In M2. The Belly of the Beast Professor Akayama has to confront the cosmic horror she created, which has swallowed her whole. The Hurricane was a spaceship meant to usher humanity to an age of peace. When its pilots’ minds were merged with each other and their machinery, the Hurricane fled earth and ate the observable universe, transmuting galaxies into its own flesh and machinery.

Mind-melding is a common trope in science-fiction and fiction in general. The earliest instance which comes to my mind, personally, is Star Trek‘s Vulcan mind-meld. However, the first time I saw mind-melding on TV for myself was in the anime Dragonball where two characters can dance and fuse into a more powerful one. I enjoy that the concept of merging minds can be taken in such disparate directions: Star Trek uses mind-melding for interrogation, while Gotenks from the Dragonball anime mostly flies around punching people with lasers, if I recall. In some instances of mind-melding, like Dragonball and Steven Universe, bodies merge as well. In others, like Star Trek‘s Vulcan mind-meld or most fictional hive-minds, bodies remain individual and distinct.

Mind-melding is even popular in the specific genre of giant-fighting-robot-action. While the Power Rangers are happy to pilot their megazords or whatever individually, Pacific Rim‘s Jaegers are piloted by two people who drift together. Symbiotic Titan has aliens jump into a robot who melds their consciousnesses. The anime Neon Genesis Evangeleon—which I sort of dissed here, but which this YouTube channel finds more philosophically meaningful—has (and these are spoilers in case you care) robots filled with the pilot’s mother’s soul. At the end, all of mankind is united in an egg, or something. (I’ve never actually watched the show, I’m skimming wiki articles. Maybe I’ll write a whole commentary about the show if I get around to watching it.)

On one hand, mind-melding the pilots of giant robots is a natural extension of having multiple robot-pilots in the first place. It just makes sense. Have you ever played QWOP? Voltron, a robot with a separate pilot for its left and right legs, should hardly be able to walk! It’s better to say, “no, no, all the pilots are blended together so they can coordinate perfectly.”

On the other hand, I feel like there’s more to it.

I mentioned here that a group of people piloting a robot is the perfect metaphor for social progress. If people can operate a robot to perform some task, they must be expert cooperators; they represent the possibility of mankind to accomplish greatness when we work as one. Here, mind-melding can either emphasize this cooperation (in Pacific Rim, only compatible pilots can drift) or decry the loss of individuality in an authoritarian state (the anti-spirals from Gurren Lagann are a collective consciousness which wants to subdue the universe). The Hurricane is more in line with the second camp: its combined mentality is essentially kidnapping the individuals which form it. The Hurricane is a tyranny, but the tyrant is the combined will of its constituents.

Simultaneously, humans are basically giant robots piloted by neurons who control machinery consisting of our muscles and other organs. Other cells could be called mechanics, or security guards, or delivery personnel, among other humanizing titles; our biome of gut-bacteria becomes a civilian population safely buoyed in our center.

Under this metaphor, the human ego is not the head pilot who leads the others. We subjectively feel in control of our executive decisions,  but we don’t control the cells of our body, and therefore it must be they who ‘control’ us. The sense of self is the outcome of the sum of our parts. We are their combined ‘consciousness.’

Of course, each cell is made of atoms and molecules, and we could pretend those particles are robot-pilots who control the actions of the cell. It’s giant robots all the way down and all the way up, is what I’m saying. Just food for thought.

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Surprise! In M1. The Fall Jay’s centipede-induced hallucinations open with a new episode of LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration, the show-within-a-story about anime robots fighting a cosmic horror. Professor Akayama apparently survived the destruction of her spaceship and landed on the Hurricane Planet.

I mentioned way back in the day that I saw some possible links to Milton’s Paradise Lost in Akayama DanJay. Akayama DanJay already draws from Dante’s Inferno, so I’m happy to brace more elements of my fiction against time-tested epic poetry. If I can use Paradise Lost to emphasize my imagery, so much the better.

Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in blank verse by John Milton in the 1600’s. It notably stars Satan himself and recounts his war against God, his damnation to Hell, and his temptation of humanity with an apple in Eden. It’s an interesting read, especially if you like references to biblical events, because essentially half the text consists of metaphors comparing elements of the biblical event at hand to other biblical events.

Seriously, though, it’s worth reading. Try the “Plain English” version side-by-side with the original; I prefer it to the forest of footnotes required to properly understand the minutiae. Satan’s peculiar charisma is intriguing, and at one point he and his rogue angels build a cannon to fire at God. (Sheesh, why hasn’t this already been adapted into a giant-robot anime?)

