Tagged: Fantasy
“I CAST FIST” – It’s Rune Soldier Louie (And Some Other Fantasy Anime)
![[Exiled-Destiny]_Rune_Soldier_Ep14_(398F6B67).mkv_snapshot_17.24_[2019.03.18_00.08.52]](https://ideaswithoutend.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/exiled-destiny_rune_soldier_ep14_398f6b67.mkv_snapshot_17.24_2019.03.18_00.08.52.jpg?w=830)
There are quite a few comedy fantasy anime in the vein of The Slayers and, unfortunately, most of them are varying degrees of quite sexist. Even The Slayers has some episodes that really don’t hold up as very good, although it also has some extremely funny episodes and some action scenes that work quite well. There are certain tropes that come through in a number of the series in this vein that, depending on execution, feel a little awkward; lots of cross-dressing, lots of jokes where the punchline is pretty much “man tries to spy on woman and gets punched” and so on. The execution varies for better or worse, but nevertheless it seems this sort of adolescent humour is a recurring theme and it’s wholly understandable that that might not appeal to people so much. Konosuba goes perhaps even further by having a masochist-fetish defender and various other more direct sex jokes.
Short Story – Gardes
I have been reconsidering what can be done with lost-world and ancient civilisation narratives. And I realised that an imagined setting I was working on, of a magical school in an ultimately colonial age, could stand to be shaken up a little.
Thus I wrote this, about an emissary of a lost civilisation making his existence known to the world. It is a direct sequel to Lunch at the Real…
Short Story – Lunch at the Real
The inspiration for this story came from the aesthetics of Dishonored 2, which took steampunk and industrial fantasy into the Mediterranean; there was a lot to like about this, and I simply ran with the inspiration it invited into a magic-school setting.
“I Am Unreasonable Mad About This Stupid Show” – Twitter User @R042 on Record of Grancrest War
It is hard to easily express in which ways Grancrest War is bad; it is, in my opinion, such a combination of failed attempts to be interesting it ends up a singular kind of ridiculously uninspiring. Even trying to consider it from within its genre, a teen-focused power fantasy series, it feels alienatingly stupid. When writing about anime it is often easy to forget that much of it is written as mass entertainment for young people, and that approaching it with the expectations of an adult fandom is rarely fruitful. So anything that seems alienating and other may simply be something that an older audience are out of touch with, a reflection of, ultimately, a foreign country’s trends in youth culture. That is as maybe; I maintain Record of Grancrest War is still not very good.
Short Story – “The Prince’s Dog”
I often find myself returning to the themes of the gothic novel; I find their ideas of power abused and stifling social traditions forcing tragedy upon the innocent fascinating. I think those themes offer a far more interesting avenue for dark fantasy than miserablism and sociopathy; arguing from the position that everyone is compromised and base is less interesting than taking the stance that evil can come from within, from the inability to understand the desires and freedoms of others.
Thus I wrote this, a gradual destruction of a past friendship that itself was not what it seemed.
Some Thoughts on Play, Acting and Magic in Eccentric Family 2
At the start of episode 4 of Eccentric Family 2, there is a straightforward summation of one of its morals; “the transformation… is strongly connected to the idea of freedom.” Tanuki lose their powers in captivity. In its own way this becomes a sort of freedom, a kind of mythic superiority over humans; tanuki play at changing roles even when unable to change shape to make a game of being zoo animals. The idea of zoos in an urban fantasy world is not one that I believe much media in the genre considers; fantastical creatures existing within a modern urban society must contend with modern attitudes of animals in captivity, and ultimately a talking animal is something ordinarily non-sapient granted humanlike sapience.
Short Story: “A Reunion (Homage to Anne Radcliffe)”
I wrote this piece for an online writing group I joined, with the prompt of writing about the reunion of two old friends.
At the moment I am reading The Mysteries of Udolpho and its beautiful prose voice and Radcliffe’s ability to write painterly landscapes and pastoral scenes proved a great inspiration for this piece.
Short Story – The After-Dinner Speech Given at the Fourteenth Annual Superior’s Club Banquet
Recently I have got very into the wargame Horizon Wars, and as part of this focused on devising background for my army. I tied it into my recent Trails of Cold Steel inspired fiction, about the science-fiction / fantasy Habsburg Empire analogue, the Double Nations of Prenzer.
Now I am beginning to populate Prenzer with named characters, who will take roles in wargames played in the setting – first was Andrew Jackson, the Lawrence of Arabia-esque tanker who featured in a few of my short stories, and now there is Prince Matthias Valon – a fighter-ace, the son of the Archduke of Prenzer and an all-around rogue and playboy.
This story owes much to the excellent novel Winged Victory for giving me a tone to aspire to in writing about the pioneers of air combat, but equally much to the Trails games for their character Olivert…
Short Story – The Hall of Armour
My relationship with the “grimdark” is troubled; I dislike the conflation of pragmatism and necessary evil with realism, the belief that something gains value in its pessimism about human nature. On the other hand I greatly like explorations of villainy, entrenched evil and indeed the maintenance of an “evil empire” of the sort genre fiction loves. Not, per se, a world where there is no good and goodness is doomed to fail – but a world where there is evil, and people live it by choice or by inability to escape.
I have recently been reading the Locke Lamora novels; they depict a truly grotesque world of the excess of the rich from the perspective of a criminal determined to bring them down. Ordinarily the excesses of, say, the second novel’s Amusement Wars (a gladiatorial games de trop) would have been the thing to turn me away from the novels – but rather than being presented as some logical gritty endpoint giving credibility to the world they are shown as a sick, contemptible display of excess.
Setting this in the context of other “dark” media I have enjoyed far more than I expected to – the lore of the Dark Souls games and the unashamedly trashy steampunk zombie slasher Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress drove me to try and write my own depiction of some hopeless world ruled by a perverse logic. I applied it to super-robot fiction, by means of the “serious” pragmatism of the hardline ace squadron. In my previous story Achelois I covered similar ground in a science-fiction setting, so this is in many ways another take on the idea of a look within the paranoid, unpleasant life of a super-robot villain group.
Kiznaiver: Not All Media Is Made For Me
Four episodes into Kiznaiver it seems a show exceptionally well-pitched for a target audience I am not a part of; it is a series which has a very strongly put across moral message universal in its importance, but expressed in a way that does not satisfy me. The premise is simple and potentially interesting; a group of misfit children, claimed to embody a “new seven deadly sins”, are abducted and given an experimental treatment whereby they all share each others’ pain; whenever one is hurt, they all feel it. From here a conspiracy plot builds, regarding who has done this and why.
Ideas Without End 