If I made the rules, I can break them. This update focuses on the architecture from Fist of the North Star, or Hokuto no Ken (HnK (even the acronym sounds like the sound a goon might make when punched)). Although it’s not a hentai manga, its character dynamics are about as stupid as any H-doujin. What distinguishes HnK’s architecture is that it’s rendered in such a scrupulous level of detail but never stops being a really weird, naive medley of styles, ranging from ancient Sumerian to German-Baroque to speculative techno-futurism culled from movies. I stop short of classifying it as mannerism because mannerism expresses a learned, particular, connoisseur-appealing subversion of classical tropes (it is perhaps partly for this specialized wittiness that the Palace of Charles V may never be more than a cultural outlier). Tetsuo Hara’s illustrations look rather like source material was amassed then slung together to fit a given scene. The effect here is purely cumulative and blunt.
Architectural weirdness is relative to HnK’s own fiction, too, though. This isn’t a story that takes place on an alternate Earth; not blatantly, anyway. Really, if it weren’t for the dungeon-palaces housing each Bad Guy, poking up higher than any other settlement structure in a manner similar to the cathedrals of old Europe, most of HnK’s distant urban views would look like a default post-apocalyptic scene: frayed skyscrapers creaking over barren lands. But it’s these fortresses and the closer looks we get of city streets that are centrally, almost singularly, responsible for throwing off a sense of continuity from regional reality. You might assume that, well, maybe the Bad Guys appropriated corporate buildings and had laborers and slaves graft “classical” pieces onto the existing frames. The problem with this assumption is that the civic design is comparably bizarre – just with less glitz. It doesn’t matter that HnK never specifies where it takes place; the more you read, the more you suspect, or realize, that its setting has no real parallel.
I honestly don’t think much thought was put into any of this by either Hara or author Buronson. You might as well also ask why there are so many impossibly enormous men wandering around (and no, the answer isn’t “nuclear radiation”). The architecture’s qualities exist as such for dramatic effect. There are evil huge men with evil huge ambitions, and they are complemented with evil huge buildings. Everything beneath that which follows suit does so for the sake of atmosphere and consistency. It’s theater. With the emphasis on muscular men, why not have them inhabit muscular environments? It’s just interesting to me that Hara settled on something so Byzantinely patchwork.
When Hara references another fictional location, he doesn’t do a whole lot to mask the imitative process. Which, you know – fine. This isn’t a subtle work. An interior shot of Bladerunner’s Tyrell Corporation building becomes the throne room of Shin, HnK’s first antagonist. Later on, the palace of Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi serves as the model for a mountain dwelling, albeit on a smaller scale, right down to the adjacent bulbous-domed tower.
These sorts of examples are barefaced. If you want, however, you can go much further back and compare some of HnK’s sites to the imaginary architecture of Erlach, Ledoux, Piranesi, Boullée, etc. It’s true that sometimes you’ll see what you want to see. But when it comes to an object like the Holy Emperor Cross Mausoleum, a pyramid-tomb built for an antagonist’s dead master, the spirit of Boullée’s funerary gigantism couldn’t be closer at hand (if this topic interests you, take an hour out of a day to watch this excellent talk by historian Erika Naginski on French visionary architecture). It’s similarly feasible – again, just visually – to compare the least inhibited palatial designs to the cake-like assemblages in plates by Piranesi which reimagine roads of the ancient Roman republic as being lined with eccentric monumental antiquities.
Click the link below if you want to see other images from the manga.
that episode where a team with only one girl and a lot of guys suddenly has another girl join the team, and everyone loves her for some reason (usually implied to be that shes pretty), and the original girl immediately hates and cannot stand second girl
are you kidding
whenever i have been in an all boy group the appearance of anything even remotely a girl has been an utter relief and total joy are you kidding
My entire professional life has been in teams surrounded by men. Like, literally, there have been repeated times in my life when I was the only woman on that floor.
On two separate occasions in my working life, I’ve joined a team and the other woman already on that team has later come over to talk quietly to me and say something to the effect of “Thank god, another woman. I was so happy to find you were joining us.”.
