I have held back no water in its season

I just recently watched this, having heard of it here and there for a while, and it’s delightful. I heartily recommend it. It has good ink and good music and a charming story which sometimes rips out your heart and stomps on it.

SO is the tale of a boy and his demon shikigami. Masahiro, the boy in question, is the grandson of Abe no Seimei, the greatest onmyouji of all time, so a major theme is, of course, his attempt to make his way out of his grandfather’s shadow and stand on his own merits. It helps that he’s a gutsy kid who has what it takes. Once he steps up to his destiny, though, he immediately has to deal with all sorts of Things That Go Bump In The Night, and the (very Heian) history and politics surrounding that make up the major plot. In doing so he has the occasional help of his grandfather’s twelve shikigami, and the constant help of one, in particular.

This one is a total angst-bunny with a Dark Past, and he’s a grumpy woobie to boot. Also darn hot and very devoted to Masahiro. Slashers rejoice, because this almost doesn’t qualify as sub-text. I mean, seriously, during the intro they reach out to each other and lace fingers. (For those who do not follow these things, laced fingers = sex. It’s one of the most unmistakable visual metaphors there is, right up there, for recognizability, with pinky fingers connected by a red thread.) His interactions with Masahiro are the cutest thing in the history of cute.

Het shippers should also rejoice, however, because Masahiro has a het love interest, who is also young and gutsy, if not always sensible. She is, in her person, a locus of politics, which adds interest, because normally Masahiro would be too low in rank to ever marry her. This does not stop them from being amazingly cute, too. She has her own independent interactions with family and shikigami and is actually her own character, which is refreshing.

Seiyuu spotters will also enjoy an all-star cast. Masahiro is voiced by Kaida Yuki, and his pet demon shiki by Konishi Katsuyuki. The young Seimei is done by Ishida Akira. The shikigami seiyuu include Minagawa Junko and Morikawa Toshiyuki. Suwabe Junichi voices one of the villains, and Seki Toshihiko one of the frequent side characters.

The original story is told in a series of light novels, eighteen to date. The anime covers the first two major arcs, which is the first handful of novels. Radio dramas have carried on to cover later arcs, and we can, perhaps, hope for those to be animated eventually.

There were licensing issues with this show, early on, since Genon took it and then tanked, and the conscientious subbers and fans who stopped for the license were left dangling for months and months. In the end, the subbers chose to finish the series, and all twenty-six episodes are available now. I suggest going to isohunt.com and getting the Yoroshiku torrent while we wait to find out whether Funimation will really take over the license and release it officially as has been rumored.

This will make more sense later, after I post an actual review of Shounen Onmyouji, which everyone, incidentally, should go watch. Right now.

For now, though, research results and links (which may help for YnM, too).

The Juuni Shinshou (Twelve Heavenly Generals) are Buddhist and come to Japan from India via China. They are, variously, known as yaksha (nature spirits), devas (warrior spirits/gods-of-a-minor-sort), and tenbu (Japanese take on Devas). They are initially associated with Yakushi Nyorai, the Medicine Buddha, and healing.

However, twelve being a popular number in Buddhism, they have become associated and overlapped with the twelve cycles of time (hours of the day, years in a cycle, etc.) and the twelve animals associated therewith. These are the animals commonly known in the West as the Chinese zodiac (see also Fruits Basket). (Maybe. See eta.)

Because the animals have elemental associations from the Taoist system (which is different from the Buddhist elements but quite similar to Shinto, oh god don’t get me started on the elements), the twelve generals have picked up elemental associations to go with their animal associations.

Important! These associations are variable! There are several variations on which animals go with which generals. Which elements go with which animals varies on a larger cycle of years as well as each having a fixed element and a base association with yin or yang, and, when filtered through the creative license of anime/manga, the whole thing gets… complicated.

In any case, it appears that the zodiac filter is how the yaksha Sanchira, for example, becomes the Serpent of Destructive Fire. Certainly the personalities given to the characters in both SO and YnM have some good matches with the zodiac personality readings.

Where the particular names come from, apart from the elemental constellation names given to the strongest animal in each element (Dragon becomes Seiryuu, Horse becomes Suzaku, etc.), I’m still trying to figure out. Similarly how the notion was arrived at that Abe no Seimei’s generic plethora of shikigami should correlate with the Juuni Shinshou in particular. I have, as yet, found no source explaining that that is not clearly contaminated.

ETA: I have also come across some indications that the twelve guardians of the Medicine Buddha and the twelve elemental/time figures are, in fact, separate groups that have been confused because of the similar translation of their titles: 神 in the first place and 天 in the second, so that it might be more precise to say the Twelve Divine Generals and the Twelve Heavenly Generals, respectively.  Results of this line of inquiry will appear in a later post, if it comes to anything.

So, what I’ve been wondering, as we move through the Hueca Mundo arc in Bleach, is: did Aizen create the current culture we see among the arrancar, or did he just take it over?

