Eruditorum Press

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“Someone who’s loved you forever”: Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!

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This is the moment where Original Dirty Pair finally lives up to its title.

“Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!” is a very Yuri story. Structurally, it’s extremely reminiscent of the other big stories that have focused specifically on her as a character, namely “The Curse of the Backwoods Murder”, “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” and “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in each of those past adventures, Yuri becomes entangled in a love story that plays out very much akin to stock or cliched Harlequin fare, with Kei becoming the third wheel. Part of Yuri really wants to just completely immerse herself in the romantic atmosphere of it all, because she does have an attraction to that sort of mushy stuff and wouldn’t necessarily mind living a quiet and charmed fairy tale life like that. This time, she falls in with the second son of a notorious mob family involved in a counterfeit operation the girls have been sent in to bust. She goes along with it mostly to keep up her undercover identity and gain access to the family’s printing room, but she pretty clearly has real feelings for the guy too.

In spite of being a deft Miami Vice style “you become your alter ego” sort of plot on top of things, this is largely the archetypical Yuri story. The reason why this is her signature plot is because the girls’ personalities and characterizations are drawn quite explicitly from astrological symbolism, and Yuri is a Piscean. Those born under this sign are said to be romantic dreamers who are infinitely fluid and malleable: They can reshape themselves into any number of different identities, but tend to be most drawn towards roles that allow them to be very expressive, such as art and dance. This makes sense because, if you recall, the Dirty Pair novels are all told from a first person perspective, namely Kei’s. This means Yuri isn’t technically a character, or rather it would be more accurate to say she’s a *diegetic* character and the only things we learn about her are what Kei cares to tell us. In that respect, Yuri really is an ephemeral, intangible being.

However the downside to all this is that Pisceans can get so wistful and so formless they can become totally detached from reality and become lost in their own fantasy worlds they imagine for themselves. And, like clockwork, in each and every one of the stories that has taken care to seriously engage with who Yuri is at a fundamental level, this is depicted as the greatest threat she faces. In “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”, she starts to dream about rekindling a relationship with her childhood friends Thunder and Lucha: Yuri can only view them through rose-tinted and distorted memories of her youth, and imagines running off with them as part of a inauthentic romanticized conception of simple country living.…

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Comics Reviews (November 12th, 2014)

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I liked the “post this as soon as it’s ready” approach last week, so I think I shall make it a regular thing. As ever, ranked from worst to best of the week, with everything being something I voluntarily paid money for…

Captain America #1

If not necessarily deliberately paid money for. This was picked up in a miscommunication (Jill did the comics run today, and mistook my request for Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1 as a request for Captain America #1 and The Mighty Avengers #1, which I submit as an illustration of the sheer number of stupid bars to entry for people who aren’t obsessive about comics purchasing, because really, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to release two comics called Captain America #1 on the same fucking day). In any case, it’s an action sequence with captions that are some of the most cliched “white person writing about black people” ever. It’s heart’s in the right place – the joke about America’s prison system is wonderfully bleak. But it’s… not good, and is in fact that other thing.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1

I’m sure this will be a lovely series once it’s not tying into Axis, but right now it’s exactly nothing I want out of a book called Captain America and the Mighty Avengers. 

Captain Marvel #9

Wonderfully silly one-off space romp with gratuitous rhyming. Good fun. I still don’t feel like I enjoy this book as much as I should, though – it often, as with this issue, feels competent without having any spark. The big cleverness here is the gratuitous rhyming, which is… forced, to say the least. Fun, but inessential.

Thor #2

This really should have been Thor #1, as it’s charming. The use of thought bubbles to convey the new Thor’s uncertainty and self-doubt is delightful, and there’s some good characterization here. I’m still not sure about the “don’t tell us who the main character is” hook, as it makes characterization for her trickier, but this was at least a good, fun Thor comic.