I guess this is how you can tell a guy wrote the script and he had very little real world experience in the environment he’s writing. When you’re in an all-male team, the only other woman would have to be a straight out sociopath who casually poisoned people around her to make me hate her. And even if she was, I’d at least try four times before I gave up. Or maybe consider joining her (I mean she might have a reason for what she’s doing after all).
How to introduce the second female character to the team: Both women are meeting somewhere the male teammates have never been. The more established woman is giving the newbie a detailed profile on every dude in the team, how best to deal with him, and how much of an asshat he’s likely to be.
What happens when clueless male writers assume a lone woman will naturally view a female newcomer as competition for male resources, instead of, as is more often the case, an ally against male dominance.
Oh my god, someone has footage of it! I remember one time my dad, lil brother, and I were leaving a Ryan’s. We were waiting for a chance to hop onto the road and in the distance we just saw everything turn grey. We saw it come closer and closer and come to find out it was rain!
It was just a wall of rain – the end of the rain, really. I’ve never seen it again, but it’s so cool to see footage of the edge of rain!
I saw this while I was in Jamaica I was so confused
I wanna witness this one day
i was at the beach during a mild hurricane and the rain kept coming in waves over the ocean, so there’d be a dry break and you could watch the next sheet of rain come towards you
so today i was talking about this time my mom threw a massive party and like, took some doors off their hinges to create a ~walkthrough space~ from one side of the house to the other, and it reminded me of this time i hulked out as a youth. i don’t think i’ve told you guys this story yet but the world has been such a bummer lately that i figured maybe it was time we all laughed at me for a while.
growing up, for the most part, i really liked school and didn’t mind getting up in the morning to attend it. which is not to say that school really liked me, because i was actually…kind of a monster child in elementary school.
two of my siblings and i had the same fourth grade teacher and at the end of the year i asked her who her favorite was and she slow-blinked at me for a really, really long time before saying carefully, “well, you caused more havoc than both your brother and sister combined,” which i took to mean, “NOT YOU.”
anyway, for some reason i woke up one particular morning and just decided that i didn’t want to go. i don’t remember there being any particular reason for it, like a test or a pre-scheduled rumble in the schoolyard. i didn’t even bother coming up with an excuse, like being sick; i just straight up told my dad that i wasn’t going to go. my father, obviously, thought that was a stupid idea and kept insisting that i “had to go” because it “wasn’t optional” and “you’re eight, you don’t get to make these decisions.”
this logic did not sit well with me.
my sweet father, the Patron Saint of Leaving It To Beaver, tried first to explain calmly and reasonably that as a young woman in a global capitalist society the best thing i could do for myself was to invest in my education, and also my brain was too sharp to waste all its potential, and double also, i didn’t have a choice because school was mandatory. not just in our house but by united states law.
my dad is very I’m Not Mad I’m Just Disappointed Dad, and my mom is very Oh, No I Am Definitely Mad Mom and i fall somewhere around, “MY DISAPPOINTMENT ENRAGES ME AND NOW I’M CRYING.”
do you cry when you get mad, because i do, and then i get mad that i’m crying, which makes me cry harder, which makes me more mad, which–
“I’M NOT GETTING DRESSED, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME, I’LL RUN AWAY FIRST,” i shouted, very confidently for someone who had no savings, no life skills, and a very limited understanding of geography. i threatened to run away a lot in those days, and actually did one time, but almost immediately returned home to demand a sleeping bag, tent, and some petty cash for groceries.
what did they expect me to do, “fend” for “myself”??? survive on my own???
hahahaha. no.
hand over a hundy, dad. i have a lavish nine-year-old lifestyle of juice boxes and american girl dolls to maintain.
it should be noted here that at eight-ish, i was in that period of every child’s life where they’ve had their first growth spurt, but only in like…some parts of their body. growth does not happen uniformly, which is why some kids have weird torsos and others can scrape the ground with their knuckles when they walk. pretty much every child in a third-grade classroom looks a little like the product of an affair their mom had with jack skellington.
i was in my prime Heir to Halloween Town years, with freakishly long limbs but not great fine motor control, which meant i knew i had elbows but i couldn’t quite get a hang of where they would be at any given moment. my legs grew so fast that my knees are, to this day, what a real live medical professional once described as, “janky.” i ran into a lot of door frames.
okay. i still run into a lot of door frames. depth perception is not my strong suit. how about you let me live, Todd the Data Scientist?
in hindsight, you can’t really blame me for not wanting to go through the farce of disguising my badly proportioned pipe cleaner skeleton in order to learn simple division or counting without using your fingers or whatever kids learn in third-grade math.