(Spoilers ahead, of course.)

The fact that Hollows right up to Menos Grande are instinct and hunger driven has meant that the lower levels don’t have much in the way of organized culture or society.  Even the adjuchas seem to organize or group only in small bands, according to what we’ve seen of Grimmjow’s past.  But the arrancar are shown to have organization.  They are still driven by hunger, but they have regained enough mind and individuality to create as well as consume, at least by the witness of Las Noches.

So, is that something they have generated and constructed themselves, over however many thousands of years?  Or is that construction and organization something Aizen imposed?  The question doesn’t seem to me to have been answered one way or another, yet.  If Aizen has been in contact with them for the whole hundred or so years, then the progression we see among the Espada, the ex-Espada and elaborate ranking and numbering, could have been his instigation.  But perhaps not. It’s Aizen who adopts their manner of dress, and those things generally mean something in KT’s writing.

I’m really hoping we get some kind of indication one way or another, somewhere along the storyline.

I was probably asking for trouble, when I started considering all the ways in which Echizen does not, as initially indicated by the early story, seem to find a tennis that is not a copy of Nanjirou’s. Now my Echizen-muse is insisting that I figure out what his own tennis would look like and write it.

Incidentally, spoilers ahead.

So let us meditate on this. The last reference point we have in the original “become not-Nanjirou” trajectory is the Regional finals. There we see a move of Echizen’s own invention, Cool Drive. It’s a move born of necessity, of needing to get up high enough to smash back a ball with the right spin and of figuring out exactly how to do that, however it takes–by climbing the referee, in the event. This move comes after Echizen has already pretty much burned himself out of muga no kyouchi, and it is, as Sanada notes after, a gamble. Using it gives Echizen an even chance of returning a shot he has no other way of getting, and he takes it without hesitation.

And then, of course, the story shears off into Nationals and the internal AU and focuses on muga’s “three doors”. And Echizen achieves the third, which no one but Nanjirou previously had, and thereby alters the progression of his skill from “finding himself” to “finding True Tennis is his father’s footsteps”.

Bah, I say; that isn’t nearly as interesting. Let us, therefore, take muga in its initial, less fantasy-esque, application, as a state of heightened awareness or response and leave it at that. What interests me more are the implications of Cool Drive.

For one, developing it shows that Echizen has started thinking in terms of evolving his own game. That’s a major hurdle right there, and indicates to me that he’s already reached beyond simply perfecting and reflecting back everything Nanjirou does to actively striving to find new ways to do things for himself. The alphabet drives in general show that, and the way we see him working on Cool Drive shows the importance he’s started to give the project (before Konomi lost his mind, anyway).

For another, the shape of the move shows something about Echizen’s approach. He doesn’t bother with conventional wisdom, which might be to work on strengthening his legs enough to jump for the height required. He also doesn’t choose to cultivate the strengths of his own body type, which might result in working on his ground speed to catch high shots when they come down and apply a different spin on return. Instead he takes all shots head on, and finds a way to meet and return them directly. And then he takes that way despite it being a risk and a gamble.

From this I take the conclusion that Echizen’s tennis doesn’t have a reverse gear. It doesn’t even really have brakes. He will just keep moving forward, believing that the skill and strength he has will find a way, and taking whatever way presents itself.

Really, it’s no wonder he does so well at Seigaku.

Echizen throws himself into the breach. Translated into actual martial arts, I might say that his style is purely aggressive, moving straight in and directly blocking rather than diverting or avoiding counterstrikes. He’s a stubborn little cuss.

So, for all his penchant for adopting everyone else’s moves, I don’t think he will ever use things like the Tezuka Zone or Fuji’s Triple (and counting) Counters very much. They’re not his own style. And, as he moves away from copying his father, I think the modality of copying in general may become a secondary rather than a primary tool for him. I don’t doubt he’ll use whatever move he knows that will do the job to win whatever game he’s in. But his own game, the moves he develops on his own, those I think will mostly be drives.

So I think what I would expect to see, in the future that is not a cracked canon-AU, is Echizen working to develop more such moves and using them with determination and forward momentum. Damn the torpedos and full steam ahead.

So, as things stand, the WordPress Categories widget supports altering sort order, post count and dropdown vs. hierarchical display. But it does not support including or excluding categories.

There is a way around this, though, while we wait for it to show up in the core code! (Everyone thank Bricksmith for suggesting this work-around.)

First, you need to download, upload and activate the php-exec plugin. This plugin allows admins to put php code in an entry or widget and have WordPress recognize it as php and execute it instead of just treating it as plain text.

Next, you go to Design > Widgets and put the Text widget where you want the Categories to appear.

Into the Text widget you paste some variation on the following code:

<li id=”categories-1″ class=”widget-categories”>
<h2 class=”widgettitle”>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_categories(’orderby=name&hierarchical=true&title_li=&exclude=76,77,78,79′); ?>
</ul>
</li>

Save that and voila, you have a pseudo Categories widget!

In my own case, I wanted to have two Categories widgets, the second one including all the categories that the first one excluded, so I pasted another copy into Text right under the first, with the ID “categories-2″ and the ‘exclude’ changed to ‘include’, and edited my CSS to add #categories-2 everywhere there was a #categories-1.

Caveats: 1) I do not know if it is possible to use this for a dropdown Categories, because that requires some Javascript and I have no idea whether that can be parsed inside a Text widget. 2) What you have is actually a widget inside a widget, codewise. The Categories widget is enclosed inside the li and div of the Text widget. This may cause problems with your CSS styling, depending on how it’s written. If your nested lists look like li li { rules }, this will probably cause problems. On the bright side, if you change it to ul ul { rules } that should fix the problem.

For a full list of the variables you can adjust in wp_list_categories, see the WP documentation.

My public service post for the month.

OpenID is a nice little thing, and it allows you to log in to services you do not actually have an account with. Generally a pseudo-account is created for you under username.homeservice.com. People on, for example, LJ-code-based services can then friend your “account”, username.homeservice.com. Voila, you can read the locked posts of your friends on services that are not homeservice. If you friend them back with your pseudo-account, you will have an otherservice fpage to read them on.

That’s the sketch. Here’s the dissection.

OpenID will not let you view all of your otherservice friends’ locked posts on your homeservice flist. If your friend on otherservice has an RSS feed account at on your homeservice, locked entries will not appear there. Alas, or possibly thank goodness, considering the security issues. What OpenID will let you do is have an flist on each service in question. Each flist will let you read and comment on the locked posts of your friends.

So what you do is this.

Go ahead and log in to otherservice with OpenID; there will usually be something on the homepage telling you how, or you can just comment. When prompted by homeservice whether or not to trust otherservice with confirmation, make sure you select “Yes Always”. Don’t worry, otherservice doesn’t get your password or anything. Open up your profile page (you will have one, at least on the LJ-code-based services).

Click on the “edit your profile” link and fill in your email address.  This is extremely important.  This is how you will get replies to your OpenID comments sent to you.  If you wish, you can also select an icon for your OpenID account.

Now log out and log in again, checking any boxes you need to check for “remember me” or “keep me logged in”. Be sure your cookies are set to allow that site to remember you, if you do not normally allow that.

Friend everyone you need to (this is also important) and ask them to friend your OpenID pseudo-account back (equally important).

Now open up your otherservice flist and copy the url.

Go back to your homeservice and add that url to your link list. Repeat these steps for each otherservice flist.

Now you can click on those links and read your various flists, just like you would click on a subdivision or filter of your homeservice flist. And, because you are always logged in (be sure to check that occasionally in case you’re bumped off) you will be able to read locked posts and comment seamlessly, without having to log in or switch around.

This is how OpenID lets you have a distributed flist. It’s really multiple flists, but if you have the link right there in your sidebar, your actual reading experience will be about as simple as it always has been with a single service.

Whenever an author goes to create a world, soon or late they have to deal with the issue of swearing. Even if the decision is “not used in this language” it has to be dealt with.

One of the common options, especially in fantasy, is to invent gods to swear by, but this can sometimes come off as contrived. I therefore offer this small compilation of swearing patterns to assist those starting out.

A lot of swearing is some corruption of an expression of respect, when you think about it, the original form having been someone calling on their deity to witness their sincerity or truthfulness or, alternatively, the severity of the situation–possibly in hopes that, having noticed, the deity in question will fork over some assistance. This, of course, quickly devolves from deliberate calling upon to simple expression of exasperation, anger or other strong emotion. So the first question is: how for down this progression is the swearing in question?

If it’s still early days, some reliable formulae are “by deity-name!”, “by deity-name’s identifying-object!” or “deity-name significant-activity!”

A bit further on, you can start loosening the association with the actual deity. For example, if you take a body part associated with the significant activity, you can use “deity-name’s descriptive-adjective body-part!”. If the identifying object seems like a better bet, “deity-name’s descriptive-adjective identifying-object!” is also pretty standard. The degree of respect or facetiousness in the descriptive adjective should be matched to the manner of the character doing the swearing.

Eventually this can progress into the downright silly, at which point it may well start expanding also. For example: “deity-name on/in/with a strange-descriptive-adjective totally-unassociated-object”.

Now, if you decide you want to avoid deities entirely, you can always use animals instead. Some common variations on that are “domesticated-animal undesirable-byproduct!” or “domesticated-animal troublesome-behavior!”.

If you’re far enough along the aforementioned progression, you can even combine this with the deity version, for something like “deity-name troublesome-behavior!”.

One thing to remember in all this: don’t get too carried away with sniggering and go overboard. Otherwise you’ll wind up like Steve White, who is clearly a little too personally amused by the literal translation of some earthier Russian figures of speech.

