been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before
had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes
Understanding perspective and magnification really helped me become a more intuitive photographer. But all of the tutorials and online classes I've taken have done such a poor job explaining it. Photography education will often give you a rule and then tell you the effect. But there is no explanation why the rule has that effect.
If you move too close, the face distorts.
This was taken with an ultra wide angle lens. It was almost touching my nose. It's implied that this goofy level of distortion is caused by a wide angle lens. You'll even hear it said "wide angle lenses distort things."
Why? What is the lens doing?
It is said that a telephoto lens compresses facial features.
Why? What is the lens doing?
In both cases, these effects are not some optical quirk caused by the type of lens. The lens isn't distorting the image. The lens isn't compressing the image.
The effects are changes in perspective and magnification.
Here is a quick breakdown that may help.
Perspective only changes with distance.
Magnification is any time you make something larger in frame.
Magnification can be achieved by physically moving closer, zooming, or cropping.
So if you move the perspective closer, you also magnify.
But you can magnify a perspective without changing distance by reducing the field of view via zoomier lenses or cropping.
Put simply... if you move, that's perspective.
If something gets bigger in the frame, that's magnification.
Perspective changes our perception of distance and geometry.
In this example, I move closer and farther to some basic shapes to show how they distort.
A close perspective exaggerates distance and shapes. Near things look bigger, far things look smaller. But if you take a far perspective and magnify to equal size in frame, distances and geometry remain more stable and less distorted.
If you've ever taken any art classes, you may have learned about the vanishing point where all angles converge off into the distance.
Buildings are not the only thing that has a vanishing point. They just have simple geometry, which helps you observe the effect.
This close perspective of a dog is no different from the buildings.
Something without perspective is called an orthographic projection. This is where all angles are parallel forever—with no vanishing point.
As you move farther away, a perspective projection appears to be almost orthographic. And if you magnify that far perspective, it looks similar to an orthographic cube.
But the far perspective still has a vanishing point, it just takes much longer to converge.
This video game allows you to play with perspective or orthographic projections.
The near cubes look very different. But the far cubes have similar geometry.
Why does a close perspective look distorted? Why does a far perspective look nearly orthographic?
This all has to do with the relative distances from the point of view of the observer. Let's move on to the real world to help explain this.
Perspective distortion is caused when the lens is very close to a subject. Only wide angle lenses have the field of view and the close focusing distance to get close enough to create severe perspective distortion.
Despite erroneous claims of eyeballs being like 50mm lenses, humans actually have a decently wide field of view. If you hold the end of a long cylinder close to your eye, you will see the same geometric distortion and dramatic vanishing point. When people are accused of misjudging the size of... cylinders, it's possible they just had a very close perspective that exaggerated geometry.
Perspective can alter our perception of size.
So the lens gives you the ability to *see* the distortion, but it doesn't *cause* the distortion.
Image 1 is taken a few inches from the subject with an ultra wide angle lens. It is magnified by moving closer.
Image 4 is taken from much farther away. It is magnified by using a telephoto lens.
Why does his left ear disappear in image 1?
It's a simple case of obstruction. The cheek is literally in the way at that near perspective.
If I stand very close to this wall, I cannot see the walkway to the right.
The walkway is physically obstructed at this close perspective. I can't see around corners.
But if I change my perspective…
Light needs a clear pathway to the point of observation.
Why does his ear seem to grow larger and larger as the perspective changes?
If you'll excuse my bad drawring...
In the top example, the lens is only 2 units away from the nose, but it is 6 units away from the ear.
The ear is 200% farther away than the nose.
In the bottom example, the lens is now 30 units away from the nose and 34 units away from the ear.
The ear is now only 14% farther away than the nose. The relative distance is less exaggerated.
Distant ear percentages are hard to visualize. What if I moved only my nose 200% closer?
If we upscale this concept, it can be easier to understand.
(My examples are going to be shitty smartphone photos taken at night with my trash bins. I'm hoping you will forgive that. If I had more energy, I would have taken better photos with more appealing subjects.)
These two trash bins are only a few feet apart. The black trash bin represents the ear. The blue trash bin represents the nose.
If I take a photo from a foot away...
From this perspective, the black bin is roughly 80% smaller than the blue bin. The blue bin is very close to the lens. The far bin is several hundred percent farther away from the lens. So it takes up a very small percentage of the frame.
So, big nose, tiny ears.
What if we magnified this perspective?
Note the little box on the house far in the background.
If we crop the image and thus magnify the same perspective...
That little box looks much bigger. But this "telephoto" field of view does not allow us to see both trash bins. The perspective hasn't changed, just the magnification.
I am making something small in the background much bigger. The distant perspective makes the object more orthographic. And when I magnify that perspective, it appears more compressed, more flat.
This is a digital crop of a wide field of view. A telephoto lens is essentially an optical crop. It magnifies the perspective in the same way. The advantage of an optical crop is that it maintains all the detail. Whereas a digital crop throws away a bunch of pixels.
A magnification of perspective is often referred to as "lens compression." This is an inaccurate legacy term that causes much confusion. It would be more accurate to call it "perspective compression," but it is very hard to change terminology in photography education.
The lens is not compressing the object. I used a very wide lens and just by cropping after the fact, I was able to get the same perspective compression as if I had used a telephoto lens. The wide field of view makes far away stuff very tiny in frame. So we struggle to notice the flatness. It isn't until we magnify the distant object that the "compression" becomes more apparent.
What if I wanted to make the nose and the ears about the same size?
I'd need to change my perspective.
Now both trash cans take up roughly the same amount of space in the frame. They are still the same distance from each other. But from this perspective, they are both about the same distance away from the lens.
And now, let's magnify this perspective.
When you magnify a perspective, you magnify everything in the photo. The house behind is bigger. The light in the far background is bigger. Everything looks more orthographic. More two dimensional. And so it has that "compressed" perspective.
And because the perspective is from farther away, the percentage distance from the lens is much smaller. The black trash bin went from being 200% farther from the lens to 10% farther from the lens. The distance and geometry become less exaggerated.
