#this feels like committing blog seppuku
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the most dangerous part of having a pet au that u never seriously work on except think abt it to ur writing playlist as u drive is that. you develop it. and it gets better. and then you really really want to write it. and you're in danger
#laughs in 5 ongoing fics#to be fair. i started them in 2019 and have updated them only like twice#so my readers know i am very slow#however thats why i can only talk abt this on this blog. bc if those guys find out im indulging other ideas i will get#well. nothing. nobody talks to me and only like 5 people actively keep up with me#but i will disappoint those mutuals and have to commit seppuku#anyway its precisely bc the bnha ending was so milquetoast that i have evolved this stupid fic#ah yes the story abt the children suffering due to the wrongs of the adults and trying to fix or burn the world and dying for their parents#ends with... nothing changing#and in fact. the parents get redeemed where the children must die#however. a story where that happens AGain however the main weapon of the children against the system is the reanimated no1 hero?#yeah.......#children who are hurt and angry and have the power to do something serious about it is my fav shit. sorry#and u know who has to fix it all and burn it all down properly this time? the guy with severe issues.#fellas is it gay to fall in love with your best friend and rivals reanimated corpse who came back wrong#however its still the closest you'll ever get to having him back#but you cant tell him you love him bc he;s not the same. he's not the one you've always loved#and then loving him as the monster they turned him into feels wrong but you do it anyway#he died for the system you're upholding even if its wrong. what are you supposed to do#now he is literally destroying that same system. do you choose your boss or do you choose the guy that used to know u the best in the world#i havent decided yet. i got distracted by the tragedy#anyway th story is that our protagonist ends up in possession of the reanimated hero bc of a quirk mishap kind of#and to curb his aggression to anyone that isnt the protagonist . they get him to play league of legends#bc he can vent his violent tendencies without anyone actually getting harmed. and accidentally becomes a ranked player#he doesnt eat or sleep so all he does in the handful of hours the protagonist has to crash is absolutely wreck shit online#âhey can i come over and see our friend who came back wrong?â âno the sight of a human will send him into a kill spiral.#however you can play video games with him as long as u dont mind getting killed a million times."
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anyways some hesperosposting so its not all technically spread out between 2-3 unwilling discords of my utter insanity, and can be on my blog for vague posterity
he lived post pandae shut hte fuck up. purging the athena out of him was easy because she had an insanely difficult time getting him to ally with her in the first place and making him into a stable hemitheos (at least that much is canon) but purging the vampire out of him was nigh impossible because he was, in fact, the most stable hemitheos. as such he's still a keywarden as a vampire, he's just also a prisoner. hed rather commit seppuku than betray lahabreas trust again though so its fine
his deal with erichthonios is that he has, in fact, always liked erich and that was a sincere feeling. however he also felt "its super weird and kinda unfortunate that this kid sucks ass at magic, i cant believe lahabrea and athenas kid is so shitty at casting? is something wrong with him?" and that got manipulated into the shit he was talking at erich in raid.
hes never cared one way or the other for athena bc she was/is entirely irrelevant to him. even as a hemitheos lol sorry athena. he tolerates her with ambivalence at best and it was pulling teeth for her to find a way to maniuplate him into lashing out within pandae.
its canon that hes known 'for his kindness to warder and prisoner alike' at pandae hesperos is out here organizing employee birthday parties shut up. he cares about you. he is the one who was giving the proto-carbuncle cat treats and thats why its so pissed off and hungry now bc its caretaker fucked off to be gay and dead. if he were demoted from keywarden to mere prisoner there would be an uprising of the minor employees who all like him, so truly the "hes both" is just the best solution for lahabrea
he was much more reserved pre-auracite but still had a grand tendency for the dramatic whenever he was relaxed enough to not be putting on professional airs. its much worse after pandae because the auracite broke down a lot of his ability for self-restraint and he has a hard time rebuilding it. generally he is Extra and internally dialed up to about 11 while trying to act as if he's at 2. he was an artsy bitch and participant in the equivalent of a drag/ball fashion scene before raids and now that he can't leave pandae hes grumpy about being deprived from theatre and will find workarounds to do something engaging. he modifies his own clothes to make them more Interesting, dress code be damned.
truly he is a theatre bitch forced by his profound lust for lahabrea to be a zoo warden
the original Beaste in greek lore hes combined with is more like a ghoul than a vampire but since he is obviously meant to be a european vampire, he is a european vampire instead of a ghoul. he possesses vampiric weaknesses, namely he can't go out in the sun (moot, since pandae is underground) and requires a diet of "other people's life" to function, though this is easily afforded through a supply of aether supplementation from the aether pandaemonium cycles. he'd be healthier with blood but he isn't going to ask anyone about that.
he is so so so photosensitive. he cant see for shit when it's bright. he can barely see for shit when its not bright if hes taken off his glasses, but turn the lights on too high and he'll walk into a wall.
the little bat minion you get from p4 is a part of him. it's a familiar generated from himself. unlike hesperos proper, those can be out in the sun.
his fighting style is most equivalent to a red mage. as a modern xiv au (as a reincarnation, i guess? not a shard, like if he were the same dude but eorzean) he'd be a red mage with some voidsent poisoning. in a modern human au he's a zoo vet.
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Analysis of shipping: Revisiting detracting arguments
I know some people were expecting more content here, and I'm sorry for taking so long to put this thing together. This post will be a little different from the other analyses youâve seen here...
It's no secret this blog is mainly about LuNa...
...and NaLu
And several post made here are meant to showcase how their respective stories build them up through consistent bonding; defend their position as potent relationships by means of evidence and logic; or both.
We know standing next to each other in the same panel or frame are not âmomentsâ if the context and/or the story doesnât turn them into a meaningful interaction.
We know a girl slapping a guy is not something inherently romantic, and itâs not a defining trait of a potent relationship, specially when context says otherwise.
We know that brief rescue scenes are not always the sign of a potential romance as there are several elements needed to turn them into actual moments for a pairing
But, there are some arguments that persist because shallow shippers think they give meaning to their premises, disprove the potential another pairing has, or both. This post will deconstruct a couple of those arguments used to argue against LuNa and NaLu's position as potent relationships in their respective stories.
1) Romantic pursuit Vs. Consistent bonding
I was going to call this one the âTouka Argumentâ, or Touka's Rhetoric. Naming it after FT's Touka...
...she seemed to be the embodiment of nearly everything shippers argue against relationships as LuNa and NaLu until we got a comedic plot-twist worthy of a trolling writer.
Still, the argument goes a little bit like this: any one-sided pursuit of romance should become part of the endgame pairing. It doesn't matter if the story doesn't take such "affection" seriously, it doesn't matter if it is meant to be a joke with little to no weight, all that matters is the character actively looking for romance while proclaiming âlove.â
A character who appears much later in the storyline openly expressing "love" for the MC. Meanwhile the MC shares far more development with a romantically inactive girl.
Some shippers may argue that the girls or guys who are actually "in love" are the ones who will win their object of affection. Others may admit this is a extremely subjective matter as some of these girls end up winning, which makes it hard to analyze this stuff properly. But, there's one thing that helps people to keep an objective perspective: development
If we take a look at relationships like Gruvia from Fairy Tail, we get to see that their most powerful scenes are not the ones that involve the characters being all mushy over each other, but the moments of actual emotional significance; actual build-up...
...created by impactful moments
Some of Hiro Mashima's works prove he's aware that what truly matters in this particular regard is not how often a character makes claims of love, but how much development she or he has with a significant other.
What about Eiichiro Oda and his works? We got one notable example from the Whole Cake island arc
One sincere gesture of kindness from Sanji (the local pervert and Casanova wannabe) was enough for him to get to Pudding's heart...
...when he shattered the image she had of herself as monster with that gesture, and later an armor-piercing question, she ended up falling for him as he was the only person on that island that saw her true face and still deemed her as a beautiful woman instead of a monster. Sanji had such impactful moments with Pudding without going "horny" mode on her.
Other authors know that this kind development is needed for the logical progression in both good storytelling and decent characterization. They may not say it out loud, but their works speak for themselves while showing even characters who are not looking for romantic love can eventually develop such bonds.
Take a look at relationships like Kenshi and Kaoru from RurĆni Kenshin...
...they became an item, despite neither of them being romantically active, because they bonded over time, supporting and caring for each other, to the point of developing a much deeper connection. No over-the-top corny lines nor becoming all horny on each other; it was just consistent bonding, which ultimately triumphed.
It's shouldn't come as a surprise given the author of RurĆni Kenshin mentored Eiichiro Oda.
And to add it more to the irony, there was another girl interested in Kenshin who got a role much greater in the anime than the manga, and who was more mild-tempered, feminine, and seductive.
Another mangaka who understood this matter is Seishi Kishimoto, brother of Masashi Kishimoto (of Naruto fame), and author of O-parts Hunters.
The moments shared by the main characters led Ruby to become Jio's emotional support, and both of them to get emotionally attached to one another. Another girl was interested in Jio, but consistent bonding made Jio and Ruby's connection remain as a potent relationship... as well as some other plot points.
And of course, there's the critically-acclaimed Fullmetal Alchemist (Brotherhood for anime-only watchers) by Hiromu Arakawa.
Edward and Winry. Two well-written characters who weren't  romantically active before ending up together, yet their relationship and later upgrade made total sense... I could name Roy and Riza too, but that would be overkill.
The point is that it's not the romantic pursuit (or gag-like claims of "love") that makes or breaks a pairing; it's all about the moments that leave an impact along with shared experiences which give a strong companionship the potential for a relationship upgrade.
2) Every shonen story is the same story?
While this argument sounds ridiculous, it serves as an umbrella for several other claims some shippers may use.
A lot of anime fans know that most popular shonen stories, such as Dragon Ball, usually feature underdeveloped relationships. So, more often than not, shippers may claim or imply significant moments and actual development mean little to nothing in a shonen story. This reasoning can be easily mixed with the "romantic pursuit" argument.
Another related argument is the "informed attribute," which means you can off-screen the whole relationship and just let a character or narration "tell" you how a pairing happened instead of "showing" you how they developed. Basically, a violation of "show, don't tell."
While it's true several shonen stories share similar tropes, the more you examine each story, the easier it becomes to tell them apart.
Eiichiro Oda wrote a story that could easily fit the concept of "romance," as in a dramatic narrative treating themes such as heroism, idealism, mystery and adventure...
In fact, according to Sugita, a former One Piece editor, "Oda revealed that One Piece was something of a deliberate subversion of Dragon Ball through having a vastly more complex story and characters, while Dragon Ball is a manga infamous for its simplicity."
This is consistent to Oda's own statement: "I write ONE PIECE as dramatically as I can. If I had written a pure battle manga, it would have been easily defeated by Dragon Ball."
Given the amount of themes the series covered and the engaging emotional narrative, the argument of this story being the same as every other popular shonen doesn't hold up. The characters are all bound together as true companions not by a desire to become "stronger," but because they're "in love with adventure" as the author put it.
What about Fairy Tail? Hiro Mashima wrote a fantasy shonen series centered around thematics that are common in other shonen stories: Companionship and Family.
While some people already commented how the manga seems to have strong similarities with One Piece, Hiro Mashima had his own ideas when making the story. As he himself said once: "Usually a shonen manga starts with just a main character, who then slowly accumulates his or her allies as the story progresses. But in the world of Fairy Tail, everybody pretty much knows each other at the beginning. That was sort of what I was going for."Â
In another interview he even stated one of the thematic differences in relation to his previous work: "Rave Master was about friends saving the whole world, but Fairy Tail is about closer-knit relationships."
This is consistent with what we've seen in Fairy Tail, as the titular guild is all about that theme, how different people of several backgrounds are connected by intimate bonds and the search for exciting adventures.
What about the characters?
Both Eiichiro Oda and Hiro Mashima (just like many other mangakas) grew up watching and/or reading Dragon Ball. But, are their main characters Luffy...
...and Natsu...
...just mere replicas of Goku and other shonen heroes?
It's true that many authors follow the shonen hero archetype when writing the protagonist of a series. Both Luffy and Natsu are golden-hearted idiot heroes, and both of them have personalities that reflect the idea of "No Challenge equals No Satisfaction."
But, unlike Goku their ultimate aim is not all about following an endless cycle of self-improvement. At their core, both Luffy and Natsu are thrill-seekers who are constantly looking for fun and adventure.
Luffy is all about freedom, and even if he's not the sharpest tool in the shed, he can still display actual leadership qualities when the situation calls for it. Natsu, like some other of his guildmates, is a mischievous trouble-maker but still pretty much the embodiment of the values of Fairy Tail.
The more you examine both characters, the more differences you can find...
All of this is related to shipping mainly because people may claim "every shonen story is the same story" to justify pairings that do not have enough canon material supporting them.
So, if the hero and the heroine have a far more substantial development and actual chemistry, shippers who oppose such characters getting together may imply the following: "if several popular mangakas make their official couples with no regard for moments or build-up, why Oda or Mashima should be any different."
Because each author is different, and even if their stories use similar tropes from time to time, elements like themes, purpose, focus, plot, and characters will vary from writer to writer.
3) Anime Vs. Manga
'It's easier to watch a series than read a story'
Which is why whenever a manga gets an anime adaptation, if the story is good, its popularity rises.
However, sometimes the directors and writers of the anime do not share the same vision as the mangaka. And people who are up to date with both mediums can perceive such differences. Dragged out fights, OOC moments, inconsistencies with plot points from the source material, etc. are common place in some adaptations.
But, some directors and other staff members take some liberties to add "shipping fuel" according to their own views and taste.
I apologize in advance if this comparison offends someone, Iâm just using it as an example. The anime adaptation of Bleach made by Studio Pierrot featured some ship tease...
Such scenes weren't written by Tite Kubo, the author of Bleach. And they could easily pass as something "romantic."
However, during an interview, one of Bleach's editors, Toya Taichi, stated that "in Kubo senseiâs mind, Orihime is the heroine character and Rukia is a comrade" and he later summed it up as "feeling like a pal" (çžæŁ in japanese).
When it comes to modern japanese storytelling, the term "heroine" (ăăă€ăł in japanese) is interchangeable with "love interest." Orihime herself was even present in the Shonen Jump heroines covers. But, people who take filler scenes as the real deal may think otherwise.
When it comes to Fairy Tail, A-1 Pictures did a decent job in adapting the story but they also added shipping fuel, small things like Gray following Lucy and getting teased by Happy for it, or the big things like the non-canon expansion of the flashbacks involving Lisanna, which some people still treat as the signs of endgame pairings.
People who watched this version before reading the manga are more prone to overhype relationships that have little to no supporting evidence from Mashima's works. Fortunately A-1 Pictures toned it down later, too bad some shippers never forget...
If we talk about One Piece, the story is very different to say the least. TOEI Animation didn't stop in this regard, as some people may recall I already posted several of the changes they made for the sake of ship tease, and unlike A-1 Pictures they keep going and going with the moments they keep adding being more and more blatantly shippy (specially with Nami and Sanji) as time goes on.
Since One Piece is very long-running manga, more and more people only watch the anime and they take all those additions as the real deal despite the heroine of this story sharing far more development and solid chemistry with the hero.
However, not every fan is into well-developed relationships, so not every manga-reader will go LuNa/NaLu. Same could be said about anime-only watchers, as not all of them are swayed by filler, so not all of them will disregard LuNa/NaLu if they like consistent bonding.
The point is that the anime adaptation has a strong influence in how the fans perceive the story, the characters, and the bonds they build. And not every anime adaptation presents a favorable image of the in-canon premises made by the mangaka.
Hereâs a little bonus:
Who's the One Piece heroine according to Oda?
When talking about Strong World, the movie he wrote, Oda said âI really wanted to make a âhero saves the heroineâ story." A movie about a hero (Luffy) saving the heroine (Nami). He added: "You might think otherwise, but I had no intention of bringing in someone new to fill that [heroine] role. So when I had to think about whom to use for it amongst the straw hats of course that meant Nami.â
He also stated in 2019, when an interviewer addressed the fact his wife is similar to Nami, "They say a mangaka often marries a person who's similar to the heroine."
Across the several years the manga had been going, Nami often appears in the Shonen Jump heroines covers due to her role in One Piece.
You can see the latest Jump heroines poster here
Who's the Fairy Tail heroine according to Mashima?
One of his latest works (HEROâS) answers this question...
