A Magical Girl Retires

 

A Magical Girl Retires

by Park Seolyeon

translated by Anton Hur

Harper Via

2024

 

 

I think there's something of a cottage industry of postmodern novels about former kid detectives who are lost and floundering in early adulthood - Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails and Dustin Long's Icelander in print, Ed Brubaker and Marcos Martin's Friday comics, and The Venture Bros and Dicktown cartoon shows, to name the ones I'm most aware of.
 
Park Seolyeon's A Magic Girl Retires is kind of like that, but for transforming, Sailor Moon type superheroes. In the length of a novella, Park shows us a young woman becoming a magic girl, meeting the larger community, struggles to understand her place in this world, and ultimately (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title) decides to retire from the superheroing life.
 
This is a deconstruction of the tropes of magical girl fiction, as well as an infusion of mundane reality into their stories. Our hero's biggest problems are depression, unemployment, and credit card debt. She lost her old job because of the coronavirus pandemic. The magical girls have a labor union, and when they talk about saving the world from a threat that could destroy civilization, they don't mean a monster, they mean climate change.
 

A Magic Girl Retires is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. She begins the book suicidal. She's pushing 30, has no job and no prospects, and owes 3 million won in debt (about 3000 US$, a deliberately small amount, I think). She's rescued at the last moment by the Clairvoyant Magical Girl, who senses her potential, knows she's in danger, and want to recruit her, believing she might be the long-awaited Magical Girl of Time.
 
Our narrator struggles with self doubt, but she also really wants to do well by her new friend, her new opportunity. She tries her best. She makes a totem, learns to transform. She gets a part-time job at a convenience store to try to pay off some of her debt. And when there's a fight, a real all-hands-on-deck fight, she joins in and does her best to help. But she realizes, being super doesn't solve her problems, and her power in particular comes with new problems of its own.
 
I like what Park's done here. This book is short but economical, using only a few episodic scenes to show us a glimpse of a magical world and invite us to imagine what it might be like to live inside, before turning away and shutting the door.

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

 
 

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

by David B

translated by Kim Thompson

Fantagraphics

2006, reprinted 2011

  

 

There's a rare pleasure in wandering stacks of bookshelves, picking out a volume because it somehow catches your eye, discovering that you've never heard of this title or author before, flipping through, and feeling that spark of interest and curiosity that makes you want to take it home. Librarians call this 'serendipitous discovery,' and in this age that overflows with reviews, recommendations, suggestions, referrals, coming soons, see alsos, and curated lists, it's not how I, or most people, find most of the books they read, but it's how I found David B's The Armed Garden, and Other Stories, in a used bookstore in Portland, tucked between trade paperbacks of Aquaman and The Avengers.

Rare too is the pleasure of reading a book you found this way, discovering something unlike what you usually read, maybe unlike anything you've ever read before, discovering something of quality, something you really enjoy, and that you found by happenstance, that you wouldn't have found any other way. That sort of thing doesn't happen every day. You want to savor it when it does. The Armed Garden is something special, and I'm glad I picked it out.

This is a graphic novel, a collection of three short stories, fantasy stories set amid the historic past. All three are medieval. Not in the sense of high fantasy, with princesses and knights. There are rulers, yes, and soldiers, but also fervent religious faith, competing heresies, and deeply weird magic that operates on a kind of fairy tale logic, outside of human control. These stories resemble tales from the Bible, or folk tales, stories that people might've shared alongside gossip of a neighbor's house-sized vegetables, or the miraculous birth of rabbits to a virgin one village over.

In the first story, 'The Veiled Prophet,' the wind blows a piece of cloth onto the face of a fabric merchant. It gets stuck there, allowing him to assume the forms of Jesus, Adam, Moses, but anyone who sees his true face dies. He amasses an army of followers, and the attention of the caliph, who sends his own army.

In the title story, 'The Armed Garden,' a crusader receives a vision that compels him to strip naked and find a new Eden. Many people join him, in his nudity, and his earthly paradise, including wild animals, and even walking trees, all carrying swords. Other crusaders come to destroy the garden, though its leader has become a star.

