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As the snake rounds it's tail, meta begins with the end...
Part III. On Saiunkoku, or the not quite shojo thing
You’ll have to forgive my tendency to iji ni natcchau when it comes to certain things. Intensity is a mode of existence I will likely not unlearn anytime soon, so passionate shall I be about cow’s milk and other silly things (like shojo), even if it doesn’t really reflect my daily commitment or conviction in life (actually, I think milk might count…).
But behind or perhaps unrelated to my desire to stick up for shojo is true affection for one story known as Saiunkoku Monogatari. And though you assure me I don’t need to, somehow making arguments for stories is always in part making arguments for myself (ずるくて危ないね; trans.: it’s wrong and danger!), so, if you will…(mild spoilation might be part of what follows but we’ll live, I think…)
The protagonist couple in Saiunkoku consists of Shuurei, the wayward daughter of a noble household whose one dream is to become a civil servant and help the good people of rainbow land + the ambiguously gay Ryuuki, who, at the start of things, is wasting away his inherited emperorship on pure indignity (while thwarting potential matchmaking by courting men).
The storytelling begins of course when the fated pair meet and set each other on the course towards ambitions and feelings more intense and larger than life than either could have imagined.
A key element of this is that it doesn’t take long for Ryuuki (as the baka ouji, he’s this series' Tamaki, I suppose) to fall definitively for Shuurei (can’t lie, I would, too)…but his feelings for her tie him as much to his unintended path as king as it does to her. And because she, like the uncooperative Haruhi, refuses to entertain his narrow feelings (whatever the shit they are), he is pushed to rely on those worthy men who harem both him and Shuurei (in order to protect what they have), and to engage more generally and fully with life (I suppose this is the way of love in all powerful shojo).
In one of the most moving articulations of this trope, he confesses to his military advisor and General towards the end of things…that if it were not for said General and others he has come to call friend, he might have lost himself to his feelings for Shuurei, and perished in the flames of its intense singularity…and while that would have been fine, too, he’s grateful things turned out otherwise.
It is perhaps fated that I would want all my sons, should I ever raise them, to be baka ouji. But I love Ryuuki because although I have felt, many times in my life, saved by stories and how much I love them; it is by some truly divine grace that I have come upon the presence of so many others who make me understand, despite everything, that I probably don’t want to live on the moon.
如果没有你…
I would not be real.
Part II. Some headcanons
a. multiverse
Like Nodame, I spent my last week in Cambridge bringing out your inner Chiaki, who is a kind of Germany via high strung Japan. (Nodame Cantabile)
Luckily for me, your inner Germany seemed up to humoring my inner Prussia. (In manner of creepy Chibi voice: Hetalia!)
Postscript: and it seems if it’s not my inner Prussia, then my inner Austria joins in the fray of unbearable existences…help, Hungary!
b. PruAus…Hun
I don’t think there’s inherently anything wrong with Prussia or even basement!Prussia. Any awesome gag character comes with its share of personality deficiencies or empowerments, depending on how you view life-meaning and self-preservation (*cough* Katsura). But he does take up a lot of space with himself when persons let him and, perhaps more importantly, when he likes them (why PruAus works).
As I seem to have the nerve to be about as narcissistic (hateful, selfish troll meets potentially fruitful, but mostly disastrous delusions of grandeur; trans.: PruAus), if not yet as capable or confident or optimistic, as my 2D heroes…I don’t really mind being too much and I shouldn’t have made it seem like some kind of trauma to be rejected by people on the basis of it.
(In reality, I’m more over that than a bunch of old fogey nations or, better yet, Ouran characters at the start of their congregation would be, but I somehow don’t have Tamaki’s grace to not harp out of pure habit.)
(はい、永遠の少年たちよ！（飛べない翼を捨てて, trans.: lose the unironic emo angst）前へ進もう！)
Therefore, the condition for me shinai-ing the enryo must be that you also don't suru the enryo when you need to fry pan.
c. Wherefore love thy brocest? Germancest, Italycest, Frasier...
He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.
(omoi ja nai. katsura da!)
Part I. 7/22/12: I used to…
After spending the hour after you left for home feeling rather sheepish and embarrassed that I had spent the good part of the evening implicitly begging your indulgence in my indolence and explicitly demanding it for my silly walk down memory lane, I realized how little I had thought about the past in recent times…how this neverending stretch of presence had been crushing me with my seeming inability to want to occupy it (iya na kotta) at the same time having people in my life—my living, breathing, life among others, that is—has made it impossible for me to completely ignore the accounts that need to be paid for it (bichuuuuuu~ = wtf smoke screen for aforementioned escape).
That is my convoluted way of saying: what would I be doing without you?
Quite possibly rubbing my face against the whale of my TV lights while kicking sexy, sexy England to the curb.
The me of my natsukashii days would say I ought to be honing my inner Prussia so that I am fully prepared with awesome the day of England’s tojou…whatever that means. Because if I’m really as awesome as my inner Prussia says I am capable of being, then I’ll be prepared for, well, whatever that means…or at least take it in stride and see it through to what it will be.
The me of my natsukashii days would say I ought to be honing my instincts and my resources, so that I am fully prepared with awesome when Austria wo oikakeru time comes…whatever that means. Because if I’m really as awesome as my inner Prussia says I ought to be, then it shouldn’t take attending my own funeral to know that the chase is on and that I’m in it to be in it for whatever it will be.
The me of my natsukashii days would not give me an ass-whooping, but like Russia in epic fem!Prussia fic, strip me of the privileges that blind me to my reality. As one girly boyish girl, f(l)ailing at H, decidedly untragic (which, if not the case, would, as you say, be nothing but some unfaithful dignification of abjectness).
So thank you for letting me meet natsukashii!me on the day reserved for celebrating your company in this world and mine. And thank you for sharing so much of what those days were like for you. The good and the bad and the near-forgotten. There may not be video-recording of that time, but you can always share them with me in whatever manner you’d like…if the desire to do so should come.
It’s nice to see nattchan (naming-sense ga warui kedo, just roll with it kudasai) every now and then, but all the more so as a reminder of this:
For coming here, for meeting you and all these crazies, for becoming who I now am, even with all the dame + latent dame, all the angst, the sleeplessness, and bleak prospects…
Well, in the common parlance of fan-love…
I regret nothing.
And insist on continuing to add more and more items to the headcanon of our friendship. So we can keep the magic alive. Because life demands it, quota damned all to hell.
Dakara...Jyakki mo, kotoshi no nokori mo, rainen mo, sono ato mo…
Yoroshiku.