1/17/2024 0 Comments Aeon flux anime fetish![]() ![]() My short story “ Recreation” is about an Ada that lives in Missouri, running a motel that caters to historical reenactment participants. For now, there are at least four “worlds” in a multiverse (that have nothing to do with one another) where Ada lives, and sometimes she has multiple lives within a particular world. It was from Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: a book about an alternative earth (and a lot of other things I won’t go into here). It’s perhaps worth repeating here that Ada’s name did not come from Lady Lovelace. Plus, I wasn’t that familiar with Moorcock at the time, but I knew that deep down I didn’t want to worry about continuity or explaining and expanding and retconning everything so it “fit.” 1st Edition I got at Powell’s Bookstore Unlike Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, there is no connected series of multiverse worlds. What was I to do? Had I truly remembered Aeon Flux, I would have just said… eh, whatever, let her in and/or let her go wherever she wants. But in 2011, she also started banging loudly on the doors of this world. ![]() And for about 3 years she inhabited an Alternative 17th Century Germany. What does this all have to do with me? And Ada?Īda first came into my world in 2008. The show was supposed to make you think, and Chung even admits to it being a deconstruction of Action Hero tropes. Trevor’s voice-over introductions were often there to introduce a philosophical theme about the intransigence of the world, and quite a bit of it had Nietzschean undertones. “Chronophasia” is practically Lynchian in its looping plot and dreamlike feel-that episode even ends in “this world” with Aeon as a Little League Mom taking her son to a game that could be happening in any town of Lynch’s Lumberton, or Twin Peaks itself. Aeon herself could be (and usually was) an a morally grey anti-hero, although in “Reraizure” she displayed her softer, more emotionally approachable side. Her lover/enemy Trevor Goodchild could be a power hungry megalomaniac or concerned surgeon and leader of his people all in the same episode.Īnd some of it flat out didn’t make any sense. In 1995, the longer (22-25 minute) episodes allowed her to fare better, but there was no Grand Character Arc or plot. One of the things I most noticed this time around was how Peter Chung and his writers totally dispensed with traditional story telling continuity, and still made a compelling “franchise.” In the short films on Liquid Television, Aeon dies at the end of most episodes. That’s a very cursory description, you can look it up elsewhere. A surrealistic, over-the-top violent, dystopian romp of Expressionistic characters running around a world straight out of Moebius. One of the central pillars for Liquid Television was Aeon Flux. The animation was subversive, weird, sometimes awful (on purpose), and sometimes magnificent (ditto). To explain that… let me just say that Mike Judge, Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Bill Plympton all had early short films featured in it, just to name a few. If you’re unfamiliar with Aeon Flux, I’ll briefly say that in 1989 MTV began their long crawl away from music videos, but this began with interesting programming like Liquid Television which was sort of a broadcast version of Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. Although there were certainly some similarities: I admit that. And it wasn’t through the artwork, per se. Watching the episodes again, I think it’s more of discovering a kindred spirit. See details for creditsīut I also wasn’t drawing again in the 90’s. However, they were all swimming in the same artistic pond. I wasn’t familiar with Schiele when the original videos came out, but I was interested in German Expressionism: Max Beckmann, Die Blaue Reiter, Die Brücke, Otto Dix, but Schiele wasn’t one of them. It was only recently, in researching and watching them again that I found out Aeon’s creator, Peter Chung, based not only her, but many of the characters’ art style on that of Egon Schiele. They both share something of a similar physique, and dark hair. Yes, Aeon is a strong, badass woman, and I certainly think of Ada that way. But the more I thought and reflected on it, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a case of convergent evolution. Fortunately, tucked away in the DVD collection, I actually had the three-disc boxed set of the animated shorts, the “pilot,” and 10 episodes MTV began airing around 1995.īased on the fan art above, you might think Aeon was something of a progenitor of Ada, but I’ve searched my subconscious on this subject, and had even done so when I bought the DVD set a long time ago when Everyday Music existed on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Recently a friend of mine commented on an illustration of Ada-as-Sisyphus (which is a major theme in Deukollectrum) as reminding her of Aeon Flux. It’s funny how one comment can propel you down memory lane which-if you’re observant and lucky-can serve as an on-ramp to something better. ![]()
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