I'm still alive. Mostly on tumblr, and using the Mamiina icon because my tumblr now has a Mamiina url. In grad school.

I've come to realise that as of a couple of days ago I've been Officially On The Internet for five years.

Hum.

I have to say, it's really hard to write a hard-boiled cop who's been wrongfully imprisoned without using profanity. It's two grown women, a preverbal infant, and sometimes a guard or two, but it still just feels weird to have swearing in a fic for this show, so I've been avoiding it as hard as I can.

Does anybody else like Kate Bush? I've kind of been falling in love recently.

Title: Endless
Fandom: Simoun
Wordcount: 3,544
Characters/pairings: Yun, Plumbish Military Governor, postmortem Rodoreamon/Mamiina, mentions of the rest of the cast.
Summary: Through more wars and more crafts and assaults, the Keeper of the Spring remains as she is. But even that which never changes must react, sometimes, to that which does.
Warnings: Mentions of massacre and children as collateral damage, implied suicidal ideation. Religion. Lots of angst. Spoilers for the whole series.
Notes: A few references to the OP and ED titles, and to Nazuka Kaori's written thoughts on the series, at the end. Thanks to the tracks for being called what they're called and to Nazuka for being Nazuka.

( When the announcement goes up that the Argentine government will be recalling its contingent of the occupation force from the capital she is twenty-one years and eleven months old, and looks the same as she did at sixteen and nine. She was too busy, too wrapped up in the world of the dead and living light, too eternally there (as opposed to anywhere, and not elsewhere, as she had once thought), to have done much to prevent it; it had happened before and by Tempus Spatium it would happen again.Collapse )

I really want to make a parody of the original Dirty Harry poster with Lin. But I'm no good at digital art. What do.

Also, Asami is a badass Margaret Burton with electricity and kung fu instead of reality warping (and a father who was not in fact brainwashed). So not really much like Margaret at all. Or she's Margaret and Elenore's daughter. That works too.

Speaking of which, 'Also, Lin's dad is Azula. It's really complicated.' I JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT THIS A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO. lizbee, sorry if it's a silly question, but were you aware of this?

Oh Jesus.

First of all, I've obviously been incredibly busy.

I finished my junior year of college (three semesters left because my major's requirements are more stringent than those of the university). I got Dean's List honours this term as well as last and a 3.65 GPA, which, I should point out, is considered remarkable in my major. Just finishing the UMass Japanese programme, assuming I do, is considered a minor feat of strength; I was surprised to learn how highly we're apparently regarded in my field. Anyway, more importantly, I firmed up some friendships this semester too. I had a fight with a friend on the weekend of Easter, which was also my birthday and Anime Boston, but that seems to have, finally, been resolved. I've been on various reading and watching binges. As one would expect I'm neck-deep in Korra right now and have outstanding commitments for various reasons to Heartcatch Precure, The Twelve Kingdoms, and Natsume Yuujin-chou.

I have an entirely unreasonable if not outright alarming degree of FEELINGS about The Prague Cemetery, mostly because it's genuinely terrifying. I had a perhaps more to be expected set about Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which made me absolutely bawl.

I was also elected to public office! I'm a member of the Town Meeting of Amherst, Massachusetts, a quaint form of local government used in New England. I'm one of 246 members and I was pretty involved in some controversial zoning votes (our side won in that the terrible development ideas that we were being presented with won't go through this year; we won only by a few votes!). I can talk more about what these controversies were and what the experience in general has been like in the comments if anybody is interested.

A week ago from the day that it now technically is on my side of the International Date Line I was finally officially confirmed in the Episcopal Church. It was the last set of confirmations for Bishop Scruton, whom I'm going to miss a lot. I'm not sure what I think of his potential successors, on whom we have not yet voted.

This summer I'm going to spend some time in Amherst with my friends and also at home with my family, doing a lot of gardening actually. A few weeks ago I finished, at long, long last, the writing project I'd been working on for two and a half years, and I've got something new going on! I've also been working on translating from a Noir artbook that I got at Anime Boston.

