Review? The Vision Of Escaflowne (1996)

If a genre exists, this show is that genre. No joke, The Vision of Escaflowne is a Romance Mecha Action Adventure Fantasy Isekai Shojo Samurai Political Philosophical Spiritual anime. It was as if the writer had decided to put everything they have ever watched into one show, in order to appeal to literally everyone who has ever watched anything.  

You would expect such a melting pot of a show to be absolutely incoherent and nonsensical, yet it isn’t. The inclusion of genre tropes from literally every genre made everything in the show easy to understand:

Of course the protagonist is transported to a fantasy world because a samurai slew a dragon and uses dead dragon gallstones to pilot giant robots that can’t fly but literal stones the size of mountains can because magic.

Of course there are fantasy trope empires playing fantasy trope politics centred around the protagonist who is a fortune teller but is also a high school girl and even though she knows the future she has no idea what she’s doing and spends half her screen time eulogizing about which senpai to love when the senpais are fighting each other in giant robots.,

Of course halfway through the show it is discovered that the samurai who had killed a dragon who also pilots giant robots also has angel wings on his back and can fly, even though his giant robot can already fly by turning into a dragon.

All of the above statements make sense in the context of the show.

Astoundingly, none of this breaks your immersion, because none of this random crap is new; you have seen all of these tropes before.

In the first half of the show, the writer made brave attempts to justify all the bullshitery with worldbuilding.

Floating stones? People tie them to ships and make them into zeppelins. Stones be floating in this world, bro; you can go to a place where everything floats, what’s the big deal?

Dragon gallstones can power giant robots? They mine – get this – the Dragon’s Graveyard for fossilized gallstones so they can mass-produce giant robots.

A samurai guy has angel wings? …it looks cool.

Basically, attempts were made to explain why there are giant robots and dragons and magic and random shit in this fantasy world where people still fight with spears; but, in the second half, the worldbuilding simply gives up and says, “why am I trying to explain this shit, it’s just cool OK, deal with it”, and lets the random bullshit take over.

If it looks cool, it’s in the show. If you’re a teenager, this show would be the peak of cool, because if there is a thing you like, this show would have it. If you’re an adult, this show would make you feel nostalgic for a 90s that has never existed.

This is the prototype of all modern trashy young adult novels, where the only consistent thread is melodramatic bullshitery. And boy, this show had production value to back that bullshitery up.

The soundtrack is a classic. Fantasy anime in the 90s loved using that melodramatic neo-classical choral stuff, and in this show it’s in peak form. The colour palette is all classic fantasy, the character designs all classic 90s. If you know a 90s production trope, this show has it, and isn’t afraid to lean into it.

Now, as we all know, towards the end of a show is usually where the plot rushes in from the back of the queue, screaming “WE GOTTA WRAP THIS UP GUYS, WE’RE OUTTA TIME”, and shoves aside all the character development, all the fun action, all the melodrama, then proceed to shove the show’s THEMATIC MOTIF down the audience’s throat through a contrived set of circumstances that were clearly thought up at the show’s inception and is entirely incoherent with what the show ended up being.

The last five episodes of this show are absolute trash, full of bullshitery pulled one on top of the other. INTENSE FLASHBACKS permeants the precious screen time. Stop making every good guy pointlessly conflicted and every bad guy a good guy deep down, bro. It just screams the fact that the writer had the ending in their mind wayyyy before they thought up the bulk of the story. Retcons of characterisations happen all over the place. Plot threads get resolved on a whim. Shit happens, more shit happens, and boom, it’s a melodramatic, sad-happy ending that would make teenagers cry and adults throw their iPads across the room.

Overall though, still pretty good. If you want an immersive 90s nostalgia trip, this is the show for you. If you want to watch a show that is literally every genre ever, this is the show for you. The pacing is on point; the action keeps you engaged; the soppy teenage romance stuff keeps your eyes rolling; and the double whammy of ‘I SAVE THE WORLD FROM SUFFERING BY KILLING EVERYONE’ and ‘I OVERCOME MY DESTINY WITH ROMANTIC LOVE’ tropes will keep you rolling on the floor until the end.

7/10 – you can watch it on Netflix.

The Filibustering Of Depravity

The famed philosopher and philanthropist, Ted Cruz, upon returning from a vacation during which his constituents back home suffered from yet another climate-change-exacerbated extreme weather event, has said that the thing he most objected to about the criticisms leveraged against him was that ‘people were being assholes to him’.

