no relation – i am david brothers (dot com)

NO RELATION: Heroes Eventually Die (a close look at Armored Core 6)

New video: NO RELATION:Heroes Eventually Die(a close look at Armored Core 6)

Above is a companion video to “Evil Mind, Evil Sword,” an AMV I cut to try to figure out some feelings about Armored Core 6. Previously, I wrote an essay about how moving I found the game, too. This video, “NO RELATION: Heroes Eventually Die,” is a close look at how I felt going after Tester AC over and over, racking up money to buy gear to go after bigger and badder enemies. I hope you dig it. It’s 9:30-ish. Transcript/essay below.

Are you there? This is No Relation, and I’m David Brothers.

“Kamina: Go on! I know you can do it, buddy!”

“Simon: Uhh, but I don’t!”

“Kamina: Listen, Simon. Don’t believe in yourself!”

“Simon: Huh?”

“Kamina: Believe in me! Believe in the Kamina who believes in you!”

“Yoko: What’s that mean…?”

“Simon: …right, I’ll try!”

I’ve been really thinking about overcoming in the mecha genre. Sometimes it’s a young pilot overcoming her past trauma in order to reach her peak, and, y’know, sometimes it’s a grizzled old vet proving that they are not past their useful season, that they have not become “winter men.” In Gurren Lagann, y’know, it’s a young boy learning to believe what others see inside him, instead of the doubt and insecurity that his heart is burdened with.

“COM: Main System. Activating Combat Mode.”

“Handler Walter: Commence mission.”

“Handler Walter: We’ve got a read on the target. Now’s the time, 621.”

Stories for me are about seeing a breadth of responses to the slings and arrows of the world, that’s what gets me fired up in mecha stories especially. I found FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, directed by Masaru Yamamura and written by Yamamura and Kazuhiro Hamatani, it was a sensational playground for this kind of storytelling.

Your character is a mostly blank slate, y’know, very easy to imprint your self on, and the cast is filled with characters who range from violent sadists to people who kind of have a point, even if their execution leaves something to be desired.

“Dafeng Student Pilot: The Redguns need this AC. I…I can’t fail this mission!”

I said “your character is mostly a blank slate, easy to imprint your self on” but what I really should have was that “my character was a blank slate, easy to imprint my self on.” ’cause I played this game in character. I aligned myself with a different faction on each run and did my best to see things their way, to behave in the game as if I was working towards the same goals right alongside them instead of, y’know, pressing buttons on the couch.

I found myself empathizing with a lot of the characters in the game because of this, thanks to the fantastic writing and storytelling, but one caught me more than all the others. He’s only ever referred to as “Dafeng Student Pilot,” a representative of the company Dafeng, and he operates Tester AC, an armored core—a mobile suit, a giant robot—for just one mission in the game.

“Handler Walter: Got a job for you, 621. It’s an open call from the Arquebus Group.”

“Arquebus Corporation: To all independent mercenaries—this request comes from Schneider of the Arquebus Group.”

“Arquebus Corporation: Dafeng, one of our adversaries allied with Balam, has introduced a new tester AC.”

“Arquebus Corporation: It’s a sample model from an external architect, featuring extensive assembly optimizations.”

“Arquebus Corporation: In the hands of an experienced pilot, it will pose a threat far too great to ignore.”

“Arquebus Corporation: This brings me to the request.”

“Arquebus Corporation: Intercept delivery of the tester AC and destroy it.”

That one mission is called Destroy the Tester AC. In exchange for more or less a hundred thousand bucks, mostly less, you’re tasked with destroying the Dafeng Core Industry Tester AC. Your handler Walter needs the various corporations and factions that are battling on the planet Rubicon to move a certain way, to get into certain positions in order to achieve his own private goals. And calling Destroy the Tester AC an assassination mission is way too kind. Because you assassinate human beings and you destroy machines.

“Arquebus Corporation: Briefing over—and happy hunting.”

Dafeng Student Pilot isn’t even collateral damage when it comes to Handler Walter and everyone else giving orders on Rubicon. He’s nothing.

But, a quick sidebar about money farming in games. If I could play a video game and never spend even a single solitary second grinding, that is game of the year for me as far as I’m concerned. But money farms can be useful. You know, if I need money, if I need a quick payday of some type, then a money farm is a quick route to get the money that I need to make a later mission easier.

And…it’s a useless experience, is my thing. It’s tedious! Because you’re just exploiting a video game’s mechanics or doing something really repetitive, running forward and hitting the same button over and over. The art of video games is lost when it comes to grinding. It’s a distraction from what’s real about the video game.

In Armored Core 6, the money farm mission is Destroy the Tester AC. Dafeng Student Pilot doesn’t put up much of a fight, and it’s a quick in-and-out. Not a huge draw on your time or energy. You don’t even have to think too hard. You just get in there, hit him a few times, and you’re done. But the empathy I felt for the other characters in the game eventually extended to Dafeng Student Pilot as well.

“Dafeng Student Pilot: Damn it!”

