skygiants | Entries tagged with twelve kingdoms

I've been feeling playlisty recently, so a few weeks ago I did a Twitter meme where I asked people for prompts for 5-song playlistlets about things we both liked, which I would make in the next week.

...it has now been almonst a month, but on the other hand almost every playlist on this list has more than 5 songs in it, so really it was an equal-opportunity lie!

clones (star wars) for

bluestalking - I uh for sure had this one ready to go already, mostly with songs siphoned off from the playlist for my clone amateur oral historian character from our last tabletop campaign

bash for

jothra - relatedly, the playlist for my clone amateur oral historian character from our last tabletop campaign

wild theatrical productions for

evewithanapple - I was not sure whether this prompt meant 'songs from wild theatrical productions' or 'the mood of creating/experiencing a wild theatrical production', so I attempted to do the second with the first? please note that 'wild' is not a condemnation, some of these are from productions I think are legitimately delightful and some from productions I sincerely believe are terrible

Kay for

aella_irene - this was surprisingly difficult, the only thing in my personal feelings about Sir Kay that for sure I feel like I captured was my strong belief that he spends his entire life annoyed and stressed

Russian Doll for

aberration - this is another one I definitely had cued up and ready to go already

the Iron Bull (Dragon Age) for

agonistes - the Land Down Under here represents Ferelden

bog bodies -

shati forbade me from using Zombie by The Cranberries in this playlist, which, technically, I did not

UNIONS! -

happydork is lucky this playlist was not composed entirely of Daniel Kahn songs

True Pretenses by Rose Lerner for

sophia_sol - this one was so much fun to do AND coincidentally also gave me an excuse to use another Daniel Kahn song >.>

Ernest Shackleton Loves Me for

pseudo_tsuga - an attempt at conveying the Mood of this great work without using any actual songs from the show

Princess Tutu - ok YOU guys all know that my personal playlist for this is LENGTHY, but the person who requested it is my roommate M and we've just finished watching S1, so I had to leave off more than half the things I would put on it until a later date when they will make sense >.>

Twelve Kingdoms for

izilen - another playlist I have had ready to go for years just waiting for someone to ask me about it

the specific emotion of yankumi pretending that shin rescued her from the scary gang member she just beat up for

esmenet - this is indeed a very specific delightful emotion which I did my best to capture!

trapped in an inn for

nextian - a mediocre playlist for a great prompt, I would LOVE more suggestions for songs that express the feeling of 'I'm been stuck for a week in this place with a bunch of people I don't like OH WAIT no nevermind I love them now'

Feel free to chime in with a.) song suggestions for any of these playlists or b.) more prompts, I am always looking to grow my music collection and I continue to find playlisting a pleasant and soothing activity.

In other news,

jinian asked me to write about five cartoon or other fictional characters I've had crushes on for the 25th, and what I think happened to them after canon!

1. Okay, I have to start this one out with Disney's Aladdin, who as far as I can remember was my very first fictional crush at the tender age of six or seven. Look, he's a WISECRACKING PLUCKY THIEF with a HEART OF GOLD and a PET MONKEY who spends much of the movie running around without a shirt. What seven-year-old didn't have a crush on Aladdin? I ask you.

I never watched the Aladdin TV show or sequel films, but I assume postcanon he continued to act as Jasmine's trophy husband, to have nothing to do with politics, and not to wear a shirt.

2. Okay, say what you will about Legend of Korra -- and I have fairly conflicted feelings about Legend of Korra that I really don't feel like going into at this time -- but I think we can all agree that Lin Bei Fong metalbending on her armor in that one episode was basically the hottest thing . . . ever to happen . . . on a children's television show . . . uh. And now I feel awkward.

I have no postcanon opinions about Lin Bei Fong though because her canon hasn't ended yet!

3. Speaking of, I feel really skeevy saying this, because wow, AGE INAPPROPRIATE, the child is SIXTEEN, but . . . uh, okay, let's say age Sokka from A:tLA up ten or fifteen years? But what a perfect cartoon boyfriend. Animated ideal. He even writes haiku!

Postcanon (or in between the two canons, I guess) I believe Sokka maintained a true Renaissance career as a scholar, inventor, politician, and publisher of bestselling and rather terrible memoirs full of bad jokes.