Context: Ellie is talking about Haru, Natsu, and Shiki (the heroes of Rave, Fairy Tail, and Edens Zero). Each one of these girls has the role of "heroine" in each of their respective stories. One of them even ends up with the hero.
BONUS: The Elephant in the room
As you probably noticed, I used a lot of official statements to back up my post. However, even those who oppose LuNa and Nalu use those kind of statments...
In the case of One Piece, several fans considered "romantic love" a concept completely foreign from the series due to a couple of quotes from the author. When asked about this particular subject, Oda stated that the members of Straw Hat crew are "in love with adventure." And later when asked again, the mangaka said that since this is a shonen story "romance isn't depicted."
Based on these answers, several fans created the myth of "romantic love" not existing in One Piece. Many held onto this conclusion with so much intensity that they always dismissed the bad girl Alvida's obvious attraction to the hero (Luffy).
However, as a clever and perceptive reviewer pointed out we're talking about the same author that once claimed he doesn't kill characters and went as far as to say "I hate when supposedly dead characters come back to life." Yet his story has a couple of "supposedly dead" characters who turned out to be alive. No spoilers here.
Some of his statments are meant to be taken with a grain of salt. He said "romance wasn't depicted" but as of recent years it's been a thing in One Piece...
...Señor Pink and Russian are one example of how traditional romance gets integrated in both story and characters. So, using the author's words to invalidate all possibility of romance in One Piece no longer works.
Ironically, haters take Oda's old claims literally when talking about Luffy, but they completely forget about it as soon as someone mentions Nami or Robin in this particular regard. A clear display of a blatant double-standard...
When it comes to Fairy Tail, some haters love to quote that Natsu and Lucy are "more than friends but less than lovers."
Yet, they choose to ignore that in recent years, when asked about the relationship between these characters, Mashima himself replied: "I feel that the Natsu and Lucy ship is more suitable."
Some time before that statement, during a New York Comic Con, when asked what he feels is ârightâ in this regard Mashima held up his drawing of Natsu and Lucy...
...so everyone could see his answer to the question.
So, using Mashima's old quote to deny the plausibility of a relationship upgrade here and there is not going to work either.
If people want to defend a pairing or prove a potent relationship has what it takes to become canon, they should try to stay true to the author's works, and the story's internal logic, instead of trying to find a way around them and/or promoting a baseless process of elimination, all to justify another premise.
Consistent bonding, chemistry, and natural development coming from the authorâs works should be superior to mere rethoric, hype, and/or anime filler
#one piece#fairy tail#eiichiro oda#hiro mashima#monkey d. luffy#nami#luffy x nami#lunami#luna#ă«ăă#natsu dragneel#lucy heartfilia#natsu x lucy#nalu#shipping#analysis#I'm ready for the salt...#this feels like committing blog seppuku#edited to correct a couple of mistakes
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Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
ÂŒâ
I'm leaving a review at all because I really passionately hate it. It's probably one of the worst books I have ever read.
As a disclaimer, this isn't a book that appealed to me a whole lot conceptually. I did my dissertation on cyberpunk media and this was one of the books I read for it, and I really wish I'd read some of the other books I'd bought and never ended up getting round to instead. I finished it only because I couldn't let such a terrible book beat me.
The book follows Wade Watts, an insufferable young man, as he competes to find an Easter egg within the OASIS - the MMORPG everyone plays in Cline's vision of the future - and win a whole load of money. Wade is very poor and very sad and so he wants to win the fortune, and because he knows so much about video games and 80s culture (much like the creator of the game), he wins, obviously, and he kisses the girl he likes and everything is lovely and happy. A lot of critical literature I read for my dissertation spoke about how cyberpunk as a whole had a tendency to be a way for nerdy guys to write a fantasy story where they were really cool and powerful as a direct result for their nerdiness, and I'd say this particularly applies here.
The misogyny is really out there. It's that weird "nice guy" flavour of misogyny. Apparently, all the girls in the OASIS have avatars that either look like supermodels (read: too skinny for Cline's self-insert) or porn stars (read: too "fake" and large-breasted for Cline's self-insert). The girl Wade likes isn't like that. She's curvy. Nerdy, too. And Wade saves all the pictures of her avatar that she posts and stalks her obsessively for years, because, you know, normal behaviour. Yes, of course he ends up dating her. No, he never faces consequences for being a massive creep, unless you count a falling-out they have at one point where he wins her affection back by stalking her some more. As in, she blocks him on everything, stops posting on her very popular blog, so he visits her in-game home repeatedly to harass her, because he reckons that's really romantic. I reiterate: he never faces consequences for this.
Similarly, there's a degree of racism, mostly in the characters of Daito and Shoto, who are always going on about "honour" and are essentially walking stereotypes. Daito gets "disappeared" by Generic Big Evil Corporation in the real world, and Wade asks if he could have possibly killed himself after losing access to his avatar (on which he had made good progress in the Easter egg hunt, and maybe you can only have one avatar, I don't recall). Shoto says "No, Daito did not commit seppuku," because, you know, he's Japanese. Not like seppuku is a very specific form of ritual suicide or anything. The scene is meant to be very serious and dark, to my recollection, and it feels like a weird joke that doesn't land.
There was a missed opportunity, I think, in that Wade would have made a good main character for something satirical, or at least something where the overall goal of the story was for him to grow from his mistakes. Instead, he remains whiny, immature, and generally dislikable, and the most character growth we see is probably after a point where he becomes depressed and stays inside masturbating constantly, and eventually decides to stop doing that.
The book relies on the reader thinking "Hey, I get that reference!" very, very heavily, and so most scenes that are clearly meant to be really cool and epic end up reading as⊠a bit sad, honestly. I have my own niche and/or obsessive interests, and will never put people down for loving a franchise or whatever, but "Ooh, my car is the DeLorean from Back to the Future and also the Knight Rider car and it has the Ghostbusters numberplate!" is just, I don't know. A bit much, maybe. A bit fanfic.
The book tries to have a vaguely anti-corporate message, presumably because Cline felt that was needed as part of the cyberpunk-y vibe he was going for, but it falls on its face even conceptually when it is so indulgent in the consumerist nostalgia that's so prevalent in media currently in the real world. I personally think it's perfectly fine for a book to be fun fluff in general, don't get me wrong, but I still feel like the irony is worth mentioning.
If you like to get references and you miss the nerd culture of the 80s, maybe you will like this book. A lot of people do and I would guess there's a reason for it. If you want to emulate the experience of this book without actually reading it, then I recommend reading Reddit posts by lonely "nice guys" and switching to a tab to read an entire Wikipedia article about an 80s video game every so often. I'd say that'd be rather more fun.
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hello!! can you write something fluff with kenma, please? some friends to lovers if possible. loving your blog đđ
OH SHIT SORRY FOR TAKING SO LONG SDFSDFJKD this is. 3.5k words roughly and im so sorry idk why my fics always come out longer than 1k words :(((
The first time you meet Kozume Kenma, heâs hiding behind the wall that is Kuroo Tetsurou and youâre both in your first year.
âOh?â The Nekoma volleyball captain stares you down in the Chem class you share with him. âYouâre [Surname]-san, right?â
âYeah,â You say, never breaking eye contact with him but secretly eyeing the quiet boy behind him. Heâs your classmate in a few other of your periods, but not this one. This class is an advanced Chemistry class, placing you conveniently with the second-years and a handful of equally smart first-years. âI need help with the homework and youâre my best bet. Could you help out?â
Kuroo narrows his eyes at you, which you donât exactly appreciate but you donât say anything. âYou sure you donât want me to just give answers?â
âI kinda need to understand this to pass the class, so no thanks.â
He hums in approval, like youâve passed some test, and nods. âSure thing. I wanted to teach Kenma this anyway.â
Oh, thatâs his name⊠you think to yourself, and you noticed the mentioned Kenma doesnât look up from his Nintendo Switch, even at the mention of his name. You watch Kuroo turn around to his companion, coercing him, âKenma, get up, weâre learning Chem.â
âCanât we do it later?â Kenmaâs voice doesnât hold anything akin to bitterness or complaint- itâs kind of devoid, actually, in a soft and cute way- and you try to tune out the sound of Kuroo scolding him but heâs so loud when heâs right next to you.
âCâmon, weâre about to go home now, we can stay after school a little longer. Plus, we get to teach this lovely lady about nuclei.â
âIâm right here, you know,â you roll your eyes lightly but before you know it, youâre defending Kozume-san. âWe can always work it out, um⊠I dunno, maybe over lunch on Sunday? I mean, it is Friday and this thingâs due Monday and⊠we can have more fun studying this if we have food.â
Stupid fucking Kuroo only grins. âOh, so youâre asking me on a date? Kinda bold, if I donât say so myself, kouhai-chan.â
âKuro, stop.â Kenma speaks up and his quiet voice somehow speaks volumes. âWe can meet with her on Sunday to do it.â And just like that, he retreats to his Switch without another word.
Kuroo turns to you and shrugs indifferently, contrasting his previously provocative and shitfaced attitude. âThe manâs laid down the law. Howâs boba on Sunday sound?â
The second time you meet Kenma is on that promised study session.
He has inconspicuous earbuds in, his face illuminated by the glowing light of his DS. He has a DS, too? He still looks cute.
And thereâs Kuroo of course, but heâs irrelevant to your case unless it has to do with your god forsaken chem homework.
âYou want me to go order some drinks next door?â Kuroo quirks an eyebrow. âMy treat.â
âJust a brown sugar milk tea, thanks,â You tell him gratefully. Thank god for men and their dead sense of chivalry.
âNo boba? Youâre crazy.â Kuroo scrunches his nose at you and you wish Kenma would start talking so you could avoid this big, annoying cat. âWhat about you, Kenma? Your usual?â
âYeah,â is all Kenma says.
âAlright, see you nerds later,â Kuroo practically sings out, patting both of your heads like an old man, and takes something from Kenma that you donât quite catch, but it makes Kenma glare at him.
As soon as Kurooâs out of sight, you find it a little awkward to keep conversation with Kenma especially with his whole gamer complex, but-
Oh.
Kuroo took Kenna's DS.
âKuroo-sanâs pretty bothersome, huh,â you sigh out in an attempt to stir conversation. Lucky for you, Kenma goes along with the conversation without fight, his eyes peering over you like reflective pools of honey.
(Theyâre really pretty, you think.)
âYeah,â Kenma slouches down a little bit more in his chair at the mention of his taller friend. âHeâs kind of like my second mom⊠but not really. Always nagging me to do things.â
You laugh at his solemn, depressed answer. âItâs fun to have him around, though, right? Heâs kind of funny sometimes-- the rest heâs annoying-- and heâs decently smart even though Iâm pretty sure heâs got, what, three braincells.â
To your unprompted delight, Kenma laughs softly at you poking fun of Kuroo, and the conversation between you and him starts piling up into more, and more, and it all feels so short. You donât even notice Kuroo coming back and hovering over the table.
âEh? You and Kenma getting along without me? What a shame, you know. I really do get third-wheeled.â Kuroo lets out a wistful sigh akin to an old man and sits down, drinks in hand. âSo, whoâs ready to study?â
The third time you meet Kozume Kenma, itâs at your mallâs arcade.
You and your friends are playing one of those claw machines, trying to get that really cute Miku figurine and those adorable plushies, wasting all your coins on these sucker games like the dumb teenagers you are. But a glimpse of familiar, two-toned hair catches your eye.
âHold on,â you tell your friends whoâre still busy trying to get that stupidly gorgeous Sakura Miku figure. âIâm gonna be right back.â
You wander your way to the familiar head of hair, and gratefully, your instinct was right. âKozume-san? Whatâre you doing here?â
Kenma practically jumps at the sound of your voice, turning around, eyes wide. âOh. I just got lost from the team. Youâre here too?â
âMhm,â You smile, pointing at your screaming group of friends. âMy friends and I are here just to chill out and have fun. You can hang with us if you want!â
He shakes his head, his hair gracefully framing his face. âNah, Iâm fine, thanks.. Iâll just hold out until Kuro sniffs me out or something.â
You furrow your brow- geez, this kidâs gonna get lost so fast-- and you gently clasp the phone heâs holding in his hand. âCan I give you my number? Iâll pick up immediately if you ever call, just give a ring.â
You fail to notice the surprise that flits over Kenmaâs face, but he reluctantly hands you his phone and you tap in your number quickly. âSee you around, Kozume-san. Donât get into trouble.â
And Kenma smiles on his own accord, his face lighting up softly like a lamp under moonlight. âYou too.â
The fourth time you meet Kozume Kenma, heâs at your house working on an Japanese Lit assignment.
âOh? Kozume-kun!â Youâre pleasantly surprised when your teacher pairs the two of you up. âNice to talk with you again.â
âYeah, â Kenma blinks a little awkwardly and he shyly grins, which you find even more stunning than it already is because heâs usually held up such a calm, unaffected facade. âUh. So do you want to meet up at⊠your house for this? So we can do the project.â
âOh, yeah,â You wave dismissively, beaming at him because this is your chance to get closer with him. âMy little brotherâs a nuisance, though, so he might bother us. I hope you donât mind?â
âNo problem.. you can text me the address, because⊠yeah.â You find it cute how Kenma doesnât want to mention that the two of you have been texting a lot more lately, and the slightest blush tints his cheeks.
âOf course!â
Flash to your house, the two of you are on the floor, slaving over a giant posterboard with paint and art supplies scattered about.
âI hate making movie posters, itâs so tiringâŠâ You groan out, trying to paint Yukio Mishimaâs face with the utmost care. âAnd this bookâs so creepy⊠why would we wanna make a poster of it? He commits seppuku!â
Kenma grins a little bit and he looks really cute, with his hair tied up in the back and his gaze focused on the painting at hand. âYouâre so easily grossed out.â
âBut he made it so detailed! You're immune âcause you play all those gross horror games.â
He laughs quietly, and you think you're going to heaven. âYou couldn't even handle Ao Oni, stop.â
You scowl at the mention of Kenmaâs dumb horror games. âHeâs this weird deformed grape, okay?? It was kinda scary!â
The two of you end up nowhere near finishing your poster, and you collectively decide to put it off for maybe another day. The rest of your day is spent-- c-cuddling? (no hetero, you reassured Kenma, although you were thinking otherwise)-- and playing more horror games, much to your chagrin.
(But it gave you a reason to hug Kenma tighter.)
You canât even count the amount of times youâve met up with Kenma now. Youâre in your second-year of high school now and your bond with him as only strengthened.
He invited you eventually to walk to school with him, along with Kuroo, and you find out that it was Kurooâs coaxing to do so. But youâre still delighted that Kenma agreed on, what, the second time Kuroo nagged him about it?
You and Kenma have gotten fairly close. Youâve vented to him, cried to him, heâs shown his emotional side, too. Youâve even gotten a little closer to Nekomaâs god, Kuroo Tetsurou (to which your friends always complain about- âyou canât take all the cute guys for yourselfâ). But, in your opinion, the most important part is that youâve been getting closer to Kozume Kenma, who you once thought would always just be the quiet classmate to you. Who would always be your unattainable, close-guarded crush.
"Kenma!â You yell out, rushing over to him with your backpack practically bouncing off of you with each step. âWait up, would you?! How do you get out of class so quick??â
 "I was waiting for you either way,â Kenma mumbles and hunches his shoulders together. âDo you wanna go to my house? I have new games and Kuroo won't be bothering us.â
âCanât we get snacks first?â You know you sound a little bit whiny, but youâre hungry as fuck, and Kenmaâs smiling either way.
âI guess.. youâre paying, though.â
âThat isnât fair at all!â
Eventually the two of you walk to your nearest 7/11 and get chips and snacks before leaving promptly, with you holding your chocolate milk and Kenma sipping apple juice. The walk to his house is full of conversation, Kenma equally engaged as you are. But as soon as you arrive at his front doorstep, the hollow noise of an empty apple juice box makes its appearance.
âYou drink your juice too fast!â You tease Kenma lightly as he frowns, unlocking the door.
âYou just drink too slow,â he replies and shoulders the door open. The two of you make your way inside and flop onto the couch, Kenma crouching near the TV to boot up his newest game. âDamn. Iâm still thirsty, too.â
âLanguage, Kenma,â You chide him, throwing a pillow at him as soon as he sits down next to you on the couch. âAnd-â it takes every ounce of your willpower not to turn bright red. â-do you want some of my chocolate milk?â
The silence that follows is very short (probably only, what, a second or two?), but it feels like hours of painful quiet. Kenma blinks at you and the pink that dusts his ears becomes more and more prominent each second.
