SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Well, are they limited to human fears? Fear is a pretty old emotion.
Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Review
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Every devil shown so far has been explicitly connected to a human fear. If nothing else precedent suggests that it's human-related. It could be that only sufficient intelligent species are capable of empowering or creating a devil. Perhaps the fears of other species just aren't sufficiently conceptually sophisticated to really qualify.
Or who knows, maybe any fear works and there's some ancient ur-devils who were spawned by the first sentient species. 🤷♂️
Well, they have concept-linked Names, so they're probably no younger than language and symbolic thought.
Which may well be much older than humanity! Whales apparently have names. But given that that factoid still isn't terribly well-known, it might not be the case in Chainsaw Man.
I heard once that Whales each have "Individualized" names as while a Whale might have a specific name for a specific member of it's pod every other member of pod has their own name for that whale.
Like one Whale calls them Jerry, another calls them Satoru, and yet another calls them Alphonsus.
Scrooge McDuck: Back to the Klondike
- Location
- Patriarchova
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire. I suspect because of my own background. And, heh, it actually did give me a little bit of nostalgia when I saw Scrooge McDuck walk down the streets of what looked a lot like my own hometown.
It's not my own hometown, to be clear. Putting the context clues together, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be Skagway, another town in the same general region. But, similar scenery, similar buildings, similar mom-and-pop seaplane companies operating off of wooden shipdocks, similar dopey pink paint on certain large buildings.
It's accurate in a way that only personal familiarity can give you. I would have thought that the artist took a Southeast Alaska cruise before penning this, but this comic was created in the 1950's, shortly before those Alaska luxury cruises became a thing. We still had tourism back then, but not on nearly so large a scale, and so there may have been a bit more of a story to this.
Hmm. Reading up on this a little, the creator and longtime Disney comic artist mainstay Carl Barks was born and lived much of his life in Oregon. Not exactly right next door, but still, Pacific Northwest cultural sphere. Makes him having travelled up north less surprising. Well, anyway!
Scrooge McDuck is a really, really weird character. He's named after the thoroughly antiheroic protagonist of "A Christmas Carol," and his characterization is all a play on that character's pre-redemption folly. And yet, somehow, Scrooge McDuck isn't a bad guy. His all-consuming greed is usually portrayed as somewhere between a harmless eccentricity and a moderately annoying personality defect. Sure, he often gets taught Important Lessons about why he shouldn't be so greedy, but they never stick, and his relapses are framed as "oh, that whacky old Uncle Scrooge.~"
As time goes by, Scrooge's character and how we're meant to see it seems ever more questionable. Getting back to my own childhood again for a bit, one of the first toys I ever remember playing with was a jigsaw puzzle that featured Scrooge and his nephews rowing down a jungle river with a canoe full of gold, while angry natives glared at them from between the trees. One of the kid nephews was pointing a gun at these natives. A pop-gun, sure, this is G-rated, but...we aren't fucking kidding anyone with that, come on. I remember asking my mother why the natives were mad at them, and she told me, very nonchalantly.
I couldn't have been more than four years old at the time, but I still knew there was something wrong here. Isn't Scrooge the greedy-but-still-nice uncle who takes his family on fun adventures? Aren't theives supposed to be the bane of his existence? Why is he the one stealing? Why do the natives all look so ugly and sinister if they're the ones being stolen from?
Scrooge McDuck gave me my first ever awareness of colonialism. Come to think of it, it might have also been the first time I ever applied critical thinking to a work of fiction as a work of fiction. At least, it's the earliest one I can remember.
Now, is that part of Scrooge McDuck's baggage relevant to this particular comic? Well, sort of, yeah. Not directly, but very closely adjacent.
We start with a slice-of-life-y gag about Scrooge battling the onset of senility. A bunch of hiijinks that he dismisses the importance of at first, but then starts to take seriously when he realizes he might be risking leaving his fortune vulnerable to thieves with him in this state.
Or, well, "senility." He gets a medical diagnosis of Blinkus Of The Thinkus Disease, which is fortunately much more treatable than its real life counterpart.
The main plot kicks off when Scrooge takes his cartoon Alzheimer's medication, and finds himself remembering things that he'd forgotten many years ago. Including the location where he hid a substantial amount of gold near where he discovered it in a Canadian rainforest. I don't recall if Scrooge having struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush is a consistent backstory thing, or if he has a different whacky "how I made my first million dollars" background in each episode, but at least this time it was gold-panning (EDIT: it's a consistent thing after all, and this story had a lot of foreshadowing because of it). And apparently he actually made his first two million dollars doing this, but left half of it buried in the wilderness and forgot about it until now.
Most of the comic consists of hijinks as they travel back through Southeast Alaska and Northwest Canada in pursuit of Scrooge's memories (despite the gold he left there being almost meaningless in the face of how rich he's gotten since then) and his miserliness causing all kinds of comical misfortunes and inconveniences along the way. There's also a long buildup about this "dance hall" owner named Glittering Goldie who he used to know up in Yukon, and who he's eager to meet again if possible. Allegedly because she owes him a thousand dollars, which he calculates to now be worth a billion with fifty years of interest, but he sure looks and acts like he had and still has feelings for this woman. Both before and after the inevitable reunion.
A nice touch is that she's wearing typical buckskin and denim roughneck clothes at first, but gets her old "dance hall owner" outfit out of storage when she needs to lay on the charm to hopefully deter Scrooge from collecting on the debt she can't pay.
Anyway, the final act of the story has Scrooge and his nephews discovering that the site where he hid the gold is now inhabited by an elderly Glitterin' Goldie. Her "dance hall" failed after the Gold Rush ended, as most of the "dance halls" in this time and place did. She used up her fortune caring for mining accident orphans, and has spent her twilight years living in this old cabin in poverty with her shotgun and her guard bear.
Once they pacify the bear and get passed the shotgun, Scrooge overcomes Goldy's charm and tells her here's here to collect with interest. She starts to morosely hand over her last few heirlooms and keepsakes and head for the nearest homeless shelter, but then Scrooge suddenly tells her that in the interest of good sportsmanship he'll give her one last chance to save what she has; they'll have a competitive gold-digging contest, and whoever finds a fleck or nugget first gets to keep this property as well as the find. And then he manipulates her into digging where he hid his old gold cache, while pretending to have mixed it up and given her the spot by accident. He attributes the "mistake" to him having forgotten to take his amnesia pills today, but the nephews learn the truth when Donald counts the pills and realizes there aren't any extras.
I'm not sure why Scrooge is so invested in keeping up his reputation for miserliness. Maybe because he doesn't want his family expecting handouts from him in the future or something. Reading further into that, it does add a bit of a tragic dimension to Scrooge's character if he thinks the only way to keep opportunists from taking advantage of him is to maintain a reputation of absolute greed and mercilessness...but like, in order to care that much, he'd need to be legitimately greedy and ruthless enough for it only to be a slight exaggeration of his true self.
Well, at least Goldie got to walk away feeling like she won rather than feeling like she was granted mercy by a capricious god that decided not to smite her after all on a whim. Definitely more empowering and less anxiety-inducing.
Anyway, the real gold that Scrooge had forgotten about was the golden-hearted woman named Goldie, and remembering her and her value was a redress of old mistakes, yada yada.
Like I said, Scrooge McDuck is a character who always sat in the grey area of likability by design, but as time goes by he has a harder and harder time staying there. This comic's purported origins for him in the Klondike Gold Rush are...well, it's not as bad as him and his kid nephews literally stealing Inca gold at gunpoint, but it's only a few steps away. The lesson he learns at the end of the comic is...well, it's a lot like the arc that the original Ebeneeze Scrooge underwent, but the difference is that in McDuck's case we know that it's just a momentary act of mercy rather than a change of art. He'll go right back to being awful in the next episode.
