I’ve just posted the first section and it’s a doozy. Read that first if you haven’t already, and let’s get discussing. In these commentaries I’ll talk about my writing process or just shout opinions at you. I’m not, like, a professional writer, but I’m having fun and I think I have something to contribute.

The first pages of a book are important. They set the tone for the whole piece and color the reader’s expectations for the rest of the book. To that end, the title of the section is made to grip the reader: Dan is Immolated in a Furnace. Who is Dan? Why is he being immolated in a furnace? Akayama DanJay is made to engage via curiosity. It is to be explored. The first section heading sets the stage for a dreamlike mystery.

In the first sentences Virgil Blue looks over an ocean and two small islands from his monastery on a larger island. Then he descends like a mist. Images of nature, especially mountains and clouds, will be repeated over and over again in different contexts throughout the book; we must start them early.

The characters discuss a cosmic journey with a matter-of-fact style which reinforces that surreal atmosphere and presents the reader with new names and concepts at a reasonable pace. There is not too much to absorb in one section, and it outlines our character’s goals and concerns.

I debated including the reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hope it conveys the “strap in for the ride” attitude I’m going for, where anything can happen, but I’m worried that it’s a bit on-the-nose. Maybe it won’t be in the final draft. When I read this at Seance, my campus writing club, a friend said they wanted to bring up HGttG when I had finished reading, but I had preempted him by mentioning it in the piece itself. I hope it got a laugh out of you, because I sure giggled when I wrote it. That’s generally a good sign.

During exploratory writing the deity these monks apparently worship was named “Mala.” Changing the name to “the Mountain” reduces the complexity of the system I’m teaching to the reader. It also hammers in the images I’m going to bring back again and again in stranger and stranger contexts.

I’m quite proud of how the ending comes as a shock even though it’s spoiled by the title of the section. We know Dan is to be immolated in that furnace, but the speed with which it occurs and the lack of reactions from the characters can come as a sucker-punch. When I read this to Seance there was panicked laughing, which I thought was the perfect reaction. My favorite line is Virgil Blue’s “I have never been good at saying goodbye.” To know Dan is to be burned alive with little more fanfare makes me think “wait, really?” each time I read it. It seals the deal on the dream-like atmosphere—couldn’t this be the end of a nightmare?

I’ve rewritten the first sections to paint a better picture of the monastery. It is a setting we revisit before the end of the book, so I want to make sure readers remember it when they see it and differentiate it from the other monasteries I might show them. In a story involving time-travel and alternate universes, readers need landmarks by which they may orient themselves spatially. I’ve put the monastery on the largest of three islands; when readers see islands again, they’ll be on the lookout.

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In Chapter R. The Wheel of Fortune Commander Lucille’s Galaxy Zephyr fires its own heart at the Enemy Hurricane. Besides being an oblique reference to Moby Dick* this initiates the rest of Akayama DanJay‘s story. The heart injures the Enemy Hurricane and becomes a Wheel which Akayama claims is a torus, a donut-shape.

In this donut, Professor Akayama sifts through the ashes of Earth to reconstruct its population. She’s not totally clear about how the process will work (which makes it easier for me to bullshit about it with plausible deniability) but she mentions principal components. Instead of recreating Earth’s population all at once, she plans to generate a few “orthogonal unit-vectors” which can be combined into any specimen from Earth.

This Wikipedia article provides an example of principal component analysis pictured below. Notice the gray data-points are smeared diagonally; describing the position of points using typical x,y coordinates would be unnatural. Instead we find two arrows (vectors) at right angles (orthogonal) which more naturally express the spread of data. The longer arrow points in the direction of maximum variation so that if we were limited to only one principal component, we would know which best exemplifies the diversity in the data.

A more visually interesting example is found in this paper from Nicolas Le Bihan and Stephen J. Sangwine where a single image is broken into principal components and reconstructed. The original image is this mandrill (a glorified baboon):

If we’re limited to just one principal component, the mandrill looks like this:

Essentially there’s one row of pixels which best represents the diversity of colors in the image and their placement. We see horizontal bands made by scaling that row of pixels, but aside from this scaling, each row is the same. If we use three principal components, we find the following:

With linear combinations of three principal components, we may render the mandrill in a symbolic grid-like pattern. With 20 and 100 principal components, the mandrill looks about as good as its original image:

If, instead of a baboon photo, we wanted to reconstruct the population of Earth, we might imagine making a collection of people-like-entities. For any person on Earth, we’d add/subtract scalar multiples of these principal-component-people to approximate that person.