“I’D RATHER DIE THAN GET DRESSED FOR SCHOOL!!!!”
haha remember when we were kids and we didn’t really know what death was and we weren’t constantly saying things like, “YOLO,” and “screw it, death comes for everybody,” in order to disguise our paralyzing terror of the reality that you and everyone you know is going to inevitably succumb to death’s cold embrace?
SO TAKE THAT VACATION, NANCY!!!
“neat,” said my father, cutting his losses on both the Logic and Reason fronts, “you don’t have to get dressed.” and with that, he scooped me up over his shoulder, nightgown and all, and began carrying me out of the room.
but ol’ Molly Long Arms wasn’t down for the count just yet. i shot my grubby grabbers out like a cowboy cracking a bullwhip and grabbed ahold of the nearest thing i could, which happened to be my closet door. now, the thing about this door is that it was one of those bi-fold shutter doors that open and close on a track, like indoor window shutters.
remember that weird moment in the late 1990s/early 2000s when all interior home decor was designed to look like the outside of a nantucket beach house?
my father kept walking toward the hallway, and i held onto slats on the door with the strength of a wet napkin but the grim determination of a spartan at the the battle of thermopylae.
it’s weird how the moment before Something Terrible happens time kind of stops. i know that sounds really dramatic for someone telling a story about a time they yelled at their dad and had weird arms, but it does. in the ten seconds before something terrible happens to you, it’s like everything slows way down and your brain has exactly enough time to go, “oh, no. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh no,” but not enough to make any course adjustments whatsoever. it’s just the universe’s little way of saying, hey, you’re about to get slapped right across the face by my whimsy, just giving you a heads up.
“okay,” your brain says, “but what if, instead, we ….. DIDN’T ….. do that?”
“oh, no, sorry, did you think this was up for debate? haha, that’s my bad. it’s for sure gonna happen. i’m just letting you know so that, later, you can relive these events in your mind over and over and over and wonder if you could have avoided them.”
“neat. thanks, universe.”
“anytime, buddy.”
in my head, the universe looks exactly like hades from disney’s hercules. if you were wondering.
anyway, for those ten seconds we were evenly matched, my father and i. i wasn’t letting go of that door and he wasn’t putting me down. my people are a stubborn people. none of us want to be the first to give. my great-great-grandfather on my dad’s side joined the canadian air force, despite not being canadian, because the u.s. hadn’t entered the war yet and he was determined to prove to someone at work that the germans were the bad guys in world war i. that’s right, we’re so stubborn we’ll go to literal war to prove a point.
so what gave was the door.
with a cracking sound that can’t have been as loud as it seemed, the folds ripped off the track. my father, suddenly sans-resistance, stumbled forward, dragging the door behind us. i was too shocked to let go, so our momentum was only stopped when the door got wedged against the wall. the jerk back to a full stop was enough to jolt me into letting go of the door, which clattered to the ground.
my dad put me down.
we stared at the door together. i don’t think either one of us was processing fully what had just happened. this fight had just escalated like, four thousand percent more than either one of us had anticipated. it was like we asked someone to break a tie in an argument we were having and that friend, A Door, responded by launching itself off a roof.
too extreme, door!!!!!! wayyyyyy too extreme!! dial it back, like, 99%!!
i want your opinion with the same gentility that you’d handle glassware in your mom’s kitchen while she’s asleep in the room next door.
“well,” said my dad.
“well,” said i.
look, nobody wants to talk about how we got to this terrible place from the less terrible place we were at ten seconds ago. that’s a horrible conversation, always. if people were meant to handle their problems immediately and responsibly, evolution shouldn’t have given us the power of suppressing emotions.
“i’m just gonna … change into school clothes,” i said. “meet you at the car in ten minutes?”
“yep,” said my dad.
and we never talked about it again.
shout out to anne carson and @sashayed for really setting the tone for this story
just moving along like everyone else 