Star Driver meta
Dec. 17th, 2011 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootOkay, Star Driver is a show that implies a whole lot but doesn't actually explain much. This is, naturally, catnip to me, and leads me to write up all my thoughts about How This Works. Spoilers, obviously.
First, there's the issue of exactly what those four seals seal off. Each Miko appears to hold a specific seal, despite the cumulative effect of them. Keito says that she was the one sealing Samekh, and Wako mentions that if her seal is undone the cybodies will be freed, so it seems they're specified.
With all four in place, we have first phase, in which a driver with a mark can access some of the designated cybody's power. Only with considerable mechanical intervention is it possible for Reiji and Sakana even marginally access their respective cybodies long enough to destroy Nunna and release the first seal, hence everyone's shock that Takuto can access directly.
With the northern seal undone, we have second phase, in which any driver with the right assistive hardware can remotely access the designated cybody. The still-limited access and lack of a true bond between driver and cybody seems to be the hallmark of this phase.
With the western seal also undone, we have third phase, in which the assistive technology can no longer keep up and only drivers with a mark can access cybodies. They can do so first hand, however, entering physically into the cybody and acting in/with it. It is notable that, while Takuto has been able to physically access his cybody from the start, his bond with Tauburn does seem to become stronger with two seals undone.
With the eastern seal also undone, we have fourth phase. Several things are seen to happen at this phase, one of which is Samekh rousing and manifesting control of the cybodies that were not restored by their drivers. Another is reasonably clear communication between the cybodies and their drivers. These suggest that fourth phase removes some kind of lock on all of the cybodies, not just Samekh, and that the characteristic of this phase might be considered connection. I would note that both Sugata and Wako experience communication with their cybodies during second phase, and this suggests that Samekh and the miko cybodies all have an unusually high degree of connectivity in any phase.
With the southern seal also undone, zero-time is unlocked and the cybodies are free to act in the normal, physical world.
All of this, of course, brings us to the question: what are these things that they were locked away so tightly?
Cybodies in the regular world appear to be huge mannequins. They are indistinguishable from each other and apparently lifeless until they are entered by a driver. At this point, they take on attributes that reflect their driver's strengths. This might suggest that they are purely machines, albeit quite powerful ones, fueled by the life and will of the driver. Drivers repeatedly receive information from their cybodies, however, suggesting that there is some form of consciousness already present. Whether this is sentience in the cybodies or simply some record or memory from previous drivers is never made clear.
One thing that is made clear is that the cybodies were not made by or for humans, saving Tauburn. Despite this, humans are capable of driving them and possess the motive force to do so. The makers do not seem to have thought this was necessarily a good idea, though, given the amount of trouble they went to to seal the cybodies away from the world that humans normally interact with. Without the substantial intervention of Kiraboshi's hardware, only Takuto would have been able to actually drive his cybody. This suggests that there is some manner of incompatibility between the cybodies and what they are designed to do, and human life.
I speculate that the makers were not physical in the same way humans are--that the cybodies are, indeed, bodies, put on and taken off like clothing. If the makers were beings of life/passion/energy/libido/whathaveyou, rather than matter, then Samekh also makes far more sense. Samekh's apparently "pre-programmed" action, upon emergence, is to try to gather up all the life of the world. Consider that the parable/metaphors we are given name Samekh a ship. Samekh is probably not, then, designed to kill drivers or worlds, but to house them and protect them on the journey to another world (which also explains how the cybodies got to Earth to begin with). Perhaps what the memory or consciousness of the cybodies tried to communicate to their current drivers is that Samekh is a wrong cybody for Earth life.
And that, of course, brings us to the question of how to interpret the parable/metaphors we are given, in this series.
The two stories seem to address two different parts of the cybody history. The one put together by Sarina has some earmarks of being far older history, which makes sense if she is indeed an alien observer herself.
The play: A man meets a girl that he can see but not interact with, and loves her.
(If my speculation above is true, this suggests that the makers of the cybodies may have been "in love" with the physical world and wished to interact with it as best they could. The girl may well be Earth itself.)
