Category Archives: Essay

Terror in Resonance and the Shadow Children

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“When heaven has a line around the corner,
we shouldn’t have to wait around and hope to get in
if we can carpenter a home in our heart right now
and carve a palace from within.”
– The Antlers

“Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”
– Bruce Springsteen

The world is against us, but the world is at our backs. The future could be ours, or there might just not be a future. There’s no “outside” of what we’re escaping, but we move forward anyway. Our only certainties are the wind, the darkness, and the distant horizon.

We live in the shadow of a great and terrible machine. That’s Terror in Resonance’s opening assumption; an assumption the show often takes very literally. Its characters weave in and out of society’s sunlit face and shadowed reality, and the rigidity of our modern social order is perhaps the show’s single constant antagonist. Whether they struggle against it or accept its presence, it is always there, always dictating the lives they may live. Terror in Resonance is a story of adolescent rebellion and societal alienation. It is a story of what the world demands of us, and what we become in its eyes. It is a story of anyone who is cast as a child by the world, and of the things only children can do.

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Hanamonogatari and the Crossroads

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“When they love you, and they will
Tell ‘em all they’ll love in my shadow.
And if they try to slow you down
Tell ‘em all to go to hell.”
– Japandroids

Kanbaru knew who she was, once. She was a runner. A basketball star. A girl in love. She was somebody, at least – a specific person. There were things typical of her; she knew where she stood and where she was running to. But at the beginning of Hanamonogatari, her path has shifted from a fixed track to an open field – her past offers no clues, her future holds no direction. She’s not a basketball star anymore. Her schoolgirl crush has shifted to respect for an absent friend. All that’s left now are hard choices, and a heavy rain of insistent, contradictory advice.

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Your Taste is Bad and So Are You

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“Some nights it’s just entertainment, and some other nights it’s real.”
– The Hold Steady

“Your favorite anime is SHIT. SHIIIIIIIT.”
– The Internet

“Do you think that, when making an evaluation on a piece of media, you are in part making some statement about those who enjoy that media?”

That was the question that prompted this post, and it really stumped me for a long, long time. The knee-jerk reaction is “no, that’s not true – people all like different things, and they have the right to like whatever they want.” But that’s really just avoiding the question, right? Yes, people have the right to like, say, an incredibly racist fantasy about how Hitler was right. But when I say “agree to disagree” to a fan, aren’t I silently adding “you crazy racist fucker”?

Sort of. Maybe? It’s not that simple.

“It’s not that simple” was my answer at the time. “This deserves a whole essay’s worth of elaboration.” And it’s true! Both of those things are true. Our relationship with media is complex – what we like doesn’t wholly define us, but it also isn’t completely apart from who we are. It says something. It means something. But it doesn’t have to mean that much, and we don’t have to take these criticisms personally. Or maybe we should take them a little personally, and that’s actually kind of important. Maybe we should learn to think a little less of ourselves than we do.

Here’s what I think.

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Imperfect Beings: Hunter x Hunter and the Chimera Ant

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Humanity is an imperfect species. Actually, that’s putting it very generously – humanity is a deeply flawed species. We’re selfish and self-destructive, ignorant to the point of blindness, arrogant to the point of madness. It’s almost a wonder we’ve come so far, or at least that we haven’t destroyed ourselves along the way. For all our triumphs, every advantage of our intelligence and self-awareness is also reflected countless times in insane invention, in total megalomania. We are our own worst enemy.

In light of this, it seems somewhat reasonable to consider the possibility of a do-over. Perhaps another species could do better than us – perhaps a species more interested in its own collective survival, and more able to coherently absorb the lessons of its forebearers. Perhaps a species somewhat more animal, more willing to be part of a grand organism than a wild, unpredictable individual. Perhaps such a species deserves that chance. Or perhaps such a species doesn’t even need to be offered a chance – if we were ever put against a creation that combined humanity’s intelligence and strength with an animalistic unity of purpose, would we even stand a chance?

Hunter x Hunter

Chimera Ant is a story about that question – or at least, about that question and a number of others. It catalogs the rise of the (surprise) Chimera Ants, a species that continuously evolves, absorbing the quirks and powers of any species it consumes. The queen of the Ants wishes to build a Perfect Being – the ultimate animal, destined to rule over all others. In order to do that, she constructs her child out of the best pieces available – and in the first of Chimera Ant’s many strange reflections, the construction of a Perfect Being end up requiring a great deal of flawed, self-involved, self-destructive human beings. As her army of Ants grows, their human DNA becomes more and more prominent, and the “imperfections” of human nature become more and more apparent in their behavior. “Fortunately,” this intermingling of human and ant instincts isn’t restricted solely to one side – as Chimera Ant unfolds, even the humans begin to demonstrate that ant nature isn’t perhaps quite so inhuman as it seems. And by the end…

Well, I’ll get to that. For now, let’s start by setting the stage.

