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Afterword
This might well be the final entry in my Kino's Journey stories. The anime was already obscure when I began, and is rapidly fading away. A pity! Also, I think I've just about told all the stories I can find for her. (Ah, but where have we heard that before?) That's a good feeling at least... I've fulfilled her potential. Still, traffic hits have been gratifyingly lively, mainly in the US, but who'd guess I would build a decent fanbase in... Singapore?! Wow!
Anyway, let's start with the usual explanatory notes.
"Land of Observances" was directly inspired by the terrific 1970's film The Wicker Man. "Somer Insel" is of course Christopher Lee himself, Lord Summerisle. In researching the story, I was startled how often human sacrifice turns up in the past: Incas, Hebrews, Russians, Greeks, and Celts all practiced it at one time, leading me to wonder if it was, long ago, truly universal.
Despite an almost sadomasochistic subtext, by having the cult theatrically mime killing Kino I could give Anthony Schaffer's story a new, more contemplative spin. I didn't quite know where to put the story, but eventually I decided it belonged first. It felt the most faithful to Sigsawa's style.
The language "Yeirumis" speaks in "The Bird of Time" was inspired by Lojban, a fascinating constructed language that I wish I had the time to learn.
The name "Kino" is a homophone for the Japanese word for "yesterday." Naturally, "Ashita" means "tomorrow."
Yeirumis once again hits the plot-point that he's reforged from the chariot used by Arjuna and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.
Yeirumis' poetry is from one of my favorites, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, or the quatrains of Omar the Tentmaker.
Dr. Brown's Flux Capacitor broke the time barrier in Back to the Future.
I made up the Temple of Ki-lee-lei, though it's inspired by the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat.
Had to do a lot of research to make the piloting sound authentic. It was inspired by Arthur Hailey's Flight into Danger. The reason this sort of story hasn't been told since the '50s is exactly because of autopilot technology. Planes literally fly themselves these days. I simply thought it'd be funny for Kino to worry herself half to death in her ignorance.
"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself, home," is the most famous line of Basho's book of haiku poetry, Back Roads through Far Towns.
Ventnor and Biggin Hill were radar installations during the Battle of Britain.
Xstylus, one of my kind reviewers, asked for "a more thorough story on how Kino ends (as you hinted in an epilogue to the Haibane story.)" That planted the seed for "Flowers and Smoke." In my mind, Kino really was going to perish in a fiery massacre, passing Hermes on just as the First Kino had. But... I guess I'm too optimistic at heart to tell such a story.
Obviously, by this point the Renewah were stand-ins for the Nazis. It wouldn't be until I sat down to write "Aegis" that I realized they were really the Tatana.
I'd foreshadowed the Scarlet Pimpernel all the way back in "Reprise." I barely even bothered to disguise "Mr. Flores," and the story is an homage to Baroness Orkzy.
Hope you all laughed at Yeirumis's surprise reappearance. TV Tropes calls these "brick jokes," and I'm altogether too fond of 'em.
When one reads cosmology and quantum mechanics, one soon encounters the mind-bending ideas of parallel dimensions, alternate timelines, and so on. Jerome Bixby claimed forever this story-telling trope with his brilliant Star Trek episode, "Mirror, Mirror." None of it is as far-fetched as it might seem.
I took the opportunity to salute some of the other crossovers in the Kino's Journey section. She encounters Haruhi Suzumiya, Doctor Who, and My Little Pony, among others. I particularly enjoyed the Princess Tutu tale. (The writer of the Who story never did write another chapter; I might just do it myself.)
Captain Forester appears again, even more obviously Captains Hornblower and Picard this time.
I'm afraid that the more time I spent with the primitives in The Iliad, the less patience I had for them. I saw the chance to vent, and to spin a little satire, with "The Aegis of Zeus." The events here happened just as in the original, albeit seen through my jaundiced eye. And yes, there really is no definite answer to what the heck an aegis is.
Bedford, Warwick and Talbot featured in the famous St. Crispian speech from Shakespeare's Henry V.
The death of the watchdog Argus at Hermes' hands is detailed in, among other places, Ovid's Metamorphosis.
Why on Earth would I cross-over with My Little Pony? Because it was fun, and like the superhero genre, Magical Realism gives us all kinds of room for fun. The show can be enjoyed at a superficial level, but yields all sorts of interesting symbolism for those so inclined. I tried to offer some intriguing examples. Someday I'd love to ask the writers in question how much of that symbolism is conscious, and how much emergent.
I had a rough draft of "A Horse in the Race" almost a year before I published it. The ponies aired an episode called "Daring Don't" that confounded my plans. (I'd originally meant for Kino to appear in Equestria, and for everypony to confuse her with the fictional Daring Do.) Rewriting that boondoggle took forever! Sadly, Dave Polsky's episode also left a trail of strained credulity and plot-holes that begged to be addressed.
Deedee's plan is a combination of Heinrich Schliemann's scheme to find Troy (he did!) and a similar scene from H. R. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, the story that inspired "Indiana Jones," and thus Daring Do.
"Black lotus" and "the pyramid of N'Gala the Mad" is a little Easter egg from my favorite Robert E. Howard, "The Queen of the Black Coast."
The wave of magic that passes over Kino of course references M. A. Larson's excellent "The Return of Harmony."
"Only the unloved hate..." is a salute to the inspiration behind Kino's big speech, Chaplain's magnificent The Great Dictator. If you're unfamiliar, go watch that speech on Youtube right now, because it automatically makes you a better person.
"We're a Long Way From Equestria" is a song written by "Mandopony." I wrote the speech while listening to an instrumental version available on Youtube.
