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tarigwaemirLowell House, on the Feast of St. Paul Miki and Companions
My toe, as I've been telling everyone in my vicinity today, is a gorgeous purple shade and swollen to about one and a half times its normal size. It was one of the two toes that got stepped on twice yesterday; I woke up this morning to find it bruised and swollen. Really, the purple is strange enough that I've been wondering if I ought to photograph it to preserve it for posterity. >_>
I am very close to finishing the Haji/Shinwoo FST, although I feel vaguely guilty for the slapdash way in which it was put together. It's not so much a soundtrack as a bunch of K-pop songs about love, but then again, it is a pairing FST. I did choose sounds that would fit Hot-Blooded Woman (i.e. I forced myself to sit and listen to bands like The TRAX which I normally avoid like the plague), but I keep wondering if the lyrics are too generic to fit. I mean, the Haji/Shinwoo relationship, despite its utter hilarity, is mostly full of generic sentiment: destiny, misunderstanding, abuse, True Love, and more destiny. Well, generic for Koreans anyway.
Answers to the meme:
Hikaru and Akira: The easiest way to sum up what I think Akira means to Hikaru is probably pointing to the last few chapters of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
murinae's epic In the Forests of the Night. Actually, I think those chapters pretty much summarize my entire conception of the series. But to expand further on the relationship...hm, let me digress a little for a moment here.
I learned about go, or baduk, for the first time when I was about eight. My father had just returned from a visit back to Korea (his first since he had immigrated here), and he brought back two books on baduk (one of them is sitting on my bookshelf now). He bought a baduk board--one of those foldable ones--at a local supermarket and a set of stones, and gave me my first lesson. He didn't teach me anything more than the principle of how stones get captured, and I watched in amazement when after about half an hour, the random arrangement of stones on the board became a net that snared every single group of stones I had. Father followed up my mortifying loss (I literally lost every single stone) with a grand exposition of the meaning of baduk: all of human society, he said, could be found in a game of baduk. He then followed up with a warning that I should never become good at the game (he needn't have worried; I suck at strategy) because baduk could grow to be an obsession. He said that he once had a university friend who would sit in his room and miss lectures and exams, just to play games. Somehow, from there, I built up a conception of baduk as the ultimate symbolic representation of human thought (i.e. a sort of proto-Glasperlenspiel) and that the fascination of baduk must be this sort of compulsive drive to discover order and rules in complexity--the same drive that makes people turn simultaneously to both astrology and theoretical physics (I think Frazer would describe it as the magician's fundamental belief that the universe can be tamed and controlled).
So the point of that rather long and unnecessary preamble was to explain why I don't think of Hikaru and Akira as a simple Jump rivalry. There is so little hostility on either side. Immature arguments to be sure, but the only time Akira really resents Hikaru is when he thinks Hikaru isn't being true to his go. The rest is just squabbling. Hikaru similarly never really resents Akira--if there's anyone he's jealous of, it's Shuusaku. The way I tend to think of Hikaru and Akira is that they are not brought together by their competitiveness but by the game itself: every match between them is a sublimated expression of their unique relationship. Dare I use the word soulmate? (Don't hit me.) Obviously I don't know go well enough to prove this, but I think there are certain hints in the manga that suggest that their very style of playing complement each other. In other words, they are rivals because of their high level of play, but they are...well, Akira and Hikaru because the way they play match each other on some fundamental level. There is a tendency in some AkiHika fanfiction to reduce them to the classic yaoi dynamic of cold, prudish, socially inept Akira to warm, sex-obsessed, well-adjusted Hikaru (to various extremes and non-extremes, of course), which I personally find strange. Because well, I think Hikaru grows obsessed with go to the point where he doesn't really have a world outside it either--I mean, his love of manga is just a frill, nothing compared to the all-consuming passion that he has for go itself. I guess what I'm obliquely reacting to is the type of fanfic where Hikaru shows Akira that there is a world outside of go, and that in itself makes absolutely no sense to me because the whole point of the series seems to be that go brings meaning and purpose into Hikaru's previously directionless life. Go is the board on which universes are created, after all, on which humans can become gods: order from seeming chaos.
Shishido and Ootori: I feel guilty writing so much for the previous pairing and so little for this one...but Shishido and Ootori are characters that I know exclusively through fanfiction. I don't watch Tenipuri anime (other than one or two chibi episodes) and I have manga scanslations only up to the middle of the doubles matches with St. Rudolph. So I didn't even know that Hyotei existed until I started readingaishuu's Prince of Tennis fanfiction. My understanding of the Shishido and Ootori dynamic has been entirely defined by, yes, tiamatv's Hyotei Roommates series. ::coughs:: I don't really know what in particular to say other than that at least from what I understand they are the perfect pairing for UST. I wish I knew more about their special tennis jutsu skills because then I'd know more about the characters individually, instead of just as a variation on a classic dynamic (I would guess they are roughly parallel to 3x4 from Gundam Wing, for example, although with key differences).
