Back to N44K00's Profile N44K00's Profile

Kirari remarks that Rei acted as the Joker in the election, as Terano remarks that Yumeko fulfilled the same. I don't need to bore you with the composition of a playing card deck and draw out the entire metaphor, but I will make this clear - the first series was a far more theoretical work, based on introducing and demonstrating mechanisms of power as Yumeko set them to work, demonstrating via stress. The second series is a more traditional series, about the process of power being born from competition & chaos.

Yumeko acted as a scourge against the machines of order the Student Council had constructed ... in the last game, finally finding her equal Magician with the blood red of her own eyes met the pale lunar blue of the president's. In this series, the story is about hierarchy - its origins and construction.

The arc of the series is the actions of hierarchy, through several lessons. The student council games questions the questions asked of a hierarchy, Yumeko working through them as our eyes into the series. The Batsubami arc is of how the lesser becomes the superior by rejecting the chains that bind them. For that, some would question how she broke her chains so thoroughly and to them I remind them of an anecdote during the sinking of the Titanic, where the third class passengers, even as many had some hint of a chance to break to the upper decks and attempt to survive, huddled in the common rooms, reciting prayers and looking to the sky, begging, like their ancestors had for millennia in feudal Europe's caste system, for their superiors to determine everything for them. The Batsubami arc was of new powers being born as the inferior realized something of their own, rising above to become a full human, with a name - beyond the animal existence of livestock. Finally, the romantic arc between Kirari and Sayaka speaks of the purpose of a true inferior. Sayaka operates wholly on logic, the blunt instrument of the physical world. She and Kirari sink into death's infinity together and emerge wedding - Kirari as Heaven and Sayaka as Earth in a beautiful romance that makes allegorical argument for the existence of caste.

While not as good as the original, for simple reason of being more specific and less abstractly broad-reaching, it's still equally worth watching if you learned anything from the first. My only mark of shame against it is that we don't see more with Yuriko and Midari - Fate and Violence respectively, their wedding could make a truly powerful work in the same fashion as Sayaka and Kirari!

After finishing the anime, I sat down for breakfast and thought back to how Yumeko defeated Kaede. He had of course done all the right moves, to an extent. Ironically, Yumeko found his weakness in forcing his hand to fight with his pride and not his much beloved order & law mindset. Seeing Yumeko lay down a queen pair, he expected that she was trying to draw the game down to her decision on high or low victory by raising higher than him. Like the thuggish man defeated in Indian Poker, his firm conviction in himself and the caste system he stood upon led him ... to dive into a situation without realizing he was standing on sand, not stone. He played exactly as he should have, ignoring that his own hand - trip eights - was not so secure as he believed it, never considering that he had guessed wrong by assuming Yumeko was trying to lower her hand as far down as possible. Yumeko laid down trip queens and his hair turned white in shock. The man of the blazon - dethroned.

There's a saying, that the march of history is mailed boots ascending a staircase as silk slippers descend. The anime is full of arcs like this, plays on the ebb and flow of power. Yumeko emerges from nowhere, taking control of every palace and stability like the mailed boots of those rebels in the upswing of a dynastic cycle. This is the truth of power - power emerges from what gives it life, a chaotic flow that temporarily crystalizes where certain forces match up in the right way. Yumeko is from chaos, her eyes glowing blood red, as Kirai is stability, her eyes the pale blue of the immortal full moon. Yumeko fulfills Kirai's vision of the school as the wilderness of power plays, the lawless open where the powerful select themselves to crystalline form above the undifferentiated mass. Each of her opponents is a different play on power, one that she exists to find the weakness in and pry the armor apart by it. She's the upswing of a dynastic cycle embodied, where a unified army marches on the decadent palace of a broken nation to bring in another era of stability.

My video player was glitching so I couldn't fully enjoy the visuals, but everything is very beautiful. The character designs, architecture, scene composition, color palette, etc, are all composed to give the entire show the aura of a casino - a nice one, not some backdoor poker game at a sleazy motel or the chintzy plastic of a slot machine. It all comes together to bring a wonderful feel to the show, one that feels just like the swipe of cards, the roll of dice, the chatter of chips, all the triggers a gambling addict could ever relapse by, all in a theatrical style that highlights key themes with works of art, strikingly composed scenes, or the personalized actions of the unique and wonderful characters.

"Men are the wind" as one of the goddesses remarks in an episode where Keiichi finds himself turned into a gust of wind. It's no occluded metaphor to show this, the full face of the show given openly in this small interaction. Belldandy's powers are the manipulation and directing of the wind, a force of motion directly compared to masculinity. Hobbes knew this, in defining man as a creature of appetites, with the gender theory inherent being in defining *men* as beings of appetite, a force akin to a flood or a gust. Belldandy's control of these forces is related to her perfection, a sickening ... degree of it, exemplifying every virtue of the ideal woman imaginable, with utter devotion to fulfilling those virtues in all ways and cases.

