Pontifus has kindly provided me with server space and a wicked site redesign.  You may find me, now, at Cuchlann.  I didn’t want to spring for my own domain, so you’ll notice it’s post-fixed as superfani.com.  This does not, in fact, mean it is under some sort of SF.c umbrella; I have not been subsidized by the gnawing, writhing worm that is Pontifus.  It just means my stuff is stored on the same server as his and, well, my stuff from those SF.c posts I do.  

Short version:  I moved! Go check it out!  All my archives are there, including your delicious comments.  There is also, wonder of wonders! a new post.  It’s about what it means to like something!  Go, read it!

Of course, neither of them actually fulfill the roles they appear to be symbolizing — together they would make a creative whole, order and emotion, Apollonian and Dionysian powers.  Yin is emotionless and Li chugs along without thinking of much.  This changes over the course of the series, though, so perhaps that’s what we’re meant to see, the beginning of a foundation to move forward from.  This does leave us wondering where the cat figures in, of course…

Episodes 13 and 14 of Darker than Black feature Yin’s back story, and the return of our favorite detective, Kurosawa Gai.  His name seemed to strike a familar chord with the man searching for Yin, so I wonder if it’s a reference to something other than general, noir-esque anonymity.

In fact, Gai ends up being our moral center, claiming that “no one on Earth should be treated like a doll.”  Huang ends up, to some extent, siding with him (though obviously they don’t know each other).  Indeed, the two of them seem very similar:  earthy and rude, they strike me as the serious and humorous side of the same coin:  regular people dealing with the events around them.  In fact, with no agenda (and/or fear) driving him in the same way Huang has, Gai ends up being more personable, more humane:  it takes him no time at all to empathize with Yin, whereas it takes a supposed impossibility to force Huang into it.

I appear to be running out of things to say here.  We are doing this at exactly the wrong time, given that I have a paper I’m working on.  I’m amazed I’ve kept up the viewing schedule so far.  I’m enjoying the show, I’m just terrible at regularly watching anything.  

Sigh.  Why is it wordpress sometimes italicizes an entire paragraph when I just want a word?  

Anyway.  I think most of the meat to chew on in this arc concerns the conviction Nick has that he and Li are the same, copies of each other.  Aside from the whole doppelganger thing (if you know me you know I love that sort of thing), it also tells us what Li might have been if his life hadn’t been so ruined:  an astronomer (maybe, as I said).  

There are little hints of personality things.  Li hates falsehood and illusion, apparently.  He also tries to protect people, when he can.  

Any story that’s about astronomy I’ll probably enjoy, at least.

These posts get shorter and shorter.  Sigh.

Besides finally doing something with Misaki other than having her be the Clousseau to Li’s Pink Panther, this arc thematically supports the idea of the two worlds of the everyday and the extraordinary clashing.  It implies that if one is entrenched too far in one’s own world, then yes indeed one is not going to be able to interact with anything else.  The hint would seem to be that to find a kind of respite from the shit he goes through, Li is going to have to stop acting as a hitman/gofer for whatever shadowy organization employs him.

That’s seriously just about all I have to say about the arc.  Hopefully the next will provide me with more to talk about.

Five and six were pretty basic, for me:  they delivered a bunch of emotionally-charged backstory concerning Li, and showed us yet another moe-girl affected by the Gate.  This time she was one of the world’s deadliest Contractors, and I suspect she has a big fan following.  She has the “broken” face and mysterious past that tends to do it for people.  

This arc deviated in an interesting way from the norm thus far:  it didn’t show us how the fights of the Contractors affect the life of someone only marginally involved, if that.  Instead, it showed us a person who had escaped that life and been pulled back in (I kept thinking of The Bourne Identity).  It gives us more of a view from within the structure of the marginalized, but I wasn’t too interested.  I much prefer glimpses of how the rest of the world is being affected.  In that way the show is much more sci-fi than it is fantasy — in fantasy, fantastic events illustrate psychological realism in the characters who confront the events.  DtB takes a personal view of things, but it’s still mostly about how a fantastic event changes the culture and lives of the world.

