bang bang, my baby shot me down
I’m slowly catching up with Tytania, and continue to enjoy it a whole lot. I like the vacillation of the episodes so far, some about Fan, some not. I just finished episode five.
My subject line is a little misleading; I’m not here to claim Tytania is a slice-of-life series. It does, however, do something similar — it often presents us with characters for only one episode, cementing the specific, character-driven events into that particular episode. I suppose I’ll break here for people who haven’t seen the episode yet:
Erwin’s dead. Oops. The episode works quickly and quietly to set up their characters — they may not be much more than cliché childhood friends, one doggedly devoted to the other, who’s devoted to something else — but they’re painted in quick, sure strokes that make me feel for them. In workshop classes students and teachers alike often refer to the confident narrator, assuring the reader that they can trust that something good will happen. This is similar. Tytania isn’t messing around. It advances something in every episode.
And that’s where my misnomer of a subject line comes from. Each episode provides a picture of the world in which the Tytania family moves and exerts influence. Sometimes we see the heavy boots they use to crush opposition, like in the previous episodes, with Fan and his lady-friend (most of the names in this show slip my mind, it doesn’t help that half the characters are in the same family) fleeing Tytania’s shock troops. In five we see the level-headed Tytania noble (the red-head) trying diplomacy, refusing to jump to conclusions, and apparently deploring the outward beauty of his own family, which led Erwin to die — red-head can’t actually know that, but it seems as though he could figure out something similar would happen. The girl wasn’t too shy with her adoration of Tytania.
The episodes in general move around, taking snapshots of the world from different angles. This show isn’t about the uprising against the cruel, dictatorial family of Tytania; it’s about the world in which, perhaps, such a family is necessary. Think of Dune – the space navigator’s guild has a monopoly on interstellar travel, and that’s bad, yes. The problem with just villifying them is that much of what they do is necessary for the way of life of millions, possibly billions. No other method has allowed humankind to move through space in anything like a functional way.
In the same vein, Tytania dominates too readily, but that could be through characters and not institutions. The beefy, angry Tytania brother constantly complains about how no one but the early, war-mongering Clan Lord was any good; clearly a lot of other people disagreed through the history of his family. They seem to regulate space travel, assuring people things will work well whenever they step on board a ship. It’s an old dilemma. Wasn’t it Nazi Germany in which, as the proverb said, the trains always ran on time?
Obviously I’m not endorsing the Nazis, or similar behavior. So if you grow a mustache and start killing a minority group in your country of origin, I’m totally not responsible. However, the painful fact is that some measure of hard-handed control is sometimes necessary in certain circumstances. Some historians believe Vlad (the impaler) Tepes acted the way he did because his country was caught in between two imperial powers (the Byzantines and the Holy Roman Empire, I think, provided those aren’t two names for the same group — wow, my mainland European history is shit), and he wanted to keep Walachia free. And until the nobles performed a coup against him, Walachia was, indeed, free of external control.
That’s (one of) the thing(s) that makes Tytania so good. It seems to be admitting, at least right now, that it’s not as easy as A: be the undergod B: kill the evil overlord/corporation/empire C: party down.