Wytches #2

I love what the book is doing, particularly with its transitions among scenes, but I find the obliqueness challenging. No recap page, no captions telling us what or where a scene is, and Jock’s scratchy art makes it hard to know what’s going on – it took me a couple tries to get that Sailor’s father and uncle were different characters, which made the final scene a challenge. A cast page or a recap page or something would be nice – I completely forget what Lucy’s deal is. But this remains a promising horror comic.

Spider-Verse #1

A collection of shorts. In general, the shorter the better – the one-page Hostess Fruitcakes pastiche and the two-page newspaper comic one were both particularly brilliant. Quite liked Skottie Young’s as well. I continue to really be enjoying this Spider-Verse crossover, and I’m glad I snagged the silly tie-in anthology.

Batgirl #36

There’s some awkwardness at the start – the book’s post-Young Avengers social media aesthetic runs aground with some dodgy pseudo-computer stuff where finding a couple terabytes of storage to use is actually something that requires time and effort.…

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Random Thing #4: Woss Going on ‘Ere Then?

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I have become convinced that the fundamental appeal of the detective story lies in fantasies of autonomy.

Think about it.  What does every detective story have in common?  The hero or heroine who can move as freely as they choose from place to place, doing what they wish according to their own judgements as they make those judgements, managing their own time, roving from person to person conducting interviews, or from scene to scene gathering evidence or perceptions, entirely under their own steam.

Sherlock Holmes hangs around in his rooms until he decides to take a case, whereupon he follows the scent wherever it leads.  He makes money from his cases and doesn’t do any other kind of work.  Poirot similarly – when he isn’t on holiday, that is.  Like Miss Marple, Poirot is retired and financially self-sufficient.  Other classic detectives combine one or more of these traits.  Spade and Marlowe run their own detective agencies.  Some detectives are aristocratic and wealthy, some live off their earnings, but they are all, essentially, either unemployed or self-employed.  Even the police detective characters – Morse, for instance – manages his own time.  He leaves his batchelor home and goes to work, but once on the job he and Lewis perambulate around Oxford as they please, stopping off in pub after pub, etc etc etc.  Most detectives, like Morse, are single.  Some are apparently asexual, some widowed, some divorced, some eternal bachelors, whatever.  But they tend to live alone or with a same-sex buddy like Watson.  The queer dynamic is often there, but usually non-diegetic.  There are detectives with families or busy personal lives – Wexford, Bergerac, etc – but even they leave their domestic or romantic entanglements behind while on a case, and rove around freely instead.  Often, in these days when cop shows have to include loads of dour and gritty stuff about how being a police officer harrows your soul and consumes your relationships, the detectives with family lives are resolutely miserable, those family lives being a catastrophic mess of some kind.  They then leave the mess behind when they zoom off to investigate.  In this case the pleasure of ditching the domestic may be furtive and guilt ridden (the trope of the cop’s wife glowering when he gets a phone call that will take him away from her) but it’s still there.  Called back to work, he doesn’t have to go and sit in an office.  Whatever the fictional copper’s notional complaints about paper work, the body of the story will see him or her cruising from suspect to suspect in a car.  The appeal is of not being tied in some way in which most of us are tied.

The original fictional detectives were a focus of anxiety about transgression of privacy boundaries.  They tended to be eccentric masters of disguise, or common-as-muck policemen who broke into the middle class home to snoop (like Mr Whicher).  The detective story settled into such a popular staple of modern fiction when the detective was transformed from a figure of disconcerting and nosy instinct (i.e.…

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Giants With Leaking Boats For Feet (The Last War in Albion Part 70: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Third Death of Swamp Thing)

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This is the twentienth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fifth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: As a coda to his extended arc about the apocalypse, Moore penned a tale in which Swamp Thing lays siege to Gotham City, causing vegetation to grow wild over the city. The final issue of this story, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” was named after a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
“[Anarchy has] become a kind of shorthand standing for the breakdown of society and order into screaming chaos; into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape populated by looters, berserkers, giants with leaking boats for feet and eggshells for a body.” -Alan Moore, “Fear of a Black Flag”

