It's like how you can headcanon practically anything into Harry Potter canon because that wizard named Harry is so oblivious. This wizard named Harry is an explicitly unreliable narrator with obvious sex and gender hangups who's vulnerable to having his head messed with, so there's all sorts of opportunities not to take his word as objective fact. :::PPP
KINTSUGI IS ALIVE AGAIN and I am pleased because I've been dying to post here, in the spirit of Persona 4 discussion that was happening over in the character analysis thread, my somewhat impressed, somewhat enraged realization that the culprit's dungeon's layout is an extremely unsubtle metaphor for the game's plot. I did not spot this until I was on my third time through it (I was grinding Naoto's level up) and then I had to stop and scream internally for a bit.
Persona 4 has a long history of environmental symbolism and metaphors so unsubtle that they eventually stop being metaphors because the game comes straight out and says it (e.g. the fog is literally confirmation bias and seeing what you want to believe is there), so I suspect I'm not reading anything into this they didn't deliberately put there. The dungeon in question is laid out with two floors of "Magatsu Inaba," a locked door you can't get past at the end of the second floor, and then a forced detour where you have to jump down a hole in the second floor and you land in an area called Magatsu Mandala. Magatsu Mandala is essentially a self-contained dungeon with six floors (called "worlds") with a sub-boss at the end, and after you beat it you're left looking at a dead end. You have to leave the Mandala entirely and re-enter Magatsu Inaba to continue- beating the Mandala boss unlocks the door on the second floor, allowing you to reach the final floor/culprit/dungeon boss. I figured it out when I talked to my party and Naoto said this: Spoiler: Spoilers Two floors you can't get past. A hole you have to go through to continue instead. A detour through six worlds down that hole. An enemy at the end that's in a central position, but is actually nothing more than a pawn for the one really responsible, and while beating them resolves the situation of the six worlds, it has no connection to the first two. But because that enemy has been beaten, finally being able to get past the barrier and find the one ultimately responsible for both the original two and the following six, who you couldn't get to before even though the way through was right there. For Izanagi's sake, the name is MAGATSU MANDALA. A representation in microcosm of a calamity, or a calamity which represents the world in microcosm. Subtle this game is not.
did you know buddhism has a fucking fetish for the number 6 when it comes to misery in the world because boy howdy do we ever have a fetish for the number 6 Also the numbers 3 and 4.
I did not! I suspect if I knew more about Buddhism and Shinto I'd have even more thoughts about location design in a couple of the dungeons than I already do. (Notably, I know very little about non-Christian concepts of heaven and I suspect there's some of that in the Heaven dungeon, and I'm sure I'm missing some important context for the thought process behind Yomotsu Hirasaka's look.)
There are Six Realms in Samsara, which is typically modeled in as a mandala. So its fitting there are six cases and the like.
Would his motive speech also tie into this? Spoiler: Vague Persona 4 Spoilers, no idea if anyone hasn't played it here and wants to I remember it basically came around as "I tried living a good life, only to fail because of things that were only slightly my fault, so now I am tired of living a boring and day-to-day life in the country where it feels like everything is the same. So I caused pain and chaos, so I have distractions against this boring life. Now leave me alone children, so you can live your boring day-to-day lives of going to school and getting good grades as the end of the world happens."
There's technically two murders and six kidnappings/disappearances (which turn into deaths if you don't prevent them, which is a Game Over), resulting in 9 areas total plus the central entryway. One major thing I'm wondering about in the Heaven dungeon is that the stairs up are masses of vines you have to climb straight up, and while my brain associates that with Jack and the Beanstalk, I have no idea how well-known that story is in Japan and it doesn't seem to be thematically relevant to a dungeon created from the mind of Spoiler a little girl who wants her dead mom back and a guy with a Messiah complex. There's also a lot of stuff where I don't know if it's a reference to a specific idea of heaven, or just something the dungeon's creator thinks of as beautiful and heavenly- heavy emphasis on rainbows and flowers, door knockers shaped like lions' heads. It's definitely got a lot of Christian heaven in there (the fact that it's floating in the clouds, the boss arena is ringed with angel statues), but I don't know if I'm missing anything that's not. (Several of the other dungeons have subtle background details symbolic of their creators- e.g. Rise's dungeon has a carpet pattern that looks like eyes- so I wouldn't be surprised if there was something similar here.) And then there's Yomotsu Hirasaka: Spoiler: Screenshots There's a few obvious things- the red and black color scheme is heavily associated throughout the game with the otherworld, corruption, and sin; the braided patterning on the gates and carpeted floors mirrors <spoiler>'s character design; the repeated red gates are vaguely evocative of shrine gates. But why all the cubes? Why is the descent into the Shinto underworld a path rising out of an ocean of mist? (Yeah, yeah, you could get something "Reach Out to the Truth(TM)"-y out of it, but what does it have to do with <spoiler>? Is there a famous shrine that's out in the middle of the ocean or something?) Do those overlapping braided patterns mean anything beyond, again, the illusion symbolism of wrapped coverings?
