Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!

[Leila Hann]

This review was comissioned by @krinsbez.


This old 1960's Hanna-Barbera cartoon is one that I kiiiinda knew about before. Sort of.

About a decade ago, I watched through another, better-known, show by the name of "Space Ghost." Not "Space Ghost Coast to Coast." Space Ghost. The original. Where the titular character is a superhero rather than a radio show host, and his wisecracking alien sidekicks Zorak and Moltar are meant-to-be-taken-seriously villains. Coast-To-Coast's popularity so overshadowed the original's that a lot of people who grew up watching the former on Adult Swim probably never even knew there was an original. Well, anyway. There was a Space Ghost series finale that had a crossover with a whole bunch of other Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, and one of the others it crossed over with was "The Herculoids."

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At the time, I didn't even realize those were other shows. I'd never heard of any of them. I just thought the Space Ghost creators had made up a million one-time characters to show up for five seconds in this one finale and then be gone forever. But no, those were other actual series, at least some of which actually aired.

So, I did technically know about the Herculoids, and I had technically seen some of the characters, before this title appeared in the queue. What I remember is that they're a bunch of alien animal-looking things, and...I think they work for a kid? Or a couple of kids? Pretty much all of these shows were like that.

Anyway, first two episodes of The Herculoids.


Seeing this late-sixties series not long after "Thundarr the Barbarian" paints a pretty enlightening picture of American TV animation, where it came from, and where it started to go, throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In terms of aesthetics and genre trappings, "The Herculoids" is pretty close to Thundarr. Same pulpy planetary romance inspirations. Same sort of Greek-statues-in-pastel-leotards-and-hairpieces character design for the good guys. Same sort of animal-people-but-somehow-weirder character design for the bad guys. The differences, on the other hand, are mainly as follows:

1. Either Herculoids was aimed at younger kids than Thundarr was, or else they just thought less of children in the late 60's than in the early 80's. In terms of both visuals and writing, this feels like someone took a Thundarr-like story and crash victim'd it with Dr. Seuss.

2. If Thundarr, He-Man, and the like had tiny budgets that needed painstaking allocation, then these Hanna-Barbera adventure shows were made on literal pocket change. The animation is so minimal that much of it looks more like motion comics than anything else. I'm talking characters frozen in unlikely poses for extended scenes while their mouths and eyes very slightly change directions to look/talk toward each other. Unmoving characters silhouetted in the middle of the screen while backgrounds scroll by behind them to signify movement. "Fight scenes" that consist of characters chasing each other offscreen followed by the frame shaking. The voice acting covers an emotional spectrum that ranges from "pretending to be excited about classwork because the teacher is looking over your shoulder" on the positive end to "the vending machine ate my dollar fifty" on the far negative end. They also have this crutch of filling screentime by zooming in on the herculoids' faces while they make animal growling noises for ten seconds at a time, which gets old exactly as fast as it sounds.

3. Thundarr's goofiness and whimsy were alloyed to a real creative vision and a desire to tell a story set in a persistent(ish) world. The Herculoids' goofiness and whimsy, meanwhile, were alloyed to a desire to get paid and go home.

1 isn't necessarily a flaw, of course. 2 is more of a negative, and I feel like working within their budget and doing an ACTUAL motion-comic thing with dedicated panels for the action shots would have been a better approach for the creators, but still, I can be sympathetic to their predicament. 3...not so much. There was definitely some genuine creativity that went into the show at some point, but I feel like it was all used up inventing the main cast of characters and the core premise, leaving none to draw upon for the actual production.

The aforementioned main cast include a human nuclear family of Zandor, Tara, and their preteen son Dorno, as well as a group of superpowered "herculoid" creatures that are either pets or found family or something in between. This group lives a happy pseudo-palaeolithic existence on a jungle planet referred to only as "Zandor's Planet." There are no other humans, and no other herculoids. Where they all came from and how they ended up living here are never addressed.

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Every episode, some kind of invader arrives on Zandor's Planet and tries to do something bad for some reason, and the family and pets need to fight them off. I'm not sure if there are any recurring antagonists, or if it really is just monster of the week every week.

The first ever episode, "The Pirates," features one of the oddest and most obtuse sources of conflict you'd ever be likely to come up with given the above series premise. Which, well, the fact that this was apparently the FIRST story they wrote for the show sure is something, in light of that. A space pirate ship lands on Zandor's Planet with the intent of burying treasure there. They don't want anyone to know where they've hidden their treasure, naturally, so when kid Dorno happens to wander close to the landing site they decide they need to kill him (or...capture him, maybe? They can't seem to decide). Even though the pirates appear to know that this planet's only inhabitants are the one family whose patriarch it's named after (the captain literally said "set course for Zandor's Planet").

The reason for the fighting kind of changes from there, over the course of the fifteen minute runtime. At a certain point it seems like the pirates are trying to escape the planet, and the family are trying to stop them. At another, it's more like the pirates are here to wipe them all out and the family are trying to survive. Maybe I was wrong to call that hidden treasure chest the source of conflict altogether; I'm kinda getting the impression that the reasons for these battles rarely matter after the first 120 seconds.

Highlight of the episode is when Dorno gets captured for a bit, and one of the herculoids - an elastic blob named Gloop who both looks and sounds like Cousin Itt - has to stretch his entire body into a long, probing tentacle (accompanied by weirdly electronic stock sound effects) to grab him back out of the ship while apathetically ignoring the pirate unloading a laser pistol into his mass.

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The episode ends with the pirate ship crushed into scrap metal by giant ape-herculoid muscles and the pirates themselves all individually hurled offscreen and then forgotten about in a child-friendly metaphor for being stranded on a barren planet to be slowly eaten alive by scavengers. The family remembers about the buried treasure, and opt not to tell anyone about it, including the authorities, because they don't want more bother.

Kinda turns the whole thing into a tragic irony about the perils of miscommunication, doesn't it? If only the pirates had just been willing to talk to the family up front, none of this bloodshed and trauma would have been necessary. It's like the Duality of Man.

The following episode, "Sarko the Arkman," once again has the youngest member of the human family imperilled by an abductor with a spaceship. This time, the culprit is this weird little fucker named Sarko who reminds me of Kermit the Frog for some reason, and Dorno's kidnapping is kinda sorta accidental.

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Sarko is a mad scientist who wants to take the herculoids as research specimens, and Dorno jut falls into a trap alongside the rhino-thing. So, the intended crime was maybe petnapping and maybe kidnapping, depending on what the herculoids count as, but in any case Dorno was collateral damage.

Does the kid just get captured in every episode? That's going to get old fast.

The family turns out to not be as isolated as I thought, as it turns out the winged dragon-ish herculoid can fly through space, and the villain's rocky homeworld is the stellar equivalent of a short car ride away. After realizing he has Dorno as well as two of the herculoids on his hands, Sarko does make some mouth noises about using him for hostage negotiations with his dad, but then he never actually ends up doing that when push comes to shove. Sucks for him I guess.

Also, what was his plan against retaliation for the pet(?)napping in the first place? Just hoping to never get caught, I guess? Except that doesn't work either, because at the beginning he openly...eh, duality of man again.

I do like this shot of the good guys finally cornering Sarko in his base, though. In particular, the fact that Zandor uses a literal slingshot in battle despite it being such a clash with the look and feel of everything including himself:

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The slingshot stones do explode, to be fair, but still.

Anyway, they end up stealing Sarko's ship and flying it home alongside their own pet space dragon. It would be cool if they kept it for the rest of the series, but I have low expectations for such.

The second episode could have actually been fairly good. There was more animation than in the one before it, including some amusingly whimsical visuals involving vine-swinging and blob-shapeshifting, and a surprisingly cool looking villain lair. The expanded setting and possibility space it opened up also did a lot for the piece. If only the writers could just commit to the characters' motivations for the length of a fifteen minute episode, the ep might have turned me around on the series. They couldn't, though, and - much like my memories of Space Ghost - the impression I get is that this is because they just didn't care enough to.

I watched ahead a bit, and unfortunately the good bits of "Sarko the Arkman" are unusual by the series standards. The space pirate one was more typical, which - I'll be honest - is exactly what I had expected.


As a piece of animation history, "The Herculoids" apparently had a bit more influence on subsequent artists than I'd realized. A few of the big names of the eighties and nineties make at least a brief mention of it when listing earlier stuff that inspired them. It also, like the other Hanna-Barbera cartoons, fills what would otherwise be a gap in the progression from the early sixties superhero toons to the SatAm milieu that blossomed starting in the early eighties. Including the ongoing influence of 1920's and 30's pulp literature on American animation, with however much watering down it took to make things kid-friendly.

I'm glad I saw it, for those historical reasons. But that doesn't mean it reflects well on its own era. It could have been much worse, but still, one gets the impression that the late sixties just weren't a great time for American TV animation in general that wasn't in the Loony Toons/Tom and Jerry mold.

 

[Leila Hann]

This review was once again comissioned by @krinsbez.


Since we're going further back into the Hanna-Barbera annals, I figured a little more historical background might be appropriate. As I mentioned last time, the late sixties weren't a great half-decade for American animation, with Disney, WB, and Hanna-Barbera all kind of just flailing under various financial blunders and copyright fiascos. Like many such funks though, it came on the heels of something of an animation golden age in the late fifties and early sixties.

And, to be fair to Hanna-Barbera Studios in particular, this particular company also played a major role in ending that funk at the start of the seventies when they rolled out the first episode of "Scooby Doo," returning to the place of honor they'd had before it with "Tom & Jerry," "The Flintstones," etc.

"Space Ghost" and its contemporaries were really just a weird, low-effort, low-budget fugue that HB fell under for a few years, in the grand scheme of things.

"Jonny Quest" is an older adventure series from 1964, right at the end of the good stretch. This doesn't necessarily mean it's good, of course, but I at least expect it to be more effortful than the stuff that followed. I haven't seen this series, but as a kid I did see a few episodes of its remake "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest," that came out in the nineties. I remember enjoying what I saw of said remake, so hopefully the original will have something going for it as well.


Future me reporting in! And yep, Jonny Quest is pretty decent. I wouldn't say it's aged well, but there's plenty of stuff to enjoy alongside the lumps, and it absolutely does have the effort and vision behind it that was missing from the later sixties H-B adventure shows.

The premise is a bit of a shaky one, but for a kids' show I think it holds up well enough. Omnidisciplinary scientific genius Dr. Benton Quest is the US Navy Intelligence's special consultant for cracking weird and threatening mysteries. He is accompanied on his investigations by his eleven year old son Jonny, who in turn is accompanied by special agent Roger "Race" Bannon tasked with the boy's education and protection and who Jonny sees as sort of a cool uncle. It's strongly implied that the late Mrs. Quest was killed by enemy agents trying to get at the doctor, explaining both why Dr. Quest refuses to be far away from his son and why said son needs a whole entire Fed to guard him full time. And, of course, Jonny always ends up playing as major a role in solving the mystery as his father does, despite Race's attempts to keep him away from it.

There seem to be some other main characters rounding out the cast, but most of them don't appear in the pilot episode. The only other exception being Jonny's dog, Bandit, who reminds me of that one incredibly cursed episode of Stardust Crusaders.

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Speaking of dogs, it's interesting how much this show seems to be a prelude of things to come as it is an evolution of what came before. Jonny, Race, and Bandit poking around at creepy environments full of danger is absolutely "Scooby Doo" seven years before Scooby Doo existed. In the shorter term, the little boy from "The Herculoids" looks and sounds a lot like a lower-budget version of Jonny, and his relationship with his father is very much like a less nuanced, more annoying version of Jonny's relationship with his father.

There's also another proto-Scoobydooism that took me by surprise in this pilot episode. The mystery is initially framed as being about monstrous "lizardmen" that turn out to just be men in costumes. The difference is that in this case, the monster-fakeout is implied to be totally accidental on the part of the bad guys. Terrorists are building a secret base in the Sargasso Sea, and they wear dark green greeble-covered diving suits as camouflage. Thing is, when people DO manage to catch sight of them despite the camo, the bumpy algae-green suits covered in bits of dangling sargasso weed make the terrorists look like some kind of inhuman reptile-men when glimpsed from a distance.

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I really wonder if this pilot *specifically* inspired some of the people working on it into making an entire show with the premise "what if other bad guys did something like that *on purpose* in every episode? And also we went for pure comedy instead of adventure-with-some-comedic-elements? And also turned Bandit the dog into the main character?"

"Jonny Quest" has some of the same production value limitations as "Herculoids" etc, but not all of them, and not as badly. The voice acting isn't great, but the extremes of feeling are a liiiittle more convincing at both extremes. There's a lot of stiff animation and "objects sliding across the background instead of properly moving" throughout, but not as often or as brazenly, and it's punctuated by bits of very fluid and effortful animation that makes up for it. Like the way these sea snakes wriggle their bodies across a dingy rusted shipwreck:

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That screenshot also reminds me that sometimes there's excellent shadow work, and sometimes there's conspicuously none at all.

I wish the quality of the animation was more consistent, rather than constantly oscillating between "really good" and "nonexistent," as the latter is more than a little distracting. Still, it's much better than being stuck on "nonexistent" all episode long.

The character writing is...not amazing, but good, especially for its time. In particular, Jonny strikes a good balance of precociousness without being annoying (at least usually), and his rapport with Race the spook babysitter is both affectionate and convincing while still leaving room for character conflict. One place where this really shines is in the show's educational bits. There's a recurring thing where Jonny asks questions about things like the history of the Sargasso Sea, what the sargasso weed is, how a hydrofoil boat works, etc. A lot of children's programming fucks this up by either force-interjecting it unnaturally into the dialogue, having the kid ask random or idiotic questions, or turning the adult's answers into a big intrusive monologue. Here though? Jonny asks the questions I'd expect a curious, intelligent 11 year old to ask, at pretty much the pace you'd expect him to, and Race answers them concisely and characterfully without interrupting whatever other thing he'd been in the middle of doing. It's a rare balance, and the show strikes it dead center.

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Another perk of this is that *some* of the trivia (in this case, the situational advantages of Judo relative to other martial arts, and the flammable nature of dried sargasso) ends up being relevant to the late-episode action sequence, but not *all* of it does. The show rewards kids for paying attention and learning things without condescending to them by treating the entire episode as a lesson plan and quiz. Watching Jonny use what he's been learning to help beat the bad guys instead of just being a liability for the adults is also a nice difference between this and "Herculoids."

Honestly, the dynamic between Jonny and Race is so strong that Dr. Quest himself is almost extraneous. His own moments with his son are less convincingly family-like.

What I'll probably remember the best about this episode, though, is the atmosphere. Once Jonny and Race stumble into the bad guys and kick off the action sequence things naturally get sillier and slapstickier, but outside of that "The Mystery of the Lizard Men" has a surprisingly effective horrific atmosphere. The way the landscape of depressing, sargasso-entangled shipwrecks is drawn and detailed, with the slow panning and the eerie, uncanny music, eesh. It really sells the trepidation of the good guys going into this investigation, and makes it so that you absolutely believe that the local fishermen would think this place haunted and the men who lurk in it monsters.

Hell, even after the mystery has been revealed and the villains exposed as just some bumbling ex-Soviet agents-turned-terrorists, seeing them glide through the weedy water and clamber up onto the shipwrecks in their rugose green suits is STILL creepy and disturbing. It also helps that the episode intro shows the "lizardmen" just straight up murdering a crew of sympathetically-portrayed Cuban fishermen in cold blood. Even when they're later being knocked around by a boy and his dog in a slapstick action scene, a little bit of that menace is still retained. And even amplified at one point, when they start setting sargasso fields on fire to flush the good guys out while shooting at them with a realistic-looking gun rather than the cartoon lasers that ended up taking their place under later censorship policies.

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The villain's plot is typical cartoon villainy. Perfect the experimental laser gun that Ivan never let him finish working on (testing it on old shipwrecks and hapless Cubans as needed), and then use it to shoot down an upcoming American moon-mission just as the rocket is leaving the atmosphere to SHOW THEM ALL. The way he and his henchman go about committing their crimes and protecting their secrets in the meantime is much more mundane, though, and - combined with the incredibly eerie atmosphere - the grittiness and inelegance of them makes them scarier than these halfwitted SatAm baddies would otherwise be.

I don't want to overstate this. Like, ultimately, a wisecracking eleven year old and his pet dog are a match for the baddies. But, within those genre limitations, they manage some surprising menace.

Dr. Quest and his US navy pals tinkering away in the background while Race, Jonny, and Bandit accidentally their way facefirst into the plot do manage to be relevant again by the end, fortunately. I imagine that in other episodes, Jonny's father has a more active role throughout, but here he manages to come into his own in the end by pulling out a special heavy-duty mirror he's been working on ever since he started to suspect the work of laser weapons at the site. The climax has Jonny and Race outmanoeuvring their pursuers until the latter are goaded into breaking out the laser gun and attacking the navy boat itself, at which point the doctor reflects the beam and lets them blow themselves up. Everyone gets to contribute to the resolution, even if some of the characters were frustratingly left to spin their wheels for most of the runtime.

Heh, speaking of spinning wheels, there's also this *charmingly* pointless little flourish involving Dr. Quest's big clunky supercomputer. The episode is bookended by them inputing all their knowledge about the situation into it, waiting ten seconds for the wheels to turn and the lights to flash, and then being wowed when the computer prints off an incredibly, unhelpfully obvious answer.

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Lmao.


Anyway, it's janky, but I'd never call this "bad" based on what I saw in the pilot. I can definitely understand why they decided this merited a remake in the nineties.

 

[Leila Hann]

This review was fast lane comissioned by @Aris Katsaris.


More Pale side-materials. Which, well, the worldbuilding for the Pale/Pact setting has consistently interested me more than the stories themselves, so I'm not complaining. This order includes bonus content from a few different chapters, so I guess it'll probably cover a wide range of subjects.

The first bit is from right after "Leaving a Mark 4.1" and concerns a magic school called the Blue Heron Institute. Apparently magic schools are a thing in PactPale, at least in some places. There's what seems like an advertisement for the school, as well as a personalized letter from its administrator to the three girls inviting them to enroll, followed by an IM conversation between the trio about whether or not to take him up on it.

Unfortunately, I don't know what's going on in the story at this point, so I can't make much of the girls' ambivalence. From the tone of the IM convo, it kinda seems like the guy running the school - an Alexander Belanger - is seen as an enemy by some of their local supernatural entities, so they're not sure if they should trust him or if the political costs would be worth it even if he proves trustworthy. I think? Something like that.

The information presented about the Blue Heron Institute itself is mostly either typical magic school genre stuff or PactPale magi-technobabble stuff, but there are some details that I can get more out of. In particular, a few bits really look like the author sat down with a pen and paper and thought "let's look at magic schools in urban fantasy and write down everything that makes sense about them and everything that doesn't." And, as far as I can tell, he seems to have done a good job at dealing with the latter. For instance, Blue Heron is specifically a magic summer school, so attending it doesn't get in the way of a modern, well-integrated young wizard's general education. The way the classes are set up also seems like it's meant to accommodate students from various magic backgrounds who may have been taught any amount of eldritch family secrets that put them ahead of or behind the curve:



Courses at all levels are available to everyone from the outset. If you were raised attentively by a well-rounded sorcerer clan, you can take all intermediate and advanced courses and leave your mornings free. If you're a muggle who stumbled into the practice, you can take all beginner courses and leave your afternoons free. The implication is that most students come in with a mixture of types of magic they've mastered and types they've remained relatively ignorant of, and thus can fill their schedules with courses that suit them. Those individuals seem to be getting the most for their money, given the way the timeslots are allocated (at least assuming a flat tuition rate rather than a courseload-dependent one).

On the subject of tuition, it's not clear what they charge. The personalized letter from Belanger implies that the girls' tuition will be waived if they sign up for this summer right now, but I lack the context to understand why he's making this offer, or what he would otherwise be charging them. Not normal money obviously, PactPale wizards surely have no need for that. Do they have some kind of unit of exchange of their own? Maybe a karma-backed or political-favor-backed currency? The more I think about it, the more the former actually makes sense. Karmic debt is a tangible thing in this world, and there are magical means of manipulating it, so taking on someone else's karmic debt in exchange for goods and services seems logical. That also means that getting badly in "financial' debt has supernatural consequences along the lines of mystically bad luck, spell failures, and Others being hostile to you, which *feels right* for the setting.

So yeah, that's my best guess about how tuition works. Either that, or some more intricate system of debts and favors that needs to be worked out case by case.

Anyway, some of the further text descriptions make it sound like the basic courses are closer to modern classrooms, while advanced courses fall closer to the wizard-and-a-couple-apprentices model. Again, logical. It also seems like personalized consultation with the Institute's rotating cast of "guest teachers" is as big a part of the curriculum as the preplanned courses, which again makes sense for a school operating in such a highly political environment with students of diverse backgrounds and previous knowledges. In some ways, Blue Heron might work more as an open forum for exchange of knowledge than it does as a formal school. Only in some ways, though; the beginner level courses are likely a balancing factor here.

Next bit is the "Gone Ahead 7.8" supplement, titled "Can We Talk About the Girls?" This one is a more conventional prose interlude, and features a (very enlightening for the reader) conversation between the girls' parents. Lucy and Verona have been friends for a long time, but their parents never interacted much, and Avery's family is new-ish in town and Avery only befriended the other two pretty recently.

The nominal POV character for this scene is Jasmine, Lucy's mother. I don't know how much she's appeared in the story before now, but here she makes a pretty good impression as a hardworking nurse who still, somehow, manages to be a responsible and attentive single mother even though it's slowly killing her of exhaustion. On one hand, Lucy herself has been a big help by helping take care of her brother (which in turn makes me more positively disposed toward Lucy herself than I was before). On the other hand, Lucy's trust and anger issues have come out in very bad ways occasionally, including an incident that apparently deterred a potential stepfather. Granted, it's not clear from the interlude if that was Lucy's fault or the man's fault, but it definitely strained her relationship with her mother either way. As for what happened to the original father, I'm not sure, but something about the tone of her narration suggests to me that Jasmine is a widow rather than a divorcee.

Speaking of divorce though, we get another appearance from Verona's father, named now as Brett. We only got a brief glimpse of him in the early chapters that I reviewed, and at the time it seemed like the negative portrayal of him might have been at least heavily down to Verona's POV. We see him from the perspective of unrelated adults now, though, and simply put he is an incredibly divorced dad. In fact, he might be the most divorced man I've ever read about. He is surrounded by an overwhelming aura of divorced energy that weakens happy marriages just by proximity. He spends pretty much the entire meeting complaining about Verona, blaming himself for how she turned out (without ever admitting to any specific mistakes), blaming his ex-wife for how she turned out (with much more specificity), and making borderline-rude observations about Verona's interactions with the other two in front of their own parents.



He sets the tone right at the start by ordering a rich pastry a la mode even though he just got out of the hospital for a stomach thing and telling the other parents who try to warn him that "his stomach will pay for it later, whatever." The scene ends, naturally, with him doubling over with stomach pain and refusing to let anyone help him back to his car.

On one hand, it's impossible to not feel for this guy. On the other, it's also impossible to like him.

Avery's parents Kelsey and Connor, meanwhile, are hard to get a read on. Moreso than the others, the token unbroken nuclear family feel like they're putting on a facade. The way they talk feels a little off in a way that makes me think the author is trying to write about them being slightly fake, but miscalculated slightly and ended up straying into stilted and uncanny. Not a lot, just a little bit.

Granted, there are also a couple of places where the uncanniness clearly IS intentional, when they're trying to recall certain details about Avery's recent behavior and clearly mentally struggling against that secrecy spell the girls use. There's also another struggle going on though, and that is concerning their daughter's sexuality. They never say explicitly that that's what they're talking about, but Connor seems incapable of talking about Avery at length without obliquely accusing this one teacher of hers for *something* involving Avery's recent behavior without making it clear exactly what he's talking about, and Kelsey gets visibly more and more annoyed at him for this until by the end they need to go home separately.

Avery's parents also seem a little younger than Brett and Jasmine, I think. Like, one of them uses the word "adulting," which I don't think any person born before 1985 has ever uttered. Or maybe they're all supposed to be in that age range, and I'm just too terrified of my own aging to imagine people born when I was having children in high school. But anyway, with Connor being in my own age cohort I can definitely imagine him being fine with gay people in general, always voting for pro-LGBT politicians, etc, but thinking that if his daughter is gay then it means a predatory adult must have done it to her and perhaps this means that wokeness is starting to go too far. Kelsey seems to be at her wits' end trying to get him to come off it by this point.

I will say in Connor's favor that he ends the scene deciding to make a commitment to being a friend to Brett, since he clearly needs one (and frankly, his daughter needs him to have one too). He's not a bad guy. Just...he has some specific conservative hangups that he never thought he'd need to confront, and he's not handling it well so far. He and Kelsey also offer to help put in a word for Jasmine at a different clinic that might give her a more stable schedule, for which she's extremely grateful. Avery's parents are flawed, but they seem to earnestly try to do what's best for the people them.

One thing that interests me about this scene, as someone relatively familiar with Wildbow's work, is that I think this is the first time I've read him handling a group of regular people in ostensibly our own world talking about mundane family stuff without any supernatural elements being mentioned. Supernatural elements are PRESENT, sure, with the way the parents are being nudged by the mind-whammy here and there, but that's a pretty minor factor in the scene overall. The writing definitely feels like the author isn't that sure of himself, and that he knows he's writing outside of his comfort zone. And, I definitely respect that. All things considered, I think he did an okay job with this interlude. Not a great one, but good enough.

On a somewhat similar note, I also feel like the author is making a deliberate effort to be more progressive, especially with regards to race issues. As I mentioned in a previous review, "Worm" had enough unthinkingly reactionary shortcuts and assumptions written into it that I think I'd have bounced off of it hard if I'd read it a few years later in life than I did. The zeitgeist has changed since then, though, and this scene demonstrates that the author has change with it. For instance, when Jasmine is talking about Lucy's anger and mistrust issues, some of the incidents she recounts involve ambiguous racism from teachers and other white adults that Jasmine herself isn't sure of (stuff like a teacher not liking the way Lucy wears her hair to class, for example). I don't know what it's like being black in rural Canada, or exactly what the oft-talked-about black hair issue feels like from inside, but I have enough experience being some type of minority in some type of isolated community that it rang mostly true for me. Likewise Avery's parents' bemused, not-sure-what-to-think reactions to being told that their daughter's favorite gym instructor might or might not have turned Jasmine's daughter off of school sports entirely via accumulated microaggressions.

Combined with the very nuanced portrayal of pseudo-progressive homophobia, this definitely points to self-examination and growth.

On a technical level, apart from the occasional not-sure-if-intentional bits of stilted dialogue, I still wish that Wildbow would do more to engage the senses with his prose. There's only a couple words of physical description, at most, of each character, and mostly only when they first appear. He picked a nice, interesting-looking venue for this parents' get-together, with Avery's parents having invited the others to meet at a quirky hipster-cafe with candlelit tables, but there's so little sensory callback to this after its (very good) initial description that it almost feels wasted.

Like I said after reading the first few chapters of the serial itself, I feel like Wildbow's prose quality has declined even as his worldbuilding and character writing skills have grown. It's unfortunate.


There are a couple more bits of Pale finishing up this month's fast lane order. I'll cover them in another post sometime next week.

 

[Leila Hann]

This review was comissioned by @Vinegrape


"Trans-inclusive lesbian separatist vampires."

If that sentence makes you go "huh?" then this movie is for you.

If that sentence makes you go "omg based," then this movie is even more for you, but probably not for the reasons you'd prefer.

"Bit" (as in the past tense of "bite") is an indie comedy/horror/hardtodefine movie that came out of the LGBT film festival circuit in 2019. I was kind of surprised I hadn't heard about it until now, given the intersection of themes and subject matter it covers. Having now seen it though, well, it makes a little more sense. This isn't a great movie. I'm not even sure if I can find it in me to call it good. And yet, despite its issues, I would never dream of calling it bad either.

I think there might be a truly amazing movie buried in this one. It's just unfortunately all covered up by the creators' inexperience and (especially) apparent refusal to work within their means. A little more polish, a little more self-awareness, and a little more efficient use of the limited resources at hand, and it's possible that this might have been my favourite vampire movie of all time. As it is, well...I still recommend it as a fun film with some cool things to say about gender, power, and patriarchy, but with a substantial list of caveats.

...

The story follows Laurel, freshly graduated from high school and freshly transitioned MtF, as she leaves her rural Oregon hometown to spent the summer with her actor brother Mark in Los Angeles. Her first night in California, Mark pressures her to go clubbing with him despite her physical and emotional exhaustion. At the club, Laurel gets picked up by an attractive girl named Izzy with similar interests to hers and well-formed plans to kill and eat her after sex.



Laurel's life is saved at the last moment by Duke, the alpha member of Izzy's all-woman vampire coven, who tells her minion that she thinks this one might be more valuable as a new recruit than an exsanguinated corpse (she seems to have been impressed by Laurel refusing to take shit from inconsiderate guys at the club earlier, which foreshadows something we'll learn about later on). What follows is the most holistically fucked up and hypocritical corruption of a "grrrl power" arc that has ever been put to film. It's also one that - without ever calling too much attention to it, apart from one brief exchange in which Duke affirms Laurel's femininity as part of the lovebombing phase of her recruitment - only serves the story as well as it does because of Laurel's transness.

"Men can't handle power," Duke tells Laurel when explaining why their brood will only ever include women, "they have it already and look what they've done with it." In an (unfortunately not as well written) preface to this, she says of women "We are politically, socially, mythologically fucked. Our bodies suspect, alien, other. We're made to be monstrous...so let's be monsters. Let's be gods." Later, when opening up to Laurel about abuse that she herself once suffered at the hands of powerful men, Duke fantasizes about a world "where all women are vampires, and men are the ones who have to be afraid to jog at night."

Laurel is initially sceptical that a transwoman falls on the right side of Duke's war of the sexes. Duke assures her that she considers her a woman unreservedly, and Laurel - hungry for affirmation - allows this to sway her for a time.

The thing is that the movie has already shown that Laurel isn't on the right side of Duke's worldview. In fact, there isn't a right side of Duke's worldview. Laurel's introduction to the coven was as a totally innocent victim, saved from death only by a last-second whim of its leader. Even more damningly, while Duke assures Laurel that the coven favors abusive men as its foodstuff of choice ("we're not a movement," she tells Laurel, "at best we're a terrorist organization. We're about 80/20 on guilty versus innocent kills"), she also grudgingly admits that feeding is more enjoyable if the victim is someone who the vampire finds attractive.

It's already established by that point that the coven are all lesbians.

In light of these facts, I don't think that Duke's statistics are anywhere close to the neighbourhood of accuracy. All she and her brood are accomplishing is giving women yet another reason to fear jogging at night.

Duke's answers to these questions constantly oscillate between idealistic lesbian separatist talking points and performative "nothing personnel kid" style moral nihilism to keep herself on the winning side of each conversation.

Even if it weren't for that blatant hypocrisy, Laurel knows that she was once perceived as a man. She (probably) also once thought herself to be a man, however miserable that belief made her. Is there some moral quality that she always had, and that the cisboys she went to elementary school with lacked? Or did she herself lack that quality herself until she came out to herself?

Throughout the movie, Laurel's brother Mark grows increasingly concerned for her as these creepy punky rave girls keep dragging her away for days at a time and leave her too exhausted to move from his living room couch while the sun is overhead. She rebuffs him with increasing forcefulness as Duke pulls her in closer; mostly out of a desire to protect him, but also increasingly because of what Duke, Izzy, and Co have been telling her. She also falls out of contact with her increasingly worried parents, and her best friend from high school (a gay boy whose common GSM status with Laurel is suggested to have been a bonding element, and who is going through mental health issues of his own). Things come to a head when Laurel's high school friend - after over a month of reaching out to her for emotional support only for his calls and texts to go unanswered - attempts suicide by overdose. The exact same suicide method, it turns out, that Laurel's brother once prevented her from attempting.

Up to this point, Laurel has (to the growing frustration of the other vampires) been avoiding feeding as much as possible, still having too many moral reservations. When Mark confronts her about her behavior toward him and her other friends and family, her hunger has reached its apex, and when she loses it at him, well, she really loses it.

"I never stood in the way of you becoming who you really are. But it turns out that who you really are is a selfish bitch."​

This leads into the action-packed climax, in which Laurel tries to save her wounded, half-bled brother from either dying or turning, and is forced to confront the ugly truth of Duke's brood head on instead of twisting herself into knots around it.

...

Before getting into the movie's final act, I'll have to talk about some other plot complexities and details that have been building up alongside the (very strong) central character arc. And, unfortunately, this is where some of "Bit'" more serious flaws necessitate discussion.

Throughout the movie, there's this subplot about a gang of rightwing chuds turned vampire hunters that have Duke's coven in their sites. Duke uses them as helpful cases in point when making her arguments to Laurel, but the pacing of their appearances in the movie are just so insanely convenient that it takes you out of the story.

Like, for instance, the leader of the hunterchuds is this creepy old man who is shown to have zero reservations about killing innocent people when it's convenient for him, but who nonetheless tries to save Laurel from having her blood drained at the beginning. Seemingly for the dual purposes of a) letting her recognize him later when the plot needs her too, and b) making him play the role of "creepy old person who tried to warn them" that every horror movie's act one is legally required to include. If he somehow knew that Duke would decide to make Izzy turn Laurel instead of just killing her like they usually do with their victims then that might make sense, but there's really no way he could have known that.

This early encounter foreshadows the movie's first proper fight scene, which in turn forces me to ask why in god's name these creators thought they could do a fight scene?

They did not have the budget for this. They did not have the talent for this. The movie did not NEED this. They could have very, very easily made a few writing changes that would eliminate 75% of the action sequences without removing anything important from the story.

Yes, there is a part of this fight where the hunterchuds literally left a giant bear trap open on the floor in the middle of the vampires' own lair without anyone noticing, and Duke steps right fucking into it somehow.​

​

I can be extremely sympathetic to low-budget productions, but only on the condition that the creators make some effort to work within their goddamned limits. Like, the acting in this movie is all over the place in quality, with the lead brother-sister duo (Laurel in particular) being by far the best actors, and Duke and the creepy old hunterchud (chunter? chunter.) leader being the worsts. I'd never criticize the movie for that though, because they were stuck with the actors they could afford, and there's no way to write the story around that. This though? I will absolutely hold them responsible for this, and judge the movie as a whole for including it.

It isn't just one fight scene either. There are a bunch of these. All of them are piles of poorly directed, poorly blocced, bad special effects-ridden shit.

The chunter subplot serves to provide Duke with visual aids for her arguments, pressure Laurel into making split-second decisions that end up forcing her deeper into the coven's grip, and also give Laurel the occasional blood meal who she can kill in self-defence rather than for the sake of feeding and thus postpone her moral downfall until the story is ready for it. Like I said, it's all *really* convenient. However, it also serves to introduce another plot point that ties the whole movie together and is essential for the final act. And it's a good plot point on its own; I just really wish they could have used anything fucking else to introduce it.

...

The creepy old man who leads the chunters is a former retainer of the vampire who turned Duke herself, who had been promised vampiredom in exchange for a period of loyal service in the daylit world. This old vampire's origins are unknown, save that he is at least six hundred years old and monstrous in both temperament and power. This elder vampire (referred to most often as simply "the Master," though numerous aliases are also listed) may or may not have ever been planning to keep this promise, but was overthrown by his own spawn before he could, and his surviving human minions are still sore about it. After the first couple of chunter encounters, Laurel gets Duke to tell the story behind this.

Teenaged Duke ran away from her virulently homophobic rural family on pain of death sometime in the 1970's. She was homeless for a time. Addicted. Prostituting. She eventually, after immense pain and laborious effort, started to get her life together and get a stable job and living situation in the orbit of New York City's underground (there was no other kind, back then) queer scene. She learned not to take shit from anyone, and was sure that she never would again. Like this guy here who pours a drink on her head at a club, and who she pulled a knife on (which seems to be what Laurel's own behavior in the club at the movie's start reminded her of):



Was that a thing, in the 1970's? Pouring drinks on lesbians? I'm not sure. I think it should be a thing now, though. Next time you see a lesbian, try pouring a drink on her. If you are a lesbian, you can get someone else to pour a drink on you or even do it yourself. This would be a good action for us all to perform. Getting back to the review now.

Just as Duke was finding herself a happy, fulfilling life, the Master found her and basically did the Purple Man thing. He was going through a "bored of immortality, let's just be as decadent and hedonistic as inhumanly possible" arc at the time, which basically amounts to Vampire Kilgrave. To this day, his mind-whammy on Duke is so powerful that she still remembers him as the single most irresistibly sexy person ever, even though she's been otherwise 100% lesbian both before and after him. He kept Duke as part of his harem for decades, and turned her mostly just so she'd stay pretty for longer. Eventually he grew lax in his control, and when some vampire hunters attacked him Duke and one of his other concubines used the opportunity to kill him while he was distracted by the...um...whoever the fuck these people are supposed to have been:



Remember, this is supposed to have happened in late twentieth century America, and seemingly at some kind of club type place. I'm just imagining these fucking ComicCon dorks marching down the streets of LA or New York or wherever in full catholic-monk-as-imagined-by-japanese-manga-artist regalia hefting their flamethrowers and silvered longswords with those dead serious glares frozen on their faces on the way to the address, and I just lose my shit. I actually had to pause the movie and laugh for several minutes at this point.

It didn't help that the background song while Duke is narrating her time as a mind-controlled sex slave leading up to this incident is this one. Like, even if the Master is literally supposed to be Rasputin (which...maybe?), it's just too goddamned silly. Or that some of the imagery shown in the collage of her enslaved years looks like this:



I know that this movie as a whole is semi-comedic throughout, but this is just off. Duke's narration is dead serious, and the events she's describing are a nightmare born of both real world intolerance and cruelty and fantasy mind control horror, but everything we see and hear besides her voice for this entire sequence says "parody."

But, getting to the point of this all.

Bitverse vampires are only weakened rather than killed by things like sunlight, garlic, and silver. They are vulnerable to fire, but to kill one for good you need to make sure you incinerate its heart. That's pretty much the only way to do it. They burned the Master to ashes, but he was so powerful that his heart refused to burn. It remained intact and beating, ready to regenerate him as soon as it comes in contact with blood. The best his rebel wives could do was lock the Master's heart in a safe and guard it from his remaining allies and retainers.

Duke, who had a more dominant personality than the other unnamed wife, had little trouble in taking command of their new pack. She also discovered that by scraping little pieces off of the Master's heart and consuming them, she could use more of the elder vampire's power. Only a little at a time, though. Whenever she takes a nibble, she feels his personality thrashing against the inside of her mind, and she fears that eating too much at once may have dire consequences. She needs that power to keep the heart safe from the interlopers, though, so she continues taking those little scrapes. She can handle it. She's sure.



As for where the other wife is now? The other victim of the Master's who helped Duke overthrow and imprison him, and then acquiescently stood down and let Duke take command and claim exclusive access to his heart-power? Well, she's currently a disembodied heart herself. At the very, very beginning of the movie, before we're introduced to Laurel, there's a little teaser that shows Duke and her three other lackeys catching a fifth coven member in the act of bestowing vampirism on a man. They incinerate him, and sentence her to one year's solitary confinement. That fifth coven member was Duke's co-revolutionary, and her heart is still locked in Duke's basement being drip-fed just barely enough blood to keep it beating.

...

Toward the beginning of the film, after forcing Izzy to turn rather than kill Laurel and then giving the latter the recruitment pitch, Duke told Laurel several things.

First: that there are three rules in their coven. No turning boys ever, no turning girls without the rest of the coven's consensus, and no mind-controlling other vampires. Other than this, Duke assures, the coven offers absolute freedom. You can do whatever you want.

Except that she can't tell if you're following the rules if you aren't in her close vicinity, so as an unspoken logical extension of those rules you can't leave the area. And also you can't tell anyone about vampires, of course, obviously. And you can't keep refusing to feed just because the victims aren't deserving of death enough for you; if you get too hungry then you'll eventually lose control, and that's a threat to their secrecy. So, you have to stay in Duke's orbit, live her lifestyle, and let her keep tabs on you at all times, but other than that seriously she's offering total freedom to do as you will.

Second, during the pitch, Duke told Laurel that she had two options (other than death or disembodied imprisonment, of course). Either she accepts the rules and joins the brood, or she drinks a potion that Duke offers her; this potion can turn a vampire back into a human, but ONLY if they haven't yet had their first blood meal.



So, having lost control, fed on her brother, and stopped herself short of killing him, Laurel drives the unconscious Mark to the coven's lair and begs for the bottle of cure. She tells Duke and the others that she'll spend as many years in the disembodied heart basement as they demand, she'll even let them execute her if Duke wills it, provided that they allow Mark to return to his human life.

Duke reveals that there is no cure. The "potion" is just purified alcohol. Drink it, and a vampire's already flammable body becomes incinerable with a mere tossed match. Even after giving her the grrrl power speech and promising freedom, Duke placed zero value on Laurel's life and was ready to kill her in a heartbeat if she said no.

...

Here I need to talk about Izzy, the vampire who turned (and would have killed) Laurel after picking her up at the beginning. Or more accurately, Laurel's relationship with Izzy. The two of them continue hooking up during Laurel's dreamlike, night-haunting time as a coven-member, and at one point Laurel tries to work out her mixed feelings about sleeping with the girl who tried to murder her and never seemed to regret it. And also tries to ask her about longterm issues like "won't people eventually start to notice that we aren't ageing, and what will that do to our social and familial prospects?"

Izzy's responses to Laurel's questions are downright wooden. Anything challenging is deflected with either humor, or something like "I just don't think about it" or "I'll deal with that problem when it comes up."



Peel away the hedonistic, devil-may-care exterior, and Izzy starts to seem almost more zombie than vampire. We never get to know Duke's other two minions that well, but one gets the impression that they're the same way.

Izzy used Laurel for sex, and then killed her for food, and doesn't get what the big deal is. Any attempts to MAKE her get what the big deal is reveal a giant blank space where a person should be.

...

Finally realizing what she's really been dealing with, and about to be murdered along with her brother, the cornered Laurel runs to the feeding grate over the prison-pit, where she rips her own throat open to let extra-concentrated blood drip onto the heart below. Duke's rival - the vampire woman known only as "the first wife," regenerates her body, and smashes open the safe containing the Master's heart to revive him as well. Duke and the others try and fail to stop her, and while they're all distracted Laurel grabs the slowly-regaining-consciousness Mark and runs away with him. They drive away, Laurel tearfully explaining their situation to Mark and trying to apologize for things she knows can't be forgiven. The two now alone to figure out what to do with themselves, including whether or not they should walk into an incinerator together.

The actor they got for the Master has an uneven set of skills. In Duke's flashback sequence, his lack of nonverbal charisma just made the whole thing even more farsical than it already was. Given an opportunity to talk now, though, the dude becomes a completely different and far more talented actor. His vocal delivery carries so much power, menace, and malice that you immediately forget all about the goofy expressions and unconvincing body language.

I wish I could take a screencap of his voice.​

Immediately, it is clear that we haven't met a real vampire until this moment. Duke and the others - even with the former being bolstered from nibbling on the heart - were never anything more than glorified spawn.

The first thing he does is make Duke admit that she's been liberally using mind control on all the others, despite her insistence that not doing so is one of the core rules. That's why Izzy is so wooden when you try to push her on certain things. That's why Laurel ignored her reservations and went with the recruitment even after the way they treated her and others in front of her. I'd gotten fairly frustrated with Laurel by this point in the movie, but now it's made clear that she never had agency. The only vampire who was an actual character in this entire drama was Duke.

Except that Duke never had agency either. She just chewed the heart and let it do the thinking for her. She wasn't a real character either.

The Master was the only one who actually did anything in this entire story. After all, he's the master. The boss. The man.

A hidden Narcissus reverberated through a deceptively colourful cast of Echos.

He then turns his attention to the other girls present - the three who Duke and the First Wife turned during his imprisonment - and tells them that he's been gravely slandered. He has been many things over his centuries of unlife. A villain sometimes, yes, but also sometimes a hero. A liberator, a force for good in the flow of human history, at least sometimes. In the late twentieth century he was a decadent hedonist yes, but that's such a tiny percentage of who and what he is as a whole. It is unfair to judge him for that tiny slice of his life, and he will now prove that they were all wrong to do so. And really, what did he ever use his mind control powers for besides making his wives feel loved and happy? Just like Duke, who now dares to cast judgement on him, used it to make her wives feel empowered and free? Hell, he was at least honest about it.

It's literally just a more charismatic, better-structured version of Duke's bullshit, where she changes the focus of the conversation to keep herself in the right. Whether it's down to her eating too much of the heart, a learned behavior from her decades of slavery, or something from within Duke's original self, she and the Master are virtually the exact same person. He's just stronger and smarter.

This, in my opinion, is where the movie should have ended. Unfortunately, it isn't.

...

After starting to drive away with Mark, Laurel abruptly changes her mind and turns the car around. She surprises the Master and - with the help of the others once he's surprise-stunned by a clever trick involving the alcohol bottle - manages to incinerate him down to the heart again in another absolutely terrible, awkward, bad-CGI-filled fight scene. His heart goes back in the safe, and Duke's goes in the punishment pit.

There's a little dialogue scene between Laurel and Mark the next day, where they discuss the prospect of continued unlife, and Laurel wonders if maybe the answer is to make EVERYONE a vampire.

-____-

The stinger has the coven, now reorganized along democratic principles and including both the First Wife and Mark, sharing the heart of the Master equally.



I thiiiink the movie intends this to be a positive ending. Which, um. I have some problems.

...

I get that they didn't want this to be a pure horror movie in the end. But with everything they established, I think they really should have bitten the bullet and gone with the bleak ending that the story frankly needs.

Vampires are not a metaphor for the thing that this ending wants them to be a metaphor for. I'm not proscribing this. I'm not trying to force the movie to conform to a broader pop culture consensus of what vampires are and what they mean. I'm saying that IN THIS MOVIE ITSELF, vampires are not what the ending says they are. Being a vampire isn't just having power. It's specifically having the power to take, dominate, and victimize with impunity. More than that, it's a state of being that requires you to do those things.

There's a scene early on, right after Laurel gets turned, when Mark tries to give her a meal and she throws it up a la Tokyo Ghoul. The need to feed is established to always be present in the vampiric mind, and trying to resist it just leads to uncontrollable bloodrages happening the next time you're stressed or angry. Vampires can feed on other vampires, but the movie reeeeeaaally doesn't frame this as a perpetual motion machine where vampires can feed on each other for infinite energy. If a vampire bite doesn't kill you, you become another vampire, so every feeding results in either a death or another mouth to feed. There are no indications that they can get by on animal blood.

Vampires in this movie are monsters. They *have to* be monsters.

Likewise, trying to frame the heart of the Master as a neutral source of power that leads to evil only when hoarded by some at the expense of others ignores the literal text leading up to it. Duke says in as many words that she can feel the Master's presence in her mind when she tastes the heart, and is clearly lying to herself and everyone else when she claims that she can keep it under control as long as she paces herself. Keeping the Master's heart and using it to empower yourself turns you into the Master. It makes you an extension of him, regardless of how you or he feels about it.

The movie could have set up the metaphors differently in order to support this ending. But it didn't. This is probably the single biggest blemish on "Bit." I could be okay with this ending if there was any apparent recognition that Laurel's approach is every bit as doomed as Duke's and that this is just the beginning of yet another tragedy, but there doesn't seem to be.

I maintain that the best way to end this film would have been to roll credits after the Master's villain speech. Duke didn't get rid of the Master, and so now she'll never be rid of him, and thanks to her and others like her the world will never be free of his depredations. Laurel and Mark might find salvation for themselves somehow, but it barely matters, because they barely matter.

That's the unironic, non-joking, bona fide horror that Bit should have culminated in.

...

Glaring issues aside, I really appreciate what this movie has to say about patriarchy and power. And, even though I dislike the ending overall, there's one exchange within it that really puts that message into words. When Laurel and Mark are discussing their future as vampires in the penultimate scene, Mark wonders if he will eventually become power-mad and cruel just as Duke predicted. Laurel replies that saying he "will" end up that way is just making excuses for his future self. Excuses that he doesn't deserve. Just like Duke doesn't deserve, and the Master doesn't deserve. There's only one person who can decide whether or not Mark will be corrupted, and that person's power over the matter is absolute.

Once again, Laurel's transness is of utmost importance when she says this. She knows what it's like to be a man, and she knows what it's like to be a woman. It's not as different as they want you to think.

There's a corollary to this piece of dialogue, earlier in the movie. During Laurel's dreamlike whirl of mindfucked unlife in Duke's orbit, there's a bit where Laurel and Izzy go to an art show or something. At said show, they end up hearing this hipster dude give an insufferably performative speech about why he doesn't consider himself a feminist, because doing so would be like pretending he's already done all the work he needs to do and letting him ignore the fact that his maleness and privilege will always be lurking within waiting to strike unless he stays vigilant. You feel nothing but a slight catharsis when Izzy tears his throat out after the show, because you just know this guy is a serial rapist. Every word of his fake speech is making excuses for himself, under a skin of performative allyship.

Laurel's neglected best friend back home being a gay man - another anomaly within the world order of hetero-masculine dominance - is also important. He's indisputably a man. Never has been and probably never will be anything remotely feminine. But he, just by virtue of who he wants to bang, isn't really the type of "man" that Duke railed against either. Not that gay men can't be misogynists, of course, but it still very distinctly just *isn't* the same thing.

Patriarchy is just the monster's outer skin. The shape it happened to grow itself into on account of its surroundings. At its core, this is an evil far more universal and primal than such petty distinctions as "male" and "female," let alone "masculine" and "feminine." Those concepts are merely tools for it.

Looking at the movie from that perspective, it's actually kind of odd that Duke was so trans-accepting. Her worldview seems like it should point directly at TERFdom. Hmm. Yeah, not really sure what to make of that decision, aside from the plot's need for her to be lovebombing Laurel with affirmation.

It occurs to me, also, that I've seen this concept before in more than just K6BD. I'm thinking of Utena in particular, but also other things. The tyrant patriarch has fallen, but he is only dormant rather than dead, and tyrannical patriarchy grows and seeps from his tomb to infect men and women alike and force them to revive him. I wonder if, in addition to the obvious tensions between second and third wave feminism, this also reflects a much broader anxiety about power and control in the modern era independent of gender politics. The liberal world order prides itself on having cast down the kings and emperors of old, but did it ever actually escape them?

...

There are other things that annoyed me about this movie. The characters making these meta-ironic pop culture references and comparing the story that they're in to "one of those vampire movies" every few scenes is supremely obnoxious. When they had the damned Master utter the words "like it says in that one movie" in the middle of his otherwise superb villain speech, it almost ruined it for me. I know I said I won't hold the acting against the film, but Izzy's actress' performance is so much better than Duke's that I found myself wishing they'd given the (much) more important character to the superior talent (though to be fair, casting a black woman as Duke might have come with its own issues).

But.

The acting and interplay between the lead sibling duo was ironclad. The atmosphere of nihilistic, half-hallucinatory decadence while Laurel is being dragged into the vampire vortex in the movie's middle third felt like a mix between a nostalgic teenaged memory and a half-remembered nightmare. The strength and clarity of the message, and the earnestness with which the movie speaks it, shine brightly. These aspects of "Bit" are beyond reproach.

That's why I said at the beginning that this is an incredible movie buried in a mediocre movie. Give the script another few passes, rethink the last couple of scenes, and give it either a bigger budget or a less overambitious director, and we'd be looking at a masterpiece. As it is, I'm glad I watched it, and I recommend that you watch it as well, but it isn't nearly what it could and should have been.

 

[Leila Hann]

Last time on The Medusa Chronicles: we destroyed Earth.

This time on The Medusa Chronicles: we destroy my investment in the story.


So yeah. Arc 5. "Peace Envoy." It's a series of words that was written down.

​

Sixty-six years have passed since the destruction of Earth. Howard Falcon has spent them building a shrine to Hope Dhoni.

I wish I was just shitposting.

As usual with The Medusa Chronicles, there's some cool scifi worldbuilding and sociological speculation behind the disappointing main character actions. A lot of people died after the fall of Earth, either by choosing to stay on the homeworld and die with it, or in the mass incidence of suicides and "just didn't care to continue the life extension treatments" that occurred in the following couple of decades. Species-wide depression, basically. Anyway, there are billions of little ice and dust "worldlets" in the outer system, most of which don't have anything valuable on them and only barely have enough gravity to stand on. So, there's been a whole trend of hollowing out these worldlets and turning them into elaborate memorials for people, places, or cultures lost. A landing pad, an airlock, and a network of hollowed-out chambers containing museum exhibits full of memorabilia, texts, and virtual recreations. They're called memory gardens, and their total number has reached the low millions.

See? This is cool. It's something I'd never have thought of, but it makes anthropological sense and it's really unique. There's also a potent irony in these memorials being built into the same type of iceballs that the Machines were originally forced to labor on.

But...having the protagonist retire from solar affairs and spending fifty-plus years on one for Hope Dhoni? Really? Really?

Like, let's pretend that Dr. Dhoni *wasn't* horribly botched in the early arcs, and that she never came across as a diabolical manipulative slavedriver. Has she had enough presence in the story to warrant this? She shows up at least once per arc, sure, but she barely ever does anything besides annoy Falcon for a few minutes and maybe perform some tune-ups. There's also never been a sense that Falcon cares that much about Dhoni, even if he occasionally says he does. It's always been her seeking him out or hunting him down, when he otherwise seems to be content spending 50 years between each arc sitting in some random space station staring at a wall and taking interest in no one and nothing. And...Hope never seemed that attached to Earth herself, to be frank, so her being one of those to die in the planet's wake in itself seems to come from nowhere.

This just feels unearned, from both the story and from Falcon.

...

You know what might have made this work?

I said that the witness at the end of the last arc who narrated the destruction of Earth should have been a different character. What if that character was Hope Dhoni?

She's either been tailing after Falcon or dragging him after her off and on for centuries, so it's far from unlikely that she'd have picked up a ballooning hobby from him at some point. She's always kind of acted as his link to Earth and mainstream humanity (though she often does a very bad job of filling this thematic role, it still seems to have been the author intent). She's earthborn, fully organic, and not a pseudo-pariah, so her caring enough about Earth to not want to outlive it is something I can buy (or could, if she'd had just a little bit more characterization to this effect in previous chapters).

So, it's Hope who took the balloon ride over the melting crust of Earth, and who vowed the Machines would pay for this with her final breaths before glimpsing the Orpheus-ghost and her airship getting caught in a Machine space-warping beam and vaporized. Maybe it's important that Falcon be the one to see the Orpheus-ghost, but if so he can just have a live feed from her headset or whatever. That would have both made the Fall of Earth scene feel less contrived, and made Hope's memorial here feel far, far more earned at least from an audience perspective.

...

Anyway, Falcon is in the middle of performing his thirty millionth little improvement to Hope's memory garden when an invited spacecraft docks with it and someone forces entry. It turns out to be a pair of (sighhhhhhh) Springers. Brother and sister Bodan and Valentina, grandchildren of the hereditary president-for-life Amanda IV. It's not clear what their official government positions are, but it's implied to not matter on account of their last name. They board the station, dare Falcon to try and attack them, and basically spend the entire conversation looking under tables and inside closets for puppies to kick to make sure that we hate them.

Cue a little exposition dump about how tyrranical the regime that used to be Earthgov has become as it bashes the remnants of humanity against the Machines over and over without regard to the cost. I'd wonder how people are able to scrounge up the time and resources to create these memory gardens if the regime is really that demanding in terms of resources and manpower, and the way the memory gardens were described earlier really didn't make them sound like a state-sponsored propaganda device. I guess we're meant to infer that the gardens are being made by people who live outside of the regime's control or awareness.

I still really, really do not understand why the evil political dynasty has to be descended from that famous astronaut dude. Or what the significance of having a rare non-evil member of said dynasty be Falcon's companion in "Return to Jupiter" was, in light of the above.

Anyway, they wheedle and threaten Falcon into coming aboard their ship to take part in a last-ditch diplomacy-backed-up-by-threat-of-new-superweapon attempt to end the war with the Machines. This takes them some effort, because Falcon has apparently gone back entirely on his fiery statement at the end of "The Troubled Centuries."

​

So yep, Falcon's passionate and weirdly atypical-for-him vow of revenge at the end of the last arc didn't actually mean anything and had no reason to be on the page.

...

Gee, it's almost like the witness should have been a different character or something.

...

They're only able to get him aboard their ship by pointing out that his body is in dire need of maintenance, and also that if he doesn't they'll have to use their superweapon without trying diplomacy first, and that their target is on Jupiter. Meaning that if there are any medusae the Machines haven't exterminated since they took the Jovian atmosphere a few centuries ago, they'll probably be wiped out for good now.

Then, once they've bullied Falcon onto their ship and taken off, they put the memory garden iceball he spent the last 50+ years working on onscreen and blow it up in front of him.

​

At this point, like...

We keep being told that Falcon isn't sure how much he values his life at this point ("this" point being a long list of times and places throughout the last couple of arcs). He's clearly at his lowest point now. Just a few pages ago, one of the Springer Duo dared him to try attacking them, and Falcon seemed to be vaguely considering it. His body, even long overdue for maintenance, is established to be insanely strong and fast, and one of the douche duo is standing right next to him within arm's reach gloating about what they just did, what other terrible things they're likely to do to him next, and how none of their promises to spare the things he cares about in return for his cooperation can be trusted.

Why doesn't he just crush her fucking skull?

There is a guard a few paces behind them, sure. Said guard might turn out to be faster on the draw, sure. But frankly, in this situation, even a small chance of taking Valentina down with him should be enough.

He's so goddamned passive, except for very occasionally when he suddenly isn't.

...

I mean, the other good option would have been to have Valentina reassure him that this is for his own good, and turn him over to the world-class psychotherapist they brought to start helping him recover from Dhoni's centuries of brainwashing, with Falcon thanking her and her brother for destroying the garden after he's completed therapy. I'd have accepted this too.

...

They bring Falcon to Io, which apparently is still under human control. Even though the Machines have (for some reason?) turned Jupiter into the center of their entire interplanetary civilization. Despite having been shown to be vastly militarily superior to humanity, and to understand the strategic significance of holding a moon over an enemy's homeworld, the Machines have apparently stood idly by and let the humans convert Io into an obvious death fortress.

In fact, the humans still hold all of Jupiter's moons. Even though the Machines are said to be conducting successfully, highly-destructive raids against the civilian population of Saturn.

I do not understand this war. Have the Machines lost their tech advantage since they destroyed Earth? Did they really not make a point of clearing the Jovian moons before that point? Did they do so, with humanity having retaken the moons since then?

...wait wait wait hold the fuck up a second. Isn't the Dyson sphere the center of Machine civilization, at this point? It was already pretty substantial by the time they took Earth. With how fast their Von Neumann tech seems to work, they must be at least *pretty far* into the process of digesting Earth at this point. There's a mention that they did end up processing Venus as well (not sure what the point of them having briefly had second thoughts was...). In this very chapter, it talks about how much weaker the sunlight throughout the system is on account of the sphere. Why the hell is Jupiter the Machine capital at this point?

...

Future me reporting in:

That Dyson sphere will never be relevant again for the entire rest of the novel.

It's mentioned as still existing, but it's significance to both the story and to the Machines is utterly forgotten after the end of "The Troubled Centuries."

I wish that was the worst of it.

...

There's an incredibly tone-deaf segue into hard-scifi-nerd techwank that forgets all about the grimness just loses itself in STEM jizz when the siblings explain their superweapon to Falcon. Basically, they've reverse-engineered the Machines' reactionless drive and hollowed out the entire fucking moon to build a giant version of it where the core used to be. Their plan is to launch the entire moon into Jupiter itself at high speed, which would disrupt Jupiter's weather system enough to...well, they don't actually have any way of knowing how much damage it would do to the Machines' operations down there, but they're sure it will do a lot. And uh. Apparently they think that this will be able to threaten the Machines into making a truce, provided they also have Falcon on hand to do the talking.

Because the Machines have been casualty-averse and infrastructurally centralized so far, amirite?

Before sending Falcon down to hopefully get the Machines' attention in a souped-up modern version of the Kon-Tiki (the Machines do not exchange any complex longranged comms for fear of cyberwarfare attempts), the Springers give Falcon the medical touch-up they promised. Mostly to make sure he doesn't die as soon as he comes in contact with Jupiter's strong gravity rather than out of any actual concern. He's prodded at by a terse, prickly medical orderly named Tem who hates her job and hates being forced to ignore the latest crop of industrial and/or war injuries in favor of Falcon even more. Granted, if this pair of Springer grandchildren are the ones who have been in command of Io for a long time, then I imagine every single person on this moon hates their jobs, so I can't really hold this against Tem.

Falcon tries to talk to her. And...well, in the previous arc, when Falcon was visiting one of the floating Laputas on Saturn, there was a part where he returned a dropped toy to a little girl even though she was afraid of his hideous biomechanoid self. Turns out that Tem is that little girl. Um...okay? Cool? Whatever? Her Laputa got destroyed in a Machine attack at some later point, unfortunately. And she actually barks at Falcon a little for having helped the Machines become what they currently are.

There's actually a nice little moment here, where Falcon does a double take and momentarily thinks that she knows what he did in the Kuiper belt, before realizing that she's just talking about his previous mentorship of Adam and playing it cool. I liked this. Wish I could say as much about anything else in this arc.

Take this exchange from a little later in the conversation, for instance:

​

When was the last time Falcon saw any Machine display anything like empathy?

Like, they MIGHT still have that. He's only seeing their society from the outside, and yes, it looks a lot like human society from the outside in terms of ruthlessness and rapacity. But how does he know what's going on beneath the surface? Hell, his inner monologues in arcs 4 and 3 both suggested that he believes the Machines have lost that empathy long ago.

Then there's...whatever the fuck this:

​

This moment ends up being important later. In particular, Tem's weird line about fearing contamination by his inferior DNA. But I don't think the authors themselves realized how weird it is for Falcon to think it's weird that a 29th century doctor might accidentally cut her thumb. Especially while she's complaining about how overworked she is and rummaging around inside a one-of-a-kind cyborg full of sharp mechanical bits that she's not used to operating on. It later turns out that she did this on purpose, thus vindicating Falcon's reaction to it.

...

I know, this is an extremely minor detail within the arc, but I can't help but fixate on it.

Genetic enhancement is suggested to be very widespread at this point, sure. But these are still flesh-and-blood humans, even if they're healthier, smarter, and live much longer. They can still cut themselves on sharp objects when doing finnicky fingerwork in unfamiliar environments full of sharp surfaces. There is nothing in their material circumstances that would make this different for the book's twenty-ninth century humans than it was for humans throughout the previous 500,000 years.

The authors could have written a world in which cut thumbs are no longer likely to ever happen, on account of super-reinforced skin or total reliance on remote-controlled smartknives or whatever, but they didn't. They're just assuming it should be so anyway, because it's the STEM spacefuture where everything is executed perfectly all the time and only acts of god or enemy sabotage can make it otherwise. The authors obviously intended for these future humans to be (very) flawed, of course, but not this kind of flawed. Not the *lame* kind of flawed, where people make mundane, boring, silly mistakes and we don't have complete control of our physical environments unless acted upon by an outside agent. How could a spacescience world - even an evil one - be that lame?

This sentiment making itself spoken so matter-of-factly and without any hint of self-awareness is honestly a really informative look into the minds of this type of futurist.

...

There's some more awkward exposition conveyed in this dialogue. Apparently there's a widespread and somewhat-effective resistance movement against the Springer regime, led by an enigmatic Emmanual Goldstein-esque figure known only as "the Boss."

​

Awkward exposition is awkward, but whatever.

After the tune-up, Falcon and the Kon-Tiki 2.0 get dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere. He's given the regime's terms in the form of a tungsten cylinder inscribed with intricate microglyphs; a form of information storage that can carry a lot of data with minimal risk of being a cyberweapon vector or a concealed grey goo bomb or the like.

Even before his descent, just by looking at Jupiter from orbit, Falcon can tell that the clouds are behaving differently; evidence of massive geo-engineering going on below the upper storm layer. Whatever the Machines have been doing down there, it probably bodes very, very poorly for the native life (other than the superintelligence implied to be lurking down near the core, obviously). Once he begins the drop, the Jovian storms are described in a very different, very much more anxiety-inducing manner than in arc 3, even though the visuals aren't much changed. Again, this is one area in which the writers continue to be very talented, even as this arc is also really, really, really laying bare their flaws. These positives and negatives combine in this next little scene:

​

He sees this. The relief that the medusae aren't extinct is followed up by the possibility that it might be even worse than extinction. Are they zombie slaves being controlled by brain implants? Conquered serfs being forced to labor with precision learned from their masters on pain of death? Or, more optimistically, are they simply adapting new behaviors (and possibly learning from the Machines by immitation) in order to survive in the changing environment?

I don't know. And...Falcon doesn't try to ask them.

Like, he just drives on passed without attempting communication.

Maybe his airship doesn't have the neccessary computers to do the interpretation, but like. He doesn't even think about how he wishes he could. He doesn't linger around here to follow them and try to learn more. His main stated reason for going along with this mission is concern for the medusae, but he barely displays any of that now.

...

Future me again, with some bad news.

This is the last appearance - or even substantial mention - of the medusae for the entire rest of the novel.

The story basically forgets about them after this.

We never find out what's causing them to act like this, or what their general state is like under Machine domination of their planet. No one asks. No one thinks of asking.

-____-

Why is this book even called "The Medusa Chronicles" anyway?

...

He descends passed the layer containing the preferred medusa habitat, and discovers a network of laser-shooting pinwheels covering the entire inner atmosphere of Jupiter in a constant thin layer of plasmafied gases. This ridiculously overdesigned network is apparently how the machines protect the lower layers of Jupiter from human sensors and comms. And apparently hasn't completely destroyed everything in the layers above it beyond recognition. Um. Okay. Falcon gets close to the layer, and one of the stupid laser-pinwheels shuts itself down long enough to let him pass.

Beneath the stupid laser-pinwheel layer is an array of giant crystalline AA guns floating in place. Apparently they can either aim through the laser-pinwheel field, or the Machines can turn the latter off to repel any serious invasion attempts. Beneath that, in turn, is an extensive mess of city-like islands made entirely of hydrogen metamaterials held in shape by Machine spacewarping tech. A big, blocky ship rises from the nearest one, approaches the Kon-Tiki II, and does the thing from "The Matrix: Revolutions" where it forms a giant face in front of itself and starts talking. The face matches Adam's from his most recent meeting with Falcon back on Earth, and the voice - though calibrated to carry in this high-pressure energized gas environment - is made to be recognizable.

On one hand, it makes sense that the Machines would do this if they're afraid of using radio signals etc. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the writers literally just ripped this particular implementation of the concept from the Matrix.

At first, Adam just postures and (politely) threatens, but then starts being a little more diplomatic. And...mentions that he's been "nominated" to be the one who receives Falcon by the other Machines. And also says that he and some other "moderates" were the ones who convinced the Machine collective to not just shoot him down as he entered low orbit.

...say what now?

Like, this isn't just me, right? In every single one of his appearances so far, Adam was presented as - if not THE leader of the Machines' hierarchy - then at least pretty damned close to the top. And he absolutely was never so much as hinted to be one of the pro-human moderates within the Machines' political milieu, insomuch as they seemed to have "politics" at all.

When he leaves his Zardoz face ship and teleports aboard the Kon-Tiki II in a smaller body, my disbelief that this could possibly be the same being who appeared on Mercury, Earth, or even in the ultimatum at the end of "Return to Jupiter" only intensifies.

​

Adam wants to try and work with Falcon to make the more bloodthirsty members of their respective peoples see reason.

...

HOW THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER SUPPOSED TO BE ADAM?

I'll grant that there's more obvious continuity in both outlook and in character voice between this entity and the Adam we met in "Adam" than between the latter and any of the intervening appearances. Like, I can readily believe that the character in this scene is an older, more cynical version the character from the Kuiper Belt sequence.

I cannot believe that he is the same guy who gave that cackling, Milton-quoting villain speech before turning Earth's crust inside out.

I guess these could be different Adam forks that branched off at different points, with the one Falcon is talking to now being an earlier instance who didn't change as much. But in that case, I have two questions:

1. Why isn't the text just saying this outright?

2. Why do this at all in the first place? Why have multiple Adam instances instead of just different Machine characters?

...and, when writing down the second question, I realized that this is the same damned problem the book has been weighing itself down with the entire time. Nearly every Machine character is Adam, and nearly every human character is Falcon, with both of them having their personalities and motivations twisted into absolute pretzels to make them play the roles that should have been filled by ten other characters.

On further reflection, I still think the root of the problem is Falcon. Or rather, the writers' bullheaded insistence and Falcon being personally important at every major event in the human-machine war. If Falcon is our only POV, then that means he needs to be the one who the Machines always talk to. Adam is the Machine who has a personal relationship with Falcon, so therefore he needs to be the only Machine who ever talks to humanity; because if it wasn't Adam doing the talking, then it wouldn't make sense for Falcon to be the one listening, and Falcon always, always, always needs to be the one listening.

The consequence of this is that four fifths of the way through the novel, spanning 600 years of human/machine history, we have only had four Machine characters, three of whom (Orpheus, Charon, and Ahab) had only a single scene apiece. All three of them being in the same few chapters' worth of "Return to Jupiter" where it was more-or-less natural for Falcon to be interacting with multiple Machine characters and thus the authors were free to have him do so. Everything else was Adam. Every other Machine in the entire story was forced to be Adam, and Adam was forced to be all of the other Machines.

...

Anyway, Falcon shows Adam the tungsten cylinder with the armistice terms inscribed on it. Adam confirms that it's a very, very complex and detailed proposal for dividing up the solar system and its resources in the longterm that leaves no possible point of conflict unaddressed. He'll have to show it to the other Machine decisionmakers to determine if it's sufficiently equitable, but for now it does at least appear to be a serious peace proposal.

Then, Adam realizes that there's something wrong. He has a malware infection, but it didn't come from reading the script on the cylinder. If anything, reading the highly complicated peace proposal was just serving to distract him from a completely different cyberattack vector. Falcon remembers Dr. Tem cutting her thumb and then saying that weird thing about being corrupted by his DNA, and realizes she was trying to warn him about what the Springer siblings were having her do to him.

​

Basically, the same quantum bullshit technology that lets them beam inertia between unconnected molecules also lets them beam information from the DNA in Falcon's organic components into the code that Adam's mind runs on. In a form that it can read and execute. As soon as he came physically close to him.

I can't tell if this is really creative and clever scifi theorycrafting, or really fucking stupid. My gut reaction is that it's really fucking stupid, but that may be my lack of computer science and/or quantum physics knowledge talking. So, I guess I'll just have to let each of you judge this plot device for yourselves.

And, um. How could they have known that Adam or another machine would come that physically close to Falcon, rather than using a dumb drone to take the cylinder from him, or having him drop it out an airlock?

Adam realizes that he's already been disconnected from the Machine internet before he came aboard the airship, and Falcon quickly intuits that the Machines suspected this was a trap and that Adam's political opponents may in fact have been counting on it being one. A suggestion that Adam is shocked and disbelieving of, but is slowly forced to conclude is probably the truth.

Erm...haven't we been told in as many words in "Return to Jupiter," and then repeatedly shown in "The Troubled Centuries," that Machines place no value on their individual lives and see personality backups as equivalent to never dying? Why would Adam be surprised by this? Why would Adam be bothered by this? Why would Adam have not gone into the situation already knowing this to be SOP?

If we were going with the egotistical child-tyrant version of Adam from "The Troubled Centuries," it might make sense that he'd think he was the lone exception to this ethos. If we're retconning Adam into being just one influential voice among many though, then it doesn't make any sense at all.

The ensuing dialogue between Adam and Falcon goes on to paint Adam as a naive sap rather than a raging hypocrite, even though he was personally present at the Battle of Mercury when the machine army fed a thousand of their own to the human warship just to lure it into their superlaser's line of sight.

-______-

Anyway, Io starts hurtling toward Jupiter. The plan was clearly to infect the Machine collective with the magic teleporting computer virus to distract them while Io falls on them. The first part of that plan is a bust, but the second part is still on for whatever that's worth.

The arc ends with Adam and Falcon deciding to plunge the Kon-Tiki II down passed the Machine-inhabited stratum of the atmosphere and let themselves be crushed by the gravity of Jupiter Within to prevent either of their remains from ending up in magic computer virus teleportation range of another Machine. And, while they're on their way down, Adam figures he might as well tell Falcon about what Orpheus found down there and how the Machines have been proceeding with that since.


Like I said, this arc killed my investment in this story and its main characters.

It made me finally understand that this story doesn't actually have any main characters. Just a couple of free-floating names and physical descriptions.

I'm curious to learn the final reveal about the Deep Jovians and those ghostly copies of Orpheus that they've ostensibly been probing the solar system with, but it's the "I'd go on the wiki page and spoil myself if I could" level of curiosity. Not the same thing as investment.

I have quite a few thoughts about how this book could have been written to make it work, but I might as well save those for the final post. For now, and taking the prognostications of future me into account, pretty much everything good about "The Medusa Chronicles" was confined to arcs 2, 3, and the first third or so of 4.

 

[Leila Hann]

Two more Pale extras to finish off this month's fast lane order. First among them is a bonus for arc nine "Shaking Hands'" third chapter. Title of the bonus bit is "Path Practicalities."

​

First of all, I love that Avery is an illustrator after my own heart, and I will never stop loving it. I'm not sure if we know who "S. Drop" might be from the parts I've read, some of them were a while ago.

Second, it looks like the tree-and-ribbon path is just one of many little dream realms that got formed by longtime themed spirit shenanigans. Like those compound-spirit entities (the one girl, Edith I think, is one), but formed into a place rather than an intelligent being. The "wolves" talked about before might be kind of half and half, a compound spirit that ended up forming into sort of a place and sort of an Other. I think.

Next is some discussion about the Lost. They've been mentioned before as a type of Other that lurks around the Paths, and that a human can potentially turn into if they wander off into the deep ethereal and can't find their way back. Apparently, "Lost" is actually a tag you can pin to any Other, object, or even place that has fallen off the beaten Paths and partially decayed in the nothingness between. Well, "decayed" is the wrong word. More like "disassembled." Pieces of things (or perhaps, masses of spirits associated with things) tend to float away in the deep ethereal. Sometimes they're able to keep being a "thing" even with essential characteristics missing (an example given would be an object that only exists from the left side and not from the right). Sometimes these fragmented spirit-complexes form links with other such fragments, based on conceptual associations that often aren't obvious to the casual observer.

I don't know how to make sense of Avery's illustration for this, but I love it:

​

Honestly, context would probably ruin it.

Anyway, there's an entire branch of magic called "Finding" (it used to be called "chaos magic" until it became better understood and formalized) that involves wandering the Paths and fishing for Lost things to reel back in and make use of. The wording of this page suggests that Avery actually took the Finder subclass when she hit third level during the preceding chapters:

​

I guess the Finder could be that S. Drop person instead of...

Oh no wait. Right. S. Drop. Snowdrop, or Sundrop. I remember this being mentioned somewhere that that's the name of Avery's pet or familiar or something along those lines. Okay, this is basically being written by Avery and Avery's magical secretary, so yeah, she's the Finder.

