cry havoc

Sidenote: I think I got a stress fracture in my foot last monday. Foot's definitely reacting like it. I've been getting these off/on (in either foot) since 4th grade, so I'm pretty blase about it. It was a little more complicated by the fact that on Tues/Wed, my team at work had a major offsite team-building/innovation thing that I absolutely could not miss -- followed by four days in Philly for the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) conference that I absolutely refused to miss. I tried to minimize the walking on Tues/Wed, with minimal success, but there was no minimizing any walking between airports, hotel, going from panel to panel, and then going out to find things to eat. Only got to go to Chinatown once. If I hadn't been limping so much by that point, probably would've spent a lot more time in Philly's more-than-a-block Chinatown.

On the plus side, coming back, I somehow lucked out and got on TSA's pre-boarding. No more shoe removal! Which was both good and bad. Bad, because I really really wanted to take the boots off (I wore hiking boots in the possibly-false hope that some compression would help) and good -- because if I had taken the boots off, there was a good chance I'd simply not put them back on. My hiking boots have the least flex in the sole, which in this case is a good thing.

But enough about me. ( Some random observations about AAS. )

In the past year, I've watched a lot less anime and a lot more live action. Except not English-speaking: Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Mongolia, and a few shows from the Middle East, where there's subtitles. Not saying I watched the movies/tv all the way through, just that I've at least done my best to give everything a half-hour before moving on.

Then I got netflix. After I'd watched the few big-name movies I'd been curious about, I went through a slew of documentaries and was mostly unimpressed at the level of non-information. I mean, when National Geographic is giving Wikipedia a run for the money on lack o' detail and glossing, that's pretty sad. I was even less impressed with netflix's inability to warn me when a movie was dubbed or subtitled; there are only three or four Asian movies on netflix that I don't have or haven't already seen. But a few I hadn't saved, wouldn't mind rewatching, but the unhappy discovery that netflix has the dubbed version, oh, that's like nails on a blackboard. At least warn me, people.

Finally a few weekends ago, out of sheer boredom and having exhausted most everything else of any interest at the site, I dug into television shows. Some of my dwircle has talked about Once Upon a Time, and barring re-watching Xena, I figured, what the hell.

My god, that show is so white.

( Myth vs fairy tale, or, someone else's myth is NOT your fairy tale. See also, Mulan. )

Related: I stumbled over a post about how Why Sleepy Hollow is both the Silliest and Most Important Show on TV Right Now. Maybe it's time to see if that's on netflix, instead, because I sure as hell can't stomach any more of OUaT, as much as I like the original premise.

That said, I definitely recommend the linked article, especially when it gets into the moralistic representations of PoC onscreen. (I think there could be an argument for the same in fiction.) But worth additional contemplation, now that I have more time on my hands, having tossed to the side yet another promising but ultimately one-note, one-color story.

Currently writing a scene in which the pivotal/cultural religion of the story's world takes center stage. This is rather odd for me, and I'm wondering if it is for anyone else.

For the most part, I'm an apatheist. For me, I don't disbelieve a god, nor believe; I just don't care. I live my life according to ethics and principles (not morals), and try to do good in this lifetime with no hope nor care for any after-life rewards. If there are, fine; if not, fine. Which really amounts to: I don't like ritual, I don't like organized religion, I don't care much for massive displays of faith/belief, or the trappings of either. I kind of look at all of it... not with a jaundiced eye so much as a disinterested one. Some people require ritual, especially of a social nature. I'm not one of them.

No surprise then that the religion I've devised for my central culture is a relatively ritual-free religion. It has a lot in common with Shinto, in that very few elements are public (no weekly sunday get-together), most of it's not just personal but also private/solitary. But for the story, it's also crucial that this religion have an obligatory aspect, as well. Certain people are considered automatically priests, and it's not always within the person's say. It's somewhat like the old European tradition that the youngest son always entered religious orders -- there wasn't much choice to the role. It was pretty much set from birth, fated.

Which, seeing how I'm rather lukewarm about ritual, it wouldn't be a surprise that obligatory ritual gets my goat even faster. Yet here I am, doing a scene in which a culture explains and justifies its obligatory ritual. And for the story's purposes, it's not right for me to subtly imply via the narrative that this is a wrong thing; to be true to the story, this must be seen as a right [for that religion and its adherents] thing.