4. You know what, though, I don't know why I should be embarrassed to talk about Sokka when I have already publicly admitted to a crush on an fictional anthropomorphic rat. Wow, Rakushun. What a dreamboat. Rational intelligence is the most attractive thing of all!

I have already written a couple of fics about what I think is going to happen to Rakushun after the canon we have -- which is one reason I have less of a fictional crush on him than I used to, actually; usually the more I write from inside a character's head the harder it is to conceive of them as a crush, per se -- but to sum up, I think he's going to graduate with honors, become a public official, move to Kei, and spend the next several hundred years acting as Yoko's unofficial Queen Consort.

5. All right, guys, I have valiantly tried to keep this to characters who could conceivably count as cartoons for most of these (Rakushun had an anime!), but you knew where this was inevitably heading:

( GRATUITOUS SCREENCAPS OF CHA SONG JOO, MASTER REVOLUTIONARY CHESSMASTER COURTESAN ASSASSIN TROLL, AND MY ETERNAL FICTIONAL LOVE )

After canon, I firmly believe Cha Song Joo came into possession of a magical time-traveling device and went around coordinating revolutions all over the space-time continuum LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOOOOOOOU

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/363121.html

Hahaha, while I think the Fullmetal Alchemist ballroom dance fic probably still counts as the most self-indulgent thing I have ever written, this definitely comes a close second.

It was worth writing either way though because it prompted

izilen to make some BEAUTIFUL YOKO/RAKUSHUN ARTWORK to illustrate it which you should all go see RIGHT NOW and which could not possibly delight me more!

(Thanks also go to

izilen for the IM conversation that spurred this on to begin with and to

dictator_duck for looking over this and reassuring me that it was un-terrible enough to post.)

Title: all things grow
Fandom: Twelve Kingdoms
Characters: Yoko, Rakushun, Shoukei, Suzu, Keiki
Pairings: Yoko/Rakushun, Keiki/hilarious social incompetence
Word Count: 6210
Summary: With Rakushun's graduation from university, the future shape of the court of Kei starts to emerge

( 'Tell me how to use you best.' )

A few things:

1. Much to my surprise and delight,

winkingstar has podficced me! Specifically the Northanger Abbey snippet I wrote for Yuletide, Catherine's Fairy-Tail, which is absolutely the last thing I would ever have expected anyone to be interested in podficcing and therefore makes me even more gleeful about it.

2. Okay, I try not to be that kind of terrifying fan who runs around shoving things down people's throats (I guess those you who have literally had me shove these books physically into your hands can feel free to laugh at me here) but some of you may remember that time I read the Twelve Kingdoms books, fell madly in love with Fuyumi Ono's brain, ranted all over LJ about the perfection of Yoko Nakajima's character arc, etc.? FOR ONCE I AM NOT ALONE and now you should all go read

izilen's Ten Reasons to Read the Twelve Kingdoms post so you can all fall down the rabbithole too.

The official news that Tokyopop is folding and the third Yoko book is therefore pretty much guaranteed to NEVER COME OUT in English actually broke me enough that I decided to do a reread on the Yoko books, this time using Eugene Woodbury's fan translations as a comparison to the Tokyopop ones I already read. In general, I think I agree with the assessment that the fan translations are better, with one nitpicky detail - I actually really like Tokyopop's decision to use 'king' as a gender-neutral term, rather than using 'empress' for the female rulers. Kingship is gender-neutral in the Twelve Kingdoms universe, and that's important to the story!

I have also now read the one Tokyopop never got around to publishing, The Shore in Twilight, The Sky at Daybreak, and - man, guys, I am SO ANGRY they never got to this one, because what Fuyumi Ono does in this series continues to be more and more impressive. This is the book where she just comes right up to the questions she's been flirting around in all the previous ones and forces the characters to acknowledge that the system of the way the world works, divine mandate of kings and all, has serious problems - makes, in many ways, no intuitive sense. And there's no way, as far as anyone knows, to reform it. Those are the rules. Break them, and your country suffers. So you find loopholes. You lawyer your way around the rules. I cannot admire Fuyumi Ono more for this - it's so brave and so fascinating to set up a system of rules for a magic kingdom and then deconstruct them in this way, and I can't think of another story that does it with quite this level of cold logic.