Anyway, Finder magic seems right for Avery and what we've seen of her personality. I'm not quite sure why, but it just feels appropriate.

The next few pages concern glyphs and tools often employed by Finders. A ball of twine intricately wrapped around a spherical mould to represent binding something to the earth, which you can hit Lost with to make their structural vacancies catch up to them. A pair of runes representing the gates of horn and the gates of ivory that you can use to either share your dreams with other people (thus enabling them to see Paths the same way that you do and coordinate with you better on missions to the ethereal), or to fuck with your own subconscious and let you see things through a different set of symbolism than usual to see if it makes a Path easier to understand. I like that those two glyphs aren't innately tied to Finding; any wizard could find uses for them, but Finders have their own specific Finding-adjacent ones that make them favorite runes of theirs.

That sort of corresponds to the functions of the Gates of Horn and Ivory from Greek mythology. Not perfectly, but that's pretty much par for the course for occult symbolism in real life. In a world where magic is real but depends heavily on the variable use and interpretation of symbols, where wizards might have had very motivated reasons to deliberately reinterpret and repurpose them throughout a history of magical conflicts, it would probably be even more par for the course. It's the kind of idiosyncrasy that hints at good world building with realistically messy in-universe history.

The last page of this section has Avery planning some kind of big Finding spell involving a major hub Path called the Station Promenade. It seems like she and some colleagues might be trying to lasso some Lost path fragments and attach them to the Promenade to expand it into a full-on pocket dimension, or something like that. Maybe? I'd need a lot more context to be sure, but I think it's something along those lines.

​

I feel like the "Crimson Path" that is deadly and/or embarrassing to find yourself on is a humorous reference to something, but I don't know what.

Anyway, seems like the trio (or at least Avery) has been moving up in the magical underworld, and happily it seems like they aren't becoming notably worse people in the process at least based onthe glimpses I'm getting. Unusual for Wildbow. I do like that Pale seems to be a break from his usual flavor of grimdark, for all the other flaws it might have.

Finding/Chaos magic is cool, too. You could probably write a whole series of fantasy novels just about this as the only flavor of magic that exists without running out of conceptual ground to cover. It fitting neatly into an even broader system of magic and metaphysics is impressive. Again, Pact/Pale worldbuilding seems to be by far the best thing about them.


The last omake for this comission comes after arc 11 "Dash to Pieces'" second chapter. Its title is "Just In Case." Three letters, left by each of the girls for their respective (blood or found) families. Each letter set to reveal itself in their houses if certain conditions are met, and to self-destruct if certain other conditions are met. All of their contacts have been mind-whammied to not think about the girls or notice their absences until either set of conditions occurs.

In other words, they're going on what they think may be a suicide mission, but also might turn out to not be.

Avery's letter is the longest, which makes sense considering she's the one with the most family who she cares to talk to. Also, she has another, shorter letter that she asks her parents to pass on to Ms. Hardy, that teacher who she had a crush on, which is also included here.

Heya mom, hi dad,

Yep, it's Avery. This is really hard to write. If everything goes according to plan, you're not going to read this. If nothing goes according to plan then this might go up in flames when it sets my mattress on fire and you'd have nothing to read. But in the event that things go mostly according to plan but you're rearranging stuff in my room to find clues about where I've gone or what happened then this isn't that.

There are things I still can't tell you, even on paper, even if I've disappeared or died. I know it sucks. It's okay if you're angry. I just want you to know I've been trying to be my best self and do good in the world and if there's something that ends up keeping me from coming back to you guys I hope you know that at least.

I don't think what I'm going to do tonight is directly dangerous but I think a whole lot of messiness can come from it and that might be dangerous. So here we are. I wanted to make sure you had something of a final word from me.

Please don't bother Verona and Lucy too much. If there were answers I could safely give then I'd put them here. If you have questions, give them lots of time to answer and take 'no' for an answer if you have to. Consider that a last wish or something. They're my best friends more than Olivia ever was.

If they aren't around either then I don't know. Maybe you can compare notes with their parents, I dunno. That's if you have to ask. But I think the best thing you could do would be to get out of Kennet. Ditch the job, bring Grumble and leave. Kennet has depths to it you wouldn't believe and it's beautiful and rich and awe inspiring and even funny. It also has parts to it which are terrible and scary and intense and awful. Whatever parts you're thinking I might be talking about like drugs or gangs it's really stuff that's at least two hundred times worse than that. I helped out with at least one of those things.

I'm going to be holding onto the best things, if I can. Trust in that. If I've disappeared at the time you read this letter then I'm pretty sure I've disappeared in adventure and excitement and laughter and style and glamour. But I can't ignore the bad stuff.

So that's why I want you to go. You told me once that you were really sorry that you sorta forgot I existed for as long as you did. That you didn't listen, that you wanted to try, you've said stuff like that, right?

And I'm a pretty good kid, right? I'm easier than some of the others so that's why I didn't get as much attention, right?

All the not listening you did and the ignoring me and everything? I forgive you for that and I think I understand but what I really need you to do is take all that credit and all the brownie points and all the listening and attention I'm due and bundle it all up and take this to heart in a big way:

GO. Run.

Leave Kennet for anywhere else.

Click to shrink...

In the early chapters of Pale proper that I read, Avery did have some anxieties about how easily she disappeared into the cracks of her large, loud family. It was also suggested that she had an easier time making the "don't think about me" spell work on her parents on account of this groundwork already being in place.

Anyway, while this letter is very cryptic with regards to where she's going and what's been happening, it definitely communicates her complicated feelings for her family pretty well. Wanting to (potentially) end things on a positive note, insisting over and over again that her parents did nothing wrong while unable to stop herself from implying the opposite. I do wonder how likely they'd be to actually skip town at her urging, even if the letter telling them to do so came alongside a creepy lifting of mental barriers and sudden realization that one of their children is gone forever. I'm not sure what the hell I would do, in their place.

I wonder how earnest Avery was being about her vanishing potentially meaning a Good End for her and possibly the other girls. That might just have been to give her family a glimmer of hope that she's happy wherever she is and thus make them less likely to go poking after her and getting themselves killed too.

She gives them some additional bullet point bits of instruction and/or advice.

• If an opossum shows up here or at your new digs, feed it. She likes me and she's cool and she deserves all the cuddles and good things. Don't let my siblings torment her.
• If anyone named Zed or Nicolette or Ray ask for anything or say anything then listen.
• Matthew and Edith are dangerous, I think. They said they'd keep me safe and if you're reading this then they didn't.
• I've left a letter for Ms. Hardy. Please deliver it.

Click to shrink...

Is the opossum she speaks of the entity known as Sundrop or Snowdrop or whatever it was? I think it might be. I remember it being an animal familiar of some kind.

Don't remember Zed, Nicolette, or Ray.

Matthew and Edith were the very nice and helpful couple whose backstory felt a little creepier and darker to me than it did to the characters at least at the time. If they're now believed (though not absolutely known) to be dangerous, well, that doesn't terribly surprise me.

Postscript is mostly stuff that should have gone in the scriptscript, but given the emotional difficulty of organizing and writing a letter like this I won't judge Avery too hard.

I love you all, my messy, terrible, glorious thunderstorm of a family. Rowan needs to step it up for Laurie. Stop faffing about and go to school and be a guy that deserves her because she's going to face the world at a run and you'll get left behind if you aren't careful. She's cool.

Declan needs to be nicer to girls and everyone in this family needs to make sure of that. I've been thinking a lot about what sports mean to me and I really hope that if video games are the same thing for you that you can find all the enjoyment in the world in them.

Kerry you have the best laugh and I can't remember a great moment with the family without your laugh as part of it so keep it up.

Sheridan, you had my back when it counted and I can't tell you what it means to me, or how it changed the idea of what family is in my head. You get so down on yourself but you're so so so much better and cooler than you think you are. You're clever and funny and cool and the big problem is that you're smart enough to think of all the reasons why not to or what could go wrong. Keep being you and take some leaps of faith for my sake, ok?

Mom & Dad, most of this letter is for you but to give you another paragraph: I have no regrets. You did nothing wrong here, to play into my disappearing or whatever else happened. All my memories of growing up and the hours-long round trips to Olivia and homeschooling and birthday parties and everything are just so jam packed with good memories I know that if I get the chance I'm going to want to do a lot of the same things for my kids way down the road so take that for what it's worth.

Sorry this is so rambly. It's so hard. Every sentence makes me want to write two more that contradict or explain and I can't do either so I'm going to make this a big messy letter and hope it's better than leaving you with only questions and wondering.

Give my love to Grumble. My heart feels like it could explode with love for him and yet writing a single paragraph for him is way too hard and I think you get why so maybe you can explain it to him if he needs an explanation because I can't.

Love you all.

Avery.

Click to shrink...

It's touching, either way. Once again, I feel like Avery is doing her best to reassure her parents they did everything right in the event that they end up reading this, but plans to hold everything they did wrong against them in the event that they don't.

Her letter to M.s Hardy is...less powerful and interesting than I'd have hoped. At least, absent context.


Moving on to Verona now. Her letter is preceded by a brief IM exchange with someone named Jeremy, who she seems to have chosen as her found family in place of Brett Hayward, Avatar of Divorce. Rather than a physical envelope left somewhere for him to find, Verona links him to a google doc that only shows a bunch of weird glyphs unless the conditions are met. Verona's got some kind of technomancy deal going on, it looks like? That's cool. Also feels appropriate to her personality; she seemed to be the most up on the engineering aspects of magic, and setting spell to software seems like it would take a very good theoretical understanding.

Jeremy dude,

I told Lucy and Avery and a woman called Miss to pass on a password for a gallery I sent you. You're my designated replacement if anything happens and that gallery has the big rundown. Yep, you thought you were getting to know me? That was all the tip of the iceberg, buddy.

If you don't remember me then that's probably because, (like the place my name refers to) I don't really exist (anymore?). But the text should – I took a few steps for that. Quick rundown: I'm Verona, classmate or ex-classmate, creative. We were/are friends of a bizarre cat and art involved nature. There was bathing-suit-area-touching and I didn't run screaming. You had your moments of being awkward and your moments of being cool and I was 100% down for being the passenger to that roller coaster so thanks. You had some damn manly moments for a guy who's supposed to only be starting on the road to becoming a full fledged man.

Maybe the most important: you sent me a lot of cat pictures too and that's a surefire way to game this system. You could have screwed up most of the stuff I just talked about and if you sent me cat pictures and if I thought you could take okay care of Avery and Lucy then I'd be like "who else!??" Theres no other consideration as I see it.

On that note? I'm writing this under the assumption that they're there. Avery Kelly and Lucy Ellingson. No other end result is okay in my books. If they aren't there and it's just Miss who is giving you this password and you're trying to decide whether you should get on board or if you're already on board but you're wondering how much you want to get into the Kennet stuff in particular? Don't.

Not without Avery and Lucy. Don't. It's not worth it without them.

That's all the thought I'm willing to spare to that!

Here we are. Quick and basic rundown. There's stuff in the files and images. It's scattered and some isn't super well explained but you should be able to figure out who to ask to fill in the blanks.

Click to shrink...

I'm not sure if she meant the thing with the cat pictures literally or not. She was the one with a cat totem, as I recall, so who knows what mystical resonance it might have created. Also, she's mind-whammied him very, very thoroughly and isn't sure if it will come off when the letter gets unlocked. Also, he's apparently her appointed "replacement," and unlike Avery she's good with him getting involved as long as the other two survive and are there to guide him.

I think he's around her age, or just slightly older? Idk.

In school I realized a teacher can't turn down or turn away your assignment if you stick to the rules and terms they set for it, along with the universal rules where you know you won't get away with stuff. This is all basically that. You need to know and pay attention to the rules to get around them or throw the people in charge for a bit of a loop. and you need to get around them because the people making and setting up the rules are older and powerful and they're set in their ways. This is how you screw them up.

It's not all that easy. There are forces who've been studying and messing with rules since before your family was the Cliffords and actually knowing and figuring out the rules is a whole thing that can take generations to work out.

You have the tools I think. You've got a good heart and a good head. You'll need to rejigger things. Put that artist part of you front and center first, okay? That part of you that can look at the page and look at a tree and figure out how to use the tool you've got to make that tree into something that sits on the page. Some of that's skill and some of its practice and some of its interpretation. Everything that goes into art matters here.

I'd give you the rundown on how I think and how I do things but that would take forever and I think you'll get the gist of it if you go through my spell notes and pictures of things. Low down, dirty reality is that if you're reading this and I'm not around anymore then my approach wasn't all that hot, was it?

You know how I'm a bit weird? You're going to be dealing with a lot of weird types and if you can figure out how to think from a certain angle where you're treating them like you treated me, I think you and them will get along well enough.

