Nominally her parent's fantastical reconciliation is with learning not to take food from the spirit world without asking. Bad manners. But I'd argue this might actually be a stand-in for Chihiro's more grounded problem with her parents, which, again, is that they are choosing to uproot the family. They are exposing Chihiro's anxious, immature self to uncertainty. That's their real breach of trust, rather than decorum, for her. That's why the three of them are locked in the limbo of the bathhouse spirit world as she decides what to do with them all. Will their family dynamics remain healthy, or will they be thrown into chaos for the next few years?

There's a strong narrative consonance between these dual narratives from that psychosomatic overlap. That's why a new fantasy world with freaky spirits was the perfect choice for replicating that unsettled feeling from the move. Examples of other media that utilize a similar grounded/fantastical or inner world approach but fail are Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch (2011) and the anime Black Rock Shooter. They lack the same gripping connection between their dual worlds.

As for memory, which was also mentioned in your question, I suppose the interesting choice the creator makes is that Chihiro does not spend much time in the movie recalling the past, or even aspects of the home she is leaving behind. The one prominent example I can think of is near the end, when Chihiro recalls falling into a river when she was young. When she remembers the name of this Kohaku River, that restores Haku's name to him. Other than that, she is very much preoccupied with dealing with plot hurdles in the present, or being anxious about the future.

Some gifs and captions of the stair scene to finish off the thematic talk:

Moving is literally scary. In this case it's not the unknown. It's the simple primal fear of heights that creates the unsettled feeling in the pit of one's stomach.

These stairs are part of the bridge between childhood and adulthood; they aren't ever going to be child-sized and comfortable to walk.

The hiding-out talk in the kitchen between Carmy and Bob Odenkirk's character was masterful, one of the best in the series. Good writing surprises you while staying believable. That Mikey and Lee actually got on good terms after the fork incident was a believable surprise to me. Some people are intense but can actually patch things up easily. So much pain bubbling under the surface for most of the convo but ultimately it got Carmy some much needed closure. From freaking Lee of all people.

Richie and Frank both sharing their insecurities with each other was great. The under-the-table scene was wholesome and magical. Yeah, they probably should've limited the number of characters under there for intimacy. But it's still one of the visuals of the entire series that will stand out the most with me, along with that damn dinner table with the thrown fork.

Let me tell you, I was struggling with whether to end this meme with Shinji, Carmy, or Cousin.

And even that scene at the end with Richie and Tiff dancing together. The reaction shot of her is so quick but just the emotions that play over her face. And him letting her hide her face in his chest. So good.

While I enjoyed the end point of the Al-Anon woman's monologue (chaotic brother saying he did water the plants, as well as Carmy empathizing with someone else in the group), I thought it took way too much runtime for it to get there. I know the directors/showrunner like these longtakes to give an actor an opportunity to really sink into a monologue, but it seemed like the director was trying to replicate the longtake monologue Carmy had in one of these same meetings from an earlier season, and it just seemed like a weaker echo.

Not an acting criticism either as I thought the actress did a good job.

The Frank Lloyd Wright house/museum montage didn't work for me either. It just seemed boring. I get that it's good for Carmy to have a life outside of the restaurant business, and that everyone needs inspiration, or to be searching for a sense of place or rootedness. But the shots just seemed unconnected and therefore didn't land for me. Marcus experiencing Copenhagen in an earlier season landed much better for me, perhaps because he was in a new environment, learning, getting out of his comfort zone. Perhaps it would've been better to focus on learning about one Frank Lloyd Wright building or feature in particular and how that one thing spoke to Carmy and why.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the writers bringing back old faces to give viewers a jolt of excitement. From the Ever crew to Luca in this episode... I mean, excellent writing would mean writers can give excitement and surprise from the main crew of characters. There isn't a need to reach for an old face. (Remember that the Ever crew and Luca were once new faces.) It can be... a writing/showrunning crutch. I'll have to see how they're utilized over the rest of the season before I can definitively say that's what's happening here.

After sabotaging everyone with the ever-changing menu, Carmy has finally come to his senses. And all it took was leaving him with no real choice because of the farmers' orders. It was the most obvious self-sabotage, which every viewer saw coming from the earlier seasons. When you're working with many line chefs/servers who are not used to the gourmet scene, it just never made much sense to start off with that modus operandi. Carmy probably could've built his team up to the challenge of a changing menu, had he started off with a set menu in the first place.

They're pots of soup with depth of flavor. Claire is just stock. She needs more to be a meal. Yeah, sorry for the cooking metaphor. I thought it fitting, considering the terrain.

As it stands it doesn't feel like she has anything going on in her own life outside of the hospital and Carmy. She was created for his story arc (specifically about how his trauma prevents him from thriving in a normal relationship with a well-adjusted person), not for one of her own. Hell, even scenes about her dealing with her residency and own life's problems, having other potential suitors but not pursuing them because of her hangups with Carmy, could've helped make her feel like her own realized, separate character. Marcus had his grandmother, his pastry-chef-development. Syd has her dilemma with the two restaurants, her relationship with her father. But Claire feels like her own island with only tenuous links to this world.

The writers tried to rectify that this season with Claire interacting with the non-Carmy characters more. They even gave her the big hospital comfort scene with Syd. But it's obvious the writers did that to rescue Claire's character too. Another character with links to Syd comforting Syd instead would've resonated so much more. Similar to her being helpful with the kid under the table at the wedding situation. Look how helpful she is swooping in! The writers want us to love her. But it's flaws and imperfections that make people get attached to characters. Wabi-sabi.

Getting into the wider analysis landscape, I will certainly concede that there's a lot of misogyny in society and female characters are far more likely to get writing criticisms of all sorts, including Mary Sue accusations. But I don't think that's where I'm coming from.

And so he uses gold nuggets he finds in bamboo stalks to build her a mansion in the city worthy of a princess. He finds a tutor attendant to teach Princess Kaguya the ways of a noblewoman, but she is not a serious student at first. Her father blindly keeps her in these lessons on how to be ladylike and beautiful, and the longer she is on this path, the unhappier she becomes. It gets even worse when marriage proposals start rearing their ugly heads when news of her beauty spreads. Men declare their love for her even though they have never met her or seen her before, hidden as she always is behind a screen. They bring her beautiful objects to win her heart and hand in marriage, but these objects are as fake as their love for her.

This film, at least the way I interpreted it, is at times a blistering critique of old Japanese court customs, where princesses were hidden from sight from suitors, and made to pluck their eyebrows and paint their teeth black. Even on an occasion celebrating her acquiring a new name, she is kept alone and away from the party, not allowed to partake in the fun.

One of my favorite aspects of the movie was the little details. For example, having your robes look picture-perfect as you sit and bow seems to be an important thing, so there's this attendant to Princess Kaguya who's always smiling and fixes peoples robes when they sit; the tutor attendant, too, fixes Kaguya's robes at a choice time. It sounds like nothing but it tickled my funny bone. That's Takahata's gentle sense of humor for you.

Anyway, watch this film for its different art style, to remind yourself that sometimes a simple life is best, and that being a princess ain't all it's cracked up to be. Overall 8/10.

He certainly isn't stuffy like other Victorian writers can be. It's easy to see why he was the preeminent Victorian writer, why he's acclaimed by both popular and critical opinion. From page one I was instantly enthralled by his powers of narration. This is truly a yarn spun. The rhythm of his words, his way with words--well, this book seems perfect for reading aloud. The stakes are there; yet, there is a lot of wit and humor in the narration which propels it forward. You understand Pip's fears and motivations so totally. It's easy to care about the characters, who are all so wonderfully drawn and memorable, even the side characters. It's easy to see them in your head as well as visualize every place or thing that's happening in the story, especially Miss Havisham and Satis House. Dickens has such wonderful powers of description. When he establishes setting it just seems so easy to him. Pip has his flaws and mistakes (not visiting Joe and Biddy!) but you still sympathize with him in most ways. In fact you sympathize with basically everyone. I suppose I know what the term Dickensian means now.

This is the type of storytelling where every element is interlinked. If a character is introduced, you can be sure they will be involved in some fashion later on no matter how minor they may seem initially. Of course, I also know now why people always mention the whole serialization aspect of Dickens and how he was paid by the word or whatever. Some of it might be wordiness or going into a character's thoughts way too much, but more of it was that Dickens certainly could've condensed the narrative if he wanted to. Like, I got way too many words on Mr. Wopsle and Mr. Pumpelchook. They were annoying as hell (as they were designed to be, I know). I thought of knocking a bit off the rating for this reason, but I suppose I can't.

Like many websites of that early web, the records are incomplete, the deeds unwritten. I have found fighter Halls of Fame hosted on old Tripod and Angelfire websites that are thankfully still around, yes. And yes, there are still some GeoCities sites that have been archived after Yahoo pulled the plug by such efforts as the estimable WebArchive and OoCities. Why, you can even get an idea of what Charmander 31’s Pokémon Chat looked like back in its day by sifting through these archive projects. You can behold the bright green text on the black background. You can see the low-res image of a Charmander welcoming you to the page, the antiquated site counter and guestbook (once staples of every website before Web 2.0 killed them), and a mysterious entity known as a web ring… You can see many of these things, and more. But the lifeblood of the roleplaying age was always in its active fighters, and they have moved on with their lives. They have jobs and children and real world problems now, and no more leisure to pass the time with a day of roleplaying. The community is dead. Yet the memories live on in a few of us. The love, the nostalgia still exist.

