watching Revolutionary Girl Utena: 1

Peggy
February 26, 2014

So this morning, Sigil shared a link to this.

The opening to ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’, done with cartoon horses. Even aside from the obvious ‘we replaced humans with horses’ this looked… strange, and weird. Weird enough that I hunted up the real opening.

Ten seconds in, I had determined that that this show was about two things: legs and roses. Forty seconds in, I realized it was also about a lesbian couple. When I said that this looked really kind of intriguing, a half dozen people were all “oh my god you’ve never seen Utena you will totally love Utena how can you never have seen Utena”.

(The answer to the last is a combination of several factors.
1. I have only learnt how to actually watch Japanese TV cartoons in the past decade; I’m very much part of the American animation culture that loves simple designs that can be very fully animated. Japanese cartoons tend to have much more complex designs and very limited animation; for years all I could really see was the myriad shortcuts they were taking, and nothing else.
2. All the rampaging otaku I’ve ever known always insisted that you HAVE to watch the subtitled version of anything from Japan. I hate watching subtitled cartoons; I want to actually look at the animation. If I’m gonna read, I’d rather go read a book or a comic. Plus I really get no nuance or emotion out of Japanese dialogue.
3. On top of that cultural chasm, there’s gender issues. Utena is strongly coded as being For Girls, and I’ve always steered away from media coded that way. In part because my tastes were formed along somewhat masculine lines before the gender dysphoria started to bubble up, in part because watching something that aggressively feminine seemed like the media-consumption equivalent of dressing my entire life in pink ruffles. Which I felt is especially unfortunate when you’re a transwoman who may not pass that well, which I was for a while.)

I’d vaguely heard of Utena for a while. Seeing this intro and reading the Wikipedia page on the series made me decide to check it out. And maybe some other stuff in the Magical Girl genre as well.

I am beginning to think that this was the same kind of flip decision as Alice’s decision to follow a talking rabbit down a hole.

I watched the first two episodes on Youtube, still lying in bed. Got up with the intent of watching the next couple sitting in a comfy chair while eating breakfast, and maybe being a lazy slug and spending half the day binging on most of what I could find on youtube. But I was defeated by my iPads deciding they didn’t want to watch anything on YT any more once I’d gotten up.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and now it seems I’m gonna have the whole series dumped on me via IM tonight (and maybe a couple others as well – maybe Great Magical Girl Anime, maybe just Great Anime). Or I could spend fifty dollars to see it via iTunes but apparently nobody involved in actually making it would get a piece of the money that way so whatever.

Anyway: here is my tweets whilst watching the first two episodes, along with some additional thoughts. More later when I get later episodes; this is an interesting show that seems to be actively deconstructing itself. Which is always good.

I am watching “Revolutionary Girl Utena”. It is about legs and roses.

It is probably about time I dig into the Japanese “Magical Girl” tradition. Apparently this is a very self-aware instance of that?

I love how Utena is just constantly and unapologetically positioned as a love interest for the ladies.

A friend noted that it’s full of weirdness and symbolism, and most importantly, ADOLESCENCE. With which I concurred.

Anthy’s incredibly blasé response to her being the champion’s slave is fucking creepy.

What is this creepy monkey mouse. It scares me.

Oh man are these shadow puppets going “do you know do you know” going to be a repeated thing. YES.

wondering if I’m starting research for a magical girl story five years from now

I’m gonna end up singing along to “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse” by the end of this, aren’t i.

Sudden realization that this is probably where Scott Pilgrim pulling a sword from his heart comes from. Somehow it’s a lot creepier when the sword comes out of the heart of an ultra submissive woman.

Anthy needs to learn how to pick better dommes, sheesh.

Really love the cinematography in the scene starting at 9:57 in ep 2. Disorienting. It puts me in mind of that scene in Chinatown where the camera slowly circles around the characters, but done in a very graphical way. (Honestly I’m finding that I’m dissecting this almost as much as a ‘motion comic book’ as a cartoon. That’s an attitude I’ll have to remember whenever I want to watch most anime, I think. It makes the part of my brain bitching about how few actual drawings there are shut right the hell up.)