He is tempted by the promises of a witch, who offers a way to interact physically and demands a particular ship in payment.
(Given the punctuation/exclamation of "Ayin!" that Tiger uses while playing the witch, this is pretty clearly supposed to be Ayingott or Ayingott's driver; possibly there was some division among the maker-race over what technology/magic could or should be used to interact with physical life. Considering that Ayingott consumes its driver, it's pretty well a given that the driver/maker/consciousness of that cybody chose a harmful way.)
He goes to take the ship and is intoxicated by its power and freedom, forgetting the girl he loved. Only when the witch informs him does he realize that he has become the ship itself.
(This suggests that Samekh merges even with a driver of its maker-race far more tightly and irrevocably than a regular cybody. It also makes pretty clear that Ayingott/driver made a power play, wanting to control the cybody that was made to contain and control the others.)
The witch attempts to take control of the man/ship only to be killed by him when he uses the power of the ship he has become.
(This explains why and how Ayingott came to be the only broken cybody found.)
The man/ship, having acknowledged and claimed for his own the power of the ship deposes the current Queen and then retreats into seclusion.
(I'm not sure what the Queen represents; possibly she was the leader of the expedition, possibly someone who did not agree with the path Samekh's driver intended to take. What is clear is that Samekh's last driver was the one who locked Samekh at least, and possibly all of the cybodies, away in zero-time.)
Enter the boy to whom this story has been told, a boy who can see the girl and loves her, and can also touch her.
(Again, if my speculation about the makers being a-physical is true, it seems likely this boy represents Earth life, and humans in particular.)
He is asked whether he, too, will take on the power that the man-turned-ship did, and what he will use it for. He answers that he will use it to protect, and the play ends as he kisses the girl.
(This seems likely to represent the creation of Tauburn, a key that humans might use to know and even unlock the cybodies. Since this particular section is ad lib, it also suggests that Sarina wants to know how Tauburn's current driver will use that key; Takuto, of course, gives her a very pure-hearted answer.)
Then we have story told by Sakana to Reiji, which is pretty clearly the story of Reiji's own quest, and an attempt to make him see what he's doing.
The story:
Our Hero, Sam, loves the beauty of the galaxy, and also loves a girl. He wants to gain a ship that can travel the galaxy with her, and to do this he must defeat a great squid and bring it's blue blood to the king who owns the ship.
(Sam is pretty obviously Reiji, and the girl Sakana. Reiji repeatedly comments on how much he loves the beauty of the world and, after all, his final goal is to be able to go back in time to savor the beautiful moments endlessly. Sakana, as is clear when she removes her collar and chain herself, is never his prisoner but rather seems to be his accomplice. This point is also foreshadowed when Sakana says Sam and the girl share a secret and eat taboo squid together. The king and ship, as the play makes clear, are Samekh. The great squid is less clear, but may be access to the cybodies themselves. If eating squid is a metaphor for seeking full access to the cybodies, then the great squid seems likely to be the difficulty of access and, at the same time, a hint that Reiji is destroying the very thing he seeks and hungers for.)
Despite the danger, and with the encouragement of the girl, Sam manages to kill the squid and bring its blood to the king. The king drinks it and thereby ends his immortal life, which was his desire.
(This is an interesting one. This is the one suggestion I have found that the consciousness of the makers/drivers may still linger in the cybodies, and that Samekh's driver in particular may be trapped until another driver tames Samekh. Alternatively, the previous driver may only be trapped because Samekh is sealed away; the results are the same either way.)
The king's parting words to Sam inform him that the ship is his, but that to start it he must kill the girl he loves and start the engine with her blood.
(This is a double-edged bit of metaphor. Indeed, the miko cybodies must be sacrificed to free Samekh, but to initiate Samekh's flight Samekh takes in the life of the world itself. The girl may be both the world and Sakana, or Sakana may be making a more subtle allusion to her love for Reiji and the fact that a) Samekh will absorb that love (libido/passion/etc.) in order to grant Reiji's wish and b) Reiji will sacrifice that love and leave her to return to his past.)
