gates of ivory and horn

So. Ochou. I think it's been generally agreed that this is the most puzzling arc of the entire anime and I can't disagree. But I think I might have figured it out. YMMV, of course, but here is my theory.

First, the origin of the mononoke itself. Throughout her life Ochou living in such a way as to please her mother by obeying her mother's desires. She wants desperately to be a good daughter, because she loves her mother so much. However, in the process she has tried to ignore her own wants and desires, because these make her a bad daughter -- selfish and disrespectful, placing her needs over that of her mother's. So in her quest to be a good daughter, Ochou has ignored herself and done it so thoroughly that she has "killed" herself by partitioning her true self off so much it is no longer a part of her and leaving behind only a shell, one that can do nothing but obey her mother's desires and later, those of her husband's family.

However, while it is Ochou's guilt over the fact that her desires do not align with her mother's and her need to please her mother that partition herself off, that is not the emotion that merges with the ayakashi to become a mononoke. The emotion that calls to the ayakashi is Ochou's bifurcated self, the part of herself that she hide and denied until it left her entirely -- her desire to be loved for who she is, her desire to kill her family, her entire to just be herself without having to bow to anyone else's whims or wishes. Ochou's true self is faceless because she has never expressed it -- even as a child she was in the process of splitting herself in two and killing one half. The mononoke must use masks in order to be seen, it cannot approach Ochou directly because it is "dead" to Ochou.

Now let's look to what the mononoke does itself during the arc. At first it seems mostly straightforward, but the coda at the end throws everything into disarray -- where did Ochou go? Did time rewind? What the hell just happened? Here is my theory: that everything from the moment Ochou looks out the window onwards was an illusion projected by the mononoke. This, yes, means basically the entirety of the two episodes. ( Consider what happens chronologically -- )


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Jesus fucking Christ I think I threw my retainers away. As in they were wrapped in a napkin and I tossed them along with the rest of the trash from my lunch.

And my orthodontist is in fucking Taiwan.

SHIT.


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Man, I should get better at keeping up with Clarkesworld. The stories there are so amazing. This month both stories deal with the inherent inhumanity of machines, though in very different ways.

The first story, The Mermaids Singing Each to Each, is terribly sad, sadder the more I think about it, but does that thing I've been noticing in Clarkesworld stories and liked so much, which is edging in bits of world-building around the corners of the story, almost like an afterthought -- except with a 4000 word limit you know it's not careless, it's got to be calculated, and it's wonderful. I think my general desire for happy/optimistic endings is influencing my ambivalence towards the story, but that just means YMMV.

I liked the second story, Brief Candle a lot more because there's the sense that a larger story is taking place -- but at the same time the scope of that story as covered in this section is so limited. Sci-fi/fantasy stories frequently have large casts, yet only the lives of a handful are shown in full. So many of the side characters, the nameless characters, are never fleshed out and you know, intellectually, that they must have lives and they must have stories. Brief Candle kind of up-ends that by ignoring the larger story to focus on the small character, the nameless and unseen one. It certainly has a few chilling moments, and I think the 4000 word limit does it a bit of injustice towards the end, but it's still a unique story pulled off with skill.


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Just signed up for Yuletide oh my god. I am so nervous. What if my details are bad? What if they are too vague? Too specific? What if I have messed up and screwed either my writer or myself over in some horribly not-really-all-that-funny-no-really manner? What if I have misjudged my free time and have to default and let down my requestee? What if, what if --

*deep breaths*

I still have time make changes and I still have the Yuletide letter and this is not such a big thing, in the grand scheme of things. I'm cool. Nothing horribly wrong is going to happen. The world will not implode because I made some mistakes in my first year. Yeah. Totally.

...

In other writing news, I am plodding away at the next bit of Contract Theory. It's really one scene, but it's a pretty big one and a fair bit of Stuff Happens during it. Still, I'm going to set a tentative goal of finishing it by the end of the month as I really want to move on -- the parts that come after are a bit fragmented in my head, but they're also the scenes that spawned the whole story in the first place and I'm really looking forward to writing them at last. So, something to look out for?

I've got a couple other ideas rolling around too, one for a bit of Warcraft fanfic and one for a sequel to my SS*BB piece. We'll see how those go; for now, I kind of want to concentrate on Contract Theory but those other ideas are things I want to get written as well, so...we'll see.


