Haibane Renmei 3: Temple -- The Communicator -- Pancakes

There aren't very many shows that can be described as "supernatural slice-of-life", but Haibane Renmei thus far is among them.  Its first three episodes are dedicated to laying out the life of the angel-like Haibane in the quaint locale of Old Home.  These episodes (and possibly the rest of the series, for all I know) are consumed with the quotidian and the almost banal.  It's world-building, but of a different sort than we usually see.  We still know basically nothing about what the Haibane are, or the world around them, or the mysterious and fairly ominous figures that run their nice little city.  But we know how they pay for things, how they raise their children, and what each of their hobbies are.

It's useful to contrast this with something like Game of Thrones.  In that series we get broad exposition about far-flung corners of the world and significant moments in history -- we have a much better picture of the world at large.  But zoom in and things start getting fuzzy.  After two seasons of Game of Thrones I still have no idea how the average person in that world lives, or at least not as much of an idea as I do of the ordinary lives of the Haibane after three episodes [1].  Haibane Renmei's focus points to a more sociological idea of fantasy, which imagines societies in the ways favoured by leftist historians that denounce the "great man" figure and focus on broader social trends and common experience.

Of course, the main difference is that whereas leftist historians are extremely critical of these aspects of society, Old Home and the village around it are thus far pretty idyllic settings.  There's work to do, but it's all pretty pleasant work, like baking and teaching.  (It's also work that's traditionally gendered feminine, although I'm not sure about the larger significance of this.)  Everybody is friendly and the worst conflict is a little mischief or childish misbehaviour, as at the end of the episode when we find out that Hikari has been using the halo mold in her baking.  The art style supports this mood, being full of thin lines and soft colours, creating a pleasant, nonthreatening, and sometimes soporific effect.

As newly hatched, Haibane Renmei's protagonist Rakka needs the world explained to her, which makes her a convenient proxy for the audience.  It's an age-old device, but it works well here.  But even for an audience surrogate Rakka seems strangely passive, constantly out of it and a little inept.  At first this makes her seem like just another hapless moe heroine, I would argue that this actually stems from the divide between her physical body and mind and her lack of experience.  We're used to thinking of the mind as developing naturally with experience, to the extent that we often fail to distinguish between the growth of the two, but Rakka presents the question of whether we can imagine a set of developed mental faculties without any set of memory or experience, newly pushed into the world.  This isn't a purely academic question either, as it raises a lot of the issues surrounding the fluid memory we know in the real world.  Rakka's strange combination of passivity, childlike curiosity, and frustration could just as easily belong to an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer.

All of the series's episode titles are triptychs, but they don't represent a rigid seperation between acts as they would in, say, a traditoinal Saturday-morning cartoon.  Instead they suggest a gentle flow from one story to another.  "Temple -- The Communicator -- Pancakes" (the title, not the episode itself) brings together three different things: the vaguely religious connotations of the series, the mysterious and faintly ominous Communicators which suggest a deeper mythology, and the genial adventures in child-raising that Rakka undertakes in this episode.  These conjure up disparate moods and disparate objectives, but in the actual episode they all appear to be of one cloth, belonging to the series's natural rhythm.  It's a magic trick that Haibane Renmei isn't afraid to brag about.

Let's start with the first part.  Japan has a complicated relationship with Christianity, greeting it with the same mixture of distrust, fascination, and incomprehension as it does most of Western culture.  Anime offers a good window into this.  There are fairly few portrayals of actual Christian religious practice -- the recent Kids on the Slope is all that comes to mind.  Instead, Christian mythology is taken and taken apart into material for fantasy.  Whereas American Christian fantasy mostly takes the whole mythos part and parcel, usually adding in its own interpretations (even something as irreverent as Dogma basically maintains the whole schema), anime has no compunctions about abandoning most of it and grasping the parts it likes into a completely new framework.  This can be seen in the jumble of Christian symbols within Evangelion[2] or Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne.  To be fair, the mostly secular Japanese culture largely treats Shinto and other Eastern religions the same way.  Some have accused shows like Evangelion of not really understanding the symbols they use, but this suggests a certain reverence for the symbols' original meanings that is disrupted by their repurposing within a genre narrative.

And so we have the angels in Haibane Renmei, who have wings and halos and live in a church but have no apparent link to the role of the angels in Christian mythology.  Is the town they find themselves in Heaven?  That would explain the generally warm atmosphere and lack of conflict, but if so it also suggests that Heaven is a very restrictive place and one that can promise contentment but not happiness.  The haibane still go to work, raise children, and have minor spats with each other -- it's just a bit more pleasant than the world we live in.  Given our experience of our fellow humans this seems to be the only version of a broad afterlife I can imagine.  So maybe the Christian mythology in Haibane Renmei is more closely tied back to its origin than it first appears.

This brings us to Rakka's interaction with the titular Communicator, one of the stranged mask men that seem to govern the haibane.  His title is somewhat ironic -- he is the Communicator because no one else is allowed to speak in his presence, only replying with a movement of the wings to signal "yes" or "no".  At the same time he hides his face, preventing anyone from reading his expression and discerning identity or information he doesn't want to divulge.  In the realm of silence, he does appear to be a mighty communicator, but it is only because of the norms that subdue all creation.  A neat metaphor for the state, the church, and really any other institution.


Of course, thus far the Communicators are presented as fairly benevolent rulers -- they accept Rakka as one of their own without much in the way of trial.  But Rakka was already a haibane.  Through this process of confirmation, the Communicator subtly transmutes an article of fact into an article of government approval, creating an appearance of generosity and acceptance while really simply tugging her identity into its realm of control.  (One could make an analogy between this and gay rights if one was really determined.)  This fits in with the general politics of the town.  They leave charmed lives, at the expense of their own autonomy and freedom -- none of them can leave, and their lives are rigidly expressed in official books.  This trade-off isn't as dystopian as one might think -- after all, we make a less dramatic but similar deal everytime we pay taxes.  But there's still something eerie to the Communicators and their obscurity, and I hope that Haibane Renmei isn't naive enough to make this setting utopian all the way through.

