“The Patient” | Handmade paper and found object installation | 2021
In the context of medicine, what does it mean to be born “different? How is the helpless body of the deformed, defective, or debilitated patient regarded by the doctor? Is it tragedy from the beginning? Is it the justification for a benevolent surgeon’s science experiments? Contending with questions about my own medical history, the piece asks: what’s does it look like when your body isn’t your own? How does it feel?
The viewer was encouraged to enter the room and handle the folder of documents, which contains copies of medical records pertaining to a series of consultations, physical exams, and surgical procedures that I underwent from ages 4 to 6. On the cover and occasionally nestled between the pages of documents are a series of monotypes exploring the thoughts and feelings that arose from the consequences of these events.
itachi’s “plans” are like. if he was helping naruto fight pain, his plan would be to launch a missile directly at naruto’s forehead, counting on naruto to block it and for it to hit pain instead. that’s the galaxy brain plane of logic he operates on. if he was helping sakura fight sasori he’d beat her with sasori’s puppets and when she got pissed enough to effectively fight back he’d say ah…just as planned. dude isn’t smart we need to accept this
Discworld is the only fantasy setting I know of that opens with The Magic Is Going Away and everyone is just kind of okay with it. Like “Welp, got to move with the times, can’t run a condom factory when there’s elves all over the place”
I feel like a big part of this is because the Disc isn’t just a fantasy world where they have condom factories, but a fantasy world where condom factories are actually relatively new. The inventor is (was) still alive, and his products are still somewhat controversial.
The setting changes.
In most fantasy settings, The Magic Is Going Away basically means “the world is going to be the same medieval cesspool it’s always been, but now you won’t even have a friendly neighbourhood wizard to cheer you up”. You don’t see that many fantasy settings that change beyond occasionally getting rid of the old ‘evil’ ruler and bringing in a new ‘good’ one.
Discworld, on the other hand, progresses. Over the course of the series (which appears to be only about a generation or two, in-universe) we basically see Ankh Morpork go from a Stereotypical Fantasy City to a Functioning Society.
We watch them develop newspapers, a police force, a postal service, what amounts to a telegraph system, and a railway network. We see dwarves, trolls, vampires ands goblins slowly gain acceptance. The Mended Drum goes from being baffled by the Disc’s First Tourist to holding choreographed bar fights.
And there are moments where people mourn this.
One of Cohen the Barbarian’s main purposes as a character is arguably to mourn this shift from an old-style fantasy world to a society with real world implications. The short story ‘Troll Bridge’, where he goes out to fight a troll and ends up reminiscing with him about The Good Old Days when heroes used to fight trolls, is a great example of this.
Angua worries about the melting pot only melting one way and erasing the cultures of fantasy creatures. The dwarves have a whole movement to try and preserve the Old Ways, even as their children embrace the New Ones.
In ‘Shepherd’s Crown’, right after we just had a whole book about how wonderful the railways are for the Disc, we have Tiffany Aching’s father wondering if he’ll be the last Aching to own a farm on the chalk (and have that family’s semi-magical connection to the land), because Wentworth would rather be an engine driver.
There are several moments throughout the series where characters do stop and look back at how things used to be, before everything went Modern, and feel some sadness about the things they’ve lost. But the series is also very clear about the things that are gained.
And that’s what I think makes it so realistic. Progress rarely does go all one way, and some things are always lost, but most people accept that you can’t spend your whole life pining after the elves (who were never really as nice as you remember them) when the city needs condoms.
Eiji Ohashi aka 大橋英児 (Japanese, b. 1955, Wakkanai, Hokkaido, Japan) - For years Eiji Ohashi has been capturing Japan through its lonely Vending Machines at Night and during Snowstorms. Photography