What triggered him was not what he did, but how upset other people were about him doing it.

There is no arousing the sympathy of a career politician. Having wrestled in the mud pit with the worst traits humanity has to offer for so long, all politicians recognize that sympathy is just another tool in their arsenal. Joe Biden can cry about half a million dead on one hand and continue locking up kids in cages on the other because he knows how to weaponize his sympathy to amass maximum political capital.

In this sense, Ted Cruz is a way worse politician than Joe, but is somehow – in a twisted turn of logic – a better human being, because he behaved authentically – like the douchebaggy asshole that he is – by failing to leverage his impromptu vacation to his political advantage.

Picture him going on camera and starting to cry, slobbering snot as he apologizes to his constituents about how he failed them, and vowing to do better next time. Those will be crocodile tears, for sure, and he will for sure do absolutely nothing to fix anything, but with a performance of sympathy he could have tricked people into believing that he truly has become a changed man, and get a bump in the polls.

Yes, that’s right. He could have done nothing, gone on vacation, let people die, and still become more popular than before, had he played his cards right.

He didn’t though. He is a degenerate asshole through and through, on camera and off, and that is exactly why he, alongside his fellow philosopher the Donald, retains a loyal fanbase that licks up every gooy drop of asshole juice that drips out of his mouth.

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People have long assumed, consciously or not, that politicians will do nothing for them, and because of the saturation of crocodile tears in the media – from politicians, corporations, and every clouted individual – they can no longer rationally perceive any act of ‘good’ as genuine.

Everyday, we are surrounded by bullshit like Saudi Arabia’s social media account celebrating Pride Day, or the Chinese government spokesperson eulogizing about the need for free access to Facebook and Twitter. (both of these things actually happened).

So it’s no wonder that everything good appears fake – because they so very often are – and everything vile and degenerate appears authentic.

Nowadays, when you hear a line like ‘We respect Indigenous culture’ or ‘This is an equal-opportunity workplaces’, how would you interpret it?

Most times it’s just bullshit put into a recruitment video or at the top of a gig, but if you assume it’s bullshit, then you’re bundling the idea inside the message with the bullshit. The act of ‘respecting Indigenous culture’ is not intrinsically meaningless. Neither is ‘providing equal opportunities’. Yet when it is used so often as a throwaway, PR-sounding line, with no real change to back them up, people start to treat them like they are meaningless.

You’ve heard it before. ‘We acknowledge that this is the traditional land of…’ or ‘Small businesses are the backbone of the economy.’

Meanwhile, the vilest, the most sinister ideas – those that involve ‘lock them up’ in one form or the other – get a free pass when they receive the same this-isn’t-real treatment. ‘Oh it’s just bunch of bullshit, families don’t really get separated at the border,’ or ‘Oh, we’re just re-educating them, no big deal.’

Both sides are reduced to, essentially, trash-talking and shit-spinning.

By applying this ‘nothing is authentic, everything is rhetoric’ filter, the highest of moral aspirations and the vilest of human nature have become mingled together and indistinguishable from one another. No good deed is authentic. Bad deeds aren’t that bad. It’s all just people blowing air.

It’s no wonder, looking out from this swamp of intangible apathy, that the politicians/companies/countries who are the vilest, or the most partisan, come out sounding the most real. Mild flavours are drowned out by this deluge of meaningless PR.

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I’d like to believe that there are very few people out there who are truly cruel under everyday circumstances. Your racist uncle may spout white supremacist bullshit while sitting on the couch, but he will have done less damage to ethnic communities than, say, a multinational conglomerate setting up a quarry in a remote community, flying in non-local workers, destroying the local ecology, yet all the while declaring, ‘We care about the local community’ or ‘We bring jobs’ or ‘Here’s a new school, cos we ain’t paying for groundwater remediation.’

So I suppose the true message of this blog is: make sure to separate the contents of the message from the way it is being presented to you. Separate the speaker, who believes not a single word he’s saying, from the contents of the speech, which must not be tainted alongside the human refuse that is the man orating on his golden stage. 

When you think like this, you realize a great many things:

Why Ted Cruz and Donald Trump appeal to so many people;

Why career politicians like Joe Biden seems completely fake;

Why big corps are suddenly giving you a ton of free services; and,

Most importantly, your true enemies are not the racist uncle who hates black people, or the lone protester who blocks a road for ten minutes; they are those who would filibuster the concentration camps, saying, ‘Oh, fake news, it’s not that bad.’

