Everything magical is parasitic?
Jan. 29th, 2010 03:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azuriteI just finished re-watching Fushigi Yuugi: Eikoden, also known as "Legend of the Eternal Light." I'm sure it would have made a lot more sense in the novel form (assuming I understood the idea that it was based off the Fushigi Yuugi Gaiden novels), but the episodes were long enough to convey a plot and...I'm still a bit confused.
The anime had some original bits to it, to make it match up with the events of the manga. But still, the general story is still the same, including the fundamental facts that:
* Only one priestess is supposed to have her story at a time
* The order is established as: Genbu, Byakko, Seiryu, Suzaku (or possibly Suzaku, Seiryu, but we'll never know because YUI MESSED EVERYTHING UP)
* The priestess needs to find and gather the seven "seishi" of her sign in order to summon the god. If she cannot, for whatever reason (or if she loses the scroll copy of "The Universe of the Four Gods"), she has to acquire the Shinzaho/Shentsupao. The priestesses of Genbu and Byakko apparently didn't have this luxury, although Genbu's story (of Takiko Okuda) isn't quite finished yet, and Byakko's story (of Suzuno Ohsugi) also hasn't been told in full.
* The priestess is supposed to be a virgin, and is "supposed" to be consumed by the god upon completion of her three wishes (I say "supposed" because that's what the legend says, but it hasn't happened yet, to a SINGLE priestess, so...)
And yet Miaka and Yui apparently messed the whole system up by getting sucked in together. If you think of the book like a sentient being, or worse, a universe within a universe within a universe (I'm thinking a subset of the "Milky Way Galaxy" created by the 4D beings in "Star Ocean: Till The End of Time"), then the fact that they both became priestesses is indicative of an "error" in the book's "programming."
Yui blamed herself for this: the book started to destroy itself, in addition to outside forces contributing, like the book being lost after the events of Miaka and Yui's adventure, and then getting damaged. The book "sought" to reset itself, but instead of going back to Genbu, which is what I think happened in the OAVs, it went back to the point of origin: Suzaku.
What I don't get is how Mayo (the anti-heroine of "Eikoden") was able to get her hands on the book and READ it without being sucked in, especially if the book was already on its way to destruction. Time passes in the book much faster than it does in the real world, but at a strange rate: Watase's said it was something like a few days at most to what could amount to several months in the book, and by "Eikoden," it's 3 years in the "real" world to 10 years in the book.
Plus, she said she first read it when she was in 8th grade, at the same junior high Miaka and Yui went to. She left it on the bus one day and it got tossed around until she stumbled across it one day again in high school (11th grade), after witnessing Miaka getting married to Taka. (By then, Miaka is 18 and probably a recent graduate of Yotsubadai, the same high school Mayo goes to in "Eikoden.") But if that's so, how did the events of the OAV where Yui becomes the priestess of Genbu and threatens to erase Takiko, Suzuno, and Miaka from the universe take place?
I don't remember the OAVs exactly, but if she became the Genbu priestess, the next in line would be Byakko. However, that would only hold true if she'd successfully summoned Genbu, right--and something must have gone wrong/changed there, because if she had, then Miaka would have been erased and Takiko and Suzuno's stories would be reset. But if she DIDN'T succeed, why wouldn't the "next" story still be Genbu, and not Suzaku? Did the book realize something was "wrong" with it and decided to go back to the point of contention: Suzaku's legend?
You could imagine Mayo reading the book WHILE Miaka and Yui's events were going on, and since priestesses for the remaining two gods were already established, she didn't get sucked in, despite being a "qualified" girl at the time. But didn't Keisuke and Tetsuya keep the book on them at all times? It only went back to the library AFTER the events! And once they were all over, the book SHOULD have sucked in the next qualified female. Does it need time to "recharge" or something, which is why it didn't suck Mayo in back then, or did it have to do with her understanding of the book?
When she finally got it back in high school, she glanced at the first page and got a jolt of Miaka's memories as the Suzaku priestess. How come she didn't get sucked in right away? Is it because she didn't read the incantation? But that doesn't make sense either, because when she finally did open the book in the park, she didn't read anything either--it looked like she flipped to the dead middle and got sucked up by a tornado!
That's also new: not sure if it's the animators wanting to abuse their CGI knowledge (and they did a lot of that throughout "Eikoden"), but when Miaka and Yui went, there was a burst of light and maybe some wind, but not a freaking tornado.
