SSSUSSPICIONSS ABOUT DARKNESSST CONFIRMED

Star*Twinkle Pretty Cure - Episode 46
Series Finale First Part
My Own Review

SSSUSSPICIONSS ABOUT DARKNESSST CONFIRMED

Here we are at the start of the final act of Star☆ Twinkle. Episode forty-six is the beginning of the end, and it has quite a bombshell to drop. Tsar Bomba-sized, actually. It is a rare case of Toei actually not spoiling a surprise (I think), though I had it spoiled for me on Twitter anyway…
Well, whatever, let’s just dive in.

The conversation at the Star Palace is interrupted by some unwelcome visitors

In this episode,  the others meet with the Star Princesses at the Star Palace, who are prepared to start a ritual that will bring peace to the universe. However, the arrival of the cadre KNotraiders puts a stop to that, and they are accompanied by Darknest.

The armour twists their imaginations

One of the first things I want to highlight in this episode is the soundtrack. The electric guitars come out as the KNotraiders lead an assault on the Star Palace, and I am all about that kind of thing. HARD ROCK HALLELUJAH!! (headbanging)
PreCures’ enemies aren’t exactly fighting of their own will, as Darknest is twisting their imagination so they are beyond control. It results in Cure Star, Cure Milkyway, and allies having a rough time holding their own.

The Cures react to Darknest’s reveal

There’s some use of repeated animation as the 'raiders attempt to destroy the barrier protecting the Star Palace, which perhaps could have been used for something a little more visually interesting. The use of a siege/storming in the climax with the sheroes as the defenders of the beleaguered place was also amped up (the Bastille was stormed to Ça ira and La Marseillaise, and ever since every good storming needs a soundtrack to encourage the attacking side!!)
On the subject of interesting, Darknest sheds the armour in this episode. And what liessss beneath the cobra cowl issss both ssssomething exxpected and a ssssurprissse...

Darknest’s true appearance

Darknest reveals herself to be the thirteenth Star Princess: the Ophiuchus Princess. Back towards the beginning of this season, I did wonder if Ophiuchus would be incorporated in some way. I guess the whole snake motif should have really given that one away…

Tsundere Ayewan

The Ophiuchus Princess reveals her ultimate goal, which leads to the KNotraiders attempting to turn against her. She possesses incredible power, though, so that doesn’t happen – not without some interference from PreCures, at least.

The Ophiuchus Princess takes advantage of the exhausted PreCures

PreCures may be able to live up to their proclamation of protecting the KNotraiders, but that just gives the Ophiuchus Princess the opportunity she needs to move closer to her goal. Unfortunately, our old friends and their new allies are left with little choice but to take a tactical retreat.

Though the thirteenth Ssssstar Princessssss hasssss already taken Fuwa for ssssinissster purpossssesss...

This episode was really good. I approve of Darknest’s reveal. I presume the PreCure ensemble will manage to redeem her next time, but I hope they do so through the medium of a good old brawl.
Soundtrack was superb in this episode, as I’ve already stated, and it was a joy to see Ayewan lend her aid to Cure Cosmos. I mean, the cyclopette and the catgirl have been playing catch-me-if-you-can throughout their character arcs and this point with snap-out-of-it-ness and the brainwashed-and-crazy factor from one of them ... kind of made me think of when Valjean freed Javert from the revolutionaries - cue existential crisis on a bridge meters above the Seine - cue plunge. Only that Ayewan fortunately didn't even stride towards the deep end of the pool.

I’m expecting good things from the next episode, as we get to the final battle.

MY OWN HUMBLE OPINION...
So... our sssserpentine sssussspicionsss about Darknessssst and the thirtheenth sssssign of the wessssstern zzzzzodiac were confirmed... even though we didn't expect Darknest's real self to be female under that cobra cowl. An imposing physique and a deep contralto were all it took for us to draw a foregone conclusion... and this was a pleasant surprise indeeeeeeed!!
That also makes the youkai she is inspired by, or rather that she inspired among humans, in the KnotRaider youkai lineup the orochi --kappa, tengu, ao oni, cyclops, and neko are all usual suspects,but the orochi is a hydra-like Lovecraftian abomination (check out my mukashibanashi on orochi for more info and agree that it's scary) that fortunately has eight weak heads for strong drink. So what are the Cures going to do to defeat Darknest... get her wasted?

