Notes for The Martian Invasion
Well, my SI glibly says they're all in character, but that's something I have to prove to you, my readers. Ganbaru sa!
Quoth Wikipedia Bidet: "Bidets are common bathroom fixtures in many southern European countries, especially Italy, where they are found in 97% of households (the installation of a bidet in a bathroom has been mandatory since 1975)…"
I don't even know why I decided to put this into the story. I guess just as a reminder that cultures have different expectations.
Akari is the only culturally Japanese undine, so her remark of "Please take good care of us, Mr. Manager!" is a direct but idiomatic translation of ｢Yoroshiku onegaishimasu, kanrinin-san!｣ It's something you'd automatically say to a new coworker, acquaintance, etc.
Just a reminder that Southern California has its own style of authentic Mexican food, just as Jalisco, Oaxaca, Guadalajara, D.F., Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas do. These are all places where Mexican and Chicano peoples have been living for longer than the United States has existed.
The probability of having three cilantro mutants in a group of seven is a little high, but not unlikely. The global average is probably ~12%. This mirrors a conversation I had in real life a few years back with my friends David and Chibi. Aika, to her credit, accepted the genetics story a lot more readily than Chibi did -- but if you spend enough time meeting new people as she does, well, it's easy to see how we all perceive the world differently. And a further note to slice-of-life writers -- mine your own experiences! Things can be funny with a little imagination!
This section in which I describe clothes the characters are wearing is inspired by the fiction of Anne Cross, who injected a large dose of fashion into EPU fanfic.
I describe the moon as a white circle, but really it's a dark gray. Its average albedo is .136, which means the regolith is reflects less than 14% of light, but it still doesn't matter because the Sun is freaking bright. See above in the concordance, where I mention how the Sun always wins. The Earth reflects much more light than the Moon does, which is why you can see a dim Moon in the sky during a New Moon -- this phenomenon is called Earthshine.
Notes for Of Channels and Canals
The reunification of the Three Water Fairies is a lot different from the manga, where everyone goes their separate ways for work, likely in analogy to graduation from school where everyone departs for parts unknown. Aria evokes a sense of 物の哀れ "mono no aware", or of 一期一会 "one life, one meeting" that reminds us that our special times are special because of their rarity, to be remembered fondly as a treasured experience.
But you know, I'm a postmodernist, so screw all that noise. If you find someone to love in this world, you better hang on tooth and nail. If you find something you like, you take it and keep the part you like alive, even if everything else changes. Heck, this whole story attempts to take Abbot Kinney's lost project and reify it once again in an entirely new context, because it was a good dream. I think this might mean I'm at war with my source material, but if so, Aria's premise is already at war with its central theme. I hope I can take these characters romantic worldview and break it down, and hopefully replace it with something even more beautiful.
Tolkien feels appropriate here, though I'm not sure why:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
Gondolieri are traditionally all male. In fact, the first female gondolier in Venice was licensed in 2010, a year before Aqua debuted. (Another retroactively became first in 2007 after she became a trans woman.)
While there is a gondola company in Marina del Rey, it's only the inspiration for this part of the story -- I have no reason to suspect that they do not comply with all nondiscrimination laws, or that they feel this way about women with oars. It's more to represent the kind of injustice that women routinely see in the workplace, and how being from another culture makes it easy to see injustices.
One of the odd things about living in L.A. is that it is still, in a lot of ways, a film industry company town. It's not all that unusual to see celebrities around; they're workers just like the rest of us, just better looking and higher paid. And quite a few other workers are aspiring actors.
I'm only saying that tachyons are dumb, because they're a purely hypothetical particle that travels faster than light -- effectively time-traveling backwards. The implication being that if someone had a phone call from Earth to Mars, you'd need some kind of FTL communication to avoid the latency of 6 to 40 minutes.
Luckily for us, Akari's laptop still supports IPv6, so that it can still talk to the rest of the net. It turns out that 2¹²⁸ IP addresses ought to be enough for anyone. In Akari's universe, the resonance of trillions of IPv6 packets a minute with the Earth's magnetic field led to the formation of the Link-layer Autonomous Intelligent Network. Because of its control of the network and desire to remain hidden, this emergent phenomenon was actually first discovered by Aquatic scientists, but not well studied, to the extent that most scientists on Manhome considered it a spurious conspiracy theory at best. Due to the disruptions of the Earth's geomagnet when it reversed polarity in 2288, awareness of the phenomenon became widespread. However, no action was take to change protocols, because everyone decided that Lain was "pretty moe."