Finally we come to the pancakes, which make up a surprising amount of this episode.  The plotline consists of Rakka trying to convince the Young Feathers to eat rice, despite her own personal distaste for it, and then bribing everyone with pancakes to do it.  The main take-away from this is that Rakka is still in many ways a child, unaccustomed to the world around her.  But I'm not sure it raises above the cute-girl-does-cute-things genre that's become so common recently.  The main issue is the apparent lack of conflict or stakes.  Even in an utopian society there's friction between people and personal weakness.  The absence of any such thing in Gile is as eerie as anything else.

Next week: "You do not want this guy on top of you hitting you in the head."

[1] If this blog ever becomes popular enough to spawn a drinking game, trashing Game of Thrones as an aside will definitely warrant a shot.

[2]Same thing for a gratuitous Evangelion reference.

Space Brothers 9: Individual Resolve

Because so many anime series are adapted from established franchises in other media (usually manga) with their own pacing and narrative divisions, you can often end up with awkward episodes which don't really work as story units in themselves.  (The same is often true of American shows adapted from non-TV media -- Game of Thrones, anyone?)  From all appearances, "Individual Resolve" would appear to be one of those episodes, with two main storylines seemingly glued together.  The only problem is that Space Brothers is an original story with no original manga to explain this strange structure.

This episode consists of two fairly discrete parts, both quiet and rather quotidian.  The first deals with the fallout, or lack thereof, from last episode's "cliffhanger", when Mutta discovered Hibito's will and came to the abrupt realization of his brother's mortality.  In the second, he reunites with his peers from the second exam and has another quasi-romantic encounter with Serika.  This structure has its benefits -- it's hard to imagine either story being interesting when expanded to 20 minutes, and we really should advance the plot after spending 3 episodes on Mutta waiting for test results.  The relaxed pace of Space Brothers can teeter on the edge of boredom, and perhaps splitting these stories up would send it careening off to one side.

At the same time, slowness is what makes the show distinct.  Its plot and dominant ideas seem lifted out of a vaguely educational shounen anime -- a long round of testing, striving to be the best, terse declarations, masculine bonding, masculine self-doubt, and uplifting music the whole way through.  But it also realizes the adult consequences of these tropes.  By making us feel the wait for the test results, the show realizes the time between excitements that most series gloss over (although it does manage to inject some excitement in Mutta's vacation.)  Similarly, the will is significant not just because it highlights Hibito's mortality, but also the practical considerations of mortality, the offensively mundane business of deciding who gets his stuff after he dies.

This leads once again to a clash between Mutta's idealism and the world around him.  Mutta is a bit of an overgrown child, still hopped up on his young self's idolization of astronauts (the frequent flashbacks to his childhood, where he seems fairly similar to his current self and Hibito doesn't, cement that more than anything), and this is what leads to the overreactions that make him such a great comedic character.  When no one else is disturbed by Hibito's will, Mutta is almost outraged at their lack of affect.


In a way Space Brothers is an adult coming-of-age story, although not as obvious a one as, say, Welcome to the NHK.  It contains two parallel narratives, one of which is a fairly idealistic story of achieving your dream through hard work, and the other being the slow realization of all the uncomfortable aspects of that dream.  Hibito's will prompts Mutta to study and realize the danger involved in being an astronaut, complicating his long-time dream.  It's a realization not just of his brother's mortality but his own.  This is all expressed nicely in the faintly beautiful[1] pre-credits sequence in which Mutta dreams that he and Hibito are in place of a trio of astronauts that died in a recent crash.

Really, this is something that Mutta should have realized earlier, probably before he made it so far into the application process for a dangerous job.  But it's only through the refracted lens of his brother that he can really deal with his own mortality.  This isn't really resolved in this episode, and to some extent it can't be resolved, in life or in fiction.  If we're being honest with ourselves, mortality is such a complete break with everything we know that it's hard to even conceive, let alone accept.  As to whether or not this will stay an issue throughout the series, we'll have to wait (although perhaps those who aren't as behind as me already know.)

Following this we have a neat little intermission, as Mutta goes out to see the International Space Station pass by.  It's an activity that, we learn, he's done since he's a child, suggesting that despite his newfound awareness of the dangers of his job there's still a continuity with his mythological view of space exploration.  (This view is something that the space program actively cultivates, right down to the names of the space shuttles.)  The ISS in particular is a direct symbol of the way in which space exploration likes to narrate itself, as an international co-operation for scientific progress.  Of course, the actual station is a bit of a disappointment from a science-fictional perspective, looking more like a satellite with room for some people inside.  Babylon-5 it ain't.

Later on we learn that all of the other astronaut applicants were watching the station as it passed over Japan.  Space exploration, then, is a shared cultural signifier that can unite people from disparate places -- everyone from Mutta to Mutta's distant love interest Serika to Hibito to even the astronaut in the space station itself are connected through this one streak of light through the sky.  At the same time it's also a subcultural signifier -- the process of watching it unites the applicants and sets them apart from the rest of the population, who neither know nor care about the space station passing.  This nicely fits space exploration's dual status in our culture, as both a broad popular mythology and something that only a few really care about nowadays.

This power to unite and divide is echoed by the party Mutta attends for their group of applicants.  They're all gathered in pursuit of a common goal, but only five of them have been selected to move to the next round.  The irony that Space Brothers hits upon, intentionally or not, is that while space exploration places so much importance and emphasis on co-operation and unity between nations and individuals, it's also a profoundly individualistic process -- not only are the applicants competing against each other, but the narratives of space make heroes out of individuals (almost always the astronauts) instead of the mass of people responsible for the mission.

Of course, this story is not out to really surprise you, so all three of the characters we actually knew during the second stage have passed on to the third.  Along with them are two nondescript characters who seem to be slightly villainous, commenting about Mutta getting through do to his brother's fame, which is a dastardly insult only enhanced by it being somewhat true.  (Things that seem well-earned from the perspective of the underdog hero who wins things the unorthodox way can seem patently unfair from the perspective of the hard-working, plain competitor.)

Mutta then stumbles across yet another cause for self-doubt, as he learns about the specific and well thought-out reasons for Serika and Makabe's interest in becoming an astronaut, which make his vague childhood dream seem rather silly in comparison.  This seems to be the pattern of the series: Mutta overcomes one source of self-doubt, and promptly stumbles across another.  There are tests and challenges, but Mutta's main quest is an internal one.

