sailorkitty (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sailorkitty) wrote2020-01-17 02:25 pm
sailorkitty) wrote2020-01-17 02:25 pm
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Snowflake Challenge 09 - Reccing Canons!
And for the next Snowflake Challenge, we're meant to promote a canon. Since I've already hammered on and on about Desert Peach over here, I'm taking the oppertunity to rec two 19th century-ish canons, one of which is also by Barr.
Pandora’s Choice
What’s it about: 1840’s America. Pandora Blais is five years old. She likes reading, playing with her cousin, and making racket to force her father to acknowledge her existence. Her father, Christopher, is the heir to a large family company. He spends his days drinking his sorrows away, ignoring Pandora’s existence and mourning her mother, a Chinese prostitute. The story follows Pandora’s learning about the world around her, while also focusing on the circumstances of her birth, and why her family is so awfully broken.
What makes it good?
Women’s stories
It’s a very feminist piece of work - As in, it chronicles women and their place in 19th century America, and does so without seeming heavy-handed or placing them in what the period considered ’men’s roles’*. It’s very much in the style of Jane Eyre, as the story of women trying to find their place in a society with little room to spare.
Setting Porn
Like many classic shoujo comics, this story takes place in 19th century America. Unlike many classic shoujo comics, the author went all-in. The gorgeous period gowns all seem to be taken from remaining fashion plates. Even the men get to shine in bright colours, plaids, and pretty smoking jackets. The interiors are all delightfully ornate and gothic, as is fitting of the story and location. If you like eye candy, this won’t let you down.
Fucked-up Family Relationships
I’m not going to spoil the story, because it is a wild ride. I am going to say that it reads like something in the same tradition of The Monk! and other OTT Gothic novellas, without ever going completely off the rails. Everything seems plausible, especially once the character’s motivations are revealed. And still being very firmly grounded in 19th century literary traditions.
Characters/Ships
Pandora / Jeremy
Jeremy is an innocent and sensitive boy. Pandora is prickly and disillusioned. Their relationship has as much potential for happiness as it has for bleakness, owing to the dysfunction in their backgrounds.
Ronnie / Chris
Veronica is Chris’ ex-wife, and Pandora’s mother. She and Chris have a very bleak, and ultimately unhappy relationship. What we see is filled with contempt, pining, and grief. Which admittedly is catnip to some of us.
Victor / Chris
Dr. Victor Durand is Chris’ stepbrother, and the only one who really cares about him as a person. He looks after Chris partially out of guilt, partially due to a fucked up superiority complex. The author has been delightfully period on what their relationship is, but she also released this image a while back.
Where to find it:
It’s over here on Lezhin, costs ca 30 USD.
*Which is fine if you like that sort of thing, I just happen to prefer this kind.Art Samples
Stinz
Story
Stinz Löward lives in a small village in a small valley, in a culture deeply influenced by Bavaria. The story follows him and his family from colthood to old age, lingering on his early adulthood and middle-age. He joins the army, fights in a war and witnesses the effects of warfare on the world. Mainly, though, he raises a family with his wife and does mundane things like running for mayor, keeping his son out of trouble, and haggling with the local baron.
Oh, and he’s a centaur. Or a ’Half-Horse’ as they call themselves. In fact, his entire village and family are all half-horses. The world around them is human at first. Then there’s a war. And things change. But village life goes on.
What makes it good?
Slice of Life
This comic has the small-village atmosphere down to pat. Local urban legends, farmers with handsome daughters, everyone being related, teenagers getting up to shenanigans and marrying young. It also features a bit of conscription Comedy on the side, though still firmly in the realm of ’ordinary youths do ordinary army things’ (Though one of them have four legs instead of two).
The World
This comic is very firmly set in a German-speaking culture, despite not being ’our’ world. This is shown by the large amount of German expressions and neologisms (Germanic languages use compounds to an overbearing extent, making it very easy to come up with new ’authentic-sounding’ terms), which all serve to enhance the ’otherness’ of the setting.
The setting is a story in and of itself - I’m not going to spoil anything, but it sets off a lot of questions and has great potential for worldbuilding.
Where to find it
Read it for free at Webtoons!
Art Samples
Pandora’s Choice
What’s it about: 1840’s America. Pandora Blais is five years old. She likes reading, playing with her cousin, and making racket to force her father to acknowledge her existence. Her father, Christopher, is the heir to a large family company. He spends his days drinking his sorrows away, ignoring Pandora’s existence and mourning her mother, a Chinese prostitute. The story follows Pandora’s learning about the world around her, while also focusing on the circumstances of her birth, and why her family is so awfully broken.
What makes it good?
Women’s stories
It’s a very feminist piece of work - As in, it chronicles women and their place in 19th century America, and does so without seeming heavy-handed or placing them in what the period considered ’men’s roles’*. It’s very much in the style of Jane Eyre, as the story of women trying to find their place in a society with little room to spare.
Setting Porn
Like many classic shoujo comics, this story takes place in 19th century America. Unlike many classic shoujo comics, the author went all-in. The gorgeous period gowns all seem to be taken from remaining fashion plates. Even the men get to shine in bright colours, plaids, and pretty smoking jackets. The interiors are all delightfully ornate and gothic, as is fitting of the story and location. If you like eye candy, this won’t let you down.
Fucked-up Family Relationships
I’m not going to spoil the story, because it is a wild ride. I am going to say that it reads like something in the same tradition of The Monk! and other OTT Gothic novellas, without ever going completely off the rails. Everything seems plausible, especially once the character’s motivations are revealed. And still being very firmly grounded in 19th century literary traditions.
Characters/Ships
Pandora / Jeremy
Jeremy is an innocent and sensitive boy. Pandora is prickly and disillusioned. Their relationship has as much potential for happiness as it has for bleakness, owing to the dysfunction in their backgrounds.
Ronnie / Chris
Veronica is Chris’ ex-wife, and Pandora’s mother. She and Chris have a very bleak, and ultimately unhappy relationship. What we see is filled with contempt, pining, and grief. Which admittedly is catnip to some of us.
Victor / Chris
Dr. Victor Durand is Chris’ stepbrother, and the only one who really cares about him as a person. He looks after Chris partially out of guilt, partially due to a fucked up superiority complex. The author has been delightfully period on what their relationship is, but she also released this image a while back.
Where to find it:
It’s over here on Lezhin, costs ca 30 USD.
*Which is fine if you like that sort of thing, I just happen to prefer this kind.Art Samples
Stinz
Story
Stinz Löward lives in a small village in a small valley, in a culture deeply influenced by Bavaria. The story follows him and his family from colthood to old age, lingering on his early adulthood and middle-age. He joins the army, fights in a war and witnesses the effects of warfare on the world. Mainly, though, he raises a family with his wife and does mundane things like running for mayor, keeping his son out of trouble, and haggling with the local baron.
Oh, and he’s a centaur. Or a ’Half-Horse’ as they call themselves. In fact, his entire village and family are all half-horses. The world around them is human at first. Then there’s a war. And things change. But village life goes on.
What makes it good?
Slice of Life
This comic has the small-village atmosphere down to pat. Local urban legends, farmers with handsome daughters, everyone being related, teenagers getting up to shenanigans and marrying young. It also features a bit of conscription Comedy on the side, though still firmly in the realm of ’ordinary youths do ordinary army things’ (Though one of them have four legs instead of two).
The World
This comic is very firmly set in a German-speaking culture, despite not being ’our’ world. This is shown by the large amount of German expressions and neologisms (Germanic languages use compounds to an overbearing extent, making it very easy to come up with new ’authentic-sounding’ terms), which all serve to enhance the ’otherness’ of the setting.
The setting is a story in and of itself - I’m not going to spoil anything, but it sets off a lot of questions and has great potential for worldbuilding.
Where to find it
Read it for free at Webtoons!
Art Samples
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(Is that Takemiya Keiko/Moto Hagio in your icon!?)
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I had a feeling that you might like Pandora ^^
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Short answer: There are non-graphic scenes with realistic amount of blood, and some medical procedures that may or may not come across as disturbing. They are never intended to be gory, usually last for 1 panel at most, and care is taken to keep them from coming across as overly graphic. Series has (non-graphic) scenes of childbirth and abortion.
Long answer: Ronnie loses her leg in a non-graphic fashion in chapter 5. Chapter 6-7 has her wearing a historically correct metal/leather device in a few panels to stop the bleeding, there is some (but not much) blood coming from it. A monkey is also killed early on, nothing gory, but the corpse is shown briefly after being shot, with blood coming from it's head.
There's a one-panel scene of food preparation where a turkey is being cut into, the turkey is portrayed as 'realistically ick' but I wouldn't go so far as to call it gore.
5 or so chapters dealing with Victor's work as a doctor has blood from gore-happening-offscreen, it also contains a brutal late abortion on a young teenager. The act isn't shown onscreen(think 'before' and 'after' panels), but her clothed body is shown bleeding, and the remains are thrown into a container that is very much shadowed-out to keep it from looking explicit(This view is only for one panel). There is also a mention of removing healthy organs from an individual who likely would have preferred to keep them.
Pandora regularly fights her father, but these are all comedic in tone and never come close to strongly explicit. Neither does the domestic violence, which is not played for comedy.
I can't recall much coming close to 'guro' or what I would consider graphic. Nothing is shown for the sake of titillation, most of it is obscured and out of view, and exists to drive the story along by portraying the options available for characters living at the time.
(Disclaimer that I'm currently on limited bandwidth and can't check everything thoroughly right now. Also that these things are subjective and that you might not share my ideas of how to apply the terms used.)