In the last story, 'The Drum That Fell in Love,' a mercenary captain is killed in battle, and his company has him, skinned, tanned to leather, and stretched to become a drum skin. When the drum is played, he returns as a ghost. The mercenaries carry the drum into battle, but eventually they're defeated, and the drummer, who's fallen in love with the ghost, runs off with the drum. The girl and the drum have more adventures together, including finding the physical location of heaven.

Each story has a weird, dream-like quality to it. There's none of the systematic, almost science-like logic that many contemporary fantasy stories apply to their magic. This is like something older, something pre-modern. David B's art is mostly black and white, with a bit of sepia shading. There's a very good match between the feel of the art and the tone of the stories.

Status and Culture

 
 

Status and Culture 

How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by David Marx

Viking

2022

 

 

David Marx is not a professional sociologist, but his book Status and Culture very effectively summarizes and synthesizes existing social theory and research into an account of the human desire for status, how we all use cultural objects to signal our status to each other, and how the way that we navigate each others' signals helps to drive cultural change. He marshals a lot of examples, connects dots that are often left separate, and writes accessibly for an educated but non-expert audience. There's real value in this kind of science writing, though it's more common to see a journalist sharing insights from physics or biology this way, and I think Marx has made a contribution here by bringing these things together and showing the steps of the larger process.
 
Marx's overall goal is to solve what he calls 'the grand mystery of culture' - basically, why do we agree to do some things and not others, and why does what we agree on keep changing, particularly in areas of life where we can't possibly point to a linear narrative of scientific advancement or technological improvement as an explanation? And his answer is status. High status people make certain choices to distinguish themselves, most of the rest of us try to imitate them to try to attain higher status for ourselves, us doing so reduces the status-value of those choices, and so those high status people move on to something new, starting the next lap of the chase. Some lower status people who don't have much hope of doing well in the race try new things that let them gain a bit of status locally, and a few of those attempts end up well-known when higher status people choose them for their own next round of distinction.
 
In the first part of the book, Marx talks about status, which is like, the esteem your fellow humans feel for you. You can have normal status, high status which means others consider you a 'good person,' or low status which means you're considered 'bad.' One source of status is possessing rare talents that are beneficial to the group; then higher esteem is your reward for helping everyone, and an incentive for others to do the same. But also, a lot of our status is determined by group membership, which we're likely born into, and only modified somewhat by our behavior. A mediocre aristocrat still outranks an excellent peasant. How much each component matters varies over time and place. The rewards of status are things like respect, deference, attention, praise, and access to scarce resources. Status feels good, so everyone has an incentive to want to maintain at least normal status, and to try to improve their position.
 
Among people who know you well, your status is determined by your category and actions, but among strangers and acquaintances, it's going to be based on who they think you are from the limited information they have available. So it's going to be based on cultural signals. It's difficult to lie with your signals, because you probably lack the knowledge and money to depict yourself as much higher status than you are, and being perceived as false or inauthentic is discrediting. But everyone has an incentive to present the best plausible version of themselves, to try to secure as much good treatment from others as they can.
 
In part two, Marx looks at the most common strategies for using culture to signal status, based on social class. People with new money fortunes signal their status with things that are obviously expensive and have low symbolic complexity, and thus can be understood by anyone who sees them - things like big houses, sports cars, flashy jewelry.
 
People with old money have less liquid cash, but more cultural knowledge, and have the prestige of having had their fortunes for a long time. They signal with things that are expensive but in ways that are less obvious to people with less knowledge - art, antiquities, and things that are very well-made. This provides what Marx calls an 'alibi' - they can tell themselves and others that they aren't buying these things for their status value, but for their high quality.
 
Professionals tend to imitate old money; they can afford some artisanal goods but mostly at the lower end, and not like, family estates. People without much capital tend to imitate the new rich, with things like sports logos, pricey sneakers, custom-decorated cars.
 
Historically, old money and professionals have insisted on the inherent superiority of high-complexity symbols, though as Marx notes (as did Bourdieu before him,) people with low capital have been denied the opportunity to receive the education needed to enjoy complex cultural objects. Low-complexity symbols require no special training to enjoy.
 
