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If I ask nicely will people reblog this and tell me what their most common breakfast is? Not your favorite necessarily, just what you have for breakfast most frequently? 🙏🏽
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
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I just won't shut up with these lengthy analyses, will I? This one was actually meant to be finished last year when I focused on the movie, but I just... couldn't. After doing some more madwoman tier stuff for the Escaweek, I had to delay it even further. And now, here it is. My sort of final thoughts on the movieverse, after translating all the materials. Thanks to @coverteyes and her editing skills (thank you once again for your help and encouragement with this!), it may be a lot more readable, but still a fair warning, this is again, insane. Also, critical, so if you blindly adore the movie, it may not be your thing. But here we go again...
As some of you may know, the Escaflowne Movie was recently screened at a few select cinemas across Japan. It’s all part of the anniversary “package” in Japan, which includes mainly a new BD release of both the series and the movie, the soundtracks, and a few more official goodies. And from the start, this was advertised as the celebration of the “30th anniversary of the series and 25th anniversary of the movie.
Well, the 25th anniversary of the movie was, strictly-speaking, last year, but nobody can blame them for joining the two events together, right? Last year, I tried to focus on the movie materials and finishing my work at translating all that was left untranslated of the official package of source materials:
The movie itself (translated officially)
CD drama 1 Earth (prequel to the movie, my translation)
CD drama 2 Gaea (prequel to the movie, my translation)
The movie novel Escaflowne (alternate retelling of the events of the movie, my translation)
So now, we have the full movie lore in English at our disposal.
Okay, I may be lying as there is one, super obscure thing, and I’m not sure if it’s not lost to time entirely. Namely, there were several complementary texts published online at the time of movie airing, like omake scenes or character backstories. It probably wasn’t common to just publish canon material online somewhere, but the widely-available worldwide web was a fresh thing and the creators tried something with that. The only thing I remember of it was that it included a story telling how Millerna joined the Abaharaki. I unfortunately don’t even remember where I heard of it. But good luck trying to find something that appeared in Japanese online space for a short time around the year 2000. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking. I only remember the nicely animated English movie website from the time period. But I’ve been planning some deep dive into what is left of the old internet, so we’ll see if I have any luck. Nevertheless, if someone knows anything about it, let me know. I would be super willing to translate it and complete my collection.
Translating these materials was something of a dream come true, not gonna lie. If you told me 20 years ago, when I watched the movie for the first time, (or even 15 years ago, when I heard of the movie novel for the first time) that I would be able to translate this book, I wouldn’t have believed you. And I did greatly appreciate the new information I discovered from these more obscure sources—I mean, new to me… in Japan, it is all very available, if Escaflowne is what you’re into. But you can’t really expect these materials to be released officially in English after all this time, so I just rolled my sleeves up. And I had a ton of thoughts after translating each of these materials and rewatching the movie, with new observations each time.
Yes, it was fun, and I love to have some extra lore on top of what we’ve been working with all these years, some of it not very clear or not clearly sourced. But at the same time, now at the end of the road, I hate to say, it got convoluted and elusive at times, instead of clearer. The many retellings must confuse your brain as a rule; you remember some smaller detail, but are not sure where from and whether it would be true in the other iteration. I’m talking mostly about the differences between the movie and the novel. The CD dramas are complementary to the movie (but not the novel). . .if you want to believe Hitomi has already come into contact with Gaea before the events of the movie. There is only some thought exercise/suspension of disbelief involved as to why no one in the movie seems to remember that happening. I made a whole post on that. Actually, it already spawned two posts:
Thoughts after translating the CD dramas
The movieverse trivia collection
And there will be at least one more after this. But let’s cut to the chase and talk about what I want to talk about here. Starting with the major differences between the movie and its novel.
Can we see the novel as an expansion of the movie?
I should have probably warned you right in the beginning that this would probably only make full sense if you read the movie novel translation (plus there are going to be some spoilers). If you did that, I think you noticed that perhaps 70% of the movie and its novel may be the same, so it ALMOST makes you feel like it’s ALL complementary… but then you always come across a landmine that makes your theory fall apart. The movie can feel quite threadbare due to the short running time; the CD dramas only help a little and create some new questions. So, you seek explanations and the ones from the novel could be true, I mean, there’s a ton of free space to explain the events of the movie.
But if you simply think the novel would give the explanations that the movie had no time to give due to time and budget constraints, you’d be soon proven wrong. It feels more a record of the staff perhaps changing their minds about things a lot during the production. Or a show of how the screenwriter alone would write it, maybe without the input of the director and the others on the team.
