Hollow//Redux

In August, I went and posted an entry that I'd written way back at the start of the year. The post in question was ambiguous, and odd, and unfocused, but I thought that it might deserve a little bit of clarification/closure now that Animania has finished for this year. The post in question concerned the fictional monsters called Hollow from Manga and Anime series Bleach.


Because I've posted so many times about it, I don't see a need to explain the plot. Maybe a little bit about how the monsters work, but that's all.

The post I'd written was a reflection on how I had tried to cope with losing something valuable at the start of 2011 by giving up on trying to feel things. On having emotional responses and instead just doing things because instinct told me to.

This had upsides and downsides. It meant that I didn't really feel the fallout of the loss until a couple months after everything had gone down (which isn't to say it hurt less; it was only delaying the inevitable), and it meant that I was able to keep functioning at nearly the same level as before. Or at least, to a level where I wouldn't be a drag on other people.
The downside of not allowing yourself to think or feel, and instead to run on instinct, is that humans are inherently selfish and broken people. We're not perfect. We mess up and if I was to follow my instinct all of the time, it would have just spiraled into this out-of-control, self-serving mess and I would have hurt a lot of friends in the process.

So in short, allowing myself to be hollow for most of last year was something that was do-able, but ultimately wouldn't hold out. It was this big ball of lucid, angry emptiness and as enticing as it was, I'm kind of glad that I don't have to be there any more.

See? This is what happens when you put the wrong focus in your heart and it gets ripped out.
One big ol' hole and something you have to hide behind.

It's taken a while, but I'm getting better.

So, that's kind of a recap on that post. A little more focused, a little less ambiguous. I'm trying to leave it as ambiguous because when this blog got started, I didn't want it to turn into a 'Dear Diary' shermozzle. So it's a matter of figuring out what personal things are okay to talk about and which are not necessary, so you still get cool posts that have more than just cats in them.

Where are we going?

Oh yes. Animania is done, and now I'm trying to figure out how much it's okay to have my friends freak out over me dressing up as a monster on Saturday and having the photos turn up on social networking sites with my name attached to them.

Because my costume was kind of freaky. I did go as a Hollow.

Why?

Because it's how I face the things I get scared of. Infiltrate and disarm from the inside out. It's why I did Weeping Angels with my mates earlier in the year. Yes, those critters are hella scary. Yes, I have been scared of them. Yes, they still give me chills.

But I know what goes into them now. I don't have to be afraid of that anymore.

I suppose that this is where people would normally go "But Brooke, it's a fictional thing. You don't have to be afraid of it at all."

What, so you've never watched a scary movie and then left all the lights on in the house?

Most people get less scared of things by forgetting them. I'm not good at forgetting.

So when I've dressed as something scary, it's my way of coping. It's my way of disarming it. It's also how I remind myself that as a fallen being, I could actually become this if I don't watch myself. And not 'become' as in, dress up as one. I mean "put on a mask and be unable to take it off because you've assumed too many characteristics of the thing you're portraying".

And that can happen. It does happen. Maybe not with literally turning into a critter with big teeth, but socially? It's much easier to gossip when you are around other people who gossip. It's much easier to let your standards slip if you have mates who don't care about the occasional laspe.

Manifesting the scary into something that I can put on is one part of it. But being able to get to the end of the day and taking that mask off is probably the more important thing. You feel like a weight has been lifted.

(Both metaphorically and literally. Saturday's mask was heavy.)

So, my friends; to those who understand my cosplay and those who don't. Please don't freak out if or when you see me dressed up in the scariest mask you can think of. I'm just sabotaging the cool-looking things that I'm scared of.

Hollow.

January, 2012:

Hey guys. Did you miss me?

I missed you too. Unless that answer was a 'no' and then I'm not sure why exactly you're continuing reading. But carry on.

I could spend an outrageous amount of time explaining why it is I've been missing out on blogging, or we could save that for another time. It doesn't make very good material. Either way, I am now finding that my world has a little bit more time, so I'll try and blog more.

Pathetic excuses aside, I thought I might try and yak a little bit about something that immediately identifies my nerd-dom but will hopefully make decent blog material.

Have your seen/read/heard of Bleach before?

It's a manga series (there's an anime about it too) - so, a Japanese comic/cartoon/blah - about a schoolkid who can see ghosts.

Odds are, you've already heard me talk about if before if you've read the blog, or met me in person. Anyway.

The gist of the story is, the schoolkid acquires supernatural powers from the other main character - a female 'reaper', and then they and a bunch of other characters do what all the Reapers (I'm going to stick with the Japanese term for the job from now: Shinigami) do in a bunch of adventures. They send the ghosts of people to the afterlife and kill the bad spirits (called Hollows).