âYeah⊠sure,â Kenma finally says and you beam so wide that youâre sure not even the sun could battle the brightness of your happiness right now. You hand him your nearly untouched chocolate milk and his fingers brush against yours as he takes it, sipping at it cautiously like he was afraid something would happen.
(Oh my god heâs so cute.. he looks so cute⊠heâs drinking my chocolate milk!! Heâs so-)
âOi, Kenma! My mom told me to pick up some tomatoes from y-â The door bursts open to reveal Kuroo Tetsurou.
You freeze, since Kuroo just witnessed you passing a chocolate milk box to Kenma and the latter sipping at the straw. Kenma kind of flushes, his mouth still wrapped around the plastic straw with chocolate milk halfway up.
âEh? Sharing drinks now?â Kuroo tsks and shakes his head, a smirk gracing his stupidly arrogant face. âYou know, you two could get mono. Or any other communicable diseases. Kinda risky, you know?â
âKuroo, stop!â Youâre wildly embarrassed to be caught in this not-so-platonic situation (in your opinion, at least), before Kuroo lets out a hearty laugh.
âYou know, thatâs an indirect kiss!â
âDidnât I say stop?!â
âAh, youth. Indirect kisses! You put your mouth on the straw, then he did. Romance at its finest!â
You know, deep inside, Kuroo just likes to rile you up, but you still bite the bait. âKuroo, shut up, please??â
And Kenma speaks up for the first time during the whole banter. âKuro, the tomatoes are on the kitchen table. Go.â
The Nekoma captain quirks an eyebrow before shrugging and heading towards the kitchen. âThanks. Donât do anything risky.â
âKuroo!â
You and Kenma awkwardly glance at each other-- you note heâs still sipping your chocolate milk-- and eventually he stands off to ward Kuroo off (who keeps chuckling for no goddamn reason).
You two are alone again, and his burnt-gold eyes stare into yours.
âDid Kuro bother you?â His ears are still pinkish, but you notice that heâs still comfortable, although you can see a sheen of sweat starting to form on his face.
âNah... â You force your voice to stay level. âWhy does he keep doing this?? God, heâs so annyoing sometimes⊠it isnât like- it isnât like weâre dating or anything.â God fucking damn stuttering.
Kenmaâs eyes widen for a fraction of a millisecond, and you almost miss it, before he clears his throat. âYeah. Not like that at all.. letâs just go back to playing.â
The atmosphere morphs into the usual, playful one that is held between the two of you, and youâre becoming proud of how much better Kenma is at redefining conversations and shifting the mood whereas in the beginning he would struggle in topic changes.
Youâre so proud of him.
(And youâre kind of in love with him.)
You have a group chat with Kuroo and Kenma, unsurprisingly.
Itâs, what, midnight on a school day, and the three of you are texting. Kuroo offers a game of âtruth or dareâ, and you accept out of sheer boredom. Plus, dares are so much easier to do online because you can fake nearly anything.
kuroo >:/: kenma truth or dare
kenma :): iâm not playing
YOU: yea you are !! ur not getting out of this
kenma :): fine
 donât say anything stupid though
kuroo >:/: so whats it gonna b???
Kenma takes a good ten seconds to respond.
kenma :): truth.
kuroo >:/: you got a crush on anyone?
YOU: oooh spicy
kenma :): kuro why
Your heart races a little bit at the comment.
YOU: oh? kenma i thought we were besties :(( why wouldnt u tell me
kenma :): it isnât thatâŠ.
 kuro you already know why are you asking me that here
kuroo >:/: for my favorite kouhai [name]-chan
YOU: fuck off kuroo we all know im ur fav bc i pay for ur boba
kuroo >:/: fair
You get impatient with Kurooâs mindless banter, so you end up texting Kenma privately.
YOU: so who is ur crush????
kenma :): why do you assume i have one
YOU: i meanâŠ.u wouldve denied it if u didnt have one?
He leaves you on seen for two minutes and youâre about to text him and complain but his reply shoots back.
kenma :): itâs you
And your heart doesnât skip a beat. No, it just beats even faster.
The blood is rushing to your face, you can feel it, and a smile tugs at your face subconsciously. Your brainâs running a mile a minute, and youâre so outrageously shocked and unprepared that the aftermath of it all hits you just about a minute later.
(What if heâs lying? What if someone made him say that? What if-)
YOU: fr?
YOU: kenma dont mess w me
kenma :): iâm not
kenma :): you wanted to know so yeah. itâs you
kenma :): i like you and idk kuro says itâs âmore than just likeâ and maybe heâs right
kenma :): see u at school tmr
YOU: WAIT KENMA COME BACK ???
You cute little rat, you seeth internally, happiness still radiating off of you. Is this a dream? Oh my god. Kozume Kenma likes me.
⊠Kozume Kenma feels the same way I feel about him.
The next day, you anxiously wait for Kenma at your doorstep. You even woke up early and had gotten ready as soon as you could, just so you could catch Kenma ASAP.
You slept surprisingly well, despite your anxiety from Kenma, and your body was filled with energy. You check your phone every two minutes, glancing at his âgood morning textâ and praying for another one.
kenma :))): gm iâm still walking to school with u if you want⊠iâll pass by your house just in case
YOU: oh!!!! yea id love to walk to school w u :))
Silence fills your ears as you anxiously pace back and forth from your doorstep to the curb of your neighborhood. You canât help but worry as your gaze flits across every house, begging for a sign of Kenma.
(What if youâre too late, you realize in panic. What if your efforts werenât enough?)
But then the sound of quiet-paced footsteps snaps you out, and you look up to see Kenma, standing in front of your house, an adorably shy expression painted across his face.
âKenma!â You hate how your voice comes out kind of squeaky and high-pitched but you donât care right now. You practically launch off of your doorstep and bound toward him, settling by his side.
He gives you a shy, adoring look but you can see the anxiety in his eyes as he points forward in the direction of Nekoma. âWe can talk while walking, right?â
You smile breathlessly and your fingers brush against his. He smiles at you, and you notice the same pink dusting his ears like when he was sharing chocolate milk with you.
Two hands intertwine and the conversation begins.
Youâre in your third year of college now, out on a âboys (and girl) night outâ, as Kuroo deemed it.
Kenmaâs got it well-made for him, striking good on his company to which you supported him through the entire time, and Kurooâs on his way to be the scientist heâs always dreamed of being even as a nerdy-jock kid. He claims heâs practically a professional volleyball player, too, just on the side, but both you and Kenma know better.
You and Kenma have been dating ever since your second-year in high school. Which makes it just about⊠four-ish years now that youâve been dating.
(Kuroo claims that in your first-year, you and Kenma were basically dating each other spiritually, but you pay him no mind.)
The three of you are out on the beach on an autumn day. Itâs pretty empty, despite the warm evening sun that casts a golden shine on the sand and ocean, so youâre all making epic sandcastles in peace.
âWe should make a moat,â Kuroo says, already digging out a ring around the lopsided sandcastle.
âWe havenât even finished the castle itself!â You protest, pushing him lightly as you use your other hand to pat down the base of the castle.
Kenma packs sand into a small bucket and delicately places it on top of the half-finished sand âcastleâ to make a tower. You find it cute how heâs the only one putting in decent effort, so you help him out by packing in another bucket of sand. âKuro would be a terrible architect,â Kenma comments.
âYou right, you right,â You sigh out while Kuroo squawks in protest. Kenma leans on you, out of instinct you think, and you kiss the top of his head gently. Kuroo covers his eyes and complains about his youth and young love before Kenma haphazardly bumps into you. Which leads to the sand castle collapsing.
âAh- Kenma!â you cry out in panic, sweeping the sand together in a half-hearted attempt to piece it back into a cohesive castle. âBe careful!â
âNo, look,â he says quietly, a small smile gracing his face.
âYou worked so hard on the base too, to make it big and flat- oh?â You sit up a little bit when you see a small velvet box in the middle of the sand pile.
Kuroo gasps very loudly and you stare at Kenma in shock.
Oh my god. Whatâs happening, whatâs happening, oh my god-
You slowly reach out for the box in the middle of the mess and take it delicately, brushing off the sand clinging to it. Your fingers pry it open with shaking fingers and you feel Kenma place his hand on your arm gently, his gorgeous honey eyes staring at you. The same honey eyes you fell in love with.
You're also in love with the gorgeous, sparkling amber ring that sits in the middle of the cushioned box.
â[Name]. I want to be married. To you. Will you marry me?â Kenmaâs voice is soft and sweet but you know with the convincing sureness in his voice that heâs been practicing this line for at least a month and heâs become confident in it.
You start crying immediately (god damn it, you think to yourself) your heart blooming with joy and your entire body feels like itâs about to explode of pure happiness.
You kiss him, full on the lips with tears streaming down your face and he kisses back, his arms wrapping around you and you realize heâs crying too. With the possibly happiest voice youâve ever used in your life, you cry out, âOf course I will!â on the beach with Kuroo clapping in the background.
Two years later on that beach, you two become the happiest couple on Earth.
#kenma kozume x reader#kozume kenma x reader#kenma kozume#kozume kenma#haikyuu x reader#haikyuu#hq x reader
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On #QAnon: The full text of our Buzzfeed Interview
Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed just published an article on this #QAnon conspiracy bullshit titled It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters. The piece features quotes from an interview we gave via email. Hereâs the full email exchange.
--
Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?
We started writing Q  in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of  activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows.
Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective "bandit", like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home.
The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis' book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web.
This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.
I've been reading up about it, and it's largely believed that it's underneath the book's narrative it works as handbook for European leftists? Is that a fair assessment? I've read that many believe the book's plot is an allegory for 70s and 80s European activists?
Although it keeps triggering many possible allegorical interpretations, we meant it as a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. We often described it as Blissett's «playbook», an «operations manual» for cultural disruption.
The four authors I'm speaking to now are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo correct? The four authors of Q?
You are speaking with three of the four authors of Q, and you're speaking with a band of writers called Wu Ming, which means «Anonymous» in Chinese. In December 1999 the Luther Blissett Project committed a symbolic suicide - we called it The Seppuku - and in January 2000 we launched another project, the Wu Ming Foundation, centred around our writing and our blog, Giap. The WMF is now an even bigger network than the LBP was, and includes many collectives, projects and laboratories. Luca aka Wu Ming 3 is not a member of the band anymore, although he still collaborates with us on specific side projects. Each member of the band has a nom de plume composed of the band's name and a numeral, following the alphabetical order of our surnames, thus you're speaking to Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1, Giovanni Cattabriga aka Wu Ming 2 and Federico Guglielmi aka Wu Ming 4.
Can you tell me a bit about your background before the Luther Blissett project?
Before the LBP we were part of a national scene that was â and still is â called simply «il movimento», a galaxy of occupied social centres, squats, independent radio stations, small record labels, alternative bookshops, student collectives, radical trade unions, etc. In the Italian radical tradition, at least after the Sixties, there was never any clearcut separation between the counterculture and more political milieux. Most of us came from left-wing family backgrounds, had roots in the working class. Punk rock opened our minds during our teenage years, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s Cyberpunk opened them even more, and inspired new practices.
When did you start noticing similarities between Q and QAnon? I know you've tweeted a bit about this, but I'd love to get as many details as I can. I feel like the details around QAnon are so sketchy that it's important to lock in as much as I can here.
We read a lot about the US alt-right, books such as Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a Basilisk or Angela Nagle's â flawed but still useful â Kill All Normies, and yet we didn't see the QAnon thing coming. We didn't know it was growing on 4chan and some specific subReddits. About six weeks ago, on June 12th, our old pal Florian Cramer â a fellow veteran of the LBP who now teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam â sent us a short email. Here's the text:
«It seems as if somebody took Luther Blissett's playbook and turned it into an Alt-Right conspiracy lore. Maybe Wu Ming should write a new article: "How Luther Blissett brought down Roseanne Barr"!»,
After those sentences there was a link to a piece by Justin Caffier on Vice. We read it, and briefly commented on Twitter, then in the following weeks more and more people got in touch with us, many of them Europeans living in the US. They all wanted to draw our attention on the QAnon phenomenon. To anyone who had read our novel, the similarities were obvious, to the extent that all these people were puzzled seeing that no US pundit or scholar was citing the book.
Have there been key moments for you that made you feel like QAnon is an homage to Q? What has lined up the best?
Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time â like we did for the LBP â weird "origin myths" are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 â the year Q was first published, by the way! â and becoming Q. QAnon's psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP's set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia...
We can't say for sure that it's an homage, but one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er, "fan fiction" inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else.
There will be a lot of skepticism I think that an American political movement like QAnon could have been influenced by an Italian novel, how do you think it may have happened?
It's an Italian novel in the sense that it was originally written in Italian by Italian authors, but in the past (nearly) 20 years it has become a global novel. It was translated into fifteen languages â including Korean, Japanese, Russian, Turkish â and published in about thirty countries. It was successful all across Europe and in the English speaking world with the exception of the US, where it got bad reviews, sold poorly and circulated almost exclusively in activist circles.
Q was published in Italian a few months before the so-called "Battle of Seattle", and published in several other languages in the 2000-2001 period. It became a sort of night-table book for that generation of activists, the one that would be savagely beaten up by an army of cops during the G8 summit in Genoa, July 2001. In 2008 we wrote a short essay, almost a memoir, on our participation to those struggles and Q's influence in those years, titled Spectres of MĂŒntzer at Sunrise. A copy of Q's Spanish edition even ended up in the hands of subcomandante Marcos. It isn't at all unrealistic to imagine that it may have inspired the people who started QAnon.
Have you seen anything in the QAnon posts that leads you to suspect any activist group in particular is behind it?
No, we haven't.
You think QAnon is a prank? Without some kind of reveal it's obviously hard to see it as that. If you think it was revealed that QAnon was actually some kind of anarchist prank, would it even matter? Would its believers abandon it or would they just see it as a smear campaign?
Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There's no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank, but who's pulling it on whom? Was the QAnon narrative hijacked and reappropriated by right-wing "counter-pranksters"? Counter-pranksters who operated with the usual alt-right "post-ironic" cynicism, and made the narrative more and more absurd in order to astonish media pundits while spreading reactionary content in a captivating way?
Again: are the original pranksters still involved? Is there some detectable conflict of narratives within the QAnon universe? Why are some alt-right types taking the distance from the whole thing and showing contempt for what they describe as «a larp for boomers»?
A larp it is, for sure. To be more precise, it's a fascist Alternate Reality Game. Plausibly the most active players â ie the main influencers â don't believe in all the conspiracies and metaconspiracies, but many people are so gullible that they'll gulp down any piece of crap â or lump of menstrual blood, for that matter. Moreover, there's danger of gun violence related to the larp, the precedent of Pizzagate is eloquent enough. What if QAnon inspires a wave of hate crimes?
Therefore, to us the important question is: triggering nazis like that, what is it good for? That camp is divided between those who would believe anything and those who would be "ironic" on anything and exploit anything in order to advance their reactionary, racist agenda. Can you really troll or ridicule people like those?
It's hard to foresee what would happen if QAnon were exposed as an anarchist/leftist prank on the right. If its perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the LBP), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one? In plain words: which narrative would prevail? «QAnon sucking anything into its vortex» or «Luther Blissett's ultimate prank»?
In any case, we'd never have started anything like that ourselves. Way too dangerous.
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Zenith: Chapter 24-26
Chapter 24
Andi wakes up in a cell, and can you guess what the inside of the cell looks like?
If you guessed itâs VERY DARK, and filled with DARKNESS that settles into Andiâs BONES (Shinsay is very fond of this metaphor, huh?), you need to leave this blog and never come back because youâve obviously been here long enough to be permanently damaged by all this bullshit.
But youâre also right. Itâs very very dark here, you guys.
So basically this whole chapter is Andi and Dex waking up in a dark cell and ... getting up and out of the cell. Thatâs it.Â
Iâll include some juicy dumb bits for you though, because whatâs a snark blog without snark?
This could have been her lifeâshould have been her life. Locked away behind bars, awaiting the death penalty, the ghost of her best friend the only thing to keep her company.