I'll give this comic its due respect for the accurate depictions of a part of the world you don't often see featured in this medium, either back in the 1950's or today. Also, this work is surprisingly dance-hall-worker positive. There's not even any implied shame in Goldie having owned a dance hall, or in Scrooge having been a patron of hers. Her portrayal is mostly positive, but not in a way that others her or infantilizes her like you often get with "token virtuous dance hall worker" characters from that era of fiction. She has her impressive charitable works, but in her old age she's also a cranky old redneck who shoots at anyone who comes on her property unannounced. And she's got plenty of traits that aren't part and parcel of being a former dance hall person. So, that's good.
It's not my own hometown, to be clear. Putting the context clues together, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be Skagway, another town in the same general region. But, similar scenery, similar buildings, similar mom-and-pop seaplane companies operating off of wooden shipdocks, similar dopey pink paint on certain large buildings.
It's accurate in a way that only personal familiarity can give you. I would have thought that the artist took a Southeast Alaska cruise before penning this, but this comic was created in the 1950's, shortly before those Alaska luxury cruises became a thing. We still had tourism back then, but not on nearly so large a scale, and so there may have been a bit more of a story to this.
Hmm. Reading up on this a little, the creator and longtime Disney comic artist mainstay Carl Barks was born and lived much of his life in Oregon. Not exactly right next door, but still, Pacific Northwest cultural sphere. Makes him having travelled up north less surprising. Well, anyway!
Scrooge McDuck is a really, really weird character. He's named after the thoroughly antiheroic protagonist of "A Christmas Carol," and his characterization is all a play on that character's pre-redemption folly. And yet, somehow, Scrooge McDuck isn't a bad guy. His all-consuming greed is usually portrayed as somewhere between a harmless eccentricity and a moderately annoying personality defect. Sure, he often gets taught Important Lessons about why he shouldn't be so greedy, but they never stick, and his relapses are framed as "oh, that whacky old Uncle Scrooge.~"
As time goes by, Scrooge's character and how we're meant to see it seems ever more questionable. Getting back to my own childhood again for a bit, one of the first toys I ever remember playing with was a jigsaw puzzle that featured Scrooge and his nephews rowing down a jungle river with a canoe full of gold, while angry natives glared at them from between the trees. One of the kid nephews was pointing a gun at these natives. A pop-gun, sure, this is G-rated, but...we aren't fucking kidding anyone with that, come on. I remember asking my mother why the natives were mad at them, and she told me, very nonchalantly.
I couldn't have been more than four years old at the time, but I still knew there was something wrong here. Isn't Scrooge the greedy-but-still-nice uncle who takes his family on fun adventures? Aren't theives supposed to be the bane of his existence? Why is he the one stealing? Why do the natives all look so ugly and sinister if they're the ones being stolen from?
Scrooge McDuck gave me my first ever awareness of colonialism. Come to think of it, it might have also been the first time I ever applied critical thinking to a work of fiction as a work of fiction. At least, it's the earliest one I can remember.
Now, is that part of Scrooge McDuck's baggage relevant to this particular comic? Well, sort of, yeah. Not directly, but very closely adjacent.
We start with a slice-of-life-y gag about Scrooge battling the onset of senility. A bunch of hiijinks that he dismisses the importance of at first, but then starts to take seriously when he realizes he might be risking leaving his fortune vulnerable to thieves with him in this state.
Or, well, "senility." He gets a medical diagnosis of Blinkus Of The Thinkus Disease, which is fortunately much more treatable than its real life counterpart.
The main plot kicks off when Scrooge takes his cartoon Alzheimer's medication, and finds himself remembering things that he'd forgotten many years ago. Including the location where he hid a substantial amount of gold near where he discovered it in a Canadian rainforest. I don't recall if Scrooge having struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush is a consistent backstory thing, or if he has a different whacky "how I made my first million dollars" background in each episode, but at least this time it was gold-panning (EDIT: it's a consistent thing after all, and this story had a lot of foreshadowing because of it). And apparently he actually made his first two million dollars doing this, but left half of it buried in the wilderness and forgot about it until now.
Most of the comic consists of hijinks as they travel back through Southeast Alaska and Northwest Canada in pursuit of Scrooge's memories (despite the gold he left there being almost meaningless in the face of how rich he's gotten since then) and his miserliness causing all kinds of comical misfortunes and inconveniences along the way. There's also a long buildup about this "dance hall" owner named Glittering Goldie who he used to know up in Yukon, and who he's eager to meet again if possible. Allegedly because she owes him a thousand dollars, which he calculates to now be worth a billion with fifty years of interest, but he sure looks and acts like he had and still has feelings for this woman. Both before and after the inevitable reunion.
A nice touch is that she's wearing typical buckskin and denim roughneck clothes at first, but gets her old "dance hall owner" outfit out of storage when she needs to lay on the charm to hopefully deter Scrooge from collecting on the debt she can't pay.
Anyway, the final act of the story has Scrooge and his nephews discovering that the site where he hid the gold is now inhabited by an elderly Glitterin' Goldie. Her "dance hall" failed after the Gold Rush ended, as most of the "dance halls" in this time and place did. She used up her fortune caring for mining accident orphans, and has spent her twilight years living in this old cabin in poverty with her shotgun and her guard bear.
How to tell between a black bear and a brown bear? Climb a tree. If it's a black bear it'll climb after you. If it's a brown bear it'll tear the tree down.
Once they pacify the bear and get passed the shotgun, Scrooge overcomes Goldy's charm and tells her here's here to collect with interest. She starts to morosely hand over her last few heirlooms and keepsakes and head for the nearest homeless shelter, but then Scrooge suddenly tells her that in the interest of good sportsmanship he'll give her one last chance to save what she has; they'll have a competitive gold-digging contest, and whoever finds a fleck or nugget first gets to keep this property as well as the find. And then he manipulates her into digging where he hid his old gold cache, while pretending to have mixed it up and given her the spot by accident. He attributes the "mistake" to him having forgotten to take his amnesia pills today, but the nephews learn the truth when Donald counts the pills and realizes there aren't any extras.
I'm not sure why Scrooge is so invested in keeping up his reputation for miserliness. Maybe because he doesn't want his family expecting handouts from him in the future or something. Reading further into that, it does add a bit of a tragic dimension to Scrooge's character if he thinks the only way to keep opportunists from taking advantage of him is to maintain a reputation of absolute greed and mercilessness...but like, in order to care that much, he'd need to be legitimately greedy and ruthless enough for it only to be a slight exaggeration of his true self.
Well, at least Goldie got to walk away feeling like she won rather than feeling like she was granted mercy by a capricious god that decided not to smite her after all on a whim. Definitely more empowering and less anxiety-inducing.
Anyway, the real gold that Scrooge had forgotten about was the golden-hearted woman named Goldie, and remembering her and her value was a redress of old mistakes, yada yada.
Like I said, Scrooge McDuck is a character who always sat in the grey area of likability by design, but as time goes by he has a harder and harder time staying there. This comic's purported origins for him in the Klondike Gold Rush are...well, it's not as bad as him and his kid nephews literally stealing Inca gold at gunpoint, but it's only a few steps away. The lesson he learns at the end of the comic is...well, it's a lot like the arc that the original Ebeneeze Scrooge underwent, but the difference is that in McDuck's case we know that it's just a momentary act of mercy rather than a change of art. He'll go right back to being awful in the next episode.
I'll give this comic its due respect for the accurate depictions of a part of the world you don't often see featured in this medium, either back in the 1950's or today. Also, this work is surprisingly dance-hall-worker positive. There's not even any implied shame in Goldie having owned a dance hall, or in Scrooge having been a patron of hers. Her portrayal is mostly positive, but not in a way that others her or infantilizes her like you often get with "token virtuous dance hall worker" characters from that era of fiction. She has her impressive charitable works, but in her old age she's also a cranky old redneck who shoots at anyone who comes on her property unannounced. And she's got plenty of traits that aren't part and parcel of being a former dance hall person. So, that's good.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Scrooge McDuck feels suspiciously like what every billionaire plutocrat wants to think they are. Elderly but has still got it. Owns a huge business but is still out there adventuring and getting into conflicts both exciting and challenging. Cantankerous and greedy but in a well meaning tough love way that is supposed to encourage others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps rather than wait for hand-outs, yet will bail you out if you really need it.