Oddly enough I also kinda want to compare the highly symbolic Utena to the highly symbolic Promethea, now that I’m in the studio. (I’d just taken 3/5 of Promethea out of the library and read it last night; looking down at the books with a head full of Utena, I realized you could totally sum up Promethea as “Alan Moore teaches you about Crowley and the Kabbalah via a Majgickal Girl.”

All the characters in the first two eps of Utena are anime-Euro. Except for Anthy, the… um… black? Indian? slave. I can’t tell what race she’s intended to be because she has the same stereotypical “pretty” face as everyone else, but… yeah. She’s a much darker color than everyone else and has a little dot on her forehead (I wonder if she had an accent in the original Japanese voices? I doubt I could even tell if she did.). And she’s super servile to whoever wins her in a tournament. PROBLEMATIC.

I do, on the other hand, like how normalized Utena’s gender crossing is. There’s one scene in the beginning where a teacher gives her shit for dressing in a boy’s uniform for the second year in a row, then it’s dropped, and various girls openly swoon over her like she’s the prettiest, sexiest thing in school. This show is really aggressively normalizing some very different modes of feminine sexuality than normal. (Contrast, though, with the fact that her hair is hyper-feminized – long and pink – while super-subby-femmy Anthy has short, butch, blue hair.)

And thinking about it, yeah, my god these characters are super adolescent. Including the way half of them follow all these orders from a mysterious organization named END OF WORLD. I mean okay maybe it sounded a lot better in the original Japanese but damn.

Anyway. That’s it for now. More later, Rita ain’t gonna draw itself.

well that was a day

Peggy
February 25, 2014

Got up early, finished a page of Rita, posted it, went to yoga. There was a substitute instructor who was kinda brutal – which was good! Despite me already being achy from pole dance on Sunday. Some things were easier than I expected them to be.

Then I came home to find my website down. I poked at it for a bit and submitted a trouble ticket; I really wasn’t sure if it was my site, or the machine it’s hosted on being a problem. I’m still not quite sure, really. I went out to Trabant to try and get some work done on Rita, but I ended up just nervously fiddling with the site for the most part, especially once the hosting control panel came back up. Something is spiking my site’s memory usage through the roof intermittently, to the point where it gets automatically shut down. I’ll have to do some investigation to try and figure out why; right now it seems to be back to normal. Maybe. I’m not sure.

I came home, hoping to work on Rita. Instead I ended up just reading most of the first three volumes of Promethea, the comic in which Alan Moore tries to slip an Introduction To Majgickqgh course under people’s radar in the form of a superhero comic. Mostly I’d picked it up because I found it sitting in the teen comics section of the library, which amused me given that volume two has an entire chapter devoted to some pretty damn expicit tantric sex. (Not that it really matters, given that the teen comics section is right next to the grownup comics section.) I really can’t say how well it does at blowing people’s mind with Fundamental Majgickq Ideas, what with me having read entirely too much about that in the past.

And then I went out to the comics meetup at the bar. I shared a toast to crowdfunding; Jer had just launched the Kickstarter for his book, and I was having a glass of cider that had been paid for by my Patreon campaign. (Pretty much exactly – it cost $5.25, and that’s how much I get per page right now. Minus Patreon’s cut and the credit processor’s cut, also plus the tip, but whatever. Patreon paid for me to get a little buzzed tonight, and that is awesome, and I thank everyone who made that happen!)

I talked about various people’s projects, got the next two pages of Rita set up and mostly roughed out (there’s some reference I need to find, and the net at the bar hates me), and tried to see how many of the characters from Pogo I could draw from memory. I got eight out before I decided that was enough! I think I could have managed a couple more, but I would have been pushing it.

