I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

*staring at the info book translations*

Okay. So, when the KHR info book came out, the timeline set ‘current time’ in the middle of Our Hero’s second year of Namimori Middle school, and their ages are given as (for the most part) 14.  To be more precise, 13/14, given Kyoko’s age.

This… actually does match up.  I kept seeing their ages set at 15, and was wondering how on earth they could be first and second years in middle school and still be 15; that’s the age for a high school first year.

But, no, it looks like the times are not screwed up, and, indeed, these characters are middle school students.

And, theoretically, Hibari’s age is unknown, but it doesn’t seem in character for him to stay in middle school when he should properly be in the high school range, so he’s probably only a year older than they are, if that, and this is going to make my futurefic for Dino/Hibari a bit more difficult to set.

*makes small ‘argh’ sounds*

Having finished up KHR’s Varia arc, it’s time to take my first go at parsing out my favorite character.  Incidentally, there will be spoilers up to there, in here.

I think a major key to Hibari’s character really is his guardianship: the cloud that can never be bound. For someone like that to be a Guardian, I think he would have to be loyal, not to a person, but to the abstract ideal of the family.  Hibari’s attitude toward the school speaks of something similar, to me; he loves the school while seeming to hold every human in it in contempt.  This says to me that what he loves and defends is the ideal; defending the actual is kind of incidental.

I think this dovetails with another part of his character.  He likes to fight.  He likes to win.  He likes things to go the way he wants them to go.  His ideal gives rise to a vision (an order, as he puts it), and he fights to enforce that vision.

In his own way, I think he’s a complete romantic.  It’s just all abstract and he doesn’t actually like the messy humans cluttering things up, however much they’re required.  He may feel they don’t understand the ideal well enough.

The things he respects are another clue.  He seems to respect both passion and control.  Consider that Yamamoto seems to be the only one who can talk him around without getting ‘bitten’.  Usually.  Similarly, consider Hibari’s reaction during the ring battles, when he says that he’s all for anything that will bring out Tsuna’s true strength.  Tsuna is the pure-hearted one, recall, the one who fights for ideals of his own.  Hibari seems to respect that, which suggests he understands that.

So I think what we have here is one variation on the Black Knight.  Hibari seeks strength/victory/control in order to defend (and enforce) his shining ideal, be it the school or the family.

Major Spoilers in this entry.

For the next installment of my contemplations on Bakura and Ryou, I must note that, all during the second half of the Duelist Kingdom arc, they switch back and forth fast and often, with only a single bobble in continuity: the moment right after Ryou re-dons the Ring and doesn’t remember Bakura assisting the pharaoh with a distraction against the maze brothers.  After that there are only  three moments when we see Bakura manifest as himself, but there are quite a few moments when Ryou says or does things that are slightly out of character: telling the pharaoh to kill Pegasus or offering to come skulking downstairs with Honda or knowing what a shadow game is.  At the same time, the moments of Ryou’s apparent control follow very quickly on Bakura’s and Ryou does not seem to be at all confused about suddenly being down in the dungeon helping Honda rescue Mokuba. If we assume that Bakura is pretending to be Ryou more assiduously than usual, that works, but then that also suggests that it’s actually Bakura who offers his heart to guard the pharaoh against Pegasus’ mind reading, which I find dubious.

What seems more likely to me is that Bakura is allowing Ryou to stay aware and in “front”, but is watching over his shoulder close enough to switch seamlessly or to influence what Ryou is saying and thinking.  The moments when he clearly takes control are one instance of his style chicanery (in the maze), two of violence (the guard and Pegasus) and one of gloating over Shadi’s portrait. Those, it seems equally likely, Ryou is not aware for; at least he doesn’t seem to realize that Bakura has killed Pegasus and stolen the Eye.  The rest of the time, however, Bakura behaves pretty benignly toward his host, and we can, perhaps, understand why Ryou thought that it was all right to wear the Ring again.

I’ve been going back to read the Yuugi-ou manga, now it’s all out domestically and I can see it in one go. And I find myself instantly caught up in the Problem of Ryou.

The problem, of course, being that Takahashi really didn’t put much thought into his character, being clearly more interested in Bakura.