Zhuge Liang: KONGMING! *_* The mention of Zhuge Liang sets my heart a-flutter! I swear, when I read Three Kingdoms in tenth grade (whoa, that was quite a few years ago), Zhuge Liang convinced me that intelligence is really sexy. Not because there's any evidence that Zhuge Liang is sexy but because the sheer coolness of his strategies made my jaw drop--I won't testify to it, but there may have been some drooling involved. Okay, I admit I'm weird. But the near supernatural power with which Zhuge Liang predicts not only the strategy of his enemies but the way they think and the way they react to him seriously impressed me. In retrospect, he's also a bit of an arrogant jerk, but I forgave him at the time of the reading because he was just so cool. (Clearly, I'm going to spend this time fangirling rather than saying anything coherent or even interesting about Kongming, but who cares?) My favorite scene is perhaps the most ridiculous one: Kongming, in priestly robes and with his hair unbound, goes off alone to summon up a wind using his secret Taoist powers. I suppose also that Kongming represented exactly the type of character that I would want to be if I was part of an epic story: that of the all-knowing advisor. And his end, I thought, is truly tragic, ever the loyal servant carrying on his master's legacy, although he must have known at some point that his cause was doomed. There are many reasons, I'm sure, for why Three Kingdoms is biased towards Shu, but I think part of it must have to do with the romance (in its traditional sense) of the story from this perspective. Great men of great valor, intelligence and virtue fight for this flimsy dream of preserving an already bygone era (Liu Bei bases his legitimacy on his distant relationship to the Han dynasty after all), and though they die, their deaths are not meaningless for they lived gloriously, as heroes of the age. Although in some ways that's why Kongming's end is the saddest because he doesn't die with the others but has to continue on his own.
Yours &c.
My toe, as I've been telling everyone in my vicinity today, is a gorgeous purple shade and swollen to about one and a half times its normal size. It was one of the two toes that got stepped on twice yesterday; I woke up this morning to find it bruised and swollen. Really, the purple is strange enough that I've been wondering if I ought to photograph it to preserve it for posterity. >_>
I am very close to finishing the Haji/Shinwoo FST, although I feel vaguely guilty for the slapdash way in which it was put together. It's not so much a soundtrack as a bunch of K-pop songs about love, but then again, it is a pairing FST. I did choose sounds that would fit Hot-Blooded Woman (i.e. I forced myself to sit and listen to bands like The TRAX which I normally avoid like the plague), but I keep wondering if the lyrics are too generic to fit. I mean, the Haji/Shinwoo relationship, despite its utter hilarity, is mostly full of generic sentiment: destiny, misunderstanding, abuse, True Love, and more destiny. Well, generic for Koreans anyway.
Answers to the meme:
Hikaru and Akira: The easiest way to sum up what I think Akira means to Hikaru is probably pointing to the last few chapters of
murinae's epic In the Forests of the Night. Actually, I think those chapters pretty much summarize my entire conception of the series. But to expand further on the relationship...hm, let me digress a little for a moment here.I learned about go, or baduk, for the first time when I was about eight. My father had just returned from a visit back to Korea (his first since he had immigrated here), and he brought back two books on baduk (one of them is sitting on my bookshelf now). He bought a baduk board--one of those foldable ones--at a local supermarket and a set of stones, and gave me my first lesson. He didn't teach me anything more than the principle of how stones get captured, and I watched in amazement when after about half an hour, the random arrangement of stones on the board became a net that snared every single group of stones I had. Father followed up my mortifying loss (I literally lost every single stone) with a grand exposition of the meaning of baduk: all of human society, he said, could be found in a game of baduk. He then followed up with a warning that I should never become good at the game (he needn't have worried; I suck at strategy) because baduk could grow to be an obsession. He said that he once had a university friend who would sit in his room and miss lectures and exams, just to play games. Somehow, from there, I built up a conception of baduk as the ultimate symbolic representation of human thought (i.e. a sort of proto-Glasperlenspiel) and that the fascination of baduk must be this sort of compulsive drive to discover order and rules in complexity--the same drive that makes people turn simultaneously to both astrology and theoretical physics (I think Frazer would describe it as the magician's fundamental belief that the universe can be tamed and controlled).