As I’ve already stated, it was a joy to see Ayewan lend her aid to Cure Cosmos. I mean, the cyclopette and the catgirl have been playing catch-me-if-you-can throughout their character arcs and this point with snap-out-of-it-ness and the brainwashed-and-crazy factor from one of them ... kind of made me think of when Valjean freed Javert from the revolutionaries - cue existential crisis on a bridge meters above the Seine - cue plunge. Only that Ayewan fortunately didn't even stride towards the deep end of the pool.

We also got some background about Purunce being not the only one of his species... and all the others being sent by the Star Princesses to a safe haven, while only he stayed behind to stand guard...

DARKNEST'S REAL AGENDA/BACKSTORY: Having worked with the other Princesses to create this universe (which makes all 13 of them physical goddesses!), she viewed their creation as a failed project because it was filled with too much imagination - which is obviously inevitable if life is allowed to develop. Thus, she resolved to just destroy it all! She had even begun the process in recruiting the cadres and, in some of their cases like Garuogre and Kappard -and maybe Ayewan- taking up GENOCIDE in order to traumatise and subsequently recruit the sole survivors of those worlds! Let's face the facts: the Ophiuchus Princess has a body count of trillions, or even more. And those victims aren't coming back, all because this snaky lady didn't like how her art project turned out. Tempting to draw parallels with the totalitarian dictators of the last century, right?

Now I listen to Parcast podcasts about fictional villains and real-life con tricksters. Alistair Murden's velvet voice and RP British accent are perfect for bedtime storytime tucked under the covers. He seems to have a background in psychology, and gives some great analyses of psychopaths like the Joker or Alex de Large or Norman Bates or the cast of No Country for Old Men. I can't wait for Alistair to dissect Iago, because his motives and intentions always slip like fish between our fingers and he (Iago, NOT Alistair) says at the end of the play that he'll nevermore breathe word about his agenda. But now back to Darknest's motive-hunting. Now Alistair Murden says that males are more likely to be psychopaths and/or violent by nature, and females to be ditto by nurture - he does very few episodes about women; but still, being a physical goddess who manifested herself ex nihilo from the primordial chaos of the Star*Twinkle universe, Darknest has little to no nurture, parental figures, education... and, with all the power that divinity entails added to her inherent perfectionism and obsession with control, a cosmic-horror entity intent on wiping out life because of its sheer entropy and freedom has carte blanche to do whatever she pleases.
Only a ragtag band of sheroes stand between her intentions and their coming to fruition.

MUKASHIBANASHI 12: THE OROCHI (GREAT SERPENT)

I have chosen this particular mukashibanashi since today 23rd of April is not only Shakespeare Day, but also the commemoration of a tale so familiar as that of Saint George AKA Sir George or George the Dragonslayer, the Anglo-European trope namer for a premise which, in spite of needing no recap, I feel compelled to sum up: reptilian monster (dragon, in the widespread Western version) beleaguers community, is appeased with allotted children and/or maidens while the local adults are powerless; stranger armed with sword (Sir George, in the widespread Western version) shows up on the eve of the last sacrifice (crown princess, in the widespread Western version), uses his blade to slay monstrous reptile, is rewarded with the hand of the final damsel in marriage, there is much rejoicing.
Now Sir George has a pre-Christian Shinto counterpart in a mukashibanashi; in fact, the Dragonslayer or Damsel-and-Dragon mytheme (folktale type 300) is, just like Cinderella or the Flood, one of the most widespread around human culture, through the ages and across the globe.

Orochi storybook, Escuela de Arte, Castellón - 

glad to see some local talent take on this myth!

So the province of Izumo, thousands of years ago, was terrorised by a monstrous reptilian beast: a hydra-like eight-headed serpent called the Orochi (大蛇 ie the Great Serpent), with 16 eyes golden as physalis with vertical-slit pupils, and so unreasonably large that not only would he cover a range of eight mountains when lying down, but that all kinds of plants (from pines and cedars to ferns and mosses) grow on his back (oui, and if a monster has a thriving ecosystem growing on top, it's obviously as unreasonably old as it is unreasonably large, having been there since the night of times). And, as always when a reptilian monster sets its sight on a human community, lots were cast once in a year to pick a child or a maiden who would be sent to the hydra (or dragon, or lindwyrm, or whatever -in other myths of this cycle-) as sacrifice to appease the reptilian beast. The villagers have long since resigned themselves to their fate and to hand over the appointed yearly tribute.

In the most widespread version, the final damsel, the last local child to be sacrificed to the Orochi, the girl saved by the slayer and subsequently betrothed then married to him, is clearly a damsel as we know the stock character: an adolescent maiden called Kushinada, who had furthermore previously lost all of her older sisters to the Serpent, keeping her parents in obvious life-or-death anxiety as soon as she is revealed to be the orochi-bait for that year.

Then, as you might have foretold, in comes a stranger, armed with a sword, who cannot stand the situation and, on the very day of the final damsel's sacrifice; determined to slay the monstrous reptile, this stranger appoints himself as a champion for the locals.
Now the former ocean god --now, Susanoo is NOT Ryuji. He (Susanoo) got laid off as ocean god and replaced with the dragon emperor due to various cosmic-horror crimes that disrupted the universe, but that is another story and will be told some other day; what matters is that Susanoo was fired and turned into a human (while Ryuji took his position in change of the ocean)-- has been living in Izumo as a supernaturally powerless human, though armed with his trusty katana, for three or four years and farmed rice and made straw hats and (what is the most relevant) gotten familiar to the Orochi cycle of the oversized many-headed reptile slithering into the village, being handed a child or a maiden that he tied up in his coils, then slithering out again with his prey to his lair.
So Susanoo is appalled by the villagers' resignation and perceived powerlessness... but fortunately, just like Blackadder, he has a cunning plan that abso-bloody-lutely cannot fail. The fact that Kushinada's parents run the local distillery plays a lead role in this plot...

So, on the eve of the fateful day, he has all the locals in the province gather up all the sake they have got and bring it to the distillery. Since he has garnered the trust of all of them, they obey his orders to the letter. Then he has commanded Kushinada's parents and their staff to distill all that sake - and the result are eight vats of rice vodka, one vat per Serpent head, which the distillers bring to the centre of that village, arranging the oversized, or rather Orochi-sized, shot-glasses in a circle, in the middle of which he stands with a drawn katana and shoulder to shoulder with the damsel.
And very soon in slithers the Great Serpent, its eight heads snaking through the sky, with glowing physalis-golden slit-pupil eyes. In some versions, he smells the liquor from afar with all of his forked tongues, in others the eyes on one head catch sight of one vat, but in all versions the Orochi is terribly thirsty and only used to hydrating with water and the blood of his prey... Soon all eight heads were lowered down to the vodka vats and drank heavily... and, as foretold, quaffing all that liquor to the last drop causes the Serpent to fall asleep, crashing down like a massive treetrunk, out like a light, all eight heads swaying in drunkenness!
After hydrating the hydra, Susanoo takes advantage of the opponent's unconscious state and puts that sword-arm to good use by beheading those clouded heads left and right --off with those heads!-- down to the last one. Hailed as the hero who just saved the province (and of course as the fiancé of the damsel he has just saved), he decides to gut the Orochi to see whether there are any objects of value inside (if you find only a one-legged tin soldier or only a golden ring inside a regular catfish, a reptilian monster's gut is a treasure trove!)... and sure enough, when he's almost finished with all the eviscerating, his own blade clanks and finds a hard resistance, striking steel instead of bones, at the tail end near the cloaca. Sure enough, it's time to get his hands dirty with blood and fat and digested vodka when our hero tucks his arms all the way up to his shoulders into the gutting wound at tail-end height... Voilà that he comes out with two katanas, his own and a shortsword (and, of course, his sleeves and arms full of gunk, crud...)! The second sword, the shortsword the Orochi had swallowed, just radiates power (like the Shinto equivalent of Valyrian steel anyone?)... It makes perfect cuts even into the smallest blades of grass, and can even cut through clouds without them being able to regenerate! So he calls the new blade the Shortsword of Gathering Clouds (Murakumo no Tsurugi 叢雲剣), which sounds as badass as any Westerosi named blade (Ice, Lightbringer, Oathkeeper...). However, the current popular name of this katana, one of the regalia of the Imperial House even in the present-day Reiwa era (the latest crown prince, in fact, is due soon to receive it from the hands of his abdicating father Akihito as part of the coronation ceremony), is the far less epic-sounding Shortsword of Lawnmowing (Kusanagi no Tsurugi 草薙の剣) or simply Lawnmower (Kusanagi 草薙). For a relic that has been with royalty since the night of time, doesn't it sound a bit funny? Seriously, what is far cooler, Oathkeeper or Lawnmower?


In spite of this fact, and for all that Kusanagi 草薙 means Lawnmower, the history behind it has given inspiration in anime to many instances of badassery (and favourites of mine):

• the surname of the Major (the female protagonist) in Ghost in the Shell
• the name of an epic starship in Gundam SEED -- it's even an Izumo-class starship!
• one of Nistro's three heroic champions (the other two are Excalibur, from Arthurian lore, and Gandiva, Arjuna's archery bow from the Mahabharata -depicted as a sagittarius-!)
• eccentric mentor Cal Kolter's original surname in the subsequent Yu-Gi-Oh continuity
• Sailor Uranus' Space Sword
• outside anime, in franime, lonely prodigy and privileged rival Kagami Tsurugi

The Orochi, in turn, has inspired various reptilian villains in anime, for instance:

• the Pokémon Hydreigon (combined with more Western hydras and dragons), 
• the Digimon Orochimon (whom Jeri, drawing from her afterschool life as an underage barmaid in the family business, even got wasted, referencing the hypotext in his monster-of-the week episode, episode 31),
• the exceedingly Voldemort-esque sissy villain Orochimaru -- who even, referencing the hypotext, has the Kusanagi Shortsword stored inside himself, and draws steel from his throat!
• the Yo-Kai Venoct (an Orochimaru parody expy) and Slurpent (a one-headed but eight-tongued rattler serpent with a weak head for strong drink)

When I first encountered this story, I was surprised! The basic structure is folktale type 300, just like Saint George, ie "damsel and dragon classic": reptilian monster beleaguers community, is appeased with allotted children and/or maidens while the local adults are powerless; stranger armed with sword shows up on the eve of the last sacrifice, uses his blade to slay monstrous reptile, is rewarded with the hand of the final damsel in marriage, there is much rejoicing. According to Maria Tatar, the "damsel and dragon" scenario is given even more weight in popular imagination than it is in the original tales; the stereotypical hero is envisioned as slaying dragons (and frequently rescuing damsels from them) even though, for instance, the Brothers Grimm had only a few tales of dragon (and other monster) slayers among hundreds of tales. Decades before, Northrop Frye himself identified the damsel-and-dragon premise as a central form of the quest. Even in the very first James Bond film, Doctor No, the titular villain's lair is guarded from intruders by a reptilian-looking, flamethrowing armoured vehicle. James and the Bond Girl du jour are menaced by the "dragon," do battle with it, yet have their friend Quarrel (the squire or sidekick) killed (obviously torched to death quicker than you can say "dracarys"), and both are captured by the crew of the Dragon Tank.

But nowhere else in any other damsel or dragon tales from any other culture or epoch does the hero make the monster drunk. Or gut the slain monster like a fish for bonus spoils, for that matter. Though, in various Hispanic versions on both sides of the pond, the serpent or dragon (lagarto) is eviscerated by the hero, and its latest prey set free into the light, just like it occurs with the Big Bad Wolf in Grimm stories (Seven Goat Kids, Red Riding Hood...) and the fish in the Tin Soldier.

The closest things I could first find as parallels to the Orochi story were the widespread cycle of dragonslayer versions (mostly Anglo-European, whether Western or Slavic) where the monster is fed a decoy, a lifesized doll or animal figure that is actually a disguised bomb (most frequently a powder-keg, like in the case of the Wawelski dragon who lived underground in Kraków, or the lagarto that terrorised the Andalusian town of Jaén; but the decoy that bursts down the throat can also be full of iron nails, of quicklime or tar, or -more recently- a motor engine, like the last meal of the shark Bruce in Jaws).

In the feminist tale The Practical Princess, a dragon demands that a king should sacrifice his daughter to him so that he will leave the rest of the kingdom alone. But the princess saves herself by making a "princess dummy" out of straw, a lifesized decoy doll like a scarecrow, and filling it with boiling tar. The princess dresses the dummy in one of her own gowns, then goes to the dragon's cave where she offers herself as a sacrifice, while actually hiding herself and presenting the decoy at the entrance to the den. The unwitting dragon swallows the straw dummy whole, and the tar explodes inside the dragon's stomach, killing him. Afterwards, the princess observes, "Dragons are not very smart."

Moving on from fish and reptiles to mammals, Chaucer's Minotaur is choked to death when Ariadne gives Theseus balls of bees-wax the size of plums to force-toss down his opponent's throat. Among the Fon people of Benin, the young hero To Kpavi saves a local village from a human-eating male lion by tossing hot coals down his throat. Further up north in a nomadic Saharan tale, similarly, a jackal who had decided to become vegan (due to an epizootic among the herbivores) gets the recommendation from nigh-unaffected insectivores (who are everything but i. stupid and ii. keen on becoming the Jackal's next meaty meal, should this veganism not last) to start his fruit diet with unpeeled cactus pears, and one such fruit, with its prickles, gets stuck in his throat and nearly chokes him to death. Cactus pears fed to canids also pop up across the pond in Veracruz, where Brer Rabbit climbs up the cactus that produces them to save himself from Brer Coyote. To appease the starving prairie wolf, the bunny throws cactus pears into his mouth and down his throat. The first and second ones are peeled and thus go down smoothly; the third cactus pear, however, is unpeeled, and the same unpleasant shock for the Coyote ensues as for the Jackal! In these stories where the (generally) reptilian monster is fed a decoy-disguised bomb or a choking wax or a prickly fruit that gets stuck in the throat, its own instinct to feed becomes its undoing, just like when it comes to strong drink for the Orochi.