So, the Hale scandal has gotten me thinking again about privacy and business on the web. Have some random thoughts.

These thoughts aren’t about identity, or issues like outing fans; that was malice and vandalism in order to punish ‘competitors’ and gain traffic. Let us instead talk about privacy and anonymity on the web at large. Hale is trying to take advantage of business opportunities, so let us consider the kinds of information commercial sites can get about you, which has little to do with identity as fandom usually considers it.

( A little background )

The thing is, we do all maintain balance of a sort. A thin thread restrains the merchants in question because they don’t want to alienate their customers entirely. And the customers don’t like finding out about how little privacy they may have, hence the voluntary policies that at least limit information trading. Even more than that, customers don’t approve of dishonesty. When the extent of the Beacon network came out, when it was clear that Facebook had misrepresented it as something to share with friends and lied about the extent and of the information gathered, there was uproar. And Facebook backed down.

So Hale hasn’t just been abrogating the mores of fandom. Indeed, she hasn’t been acting within fandom at all; that was merely the front. She has also crossed the line for a commercial web-entrepreneur. She has suggested that her site was for fandom and/or historical research purposes, when, in fact, it is a commercial site. This is one of the few triggers just about guaranteed to anger and alienate prospective customers, thus demonstrating that not only is she a dishonest merchant but she’s not even good at it.

I’ll just be over here, watching the karma drop from a great height.

Not the musicals, but the music–the characters songs.  It’s a totally separate continuity, in tenipuri, it really is. Characters who are presented as (mostly, allegedly) straight sing love duets with each other. Characters known for their reserve and stoicism sing really silly songs. Some of the character songs fit in with either the anime or the manga continuity, especially the Best Riva/Best Player songs, but a lot of them, especially the ones produced for the more popular characters, form a continuity of their own with a whole different set of characterizations that are, by and large, pure fanservice.

This is, to be sure, complicated by the occasional descent of both anime and manga canon into similar fanservice, anime moreso than manga. The continuities have even crossed, as for example the ‘talent night’ thing in the Senbatsu arc. And then there are the music video things, which appear to have some crossover with other parts of the music continuity, especially in the formation and naming of discrete groups.

In short, the whole notion of “continuity” in tenipuri is vastly complicated and a huge mishmash, but I’d still say it’s possible to count the music itself as at least one and quite possibly two or three totally separate continuities.

In case anyone wondered, these reflections are the direct result of Kirihara’s latest single.  That seems more a seiyuu character song than a character character song, really.

Continuing on with the What I Like series, I have been reflecting on where my genre fiction tastes intersect with my Literature tastes.

I enjoy a good deal of 19th C lit of all sorts, but the authors I am very especially fond of are Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf. Comparing them to my genre fic favorites and considering just what it is I enjoy, not just about reading them, but about analyzing them, I have concluded that I like authors who turn their brains inside out on the page.

But, and this is an important caveat, I also require a modicum of poetry to really hold my attention. That was my problem with Heinlein–well, one of my problems, to go along with my disgust for his rampant misogyny. His stories read as though he turned his brain inside out, indeed, and then just shook it over the page, squashed the pages together, and sent that off to the publisher like some kind of verbal Rorschach blot.

I require some linguistic artistry to go along with the brain-guts, otherwise I just get bored.

On reflection, this is often my problem with science fiction in general, at least the kind written by actual scientists and science associates, who, as a general rule, cannot write poetry to save their souls. Limericks, yes; poetry, not so much.

On a similar note, not only is brevity the soul of wit, it is the soul of keeping me reading. I have about the same tolerance for reading minute descriptions of machines as I do for reading minute descriptions of buildings and clothing, which is to say, very little. Jane Austin and David Brin both win on this score. Issac Asimov frequently loses and the less said of James Fenimore Cooper the better.

It’s really too bad there isn’t some kind of litmus test I can do on new books, a carefully calibrated metaphorical strip I could dip between the covers to see what colors it turned–whether I’d get that turquoise tinge that means poetry plus brain-guts or the flat indigo of just poetry. Which interests me about as much as just brain-guts, which is to say, yawn.  Jacket blurbs are worthless for this purpose.

Oh, well. I guess I’m stuck with standing in the aisle flipping through my prospective books and hoping for a bit of nicely turned gut phrasing to catch my eye.

I think I have identified one of the things that leads me to like an author’s writing: when they write in several genres at once.

I knew Bujold did this, and Pratchett. But they’re both the kind of writers it’s easy to think of as simply exceptional. What I just realized, recently, is that some of my other favorites do this too. Barbara Hambly, for example.

Hambly writes science-fiction and fantasy. She writes horror. She writes historicals. She writes romance. And the thing is, she writes all of them at once. While any book of hers may lean toward one more than the rest, you can pretty much count on all those genre threads being in every book.

Of course, this means that she doesn’t usually follow most genre conventions of any of them.