So the point of that rather long and unnecessary preamble was to explain why I don't think of Hikaru and Akira as a simple Jump rivalry. There is so little hostility on either side. Immature arguments to be sure, but the only time Akira really resents Hikaru is when he thinks Hikaru isn't being true to his go. The rest is just squabbling. Hikaru similarly never really resents Akira--if there's anyone he's jealous of, it's Shuusaku. The way I tend to think of Hikaru and Akira is that they are not brought together by their competitiveness but by the game itself: every match between them is a sublimated expression of their unique relationship. Dare I use the word soulmate? (Don't hit me.) Obviously I don't know go well enough to prove this, but I think there are certain hints in the manga that suggest that their very style of playing complement each other. In other words, they are rivals because of their high level of play, but they are...well, Akira and Hikaru because the way they play match each other on some fundamental level. There is a tendency in some AkiHika fanfiction to reduce them to the classic yaoi dynamic of cold, prudish, socially inept Akira to warm, sex-obsessed, well-adjusted Hikaru (to various extremes and non-extremes, of course), which I personally find strange. Because well, I think Hikaru grows obsessed with go to the point where he doesn't really have a world outside it either--I mean, his love of manga is just a frill, nothing compared to the all-consuming passion that he has for go itself. I guess what I'm obliquely reacting to is the type of fanfic where Hikaru shows Akira that there is a world outside of go, and that in itself makes absolutely no sense to me because the whole point of the series seems to be that go brings meaning and purpose into Hikaru's previously directionless life. Go is the board on which universes are created, after all, on which humans can become gods: order from seeming chaos.
Shishido and Ootori: I feel guilty writing so much for the previous pairing and so little for this one...but Shishido and Ootori are characters that I know exclusively through fanfiction. I don't watch Tenipuri anime (other than one or two chibi episodes) and I have manga scanslations only up to the middle of the doubles matches with St. Rudolph. So I didn't even know that Hyotei existed until I started reading
aishuu's Prince of Tennis fanfiction. My understanding of the Shishido and Ootori dynamic has been entirely defined by, yes, tiamatv's Hyotei Roommates series. ::coughs:: I don't really know what in particular to say other than that at least from what I understand they are the perfect pairing for UST. I wish I knew more about their special tennis Zhuge Liang: KONGMING! *_* The mention of Zhuge Liang sets my heart a-flutter! I swear, when I read Three Kingdoms in tenth grade (whoa, that was quite a few years ago), Zhuge Liang convinced me that intelligence is really sexy. Not because there's any evidence that Zhuge Liang is sexy but because the sheer coolness of his strategies made my jaw drop--I won't testify to it, but there may have been some drooling involved. Okay, I admit I'm weird. But the near supernatural power with which Zhuge Liang predicts not only the strategy of his enemies but the way they think and the way they react to him seriously impressed me. In retrospect, he's also a bit of an arrogant jerk, but I forgave him at the time of the reading because he was just so cool. (Clearly, I'm going to spend this time fangirling rather than saying anything coherent or even interesting about Kongming, but who cares?) My favorite scene is perhaps the most ridiculous one: Kongming, in priestly robes and with his hair unbound, goes off alone to summon up a wind using his secret Taoist powers. I suppose also that Kongming represented exactly the type of character that I would want to be if I was part of an epic story: that of the all-knowing advisor. And his end, I thought, is truly tragic, ever the loyal servant carrying on his master's legacy, although he must have known at some point that his cause was doomed. There are many reasons, I'm sure, for why Three Kingdoms is biased towards Shu, but I think part of it must have to do with the romance (in its traditional sense) of the story from this perspective. Great men of great valor, intelligence and virtue fight for this flimsy dream of preserving an already bygone era (Liu Bei bases his legitimacy on his distant relationship to the Han dynasty after all), and though they die, their deaths are not meaningless for they lived gloriously, as heroes of the age. Although in some ways that's why Kongming's end is the saddest because he doesn't die with the others but has to continue on his own.
Yours &c.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 02:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 03:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 03:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 05:00 am (UTC)Exactly! Those kinds of fics make me tetchy. The point of everything is Go. The show and manga is called Hikaru no Go, not Sai no Go, and not Hikaru and Akira no Go, right? Go, Go, Go. I ranted about the tendency of fics on ff.net that did that, once. Out grew a fic... but anyway, your thoughts about Go, and Hikaru, and Akira, are making me think.
Er, sorry for the rabid reaction.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 02:51 pm (UTC)And if my little ramble even indirectly inspires another HnG fic from you...why, I'd have done a service to the fandom. ^____^ (A not so subtle hint that you should write more. ^_~)