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.

So far as I noticed, no one really said much about this when it happened, but a new Slayers series premiered this past summer.  Oh my goodness was that awesome.

Slayers isn’t for everyone, I suppose.  Because some people suck.  Really, though, I love comic fantasy, and Slayers is where it’s at for that.  The first anime DVD I ever bought was Slayers:  The Motion Picture.  It’s one of the series I have to thank for my interest in anime at all, I believe.

Slayers has actually been there for me sometimes when life just sucked.  That first anime DVD purchase I was talking about happened a few weeks into my freshman year of college.  I was miserable.  I’m only just now, seven years later, moving into a place where I could consider not living at home when I’m not attending school, so back then?  Suck.  I went home every weekend and didn’t miss anything, because the campus I went to was terrible.  People who weren’t as tied to home as I was went home every weekend, because they had more to do there.

I was planning to transfer, which was its own wrench:  near the end of my second semester I finally started hanging out with some of my high school friends who were at the same school, and my best friend was about to start there in the fall.  Of course, I was also worried I wouldn’t be able to transfer, due to financial issues, so I was afraid I’d be stuck at the same terrible place for another year, maybe three more.  I spent the weekends at home at that time watching Slayers Try a lot.  The local video place in my hometown had all of it (as well as Dragon Half and some really shitty stuff, like Maze).

So move all the way to 2008 from 2001.  I’d come a long way.  Summer.  I could drive on interstates without panicking.  I’d had two girlfriends, one serious (or, perhaps, srs bns).  I was halfway through my second graduate-level degree.  And, lo, again there was Slayers.  I spent several days at a friend’s place, playing DnD, Rock Band, and generally being a huge nerd with a bunch of huge nerds, a few days after my girlfriend broke up with me (yes, I know I mentioned this already.  It’s important moments of 2008 and that’s when this happened, what do you think’s going to dominate my thinking?  I’m not retconning my emotional state for your convenience).  Checking some websites on my friend’s computer, I saw a new Slayers series was airing.  My mindset is important here.  Depressed — fuck yes.  However, I had also basically assumed I would never see another full series.  They (whoever “they” are in this case) seemed content to release OVAs every so often.  One of the first things I did when I got back home was to download the first episode of Slayers Revolution, and it was great.  It was also the first episode of anime I watched after the dumping, as I couldn’t stand to sit alone in front of a computer for a little while.  I was so excited about it all that I broke out the seventh Slayers novel, which I hadn’t read yet, and read that, marking the first book I’d managed to sit down and read.  Again, alone with whatever recriminations I might manage to find = bad times.

The thing about Slayers, I think, is that it might not be the most brilliant, artistic work ever done, but it seems to have stayed precisely consistent over the years.  Obviously one has to agree that Slayers Try is good to agree with that statement.  And Revolution delivered.  The ED song, with its shouted beginning “This isn’t the end!” was obviously a balm to me — at a time when all I could think about were endings, the song reminded me that something good that’s threaded through my life for a very long time is still going.  And that’s great.

Of course, I haven’t finished watching the new series yet. . .  But if you keep up at all you know I’m terrible about stopping halfway through, usually because, subconsciously, I’m enjoying it too much to let it end.  Oops.