If the book itself isn't sentient and/or parasitic, representing the inherent "consuming" desires of the gods that inhabit it, is it something like an automated version of Taiitsu-kun (Tai yi-jun)? After all, in the book universe, it's her that gave the four countries their scrolls, but it doesn't explain how Einosuke Okuda ended up "translating" the book and binding it into what Miaka and Yui and the other priestesses read.
And then you get into the story itself: Miaka collapses one day after selfish Mayo opens the Universe book and gets sucked in. The book, for whatever reason, thinks Suzaku's story needs to be retold, and yet it dumps Mayo 10 years after the events of Miaka and the war that killed many of the Suzaku seishi. Mayo doesn't seem to want much for the country: she deludes herself into thinking she can make a life for herself and Taka (and "their" baby) in the world. She claims to be the priestess, except she knows she's pregnant and she flaunts it. I thought the priestess HAD to be a virgin, which is why there was all that UST between Tamahome and Miaka in part one of the anime, and why we all knew Yui was being duped by Nakago about having been raped!
She stupidly gets tricked by a personification of her own hatred (the book's starting to remind me of Inuyasha's "Jewel of the Four Souls," where the gods themselves aren't "good" or "evil," but serve the country they are associated with, but the book definitely seems to have "good" and "evil" components to it), and feeds it by believing its lies, the same way she deluded herself with lies about Taka and herself.
Then on top of that, she starts disappearing and taking the whole world--and even Miaka!--with her! But not Yui. Nope, Yui's done, even though she blames herself for going into the book and fucking up the whole story in the first place.
Somehow, the baby (Taka and Miaka's) is the Shinzaho. Here's another thing I don't explain: we know Miaka and Taka got married shortly after Miaka graduated high school. She is around 18 years old at the time, and Keisuke, three months later, tells the girls' basketball team that it's a "honeymoon baby." I thought Shinzaho were only created at the time of the summoning of the god. That was three years ago, so since Miaka was still a virgin then, how could the baby be the Shinzaho? Is it just because she was the priestess and the baby is the representation of hers and Taka's love, manifest physically? (It breaks the rules of the other two Shinzaho, and "Eikoden" doesn't ask whether Yui had a Shinzaho that she made, either. Why make Genbu and Byakko's Shinzaho necessary to summon either Seiryu or Suzaku, but not make anything more than the Suzaku Shinzaho necessary for summoning Suzaku a second time?)
Also, it wasn't Mayo that wished the baby to be hers, but Miaka that "sent" it to her. Subconsciously, Miaka/the Priestess of Suzaku knew that the book was deteriorating, but also that she was sealed from the book (still by Yui's wish, right? Or simply by her story "ending" and her being pregnant now?), so someone else had to go in her place. But why, if she would send the baby, thereby rendering the once-virgin priestess...not really virginal?
Or is it like the whole Immaculate Conception thing, where Mayo still counts as priestess even though she's pregnant, because the truth is (and Taka knows, even if Mayo lies about it to everyone else) that the baby is his and Miaka's, not his and Mayo's? And Suzaku's got no issue with it, because Suzaku knows all and senses the baby is the child of a priestess and a former seishi?
Still doesn't explain why the baby's the Shinzaho.
Miaka, ever the one to take on the world's burdens, probably saw Mayo catch the bouquet at the wedding. She might have even known that Mayo had a bad crush on Taka, and felt bad about it, but wasn't about to give her husband up, especially not after all they've been through. So she says she'd feel bad if the girl who caught her bouquet wouldn't find happiness, and maybe subconsciously, that creates a link between Mayo and Miaka, enabling Mayo to find the book again and therefore imagine she can find her own happiness (initially by stealing Taka and the baby away) by rewriting Suzaku's story.
Mayo is not likable from the start. I disliked her from the get-go even more than Yui. Yui, at least, had good reason for hating Miaka, even though she became kind of stupid and naive for refusing to listen to Miaka repeatedly. But Mayo just comes across as a clingy, emo teenager who doesn't know how to channel her anger and sadness anywhere but at other people, blaming them for her misfortune instead of trying to change it herself.
And in the story of "Eikoden," she's gullible, resentful, selfish, deceitful, rude--I could go on. And yet we're supposed to feel sorry for her because she had a crappy home life (like Yui and Miaka didn't!? Or hell, Takiko)!? At some point, though, she does seem to change: she realizes she's been tricked by the false god that was fed/created by her own hatred, she listens to Empress Yotaigo (Houki)'s story and starts to empathize with her and Boushin, and believes that Hotohori really loved Houki instead of just misplacing his love for Miaka onto another woman.