“Dafeng Student Pilot: I… I just…”

He has a work ethic.

“Dafeng Student Pilot: I’ll deal with the merc! I’ve been training for this!”

He understands the stakes.

“Dafeng Student Pilot: The Redguns need this AC… I… I can’t fail this mission!”

And most striking to me, that he has skin in the game.

“Dafeng Student Pilot: I can’t die to a merc who only kills for credits!”

Our character, my character, 621, is not even from the planet Rubicon. Another character in the game calls him a tourist repeatedly and exclusively. But all of these are traits that Dafeng Student Pilot has are things that I would find admirable in a hero character, or a villain character, to be honest. But he’s not really either one of those. He’s worth a hundred thousand bucks, and I have a ton of equipment left to buy. I can’t get away with not grinding in this one.

“Handler Walter: That’s it for this job, 621. Return to base.”

I like that this money farm puts the cost of farming front and center. You have to listen to his screams before you get your little reward, before you can go off and buy a new shotgun or funnels. There’s something really nice about that.

But even still, I obliterated Dafeng Student Pilot over and over for my own benefit and the benefit of my handler. Each time, he insisted that he was ready for it, that he could keep up, and that he just can’t let it end like this.

One alternative to overcoming is surrender. And where overcoming is triumphant, surrender is cold, an acquiescence to the, the way of things. No matter how much our hearts, training, or willpower say otherwise. Sometimes you don’t get to win. Sometimes you’ve had enough, sometimes it’s easier to not do the hard thing. Sometimes the game’s mechanics point you right at the big bags of money even as the game says you’re evil for taking it. And sometimes you don’t like it, but do it anyway, because this is how video games work. You know. Very much “It is what it is” as a curse.

“Chirico Cuvie: And, feeling as safe as a child held to its mother’s breast,”

“Chirico Cuvie: before I knew it, I was fast asleep.”

So, what was possible for Dafeng Student Pilot if it isn’t what it is? What’s likely? Would he have grown into Amuro Ray type of character, one of those heroes who finds a new path and doesn’t leave a trail of death and destruction behind them like I did on Rubicon? Does he become a symbol of hope for his community? An ace like Roy Fokker? A tyrant? Something else? What exactly am I crushing when I snuff out Dafeng Student Pilot’s light?

It doesn’t matter. I’ll never get to know. There’s only this moment, shared between us where I show up, he does his best, and it’s not enough. It reminded me of the first ending from Yoko Taro and PlatinumGames’s Nier Automata, when a character faces a great tragedy and, in a fourth-wall breaking moment, says, “It always ends like this,” just…bleeding despair.

“2B: It always ends like this.”

It always ends like this because it was written this way. It would take impossible effort to change it. So, if I can’t win, if Dafeng Student Pilot must die in order for me to achieve my goals, in order for things to proceed, then there has to be something that I can learn from what I’m taking from him. What does it mean for me, the nominal hero character of the game, the savior of Rubicon…what does it mean for me to punish Dafeng Student Pilot over and over again?

Questions like these are why I love Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. It was hands down the best thing I played in 2023.

Further Reading:

Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon: Directed by Masaru Yamamura, written by M. Yamamura & Kazuhiro Hamatani. Dafeng Student Pilot voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch. FromSoftware (2023)

Armored Trooper VOTOMS Complete Collection: Directed by Ryosuke Takahashi Written by Soji Yoshikawa & Jinzo Toriumi. Sunrise (1983)

Gunbuster: The Complete OVA Series: Directed by Hideaki Anno Written by H. Anno, Toshio Okada, Hiroyuki Yamaga Gainax (1988)

Gundam: Reconguista in G Written and directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino. Sunrise (2014)

Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt & Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt: Side Story: Yasuo Ohtagaki (writer/artist) Shogakukan (2020)

Nier: Automata: Directed by Yoko Taro Written by Y. Taro, Hana Kikuchi, & Yoshiho Akabane PlatinumGames (2017)

Street Fighter 6: Directed by Takayuki Nakayama Designed by Mitsugu Ashida Capcom (2023)

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi Written by Kazuki Nakashima Gainax (2007)

The Winter Men: Brett Lewis (writer), John Paul Leon (artist), Dave Stewart & Melissa Edwards (colorists), John Workman & Jared K Fletcher (letterers) Wildstorm/DC Comics (2007)

(me+you): “I would like to know who made this magnificent cut.”

This is a piece from my newsletter, (me + you), which comes as the spirit moves but is hopefully worth the wait. I use it as a place to test drive ideas, to practice therapy, to get writing tics out of my system…it’s really just a sandbox for me to write to you. The newsletter is about everything and nothing, and this one is about how I felt before, during, and after watching Takehiko Inoue’s The First Slam Dunk. I wrote this back in January, shortly after seeing the movie in Japanese sans subtitles and after a season of bad brain days. Memoir as criticism, I guess. The First Slam Dunk is a great movie, and the art book is pretty cool, too. I saw the English dub today, which is as good a reason as any to make this public.