Take the horror, for instance. Hambly’s books have plenty of it, whether gruesome and unknowable creatures from beyond the stars or the depths of human depravity and cruelty. But it’s never the point. It’s just there, and the characters have to deal with it. Which means she can’t be easily categorized as “dark fantasy” either, because the fantasy elements generally contribute to a very optimistic story, overall.

Or take the romance. Her books do generally feature multi-verse spanning, life altering love found at long odds. But her characters deal with it as one would expect people in the middle of deadly crises to do: “Wow, this is incredible! If we live, let’s have a good snog/marriage/deathless bond, okay? Now duck!”

As for the historical aspect, well even without her biographical blurb I’d have guessed she had either an advanced degree or an advanced hobby in history. Her narratives are chock full of little details that unmistakably set the stories in place and time. But it’s still the characters who are the point, not the details, and a lot of the books are set in places and times that didn’t actually exist, which makes it hard to call them historical fiction.

She writes against the genre grain, which I find charming. Also something I should probably keep in mind when next browsing the library or bookstore shelves.

Following up my earlier post about how some fans deploy ratings.

The comments were an interesting study in themselves. My first observation was that a good half did not respond to the post itself, but rather were personal position statements on ratings qua ratings. From this I draw the conclusion that there is an issue-iceberg floating under this comment-water.

The largest subset within this segment appears to group around the fairly incontestable argument that the MPAA is an appalling body of prodnose prudes, whose rating system reflects their disgustingly skewed priorities. Far be it from me to argue with this premise; indeed, I might well state it more strongly.

The curious thing I observed was that none of this group really seemed to want to argue directly with my actual post hypothesis, which is that many in my own corner of fandom and possibly others have subverted the MPAA scale for our own wonderfully non-prudish ends. The impression I have from those comments is that those particular fans do not feel their own usage of the scale is a subversion, and therefore that fora and communities that require MPAA ratings to be used are forcing the official, un-subverted MPAA system, and concomitant attitudes, upon them. The general feeling of those responses seems to be that, far from a self-applied advertisement of sexy content, the required use of the MPAA scale calls on them to be complicit in the MPAA agenda of censorship, anti-sexuality, misogyny and homophobia

This was not stated in so many words, so this reading of the comments makes some assumptions; I may be wrong. But I can certainly appreciate why this would be deeply objectionable, if I’m reading the subtext correctly.

The previous post did not, of course, deal at all with the issue of required ratings. However, the issue of required ratings, and the use of the MPAA scale as one of those commonly required, is clearly at the forefront of some fans’ minds. Thus, I would like to offer a post that to address the issue directly. On this topic, I would say that requiring the use of a scale whose non-fandom deployment is so distasteful is not exactly the best way to promote emotional safety and intellectual ease among fandom at large. In an ideal world, I think self-applied ratings should not require the internalization of a puritan censor in the back of every writer’s head.

One of the most common alternatives the commenters suggested was the use of a simple “explicit” versus “non-explicit”, which would serve much the same purpose that any rating system currently does. It isn’t perfect; it still contains a good deal of elasticity in what each poster considers “explicit” to mean, but this is going to be an issue in any rating system that is self-applied. I certainly would not suggest turning to externally applied ratings simply to achieve greater consistency, even were such a thing remotely feasible which it is not. In combination with the usual run of other meta information (genre, warnings, etc.) explicit/non-explicit would seem to address the concerns of those communities that do require the use of ratings. It has the bonus of being something any English-speaking fan can readily understand, which is not the case for any nationally-specific rating system. Nationally-specific interpretations are, as usual, part and parcel of any system’s elasticity.

For myself, to throw my hat in the ring right off the bat, I am inclined against required meta information of any sort. Required ratings or disclaimers or such seem to serve no useful purpose. I doubt many of us deceive ourselves that there is any actual regulatory or legal utility in meta information. Courtesy to one’s readers may come into it, but its definition varies, sometimes wildly, from one forum to another. My personal inclination is to let authors write the meta information as they will, with an awareness of where they are publishing, and then let the readers read as they dare. Fandom has promoted a general tendency to proliferate rather than par labels, after all. Thus, those fans who want no contact with the very notion of the MPAA can avoid it while those fans who want to attract the eye with an NC-17, promising porny pleasures behind the cut tag, can keep on giving the MPAA the virtual finger every time they do so.

Okay. Now you have somewhere to debate ratings qua ratings.

So, we as fandom and ficcers have gone around on the question of ratings quite a few times, and for quite a few reasons by now. The most peculiar and widespread round was probably triggered by the MPAA’s pissyness over archives using the NC-17 rating. Plenty of people in US fandoms still use G-PG-R-NC-17, of course, because it’s widely established and generally understood. Others, like ff.net, adopted the slightly altered version of K-T-M. Still others have come up with still more customized variations, and some people have argued that the written word should not have a rating system applied to it at all, and that it certainly isn’t to professional publications.

Ratings are pretty embedded in fandom practice by now, of course, and I doubt we’re getting rid of them. So we struggle on to find a system that says what we want it to say. One of the more recent contributions to the debate got me started thinking, though.

Ratings, as applied to fanfiction, work rather differently than ratings applied to other media, such as movies. For one thing, they’re self-applied and, for another, they don’t actually seem to be regulatory. I am not sure, though, that this fact calls for an alteration in the most commonly used ratings.

Let us start at the beginning. What do we use ratings to indicate?

One of the most common things seems to be sex. Among US fans at least, I believe this is inherited pretty directly from the MPAA, who place a completely disproportionate emphasis on sex as the primary gauge by which to restrict audiences.

This leads me off, though, to one of the major underlying questions: do we use ratings to restrict an audience? Or so we use them for another purpose?

Consider the use of the contested NC-17 rating in fanfiction. My impression in my own fandom sector, anime fandom, is that this rating is used more as advertising than for restriction. When an author wishes to warn off parts of the audience, for disturbing content let us say, such restriction is more often handled through the warning labels rather than the rating. The rating seems most frequently used to advertise the explicitness of the sexual and/or romantic content.

In some ways, then, it seems to me that we have taken in the MPAA focus on sex and subverted it. MPAA ratings are about restriction, and focus on the presence or absence of explicit sexual content disproportionate to the wide variety of other things that might justifiably restrict the audience. Fan use of those ratings is about audience selection and enlargement; we often use them to appeal to the audience that is looking for sexual content (at least in my corner and I think in others from what little I’ve seen of book/media/etc. practice).

There is, of course, another segment of fans that is interested specifically in restriction, or, as it’s most commonly expressed, keeping youngsters away from ideas they should not yet be exposed to. The actual content of those ideas, again, varies, but some of the frequently cited ones are sexuality, cruelty and/or violence, and bad language. Ratings, however, do not seem to come up in these discussions as much as mechanical restrictions, such as registration requirements for sites that contain variously defined mature material. This may be because this segment understands perfectly well that a rating never stopped any kid, especially from doing something as simple as clicking on a link.

So the actual utility of ratings for fandom texts seems to have very little to do with audience restriction. Rather, ratings seem to serve as a special-purpose label, one that can generally be counted on to address the sexual content unless the rest of the meta information specifically points in a different direction

The meta information can be reworked as a whole, so that the rating addresses something else and the sexual content is addressed in some other way. I do this in my own archive. But if a writer or reader desires greater precision or specificity, it is unlikely that a different rating system alone will deliver it. Ratings, by their nature, are very general and not comprehensive. Verbal labels seem far more likely to deliver, on that score.

Then, too, the MPAA scale has gained jargon meaning, among US fans. When I post to fandom forums and comms, I find myself swinging back to the MPAA scale in order to communicate with my potential audience in a way the community consensus understands. Considering this, it seems to me that, at least in my parts of fandom, our subversion of MPAA is already sufficient to its task. If the rating were the only meta information available, then it would not be, but meta information has become a form of composition all its own, and, looking at it, I think this may be a good thing after all. We are not making movies; we are not publishing novels; we are writing fic, and that is a medium of its own that calls for and evolves its own framework.

We might, in fact, think of our use of the G-PG-R-NC-17 scale as fic of MPAA, a notion that rather appeals to me.

Bleach: *fans self* Oh my. Aizen has met his match for top contender in the “badness is hot like fire” sweepstakes. Who knew Urahara could be sexy as hell?

Naruto: *slaps desk* There, now that is a fine issue! Why can’t you write like that more often, Kishimoto? Just the right balance of heart-rending and hopeful, with good, stark shading to complement it. Ditch all these fights with characters who take ten freaking issues to die after being gut-stabbed and write like this more.

Eyeshiled 21: … InaMura, you want to kill us, don’t you? What was that? Three reverses in one issue? My heart won’t take another three months of this!

All in all, a darn good week.

So, while out browsing around, I stumbled across the fact that the fanhistory wiki has a listing for me. It’s based entirely on my ff.net account. As such it is laughably inaccurate. It did start me thinking, though, about what a more accurate version would look like, and I thought I’d give it a try. Not to post on fanhistory, because the people who run it tend to annoy me, but just to get it all down on pixels.

( Herein lies the fandom history of Branch )

So I’m rewatching the Fudoumine matches again, and listening, as opposed to reading the initial translations, a few things catch my attention.

One is that Nanjirou is referred to as “flawless” or “perfect”, that is ten’i muhou, repeatedly.

The other is that, at this point, both Nanjirou and Tezuka state that Ryouma will have to move beyond merely copying his father if he wants to progress in his spiritual journey tennis.

So… how, again, is it moving beyond merely copying his father if Ryouma’s Final Ultimate Supercalafragalistic move is Ten’i Muhou no Kiwami?

I do not expect this to be answered, having long since concluded that if Konomi ever had a clear idea of how he wanted to conclude this story he lost it round about the time he started the National arc.  But, as a fic writer who wishes to make some little sense out of canon for my own nefarious purposes, I fret.

I also note that, right from the first, there’s this pattern of players being willing to injure themselves to secure a team win.  Kawamura doesn’t notice what he did to himself immediately, but Ishida is knowingly courting injury after being told it could permanently impair him to use Hadoukyuu too often. I could see this being a commentary on the way it twists the game to play it for nothing but victory, if I believed that was Konomi’s moral from the start, except… Ryouma does it too, when his eyelid is cut.  And we’ve just been told, repeatedly, that he’s exactly like Nanjirou, our exemplar of Pure and Innocent Tennis, so that determination being negative doesn’t fit in nicely.  This is especially so seeing as Ryouma’s stubbornness is the occasion for a heart warming round of team bonding and mutual support, as per standard shounen sports practice.

So I suppose I will just continue to consider canon Nationals some kind of strange AU and accept the pre-Nationals story trends.  There’s more of them anyway.

So I finally got around to watching the last few eps of the Prince of Tennis semifinals OVA, and, seeing it all in one shot, suddenly something makes more sense.

(Not about Akaya, because nothing could make that make sense, Konomi, you bum.)

I’ve felt from the first reading of the last issue that the series’ “moral” was bizarrely out of place.  The whole notion that Fun Tennis Rules Them All seemed utterly unsupported in any part of the foregoing series.

And it is utterly unsupported… except for Kintarou.  Kintarou is the epitome of playing tennis for the sheer, crazy fun of it and, because of that innocence and purity, being the strongest thing on earth.

If we recall that Kin-chan was originally supposed to be the hero, all this starts to make a bit more sense.

Konomi let Ryouma have a draw because, well, Ryouma is the hero.  And then Kin-chan gets trounced by Yukimura, which completely undercuts the notion that Fun Tennis is the strongest. But Kintarou’s moral is still the one that wins, having been transplanted to Ryouma.  Ryouma even gets a dose of Kintarou’s innocence, via the go-round with amnesia.

This does not make the ending actually make sense inside the story-world.  This is an explanation we can only reach from outside.  But it does give me slightly more hope that Konomi was not actually hallucinating while he drew the whole Nationals arc.

Memory loss or sheer, howling, culpable carelessness in ignoring his own story to date, that he’s still tarred with.  But I no longer feel the serious urge to inquire about the contents of his medicine cabinet.

I find myself torn every time I go back and read Janny Wurts, especially any of the volumes of Wars of Light and Shadow.

On the one hand, I like her characters very much. I like the texture of the world she’s made. I like the story itself.

When I can winkle it out of the thicket of adjectives, that is.

And that’s the first sticking point. Wurts is a good storyteller but not a skillful writer. It makes me tear my hair. She’s in love with descriptive phrases, especially ones that make no actual sense. Now that can be done well, and I’m very fond of the way Barbara Hambly, for example, makes occasional use of it, but Wurts takes it way, way too far. It’s lot like her italics, which some kind person should take away from her before she hurts herself. Her crises tend to be very artificial, and, really, there’s only so much Cosmic Misunderstanding I can take before I throw up my hands with frustration. The stories have a lot of pathos, but the narrative renders it all plastic.

That isn’t the part that makes me twitch the most, though. No, the part that makes me twitch the most is the Sledgehammer of Scary Morality. That’s the real other hand.

Wurts has created a world in which humans have no right to exist. While humans have much vaunted free will, there, if they screw up they’ll be wiped out of existence. Screwing up is defined pretty much as any interference with unsullied Nature–so, eg, entering an industrial age and gaining any technology beyond muscle-power, because this would, of course, Blight The Land.

Corollary to this, she has created a world in which technology is explicitly identified with humanity’s downfall and self-destruction. Back to the land for the humans, because that’s the only salvation! Of course, when humans are biddable there’s magic which, despite not being of any use in daily life, somehow makes up for everything. Just by, you know, existing.

She has created a world with a biologically determined ruling class, in which heredity infallibly produces enlightenment. This ruling class currently lives as Noble Savages with, as an added bonus, a racial past that includes castles and courtliness and probably roses. Two for the price of one.

And just to round things out, she has produced a world in which the wizardly guardians of God’s Natural And Unsullied Order are seven old men while the group of Misguided, Selfishly Humanocentric And Arrogant magicians are exclusively women. This seriously undermines the gender equality she allows those characters in less critical walks of life.

Those, and not the italic melodrama, are the real things that make it impossible for me to read a whole volume without putting it down and reading something with less species-and-gender self-hate in it for a bit. Wurts is a perfect example of one of fantasy’s Really Bad Habits: the pretense that the absence of technology can somehow redeem humanity’s ravening nature.

The only thing that can redeem humanity’s ravening nature is for humanity to knock it off. The presence or absence of technology may well speed the process of whatever we’re doing, but we can’t shove responsibility for our actions off onto our tools. That just obscures the real issues.

Kind of like Wurts’ adjectives.

So I was reading around on tvtropes.org recently and I read Spell My Name With An S, and I read Theme Naming, and I read Word Of God, and it all reminded me of the tangle that invariably comes up over the spelling of anime/manga names. Of course, any time we deal with a source from a different language the question of appropriate translation comes up, but names… names are special. Names get all the usual issues squared.

For one thing, there’s the basic issue of how one renders the sound of a language with a completely different writing system. In some ways, this is actually the easiest part; the only reason it’s complicated at all is that English has several standardized methods of romanizing any given Asian language to choose from. So some people write “Shaoran” and some write “Syaoran”, and if the two sides occasionally try to kill each other, well that’s fandom.

Things get more fun and exciting when the ‘Japanese’ name has, in fact, been taken from another language and there is a double transliteration to deal with. That adds the question of whether we should use a standardized English transcription of the original language (Xiao Lang) or a standardized transcription of the Japanese phonetic rendering (Shaoran).

Theoretically, an official romanization could resolve the question, but we run into complications there too. The original writer may or may not understand the rules of pronunciation and transcription for a) the original language or b) English if the two are different, and may or may not even be the source of the official information in question (aka Studio Minion Syndrome). This can leave us with romanizations like “Riza”, for a name pronounced ree-sah, which doesn’t make sense as an English spelling no matter how you slice it but almost everyone uses anyway just to stop the bickering. It’s just as bad when the official in question is an English speaker who doesn’t understand Japanese phonetic transcription of loanwords; that’s when we wind up with “Arukennymon” instead of “Arachnemon”.

Then, of course, there’s the problem that Japanese does not seem to have an official standardized system for kana-fication of other languages. The characters used to render Latinate or Germanic languages, especially, can vary, and the unwritten rules appear to be pretty constantly evolving. Complicating this basic problem, the same character often gets used for more than one sound. An extended terminal “ah” syllable may stand for an “er” or it may stand for an “a”. A terminal “su” may indicate an “s” or a “th”. If there is no official romanization or, better yet, if different official sources conflict, we’re left to guess and argue and act like there are spelling OTPs.

And that’s just for starters!

Because a number of anime/manga authors mess with the spelling of their characters’ names deliberately, usually in order to indicate that they are strange/futuristic/exotic. Consider the name Kira Yamato, about as Japanese a name as you can get, but spelled on the official website in katakana, the script used for foreign words. Consider K.T.’s penchant for putting extraneous double letters in the names of some characters, eg Nnoitra. Double letters in general seem to be a popular way to strange names, especially double L’s (Cagalli, Killua). And then, sometimes, the writer goes full bore and comes up with something like “Quwrof Wrlccywrlir” for a name pronounced “Kuroro Rushirufuru” (the historical betting leans toward the last name being an imported “Lucifer”).

That’s my personal line in the sand. If I look at it and say “it doesn’t make any sense”, even after thematic research, then I don’t care if it’s official, I’ll spell according to my own best guess. Milage varies on this, of course, and some fans hold by official spellings no matter how weird. All of which only goes to show, this is another debate that will never end. Ah, well, I suppose life would be boring if fans agreed on anything.

It seems to me that Avatar is actually two totally separate shows that just happen to be about the same characters.

On the one hand there is the Kiddie Show, consisting of episodic encounters with villains of the day, or possibly misguided-people-of-the-day, which teaches simple moral lessons. These episodes have a lot of slapstick humor and situational comedy.

On the other hand, there is the Young Adult Show, full of functional and dysfunctional families, feuding nations and siblings, knotty questions of spiritual and emotional maturity and actual plot. It’s very Greek-drama, really.

This double threading is not terribly unusual for US animation. Unfortunately, Avatar’s two shows are very distinct from each other all through the first two seasons. Any given episode is either one or the other, with very few exceptions. It’s only in the third season that they merge into each other. This means that the character development necessary to serve the Young Adult Show is frequently either very rushed or else completely invisible, motivations and histories left entirely up to the viewer to imagine because the time they would have needed is taken up with Kiddie Show episodes that do not generally advance either plot or characterization.

I like the show a lot, mind you. I’m eagerly waiting for the last handful of episodes, especially since season three has managed to combine the two threads fairly gracefully. But this particular narrative flaw places Avatar firmly in the mid-range, for me. If the writers had made up their minds to present either one or the other, or if they had understood their own agenda sooner and combined the threads early on, as it’s clear they are capable of doing, then I would probably have been willing to put Avatar up there with Card Captor Sakura or Saiunkoku Monogatari. As is, I’d have to say it’s a handful of pegs below Batman Beyond, around, say, King of Bandit Jing. Fun to watch, probably a benchmark in production terms, but not something I’ll put on the frequently-rewatch list.