Pineapple: Planning Your Route

To begin with, I want to announce that we’ll be deviating from our regularly scheduled two posts per month to only one post per month through the end of the year. This is my last term of graduate school, and the time devoted to my job, my internship, and completing and defending my thesis and portfolio, I simply won’t have the time for two. Thanks for your understanding, dear readers. Now, on to the blog post!

One of my favorite things to eat any time of year is pineapple. August is the end of pineapple season, so we’re going to give it some love, gosh darn it. Of course, one of the best things you can possibly do with a pineapple during pineapple season is just buy a ripe one, cut it up, and eat it… But I’m one of those people who loves pineapple on their pizza, their burgers, and their thai fried rice. A tango dancer taught me this recipe at a milonga (read as “tango dance party”). It’s easy, requires very little effort, and is perfect for potlucks—because part of the reason this requires so little effort is that it’s a slow cooker recipe. All you will need is some pineapple (canned or fresh, up to you!), some barbecue sauce, and a bag of frozen meatballs of your choice.

Mix meatballs and pineapple to your preferred proportions (I do about half and half, so two cans of pineapple chunks to your one small/medium size bag of meatballs will do nicely). Then, douse it all in barbecue sauce. Don’t drown it, though. There’s a difference between dousing and drowning, and the difference is that the barbecue sauce has covered the surface area of all the materials in the slow cooker, but the other ingredients are not submerged in a bath of BBQ. Then, cook it for 4 hours on low, serve, and enjoy the delightful salty sweet of this dish!

This month I’m going to talk about media you have to plan for, just like when you decide to cook with pineapple. Some might say you would have to plan for any recipe, but pineapple is the sort of ingredient that either works or does NOT. You have to plan for it. Just like with choose your own adventure books and games with time limits, both of which we will be talking about today!

Choose your own adventure books were always something of a mystery to me when I was a child. I could never seem to figure out what I was supposed to do, and more often than not I got tricked into ringing a bell forever, accidentally became a cult sacrifice, or got gored by a unicorn. That was not the case with the new Gravity Falls choose your own adventure book, however! Although Dipper and Mabel and the Curse of the Time Pirates' Treasure! offers the reader plenty of terrible ways to die or mess up time forever, the book also allows readers to get back on the right track. The book begins with three paths. Dipper, Mabel, and Blendin can go to the future, the middle ages, or the old west. It’s possible to get a time key in each era, and it’s possible to unlock the final ending once you’ve got the time key. It’s just getting one that can be so gosh darn difficult.

When the children and Blendin arrive in an era, there are choices to be made. There are three things to choose from in the old west and in medieval times, but the future only has two choices—probably due to the mystery hidden within this timeline of events, but more on that later. One might think that only one choice would lead to finding a time key. In a way, that’s correct. Only one series of events within each era will lead to finding a time key. Fortunately for the reader, any of the choices available when entering an era have the potential to lead back to choosing from that menu again.

Say, for instance, you choose to battle the knight in medieval times. Battling the knight might not get you a time key, but the King will let you choose from the other two tasks he originally offered to Dipper, Mabel, and Blendin if the reader successfully wins against the knight. This is true of the three choices offered in the old west and the two offered in the future as well.

The planning aspect of this book comes in trying to find your way to the treasure. So many choices, but which one could be right?! If you’re a Gravity Falls fan, you’ll likely end up trying to make every choice once just so you can read the whole book. It means you need to plan to have an ample supply of bookmarks handy, but it’s a good way to approach the book—because even though you might find the time pirates’ treasure by finding a time key, you won’t find some of the more interesting endings or secrets hidden within the book.

The second piece of media I want to bring up is Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns. It’s one of the only games I ever bought the official guide for, and here’s why: the game is on a time limit. I know what you’re thinking, “A time limit? What are you talking about, this is a JRPG!” So was Majora’s Mask. But unlike Majora’s Mask, Lightning can’t play the Song of Time and return to the beginning of her three day period. Her game is actually set on a six day period (although you can create a seventh day by saving enough souls), and is designed so the player will come back and play the game again and again. But who really has time for replays in this day and age?