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The Rising Tide: Madoka Rebellion and Communal Culture

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“And I / I disowned my / own family
All for love / All for love.”
The Lake – Typhoon

Madoka Rebellion

I’ve been planning on writing about Madoka Rebellion for a long time now, but Rebellion really hasn’t made it easy for me. It’s a strange beast – both reflective of Madoka Magica and totally apart from it, a continuation in some ways, a betrayal in others. Though you can certainly critique it as a film in its own right, it only really unfolds when you put it in context – and when a film’s context is “an emerging sea change in the process of media engagement,” it can be kinda hard to sum up the film as Good or Bad! If you’re looking for a simple takeaway, I believe Rebellion is a beautiful film and a terrible sequel – but why that is, and what its existence actually reflects, will take a little unpacking to explain. To understand Rebellion, you really have to understand Madoka Magica – so let’s begin there, with the series that started it all.

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Ping Pong and the Courage to Fall

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“A new age has come, but I still can’t get out of this rut
And it’s too straight and narrow, no escape routes around…”
Tadahitori

“Staking your life on ping pong is revolting,” says Smile, the ostensible “protagonist” of Ping Pong. In the context of a sports show, that seems kind of like sacrilege – what can be more important than giving it your all, than pinning your hopes on the pursuit of a crazy ping pong dream? But in the context of Ping Pong, his words make sense – because Ping Pong isn’t really much of a sports show. The matches are emotive and interpretive, the “training arcs” don’t exist, and instead of characters learning new techniques, we get rambling Christmas song montages. There’s no romance in believing in victory here – in the context of Ping Pong, Smile’s belief in a hero that will save him seems to almost be some kind of ironic joke.

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Shiki and the Setting Sun

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I’m kind of tired of vampires, you guys.

At this point, they seem just generally kind of played out. They suck blood, they sometimes turn into bats, they originally meant “fear of feminine sexuality” and now mean “sexy danger.” Sexy danger is pretty cool I guess, but if you keep using vampires to be dangerously sexy, eventually the spark fades. The current wave of trashy vampire romances certainly hasn’t helped, but vampires have always had a ceiling on their resonance as long as they stuck to the old model of what vampires really are.

Fortunately, Shiki thinks vampires are something very different.

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Character Design 101: Want and Need

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Management: Vague character-arc spoilers for a few shows here – FLCL, Eva, Tatami Galaxy, Cowboy Bebop, Hyouka. Hyouka’s the only one I get particularly specific on.

Gonna share something a little different today! Recently I’ve been thinking about characters, which is probably because I am always thinking about characters. While a lot of my personal views on character writing have obviously come from reading and watching a whole lot of stories, a fair amount of my understanding has also come from writing characters. As a fiction writer, knowing how to write a fleshed-out human being is rarely optional – but even just as someone who just wants to poke more deeply at the things they consume, I think analyzing characters from a character-creation standpoint can be very enlightening. Characters are kind of like trees – though the individual branches of their actions may look strange and circuitous, generally everything winds its way back to the central trunk of their base nature and desires. And looking at characters trunk-first can do a whole lot of work to make sense of their wildly winding limbs.

So let’s get down to that trunk, to the absolute base nature of a character. There are a few ways to approach this, but personally I think the easiest way to consider character writing is to start with two key variables. The two often-conflicting desires that tend to define their choices, their conflicts, and their ultimate resolution: what they want and what they need.

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Mushishi and the Hand of God

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Mushishi is a broad and ambiguous collection of vignettes, and it offers few easy answers. In light of this, it seems silly to try and impart any “one truth” of Mushishi’s narrative  – everyone will take something different from its stories. In light of that, I hope my audience will forgive me for my own somewhat selfish experience of this series. Mushishi can mean many things to many people, but it means one very important thing to me.

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Sekai Seifuku and the Island of Misfit Toys

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“So they make it back and when everybody hears their story, they start to realize… maybe they were a little hard on the misfits. Maybe misfits have a place, too.”

My mother loves Christmas. Not for any religious reasons – my family has pretty much always been a bunch of godless heathens. But because it’s a family holiday. Because it means time spent together, and the opportunity to express how much you care about those you love. I’ve always had a loving family, for which I count myself lucky. And one memory I always associate with Christmas is that old stop-motion Rudolph movie, where Rudolph meets an elf who wants to be a dentist and goes on all sorts of strange adventures.

The movie’s pretty great, actually – it’s whimsical and endearing and clearly made with a great deal of heart. But at the center of a movie that with every fiber of its existence wants to stress the importance of being together with those you love, the main characters find themselves visiting a strange place that threatens the exact opposite – the Island of Misfit Toys. On this frozen, forbidding rock, toys gather that have been rejected by the world – toys that don’t fit into the roles they’ve been assigned, toys that fail to live up to their owners’ expectations. Though strange and laden with melancholy, these toys end up gathering together in the wilderness, making a family of their own and awaiting the day the world will accept them once again.

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