This could quickly become irritating, but the series manages to pull it off and make things consistently interesting.  Its best weapon is its humour, which is sometimes so dominant that it would seem accurate to classify the show as a comedy.  It can also produce wonder and inspiration from pretty sparse materials -- somehow the same piece of music that's been used in every episode still manages to stir up emotion within me.  The secret isn't in the script -- it's in all of the elements that surround it.  Space Brothers is an example of what all of the guys who don't get lavished attention on as auteurs in television -- the musicians, the episode directors, the producers -- can bring to the table in making something better than it should be.

Next week: "Pancakes!  Pancakes!  Pancakes!"

[1]Whenever space appears in the show, it looks exquisite and exactly like the glorious fronteir that Mutta no doubt imagines it to be.  We'll see if things stay this way when the characters go there for real.

UFC on FX 4: Maynard vs. Guida

In some ways sports are the purest expression of the scientific ideology.  As much as we like to attach sentimental narratives to sports, the actual coverage of them relies heavily on numbers and mathematics.  This is not in opposition to the heavy narratives we attached to sports (which I described in my last UFC post) but rather in support of it: the idea of an unbiased, scientific testing-ground provides the stakes and legitimacy for the narratives we weave.

Mixed martial arts, then, is a bit of an abberation.  Desepite the constant attempts to inject statistics into the sport, it remains thoroughly subjective.  All of the methods for winning a match involve a decision on someone's part, whether it's a referee deciding to stop the fight, a fighter choosing to submit, or the judges deciding to score it for one side or another.  At some points this is merely an academic distinction, such as when a fighter is obviously knocked out cold, but it still doesn't have the obvious facticity of something like boxing's ten-count.  This particular event seems to highlight that subjectivity more than the usual, with the top-billed three fights all going to close and rather contentious decisions.

The first of these fights was between Brian Ebersole and TJ Waldburger.  Waldburger is one of those oddities, a veteran undercarder, who wracks up an impressive number of UFC wins in minor untelevised (or, as is now the case, televised on nothing channels) fights, then goes up to the main card to blank stares and is usually defeated.  It's not a bad career, but I'll confess to thinking of him as cannon fodder -- which is why I was so surprised when he came out of the gates and started kicking ass.

Ebersole is almost the opposite -- a fighter who's taken on competition that's only a bit better, but is a lot more high-profile.  This is mostly because of his fan-friendly oddness, from his fondness for cartwheel kicks to shaving his chest hair into a giant arrow.

He has a narrative -- the quirky older veteran making one last run at the big show, and he's not afraid to tell it via fan sites and social media, which is essential for a sport with a young fanbase.  That's why this was "the Brian Ebersole match" instead of "the TJ Waldburger match" even though, as the match itself showed, both guys are pretty equally skilled.

The match highlights one of the constant dilemmas of MMA judging -- top control vs. defense from the bottom.  There's a vocal set of fans that contend that judging unfairly favours the fighter who ends up on top when things go to the ground, mainly due to judges' lack of knowledge of the ground game (most MMA judges have their roots in boxing).  This has lead to the dominance of wrestling and the "lay and pray" strategy.  These people have more than a bit of a point.  Waldburger's actions in the second round are the kind of offensive gaurd-work, constantly going for submissions and sweeps, that more or less negates Ebersole's attempts at ground and pound.  On the other hand, none of the submissions really come close to succeeding -- should we disregard them as we would a missed strike?  Rate them as a successful attack, or at least successful grappling, because they stopped Ebersole from striking on the ground?  Or give the points to Ebersole for dictating where the fight took place?  After all, if Waldburger gets points for putting his opponent in an ineffective hold, surely Ebersole should get the same.

In the end, two out of the three judges saw it for Ebersole, which only gives more fuel to the bottom-game advocates.  It'll get marked down as a win just like the more definitive ones are, and absent any furor over the judging (which is usually reserved for more high-profile fights like the recent Diaz/Condit or Edgar/Henderson matches) it'll generally be regarded as a legitimate result.  As it should -- if you're going to have judges, you should take their judgements seriously.  But there's a moment of subjective choice and opinion here that's immediately papered over by the objective trappings of sport.

In the co-main event, veteran lightweight also-rans Sam Stout and Spencer Fisher completed their trilogy.  It's a bit of an odd trilogy, one without much in the way of story or stakes behind it, although at least it gives some identity to two of the lightweight division's very thick middle.  The decision, like the one before it, priveledged top control: in this case, the takedowns Stout landed seemed to overcome what I saw as stronger striking from Fisher.

The question of fairness is one that inevitably gets raised when it comes to decisions, but it's trickier than one would think.  Even if you disagree with the standard judging philosophy, which values takedowns and top controls over damage (within reason), it's a well-known one, and every fighter at this level knows that a takedown can often win them a round they would otherwise lose.  If the scoring system and its biases are public knowledge, then the sport becomes fair again -- nobody argues that football is unfair because it gives more points for a touchdown than a field goal.  Of course, this violates the premise of mixed martial arts, that it's the closest simulation to an actual fight possible, given safety concerns.  When people object to the priorities of judges, it's because they make it more abstract, and further away from the core concept.  Combat sports, unlike most other sports[1], has a claim to authenticity at its centre, as the ability to physically fight someone is (or at least seems) more inherently valuable, stemming from real-world occurrences, than the ability to kick a ball into a net.  The professionalization of mixed martial arts threatens that authenticity, even as it helps MMA as a sport qua sport.

There's also a bit of unintentional foreshadowing for the next fight, as a match billed for its excitement value, rather than its relevance, fails to be very exciting.  This isn't a scripted sport like pro wrestling by any means, but there are still roles certain fighters and certain matches are expected to play, and Fisher and Stout were given the role of "go out there and brawl".  Their failure to live up to this unspoken expectation was a minor and not-muched-noticed one, but it would set the stage for a more significant one later.

That is, of course, the now-infamous[2] Maynard/Guida main event.  The fight was billed as the best of both worlds -- two top lightweights fighting in a match that seemed sure to be exciting.  However, Clay Guida, long established as a fan favourite for his oversized personality and frenetic pace, played a very rangy and reactive gameplan, which involved moving around more than striking.  Until the last couple of rounds Maynard seemed content to play into that strategy.  As the fight wore on, Guida seemed to forget the "counterstriking" part of the plan and focus solely on dodging.

