ewein2412 | A Fete Worse than Death

Last week while Tim was in CA I had to drag the kids thru the "Summer Fayre" at Sara's school. It was very earnest but SO disorganized. They'd been planning to have it on the playground, but it was pouring, of course, so they were forced to cram themselves into the corridors and classrooms and 2 small gym halls. They had a bouncy castle in one hall and a magician and refreshments (along with 3 different raffles, a plant stall, paint-your-own flowerpots, bake sale items--yes, you can sell baked goods if parents are coming along to supervise their nut-allergic kids in buying). One of the disappointments was that the visiting fire engine had to leave to put out a fire ten minutes after it got there. Mark and I got to watch the firemen putting on their suits and then speeding across the playground with siren wailing--and ten kids running after them, JUST LIKE in all the classic pictures of fire engines. Sara came out of the school building about thirty seconds later and said, "Where's the fire engine?" and we told her, "It had to leave to put out a fire."
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In other news:

Mark (5 years old): Why is your eye so small but it can see big huge things? My eyes are very small but I can see the whole of you, and you're big.

Tim (45 years old, pompously): "The eye is the window of the soul."

He wasn't trying to be helpful when he said it, but I took that ball and ran with it. "Look, the window of our house isn't very big, but you can see all of Perth and Kinoull Hill out there! Your eye is like a window!"
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I just adore Fullmetal Alchemist. It is so gorgeous and sweet and melodramatic and irreverent. Sara likes it too.

Incidentally, is there some special significance to the enormous array of manga characters who are blind (or nearly blind) in their right eye? I have got a character in an unpublished novel who is blind in his right eye (Dark Secrets of E Wein)

Threaded | Flat

Sometimes they're blind in their left eye. No, seriously, I have no clue, but there are sure a lot of them.

I've been assuming the eyepatches make them look dashing. Or something like that.

(Er, hello! You don't know me, I just love your books.)

Dunnobout manga, but there's always Odin. Though the Japanese Secret Flaw sounds very cool - I wonder if it's particular to those islands? I'll ask around.

More Dark Secrets, please? That character sounds tantalizing. . . .

Quant a moi, it gives me such a headache trying to remember which eye Lord Ferris has the patch over - and since he has come to feature rather prominently in the new novel, I have to get it right!

You should be flogged for that.

The only thing I can thing of that might be a cultural reference is that a very revered warrior in Japanese culture, Yagyuu Jubei, is blind in one eye. It might be a stretch to call that a tribute to him. That's the only thing I can think of off hand.

Catherine

I haven't read much manga, but I know Fullmetal Alchemist, Yami no Matsuei, Saiyuki, and Weiss Kreuz, all of which feature at least one character who is blind in one eye. In the case of FMA, Yami, and Weiss, said characters are untrustworthy and often villainous. In the case of Saiyuki, the character is arguably a good guy, but he's done horrendous things in the past.

All of the characters lead double lives/are not quite human/should have died/went through some form of death at some point in the past. Two of them wear eyepatches. One of them has a prosthetic eye and wears glasses (which glint, which is a sign of a character not to be trusted in anime, at least, if not manga), and one of them wears a monocle over an eye that looks normal, but also might be prosthetic (it's never made clear).

I have no particular insight into Japanese culture, so it's possible I'm making connections where there are none, but blindness in one eye does often seem tied to a secret nature of some kind.

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"a fete wose than death"

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