The Patreon Letters - 27th January, 2018 (Patreon)

It's still fucking January? God damn. Alright. This year will be longer than we could ever know.

Hello everyone, it's Jackson here with this week's Patreon Letter, and as ever, I don't really know what to talk about. I don't feel like talking about The Media I've Been Enjoying, but I also don't just wanna bust out some kinda personal essay either. I loved Em's writing last week (if you haven't read it, go do so immediately) and I don't have anything so eloquent to say. Sometimes you're just depressed, and yeah there's reasons, but really they don't matter. Well, they do, but they're the same reasons as last week and the week before that. You can't find some sense of catharsis or profundity from every single bad mood. You can't wring blood from a stone.

I've been rewatching Evangelion, which I am somehow loving even more on the second go around, and it isn't so much about this idea as it takes this theme and smashes you over the head with it every single episode. Shinji's depression is boring, almost unbelievably so. Until Asuka arrives, the first few episodes hammer the same beats over and over again, he never gets any better, he never changes, and he's so god damn broken that he runs away multiple separate times. What a fuck up.

it is, in a word, relatable. Watching it a few years ago I was extremely "oh i'm shinji," but I said on twitter this week that I'm some kind of unholy Shinji/Asuka mix. Which is an incredibly mean thing to say about someone so none of you are allowed to agree, no matter how true it is.
Shinji's a depressed fuck up who needs validation for every single thing he does in life. Asuka on the other hand is a ball of disgust and resentment, which is probably the correct reaction to being taken out of your nice life in Germany and forced to star in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The best episode in the series - the best thing that Evangelion has ever done - is the episode where they are forced to work together and dance, in their mechs, to defeat an angel.

So much of Evangelion is concerned with the interiority of its characters, with how fucked up they are, and with drilling down into just why they got so fucked up. It's honestly one of the things I love about it, the way it draws direct lines from person to person, trauma to trauma, all of us hurting and being hurt, wishing hopelessly for a way to stop it. But in its greatest moment, all that fades away, until there's no voices in anyone's head but music, and nothing to do but dance.

It means more to me than the ending, which is fantastic but ultimately impractical, a catharsis, a breakthrough in a series that is been defined by their absence. The dance battle presents something else; nothing is fixed and no one is suddenly better. Instead it shows that maybe, when the right song comes on, these two total opposites so full of misdirected hate, these two awful parts of myself, can come together and create something beautiful.

I am the Metal Gear and Evangelion liker. I know I'm boring, but I must live my truth.

I've been doing other things too, like reading! I've absolutely fallen in love with a Manga called Dead Demon's DeDeDe Destruction, which I won't write about yet because it's not finished but it has a fat character who doesn't feel like a joke so it's already the greatest fucking manga I've ever read. Also it's beautiful. The english version is coming out soon and I'm definitely going to support the official release, as they say. This is my official recommendation to you.  

The thing I will talk a little about is Y: The Last Man, which I read on a whim and tore through in a couple of days. I knew nothing about it except its premise and its creative team, and so expected it to be a problematic but pretty good read. Which it totally was, but it was much, much better than I expected. It's essentially a zombie story without the zombies, so it cuts through all the chaff (running away from zombies and the usual post apocalyptic nonsense) and gets immediately to the wheat (a bunch of different communities in a world slowly recovering from disaster).

I've got a lot of replies as I've gone through it wondering if it holds up and good news: it holds up. It's very pulpy, the characters are all pretty stock tropes yet very well defined, and it has a fantastic ending - which is 100% the key to making me actually like your thing. But more importantly, the art is incredible in a way that was very refreshing considering I had just finished up The Death of Spider-Man, which was mostly great but like, the art was not good. Here's the panel where spider-man dies. This is meant to be moving but it feels like some statues in poses, with colouring that completely kills the mood. Y, on the other hand, is full of beautiful, subtle moments, that are a large part of why these pulpy stories with trope heavy characters feel so human. Vaughn and Guerra share a credit as "Writer/Artist & Creators" in the title card pages, as they should. It's good.

Alright, that's enough from me. I'm gonna go do some different work now because I'm way too busy. We're recording both the Shadow of the Colossus and the final Mobile Suit Gundam podcast tomorrow so this is your final reminder: podcast@abnormalmapping.com if you have any questions! Don't say we didn't warn you!!!

Goodbye, goodnight, have a good one,
<3 Jackson