INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 4

 In Part 3 of this essay-series, I asserted that the characters Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne were better defined through their collective statures, as members of the Avengers team, than through whatever individual stature they had accrued in their original stint as the bonded ensemble they comprised in the original "Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp" feature. This statement went in contradiction to the more general rule that when members of either inclusive or semi-inclusive ensembles had sustained their own features, as did other Avengers like Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, then their individual stature was of paramount importance.                                                                                 

 Now, inclusive teams need not always be as expansive as the Avengers, for there have also been inclusive teams where publishers united just two heroes under the same banner. The best-known is that of the GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, but though this pairing became famous, the two heroes not only retained their individual stature from prior to the shared banner, they enjoyed individual serials afterward that added to their stature in both the quantitative and qualitative senses. But with some characters, it's hard to judge whether their individual or collective stature is greater in isolation or in tandem-- and such is the case with Power Man and Iron Fist.                                                                                                     

 As individual features, both Power Man and Iron Fist lasted somewhere between two and three years before both were threatened with cancellation. Aside from a few stories written by Don McGregor, almost all of the Power Man stories are at best just adequate formula, though still better than most of the tales in the oeuvre of the "Giant-Man/Wasp" feature.                                              

Iron Fist's solo career was roughly the same, though the character's title benefited from work by Chris Claremont and John Byrne during their salad days, including the debut of the villainous Saber-Tooth, who eventually became a major X-Men adversary. Presumably the two creators enjoyed Iron Fist enough to pitch the idea of merging his failing book with Power Man's failing book. However, Byrne was gone after the debut issue, and Claremont only stayed a few more issues. However, in issue #56 the title's assistant editor Mary Jo Duffy took over as writer and kept the title going for another three years. Though the title lasted until #125 (1986), my general impression is that the Duffy years made the team most viable and produced the most memorable stories-- although most of these, too, were also just adequate formula, like the stories in the individual titles. I cannot claim, as I did with my examples of Pym and Van Dyne, that the collective stature of Power Man or Iron Fist in their ensemble excelled whatever individual stature they had in their individual-focused features.                                           

   Further, after the original POWER MAN AND IRON FIST was cancelled in 1986, the two characters continued to appear in both solo-featured serials and in revivals of their ensemble. My scant impression is that most of these manifestations were of even less consequence than the most meretricious junk from the earlier runs. However, there is one aspect of the Luke Cage-Danny Rand ensemble that makes their collective status more significant than that of their individual adventures-- and that is the idea of taking these two exemplars of Marvel Comics responding to 1970s cultural trends-- blaxploitation for Cage, martial arts for Rand-- and creating an ensemble in which those cultural aspects played off one another in a salt-and-pepper combination. The "Netflix Marvel" serials built some of their concepts around that ensemble, and while I don't view those tv shows as supervening the comics themselves, they do at least verify that non-comics professionals found the ensemble-idea appealing for their narratives. I suppose I would have to say that the ideal of that combination, even if it has never quite been fully realized by any single story or group of stories, makes me feel that the ensemble of Cage-and-Rand gives both of them more stature collectively than they have ever possessed individually. Unless there are tons of great individual Power Man or Iron Fist stories of which I'm unaware, I would tend to say that they form a bonded ensemble, in contrast to the semi-bonded one seen in the short-lived GREEN LANTERN-GREEN ARROW feature.  

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 I devoted one essay in this series to "external alignment," defined thusly: 'This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.' I then followed it up with another essay, which defined "internal alignment" as "substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos." However, in re-reading my other essays on the topic of "alignment," I see that the essay I wrote just before these two, COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5, also dealt with two forms of alignment, both of which might subsume the external and internal formulations.                                       

