Suikoden Tierkreis

Yes, the reason I haven't done any of the promised posts on Suikoden 2 is that I haven't reached the section in Suikoden 2 that I've been so looking forward to.

Instead, Suikoden Tierkreis ate my brain.

The reviews say it's not as good as the other Suiko games, and they're right.  This isn't like with Suiko 3, where I looked up and wondered what the heck that everyone was talking about -- where Suiko 1, 2, and 3 are all tied for my "favorite" except when Suiko 2 makes me forget how to breathe.  Suikoden Tierkreis isn't nearly that level.  It's ... pretty, though.  I don't mean in a visual way.  I mean that the rhythm of unlocking new trade goods and then carrying them between towns is quite addictive.  There aren't any super compelling characters (either in a good or bad way), but there's still plenty of interesting puzzle-type combinations of characters, having only four instead of six helps in a very weird way, and there are at least a couple who I really care about.  And there's angst!  Okay, maybe not enough angst to keep me happy (but ... ummm ... that's kind of a tall order).  But there's been something significant to happen that results in a very real amount of grief with a number of characters, and I'm eating it up.  The bad guy is the One True Way, who ... well, it's kind of like all the stereotypes about the Protestant sects of predestination without any of the potential nuggets of truth.  Normally I don't like stereotyped religious characters being the bad guys (actually normally that's the easiest way to get me to quit playing entirely).  But this is different ... I think because the One True Way is so obviously ridiculous it doesn't have anything to do with the real world, and that gives me a villain who isn't the least bit sympathetic, and seeing the results of the ideas in the Way adds more angst.  Oh, and the bit between Chrodechild and Freudegund was my favorite part so far.  Ummm... without spoiling, Freudegund was left behind while Chrodechild escaped and Freudegund thought she was dead, so Freudegund turned to the One True Way for the comfort they do offer and had to be talked back from the Dark Side very dramatically.  Epic scene involved.

Anyway, I'll be back to Suiko 2 when I finish Tierkreis.  Might be a little while longer -- the walkthrough I have isn't in precise chronological order so I don't know where I'm at in terms of plot.

Xena Fandom: Wakaba

Once I was having lunch at Soup or Salad with a friend, and the conversation turned to Wakaba.  I said that it was almost like we had the same needs.  She started to say how maybe that wasn't healthy.  I explained it further.  It was like -- without ever officially saying it -- Wakaba and I had chosen to approach life as a team.  What the world threw at one of us, it threw at both of us.  I gave my friend some specific examples.  When Wakaba forgot her lunch, that became my problem too -- I'd run to the Circle K near her job to get some snacks to bring to her.  When I had family drama with my brother and being so far away and completely helpless, that became Wakaba's problem as much as mine -- well, mostly just to talk to me and tell me it was okay to pass him and my older cousin on the way to the bathroom and stop hiding.  I can't quite explain it.  With her on the other end of the phone line, it was okay to stop hiding.  Forum disputes, practical difficulties both big and small, mutual friends' life issues, heck, even pets ... we didn't face anything as "I" but as "we" when Wakaba was still in my life.  I'll never forget my friend's response.  She gave me one of those gentle penetrating looks she was so good at and said, "that's love -- that's family."

Somehow, that makes it a little more permissible to miss Wakaba as desperately as I do.  Not easier, but at least I'm not doing anything wrong.

Go fulfill your dreams, my friend.  I really hope you're okay.  And that we see each other again one day.

Suikoden Article

I was going through old PS2 magazines for collage material, and look what I found!

Rich Mullins, "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are"

Here are the lyrics to the song itself:

It took the hand of God Almighty to part the waters and the sea
But it only took one little lie to separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
And they say that one day Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky
But I can't even keep these thoughts of you from passing by
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made
Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of selfish rage
And with these our hells and our heavens so few inches apart
We must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are

And the master said that faith was gonna make the mountains move
But me, I tremble like a hill on a faultline just at the thought of how I lost you
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made
Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of selfish rageAnd with these our hells and our heavens so few inches apart
We must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are

And if you make me laugh, I know I can make you like me
'Cause when I laugh, I can be a lot of fun
And when we can't do that, I know that it is frightening
What I don't know is why we can't hold on, can't hold on

It took the hand of God Almighty to part the waters and the sea
But it only took one little lie to separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
Wouldn't you love to walk on the water, just don't stumble on the waves
Me, I want to go there something awful, but to stand there and take some grace
Because oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
No, we are not as strong as we think we are