(click for full size)

L-R: Pogo Possum, Albert Alligator, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme, Porkypine, Mole, Miz Beaver, Mam’zelle Hepzipah. Some are more off-model than others.

edit. I got a response to my ticket, the problems were due to “system admins had to perform some critical MySQL and disk maintenance”. Which means it is not my fault and I don’t have to spend the next three days trying to figure out what’s gone wrong instead of drawing more pages of comics. Hooray!

hello, body. good to be back.

Peggy
February 25, 2014

Oh man. Yesterday I kinda bummed around feeling achy from Sunday’s pole dance class and not doing too much of anything. This morning, I woke up early. I still ache in places I’ve never ached before, but I’m finding myself bouncy and flexible and eager to move like I haven’t been since burlesque class trailed off. Doing this kind of thing really connects me with the joy of having a physical body like nothing else.

It is quite possible that I am simply one of Nature’s strippers.

the dream of an alternate version of the climax to Decrypting Rita

Peggy
February 24, 2014

Last night I went to pole dance class for the first time. It was fun and probably deserves it's own entry. I came home and pretty much just fell right into bed.

And I dreamed.

The earliest bit I remember involved being in an awkward pit behind some stairs. I had to jump – very slowly and driftily – high enough to catch myself at the top and pull myself up onto the stair landing; this was complicated by there being a two-dimensional neon-glowing cobra wandering around. I caught it, threw it into the little pit I'd been in, and clambered out. The stairs looped around strangely, bringing me back where I'd been in short order; I jumped back down into that little pit, stomped the cobra, then wandered off through a hidden passage, talking to the cobra in a suddenly friendly manner.

I can't remember how I got here from there, but after a bit I was in a car with my mother, talking a nighttime drive through a semi-ruralish area. In the sky, I showed her some of my plans for the next bits of Rita: a scene in a kitchen between Rita1 and Carol1. Rita was glowing; the lights went out and she disintegrated into an angular line drawing, as if she was in a vector game, then those lines simplified and broke up and rearranged themselves into a really complicated array of sine waves plotted in slight 3d perspective. The waves overlapped and flowed (and I winced at the shortcuts I'd taken here and there in animating this). Then the waves shifted from a horizontal flow to one going up and to the right, and coalesced into a multicolored line. Every few color changes, a sub-line would branch off briefly, taking a little 45° turn, then another one back to parallel the main line. Some of them went backwards; they all ended after a very short time. But as the line scrolled by, some of the branches started getting longer and longer, growing little sub-branches of their own, splitting and spreading until there was too much to fit in the frame at once. The view scrolled back and forth some, examining the whole width of this design.

I felt like this sequence went on a bit too long, and needed to be cut down before it actually went into the comic. (I have a climax planned that sort of touches on some of the same themes I felt this was abstractly discussing, by the way.)

Then we were at an earlier point in the drive, before I showed off this sequence. Instead of taking a left turn to a long looping detour, we jinked right into a military base, and drove into a tight little tunnel. The car was now a little off-road four-wheeler, and I was hanging on the back; I had to duck my head lest it be brushed against the bright yellow plastic of the tunnel.

We came out into an office and got off the four-wheeler. I was presented with a check I'd given the clerks the last time I'd been here, that hadn't gone through. Probably because I'd signed it “Katie Rice” instead of with my own name. It was also an oversized one of my business cards but that seemed to be perfectly acceptable. So I dug in my bag and found another card – I had to awkwardly tear it off of a set of three, that were I perfectly cut – and wrote a new check for $20 (covering both that bad check and this passage) and handed it over. We were free to proceed.

Which we did on foot, instead of on that vehicle. There were several large rooms, connected by tight little tunnels I could barely get through. Eventually I ended up by myself in a dark, vast arcade, full of huge versions of games. And lots of people wandering around. Nobody was playing the games, the y'all seemed to have places to be. I paused before a reinterpretation of Dig-Dug that had you zooming through space, following chains of fruit bonus pickups at high speed, then diving into giant space gourds full of dirt for what I assume would have been some form of more digging-oriented game play, but I wandered off around that point in the demo.