That’s why Professor Akayama takes her role as guardian of the afterlife. She’s looking for outputs of her machine-learning process, choosing principal components to reconstruct Earth’s population. When she eats worms, she’s gathering data and refining those components as much as possible. Apparently one of those components was Beatrice.

Philosophically speaking, even if linear combinations of principal components accurately resembled Earth’s population to an arbitrary degree, could that really be called Earth’s original population? As a trivialist I’d say sure, why not. In the fiction of Akayama DanJay Professor Akayama is the universe’s leading expert in mind-merging; I’d trust no one else to reassemble my phenomenology—my notion of consciousness and personal experience.

But we’ll just have to see how it turns out. See you next week.

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*”He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

You might know the Star Trek version of the quote better: “And he piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.”

Other noteworthy references I try to make in this section:

Lucille says “War’s all I’m good at!” which I want to echo demon Moloc’s statement in Paradise Lost, “My sentence is for open Warr. Of wiles more unexpert, I boast not.” In inverting elements of Paradise Lost I want Lucille to basically be Satan aligned alongside God (Akayama) against Hell (the human hubris of the Enemy Hurricane). Rolling lines from demons into her character feels appropriate.

The Galaxy Zephyr’s heart boils “so violently the bursting bubbles howled like hounds eager to slip for war.” Besides the obvious relation to “let slip the dogs of war” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I want this to echo the character Sin in Paradise Lost. Sin was born from Satan and gives birth to Death; her labor is described thusly:

…about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung [ 655 ]
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturb’d thir noyse, into her woomb,
And kennel there, yet there still bark’d and howl’d
Within unseen…

“…my womb
Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown
Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. [ 780 ]
At last this odious offspring whom thou seest
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way
Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transform’d: but he my inbred enemie [ 785 ]
Forth issu’d, brandishing his fatal Dart
Made to destroy: I fled, and cry’d out Death;
Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d
From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.”

While Sin gives birth to Death, the Galaxy Zephyr uses its “hounds” to recreate Earth’s population.

Lucille tells the Enemy Hurricane “I introduced you to pain!” In Paradise Lost Satan first feels pain at the sword of archangel Michael when Michael cuts him in half:

with swift wheele reverse, deep entring shar’d
All his right side; then Satan first knew pain,
And writh’ d him to and fro convolv’d

So Lucille isn’t just associated with demons; she represents angels, too, albeit in a bloodthirsty way.

Lastly, Lucille calls her Wheel the wheel of fortune. This isn’t a reference to the game-show, but to Dante’s Inferno. Says Brown University:

Dante merges the pagan and Christian beliefs in his scheme of the universe by elevating [Fortune] to the “rank” of a Divine Intelligence, God’s “general minister and guide,” who controls the empty wealth and splendor of the world of men. She is inscrutable, swift and powerful within her licensed limits. Though often slandered, she dwells above in bliss, untroubled.

“Your wisdom cannot withstand her: she foresees, judges, and pursues her reign, as theirs the other gods. Her changes know no truce. Necessity compels her to be swift, so fast do men come to their turns. This is she who is much reviled even by those who ought to praise her, but do wrongfully blame her and defame her. But she is blest and does not hear it. Happy with the other primal creatures she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss” (Inferno, VII.85-96).

The Enemy Hurricane will find no leniency from Lucille. To her, this isn’t a fight for the sake of Earth. She’s never been to Earth and couldn’t care less for it. Akayama’s recreation of Earth, the Wheel, is merely Lucille’s weapon. Ironically, that’s exactly what Earth needs at this point in the story.

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In Chapter Q: Under the Thumb Professor Akayama returns to her water world to tell Nemo what she’s doing with his planet. With “a lot of statistics” she will conjure Earth’s vaporized population. I’ll share more details next week, but for now, let’s discuss how this reflects on the rest of the story.

