- Location
- Patriarchova
1. Yup. Coldsteel the Hegeheg really turned into an emblem.
2. Greek mythology.
-
For all readers and writers
After much ado, our new tagging system is here and being rolled out to the userbase. Read more here!
Let's Watch...things. Mostly blind idk.
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Review
1. Yup. Coldsteel the Hegeheg really turned into an emblem.
2. Greek mythology.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I could tell just from the name tbh
Shadows House (S1E1-5)
New
- Location
- Patriarchova
This review was comissioned by @Bernkastel
I thought it was supposed to be "Shadow House," "Shadow's House," or "Shadows' House" at first, but nope! It's Shadows House, yes S but no apostrophe. Anyway, this seinen manga has been ongoing since 2018, and it got two cours worth of anime in the 2021-2 era. I'm going to be talking about the first few episodes of that anime adaptation today.
The good news? I have plenty to say about Shadows House, and nearly all of it is positive.
The bad news? I still can't say nearly as much about it as I think I'd like to, on account of this being a mystery plot through and through, and these five initial episodes don't even finish setting up the initial round of questions let alone answering them.
The teaser does a good job of setting up the very, very basic (apparent, at least) premise and establishing the themes and atmosphere that will persist through these early episodes. A group of black silhouettes, their featureless outlines emitting a slow trickle of black carbon dust out through the gaps in their colorful pseudo-Victorian finery, stand by a window in a grim, expansive mansion. A row of normal-looking children whose own silhouettes eerily mirror the shadow people's ritually drink from row of cups offered to them, and then - speaking with a single, creepily cheerful voice - swear to serve the noble Shadows Family loyally and indefinitely, as all "living dolls" like themselves must do.
The rest of the teaser is less narrativistic, but similarly dreamlike and eerie. Featuring a (living doll?) servant girl and a mirror-silhouetted Shadows girl having what appears to be a very complicated relationship told in impressionist montage, along with some more horrific stuff involving the giant creepy mansion and clouds of the ash the Shadows apparently exhale through their skins doing scary Poltergeist shit.
There's also some external shots of trains running through ash-clouded tunnels. The people on the trains appear to be normal humans rather than members of the illustrious Shadows family.
And, that leads us to the pilot, "The Shadow And Her Doll." Our protagonist - a living doll who will soon be given the name of Emillico - as she wakes up for the first time in the coffinlike device she was ostensibly born in. She doesn't seem to trust her surroundings, fearing the darkness and fumbling with the series of doors and locks she needs to navigate in order to reach her Mistress' chambers. She wasn't born knowing much: just that she's a living doll, and that her purpose in life is to serve Mistress Kate Shadows as a personal slave. She *really* wants to do a good job of this. That impulse seems to be as innate as the knowledge, and as bereft of competing impulses.
Surprisingly, Kate didn't know that her servitor still needs to be named. She decides on the name "Emilico," after the living doll's goofy cheerful behaviour reminds her of a character in a book she's been reading.
Emilico's main job, henceforth, will be to clean Kate's suite. Kate is tidy by nature, but like all Shadows her body is constantly emitting clouds of ashes and soot, and whenever she experiences a negative emotion - anger, fear, anxiety - she emits exponentially more. Whole choking clouds and trickling waterfalls of it. It's even worse when Kate is asleep; she wakes up every morning in a bedroom buried in ash, and it's implied that the other members of the Shadows family are likewise. Like something truly terrible is haunting their dreams night after night.
As Emilico tries her best to please her new Mistress despite her overenthusiasm and (rather cliched, I have to say) moeblob-brand clumsiness often interfering with her performance, Kate reveals more and more of her own personality, and things get weirder with every step. For one thing, she never refers to herself using pronouns; she refers to herself as Kate and only as Kate, but has no problem using he/she/them/etc in reference to anyone else. She also, despite not being shy in her observation and studying of Emilico, is strongly averse to being watched (or even looked at unnecessarily) herself.
She clearly enjoys Emilico's company, even as she visibly tries to put up walls against it. Emillico, for her own part...well, it's very hard to say if she actually likes Kate or not at this point, or even if she has enough free will to not like her designated Mistress. Emillico always tries to look at Kate at a profile against the window, so that she can see the outline of her lips and cheeks and see if she is smiling or not (and it turns out that she often is, at least when Emillico gives her anything to react to and her staring isn't noticed). The pilot episode ends with Mistress Kate giving in to her affection and deciding to use her living doll as a literal living doll and dress her up in her own best clothing and makeup, just so she can enjoy Emilico's own happiness at the sight of her newfound beauty in the mirror. It is also in this final scene that Kate chooses Emilico's name.
Throughout the episode though, there are a few moments that go out of their way to remind the audience that what we're seeing here is very, very wrong.
First: relatively early in the episode when the not-yet-named Emilico is trying to make Kate smile and catch the shape of it in her profile, and admits it out loud, Kate momentarily turns into an angry tyrant with a sharp, venomous bark and a erupting cloud of frenzied black soot. "Don't you EVER," she hisses at Emilico, "try to control MY emotions." The emphasis she places on the words make it very clear that the Shadows are expected to control what their living dolls think and feel, but that the reverse is completely unacceptable and punishable very, very harshly.
She calms down again a second later, and even apologizes (seemingly in earnest) when she sees how frightened and upset Emilico has become. But still. It did happen, seemingly on reflex. This scene casts a long shadow (heh) on all of their more pleasant and heartwarming interactions afterward; no matter how cute they are playing together, and whatever fantasy circumstances there might be to soften the edges, these two are a master and slave with all that entails.
Second: throughout the first few scenes of the episode, there are some really unsettling details hinting at what a "living doll" actually is. One memorable subplot has Emilico feeling a growing discomfort that she attributes to a lack of maintenance and need for oiling, until she finally collapses and needs Kate to tell her that she's starving and needs food. When asked why a doll would need human food, Kate simply replies "your body still needs energy."
Related to this is the fact that Emilico is illiterate, and that Kate needs to teach her how to read in order for her to read the instructions left for her. Kate states outright that most living dolls aren't born not knowing how to read, any more than they're born not knowing what they are and who they need to serve. She's evasive about why this might be, but to me it suggests that these children were something else before they were turned into "living dolls" and that they came from different backgrounds and levels of education. Then again, Kate was also surprised she didn't already have a name, so this may or may not mean anything.
Third: Kate murmurs ominously about how each of the Shadows needs their personal doll to act as a "face" for them.
With each member of the Shadows family being considered a faceless nobody despite their apparent privilege until they come of age and are assigned their slave to act as a face. Hopefully this won't involve flensing. In the meantime, Kate seems to be almost as much of a prisoner as Emilico, and she's suffering from chronic isolation and boredom.
But then, how literally "faceless" the Shadows are is also called into question near the end, when - during the "dolling up" scene - Emilico manages to touch Kate's face with a makeup-sponge before she can push her hand away.
For just a moment, white skin is revealed before it secretes another covering of ash.
Did both of them used to be something else, before being made into a Shadows and a living doll?
Did they both used to be the same person, before being *split* in some way? Their outlines are identical, just like all of the Shadows' are with their dolls'.
The second episode, "Outside the Room," introduces a little more of the Shadows House and its occupants. Only a little, though. This castle is absolutely huge, and its structure is designed to keep it highly compartmentalized. Each section of the building houses a different age and sex cohort of the (seemingly very large) Shadows Clan and their dolls. This wing is set aside for young Shadows who have only just received their dolls. Within the wing, different floors and hallways seem to be reserved for either boys or girls. Each living doll spends a part of their time cleaning the hallways and common areas though, and when doing this they're able to socialize with pretty much any other doll from their wing who happens to also be on general custodial duty.
Emilico quickly befriends Mia, Rosemary, and Lou, girls who appear to be around her age and are the personal slaves of other Shadows their age. They seem cheerful, for the most part, but it quickly becomes apparent that this happiness is something that requires constant, wilful reinforcement, and that some of them are much better at maintaining it than others.
As for who uses these living spaces, well. Apparently, each Shadows youth undergoes a debut ceremony in which their living doll becomes their official "face." After that, they're allowed to leave their rooms at will and go more or less where they wish, provided their face is with them. Faceless pre-debutant children, it seems, are to be neither looked at nor heard.
Emilico is taught where to clean, where living dolls are and aren't allowed to go (certain hallways that presumably lead out of their building section are strictly forbidden, at least without a post-debut Shadows master). Whenever she asks about something outside of their immediate purview, she is simply told "not to fret over trivial things." Living dolls clean, and they do whatever else their masters tell them. This makes them happy and healthy and long lived. The consequences for not doing so are trivial things that need not concern you, because seriously, why would you want to do anything else anyway?
She's even taught a song to sing as she sweeps and wipes, about the happiness of her kind as they serve and their lack of need to think about anything else. It would honestly sound like a Disney Rennaissance number, were it not for the total lack of music to go with the vocals that makes it feel hollow and its cheer empty and strained. Emilico herself seems to think that she's as happy as the song says she is, but things are clearly nagging at her at least a little by this point.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF1B48Y85J4
They need to go through a big airblaster to blow all the soot off of them after each day of common area cleaning, with a fan so strong you can't even breathe while it's cleaning you. They are also each given a bodysuit and plague doctor-looking gas mask, in case an area of castle under their care ever gets dangerously sooty. You wouldn't want to catch the soot-sickness, after all.
...
