BW Media Spotlight

I was watching an episode of the original Kino’s Journey recently. The episode was part two of “Coliseum”, where Kino ends up in a deathmatch tournament, though surrendering is an option, but the main story isn’t what matters. It’s what happens at the start of the episode. The final four are forced by the mad king behind the event to watch a puppet show about how he ascended to the throne. I won’t go into details, but one of the participants got really angry (because his own story was tied to the events) while another was bored by it and Kino and the other girl were at most apathetic to the whole thing.

I was thinking at first how the reaction to that story helped set up the character’s reveal by the end of the story since it was kind of obvious who he really was. As my brain tends to do with a good story, it went into being a character there myself (or some better variant of myself), confronting the man as Kino would do later, but in my own way. I figured out who he was and why he hated the king from his reaction, noting that stories are a sort of gateway to the soul. Usually we think about that when it comes to the writer, but then I took a different mental path: what does our reaction to stories say about us?

One date idea I’ve had (if I could find a woman to agree to one and time slips further away from me) is a personal double feature. She grabs her favorite movie, I grab mine, we watch both and then we explain to the other why that movie mattered to us. Two people can have the same favorite movie, or book, or episode, or game but for different reasons. At a time when Hollywood’s alleged creatives seem transfixed on telling their story through characters they didn’t create at the expense of those characters’ stories, I kind of wonder what the stories we’re into says about us, because there are so many types out there.

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