Attempting to increase your status outside of these strategies is riskier. It can pay off if you do something innovative that ultimately gets accepted, or it can result in lowered status if people think what you're doing is ugly or immoral. Subcultures are usually low-status young people trying to invent a new criteria for judgment, one that favors them. Although Marx doesn't mention it, sociologist Shyon Baumann has written about how both social movements and art movements are attempts to claim greater respect by elevating a particular social group or artistic medium up into normal status.
 
In the third section Marx shows how status drives cultural change, following the steps of Everett Rogers' model of the diffusion of innovations. Marx argues that while new cultural innovations can occur anywhere, it's only when they follow the path he's describing that they end up as society-wide trends. Already high-status people start the cycle by innovating some new cultural symbol as a mark of distinction. Historically, anything that uses rare materials or is expensive to make - because it needs a lot of time, labor, or skill - is a promising starting point. The innovation could also be lifted from a subculture or an artist. The point of every new trend is to mark its trendsetters as different, and better, than everyone else.
 
In order to reach a larger audience, the trend has to be reported on in the mass media. Initially, these reports will be limited to elite, tastemaking publications, where they will be seen by people outside the elite who want to emulate them. As a book critic, I'm participating in this step of the process, albeit in the least effectual way possible. Because the trend, in its initial form, is probably too complex and too expensive, it will be simplified as it passes from its innovators to the early adopters. It becomes a bit more standardized and defined. One of Marx's original insights is that trends necessarily change as they pass to larger audiences.
 
Once a trend is established among the early adopters, companies realize there's money to be made in mass production. This involves simplifying and cheapening again, but also allows a proliferation of (more-or-less formulaic) variants. The early majority mostly doesn't take their cues from the press, but from what they see on the shelves. To they extent they are reading reviews, they don't want to know that something is cool, they want to know that it's good, and why. (Actually, it's possible that my reviews fall here...) The early majority are people who fear losing respect due to following a trend that their peers will think is bad, but are happy to engage with something that is itself sliding down from high status to normal status.
 
Once something is fully normalized, it's also picked up by the late majority, who adopt the trend because they fear being perceived as low status if they don't. By this point, the original elite innovators have already jumped ship to the next new thing that will give them distinction again. At this point the trend has reached its simplest form and become ubiquitous as mass culture.
 
In Marx's final section, he talks about status and culture in the age of the internet, when trends no longer seem to mark the passage of time by replacing each other in succession, but instead appear to pile up in a perpetual now.
 
I thought this was a really effective overview of what social scientists have learned about status and culture, and that Marx put these ideas together in a more complete way than you usually see them. He also drew attention to lesser-discussed features of theories, and added his own insights, in ways that enlarged the value of the project. He also used a wealth of examples from nearly every domain of culture - fashion, music and art, food, etc in a way that helped illustrate the processes he described.

Goliath

 
 

Goliath

by Tom Gauld

Drawn & Quarterly

2012, reprinted 2017 

 

 

I'm generally fond of Tom Gauld's comics, but I have to admit that Goliath really doesn't do much for me. Somehow it feels like the concept is too slight to sustain the execution, and Gauld's very minimalist style contributes to my feeling of there simply being not enough there.

I suppose you would describe Goliath as a deconstruction. Like John Gardner's novel Grendel, it takes the villain of an old story and re-centers him as the protagonist. But like many modern literary characters, Goliath here is not positioned as an active agent of his own fate, but as a kind of beleaguered everyman, swept along by forces larger than himself, outside of his control.

Goliath is a soldier in the army of the Philistines, who are at war with the Israelites. The enemy army, we are told, are hiding amidst the rocks of a certain natural cairn; they are never seen for the entire book, until the very brief arrival of David at the end. Goliath is very tall, but also very blase and uninterested in fighting. His favorite task is administrative paperwork. He happily exchanges his assigned guard duty with other soldiers looking to get out of their turn doing admin.

He is essentially a low-level, white-collar office worker miscast into a Biblical epic.