A Hollow is a ghost with no heart. They turn into monsters and eat other ghosts, people, Shinigami, blah blah blah. The point is that it's a Shonen manga so there's a truckload of fighting and drama and explosions and infrequent fanservice, which is frankly embarrassing even at the best of times.

But rather then spend my long preamble telling you about the Boob Lady, I kinda wanted to bring up the idea of the Hollow.

Hollows, or the theory of a Hollow, was something that I checked out earlier in the year, because I based a uni project around the idea of the mask, which relates to Hollows and the such.

Pictures explain better.

So, there is the hollow. It has a hole where the heart used to be and a mask that shields what is left of the ghost. What is left exactly? According to Kubo, the writer of the series, 'a heap of instincts'.

Hollows get to be more fun later in the series, because the main character, Ichigo, has some fairly close encounters with one particular one. I'm deliberately being vague.

What does this have to do with anything?

At the start of 2011, I had a bit of a 'life priority reshuffle'. It was needed, but it was hella painful, and for a while there, things got...interesting.

So, because the brain and the heart were playing up, I spent a lot of the year playing with and tinkering on the concept of instinct.


I did more things based on it. I allowed it to become a little more rampant, at the cost of a bit of sanity, and probably part of my reputation with my housemate. But then, housemates are spared the tediousness of interacting with the mask instead of what exactly is underneath it.

(You see what I did there?)

What I am saying is, there is no point to a mask with a housemate. Anyway, I'm drafting this when I ought to be in bed, so I hope that there's some quality still intact.

Rambling aside, this year got to be very different. And spending bits of it as a Hollow was...

...I want to and at the same time don't want to say worth it. Do you want to spend half your time running on instinct?

That's up to you.

What I found was that it was almost exactly like Ichigo's experience in dealing with...yeah. I mean, it's useful for getting out of tight spots, and berserkering is great, but a lot of the time got spent either trying to rein it in or trying to regain control.

And truth be told, there's no way that people are able to hide behind a mask for too long. The harder you try, the harder the repercussions are later. Things just...don't work.

But then, this world is fallen. Things don't ever work. And I know that choosing to live by instinct won't ever work well because eventually it just rolls around and turns into self-serving desire before biting you in the bum. Not productive.

Did I enjoy my year as a Hollow?

Some bits. The bits where I got to sit down and draw, and that was what was required for uni work, then instinct was great. Especially in an art school that pushes Abstract so much (I should put that in Comic Sans to make you understand how I feel about being told to stick to blobs all the time). You sit down, tell your brain to shut up about how much you suck, and get down to whatever it is you're working on. Good times.

Would I choose to keep living as a Hollow?

I don't think so. It's handy, but kinda messes up the psyche a lot.

Is this post one that needed a filter?

Probably.

I'm going to save this as a draft and show you tomorrow.

*Eight months later*

Gilligan-style cuts are amazing, no?

I came home for this weekend. Partly to see the folks, partly to rub my face on the owl some more, and partly to prep for Animania in September.

Anyway. I do a lot more driving by myself now. Was going to get people to come with, and then I left Newie before any of that could get organised. So I got to spend three hours yelling at myself and singing/yowling along with the Hume brothers and Florence Welch. Small cars are amazing.

I'm sorry, we'll get back on track shortly.

So, Animania. And I suddenly realised the Batman take I was having this year on making of costumes. Because earlier in the year I got to be a Weeping Angel with some mates. And in a month, have a guess at what I'm going to be?

Covered in white paint, that's what.

Tomorrow will be sit down and Handicrafts day, where I will sew my sister a trenchcoat, and she will cast a Hollow mask on my head. It will be grand.

But the concept of the Hollow, as I mentioned earlier/ages ago, is something I find intriguing. And more than a bit scary, for a variety of reasons. I think it's a reminder of what we could be if we didn't keep stuff in check.

Vague stuff FTW.

Batman? You know, dress as what frightens you. And what looks gnarly.

I've got a bit more to go before I can give a convincing Hollow scream though.

4th wall? Pfft.

I know, right. Two posts in a week? What, is the sky falling?
Maybe. It's been pretty wet and cold in Newcastle of late. I have to dress for snow weather in order to approach the Darkrooms at Uni, and required dunking in hot water to defrost when I got home. But still.

I guess that the upping has been a little to do with Uni. This is both work and procrastination for me; Work because I'm blogging about Uni, and procrastination because it is a more fun method than simply typing things out in Word and printing it off. What can I say? Tactile thinking is just more fun. Anyway. Here goes with the next concept I'm working with.

This is project #2 for Fibres. Being out of sequence is fun because it confuses everyone, and I feel that brings us all down to my level.

'Do you know what's going on? No? Ok. Me neither.'