However, the most striking parallels to the Orochi tale come from Gipuzkoa of all places, where the monster is also a hydra, but this Basque serpent, Herensuge, has one head less (ie seven); but this story also contains the motifs of animal prey and of the decoy bomb (a stuffed young bull, the inside of whose skin is full of gunpowder and phosphorus):

Cerca de Ahuski se encuentra la cueva de Azalegi. Allí vivía antiguamente Herensuge. Era

una serpiente de siete cabezas. Con su hálito atraía al ganado vacuno del monte y lo comía. Después de hartarse bien, bajaba a beber agua al río Aphura, en la comarca de Altzai. Un día, los hombres de la margen derecha de la vega se comprometieron con el señor de Zaro a matar al monstruo. El hijo

del conde de Zaro y de Altzai lo mató. Despellejó un becerro, un toro joven, y llenó de pólvora y fósforo su piel. Lo cosió, disecando al becerro, y tomando un caballo, fue con su piel a la parte superior de la cueva. Y allí se puso a silbar. Y como se dio cuenta de que Herensuge se sacudía y andaba, le arrojó el becerro disecado.

La serpiente atrajo con el hálito el señuelo y se lo tragó. Creyendo que era un becerro de verdad, lo devoró de una bocanada. En cuanto empezó la pólvora a producir su efecto, no pudo apoderarse de

los otros, despedazó a golpes de cola todas las rocas de Sobe, saltó después al mar y allí se ahogó. Entonces el conde puso de vuelta al caballo.

Y vio a Herensuge ardiendo en llamas dirigirse por el aire hacia el mar. Como tuvo que pasar

por encima de un bosque, segaba las ramas de las hayas.  El conde murió del susto. Herensuge

no apareció más (San Sebastián, 1997: 77-78).

If there is nothing called the collective unconscious, chance, or serendipity, then how did the story pass from Izumo in Japan to Gipuzkoa in Iberian Euskadi, or vice versa?

DRUNKEN MESSENGER: IN JAPAN AS WELL!?

DRUNKEN MESSENGER: IN JAPAN AS WELL!?

I had heard of this as a primarily Occidental story motif... did European merchants or Jesuits bring it to the isolated Shogunate??? Or might there be another, more primeval, reason??

"a messenger happens to stop by the stepmother’s house to rest. The stepmother, who hears from the messenger is consumed with hatred and exchanges the letter for one that she writes while the messenger lies in an alcohol-induced sleep."

I had heard of this as a primarily Occidental story motif... did European merchants or Jesuits bring it to the isolated Shogunate??? Or might there be another, more primeval, reason??

Anyway, as far back as the Odyssey records the use of ethanol as a narcotic. But there are hypotheses that state that our attraction to this substance reaches as far as the whole length of the time we sapiens and our primate ancestors have fed on fruit. Which would equal thousands of millennia.
Other omnivores and herbivores have been seen exhibiting ethyl intoxication: the moose which run rampant in Swedish suburbia during late summer to early autumn, having consumed fermented fallen apples, for instance. Or fruit bats, or waxwings, or certain lepidoptera, who have also been seen displaying signs and symptoms of inebriation. Ethanol is actually fructose (fruit sugar), which has undergone certain biological changes (making it contain more calories), and it turns back to sugar after being absorbed. Sugar which brings power to bring on any undertaking (was this one of the key factors for Gustavus overpowering Tilly at Breitenfeld?). The scent of ethanol would help herbivores and omnivores find out if the fruits in question were ripe and suitable for consumption. In addition, the chemical also preserves fruit from decay. So the whole fatal attraction is hardwired since the dawn of times: ethanol=more calories. It's as simple as this.

In Japanese lore, the Orochi (8-headed serpent similar to the Hydra of Lerna), which had to be appeased with the damsel du jour, was plied with exceedingly strong distilled sake before it was beheaded.

So, ethyl intoxication is older than written history, even older than humanity itself. As old as time.