Category: Notes

Immigration

Immigration is a theme in this story that shows up in a lot of places, and I want to comment a bit on how I depict it and why.

Start with the fact that the majority of characters in this story are immigrants. It’s not something Kyoko really emphasizes or sees as a significant part of her identity, especially after this long; she’s pretty well assimilated into American culture. But it’s something I do try to keep in mind. She was not raised there. Her early life was primarily spent in Tokyo and its immediate vicinity. When she was very young, she traveled more; she went on some business trips with her father, who was trying to groom her for the same kind of corporate salaryman position he held. She also spent time in Osaka with his family. When she got a bit older, in her teens, those things stopped and she was almost strictly based in Tokyo.…

Psychiatry and Mental Hospitals

So mental hospitals and psych wards have been mentioned a few times now. Psychiatry, and mental health in general, can be very delicate subjects for a lot of people, and this delicacy is something I do keep in mind while writing. All the same, though, I want to take a moment to comment more extensively on the prevalence of these topics, and on the tone with which they’re handled in the story. I will note, a priori, that I am an extremely biased source here. I have extensive experience of the mental health system, and my experience has not been good nor normal. I’ll comment on that further later, but I feel I should stress this up front, because it does heavily impact how I write about this topic. Additionally, all of my experience has been in the United States. This kind of information is very hard to really get from the outside of a culture, so I do not know nearly as much about how the system works in Japan. This caveat is significant and likely unavoidable in impact when I’m describing her experiences in Tokyo, particularly with how long ago those were. That said, and with the additional caveat that this note is on the long side, let’s dive in.…

Dice and Card Games

So characters play games in this story a lot. It’s a character trait that comes up a lot, particularly with Saori and Raincloud. What games they play, when, and how is something that I put a fair amount of thought into.

Dice games are the most commonly referenced. The reason for this is pretty simple, and it’s one that will show up in actual life a lot. Dice games are easy to play. You don’t need much for it. You can play a game of liar’s dice with nothing more than a flat surface, a bag of dice, and some cups or screens. It’s simple, easy, and portable. You can pack up quickly and with little fuss. You can play anywhere that there’s a reasonably flat surface. Dice are durable, and if you lose one, you can use any other die of the same type to replace it.…

Werewolves

Derek has some comments here about werewolves and the experience of being one. Some of this has been mentioned already, but other parts are new information, and it seems like a good time to talk more about it metatextually as well. A lot of information about them isn’t widely known, and some of those details may be revisited later, but for now I’m going to be focusing more on basic information that’s easily learned in-setting.…

Classifying Mages

It’s been mentioned that trying to classify mages is difficult or impossible. But it’s also been mentioned that people have tried and they have created various systems for doing this. The reason is pretty straightforward. Even if these systems are intrinsically imperfect, they’re informative, and having language for easily describing someone is useful. The motivation for systems both informal and rigorous is easy to see. Theories about why they work the way they do are often very complex, and are largely beyond the scope of this note, a phrase you should get ready to see a lot.
Despite ignoring the underlying theory and the reason things take some of these forms, this is going to be a long note. It’s not important to fully understand the back-end reasoning in order to understand the story. In case you want to know the categories that are mentioned throughout the narrative but not to read the full essay, I’ll go ahead and list those up front. The main categorization system, aside from just going “that mage works with this specialty”, has five categories: Wizard, sorcerer, druid, shaman, witch. Wizards and sorcerers both work with physical forces; wizards do so using rational logic, while sorcerers work with emotion and intuition. Druids interact with the physical world, and shamans interact with the spirit world. Witches interact with living things.

Knowing this set of terms is enough to get by in the narrative itself without losing anything. The rest of this essay is just for people who are interested in the back-end reasoning I use for this, which (as usual) is much more elaborate and abstract than it first seems.…

Teleportation

Teleportation is almost impossible. For the vast majority of people, human and otherwise, it is completely out of reach, impossible; it is among the most complex and difficult types of working there is, in this setting. The reason for this goes back to something that was mentioned in the Magical Mechanics note: Location is among the most fundamental and difficult-to-change parts of the world. Any time you want to screw with spatial dimensions and the concept of position, things get difficult fast.

Now, to start, let’s define teleportation. What people in-setting mean by this is that someone is in one spatial location, and is then in a different spatial location, without having moved and without having engaged with the space in between.…