A Tale of Two Monkeys (and a Dog)

 Primordial by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino is an alternate Cold War mini-series about two monkeys, Able and Mrs. Baker, and Laika, everyone's favorite space dog. A signal from space is discovered which deflects the Cold War from celestial posturing to more terrestrial endeavors. Before the end, however, two monkeys and a dog, who is of course Laika, have been launched into space. It is not clear what the space trio encounter, perhaps because they are animals and respond accordingly, or perhaps because it is alien and no terrestrial being could comprehend it. This is not a story, however, about an alternate history without the space program, or a story about the fallout from animal-alien contact, but rather a reflection of the strangeness of the universe, how wonderfully and terribly all things have been made.

Jake the Idiot, but no Finn

    The first few chapters of Andrew Moriarty's Trans-Galactic Insurance: Adventures of Jump Space Accountant reminds of nothing so much as the first three issues or episodes of a mini-series which I would drop and later, after the series was complete, revisit now that I understood the importance of the interminable exposition to a serviceable but hardly exciting mystery. The initial reference to Belters suggested a story that was Solar rather than Galactic. The characters were sufficiently fleshed out to serve the plot but scarcely more than that, as is common espionage plots. The implication of a plucky girl who aids the protagonist also being a minor in modern Western sensibilities, and therefore a nod to Heinleinian heroine, was well executed by a single line. The portrayal of the ideal spy as too boring to cause casual notice was a relief from the flashy action heroes of so much science fiction.

                My greatest annoyance at the plot-driven world-building is the use of the term ‘credit’ as a basic fiat unit of currency in a book starring an accountant investigating fraud! I realize that credit is a generic science-fictional unit of currency, but one would think that a story about financial fraud would be savvy to the specific financial meaning of credit and debit in balancing accounts. I am not saying that the author should have chosen some exotic name for the currency, such as ‘quatloos’, just something other than ‘credits’ when the fictional economy uses a double-entry system. I suppose this is the way that physicists and engineers feel about gross ‘errors’ in other science fiction novels. If you want to read a series that begins with a space-based human civilization cut off from its parent, you should go read John Scalzi’s latest trilogy instead.

Triangles! Triangles Everywhere!

Agsin and again I am drawn back to the aesthetic appeal of  Ditema tsa Dinoko, also known as Isbheqe Sohlamvu. A good aesthetic is an excellent tool for promotion and its overlay of the IPA chart on the indigenous symbols assures me that this is a result of international syncretism. The iconography is sufficiently simple to allow combinations of sounds and (where appropriate) to compose syllable clusters, which the eye and mind of native speakers can process as a word. The extensive system of prefixes and suffixes in Bantu languages no doubt facilitates this process. It would be fascinating to see a study on the relative speed of comprehension for Ditema tsa Dinoko versus Roman orthography.

There are, however, two questions that come to mind. The first is that of the order of the syllables in the visual medium. If the syllables fit more harmoniously in a non-concatenative order, it is sensible to order them in such a way; but there must be some sequences whoch could be reade in more than order, even if the noun class prefix is clear from the surrounding context. The second question is not so much a question as an observation. Direma tsa Dinoko, along with Mandombe and other African and indigenous scripts, depend on rotational symmetry. Although the reduction of shapes simplifies the number of design components needed to create the specialized font, quite a few persons have difficulty with rotation and reversal, especially when the orthography is so heavily dependent on these processes. Perhaps it is a challenge overcome by practice, but this challenge illustrates the conflict between simplicity of composition and simplicity of comprehension.

Not All Robots: Science Fiction Done Right

 Not All Robots, wirtten by Mark Russell and drawn by Mike Deodato Jr, is a mini-series in the classic tradition of science fiction: tackling modern problems through allegory. The world of Not All Robots is one in which humanity has retreated into bubble cities to escape the devastation of the world. The human unemployment rate is almost a hundred percent; a robot is assigned to each family to provide for them. The humans are bored and angry at their lack of agency and ungrateful: not the most flattering depiction of humanity, but a probable reaction to the circumstances. Hairdressers alone retain a profession, a reflection of the limited opportunities afforded to women throughout many eras. Even the robots, however, lack job security because the job of many robots is to build their own replacements. Under such conditions, it is no wonder that strife breaks out.

The simplicity of the scenario is its strength. Although the five-issue mini-series is divided in a chapter per issue, the brevity of the format allows just enough explicit detail while omitting or passing over other details that would distract from the basic questions of identity, mortality, and purpose. A short story does not have to explain the tax policies of the apocalypse.