Her sisters and compatriot form counterpoints to her own magic of the wind. Urd controls fire and electricity, inflamed herself with passions and the occultist practices of Hell, something endemic to her very blood. Skuld has no powers meanwhile, only able to project herself through cold mechanism without the soul of magic, her maturity not yet reached. It's telling that her maturity came with the realization of love, an emotional alien to her until then, which shocked and confused her - showing her childish nature.

All of this is to say, this show is a slice of life and an instructional. The goddesses show in varying forms an examples, ways of womanhood, through their various dramas of manipulating men. The show centers around Keiichi, a sort of training-male, castrated and only partially alive, which the Goddesses demonstrate and work through their abilities of manipulation. The show is two seasons of this - watching the Goddesses train in a harmless environment, to show the proper magical and manipulative techniques of witchcraft.

As Andrea Long Chu said in her writings on sissyfication fetish, desire is always non-consensual. The horror of desire is that it always take the form of masochism. One in their superego, will always rebel against the fact of their being a sexual being. The only question is what form and to what degree that rebellion takes place. Taimanin Yukikaze demonstrates this in the classic fashion that NTR porn does. Yukikaze and Rinko are, in their superego, not consenting to the actions they take part in, yet the desiring part of them, their physical performances and their own self's reactions of pleasure to it, are ... forced upon them. The drama is within themselves, the ego split in twain as the supergo uncovers the horrifying depths of depravity hidden within the self's unconscious, as it sees, as if from third person, the actions the body was desiring, without the superego ever consenting. The horror of this is shown in the classic NTR finishing scene, Yukikaze's boyfriend sitting alone in his room, fanatically cooming to hours upon hours of footage of his girlfriend whoring herself out. Here, we see the broken superego, the final state of the protagonist women of this genre. The body is allowed to do what it was planning to from the very beginning. The superego's will is finally shattered, and what was always present and potential within the self is now left to freely move without obstacle.

Oboro, for all her sadism and acceptance of Black's goals on the surface, never truly accepted the demonic presence inside her. For all she facilitated Asagi's induction into the arena, it was always out of a homoerotic rivalry as warriors. it was for this that she failed in the end. She never fully grasped the true nature of what was occurring when she inducted herself into the world of demons. Rather, it's Asagi who Black understands the true potential of. After the death of her boyfriend, she loses all ties to the ways of a ninja, ways which Oboro was still bound to, despite her ... demonic possession. Asagi then falls into a fully carnal state, engaging in nihilistic violence after killing her ties to her old ninja order.

Asagi, in doing so, better fulfill Black's goal and ideal than Oboro ever did. Violence is as we can all know from Bataille, the opposite side of sex, with both being expressions of the same libidinal force, what Suda51 uses again and again in his games as "blood". This libidinal-becoming is a way of eros, and ultimately, it's induction into this that Black desires. Ninjas, who follow ways of thanatos, are kidnapped and forced into a world of overwhelming libido in the hopes that they'll change the way into life-producing, not life-negating. Oboro, for all she appeared to be on Black's side, was always more like Asagi than anyone else. She still remained, through all of it, wedded to the death-drive of the warrior, when the purpose of the series is the remaking of death-driven warriors into life-driven immortals.

Gensokyo as a place is constructed upon Yukari's keen awareness of the nature of fiction and reality. Gensokyo was built as a retreat from the outside world, enclosed behind a barrier of phantasms and illusions by being sheltered inside that world. It is Earth so long as Earth is treated as the world from humanity, not the world of flesh and blood.

It's through this creation that Yukari is able to pull off her plan. Manipulation of borders, as a blunt power, only goes so far, the manga clearly shows she's unable to simply "gap" her way wherever she wants. Rather, she makes clever use of ... the nature of the moon, by its link to being like Gensokyo. As the light side of the moon has its relation to the dark side that the Outside World has to Gensokyo, the linkage between Gensokyo and the Lunar Capital is through the medium of their border construction, fantasies secluded into fantasies, the "floating world" of ukiyo-e. This nature of borders, of both the Moon and Gensokyo, is explored twice. Firstly, in the way in which Yuyuko enters, through the reflection of a full moon in a placid lake, and secondly in the way Remilia & co enter, through their own interpretations of the various phantasms and spectral images of the Outside World's space program.

This manga is highly recommended in order to understand the nature of Gensokyo & Yakumo Yukari's ideology.