I kept wondering how I was going to get gondolas to Venice, California, right up until I saw the last episode of Black Butler. Sebastian has a gondola, because spoilers! Real gondolas take quite a bit of time to craft, as do most traditional boat-building arts. But one is better than none for getting story started.
Pride is perhaps the strongest theme of Black Butler. Wrath may begin the plot, but it is pride that carries it until the very end. So, just because the Pit might be working with the Cloud right now doesn't mean that Sebastian isn't going to offer temptation. And pride would have worked the best on our undines, but fortunately he got to them too late, after Alicia had inoculated them all with her serenity.
A Venetian gondola bears 6 rebbi (teeth, or tines) in front, one for each of the sesteri (six neighborhoods) of Venice. Sebastian's personal one, on the other hand, has one for each of the nine hells.
The water from the Styx doesn't have any special properties like the Lethe (forgetfulness) or Phlegethon (being lava, apparently), but it was apparently very dark and muddy. My favorite stygian color is stygian blue.
The original plan in writing this was to simply portage the boat into the water, because a gondola is a big canoe, right? Well, at 10m and 700kg, this seemed right at the edge of possibility for 7 people, which is to say a bad idea. So I just decided to use the boat trailer I had already written into the story. Duh.
The water in Venezia being dirty is something of an understatement. It's a city with largely medieval infrastructure, so in parts of the city the canals are the sewers.
OK, so bidets are just funny to Americans. Heck, when I was in Japan with an indenture of graduate students, there were a lot of giggles about the washlets in some of the fancier hotels we stayed at. The squat toilets got much lower reviews. But really, bidets save so much water compared to toilet paper production that I'm afraid Americans are on the wrong side of history.
Notes for "Adrift in Time" or "Clock Like A Pirate Day"
The title is a reference to the episode titles of Rocky & Bullwinkle, which frequently had two titles where *both* were puns. Talk Like a Pirate Day comes every year in September, and is a chance for us all to say "ARRR!" and "Ye scurvy dog", and other things which historical pirates definitely probably possibly said.
Oh look, it's the Ides of March. Ominous.
Magineering refers to the "imagineering" of Disneyland, which is what they call their attraction creation process. While so much of Disneyland is meant to be immersive, the reminder of the imagineers who create and maintain the park is one of Walt Disney's better legacies. I'm just assuming that Azumanga's Magical Land is basically Tokyo Disneyland minus the trademark, which is why I chose that location.
This section was somewhat inspired by Cory Doctorow, and his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- at least insofar as I learned that theme parks make a great setting.
A crossover of Azumanga Daioh with Black Lagoon has always intrigued me. Azumanga is an absolute acceptance of civilized, everyday life, and Lagoon is a rejection of the same. Rock chose to reject his ordinary life, yet he stands on the boundary willing to save others from being forced into his world.
Notes for Ti Kallisti
The title, Ti Kallisti, is Greek for "to the prettiest". It was the phrase inscribed on the golden apple which Eris chucked into a Mount Olympus party. Long story short: Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera got into a fight about it, the mortal Paris got asked to be the judge, and somehow this started all the Trojan War. After the fighting, Odysseus took a really long time to get home. In this context, it's a reference to Tomo's question near the end of the chapter.
I have met a few members of the U.S. Congress as a student lobbyist, among other reasons. Once you've seen your own Congressman charge out of his office to talk to you for supposedly wanting to let terrorists into the country, the charm kind of wears off.
The letters spell out LAX, of course. It's just that you see them backwards if you're leaving the airport first.
The standard Japanese impression of America, informed by movies, is that America is a violent place. Given the statistics, it's not exactly wrong either, but as usual for stereotypes the case is somewhat exaggerated. Tsukkomi is when the straight man punctures the joke, out of the manzai comic tradition.