Akayama DanJay has two halves. In the Akayama half, a giant anime space-robot fights a cosmic horror at light-speed while reconstructing Earth. In the DanJay half, human simulacra bumble around Earth’s reconstruction unaware of their cosmogonic origin. Dan, Jay, Faith, Beatrice, Leo, and everyone else in the ‘real’ world are actually placeholders in a machine-learning process generating Earth’s original population.

I wrote the DanJay half first for two reasons: one, I’m making stuff up as I go; two, I thought it was a better reading experience to have the Akayama half as a big reveal. To be fair to myself, I still think it’s fun to watch Jay puzzle over a mysterious desert and eventually eat a centipede in search of answers. Nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight, a theoretical final draft might look a little more like this:

We’d start with Princess Lucia’s piloting exam. Then we’d skip twenty years to Lucille meeting ZAB. ZAB would show Lucille how her parents died. At the end of the first chapter, we’d go BACK twenty years to Akayama’s fall to her Hurricane Planet. From there we follow Akayama until the reconstruction of Earth.

As soon as Earth’s reconstruction begins, we’d zoom in on Dan being immolated in a furnace. We’d follow Dan/Jillian/Jay until Jay watches an episode of anime with Faith. In this ordering, the episode would no longer be a detour from the main story, but a RETURN to the main story. The episode would show the ongoing battle between Lucille’s Galaxy Zephyr and the Hurricane, keeping tensions high.

After the episode we’d return to following DanJay. When Jay visits the afterlife, there would be a sense of irony: Jay has no idea what’s happening, but the reader would know exactly why smoking centipede sends him to a desert. Akayama, under the name Nakayama, meaning “inside the Mountain,” introduces herself as the Heart of the Mountain, presumably because after twenty years imprisonment she’s lost the finer points of human interaction. The reader would know why Akayama is a giant bird-thing, but Jay would still see her as a monster.

From there, we’d keep following DanJay while occasionally watching anime to showcase how the two halves of the story interact with one another.

Rearranging the sections of Akayama DanJay like this would take some rewriting and editing. If I change which anime episode the characters are watching in any section, I’d need to edit the dialog before and after. Jay will have to watch more anime, as well, to keep the reader updated on the fight between Commander Lucille and the Hurricane. But this would be worth it, because characters in DanJay‘s half are generally reactive, not proactive, and couching their story in universal conflict helps validate that passivity by contrasting it with action. DanJay‘s half lacks tension until the reader understands the nature of their world as subsidiary to a giant anime space-robot fight, but currently this reveal occurs too late in the narrative.

I didn’t realize this, of course, because I understood the nature of their world since the beginning (or, at least, I had rough plans). Therefore the order of sections on akayamadanjay.com was a natural order for writing, even if it’s not the optimal order for reading. A difficult aspect of writing is stepping back to look at work with fresh eyes, and understanding how a natural writing order must be warped into a natural reading order.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I’m having lots of fun.

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In Chapter P. The Robot the Size of the Galaxy Professor Akayama meets Commander Lucille. They pool their resources into a Zephyr with all the mass of the Milky Way. Unfortunately this isn’t a huge improvement in their quest to take down the Hurricane, which is as big as the observable universe minus the Milky Way.

Obviously I’m not aiming for scientific accuracy. The easiest place to see this is in my treatment of the speed of light: not only can robot-spaceships travel faster than light, but characters can see events too far away for light to reach them in reasonable time.

The clearest example is the peculiar eye-movement-communication manifested by the Hurricane. I decided to let Hurricane Planets communicate visually like this to get around the “no noise in space” issue, but now that I need characters to communicate across thousands of light-years, I have to swallow my pride and pretend it just works. Half the fun of anime fights is watching characters shout at each other, and it would be a shame to cut that just because it wouldn’t be scientifically accurate. Call it artistic liberty.

Giant robot stories can be compelling even while adhering to physics, but since Akayama DanJay involves enemies the size of the universe and other impossible situations, concessions must be made. The larger-than-life subject-matter of Akayama’s story is meant to contrast DanJay’s more down-to-Earth narrative: while DanJay investigates the afterlife in a mundane, drug-induced manner, Akayama essentially becomes a god when she makes a new Earth and spawns life. It feels natural for Akayama’s story to involve robots attacking each other with punches faster than light because hers is the otherworldly celestial realm, where entities of unimaginable power combat each other in incomprehensible manners.

