Talk:Restless Souls/Technology: Difference between revisions

*The "troublemaking" semantic and the Chinese origin of the word Daodan were acknowledged by Oni's authors (for what it's worth; obviously Hardy's words aren't sacred or anything). I merely looked up the actual kanji for "troublemaking" and noticed that the substantive form "troublemaker" uses the guǐ/oni kanji. The way it looks to me is, it all started with Hardy's Chinese-influenced "troublemaker" concept, and then someone noticed that the guǐ kanji looked cool on its own - and sounded cool in Japanese, too, with more than enough mystical lore to back it up. As we also know, Hardy's approach to the whole ghost/demon/ogre/monster distinction was rather fuzzy, so it makes sense that the good-looking and snappy-sounding "Oni" was picked for merchandising, and the Daodan moniker stayed in the story for almost sentimental reasons. That (the Daodan-to-Oni, Chinese-to-Japanese migration) is my personal conjecture, which is out-of-universe and has little effect on anything story-wise. But at the very least I would like to stress that the Chinese origin of Daodan, and specifically the "troublemaking" semantic, is strongly supported by Hardy, and is not something that I made up. As for the "day-oh-dan" pronunciation - if I had a nickel for every time a French or Latin word is butchered (per official pronunciation rule!) by English/US speakers...

*Good catch with the "sly fox" page on the Chinese Wikipedia and the whole trickster archetype. Not sure why you see this as a contradiction, or why you would expect to see a "demon" kanji in the Japanese version of that article. Archetypal tricksters doesn't have to be demonic in nature, although they can be seen as "agents of chaos" and mediators between the human and the divine. If you read the English or German page, troublemaking is clearly at the core of the archetype, whether it's a bunch of practical jokes or a serious disruption of the established order and authority. If 捣蛋鬼 can indeed be used to reference disruption at an archetypal level, then that makes its use even more fitting. (Last but not least, let us not forget Shinatama and her sleight-of-hand semantic - obviously a "trickster doll" is a minor deceiver rather than an agent of chaos, but she fits in rather well.)

*The following paragraph from your writeup is fairly close to my "philosophical/ethical" interpretation, and I am glad you formulated it. Yes, Konoko is a ''proxy'' troublemaker if anything.

*As for the "actual" trickster that's empowering Konoko's disruptive actions, it may very well be an imaginary construct (or archetype, yes), rather than some self-aware entity or an invention that "causes trouble by design". Trouble and loss of control are best seen as unavoidable side effects of the "hyper-evolutionary process" - something that would have been obvious to Hasegawa and Kerr even during the earliest research and development. If as Kerr says they "had never intended to implant those Chrysalises", then it made total sense for them to label the thing as "big-time trouble". It can just be basic intellectual humility at that point, not planned disruption.

*Whether Hasegawa came to see the Chrysalis as a means to infiltrate and repurpose the Syndicate - that's an entirely different question, and a matter of storytelling choice. The Chrysalis certainly has potential for such an operation, but it doesn't mean that Hasegawa and/or Mukade initially devised the Chrysalis as an agent of chaos and change, and named the Daodan accordingly, with the trickster archetype in mind. For all we know, maybe the Daodan's name was coined merely to acknowledge its clearly troublesome potential, and the archetypal interpretation (in Hasegawa's mind and/or Mukade's) came later if at all: maybe Hasegawa perceived himself as a "trickster" while infiltrating/alienating the Syndicate, and maybe he didn't. We Do Not Know - but that's a fair possibility. Same for my earlier conjecture that the name Daodan may have been a tribute to his and Jamie's past as activists - it's just a possibility that fits in well with the general troublemaking semantic, but as we see there are other reasons to acknowledge the Daodan as a "troublemaker", and Jamie's memory is merely one of many considerations.