Now, Bakura is interesting, no doubt about it.  Reading over again, it makes a good deal of sense that Bakura himself is, in a way, two people at once: Bakura and Zorc.  *pauses to roll her eyes over that name once again*  They want the same thing (the Items) but for different reasons. Bakura strikes me as the one who is insanely competitive, more than a little unbalanced, and frankly a bit of a spazz. Zorc, early on, is pretty much in the background, but as time goes on I think his influence manifests more in the moments of colder arrogance.  Bakura is arrogant, right enough, but he burns hot.  This is the person who thinks nothing of injuring the body that he is still actively inhabiting in order to make things go his way, and then cackling about it. He’s also the person who likes close games, wants to win but seems to enjoy both the edge of uncertainty and crushing his opponents’ hopes at the eleventh hour.

The best hints we get of how Ryou fits into all this come early. During that first RPG, there’s a lot of soul manipulation going on, that being the Ring’s specialty, and Ryou takes active part in that.  Indeed, he does it well enough to win, making fast moves to control his body when opportunity presents, moving by stealth or open defiance whichever will shake Bakura more, shifting himself to the Wizard, and to the dice, giving himself a fall-back.  He is presented as someone who has always loved RPGs, so I doubt this was by chance; rather, Ryou is a good strategist, good enough to win against Bakura, and determined enough to take a long chance to save his new friends.

The result of his defiance is also interesting. He insists that he will not allow Bakura to hurt his friends anymore.  And, after this incident, to the best of my recollection, Bakura doesn’t. He manipulates, as with the soul fragment in the puzzle. He puts them aside, as with the sleep spell on Yuugi’s grandfather.  But he never acts directly/terminally against them again, outside the usual scope of duels.

This suggests to me that Bakura is a good deal more influenced by Ryou than anyone suspects.  It is even possible, given what we know, that Ryou is in direct conflict with Zorc himself for influence over Bakura’s actions, which would make a nice reversal of the obvious dynamic.

And the reason all this is possible is that Takahashi neglected to actually give us any firm idea of what’s going on with Ryou.  *sighs*  Well, I suppose we fic-writers can count that as a bonus of a sort.

Going back, today, to revise a story I’ve been let marinate for a while, I find that there’s only one section I need to heavily revise, at this point, and that section is the paragraph of sex.  I wrote the paragraph during one of those phases of “just get the thing done and on paper and fix it later”, so this is not entirely surprising.  What catches my attention is exactly what needs to be fixed.

All the action is there.  All the physical details are just the way I want them to be. And it’s really boring.

What’s missing is the meaning. This section has nothing at all about what the experience, the sensation, the action means to my pov character. And this, it comes to me all over again, is why writing sex is just like writing tennis or swordfights or any other kind of action.  All action, in print, has to mean something.

I’ve had people ask, before, if I’m just using the porn as something to hang the characterization and inter-character development on, why use porn so often? And, looking at the kind of meaning I’m starting to layer into the scene I’m revising, I think I have at least one answer (in addition to a) why not? and b) it gets attention).  It’s because porn can happen anywhere.  To get my characters to the kind of realizations I need, for the story to wrap up nicely, I need them to be in a charged exchange, one in which physical action and emotional meaning can resonate, and sex is a lot more flexible to set than tennis.

Today’s writing epiphany brought to you by the letter F and the number 2.

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, I finally got around to reading the full translation of Yukimura’s 40.5 profile (*tips hat to Ai*), and the tarot reading at the end caught my attention.

For one thing, as divinations go, it was considerably less corny than most of what shows up in these profiles.

Over and above that, though, I found this bit absolutely fascinating. It really looks like either Konomi is a tarot geek with a complex conception of Yukimura’s character (and just can’t translate that into narrative to save his soul), or else got really lucky.

Disclaimer: I had to make some assumptions about which spread Konomi was basing this on; there are dozens of different ways to interpret which card falls where and how they relate. Since this was divination for Yukimura’s profile, though, and since there are only the five cards, I assumed it was a fairly standard “who is this person and what are their circumstances” reading.

( So let's take a look at this )

It’s a complex reading. Me, I just wish Konomi had put all this into the story instead of stuffing it into a profile offstage.

Hang on. Wait just one minute.

So, the bit about Sanada telling Yukimura about the Kantou results.

One, hasn’t Yukimura just finished having surgery? Where is he getting all that liveliness from?

