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Twelve Kingdoms 23-26
Ep. 23
--I had this brief passing worry that I would be bored by story not involving Yoko or Taiki. I am no longer worried! All of Ono's story is good story.
--Wow, no wonder Suzu/Mokurin was so frantic when she met Taiki! I absolutely feel sorry for her. Life as a kaiyakyu is rough, and even worse if you don't turn out to be a taika and a king or a kirin. She'd even had three whole sucky years of being unable to adapt to her new world before she plunged into a century of degradation as the eternal servant of an eternal mistress who keeps her around just to torment. Suzu's life in Japan sucked, but her life in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms actually sucks worse.
--Two generations of failed kings? No wonder the revolutionaries killed poor, dying Hourin. Given that kirin do not, apparently, get any leeway in choosing their kings, it seems kinda harsh, but I suspect Hourin might have appreciated it, by that point. I think kirin suffer a lot with bad kings, and I don't just mean the shitsudou.
I also pity Shoukei/Gyokyuyou, the former princess of Hou. I won't say she was entirely innocent in the crimes committed by her royal family--they obviously sheltered her from it--but she doesn't appear to have been curious at all about the daily lives of the citizens that her father ruled over in ever-more tyrannical fashion for three decades, or the palace folk that her mother terrorized and murdered, and that's a kind of naivete that can't be easily forgiven in someone her age. (Although, it's unclear how children who become immortal as Sennin grow--do they age mentally and emotionally, even though they're frozen physically? Is Shoukei's innocence only a product of her royal sheltering, or also the byproduct of this mechanism of immortality? It's hard to tell.)
One understands what prompted the citizens of Hou to rise up and slaughter the king and queen and the rest of the standing regime (three hundred thousand people dead in just ONE year? In the life of a king who's immortal until his insanity destroys his kirin? God.) The rage and terror and bone-deep desire for revolution that arise in the wake of governmentally-inflicted mass murder don't tend to leave much room for mercy. Shorei was incredibly blessed to have been merely demoted to humanity and left in the care of an orphanage, given the crimes her parents committed (some even in her name, if not with her knowledge or blessing).
Ep. 24
--Rakushun and Enki and En show up for Yoko's coronation. Yay! Continued court drama, and it's very serious, very ambiguous drama, too--the one provincial general of Kei who did not bow to the false queen is accused of treason, and it's unclear whether he refused to bow to her because he believed she was false, or because he was making a play for the throne. Obviously, it's important to figure out which, but Yoko is still feeling out the territory, and this is a court full of ambitious, scheming people who have been pretty much accustomed to ruling the country themselves for the past decade or so, so it's not easy to clear things up.
--Frivolously, I must say that Yoko looks awesome in her coronation robes. I think her court is driving her nuts--maybe she should go take a nap in one of the thirty-two houses given to her by HEAVEN--but she's still game. Confused, annoyed, and frustrated, but game. You rock, Yoko.
Man, this ruling thing is tough. I am so glad I'm not a king--I don't think I'd be suited for it at all.
--Yoko talks to En about the court drama, and among other things, he tells her that a ruler will never be rewarded for honesty if they say they're agonizing over something--true, that--and so to present a front of certainty at all times. (I think I agree. As dramatically interesting as I find it to consider the personal agony of a person in authority, a la The West Wing and like things, as a citizen, I prefer a show of decisiveness. I am willing to assume that authorities arrive at decisions by a process of due consideration, but I feel more confident in their leadership when they appear to have their act together enough to make a public stance and stick with it.)
En says that difficult decisions keep his life interesting, and without them, he might be tempted to ruin his kingdom. During this speech, Enki comes up behind him and looks seriously at him, and En pauses a moment, gazing out of the corner of his eye at his Taiho before he continues. Nice. Enki would not approve of En ruining the kingdom just because he was bored. He might smack him! En and Enki smack each other often. I find this cute.
--Suzu is kind of Yoko's pathetic shadow--a Yoko if Yoko wasn't a taika.
But a little delusional. A hundred years of misery and all; perspective and rationality are not to be expected.
--Shoukei is also kinda delusional, apparently. And her priorities to me are weird. I can't help but think: if you can muster the will to start a quest to dethrone a seated king who has the will of heaven backing her, couldn't you also muster the will to improve your personal situation to better than "orphan #3 in an an orphanage where the headmistress really hates your guts because the king your father had her son executed on a minor charge"? Maybe you could even become a sennin again, since growing older seems to freak you out. It's got to be easier than killing a king. Most things are.
--"At the time, Yoko thought she had made her first independent decision." Awwwwwww the wording of that makes me think that this is going to lead to DOOM down the line. Like the DOOM that we are hinted happened after Keiki gave some more bad advice to Taiki. This must be Keiki's fault somehow! Doom follows him around like a puppy.
