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everythingsinred · 6 months

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Family and the Institution of Alice Academy

Was thinking about this ever since someone (I forgot specifically who, sorry) posed a question like this in the GA discord, asking about (I think) Natsume's extended family or something like that. It was a really interesting concept that I've been thinking a lot about since it was brought up, so here are the thoughts I've accumulated. I'll try to be concise but I have a LOT of thoughts and my brain is messy.

My general opinion at the end of all this thinking I did is that I don't think Academy students typically have very close familial ties after graduating.

I think the most apparent reason for that would be that students are expected to graduate when they are twenty years old. Our main four are exceptions to the rule, coming to the Academy pretty late in life. Most children are taken early, as toddlers or even babies. Natsume, Ruka, and Hotaru's families did all they could to avoid Academy scouting. Mikan was entirely accidental--if she had never met Hotaru, she might have never even found out she was an Alice to begin with. That being said, most kids were separated from their families at a very young age, only to be allowed to reunite with them once they're already adults. For many students, they've been away from their parents for close to two decades.

On top of that, the Academy doesn't allow visitations or phone calls and severely restricts letter communications. Only one child from each class is allowed to return home for one week each year, and that one week does not do much to make up for all the time spent at school.

My point is that by the time students are allowed to see their families again, that familial bond has already been severed, for all intents and purposes. That feeling of closeness and protection no longer exists. Students will feel more closeness and connection to their classmates and even to their teachers than to their parents or siblings, and as a result, I can imagine many graduates not even bothering to visit their families.

While I was pondering this, I made the connection between Academy students and the real life example of a similar situation with Janissaries from the Ottoman Empire. Basically, Janissaries were children stolen from the subjugated people under Ottoman rule. They were taken for the purpose of a "child levy", also known as a "blood tax." Some children were even willingly given by their families due to the possibility of socially advancing, and because the children were promised first class status (sound familiar?). Essentially the children were taken, forced to comply with Ottoman standards and traditions (including forced conversions and circumcisions), and then trained for military service. These soldiers would actually end up being incredibly loyal and efficient, despite likely never seeing their families again.

(Edit: forced circumcisions are particularly heinous when you consider that the children were typically at least 10 years old at the time they were taken.... so.... uh.... not pleasant.... But also interesting that the Janissaries were typically much older than the Alice children at the time of being taken.)

That level of separation doesn't endear ties; it severs them. These Janissaries--very often forcefully taken from their families--ended up growing up with very little connection to their parents or siblings. The feeling of belonging to their previous communities was gone. Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. This was done as a means of creating a strong military force but also to disillusion subjugated communities and tear away their hope. Their children could always be taken; their communities could always be crushed, even without the use of physical force. It's a very effective tool to oppress a group of people.

(There's actually a lot of similarities between Academy children and Janissaries beside the separation of children from their families. They were also paid for their service and were high ranking; the Academy students are given an allowance and many of them, despite being stolen from their families, have a sense of superiority over non-Alices. They feel like they are treasures, and are of higher value and rank. Additionally, Academy students, especially in the DA class, are highly trained and efficient child soldiers, much like the Janissaries. Janissaries are actually a super interesting historical topic and are worth looking into!)

We can even see the effect of this distance when Yuka escapes the Academy and runs away to her family. Yuka was essentially sold to the Academy, with her parents trading her in exchange for money and status. She was very young, far too young to really understand that her parents had abandoned her. As a result, she romanticized her bond with them, and the longer she was separated from them, the more that bond became fantastical. She made many attempts to escape the school to reunite with her parents and she fantasized about seeing them again. When she finally is able to, it's nothing like she imagined. They're cold, and unfamiliar. They don't recognize her. She doesn't know her brothers. They're related, but there's no real connection.

"I shouldn't have come here."

Yuka's is an extreme example, but I'm sure she's not an exception. For most Academy students, the almost 20 years of separation from their parents would be too much to ignore. They would not recognize each other, or be close. I'm sure many parents did not sell their children like Yuka's family did, but the bond between child and family had not been nurtured the way it should have been, resulting in coldness and distance.

Because of that, I doubt most students even bother seeking their families out, or even if they do, it's to visit a few times before starting a new life with a career. That familial bond, now broken, is difficult to repair. The connections people often feel with their families or hometowns is something Academy students instead feel with each other. They are all Alices, all in the same boat together. That feeling of superiority that many kids feel means they view each other as on the same level, and I'm sure that could interfere with family connection as well.

Thus, I don't think there's many multigenerational Alice families out there with close bonds. I don't think families like Natsume's have strong ties with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. Even the sibling bonds at the Academy are stunted, with the Imai and Shouda siblings being the prime examples of that.

The Imai siblings have a significant age difference, yes, but additionally the Imai parents had a very different approach to Hotaru after seeing what happened with Subaru. They refused to hand her over as easily, wanting to show her important things in life and build happy memories for as long as they could. Even when Hotaru does enter the school, it's more than six months before she even comes across her brother, since the high school and elementary school are not integrated with each other and they do not belong to the same ability class. Similarly, the Shouda siblings are in different ability classes but they have a much smaller age gap. Despite this, Sumire refers to her brother very respectfully, indicating that there isn't a particular closeness.