Now let's line up all of the trash bins from both near and far perspectives and magnify them the same amount.
Look at that cute little guy.
How can we use this knowledge in a practical way?
By changing your mental model to perspective rather than the focal length of the lens, you can take control of how much perspective distortion you allow in your photos.
Let's use the humble selfie as our example.
Smartphones typically have a main camera with a wider field of view. And when you fill the frame with a face, you may get some unflattering perspective distortion.
I know that this distortion is not caused by the lens. It is caused by the camera being really close to my face.
So if I hold the camera farther away and change nothing else...
My face looks less distorted. However, it is taking up a much smaller area of the frame. But since modern smartphones have pretty good detail, I can just crop. I can magnify this farther perspective.
And when you compare the exact same framing from the near and far perspective...
The only variable I changed was extending my arm. It's the same wide angle lens.
You'll notice that the farther perspective made my head look bigger. I have a big head, that's fine. But this demonstrates another common photography fallacy. It is often said that 85mm lenses are the best for headshots and portraits. The idea is that compressing facial features is more flattering. But if someone has a big noggin, a telephoto lens may actually exaggerate their cranial prowess.
For people with larger or rounder heads, you may need to test different perspectives—different distances—to find a balance between compressing facial features and not exaggerating their head. 50mm might be more flattering for them.
I think photos of myself with a magnified distant perspective overwhelm people with the size of my dome and the luxuriousness of my mane.
At 85mm, the camera has to be farther away and it gives that imposing orthographic effect.
But at 50mm, I think my head feels a bit less... Megamind.
If you have a small or slender face, you may look best at 100mm or 200mm—because longer lenses force the camera to be farther away.
You can test what perspective works best for your head shape and facial features. But try not to think of it in millimeters. Think about how far away the camera is. This works even with a smartphone. You just place the camera at different distances, crop all the photos so your head has the same framing, and figure out which distance flatters you the most.
And then if a photographer is taking your picture and they seem too close or too far away, you can nudge them to the appropriate distance. And that distance will dictate what lens they need.
I hope this perspective of perspective gave you perspective on how to think about perspective.
My health has not been great and so I was working on this post since October. But it feels good to finally have it published. Hopefully you don't mind if I shove it back into the timeline to give it another chance with the algorithmic gods.
Some additional perspectives on perspective...
Perspective is not just a technical decision. It can be used artistically as well.
A close perspective gives the viewer a sense of intimacy. As if they are occupying the same space as the subject.
The lens has a wide field of view, but the photo is taken quite close and your perception feels that subconsciously due to the geometric cues.
What I call "common perspective" is based on the distance we are most comfortable when interacting with other humans.
When people say a 50mm lens is closest to the human eye, they are actually talking about this socially accepted distance. Our eyes have a wider field of view—so it isn't that our eyes match a 50mm, but rather the perspective the lens must use to fill the frame with a person's face matches our common comfortable perspective.
For headshots, photographers will typically move a little farther back than the common perspective and then use a slightly telephoto lens to magnify it. This still gives an intimate feel while flattening facial features and flattering proportions.
As I mentioned, it is important to consider head size and shape when using this farther portrait perspective. For big heads it can help to move closer and zoom out a bit. For slender faces you may want to move farther back and zoom in.
A far perspective with a wide field of view gives a sense of the environment. The space the subject occupies becomes a secondary character in the composition.
A distant perspective that is magnified can create an "observer" effect. As if the subject is being viewed from afar. This is great when you want to give the composition a feeling of isolation.
This is also why super telephoto paparazzi pictures can sometimes feel extra unsettling or invasive.
You can use perspective distortion to play with exaggerated size and geometry. A close perspective with a wide field of view can create some really fun and creative compositions.
And another cool perspective effect is to shoot from a low angle. This is often how "power poses" are photographed. You angle the camera slightly upward from below the subject's eyeline and it gives a sense that they are towering over you.
This can be subtle...
Or exaggerated...
In summary...
Close perspective is intimate.
Common perspective is comfortable.
Portrait perspective is flattering.
Far perspective with wide field of view is environmental.
Far perspective magnified is isolating.
Ultra distorted perspective can be fun and creative.
Low perspective can give a sense of power.
Okay I'm almost done with Fellowship, here's an incomplete list of shit I noticed and thought was buck fucking wild on my first ever read-thru: medieval edition.
In literally the second line of the book, Tolkien implies that Bilbo Baggins wrote a story which was preserved alongside the in-universe version of the Mabinogion (aka the best-known collection of Welsh myths; I promise this is batshit). This is because The Hobbit has been preserved, in Tolkien's AU version of our world, in a "selection of the Red Book of Westmarch" (Prologue, Concerning Hobbits). If you're a medievalist and you see something called "The Red Book of" or "The Black Book of" etc it's a Thing. In this case, a cheeky reference to the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest). There are a few Red Books, but only Hergest has stories).
not a medieval thing but i did not expect one common theory among hobbits for the death of Frodo's parents to be A RUMORED MURDER-SUICIDE.
At the beginning of the book a few hobbits report seeing a moving elm tree up on the moors, heading west (thru or past the Shire). I mentioned this in another post, but another rule: if you see an elm tree, that's a Girl Tree. In Norse creation myth, the first people were carved from driftwood by the gods. Their names were Askr (Ash, as in the tree), the first man, and Embla (debated, but likely elm tree), the first woman. A lot of ppl have I think guessed that that was an ent-wife, but like. Literally that was a GIRL. TREE.
Medieval thing: I used to read the runes on the covers of The Hobbit and LOTR for fun when I worked in a bookshop. There's a mix of Old Norse (viking) and Old English runes in use, but all the ones I've noticed so far are real and readable if you know runes.
Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you once spent months of your life researching the early medieval art of galdor, which was the use of poems or songs to do a form of word-magic, often incorporating gibberish. If you think maybe Tolkien did not base the entirety of Fellowship so far around learning and using galdor and thus the power of words and stories, that is fine I cannot force you. He did personally translate "galdor" in Beowulf as "spell" (spell, amusingly, used to mean "story"). And also he named an elf Galdor. Like he very much did name an elf Galdor.