Figure 527: Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden
of Earthly Delights, closed.
This ambivalence is reflected in the title of this last issue, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is drawn from a triptych painted in the late 15th/early 16th century by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting consists of three distinct panels, following the general convention of the form in that era and moving from a depiction of the Garden of Eden in the leftmost panel and the Last Judgment in the right. The first panel depicts God presenting Eve to Adam, which flows smoothly into the largest panel, the center one, continuing the skyline across the gap so as to give a sense of this image emerging directly from the first one. This center panel depicts the titular garden as a scene of vast, libidinous excess. Nude figures embrace within a transparent globe that is itself the fruit of a plant, birds the size of people frolic in the stream, vast phallic and yonnic towers emerge out of the lake, there are men with heads of fruit, and men riding fantastic beasts, all spilling out across the panel in an overwhelming, breathtaking spectacle of man and nature in seeming harmony. Finally there is the rightmost panel, which breaks from the flow of the skyline, depicting a night scene in hell in which people are inventively and grotesquely tortured. The overall message, at least initially, appears to be an anti-materialist one that considers the earthly delights of the central garden but that ultimately concludes that these delights, which stem out of the original temptation of the flesh in the Garden of Eden, lead only to demonic ruin.
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“Know when to walk away/Know when to run”: And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore

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If there was going to be an episode that caused me any manner of trepidation, it was going to be this one.

Dirty Pair has historically not been good when it comes to gambling or games. Any kind of games: Casino games, card games (unless the Bloody Card is involved), video games, the lot. Despite “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette” being an early highlight of the TV series, “The Vault or the Vote? A Murderous Day for a Speech”, which saddled Kei with a crippling gambling addiction basically for shits and giggles, gets *my* vote for quite possibly the single worst bit of filmed Dirty Pair ever made. Even the first chapter of “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” from The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair bugs me a bit, because Takachiho seems to cluelessly conflate video arcade games with gambling, and as someone who has very fond memories of afternoons spent in such places and for whom video games as a medium became dreadfully important, it left something of a bad taste in my mouth. I know Japan has a much stronger tradition of linking arcades with gambling then the West does, such as in pachinko halls, for example, but it’s still not to my tastes. And of course, there was that terrible, terrible Famicom Disk System game from last year.

So I was a bit nervous to see the trailer for this episode prominently featuring the girls dressed to the nines in a casino, a deeply worried Gooley and Mughi dressed as what appears to be a pallet-swapped Mario. Thankfully, the episode itself turned out to be completely contrary to any expectations I might have had. It really is it’s own thing (indeed, this may well be the episode that codifies what the stylistic tone and general themes of the OVA series are), but if we were to compare it with one of the TV episodes, we wouldn’t liken it to either of the casino or gambling romps, but rather to “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in that story, “And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore” is actually about, at least in part, diegetically and extradiegetically underestimating Kei and Yuri. It leads us along thinking the girls (and in one scene, even Mughi) are going to go badly astray somewhere along the line, building to some embarrassing failure and then just…doesn’t. And, I have to sheepishly admit, I fell for it.

Most of the plot for “And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore” is essentially window dressing for its central joke, but there is a point to the to the high-rolling casino trappings. There are two main threads to unpack here, one of which flags the story’s ultimate resolution and one of which involves the fact Meteo is a game that’s built to be rigged and built to get people addicted. The casino can control where the asteroids land, and thus determine the winner game to game based on their video surveillance of the bets people are placing.…

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A Little Bit of Nip in the Air (The Snowmen)

