Passing the Torch Around
My weekend had a bit of craziness to it, and not just because I was getting over a cold. I took an unexpected loop around my brain and ended up with some renewed writing motivation.
And it was all thanks to my Number One Anime Nerd Girl of Science.
Okay, some background. Kemono no Sou-ja Erin or Erin the Beast-Player was a 2006 anime fantasy series about a girl growing up in a world with giant lizards called "touda" and giant wolf-headed eagle creatures called "beast-lords." We follow Erin from her days as a curious ten-year-old in her home village, through various adventures until she ends up as a twenty-year-old teacher in her kingdom's beast-lord refuge. What struck me about Erin was that she's a passionate scientist through-and-through. She may be dealing in made-up science about made-up creatures, but her methods of scientific inquiry and deduction are real-world solid. As I've said before, if we had more characters like Erin in our fiction, a lot more people would understand how science really works.
But the anime series only covers half of Erin's story, the first two of four light novels that were written about her. The other two have never been translated into English, and I've only ever found a brief summary of what happens in them, a summary that didn't give the story a happy ending. Supposedly Erin was roped into breeding beast-lords to be weapons, in a coming war against an enemy that would attack with an army of touda. The final battle is literally apocalyptic, with both forces of weaponized creatures raging out of control and threatening to kill everyone on both sides. (Yes, touda and beast-lords are pretty recognizable symbols for the atomic bomb.) Erin manages to stop the conflagration, but sacrifices herself in the process.
A short synopsis is easy to fake, and so for the past several years I've looked around the internet periodically, trying to find something that would either confirm or refute what I'd read. Saturday afternoon, I hit the mother lode.
Unfortunately, the detailed description confirmed the briefer version I'd read before. But it also added some depth and an underlying theme that gave the story a much-needed infusion of hope. And there was also a scene that knocked my socks off.
You see, all through the twenty-odd years the final two books cover, Erin never stops being a scientist. Even after she's resigned herself to creating her "beast-lord battalion," she never stops trying to learn new things and answer new questions. And then there comes a scene where she's talking to her son Jessie (or "Jeshi," as some spell it), when he's roughly the age she was when we first saw her. She talks to him about nature, about the trees and the birds and the fire-ants he'd tangled with a few months earlier. He's impressed by her knowledge, but then she admits that she'll never know everything. But what she can do is pass on her knowledge. She may only find one piece of the puzzle in her short human lifetime, but she can add her piece to pieces others have gathered.
"Imagine a lit torch, Jessie. That torch can only illuminate what's around you, but you can light other people's torches around you and soon you'll see much farther, right?"
I could pretty much use that for my own mission statement, just as it is.
In the epilogue, we learn that Erin survived four days after the battle, and spent much of that time dictating as much of her knowledge and experience as she could to a scribe. We also learn that Jessie becomes a teacher himself, following in her footsteps. The overt message of the story is the futility of war and the hubris of people who think they can control the powers of nature. But underneath, there's the unmistakable message that learning and knowledge bring hope.
Last night, as I was searching for a YouTube video to play while I washed dishes, I came across the latest field reports from Santa Cruz Island. The researcher went up Montañon Ridge a couple of weeks ago, and in the video he pointed out some things I'd missed when I went there a year ago. Now I've got to go back. Learning and knowledge bring hope.
And it was all thanks to my Number One Anime Nerd Girl of Science.
Okay, some background. Kemono no Sou-ja Erin or Erin the Beast-Player was a 2006 anime fantasy series about a girl growing up in a world with giant lizards called "touda" and giant wolf-headed eagle creatures called "beast-lords." We follow Erin from her days as a curious ten-year-old in her home village, through various adventures until she ends up as a twenty-year-old teacher in her kingdom's beast-lord refuge. What struck me about Erin was that she's a passionate scientist through-and-through. She may be dealing in made-up science about made-up creatures, but her methods of scientific inquiry and deduction are real-world solid. As I've said before, if we had more characters like Erin in our fiction, a lot more people would understand how science really works.
But the anime series only covers half of Erin's story, the first two of four light novels that were written about her. The other two have never been translated into English, and I've only ever found a brief summary of what happens in them, a summary that didn't give the story a happy ending. Supposedly Erin was roped into breeding beast-lords to be weapons, in a coming war against an enemy that would attack with an army of touda. The final battle is literally apocalyptic, with both forces of weaponized creatures raging out of control and threatening to kill everyone on both sides. (Yes, touda and beast-lords are pretty recognizable symbols for the atomic bomb.) Erin manages to stop the conflagration, but sacrifices herself in the process.
A short synopsis is easy to fake, and so for the past several years I've looked around the internet periodically, trying to find something that would either confirm or refute what I'd read. Saturday afternoon, I hit the mother lode.
Unfortunately, the detailed description confirmed the briefer version I'd read before. But it also added some depth and an underlying theme that gave the story a much-needed infusion of hope. And there was also a scene that knocked my socks off.
You see, all through the twenty-odd years the final two books cover, Erin never stops being a scientist. Even after she's resigned herself to creating her "beast-lord battalion," she never stops trying to learn new things and answer new questions. And then there comes a scene where she's talking to her son Jessie (or "Jeshi," as some spell it), when he's roughly the age she was when we first saw her. She talks to him about nature, about the trees and the birds and the fire-ants he'd tangled with a few months earlier. He's impressed by her knowledge, but then she admits that she'll never know everything. But what she can do is pass on her knowledge. She may only find one piece of the puzzle in her short human lifetime, but she can add her piece to pieces others have gathered.
"Imagine a lit torch, Jessie. That torch can only illuminate what's around you, but you can light other people's torches around you and soon you'll see much farther, right?"
I could pretty much use that for my own mission statement, just as it is.
In the epilogue, we learn that Erin survived four days after the battle, and spent much of that time dictating as much of her knowledge and experience as she could to a scribe. We also learn that Jessie becomes a teacher himself, following in her footsteps. The overt message of the story is the futility of war and the hubris of people who think they can control the powers of nature. But underneath, there's the unmistakable message that learning and knowledge bring hope.
Last night, as I was searching for a YouTube video to play while I washed dishes, I came across the latest field reports from Santa Cruz Island. The researcher went up Montañon Ridge a couple of weeks ago, and in the video he pointed out some things I'd missed when I went there a year ago. Now I've got to go back. Learning and knowledge bring hope.
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