Seven and eight were a lot of fun.  Comedy makes just about anything better, and I was figuring, from the beginning, there would be a noir-esque detective arc, given how each arc toys with some genre or another.  The self-shaped detective (who’s calling himself “Gai,” or “Guy,” to underline his hard, faceless life on the margins of the urban world) blunders into a fight essentially about nothing.  That is, people are being killed over perfume samples.  At first it might be difficult to see what this arc offers in terms of the society looking at the Contractors, or vice versa, but remember that Gai’s assistant thinks Li is hot, and wants to stalk him.  Certain segments of society continue on, not really paying attention to the changes.  Why wouldn’t they?  They have more important things to think about, like sex (it’s significant that both the detective and his assistant are obsessed with essentially-unattainable people, the widow and the stranger on the street).

Episodes three and four are horror from beginning to end.  The one decent fight is even minimized and cast into hidden cause and effect (like knives appearing from off-screen to pierce a Contractor’s arm) to amplify the sense of horror.  

The new focus of the arc is a schoolgirl (of course — in fact, if all the affected people in each arc are women of one “cute” type or another, I’m going to be very irritated) who is a firestarter, though she doesn’t know that.  The episode engages spectacularly horror of the self.  Mai learns she is a firestarter slowly, coming out of dazes to find trash afire.  This is her, nothing outside of her.  

I put on my gnote that “Horror is often the interruption of everyday life by the extraordinary; it illustrates how fragile our created system of life is.”  I can’t put it better than I did, so there you go.  Horror messes up our lives.  It’s one of the ways to tell the difference between a horror story and an urban fantasy story:  how fucked up does the protagonist’s life get once things start to get out of the ordinary?  If you’ve read any of the Anita Blake books, you’ll know that Anita’s system of life stays pretty much the same, though her personal issues increase.  Those are fantasies, even though they’re about vampires and zombies.  I am Legend, on the other hand, destroys the artificial but functioning system of civilization, first for Neville, then for the entire world.  That’s horror.  It pulls away the mask we’ve put on the world and shows us we’re at the world’s mercy after all.  That’s why it’s creepy, even if you don’t believe in vampires.

Darker than Black has plenty of horror stuff in it; I don’t think this arc is the only time that will be clear.  But as a single story, this arc functions as horror more than anything else.  It has a father experimenting on his daughter to protect her, only to actually make things worse (like in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Hawthorne — the flower motif also plays into the resemblance).  It reveals that the Contractors are born, not made, adding to the horror of lineage we’re already feeling (you like that? You should read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by Lovecraft).  Mai comes to accept her lineage, but only by murdering her friend and (circuituously) her father.  She destroys her own past and is forced to sing over the ashes, at the feet of her father’s corpse.  This is some creepy shit.  Her personality seems to drain away from her in the final moments, leaving her, apparently, what everyone assumes a Contractor is: less than a person.  Are all the Contractors without affect because of the trauma that marks their early lives?  Or is she like Li:  affectless when using her powers, but still human otherwise?  Is Li’s life a preview of hers? 

Yeah, sucks to be her.  I thought I should also mention something I forgot last time:  the Hell’s Gate reminds me of the area affected by the quantum disaster from the novel Nova Swing by M. John Harrison.  People are drawn to it, the rules of nature don’t seem to apply (really, no one has understood them yet), and it acts like a center for the town in which it hits, drawing people to it or pushing at the lives of those outside it, though never without a volition of its own.  It’s simply a place.  Anyway.  Thought I’d mention that.

The first two episodes reminded me of a novel I read this semester, called His Master’s Voice.  It’s by a Polish author, Stanislaw Lem (so it’s originally Glos Pana, but whatever).  That book is all about what might really happen if we got a message from an alien race:  that is, if they’re alien, then evolutionary theory would necessarily posit they are incomprehensible to us.  Why would we even assume they have language for us to decode?  It’s a brilliant book.

This has to do with DtB because of the obvious encounters between the unhuman and the normal, in the first arc, but primarily (in my mind) because of the research.  A huge team of researchers are put on the His Master’s Voice project, and they develop a handful of discoveries and technologies based on the “letter.”  The same appears to have happened in DtB.  The overtones are not exactly subtle.  The mysterious area from which all the discoveries, the Contractors and Dolls, come from is generally called Hell’s Gate, and sometimes Pandora’s Box (though that could refer to something related, and not the area exactly).  