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Abominable special effects.
It’s December 25th, 2012. Justice Collective are at number one with “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” blocking the X-Factor winner from its traditional Christmas coronation by being a supergroup charity recording for Hillsborough charities, which is basically the sort of thing it’s impossible not to have go to number one. Rihanna, Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, and Psy also chart. 
In the three months since the Angels took Manhattan, Barack Obama took a second term, Hurricane Sandy took out a large swath of the New York/New Jersey coast, and Disney took over the rights to Star Wars. Much more bleakly, the fact that Jimmy Saville was a horrific and serial pedophile who sexually abused hundreds of people came out. Also, Nadine Dorries is suspended from the Conservative Party because she decides to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! She was beaten by, among others, Colin Baker. 
While on television, after our five-week dalliance with the Ponds, the future promised back in Asylum of the Daleks finally fails to arrive again. We’ll tackle the problems and brilliances of the Impossible Girl story over the next season, so there’s not really a rush, but it is worth noting that some of its weaknesses start to appear here. This is by design a false start – the new companion is seemingly introduced and then killed. Unlike in Asylum of the Daleks, this one was billed as the debut of Jenna Coleman. If you paid a lot of attention you could tell there was a ruse, but for the most part, it was a solid bait and switch. Certainly this was necessary for the Impossible Girl arc, not least because without it the headline was “the new companion is a Dalek” and not “the new companion keeps dying.” 
The trouble is, the moment when Clara gets killed is the moment when a tremendously promising and interesting episode goes off the rails. Part of this is unrelated to the plot twist as such – the fact that “a family crying on Christmas Eve” as the only thing powerful enough to stop the snow is grotesquely unearned, for instance, has little to do with killing Clara as such. The real problem is simply that Clara’s death transforms The Snowmen from a relatively self-contained bit of Christmas fairy tale into a teaser for the next season. Which is, of course, always the problem (and brilliance) of the Impossible Girl arc – it constantly erases what’s actually there, replacing it with a mystery about what isn’t. 
So let’s, in effect, simply clip off more or less everything between Clara’s fatal fall and the cemetery scene, allowing this episode to be a tremendously charming Christmas fairy tale with one of the best images in the history of the series in the form of that impossibly tall staircase ascending to the TARDIS on a cloud that closes with a quick teaser to get everyone back in March. The future will come along eventually anyway, so no need to talk about it now.
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“It turned into a pig”: Who Cares If They’re Only Kids!

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Kids are horrible.

One lingering consequence, among many, of the damagingly retrograde social norms of the Victorian age has been an idealization and objectification of children. Drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as the scripture of the New Testament and Rosseau’s notions of the blank slate and social contract, the Victorians reconceptualized childhood (some would say invented and defined it) as a time when human beings are inherently good and innocent, free from the poisonous influence of cynical adult society. What this does, of course, is only facilitate the oppression of children and the removal of their agency, because “The Children” in the monolithic general must be looked after, sheltered and protected. It’s another manifestation of what Lee Edleman calls reproductive futurism, an oppressive ideology where one is shamed out of political agency out of respect for idealized future children.

This project itself is not immune to this reading. I’ve several times used the word “childlike wonder”, though not in ignorance of what I was saying, I might add, and I certainly do have a fixation on children’s literature and people who place heavy emphasis on children’s perspectives, such as Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki. But when I use phrases such as “childlike wonder”, I try to do so with the conceit that such a state of mind would really just be a variety of idealism and cosmic wonder that might come more easily to children than to distracted adults. And the very best children’s literature, in my view, does the exact opposite of sheltering children and forcing them to remain apolitical: It listens to them and gives them an outlet to form their voices and positionalities, and in doing so it helps them grow into better people. That need for respect and dignity in narrative is not limited to children, even if it’s the sort of thing that, for whatever reason, is thought of as strange to afford anyone but children.

