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yamayuandadu · 3 months

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"Tenma, boss of the tengu". Exploring the "heavenly demon(s)"

The identity of Tenma, the leader of tengu in Touhou, remains a mystery. I think only ZUN can solve it - if he ever chooses to, obviously. Therefore, this is not quite an article meant to prove I figured out who Tenma is. Instead, it presents the origin of this name, and introduces a handful of figures in various contexts portrayed as leaders of the tengu who I think would be interesting candidates for the position of Tenma.

My additional goal is to show that even though popculture tends to portray all tengu as basically interchangeable, there is actually a fair share of unique tales about specific named members of this category. Corrupt monks! Vengeful spirits! Visitors from far off lands! There’s even a sea monster converted to Buddhism! Obviously, this isn’t supposed to be a list of every single named tengu and every single story. It’s not even a list of all of my favorite tengu. It’s simply an attempt at convincing you that digging deeper into tengu background is worth it - and in particular that there is still a lot to speculate about when it comes to their leader in Touhou. It’s some of the best oc free real estate in the series, really. Due to technical difficulties, the bibliography is included as a Google Docs link rather than a part of the article. I'm sorry.

From Mara to tengu: the development of the concept of tenma

Silhouette of a tengu negotiating with Kanako in WaHH 38, sometimes labeled as Tenma on fan sites through debatable exegesis.

As we originally learned in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, Gensokyo’s tengu are ruled by an individual named Tenma (天魔). Akyuu simply describes them as the “tengu’s boss” and provides no further information. While some additional tidbits have since surfaced here and there, they largely remain a mystery. Next to Chang’e, the unseen fourth deva of the mountain and the fourth Beast Realm figurehead they’re easily the highest profile unseen character in the entire series.

While in absence of information on the contrary we cannot necessarily assume that Tenma isn’t a given name in Touhou, ZUN did not actually come up with this term. It has been a significant part of tengu background at least since the Kamakura period. It can be translated as “heavenly demon”, and it’s a shortened form of Dairokuten Maō (第六天魔王), “Demon King of Sixth Heaven”, the Japanese name of Mara. Tenma is explained as a synonym of Mara’s “personal name” Hajun (波旬; Sanskrit Pāpīyas) for instance in the treatise Makashikan (摩訶止観; translation of Chinese Móhē Zhǐguān, “Great Cessation and Insight”).

Is that all there is to the mystery of Tenma? For what it’s worth, a possible reference to the full form of Mara’s name can be found in a description of Okina’s ability card in Unconnected Marketeers, which mentions “Tenma living in paradise”. I don’t think this is very strong evidence, though.

Touhou aside, it is hard to deny tengu are fundamentally tied to Mara. They are directly described as his subjects in Buddhist works such as Soseki Musō’s (1275–1351) Muchū mondō (夢中問答集; “Questions and Answers in Dreams”) and Unshō’s (運敞; 1614–1693) Jakushōdō Kokkyōshū (寂照堂谷響集). However, it needs to be stressed that a being referred to as Tenma does not necessarily have to be Mara himself.

A plurality of Maras theoretically became possible as soon as the belief this name didn’t designate an individual, but rather a position which could be held by various individuals or a category of beings developed in Buddhism. The former idea already appears in the Māratajjanīya, a part of the Theravada Buddhist Majjhima Nikāya, dated to the late first millennium BCE or early first millennium CE. Maudgalyāyana, one of the disciples of the historical Buddha, reveals in it that he was (a) Mara in a past life, and thus can easily notice the presence of the present Mara. The shift from a singular Mara (魔, mo) to an assortment of “demon kings” (魔王, mowang) is also well documented in early Buddhist sources from China.

As a curiosity it’s worth noting that even though the terms mo and mowang originally referred to strictly Buddhist demons, they were also incorporated into Daoist traditions, especially Lingbao and Shangqing. For example the former school's central text Duren Jing (度人經; “Scripture for Universal Salvation”) maintains that multiple mowang exist. While some of these “demon kings” are tempters not too dissimilar from their Buddhist forerunner (though what they obstruct is attaining the distinctly Daoist form of transcendence - in other words, immortality), others are portrayed as judges responsible for determining the fates of people in the afterlife. In later sources the term mo sometimes also refers to supernatural pathogens (generally 邪, xie or 邪氣, xiequi).

Sun Wukong and his fellow pilgrims battling the Bull Demon King on a mural from the Summer Palace in Beijing (wikimedia commons)

You don’t really need to look for any particularly obscure sources to see this transformation of Mara into a generic moniker, though - even the Bull Demon King from Journey to the West has the compound 魔王 in his name. Same goes for numerous other antagonists from this work.

When it comes to Japanese sources, it also doesn’t require looking for anything particularly obscure to find evidence in the belief in multiplicity of ma or tenma.

In the historical epic Heike Monogatari, emperor Go-Shirakawa implores Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin to explain the nature of tenma to him. He reveals that this term refers to monks and scholars who, despite nominally following Buddhism, lacked the mindset needed to attain enlightenment. He compares them to birds of prey, but also states they belong to the “dog species”. All of these are nods to well established beliefs about tengu, which I discussed in my previous article, with a reference to the writing of their name on top of that. It comes as no surprise that right after that Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin specifies that “the wise men of the eight sects who become tenma are called tengu”. He also makes it clear the tenma are quite numerous: “nine out of ten will definitely become tenma and try to destroy the Law of Buddha,” he warns.

A plurality of tenma can also be found in assorted biographies of pious Buddhist reborn in a pure land, so-called ōjōden (往生伝). The Tendai treatise Asabashō (阿娑縛抄) attributes the ability to “subdue all tenma” - evidently a class of beings, not an individual - to Fudō Myōō.

Through the rest of the article, I will introduce some of these tenma - the most famous tengu. My goal is not to convince you that any of them is a uniquely plausible candidate for the role of the unseen Touhou Tenma - I merely would like to point out there are multiple interesting options.

The oneness of vice and virtue: Ryōgen, the ruler of Makai

The historical Ryōgen (left) and his deomic alter ego Tsuno Daishi (wikimedia commons)

Before Ryōgen (912–985) came to be seen as a tengu, he was one of the most influential members of the Tendai school of Buddhism to ever live. He reformed the Enryaku-ji complex on Mt. Hiei, took part in numerous theological debates, and gained the favor of the imperial court by supposedly enabling the birth of an heir of emperor Murakami with his prayers. He was also renowned as a master of esoteric protective rituals.

The proponents of the Tendai establishment understood him as a fearsome protector of this tradition. As early as 50 years after his death, in the 1030s, he came to be identified as the reincarnation of Tendai’s founder Saichō. He was also considered a manifestation of one of the eight dragon kings, Uhatsura (優鉢羅; from Sanskrit Utpalaka). Ōe no Masafusa states that in this form he continued to protect Mt. Hiei, instead of being reborn in a pure land. This idea continued to spread, and by the end of the Kamakura period he came to be commonly revered as a protective figure by all strata of society. Haruko Wakabayashi notes that only Kūkai developed a similar cult in Japan as far as patriarchs of the esoteric Buddhist schools go.

It was not Ryōgen’s ability to navigate complex doctrinal debates about the interpretation of sutras that resulted in his popularity, but rather his esoteric skills. He was supposedly uniquely accomplished when it came to subduing anything which could be described as ma. In a Konjaku Monogatari tale I’ll discuss in more detail later, he effortlessly overcomes a tengu, for instance. However, in addition to spiritual obstacles and demons, the ma he was supposed to conquer also included political opponents, rebels or brigands, as the Buddhist law and the interests of the state were understood as identical. Ryōgen’s efficiency was so great he came to be viewed as a manifestation of Fudo Myōō, one of the wisdom kings and the conqueror of ma par excellence.

Not everyone viewed Ryōgen positively, though. The earliest criticism came from his contemporaries. It was argued that he favored monks from aristocratic families, and that he lived in luxury unbefitting for a monk. Furthermore, numerous conflicts between monks erupted during his tenure as Enryakuji’s abbot, including the split between the Sanmon and Jimon lineages. Since in some cases this led to armed confrontations, later on he was blamed for essentially enabling the rise of militarized monks who commonly caused disturbances on Mt. Hiei.

The real breakthroughs were not these tangible “political” criticisms. Rather, it was the identification of Ryōgen as ma, which arose due to conflict between various schools of Buddhism in the early middle ages. Most commonly this meant portraying him as a tengu - as I explained in my previous article, the form arrogant or corrupt monks were believed to take. A variant tradition described him as an oni, though according to Bernard Faure this likely simply reflects a degree of interchangeability between them and tengu.

Ryōgen is arguably the most famous historical monk to be furnished with such a literary afterlife. An early example can be found in the Hōbutsushū from the twelfth century, which states that this was a result of his attachment to Enryaku-ji. In Jimon Kōsōki (寺門高僧記) it is instead his investment in doctrinal debates that made him unable to attain rebirth in a pure land.

A gathering of tengu leaders from Tengu Zōshi (wikimedia commons)

Since Ryōgen was no ordinary monk, his tengu self also had to be special. In the Tengu Zōshi (天狗草紙), he is described as the ruler of all tengu and the realm they inhabit, Makai (“world of ma”; also referred to as Tengudō). It's worth pointing out the notion of Makai being a place where monks turn into specific classes of supernatural beings is basically a core part of UFO’s plot, and in SoPM Miko even wonders if Byakuren shouldn’t be considered a tengu.

As a ruler of Makai, Ryōgen came to be referred to as a “demon king”, maō (魔王). An example can be found in the historical epic Taiheiki, where he is described as one of the “great demon kings” (大魔王, daimaō) who debate how to cause chaos in Japan. He is assisted by vengeful spirits of the emperors Sutoku (more on him later), Go-Toba and Go-Daigo; two members of the Minamoto clan who sided with Sutoku, Tameyoshi and Tametomo; and the monks Genbō, Shinzei (真済, 800-860; obscure today, but apparently well known as a monk turned tengu in the middle ages) and Raigō (who supposedly turned into the infamous “iron rat”).

In Hirasan Kojin Reitaku (比良山古人霊託; “The Spiritual Oracle of the Old Man of Mount Hira”) this is only a temporary fate, though: supposed by the time this work was compiled, he already managed to leave Tengudō. As I discussed last month, this reflects a fairly standard belief too: to become a tengu, one had to actually be a Buddhist, and while it made striving for enlightenment more difficult, it did not mean eternal damnation or anything of that sort. A tengu could still choose to pursue rebirth in a pure land - it was just more difficult than for a human.

The evolution of Ryōgen’s image didn’t end with the establishment of his new role as a king of tengu, or even with the arguments that he might have nonetheless subsequently attained enlightenment. By the end of the Kamakura period, he came to be worshiped explicitly in the form of a “demon king”. While initially polemical, this image of him came to be subverted by Tendai monks to their own ends. They asserted that Ryōgen did not enter the realm of ma because of his arrogance, but rather consciously chose to do so in order to protect Buddhist principles. By becoming the ruler of its inhabitants, he also became their ultimate conqueror.

The notion of a being who is simultaneously essentially Mara-like and a protector of Buddhism seems contradictory. That’s actually the intent here. Through the middle ages, the esoteric schools of Buddhism developed the notion of hongaku, or “original enlightenment”. In its light, opposites were in fact identical. Buddha was the same as Mara (魔仏一如, mabutsu ichinyo). As it was argued, to attain Buddha nature one had to understand and experience delusion as well. Thus virtuous individuals could become demon kings in order to freely control evil beings.

In addition to its deep philosophical implications, the hongaku theory was also used to reject criticisms of the Buddhist establishment. Enjoying luxuries was but a way to better understand delusion, and thus to advance along the path to enlightenment. Its proponents embraced some criticisms of Ryōgen: he did favor nobles, accumulate wealth and live arrogantly. He did become a powerful tengu. But all of this was in fact part of a noble goal. And on top of that, as a demon king he was an even more fearsome protector of Tendai than he would be otherwise.

"Tsuno Daishi and a snail" by Teisai Hokuba (Sumida Hokusai Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

The new role of Ryōgen warranted new iconography. While formerly portrayed simply as a monk holding the expected priestly attributes, in the Kamakura period he came to be depicted as Tsuno Daishi (角大師), the “Horned Master”. This image spread far and wide due to the development of a belief that hanging depictions of Ryōgen would guarantee the same protection Tendai institutions received from him. He came to be seen as particularly efficient in warding off disease. Many temples still distribute talismans depicting Tsuno Daishi today. This custom received a lot of press coverage in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and you might have seen some examples on social media. From vengeful spirit to tengu: the case of emperor Sutoku

Sutoku, as depicted by Yoshitoshi Mori (Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Sutoku has much in common with Ryōgen - he was also a historical figure who purportedly became a tengu. However, he was not a monk, but rather an emperor. He reigned from 1123 to 1142, when he was forced to abdicate in favor of his half brother Konoe.

Konoe passed away in 1155, but Sutoku was not allowed to return to the throne. It was instead claimed by another half brother, Go-Shirakawa. Sutoku decided that’s enough half brothers seizing a position he believed was still rightfully his, and plotted an uprising. This culminated in the Hōgen Disturbance of 1156. Alas, planning seemingly wasn’t his strong suit, since the conflict was essentially resolved before it even started. Go-Shirakawa’s forces defeated Sutoku’s before they even left their encampment.