“Top priority:
Peace before everything, God before anything
Love before anything, real before everything
Home before anyplace, truth before anything
Style and state radiate, love power slay the hate”
–Yasiin Bey, fka Mos Def, “Priority”

Back when I was first learning how to read, I used to do this one thing that was great for me but terrible for my aunts and uncles. They were nine or more years older than I was back then, so firmly in their teens and early twenties. Whenever we watched a movie, I’d demand to watch the credits to see if I could find my name, and, being one of the babies of the family at that time, I usually got my way. I was learning to read, and since David is an eternally popular name (with good reason, beloved), I knew my name would be in there somewhere. I just had to sound every other name out to find it.

So I’d read all the credits to everything we watched while my aunts and uncles were desperate to change the channel, to leave the theater, to simply get on with things. I’d even get upset when tv shows do that fast credit thing to get to the movie up next faster. I’d read all the jobs and names in my head as the credits ran, even though I didn’t understand many of them.

I still do this as an adult, and since Marvel’s movies made it cool, my friends get it too.

On New Year’s Eve just past, I was sitting in TOHO Cinemas Nihonbashi in Tokyo about fifteen minutes before the year turned over. I’d just finished watching The First Slam Dunk, the adaptation of Takehiko Inoue’s classic boys’ sports manga written and directed by the mangaka himself, and the credits were rolling. I don’t read Japanese well yet, but I wanted to see if I could read some of the kanji and see how many names I could read and roles I could sound out. I’ve been studying Japanese off and on for the past few years, never quite as seriously as I should be considering my day job is in localization, and this was a good way to test my reading after a whole movie’s worth of listening practice.

I thought about being a kid and doing this same thing thirty-five years ago maybe and laughed a little. I thought about becoming a comics critic as an adult and how important proper credit eventually became to me. Getting the names right centers that fact that whatever thing was made by human hands in my head. “If you do it, it’s yours and you deserve the credit.”

It’s less a line drawn from childhood to adulthood so much as two parallel lines, two ways of looking at one thing. I didn’t have the capacity to understand the importance of artistic credit as a kid, right? But as an adult, reading credits is like looking at a long list of people who’ve earned being credited their work, even if I have no idea what their field is all about. “We made this.”

On “RAP Music,” Killer Mike says, “I’ve never really had a religious experience in a religious place. Closest I’ve ever come to seeing or feeling God is listening to rap music. Rap music is my religion.”

I’m a little similar to Killer Mike here. I grew up in the church and I still practice/believe, but I don’t go to in-person church for various reasons. But I do appreciate and desire the presence of the sacred in my life, and the way I experience my connection with the sacred more often than not is through creation of my own and through seeing the results of someone else’s thought and effort.

I don’t know if you feel similarly, but I absolutely love to see people cooking, just killing it at whatever they do. Whether it’s Steph Curry draining threes from unlikely distances and angles or Kim Jung Gi effortlessly drawing a whole piece freehand, I love when there’s something there that makes me pause and go, “Man, humans can do that?” It’s that hashtag blessed to be here feeling, but overwhelmingly earnest.

I’ve talked about this a fair amount on our podcast Mangasplaining, but there is a real pleasure in reading a book by someone who loves to draw, rather than someone who just uses comics as a vehicle for the story (non-pejorative; sometimes you need a certain box to carry a certain idea), and a special pleasure in seeing the figurative hand of the artist behind the work. I recognize that hand most often in how “drawn” something feels, how well I can see the seams and imperfections that come when humans do anything. The emotional resonance that they pour into the work matters a great deal too, (said the critic, shuffling towards legitimacy), but give me a scratchy, uneven human line over a cleanly machined one any day of the week. Clean drawings are nice, but there’s something fresh about the other.

It’s like songs with dirty drums. Clean drums are great, but dirty ones just hit different, especially in a car. Sometimes the imperfections of the process become a bonus feature of that process, and that’s something you can really fall in love with. This is as true of art styles as it is music production. The idiosyncrasies are the best part.

I don’t know the meaning of life, what God specifically wants me to do on Earth, but my best guess is that simply living it, taking care of each other, and doing things we love is gonna get me pretty close to the target. When I see someone excelling at their craft in a certain way, I feel second-hand enthusiasm. It makes me think that they’re feeling it, that they’ve gotten in touch with something that has then gotten in touch with me. It feels amazing, experiencing things like that. It feels sacred. I’m frequently flooded with gratitude when I find something that hits the right spot.

I feel it directly when I’m writing. There’s this bit in the war movie Fury I dig a lot, when the character Bible is complimented for some good shooting, and he says, “I’m the instrument, not the hand.” Flip it to “I’m the bullet, not the gun,” and you kinda have how I feel about a lot of things. I haven’t aimed myself or placed myself anywhere. I’ve gone where I’ve been sent and met whatever was there for me head-on, to the best of my ability, and in doing so, hopefully revealed my own nature to my self.