From the final dialogue, one can see, when squinting, a connection between this and Kojima's meme theory as explored in MGS2. I bring up this link for a specific reason. While Kojima takes a linear approach to his themes (scene, meme, gene), in that he'll set up within the diegetic world, explicate formally, and then just sort of leave them hanging, presented by never pursued, Stand Alone Complex has a more complex take on the same issue. Meme can be read as an antecedent in thought the concept of a Stand Alone Complex, as the additional layer of proper systems theory is added into the ... concept of a Stand Alone Complex. A meme, as explicated in the final dialogue, moves through humanity and its this movement that is the concern of the previous twenty five episodes. The tachikomas make for the most important demonstration, where their completely machinic existence is able to generate, via transmission of memes throughout systems, a system of transmission with enough complex and looping feedback to generate the so-important "ghost", or consciousness. It's this which gives us our mascot, the Major, as the emblematic figure of the Stand Alone Complex, the ghost, from and within, a machine.

In the Masque of the Red Death by Poe, the chambers of the fortress make an erotic journey by which the antagonist-flow penetrates, slipping through like water pours through cracks in stone, following the channels and pathways set for it by what it invades. This anime does the same thing, using the social-cultural facts of food in order to be the linguistic-chambers of flow for the erotic flows of sexuality and romance which are shared by the two main characters. The food is obviously a metaphor for sex, pornographic shots of consumption and orgasmic expressions resulting. What's interesting isn't so much the fact of food ... being a metaphor for sex, but the fashion in which sex is related to the two characters. The characters share their experience culturally and socially, which provides the vehicles by which they share the erotic experiences. It's in this that we find the ultimate point of this series, the way in which *romance*, the cultural and social rituals, prepare the mind for a fully realized experience of desire, the fleshly-level emotion within it.

This being said, it felt overly long. This didn't need twelve episodes to get this point across. Very repetitious.

In the analysis of Dr Schreber, Freud makes the claim that hallucinations are a positive sign in the treatment of schizophrenic patients, for the reason that the hallucinations evidence the mind processing & working through whatever its underlying pathology may be. In properly systemic thinking, Freud's lessons come into play in a show such as this, where a systemic entity, a city, goes through the same convulsions of a mind, the underlying pathologies, the systems of the city, working themselves out via the bloody spectacle that takes up the runtime. In proper Cybernetic analysis, Lukuss is given to as a system, inhuman machines commanding and ... controlling the bodily understructure, the base of labor, humanity. The plot is broadly, these systems disintegrating to a terminal end by their mechanics being forced to act and thus terminate the very things which make their functioning. This top-down root of destruction is evident in the main antagonist, who brings about the final death in much the same way, attempting to construct a modernist outside-text, in the vein of a fascism or communism, to bring about some perfection of society. He fails and in doing so only causes more decline, sparking the destruction of the very system he sits atop, the class. The protagonist fades out watching colored lights from his arm, those of his mother, as his mother rests as a ghost, immortal in the "land of the dead", the literal overworld, superstructure.

Texhnolyze is an anime about death, about the failure of a corpus, a system, and its final decline until all that remains are the overground ghosts, living a half-existence forever, like the paintings and images live on when the body has been long destroyed by time. In proper fashion of melancholic media, much of the screentime is taken up with atmospherics, with the run-time greatly extended by beautiful ambient scenes intercut between the shots.

One of the examples given in the opening of the 2nd Plateau of ATP is the nature of a multiplicity, done by describing the nature of speed. Speed is topological in nature, it changes only be degree, by quantity, never by quality, being indivisible. All these multiplicities described are this way, changing only in degree, differences in kind only emerging from that. What is changing in degree in all of these is motion, some level of motion. This is the nature of wind as well, with "wind" not being so much an entity encapsulated like the word claims to, but instead being a motion across ... the atmosphere caused by a variety of factors. Such is the nature of wind in this show, an extremely powerful contemplation on this very idea and its magical and practical applications. In the twelfth episode, Nao presents the first half through her own mind, showing us artistically distorted images of the sakura season. Taiki-sensei said earlier that the sakura season reflects the color of one's heart, a telling reference to the explored ideas when they went to the Wind Village, where they learned to cultivate the wind "inside their hearts". Nao shows us in plain terms then, her own heart, letting the wind flow through her and directing those flows, showing us the way of topological, multiplicitous magic. This lesson is further shown in the way they must almost die in order to realize the wind, the emptiness of falling, of motion of a motorcycle or accidental fall, Nao opens her heart to these flows and controls them as they pass through her. By all of this, Fuujin Monogatari shows us a radically monist path, the way to navigate metaphysical praxis in a world of flows and degrees, showing us the way to become the flying cats - true daoist masters.