The Santa Ana winds are a dry, warm wind that blow through the Southland every so often. They're members of a whole class of winds called föhn. As air moves from the desert, it gets squeezed through the canyons and passes, speeds up, and flows downhill. As it goes down, the already warm and dry air undergoes adiabatic compression, getting even warmer and drier. Temperatures, allergies, and tempers are all known to flare up during these Santa Ana wind events.
The train tracks, of course, had been there before -- several decades earlier, as part of the Pacific Electric line.
The surprising part is that Akari actually knew and remembered the names of Sakaki and Chiyo-chan. In canon, she went for over a Martian year while still calling one of her friends "Mr. Mailman".
One of the problems -- and joys -- of writing Yomi is that she'll notice that something is off, and keep looking until she finds the fourth wall. She'll keep hitting it with questions until she reveals what's going on behind the curtain. Tomo will notice too, but she'll be mostly happy with hanging a lampshade on it -- unless it's more disruptive to reveal the truth. Paradox is the stock in trade of comedians. Humor is found in the inconsistencies of life -- the vices of a sanctimonious man, the banality of the powerful, the foolishness of conventional wisdom, and the long, long gap between expectations and reality.
It's actually not too uncommon for people with poor grades in Japan to do well speaking English, as did Tomo here. She's not afraid of failure, so she's better able to ignore the social embarrassment of communicating poorly in another language. I assume Yukari-sensei was much the same.
Lily Rank is an actual game concept in the various Neptunia series, such as Hyperdimension Neptunia. It involves the all-female PCs playing tag-team more, and thus unlocking dual attacks. If you know that lily translates to yuri in the Japanese language, well, you're all caught up.
If you haven't seen Azumanga Daioh, the trio of Tomo, Osaka, and Kagura are the Baka Rangers. Baka Ranger Red (traditionally the color of the leader in sentai) rotates based on who most recently got the lowest test score.
Tomo's "Maji de?!" with twinkle-eyes is taken from Tomo's contemporary and Shibuya's #1 Gal Kotobuki Ran.
My own model of humor is the one I mentioned above, not the "pain of others" model I mention in the omake. It's a common model, but too many cases fall through it, including almost all puns and large sections of *Azumanga*. Actually there are a ton of theories of humor, so it's possible we're all seeing different parts of the whole.
Well, my SI glibly says they're all in character, but that's something I have to prove to you, my readers. Ganbaru sa!
Quoth Wikipedia Bidet: "Bidets are common bathroom fixtures in many southern European countries, especially Italy, where they are found in 97% of households (the installation of a bidet in a bathroom has been mandatory since 1975)…"
I don't even know why I decided to put this into the story. I guess just as a reminder that cultures have different expectations.
Akari is the only culturally Japanese undine, so her remark of "Please take good care of us, Mr. Manager!" is a direct but idiomatic translation of ｢Yoroshiku onegaishimasu, kanrinin-san!｣ It's something you'd automatically say to a new coworker, acquaintance, etc.
Just a reminder that Southern California has its own style of authentic Mexican food, just as Jalisco, Oaxaca, Guadalajara, D.F., Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas do. These are all places where Mexican and Chicano peoples have been living for longer than the United States has existed.
The probability of having three cilantro mutants in a group of seven is a little high, but not unlikely. The global average is probably ~12%. This mirrors a conversation I had in real life a few years back with my friends David and Chibi. Aika, to her credit, accepted the genetics story a lot more readily than Chibi did -- but if you spend enough time meeting new people as she does, well, it's easy to see how we all perceive the world differently. And a further note to slice-of-life writers -- mine your own experiences! Things can be funny with a little imagination!
This section in which I describe clothes the characters are wearing is inspired by the fiction of Anne Cross, who injected a large dose of fashion into EPU fanfic.
I describe the moon as a white circle, but really it's a dark gray. Its average albedo is .136, which means the regolith is reflects less than 14% of light, but it still doesn't matter because the Sun is freaking bright. See above in the concordance, where I mention how the Sun always wins. The Earth reflects much more light than the Moon does, which is why you can see a dim Moon in the sky during a New Moon -- this phenomenon is called Earthshine.
Notes for Of Channels and Canals
The reunification of the Three Water Fairies is a lot different from the manga, where everyone goes their separate ways for work, likely in analogy to graduation from school where everyone departs for parts unknown. Aria evokes a sense of 物の哀れ "mono no aware", or of 一期一会 "one life, one meeting" that reminds us that our special times are special because of their rarity, to be remembered fondly as a treasured experience.