  One example I gave of internal alignment was that of the 2014 film NOAH. I remarked that this film took place in the "Noah cosmos," but that it reached into some loosely allied Biblical narratives to flesh out the cinematic storyline: narratives such as the story of Tubal-Cain, which is not directly involved in the tale of Noah. I did not mention that the film also played off of alternate Noah-stories like the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which is probably the movie's source of its "rock-giants." These two borrowings bring me to explore my description of "static alignment" in Part Five of COSMIC ALIGNMENT. In that essay, I used the Joker as an element of the "Batman cosmos" that is always aligned with Batman, no matter how many other "other-universe" characters the Joker may encounter.                                                                                           

Now, there are various narratives, whether stand-alone or serial in nature, that relate fictional stories of archaic myth-characters meeting, even though they never met in archaic stories. The archaic Hercules never met a lot of the Greek figures encountered by, say, the televised Hercules of the LEGENDARY JOURNEYS teleseries, such as the above-seen monster Echidna. But in my view, even the modern-day version of Hercules remains in a static alignment with nearly all Greek mythology, just as the modern-day Noah is in a static alignment with all Biblical mythology. The only way in which the alignment is bent, though not broken, is when an element strongly aligned with another icon-cosmos is imported into a given narrative. The rock-giants of NOAH aren't in the Old Testament text, but they are in the Book of Enoch, so the two iterations of the Deluge Story can blend with no crossover-vibe. But Tubal-Cain, though he's a distant Hebrew ancestor like Noah, properly belongs to the narrative of Cain, and so a static type of crossover ensues.                                       

                           

              

                                       

     The opposite of the "static alignment" was the "dynamic alignment." My main aim in forming this concept was to describe cases in which a particular "Sub" was not firmly bonded to the cosmos in which it first appeared, so that it could successfully migrate into other cosmoses. My examples there were super-villains like Thanos and the Cobra-Hyde team, which did not remain firmly associated with the hero-cosmos in which each originally appeared, to wit, Iron Man for Thanos, Thor for Cobra-Hyde. This also applies to the examples given in the "external alignment" argument: certain elements in a given culture's stories can be seen as dynamic in that they can and do move from one sub-cosmos to another. For example, one may posit that the Greek monsters called "Cyclopes" start out as smith-servants to Zeus, King of the Gods, crafting the heaven-lord's fatal thunderbolts. Arguably later, the poet Homer reworks these traditional figures into a race of cannibalistic giants who live apart from humankind and become menaces within the cosmos of the hero Odysseus.                                                                                                                         

                                                                             This transitive property of certain myth-figures transfers to their entirely fictional (and thus nominative) iterations. Thus Marvel Comics' Thor can meet pretty much any figure within Norse mythology-- say, the fire-god Surtur-- and it doesn't matter that Archaic Thor never crossed paths with Archaic Surtur.  This is the same intertextuality that keeps the NOAH movie's intermingling of elements from both Old Testament and apocryphal sources from meriting the crossover-vibe. The "static crossover" might still be possible if Marvel-Thor is constellated with another major figure of Nordic myth, like Roy Thomas' attempt to meld the legend of Marvel-Thor with that of Seigfried. But there's no intertextuality between Norse myth and Hindu myth, as per my example of Marvel-Thor meeting Marvel-Shiva. Thus, an encounter between any version of Thor and any version of Shiva is a dynamic one and parallels the sort of dynamic crossover one finds whenever a villan with a static default to a particular cosmos interacts with some other cosmos (The Joker hassles Superman, for example).                                                                                   

                                                                                      I felt I should be more specific on this subject also with reference to purely nominative fictional characters who are aligned with archaic mythologies, such as Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman simply encounters a beast from Greek mythology without its "own story," such as the Chimera or the Hydra, then that's not a crossover. But if she meets a character from Greek myth that has been the "star" of his own narrative, such as Heracles, then that's a static crossover-- while if she meets myths or legends from outside the sphere of Greek myth, then that's a dynamic crossover.

