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krpalmerThe ninth translated volume of Legend of the Galactic Heroes I understood to be the penultimate instalment in the series. “Don’t count the volumes until they’re in your hand” still hasn’t left my mind, but the ninth volume did at least move beyond “Yang Wen-li fights an endless rear-guard action against ever greater odds on the historically informed thought even his decayed and unworthy democracy might yet be more capable of regeneration than Reinhard von Lohengramm’s fresh, enlightened despotism is capable of maintaining its obvious excellence.” The “new territory” reached, even so, is events I’m already familiar with from having seen the anime adaptation. Still, some of the details to what I was expecting might have faded from my memory over time.
I remembered that in this part of the story, with the last free survivors of the Free Planets Alliance isolated in a formidable but not “hidden” fortress, things turn somewhat against Reinhard when one of his most important commanders, Oskar von Reuenthal, raises his own flag of rebellion. Von Reuentual has his own deep-seated issues, much of it tied up with how he has one brown and one blue eye (this seems an occasional fetish when the larger eyes of a female anime character show a more unnatural mix of colour, although there the word “heterochromatic” isn’t constantly being used in description). However, what I hadn’t really remembered was him being nudged into this by conspirators rather than just talking himself into something grandiose. At the same time, though, the opposing personalities being too proud to ask forgiveness or go halfway did seem to work for me where at other times I’ve bumped up against wondering if fictional characters presented as “reasonable” can risk leaving me unable to shake the conviction they could have defused the conflicts they’re stuck in but for authorial fiat. It did make for affecting events, even if it also reminded me that in the anime ordinary starships exploded once hit but the ships of important characters were just a bit more durable.
An earlier event in the book was something else I’d generally remembered too, but one comment about it did get my attention. At a low ebb when reminded of an atrocity he’d permitted for the sake of ending a conflict, Reinhard asks that his trusted advisor Hildegarde von Mariendorf not leave him during the night. Trying to make up for his lapse of honour, he follows with a proposal of marriage; then, though, there’s the eventual revelation that, as in other finger-wagging warnings, one night can amount to an imperial heir on the way. I suppose I’d have casually accepted all of that potentially comedic awkwardness, but the comment that caught my eye declared Reinhard’s “physiological desires, although not entirely absent, were simply very weak.” Perhaps I bumped up against how often I’ll shrug and “leave a fictional character’s sex life out of the way” (even as I can contemplate “others” might have been supposing Reinhard in denial about his long-gone companion Siegfried Kircheis or just stuck with some form of sublimated sister complex). I am aware comments like “nice girls don’t think about that” have caused their own problems (even as young men are either winked at or saddled with their own hardships), and yet this did leave me with things to think about. The book, anyway, did declare “we can understand those of more powerful lusts than our own, but we struggle to do so when faced with someone whose drives are weaker.”
After finishing this volume I did some looking and turned up pre-order listings for the tenth, which I suppose to be the last. I do have recollections of what should be happening in it, but I’m willing to be surprised by the details even as I keep trying to tell myself I still have to “hope it’ll show up too.” (At one point in this volume, though, I did feel surprised by one character described as wearing a cape, where I’d supposed Reinhard the only person who’d sported one in the anime to signal his uniqueness. With some spot-checking, however, I was able to see the uniforms had been redesigned partway through.)
I remembered that in this part of the story, with the last free survivors of the Free Planets Alliance isolated in a formidable but not “hidden” fortress, things turn somewhat against Reinhard when one of his most important commanders, Oskar von Reuenthal, raises his own flag of rebellion. Von Reuentual has his own deep-seated issues, much of it tied up with how he has one brown and one blue eye (this seems an occasional fetish when the larger eyes of a female anime character show a more unnatural mix of colour, although there the word “heterochromatic” isn’t constantly being used in description). However, what I hadn’t really remembered was him being nudged into this by conspirators rather than just talking himself into something grandiose. At the same time, though, the opposing personalities being too proud to ask forgiveness or go halfway did seem to work for me where at other times I’ve bumped up against wondering if fictional characters presented as “reasonable” can risk leaving me unable to shake the conviction they could have defused the conflicts they’re stuck in but for authorial fiat. It did make for affecting events, even if it also reminded me that in the anime ordinary starships exploded once hit but the ships of important characters were just a bit more durable.
An earlier event in the book was something else I’d generally remembered too, but one comment about it did get my attention. At a low ebb when reminded of an atrocity he’d permitted for the sake of ending a conflict, Reinhard asks that his trusted advisor Hildegarde von Mariendorf not leave him during the night. Trying to make up for his lapse of honour, he follows with a proposal of marriage; then, though, there’s the eventual revelation that, as in other finger-wagging warnings, one night can amount to an imperial heir on the way. I suppose I’d have casually accepted all of that potentially comedic awkwardness, but the comment that caught my eye declared Reinhard’s “physiological desires, although not entirely absent, were simply very weak.” Perhaps I bumped up against how often I’ll shrug and “leave a fictional character’s sex life out of the way” (even as I can contemplate “others” might have been supposing Reinhard in denial about his long-gone companion Siegfried Kircheis or just stuck with some form of sublimated sister complex). I am aware comments like “nice girls don’t think about that” have caused their own problems (even as young men are either winked at or saddled with their own hardships), and yet this did leave me with things to think about. The book, anyway, did declare “we can understand those of more powerful lusts than our own, but we struggle to do so when faced with someone whose drives are weaker.”
After finishing this volume I did some looking and turned up pre-order listings for the tenth, which I suppose to be the last. I do have recollections of what should be happening in it, but I’m willing to be surprised by the details even as I keep trying to tell myself I still have to “hope it’ll show up too.” (At one point in this volume, though, I did feel surprised by one character described as wearing a cape, where I’d supposed Reinhard the only person who’d sported one in the anime to signal his uniqueness. With some spot-checking, however, I was able to see the uniforms had been redesigned partway through.)