From a strategic standpoint, Guida's gameplan wasn't a complete disaster.  He lost by only the narrowest of margins (two 48-47 decisions to one) and many fan writers gave him the match.  But from an aesthetic standpoint, it was awful.  (Matthew Polly has a good summation of this, a rare thoughtful piece in the MMA media).  The fight evinced such revulsion that the fans, who began cheeering Guida, were chanting for Maynard by the end, a first for the usually dull wrestler.  In a way, this is a kind of accidental genius.  Pro wrestling, with the benefit of scripting, often tries and fails to change the audience's opinion of an athlete this completely, and the "double turn" is rarely successfully pulled off.  This is the benefit of sports: the audience can decide who the heroes and villains are, even if their decisions are capricious.

And the audience reaction is hardly irrelevant.  With the scores as close as they are, it's easy to imagine that the crowd's hatred of Guida's passivity might have been a finger on the scale.  Beyond that, the UFC is run without any kind of formal rankings or brackets, so popularity influences how a fighter advances or slides as much as their wins or losses do.  Maynard certainly seemed to grasp this, actively egging the crowd on and doing his best to make Guida look foolish.


The role of entertainment in MMA is a complex one.  Certainly in other sports people complain about boring teams, but you'll rarely see a boring win dismissed as illegitimate in the same way it often is in MMA fandom.  And, because of the informal nature of rankings and contendership, this is often true in the actual organization as well -- no matter how many times Jon Fitch won a match by wrestling a guy into a stupor for fifteen minutes, he wasn't going to get another title shot.  In part this is due to MMA's claim to authenticity, with the buzzwords often being "a real fighter" against "point fighting".  It may also be due to MMA's historical connection to pro wrestling, with many current UFC fans being past WWE fans who are looking for more authentic violence but still want a garauntee of entertainment.  Such judgements may seem less fair and less scientific than the clarity of other sports, and I've certainly argued in defense of "boring" fighters in the past.  But, for a sport as rooted in subjectivity as MMA, it seems oddly appropriate.

Next week: "You should practice your handwriting, so you don't embarass yourself after you die."

[1] The exception would, I suppose, be things like track and field and swimming, which are tests of natural abilities.

[2]"Infamous" feels a little historical for something that happened last week, but in the rapid age of media reaction, things become historical symbols of themselves very quickly.

Game of Thrones 2-10: Valar Morghulis

(No, this is not a change of format.  My randomizer has just served me alternating RahXephon and Game of Thrones episodes for the past four weeks.  Believe me, I'm as baffled as you are.)

"Valar Morghulis" is basically the structural opposite of the previous episode of Game of Thrones, "Blackwater".  That episode narrowed down the scope of the series to one event and location and greatly benefited from it, producing the best episode of the series thus far (although one that was still affected by some of the show's other flaws).  What's more it was a distinct episode of television, separate from what came before and what came after but still in continuity with them.  It was a sign that this show could be, if not brilliant, at least moving.

But in the finale things revert to form.  As I mentioned many moons ago, a season of Game of Thrones often feels like a ten-hour movie chopped up into one-hour chunks for the convenience of broadcasting, which kind of goes against the whole point of serialized TV.  Part of this is the ever-expanding scope of the series: as the characters scatter to the four winds, we have to follow every one of them, resulting in more and more plotlines.  This is an extended episode, but even so it feels like it's in a desperate rush to touch base with every plotline just to set it up for a cliffhanger going into Season 3.  Jason Mittel counts 12 main stories in this episode, which is off the charts as far as TV episodes go.

It's tempting to compare this expanding universe to that of The Wire, which was constantly adding new layers to its portrayal of Baltimore.  But the major difference in my mind (besides sheer quality) is that The Wire envisioned all of these as part of a complex societal machine.  In Game of Thrones the various stories are certainly connected, although some of the more far-flung adventures -- like Jon Snow's travels beyond the Wall or Danerys's troubles in Qarth -- are rather isolated.  Still, there's the implicit promise that even those will pay off in time.

It's hard to know really where to begin, then.  Giving a fair amount of consideration to each plot would make this post a lot longer than I have the time or effort for, and to scale back and try to cram everything in would more or less reduce the post to recap.  Perhaps this is why episodic bloggers, already a breed given over to recap and thumbs-up/thumbs-down evaluation, love Game of Thrones so much.  It may not give you the best stories or characters on TV, but it certainly gives you the most. (But this is probably just me being bitter.)  This may explain why, even more than usual, I'm going to ignore big parts of the episode and focus on the implications of just a couple of events.  It's not like it's an unified whole in itself, after all.

In particular two one-off scenes highlight the economy of sexual violence in Game of Thrones, as well as the economy of just plain violence.  In an early scene we have Joffrey swapping out his fiancee Sansa for a more politically prudent model in that of Margery Tyrell, the kind of deal that is brokered very carefully behind closed doors (although this is never explicitly shown) but has to be performed before the court so it appears spontaneous and cinematic at the same time.

(It's hard to make out in this reduced image, but that's the happy couple in the background, dwarfed by the ceremony surrounding them.)

The idea of romantic marriage, which didn't really exist in actual medieval times, appears to be an ideal in Game of Thrones, if a seldom-reached one.  Margery and Joffrey make shows of confessing their improbable love for each other, even though it's an obviously political marriage, and Robb marries Talisa in a small and politically impractical ceremony because he swears he's in love.  It's hard to say whether or not this is a conscious change from the actual beliefs of medieval Europe or simply a misunderstanding of them.

This marriage frees up Sansa, who was previously one of the many recipients of Joffrey's sexual violence.  His violence is obviously supposed to mark him as a villain, but the show also seems to take pleasure in displaying it cinematically, even when it doesn't seem to really add anything to the story or the character (the peak being the scene where he makes a pair of hookers beat himself).  Sansa suffered this violence quietly, always pledging her love for Joffrey, and it was hard to tell whether she actually believed what she was saying or not.  Sophie Turner deserves a lot of credit for her acting this season, and the broad smile when her engagement is broken, finally showing her true feelings, is the most joyous moment of the episode and maybe the series thus far.