Sutoku as a vengeful spirit, as depicted by Kuniyoshi Utagawa (wikimedia commons)

In the aftermath of his failed rebellion, Sutoku was exiled to Sanuki, where he eventually passed away in 1164. However, his memory lingered on. He most likely came to be widely perceived as a vengeful spirit after the great fire of Angen broke out in Kyoto in 1177. Other subsequent disasters, including the Genpei war (1180-1185) and the 1181 famine, strengthened the belief that he was punishing his enemies from behind the grave. However, he didn’t become just any vengeful ghost, but one of the three greatest members of this category ever, next to Sugawara no Michizane and Taira no Masakado. Sutoku was, in a way, the sum of many of the greatest fears of medieval Japan. The belief in his rebirth as a vengeful ghost coexisted with a tradition presenting him as a tengu - arguably one of the greatest tengu ever. This status is firmly ingrained into his image in later sources. Today he is frequently included in modern groupings of “three great youkai” alongside Shuten Dōji and Tamamo no Mae. It seems sometimes he’s replaced by Ōtakemaru, but honestly I think he is more worthy of this spot, and also even though this is ultimately a synthetic modern group, it’s much more representative of medieval culture to have a tengu alongside an oni and a fox.

A strikingly tengu-like vengeful Sutoku, as depicted by Yoshitsuya Utagawa (wikimedia commons)

While peculiar, Sutoku’s dual role as a tengu and a vengeful spirit is not entirely unique. Initially these two categories were pretty firmly separate. Tengu obstructed attaining enlightenment and rebirth in a pure land; vengeful ghosts, as their name indicates, were focused on personal vengeance. However, in popular imagination they overlapped, as evident for example in members of both groups scheming together in the Taiheiki. This most likely reflects the overlap between the perception of enemies of Buddhism and enemies of the state. Vengeful ghosts were typically members of factions who lost one political struggle or another, and their vengeance was aimed at the establishment.

Regardless of Sutoku’s supernatural taxonomic position, his post-mortem fate is tied to the fact he was a devout Buddhist. All accounts of his exile stress that he spent much of his time copying sutras. According to a rumor first attested in 1183, he also wrote a curse on their backs using his own blood, vowing to become a “demon king” - (a) Mara - due to perceived injustice he faced. There is no evidence it’s based on a historical event, even though it’s not impossible Go-Shirakawa did believe in it. At the very least, he definitely saw the deceased Sutoku as a supernatural threat, as he had various ceremonies performed in hopes of pacifying him.

Hōgen Monogatari, composed in the early fourteenth century, asserts that he became a tengu while he was still alive. When his request to deposit the completed manuscripts in a temple in Kyoto was denied by Go-Shirakawa, he vowed to remain his enemy in future lives, and stopped cutting his nails and hair. This symbolically marked his transformation. However, a former emperor couldn’t just become any tengu. Therefore, for instance in the Taiheiki he is described as a leader of the tengu, and his bird form is that of a golden kite.

Up to 2022, the Touhou wiki used to claim that “among Touhou fans, it is almost a general idea that the Tenma is inspired by Grand Emperor Sutoku” (not sure what is the “grand” doing here, there’s no such a title as daitennō as far as I am aware, but I digress), as you can see here. I will admit I’ve never encountered this headcanon - you will generally be hard pressed to find Touhou headcanons relying on actual mythology that aren’t just some variety of power level wank or otherwise all around awkward - so I think removing it was the right move (I don’t think the replacement is any better considering Mara is not a “Hindi god” - Hindi is a language, not a religion - but that’s another problem).

I’m also not aware of any Sutoku fan characters save for Tenmu Sutokuin from the fangame Mystical Power Plant who isn’t even supposed to be a take on the canon Tenma. Design-wise she clearly leans more into the vengeful spirit side of things (to the point the design would work better as Michizane than Sutoku, really, though I don’t dislike it). The filename on the wiki misspells her name as Tenma, but I have no clue whether this has anything to do with the strange headcanon assertion from the Tenma article. The closest thing to a Tenma reference she gets is a spell card referencing the sixth heaven, but the game refers to her merely as a “great tengu”.

Kōgyo Tsukioka's illustration of a performance of Matsuyama Tengu, with actors playing Saigyō, Sutoku and another tengu (wikimedia commons)

MPP aside, there's a lot of room for Sutoku in Touhou. The poet-monk Saigyō, whose life and works served as a loose inspiration for the plot of Perfect Cherry Blossom and Yuyuko’s character, went on a journey through locations associated with the late ex-emperor four years after his death, in 1168. He felt a personal connection to him because before being ordained he served as a guard of the imperial palace during his reign. This unconventional pilgrimage to at the time peripheral, sparsely inhabited areas was both a form of paying respect to his former superior, and possibly a way to pacify his vengeful spirit.

Saigyō obviously did not meet the deceased Sutoku, and ultimately only two of his poems deal with his downfall. However, later legends kept expanding upon their connection. This eventually culminated in the development of a tale according to which the monk in fact encountered Sutoku in the form of either a vengeful spirit or a tengu. The noh play Matsuyama Tengu is based on it. Its title is derived from the name Sutoku’s first residence after his exile. As a curiosity it’s worth pointing out the play singles out Sagamibō (相模坊), the tengu of Mt. Shiramine, as an ally of Sutoku - an ideal candidate for a stage 5 sidekick, if you ask me.

Some further interesting developments regarding Sutoku’s tengu identity took place in the Edo period, but I’ll discuss them in a separate section later.

The other tengu emperor: Go-Shirakawa

A portrait of Go-Shirakawa (wikimedia commons)

While Sutoku’s opposition to Go-Shirakawa essentially was the first step to the development of the belief he was a tengu, the latter also came to be viewed as a member of this category. While still alive, no less. One of the first sources to identify him as a tengu is a letter of his contemporary Minamoto no Yoritomo. He refers to the emperor as the “greatest tengu of all Japan” because of his notoriously fickle political positions. He at one point approved Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s plan to suppress Yoritomo, just to reverse this decision and declare Yoshitsune is acting on behalf of a tenma.

The notion of Go-Shirakawa being a tengu is present in the Heike Monogatari as well. In the scene I already mentioned, Sumiyoshi informs Go-Shirakawa that extensively studying Buddhist texts made him arrogant, and that he’s already attracting the attention of tengu. It is just a matter of time until he will be reborn as one of them himself. Stressing his religiosity is meant to show how it is possible for him to become a tengu in the same manner as monks.

Go-Shirakawa’s tengu career arguably peaked with his portrayal in Hirasan Kojin Reitaku. It states that both him and Sutoku became tengu, but it is the former whose “power is beyond comparison”. However, he plays no bigger role in the narrative, and he’s not described as a leader of the tengu, or even as the most powerful of them. In the absence of Ryōgen, it is apparently his contemporary Yokei (余慶; 919-991) who became the most powerful tengu. Go-Shirakawa doesn’t even get to be the second most powerful - that’s apparently Zōyo (増誉; 1032–1116). As far as I am aware, no distinct legends about these monks becoming tengu exist, so much like the elevated position of Go-Shirakawa this seems like a peculiarity of Hirasan Kojin Reitaku.

Early twentienth centiury depiction of a typical shirabyōshi costume (wikimedia commons)

While Go-Shirakawa doesn’t appear in any particularly significant pieces of tengu literature otherwise, his personal quirks are responsible for a somewhat obscure aspect of tengu background. A further detail revealed in the Hirasan Kojin Reitaku is that tengu are connoisseurs of all sorts of performances, but enjoy the dances of shirabyōshi in particular. know, I brought this up already in the previous article, but I think it’s a fun detail. Think of the sheer potential of a tengu shirabyōshi character (whether in Touhou context or elsewhere), also.

From celebrated saint to reviled tengu and back again: Ippen

A statue of Ippen from Hōgon-ji, apparently destroyed in a fire in 2013 (wikimedia commons)

Ippen is here more as a curiosity than anything, since he isn’t really a mainstay of tengu literature. Like Ryōgen and the two emperors-turned-tengu, he was a historical figure. He lived from 1238 to 1289 and founded the Jishū school of Pure Land Buddhism. He spent much of his life as a wandering preacher, advocating a unique form of nenbutsu (chanting the name of Amida), the self-explanatory nenbutsu dance (念仏踊り, nenbutsu-odori). Legends assert that various miracles occurred thanks to Ippen’s devotion. For instance, at one point the nenbutsu dance he initiated made flowers fall from the sky. On another occasion, purple clouds appeared above him. Stories of his various miraculous deeds were retold in the form of picture scrolls, such as Ippen Hijiri-e (一遍聖絵; “The Illustrated Biography of Ippen”).

Ippen’s activity, in particular the dance he promoted, was evidently controversial among his contemporaries. Tengu Zōshi refers to him as the “chief tengu”, and portrays the practices he spread negatively. An entire explanatory paragraph is devoted to stressing the disruptive character of nenbutsu he promoted. Alongside other unorthodox behaviors it is blamed for various social ills including the fall of the Song dynasty in China (sic).

The opposition of other Buddhist schools to certain early currents within the Pure Land movement was often rooted in the rejection of the worship of deities and even Buddhas other than Amida. Of course, today it’s not hard to find people incorrectly convinced Buddhism is a “religion without gods” (this is a phenomenon so widespread it was actually considered a major obstacle by researchers of the history of Buddhism). However, through the middle ages devas, kami, Onmyōdō calendar deities and various figures like Dakiniten or Matarajin who defy classification altogether were anything but marginal in most schools of Buddhism in Japan. Oaths were sworn by Taishakuten and his entourage, Enmaten and Taizan Fukun were invoked in popular rites meant to guarantee good fortune, and so on. Interestingly, Tengu Zōshi does not deny that miracles attributed to Ippen really happened. In fact, they are even depicted in the illustrations. However, the reader is expected to realize they are implicitly not a genuine display of Buddhist holiness, but merely a tengu trick meant to lead people astray. This is essentially a twist on stories already common in the Heian period, something like the tengu pretending to be a Buddha in a famous story from the Konjaku Monogatari adapted to reflect the anxieties of the Kamakura period tied to new religious movements.

The condemnation of Ippen goes further than merely implying his miracles were trickery, though. While in the final section of the scroll it is revealed that with enough effort even a tengu can attain buddhahood, Ippen is singled out as incapable of that. He is destined to fall even further from grace and to be reborn in the realm of beasts. Despite the circulation of such negative opinions about Ippen among his contemporaries, Jishū school ultimately survived past the Kamakura period, and it still exists today.

Tengu caught between history and fiction: Tarōbō

Tarōbō in a mandala from Mt. Atago (via Patricia Yamada's Bodhisattva as Warrior God; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Tarōbō (太郎坊) is the tengu of Mount Atago. This location’s association with the tengu is well attested, and for instance in Hirasan Kojin Reitaku multiple of them are said to reside there, including Yokei, Zōyo and Jien.

However, Tarōbō is not identical with any of these historical monks. He’s an interesting case because it would appear he stands exactly on the border between historical figures and literary characters. One of the first attestations of him, if not the first one outright, has been identified in the Tengu Zōshi. On an illustration showing a gathering of tengu leaders, who are mostly identified by the names of schools of Buddhism they represent, one is instead given a specific name, Atago Tarōbō (愛石護太郎房). His notoriety continued to grow in later sources: Taiheiki presents him as a well known tengu, while Heike Monogatari outright labels him the “greatest tengu in all of Japan”. While Tengu Zōshi and other early sources don’t provide any information about Tarōbō’s origin, in later tradition he came to be identified with the legendary Korean monk Nichira (日羅). His name would be read as Illa following the Hanja sign values, and at least some authors prefer using this reading or list both. I’m sticking to Nichira here, to maintain consistency with a name sometimes used to refer to his tengu form, Nichirabō (日羅坊; “the monk Nichira”).

A statue of Nichira (amagasaki-daikakuji.com; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Nichira is mentioned for the first time in the Nihon Shoki, in the section dedicated to the reign of emperor Bidatsu (late sixth century). He is described as an inhabitant of Baekje, one of the three Korean kingdoms which existed at the time. However, his father came there from Japan. The emperor seeks his help with navigating foreign policy. After some tribulations - apparently the king of Baekje didn’t want to let him go - he finally arrived in Japan in 583, armed and on horseback. He starts acting as an advisor to the emperor.

After a few months, Nichira is assassinated by other Baekje envoys present in the court since he wants the emperor to pursue rather aggressive foreign policy (most notably, he suggests ruthlessly slaughtering any potential settlers from Baekje who would try to establish settlements in Japan). The assassination has to be delayed, because he emits supernatural light at night. That’s not where his apparent supernatural powers end - after being killed he resurrects for a moment in order to make it clear his assassination was not a plot of Silla (another Korean kingdom). He is later buried, and no further mention is made of him.

While some elements of the Nihon Shoki account were retained in later legends about Nichira, especially his arrival from Korea and his ability to emit a supernatural glow, he was otherwise essentially entirely reinvented. Instead of an advisor of emperor Bidatsu, he came to be portrayed as a Buddhist monk and as an ally of prince Shotoku.

An early example of such a legend is preserved in Nihon Ōjō Gokuraku-ki (日本往生極楽記; “Japanese records of rebirth in a Pure Land”) from the late tenth century. It states that Nichira met with Shotoku when the latter was still a child, and declared he was a manifestation of Kannon. The prince in response recognized him as the reincarnation of one of his disciples from an unspecified past life. We also learn that he is capable of emitting light because of his devotion to Surya, the personification of the sun. There’s no real chronological issue here: while Nihon Shoki doesn’t mention Shotoku (or Buddhism, for that matter; it first comes up a year after Nichira’s death there) in any passages dealing with Nichira, the prince would indeed be a kid at the time of his arrival.