( And two… )

Konomi, can’t you write a consistent storyline to save your soul? *disgusted* It’s true, you know. The whole Nationals arc is a freaking AU.

This is a bit like asking the “correct” way to spell a Japanese character’s name using the Roman alphabet. There are so many possible answers it boggles the mind.

But let me simplify it a little and specify more: should one stick with information presented in the anime/manga, which is frequently contradictory; or information presented in guide/info books, which often provides more background detail but may, again, be contradictory; or information pertaining to real life?

For example: if Tezuka acts like a serious-minded, reserved and careful thirty-year-old in the anime while the info books tell us he’s a rugged out-doorsman and we know that, in real life, fifteen-year-old boys act like, well, boys… then how do we write him?

Do we write anime/manga characters the way they’re written, or the way real people might act in their circumstances? Do we go ahead and use the fluid and exaggerated physical proportions, which are generally there to make characterization points, or do we take the numbers in the guide books and stick to them?

I don’t actually think there’s a single answer to this, of course, but it’s something worth thinking about as we write.

Okay. Enough of the SaiMono novels are out that I finally have some idea of where the Emperor!Seien storyline needs to go.

See, the difficulty is that the first arc fits in pretty neatly. Just swap around a few characters, and it still works. After that, though, we start to have problems.

( Spoilers through novel 12 herein. )

Actually writing all this will probably take a good long while. But I’m very pleased with where the canon storyline has been going, and the fact that a lot of complex issues are having justice done to them. Plus, I’m totally giggling over the idea of Seien giving Ensei a flower. Probably with a bunch of insults thrown in.

*rubbing forehead* Konomi, you worthless hack, how am I supposed to make a coherent character for Kirihara out of this? This isn’t a plot twist, it’s a freaking mobius strip. I mean, the GB fixed by surgery was bad enough.

( But this is just ridiculous. )

Or maybe he’s just decided to finish the manga by destroying all of the teams, one way or another. He’s certainly well on his way to destroying Echizen with sheer pointlessness. At this rate, I’m kind of hoping he never does get around to Yukimura’s match, because the little demons of chaos only knows what he’ll do to that.

So when I get this far in the Translated arc, I’m rewriting the matches. In some way that does not pretend all the development of Regionals has somehow vanished into the ether.

( Cut for speculation about Hisoka's disturbing life, especially re Muraki. )

On characters: I’m fascinated by how Yue is developing in the arc I’m working on. In manga-canon, we see him respond intensely to the tiniest gestures of emotional warmth. His eyes widen, his lips part, his posture opens. It makes a poignant contrast to the way he responds to Eriol, when they’re discussing the fact that Eriol =/= Clow. During that time, Yue is frowning, his mouth is tight, his body is curled up and closed in. He looks like he’s in pain. Yet he responds quite pliantly to Eriol’s smallest touch or gesture.

You see, CLAMP can’t write coherent emotional motivation to save their souls, but they can draw it quite well. Yue reads clearly, to me, as someone who has been deeply hurt and yet still loves/values/wants the acknowledgment of the person responsible. His apparent shock at gestures of warmth or care from anyone other than Eriol/Clow speak of someone who has been completely (pathologically, really) focused on one person. He wants that singular focus and closeness back, and pushes away any other attempts at connection.

I find myself wondering about the degree of shock he shows, though. Does Yue, perhaps, feel that, having been abandoned by his One Person, he’s worthless? That he doesn’t deserve warmth and care? The occasions on which his expression softens for a moment, when the brows tip up and the eyes are a shade rounder than usual, when he seems bewildered by care, make me think so.

And the way this is manifesting in my own Yue is that he responds to Touya’s little, everyday gestures–handing him a teacup, holding out a hand to invite him to sit down–the way a more normally socialized person might respond to their first explicitly sexual contact. He gets flustered and flushed, he reaches back but hesitates, he gets warm and a little shaky. The contrast between the casualness of the gestures and the way Yue responds as if it were an intense intimacy is a little stunning.

On writing process: I suspect this Thought of the Day was rather influenced by the above. Because the metaphor that’s coming to me, for writing a story arc, is that of multiple orgasms. Each story provides its peak of realization and the satisfaction of completing it–and yet that satisfaction is almost immediately swept up into the hovering, yearning, reaching for it feeling of constructing a new story, seeking that next moment of realization.

I think Hiruma might be a bastard.

