellent summaries of political events in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1939 — and both do so without ever talking down to their readers or implying that they shouldn’t need to provide them with this information, which is quite an accomplishment. Cook can be vague about the dates and chronology of personal events, while Vincent simply is vague on music in general and opera in particular, subjects in which she clearly has no genuine interest. (As Fred Cohn points out in his review of Vincent’s book in Opera News — which is how I learned of it; here’s a link, but I’m not sure that it will work for non-subscribers — her subtitle is a complete howler: there were no “stars” among the Cooks’ refugees; in fact, many of the people they helped weren’t involved with music at all. In spite of this, the Library of Congress has classed Overture of Hope as ML (Literature on Music).) As well, Vincent gives short shrift to the war years. (Louise was evacuated to Wales with her office; Ida was an assistant warden in a Bermondsey air-raid shelter, while continuing to write; the Royal Opera House became a dance hall year-round.) On the other hand, she provides us with a firm chronology of the Cooks sisters’ pre-war lives, and she also reveals the hard facts of how the people whose escapes they facilitated fared, which are not happy stories in all cases.

It is also Vincent who relates that Clemens Krauss fared badly in denazification proceedings. Despite his efforts on behalf of his Jewish associates and their families (as well as many complete strangers), he was widely denounced in 1945, and it’s undeniably true that he displayed a Machiavellian streak that led him to consolidate his artistic influence by securing the directorships of both the Vienna and Munich State Operas under the Third Reich. He ended up being banned from conducting for two years, but Vincent documents that just about all of his denouncers were his professional rivals. (The same thing frequently happened in France during the search for collaborators.)

Finally, Vincent quotes extensively from a film treatment that Ida Cook wrote, based on We Followed Our Stars, that is languishing in Joshua Logan’s papers at the Library of Congress. That document needs to be plucked out of purgatory and produced. Right now!

[wander-wren]

THE POINT ABOUT SHIVER BEING A CASHGRAB THAT GOT DERAILED

i’m actually semi-qualified this time! i’ve done a lot of research into publishing, bc i want to Get Published, and i happen to have recently written a small essay on maggie stiefvater so i have info about how shiver came to be.

i also have a lot of anger. i will try to contain it. ahem. also i apologize to the person/people who made the cashgrab allegations originally, i am not mad at you so much as at the general world/attitude. patpat. we’re all good buddy

basically, i don’t think shiver was a cashgrab. i try not to have parasocial relationships with authors, but i do think maggie stiefvater is dedicated enough to authenticity to not, like, do that. specifically i remember reading this blog post about author-reader and reader-author responsibility.

everything i’m about to say, unless stated otherwise, comes from maggie’s interview on the First Draft podcast. i’m too lazy to track down links, but i’ll try to at least say where i got things from.

so, shiver is maggie’s third book. the first, she sold to a small publishing house for an advance that was around $2000 that’s small as fuck. the average advance is $25,000, the median is $50,000, and those numbers if memory serves come from a 2021 survey of debut authors.

(average and median, for people who are curious, are so far apart because most advances are on the smaller side, but big six and seven figure outliers affect the median. i think. i gave a speech on this but that was six months ago. i may be getting them backwards, the principle stands.)

so anyway, maggie sells her first book, ballad, buys a mattress, and keeps writing. she sells its sequel, lament, and also happens to have shiver ready at the same time. the house also wants shiver, so the two go together. ballad and lament both come out very quietly. shiver comes out about a year and a half later (i don’t know why, publishing is fickle), and immediately lands on the nyt bestseller list. this was august 2009. mstief couldve very well written it bc of the twilight paranormal romance boom, was probably writing it around 2005, 2006. lament was published january 2008, meaning both books had probably been bought in 2006 or 2007. but we don’t know what her thinking was.

small house, quiet releases, and none of the Peak twilight tropes. somehow i don’t think maggie was aiming for, or expecting, a cash grab.

and i hate this! i hate this assumption. not bc i think a very famous very successful author needs to be defended on tumblr, but because it’s such a common assumption that authors (especially ya, especially fantasy romance) are just out for money. it sucks.

first of all, publishing is almost impossible to make a living in. see those advances up there? they’re split into chunks. right now, usually quarters, each to be paid on a specific milestone of the publishing process. often, when the book comes out an author has not received all or even most of their advance payments. yes, that is stupid. we hate it too. and you can’t receive royalties until after the advance is paid, so that 25k or 50k or what-have-you may take two or three years to get to you. and then there’s taxes and a 15% cut for your agent. @xiranjayzhao (ohgod i’m so scared to tag you if you see this hii) has spoken before about how they could not live off the money from iron widow, despite it being a huge bestseller.