Things get more complicated later on. True to his portrayal as a ruthless enthusiast of military operations, Nichira came to be described as aiding Shotoku in quelling Mononobe no Moriya and his allies. Following the conventional chronology this would have happened long after Nichira’s death, though. A possible attempt at reconciling obviously contradictory traditions can be found in Ōe no Masafusa’s Honchō Shinsenden (本朝神仙伝), as you might remember from the Ten Desires post from last year. In contrast with virtually every other source dealing with Shotoku’s genealogy, Masafusa claims the prince was a son of Bidatsu, which would make him considerably older at the time of Nichira’s arrival. The meeting between them is fairly similar to the Nihon Ōjō Gokuraku-ki version: Nichira recognizes Shotoku as a manifestation of Kannon, and both of them then emit supernatural light. No mention is made of any military help, though. The portrayal of Nichira as a military ally of Shotoku is present in legends which link him with tengu. After the defeat of Moriya, he supposedly left to take over Mt. Atago. According to a guide to famous places (名所記, meishoki) from 1686, Kyōwarabe (京童; “Children in Kyoto”) by Kiun Nakagawa (中川喜雲; 1636-1705) he did so in the form of a tengu.

Atago Gongen (wikimedia commons)

Bernard Faure notes there is a similar legend in which Nichira is a separate figure from Tarōbō. The former, portrayed as a military official in the service of prince Shotoku, sets on a journey to pacify the tengu of Mt. Atago. He accomplishes this by revealing he is a manifestation of Shōgun Jizō (勝軍地蔵), a Kamakura period reinterpretation of this normally peaceful bodhisattva as a fearsome warrior, historically worshiped on Mt. Atago as Atago Gongen. Nichira then becomes the leader of the tengu, while Tarōbō provides him with information about the mountain.

Something that surprised me is that there is a single Korean source which mentions the tradition presenting Nichira as a monk who became a tengu. During the Imjin war, a failed Japanese invasion of Korea, the Korean Neo-Confucian philosopher Kang Hang was captured and subsequently spent three years (from 1597 to 1600) in Japan as a prisoner of war before escaping (possibly with the help of Seika Fujiwara, a fellow Neo-Confucian scholar he befriended). He wrote a memoir dealing with this experience, Kanyangnok (“The record of a shepherd”) in which he mentions Nichira in passing. He states that he was known as Tarōbō, and that he was enshrined and worshiped as Atago Gongen.

Something that’s worth pointing out is that despite living centuries apart, Ōe no Masafusa and Kang Hang both make the same mistake, stating that Illa arrived in Japan from Silla, as opposed to Baekje. I thought this might represent an alternative tradition, but in both cases translators pretty firmly conclude we’re dealing with a mistake. My best bet would be that this has something to do with the Japanese name of Silla, 新羅, sharing a kanji with Nichira’s own name; the name of Baekje, 百済, does not. It doesn’t seem any later legend brings up his post-mortem effort to clear the name of Silla envoys from the Nihon Shoki, so I don’t think that was necessarily a factor.

I’m actually shocked I haven’t seen a Touhou take on Nichira, considering his association with Shotoku. In particular, it’s worth pointing out that his transformation into a tengu is essentially how people tend to mistakenly assume the connection between Matarajin and Hata no Kawakatsu works (in reality, it’s very limited in scope and indirect, but that’s a topic for another time). Plus there’s a lot of storytelling potential in having a tengu - or even Tenma - be yet another character from Miko’s past. ZUN isn’t very interested in building upon prince Shotoku legends involving Kawakatsu or Kurokoma, but it’s hard to deny they’re a popular topic in fanart.

Yet another tradition about the identity of Tarobō, as far as I can tell entirely independent from his connection to Nichira, is preserved in the Engyōbon, the oldest version of Heike Monogatari. A gloss states that he is the tengu form of the monk Shinzei (真済; 800-860), who in a tale from Konjaku Monogatari and a variety of other sources menaced empress Somedono (染殿后; Fujiwara no Akirakeiko), the wife of emperor Seiwa.

Tarōbō also plays a role in a tale unrelated to speculation about his origin, Kuruma-zō Sōshi (車僧草紙; “Tale of the handcart priest”). It was originally composed in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The eponymous protagonist is a Zen practitioner who, as his name indicates, travels with his handcart in tow. Tarōbō attempts to convince him to abandon this lifestyle. They engage in a Zen dialogue (mondō), in which the monk triumphs over the tengu. He also manages to overcome Tarōbō’s subordinates who attempt to make him stray away from his practice by showing him gruesome images of battles in the realm of the asuras.

Finally, under the name Nichirabō Tarōbō appears in the tale of Zegaibō. Initially I planned to only dedicate a single paragraph to it, but I figured Zegaibō is such a fun figure that a separate section is warranted.

Not a tiangou: Zegaibō, the Chinese tengu

Zegaibō taking a bath (wikimedia commons)

The history of Zegaibō (是害坊) starts before he even got this name. In the anthology Konjaku Monogatari, there are a handful of stories about tengu arriving in Japan from overseas - specifically from India or China. These are obviously literary fiction, as there is nothing quite analogous to tengu in Indian literature, and while their name is borrowed from Chinese tiangou, this term also doesn’t have all that much to do with tengu, ultimately.

One of the aforementioned stories focuses on a Chinese tengu named Chira Yōju (智羅永寿; I was unable to establish whether there’s any connection with 智羅天狐, the alternate name of Iizuna Gongen, Chira Tenko) He arrives in Japan to challenge local Buddhist monks. He reveals that he has previously bested these in his homeland successfully, and that he would like to check how their Japanese peers compare. Local tengu take him to Mt. Hiei, where he unsuccessfully tries to bait major Tendai monks, including Ryōgen, into battling him. He is eventually beaten up by Ryōgen’s attendants, and after his defeat the Japanese tengu take him to a hot spring so that he can recover. In the end he decides to return home. It was possible to establish that Chira Yōju was the basis for the tale of Zegaibō because the colophon of an illustrated scroll known simply as Zegaibō Emaki (是害坊絵巻) states that the story draws inspiration from a similar tale from the lost collection Uji Dainagon Monogatari. Based on other sources it is assumed it was most likely identical with the Konjaku Monogatari account of the misadventures of Chira Yōju. Save for the change of the main character’s name, the stories do not differ much. More time is dedicated to the meeting between Zegaibō and the Japanese tengu, though. They are led by Nichirabō from Mt. Atago.

Zegaibō meeting with his Japanese peers (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

Zegaibō evidently became a popular, recognizable character later on. This might reflect a sense of patriotism (or nationalism) the story possibly could have inspired in the readers: the Japanese monks are portrayed as more resistant to the schemes of demons than their continental peers, after all. However, it’s also possible that Zegaibō’s defeat was interpreted as a take on tensions between Buddhist monks and shugenja, considering the latter were commonly compared with tengu. Regardless of which interpretation is correct, Zegaibō’s undeniable popularity allowed him to reappear in a variety of other tales. There is a noh play which simply adapts the tale about him, Zegai. The events are largely the same, though the name Tarōbō is used instead of Nichirabō to refer to the tengu of Mt. Atago. Bernard Faure mentions that in one version of the legend about Nichira’s arrival on Mt. Atago, he defeats Zegaibō, here portrayed as the leader of the local tengu. The tengu subsequently reveals the “sacred geography” of Japan to him. Finally, Zegaibō plays a major role in the Edo period puppet play Shuten Dōji Wakazakari (酒呑童子若壮; “Shuten Dōji in the Prime of Youth”).

In this work, Zegaibō is indirectly responsible for the transformation of the eponymous character into an oni. After a rampage which left 160 monks dead and various other heinous acts, the young Shuten Dōji, known simply as Akudōmaru (悪童丸; “evil child”), proclaims that there has never been anyone more mighty than him in Japan, China or India. This display of arrogance alerts Zegaibō, who appears in the guise of a young monk and offers to wrestle with him so that he can prove his strength. However, as soon as the fight starts, he reveals his true form and takes Shuten Dōji into the air.

Zegaibō presents Akudōmaru to Maheśvara (via Keller Kimbrough's Battling Tengu, Battling Conceit; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Zegaibō then brings his opponent to Maheśvara (摩醯首羅王, Makeishuraō; a phonetic transcription is used in place of the most common Japanese form 大自在天, Daijizaiten). The latter is unexpectedly described as a maō. Zegaibō seemingly presumes that his boss will punish the unruly human by turning him into a tengu, but Maheśvara is so impressed by his bravery that he chooses to turn him into an oni to let him cause even more chaos. This is rather obviously distinct from the more widespread versions I discussed in the not so distant past.

From makara to tengu: Konpira

A typical depiction of Konpira as one of the heavenly generals (via Bernard Faure’s Rage and Ravage; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

While Zegaibō according to tales focused on him arrived from China, there is technically a tengu whose origins were believed to lie even further away - Konpira (金比羅). However, he is a special case because despite being arguably one of the most famous tengu, he actually wasn’t viewed as a member of this category for most of his history.

Konpira is a Japanese transliteration of Sanskrit Kumbhīra. This name can be literally translated as “crocodile”. His origin is poorly understood, though it is possible he was originally essentially a divine representation of reptilian inhabitants of the Ganges. As you can read here, the gharial, the mugger crocodile and the saltwater crocodile all can be found in this river in some capacity.

Fittingly, Kumbhīra is sometimes described as a makara who converted to Buddhism. This term refers to a type of partially crocodilian mythical hybrid, most notably depicted as the steed of Hindu deities such as Ganga and Varuna. Bernard Faure suggests that in Japan he might have been analogously understood as a wani at first. However, Kumbhīra could also be portrayed as a yaksha, for example in the Golden Light Sutra. What remained consistent is the idea that he was a fierce being converted to Buddhism.

Kumbhīra is well known as the foremost of the Twelve Heavenly Generals (十二神将, jūni shinshō). It is possible that the crocodilian Kumbhīra and the homonymous heavenly general were initially separate deities, though in Japanese context they are effectively the same. Konpira and his peers are regarded as the protectors of the Buddha Yakushi but historically were simultaneously perceived as a type of shikigami. I will only discuss this role more in my next article, though, as it is not very relevant here. All you need to know is that it made him a commonly invoked protective deity in apotropaic rituals.

An interesting legend pertaining to this aspect of Konpira’s character is preserved in the Taiheiki. When Fujiwara no Yasutada (藤原保忠; 890-936) fell ill, a Buddhist priest arrived to perform a ritual focused on Yakushi and his heavenly generals to heal him. However, as soon as he started to invoke Konpira, Yasutada got so horrified that he died. The ritual has apparently been hijacked through supernatural means, and what he heard was not the name “Konpira” but rather the phrase kubi kiran - “I’ll cut off your head”. This was an act of vengeance of the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane - Yasutada was one of the courtiers who conspired to exile him earlier. Evidently after he became a vengeful spirit he was able to essentially turn Konpira to his cause and reverse the effects of invoking him.

While the heavenly generals are associated with the Chinese zodiac, the correspondences between the individual deities and zodiacal animals aren’t really consistent. Konpira can variously be linked with the tiger, the rat or the boar, and accordingly with the northeast, north or northwest. The northeastern link is particularly significant, as in some cases it led to conflation between him and Matarajin, who as a subduer of demons was strongly associated with this direction.

A variant of the legend in which Saichō, the founder of Tendai, meets Matarajin during his journey to China identifies the latter with Konpira. Supposedly Konpira slash Matarajin was originally the protector of the Vulture Peak in India, then moved to Mount Tiantai in China, and finally reached Mount Hiei in Japan with Saichō. The two were also equated with each other by the Tendai priest Jōin (乗因; 1682–1739) in the Edo period. However, his attempt was actually met with criticism from his contemporaries. A certain Sōji Mitsuan (密庵僧慈) wrote in 1806 that Jōin was evidently confused because Matarajin and Konpira are clearly separate deities. He concludes he evidently didn’t even read the Mahāvairocana Sutra. I’m honestly surprised ZUN didn’t reference this conflict over syncretism in any of Okina’s spell cards, it would fit right in.

Konpira Daigongen (wikimedia commons)

Despite Matarajin’s tengu credentials, which I discussed last month, the association between him and Konpira actually isn’t why the latter came to be seen as a tengu. This phenomenon instead began as an aspect of his role as the protective deity of Matsuo-ji on Mt. Zōzu (象頭山) in Shikoku. Here he came to be worshiped under the name Konpira Daigongen (金毘羅大権現). His enshrinement apparently only occurred in 1573, though according to a legend from the seventeenth century he arrived there much earlier, and already resided on Mt. Zōzu in the times of En no Gyōja. However, there is no reference to him in the few earlier sources dealing with this location. Since its name can be translated as “Mt. Elephant Head”, it has been suggested that it might have been associated with Shōten, the Japanese form of Ganesha, in earlier periods, though this remains speculative.