This is a book about how you can't just afford to obey the rules and keep your own house in order and close your eyes to what's happening elsewhere, because sooner or later it's going to rebound on you. And Yoko's intuitive sense of responsibility, the way she brings this point home and makes the rest of the rulers acknowledge it, makes me love her even more than I already did, IF THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE. (But we all know that I've got my #1 Yoko Nakajima Fangirl badge pinned onto my metaphorical shirt all the time, so.)

This is also, I should mention, a book in which the most important dynamic is between a lady general and the lady king she's come to ask to help save her country. Plus, a genderqueer king! (At least, that's how I read the king of Han.) And Yoko hilariously blackmailing Shoryuu into doing what she wants! And Shoukei and Suzu being background awesome! In short: DAMMIT TOKYOPOP, I would really have liked to own a physical copy of this book.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/242057.html

I have a confession to make: my current fictional crush spends most of his time as a giant anthropomorphic rat. LOOK he's a totally awesome rat, okay! He is overcoming prejudice against being a giant anthropomorphic rat to attend the best university in fantasyland! He can cheerfully discourse on legal, architectural, and socioeconomic distinctions between kingdoms without being a mansplainy jerk about it! He cures psychotic and homicidal teenagers with the sheer power of his sanity! Also canonically he is quite cute when he is person-shaped DON'T JUDGE ME (I am already judging myself.)

Which is to say, I have finished reading the fourth Twelve Kingdoms book, Skies of Dawn, and IT WAS AWESOME. Skies of Dawn fills me with great amounts of joy; my giant crush on Rakushun (aforementioned anthropomorphic rat) is only one of many reasons. Here are some others:

1. I have talked before about how Fuyumi Ono enjoys kicking tired tropes in the face. She is doing it again, and she is doing it AWESOMELY. My favorite is how - well, okay, you know that game that characters often play in fiction called My Backstory Is More Tragic Than Yours? (RPers on my flist, you probably know this game especially.) A significant portion of Skies of Dawn involves pointing out that this game is STUPID AND DUMB.

( For example, the amazing scene that goes like this )

I also continue to be really, really fond of the way she handles the whole King of Fantasyland trope, in which our Standard High School Student is like, "Dude, guys, you want me to make decisions about how to run this country? I don't know anything about this country! I can't tell you whether it's more important to build dams or to fortify for winter!" And then goes off to LEARN about it. Because Fuyumi Oni is awesome.

2. I continue to love Yoko with a fiery passion. I love that her transformation into awesome kickass protagonist isn't complete, that she occasionally backslides into wanting approval and to please everyone - and then she catches herself, and is like "no, that's dumb, I'm not doing that," and fixes it. I love that she calls Keiki on his crap, I love how willing she is to learn from her mistakes, I love her continuing character development, and I also love the emphasis on accountability and responsibility.

3. And did I mention: accountability! Responsibility! These words are like music to my ears. This book is really focused on exploring the responsibility that a government has to its citizens, and what responsibility those citizens have to change the government when it's failing. I don't agree with all its answers, but I agree with a lot of them. And I love that Fuyumi Ono sets up a system where kings are literally chosen by divine fiat, and then uses that to explore the question even further: a lot of the questions I thought she backed out of in The Vast Spread of the Seas, she brings up again here.

4.

( 4 is spoilery and involves AWESOME LADIES )

And now it is a full year before the next book. ;_; Which is not even a Yoko book, though I'm cool with that because apparently it is about the King of Kyou, and I am SO CURIOUS about the bitchy immortal twelve-year-old-girl King of Kyou, who appears in this book mostly to announce to her magical unicorn advisor "I WISH YOU WERE SMALLER SO I COULD SMACK YOU IN THE FACE MORE EASILY WHEN YOU WERE BEING DUMB." Have I mentioned I love Fuyumi Ono's brain?

Writing about Fuyumi Ono's The Vast Spread of the Seas is going to be a little hard for me because I simultaneously was a little disappointed in it, and loved it passionately. My feelings are sometimes complicated!

