Genealogies of Public Domain Fictional Characters

I have been imagining my own framework for a shared continuity between various Public Domain fictional sags and characters for the purpose of stories I may write in the future.  It is influenced by the Wold Newton Universe but ultimately different, starting with my disinterest in the very plot device it is named after.  But it is particularly influenced by the French WNU work on CoolFrenchComics.com.

One idea constantly floating around in WNU circles I particularly don't like is Captian Nemo being the same person as Professor Moriarty.  First of all it contributes to the White Washing of Nemo, Nemo should be Indian which is one of the few things I give Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman credit for.  But also it just doesn't fit personality wise or archetypically, Nemo like Robur opposes the British Empire from without not from within.  I'm all for the idea of Moriarty actually being a nationalist rebel against Britannia, but based on him and Moran having Irish surnames and The Valley of Fear it would be Irish nationalism carrying on the mission of Fergue O'Breane (Of Feval's The Mysteries of London) and Sarah O'Neil (Of Feval's John Devil) through The Gentlemen of The Night.  (The recent Anime Moriarty The Patriot is a pretty decent exploration of the idea of Moriarty as a Revolutionary, I haven't seen season 2 since it's not Dubbed yet but I suspect it will be.)

While Public Domain characters are the focus, plausible connections to non PD characters for the purposes of Fan Fiction will come up occasionally.

My unique combination of interests makes me an Otaku looking to strengthen the ties between the lore of Lupin III and and the original Arsene Lupin.  The CoolFrenchComics Lupin Genealogy has connections I like and would keep and others I would discard or adjust.  I think their Arsene Lupin Timeline is pretty solid except that I would probably at least not directly mention any stories not written by Maurice Leblanc.  I won't be able to comment on the Borostyria=Montenegro theory till I read The Woman with Two Smiles for myself.  Now the only versions of Lupin III that can really fit a shared universe like this, at least with the "Third" part being literal, are period pieces set in the 60s and 70s, of which my starting point would always be The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.  Maybe some stuff set in the 80s or early 90s could still work if you're willing to imagine the characters actually now look older then they're being drawn, after all the original Arsene Lupin had a career the spanned over 30 years.

The mother of the Arsene Lupin The 2nd who's the father of Lupin The Third I have decided should be Florence Lavasseur.  I have also decided that Albert d'Andresy descends from Hortense Daniel, that of course probably conflicts with the Nestor Burma theory CFC endorses, but I imagine that theory had problems on it's own.  It's a decision that is symbolic of my viewing Albert d'Andresy as the heir of the 813 form of Arsene Lupin (Jean-Marc & Randy Loffcier's analysis of 813 in the introduction to their translation is spot on).

As far as the ancestry of the original Arsene Lupin goes.  For those who don't know Theophraste Lupin comes from Maurice Leblanc himself.  C .Auguste Dupin actually being a Lupin and Theo's father with Poe simply changing the first letter for some reason I like, however I feel the generation between Dupin and Balzac's Bibi-Lupin (who I think could be the same person as Alexandre Dumas' Monsieur Jackal in The Mohicans of Paris) is unneeded, Bibi could easily have sired Dupin directly.  And their lineage going back to the protagonists of Paul Feval's The She Wolf and The White Wolf I also like.

Next is the question of the Lecoq line.  Farmer created Albert Lecoq to be the grandfather of Gaboriau's Lecoq with probably no idea a candidate for the in-between generation already existed, in fact I bet Farmer only knew of Gaboriau's Lecoq because he was mentioned in A Study in Scarlet.  

I am going to keep Feval's Lecoq as the father of Gaboriau's Lecoq in-spite of it's problems because of how it fits on a Meta-Level with Feval having been Gaboriau's Sensei, and Gaboriau contradicted himself on Lecoq's backstory anyway.  I also keep the Ballmeyer-Rouletabille connection and the Lecoq children who kept the last name in the Fan Fiction of Fortuné de Boisgobey, William Busnach & Henri Chabrillat and the 1908 La Fée au Vitriol memoir of Lucien, and I'd like to somehow add Beautrelet of The Hollow Needle. [Note: I'd missed or forgotten that Beautrelet was already on CFC's Lecoq family tree, still I think I may want to change where, I think I like Beautrelet as a younger brother of Rouletabille.]