On the other hand, you may choose the explanations from the novel you like and discard those you don’t. For example, in the novel, Dilandau’s squad are his “bodyguards”. I used ‘guards’, but bodyguard is a legitimate translation of the word used. Then there are crazier changes, like Celena being her own person who had lived with Allen for the entirety of her (short and tragic) life (?!); Dilandau being Van and Folken’s half-brother instead (??!); Dryden launching rockets and being a bit creepier (...); Merle sister-zoning herself (wow); Van seeing Hitomi naked on their way from Arzas ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°); the two having a calm, open, and almost mature, discussion about their feelings (<3). . . it’s all on the menu to accept as your possible headcanons for the movieverse, if you like! But there are also some things you cannot match together, even if you tried.
The changing roles of Folken and Sora
The first thing that really clashes with the movie canon is the changed role of Sora and how novel!Folken holds such a desperate, tragic love for her. Compared to that, the movie!Folken is practically indifferent to Sora.
In general though, the novel!Folken is not a very sympathetic guy. Violently impulsive, manipulative, bitter about his dad… ready to kill Van because Sora chose him to be a king and kissed him to ritualistically seal the deal. In the CD drama, it is said Folken let Van live intentionally, but in the movie novel, Sora threw herself before Van, otherwise Folken would have killed him on the spot. Ooof. That’s a real blow to the character we know.
Now, compared to the series!Folken, people say even movie!Follen is already more of an unsympathetic evil villain. But he has nothing on novel!Folken, who is ready to off his cute little brother on the spot cause his gf Sora (aka the Dragon Child) kissed him to make him the king! On the other hand, novel!Folken is capable of romantic love and therefore has a better reason for turning evil than just “not being chosen to be a king”. Quite tangled!
There are more question marks about the novel!Folken. He randomly sends his doppelganger (RIP once again, Zongi) after Van, and through him, explains to Van that him being chosen as a child was part of a plot by the military commanders, who convinced Sora to pick Van instead of him. That is the first and last time Folken sort of offers Van a chance to stand on his side. Is he trying to manipulate Van with a made-up story? Or is he desperate to find an excuse for Sora’s betrayal? The fact that he actively sends a doppelganger with that message points to the first option.
But then, at the end, when a ghost Sora appears to scold Folken, she admits that she chose Van of her own volition. Which clearly disappoints Folken… so he must have believed, or wanted to believe, another story. He does not explicitly mention the commanders anymore, though. Folken literally blames her for betraying him with Van. A five-year-old.
Is it just me or would this story make far more sense if everyone was of age? Yes Folken, your gf finds your brother cute, but it’s a kindergartener-sort-of-cute. No need to get ballistic about it. And Sora, Dragon Child, why not share with your bf in private that he’s not gonna be chosen as a king? I know, it sucks for everyone involved.
For Dune/Folken, it’s probably not gonna feel great to stick around the White Dragon kingdom after being rejected like that. But judging by his violent reaction, there is probably more to the story than just the ceremonial kiss. Perhaps Sora (the Dragon Child) would have to stick close to Van his whole life so he could use Escaflowne when he needed; perhaps there’s more to the Dragon Child and Dragon King’s relationship than that. But it’s left unsaid. It’s never stated outright that the Dragon Child is the designated partner to the Dragon King. In the movie lore, the Wing Goddess is sort of a soulmate (spiritual twin) to the Dragon King, but no such thing is mentioned in the novel for the Dragon Child and the Dragon King.
I would have liked the movie!Sora to have more agency and her background explained, but strictly from the point of actually liking Folken as a person, even his (already criticized) movie version is a preferable candidate to the movie novel one. I think that the essence of his character was always caring about Van, so somehow, the vanilla movie!Folken still seems more like the character I associate with that name rather than this goth-loverboy who-murders-and-then-freezes-his-dead-gf-in-a-slab-of-ice-so-they-can-watch-the-end-of-the-world-together. Who also can’t forgive his father’s moral failures, even on his deathbed, and for that reason cannot even feel sympathy for his half-brother whom he tortures… And he has absolutely none for his full-brother, either. Yet Van still sheds a tear after him, but tbh, I could not identify too many redeeming qualities in this Dune, not to mention, this Folken (the pun is that Dune is the name of Folken before he betrays his country… and vanilla movie!Dune seems pretty alright in comparison to novel!Dune). But back to the topic at hand…
Sora is such a strange character. Created intentionally just for the movie, they still weren’t sure what to do with her. In the novel, she is something else than in the movie. She seems like a version of Varie, mysterious and important, but nobody knows in what way exactly. Her presence is very Varie-like, similar dress, similar otherworldness and beauty, she even got the coloring that Nobuteru Yuuki always intended for Varie. In his artbook, he says he always imagined Varie with "silver hair, wearing a white kimono with golden embroidery, and a red and gold slashed obi". Imagine Varie like that… actually, you don’t need to stretch your imagination too far. Here goes.
In the movie novel, she even has dark hair and a "Snow White" kind of complexion, making her even more similar to Varie. It seems like Yuuki finally got his say in the end with the colors though.
Nevertheless, I may be a bit unfair because I’m mixing the movie/CD drama with the novel, which is not exactly the same setting, as is clear right from the start. One difference I mentioned a few times already, is how in the novel, it’s Ryuu no Miko, Dragon Child, instead of Tsubasa no Kami, Wing Goddess, and it is confirmed to have been originally Sora. And when we say Dragon Child, we are not talking just any child, but a promised, miraculous child. A child of a god, practically (it is literally used for Jesus in Japanese). That’s Sora’s and Hitomi’s role in the novel. Oh, and it’s non-gendered. I could have made it, idk, “heir” or something, but I couldn’t come up with a gender-neutral term to use (and “descendant” is a mouthful). Sora is not some untouchable or reincarnated goddess either; she’s Dune’s beloved, and she lives at the court of the Dragon King. She seems more of some sort of priestess and has the special role in choosing the new king…
Which is why it was kind of strange that Sora is a 御子 miko and not the more common 巫女 miko, because the second miko can mean shrine maiden, or even priestess/sorceress. If this was an anime or a CD drama, and I was going by the sound alone, I think I would be convinced that it’s the shrine maiden miko, just by instinct. Cause it just suits the concept of Sora better as the character, though I’m possibly influenced by her movie version.
In the movie, Sora is still a miko, but not the "promised child" kind. She is a regular priestess miko. I think the homonym is very intentional, because Hitomi is confused herself in the novel and thinks she is being called a shaman, not a god-child. Only the reader of the novel knows, seeing it written. The same way the reader of the movie artbook knows that movie Sora is the shrine maiden/shamaness. I think it’s an intended play on words or an easter egg.
I also think the evolving concepts theory that I mentioned in the intro are confirmed by the fact that Nobuteru Yuuki, in his movie artbook that is full of early movie concepts, STILL talks about Tsubasa no Miko, Wing Child, which is a mix between the novel Ryuu no Miko (Dragon Child) and Tsubasa no Kami (Wing Goddess) from the movie. They couldn’t make up their minds about the name! Not to mention the meaning of the character…
The elusive meaning of that mythical entity
When Merle asks about Hitomi’s powers, the only thing that comes to Hitomi’s mind is an occasion where her intuition saved her from injury. Which is… pretty normal as Hitomis go. A sixth sense, a good intuition, foretelling bad things happening… Those are all Hitomi characteristics, as we know her from other iterations. Not necessarily some mythical figure traits.
In the movie artbooks, Nobuteru Yuuki explains that the scene at the train station was supposed to have a more specific meaning: Dune was in fact supposed to come to warn little Hitomi before a train crash… they were probably supposed to be made by him to miss the shinkansen, later being thankful for it. In any case, the idea got axed, and they simply boarded the train… we never got to know whether something happened or not. Probably not, I mean, if Dune’s presence did not change anything, if he hadn’t even attempted to change their course of action and save Hitomi, then there probably was no danger. Anyway, you would think that if what Yuuki says is true (and yes, it gives a meaning to a scene that is otherwise kinda pointless from the plot POV), the scene would find its way to the novel written by the movie writer. After all, its production precedes the movie and, much like the TV novels, could be seen as proto-screenplay for the movie. And yet you would be wrong.
In the novel, there are few random flashback scenes. There is one where Hitomi is warned before a bus crash, but it is her own instincts that provide the warning. There is no appearance by Dune or any other Gaean character, she just changes the seats by her own intuition and avoids a nasty crash catapulting her across the bus and hurting her (but not too seriously). The girl that takes Hitomi’s original seat is hurt, but not life-threateningly so. In any case, it does feel like an echo of the shinkansen scene, I mean, something warning you and making you change your actions to avoid serious danger… and it could have a meaning, BUT THEN at another point in the novel, Hitomi randomly remembers she was also once run over by a car, with about the same amount of danger to her life, perhaps more… nothing seems to have warned her before that! And it kind of slashes the significance of the bus scene (which wasn’t life-threatening in the first place) further in half.
But who even is that Wing Goddess, or Dragon Child, as she is called in the novel. This elusive entity that descended to ancient Gaea as a goddess before, and is prophesied to do so again. She is so respected, even the wannabe Dragon kings, the leaders of Gaea, bow before her.
If we talk about the movie and the CD dramas, she had close relations to the Dragon King it seems, and the reincarnation of this guy is Van. The reincarnation of the Wing Goddess is Hitomi. So far, so good. So, what does the Wing Goddess do? Why is she a Wing Goddess, and not say, Crystal Goddess…or Armor Goddess? Alright, she is supposed to have wings:
“Would you like to look for the wings that you’ve lost?”
–Orm in the CD drama.
But so do other people on Gaea, who are not described as gods. So why is she a goddess and not a priestess, seer, princess, heiress, whatever? Can she command birds, ride the wind, make wings grow on pigs, can she make feathers rain? Possibly, but it’s never 100% confirmed. The main purpose of the Wing Goddess is apparently bestowing the Dragon Armor upon the Dragon King. So that is why the king needs her. But can’t the king rule without the Dragon Armor? Did Van’s father have the Dragon Armor? Nothing suggests as much… But the only time the Dragon King needs the Dragon Armor is when he’s in crisis… more specifically, at war, cause I can’t think of another crisis that may be helped by that hugely destructive armor.
In the novel, the Dragon Child also (even more directly) decides who will be the Dragon King (in the movie/CD drama it’s a prophecy/appearance of the “sign of a king” that decides). Okay. Except, the Dragon King or Dragon Royalty, and possibly even the whole Dragon Clan has wings too, along psych psychic powers such as telekinesis, governing wind, telepathy, and setting shit on fire. The only special power of the Wing Goddess we see displayed is that she can make Escaflowne into a gem and a gem into Escaflowne. Which is pretty cool but wouldn’t it actually stand out more if Dragon Clan/Van didn’t have those wings then? If let’s say, the psychic powers were enough. “The wing possesses the power to seek the one who desires it,” says Van in the movie to explain why Escaflowne started flying. It seems she isn’t even the one to make it fly. So where is the Wing Goddess in all this?
Perhaps the Dragon Armor is something like a nuclear weapon. The Dragon King may not be using it—and it is the sane thing not to use it—but in order to deter his enemies and keep them in check, and to confirm his position as the king, he declares he has access to it. That he has, let’s say, the Wing Goddess’ favor. Perhaps it is normally enough to sort of worship her at your palace (it does look like there might be a statue or an altar of the Wing Goddess at the burned palace, alongside the dragon bones). But there may come a time you’d be desperately asking her for help and hope that she will manifest herself, and soon after, manifest Escaflowne. There’s no doubt Van strongly feels he needs the Dragon Armor, in all three iterations, meaning the movie, the CD dramas, and the novel. So the Wing Goddess might be an entity that only appears in a time of a crisis, likely a war. And then her power is truly decisive: whoever gets the armor wins the war. This might be the only power Wing Goddess has. Which is why it makes no difference whether she is called a “dragon” or a “wing” mythical entity, since she is not really controlling either. But there’s also some evidence to the contrary.
Which is something of a recurring instance, which leads me to the main criticism I have about the movieverse writing.
The hot symbolic mess of dragons, wings, and other fanservice
There is a scene in the movie novel which literally made me pause because it felt so bizarre. It’s practically the scene from the movie where Van spreads his wings after he and Dilandau tear the ground apart Dragonball Z style with their powers. Same thing happens in the novel, and the onlookers are like, “I see wings. She’s the true Dragon Child!” (She’s not even a Wing Goddess there, mind you, yet they associate wings with the Dragon Child.) The characters are observing it from a distance so they may think the wings are Hitomi’s, but really, would it be such a huge secret that Van/Dragon Royalty/Dragon Clan has wings (I realized we don’t even know which of the three is true)? No, even as her enemies, they all know she is supposed to have wings and WANT TO BELIEVE that it’s her wings… even though that known winged guy is right there. And the same thing happens later… Van takes wing and Hitomi is not even anywhere in the vicinity and people start drooling like “Dragon Child, save us!” Guys,do you think she controls every wing growing on a guy?
–Hitomi, probably
To be fair, Sora, the Dragon Child, was winged. She had her wings out all the time. All the time we see her, which may be significant, because it’s either the ceremony, or she is flying towards Hitomi in some way. Still, fair to say she had them out pretty often. Hitomi calls her an angel right away for this reason.
Now think about it. Remember Van’s mother, the pure-blooded Dragon Clan princess? Why wouldn’t she have wings, if Van has them? If so, what makes Sora that much different, and more mystical, than her? How did she even convince everyone she’s the Dragon Child without summoning Escaflowne? Her wings shouldn’t be shocking to the Dragon Clan Royalty, little Van would probably be the only one pointing at her like, “Hey, you have wings, too!” And if Van’s mother didn’t have them, the old Dragon King surely had, right? Then wouldn’t Dune have them? Wouldn’t even the novel!Dilandau have them, as his son? Maybe not, maybe the wings are actually the sign of the Dragon King. Maybe only the Wing Goddess and the Dragon King are supposed to have wings, not anybody else. But why not say it outright? Actually wait, movie!Folken mentions his wings, too, saying that he “discarded them”. Meanwhile, I don’t think the novel!Folken mentions ever having them.