Granted I also wonder how much of Scrooge is just a plot device. His wealth and adventurous interests are an excuse for team protagonist to be anywhere or do anything, no questions asked, just right to the adventure. This is a decently common role in fiction, but in any work where the plutocrat repeatedly bankrolls the protagonist adventures, it generally requires them to at least be nominally good lest their behavior cast aspersions on the protagonists for their continued association with them.
Granted I also wonder how much of Scrooge is just a plot device. His wealth and adventurous interests are an excuse for team protagonist to be anywhere or do anything, no questions asked, just right to the adventure. This is a decently common role in fiction, but in any work where the plutocrat repeatedly bankrolls the protagonist adventures, it generally requires them to at least be nominally good lest their behavior cast aspersions on the protagonists for their continued association with them.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
Something something Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves something something
thenew
#1 Masters of the Bazaar Fan
- Location
- My Lodgings
I do recall a few Scrooge stories I used to have in my collection that went extremely hard because they went all in when it came to him being utterly, unforgivably awful. He and that impossibly lucky cousin are definitely high up there in the list of reasons Donald and his nephews should just fuck off and never ever talk to half his family ever again, honestly.
There's one where Donald is working for him near Christmas cleaning snow on his ridiculous box mansion, and sees to a man giving food to the jobless. Having not eaten that day, he tries to sneak into the queue until someone recognizes him as working for Scrooge. He's afraid for a second until the man hands him a plate of steak- saying working for that man isn't a job, it's slavery, and he deserves it more then anyone else here just for putting up with the old fuck. The homeless people next to him agree, lol. That line stuck by me.
There's one where Donald is working for him near Christmas cleaning snow on his ridiculous box mansion, and sees to a man giving food to the jobless. Having not eaten that day, he tries to sneak into the queue until someone recognizes him as working for Scrooge. He's afraid for a second until the man hands him a plate of steak- saying working for that man isn't a job, it's slavery, and he deserves it more then anyone else here just for putting up with the old fuck. The homeless people next to him agree, lol. That line stuck by me.
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- Location
- Patriarchova
I was tempted to work that reference in. Your post makes me feel like I should have.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Scrooge McDuck is indeed a really weird character. Like, sure, any western comics character that lasts long enough is by necessity going to be different from their first depictions (because, you know, western comics overall exist in a perpetual state of arrested development where very little ever changes), but still!
I can't imagine that even back when he was made anyone thought 'yeah this hyper rich dude should be a super heroic figure'.
He did go in there wanting his money back with interest, but upon realizing he'd be stripping a woman around his age of her heirlooms, he backtracked. He didn't want to admit asking her for the money in the first place was wrong, so instead he made it about sportsmanship, about 'fairness', something that his modern depiction is very concerned with (or at least, the idea of fairness).
So it's not just that he wanted to continue the pretense that he's greedy and merciless, it's that he's an old man that doesn't want to admit aloud that he was wrong. And perhaps he was also thinking of Goldie's own pride. Old people also don't like accepting charity, usually - or feeling like someone is pitying them.
I can't imagine that even back when he was made anyone thought 'yeah this hyper rich dude should be a super heroic figure'.
If you ask me, it's all about pride.
He did go in there wanting his money back with interest, but upon realizing he'd be stripping a woman around his age of her heirlooms, he backtracked. He didn't want to admit asking her for the money in the first place was wrong, so instead he made it about sportsmanship, about 'fairness', something that his modern depiction is very concerned with (or at least, the idea of fairness).
So it's not just that he wanted to continue the pretense that he's greedy and merciless, it's that he's an old man that doesn't want to admit aloud that he was wrong. And perhaps he was also thinking of Goldie's own pride. Old people also don't like accepting charity, usually - or feeling like someone is pitying them.
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Iron Man is still a thing, even if he does end up being the source of a lot of problems these days.
And rich and powerful enemies aren't exactly rare for him either.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I feel the 2017 DuckTales series plays even more into this by adding a villain whose whole deal is "Scrooge is the real bad guy!" Which reminds me of the persecution complex a lot of billionaires have.
Not that DuckTales 2017 isn't critical of Scrooge, but (from what I've seen) more of him as an individual instead of him being a billionaire and a colonialist.
Speaking of DuckTales, if anyone's wondering why Launchpad's not here, he was made up for the 1987 series due to Disney being stingy with how much they could use Donald.
Carl Barks often sent the ducks on globe-trotting adventures even without Scrooge, 'The Golden Helmet' and 'Lost in the Andes' being two prominent examples. Though yeah, Scrooge's wealth would've made adventures like these easier to justify long-term.
'Back to the Klondike' is considered the first Scrooge comic to show a sympathetic side to him at all, with him being not outright evil but still a total jerk until then. Edit: So he was less Batman and more a proto-Mr. Burns.
Given Matt Groening is reportedly a Carl Barks fan, now I'm wondering whether Mr. Burns was a reaction to the softening of Scrooge McDuck? Though the Occam's Razor answer is that Mr. Burns is just a satire of billionaires in general. That said, Flanders' early characterisation has a lot in common with Gladstone Gander (the aforementioned impossibly lucky cousin)
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The Flowers of Evil #1
- Location
- Patriarchova
This ultra-pedantic excruciatingly detailed autistic review was commissioned by @Synaptic Star.
This 2009 shonen manga by Shuzo Oshimi is one I've never heard of before. And, since @Synaptic Star paid for a live react, this will be an old school blind Let's Read like the kind I started with. In keeping with the spirit of that, I won't be doing any more research about this work until I've finished the post to keep myself unspoiled.
Let's go!
We start in a sleepy Japanese town, under an overcast sky, with a teacher handing back tests to a classroom full of teenagers. Our apparent protagonist, a boy named Takao Kasuga, hasn't done very well on it.
He's clearly an enthusiastic reader, as evidenced by him having a copy of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal on hand despite it having nothing to do with his coursework. However, the fact that he has this personal reading material out and visible in the middle of class is likly giving us a hint as to why his test scores haven't been reflective of his intellect.
Also, his friends give him shit for being an annoying smartypants nerd who still can't even get good grades.
A difficult life, some of us live. I had pretty much the exact same problem with regards to focus in my teens (my ADHD was undiagnosed until just a year or so ago), so I can relate.
We learn also that Kasuga has a crush on his classmate Saeki Nanako, who's as booksmart as him but also much better able to leverage it toward academics. And also like, confident and pretty and stuff. You know the type.
Kasuga is too nervous to approach her, let alone form a friendship, let alone let that friendship become more than a friendship. You know the type.
The next character who our attention is called to is Nakamura, the girl with the only test score in the class even lower than Kasuga's. I'm not sure if it's really fair to compare them though, because while Kasuga made an actual effort, Nakamura just left her entire test sheet blank. She looks surly, perhaps even indignant, when called up to take her graded test back, as if she's furious at the teacher for even acknowledging her presence in the room. Then, when he scolds her for her perfect zero, she does this:
The teacher loses his shit. For a moment, he actually raises his hand as if to strike her, before catching himself with a frightened expression and lowering his arm again before issuing her detention. It looks for all the world like she was deliberately baiting him into doing something that would get him fired, and he came within centimetres of biting.
Neither Nakamura nor the teacher come out of this exchange looking great. Nakamura at least comes out of it looking like she has giant balls though, so that puts her slightly ahead of him in both the readers' and her classmates' estimations.
After school, Kasuga and his friends exit the building, gossiping among themselves about what a scary bitch that Nakamura is. It turns out that Kasuga's social group all give each other shit about stuff, so they're not just picking on him. That's good. Less good is when the conversation turns to the subject of other girls in their class, and one guy with a really creepy face starts acting really creepy about good girl Saeki.
Sleep paralysis clown face up there is soon named as Kojima, which is lol. I'll bet he thinks Saeki breathes through her pubes.
Granted, for all that Kasuga gets indignant on Saeki's behalf and gets even more shit from the others on account of it, his own thoughts about her are...well...honestly almost worse.
