“Yet another improbable set of problems tackled, and back where we started,” she sighed, relieved.
“We sure get mixed up in a lot of strange stuff, on an alarmingly regular basis,” he observed. She pondered this for a moment.
“Do you ever get the feeling that we’re stuck in an endless cycle of tropes that are moving our relationship forward bit by bit, leading towards some sort of dramatic culmination?” She asked.
At the stunned look he gave her, she quickly said, “Yeah, me neither.”
The adventure had come to an end, their love for one another confessed; at last they could begin to build their life together. Or so they thought. No sooner was the final deed done than they were flung back to their homelands, separated enormously by time and space. The forces that had set their adventure in motion cared little for the feelings that had grown between them during the time they had spent together. In a sense, they had been used by the universe to fulfill a particular purpose, and once that was completed, they were simply returned to where they had been before the whole thing had begun. No thinking creature had brought them together, and in the end, they were thoughtlessly separated, never to see nor hear from one another for the rest of their lives.
It’s no secret to my friends that I’m rather obsessed with the manga series Holyland; a series that is not even available through legal channels in the US. On its face it’s just another wimp-to-badass manga with a high school student who keeps getting stronger, and therefore by (improbable) happenstance ends up fighting ever strong opponents.
There are a few things that set Holyland apart, however. One thing that draws many fans is that the artist is clearly a martial arts nerd who clearly worked very hard to make the fights as realistic as possible, contra just about every other manga in the genre. Addressing the readers directly, Kouji Mori frequently chimes in to explain the physics and anatomy of what goes on in a given fight, and why it’s different from what most fictional fighting or common sense assumptions might lead you to believe. The only real break from reality (aside for the main character’s improbable quickness in learning new techniques) is that people seem to heal way too quickly from their injuries. But even here, an effort is made towards realism.
The thing that really sets it apart, that I want to talk about here, is the psychology of the thing. Kamishiro Yuu is no ordinary hero or even anti-hero. He’s a victim who tries to rise above it, but whose trauma looms large throughout the series, always threatening to turn him into something worse than the people that created him.
Continue reading Answering Malice with Violence: a Look at the Psychology of Holyland
Alex and his partner, Shannon, sat patiently in their unmarked car, waiting for their mark to come out of the small, nondescript shop across the street. To the casual observer, this seemed to be nothing more interesting than an Internet cafe, something that had existed in varying numbers since the very early days of mass usage of the net. However, the two NYPD officers were well aware that it served a far more specialized market.
Every morning Ellen checked the thin black laptop she kept under her side of the bed. Michael had stopped asking her about it, and she had stopped assuring him that she would explain it all to him some day. She only ever used a single program, an open source email client which utilized OpenPGP to securely communicate with others that she had shared her public key with. The email address itself was a string of 25 random characters, as were the addresses of all the other people who had her public key. You would not have thought that Ellen would be the kind of woman to have such a setup from the looks of her; a pudgy middle-aged mom living with her family in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. In truth, it had been set up for her, by one of the few dozen people—128 at last count—that would potentially communicate with her through this channel.