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Old 2010-12-16, 20:40   Link #19846
Renall
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Join Date: May 2009
Allow me to attempt to explain why Shkanon in the traditional sense is the most disrespectful thing to be wielded against those characters.

Shannon and Kanon are furniture. Furniture attends to the needs of the witch and serves the witch's ends. From the standpoint that the witch is the teller of stories (whether literally or in "magic" terms, or one and the same if you wish), furniture are literary devices that serve the ends of the storyteller.

Shannon and Kanon are created as literal literary furniture, dehumanized pieces put into place to fulfill the needs of the writer. They don't really have backstories, they're servant characters (a traditional utility role), they're given magic powers when it suits (described as human forms created by Kinzo's magic), whatever is required.

Except... they start to rebel, as early as the second message bottle story. Shannon is a step ahead. She desires to become human. Beatrice doesn't think it's possible and warns her she'll only be disappointed. She is a character, not a person; that's basically Beatrice's thesis there. Kanon warns Shannon of the same thing. But he too winds up falling for Jessica and wanting to become human.

They rebel a lot and a lot more often against the machinations of "Beatrice." They plant themselves in opposition to the role that the storyteller originally set for them. This continues through multiple authors, but it's even present in the original. The whole notion of "the author seeing themselves in Shannon and Kanon" is important, because my suspicion is they were not initially supposed to do this. If you think about the roles they play in ep1, they're rather minor players (despite being obvious culprit candidates). Their surface roles are basically to play as victims. As their rebellion mounts and they fight toward humanity, their prominence increases.

Kanon is more obvious than Shannon perhaps because of the long delay before we learn his name. Kanon is just Kanon for the longest time. A fake name for a fake person, which is all he thinks he is. It doesn't matter if Yoshiya is actually his name or not or if there ever was a Kanon in the first place. By claiming a name he's claiming to be a person, his own person at that. There is a freaking person behind Kanon, and that person deserves to be able to fight for Jessica just like anyone else. That he may not have "really" existed isn't relevant to where he is now. We can actually twist George's words around there, in fact...

What does it mean exactly to "become human?" I think, in part, it means not being disposable or flexible anymore as a character. Shannon and Kanon become Sayo and Yoshiya and their personalities and desires become fixed. They are now as predictable as any other piece, and that's a good thing, because it means their characters have enough depth that they can no longer be manipulated on a whim.

In ep6 they're set against each other, and they fight, but then at the end everybody gets what they wanted anyway. They are human, their love is real, they deserve happiness. ANGE wonders whether this "satisfies the witch." Now if they didn't do what the author wanted, would that satisfy her? Well... possibly. Just because they took on a life that wasn't intended doesn't mean that unexpected development wasn't actually a pleasant surprise. Or that it didn't turn out to mean something more than would have been expected.

Now compare this to a certain person we've been introduced to. Someone torn between feelings of being inadequate and inhuman and believing themselves to be special and deserving of so much more than they have. Someone whose wishes to become human were transferred subconsciously into even the smallest roles in their stories. And those wishes took form, took root, and took flight.

Beatrice demanded Battler acknowledge her as a witch, but I think it's clear that what Battler actually realized and acknowledged was a person. Which was the goal all along. If the intent is to mirror the human author's personal struggle to be acknowledged, shunting Shannon and Kanon into authorial gimmick mode is denying the very same thematic element.

It may well be that they were implemented to create that doubt. But they fought against it over time. They distinguished themselves. Behind a surface existence, two "characters" fought to become "humans." Behind a story, a "witch" fought for the same thing. I don't want to deny that any more than Battler wanted a family member cast into the role of a killer. It's easy to mock shippers' attachment to the Shannon/George or Kanon/Jessica relationships, but isn't it telling that there's anything there to appreciate in the first place?
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Redaction of the Golden Witch
I submit that a murder was committed in 1996.
This murder was a "copycat" crime inspired by our tales of 1986.
This story is a redacted confession.

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