I’m aware there’s another episode of Durarara!! out, but I haven’t seen it yet; it may show up in my next bout of catchup posts, after my next post-schoolwork marathon. Or maybe that won’t be necessary — spring break is coming up, and it’s not as if I have any plans.

Katanagatari 1-2

From Twitter:

2.26.2010 5:08:20 Katanagatari 1: So, uh, what keeps them from just killing their opponents during those 5-minute speeches? Dramatically convenient bushido?

2.26.2010 5:09:20 Katanagatari 1 cont.: Stupid complaint, since it’s sort of played for humor, but I like plausibly brief fights to the death these days.

2.26.2010 5:39:41 One thing I’m coming to love about Nishio Ishin: really twisted romance.

2.26.2010 6:45:24 Katanagatari 2: Haven’t decided how I feel about the author surrogate thing, but I definitely like this enough to continue.

As it says. There’s enough for me to like about this — the art, the music, the humor and general delivery, the fact that Shichika is basically Sabin/Mash from Final Fantasy 6 — that I’ll be trying to keep up with it. But I do want to talk a little about the author surrogate issue.

I raise a brow at Katanagatari’s author surrogate with the understanding that, in my current fiction-writing project, I’ll need to introduce an author character some 35,000 words ahead of where I am. And I want very much to avoid turning him into an author surrogate, so it’s probably worth considering at this point what, exactly, constitutes such a thing.

Consider Stephen Dedalus — not the mopey one from Ulysses so much as the…somewhat less mopey one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is, quite literally, a surrogate of James Joyce; the Portrait is semi-autobiographical. And he gives voice to a good bit of metafiction, some of which is probably concurrent with Joyce’s opinions on fiction and the writing thereof. But what keeps Stephen from being an author surrogate of the sort I mean here is that he never really comments upon the texts in which he appears. As far as literary art goes, he holds drama in the highest regard, so he doesn’t talk about novels much at all. Togame, on the other hand, remorselessly kicks the fourth wall down — and it can be funny, I’ll grant, but it can also be distracting, and the line between the two is thin.

So, what I mean by “author surrogate” is a character who (being written by the author) speaks with an authorial voice on matters of the text at hand, and does so in a moderately explicit way. This is problematic for me for two reasons. Firstly, until I’ve finished reading a thing at least once, I generally don’t want to know what it means to the author, lest my reading be affected. I’d rather not have my hand held. And secondly, I consider it a little irresponsible on the part of an author to indulge those readers who would limit their readings (and those of others, when possible) based on the author’s opinions — but, as that basically amounts to a complaint that writers too often give the majority of readers what they seem to want, I’ll accept that I’m being somewhat unreasonable here.

Or perhaps what I’m complaining about is simply the inward-looking text. A text’s commentary on itself is text, isn’t it? But a text can look inward, I think, without “reading” itself — without telling its reader how things should be interpreted. One reason I generally don’t read high fantasy anymore is the tendency of some authors in that genre to make all the requisite moral judgments for the reader. Perhaps, then, I’m leveling a complaint at unambiguous texts specifically. Or texts unambiguous in a specific way.

Suffice to say that I think Katanagatari is doing okay so far, but that I have my concerns.

Durarara!! 3-7

What was the last episode I wrote about? I guess it was the second, regarding all that interstitial mapping business. Which has more or less carried on as expected, but I haven’t felt the need to write a post for each episode telling Durarara!! to keep up the good work.

The third episode was good. But, I have to admit, the fourth put me off for a while. It occurred to me that I didn’t want any backstory for Celty — I didn’t want her to have a definite name, even. Episode seven gives another supernatural entity human roots, but I’m alright with Shizuo being half-human. Celty, on the other hand, is the ur-faerie. She doesn’t do extraordinary things with mundane objects; she doesn’t throw vending machines, or move quickly and knife people — she rides a motorcycle that’s actually a spirit-horse, and she pulls a scythe out of her smoking neck-hole. Somehow I wanted her to remain wholly magical, and by that I mean I wanted her existence to be a matter of “just because.” She’s less impressive now that we know how she got to where she is, and what she means to do there. But maybe that’s the point, as she’s made more human with each episode, it seems. We may as well let her be human, or humanized. It’s not as though we have anyone to blame for magic and myth but ourselves.