This might be a nitpick, but âthis couldâve been her lifeâ implies that sheâd be locked up for the rest of her life. Which I guess would technically be true since waiting for her death penalty would be the rest of her very short life, but it still sounds really weird. Itâs like sheâs expecting to wait for ... well, years and years and years, when the previous chapters mentioned her sentencing happening quickly.
That familiar wave of fear spiked through her, and Andi wanted to reach for her swords, to slash and slice and tear apart that piece of herself as she tore apart the bodies of others. Death after death, to cover up Kaleeâs. To give herself the kind of fate she deserved.
So Andi harms herself? Does she want to seppuku this bitch up? Why else would she want to physically reach for her real, actual swords? Does she want to actually slice at a metaphorical part of herself?Â
Also, can I just say that this still doesnât make a lick of sense? âI technically didnât murder my friend and technically hate the fact that I do think that I murdered my friend, and I will put a soothing balm on the wound of my soul by murdering even more innocent people, but this time intentionally, thinking I need to kill people for some reason even though I constantly mope about how badly I donât want to kill people!âÂ
Makes ... no sense. This is why her characterization is so bad, Shinsay canât commit to the âsoft, compassionate, uwu beanâ side of Andi because that would make her NOT COOL AND BADASS AND WEAK, but they also barely touch the âRUTHLESS MERCENARYâ side of her because that would make her morally ambiguous and we canât trust the reader to make up their own mind about her, can we now? Nor can we write anything that complex but thatâs another debate.
Anywhoo, Dex wakes up and fingers Andi in the dark.Â
She didnât even flinch away as his fingertips scraped hers and he froze.
Gotcha.
Then we get a ... joke? I think itâs supposed to be a joke, at least. Someone teach Shinsay how to be funny and how to translate comedy into text, please!
âPlease tell me this is Andi, and not some love-hungry Xen Pterran carriage slug named Stubby.â
Despite herself, Andi laughed. The massive slugs were gruesome, oily beasts that tried to bed anything with a heartbeat.
If there was anything this story was missing, itâs oily fuck-slugs.Â
Thank you for that, Shinsay.Â
Also ... âbed?â Are you telling me these slugs, that seem to be used to pull carriages, take their (dubiously willing) partners ... to bed?Â
Shinsay, I get that you physically cannot get off SJMâs massive throbbing cock, but youâre not actually writing a faux-medieval fantasy book, ok? Youâre writing a SUPER EDGY AND MATURE space opera, with all sorts of edgy violence and references to sex in it.
I donât understand how bad your cognitive dissonance must be if you can invent rapey fuck-slugs, but donât have the guts to say âfuckâ or even âsex.â
Are you afraid your moms will read this? Is that why this is all so coy and immature as hell?
Thatâs what gets to me tbh. This book is too inappropriate to really be for younger YA audiences, but itâs also far too childish to be anything but laughable for older teens and young adults.
Dex and Andi have completely pointless banter as they try to get out of their cell. I find it very convenient that they ended up in the same cell, but ok.
Andi sticks out her tongue at Dex after he mildly insults her like a super cool ruthless murderess and not at all like a five-year-old.
We also get several mentions of the fact that Andiâs wrist cuffs can give off light, because I guess Shinsay are very proud of that particular high tech sci-fi invention.Â
Itâs very very very very dark, like SUPER dark, and Dex asks Andi if sheâs scared.
She feared a lot of things.
Loneliness. Losing the lives of her crew or damaging her ship beyond repair.
But not darkness. That was a part of her; the very thing that had allowed her to survive for this long.
I had to read that, and now so do you.Â
The thrill of the moment had arrived.
Without a word, Andi took a step forward, shedding the weakest parts of herself as she allowed the Bloody Baroness to take over.
Letâs wait until Andi becomes all sad and mopey over this again.Â
Does this woman have ONE consistent personality trait?
Dex followed, and together, they left their empty cell behind.
Are you sure it was empty? And not full of DANK DARKNESS?!
Anyway yeah, it took Andi and Dex one entire chapter to wake up and leave a room.Â
So this is how you pad your word count ...Â
Chapter 25
Weâre in Dexâs POV. They take care of a couple of guards, and by that I mean Andi does a couple SICK FLIPS and Dex is very impressed.Â
âGodstars, Andi,â Dex said now as he leaned over to inspect the corpse.
The key looked strangely at home in his eye socket, perfectly positioned in the center, as if Andi had placed it there with an artistâs flair.
Ok, Iâll give Shinsay credit and say that this is reasonably evocative and Dex does admit that the key strangely looks at home in the guyâs EYE, but the âartistâs flairâ thing ruins it completely. When you think âartistâs flair,â you donât think of someone forcefully shoving a blunt object into someoneâs eye, you think of a fancy shmancy person doing a little elegant flourish with their hand, like painting the delicate eyelashes of some noblewoman.Â
Even when Shinsay manages to write something thatâs actually rather imaginative, they ruin it by adding more guff that simply doesnât fit and is only there to slap on more âpretty proseâ and make Andi sound awesome and pad the damn word count.
Furthermore, specifying that itâs âperfectly in the centerâ doesnât mean anything. If you manage to pierce a personâs eye with a key in the first place, thereâs little margin of error, assuming this was a human and not an alien with abnormally large eyes with lots of options for key placement.
If you want to take the absurd imagery of the key âbelongingâ in the eye further, hereâs what Iâd suggest:Â
âGodstars, Andi,â Dex said now as he leaned over to inspect the corpse.
The key looked strangely at home in his eye socket, and Dex felt as if he could just lean down and twist it and open the manâs face like a door.
Dex seems deeply horrified by Andiâs actions for reasons I cannot fathom, seeing as heâs the one constantly bragging about how he taught her everything she knows.Â
When Andi explains to him that she had to kill the guard to make sure he didnât sound the alarm and summon more guards, Dex has a really dumbass realization:
As Dex stared at her, he suddenly understood the bare truth.
There was no remorse in her eyes for the kills. Not even a flicker. There was nothing but the promise of the mission pulling her forward.
... Well, doy? How exactly did you expect this to go down, Dexy-Boy? Did you want to talk the guards into silence with your witty banter?Â
This chapter serves literally no other purpose than to wank on about how cool and remorseless Andi is. We get Dex angsting about how Andi used to feel things very very hard, you guys, but now, the rumors were TRUE, and she was indeed a cold, non-feeling murderer.Â
Dex asks Andi all deep about how the Bloody Baroness isnât âjust a reputationâ and thinks about how badass Andi looks when sheâs all stoic and shit.Â
Andi then tells Dex about her apparently-not-so-secret ritual of carving tallies into her swords, which then makes Dex realize that MAYBE the Bloody Baroness IS a facade and Andi actually DOES have feelings, just like he thought 500 words before this! Rendering this entire internal monologue -- and by extension, this fiking chapter -- COMPLETELY USELESS!
Shinsay, literally what is the whole-ass fiking point of this? Was there progress made? New character traits revealed? No. We ended literally where we started. Nothing new was discovered.Â
1. Dex thinks Andi still has some humanity left and the Bloody Baroness is just a reputation fabricated by her to protect her and her friends
2. Andi murders a dude, making Dex think that BB is indeed REAL and that Andi has no remorse for killing dudes
3. Andi tells Dex about her tallies, saying she remembers each and every kill, making Dex think that perhaps there is some humanity left and the Bloody Baroness is just a reputation fabricated by her to protect her and her friends
Shinsay, Iâm coming to your houses to leave rotten eggs between your couch cushions.
We get this from Andi:
âTwo deaths. Two tallies on my swords.â She looked down at the dead guards, then back up at him. A flicker of pain flashed through her eyes. âI have a code, you know. Lines that I donât cross.â
Wonât surprise me the least if we never find out what that code is.Â
Dex thinks about how cool and great it is to be working with Andi and the âchapter,â as Iâll generously call it, ends.Â
Chapter 26
Hey, remember Klaren?Â
Me neither.
Anyway, itâs year nineteen now and sheâs holding baby Nor. Klaren thinks about how her baby -- oh sorry, âbabe,â because this book still wants to be fantasy I guess -- is a mistake and how little effort she had to put in to make the king love her.
Sheâd hardly had to try to entice him. Perhaps, in some way, that meant he was her gift. A man who loved her despite what she was. Despite the past sheâd kept hidden from him all these years.
Did this reasoning actually make sense to Shinsay? How can he love you âdespiteâ the past youâve hidden from him if youâve HIDDEN IT FROM HIM AND HE DIDNâT EVEN KNOW ABOUT IT?!Â
Who let Shinsay write? I need to find them and have a few words.
Anywhoo, the king is off to war and Xen Ptera is dying and itâs the apocalypse and whatever.
The baby wailed, drawing the queenâs attention. âSleep now, my perfect little mistake,â she whispered. âSleep, and remember to dream of the light.â
I guess this is supposed to be deep? Who even knows tbh.
Alone in her palace quarters, the queen of Xen Ptera rocked her daughter gently, a tear slipping down her cheek as she remembered her mission and thought of how little time they had left.
Weâve had a bunch of chapters with Klaren already and I still have no idea what purpose they serve or what their plot is.Â
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How would Gintoki, Hijikata, and Takasugi react to falling in love with their crush? Glad thereâs another imagine blog for Gintamađđđ
Thank you so much! Hereâs your request. :>Â â mod aya
Sakata Gintoki:Â
At first, he believes that itâs hunger thatâs been messing with his stomach. Or due to his cravings for sugary food thatâs making him feel this way.
And yet, after eating so many parfaits, the rumbling feeling is still there.
When he finally realizes that itâs because he likes you, the realization hits him like a ton of bricks.
âOh, shitâŠâ
Heâs got to admit, he loves your smile.Â
He hides his feelings well from you, however, a few people can see through his facade. (Namely Shinpachi and Kagura, who know that their âGin-chanâ wouldnât put in effort for just anyone.)
He shares a few of his sweets with you.Â
Finds ways to see you. Purposely chooses routes that have a chance of catching a glimpse of you when buying Jump magazines.Â
He wonât confess directly, but he might give them a hint or two when he takes you on what seems like a âfriendly meetingâ in a sweets shop. (Cough, date.)
âUh, thereâs a new shop that has your favorite dessert⊠wanna check it out?â
Hijikata Toshirou:
Like Gintoki, he wouldnât conclude that he likes you at first. But Hijikata realizes it much quicker than he does.Â
He believes that he might put you into danger for associating himself with you, so he starts avoiding you.
But he then figures out that he canât not see you.
Hijitaka notices anything new about you. Whether itâs your appearance or if you have any troubles in your mind. He does his best to relieve you off your worries.
Always keeps a watchful eye on you.Â
He also attempts to stop smoking when youâre around, as he doesnât want you getting sick from all the smoke.
He thinks heâs doing a great job on keeping his so called âsecretâ. However, everyone in Shinsengumi can see whatâs beneath the Demon Vice Commander. He ends up being teased, with those teases ranging from contained laughter, to even approaching you with the objective of hinting his feelings for you.Â
It ends up with everyone being threatened to commit seppuku.Â
âIgnore them, theyâre just being idiots.â
Takasugi Shinsuke:
He actually realizes his feelings for you fairly quickly. However, he doesnât plan on doing anything with those useless sentiments.
Takasugi blames himself for letting you crawl under his skin.
He never expected to feel that kind of way, as he has other important plans to take care of.
He continuously pushes those feelings down and tries to make them disappear.Â
Like Hijikata, he will definitely ignore you. He pretends you donât exist excellently. But if his crush perseveres and breaks his shell, heâll start to accept that thereâs no running from those sentiments of his.
Itâs hard for him to admit that not seeing your face around made him uncomfortable.
Takasugi wonât treat you any differently, but he keeps a closer distance than usual. If he notices any danger, heâll bring you somewhere safe. Nonetheless, to make sure you donât get any thoughts about his feelings for you, he might say something mean.
âIf you get hurt, itâll just be a bother.â
He also wonât admit it, but seeing your smiling face calms him down a bit.Â
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New Look Sabres: GM 74 - MTL
Remember smashing the Habs during the win streak? Those were the days. Remember when I said 15 games ago that I was done bringing up the win streak? Beating the Montreal Canadiens so consistently was one of my favorite features of this season long before we took off on that unreal stretch. It feels like it was a different season the last time the Sabres edged the Habs in overtime. Had the bar-goers been billionaires at that point there wouldâve been a statue of Jeff Skinner downtown. The Habs are in my top 5 most hated teams so Iâm going to only send good feelings to Montreal enough to say go dispossess Carolina of their playoff spot. From here on out, I got nothing but hate for you French speaking trash talkers. With the conclusion of this game the Sabres are eight games away from the merciful end of another failed NHL season. Shockingly, this loss was the official elimination of the Buffalo Sabres from playoff contention. Yeah, I too thought that was like three weeks ago. I saw a lot of folks eulogizing this season after this loss and even some christening of the word that used to be reserved for the Bills: Drought. That is a conversation we need to have but Iâll save it for after our rewind of this game because this one was a little whacky. Iâll come out right now and say I was more interested in College Hockey, Soccer and College Basketball this weekend. I donât think that was an uncommon feeling in Buffalo but its worth mentioning to say that there were parts of this game that were somewhat gripping. That hate Jack Eichel has when he plays Toronto exists in this team when they play Montreal even if at a fractional level. Jeff still-hasnât-signed-his-contract-yet Skinner will tell you all about that. I enjoyed all these bits weâll talk about, but it wouldâve been more fun with the W. This one ended 7-4 Habs and the only reason that doesnât give me shuttering spastic flashbacks to the Josh Gorges era is because we did help Montreal chase down Carolina.
Evidently the Sabres were having their fair share of flashbacks too. The good olde Canadian boys on the team must have known they were on Hockey Night in Canada in the first because Buffalo got some chances with a capital C. Carey Price was tested early and often but it took until 12:26 into the first when Sam Reinhart got the puck from Mittelstadt in front and snuck it through. Buffalo took a 1-0 lead into the first intermission and were feisty enough that I watched most of the second as a result. Big mistake. Claude Julian gave the boys a spanking in the locker room because a little over five minutes into the second period French Canadaâs best came storming into the game with three goals in a little over nine minutes: Artturi Lehkonen, Brendan Gallagher, Andrew Shaw. Gallagher has dumb face and honestly some days Iâm embarrassed to share a name with Andrew Shaw, so those goals hurt after I thought I had a game to watch. I was literally in the process of turning my attention to a March Madness game when a weird delay of game call gave the Sabres a powerplay. I know I shouldnât expect much from those with this team but Iâm a sucker for the Blue and Gold even at this juncture of the season. I was rewarded this time and Alex Nylander got a puck in the circle and one timed it past the most expensive goalie in the NHL. We are going to have a VERY interesting conversation about Nylander this offseason and I for one, cannot wait. Call me a silly, shell-shocked Sabres fan for being excited about those kinds of offseason things but if you donât laugh, youâll cry, right?
What followed was perhaps the least possible situation a Sabres fan might expect from this team: Johan Larsson did drop pass to⊠wait for it⊠Marco Scandella, who proceeded to beat Carey Price to tie the game at 3. I put those ellipses in there not to pretend I am real good with the English language, if youâve read this blog long enough you know thatâs not true, I put them in because otherwise that sentence might just not be believable. Montreal didnât let us bask in the weirdness of this tie for very long and Sabres 2007 Draft Pick Paul Byron got the Habs back on top. That ended a period that included six goals my viewing because it was at this point my mother-in-law got all of us going out to the lake to see the Northern Lights. We didnât see the Northern Lights and the Sabres never evened up the game again. There were however, four goals in the third: two were completely unpalatable, one was a Sabres goal and the fourth was by Tomas TATAR! That was kind of fun to say that name like that. The Sabres goal was Jack Eichel. Apparently this was his first goal against Montreal in his career. I know it takes a while to get all the teams in the NHL, but I didnât think the last team standing would be in his division. It was a saucy crease goal, but it was a goal nonetheless. Thatâs all the scoring I care to talk about. The Jeff Skinner incident in this game is interesting because it happened at a time the optimistic among us could still see a comeback but not really. It also apparently involved a yelling match with Max Domi so we can all relate to yelling at entitled white boys. I was not tuned in, so I automatically go to blame Andrew Shaw for Montrealâs penalty box misgivings and Shaw was charged with two roughing calls in the third, one against Skinner. It was real fun dragging Montreal four months ago but now it feels meh at best. Like Iâm writing this pissed off they couldnât polish off a regulation win over Carolina tonight, should I be railing against them in a game that mathematically eliminated the Sabres from the playoffs? There is truly nothing holy in a season your team doesnât make the playoffs.