But it doesn't seem to affect her in any permanent, visible way: she still loves Taka like crazy, even though she knows she can't have him, even though she's done nothing to warrant his affection at all. It seems like Miaka chose her just because Miaka's the nice one, the empathetic one. Mayo's sort of like a "default" choice, if anything. (Can you tell I don't like her? She didn't seem to grow as a character at all.)
And then came the wishing: the real Suzaku destroyed the false one, but that could have been one wish, or even part of the summoning incantation. There were no other wishes seen. Should we assume that
(1) False god destroyed
(2) Konan's glory restored
(3) Protect Konan in the future
are the wishes, or that they don't get wishes for this weird and special occasion, or...?
Plus, normally one single wish sucks a lot out of the priestess, and we had DOUBLE DUTY with both Miaka and Mayo acting in their Priestess roles. But both reappeared in the real world relatively fine compared to how they had been even before the wishes: Miaka weak but conscious, and Mayo ill but conscious. We never saw the human form of Suzaku or the symbol on anyone's head but Tamahome/Taka's, not even the Suzaku sigil on Mayo/Miaka. The book seems to be parasitic, not unlike Sailor Moon's Silver Crystal, because let's face it: it wants virgin schoolgirls.
And the book disappeared from Miaka's bed stand and magically reappeared in the library--how!? What is the connection between the book and the library, and how did it form? Did it reset itself to Genbu, or no? Is the book undamaged? Why didn't the book just disappear altogether, if the legend only needs the four girls in total? Clearly they don't all need to be from the same generation, but maybe it's "once a century" for each god-beast? After all, all of the ones we know about took place in the 1900s....
With the book universe and Konan restored, does that mean there's no need for those Seishi who were reincarnated: Mitsukake, Hotohori, Nuriko, and Chiriko? Do they lose all their powers and memories once Suzaku is summoned, or do they retain them, living bizarre half-lives, because they're still in their reborn forms?
Plus, if they got reincarnated, what about the Seiryu seishi that died, like...er, all of them (except Amiboshi, because Amiboshi is just that cool.)
"Eikoden" seems to wrap everything up, but it's only left me with more questions.
The anime had some original bits to it, to make it match up with the events of the manga. But still, the general story is still the same, including the fundamental facts that:
* Only one priestess is supposed to have her story at a time
* The order is established as: Genbu, Byakko, Seiryu, Suzaku (or possibly Suzaku, Seiryu, but we'll never know because YUI MESSED EVERYTHING UP)
* The priestess needs to find and gather the seven "seishi" of her sign in order to summon the god. If she cannot, for whatever reason (or if she loses the scroll copy of "The Universe of the Four Gods"), she has to acquire the Shinzaho/Shentsupao. The priestesses of Genbu and Byakko apparently didn't have this luxury, although Genbu's story (of Takiko Okuda) isn't quite finished yet, and Byakko's story (of Suzuno Ohsugi) also hasn't been told in full.
* The priestess is supposed to be a virgin, and is "supposed" to be consumed by the god upon completion of her three wishes (I say "supposed" because that's what the legend says, but it hasn't happened yet, to a SINGLE priestess, so...)
And yet Miaka and Yui apparently messed the whole system up by getting sucked in together. If you think of the book like a sentient being, or worse, a universe within a universe within a universe (I'm thinking a subset of the "Milky Way Galaxy" created by the 4D beings in "Star Ocean: Till The End of Time"), then the fact that they both became priestesses is indicative of an "error" in the book's "programming."
Yui blamed herself for this: the book started to destroy itself, in addition to outside forces contributing, like the book being lost after the events of Miaka and Yui's adventure, and then getting damaged. The book "sought" to reset itself, but instead of going back to Genbu, which is what I think happened in the OAVs, it went back to the point of origin: Suzaku.
What I don't get is how Mayo (the anti-heroine of "Eikoden") was able to get her hands on the book and READ it without being sucked in, especially if the book was already on its way to destruction. Time passes in the book much faster than it does in the real world, but at a strange rate: Watase's said it was something like a few days at most to what could amount to several months in the book, and by "Eikoden," it's 3 years in the "real" world to 10 years in the book.
