An update on my Black Coat Press and Tales of The Shadowmen interests

Been a while since I said much specifically on that subject.  It'll be awhile before I can contribute to the Tales of The Shadowmen anthology series since the story ideas I've been having lately haven't been on that subject, Anime has taken over my imagination.  And of course I always have trouble getting my stories actually written down anyway, having an explicit deadline helped motivate me when I was writing TOTS stories.

I also feel bad that I still haven't finished The Companions of Silence, I bought the book early this year and started it, I like it as much as I do most Paul Feval stuff, but my mind has been fixating on other things.  This February The White Wolf is being released, it has had English versions before but they're rare and hard to find.  I hope they follow that up with The She Wolf.

I spent a good deal of time last year recommending Princess Principal to fellow Shadowmen fans.  It's set in an alternate Steam Punk version of Victorian England, but a lot of it's themes feel more appropriate for post-Revolutionary France.  But regardless plenty of the French novels we like used Britain as a setting, from The Mysteries of London to the last three Rocambole novels to John Devil.

I bring it up again now because it's Dub has finally dropped.  Now I haven't watched said Dub yet, I know from the trailer they actually went with British Accents which is a decision I'm actually rather skeptical of.  Noir's Dub worked great without any accents, I love Anime dub VAs but accents aren't their strong suite.  Still I will give a shot eventually.

The show is legally streaming on both HIDIVE and Amazon Prime, I think only HIDIVE has the Dub but I'm unsure, it may be you need to buy the DVDs for the full Dub.  Either way neither can be streamed for free, they are not making it easy for me to show this show to outsiders.

Something else about Princess Principal is I feel the episodes should be watched in Chronological order.
2, 3, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12

A lot happens in Anime that reminds me of my Francophilic tendencies.  This coming Fall Season will have yet another Anime version of Jeanne d'Arc in a show that's also about Alchemy.  We also had more Lupin III Anime this year, I won't be watching Part V till it's Dub airs however, which based on the time-frame for Part IV I suspect will be next year.  All the main Lupin III shows are on Crunchyroll Subbed right now, but suddenly The Woman Called Fujiko Mine isn't streaming anywhere.

Thanks to Hulu dropping most of what it had, Rose of Versailles and Revolutionary Girl Utena can't be legally streamed anywhere now either. That's really frustrating.

Lastly I want to talk about an observation I made about Pokemon Heroes: Latios & Latias, the Fifth Pokemon movie.  This observation can only be fully understood by others who have read Knightshade (Brian Stableford's translation of Paul Feval's Le Chevalier Ténèbre), including it's introduction and afterward material.

I feel that Annie and Oakley can be thematically compared to the Ténèbre Brothers.  They are called sisters in material I've read though I don't recall that being explicitly stated in the Dub.  Oakley is definitely Avarice.  Calling Annie "Lust" may be a bit more of a stretch since it's a kid's movie and all, but she is very vain and likes pretty shiny things, and is officially described as the prettier one.  This parallel is most likely a coincidence, but I enjoy making parallels between the works of this semi forgotten author and modern Nerd media.

Star Wars is about Fascism, but is it so in a way that is actually useful in opposing Fascism?

So my fellow SJWs at TheMarySue and LadyGeekGirl and on Tumblr have been going on and on about how Star Wars is obviously political.  What they mainly mean by that is it's obviously on their side, and want to use that George Lucas and the new directors are all mostly on the Left side of modern American politics as proof of that.  But the Author Is Dead and George Lucas especially was like Tolkien in that he wanted his stories to have a universal appeal beyond his own personal views or context.

But I'm not making this to talk about any intentional room for interpretation.  But rather a far deeper issue of how society responds to the fiction they watch.  And to start with you should watch this video from KyleKallgrenBHH on YouTube.

From Caligari to Hitler: Imagining the Tyrant - Between the Lines

This premise goes back decades. But this particular video on it was made in November of 2016, after the U.S. presidential Election of that month but before Rogue One came out.  I had watched it when it was still pretty new and bookmarked it on YouTube.

Rogue One is a movie I loved and enjoyed.  But as I looked at a certain segment of Star Wars fans not so impressed with it, expressing how bothered they were by people in their theater openly cheering on Darth Vader at the end.  I was reminded of the above video.

Because this thesis was not mainly about heroes of German cinema who could be viewed as unintentional proto-Nazis, though that was a small factor.  It mostly came down to the tendency of the masses to be fascinated by Villains.  Star Wars has always had that factor, it is the TVTropes Trope Namer for Rooting For The Empire.  And recently The Fanboy Perspective did an editorial about how annoyed he is by movies who's villains are not sufficiently charismatic and Bad@$$ enough to satisfy him.