Just a reminder: this soot is coming from the bodies of their masters, and a lot more of it comes out when said masters are experiencing anger or fear. The servants sometimes need to wear protective gear to stop it from killing them.
The symbolism here is pretty self-explanatory.
...
The metaphor comes close to surface text just a scene later, when Emilico returns to Kate's room to resume her personal slave duties. Kate is happy and entertained by Emilico's excitement as the latter recounts her first experience of the "outside world" as she thinks of it. Everything is going really well. But then Emilico gets water on a little stuffed doll that Kate keeps on the shelf, and Kate flips the fuck out in a tantrum of yelling, insulting, and venting ash like an active volcano.
That doll is apparently the only object in the room that Kate actually cares about. She never mentioned this to Emilico, but that isn't sparing the latter right now. Kate refuses to accept an apology, claiming that Emilico could never understand how much Kate values that doll, because (according to her) Emilico values nothing whatsoever. Because that's an accusation you can make of someone who was effectively born a few days ago. Telling Kate that Emilico values her as a person just enrages her to the point of stomping off to hide in the bathroom for a few hours.
The soot formation left on the ceiling over the site of Kate's freakout is a veritable stalactite of solidified ash that refuses to come off no matter what Emilico does to it. Emilico knows that the instruction booklet contains advice for how to remove extra-resilient soot patches, but she still can't read well enough to decipher the text without help, and she's terrified of what might happen if she asks Kate for help with it. So, in the meantime, she tries something else.
When Kate emerges back into the bedroom, Emilico has delicately opened, oiled, dried, fluffed, and sewed her doll back together again with no trace of the water damage. She ALSO, in that time, started making a new doll of her own; a little chicken-type thing made from spare bits of cloth and stuffed with a little soot-snowman that Kate had earlier built during her boring, lonely time without her slave.
This is meant to prove to Kate that she is also capable of valuing inanimate objects. The soot-snowman stuffing is to represent her love of Kate as a person as well.
Kate is charmed. Impressed. And also (just like the last time she got mad at Emilico) very vocally apologetic.
However, there is still a (potentially toxic) ash-stalactite on the ceiling. And Emilico is still the one who needs to deal with it, once Kate magnanimously helps her read the instructions for how to do her job for her.
The little chicken-doll ends up being the cause of another problem not long afterward, though. When Emilico is scrubbing the outside of Kate's bedroom window, the ash-chicken falls out of her pocket, and while trying to grab it she ends up falling out the window and falling two floors into the garden below. She lands in some thick hedges, but still hits her head hard enough to lose consciousness.
Here, we see what might be some self-awareness from Kate when she breaks the rules of her people and leaves her room to dash downstairs and see if she's okay, just hoping that no one sees her.
It definitely feels as if Kate understands that it's her own fault that Emilico would risk her life for that stupid chicken doll. There's guilt motivating her here, not just concern.
No concussion or broken bones, fortunately. However, the scrapes and bruises that Emilico did get are normal wounds on normal skin that bleed red. When she wakes up and asks Kate why a "living doll" would be made of flesh, blood, and bone, Kate simply deflects.
...
Earlier, Kate also marvelled at Emilico's sewing ability. That's not a skill that living dolls should be programmed with. Certainly not one prioritized over the ability to read their own instruction booklets.
...
While they hurry their way back toward Kate's room, they unfortunately run into someone. Emilico's cleaning friend Mia, in the company of her own post-debut mistress, Sara.
Mia doesn't react when Emilico speaks to her. Just mimics Sara's body language and sneers cruelly at the other pair as Sara cackles about what a weakling Kate must be for letting her Face move and speak independently while outside her room. If she's this much of a screwup, then the Shadows Lord Grandfather will likely have her removed, which is alright with Sara if it means less competition for favor and family resources within their cohort. Still, just because Sara is such a nice person, she won't report this indiscretion from a pre-debutant to Lord Grandfather. Kate should consider herself lucky; few other Shadowses would have been this merciful.
The next time Emilico sees Mia, the latter acts like nothing happened. After all, she was just acting as Mistress Sara's face back there. Nothing to do with herself or with Emilico. That said, Sara was telling the truth about the Lord Grandfather euthanizing debutants who displease him, and their "faces" don't survive the process either, but there's no need to think about trivial things like that. Just clean the mansion and follow orders, and you'll stay happy.
No word about how this telepathic bond that lets a doll serve as a realtime "face" is meant to be formed; you're just supposed to DO IT.
On one hand, no flensing, so that's good. On the other hand, well...everything.
That night, Emilico starts using her growing literacy to take notes about things she shouldn't bother thinking about. Getting them down in a notebook in her coffin-bed-thing will help keep them out of her head where they'll distract her, right?
So, that's two out of five Shadows House episodes in this order. I think you all see what I mean about there being too many questions and not enough answers for me to do much analysis yet.
One thing I do wonder, though, is if the significance of each Shadows being a literal "shadow" of their appointed doll with an identical silhouette, combined with the dolls having a kind of positive, non-parasitic identity that the Shadows lack, is pointing at something Hegellian? The slave, ironically, having a more self-affirming existence and in many ways more freedom to be themselves than the master, making the state of mastery a kind of negation of the self. The slaves suffer for always needing to deal with the ashes and soot, but the masters spend their lives so completely covered in it from head to toe that there's little else left of them.
I feel like it's playing with something along those lines, but not exactly that. I'm not sure what, or how, but something LIKE it.
In any case, I definitely am wondering if the Lord Grandfather (who pretty much has to be some kind of eldritch abomination) has been capturing human children and splitting them into "doll" and "shadow" halves to create a two-tiered society of minions. There are just too damned many hints for this to not be at least *close* to what's going on.
Profoundly weird show, but so far I've enjoyed every minute of it. I might have more to say after the next pair of episodes.
I thought it was supposed to be "Shadow House," "Shadow's House," or "Shadows' House" at first, but nope! It's Shadows House, yes S but no apostrophe. Anyway, this seinen manga has been ongoing since 2018, and it got two cours worth of anime in the 2021-2 era. I'm going to be talking about the first few episodes of that anime adaptation today.
The good news? I have plenty to say about Shadows House, and nearly all of it is positive.
The bad news? I still can't say nearly as much about it as I think I'd like to, on account of this being a mystery plot through and through, and these five initial episodes don't even finish setting up the initial round of questions let alone answering them.
The teaser does a good job of setting up the very, very basic (apparent, at least) premise and establishing the themes and atmosphere that will persist through these early episodes. A group of black silhouettes, their featureless outlines emitting a slow trickle of black carbon dust out through the gaps in their colorful pseudo-Victorian finery, stand by a window in a grim, expansive mansion. A row of normal-looking children whose own silhouettes eerily mirror the shadow people's ritually drink from row of cups offered to them, and then - speaking with a single, creepily cheerful voice - swear to serve the noble Shadows Family loyally and indefinitely, as all "living dolls" like themselves must do.
There's also some external shots of trains running through ash-clouded tunnels. The people on the trains appear to be normal humans rather than members of the illustrious Shadows family.
And, that leads us to the pilot, "The Shadow And Her Doll." Our protagonist - a living doll who will soon be given the name of Emillico - as she wakes up for the first time in the coffinlike device she was ostensibly born in. She doesn't seem to trust her surroundings, fearing the darkness and fumbling with the series of doors and locks she needs to navigate in order to reach her Mistress' chambers. She wasn't born knowing much: just that she's a living doll, and that her purpose in life is to serve Mistress Kate Shadows as a personal slave. She *really* wants to do a good job of this. That impulse seems to be as innate as the knowledge, and as bereft of competing impulses.
Surprisingly, Kate didn't know that her servitor still needs to be named. She decides on the name "Emilico," after the living doll's goofy cheerful behaviour reminds her of a character in a book she's been reading.
Emilico's main job, henceforth, will be to clean Kate's suite. Kate is tidy by nature, but like all Shadows her body is constantly emitting clouds of ashes and soot, and whenever she experiences a negative emotion - anger, fear, anxiety - she emits exponentially more. Whole choking clouds and trickling waterfalls of it. It's even worse when Kate is asleep; she wakes up every morning in a bedroom buried in ash, and it's implied that the other members of the Shadows family are likewise. Like something truly terrible is haunting their dreams night after night.
As Emilico tries her best to please her new Mistress despite her overenthusiasm and (rather cliched, I have to say) moeblob-brand clumsiness often interfering with her performance, Kate reveals more and more of her own personality, and things get weirder with every step. For one thing, she never refers to herself using pronouns; she refers to herself as Kate and only as Kate, but has no problem using he/she/them/etc in reference to anyone else. She also, despite not being shy in her observation and studying of Emilico, is strongly averse to being watched (or even looked at unnecessarily) herself.
She clearly enjoys Emilico's company, even as she visibly tries to put up walls against it. Emillico, for her own part...well, it's very hard to say if she actually likes Kate or not at this point, or even if she has enough free will to not like her designated Mistress. Emillico always tries to look at Kate at a profile against the window, so that she can see the outline of her lips and cheeks and see if she is smiling or not (and it turns out that she often is, at least when Emillico gives her anything to react to and her staring isn't noticed). The pilot episode ends with Mistress Kate giving in to her affection and deciding to use her living doll as a literal living doll and dress her up in her own best clothing and makeup, just so she can enjoy Emilico's own happiness at the sight of her newfound beauty in the mirror. It is also in this final scene that Kate chooses Emilico's name.