Spoiler: Also spoilers I gotta be honest, given his general behavior, when he said, "I made one little mistake" I automatically assumed the mistake in question was something like "got caught sexually assaulting someone."
Spoiler: Continuation of Spoilers and Theories That would be logical, especially since doesn't Japan have a big problem with sending sexual predatory cops to the sticks when they're caught by internal affairs? I've seen a lot of theories for why, but I can go with this, or (my own personal theory, based on the Magatsu Pistol you find in the lowest layer of the Mandala) him losing a gun as part of an investigation and causing a massive uproar in IA as a result of his negligence, as being the reason why he got sent out to the sticks. And a coverup entirely can also explain how he's able to start working for an out-of-country police force if he's not caught by the MC in Persona 4 Golden.
Spoiler I don't know much about the Japanese police situation, but I know American police forces sometimes have problems like that, so I wouldn't be surprised. Mostly I have trouble believing that Mayumi Yamano was the first woman he went after, considering how little hesitation he had about both her and Saki and that he says outright the only reason he became a cop was so he could carry a gun. Yeah, I figure there's a pretty good chance that whatever he did got covered up, especially since he didn't get straight-up fired. Could have been they didn't want to fire him because that would bring more attention to whatever he did, and they thought that getting out would reflect badly enough on the department that it was safer to sweep it under the rug. And if nothing else, Dojima doesn't seem to suspect him of anything but being kind of lazy and bad at his job.
{*We interrupt this intelligent exchange of ideas for a special bulletin: Carrick's thoughts about yaoi DVD special features~~!*} So I'm currently obsessed with a certain British actor and have set out on a quest to watch every movie he's ever been in. It's Jeremy Irons, so it turns out things get weird in a hurry. I have two gripes at the moment. Spoiler: They involve ducks and raw footage of camera crews derping around 1. I cannot find any way to get my hands on a copy of a movie called The Wild Duck. I have found a sparse scattering of VERY pricey listings for the DVD version, but it's Region 2. Beyond that, I can find so little information about it, I'm half convinced it only exists as an elaborate conspiracy of IMDB editors. 2. Why is it that the worst movies seem to always have the most/best extra features?? I just sat through over 3 hours of featurette and commentary for Being Julia, which is not the WORST FILM EVER or anything, but I really really dislike the main character and how she gets rewarded for being a bored diva. The movie is like a long episode of "Slings and Arrows" if you can imagine that the only plot point involves Ellen trolling the company and being heckled by the resident ghost. Then Brideshead Revisited contains more or less a thesis study of the series, and I still don't understand why this thing was ever popular. On the other hand, I got lucky with Callas Forever--a DVD which I had to get IMPORTED FROM SPAIN because it doesn't have an American release (??????)... The DVD case and menus are all in Spanish, but all the content is as filmed, in English. Someone involved in that production included a long chunk of unedited footage of the cast and crew just... doing the stuff they do when making a movie. No explanations or focus or anything, shitty audio, but oh my god I COULD WATCH THAT KIND OF SHIT FOR HOURS. I THRIVE on behind-the-scenes material. A lot of the time, I'm vastly more interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff than in the movie itself. So uhh... I might have done some trawling through Amazon today and ordered... several... of Jeremy's other movies that have extra features on the DVD. Because true obsession is the joy of endless research as one quests for Enlightenment through knowing ALL things about one's soul's obsession~~~.
Oh, breaking away from my pattern of ranting about JRPGs, I can also talk about the narrative function of the storytelling structure of Darker Than Black and the effect it has on the parts of the premise that are steeped in male power fantasy.