It ended 7-4 and even for the most engaged among us at this point the feelings were more in June at the Draft in Vancouver than they were feeling for a Sabres team that lost in Montreal. There were many bemoaning the now official reality of an eighth straight playoff-less season. Iâve gotten started writing the Season Retrospective and Iâve been debating how to talk about this season. Talking to my not-so-hockey-obsessed siblings today gave me some more perspective. Yes: our playoff chances were 83% at one point, they won ten games straight! Yes: the collapse it took to turn that 83 into a 0 was of historic proportions. Yes: The Coaching Staff should be held accountable for that collapse. But, and this but is so important: in October we were predicting this team would be punching above their weight to make the playoffs. This ending is a little below expectations but not by a lot if this is strictly a conversation with ourselves from October. That sounds stupid and it is, but the point is we knew this season was a development year. It will end a development year even thought it had the strong chance of being a progress year at one point. Secondly, letâs talk about this word Drought. For those of you outside Western New York: in Buffalo the words and phrase âPlayoff Droughtâ was always used for the Bills who went 17 years before making the playoffs. My brother for example had his first look at a Bills playoff game when he had already committed to his college. That was the big kahuna so when Buffalo Sports Fans use that word itâs a metal bat, not a 2x4. On the other hand, as it gets more likely the Hurricanes end their drought, the only active NHL playoff drought longer than the Sabres, it becomes more justified of a thing for us to talk about it more seriously with the hockey team. You can count on one hand how many times the Sabres have made the playoffs since the 2005 lockout. That is really the stat weâre using to turn the knife right now. Letâs stop with the seppuku and think about those four playoff appearances: two saw Eastern Conference Finals and one was a Presidentâs Trophy season. Letâs not pretend the Sabres have not been good this millennia. Also: eight straight years without a postseason berth should be frustrating for no other reason other than it being the longest such drought in franchise history. Yes, itâs a drought; but its just a drought. 17 years for the Bills was historic league-wide in its drought-iness. 8 years is just tough for us within our fanbase. Itâs not nearly as rough considering how bad, prolonged rebuilds have and are going in this league. Vancouver had their time in the sun eight years ago, but theyâve been terrible for most of the time since only now looking up. Edmonton⊠do I even need to complete this sentence? Letâs all chill out for now because itâs a little more than the optimist in me saying the 2020s are going to be the decade of the Buffalo Sabres.
Before I wrap up I want to add that Phil Housley is definitely going to get fired. Maybe its not before next season but if there isnât a new guy behind the bench by Halloween Iâll be shocked. Itâs exactly eight games left this season and if youâre considering recommending this blog to a friend now is the time. Theyâll get a little taste of in-season blogs while getting what I really think is my wheelhouse: the offseason. Like and comment while youâre sharing and let me know when you want to see next seasonâs logo for the blog. I made a new one for 2019-2020 and I think its flatly better than that gray, yellow-column logo I got going right now. Itâs certainly far more unique. Let me know because it will definitely be revealed on the blog by June, but it would be more fun if we get it out earlier than that. Thatâs all I got tonight, Letâs Go Buffalo!
Thanks for reading.
P.S. The only ray of light in the Canes making the playoffs is old bores like Don Cherry having to put up with the Storm Surge in the post-season.
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Kuro Nightmare Mode
Read at your own risk:
Nightmare scenario 1: Elizabeth dies in Cielâs arms. Ciel doesnât react and says, âLizzie, you were the epitome of a fiancee.â But this is totally in character because obviously Cielâs a selfish person with no feelings! And we can always blame this on Sebastian or whoeverâs standing nearby anyway. 10/10
Nightmare scenario 2: Ranmao dies protecting Lau. Lau doesnât react and says, âRanmao, you were the epitome of an honorary sister.â This is also in character because Lauâs an opium dealer and opium dealers donât have feelings, plus itâs a good way to write him and Ranmao out of the story. 20/10
Nightmare scenario 3: Edward is dishonored and commits seppuku like any Englishman would. He dies in Franceâs arms. Frances doesnât react and says, âEdward, you were the epitome of a son.â Totally in character because Frances is a strong, tough woman, and strong tough woman donât feel things. 30/10
Nightmare scenario 4: Claudia dies in Undertakerâs arms. Undertaker doesnât react and says, âClaudia, you were the epitome of a Phantomhive.â In character because Undertakerâs character changes depending on the plot. 40/10
Nightmare scenario 5: GF Fantasy cancels Kuro before we ever find out who killed Cielâs parents. Yana writes a blog post and tells us, âyou were the epitome of readers!â 100/10
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[Repost] Azusa Hayano and the Aokigahara Forest
WARNING! THIS VIDEO AND BLOG POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC MATERIAL THAT MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME VIEWERS. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!
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Meet Azusa Hayano. He is a geologist that studies volcanic eruptions and the plantation at the foot of Mt. Fuji. He became a part of a documentary about the infamous suicide forest called the Aokigahara Forest. Sometimes I get fascinated by very creepy locations all over the world. Abandoned amusement parks like the Spreepark in Germany, a left to rot island known as Hashima Island or Gunkanjima, and other places that give me the tingling spine. I stumbled over the word (éæšă¶ć) Aokigahara and got very curious about what it is, and it turns out it is a forest next to Mt. Fuji. But the sad and creepy part is that it's a very popular location for suicides. The deaths were so bad that they had to have signs that try to prevent suicides such as "Think of your family." and "Life is precious.". It makes me sad seeing this beautiful forest being a place for the corpses. It is a disturbing topic even for me, but there is something about this documentary video that truly fascinates me. It was the man in the documentary that got my full attention; Azusa Hayano. I do not see any well known T.V. celebrities I do not see any soldiers doing what they can for their country I do not see any licensed motivational speakers I do not see any writers I do not see any priests I do not see any super heroes All I see is Azusa Hayano; a geologist that studies volcanic eruptions and the plantation of Mt. Fuji... and something else. In the video, he discuses what he saw when coming to the forest. He pointed out an abandoned car that has been left out for months and months. It's a sad reason why it's been abandoned. Next part is when he showed us the signs preventing the suicides. I personally could not believe they had to put up signs for that. If Aokigahara is known for that, then I have virtually found one of the saddest places in the world. Most of you already watched the video, but I would like to take the time to type out what I've learned from Mr. Hayano. The forest held some of the most deepest and darkest secretes about weather or not people want to die. Tents, tapes, messages, signs, signals, and anything that doesn't involve a noose is what Azusa would say that they are still undetermined weather or not they want to die. He told us that he met a person that tried to hang himself. The other person said that it was too painful and he did it with his feat touching the ground. Azusa told him not to do it again and the guy had a long talk with him and swore not to ever do it again. He calmed down he said and didn't feel like dying. A yellow tent was later shown in the middle of a path not for the locals. Azusa approached the tent and then a conversation occurred between Mr. Hayano and the man in the tent. "Are you okay?" "Yes." *zips up and hides inside the tent* "You're not aloud to camp here." "I'm sorry." "I'm the Natural Guard... I'm on suicide patrol. How long are you staying?" "Until tomorrow." "Do you have food with you?" "Yes, I do. I'm sorry." "I just hope you're okay. I'm just trying to prevent suicides. Please take this way back." *encourages to go left* "I'm sorry for the trouble." "Take your time to think, be positive. It was nice meeting you." The more they talked, the more Azusa saw the man's spirits slowly getting back. But his heart still felt sick; he was worried about the man in the tent and wanted to help. I believed that the more Azusa went on exploring the forest, the more discoveries he found in the world he sees. He made a statement that says: "I think the way we live in society these days has become more complicated. Face-to-face communication used to be vital, but now we can live our lives being online all day. However, the truth of the matter is we still need to see each other's faces, read their expressions, hear their voices, so we can fully understand their emotions. To coexist." - Azusa Hayano I truly saw it in him that he said that within his heart, it tells me that anyone can be who they want to be and still have a kind heart. When discussing more about the corpses and how it's just bones and clothes, he then came up with another amazing saying. "I think it's impossible to... die heroically by committing suicide." - Azusa Hayano The Samurai did it in honor for they did not want to die by the sword of the enemy. But like Azusa said, it does not show any heroic moment in suicide by honor. If I were to become a legendary Samurai warrior, I would live on and will keep fighting till the end. Luckily, I am not like the Samurai. I will not kill. If there are many things I have learned about the Samurai, one of them is the Seppuku; the name for the suicide ritual. Sad for them to give it a name. In my theory, I had the thought of this as a cowardly act in order to not get killed by the enemy. For that I feel very sorry for the warriors. Azusa was right when it's impossible to die heroically by Seppuku. In the modern times, death by sword is optional, now there are many ways to die by one's self. All of it is done with no heroic action at all. It gives out pain to others all around no matter who it is. Those who have a kind and sweet heart like Azusa Hayano would think about others and all the troubles that go on daily, which is why we face them all like heroes and heroines. At the end of the documentary video, Mr. Hayano saw flowers, chocolates, chips, and a book. Believed it's all from the deceased's family, he made one last statement which was his final words on the video. "You think you die alone, but that's not true. Nobody is alone in this world. We have to coexist and take care of each other. That's how I feel." - Azusa Hayano Mr. Hayano gave me the vision of the entire world filled with life; human life. The species lives on forever since the beginning of the entire life cycle... unfortunately our kind is not enough for our same kind. People can be picky on who to coexist with who and I had to undergo ultimate rejection by others who were the same age as me. It's all in the "autistic" symbol that makes most people back off. In reality, I can be like everyone else. Nobody is alone in this world. We all have to take care of each other... to coexist as a population of one. I want to point out the part where he said: "That's how I feel." Once he said those four little words, I easily found his heart in doing the documentary. He didn't have to say those kind words on camera or even end it with "That's how I feel." He would of said hardly anything when encountering the flowers, chocolates, and all the other things the family placed for the deceased person in the forest. But I saw his heart into his words. Especially when he wanted to help the man in the yellow tent. I have been writing my book Populaion: One Autism, Adversity, and the Will to Succeed for a while, and after writing the manuscript I came across this man on the internet. I always think it's wrong to find things interesting on the web. It's unnatural for humans to discover new things just on a screen. He said earlier that people can coexist by hearing each other, seeing, each other, touch each other such as shaking hands and hugging. All of these social discoveries I want to discover for myself as well as seeing new things in the real world. Meeting Azusa Hayno and give him a hug for being such an inspirational man. Because he doesn't experience volcanic eruptions on a computer, he studies them because that's his job and that's what he wants to do. I can really relate to this man because before seeing his video documentary I did something that's a little similar. It was at The Grand Night Out; a party after graduation. I was on a boat back to Bainbridge and wanted to look around outside the boat, bow and stern. When I was looking around, I found two people alone outside. The two individuals used to go to my grade school almost all the time so I was familiar to them. They looked a little lost, sad, and upset. I wanted to help. "Excuse me friends, you two look lonely out here. Wanna go inside and play some games, eat, drink, and dance a song or two?" "We're talking!" "Okay. Sorry about that. I am here to help. Take care now." Then I went back inside. I didn't really see them talk as much really. It seems that it is true that people know how to think of many ways to say "go away" instead of talking about what is going on. I always feel like I want to help people have a good time. I saw kids inside having a great time with happy faces, and whenever I see others with no happy faces then it makes me sad. I can almost tell when people aren't happy. I will be sure to tell the full story in my second book, Joining Population ONE: Autism, Tribulation, and the Will to Thrive. My parents can easily tell, then I put my experiences in comparison to my peers. "I am here to help" is what I always want to do. There are many people who "started out with nothing". It bothers me because the definition of that is usually poor and come from a harsh environment. Others who are born rich are well known and seems like they are somebody to the world. Doesn't matter if we are rich, or poor, we are all the same. No one is alone in this world. "I think the way we live in society these days has become more complicated. Face-to-face communication used to be vital, but now we can live our lives being online all day. However, the truth of the matter is we still need to see each other's faces, read their expressions, hear their voices, so we can fully understand their emotions. To coexist." - Azusa Hayano This is to the Aokigahara Forest. We all must coexist peacefully. I am sorry for the troubles that happened to the individuals that died in the forest and I am very sorry for the loved ones that lost their friends and family members in the forest. I want everyone to learn from the geologist Azusa Hayano; his thoughts, wisdom, and kindness in a certain documentary video about the Aokigahara. Life is truly the reason why we exist. It keeps us alive.
#Aokigahara#Aokigahara Forest#suicide#death#life#Azusa Hayano#dead#exist#alive#unsettling#bones#alone#doll#rope#autism#Fuji#tribulation#plantation#documentary#tent#coexist#graphic#disturbing#creepy#thrive#Tyler McNamer
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Hello! Glad to found another tourabu HC blog! Can I request taishogumi (Shinano, Gotou, Yagen and Atsushi) reaction when their saniwa is forced to commit seppuku. Good luck for your blog ^^
Iâm finally back to working on requests and I start with angst its great.
Thank you anon! Naturally this one will be under the cut as seppuku is sui**** albeit in this situation forced. Iâm writing this under the assumption the Saniwa has done something to lose the Governmentâs faith in them and are ordered to commit seppuku in repentance.
Just to give a little background to those who donât know, when commiting seppuku one would cut open their abdomen with a tantou. As a way of dying honourably on order, it wasnât unusual for seppuku to be part of execution. If they were being given a death with any level of honour, those being executed by seppuku would have their heads cut off after stabbing themselves as a way to quickly end their suffering. Thatâs the kind of execution Iâll be writing, for more angst the Saniwa will the using the blade form of each tantou that Iâm writing the reaction of like the Saniwa chose them.
Shinanoâą âNo! No! No! This is not what Iâm for! This is not what should happen!ââą He would protest strongly, not for the sake of his pride but because he doesnât want you to have to. âą He tries to convince the other swords to rally together and save you to no avail.âą Eventually heâll accept there is nothing he can do to stop it, falling a bit into despair. He wouldnât be able to bring himself to watch.
Gotouâą âThis⊠canât really be happening.ââą Would be a bit stuck in a stupor, unable to believe it. He doesnât want to believe it. âą Probably would try to plead with whoever made the order to change their mind. When they wouldnât heâd feel weak and helpless. âą When the time finally came, he would just stare. Heâd be frozen in place, god how heâd blame himself regardless of why you were ordered to in the first place.
Yagenâą âI canât accept this.ââą Probably one of the only things that could shake his usually calm composure, he tries finding anything he can which will save you. âą When nothing works he still wouldnât accept it, heâd keep struggling and stressing until the time finally came. âą Once you head fell he collapsed to his knees and would cry uncontrollably.
Atsushiâą âGeneral! It was one mistake stand up and fight again.ââą More than anything he would want to see you with fighting spirit again, seeing you so calm and accepting is shaking his resolve. Heâs lost masters before but this is different. âą In order to not seem weak around his brothers he would try his best to accept the decision and just wish things be as painless as possible for you. âą After it, he would be a lot darker and quieter, itâs his burden alone to bear for your sake as far as heâs concerned.
#touken ranbu#touranbu#tourabu#tkrb#shinano toushirou#gotou toushirou#yagen toushirou#atsushi toushirou#taishogumi#i'm kin with an executioner but I still shouldn't have sounded so enthusiastic talking about seppuku#rip#literally#mun pro
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The Decay of the Angel:
Yukio Mishima and Paul Schrader on the Body, Death, Suicide, Sexuality and the Nature of Evil
Being a reworking of three previous blog posts into one essay.
On a hot day after Christmas, in a second-hand bookshop in Newcastle, New South Wales, I came across The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima. It was one of those books that resonates immediately at some visceral level without even having to open the cover: the book as fetish object. On beginning to read in the shady basement where I was staying, one of the first impressions the book made on me was that the title, in English, seemed to be a mistranslation. The decay referred to pertains to a dimension dreamed by a rich old man, Shigekuni Honda, one of the novelâs main characters. The name of this dimension has been more often translated into English (from many and various Asian Buddhist texts) as the âGod Realms.â So the âangelâ who loses her wings would belong to a pantheon of gods and goddesses rather than a host like the seraphim.
