James Bond – Page 3 – A Piece of the Sky

Midari and Yumeko

Yumeko understood Midari (Russian roulette, Zener ESP card deck), who lost a pretty ugly bet to Kirari. Most people write Midari off. I even wrote Midari, off at one point. I feel guilty about that now. But Midari has a good heart. She saved Yumeko, in Ep. 4, of Season 1, and she didn’t want Yumeko to face Kirari and endure the same fate she did.

Basically, if the Debt Swap game was about wrongs committed in between the genders, then the episodes about poor Midari’s story are about wrongs that women commit against each other. Obviously, however, there is no perfect world.

Midari and Yumeko are similar, but not the same. Midari is formidable because she has less fear, making her immune to several motivations most people have. Midari is a genius, a gambling One Punch Man. However, the weak side is sadness and ennui. Thus, her motivation to feel something, with the things most people fear most, is an uncommon motivation – but still a motivation.

Yumeko was able to exploit this. If a person has one motivation, once that motivation is figured out – however obscure that motivation is – their moves become predictable and the game has no risk. Hence why Yumeko became truly upset because the ESP game wasn’t gambling. Yumeko hated that Midari’s game had no risk, because even with scams, Midari rigged it so that she would lose.

0% or 100% probability are not your friends. If you eliminate all risk, even at the last second, you lose all reward. A world without risk is a world without change: a perfect world, but also a dead and frozen one.

To the uninitiated – compared to someone like Mary – Midari and Yumeko might as well be the same. I like Midari and Yumeko. I like that they don’t hold back their feelings of pleasure. They claim them and own them. You can afford to have a lot of fan service if the story is strong. Yumeko is empowered, and everything she does is consensual. She is happy and having fun with her life, naturally. That makes an enormous difference; that’s the difference, not the fan service itself

Kakegurui is so sexualized, that it’s funny. It’s fan service and it’s funny spicing up a show that would normally bore most people with probabilities and gambling math. It’s also sex positive. The women are owning their own sexuality. You can tell; there is a difference. All of this also fits with Yumeko’s confident, take no prisoners mentality.

1) Strong women owning their sexuality is good, like I said. 2) If done tastefully, and subtly (or in an obviously absurd way, like Kakegurui does), not all fan service is bad; some of it is fun. 3) Spicing the more theoretical gambling parts up, with desire, makes sense.

How are Midari and Yumeko different? Midari constantly always focuses on the end result – which is better than most people – but Yumeko also is concerned with the probabilities to get to the result. This is the mark of a true gambler.

Following the dual theme of each episode, Yumeko and Mary both end up separately being the Woman that Refused (more Yumary shipping). Midari tried to protect Yumeko from the darkness of Kirari – who is dark, (except for when it comes to Sayaka and Batsubami) – but Yumeko is strong enough to face Kirari on her own. Midari was just trying to protect Yumeko from Kirari.

Every game has had a scam in it and Yumeko easily sees through the scam and wins or ties, under both the constraints of the game and the scam. Yumeko is fiery. Plus, you don’t get enough genius or gambler female characters. Yumeko never underestimates anybody. That’s her real secret to winning.

I just wanted to see the hand in the $100M betting war. Three of a kind, jacks. An amazing game. I love poker, so I understand a little bit how Yumeko feels, how risk – and reward -excite her. Yumeko’s hand wasn’t even a full house – but she just needed it to be stronger than a 3 of eights. Nice.

Yumeko didn’t even need the Opposite Day twist to win; she won with the normal hand rankings of poker. Manyuda doubled down on just having the right to choose. He should have folded. When he chose to play with the normal hand ascendancy, he still lost, to a middle tier hand.

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Good thing Boone went with Locke, and Jack went with Kate – otherwise the story of Lost: Season 1 would have been totally different. Boone wouldn’t have died in the Beechcraft crash. Kate would have never been able to be manipulated, as much as Boone would have been. Kate felt established in the Losties’ tribe. She had tracking expertise, weapon skills and a wily mind. She would have, thankfully, told someone else about the Hatch, leading to no one dying in the Beechcraft.

However, Locke would not have wanted someone, with a mind of their own, alongside him, on this trek. Cult leader Locke needed an impressionable person, like Boone, who was desperate to prove himself. Locke recognized the same gullibility and the same deep need to matter, in himself, as Locke’s dad, Cooper, the con man, rightfully pegged in Locke. Con men and cult leaders.

The whole fascination with a frozen alternate dimension and polar bears, reminds me of the Narrator’s spirit animal dream, in the ice cave, with the penguins – a happy space, that subsequently gets invaded by thoughts of his crush. This was in the movie Fight Club. The connection between fire (or a hot jungle) and ice – polar opposites – seems to have been a big fascination, in the late ’90s. Just look at the opening sequence and thematic plot points of Die Another Day, in the 007 franchise – a film which came out around the same time.

Lost Atlantis and a nuclear submarine sound cool, but they’re not as central to the Island, as the Hatch, one of the Dharma Stations, is. This may be a confirmation bias, but all other ideas sound random, compared to the Hatch – even though frozen donkey wheels, submarines and nuclear bombs do later make it into the series. There’s a time and a place for everything.

At the bottom of the Hatch, is a lair: the underground Swan Station (swan song). A lab rat, Desmond, must press a button, every 108 minutes, or the world will end. It reminds me of an old short story, I wrote in college, before I saw Lost, of an avatar being able to restart the universe, on a set schedule, with the latest updates – like a Windows operating system. This mirrors how the Numbers and the Equation concern the end of all time, in Lost. That and electromagnetic anomalies, in this pocket dimension, are what the Dharma Initiative and Rousseau’s expedition, came to the Island to study.

The Hatch was originally going to be found, underwater – which explains, why polar bears (which can swim adeptly) or an ice bio-dome, or Atlantis, or a nuclear submarine, were supposed to be at the bottom of the Hatch. You can see strains of this, when, in later seasons, the Egyptian statue’s foot, ends up underwater. The Black Rock slave ship and Rousseau’s expedition, both shipwreck, on the island – following in the vein of a seafaring story.

By definition, Atlantis is a lost land in the Atlantic Ocean. Given all the references to LA and Sydney, – despite that one blip, about drug planes, from Nigeria – all hints and clues point to the Island pocket dimension primarily residing in the Pacific – somewhere between Australia and Hawaii. Atlantis is its own legend, a whole other set of myths – and the Island being in the wrong ocean just wouldn’t be on brand, for Lost.

Another axed idea, in the writing room, for the Hatch, was a nuclear submarine, that had run aground, and then been covered by a mudslide. Nuclear submarines, in polar waters, are thematically very Cold War (The Hunt for Red October, with Sean Connery), but the idea of how such a thing would get on the Island, and end up buried, is super unrealistic, and stretches viewers’ suspension of disbelief way too much – even for Lost. The Black Rock – a wooden slave ship and mining ship – flying through the air, on a huge wave, during a storm, and snapping the Egyptian statue, in two, at the legs – only to end up in the jungle, almost completely intact, full of un-exploded boxes of dynamite, will already be a big plot point, to swallow, later on.

The names of some the characters touch on the philosophy of the political science, of the Island. Less government is inherently better, because even though human nature is inherently flawed, more government means more people are held at the whims, of fewer people – and those leaders are inherently flawed. Rousseau, the thinker, is right in that the only solution for human nature, is to keep people as far away from each other, as possible, governance-wise. The few common goods available are governed by the Social Contract, so there is some government – but as little as is functionally possible.