And illegitimate, too. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) In fact, I think he’s the child of someone high up in whatever his walk of life is, possibly even someone known colloquially as God (“Devils don’t ask favors of God.”).

It would explain why, in a story that takes some trouble to include parents and homelives, we see /nothing/ of his; the way his father seems to be pleased with him but knows Hiruma won’t want to hear it; Hiruma’s choice to engage, not just in delinquency, but actual criminal activity; the way he’s paralleled with Kid; the amount of ready cash and capital he always has; and possibly even his taste for blackmail–maybe he learned that tactic first with dear old dad.

If this is the case, I expect his mother is either dead or very embittered.

I have hopes we will find out one way or another, eventually.

Rereading the Rain Match, hoping it will prod the bunnies.

Fuji.

It isn’t that he doesn’t care about winning or losing. In fact, I’d say he probably hates to lose. It’s just that he doesn’t really have much reason to think in those terms. He doesn’t lose; so there isn’t any real reason for him to either be afraid of losing, or motivated by that fear, or to value winning particularly. Winning and losing are not his scale of value. So of course competition, and the determination the others show, aren’t why he’s doing this.

As for what his scale of value is… the thrill is clearly part of it. The thrill of the possibility of loss. Not the fear, which is, I’d say, why it never becomes a motivation to him. But he enjoys the pressure of someone closing in and making him work for it. Given how rarely he says that comes, though, another part would seem to be… aesthetic. Drawing his opponents out and seeing them at their limits, as he says.

And, of course, that’s why he doesn’t consider himself ‘serious’. Because it’s all totally personal reasons, with no greater goal or will to exceed. The shape of future matches seems to indicate that he might not actually be aware, at this point, of the possibility of being serious–that he thinks Tezuka, and perhaps Echizen too, are like him, doing this for the personal thrill. To an extent, I think he’s right about Echizen, this early on. Which may be why they clicked so well, in this match.

I think this story will have to be from Fuji’s pov.

*snaps fingers* That’s it! *hearts Athena for making her think*

What I really don’t like about so much fic-Yukimura characterization. It’s that, in absence of hard information, the vast majority of fandom writes Yukimura like they write Fuji.

And they’re not the same at all.

Fuji is one of the single most elusive characters in tenipuri. I’d put him and Tezuka in the top two slots, though for rather opposite reasons. Tezuka is elusive because he shows so little of himself. Fuji is elusive because he shows so much that’s misleading. Fuji always keeps an ace in reserve, or tries to. Fuji stays out of arm’s reach, perceptually speaking.

Yukimura never hides what he is.

And where part of Fuji’s character development has been for him to become engaged, to learn how to feel involved and act on his own and his team’s ambitions, Yukimura has never been un-engaged.

Disengaged, perhaps, but most certainly not by his own will or desire, and he takes a significant personal risk to return to tennis and his team as soon as humanly possible.

To write Yukimura as hidden, in the way that Fuji typically hides himself, really seems to miss a core aspect of his character.

*amused* This started with the thought that Yukimura uses ore, while Fuji uses boku, and why the difference exists.

Okay, having finished re-reading up to the end of Regionals I find myself torn.

On the one hand, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that Sanada does in fact have a good deal of self-control. We see him break reserve exactly three times, off the court. Once when Yukimura is being taken into the hospital right after his collapse. Once when Kirihara loses to Echizen (which, it appears later, Sanada only thinks could be possible if Kirihara was blowing the game off and screwing around). And once, maybe, as he calls to Kirihara-in-Muga to go for it, to win the match and take the tournament.

On the court… you know, having read it all through, I think that his consistent yelling at his opponent about how worthless they are and how they should just give up now is a part of his play style. A calculated psychological attack to drive down his opponent’s fighting spirit. Because he’s never just wild; he’s thinking all the time he plays. He only shows a flash of wildness, on the court, when he uses Ka.

Sanada watches all the time, with scary intensity. Compared to his watchful expression, his smirks/grins are very rare, and at least half of them are confined to that alarming grin he has when he hits Ka.

Now. The reason I’m torn is that he clearly failed to watch Atobe closely enough, when Atobe came to challenge him.