However my imagination extends the genealogy even further to make Lecoq the real meaning of the L designation in Death Note, Lawliet can still be his forename, he wouldn't be the first Lecoq named alliteratively.

Albert Lecoq is rendered unnecessary by no longer keeping Wold Newton itself.  Albert as the forename of Toulonnais L'Amitie's father certainly isn't a problem, but what Wold Newton writers familiar with Feval and The Blackcoats like Rick Lai and Win Scott Eckert tend to do with Albert doesn't actually fit Feval's lore.  A Normandy family like the Lecoqs would not have become affiliated with The Colonel or the Veste Nere until they first set up shop in Paris in 1818.  In fact I'm pretty sure The Colonel didn't actually use the title of Colonel or even set foot outside of Corsica till then either.

But there is an even bigger issue I have with the CFC's Lecoq tree, and that's making Marguerite Sadoulus the mother of Monsieur Lecoq and Albert's wife a descendent of Milady De Winter.  

First of all in Heart of Steel it's pretty clear to me that Marguerite's relationship with Lecoq doesn't begin till 1832 so it exists 100% contemporary with her marriage to Joulou and her formally holding the title of La Comtesse DeClare, so any son she bore then would be presumed to be Joulu's and raised as a potential DeClare Heir and thus not have had the Lecoq name even if Lecoq was the real biological father, so Inspector Lecoq must have had a different mother, maybe a secret marriage Toulonnias had in his native Normandy.

But also, given how often there are Meta symbolic reasons for these Wold Newton style genealogical connections.  Why make Marguerite's boyfriend an heir of Milady De Winter rather then Marguerite herself?  

Usefulcharts did a series of videos on hidden European Matrilineal family trees starting with the House of Garsenda, in order to try breaking away from how patrilineal by default the study of genealogies has long been.  Well the writing of fictional genealogies has mirrored reality in this regard.  So I've been working on constructing a Matrilineal family tree of fictional French Femme Fatales with Marguerite Sadoulus being the focal point.  I shall post here what I have so far but it is subject to change.

Update; I'm already half regretting some aspects of that, but the gist of that is still my starting premise.

I've been thinking about my French Pulp Fiction interests again.

I did a post recently on how Anime still isn't Mainstream, but the thing is Anime isn't even the most Niche thing I'm into.  Anime at least has enough of an active online fandom presence that I can Tweet about it and find lots of interesting YouTube videos and Tumblr posts and Fan Fiction.

What I'm talking about in this post I'm not even sure what to call it, it's way more specific then what most people who'd call themselves a Francophile mean.  I often use Shadowmen as a short hand after the anthology series Tales of The Shadowmen or the nonfiction book Shadowmen: Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction.  

The main fan-site is CoolFrenchComics.com and the main modern publisher of relevant content is Black Coat Press.  They publish lots of English Translations of 19th and early 20th Century Pulp Fiction, but also some books that contain new stories using these characters or related themes.  The Editors who run BCP are Jean-Marc & Randy Loffcier and some of the books they Translate themselves.  However a lot of their flagship books are translated by Brian Stableford.  A number of them, including some that may benefit from a Female perspective were translated by Nina Cooper.  It seems everything that's a Stage Play rather then Prose is translated by Frank Morlock.  Another notable contributor is Rick Lai who I'll talk more about later.

BlackCoatPress has made some marketing decisions I consider unfortunate.  Starting with their decision to say "Adapted by" rather then "Translated by" on the covers of all their translations. Now they have an explanation for this on their website on a page called Adapted vs Translated, where it's basically because they are comparing themselves to old Public Domain translations that are little better then what we in the Anime Community would call Machine Generated Translations, they want to give their translators credit for the skill they provide in making their translations actually pleasing to read, it's not because they are actually changing anything.