The Imais fight against this divide, and put in genuine effort into rebuilding their relationship, but it's a difficult process, and one they struggle to admit to for a long time and for various reasons. Familial closeness is not encouraged, not even within the Academy.

(Though Natsume's bond with Aoi is exploited and the school does rely on him caring for her to take advantage of him, but ultimately he is kept from seeing her. Thus, that bond is also severed despite being exploited.)

Additionally, it would make sense to me if many Alice graduates decided to, upon having children, avoid scouting, like Natsume's parents did, and thus ended up moving around a lot to escape Academy notice. Moving around like that and laying low means that you're not going to be hosting huge family reunions or inviting relatives over often, even if all the other points were moot.

Finally, I think all this creates further obstacles for Yuka's wish to "have a family." At some point she says that, for normal people, the desire to settle down with someone and start a family is a pretty modest goal, but for Alices it's almost impossible. Escaping from the school, or even graduating, is a struggle. And you can have a kid, but it's likely that child will be taken from you, just as you were taken, and by the time the child graduates, they will have no connection with you. Wanting to be a potential grandparent, for example, might seem like a definite impossibility, since being a real parent is impossible.

It's even more proof that the Academy exists as an institution to subjugate and undermine Alices, as children and then as parents. Ultimately, an Alice never has control, not as a child and not even as an adult. The pain doesn't end once you've graduated; in fact, it never does.

#gakuen alice #ga #my meta #ga meta #azumi yuka #hyuuga natsume #alice academy #yes there are kids who lose their alices and thus leave early #i think those kids might find more luck reestablishing familial bonds #also there seem to be a few powerful and intergenerational families within the alice system #but those families seem rather to be in control of the school... theyd be the puppetmasters essentially #and thus might not be as victimized as normal families like natsume's.... he clearly has no power or control in the alice world AT ALL.#so yes i think those big and powerful families are exceptionally rare and thus not as relevant to this post #theyre not 'subjugated' like most other alice families are... idk how else to phrase that #feel free to hmu with ur thoughts on this topic! its super fascinating to me as yet another example of the academys many atrocities #and one i hadnt even properly thought of to this degree until recently!#its so very fun to discover and consider new aspects of ga lore or implications in the story! i love it so much!#i just cant see myself ever getting tired of analyzing this manga #i didnt actually narrow in on any one character but yuka seems to be the best example of my points so i focus on her the most #if u want we can talk abt other characters and families and discuss how the academy affected those bonds!#what an interesting concept.... im having a blast thinking abt all this rn

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hella1975 · 3 months

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Hi hella!!!

I feel like i always start these off or end them by saying that these things are going to be incomprehensible in some way, mainly bc i have trouble translating whats going on in my mind into written words so i really dont know how much of my list thingies make sense to you but this one is especially probably going to not make much sense. (also bc i send them a lot when im either very tired or not sober, but i am sober and wide awake rn so this might be a different kind of incomprehensible)

I found one of my old drafts for an ask from around a year ago and it was a follow up response to the last chapter you posted at the time, so im not sure how its going to sound without the context of that specific chapter, but i also mentioned in one of my other asks that i add stuff in last minute and that ask i added a shit ton of stuff so i dont have any of that pretyped out so im going by memory. But im sending it again bc i havent seen you answer it

(please do not interpret this as ‘why didnt you answer my ask >:/’ or me rushing you to answer asks or anything like that, but like I said its been a year so im assuming tumblr ate it. If not and you just havent cleaned out your ask box and you find the original, congratulations you’ll know what i originally said. Bc idk how accurate this will be)

Theres two different ways that you seem to write metaphors (idk if thats what theyre called im not caught up on my literary terminology)

(im scrolling through your blog rn looking for my other asks and tumblr really did you dirty in your asks system like i started scrolling and the third one down was from 2021 and im fighting for my life trying to find my tag (thank you for my tag btw its very useful to me))

Anywho, most of your metaphors ( to me) can be split into two categories. Theres the simple ones and the complex ones. Now this might seem obvious but im going to explain to you how these have different effects on my brain.

An example of the ‘simple’ ones is

““If Nanook’s tone had a note of seriousness, then Zuko’s was the entire orchestra.”” (idk what chapter this is from its been a while)

You have a lot of these kinds of whatever the haick kind of literary technique this is (is this a metaphor i’ve been trying to google it for like ½ an hour and i cant figure it out) BUT these type of things that are simple and easy to process is one of my favorite things about the way you write. I think this is a very common technique but the way you do it to me is just a lot more unique than the ways ive seen it done before. Its extremely fluent with the voice of the characters and brings a perfect kind of vibe to the ‘conversation’ (or story, text, whatever) and it paints the picture of what your trying to say perfectly. I also really like how these types of things arent ever in Zukos pov a lot (sometimes it is, but not nearly as much, I’ve noticed) and its not in the more serious like revelations that you drop these in. Like I said, it adds to the voice of the characters, bc of the contrast of Zuko constantly having revelations and dramatic archs and stuff, and the other characters just in general being a lot more calm. Its like when youre listening to a song and you have the lyrics and the like ‘main’ music behind the lyrics, but then when you listen to the song a lot you notice the smaller, like backup music that adds a lot to the song and makes it a lot more enjoyable than if it was just the lyrics and the louder more up front music.