A closer translation into English might have resonated with Wagnerâs GötterdĂ€merung (Twilight of the Gods), that I suspect may have been in Mishimaâs mind when he wrote it. One strand of narrative traces Hondaâs reconciliation to a less simplistic Buddhist world view than that with which he begins in the book. Could Mishima also be alluding to Nietzscheâs death of god? The allusion to decadence is still there. Despite the questionable title, The Decay of the Angel has been rendered in beautiful translated prose that evokes the sea, the ships, the industrial harbour of Yokohama, Hondaâs dreams, and his obsession with a sixteen-year-old boy, whom he takes for a reincarnation of others he has followed in his life, all of whom have died young. Both Honda and the boy TĆru seek to destroy each other in a web of evil that ultimately threatens to destroy them both.
It was after completing the writing of this book, which Mishima considered to be his masterpiece, the last of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, that he committed seppuku, planned as a grand theatrical staging of a ritual suicide at a headquarters garrison of the Japanese Self Defence Force, or the army by any other name. Mishima is considered by many to be a proto-fascist but the truth seems to be far more complex. Paul Schraderâs film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, takes on the complexities of Mishimaâs entire life as art; another resonance with Nietzscheâs idea of life as a constant act of creation: an expression of the will to power.
In an interview about his Mishima film, Schrader says, âI do believe that the life is his final work and I believe that Mishima saw it that way, too. He saw all his output as a whole, from the tacky semi-nude photographs to the Chinese poetry to the Dostoyevskian novels to his private army â it was all Mishima.â (Schrader on Schrader, Faber and Faber.)
The film has never been distributed in Japan. Schrader says, âMishima has become a non-subject. People read about him but there is no official viewpoint, so that if youâre at a dinner party and his name comes up thereâs just silence. Now, that atmosphere of cultural discomfort is amplified by the fact that one of the precepts of the Japanese psyche is that outsiders really canât understand them⊠So if (the Japanese) donât understand Mishima, how can a foreigner possibly hope to?â
Itâs true that when reading writers of other cultures, or writing about them, or making films about them, inevitably the maker creates his or her imaginary versions of that culture that those who are born into it may not share at all and resent the intrusion on the shared cultural construction of those born in place.
Schrader â as does Mishimaâs biographer John Norton â sees Mishimaâs suicide as the ultimate theatrical expression of a man who wanted to reconcile art and political action in real life. The film builds toward this climax in a collage of âpresent-time,â flashback, and novel-dramatization, each with its particular filmic âlookâ that draws on Costa Gavras, the black and white of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and the present day theatricality of the set designer Eiko Ishioka.Â
Purity, the Emperor and Suicide
A red rising sun opens the film and the image is underscored by Wagnerian echoes in the extraordinary music composed by Philip Glass. The music quickly transforms into a military snare tapping a march, as Mishima vests himself in the dress uniform of his private militia, the Shield Society. The film begins on the day when Mishima sets out with four cadets from the Shield Society, ostensibly to instigate a military coup but with the intention of committing seppuku because he knows that the coup will inevitably fail.
The end of the mission is foreshadowed in the filmâs dramatization of Mishimaâs novel The Runaway Horses. A group of military cadets plot a coup. Their leader, Isao, says to his followers: âThe Emperorâs face is not pleased. Japan is losing its soul. In a single stroke, weâll assassinate the leaders of capitalism. Burn the Bank of Japan⊠At dawn weâll commit seppuku.â To his military superior he says of the plot: âJapan will be purified. Weâll only use swords. Our best weapon is purity.â
In a telling interrogation, the police detective, who has arrested the young plot leader, says: âYouâre still too young and pure. You will learn to tone down your feelings.â Isao answers: âIf purity is toned down it is no longer purity.â And the detective: âTotal purity is not possible in this world.â And Isaoâs reply: âYes, it is⊠if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.â
As a young man though, it appears that Mishimaâs resolve of purity and oneness with the spirit of Bushido was undermined. Schraderâs film depicts Mishima in his late teens where he claims that his dream is to be a soldier and fight for the Emperor and Japan. The young Mishima is mortified when he exaggerates his physical weakness at his army medical and is discharged as unfit for service. In the filmâs voiceover, the adult Mishima character says, âI always said I wanted to die on the battlefield. But my words were lies, I never really wanted to die.â
Schrader uses this moment as a turning point where the character of Mishima resolves to perfect his body, the better to embody the spirit of the Samurai. And this worship of the perfect body resonates with Mishimaâs sense of his sexuality.
The Body and Sexuality
Schrader was stopped from using Forbidden Colours â Mishimaâs most overtly gay novel â by Mishimaâs widow who wished to play down her husbandâs sexuality. Schrader got around this by basing some scenes on Mishimaâs semi-autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask. He introduces the writerâs sexual orientation as he deals with the writerâs childhood. In the movieâs first chapter, entitled Beauty, at the age of twelve, Mishima is taken to the theatre by his grandmother and through an open door, he sees three Kabuki actors, all of them men, one of whom is playing the part of a woman, the others in effeminate make-up. Schraderâs shots of the boy and the actors creates a palpable sexual tension. At school, the boy is ridiculed by his classmates for being a poet. When the boy Mishima sees a picture of St Sebastian pierced by arrows it arouses him to masturbate.
During the black and white flashback sections of the film, Mishima is dancing with another man in a gay bar. Heâs upset when his dance partner jokes that Mishima is too flabby. Mishima takes up bodybuilding to improve his physique.
In voiceover, Mishima says, âMy life is in many ways like that of an actor. I always wear a mask. I play a role. When he looks in the mirror the homosexual, like the actor, sees what he fears most, the decay of the body.â
In the second chapter of the film, entitled Art, Schrader develops the characterâs sexuality using a dramatization of Mishimaâs novel Kyokoâs House. The actor in the story takes up bodybuilding as he fantasizes having the physique of a matador so that his body will be as beautiful as his face.
There follows a long voiceover soliloquy as Mishima, lauded in Japan, respected abroad, goes on a journey across the world.
âAs the ship approached Hawaii I felt as if I emerged from a cave and shook hands with the sun. Iâd always suffered under a monstrous sensitivity, what I lacked was health, a healthy body, a physical presence. Words had separated me from my body. The sun released me. Greece cured my self-hatred and awoke a will to health. I saw that beauty and ethics were one and the same, creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical. I attained physical health after becoming an adult. Such people are different from those born healthy, we feel we have the right to be insensitive to trivial concerns. The loss of self through sex gives us little satisfaction. I was married in 1958, my daughter was born in 1959 and my son in 1961.â
In the dramatization of Kyokoâs House the bodybuilding actor gets into an argument with a visual artist. The actor says, âThe human body is the work of art. It doesnât need artists.â But the artist replies: âOkay, letâs say youâre right. What good does your sweating and grunting do. Even the most beautiful body is destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure. You must devise an artistâs scheme to preserve it. You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.â
The actor signs a sadomasochistic pact with an older woman libertine who cuts and burns the actorâs beautiful body before they commit suicide together.
Evil as Aesthetic in De Sade, Genet and Mishima
In The Decay of the Angel, the old man, Shigekuni Honda steals a glance at the young TĆru âand felt that he was seeing in that glance his own life⊠The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness. A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death as it composed noble condolences, that invited the world to destruction while seeking the last possible moment for itself⊠his own inclinations all through his long life had been to make the world over into emptiness, to lead men to nothing â complete destruction and finality.â
Honda wants to cultivate TĆruâs evil potential. The evil in The Decay of the Angel is all on the level of personal betrayal. The aesthetic is similar to that of Jean Genet who gives himself over to sordid betrayal and punishment. He makes Evil into Good, or more than that: into holiness and sanctity; hence Sartreâs essay Saint Genet.
In Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille points out that in Sartreâs essay on Jean Genet: âIt seems to me that the whole question of Good and Evil revolves around one main theme â what Sade called irregularity. Sade realised that irregularity was the basis of sexual excitement. The law (the rule) is a good one, it is Good itself (Good, the means by which the being ensures its existence), but a value, Evil, depends on the possibility of breaking the rule. Infraction is frightening â like death: and yet it is attractive, as though the being only wanted to survive out of weakness, as though exuberance inspired that contempt for death which is necessary once the rule has been broken.â
Just as Honda wants âto lead men to nothing â complete destruction and finalityâ, Sade in Les Cent Vingt JournĂ©es de Sodome imagined as many ways as possible to destroy human beings singularly and collectively. Bataille says: âIn the solitude of prison Sade was the first man to give a rational expression to those uncontrollable desires, on the basis of which consciousness has based the social structure and the very image of man⊠Indeed this book is the only one in which the mind of man is shown as it really is. The language of Les Cent Vingt JournĂ©es de Sodome is that of a universe which degrades gradually and systematically, which tortures and destroys the totality of the beings which it presents⊠Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt JournĂ©es de Sodome without feeling sick.â
Sade spent time in jail because he acted out to some extent the frenzies to which he was driven. He did cut a female beggar, Rose Keller, with a penknife and pour wax into her wounds. He did organise orgies at the castle of Lacoste though not to the extent of acting out the fantasies he wrote of in Les Cent Vingt JournĂ©es de Sodome, but for sure, women and men were badly hurt. In comparison with characters in the writings of Genet and Sade, the evil of Honda, or of Georges Batailleâs characters, is a little tamer. Honda, as we see, holds back at âthe last possible moment.â
And Hondaâs female friend, Keiko, tells Hondaâs protĂ©gĂ©, TĆru: âYouâre a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place. You want to get your hands on your fatherâs money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent⊠your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon⊠Youâre a clever boy, no more.â
Whereas Sade and Genet pushed their criminality in waking life to extremes beyond âdecency,â they pulled back at the last moment from death, and left that ultimate âexpression of freedomâ, if it can be called that, to their literature. Mishima did not go so far in his literature as Sade or Genet, or even Bataille, in their portrayals of sexuality. And Mishima is the better writer for it.
Finally, Mishima didnât pull back â as Honda and TĆru do â in his life or his death. He was determined to unify his actions and his art. Itâs Mishimaâs obsession with the body and beauty and its connection to his sexuality and ideas of purity that creates the complex psychology that foreshadows his death by suicide and how he made that theatrical performance of seppuku the union of action and art.
In Schraderâs film, in voiceover Mishima says: âThe average age for men in the bronze age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.â
But Mishima already was losing the desire to live. Again, in voiceover, the adult Mishima says: âA writer is a voyeur par excellence. I came to detest this position. I sought not only to be the seer but also the seen. Men wear masks to make themselves beautiful. But unlike a womanâs, a manâs determination to become beautiful is always a desire for death.â
Politics
In the third Chapter of Schraderâs film, entitled Action, Mishima, as writer, has reached the height of his fame, and has perfected his body to the point of narcissistic infatuation. He poses for photographs as a samurai, as St Sebastian, as the successful artist beside Greek sculptures. He founds a private militia, complete with uniforms designed by himself and the tailor to General Charles De Gaulle. He names his militia the Shield Society, a spiritual army to protect the Emperor and the pure spirit of Japan. He is aware of the ridiculousness of his position. In a speech to gathered dignitaries of the theatre world of Japan and the West he states: âSome people have called us toy soldiers. But our goal is to restore the noble tradition of the Way of the Samurai. I have always supported the tradition of elegant beauty in Japanese literature. I cannot stop striving to unite these two great traditions.â
When Mishima is invited to speak on campus at a university protest occupation in the sixties, there is something absurd in his facing the vociferous students. They accuse him of being illogical in his purist stance. He says: âHaving got to this position out of sheer pride, Iâm not going to become logical now. We all want to improve Japan. Weâve all played the same cards, but I have the Joker. I have the Emperor.â
In voiceover, he says of the moment where he faced the students: âFor a moment I felt I was entering the realm where art and action converge, for a moment I was alive.â
Seppuku
Chapter Four of Schraderâs movie is entitled The harmony of pen and sword. Mishima says in voiceover: âThe harmony of pen and sword. This samurai motto used to be a way of life. Now itâs forgotten. Can art and action still be united? Today this harmony can only occur in a brief flash. A single moment.â
He dedicates more of his life to the Shield Society.
âRunning in the early mist with the members of the Shield Society I felt something emerging as slowly as my sweat. The ultimate verification of my existence⊠Our members were allowed to train in the facilities of the regular army. I flew in a combat fighter. These privileges were granted to us because of the symbolic significance of our society. Even in its present weakened condition the army represented the ancient code of the Samurai. It was here, on the stage of Japanese tradition, I would conduct my action. Having come to my solution I never wavered. Who knows what others will make of this? There would be no more rehearsals.
âBody and spirit had never blended. Never in physical action had I discovered the chilling satisfaction of words. Never in words had I experienced the hot darkness of action. Somewhere there must be a higher principle that reconciles art and action. That principle it occurred to me was death. The vast upper atmosphere where there is no oxygen is surrounded with death. To survive in this atmosphere, man, like an actor, must wear a mask. Flying at 45,000 feet, the silver phallus of the fuselage floated in sunlight, my mind was at ease, my thought process lively, no movement, no sound, no memories. The closed cockpit and outer space were like the spirit and body of the same being. Here I saw the outcome of my final action. In this stillness was a beauty beyond words, no more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or female. Then I saw a giant circle coiled around the earth, a ring that resolved all contradictions, a ring vaster than death, more fragrant than any scent I have ever known. Here was the moment Iâd always been seekingâŠâ
The final act of the film and of Mishimaâs life in politics and art took place on November 25th 1970. Allowed into the barracks of the Japanese Self-Defense Force with his four cadets, and welcomed into the commanderâs office, Mishima took the general hostage and demanded that the soldiers of the garrison be commanded to assemble in front of the building in order to hear his speech. The general acceded to his demands. Mishima stepped out onto the balcony and addressed the soldiers. He exhorted them to rise up in the spirit of Bushido and to install the Emperor as the rightful ruler, and to protect the pure spirit of Japan from Western military and economic occupiers. Ridiculed as much by the soldiers as he had been by the university students, Mishima realized that the soldiers had hardly heard a word of his cry for resistance.
Mishima stepped off the balcony from where he had delivered his final address. In the office of the commander of the barracks, he knelt to disembowel himself. He botched the ritual. One of his cadets was supposed to behead him with a sword. The chosen one made a mess of it and another cadet had to take over while the first cadet committed suicide. Tastefully, Schrader doesnât show the acts of self-butchery. The film closes with a poetic vision of the rising sun and the poetic lines of transcendence  that describe the final moments of Mishimaâs character Isao from The Runaway HorsesâŠ
What is it in Mishima and in Schraderâs biographical account of his life that holds such a fascination for me?
On an aesthetic level, Schrader is a Western artist who is trying to understand an artist of the East who is a fanatic in his pursuit of perfection. This essay (in the French sense of essayer) became an obsession for me: another way of understanding my attraction to the idea of a pure and unattainable perfection whether in literature or spirituality.
Mishima, as symbol, embodies for me all those weaknesses of systems that strive for such purity of spirit; that are inevitably an expression of the egotism of wanting to be a master â of oneself or of others; combined with the whole traditional set-up of sensei and disciples, that finds its ultimate expression in the blindness or delusion of an inner group convinced of its rightness and purity: the fanaticism of seeking purity in the spirit or in art that inevitably collapses into messy and tragic farce.
Schraderâs film plays this out on screen: Mishima played it out in his life and art. Itâs not that Mishima didnât produced great works of literature. He did. But the extremes that literature permits us to explore belong to art, to cinema, to writingâŠ
De Sade belonged in jail. Genet was happy to end up in jail. Mishima was happy to die as he did. Their literature permits us to go to imaginative extremes, to liberate ourselves of concepts that stop us being internally free; to face up to the dark side of the psyche, to the fascination with the scatological.
Bataille kept his excesses to the literary and the consensual for which itâs possible to have far more respect. Baudelaire, too, to some degree. As a writer who regards commitment to literature and the political to be crucial to life, I canât help but mention Samuel Beckett. Beckett didnât shirk his responsibilities to the political world: he risked his life in the French Resistance against the Nazis. At the same time, he had a total commitment to literature.
How much saner, or for me more enviable, is Beckettâs approach than that of Mishima, or De Sade, or Genet? âEver tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.â
Bataille says that âNobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt JournĂ©es de Sodome without feeling sick.â There were moments in writing this essay where I felt something similar in confronting Mishimaâs outlook and embracing Schraderâs interpretation of his life. No doubt, the subject touches something terrifying in the darkness of my own psyche.