Sam does indeed sacrifice the girl and take ship, but realizes that all the beauty of the galaxy was already to be found on his own world.
(In other words, Reiji is about to sacrifice all the beauty of present and future in order to re-live the beauty of the past, and may well come to regret it. It is, of course, at this point that Reiji stops listening and more or less tell Sakana to get lost.)
Taken together, the two stories actually imply a whole lot about how the cybodies in general and Samekh in particular work.
However, even these stories beg the question of how the marks are passed on and just how the miko seals work.
For one thing, we know that marks can be lost, can cease to manifest, and yet still be available to the lineage if the heir has sufficient willpower. Shinada demonstrates that when she reclaims a connection to her family's mark in order to regenerate Peshent, even though the mark does not seem to manifest visibly until later. We see that Takuto receives his mark from his grandfather. Taken together, these things might suggest that a mark can be lost to latency if it is not handed on directly before the current driver's death. It is implied that Sugata may have been born with his mark, but it is not manifested until well into the series and he cannot enter zero-time until then. It seems likely that the Shindou family knows who will be the next heir to Samekh simply by the simultaneous birth of girls to the miko lineages. All the marks, then, seem to rely a lot on the will of the current holder or, if latent, potential holder to manifest.
And that brings us to the question of the mikos. It would not be very feasible for one of the four miko marks to go latent, since that would presumably leave the corresponding miko cybody without a driver; since it is clearly the cybody that contains and embodies the seal (they are what must be destroyed to undo a seal), a lapse in that connection/empowerment seems very likely to cause the seals to break.
The next twist is the implication that a miko who is no longer virgin will lose the ability to hold her quarter's seal. This might be supported by the mystery of the families. Wako has a grandmother. Keito has an aunt. Mizuno has an aunt and a mother who abandoned the island. In no case is it suggested that one of the mikos' mothers was a miko herself. It is possible that inheritance zig-zags, and that a sibling's child is always the next heir, leaving the miko herself virgin until her heir can take over. If this is the case, however, the current generation will be the last, because only Mizuno has a sibling (thought I suppose Keito might conceivably pass her mark to a cousin). If there were such a crisis looming on the horizon, you'd think someone would have mentioned it.
In addition, we do know that Samekh's driver is traditionally wed to one of the mikos born at the same time he is; unless that marriage goes unconsummated for quite a while, that suggests virginity is not vital and all the more so since Samekh's drivers all fell into irrecoverable comas on first contact with Samekh's power and presumably had to breed fast. It is, of course, possible that the Shindou lineage runs through nephews and cousins the same way the mikos' might through nieces and cousins, but, again, there is a resounding lack of relatives and no apparent anxiety over that.
Considering all of this, and despite the traditional link between miko-duties and virginity, I'm personally inclined to take the idea that the seal requires virginity with a grain of salt.
Alternatively, the mikos and Sugata could have plenty of relatives who scattered into hiding when Kiraboshi started to come out in the open specifically in order to preserve the lineage against this threat. That's the only other possibility I've come up with that covers what we're shown (and not shown) in canon.
Except, why would "bodies" built by and for a-physical non-human entities give a good goddamn about the state of a human driver's hymen? Yes, drama > logic, but seriously. I find it far easier to believe that that (mis)information was added later on by humans and that neither the seal nor the mikos' ability to drive the miko cybodies are actually affected by the driver's "purity".
Besides, I want to write hot threesome porn without de-powering Wako, and porn > contradictory canon. Canon amelioration time!
So there you go. My thoughts on some of the worldbuilding. For my thoughts on what's going to happen next, now that the Spoilers are outside of Spoiler and can presumably be Spoilered at any time... well, that's what fic is for.
First, there's the issue of exactly what those four seals seal off. Each Miko appears to hold a specific seal, despite the cumulative effect of them. Keito says that she was the one sealing Samekh, and Wako mentions that if her seal is undone the cybodies will be freed, so it seems they're specified.
With all four in place, we have first phase, in which a driver with a mark can access some of the designated cybody's power. Only with considerable mechanical intervention is it possible for Reiji and Sakana even marginally access their respective cybodies long enough to destroy Nunna and release the first seal, hence everyone's shock that Takuto can access directly.
With the northern seal undone, we have second phase, in which any driver with the right assistive hardware can remotely access the designated cybody. The still-limited access and lack of a true bond between driver and cybody seems to be the hallmark of this phase.
With the western seal also undone, we have third phase, in which the assistive technology can no longer keep up and only drivers with a mark can access cybodies. They can do so first hand, however, entering physically into the cybody and acting in/with it. It is notable that, while Takuto has been able to physically access his cybody from the start, his bond with Tauburn does seem to become stronger with two seals undone.
With the eastern seal also undone, we have fourth phase. Several things are seen to happen at this phase, one of which is Samekh rousing and manifesting control of the cybodies that were not restored by their drivers. Another is reasonably clear communication between the cybodies and their drivers. These suggest that fourth phase removes some kind of lock on all of the cybodies, not just Samekh, and that the characteristic of this phase might be considered connection. I would note that both Sugata and Wako experience communication with their cybodies during second phase, and this suggests that Samekh and the miko cybodies all have an unusually high degree of connectivity in any phase.
With the southern seal also undone, zero-time is unlocked and the cybodies are free to act in the normal, physical world.
All of this, of course, brings us to the question: what are these things that they were locked away so tightly?
Cybodies in the regular world appear to be huge mannequins. They are indistinguishable from each other and apparently lifeless until they are entered by a driver. At this point, they take on attributes that reflect their driver's strengths. This might suggest that they are purely machines, albeit quite powerful ones, fueled by the life and will of the driver. Drivers repeatedly receive information from their cybodies, however, suggesting that there is some form of consciousness already present. Whether this is sentience in the cybodies or simply some record or memory from previous drivers is never made clear.
One thing that is made clear is that the cybodies were not made by or for humans, saving Tauburn. Despite this, humans are capable of driving them and possess the motive force to do so. The makers do not seem to have thought this was necessarily a good idea, though, given the amount of trouble they went to to seal the cybodies away from the world that humans normally interact with. Without the substantial intervention of Kiraboshi's hardware, only Takuto would have been able to actually drive his cybody. This suggests that there is some manner of incompatibility between the cybodies and what they are designed to do, and human life.
I speculate that the makers were not physical in the same way humans are--that the cybodies are, indeed, bodies, put on and taken off like clothing. If the makers were beings of life/passion/energy/libido/whathaveyou, rather than matter, then Samekh also makes far more sense. Samekh's apparently "pre-programmed" action, upon emergence, is to try to gather up all the life of the world. Consider that the parable/metaphors we are given name Samekh a ship. Samekh is probably not, then, designed to kill drivers or worlds, but to house them and protect them on the journey to another world (which also explains how the cybodies got to Earth to begin with). Perhaps what the memory or consciousness of the cybodies tried to communicate to their current drivers is that Samekh is a wrong cybody for Earth life.
And that, of course, brings us to the question of how to interpret the parable/metaphors we are given, in this series.
The two stories seem to address two different parts of the cybody history. The one put together by Sarina has some earmarks of being far older history, which makes sense if she is indeed an alien observer herself.
The play: A man meets a girl that he can see but not interact with, and loves her.
(If my speculation above is true, this suggests that the makers of the cybodies may have been "in love" with the physical world and wished to interact with it as best they could. The girl may well be Earth itself.)
He is tempted by the promises of a witch, who offers a way to interact physically and demands a particular ship in payment.
(Given the punctuation/exclamation of "Ayin!" that Tiger uses while playing the witch, this is pretty clearly supposed to be Ayingott or Ayingott's driver; possibly there was some division among the maker-race over what technology/magic could or should be used to interact with physical life. Considering that Ayingott consumes its driver, it's pretty well a given that the driver/maker/consciousness of that cybody chose a harmful way.)
He goes to take the ship and is intoxicated by its power and freedom, forgetting the girl he loved. Only when the witch informs him does he realize that he has become the ship itself.
(This suggests that Samekh merges even with a driver of its maker-race far more tightly and irrevocably than a regular cybody. It also makes pretty clear that Ayingott/driver made a power play, wanting to control the cybody that was made to contain and control the others.)
The witch attempts to take control of the man/ship only to be killed by him when he uses the power of the ship he has become.
(This explains why and how Ayingott came to be the only broken cybody found.)
The man/ship, having acknowledged and claimed for his own the power of the ship deposes the current Queen and then retreats into seclusion.
(I'm not sure what the Queen represents; possibly she was the leader of the expedition, possibly someone who did not agree with the path Samekh's driver intended to take. What is clear is that Samekh's last driver was the one who locked Samekh at least, and possibly all of the cybodies, away in zero-time.)
Enter the boy to whom this story has been told, a boy who can see the girl and loves her, and can also touch her.
(Again, if my speculation about the makers being a-physical is true, it seems likely this boy represents Earth life, and humans in particular.)
He is asked whether he, too, will take on the power that the man-turned-ship did, and what he will use it for. He answers that he will use it to protect, and the play ends as he kisses the girl.
(This seems likely to represent the creation of Tauburn, a key that humans might use to know and even unlock the cybodies. Since this particular section is ad lib, it also suggests that Sarina wants to know how Tauburn's current driver will use that key; Takuto, of course, gives her a very pure-hearted answer.)
Then we have story told by Sakana to Reiji, which is pretty clearly the story of Reiji's own quest, and an attempt to make him see what he's doing.
The story:
Our Hero, Sam, loves the beauty of the galaxy, and also loves a girl. He wants to gain a ship that can travel the galaxy with her, and to do this he must defeat a great squid and bring it's blue blood to the king who owns the ship.
(Sam is pretty obviously Reiji, and the girl Sakana. Reiji repeatedly comments on how much he loves the beauty of the world and, after all, his final goal is to be able to go back in time to savor the beautiful moments endlessly. Sakana, as is clear when she removes her collar and chain herself, is never his prisoner but rather seems to be his accomplice. This point is also foreshadowed when Sakana says Sam and the girl share a secret and eat taboo squid together. The king and ship, as the play makes clear, are Samekh. The great squid is less clear, but may be access to the cybodies themselves. If eating squid is a metaphor for seeking full access to the cybodies, then the great squid seems likely to be the difficulty of access and, at the same time, a hint that Reiji is destroying the very thing he seeks and hungers for.)
Despite the danger, and with the encouragement of the girl, Sam manages to kill the squid and bring its blood to the king. The king drinks it and thereby ends his immortal life, which was his desire.
(This is an interesting one. This is the one suggestion I have found that the consciousness of the makers/drivers may still linger in the cybodies, and that Samekh's driver in particular may be trapped until another driver tames Samekh. Alternatively, the previous driver may only be trapped because Samekh is sealed away; the results are the same either way.)
The king's parting words to Sam inform him that the ship is his, but that to start it he must kill the girl he loves and start the engine with her blood.
(This is a double-edged bit of metaphor. Indeed, the miko cybodies must be sacrificed to free Samekh, but to initiate Samekh's flight Samekh takes in the life of the world itself. The girl may be both the world and Sakana, or Sakana may be making a more subtle allusion to her love for Reiji and the fact that a) Samekh will absorb that love (libido/passion/etc.) in order to grant Reiji's wish and b) Reiji will sacrifice that love and leave her to return to his past.)
Sam does indeed sacrifice the girl and take ship, but realizes that all the beauty of the galaxy was already to be found on his own world.
(In other words, Reiji is about to sacrifice all the beauty of present and future in order to re-live the beauty of the past, and may well come to regret it. It is, of course, at this point that Reiji stops listening and more or less tell Sakana to get lost.)
Taken together, the two stories actually imply a whole lot about how the cybodies in general and Samekh in particular work.
However, even these stories beg the question of how the marks are passed on and just how the miko seals work.
For one thing, we know that marks can be lost, can cease to manifest, and yet still be available to the lineage if the heir has sufficient willpower. Shinada demonstrates that when she reclaims a connection to her family's mark in order to regenerate Peshent, even though the mark does not seem to manifest visibly until later. We see that Takuto receives his mark from his grandfather. Taken together, these things might suggest that a mark can be lost to latency if it is not handed on directly before the current driver's death. It is implied that Sugata may have been born with his mark, but it is not manifested until well into the series and he cannot enter zero-time until then. It seems likely that the Shindou family knows who will be the next heir to Samekh simply by the simultaneous birth of girls to the miko lineages. All the marks, then, seem to rely a lot on the will of the current holder or, if latent, potential holder to manifest.
And that brings us to the question of the mikos. It would not be very feasible for one of the four miko marks to go latent, since that would presumably leave the corresponding miko cybody without a driver; since it is clearly the cybody that contains and embodies the seal (they are what must be destroyed to undo a seal), a lapse in that connection/empowerment seems very likely to cause the seals to break.
The next twist is the implication that a miko who is no longer virgin will lose the ability to hold her quarter's seal. This might be supported by the mystery of the families. Wako has a grandmother. Keito has an aunt. Mizuno has an aunt and a mother who abandoned the island. In no case is it suggested that one of the mikos' mothers was a miko herself. It is possible that inheritance zig-zags, and that a sibling's child is always the next heir, leaving the miko herself virgin until her heir can take over. If this is the case, however, the current generation will be the last, because only Mizuno has a sibling (thought I suppose Keito might conceivably pass her mark to a cousin). If there were such a crisis looming on the horizon, you'd think someone would have mentioned it.
In addition, we do know that Samekh's driver is traditionally wed to one of the mikos born at the same time he is; unless that marriage goes unconsummated for quite a while, that suggests virginity is not vital and all the more so since Samekh's drivers all fell into irrecoverable comas on first contact with Samekh's power and presumably had to breed fast. It is, of course, possible that the Shindou lineage runs through nephews and cousins the same way the mikos' might through nieces and cousins, but, again, there is a resounding lack of relatives and no apparent anxiety over that.
Considering all of this, and despite the traditional link between miko-duties and virginity, I'm personally inclined to take the idea that the seal requires virginity with a grain of salt.
Alternatively, the mikos and Sugata could have plenty of relatives who scattered into hiding when Kiraboshi started to come out in the open specifically in order to preserve the lineage against this threat. That's the only other possibility I've come up with that covers what we're shown (and not shown) in canon.
Except, why would "bodies" built by and for a-physical non-human entities give a good goddamn about the state of a human driver's hymen? Yes, drama > logic, but seriously. I find it far easier to believe that that (mis)information was added later on by humans and that neither the seal nor the mikos' ability to drive the miko cybodies are actually affected by the driver's "purity".
Besides, I want to write hot threesome porn without de-powering Wako, and porn > contradictory canon. Canon amelioration time!
So there you go. My thoughts on some of the worldbuilding. For my thoughts on what's going to happen next, now that the Spoilers are outside of Spoiler and can presumably be Spoilered at any time... well, that's what fic is for.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 07:35 am (UTC)1) there's some problem with seal carrying while pregnant/nursing, and as usual, the attempt is made to control the whole girl in order to control her uterus.
2) it's a translation issue. Shonnen is just a boy, but shojo is a virgin girl. This happens in a lot of languages, where "young female" is a synonym for virgin. Possibly the aliens were trying to recommend youthful drivers and were misunderstood -- for that, they may not have really understood aging, and have recommended a youthfully open minded attitude.
3) holding a seal is a position of responsibility, a wife often has no separate legal identity or responsibility. It might have just seemed unnatural or impossibly hard on a marriage to leave this issue out of a husband's control, so the mikos got used to passing the mark before they married.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 05:04 pm (UTC)