Tom Bombadil in fact does galdor from the moment we meet him. He arrives and fights the evil galdor (song) of the willow tree ("old gray willow-man, he's a mighty singer"), which is singing the hobbits to sleep and possibly eating them, with a galdor (song) of his own. Then he wanders off still singing, incorporating gibberish. I think it was at this point that I started clawing my face.
THEN Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you've read the description of the scop's songs in Beowulf (Beowulf again, but hey, Tolkien did famously a. translate it b. write a fanfiction about it called Sellic Spell where he gave Beowulf an arguably homoerotic Best Friend). The scop (pronounched shop) is a poet who sings about deeds on earth, but also by profession must know how to sing the song or tell the story of how the cosmos itself came to be. The wise-singer who knows the deep lore of the early universe is a standard trope in Old English literature, not just Beowulf! Anyway Tom Bombadil takes everyone home and tells them THE ENTIRE STORY OF ALL THE AGES OF THE EARTH BACKWARDS UNTIL JUST BEFORE THE MOMENT OF CREATION, THE BIG BANG ITSELF and then Frodo Baggins falls asleep.
Tom Bombadil knows about plate tectonics
This is sort of a lie, Tom Bombadil describes the oceans of old being in a different place, which works as a standard visual of Old English creation, which being Christian followed vaguely Genesis lines, and vaguely Christian Genesis involves a lot of water. TOLKIEN knew about plate tectonics though.
Actually I just checked whether Tolkien knew about plate tectonics because I know the advent of plate tectonics theory took forever bc people HATED it and Alfred Wegener suffered for like 50 years. So! actually while Tolkien was writing LOTR, the scientific community was literally still not sure plate tectonics existed. Tom Bombadil knew tho.
Remember that next time you (a geologist) are forced to look at the Middle Earth map.
I'm not even done with Tom Bombadil but I'm stopping here tonight. Plate tectonics got me. There's a great early (but almost high!) medieval treatise on cosmology and also volcanoes and i wonder if tolkien read it. oh my god. i'm going to bed.
Right, so the thing nobody outside the Puget Sound ever gets about bikini baristas is that the bikini is not actually where the story starts — the story starts with the specific building, the seventy-square-foot prefabricated cedar-shingled drive-thru shack on the corner of a gas station forecourt or the dead wedge of a mini-mall parking lot, which is itself a specific regional invention that predates the bikini by about ten years and exists because of a regulatory arbitrage between food-service licensing and retail real estate that the rest of the country has mostly never figured out how to exploit.
A real coffee shop with interior seating — the thing you think of when you think of a coffee shop, the Starbucks or the Café Vita or the Victrola — is a restaurant, regulatorily, with all the capital requirements that entails: bathrooms for customers under health code, ADA-compliant access, fire egress on two sides, HVAC, parking minima under local zoning, ideally a real commercial kitchen ventilation hood, a grease interceptor if you're doing any food. You're looking at a buildout in the six figures minimum and a lease on a 1,500 square-foot storefront at retail rents.
The drive-thru espresso stand — Seattle invented the form in the late 80s and early 90s — is none of those things. It's a shed. It has one employee. The employee has a hand sink and a cash drawer. There is no public interior. No bathroom is required for customers because there are no customers inside the building. ADA doesn't apply the way it applies to a storefront because the transaction happens at the car. Zoning doesn't care that much because the footprint is too small to count against anything.
You can put one of these things on a parcel of land so small and so awkwardly shaped that no other commercial use would even consider it — a twelve-by-twelve square of a shared gas station lot, the gore between two driveway cuts, the leftover piece when a subdivision fails to close. The regulatory class of the drive-thru espresso stand is approximately the same as a hot dog cart, and this is the substrate on top of which everything else sits.
Now stack this on top of the fact that by about 1995 Seattle had — because of a twenty-year head start that basically nobody else in America had on real espresso drinking — the country's first population of mass-market espresso-habituated morning commuters. The history here is worth getting right, because people think Starbucks invented Seattle coffee culture and it's actually the other way around.
Starbucks was founded in 1971 as a bean roaster at Pike Place. It was not an espresso bar. The espresso bar in Seattle was Café Allegro, founded 1975 in the U District, which did the actual work of developing what became the "Starbucks dark roast" in collaboration with Starbucks's early roasters — Starbucks at that point was selling Allegro their roasted beans as a wholesale account.
You had a decade-plus of steady growth in actual Italian-style espresso consumption by Seattle baristi and their customers before the format got scaled into malls, and by the time Starbucks went public in 1992 and the national chain expansion began, the Seattle local market was already saturated and looking for differentiation. Uptown Espresso 1984. Vivace 1988. Bauhaus 1993. Caffe Vita 1995. This is an absurd density of genuine third-wave coffee businesses in one metro, twenty years before "third wave" was a phrase anyone had agreed on.
The specific thing the drive-thru stand does that Starbucks can't do is catch the 4:30am shift worker. Seattle and Tacoma in the mid-90s were a manufacturing and military town — Boeing in Everett and Renton running around the clock, Paccar trucks in Kirkland, the Bremerton naval shipyard, the Tacoma port, the Fort Lewis base, Weyerhaeuser timber operations in the surrounding counties, and later the Microsoft and Amazon tech workforces with their own weird shift patterns and very long commutes because of the geography.
Puget Sound is a water-shaped metro: every commute is bottlenecked through a small number of bridges and highway corridors, which means your drive from Auburn to Everett takes two hours on a bad day and you want coffee on the way. Starbucks in 1995 is a sit-down café concept, occasionally with a tiny drive-through bolted on late in the franchise process, and it doesn't open until 5 or 6am. The 4am Boeing guy pulling out of Puyallup cannot use a Starbucks. He needs a drive-thru stand on his route that opens at 3:30.
The specific economic opening for the drive-thru espresso format is that gap — the blue-collar Pacific Northwest commuter with twenty years of cultural exposure to real espresso who needs that espresso before civilization has opened for the day. The stand serves him. The stand exists for him.