At a physical level, Mishimaâs choice to die at forty-five when at the peak of oneâs power is ridiculous: there is so much more living to do. Itâs easier to understand Hemingwayâs decision at the age of sixty-two. With mind and body passing sixty, there is a sense of fearing death less than facing mental and physical deterioration and incapacity.
In 2016, I lost my brother to early onset Alzheimerâs Disease. Even without such a tragic and heartbreaking illness, at the moment, Iâm aware that my physical and mental capacities must inevitably diminish. Having witnessed in another, so close to me by blood, and more, the ravages of such a debilitating illness, the engagement with Yukio Mishimaâs writing and Paul Schraderâs film of his life, makes this essay a direct confrontation of my own fears of old age, sickness and death. No matter how much the idea of death as less frightening than physical and mental deterioration, I take solace in Nietzscheâs understanding of our constant becoming as an irrepressible expression of the creative will, aware that there is a part of me, no matter how deep the moments of desperation, that still insists on its expression in life.
#yukio mishima#de sade#georges bataille#jean genet#samurai#japanese literature#paul schrader#nietzsche
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1. Cultural Criticism
Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch
Michael Pollan, The New York Magazine
1. JULIAâS CHILDREN
I was only 8 when âThe French Chefâ first appeared on American television in 1963, but it didnât take long for me to realize that this Julia Child had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother began cooking dishes sheâd watched Julia cook on TV: boeuf bourguignon (the subject of the showâs first episode), French onion soup gratinĂ©e, duck Ă lâorange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more ambitious dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward weekend company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others â including the boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved â actually made it into heavy weeknight rotation. So whenever people talk about how Julia Child upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe her. Not that I didnât also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners, and those were pretty good, too.
Every so often I would watch âThe French Chefâ with my mother in the den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor, which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough) but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen-chemistry-set spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast uncut and unedited, so it had a vĂ©ritĂ© feel completely unlike anything you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia waited for the butter foam to subside in the sautĂ© pan, you waited, too, precisely as long, listening to Juliaâs improvised patter over the hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Juliaâs voice was like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC supposedly took âThe French Chefâ off the air because viewers wrote in complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.
Meryl Streep, who brings Julia Child vividly back to the screen in Nora Ephronâs charming new comedy, âJulie & Julia,â has the voice down, and with the help of some clever set design and cinematography, she manages to evoke too Childâs big-girl ungainliness â the woman was 6 foot 2 and had arms like a longshoreman. Streep also captures the deep sensual delight that Julia Child took in food â not just the eating of it (her virgin bite of sole meuniĂšre at La Couronne in Rouen recalls Meg Ryanâs deli orgasm in âWhen Harry Met Sallyâ) but the fondling and affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state and the magic of their kitchen transformations.
But âJulie & Juliaâ is more than an exercise in nostalgia. As the title suggests, the film has a second, more contemporary heroine. The Julie character (played by Amy Adams) is based on Julie Powell, a 29-year-old aspiring writer living in Queens who, casting about for a blog conceit in 2002, hit on a cool one: she would cook her way through all 524 recipes in Childâs âMastering the Art of French Cookingâ in 365 days and blog about her adventures. The movie shuttles back and forth between Julieâs year of compulsive cooking and blogging in Queens in 2002 and Juliaâs decade in Paris and Provence a half-century earlier, as recounted in âMy Life in France,â the memoir published a few years after her death in 2004. Julia Child in 1949 was in some ways in the same boat in which Julie Powell found herself in 2002: happily married to a really nice guy but feeling, acutely, the lack of a life project. Living in Paris, where her husband, Paul Child, was posted in the diplomatic corps, Julia (who like Julie had worked as a secretary) was at a loss as to what to do with her life until she realized that what she liked to do best was eat. So she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook. As with Julia, so with Julie: cooking saved her life, giving her a project and, eventually, a path to literary success.
That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Childâs legacy. Julie Powell operates in a world that Julia Child helped to create, one where food is taken seriously, where chefs have been welcomed into the repertory company of American celebrity and where cooking has become a broadly appealing mise-en-scĂšne in which success stories can plausibly be set and played out. How amazing is it that we live today in a culture that has not only something called the Food Network but now a hit show on that network called âThe Next Food Network Star,â which thousands of 20- and 30-somethings compete eagerly to become? It would seem we have come a long way from Swanson TV dinners.
The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American homes and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news channels. Millions of Americans, including my 16-year-old son, can tell you months after the finale which contestant emerged victorious in Season 5 of âTop Chefâ (Hosea Rosenberg, followed by Stefan Richter, his favorite, and Carla Hall). The popularity of cooking shows â or perhaps I should say food shows â has spread beyond the precincts of public or cable television to the broadcast networks, where Gordon Ramsay terrorizes newbie chefs on âHellâs Kitchenâ on Fox and Jamie Oliver is preparing a reality show on ABC in which he takes aim at an American city with an obesity problem and tries to teach the population how to cook. Itâs no wonder that a Hollywood studio would conclude that American audiences had an appetite for a movie in which the road to personal fulfillment and public success passes through the kitchen and turns, crucially, on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon. (The secret is to pat dry your beef before you brown it.)
But hereâs what I donât get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence â along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star â has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.
That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the cultureâs continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it â and watching it.
Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); thatâs less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. Itâs also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of âTop Chefâ or âChoppedâ or âThe Next Food Network Star.â What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves â an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.
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2. THE COURAGE TO FLIP
When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that âfor so many of us she took the fear out of cookingâ and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show (or, as Julia pronounced it, âthe poh-TAY-toh show!â), one of the episodes that Meryl Streep recreates brilliantly on screen. Millions of Americans of a certain age claim to remember Julia Child dropping a chicken or a goose on the floor, but the memory is apocryphal: what she dropped was a potato pancake, and it didnât quite make it to the floor. Still, this was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.
The episode has Julia making a plate-size potato pancake, sautéing a big disc of mashed potato into which she has folded impressive quantities of cream and butter. Then the fateful moment arrives:
âWhen you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,â she declares, clearly a tad nervous at the prospect, and then gives the big pancake a flip. On the way down, half of it catches the lip of the pan and splats onto the stove top. Undaunted, Julia scoops the thing up and roughly patches the pancake back together, explaining: âWhen I flipped it, I didnât have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.â And then, looking right through the camera as if taking us into her confidence, she utters the line that did so much to lift the fear of failure from my mother and her contemporaries: âIf youâre alone in the kitchen, WHOOOOâ â the pronoun is sung â âis going to see?â For a generation of women eager to transcend their mothersâ recipe box (and perhaps, too, their mothersâ social standing), Juliaâs little kitchen catastrophe was a liberation and a lesson: âThe only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them!â
It was a kind of courage â not only to cook but to cook the worldâs most glamorous and intimidating cuisine â that Julia Child gave my mother and so many other women like her, and to watch her empower viewers in episode after episode is to appreciate just how much about cooking on television â not to mention cooking itself â has changed in the years since âThe French Chefâ was on the air.
There are still cooking programs that will teach you how to cook. Public television offers the eminently useful âAmericaâs Test Kitchen.â The Food Network carries a whole slate of so-called dump-and-stir shows during the day, and the networkâs research suggests that at least some viewers are following along. But many of these programs â Iâm thinking of Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee â tend to be aimed at stay-at-home moms who are in a hurry and eager to please. (âHow good are you going to look when you serve this?â asks Paula Deen, a Southern gal of the old school.) These shows stress quick results, shortcuts and super convenience but never the sort of pleasure â physical and mental â that Julia Child took in the work of cooking: the tomahawking of a fish skeleton or the chopping of an onion, the Rolfing of butter into the breast of a raw chicken or the vigorous whisking of heavy cream. By the end of the potato show, Julia was out of breath and had broken a sweat, which she mopped from her brow with a paper towel. (Have you ever seen Martha Stewart break a sweat? Pant? If so, you know her a lot better than the rest of us.) Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didnât do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television.
Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air â 1963 â was the same year Betty Friedan published âThe Feminine Mystique,â the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression. You may think of these two figures as antagonists, but that wouldnât be quite right. They actually had a great deal in common, as Childâs biographer, Laura Shapiro, points out, and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women. Julia never referred to her viewers as âhousewivesâ â a word she detested â and never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who read âThe Feminine Mystiqueâ that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent womanâs attention. (A manâs too.) Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in âThe Second Sexâ that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of ârevelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift.â This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (fĂ©minisme, câest bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.
3. TO THE KITCHEN STADIUM
Whichever, kitchen work itself has changed considerably since 1963, judging from its depiction on todayâs how-to shows. Take the concept of cooking from scratch. Many of todayâs cooking programs rely unapologetically on ingredients that themselves contain lots of ingredients: canned soups, jarred mayonnaise, frozen vegetables, powdered sauces, vanilla wafers, limeade concentrate, Marshmallow Fluff. This probably shouldnât surprise us: processed foods have so thoroughly colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have redefined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food. Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff. So the shows encourage home cooks to take all manner of shortcuts, each of which involves buying another product, and all of which taken together have succeeded in redefining what is commonly meant by the verb âto cook.â
I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that âpeople call things âcookingâ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave â heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.â Balzer has been studying American eating habits since 1978; the NPD Group, the firm he works for, collects data from a pool of 2,000 food diaries to track American eating habits. Years ago Balzer noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be meaningless, so the firm tightened up the meaning of âto cookâ at least slightly to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some degree of âassembly of elements.â So microwaving a pizza doesnât count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this dispensation, youâre also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.) At least by Balzerâs none-too-exacting standard, Americans are still cooking up a storm â 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s.
Like most people who study consumer behavior, Balzer has developed a somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his research suggests is ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both. I kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of the activity I referred to as âreal scratch cooking,â but he wouldnât touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.
âHereâs an analogy,â Balzer said. âA hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, thatâs exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.â
After my discouraging hour on the phone with Balzer, I settled in for a couple more with the Food Network, trying to square his dismal view of our interest in cooking with the hyper-exuberant, even fetishized images of cooking that are presented on the screen. The Food Network undergoes a complete change of personality at night, when it trades the cozy precincts of the home kitchen and chirpy softball coaching of Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee for something markedly less feminine and less practical. Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late â90s, recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, âpeople donât watch television to learn things.â So she shifted the networkâs target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe and one that â important for a cable network â happens to contain a great many more men.
In prime time, the Food Networkâs mise-en-scĂšne shifts to masculine arenas like the Kitchen Stadium on âIron Chef,â where famous restaurant chefs wage gladiatorial combat to see who can, in 60 minutes, concoct the most spectacular meal from a secret ingredient ceremoniously unveiled just as the clock starts: an octopus or a bunch of bananas or a whole school of daurade. Whether in the Kitchen Stadium or on âChoppedâ or âThe Next Food Network Starâ or, over on Bravo, âTop Chef,â cooking in prime time is a form of athletic competition, drawing its visual and even aural vocabulary from âMonday Night Football.â On âIron Chef America,â one of the Food Networkâs biggest hits, the cookingcaster Alton Brown delivers a breathless (though always gently tongue-in-cheek) play by play and color commentary, as the iron chefs and their team of iron sous-chefs race the clock to peel, chop, slice, dice, mince, Cuisinart, mandoline, boil, double-boil, pan-sear, sautĂ©, sous vide, deep-fry, pressure-cook, grill, deglaze, reduce and plate â this last a word Iâm old enough to remember when it was a mere noun. A particularly dazzling display of chefly âknife skillsâ â a term bandied as freely on the Food Network as âpassing gameâ or âslugging percentageâ is on ESPN â will earn an instant replay: an onion minced in slo-mo. Can we get a camera on this, Alton Brown will ask in a hushed, this-must-be-golf tone of voice. It looks like Chef Flayâs going to try for a last-minute garnish grab before the clock runs out! Will he make it? [The buzzer sounds.] Yes!
These shows move so fast, in such a blur of flashing knives, frantic pantry raids and more sheer fire than you would ever want to see in your own kitchen, that I honestly canât tell you whether that âlast-minute garnish grabâ happened on âIron Chef Americaâ or âChoppedâ or âThe Next Food Network Starâ or whether it was Chef Flay or Chef Batali who snagged the sprig of foliage at the buzzer. But impressive it surely was, in the same way itâs impressive to watch a handful of eager young chefs on âChoppedâ figure out how to make a passable appetizer from chicken wings, celery, soba noodles and a package of string cheese in just 20 minutes, said starter to be judged by a panel of professional chefs on the basis of âtaste, creativity and presentation.â (If you ask me, the key to victory on any of these shows comes down to one factor: bacon. Whichever contestant puts bacon in the dish invariably seems to win.)
But you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills might translate to the home kitchen â or anywhere else for that matter. For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?) Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on Godâs green earth.
We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but theyâre not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the kind of cooking practiced in prime time is far more spectacular than anything you would ever try at home. No, for anyone hoping to pick up a few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of todayâs prime-time cooking shows is, Donât try this at home. If you really want to eat this way, go to a restaurant. Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, âHow much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?â
What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear â the social anxiety â out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what âcrudoâ means!) Then, at the judgesâ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption â including its conspicuous consumption. (I think Iâll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . .)
Surely itâs no accident that so many Food Network stars have themselves found a way to transcend barriers of social class in the kitchen â beginning with Emeril Lagasse, the working-class guy from Fall River, Mass., who, though he may not be able to sound the ârâ in âgarlic,â can still cook like a dream. Once upon a time Julia made the same promise in reverse: she showed you how you, too, could cook like someone who could not only prepare but properly pronounce a bĂ©arnaise. So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as lifting a spatula. The glamour of food has made it something of a class leveler in America, a fact that many of these shows implicitly celebrate. Television likes nothing better than to serve up elitism to the masses, paradoxical as that might sound. How wonderful is it that something like arugula can at the same time be a mark of sophistication and be found in almost every salad bar in America? Everybody wins!
But the shift from producing food on television to consuming it strikes me as a far-less-salubrious development. Traditionally, the recipe for the typical dump-and-stir program comprises about 80 percent cooking followed by 20 percent eating, but in prime time you now find a raft of shows that flip that ratio on its head, like âThe Best Thing I Ever Ateâ and âDiners, Drive-Ins and Dives,â which are about nothing but eating. Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts âDiners, Drive-Ins and Dives,â ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time heâs wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations: a 16-ounce Oh Gawd! burger (with the works); battered and deep-fried anything (clams, pickles, cinnamon buns, stuffed peppers, you name it); or a buttermilk burrito approximately the size of his head, stuffed with bacon, eggs and cheese. What Fieriâs critical vocabulary lacks in analytical rigor, it more than makes up for in tailgate enthusiasm: âMan, oh man, now this is what Iâm talkinâ about!â What can possibly be the appeal of watching Guy Fieri bite, masticate and swallow all this chow?
The historical drift of cooking programs â from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it â surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in televisionâs orbit. Itâs no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television â or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.
Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about â that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that, with âThe Next Food Network Star,â appears to have entered its baroque phase. The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about whatâs cooking than whoâs cooking. A few years ago, Mario Batali neatly summed up the networkâs formula to a reporter: âLook, itâs TV! Everyone has to fall into a niche. Iâm the Italian guy. Emerilâs the exuberant New Orleans guy with the big eyebrows who yells a lot. Bobbyâs the grilling guy. Rachael Ray is the cheerleader-type girl who makes things at home the way a regular person would. Giadaâs the beautiful girl with the nice rack who does simple Italian food. As silly as the whole Food Network is, it gives us all a soapbox to talk about the things we care about.â Not to mention a platform from which to sell all their stuff.
The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch â into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch. The formula is as circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV. True, in the case of the Swanson rendition, at least you get something that will fill you up; by comparison, the Food Network leaves you hungry, a condition its advertisers must love. But in neither case is there much risk that you will get off the couch and actually cook a meal. Both kinds of TV dinner plant us exactly where television always wants us: in front of the set, watching.
4. WATCHING WHAT WE EAT
To point out that television has succeeded in turning cooking into a spectator sport raises the question of why anyone would want to watch other people cook in the first place. There are plenty of things weâve stopped doing for ourselves that we have no desire to watch other people do on TV: you donât see shows about changing the oil in your car or ironing shirts or reading newspapers. So what is it about cooking, specifically, that makes it such good television just now?