Despite Konpira’s new role as a mountain god, his early aquatic connections were not entirely lost. In the eighteenth century he came to be seen as a protector of maritime routes through the Seto Inland Sea and tutelary god of navigation. This reflected the growth of importance of inland maritime trade which was a result of the shogunate's ban on most foreign trade. Interestingly, while most donations were made to Konpira by local sailors and merchants, his new role made him so famous that Chinese traders residing in Nagasaki prayed to him too, and a small shrine was even erected in that city at one point. Donations made by travelers from the Ryukyu Kingdom are recorded too. Both of these phenomena were highlighted in Edo travel books in order to stress the prestige of Konpira.

Kongōbō (Universität Wien's Religion in Japan: Ein digitales Handbuch)

Konpira didn’t become a tengu right away. The oldest recorded tradition associating Mt. Zōzu with a specific tengu refers to him as Kongōbō (金剛坊; “diamond priest”). He was not (yet) a form of Konpira, but rather a deified seventeenth century Shingon monk, Yūsei (宥盛), who between 1600 and 1613 served as the abbot of Matsuo-ji. It seems Yūsei actually created the image of himself as a tengu on his own - in 1606 he commissioned a statue depicting him as a tengu manifestation of Fudo Myōō. The inscription explicitly states that he “entered the way of tengu” in order to bring fame to the mountain. This was a part of a bigger project of portraying himself as a master of various esoteric arts in order to gain the patronage of local nobles. After he passed away, his disciples and relatives continued spreading the image of his tengu form, now renamed Kongōbō. He eventually came to be seen as a manifestation of Konpira.

In popular imagination the new tengu-like image of Konpira eventually came to be detached from its actual origin. He was instead identified as emperor Sutoku simply because both were associated with roughly the same area - the historical Sanuki province. This idea was popularized by the 1756 play Konpira Gohonji Sutokuin Sanuki Denki (“The Sanuki Legend of the Retired Emperor Sutoku, the Original Source of Konpira”) by Izumo Takeda II. Various other authors followed in his footsteps, including Akinari Ueda and Bakin Takazawa, strengthening this equation.

While I focused on the early portrayal of Konpira and on his eventual transformations into a tengu, the traditions of Mt. Zōzu continued to evolve in subsequent centuries. After the separation of Buddhism and Shinto, Konpira came to be viewed as a kami. Due to the influence of Atsutane Hirata and his disciples he received a new name, Kotohira (金刀比羅) after the Meiji reforms. However, many lay people continued to refer to the protector of the mountain as Konpira. Today both forms of the name are in use.

Bibliography Tumblr doesn't let me post the bibliography as a part of the article for some reason. You can find it here in the form of a google doc.

#touhou #touhou project #tenma #tengu

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viridianjester · 2 years

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Kuroshitsuji Anachronisms (1)

Hello folks! I finally decided to put a post together about the historical inaccuracies/anachronisms I found when reading through the manga last month. This is by no means a comprehensive list -- I know I missed the Funtom DS, and I definitely paid less attention to out of time details in the later arcs due to getting pretty absorbed into the art and story -- but it is a fun compilation. I'll put the screenshots in chronological order, adding short commentary on each entry. I'll also be pretty lenient on fashion with this, although outfits will come up occasionally. Unfortunately, since I have way over 10 images, I'll have to do this in multiple parts. I'll probably do one part every day for the next however long this takes, but we'll see. With that out of the way, let's get started!

Introduction (Mini) Arc:

First, we have the video game from abybweisse's Mother 3 theory. Although part of the box's side is covered by the speech bubble, it looks like a GBA game to me. I shouldn't have to say this, but there were no Gameboys in the Victorian Era.

Next, Bardroy calls Sebastian "Superman." The first Superman comic didn't come out until 1939.

The translation in this chapter is a bit iffy; I think it's supposed to be Bitter Rabbit here. However, I still think this might be a reference to Peter Rabbit, whose book The Tale of Peter Rabbit came out in 1901. Due to the translation, I'll count this as a half instance.

The "watch" here seems to be referring to a TV show given the context. The specific show is likely a reference too, but it's to nothing I know. There were no TVs in the Victorian Era.

The wiring in these panels seem to imply that the manor has electricity. Technically, in 1882, Edison started a company that began to bring electric lights to Manhattan, and Ciel, being rich, could probably afford electricity; however, electric lights were still pretty rare in the time period. As such, this isn't necessarily inaccurate, but I do find it interesting.

Finnian's line here is clearly a reference to Tom and Jerry, which is a TV program that shouldn't exist since TVs shouldn't exist.

I… don't think they had cat onesies in the Victorian Era? But it's not exactly something I can really Google easily either lol.

Finnian's cat girl maid outfit is definitely historically inaccurate. Baldroy's uniform cut is likely inaccurate too, as the style looks like something from the later half of the 20th century, but since I'm not an expert in Japanese school uniforms, I can't say for sure.

This car is historically inaccurate. Technically, the first car was invented between 1885 and 1886, but it was more of a motorized tricycle than anything resembling a modern vehicle. This looks like a 1920s car. The cell phone is also not something you'd find in the Victorian Era (in the anime, I remember the cell phone being a car phone, but that's also inaccurate as the first instance of that in irl history seems to be 1946).

Cell Phone 2: Electric Boogaloo.

And that's a wrap for part 1! I hope you all have a great day :)

#kuroshitsuji #black butler #anachronisms #historical inaccuracies #kuroshitsuji anachronisms #kuroshitsuji anachronisms part 1 #kuroshitsuji manga

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castielmacleod · 1 year

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A historical etymological perspective on “Rowena”

Hi I’m Ben and today I’ll be taking the realism of a soupy natural character’s name far too seriously!

Not that any other name would suit her because it truly is perfect, but from my esteemed position as an armchair cultural historian regarding medieval Scotland, I cannot help but be bothered (only mildly) that “Rowena” is not actually a Gaelic or medieval Scottish name. There’s no dramatic issue with “MacLeod” at least, as the MacLeods were a real historical Highland clan based in Skye, but “Rowena” is a frankly BIZARRE thing for a tanner’s daughter born in the 17th century to be called. It’s not technically an anachronism—the name was first recorded in the 12th century in Wales—but that still doesn’t draw a clear line between the name’s apparent origin and our friend Rowena herself.

People aren’t sure about the etymological origin of the name, either. Baby name websites will say all kinds of shite sourced from the lord knows where but from my research, at least, the actual peer-reviewed linguistic historians are saying “Rowena” is either a corruption of an originally Germanic name that is now lost to us, or that it’s related to Welsh rhawn which means…. horsehair. To me the Welsh origin would make sense given that the name was first recorded by a Welsh scholar, but that’s just from my armchair.

Apparently the name has no relation to the tree, which is what I had assumed for the longest time, but I suppose that’s rowan with an “a” as opposed to Rowena with an “e” after all—even little differences like that can be more etymologically significant than you’d think. It’s lightly disappointing, though, since rowans are also called witch-trees and the word “rowan” itself comes from a Germanic verb which means “to redden”. I was so sure the writers had considered one or both of those things when naming their redhead witch character but I guess not. Unless of course they just made the same assumption as me (VERY possible).

Though at this point I think that if Rowena’s name had ANY inspiration at all beyond “this sounds good” from the writers, then Queen Rowena of the Britons is actually a more likely namesake. This Rowena is first mentioned in the Historia Regum Britanniae which was written by the Welsh gentleman I mentioned earlier (the Historia being the aforementioned earliest known place where the name “Rowena” was recorded in the first place—Queen Rowena was the blueprint, as they say). Like most Matter of Britain fare we don’t actually know if Queen Rowena existed. But the Historia, at least, presents her as a femme fatale wicked stepmother type character who poisons people. It’s certainly not 1:1, but it does somewhat recall Rowena’s season 10 characterisation. Were any spn writers familiar with the details of 12th century medieval manuscript Historia Regum Britanniae? Not impossible I suppose. It’s not as though they come off as a particularly well-researched bunch though is it.

But anyway, tying this back into the in-universe explanation for our Rowena being called Rowena. After Historia in 1136, Queen Rowena of the Britons gradually entered English, Welsh, and Frisian traditions and became a recurring villainous figure in works of literature. In 1796 her story was adapted into an English play, and then in 1819 the name was used for the heroine of an English novel, and that popularised the name throughout the 1850s. Remember that Crowley was born in 1661 canonically, meaning the earliest Rowena could have been born would be 1640s—that is, WELL before Rowena was popularised as a given name.

Furthermore, there is a very particular historical context for medieval Europe, Scotland included, about literary namesakes. Put simply, naming your child after a heroic figure was a very common practise, but naming your child after a villainous figure, however, meant there was something deeply wrong with you and you must hate your kid or something because that is just an atrocious choice of name any way you slice it. The idea was that to name your child after somebody was to hope they’d take on their namesake’s characteristics, so people having villainous namesakes was outright unheard of. Thus, even though stories about Queen Rowena had disseminated throughout large areas of the British Isles by the time our Rowena MacLeod was born, and you could technically argue that her parents heard the name somewhere within the time period, for them to have actually named her that would have been just an absolutely bizarre move on their part, culturally.

So, in terms of how Rowena could have realistically come to be called Rowena, these I think are the most likely options:

Rowena’s parents were surprisingly familiar with the Matter of Britain for a tanner’s family, and were on top of that VERY culturally abnormal and weird probably to the point of being social pariahs (not out of the question and honestly a bit funny to think about)

“Rowena” is not her original name but an alias taken from, or she flat out renamed herself after, a contemporary villainous literary figure on purpose (also not out of the question even slightly because she very much would do that, plus another for the “like mother like son” jar)

Personally I think both of these options have a lot of merit. On the one hand you can imagine a young Rowena growing up in a historically accurate medieval Scottish version of the Addams Family where everyone else on the street gossips about how the devil has almost certainly taken the local tanner or something hysterical like that. On the other hand, the narrative suggested by Rowena inventing a new name (and maybe persona) for herself, possibly after becoming a witch or just to feel more powerful in general, is very compelling AND provides a delicious parallel to Crowley who also changed his name to befit a new and less weak version of himself. Of course the specific historicity of Rowena’s name can just as easily be ignored and you can just imagine her name is Rowena with zero caveats, I just tend to find this kind of thing fun.

In the end, though, Rowena is Rowena no matter how she got there! Thanks for coming to my Tedtalk.

#Rowena MacLeod #My posts #Lame ending bsgsjsgshs but whatever #Sorry to keep historically analysing Crowley and Rowena in the context of medieval Scotland. As if it’s my fault

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epicspheal · 2 years

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I don’t think Rose ever actually DISOWNED Bede, just disqualified him from the Gym Challenge. As for Rose telling Bede to wait in Hammerlocke, I find it somewhat telling that Opal had an errand there of all places. I dunno, I think Rose volunteered Bede as her successor because she would actually discipline him, something Rose realized he himself never did. Still, it sucks we never got one more interaction between them after the mural incident.

Hi there anon!

While true there’s no confirmation that Rose ever formally adopted Bede (like signed papers or what not), he does technically disown Bede by the most literal definition of the word. The definition of disown is “to refuse to acknowledge or maintain any connection with” which doesn’t absolutely refer to family (even though, to be fair, is how the word is used in most contexts).

Remember Bede was an orphan and then Rose came along and gave him an education at a fancy trainer school, gave him a Pokemon and the means to travel and compete in the gym challenge (something that at least in the manga is stated to be expensive so poor children, like orphans, tend to get excluded from). All of this is something that parental/guardian figures do. So informally there was, especially in Bede’s mind, a bond there that got rather brutally severed and in Bede’s perspective he definitely felt disowned even if no adoption papers were ever signed.

Now as far as Rose volunteering Bede to be Opal’s successor, I personally doubt that it’s the case. To be clear, I’m not a “Rose is the absolute worst and is irredeemable” type of SwSh fan, so my objections to this aren’t out of thinking he has no good points to him. I just think that with how hasty Rose is shown to be in canon, I don’t he think he would’ve really given the thought of trying to look out for Bede (someone who’s name he couldn’t even remember/be bothered to use). I think he just was trying to absolve himself from any liability that would occur from being the endorser of someone who vandalized a historical (which when you take out other context like Rose’s long term goal, is understandable from a PR perspective). The whole situation is supposed to show that despite all tof he good Rose has done he’s not perfect and there’s bad decisions he makes. A situation where’s he’s working with Opal undercuts this very important part of the narrative

Also, it could potentially look bad on the league if Rose was ever found out to have just quietly shuffled Bede to Opal after the Stow-On-Side incident. Remember the league already had a bribing rigged match incident well before Rose became chairman and if we pull manga canon into this there were already accusations of nepotism launched at Rose thanks to Sonia being a gym challenger. To the public, who weren’t yet aware of what Rose was planning, him taking someone who destroyed a monument and putting them under the care of a gym leader could be taken as being unfair. Rose is very big about trying to keep his reputation in tact and even though working with Opal is a good thing, it would definitely damage his reputation

In many ways, it’s better for Opal to have acted independently in choosing Bede rather than an arrangement between her and Rose (although one could argue Opal was acting rather selfish in her taking Bede under her wing, although that's a topic for another day). Opal’s literally trying to retire so she doesn’t care if people look at her sideways for taking Bede in after what he did (again under the context of the public not knowing how Rose and Oleana did Bede and thinking Bede was just acting on his own). More importantly, it helps Bede to grow as a person. As long Bede knew Rose had something to do with the arrangement, he would still be stuck on trying to please the chairman which would’ve stunted his growth overall.