I was just 11 years old, the day I grew bored and went searching for something else to do on the internet. I may have even used Yahoo or AOL or AskJeeves instead of Google to search for something to do. That was how long ago it was. Back in those days, search engines returned results based on the frequency with which your entered keywords were found within the webpage. Before Google revolutionized search engines with algorithms to figure out relevance. I found the online roleplaying movement in its middle stages, right after the turn of the millennium, around the year 2001. As a kid who cultivated an interest in Pokémon, I searched for sites to pass the time with other likeminded individuals. Perhaps it was the Yahoo search index that led me to it – a listing of websites arranged into categories. I came across empty chatrooms embedded on random Pokémon fansites, before I came across the familiar scrawl of the GeoCities website of Charmander 31’s. To my surprise, the Multicity chat (eventually replaced by Parachat) was occupied. More than that, it was always active. In fact, it was active enough for the Charmander 31 site to support two chatrooms (and a secretly hidden third one). There were always people in the two chatrooms. There were always people in the other website, Ace Digimon’s, chat.

I still remember entering the Chars31 chatroom with a Charizard nickname and being confounded at what was going on. The people in the chat talked of anything they wanted to. They used asterisks and other symbols such as greater than and less than signs or dashes as action keys to signify when they were performing an action, like so:

Charizard: *stomps his way over to ETW and thrashes his tail around*

What a curious thing, I thought to myself. It was not a Pokémon chat at all in its content. People created avatars for themselves, sometimes creating a wholly new character of their own, or borrowing a character from their Anime or video game proclivities and fandom. It was a place where Inuyasha could rub elbows with a D&D-type character. The people sat around the chat, simply talking, lounging about, and interacting peacefully… I created a new handle then, Seifer. I was the second Seifer, for there had been one who used the handle before me and achieved some fame (and I must stress that I came to know him and he gave me permission to take over as Seifer). I hung around, getting to know other denizens of the chat. Names such as RinoaHeartilly (the great matchmaker), SS_Darien_Shields, and FalconofForests (a.k.a. Galford, who also claimed to be the founder of Charmander31’s, a dubious claim which is nowadays thought to be false). One name stuck out most of all. He was Squall, and he was the greatest fighter I ever knew.

These were the days before every PC game had an online multiplayer component. The consoles of that generation, the SNES, the Genesis, the Playstation, and N64, also did not allow you to go online. There was the DreamCast with Phantasy Star Online, of course, but on the whole, it was not a common thing yet. People who played Doom on their PCs together, or WarCraft and StarCraft and Diablo, had to do so over unreliable and slow dial-up modems, which disconnected from the internet if a household phone rang or was picked up. These were called landlines, and they may not even exist anymore in 30 years.

This is one reason why online textual roleplaying came to popularity. It is why it was so short in its lifespan. It died out as every PC game soon developed multiplayer, and high speed broadband connections made gaming easier, faster, and more convenient. Still, anyone who does battle or hangs out in an online virtual world, be it textual or 2D or 3D, augmented or virtual reality or what-have-you, should understand why people roleplayed in chatrooms: It was simply fun. They owe a debt to those who came before them.

It is my belief that never again will textual roleplaying attain such popularity. I believe it because I have searched for it, something like it. There was roleplaying in Neopets guilds when that site had its day, but now that site’s body is old, decrepit, and twisted, and most guilds gather dust. I have tried to find it in IRC rooms, but these rooms do not have the constantly active community that Chars31 and Ace Digimon had. It will never again be, because gaming is too advanced nowadays for people to return to a simpler, more primitive way.