Granted, these boys are like 14 or whatever, I wouldn't expect them to not be creepy about girls at all. But within the spectrum of teenaged boy weirdness, I feel that "I'll bet she has great pubes" is significantly less toxic than "this girl who I've never talked to is my muse and goddess." More obnoxious when expressed aloud, but less toxic.
Nice Guyism is an insidious mind trap for boys. Well, hopefully he'll get better.
It's likely that he will, because - refreshingly - the author of this comic is aware that Kasuga's attitude toward women isn't any better than Kojima's. When Kasuga realizes he forgot his Baudelaire book in the classroom and runs back to grab it, he happens to notice Saeki's gymbag left forgotten as well. This would be a great opportunity to make conversation with her, if he sought her out and told her she forgot her bag. However, instead of doing that, Kasuga steals her gym clothes out of the bag and hurries home with them to rub his face all over her sweaty underwear.
There's so much tension and nervousness around Kasuga's transgression, with him frantically looking around every five seconds as he leaves the building to see if anyone has seen him, jumping whenever he hears a door close or a voice speak from around a corner, etc, that at first I thought he was reacting to literal poltergeist activity. Like, his fearful reactions to all the sounds and shadows, the artist's exaggerations of those sounds and motion to convey his hyperfocus on them, it really looks like a horror manga for a few panels there. Nothing supernatural after all, though, just a protagonist's guilty conscience.
Getting home doesn't calm him down. He was the same reaction to his mother showing up to scold him about his messy room that he did to the sounds in the school building.
Straight up Calvin & Hobbes gags, heh.
I haven't read Baudelaire since undergrad myself, and unfortunately I don't remember his work well enough to understand the literary reference Kasuga makes as he starts fondling Saeki's shorts while imagining her ass is inside of them and we fade to black.
I know that "The Flowers of Evil" is the one collection of Baudelaire poetry that he published during his lifetime, but I don't recall what significance the name itself has. So, not sure what he means, aside from a very straightforward "enjoying the sensual pleasures born of misbehavior" thing.
The next day, Kasuga is alarmed when Saeki isn't at her desk, and her gym bag isn't where he left it. And then even more alarmed when the teacher addresses the class with an accusatory, interrogative air, and Saeki enters the room late looking like she's been crying.
Kasuga's own friends, including the ones who had disgusted him the day before, all muse aloud about what a fucked up pervert they must have in their class. Saeki, who Kasuga has been putting on a pedestal, feels way, way more hurt and violated than he ever would have expected her to be if she found out about the theft (and ideally, she'd never have even known).
Kasuga is silent, shrinking into his chair, stewing in his own emotions. There's an amazing panel transition as we jump ahead to that afternoon.
The vortex of his guilt and misery literally piping him into the cloudy sky that awaits him after school. Showing how he's been totally overwhelmed by his feelings and blinded to all else for his entire schoolday.
He does not hang out with his friends after school this time. And his mood in general does not improve.
Dramatic as all hell, but like...it's realistic drama? This is about right for the mind of a fourteen year old boy who's just fucked up his own self-image and also reads a lot of modernist poetry.
...
I assume that the eyeball-flower levitating above his head in the above panel is another allusion to something in said modernist poetry, heh.
...
He rides around town all broodingly, cursing himself, his decisions, the town itself, God, etc. Making very Baudelaire-esque observations about the rusting metal, the small minds, how terrible his life is, etc. I do remember Baudelaire enough to recognize the general aura at least, heh. Suddenly, his melodramatic self-hating reverie is interrupted by Nakamura the scary girl. She was just randomly sitting against a roadside fence as he rode his bicycle past, and she calls out to him sharply, almost angrily. I get the impression that that's the only way she knows how to talk, heh.
He gets the sense that she's been waiting for him. The next few pages suggest that he was probably right about this.
After disinterestedly interrogating him about where he was going (and disinterestedly interrogating him about his choice of reading material when he says "the library"), she suddenly seats herself on the back of his bike and starts making outrageous demands.
He demands to know what the fuck. In response, she reminds him that she sits behind him in class and sees everything he reads over his shoulder. And then wraps her arms in a creepily possessive ways around his waist. And then takes off her glasses to reveal an even more deranged-looking gaze than Kojima's as she says the thing that the reader will have probably predicted by this point.
The seeds of evil, planted, have grown and flowered. And now he's got to smell them. Dunno if this girl has a messed up stalker crush on him (like a wilfully malicious version of his own feelings for Saeki. Just like her being a bad student is a warped exaggeration of his own academic woes), or if she's just doing the waist-squeeze to make him uncomfortable as part of a general opportunistic meanness. The fact that she sits behind him - and that she's just made a point of reminding us that she sits behind him - suggests the former.
The chapter closes with an author's note explaining a bit about his choice of poets, and - amusingly - about the eyeball-flower imagery I was wondering about before.
So that's cool.
I'm tempted to keep reading this comic for its own sake. Not for enjoyment, but for instruction. I've been writing short stories for an elementary-to-middle-school English curriculum, and this kind of plot is exactly the subject matter they usually want me to write about. Realistic fiction, child protagonists, moral lessons. "The Flowers of Evil" manages to make these elements feel dramatic and meaningful in a way that I've been struggling to manage. It also strikes a really good balance of featuring exceptional - if still mundanely realistic - circumstances, with actions that could have very serious consequences for the characters at least in the short to medium term, while still avoiding anything too heavy.
It's also very well drawn, which I appreciate.
This 2009 shonen manga by Shuzo Oshimi is one I've never heard of before. And, since @Synaptic Star paid for a live react, this will be an old school blind Let's Read like the kind I started with. In keeping with the spirit of that, I won't be doing any more research about this work until I've finished the post to keep myself unspoiled.
Let's go!
We start in a sleepy Japanese town, under an overcast sky, with a teacher handing back tests to a classroom full of teenagers. Our apparent protagonist, a boy named Takao Kasuga, hasn't done very well on it.
He's clearly an enthusiastic reader, as evidenced by him having a copy of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal on hand despite it having nothing to do with his coursework. However, the fact that he has this personal reading material out and visible in the middle of class is likly giving us a hint as to why his test scores haven't been reflective of his intellect.
Also, his friends give him shit for being an annoying smartypants nerd who still can't even get good grades.
A difficult life, some of us live. I had pretty much the exact same problem with regards to focus in my teens (my ADHD was undiagnosed until just a year or so ago), so I can relate.
We learn also that Kasuga has a crush on his classmate Saeki Nanako, who's as booksmart as him but also much better able to leverage it toward academics. And also like, confident and pretty and stuff. You know the type.
Kasuga is too nervous to approach her, let alone form a friendship, let alone let that friendship become more than a friendship. You know the type.
The next character who our attention is called to is Nakamura, the girl with the only test score in the class even lower than Kasuga's. I'm not sure if it's really fair to compare them though, because while Kasuga made an actual effort, Nakamura just left her entire test sheet blank. She looks surly, perhaps even indignant, when called up to take her graded test back, as if she's furious at the teacher for even acknowledging her presence in the room. Then, when he scolds her for her perfect zero, she does this:
The teacher loses his shit. For a moment, he actually raises his hand as if to strike her, before catching himself with a frightened expression and lowering his arm again before issuing her detention. It looks for all the world like she was deliberately baiting him into doing something that would get him fired, and he came within centimetres of biting.
Neither Nakamura nor the teacher come out of this exchange looking great. Nakamura at least comes out of it looking like she has giant balls though, so that puts her slightly ahead of him in both the readers' and her classmates' estimations.
After school, Kasuga and his friends exit the building, gossiping among themselves about what a scary bitch that Nakamura is. It turns out that Kasuga's social group all give each other shit about stuff, so they're not just picking on him. That's good. Less good is when the conversation turns to the subject of other girls in their class, and one guy with a really creepy face starts acting really creepy about good girl Saeki.
Sleep paralysis clown face up there is soon named as Kojima, which is lol. I'll bet he thinks Saeki breathes through her pubes.
Granted, for all that Kasuga gets indignant on Saeki's behalf and gets even more shit from the others on account of it, his own thoughts about her are...well...honestly almost worse.