Speaking of ur-faeries and half-humans and such, I’m noticing a hierarchy of mysterious characters emerging. Toward the bottom, or human, end, we have Kida, who knows more than he lets on, but doesn’t seem to be actively involved in the unusual; the Dollars are somewhat higher up, and Simon, Shizuo, and Izaya higher still; and at the top we have, perhaps needless to say, Celty, the dullahan herself. With each episode the strange elements of Ikebukuro look more like a proper mythology.

We’re nearing the last leg of Northrop Frye’s first essay in Anatomy of Criticism; this time we’re tackling the section called “Thematic Modes.”

Frye opens by citing Aristotle’s six aspects of poetry, and puts off three until later in the book — so the three we will be dealing with are “mythos,” “ethos,” and “dianoia” (whcih are plot, characters/setting, and “thought,” respectively).  He identifies “thought” as “theme” (52).  He points out that works may be more interested in one than another, but all works have all elements in them.   They also scale.  For example, Sense and Sensibility is strongly thematic, until compared with The Grapes of Wrath.

“All formal allegories have, ipso facto, a strong thematic interest, though it does not follow, as is often said, that any thematic criticism of a work of fiction will turn it into an allegory [...] Genuine allegory is a structural element in literature: it has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation alone” (53-54).  I think this bears focus for two reasons — one is personal, in that I hate people trying to argue stories are allegories when they’re not, such as the people who claim The Lord of the Rings is an allegory of the second World War.

Also, and more importantly, it deals with people who refuse to believe that examination of themes in a work of art do anything other than paint another story on top of them — examining themes is not the same as attempting to overlay an allegory on the story.  I have been accused of this and (RE: my hatred of allegory in most cases) generally get irritated by it.  The comparison, as Frye illustrates with Sense and Sensibility vs. The Grapes of Wrath, alters our point of view toward the theme and the “plot,” but does not change what is actually there.

Frye illuminates an interesting dichotomy of creators, which he calls “episodic” and “encyclopaedic” (55).  These terms have to do, first, with how continuous the form of the work is (obviously “episodic” would be discontinuous).  He claims the creator communicating as an individual is episodic, while when the artist communicates “with a social function” the extended patterns of the encyclopaedic form is more useful.  Again, they’re not unrelated.

This, I think, has a lot of relevance to us in the otaku-rhombus.  First, go read Pontifus’s latest post.  We could consider the originating piece as episodic, whether it’s the first version of Arthur (whatever that is) or the first Toradora novel.  That is, the author was interested in committing the story to text rather than compiling the pieces and parts — Frye compares the encycopaedic tendency to the oracle or minstrel, who would, through his or her art, keep the stories of the entire culture (yes, any Arthur story, especially early Arthur stories, could be considered as a compilation of cultural folk stories; I’m more talking about versions by a person, shifting at least somewhat from the mythic to the romantic).

So what’s interesting to me, here, is to consider what the “encyclopaedic” artist would be in this case.  Which artist has the community in mind?  Well, critics, fanfiction writers, fan artists, doujinshi creators, they’re all likely suspects.  Here’s the typical classic example (I’m picking one I’m more familiar with):  Virgil, in The Aeneid, “re-compiles” the story of The Iliad and positions it within his culture, making it the origin of Rome — this is the minstrel using story to hold his cultural heritage in place.

The same thing seems to happen in all the forms of art I mentioned earlier.  Fanfiction isn’t just fiction based in someone else’s playground — the same is true of “shared-universe fiction,” such as the Star Wars novels.  A lot of people have wondered what separates those novels from fanfiction.  I think Frye offers us a way to figure that out — and let’s face it, there is some sort of difference.  I’ve read both.  It is the degree to which the artist keeps the community in mind.  George Lucas didn’t really, not in comparison to our other examples, when he made his movies.  The novelists keep the community in mind a little more, but so long as they follow the “Bible” (the collection of things that must be true in any work of a shared universe) they can do what they want.  Fanfiction writers, on the other hand, not only have to keep all that stuff in mind, they often have their own conventions, specific to the fanfiction writer community.  I’ve dealt with this a little in an earlier post.  That is almost pure community-focused art.

