![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
So...
If I stay here, I know what will happen. If I go with you, I don't know what will happen.
... I had this dream the other night. But this post isn't about the dream, but about something spurred by the dream. The dream itself came out of a chapter in Aria* manga I'd read the night before. The main character visited a small island that was modeled after a Japanese shrine, with rows and rows of torii**, and dedicated to the worship of a fox god. An old woman selling inarizushi warns the protagonist that if she meets the fox god, not to go with him because if she does she'll never return. hat, naturally, sparked a similar scene in my dream (with different characters), where one spoke the words I italicized above to the other, to explain why that person was choosing to go with the other. Which seems to have relevance to That Thing Wot I Am Not Writing. Only, in this case, it's not that the character will never be seen again,*** but that the character will ... er, not have their perceptions changed, but become aware of, and a part of, another aspect of the world that most people aren't truly aware of.****
... And now I've forgotten what the question I was asking was, in searching for and describing the manga. *twitch* I think it had something to do with somehow characterizing this change, from one mode of being/perception/whatever to the other, and how to do that.
And also figuring out why this may not necessarily be such a good thing. I mean, in Western fairy lore, when the midwife rubs her eye with the hand containing the magic ointment, she can see the other world and eventually her eye gets put out, but there's no other consequences to her and why she might not want that, beyond "well, someone might put your eye out if they find out," or why, if she was given the choice, she might not want to do that. Other than generic fear of the unknown.
Also, this is based in Asian lore, and I want more of an Asian flavor to the reasons and the choices - that's one of the reasons why I'm not, at the moment, reading European fox lore, since I need the foxes to be particularly Asian in this.
So - does this spark any rambling thoughts in anyone? I've already worked out a thing or two just writing it, but it pretty much takes an outsider coming in and saying something to get my brain booted onto other tracks. Sorry I'm so vgue, but it's vague in my head, and this is part of pinning it down and brining it into relief, even if it's by saying "No, it's not that way" over and over until the way it is shows up.
(and heading home due to incipient migraine, so if I don't respond quickly, I'm probably on the road.)
* Sequel to Aqua, although as both of them are plotless setting-manga, it's not necessary to read them in any particular order. In the future, the main character moves to a terraformed Mars, which is almost completely covered with water, to become a gondolier, called an undine, in the city of Neo-Venice, which is a reproduction of the old Venice on Earth. She's a trainee in the first one and a journeyman in the second, but they're all mostly about tooling around the city in a gondola and appreciating the beauty of the moment. I probably would have liked them better if they hadn't been compared to Records of a Yokohama Shopping Trip wherever I heard about them, because nothing compares to Records of a Yokohama Shopping Trip, which is pretty much the pinnacle of the "not much happens but you're fascinated anyway" genre. Aria and Aqua lack the sense of profundity that Records of a Yokohama Shopping Trip specializes in.
** In the notes, the mangaka admits to having been influenced by the Inari shrine in Kyoto. XD
*** That's another possibility, later, but not in this particular part of the story.
**** Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's supernatural.
... I had this dream the other night. But this post isn't about the dream, but about something spurred by the dream. The dream itself came out of a chapter in Aria* manga I'd read the night before. The main character visited a small island that was modeled after a Japanese shrine, with rows and rows of torii**, and dedicated to the worship of a fox god. An old woman selling inarizushi warns the protagonist that if she meets the fox god, not to go with him because if she does she'll never return. hat, naturally, sparked a similar scene in my dream (with different characters), where one spoke the words I italicized above to the other, to explain why that person was choosing to go with the other. Which seems to have relevance to That Thing Wot I Am Not Writing. Only, in this case, it's not that the character will never be seen again,*** but that the character will ... er, not have their perceptions changed, but become aware of, and a part of, another aspect of the world that most people aren't truly aware of.****
... And now I've forgotten what the question I was asking was, in searching for and describing the manga. *twitch* I think it had something to do with somehow characterizing this change, from one mode of being/perception/whatever to the other, and how to do that.
And also figuring out why this may not necessarily be such a good thing. I mean, in Western fairy lore, when the midwife rubs her eye with the hand containing the magic ointment, she can see the other world and eventually her eye gets put out, but there's no other consequences to her and why she might not want that, beyond "well, someone might put your eye out if they find out," or why, if she was given the choice, she might not want to do that. Other than generic fear of the unknown.
Also, this is based in Asian lore, and I want more of an Asian flavor to the reasons and the choices - that's one of the reasons why I'm not, at the moment, reading European fox lore, since I need the foxes to be particularly Asian in this.
So - does this spark any rambling thoughts in anyone? I've already worked out a thing or two just writing it, but it pretty much takes an outsider coming in and saying something to get my brain booted onto other tracks. Sorry I'm so vgue, but it's vague in my head, and this is part of pinning it down and brining it into relief, even if it's by saying "No, it's not that way" over and over until the way it is shows up.
(and heading home due to incipient migraine, so if I don't respond quickly, I'm probably on the road.)
* Sequel to Aqua, although as both of them are plotless setting-manga, it's not necessary to read them in any particular order. In the future, the main character moves to a terraformed Mars, which is almost completely covered with water, to become a gondolier, called an undine, in the city of Neo-Venice, which is a reproduction of the old Venice on Earth. She's a trainee in the first one and a journeyman in the second, but they're all mostly about tooling around the city in a gondola and appreciating the beauty of the moment. I probably would have liked them better if they hadn't been compared to Records of a Yokohama Shopping Trip wherever I heard about them, because nothing compares to Records of a Yokohama Shopping Trip, which is pretty much the pinnacle of the "not much happens but you're fascinated anyway" genre. Aria and Aqua lack the sense of profundity that Records of a Yokohama Shopping Trip specializes in.
** In the notes, the mangaka admits to having been influenced by the Inari shrine in Kyoto. XD
*** That's another possibility, later, but not in this particular part of the story.
**** Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's supernatural.
no subject
no subject
no subject
This lead me to think about rules of magic. There are some systems where if you don't know anything about magic and you're in a magical kind of world/situation you're totally screwed. But there's also the sort of system where not knowing anything means you don't get noticed -- where the ostrich burying its head in the sand works, and if you don't believe in the weird stuff, the weird stuff doesn't believe in you either.
That would be a very specific fear of the unknown; instead of being afraid of things that are strange to you, of liking things staying the way they are, you have this very real and justified fear that by gaining knowledge you will put yourself in danger because knowing things makes you stand out and makes you worth someone's attention. So if you know that becoming aware of a world that most people can't see will draw the attention of said world, you'd have to think very carefully about whether or not the risk would be worth whatever you're gaining from having the new awareness.
no subject