The Ninth Jedi is what the Sequel Trilogy could have been.

It manages to do much better the seeds of compelling new ideas The Sequel Trilogy introduced and squandered, but without all the falling back onto wanting to also be an OT Remake. 

The sequel trilogy wanted us to believe that Kylo Ren wasn't a Sith but something different, but no meaningful distinction was ever made.

Nawaan in The Ninth Jedi is the opposite of a Sith, while the Sith are all about indulging in your emotions Nawaan's ideology is about trying to empty yourself of Emotions.

And that context finally provides a new meaning to Balance. The Jedi are not the opposite of The Sith but the Balance between these two opposite approaches to Emotion. The Jedi's flaws in the Prequel Trilogy are a result of being a little too much like Nawaan. Nawaan is what most people wrongly think Stoicism is, The Jedi are at their best true Stoics. 

Now explaining why Kara makes a better Star Wars protagonist then Rey is going to be difficult to explain because of the sentiments I don't want to be mistaken for endorsing.  I don't agree with calling anyone a "Mary Sue", I don't even think having a protagonist be perfect from the start never making mistakes is an inherently bad thing in general, but it doesn't work for Star Wars. Kara makes mistakes and has to grow and learn in exactly the way Rey didn't. 

There are even other smaller ways in which this comparison is fascinating.

We have a story where one of our Mentors' has a valid reason to feel responsible for the villain's fall. But if this scenario or something close to it was done with Luke it would not have felt like a complete reversing of his core ROTJ characterization the way TLJ's twist does.  

There's also a character whose role resembles what Leia's could have been. 

Even the Kaiber Canon somehow does this,  Functionally it's the same as Starkiller Base, how it's an ever bigger superweapon then the Death Star is exactly the same.  But the context around it manages to make it more interesting. 

Also of course the fact that it isn't aesthetically repeating the Rebels vs Empire, or even prequel Aesthetics, it is mostly all new Stuff, lots of compelling Seeds for a new Expanded Universe.

It introduced what are essentially Star Wars Dwarves but without feeling cheap and unimaginative. 

The confrontation between kara and Nawaan in episode 4 felt evocative of Luke vs Vader in Empire Strikes Back but without feeling like it was simply copying. 

As an Anime it also satisfying what you would want from an Anime. Kara even turns a Bounty Hunter to her side by defeating him like a Battle Shonen. 

Update August 18th: Once again something about the Sequel Trilogy has made me act like the kind of Internet reviews I hate. I always get annoyed when other people base their praise of something on trashing something else. 

I bet to their fans how much The Ninth Jedi echoes the Sequels in it's decision making is a vindication of them.  They are now a part of Star Wars for new Star Wars stories to include among their inspirations. 

But The Ninth Jedi also deserves better then this.  It's a great show period, it doesn't need to be compared against something worse to look good. 

Was 1990-2004 the Peak era for Fantasy?

I made a prior post inspired by a BookTuber named EverymanReads where he argued for that.

https://mithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2026/02/booktuber-overing-classic-fantasy-novels.html

There we were talking just in the context of Prose Novels. Looking beyond that the case becomes even stronger.

For movies we have Hook, Army of Darkness, Peter Jacksons' LOTR Adaptations and the first two Star Wars Prequels to name just the first that easily pop into head.  For TV we had Hercules and Xena, that Sam Neill Merlin miniseries. And Urban Fantasy was largely defined by shows like Forever Knight and the Buffyverse and Charmed and Anime like Witch Hunter Robin. 

Speaking of Anime and Manga, this era had classics like Berserk and Escaflone and forgotten classics like Maze, and adaptations of some of those LNs I talked about, and most of the most defining entries of the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre as well as Battle Shonen.

But Video Games is where things were even more genre defining. It'd almost be easier to name what Video Games aren't either Fantasy or Sci-Fi in some ways, the defining franchises of the medium like Mario and Sonic and Kirby and Pokémon are distinct Fantasy settings that only Gaming as a medium could come up with. 

But even if we limit ourselves to Games that feel more inline with conventional Fantasy there is still a lot.  For Zelda this period includes A Link To The Past, Link's Awakening, Ancient Stone Tablets, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, The Oracle Games, The Winder Waker, Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures and The Minish Cap. All those genre defining JRPGs of the SNES and PlayStation that were important to prior post of this blog are this era, as well as much of the PS2 and Game Cube era. Then there's Castlevania and lots of classic Star Wars Games. 

And spinning off from that are Visual Novels like YU-NO: The Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound Of This World, Higurashi, Tsukihime and it's sequels and Fate/Stay Night. 

For Otaku media I almost want to shift it a year to be 1991-2005. I don't even know much what I'd be loosing dropping 1990, but I know I'd be gaining Fate/Hallow Ataraxia, Mai Otome, the second seasons of Nanoha and PreCure, most of the Shuffle Anime Adaptation.  Or heck maybe even 1992-2006.

Even EverymanRead's reading list doesn't include all English language fantasy novels form this era, it for examples includes no Star Wars EU novels. This era includes all the Bantam books and the first 5 years of Del Rey which includes the New Jedi Order series containing the Yuuzhan Vong War and the earliest Prequel Era novels. Maybe for Star Wars we could move the era up a year since nothing notable came out in 1990 but 2005 has Revenge of The Sith and a number of EU novels tying into it directly including the Dark Nest trilogy in the Post-Endor saga. Or with an April 91 through March 2006 timeframe we could include Timothy Zahn's Outbound Flight. 

The late 90s also includes the three Willow novels by Chris Claremont. 

Why limit myself to 15 years per era? Because it feels like that's the average for the pretty agreed upon language for talking about eras of American Superhero Comic Books.

And speaking of which the 90s and early 00s is when most of my favorite DC Comics came out as well, most of which have some degree of Fantasy in them. The Triangle Era of Post-Crisis Superman Comics begins in November of 1990. And related to the other timeframes I've mentioned, 1992-2006 is also the timeframe of the DCAU. In the Comics the first half of 2006 was Infinite Crisis, so more or less the end of the era of DC Comics I'm most Nostalgic for. 

All Art is Political, but not all art is Partisan.

All Art is Political in the sense that all Art will reflect the politics of the time and culture that created it in some way, especially if it’s actively trying not to. What is perceived as Apolitical says a lot about the politics of a given time or culture. 

The conservatives who object to that statement do so because they can only see art as political when it’s loudly taking a side on an actively contentious contemporary political issue.  Which is what I mean by “Partisan” here, might not be the best word to use but it's what I could think of. Because I'm willing to count as "Partisan" here stuff that does condemn both sides depending on how it goes about it, or refuses to fully demonize the other. 

However Conservatives are not the only ones getting the true meaning of “All art is political” wrong. Because a lot of Breadtubers are often citing the true definition only to then justify their very Partisan political reading of something as objectively undeniably the only correct reading. 

This obsession with trying to tell all the reactionaries of the Internet that whatever they are nostalgic for was "always Woke actually" is very misguided. Because even when it is somewhat true it is so usually because of how a lot of what was Woke when the original Star Trek series was airing has become the mostly uncontested Apolitical Status Quo since. 

Most mass produced highly popular Art is pretty broadly Centrist in the grand scheme of things even when taking a few actually Partisan stances. And most Art that is made by Conservatives are not like the cartoonish virtue signaling content Breadtubers dunk on to “prove” all Conservative Art is bad, most of it is actually pretty good at drawing on where in theory Leftists agree with them.

As a Death of the Author advocate, I firmly believe you can make a plausible Woke reading of just about anything. And I believe we should make those readings and keep making YT videos based on them. But those are not objectively the only correct way to read them and we shouldn't pretend they are.  

And the most almost actually Leftist stuff Hollywood has made like Andor can still be read by Conservatives as supporting their world view in ways that engage with the actual text just as much as our reading does, like Feral Historian's Andor videos.  We can’t call it denying reality when they do it but sophisticated analysis when we do it. 

I’ve even seen Breadtubers try to claim Tolkien was Woke actually, and I’m sorry but that’s absurd, being less Racist then the Nazis does not a Woke person create.  