But of course, this is Game of Thrones, so her happiness lasts a matter of seconds.  She is immediately offered protection by Littlefinger, an offer that is hard to refuse but nevertheless has sinister undertones -- not least because Littlefinger owns a whorehouse, and has just been given a big spooky castle.  Sansa is a near-constant  subject to sexual violence, or what Sady Doyle bitingly refers to as the game of "Who's Molesting Sansa Stark?"  In part this is because of how determined she is to traditional gender roles, which makes her vulnerable to the power of men above her as well as the rage of white male authors

On the other side of the equation we have Brienne, who embodies non-femininity.  Her sole scene begins with Jaime light-heartedly threatening her with gang rape.  They then came across three girls executed for "laying with lions" or prostituting themselves to the wrong side of the war -- a harsh enforcement of the restrictions on female sexuality.  They are set upon by the three men who killed the women, who promptly laugh at Brienne and imply that they raped one of the women.  Despite being on the "good" side of the war, fighting for the Starks, this establishes them as worthy of the violence which Brienne shortly visits upon them.

I've mentioned this before, but it's still a troubling idea that the series presents.  In the world of Game of Thrones, sexual violence is a currency and a tactic, and certainly commonplace.  It appears in both subtle forms (arranged marriages for political ends) and blatant ones (rape by random soldiers).  But the series suggests that violating traditional femininity, or simply being powerful and strong-willed enough by Danaerys, is a way of protection against this culture of rape.  Such acts certainly have the capability of subverting the patriarchal ideology that justifies such sexual violence.  But they also put the onus of this violence on the women -- after all, if they were all as cool and strong as Brienne, they wouldn't be in trouble all the time.  And queer or otherwise gender-non-performing women in the real world certainly have no special resistance against rape and violence -- if anything, they're more frequently targeted for it.

Sansa and Brienne may be the most obvious targets, but the threat of sexual violence seems to hover constantly over every young female character, whether it be a momentary obstacle to be cut down (as Brienne does to the implied-rapists) or a long-term danger that proves harder to escape (as with Sansa's many engagements).  Certainly this is part of Game of Thrones' intended commentary on gender roles in its society, and our (possibly just historical) society by implication.  But it's hard not to wonder if the narrative isn't also using sexual violence as a kind of currency, providing at once vicarious thrills and the exhibition of simplistic justice.

One final, aesthetic note.  In my first Game of Thrones post I mentioned that it used different colour schemes to differentiate between its far-flung locations.  It still does that to an extent -- the barren whiteness of the North -- but overwhelmingly the mise en scene is dominated by black and orange.

(See also the above King's Landing pictures.)

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this shift -- possibly it's just a change from day to night, with the torchlight providing the orange glow.  But it seems symbolic of a greater tension within the series.  As the scope expands and expands, the range of possibilities in Game of Thrones becomes smaller and smaller.

Next week: "I came to fight, you know, I wanted to get bloody, have fun..."

RahXephon 5: On Earth As It Is In Heaven

As I mentioned in my last post on RahXephon a mere two weeks ago, it draws undeniably on the influence of Neon Genesis Evangelion, although pretty much any mecha series produced in its era has to deal with living in a post-Evangelion world.  For instance, we now have to deal unavoidably with the fact that mecha pilots have feelings, and sometimes those feelings aren't burning passion.  Sometimes they just want to act like the teenagers they are.  Weird, eh.

"On Earth As It Is In Heaven" is a cool-down episode which seemingly concerns itself entirely with the mental state of Ayato.  Ayato is refusing to fight, which petrifies his giant robot, as always a massive symbol of his psyche.  There's nothing especially new about this plot.  The refusal to answer the call of heroism is a trope older than print, and it serves a very specific narrative purpose: to ease the adjustment of the reader-surrogate (or here the viewer surrogate) from the ordinary to the fantastic.  RahXephon explicitly eschewed this in favour of a confusing rush of plot points to open the series, but perhaps now it is doubling back for a slower approach.

There's definitely some generic need driving this plotline, because there doesn't seem to be a clear diegetic reason for it.  Ayato doesn't provide a reason for not fighting, although the stakes of his battles with monsters are so clouded that it would be hard to really articulate any side of such a debate.  I think rather we can see this storyline as the series's attempt to justify its own violence.  Monsters are narratively useful because we can wage war against them, or enjoy the violent spectacle of war being waged against them, without the ethical issues of killing a person with thoughts and feelings.  We can watch our heroes killing a monster with the kind of visceral joy that we can't when they're fighting other humans.  This is, perhaps, the only reason why Ayato's refusal looks foolish and a little cowardly instead of heroic.

The estrangement of monstrosity, however, isn't enough for RahXephon.  This particular aspect of the refusal of the call is perhaps not uniquely Japanese but still can be related to the strand of at least surface pacifism imposed on the culture in the postwar era.  To make acceptable fodder for a cartoon, war must not be war, because war is wrong and our children need to learn this[1].  This is why every Gundam series has a convoluted political rationale that allows its heroes to "fight for peace" and so many shounen series, after hundreds of episodes of entertaining fisticuffs, come around to lecutring about the evils of violence.  Of course, RahXephon wasn't really aimed at kids, but it stems from a genre that largely was, and so is indirectly influenced by these concerns.

The answer to "why should I kill these people (or monsters) I don't know?" has traditionally been country, but RahXephon doesn't take this tact.  Its heroes belong to TERRA, an international agency that frequently clashes with the national Japanese self-defence force.  The appeal, then, is something more similar to the recently popular excuse of humanitarian intervention.  But that's not really it either: it's missing the paternalistic tone and essential Othering of the nation to be "saved".  This is, after all, a global problem.

The general strand between all of these excuses for war is, however, something that RahXephon ultimately cottons on to.  That is the idea of belonging to a collective whose needs are greater than yourself, and which you are compelled to sacrifice yourself for.  Ayato's objections to piloting RahXephon are entirely personal and individualistic: the war doesn't concern him, he finds battle unpleasant, and he generally doesn't want to suffer for the benefit of others.  The genre conventions exaggerate the ramifications of this personal choice: Ayato is The Only One Who Can Do It, by virtue of being the main character, and so his refusal is a much more significant blow to the TERRA war effort than anyone else's hesitation would be.