Throughout the episode though, there are a few moments that go out of their way to remind the audience that what we're seeing here is very, very wrong.
First: relatively early in the episode when the not-yet-named Emilico is trying to make Kate smile and catch the shape of it in her profile, and admits it out loud, Kate momentarily turns into an angry tyrant with a sharp, venomous bark and a erupting cloud of frenzied black soot. "Don't you EVER," she hisses at Emilico, "try to control MY emotions." The emphasis she places on the words make it very clear that the Shadows are expected to control what their living dolls think and feel, but that the reverse is completely unacceptable and punishable very, very harshly.
She calms down again a second later, and even apologizes (seemingly in earnest) when she sees how frightened and upset Emilico has become. But still. It did happen, seemingly on reflex. This scene casts a long shadow (heh) on all of their more pleasant and heartwarming interactions afterward; no matter how cute they are playing together, and whatever fantasy circumstances there might be to soften the edges, these two are a master and slave with all that entails.
Second: throughout the first few scenes of the episode, there are some really unsettling details hinting at what a "living doll" actually is. One memorable subplot has Emilico feeling a growing discomfort that she attributes to a lack of maintenance and need for oiling, until she finally collapses and needs Kate to tell her that she's starving and needs food. When asked why a doll would need human food, Kate simply replies "your body still needs energy."
Related to this is the fact that Emilico is illiterate, and that Kate needs to teach her how to read in order for her to read the instructions left for her. Kate states outright that most living dolls aren't born not knowing how to read, any more than they're born not knowing what they are and who they need to serve. She's evasive about why this might be, but to me it suggests that these children were something else before they were turned into "living dolls" and that they came from different backgrounds and levels of education. Then again, Kate was also surprised she didn't already have a name, so this may or may not mean anything.
Third: Kate murmurs ominously about how each of the Shadows needs their personal doll to act as a "face" for them.
With each member of the Shadows family being considered a faceless nobody despite their apparent privilege until they come of age and are assigned their slave to act as a face. Hopefully this won't involve flensing. In the meantime, Kate seems to be almost as much of a prisoner as Emilico, and she's suffering from chronic isolation and boredom.
But then, how literally "faceless" the Shadows are is also called into question near the end, when - during the "dolling up" scene - Emilico manages to touch Kate's face with a makeup-sponge before she can push her hand away.
For just a moment, white skin is revealed before it secretes another covering of ash.
Did both of them used to be something else, before being made into a Shadows and a living doll?
Did they both used to be the same person, before being *split* in some way? Their outlines are identical, just like all of the Shadows' are with their dolls'.
The second episode, "Outside the Room," introduces a little more of the Shadows House and its occupants. Only a little, though. This castle is absolutely huge, and its structure is designed to keep it highly compartmentalized. Each section of the building houses a different age and sex cohort of the (seemingly very large) Shadows Clan and their dolls. This wing is set aside for young Shadows who have only just received their dolls. Within the wing, different floors and hallways seem to be reserved for either boys or girls. Each living doll spends a part of their time cleaning the hallways and common areas though, and when doing this they're able to socialize with pretty much any other doll from their wing who happens to also be on general custodial duty.
Emilico quickly befriends Mia, Rosemary, and Lou, girls who appear to be around her age and are the personal slaves of other Shadows their age. They seem cheerful, for the most part, but it quickly becomes apparent that this happiness is something that requires constant, wilful reinforcement, and that some of them are much better at maintaining it than others.
As for who uses these living spaces, well. Apparently, each Shadows youth undergoes a debut ceremony in which their living doll becomes their official "face." After that, they're allowed to leave their rooms at will and go more or less where they wish, provided their face is with them. Faceless pre-debutant children, it seems, are to be neither looked at nor heard.
Emilico is taught where to clean, where living dolls are and aren't allowed to go (certain hallways that presumably lead out of their building section are strictly forbidden, at least without a post-debut Shadows master). Whenever she asks about something outside of their immediate purview, she is simply told "not to fret over trivial things." Living dolls clean, and they do whatever else their masters tell them. This makes them happy and healthy and long lived. The consequences for not doing so are trivial things that need not concern you, because seriously, why would you want to do anything else anyway?
She's even taught a song to sing as she sweeps and wipes, about the happiness of her kind as they serve and their lack of need to think about anything else. It would honestly sound like a Disney Rennaissance number, were it not for the total lack of music to go with the vocals that makes it feel hollow and its cheer empty and strained. Emilico herself seems to think that she's as happy as the song says she is, but things are clearly nagging at her at least a little by this point.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF1B48Y85J4
They need to go through a big airblaster to blow all the soot off of them after each day of common area cleaning, with a fan so strong you can't even breathe while it's cleaning you. They are also each given a bodysuit and plague doctor-looking gas mask, in case an area of castle under their care ever gets dangerously sooty. You wouldn't want to catch the soot-sickness, after all.
...
Just a reminder: this soot is coming from the bodies of their masters, and a lot more of it comes out when said masters are experiencing anger or fear. The servants sometimes need to wear protective gear to stop it from killing them.
The symbolism here is pretty self-explanatory.
...
The metaphor comes close to surface text just a scene later, when Emilico returns to Kate's room to resume her personal slave duties. Kate is happy and entertained by Emilico's excitement as the latter recounts her first experience of the "outside world" as she thinks of it. Everything is going really well. But then Emilico gets water on a little stuffed doll that Kate keeps on the shelf, and Kate flips the fuck out in a tantrum of yelling, insulting, and venting ash like an active volcano.
That doll is apparently the only object in the room that Kate actually cares about. She never mentioned this to Emilico, but that isn't sparing the latter right now. Kate refuses to accept an apology, claiming that Emilico could never understand how much Kate values that doll, because (according to her) Emilico values nothing whatsoever. Because that's an accusation you can make of someone who was effectively born a few days ago. Telling Kate that Emilico values her as a person just enrages her to the point of stomping off to hide in the bathroom for a few hours.
The soot formation left on the ceiling over the site of Kate's freakout is a veritable stalactite of solidified ash that refuses to come off no matter what Emilico does to it. Emilico knows that the instruction booklet contains advice for how to remove extra-resilient soot patches, but she still can't read well enough to decipher the text without help, and she's terrified of what might happen if she asks Kate for help with it. So, in the meantime, she tries something else.
When Kate emerges back into the bedroom, Emilico has delicately opened, oiled, dried, fluffed, and sewed her doll back together again with no trace of the water damage. She ALSO, in that time, started making a new doll of her own; a little chicken-type thing made from spare bits of cloth and stuffed with a little soot-snowman that Kate had earlier built during her boring, lonely time without her slave.
This is meant to prove to Kate that she is also capable of valuing inanimate objects. The soot-snowman stuffing is to represent her love of Kate as a person as well.
Kate is charmed. Impressed. And also (just like the last time she got mad at Emilico) very vocally apologetic.
However, there is still a (potentially toxic) ash-stalactite on the ceiling. And Emilico is still the one who needs to deal with it, once Kate magnanimously helps her read the instructions for how to do her job for her.
The little chicken-doll ends up being the cause of another problem not long afterward, though. When Emilico is scrubbing the outside of Kate's bedroom window, the ash-chicken falls out of her pocket, and while trying to grab it she ends up falling out the window and falling two floors into the garden below. She lands in some thick hedges, but still hits her head hard enough to lose consciousness.
Here, we see what might be some self-awareness from Kate when she breaks the rules of her people and leaves her room to dash downstairs and see if she's okay, just hoping that no one sees her.
It definitely feels as if Kate understands that it's her own fault that Emilico would risk her life for that stupid chicken doll. There's guilt motivating her here, not just concern.
No concussion or broken bones, fortunately. However, the scrapes and bruises that Emilico did get are normal wounds on normal skin that bleed red. When she wakes up and asks Kate why a "living doll" would be made of flesh, blood, and bone, Kate simply deflects.
...
Earlier, Kate also marvelled at Emilico's sewing ability. That's not a skill that living dolls should be programmed with. Certainly not one prioritized over the ability to read their own instruction booklets.
...
While they hurry their way back toward Kate's room, they unfortunately run into someone. Emilico's cleaning friend Mia, in the company of her own post-debut mistress, Sara.
Mia doesn't react when Emilico speaks to her. Just mimics Sara's body language and sneers cruelly at the other pair as Sara cackles about what a weakling Kate must be for letting her Face move and speak independently while outside her room. If she's this much of a screwup, then the Shadows Lord Grandfather will likely have her removed, which is alright with Sara if it means less competition for favor and family resources within their cohort. Still, just because Sara is such a nice person, she won't report this indiscretion from a pre-debutant to Lord Grandfather. Kate should consider herself lucky; few other Shadowses would have been this merciful.
The next time Emilico sees Mia, the latter acts like nothing happened. After all, she was just acting as Mistress Sara's face back there. Nothing to do with herself or with Emilico. That said, Sara was telling the truth about the Lord Grandfather euthanizing debutants who displease him, and their "faces" don't survive the process either, but there's no need to think about trivial things like that. Just clean the mansion and follow orders, and you'll stay happy.
No word about how this telepathic bond that lets a doll serve as a realtime "face" is meant to be formed; you're just supposed to DO IT.
On one hand, no flensing, so that's good. On the other hand, well...everything.
That night, Emilico starts using her growing literacy to take notes about things she shouldn't bother thinking about. Getting them down in a notebook in her coffin-bed-thing will help keep them out of her head where they'll distract her, right?