Ep. 25
Shoukei is really not adjusting well to peasant life. Although I imagine some of it's just in response to losing her entire life and ending up at the bottom of the trash heap in the orphanage, but her sneering in response to the overtures of friendship from a fellow orphan are rapidly sapping my sympathy for her. She wasn't in control of her life before, and she's not in control of it now, but she's not ignorant any more; she can make choices about how to act, how to respond to the people around her. And I don't like her choices.
Randomly, I suddenly wondered how Hourin managed to pick two whole generations of awful kings without shitsudou coming sooner. She was dying of it by the time they killed her, but either the previous king can't have been as bad as this one--whose mass killings probably register somewhere at the Pol Pot level--or the previous king killed him/herself when shitsudou set in. And then Hourin got to do it all over again! Sucks to be her. Sucked at least as much and maybe more to be one of the tens of thousands of peasants who were brutally oppressed or murdered, though. Which is worse, unbearable suffering and helplessness, or unbearable suffering and guilt?
--I suspect Shoukei and Suzu are shaping up to be primo stalkers for Yoko. Centering freaky love/revenge fantasies around a famous woman they've never met? Check and check. Well hey, now that Yuka is back in Japan, acting like a rational human being, someone's got to run around after Yoko and scream at her and try to kill her over wrongs that exist entirely in their own head.
Gosh almighty, their lives certainly do suck. The populist revolutionary politics of Shoukei's story in particular are kind of horrifyingly captivating in all kinds of ways. When the revolution came, Shoukei was like, second up against the wall, except that for narrative purposes, she didn't get shot. She probably didn't deserve to get shot.
--Back to Yoko: Uikyou's all-black doll eyes freak me out. I keep thinking she's evil.
So there's normally gender parity in this world? Yoko instantly makes the connection between the equality of the sexes and the fact that women don't give birth (as babies do grow on trees here). Nice touch.
Oh hey. Uikyou's evil. What did I say? Huh? Huh? Yeah. Also, wow, that was dramatic, and I love the art in this anime.
Ep. 26
--The court politics in Yoko's country are kinda even worse than we thought.
--Drama! Between Yoko and Keiki! I've noticed that Keiki kinda always seems to be putting his foot in it.
--Have I mentioned how cool/weird/terrifying it is that when the cute little girl who tried to befriend Shoukei found out who Shoukei was, she went and rallied the local populace for a mob beating? Like I said, populist revolutionary politics, horrifyingly captivating. People just get so cranky when you have their mother brutally murdered in a field for taking time off work to nurse their sick children.
--Christ, they're going to kill her in a horrible way. While explaining to her that her father had their wife/friend/relative murdered in the same manner for breaking some minor and ridiculous law. Terrifying. Captivating. Soul-killing. I hope I die before I ever lose myself to revenge enough to want to see someone torn apart in front of me.
Is this Shoukei's dehumanizing ordeal? Like the one that Yoko went through? Is Shoukei gonna come out of this a better human being? Or is she just going to be whittled away fragment by fragment, until nothing is left but a fleshless, bony monster? With Ono, it feels like it could go either way.
Why the hell didn't Lord Kei just kill Shoukei? It might have been more merciful, and it certainly seems like it would have been simpler, since she's a lightening rod for trouble.
--Yuzu made a tiger fly! Awesome~
--"I'm always afraid of what others will say. I'm afraid to hear the sighs from Keiki, and the ministers...so I look for the answer that will please everyone."
Dude, maybe you SHOULD outlaw sighing with your first proclamation! But anyway, I dig that Yoko is still grappling with her lifelong issues with regards to compromising herself for her need to please other people all the time. The habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and the neuroses of a lifetime harder still. Her ordeal gave her the desire and the tools to do that, but she still has to work at it. Ono. Your brain? I love it.
--Yoko thinks that her court is just like her high school. Hee.
--The lord of Kei: "I could not wait until the heavens punished him." Means something kinda different in a world where the heavens overtly intrude upon the affairs of mortals. I think I like him.
Why doesn't he just toss Shoukei in a prison to rot, though? Mercy, again? He won't damn her just because she disgusts him? Quite the visionary--he's a revolutionary and a saint all in one. I hope he doesn't come to a bad end.
"Everyone was just jealous of me!" Hah hah NO. They just didn't want to let your dad and mom keep slaughtering them. You have miles and miles to go before you are a real person.
"Even I used to love that song of hers,"--that song, which was the symbol of innocence and purity. Oh, so that's why he didn't have her up against the wall when the revolution came! Seriously, I was wondering.
Shoukei is jealous because the queen of Kyou has a younger appearance than her. I'd be ticked about the sexism, but we are talking about sometime-immortals, here, so it's kinda undermined? It's a former-immortal thing, not a female thing.