Itâs worth keeping in mind that watching other people cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when âeveryoneâ still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men, for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. Watching my mother transform the raw materials of nature â a handful of plants, an animalâs flesh â into a favorite dinner was always a pretty good show, but on the afternoons when she tackled a complex marvel like chicken Kiev, I happily stopped whatever I was doing to watch. (I told you we had it pretty good, thanks partly to Julia.) My mother would hammer the boneless chicken breasts into flat pink slabs, roll them tightly around chunks of ice-cold herbed butter, glue the cylinders shut with egg, then fry the little logs until they turned golden brown, in what qualified as a minor miracle of transubstantiation. When the dish turned out right, knifing through the crust into the snowy white meat within would uncork a fragrant ooze of melted butter that seeped across the plate to merge with the Minute Rice. (If the instant rice sounds all wrong, remember that in the 1960s, Julia Child and modern food science were both tokens of sophistication.)
Yet even the most ordinary dish follows a similar arc of transformation, magically becoming something greater than the sum of its parts. Every dish contains not just culinary ingredients but also the ingredients of narrative: a beginning, a middle and an end. Bring in the element of fire â cookingâs deus ex machina â and youâve got a tasty little drama right there, the whole thing unfolding in a TV-friendly span of time: 30 minutes (at 350 degrees) will usually do it.
Cooking shows also benefit from the fact that food itself is â by definition â attractive to the humans who eat it, and that attraction can be enhanced by food styling, an art at which the Food Network so excels as to make Julia Child look like a piker. Youâll be flipping aimlessly through the cable channels when a slow-motion cascade of glistening red cherries or a tongue of flame lapping at a slab of meat on the grill will catch your eye, and your reptilian brain will paralyze your thumb on the remote, forcing you to stop to see whatâs cooking. Food shows are the campfires in the deep cable forest, drawing us like hungry wanderers to their flames. (And on the Food Network there are plenty of flames to catch your eye, compensating, no doubt, for the unfortunate absence of aromas.)
No matter how well produced, a televised oil change and lube offers no such satisfactions.
I suspect weâre drawn to the textures and rhythms of kitchen work, too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays. The chefs on TV get to put their hands on real stuff, not keyboards and screens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi; they get to work with fire and ice and perform feats of alchemy. By way of explaining why in the world she wants to cook her way through âMastering the Art of French Cooking,â all Julie Powell has to do in the film is show us her cubicle at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where she spends her days on the phone mollifying callers with problems that she lacks the power to fix.
âYou know what I love about cooking?â Julie tells us in a voice-over as we watch her field yet another inconclusive call on her headset. âI love that after a day where nothing is sure â and when I say nothing, I mean nothing â you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. Itâs such a comfort.â How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends â assuming the soufflĂ© doesnât collapse â with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflĂ© is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.
5. THE END OF COOKING
If cooking really offers all these satisfactions, then why donât we do more of it? Well, ask Julie Powell: for most of us it doesnât pay the rent, and very often our work doesnât leave us the time; during the year of Julia, dinner at the Powell apartment seldom arrived at the table before 10 p.m. For many years now, Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, weâve added 167 hours â the equivalent of a monthâs full-time labor â to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation â an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.
Itâs generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking â but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who donât work outside the home as it has among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who donât have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.
Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in âSomething From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,â the food industry strived to âpersuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.â The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.
Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their âmoral obligation to cook,â something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the âbakerâ to do â specifically, crack open an egg â she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens â which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today â opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.
Harry Balzerâs research suggests that the corporate project of redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal has succeeded beyond the industryâs wildest expectations. People think nothing of buying frozen peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their childrenâs lunch boxes. (Now how much of a timesaver can that be?) âWeâve had a hundred years of packaged foods,â Balzer told me, âand now weâre going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.â Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing. Balzer is unsentimental about this development: âDo you miss sewing or darning socks? I donât think so.â
So what are we doing with the time we save by outsourcing our food preparation to corporations and 16-year-old burger flippers? Working, commuting to work, surfing the Internet and, perhaps most curiously of all, watching other people cook on television.
But this may not be quite the paradox it seems. Maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on TV is that there are things about cooking we miss. We might not feel we have the time or the energy to do it ourselves every day, yet weâre not prepared to see it disappear from our lives entirely. Why? Perhaps because cooking â unlike sewing or darning socks â is an activity that strikes a deep emotional chord in us, one that might even go to the heart of our identity as human beings.
What?! Youâre telling me Bobby Flay strikes deep emotional chords?
Bear with me. Consider for a moment the proposition that as a human activity, cooking is far more important â to our happiness and to our health â than its current role in our lives, not to mention its depiction on TV, might lead you to believe. Letâs see what happens when we take cooking seriously.
6. THE COOKING ANIMAL
The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one. In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that âno beast is a cook,â called Homo sapiens âthe cooking animal,â though he might have reconsidered that definition had he been able to gaze upon the frozen-food cases at Wal-Mart. Fifty years later, in âThe Physiology of Taste,â the French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had âdone the most to advance the cause of civilization.â More recently, the anthropologist Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss, writing in 1964 in âThe Raw and the Cooked,â found that many cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as a symbolic way of distinguishing ourselves from the animals.
For LĂ©vi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation of nature into culture, but in the years since âThe Raw and the Cooked,â other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Earlier this year, Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called âCatching Fire,â in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors â not tool-making or language or meat-eating â that made us human. By providing our primate forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger (brains are notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (Thatâs nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.) Also, since cooking detoxifies many foods, it cracked open a treasure trove of nutritious calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.
Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would likely have fed himself on the go and alone, like the animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters weâve become, grazing at gas stations and skipping meals.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, all served to civilize us; âaround that fire,â Wrangham says, âwe became tamer.â
If cooking is as central to human identity and culture as Wrangham believes, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in our time would have a profound effect on modern life. At the very least, you would expect that its rapid disappearance from everyday life might leave us feeling nostalgic for the sights and smells and the sociality of the cook-fire. Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray may be pushing precisely that emotional button. Interestingly, the one kind of home cooking that is actually on the rise today (according to Harry Balzer) is outdoor grilling. Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture. (While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals, many of them on the grill.)
Yet we donât crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most people is more ceremony than routine. We seem to be well on our way to turning cooking into a form of weekend recreation, a backyard sport for which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator sport we watch from the couch. Cookingâs fate may be to join some of our other weekend exercises in recreational atavism: camping and gardening and hunting and riding on horseback. Something in us apparently likes to be reminded of our distant origins every now and then and to celebrate whatever rough skills for contending with the natural world might survive in us, beneath the thin crust of 21st-century civilization.
To play at farming or foraging for food strikes us as harmless enough, perhaps because the delegating of those activities to other people in real life is something most of us are generally O.K. with. But to relegate the activity of cooking to a form of play, something that happens just on weekends or mostly on television, seems much more consequential. The fact is that not cooking may well be deleterious to our health, and there is reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and 16-year-olds has already taken a toll on our physical and psychological well-being.
Consider some recent research on the links between cooking and dietary health. A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of price but also in the amount of time required to obtain them. The French fry did not become the most popular âvegetableâ in America until industry relieved us of the considerable effort needed to prepare French fries ourselves. Similarly, the mass production of cream-filled cakes, fried chicken wings and taquitos, exotically flavored chips or cheesy puffs of refined flour, has transformed all these hard-to-make-at-home foods into the sort of everyday fare you can pick up at the gas station on a whim and for less than a dollar. The fact that we no longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these items, as we would if we were making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely to indulge impulsively.
Cutler and his colleagues demonstrate that as the âtime costâ of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up, particularly consumption of the sort of snack and convenience foods that are typically cooked outside the home. They found that when we donât have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, weâve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.
Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.
So cooking matters â a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, theyâre bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes weâre hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and weâre struggling to deal with the consequences.
The question is, Can we ever put the genie back into the bottle? Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?
Let us hope so. Because itâs hard to imagine ever reforming the American way of eating or, for that matter, the American food system unless millions of Americans â women and men â are willing to make cooking a part of daily life. The path to a diet of fresher, unprocessed food, not to mention to a revitalized local-food economy, passes straight through the home kitchen.
But if this is a dream you find appealing, you might not want to call Harry Balzer right away to discuss it.
âNot going to happen,â he told me. âWhy? Because weâre basically cheap and lazy. And besides, the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation to cook? I donât see it.
âWeâre all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, thatâs the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket.â
Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the past three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality. This took a little doing. Many of his clients â which include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers â profit handsomely from the decline and fall of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself made it clear that he recognizes all that the decline of everyday cooking has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.
âEasy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Itâs short, and itâs simple. Hereâs my diet plan: Cook it yourself. Thatâs it. Eat anything you want â just as long as youâre willing to cook it yourself.â
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Samurai Swords: A Quick & Easy Guide
If you put together all of the deadliest weapons in human history, the most recognizable one would probably be the samurai sword. Although samurai swords have been gaining popularity lately through outlets like television and Hollywood, the weapon has been around for centuries. Originating in Japan, it has been one of the most recognized symbols of the country. Synonymous with strength and beauty, many feel that the samurai sword is the crown jewel of Japanese culture.
Samurai Swords
There are three main types of samurai swords, however probably the most famous is the Katana. The Katana is a sword with a long, curved blade that has a cutting edge on only one side. It came into being sometime in the late 10th century, with its original purpose being a weapon for surprise attacks. Soldiers would carry them at their belts in battle with the cutting edge facing up. During the age of the Samurai, swords were paired together and worn at the side as a symbol of status. Only if you were a samurai could you wear a pair of swords? All samurai wore a Katana. However, the second sword was chosen and worn as a matter of taste. The Katana could be paired with one of two additional swords, a Wakizashi, or a Tanto. A Wakizashi is a shorter sword than the Katana and when used in concert it is an effective tool for defense. Most times a Wakizashi was worn with the Katana if the particular practitioner of swordsmanship was a student of a particular "two-sword" style, like that of Miyamoto Musashi. The other sword that could be worn with a Katana was more of a knife than a sword. The Tanto was a short blade not usually longer than eleven or twelve inches in length, that was carried as an instrument for committing "hara-kiri" or a type of ritual suicide. Hara-kiri, or Seppuku, was enacted when a samurai had dishonored himself in some way and was done by sticking the Tanto into the left side of the abdomen and then dragging the blade upwards towards the heart and then to the right towards the lungs, thereby severing most major organs and ensuring an honorable death. Once again, either the Wakizashi or the Tanto could be paired with the Katana and worn on the left side. Traditional samurai swords are made out of a special Japanese steel called Tamahagane. During the forging process, two different consistencies of Tamahagane are added together to form the finished product. A harder outer steel is used to provide the sword with a hard and sharp cutting edge that will not dent or fracture easily. The harder steel is then wrapped around a softer inner core steel that allows the blade to absorb the energy of impacts thereby adding to the longevity and durability of the sword. After their forging, traditional Japanese swords are then sent to a polisher who sharpens and hones the edge of the blade to its final razor-sharpness. Japanese sword polishers spend years apprenticing and improving their skills under a teacher before they are certified and allowed to do such things on their own. It takes on average five to six years to become a licensed Japanese sword polisher, and even then it takes longer to be called a master. After the polishing of the blade is complete, it is fitted with a handle and a scabbard. Each of which is custom made by professionals in the respective areas. Only after the fittings are complete can a traditional samurai sword be considered complete.
Buying a Samurai Sword
In recent years the market for Japanese swords has grown, partly due to the massive flooding of cheap stainless Chinese knockoffs, that is ONLY MEANT FOR DISPLAY! In no way are these cheapo Chinese swords functional or intended for use at all. However, it is still possible to find functional samurai swords at affordable prices. Although not always traditional Japanese swords (by definition being made in Japan), they are made using the same methods and materials as higher priced traditional swords. Manufacturers such as Musashi Swords, Masahiro/Ryumon, Shinwa, United Cutlery, and C.A.S. Hanwei offer fully functional Japanese-style swords at affordable prices. Although most traditional Japanese Katana's have traveled to the realm of Antiquity and sword collectors, it is still possible for the modern day sword enthusiast to find and buy Japanese-style swords at affordable prices. Who knows, you might stumble upon something better than you bargained for. Keep your eyes and ear open. Traditional Japanese swords do turn up every once and a while. You just have to be patient.
youtube
from https://www.katanasale.com/blogs/katanasale/samurai-swords-a-quick-easy-guide from Katana Sale http://katanasale.blogspot.com/2018/02/samurai-swords-quick-easy-guide.html
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Text
Samurai Swords: A Quick & Easy Guide
If you put together all of the deadliest weapons in human history, the most recognizable one would probably be the samurai sword. Although samurai swords have been gaining popularity lately through outlets like television and Hollywood, the weapon has been around for centuries. Originating in Japan, it has been one of the most recognized symbols of the country. Synonymous with strength and beauty, many feel that the samurai sword is the crown jewel of Japanese culture.
Samurai Swords
There are three main types of samurai swords, however probably the most famous is the Katana. The Katana is a sword with a long, curved blade that has a cutting edge on only one side. It came into being sometime in the late 10th century, with its original purpose being a weapon for surprise attacks. Soldiers would carry them at their belts in battle with the cutting edge facing up.
During the age of the Samurai, swords were paired together and worn at the side as a symbol of status. Only if you were a samurai could you wear a pair of swords? All samurai wore a Katana. However, the second sword was chosen and worn as a matter of taste. The Katana could be paired with one of two additional swords, a Wakizashi, or a Tanto.
A Wakizashi is a shorter sword than the Katana and when used in concert it is an effective tool for defense. Most times a Wakizashi was worn with the Katana if the particular practitioner of swordsmanship was a student of a particular âtwo-swordâ style, like that of Miyamoto Musashi.
The other sword that could be worn with a Katana was more of a knife than a sword. The Tanto was a short blade not usually longer than eleven or twelve inches in length, that was carried as an instrument for committing âhara-kiriâ or a type of ritual suicide. Hara-kiri, or Seppuku, was enacted when a samurai had dishonored himself in some way and was done by sticking the Tanto into the left side of the abdomen and then dragging the blade upwards towards the heart and then to the right towards the lungs, thereby severing most major organs and ensuring an honorable death.
Once again, either the Wakizashi or the Tanto could be paired with the Katana and worn on the left side.
Traditional samurai swords are made out of a special Japanese steel called Tamahagane. During the forging process, two different consistencies of Tamahagane are added together to form the finished product. A harder outer steel is used to provide the sword with a hard and sharp cutting edge that will not dent or fracture easily. The harder steel is then wrapped around a softer inner core steel that allows the blade to absorb the energy of impacts thereby adding to the longevity and durability of the sword.
After their forging, traditional Japanese swords are then sent to a polisher who sharpens and hones the edge of the blade to its final razor-sharpness. Japanese sword polishers spend years apprenticing and improving their skills under a teacher before they are certified and allowed to do such things on their own. It takes on average five to six years to become a licensed Japanese sword polisher, and even then it takes longer to be called a master.
After the polishing of the blade is complete, it is fitted with a handle and a scabbard. Each of which is custom made by professionals in the respective areas. Only after the fittings are complete can a traditional samurai sword be considered complete.
Buying a Samurai Sword
In recent years the market for Japanese swords has grown, partly due to the massive flooding of cheap stainless Chinese knockoffs, that is ONLY MEANT FOR DISPLAY! In no way are these cheapo Chinese swords functional or intended for use at all. However, it is still possible to find functional samurai swords at affordable prices. Although not always traditional Japanese swords (by definition being made in Japan), they are made using the same methods and materials as higher priced traditional swords. Manufacturers such as Musashi Swords, Masahiro/Ryumon, Shinwa, United Cutlery, and C.A.S. Hanwei offer fully functional Japanese-style swords at affordable prices.
Although most traditional Japanese Katanaâs have traveled to the realm of Antiquity and sword collectors, it is still possible for the modern day sword enthusiast to find and buy Japanese-style swords at affordable prices. Who knows, you might stumble upon something better than you bargained for. Keep your eyes and ear open. Traditional Japanese swords do turn up every once and a while. You just have to be patient.
youtube
from KatanaSale â KatanaSale https://www.katanasale.com/blogs/katanasale/samurai-swords-a-quick-easy-guide
from Katana Sale https://katanasale.wordpress.com/2018/02/24/samurai-swords-a-quick-easy-guide/
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