Escapism and Narrative Complexity: Being the First in An Attempt to Defend Serious Analysis of Popular Works

Recently, while spelunking down some time-wasting cavern of Internet articles, I stumbled across a 2014 article on Slate called “Against YA” by Ruth Graham, a “regular Slate contributor” who lives in New Hampshire. (This is on the article, set aside in a little box along with her photograph. I’m not really sure why. If all my blogs included a little box that said I live in California, it would make sense, because then you’d know you could just dismiss all my weird views as more California crazy-talk. But all “lives in New Hampshire” says to me is “gets way more visits from Presidential primary candidates than I do”.)

Graham argues against the now-trendy idea that it’s okay for adults to read and love young adult novels. “Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children,” Graham writes. She goes out of her way to mention that it’s fine for teenagers to read these books, but she finds it shameful for adults to be turning to them instead of to something more painfully literary. I can’t really name names; Graham doesn’t, and I don’t keep up with contemporary literary fiction at all, which probably tells you something about where I fall in this argument, alongside the fact that I write a blog devoted to exegeses of superhero films and perversely sexual animated shows from Japan. There are three subtleties to the previous sentence to keep in mind as signposts marking out the fuzzy boundaries of my feelings on this issue. The first: contemporary literary fiction. The second: exegeses. The third: modern mythological masterpieces and artistic works offering insight into the culture of today’s third-largest economic power. Okay, that’s not what I said, but it highlights what a flip-flopper I am on this issue.

After setting out the problem, Graham spends the first part of her argument talking about how she didn’t cry at The Fault in Our Stars, and even found herself groaning a few times at its sappy dialogue and characters, because she’s an adult. But visceral reactions like that are a matter of taste, and arguing over taste is entirely unproductive, especially when you’re arguing with unsophisticated readers who might not be able to articulate why they like something, but will feel attacked on a personal level if you insult it like this. (Guess how I know this. Yup, there are lots of unsophisticated “readers” in the world of sexually perverse animated shows from Japan.) The more interesting part comes later, when she starts building a logical case for the shame adults should feel reading YA novels, saying that “the enjoyment of reading [YA] has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia” and that “the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction”. YA fiction is oversimplified, Graham argues. It presents an unreal picture of the world that adults should know to reject as too easy, too childish. Instead they’re embracing the books that present this simplistic worldview, and, Graham fears, ignoring stories where they could find “satisfaction of a more intricate kind in stories that confound and discomfit, and in reading about people with whom they can’t empathize at all.”

The pseudo-literate keyboard poundings which follow are not exactly a rebuttal to Graham, because I don’t entirely disagree with Graham. But I do think her argument takes a lot of fundamental assumptions on faith, and said following pseudo-literate keyboard poundings are my attempt to lay out these fundamental assumptions and explain whether I find them to hold or not, with reasons.

Every text is good, every text is great...

There is no such thing as a text you should feel ashamed of reading.

I have a philosophy. Like all great philosophies, I invented it to justify some decision I’d already made based on gut feeling. I’ve enjoyed fantasy, superheroes, Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and anime since I was young. When I became old enough to grow out of them, I did what lots of people my age did, and chose not to. To justify my decision not to grow out of these things, I adopted the philosophy that every text is good, every text is great, and if a text is wasted, Dr. Johnson gets quite irate. All texts are equal. All texts are worthy of literary analysis. We can learn something from every text. If you find a text that you can’t learn anything from, either you haven’t adopted the right perspective, you aren’t looking hard enough, or you’re letting your feelings cloud your analysis. (I’m using “text” here in the literary criticism sense. A “text” might be something other than words printed on a page. It might be a song, a film, a comic book, a cave painting, a magazine advertisement, a perversely sexual animated show from Japan. In literary criticism, “text” basically means “object of analysis”.)

Sometimes, to learn something from a text, you have to look behind the text. Sometimes you have to look multiple levels behind the text. Star Wars doesn’t teach us much at a textual level, nor does looking behind the text to its author, George Lucas. But if you look multiple levels behind the text to the way it connects to people on an emotional level, and even further behind it to what Star Wars and its popularity say about American culture and society in 1977, you can indeed learn something from it. Luke Skywalker’s plot arc, for instance, is the most American thing ever, even though it takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far far away: a young man who grows up on a farm in the middle of nowhere leaves to fight an evil empire, gains power and privilege due to his special talents, and eventually attains moral superiority over his foes, which allows him to militarily overcome them despite their overwhelming power. What’s more American than that? All it needs is some apple pie and a white picket fence. Star Wars is a real hard-case, too. It’s unusual in its determination to make sure you can’t learn anything from it.

This philosophy isn’t original to me. It’s in line with schools of critical thought made up by real literary critics who know things about literature and weren’t just trying to make themselves feel better about being man-children who won’t grow up and start praising Manchester by the Sea. In modern universities, you’ll find people who make serious study of comic books and science fiction, and probably also YA novels. I’ve read a Master’s thesis on the depiction of evil in the works of Stephen King. I’m sure someone out there has written a dissertation on The Fault in Our Stars, despite the fact that it made Ruth Graham say “Oh brother”. Should these people feel ashamed of themselves? Maybe they should. Personally, I think they should, but not because of comic books or The Fault in Our Stars. They should feel ashamed of themselves because they get paid by a university to sit around and read books and make up elaborate theories about them, instead of doing something useful for society, like prospecting for oil, or selling credit default swaps, or coding up cat picture blogs and fake news delivery systems in an open plan office while guzzling free soda. Seriously, guys, get a real job! (Unless you’re willing to hire me to read books and make up elaborate theories about them with you. Then you guys are great, I love you, you’re the salt of the earth, real paragons of society.)

Because every text, in theory, can teach us something, there’s no reason we should feel ashamed for choosing to learn from one text over another. Labels like “YA” and “literary fiction” are for marketing. They don’t tell us much about what we can learn from a text; they’re designed to tell people whether they’re likely to enjoy this book if they buy it. People also read for aesthetic pleasure, of course, but which texts give you aesthetic pleasure is a matter of taste. There’s nothing stopping us telling someone that their taste is wrong, but it won’t sit right with me to do it unless we’ve got a better reason than “Because it’s not my taste”, which is where arguments of taste usually end up. Later on, I want to try to develop an argument why certain tastes are wrong, but we’ll table that for now and talk about a caveat of another sort to my philosophy.

...But some texts are more equal than others...

So if every text is good, every text is great, then all texts are equal, right? That means it doesn’t matter what we consume. All texts are equal, so all of them are equally good.

That’s what I used to think. But it’s not exactly true. All texts are worthy of study, but some are more worthy than others. Some will reward your close study more than others. The best texts, the worthiest of analysis, are multi-layered. They have a surface story which can be enjoyed as pure entertainment, but a closer look will reveal an interesting substructure of ideas, symbols, influences, and commentary. It doesn’t matter what genre, audience, or time period you look at: some texts have more to teach us than others. This is presumably what separates Ruth Graham’s “very literary novel Submergence”, or the other “adult” writers she mentions such as John Updike, Alice Munro, Charles Dickens, and Edith Wharton, from writers like Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel, who specialize in airport bookstore potboilers. This latter group of writers writes for adults just as much as Alice Munro and John Updike do, but their books tend to be pure escapism, meant to occupy an adult’s mind while sitting on a plane or on a beach or by a poolside. As such, the stories, characters, and language are straightforward and not particularly multi-layered.

Even among anime, there are some that reward close scrutiny more than others. Shows like Dragon Ball and Yu Yu Hakusho are fun, but there’s nothing below the surface. The characters even tell us their motivations in long monologues during the middle of a fight, just in case we were thinking of trying to figure something out for ourselves. You can try to analyze them, but they’re hard-cases like Star Wars: they bring out all the subtext and parade it in the open, so there’s nothing left to discover. One Piece is similar, but even it plays with its genre in some interesting ways that give it a little more to explore. Card Captor Sakura is a fun series with likable characters, but Madoka rewards close scrutiny more richly. It plays with and subverts its genre just like Card Captor Sakura does, but directly and indirectly touches on bigger, more fascinating ideas, while also having an exciting surface story to enjoy. And I hope I don’t need to explain how Evangelion yields a tenfold return on whatever energy you invest into trying to understand it, only payable after ten viewings. If you’re not seeing it, check out the three-part tear I went on about Eva back in 2012, which was honestly pretty superficial for an analysis of Eva; I wrote it when I was just starting to figure this stuff out, and nowadays it reads like Baby’s First Literary Analysis. (I’ve moved up to I’m a Big Kid Now Literary Analysis by Fisher-Price.) I even got a pretty good harangue out of Ore Imo, which illustrates both sides of my point: Ore Imo was obviously a richer ground for analysis than a lot of other anime I’ve seen, but there’s nothing about it that suggests it would be, so I never would have realized this if not for the principle that every text is good, every text is great.

...And there’s more at stake here than pleasure

If this were all just a matter of taste, if it were all just about what gives people aesthetic pleasure, then I would join the YA fans of the world in dismissing Graham as a stodgy old geezer bent on imposing her ideas of quality on others in a desperate bid to stay relevant. The thought had crossed my mind anyway, as you can probably tell by how easily I came up with the specific obloquy. But she does have a point.

Every text is equal, but some are more equal than others. Some are more complex, more subtle, constructed with more care, woven through with more sophisticated ideas, more provocative commentary, better at putting readers into an unfamiliar place, letting them walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. When I was a kid, the buzzword was that books can use your imagination to take you to faraway places and times, to show you incredible new things, let you have amazing new experiences. It’s true, they can, but they don’t all do it equally well.

Travel is supposed to broaden your horizons, but imagine you go to France, stay at a hotel where everyone speaks English, look at the Eiffel Tower, eat at McDonald’s, and then go back to the hotel in the evening to watch Duck Dynasty. You’re not broadening your horizons. You’re doing the same shit you always do, but in another country. It’s the same with texts. If you always read the same kind of shallow texts, whether those are YA novels or potboilers about spies or perverted Japanese cartoons about cute girls (urgh, that one hit close to home), you’re not letting your imagination transport you to a faraway place or experiencing incredible new things. You’re doing the same shit you always do, but in a different text.