Nothing feels as good as sitting there with a blank page and filling it line by line, crystalizing my thoughts one after the other and making them readable for someone else, even if there’s no intended audience for whatever I’m writing. When it’s pouring out of me, I know that I’ve found something inside myself that I needed to say. When it’s dragging, I know that I’m not writing the thing I need to write at that particular moment in time, like I haven’t given the idea enough time in the metaphorical oven to crystalize it just yet.

Realizing that I feel better when I’m writing regularly was a big surprise. I didn’t recognize the meditative aspect of a regular writing practice, for lack of a better phrase, until I hit a period where I wasn’t writing and getting used to a new gig and felt off in a new way. When I came back, it felt like coming home.

Nowadays, I keep a few projects in progress, and this newsletter is my “long-term” one. I do it as needed…I hesitate to say “as the spirit moves,” but it’s not not that, either. I don’t wait for inspiration, but sometimes something settles on my heart and is like, “Yo, get me on a page somewhere quick.” Sometimes the idea itself is banging on pots and pans, hollering about finally being ready to go. (That’s where that Gundam fanfic I wrote came from.)

I’ve been writing comics for a couple of friends (an unexpected development, but welcome) and doing a little prose fiction for myself for a long while now. I figured out what I want from my creativity and I think I’ve found solid ground to stand on. I want to be better than I am, but I’m happy with where I’m going, too.

(I don’t have the heart for the full freelance life, though. Chasing invoices was stressful enough to me that even if I’m on vacation from my day job, if I know one of my freelancers has an invoice coming, I’ll file that from wherever I’m at.)

I’m not sure where writing will take me, but I don’t know that it needs to take me anywhere. I do what I want, it feels good, and sometimes people say nice things about it, too. It would be nice to get rich off words, but that’s a long shot. I’m happy doing what I do, and challenging myself when I can.

In John Rambo, a fairly execrable movie, Stallone says that “When pushed, killing is as easy as breathing.” Love the line, don’t care about basically anything else in the movie, except for a gnarly mounted machine gun bit at the end. Anyway, I’ve been stealing that to describe how writing feels for years. “Writing is as easy as breathing to me.” It’s how I process things. Writing well? That’s a little more complex, of course.

How was The First Slam Dunk? My spoiler-free take is that it is a comic book movie that would be delighted if you read the comics. There are multiple moments where you can see Inoue’s hand, not just as director, but as the original artist. It’s explicit about its origins, about the fact that someone sat down and drew a couple dozen volumes of basketball action with his own human hand.

It’s beautiful in a way I wasn’t expecting at all. I’m not really into the 3DCG side of anime. Mostly, they make me want to read the comic because the visuals tend to be lackluster compared to that raw uncut stuff that I love. But Inoue is so present here that the texture of the thing actually feels good. It made me want to reread the comic because it’s a testament to that work. Having Inoue behind the camera reinforces his POV from the original work, but now with the presence of thirty-some years of hindsight and frankly explosive artistic growth. There were multiple moments where I knew exactly what was about to happen, and yet it still hit me like a ton of bricks. I was vacillating between being fully in my feelings while watching and being fully wrapped-up in the world of the film.

It’s a couple hours long, and the majority of it is an adaptation of existing material, with the addition of several new scenes to further flesh out the original work. I watched it in Japanese sans subtitles and understood maybe a fifth of the dialogue in real time, but, having read the series a handful of times, I know the comic well enough that the other four-fifths was still familiar in the moment, and I got the rest via context. (Slam Dunk is an all-timer. A lot of what made Haikyu!! so good feels like a response to Slam Dunk.) I was crying by the end of the movie, even with the language barrier.

—

I crystallized the idea that led to this newsletter while watching it. I took a trip to be anonymous and out of my head for a while. I had a year that felt like it sapped my motivation despite having a number of true highlights that I appreciated. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and out of my routine, but not so far out of my element that I’d feel uncomfortable and be unable to focus. I’ve visited Japan a number of times now and my Japanese is finally strong enough for a solo trip, so I went for it. When I saw that The First Slam Dunk was still in theaters, I took it as an opportunity to watch a movie that at worse would remind me of something I liked and then greet the new year ten minutes later on the walk back to the hotel, just me, my self, and I.

I’d been thinking a lot about the sacred and my connection to it before the movie. I love the idea of ecstatics, people who’ve given themselves body and soul to art. It’s not quite my relationship to art (I was never really a speaking in tongues guy, either), but when I’m feeling low, art is what I tend to turn toward when I need something to smother a bad brain day.

I was thinking about ways to reinforce my connection to the sacred and steal back some motivation when I sat down. About ten minutes into the movie, I had my answer. I realized that Inoue was cooking, and cooking in a way that felt custom built for me.

He was cooking cooking, like that ten-minute Black Thought freestyle. That thing in him that led to Slam Dunk in the ’90s reached across the years to find him once again, resulting in something new and wonderful. And then that new thing enveloped me in a theater an eleven hour flight from home and a sixteen hour flight from where I grew up, and found me too.

