{"id":54847,"date":"2022-10-02T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-02T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54847"},"modified":"2022-10-09T08:42:14","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T12:42:14","slug":"sci-fi-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54847","title":{"rendered":"Sci-Fi Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

The year was 2005, I was seven years old. Netflix was still sending out discs in little paper sleeves, tucked into envelopes for people to rent on a subscription. There was no limit to how many discs you could rent, for a monthly fee, provided you could get the thing into the mail fast enough for them to return a new one. Our family was on the ‘two discs at a time’ plan, Dad got one, and the kids got one Mom would get something occasionally but it was usually something to sit down and watch as a family. As a mom of three homeschooled kids, she just didn’t have the time.<\/span>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The day we got to sit down and pick out our next run of discs was sacred. The library was huge, with more things than I\u2019d ever seen as options in my tiny little life. I\u2019d been in a Blockbuster before, and my library’s poorly-run disc rental section (which made one feel like a fugitive for checking out a movie), but Netflix’s selection\u2026it was everything I could dream up.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Every niche option, every weird film no one had ever heard of, and every old classic in the books. In the days before streaming and licensing, when Netflix ran as a rental service, it was so rare to see something not<\/em> available. They didn\u2019t have to compete with Blockbuster for who got which release, they both got everything, and Netflix didn’t rely on brick-and-mortar stores to hold<\/em> everything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Out of all the options, all the amazing things we could order\u2026I would not stop asking for Zathura, a knock-off Jumanji film directed by John Favreau, which took place in space. I do not know why I was obsessed. That movie scared me so bad I think I learned to hold my breath for extended periods of time just because I kept forgetting to breathe from fear. I had nightmares about that movie, I learned fear from Zathura.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

All hail ZATHURA.<\/div>
All hail ZATHURA.<\/div><\/p>\n

As I remember it, (and this may be contested by some members of my family) my mother finally put her foot down after I ordered and sent back the same movie four times in a row. She threw into the queue two \u2018animes\u2019, something which I had never heard of before, and I <\/span>lost it.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Somehow, I got into my head she was ordering old-style ninja\/samurai flicks which I would not be able to understand due to a language barrier, and were also <\/span>Not Zathura.<\/b> Being <\/span>Not Zathura<\/b> was a crime of the highest magnitude to my young neurodivergent brain, and so I refused to watch these, \u2018animes’ when they arrived. I am ashamed to say, I continued to refuse to watch <\/span>Not Zathura <\/b>for months. This isn’t 100% true. We had a rule at the time that the kids had to watch two educational movies for every ‘fun’ movie, and if memory serves, that rule was enforced. So, I must have been watching a lot of documentaries then, too? I only remember Zathura.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

I delayed my access to those two animes far longer than need be, and when I finally did watch them, I realized my horrible mistake. These were not <\/span>Not Zathura<\/b>, no they were a gift from the heavens, and subsequently the only thing I would be watching for the next six months.\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The first one was A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, an arguably kid-geared anime with very few real stakes. There were a few heavier themes I think the protagonist’s mom had died a few years before the show took place, but it wasn’t truly the focal point of the anime.<\/span>. But, for the most part, it was the anime equivalent of eating a tub of marshmallow fluff. I don\u2019t go back and watch it much, except maybe the first episode for nostalgia’s sake. It wasn\u2019t my Sailor Moon, it was more like Blue’s Clues; I loved it, and grew out of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The other, though, was Angelic Layer.<\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Angelic Layer was light and fluffy like A Little Snow Fairy Sugar was, but it had a lot of complexity under the surface, including some pretty compelling sci-fi themes and technology we\u2019re actually starting to see today. It had an <\/span>opening theme<\/span><\/a> This is the only copy I can find of the ‘anime’ version online. It says creditless, it is not. It’s ‘Be My Angel’ sung by Mikuni Shimokawa, I don’t know who did the anime remix, though.<\/span><\/span> that still appears in some of my playlists, and some great character personalities, although extreme and if I recall, often odd.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The protagonist, <\/span>Misaki Suzuhara, is twelve and moves to Tokyo to live with her aunt and go to school.\u00a0 She accidentally stumbles her way into buying an \u2018Angelic Layer\u2019 doll on her first day out in Tokyo and…subsequently stumbles all the way into the championship fights that these dolls can compete in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The dolls are basically articulated Barbies, that with the help of a special table and headset attached to the competitor, can move like people, controlled by the headset wearer. In the competitions, two competitors put on headsets and make their dolls fight. The fighting isn\u2019t real ripping-each-other-apart stuff, for the most part, there\u2019s no blood or gore. They presumably have sensors, leading to health bars on a screen to track who\u2019s winning.<\/span><\/p>\n