Criticism acts in the same way — most of it is community-centered.  I would argue that’s why a lot of people consider it “not art,” because we live in an era of ironic art, in which the individual artist is considered the new oracle, toughing it out on his or her own with no reference or bowing to anyone else.  Most of our culture can’t countenance an artist who makes obvious use of other sources in the art.

Herein lies, I think, our problems with adaptations.  It’s based on something else!  I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself.  It can’t be art, the ironic soul shouts, if it’s not original!  Brand new!  The artist’s pure, individual vision!  Well, wrong.  This just describes art that is primarily “episodic,” jointed only according to the artist’s needs and not the community’s.  We are left wanting to see, in a new form, the original.  Anything that drifts away from the original is violating the author’s vision.  Really, it is simply taking into account the community in which it moves, both creatively, as adaptations immediately create a community of creators (that is, author + director + actors +&c, for example), and in terms of audience (the community of television watchers have different cultural demands that the community-minded creator must keep in mind).

Frye goes on to provide a whole system of dealing with creators in the terms of the modes he set out earlier for comedy and tragedy.  I’ll spare you that, as it would nearly double this entry.  Interested parties should check out the book.

I’ll end with this bit:

[T]he poety never imitates “life” in the sense that life becomes anything more than the content of his work.  In every mode he imposes the same kind of mythical form on his content, but makes different adaptations of it.  In thematic modes, similarly, the poet never imitates thought except in the same sense of imposing a literary form on his thought.  (63)

This explains the origins, in the head of the artist, of mythic themes, according to Frye — they act as a method of structuring the stuff the artist wants to get out of his or her head.  The structure is easily adaptable to whatever it is the artist has in mind.

That’s the first essay!  Next in AiC will be, I believe, either the second essay, some of the stuff in the book I bought recently, titled Resistance to Theory (not quite what it sounds like), or some of the stuff in a book I got last month, Speculations on Speculation, which is a book of critical essays on science-fiction.  We’ll see how it goes.

Remember me? It’s Pontifus, that guy who has successfully ignored the blog he created for about a month! Why, you may or may not ask? Because I’m embroiled in another of my regularly scheduled methodological crises, and those are well and truly crippling. But that’s boring, so let’s move on.

I realized recently that Baka-Tsuki and its cadre of rogue translators are working their way through the Toradora light novels, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge. Normally I would resist; I don’t like to be in the middle of more than one adaptation at a time. But I’m willing to make exceptions when I’m far enough in one that I’m well past the beginning of the other, and when I really like the franchise in question.

In retrospect, I almost wish I’d exercised some restraint.

I really like the Toradora anime, and I mean really like it. A lot of people do, it seems. It reminds me so much of my own high school and college years that it’s painful to watch¹ at times, which is, come to find out, a good thing by my reckoning. I suppose this means I’m even more predisposed than I normally am by pure literary douchebaggery alone to find flaws in the Toradora light novels.

And that’s all well and good, but why is it so? I have a few guesses, several of which may apply. There are, by my reckoning, two repeat offenders: disparity of written imagery and visual images, and disparity of narrative techniques. These differences are not in themselves bad things, but they go a long way in rendering my response to the Toradora light novels less positive than my response to the show.

Join me, if you will, as I examine a few lines from the first chapter of the first Toradora novel² and try to explain what in God’s name I’m talking about (with the help of plenty of spoilers from the show, so if you haven’t seen much of it, turn back!).

A frustrated hand wiped the mist from the mirror. The run-down bathroom was foggy due to an early morning shower. So after wiping the mirror, it returned to being cloudy. It was pointless to take anger out on the mirror no matter how frustrated one was…

Make yourself gentle with floating bangs — That slogan was seen in the latest men’s fashion magazine. Takasu Ryuuji’s bangs were now “floating”. As the article instructed, he pulled his bangs at length, blow-dried them until they stood up, and then gently rubbed them sideways with some hair gel. He specifically woke up a half-hour early in order to make his hair resemble that of the model’s and have his wish granted.

Even though he had always wiped the steam off, even after spending a whole day last week cleaning out the mold in the kitchen and bathroom… All his effort had gone to waste in that horribly humid room. Biting his lips begrudgingly, Ryuuji tried to see if he could wipe off the mold with some tissues. Of course, it was never going to be that easy, and he ended up tearing the tissues to shreds.