Which gets us to the bikini, finally, which is a product of the small-footprint stand's product differentiation problem. Once the drive-thru stand format proliferates — and it proliferates hard through the mid-to-late 90s, Dutch Bros gets founded 1992 in Grants Pass down in Oregon, dozens of Puget Sound independents spring up — you've got the classic problem of a commodity retail category where every shack is selling identical espresso from a Rancilio or a La Marzocco, every shack is roughly the same footprint, every shack is pulling the same commuters off the same highway.
There are only so many ways to compete. You can compete on location (best highway off-ramp), you can compete on price (bad idea, margins are already thin), you can compete on speed (maybe), or you can compete on the barista. And the barista is a female person in her twenties — this has been true in the Puget Sound espresso industry since Allegro, who initially hired art students and actresses and poets, because the job pays OK for part-time hours and appeals to a specific demographic — so you already have a workforce that skews young and female, and the move from "our baristas are art students" to "our baristas are attractive" is a small move, and the move from "our baristas are attractive" to "our baristas are attractive and wearing tank tops because it's August in an un-airconditioned shed" is a smaller move, and the move from "our baristas are in tank tops" to "our baristas are in bikinis" is barely a move at all — which is roughly the sequence that happened at Cowgirls Espresso in Tukwila in summer 2003, when Lori Bowden's employees suggested a "Bikini Wednesday" promo because they were hot and the owner noticed sales spiked and the promo became the format.
The key piece of regulatory architecture here — and this is the part people consistently miss — is that Washington State and specifically the county-level zoning regimes in King and Pierce and Snohomish counties have a very specific legal line between "food service" and "erotic entertainment," with the former allowed on strip-mall commercial parcels next to schools and churches and whatever, and the latter subject to setback requirements that mean you have to be in industrial zones or specifically designated adult-use districts, miles from where the commuters actually drive.
The bikini is precisely calibrated to sit as far over toward the erotic end of the spectrum as you can go while remaining on the food-service side of the line. The pasties are the line. Full nudity is the line. Specific touching or sex acts are obviously the line. But a bikini that would be perfectly legal on any public beach in the state is demonstrably not "erotic entertainment" by any standard the county can defend in court, because if it were, the beach would be too.
Mason County tried to push back in 2008 — ruled that a particular stand called Espresso Gone Wild was operating as erotic entertainment and had to cover up or shut down — and the result was basically that Espresso Gone Wild's baristas started wearing bikinis instead of pasties, and that was the end of the legal question. The industry settled at the bikini specifically because the bikini is what you can wear without your entire commercial category collapsing into a zoning nightmare. This is a genuine regulatory equilibrium, worked out through about a decade of nuisance complaints and planning-commission meetings, and it is why a visitor from another state — who does not know about this equilibrium — sees the phenomenon and experiences it as bizarre and inexplicable, when in fact every element of it is fully determined by the specific legal and economic constraints of operating a marginal commercial food-service establishment in the Puget Sound.
(The climate inversion is doing a specific aesthetic job as part of this, by the way. A bikini in Phoenix or Tampa is unremarkable; a bikini in Federal Way in November, visible through the rain on your windshield at 5am, is a kind of surreal commercial spectacle that the business is absolutely leveraging. The cold makes the bikini legible as a commercial signal in a way warm weather would not. You are being sold the fact that it is 43 degrees and raining and she is in a bikini, which is why you want to roll your window down. This is not unlike why mid-century tiki bars worked in suburban Minnesota — the whole product was the climate inversion, the hibiscus and the thatched roof and the rum served in a ceramic moai in the middle of a snowstorm. Same thing with better coffee.)
Who's actually buying? This is where the public imagination gets it very wrong. The customer base for a bikini espresso stand on a strip mall in Kent or Lynnwood or Federal Way is predominantly blue-collar commuters — the 5am plumber, the Boeing mechanic, the long-haul trucker rolling through, the construction foreman starting a job, the utility lineman on his way to a substation, the retired guy on his way to help his son put up a fence.
It is extremely not a pervy-old-men-in-raincoats customer base, and it is extremely not a strip-club-adjacent customer base, because the format doesn't support that — there's no dwell time, no privacy, no opportunity to do anything other than order coffee and pay for coffee and drive away with coffee. What you're buying, if you're a regular, is a two-minute pleasant interaction with a friendly young woman at the start of a long day on a job site, and the bikini is just signaling that the interaction will be pleasant rather than cold.
The drive-thru format enforces a specific kind of chastity on the whole transaction. You literally cannot get out of your car. The barista is behind a sliding window. The line of cars behind you is watching. The whole thing is about thirty seconds. If you are looking for something more than pleasant banter and a good latte you are at the wrong establishment, and everybody in the whole supply chain — baristas, owners, regulars, cops, zoning boards — knows this and wants it to stay this way.
This is why the format is regionally sticky and has failed most of its attempts to spread. LA tried it in 2009, failed in four months. A couple Arizona operators have gotten it to work in Phoenix and Scottsdale. There are scattered attempts in Texas and Florida. None of them have built the actual density that the Puget Sound has, because none of them have the substrate — the preexisting espresso culture, the blue-collar commuter base, the surface-parking exurban geography, the specific zoning equilibrium, the regulatory familiarity with small-footprint drive-thru food service. Outside the Pacific Northwest, a bikini espresso stand is a novelty you might visit once; inside the Pacific Northwest, it is a weekday-morning routine that an entire class of workers has built into their commute for twenty years. The industry has matured. There are national chains now — Bikini Beans out of Scottsdale, Boomtown Babes in Odessa — but the actual heartland remains a ninety-mile strip along I-5 from roughly Bellingham to Olympia, with genuine multi-location operators and a regulatory equilibrium that the rest of the country hasn't reproduced.