I agree though that we should’ve seen more interactions with Bede and Rose. I genuinely love SwSh but I feel like there was a lot of room for much better exploration of character dynamics and I think Bede and Rose definitely could’ve benefitted from this. It would’ve been nice if say we saw the orphanage Bede was in from a flashback with Rose coming to see him or maybe just an interaction with Rose and Bede in the mines with Rose mentioning how he used to work in them back in the day.

#chairman rose #rival bede #gym leader opal #ask epic spheal

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isaacathom · 6 months

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my character got given a fun crisis in the last dnd session and im still like *head in hands* oh christ

the brief context is that my character, Naielle Odelia, was exiled from elf!France for treasonous writings, which she produced incidentally while doing historical research with the aid of her warlock patron, Alcor. Also being a warlock is treason too. Naielle's younger sister, Mariela, is in the french army as a feywalker, some cool feywild traveller type.

When Naielle made a brief trip back (using a daisy chain of Plane shifts and Gates) to see her wife, a resistance fighter, the two of them ended up capturing Mariela to prevent her from doing Some Shit, don't worry about it. It was decided that, because of Mariela's skill set, the best way to remove her from the war would be to take her back with Naielle to the plot of the campaign (set in fantasy South-East Asia, broadly, and which is classified as a separate material plane). Lo, it is done.

Naielle and Mariela do not get along. real contentious sibling relationship. Their first actual conversation in the ~20 years since Naielle's exile was an argument about the Some Shit Mariela was trying to do, and it was fucking BITTER. And yknow, yeah, Mariela has a right to be fucking pissed in this context. ESPECIALLY now she's been kidnapped to another plane several months normal travel away from home. have fun!

Naielle does love her though. She's her younger sister! She's wicked clever, she's very good at her job, the family has long been justifiably proud of her. She's her sister!!! Naielle justified the plane shift as a way to keep Mariela out of trouble and, ultimately, to keep her safe. There's more to that specific sentiment but it's not important.

Well.

Alcor, as Naielle's patron, saw Mariela and went :) Ah! Another member of your bloodline! An ally to assist you in our quest to oppose abominations (mindflayers and so on).

And forcibly formed a warlock pact with her

When Mariela, understandably, objected quite strenuously, Alcor blinded her (temporarily, though uh, not by design i guess). The stress of the magic, one supposes.

And the worst part, for the both of them?

Naielle, functionally though not specifically, has a Geas on Mariela. they're bound together. Mariela has to work with her, has to help her with the abomination shit, or Alcor will keep fully fucking with her shit.

And Naielle is furious.

The whole point!!! The whole point!!! Was she wanted her sister out of trouble. She didn't want her sister to do her Some Shit (which would, whether it went well or not, have technically been Naielle's fault). She wanted her to stay safe. And in so doing, directly brought her into contact with her warlock patron, an entity that has fucking RUINED NAIELLE'S LIFE. She wouldn't've been exiled if not for that fucker! Maybe she's done some good using their power, but has it outweighed the fucking cost to her soul? jesus christ.

And now Mariela has been forcibly roped into it, and now she is bound to Naielle, and NONE of this is what Naielle wanted, and she can't even convey that to Mariela because WHY WOULD SHE BELIEVE HER??? Mariela has absolutely no incentive to trust what Naielle says, and in fact multiple incentives to believe she's a duplicitous bitch. It doesn't matter if, at least on this matter, Naielle is sincere. It's not trustworthy. Mariela's life had already been derailed by Naielle, and now its been completely fucking upended, and she can't even do anything about it bc if she attacks Naielle with intent she takes fucking 5d10 of psychic damage. and i've seen that woman's spell list, she can't bring naielle down before that damage would become a hazard and she doesn't have naielle's sustain. like, whats she gonna do, thunder step a bunch??? good luck. she'd be trading 5d10 psychic for 5d10 thunder on naielle and naielle has more health and other things that would keep her okay that Mariela doesn't have.

It sucks!!! Naielle's genuinely furious about the whole thing, for Mariela's sake, and her own. Her pact ruined her life, and she's been trying desperately to be good and do good through that pact to try and make that "worth it", so that her life being ruined had a fucking purpose. And now she's ruined her sister's life, and it is her fault, even if it very much was not her intention. So what good is it? Has that debt been remotely settled through her deeds? No!! No it hasn't!!

It sucks, man. Naielle's fucking shaken about it.

All that said, I have thought of a fun Bonding Exercise for the two to do which will keep Alcor off both their backs for a while - Naielle has a specific mindflayer she has to kill. Mariela has to help her (in general). So, team bonding, when we get an opportunity you, i, and the robot who hates mindflayers and has custody of the teleporting ship, we go for a jaunt and we fucking kill him, and you can pretend the mindflayer is me the entire time if it makes you feel better :) and my gm has already said that proposal will probably work and be a very fun lil side session in future. especially bc it'll be done without the commodore's permission ;) fuck listening to his orders ive got personal matters to deal with

#story blogging #naielle odelia #tl;dr naielle got her sister into a warlock pact unintentionally and this has made things significantly worse #and naielle might not like her sister but she does love her. yknow? she's her sister. she has to #also if their mother ever learns about this she Will fucking kill Naielle. thats just in the back of her mind the whole time #like wow! Like it was bad enough i kidnapped my sister but forcing her to commit treason (warlock pact)? jesus christ #like Oriphira would kill Naielle herself. unless the two sisters become Very Close in the rest of the campaign #and also successfully remove the Geas-y thing. then Naielle can literally never go home in her mind #bc mariela will rightfully tell them what happened and hoooooOOOOO

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cakesandfail · 3 years

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A conversation in a fb group has led to me thinking about the concept of Vlad the Impaler vs Nandor the Relentless so I guess I have to write about that now 🤷‍♀️

#the impaler... fucking guy #vampire stuff #i mean can you IMAGINE #forest of stakes efficiency vs the personal touch of just never relenting #i suppose TECHNICALLY given the historical context...#one of them could be the other one's vampire dad...#much to think about!#anyway i'm sure you could write something serious about this but it won't be me doing it

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bcitisthelight · 3 years

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So.Where to begin.

What you should know is, this isn’t my fault. It’s @misskirby who is to blame for this. She has this AMAZING fic, it’s called Benediction. I like to read it weekly, for sustenance. Go read that first if you want...literally any of this to make sense. So there’s this passage which stole every marble I had, wherein Anakin is explaining the etymology of the Huttese he uses to refer to his children (with a really thorough explanation on Luke’s name.

Anakin scrubbed the back of his neck. “Huttese doesn’t have—words of love. It doesn’t have… benedictions. It’s kind of a cruel language. There’s a whole case for groveling and then—there’s really only the word for love.”

“And that’s abiya?” Obi-Wan said.

Anakin’s grin was crooked. “No. That’s luke. In the Tatooine dialect, at least, it’s luke. We used—things, mostly, to—you know.”

“Luke,” Obi-Wan said, tasting the word, looking down at the sleeping child he’d just been holding, one who carried his parents’ love for him in his name. For the first time in all his life, he wondered what his own name meant, and who it was who had given it to him.

“Abiya is the milk from a flowering cactus,” Anakin said. “It’s very sweet. And rare. I only ever had it once, with my—my mother.”

Obi-Wan turned to look at Anakin again. The expression on Anakin’s face was raw, intense, but Obi-Wan forced himself to look at it, out of respect for the memories of a woman he owed all of Anakin to; the one who had protected him, loved him, when Obi-Wan hadn’t known he had existed at all.

“It also means the morning rain,” Anakin said, waving a hand. “A lot of words in Huttese have many definitions. Abiya, though—it’s a relief. A respite. Pure joy.”

Obi-Wan swallowed around the burning in his throat. “I see,” he said, strangled.

Anakin looked away, his throat bobbing. “Luke only has the one definition, though. There’s only one word derived from it, too, lukkali. Noun and a verb. A krayt dragon whelp, or—krayt dragons, the mothers, their carry their whelps in their mouths, because there’s no place on Tatooine that’s safer, so it’s also the act of doing that.”

I LOVE this passage. I love all of the work it does emotionally, narratively, etc. It’s the best. And yesterday morning, I zeroed in on a specific line. “In the Tatooine dialect” Except hold on, I thought to myself. Anakin was born a slave. What if, when he says the Tatooine dialect, what he means is...the dialect of the slave class?

So here’s the thing. The Hutt society is based on the idea that the Hutts are the prime race, there was the whole Hutt empire thing, I mean the holiday the Boonta Eve Classic is supposed to commemorate is literal holiday that commemorates a Hutt ascending to godhood, during the process of which all of his slaves renew their vows of fealty. It’s not just a class system, where you can you know, in theory move between classes. This is a strict caste system, which you are born into or are captured into. Which got me thinking - what if the language of Huttese has a dialect system...based on caste? We see examples of this sort of socio-linguistic pattern in actual real life!! Tamil and Arabic are some pretty famous examples where certain historical societies who use that language break down that language based on caste, with their different varieties having all sorts of different meanings and cultural connotations, but there’s a ton of them. And in fact, there’s tons of societies which base their dialects on social or other cultural factors.

There’s even a name for it: diglossia, where a society as a whole uses one language but different parts use radically different dialects and forms of that language in different circumstances. Now, strictly historically, how diglossia typically works is that one dialect is seen as a low (L) dialect and one is seen as a high (H) dialect. And get this - in diglossic societies which also contain really severe social inequality - in some cases the dialects can seem almost unintelligible to those who speak the opposite dialect And then based on that passage I posted above, I thought...what if the unintelligibility in this certain case, specifically the unintelligibility between “high” huttese and the dialect spoken by slaves wasn’t surrounding the actual words or structure...what if it was /context/.

So basically in the last thirty six hours I’ve....I’ve made an entire headcanon on Huttese as a trifold diglossic dialect system. I’m putting it under the cut because God its, its a lot guys. Its a lot. Also? It’s written as though its an entry in sociolinguistic glossary of sort, because of course it is. Who wrote that glossary? Space nerds. Nerds in space. Nerds in space from Coruscant University who need research credits for their space masters degrees.

For the purposes of this glossary, the modern caste system of the Hutt Clan has been recorded below. 1. Masters 2. Servants* 3. Slaves The reader should be aware that there is technically a high caste called “Grand Masters”, which historically was comprised of members of the Grand Hutt Council and their families. This caste used a dialect usually referred to as “Archaic Huttese”, and is the source dialect of Huttese, originally developed on the Hutt home planet of Nal Hutta. However, this language has long fallen out of common use. The reader should also note that belonging to the Servant caste does not imply any quality of servitude per se. Rather, this is the caste of all ordinary free people who live under Hutt Rule. This designation is believed to have originated in the understanding within the ancient Hutt empire that any being who lived under Hutt dominion was by rights a servant to any Hutt who should need them. The dialects of the castes are as follows. 1. The dialect of the master class is also known as “High Huttese”. The common dialect of all high-born Hutts, and widely adopted by non-Hutts who own slaves or hold positions of authority within Hutt society. This dialect is used in all interactions involving a master, whether between a group of masters or a master and a lower-caste member. With Hutt families whose bloodlines have been regarded as a part of the master class for several centuries, there is a curious strain of monolinguism in an otherwise highly polylinguistic society, with many high born Hutt families refusing to learn even the fundamentals of standard Basic. The reasoning for this seems to be a cultural belief held by the masters that any person of a lower caste bends to the needs of the masters, rather than the other way around. The historical risk of a master’s displeasure upon improper address has led to this dialect becoming the default in conversation unless you are absolutely sure of another person’s caste, since historically the risk of offense should you choose wrong was often very high. There are at least three different cases of blood feuds between members of Hutt Master families which involved the use of a lower caste dialect as a cause of offense.

This default status of this dialect means that when a person in the Republic references “Huttese”, they are almost always referencing the master dialect. The master dialect is what is taught in the schools of the Republic. This has led to a sort of self-perpetuating cycle. As interactions with the rest of the galaxy have shifted to singular dialect, the use of the master dialect has become more solidified within common Hutt Society, even when the speaker is aware that Low Huttese would be acceptable.

It should be noted that this exception applies only to free people. Slaves are required by Hutt law to use this dialect when speaking Huttese to any non-slave they interact with, even if that person does not belong to the Hutt caste system. The Hutt law imposing this requirement famously reads, “Because all beings are above a slave, a slave should speak to every being in the tongue of their masters.” The penalty for a slave addressing a master in anything but the high dialect is often some sort of physical punishment. A rather gruesome tradition which is kept in force to this day. 2. The servant dialect is also called “Low Huttese”. While originally it was relatively distinct from both the dialect spoken by the masters and the dialect spoken by the slaves of Hutt Society, it has since suffered a bit of stagnation. There are many factors which could cause this to occur. As the Republic opened up more and more channels of commerce to Hutt Space, and the Master dialect has become the norm outside of Hutt Society, true enforcement of the linguistic standard for non-enslaved beings has fallen much to the wayside in the last two standard centuries or so. Modern Low Huttese dialect is thus mostly similar to the Master dialect in grammar and generally accepted vocabulary. However, a remaining diversion exists which is based on pronunciation, and a significant reliance on rather course slang on the part of those who speak Low Huttese. It has been said by Huttese linguistic scholars that while High Huttese is a an excellent dialect for threats, Low Huttese is an excellent dialect for swearing. 3. The slave dialect has no name in any official Hutt or Republic record. It is not recognized by any authority in either written or spoken form. In fact, generally the only beings who know or speak the slave dialect are those who are or who once were enslaved, and their loved ones. The dialect differs rather severely from high huttese - though primarily through meaning and cultural context, rather than actual structure.

It seems that this “hidden” diversion was born of necessity, rather than choice. The masters didn’t like the idea of their slaves having a way of communication the masters were not privy to, and so would punish any slave caught speaking a dialect which was immediately recognizable as being outside of the master dialect. The slave class in the ancient Hutt empire adapted to this by taking the dialect forced upon them, and manipulating a large portion of it for their use. Rather ingeniously, they seem to have developed an entire dialect specifically ordered so that they could express themselves freely without being automatically targeted by a passing master or authority figure. This is the vital distinction: words in the master dialect often have vastly different or even opposite meanings when used in the slave dialect. Added to this complexity are the wide range of connotations and contexts for each word. An interesting note to the slave dialect is that generally, the more abstract a word is, the fewer meanings or connotations it has, whereas often the most culturally impactful words and concepts are taken from simple or every day words. There is only one word for love in the slave dialect - “Luke” - because it is seen as pure, and when given, unconditional. When this word is used, there is no linguistic distinction between platonic or romantic love - the slave class instead relies on idioms or proverbs to express the difference in feeling. In direct contrast, there are nine different ways a person can use the verb which means “to attach”, ranging from the mundane (“Attach these two machine parts together”) to the taboo (“to cause another person to be enslaved”) There are some words which are unique to this dialect, however. One example is the word for “freedom”, which in the slave dialect is “telena”.

The master dialect’s word for freedom is the same as their word for authoritarian power. Freedom within the master caste, then, was specifically associated with the ability to exercise dominion over the world around them. Members of the slave class, as individuals who constantly suffered under that same authoritarian power, showed a collective repugnance for the association between freedom and the very dehumanization they themselves suffered. Drawing from the use of the anakin plant as one of the most culturally and spiritually significant symbols in the caste (See entry on Anakin, a flowering plant which originated in the deserts of Tatooine but which has since been domesticated throughout the Outer Rim) they instead chose to develop a word based off the Hutt verb “to bloom” One common expression amongst the slave class is “Telena telen ali anakin” - “Freedom blooms with the anakin” Those interested in the study of this dialect, then, are well warned that they should take great care in attempting to communicate in this dialect (if they can find a teacher, that is - many slaves or even those who were formally enslaved are understandably reluctant to give up what is likely one of the only means of expression of not only agency, but of caste solidarity. I have seen two former slaves go from total strangers to kindred spirits in the space of five minutes, upon discovering by means of dialect each others mutual experience.)

#I made an entire headcanon on Huttese as a trifold diglossic dialect system #she said #like a LOSER #do you ever write a sentence so insane it immediately deals you psychic damage #and what makes it worse is that #this is something i did in my free time today #this is what i do for FUN #anyways #I will be writing more to come lmao #Huttese #star wars #conlang #sociolinguistics #but you know #in space #please don't take the actual structure too seriously i am strictly here for the social connotations #i dont know linguistics #and frankly #i dont care

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littlemisssquiggles · 2 years

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I think it be cool if we see Oscar as the person we see use plant dust caz I don't think we seeing it in show

Hello anon-chan! Uhm…I’m not quite sure if there is such thing as “plant dust” in the world of Remnant?

Hold on let me take a quick look. *Looks it up* Well whaddaya know! According to RWBY Wiki, plant dust is indeed a form of dust that exists canonically in the series and it’s stated in the description that plant dust is likely used for farming purposes.

That’s interesting. The closest to thing to any earth-related dust we’ve seen in the main animated series is rock dust. Going back to your question, while I’m not sure about the possibility of Oscar utilizing dust as a weapon, I still wish to stick with the Pinehead headcanon of Oscar using earth-based magic.

Similar to semblances, dust is meant to replicate the elemental effects of magic which Oscar technically possesses. If it wasn’t for the sillyfact that the showrunners wrote in that Oscar is afraid to use magic due to it allegedly accelerating the effects of his inevitable merge with Ozpin which the little prince has voiced not being emotionally ready for---if it wasn’t for that then I could’ve totally seen Oscar using earth magic; having come from a farming background in an earth-based spring kingdom and continent.

That’s what I would’ve liked to see. But given how the showrunners keep limiting how much magic Oscar can actually use, I think all us Pineheads can canonically look forward to is Oscar simply beating things with the Long Memory. That’s it. That’s all he’d be able to do now as of V8!

He can’t fully use the little percentage of magic he inherited from Ozma through Ozpin because it quickens the Merge (which is just ridiculous) and he can’t use too much of the built up kinetic energy stored in the cane cause it’d blow everyone to smithereens which is also ridiculous! I mean, why even give him these abilities if you’re just going to redact them later and make Oscar not use them at all moving forward? It seems like a waste of an idea.

All that’s left now is Oscar’s so-called semblance; to which…they BETTER NOT take that back too.

I just…as a proud squiggly Pinehead, I find it sooo increasingly frustrating how the showrunners keep nerfing Oscar at every stage in the most ridiculous ways. Let Oscar be great and powerful, dagnabbit! I’m not just saying that because he’s my favourite, I’m saying it because technically Oscar is supposed to be powerful!

Him being powerful makes more sense than other certain characters in the show being powerful (*coughsWeisscoughs*).

Not only does he draw inspiration from Princess Ozma---the most powerful magic user in all of Oz in the Wizard of Oz series. But in the context of RWBY, Oscar is the current reincarnation of one of the last wizards in Remnant. The only person who has ever defeated Salem and would’ve ended her reign eons ago if the dynamic dumbasses that are the Gods of Remnant did not curse Salem with immortality and then left her wicked witch ass with that immortality for poor Ozma to clean up without a bloody clue how to revoke it.

Oscar doesn’t have to be brokenly overpoweredbut for Pete’s sake, at least allow him to be strong enough so we can finally move past seeing him just beat shit with a wind-up bulb on a stick! No shade at the Long Memory because I actually think it’s a cool weapon given its history and meaning. It’s just that it’s annoying knowing that Oscar can probably do A LOT more given his abilities yet the writers won’t let him…because PLOT!

If Oscar can’t use magic because of PLOT, then I like concept of him experimenting with the practice of using dust in combat as an alternative to magic.

That could be nice and it could be fitting to see him do this in Vacuo since I think, historically, Vacuo is supposed to have a great dust supply hence why the SDC wanted to capitalize on that in the past. It’s also a good way to see Oscar befriend Whitley since, technically, as of V8, isn’t Whitley Schnee officially the new CEO of the SDC?

He was Jacques’ heir to the company after all replacing Weiss from V4. And given that Jacques is now deceased…that would make Whitley next in line as head of the SDC and overseer of all its dust mining operations and resources across Remnant. Basically what I’m trying to say is that I can easily see Whitley becoming a dust supplier to the huntsmen and huntresses currently stationed in Vacuo; inclusive of Oscar, Nora, Ren and Emerald.

I just like the idea of Whitley using his resources with the SDC to further assist the hero team which is inclusive of dust. And since V8 highlighted Whitley being the one who cooked up the schematics that the team needed for the creation of the channels they used to migrate everyone from Atlas to Vacuo, this also highlights a technical talent in Whitley that I’d like to see continued for V9.

Maybe even have Whitley partner with Pietro Polendina (believing that him and Maria are still alive since they were only awkwardly written out of the story for V8) to create some new dust-based weapons and tools for our heroes to use. That’s something that could be done too.

I just want to see Oscar have the big-brain epiphany that since he can’t use magic, his next best bet is to use an alternative method---upgrading and refashioning the design of the Long Memory to now use dust with Whitley’s assistance.

The last time we saw the Long Memory’s design change was with Henkle.

So I think it would be fitting if the cane changed again with Oscar.

Perhaps... even use it as a way to symbolize Oscar finally accepting the Merge but still choose to do it his way by making it his own---leaving a part of himself etched into the new look of the weapon as his way of saying, even if he disappears, he was still willing to bank on a part of him living on in the new person he becomes---small yet extraordinary. Just like Oscar is.

Now that could be a really, really cool idea if done in the canon and as I mentioned before, it could simultaneously be a good way to have Oscar and Whitley bond since there are still fans, like myself, who would like to see these young boys become friends.

But that’s just me spouting ideas on that as usual. Rant aside, I hope I actually answered your question anon-chan.

~LittleMissSquiggles (2022)

#squiggles answers: rwby #oscar pine #rwby volume 8 spoilers #whitley schnee #rwby volume 9 theories #rwby theories #pinehead headcanons #squiggles pinehead headcanons

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nienna-talks-asscreed · 2 years

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Assassin's Creed: Rogue is so much better than it has any right to be

I honestly haven’t been in the Assassin’s Creed fandom all that long. It was something I finally got into because of the pandemic (and maybe a touch of “I just graduated from college oh god what do I do with my life?”), but it’s something I fell in love with almost instantly. Looking into the fanbase and its opinions has definitely been an experience -- one that I confidently can say I would not recommend to everyone -- but, unsurprisingly, it’s made me incredibly amused by my own opinions.

Because, well, Rogue is far and away my personal favorite game of this franchise. You know, the game that Ubisoft itself seems to forget even exists. And which people online seem to deem either insanely underrated or aggressively mediocre. As for me? I fall more closely on the “underrated” side of that argument, though that’s not to say the game is without flaws.

Of course it’s not. It has its own issues and such that I can -- and will -- talk about, but it’s also got its highs that mean a whole lot to me.

That said, I won’t be talking about every aspect of the game in-depth. I’d rather use my words in areas where I actually have detailed opinions and thoughts. Though I will do a quick summary of those things here at the top.

General mechanics: great. Stealth feels fantastic, movement feels fluid and on-par with the rest of the Kenway saga. Naval gameplay is spectacular. I actually played Rogue before Black Flag and honestly find it more fitting to my personal playstyle, so I love it. If you want a more detailed look at technical stuff about things like freerunning and combat and the like, I’d check out other people’s thoughts; I just don’t feel super qualified to speak on this, given that my personal repertoire of games I’ve played isn’t super wide.

Setting: beautiful. This is an Assassin’s Creed game -- they’re gonna get this part right. I regularly go back to the North Atlantic just to sail around because it’s so damn pretty. More of the Seven Years War might’ve been nice, but it’s not a time period I personally know much about, so it just didn’t bother me that it wasn’t a huge thing.

Side content: varies. Assassin interceptions were actually pretty cool and I liked the story at the end. The rest is pretty forgettable. The optional outfits look real good in this game, but, as everyone has already said, there are too many collectibles. Although, isn’t that just a staple of Assassin’s Creed games up through Syndicate?

Mission structure: felt good to me. Only one tailing mission, which is always nice. Other than that, it just felt like good ol’ Assassin’s Creed gameplay without ever feeling too repetitive for me. Again, if this is something you want to know more about, you’re probably better off looking somewhere else for information. Sorry? Just not exactly my cup of tea.

The Versailles Sequence/Unity tie-in: look, I can scream about this for ages, and that probably doesn’t belong here. I’ll mention this a bit a the end, but that full rant will be saved for another day.

I think that about covers it. So let’s get going. Oh, and spoilers ahead. Obviously.

*****

The Modern Day

Let’s just jump in with this whole topic by saying that, personally, I think the modern day is fine. Nothing to write home about, but nothing that’s egregious or anything. I’m still not a fan of getting pulled out of the historical part of the game, but I never really have been in any of these games. But it does what it’s supposed to do, and it’s built on, what I consider to be, at least an interesting idea. Because this is the Templar game, you’re playing as an Abstergo employee who, presumably, joins the Templars sometime shortly post-game, and ending the modern day story with that offer is kind of interesting. It’s the kind of story that only really makes sense in the context of Rogue, so I understand why this is what they chose to do, and the story does feel like it moves toward that ending. Not high praise, sure, but it just works for me. Plus, I’m not really bothered by this first person player, because I never feel like I have to be all too attached to their story. I never feel like I’m missing something because I’m not connecting with a full-on character like Desmond or Layla. I’m allowed to go “oh, okay, so things are just happening but I don’t need to devote that much time into this, cool, thanks.” (Honestly, this is something that I might talk about elsewhere, so I’ll leave it at that for now).

You also don’t need to do any of the side content that comes with the modern day to actually understand what’s happening, but doing so does give you some interesting lore, if that’s what you want. Which is, honestly, how I think side content should be handled in these games. You can learn about other Pieces of Eden, history regarding the Animus, or just stuff about Berg (who ends up becoming a weirdly prominent character in the franchise despite coming from this game, of all places). It’s really cool deposition, but completely off to the side of the main story, and I appreciate it being there.

So, yeah, overall, I just don’t really have major beef with the modern day. It’s unobtrusive, which, sometimes, is all you can ask for these days.

*****

The Historical Storyline

Alright, time to have a bit more fun, now.

You follow the story of Shay Cormac, an ex-Assassin who grew disillusioned with the Brotherhood and joined the Templars. And the game introduces you into that world in a pretty enjoyable fashion -- swooping through the North Atlantic and following the eagle as Shay monologues in the background is really dramatic, and it’s the kind of drama that I play these games for. (Plus, having that opening monologue completely parallel the ending one -- flying in toward Shay as he recites the Assassin’s Creed at the start, vs. flying away from him as he recites the tenants of the Templar Order -- is just a really cool narrative device that I personally find rather clever). And then that first prompt of “Kill the Assassin” is such an interesting way to just dump you right into the middle of things, before you realize that, no, you’re actually starting a few years before all of that. Overall, it’s a pretty strong start, and a unique one, at that. I’m a fan!