Ah, right, this scene — you know, I barely recognized it at first as the same scene with which the anime opens. This is one of those narrative technique issues I mentioned. In the show, it’s a very kinetic scene, all movement and very little language, and it’s entertaining for that reason; we begin to get a feel for Ryuuji without any need for straightforward exposition. But, here, that movement is slowed by the explanation (maybe necessary, maybe not) of certain minutiae: we’re told that the bathroom is foggy in the aftermath of a shower, for example, and that Ryuuji has a habit of cleaning things. We could probably figure out the cause of the fogginess for ourselves, and the obsessive cleanliness could just as easily be shown later on — we can see it when Ryuuji attacks the mold immediately with whatever cleaning implements he has on hand. Note that this is not a criticism; the novel’s way of doing things isn’t necessarily bad, as it does serve the purpose of situating us more thoroughly in Ryuuji’s thoughts. It’s probably safe to say that film is better at conveying movement while literature excels at conveying thoughts and emotions, and the writers of the respective adaptations may have been playing to the strengths of their media. In this case, though, I prefer the movement, and while this may be the fault of bias set in place by my having seen the show first, I suspect it may have more to do with general personal preference; I like movement and physical response in novels more than long, unbroken tracts of description. I wouldn’t describe the above excerpts as long, unbroken tracts of description, mind you, but they certainly aren’t as active as the corresponding animated scenes, and again, maybe it’s a constraint of the medium.

Last year, just a few meters from the south side of this house, a ten-story luxury apartment building was built. As a result, the sun no longer shone through. This had driven Ryuuji to the brink of madness and frustration countless times already — the laundry could no longer dry; the tatami now expanded due to the humidity, curled at the corners and grew moldy; and sometimes it would even get frosty. The wallpaper was starting to peel, which must have had something to do with the humidity as well. It doesn’t matter since this is just a rented apartment, Ryuuji wanted to tell himself. Yet being extremely sensitive about keeping a place tidy and clean, Ryuuji just could not get himself to tolerate and compromise on such a thing. Looking up towards the white-tiled high-class condo, there was nothing those two poor people could do but stand shoulder to shoulder with their mouths open.

There’s something to be said for well-placed exposition, though. As someone who knows what’s coming, I like this description of Taiga’s apartment as a shadow over Ryuuji’s home and a blight upon his tatami mats — he’ll be tossed out of his comfort zone, and whether that’s a good thing is a matter of reader opinion, but it’s certainly a thing that happens to most (if not all) teenagers at some point. I wonder if first-time readers would find this passage tedious — the lead-up to the above paragraph seems to make it obvious enough to me that the apartment will be important later, but then, I knew that much from the beginning.

In order to give birth to Ryuuji, Yasuko dropped out of high school when she was still a first year, so she was not familiar with what life as a second year was like. Ryuuji felt a sense of sadness for a moment.

Wait, wait, wait…did they just make Yasuko tragic? I always wanted the show to give her more depth — single mothers are characters for whom I can muster a lot of sympathy — but I imagine it may have been hard for the writers to balance sympathy with her visual portrayal as altogether ridiculous. In animation (and probably any film, really), I suspect a character’s layers of depth will always be seen through the shadow of their physical form. Surely some film critic has written about that, but I don’t really know film criticism. It reminds me of literary mind-body dualism (which Cuchlann mentions toward the bottom of this post, if you’re curious), but unavoidable insofar as making judgments at first sight, however cursory, is unavoidable³. We might say that the dualism, if there is dualism, is an end rather than a means.

…[Ryuuji's reputation] could be partly blamed on his rough personality. He spoke in quite an unrefined way, which had something to do with his extreme sensitivity. This was why he rarely joked around or said anything foolish.

Interesting; I didn’t get “rough” or “unrefined” out of the show’s characterization of Ryuuji. Where social class is concerned, though, I suppose he isn’t exactly at the top of the pecking order. If anyone could give me this paragraph in the original Japanese, I’d appreciate it, as certain connotations of whatever words Takemiya used may have been lost when they became the English “rough” and “unrefined,” and I’d like to try to puzzle through it myself.