For this reminiscence, I leave the best and most fascinating element of online roleplaying for last: fighting. There are many forms of fighting, but I was not renowned for my prowess in that arena, so I can only speak of the styles I am familiar with. The three I know are called T1, T2, and AA. In my day, T2 was the most popular form, as I saw it. T1 is a slower, turn-based form that is more technical. T2 and AA are similar in that they are speed-based fighting systems. They reward the fighters with the faster typing speed. AA, or Advanced Auto, is the simpler, more noobish style. Its requirements are defined as 4-4-4. Basically, in that style, every action you take in a fight must consist of at least four words. T2 has the same basic premise, but its requirements are 7-10-7 (meaning 7 words required for attack, 10 words for connect, and 7 words for dodge, mechanics which will be explained momentarily), so it was meant for intermediate and expert fighters only. There are six basic types of actions in online textual roleplaying as I remember. They will be demonstrated by imaginary characters Shootist and ETW below. They are:

1. movement – having your character move from one place in the virtual environment to another • ETW: *I run and jump the chasm to the other side of the cliff*

2. dodging – dodging another player’s attacks. This can be achieved if the response is typed out and entered into the chat before a connection is made • Shootist: *I roll quickly to my right, dodging the earth-based attack*

3. charging – charging up a spell or otherwise prepping an attack • ETW: *I bring my hands together and begin chanting a spell in elvish words of old*

4. attack – as the name states, attacking someone else • Shootist: *I draw the hammer back on my revolver and pull the trigger, aiming for ETW*

5. connection – a technical aspect of fighting, this is the secondary part of an attack, where it is confirmed to hit • From the previous example in (4) – Shootist: *The bullet connects, ripping a big hole right in the heart of ETW*

6. counter – this combines negating an opponent’s attack with an attack of one’s own • From the previous example in (4) – ETW: *My forcefield stops the bullet inches from my chest and I then launch it back towards Shootist*

On a technical note, important fights, and even some impromptu fights, often had judges drawn from neutral members also in the chat at the time the fight takes place. They can judge any action by one character invalid if it contains too many typos (thus making it too hard to understand for the other fighter), does not follow the logic of the fight, gives a character too much invincibility (god mode), or is simply too vague. An example of the last one: *My fist smashes through his face* Did the fist simply hit him hard, or did it literally crumple his face? This may have been deemed invalid by a judge because of vagueness.

There were clans in these days, people who banded together, usually under a leader. I even attempted to establish a small clan of my own. It was an unsuccessful wolf pack under the old Elemental name (an old wolf clan that had died out by that time). These clans and fighters often had their own cliques and factions, and these greater groupings led to wars and raids. Fighters would sometimes traverse the digital stretches of the internet to bring their war or impress their fighting philosophies and styles upon a certain hangout. It was quite similar to the kung-fu film trope of attacking other dojos and schools. This necessitated the appointment of a chat guardian, an extremely skilled fighter who could turn back enemy fighters trying to make trouble. Squall was such a guardian for Chars31. Sadly, he left the world of online roleplaying. I heard it was because he lost a fight against BlueLightningFlik, and it crushed his pride, but perhaps that was rumor. It is hard to verify, for even in their later days, fighters are prideful and each tells a biased account of their old deeds. Some always claim to be unbeaten. It could simply be that Squall IRL (in real life) had grown too old for the activity of online roleplaying.

I must apologize for my lack of further details, or if any details in this article are slightly off. As I have said before, I was not one of these great fighters. I was simply a side character who walked among giants, a footnote in the great history of online roleplaying. And my memory does not serve me well. Records of this age of gaming and community are ill-kept, and perhaps soon, even these inadequate chronicles will crumble and be forever lost to cyberspace. If you are looking for other resources to get a grasp of what online roleplaying was like, I suggest you look up the web archive to look at what the Chars31 and Ace Digimon websites looked like. The Halls of Fame are Tripod and Angelfire webpages you can find if you search for them. They are outdated listings that miss accomplishments from the later days of online roleplaying, but they do record the names of famous fighters, people who were fundamental to the online movement of roleplay. Some names even have a brief paragraph detailing their exploits and accomplishments. There is a Seifer on both lists, though I must stress that that is not me, but the original Seifer, as I did not do anything of note during my time as the character. Another site I wish I could recommend you, friend, is historyofrp.proboards.com, where a few former fighters gathered from time to time to talk of their old deeds. Unfortunately, that forum seems to be in maintenance mode now, and only staff members can log in. It is an unfortunate loss. Still, try! Better yet, try some online roleplaying with your friends one day to see what it’s like!

As for why I felt the need to record these thoughts, perhaps it was simply nostalgia. Or perhaps I thought it worth remembering. At the very least, I did not want this awesome world of a bygone era of the internet to disappear softly into the night without a trace. I leave you with a final thought, changed for my purposes from a film quote:

If they ever tell my story, let them say... I walked with giants. Men rise and fall like the winter wheat... but these names will never die. Let them say I lived in the time of DragonMasterAlex, first guardian of Chars31. Let them say... I lived in the time of Squall.

Author's Note: Initially I was going to write this in a realistic manner, but then I realized the best way to honor Chars31 was to write it in an epic fashion.