A little more Elsie musical history here.  There were three songs that made me decide that Rich Mullins was my favorite singer and always would be: "Sometimes By Step," "Hold Me Jesus," and "Growing Young."  Back when all I had was "Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth" and "Brother's Keeper" (on the back shelf, before I fell in love with the album), one song made me decide to buy "Songs," and that was "Hold Me Jesus."  I can't even describe what it was like to hear that song for the first time.  I was a sixteen year old autistic kid with no bridge between the things tearing her apart inside and the real world before the line "hold me Jesus, 'cause I'm shaking like a leaf" built that bridge all by itself.  I heard "Hold Me Jesus" from a friend's compilation album in the summer, and it was winter before I bought "Songs."  And then I skipped all the way to the end just to loop the song I'd bought the album for.  Then I went back to the beginning and started listening.  I didn't like all the songs at first (and that's a pattern with me; my very favorite songs are the ones I skip the first time through).  "We Are Not As Srong As We Think We Are" captured me the very first time, though.  Because it was so slow and pretty, and for the line "I tremble like a hill on a faultline just at the thought of how I lost you."

Those two images became enmeshed with each other in my head, and to "tremble like a hill on a faultline" became the way to express a grief too deep for tears.  The first time I remember specifically using the line was when I said goodbye to my high school friend A.  She'd been a kind of project of mine -- our friendship consisted mostly of me cheering her on at her horse shows and helping her to shovel the stalls, then playing hours of Final Fantasy.  I tried out my ideas of Christian service on her and received my first rebukes at the condescending way I'd been taught to present.  And I think I did love her in a way.  It wasn't with the kind of raw emotional need I've felt later on in my life, but we had a connection.  And I felt sad when I said goodbye to her, knowing it would be the last time.

Here's what Rich had to say about "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are" (link to the full concert below -- well worth listening to):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYN5AyBZhn4&list=PL49BDE2090F22FE67&index=9

I'll do a more recent song because I might remember it better.  It's the closest thing to a love song I've actually written in the last several years, because I don't date anymore so I don't need to write many, y'know, love songs.  Because they never worked very good anyway.  But uh, it always worries me listening to Christian radio occasionally, you get a little worried because if you were really tuned in to that stuff all the time, it would warp you.  I became alarmed at this lack of good breakup songs on Christian radio.  It's as if we were all part of Focus on the Family or something.  We didn't do that.  So, uh, me and Beaker decided to write one.  It's really hilarious because of all this Internet stuff.  I get all these letters from people trying to console me on my divorce.  I'm going geez, I haven't had a date in a decade, how can I get a divorce.  It's not really a personal story, it was just an exercise.  We decided we would try to make it hard for the other guy to rhyme, and that's how we wrote it.  But anyway, they played it on radio, so it must be okay.

Rich had a line in "Afraid of the Dark" that -- paraphrased -- goes, "I am no longer afraid of goodbyes; I have become so accustomed to them that it scares me."  I think I understand that line, for the first time in my entire life. 

Hmm.  Okay.  I was a very strange kid in that I've always -- as long as I can remember -- had this perspective that this life is only a very tiny slice and Eternity is going to be so much bigger and longer and more real.  So by that definition, goodbyes in this life are always temporary.  I've lost some family members along the way.  Never anyone who was extraordinarily close to me.  So I'm not sure how I'll react to real, immediate grief.  But I've always seen death that way ... just a passageway.  Just a door.  Temporary.  We have the great company of the saints who have gone before us around and behind, watching and cheering and praying and being intimately part of our lives.

The most important goodbyes when I was a child was with my cousins.  In general, I was a really lonely kid.  Every summer, my family took a road trip to visit my father's family in one state and my mother's family in another state.  The states weren't close to each other or our home, but involved several days in the car (hence I love songs like Andrew Peterson's "Venus").  We'd typically visit a week or so each place.  I speculated that those two weeks were only times I was truly alive.  I was really close to two of my cousins, one on my dad's side (which was more of a big-sister relationship), and one on my mom's side (which was more of an equals-relationship; I was a year older but I felt like she'd been through more).  This was before cell phones and free long distance.  It was also before I had an email account or was comfortable on the Internet (or used it anywhere besides the school library).  We tried paper letters, but those typically didn't go back and forth more than a couple of times during the year.  The goodbye at the end of the visit was a true goodbye, at least (to my teenaged brain) for an awfully long time.  I'd always console myself that eventually we'd all live in a place where there would be no more goodbyes.

