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.
The position of "leader" within any organisation is a strange one. Rather than directly contributing to the actual output of such organisation their role is to manage resources and direct others to carry out the work that needs doing. But despite being a position which directly produces nothing, it is the position that comes with the most prestige, power and reward. The Marx-ist may see the role of leader as a parasite, stealing the fruits of other men's labour. The liberal pragmatist may see it as an amoral, natural result of following market forces. Many idealists, however, see it as a glorious representation of the structure of the universe reflected in civilisation, such is the emergent role of "king". A king is not merely a leader like a company CEO or even a minister of state; a king has a spiritual role, playing the central figure in the highly ritualised performance of leadership; symbolising power and decision-making, even when the decision-making itself is made without his involvement. It is important to note that this ceremonial role of a king I am describing is separate from the modern phenomenon of a "constitutional monarch", in the days of yore when kings held real, political power their primary role was still to perform the necessary rituals of state. To act as the nexus for all affairs and to balance the delicate dance of the royal court.
In this balancing act a king's principal concern is always to maintain order within his court, which in turn should maintain order across his domain. He should mediate justly between disputes. He should never favour one party's interests to heavily over another's. He should neither remove himself entirely or involve himself to deeply with everyday affairs. All of this while maintaining himself as a paragon of those virtues which are kingly. All of this requires both courage and restraint, and the one vice he cannot fall into lest he be lost, but is nevertheless the most common of kingly vices, is hubris. As the central character in a play he must always remember that he is an actor, once he starts to believe in his own infallibility, omnipotence or universal adoration he will lose his conviction to those rituals which are his purpose and will inevitably lose his power: once this happens, "the emperor has no clothes".
At Versailles in the late 17th century, King Louis XIV, the Sun King, commissioned the building of the most expansive, grandiose and decadent royal court to ever grace the continent of Europe. The complex was truly enormous, having thousands of rooms all adorned with the riches and arts of the world. Here "le Roy Soleil" acted out his great performance of regal grandeur. Lavish balls held in halls of mirror and gold, court hearings designed to instill terror and awe in the guilty and the innocent alike, an endless enfilade of state rooms for the meeting of dignitaries and the signing of treatise. This temple to power enshrining one man in an apotheotic majesty. But, although as an Englishman it shames me to admit, Louis played his role well. His mastery of the system he had built enriched France and consolidated power back into the hands of the royal court. His famous quote "I am the state" was a declaration of his cosmic significance to France rather than an arrogant neglect of the protocols of government. However, his skill at courtly leadership was so great that he built a system that only he could handle, by the end of his unprecedentedly long reign "L'Hexagone de France" was balanced firmly in his right palm. He handed a mammoth responsibility to his descendants which they inevitable could not wield. After Louis' death he was succeeded by Louis, and then in turn by Louis. These two Louis (apparently the plural of Louis is just Louis) were unfortunate, they were unable to handle the burden which the Sun King had bestowed them and within just 75 years the French "Ancien Regime", the strongest monarchy in Europe, was overthrown by a horde of angry peasants, culminating with the sanctimonious guillotining of the King in the centre of Paris. The kings had, along with much of the French nobility in Versailles, fell foul of an extreme fantasy. They had been bewitched by the grandeur of the palace and the legacy of the Sun King, they thought themselves near god-like beings. The War of Austrian succession saw a phyrric stalemate for France, emptying her of the expansive treasury the Sun King had left behind. The disastrous Seven Years' War then saw France lose her entire empire in both America and India to the British, but the defeat and ensuing financial crisis was ignored by the King. Instead he ploughed ahead with major reforms that proved incredibly unpopular to the landowning class, the church and the peasantry at large, all while the Queen Antoinette drank tea and ate cake... Hubris destroyed France.
The anime "Tale of the Tearmoon Empire" portrays the collapse of a Kingdom to an "enlightened" and bloodthirsty revolution a la France. Our protagonist Mia is the daughter of the emperor, and is duly guillotined before an audience of baying crowds after years on confinement. However, she is sent back in time by some sort of divine providence, returning to several years before the revolution in order to use her position to prevent the revolution from ever happening. Although often by accident, Mia slowly learns that the key to her demise was her arrogance. She saw herself above the running of the state, taking no interest towards it and living in decadent isolation from her subjects. She learns that she can indeed a "great noble" despite her lack of skill, just by playing the role of a princess: working within the system that had been so carefully crafted for this very reason to stabilise the nation and gain the adoration of her subjects. But she never falls foul of arrogance again, learning to play the court like a fiddle, utilising her unique perspective to see past the pomp to the very real implications of the interpersonal relationships and political machinations that might allow her to avoid execution. In the end she has to give her retainers and her people what they desire: a princess.