Youth and maturity come in different forms and have many different meanings and contextual associations. As I’ve argued before, I’m of the opinion a perspective to strive for in life is a delicate mixture of the two elements: Youthful energy, spirit, drive and idealism with experience, maturity and wisdom. Star Trek: The Next Generation seems to be shaping up to be this sort of thing with the restless, yet worldly, sense of adventure that permeates the show’s worldview. And this is what Kei and Yuri, our evergreen seishun heroines, stand for as well. But here also I’d like to draw a distinction between childlike and childish: This is what the girls are up against in this episode, and they make it perfectly clear their intent is to dispel any outdated myths about the intrinsic goodness of children. Obviously, Kei and Yuri would be against reproductive futurism: Their affinity with Missinie in Affair of Nolandia notwithstanding, kids have not been especially kind to the Lovely Angels over the years, and the implicit shaming that accompanies reproductive futurism is something that affects women in particular.…

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Reverse Racism (‘Into the Dalek’ 2)

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The Doctor learns that he is bigoted because he refused to accept the idea that a Dalek could be good.  Indeed, he hates Daleks so much that the one time he is prepared to even countenance the idea of a good Dalek is when he meets a Dalek which says all Daleks are evil and should die.  So he hates genocidal racists so much that the only member of that race he can think of as good is the one who says that it would be a good idea to exterminate an entire race.  But, of course, that isn’t good.  That’s bad.  That makes you as bad as a Dalek.  Indeed, that’s Dalek-thinking.

Ironic, fairly interesting, and doubtless intentional.

But there’s another interesting irony here, which probably wasn’t intended.

As has been frequently pointed out, SF often falls into the trap of a race essentialism.  Alien races in SF all have the same characteristics.  The same sort of thing is true in Fantasy, and in other forms of storytelling featuring sapient non-humans.  All Vulcans are logical, all Sontarans are militaristic, all House Elves are servile, all Orc are psychopaths, etc.  The problems with this are obvious.  It rests upon a reductionist view of race, society and sentience… not to mention a set of assumptions directly related to biological racism.  But that’s all obvious, and well covered elsewhere.

Back to the unintended little irony in ‘Into the Dalek’… which, to be fair, is more an irony about the Daleks themselves.  No, not the irony of creatures which metaphorically express the evil of racism themselves being based on race essentialism.  I’m not really talking about race here.  I’m talking about politics.

Because, as is also well understood, the Daleks are metaphors for the Nazis.  Actually they hardly even bother being metaphors.

So we wind up in a peculiar situation politcally when we question the idea that there is something wrong with assuming that all Daleks are evil (an assumption that ‘Into the Dalek’ more or less explicitly questions).  We wind up essentialy questioning the idea that all Nazis, all fascists, are bad.  But you see… they are.  By definition.  The DWM review of Timewyrm: Exodus said that Hermann Goering was the closest thing to a nice Nazi (a pretty startling remark if you know anything about the man).  But you can’t have nice Nazis.  You can’t even approach that.  It’s like talking about dry water – if it’s dry, it ain’t water.

We have bumped up against a standard misunderstanding about discrimination.  It isn’t something that can happen to anyone or everyone.  There’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism’, or ‘misandry’ (at least as the term is meant by the crybabies who object to feminism on the basis of their bruised manfeels).  There certainly isn’t any such thing as unfair discrimination against fascists.   That’s why they shouldn’t be allowed on Question Time, no matter how many people vote for them.  You can’t have democratic fascists.  Obviously, therefore, you can’t extend them the boons of democracy. …

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Death in Heaven Review

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Thank you so much to the 171 people on Patreon who made these reviews possible. It’s not been the easiest past two months, and this has been an absolutely huge help. Come Christmas, I’ll be back with one more review, and a season wrap-up, and then a bit after that I’ll have something or other about future uses of Patreon, as it’s been rather lovely, frankly. So thank you very much. This has been a wonderful bit of fun. 