To use soccer as a metaphor, Ryuuji would be a center defender who hardly ever had any chance of participating in offense.

OH LOL, for lack of a better term. Ryuuji is a professional wingman, of course, a groundskeeper of the friend zone, and it caught me off guard when the novel came right out and said so. Maybe it shouldn’t have; it’s funny, I suppose, but Ryuuji’s unfortunate predicament is pretty obvious anyway.

Her various cheerful expressions.

Her delicate body and exaggerated movements.

Her innocent smiles and clear voice.

Despite his intimidating appearance, she still managed to keep her usual cheerfulness in his presence, even to this day.

That’s Kushieda Minori for you.

As I read, I found myself trying to poke holes in this description of Minorin in spite of better judgment, which tells me it’s best to consider adaptations as independent entities, at least during the initial reading of each. I wonder now if that’s even wholly possible — it may be possible for someone, but my record is perhaps suspect, and it’s not as if I don’t know better. Is it related to my broader inclination to compare things with other things often and at length? Is it possible that those who disparage the Toradora anime for not being more like the novels (just as I feel inclined to disparage the first chapter, if not vocally or with any belief in the objective rightness of doing so, for not being more like the anime, or perhaps for not being the anime) aren’t consciously at fault? Perhaps we’re dealing with some mechanism of reading here, some attribute of the body of narrative art. Or — and this is of course an implicit corollary of all artistic interpretation, analysis, and such — maybe it’s just me.

For my part, my impression of Minorin does include some of the novel’s descriptors, but is best summed up by the three particular incidents from the show which come to mind when I think of her — the first, representing her genki girl craziness, which rubs off on her friends once or twice…or thrice:

The second, representing her dedication and dauntlessness:

And the third and most recent, in which Ami throws all her flaws in her face (and for great justice):

These are the images which really stick with me, and pull the most weight in determining Minorin’s character for me — the first because it made me laugh for five minutes, the second because Minorin is fucking gar, and the third because I still feel anxious just thinking about it (for about an hour prior to the writing of this sentence, I’ve been jittery at the prospect of having to watch that scene again for the sake of grabbing the screencap). Regardless of their taking place later in the…not shared narrative, as the two adaptations give us two different narratives, but maybe the Toradora proto-narrative…I can’t help bringing these and other scenes with me when I read the novel. Perhaps they’re confounding influences, mere distractions, but even if they are, they exist; when the novel cues me with “Kushieda Minori,” I need to mentally construct a character to attach to that name, and if I’ve already done so for an alternate adaptation, I don’t know how I could completely and utterly disallow that Kushieda Minori from lending qualities to this one, considering the importance of prior knowledge and experience in reading.

Specifically, expressiveness, physical exaggeration, and cheerfulness are all things I associate with Minorin, and so I didn’t have trouble accepting those traits when the novel handed them to me. But “delicate body” gave me pause — maybe she looks delicate, but she’s proven her ability to hold up under physical duress more than once in the show, rendering half the connotations of “delicate” inapplicable. Granted, that may be attributable to a translation nuance, but “innocent smiles?” We viewers all know what lurks beneath that presumed innocence by now. Of course, there’s no way the novel could convey all that in one chapter, and Ryuuji doesn’t know Minorin well enough at that point to judge her accurately. I comprehend that on a conscious, logical, intellectual level, just as I comprehend that the two Minorins are not practically one and probably should not be considered as such, but that isn’t going to stop impatience and jadedness from being emotional byproducts of reading, and it isn’t going to stop my mind from being hypersensitive to possible “inaccuracies” against my will. Knowledge of the one version affects the experience of the other, and there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it (and I try, believe me).

Oh, and let’s not forget that the light novel offers its own visual depiction of Minorin…

…which isn’t wholly analogous to the Minorin I’m used to lately, who is prone to romantic dilemmas and hitting people who point out her flaws. These alternate depictions and their discrepancies inform and perhaps confound one another, especially when the adaptations in question are fairly similar; I’m starting to suspect that whether they should or not is of little consequence.

Her long straight hair softly fluttered and covered the tiny body of the Palmtop Tiger.