I wandered to a different part of that room, organized like a bookstore. As I went up and down the aisles, I dug a handful of change out of my right pocket, and started filtering out the quarters. I am pretty sure I ended up with more quarters than I had coins of any kind at first; dream money is weird I guess. I put the quarters in my right pocket, and the other coins in the left, without at all remarking on the fact that I was wearing jeans – something I haven't really done since before I transitioned.

Now that I had quarters, I wanted to go try some of these games. But instead of going directly back, I went through another tight tunnel to an area I'd been in before, I think it was some kind of spa? I can't remember. Whatever it was, the tunnel got tighter, until I had to turn around and start climbing down through its close embrace of loose cloth.

And then suddenly I was awake.

I lay there for a bit, deciding if I wanted to get up. And then the ipad beside my bed emitted a gentle chime. I picked it up to see what it wanted me to do. The lock screen merely told me it was 7:00, so I unlocked it, and found myself in the Kindle app looking at “The Oversoul 7 Trilogy”, which I'd been reading the night before. It's a weird book about an “Oversoul” being examined, and having to jump between the various humans it's connected to. Interesting synchronicity.

It turned out the chime was a notification for the now-cancelled appointment for a Comcast tech to poke at my net (it went down yesterday, I made an appointment, then a tech showed up to fix the net for a different apartment in my building, and fixed mine while he was at it). I rolled over and decided to go back too sleep, but couldn't. Eventually I picked up the ipad and started writing this. When I got to the point of writing about it going ding, another notification for the same appointment popped up and went ding again.

I'm never sure if synchronicity happens because some part of my brain is looking for patterns, or if there's something actually there. Who knows.

Anyway, that's the dream I had this morning.

the dream of being a confused old lady simulation

Peggy
February 22, 2014

I had a confusing dream that included working on Rita in front of a wide floor-to-ceiling window, leaving my apartment to find myself in some kind of multi-artist studio, and finding myself lost in the crowded space behind the desk of someone who worked in lots of real media and small sculpture.

Then some people found me and brought me back to my place. They started digging in my closets. The woman came out half hidden in a brightly colored bondage sack of some kind; when I unzipped it she was wearing a blue and white harlequin fetish outfit, and may have become rubber. Then the guy spoke softly to me and plugged a thick, multi-strand cable into my right eye.

I woke up with a start, convinced I am actually in some kind of virtual rest home for broken brain dumps.

Then I went back to sleep because it was like 5AM and I didn’t feel like getting out of bed.

I would sort of like to work the blue and white artificial harlequin into Rita but I don’t think I have the room. Oh and also the sequence of Rita I was drawing in the dream was an extended superhero riff, which… no, just no.

Speaking of Rita, once I get out of bed I’m going to make two little tweaks on things the printer caught, and send off what should be the final files for book 2.

finally watching Asterix cartoons

Peggy
February 21, 2014

Nick came over yesterday; as we often do, we curled up in the living room and watched some media he’d brought. This time it turned out to be “Asterix in Britain”. In Dutch.

And I discovered that I’ve read enough Asterix that it really didn’t matter that it wasn’t in English (aside from the occasional veddy veddy English interjection). I know the characters, I know the general shape of how the story’s going to play out. I’m sure we missed out on a lot of the jokes and terrible puns, but on the other hand this also forced Nick to pay more attention to the visuals then he normally would – I joked that he was seeing this cartoon the way I see everything.

This was the first time I’ve seen one of the films; I knew there had been a few (Wikipedia says there are eight animated features, and four live-action) but had never tracked any down. I was really, really impressed by how lovingly animated all the jowly, pudgy people of the Asterix world were; everyone had just about exactly the same level of detail as the drawings in the comic.

I never realized until now what a whiny baby Obelix can be, though. Or that Asterix and Obelix are basically professional freedom fighters – about half the stories are in the general format of “A&O leave the tiny Gaulish village they defend, wander into some other part of Europe, and push back Roman forces there”.