But you know, I'm a postmodernist, so screw all that noise. If you find someone to love in this world, you better hang on tooth and nail. If you find something you like, you take it and keep the part you like alive, even if everything else changes. Heck, this whole story attempts to take Abbot Kinney's lost project and reify it once again in an entirely new context, because it was a good dream. I think this might mean I'm at war with my source material, but if so, Aria's premise is already at war with its central theme. I hope I can take these characters romantic worldview and break it down, and hopefully replace it with something even more beautiful.
Tolkien feels appropriate here, though I'm not sure why:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
Gondolieri are traditionally all male. In fact, the first female gondolier in Venice was licensed in 2010, a year before Aqua debuted. (Another retroactively became first in 2007 after she became a trans woman.)
While there is a gondola company in Marina del Rey, it's only the inspiration for this part of the story -- I have no reason to suspect that they do not comply with all nondiscrimination laws, or that they feel this way about women with oars. It's more to represent the kind of injustice that women routinely see in the workplace, and how being from another culture makes it easy to see injustices.
One of the odd things about living in L.A. is that it is still, in a lot of ways, a film industry company town. It's not all that unusual to see celebrities around; they're workers just like the rest of us, just better looking and higher paid. And quite a few other workers are aspiring actors.
I'm only saying that tachyons are dumb, because they're a purely hypothetical particle that travels faster than light -- effectively time-traveling backwards. The implication being that if someone had a phone call from Earth to Mars, you'd need some kind of FTL communication to avoid the latency of 6 to 40 minutes.
Luckily for us, Akari's laptop still supports IPv6, so that it can still talk to the rest of the net. It turns out that 2¹²⁸ IP addresses ought to be enough for anyone. In Akari's universe, the resonance of trillions of IPv6 packets a minute with the Earth's magnetic field led to the formation of the Link-layer Autonomous Intelligent Network. Because of its control of the network and desire to remain hidden, this emergent phenomenon was actually first discovered by Aquatic scientists, but not well studied, to the extent that most scientists on Manhome considered it a spurious conspiracy theory at best. Due to the disruptions of the Earth's geomagnet when it reversed polarity in 2288, awareness of the phenomenon became widespread. However, no action was take to change protocols, because everyone decided that Lain was "pretty moe."
I kept wondering how I was going to get gondolas to Venice, California, right up until I saw the last episode of Black Butler. Sebastian has a gondola, because spoilers! Real gondolas take quite a bit of time to craft, as do most traditional boat-building arts. But one is better than none for getting story started.
Pride is perhaps the strongest theme of Black Butler. Wrath may begin the plot, but it is pride that carries it until the very end. So, just because the Pit might be working with the Cloud right now doesn't mean that Sebastian isn't going to offer temptation. And pride would have worked the best on our undines, but fortunately he got to them too late, after Alicia had inoculated them all with her serenity.
A Venetian gondola bears 6 rebbi (teeth, or tines) in front, one for each of the sesteri (six neighborhoods) of Venice. Sebastian's personal one, on the other hand, has one for each of the nine hells.
The water from the Styx doesn't have any special properties like the Lethe (forgetfulness) or Phlegethon (being lava, apparently), but it was apparently very dark and muddy. My favorite stygian color is stygian blue.
The original plan in writing this was to simply portage the boat into the water, because a gondola is a big canoe, right? Well, at 10m and 700kg, this seemed right at the edge of possibility for 7 people, which is to say a bad idea. So I just decided to use the boat trailer I had already written into the story. Duh.
The water in Venezia being dirty is something of an understatement. It's a city with largely medieval infrastructure, so in parts of the city the canals are the sewers.
OK, so bidets are just funny to Americans. Heck, when I was in Japan with an indenture of graduate students, there were a lot of giggles about the washlets in some of the fancier hotels we stayed at. The squat toilets got much lower reviews. But really, bidets save so much water compared to toilet paper production that I'm afraid Americans are on the wrong side of history.