It'd be very easy to write a story in which religion (any religion) gets its comeuppance, or gets dissed or shown to be wrong in some way. I've seen that, too, when some religions -- usually ones written as seriously-close analogues to existing/real religions -- are portrayed by authors who don't believe in that religion. It feels like a failure of empathy on the author's part, because they'd rather demonize the non-Christian (or non-Pagan, or non-Western, or non-Eastern) religion than see it from the other side. (For the record, I hate those stories even more, oddly. I don't like any religion demonized, even if that sounds strange given my intro.)

It actually feels harder to write -- believably -- characters who really do cherish, and respect, and feel obligated to fulfill, a set of religious precepts. It's like I can't quite see ever being so deep-down in it that I couldn't understand how one could not be, or believe, such-and-such. Like people I knew in college who tried desperately to convert me (since apparently Episcopalian doesn't really 'count' as A True Believer) -- they were absolutely flabbergasted, even genuinely hurt -- that I couldn't seem to see how So Very Important the issue of "what you believe" really was. To them, yes, but to them, their belief was an all-encompassing thing and thus I, as someone whom they otherwise felt something in common with or whatever, must therefore also have the same something inside me that would call me to belief just as strongly as it called them. If that makes sense. (It did in my head.)

That's really hard for me to write. I can't write strong-faith characters believably. (I could say fanatic, but with the caveat that my personal attitude kind of skews the grading curve; I'm so far below "casual religion" that someone who does church once a week and sometimes on Wednesday night get-togethers is practically a fanatic in comparison.) I have an even harder time writing someone trying to justify their fanaticism, which on a good day might just be Very Strong Belief.

Anyone else deal with this in stories, or read a work where you get the idea the author's dealing with it? Or the opposite -- an author with Strong Beliefs struggling to write non-believer characters? Any tips, ideas, something to help me make sure I'm not dissing characters who in all other ways deserve to be non-demonized and treated respectfully?

A year (or two?) ago, there was a conversation online about the experience of growing up as an immigrant, with Mom's homefood for lunch and the reactions of (native-born, white) Americans to seeing the unfamiliar food. I cannot recall where that conversation occurred (community? someone's journal?) but if you do, pass along this link.

Is it Fair for Chefs to Cook Other Cultures’ Foods?, Francis Lam and Eddie Huang. Two immigrant sons hash out what it’s like to have your food shunned and celebrated in America

Some interesting, err, food for thought, in terms of how that childhood experience bears on the adult experience of two non-white American chefs/foodies and the question of -- when a non-American cuisine becomes 'popular' -- who has the right to cook it.

Sometimes it's a little odd to analyze other people's stories, and also get feedback from the author at the same time. Evidence A and B being some point I made for Diana Francis once and her response was basically, "hunh." Even over the phone it was kind of clear she was trying to figure out how I'd come up with that one, whatever it was. Which is to say, I think sometimes it's what a reader sees (whether reading into, or just picking up on little details that tip the nuance one way or another), and sometimes it's just the writer being focused on this plot-point and that character arc. Or: in the process of writing, the author sees the trees and doesn't realize until the end -- or until a beta points it out -- that the forest is not high altitude evergreen after all but somehow ended up being a semi-tropical rainforest.

It occurred to me today, out of nowhere, that while my current wip has an additional (if somewhat casual) theme of a matriarchal-blend in a patriarchal world, there's another genderflip going on that I'd completely missed. Main character has two potential spouses (polygamous society). In the MC's marriage to one of them, the one who proposes is the woman (editor: more like demands, really). For the MC's second marriage, the male potential consort arranges himself as part of a political transaction, which takes all of it out of his control, and in the end is effectively given as a male-consort to the MC. (I should note that since the second is a political transaction, it's not within the MC's control, either, but that's just a side-point.)

I had been thinking along class-lines, not gender lines. The female consort is from the farming class, and historically it seems that since the lower classes didn't have a lot of money or land, there was little basis for making marriage into a business transaction. When your dowry is going to be new shoes and maybe a picture for the family altar, or the bride price consists of a half a leg of cow (if even that much for either), then there's just not reason for anyone to get all worked up about arranging the marriage as an alliance between two dynasties. Over and over I've read historical commentary about otherwise widely-disparate cultures where the lower classes did do the whole love-match thing, because love (or at least a general like) was the only currency the participants really had. For that matter, lower classes tended to marry later, and without a lot of hoopla, and even in societies with emphasis on arranging (for middle class and above), the lower classes didn't have, or need, or could afford, such busy-ness.

So it made sense to me that if the female-consort is from a lower class background, she'd have grown up expecting marriage to be basically a, "hey, let's me and you live together." As long as the families don't hate each other, and the two parties agree, then that's about the extent of it.

Meanwhile, women in upper-class have less freedom -- being valuable assets used in transactional politics, like marriage alliances -- so the upper-class consort had to be male if he were to participate in the story at all. (Along these lines, I also realized belatedly that there's only one woman of rank from the patriarchal society who even gets named, let alone has any role to speak of; all the rest of the female characters are lower-class, thus not shut up in the house to sit around looking pretty all day.) And that means marriage becomes transactional, so it's not a huge stretch, culturally, for him to assume that marriage between his own elite family and someone else's family will be based on business/political alliance.

Anyway, that just struck me, that I'd unexpectedly reversed the usual gender-based order of things. It's the woman who takes the traditionally-(western)masculine approach of being active and doing the proposing; it's the man who sets himself up as a commodity to be bartered for and purchased, unseen by the groom.

Hunh.

From an interview with the author:

Q: I’ve studied Japanese for six years and been to Japan yet still may not have been able to execute a Japanese-inspired world as real and sensational as yours. What was the research involved in bringing the world of Stormdancer to life? Or did you drink some magical sake and try your luck?

A: I’ve had a few people say that, and it’s really flattering, but honestly I think most of my research was done via osmosis. I’ve always had an interest in Japanese cinema and manga, so I absorbed a lot of knowledge through that over the years. Wikipedia was really my go-to source for information, plus a few specialized sites dealing with the Tokugawa age.

The cool thing about writing a setting that’s inspired by Japan, but not actually Japan, is that you can take what you want from history and mythology and leave the rest. Take thunder tigers, for example – there’s nothing close to griffins in Japanese folklore. But without thunder tigers, there would be no Stormdancer.

My theory has been that if you want a place inspired by Japan (or anywhere) that's not actually Japan (or wherever), then you must avoid all non-English words that are not long-standing loan-words, for starters. At the simplest level. Otherwise, you're obviously writing about a certain place because the non-Englishness is going to act as a red flag, and pull people back into the concrete this-place that's the analogue to your wherever. This is why authors make up their own words & phrases in fantasy and science fiction, except in those cases where they specifically want you to be thinking France, Japan, Mozambique, or wherever.

But I'll let other folks do the talking, since that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story. Oh, Goodreads, why do you recommend stuff that just makes my blood boil?

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/365384575

Discounting manga/anime, I can count on two fingers how many Asian-inspired fantasies I know of. Stormdancer gets the middle one.

( Have a small link roundup. )

And some useful posts, for you guys and also for me:
http://whatfreshhellisthis.tumblr.com/post/5261084308/whats-wrong-with-cultural-appropriation-i-mean-i
http://thesadnessofpencils.tumblr.com/post/3485124248/do-you-have-any-guidelines-on-how-a-white-not-english

Honestly, when it gets to the point that I'm watching the newest Legend of Korra episodes because they're better than my other anime-options (and it's still 24 hours before the next Moretsu, anyway, so I'm dyin' heah), that's just... so many kinds of wrong. But still, voice-acting aside, it's a far more dynamic (camera-action-wise) cartoon than just about anything else I can ever name that came from a Western production company. And the background shots of the AU-Shanghai are just incredible. Sure, it's not Last Exile (but really, there is only ONE Gonzo), but it's head-and-shoulders with some anime I've seen, and several body-lengths above any cartoon I've ever seen, including the first Avatar series. (Then again, Nick isn't doing the awful compression-crap they did on the first Avatar, gawd, my eyes.)

I wanted to like Kuroko's Basketball, but by the third episode, it was showing its shonen roots, and not showing anything to break from that mold. Having a female coach doesn't save the day if you never actually see her, y'know, coach. Or produce a strategy, or tell the players what to do. Nice idea, but she's certainly no coach like Oofuri's Momo-kan. See, now that's a coach.