Is that wrong? I wouldn’t go that far. You’re not a bad person for always sticking with the same kind of shallow texts, and always reaping the same kind of shallow harvest. But you’re not the best person you could be. You’re selling yourself short by not trying to grapple with more complex narratives. We all understand the world through narratives. It’s how we reduce the vastness of nine billion people, of a world of 197 million square miles, an observable universe with two trillion galaxies, deserts, mountains, wolves, snow, blue whales, streptococcus, Liberian child soldiers, quasars, plankton, thermal vents, string theory, into something small and personal enough that we can think about it, analyze it, have an opinion on it. The death of one is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic. Not because people are all unfeeling monsters, but because our minds lack a way of understanding a narrative on that scale. If someone tells me that one million people were slaughtered in a brutal pogrom, I can’t compass the scale of that destruction, and it ultimately means little to me. But tell me a story about a family who hid in a neighbor’s basement for six weeks, until they were finally dragged out, and the mother cut down in front of her husband and young son, and the horror of that pogrom becomes something I can understand and feel. The narrative gives an emotional context to the mass tragedy. It’s the reason stories like Anne Frank or the work of Elie Wiesel or Art Spiegelman’s Maus are so popular: they build personal narratives of the Holocaust that we can all feel and empathize with. A dry recitation of number of deaths at prison camps has no emotional truth without a narrative, whether it’s one told by those who were there or one we bystanders create out of our imaginations.

For your consideration, here’s another philosophy of mine: I believe that there is an objective reality, but no human is capable of perceiving it. Things happen in this world, independently of whether we know about them. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does still make a sound. But as soon as we perceive this objective reality, before it even enters our conscious thoughts, our minds start adding things, embellishing it, filtering it through our own biases. It starts without us even realizing it, and we can’t stop it. Even data, like measurements of radio waves emanating from a distant galaxy, start to take on meaning as soon as we perceive them. Are they coming from a new kind of neutron star or an extraterrestrial intelligence trying to reach out? Which one you leap to depends on how you see the world.

As soon as we perceive objective reality, we start to weave a narrative around it, so we can make sense of it the only way we know how. The more sophisticated we are at understanding narratives, the more sophisticated we are at making them. People who can only understand simple narratives in simple terms will weave simple narratives in simple terms around complex realities. Politicians and ideologues take advantage of this. They reduce difficult, multifaceted issues to the narrative complexity of a GI Joe cartoon: Cobra bad, GI Joe good, go Joe! Many religious leaders take advantage of this. Thousands of years of debate on what certain passages of the Bible mean, complex moral issues, subtleties of theology, all get boiled down to the level of a children’s picture book.

Experience grappling with a complex narrative helps weave a narrative sophisticated enough to encompass the realities we experience, but it also helps us know when to reject someone else’s narrative as too simple. What would you think about a book where a fat kid starts drinking Gatorade every day, becomes a musclebound Adonis without ever lifting a single weight, dumps his bullies in the trash, and hooks up with a hot rich girl who falls in love with him at first sight? Ridiculous, right? Nothing works out that easily in real life. So when a commercial tells us that drinking Gatorade will solve all of our problems, we know it’s not true, because nothing works out that easily in real life. We know this narrative is too simple to explain anything in our experience of reality.

Is escapism tantamount to burying our heads in the sand?

A lot of people nowadays will defend dumb, escapist texts like the Fast and the Furious movies, simplistic narratives without a grain of reality in them. They see narratives as entertainment, a pure matter of taste, and you can’t argue with someone’s taste.

As I argued above, narratives like this still have some value, but they’re definitely on the less equal side of “some texts are more equal than others”. They’re more interesting for what they say about the society that spawned them than for what they themselves say. Does that mean it’s wrong to enjoy them? Are people who enjoy these films hobbling their own ability to understand complex narratives, dooming themselves to believe every ideologue’s ranting?

Let’s go back to what Ruth Graham said about YA novels: “[T]he enjoyment of reading [YA] has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia”. Graham argues that adults should feel ashamed for enjoying escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia instead of finding pleasure in unraveling a complex, ambiguous narrative. This argument assumes that if you seek out those qualities in some of the texts you read, you then only seek out texts with those qualities.

But people can enjoy escapist and nostalgic texts without making those the only kind of text they enjoy. I can eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups every once in a while, and experience a moment of instant gratification and nostalgia, and yet still go out and enjoy the subtly layered flavors of a ratatouille, or the freshness of a spinach and mint salad. The problem isn’t that I eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the problem comes when I eat only Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Graham’s argument also assumes that every such text offers escapism, nostalgia, and instant gratification, and nothing else. But even a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup can be enjoyed from a more adult perspective. As I eat it, I can note how the chocolate has a peculiar graininess to it, unlike the smoothness of more expensive chocolate. The peanut butter has a dry, gritty texture unlike other peanut butters. It’s not exactly good, not by my adult standards, but it’s sweet and it brings back memories of my childhood. It also offers fodder for self-reflection: how much have my tastes changed since I was a child? Have I really gotten more sophisticated, or am I just living on Justin’s peanut butter cups instead of Reese’s? And sometimes, things you enjoyed in your childhood turn out to be more complicated than you expect. I don’t have a good food analogy, but when it comes to books, I read A Wrinkle in Time and its first two sequels again recently, and was amazed at how much deeper and more complex they were than I remembered. Unlike The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit, which stand out in my mind as the other two important works that got me into fantasy and speculative fiction, the Time books directly engage with subtle ideas about morality, growing up, society, and one’s place in the universe, against a backdrop of unique fantasy elements that even start from a soupçon of real science.

So the answer to my rhetorical question from the heading title is, yes, escapism can be tantamount to burying your head in the sand, if you seek out only the lowest common denominator of escapist texts and consciously avoid taking on anything that might challenge you, if you purposefully blind yourself to anything deeper a text might be saying and focus only on its surface elements. And if you fall too deeply into this habit, you might not only stop developing your ability to understand and create complex, layered narratives, you might actually hobble it.

On the other hand, go ahead and eat the occasional peanut butter cup. It’s not going to kill you. You’ll still be able to appreciate that dish of paella.

Iron Fist: A Most Unremarkable Specimen

I’m a huge fan of the Marvel Netflix Universe. Ever since I saw Episode 4 of Season 1 of Daredevil last year, when Wilson Fisk goes from awkwardly courting a sexy art gallery owner to chopping off a Russian gangster’s head in the door of his car, I was entranced.

My opinions on the four shows are pretty widely held. Jessica Jones is my favorite, for the incredible plot, great villain, and the character of Jessica herself, who I love to watch. She’s such a beautiful trainwreck of a human. If you haven’t seen the show, picture Krysten Ritter (you know, the druggie girl from Breaking Bad who was Q’s daughter) playing a self-loathing version of Wolverine. Transplanting that gritty tough guy personality to a woman was brilliant, too; it really makes you think about the way double standards work in media representation. People look at it differently if a grizzled tough guy with a permanent five-o’-clock shadow like Wolverine guzzles alcohol and sleeps around than if a nice-looking young woman like Jessica does, and Jessica lives out the consequences of this in-universe. I loved the character so much that I bought all the collected editions of the Alias comic series where she debuted. Comics Jessica is older, a bit more collected, and slightly more emotionally mature than TV Jessica. Her sarcasm in the comics feels more a product of abiding cynicism than the emotional wreckage and self-loathing that seems to trigger it on TV. We get to see her caring side more often in the comics, the side of her that shows that, as broken and cynical as she is, she does still give a fuck about people. Also, she has an off-again on-again relationship with Ant-Man throughout the run of the comics. This is funny in the MCU context, the idea of Scott Lang, one of the lightest characters in the cinematic universe, in a relationship with Jessica Jones, one of the darkest.

As for the rest, I like Daredevil second best. I prefer Season 1 to Season 2; Season 2 had higher highs, but also lower lows. I liked Luke Cage a lot as a character, but his show suffered for lack of a great villain and some plotting and pacing issues, despite its great style and music. I’m not a fan of hip hop or R&B, but even I thought Luke Cage had a great soundtrack; for the way it brings the viewer into Harlem, it deserves praise.

The interesting thing about the Netflix MCU is that up to this point, the shows were not only beloved by fans but also by mainstream critics, and not in that “Yeah, it’s a shallow, noisy movie, but it’s fun and there are worse things out there you could be sitting through” way that the Marvel films get. All three of the shows until Iron Fist got genuine critical love. Luke Cage and Jessica Jones got the most for the smart ways they handled social themes around being black or female in America today, but Daredevil was also praised for having an exciting, well-crafted story with a great villain. While its social themes weren’t as obvious as Luke Cage or Jessica Jones, I still think Daredevil Season 1 had some nice examination of issues around social class and gentrification, and you could read the fog of mystery around Wilson Fisk as a metaphor for the ability of political actors in the modern day to spend massive amounts of money pushing their ideologies while hidden behind a smoke screen of front corporations, institutes, charities, and think tanks.

The critical love ended with Iron Fist, though. Not one critic I’ve seen had any words of praise at all for it. And I honestly can’t say I blame them. While I don’t think Iron Fist is as bad as it’s often been made out to be, it’s also not really good in any sense. The story is painfully slow moving, the fights are boring and badly staged, and interesting character traits and plot elements are forgotten or thrown aside in favor of uninteresting ones. The whole show has the feeling of a hurriedly made stepping stone on the way to The Defenders, the big Avengers-style crossover between the heroes of the four Netflix shows (which I’m eagerly looking forward to; if you thought Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America had trouble getting along, wait until you get these four people in a room together. I’m predicting a scene where Danny Rand says something stupidly naive and Jessica Jones goes off on him and tells him how it really is, while Luke Cage shakes his head sadly and Matt Murdock looks uncomfortable and impatient).

You can pretty much split the problems with Iron Fist into four categories: the plot, the characters, the action scenes, and the social themes (or lack thereof). Yeah, that’s all the categories. Pretty much nothing in this show actually stands out as amazing, and all the aspects of it have some problems.

The Plot

—is boring and slow as fuck. Granted, it is not the most boring thing I’ve ever watched. I did manage to make it through the entire series. I only made it through one episode of Agents of SHIELD. But “it’s boring, but not the most boring thing ever” is hardly glowing praise.

One big problem with the plot of Iron Fist is that it wanted to be more grounded and gritty, like the other shows, so the writers avoided jumping into crazy kung fu magic right away by starting with a subplot about Danny convincing his childhood friends of who he is and joining his father’s company as a 51% shareholder, then causing a bunch of trouble with his stupid naivete. Naivete is Danny’s core character trait, as Claire even points out in a later episode (yes, she’s in this too). We’ll go into that more in the characters section.

This plot construction means we spend a lot of the early episodes in corporate boardrooms and fancy corner offices with Danny’s childhood friends, Ward and Joy Meachum. Both are decently characterized, though Joy is a little inconsistent. But the early episodes spend so much time with them. By comparison, I just watched the first three episodes of Daredevil again; Foggy and Karen get about fifteen minutes out of two episodes, which is just the right amount for us to get to know them without distracting us from the actual story.

But saying “actual story” implies that there is an actual story, and Iron Fist doesn’t really have an actual story. It does have some actual plot elements, but those on their own would only fill up about four episodes, and they don’t have any kind of meaningful climax. Still, later episodes at least get us out of the goddamn boardroom and out on the streets watching kung fu battles. (This ultimately fails to satisfy, as we’ll see in the action sequences section, but it’s better than watching a bunch of people we don’t care about arguing about corporate governance.)

So, to sum up, pretty much everything that happens in the first four episodes could have been resolved in like five minutes, then we get some decent story, then some more weird, belabored stuff that probably could have been resolved in like twenty minutes, and then a very disappointing finale that really throws into focus how bad the action scenes are.

But the main problem with the plot isn’t how boring or slow it is. The fundamental problem is that we’ve seen this all before. We’ve seen stories about someone who comes back from the dead and has to prove their identity. We’ve seen stories about young, fresh, idealistic guys who come in to a stodgy old company and start turning the way they do things upside down. The show hits all these beats we’ve seen before, and does absolutely nothing new with them. Then it spreads these stale old plot elements that we’ve all seen before over multiple episodes of belabored drama until we all cry out “Enough, we’ve seen this before!” It has the same problem with a lot of the magical kung fu material, but that at least is inherently exciting, unlike uninspired boardroom drama.

The characters

—are really annoying and inconsistent. I’m not one of those people who usually gets angry at fictional characters for doing something stupid or overlooking an obvious solution to their problems, but even I was wincing and going “Geez, Danny, why the hell did you do that?” more times than I’d prefer.

Danny is stupid. There’s no other word for it; he’s just not very smart. I mostly gave him a pass for this because I know he’s being set up as a boyish, naive character to contrast with the three dark, moody, gritty, street-smart loners that will make up the rest of the Defenders. But there were times when his actions defied sense, like when he breaks into Joy’s apartment in Episode 1.

Colleen Wing is probably the most interesting character, but they dropped a fascinating thread from the early episodes, where Danny finds out she’s been participating in underground cage fights and she admits she enjoys the feeling of being out of control and showing off her true skill. Instead, she becomes a sidekick and later girlfriend/sidekick. While her relationship with Danny wasn’t the worst relationship ever put on TV, it didn’t feel quite natural.

Ward Meachum is portrayed as a conniving asshole the entire series, only to have a sudden change of heart and become best friends with Danny towards the end. On the other hand, Joy Meachum was the one on Danny’s side, but she turns against him for poorly motivated reasons in the final episode. Her change of heart is better motivated than Ward’s, but there are still aspects to it that don’t make sense.

I liked seeing Jeri Hogarth, the lawyer from Jessica Jones played by Carrie-Anne Moss, get to show off her better side in this series. She was a very unpleasant person in Jessica Jones, but she was also at an extreme low point in her life, so seeing her be less ruthless in Iron Fist makes her seem more three-dimensional as a character.

I also liked seeing Claire Temple again. She was one of my favorite parts of Luke Cage, and we get a nice Easter egg when she reads a letter Luke wrote to her from prison. She isn’t as important and vital a part of the narrative here as she was in Luke Cage, though. Here she’s kind of another sidekick for Danny. The other annoying thing about her appearance, which is unfair and completely my own problem, is that she kept on dropping hints about all the other heroes she knows, but no one ever thought to try and ask them for help. Luke may be in prison, but Claire also knows Daredevil and Jessica Jones, yet when Danny runs off to fight his way through three deadly martial artists and rescue a girl from the evil bowels of The Hand’s base by himself, no one ever considers calling one of them for help.

The villains in Iron Fist are, if anything, even worse than Luke Cage. Harold Meachum, Ward and Joy’s father, is revealed as the main villain in a shocking twist that was also totally obvious ever since Episode 4. The fight with him in Episode 13 is...ah, I’ll talk about it in the action scenes section, but I think the best word for it is “pathetic”. There’s also Bakuto, who is sort of a less interesting ninja version of Diamondback with a weird voice. And Madame Gao is still going around making trouble. She’s the closest thing to a decent villain we get in Iron Fist, but later in the show she just kind of gives up and lets Danny fight with Bakuto and Harold while watching from the sidelines.

By the way, if there’s one thing that worries me about The Defenders, it’s the villain. Luke Cage and Iron Fist have both had trouble developing convincing villains, and The Hand, who are apparently going to be in play for The Defenders, weren’t amazing villains in Daredevil Season 2 either; they just got by because we had Elektra and The Punisher to distract us, so all we needed was a big army of disposable ninjas for them to plow through. It’s possible that The Defenders will survive with a disappointing villain on the strength of having all four heroes get together, the same way The Avengers and Age of Ultron did. (Yes, I don’t consider Loki a particularly engaging villain. I guess he’s more interesting compared to the villains in other Marvel movies, but that’s not saying much.) But Daredevil Season 1 and Jessica Jones were such strong stories largely because of their villains, and I attribute at least part of the weakness of Iron Fist and the later parts of Luke Cage to the lack of such a villain. I hope The Defenders can aspire higher.

The action sequences

—are not very good.

After I watched the series, I saw some news items indicating that Finn Jones, the actor who plays Danny (and also Ser Loras Tyrell, the gay knight in Game of Thrones) only had about three weeks to get in shape and learn martial arts before filming started, and he would get about fifteen minutes to practice a fight before they started filming. It shows. It really shows.

Sometimes the fights are still pretty good. There was a fight scene in the back of a truck in Episode 5 that was filmed in short, jerky, close-in shots so you couldn’t tell how slow and clumsy the actors actually were. Colleen’s two cage matches in the early episodes are at least competently performed and manage to evoke a genuine sort of tension at times. (Although I find it funny how quick the big, tough guy in the first fight was to jump into the ring with her after all the hooting and booing that the audience was up to. Dude, you’re walking into a lose-lose situation. If you win, you’re a hulking six-foot man who just beat up a five-foot-tall woman. Gee, what a man. And if you lose, you’re a hulking six-foot man who just got beat up by a five-foot-tall woman. Ha, what a loser!) The final battle with Bakuto in the rain is also decent.

Most of the fights, however, are closer to something that would maybe be passable as a dance routine on America’s Got Talent. They would probably get an enthusiastic pass from two of the judges and maybe a weak pass from a third. In Episode 6 we get a three-fight tournament style battle that should have been awesome, but the fights themselves were so underwhelming that it was hard to enjoy. All I could keep thinking of was the last part of the Kyouto story in Rurouni Kenshin, when Shishio invites the heroes to a similar tournament against his three champions, and how much better it was in every way. The second fight wasn’t even a real fight; it was a weird, out of place, clumsy attempt at seduction followed by a woman sticking poisoned acupuncture needles in Danny.

Colleen carried a katana everywhere, but she seemed oddly reluctant to actually cut anyone with it, and it bugged the shit out of me. It reminded me of watching cartoons in the 90’s, when characters would have guns or swords, but they couldn’t actually use them. Gargoyles was one of my favorite shows, but it always bugged the hell out of me that Elisa could never fire her gun and Hudson could never actually use his sword to cut up anyone. Elisa’s gun would always get knocked out of her hands or crushed, and Hudson would seem to forget he even had a sword unless there was a rope he could cut to make something fall from the roof onto his enemies. (Until the battle droids came out; then it was all slicing and stabbing.) Colleen practices the same style of swordsmanship; she mostly just attacks the other person’s weapon and misses perfectly good chances to stab dangerous, gun-wielding enemies, instead choosing to laboriously fight them off with her fists. I understand that they didn’t want Danny or Colleen to kill anyone, but Daredevil never really kills anyone either, yet he is constantly breaking arms and occasionally throws Russian gangsters off of roofs, because that’s what you have to do when you’re in a realistic universe fighting dangerous gun-wielding gangsters with just your fists and a stick. Colleen is a darker character than Danny, and she carries a goddamned katana, so it would have been in-character for her to cut off some limbs, especially in the final battle when she’s fighting a bunch of thugs with guns.

Speaking of the final battle...yeah, it’s bad. Danny and Colleen clumsily fight their way up to the top floor of Rand Enterprises to take on Harold Meachum. Once the guns come out, the only reason they aren’t shot to pieces immediately is that all of Harold’s guards graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship, so even Colleen, who has no superpowers whatsoever, can run through a hail of bullets without being hit, then beat up five guys one-handed. (She does it one-handed because the other hand is holding the sword that she’s not using.) It ends with a one-on-one rooftop fight between Danny and Harold, which is, as I stated above, pathetic. Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist, the defender of K’un-Lun, the first white guy ever to overcome the dragon and gain the power of the Iron Fist, who has spent the entire series telling us at every opportunity that he is, in fact, the Iron Fist, fights one-on-one on equal footing with a company CEO in late middle age who drinks lots of veggie juice. Actually, he gets beaten by a company CEO in late middle age who drinks lots of veggie juice. He isn’t killed only because Ward comes to the roof and shoots Harold.

If Jet Li couldn’t beat an old white guy who drinks juice, I’d call bullshit. Finn Jones is no Jet Li, but his character is supposed to be. And he can’t do it. Not even with supernatural powers. This takes the half-baked, awkward battles of the rest of the show to a whole new level of stupidity.

The social themes

—are not there. There aren’t any. There are a few weak attempts at doing corporate responsibility as a theme, but it’s poorly developed and has no real payoff or conclusion.

Not all good stories have social themes. Breaking Bad has no overt social theme, but it’s a well-made show with a great story and interesting characters, and many critics agreed. I also believe in the power of implicit social themes, ones that you only get by analyzing the context of a story. The Spider-Gwen comics, for instance, are almost indistinguishable in story content from the early Amazing Spider-Man, just transplanted to 2015. But just by doing that, they’re implicitly validating the idea that female superheroes are just as worthy of attention as male superheroes, that they can have all the same admirable qualities and all the same flaws and foibles. I think it’s worthwhile to do stories like that alongside stories like Jessica Jones that hinge more directly on the main character being a woman. Implicit social statements often don’t seem noteworthy twenty years later. No one who watches Star Trek nowadays finds it remarkable that Uhura works on the bridge with all the white men. But it was an important message for people at that time that a black woman could be a professional in a trusted position alongside the white men.

So it’s not like Iron Fist needed to have social themes. Not having them does make it more boring, but it doesn’t irreparably damage the show in my eyes. A lot of critics did castigate the show for its lack of social themes, but I think that came less from an overriding belief that every show needs to have social themes, and more as an easy symbol for the fact that this show offers absolutely nothing new from a storytelling or character perspective. It’s a story about a dumb, naive, heroic, powerful white guy with a simplistic sense of morality fighting against evil ninjas and scheming corporate leaders. It’s Monkey D. Luffy starring in Batman Begins.

Apparently there was a whitewashing controversy over this show. There seems to be a whitewashing controversy over everything nowadays. Sometimes it has merit; nothing against Tilda Swinton, but the reasons given for casting her as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange were, let’s say, reasons that I had a problem with. It doesn’t bother me that they cast Danny Rand white; Danny Rand in the comics was white, and frankly, he’s such a doofus in this show that I’m glad he’s not Asian American. As a quasi Asian American, I don’t want him as the representative of my people in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Colleen Wing in the comics is, as far as I can tell, half white and half Japanese, so casting half white and half Singaporean Chinese Jessica Henwick was a pretty good call. Bakuto’s casting does bother me a bit, though. He’s a ninja with a Japanese-sounding name, but he’s played by Puerto Rican Ramón Rodríguez. If he gave a good performance, it might not bother me, but he doesn’t; he’s a stereotypical villain with cheesy monologues delivered in a weirdly effete voice that’s half 80’s cartoon and half Roger Moore-era Bond villain. Some of this is obviously the writing and direction’s fault, but Rodríguez does nothing to make it better. Meanwhile, two much more menacing villains played by Asian actors, Drunken Fist Guy and Room Full of Weapons Guy, don’t even have names. (Room Full of Weapons Guy first appears in a karaoke room full of people he massacred, which is by far the most competent evil thing anyone does in this show.) Iron Fist’s buddy Davos, apparently a native of the Chinese-themed K’un-Lun, is named after a Swiss city and played by Sacha Dhawan, an actor born in England to Indian Hindu parents. Ethnically, Dhawan was also a somewhat odd choice, but unlike Rodríguez, he does give a good performance, so it doesn’t bother me.

Conclusion

I was pretty hard on Iron Fist in this review, but it’s honestly not completely terrible, more incessantly mediocre. When the plot isn’t being boring, it’s decent at building anticipation, but this anticipation is usually let down by lukewarm plot twists and the terrible action scenes. The characters aren’t badly written and they’re mostly competently acted (except for Bakuto), but there’s nothing new about them. There are no characters like Wilson Fisk, like Jessica Jones, like Kilgrave, like Misty Knight, who completely take over the screen and keep on surprising you with how they develop. Colleen is definitely the most interesting, and she’s the closest to being something different, but none of the interesting parts of her character ever go anywhere: her struggles with money evaporate when Danny buys her building; her exasperated, “don’t get me involved” attitude disappears as soon as Danny buys her a fancy dinner and asks her to help scope out The Hand’s drug shipment; her lust for combat gets forgotten and abandoned around the same time; and her desire to help out the disadvantaged kids in her neighborhood ends up feeding soldiers to The Hand, but she never takes a moment to regret this, instead jumping to make up with Danny and get involved in his pathetic final battle against an old guy who makes juice.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. Good things about Iron Fist. Right. Well, there aren’t many (really any), but there also aren’t any flagrantly terrible things about it. It’s a solid 2.5 out of 5: bland, artistically inoffensive, its major crime infliction of boredom. It only makes the leap to really terrible if you get riled up over its lack of social themes or the whitewashing stuff, but as I said, I don’t really consider Iron Fist whitewashed because Danny Rand was white in the comics, and although they could have reasonably changed him to Asian American, I’m not sorry they didn’t because then the dumbest, blandest hero in the Defenders would also be the Asian one, which does about as much for representation as Challenge of the Superfriends did by adding Apache Chief and Black Vulcan.

The mediocrity of Iron Fist is only noteworthy because it comes on the heels of three amazing shows that I, honestly, enjoy a lot more than the MCU films. Iron Fist feels like one of the films trying to be one of the Netflix shows. It doesn’t take any chances with its story or characters, like the films, which mostly rely on a hero with a big personality surrounded by the same set of standard supporting characters proceeding through one of a few different simple plotlines. But it throws away the things that the films focus on instead—the colors, the quips, the fun, the incredible action scenes, the spectacle—and treats its bland characters and story as if they’re as engaging and challenging as the other Netflix shows’. The previous three shows, despite their imperfections, were incredible, and Iron Fist didn’t live up to any of them on any count. It’s hard not to be disappointed by that.

It’s also unfortunate that Iron Fist might turn out to be required viewing to follow The Defenders when it comes out. Not many plot details have been released about The Defenders, but what has come out suggests that it’ll involve the big hole in the ground that The Hand was digging in Daredevil Season 2, which means The Hand will be the villains, which means things we learn about them in Iron Fist might come into play. Works that take place in a big shared universe have their pros and their cons, and this is one of the cons: sometimes you have to keep up on the mediocre stuff to be able to follow what’s going on in the really good stuff. That’s really the only reason I could recommend that someone watch Iron Fist; it doesn’t gain anything interesting from being in the MCU, and there are better corporate dramas and better kung fu movies about there, so there’s no real reason to watch a show that’s half corporate drama, half kung fu movie, and not particularly good at either.

Hibike! Euphonium 2 and the Disappointment of Missed Potential

Last time, I talked a lot about how Hibike! Euphonium had all this great, deep, subtle characterization and how it avoided using cheap overwrought melodramatic climaxes with the characters yelling and crying and resolving all the teenage angst and silly misunderstandings that had led to this regrettable situation, substituting real emotional buildup and understated drama that sprang naturally from the characters’ personalities.

Then I started watching Series II. Boy, did I feel stupid.

I didn’t hate Series II. It didn’t do a Batman and Robin on Series I. But jeez, those first few episodes were a dark time. I watched Kumiko, the snide, apathetic heroine I’d come to love, become just the sort of yelling, crying, meddling in others’ lives kind of character that every single school life light novel protagonist has been since the Haruhi Suzumiya series began. I understand the writers were trying to show her evolve and realize she loves the euphonium and her friends, but man, did they screw up the landing. Series I had already introduced this interesting, complex idea that Kumiko could love her friends and the euphonium while still remaining her distant self by giving herself over to pride and ambition, like Reina, but instead of continuing with that, they just made her yell and cry a lot. I mean a lot. Kumiko has like eight crying scenes in Series II, two of them in the final episode alone. When Haruka, the club president, cries, I accept it because it’s part of her character. She’s an emotional person. But who knew Kumiko had such an emotional glass jaw?

The first few episodes are definitely the worst in the series (counting both Series I and Series II), because they have another problem: they center on a couple of characters that were just introduced and that I didn’t care about. Mizore, the soft-spoken oboe player, and Nozomi, a mysterious flute player who begs Asuka to let her back in the club after she quit during the apocalyptic event alluded to back in Series I, are the center of the first story arc. This poses a major narrative challenge, because Kumiko doesn’t know either of them until they’re introduced in this story arc and has no solid reason to care about or get involved in their personal lives, but the perspective won’t leave her (presumably because the novels were narrated by her in the first person like most school life light novels), so we can only move Mizore and Nozomi’s plot forward by getting Kumiko involved in their personal lives, which the show does by shoving her into random chance meetings with them and suddenly having her be interested in other people’s personal lives. Where’s the Kumiko who imagined a love triangle between herself, Shuichi, and Hazuki and thought “What a pain”? Who’s this new meddlesome Kumiko who won’t rest until she finds out why Asuka is unfairly withholding her completely unneeded permission for Nozomi to rejoin the club?

Of course, it turns out that Mizore and Nozomi were subtextual yuri lovers and Mizore was hurt when Nozomi left the club without consulting her. Yuko, the girl who tried to delegitimize Reina’s right to play the trumpet solo so her own subtextual yuri lover Kaori-sempai could play it, has been acting as Mizore’s substitute subtextual yuri lover while Nozomi was out. There’s a big finale where Mizore info-dumps her backstory to Kumiko, who screams and cries, then gives way to Yuko, who also screams and cries and, for extra drama and subtextual yuri, gets on top of Mizore. Then Nozomi comes in, and they both cry and admit how wrong they were, and live happily ever after in subtextual yuri love.

The only thing the Mizore / Nozomi plot contributes to the actual ongoing story about the characters I cared about is the escalating little flashes of Asuka’s cynicism that lead into Asuka’s story arc in the following few episodes. Things pick up in the Asuka story arc. There’s still a lot more yelling and crying, particularly on Kumiko’s part, than I would have liked, but the Asuka arc also brings back some of the things I liked about the first series, like the subtlety, and the complexity, and the characters I cared about. In a tense scene, Asuka’s mother comes in to demand that Taki-sensei eject Asuka from the club so she can focus on her studies, and slaps Asuka when she resists. That’s fairly standard dramatic stuff, although KyouAni’s superb animation really gives us a sense of the force that Asuka gets hit with. But then, Asuka’s mother breaks down into tears and starts begging Asuka for forgiveness. Asuka impassively takes her mother’s arm and escorts her out, apologizing to Taki-sensei. It’s a great scene. In this one scene, we get everything we need to know about Asuka’s mother and their relationship: that she’s emotionally unstable, manipulative, codependent, and borderline abusive, and that Asuka has developed her cynicism and disinterest as a defensive response to allow her to keep loving the only family she has even in the face of such outbursts. Best of all, no one ever tells us this. There’s no narration that explains it all. There is an info dump later when Asuka invites Kumiko over to help her study so they can talk, but she only lightly touches on her relationship with her mother. However, when we hear that Asuka’s mother refused to let her have any contact with her father, a famous euphonium player, and that the only thing she has of him is the euphonium, book, and CD that he sent her when she was young, it all makes sense based on what we know. And even though we can see that Asuka wants to play her euphonium for her father and get his approval, the indirect way she goes about it—wanting to reach the nationals, where he’s a judge, and play for him in public without actually meeting him one-on-one—also feels characteristic to Asuka.

The final two stories concern Kumiko’s older sister choosing to leave college and go her own way in life, and the club’s final performance at the nationals and the graduation of the third years. These were both good stories overall, but they could have had more impact if Kumiko hadn’t wasted all her yelling and crying on Mizore and Nozomi’s subtextual yuri love reunion, or on Asuka coming back to the club (which was a foregone conclusion at that point, though Kumiko didn’t know it. Asuka even mocks her for yelling and crying about it so much). The story about Kumiko’s sister was actually handled perfectly: there’s no crying and very little yelling, and what yelling there is comes from Kumiko’s parents fighting with her older sister over her decision, which is natural. Over the course of this story, Kumiko realizes that she started playing the euphonium because of her sister, and that she loves it partially because it reminds her of their time together. She manages to persuade her sister to come to her performance at the nationals, and the emotional climax of this plot thread comes after the nationals when Kumiko catches up with her sister and finally makes up with her, telling her that she loves her. Like all the other emotional climaxes in Series II, this could have just as well been played subtly and still had impact because of the emotional backdrop, but like all the other emotional climaxes in Series II, they go the yelling and crying route. Still, it was a good story.

The final storyline is also decent. Much of it is expected, but it throws some nice curveballs while also giving us closure on Asuka’s story. Yuko and Natsuki becoming the president and vice president was kind of lame, though. Neither of them seemed suited for the job; it came off more like they were the only two second years who had appeared (Riko and Goto only appeared like twice in Series II), so they became president and vice president by default. Kumiko’s final scene with Asuka is the one scene where I think a little crying was warranted. If it hadn’t been used like six times in the series before this, it could have been a really effective way to show how important Asuka had become to Kumiko, and offered a final contrast between Kumiko, who has been trying this whole time to get closer to her friends, and Asuka, who seems to make friends easily but value them little. But since by this point Kumiko seems to cry over basically anything, what should be an impactful parting loses some of its strength. If we ignore all the bad stuff from earlier in Series II, though, this conclusion is kind of perfect. It doesn’t neatly wrap up all the plot threads with a nice little bow, but it does give us closure on the story that started back in Series I, and we get to see how Kumiko, Reina, and Asuka have grown in the meantime. (Hazuki and Midori are, sadly, completely forgotten, as they are through the majority of Series II.)

As disappointed as I was with certain aspects of Series II, it does wrap up very nicely from an emotional standpoint. Yes, Midori and Hazuki both disappeared towards the end, but they both got a decent amount of screentime in Series I, so I still felt like I got a good taste of their stories. Certain threads are dangling, which lends the conclusion a certain realism, but it also feels satisfying: everyone has changed or advanced over the course of the story, and we’re left to assume that the characters go on, having their share of victories and defeats, achieving some dreams and outgrowing others, as in real life. If it kept going, it would just shoot itself in the foot as it already started to do by focusing on pointless side characters like Mizore and Nozomi. Since Hibike! Euphonium is based on a light novel series, I never even questioned that the story continued, and almost certainly degraded, in the novels, but to light novel author Ayano Takeda’s further credit, the novels end exactly where the anime does.

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Kumiko’s sudden conversion into the kind of yelling, crying protagonist who usually populates emotional school life tales like this illustrates a problem I’ve been noticing in anime storytelling for a while. The first time I noticed it was probably in the mediocre Haruhi knock-off Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko, known in English as Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl, because the Japanese title translates to Electric Wave Woman and Adolescent Boy, which is a stupid title, because there is no possible way to create a good title containing the phrase “and adolescent boy”. No matter how awesome the rest of your title is, that phrase ruins it. The Empire and Adolescent Boy Strikes Back? Ugh. The Dark and Adolescent Boy Knight Returns? Yeech. Soul and Adolescent Boy Eater? Unless it’s a hentai series about a shotacon succubus, no way.

Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko sets up a potentially interesting story about main character Makoto’s relationship to his cousin, Erio Touwa, who disappeared several months before the story began. She reappeared floating in the sea, crazy from some sort of trauma, and started behaving oddly and raving about aliens. If the show had been willing to go extremely dark with this, there was a wealth of material here to explore, but it didn’t want to do that; it wanted to be a lighthearted pseudo-clever quasi-harem show like Haruhi. Even under that constraint, there was still a ton of potential in this concept. Giving the bothersome yet cute girl who depends on the main character an actual mental illness adds such an interesting dimension to the usual story where he goes along with her crazy schemes just because she’s cute and he’s got nothing better to do. How should he respond to her when she wants to drag him across town after some alien signal that he knows she’s just imagining? Does he go along with her, or try to argue with her that it’s all in her head? Does he ever feel bad for yelling at her when he knows she’s sick and can’t really help it? The show could have done the same kind of slice of life stories it did, but added a whole extra layer to it by showing what it’s like to care for a mentally ill relative and get them through various day-to-day activities that are normally simple. It could have slipped in subtle hints about the trauma she suffered when she disappeared. Since Erio’s mother, Makoto’s aunt, is set up as flighty and unreliable from the beginning, it could have deconstructed the anime trope of wacky, irresponsible parents who leave their kids alone all the time.

Instead, Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko “cures” Erio in an early episode by having Makoto stick her on the front of his bicycle and drive off a cliff. No years of psychotherapy. No slowly confronting the trauma she faced. No realistic depiction of the day-to-day challenges of caring for a mentally ill relative. Instead, Erio gets “cured” (via a method that makes absolutely no sense) and becomes just slightly eccentric, and then we get a bunch of episodes of wacky alien-themed fun and Makoto drooling over two other boring characters who both have secret crushes on him.

What I’m getting at is that Denpa Onna created a situation fertile with storytelling possibilities, a Nile Delta of potentially interesting plot threads and character arcs, but the writers didn’t realize what they had, and they threw it away by using their scenario to tell a safe, conventional sort of story. And that’s something I see in anime far too often: the writers create unique, interesting characters and scenarios, but they don’t quite understand what they have and it gets shoehorned into one of the many conventional narratives of anime. Maybe it’s not even the writers’ fault; maybe it’s editorial mandate. I think a full incest ending of Ore Imo would have been just as stupid as what we got, but it was Tsukasa Fushimi’s vision for the series, if you believe the rumors, and it was destroyed by the editors. Maybe the author of the Denpa Onna light novels actually wanted to take the story in one of those myriad more interesting dimensions, but the editors were afraid it wouldn’t sell and forced it to be Haruhi knock-off #14538. Doesn’t matter in the end; what we get is wasted potential.

Hibike! Euphonium falls into the same trap. It creates the interesting, unique worldviews and personalities of Asuka, Reina, and Kumiko in the first series, but in the second series it shoehorns them into a conventional narrative about trying to confess your love to your teacher or losing Sempai after graduation. It’s a school life / school drama / cute girl show, and it does a pretty good job at that, so it didn’t have to be something completely different, but it would have been nice if, having made these unique characters, it let them conduct their school life drama in a way that suited their unique personalities instead of restraining them to a template. This still happens often enough that I feel this was all intentional, and the writers did know what they had in these characters, and had created it on purpose, unlike other shows where the writers seemed to be blind to the potential they had. But including the generic, conventional Mizore / Nozomi storyline was a huge misstep. It focused on a bunch of characters like Mizore, Nozomi, Yuko, and Natsuki who had never been properly developed to be able to withstand the limelight, which forced the writers to fall back on convention and cliché. But that’s something I could only see in hindsight; as I was watching, for several episodes, I questioned whether I might not just be reading too much into bad and inconsistent writing. It wouldn’t be the first time an anime had done it to me.

However, unlike Denpa Onna, Ore Imo, and some other anime I could mention, Hibike! Euphonium manages to escape from the trap with only minor injuries. Kumiko herself is the main casualty, but even she isn’t completely ruined. She still comports herself well in the story with her sister, and if she becomes a boring sounding board for Asuka’s monologue during the pivotal scene of Asuka’s story, it’s harder to notice because Asuka is shining so brightly. But I was sorely disappointed that it had to turn out this way. Kumiko was such an interesting variation of the “disinterested outsider who learns to become involved with others” that serves as the hero of so many of these more mature light novel-derived school life shows. The part is usually given to a male character, so Kumiko stood out by being a female example, but she also, in Series I, had found her own way to stop being a disinterested outsider, uniting with other people over a passion for music instead of romantic attraction or a generic desire for companionship. In Series II, she takes on a more typically feminine style, with all the yelling and crying, instead of continuing to play the role of a male character as she did in Series I. And she starts meddling in other people’s lives, completely against her previous inclination, on the thinnest of pretenses. True, she finally goes over the edge in supporting Nozomi when she finds out that Nozomi loves the flute so much that she went out and bought one for herself when her middle school didn’t have any. But she only got to this point because she wouldn’t stop inserting herself into the situation, which was completely out of character given how she was.

I don’t know what it is about anime, manga, and light novels that makes for poorly realized executions of an interesting vision. Other media seem to more consistently fail as clichéd garbage or succeed on the strength of ideas, but anime, while definitely replete with clichéd garbage, seems to also have a strangely high number of series with good ideas that fail on execution because the writers are clueless about what to do with those ideas. It’s clearly not impossible to fully realize a vision in these media: Death Note, the Monogatari series, Madoka, and many others start with interesting visions and then do manage to explore those visions enough to bring out the potential. Hibike! Euphonium comes admirably close to doing so. But Denpa Onna, Ore Imo, and so many others miss the mark, and it’s frustrating, because the concepts have such creative possibility and that possibility is squandered. If they were purely by the numbers, their failure wouldn’t vex me so much, but they do have original, interesting ideas, and I hate to see those wasted.

At the end of the day, if you liked Hibike! Euphonium, you’ll probably enjoy Hibike! Euphonium 2. I did enjoy parts of it very much, especially once we were done with the tedious Nozomi / Mizore story. It offers satisfying conclusions for most of the characters we’ve come to love (Hazuki is a notable exception). I just wish they could’ve dumped the filler and stuck to their guns more with the characterization.

Why the Schumacher Batman films are Tim Burton's fault

Recently I re-watched all eight live-action Batman films. (I’m excluding the 1966 Adam West movie because that’s not a Batman film, it’s a sketch from some demented precursor to Saturday Night Live.) I started from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and then, since it’s been years since I saw the Tim Burton films, went back and watched those. The DVD set I bought also included the Schumacher films, so I watched them as well.

I like serious Batman. My first exposure to the character was the 1990’s animated series, which, even when it was unrealistic, was solemn and respected the characters as people. Even ludicrous villains like Clayface and the Mad Hatter had interesting backstories, and the animated series’s backstory for Mr. Freeze was so good that he became a breakout character and got his own direct-to-video film, Batman and Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero. His popularity in the animated series is probably also why Mr. Freeze was chosen as a villain for Batman and Robin, which proceeded to make him into exactly the kind of cartoonish joke he’d never been in the animated series.

I’m telling you this because I’ve found out that there are people who defend the Adam West and Joel Schumacher material, which can only mean they value completely different things about the Batman characters and mythos than I do. If you happen to be one of those people, I’m acknowledging that you exist so I can warn you that I cordially despise the Adam West and Joel Schumacher interpretations of Batman, and the subject of this entire essay will be how Schumacher’s era was a dark day for the Dark Knight, and how we can partially blame Burton for bringing it to pass. You are thus free to stop reading.

The Burton films

The two Burton films, Batman and Batman Returns, are pretty good movies. Ultimately, I prefer the Nolan films, but I have no problem with the Burton movies as Batman films. They inspired the animated series, which I do think went on to be much more interesting than these two films, but the tone and visual style are similar. (I’ll also mention that I like Danny Elfman’s soundtrack to the Burton movies best of all the Batman films.)

Opinion seems to be split on the better of the two. Personally, I prefer Batman, mainly for the tone and writing. It’s more grounded and serious than Batman Returns, and Bruce Wayne gets some good character development in before Jack Nicholson’s Joker starts to steal the film towards the middle. Neither film has very good action sequences. The bat suit in these movies barely lets the actor move, so martial arts action is limited. Michael Keaton can’t even turn his head, so he does a lot of awkward bobbing and ducking to turn himself around. Batman mainly defeats enemies in these movies with gadgets and mysterious super strength that lets him pick them up and throw them around like crash dummies. (On a related note, Michael Keaton’s Batman is around as kill-happy as Ben Affleck’s Batman in Batman v Superman; he seems perfectly willing to mow down his adversaries with machine guns when it’s convenient, and Batman ends with him dropping the Joker to his death.)

The thing about Batman Returns is that it’s not really a Batman movie; it’s a Tim Burton movie about Batman characters. Batman Returns has a very distinctive tone and visual style, in many ways closer to Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands than to Batman. The villains, Danny DeVito’s Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, both unleash a constant stream of themed puns and sexual innuendo. Although their interests conflict, they eventually team up to execute a grandiose, convoluted plan for unclear reasons. Fantasy elements are tossed in without comment: we have no idea why Selina Kyle came back to life after cats licked her, or why she was insane when she came back, or how she got the ability to do backflips and survive being shot or falling from the tenth floor of a building. Other elements feel cartoonish, like Penguin’s army of penguins with missiles on their backs, or his thematically appropriate hideout in the Arctic exhibit of the abandoned Gotham City zoo.

But Batman Returns does still work, for the same reason the animated series works: as crazy and bizarre as it gets, it’s still anchored by its characters’ motivations and backstories. Penguin wants to find out who his parents were, and later wants to join the high society he would have been part of if they hadn’t abandoned him. And Selina is motivated by her desire for revenge against her boss, Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck, who pushed her out a window when she discovered his plan to steal electricity from Gotham and sell it back to them by constructing a fake power plant. But in the background for both villains is a sense of insecurity, Penguin over his grotesque appearance, and Catwoman over her previous life as a doormat; both villains are at least partially overcompensating, lashing out at the world because of personal feelings of inadequacy. As over the top as these characters are, their motives are complex yet understandable and are developed well over the course of the story.

Like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, the movie is kept from being cartoonish by its cynicism and ghoulish sense of humor. When Selina’s boss, corrupt businessman Max Shreck, finds out that she knows about his plan, he kills her with barely a second thought, cracking jokes as he pushes her out the window, then tries to play it off when she comes in to work in the middle of a meeting with Bruce Wayne. Later in the movie, Shreck conceives a plot to recall the current mayor and get the Penguin elected by deploying Penguin’s thugs to sow fear and distrust in the people of Gotham and then playing on the popularity the Penguin gained from a faked rescue of the Mayor’s baby and the subsequent news coverage of his search for his parents’ identities. They nearly succeed until Batman hacks the loudspeakers at a rally and plays back a tape of the Penguin insulting the people of Gotham. (Though we saw in the presidential election of 2016 that that wouldn’t actually work in real life; put it down to a plot contrivance.) In a small way this is actually darker than The Dark Knight; the people of Gotham in Batman Returns are corrupt, stupid, and easily manipulated, whereas The Dark Knight shows two shiploads of people decide independently that they’d rather all die than sacrifice the people on the other ship.

The Schumacher movies

Unfortunately, Batman Returns was too dark and weird for McDonald’s to do Happy Meal toys, so Warner Bros. decided to go in a lighter direction for the next Batman movie. They stuck Joel Schumacher on it, and we ended up with Batman Forever.

The odd thing about Batman Forever is that Schumacher and whoever was writing it didn’t choose to go back to the light and dippy tone of the Adam West show and the older TV cartoons, or even back to the serious but more conventional feel of Burton’s first film. Instead, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin both copy the formula of Batman Returns almost beat for beat, including the bizarre visual style, the sexual innuendo, and even a few dabs of the cynicism, you know, that stuff that Schumacher was supposed to get rid of. They replace Tim Burton’s unique visual style with Joel Schumacher’s unique visual style, replete with neon paint, garish costumes, and architecture inspired by carnival haunted houses, and they get rid of all the character development and backstory that made Batman Returns watchable in spite of how ludicrous some elements of it were.

The Schumacher movies play out like parodies of Batman Returns. Both of them have two major villains, Jim Carrey’s Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face in Batman Forever, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze and Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy in Batman and Robin. In both movies one of the villains (Riddler in Forever and Mr. Freeze in and Robin) have ridiculous, over the top, barely sensible schemes planned to accomplish some foggy goal, and end up working with the other villain to accomplish it. All four villains become cartoonishly insane after some trauma, take on a theme, and change their dialogue to a stream of themed puns, similar to Penguin and Catwoman, but without the insecurity or motives that made them kind of believable.

Both movies mimic the chaotic, overstuffed story structure of Batman Returns as well. Batman Forever sort of tries to have a plot, and it almost succeeds; it at least seems like one event proceeds to the next in a sensible way. The worst part about Batman Forever is Nicole Kidman’s character, Dr. Chase Meridian, a terribly written character who shows up in Gotham already determined to bone Batman, starts a romance with Bruce Wayne after an encounter at her office full of terrible one-liners and second-rate James Bond innuendos, and decides she really wants Bruce instead of Batman before discovering that they’re the same person. Her entire subplot could pretty much have been excised from the movie with no ill effect. It might have even made things better, because all her dialogue was painful to listen to. The second-worst thing about Batman Forever is definitely the scenes between the Riddler and Two-Face. The Riddler is kind of a silly character already, so they could have just barely made him work if they’d stuck to a normal Riddler plot instead of the “TV steals your brain” plot that feels like something out of the 1960s Superfriends cartoon. (In another “homage” to Batman Forever, Edward Nygma kills his supervisor by pushing him out a window, in a near exact copy of the scene where Shreck pushes Selina out the window.) But Two-Face as the ridiculous purple caricature this film makes him doesn’t work in any sense. In fact, the only subplot of Batman Forever that does kind of work is the Robin subplot. Incorporating Robin’s origin into the main story by having his family die in an attempt by Two-Face to make Batman come forward was a good move to keep the plot from getting even more overstuffed, and it worked well. Bruce’s motive for bringing Dick into his house also made sense. I believed in Chris O’Donnell’s performance as the rebellious teenager Robin is supposed to be in this film, and he gets a full, if predictable, character arc when he decides not to get his revenge on Two-Face at the end.

The less said about the plot of Batman and Robin, the better. Utterly nothing it tries to do works. It’s just as overstuffed and overcomplicated as Batman Returns and Batman Forever, but all the subplots are at or below the level of the Chase Meridian plot in Batman Forever. Of all the films, it most closely mirrors the Adam West TV series, but retains the sexual innuendo-laden dialogue of Batman Returns and includes a few dark moments like the human experimentation that produces its version of Bane. Once created, though, there’s nothing dark about Bane himself. He’s just a big dumb Frankenstein creature who works for Poison Ivy. If you dig a little below the surface, Batman and Robin actually has some rather ugly politics. Poison Ivy is a right-wing caricature of an environmental activist, willing to let millions die in her mission to save the plants, and even before she goes insane and becomes a villain she’s running dubious experiments to create hybrid GMO plants with fangs and venom, supposedly to allow them to defend themselves. And while Batman films are hardly known for being feminist, the Schumacher films are even worse in their depiction of women than the Burton or Nolan films. Of course, the whole film is so cartoonishly idiotic that I can’t believe it was actually trying to make a serious political point, so it’s not really worth digging too deep into any of this.

Why did the Schumacher films copy Batman Returns?

Beats me. But I have a theory.

Apparently, Schumacher actually wanted to do a story based on Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, but the studio summarily rejected that idea and dictated to him what the tone and content of the movie should be. You know what other movie is largely based on Batman: Year One? Batman Begins. And it’s incredible. Eh, it’s probably for the best that the studio denied Schumacher.

Then, as now, the studio wanted to maximize profits by marketing to children and producing toys, lunch boxes, and Happy Meal tie-ins. So Year One was out and live-action cartoon was in. (But not a live-action version of The Animated Series.) Once this decision was made, it was up to Schumacher to figure out how to make the movie fit the marketing. Batman Returns, though, had almost worked in this capacity until people started pointing how cynical and full of sexual double entendres it was, so the studio and Schumacher probably went back to Batman Returns and tried to copy its formula and the attendant merchandising potential while excising all the tight-fitting cat suits, evil businessmen, wanton murders by hero and villain alike, and references to the female stimulation potential of Penguin’s flippers.

So why not go back to Batman, which was also a merchandising machine? Because to some people, Batman Returns was actually lighter in tone. Tim Burton is quoted in the Den of Geek article as saying this:

One person would come in and go, ‘This is so much lighter than the first movie.’ And then the next person would come in and go, ‘Oh, this is so much darker than the first movie.’ And it’s like, light and dark are opposites! But it was 50 percent passionately one way and 50 percent the other.”

Both groups of people are right, in a sense. Batman Returns is darker than Batman the same way it’s darker than The Dark Knight: its outlook on the Batman character, society, and people in general is dimmer and much more cynical. But Batman Returns is also lighter than Batman because of cartoonish flourishes like themed puns, duck boats, and an army of penguins with missiles strapped to their backs. Where Batman is closer to the noir roots of the comics, Batman Returns has a silliness to it that becames grotesque under the ugliness of the situation.

So if you want to make a live-action cartoon without straying too far from what’s been proven to attract audiences in the past, it makes sense to copy Batman Returns. There was no guarantee that audiences would actually turn out for a remake of the Adam West TV show. And Batman and Robin, which does hew closer to the Adam West side, tanked at the box office, which finally convinced the Warner Brothers executives to give up on Batman until Nolan came along. (Though they keep on making the same mistakes with the DC properties: see Catwoman, Green Lantern, Suicide Squad.)

In that sense, we have Tim Burton to blame for Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He provided the formula, the inspiration for how to make the Batman films into a live-action cartoon. Of course, with the mediocre run of films he’s had ever since 2001’s Planet of the Apes, culminating with 2016’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and to my knowledge broken only by Sweeney Todd and Big Eyes, perhaps we don’t need to heap any extra blame on Tim Burton.

Re-watch of Hibike! Euphonium Series I

When I started re-watching Hibike! Euphonium in preparation for Series II, I had big plans. I was going to make detailed notes with ten insightful observations for every episode, do a deep dive into character and theme like I did for A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, and create a poetically written critical analysis for this masterpiece of a show. What actually happened is that I only did notes twice, once after Episode 1 and once at the mid-season, after Episode 7. I only made it to seven points on the mid-season notes, and two of them were about how hot Asuka is (god, she is so hot).

As I was forced to admit when I did the mid-season notes, this show is not actually deep enough for that kind of analysis to be necessary or rewarding. But even though I was burned out on anime when I started re-watching this, the show still drew me in with the strength of its animation and characters. When I say Hibike! Euphonium isn’t deep, I don’t mean relative to other anime. It is actually rather deep relative to other anime, which admittedly do not set the bar very high. I mean it’s not terribly deep as a work of fiction in the entire sea of fiction that includes James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, Margaret Atwood, and famed political philosopher Ted Kaczynski. If you’re into slice of life, cute girls doing cute things, iyashikei, drama, or school life even a little, Hibike! Euphonium is well worth seeing. Even if you don’t think Asuka is as hot as I do. I saw it described on Crunchyroll by other viewers as “K-On with the concert band”, but while its style is reminiscent, its goals are vastly different. And if you haven’t seen it, be warned that, as always, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

It’s hard to really say what makes this show so good without summarizing all the character arcs and major scenes and contrasting them with other similar shows. Hibike! Euphonium eschews the bogus situational drama and stereotypical characters that plague a lot of school life anime. (My notes from the first time I watched the series contain a lot of comparisons to Hanayamata, which I’d seen and been disappointed by around the same time.) While the characters have enough of the usual traits to seem familiar, no one fits straight into a mold.

Again, it’s hard to really describe what makes this show so special without examining specific examples, so let’s go through a few. My three favorite characters of the show were Kumiko, Reina, and Asuka (and not just because she’s hot). Kumiko, the main character, actually conforms a bit to a male character archetype: she’s the disinterested outsider who gets drawn into a group that we often see as the main character of light novel-derived harem (e.g. Kyon of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyousuke of Ore Imo, Kodaka of Haganai, Hachiman of Oregairu). But where the guys all capitulate pretty easily to the charms of a cute girl, proving that they weren’t really distinerested, just lonely and a bit cynical, Kumiko actually has a smug apathy to her even when she’s superficially getting involved with her people. Her reaction to realizing she might be involved in a brewing love triangle is priceless: “What a pain”. Even after she capitulates to the charms of a cute girl and becomes emotionally involved later in the series, she retains a smugness to her, a vague sense of self-alienation, due to the particular way that this cute girl charms her.

The cute girl is Reina. It’s interesting that even though she and Kumiko are both girls, the narrative treats Reina with the otherness usually reserved for romantic love interests. It gives their relationship a romantic subtext from the very beginning, which later becomes more explicit. Kumiko said something insensitive to Reina when they were in middle school, and spends the first several episodes being awkward around her, avoiding her, and trying to figure out what to say. Reina eventually resolves this situation without meaning to by casually saying something to Kumiko and absolving her of the burden of clearing the air between them, but their relationship doesn’t really get going until they end up spending a romantic festival night together due to a misunderstanding. Kumiko, trying to get out of spending the festival with her childhood friend Shuichi because she knows that her friend Hazuki has a crush on him and intends to ask him, grabs the first person who passes by, which happens to be Reina, and claims to have plans to spend the festival with her. The two of them end up climbing to the top of a hill and playing their instruments together. During the walk, Reina lays all her cards on the table. She’s noticed that Kumiko is distant, apathetic, distinterested, that she pretends to be normal while holding herself apart from the rest. Reina says she was intrigued by this because she does the same thing in a more obvious way. Reina has devoted herself so fully to becoming a great trumpet player that she has no time for anything else, including politics, humility, or the feelings of others. She inspires Kumiko to do the same and strive as she does to be a great musician, and Kumiko ends up supporting her emotionally through a confrontation with her section leader over who will get to play the trumpet solo in the big competition.

While I liked Asuka and I have high hopes for her full arc in Series II, the real third star of Series I is Kumiko’s friend Hazuki, the bright spot in the whole mess. While Hazuki is energetic and innocent, we also see her down in the dumps, first because she can’t play as well as she wants to and then because of her thwarted crush on Kumiko’s childhood friend Shuichi. The love triangle subplot is subtle and natural, yet also unexpected: no one responds how other anime have trained us to think they should. Kumiko, whose interest in Shuichi is still very much unknown, thinks the whole thing is a huge pain. Shuichi decides that it’s best to be honest and lets Hazuki know very early on that he likes someone else, instead of trying to spare her feelings. Hazuki handles the letdown very maturely; you can tell in the last few episodes, and even more so in the OVA episode focusing on her, that Hazuki hasn’t gotten over him. Yet she is doing her best to move on.

Other supporting characters like Haruka, Kaori, and Yuko have interesting and unexpected arcs fit in around the main sweep of Kumiko and Reina. Even when the subject matter borders on melodramatic, the restraint that the voice actors, animators, and writers show is very effective. A well chosen line, a well drawn expression, or an emotional subtext can cut even deeper than seeing a character cry or yell, and when we do see someone cry it always seems earned and in-character. (Only Haruka’s crying scene in an early episode seems too intemperate, but it also feels in-character for Haruka, and leads to a scene where we learn about Asuka’s darker side that first clues us in to the kind of person Asuka really is.)

I suppose the real revelation here is that characters’ motives and emotions are never simple and obvious like in many anime. No one ever just feels angry or frustrated because of something angry or frustrating. Whenever we get an emotional scene, the character is always feeling three different emotions for five different reasons. Emotions don’t lead neatly to motivations which lead neatly into actions; characters do things that only sort of make sense, in response to emotions they only sort of understand. Kumiko’s description of her newfound desire to strive for greatness, to take one example, is muddled and confusing. That’s because Kumiko is muddled and confused about it. All she knows is that she wants to be like Reina, to “become special”, to try and be the best at playing her euphonium. She can’t really explain why she suddenly feels that way. She can try to get at it, she can cite incidents from her past that contrast it, but she can’t draw a clear line of causation from her talk with Reina to her drive to improve. Characters’ emotions and motivations are complex and subtle.

This emotional payoff, known to some as “the feels”, is the main thing you’ll get out of Hibike! Euphonium. If that sounds boring to you and you’d prefer a show about ninjas shooting magic beams at each other, this probably isn’t your kind of show. If you’d prefer a show about cute girls, they’re here, but don’t expect them to shoot magical clothes-stripping beams at each other.

Winding Back to A Wind in the Door

As dearly as I held A Wrinkle in Time as a child, I had always liked its follow-up, A Wind in the Door, a bit more. And having read Wrinkle again and found it often unsatisfying, the higher quality of Wind is thrown into even sharper contrast. It turns the plot skeleton of Wrinkle, in which a young protagonist is pulled from the troubles of ordinary life into a battle with cosmic forces that reflects those ordinary troubles, into a formula; and it elevates that formula.

The story picks up with Meg and Charles Wallace some time after Wrinkle, and the events of the first book seem to have been forgotten, since they’re never mentioned again. But their father is around, though he spends most of the book on call in Washington and out of the way. Charles Wallace has started school and is bullied by his classmates. Meg, in distress, appeals to the principal, Mr. Jenkins, her old foe, to no effect.

Charles Wallace is also coming down with a mysterious disease related to his mitochondria and their tiny inhabitants, farandolae. (Mitochondria are real; farandolae are an invention.) Mrs. Murry is doing research in this area and trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. One night, the Murry children and Calvin, who’s back and just as irrelevant as ever, are visited by Blajeny, a Teacher, and their fellow student Proginoskes, a cherubim. In the world of Wind, practically everyone is a Teacher and cherubim are a horrific agglomeration of eyes, wings, and claws that can dematerialize or turn into a wind or a flame. (The characters point out that “cherubim” is a plural word but Progo responds “I am practically plural.”) Meg and Progo team up to complete three trials in a battle against the Echthroi, the vaguely menacing creatures alluded to in the first book, whose nature and purpose is made more clear here. Meg and Progo become Namers; when Progo talks about an earlier assignment to Name all the stars, he says that “part of the purpose was to help them each be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job.” Later he says, more plainly, “A Namer has to know who people are, and who they are meant to be.” The Echthroi, then, are un-Namers; they induce their victims to abnegate their own identities, losing their place in creation and dissolving into nothingness, a process known as Xing.

