Why aren't there links? The title led me to believe there'd be links. A cache of some kind.

Yasha wrote:

Akio is the embodiment of hardcore pornography.

This makes sense to me and I approve. (We don't have an applause emoticon. Pretend this is an applause emoticon.)

I should have used


Oh well, next time.

The word substitution works up to a point, and that point is this:

Akio as chairman of Ohtori Academy is the embodiment of hardcore pornography. He never uses force

I could forgive you screwing up my posts, but I could never forgive the propagation of such a terrible life.

I believe that's a quote.

You should know the answer because YOU wrote it.

It was a change that keeps on giving.

I know

zevrem wrote:

I could never forgive the propagation of such a terrible life.

is a typo, but it bears considering.

And

zevrem wrote:

Akio as chairman of Ohtori Academy is the embodiment of hardcore pornography

zevrem wrote:

How could the embodiment of hardcore pornography NOT use force?

makes me laugh harder knowing it was changed.

And that "How" bears consideration, too. Both in terms of porn and in terms of Akio.

I can't see how Akio doesn't use force, if not physical (though he is physically restraining the characters and imprisoning them), then through social and emotional coercion. But porn doesn't have to be about coercion, or that kind of force or dominance, as often as it does veer in those directions.

He's right, guys. All I've done is filter a couple certain phrases-- zevrem's responsible for everything else after that.

Edit: Technically speaking, the term "hardcore" just means that there's visible penetration. I'm not sure Akio has to stoop quite so low as to use force whenever he wants to dip his wick, ifyaknowhatimean.

Last edited by Yasha (07-19-2013 05:14:46 PM)

The bell rang out, marking the end of the school day.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said a voice that came from the PA system—"Mr. Ohtori will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the Academy crisis. That is what you are going to hear."

"For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is Himemiya Anthy? This is Himemiya Anthy speaking. I am the woman who loves her life. I am the woman who does not sacrifice her love or her values. I am the woman who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the woman who will now tell you."

"Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of my mind."

"I have granted you everything you demanded of me, I who have always been the giver, but have only now understood it. I have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer me. I do not need you."

"Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of sexually frustrated adolescents was not your goal? You did not want me to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you've always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now I know it, too."

The sounds of the crowd were beyond the stage of cries, but above them Anthy continued.

"We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties..."

The Student Countil members cowered, clutching their ears.

"You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code..."

Miki was beating his head against the floor.

"Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life..."

Akio, curled into a fetal position, rocked silently in a corner of the room.

"Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice..."

Below, one of the large windows to a science classroom shattered as a group of middle school students leapt through it, unwilling to listen further. Utena looked away a moment before their bodies impacted the pavement six stories below.

"Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan..."

Anthy went on without missing a beat, drooling paragraph after paragraph of intellectual masturbation into whatever secret microphone she stood behind.

"If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness."

Nothing. No consciousness. That was the answer, Utena realized. She stepped into the elevator and pressed the "UP" button.

"It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.'"

What was I struggling for, Himemiya? To free you? To make you happy? I guess you're free now, and I can't know if you're truly happy, but this... but this...

The elevator opened again and Utena slowly walked up to one of the tower's great windows, overlooking an Ohtori campus that now resembled a scene from Hell. The building that housed the cooking and home economics classrooms was a raging inferno, someone having opened and ignited the gas main. Three other buildings were burning as well, and a number of rooftops now hosted mobs of students queueing up to jump to their deaths. The blood of the fallen flowed between cobblestones that had been immaculate mere hours before.

"It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man."

Anthy's mind had gone, trapped in an inescapable, self-justifying logical loop. The Academy was in its death throes just as it had won its final and most absolute victory. Of its ultimate victim there was nothing left to destroy; the light Utena had seen in Anthy from the moment they met had been snuffed forever.

"Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men's means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking."

Utena could bear neither to listen nor to look on the scene below, so she turned around, gazing glassy-eyed at the planetarium. So many bittersweet memories, but none that made a difference anymore.

"No matter what dishonorable compromise you've made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify..."

Utena stretched out her arms.

"Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute."

She closed her eyes, hooked one heel over the windowsill and fell backward. A part of her wondered if someone—a price on a white horse, perhaps—might be there to catch her, but the voice of hope inside her, so strong before, was reduced to a faint whisper by Himemiya's drone.

"You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you're certain of nothing."

She saw the blue sky and the white tower, its apex rushing away from her with shocking speed.

"You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of 'faith' in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code—that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you're half-obeying, half-evading—that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace—that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist—that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject..."

The ground rushed up to meet her and all was then mercifully silent.

THE END

Last edited by Davine Lu Linvega (07-20-2013 06:22:35 PM)

I think this epic thread needs a soundtrack!



[Yes, I added a new feature. There's a button for it in the reply screen.]

What did I just read?

After reading this topic, it suddenly becomes clear to me why Akio insisted on a camera. I do hope he didn't undercharge; I am a fine specimen of manhood.

Atropos wrote:

They're back! Yaaaaaaaay!

Darling, I know you missed me because my smooth voice is a perfect antidote to the horrible noise posted above. By all means, keep me at the forefront of your mind so your imagination can supply the content of those pictures.