While Paradise Lost is about the fall of mankind near the dawn of time, Akayama DanJay is meant to convey the power of modern humanity to salvage itself. Accordingly, events of Paradise Lost are thematically inverted. In contrast to Milton’s perfect, omnipotent God, Professor Akayama represents a fallible God; she built the Hurricane, a spaceship with the power to bring humanity into a bright new age, but her vision was warped into a horrible hellscape which fills most of the universe. Akayama leaves her military moon-base (God’s army of angels) and sentences herself to the metaphorical Hell she created.

She lands in an ocean of strange fluid, as Satan and the other rebellious angels fall into a lake of fire at the beginning of Paradise Lost. Satan and the others lay about languishing for days before they regain their senses and come together in council; Akayama has to wait for her bones to knit before she can quest for her Zephyr. Without spoiling too much, in the following chapters, Akayama will attempt to escape the Hurricane (as Satan escaped Hell) and be tasked with building a Garden of Eden (while Satan perverted Eden).

Meanwhile Lucille, orphan daughter of the late Princess Lucia, has a name which sounds like “Lucifer,” Satan’s name when he was the brightest angel in Heaven. Lucille smiles “impishly” and she has quite an ego (she insists she can pilot two robots at once). She’s also the Lunar Commander; unlike Satan, self-appointed leader of the rebellious angels, she is promoted to her position by virtue of her leadership skills and proficiency on the battlefield. Rather than waging war against God with a cannon, Lucille will ally herself with Akayama to defeat the Hurricane in a giant robot.

These relations to Paradise Lost are largely coincidental. When I wrote my exploratory draft I just wanted to hit as many religious notes as possible, and I only considered Paradise Lost later. As I rewrite, I can keep Milton’s epic in mind with intention to emphasize parallels.

I hope, by the end, to present a message about wrath. Milton’s God damns Satan to Hell (twice, if I recall correctly). On the other hand, Akayama won’t rest until she salvages the pilots of the Hurricane from the fate she built for them. While she despises the Hurricane itself, she has only mercy for the constituent parts of its consciousness. Infinite wrath can only be tempered with infinite mercy. Anything which calls itself God had better have both.

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In J3: LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration, S2 E13 DanJay and Bob watch an episode of a giant space-robot anime. I know I promised to talk about Paradise Lost the next time we we saw LLS-TA, but I lied again. I want to talk about flashbacks.

A flashback is an interlude in which the audience sees something which happened chronologically prior. There are two kinds: flashbacks which introduce new information, and flashbacks which remind the audience of old information.

Flashbacks of the first kind are sometimes considered marks of poor storytelling. How many times have you rolled your eyes at a story for introducing yet another cookie-cutter character with a tragic backstory? Still, TV shows like LOST use these flashbacks to produce intrigue. These flashbacks can add new dimension to otherwise flat characters—anyone who’s watched the latest season of Bojack Horseman can attest.

Movie-goers seem to love flashbacks of the second kind, in which the audience is reminded of important details as they become relevant. When a detective realizes the connection between two clues, they might have a flashback to the scenes in which the clues were introduced. Fitting puzzle-pieces can give the audience a cerebral catharsis. If everyone sees the twist coming, though, the flashbacks will just garner another eye-roll.

In Akayama DanJay I try to avoid flashbacks by providing the reader will all the information through the protagonist DanJay. DanJay’s double-life lets him learn about characters and plot elements in a roughly sensible order, and he happens to meet exactly the right people to tell him stories. Jango tells Jay a story about his childhood, which isn’t quite a traditional flashback in the sense that the reader is learning about information alongside Jay instead of in a free-floating narrative interlude. DanJay anchors the reader in the present.

This week’s episode of LLS-TA pulls a similar shtick. Lucille learns the truth about the Hurricane and her parents’ deaths from a recording made by Professor Akayama. In the next section, Dan will note that people who watched the first season of LLS-TA already knew the twist; Lucille sees it for the first time, but the audience just sees the same thing again. Jay will say it has more impact the second time because the audience must await Lucille’s reaction to something they know will hurt her.

The readers of Akayama DanJay are like Bob. They had not seen the death of Commander Bojack and Princess Lucia until now, and they did not know the Hurricane’s origin. So I’ve cheated again by having a flashback which isn’t a flashback. It’s not quite a flashback in LLS-TA because the event is re-contextualized for the audience by Lucille’s presence. It’s not quite a flashback in Akayama DanJay because the reader is seeing these events alongside Bob in the narrative present.

By presenting flashbacks in this manner, I hope the reader is constantly learning something new and perceives time as constantly moving forward. When they read a ‘flashback’ they don’t feel like the narrative is on hold. I can give the reader whole chapters which are technically flashbacks, and the time spent in the chronological past impacts the narrative present simultaneously.

If my technique isn’t working—if all the flashbacks Jay witnesses by proxy are boring and a waste of time—then the next chapter is going to be a slog. Next week we’ve got a very special guest.

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In E3: In-Flight Entertainment Jay watches another episode of LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration to avoid conversation with an obnoxious man on an airplane. I know I promised to discuss Paradise Lost the next time we watched anime, but I lied. Paradise Lost comes later. For now, let’s talk about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. (Spoiler alert.)

JJBA is a long-running manga by Hirohiko Araki, now being adapted into an anime you can watch for free on CrunchyRoll. It follows a series of people all nicknamed JoJo beginning in Victorian England with Jonathan Joestar, then his grandson, then his grandson’s grandson, then his grandson’s illegitimate son, and so on through the family tree. It’s worth watching a few episodes just to see how weird it gets; the first episode is an over-the-top period-piece slice-of-life until Jonathan starts fighting the undead. Eventually people are punching each other with ghosts. Punchy-ghosts.

The reason I want to evoke JJBA is its generational story. Each JoJo lives in a new time period, in a new location, has a new personality, and uses new powers to fight evil:

Jonathan is an enormous bull of a man whose golden heart never steers him wrong, but the vampire DIO kills him. DIO fades into the background and his influence is felt through the decades.

Jonathan’s grandson Joseph masters as a child the power Jonathan did not know until he was a man. Joseph takes up the mantle fighting vampires and worse. He’s my favorite JoJo.

Joseph’s grandson Jotaro Kujo destroys DIO once and for all, punching with his punchy-ghost. Even then, DIO’s actions force further generations of the Joestar line to dedicate their lives to fighting evil.

The fourth JoJo, Josuke, must rid his town of powerful artifacts left by DIO, punching with his own punchy-ghost who can also heal things.

There are more, but you get the point. Each JoJo defeats enemies their ancestors could not have fought.

So, too, will Lucille fight the cosmic horror which killed her parents. Princess Lucia had Jonathan Joestar’s pure-heartedness and drive. Commander Bojack had Joseph’s cocky attitude in the face of danger. Their daughter Lucille will have Jotaro’s unyielding doggedness and propensity for shouting. She is the third, the one who gets shit done.

‘Generational improvement to destroy ancient sin’ is a central theme in Akayama DanJay, even outside the anime segues. When Dan is obliterated trying to take down Anihilato, he’s reincarnated as Jay and surpasses his previous life in spine and spleen. (JayJay, LuLu’s, JoJo’s—I’m being fairly blunt with my references.)

This idea of constant improvement in the face of insurmountable obstacles reminds me of another anime we’ve discussed, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. In TTGL, the heroes fight larger and larger robots using giant drills and become larger themselves with each victory. Their idea of a drill advancing through hardship with each revolution mirrors the Joestar lineage’s refinement each generation. (Arguably ‘increasing potential’ is a common theme in most anime and indeed most stories in general, but I’m trying to justify the dorkiness of my story, okay?)

In Akayama DanJay, I hope showing improvement with iteration contributes to a feeling of grandiose spectacle. Every time a character fails and falls, they stand up stronger. Dan dies, and Jay will be a master of death. Lucia and Bojack were killed by the Hurricane, and Lucille will see its reckoning. Eventually the characters will succeed so spectacularly we’ll wonder if there was ever any doubt. Someday a generation will exist who can cleanse us of the sins of the past.

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I write these commentaries because I feel like authors are too tight-lipped about their process. Lots of authors will talk about basic plot structure, but rarely do I see anyone discuss why they decided to include certain images, themes, or allegories. It’s a hidden process, like sausage-making. Well, I’m proud of what’s in my sausage, even dorky ingredients like JJBA.

Akayama DanJay is an eclectic bag of references. We’ve already discussed Dante’s Inferno and giant-robot-anime, and now I’m waxing on about JJBA while promising Paradise Lost. Outside some generally superficial Christian symbolism in anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Death Note, there’s not a lot of overlap between the media I’m mixing. Why did I decide to combine these ideas?

Well, when I wrote the first draft of this story, the ‘exploratory’ draft, I just wrote what I wanted and got The Inferno with giant robots. That’s a good way to start any project: do something fun. You’ll never regret the practice. I scrapped that draft and started again, this time focused on the meaning I wanted to convey. I didn’t start with a theme; I blindly wandered my way from one cool moment to another. The theme only revealed itself when I considered the references I made in hindsight. Once you have your theme, your book writes itself.

Dante’s Inferno is about guilt. Dante Alighieri emphasizes to no end that the damned are punished by their own conscience. After touring Hell, Dante finally ‘recognizes his own sin’ as any good God-fearing Christian must. He purifies himself through the rest of The Divine Comedy in Purgatory and Heaven.