During the very last such visit, my cousin just -- well, had a lot of stuff going on and felt like a bad hostess to me.  I finally forced the issue by saying that I felt like we were growing apart, and she sighed and said she'd give me a hug and walk me back to Grandma's.  I ... I guess kind of stumbled back numbly (I'm not sure what happened those first few hours), and, careful to be quiet, cried myself to sleep.  That kind of pain ... by its very nature has to be temporary.  I get to the point where I can't feel any more than I already do.  It's not that part that I don't understand.  It's the way that it settles into a quiet kind of grief that just stays.  I told myself that friendship was over.  It probably is, at least in this life.  I think by this point she and I have both accumulated too many scars to ever be able to reach across the chasm and connect in any way.  The part that I don't understand is the awful feeling that "this cannot be."  It's unthinkable that this hole will remain in my heart and life for the rest of my time on this earth because ... it just is.  It's not logical.  So some part of me (maybe the part that's still five years old) convinces myself that this isn't really goodbye -- that as much as it stinks, that the hole is my cross to carry for a time, but someday it will be lifted.  And with this particular friendship, that's still possible, not in this lifetime but in the next.

To me the "I have become so accustomed to goodbyes that it scares me" part comes when it stops hurting like that ... if that makes sense.  When the part of me that rebels and says that the 'goodbye' can't be forever because it just can't, because it's unthinkable, because ... it just can't be forever.  When that part of me gives up and accepts that sometimes there's no happy ending, sometimes love isn't enough, and sometimes scars can be permanent.  That's another bit that I can't understand.  I'm okay with scars remaining.  Scars are healed wounds.  I don't think that there's any horrible experience, any trauma, any flashback or nightmare or memory, that God can't heal someday.  I'm still on the fence as to whether He can do it without being able to touch me ... but that's a subject for another post (besides, that's a question to which I can always be picking up new information).  But I can't understand how God can make permanent goodbyes not-hurt.  The whole idea of "goodbye" is wrong.  It's part of this fallen world.  I picture building halls and rooms in my heart and life for each individual person who is part of it.  I can always build more.  But I can't take anything away.  And the more deep and close the relationship, the less likely that anyone else can inhabit another person's rooms.  I think that capacity and that individuality of relationship is inherently a good thing.  So the way that the empty echoing halls hurt is also inherently a good thing -- the problem isn't that the halls hurt, the problem is that the halls are empty.  That something good has been torn away.  Even if eventually there will be no more goodbyes, I don't understand how the ones that have already transpired can ever stop hurting.

I pick theme songs for events in my life.  It's kind of silly ... I guess ... but it's the way I relate to the world, and it is what it is and it's always been this way, so I just keep on doing it.  My song for separating from a couple of specific people in the "Xena" fandom is Mark Schultz' "Think of Me."  I don't have a song for separating from the entire fandom.  So as I began this post, I wondered if "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are" could be it.

"I tremble like a hill on a faultline at the thought of how I lost you" is a very good description, actually.  I always have flashbacks, but the past couple of weeks have been insane, and I finally made a "Xena" angst video to try to shut up the flashbacks themselves.  With mixed results, I guess.  I'm no longer flashing to individual things, but now there's this generalized grief that kind of shows up and then recedes like waves in the ocean.  I'd thought that telling the stories would help a little, but it doesn't.

The truth is that absolutely nothing can fill the empty rooms left by the "Xena" fandom people.  They occupied an entire wing of my heart.  Nothing can recapture the crazy twisted sense of reality -- the pictures and philosophy and artwork, the interconnections, the feeling that I had an entire network all over the world who had my back, the service opportunities, the travel opportunities, our crazy inside language that I didn't even realize was a secret language until I'd slip and use one of the words in my everyday conversation and then have to explain it and run back to the board and post the story.  The way it felt to share music.  To hear Plumb's "Cut" for the first time, or Nightwish's "Sleeping Sun."  To have the weirdest things about my internal life exposed and understood all through writing which didn't seem weird, in public no less and yet to stand unashamed in the midst and to learn what it felt like to be proud of all the parts I'd always had to keep hidden.  To be a mediator, to think about interdynamics friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.  To think nothing of buying others' plane tickets or fill gas tanks, to watch "Xena" interspersed with swimming or shopping or driving or sightseeing.  To dance until three in the morning at the convention, and not even have to deal with post-con-depression because I was too busy posting threads and pictures and reliving every moment of it.