His commander tries to undo this hesitation by making him establish connections with this larger collective.  Ayato is introduced to the personalities of TERRA's man-made island, most of which seem to be supporting the war effort in some way.  They're also all kind to him, save for his new housemate Megumi, who comes around by the end of the episode in classical tsundere fashion.  It follows the usual pattern of these things -- the unfriendly and argumentative girl has her vulnerability exposed, and eventually becomes kind to the main character.  In this way the aggressive female is disarmed of any troubling potential she might hold and is made into an acceptable sex object.

After Megumi becomes friendlier to Ayato, she shows them the trick of ramune bottles: they contain a marble which you have to slide aside to get at the drink.  The show takes a similar approach to both characters: once you place aside the stubborn blocking mechanism, they flow freely towards their purpose.  Ayato isn't fully convinced to fight in this episode, but becoming familiar with the people he's fighting for goes a big part towards "unlocking" him.

Once again, Ayato serves in many ways as a substitute for the audience.  Just as he's being made to care about the conflict, so are we, through the age-old tactic of introducing appealing secondary characters that can then be put at risk.  What separates RahXephon from most is that the hero is experiencing this narrative manipulation at the same time as the viewer, and the narrative is thus at least a little self-reflective.  The characters don't know that they're in a mecha anime, but they know how storytelling works and are able to deploy it effectively.  The show's interest in Jungian archetypes suggests that this will not be the last of such self-reflexivity.  Whether this makes the conventional core of the show any more palatable is an open question.

This is something that is probably true of all genres and mediums, but seems especially visible to me in Japanese anime (possibly simply because of its foreignness).  Tropes are less of an easy fallback and more of a language that we use in meta-fictional conversations.  Through their use of tropes series align themselves with and differentiate themselves from their predecessors.  For instance, by spending an episode on Ayato getting to know his housemates RahXephon differentiates itself from the more episodic super robot series, both by serializing the story and by incorporating tropes from harem anime.  In this very maneuver it's also drawing itself closer to the "new wave" of mecha like Evangelion and Nadesico, both of which did the same thing.  In this way it negotiates its position in the ongoing dialogue of the mecha genre and, ideally, notches a place for itself in the canon.

But ultimately every series, no matter how derivative, must differ from its models a bit.  "On Earth As It Is In Heaven" is distinctly not a Nadesico episode -- it's too low-key and earthbound for that -- and doesn't really match the rhythms of Evangelion either.  It has a broader world than either of these series, and it shows in episodes like this and the next one, both of which develop a minor character who will remain a part of the series space.  We're beginning to see TERRA develop as not just another shady, conveniently-acronymed military organization but as a community bent towards a collective mission.  And, as someone who wants to like this show a lot more than he presently does, that makes me optimistic.

Next week: "Maybe I told the Great Stallion to go fuck himself"

[1]I'm phrasing this snarkily, but I think it's a genuinely healthy message to convey, and probably more healthy than the messages in most American cartoons.  Even if it's somewhat contradicted by the content of the shows, at least there's something complicating the otherwise enthusiastic embrace of violence.

Game of Thrones 2-08: The Prince of Winterfell

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Episodist, a testament to the determination in my madness.  Hopefully I've got the hang of this by now.  A big thanks to all of the readers, who (judging from my stats) mostly stumbled here looking for "Archer Pam porn" or "incest in Suburgatory" but maybe stayed for a moment before backing out and looking for something that would actually satisfy their carnal cravings.  Speaking of weird sexual stuff, here's Game of Thrones.

The central metaphor of Game of Thrones is right in the title: it's all a game, a view of politics as a strategic struggle that can (and has) been rendered into a boardgame.  This means that the series takes a gamer's perspective: it is not a question of morality, but rather of competence.  The characters that can succeed strategically are glorified: they get all the best lines, have things turn out their way, and win every argument.  The characters that fail are verbally (and sometimes physically) beat up at least once an episode.  Game of Thrones is not really morally nuanced, as its fans argue, it just has a morality that runs parallel to the one we usually think of.  It's the morality of competition: the central sin is weakness and stupidity, which the whipping-horse characters of Game of Thrones are constantly accused of.  This is why the series is almost entirely unconcerned about the mass of people that live in this fantasy world.  They aren't nobility, so they've already lost the game.

The biggest example of this in this episode is Theon, the titular false prince.  He's captured the central castle of the Stark family, but is unable to get respect even from the young children he captures, who are incredibly nonplussed and easily escape.  Later in this episode, his sister stops by to spell out for him and the audience why he's being dumb and will be unable to hold the castle.  The whole conversation has the air of somebody writing a political screed disguised as a dialogue: his sister is hyper-rational and sympathetic at the same time, taking Theon's beliefs apart piece by piece, while he responds with only increasingly emotional blurts.  It's a strawman dissection, but the strawman isn't really a political position, but a strategic one.

Joffrey, the young king, is another example of those pilloried characters.  He's basically a sociopathic, cartoonishly evil ruler, but this is not enough to earn the series' condemnation.  Instead, as Tyrion (often an authorial voice) argues in a previous episode, he's mad and an idiot.  We only have one scene of his in this episode, where he proposes leading the charge himself, which confirms his vainglorious nature that goes against the show's belief in realpolitik and dirty, effective strategizing.  Joffrey accrues negative personality traits like an evil Katamari, all of which stem from his strategic ineptness, which began (the series suggests) with executing Ned Stark and starting this whole messy war.

Finally, we have Catelyn Stark, who in this episode lets her camp's prize prisoner, Jaime Lannister, go free in exchange for the possibilities of seeing her captured daughters again.  Her son Robb upbraids her for her sentimentality bordering on treason and takes her prisoner.  (You could probably do an interesting Freudian reading of this whole scenario, but it would be a bit of a stretch).  True to form, Cat isn't given much verbal ammunition to defend herself for this strategic blunder, and comes off as an idiot for not being willing to sacrifice her daughters for strategic value.  We don't even see the release, a scene that would require us to enter her perspective at least a bit.