it’s very difficult to make a living off of books. it’s even more difficult to make a living off of books while being honest. people with ghostwriters or ai help or just a lot of determination can churn out dozens of crap romance novels and perhaps make that work. and that’s valid. yknow, i respect the hustle.

but quality and authenticity take time and this industry moves SO goddamn slow that even if you can write a sellable book in a month it’ll be two years before it comes out so what’s the point in writing to the current market?

i don’t care what you think privately about maggie stiefvater or shiver but i DO care that there’s this strange culture that if something is a little bit tropey or a little too much like something popular it has to be a cash grab. that authors are doing this for the money. some are. most aren’t.

maybe i’m just a bit sensitive bc i’m working towards hopefully the final round of edits on a book heavily inspired by six of crows and i agree wholeheartedly with the blog post i linked above. i’ve ranted before about how important authenticity in writing is to me and how much i hate the implication that i value quantity over quality or whatever the fuck.

so here’s a post that is probably too long with a whole lot of numbers to tell you that sometimes people are actually honest. and sometimes people do care about art for art’s sake. and if you don’t like a book, that’s okay, but at least dislike it for accurate reasons, thank you

[ayearwithoutwater]

Four.

A decade ago, I began collecting Hello Mr., the self-proclaimed magazine “about men who date men.” I discovered one of their earliest issues as a coffee table book in someone’s apartment (memory fails me, but I’ve narrowed it down to having been either a friend of a friend’s or a hookup’s) during my third year of college, and I became quite taken with the magazine because it represented unspoken possibilities that I’d not yet found realized both in the wider world and within my own life.

I thought Hello Mr. was beautifully curated. Its images were simple yet evocative, and its essays gave me a glimpse into the headspaces of other LGBTQ+ men. (Although I have no qualms about referring to myself as a gay or queer man, I hesitate to apply such labels liberally to others given each individual’s personal relationship to the terms.) I was a baby gay who didn’t yet know how to behave, and I was very much in the early stages of constituting my sense of self. I didn’t know who or how I wanted to be, but the voices within Hello Mr. gave me examples of who or how I could be—and affirmed that the me I already was was not so alien after all.

Although it ran for only ten issues, Hello Mr. published and interviewed the likes of Alexander Chee and 黃家奇 (partner of the late 任航). Because the magazine had only just launched in 2012, mere months before I chanced upon it, I felt poised to begin amassing my own collection of something original, something important and artistic and beautiful, that I could use to decorate my space, to give visitors hints about my inner world, and to demonstrate that I was learned yet interesting yet stylish. I purchased the issues already extant and read voraciously. I read and reread again. I had only just experienced my first romantic relationship, and I subconsciously came to rely on Hello Mr. (and HBO’s seminal television show, Looking) to give me some sense of validation that what I was doing was right and natural.

But, the beginnings of my self-discovery weren’t limited to curating my media consumption. I took advantage of the flexible control I exercised over my college curriculum to study scientific racism, ethnomusicology, neocolonialism, and the like, and I grew increasingly disillusioned with mainstream LGBTQ+ media as I read more and more and more. The works that I so idolized suddenly rang hollow, because, frankly speaking, the lives and experiences depicted within were so far removed from my own. Despite our shared commonality as a minority group, despite the fact that certain works here or there did at least somewhat resonate with me, there was almost nothing that spoke to me in totality as a gay Asian American man. I wanted something that conversed with my soul, and, within Hello Mr., I only ever found fragments of such conversations.

One such fragment was an essay, published within one of the magazine’s first four issues, on what remains after a breakup: items left behind by ex-boyfriends, memories made physical of what once was. As I processed my breakup with Henry, that was the one essay that kept returning to me. Written with this theme, the piece included testimonials from random men about the belongings that they kept as well as their symbolism. So, in the wake of my own, in the aftermath of the ending to the one relationship I wanted so badly to go on forever, I took stock. I reached out to all the men who’d ever dated (and still maintained an open connection with) me to talk. And, then, as I excavated my belongings, so too did I excavate myself.

In chronological order, from my ex-boyfriends, this is what I(‘ve) kept.