This contrast between the mundane and the impossible is the heart of Akayama DanJay. What DanJay calls reality is overshadowed by a more ‘real’ reality which, paradoxically, comes across as less real to the reader: a fight between giant anime robots who treat light-speed as a suggestion. Dan, Jay, Faith, Beatrice, and Leo are realistic and grounded compared to Commander Lucille, whose bombastic leadership style probably wouldn’t fly in any legitimate military organization.

I hope this reflects our own reality: our day-to-day lives are influenced by fictional stories—for example, political propaganda—perhaps to a greater degree than any ‘objectively real’ aspect of life. The line between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ is blurred when we understand that ‘fantasy’ is created by people influenced by ‘reality,’ and those ‘fantasies’ in turn influence ‘reality.’ In truth, there is no difference: Harry Potter is as real as anything else in the sense that it influences ‘objective reality.’ Writers should let ‘reality’ interrupt their ‘fantasy’ only to the subdued degree that ‘fantasy’ gets to interrupt ‘reality.’

Next week I’ll explain my ideal reorganization of Akayama DanJay. I think portions of Akayama’s story should occur before we see DanJay’s story, even if DanJay’s story starts on such an intriguing note.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Reality is shared between us now.

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In O4. Earth Explodes the Hurricane decides it doesn’t need the rest of humanity, and destroys it. One well-aimed projectile obliterates our planet.

That’s enough of an excuse to talk about One Punch Man, a webcomic/manga/anime about an eternally bored superhero named Saitama who can obliterate any monster in one anticlimactic punch. It’s a satirical take on action anime, though I’d argue it occasionally gets bogged down in the tropes it tries to mock. (The anime does a great job tightening it up.)

Although One Punch Man is a comedy with an invulnerable hero who can’t be physically threatened, it strikes serious tones with tact; any fan could tell you how Saitama dirties his own name to preserve the public image of other, more vulnerable heroes.

One serious theme which I haven’t heard discussed is One Punch Man‘s take on identity and self-determination. The most interesting monsters in the story are those who used to be human themselves.

In One Punch Man humans aren’t transformed into monsters by chemical spills or radioactive spider-bites. Monster-hood might be granted just by obsessively repeating mundane actions. (Remember to read manga right to left.)

These examples suggest (to me) that humans turn into monsters because they feel outcast. “Incarnation of Electric Light String” redirected impotent anger at inanimate objects, and their newfound power lets them act out in public. Crablante became a crab-monster when they ate ‘too much’ crab, as if their body warped out of sheer contempt for social bonds. Who knows if Crablante actually ate a disturbing amount of crab—what matters is Crablante felt alienated because of his diet.

Even when mad-science is involved, the transformation from human to monster aligns with the monster’s former vices.

Meanwhile Saitama says he never wanted to be a salary-man…

Saitama attains this awesome power not by gamma ray bombardment, but with physical training.

On one hand, this is absurd; you can’t gain infinite power through calisthenics. Even other characters in One Punch Man call Saitama ridiculous. On the other hand, if boxing the string dangling from a light-fixture turns someone into a monster, why can’t exercise make someone a hero?

Another path to becoming a monster is introduced later in the series: if a human eats a “Monster Cell,” they become a monster themselves.

This provides insight into why humans might seek monster-hood.

These stated motivations (the last in particular) reinforce the idea that humans become monsters to ignore boundaries in pursuit of their own interests. “Man, it feels so good to admit this” is exactly Crablante’s motivation: “yeah, I eats lots of crab,” says Crablante, “I’m a crab-monster! Whatchu gonna do about it?”

There’s power in becoming the monster society perceives us to be (or the monster we think society perceives us to be). Some people wear insults like jewelry. If you decide “yeah, that’s right, I am an asshole, and that’s the way I like it,” you spontaneously free yourself from all social constraints at the cost of revealing yourself as the asshole everyone knows you are.

In contrast, Saitama’s self-declared rival, a ninja named Speed-of-Sound Sonic (really), desires strength but can’t stomach their Monster Cell uncooked. Cooking the cell deactivates it. You can’t achieve monstrous freedom without accepting the monstrous burden of discarding decency.