Granted, these boys are like 14 or whatever, I wouldn't expect them to not be creepy about girls at all. But within the spectrum of teenaged boy weirdness, I feel that "I'll bet she has great pubes" is significantly less toxic than "this girl who I've never talked to is my muse and goddess." More obnoxious when expressed aloud, but less toxic.
Nice Guyism is an insidious mind trap for boys. Well, hopefully he'll get better.
It's likely that he will, because - refreshingly - the author of this comic is aware that Kasuga's attitude toward women isn't any better than Kojima's. When Kasuga realizes he forgot his Baudelaire book in the classroom and runs back to grab it, he happens to notice Saeki's gymbag left forgotten as well. This would be a great opportunity to make conversation with her, if he sought her out and told her she forgot her bag. However, instead of doing that, Kasuga steals her gym clothes out of the bag and hurries home with them to rub his face all over her sweaty underwear.
There's so much tension and nervousness around Kasuga's transgression, with him frantically looking around every five seconds as he leaves the building to see if anyone has seen him, jumping whenever he hears a door close or a voice speak from around a corner, etc, that at first I thought he was reacting to literal poltergeist activity. Like, his fearful reactions to all the sounds and shadows, the artist's exaggerations of those sounds and motion to convey his hyperfocus on them, it really looks like a horror manga for a few panels there. Nothing supernatural after all, though, just a protagonist's guilty conscience.
Getting home doesn't calm him down. He was the same reaction to his mother showing up to scold him about his messy room that he did to the sounds in the school building.
Straight up Calvin & Hobbes gags, heh.
I haven't read Baudelaire since undergrad myself, and unfortunately I don't remember his work well enough to understand the literary reference Kasuga makes as he starts fondling Saeki's shorts while imagining her ass is inside of them and we fade to black.
I know that "The Flowers of Evil" is the one collection of Baudelaire poetry that he published during his lifetime, but I don't recall what significance the name itself has. So, not sure what he means, aside from a very straightforward "enjoying the sensual pleasures born of misbehavior" thing.
The next day, Kasuga is alarmed when Saeki isn't at her desk, and her gym bag isn't where he left it. And then even more alarmed when the teacher addresses the class with an accusatory, interrogative air, and Saeki enters the room late looking like she's been crying.
Kasuga's own friends, including the ones who had disgusted him the day before, all muse aloud about what a fucked up pervert they must have in their class. Saeki, who Kasuga has been putting on a pedestal, feels way, way more hurt and violated than he ever would have expected her to be if she found out about the theft (and ideally, she'd never have even known).
Kasuga is silent, shrinking into his chair, stewing in his own emotions. There's an amazing panel transition as we jump ahead to that afternoon.
The vortex of his guilt and misery literally piping him into the cloudy sky that awaits him after school. Showing how he's been totally overwhelmed by his feelings and blinded to all else for his entire schoolday.
He does not hang out with his friends after school this time. And his mood in general does not improve.
Dramatic as all hell, but like...it's realistic drama? This is about right for the mind of a fourteen year old boy who's just fucked up his own self-image and also reads a lot of modernist poetry.
...
I assume that the eyeball-flower levitating above his head in the above panel is another allusion to something in said modernist poetry, heh.
...
He rides around town all broodingly, cursing himself, his decisions, the town itself, God, etc. Making very Baudelaire-esque observations about the rusting metal, the small minds, how terrible his life is, etc. I do remember Baudelaire enough to recognize the general aura at least, heh. Suddenly, his melodramatic self-hating reverie is interrupted by Nakamura the scary girl. She was just randomly sitting against a roadside fence as he rode his bicycle past, and she calls out to him sharply, almost angrily. I get the impression that that's the only way she knows how to talk, heh.
He gets the sense that she's been waiting for him. The next few pages suggest that he was probably right about this.
After disinterestedly interrogating him about where he was going (and disinterestedly interrogating him about his choice of reading material when he says "the library"), she suddenly seats herself on the back of his bike and starts making outrageous demands.
He demands to know what the fuck. In response, she reminds him that she sits behind him in class and sees everything he reads over his shoulder. And then wraps her arms in a creepily possessive ways around his waist. And then takes off her glasses to reveal an even more deranged-looking gaze than Kojima's as she says the thing that the reader will have probably predicted by this point.
The seeds of evil, planted, have grown and flowered. And now he's got to smell them. Dunno if this girl has a messed up stalker crush on him (like a wilfully malicious version of his own feelings for Saeki. Just like her being a bad student is a warped exaggeration of his own academic woes), or if she's just doing the waist-squeeze to make him uncomfortable as part of a general opportunistic meanness. The fact that she sits behind him - and that she's just made a point of reminding us that she sits behind him - suggests the former.
The chapter closes with an author's note explaining a bit about his choice of poets, and - amusingly - about the eyeball-flower imagery I was wondering about before.
So that's cool.
I'm tempted to keep reading this comic for its own sake. Not for enjoyment, but for instruction. I've been writing short stories for an elementary-to-middle-school English curriculum, and this kind of plot is exactly the subject matter they usually want me to write about. Realistic fiction, child protagonists, moral lessons. "The Flowers of Evil" manages to make these elements feel dramatic and meaningful in a way that I've been struggling to manage. It also strikes a really good balance of featuring exceptional - if still mundanely realistic - circumstances, with actions that could have very serious consequences for the characters at least in the short to medium term, while still avoiding anything too heavy.
It's also very well drawn, which I appreciate.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Flowers of Evil is a manga I dearly wish was more talked about sometimes, because it's really good. The author is one of those types that knows how to write their niche exactly the way they want, and I wish I could elaborate more on that, but I want to err on the side of caution and assume that giving out more details about the mangaka's other works might count as spoilers.
...Oh, one thing I can say is that The Flowers of Evil generated a lot of controversy and criticism some years back, back when it got an anime adaptation, because for some reason, instead of being a traditionally animated series, they decided to go with a weirdly rotoscope-animated thing that was really weird and offputting to the average viewer.
I don't recall if it was the author's idea or the studio's, but I imagine that was done to more properly service the themes at work in the manga - to emphasize the mundanity of the setting.
If the intention really was to make it uniquely offputting, to convey a dark-ish subject matter and dreadful mundane reality via a style that is neither normal animation nor full-on live action TV, they succeeded... and in the process, alienated a good chunk of the potential audience. Honestly, I'm still kinda bummed out by that - the author's art actually improves quite a lot early on, if they'd gone with his style they could have grabbed a way bigger audience.
Regardless of the quality of the anime, I'd definitely suggest sticking by the manga, it's more consistent in some ways.
...Oh, one thing I can say is that The Flowers of Evil generated a lot of controversy and criticism some years back, back when it got an anime adaptation, because for some reason, instead of being a traditionally animated series, they decided to go with a weirdly rotoscope-animated thing that was really weird and offputting to the average viewer.
I don't recall if it was the author's idea or the studio's, but I imagine that was done to more properly service the themes at work in the manga - to emphasize the mundanity of the setting.
If the intention really was to make it uniquely offputting, to convey a dark-ish subject matter and dreadful mundane reality via a style that is neither normal animation nor full-on live action TV, they succeeded... and in the process, alienated a good chunk of the potential audience. Honestly, I'm still kinda bummed out by that - the author's art actually improves quite a lot early on, if they'd gone with his style they could have grabbed a way bigger audience.
Regardless of the quality of the anime, I'd definitely suggest sticking by the manga, it's more consistent in some ways.
We can post the Anime's ED music? It's ominous stuff.
Last edited:
- Location
- Patriarchova
Queue is wide open, if you want to order it.
The Miracle Workers (part one)
- Location
- Patriarchova
This review was commissioned by @krinsbez
Time for another Jack Vance novella! This one was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1958, about five years before "The Dragon Masters." This one is also illustrated, albeit a bit more sparsely and by a different (though at least as talented) artist.
Dunno what this one is about, aside from my general knowledge of Jack Vance's work. As it's fairly long, I'll be dividing it into two or three posts.
Having read the first third or so of "The Miracle Workers," I think I see why @krinsbez chose this one next. Vance might have had his favorite themes and concepts, but the setting and backdrop of this story are so similar to "The Dragon Masters" that it's hard for me to not see them as earlier versions of the same thing.