The name of the module is called 'The Fabric of Myth' and relates directly to the role of fibres and textiles in myth. Golden fleeces, windbags, shrouds and string-operated GPS systems (wait. Did I just double-state something?) all relate heavily to myth and the use of textiles, and Greek myths, which are the basis for 'classical' mythology, are a bag of fun. I think I just lost my thought train.

ANYWAY.

I was originally going to create a spin on the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and make some wearable art that was wings. This got changed slightly a lot when I went to Ironfest in...wait. When was that? April. I think.
Ironfest is in Lithgow, and after trying to explain it to a few people who had no idea what I was babbling about, got simplified to 'something like a produce fair for Medieval enthusiasts'

Pictured: Sparta. Source

Ironfest is a bucketful of things more than that, because the medieval enthusiasts happen to usually be interested in things like Steampunk and Doctor Who. This fact is important. Save it for later. The fact that the festival is also held in Lithgow (which is somewhere in the Blue Mountains, in the freezing bit) means that they behave a bit different around pointy objects than the guys who run Anime conventions in the city. Go to Animania and your props need to be made from foam, cardboard or balsa wood. Go to Ironfest and people are walking around with legit swords and machetes and selling said swords and machetes and assorted pointy things.


They had things to look at and things to do, and my friends and I took great interest in Archery (that you could partake in), Horseback Archery (Which spectators could spectate but not try out (understandably)), Jousting (see above), Falconry (Also just a viewing) and the Gran Melee (guys in chainmail and half-plate armour hitting each other with swords. Do the mathematics on audience participation yourself).

All of these things were excellent, and most of them we took care to check out in detail on the Saturday rather than the Sunday.

See, for the last month, and in frightening concentration over the last three days, we had been constructing our own costumes for wearing at Ironfest. Dressing up was not mandatory but there were a lot of people at the event in varying degrees of anachronistic wear. And a gimp. And a lady with no pants.

Those last two bits are not important.

So, our group had been constructing costumes because there are only so many places where it is acceptable to wear something spun entirely from fiction.

This is where the story begins to track back to it's origin and away from tangents involving Brooke's first experience of Dutch Pancakes.

We'd made Weeping Angel costumes.

Weeping Angels are one of the monsters that grace the screen of Doctor Who. They are...wait. Mister Tennant? Care to explain?

This is going to be fun for my Tutor who actually gets to mark the work and finds just the video link.

Hi Brett!

The basic concept behind the Weeping Angels is that they can't move while you're looking at them. When you blink, they can move (frightfully quickly) and if they touch you, they send you back in time (if you're lucky) and consume the energy you would have expended in the present. If you're not so lucky they'll just kill you.

Also, we find another excellent easter egg later in the Canon of Doctor Who. Anything that takes the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel. Photographs; videos. Don't look at one in the eyes or it'll plant a seed of one in your mind. Weeping Angels seem to in general possess the same 'screw the 4th wall' tendencies that Costumers and Cosplayers display when creating.

Oh. Cosplay?
I mentioned it a while ago in this post. I guess I'll keep adding to it over time.

Cosplay = Costume Play.

Recreating a character from fiction into the real world. There's usually some degree of role play involved in there too. But why do we do it?

I think there's a combination of factors.

Retelling the myth (story)
Becoming the protagonist/character
Enjoying some kind of escape through whimsy-
Taking part in an adventure beyond desks and paper and computers.

"Can't work. Busy fighting Angels."

There may also be some identifying factor between the individual and the character portrayed (which is why I pick my cosplays carefully) or maybe the character is just very good at wiping the floor with the faces of his enemies.

That aside, I think the adventure factor is fairly prominent. In the same way that you watch a Die Hard film for the amount of things John McClane can improbably explode, people interested in the realm of Costume and Character love a good suspension of disbelief.

Ran out of bullets? You just fired 20 shots from that one magazine!

This is especially relevant in our case, because when my mates and I rocked up at Ironfest decked from head to toe in grey paint and foam wings, we got to experience the other end of the stick. We were the characters spun from fiction. The walking myth. And it was a lot of fun.

See, a good cosplay is accurate.
A great cosplay is where the wearer is willing to behave like the character.
A brilliant cosplay is when the audience completes the myth and responds appropriately to the thing being portrayed.

We had people for a radius of ten metres staring at us, murmuring 'don't blink' and the like, staring us down. Small kids followed in our wake clamouring at how we weren't supposed to move because they were looking at us.

I may have been reading too much Cracked.com in the last week.

Far from it being that they thought we were legit; the people we met that day were willing to play along because we all knew the rules to this imaginary game, and it allowed us to spin fiction into reality with quite amusing results.

When we were finishing the costumes (on the vacant lot next to Jo's relative's house), panicking and trying to remember to eat before heading out, Jo stated that he would be happy if we had one person ask for a photo.

We left on Sunday evening as very happy people.