And back we are in the vicious circle.
I illustrated it with the novel, but the movie is similar. Hitomi is supposed to be the Wing Goddess, but it’s Van flaunting his wings all the time. Who exactly is supposed to have wings seems to be really elusive and possibly different for each retelling. And the hard truth I see is, there is no necessity for Van to have wings in this setting, except for sticking to the other versions of this character. It’s like they said, “Van should have wings, otherwise it’s not him!”, for recreating the memorable scenes from the series… and for making that terrific first scene in the movie possible. So basically, for the rule of cool. They made no point of Folken or other Dragon Clan members having wings either, just Van.
I think they should have been braver and made only Hitomi winged, because as it is, they are harming the whole consistency and symbolism. Hitomi’s reveal of wings in the movie end scene would have been that much stronger, too. Basically, as a viewer/reader, at some point I started feeling like, “If she’s the Wing Goddess, then let her have the special wings dammit!”/”If she is a magical Dragon Child, then make her different from other Dragon Clan people!” The symbolism is just diluted by not doing any of this.
Yes, the usual criticism is that the movie is extremely quick-paced and many characters appear as mere cameos. Another criticism could be the few random POV shifts in the novel, but that can be attributed to the writer (who is a professional screenwriter rather than a novelist) imagining the anime scenes playing out rather than adhering to the rules of writing. But what really doesn’t work here are the meaning and the symbolism of the words: weighty words such as “god” and “king” that are thrown about, and symbols like “wings” and “dragons” get overused; which is how their meaning may become lost. I mean… let’s take a look at some other instances of this.
Like DRAGONS.
Gaea was created by twin Dragon Gods, possibly those two dragon fossils we see, one of them in the face of the mountain for White Dragon Clan where Van prays to it in the CD drama, the other inlaid in Folken’s castle/fortress for the Black Dragon Clan. Well, at least that’s what I thought, until I realized that the floor one is probably stolen from the wall in the throne room of the royal castle. And it all falls apart. I guess it’s just regular dragon fossils, then, which were turned into sort of dragon altars, and there may be more than two to be found?
In any case, it is confirmed dragons used to roam ancient Gaea freely… but then the Dragon Gods used their Dragon Armors (cause they are gods but they fight via proxy using some armors, not, idk, whatever the gods possibly in the form of gigantic dragons can do by themselves to cause destruction), and they cannot even pilot the bloodsucking armors they created themselves, which I guess is something they didn’t think through as gods. But it’s alright, cause they have the two Dragon Clans, basically the people created by the Dragon Gods who are also their worshippers… BUT WAIT, there are other people—regular people who intermingle with the Dragon Clan in the empire of the Black Dragon Clan which they named the Black Dragon Empire in a bout of fresh inspiration—and that’s not all, in the white Dragon Clan, and presumably, White Dragon Kingdom there’s a Dragon King… who is not a Dragon God and not a regular human either, and neither is he just a regular dragon-clansman. Whew.
Anyway, this Dragon King is the designated ruler of Gaea. So, even in the midst of the Dragon Clan, there is Dragon Royalty. And it’s not just the immediate family of the Dragon King; because after the death of his first wife and queen, they found him another pure-blood (dragon) princess who could bear him a new purebred Dragon Clan son, so it’s more of a blood thing than who you marry. This son of the Dragon King is supposed to be a Dragon King himself, but he is as of now known simply as the Dragon (not even the “last dragon” or some other more specific dragon, just “the Dragon” in a world full of dragons and dragon references… okay). So, this Dragon King (or someone with his blood) is so special because he can pilot the Dragon Armor, right? Not so fast, A WING GODDESS (movie) has to bestow this armor upon him because the planet creating Dragon Gods who created those armors have decided that’s their limit and they cannot decide upon such matter, you see. Or they are dead already, who knows. So, Van is the designated Dragon King, son of the Dragon King, but also a reincarnation of another Dragon King from ancient times. According to Orm: he bears “the sign of a king that was not seen for millenia” and “used to live with the Wing Goddess on ancient Gaea”. So the Wing Goddess and the Dragon King can reincarnate, but those Dragon Gods are dead and fossilized 4eva. Gotchu.
Speaking of Orm, we have here this sorcerer; by Hitomi’s description he looks like a goblin, but hey, here he comes transforming into a flying dragon to send the Wing Goddess back to Earth in the CD drama. Not to be confused with flying dragon Escaflowne from the end of the movie/novel (which is only explained by “wishes attract the wing”). Or, idk, the two may be connected somehow, who knows?
AND THEN, last but not least, we have Dragon Slayers led by Dilandau… but they are not slaying dragons, they are not hunting down the last Dragon King, and they are not even looking for the Dragon Armor, it’s just the name of their band, ok? Heck, there’re so many dragons here I’m not sure where they would even start slaying. Just kidding. The literal translation of their name is Dragon Attack-Squad, so it could be they just wanted to have a dragon in their name like everyone else and they weren’t actually out for anyone’s blood. Or, they all have Dragon Clan blood in them, hence the name (that is just an unfounded speculation).
Anyway, in the movie novel, we HAVE almost ALL THIS plus a Dragon Child (instead of the Wing Goddess)!!! And actual dragons as creatures still living on Gaea. And a random old man, possibly the old Dragon King, or maybe some variation of Orm actually, who ALSO transforms into a HUEG dragon, but in a totally unrelated scene to the Orm transformation. See what I mean there? THAT’S TOO MUCH DRAGON FOR YOUR HOTPOT ALREADY.
Just to sort of recap, this is how the hierarchy looks (from the bottom up):
Human
Human mixed with Dragon Clan (maybe with some special abilities)
Dragon Clan (worshipper of Dragon God with special abilities)
Dragon Clan nobility (unknown how it has formed but they must be pure Dragon Clan blood, likely related to the previous Dragon King(s) by lineage and therefore more powerful)
Dragon King (who is Dragon Clan but with EVEN MORE special features, has the favor of a mythical entity and can pilot Dragon Armors, plus rumors have it there may even be reincarnation from another mythical entity going on)
Dragon God (not sure if they appear in humanoid form at all though)
And this is how the dragon hierarchy looks, just ftr:
Regular, Gaea-roaming dragon (now likely extinct)
Flying armor-dragon transformed from the Dragon Armor
Dragon God (later fossilized and used as an altar/decoration… or is that meant to be the first type actually, used only symbolically???)
Okay, one last symbolic keyword, WOLVES.
As we know, Adom is a predominantly a wolf people village (with other types of beast people present) and it took all this village to rear the exiled child Van. Alright. But then we get the Nukushi, a different wolf (at least Hitomi calls him a wolf in the novel; but to be fair no official materials confirm what species was the inspiration… “Nukse” or “Nukushi” does not resemble any name of animal species in Japanese, either). The Nukushi seem more beastly, they run on all fours, their faces are less human. They are just used, not even as fighters, just as a disposable tool by the Black Dragon Clan.
The Adom wolves, on the contrary, walk upright and are more human-like. The character of Ruhm is even described in the novel as wise, “philosophical”. The Adom village has agriculture and other culture, and “elders” well-versed in medicine and magic. It almost seems like a different level of evolution within the same species. Which is a whole another thing to unpack, how it even works with these beastmen seemingly at different steps of evolution, or some more beastly than others. The same thing I guess is happening in the series with those clothed rodents, but at least it’s not within the same species (more or less).
Back to the Adom wolves though, even before they heal Van, the “village head” advises him on how to summon the Wing Goddess. And remember, Van is the supposed Dragon King, who has powers and is the leader of Gaea, has ties to its ancient past, and is practically a demi-god himself. Yet these wolves have a thing or two to teach him, what we could understand as the wolf magic.
Last but not least, we have sorcerer Orm from the CD drama, the goblin-like creature that we have never before seen in this franchise. He uses a doppelgänger but is not one himself. But what is even stranger, he is a bearer of both WOLF and DRAGON imagery for an unknown reason. In the movie drama CD1, Hitomi makes her first contact with Gaea after entering a dark cave. She hears howling inside. And at first, I thought this has to do with Van being in the wolf village and the wolf elders possibly using some spells themselves to support him. But THEN, in CD2, there’s the wolf call again, and Van recognizes it as “Orm calling him”.
So, ugh, let me get this straight, this goblin-like sorcerer character that sounds like rustling chains when he moves and can transform into an old human man or a dragon at will also has some… lupine magical properties? I was also reminded of the series and the wolves calling to Van, who understands their call. It’s like the same lego pieces that got mixed and constructed in a different way. But there are some edges sticking out now.
Okay, maybe Orm calls out to Van in wolf language because he knows he has lived in the wolf village and understands it. No, actually that’s BS, because he uses it in the cave, too, and he’s definitely not calling Van then. OR WAS HE? Was he in fact working for Van? In that case, he hid it pretty well. From Folken, from Van, and even from the audience! Perhaps it was the calls of the wolf village elders in the cave, after all. Who knows? Who COULD know, from all this???
Anyway, Orm knows a lot about Van and his life BOTH at the Dragon Clan royal court and his previous life in ancient Gaea. Not to mention, he also knows about Van’s life with the wolves… but he is never shown to have an association with them. AND YET, his call is that of a wolf. And remember, wolves are dominantly humanoid creatures in this franchise, it’s not just some random animal, it’s a sound sentient creatures make. It’s like there was a human sorcerer in LOTR and his telepathic means of communication would be hobbit drinking songs or something.