One day, a hotshot middle manager gets an idea to end the war quickly and with minimal bloodshed by dressing Goliath up in some custom bronze armor, and having him shout a challenge to the Israelites to send out a champion, and to decide the war based on a fight between the two. Goliath doesn't really like this idea, but he's outranked, and the middle manager assures him he won't actually have to fight, surely the Israelites will be intimidated into surrendering.

For the next 40 days, Goliath walks from the army camp to the front line, shouts his challenge to the faceless, invisible, (possibly absent?) enemy, receives no reply, then trudges back to camp. His task seems pointless; he considers deserting the army to go back to farming. His only companion is a child shield-bearer, and occasional unsatisfying pep-talks from the middle manager.

And then, one day, David emerges from the rocks, and Goliath's story ends, very suddenly and anticlimactically.

Gauld does a good job highlighting the absurdity of these very modern characters going through the motions of ancient warfare. There's maybe something insightful in positioning the contest of champions as basically a harebrained scheme by an overly ambitious manager who's eager to promise that someone else will do a lot of pointless work to please his own boss. And I liked that in the few places where Gauld quotes directly from the Bible, this text gets a totally different and more grandiose font than the simple sans serif text of everyone's human dialogue.

And also, like, I do get that the meaninglessness of this task, of trudging across an empty field to address an invisible audience, doing this over and over with absolutely no response of any kind, I get that that's the goal of this book, to show how pointless and disheartening that would be from Goliath's perspective. But even knowing that, there just isn't enough story here for me to fully appreciate it, especially since Gauld's own later Moon Cop attempts much the same task and, to my mind at least, accomplishes it much more successfully.

In the Country of Last Things

 
In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

Penguin

1988

 

 

In the Country of Last Things is a dystopian novel set in the capital city of an small, unnamed, fictional European country. The country is effectively a failed state, and the city is stuck in a condition of disorganization and lawlessness that resembles a warzone, although no fighting is happening, and the causes of the breakdown of society or the ongoing crisis are never stated. Auster has written the novel as the first-person account of a woman who traveled to the city to find her missing brother, and became trapped there herself. It takes the form of a book-length letter written by the narrator, Anna, to an old friend back home, explaining what's happened to her.
 
Structurally, the book isn't organized into chapters, only unnumbered sections with short breaks between them. In terms of plot, there are basically four parts. The first part is primarily exposition about the city. There is very little law anymore, and theft and murder are effectively legal. Private toll collectors defend spots of turf and demand money, food, or sex to pass by. Corpses and shit are collected by the city government and burned to make methane for fuel - these are virtually the only municipal services that exist. One of the only remaining occupations is private trash collection. This too is burned for fuel. Scavengers also hunt for lightly damaged objects to resell, and bandits survive by robbing scavengers. There is little food and many are homeless.
 
Anna explains that this is a place where things are lost, or taken away, and never return. Loved ones die, buildings collapse, streets are ruined, nothing is ever fixed or repaired, and nothing but conflicting rumors remain afterward, if anyone knows anything at all. We see this again and again, across the rest of the book. Only once in the book is one single lost thing ever returned. All the rest is a chronicle of repeated dispossession.
 
Anna arrives in the city, finds not the slightest trace of her brother, and becomes a scavenger for her own survival. In the book's second part, she helps an elderly woman who is also a scavenger, learns more about the city, and becomes the old woman's caretaker as her health fails and a killing winter cold sets in.
 
In the third part, she meets someone who knew her brother, another journalist who came to the city to look for him before Anna did. They become lovers, and partners, until he becomes lost to her too.
 
In the fourth and longest part, Anna works in a charity hospital and tries to help the city's poorest and most vulnerable. The book ends with Anna writing her chronicle of events thus far, and preparing to attempt an escape.
 