On the other hand, there is the other side of his personality that I also observed this time around. He’s not very quick to react to quick changes in circumstances. When Ooishi snaps and says Seigaku came to win, and then runs back to the team in flusterment… When Kirihara gets in between Sanada and Yanagi… When Echizen mouths off at the start of their match and trots away… Each time, Sanada is left standing there for a frame (with his hand hanging in the air, for the first two).

So I think… he’s stubborn.

He watches. He’s a very good analyst. He has a good deal of self-control, which he seems to use to hold and focus that phenomenal intensity of his. But he also has a stumbling block, which is his own stubbornness, and I suspect that this sometimes trips him up and skews the speed/accuracy of his analysis. Not by much. But by just enough that another opponent who’s very, very good can slip in through the crack.

He is, however, capable of adjusting quickly. After he loses he makes an immediate shift around to the stance of Rikkai as challengers, and rallies his team around that point.

So I think what his stubbornness and occasional slowness to respond are based on is the same thing his occasionally brusque manners are based on: his pride and confidence. He has been, for years and possibly barring Yukimura, the very best, and sees no reason to be humble about it. His pride is not, however, an all-encompassing blind-spot. He does not willingly allow himself to be moved by others. But when it happens, he deals with it.

I will be very interested to see how his character develops now. (Always supposing Konomi bothers with his development…)

Spinning off from Resonant8′s entry on character making, and the discussion following, I find myself wandering in thought toward the writers of the Endicott Studio, toward Ursula K. Le Guin and her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, and toward Lois McMaster Bujold and her Vorkosigan books.

At first glance, one of these things is not like the others.

The Endicott writers such as Emma Bull, Charles Delint, Terri Windling and all her proteges have, I think, an obvious resonance with Le Guin. As Le Guin points out, the story of the Hero and his linear conflict with, not uncommonly, most of the rest of the world, is the most valorized literary model of Western storytelling. There are, however, other ways of telling a story, and other stories worth telling. Those other stories are often the ones that the Endicott writers focus on. The world of their stories does not make sense (as per Mr. Clemens’ dictum); what we see instead is the characters attempting to make sense of their world–not always successfully and certainly never completely. Their stories and characters wander, picking up as they go things that seem meaningful or interesting to stow in the bag of the story. Some of those things prove not to be meaningful to the immediate story, after all, and, in a proper Hero story, would have been snipped out in the telling… or, at least, in the editing. Here, they are not, but rather left in the bag to puzzle everyone with their presence. “Secondary” characters have just as full a life and existence as “primary” ones, only we see far less of those lives, often leaving us wondering what was left untold. We are not directed to the triumphant or tragic end of the story, but rather tempted toward the outskirts and down side alleys. This is especially obvious in the Bordertown anthologies, in which the writers shared their characters back and forth, pulled them into each other’s stories and chucked them out again, willy nilly and with no enlightenment to show for it. The conflict that the characters think they are in often turns out to be a mistaken perception.

This is Carrier Bag writing.

And that brings me to Bujold. Because one of the more consistent themes in the Miles Vorkosigan books is that Miles throws himself into the conflicts in his life with every ounce of energy and spirit that is in him… only to find that the conflict is a mirage and his hands pass through it and he lands in an ungraceful heap in the middle of another situation entirely. By all rights of character, Miles should be a Hero. And sometimes he is. But those times are, as he puts it, matters of “forward momentum”, of running full tilt along a highwire, because if he stops he’ll waver and fall. Exciting. Desperate. Unsustainable.

Is that not the essence of the Hero story?

Recently, and, tellingly, as Miles gets older, Miles comes to reject that model. He is still the Hero, at times. But now, instead of running, he stands still. Instead of his military career he embraces a political one–and not the politics of conflict but the politics of family, of kitchen negotiation, of cultivation. Instead of the stories of the bag-carriers being subordinated to The Story of The Spear-carrier, it happens the other way around. Miles is the Hero in the service, not of Accomplishment, but of Existence–not the linear, or even the circular, but the still and the wandering.

Bujold has put the Hero in the Carrier Bag.

I find this delightful, but it is true that such departures often fail to endear a story to an audience grown to expect Heroes with spears and without bags, and nicely spun yarns that don’t snarl. I suspect that the presence of the Hero, despite his Bagging, is one of the reasons Bujold has better sales, and considerably better market staying power than the Bordertown books. By the same token, I suspect Bujold’s tendency toward bag-narrative is a significant part of why she has a smaller following than, say, Mercedes Lackey.