By that same token, I think that TDM benefitted from narrowing its conceptual scope. It might have had a lot going on in it, and some of the moving parts might have felt like they weighed down the story a bit more than they were worth, but "The Miracle Workers" is a much greater offender. Dragon Masters was a borderline case of "too much going on." Miracle Workers is almost a textbook case of it.
Just like last time, our setting is a lost colony settled by deserters and refugees in a losing galactic war that has since regressed to pre-industrial tech levels. Once again, the story begins with feudal warlords armed with swords, a few ancient high-tech trinkets, and a weird warfare-redefining new weapon type that their ancestors obtained sometime since planetfall, doing grimy unromantic wars of expansion to each other. Would you believe me if I told you that there was a third party of cryptic, elf-like beings off in the wilderness who hold the neo-medieval humans in contempt? Yeah, well, there is.
Where the differences come in is also where this story feels like it's doing too much at once. First, there's no bleak dread hanging over the setting because of what has been lost and how few free humans there might still be. These war-refugees are said to have been soldiers who chose to go to ground rather than surrendering, rather than civilians fleeing a genocidal conqueror. The story explicitly says that the martial nature and latent anti-intellectual tendencies of these soldiers played an important role in how their society developed going forward. Implicitly, well...
It doesn't SAY that they were war criminals. The "vengeful enemies" might have just been petty and bloodthirsty. But the way the text also specifies that the anti-intellectualism and militarism were baked into the colonist population from the beginning, well.
Related to the above is that rather than the spacefaring past of the colonists before their technological regression being seen as a long-lost golden age to be looked back on with wist and longing, these people have a very...weird...view of their own history. They have grudging respect for certain unreplaceable artifacts of the past, and they value and guard them jealously despite the respect being grudging. But only the directly weaponizable artifacts, and they also see the people who created that technology - technology that is beyond them in the present day - as primitive and savage. Both because they used outdated concepts like "empiricism," and because those dark age savages didn't have any magic.
Yeah, that's a thing in this story.
Magic is apparently a thing that they only discovered a generation or three after settling this planet and losing contact with the rest of the galaxy. Why that might have happened, the story has not yet revealed. Magic is practiced by an esteemed class of professional magicians, the most accomplished of which are given the title of "jinxman" and hold a social status somewhere between a medieval guildmaster and an early modern mercenary commander. Powerful people, sometimes essentially the power behind the throne, but - for reasons that haven't become clear yet - they never seem to sit on the throne themselves.
The elflike party in this setup isn't an older, higher-tech bunch of humans this time, but rather the native sophonts of the planet. The "first folk" as the humans call them are bizarre insect-mollusc creatures. They have only palaeolithic technology, and - curiously - no "magic" like the kind practiced by the human magicians, despite them having lived on the planet where magic was discovered for infinitely longer. Despite this, they do seem to have some kind of (possibly related?) preternatural control over the nearby plantlife, which they use to create biological defences and refuges for themselves against the human invaders. At some point after making planetfall, humans started expanding into the first folk's inhabited lands and displacing them. This led to the first folk abandoning most of their territory and hiding in the deep forests where they can better defend themselves.
See what I mean about this story having way too much going on for a seventy page novella? "The Dragon Masters" also had a lot of moving parts, but they at least mostly tied back into each other and had a common origin in the ancient human-alien war. It doesn't look like "Miracle Workers" is going to do that, and...it really don't think it's going to have enough space to give all this stuff the breathing room it needs and deserves.
I could be wrong, but I mean...I'm almost a thousand words into this review, and I've only barely managed to summarize most of the background without even getting to the plot or characters yet lol.
So, plot and characters. We start the story in the POV of one Lord Faide, who...well, he's basically the BBEG of the setting. A skilled political power-player and even more skilled military commander, Faide is about to finish the process of conquering the continent, with only one small alliance of city states still standing against him before his army reaches the coast. Faide's ambitions and pace might bring Alexander the Great to mind, but unlike him Faide seems to derive zero pleasure whatsoever from his endless conquests. In fact, he doesn't seem to derive pleasure from anything at all, and even gets annoyed at his underlings when they show too much enthusiasm or sensualism. He's dreading his final victory, because he knows he's going to need to build a new order to keep his vassals in line once the looting kickbacks stop reaching them. His conquests weren't motivated by fear of being conquered by someone else either, as best I can tell. I'm honestly not sure why Faide wanted to take over the world in the first place, and I don't think that he knows either.
If Faide seems weirdly unexcited about his own campaigns, his men are in a far worse situation. Think less Imperial Macedonia, and more Imperial Germany. The human society depicted in this story isn't intrinsically horrifying the way the dragon masters with their eugenic slavery were, but their way of prosecuting warfare is. Largely on account of the military applications of the jinxmen's magic.
The *least* bad part of it is the library of effigies that every jinxman spends their life accumulating. Knights, prominant soldiers, important bureaucrats, family members and loved ones of the ruling nobility, etc. The ruling lords themselves are protected from effigy attacks by treaty, but everyone else is fair game. Typically, before the armies clash, both armies' jinxmen will start setting effigies on fire, and both armies' commanders will do their best to bully and threaten their men into not breaking even as they feel flames licking their bodies and psychosomatic burns start to appear.
The *worst,* meanwhile, are the "demons" that the jinxmen summon. These demons seem to be artificial life forms, psionic entities created by jinxmen through a complicated process. When invokes, the demons possess the bodies of friendly soldiers and grant them superhuman strength, durability, and speed. That is, until the jinxman ends the spell. At that point, the soldiers get control of their bodies back, and all the damage that they've been ignoring and overexertion they've placed on their bodies suddenly falls on them.
Demonic possession is a death sentence; a slow, horrifying permutation of suicide bombing. Every time a major battle if fought, dozens or hundreds of men are sent to this fate by their own commanders with barely a thought.
Lord Faide has been fighting battle after battle after battle, and constantly adding to his collection of pet jinxmen for his ever-more-magic-reliant army. The fact that the men all submissively line up and go to the jinxmen to be possessed when ordered suggests that both a) an even more terrible punishment awaits those who refuse, and b) that defiance against the nobles with their wizard enforcers is known to be futile. And Faide is doing all this for...why, exactly? Seemingly just because he feels like it.
...
An army is a reflection of the civilization it belongs to. Seeing how these armies function and clash paints an incredibly bleak picture of what life is like for the common people of this society.
...
As Lord Faide's army lays siege to one of the last bastions of resistance, the protagonist role in slowly yielded to a much more sympathetic character by the name of Sam Salazar. An apprentice magician to one of Lord Faide's warmages, Sam has a deep interest in the underappreciated wonders of their people's high tech past, and a curiosity about expanding the frontiers of magic and seeking knowledge for its own sake that his culture (and Lord Faide's regime in particular) doesn't encourage. In fact, during the attack on the enemy fortress, Faide deems Sam to be unimportant enough to put on decoy duty, making him dress in his own armor and drive his heirloom hovercar around the perimeter of the battle to draw fire from the defenders' own heirloom laser cannon. Not disposable enough to put on suicidal demonhost duty (and also, being an apprentice magician, he might not be possessable), but disposable enough to be given the next worst job. Sam's own master - one of Faide's jinxmen, a particularly unpleasant demon-specialist by the name of Isak Comandore - has tired of the young man's fanciful experiments and excess of curiosity, and is barely bothered by Lord Faide's decision.
Sam Salazar survives his decoy duties, as it turns out that the defenders' laser cannon hasn't actually been functional in nearly a century. There's also a scene when he's being assigned these duties that really characterizes both him and the social context he exists in:
Another such moment, slightly earlier in the story, is when the army is approaching their target and finds that the first folk have caused a forest to spring up in the area they planned to march through. Sam is part of the party sent to parlay with the first folk (mostly just to help check for traps in the outer forest perimeter until they make contact), and it's very clear to the reader that his thoughts and musings about the situation suggest something that everyone else is missing.
First, while away from his ill-tempered master, Sam tells another, more open-minded, senior jinxman about his experiments trying to make telepathic contact with plants the same way that he can with other humans.
He was, with great effort, able to get what he thought were vague sensory impressions from the plantlife he tried it with. The older jinxman - Hein Huss - accepts that Sam might have actually done what he says he did, even if he doesn't think it's an avenue of research worth pursuing. After all, the more different a creature is from yourself, the harder it is to touch its mind by magic, and plants and humans are about as different as it gets.
Then, when they meet a party of first folk, the aliens tell them that they intend their new forest expansions to be hazardous for humans, and that the fact a human warlord is now here to complain about them is proof that it's working. They manage to appeal to the first folk's hatred of humans in their own favor, pointing out that their army is on its way to kill a lot MORE humans, so letting them through would actually help the first folk more than stopping them. Suspiciously though, the lone first folkscreature that they talk to seem to weigh their arguments and come to a decision unilaterally, in just moments.
Earlier, it was established that the first folk don't have proper magic. However, looking at all these things that Sam is noticing and pointing out, it seems like that might not actually be the case. Pretty much all the magic we see jinxmen use in these early chapters involves psychic connections - reading minds, possessing people with synthetic demon-spirits, sympathetic effigy curses, etc. First folk are weird insectoid aliens. It might just be that they and humans are too mentally different to use magic on each other, which from a human perspective might make it seem like they don't have it at all. Likewise, if Sam's tree experiments were able to get even a very partial success, then that establishes a precedent that proves the principle. Maybe the first folk have done more research on crossing the plant/animal barrier when it comes to telepathy. Maybe they're closely related enough to the trees to easily telecommunicate with them just by virtue of being born of the same planet's biosphere.
It's pretty clear that the individual they met was a first folk magician, and that it was in telepathic contact with their leadership during the conversation. They've perfected magic into something much more reliable and readily usable than what the humans have figured out, and can even use it to control plantlife. They just can't use it directly on humans.
Sam Salazar is probably beginning to figure this out, but nobody else besides the reader is.
After they cross the forest and Lord Faide wins the battle against the human resisters, Sam manages to finagle his passage out of Isak Comandore's tutelage and into the less cruel and more openminded Hein Huss'. I wouldn't call Huss a great guy or anything. He's another senior member of Lord Faide's magical warcrime squad, after all. But, he seems like the least bad of the lot, and at the very least he sees value in having Sam as an apprentice whereas Comandore is on the brink of sacrificing him or something.
Not sure where things are going from here. Like I said, there's a ton going on, and the story isn't that long.
I will say that Jack Vance's ability to exposit via action is nothing short of incredible. This story throws even more wild high-concept crap at you than TDM, but it still, somehow, even when it's at its most busy and overcooked, never crosses the line into overwhelming or impenetrable. It's all readily understandable. Everything explains itself quickly, clearly, and concisely just through demonstration, with only the very rare paragraph of third person exposition ever being needed.
Vance was an absolute master of "show don't tell." I know that that writing principle has come under scrutiny lately, but even if it isn't always the right approach Vance is a perfect example of what it can be good for.
On a random sidenote, this 1950's vintage story has the wizards refer to "mana" as a supply of mystical power that can be used up and replenish over time. The word comes from Pacific Islands shamanism of course, but my understanding is that it being a resource you expend and regain over time is not part of the source mythology. Was Jack Vance the first fantasy author to give magicians recharging spell points and call them "mana?" Did he actually introduce BOTH of fantasy gaming's go-to magic systems? Would be wild if so.
Not sure what else to say until I've read further into the story. Just explaining what it's about is work enough for now!
Time for another Jack Vance novella! This one was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1958, about five years before "The Dragon Masters." This one is also illustrated, albeit a bit more sparsely and by a different (though at least as talented) artist.
Dunno what this one is about, aside from my general knowledge of Jack Vance's work. As it's fairly long, I'll be dividing it into two or three posts.
Having read the first third or so of "The Miracle Workers," I think I see why @krinsbez chose this one next. Vance might have had his favorite themes and concepts, but the setting and backdrop of this story are so similar to "The Dragon Masters" that it's hard for me to not see them as earlier versions of the same thing.
By that same token, I think that TDM benefitted from narrowing its conceptual scope. It might have had a lot going on in it, and some of the moving parts might have felt like they weighed down the story a bit more than they were worth, but "The Miracle Workers" is a much greater offender. Dragon Masters was a borderline case of "too much going on." Miracle Workers is almost a textbook case of it.
Just like last time, our setting is a lost colony settled by deserters and refugees in a losing galactic war that has since regressed to pre-industrial tech levels. Once again, the story begins with feudal warlords armed with swords, a few ancient high-tech trinkets, and a weird warfare-redefining new weapon type that their ancestors obtained sometime since planetfall, doing grimy unromantic wars of expansion to each other. Would you believe me if I told you that there was a third party of cryptic, elf-like beings off in the wilderness who hold the neo-medieval humans in contempt? Yeah, well, there is.
Where the differences come in is also where this story feels like it's doing too much at once. First, there's no bleak dread hanging over the setting because of what has been lost and how few free humans there might still be. These war-refugees are said to have been soldiers who chose to go to ground rather than surrendering, rather than civilians fleeing a genocidal conqueror. The story explicitly says that the martial nature and latent anti-intellectual tendencies of these soldiers played an important role in how their society developed going forward. Implicitly, well...
It doesn't SAY that they were war criminals. The "vengeful enemies" might have just been petty and bloodthirsty. But the way the text also specifies that the anti-intellectualism and militarism were baked into the colonist population from the beginning, well.
Related to the above is that rather than the spacefaring past of the colonists before their technological regression being seen as a long-lost golden age to be looked back on with wist and longing, these people have a very...weird...view of their own history. They have grudging respect for certain unreplaceable artifacts of the past, and they value and guard them jealously despite the respect being grudging. But only the directly weaponizable artifacts, and they also see the people who created that technology - technology that is beyond them in the present day - as primitive and savage. Both because they used outdated concepts like "empiricism," and because those dark age savages didn't have any magic.
Yeah, that's a thing in this story.
Magic is apparently a thing that they only discovered a generation or three after settling this planet and losing contact with the rest of the galaxy. Why that might have happened, the story has not yet revealed. Magic is practiced by an esteemed class of professional magicians, the most accomplished of which are given the title of "jinxman" and hold a social status somewhere between a medieval guildmaster and an early modern mercenary commander. Powerful people, sometimes essentially the power behind the throne, but - for reasons that haven't become clear yet - they never seem to sit on the throne themselves.
The elflike party in this setup isn't an older, higher-tech bunch of humans this time, but rather the native sophonts of the planet. The "first folk" as the humans call them are bizarre insect-mollusc creatures. They have only palaeolithic technology, and - curiously - no "magic" like the kind practiced by the human magicians, despite them having lived on the planet where magic was discovered for infinitely longer. Despite this, they do seem to have some kind of (possibly related?) preternatural control over the nearby plantlife, which they use to create biological defences and refuges for themselves against the human invaders. At some point after making planetfall, humans started expanding into the first folk's inhabited lands and displacing them. This led to the first folk abandoning most of their territory and hiding in the deep forests where they can better defend themselves.
See what I mean about this story having way too much going on for a seventy page novella? "The Dragon Masters" also had a lot of moving parts, but they at least mostly tied back into each other and had a common origin in the ancient human-alien war. It doesn't look like "Miracle Workers" is going to do that, and...it really don't think it's going to have enough space to give all this stuff the breathing room it needs and deserves.
I could be wrong, but I mean...I'm almost a thousand words into this review, and I've only barely managed to summarize most of the background without even getting to the plot or characters yet lol.
So, plot and characters. We start the story in the POV of one Lord Faide, who...well, he's basically the BBEG of the setting. A skilled political power-player and even more skilled military commander, Faide is about to finish the process of conquering the continent, with only one small alliance of city states still standing against him before his army reaches the coast. Faide's ambitions and pace might bring Alexander the Great to mind, but unlike him Faide seems to derive zero pleasure whatsoever from his endless conquests. In fact, he doesn't seem to derive pleasure from anything at all, and even gets annoyed at his underlings when they show too much enthusiasm or sensualism. He's dreading his final victory, because he knows he's going to need to build a new order to keep his vassals in line once the looting kickbacks stop reaching them. His conquests weren't motivated by fear of being conquered by someone else either, as best I can tell. I'm honestly not sure why Faide wanted to take over the world in the first place, and I don't think that he knows either.
If Faide seems weirdly unexcited about his own campaigns, his men are in a far worse situation. Think less Imperial Macedonia, and more Imperial Germany. The human society depicted in this story isn't intrinsically horrifying the way the dragon masters with their eugenic slavery were, but their way of prosecuting warfare is. Largely on account of the military applications of the jinxmen's magic.
The *least* bad part of it is the library of effigies that every jinxman spends their life accumulating. Knights, prominant soldiers, important bureaucrats, family members and loved ones of the ruling nobility, etc. The ruling lords themselves are protected from effigy attacks by treaty, but everyone else is fair game. Typically, before the armies clash, both armies' jinxmen will start setting effigies on fire, and both armies' commanders will do their best to bully and threaten their men into not breaking even as they feel flames licking their bodies and psychosomatic burns start to appear.
The *worst,* meanwhile, are the "demons" that the jinxmen summon. These demons seem to be artificial life forms, psionic entities created by jinxmen through a complicated process. When invokes, the demons possess the bodies of friendly soldiers and grant them superhuman strength, durability, and speed. That is, until the jinxman ends the spell. At that point, the soldiers get control of their bodies back, and all the damage that they've been ignoring and overexertion they've placed on their bodies suddenly falls on them.
Demonic possession is a death sentence; a slow, horrifying permutation of suicide bombing. Every time a major battle if fought, dozens or hundreds of men are sent to this fate by their own commanders with barely a thought.
Lord Faide has been fighting battle after battle after battle, and constantly adding to his collection of pet jinxmen for his ever-more-magic-reliant army. The fact that the men all submissively line up and go to the jinxmen to be possessed when ordered suggests that both a) an even more terrible punishment awaits those who refuse, and b) that defiance against the nobles with their wizard enforcers is known to be futile. And Faide is doing all this for...why, exactly? Seemingly just because he feels like it.
...
An army is a reflection of the civilization it belongs to. Seeing how these armies function and clash paints an incredibly bleak picture of what life is like for the common people of this society.
...
As Lord Faide's army lays siege to one of the last bastions of resistance, the protagonist role in slowly yielded to a much more sympathetic character by the name of Sam Salazar. An apprentice magician to one of Lord Faide's warmages, Sam has a deep interest in the underappreciated wonders of their people's high tech past, and a curiosity about expanding the frontiers of magic and seeking knowledge for its own sake that his culture (and Lord Faide's regime in particular) doesn't encourage. In fact, during the attack on the enemy fortress, Faide deems Sam to be unimportant enough to put on decoy duty, making him dress in his own armor and drive his heirloom hovercar around the perimeter of the battle to draw fire from the defenders' own heirloom laser cannon. Not disposable enough to put on suicidal demonhost duty (and also, being an apprentice magician, he might not be possessable), but disposable enough to be given the next worst job. Sam's own master - one of Faide's jinxmen, a particularly unpleasant demon-specialist by the name of Isak Comandore - has tired of the young man's fanciful experiments and excess of curiosity, and is barely bothered by Lord Faide's decision.
Sam Salazar survives his decoy duties, as it turns out that the defenders' laser cannon hasn't actually been functional in nearly a century. There's also a scene when he's being assigned these duties that really characterizes both him and the social context he exists in:
Another such moment, slightly earlier in the story, is when the army is approaching their target and finds that the first folk have caused a forest to spring up in the area they planned to march through. Sam is part of the party sent to parlay with the first folk (mostly just to help check for traps in the outer forest perimeter until they make contact), and it's very clear to the reader that his thoughts and musings about the situation suggest something that everyone else is missing.
First, while away from his ill-tempered master, Sam tells another, more open-minded, senior jinxman about his experiments trying to make telepathic contact with plants the same way that he can with other humans.
He was, with great effort, able to get what he thought were vague sensory impressions from the plantlife he tried it with. The older jinxman - Hein Huss - accepts that Sam might have actually done what he says he did, even if he doesn't think it's an avenue of research worth pursuing. After all, the more different a creature is from yourself, the harder it is to touch its mind by magic, and plants and humans are about as different as it gets.
Then, when they meet a party of first folk, the aliens tell them that they intend their new forest expansions to be hazardous for humans, and that the fact a human warlord is now here to complain about them is proof that it's working. They manage to appeal to the first folk's hatred of humans in their own favor, pointing out that their army is on its way to kill a lot MORE humans, so letting them through would actually help the first folk more than stopping them. Suspiciously though, the lone first folkscreature that they talk to seem to weigh their arguments and come to a decision unilaterally, in just moments.
Earlier, it was established that the first folk don't have proper magic. However, looking at all these things that Sam is noticing and pointing out, it seems like that might not actually be the case. Pretty much all the magic we see jinxmen use in these early chapters involves psychic connections - reading minds, possessing people with synthetic demon-spirits, sympathetic effigy curses, etc. First folk are weird insectoid aliens. It might just be that they and humans are too mentally different to use magic on each other, which from a human perspective might make it seem like they don't have it at all. Likewise, if Sam's tree experiments were able to get even a very partial success, then that establishes a precedent that proves the principle. Maybe the first folk have done more research on crossing the plant/animal barrier when it comes to telepathy. Maybe they're closely related enough to the trees to easily telecommunicate with them just by virtue of being born of the same planet's biosphere.
It's pretty clear that the individual they met was a first folk magician, and that it was in telepathic contact with their leadership during the conversation. They've perfected magic into something much more reliable and readily usable than what the humans have figured out, and can even use it to control plantlife. They just can't use it directly on humans.
Sam Salazar is probably beginning to figure this out, but nobody else besides the reader is.
After they cross the forest and Lord Faide wins the battle against the human resisters, Sam manages to finagle his passage out of Isak Comandore's tutelage and into the less cruel and more openminded Hein Huss'. I wouldn't call Huss a great guy or anything. He's another senior member of Lord Faide's magical warcrime squad, after all. But, he seems like the least bad of the lot, and at the very least he sees value in having Sam as an apprentice whereas Comandore is on the brink of sacrificing him or something.
Not sure where things are going from here. Like I said, there's a ton going on, and the story isn't that long.
I will say that Jack Vance's ability to exposit via action is nothing short of incredible. This story throws even more wild high-concept crap at you than TDM, but it still, somehow, even when it's at its most busy and overcooked, never crosses the line into overwhelming or impenetrable. It's all readily understandable. Everything explains itself quickly, clearly, and concisely just through demonstration, with only the very rare paragraph of third person exposition ever being needed.
Vance was an absolute master of "show don't tell." I know that that writing principle has come under scrutiny lately, but even if it isn't always the right approach Vance is a perfect example of what it can be good for.
On a random sidenote, this 1950's vintage story has the wizards refer to "mana" as a supply of mystical power that can be used up and replenish over time. The word comes from Pacific Islands shamanism of course, but my understanding is that it being a resource you expend and regain over time is not part of the source mythology. Was Jack Vance the first fantasy author to give magicians recharging spell points and call them "mana?" Did he actually introduce BOTH of fantasy gaming's go-to magic systems? Would be wild if so.
Not sure what else to say until I've read further into the story. Just explaining what it's about is work enough for now!
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I wonder if it's tradition or something. Like, say his father or other ancestor started the war and he's just finishing it out of momentum.
It could be he started the war as a distraction/manufactured cause to get people to rally round the flag. Give his people a goal to strive for (even an arbitrary and unnecessary one), and they won't complain about the taxes.
Consider his worries about how to keep his power base under control after the war is done.
Consider his worries about how to keep his power base under control after the war is done.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
wake up
first day as a forty second century warlord
i got work tomorrow
So he's a Paradox Game player.