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First order of business: this post by halcyonjazz articulates all that is wrong with the whitewashed Prince of Persia that's coming out soon. Not much else for me to say but YES. And also to go read it.

Second order of business: New Year's gift fics. These're New Year's giftfics rather than Yule giftfics mostly because I'll be posting them in early January of next year. This is also partly because I am uncomfortable with stealing the neighbors' wireless while at my relatives' house for winter vacation and not having much internet access did wonders for my productivity last year and I want to see if I can replicate the magic this year.

Anyway, so how this will work is: you give me a prompt and I'll write you a ficbit that's a minimum of 500 words. Prompts are open to --

• Fanfic
  Fandoms include Warcraft, Sakura Gari, Kuroshitsuji, Doctrine of Labyrinths, and maybe Star Trek? If there's another fandom you think I might know enough to write for feel free to ask.
  
  
• Original fic from an existing project
  My only real WIP right now is Contract Theory and I'm going to say no to asking for chapters -- asking for side scenes, however, is totally okay. The same goes for any project I've mentioned before in memes or drabbles or one-shots or started and dropped before.
  
  
• Original fic that's completely new
  Instead of messing with an existing idea, I'll write you a one-shot from scratch! The Original Fic Drabble-thons Round 1 and 2 have some really good examples of prompts that work for this kind of thing.

Despite everything I've just typed, these are meant to be gifts so really take everything above and being more guidelines rather than hard and fast rules. Requesting something I haven't mentioned specifically is totally okay.


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A slightly expanded version of my SS*BB piece is up.

(Check out this post for access.)


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The 21st issue of Shousetsu Bang*Bang is out! This month's theme was Ninjas vs. Pirates. At any rate, the reason I'm posting is to let y'all know that one of the stories is mine and no, I won't say which one. The pseudonyms are half the fun! But I will post my story to DW in one week's time, under lock. *whistles*

Annnnyway, should you decide to check out SS*BB, just be warned that all the stories are going to feature m/m with explicit sexual content -- everything will have a minimum rating of R. More specific warnings than that, I cannot give, having not read all the stories myself.

Also it's nearly one in the morning and my right hand is so cold I can barely feel my fingertips enough to type. Damn you, cold snap! I shake my first in your general direction!


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And it is book sales.

I was doing so well in ignoring this one, too! And then my friend showed up at lunch with her purchases and that was basically the end of my self-control. I left with six books for a total of $42, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. To put what happened in Dungeons & Dragons terms: I walked among the tables and poked at the book stacks laid out so nicely upon them and it was like every d20 I rolled came up a natural 20.

What's doubly frustrating is that I know this is going to just be trouble down the road. I suck so badly at culling my book collection so what the hell am I going to do when the school year ends? It's not like I can just ship them all home and back again! I could feel myself making all these nice, sane, reasonable arguments against going crazy with the book-buying and then ignoring them in favor of the shiny. It's probably a good thing that I don't have the patience to trawl secondhand bookstores very often or I would be doomed.

And while I'm on the subject of kvetching let me also say that the Philip K. Dick novels were a complete rip-off, even discounted. They're so thin! I could read one in three hours, tops! And they cost as much as a book that's twice their length! But I still bought one and the publishers are probably laughing at me as we speak, because I may yet go back to buy another. And maybe a couple for my brother's birthday.

The upshot of it all is that the no-book embargo is now doubly in effect! The only exception I will make all year is for the new Terry Pratchett when the paperback comes out and that. is. it. I swear. No more new books! No more exceptions!

Now if I could only convince myself I meant it.


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Bandwagon! Various people on my flist have done this one, and I am nothing if not easily swayed by the masses. Also it looked interesting?

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Fanfic tag here. I don't write fanfic very often, especially in recent memory, so I'm opening it up to original fic too.


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Yesterday I found out I got into the ~English major~ fuck yes! Seriously I'm really excited about this -- every English class I take makes me more and more certain that that's what I want to study, especially at this university. Plus today my current teacher (who is awesome) told me that the professor of the class I'm thinking of taking next quarter (SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FUCK YES THE SECOND) is awesome and that the class is awesome and omg I'm just, like, doing mental cartwheels. DOUBLE WHAMMY OF JOY!

(Especially because last week I had a dream where I received an e-mail telling me that "We regret to inform you that we decline to accept your application into the English major at this time..." It seems I do not have powers of prophecy after all! WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN.)


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