Then in contrast you have the bigger ‘metaphors’

An example of this is ‘You curse in words already invented’

THIS IS MY FAVORITE LINE IN THE ENTIRE FIC.

OF ANY FIC OR BOOK EVER READ

AND THIS IS WHY

When I tell you I could not figure out what this meant for months I am AWFUL with stuff like this and interpreting it my english teachers hate me bc of it. Id have the question ‘why were the curtains blue’ and my answer would be ‘bc the people who decorated the room like blue maybe theyre interior designers and it goes with the room 😊 and thats so hot of them bc i love blue too’

But even thought i couldnt figure it out it stayed in my head and i probably thought about it once a day (i mean this literally, i think about that part all the time) and i cant remember the context for that or anything but i do remember that i knew it was a wonderful phrase.

I’ve mentioned in my other asks how whenever im reading anything at all that you’ve written (whether its tams, or toab, or in the tags of something even if its like 10 words), everything you type comes out so fluidly like a formula or a color wheel or however i put it last time i talked about this. And this is on the prodigious end of the spectrum of this.

But phrases like that are another part of the fic, theyre like the lyrics of the song. Like the phrases that gets all the attention and gets put in fanart and that gets quoted in comment sections because they deserve that recognition and you deserve that recognition and are just a reminder of how incredibly talented you are.

I mean that in the most sincere way that i know how to express.

I am constantly in awe of you and your writing style, and i really do think of you as one of the most talented writers of everything ive ever read.

And something else worth mentioning is that it isnt just your ao3 that portrays that. Like if I were to just read your ao3 I’d be like ‘oh wow this person is an amazing writer’ But your tumblr persona plays into it a lot more (In my opinion). Because then you see like more ‘backround’ stuff on ao3. And more of your system (im not articulating this in the way i mean it very well) and you get privy to the fact that you’re not a 30 year old with a masters in english and that you’ve never had any formal education on writing. I vaguely remember you talking about a story about a sailor (??? i might be misremembering that) that you wrote when you were a child and thinking ‘oh wow so she’s always been like that’. And its stuff like that that you dont get on ao3 that kind of reaffirms how incredible of a writer you are.

And this (to me) makes you a really easy person to admire. (ik i touched on this in a different ask but i dont remember if it was one of my list asks or not) but as someone who probably isnt going to ever be able to get an education around writing, it kind of reassures me that i dont need that to be great at it.

(i kind of feel like a lot of the stuff in this ask is too like ‘simple’ or obvious to be given a lot of weight, but this whole thing is about the kinds of things you do that brings me personally joy and the metaphors are one of them so)

Also on an off note when i was looking through your asks to try to find my tag, I noticed that i send you a heavy percentage of your anonymous asks (mainly without my alias) and I thought that was funny. But also i hope it doesnt come across as obsessive or weird, I swear i do that to a lot of people on here, I’m just a very social person. .😂

Also Im in your tbos server (lurking in the shadows) and someone pointed out that whenever you do the reaction emojis you always do the white ones, and thats going on the official ‘my favorite things about hella’ list because that was genuinely one of the funniest things ive seen.

Also the ‘anytime you type its very fluid (im too lazy to scroll up and see how i put it rn) also carrys on to discord. I think that i could probably block out the user names and be able to figure out that its you talking every time, you have a very distinct way of talking.

Also i wanted to mention that every time you answer these i read them again and i want to say like 1/3 of what i sasy, i have no recollection of. And i never have any idea what im talking about. so i think thats funny.

LIST ANONNNNNNNNNNNNN BAWLING MY EYES OUT HELLO BABY WELCOME BACK FROM WAR IVE MISSED YOU IM JUST HERE LIKE THIS RN

#this is so something i needed to hear rn bc always during exam season i 'lose' my ability to write like even the writing i do get done #just feels so fucking stale and awful imo and i just have to force myself to push through or else ill have a crisis about it #so i started studying in DECEMBER and it's now almost february exams are done but i CANT get out of that mindset for some reason #like ive been in a really bad writing flunk where im ABLE to write but the stuff i do write just feels genuinely terrible #like im losing it about dog teeth atm bc this story i was so in love with just feels so basic and underwhelming on a reread #and idk how much of that is me being insane and perfectionist and how much is valid criticism #so being told that actually there are people who not only enjoy my writing but are so thoroughly convinced it's a fundamental part of me #and something i am inherently GOOD at to the point even the way i talk CASUALLY is telling of it is just. oughhh im pacing my room #and the fact it doesn't HAVE to be my pretentious prose shit sometimes the more 'basic' stuff is STILL good. you're in my walls #i cant believe you're in the discord i hope you say hi!!! i dont bite!!! <- lying #also those assholes can take my silly white emojis from my COLD DEAD HANDS. white thumbs down will never die #ask #list anon

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