Anyway. I’m debating between taking a nap, or taking some overdue books down to the library and poking at some Rita down there. Having a carb-heavy cookie at the cafe with Nick this morning probably didn’t help my awakeness, to be honest.

definitely feeling spring

Peggy
February 19, 2014

Today I’m puttering around the house in 4″ heels. I just got out of the bathroom, where I dyed my hair back to its usual color of a red-to-orange gradient. (With a big black patch at the back because I really need to bleach it again but whatever.)

I am also trying to return exercise to my life so I can be in something like the shape I was during the year of burlesque.

Hello, glamour. It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.

Edit, a couple hours later. Summon your glamorous self and you get it; Glamorous Peggy came out, weighed herself, sighed at what Mopey Peggy let happen to her body, and signed up for an intro to pole dance class. Because I have no willpower for Just Exercising, but hell yeah will I go Learn To Dance.

(Glamorous Peggy did not sigh too hard, as I’m only about 7-12 pounds above my weight during Peak Burlesque, plus being kinda flabby. I’ve been letting myself go but I haven’t been REALLY letting myself go.)

MOOCH

Peggy
February 19, 2014

Wake up at 3:30am, according to the phone's clock. Put phone back down on the floor next to the bed.

Have a drink of water from the glass sitting next to the bed.

See the word “MOOCH” floating in the very bottom of the glass, in luminous white letters. Just for a moment. Then it blinks out.

. . . .

I'm pretty sure this was just some crazy refraction going on with the water, the bottom of the glass and it's clear stem, and the white “3:30” on the phone's screen, pointing straight up to the ceiling, plus my bad eyesight when the glasses are still on the floor, but damn that was unsettling.

Back to sleep.

TxK Considered As A Work Of Abstract Art

Peggy
February 18, 2014

Tweets from a little earlier:

I have this sudden urge to write a review that starts “With TxK, Jeff Minter has established himself as one of the preeminent abstract artists of this age.” I would then go on to establish a context firmly grounded in abstract art, thoroughly ignoring Minter’s strong identity as A Maker Of Games. Because I kinda feel like it DOES stand on its own as an art piece. It’d be totally at home next to one of Kandinsky’s abstractions – maybe as an eternal video loop playing itself, maybe as a framed screen with a set of controls mounted beneath it.

I mean it is also an abstract art piece that occasionally urges you to INGEST CLOCKWORK MALAISE but that’s part of its post-modern charm. It’s much less self-deconstructing than Minter’s previous take on this theme; Space Giraffe was a deliberate inversion of the Tube Shooter in a lot of ways. And SG occasionally became a little too self-aware – the dreamy atmosphere of its bonus rounds were constantly punctured by comedy burps. TxK is more interested in being a pure, polished instance of its theme, and thus keeps the deconstruction to the sides.

But I’m drifting into more normal game review territory. Hmm. Compare the shattering effects to the broken angles of the Vorticists. I mean TxK can definitely be placed into the Futurist/Vorticist space. Look at some of this stuff. In particular:

Minter’s work is clearly in a different medium (and better reproduced; the Futurist/Vorticist work is phone camera shots taken in the library from a book on that movement), but I feel like there’s a definite set of shared visual concerns that unites his abstract art with these earlier works. Futurists and Vorticists were fascinated by movement, and found ways to stutter and shatter images on the canvas to represent it in new ways; Minter continuously shatters and fragments his subjects to create shimmering fireworks on his tiny little glowing canvas.

Anyway. That’s it. I should get moving on my comic book but I really wanted to spend a few moments actively playing the “are games art?” game by considering something solidly and enthusiastically A Game as a piece of abstract art.

10/10, I bought a fucking Vita just to play this thing and it was totally worth it.

The Lego Movie (contains spoilers)

Peggy
February 16, 2014

I just saw The Lego Movie. It was fun and clever and generally a treat for the eyeballs, but I feel like it has a serious conflict with itself at its core.

Spoilers behind the cut, if you care. Continue reading →