I have much better and truer friends now, and I don't believe I have any secrets I've told to "Xena" people that I didn't also tell to someone else, someone still in my life.  It kind of hit home to me this weekend that my social life is full again ... maybe not like it was, maybe not like I'd like it to be, maybe I still feel horribly lonely ... but the fact is I have more than a lot of people do, and the friends I have are truer than many people ever experience.  It's ... I think it's impossible to fill that empty wing.  I don't have the time, I don't have the ability to trust, and some things are once-in-a-lifetime anyway.  But the fact that it will just remain empty forever is unthinkable.

"I have become so accustomed to goodbyes that it scares me."  Except ... I haven't.  I wonder sometimes if the fact that this is still unthinkable, so many years later, is actually a good thing ... it means I will never lose the capacity to love.  I just wish it didn't hurt so much.  Or feel so permanent.

She wishes she was with them, but she looks and they're not there.  Seems love comes for just a moment, and then passes on by.

--Rich Mullins, "Jacob and Two Women."

Xena Fandom: Aslan the Kitty

After all that talk about The Rift, I spent the last two days creating my own Rift video.  It's finally finished and posted.  I've spent the past hour or so going through the "Xena" videos on my hard drive, attempting to separate out the videos I would like to have on my ipod and convert any in non-ipod format.  It's fairly tedious work, but it's worth it to have a finished "Xena" video collection.

I just stumbled across and watched a video that Belle had made for Annabelle.

When I established the "only good memories" policy...I knew this part would be horribly painful.  There's so much surrounding all these stories that I can't talk about here.  But there are a few memories surrounding the way that video got on my computer in the first place that I can post.

It was ... maybe a week after Belle flew here, maybe two weeks, but it couldn't have been much longer than that.  Belle was staying with Wakaba.  I was renting a room from a friend of mine, since I had less than six months before going to Alaska.  Wakaba and I were about 45 minutes apart, but between her work, my work, and job-hunting with Belle who would be rooming with me once I got back from Alaska, the three of us spent a lot of time together -- all in the same room/car or in combinations of any of the three of us.

One of our first dinners together, we went to the Panda Express near where Wakaba lives.  We were in my car.  Wakaba was driving.  At Belle's request, I played the Sarah McLachlan song, "Answer."  She interpreted the line at the end to be about nightmares -- "cast me gently into morning for the night has been unkind."  I'd always simply interpreted that line as being about the generalized way I'm afraid of the dark (or rather, what I do to myself when the lights are off).  It was wonderful to be with people who intuitively understood that.  We got to the restaurant before the song finished, so we sat in the car to hear the rest.  Then we went in and got our dinner.  As we were leaving, Belle noticed that there was a fire truck parked next to the restaurant.  We took our pictures near it.

Belle stayed over in my room at my friend's house a couple of times, job-hunting, apartment-hunting, or investigating the schools.  The first time I dropped her off at the local community college, besides looking at the class offerings, Belle made this for me:

 

Since I like some unconventional pairings for the characters (Xena/Marcus and Gabrielle/Perdicus), I had asked Belle to make a Xena/Marcus banner for me.  While I've made several banners of my own, Belle's art skills are much better than mine.  Besides ... sometimes it just means more to me to be able to use pictures that others have made for me.

 

That evening, the friend who I was staying with invited Belle and me to eat dinner out in the main area of the house with her.  We explained a rather complicated situation with Cecile, a mutual friend of ours who lived maybe 20 minutes from Wakaba and 50 minutes from us (another long story).

 

After dinner, when we were hanging out for a little while before I brought Belle back to Wakaba's work to ride with her there back to Wakaba's house, Belle offered to copy all her "Xena" videos to my computer.  Belle's an awfully good video maker in general.  I believe that I have several videos that she never put/left online.  My favorite of hers has always been to the song, "We Don't Need to Look Back Now," which I'd had on my ipod for years at that point thanks to the video.  I guess that's why I have the more personal videos as well.