To recap: this is the third book in the Twelve Kingdoms series which I am following with extreme interest. The Vast Spread of the Seas is a prequel that follows a pair of characters who, when you meet them in the first book in the series, are firmly established as Awesomely Successful King of En and Advisor. Obviously back in the day things were not so easy! In this universe, kings literally chosen by divine mandate - magical creatures called kirin basically go around looking for them until they experience a revelation and find the right person, and they rule (with the kirin's help) until they screw up enough that they lose the divine mandate, at which point both kirin and king start to sicken. But this process can take a while, and by the time baby kirin Rokuta finds Shoryu, the new king of En, the kingdom has been basically turned into a wasteland by several years of terrible management followed by several more years of no management at all.

Now skip twenty years into the future. The kingdom is slowly getting back on its feet, but Shoryu seems to be your classic Prince Hal-type irresponsible ruler, wandering out of meetings and spending all his time getting drunk and hanging out with the ladiez, much to the chagrin of his advisors. (Who are hilarious, by the way - they are basically all lower-ranked people who got promoted by insulting the king during his first few months of office, and spend most of their time ranting, facepalming, and insulting the king some more.) Meanwhile, Rokuta - who is an eternal thirteen-year-old as well as a magical kirin, and has some backstory issues of his own - is pretty dubious about the whole kingship concept to begin with, and Shoryu's apparent inability to take anything ever seriously doesn't help. So when Rokuta is kidnapped and held hostage by a group of rebels that includes a lonely boy he befriended a long time ago, who say that ALL THEY WANT IS FOR THE KING TO BUILD THEM SOME AQUEDUCTS, SERIOUSLY, he finds himself kind of sympathizing with their cause even as the situation in En starts to build to civil war.

Reasons I loved this book: first of all, I really like Rokuta, the magical chooser of kings who is actually really skeptical about the whole concept of magically chosen kings! (I also love how he is simultaneously a cranky brat, and a holy creature of kindness who literally runs a fever when exposed to too much blood.) He has a lot of conversations that go like this:

PERSON A: Rokuta, the king isn't doing his job!
ROKUTA: Dude, don't ask me, I didn't pick him.
PERSON A: But . . . actually, um, you did. You had a divine revelation and everything.
ROKUTA: Look, take it up with heaven, okay? KINGS SUCK. THE END.

I love all the political discussions and how Ono problematizes her own magical kingship system, and I love the shades of gray and the emphasis on difficult decisions - once again, Ono shows how much she loves stomping on and complicating tropes, and I eat it up with a spoon! And I did love Shoryu, who I don't think it is spoilery to say hides a lot of competence underneath his flippant surface of constant LOL. (I kept picturing him as played by Dam Duk from The Legend.) The dude knows how to work the propaganda machine! It's an important skill in a ruler. I also really loved the constant and deliberate paralleling of Rokuta and Koya, the demon-riding war orphan that Rokuta sees a little too much of himself in, and the way their roles are reversed at the end.

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff I loved with all my heart also had a flip-side that I had my doubts about, or didn't go as far as I wanted it to.

( Cut for spoilers! )

These issues aside, though, I continue to love this series so much. SO MUCH. Sea of Shadows is still my favorite, but this is a really excellent book too, and I am so massively looking forward to the next one. March! Get here faster!

It's Saturday! I am in my office doing work! The reason for this is that this upcoming week is the Big Conference of Epicness that my entire job revolves around, which means that today I am frantically printing out all the lists of Things I Need to Do And Places I Need To Be. In other words, this is basically a notice of absence - I may be around in the evenings, but don't expect to see much of me between now and next weekend.

In the meantime, I am way behind on my booklogging and likely to get more behind. SO: Fuyumi Ono's Sea of Wind. This is the second Twelve Kingdoms book and the sequel to Sea of Shadows, which some of you may have noticed me falling into PASSIONATE LOVE with when I read it. Sea of Wind takes place about ten years before Sea of Shadow and follows a different character, Taiki.