The problem is that explanation isn't on the back of the every book.  And so for example when I'm trying to convince fellow Anime fans to try one of them out, a Translation openly branding itself as an "Adaptation" is going to make them think of 90s Hack Dubs where the names are all Americanized, and Croissants are called Jelly Donuts, and Death is euphemized as "leaving this world", and Eugenie Danglars & Louis d'Armilly are referred to as "cousins".

Rest assured BCP's Translations are the opposite of that, preserving the French cultural characteristics in ways even modern Anime Dubs and even Subs struggle with, like keeping rather then translating French nicknames and Honorifics.  I watched a YouTube video once where someone talking more about Manga translations actually said that Honorifics should be translated or dropped entirely, that they simply don't work in English and only pretentious Weaboos want to keep them.  And I've come to realize that's just plain Racist, only when talking about East Asian media is it at all controversial to preserve their Honorifics, no modern respectable translation of Les Misérables for example would dare change Monsieur to Mister or Mademoiselle to Miss, some of those old PD translation that BCP wants to distinguish themselves from so bad did, but everyone today agrees that's stupid.  No one considers it jarring in the Musical when these French honorifics are spoken by the Cockney accented Thenardiers, it actually works just fine.  Japanese honorifics are way more different from English honorifics then French ones are, what they communicate about the culture is even more important to preserve and any attempted 1 to 1 equivocation of them to English words will be way less accurate in their connotations.

Another marketing mistake is that a few books will on their back cover blurbs describe aspects of what happens in ways that might feel a bit like a bait and switch once you've read them.  So for example don't read The Wandering Jew's Daughter expecting The Wandering Jew to be Superman.  The Wandering Jew's Daughter is itself not one of the best of Paul Feval's novels, but the BCP translation is worth buying just for the information Stableford provides in the Introduction for cultural context, so much history of how the Wandering Jew legend was used in French literature and melodrama that you won't find on Wikipedia.

Stableford's translations always have very in-depth educational Introductions, extensive Footnotes, and more often then not an insightful Afterward as well.  With both John Devil and The Vampire and The Devil's Son I definitely support Stableford's Afterward provided interpretations of what actually happened in the story. Companions of The Treasure is another one where Stbaleford's interpretation is basically Canon to me.

The Phantom of The Opera is such a classic of literature and pop culture in general not just in France that you would probably think surely a good faithful and complete English Translation existed before Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier published theirs in the 2000s, but you'd be wrong.  Multiple reviews of their translation affirm that no one before even kept the basic format of how the story is told.  But because theirs came so late and most people assume that "certainly a Penguin Classics edition can be trusted" their English version remains rarely read even by younger readers.  Half the Phantom of The Opera content on YouTube is from Lindsay Elis, and one thing you learn in those is how pervasive is the opinion that Andrew Lyod Webber's musical is better then the original novel, and I can't help but blame the fact that most of these Musical Theater Kids have never read the real novel.

Speaking of Lindsay Ellis she did a video on The Persian, lamenting the constant either White Washing or Demonizing of that character.  So it's a shame she never read Rick Lai's Shadows of The Opera, in that series The Persian is not exactly a main character but they are from what I recall faithfully preserved as both a Persian and a good person.

Speaking of which, now is a good time to mention that there is some relevant material published by other publishers.  A number of Frank Molock's stage play translations were published by Borgo Press, and the first volume of Rick Lai's Shadows of The Opera was from Wild Cat Books, but BlackCoatPress took over for the follow ups.  BCP hasn't published any Rocmabole stuff besides two Stage Plays in one volume, Basil Balian has made a very abridged translation of the entire Rocambole saga, and Jean De Ponson du Terrail has made complete translations of the first two volumes.

I did mention above my desire to sell this stuff specifically to fellow Anime fans.  Rick Lai's Shadows of The Opera and Sisters of The Shadows series is a good place to start.  It began with Rick Lai making a female version of The Shadow, and then things get increasingly implausible with how nearly all the major players in this epic saga are female.  It's a series waiting to be made into an Anime. 

But as interesting as I find Rick Lai's work, some of the characters he uses I really don't want his takes on to be people's introductions to them.  Chiefly Paul Feval's The Blackcoats saga and Maurice Leblanc's The Countess Cagliostro, both have been translated by BlackCoatPress.

The Countess Cagliostro is however the Prequel of the Arsene Lupin saga, and not the only book of that saga to take place before some books already published when it was written.  So is the Lupin Saga one where it's appropriate to read in Chronological rather then Publication order?  Well I still haven't read all of them, but for the essentials of what I have I'd say go ahead.  Basically the essential Arsene Lupin works are the ones translated by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier and the original short stories included in Arsene Lupin: Gentleman Burglar which basically all take place between Countess Cagliostro and The Blond Lady aka The Blond Phantom.

Paul Feval's works are the most interesting to me.  My introduction to him began as part of my prior Vampire phase, it was The Vampire Countess and Vampire City which caught my attention first and which I read in that order.  Both are great and so are Knightshade and Revanants.  Countess and Revanants are from an earlier phase of Feval's career when he hadn't gotten as ultra Meta yet.  

There is something said in a few reviews of Vampire City I consider misguided, and that's making it sound like Polly Bird is in any way Trans representation, she was simply the subject of supernatural gender bending and it isn't even emphasized all that much, and in the end it would certainly be problematic to read her as Trans representation.

John Devil is the best of Feval's novels, but also the longest at least of what BCP has translated.  I think the best entry point to The Blackcoats saga would be either Salem Street or The Invisible Weapon, but 6 out of 7 of them are worth reading and fairly capable of standing on their own, The Cadet Gang is the one that he clearly was forcing himself to write after losing all passion for the topic so I'd say don't bother with it.  

Thing is while a good deal of the Prose content relevant to this interest is available in English now (there are some still untranslated I want to see get translated), most of the French Movies and TV shows about these characters have no English Subtitled release I can watch.  It's in this area where fans of Japanese entertainment media are lucky, even the most obscure stuff can usually be found Subbed in some capacity.  But for French stuff I wanna watch, the 60s Fantomas trilogy, the 63 Judex, the 96/97 film version of Paul Feval's Le Bossu titled on Amazon as On Gaurd, and the 2004 Arsene Lupin have Subs I can watch, but that's it.  However I also wanna see some of the films based on Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, or Rocambole, or all of the other Le Bossu adaptations (it seems one gets made about once a decade), or the TV adaptations of Les Habits Noirs and Le Loup Blanc.

Update: I forgot to talk about something important.

If I have piqued anyone's interest in buying stuff from BlackCoarPress, I know from talking with them that buying the book using their website directly gives a larger percentage of what you spend to the Author or Translator then they would get when using a site like Amazon as the middle man.  However that also costs the consumer more on shipping and handling.  And more often then not I get the book faster when I use Amazon, but that's because of the same circumstances that force their delivery drivers to piss in bottles.

It's another unfortunate symptom of Capitalism that what's more affordable for the consumer results in less of the money spent going to who actually deserves that money.  I am in a financially difficult situation right now.  But anyone who is in a fairly comfortable situation financially I would ask to be willing to spend the extra money necessary to support BlackCoatPress directly.

A Guide to Anime Films

I'm into Anime in large part for the serialized content, however films have been both more "respectable" and more profitable for most of modern history, on both sides of the Pacific and in terms of both Live Action and Animation.  That means theatrically released Anime films frequently have more budget to work with, and less time constraints placed on their production, which allows certain technical advantages. So for many newcomers movies may be where they want to start.

Again as a consequence of my watching Anime mainly for the serieses and sagas, most of the films I have seen are in some way tied to a series.  Of Anime movies that simply are stand alone (or were until they got a sequel), I've seen a handful of Miyazaki films, two non Miyazaki Ghibili films, Akira, Barefoot Gen, Project A-Ko, Metropolis, Kara no Kyoukai, Maquia, A Silent Voice, Your Name and Weathering With You, Vampire Hunter D, a couple mostly now forgotten Fantasy films from around 2010, and one that's basically a more serious take on the premise of Chunibyo, and some more obscure ones slipping my mind right now.

However Anime films that are tied to TV shows come in many forms in terms of how accessible they potentially could be to someone not already into that series and capable of standing on their own.

A note, Anime database websites like MyAnimeList define "Movies" based on how they are released not runtime, so theatrical shorts are classified as movies but feature length OVAs and TV Specials are not.  My mind still prefers to define a movie mostly by runtime and if it wasn't in theaters just call it a TV movie or Direct to Video movie.

First you have the franchises that are largely negative continuity or flexible continuity or at least highly episodic and long running enough to begin with that I generally think the actual first TV episode is almsot the worst first impression because of the early instalment weirdness.  So for these shows one of their ambiguously canonical films probably is the best way to introduce it's cast of characters to someone new.  These are shows like Lupin The Third, Pokémon, 90s Sailor Moon, PreCure and Detective Conan aka Case Closed.  

Sailor Moon R: The Promise of The Rose is all of the core appeal of Sailor Moon concentrated into a well paced easy to follow but highly emotionally dense film.  For Pokémon the Third movie Spell of The Unown is the very best, but ironically one of the few that does something which might be a problem for a viewer who hadn't followed the show up to that point, but maybe not, I think Pokémon fans reading this can guess what I'm talking about without me needing to spoil it.  The first two Pokémon films are perhaps in different ways trying too hard to be "cinematic".  The other Pokémon movies I'd rank as above average are Heroes Latios and Latias, Destiny Deoxys, Ranger Temple of The Sea, The Power of Us and Secrets of The Jungle, but most are perfectly good at what they're meant to be.

Detective Conan/Case Closed is the franchise I have been most obsessed with recently, and so in part thinking about it's movies was what inspired me to write this.  Every movie is in part designed to work for newcomers while also doing something special for fans, that's why at the beginning there is always a brief summery of the show's premise.  But some I consider more recommended for this purpose then others.  The actual first movie The Time Bombed Skyscraper could work well enough with it's cold open basically being how an average episode ends.  The third movie The Last Wizard of The Century is probably the best of them (that seems to happen a lot with Anime, it's like the opposite of how Hollywood franchises are perceived).  Movie 4 Captured In Her Eyes is interesting in how it's cold open is actually a flashback to before what happens in the premise summery segment making it perhaps by default the most chorological movie.  Of the three movies that feature the show's Arc villains, movie 5 Countdown To Heaven is the best executed in how it utilizes them given that they're not allowed to change the status quo, and also of all the movies I've seen the best for getting to know Haibara Ai (called Vi Graythorn in the Funimation Dub). Movies 7-18 do not have Dubs yet and so I've only seen four, of those movie 8 Magician of The Silver Sky is the most interesting, it breaks from the usual formula in a way that allows it to recreate the vibes of the tv show better then any of the others, and it's simpler plot makes it easier to watch Subbed.  

Movies 19-23 are currently the only movies easy to watch legally in English, Subbed or Dubbed, with all of the BangZoom releases purchasable and rentable on Amazon Prime, while prior movies either were never officially released over here or were only via now long discontinued localizations.  These movies and some of the ones preceding them are often criticized by longtime fans for being too much like over the top modern American Superhero movies and thus allegedly less intelligently written then the first 9 or so.  I can't entirely say I disagree since I don't feel like recommending any of those as much as the early ones I just listed, but I do enjoy all of them just fine and I didn't list all of the first 9, their basic appeal is still the same in my view, they've changed similarly to how the show has changed, but the movies were always a good deal more action oriented then the show.  Zero The Enforcer is the only one I can even come close to saying I dislike.

A second type of Anime tie in movie is a kind some less episodic shows have, that may start out feeling as stand alone as the above mentioned movies, but during the last act there will be an increasing amount of plot relevant fan service only followers of the show will get.  There are two main examples that come to mind, A Certain Magical Index: The Miracle of The Endymion, and Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale.  I enjoy both movies, Endymion I give a 10/10, but watch the series first, actually for Endymion there's kind of two series you need to have followed.  However for people becoming fans of those shows know that they are like the above movies in how they won't actually effect the status quo of the show and rarely if at all be acknowledged.

The third type are movies that are sequels or continuations, or sometimes even specifically the Ending, or a Coda to the show's ending.  Type 2 films have a chance of being satisfying to a non TV show viewer because by the time the stuff they won't get factors in they might have gotten invested enough to just roll with it. But Type 3 are explicitly not stand alone works on any level. Char's Counterattack,  The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, End of Evangelion, The Conqueror of Shambala are probably the biggest examples, I also like the Gundam 00 movie and Code Geass R3 Lelouch of The Resurrection, and most recently we had the Sailor Moon Eternal movies which picked up where Sailor Moon Crystal season 3 left off.  Maybe some of these can overcome their continuity lock out issues simply by being good, but being good on it's own is not the barrier breaker some people want to think it is.

Type four would be Recap movies, these are basically a chunk of a series, ranging anywhere from 8 episodes to 25, trimmed down and reedited into a film length, some may try to do a whole show in one but most go for 2 or a trilogy.  There may be some genuinely newly animated material in a few select scenes or as a framing device.  These almsot always fail to be satisfying movies on their own, or even give the fans interested in that concept what they want.  The only definitive exception is the Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Trilogy which were longer then most and in a unique situation.  I have seen some people speak highly of Macross Do you Remember Love but I haven't watched that one yet.

Type 4b is when the story of a show is fully remade as a movie, or the source material re-adapted, A lot of the movies that fit this category I haven't seen yet even when they exist for a show I like, but the Rebuild of Evangelion films are the most notorious.  The Sailor Moon Eternal films actually also fit this category in relation to Sailor Moon SuperS and the first 6 episodes of Sailor Stars from the 90s Anime.  In the re-adaptation case sometimes the movie version came before the series, but usually the movie still winds up feeling like it should be the less definitive Anime version like with Clamp's X.  Detective Conan/Case Closed Episode "One" The Great Detective Turned Small is basically a remake in the show's modern style of the first episode and a half of the series, but it also starts a little earlier and then ends a bit like a Recap episode.

I wanted to say those 4 categories covered everything, however Crossovers like Lupin The Third vs Detective Conan or the PreCure Allstars films are difficult to categorize, they are often structurally similar to Type 1 but it's hard to imagine seeing any appeal to watching a Crossover movie if you aren't already a fan of any of the parties involved.

And then there is the very unique case of Adolescence of Utena.  At face value it is Type 4b, the fan theorizing that it's actually a sequel on some cosmic time loopy metanarrative level also exists for the Rebuild films but for those films that theory doesn't effect what you think they mean nearly as much.  But beyond all of that is how the Utena movie is even more abstract in it's Symbolism then the TV show titled Revolutionary Girl Utena, to the point where you really need to have seen the show to have any hope of deciphering what's going on in the movie, and even for those of us who have seen it it isn't easy.

Magic Kaito and Tuxedo Mask

One of the interesting things you will learn as you really dig deep into Detective Conan is that the character of Kaitou Kid/Kid The Phantom Thief has his own Manga and it's actually older going back to 1987.  A date which also makes it older then Sailor Moon.

Meaning that Manga seems very likely to be part of the Pre-History of Sailor Moon that Mahou Shoujo aficionados like to look into.  Because Kid and Tuxedo Mask visually are practically pallet swaps of each other.  And both are looking for a very specific Gem that they can't know if one is it or not till they see it up close.  Kid's elusive Gem hunt even also involves the Moon.

The 90s Anime completely forgets about Tuxedo Mask being a Phantom Thief which is why many casual fans don't know about it either, but it is stressed in the original Manga, Crystal and the Live Action show commonly called PGSM.

Codename Sailor V also had her own Phantom Thief love interest called Kaito Ace.  

The Magic Kaito Manga is technically Shounen not Shoujo. So Kid being a Shounen protagonist rather then a Shoujo Romantic lead has a tendency to be not actually as Sauvé out of costume as he is in costume.  But I'm willing to bet that Manga had always been able to attract a bit of a female audience and maybe Naoko Takeuchi was one of them.

There are two other Manga that I think were influenced by Magic Kaito while Animated sooner, and they too were Mahou Shoujo but while applying the Phantom Thief format to the titular Magical Girl herself.  Saint Tail and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne.