Recently someone posted a torrent over at BakaBT. They proudly declared that it was a BD rip of the entire Card Captor Sakura series. However, for some strange reason, they reduced the video to 640*480. Which seems to really miss the point. Even so, the 70 episodes of the series came in at 20.5 gigabytes.

But I can top that. I just downloaded the whole series as a BD rip, only it was full sized.

I say "just downloaded"; what that means is I started it last Wednesday, and it finished this morning some time. 80.8 gigabytes. Ye Gods. I had to delete a few of my existing torrents to make room for it on my sacrificial lamb machine, since it needed 25% of the new big HD. (Bye, Hayate 1 & 2! Farewell, To aru majutsu no Index!)

I haven't decided if I'm going to leave it up perpetually. I'll leave it up for now, however; the swarm has 24 seeds and 287 leeches, and my ratio on that torrent is only 0.66 right now. So I'll at least leave it running until I top 1.0 -- which is to say at least another 27 gigabytes. If I saturate my 200 KB/s uplink, it'll be 39 more hours. But it's sharing my pipe with dozens of other torrents and right now it isn't even half of my bandwidth.

That one is using Nyaa Torrents as a tracker. This morning it was the only torrent I was running that had a green icon. BakaBT's main hard drive died, and the system was down until late this afternoon.

One time when I tried visiting it, accessing the main URL brought up the text "It's working!" but there wasn't anything else out there. I guess that was a test in preparation for recovering from backups.

Anyway, everything's copacetic again. Meanwhile, now that I've downloaded the BD rip of Card Captor Sakura, what in hell am I going to do with it? I don't really feel any great urge to watch the series again.

Some series grow on you. Pete has had that experience with Shingu; after he watched it the first time, he didn't think it was all that good. But it improved over time and now it's one of his favorites.

CCS had the opposite effect on me. After I first watched it I was tremendously enthusiastic, and when I wrote my review I gave it 4 stars. But it hasn't been a show I've wanted to rewatch, and over a few years what has happened is that what stayed with me was just how creepy CLAMP is, deep down. CCS isn't wholesome. It has a lot of very warped undertones. And in some ways the story is very cruel to some very sympathetic characters.

Certainly all the weird sexuality is creepy. But the fundamental story concept bothers me quite a lot now. The story in the first part of the series is, effectively, that Sakura has to capture a whole lot of escaped slaves, many of whom do not want to go back into captivity.

It doesn't matter that Clow Reed created them originally rather than capturing them. The fact remains that when he died he locked them all in a cage, and once they had a chance to escape from the cage and taste freedom, Sakura was out there finding them one by one and reimprisoning them -- in that same exact cage.

Certainly, if they had remained free, the energy would have run out and they would have perished. But is that any different from you and me? We're not immortal either. All lives come to an end. And isn't it better to die free than to live as a slave?

Sakura is too sweet a little girl to really understand the full implications of what she's doing, but I'm not a sweet little girl and I understand all too well what's going on. Sakura is a sweet little girl, but what she's doing is deeply evil. It certainly isn't heroic.

Of all the sins committed by CLAMP against characters in that series, surely Yuki comes in first. He gets a happy ending, of sorts, but it's a strange life he'll lead from then on. Because he is first of the slaves. Whether he wants to or not, he has to stay with Sakura, because Yue is bound to her and Yuki only has free will to the extent that Yue allows it. Yuki isn't really alive; he's living off of Sakura's life energy, just as is the case with all the cards. Sure, he eats and drinks but he also has to siphon off some of Sakura's ki or he'll die stone dead no matter how much he eats. And he won't even leave a body behind.

Or rather, he will be living off of Sakura's life energy. For the moment, Yue's existence is maintained by using up the energy they took from Touya. That was a one-time event, and Touya gave it up willingly. But Touya has lost something special, something very important and valuable to him. Touya blinded himself to save Yuki's life. He's yet another victim of CLAMP's warped love, and warped views about love.

Anyway, eventually that energy will get used up, and then Yue really will have to plug into Sakura and start drawing energy from her. And thus Yuki will have to stay near Sakura, no matter where she decides to go or what she decides to do. If she marries Shaoran, which seems likely, and if his mother convinces Sakura to move to Hong Kong, which also seems likely, then Yuki has to go along whether he likes it or not.

Because if he doesn't, he'll die in just a few weeks.

In the mean time, whenever Sakura needs Yue, Yuki goes into a coma.

I wonder what kind of shock it must have been to Yuki to discover that most of his memories were false. And to learn that the grandparents he remembers, and thinks he lives with, don't exist.

Knowing the truth about Yuki makes it so that I can't really watch the early part of the series with the same innocent eyes that I did the first time I watched. Yuki's situation is really quite tragic. And what happens to Touya ain't a whole lot better.

There are a whole lot of romantic relationships in the series, ultimately, and not one of them is normal. ("Normal" defined as "heterosexual, between consenting adults". And don't give me any grief about it.) The closest we come to a normal relationship is Sakura and Shaoran but even that one is a bit creepy given how young they are. 4th grade is just a bit too early for picking life partners.

There are a few episodes I might rewatch, sometime. But there's no great urgency, and a lot of other things to watch instead. I don't regret downloading it, and I won't delete it, but in the end it's pretty much a waste of disk space.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:17 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
Post contains 759 words, total size 7 kb.

1 You make me worry about Kobato.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 01, 2009 05:27 PM (/ppBw)

2

At this point I pretty much automatically assume that any show that CLAMP has touched will be very strange and disturbing in at least some ways.

Even Angelic Layer, and on that one the anime director seriously rewrote the ending. It's still quite disturbing in some ways, but the ending of the manga was a lot worse.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 06:02 PM (+rSRq)

3 I think your analysis of CCS is correct, but it just doesn't upset me the way it upsets you. None of the characters gets a perfect deal--even Sakura pays a price for what she achieves--but they play the cards they were dealt, and are reasonably happy with the results. I don't consider that tragic.

As for Kobato, I'm not making any bets, except that whatever happens will probably be weird and unexpected.

Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at November 01, 2009 06:14 PM (7wFYN)

4 Actually, on second thought I do disagree with part of your analysis: the idea that Sakura is enslaving cards who want to be free.

To me their behavior suggests that they want a master who is capable of keeping them alive. They fight Sakura in order to test her, to see if she is strong enough to do the job. A weak master would be worse than useless to them.

That is why when Sakura and Shaoran compete for a card, the card voluntarily goes to the one it thinks defeated it.

Yue's behavior is more complex. He has other issues and initially doesn't want to survive.

Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at November 01, 2009 06:53 PM (7wFYN)

5

They vary a lot.

Some give up easily, like Wood. Some demand a contest, such as Power. A few of them are more like out-of-control machines, like Shot.

But there are a few who seem more like they're trying to kill Sakura than simply to test her.

Anyway, slavery is evil even if the slave wants to be a slave. The slave owner doesn't get an ethical by because of that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 06:58 PM (+rSRq)

6 The thing is, I know I didn't think of the Cards as being slaves at all.  A hammer is a tool, not a slave, and the Cards to me came across as being just that: tools.  Having them "locked in a cage" is no more troubling to me than putting my hammer back in the toolbox.

Magical tools that often showed signs of being aware and self-aware, but I never saw any true level of intelligence in them, except in the use of their powers.

I can see how someone can think of them as being more --quite easily in fact-- but I don't feel that much empathy towards them.  YMMV, of course.

Posted by: Wonderduck at November 01, 2009 09:35 PM (4Mcos)

7

Wonderduck, how about the Mirror card? Twice in the series, Sakura uses Mirror to create a double of herself so that she can go after a card without her brother knowing. Touya sees right through the deception, though, and the second time he buys Mirror a pair of ribbons for her hair, which ribbons appear on the card thereafter. And he thanks Mirror for helping Sakura.

For that matter, Light and Dark? Once Sakura meets them, they converse with her before she captures them.

Many of the cards have intelligence at the level of an animal. I'm thinking of Jump, Fly, Dash. And some of them are more like machines e.g. Shield.

But Illusion was sufficiently intelligent to come up with a credible plan to kill Sakura, and damned near did. They vary a lot, and several of them clearly are of human-level intelligence.

I would argue that Fight has to be intelligent. Martial arts are not just about power and speed; it takes a lot of thinking, too.

That's all leaving aside the entire question of Yue and Keroberos, about whom there is no doubt at all.