 

Months after that, after an, um, lot of complications that fall into the dirty laundry category, Belle, Wakaba, and I planned to visit Genkakette.  That evening first I stopped at gas stations to buy everyone's favorite sodas to stock the cooler for the trip.  Then I went to one of the local church Catholic chapels and prayed that if the weekend turned out to be a disaster, it wouldn't be my fault.  Then I went to Wakaba's to spend the night in preparation.  I was out on the sofa.  I had such a hard time falling asleep; the seeds of the coming disaster were already in motion and I had no way to stop it.  Then Belle's cat hopped up on the couch with me, purring like mad.  It was the first time I'd seen Belle's cat as an almost-adult -- she'd been a tiny kitten when I'd first met her coming off the plane.  I was reminded of a moment in the fifth book of the "Chronicles of Narnia."  Shasta sleeps alone with the pyramids at his back, and he's terrified of the dark and of ghosts and of being alone until this cat comes to him, snuggles up to his back, and purrs.  I pictured Belle's cat as being like the cat who came to Shasta, who later turns out to be the great lion Aslan.  And I slept.



 

Xena Fandom: Found my London Con Journal

In searching through my old gaming stuff, I ran across a journal that I had at the London Convention.  All the fans signed at the back, and obviously I can't post those signatures since they're people's real names -- but over the next few days I'll see what I can scan in.  It has my recap of my conversation with Steve Sears about blood innocence from about twenty minutes after it happened.

Xena Fandom: My Dad Saw WHAT????

This one will need to be under a spoiler cut.  Spoilers for the Xena Rift arc and early season 4.

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This belongs in the category of Xena fandom memories, because this was my go-to "most embarrassing moment" story at all the conventions.

My favorite Xena storyline was fan-dubbed "The Rift" arc.  I saw this before I had any experience with the Xena fandom itself, so I was completely unspoiled, and I was -- and am -- in awe.

Obviously I wasn't here for the original run-through, but during one of his panels that I did get to attend, Steve Sears described his original presentation of season 3 to the con audience.  He said, 'We're going dark."  He went to one side of the stage.  "Here's where you think we're going."  He went to the other side of the stage.  "Here's where we're actually going."

The storyline starts out with Xena and Gabrielle rescuing Khrafstar, who you are meant to assume is a Hebrew messiah character.  Xena forms an alliance with an approaching army.  So far, pretty typical (and I'm not telling this very well -- it's been a long time since I've seen it.)  There is some backstory revealing that at one point during her warlord days, Xena was allied with Caesar, who betrayed her.  In the present, Xena's so preoccupied with leading this army against Caesar that she doesn't notice that Gabrielle and Khrafstar are in one of the nearby temples performing a sacrifice.  This is one of the absolutely brilliant aspects of the show.  They make you think that it's going to be this huge battle episode.  But the second Xena realizes how much trouble Gabrielle is in, she dashes off the battlefield, and that's the last you see of either army.  You don't know who wins and you don't care.  They also make you think that Khrafstar worships the One God of the Israelites (who has already made at least one appearance on the show -- and in a way that's respectful to both Christianity and Judaism).  The seeds were all planted when Khrafstar told Gabrielle about his god giving him the strength not to take vengeance.  But suddenly in the temple, Khrafstar reveals that he worships Dahak, the evil Babylonian god (and debatably the scariest villain on either "Xena" or "Hercules"), and referring to the One God of the Israelites, "he will be taken care of too." 

The end result of the sacrifice scene is that it was orchestrated to make Gabrielle take a human life, in doing so sacrifice her "blood innocence," and that sacrifice bring Dahak back into the world.  Xena arrives too late to stop Gabrielle from killing.  The very end of the episode has Gabrielle sobbing and repeating what Xena had said earlier, "everything's changed," while rocks from the battle and the collapsing temple fall all around them.  I think it's the most haunting and beautiful image in the entire show.  Yes, I'm an angst addict.  We all knew that.  Moving on...

The concept of "blood innocence" is itself one of my favorite elements of the show.  And after all the different threads I've participated in on the subject, you'd think I'd be able to at least define it.  The plain factual definition is that a person who still has his or her blood innocence has never taken a human life.  Causing or willing someone to be killed does not count -- an emperor could order the execution of an innocent man and be morally culpable but still retain his blood innocence.  Unintentional killing or killing in battle does count.  Gabrielle was in no way morally culpable for the life she took -- the willing sacrifice pretty much shoved the dagger into Gabrielle's hand and then threw herself on it, while Gabrielle was standing there immobilized with shock.