I felt what he was putting down, and the way he put it down demands more from me as an audience member and a person who writes things. It made me wanna really shake some confidence issues I’ve been working with and get back to being dangerous. If he can do it with his own human hands, and art and culture is achievement stacked on achievement on achievement, then I have to build from this new foundation he’s shown me. It made me want to be better. You must aim this high to ride.

The First Slam Dunk is a proper sports movie. It’s the exact kind of achievement that makes me feel grateful to God for letting me and Inoue share the same time on Earth. I could’ve been born at any time but I’m right here, right now, watching a basketball movie based on a basketball comic that’s making me think about how much I love my mom in the middle of one of the most awe-inspiringly dense cities on Earth. That level of depth makes me feel like there’s something bigger than us that connects us all.

Thanks for reading,
davidb

(me+you): “And Arrakis is just another place.”

This is a piece from my newsletter, (me + you), which comes as the spirit moves but is hopefully worth the wait. I use it as a place to test drive ideas, to practice therapy, to get writing tics out of my system…it’s really just a sandbox for me to write to you. The newsletter is about everything and nothing, and this one is about a trope I enjoy a lot. I wrote this back in October and it’s posted here pretty much unchanged, save for one dumb joke I added for the die-hard fans. You can stream Cucuruz Doan’s Island now, so go check that out.

Despite the fact that it was commissioning a murder, the ad didn’t feel creepy, but was rather streamlined, with a modern feel. It had quite a lot of visual impact. A considerably skilled designer must have been hired for the purpose.
–Kazuhiro Kiuchi, Shield of Straw

—

I’m a fan of killers with rich home lives (Nobody trailer), hitmen with loving relationships that take them out of the game (John Wick trailer), and assassins who demonstrate compassion for the vulnerable (Kate trailer). I love this stuff in movies, even if the actual movies end up being so-so. In non-Genre Wick movies, think of The Professional or characters like Wolverine, gruff dudes who kill people and raise daughters. There’s also criminals who operate orphanages, a go-to trope for yakuza (and plot point in the Yakuza video game franchise, which stars a nigh-virginal and nigh-invincible career criminal, who is also a valiant protector of the needy).

It’s a fun trope because these characters are attempting to reconcile the troubled lives they live, whether they create the trouble or have been subjected to it, with the peace or love that they’ve grown to enjoy or aspire to receive. It’s very relatable, very clean. It’s the kind of thing we’d talk about in therapy, only for us it’d be a square job, rather than shooting people and having great abs. The addition of a crime or some type of transgressive or troubled aspect to a relatable feeling like this turns it into an interesting moral quandary when I mull it over; a suggestion of where a person’s values may truly sit, even if their actions temporarily indicate otherwise.

Basically, we’re all capable of being good, deep down inside, right? It’s just that sometimes you have to dig for it. It’s not innate. It takes work. Movies like this hint at the work or demonstrate one way it may go in a way that I dig.

—

There’s another trope, a cousin to the temporarily well-adjusted killer thing, that’s come up in a few different stories specifically from Japan that I’ve enjoyed, most recently the movie Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island, directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. In it, the mobile suit pilot Cucuruz Doan deserts the military after witnessing the toll war takes on a bunch of children he’s implied to have orphaned during battle in particular. He settles on an island with a frankly untenable number of teens and toddlers for one man to raise. He teaches those orphans how to live well, repair things, respect each other, and grow their own food. Their life is complicated when Amuro Ray, the ace pilot and original hero-star of the series, ends up stranded on the island and must learn to work alongside them, despite being on opposing sides. There’s a big focus on working with the land, Amuro and Doan both, as a way of implicitly cleansing themselves of what’s required in the war outside the island.

A similar scene popped up in Takehiko Inoue’s comic Vagabond, the story of how Miyamoto Musashi became the greatest swordsman of all time. After killing dozens upon dozens of men and repeatedly proving his prowess to every person with a blade that was fool enough to cross his path, Musashi was left depleted and overwhelmed by the weight of living amongst so much endless death. While wandering, he comes upon a small village that’s surviving on the edge. He settles there, learns to till the fields and even how to tell different types of dirt apart while helping them with planting, and eventually, he discovers a new way of being himself, a revelation which in turn will push his swordsmanship to a new level.

In Makoto Yukimura’s Vinland Saga, young Thorfinn forges himself into a blade, a ferocious fighter with a knife in each hand that’s desperate to avenge the death of his father at the hands of his current employer some years ago. Much later in the series, once that plot has run its course, we meet Thorfinn again as an adult. At this point, for a wide variety of reasons, he’s given up violence as a way of life and settled into serving as a slave for a landholder. He shows no real intentions of escaping even. He’s found a place and he’s found a measure of peace, not in service, but in deepening his connection to the ground and his community. He fears returning to boy he was, which speaks volumes about the man he’s become.

In Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time, written and directed by Hideaki Anno, Shinji Ikari and Rei Ayanami are two children who have spent their adolescence fighting against giant monsters for the sake of humanity, only to see most of the population of Earth essentially culled via horrible conspiracy. While their fellow frozen-in-time teenage warrior Asuka Langley has had fourteen years past her debut to learn how to cope with the ongoing apocalypse, these two are lost, figuratively adrift. They discover their innate humanity, thriving culture, and local community by working the rice paddies with the locals.

