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.
In chapter 36 of Mahoromatic, Mahoro declares herself to be "the maid who runs off tears", 「涙で動くメイドさん」. She explains that although she is the most perfect weapon, she is unable to use that strength for her own gains or for the unjust gains of others. She has the divine combination of benevolence through her human soul, strength through her mechanical body, and knowledge through her connection to Matthew, and due to her perfection, or at least when compared to the fallibility of humans, it is her nature to be their servant rather than their ruler. Now this seems backwards from our subjective points of view: surely we know from history and our own lives that the strong rule and the weak are ruled. However when we take a closer look at this axiom it falls apart, and to explain why I will use the story of the Taliban.
In 2021 America withdrew her troops from the mountain nation of Afghanistan, leaving behind the Islamist terror group the Taliban to take over the offices of state power. The Taliban had been fighting a guerilla war for the last twenty years, always the underdog to the demigodly power of the US Army. With such an uneven conflict there was never a chance of American defeat in battle, the American-backed republican regime ruled the country outright, exercising hard power over even over what the Taliban would have considered "their territory", able to conduct strikes on Taliban targets anywhere in the country at short notice. It would seem that the Americans ruled and the Taliban were ruled. However, now in 2023 the Taliban have swapped their AK-47s for biros and are firmly in-charge, and they seem to be finding governing such a country as hard as the last guys: struggling with general administration, government bureaucracy, and internal & external politics. They're even facing their own Islamist terror groups such as "ISIS-K", who view the Taliban jihad as not going far enough and have already killed hundreds of civilians in terror attacks since the takeover. And ISIS aren't necessarily wrong here: in order to run a semi-functioning state, the Taliban have had to let go of many of their most extreme views, and dampen down their dreams of utopia. When they had been guerilla insurrectionists they could dream romantic dreams, even if those dreams were rotten, but now as supposed "rulers" they must live in the real world and work hard to maintain basic order. While on paper they are now the rulers of the Afghan race, really they're now the (civil) servants of them. And conversely, when they were guerillas they were the rulers: what other group of men outside the Western elite could command the most powerful militaries of the West to rain hellfire on random desert valleys? I know I don't have that power, but the Taliban did. For decades they orchestrated the actions of large portions of the world's military strength: now they can only boast a pathetic state of underfed thugs cum underqualified civil servants.
It is the nature of the world for the powerful to serve the weak: the king must serve his subjects, the officer must serve his troops. And nowhere is this evident more transparently than in the main plotline of the world: the incarnation of God in Christ. By definition God is the most powerful being, and Jesus becomes the ultimate servant of mankind. He cures our loved-ones, he washes our feet, he even dies for us. Through Jesus God showed that he is our ever-faithful servant and our eternal king simultaneously, and that it is far from a contradiction.
To finish off let's return to maids. Mahoro is evidentially Mahoromatic's stand-in for the perfect human: omnipotent, omnibenevolent, (sort of) omniscient; a god if you will. But she is the natural conclusion of extrapolating the essence of a "maid". A maid is meant to be a glimpse at feminine perfection: a beautiful virgin bound to serve her master or mistress. Ever elegant, without blemish or cracks in her facade. In a society obsessed with etiquette such as early-modern England, the maid was meant to be the epitome of such social values: it was the aristocrats vision of power. Which is why in their modern incarnations, maids have seamlessly flowed into the roles of a physically strong protector or an object of sexual fantasy. Whatever you value, be it social standing, physical strength or sexual attractiveness, your maid should be the perfect reflection of that value, and because she is stronger than you, she must serve you. Wodehouse understood this dynamic too through the relationship of the impeccable Jeeves and the hopeless Wooster. And so this is why Mahoro is "the maid who runs off tears", as the perfect being she is driven by sympathy: the woes and joys of mankind are her motivators as our servant and ultimate saviour.
PS: This post was made as the first in a series for a bet made with the writer for BreadIsDead. The bet was a weekly post to made to our respective websites before midnight on Sunday, to continue until one of us misses a week. I will of course, not lose...