Well here we are, for one last round before, you know, the next round. Twitter is a somewhat mixed reaction. GallifreyBase has 71.65% on 8-10, with 34.62% of those tens. Me? I loved it. 
It’s ostentatious as hell. It builds on Moffat’s previous tricks in so many interesting ways. You can accurately describe it as “the Doctor Who version of His Last Vow” or as “Eric Saward done right,” it’s got the first companion departure to top Doomsday (Donna is disqualified for the horrific consent violation involved), and it manages an entirely different take on the phrase “tomb of the Cybermen” than the one we had last week. It frames that perfectly, with Clara and the Doctor having the exact inverse of the conversation Clara was trying to have with Danny at the beginning. It’s the Master as an evil River Song, while Clara plays out Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead with Danny in River’s role. It’s as perfectly timed for Remembrance Sunday as Deep Breath was for the sunset. Clara applies the moral legitimacy she earned in Kill the Moon to the question of granting her boyfriend’s request for assisted suicide. The opening credits recycle the trick from the sixth episode of Jekyll. Clara’s an adult Linda. The fucking Brigadier. Moffat, a writer whose work is defined by narrative substitutions, plays it completely straight while doing weird inversions of everything else around him while telling a more or less straightforward point A to point B story over ninety minutes. 
It works. There are plot holes. I identified several in the immediate aftermath. On a second pass, all of them have, at the very least, a line of dialogue. Yes, Missy’s entire reason for bringing the Doctor and Clara together and intervening in their timestreams to keep them together was that Clara would eventually lead the Doctor to try to rescue a loved one out of heaven. It’s a scheme by the Master, what did you expect, sanity? The Doctor probably could have commanded the army to self-destruct, but he recognized that Danny was the right person to do it. They’re not always satisfying payoffs, though for the most part, they’re as satisfying as they need to be for the amount the show built them up – if fans inflated the minor mysteries further, that’s their problem.
And when anything falters, it’s willing to get through on sheer bravado. Moffat returned to the two-parter on the back of Sherlock, and built one with a corker of a cliffhanger.
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Outside the Government 20: Wizards vs Aliens

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One of my favorite moments in About Time, a book series I don’t get to talk about much anymore having long since gotten ahead of them, is in its critique of The Sensorites, a story that is wrongly, if understandably, unloved. Miles and Wood open by saying, “Opinion is divided over this: the common reaction is ‘why?’, but the correct answer is ‘awww… bless’.” Which pretty much sums up not only The Sensorites but Wizards vs Aliens, a strong contender for the single most heartwarming origin story of any television series ever.
Following the death of Lis Sladen, Russell T Davies didn’t want the Sarah Jane Adventures production team to be out of work. He also didn’t want the BBC to abandon production of children’s drama. And so he came up with a suitably high concept series that he could oversee from a distance (much as he had Sarah Jane Adventures), this time while caring for his partner, whose diagnosis with a brain tumor led to Davies’s abandonment of his “break out in America” plan. 
It is, to be fair, a good premise. The start of the first episode, which begins with a standard sort of “pagans chanting in a stone circle” thing, goes far enough to confirm that magic is real, then drops a spaceship onto the stone circle and has the wizards abducted by aliens who triumphantly proclaim that they have come for Earth’s magic, is a triumph of mashing up genres. Really, the entire idea is long on cleverness – what’s basically a Harry Potter knockoff gets invaded by what are basically the default setting of Doctor Who aliens. The tropes of each, unsurprisingly, prove good fits for one another. Davies is well aware that the types of stories you can tell with fantasy and science fiction are basically the same, and is slyly taking advantage of the supposed distinctions between the two iconographies to make a decent playground.
And it does. It’s a clever hook, and while Davies’s suggestion that it could run for ten years is almost certainly over-optimistic, it’s not a huge surprise that this is currently on its third season. It fills the same role that The Sarah Jane Adventures did of providing good, classic, and well-made children’s television. It’s got much of the same commitment to diversity, making the extremely good decision to have Benny, the nerd character, be played by a black man. Although to be honest, its commitment to diversity is visibly weaker than that of The Sarah Jane Adventures. There’s no equivalent character to Maria or Rani, and instead we’re generally using the two boys setup of Merlin, only with clear analogues of Clyde and Luke in the leads.
But on the whole, this is a loving and full-throated homage to the classic tradition of British children’s television. And, in turn, a celebration of the classic tradition of British children’s literature, which, fair enough. If you’re making a list of things the UK can legitimately have a sense of national pride in, its legacy of children’s fiction is absolutely something that should be on that list.
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