The world of DtB has been shaken by some kind of cataclysm that left a region of mystery and stuff.  At the end of episode two we have little to no idea of what’s happening — except we know scientists are on it.  Chiaki was a researcher on a project similar to the HMV Project, and refers to the effects and powers of the Contractors by their scientific terms, inscribing physics onto what appears to be mysticism.  The police study the skies very carefully to observe the movements of apparently false stars that each map to one of the powered individuals, in a new form of astrology that is, this time, accurate.  The world, from inside, still functions under rational laws.  We absorb it as though wizards are casting spells, though.  We have no idea how anything is happening.  One is led to suspect that the prime cause of all this is tied into the drama of the show, and thus our dis-entangling of the mystery will approximate the search for truth in shedding mystical beliefs and adopting sound scientific explanations.  We will get bits and pieces of knowledge as we slip deeper into the drama.  

I may be required, at this point, to quote Arthur C. Clarke:  ”any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Really though, having watched the last episode, I think I’m contractually obligated to say something about it.  Especially as, in recent weeks, everyone has been up in arms about the way the show was trending.

Short version is:  I liked it, I always liked it, and at no point was I, personally, bothered by any of the moves the storytellers made.  Some of the things the characters did were a bit stupid, but that’s the point — it was, by virtue of their actions, in their characters to do those stupid things, as they did them.  It’s tautological, but that’s essentially how characterization works; it’s a conglomeration of all the actions a given character does.  It is essentially impossible for any action to be out of character for someone, as it immediately shapes what their character is.

What I suspect has happened is that fans built pictures of the characters in their heads.  If you’re on top of things you’ll realize that’s not a problem; indeed, that’s how “reading” a story of any sort works, it’s the process.  One of the common problems in the process of consuming a serial story is that a fan can often stop adding elements to their picture of a character/setting/plot, and anything that then deviates from their picture is “out of character,” or just plain wrong.  I once again cite my acquaintance who was upset that Psych would dare to have two characters be interested in each other — her picture included sweet homosexual love for the main character, and heterosexual love obviously didn’t fit into that picture.  It didn’t matter that the show did it, thus making it (in fan terms) canon, as she’d stopped adding to her picture.  

I don’t know if I really manage to build my picture right up until the end or not, but in general it feels like I must, as I never have a problem with endings that go off in a direction I didn’t expect — as I never expect much other than the characters to show up and do stuff.  I didn’t even have that particular problem with the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s series ending, though I easily could have, it coming pretty much out of nowhere (this is not to say I liked the ending; I thought it was ham-handed, but that’s in execution, not actual in-story events).  

Also, remember Kannagi?  Same thing happened.

And of course some people are bothered by the show but not for these reasons.  But in observing a lot of discussion on Toradora! so far, this is what’s happening a lot of the time.  It’s the curse, as I said, of serial entertainment, but all that can really be done to avoid it is for the viewers to keep an open mind.  It’s worth your while, if you happen to be one of the people who should try it out:  you’ll certainly end up having more fun (see my twitter for corroboration).

Yes, I haven’t watched Clannad, but my comment isn’t really about the show.  In the anitation, lelangir writes, “Clannad’s message, sojourner tell us, is ‘[w]hen empowered by strong emotions like love and friendship, a person’s thoughts are able to shape the future.’”

That’s a perfectly valid message; a few more modern philosophical schools say exactly that.  I think Sartre claimed something similar, that once one accepts one’s own responsibility for one’s actions, it is a simple matter to affect one’s future by deciding what one wants and doing that.  He equates the thoughts with the ability to “shape the future,” as being able to think the right thoughts is the difficult thing to do (supposedly).

Also, we’re running the first Voice Module “Call In Radio” contest:  that is, vote in a comment to the SF.c post as to which show, of three mentioned, you want to force me to watch over an upcoming weekend.  There are three options, but you’ll have to listen to find out!