--I had this brief passing worry that I would be bored by story not involving Yoko or Taiki. I am no longer worried! All of Ono's story is good story.
--Wow, no wonder Suzu/Mokurin was so frantic when she met Taiki! I absolutely feel sorry for her. Life as a kaiyakyu is rough, and even worse if you don't turn out to be a taika and a king or a kirin. She'd even had three whole sucky years of being unable to adapt to her new world before she plunged into a century of degradation as the eternal servant of an eternal mistress who keeps her around just to torment. Suzu's life in Japan sucked, but her life in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms actually sucks worse.
--Two generations of failed kings? No wonder the revolutionaries killed poor, dying Hourin. Given that kirin do not, apparently, get any leeway in choosing their kings, it seems kinda harsh, but I suspect Hourin might have appreciated it, by that point. I think kirin suffer a lot with bad kings, and I don't just mean the shitsudou.
I also pity Shoukei/Gyokyuyou, the former princess of Hou. I won't say she was entirely innocent in the crimes committed by her royal family--they obviously sheltered her from it--but she doesn't appear to have been curious at all about the daily lives of the citizens that her father ruled over in ever-more tyrannical fashion for three decades, or the palace folk that her mother terrorized and murdered, and that's a kind of naivete that can't be easily forgiven in someone her age. (Although, it's unclear how children who become immortal as Sennin grow--do they age mentally and emotionally, even though they're frozen physically? Is Shoukei's innocence only a product of her royal sheltering, or also the byproduct of this mechanism of immortality? It's hard to tell.)
One understands what prompted the citizens of Hou to rise up and slaughter the king and queen and the rest of the standing regime (three hundred thousand people dead in just ONE year? In the life of a king who's immortal until his insanity destroys his kirin? God.) The rage and terror and bone-deep desire for revolution that arise in the wake of governmentally-inflicted mass murder don't tend to leave much room for mercy. Shorei was incredibly blessed to have been merely demoted to humanity and left in the care of an orphanage, given the crimes her parents committed (some even in her name, if not with her knowledge or blessing).
Ep. 24
--Rakushun and Enki and En show up for Yoko's coronation. Yay! Continued court drama, and it's very serious, very ambiguous drama, too--the one provincial general of Kei who did not bow to the false queen is accused of treason, and it's unclear whether he refused to bow to her because he believed she was false, or because he was making a play for the throne. Obviously, it's important to figure out which, but Yoko is still feeling out the territory, and this is a court full of ambitious, scheming people who have been pretty much accustomed to ruling the country themselves for the past decade or so, so it's not easy to clear things up.
--Frivolously, I must say that Yoko looks awesome in her coronation robes. I think her court is driving her nuts--maybe she should go take a nap in one of the thirty-two houses given to her by HEAVEN--but she's still game. Confused, annoyed, and frustrated, but game. You rock, Yoko.
Man, this ruling thing is tough. I am so glad I'm not a king--I don't think I'd be suited for it at all.
--Yoko talks to En about the court drama, and among other things, he tells her that a ruler will never be rewarded for honesty if they say they're agonizing over something--true, that--and so to present a front of certainty at all times. (I think I agree. As dramatically interesting as I find it to consider the personal agony of a person in authority, a la The West Wing and like things, as a citizen, I prefer a show of decisiveness. I am willing to assume that authorities arrive at decisions by a process of due consideration, but I feel more confident in their leadership when they appear to have their act together enough to make a public stance and stick with it.)
En says that difficult decisions keep his life interesting, and without them, he might be tempted to ruin his kingdom. During this speech, Enki comes up behind him and looks seriously at him, and En pauses a moment, gazing out of the corner of his eye at his Taiho before he continues. Nice. Enki would not approve of En ruining the kingdom just because he was bored. He might smack him! En and Enki smack each other often. I find this cute.
--Suzu is kind of Yoko's pathetic shadow--a Yoko if Yoko wasn't a taika.
But a little delusional. A hundred years of misery and all; perspective and rationality are not to be expected.
--Shoukei is also kinda delusional, apparently. And her priorities to me are weird. I can't help but think: if you can muster the will to start a quest to dethrone a seated king who has the will of heaven backing her, couldn't you also muster the will to improve your personal situation to better than "orphan #3 in an an orphanage where the headmistress really hates your guts because the king your father had her son executed on a minor charge"? Maybe you could even become a sennin again, since growing older seems to freak you out. It's got to be easier than killing a king. Most things are.
--"At the time, Yoko thought she had made her first independent decision." Awwwwwww the wording of that makes me think that this is going to lead to DOOM down the line. Like the DOOM that we are hinted happened after Keiki gave some more bad advice to Taiki. This must be Keiki's fault somehow! Doom follows him around like a puppy.