Sakamichi no Apollon, why oh why must you be only eight episodes? Talking about animation, I honestly do not think I have ever seen anyone animate music-playing to this degree. It's delightful. Even if the strong Kyushuu accent seems to be tripping CP up constantly.

And for those of you who'd wanted to know about potential yuri in Moretsu Pirates, well, my yuri goggles are a little cracked, so I'm not seeing it. But I can tell you that I was pleased and impressed with ep17 (the most recent). Here's the deal: it's an adaptation of a series of light novels, and somewhere in the pre-production, the director said in an interview that in order to adapt the story faithfully, something had to be cut... and the decision was made to cut the romantic storylines. Pretty gutsy, given that this might alienate some part of the shojo-tuned audience for whom romance is a make-or-break.

But! But! In the wiki, it mentions that Lynn, the now-president of the school's 'yacht' club (where 'yacht' = 'spaceship'), is a lesbian, and in love with Jenny, the previous president of the same club. I had expected that if all romance was being dropped, that this, too, would be set aside. I was okay with that, since it's not like the usual, where the non-traditional romances get set aside and only the heteronormative ones make it through adaptation decay. Except this time? The only romance that's so far made it into the adaptation is the lesbian relationship.

Let me clarify: it's not yuri. It's not primed for the male gaze. It's actually given the same respect and affection (and other characters' reactions) that I'd expect if one of the two were a guy. It's simply a relationship, and now it's canon for this adaptation, too. My love for Moretsu, it just grows exponentially with each episode.

Aaaaand then we have this season's Guilty Crown -- well, one of many, but the only one I took even a few minutes to bother watching, Hiiro no Kakera. Don't ask me why; I was bored. Reeeeeeally bored. (Then again, I marathoned the first 18 episodes of Guilty Crown in a fit of absolute crazy-contract-recovery madness. And then I sobered up and said NO MORE.) CP mentioned he was thinking of downloading it, since it ostensibly revolves around a priestess (a particular area of study of his, pop-culture-wise), and I had to break it to him. This show makes Guilty Crown look good. That takes quite a bit.

That's my new benchmark, incidentally. Is it as bad as Guilty Crown? If yes, it means that budget, voice-acting, backgrounds, and in-betweening is all decent to fairly high-quality... but that someone forgot to, y'know, actually hire someone to write a damn story.

Oh my gawd, the pain. I lost nine hours of my life watching that debacle AND I WILL NEVER GET THOSE HOURS BACK.

I've been on a recent tear through a slew of non-European-inflected high/epic fantasy, and I'm starting to wonder if it's just me. Am I finding the cultural mixes in some stories to be awkward or badly-done because I know too much (or even only a little more than nothing!), or is it because I'm not fluent enough in the cultures to be comfortable with mixing them up?

In a three-way tie for most egregious, there's Shea Godfrey's Nightshade, which has this visual within the first few paragraphs. The numbers are me, counting the ways.

Jessa walked straight among them, a dark green sari[1] wrapped about her lower body in turns of silk and draped forward over her left shoulder with a long-sleeved golden choli[2] blouse beneath it. She wore a burka[3] that covered her head and face, though it was not quite long enough to hide the ends of her hair[4].

The men lounged upon the dais. The raised platform curved about the head of the vast oval room like a horseshoe and closed in on the wide aisle that led to the throne at its deepest point, the Jade Throne[5], which was the seat of all power within the land of Lyoness[6]. ... Jade was the province of the throne and these were the chairs for the sons of King Abdul-Majid[7] de Bharjah of Lyoness.

This was my brain's reaction as I read:
1, 2. Ah, okay, an Indian-inflected setting.
3. Why a burka? Wouldn't you just pull the end of the sari to drape over your head? Or maybe this is Pakistani-inflected, with a Muslim touch?
4. There is something really wrong with this burka. It's missing like, the rest of it. Or her hair is past her ankles. Wait, does the author actually mean she's wearing a chadri? That would make more sense.
5. Uhm, like the Jade Emperor? China's in here, now? Or Guatemala. (Mayans being the other major culture that had jade mining and prized the rocks highly.) Unless the author's thinking serpentine, which isn't jade, but gets mistaken for it often -- and serpentine was prized in the middle east.
6. ...Except for the French-styled name, whut.
7. Looking pretty middle-eastern, there.