The useful comparison case is Dutch Bros, which is the biggest drive-thru coffee chain in the country, founded in 1992 in Grants Pass, Oregon, so basically the same moment in basically the same region on the same highway system, same small-footprint drive-thru stand format, and emphatically not a bikini concept — the Dutch Bros branding is evangelical-adjacent, youth-group cheer, a specific kind of Oregon-Christian-athlete sunny aggression that the company calls "broistas" and that reads as a deliberate anti-bikini positioning. The broistas wear branded T-shirts. The stands have elaborate windows painted with chalk slogans. The music is loud and the conversation is performative-friendly in a way that is absolutely not sexualized.
Dutch Bros is now publicly traded and has something like nine hundred locations across the West and is expanding east, and the bikini chains are regional and will probably stay regional, which should tell you that if you're trying to scale a drive-thru coffee concept nationally the bikini is actually a liability and not an asset, because the bikini locks you into Puget Sound's specific regulatory and customer environment. Dutch Bros figured out that the scalable version of the drive-thru stand was the one that could get permitted in Boise, in Sacramento, in Oklahoma City, in a strip mall next to a Chick-fil-A in the Dallas suburbs, and you cannot do that with bikinis. You can do it with evangelical broistas and pumpkin-spice Rebel energy drinks and a "giving back to the community" marketing program. The fact that both concepts emerged from the same regional substrate within a decade of each other is what you'd expect; the fact that one of them is a national juggernaut and the other one is an I-5 regional specialty is also what you'd expect, once you've noticed which constraints each one is solving for.
As for the baristas themselves — the economics from the inside are genuinely weird, and worth noting because it cuts against the standard assumption. A barista at a busy stand on a good morning shift can clear two to four hundred dollars in tips on top of a reasonable hourly wage, because the customers are mostly regulars, the regulars tip in cash, and the tip culture at these stands is one of the more aggressively supportive tipping cultures in American retail — guys will tip ten or twenty bucks on a four-dollar latte because the interaction is the thing they're actually paying for.
Aggregate that across a six-hour shift on a busy corner and you're looking at effective hourly rates that blow the doors off most food-service work, and which rival what women in the same age bracket are earning at the lower-tier dance clubs, with dramatically less physical and emotional friction. The job is hard — you're standing on maybe twelve square feet of rubber mat for hours, the espresso machine runs hot, the steam wand is loud, the winter cold coming through the slider window is relentless, the men range from perfectly nice to occasionally awful and you have no backup — but the money is real and the hours are not bad and the work is genuinely skilled coffee work.
The career arc is the same as most service-sector gigs oriented around young female labor: you do it for a few years, you age out or you move up (to shift lead, to manager, occasionally to opening your own stand), you transition to something else. Some women stay in it for a long time and do well. Some get out quick and want nothing more to do with it. A nontrivial fraction use the money as runway to start something — aesthetics practice, real estate license, nursing school — which is the standard use of high-tip-ratio female-labor jobs everywhere going back to cocktail waitressing and beyond.
There is a darker layer under all this, which it would be dishonest not to mention, and I don't want to belabor it because the kontextmaschine move of "and here's the actually exploited people" is a move I try to ration, but: the industry is split between genuinely operator-owned micro-businesses (often run by former baristas who've saved up, bought a shack, hired their friends) and more extractive operations where the owner is basically a labor contractor running a fleet of shacks, taking a cut of tips, charging baristas for costumes and shift rent, and where the barista-owner relationship gets ugly fast. A few of the ugly-end owners have been criminally prosecuted for sex crimes against their employees. This is a real thing.
The industry knows this, and the operator-owned end of the industry resents the extractive end fiercely, which is why you see branding around words like "safe" and "respectful" and "woman-owned" in the newer stands — it's a competitive signal to customers who know the difference and want to patronize the better operations. This is about where every labor-intensive marginal-regulation industry with a young female workforce ends up — the salon industry, the dance industry, the modeling industry, the massage industry, the personal-training industry — a mix of good operators and predators and a lot of women trying to figure out which is which before they take the job.
The temporal rhyme that keeps wanting to surface, which I'll land on and then stop, is the gas station of the 1940s through the early 70s, when gas-station competition was primarily on service quality and every chain was selling identical regulated-price gasoline from indistinguishable pumps. Standard Oil, Shell, Chevron, Texaco — they all looked the same, they all cost the same, the only differentiator was the full-service experience, and the experience was mediated by young attractive attendants who wore specific uniforms, pumped your gas, washed your windshield, checked your oil, and flirted professionally with the regulars while the transaction completed in about the same ninety seconds it takes to pour an espresso.
This was a whole branded commercial category. Esso Girls. Texaco Star Service. Phillips 66 attendants in the red-and-white uniforms. It was a minor but real sector of the American female service-labor economy for about thirty years. Then the 1973 oil crisis cracked the margins, self-service mandates and convenience-store economics killed the attendant position, and the entire category simply evaporated inside of fifteen years.
The women who would have been Esso Girls in 1965 found other work. The customers who would have flirted with them adjusted. Nobody even remembers that gas stations used to compete on the attractiveness of their attendants — it's a minor detail of mid-century American commercial life that's been completely forgotten outside a handful of old advertising posters and a certain kind of nostalgic illustration.
Which means somewhere around 2045 or 2050, when the Boeing plants have mostly automated and self-driving commuter traffic has reshaped I-5 into something that doesn't require anyone to stop for coffee in person, and the exurban drive-thru espresso shack has collapsed into the same historical footnote as the gas-station attendant — the bikini barista will be one of those things people vaguely remember as a cultural oddity of the turn-of-the-century Pacific Northwest, the way people vaguely remember the Esso Girl. Somebody will make a short documentary. The surviving operators will be quoted fondly. The zoning regime that produced the whole equilibrium will be invisible. The regulatory arbitrage will be invisible. The commute-pattern geography will be invisible. It'll just look, to somebody seeing a photograph, like an inexplicable piece of regional weirdness that went away. Anyway, the coffee is actually pretty good.
sobbing my eyes out over how terrifying meeting grace must have been for rocky. obviously there’s the horror of what grace “looks” like to him, but the fact that rocky feels responsible for killing everyone and now there’s this fragile, squishy thing that rocky can kill with one wrong move. what if he messed up the oxygen in the tunnel? or it wasn’t enclosed all the way? and then he was alone, again.
yeah you get it. that's what fucks rocky up so much about—eridians have a crystalline brain. rocky remembers every single thing that he perceives in perfect detail. he's one of the best engineers erid has ever seen, so it's logical that he double checks his work not just to screen for oversights, but to see if anything new can be added. typically this is done in a thrum, allowing for ideas to bounce off one another.
but rocky was alone at tau ceti for almost 50 years. there was no thrum—not for lack of trying to get his crewmates to respond—so rocky does it himself.
so rocky gets stuck in loops. his brain rereads the same information over and over again, expecting to be passed onto another one of his species. when it isn't, there's no sense of completion and the loop starts back over. not having another eridian translates to stress on an instinctual level so his brain thinks there's an error in the loop or in his work. he completes a ritual or task to satisfy the anxiety. the cycle repeats itself regardless because eridians are not meant to be alone.
he has to check on grace's breathing. he needs to check the taumoeba. he needs to make sure he isn't dying of radiation sickness. he needs to force feed his friend as he wastes away. there's so much rocky can't fix and so much that he could have if his crew was still alive (if he didn't kill them). it starts to become more irrational—tapping in sets of five on the xenonite barrier to make sure it's stable. saying words over and over that don't really make sense with eridiani sentence structure. if he doesn't click and shake his carapace, his brain will make him relive the fat of grace's arm liquefying and coagulating in his hold.
inside his body, his worker cells are exhausted from constantly going to repair a sickness that doesn't exist. his cells are the sickness, driving themselves to ruin in a never-ending death spiral.
he's so, so tired, but he can't go to sleep because he has to check.
celestia is such a funny character like she's constantly manipulating twilight and friends to do shit instead of just asking and you could arguably frame that as being bc she's a "god" and pushing fate to her design or whatever, except that she engages with the group like a normal and relatable person, which makes it more like villainous machinations, except 90% of this manipulation goes towards things like "I don't want my party to be boring shit again. put my little country girl blorbos in there with zero prep so they fuck it up bad"
Celestia instantly makes more sense as a character when you ignore the princess stuff and remember that she's a 1000+ years old wizard. Of course she does manipulative trickster stuff to teach moral lessons and/or cause chaos to amuse herself, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course sometimes she's actually socially awkward and bad at personal relationships and has bad ideas that she thought were good that result in her eating shit embarrassing style, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course she lets the aristocrats and nobles run around being assholes she's still running on wizard advisor programming, she's basically trying to merlin the entire upper class of equestria instead of just a king and some knights. "Yeah uuhhh we'll release the incarnation of chaos himself from his ancient prison because we think this shy girl can be friends with him", terrible plan if you're thinking like a ruler, amazing plan if you're thinking like a wizard. Just look at Canterlot 'Castle' for five seconds and ask yourself if that's in any way a castle. No. Wizard tower, yes. Wizard.
My theories were blown out of the water. I expected a big twist akin to those in Evangelion, which Gooseworx indicated was an influence, but it was more of a simple plotline with deep introspection like a play. Which is fine. If I want to explore those ideas, fanfiction is right there, and I suspect the finale was written knowing people would write fanfiction following up on loose plot threads.
There's an interesting tone shift, so it's less cartoony and more real, visceral. It's like after they realize they're uploaded minds, they feel more human than ever. The Jax actor feels like he's not doing a Jax voice, just sounding like a guy in a Jax avatar. Which makes Jax's insistence that he's a cartoon character feel like an even more desperate excuse to cover up his insecurities.
Or, rather, her insecurities. Jax being a trans woman is heavily implied if not explicitly stated. A song using female pronouns plays over her big scene, so the plot frames her as a her even if she refuses to take the plunge.
Jax... is a piece of work. Sympathetic, someone worth saving, but such a terrific asshole, you don't particularly want to put in the effort. Which is, of course, the point. Deeply insecure people drive people away to protect themselves from the potential of feeling hurt, but they really want a friend to fight for them. The problem is, the insecure people become more intensely unlikable to further push their friends away, and if they don't push through that, the insecure people only take it as confirmation that they should be closed off and descend into deep depression and aggression. Such it is with Jax and her friends Ribbit and Pomni.
I've met people like that. I might have been someone like that in my more intense stages of mental illness (there are memory issues, so I don't know for sure). It's a trait of BPD, among others. It's a plotline I've seen in Haibane Renmei, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Steven Universe, and this is the first time I've seen it... fail. Jax refuses to be saved by the power of love and descends into the depressed purgatory of abstraction, only showing the slight sign of possibly getting better in the future when the abstractions get put in a comfortable environment and stop being aggressive. And that's more realistic. It's sad, but that's what people are like; they need to go at their own pace.
One of the backlashes to the finale is people thinking Jax is too cruel in employing social ostracism to push Ribbit away, which, along with one of Jax's personalities strangling Pomni, makes Jax look like a sadistic psychopath not worth saving. That is what Jax wants you to think. That is her armor, guarding her insecurity at feeling something. Pomni pushing through that is also what Jax wants.
Because Jax never explicitly says she's a woman and employs misogyny as a means of pushing people away and refusing to address her own femininity, cisgender audiences frame the character as unambiguously male and interpret Jax's abuses in the framework of a man abusing women, but it's more like she's an alpha bitch Regina George type using feminine bullying tactics and pretending at misogyny. Denying Ribbit friendship as revenge and to feel safe from the possibility of Ribbit hurting Jax through gossip is extremely feminine. That's the form female abuse often takes. Jax therefore cannot be judged as a male villain, just a complicated female villain.
Interestingly, Reki in Haibane Renmei is the only other BPD-coded character to push people away using such tactics. When Willow tries to push away Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she uses more masculine tactics of physical violence. So does Steven when he turns into a kaiju in Steven Universe. It's Jax to take the feminine form of bullying, and she is more biting than Reki. Maybe that seems worse when it comes from a character seen as male just because men don't typically act like that with that degree of efficacy.