Now don't get me wrong.  That Vader scene is one you are supposed to "enjoy".  You are supposed to "enjoy" it the same way you "enjoy" a Slasher film.  But of course the fandom of Slasher films has this same problem, I keep seeing people try to say the Final Girl archetype is Feminist, but they don't sell action figures of Laurie Strode, they sell action figures of Michael Myers.

Now I was planning on making this post and saying what I am about to say before Carrie Fisher was even hospitalized.  But naturally I now find it even more important to say that the character people should have been standing up and cheering at the end of Rogue One was Princess Leia.

And of course I can't help but notice the clear correlation between this kind of Star Wars fan, and the Prequel Haters.  People who resent the Prequels for emasculating Darth Vader, and are oh so thankful now to Rogue One for restoring his Manhood, quite literally symbolized by the extending of his Lightsaber.

And we see that in the new Trilogy's haters also to an extent, not liking how whiny and pathetic Kylo Ren seems, they wanted a new Vader, not a Vader wannabe.

Now before you go "great Job invoking Godwin's Law in your ongoing Crusade against Prequel Haters".  I want to say, don't oversimplify my premise.  I'm not saying you can identify Trump voters by tallying who cheered on Darth Vader, or who hated the Prequels.  On Tumblr I certainly know many Prequel haters who are Anti-Trump, and the most Conservative Star Wars fan I know is a relative who's pretty okay with the Prequels.  My point is that there is a basic cultural overlap between the mentality that leads to thinking the Villains are the best parts of Comic Book films, and finding Trump's style appealing.

And I know full well The Prequels also give us a Villain to be fascinated by, as they finally gave The Emperor an actual character.  Yet at the same time so much Prequel hate is tied to feeling Darth Maul and Count Dooku were under utilized.  And complaining about Anakin killing the Younglings.

Yes, that is an important comparison to the Rogue One scene.  Undeniably that should show the character's Evilness far more.  In Rogue One he's killing enemy combatants, not even a War Crime much less one against civilians, it's wrong only to the extent he is on the wrong side.  But it's not so easy to cheer on Vader massacring Younglings, which Lucas kept off-screen anyway.  More importantly then that though, is how it doesn't make him seem Bad@$$, it makes him seem Pathetic.  Sidious had basically just told him he needed to do some Evil for the Evuls to grow more powerful with The Dark Side, and so he did just that.  Reminds me of how Utena fans who hate the movie are so upset by Akio now being made to look pathetic, Ikuhara did that deliberately.

The massacre of the Seperatists leaders could have been far easier to cheer on.  But the way it's scored and shot, and how it's inter-cut with Palpatine's speech (Lucas cited this as his one Godfather Baptism moment) discourages the audience from doing so.  Topped off by seeing how even this killing of people who narratively had it coming had Anakin crying, showing he still has further to fall, and is certainly as Yoda predicted "Suffering".

I also noticed recently a problem in how all the universally praised Star Wars films, are ones where the "War" in question is unquestioningly a just one, for our Heroes side at least.  And in TFA and Rogue One even more so then the Original Trilogy, hesitancy to go all in on fighting it is presented as weakness.  While The Prequels which send the message that fighting an unjust war, one where our Heroes were the aggressors, is what created The Empire in the first place, get decried for not being simple enough.

2002 saw the release of both Attack of The Clones and The Two Towers.  That was also the year the Bush Administration was beating the War Drums on Iraq, so much so my mind still affiliates that War with 2002 more so then 2003.   Both films happen to have a theme of a War about to break out, which it does at the end.  Bizarre coincidence since it couldn't have been pre-planned.

The sad Irony is that Tolkien would certainly despise the Bush Doctrine as someone traumatized by WWI.  Yet the timing of when the Two Towers movie came out allowed many Bush voters in the theater to take Aragorn's "Open War is upon you, whether you would have it or not" as a take that to Anti-War liberals.  I know this because way back then I was one, a fact I'm deeply ashamed of.  Meanwhile AOTC clearly presents the decision to go to War as a mistake.  The Empire was truly Born in Episode II, and the score beautifully tells you that at the end.  It was just formalized in Episode III.  I wonder to what extent the Prequels are a factor in my ceasing to be Pro-War by 2006.

Going back to Lucas intent, yes he wanted to cosmetically reference the Nazis like everyone was doing at that time.  But in the Audio Commentaries the real meat when he's talking about Historical influences lie in his talking about Ancient Rome and of all people Napoleon III.  Julius and Augustus Caesar, and both Napoleons presented themselves as the Left Wing of the politics of their times, however odd that may seem to us looking at it now.  Lucas message in the prequels was about how Democracy can be subverted, regardless of the ideology of the one subverting it.

That he cited Napoleon III is interesting to me.  Years after I'd first enjoyed those Audio Commentaries, I started developing an interest in 19th Century French Popular fiction, the genesis of which was discovering Paul Feval and BlackCoatPress.  Brain Stableford talks much about the historical contexts of all these novels in his Introductions, Afterwards and Footnotes of his Translations, (interestingly in The Invisible Weapon he theorized Feval become personally disturbed by his own ability to write such compelling villains, that he became like Mliton, unknowingly of The Devil's Party).  And there too Napoleon III is unavoidable.  He may be a nearly forgotten figure today, but to his contemporaries he was very important.

And of course the shadow of Napoleon Classic Version is vital to that.  Especially since censorship meant any negative commentary on him had to veiled.  And he had critics from both progressives and old fashioned conservatives.  Seemingly any novel mentioning the original Napoleon in the 1850s, 60s or even to an extent 70s had Napoleon III in mind.  But not using OG Napoleon himself as the allegory, no they didn't want to grant him that.

The thing about the real Napoleon was that he managed to earn the respect even of those who most harshly opposed him Politically, from both the Royalists and Republicans, from Alexandre Dumas to Paul Feval.  Napoleon III couldn't do that.  And thus the contemporary fictional allegories for him lie in the Napoleon wannabes.  Like Henri Belcamp of Paul Feval's John Devil, or The Blackcoats: Companions of The Treasure, where Julian Bozzo-Corona disguised himself as his far more iconic Corsican Grandfather, Colonel Bozzo-Corona.

Of course it is this failed wannabe nature of how Napoleon III was fictionalized by his contemporaries that makes someone in the know like me a little disappointed in Palapatine as a character partly inspired by him.  And this informs what I in-spite of my issues with TFA love about Kylo Ren.  It is Kylo Ren's failure to be Darth Vader that reminds me of Napleon III's failure to be Napoleon.  And I now kinda hope Snoke is equally a wannabe Sidious, overcompensating in his hologram so no one questions the size of his.... hands.

I realize I kinda left the original topic a bit there.  But I wanted to show I'm not just being a hater who's now completely cynical to seeing useful Politics in Star Wars.  Because Donald Trump also wants to be something he is not.  The Alt-Right sees this as a second American Revolution, but Trump is no George Washington.

Some people might find it offensive to see any French Figure as a proto-Fascist when France was a nation victimized by 1940s Fascists.  But in their current Political Climate they should know they're no more immune to it then America is.

June 20th 2017 Update: Triumph of The Will

I just watched a YouTube video by Folding Ideas about Triumph of The Will. It didn't exist yet when I first made this post.

It was informative on a few levels, the key thing is the closing, that this film that defines how we think of the Nazis, is how the Nazis wanted people to think of them.  It really makes you rethink things.

Because the imagery of that infamous Propaganda film is also core to how fictional evil Empires and Tyrants are compared to the Nazis to demonize them.  Including in Star Wars.  And yet paradoxically I've also seen it observed that it influenced the Rebellion's award ceremony at the end of ANH.  You know, the one where the Blond White Male heroes get Medals but the hairy alien who can't talk properly doesn't.

"Show don't Tell" isn't a universal rule

There are times when many people seem to think it is, or at least in a visual medium like film and animation it is.  I see it in Fanboy-Perspective's defense of Batman V Superman and Clark's lack of dialogue in it.

But there are times when I do feel telling is better then showing. Especially if you're someone who wants less Origin Stories in Superhero movies, what you basically want is to be told not shown.  Likewise if you don't like overuse of Flashbacks, you want to be told not shown.  I'm annoyed how many fans feel that dead Robin easter egg means some DCEU film HAS to flashback to when that happened, how about we just leave that to the imagination for a change?

If you are the opposite of me on the issue of if movies should be longer or shorter, or if you feel the same.  Sometimes telling is shorter and sometimes showing is shorter, it depends on what you're trying to communicate.

And this also ties into how I'm a big supporter of, especially for horror, the idea that what you don't see is more disturbing then what you do.

But the thing about any medium that has acting as one of it's story telling tools.  Is what you can do by showing how a character tells something, and how others react while listening.  When trying to understand Shakespeare, it's import to know that Elizabethian audiences would have cared more about what they heard then what they saw.

In the 70s TV Miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, there are many things I don't like about it (mainly the White Washing) but also things I think it did well.  One of it's highlights was showing Jesus tell the parable of the Prodigal Son to a room full of people, it was a far better choice then cutting to a dramatization of it.

I enjoyed Suicide Squad, but yes it is a flawed movie.  One of it's highlights is El Diablo telling his backstory in the bar scene.  I feel that could have maybe been improved by not having any flashbacks, but just having him tell the story.

If a movie is ever made of Paul Feval's John Devil.  I do not want any "Flashbacks" or whatever you might call a Dramatization of the stories Henri Belcamp tells about his adventures in Australia and on St Helena.  One reason is because none of those stories are entirely true, and the audience of a movie tends to assume anything we see play out must have happened.