I also have a tumblr now!


I'm so sorry about my prolonged absence! How has everybody been?

Everything is Korra and nothing hurts, except homework which I have a lot of because classes resume in about twenty-eight hours.

More thoughts forthcoming at some point.

(I LOVE LIN. AND TENZIN'S ENTIRE FAMILY.)

I'm sorry I haven't really been saying or doing much on here of late! I'm extremely busy.

In other news, I have no idea how to finish a question when none of the examples had a remotely similar sentence structure, film at eleven.

I'm really burnt out tonight. As long as I finish everything I'll do just fine, but that doesn't really help when the problem is that I'm being assigned some of the most unbelievably time-consuming language work imaginable to pound into my head things like the fact that 'koto ni natteiru' indicates a socially imposed demand but 'koto ni natta' indicates a necessity imposed by some specified or unspecified outside force. I'm grateful for it, but I'm getting deep muscle pain and have no idea why even though I have no other symptoms of illness and I'm starting to find it hard to confine my thoughts to one language.

Taitei, watakushi no kangae between English and Japanese wo ukimasu kara, chotto taihen na language usage wo tsukai, tomodachi ni confused saserareteshimaimasu. And yes that is a reasonable example of how my thoughts sound these days.

There's a lot of so-bad-it's-amazing yuri in the winter anime season, and I've been falling ever deeper in love with the church I've been going to the past year and a half or so as I move towards confirmation and possibly even postulancy (!).

What's been going on with you guys?

I am back at my university!

On Tuesday, I start Japanese Popular Culture, Spiritual Autobiography, and Introduction to LGBTQ Affairs! (I start Intensive Intermediate Japanese II to-morrow but that's a given.) I'm sorry I've not been much in evidence of late.

Despite some trepidation about my new Japanese textbook and the fact that the LGBTQ class will very probably end up quite tendentious and argumentative, I have to say I am looking forward to this semester.

Hit me with LGBTQ-studies stuff. I want to get into this~

What are our thoughts on Magic Knight Rayearth?

What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?
Improved my Japanese; went to a French-speaking country; went to the Deep South; volunteered to be a Lay Eucharistic Visitor (but wasn't needed to do it).

Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I made any resolutions last year. My resolution for this year is for 2012 to be substantively similar to the last five months or so of 2011.

Did anyone close to you give birth?
No.

Did anyone close to you die?
No.

What places did you visit?
New York, Boston, Alabama, Quebec, and Cape Cod (i.e. my family), in that order! On the way to Quebec I also passed through Vermont, where I grew up. Quebec was brilliant and I would love to go back.

( More under cutCollapse )

Everybody.

THERE IS AN EDITION OF THE BIBLE ILLUSTRATED BY SALVADOR DALI.

I now know what my life has been lacking all this time. Hint 1: It's not sex. Hint 2: I mention it in this very post.

Merry Christmas!

Since I'm in a somewhat pensive and thoughtful mood I'll link to this Umberto Eco essay about Christmas (it's unfortunate that the essay is in a right-wing British rag like the Telegraph, especially considering that Eco is firmly in the mainline [culturally-]Christian-Socialist centre-left of Italian politics himself). I'm having A Very Postmodern Christmas anyway, since I got AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF THE PRAGUE CEMETERY, a Vienna Teng album, a Warren Zevon album, and a book of bloodbath-y lesbian historical stories by Yoshiya Nobuko (among other things), as well as playing with my young cousins and their new kittens and tending my aunt and uncle's fireplace.

I've been on Cape Cod for two days now and I'm remembering how much I love being here and how it was silly of me not to visit my aunt's house for two and a half years. Things are less hectic than they were yesterday, obviously. Some of my cousins have drifted off from then. Over the past few days I've seen the end of Penguindrum and been to a church in South Yarmouth that I hadn't been to before, which were worryingly not-dissimilar experiences. I have a specific, minor-to-moderate problem with Penguindrum, which to people who have seen it and know me well should not be surprising, but given who made the show I'm more than willing to assume a good-faith dropping of the ball; it's definitely up there with Madoka, Eden of the East, and Spice and Wolf among the best television anime of the past few years.

The church was nice. It's St David's, a Cape-style building with mostly unpainted wood architecture and designs. The service was mostly fairly standard, old-ish Christmas fare; it wasn't quite as lovely as Lessons and Carols at Grace in Amherst with its mediaeval and baroque focus was. I guess I'd go again if I find myself again on Cape Cod on a holiday or important Sunday.

My uncle's dog is Galactus, and the new cats in my family are adorable.

How was everybody else's holiday?

I'm enjoying Kajiura Yuki's ongoing years-long musical exploration of her (or someone's close to her, or somebody whose perspective she's trying to compose from) spiritually-violent-seeming inner life. I'm not sure if I'm justified in reading a conversion experience into some of these Kalafina lyrics she's been coming out with the past few years or if she always had these traits and they're just becoming more pronounced artistically. Whatever it is, I like it.

So I have made a thread at the holiday love meme which you should all use to make me happy~

Speaking of things that make me happy, SOMEBODY DID 'PUELLA MAGI AMELIA MAGICA' FANART. 'Puella Magi Amelia Magica', for those of you who don't know or remember it, is a very short Doctor Who/Puella Magi Madoka Magica crossover oneshot that biichan made me write. I forget how long it took me to write but it couldn't have been more than an hour or so, since the elapsed time between 'Dare you to write it.' and 'Fic: Puella Magi Amelia Magica' seems to have been about eighty-two minutes. And somebody did fanart for this. AND CALLED ME TALENTED EVEN THOUGH SHE'S MORE TALENTED THAN I AM AND I WAS A FAN OF HER 'WOMEN OF JAPANESE HORROR' SERIES EVEN BEFORE THIS.

Ahem. Sorry. It's just that I feel appreciated.

Speaking of Madoka and Doctor Who, you all need to watch this:



'I am the Doctor' is the best song ever written. It is the 'Veni, Creator Spiritus' of our generation, you cannot deny.

Also I watched Madoka and Noir with my friends from the Philosophy Club, of all clubs, recently, and they loved them. One of my friends insisted on reading Kyouko's lines out loud in a Brooklyn accent.

Should I get a tumblr?

SO MANY FINAL PROJECTS

How is everybody?

Pick a number and I will talk about:

01. My sexual orientation.
02. What I'm really bad at.
03. The one person whose arms I'd like to be in.
04. My best first date.
05. A description of my self-esteem.
06. Who my best friends are.
07. My favourite book.
08. Biggest turn-offs.
09. A description of my best friend.
10. My favourite animal.
11. Someone I miss.
12. The reason behind my last break-up.
13. What I did yesterday.
14. My greatest achievements.
15. My favourite songs right now.
16. A description of my last kiss.
17. What I find attractive.
18. All of the pets I've ever owned.
19. My favourite ice cream flavour.
20. The one place I wish I was right now.
21. The most cruel thing anyone has ever said to me.
22. All of the places I've lived.
23. Qualities that make me more likely to love a person.
24. My future plans.
25. One of my internal conflicts.
26. What I'm doing tomorrow.
27. My life's aspirations.
28. My most embarrassing moment.
29. Two of my insecurities.
30. What I would do if I won the lottery.
31. What I love most about myself.
32. My biggest pet peeves.
33. What musical artists I've seen live.
34. How many kids I would like to have.
35. My idea of a perfect date.
36. What I'm really excellent at.
37. My most traumatic experience.
38. Where I would like to live.
39. The nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
40. Whether I like where I live now.
41. What I can hear right now.
42. My relationship with my siblings.
43. What's currently worrying me the most.
44. Something I've repeatedly wished for.
45. My relationship with my parents.
46. What I dislike most about myself.