The rest of the story follows Shay’s personal journey and his turn away from the Assassins, which, I think, is fairly well executed. In the first couple of sequences leading up to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (which, yes, is a real thing, and is caused by Piece of Eden macguffins in this universe, because, honestly, we shouldn’t expect anything else), they do sow seeds of doubt about the Assassins. Shay’s questioning as to whether killing Lawrence Washington is really the right thing to do in 1-4 (Sequence 1, Memory 4); the Assassins’ support of the French, who actively promote slavery in the Caribbean (which is made doubly confusing if you’ve played Freedom Cry, but that’s neither here nor there); their blind, neverending search for Pieces of Eden; and even the general sentiment passed around of always just trusting in your superiors, which is mostly said by Chevalier (but also kind of implied by Achilles) and, in my opinion, isn’t talked about enough. Point being: there are problems that Shay already sees from the get-go, and Lisbon is just the cherry on top of that.

Which, speaking of Lisbon, I think that sequence is great. Seeing the city crumble around you -- it’s an absolutely insane setpiece, and a really impressive one, at that. The shot of the city burning at the end is, honestly, a really great use of Assassin’s Creed’s already impressive ability to craft beautiful cities and settings in general -- the only thing I would’ve added is dropping the title card there, rather than at the end of 1-1. Sure, it doesn’t fit with where Ubisoft usually put their title cards in these games, but I really think that would’ve made a statement.

Also, on Lisbon, I do want to address another thing that I’ve seen crop up on occasion. So, slight sidebar, but I do think it’s relevant to the game overall. I know I’ve seen complaints that, while Lisbon is great as a setpiece, the game doesn’t do enough to get you attached to the city. And I understand that, but only to a degree. Where I disagree is the how of getting you attached, because the idea of having Shay lose someone close to him during the earthquake -- like a romantic interest -- isn’t something I can get behind. To me, part of what makes Rogue work is actually the lack of romantic plotlines overall. This is an entire other subject on its own, but it suffices to say that, personally, I’m usually pretty harsh on romantic subplots, and, to me, if they don’t actively add something good, then I’m happier without them. Now, given how short Rogue already is, I can’t imagine that a romantic subplot would be explored deeply enough to really be worthwhile. So to have Shay’s entire motivation be centered around a probably-underdeveloped character and nothing else would sort of remove any room that he has to struggle with the conflict around him.

I do get the idea of wanting more connection with Lisbon as a location, but I just don’t think romantic subplots would necessarily be the way of doing it. Watching the city burn and fall just did enough for me. And, at least as I see it, leaving it that way sort of fits the game’s MO. Shay’s motivations are pretty rarely centered around particular people, which would include any love interests. I mean, that’s the whole point of the game; Shay is willing to act against people he cares about because they’re doing the wrong thing. His motivation throughout the whole game is connected to the more abstract ideal of defending innocent people. Wanting justice for the death of thousands of innocents -- rather than one special person -- is very in line with how Shay operates.

But, alright, back to the actual review, and it’s time to talk Shay’s defection. Because you can’t discuss this game without talking about 2-5. So here’s my two cents: I like it. I think it works. When you boil things down, yes, it’s all a problem of miscommunication. Had everyone just talked, then the plot of Rogue probably wouldn’t have happened. But I don’t blame Shay for that, which is why I still feel like this scene doesn’t ruin the entire central conflict. For one, there are already problems within the Assassins (which is an entire topic on its own), so solving this argument wouldn’t end well down the line anyway. But more than that, between Shay and Achilles -- I’m sorry, but I don’t expect Shay to be the one who has to accommodate Achilles here? Shay just watched a whole city fall, feels personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, and then probably had to bottle all of that up during the months-long trip back to the Colonies from Portugal. None of that is explicitly stated, but I mean, we can read between the lines. I wouldn’t expect anyone to be mentally sound and ready to have a perfectly level-headed conversation after that. Achilles, though? Achilles is Mentor, and the teacher of a bunch of people who make their living in murder -- he should be better equipped to deal with people being Clearly Not Okay. Because Shay is Clearly Not Okay, but then he just gets thrown out of the house, and no one thinks to check in and ask him if he’s fine or what even happened? Even though something clearly happened? Look, I understand the other argument -- that Achilles truly didn’t know what would happen and Shay just burst in yelling -- but I can’t find a way to really believe that Shay is the one to blame here? Just saying.

Here’s my point: I like the way Shay’s defection is written -- his emotional response is completely valid -- and it does justify the rest of the plot. That narrative just works, for me. As for how that narrative is paced, well, that’s an interesting question. On the whole, I do think it’s fine. Rogue is really trimmed down, especially compared to a lot of the other games. It doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot of fluff, and most of the missions do feel like they do something to advance either the actual plot, or give you something about Shay’s character (the latter of which is my bread and butter, but again, we’ll get there, don’t you worry). It feels dense enough that I don’t get bored, or just forget about massive portions of story, which is a problem which some of the other games have. The fact that the structure is not as redundant also really helps. It doesn’t follow that structure of introducing a new target per sequence, then killing them at the end, which was an absolute godsend to me. Seriously, this is a topic for another analysis, but Rogue’s decision to not follow that structure and just follow the plot as it naturally progressed was one of the best things it could’ve done. Because I actually remember what happens, which is, you know, a good thing for a piece of media. It’s a story, not a hitlist.

That said, the pacing does still feel...odd at times? The first two sequences just aren’t that memorable -- they do the thing where it’s like “here’s your target that you’ve never heard of, now go do a murder” which just doesn’t excite me anymore? And the beginning just feels strangely long? I mean, 1-1 does end up introducing you to freerunning and assassination mechanics, as well as the basics of naval warfare. 1-2 as an additional training sequence just feels like overkill, and is really only good for bringing in Adewale, and for the conversation he has with Achilles (which is actually an optional thing to listen to -- one of the most glaring errors in this game, by the way. That’s a huge plot point and it’s so easy to miss? I don’t get that choice.) Same with 1-3; it brings in Le Chasseur, but really it’s just there to introduce ship boarding, which, again, could’ve technically been done in 1-1 when you first get the Morrigan? It just doesn’t feel incredibly necessary, and that time could’ve gone to things like the Lisbon earthquake. Or maybe even into events that take place from sequence 3 to the end?

That said, I generally like the pacing while Shay is with the Templars. With few exceptions, the events in the back half of the game all feel important, and there’s enough momentum to keep me invested all the way through to the end. You know who all of your targets are going to be, and you actually don’t even hit them in this super measured type of manner. They just happen whenever they happen, with three of them happening in the last four memories of the game. To me, having these assassinations come at varying times actually works really well, and it makes the game’s pacing feel organic. Everything is based around the story, and not imposed by some outside force (the writers). Having so many assassinations near the end gives me the feeling that things are accelerating into the ending, not the other way around. Plus, keeping everything dense is, once again, to its advantage -- I don’t feel bored at any point, or like the things I’m doing are completely inconsequential.

*****

The Side Cast

I’ll be honest, I can recognize some of the flaws that did come out of having such a compact game, and the side characters are definitely one of those flaws, or at least, something that could’ve been better. At the end of the day, a lot of the side cast just doesn’t have that much screentime, even though screentime was something they probably needed. Liam gets a decent amount of deposition and character, and Hope gets a bit, but most of the Assassins just don’t get filled out that much. Kesegowaase largely just exists, as does Le Chasseur, and Chevalier is mostly just a piece of scum, but you don’t really know much about them, even though, given the plot of this game, it would’ve been really nice. Having a deeper emotional connection with each of them would’ve made their subsequent deaths hit us, as players, a little bit harder. It would’ve made this idea of an ex-Assassin hunting down his brothers become really tragic, no matter how you wanted to look at it. And, I don’t know about you, but I would’ve been completely on board with this game absolutely sucker-punching me in the feels. I mean, come on, make me cry, I dare you.

Well, anyway, I also just want to mention that it’s not just the Assassins who could’ve done with more screentime. Most of the Templars work perfectly fine as they are -- they have enough personality that I can 100% enjoy the storyline and their part in it. Would it have been nice to get more from them? Sure, but I’m not incredibly bothered by it. The Finnegans are actually the characters I wanted to bring up, though. Because, while their part in the story is completely fine, and I do like the part they play in Shay’s story, I really think it would’ve been cool to have more of them. To clarify, this is purely speculative, and doesn’t actually take away from the game that’s in front of us, but they’re characters who, I think, could’ve formed a really close bond with Shay and potentially been a big part of his journey into joining the Templars. Just a bit of an emotional pull that could’ve been nice to see play out, had they been able to come back a couple more times through the back half of the story.

I don’t know, it just seems like a nice idea to me, even if not expressly necessary.

*****

Protagonist Time

So, I wouldn’t be surprised if you reached this point and wondered, “hey, so you said that this is your favorite game, but parts of this review have been really lukewarm. Why is it your favorite?” And if that’s your question, then congratulations! You’re about to get your answer. Because the thing that really makes this game work, and, for me, makes it stand out above many of the other, more technically sound, games of this franchise, is its protagonist.

Shay is nothing less than fascinating to me, while also being a character I can absolutely adore. He just feels insanely genuine and real and fully-realized in a way that I’m constantly impressed by. And he’s a big part of why this game works as well as it does, especially for someone like me, who is really heavily drawn into a story by the strength of its characters.

More than many of the other protagonists, Shay just feels like a real person. Not like a collection of related traits that were chosen to facilitate a particular story arc. He’s actually fairly reserved and introverted, but he’s never cold or aloof or distant (which seems like an easy way to write introverts, and something Ubisoft has sort of done for its other characters). He always comes off as warm and has this endearingly dorky sense of humor. We see him moved to anger or joking around with the people he’s close with (the Assassins at first, but Gist and crew later), because, surprise, that’s how people work. Introverts aren’t always quiet in every situation, and it’s not “surprising” that we have emotions, or something like that. Shay just being characterized like this -- and the story never making some sort of deal out of it -- honestly makes him feel incredibly familiar.

What really makes him work, though, is that he’s an incredibly expressive character, and I need to give Steven Piovesan -- Shay’s voice actor -- all of the credit in the world for that. At every point in the story, you can watch and listen to Shay and understand exactly what he’s feeling in that particular moment. You can actually see the pain or the confusion in his eyes when he learns that Hope is leading the gangs (and when he has to kill her) or when he’s told that Monro is dead. You can hear his hesitation when he first meets Monro, his guilt when he mentions Lisbon to Haytham, or just how genuinely thankful he is to the Finnegans and Monro for saving his life. When he’s chasing Liam through the cave in the last memory, the way he screams “I’m sorry!” and “I had to!” just gutted me. You’re never left at a loss for what he’s feeling, and it makes it so easy to empathize with him. (Personally, with how often he feels noticeably guilty, I just want to give him a hug, which is how I know that someone, somewhere, has done something right in my book).

And all of that together is what carries the story. I care about this plot because I care about Shay. I care about what’s happening because he does, and I want to know how he responds, and I want him to come out of it all okay. It’s all really character-driven, which is the most effective way to get me, personally, invested in any story. And it also actually, weirdly, fills some of the above-mentioned writing gaps, especially where the side cast is involved -- namely, the Assassins. We, as the audience, know very little about the other Assassins at this point in time; it’s something I don’t want to fault the team for too much, because the game is just so short that getting us attached to those characters would be a challenge. Everything is so lean already, and the last thing I’d want is for random bloating of the plot. But they kind of work around that? We don’t know these characters well, but Shay does. And so while I don’t care that much about, say, Hope when she dies, Shay visibly and audibly does. And his emotions in that scene feel real enough that I care a lot about how distraught he is over the situation. It manages to keep me emotionally invested in everything going on, even though there wasn’t enough time for me to grow attached to each of those side characters individually.

It honestly feels like a strange writing hack, but one that seems effective and appropriate for how this game was put together.

But, anyway, let’s switch gears just a little here, because I’d be remiss not to talk at all about Shay’s morality, since, again, it makes him sort of unique among the protagonists. And, no, not just because he’s a Templar -- things aren’t that black and white.

If you condense down what Shay really fights for, it’s basically “protecting innocents and doing right by everyday people”. Which isn’t bad or complicated -- it’s incredibly pure -- but is strangely out of place in this particular universe. At least to my reading, Shay doesn’t really, fully align with either Templars or Assassins, and so he can really easily be at odds with one or both sides. Add into that the very positive view of loyalty as a trait -- in the Assassin’s Creed universe, in other pieces of media, and in real life -- and it places Shay in an interesting spot. He’s the kind of character who will do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing, someone who will become the villain in someone else’s story if it means protecting others. Although this isn’t “villain” in the traditional sense. It has more to do with the fact that he’s willing to forego positive-aligned ideals like loyalty -- usually something a protagonist already has in spades or learns as part of their arc. Also, the fact that he doesn’t condone what he’s doing, and would even call himself a monster (seriously, that scene with Adewale? Fantastic). It makes him feel really understandably conflicted -- someone who wants to do the right thing, but is stuck between a rock and ten hard places -- and selfless, in this somewhat strange way. He’s willing to hate himself in service to something much larger. Which, again, makes him feel really sympathetic (so maybe this mention of Shay’s philosophy wasn’t as much of a tangent as it seemed).

