{"id":4917,"date":"2019-12-14T17:10:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-14T17:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4917"},"modified":"2019-12-14T17:10:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T17:10:52","slug":"fallen-angels-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4917","title":{"rendered":"Fallen Angels #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are from the digital edition.<\/em> This isn’t a continuity-heavy issue, and a lot of it is taken up with a fight scene… so this is probably the shortest annotations post yet.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Psylocke\/Kwannon, sheathing a bloody sword, surrounded by blossom, and with another woman apparently training behind her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 2-3.<\/strong> Apoth’s internal monologue.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apoth – which gets the computer font lettering – gives us a weird speech where the main points are (a) he is God; (b) God transcends morality, and birth and death are neither good nor bad but just part of the scheme of things; (c) he is lonely; and (d) Psylocke is his “mother” who created him. He apparently wants to draw in Psylocke so they can be together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stuff about birth and death lacking moral content echoes Kwannon’s training material from earlier issues. More generally, Apoth seems to be saying that people turned him into a God, in order that he in turn could elevate them. (There’s a man-machine version of the Sistine Chapel fingers to emphasise the point.) Again, this is squarely in the Hickman era’s theme of technological progress versus evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

PAGES 4-5. <\/strong>Recap and credits. This is “Seppuku” by Bryan Hill and Szymon Kudranski. “Seppuku” is a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment, probably better known as “harakiri”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 6-13. <\/strong>They fight.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psylocke and X-23.<\/strong> This series continues to push the idea of X-23 being trained as a warrior by Psylocke. The problem is that this seems to ignore the level of experience that X-23’s previously been shown having, and to largely disregard her character development over the last few years. Either that or Psylocke’s advice is pitched wrong – no doubt Psylocke, a trained ninja with unique experiences, does have some things she could usefully share with X-23, but it’s coming across on the page as if she’s meant to be mentoring a rookie. I generally try and save that sort of comment for the reviews but… it’s difficult to read this book’s take on X-23 as a plausible one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Portuguese dialogue.<\/strong> It means what you’d expect from the context. X-23’s translations are accurate. The last line, which she doesn’t explicitly translate, is “Don’t be afraid. This won’t hurt.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 14-17.<\/strong> Cable gets captured by Apoth.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cable gets separated during the fight, and runs into… well, it looks like some sort of shadowy portal thing, I guess. This is a servant of Apoth, as clarified later. It says that he and Nate will have a future together, but that’s probably just promising some kind of a permanent bonding rather than having any particular prophecy or future-history in mind. When we see this thing later, it looks like a floating cyborg thingummy, rather than the hazy portal we see here – maybe it changes, maybe this is meant to be Cable’s point of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing which goes into the back of Nate’s head is presumably an Overclock device, and apparently Nate’s going to be very happy through losing individuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong> Data page with “Excerpts from the scrolls of the exile.” It’s more stuff to the effect that conventional morality is a prison and we must transcend it to achieve self-actualisation. The butterfly image returns as well: once transformed, we will be butterflies and we will forget our past lives. The references to “the palm of the hand” and “weapon of the hand”, despite not being capitalised, obviously refer to the Hand ninja order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second page, however, seems to do a U-turn. It says that evil people will try to convince you that there’s no good and evil. Still, the writer remains concerned that comfort is a distraction from self-actualisation, which he compares here to the forging of a sword – making the point that it can only be done once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“They will use the word ‘peace’ to mean war. They will use the word ‘freedom’ to mean slavery.”<\/strong> “Peace is war” and “Freedom is slavery” were two of the slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984<\/em>. The third was “Ignorance is strength”, which also seems to fit neatly with the Hand’s “trust what you’re told” training philosophy. This is all fairly familiar brainwashing \/ “gaslighting” stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Tamashii o ireru”.<\/strong> As best I can tell, this just means something like “putting in the soul”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 20-25.<\/strong> X-23 and Psylocke decide to go after the abducted children before going after Cable.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s pointed out, very directly, that Apoth is really interested in Psylocke and has a thing about children. Perhaps less obvious is that in issue #2, it was X-23 who was interested in going after the children, and Psylocke who didn’t care unless Apoth was involved; those roles are reversed here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Apoth’s unspecified servant is shown more clearly. It’s a weird looking floating creature that says it wants to bring about a merger of humans, technology and mutants. In theory, this is interesting in terms of the wider Hickmanverse, since Apoth is trying to transcend the main divide that potentially destroys everyone – but being a villain, he’s going to overshoot the mark and make everyone the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 26-27.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads “NEXT: NYMPH”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are from the digital edition. This isn’t a continuity-heavy issue, and a lot of it is taken up with a fight scene… so this is probably the shortest annotations post yet. COVER \/ PAGE 1. Psylocke\/Kwannon, sheathing a bloody sword, surrounded by blossom, and with another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4917"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4922,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4917\/revisions\/4922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}