The show lets its characters get attached to these dolls, giving them names, personalities, and fighting styles. But, aside from a few pivotal moments of dramatic eye contact from player to doll mid-combat, and the player projecting emotions onto them, it’s pretty clear these are meant to be tech<\/em>. These dolls aren’t androids with personalities and lives, it’s never even really suggested that they are, they are toys, tools even.<\/p>\n

The art was actually very impressive for the era as well. Compared to other shows from the same time (2001). There's nothing radically disproportionate anatomy-wise, at least not egregiously so. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it was animated by Clamp, after all.<\/div>
The art was actually very impressive for the era as well. Compared to other shows from the same time (2001). There's nothing radically disproportionate anatomy-wise, at least not egregiously so. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it was animated by Clamp, after all.<\/div><\/p>\n

There are some spoilers ahead, as a warning. I\u2019ll try to keep them minor but the anime is also from 2001 and has very few major spoilers to give, so I think we\u2019ll be okay.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You come to find out as you watch the show that the company producing these dolls actually has a different motive for the tech they\u2019ve developed. The dolls are great, they make the money needed to keep researching, but their main goal is <\/span>prosthetics.<\/span><\/i> Those dolls that can be controlled by a headset? The idea is to scale them up massively. You start by moving a doll with your mind and eventually work your way up to moving a human-sized arm effectively.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The writing was simple, and I took it for granted as a kid, but in hindsight, it was handled brilliantly. It was not only actually sci-fi and interesting, but also how things work in the real world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is an issue that comes up with disability <\/span>all the time.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

You have a group of people who need new legs, a rare kind of mobility aid, or treatment for Type Six Very Very Rare Syndrome. These people aren\u2019t the ones with money, necessarily, they’re just sick people. Maybe you\u2019ll get \u2018lucky\u2019 and some billionaire will end up with the same condition and fund your research, but he could also just throw money into getting a custom fix, leaving the rest of the condition sufferers on their own.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And even if you beat all the odds and get your product to market for the people who need it\u2026supply VS demand breaks your heart, and you watch your product have to cost $1,000 just to be manufactured. Your mobility aid, your medication, your invention, now sits behind a paywall, or worse, insurance, and you can\u2019t get it to the people who need it most.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was bitching and moaning months ago that shower chairs come in three colors; gray, beige, and medical equipment blue. I wanted something funky that didn\u2019t make me feel old and decrepit. It was a silly, vain complaint that had more to do with being upset I needed one at all, but it was somewhat justifiable. People need shower chairs, it’s a shame they have to be both expensive and ugly, in a world that makes it feel like they could easily be neither. Maybe sitting in the shower will get marketed as the new self-care and the abled-bodied people will buy enough to get interesting colors on the market\u2026not the point.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Angelic Layer gives me strange hope. It\u2019s realistic enough to not feel like it\u2019s living in an insulting fantasy world, but optimistic enough to not feel like dystopian social commentary. In a world where most media feels the need to either scream a moral of the story from the high heavens or be total escapism, it\u2019s just kind of nice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, is this a good time to mention this was supposed to be a post about the Oculus Rift with only a short battle-doll tangent? Oops. Next week, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The year was 2005, I was seven years old. Netflix was still sending out discs in little paper sleeves, tucked into envelopes for people to rent on a subscription. There was no limit to how many discs you could rent, for a monthly fee, provided you could get the thing into the mail fast enough […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,618],"tags":[627,622],"class_list":["post-54847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","category-epilogue","tag-anime","tag-disability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54847"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54878,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54847\/revisions\/54878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}