Speaking of those illustrations present in light novels, I wonder if we should consider them separate in terms of characterizing influences from the descriptions of the characters they represent, and, if so, to what degree. I mention this because this…

…is not “straight hair.” Is this a minor discrepancy? Yes, but it illustrates that different creators bring different agencies to different depictions of the same character, and this isn’t mitigated by the two depictions coexisting in the same physical text. I don’t know how much this matters, but it could certainly lead to situations in which the reader must contend with differing adaptations in deciding, consciously or not, what to include in their mental image of the text.

At the end of the day, I’d maintain that adaptations of the same “proto-narrative” should be considered separate texts, and that “I like this less because it isn’t like the other thing” shouldn’t be considered an objective basis for making a value judgment. As Cuchlann more pithily suggests, we should at least try to appreciate varying adaptations on their own merits rather than simply throwing them against one another. But personal preference is a shifty bastard, and if knowledge from one adaptation creeps into the experience of another, I don’t suppose there’s a whole lot we can do to keep the resultant webs of influence from becoming significant and often complex.

Of course, much of what I’m talking about here depends heavily upon my own reading nuances, as those are the only reading nuances about which I can speak accurately. Maybe you can erect impenetrable walls between adaptations, in which case I’m curious to know what that’s like.

Endnotes

¹See also Casshern Sins and Clannad ~After Story~. Damn this season is deliciously painful. Damn that last sentence sounds creepy in retrospect.

²You can find the chapter in question here, though, due to the wiki nature of Baka-Tsuki, the wording of the translation may have changed since I quoted it.

³See this recent article from New Scientist for more on that. I’m not so sure about “new physiognomy,” but I suspect that the idea of judging by appearances and the inevitability thereof carries over to fictional characters with visual representations. Even in the case of Ryuuji, whose fierce appearance is deliberately mismatched with his gentle personality, that sense of being mismatched is a ubiquitous element of his character, as we’re reminded of it by his physical form, central as that form is to the depiction of his thought, speech, and action.

I learned yesterday that there’s a new Slayers series airing right now.  I hadn’t heard anything about it, as I get most of my news from fellow bloggers, and I seem to be the only person who cares about the weapons-grade awesome of Lina Inverse, et al.  At any rate, I watched the first two episodes today, and decided to make a post that’s actually been in the back of my mind for a while now.  I’ll pose a question to you:  where does power come from?

In the Slayers world it comes from a lot of places.  Zelgadis is one-third demon, and seems to draw a lot of power from that part of himself (a semi-popular fandom trope is that he’ll be left behind if he’s ever cured of his chimerical status, as he wouldn’t then be on the same epic-tier as the other party members, to borrow some DnD terminology — appropriate, as Slayers supposedly began as an idea planted by a DnD campaign).  Gourry has a magic sword doodad.  Lina, Amelia, and all the other spellcasters draw their powers from prayers, basically.  They are spells, but they call upon the power of certain gods, demons, and so on.

There’s a significance here that I think a lot of people overlook.  Lina is a good character at her core.  In DnD terms, again, she would be considered Chaotic Good (wanting, sometimes desperately, to be Chaotic Neutral).  She helps people, generally, even though she also demands payment or, famously, preys on bandits to get lots of cash while still doing good deeds.  Amelia is definitely good — paladin material, if she weren’t a cleric already.  Lawful Good, in fact.  She’s a healer, a do-gooder, and a bit of a power ranger (she’s fond of high ground).  And yet, her reason, originally, for following Lina around was to learn the Dragon Slave, the rare spell that Lina mastered at some point before the story begins.  It’s devastating, the magical equivalent of a small nuclear bomb.  It’s also evil — the spell draws its power quite specifically from Ruby-Eye Shabranigdo, the demon that almost destroyed the earth in the Slayers setting’s ancient past.  Lina fights Shabranigdo at one point, and she can’t use the Dragon Slave, as it’s trying to hit him with himself.  This is (roughly) the equivalent of drawing power from Satan — though, as usual with media from Japan, there’s not just a binary set of gods out there, but the comparison is valid.  Shabranigdo is evil, the show never makes any bones about that.  Lina uses his power to fuel her most famous (though not most powerful) spell.  Where does that leave us, exactly?  Most media of the same ilk tells us that evil power is evil, and good power is good.  Star Wars makes a good comparison — it doesn’t matter what one’s goal is, if one uses the Dark Side, one is evil.  Light Side?  Good.