Plus, she said she first read it when she was in 8th grade, at the same junior high Miaka and Yui went to. She left it on the bus one day and it got tossed around until she stumbled across it one day again in high school (11th grade), after witnessing Miaka getting married to Taka. (By then, Miaka is 18 and probably a recent graduate of Yotsubadai, the same high school Mayo goes to in "Eikoden.") But if that's so, how did the events of the OAV where Yui becomes the priestess of Genbu and threatens to erase Takiko, Suzuno, and Miaka from the universe take place?
I don't remember the OAVs exactly, but if she became the Genbu priestess, the next in line would be Byakko. However, that would only hold true if she'd successfully summoned Genbu, right--and something must have gone wrong/changed there, because if she had, then Miaka would have been erased and Takiko and Suzuno's stories would be reset. But if she DIDN'T succeed, why wouldn't the "next" story still be Genbu, and not Suzaku? Did the book realize something was "wrong" with it and decided to go back to the point of contention: Suzaku's legend?
You could imagine Mayo reading the book WHILE Miaka and Yui's events were going on, and since priestesses for the remaining two gods were already established, she didn't get sucked in, despite being a "qualified" girl at the time. But didn't Keisuke and Tetsuya keep the book on them at all times? It only went back to the library AFTER the events! And once they were all over, the book SHOULD have sucked in the next qualified female. Does it need time to "recharge" or something, which is why it didn't suck Mayo in back then, or did it have to do with her understanding of the book?
When she finally got it back in high school, she glanced at the first page and got a jolt of Miaka's memories as the Suzaku priestess. How come she didn't get sucked in right away? Is it because she didn't read the incantation? But that doesn't make sense either, because when she finally did open the book in the park, she didn't read anything either--it looked like she flipped to the dead middle and got sucked up by a tornado!
That's also new: not sure if it's the animators wanting to abuse their CGI knowledge (and they did a lot of that throughout "Eikoden"), but when Miaka and Yui went, there was a burst of light and maybe some wind, but not a freaking tornado.
If the book itself isn't sentient and/or parasitic, representing the inherent "consuming" desires of the gods that inhabit it, is it something like an automated version of Taiitsu-kun (Tai yi-jun)? After all, in the book universe, it's her that gave the four countries their scrolls, but it doesn't explain how Einosuke Okuda ended up "translating" the book and binding it into what Miaka and Yui and the other priestesses read.
And then you get into the story itself: Miaka collapses one day after selfish Mayo opens the Universe book and gets sucked in. The book, for whatever reason, thinks Suzaku's story needs to be retold, and yet it dumps Mayo 10 years after the events of Miaka and the war that killed many of the Suzaku seishi. Mayo doesn't seem to want much for the country: she deludes herself into thinking she can make a life for herself and Taka (and "their" baby) in the world. She claims to be the priestess, except she knows she's pregnant and she flaunts it. I thought the priestess HAD to be a virgin, which is why there was all that UST between Tamahome and Miaka in part one of the anime, and why we all knew Yui was being duped by Nakago about having been raped!
She stupidly gets tricked by a personification of her own hatred (the book's starting to remind me of Inuyasha's "Jewel of the Four Souls," where the gods themselves aren't "good" or "evil," but serve the country they are associated with, but the book definitely seems to have "good" and "evil" components to it), and feeds it by believing its lies, the same way she deluded herself with lies about Taka and herself.
Then on top of that, she starts disappearing and taking the whole world--and even Miaka!--with her! But not Yui. Nope, Yui's done, even though she blames herself for going into the book and fucking up the whole story in the first place.
Somehow, the baby (Taka and Miaka's) is the Shinzaho. Here's another thing I don't explain: we know Miaka and Taka got married shortly after Miaka graduated high school. She is around 18 years old at the time, and Keisuke, three months later, tells the girls' basketball team that it's a "honeymoon baby." I thought Shinzaho were only created at the time of the summoning of the god. That was three years ago, so since Miaka was still a virgin then, how could the baby be the Shinzaho? Is it just because she was the priestess and the baby is the representation of hers and Taka's love, manifest physically? (It breaks the rules of the other two Shinzaho, and "Eikoden" doesn't ask whether Yui had a Shinzaho that she made, either. Why make Genbu and Byakko's Shinzaho necessary to summon either Seiryu or Suzaku, but not make anything more than the Suzaku Shinzaho necessary for summoning Suzaku a second time?)