"Lili Marleen," by Hans Leip and Norbert Schultz, was famous for being popular on both sides of the Second World War. Ross Parker and Hughie Charles' "We'll Meet Again," is the signature song of Dame Vera Lynn.
Not much to add with "On the Wing." It violates the show-don't-tell rule, but this is just how the story happened to me. Perhaps I'll fill in this sketch of Kino's life in future stories. With Kino surviving the death I'd planned for her, I needed a new ending. I like this one better.
Alternate realities, timelines, and eigenstates are concepts I'm pretty shaky on, so if you're a cosmologist or quantum physicist, just roll with me.
Celestia and Luna's Greek equivalents would of course be Helios, and his sister Selene.
Some four billion years from now, our Sun will be expanding toward its red-giant stage, and boil away the Earth's oceans. Hopefully, humanity's descendants, likely no longer remotely human, will be traveling the galaxy. At the same time, our Milky Way will be colliding with Andromeda. The odds of this destroying any star systems in the process are slim, because interstellar space is just that vast. Perhaps this will be an exciting time for our descendants.
Final Reflections
Usually, when I write stories, I begin with two ingredients: first, a theme - what is this story about... really about underneath all the plot-events? Second, how will it end? That's the advice of Lajos Egri and William Goldman, respectively. If you want to learn to write stories, I enthusiastically recommend them. (If I may presume, my other bit of advice would be to read everything you can - Basho and Khayyam, Hawthorne and Howard, Shakespeare and Gaiman, and everything in between! If it speaks to you, it will be useful later!)
I've reached a stage where storytelling feels so natural to me that I don't necessarily write the ending first anymore. Most recently, themes have begun to emerge organically from characters, rather than mechanistically from a preordained idea. This is progress, I think. But I would not recommend a writer seek this as a goal. Rather, focus on the story you're writing right now, make it as good as you can, and let such things come naturally, if they do, having written story after story. There's also a lovely bit of advice from Alan Moore to experiment. Try new things! Never settle into a comfy rut. For example, my little game of mimicking writers I admire proved so useful, I'd recommend it to anybody searching for their own artistic voice. I can point to sentences in this series and say, "listen... that's Bradbury, that's Lovecraft, and there's Tolkien! Can you hear them? They live on, in me."
When I began my own journey here on Fanfiction back in 2009, I had absolutely no idea that I'd write so many tales. Each came knocking, one after the other, and I dutifully took dictation. If you've read the lot (and thank you,) you've seen how each ends, and now how the entire arc ends. Has a unifying theme emerged? What is the meaning of all this?
On some reflection, I have my answer. I hasten to add this is not the correct answer. For example, I shared my own interpretation of stories like Haibane Renmei and Friendship is Magic, but it's possible the writers involved would have no idea what I was talking about, or might even disagree with me, like Marshall McCluhan telling off that teacher in Annie Hall. Unlike McCluhan, if you found some other interpretation, I'd love to hear all about it.
In the case of Gia from the Old Haunts arc, I think she was cut off by her parents, even before we met her, from that part of herself Jung called the Shadow. She struggled so hard to be "perfect" for them that she suppressed all her human frailties, her sexual desires, and her anger. Tisiphone is the personification of those amputated parts of herself. Like Captain Kirk in Richard Matheson's very good Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within," Gia is weakened because she is not whole, and faces her wild dark side. Unlike the Captain, she has no convenient transporter, so her story is about how she manages to re-integrate herself into a single, whole and fully-functioning being. We live in a world where we must often, faced with poverty or authority, swallow our completely justified outrage, and pretend. I suspect many, many people can sympathize with Gia's plight.
Kino also has a severed relationship... with humanity. After a chain-reaction of traumas, but also due to innate tendencies that had other children calling her "gloomy," she finds herself disconnected from humanity at large, and even routinely disconnects from her own humanity. Sometimes, like when she pets the dog Riku, she's whole and adorable. But under stress, like when she butchers a rabbit or eats a scorpion, she "unplugs," and her behavior becomes mechanical, a part-time psychopath, meaning not the homicidal mania of movies and TV, but shallow emotions and diminished empathy.
Her story, in both Dead Man's Curve and The Bird of Time, is about her struggle to reconnect with her own humanity, and with humanity at large. It's a hard journey with many setbacks. The haibane awaken in her the desire to do so. She begins to settle in with a primitive tribe, but Corina interrupts this. Corina offers Kino a place, but really only wants to use her. Kino bonds with Gia and has a brief fling, but that blows up in their faces.
Kino's rite of passage extinguishes her fears, only for the plane trip to reveal she's not fearless after all. With the horrible events in Kelbright, she's ready to give up, and Hermes' account of the barbarity he's witnessed only reinforces her alienation. But like the haibane, the ponies come to Kino's rescue, and inspire her to, at last, genuinely accept the friendships she's been offered. She repents of her dismissive coldness, and rejoins the human race. With her friends' help, she tries to pass on her gift to the brutalized Tatana.
Did I have this arc planned? Heavens, no! Am I pleased by it? Oh yes, very much so! I'm startled by how well everything's worked out. I hope that if you find yourself in a similar state to either Kino or Gia, you will find solace and useful guidance in their journeys. That is what stories are for.
With reviewers like GDeacur saying, "I borrowed a few books from the library this week that weren't as well written," or Lehst asking me for original work, I'm due and overdue to pursue my own writing again. I'm working on a non-fiction book now, I hope to convert my languishing screenplays into novels, and I think I might just retool my Kino and Gia stories into something publishable. Then... who knows?
Wish me luck, and thanks for all your kind words.
October 1st, 2014
— The Blue Footed Booby
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