Lina is…  uh, well.  Lina.

Amelia isn’t the only person to take lessons in the Dragon Slave from Lina.  Sylphiel (your spelling may vary, I think this is what the American novel translations use) learns it too, and as we see in Slayers R, mastered it finally (along with Flare Arrow, a spell she couldn’t use for diddly beforehand).  Sylphiel is a shrine maiden, a magical miko, and knows no spells other than healing spells when she enters the story.  She’s fine with the Dragon Slave as well.

Slayers leaves us with one impression:  the source of power is completely unimportant.  This isn’t all that new, other shows, comics, and novels have posited the same thing, but it’s not the most popular view in fiction such as this.  The trope is that corruption leads only to corruption.  Gandalf must refuse the One Ring, even to the point of death or failure.  One point of view isn’t better than the other, mind; Slayers is just taking an interesting route, given that it’s also a show that features a main character who’s willing to destroy the only hint for a quest because the hint reminds her of someone she doesn’t like.

If you haven’t already grokked the title, I’m building to a Nietzsche reference here.  I really like Nietzsche, even though I still haven’t read a whole lot of his stuff.  In many of his works, including Will to Power, he posits that power is a construct essentially in the mold of Lina Inverse:  it’s just power, who cares where it came from?  What are you going to do with it?  Nietzsche goes so far, I believe, as to say if one has the power, whatever one does is okay.  That might be an overgeneralization, but it wouldn’t be the first time Nietzsche has suffered such (certain language, his association with Wagner, and his sister’s political inclinations after his death have been enough to brand Nietzsche both an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer).  We can see, at least, why Hitler might like Nietzsche, but I suspect Nietzsche would think Hitler a buffoon, using power to do stupid, quotidian things rather than altering the paradigms (to borrow phrasing from other philosophers).

Does this have any significance to reading Slayers itself?  I feel that it does.  I have always wondered, when I wasn’t laughing at it, why Lina’s name is so widely feared and wrongly interpreted.  She’s saved the world several times now, and yet it’s perfectly okay, socially, for the inspector, at the beginning of Revolution, to arrest her simply for being Lina Inverse.  One gets the sense, from her companions’ reactions, that it would be enough for a conviction.  I suspect that the world of Slayers has two layers to its power aquisition — one is the purely utilitarian, which we have been dealing with so far.  The other is the social picture painted of it, and I believe stories probably lean, in the world of Slayers, toward the Star Wars side of things, that power comes from good and bad places, and thus shares nature with its origins, rather than its use and purpose.  To this day, after nearly destroying the world, Rezo the Red Priest is regarded with awe and respect, though we know all his terrible history.  His public magic came from healing sources, and thus he was good.  Lina’s public magic comes from destructive sources, and thus she is evil.  That’s the press for you.

It’s remarkably medieval, actually, which makes sense given the setting.  Medieval Europeans believed the exterior of a person reflected the interior, so a beautiful woman was saintly, an ugly man was devilish, and a beautiful person randomly scarred (probably by pox) did something immoral and their inner nature has changed.  As I’ve told my students, all that description of how someone looks in a medieval romance, that you might think would be better as some kind of characterization, is both.  External appearance was characterization for readers back then.  So Lina looks evil, because of her spells (along with her temper and so on) so she is evil, despite what we know about her.  Her friends do the same thing as the villagers they run into, despite knowing everything we do about what she’s been doing the past few years.

In Slayers, it’s pretty clear that where power comes from doesn’t matter.  You can summon the devil himself, so long as he doesn’t go berserk and you use the power he lends you to save a town.  However, the town is likely to misinterpret things just a bit.

With a new season of Maria-Sama ga Miteru (alternately marimite and The Virgin Mary Watches Over Us), it’s on everyone’s minds again.  I might have already entered the fracas once, but here we go again, this time not on the new season, or even the OP, but the show as a whole and why we love it so (if we do).

I have this theory about certain entertainments…  that they get their strength from weaknesses.

That’s suitably oblique to be quotable when I’m dead and famous, so I’ll explain myself now.  Some stories, be they movies, books, or something episodic, have holes in them.  These are different from the gaps Wolfgang Iser talks about — which are the same as Scott McCloud’s gutter (you know, the one all the blood runs in).  These holes are just spots where there isn’t something that should, by all rights, be there.  Sometimes it’s necessary to leave it out.  Even after all these years the X-Men comic can’t afford to give us every detail of the characters’ lives, so there are holes.  Sometimes it’s down to lack of sense — I hold this is why all the holes are present in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, but even great writers like Arthur Conan Doyle are guilty of it, and for the same reason (specifically, Watson’s old war wound kept moving because Doyle ended up disliking working on the Holmes stories, so he never bothered to look it up and didn’t remember).  These holes allow the audience, if they’re willing, to nestle in and build their own little world, like the miles of abandoned subway in some major cities that are inhabited now.  There’s a third type, but I’ll get to that in just a bit.

There’s a danger in this kind of enjoyment.  I know, you must be crying out at this point:  how can you, you, ever claim there’s a danger to enjoyment?  Aren’t you the populist?  Well yes.  But it can lead to perfectly happy people not enjoying themselves when things take a turn.  Despite how inadvisable it is (I tell me students generally not to do it unless they have some more evidence), I’ll use a personal example:  I have a friend who really liked Psych, the USA network comedy about a Holmesian detective who has to pose as a psychic to get any work.  This friend got so used to “fandom” entertainment that she never seemed to enjoy anything that didn’t have the holes required by such things as fanfiction or even simple speculation.  So she started writing Psych fanfiction, slashing the main character with his antagonist, a detective on the police force who loathes him.  Let’s never mind, for now, this inexplicable tendency to pair characters with people who genuinely hate them, and focus on what happened later.  Eventually the show sort-of capitulated the very obvious and very telegraphed interest between the main character and, gasp, a lady.  My friend nearly swore off the show because it had violated her speculations.  Now, I have all sorts of personal reservations about this sort of thing, but what’s relevent here is that it curtailed her enjoyment of something she could have merrily continued watching (I did, and it continued to be as funny into the next season).

Now I can get to the third type of hole:  the kind that’s there deliberately.  Marimite has these kinds of holes, it seems to me.  The setting is fairly friendly to yuri, as the stuff with Sei and her old flame illustrate.  However, it never comes through — and from what scuttlebutt I’ve heard about the latter novels, that’s basically true to the end.  It tantalizes the reader with pretty obvious yuri implications.  I’ve read (if “read” is the right term for my stumbling, dictionary-referencing actions) the first marimite novel in Japanese, and there’s a moment when Yumi starts breathing heavily and her heart pounds, while she blushes and has nearly all the other trademark signs of arousal, all while thinking of Sachiko.  She then wonders why she’s responding that way, doesn’t get it, and wanders off to be a cute raccoon somewhere else.  But nothing ever happens.  It seems a lot like my aforementioned holes to me, emptied-out spaces in which the audience can fill their own versions of events.  And they have. Marimite is one of the few things I still read fanfiction for (by the way, while I still do not “ship” anything, sometimes I do want to read Yumi x Touko stories, and where the fuck can I find more than, like, three of them?); the fanart and doujinshi runs fast and strong, like the Mississippi, from the fandom; communities, strangely well-mannered — like the show itself, I suppose, where walking slowly is preferred — have gathered to simply discuss the characters, their relative pairings, and then link to yummy fanfiction where skirts are raised and characters stutter “onee-sama” a lot, usually breathily).

So.  Marimite is, for lack of a better term, a kind of lesbian clit-tease.  That’s okay.  I enjoy filling in those spaces like everyone else.  There is one application of this post to the new season, though, that I’ve thought of.  This idea of all the spaces (you’ll notice I abandoned the term “holes.”  If you haven’t figured out why, I’ll tell you when you’re older) being filled runs into certain problems, much like Psych did in my above example.  People have this picture that, due to the text’s reliance on empty spaces, is very vibrant, basically the entertainment itself.  But as I’ve pointed out, the show never quite capitulates on the promises it seems to make.  Guys do enter the picture.  So the furor about guys showing up to act in the play might be an extension of this.  The picture most of us (me included) have doesn’t involve guys; it involves cute ladies having make-outs.