But hey, if there can be smart wolves and animalistic wolves at the same time (same as there are god dragons, human dragons, machine dragons, AND maybe even the regular ol’ beast dragons), perhaps alongside the anthropomorphic characters there exist regular animal wolves as well. Then what even fits under the term “wolf”, really, in this lore?
It’s all stuffed into the bag quite haphazardly. I refer back to what I already mentioned: Van, the Dragon King of the White Dragon Clan, also known as “the Dragon”, bears a dragon tattoo (novel), pilots a Dragon Armor. Doesn’t it sound a bit like a kid who falls in love with some game or comic or something and his whole wardrobe, room, and identity is now… that? Plus, when you spam dragon everywhere, how the heck is just “dragon” specific enough to know that you’re speaking about a specific person? You CAN do it of course, but would the other party understand? And if they DO, if at this time and age Van is so famous they immediately know who you’re talking about… then why would they automatically think of another mythical creature when seeing his wings, the mark of who HE HIMSELF is?
And I mean yeah, I sort of get it. I’ve made my own attempts at writing. Sometimes, you need that little asspull to see what you want to see. And I’m using the expression “asspull” in the most loving way. The problem is, they never bothered even with that (or had the time) to explain some of the stuff. So, we are often left even without the asspull explanations, just see their results on the screen or page.
In place of conclusions
So, what do you think? Does something like this bother you, or is it just me? Would you consider it original or just bad writing? Would you come to peace with Van not having wings if it made Hitomi shine more as the Wing Goddess? And, for those who read the novel translation, what did you think of it all? Do you appreciate having more lore now, even if it makes things more confusing?
I haven’t yet written any fic for the movie, but if I did, I would take the movie, its artbooks, and the CD drama as the main canon materials. From the novel, I would probably only pick pieces that make sense to me and don’t interfere with the established canon. Or just write with the novel as the base material, alternatively.
I know this is all pretty critical, but I must say I still enjoyed the novel, and I really appreciated some parts. For example, I like that it was written more like a real novel rather than anime material. Hitomi felt pretty realistic as a character, probably more fleshed-out than in the movie itself. Her relationship with Yukari is more defined, you understand better why Yukari takes her to the National Stadium, that she really cares and worries about Hitomi, even with her “smart” and “tough girl” image and manners.
Now, I expected Hitomi to go back in the end out of habit, so it was quite a bit of a surprise when it was implied she chose to stay on Gaea. I’m happy we have a piece of canon material where it’s presented as plausible. What’s more, I am not even sure that Van must strictly play the role of a king (in a traditional way) in the movieverse, which would give the two more freedom in how to live their lives. It's an interesting possibility to think about!
For a male-written novel, the focus on romance is a surprise already, but the scenes were also pretty sweet and romantic. On the other hand, the violent scenes were really brutal and it does take some level of it to make me say that. In this regard, I guess it’s well-balanced. I also like that Millerna is given more space as a fighter. And that Merle is not hung up on Van but refers to him as her brother. People got some backstories, at least. I think the novel can stand well on its own two feet, but the overall movieverse lore is nonetheless still quite confusing.
That being said, I appreciate the movie and all the thought that went into it now more than ever. Way more than I used to. I never was one of the movie haters who would say that the movie is bad. I felt the love that went into it as well as I felt they fought for every minute to put it into, and made it worth it. It takes a lot to reinvent the story like that, to make it feel new and intriguing while keeping what people loved. Like was very well said elsewhere, its depiction of depression and the struggle between isolation and human connection is extraordinary, brave, and should be appreciated. It also marks the absolute height of the cel animation and has wonderful music and acting. I’m actually jealous of the people who got to see it on the big screen in Japan a few months back.
Maybe my criticism here is only meant to say, they shouldn’t have been afraid to turn it even more around and take risks that perhaps would have made some fans upset. (Like the people who loved series!Folken likely felt upon seeing his movie counterpart.) For me, it would be worth it to see some fresh stuff and have a lore that is different from the series, but with clearer, more logical inner workings. But you know what, I enjoy the imagery of dragons, wings, and such too much to blame the creators for it. Perhaps there was a bit of a struggle between fanservice and depth, but I can’t say that I don’t enjoy both equally. I hope the movieverse continues getting the love it deserves!