Anyway, trying to delete Caine was apparently the kick in the teeth needed to get him to realize that he was abusive, and he does the work necessary to recover and mend ties with the group. I guess Bubble was the blue AI, and by disentangling himself from him, Caine (the red AI) loses his AM tendencies.
In the end, not every question is answered; not everyone is saved, but there is emotional fulfillment. There is hope for the future. And the rest is fanfiction.
according to An Immense World, apparently giant squid eyes are, like, UNREASONABLY large, even for something their size living at those depths. the next largest eyes on earth, blue whale eyes, are less than half the size, and swordfish, who live at similar depths as giant squid and have the largest eyes of any fish, have eyes that could fit inside a giant squid's pupil.
eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??
turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.
sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around
and also I gotta say, the imagery... the huge lurking threat betrayed only by the ambiguous glowing shape of its movements through the water, is really evocative, if spooky deep-sea games aren't already using that to make things extremely ominous then they should really start
Gall Wasps: these wasps produce a chemical that triggers abnormal cell growth in plants, causing the plants to form strange-looking structures around the wasp's larvae
Above: plant growths caused by the larvae of three different species of gall wasp, including Trigonaspis teres, Callirhytis seminator, and Feron izabellae
These tumor-like growths are known as plant galls. They develop in response to chemicals that are injected or secreted by certain insects, mites, and nematodes. Each plant gall forms around the body of a single larva (or, in some cases, a small group of larvae), and the structure serves as both protection and sustenance for the tiny creature developing within.
Above: the plant gall of the oak apple gall wasp, Atrusca quercuscentricola, with a bisected view that shows the larva within
There are many different insects that can trigger the production of plant galls, including certain aphids, psyllids, flies, beetles, scale insects, and caterpillars, but gall-forming wasps are especially diverse. They also create some of the most distinctive plant galls in nature.
Above: the photo at the top shows the plant gall of an unidentified gall wasp from the family Cynipidae, and the photo at the bottom depicts the plant galls of the urchin gall wasp, Cynips quercusechinus
The color, shape, size, and texture of each plant gall varies depending on the species of gall wasp that induces it. Some wasps are associated with plant galls that look like fuzzy little pom-poms; others produce mushroom-shaped structures, colorful discs, cones, pink spheres, cottonballs, etc.
Above: this photo shows a mushroom gall wasp, Heteroecus sanctaeclarae, which produces plant galls that look like tiny mushroom-shaped houses
As this article explains:
Galls are plant growths (similar to tumors) that are induced by various organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and insects. Gall wasps have evolved to “trick” the plant into forming this growth which they then use for food and shelter as they transform from a larva to an adult.
The wasp larvae secrete chemicals that mimic growth hormones in a particular plant upon hatching. The chemicals trick the oak into growing a gall on its flowers, acorns, leaves, or stems. The larva is then encapsulated by the gall as it grows, waiting patiently inside until its metamorphosis is complete.
Above: Feron parmula, commonly known as the disc gall wasp
Many of these plant galls have elaborate, colorful features that are truly stunning.
Above: the spined-turban gall wasp, Cynips douglasii
Gall-forming wasps are only parasitic toward plants -- they do not parasitize other animals. The larvae feed on the nutritive tissues of their plant galls, but the adult wasps do not feed at all.
Above: plant galls produced by two different species of gall wasp
These wasps also have a peculiar reproductive cycle:
Many species have alternating generations, meaning all of the adults emerging from galls during one time of the year are female-only, while the adults emerging in a different season have both males and females. Most species have females that can reproduce using parthenogenesis when they emerge by themselves. This means that their eggs are essentially clones of themselves. What’s more, some species appear not to have any males at all.
Above: the huge, fuzzy plant galls of Striatoandricus furnessae and Druon pattoni
Scientists have named and described roughly 1400 species of gall wasp, and that's likely just a fraction of the number of species that actually exist, as gall-forming organisms are widely understudied.
Above: close-up of a gall wasp larva nestled in its plant gall
Once the larva transforms into a fully-developed wasp, it finally emerges from its gall.
Above: adult gall wasps
Sources & More Info:
Forest Watch: Gall Wasps
Gallformers: What the Heck is a Gall?
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve: Ecosystem Engineers
Surprisingly not long! Peafowl actually have a gesture that means "this object is yucky and you other birds waiting to see if I like it should not try to eat this because it's yucky" and if one of them makes that gesture, most if not all of the nearby birds will repeat it, and no one will eat the thing. This makes giving them new treats a huge fucking fiasco every time, because if a picky bird gets to the treat first, no one will eat it. Even if it's something they all like and have had before.
But! Since it's just them shaking their head and clacking their beak like they've tasted something gross and want it out of their mouth (EVEN IF THEY DID NOT EVEN TRY IT), you can easily mimic this gesture and pair it with a phrase to teach hand raised birds not to eat things. It only takes a few times for them to make the association.
Since Bug was indoors and I didn't want her trying to eat things like a bottle cap I accidentally drop, it was one of the earliest things I taught her. She actually knows the difference between "not food"and "yucky" because when I tell her "it's not food" I usually let her try it, and then behold, it's not food, so she will (generally) lose interest even if I just say "it's not food." Sometimes she gets really put out because SHE thinks it's food and she'll stand in this posture that very clearly says she thinks I'm lying, which is usually when I let her have a taste, which she will do fast and hard like a defensive bite, realize she was wrong, and chill out. That's always very funny to me. Like, Babygirl I would not lie to you, if I'm eating something that's mine I'll tell you "not for you" instead. You can have a hissy fit then.
Whereas if I tell her it's yucky, she starts making the yucky gesture and won't try it. Which is useful, because I still may want to interact with not food items (like putting a hat on her) but usually do not want her to interact with yucky things (because it's usually toxic to her).
She will also copy me if I make the "yummy treat" noise with my hand (bird "head") near a treat - she starts doing the yummy treat squeal before even trying the food, she just trusts I wouldn't tell her it's yummy if it's not. I try not to betray that trust. She'll try most new things, but sometimes doesn't like stuff, and I try to respect that and not tell her it's yummy again.