Doing What’s Best

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‘We did what we believed to be best for you.’ This line – often touted by HR, middle management, family members, or your run-of-the-mill parliamentarian – is their go-to excuse whenever they decide to fuck you over.

In fact, whenever this line is spoken, it means the exact opposite of ‘doing the best for you’, because they are inevitably doing what’s best for themselves.

This line serves two functions:

1 – Reverse the victim/prosecution relationship.

A female staff member is sexually assaulted at the workplace. To protect the company’s reputation, they are ‘letting you go’ and sweeping the issue under the rug. ‘We’re doing what’s best for you’, they say. To avoid getting it on the record, they do not reach an official settlement with you, only agreeing on vague terms that compensation will be paid at some stage, and that you should not talk about it.

The victim is, effectively, told to protect the company’s reputation, even though it obviously is not reputable. In most cases, the victim does not have enough resources to launch legal action, out of fear that they’ll never find a similar job again – the next company will inevitably say, ‘Oh, this person likes to sue their employer, we can’t hire them, it’s too much risk.’

This is a perverse reversal of responsibility. The company is supposed to be the one suffering a reputation hit and becoming unable to hire staff or get clients. Instead, it is the victim who suffers, freeing the company to carry on as usual with no systemic changes, leaving the door open for similar incidents in the future.

This is not ‘what’s best for you.’ This is ‘what’s the best for us, you can get fucked.’

2 – Assign blame.

By saying ‘doing what’s best for you,’ the speaker is assuming that they know better than you – that you don’t know what’s best for yourself.

Factually, this is often true. You might have made a genuine mistake, or in your emotional state you might make a stupid decision, like vandalizing the office, or go air out your grievances on national TV, or something.

The fault lies not in the content of the statement, but in the automatic assumption that, ‘of course you don’t know what’s best for yourself.’

Nowhere does it say that the company is failsafe – that it never makes mistakes, that senior management never makes impulsive, knee-jerk reactional decisions, yet it is always the individual that ‘doesn’t know what’s best.’

With this assumption in place, it becomes impossible to negotiate a satisfactory outcome between the two parties. When one side assumes themselves to be impervious – to always know what’s best – then any and all mistakes must come from the other side.

Essentially, they’re saying that only the victim can be wrong.

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These two points become further entrenched if the victim’s grievances – through their courage and perseverance – become public knowledge.

The offending party, confronted by public condemnation, will corner themselves further into being the victim. They have two ways of achieving this.

1 – Become emotional.

A lesser-tread route, since in most countries it is assumed that only women can publicly display emotion on something as trivial as sexual assault. The party responsible for the victim’s circumstance will air a public apology – not over facts, but over how upset they have become at this whole situation.

Essentially, instead of ‘I’m sorry we did this,’ they are saying, ‘I’m sorry that you had to find out that this happened.’

The offending party will send out – inevitably – a woman, to cry about it to the public and in front of the cameras. To be fair, this person will feel genuinely apologetic, and her distress will not be feigned. At the same time, she will also have zero say in negotiating a good outcome for the victim. Her entire purpose will be to look sad and apologetic, so that public opinion is coerced into taking the side of the offenders.

By looking and acting more distressed than the victim, the offending party further paints themselves as victims.

2 – Become disengaged.

Now that the crying woman schtick is played, it is time for the men to come out and say, ‘let’s all move on, that’s the best thing to do right now.’

They will trivialise the issue by insisting that it is ‘being handled through the proper channels,’ and subtly implying that ‘there is bigger fish to fry’.

What they love more than anything, in this situation, is another public grievance that is not focussed on them. Say, a social media platform banning news or something. They would have gained a reasonable excuse to stop discussing their current entanglements and act out their idea of ‘we’re doing what’s best’ in another scenario – even though, with no systematic changes made, they are liable to make another mistake anyway.

Eventually, distraction or not, the public will move on to something more interesting, and the victim will be left, once again, to fend for themselves. With any luck, they will be able to hire a capable lawyer and reach a settlement – which should have been reached a very long time ago, had the offending party not insisted on their ‘we’re doing what’s best for you.’

If the victim had no resources to hire a lawyer or is too afraid to do so out of fear of further prosecution, then, well, they are fucked – which is the perfect outcome for everyone else.