The discovery is part of a long sequence, a mix of still shots and exquisite animation. You see Rei Ayanami getting closer to her neighbors, learning the vagaries of the land, and opening up. Her plugsuit forever represents the gap between her and the rest of humanity, the difference between them, but it isn’t a wall. It’s not a cage. She’s here. She’s us. I like this compilation of her being curious about life.

—

A brief sidebar, because I want to say this but don’t have an essay in me about it: part of the joy of mecha animation is being at the human scale looking up at the robot, or being at the robot scale and marveling at the small figures below. Anno and company take Evangelion 3.0+1.0‘s POV and aim it squarely at the eyes of the people living under the feet of giant robots for a great deal of the movie. It feels like an emphatic message, as if Anno’s saying, “I know you came here to see beautiful robot fights, but look at these lushly animated moments of simple life. Look at a mother breastfeeding, think about what it means to say ‘good morning’ to someone you love. The robots are cool, but they’re just a vehicle for this: I’ve been depressed. I know despair. But I love my wife.”

It’s a good movie. The fact that the trailer ends with Utada Hikaru singing, “I love you more than you’ll ever know” on “One Last Kiss” feels remarkably significant.

—

Each of these works were produced over years and far apart from each other. They’re not directly related, other than sharing a language and I guess being composed of millions of little drawings. The lines I draw between them have me at the center, you know what I mean? The main thing they have in common is that I found the latter three greatly moving when I encountered them, which was also exactly when I needed to encounter them each of them emotionally. (Sometimes it takes a few tries before you really get it.) When the trope popped up in Cucuruz Doan’s Island, I found myself immediately charmed by the movie and curious to see where they’d take it. “Oh, it’s gonna be one of those, huh?” as I lean forward in my seat.

This is a trope that works very well on me, something I recognized in my self thanks to those three projects. It works because there’s something about the tactile aspect of the emotional metaphor and physical actions they take that feels familiar and intensely relatable. Growing up, my grandfather had me helping out on the various projects we had going around the house, whether that was sorting out whatever was clogging the septic tank, yard work, or cutting down trees. It was a pain at the time, because we generally did all this during the exact duration of the Fox Kids Saturday morning cartoon block, but I grew to enjoy it over the years. It gave me a work ethic I’ve carried into adulthood. A job’s not over til it’s done, in a work now, party later sense.

Yakuza operating an orphanage or hitmen getting married are kind of the vibes-y version of this kind of emotional and cultural reconciliation. Most orphanages of this type in media are run by like, a handful of colorful characters, their ingenue daughter who is probably gonna get kidnapped at some point but she’s a scrapper so it’ll turn out okay, and the thirty-six thousand cartoonishly cute children who live there. There’s a level of unreality that doesn’t harm it, but doesn’t necessarily help me see my self in it either.

Here: Cucuruz Doan somehow provides food for a dozen mouths on an island that appears to be mostly rock and the remains of the giant robots that he goes out and fights to protect them. “You wanna know how do I provide for the kids, man? The minovsky particles provide, brother. The minovsky particles provide.” That’s what I mean by vibes-y. You’re not supposed to scratch this surface.

But the planting stuff, digging and working with your hands and finding a measure of peace doing it; I’ve been fortunate enough to do some of the things in real life that these characters simulate on-screen or on-panel, so the resonance I feel there is sometimes very strong. It makes me snap to attention to see if what they get out of it is what I get out of it.

—

I think my favorite thing I did as a kid out in the yard was help tear down a brick fence with a sledgehammer. We needed to put down a new wooden one a few feet further out, so me, my grandfather, and my uncle went outside. They handed me a sledgehammer, which I was barely big enough to hold at that point, and I gave the fence a good swing. It blew a relatively small hole in the front of the bricks for the size of the head, which was disappointing at first. But then I realized that the hammer had absolutely exploded the back side of the fence in a shower of orange and white. It ruled, honestly. Demolition is rough on the hands but great for the soul.

—

The crux of it, the engine of these stories for me, is an emphasis on the literally physical aspect of working with the land, and what that may result in emotionally. Characters pick up clumps of dirt, they learn how to work a rice paddy, and—a personal favorite—how to dig effectively. They get their hands dirty, and that provides the connection they need to discover or rediscover their humanity. They stand side-by-side with their peers, even if they don’t realize it or acknowledge it yet, and learn what it’s like to belong, rather than being the best, or the hero, or lost.

These men and women all learn different, story-specific things from their farming and found family experiences. The stories have a similar engine and similar ideals, but those similar ideals are put toward myriad ends. Maybe the lesson is that you can’t be a warrior and a farmer due to a core incompatibility between the two, or maybe it’s that a sword swung for no reason but pride is a cosmic waste. For me, beginning to get a handle on my feelings was aided by an approach to perspective I’ve been summing up as “Some things matter, most things don’t” for years now, because while I occasionally can’t be emotionally honest with myself, I can always be ruthlessly glib. It’s true, though.