MYTHCOMICS: "ROBIN DIES AT DAWN" (BATMAN #156, 1963)

 

There might not be a lot of subjects on which long-time Batman-fans agree, but almost all seem united in despising the Caped Crusader's "alien period" of roughly 1958-1964, largely under the influence of editor Jack Schiff. Schiff, who was not personally a fan of the science fiction genre, didn't rely only upon pitting the hero against weird ETs. I noted in my essay PARADIGM SCHIFF that he also introduced more costumed villains in Batman's post-Code adventures, possibly in order to downplay the Wertham-created stigma of "crime comics." Batman's alien invaders were also probably Schiff's attempt to emulate the financial success of the Superman books under fellow DC editor Mort Weisinger, who increased the frequency of sci-fi elements in the Man of Steel's stories around the same time. However, though Batman had encountered alien threats sporadically during the Golden Age, few if any fans embraced the importation of so many extraterrestrials into a Bat-cosmos that was usually comparatively mundane. Yet one Schiff-story proved the exception to all that fan-hostility.                               

Before launching into the contents of said story, the Bill Finger/Sheldon Moldoff opus ROBIN DIES AT DAWN, I should note that writer Finger almost certainly took inspiration from the debut episode of CBS's TWILIGHT ZONE series, first airing in 1959. The Rod Serling script for the debut story, "Where is Everybody?", depicted a solitary man wandering about a deserted town, freaking out at the total absence of other people while equally concerned at not being able to remember his own identity. The Big Reveal is that the man is an astronaut trainee who has hallucinated his experiences in the empty town after having been confined for many hours to an isolation booth. Finger utilizes the same basic notion of a government experiment, meant to train astronauts in resisting the rigors of loneliness, but takes that basic idea in a direction specific to Batman's mythos.                                                                   

 Like the protagonist of the TWILIGHT ZONE tale, Batman experiences a sudden shift into a world he does not recognize. Unlike the trainee, Batman remembers everything about himself, but he has no clue as to who brought him to this place, or why that entity deprived him of his weapons. As with the other protagonist, everything Batman perceives is a hallucination conjured from his own mind due to being isolated from human contact. But instead of seeing an Earthly world bereft of people, the crusader imagines himself on a night-shrouded alien world, where he encounters only beasts, mutated plants, and one huge symbol of the world's past habitation.   

  Batman finds a deserted city as does the ZONE protagonist, but not only does he find no sentient life, he's attacked by a mutant plant. Unable to free himself, he wishes that his boon companion Robin would render aid, and in marked contrast to the ZONE story, the object of Batman's desire for companionship does materialize and frees the senior hero. The two heroes walk around a bit-- if they compare notes on their respective advents, we don't hear it-- but Batman feels even more acutely the surveillance of some unseen intelligence. The sun dawns, but this only presages a new horror, as the duo stumble across a four-armed idol that comes to life and pursues them.                                                                                         

Unable to fight such a threat, the heroes hope to maneuver the giant into falling into a chasm. It's Robin's idea to provoke the colossus into a rash attack, and the Boy Wonder's ploy succeeds-- but at the cost of his own life. Finger's caption implies the irony that the dawning sun, so often associated with life and human activity, bears witness to Batman's "terrible catastrophe." There had been various Batman stories in which the hero had become enraged when criminals injured or threatened Batman's young partner. But this seems to be the first in which Robin suffers from the fact that Batman called upon his partner for succor-- making it the first time Robin's injury can be seen as directly Batman's fault. There is nothing remotely like this "survivor guilt" in the Rod Serling story.                              

Batman continues to experience the feeling of being watched, and this feeling manifests in a four-footed alien beast with huge eyes that glow yet possess no pupils. It's just when Batman is about to give up on life that the scientists behind the isolation-experiment terminate the hero's torment. As in Serling, the whole test has been to gauge how well even a superb specimen like Batman can cope with the demon of loneliness, all in some dubious service to the space program. But the consequences of the experiment have yet to play out.                                                                                                            

It's while Batman and Robin undertake a nighttime attack upon a band of thieves, the Gorilla Gang that Batman experiences a new hallucination, and in trying to prevent Robin's death a second time, the hero almost kills both of them. 