Go, Gowachin, Go!

Now and in the immediate future Dune will be the Frank Herbert book most read (or claimed to be read), but as much as Dune stands out among science fiction novels, it is worth reading Herbert's other books such as The Whipping Star. The universe of The Whipping Star is one in which government has achieved such efficiency that it is necessary to inhibit it in some way. This efficiency is the least plausible part of the setting, but initial conditions in science fiction sometimes must be accepted. The organization in charged with disrupting the bureaucracy is the Bureau of Sabotage, or BuSab. The representative of BuSab is Jorj X. McKie. McKie uncovers a conspiracy that threatens virtually all life in the universe because aliens are, well, alien in thought and experience or lack thereof.

The sequel, The Dosadi Experiment, is the better of the two. The Dosadi Experiment is this: what happens if we put various alien species in the most vicious social pressure cooker ever evented? The chasm in which the Experiment takes place is the opposite of the paradise of Malacandra: crowded, competitive, and amoral. BuSab sends McKie to check on the Experiment, and it does not bode well for the rest of the universe, as one might expect from a perpetual gom jabbar.

These are shorter and less dense than Dune, a palate cleanser between Messiah, Children, and God Emperor.

A Sorrowful and Epitrite Heart

 The group has embarked upon reading Pindar Pythian 4 as a thematically appropriate work after reading Euripides' Medea. Pindar dwells on happier days, although there is an exile in the Ode. To say that the meter of Pindar is challenging would be an understatement, and scholars of previous generations had difficulty determining the lines. Their suffering, however, has brought wisdom to later generations.

Most classicists are trained on dactylic hexameter, iambic trimeter, and elegiac couplets, with the meter of the chorus often provided in the back of the text (assuming the text is not hopelessly corrupt). Other meters can be painful to learn and even passed over in the need to complete the lines assigned. Recitation is not as common as it once was.

The meter of Pythian 4 is dactylo-epitritic, which no doubt has a high morbidity rate. Dactyls are familiar to virtually all classicists, although in this case the dactyls are doubled and extended into a series long-short-short-long-short-short-long (a hemipes). Epitrite, which might also be a parasitic plant, is a specific kind of foot, but varies more than feet of two or three syllables. It is common for tetrasyllabic feet to vary in a specified way: once the foot is of this length, perhaps it is no longer productive (pace Latine loquentibus) to give individual names beyond the ordinal. The epitrite is a tetrasyllable in which one syllable must be short and the others long, much like desperate sailors at sea. The combination of this foot with the hemipes, along with variations, produce some long lines compared to epic or tragedy.

Let's Talk About Ptolitics

A challenge often faced by linguistic neophytes is the mastery of clusters not found in their native tongue. In the case of English-speakers learning Ancient Greek, one such cluster is πτ at the beginning of the word. The Greeks themselves were not thrilled with this combination, if the development of πτόλις to πόλις is any indication. Internally, this cluster did not present a problem. Exempla even developed from the juncture of π and the first-person suffix yo in verbs such as πίπτω and κλέπτω. The average Greek was not a linguist, even a poor one, for comparative linguistic had not yet been invented, so the root was reanalysed as πίπτ- and produced both future πεσοῦμαι and infinitive πίτνειν through another round of affixation and cluster reduction. One of the words which kept the πτ was πτῶσις, falling, from which the word for case, the best grammatical invention of man, derives its name.

Despite the potential difficulty of pronouncing πτ, the original pronunciation was even more challenging: τπ. If this looks improbable, let us remember that the Proto-Indo-European root for earth was *dhghom-, so someone at some point deemed such clusters pronounceable. In the later evolution of the language, it is a bit surprising that the t did not become an s: PIE loves its s almost as much as Greek likes to drop it intervocalically. The rule which developed in Greek was this: in a cluster of two different plosives the first could not be a dental; or in layman's terms, τ, d, and θ could not be first. Greek, therefore, has πτ and κτ and lacks τπ and τκ. The earth is χθών not θχών. 

Superman '78 Mini-Series Review and Analysis

 To me, Superman will always be Christopher Reeve. I was excited, therefore, to read the six-issue mini-series Superman '78. 

Robert Venditti is the writer. Wilfred Torres is the artist. The colorist is Jordie Bellaire, and Dave Lamphear of A Better World (DC's main earth, perhaps) is the letter. Torres does an excellent job rendering the characters to resemble the actors, and Venditti captures the dialogue admirably. I am, however, more interested in how the mini-series' themes allow it to serve as the third volume and conclusion to the first two movies. This is absolutely worth reading, but my analysis below includes spoilers, as an ending in a trilogy would, so be forewarned. Even better, buy it wherever you get your comics.

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The goal of the Superman movies can be summed up in Jor-El's words to Kal-El: "They can be a great people, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you ... my only son." (Superman: The Movie) Jor-El's world is doomed, with an absence of hope, but he can share hope with another civilization. Superman in the first movie learns how to be human from his adoptive parents and about Kryptonian civilization from the Fortress of Solitude; unlike the Kryptonians, however, he learned about it without the sterility or Jor-El's despair. He learns that he can literally change the course of history. In the second movie, Superman faces off against Zod and his goons. Zod's goal is to exploit others, whether they be the doomed Kryptonians or humans under Kal-El's protection. Superman learns that the capacity for evil is as present in Kryptonians as it is in humans, and that this nature must be incorporated and overcome because it cannot be eliminated.

Since the first movie had Luthor as a villain and the second had Zod, the mini-series uses Brainiac. The movie universe has a simple mythology, so Brainiac is doing what he always does: bottling cities and destroyed civilizations. This obsession, of course, makes Superman a rare prize. This Brainiac is not the organic one of the Silver Age, not the mechanical skull of the Post-Crisis era, but a more movie-suitable transitional one - appropriate for the period in which Brainiac was moving from organic to artificial. Brainiac himself is the sole survivor of his civilization, but lacks the empathy of Superman and Jor-El. It is not clear whether this is the result of eons of loneliness or a defect in his species' psychology. Brainiac doesn't even have a '70s space monkey for company. His "solution" to his loneliness is not to settle somewhere for a time, or even communicate extensively with various civilizations, but rather to preserve each in his bottles. This preservation leads to resignation at best, and despair at worst for the cities in flight; thus Brainiac is spreading despair rather than hope. 

Superman is willing to sacrifice himself to save the Earth, but Metropolis is bottled anyway. The existence of Kandor is a surprise for Superman, but not to anyone who knows the Brainiac mythos. The bigger surprise is that Jor-El and Lara are in Kandor. They are delighted to see their son, but Jor-El, whose words were so inspiring to young Clark Kent, has given into despair and seeks only to ensure the continued existence of Kandor, the last remnant of Krypton. Superman does not accept this and wins Jor-El over with his optimism borne of sources unavailable on Krypton. The sterility of Brainiac's ship is fundamentally no different from the sterility of Krypton. Superman fights Brainiac, but the fight also includes a discussion of how one reacts to the destruction and other terrors of the universe, whether the hope of action or the despair of inaction is the appropriate response. Brainiac choses to die rather than live among lesser mortals; he also choses death for all the bottled cities and the lesser mortals who live therein. Even if suicide is a legitimate choice for Brainiac, he not only has no right to choose for others, but he is also making the opposite choice of the citizens of the two cities featured in the mini-series. The look on his last uploaded body suggests that Brainiac realized his error after he could no longer avoid the consequences. 

Superman saves Kandor and Metropolis, the latter of which has apparently not set to permanent miniaturization, but the bigger surprise is that he saves most or all of the other cities as well. Perhaps this is as close to the Cosmic Zoo as the movie universe can come, but the more likely reason is that the victory over despair would ring hollow if only the cities of the hero and his loved ones survived. Although Brainiac's technology is lost, the cities and their inhabitants are safe, protected by a guardian who wants to restore them rather than a specimen collector who wants to preserve them. Hope triumphs over despair.

Stopping At Slowyear: Willoughby Among the Stars

 For a book about which I only occasionally remember details, Stopping At Slowyear certainly sticks in my mind; at yet this patchy memory is thematically appropriate. Stopping At Slowyear is a book Fred Pohl wrote late in life, and this too ties into the theme, which unfortunately is also the twist. It is no accident that the outdated cargo ship is called the Nordvik, a Viking name reminiscent of Pohl's early work, nor that the main character is named Mercy. The setting is spare and basic: an old ship, a planet of long and bitter seasons, and a romance between a spacer and a grounder. There is, of course, a secret which the locals are loath to reveal.

It's a good story, but don't read this at a low point in your life. Or perhaps you should: consolation has been found in stranger places.

The Curious Case of the Removable Nu

 There are many dialects of Ancient Greek, and individual dialects are often assigned to different genres, presumably due to some founder effect. This literary dialect then is smoothed and standardized and thus acquires some forms not found in the original dialect. Many literary dialects mix features from more than one dialect. Tragedy generally separates the Ionic speech of the majority of the play from the stage Doric of the Chorus, but even this relatively clear separation does not prohibit the occasional intrusion of a Doric verb into the Ionic sentence. The proper dialect of an Ode is Doric and Aeolic combined. This presents a challenge to the modern student of Ancient Greek, who has trained on Attic Greek, itself not as standard as the Athenians would have you believe. And thus we come to the removable ν.

Calling this ν 'removable' is somewhat misleading, for although it disappears, it does not do so without leaving a trace. The nature of that trace is the reason for such variation among the Greek dialects in critical grammatical forms such a participles. Greek loves participles; if one wields them correctly, they increase the subtlety of Greek to a degree that would make Cato uncomfortable. The present and aorist active particles have an affix -ντ- to which the case endings are appended; but the σ of the nominative singular triggers changes which differentiate it from the oblique cases. These changes are not the same in every dialect. In general, the change involves lengthening the preceding vowel. Such is the case in Attic. In the dialect of Pindar's Odes, however, lengthening is replaced by diphthongization; thus -ανς from -αντς becomes -αις rather than Attic -ας. This phenomenon can be confusing for a student at their first encounter because it is similar to the feminine dative -αις (which is -αισι here, for reasons best dealt with elsewhere and never had a ν). These changes create a brief uphill battle for the neophyte, until they see the horror of even more radical non-configurationality.

Where Have All the Flores Gone?

 The recent cancellation of Wonder Girl, the Wonder Woman Family title starring Yara Flor, the first Wonder Girl of indigenous Amazonian descent, was disappointing. Although Flor's demotion from Wonder Woman in the Future State timeline was inevitable, given the large number of Amazons with a prior claim, a series featuring an Amazonian Amazon was an opportunity to expand the corpus of mythologies available to the Wonder Woman franchise beyond the Tetrarchy of Greek, Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian. Unfortunately, the financial reward for even the headlining Amazon has often been tenuous. If American comics companies will not support stories of Amazons of the Amazon, perhaps there is an opportunity for some Brazilian company to do so.

It is satisfying to see that at least the cancellation happened at the end of story arc, but it exposes a problem with the big two in general: the money made from events prevents characters from having isolated adventures which build up their voice.

A Singular Story

I have finished the Singular book When Men Become Gods about the FLDS communities on the borders of Arizona and Utah. The only time I was near those towns was back in grad school, when I went on an Episcopal mission trip to the northern edge of the Navajo Nation. That was an interesting trip, but it had nothing to do with polygamy. Polygamy is a fundamentally unbalanced social mechanism; the assignment of many women to one man excludes the other potential husbands from marriage unless you swap women around like oxen and she-asses. The assignment, and especially reassignment, of women, eviscerates any pretense of a system of family values; but there are politicians to the left of the FLDS who are equally hypocritical, if not on such a grand scale. Polygamy especially does not mix well with the founder effect, but perhaps a polygamist society could overcome this with overbreeding, the Eleventh Commandment as it were. In the backstory of the FLDS and its steady reduction to monarchy or tyranny, I was surprised that nobody brought up Samuel's denunciation of the concept of kingship.

To Euripides, She Was Always The Woman

Medea is a play that has never been out of style, but directorial choices have varied, and on occasion playwrights have adapted the material to the current circumstances. A proletarian perspective on Medea is possible, but such an adaptation would be to Euripides as Anouilh to Sophocles; even less so, because Anouilh did not need to shift the focus from Antigone. The Nurse delivers the first speech on the subject of the foolish drama of the aristocrats; the Pedagogue advocates on the behalf of the children; and the Messenger, despite his fancy speech (which may be due as much to his job in addressing the melodrama of the those who rule as much as his own personality), has a rather common view of the world. 

Meanwhile the aristocrats put on a poor show. Aegeus is on the lower end of the IQ scale. Jason is not much smarter and does not learn from experience than angering a woman who would murder her own brother is a bad idea even if there is now an opportunity for gain. Creon and Glauce are generic placeholders for king and Corinthian progeny - Creon literally means 'one who has strength' and Glauce or Glaucus is a generic name for a princess, especially a Corinthian one such as Bellerophon. Anyone named Glaucus in Greek mythology either dies or is ultimately ruined and broken. Medea, meanwhile, seems trapped between two genres, the tragic and the epic, and rejects the possibility of breaking the cycle of abuse from which she has suffered. The only physical affection between two related aristocratic individuals results in the painful death of both. Medea's advice to Aegeus sets in motion the birth of Theseus, which ultimately leads to her later flight from Attica and the eventual death of Aegeus due to the black sails of Theseus' return.

In the current media environment, I would expect a book from the perspective of the Nurse and the Pedagogue; but mostly the Nurse, since women narrators seem to sell better.

Mike Carey's Unwritten (Some Spoilers)

 Mike Carey is a favorite author of mine, whose works include both the Vertigo series Lucifer (original run) and the book The Girl With All the Gifts. Carey's series Unwritten, however, does not have the same impact on me, and I think I now know why. I thought my lack of response might have been a surfeit of meta-commentary in series of the time period, but this turned out to be false.

Unwritten stars Tommy Taylor, an expository character for Harry Potter, whose fictionality is substantially greater than that of many media celebrities. An unpleasant experience with an obsessed fan leads to a plot that threatens all reality and breaks the tenuous barrier between fiction and reality. The conclusion of the series involves the abolition of fiction - all fiction. I should have expected this ending, given the title of the series and the Flood motif, but it had little emotional impact on me, save for vague disappointment. I am a student of myth and legend, and therefore a conclusion that the old stories must be swept away and utterly forgotten is the antithesis of what I hold dear. I do not regret reading the series, but its conclusion is more palatable to a younger, less traditional generation.

Old Man's War

I recently finished reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Scalzi is one of those writers whom I get confused with another quite easily, like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. In this case, I often passed up reading Old Man's War because I confused it with Joe Haldeman's Forever War. Perhaps there is something to editor's fears of using too-similar titles! The premise of Old Man's War is intriguing - it is seldom that a scene about military recruiting is mysterious. Once our hero has signed up, the training sequences are pure Heinlein, the right mixture of jingoism (to fire up the troops) and pragmatism (to aid in the troops' survival). The aliens are lightly sketched, but distinct enough to qualify as separate species. The anthropophagous deer and bellicose Lilliputians are particularly striking choices.

I highly recommend.

What Do You Want, Your Modesty?

 One of the peculiarities of life is that you can go years or decades without examining patterns that you know are peculiar. Such was the case recently with the constant switch in Ancient Greek between singular and plural. This fluidity is particularly noticeable in the Chorus, and to a lesser degree in the protagonist, deuteragonist, and (if there is one) tritagonist of Greek tragedy. This environment, however, partially normalizes this movement, especially if you know the history of Greek drama. The Chorus was the primordial performer at the Dionysia, with the occasional Choregos as the equivalent of the modern soloist. The Choregos could stand out, but he was still ultimately part of the Chorus. The Protagonist emerged as a performer who could act independent of the Chorus and engage in dialogue with it. The Deuteragonist came next, although a bit too early to be a cat of any kind, and then, much later the Tritagonist. The Chorus was singular and plural from the beginning, and the Choregos could move between the numbers as necessary, but the permeability of grammatical number for the Protagonist and his kin I had assumed was the result of the elevated style of Greek drama. This was partially true, but not necessary for the reasons I had assumed.

Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that in almost all case the explanation of metric convenience is a facile explanation and diminishes the skill of the tragedians.

An investigation into Smythe's Greek Grammar, a tome of wisdom compiled by a greater intellect than mine, revealed much. There is a Plural of Majesty (S1005) in Greek, but it applies to the noun rather than the verb, as an Anglophone might anticipate. These plural nouns do impart an air of majesty to tragedy, but it is the number of the verb which is more relevant here. The verb, specifically in the first person, when plural with a singular noun, is termed a Plural of Modesty (S1008), a concept rather alien to English-speakers, except perhaps in a cynical and manipulative way. This Plural of Modesty is meant to diminish the individual and place her in the greater crowd of whichever category is currently applicable. The evidence that some individuality remains lies in the retention of the feminine. When a feminine speaker uses the Plural of Modesty in verbalization, the modifying participles remain feminine if singular (S1009). If the participles change their number to plural, the gender becomes masculine, because masculine is the default in Greek. The construction of participles render this condition especially visible. 

The permeability of singular and plural, however, is still far more common than the above would suggest. Tragic dialogue flows between the specific circumstances of the tragedy and general statements which are applicable to the circumstances (S1012), between individual disaster and cosmic horror. This fluidity renders most of the shifts of number comprehensible, with the remainder a matter of consistency of style.

The core of Greek is its facility with grammar, but even something as simple as grammatical number cannot escape (lanthanein) the pathological philosophizing of the greatest dramatists.

He May Be Invincible, But My Wallet Isn't

 At great personal cost, I have caught up to what I believe is the appropriate point in Robert Kirkman's Invincible. I cannot be certain, however, due to the reshuffling of plot elements in adapting it to a different medium. Consecutive reading renders the sense of time quite differently, but the events in-universe do occur faster than I had imagined. When Invincible first came out, I read some issues, but I was more enthusiastic about Dynamo 5 than anything else in the Kirkman universe. The events of Volumes 3 and 4 move quickly because the comic-reading audience would already be familiar with the scenarios from other franchises. Ottley's style is not my favorite, but it is neither off-putting nor fundamentally unreadable (if colors can be said to be read). I have a bad habit, driven by the impulse to cut the chaff from my pull list, of dropping series before the surprise reveal which rewards the patient reader; on the other hand, the risk of continuing a series beyond literary and financial justification would make me a sucker rather than a good and loyal fan.

    Kirkman's dialogue is reflective of the era in which it was written; for some this may be an unforgiveable sin. I do not deem it as such. Although I would not use such language now, the slur in question was used casually then, and even now there are worse and more malevolent curses. Active homophobia seems not to be a concern in a universe full of Martian invaders. The other issue, the strange relation that Robot and Monster Girl have to aging, is not problematic as much as fascinating and a problem that could only be explored using fiction. I may write more about this later. For now, I recommend Invincible, but perhaps a more graduated approach to financial acquisition.

Foundation's Fruit: Seeds

 My review of Foundation, Season One, was the last, best hope for taking this blog in a certain direction. It failed. But an autopsy is still in order. For those who hold the delusion that the original book is filmable as is, I can do nothing. Film must fill the visual voids that a well-honed story leaves to the imagination of those that have them. Foundation also faces the John Carter dilemma of appearing derivative because others have borrowed from them in another medium.

The first season of Foundation accomplishes several things. Firstly, it establishes a framework of a season-long mystery. Mystery is a fundamentally Asimovian narrative structure. Psychohistory may be based on probability, but the initial conditions are specific. Secondly, it fills in the universe; the original stories assumed that readers at the time would fill in the context from the blatant historical references. The elements which trickled in must appear more quickly in a visual medium. Thirdly, the casting corrects (perhaps overcorrects) the blandness forced upon the original trilogy by John W Campbell's preference for only white heroes.

If any franchise is going to play the long game, it is Foundation. I do not believe I can assess it properly without watching a second season.

Miracleman (Miracleman, Does Whatever A Miracle Can ...)

Marvel is incorporating Alan Moore's Miracleman, or a version thereof, into its main universe. The true miracle is that the rights situation was resolved. Given Miracleman's transformation from Captain Marvel to Marvelman to Miracleman, perhaps this version should team up with Angela, a fellow company-crossing character. Both have been written by Neil Gaiman, after all. I cannot imagine, however, that Marvel can deliver on the mood of Miracleman's world.

Made in Abyss, Season 1: Katabasis Japanese-style

 

I’ll admit, I binge watched Made in Abyss, Season 1. I’d been wanting to watch it for a while, because I like YA protagonists experiencing and overcoming horrifying scenarios, but I was put off by the rumor of Japanese images not conducive to the online reputation of American males. Thus, the opportunity to binge it without extra cost was welcome. You know things are going to become dark when the default idyllic hometown from which the plucky girl protagonist leaves has lax child-labor laws, especially for orphans. The duo of plucky yet emotional child who should not be embarking on life-endangering quests and her ridiculously human robot boy (with plot-convenient amnesia, of course) is as wholesome as animation comes. The animation itself, both of places and bizarre creatures, is Ghibli-esque. The price paid for the descent into the Netherworld (and especially any ascent) is just as excessive as it should be. Facilis descensus Averni indeed.

I am looking forward to Season 2 in 2022. But why are the Japanese so obsessed with still-birth? And why is nobody in this world concerned about the specific timing of the layer with all the skeletons?