Meg and Progo first Name Mr. Jenkins, picking the true Mr. Jenkins from a pair of Echthros impostors. Then they and Calvin, who randomly appears at this point, meet Sporos, one of Charles Wallace’s farandolae. We find out that farandolae are weird mouse shrimp creatures who take root and become tree-like farae in a process called Deepening. The second trial is to Name Sporos, and convince him to give up his callow youth and Deepen into a fara. Sporos and a group of young farandolae have decided to kill off the farae and their song, a mystical song that rings throughout the universe and is also sung by the stars. Meg, Calvin, Progo, and Mr. Jenkins succeed, but the Echthroi attack and Mr. Jenkins jumps in to rescue Meg. In the third trial, Progo Xes himself to save Meg and Mr. Jenkins from the Echthroi. Charles Wallace is saved from his mysterious disease, and Meg and Calvin are left with the power to kythe, taught to them by Progo, which is basically Windows shared directories but between your minds. Meg and Calvin redeclare their love and decide they aren’t really that torn up over Progo after all.

A Stronger Sense of Conflict

Wind has elements which are poorly developed or abrupt, like Calvin’s sudden and unceremonious appearance in Metron Ariston alongside Meg prior to the descent into Charles’s mitochondria, or really everything to do with Calvin in this book. I think I would have preferred if Calvin never appeared, or only appeared in the opening scene, but made his presence felt through Meg’s thoughts and memories.

Nevertheless, A Wind in the Door arranges its strange cosmic battles of emotion and morality to much greater impact than its predecessor. As I mentioned in my review of Wrinkle, Meg’s first trial, in which she must find it in herself to love Mr. Jenkins, leads to much more growth in Meg than her sudden, easy victory over IT due to her love for Charles Wallace in the first book. Progo even says during the trial “Oh—you love your family. That’s easy.” Most of the “action” is a dialogue between Meg and Progo where Meg insists that she can’t love Mr. Jenkins, and Progo, using the mind-sharing powers of kything, digs into her subconscious memory and finds examples of good things she knows about Mr. Jenkins. This lets her understand him, and choose him from among the two Echthroi.

In the second trial, instead of arguing for good against the immovable evil of IT, Meg, Calvin, Mr. Jenkins, and Progo find themselves arguing with the arrogant and wayward Sporos, who intends to abdicate his place in the universe in order to hang on to the pleasure of his youth. The Echthroi stand against them and encourage Sporos to give in to those urges. If Sporos doesn’t Deepen, Charles Wallac dies. Instead of the aimless debate across a moral and cultural gulf that we saw between IT and the children in Wrinkle, there are actual stakes and an actual win condition to this argument. It’s a central part of the action, instead of a long digression purely to make a point.

A Curious Contradiction

Interconnectedness is a major theme of A Wind in the Door. Stars, among the very largest objects in creation, sing the same universal harmony as the tiny farae that live inside human mitochondria. Every being has a place in creation. To abdicate that place is to abdicate creation, to yield to the nothingness of the Echthroi. But this is the opposite of the message we got in Wrinkle, that conformity was evil, that to struggle against society was noble.

On its face this might seem like a contradiction: why is it evil to conform to the society of Camazotz, and yet also evil for the farandolae not to conform to the inevitabilities of their strange life cycle? But it seems likely that this apparent contradiction is symbolic of Meg growing older, maturing, and grappling with the complexity of the world. In Wrinkle, Meg was a misfit who felt misunderstood and hated by the world, and her adventure on Camazotz reflected that, telling her that it was noble to struggle against an unjust order. But in Wind, Meg has grown up a little. She’s fallen in love with Calvin, and from him has learned to fit in better at school, the society where she currently resides. She’s trying to help Charles Wallace do the same. It takes strength and maturity for Meg to go visit her old enemy, Mr. Jenkins, and humbly ask him to help Charles Wallace, a strength and maturity that Wrinkle Meg didn’t have but that Wind Meg has gained. Charles also accepts rather than rebels; he talks about his struggle as a need to adapt, in a Darwinian sense, and fit in better with his environment, one where first-graders don’t talk about cutting edge biological research or quote Shakespeare.

Camazotz, the cruel society of enforced conformity where the unconventional are tortured and killed, was the world as Meg saw it during her early high school years. The world we see in Wind, of farae and stars, the tiniest things and the largest, singing a song of harmony in a world where everything has its place, is society as Meg sees it now in her later teenage years: still full of mysteries, still uncertain, but a place where she is now able to fit in and has people precious to her, such as Charles Wallace and Calvin, who help define her place in it. Unlike Camazotz, where everyone did the same things in the same way to the horrid rhythm of IT, in this new world, everything is interconnected and all beings have a duty to take up their unique places in creation and serve the greater order, and to do that they must grow, mature, and realize that everything is interwoven. To do otherwise, to refuse to grow up and take one’s place, is to throw off the order of creation; as Progo puts it, “The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.” But later Proginoskes mentions that one individual, no matter how small, can still be important in the vastness of creation. On two occasions, Mr. Jenkins asks why Charles is so important. The first time, Progo replies, “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.” The second time, he answers, “It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe.”

(Digression: I really don’t like the example Proginoskes brings up here, of Charlemagne falling at Roncevaux being an Echthroi victory. I assume this as a reference to the popular belief that Charlemagne was the West’s bulwark against Muslim takeover and without him the Moors would have made further inroads into Europe and possibly wiped out Christianity. Not only is this historically naive, it’s also ethnocentric to assume that all good in the world came from Christian Western Europe and the world would have fallen into darkness otherwise. History would certainly have been very different if the Muslims had had a larger presence in Western Europe, but I have a hard time believing it would have been worse; Christians at the time were hardly spreading peace, love, and enlightenment either. Many profound advancements are credited to the weakening of Christianity with the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment; if anything, these advancements might have come sooner if a stronger Islamic presence meant the Catholic Church had less of a stranglehold on Western Europe. Digression over.)

Creation without a Creator

Wind uses the concept of “Creation” liberally, and speaks of an order to it. When Meg, Calvin, Proginoskes, and Mr. Jenkins first enter the mitochondrion Yadah, the tree-like farae proclaim themselves and the stars the singers, and say, “Our song orders the rhythm of creation.” The rhythm of creation, like the rhythm of IT in Wrinkle, sets the beat for all those who dwell in the universe, from farandolae to stars, cherubim to humans. But unlike the rhythm of IT, to move with the rhythm of creation is to take one’s rightful place in the universe, a beautiful act and a painful duty imposed on all beings. The place of the farandolae is to Deepen into farae and sing with the stars.

But like Wrinkle, Wind stops short of implying a Creator. Even Proginoskes, an “angel”, a singular cherubim based more on the weird creatures of the Old Testament than on the winged men that adorn Christmas decorations, is called “nothing but a deformed emanation of energy” by the Echthroi. If his existence is based on natural laws, he’s less a divine being and more like the powerful energy creatures in Star Trek. We’re left to infer that the Creator is the source of the rhythm of creation that the song of the stars and farae shapes. But the Creator, if one exists, cannot have the same central place in the universe as the Christian god, because “nothing created is the center”, unless L’Engle was using “nothing created” as a loophole, signifying that the Creator was never created and simply was.

The Christian influence instead comes through in the book’s approach to good and evil, and its deterministic view of the universe. The Echthroi, “fallen angels”, are creatures of pure evil who attempt to destroy creation by stopping beings from taking their rightful place in it. Each being has one single rightful place in creation. To accept that place is good, is affirming of creation. To abdicate it is evil, is to deny creation.

Wrinkle, as I pointed out in the previous review, had obvious similarities with C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, but these end with Wind. While there are some similarities between Wind and Perelandra, L’Engle’s book makes its points more subtly, and its ideas are complex and beautiful enough that even an unbeliever can find pleasure in them, whereas Perelandra, to me as a non-Christian reader, felt very caught up in particular moral and doctrinal questions, to an extent where story and action suffered compared to Out of the Silent Planet.

But is it good?

Even terrible books can have lots of ideas, but as I alluded to earlier, when it comes to literary construction, Wind is a better book than Wrinkle. The plot is better put together and the characters are more interesting this time around (even Calvin), but Wind also improves on Wrinkle in smaller ways. The incessant quotes are replaced with meaningful references to literature and history, such as Mr. Jenkins’s comparison of the rebelling farandolae to the power hungry Hitler and Napoleon.

The dialogue, which makes up the majority of the “action” in the book, is kept from getting too heavy with clever puns and double meanings. When the Echthroi invite Sporos to give up creation, they say, “Come with us to naught, to nought.” Proginoskes uses the word “matter” as a verb to mean “assume a material form made of matter”, since he has the ability to be pure energy. Later, when debating with Sporos, Progo tells him that all farandolae are princes, to which Sporos replies contemptuously, “In Name only.” Progo says, “The Name matters”, and Sporos counters, “Only to matter.” And early in the book, when Progo tells Meg there’s a word for what she needs to have to name Mr. Jenkins and gets cagey about saying the word, afraid she’ll misunderstand it, he tells her, “It’s a four-letter word. Aren’t four-letter words considered the bad ones on your planet?” Although the ideas and outward trappings couldn’t be more different, the narrative technique of advancing plot and character through punny dialogue reminds me of Nisio Isin’s Zaregoto and Monogatari books.

Wind came out in 1973, eleven years after Wrinkle. Like its heroine Meg, it’s matured over its predecessor. The story it presents is more nuanced; the ideas it conveys are subtler and harder to grasp; and the way it tells its story is challenging, possibly even too challenging for many adults. It still has flaws, but I enjoyed its plot and characters, especially the sarcastic whinger Proginoskes, and found its message about finding your place in a complicated universe powerful and beautiful. I’m glad I moved on to read it again even after Wrinkle didn’t quite live up to my nostalgic memories, and because I enjoyed Wind, I’ve now moved on to read the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I never did finish as a teenager.