Within this trope, everyone involved gets to where they need to be via the same route, which is changing their focus and humbling themselves—that is, stepping away from their all-consuming mission and submitting to something greater than their ego, their self. They’re submitting to us and our needs, and I don’t mean “us” in the sense of “us versus them,” but “us” in the sense of “us and them.”

They’re we and we’re us. This trope feels like an implicit step away from Lone Man or Chosen One-type stories, where only someone special enough to beat the local menace or destined to be here can save us, and toward something focused a little more on community. You need to be part of us to save us, maybe. It’s easy to lose sight of that in stories, which sort of require someone to be set apart and focused on to the exclusion of others. But in real life, it’s not the same way at all, is it? It’s nice to see stories that nod in that direction, even if they do tend to universally end up in a one-on-one fight because the genre demands it. That’s cool too, I think.

—

Lately, I’m watching Island of Sea Wolves on Netflix, this behind the scenes video showing how they did a neat stunt from The Raid 2, this wrestling match from TNT Extreme Wrestling Supreme Extreme 2019 featuring Vancouver’s own El Phantasmo versus Death Triangle’s Rey Fenix doing some wild anti-gravity stuff in the ring, and I’m finally a couple episodes into the second season of The Sopranos. I’ve been alternating listening to Ari Lennox’s new and extremely nsfw album age/sex/location (“Hoodie” music video, cold showers to your left) and the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs record, Cool It Down (“Spitting Off the Edge of the World” music video).

Speaking of the varying morality and connections in crime movies, Michael Bay’s Ambulance is about two brothers (no relation) who rob a bank together and then have to escape from the cops. It’s a movie that has almost everything I like in crime movies, so it’s possible I’m a bad judge, but I really enjoyed it. (There was no gardening, though). What really killed me though is that Jake Gyllenhall has a line in there toward the end about the difference between his brother and him that made me lean back and realize I’m gonna be thinking about this movie all year. If you’re open to Bay, it’s a barnburner.

thanks for reading,
davidb

(me+you): “You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse”

“Because,” Brenda said, “you’ll meet him again. You’ll work with him again. And he’ll look at you, and what will he say? That’s the stand-up guy came back for me? Or does he say, That’s a guy I don’t trust so much any more? What do you want him to say, Ed, next time you see each other?”
–Richard Stark, Comeback

I think I’m required by international law to disclose that I’m friends with Chip Zdarsky, who co-created Newburn with Jacob Phillips. (We do a podcast together with a couple of other friends, Mangasplaining.) Newburn #1 is out this week, and it’s split into two parts. The main story is by Zdarsky & Phillips and features a private detective who works to solve crimes on behalf of criminals (you can’t just ask a room of goons, “Hey, who killed Bobby?” like you used to), while the backup story comes from Nadia Shammas, Ziyed Yusuf Ayoub, & Frank Cvetkovic. This split is a format I’m very partial to, because getting a comic after a comic is like getting overtime after watching a whole basketball game.

Newburn #1 lines up nicely with an idea I’ve been chewing on, the idea that crime fiction—whether it’s on the side of the law or the thugs—is a genre that is often about confirming that there is an order to the world. To the cops, that order must and can be effectively protected. To the thugs, the rock-solid truth of that order can be effectively circumvented so that you can balance the scales by your own means. This is particularly true of detective fiction, I think.

It’s like when Robert Browning wrote, “The year’s at the spring, And day’s at the morn; Morning’s at seven; The hill-side’s dew-pearled; The cop loads their gun; The skel’s on the lam; God’s in His heaven— All’s right with the world!” Everything is in its right place, everything is working as intended. Things make sense, but only if you pay enough attention to the right things. There are procedures to follow, traditions to observe, and once done, they speak to the rightness of the world. It feels strange to call crime stories comforting, but—there it is.

The backup story in Newburn #1 is “Brooklyn Zirconia,” part one. The first part of Shammas, Ayoub, & Cvetkovic’s story is just a few pages long, so you’ll forgive me if I talk around it. Let’s say that a thing happens and that thing forces someone make a decision. That’s enough ground for us to build on for the next few minutes.

In Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, there’s a moment where Miyamoto Musashi, having won a few fights and made few friends as a result, hightails it into the woods and up a mountain with the 70-member strong Yoshioka dojo out in the streets looking to bring him back to face justice. Halfway up the mountain, though, he hems, he haws, and then he walks back down the mountain, out of the woods, and directly into the group of men waiting for him. About four hundred pages of some of my favorite comics later, seventy men are dead in the dirt and Musashi has stepped into infamy.

There’s a moment in that span where Musashi makes a decision. In this case, it is an incredibly bad one, and as a reader, I love it. These moments, when you can see or feel a character’s brain working, are manna from Heaven for me. It makes me think, it makes me wonder, and it makes me get really attached. Sometimes the decision is to save someone else. Sometimes the decision is to make someone pay for killing the dog your late wife got you, or for decorating their saloon with your friend.