Throughout, Auster thinks about the nature of attachment and loss. Arguably, due to the arrow of time, all of life is the progressive ending of one thing after another, a series of losses that can't be recovered, not just in this city, or in war, but everywhere, always. But life is also always new things starting, and continuations of everything we haven't lost yet. Anna comes to the city hoping to remain above it. To go, find her brother, and get out, without forming attachments, without getting involved. When we're young, we don't necessarily think we're invincible, but we usually think we're special, lucky, blessed. Bad things will happen to other people, an pass over us like the Angel of Death during the Biblical plague. But it's impossible, for Anna and for all of us. She's dragged down into the mud and shit. She does things she's not proud of, makes mistakes she regrets. And she can't help but make friends, fall in love, to care, to try to help. That too is life.
 
Books like this, set in imaginary European countries, are sometimes called 'Ruritarian romances,' named for the fictional country at the heart of Prisoner of Zenda, although it somehow feels wrong to call a nightmare dystopia like this a 'romance.' I do like Ruritanian settings though, and they work well for dystopias, like Alan Sillitoe's Travels in Nihilon or Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole. Sometimes it's surprising that there's no corresponding tradition of American fiction set in a fictional state, but I suppose that the names and boundaries of the US states have been pretty consistent compared to the way various European regions and principalities have repeatedly been absorbed in war, split apart, or gained independence after a conflict. And DC Comics have their fictional cities, their Metropolis and Gotham and others, which is maybe the closest domestic analog.

Fables 18: Cubs in Toyland

 

Fables 18

Cubs in Toyland

by Bill Willingham

art by Mark Buckingham

Vertigo Comics

2013

 

 

I used to follow the Fables comic, up through the end of their war with the Adversary who drove everyone out of their original, magical fairy tale lands and into the Mundane World where the series takes place. Volume 18, Cubs in Toyland is pretty much a stand-alone story that takes place shortly after the long-running war storyline has wrapped up.

If you've never read Fables before, it imagines various fairy tale characters as refuges who've built a new home, in secret, among the non-magical population of New York City. Characters from many stories and traditions are all mixed up, and all the old feuds are supposed to be forgiven by amnesty so the new community can have internal peace. Eventually they learn more about the evil empire that forced them to flee their homes, and they try to decapitate the empire by capturing or killing its ruler.

While all that's going on, deputy mayor Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf, who has a human form and acts as the fables' sheriff, fall in love, get married, and have seven cubs together, who also have human forms. After the war, they retire from the government and get a cabin upstate to spend more time parenting their kids, who appear to be somewhere in the 7-9 year old age range when this storyline takes place.

One thing I always liked about Fables is that it doesn't shy away from some of the darkest elements and implications of a lot of those old stories. And in that tradition, Cubs in Toyland is bleak, almost crushingly dark and hopeless until the end, in that particular way that only a story following the merciless logic of a fairy tale can be. (See for example, Richard Coover's "The Goldilocks Variations," which is like, completely bereft of hope.)

Snow White and six of her cubs are at home in their cabin, while Bigby and one daughter are off studying so that she can grow up to be the new North Wind. The cubs are mostly pretty rowdy, rough and tumble kids, except perhaps for Therese, who seems to be the Mary Bennett of her family. (Although that's a little unfair of me. We learn by the end of the volume that her personality was being magically affected the whole time, so you'd have to read an earlier book to see what she was originally like.)

Early on, Therese complains to her mom that she doesn't like the toy boat she got for Christmas, because it won't like her to play with her other toys. This was Snow White's one chance to notice something was wrong and intervene, but she doesn't realize she should worry, and says something about how toys can't talk or get jealous. This is a capital letter Adult Fear scene in light of everything that follows.

The next day, the boat, which can talk and is jealous of Therese's time and attention, bullies her into skipping playing outside with her siblings in favor of finding a creek. When they do, the toy grows to full size, and the little stream becomes an ocean, and Therese gets bossed into climbing onboard and sailing to a distant shore on another world. Eventually, she arrives in Toyland, or at least one island of a larger land, where only lost and broken toys go. It's worse than that actually, although we don't find out right away. This is an island for toys whose child died while playing with them.

The toys, led by giant teddy bear Mr Ives, cajole her into becoming their queen. Therese doesn't really like any of this. She keeps asking to be let go, to see her mom again, to go home, and being told it's impossible. Soon she asks for food, but literally nothing grows on this island, just rocks and sand and mud and all the toys; the only fresh water comes from rain.