On yet another night, history repeats itself: this time, Batman re-experiences a sense of sacrificial guilt and almost lets himself be run down by a car he associates with the glow-eyed monster of his nightmare. Now that the psychosis has occurred twice, Batman concludes that he must now hang up his cowl, for he can no longer function in a crimefighting partnership that endangers him, his ward or both of them.                                                                                         

  Ironically, it's these small-timers in the gorilla-suits who make possible Batman's continued career. They capture Robin and send Batman a message that they're going to execute the Boy Wonder at dawn. Batman's mad detective skills show that he can still suss out clues that take him to the gangsters' hideout, and Finger teases readers one last time with the possibility of a Bat-blackout.                     

 But a true threat to Robin's life activates Batman's "reality principle," and provides a shock to his system that permanently erases the effects of the deprivation-test. It can be fairly said, too, that Batman's return to a protective parental status-- where he's the one who does the rescuing of his junior partner--also banishes what may be seen as fears of inadequacy. And so this time, when the sun dawns, it's to banish nightmares, rather than to reveal them.  

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.         

THE READING RHEUM: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1831)

 In this review I'll use the English language title for Victor Hugo's novel rather than the French one. One reason is that the word HUNCHBACK is easier to use as a short form for the title. But I also think it's a better title. Quasimodo is indubitably the novel's central icon, and as important as the 15th-century Parisian setting is, that importance is secondary. Supposedly foreign tourists became more interested in the Notre Dame cathedral after the publication of Hugo's novel. But I'd bet few tourists came to observe the cathedral's architectural wonders, but rather thought about the setting in which the pitiable hunchback came to his sad end.                                                       

In contrast to some 19th-century novels that I have frequently reread, like MOBY DICK and FRANKENSTEIN, I only read HUNCHBACK once before, thirty-forty years ago. I don't remember most of my impressions from the first reading. I had probably seen the classic 1939 movie adaptation and may have heard that it was not entirely faithful to the Hugo novel. I probably didn't know that Esmerelda too meets a terrible fate, and back then, I might have called that end "tragic." But on this reread, I realized that almost everything about the Hugo book is oriented toward the mythos Northrop Frye termed "irony." Esmerelda is the only character who incarnates any potential for good, and that means that she must be sacrificed to the stupidity and venality of 15th-century Paris. Quasimodo's claim to goodness is shakier, but he starts out with all the odds massed against him, so he too is doomed. Of the few characters in HUNCHBACK who prosper, all are utterly unworthy. 

   Often HUNCHBACK has been adapted in other media that obscured the book's ironic mode, focusing on the pathos of Quasimodo rather than his inevitable doom. Some versions also give Esmerelda a "happy ending" with her beloved guardsman Phoebus, one of those worthless characters mentioned above. But I've yet to see a truly ironic version, one that follows the book in depicting the entire society as informed by cruelty and rapacity. Usually all the negative aspects of Quasimodo's world are channeled into the hunchback's father-figure Frollo, who becomes obsessed with the beautiful Esmerelda's physical charms. Ironically, Esmerelda herself is no less captivated by beauty, becoming smitten with Phoebus for his looks (the reference to Apollo is a telling one). Quasimodo may be the one individual, even with his limited mentality, who appreciates Esmerelda as much for her kindness as for her beauty.           

 