But also because I want to see Henri Belcamp be an Orator.  I want to show how he plays his audience and how they are suckered in by it.  Same thing if a movie was made out of The Vampire Countess, another Paul Feval novel translated into English by Brian Stableford.

So no, what I'm saying is we don't need to see everything, it sometimes works to just tell us.

Majora's Mask speculation

I figure October is a good month to do a Majora's Mask post.

I watched Gaijin Goomba's 3 part video about Majora's Mask and Africa.  The first two parts were very good, like most of his videos.  But the third one about Majora himself felt like much more of a stretch, I'm afraid I don't really buy it.  I think a connection between Majora and Dionysus/Bacchus could make sense, Dionysus is frequently affiliated with such chaotic behavior, and via his connection to the stage with mask wearing as well.

I also enjoyed the Game Theory video about Link being Dead in Majora's Mask.  There is also a good counter video to that, which I lean towards.  But what interests me is while the Game Theory video was doing it in terms of Termina as a sort of Purgatory world, one could also argue it's all in Link's head during his dying moments.  Which is a genre I know a little bit about from what Brian Stableford discuses in his Afterward for The Vampire and The Devil's Son, published by BlackCoatPress.  His English Translation of Alexis Ponson du Terrail's La Baronne trépassée (1852).

I also can't help but be intrigued by the Stone Tower of Babel theory.

There are a lot of mythical themes in Majora's Mask.  The whole having 4 divine or semi divine beings at the four corners of the Earth is a common mythological motif.  One arguably included in The Bible in Revelation chapter 7 (which leads into Flat Earther arguments).

In Clock Town an annual festival is approaching.  I decided that since festivals are frequently based on the cycles of either the Sun or Moon, and Termina's Moon clearly isn't running on a normal cycle, to speculate on if this festival could be seen as linked to a Solstice or Equinox.

The three days over which the game takes place are days during which the daylight and nighttime hours are exactly even.  Now it's done that way for game play convenience, but still it does effectively make it very likely that these events are happening at an Equinox.

So next question is, is it Spring or Fall?  After you end the unnaturally prolonged winter on the Goron's Mountain there are clear references to it being spring there.  That doesn't necessarily prove anything about the seasons of the rest of the world, but thematically it does link the story of the game to Springtime.

The Roman Bacchanalia was in the Spring, as was the Athenian Urban Dionysia.

The speculation below is not at all stuff I think the designers had in mind, it's purely my own fun head canon.

As a Christian, Springtime festivals make me think of Passover, Purim and Easter.  A period of 3 days being relevant fits that even better.  And with there indeed being a theme of Death and rebirth involved, I figured why not have some fun with it.

After you beat the game is the Dawn of a New Day.  Which works very well in my mind to see as correlating to when Jesus Tomb was found empty early Sunday morning.

I believe that Sunday was April 9th, agreeing the traditional date of the early Eastern Church.  But the Western Church often believed that Sunday was March 25th, which is indeed about 3 days after the Spring Equinox.  Or some speculate originally that day was the Equinox but then somehow things got moved by a few days.

I support a Thursday Crucifixion model.  Which would place Jesus Death on The Cross at 3:00 in the Afternoon on the first day.  6:00 AM in the morning is when Pilate sentenced Jesus according to John 19:4.   However the theories of Wednesday proponents are perhaps most interesting here.  People who are Wednesday proponent while also believing days should start at Sunrise could easily see these three days as matching when Jesus was in the Tomb.

For traditional Catholics this makes the first day Holy Thursday, the second day Good Friday and the third day Holy Saturday.  But of course on Hebrew reckoning the days begin and end at Sunset not Sunrise. 

My Review of The Vampire Countess by Paul Feval

 My Review of The Vampire Countess by Paul Feval translated by Brian Stableford for BlackCoatPress

Written in the 1850s, it's surprisingly modern in that it blends being a Vampire tale and other genres. It's set in 1804, as Napoleon is about to make himself Emperor. It has a Film Noir vibe to it with the titular Vampire (Often described as an Enchantress) serving as The Femme Fatale.

From here on the review may contain spoilers, but I'll try not to spoil to much.

The Vamp in question is involved in (And at times seemingly the leader of) a secret society plotting to Assassinate Napoleon. But she also latter secretly helps the police trying to thwart them. Her true agenda seems to be simply to obtain wealth for her master Count Szandor.

Some dialogue scenes drag to a great deal, but when we see the Vampiress in action it's one of the most powerful Seduction scenes I've seen written, rivaling even Carmilla (My favorite Vampire Tale).

I recommend this, for all avid fans both of Vampires and of Crime/Pulp Fiction.