Also, it wasn't Mayo that wished the baby to be hers, but Miaka that "sent" it to her. Subconsciously, Miaka/the Priestess of Suzaku knew that the book was deteriorating, but also that she was sealed from the book (still by Yui's wish, right? Or simply by her story "ending" and her being pregnant now?), so someone else had to go in her place. But why, if she would send the baby, thereby rendering the once-virgin priestess...not really virginal?
Or is it like the whole Immaculate Conception thing, where Mayo still counts as priestess even though she's pregnant, because the truth is (and Taka knows, even if Mayo lies about it to everyone else) that the baby is his and Miaka's, not his and Mayo's? And Suzaku's got no issue with it, because Suzaku knows all and senses the baby is the child of a priestess and a former seishi?
Still doesn't explain why the baby's the Shinzaho.
Miaka, ever the one to take on the world's burdens, probably saw Mayo catch the bouquet at the wedding. She might have even known that Mayo had a bad crush on Taka, and felt bad about it, but wasn't about to give her husband up, especially not after all they've been through. So she says she'd feel bad if the girl who caught her bouquet wouldn't find happiness, and maybe subconsciously, that creates a link between Mayo and Miaka, enabling Mayo to find the book again and therefore imagine she can find her own happiness (initially by stealing Taka and the baby away) by rewriting Suzaku's story.
Mayo is not likable from the start. I disliked her from the get-go even more than Yui. Yui, at least, had good reason for hating Miaka, even though she became kind of stupid and naive for refusing to listen to Miaka repeatedly. But Mayo just comes across as a clingy, emo teenager who doesn't know how to channel her anger and sadness anywhere but at other people, blaming them for her misfortune instead of trying to change it herself.
And in the story of "Eikoden," she's gullible, resentful, selfish, deceitful, rude--I could go on. And yet we're supposed to feel sorry for her because she had a crappy home life (like Yui and Miaka didn't!? Or hell, Takiko)!? At some point, though, she does seem to change: she realizes she's been tricked by the false god that was fed/created by her own hatred, she listens to Empress Yotaigo (Houki)'s story and starts to empathize with her and Boushin, and believes that Hotohori really loved Houki instead of just misplacing his love for Miaka onto another woman.
But it doesn't seem to affect her in any permanent, visible way: she still loves Taka like crazy, even though she knows she can't have him, even though she's done nothing to warrant his affection at all. It seems like Miaka chose her just because Miaka's the nice one, the empathetic one. Mayo's sort of like a "default" choice, if anything. (Can you tell I don't like her? She didn't seem to grow as a character at all.)
And then came the wishing: the real Suzaku destroyed the false one, but that could have been one wish, or even part of the summoning incantation. There were no other wishes seen. Should we assume that
(1) False god destroyed
(2) Konan's glory restored
(3) Protect Konan in the future
are the wishes, or that they don't get wishes for this weird and special occasion, or...?
Plus, normally one single wish sucks a lot out of the priestess, and we had DOUBLE DUTY with both Miaka and Mayo acting in their Priestess roles. But both reappeared in the real world relatively fine compared to how they had been even before the wishes: Miaka weak but conscious, and Mayo ill but conscious. We never saw the human form of Suzaku or the symbol on anyone's head but Tamahome/Taka's, not even the Suzaku sigil on Mayo/Miaka. The book seems to be parasitic, not unlike Sailor Moon's Silver Crystal, because let's face it: it wants virgin schoolgirls.
And the book disappeared from Miaka's bed stand and magically reappeared in the library--how!? What is the connection between the book and the library, and how did it form? Did it reset itself to Genbu, or no? Is the book undamaged? Why didn't the book just disappear altogether, if the legend only needs the four girls in total? Clearly they don't all need to be from the same generation, but maybe it's "once a century" for each god-beast? After all, all of the ones we know about took place in the 1900s....
With the book universe and Konan restored, does that mean there's no need for those Seishi who were reincarnated: Mitsukake, Hotohori, Nuriko, and Chiriko? Do they lose all their powers and memories once Suzaku is summoned, or do they retain them, living bizarre half-lives, because they're still in their reborn forms?
Plus, if they got reincarnated, what about the Seiryu seishi that died, like...er, all of them (except Amiboshi, because Amiboshi is just that cool.)
"Eikoden" seems to wrap everything up, but it's only left me with more questions.
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Date: 2015-07-24 09:21 am (UTC)