(Reference link)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 09:56 PM (+rSRq)

8 Well, but you're answering your own question there. The majority of the cards are not moral actors.

Several of the cards are mischievous - they get Sakura's attention by doing what it is they do, usually in a pulling-pranks sort of way. But a lot of those pranks are scary or dangerous (Waty was trying to drown people right from the start, after all.) This isn't because Waty is malevolent or inherently violent or murderous. It's illustrative that Waty had a whole range of things it could be doing to pass the time, but what it actually WAS doing was dangerous to people.

As a class, the cards don't demonstrate any sense of morality. Jump jumps, that's what it does. Some of them are nice, or mean, but their dispositions don't seem to indicate a rational conclusion more than just a natural inclination. (Woody gives in immediately. Yet before it did, it was busily tearing apart Sakura's house...) As a class, they can't possibly be left alone; eventually they'll kill people, not because they want to, but because they do what they do irrespective of whether it hurts someone.

The real question is, what the heck was Clow thinking? He certainly wasn't doing Sakura any favors, arranging things like that. Of course, it's possible that Clow did actually arrange things so that nobody would get killed (in which case the cards are his train-a-magician machine). Alternately, it's possible that he knew that the Cards would run amok, and cause danger to people, but he thought that training Sakura as a magician (and in that fashion) was so important that endangering Sakura or some uninvolved bystanders would constitute an acceptable risk (in which case, the cards are still a train-a-magician machine, on Nightmare Mode).

The reason that slavery is evil is because the slave is also human - a moral being who can take responsibility for their own actions, in all important respects just like the owner. The cards clearly don't rise to this level. By contrast, we're perfectly okay with the ownership of animals, who can clearly "feel" and even do a little thinking.

There's also unique beings with tragic circumstances, but why take a dark view about it? Rather than forcing Yuki to move along with her in order to maintain the energy link to keep him alive, wouldn't it be more in character for Sakura to insist on staying close to where he was, so that he'd be able to live his life as best as possible? Even if she isn't formally obligated to do so, she's a good person, and would need a darned good reason to even ask Yuki to change his lifestyle to accommodate her, much less force him into it.

It'd be interesting to see what happens in Nanoha when a device decides it doesn't want to do what it's told. Clearly they're self-willed, and occasionally do things that they're not asked to do (even in cases where it means substituting their judgment for their master's.) But we don't ever see any devices which are just plain ornery. Do they exist? Is there a master-device matching service that tries to find good homes for disgruntled devices? Or do they just get stuffed in a bin somewhere (or more creepily, reprogrammed to be easier to get along with)? Apologies for the de-railing, but it's a related topic, wouldn't you say?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 01, 2009 11:26 PM (vGfoR)

9 Avatar, the whole question of AI's in Nanoha is definitely interesting, and I started thinking about it early this evening. I think I'm going to do a post about it later. But not today, and let's not talk about it in this thread.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 11:32 PM (+rSRq)

10 "I never saw any true level of intelligence in them, except in the use of their powers."

I said that in my first comment, and the examples you brought up relate directly to the part in bold.

Regarding Mirror, I've bought my hammer a better grip, something with a lot more texture to it than the stock one that came with it.  But nobody who saw it would ever think it was anything other than an Estwing, no matter what grip I have on it.

Tools.  Smart tools, but I've used saws that could cut wood on their own, too.

Posted by: Wonderduck at November 02, 2009 05:50 AM (4Mcos)

11 OTOH, that begs the question:  if a tool is smart enough that you can mistake it for a person, is it really just a tool?

I suspect this is a case of Fridge Logic that applies to *lots* of magical fiction, where you have spirit beings of some kind summoned and bound by wizards.  How is it not indistinguishable from slavery?

There are ways you can set up the cosmology so that the issue doesn't apply.  For instance, if the spirits are dreams or thought-forms drawn from the caster's own mind, then they aren't really independent beings, any more so than different moods and aspects of your personality are.  Alternatively, if there is some sort of celestial hierarchy, it could be you *aren't* enslaving them; a summoning amounts to sending a proper job request up the hierarchy, which then assigns one of its employees to fulfill it.

A lot of stories just ignore the issue, sadly.

Posted by: metaphysician at November 02, 2009 07:32 AM (vM63Z)

12 You guys are splitting the difference between Pokemon and Pokegirls.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 02, 2009 07:41 AM (/ppBw)

13 Hey, now that you remind me, I find Pokemon *much* creepier than most stories and settings involving mystic summonings. . . 

Posted by: metaphysician at November 02, 2009 05:21 PM (vM63Z)

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