So, that's two out of five Shadows House episodes in this order. I think you all see what I mean about there being too many questions and not enough answers for me to do much analysis yet.
One thing I do wonder, though, is if the significance of each Shadows being a literal "shadow" of their appointed doll with an identical silhouette, combined with the dolls having a kind of positive, non-parasitic identity that the Shadows lack, is pointing at something Hegellian? The slave, ironically, having a more self-affirming existence and in many ways more freedom to be themselves than the master, making the state of mastery a kind of negation of the self. The slaves suffer for always needing to deal with the ashes and soot, but the masters spend their lives so completely covered in it from head to toe that there's little else left of them.
I feel like it's playing with something along those lines, but not exactly that. I'm not sure what, or how, but something LIKE it.
In any case, I definitely am wondering if the Lord Grandfather (who pretty much has to be some kind of eldritch abomination) has been capturing human children and splitting them into "doll" and "shadow" halves to create a two-tiered society of minions. There are just too damned many hints for this to not be at least *close* to what's going on.
Profoundly weird show, but so far I've enjoyed every minute of it. I might have more to say after the next pair of episodes.
Last edited:
I'm going to guess the pacing to fit the episode time can be a bit weird, and that the flipping of pages for reveals has a bit more effect for some people, which are common structural problems with adaptations.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Shadows House is really really good but I have to second how the anime has a few hiccups, and stress that this is really the sort of work that works best if you don't get told basically anything about it.
Just about the only thing you can get safely told about it is that its manga is released in full color. Manga usually just reserve color for splash pages when the magazine they're published on can afford it, or for special chapters, or sometimes for special editions, but literally every chapter in the manga is in full color. It really emphasis the contrast between the Shadows and their living dolls, and highlights, say, the bright colored clothing the Shadows wear.
It's also from the same author as Kuro, which is a manga about an adorable little girl, Coco, who lives alone in a big mansion in the outskirts of a town near a forest with just her black cat, Kuro (literally, Black). Kuro is totally normal, and the little girl loves to see his cat shenanigans.
Just about the only thing you can get safely told about it is that its manga is released in full color. Manga usually just reserve color for splash pages when the magazine they're published on can afford it, or for special chapters, or sometimes for special editions, but literally every chapter in the manga is in full color. It really emphasis the contrast between the Shadows and their living dolls, and highlights, say, the bright colored clothing the Shadows wear.
It's also from the same author as Kuro, which is a manga about an adorable little girl, Coco, who lives alone in a big mansion in the outskirts of a town near a forest with just her black cat, Kuro (literally, Black). Kuro is totally normal, and the little girl loves to see his cat shenanigans.
Last edited:
So it's a Lovecraft cat?
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Kuro is a totally normal cat. I can't say anything else within the confines of the thread.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I hope it's not Lovecraft's cat or else it would get rather awkward to read very quickly
Shadows House (S1E1-5) (continued)
New
- Location
- Patriarchova
The third episode, "The Soot Sickness," basically confirms things that had only been ominously hinted at in the first two. For instance, the fact that living dolls who fail to content themselves with superficially happy, mindless service will be executed.
Likewise Shadows who displease the Lord Grandfather (who it turns out also has a bunch of other titles, but living dolls aren't supposed to speak any of them unless it's strictly necessary, as his epithets are sullied by the tongues of such lowly creatures as the living dolls). The debut ceremonies are where most of these purgings - of both Shadow and Doll - are conducted.
But no need to stress over that. No wasting time thinking about trivial things.
The nature of the Shadows themselves is also made (even) more ominous with the introduction of a new plot element. It's not just for the sake of cleanliness that the living dolls need to constantly wipe up the soot their masters leave everywhere, but also for security. If too much soot builds up in one spot, it apparently congeals into a living, malevolent Studio Ghibli-looking creature called a scorch. On their own, scorches are small, vicious monsters that can pose a threat to lone people. Several of them can fuse together into a "phantom," which is a much bigger threat.
Thanks to the dolls' fastidious cleaning, phantoms form only very rarely; once every several years at most. But, one of them has formed today.
While rallying with the other dolls to contain and destroy the rampaging monster, Emilico also learns that ash-creaturs aren't the only threats she has to be wary of. It turns out that there are living doll kapos. It is here that the cheery, superficially-homey facade over their servitude drips away completely, and brute force oppression makes itself brazenly visible.
The battle reveal the scorch/phantom creatures to also have a significant degree of tactical intelligence. After the dolls break the phantom up into a swarm of scorches that go scurrying off and need to be hunted, the scorches use sophisticated baiting and ambush tactics to isolate small groups of dolls, refuse into proto-phantoms, and try to overwhelm them. Emilico and her friends are one such small group, and one of their number ends up with a proto-phantom engulfing her head and trying to drag her away.
It almost looks less like a predator grabbing its prey than it does like some type of parasitic fusion.
Considering that the soot these creatures spawn from is generated by the Shadows, and the Shadows have a kind of telepathic link they develop to use their "faces," well. I'm getting the impression that the soot itself is some type of malevolent, parasitic life form.
And we saw that Kate (and presumably the other Shadows) have human skin under their coating of soot.
But then, they each also have a human "living doll" shaped just like them. Hmm.
Well, for now they manage to destroy the creature attached to Rosemary, but she's clearly not okay. Aside from suffocation, she's showing other symptoms that the more experienced dolls attribute to "soot sickness." Rosemary is taken away by the living doll medical team, who assure Emilico and the others that she'll be back healthy and just fine soon enough, don't worry about it.
I was very surprised when they turned out to be telling the truth at the end of the episode. Rosemary (or else a very faithful clone of her) does indeed return from their care in the following episode, all healed up and chipper again. I feel like there has to be a dark secret behind this that hasn't been revealed yet, but so far the ominous implications seem to have just been a fakeout.
...on the flip side, there's also a scene in the meantime where Mia cheerfully tells Emilico that she's "very lucky," in response to Emilico saying how much Mistress Kate yells at her. Cue the reveal that Mia's back is covered in scars. Not really a surprise, given what we've seen of Mia's own mistress, but unpleasant nonetheless.
The episode ends with a discovery that probably should have bothered Emilico more than it does, even with her conditioning to not think about thing. That little chicken-doll she made of spare cloth and stuffed with soot starts to move on its own a little, and - despite having just seen what soot moving on its own signifies - her reaction is enchantment rather than alarm. On the other hand, there is a mitigating factor that comes right on the heels of this; when Emilico shows the doll to Kate, Kate discovers - to both of their amazement - that Kate can control the doll's movements.
Emilico is a bit less surprised by this than Kate. After all, she herself thinks that she's an (inexplicably flesh and blood) doll that was brought to life by the power of the Lord Grandfather, so it only makes sense that lesser Shadows can animate lesser toys. Kate, who knows a bit more of the truth (though seemingly nowhere near the entire truth) than Emilico, is more pensive.
Emilico does briefly wonder, during her writing of unwanted thoughts in her notebook that night, if the scorch/phantom entities are actually independent creatures after all, or if they're being animated by an outside force. Of course, the notebook is for things that she intends to not think about, but it's also for things that the audience is intended to think about.
Well. We already know that the soot is the pent up rage and negativity of the masters, inflicted indirectly on the slaves. Those negative emotions sometimes animating some of the soot as hate-elementals could be a natural extension of that, but there also could be more to it. The malice actively felt by shadows might be "activating" soot that's already accumulated, in a monsters from the id kind of way.
Alternatively, there's some kind of conspiracy going on within the Shadows House, and someone is deliberately animating and directing those monsters to attack the help as part of some intricate political ploy.
Of course, if they can control the soot that much, it seems like they shouldn't need slaves to clean it all the time. Hmm.
In any case, Kate swears Emilico to secrecy about what they've discovered wrt Kate's soot-animating powers. She's not sure what to make of this unknown ability of hers yet, and she doesn't know what the consequences of revealing it might be. I believe her in this case, and frankly I also agree with her decision. It might turn out that all Shadows can control the soot and it's no big deal, but it also might be that only the Lord Grandfather is supposed to have that power and he'd kill her as a potential rival.
Speaking of him, this episode's stinger has him and some other upper-echelon Shadows planning the upcoming debut ceremony. He's definitely less human-looking than the others, as I expected.
Humanoid, but three times the size of a normal person and with a distinctly amorphous look to how he fills out his clothes. Like I said, about what I expected.
Episode four, "Watchers in the Night," begins with Emilico and a couple of other living dolls running afoul of their resident kapo during the next hall-cleaning session, and being assigned punitive duties. Specifically, they're being ordered to patrol the great hall and other common areas of their wing all night for the next week to see if they can find any more signs of scorch activity. They still aren't sure where that big phantom last episode came from, and the management is very eager to find out which work team slacked off badly enough to let that much soot build up in one place.
Along with Emilico, this penal night-patrol includes a prickly - but kindhearted - boy named Shaun, and a very quiet nervous girl who eventually names herself as Rum. Shaun is nearsighted and hasn't been given any kind of corrective lenses or the like. Rum seems to have an anxiety disorder. Both of them underperform in their cleaning duties because of this, and Emilico made the mistake of trying to stand up for them when the kapo was bullying them for these shortcomings.
Additionally, all three of them are attached to pre-debut Shadows, and they were baited into bringing kapo-girl's attention down on them by the machinations of another pre-debutant's doll on his master's instructions. He seems to think that overworking his rival's dolls and giving them less time together in the time leading up to the ceremony will make him look better by comparison.
Patrick Shadows may or may not be right about how that works, but either way he's a dick. His doll Ricky who actually did the baiting for him, well...I'm going to wait before judging him, considering the amount of power Patrick has over him.
The first couple of nights are uneventful. Eventually though, sleep deprivation starts to catch up with them, and Shaun decides to bring pillows and blankets so they can sleep on the job since it seems like no one is paying attention to them anyway. Shaun is smart; he seems to have intuited that this whole thing is a plot to undermine their ability to serve their masters in the coming debut.
He's also nice, even if he acts sarcastic and condescending. He brought extra blankets for the other two as well.
Emilico and Shaun bond a little bit while Rum shivers and apologizes for nothing under her breath. Emilico tries to get through to her, and seems to actually be making progress, when a newcomer in the great hall gives them all a scare. It turns out to not be a phantom like they feared, but rather a "veiled doll." Masked, adult-sized living dolls who never speak, never interact with the others, and are only seen bringing and taking things to the kitchen and laundry room.
I have a suspicion that these are the zombified would-be faces of shadows who fail to pass their debut exam. Something like that, anyway.
Unfortunately, the nervous Rum fled the room before they could learn that the newcomer was harmless, and she doesn't come back afterward. With phantoms and possibly worse things potentially being on the loose, the other two decide that they need to go find her. Even when their search brings them to one of the hallways they are forbidden to enter.
It turns out that the Lord Grandfather really, really, really doesn't want living dolls poking around in that hallway.
Actual pressure-plate-activated arrow traps. I'll bet there'll be mimics, gelatinous cubes, and spheres of annihilation hidden in statues' mouths up ahead.
It's Shaun's fast reflexes that save Emilico from the arrow trap. But, after he regretfully urges her to turn back and just hope Rum survives, it's Emilico who hears Rum's timid whimpering and intuits the presence of a hidden revolving door similar to those connecting each doll's sleeping compartment to their master's chambers.
Hidden doors to circumvent the arrow traps. Yeah, there's definitely going to be mimics.
Rum, for her part, has been hiding in this filthy little crawlspace behind said hidden door telling herself that the others will never forgive her for abandoning them and that she should just die and get it over with already. I'm not sure how she's supposed to have gotten into this space, but I guess she managed somehow. Her finger tries to reassure her, in a high pitched voice, that there is still hope.
She talks to her finger, a la Danny Torrance from "The Shining." Not sure if she's actually got a plural thing going on, or if it's just an eccentric habit of a deeply lonely child.
Her finger turns out to be correct; the other two do come for her, and don't hold anything against her at all. Her finger is clearly the one with the best judgement, she should defer to its opinions henceforth.
Rum's hiding actually ends up giving them a lucky break; exploring this mysterious crevice turns out to be the key to a successful mission. A trapdoor in the ceiling leads into a long unused attic-like space, and this place is all full of soot. Trace amounts of soot particles that happened to blow upward toward the ceilings seem to have very slowly built up in this attic, and everyone seems to have just forgotten the place existed until the lock on this trapdoor rusted apart and let the scorches that had been gestating there escape.
Well, that's the optimistic interpretation. The other is that someone's been deliberately using the attic as a soot-storage that they can animate "monsters" from as needed. But at this point it really could be either.
The fifth episode is "The Debut." I think it, and my parting thoughts, will require a post of their own.
Likewise Shadows who displease the Lord Grandfather (who it turns out also has a bunch of other titles, but living dolls aren't supposed to speak any of them unless it's strictly necessary, as his epithets are sullied by the tongues of such lowly creatures as the living dolls). The debut ceremonies are where most of these purgings - of both Shadow and Doll - are conducted.
But no need to stress over that. No wasting time thinking about trivial things.
The nature of the Shadows themselves is also made (even) more ominous with the introduction of a new plot element. It's not just for the sake of cleanliness that the living dolls need to constantly wipe up the soot their masters leave everywhere, but also for security. If too much soot builds up in one spot, it apparently congeals into a living, malevolent Studio Ghibli-looking creature called a scorch. On their own, scorches are small, vicious monsters that can pose a threat to lone people. Several of them can fuse together into a "phantom," which is a much bigger threat.
Thanks to the dolls' fastidious cleaning, phantoms form only very rarely; once every several years at most. But, one of them has formed today.
While rallying with the other dolls to contain and destroy the rampaging monster, Emilico also learns that ash-creaturs aren't the only threats she has to be wary of. It turns out that there are living doll kapos. It is here that the cheery, superficially-homey facade over their servitude drips away completely, and brute force oppression makes itself brazenly visible.
The battle reveal the scorch/phantom creatures to also have a significant degree of tactical intelligence. After the dolls break the phantom up into a swarm of scorches that go scurrying off and need to be hunted, the scorches use sophisticated baiting and ambush tactics to isolate small groups of dolls, refuse into proto-phantoms, and try to overwhelm them. Emilico and her friends are one such small group, and one of their number ends up with a proto-phantom engulfing her head and trying to drag her away.
It almost looks less like a predator grabbing its prey than it does like some type of parasitic fusion.
Considering that the soot these creatures spawn from is generated by the Shadows, and the Shadows have a kind of telepathic link they develop to use their "faces," well. I'm getting the impression that the soot itself is some type of malevolent, parasitic life form.
And we saw that Kate (and presumably the other Shadows) have human skin under their coating of soot.
But then, they each also have a human "living doll" shaped just like them. Hmm.
Well, for now they manage to destroy the creature attached to Rosemary, but she's clearly not okay. Aside from suffocation, she's showing other symptoms that the more experienced dolls attribute to "soot sickness." Rosemary is taken away by the living doll medical team, who assure Emilico and the others that she'll be back healthy and just fine soon enough, don't worry about it.
I was very surprised when they turned out to be telling the truth at the end of the episode. Rosemary (or else a very faithful clone of her) does indeed return from their care in the following episode, all healed up and chipper again. I feel like there has to be a dark secret behind this that hasn't been revealed yet, but so far the ominous implications seem to have just been a fakeout.
...on the flip side, there's also a scene in the meantime where Mia cheerfully tells Emilico that she's "very lucky," in response to Emilico saying how much Mistress Kate yells at her. Cue the reveal that Mia's back is covered in scars. Not really a surprise, given what we've seen of Mia's own mistress, but unpleasant nonetheless.
The episode ends with a discovery that probably should have bothered Emilico more than it does, even with her conditioning to not think about thing. That little chicken-doll she made of spare cloth and stuffed with soot starts to move on its own a little, and - despite having just seen what soot moving on its own signifies - her reaction is enchantment rather than alarm. On the other hand, there is a mitigating factor that comes right on the heels of this; when Emilico shows the doll to Kate, Kate discovers - to both of their amazement - that Kate can control the doll's movements.
Emilico is a bit less surprised by this than Kate. After all, she herself thinks that she's an (inexplicably flesh and blood) doll that was brought to life by the power of the Lord Grandfather, so it only makes sense that lesser Shadows can animate lesser toys. Kate, who knows a bit more of the truth (though seemingly nowhere near the entire truth) than Emilico, is more pensive.
Emilico does briefly wonder, during her writing of unwanted thoughts in her notebook that night, if the scorch/phantom entities are actually independent creatures after all, or if they're being animated by an outside force. Of course, the notebook is for things that she intends to not think about, but it's also for things that the audience is intended to think about.
Well. We already know that the soot is the pent up rage and negativity of the masters, inflicted indirectly on the slaves. Those negative emotions sometimes animating some of the soot as hate-elementals could be a natural extension of that, but there also could be more to it. The malice actively felt by shadows might be "activating" soot that's already accumulated, in a monsters from the id kind of way.
Alternatively, there's some kind of conspiracy going on within the Shadows House, and someone is deliberately animating and directing those monsters to attack the help as part of some intricate political ploy.
Of course, if they can control the soot that much, it seems like they shouldn't need slaves to clean it all the time. Hmm.
In any case, Kate swears Emilico to secrecy about what they've discovered wrt Kate's soot-animating powers. She's not sure what to make of this unknown ability of hers yet, and she doesn't know what the consequences of revealing it might be. I believe her in this case, and frankly I also agree with her decision. It might turn out that all Shadows can control the soot and it's no big deal, but it also might be that only the Lord Grandfather is supposed to have that power and he'd kill her as a potential rival.
Speaking of him, this episode's stinger has him and some other upper-echelon Shadows planning the upcoming debut ceremony. He's definitely less human-looking than the others, as I expected.
Humanoid, but three times the size of a normal person and with a distinctly amorphous look to how he fills out his clothes. Like I said, about what I expected.
Episode four, "Watchers in the Night," begins with Emilico and a couple of other living dolls running afoul of their resident kapo during the next hall-cleaning session, and being assigned punitive duties. Specifically, they're being ordered to patrol the great hall and other common areas of their wing all night for the next week to see if they can find any more signs of scorch activity. They still aren't sure where that big phantom last episode came from, and the management is very eager to find out which work team slacked off badly enough to let that much soot build up in one place.
Along with Emilico, this penal night-patrol includes a prickly - but kindhearted - boy named Shaun, and a very quiet nervous girl who eventually names herself as Rum. Shaun is nearsighted and hasn't been given any kind of corrective lenses or the like. Rum seems to have an anxiety disorder. Both of them underperform in their cleaning duties because of this, and Emilico made the mistake of trying to stand up for them when the kapo was bullying them for these shortcomings.
Additionally, all three of them are attached to pre-debut Shadows, and they were baited into bringing kapo-girl's attention down on them by the machinations of another pre-debutant's doll on his master's instructions. He seems to think that overworking his rival's dolls and giving them less time together in the time leading up to the ceremony will make him look better by comparison.
Patrick Shadows may or may not be right about how that works, but either way he's a dick. His doll Ricky who actually did the baiting for him, well...I'm going to wait before judging him, considering the amount of power Patrick has over him.
The first couple of nights are uneventful. Eventually though, sleep deprivation starts to catch up with them, and Shaun decides to bring pillows and blankets so they can sleep on the job since it seems like no one is paying attention to them anyway. Shaun is smart; he seems to have intuited that this whole thing is a plot to undermine their ability to serve their masters in the coming debut.
He's also nice, even if he acts sarcastic and condescending. He brought extra blankets for the other two as well.
Emilico and Shaun bond a little bit while Rum shivers and apologizes for nothing under her breath. Emilico tries to get through to her, and seems to actually be making progress, when a newcomer in the great hall gives them all a scare. It turns out to not be a phantom like they feared, but rather a "veiled doll." Masked, adult-sized living dolls who never speak, never interact with the others, and are only seen bringing and taking things to the kitchen and laundry room.
I have a suspicion that these are the zombified would-be faces of shadows who fail to pass their debut exam. Something like that, anyway.
Unfortunately, the nervous Rum fled the room before they could learn that the newcomer was harmless, and she doesn't come back afterward. With phantoms and possibly worse things potentially being on the loose, the other two decide that they need to go find her. Even when their search brings them to one of the hallways they are forbidden to enter.
It turns out that the Lord Grandfather really, really, really doesn't want living dolls poking around in that hallway.
Actual pressure-plate-activated arrow traps. I'll bet there'll be mimics, gelatinous cubes, and spheres of annihilation hidden in statues' mouths up ahead.
It's Shaun's fast reflexes that save Emilico from the arrow trap. But, after he regretfully urges her to turn back and just hope Rum survives, it's Emilico who hears Rum's timid whimpering and intuits the presence of a hidden revolving door similar to those connecting each doll's sleeping compartment to their master's chambers.
Hidden doors to circumvent the arrow traps. Yeah, there's definitely going to be mimics.
Rum, for her part, has been hiding in this filthy little crawlspace behind said hidden door telling herself that the others will never forgive her for abandoning them and that she should just die and get it over with already. I'm not sure how she's supposed to have gotten into this space, but I guess she managed somehow. Her finger tries to reassure her, in a high pitched voice, that there is still hope.
She talks to her finger, a la Danny Torrance from "The Shining." Not sure if she's actually got a plural thing going on, or if it's just an eccentric habit of a deeply lonely child.
Her finger turns out to be correct; the other two do come for her, and don't hold anything against her at all. Her finger is clearly the one with the best judgement, she should defer to its opinions henceforth.
Rum's hiding actually ends up giving them a lucky break; exploring this mysterious crevice turns out to be the key to a successful mission. A trapdoor in the ceiling leads into a long unused attic-like space, and this place is all full of soot. Trace amounts of soot particles that happened to blow upward toward the ceilings seem to have very slowly built up in this attic, and everyone seems to have just forgotten the place existed until the lock on this trapdoor rusted apart and let the scorches that had been gestating there escape.
Well, that's the optimistic interpretation. The other is that someone's been deliberately using the attic as a soot-storage that they can animate "monsters" from as needed. But at this point it really could be either.
The fifth episode is "The Debut." I think it, and my parting thoughts, will require a post of their own.
Last edited:
@Leila Hann So, uh, is there a reason you're spelling kapo with two ps?
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
- Location
- Patriarchova
Because I can't spell.
The Usagi Yojimbo crossover we neither want nor need.
Last edited:
Would Shadows House be improved if the shadowses were literally shadow bunnies/dogs/birds/other common silhouettes?
Shadows House (S1E1-5) (continued more)
New
- Location
- Patriarchova
"The Debut." This episode is an odd one, in terms of story progression. It simultaneously reveals a lot of information and enlarges the cast, and avoids answering any of the existing questions. It starts a major plot event, but only just starts it. It feels like an awkward point to end at, but considering that these episodes were comissioned piecemeal over a relatively long period of time, well, it might not actually be the intended end point regardless of whether or not it ends up being so.
The penal phantom-hunting mission may have been cut short, but it still lasted until just a day or two before the debut, so the conniving Shadow kid Patrick who had his doll bait them into it still got what he wanted out of it. On one hand, this guy is really, really insecure about his debut performance. On the other hand, considering the consequences for underperforming, well...I guess he and his doll Ricky are in equally desperate and frightened situations at the end of the day. On one hand, his sort-of-rival debutants aren't doing this. On the other...desperation, it's a fucked up thing even if some people handle it better than others. Anyway! It's debut time, and Kate and Emilico - as well as Shaun, Rum, and their own Shadows - are woefully underprepared.
Speaking of other Shadows, here's what I meant about the cast growing. There are five debutants in this batch. We've met all of their "faces" before, but some of them only very briefly (one girl, Lou, was pretty much just an extra body in the great hall scenes with Mia and Rosemary until now). Now they're all important, sharing screentime together, and have their Shadows masters along with them. And then there's also the adult watching and judging their performances.
Kate's whimsical name choice for Emilico was unusual, it turns out. The other Shadows tend to give the dolls assigned to be their faces names similar to their own. For instance, Patrick the schemer named his Ricky. Lou the minor character was named by a Shadow named Louise. Etc. Sara and Mia are as far from one another as they *typically* get, so Kate's choice was very much an odd one. Anyway, on the night before the debut:
Patrick is very pleased with Ricky's work, and looks forward to their symbiosis continuing long into the future as Patrick rises to a position of influence in the Lord Grandfather's court. Ricky says he's proud to have done so well for his master, but his eager smile looks strained at the corners and doesn't reach his eyes.
He's definitely not as happy about doing this shit as he wants his master to think.
Rum, the anxious girl from the night-patrol, apparently isn't even on speaking terms with her mistress, Shirley. It's implied that Rum actually named herself, because Shirley wouldn't even do that. This might be because of Rum's anxiety problems, or it might be the *cause* of her anxiety problems. Or, perhaps, Shirley has the same mental health issues that her slave does, and they've both been unable to initiate with one another because of it. In any case, she's not feeling very good about her or Shirley's odds of survival.
The worst part is that she's probably right.
Shaun, meanwhile, seems to have as good a relationship with his master John as a slave can possibly have with a master. Much closer to Emilico and Kate in this respect. It even turns out that Shaun *was* given glasses. He's just trying to learn how to get through his duties without them, because living dolls are supposed to keep their faces as plain as possible while serving as the "face" for their Shadow. John keeps trying to get him to agree to let himself wear a matching pair of glasses so it will just seem like his master's aesthetic choice, but Shaun deems this too risky; if someone finds out that John is letting himself change to match his "face" rather than the reverse, that could be bad news for both of them.
Literally the opposite of what a real life "shadow" does.
I'd think that the Shadows were literally these kids' shadows torn free of their bodies and given autonomous life by the Lord Grandfather's power, but then that leaves the question of what the soot/ash connection is. Hmm. Something to do with the Jungian "Shadow" concept, with the negative emotion thing? Don't know. Too weird of a setting element that I know too little about thus far to really make educated guesses.
Anyway, in letting Shaun shoot down his plan because it would make him seem too deferential to his face, John is proving to the audience that he is in fact pretty deferential to his face. If John ends up being a bigshot among the Shadow Clan, then Shaun might be the power behind the throne. Assuming they aren't expected to ritually eat their Faces on their twenty-fifth birthdays or something.
Lastly, Lou and Louise. Lou just does what Louise says, and Louise treats Lou like a fashion accessory without any kindnesses or cruelties that don't stem inevitably from that. On one hand, pretty miserable for Lou. On the other hand, it seems like Louise probably generates less soot than most Shadows do, so cleaning her room is likely a comparatively light workload.
Of course, "miserable" is also contextualized by a look we get of one of the post-debut pairs. Sara the catty bitch is displeased with her face and Emilico's best friend Mia about something. Which means Mia is expected to bring Sara the rod and politely beg her to try to improve her behaviour with it. To the show's credit, it scrupulously avoids framing this brutal physical abuse between preteen characters as even remotely kinky or titillating despite the oft-fetishized aesthetics involved.
Unfortunate that I feel the need to praise the show for this, but well, I still haven't totally let my guard down again after Monogatari.
Anyway, this painful-to-watch scene cements Sara as a real villain, and adds more "suffering in silence" intensity to Mia's relentless forced positivity.
There's also the horrifying detail of this being the only look at a post-debut Shadow-face pair interacting that we've seen so far. The implication being that even the kinder masters we've seen in the montage might all eventually become like this after a few years of surviving in the snakepit of Shadow Clan politics. In which case, this might be the rest of every single living doll's life (at least until their masters turn twenty-five and eat them).
So, there's our dramatis personae, some of them debuting for the audience as well as for the Shadows patriarch. What happens with them? Well, in this episode on its own, not that much. More than you might expect, considering how much introduction everyone needed, but still not a ton.
The five Shadows and their respective dolls are met in the great hall by a man named Edward. He claims to be a "special" living doll who serves the Lord Grandfather and his inner circle. On one hand, he appears to be in his fifties or so, which bodes well for their life expectancies. On the other hand, he specifically isn't anyone's "face," so his fate might not be the one ahead of Emilico and the others.
Also, his movements are distinctly puppet-like, and his eyes have a blank stare to them regardless of what the rest of his face is doing. Maybe just symptomatic of a life of soul-crushing labor and mindless obedience, but maybe something (even) worse. One of the debutants even points out that it seems odd a living doll would be judging them rather than an actual Shadow, and Edward just deflects the question in a way that makes me suspect he might be remote-controlled.
And yeah, it turns out he's the only witness for their "debut." Or at least, of the first phase of their debut. I'm pretty sure now that this guy is under direct mind control, and it's really a senior Shadow (possibly the Lord Grandfather himself) seeing, hearing, and speaking through him.
So. The first test. He brings them to a little banquet hall all set out with food and drink, and tells the lot of them to just do what they want. He also takes out a little figuring representing each debutant and places them on a vertical stack of shelves, where he constantly adjusts their vertical positions based on their presence, etiquette, and propriety. No pressure or anything.
Debutants get moved down a level for weakness, visible uncertainty and nerves, and - most of all - inability to keep their faces on a short leash. At the very beginning, Edward asks all the faces if they can tell him why the hallway leading to this banquet room is so long, with the correct answer being "I don't know, living dolls are not to think about trivial things." The two pairs whose faces answer correctly (Patrick/Ricky and Louise/Lou) start with their figurines one tier above the rest.
Things go poorly for most of the debutant pairs, especially Shirley/Rum and Kate/Emilico. The other duos have apparently figured out the mental link trick that lets the doll mirror their Shadow's movements and (desired) expressions in realtime, even if they aren't all equally good at it. Shirley/Rum seem to be coming in dead last until Rum realizes, with some surreptitious encouragement from Shaun, that she can communicate with her mistress by speaking into her The Shining finger. And...Shirley seems generally inclined to follow Rum's lead. They do a decent-ish job at keeping this dynamic from Edward, which prevents them from coming in dead last.
...
Interestingly, Rum and Shirley are a case of a Shadow actually doing what shadows normally do. Again, I wonder if the Shadows are actually just that; people's shadows severed from the body that cast them, brought to life, and taught to lead instead of following.
God, this show is weird. Not Utena-weird, but close.
...
John/Shaun manage to keep themselves ahead by challenging the Patrick/Ricky duo on Patrick's slightly-too-undisguised arrogance and smugness, and being both witty and manly (in the classic Victorian aristocrat manner) in how they do it. Louise/Lou mostly keep to themselves, but perform well enough when they do interact. The worst showing of the lot ends up being Kate/Emilico. For reasons that I have a lot of trouble not holding against Emilico. I have ADHD myself, and I remember what being a preteen was like, but even so, I can't imagine myself ever paying that little attention when life and death are on the line.
Even if they don't have a mental link (and at this point I'm not sure if *any* of them do. It might just be a matter of subtle gestures and other visual cues), Emilico isn't even watching to see where Kate is and what she's doing half the time. To be fair to Emilico, she's often distracted by concern for the other dolls. But, to be fair from the other direction, she also gets distracted by their makeup and the taste of the pastries. So yeah.
After the banquet, Edward starts playing music, and they're expected to dance. A test of Shadow-Face coordination, almost as pure of one as you can get. Some pairs seem to have the living doll discreetly leading their Shadows rather than the reverse. Rum has to whisper the choreography into her finger for Shirley to be on the same page as her. But Kate and Emilico, well, they're just fucked. Kate starts to have doubts about Emilico, with a whole mental monologue where she seems to be venting all of her fear and anxiety onto her slave. And then...hmm. This could be the first step toward some very, very bad things:
Well. On one hand, the soot particles attached to Emilico's skin let Kate save their performance and somewhat make up for the abysmal banquet showing.
On the other hand, Kate was just silently putting Emilico down (somewhat justifiably, but still), and then a second later she starts controlling her body using the physical manifestation of Kate's own fear and anger.
Yeaaaaah.
The episode ends with Shadows and Faces being separated for the next phase of the ceremony. Like I said, awkward place to leave off, but here we are at least for now.
I still really wonder how deliberately this show is playing into Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Kate's anger at Emilico being persistently (albeit stupidly, in these circumstances) freeminded translating directly into more power to control her which in turn only reinforces her dependence on her, well, yeah.
Mostly though, I really am just wondering what the shadows are. Particularly since they do seem to have human skin of their own under the layer of soot, which suggests that they can't be *just* literal shadows removed from the brainwashed children and brought to life. They might still be that, but there's another ingredient in there as well. In terms of behavior, well...some of them mirror their living doll counterparts like a literal shadow, and some of them do seem like they could *potentially* be darker aspects of their doll a la Jung, and there are maybe one or two who might be interpretable as the opposite/flipside of their dolls, but then others don't seem to follow any of those logics at all.
There IS a logic to this, I'm sure, but I just haven't been able to put my finger on it yet.
I'm actually surprised that the manga this is based on is still ongoing. This *seems* like it's setting up a story with very limited space to fill before it reaches the ending, but apparently it's been going for quite a while now. How much room does this house even have in it? Apparently more than I'd have thought, assuming the story stays good for that entire length.
And it IS good. Or at least, the anime version of it is. In fact, this is one of the very, very few pieces of media I've reviewed to date where I didn't find *anything at all* to complain about. The action scene with the scorches and phantom was sort of weirdly slow-paced and unkinetic, I guess, but that's a very minor issue and one limited to one scene in one episode. The ubiquitous, all-shrouding mystery that the series starts with only gets more tantalizing as it reveals greater intricacies and poses additional questions-behind-the-questions.
The production values are, if not exceptional, then at the very least up to the (generally high) standards of modern anime. The voice acting works for me. The backgrounds are pretty and haunting in equal measures. The music is low key, but it's fairly effective. Emilico's archetypal genki-moe schtick is a little bit boring if you've seen a bunch of characters like her before, but the way that this generic personality is clearly just what emerged to fill the empty space of a suppressed human identity makes it much more interesting. If this is who she became without her memories and with the Lord Grandfather's indoctrination, then who was she with the memories and without the programming? What we're seeing is a dumbed-down, out-of-context version of the person Kate decided to name "Emilico." The way the character is written, animated, and voice acted is informed by this; it shows itself in small ways through her otherwise bland archetype. It's subtle, but it's there.
This story is definitely going to keep getting darker before it gets finished, of that I'm certain. Hopefully, it will keep being as good throughout. I wouldn't say that these episodes of Shadows House ever reached greatness, per se, but they maintained an incredibly consistent and reliable level of goodness. That's easily enough to keep me wanting more.
The penal phantom-hunting mission may have been cut short, but it still lasted until just a day or two before the debut, so the conniving Shadow kid Patrick who had his doll bait them into it still got what he wanted out of it. On one hand, this guy is really, really insecure about his debut performance. On the other hand, considering the consequences for underperforming, well...I guess he and his doll Ricky are in equally desperate and frightened situations at the end of the day. On one hand, his sort-of-rival debutants aren't doing this. On the other...desperation, it's a fucked up thing even if some people handle it better than others. Anyway! It's debut time, and Kate and Emilico - as well as Shaun, Rum, and their own Shadows - are woefully underprepared.
Speaking of other Shadows, here's what I meant about the cast growing. There are five debutants in this batch. We've met all of their "faces" before, but some of them only very briefly (one girl, Lou, was pretty much just an extra body in the great hall scenes with Mia and Rosemary until now). Now they're all important, sharing screentime together, and have their Shadows masters along with them. And then there's also the adult watching and judging their performances.
Kate's whimsical name choice for Emilico was unusual, it turns out. The other Shadows tend to give the dolls assigned to be their faces names similar to their own. For instance, Patrick the schemer named his Ricky. Lou the minor character was named by a Shadow named Louise. Etc. Sara and Mia are as far from one another as they *typically* get, so Kate's choice was very much an odd one. Anyway, on the night before the debut:
Patrick is very pleased with Ricky's work, and looks forward to their symbiosis continuing long into the future as Patrick rises to a position of influence in the Lord Grandfather's court. Ricky says he's proud to have done so well for his master, but his eager smile looks strained at the corners and doesn't reach his eyes.
He's definitely not as happy about doing this shit as he wants his master to think.
Rum, the anxious girl from the night-patrol, apparently isn't even on speaking terms with her mistress, Shirley. It's implied that Rum actually named herself, because Shirley wouldn't even do that. This might be because of Rum's anxiety problems, or it might be the *cause* of her anxiety problems. Or, perhaps, Shirley has the same mental health issues that her slave does, and they've both been unable to initiate with one another because of it. In any case, she's not feeling very good about her or Shirley's odds of survival.
The worst part is that she's probably right.
Shaun, meanwhile, seems to have as good a relationship with his master John as a slave can possibly have with a master. Much closer to Emilico and Kate in this respect. It even turns out that Shaun *was* given glasses. He's just trying to learn how to get through his duties without them, because living dolls are supposed to keep their faces as plain as possible while serving as the "face" for their Shadow. John keeps trying to get him to agree to let himself wear a matching pair of glasses so it will just seem like his master's aesthetic choice, but Shaun deems this too risky; if someone finds out that John is letting himself change to match his "face" rather than the reverse, that could be bad news for both of them.