But daughters are so often sacrifices in the Game of Thrones universe that it's hard not to feel a bit for Catelyn, and I don't think the series is entirely unsympathetic to her either.  In an earlier episode Tyrion married off Cersei's daughter for her own safekeeping as well as a good bit of strategic advantage, and last season Catelyn had no issue with promising the absent Arya (along with Robb) to the disturbing Frey family in exchange for a momentary advantage.  Even if the girls' lives are not literally consumed, their lifetimes are used as fodder for political gain through marraige.  Seemingly every female character (except the masculine Brienne and Arya, whose lack of interest in girly things makes them immune from such degradations) uses sex to get their way, usually on behalf of some male power.  Catelyn's act is an ineffectual, desperate rebellion against the patriarchy of the world, a patriarchy which Game of Thrones does not hide despite its distaste for all things feminine (besides breasts).

An interesting point of comparison is Robb's love affair with the nurse Talisa, which conflicts with that whole marraige-for-a-bridge thing again.  This is strategic foolishness, but once again the show views it as more acceptable, and it receives far less condemnation than Catelyn's plot to rescue her daughter.  (Although that may just be because nobody knows about it).  The whole thing is played as a standard romance plotline, with the earlier marraige as the genre-required obstacle between the lovers, and their sex scene in this episode is shot as a victory, not a mistake.  This relies on the generally assumed supremacy of not just male desire over female desire, but of romantic love over familial love.

I should stop to add a sidebar here.  To a certain extent Game of Thrones is consciously critiquing value judgements like this, and it's highly critical of the restrictions of its patriarchal setting.  But that's not incompatible with believing in a more modern kind of patriarchy, in which girls are cool as long as they play with the boy toys, and the sexual objectification of women is a mark of seriousness and sophistication.  Its would-be feminist critique is estranged from the world we live in, and it seems unlikely to do anything but make the viewer remark about how bad things were back then.  On the other hand, its patriarchal pleasures are immediately accessible to us.  This may be imparting too much intention to the text -- certainly you can make a feminist reading of it (as I've tried to do in the paragraphs above).  But if there is a feminist voice within Game of Thrones, it's a voice that's always displaced and counteracted.

(Even if we do take its feminist argument seriously, it has to be noted that it's the most mainstream, priviledged, and liberal type of feminism, more concerned with the self-expression of a white nobleman's daughter than the brutal lives of the prostitutes the camera lingers over.  But that's a rant for another time).

Speaking of Arya, her adventures are interesting mainly for existing in a significantly different genre than the rest of the series.  Of course, most of the show's scattered plotlines are somewhat generically different, offering up a basketful of different pleasures for its broad viewership.  We have Danaerys's orientalist fantasy, Jon's survival horror story, the main war narrative, and all of it occasionally giving way to sporadic bouts of romantic comedy or softcore porn.  But Arya seems to be existing in a children's adventure story, albeit a particularly dark one, which operates according to different rules than the rest of the broader narrative.  Abigail Nussbaum has suggested that Martin's novels follow a lot of YA conventions, and this seems like the most obvious example.

Take her bargain with mysterious pronoun-adverse criminal Jaquin, in which he offers to kill three people in exchange for her freeing him from a burning cage.  This is a grimdark riff on the classical genie story, a story that abides by the logic of fairy tales: if you do a good thing, magic will reward you.  In the rest of the series, doing a good thing is likely to get you killed, and have Tyrion show up and wag a finger at you for your idealism.  Arya uses her first two deaths on local bullies rather than the big bads of the series, another sign that she seems to be existing in her own dimension with child-sized stakes.  The scene when she escapes Harrenhall with her friends[1] (a hunky love interest and a chubby comic relief right out of central casting) seems like a gang of misfits sneaking out of the house with her friends, although the hanging body does put a bit of a damper on things.

There's a strange contrast between these adventures, which are not light-hearted but certainly seem more innocent than the generally cold perspective of the rest of the series, and that of the setting in which they take place.  Harrenhall is a supposedly invincible castle that was burnt to a husk, and its presence suggests the ultimate doom of all the mythology that the kings and lords wrap themselves around.  What appears to be mythical -- an invicible castle -- is vulnerable to the mortal.  Its hollowness represents the hollowness of power, even the brutal, fly-by-night power of the Lannister army camp.  In the opening credits, it isn't even animated, a formal death.

So the question remains -- is the brutal realpolitik that the series professes to believe in, its gamers' view of the world, the fire that burns away the pretensions of nobility?  Or is it (and this would be more interesting) another facade, another invincible palace, tha is as doomed as Harrenhall?  I doubt the series will ever answer this in a way that satisfies me, and a completely coherent thematic answer would be too pat anyway.  But in the meantime I'll be sitting here, waiting for more idols to go on the fire.

Next week: "Perhaps a good woman will become a better friend for him than a good person."

[1] And that's another thing.  What other Game of Thrones character can refer to someone unironically and unreservedly as their friend?

RahXephon 3: City of Two

(Imgur is not working right, so no screencaps for you today.  I may go back and add them at a later date.)

Why does popular culture so often seem like a form of mysticism?  To be more precise, why is it that the overabundance of symbols any hazily defined connections that make up occultism also make up a kind of perenially popular genre?  As I mentioned in last week's post, it's easy to dismiss the public as only caring for things that cater to their baser instincts and that they don't have to think about, but that doesn't explain why some shows that are so complex as to be baffling become mega-hits.  Some examples are Lost, which forms its own mythological web of symbols that resists any attempt at understanding, and The X-Files, which engages with a more familiar American mythology but does so in a distinctly paranoid register.  The DaVinci Code was a huge phenomenon and it based itself on an especially strange branch of conspiracy theorists.  To hit a bit closer to the subject we're dealing with today, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show that's alternately under- and overwhelming, delving headfirst into a forest of Freudian imagery and Biblical apocrypha without slowing down to parse anything for the viewer.  Of course, the strange and mystical can also be artifacts of the counterculture -- think The Illuminatus! Trilogy or The Invisibles or, for that matter, the foundational beliefs of any cult or conspiracy theory.  But in any case, what we don't understand has great cultural power.

A cynic would suggest that this is simply because, in the face of the inpenetrable, we assume that the text must be intelligent and it is us who fail to understand its genius.  (As an initiate in the cult that is academia, I don't think this is entirely off-base.)  But there's also a kind of power that the inexplicably dense[1] has on us.  Maybe it's that the image that we don't know the referent is becomes the perfect simulacrum.  Maybe there's something we enjoy about incomprehension.  Or maybe it is precisely because the mystical, through obscuring its mortal origins and analogies, seems like something bigger than us, something due more reverence.