Even though on the show, they called Gabrielle's former blood innocence her "innocence of evil," I think this was a case of an unreliable narrator (or rather, a narrator with an agenda -- they're the bad guys!)  We speculated on the board that perhaps loss of blood innocence wouldn't have been so important if Xena hadn't made such a big deal over it.  I can understand the members' points, but I disagree.  We also speculated that maybe blood innocence was like virginity.  But ummm... sex is good and murder is bad, y'know?  So that can't be the whole story either.  The way that I view it is that blood innocence is one aspect in the larger concept that we call "innocence" in the childish sense, not the moral sense.  Before the sacrifice, Gabrielle did not experientially know the kind of damage that her hands and weapons were capable of dealing.  After the sacrifice, she did know.  And everything changed.  (If we're doing reminiscing-type tangents ... I got very frustrated when the prevailing mood of the board was that Xena had a slight Madonna-complex about Gabrielle, that Xena was the one defining blood innocence and doing it for selfish reasons -- because she couldn't stand seeing her idol morally tarnished.  It's a purely intellectual frustration.  I sometimes think that the board in general was too hard on Xena because they assumed -- with Xena herself -- that Xena was already damaged, and that Gabrielle somehow deserved to be spared.  At one time, Xena was a punk kid who led her townspeople into battle, got someone she loved killed, and killed in battle for the first time and had her entire way of seeing the world changed.  She wanted to spare Gabrielle that pain.  She didn't succeed, but she tried really hard, and I think Gabrielle took that in the spirit it was intended.)

BTW, I'd intended just to define what the Rift was, and I'm nowhere near the concept anymore!

Besides losing her blood innocence in the temple, Gabrielle was magically-impregnated with arguably the most ambiguous character in the entire show, Hope.  It became almost a joke that board members started Hope Wars when we were bored.  I got involved at the beginning before I knew any better, but once I understood the depth of feeling that people on both sides of the Hope Issue held, I stayed out of it too.

Xena tries to kill baby Hope.  Gabrielle defends her and eventually sends her away in a basket, then lies to Xena about Hope being alive.  Xena takes off to go assassinate a Chinese boy-leader.  Gabrielle betrays her to stop her and nearly gets Xena executed.  Xena assassinates the Chinese kid anyway and lies to Gabrielle about it.  (The kid was pure evil.  Really.  I don't actually fault Xena for what she did, just for lying about it.)  Hope, who grows at the magical-baby rate, shows up as a young child and kills Xena's eleven year old son.  Gabrielle poisons Hope and then debates drinking the poison herself.

And as you can see, Steve Sears certainly wasn't kidding about going dark!!  That's actually the second-most beautiful haunting image in the whole show, in my opinion -- Gabrielle holding the flask to her mouth, Xena watching her from the forest with those empty eyes, Gabrielle finally setting the flask down.

And then we have the Xena Musical (sorry to the Xena creators, but the only real one in my opinion).  It's brilliant and scary and ridiculous in places and Gabrielle's parts are very obviously dubbed (and also too pretty for what she's going through) and it contains one of my favorite songs in the world.  And no, actually, it's not "Love of Your Love" -- that's my second favorite song.  My favorite is the end of "Hate is the Star" where Gabrielle starts out with "I never thought that we'd be distanced by a hate," and the horror of what their friendship has become and the realization that they still need each other and what they have still exists even behind all the impossibilities and ... love triumphs.  (Missy Good's fanfic "Darkness Falls" used the same concept only without all the supernatural singing -- what if Xena and Gabrielle only had human methods to use to do it, could they still have found their way back to each other?  The story's answer is "yes," just involving way more time than would have worked for TV.  I got Missy Good to sign a printed chapter from "Darkness Falls" at the last convention I went to.  I'm very proud of that.)

I believe in fandom terminology, The Rift is over after the musical episode.  But I consider The Rift to have stretched through the beginning of season 4.  In the last two episodes of Season 3, it's revealed that Hope is still alive, and, in order to kill her / beat her and keep Dahak from rising again, Gabrielle throws herself and Hope together into a flame pit.  So season 4 starts out with Xena questioning Hades about where Gabrielle is.  They're finally reunited in the third episode of season 4, "A Family Affair."

Okay.  So, when I was attempting to convince my mother that "Xena" was an awesome show, I sent her some episode choices.  Basically, by season 3, "Xena" switched between episodes that furthered the overall story and episodes that didn't (so even though The Rift lasted more than a season, maybe a third of the episodes were all about The Rift -- maybe a bit more than that; again it's been so long I can't remember very well).  I took out the discs that had Rift episodes on them, mailed them to my mother, and told her which episodes to watch.

She just watched all the episodes on the discs that I sent.  Oh, well.  They were mostly clustered anyway.

The last episode that I'd intended for my mother to see was "A Family Affair" with the reunion between Xena and Gabrielle.  Mom backed up and watched all three episodes on disc 1 of season 4 of Xena: Warrior Princess.

I'm writing this as if my audience hasn't ever seen "Xena," but if you have seen season 4, you'll know that the first two episodes are mostly flashbacks from Xena's time with Borias, and then there's that spiritual battle with Alti at the end.  From my reading of my old Xena board: fan favorite part: Borias is hot, fan least favorite part: Xena looks like she's on drugs the whole time.  I actually adore those episodes, flaws and all.  I don't think Alti is necessarily a well-rounded villain, but I think she's an example of a very real possibility of what a human being can become with enough dark magic.  It's Xena's choice in particular that kills me: go forward to eternity and abandon her mission in this life, or go backwards and leave Gabrielle behind -- maybe not forever, but at least for the rest of Xena's life.  I know that sounds confusing since Gabrielle wasn't really dead, but Xena didn't know that, so in her mind that was the choice before her, and it is just SO beautiful.

So.  My mother watched those episodes instead.  My dad chose that particular moment to walk into the living room.

My conservative Protestant minister father's only glimpse of "Xena: Warrior Princess" was Xena and Borias humping under the bear rug.  Probably the most explicit "they got away with that on television?" scene in the entire show -- well, at least explicit Like That; they pushed the violence boundaries a lot farther later on.  With all the blurriness and the drugged camera angles and, um, certain noises so you didn't see anything but you didn't have to.

Chances that my dad will EVER watch "Xena" again: zero!

 

Xena Fandom: Lady Gaga

I'd heard of Lady Gaga.  I mean, who hasn't?  I'd also heard "Poker Face" during my summer in Alaska, but I wasn't aware of the author of the song.  I didn't like it.  I'm not sure why -- it's catchy and everything -- it was just one of those songs that grated on me with repetition, and they played it in the Alaska kitchens an awful lot.

During the next year or so as I re-integrated to the work world after Alaska, Rina told me that she'd rediscovered Lady Gaga and there were two songs in particular that I had to check out: "Alejandro," and "Bad Romance."  Rina wrote so poetically about "Alejandro" that I didn't have a choice but to like it.  "Bad Romance" I was a little more on the fence about, but not for anything having to do with the song but for the fact that so many Xena fans made Xena/Gabrielle videos to the song.  I'm not a subtexter and I never have been -- I've been firmly in the Romantic Friendship camp since the term was first revealed on the board.  The lyrics to "Bad Romance" seem quite opposed to Romantic Friendship -- not just favoring the subtext 'ship, but actively opposing mine, and thus I won't watch any X/G videos to the song.  There was one that Rina sent me for Helen Magnus and Nikola Tesla from "Sanctuary" that I really enjoyed.

The "Xena" fandom in general was never more than lukewarm about Lady Gaga -- at least, I don't believe that there was ever a big burst of popularity on the boards.  There were the people who liked her songs, and then there were the people like Claudia, who responded to me once saying that she couldn't believe I'd have such poor taste as to buy a Lady Gaga album.  I just did what I've always done -- listened to the music that Rina sent me, paid attention to the parts that I liked and disregarded the rest, and remained generally oblivious to popular music.

Right around the time "Born This Way" came out, Lilly, Genkakette, and Apple all fell head over heels in love with Lady Gaga.  I'd been independently discussing the album with Rina and bought my own copy.

The nice thing about buying it myself was that I had a chance to form my own opinions before I delved into any Lady Gaga discussion with any of my friends.  My favorite songs were "Marry the Night," "Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)," and "Edge of Glory."  Genkakette joked with me that as she was trying to tell people that Lady Gaga had deeper lyrics than "Poker Face," said people would quote the line with "whiskey mouth," which really has only one interpretation (and it's not kid-appropriate).  LOL.  I never liked that song much, but it was more a question of taste than anything else -- just like I wanted to like "Born This Way" and could never get into it.  I really, really, really adored "Edge of Glory," though.  Rina sent me a Youtube link to an acoustic piano version that cinched it for me.  It has the kind of layers that capture me in a song, the way that it can be to and about more than one type of experience, and the imagery is astounding.

I've tried to listen to it again -- the Glee version of "Edge of Glory," anyway, since sometimes cover/alternate versions of songs aren't as painful as the originals.  I can handle the Glee version of "Edge of Glory" every once in awhile if I prepare myself sufficiently, and ditto for "Highway Unicorn" (the real version of that one).  Besides that, I haven't even attempted to listen to Lady Gaga since everything went wrong.  One of the worst parts of all this is that some of the most beautiful songs in my whole collection are too painful to listen to anymore.

I remember one visit to Genkakette's which was all about Lady Gaga.  First Genkakette showed me her Twitter page.  I've actually never used Twitter myself.  I've seen a few of my friends' accounts, but never in the kind of detail that Genkakette showed me.  She pointed out all the other regular fans and some of the inside jokes and the creative projects they swapped back and forth.  We watched at least two Lady Gaga interviews.  I was impressed with Lady Gaga's perspective on fame.  It seems that most people who are in the spotlight have to become kind of like Captain Picard -- they develop public personas and private personas and draw the lines very clearly for themselves since they know that some media person will try to cross them.  Versus, there are a few stars like Lady Gaga, who have the type of personality that makes it almost impossible to do that -- I can relate because I'm the same way; if someone asks me a question, I'm going to answer in as much detail as I can first and think about consequences second.  So rather than that, Lady Gaga gives the cameras something to look at -- she puts some pretty outrageous stuff out there, but it keeps reporters from asking her questions about the stuff she does want kept private.  Her music suffers for me from the mainstream need to please a lot of different kinds of audiences, but I appreciate the talent and depth and skill that went into all of her songs.  Oh, and Genkakette wanted my opinion on "Judas" from a Christian perspective.  I can't recall precisely what I told her, but I remember not being offended so much as wondering if there was a theological error in the premise around the poetic truths.  I liked the song, if not quite as much as Genkakette did.

After that visit, I made this banner for Genkakette:

Xena Fandom: Two Announcements

These two announcements completely unrelated to each other but both related to Xena fandom, so...

Announcement 1: Well, I haven't heard any objections yet to my convention of naming Xena fandom people after Suikoden characters.  However, I thought of a few new liberties.  First, there's one fan where I thought of a Suiko character who has the same first letter as her given name rather than her fandom name, but I want to use it anyway since that character seems like a perfect fit, and since I helped come up with her fandom name, it "squeaks a little when I turn it around" (to steal a line from the Mallorean).  So I want to use my first idea.  And second, there's a fan whose online name begins with a "U."  I can't think of any Suiko characters whose names start with "U" off the top of my head, but there's Yuiri, Yumi, and Yun from Suiko III whose names start with the same first sound.  Therefore, all naming will be phonetic.

Announcement 2: I just finished reading the results of my friend's master's survey on autism and religion.  It made me want to write about my own experience with Asperger's.  That's actually very tied up with my experiences in Xena fandom, but it doesn't have to do with one good story, you know?  I didn't get the diagnosis until my last couple of years in the fandom, and there are as many painful experiences wrapped up with it as good ones.  So rather than trying to manhandle a Xena fandom post into something that would relate, I've decided to create a separate page.  At this rate I'll fill up my page quote ... but blogger says I can have up to 10, so I haven't used them all up yet.  Look at the "tabs" up at the top if you haven't already for the pages.

Ragamuffin Movie: Shiny!

http://christianmediamagazine.com/cmm/rich_mullins_film_ragamuffin

I, like you and others, was a huge fan so I’d read “An Arrow Pointing to Heaven” and listened to a million of his concerts and interviews, but I didn’t want to make an assumption that I knew him just because I was a fan. I talked with a few key people who kind of opened up a lot of doors to a lot of people who knew him really well, family, friends, and other artists. So when you set out to do something like this you really just listen versus making preconceived notions of what you want it to be. How do you fit a whole life in two hours? Not an easy thing to do. God just showed us a lot of grace showed us what the story should be. So I totally get it. And this movie may be or may not be what you want it to be, but I guess you had to be there to understand the whys of how it turned out the way it did.