The decision in “Brooklyn Zirconia” isn’t like Musashi’s, but it’s not not like Musashi’s either. In this case, a person makes a decision rooted in some flavor of melancholy (sadness? resignation? hopelessness? apathy? wait, am I projecting?), and it happens in such a way that I am personally hooked. Stories where someone makes a measured and probably incredibly bad decision really sing for me. The doomed and damned on a rush to a bitter end, for means that may be noble or petty but are utterly undeniable? I’d eat it with a spoon if I could.

In general, my favorite characters tend to be laconic. I love Boyd Crowder and Lupin the Third, but Golgo 13, Amos from The Expanse, Parker from Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter, Chiyoko from Akira, Cougar from The Losers, and a host of gruff, dark-haired shonen adventure manga characters are near and dear to my heart. Again, while this is not what Team Brooklyn Zirconia is up to here, it’s not not that either. There’s a texture here that’s familiar, a string to tug that’ll take me somewhere fresh.

Plus, I love me a word balloon with three words or less. It feels like raw, unadulterated confidence.

If you hear “I hate waiting” in this clip and smile, I think you get what I mean. If you laugh a mean laugh when you hear “Better if I don’t,” let’s play Tekken together. You’re family now.

I want to know more about the thing that happened in “Brooklyn Zirconia,” I want to know more about the decision-maker, and mostly I just wanna see where this team is gonna take me. I’m fixated on the decision in the story, but the little creative decisions are cool, too. Cvetkovic uses a lot of zig-zaggy balloon tails and connectors, which does a fantastic job of setting this story apart from “Carmine’s Apartment,” the first chapter of Newburn. I really like how the people are drawn and colored too, the way they’re cartoony but also maybe reminiscent of people you see day-to-day, the way the art has kind of a cut-out quality sometimes…the combined effect is a really pleasant one. When I read “Brooklyn Zirconia,” and I believed it. I want to see what the decision leads to, how it looks when this person gets to some place for whatever reason it is that they’re headed there.

Team Newburn’s side of Newburn #1 features the title character, the retired detective who’s found a new gig investigating crimes for the other side. You can’t be a corrupt cop if you’re not a cop, right? It’s a clever idea, a fun little inversion of what you normally expect from stories like this.

“Stories like this” is important here, because if you read enough of anything you tend to recognize the formula, and when I read a LOT of anything, the way the creators follow and deviate from the formula becomes part of the draw for me. It’s the difference between listening to a drummer and listening to Ringo Starr drum. Ringo is gonna do something different, like this tiktok video breaks down in an incredible fashion. Ringo could take a song that was already a bop and still make it funky.

@grahamethedrummer
Dear Beatles fans, it’s our duty to keep this great music alive for many more generations. #thebeatles #ringostarr #drummer #music
♬ I Feel Fine – Remastered 2015 – The Beatles

The “Come Together” part is so good it’ll give you gas face.

Anyway, Newburn feels like a procedural. The title character walks around, he talks to people, and he figures things out. It’s not really the kind of story with a lot of Genre Wick stuff going on. It’s more about the details and subtler touches than the gunfights. You can see it in the way people move in the book, with how often Newburn will look and notice things before acting on them in a subsequent panel, how he touches a wall while explaining the what he’s found, how he changes the way he speaks to maximize his chances of getting his way.

I realized where Phillips & Zdarsky had decided to Ringo it up when I thought about his status quo in relation to the usual demands of a procedural or detective story. A police procedural is often about returning things to zero by the end of the episode. The cops solve the case, the criminal goes off to get tried in a hit spin-off TV show as part of a crossover, and society is safe once again. Heist movies are probably the closest we get to a criminal procedural, and in the end, those are about up-ending things, defeating the establishment instead of restoring it. A reverse-procedural. More or less equal and opposite.

What’s the overall outcome of a detective using the law to serve and protect criminals? Whose idea order is maintained or destroyed at the end? If criminals are committing crimes against other criminals, then that necessarily means that he’s going to run afoul of someone on his side, but he doesn’t work a straight enough job to expect protection from the police, either.

This moment right here, where I’m not sure where it’s going to go but I can see that it’s obviously just laid out a briefcase full of Chekov’s guns and for some weird reason my name is on every bullet.

The first chapter of Newburn makes me think about how if you can figure out a way to be just observant enough, you can divine the order of the world and find truth. The first chapter of “Brooklyn Zirconia” makes me think about how sometimes there are things that must be done, even if you must do them through a heavy sigh. They must be done because they’re right, or necessary, or meaningful, or whatever whatever.

As a reader, these kinds of textures are the things that hook me. That intersection between duty and damnation that comes with one story, that blend of safety, knowledge, and hidden motives that run through the other.

Hey, what do you think is a weirder experience, writing an essay about your friend’s book or reading an essay about your book from your friend? There’s a running gag on the Mangasplaining podcast that Chip and I are sometimes the same person. I’m even more convinced now.

(special thanks to chris butcher!)