Notes for "Adrift in Time" or "Clock Like A Pirate Day"
The title is a reference to the episode titles of Rocky & Bullwinkle, which frequently had two titles where *both* were puns. Talk Like a Pirate Day comes every year in September, and is a chance for us all to say "ARRR!" and "Ye scurvy dog", and other things which historical pirates definitely probably possibly said.
Oh look, it's the Ides of March. Ominous.
Magineering refers to the "imagineering" of Disneyland, which is what they call their attraction creation process. While so much of Disneyland is meant to be immersive, the reminder of the imagineers who create and maintain the park is one of Walt Disney's better legacies. I'm just assuming that Azumanga's Magical Land is basically Tokyo Disneyland minus the trademark, which is why I chose that location.
This section was somewhat inspired by Cory Doctorow, and his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- at least insofar as I learned that theme parks make a great setting.
A crossover of Azumanga Daioh with Black Lagoon has always intrigued me. Azumanga is an absolute acceptance of civilized, everyday life, and Lagoon is a rejection of the same. Rock chose to reject his ordinary life, yet he stands on the boundary willing to save others from being forced into his world.
Notes for Ti Kallisti
The title, Ti Kallisti, is Greek for "to the prettiest". It was the phrase inscribed on the golden apple which Eris chucked into a Mount Olympus party. Long story short: Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera got into a fight about it, the mortal Paris got asked to be the judge, and somehow this started all the Trojan War. After the fighting, Odysseus took a really long time to get home. In this context, it's a reference to Tomo's question near the end of the chapter.
I have met a few members of the U.S. Congress as a student lobbyist, among other reasons. Once you've seen your own Congressman charge out of his office to talk to you for supposedly wanting to let terrorists into the country, the charm kind of wears off.
The letters spell out LAX, of course. It's just that you see them backwards if you're leaving the airport first.
The standard Japanese impression of America, informed by movies, is that America is a violent place. Given the statistics, it's not exactly wrong either, but as usual for stereotypes the case is somewhat exaggerated. Tsukkomi is when the straight man punctures the joke, out of the manzai comic tradition.
The Santa Ana winds are a dry, warm wind that blow through the Southland every so often. They're members of a whole class of winds called föhn. As air moves from the desert, it gets squeezed through the canyons and passes, speeds up, and flows downhill. As it goes down, the already warm and dry air undergoes adiabatic compression, getting even warmer and drier. Temperatures, allergies, and tempers are all known to flare up during these Santa Ana wind events.
The train tracks, of course, had been there before -- several decades earlier, as part of the Pacific Electric line.
The surprising part is that Akari actually knew and remembered the names of Sakaki and Chiyo-chan. In canon, she went for over a Martian year while still calling one of her friends "Mr. Mailman".
One of the problems -- and joys -- of writing Yomi is that she'll notice that something is off, and keep looking until she finds the fourth wall. She'll keep hitting it with questions until she reveals what's going on behind the curtain. Tomo will notice too, but she'll be mostly happy with hanging a lampshade on it -- unless it's more disruptive to reveal the truth. Paradox is the stock in trade of comedians. Humor is found in the inconsistencies of life -- the vices of a sanctimonious man, the banality of the powerful, the foolishness of conventional wisdom, and the long, long gap between expectations and reality.
It's actually not too uncommon for people with poor grades in Japan to do well speaking English, as did Tomo here. She's not afraid of failure, so she's better able to ignore the social embarrassment of communicating poorly in another language. I assume Yukari-sensei was much the same.
Lily Rank is an actual game concept in the various Neptunia series, such as Hyperdimension Neptunia. It involves the all-female PCs playing tag-team more, and thus unlocking dual attacks. If you know that lily translates to yuri in the Japanese language, well, you're all caught up.
If you haven't seen Azumanga Daioh, the trio of Tomo, Osaka, and Kagura are the Baka Rangers. Baka Ranger Red (traditionally the color of the leader in sentai) rotates based on who most recently got the lowest test score.
Tomo's "Maji de?!" with twinkle-eyes is taken from Tomo's contemporary and Shibuya's #1 Gal Kotobuki Ran.
My own model of humor is the one I mentioned above, not the "pain of others" model I mention in the omake. It's a common model, but too many cases fall through it, including almost all puns and large sections of *Azumanga*. Actually there are a ton of theories of humor, so it's possible we're all seeing different parts of the whole.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto