Alexa's Page

Xavier Rudd - The Letter

Xavier Rudd - The Letter

The SET Game

My greatest defense against Alzheimer’s.  There’s an iPhone/iPod app now!

JS&MN - Stephen Black, Jonathan Strange, and Arabella...

JS&MN - Stephen Black, Jonathan Strange, and Arabella Strange

Rough for another illustration.  Maria Absalom, from pages...

Rough for another illustration.  Maria Absalom, from pages 272-273 of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.  I tried to draw some S&N stuff for Emma last week and failed utterly, horribly, miserably.  Which is a shame because I know when I’ve read the book, I’ve had some really good stuff in my head.  So I started re-reading the novel, and marked passages that I’d like to do something with, eventually.  I think this chapter, The Shadow House, invokes some of the most lush and vivid imagery.

Death Note copycat crimes and imitations

Clearly, you cannot trust us white people with anything.

I’ve finally realized why I didn’t like Death Note.  Or rather, I always knew (sort of) why I didn’t like Death Note, I just never quite knew how to articulate it.  So.  In Death Note, the two main characters (Light and L; I never got far enough along to where that wasn’t the case), were constantly plotting against each other, and not only that, many of their plots involved predicting what their counterpart was going to do at least three steps in advance.  And the logic they used to do this, man, the logic was almost always bizarre, nonsensical, or stupid.  Sometimes all three at once.  Yet somehow, they were always right!  In spite reaching these conclusions via the strange mental alchemy favored by schizophrenics, their predictions were always correct.  Of course, if one of them predicted the other’s next move, chances were that the other had already predicted that the first one would predict it, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.  And then, even more frustratingly, the manga would present all this absurd plotting and side-stepping as evidence of  both characters’ genius.  Because this was the pillar upon which both of these characters were supported: patently superior intellect.  No one was as smart as Light or L.  NO ONE!  Not even their parents.  Especially not their parents!  (Well, Light’s parents… did L have parents?)

I have a theory.  There is a period of time in the life of every adolescent (similar to the age of Shounen Jump’s target audience), averaging seven years or so and beginning at age 10, where children are convinced that their parents are unconscionable idiots.  Not just their parents, in fact, but almost everyone else on the planet.  Not only do the know everything, but they are alone in their brilliance!  If you subscribe to the theory of mind, and think of human development on a scale from “fundamentally selfish amoeba” to “empathetic human being”, this would be somewhere in the middle.  You’ve begun to comprehend, in a practical way, that the other people living on this planet are sentient beings.  Each of them do, in fact, have their own individual consciousness. But you still haven’t cleared the hurdle of thinking that, if this is so, then all those other individuals must be, like, totally retarded.  This is the attitude on which Death Note is constructed.

I understand that this is a stage most people go through.  So while it is not exactly shameful, I’m not sure I like when it’s appealed to, either.