Watching Simoun, one of the characters one will come across is Yun, who among most people who have seen the show seems to engender a tremendous amount of affection and respect. It's interesting that this should be the case for a character who was created essentially to plug a gap in a minor aspect of the plot of an early episode and ended up with a storyline most of which was intended for somebody else (which is lucky, since if Rodoreamon had in fact ended up with what became Yun's storyline as well as what became her own she probably would have to an extent dominated the show). It's especially interesting for a person whose decision-making process, one of the things that people seem to admire the most about her, is so removed from normal modern Western secular sane-person standards.

People have referred to Yun as deontologically inclined, which makes a certain degree of sense; she definitely believes in absolute moral laws and attempts to act accordingly, and spends a lot of the show in the classic deontological despair of conflicting absolutes (pacifism versus remembrance of and respect for the dead). The problem is that while it may correlate closely to this, formal deontological conceptions are almost certainly not why Yun cares. If one asked Yun (and Yun is smart, probably the smartest character in the show other than Dominura and maybe Limone when she's older) she would probably articulate some form of Divine-command morality and describe her watchword as whatever equivalent her religion has of the Christian concept of 'grace' (and there is very obviously an equivalent there that informs what she does).

This becomes deontological in practise, because Yun unlike many of the other characters is entirely willing and indeed eager to take her faith's strictures seriously and follow them to their end points, regardless of convenience. It is meet and right to pay respects to those who died in the service of God, so she opposes what she sees as the desecration of the corpse of a religious suicide bomber from an enemy country. Even so, even if one can forgive and pay respects to the people involved, violence, battle, and murder are always wrong, so her ideal end for the war in which she is fighting in order to pay respects to her dead friends does not involve her own happiness--indeed, it involves her death, which she sees as the only natural or acceptable outcome. She believes so strongly in her religion's eschatological concept, the Eternal Maiden, that when she happens upon a person who has tried to embody the Eternal Maiden, failed, and undergone severe punishment for it, she completely accepts her, completely forgives her, and tells her that she is beautiful before taking on that role for herself. Not even the existing fact that this eschaton has fallen and pursuing it in this particular way (other characters pursue the same ideal with greater success) leads to theoretically endless suffering will prevent Yun from admiring, loving, and wanting to save and forgive and free a person who has striven for what she believes is the right end to the world.

To an extent there are elements of conscious performance in Yun's behaviour: It's more than possible that she sees herself not so much as an agent as an instrument by which an Agent works in the world. Divine commands for her work on a partially reciprocal basis: Yearning for death as the natural end of remembering the already-dead, taking on the liminal role of the failed, 'stuck' Eternal Maiden as appropriation of her predecessor's failure, accepting the proprietorship of the relics of a transcendent martyr to symbolise the incompleteness and loneliness of her own martyrhood and to accept a role as a bridge between the world or the real (Rodoreamon, who is still alive and takes a position of what seems to be political power--interestingly, this is technically under Yun, though I cannot imagine Yun being particularly active as a temporal theocrat) and the otherworld or the superreal (Mamiina, and the braid that seems to dissolve into or fuse with the sacred water and light of the Blue Spring). It is undeniable that to an extent, in some ways a very great one, Yun is a fanatic and, indeed, a fundamentalist--but she knows exactly what faith, horrific and necessary, demands of her, in her complete lack of complacency with herself. She tries for quite some time to put up a complete cordon sanitaire between herself and the world, which she is most comfortable dealing with in the abstract. Even her grammar is deliberately rough and shocking. In the end this falls. Since she is able to do the will of her God and change the world even if only in small ways (see icon keyword), she finally finds a place where she can be.

For the truly faithful, for the truly fanatical in the sense of carrying Divine love into the world regardless of the cost or situation, that's balm of Gilead enough for a renewed eternity of aching.

Should I do Yun meta?

Here is a meme!

I love living here.