fishes

MICAO (Mika Hirasa)

Lion parents and cubs

I loved painting this one. It was truly a delight to create and I hope that shows 💚

"a sith wanting an acolyte is an abusive power dynamic"

have you considered that it's hot? look at them

Your anger betrays your thoughts.

there are references to the child ballad scattered all throughout howl’s moving castle:  howl is not in possession of his own heart; he can’t call his soul his own, because he is under the thrall of the witch of the waste, this story’s stand-in for the faerie queen. sophie, just like janet, leaves her father’s house and literally BREAKS INTO HOWL’S CASTLE just as janet plunges recklessly into carterhaugh.  tam lin has a running symbol of picking the roses red and green; sophie wants a nice house with lots of flowers and ends up with a sprawling meadow garden and a flower shop.  janet returns to carterhaugh to pick the poison rose - sophie creates her own extra-toxic daffodils and the infamous weed-killer.  

sophie remarks that there are such a lot of different aspects to howl that you never know what to make of him - tam lin changes in janet’s arms, from adder to lion to wild swan.  the analgram of a man that the fire demon miss angorian makes with parts of suliman and prince justin is this story’s version of the year-king, a straw-man that she will use and then sacrifice to build up her own power just as laurel planned to sacrifice tom in fire and hemlock.  sophie is the one to return to howl his heart and to initiate his transformation back into a human man - she even holds a flaming calcifer in her palm just as janet holds the burning seed while tam lin undergoes his own transformation.  and sophie holds howl in her arms as he changes - his eyes go from glassy to a normal green.

and, in keeping with diana’s views of possession and attachment from fire and hemlock, sophie must let howl go the same way polly must give up tom: beliving that howl is in love with miss angorian, sophie leaves the castle to save miss angorian from the witch.  in this version, sophie rushes off not with the intention of rescuing howl - though she does, in more ways than one! - she goes to the waste to save whom she believes is howl’s true love!  which is just.  it’s SO MUCH the same as polly letting tom go, knowing that the only way to save him is to lose him.  and howl tried to bind sophie to him the same way tom tried to use polly, with attachment and clinging jealousy - howl even remarked that he’d thought that sophie’s jealousy of miss angorian would provoke sophie into bullying miss angorian away from him.

it’s just SO fascinating to see how diana plays with her own themes from fire and hemlock, reusing the same elements but shifting everything slightly to the left to create a completely new kind of story, with a totally different emotion and feeling to it.  fire and hemlock is a story told from the depths of despair: at the bottom of nowhere, as polly says, while howl’s moving castle is told with such utter joy in the act of creation and chaos.  they’re nothing alike - but they are so similar!!

Mon oncle ~ 1958

THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL (2017–2023)