In case you couldn't tell from the tangential first two paragraphs, I'm having a very difficult time grappling with RahXephon, and I think its mystical nature might be why.  The pieces of it that are comprehensible, written in a generic language I'm used to, are all very generic indeed -- lifted from Evangelion or a host of other mecha series.  They are generally not impressive.  The characters in the series are undefined, especially the personality-less hero, and the plot is mostly obscured.  All that leaves, then, are the archetypes, the overabundant symbols.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh.  There are certainy interesting images in RahXephon -- the monster that Nayato battles with the titular giant robot looks pretty crazy, and the unexplained images of women in strange masks in tubes, looking like what would happen if H. R. Giger opened an opera company, are plenty striking.  It's later implied that these women are controlling the enemy Dolems.  But images cannot redeem narrative issues, although they can certainly be a pleasant distraction from them.


Or maybe what I'm feeling now is intentional (though this seems like a bit of a cop-out).  The first three episodes of RahXephon seem to be designed to disorient the viewer.  This is a common enough way to begin an anime series, and Evangelion does much the same thing[2], but few series stretch out the disorientation quite this long.  The viewer stumbles through darkness, sure that there will be light just around the next tunnel, but never finds that light -- they simply learn to see in the dark.

"City of Two" seems to disorient mainly by drastically slowing things down from the frenzied pace of the first two episodes, which mostly consisted of Ayato being knocked back and forth between various catastrophes and oddities.  This episode begins with the culmination of those, the battle between Ayato in RahXephon and the mysterious monster later identified as a Dolem.  What's notably here is the distinctly embodied style of fighting between the two mecha, who instead of preferring the usual military weaponry go at each other like a street fight, with the fight ending by RahXephon wripping out the other one's throat.  This is another bit of Evangelion's influence, and it represents a decisive break with earlier mecha shows that centred arount scientific and mechanical advancement.  In RahXephon, the mecha aren't technological at all, and the series could best be described as a fantasy instead of science-fiction.  The fight is just a brutal way of demonstrating that.

After that, however, we have a bit of down time.  Ayato is stranded outside the city with Haruka, a still-mysterious (of course) woman who acts as his guide to this new world.  This focuses on the idea of estrangement -- Ayato was literally unaware that a world outside Tokyo still existed, so the sudden reintroduction of a global society comes as a bit of a shock.  The outer city that he and Haruka wander seems to be empty, but the world is far from apocalyptic: a radio broadcast mentions the skateboard event at the upcoming Olympics.  He even learns that the year is different than he thought it was.  In a way, this is an universal experience[3]: part of coming of age involves leaving your home town and learning just how big the world can be, and that there are people who perceive it completely different than you do.  This is, like the best fantasy, an exaggerated circumstance that lets us gaze directly on a real commonplace.

It's here that RahXephon runs into a problem.  Its characters are finally given an opportunity to talk without things blowing up around them, but by its nature the series wants its mythology only to come out at a trickle, and Haruka knows a lot more than Ayato.  (Call it the Lost syndrome.)  Reasonably, if the purpose of these scenes is to show the two of them becoming closer, she would be truthful with him at one point.  So instead of exposition, what we get are some awkward fanservice scenes (Ayato accidently grabbing Haruka's boobs, which happens all the time IRL).  And Ayato, for all he's dumbfounded by this strange new world, seems actively incurious about it, rejecting Haruka's offer to explain the year difference.

 The harem comedy antics aren't completely throw-away filler -- they're part of RahXephon's genetic makeup, although it's probably akin to that weird inbred section of your family tree that you can never figure out how to draw.  This series (once again, like Evangelion) is mediated mainly through the feaureless protagonist's relationships to many women.  Here the women seem to stand in for almost archetypal ideals, most notably so far the virgin (the innocent-looking but powerful Reika) and the mother (Haruka).  Ayato's apparently adopted mother is revealed to be some kind of alien in the last episode, so she becomes the false mother, the empty of negation of the archetype, while Haruka (who has no real-world clame to motherhood over Ayato) fills that role by taking care of him and introducing him to this new world.  In one scene she picks out clothes for Ayato once he proves himself incapable of not dressing like an idiot, literally teaching him the most basic of tasks.
This is something that is really unique to anime -- the complex messages and ideas spelled out through the arrangement of stock characters, usually female ones that also sometimes act as fetish objects for the viewer.  This can be alienating for a lot of viewers, and I'm not going to praise it as secretly genius, but it does become a kind of fascinating symbolic language.  The message here will take a bit longer to unravel, and it may turn out to be a wild goose chase, but in any case after watching enough of these series one gets the impression not of endless regurgitation but rather of mythology, where the same characters in different iterations are repeated through countless stories, altering a bit each time like a game of telephone.

RahXephon is one of those series that comes from such a great pedigree that when they fail to immediately impress there's a feeling of betrayal.  This one is written by cyberpunk scribe Chiaki J. Konaka (Serial Experiments Lain), and is one of the early works of the usually-great studio BONES (Fullmetal Alchemist, Eureka Seven, etc), but both entitites leave their trace here only in the obscuritanism that they have a tendency to indulge in.  (There are a couple moments where it seems like the precursor to Eureka Seven, in particular a couple of things that look like trapar flows, but that's about it).  Maybe director Yutaku Izubuchi, who made his name as a mecha designer and not a series director, can be blamed for RahXephon's failure to gel.

Still, even if I haven't been overly impressed, I'm willing to delve further into the series just to figure out what the heck is going on.  That's the power that mysticism holds, even over those who know better: you can't help wondering if there are actually some profound secrets at the bottom of that rabbit hole, and once that thought gets into your head you can't really turn away.

Next week: "Why are all the gods such vicious cunts?"

[1]"Inexplicably" as in "not able to be explicated" -- we can't take apart the images to understand them.

[2]Sorry, but the Eva comparisons have to be made.  I'm not willing to say at this point that RahXephon is an Evangelion rip-off, as has been argued by some, but there's no denying that there's a clear influence, and also it probably wouldn't have been made if Evangelion hadn't come before it and been such a hit.

[3]"Universal" is, as always, an exaggeration: there are plenty of children, especially diasporic ones, who have always been aware of the largeness of the world.  But it's still by and large globally relatable.