Likewise, TTGL is all about refining the soul. Sure the characters slam their robots together to punch Space-Satan, but that’s not what it’s really about. The characters begin underground (hell) and stage their final battle in the sky (heaven), by means of a drill (purgatory). To escape the shackles of earth, Simon copes with the limitations of his own humanity by fighting robots who represent the spiral of DNA and allying himself with human reason, the Spiral King Lord Genome, a la Dante’s Virgil. The Spiral King eventually sacrifices his physical form to give Simon a cosmic drill, just as Virgil is barred from the kingdom of Heaven. Their final robot is made totally out of spiral energy, the manifestation of their outrageous determination. Simon is lead to victory against the anti-spirals by his lover Nia, just as Dante is accompanied by Beatrice through God’s Kingdom. Symbolically and almost literally, TTGL is about the same soul-purification as Dante’s Divine Comedy. Only by knowing themselves can the protagonists achieve the ultimate attainment.

JJBA starts with a power called hamon, which Jonathan controls by focusing on his breath. The power visually parallels TTGL‘s spiral energy while tying the series to real-world religious practices (Jonathan learns of hamon from a man who learned it in India, one hot-spot for breathing-oriented spirituality). Jotaro’s arc introduces the stand (punchy-ghost), a hamon-emanation which fights alongside its user. This reminds me of both the final form of the robot Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (a human figure formed by effort) and the supposedly Tibetan practice of making tulpas or thought forms, physical manifestations of one’s essence. Recent arcs of JJBA involve another power called spin, which relates the series to TTGL‘s revolving soul-drill and Dante’s endlessly winding afterlife.

Akayama DanJay has made tribute to each of these literary parents. Dan tours the afterlife seeking Beatrice, guided by Virgil Blue and Faith. The Zephyrs are giant robots powered by spinning engines which can be combined for battle with TTGL-style shouting. And rising from the ashes of past failure, JayJay and Lucille will rout the enemies of the past.

Next week, I play with fire. Keep eating your worms!

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In B4: LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration, S1, E12, Princess Lucia proves her giant robot skills and we finally meet Akayama, completing the title trifecta. Here I show my dorky plumage. I’ve studied Japanese for years and studied in Tokyo for six months in 2015, and while I don’t watch a whole lot of anime, no one can hate giant robots.

Giant robots, or mecha, have been a staple of Japanese animation since the 50s. The first was Gigantor, known in Japan as Tetsujin 28-go. Franchises like Getter Robo (the first combining robots!) and Gundam have long-term, widespread popularity. There are deep cultural reasons for the popularity of the genre in Japan, but it’s infectious: American movies like Pacific Rim are love letters to mecha and giant-monster movies, a related genre. So I hope it’s not too “cultural-appropriation”-y if I mix giant robots into my Divine Comedy allegory.

Akayama DanJay contains LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration, which will draw from Gurren Lagann (which itself borrows from other giants of the genre). Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, or “Heaven-Piercing Red Face,” is a popular 27-episode giant-robot anime made by Studio Gainax in 2007. Spoiler alert: it’s rad. The main character Simon starts as a mopey digger in an underground cavern and eventually pilots a robot larger than the observable universe in a fight against another, bigger robot. You will never need another over-the-top anime; TTGL is famous for walking the line between ridiculously cool and just ridiculous.

Simon uses a drill to dig and his robot Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann fires a giant drill at the evil Anti-Spiral. That’s why I want Akayama DanJay to tie TTGL to the Divine Comedy. Purgatory is a giant drill, literally piercing the heavens! Look at this:

I could see Simon shooting that thing at the Anti-Spirals. That’s a great image—one worth building a book around.

To make LLSTA ring true I’ll need to carefully handle the tropes of the genre. Besides the obviously necessary giant robot, the Zephyr, the cast contains Japanese names like Akayama and Daisuke next to English names like Lucia and Bojack (just like TTGL contains both Kamina and Simon). Interesting hair colors abound (gotta have blue hair). The story reflects the importance of teamwork, a common theme in anime of all genres. Bojack is a lot like Kamina from TTGL in that his spiky, flame-like sunglasses and rambunctious teenage attitude don’t quite mesh with his position as a high-ranking space-robot pilot. Lucia, the inexperienced but talented Princess, echoes Simon, while her firing the “Super Heart Beam” brings to mind the idea of a magical-girl anime, another popular genre. The superficial characteristics of LLSTA borrow from the lexicon of TTGL and other anime.

When we play these traits straight the odd bits stick out. Why doesn’t the Zephyr have legs? It must look like a genie, or djinni, shooting steam out its hips. That’s cool, but it seems incomplete. By the end of the book the Zephyr will have legs, contributing to the images of improvement and growth. Of course, before then it will be reduced to just a head…

We won’t watch another episode for a while, but before the book ends we’ll see a lot more LLSTA. 

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