Hugo is sometimes linked with the artistic movement called "Romanticism," but I don't think HUNCHBACK is a Romantic novel, as are both MOBY DICK and FRANKENSTEIN. It contains larger-than-life scenes that everyone with a basic education knows, like Quasimodo's public flogging and the mercy shown him by his sort-of victim Esmerelda, and the hunchback's dramatic rescue of Esmerelda from the hangman's noose. But HUNCHBACK also contains reams of incredibly prolix prose, as Hugo burns up space descanting on the foolishness of the Parisians, from the highest to the lowest. Hugo acts as if he thinks he invented satire, with the result that most of the other characters are superficial. HUNCHBACK is one of those rare novels which has become a sort of secular literary myth, at least in the sense that most people have at least a broad knowledge of its contents. Yet Hugo's mythopoeic powers are at odds when his didactic ones. For instance, one of the novel's most mythic moments takes place when one of Hugo's POV characters is victimized by the denizens of The Court of Miracles, possibly the first "city of thieves" in canonical literature. This is a great nightmarish scene, potentially portraying the thief-society as the inversion of normal Parisian existence. But once I saw that "overground" Paris was just as rotten and arbitrary as "underground" Paris, I felt that Hugo was making a very superficial equation between the two. In the end, HUNCHBACK is a classic novel that I can admire in many respects. But because of the conflict I perceive between Hugo's intellectual and imaginative powers, it's not a novel I like.                                                                                                       

Unlike most of the "monsters" who appeared first in 19th-century fiction, Quasimodo is never as imposing a menace as Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster or even Mister Hyde. I still believe he belongs to the domain of the uncanny because his crippled-yet-powerful status is not completely in the naturalistic mode.   
          

CURIOSITIES #45: ALTRUISM ANALYSES

 Since posting this mythcomics essay on one of the stories in Reiji Miyajima's THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN, I've kept monitoring the series. It's not likely to come to a conclusion any time soon, given that Miyajima created five possible romantic subplots for the male hero. The newest installments, Part 44 and 45 (both untitled according to the online translation I read), concerned one of the sisters whose relation to her not-brother Arata has not yet received a lot of attention. This is the "science-nerd" Seiha, on whom I briefly commented in the earlier essay. I've no insight on where Miyajima might be going with this subplot, but I found one page interesting for the following philosophical reflection on altruism.                                                                                                     

The plot-context of Seiha's meditation, conveyed to her rather puzzled brother-in-name-only Arata, is that moments before this conversation, Seiha was assaulted by a couple of punks who thought she'd accrued a slutty reputation due to school-gossip. Hunky brother Arata shows up and chases the punks away, so that all Seiha suffers is some brief manhandling. Arata seems to recover from the experience very quickly, for she immediately launches into a lecture about how "self-sacrifice and self-importance are two sides of the same coin." Is she trying to distance herself from the unpleasant experience? Quite likely, and she qualifies that her general opinion of altruism does not affect her feeling of gratitude to Arata for his intervention. However, given her earlier lecture about the chemical determinism of human biology, clearly these thoughts are not new to her. One might assert that, based on what the artist reveals about Seiha's life, she might be the type who distances herself from all experience in her attempt to take a dispassionate, quasi-scientific view on life.                                                                                         

   So, since Seiha admits that she has been the beneficiary of Shiunji's altruistic action-- an action one assumes he would have taken for any woman, from real sister to perfect stranger-- why veer off into a discussion of how an individual act of "self-sacrifice" is inevitably tied to that individual's sense of "self-importance?" The reader doesn't know, yet. I considered another possibility: that Seiha also might be seeking to de-emphasize any instinctive feminine reaction to her being a defenseless young woman "saved" by an armorless (but maybe not amour-less) knight.  Saying that Arata was motivated in part by his own sense of self-importance perhaps takes away some of the "savior glamor." Her last remarks bring the conversation back to the fact that they're not real siblings, so that his rescue isn't a response to blood ties. But I don't know how seriously to take the idea Miyajima puts in Seiha's mouth: the idea that their non-relation should negate basic altruism, such as defending an imperiled woman whether one knows her or not. Presumably Seiha would say that this form of altruism too would be compromised by the "other side of the coin," though this seems like false rhetoric at this point.                                                                                                 

 I may revisit Miyajima's concept in future posts. For now, I'll note that this short reflection resembles a much more developed line of similar thought in one of Mark Twain's last works, the 1906 essay WHAT IS MAN? I have not read this in twenty years, but at the time I found it massively impressive. This too I may seek to revisit in future posts somewhere down the line.