While One Punch Man‘s monsters enjoy grotesque freedom, Saitama’s only goal is to be the best hero, and so, through repetitive exercise, he achieves this. The only difference between heroes and monsters, then, is the direction they aim themselves. Both humans and monsters are warped by their self-image, into their self-image.

Saitama’s face is iconic and simple, which I attribute to the simplicity of his goal. While monsters are often complicated and detailed, Saitama gains power through straightforwardness. The only character with a face simpler than Saitama’s is Watchdog Man, one of the most powerful heroes in the series.

This shows how Watchdog Man surpasses Saitama, not in power but in purity of ambition. Saitama was motivated by attaining power and now his power bores him. Watchdog Man gains power and contentedness from his self-assigned duty of protecting his city. Watchdog Man shows what Saitama could achieve someday in terms of devotion to heroism; for now, Saitama is distracted by desire for catharsis in battle.

Anyway, I hope that sheds more light on the Bishonen Line that I talked about last month. The Hurricane gave up its humanity long ago. Now that Lucille has no Earth to restrain her, we’ll witness the scope of her vengeance. See you next week!

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In O3. The Arms Race Nemo follows a disembodied arm up the mountainous main island of Sheridan. The arm convinces him to eat a centipede, and then Nemo eats the arm.

Writers often hear, “where do you get your ideas.” I don’t hear this so much, because I’m not exactly a writer, but I’ll still self-righteously subject you to my opinions.

In my opinion, writing is mostly making stuff up as you go, and the rest is researching and rewriting and editing. That means I’ll retroactively find religious allegories in my dumb anime robot fiction, and then rewrite to make the religious allegories more meaningful and fun.

In the opposite vein, I sometimes spontaneously recall ideas I’d long ago forgotten. An idea worth remembering never knocks just once, and occasionally it returns without warning.

I’ve been sitting on a particular idea for years and never found inspiration to write a short story about it. Have you heard of the ancient alien theory, somehow popularized by the History Channel? I can’t honestly pretend to believe it, but it’s a great concept. What if all modern religions are just misinterpretations of an intergalactic visitor?

I imagine a space-alien stranded  on Earth. The alien teaches primitive humans the basics of civilization and demands the humans build a spaceship shaped like a pyramid, for example. The alien takes the spaceship back to their home galaxy, and returns centuries later to find the humans building the Pyramids of Giza, naive models.

This is a nice little idea. I’d get to re-contextualize any number of iconic religious images as misunderstood sci-fi elements, like having the alien’s space-helmet look like a halo. It’s cute, but I’ve never actually written it.

Instead I wrote Akayama DanJay, which accidentally contains the same themes. Henry hits the nail on the head with his notion of cargo cults: what Dan and Jay call the ‘real world’ is a copy made by Professor Akayama, and the Islands of Sheridan have a religion based on her misunderstood teachings.

Recall the three commandments listed in the red card-stock pamphlet: never harm or photograph birds; only Virgil Blue can prepare centipede; never walk above the permanent cloud-cover. A few sections ago, Akayama tried to tell Nemo not to eat birds. In this section she tells him not to let the other islanders eat centipede, then sets herself on fire and becomes the permanent cloud-cover. It seems natural to me that Nemo, without language, might misinterpret her.

Again, I didn’t write my ancient alien story on purpose. During exploratory writing I just wrote what I thought would be cool. I only realized afterward that my old idea had reappeared organically, and now, in my second draft, I’m writing with it in mind.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King compares writing a narrative to digging up dinosaur bones. At first you might find a few bones of the tail. It’s not until you unearth the skull that you really understand the dinosaur you’re investigating, and it has every right to surprise you. Once you know the nature of the beast, you throw muscles and skin over it.

Thanks for reading my half-baked musculature. I hope you enjoy reading it like I enjoy writing it.

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In O2. Nemo’s Children Nakayama helps Nemo hatch his egg. He’s a father now, to over a thousand full-grown adults. He’s a pretty good dad considering he’s a day old: he immediately teaches his children his own name, their own names, and how to eat apples and peel oranges. He even investigates a dangerous invader to keep his children safe—it’s a disembodied arm with two elbows, a mouth, and an eye, and it crawls in the dirt like a snake.

In my commentary to M1. The Fall I promised comparisons to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic poem about how Satan made a cannon to kill God. Professor Akayama created the Hurricane and then banished herself to it out of guilt, which is my reversal of God banishing demons to Hell. While Milton’s Satan becomes leader of the underworld through charisma and guile, Akayama’s silver tongue barely buys her twelve years of labor before being assimilated. After assimilation, she’s forced to build a world to dominate; the islands she builds become Sheridan, which is Akayama DanJay’s take on the Garden of Eden. Akayama gives Nemo all kinds of fruits.

In Paradise Lost Adam loves Eve (perhaps mostly) because of her beauty. After Satan disguises himself as a snake to convince Eve to eat an apple, she is cursed to painful childbirth. The birth of Nemo’s children is comparatively sterile and painless: he jerks off on an egg. He doesn’t even have a female partner; that role is taken by Nakayama. It is only after becoming a father that Nemo finds his snake, a disembodied arm with two elbows.

I don’t mind spoiling that Nemo eats his forbidden fruit next week. The arm, controlled by the Hurricane Planet, will convince him to eat a centipede. The centipede will connect Nemo to the Hurricane and make him a puppet for one of its pilots. You’ll have to check in next week to see what happens, but I’ll say it continues my goal of thematically inverting elements of Paradise Lost. Milton’s God made Eden to replace the army of demons He sentenced to Hell. Akayama built Sheridan because she was told to. Adam’s eating an apple granted him knowledge of pain and expelled him from the garden. We already know Nemo becomes Virgil Blue, religious leader of Sheridan for centuries to come.

So far, I like how Akayama DanJay thematically inverts Paradise Lost in its second half while referencing Dante’s Inferno in its first half. As literature based on Christian canon, they fit together as snapshots before and after the fall of man. The fact Akayama looks less like the Christian God, and more like a feathered serpent a la Quetzalcoatl, just helps the narrative straddle cultural boundaries with a surreal twist.

Of course, I’m totally spit-balling here. I don’t write these commentaries to explain from a high-chair what my work is about. For me, writing is just making stuff up. Then I compare what I’ve written to other stuff I’ve heard about, like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and try to emphasize what I enjoy in future drafts.

So thanks for reading! I’m having fun.

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In O1. The Egg with 1000 Yolks Akayama meets with her Hurricane Planet. The planet gives her an egg which will hatch into enough humans for each of the Hurricane’s pilots to possess one. It also gives her centipedes which will make those humans immortal, so the Hurricane’s pilots will be safe in their private people.

Immortality is a mixed bag, especially if indestructibility is part of the deal. On one hand, you get to live forever. On the other hand, you have to live forever. You’ll see the rise and fall of civilizations, but long before then, all your friends will die. You’ll watch the landscape wrinkle into mountains, and eventually the sun will explode and you’ll be stuck in it.

Remember that episode of Doctor Who, the Family of Blood? A family (of blood) wants to steal the alien doctor’s immortality. Eventually, says wikipedia,

the Doctor captures them and issues each member an eternal punishment. He pushes the mother out of the TARDIS into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, wraps the father in unbreakable chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star, traps their daughter in every mirror everywhere in existence, and suspends their son in time before putting him to work as a scarecrow.

In fiction, immortality is often like a genie’s wish: you wish for eternal life but eventually you wish you could wish to die.

In Akayama DanJay the universe-sized cosmic horror called the Hurricane is immortal. Even if a whole Hurricane Planet is destroyed, it’s just one cell of the entire Hurricane, and each cell is identical. Each planet contains a copy of their pilots’ consciousnesses, blended into a mind seeking only self-preservation. They swallow any being they encounter, adding them to their roster of pilots and preserving them for eternity.

The only Hurricane Planet which goes against this is Akayama’s. She appealed to its ego to preserve her individuality, which, even if only a temporary solution, has split her Hurricane Planet from the others. Her planet wants to separate its pilots to regain its humanity. But even so, it demands immortality.

Akayama correctly observes humans aren’t immortal; you can’t learn humanity from anything indestructible. She’s a bit naive, though, in telling the Hurricane to make the egg so the humans born from it represent all skin-colors and genders. She says this will show the Hurricane the “full gamut of humanity” but you can’t understand races and genders just by inhabiting bodies with different qualities. Their human vessels will live light-years from any notion of racism or sexism. Professor Akayama’s mindset has been warped by the Hurricane even if she hasn’t noticed: she thinks humanity can be recreated in full just by reproducing its superficial characteristics.

Perhaps to prove a point about mortality, the Hurricane Planet deletes the copy of Akayama it’s stored aboard. Akayama is crushed by the death of her copy, the only sympathetic consciousness in light-years. Eventually, though, she’ll be relieved. The Hurricane will one day regret attaining immortality. Its hubris will be repaid in full.

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In N4. Recombination Lunar Commander Lucille leads her army of robot pilots in combining their Zephyrs into a kilometer-tall mech. Their method of combining is a little unusual: instead of each robot being a different limb, a la Voltron, each robot disbands its own limbs to reshape into a single muscle group. The combination’s quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves are each different robots. (My ‘art’ might not reflect this, but cut me some slack, there are only so many colors.)

As far as I know, this is a fresh twist on the established giant-robot formula. It’s also commentary on a common theme of combat fiction: the Bishonen Line. TV Tropes, which is obviously the indisputable arbiter of all fiction, traces the term Bishonen Line to a webcomic by Mark Shallow:

“Leading powerfologists theorize that as you become more powerful, you become more monstrous, and then sharply become humanoid again. They call it the Bishonen Line.”

This notion is present in eastern and western fiction but is perhaps most obvious in an anime like Bleach. (I’m working on vague memories of Bleach from my early teens, but I figure that’s appropriate. Minor spoilers.)

There’s a tendency in fiction for powerful monsters to be big and scary; viewers know the Hollows in Bleach are intimidating because they’re enormous bone-creatures. That’s why it’s impressive when the hero slashes them with his big-ass sword.

Then the hero fights a Hollow who holds a sword bigger than a tree. In an anime about big-ass swords, that means the Hollow must be supremely powerful, right? But the hero’s father reveals that he, too, is a magic-sword-fighty-person, and he defeats the Hollow with a sword of ordinary size. How can this be? Didn’t their bigger sword mean the Hollow was stronger? The hero’s father disagrees: if the size of swords actually represented power, says he, his own sword would be colossal. His restraint keeps his sword from growing unwieldy.

The hero’s father was on the other side of the Bishonen Line. Up to a certain point, characters in fiction become bigger and scarier as they grow more powerful. Then, all of a sudden, an increase in power returns the characters to traditionally humanoid shapes. The same idea applies to the Arrancar, the strongest Hollows in Bleach: as Hollows grow more powerful they grow larger, until they start shrinking. Eventually they look like humans cosplaying as skeleton fuccbois.

TV Tropes says the trope was exemplified by Dragon Ball. The Saiyans, humanoid aliens with monkey tails, can become giant apes of unmatched strength… unmatched, that is, until they discover the Super Saiyan transformation and become powerful while maintaining human size and shape. From there, subsequent transformations increase their power while providing slightly simian facial features, until that goes out the window and the Saiyan returns to their original form with dyed hair.

(I hope it’s alright to use these photos. I got that one from OtakuKart.) The Bishonen Line is less clear in western fiction, but TV Tropes cites Marvel’s Age of Ultron. Ultron, the robot, could take any form but remains merely humanoid. The Vision, a more powerful robot, is just a bald red dude.

There are a few reasons for having the Bishonen Line. It’s easier to conceptualize and animate a fight between two humans than a fight between a human and a giant monster. It’s also a great “oh shit” moment when the bad guy says, “this isn’t even my final form,” and becomes smaller. It’s like their power is compacted.

In Akayama DanJay the Hurricane is a monster the size of the universe made of planet-sized cells. Those Hurricane Planets can make human limbs but prefer tentacles, a typically inhuman appendage.

Meanwhile Lucille’s Zephyrs look like body-parts which combine by color into humanoid robots. In this section they all try to combine into an even bigger humanoid robot, albeit by becoming enormous muscles. Yet the pilots of those muscles are still distinct humans, while the Hurricane’s pilots have had their consciousnesses blended into a pink, homogeneous mass spread across the cosmos.

I hope this enhances the social commentary I introduced the last time I talked about combining robots. The Hurricane is more powerful than the Zephyrs, but at the cost of its pilots’ humanity. Lucille’s army maintains its human shape no matter how powerful it becomes. This portrays the Bishonen Line as a conscious decision: the Hurricane decides to take the most direct route to power, getting bigger; Lucille pursues power through refinement, cooperation, and self-acceptance.

We’ll have to see whose strategy takes them farther. So far the Hurricane seems ahead, but knowing the Bishonen Line, it’s just a matter of time until Lucille catches up.

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In N3. Captain Nemo Professor Akayama builds islands by tearing underwater magma vents. She finds a living human inhabiting the islands much sooner than she expected. She names the man Nemo, most likely after the character Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s stories like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea rather than the fish-kid from Finding Nemo.

I can’t do Jules Verne justice (because I haven’t even read any Jules Verne) but I know someone who can: the folks at Extra Credits have a series about sci-fi. I love the Extra Credits team, as they exhibit unbridled passion for everything they do from video-game design to history series. Watch that video and all their other videos, too, I’ll wait.

Anyway, I’d like to speak specifically about Captain Nemo. Thanks to Wikipedia I can pretend to know what I’m talking about: Captain Nemo, also known as Prince Dakkar, is the inventor and pilot of the Nautilus, a submarine in which he secludes himself from society. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea he lives in self-imposed exile and shocks his crew with his commitment to vengeance against the society which wronged him.

He also fights off a giant octopus. At the time, political cartoons and sci-fi stories used an octopus or squid to represent the stranglehold of imperialism and eventually economic monopolies. Perhaps Jules Verne borrows the symbol to show Captain Nemo’s battle against the bonds of society.

In Akayama DanJay Professor Akayama built a spaceship called the Hurricane, and now she’s trapped by the cosmic horror it has become. While Captain Nemo fights the tentacles of society in his Nautilus, Akayama is separated from society by her own tentacled creation, unwillingly. Perhaps Akayama names her first human Nemo as a defense mechanism. “I’m not trapped here,” she says, “Captain Nemo wasn’t trapped by his Nautilus. Here’s my Nemo. Here’s my empowerment. Here’s my individuality. You’re not the Hurricane’s pawn, and neither am I.”

Akayama’s first human, Nemo, is naturally terrified. Akayama is a giant bird-creature now. While Verne’s Captain Nemo eventually repulses his crew with his desire for revenge, Akayama initially repulses her human named Nemo with the horrific physical figure she has become.

I named this character Nemo because I thought it sounded cool. If I’m implying I did anything intentionally, I apologize. A huge part of writing is doing whatever you want and fixing it later or justifying it retroactively.

Anyway, we already know how Nemo’s story ends. He becomes an immortal religious figure whose teachings become too austere. He ejects himself from his own society to protect his own religion from himself. Rather than retire in a submarine, he walks into a permanent cloud and never returns. Still his teachings haunt the dreams of his protege for generations.

Retroactively speaking, I think this contrasts nicely with Captain Nemo. While Captain Nemo uses his ingenuity and cunning to escape a humanity he hates, Akayama’s Nemo was assigned his name by a god-like figure trying to establish her own independence by proxy. He’s created by a god and given the title of someone who seeks independence. That’s a big burden to put on someone’s shoulders in their first day of existence. If Akayama’s Nemo remains independent of the Hurricane, isn’t he just obeying Akayama? That’s not independence at all!

Akayama’s Nemo can’t escape to fantastical undersea adventures for his freedom. His quest to live freely will take him to permanent seclusion on an obscured mountain peak on an island in the most isolated area of the world.

This contrasts different notions of independence. Captain Nemo left society because of what it did to him. Akayama’s Nemo will leave society because of what he does to it. Meanwhile, Leo expects society conform to his own notion of freedom.

Coincidentally, when Captain Nemo dies in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, his last words are, according to Wikipedia,

“God and my country!” (“Independence!”, in Verne’s original manuscript)

Even Jules Verne had his Nemo’s independence tainted by alignment to some superior: an editor or publisher who thought God and country were more appropriate. Akayama will certainly have difficulty securing freedom for her own Nemo.

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