It comes down to this: Shay resonates with me a lot, and ticks a lot of boxes for what I like in characters. And that plays really heavily into how I personally judge a game.

*****

A Really Bizare Production

At the end of the day, I just think this is a really fun game, and one that happens to appeal really effectively to my personal interests. But it’s also a game that you can’t fully separate from the circumstances of its production. The more I’ve heard about this game, the more I’m impressed it has a functioning story at all. The production seemed ridiculous and insanely fast, with motion-capture/recording and writing apparently kind of happening at the same time (I’d recommend Loomer’s podcasts with Steven Piovesan (x) and Richard Farrese (x) -- Shay’s VA and Rogue’s lead writer, respectively -- if you want to hear some of this stuff), and so I have to assume it led to some of the more bizarre inconsistencies I can see in this game.

I’m mostly talking about the Versailles sequence here. Because, sometimes, I feel like the only person who isn’t a huge fan of it.

I mean, obviously, the Unity connection is really interesting, and it absolutely makes me want a crossover story for not only Arno and Shay, but also Connor (three protagonists running around at the same time? Come on Ubisoft, how have you not written this story?). But it’s part of this larger problem, which is that this sequence feels really out of step with the rest of the game. This is something that I absolutely could go into, but won’t, just for brevity’s sake. (Believe me, it’ll be its own analysis). So it’ll suffice to say that Shay’s personality and philosophy just aren’t the same as what we saw in the rest of the game. It feels like a different character. And while that could be explained away with sixteen years of missing context (an explanation I don’t accept, because we’ve never been offered that context anywhere else), I honestly think that it’s a leftover bit of planning. This feels like a bookend that the writers decided on at the start as a way to guide their plot. But then, because there were so many changes happening, and so much plot was getting rewritten, all while filming was happening, Shay’s character and motivations just naturally shifted. (I can’t guess why -- maybe it was just an idea a writer had, maybe the acting of the character pushed it in a different direction -- but it did seem to shift). That shift does seem to have been embraced -- the main game itself is very cohesive and consistent -- but they either had to or wanted to keep the bookend pieces. Maybe for the Unity tie-in, or maybe because the promotional materials were already put together (the marketing feels a lot like it was written from either the ending, or from early concepts of the game). I don’t know game production; I’m just guessing.

But what you end up with is this strange leap or gap that isn’t easily explained, but that just exists and leaves me wanting answers.

I don’t know. Personally? I wish the scene on the Morrigan had been the last one. That one would’ve made for an interesting ending, I think.

*****

Alright, let’s close this out real simply. I love this game. Is it perfect? No. Is it the only game I’ve 100%-ed and fully replayed? Yes. Rogue is just my weird little comfort game, and good luck trying to take that away from me.

#ac rogue #assassins creed rogue #assassins creed #review

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon

Every fictional character you can think of has experienced 9/11 in fanfiction.

A Clone Wars veteran with two lightsabers is on United Airlines Flight 93 and prevents it from crashing. Ron and Hermione get caught up in the chaos as the towers fall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends watch the attacks unfold on TV from Sunnydale. We have spent 20 years trying to process what happened on 9/11 and its fallout, and that messy process can be tracked through the countless, sad, disturbing, and sometimes very funny fanfiction left across the internet.

Many of the fanfics written in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks seemed to directly respond to the news as it happened, processing the tragedy in real-time through the eyes of characters they loved. In the absence of a canon episode where Daria Morgendorffer paid respects to those lost, writing fanfic about these characters also experiencing trauma helped fans cope.

One YuGiOh fanfic published on fanfiction.net in May 2002 could have been ripped exactly from what this writer experienced that Tuesday morning. “It started as a normal day,” user Gijinka Renamon wrote. Yugi and his friends were in school, where their teacher informed them of the attacks and sent everyone home from school.

“After reading people’s 9/11 fics, I decided to write my own, and put a certain character in it. And Yugi and his pals were my first choice,” the author's note reads, explaining the connection they felt to United flight 93 and the World Trade Center attacks. Given that they lived in Pennsylvania, and “it’s close to New York, I felt really sad about it.”

Stitch, a fandom journalist for Teen Vogue, told Motherboard that this reaction to 9/11 is not at all uncommon in fandom.

"Fandom has always been a place that positions nothing as 'off limits,'" she said. "Historical tragedies like the Titanic sinking and atrocities like… all of World War 2 show up regularly across the past 30 years of people creating stories and art about the characters they love. So, on some level, it makes sense that 9/11 and the following 20-year military installation in the Middle East has joined the ranks of things people in different fandoms turn into settings for their fan fiction."

Reactions depicted in a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics published in the weeks after the attacks ring a little truer to the characters. “Tuesday, 11th September 2001,” written by Anna K, almost echoes the lyrics from “I’ve Got a Theory,” one of the songs in the musical episode that aired in November 2001. “We have seen the apocalypse. We have prevented it. Actually, we’ve prevented quite a few. So we know what they look like,” they write, before taking a darker turn. “They look a lot like…New York today.”

Killing demons and vampires doesn’t phase the Scooby Gang, but when preventable human death is brought into the picture, it’s gut wrenching.

“What am I supposed to do…When I can’t do anything to save the world?” Buffy cries into Spike’s chest, watching the attacks unfold on TV in a fanfic the author described as being “about feeling numb and helpless.”

In “Blood Drive,” Kirayoshi writes about Buffy and her friends saving a van full of donated blood meant for victims of the attacks from a group of thirsty vampires. One Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic even takes a blindly patriotic turn, where noted lesbian witch Tara McClay helps Xander hang an American flag from the window of the magic shop to make Anya feel better.

Experiencing 9/11 as a young teenager was overwhelming not just because of the loss of life. Almost immediately after the event itself, it was as if the entirety of American culture re-oriented itself towards an overtly jingoistic stance. As we get distance from the attacks, seeing the tone of television and movies from the early 2000s is jarring, and some have gone viral on Twitter. In the world of pop music, mainstream musicians like the Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted from the radio while Toby Keith sang about putting a boot up the ass of terrorists. On the Disney Channel, a young Shia Labeouf reading a poem he supposedly wrote about the events. The poem concludes with the line, "it's awesome to be an American citizen."

In a world so completely saturated with this messaging, it is not surprising that fanfic authors started including 9/11 in their work so soon after the event. Even The West Wing had a strange, out of continuity, fanfic-esque episode where the characters reacted to 9/11. In some cases, it made sense that the characters in the stories would be close to or a part of the events themselves.

"For characters like John Watson or Captain America, the idea works to an extent," Stitch told Motherboard. "In the original Sherlock Holmes works and the 2011 BBC series, Watson had just returned from Afghanistan. For Captain America and other Marvel heroes, 9/11 was something that was addressed in-universe in The Amazing Spider-Man volume 2 #36. Technically, 9/11 is 'canon' to the Marvel universe."

In “Early Warning: Terrorism,” a fanfiction for the TV show Early Edition in which a man who mysteriously receives tomorrow's newspaper, predicting the future, avoids jingoism, but tries to precent 9/11 from happening. This fanfic remains unfinished; it’s unclear if the characters successfully prevent 9/11 in this retelling.

Largely in fanfic from the era just after 9/11, when many young authors were trying to emotionally grapple with it, the characters don't re-write or undo the events themselves. It's this emphasis on the reaction to tragedy that colors the fanfiction that features 9/11 going forward.

Although fanfiction authors have been writing about 9/11 consistently since soon after the event, whenever that fanfiction reaches outside of its intended audience, it looks bizarre.

A screenshot of a Naruto 9/11 fanfic on the Tumblr subreddit comes without any context, or even more than two lines and an author's note. It’s impossible to suss out if this falls into the category of sincere fanfic without the rest of the piece or a publication date, but modern-day commenters on the Reddit thread see it as classic Tumblr trash.

Screenshot from r/Tumblr

“Bin Laden/Dick Cheney, enemies to lovers, 10k words, slow burn,” one user joked in the replies, underscoring the weirdness of Naruto being in the Twin Towers by comparing it to a What If story about Cheney and Bin Laden slowly falling deeply in love.

It’s hard to tell how much of the 9/11 fanfic and fanart starting a few years after the attacks is sincere, and how much of it is ironic, and trying to make fun of the very concept of writing fanfiction about 9/11.

A 2007 anime music video (in which various clips, usually from anime, are cut together to music) that combines scenes from The Lion King with Linkin Park’s “Crawling” and clips from George Bush’s speeches immediately after the attacks feels like the perfect example of this. Even the commenters can’t seem to suss out if this person is a troll or not.

There’s no way that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 9/11 fanart could be serious, right? Especially if the description pays tribute to “some of the nation's most memorable buildings,” and features five of the main characters as child versions of themselves. The comments again are split between users thanking the artist for a thoughtful remembrance post, and people making their own headcanon for why Twilight Sparkle is surreptitiously absent from the scene.

Screengrab via DeviantArt

There’s Phineas and Ferb fanfic that combines a 9/11 tribute concert with flashbacks to Ferb being rescued from the towers as a baby, written on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It jumps from introspection to lines like, “‘Quiet Perry the Platypus. I’m trying to listen to these kids singing a 9/11 tribute.’”

The author's notes make it more likely that they meant for this to be a tribute piece, but it doesn’t quite make sense until watching a YouTube dramatic reading of it from 2020, fully embracing the absurdity of it all.

“For me, 9/11 is synonymous with war. It completely changed the course of my life," Dreadnought, the author of a Captain America fanfic Baghdad Waltz that sees Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes fall in love over the course of the war on terror, told Motherboard. "It’s the reason I joined the military, and I developed deep connections with people who would go on to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. These very much felt like my generation’s wars, perhaps because people I graduated high school with were the youngest folks eligible to serve at the time.”

Dreadnought told Motherboard that although they didn't deploy, their career has kept 9/11 and the trauma from it in their mind. After seeing that people who fantasize about Steve and Bucky getting together seemed particularly interested in reading fanfiction that related to 9/11, they decided to try their hand at it.

"I had to do something with all of that emotionally, and I’m admittedly a bit emotionally avoidant. So I learned through fic that it’s easier for me to process those feelings and the knowledge of all the awful stuff that can happen in war if I can turn it into something creative," Dreadnought said. "Give the feelings to fake people and then have those fake people give the feelings to readers!"

To Dreadnought, who is a queer man, the experience of researching and writing this was more cathartic than they first expected, especially as a way to navigate feelings about masculinity, military culture, and queer identity. But they said the research they did, which included watching footage of first responders at ground zero, was what helped them finally process the event itself.

"It was like a delayed horror, and it was more powerful than I expected it would be." Dreadnought said. "When I was eighteen, I was pretty emotionally divorced from 9/11; I just knew I wanted to do something about it. So coming back to it in my 30s while writing this fic, it was a very different experience. Even the research for this story ended up being an extraordinarily valuable exercise in cognitively and emotionally processing 9/11 and all of its second and third order effects."

Fanfiction that features 9/11 provides an outlet for people who still grapple with the trauma from that day. But Stitch warns that the dynamics of fandom and how it relates to politics can also create fiction that's less respectful and more grotesque.

"With years of distance between the stories written and the original events of 9/11, there seems to be some sort of cushion for fans who choose to use those events as a catalyst for relationships—and Iraq and Afghanistan for settings," Stitch said. "The cushion allows them room to fictionalize real world events that changed the shape of the world as we know it, but it also insulates them from having to think about what they may be putting into the world."

The tendency of turning these events into settings or backgrounds for mostly white, male characters to fall in love has the unintended effect of displacing the effects that the war on terror has had on the world over. Steve and Bucky might fall in love during the war on terror, but they would also be acting as a part of the American military in a war that has been criticized since it started. Fanfic writers in other fandoms have come under fire for using real world tragedy as settings for fic before. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake Supernatural fanfiction about the actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki going to the island to do aid became controversial within the fandom. There have also been fics where characters grapple with the death of George Floyd that is written in a way that displaces the event from the broader cultural context of race in America.

"A Captain America story where Steve Rogers is a 'regular' man who joins the US Army and 'fights for our freedom' post-9/11 is unlikely to deal with the war’s effect on locals who are subject to US military intervention," Stitch said. "It’s unlikely to sit with what Captain America has always meant and what a writer is doing by dropping Steve Rogers into a then-ongoing conflict in any capacity."

After enough time, “never forget” can even morph into “but what if it never happened?” A 19k+ word Star Wars alternate universe fanfic asks this question, wondering what would have unfolded if someone with two lightsabers was on United Flight 93. This fic, part of a larger fanfic series with its own Wikia, considers what would have happened if Earth was a military front in the Clone Wars.

In this version of events, a decorated general who served in the Clone Wars is able to take back control of Flight 93 before it crashes, landing safely and preventing even more tragedy from happening that day. In the end, all of the passengers who made harrowing last calls to their loved ones before perishing in a Pennsylvania field survive thanks to the power of the Force, and are awarded medals of honor by President Bush.

Twenty years after the attacks, it’s painful to think about what would have happened if people got to work 15 minutes later, or missed their trains that morning. There weren’t Jedi masters deployed to save people in real life, but for some of the fanfic writers working today, the world of Star Wars might feel just as removed as the world before September 11, 2001.

Fiction serves as a powerful playground for processing cultural events, especially generational trauma. The act isn't neutral though; a decade's worth of fanfiction that takes place on or around 9/11 shows how our own understanding of a traumatic event can shift with time.

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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