Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
This week it rained a lot. All across England rivers burst their banks and inundated surrounding settlements. My hometown was no exception as the river flooded the low-lying areas all across town over the last few days. Fortunately the left-bank, which has a lower elevation and thus took on most of the floodwater, is the less inhabited side, so most people's homes were unaffected. Walking around the town I know so well in such a different state felt very strange. It felt like a different place, our own "acqua-alta". My usual routes were no longer feasible, the old buildings had new moats, and the very geography itself, something I envisage as unchanging, had shifted fundamentally creating a "mirror-town" which was not the same as that place I grew up.
The power of water fascinates me: nature's unstoppable force, its part of the reason I became a sailor after all. There's something totally inhospitable about it: the vast emptiness of the sea, the destruction wrought by flood, storm or tsunami. However conversely its simultaneously the key to life, and even in those dark depths of the ocean live a plethora of beings. In stories, floods are often used to express an allpowerful force, an unstoppable and amoral (or at least perceived as such) event that brings death and subsequent rebirth to the land it envelops. Obviously Noah's Great Deluge of Genesis is the paramount example: a flood that wiped clean the face of the Earth of all life except the chosen few, and restarted everything from a blank page. But despite the terrible destruction brought on by the world-flood, I strangely also feel a tranquillity from the story. Those peaceful and silent months between the rain stopping and the flood subsiding, where Noah and his family are floating all alone on a perfectly flat ocean that stretches out across the entire globe. I imagine the heavy sun beating down and the winds falling still and quiet: the gentle waves of the azure sea lapping against the hull of the arc as Noah and his menagerie sit and wait in silence, watching the hazy horizon as the sun makes his way across the sky...
In moderntimes the primordial fear of a world-flood has been adopted by the scientific community also, through the theory of climate change caused rising sea levels. This concept too bears that paradoxical aura of peaceful destruction to me, as expressed in Ashinano-sensei's beautiful manga "Yokohama Shopping Log". Here human-caused climate change has melted the ice-caps, raising sea-levels by many dozens of metres; human civilisation has ceased to progress and now lives merely on the resources left by a more prosperous time. The world is "outside of time" in a sense, as its inhabitants accept their lot and live peacefully through the "twilight of humanity". There are many examples of such settings across Japanese Media, including many (and I mean many) of my favourites: "Humanity has Declined", "Girls' Last Tour", "Aqua", "Shuumatsu Touring", "The Wind Waker", "Future Boy Conan", "Angel's Egg", "Nausicaa", even the currently airing "Frieren" has a similar theme. It could has something to do with the state of the Japanese nation itself, since the 1990s declining in many metrics including wealth, population and youthfulness. It must almost feel like the "end of history" for them, a slow and comfortable period of respite from that ridiculous period of time from the fall of mediaeval feudalism to the neon lights of Shinjuku that took barely over one lifetime. In a way modern Japan could be called a "sinking golden city".
Miyazaki seems to also have an interest in flooded worlds, but the way he uses them is subtlety different from the peaceful-post-apocalypse of YKK. In Spirited Away the world beyond the youkai-town is seen to be a flat and barren place, covered in a seemingly thin sheet of floodwater, maybe a foot or two deep. As Sen and No-Face take the train across this desolate landscape we get a tiny glimpse into a world where small, isolated flooded towns are connected together via rail and boat, inhabited by faceless people (this article's cover image is from this scene). Oh how I would love to see more of this world, but we literally get 90 seconds before the film moves on. Here this landscape clearly evokes "loneliness": the loneliness, fear and mystery Sen feels as she travels far across this strange alien world to meet a witch she's never met and who doesn't expect her coming. We again see a world of water in Miyazaki's new film, "How Do You Live?" (annoyingly released as "The Boy & the Heron" in the West). I will be making a full post on this film once I can watch it again, because I think its particularly wonderful. But here the protagonist is pulled into the underworld, a world of endless oceans dotted with little isolated islands and inhabited by a civilisation of semi-intelligent birds. This vision of the underworld combines the lonely isolation of Spirited Away with the eternal peace of YKK, and evokes the "Asphodel Meadows" of Greek mythology. But there is also a bubbling sense of adventure there: when you see a world like this you want to explore it, travel across the flat seas in a small boat visiting islands and living amongst their strange avian inhabitants over an eternity and a day; or maybe that's just me.
PS: If you're really into this sort of world, you might enjoy this idea. A few years back I was exploring the "infinite, shallow ocean" idea, a-la the train scene from Spirited Away: I even wrote a worldbuilding premise including it. You can create a unique Minecraft experience like this if you create a superflat-world with the custom preset of: minecraft:bedrock,5*minecraft:stone,3*minecraft:sand,minecraft:water;minecraft:plains Thus creating an infinite one-block deep ocean. Make sure to turn "Generate Structures" on too so you can explore the weird little floating villages it generates. I then went one step further and travelled around via rail, you can do this by building a dozen-odd blocks of track in a straight line (mine just consisted of a sand-block with a rail on-top repeated), then using a command similar to this: /clone ~-1 ~-1 ~ ~-64 ~1 ~ ~ ~-1 ~ This will clone the track behind you ahead of you (note that this specific command only works when travelling from West to East, you'll need to swap the cardinals and negatives around to adjust for different directions). If you then hop in a minecart and move along it, you can generate the track in front of you by repeatedly pasting the command and travel forward indefinitely. I would stop whenever I saw a structure generate in the distance and build a little station, along with a method of getting from the station to the village. This amused me for many hours during the late pandemic.