If Ayn Rand hadn’t been so vocal about her politics in non fiction contexts I’m convinced there absolutely would be a group of Internet Leftists arguing her fictions were Woke actually.  Or at the very least if we only had The Fountainhead to go off, a Woke reading of The Fountainhead is absolutely theoretically possible. 

All the time I see people just using the fact that a given story has Nazis be the bad guys as their proof that it's Woke. And every time I feel like yelling “you know better than this”, you know that most Nazi villains in fiction are disconnected from why we Leftists consider them the ultimate Evil and are just being used as symbols of vague Authoritarianism, or purely for the aesthetic. You know full well that Conservatives are constantly calling Leftists the real Nazis. 

Sometimes just the simple fact that a Fantasy or Sci-Fi narrative is doing Rebels against an Empire is seen as an inherently Left Wing position to take  But when these same people are looking at real life history they know better, they know sometimes the Rebels are the Reactionaries, The Confederate States of America, The Beer Haul Putsch, January 6th, Bacon's Rebellion ect.  And sometimes even a person literally holding the title of King or Emperor is, on the issue that created the conflict, more in agreement with modern Leftists then those deposing him, like Pedro II of Brazil in 1889. 

We all know full well that nominally Left Wing Dictators have also worn military uniforms and done big showy military parades.  So let’s stop pretending we don’t and that those visuals are only ever about Fascism ™.

And there is also more to Anticapitalism than just “Rich People Bad”, as someone who has heard people all over the Political Spectrum talk about their perspectives I can assure you that most Conservatives and even most Libertarians firmly believe that the vast majority of Rich People are Evil.  The political disagreement is mainly about what policies serve their interests.  And if you think that is too absurd to be true in some cases, let me give you this very enlightening example.  

I have seen Climate Change Deniers claim that it is specifically the Big Oil Companies who created the Global Warming narrative and fund environmentalist groups opposed to Fracking and Offshore drilling because it helps them control the market and drive up Oil Prices to not be drilling for Oil domestically.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

I’ve made a few posts on this blog before the line between Fantasy and Science Fiction and stores that straddle that line.

But I’ve recently come to a final conclusion about how to define these genres that is important.

Science Fiction is defined by what can’t happen in it far more than Fantasy is.  Because the point of Science Fiction is to try and stay theoretically scientifically possible no matter how out there it gets. The supernatural can never unambiguously happen in Sci-Fi. 

But it goes beyond just what literal things can and can’t exist in the universe, there are certain kinds of stories that at their core are Fantasy stories no matter how Futuristic or Scientific you try to make the setting. A Sci-Fi story would never begin with “Once Upon a Time” or something analogous to that. 

Fantasy meanwhile is defined by its lack of limits, anything you can fantasize about can be Fantasy. That’s why I once argued that Sci-Fi can be in its entirety viewed as a subgenre of Fantasy, from a certain point of view. 

However nothing that is at its core a Fantasy story can become Sci-Fi by draping itself in cosmetically Sci-Fi elements like space ships and lasers.  One thing some stories want to do is start as Fantasy but reveal it all to have been Scientific later, but that simply doesn't work, once I see a story as Fantasy no amount of Technobabble can handwave it away. 

And that once again brings us to Star Wars, the most contentious franchise in this debate. 

The Midichlorenes do not make The Force scientific enough to qualify as Sci-Fi, they tie this fundamentally mystical concept to Nature in a way no different then how The Lifestream works in Final Fantasy VII, or Magic Circuits in Fate/.

But what’s really funny is when the Prequel Haters who hate the Midichlorenes for allegedly demystifying The Force also want Star Wars to be allowed to qualify as Sci-Fi.  They fail to see how their interests conflict. 

The people who really want to be allowed to classify Star Wars as Science Fiction are basically insulting Fantasy as a genre, because it’s clear however much they don’t want to outright say it, that this comes from a palace of viewing Sci-Fi as more respectable. 

And it says something about the modern world that in this unique case the younger Genre is viewed as the more respectable one, by some people at least.  Science Fiction as a distinct genre begins with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein at the absolute earliest. Fantasy meanwhile is the oldest genre there is, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Eddas, the Mabinogion, the Shahnameh, 1001 Arabian Knights, medieval Arthurian and Grail Romances.  All of them are Fantasy stories in a modern genre classification context. 

Andor is the one piece of Star Wars media that feels like it could count as Sci-Fi if only it weren’t in the same Universe as all that Force stuff. And sadly I think that’s a factor in why it’s the closest to universally praised any Disney Era Star Wars project has been. I liked Andor well enough but do consider it overrated, I’d rather have more stuff like Ahsoka and The Acolyte which actually delve into Force Lore. 

So the gist of what I'm saying is, everything that straddles the line will by default be Fantasy. 

But there is a respect for Authorial intent I'm including how I apply that rule.  If the intend is clearly to be purely Scientific but what they failed to hold up to scientific scrutiny I will still classify it based on the intent rather then the success.  This is what keeps Star Trek Sci-Fi in spite of all the entities that are basically gods but who we're supposed to understand as "highly evolved" aliens. To me that trope is bad Sci-Fi but still Sci-Fi. 

Charred Corpses in a Galaxy Far Far Away

A common trend in YouTube videos about Star Wars during the past decade or so has been to cheekily dismiss the idea that the original Star Wars was “for kids” by showing Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s burned corpses.

Funny thing about this is as someone who’d been a watcher of these movies since sometime before 1997, I didn’t notice that their bodies were actually visible onscreen in that scene till these very modern YT videos started doing this in the 2010s. I thought we were just being shown that the farm was burned down and the actual bodies were offscreen or maybe completely disintegrated. 

And that shouldn’t be surprising, they were not zoomed in on, there was smoke everywhere, and I was originally watching these on VHS on CRT TVs sitting on the other side of a living room. These modern BluRay rips the YouTubers are using are not what the experience of this scene was like for most of its existence. 

I’m not saying they were impossible to see before if you were looking for them, but the kids these people keep trying to prove Star Wars was never for would not have been looking for them. Heck at first I didn’t really notice them in these modern YouTube videos trying to draw my attention to it.

Ki Sho Ten Ketsu

First I’ve made this playlist of a number of YT videos about Kishotenketsu, I haven’t actually watched all of them yet but the ones at the start I have.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CWxmx4wepidrlF-PrpezIs-mVr3Q0Ls

In this post I’m going to talk about it in a few different ways.

First, as I've already said before, I think the common translation of Ten as “Twist” is unintentionally misleading. And one manifestation of that is how it’s applied to Attack on Titan.  Yes I think even Pause and Select is wrong in trying to argue the Kishotenketsu breakdown of Attack on Titan correlates to the official Season designations of the Anime.

This is largely driven by the confusion of Ten with being a plot twist, because Season 3 revolves around plot twists way more then the first two seasons.

The first 3 seasons were designated three seasons even though they functionally aired as 4 broadcast seasons and have slightly more than enough episodes to theoretically be divided into Five seasons because of the quirks of how it aired. I’m convinced the 5th Broadcast season was branded as the “Final Season” purely for marketing, because the Manga was about to end and they’d committed to adapting the rest of it. 

However, narratively speaking I believe the Ten begins when Reiner becomes the main POV protagonist for a while.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Ten at least when applied to long form stories like this is about the story being very different then it was before.  And that if there is indeed a Plot Twist that causes it, that plot twist isn’t always part of the Ten but can often happen at the end of the Sho.

And one precedent for that is the Evangelion Rebuild films.  

One reason I think some people have trouble accepting the claim that the Three Act Structure isn’t as big in the East is because so many Anime film series are made as Trilogies, but honestly I think that kind of is just the Japanese Film industry mimicking Hollywood. Take the Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Compilation films, they are a trilogy but I feel would clearly have worked much better as four films with the second beginning and ending with the Ramba Ral and Crowely Hamon arc.

And that’s why the Rebuild films are special, they are a true Kishotenketsu Tetralogy.  Evangelion 3.33 feels almost like itself a Reboot, but why everything is so different now is because of what happened at the end of 2.22.

And this also fits how I feel Kishotenkestsu very intentionally applies to the Wachowskis Speed Racer film from 2008.  Basically each of the film’s four races are the culminations of each of the four acts, with the film’s main “Twist” if you can call it that happening alongside the second race.

Like many who are aware of Kishotenketsu I often get annoyed when seeing some Normie YouTuber try to force the Three Act Structure or some other Western Structure derived from it (any proposed structure with an Odd number of parts is clearly just trying to stretch out the Three Act Structure) onto an Anime or Manga.  

However I also admit it’s not entirely wrong.  There are natural things that led to the Three Act Structure that can make it not limited to the West.  But I think the reverse is also true.  One video in that playlist argued Kishotenketsu is a Rhetorical device not a Story Structure, I disagree with the “not” part, or rather would add an “only” after it.  Both the Three Acts Model and Kishotenketsu can be viewed as lenses through which to look at stories that are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  After all most 12 episode Anime are either 4 Acts of 3 episodes each or 3 acts of 4 episodes each.

Still there is a Western Chauvinism I think in how often the Three Act Structure is imposed on Eastern stories rather than the other way around.  So I figured I should try to even that out.  I already mentioned Speed Racer but as an Anime Adaptation it’s certainly not independent of Eastern Influence, rather it shows how the Wachowskis did their research better then a lot of other Hollywood Anime Adaptations. The Cynic Clinic video at the start of my Playlist cites examples of people in Japan seeing Kishotenketsu in Frozen and Little Red Riding Hood. 

JustWrite has a video on how Batman Begins actually follows a Four Act Structure, but a differently defined one then Kishotenketsu.  And yet I can apply a Kishotenkestsu lens to it fairly easily by simply saying its midway point "Twist" is the introduction of The Batman to Gotham City.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace certainly can be broken down into four acts instead of the usual three based on what Planet the main cast is on, Naboo, Tatooine, Coruscant, and Naboo again.  The question is how plausible Kishotenketsu is? It could be in this context the Midway Point Twist is the existence of Darth Maul becoming known to the Jedi. 

But also on the subject of Star Wars, each season of Andor is divided into 4 Arcs of 3 episodes each just like a lot of Anime.

I also think about how Superman The Movie and Superman II are meant to be telling one massive story across two movies and that kind of fits.  First Superman is introduced to the world, then stopping Luthor’s plan is the development, then the introduction of the Super Villains is the Ten and the eventual battle between them and Superman is the Ketsu. 

I recently rewatched It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and concluded it too can be given a four act breakdown.  The first ends when the race properly starts after the failed negotiation on how to split up the money.  The Intermission breaks up Acts 2 and 3.  And Act four begins with the finding of the money.  

A number of DC and Marvel limited series that get referred to as Graphic Novels were originally published as 4 praters.  The Dark Knight Returns might actually the easiest to apply Kishotenketsu to. 

I added an update to my post about Spin Offs that start with no prior connection to the main cast arguing how they can fit one way of defining Kishotenketsu. And that also got me thinking how Phase One MCU can be viewed as following that kind of Kishotenketsu.  The first Iron Man film is the Ki, Iron Man 2 is the Sho, Thor and Captain America are the Ten and The Avengers is the Ketsu.  

I also got to thinking how one could make a standard Hollywood Trilogy into that by taking a setting or character only in the third film and making a prequel about them placed on the watch order between movies 2 and 3.  For the original Star Wars trilogy I guess the Ewoks would be the best option for that, (and there are Ewok focused Spin Offs but I don’t know where they hypothetically fit on the timeline). [Update: I guess a movie about the Bothans could also work if it also gives screen time to Admiral Ackbar and Mon Mothma.]  For The Dark Knight Trilogy an origin story for Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman would be the best bet.

Four Koma Manga like Azumanga Daioh are often cited as the perfect way to demonstrate Kishotenketsu on a micro level. But strangely never actually contrasting it to the standard Three Panel structure of American Newspaper Comics like Garfield.  It perhaps says something about my biases that I think the Azumanga Daioh girls in a Three Panel comic would look weird, but I think Four Koma gags with Garfield and Friends could work pretty well.

But I also notice Internet Memes and Web Comics tend to be Four Panels instead of Three (but you have to read them Right to Left unlike a Manga).  Is it possible that is because of how indirectly Japanese Comedy has influenced Internet Humor from very early on via Video Games and Anime and the sillier Godzilla movies?

The most infamous Four Panel Webcomic is arguably Loss, but honestly I’m having trouble even forcing it to fit Kishotenketsu.  It is more like Western Storytelling where the “Twist” happens in the last panel.  That’s not me dissing it, frankly I’m sick of the unfair hate that author has received and honestly I think it's a brilliant piece of wordless purely visual storytelling and the way people have abstracted it to mock it only further proves that.

However what I do think shockingly conforms to Kishotenketsu is a Prequel Meme, the one based on that Padme and Anakin scene from Attack of The Clones, “You’re Joking Right”.  Because I can easily argue that the Ten is the implication that Anakin isn’t Joking. 

I honestly am shocked that much of this wound up being about Star Wars.  Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. 

I’ve wondered if maybe Japan also has a more niche Six Act structure given how many OVA series (like Gunbuster, War in The Pocket, Tenchi Muyo and Murder Princess) and Anime Arcs (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and the first arcs of A Certain Magical Index, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sailor Moon SailorStars) I’ve observed play out over exactly 6 episodes (and the School Days Visual Novel is structured as 6 episodes). But then I think about how the Freytag’s Pyramid Five Act structure is just the Three Act structure with a couple extra steps, and suspect these Six Part stories have a similar relationship to Kishotenketsu, with it probably most often being the Sho and the Ten that get an extra episode each. 

That allows the Phase One MCU model to fit even better. I'd already split the Ten into two movies and now I can add The Incredible Hulk to the Sho rather than ignoring it.

Can I make the 6 episode George Lucas Saga fit? Maybe.  The Phantom Menace as an Introduction to everything obviously works, then we have two episodes covering the Clone Wars, then two episodes of following the next generation before Return of The Jedi brings everything together. 

Update February 2026: It seems season one of A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms will be 6 episodes, and episode 3 ended on a Twist. 

Someone on BookTube finally covered George MacDonald's Lilith and I observed from how they described the structure that it kinds of works as KiShoTenKetsu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu61VYRn_yE

I've also remembered once watching a YouTube video that says in the original Rocky the inciting incident happens at the halfway point.

YU-NO and The Elixir of the Hero's Journey

The thing about discourse around Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Monomyth is that it’s based on a bunch of observations that I’m not even sure he intended to claim universally applied to absolutely all stories as much as it often seems like he was.

Even when we take the observation that the Return Section involves three mutually exclusive options that can’t coexist in a story with only one timeline thus moving the total number of bullet points down from 17 to 15, you’ll still be hard pressed to find any story that actually does all 15 without the analysis being forced to really stretch some parts, even in the stories most said to be directly intentionally following Campbell like Star Wars.

However that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful and fun to notice the points that apply intentionally or not. And I also want to note that the different Story Structure models we talk about aren't necessarily as mutually exclusive as we sometimes paint them.  So for example a Japanese writer who’s been influenced by Western Stories can write in the Kishotenketsu structure and still have pieces of the Hero’s Journey influencing beats within those Acts. 

One aspect of the Hero’s Journey that rarely happens in modern stories in a remotely straightforward manner is the idea that there is a Boon or Elixir in the “Other World” that the Hero has to find and bring back to his world for the benefit of his world. I’m calling it the Elixir mainly because of Blue’s video on the topic on the OverSarcastic YouTube Channel.

The desire to apply this to Star Wars or LOTR or Narnia or The Matrix or any number of Superhero films requires highly abstracting all of it. Now that the “Other World” isn’t actually a completely different world or even always a different part of it geographically speaking is fine actually, it’s everything else that I find kinda funny how you have to really force it to apply. 

One exception is the 1984 Supergirl film, I remember on IMDB back in the day at least one poster really invested in saying that film is the most perfect encapsulation of the Hero’s Journey, and I do see why they would feel that way.  In the case of this topic the Omegahedron is the Elixir. 

I also recall Leonard Nimoy talking about this in the Audio Commentary for Star Trek IV The Voyage Home where in that film the Elixir is the Whales. 

But what I really find fascinating in this context is the 2019 TV Anime adaptation of the 1996 Adventure Game titled YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound of This World. It really turns out to be a fascinating fusion of Kishotenketsu and the Hero’s Journey. 

First of all the fact that in Kishotenketsu the “twist” happens close to the halfway point is perfectly represented by how the actual transportation to the Isekai world happens a few episodes into the Second Cour. 

But in this context the Elixir is the Saikite that Takuya needs to save Kanna.  That he’s doing it for one Girl instead of the entire world fits in with common Otaku Media tropes quite well actually.

The last point is a difference from the original game however, I imagine it’s a change many fans dislike but for me it constantly proves to be a crux why I find the Anime so incredibly good and underrated. 

Baby Yoda and Elves

I love Baby Yoda as much as everyone, but I can’t help but find the concept of being a Baby who can’t even speak yet for over 50 years kind of horrifying, and I’ve seen similar tropes done with the aging process of some Anime Elves.  I remember thinking a more serious world builder would just explain how their very long lived race matures to adulthood at about the same timespan humans do and then their aging slows down dramatically.  

But then I learned that in some of Tolkien's more obscure writings it’s clarified his Elves were also envisioned as taking like 100 years to become adults.  

The growing that we humans experience for the first 25ish years of our lives and the decaying that defines the rest of it are very different biological phenomena, that both can be described as “aging” doesn’t make them the same thing.  So the later being massively slowed or even frozen for a fantasy race doesn’t inherently mean the former has to be slowed as well.

So any Elves in a story written by me would grow up perfectly normally.

Fandom Wiki Network sucks

I'm definitely a supporter of the growing Anti-Fandom movement in the Fan Wiki Community. 

mossbag and Connorsseur both have YouTube videos on the subject I highly recommend.

Some of the franchises I often need to use wikis for don't have their Fandom alternative even as the second option to come up on a search, partly because of their not so straight forward names.  So I want to share some here real quick.

DetectiveConanWorld.Com has a Wiki that is a great resource for Case Closed.

TolkienGateway.Net is great for Arda Lore.

WikiMoon.Org is a non Fandom Sailor Moon Wiki.

FinalFantasyWiki.Com, Dragon-Quest.Org and SaGaWiki.Org don't seem to be as comprehensive as they need to be to compete with Fandom yet, but they can be made better simply with the help of new contributors.

I was also already a user of some of the more well known ones mentioned in those YT videos like Bulbapedia and the Mario Wiki.

However there are some I'm still frustrated to see have no Fanodm alternative, at least not one I've found searching.  Wookipedia is still the only option for Star Wars, DC Database is still the best option for DC and the others are also on Fandom.  PDSH is also a Wiki I like to use and wish would migrate.

And getting back to my Weeb stuff, ToAru, and the Nasuverse and Code Geass and Overflow still only have their Fandom options.  For Overflow there's a lot of information on the broader School Days Universe only available in English on that wiki, I wish that would change.

I also have occasional interest in the DereTypes Wiki so wish it would migrate, as well as the Dubbing Wiki and Audio Drama Wiki.

Update February 1st: I felt like mentioning this Megaman Wiki I stumbled upon.

https://megaman.miraheze.org/wiki/Mega_Man_Knowledge_Base

Here's a page where Miraheze attempts to comprehensively list their Wikis.

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Gazetteer_of_wikis

Update February 19th: There is a non Fandom Song of Ice and Fire Wiki.

https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_Page

Update July 2024: A non Fandom Star Wars Wiki now exists.  

https://starwars.archivum.wiki/

Update September 5th 2024: Now I've found a non Fandom Madoka Wiki.

https://wiki.puella-magi.net/Main_Page

Update April 30th 2025: I recently learned on BSKY that for Wikis without an alternative you can add "anti" before "fandom" in the URL to create a more useable alternative.  A truly independent Wiki is the ideal, but this will prove helpful especially for my continued dependence on the Overflow Wiki.

Update June 1st 2025: I've learned there is a Non Fandom Touhou Wiki.

https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Touhou_Wiki

Update August 2026: I just learned about this interesting Wiki.

https://evilbabes.miraheze.org/wiki/EvilBabes_Wiki

A Certain Magical Index Deconstructs Meritocracy

During the Index account of the Sisters Arc back in season 1 we are shown how the official propaganda of Academy City is that any Esper could reach Level 5 if they try hard enough.  But in Index III at the end of the plotline with the Item characters it is made clear how only certain people have the potential to be a level 5 and those in charge mostly know who they are.

And this was always heavily implied, by the Sisters Arc itself Misaka was selected for the cloning experiment as a small child long before she was officially known to be a Level 5 yet the implications of that don't ever seem to be something that's occurred to her.  We've also seen that Accelerator and Mental Out were also already singled out to be experimented on as small children.

And now I feel compelled to return once again to The Last Jedi/Sequel Trilogy discourse.  The fact that so many online leftists think it's more Left Wing for anyone to be equally a potential Jedi shows how actually Liberal their mindset still is.

Leftists are Materialists, we acknowledge that some people do have innate natural advantages to being able to be successful that most people don't have.  We are the opposite of Nazis in that we reject that those with innate advantages should actually be considered more valuable. (And Nazis are also wrong to think they directly correlate to things like "Race")  But to deny the innate advantages exist ultimately serves the interest of Conservatives, it lets them convince themselves those already with power must be the ones who earned it.

Meritocracy is the justifying ideology of Capitalism.

The Raildex Anime are better social commentary then any Dystopic Science Fiction precisely because they are avoiding the usual Aesthetics of Dystopia. It's world is different from the real world but about the same in how Free or not Free it's society is.

Update May 31st 2024: I recently watched all of Durarara!! and it has a similar them especially with the character of Shizuo Heiwajima who because of his naturally strength and rage is unbeatable in a fight even though he's had no training, multiple far more trained fighters consistently lose.  

Interestingly that's another Light Novel series that also started in 2004.

Sometimes it's good to not start at the beginning.

One thing I lament about how Streaming is becoming the standard way all TV shows will be watched going forward is that younger generations are going to miss out on the magic of getting into a show because you stumbled upon a random episode flipping through channels.

I've talked on this blog before about how the first episode of Buffy I watched was This Year's Girl from season 4, an episode more then halfway through the show's middle season that brings back a character from the prior season.  Internet discourse about continuity lock out suggests an episode like that should be the absolute worst kind to start with, but I dug it, all the references to history I didn't actually know the context of just piqued my curiosity.

I've been thinking about this lately for a number of reasons.  I decided to watch The Devil Lady Anime Dubbed on Tubi even though I have still seen no Devilman stuff.  But that's perhaps a bad example because from what I've heard this isn't necessarily the same continuity as anything else.

But I also thought about it when watching the first two episodes of Ahsoka.  This show is arguably really meant to be Rebels season 5, but I only watched the first two seasons of Rebels, this show has clearly mentioned a lot of stuff from the latter seasons of that show.  And here's the thing, I may wind up not liking this show but that won't be why, I am following everything just fine, some stories start with characters with history being reunited but it isn't actually a sequel to anything that's just part of the set up.  Just like how my having never seen Bo Katan in any of her animated show appearances didn't hinder my ability to enjoy her in The Mandalorian seasons 2 and 3.

It's not surprising that Star Wars can work this way, because that's what it was going for from the beginning, George Lucas always intended for the original movie to be called Episode IV because he wanted it to feel like jumping into an old Saturday Matinee Serial in the middle.  Clone Wars went even harder on that aspect.

I also recently watched yet another AniTube video about the Three Episode Rule.  And this guy's take was that it may sometimes take more then three episodes especially for a show that's more then one Cour because he doesn't understand the Why of the Three Episode rule, it's never that the 3rd is the earliest that sells the show's full potential but that it often takes three episodes for the premise to be thoroughly set up, one of my favorite examples to demonstrate it with is actually Pokémon.  But that's besides my point here.

Much of the video was him talking about the difficult situation of convincing someone to sit through maybe 20some episodes to get to the one that they feel really sells the show.  And the possibly of recommending to just skip right to that episode(s) never crosses his mind.

Even most of my earliest Anime memories involve watching something not from the beginning because I stumbled upon it on Toonami or Adult Swim or that old AniMondays SciFi Channel block or even watching random episodes of a show On Demand when it only had the most recent 2 or 3 episodes, Noir, Madlax, Code Geass, Gundam 00 ect.  

But I mainly don't try to recreate that experience today because....

1. I'm a MAL addict now and on MAL how many episodes you've seen is supposed to be from the beginning unbroken.  (And it's the same with the MAL alternatives people people who don't like MAL are promoting.)

2. The randomness was the magic of it, I didn't start Buffy with that episode because it was what someone recommended, probably no one would have ever recommended to start there, I just happened to flip by the WB a night they were airing it.  And I had similar experiences with many other shows from Xena Warrior Princess to House M.D.

However in the last 2 years I have given myself a similar experience via Detective Conan aka Case Closed.  

I first got into it watching some of it's vaguely non-Canon movies, ironically the set of movies I now consider among it's weakest but they were good enough to get me hooked.  When I started watching the actual series I did start at the beginning, and then used an online filler free guide for some of it.  But it wasn't long before I mostly decided what to watch pretty randomly.  On MAL I'm listing myself as having seen only 134 but that's only unbroken from the beginning, I've probably seen over twice that actually.  And even those first 134 I didn't watch in order.

That is a pretty episodic show most of the time so naturally it does have plenty of good places to jump in randomly.  But honestly I feel even most episodes about one of the ongoing plotlines do a good job at being accessible to new viewers.  I'm still far from seeing all the episodes and I probably never will but this experiencing older stuff almsot on a randomizer feels like what it was like watching old Procedurals via random Syndicated reruns.

Right now if I did have to recommend a jumping on point I'd say it's among the 50 episodes currently on Tubi.TV (the Subbed and Dubbed are uploaded as if they were different shows) but not quite the first of them.  It's Makoto Kyogoku The Understudy episodes 993-995, it's not filler it actually does tie into a lot of ongoing plots but strictly not the main one, yet I still think it's a great first impression of the show.

But if you're a more Retro Style Anime fan who'd rather get into a show from the 90s in it's classic 90s look then among the first 123 episodes (which are on Filmrise and Crunchyroll but not Dubbed) I'd recommend The Kamen Yaiba Murder Case or The Locked Bathroom Murder Case.

Unfortunately the many good jumping on points that exist between episodes 123 and 754 aren't available on any official streaming sites.  There is also a Dub of the first 123 (numbered as 130 via longer episodes being split up) that isn't officially streaming anywhere.

Stan Lee once said that every Comic could be someone's first, but that didn't stop him from telling stories heavily budling on earlier ones, what he did was tell readers where to go to get that context.  And now we have all kinds of Wikis and Fan websites that help catalogue all that trivia.  

So if you think episode 8 of season 2 of some show is the best episode to get someone hooked with, just tell them to start with that episode, or a few sooner if you feel some emotional set up is necessary.

Dystopian Science Fiction only reinforces the real world Status Quo

They establish the Evil Government or Empire in question as being obviously Evil to the audience by having it be nakedly and obviously oppressive in a way no current First World Nation is.  It doesn't matter how many Bread Tube Video Essays go on for hours about how it's a perfect allegory for the real world's problems, nor does it matter if that's what the author intended, the average viewer is at best going to see it as a "cautionary tale".

And that's the problem, scaring the public with the variety of different ways things could be worse creates hostility to the very concept of change.  In most of these stories the better freer society the rebels are fighting for is Liberal Democracy, the real world status quo.  The official full name of the Rebellion in Star Wars is "The Alliance to Restore The Republic", that does make it technically speaking a Reactionary Revolution not a Progressive one, the kind Edmund Burke would call a Reformation rather then a Revolution.  

We see how broken The Republic always was in The Prequels and Clone Wars, yet because The Empire is so blatantly worse people long for The Republic and are not even considering the idea of trying to build something new, or question the very concept of having a Galactic Government in the first place.  The only value I ever saw in writing more Star Wars post ROTJ is attempting to address this.  Instead the overarching narrative we're getting is that the New Republic's mistake was demilitarizing and refusing to take quick harsh action against the rising First Order, even though the message of The Prequels was that militarizing is exactly how The Republic became The Empire in the first place.

Andor is the first Star Wars project to actually really be this Genre.  Star Wars may have "always been Political" but the politics was usually set dressing and framing devices and only remotely part of the main story in the Prequel Trilogy. The Empire was something our protagonists were under the threat of but never living directly under.  Andor is the first Star Wars project to be perceived as some groundbreaking Political Manifesto, but it's not.  The character in the second arc who's supposed to be the ideologue of the group never says a damn thing about the kind of society he wants to create, just a bunch of philosophizing about how highly authoritarian systems like the Empire inevitably destroy themselves, which isn't even true, Rome lasted Centuries.

Breadtubers really love to argue that every fictional Dystopia is either Fascist or Capitalist or both and the Right Wingers interpreting them as being in any way Socialist are simply not getting them.  Unfortunately most Hollywood writers are relatively Centrist Liberals who do view Communism and Nazism as two sides of the same coin.  I like Divergent, I only saw the first movie but I found it more engaging then The Hunger Games.  However the society it depicts can't be viewed as Capitalist nor does it contain any of the things that animate actual Fascist movements.  Even watching it as a Communist I see it as what it looks like when Communism is tried but goes wrong, or at least what Liberals think it looks like when Communism is tried and "inevitably" doesn't work.  Of course when I first watched it I wasn't the Communist I am now as you can probably guess from my first post mentioning it on this blog.

Classic CyberPunk is often alleged to be where Capitalism will inevitably lead if we don't change course.  The problem is most viewers won't see it that way not because they are stupid but because CyberPunk is stupid, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Capitalism to think it would ever benefit the Capitalists to get rid of the Government.

Here's an informative YT video on George Orwell.

https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo

The Anime 86 is more interesting then many other Dystopian shows because the Republic of San Magnolia actually claims to be a Democracy.  

I have now watched the Anime Psycho-Pass (only season one for now which I'm pretty sure was originally meant to stand on it's own).  And I'm going to Spoil it.

Mystery Box Storytelling can be good, J.J. Abrams is just bad at it.

Now I know the first response is gonna be that Abrams coined the term so how can he be the one doing it wrong?  Did he identify a type of storytelling but not fully understand it?

I myself in the past have sometimes gone along with those saying Mystery Boxes are inherently bad because that's how you get Disney Star Wars.  And I still agree that it shouldn't have been the approach taken to Star Wars, that the Original Trilogy was Absolutely not Mystery Box storytelling.  Abrams' problem seems to come from him seeing it everywhere.

But since I think this idea particularly is done dirty by it's very name it's perhaps necessary to define it.  It's not any Mystery at all, it's certainly not twists where we weren't expecting there to be one, nor even every twist where we were expecting there to be a twist, and it's not anytime a character isn't named in the very first scene they appear in.  

A Mystery Box is something the story presents as being an unanswered question early on and builds up to revealing, possibly for quite a long time relative to the story's total length.  But I would also argue it only truly exists in serialized storytelling and doesn't include any question both asked and answered in one self contained Episode or Movie.

I feel bad about claiming I agreed with Mystery Boxes being inherently bad in the past because I've absolutely loved plenty of TV Shows and Anime that Absolutely did this, and specifically enjoyed engaging in that mystery speculation.  And that includes ones where the answer to the Mystery can be considered disappointing because it was either very obvious or not something I ever had a fair chance at solving in advance.  Because I truly believe in the adage that it's about the journey rather then the destination.  But the thing is I can hold the view that the answer to the mystery doesn't really matter and still enjoy engaging in all that speculation and coming up with theories of my own anyway because it simply is fun.

There is no actual tangible rule that explains what the Mystery Box stories I like did differently from Abrams.  The closest I could come to is saying the good ones don't have that as the only thing going for them, they are stories where I was actually invested in the characters and so the investment in the Mystery is about how the Answer is relevant to them, or at least they think it is.

But the thing is that's subjective, plenty of the shows I'm about to talk about loving are hated by others, and plenty of people like Abrams's Star Wars Movies, even Rise of Skywalker, I know because depending on my mood I've been one of them.  Yes I just admitted that the last part of the title of this post is Subjective, in fact it's a subjective opinion I have based on very limited information because his Star ____ movies are the only Abrams things I've seen, I haven't watched any of Lost.  Maybe it's really more Abrams being bad at explaining it in that Ted Talk people meme on then actually bad at doing it, artists are like that sometimes.

My favorite Live Action TV show and my Favorite non Japanese TV show was Pretty Little Liars, it's Mystery is ridiculously convoluted and ultimately doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and I don't care, I enjoyed every stop of the ride to get there.  It means way more to me then any Star Wars does, even The Prequels.

But the Mystery Box approach is also core to Twin Peaks and Game of Thrones going back to it's books.  Deliberately withholding information is Absolutely vital to what they were doing.

But what I'm most into is Anime.  Right now the most well known Mystery Box style Anime is Attack on Titan, and I enjoyed the first "Three" seasons of that show.  I stopped enjoying it during the "Final" season but not because I found any reveals bad or disappointing, everything about the show had changed basically which isn't inherently bad but I just wasn't into it anymore.

However my personal Favorite Anime of all time is Noir.  And it too had a Mystery Box, who killed Mireille's parents and why does Kirka have their Watch.  If you think you've solved that mystery from just the information I provided you in that sentence you are correct, the answer is that simple and obvious but it didn't matter, I still love the scene where it was revealed and love that they pretended it wasn't obvious.

Witch Hunter Robin, Madlax, El Cazador de la Bruja are other fairly obscure 2000s Anime I enjoy in part for their Mystery Boxes.

Even Revolutionary Girl Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion are Mystery Box shows, the objection you may make to explain why they are not are equally applicable to The Force Awakens as far as the people who still like that movie are concerned.

Basically the Mystery Box is one of those story telling devices that people insist on claiming is inherently Bad and then come up with endless excuses why the ones they like don't count.

Fascism is Heroarchy

The problem with Umberto Eco’s attempt to reconstruct a hypothetical Ur Fascism is that the actual Ur Texts of Fascism were never lost but were in fact preserved and celebrated, and Eco’s guess about what shared traits of the many 20s and 30s movements called Fascist were key to identifying it were in fact wrong.

The actual Ur Text of Fascism was the Heroarchy philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, I’m not the first to suggest this by any means, many Nazis during the 30s in both Germany and Britain saw the connection at the time.  But I feel there are lessons to be learned from this connection.

Now I have in the past made a big deal out of distinguishing Nazism from Fascism, and I still believe the differences do matter, but learning to understand how much Carlyle is the key has helped me to accept that they are sibling or rather cousin ideologies and Carlyle is their Grandfather (and perhaps the other Grandfather is Proudhon).

Thomas Carlyle is most famous for being the author of the Great Man Theory of History.  A theory of history generally discredited today even though its influence on pop history and historical fiction still persists.  That theory is itself part of Fascist ideology, Fascism at its core is about trying to identify the right Great Men of the present to put in power and then blindly follow.  But Carlyle didn’t talk about only that subject, his political philosophy he literally called Heroarchy, essentially a type of Monarchism but that favored Meritocracy rather than the standard familial inheritance of traditional Feudalism.  And he was openly Racist and Antisemitic with even hints of Marcionism. 

During his own lifetime his writings and ideas were very popular not just within his own country of England but also in Germany and across the Atlantic in the former colonies, especially in The South, and even more so post Civil War Neoconfederate Ideology via George Fitzhugh.  Mussolini and the other founders of Italian Fascism may have been less inclined to explicitly cite Carlyle than their cousins in countries speaking Germanic languages.  Georges Sorel’s philosophy is an important middle man in understanding how Hero Worship gave birth to Fascist movements in Romance Language countries, alongside Integralism, and a key middle man between him and Carlyle is William James, but I maybe don't need a middle man because Sorel had probably read Carlyle directly. Ironically Sorel himself ultimately disapproved of Fascism and praised the Bolsheviks instead. Houston Stewart Chamberlain also wrote openly about having been an avid reader of Carlyle. Nietzsche borrowed from Carlyle while also criticizing him. J. A. Hobson was influenced by Thomas Carlyle. Henry Hyndman was also heavily influenced by Thomas Carlyle and he founded Brittan's first National Socialist Party. John Ruskin was also a friend of Carlyle.

Fascism and Liberalism both value Meritocracy but with different ideas on how that Merit ought to be determined and measured, the Left needs to reject Meritocracy altogether.  Understanding the role of Heroarchy in Fascist ideology also helps us understand why there is disagreement about if Fascism is Individualist or Collectivist.  You see while Fascism represents the Far Right on most specific policy issues relevant to the modern world, when it comes to the broad philosophical Individualism vs Collectivism dichotomy Fascism places itself in the center as the compromise, they believe the State needs all the people to be a single Body Politic, but they also believe those Great Men need to rise up to be the Heads of that Body. Modern critiques of the Great Man Theory often treat it as an individualist error but Carlyle himself was no fan individualism, not any Liberal understanding of it anyway.

CulturedThug is the name of a former YouTuber who was somewhat prominent in the AltRight as a self described Fascist, and unlike a lot of other self described Fascists who I don’t think actually understand the word any better than those using it as a generic insult CulturedThug is very well read, if I had to give anyone the dubious distinction of being the contemporary Philosopher of Fascism it would be him.  I bring him up here mainly because I watched a video once where he lists his favorite movies, now most of them he did not explicitly claim to like because he saw them as Fascist movies that spoke to him as a Fascist, but the top 3 he did, and they were (I may be misremembering the exact order) the 2002 film Hero starring Jet Li, Conan The Barbarian starring Arnold Swarzenegger, and John Boorman’s Excalibur.  All three definitely are in different ways modern manifestations of the kind of Great Man Hero Myths that Thomas Carylyle fixated on, and so them being the kinds of movies to speak to modern Fascists shows fetishization of that kind of Hero Myth is still at the heart of Fascist identity.

This is not to say that all stories about Heroes are inherently Fascist whether they were intended to be or not, a lot of this is tied to specific ideas about what makes a Hero that overlap a lot with Toxic Masculinity and fetishization of the Heroic Sacrifice.  But they are amorphous enough that you can create a fairly Fascist compatible Hero Myth even while trying to be Leftist or succeeding in getting lots of Leftists to praise the story you wrote. The etymology of the word Hero simply means Defender or Protector, that obviously is objectively good, it's the stuff people like Carlyle wrapped up into the concept that is the problem.

In general I feel Anime Culture has very different ideas about what makes a Hero that I feel allows most Anime to be safer from these issues, especially when I look at how many of my favorites place so much emphasis on rejecting the necessity of Sacrifice.  And yet there are exceptions, everything I’ve said above in this post only adds to the reasons to be concerned about shows like Attack on Titan and Gate.  But actually digging into this Carlyle as the root of Fascism thesis has caused me to become self reflective about some characters and sequences I’ve liked in shows not usually thought of as being part of the Fascism in Anime discussion.

First is the infamous Grail Dialogue which is episode 11 of Fate/Zero. Iskandar is a very popular character in the fandom, you’ll be hard pressed to find a YT video essay on this Dialogue that doesn’t take the position that he “won” the debate, that his argument on what makes a good King is vindicated as the correct one.  Now my personal view is that the most correct position is the hypothetical fourth left unrepresented.  But my point here is that Iskandar’s position when you really break it down is Heroarchy, it is essentially Fascist ideology boiled down to its simplest expression, but because he doesn’t preach it in while earing a modern Military Uniform most viewers don't notice and many were actually swayed by it.

And the sad thing is even my favorite Anime Genre to refer to as Antithetical to everything wrong with western ideas of Heroism is not immune.  Yuki Yuna Is A Hero I have referred to as my favorite Magical Girl Anime in the past, and I still love the show.  But I’ve come to realize a lot of what happens in this saga is essentially the Stab-in-the-Back-Myth applied to Mahou Shoujo.  Any story so built around your Heroes Sacrificing everything for society yet being constantly betrayed by that society should always raise a red flag.  Now there are certain Anti-Fascist ways to read the story even when you're aware of this connection, but I felt it was important to bring up.

However the real reason I think it’s important to talk about this relationship between Fascism and Hero Myth is because it helps explain how a story can knowingly or not teach or reinforce Fascistic ideas in the story it tells with it’s Heroes even while draping it’s Villains in the cosmetic iconography of certain past specific Fascist regimes, or even explicitly identifying them with one.  You see in modern popular fiction the Nazis have been semi-disconnected from the original political project of the NSDAP.  Both actual Nazis and Space Nazis are in the popular imagination now just new Dragons to be slain by modern Heroes in making modern Hero Myths.  Sometimes they are even literally hoarding Gold just like Fafnir.

That’s my issue with the discourse surrounding the song Be Prepared in The Lion King, that film gets to be considered Anti-Fascist by default because Triumph of The Will is referenced during the villain song.  But the problem is this is a film where the villain is a queer coded “degenerate” member of the ruling class colluding with the foreigners who don’t belong in the kingdom, it’s a story where the villains upset the natural order of things but putting the rightful King back on the throne magically restores everything.  It is exactly the kind of Hero Myth that Fascists love. Basically if you're gonna have the main villain be a different "race" from most of their minions, it's really messed up to then call them Nazis since you're the one who just did a Nazi propaganda trope.

Even Casablanca I think needs to be criticized more, this is a movie where the actual reasons people today consider the Nazis uniquely Evil aren’t relevant at all.  As far as this film is concerned the Nazis main sin was invading and taking over other countries, where the principal Refugee in the story isn’t depicted as any kind of marginalized person but a White Man who simply opposes them because of what he believes in, those beliefs themselves are not explored in depth either.  But if that’s why the Nazis are bad then the very setting of the film undermines any notion that the French have moral superiority, Casablanca was a French colony the actual indigenous people of which are not represented in the film.  There’s actually something deeply wrong with lionizing a defiant display of Patriotic French Resistance on soil the French themselves stole.

And yes all this also applies to Star Wars as well, after all Star Wars has become so married to the Monomyth thesis of Joseph Campbell, and modern criticism of Campbell has its roots in how much Campbell’s ideas also derived from Carlyle. Modern Internet Neoreactionaries have always seen themselves in the Rebels and their bad understanding of Socialism in The Empire, and I’ve already talked about why they aren't without good reason to do so.

Even in Andor which so many Breadtubers now think is so special, so good even compared to other Star Wars at being Anti-Fascist and Anti-Capitalist.  In episode 10 Luthen the character played by Stellen Skarsgard gives a speech to his informant that everyone has been simping for as one of the best Anti-Fascist Speeches of all time.  But to me it’s exactly that kind of monologue that should raise a red flag. It is a part of the understanding of the Heroic Sacrifice in the minds of people like CulturedThug that it’s sometimes your conscience, your very morality that has to be sacrificed.  And no I’m not against acknowledging that a resistance movement may have to do some morally gray things, that you can’t change the world without getting your hands dirty, but justify it with normal utilitarian arguments rather then preaching a Sermon about how you’re sacrificing your soul for the salvation of the future.

It has always been my position that Star Wars stories set after ROTJ are more interesting when they deal with the political difficulties of building a New Republic in the aftermath of the War.  But as I look at where Disney SW has been going in it's post ROTJ stories, it seems like it's usually the Soldiers of the Rebellion who are the ones who are right and the Politicians should have listened to them.  And that demilitarizing so soon was one of their biggest mistakes.  And maybe the old EU timeline was no different, I'm no expert on it.

The current backlash to Harry Potter has helped open people’s eyes on this, the Slytherin/Voldemort ideology is coded as being Nazi like, yet the text literally contains Nazi propaganda in its depiction of the Goblins.

But before that and even still to an extent Breadtubers are only prepared to process the idea that a story could have Nazi villains but be counterproductive to actually opposing Fascist ideology when the problem was the villains being too cool.  And that was the basis of the freak out a lot of Leftists in the Anime Community had over Dies Irae in 2017, that yeah the Nazis may be villains but they’re cool sexy Bishonen villains who the Fujoshi are gonna turn into Ernst Rohms in their Doujins.

I’m not sure what I think about Dies Irae, I didn’t feel like I understood what it was trying to say when I watched it and now I don’t properly remember all of it, and fans of the VN hated the Anime as an adaptation to begin with, I’m not gonna play the VN I don’t even play the VNs of Anime I actually liked a lot more than this.  But there were moments in there that as I recall them now make me wonder if maybe it was trying to be self aware about the very issue I’ve been talking about, acknowledging that these Nazis fetishize that very kind of story this genre of fiction has its roots in and was perhaps trying to say something about that.  Or maybe it was just pretentious lampshade hanging, IDK someone who understands the original VN will have to answer that.

Update April 2nd: I've continued this train of thought a bit on my other Blog.

https://solascripturachristianliberty.blogspot.com/2023/04/plato-and-fascism.html

Update April 5th: I started a Thread about this on a Message board where you can see me discus the matter further.

https://sfdebris.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7352

Update May 27th: Thing about this post is that it was never meant to stand alone, I'm hoping people will look into the already existing arguments for the connection between Carlyle and Fascism as well as knowing something about the Caligari to Hitler thesis and Starship Troopers discourse and criticism of Joseph Campbell.  I simply wanted to add my two cents to that already existing conversion and then use it to talk about a few Anime and some Star Wars.  And hopefully maybe inspire some Video Essayist to go even deeper.

I definitely made a mistake in the Yuki Yuna section.  Citing the stab-in-the-back myth specifically doesn't hold up because that whole thing is about who to blame for losing a war when the Heroes in YuYuYu didn't lose, they Won pretty unambiguously.  So the situation is more like Italy who was on the winning side of WWI but didn't get what they were promised by the Allies so felt rather screwed over, especially the Veterans.

My prior post on Gate I linked to ultimately doesn't talk about the scene that is most actually what I'm talking about in this post.  The most Fascist scene in Gate is the Diet scene, where that whole storyline is about demonizing the Civilian Government for daring to question the Military. [Update November 2025: I loved the Ahsoka show, but it does have a seen that is exactly the same problem as Gate's Diet scene.  And I'm not alone in seeing it as Fascist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSs3pqaLmVI&pp=ygUSQWhzb2thIGRpZCBGYXNjaXNt]

Update August: I recently rewatched a bunch of the Anime Tanya The Evil and it certainly reminds me of aspects of this.  As does my recent looking into the Openly Fascist sympathies of The American Legion during the 1920s.

I originally didn't want to actually link to the video of CulturedThug talking about his favorite movies, but the truth is the context of exactly what he says in it is important, that's my point more so then the films themselves.  So here it is.  Again only the top three does he explicitly say are Fascist movies in his view, but what he says about one or two others also speaks to the Heroarchy mindset.  The list also includes some of the usual suspects of movies Fascists like that Leftists say the Fascists don't understand.

However I don't think the "the movie actually condemning the very thing Reactionaries like about it" thesis works for those top 3.  Hero was literally State Sponsored by a very authoritarian State and Excalibur is Arthurian Legend taken at face value.  With Conan an Anti-Fascist fan could try to say it's villain is who actually represents Fascism, but that just brings us back to the Nazi Villain problem.

Update November 2025: Here's a recent Video Essay on just one way in which Hero is Fascist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8LXMRZZLT4

Spin-Off shows waiting for seaosn 2 to bring in older characters

This is a Strategy for Spin Off building that I've noticed the existence of recently in fairly recent stuff, maybe it always existed?

But some people don't like it, or they don't like the second half of it.

Obviously I feel like I have to start with The Mandalorian since that's the first time I noticed this approach being a thing, but it may not actually be chronologically first one this post covers.  I've come to hate talking about Star Wars in the current climate of the internet, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

The Mandalorian season 1 features no characters we already knew, not even minor characters, it's always featuring Star Wars stuff, but while introducing new characters and usually new locations.  Season 2 then has Mando meet characters from Clone Wars and even the Original Trilogy.

This approach worked because if Mando was sharing screen time with older legacy characters right from the start their shadow could have made it difficult for him or the other new characters to make their mark.  But once they're established it's then cool to see these new characters we've come to like meet other characters we like.

But now I have to address what I said above.  There is a certain type of aggressively anti-fanservice fan among those who make YouTube Videos that liked the independence of season 1 and felt season 2's bringing in the older characters was chickening out on that.  And I feel like you're not really a Star Wars fan if you're so damn hostile to seeing Star Wars characters in a Star Wars show.  I'm a fan of Star Wars because it has characters I like, not vauge late 70s Sci-Fi aesthetics.

Mando season 2 is still principally about Mando, none of the other characters detract from that but are  there to serve Mando and Grogu's story.  But JustWrite in his Andor video said season 2 was still good but it feels like the story was built around enabling all these cameos and crossovers.  And I say so what, every story is written to do what the writers want it to do, which may or may not also be what the fans want.

I have mixed feelings on Andor, I feel it is not remotely the bold and brave political manifesto so many shallow online leftists are pretending it is, but I did enjoy it more then I expected to, which is frankly at all.  However JustWrite's praise of the show's avoidance of Fan Service, even noting the lack of Aliens, I can't agree with.  Because for me that just makes this story feel like any other shallow YA Dystopia from the early 2010s barely even wearing Star Wars clothing.

I suspect Andor when it gets a season 2 will also follow the formula I'm talking about here.  Now it's technically not because it's main/title character is a prior established character, but Cassian Andor in Rogue One was such a bland blank slate generic cishet male hardened solider archetype that this show was effectively building a new character.  In a way it hurts Andor's status as a prequel to a prequel as I'm wondering where this personality is going to disappear to, but whatever.  Now that he's signed up to the Rebellion I predict season 2 will inevitably bring in more characters we've seen before, even if they're mostly characters from prior Disney Star Wars, both Solo and Obi-Won featured Proto Rebel groups who could play a role, and most of the cast of Rebels have Live Action actors now thanks to Ahsoka.  I hope Disney has the guts to bring back CGI Leia and Tarkin.

But it's time to finally move this discussion outside of Star Wars.

Disney had actually done this before with Milo Murphy's Law, in season 1 it's connections to Phineas and Ferb are just occasional in-jokes until the very end, then they do the big crossover and former P&F characters become a more regular presence in season 2.  And it worked out great, I'm still annoyed at the lack of a 3rd season.

I was in fact already noticing this about Mando years ago and back when Pennyworth only had 1 season I was hoping it'd do the same.  But it's a Batman prequel way to far in the past to really feature any more then who they did and where the show did wind up going is mostly fine, I feel it's underrated in fact, it's a better fictional depiction of Fascism then any Star Wars has ever been.

But I'm mostly a Weeb now and so the rest of this post shall be about Anime.

The principal Anime example of this approach is Lostorage incited Wixoss.   For the first 9 episodes I didn't even think it was actually in continuity with the original Mari Okada written Wixoss saga with it's very different rules and everything.  Episode 10 however establishes that one of the most minor notable characters in this show is also one of the most minor notable characters from Selector infected Wixoss.  But it's a subplot that doesn't really impact the resolution.

That show's second season Lostorage conflated Wixoss is then about bringing the Lostorage cast and the original cast together.  So I entered it very hyped and do like it over all, but I don't feel like I can praise it's execution of this approach as much.  Now the thing is in the rules of good writing people like JustWrite base their career on this season 2 crossover may well qualify as more "organic" then Mandalorian Season 2, but Organic vs Contrived is not a dichotomy that concerns me.

I first of all simply feel that basically doubling the cast of this show for season 2 kind of made it need more then just 12 episodes.  This is after all the first show where the rules for the new version of the Selector Battles aren't even partially set up in the first episode.

Now the character who was very minor in all previous shows becoming the Main Character for the Avenger Assembling is itself probably the best part of how they approached it, and this character being a Kuudere of sorts makes her very appealing to me personally.

But I also can't help but feel like I'd have preferred the only additional OG Wixoss character to be added was Akira Aoi, or at least gave her a lot more of the focus.  Akira was the only major character of the original who's story felt incomplete, plus her specific history with the character serving as the glue connecting these stories fits perfectly.  But instead Conflated winds up effectively regressing her Spread development and using her mostly as a punching bag, very mean-spiritedly.  I like Akira and one of the things I like about Anime is it not being as Hostile by default to her personality type as western Nerd media often is. Conflated's opinion of Akira seems like what a western Nerd's would be, and it's shockingly not the only time Conflated does something that feels more western.

There is a plotline in the latter half where the villain manipulates the main protagonists of the prior shows into fighting each other, and it so annoyingly reminds me of how every DC or Marvel Superhero crossover has to feature them fighting each other for some dumb reason first.  And I know this probably isn't the only Anime to do this, it's maybe even in Anime I've watched before, but in a show that I'm thinking of as tangentially related to the Magical Girl Genre it feels wrong.  As a fan of both Batman and Superman I understand why those characters would sometimes come to blows, but as fan of these Anime protagonists and others like them I know them jumping into a fight without even trying to talk first is really out of character.  And the thing is this franchise has built in reasons for people who aren't enemies to still battle each other, they didn't need to do this trope to get this fan service, they chose to.

But I also feel Conflated should not have included Yuzuki if they were going to be afraid to even acknowledge the existence of Kazuki.  My personal headcannon for what happens after the end of Spread/Destructed is a Yuzuki/Kazuki/Hanayo threesome.  This show wants to neither confirm or contradict any shippers on that triangle to appease them while not grossing out whatever normie audience the show has.  But to me Yuzuki simply isn't Yuzuki if that is never on her mind.

Basically the difference between Conflated and Mando season 2 is that Mando didn't turn the entire Original Trilogy Cast into new main cast members.

There is actually a third Wixoss show now but I haven't watched it yet, I will probably give it a try eventually.

Another Anime that does this to a lesser extent is Magia Record.  The original Madoka cast have a handful of cameos in season 1, but season 2 is where they team up with the new cast, and then they're mostly out again for season 3.  Magia Record was fine but I'd already talked about why Madoka EU stories the way they tend to be handled have a limited appeal to me.

Update February 2023: Season two of House of the Dragon can't do this in terms of specific characters, but in a sense the Starks finally entering the drama will have a similar effect.  Having no Starks in season 1 is part of what helped it establish it's own identity, but now that the Dance has started the North is going to have to play some role.

Update April 2025: After watching more of Zeta Gundam I noticed it kinda fits, the first Cour is mostly focused on the new characters but then in the second Cour in brings in Amuro.

It also hit me recently how what I'm talking about happens to fit how the Kishotenketsu story structure is sometimes defined.  The Ki is the original story that creates the universe, the Sho is the Sequel or Sequels that develop it more still following.  The Ten is a new story in the same universe following mostly new characters introducing new aspects of it.  And then the Ketsu is the Crossover.

One issue with Kishotenketsu discourse is the translation of Ten as twist, it's not really wrong but the fact that so many westerners learning about it first and foremost think of a Plot Twist like "I am your father" or an M Night Shyamalan film.  But the point of Ten is more that it's introducing something new, a change to the status quo or a new perspective or indeed it could function as the story temporary staring a different cast of characters.

This changes my perspective on the Lostorage Wixoss situation, a lot of my criticisms remain but I now understand more why they didn't feel the Lostorage character needed equally as many seasons on their own.