Click to shrink...

That's definitely an interesting metaphor. The school rules and the teachers.

Very self-aware admission that he should probably avoid using her own tricks if she ended up getting herself killed with them, heh.

Unsurprisingly, Verona's letter is the shortest overall.


Lucy's message for her mother is probably the most interesting of the three, mostly on account of the things it *doesn't* do. Especially in light of her mother Jasmine's characterization in the "talk about the girls" interlude.

There's no way to write this letter and also keep secrets. So keep in mind that this part of the letter can't go to the police. It has to be the business letter only.

Magic is real. All of the little things that don't add up about me being gone don't add up for a reason. I and Verona and Avery were each brought in to fill a spot for the local monsters, so they could say they had someone in place.

As I write this letter I am planning to go confront a woman named Edith James and her husband and possible co-conspirator with some pretty heinous things. It's not a drug problem that's filling up the emergency department's waiting room, it's the aftermath of something they did that I think they did out of greed, killing something big that was supposed to keep the balance.

Click to shrink...

No cryptic shit, no mysterious half-explanations, no "I wish I could tell you more"s. Just full damned disclosure. Masquerade lifted.

Jasmine definitely seemed to be more trusted by her (otherwise mistrustful-to-a-fault) daughter than the other parents were by their own. More than that though, I get the sense that Jasmine's supportiveness had a somewhat clued-in nature even as far back as then. Like Lucy has been slowly letting her in on things in stages, and this deadhand letter is just a (potential) acceleration of that process.

It's a big contrast with not only the other two girls, but also with the usual YA fantasy genre expectations as a whole.

Typically of Lucy, she's more sure than the others that the suspects they have in mind are in fact guilty even before getting the final confirmation. Also, apparently whatever the Carmine Beast was killed for, it's putting local muggles in the hospital in droves.

Apparently that Hungry Chorus thing was also even worse than it sounded:

A few hundred or thousand people across Ontario have died and they didn't even get to be remembered afterward. Their vulnerabilities were preyed on and they were killed in a series of horrible, violent nights that went on for nearly a decade. Many of those in the know seemed to think it happened naturally, a ritual starting on its own, but it was made with greedy intentions. Everyone who died was erased and their families and classmates and friends forgot they existed. I stopped that process from happening but I don't think I can bring those people back.

I don't want this to end without there being justice. If I was capable of accepting any other answer then I think this might be the point I gave up. I could let Edith win, I could choose the option where I didn't risk me dying and you having to find this letter.

I can't. I can't let the people who would do that get what they want and take any more power or get any more influence.

That's why I'm going, even if there might be collateral damage. It's why I'm writing this letter as a just-in-case.

Click to shrink...

The candlelight necromancer duo had a hand (if not neccessarily the most active hand) in creating the Hungry Chorus. Which apparently killed thousands of people and erased their memories and records from existence.

I'm guessing this was either preparation for whatever thing they and their mysterious co-conspirator killed the Carmine Beast for, or the Beast found out what they were doing and had to be killed before it could bring the entire regional pantheon down on them.

Anyway, Lucy's main motivation is apparently to not let the bastards get away with it. Not sure what the other two are motivated by at this point. And, I guess arc 11 is where they finally crack the case that started the story? It's still less than halfway through the serial though, so I guess either they turn out to have been barking up the wrong tree with Matt and Edith or it turns out that there was another BBEG with an even bigger plot behind them.


I wish I could say more. The worldbuilding interludes are all really good and give me plenty to analyse. The plot extras...I just don't feel equipped to say much about without having read the actual story.

 

[Leila Hann]

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.

 

[Leila Hann]

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.

 

[Leila Hann]

"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.

 

[Leila Hann]

This review was comissioned by @krinsbez.


The early nineties multimedia revival of THERE WAS ONLY EVER THE CARTOON G.I. Joe was successful enough that tie-ins, spin-offs, and crossovers were inevitable. Some of these, inevitably, were more successful than others. "Sergeant Savage and his Screaming Eagles" was never quite given a real chance on account of Hasbro committing to a franchise reboot right after its toys and comics started coming out, with the pilot of its planned animated series never even airing on TV and only becoming available on VHS after the fact.

That said, the toys themselves didn't appeal that well due to a mix of (comparatively) boring character design and just plain enshitification of Hasbro's action figures that was setting in by then. The animated pilot, meanwhile, despite being produced by Sunbow studios just like the enormously successful animated series, was...well, as you're about to see, saying that it lacked a certain something that GI Joe TAS possessed would be an understatement.


The first thing I noticed about the Sgt. Savage pilot is how homogenous and ugly all the characters are, especially compared to GI Joe Classic. Remember all these colorful designs, unique silhouettes, and memorable visual details?

​

Okay, now look at this:

​

It's not just the more homogenous, pseudo-realistic uniforms either. Every single male character in this pilot (and there's only one female character who's onscreen for maybe two cumulative minutes) has almost exactly same silhouette. Which would be bad enough on its own if that one body type wasn't "gorilla person." All the way down to the grotesquely gigantic hands and puny heads that get lost on the Great Shoulders Plateau.

What's extra irritating about that aesthetic choice for this story in particular is that the titular Sergeant Savage is supposed to be a roided-up supersoldier created by a villain's mad science experiments. It actually makes sense for him to look like a barely-human muscle monster. But everyone else looks exactly the same, so that appearance ends up doing nothing for a character that it would otherwise serve well.

The character in question, Sergeant Steven Savage, is Captain America. When I say that he's Captain America, what I mean is that he's an elite special forces squad leader from World War 2 who got frozen, was declared MIA, and then discovered and thawed out decades later to serve his country again when it is menaced by the same nazi-aligned supervillain who he fought back in the forties.

What I don't mean when I say he's Captain America, on the other hand, is that he has any of the pathos, charm, or idiosyncrasy that various depictions of Cap have been imbued with by their authors. He's just a grimly determined military badass of few words. Flashbacks to the war reveal him to have always been a grimly determined military badass of few words. His reactions to being a man out of time are extremely minimal, and that entire backstory seems to only exist in order to a) leech off of Captain America's popularity and b) be an extremely thin justification for a few new WW2-themed toys (more on this in a minute).

So, the plot. A GI Joe team somehow stumbles on an old secret laboratory in East Germany that hasn't been opened since 1945, inside of which is a cryocell containing a mutated Sergeant Savage, long thought dead. He and his "screaming eagles" had been probing a rumored blacksite deep behind enemy lines when one of the eagles, a Corporal Krieger, betrayed them to the enemy. An enemy that seems to have been packing power suits and laser guns to their field camo and Brownings.

​

Fucking nazis with the fucking superscience in the fucking secret labs amirite.

The entire team was wiped out, save Savage, who they decided to use as a guinea pig for some reason. I guess they kept him under for the entire time they were doing that, because when GI Joe thaws him the last thing he remembers is his squad being wiped out and Krieger smugging at him from behind a row of not!HYDRA power suits.

I really do mean not!HYDRA, incidentally. The not-exactly-part-of-the-normal-reich-heirarchy cell running that lab and inventing that futuristic bullshit ended up surviving the war and becoming one of several organizations that would later combine under the banner of Cobra. So yeah. It's ersatz Marvel Comics lore all the way down.

As they wake Savage up, a robot that looks like a more advanced version of one of those proto-Cobra suits breaks into the facility and tries to kill him before he can finish thawing, which gives Savage a good chance to show off the super-strength augs the bad guys tested out on him. Unfortunately for him, his superstrength and toughness are very unreliable, constantly turning themselves on and off without warning, and he's having other health complications from them that could result in premature aging among other life-threatening issues.

Unfortunately for us, these issues - including the unreliable superstrength that seems like a perfect recipe for drama and creative problem solving and tactics - will all be forgotten the instant that there's a serious battle to fight.

:/

That's later though. For now, GI Joe commander Hawk orders Savage confined to base until the doctors can finish their medical bugfixes. And also tells Savage that he's now responsible for whipping this team of incredibly strong, educated, and totally undisciplined (to the point that they ignore direct orders and act like literal schoolchildren) soldiers into shape. Which he has him do in a big junkyard full of scrapped vehicles and machinery without additional supervision, despite the fears for Savage's health.

​

After Savage whips them into shape (by literally beating them up until they stop behaving like 12 year olds in adult bodies), they find some WW2 era vehicle hulks laying around the scrapyard and - using the genius educations in various fields of science and engineering that they all have - decide to repair them and refit them with futuristic weaponry and engines to help their new commander feel more at home. Thus, the new Screaming Eagles team is born. And thus, we try to milk some new toy tanks and fighter planes out of Savage's backstory.

I kinda wish they just did what the first MCU Cap movie did, and had the pilot (and planned first season) of this show be *entirely* backstory. Would be a much less forced way of doing what they apparently were trying to do.

Regardless.

By total coincidence, Savage's recovery and reanimation happens at the same time that GI Joe is coordinating with a European aerospace company to build a new communications satellite. And Savage recognizes the man Hawk is talking to on the viewscreen as none other than Krieger, the man who betrayed his team to proto-Cobra. He hasn't aged nearly as much as he should have, and he calls himself Dr. Stromm now, but it's definitely the same guy.

Naturally, Hawk doesn't believe Savage when he tells him this. Which I liked at first; Hawk is kinda playing the *role* of the unreasonable strawman bureaucrat overseer here, but you can see how from his perspective it really seems much more likely that Savage is just groggy and traumatized and seeing the man who ruined him everywhere. Everyone is behaving reasonably with the knowledge available to them, and I was looking forward to seeing them work it out using reasonable arguments and investigation. Unfortunately, that's not what happens.

Instead, Savage gets his hands on the remains of the robot that tried to prevent his awakening (erm...how did he get access to this highly sensitive piece of captured enemy tech when the GI Joe base staff are all supposed to be keeping him away from sensitive stuff due to his health issues?) and has the one female character computer whiz lady hack into its onboard computer (erm...why the hell didn't Hawk already order her to do this as soon as the robot was disabled?). She easily finds a mountain of evidence directly implicating Dr. Stromm's company. Which Savage and the new Screaming Eagles team then immediately take their schizotech biplanes to go act on alone and unauthorized, instead of bringing this new evidence to Hawk like an actual person would do.

Remember how trust and transparency were an important part of the winning ethos in "The Pyramid of Darkness?" Yeah, that was cool.

Meanwhile, Krieger/Stromm (who apparently became the leader of the "IRON Army" organization and also an immortal cyborg between the 1940's and now, whereas before he seemed to just be one of their agents) is cutting ties with Cobra Commander. With this new satellite and the secret techno-bullshit he just tricked the Joes into helping him with, Krieger is ready to do his own world domination scheme without Cobra Command or its other subsidiary organizations demanding a slice.

​

On one hand, if they're going to start this off with IRON Army splitting away from Cobra, why even link them to Cobra in the first place?

On the other hand, given that Cobra's leaders do this to each other every weekday and then grudgingly make up after every single time, maybe I'm reading too much into this scene. Maybe the plan was for this particular GI Joe sub-organization clash with this particular Cobra sub-organization for the whole series, with their respective levels of autonomy often shifting due to GI Joe expansion/reorganization and Cobra internecine bullshit.

Anyway. The Screaming Eagles attack the launch site. Krieger, or "General Blitz of IRON Army" as his supervillain moniker apparently goes, rips his Dr. Stromm costume off to reveal his nazi-ish uniform and cybernetic body. The fight is short, so-so, and doesn't capitalize on Savage's weaknesses and instability in any interesting ways you might have hoped for. The day is saved, but the villain gets away, presumably to come crawling back to Cobra Commander for the umteenth time. If there's supposed to have been a resolution/reconciliation scnene between Savage and Hawk, they put it off for the second episode that never got made.


On top of the ugly and samey character design, and the writing that isn't nearly silly and psychedelic enough to get away with being nonsense like the mainline GI Joe series did, the music in this pilot is also lacking. Nothing like the bombastic wind and drum sections that brought every blessed moment of "Pyramid of Darkness" to life, that's for sure. It might have come from the same studio, but I get the feeling that not many of the same people worked on these two projects.

The "not silly enough" problem really reared its head with the introduction of the new team. I feel like if those guys were introduced in the mainline animated series, the absurdism of "elite supergenius commandos who act like lazy middle schoolers" would have been played in a really clever and amusing way. Here, it just wasn't. Likewise, much like the fake comics that I made up as a weird piece of performance art way back when, I feel like the ties to real world history and geopolitics are trying to ground a story that would be better off airborne.

Looking at other nineties SatAm series, I can't really say that this pilot is bad by those standards. Just, they're really low standards, and I can't say that it's especially good by them either. I can definitely see why this might not have ever caught on even without the external factors working against it. It just doesn't measure up, on pretty much all fronts.