Ooooh, we have a bunch of really fancy pedestrian traffic lights in Germany! I need to share:
Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):
The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:
Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):
Traffic light lady in Bremen:
Karl Marx light in Trier:
Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:
Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):
A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:
Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:
Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:
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when we started talking about getting a small-breed dog I was like, "I will NEVER turn into one of those people who treats their little dog like a doll or an accessory by forcing them to dress up in ridiculous outfits. Dogs HATE that. They should get to be DOGS, and that means not having to wear anything but a HARNESS and being FREE to ROLL in the MUD." and then I adopted a dog who throws a fit if you try to take him for a walk without letting him pick out a bow tie first. a dog who loves wearing pajamas so much that I'm about to spend a disgusting amount of money on several sets of linen ones for summer. a dog who watches me wave at him to follow me through a mud puddle and just stands there blinking up at me like, "are you fucking serious? and get my paws wet?"
me: I will raise him no differently than the two 80-lb labs I had growing up. absolutely no hoity-toity frou frou little yapyap dog stuff. he's gonna be a good ol' fashioned, rough-and-tumble, capital D-O-G—
to celebrate the popularity of this post, I ordered him another set of the linen jammies in yellow. now he looks like paddington bear
the etsy seller threw in a little miniature hermes silk scarf as a freebie and I dare you to tell me he doesn't know how handsome he looks in it. whenever we take it off of him he broods like he's a wealthy victorian orphan child in desperate need of a seaside holiday to restore his delicate aristocratic constitution
The series is called THE SHADOW QUEEN and book 1 is Tessa of Hundrfeld. I'm currently battling through chapter 14 (semi-literally? Tessa is mid battle) of book 2. Norse-inspired fantasy world filled with prophecy, betrayal, and deceit :)
(Pssst I suggest typing "A.L. Heard," bc it looks like a/i. Unless of course you did and the *lovely* Tumblr app doesn't behave like the site does. Eyeroll sigh) Aaaand where can we buy it?
Anyway, my biggest tip for getting into fandom is to engage. Send asks. Share your creations. Do the tag game even if you haven’t been tagged. Talk to people on their posts. Ask for people to follow who like x things. All difficult things for the socially anxious, I know, but it gets better with practice, I swear 🫶
ppl on ao3 should use the "this work was inspired by" option more. so many fics out there that put links to other fics in the a/n but theres a better option.....
important addition i forgot that not everyone might know. similar to how ao3 bookmarks work, you can also link to non-ao3 fanworks using this format. so, for instance, if theres some fanart on tumblr that inspired you to write the fic? you can link that fanart to your fic!
I love this feature of AO3! I used it to link to an ancient fic of my own on Fanfiction.net to say it was "inspired by" and explained in the author's note that this is me posting on AO3 to try and complete the 17-year-old story. It worked well to be able to link the original copy, which is still live, to my new AO3 one.
I also use it whenever I post a podfic, be it my own original written fic or somebody else's, so the audio version and text version are linked together. ♥
People don't know AO3 is (super awesome to) offer/s this option. The author is doing great in giving credit *and linking* to theory motivation. ( leven better if they're not just copy&paste the URL.)
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i can’t stop thinking about the time my roommate and i asked our insanely ripped neighbor brian who wore flip flops year round and sunglasses on the back of his head for help with carrying a solid wood dresser up to our apartment. he wanted to get his son who was home from college to come help too so he takes out his phone and goes, “siri, call christian christianson” and turns speaker phone on while we stand there sort of stunned by the name and after a few rings cc answers, “what the hell do you want” and brian just hangs up without responding and is all, “kids, am i right” then carries the dresser up four flights of stairs pretty much by himself. we offered him a six pack of rainier as thanks which he immediately opened in our kitchen and downed 2/6 beers in 10 mins while telling us about his 1989 dodge ram 1500 he was trying to get his son to restore with him to no avail. really nice guy. we never saw his son before he went back to school but any time i ask my roommate for help with lifting stuff or reaching something he says, “siri, call christian christianson” and we reminisce about brian and his truck.
... My reply became long enough I wanted to reblog it to my blog.
My husband goes by CJ bc there were too many Chrises in his elementary school growing up. His friend group growing up had a lot of Bens: His brother, a close-ish church friend, someone else's brother, and a neighbor.
In college, my husband met and befriended a guy who was born in the same hospital a few days apart. Funny story: Before we really knew each other, the guy lent me *my husband's* copy of Serenity, without asking. (Their library was kinda a free for all.)
In elementary school, another classmate had my same birthdate.
I have two Aunt Bettys on my paternal side, and an Aunt Debbie on my mom's. Paternal side my generation, two cousins married Julies. (My cousins hung out a lot growing up, too.) One Aunt broke the "two kids" rule (joke) with three. My cousin has four kids. (One of seven cousins, plus me and my brother = 9. A few of us dont count [Yet.] Curious what the future holds.)
The most recent baby was *almost* born my my brother*s birthday.
One of my famly members just attended a wedding in which the bride and groom had mine and my brother's names, spelled the same.