I'm not saying I have an issue with middle-eastern-inflected stories, even if it sounds like name-dropping on Indian and Chinese. (I'll let it go with only a mention of the author portraying a quasi-middle-eastern family -- with their chained dogs two inches away from outright dog-fighting -- as barbaric and cruel. I think the only adjective missing here was 'swarthy'. Hello, typecasting 101.) Regardless, maybe if I didn't know there's a difference between a burka and a chadri, or didn't realize that not everyone east of the Tiber dresses like Gandhi extras, maybe I wouldn't be bothered. Or maybe if I knew costume and dress far better than the smatterings I do know, I wouldn't be under the impression that these things don't mix.

( But then there's a different type of egregious; four of those, and two less so, behind the cut. )

But still, I could forgive a lot more, I think, if the names weren't so atrocious.

Alright, so there was this guy called Oda Nobunaga, but he also had the title of Kazusanosuke (as in Kazusa-no-suke, I think it was, which apparently means "vice-governor of Kazusa province"). In the manga I've been reading, some characters call him Nobunaga, and some call him Kazusanosuke. The same happens for other characters, like Oda Nobuyuki, who also gets called Kanjuurou, or Maeda Toshiie, who sometimes get called Matazaemon.

There seems to be a general pattern, in that Nobuyuki and Nobunaga's advisors both refer to him as Nobunaga, but his own wife calls him Kazusanosuke. And the opponent's advisors refer to Nobuyuki as Kanjuurou.

What was the deal with names? Did the position-title (which I presume names like "Kanjuurou" are) stand in for surnames, or something? What's the logic of when one is used, versus another?

In this post: GetBackers, Vampire Knight, D.Gray-man, Amatsuki, Di(e)ce.

I gave up on GetBackers, despite branchandroot's rec. Mostly, though, because of its discordance. Background, if you're not aware: it's the usual shonen bromance kind of story, with a fair bit of quasi-science-fiction/supernatural mixings, and plenty of the usual cliches. Two things about its development stuck in my head while reading. Hmm, make that three. I made it about halfway through the anime, then tried the manga, and quit about halfway through. While watching the anime, I also checked into the anime's development, and noted an unusual bit of info about the series' wrap-up (which happened prior to the story wrap-up, so there was the usual question of whether to do an anime-original ending).

Note: the story is actually a three-way invention, from what I gather. I think, not sure, but I seem to recall the author is actually a brother-sister penname, who work jointly with an artist. That is, the penname gives credit to brother and sister, but apparently (why am I surprised) the only mention of author quotations act like it's just one guy. So, dunno what the sister does. Anyway.

I can't find where I came across this bit -- I think in one of the articles cited in the wiki entry. Apparently, the anime director suggested making Kazuki's relationship canonical (anime canon, that is) with his second, Juubei. (Their respective weaponry, threads and needles, even suggest the pairing... among the many, many other things that do, including their own dialogue.) The mangaka-author refused, saying that Kazuki already had a destined pairing, Ren Radou.

Then I got to that character's introduction in the anime, and discovered the character isn't even real. She's part of the 3D/holographic construct. Alright, it's one thing if there's a flesh-and-blood half to match with the flesh-and-blood (err, in context, that is) character, but I have major issues with a story-author who'd insist there's a pairing, and choose a pairing in which one character is a computer program. It'd be one thing if the author insisted it be left undefined, but it says a lot to me about the author's agenda if he'd choose this real/nonreal pairing over the damn-near-text of a real/real pairing. There's erasure, and then there's replacement that reaches the level of ridiculous.

( The second bit was the mangaka-artist, who -- based on the copious amounts of ho-yay artwork -- has some serious yaoi fanboi leanings. Like, not even leanings. I'd say that tree fell over in the forest awhile back... and other commentary, and then onto the rest of the list. )

...and that should be enough for now. Back to catching up on Amatsuki, and at some point, I really will finally finish Kekkaishi, and catch up on Nurarihyon no Mago. Well, once I finish two other major projects on my plate, and there's always the kitchen...