Neo Scavenger: Of Death and Fur Coats

     I'm dying. It's the middle of the night, which means I can't see anything around me and - more troubling - I can only take one action a turn. Normally this isn't much of a problem, but then again I'm not usually starving. My best bet is to find hunting grounds I can trap squirrels in, or barring that, a crumbling apartment to loot ketchup packets from. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything but flat plains in the past 7 hexes and I can't scavenge berries from the grass without the Botany skill. It's at this point in my blind, painfully slow search that I stumble into a hilly area and a dogman erupts from the darkness around me.

     At first I panic. Combat in Neo Scavenger starts as soon as two creatures occupy the same space, and dogmen are by far the most dangerous creatures I've ever encountered in the game's post-apocalyptic Michigan landscape. Then I remember that they can also be skinned and eaten if you manage to kill one.

Dogmen.

Mushishi Episode 11: Mountain Mystics

     I'm rewatching Mushishi on DVD and blogging it. Previous post here. First post here. You can watch this episode and the rest of the series legally (and free) on Youtube. For those looking for a brief refresher, there's a list of brief episode descriptions here.

     Thus far in the series, there have been two essential categories of mushi: those whom Ginko can control, and those who are so untouchable and powerful that he can't even attempt a cure. In other words, either beasts or gods. And some do take on the form of gods, literally: they command humans' worship (episode 6), control their dreams (episode 7), establish their taboos (episode 9), and even have dominion over the nature of their lives (episode 1). But if the mushi are gods, what does that make the mushishi?

     Why, they're the priests, of course.

Mushishi Episode 10: Taking Responsibility

     I'm rewatching Mushishi on DVD and blogging it. Previous post here. First post here. You can watch this episode and the rest of the series legally (and free) on Youtube. For those looking for a brief refresher, there's a list of brief episode descriptions here.

     While some episodes of Mushishi are mysteries in and of themselves that require extensive unraveling (like episode 3), others are more straightforward stories simply enjoyable for what they are at face value. Episode 10 was one of these. The technical competence of the episode was as enthralling to behold as ever, with gorgeous visual and sound design. The story, at its heart one of a former inkstone artisan returning to her craft, requires little more than the viewer's attention to make sense.

     I'm okay with that. One of the things that has always made Mushishi a special piece of media is its blase attitude towards itself. Sometimes it has incredibly nuanced, uplifting, or grim ideas and themes it wants to explore, and just as often it simply wants to tell an unusual tale and leave it at that. It's a series that walks its own path, at its own pace, and welcomes you to travel with it, skip ahead, stay behind, or ignore it entirely. It's just. . .there, and that's fantastic.

     That being said, it isn't hard to excavate ideas from stories that don't necessarily revolve around them. Episode 10, The White Within the Inkstone, isn't a story about responsibility, per se, but as a motif it rears its head on more than one occasion.

A visual representation of owning up to a mistake.

Mushishi Episode 9: A Chip off the Old Block

     I'm rewatching Mushishi on DVD and blogging it. Previous post here. First post here. You can watch this episode and the rest of the series legally (and free) on Youtube. For those looking for a brief refresher, there's a list of brief episode descriptions here.

     The majority of Mushishi is dominated by philosophical discussion, but it has been largely obfuscated thus far. This episode, however, shifts it to the forefront, with two men discussing morality in a hut serving as the climax of the episode and the investigation and curing of mushi being left out entirely. The viewer is required to accept a lot at face value. Both traditional storytelling and the hallmarks of previous series entries are highly warped and even disregarded so we can have twenty minutes of people talking. If you can take that step, though, this episode has perhaps the most to say of any others up to now.

Breaking taboo, yet moving towards light.

Mushishi Episode 8: A Slave to Himself

     I'm rewatching Mushishi on DVD and blogging it. Previous post here. First post here. You can watch this episode and the rest of the series legally (and free) on Youtube. List of brief episode descriptions here.

     And we're on to disk two!

     As I mentioned in my last post, the previous episode was one of my least favorite in the entire show, largely because I could never understand what it was trying to say. When I rewatched it last month, however, I was delightedly surprised by how much I enjoyed both the episode and the message I extracted from it. Believe me when I say that when I watched episode eight (one of my previous favorite entries) and found it a miserable and depressing affair, the irony was not lost on me.