As usual when I'm talking about Darker than Black, there is no second season. DtB's premise is, when you summarize it, something that sounds like it was written by an edgy teenage boy. People randomly get powers, and they lose their empathy, and they get recruited by government black ops and organized crime and they have superpower battles and this is all hidden from the public and the main character is the MOST NOTORIOUS MOST MYSTERIOUS MOST BADASS super-assassin with a tragic past who does ~edgy crime things~ and doesn't show his emotions or open up to people but occasionally does some random rescue-heroics to show that he ~secretly cares~. You could take that premise and write a grim, angsty, "gritty," boring seinen series that's all about Protagonist McManpain's badassitude and all the awesome crimes he does and all the awesome fights he gets into and how tortured he is, and on paper the plot summary would still look a lot like Darker than Black. But the tone, themes, and impact would be completely different. Because DtB does two very unusual things with its storytelling: Hei, while the main character of the series, is not the main character of most of the show's two-episode arcs. The narrative doesn't care at all about most of his edgy crime missions except as a reason to have him in a certain place doing something. The story does not give a damn about heists and assassinations and elaborate extended fight scenes. And neither does Hei, and neither do most of the people he's fighting- they're doing what they're ordered to, but they've got no emotional investment and no choice. What the show cares about is the people on the sidelines who get dragged in: a young scientist who agreed to spy for an organized crime syndicate so she could get her dream job, a recent Yakuza recruit who wants to rescue a mostly-catatonic woman his organization was trafficking, a teenage girl angry at her father for neglecting her to bury himself in research, a private detective trying to find a lost cat who never even realizes he's stumbled onto the edge of a case of body-snatching and corporate espionage. Oh, the thefts and fight scenes are there, but they're never the point. There's a reason they're mostly realistically short (often over in one exchange) despite being anime magic superpower battles. What matters is the characters' emotional arcs- a fight scene might lead into or follow the emotional climax, but it's actually the climax all of twice, and one of those is a parody OVA involving elephant yaoi. Often, Hei is barely in an episode at all- he's just that quiet dorky Chinese exchange student doing some menial minimum-wage job in the corner, with a couple minutes of ~Black Reaper~ stuff happening off to the side. He's placed as much as an observer as an actor in many of the arcs, and even when a focus character's motivations do involve him, it's more often than not about their idea of him rather than who he really is. He's a secondary character in other people's stories, just as they're secondary characters in his. And, notably, until the last episodes Hei himself almost never gets the kind of emotional narrative focus that far more minor characters get. And when he does, it's not broody manpain- it's frankly frightening violence and outright panic attacks. His history and even his abilities are drip-fed to the viewer; it's not explained outright what his power is until episode 6, and the price for his power isn't stated until the finale. The power fantasy stuff is all still there, but the narrative structure essentially turns it into a sideshow. Which is appropriate, when we finally get to the end, and find out exactly what makes Hei tick: Spoiler He's not a Contractor. He's an ordinary person, with all empathy and feelings and remorse functioning entirely as normal, and he's deeply traumatized and hurting and hides behind the Black Reaper persona because if he can convince himself he doesn't care he doesn't have to think about the fact that he hates every minute of his life. I'm not really sure if I have a point here at the end, but it's fascinating to me.
(Another point worth mentioning re: DtB is that while it's not explicit (because very little in the show is explicit), it's at the least implied that a lot of Hei's ~cool dispassionate stoic brooder~ thing is straight-up depression. Which is another point in the overall theme of the power fantasy being a mask, and Hei actually having very little power in the areas that matter the most.)
Oh, and there's one specific character whose fights are always flashy and long and dramatic and wouldn't be out of place in a shonen series. Those are the only fights framed that way, with close-ups and slow-mo and a ton of fancy acrobatics. And that character is the only Contractor in the entire show who really seems to enjoy fighting for the sake of fighting- the narrative lingers over and glorifies those because that's what he cares about. (And even then, those fights are never the climax; they all happen halfway through an episode that moves on to other things afterward.)
ohey so I saw this post and does anyone want to hear me talk about Terry Pratchett's use of Deus ex Machina Because I have thoughts about Terry Pratchett's use of deus ex machina.