Literally the opposite of what a real life "shadow" does.
I'd think that the Shadows were literally these kids' shadows torn free of their bodies and given autonomous life by the Lord Grandfather's power, but then that leaves the question of what the soot/ash connection is. Hmm. Something to do with the Jungian "Shadow" concept, with the negative emotion thing? Don't know. Too weird of a setting element that I know too little about thus far to really make educated guesses.
Anyway, in letting Shaun shoot down his plan because it would make him seem too deferential to his face, John is proving to the audience that he is in fact pretty deferential to his face. If John ends up being a bigshot among the Shadow Clan, then Shaun might be the power behind the throne. Assuming they aren't expected to ritually eat their Faces on their twenty-fifth birthdays or something.
Lastly, Lou and Louise. Lou just does what Louise says, and Louise treats Lou like a fashion accessory without any kindnesses or cruelties that don't stem inevitably from that. On one hand, pretty miserable for Lou. On the other hand, it seems like Louise probably generates less soot than most Shadows do, so cleaning her room is likely a comparatively light workload.
Of course, "miserable" is also contextualized by a look we get of one of the post-debut pairs. Sara the catty bitch is displeased with her face and Emilico's best friend Mia about something. Which means Mia is expected to bring Sara the rod and politely beg her to try to improve her behaviour with it. To the show's credit, it scrupulously avoids framing this brutal physical abuse between preteen characters as even remotely kinky or titillating despite the oft-fetishized aesthetics involved.
Unfortunate that I feel the need to praise the show for this, but well, I still haven't totally let my guard down again after Monogatari.
Anyway, this painful-to-watch scene cements Sara as a real villain, and adds more "suffering in silence" intensity to Mia's relentless forced positivity.
There's also the horrifying detail of this being the only look at a post-debut Shadow-face pair interacting that we've seen so far. The implication being that even the kinder masters we've seen in the montage might all eventually become like this after a few years of surviving in the snakepit of Shadow Clan politics. In which case, this might be the rest of every single living doll's life (at least until their masters turn twenty-five and eat them).
So, there's our dramatis personae, some of them debuting for the audience as well as for the Shadows patriarch. What happens with them? Well, in this episode on its own, not that much. More than you might expect, considering how much introduction everyone needed, but still not a ton.
The five Shadows and their respective dolls are met in the great hall by a man named Edward. He claims to be a "special" living doll who serves the Lord Grandfather and his inner circle. On one hand, he appears to be in his fifties or so, which bodes well for their life expectancies. On the other hand, he specifically isn't anyone's "face," so his fate might not be the one ahead of Emilico and the others.
Also, his movements are distinctly puppet-like, and his eyes have a blank stare to them regardless of what the rest of his face is doing. Maybe just symptomatic of a life of soul-crushing labor and mindless obedience, but maybe something (even) worse. One of the debutants even points out that it seems odd a living doll would be judging them rather than an actual Shadow, and Edward just deflects the question in a way that makes me suspect he might be remote-controlled.
And yeah, it turns out he's the only witness for their "debut." Or at least, of the first phase of their debut. I'm pretty sure now that this guy is under direct mind control, and it's really a senior Shadow (possibly the Lord Grandfather himself) seeing, hearing, and speaking through him.
So. The first test. He brings them to a little banquet hall all set out with food and drink, and tells the lot of them to just do what they want. He also takes out a little figuring representing each debutant and places them on a vertical stack of shelves, where he constantly adjusts their vertical positions based on their presence, etiquette, and propriety. No pressure or anything.
Debutants get moved down a level for weakness, visible uncertainty and nerves, and - most of all - inability to keep their faces on a short leash. At the very beginning, Edward asks all the faces if they can tell him why the hallway leading to this banquet room is so long, with the correct answer being "I don't know, living dolls are not to think about trivial things." The two pairs whose faces answer correctly (Patrick/Ricky and Louise/Lou) start with their figurines one tier above the rest.
Things go poorly for most of the debutant pairs, especially Shirley/Rum and Kate/Emilico. The other duos have apparently figured out the mental link trick that lets the doll mirror their Shadow's movements and (desired) expressions in realtime, even if they aren't all equally good at it. Shirley/Rum seem to be coming in dead last until Rum realizes, with some surreptitious encouragement from Shaun, that she can communicate with her mistress by speaking into her The Shining finger. And...Shirley seems generally inclined to follow Rum's lead. They do a decent-ish job at keeping this dynamic from Edward, which prevents them from coming in dead last.
...
Interestingly, Rum and Shirley are a case of a Shadow actually doing what shadows normally do. Again, I wonder if the Shadows are actually just that; people's shadows severed from the body that cast them, brought to life, and taught to lead instead of following.
God, this show is weird. Not Utena-weird, but close.
...
John/Shaun manage to keep themselves ahead by challenging the Patrick/Ricky duo on Patrick's slightly-too-undisguised arrogance and smugness, and being both witty and manly (in the classic Victorian aristocrat manner) in how they do it. Louise/Lou mostly keep to themselves, but perform well enough when they do interact. The worst showing of the lot ends up being Kate/Emilico. For reasons that I have a lot of trouble not holding against Emilico. I have ADHD myself, and I remember what being a preteen was like, but even so, I can't imagine myself ever paying that little attention when life and death are on the line.
Even if they don't have a mental link (and at this point I'm not sure if *any* of them do. It might just be a matter of subtle gestures and other visual cues), Emilico isn't even watching to see where Kate is and what she's doing half the time. To be fair to Emilico, she's often distracted by concern for the other dolls. But, to be fair from the other direction, she also gets distracted by their makeup and the taste of the pastries. So yeah.
After the banquet, Edward starts playing music, and they're expected to dance. A test of Shadow-Face coordination, almost as pure of one as you can get. Some pairs seem to have the living doll discreetly leading their Shadows rather than the reverse. Rum has to whisper the choreography into her finger for Shirley to be on the same page as her. But Kate and Emilico, well, they're just fucked. Kate starts to have doubts about Emilico, with a whole mental monologue where she seems to be venting all of her fear and anxiety onto her slave. And then...hmm. This could be the first step toward some very, very bad things:
Well. On one hand, the soot particles attached to Emilico's skin let Kate save their performance and somewhat make up for the abysmal banquet showing.
On the other hand, Kate was just silently putting Emilico down (somewhat justifiably, but still), and then a second later she starts controlling her body using the physical manifestation of Kate's own fear and anger.
Yeaaaaah.
The episode ends with Shadows and Faces being separated for the next phase of the ceremony. Like I said, awkward place to leave off, but here we are at least for now.
I still really wonder how deliberately this show is playing into Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Kate's anger at Emilico being persistently (albeit stupidly, in these circumstances) freeminded translating directly into more power to control her which in turn only reinforces her dependence on her, well, yeah.
Mostly though, I really am just wondering what the shadows are. Particularly since they do seem to have human skin of their own under the layer of soot, which suggests that they can't be *just* literal shadows removed from the brainwashed children and brought to life. They might still be that, but there's another ingredient in there as well. In terms of behavior, well...some of them mirror their living doll counterparts like a literal shadow, and some of them do seem like they could *potentially* be darker aspects of their doll a la Jung, and there are maybe one or two who might be interpretable as the opposite/flipside of their dolls, but then others don't seem to follow any of those logics at all.
There IS a logic to this, I'm sure, but I just haven't been able to put my finger on it yet.
I'm actually surprised that the manga this is based on is still ongoing. This *seems* like it's setting up a story with very limited space to fill before it reaches the ending, but apparently it's been going for quite a while now. How much room does this house even have in it? Apparently more than I'd have thought, assuming the story stays good for that entire length.
And it IS good. Or at least, the anime version of it is. In fact, this is one of the very, very few pieces of media I've reviewed to date where I didn't find *anything at all* to complain about. The action scene with the scorches and phantom was sort of weirdly slow-paced and unkinetic, I guess, but that's a very minor issue and one limited to one scene in one episode. The ubiquitous, all-shrouding mystery that the series starts with only gets more tantalizing as it reveals greater intricacies and poses additional questions-behind-the-questions.
The production values are, if not exceptional, then at the very least up to the (generally high) standards of modern anime. The voice acting works for me. The backgrounds are pretty and haunting in equal measures. The music is low key, but it's fairly effective. Emilico's archetypal genki-moe schtick is a little bit boring if you've seen a bunch of characters like her before, but the way that this generic personality is clearly just what emerged to fill the empty space of a suppressed human identity makes it much more interesting. If this is who she became without her memories and with the Lord Grandfather's indoctrination, then who was she with the memories and without the programming? What we're seeing is a dumbed-down, out-of-context version of the person Kate decided to name "Emilico." The way the character is written, animated, and voice acted is informed by this; it shows itself in small ways through her otherwise bland archetype. It's subtle, but it's there.
This story is definitely going to keep getting darker before it gets finished, of that I'm certain. Hopefully, it will keep being as good throughout. I wouldn't say that these episodes of Shadows House ever reached greatness, per se, but they maintained an incredibly consistent and reliable level of goodness. That's easily enough to keep me wanting more.
Considering how weird things are in one wing a good question might be if there is a true limit to the house.
- Location
- Patriarchova
I mean conceptual and narrative room, not physical space.
- Location
- Spain
Well by this point most of the House mysteries have been answered and the genre has shifted to something like a spy thriller. It's still good, just a bit different.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Huh. Never realized Shaun was another export of יונתן.