Mantis, on the other hand, just believes everything must be food for her, and will not believe me when I say it's yucky. I didn't raise her, Bug did, and they were mostly outside where she could try to eat pretty much anything in the pen and it wouldn't hurt her, so she's just not been told no very much. On the one hand it's terrible when I DO have something that's not food but on the other hand she's the least picky bird I've ever owned.
One of the most recognized brand designs in Russia is a can of condensed milk. This design was created in 1939 (or 1937 according to some sources) by Iraida Fomina.
Condensed milk cans of this design were made by dozens and hundreds of manufacturers throughout the country.
1920s and 30s in Russia were the era of avantgarde or futurist design with its love for clear geometric forms, bold color contrasts, and functional simplicity.
The design is so ubiquitous and familiar today that even though I'm a fan of the 20s/30s avantgarde movement, I was perplexed to learn that this too is avant-garde.
Even today all condended milk in Russia is made with this design, or plays on this design.
One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.
Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.
There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!
the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."
bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.
Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.
In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.
Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.
So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.
But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!
It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)
It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?
Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.
Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.
Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:
“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”
The Sunlit Garden/Comforting Nostalgia is an amazing piece of metaphor and foreshadowing made from background-turned-diagetic music and is perfectly on the nose without being obvious, to the extent you may miss it all together in this essay I will
A’ight cause I had some people actually ask, here goes!
My (quick and dirty) analysis of ‘The Sunlit Garden’ theme and it’s use as foreshadowing!
‘The Sunlit Garden’ is what I would possibly peg as one of THE big themes of Utena, but an often overlooked one in terms of analysis.
The track ‘The Sunlit Garden’, or ‘Comforting Nostalgia’ in it’s rearrangements, is the first track played in the show (outside of the OP which I don’t count) and plays in 10 of the episodes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, and 38), just over half of the entire show (possibly 1 or 2 more, but I’m not scrubbing through them again to check) , as well as an appearance in the movie.
If you’ll allow me to gush a moment, ‘The Sunlit Garden’ is an absolutely beautiful and masterfully arranged piece of music. It has the ability to instantly sound nostalgic even upon the first listen. Which, perhaps makes the rearrangement’s name, ‘Comforting Nostalgia’ even more apt.
Aside from that, little stands out about the piece in comparison to the other tracks of the show. Put alongside gut punching tracks that show up alongside it like ‘When, Where, Who, Which’, and the other duel themes, it perhaps pales.
That is, until, episode 4; The Sunlit Garden - Prelude.
Not only is the episode named after the arrangement itself, but the plot revolves around it. (I’m assuming those reading this know the episode, so I won’t summarize here)
I would personally consider this the first ‘off kilter’ thing the show does.
Sure, the premise of the show is a bit weird. But, not weirder than any other fantastical magical girl show.
But, episode 4 is the first episode where RGU does something a little unusual, as it specifically calls out a piece of music within the show itself. It actively pulls it from being just background music, to actually being a diegetic piece within the world of the show. It’s suddenly a piece of msuic that exists in the world of the show, and can be heard and experienced by it’s characters. It’s real.
The show doesn’t quite break the fourth wall here, but it certainly taps on it.
Revolutionary Girl Utena grabs this one specific track, and holds it up for the audience going ‘look at it!’
But why?
Well, let’s start with the composer of the piece, Miki Kaoru.
Miki is a character trapped in his own delusion of nostalgia. He longs for a more innocent and pure and happy time. A time when he played piano with his sister, Kozue. Back when she was “Pure” and “Innocent” and not, presumably, “Dirty” and “Impure” like she is now. (Miki, like just about all the men in the show, suffers from a case of ‘Madonna/Whore complex. His is just aimed at his own sister)
‘The Sunlit Garden’ is a song that reflects those sweet memories, as well as encapsulates the nostalgia and longing that comes with them.
But, Miki’s memories are a lie. Or, rather, they’re a half truth. There were good times there, but Miki views them with rose tinted glasses. Kozue played piano with him, sure, but at the end of episode 5 she reveals that she was never really that good or into piano. She started because a boy said he liked her playing, and in truth, Miki was always the musical genius, making up for her own mistakes. And Kozue was never the “Pure” being Miki thought she was, any more than she is “Dirty” now. She’s just a person with her own hangups and issues, same as anyone.
Miki is an unreliable narrator of his own past, because he views it through rose-tinted glasses. Because often, that’s what nostalgia does. Our ‘Comforting Nostalgia’ is just that. Comforting. But not always the whole truth.
So why is all that important?
Well, remember when I said the ‘Sunlit Garden’ was the first track (outside of the OP) to play in the show?
Well, it plays over this.
This little shadow play (that we see time and time again) exists somewhere outside the world of the show. It’s a fantasy. The World of Utena (despite it’s fantastical elements) is more grounded. It’s a place with schools, and uniforms, and cars. Not a place of princes and princess, and kingdoms, and magic.
It’s a non-diegetic piece of storytelling within the show.
Or is it?
After all, ‘The Sunlit Garden’ exists within the world of the show. It’s a thing the characters know of. Hear. Experience.
So, what does that say about this?
From episode 1, the show is telling us in big letters “THIS HAPPENED!”
BUT.
If Miki, the composer of ‘The Sunlit Garden’ is an unreliable narrator to his own past, what must that say about the narrator of this story? What does it say about Utena’s own memory and interpretation of the events of her childhood?
Sure, this may have truly happened to some extent, but episode 4 is very subtly calling into question exactly how it happened.
Before any big end-of-show reveal. Before Akio comes in to make Utena (an the audience) question her childhood. Before Touga steps in even earlier to do the same.
Before the show even begins to hint that there’s more going on behind the curtain, ‘The Sunlit Garden’ is very subtly whispering to us ‘yes, this really happened, but not the way you think it did! Pay attention!’
And with that, I’m out! *does a jump kick and twists my ankle*
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