Jumbled up bags are fascinating, but they are not quick.

These, then, are my own models of character building (and, indeed, world building). The guiding concept I have taken from these stories is not to select a specific conflict to motivate my characters, but rather to elaborate wildly and somewhat omni-directionally on my characters’ potential lives and then choose a handful of threads from that tapestry (or snarl) to tell about in a given moment. The choice of threads narrows the scope of what is told. But my most favorite stories are the ones that tell, one way or another, everything that the chosen viewpoint can see in that swatch.

So, between them Permetaform and Melannen got me thinking.

Muses. Imaginary Friends. Characters.

As best I can tell, you know, the three have always been much the same thing to me. I vaguely recall having imaginary friends (one or two) who were not either my characters or someone else’s, but the characters, and the stories I could tell around them and me definitely predominated, as far back as I can remember. My terminology is the only thing that’s really changed over time, as I called them imaginary friends, and then characters, and then muses–that last happening when I got involved in fandom and fanfic, where it seemed to be the going vocabulary term.

I also remember passionate arguments with other people about whether or not they were real. I said they were, only to be told if they were real they should be able to move a bowl or some such. This frustrated me hugely, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to say what, in retrospect, I think I understood very early on. Their reality was not a physical thing. It’s true, the story taking place was often something I acted out as a child, overlaying the physical shapes of the story environment on my ‘real world’ environment so that, for instance, my dresser became a supercomputer. But it was an overlay. The reality of my IFs was a reality arising from the truth or genuine-ness of the personality pattern in question. Anything that rang true and led to a positive interaction between that other pattern and my own was real. That reality, I felt then and still feel now, was not less because the other participants couldn’t pick up the bowl.

This leads to something I’ve written about before, but now comes back to me refracted at a different angle. Muses, characters, IFs are not me. But I make them out of myself. This is precisely how some characters, and not others, gain enough depth to be muses/IFs for me. Those identities are not mine, any of them. But when I’m fascinated enough to conceptualize a character, and bits of them are missing, which is invariably the case, I take whatever bits of my identity pattern or experience match what is there (in my idea-sketch of this person, or in the source text) and use that to fill in the gaps.

This is why I can’t say that my muses are either internal or external to me, because it’s both and neither. They are not me, they have their own integrity as personalities, and in that way they are external individuals. Yet, they are made from me and my sense of their integrity is no doubt strengthened by the fact that I have loaned them my own, and in that way they are internal parts of me. They exist in border territory: Storyspace.

And in Storyspace, I am also a character. My personality patterns occupy space in that border territory, and interact with the other patterns there. This is what I’ve done from the start, only now I act it out on the page, rather than in three-d, and call it muse-chat. When they enter the framework of a plot, and I am not present as a character, then I call it a story. When both happen at once I call it a role-playing log.

It’s probably redundant to mention that I write very character-driven stories.

Despite that parity of existence, within Storyspace, my own experience of where the basic inspiration or creativity or suggestions come from is that it comes from myself–the parts of myself that process experiences and extract patterns and apply them to actions, both internal and external. Those parts of myself are where I connect to the rest of the world; they are the active boundary; they are what produces Storyspace in border territory. When a story possesses me, as one occasionally does, and gains enough momentum that writing feels nearly involuntary, it isn’t the willfulness of the characters–it’s the shape of the story as a whole, beautiful and fascinating enough that I don’t want to leave it.

I am not, however, about to generalize from this to some Unified Theory of Creativity, and say that anyone who experiences inspiration as external must simply be alienating their own creative voice. Because if anyone were to tell me that all inspiration must be external and that my own experience is ‘simply internalizing’ that external source? I’d eviscerate them with a plastic spork. Slowly. Sometimes highly individual muses are obviously just a figure of speech within a given discourse community. Sometimes it’s equally clearly a given writer’s literal experience. *shrugs* “Infinite diversity in infinite combination” yeah?

What I would like to know, myself, is why vivid descriptions or accounts of highly individual muses seem to squick so many people (and other writers, particularly) who don’t share the experience? I’ve seen the squick itself expressed, but not really explained.

A mention in one of the recent threads at fanthropology reminded me of that apparently popular fandom sport: Mary Sue hunting. And one of the things that struck me, thinking about it, is that Mary Sues are reviled in the same terms within lit fandoms and anime fandoms. I find this strange.

It bears pointing out that almost all of the common criteria for Sue-dom fit a sizable category of the canon characters in anime. While I can see the justice of readers becoming annoyed by a fan-made original character who takes over the story when the reader was expecting to read about the original original characters, I’m increasingly convinced that it’s unreasonable to protest on most of the other standard Sue grounds.

Consider the common criteria sited: Funky hair/eye color or otherwise remarkable appearance. Completely unrealistic powers, possessed just because it’s her/him. An equal degree of “endearing” klutziness or similar lack of some basic skill such as self-preservative instinct. Universally loved, despite immature behavior and somehow manages to be the center of the other characters’ attention at all times. Either effortlessly sweeps to victory through overwhelming power or else falls into it by luck and the apparent blessing of chance at every turn. Instant love interest for any and all heros and villains, frequently both at the same time (if heros/villains are of the same sex, “obsession” may be substituted for “love”; it looks much the same). Usefully tortured past, or possibly present, that s/he has nevertheless managed to survive/overcome at completely unreasonable odds.

This is the basic profile of both the shounen and shoujo hero/ine.

Tsukino Usagi (BSSM); Yuuki Miaka (FY); Himura Kenshin (RK); Mutou Yuugi (YGO); Honda Tohru (FB); Utena (Utena); Shiro Kamui (X); Naruto (Naruto); Vash (Trigun); Sanzo (Saiyuki). Few of them meet all of the criteria, but it’s close. Admittedly, the major victories won by these characters are rarely “effortless”, but they are often a matter of uncovering a pre-existing inner strength and the catalyst for doing so is often external. That’s what the main love interest, or, occasionally, the friend-group, is there for; to flip the switch for the hero/ine.

It may be worth noting, here, that I love most of these characters to pieces.

My point is, in order to fit new characters into an anime-based fanfic, they need extraordinary appearance and ability, and quite possibly equally extraordinary Murphy-baiting, Darwin-taunting behavior.

One complaint that I have some sympathy for points out that writing a replacement hero/ine turns the story away from the beloved original, and where’s the point in either writing or reading that. And yet… I still find myself asking, where’s the heinous crime? I don’t exactly go out of my way to read Sue stories, both because it’s generally an extremely personal kind of writing and because the technical ineptitude with which Sues are usually written gives me headaches. But the technical lacks have no intrinsic relation to the character shape so often denounced. If I want, say, a female character who can fight at the same level as the males of Rurouni Kenshin, I’m going to have to make her myself, because the mangaka sure isn’t going to. (And, you know, I’d really like to read that.) If I want a character to come in and smack Naruto upside the head and talk some practical sense to him, s/he will have to come from outside Konoha to have an unencumbered viewpoint, and s/he had better kick ass and take names or Naruto would never listen. And if I want it right now, I’ll have to make her/him up myself. And if I want more adventures of Sailor Moon and Co. I’ll have to invent yet more villains, because she’s vanquished all the pre-existing ones. And they’d better be super-duper villains, to be worth her time. And they almost have to fall in love with her, because that’s practically an article of faith in that story’s universe. None of these things are intrinsically technically flawed, but you’d never know it to listen to the Sue hunters’ complaints.

The other category of complaint that is often valid is that a Mary Sue does not develop. As Omi pointed out, this is what really differentiates a Mary Sue from an anime hero/ine. Well, most of them. But if this is the primary complaint, why is it so rarely articulated? What I see far more often is scorn for the fact that here is a character with lavender hair and phenomenal cosmic powers named Tsukihana Kirei–which characteristics do not, in themselves, really differentiate her much from the canon character standing next to her. It’s as if the Sue’s appearance has become the metonymy of all the more significant character aspects that readers wish to protest–her flat/static nature, her takeover of the story, her use to manipulate the hero/ine’s love life. I find this problematic enough in lit fandoms, but in anime fandoms it becomes absurd.

So, while I’m all for the idea of increasing one’s technical skill, and staying true to the shapes of the characters and story, I think it may have been overlooked that a Sue, by and large, is true to the shape of a big chunk of anime. The vituperation poured on her copper-tressed head seems disproportional and oddly angled. If the critiquers really dislike that particular character shape, why are they watching these shows to begin with? And if they don’t dislike it, why do so many rail against it with such unthinking specificity?