Invisigoth wrote: ↑Sun Jan 06, 2019 11:07 am
Okashinamaru wrote: ↑Sun Jan 06, 2019 9:08 am
Ah yes, the white knight sallies forth to save the damsel in distress, and then she swoons over him and they live happily ever after. I guess this is a fantasy story after all.
Do you even read MegaTokyo bro?
Well, maybe, or maybe not. Or maybe Okashinamaru just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
Okashinamaru,
1) I think Kimiko sees Piro as much more than a boy-toy. Does she want him for herself? Maybe, but the last we knew, she was trying (as I think Cidjen has noted) to help him sort out his feelings for Miho.
2) I think it can fairly be said that up until the last week or so (in Megatokyo time) that Miho was pretty self-centered, believing that (except for a few people who knew her secret) people in general saw her as merely a toy to use for their own purposes. Recent events have proven to her that there are people (chief among them, Piro) who see her as more than a "story", who see her as someone worthy of love in her own right. Is she going to have difficulty in relating properly to those people, occasionally making mistakes and mis-steps? Of course she will -- she's been in a prison of sorts for over a century (if we're to believe her back-story), and freedom is a hard thing to get used to.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
There's a certain comfort in avoiding entanglements, in seeking to make one's heart unbreakable, the better to avoid having your heart broken yet again by other people, or by life generally. Give Miho some credit for turning away from that road, dude.
3) As for Ping ...... Miho's prison was one of bitterness and cynicism. Ping's prison is one of ignorance. We humans grow up (or should grow up) learning about our own natures and the natures of other people, and in "rubbing against other other people" learn how to deal with their rough edges (and our own) and come to know how to love and be loved. Ping never had that. Miho learned the wrong lesson from her experiences -- Ping has had basically no lessons at all, and has to play "catch up" on the 15 or 20 years of life that we take for granted.
Basically, Ping is struggling to grasp something that a lot of people have a problem with ...
Robert Godwin, in his blog, "One Cosmos", 22 Oct 2014 wrote:It is that the body is not made for oneself, but for the other. I can't remember the psychoanalytic theorist who discusses this, nor does it really matter, but it is a kind of narcissism to presume that one's genitals belong to oneself, so to speak. Rather, penis "belongs" to vagina, and vice versa (obvious, right?). The one is obviously meaningless in the absence of the other, for it is robbed of its sufficient reason; each is a signifier that doesn't refer to itself, but to its complementary opposite, on which it has a "lawful" claim ("lawful," as in being "in the nature of things").
This, I suggest, is the "spirit" of the truth which the Biblical injunction condemning onanism (and homosexuality, for that matter) is really about, for it violates God's design: that it is not good for man to be alone (or with a narcissistic image of himself, which amounts to the same thing via proxy).
As LaBarre explains, one of the "wrong messages" one may internalize from a dysfunctional childhood is that "there is no love to be had in another's body, and his only pleasure resources are in his own body and his own mind; he is not taught by love of the Other, the not-self that lies outside his own organic skin." Thus, the real injunction is against a self-sufficiency that forecloses the space where love and knowledge (not to mention religion) occur. The same thing would apply to alcoholism, or food addiction, or any other activity that encloses us in vice instead of versa.
(Godwin is referring primarily to men, but the same thing applies to women, too, for that matter.)
The last paragraph of the quote from Godwin applies to Miho, too -- her childhood may not have been dysfunctional, but her century-and-a-half-long young-adulthood certainly has been.
.... I've been banging away on this keyboard for most of an hour, and I have to go. (Please keep your cheers to yourselves.
)
And where's Iffy when you need him, anyway?
(Edited for grammar)
I'm asking what things, subtle or otherwise, that "suspicion" is based on.