Ep. 25
Shoukei is really not adjusting well to peasant life. Although I imagine some of it's just in response to losing her entire life and ending up at the bottom of the trash heap in the orphanage, but her sneering in response to the overtures of friendship from a fellow orphan are rapidly sapping my sympathy for her. She wasn't in control of her life before, and she's not in control of it now, but she's not ignorant any more; she can make choices about how to act, how to respond to the people around her. And I don't like her choices.
Randomly, I suddenly wondered how Hourin managed to pick two whole generations of awful kings without shitsudou coming sooner. She was dying of it by the time they killed her, but either the previous king can't have been as bad as this one--whose mass killings probably register somewhere at the Pol Pot level--or the previous king killed him/herself when shitsudou set in. And then Hourin got to do it all over again! Sucks to be her. Sucked at least as much and maybe more to be one of the tens of thousands of peasants who were brutally oppressed or murdered, though. Which is worse, unbearable suffering and helplessness, or unbearable suffering and guilt?
--I suspect Shoukei and Suzu are shaping up to be primo stalkers for Yoko. Centering freaky love/revenge fantasies around a famous woman they've never met? Check and check. Well hey, now that Yuka is back in Japan, acting like a rational human being, someone's got to run around after Yoko and scream at her and try to kill her over wrongs that exist entirely in their own head.
Gosh almighty, their lives certainly do suck. The populist revolutionary politics of Shoukei's story in particular are kind of horrifyingly captivating in all kinds of ways. When the revolution came, Shoukei was like, second up against the wall, except that for narrative purposes, she didn't get shot. She probably didn't deserve to get shot.
--Back to Yoko: Uikyou's all-black doll eyes freak me out. I keep thinking she's evil.
So there's normally gender parity in this world? Yoko instantly makes the connection between the equality of the sexes and the fact that women don't give birth (as babies do grow on trees here). Nice touch.
Oh hey. Uikyou's evil. What did I say? Huh? Huh? Yeah. Also, wow, that was dramatic, and I love the art in this anime.
Ep. 26
--The court politics in Yoko's country are kinda even worse than we thought.
--Drama! Between Yoko and Keiki! I've noticed that Keiki kinda always seems to be putting his foot in it.
--Have I mentioned how cool/weird/terrifying it is that when the cute little girl who tried to befriend Shoukei found out who Shoukei was, she went and rallied the local populace for a mob beating? Like I said, populist revolutionary politics, horrifyingly captivating. People just get so cranky when you have their mother brutally murdered in a field for taking time off work to nurse their sick children.
--Christ, they're going to kill her in a horrible way. While explaining to her that her father had their wife/friend/relative murdered in the same manner for breaking some minor and ridiculous law. Terrifying. Captivating. Soul-killing. I hope I die before I ever lose myself to revenge enough to want to see someone torn apart in front of me.
Is this Shoukei's dehumanizing ordeal? Like the one that Yoko went through? Is Shoukei gonna come out of this a better human being? Or is she just going to be whittled away fragment by fragment, until nothing is left but a fleshless, bony monster? With Ono, it feels like it could go either way.
Why the hell didn't Lord Kei just kill Shoukei? It might have been more merciful, and it certainly seems like it would have been simpler, since she's a lightening rod for trouble.
--Yuzu made a tiger fly! Awesome~
--"I'm always afraid of what others will say. I'm afraid to hear the sighs from Keiki, and the ministers...so I look for the answer that will please everyone."
Dude, maybe you SHOULD outlaw sighing with your first proclamation! But anyway, I dig that Yoko is still grappling with her lifelong issues with regards to compromising herself for her need to please other people all the time. The habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and the neuroses of a lifetime harder still. Her ordeal gave her the desire and the tools to do that, but she still has to work at it. Ono. Your brain? I love it.
--Yoko thinks that her court is just like her high school. Hee.
--The lord of Kei: "I could not wait until the heavens punished him." Means something kinda different in a world where the heavens overtly intrude upon the affairs of mortals. I think I like him.
Why doesn't he just toss Shoukei in a prison to rot, though? Mercy, again? He won't damn her just because she disgusts him? Quite the visionary--he's a revolutionary and a saint all in one. I hope he doesn't come to a bad end.
"Everyone was just jealous of me!" Hah hah NO. They just didn't want to let your dad and mom keep slaughtering them. You have miles and miles to go before you are a real person.
"Even I used to love that song of hers,"--that song, which was the symbol of innocence and purity. Oh, so that's why he didn't have her up against the wall when the revolution came! Seriously, I was wondering.
Shoukei is jealous because the queen of Kyou has a younger appearance than her. I'd be ticked about the sexism, but we are talking about sometime-immortals, here, so it's kinda undermined? It's a former-immortal thing, not a female thing.