From Alberto: The first and only love letters anyone’s ever written me, a pair of pants (later returned), and photo strips

From Wayne: Sketches and notes, a personally-designed cap, a bespoke etched wood lamp, a cardboard cutout of Mariah Carey, a pair of flip-flops (later broken and trashed), and photo strips

From Jun: A custom handmade Surskit plush doll, his old set of Cardcaptor Sakura cards, assorted kitchenware (disproportionately spoons, to my continuing chagrin), one or two errant pieces of underwear, and photo strips

From Henry: Skincare products, a Uniqlo shirt, an AirPods case in the shape of a Digimon Digivice, bathmats (later disposed), a cover sheet for my foldable couch, winter outerwear, and photo strips, so many photo strips

As I sorted through, I was an emotional mess. Some items only made me smile, resurfacing fond memories; others only upset me to no end, and I made plans to rid myself of those offending items forever. Unsurprisingly, it’s the photos that gave me the most pause. I’m sentimental to a fault, so I’ve never tossed or destroyed any of the photos I’ve ever taken with any of these men, reasoning that they still remain worthy tokens memorializing the time and love spent and developed together; throwing them away would feel too much like casting aside those past iterations of my self.

There were so many photos of us. I looked at each, refreshing my memory of every moment captured within those images by reading the captions I’d written on the back. It’s long been a practice of mine to provide handwritten context (date, location, and a rough sketch of that day’s events) on the flip side of each for posterity, and doing so has never not come in handy whenever I decide to look back through time. I obsessed over the pictures of me with Henry, including extra copies of the ones I had printed and laminated at a FedEx shop around the corner from my FiDi apartment, where I’d explained to an employee that I was going through a rough patch with him and that he needed to be reminded that he loved me. (Sympathetic, she had nodded and agreed because, as she said, so too did her boyfriend.) I’d mailed the originals to him with a handwritten letter in which I accepted blame for every fight we’d ever had, because I no longer had my pride, because it was worth it to debase myself if it meant that he would come back, that he wouldn’t give up on us as I had begged him to do, because I loved him. I fucking loved him and I wanted the world for us, and I would have done anything—even hiring or somehow engaging his favorite Indonesian pop star—if it meant that I could save us, because he was the one that I wanted more than I’d ever wanted anyone in my whole life. He was the one that was supposed to last forever.

Although I’d earlier returned most of his possessions to him, at which point we’d had conversations that I originally thought were fruitful, I confess that I didn’t return his winterwear on purpose—mostly because they were too heavy to carry on either of the two trips I made to his apartment during the aftermath, but also because I had still harbored hope that he would one day come to his senses. As my year without water went on, that hope crumbled away, only to be replaced by bitter acceptance.

The guys in Hello Mr. discussed preserving these physical remnants of their past relationships as a meaningful exercise; to them, it was better to have loved then lost than to have never loved at all. Ardently, vehemently, obstinately, I disagree.

I don’t discount how lucky I’ve been to have experienced the loves that I’ve had. I don’t regret some of them, and even then I regret only one of them to the point that I would so stubbornly object to that adage.

I regret Henry.

I was not—am not—better off to have loved him, to have been loved by him, and then to have lost him, than I would have been had I never loved him at all.

My friends would say that my life now is eons improved from the life I had before I met him. I counter that that improvement was made not due to him, but despite him: I had no choice but to survive, but to press onward. I was so lost without him and, without exaggeration, I almost died. I withered away; my friends nourished me back to life.

I remember, week after week, apologizing to my therapist. Objectively, my life did get better: I landed a fantastic new job, I moved into the apartment of my dreams, I took myself on vacations around the world, I was making new friends and I was letting myself partake in every activity I’d wanted to but never let myself do. Yet still I apologized to my therapist because still I yearned, still I wished that things would work out, still I couldn’t quash in entirety the hope that he would return. Still I talked about him. I felt like a broken record, I’d say over video conference, laughing, but this was the one subject that bothered me to no end, to which I kept subjecting my poor therapist, because there truly was nothing else in my life that felt worth our weekly sessions. I talked about my childhood, I talked about the people I’ve lost, but it invariably always came back to him: my grief was additive. I apologized for boring my therapist; this was the one wound that wouldn’t heal.

To this day, I’m still divesting myself of his belongings. As I do that, I also shed the mental baggage whose dead weight I’ve been carrying. Although I didn’t, won’t, dispose of all that remains, every tangible reminder of the life we once shared, I’m allowing myself to leave some things behind. I’ve made my peace with letting go of them so that the worst memories can begin to fade. Slowly, inexorably, I’m moving on.

I never purchased another copy of Hello Mr. Upon vacating my apartment on Tompkins Square Park, all those years ago, I left my four issues in the building lobby. I wondered whether someone else would chance upon them.