I didn't fall in love with Sea of Wind the same way, but I did not really expect to, because I imprinted SO HARD on Yoko, and it seemed unlikely that I would feel the same way about Taiki. Which is not to say that Taiki is not a fun character! Taiki is a kirin, a magical creature-person who has divine mandate to choose and advise the king of one of the kingdoms. Each kingdom has its own kirin, and when one dies, another is born. Unfortunately, Taiki gets blown away over the ocean into Japan by accident and born as a human child, which causes some awkwardness when the oracles who are supposed to be taking care of him finally find him again. 10-year-old Taiki, abused by his family, is perfectly willing to believe that his real home is in another world where everyone loves him and thinks he's special - but he can't do anything a kirin is supposed to be able to, and his insecurity issues just keep growing the more the oracles dote on him and tell him what an awesome kirin he's going to be.

I think Taiki isn't as unusual a fantasy protagonist as Yoko - he's a total sweetheart, of course, but either Ono or the English translator occasionally lays on the "poor little kid" angle a little thick - and so the plotline of the book didn't feel as subversive to me. The book picked up pretty quickly halfway through once the other characters appeared, though. Best were the scenes with Keiki, who is an important but not-often-visible figure in Sea of Shadows, where he mostly takes on the role of Cryptic Blonde Bishounen. In Sea of Wind, however, it is revealed that he is not so much cryptic as hilariously lacking in social skills - my favorite scene is the one where like twenty oracles are shouting at him because HE MADE THE BABY KIRIN CRY, DAMMIT.

( And then hilarious spoilers! ) And then you get into interesting political stuff, and that is cool too! I hear that there is more interesting politics in the next one, so I am excited for that.

Sidenote: the translation felt way more awkward to me in this one than it did in Sea of Shadows. And it is very weird to label clearly Chinese and Japanese-inspired creatures as faeries and lamia. WTF?

ALSO WHILE I AM TALKING OF WTF: y'all who know the Fullmetal Alchemist storyline, and I know there are several of you, I NEED VERY IMPORTANT CONFIRMATION ON SOMETHING.

( SPEAKING OF HILARIOUS SPOILERS )

So while I was reading Monster Blood Tattoo I was thinking that I was a little bit sick of teenaged protagonists and their fantasy coming-of-age tales . . . and then I read the first of Fuyumi Ono's Twelve Kingdoms books, Sea of Shadows, and I was like "I TAKE IT ALL BACK, COMING OF AGE IS AWESOME!" OR MAYBE it is just that this book is awesome.

Okay, so if I summarize Twelve Kingdoms it is going to sound a lot like a collection of tropes we all know very well: Yoko is an Ordinary High Schooler, quiet and shy, who doesn't quite feel like she fits in and is set apart by her super special red hair! AND THEN some crazy dude shows up, swears fealty to her as a destined chosen one, takes her to a magical land, hands her a magic sword, and tells her to fight monsters with it! Awesome wish-fulfillment, yes?

Well, no, actually, not at all. After Yoko is given the sword (and reacts with "No, no, WTF, you're insane, I want to go home, and more no!") she is almost immediately separated by a monster attack from the person who brought her, leaving her completely alone.

In a poverty-stricken country that has severe laws and prejudices against kaikyaku, people from the other world.

With monsters attacking her wherever she goes.

Basically, Fuyumi Ono apparently takes great glee in rounding up her super-magic-wish-fulfillment-fantasy tropes and then kicking them in the face. Let's make it clear from the start, Yoko is not noble or instantly likable or an independent thinker, or in any obvious way a heroine in the making.

( Cut for lengthy babble about Yoko's flaws and character development and IN SHORT I LOVE HER AND IDENTIFY WITH HER LIKE CRAZY OKAY. )

Um, besides how much I love Yoko, there's other good stuff about the book too! The world is really unusual and interesting - based largely on Chinese mythology, I believe - and there's setup for cool political stuff and some really cool secondary characters who enter about two-thirds of the way into the book and I like the whole thing a lot, but basically for me it is all about Yoko. (Except not really, because I understand the next two Twelve Kingdom books that are published in English are not at all about Yoko, and I am still going to hunt them down and devour them ASAP. But I am most excited for the one that has Yoko again, which is coming out next year.)

I also desperately want to see the anime based on it, but I kind of want to wait until I've read the rest of the books. But they are only being published once a year and there are four to go, so that is like four years to wait! D: D: DILEMMA!