Therese is magically hearty, but she will starve to death eventually, and aside from hunger and loneliness, we're told that she's being brought low by the nature of the place and its inhabitants. She's not the first girl the toys have brought here, but the others have all died before fulfilling their purpose. The toys want Therese, as their queen, to magically restore them to pristine condition.

The idea of Toyland is a powerful one, and I like that Willingham focuses in on just part if it, an Island of Misfit Toys if you will, except much worse. You can see how it's a kind of cousin to the older fairy lands. And there's already a kind of heartbreaking component to things like Toy Story or Jim Henson's The Christmas Toy - the idea that our toys are alive and sentient, but also unchanging, so they get lonely when we don't play with them and miss our child selves when we grow up - a kind of cruel nostalgia embedded in the very premise. This just raises the stakes a little higher.

Back on our world, Snow White is distraught over her lost daughter. Bravest son Darien gets an offer to help find his sister from the mechanical tiger who lives in their front yard. He's a toy in the real world and a living tiger in Toyland, and he bring Darien on a rescue mission. They storm the castle but are defeated by an avalanche of broken toys. Darien falls down a mountain back to the shore. As for the tiger, Mr Ives kills him so that Therese can eat, and have a bit more time to perform the queenly magic they're all convinced she's capable of. Therese, visibly wasting away from hunger, eats some meat raw, and orders the burning of wooden toys for fire to cook the rest. She's becoming a killer, too. It would be hard to overstate how wretched she seems by this point.

Bigby returns home to Snow, and he can tell that both his missing children have traveled to another world, but not where they've gone or how to find them. For both parents, this is a time for despair. On the island, Darien's pretty badly injured, and hallucinating from a concussion, but he remembers some Old Magic. He can't rescue his sister, or escape himself. But he can save her, at the cost of his own life. A human sacrifice is the price to power an endless stewpot that will provide Therese meals forever. With no hope for himself, Darien is brave one last time, and casts the spell.

When Therese eats some stew, she realizes what her brother has done, and also, whatever hold the place had on her is broken. She's restored to her own personality, and nearly overwhelmed by guilt and regret. She also knows how the toys can be restored now, and how she can earn forgiveness - by preventing other accidental deaths and saving children's lives. Eventually, as a grown adult, she returns home to the cabin in the Adirondacks, where only a few days have passed, to tell her parents what happened before she leaves again for good. You can tell I'm getting older, because I'm finally really thinking about how the grown ups must be feeling in scenarios like this, and the prospect of losing two children, in this or some ordinary non-magical way, seems utterly devastating.

Alongside all this are some goings on in Fabletown, as the residents adjust to the end of the war. There's also a short story at the end of the collection showing how the Big Bad Wolf got his destiny, illustrated by Gene Ha, instead of Mark Buckingham who drew the main series.

Children are Civilians Too

 
Children are Civilians Too

by Heinrich Boll

translated by Leila Vennewitz

Penguin

1970, reprinted 1995

 

 

Originally printed in 1970, a couple years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Children are Civilians Too is a collection of German author Heinrich Boll's short stories published 1947-1950, with the majority from 50.

This collection fits 26 stories into about 190 pages. The earlier stories, especially, tend to be on the short side. There are a lot of 3-5 page entries, only a handful 10 or longer. Almost all of Boll's stories are told in the first person, really only a couple have a third-person narrator. For the most part, these are not stories where much happens externally. Instead we stick close to our main character while they complete a single task or experience a single emotion, usually a kind of acceptance of loss or disappointment.

Most of Boll's stories are about soldiers or veterans. They're not about combat, but about moments in between. There are several stories about soldiers enjoying a night out drinking while on leave; in one, "That Night We Were in Odessa," they're broke but pawn their possessions so they can get schnapps and sausage, a good last meal, because they expect to die the next day when they're redeployed.

We also see soldiers in field hospitals. In the title story, a man with a head wound buys baked goods from a Russian girl who sneaks on-base. In my favorite, "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We...," the injured soldier realizes he's being treated in his old high school, which he left less than a year earlier, his own handwriting is still on a chalkboard, copying out a classical quotation. In "Lohengrin's Death," it's a little boy who dies in the hospital, if a morphine overdose, after breaking his legs while trying to steal coal from a moving train.

Veterans after the war often want work or have a poorly-paid and low-status job. Or perhaps they hope in vain to see someone again, perhaps at a train yard. Even former bootleggers want straight jobs, and will take whatever task they can get. In the sole scifi story, "My Sad Face," an unemployed man is arrested and rigorously beaten, according to police regulations, for failing to look as happy as the law requires, in a futuristic totalitarian state.

I would say that these stories mostly speak to their specific time, and to Germans who had to reckon with the fact that their country, their public, had largely accepted the patriotic justifications for war, and gone into it willingly, eagerly, while the conditions for soldiers were awful.

Boll doesn't mention the Holocaust, and there's no real hint of the idea that it was wrong of Germany to inflict war on others. But he does pretty thoroughly dismantle any image of being a soldier as noble or romantic or heroic. Boll's soldiers are working men with a particularly shitty job they were told would be better. In some ways, it reminds me of Americans' attitude toward our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can see now that our justifications were hollow, and that the wars were bad for 'the troops' they were supposedly fought in support of, but we mostly don't think about what we did to the Iraqi or Afghani people, what they suffered, how many of them died.

I think Boll is better known for some of his other writing, but "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We..." is very good. It's probably my second-favorite of his stories, after "Action Will be Taken!," which isn't in this collection.

Witch Hat Atelier 6

 

Witch Hat Atelier 6

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2020

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 6, the girls are whisked off to the Great Hall, the enormous castle that serves as the center of witch society, at the bottom of the ocean! And they all get a chance to take a magic test, but to pass, they have to surprise one of the masters of the Hall...

In the previous volume, the Brimmed Cap Witches, who practice forbidden magic, attacked the testing site where Agott and Richeh were trying to earn permission to use magic in front of civilians. Their teacher, Qifrey, was badly injured, and Euini, a student from another atelier, was tattooed with a curse that turned him into a wolf. Fearing that the puritanical Knights Moralis would erase Euini's memory, or worse, imprison or kill him, the witch proctoring the test took responsibility for hiding Euini and trying to cure him.

And the Knights did show up! Fortunately Olruggio is there too - another adult witch who lives at the atelier, a standard practice basically to ensure the teacher isn't mistreating the students. He makes sure that Qifrey is taken straight to the hospital, and that the girls are questioned rather than interrogated. Even in this secure bastion of magic, the doctors and nurses aren't witches. To prevent forbidden magic that's cast on the body, they can't learn any magic, and witches can't learn any medicine. Qifrey spends the rest of the book unconscious while he heals.

After telling what they know (except what happened to Euini), Coco, Agott, Richeh, and Tetia are introduced to Master Beldaruit, one the most knowledgeable witches in the world, who rides around the palace on a goat-legged walking throne. I wasn't sure if this was a necessary mobility aid, like a magical wheelchair, or if it's just an affectation because he's just that whimsical. Since Agott and Richeh's test was interrupted, and since Coco and Tetia helped when they were trapped in the magic cave, Master Bel gives them all a chance to retake the test. They can earn the right to use magic in public if they can surprise him.

This is, of course, harder than they first think. The solution involves thinking about who their audience is, and what might satisfy that person - good advice about rhetoric and communication for the real world manga readers as well as the fictional witches. While they're studying, we get a tour of the Great Hall, where most witch children grow up. Coco also hears a rumor that Agott was rejected by her famous family for plagiarism, essentially, claiming credit for a spell someone else invented. Coco doesn't believe it, although it's clear that something happened to estrange Agott from her family, so this is probably a clue of some sort.

The girls do pass the test, and Master Bel invites Coco to come live in the Hall, where she can get socialized, and be safe from both the Brimmed Cap Witches and from Qifrey. Why should she need protection from Qifrey? An excellent (and cliffhanging) question!