#twelve kingdoms

Rewatching Juuni Kokki (The Twelve Kingdoms). There are dull moment at the start of the anime, but it gets good again when the exhibitionist rat is introduced to the story.

Lately, they are trying to revive it which is good. I just wish it can replicate the beauty of the manga. Red River anime style is not doing it for me.

taiki is surely both standoffish and codependent simultaneously. gyousou knows intimately (has always known) that taiki is what makes him emperor. he owes everything to taiki. the people of tai may be his reason for living but taiki is the reason he's alive (in more ways than one). he knows how to lead, but taiki has a better grasp on the politics at this point.

taiki, after suffering for six full years of esui and his horn being severed, and another year struggling to recover at the palace, took a single look into gyousou's eyes and fucking turned right back into a kirin. after all of the shit he went through, after so many situations in which doing so would have solved his problems. i fully believe he didn't realize he could do it until he finally saw gyousou again. taiki is a kokki, said in-text to be more powerful than a golden kirin, and he doesn't even know what he can do or how to do it--except when he's with gyousou. for his emperor, he changed into a kirin the first time; he did it again at the crucial juncture that could have seen them both killed. his connection, whatever it is, with gyousou saved them both. his connection to heaven and tentei is gyousou. he has only perceived the Will for this man.

meanwhile, gyousou is so prideful that he was going to leave his kingdom after failing the shouzan, and then he was chosen anyway. taiki perceived his imperial aura as fear. say what you want about a child misinterpreting awe, but there is a lot of description in that first book about gyousou's cold, blood-red eyes. (and yet he's a warm man whose retainers love him, and he takes on risai, and loves his kijuu, and he remembers names of random soldiers--! he thinks he needs to press his reforms forward immediately after ascending because people don't like him, they only appreciate the good works he does. he's an idiot.)

taiki, meanwhile, is unhinged and recovering from esui and monstrous, he is exactly what rousan has been saying he was this whole time. he sent his shirei away, he bowed to a false emperor, he killed a man, he was ready to kill himself, and all for gyousou--and yet if gyousou died taiki would have to shift right on to a new emperor and devote himself fully to them. at his core, taiki has always thought of the people of tai first, beyond anything else. he would do what needed to be done. gyousou needs taiki much more deeply than taiki needs him.

they've spent 6 months together ever and taiki was a child at the time. they are both beasts of men, kind and unapproachable in turns. they are each other's reason for existence.

i just finished Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon (newest taiki/gyousou story) and i think that while it definitely got too bogged down in geography, politics, etc., i LOVED it. i read all four books in under a week and would have gone faster had i not had to work and live.

i'm so glad risai survived. i loved that it ended on her and kyoshi and kouryou, right where it started. i love that enki and youko argued shoryuu to a standstill about helping tai. so fab.

i love that taiki took 1 look at gyousou and fucking turned right back into a kirin. whoever said afterward that "oh he hid from us that he'd recovered! how smart"---i FULLY believe he didn't realize he could do that lol. it probably surprised him too. his bond with gyousou is just that powerful.

on a serious note...it's been a long time since i read most of the other books. I did reread the risai-goes-to-kei book this week as well, but the rest are more than 10 years into the fog of memory for me, if not 15-20. That said--I was surprised to see raisai and shikirei talking about sexism in the army, as my understanding of the universe was kind of that sexism wasn't really a thing (idk, due to the riboku thing?). in retrospect, i also noted the multiple implications of rape (ukou..... do not rip) that were discussed when villages got ransacked, always to the women. so CLEARLY there is violence and sexism directed at women in this universe. bc i haven't read the other books in so long, i wonder if i just missed it before? or whether this is a product of the author writing over the course of so many years and changing her mind about what should be mentioned?

i was also very surprised by the inclusion of the queen mother of the west, ie a literal god, when to my memory we'd never seen that before? there was a lot of talking-up of gyokuyou as ~oooh the closest we get to heaven, who knows who's pulling the strings~ and then WHAM later in the book (1 book later? idr) risai (who has, mind you, spent an entire book saying that god doesn't exist) is confronted with a goddess. that was all very strange.

i am fascinated by both rousan and taiki. i don't understand rousan. i appreciate her and also hate her, and her motivations were never entirely clear. like, taiki at the end was certain she had protected him, but unequivocally, she was the one who gave asen the jisen???? and the other youma??? SHE enabled him to do all of this. what does taiki mean she's not against them!!! sure, she talked a big talk the whole time about a sort of neutrality, and was clearly judgmental of asen, but...she did that. like, come on. 1 yari does not a coup solve.

on taiki's count...like, it is incredible that he could push through and bow his head to asen. i LOVE that for his character. he IS a monster. and there's been hints here and there that black kirin/kokki DO have extra special abilities, so why not that? (the tears of blood....BABE....) and yet at the same time i feel that that has gone against a completely concrete piece of worldbuilding: namely, kirin cannot bow to anyone but their emperor. it is literally a plot point in taiki's first book.

so, on the one hand, i love the story this tells about him and his desperation and how fucked-up he is. and he DID get hit with the esui after killing that guard! so there's some kind of consequence. but....he shouldn't have been able to bow at all. i suppose it's just an unwritten, nobody-tried-that-hard-before sort of rule, but it does slightly rub me the wrong way.

back to risai. love love love. (except for that bit where she was railing against the universe, that got really old quick???) i love that none of this could have happened without her. SHE is the reason tai can be saved. she went to kei fully intending to trick youko to her death, almost immediately pulled back, and made the rescue happen anyway.

all of the backstories about the different temples, regiments, retainers, etc. i ended up soooort of skimming (i guess i read it without comprehension, which is nearly the same thing) so i really think that could have used some editing. FASCINATING how they kept going toward and away from kan'you mountain.

FASCINATING how gyousou fucking got himself free right as everyone starting looking for him. what he said about heavenly providence giving him the black suugu has to be the case.

someone's post i read the other day theorized that heaven itself had made asen start a coup because gyousou was running damn close to losing the Way (and so quickly), so i went into the last few books with that in mind, and i am not opposed to that reading of the situation. i mean, asen obviously had his weird complex about it all and fully could have intended on the coup anyway--and had access to merceneries and rousan etc--but the writing of it DOES seem to indicate that gyousou was going too hard, too fast, AND he was described post-mountain to have found some sort of inner peace. soooo. (also, like. how did that father know to send offerings into the mountain....)

SO. svsss people! if you're in an exploratory mood, this series is japanese but based on chinese historical aesthetics, girl/boy gets pulled to another world and it turns out they're the emperor/emperor's really important magical unicorn, respectively. (not to each other.)

i read these originally in the tokyopop translation back in the early 2000s (also when the anime was made) but seven seas is licensing a new translation, so clearly they think it'll appeal to you guys! a bunch of them are already available.

there's no romance whatsoever, a lot of it is political drama or fighting, but the characters are amazing, the ties between emperor and kirin (the unicorns) are sooo interesting, etc. (i am someone who does not enjoy reading about politics and fighting, and i still cannot put these books down. i love them.) immortal kings (gender-neutral) and their sexy, sexy assistants who can transform into flying horses. it's great.

ALSO. if you don't want to purchase. a particularly dedicated fan (RIP eugene) completed translations of all the books over a decade or more, and you can read them all here/on the site he links.

reading order: i think they're all great and would just start from #1. if you have trouble with the politics, names, etc. you can watch the anime first so that you have their faces in your mind! The OG book 1 (SS 1+2, youko + keiki) and its section of the series focus on female mcs, and the anime starts there.

but if you're coming from danmei, i can imagine that you might want to start with the male/male sets, so SS book four (enki + shoryuu, originally book 3) or the whole taiki + gyousou saga (SS book 3, OG 2). enki + shoryuu first appear in youko's story, and everything is connected but i think the different stories are designed to be able to be read standalone, so.

pithy summaries: taiki (black hair, above) is a twink who falls for (/chooses as his emperor) a hot white-haired army general. there is no way they don't have a weird codependent relationship in the later books. enki (blonde hair) similarly falls for a jaded young samurai lord and now they're both 500 years old and stuck ruling together. (one of the books is about a courtier rebelling against the emperor and i really want them to fuck.) (the emperor spends his time at brothels drinking and listening to music. he's like if shen jiu wasn't totally insane). youko (red hair) gets chosen as empress by a tall blond himbo who might be thought of as a lan wangji w/o his wwx. her best friend is a twink who turns into a rat and then she falls in with an ex-princess and a peasant. the closest this series gets to romance is youko x the rat. it's amazing.

this concludes me plugging 12k....please watch/read!!!

The Twelve Kingdoms+text posts Part 7

like the way each of them treats taiki - risai treating him with kid gloves and she's much like an older sister being massively overprotective of him while rousan calls him a monster constantly (even when he was a child) and is the only person around him who never underestimates him and his nature.

their respective relationship to gyousou is also very different. risai is the newest addition to his retinue but still serves with the utmost loyalty placing the emphasis on the fact that he's the emperor. rousan, on the other hand, is one of gyousou's oldest retainers (being there before kouryou- who was present at the tetsui incident) and while she does respect gyousou as a person, her scientific curiosity about providence rises above both that and loyalty for a ruler one feels.

then of course their relationships and views on heaven. risai at first is very conflicted by it, both resenting the fact that heaven abandoned tai and begging for it to save tai from its plight. later on this outlook does change considering that she got to experience the workings of it firsthand and her view takes on more of a "it's just works the way it does and there's nothing I can do about it" viewpoint. but rousan is endlessly fascinated by it to the point of trying to push things in the wrong direction just so she could see how heaven would right the course of tai's future.

another thing is the patriotism that risai exhibits for her kingdom and how everything she does is for the sake of tai and how that's deeply engrained ih her sense of purpose, while rousan as a koushu certainly holds no sentiments like that.