There’s a lot to cover in Lightning’s story. Anyone who’s played the first two games of the Final Fantasy XIII series knows there’s a lot of damage control to do, and on top of the major plot stuff there are plenty of sidequests! It’s a lot to work into a single playthrough—which is why the player must manage their time effectively.

The player also has to choose what Lightning is going to wear. You thought picking your outfit on a daily basis was a toughie, just wait until things like your defense, speed, and strength are linked to it! Some truly terrible clothing decisions can be made, and some lovely ones too—but it takes a keen eye, careful planning, and occasionally a credit card and tactical preorder for premade Final Fantasy throwback costume DLC. The player is allowed to have three outfits equipped at a time and can cycle through them in battle. Since Lightning is the only character the player has in their party (most of the time) it’s important that these outfits not only look good, but play a particular role in the wardrobe. Fighting something that’s weak to magic? Better cycle over to Yuna’s outfit from Final Fantasy X-2. Need something cut to tiny pieces? Cloud’s outfit comes with the buster sword.

The nice thing about having the guide for this game is that it allows the player to plan their wardrobe and their time in an effective manner to get the most out of the game the first time through. In a game with a time limit and no Song of Time to help me navigate around within it, I was truly grateful to have a plan going in.

What’s some of the media you’ve had to plan for in order to enjoy? Tell me in the comments!

Oyakodon: Today I am Thankful for my Family

November is coming to an end, and I'm thinking about Thanksgiving. Of course, making a turkey dinner in Japan is a little difficult, but there is a dish that seems to convey the idea of family and makes a meal of itself. Oyakodon (親子丼) or, in English, “parent and child donburi” is a dish that uses both chicken meat and eggs. The use of both chicken and eggs together is where this dish pulls its name from. Some of my western friends thought this was creepy, but I thought it was rather sweet. It reminded me of all the family—both that of blood and that of heart—I have back home that I'll be missing this year.

Here's the way I made oyakodon with my host mother, Motoko Okada:

Ingredients:  4 onions, 3 carrots, 3 small green peppers, 1 small chicken, 5 eggs.

1. Julienne and sauté all veggies (in order of appearance). Add sake, some chicken stock (dried) and a bunch of water and simmer for a bit.
2. Marinate chicken with ginger, onions, garlic, salt, and sugar for a nice taste. Best if done the night before.
3. Remove chicken from marinade and grill.
4. Mix eggs and cook separately.
5. Once everything is cooked to taste, lay ingredients over a bed of rice and serve.

Here’s another recipe too, if you find my hurried notes too inexact.

It felt right to make this with a maternal figure during this time since it’s still Thanksgiving in my silly American heart even if the people in Tokyo aren’t celebrating it. But it got me thinking… How often do we see healthy familial relationships in media? Can you count the number of them you’ve seen in the last week? Are you only using one hand? Yeah…

When I first heard the name oyakodon and was told what it meant, it actually immediately reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from Fire Emblem: Awakening.

Those of you familiar with the Fire Emblem series will remember the support system of the previous games that allowed you to build relationships between your army’s units. But in Awakening, the support system also allows the player to meet the offspring that result from the romantic support links. These children travel back to a time before their parents have conceived them in order to prevent the tragic events of the future they come from—in which most of their parents have died and the world has been overrun by darkness and chaos due to the Fell Dragon Grima—in order to attempt to save their parents and to build a future in which they can all live happily together. When Chrom, the main character of Awakening, meets his daughter Lucina and hears her story, he reacts not as a soldier or as the Exalt, leader of the country of Ylisse, but as a father—and it is so much more emotionally powerful than any declaration of war he could have made on Grima.

Those of you less familiar with niche JRPGs will remember The Incredibles. Part superhero movie and part family romcom, each member of the Parr family has a pretty “incredible” power; Dash has enough speed to allow him to play as many pranks as a young boy could think of; Violet’s invisibility and force fields allow her to admire the world of high school without ever having to worry about stepping foot in it; their mother Helen’s ability to stretch makes her more than flexible when it comes to balancing house work, her third baby, and the rest of her family; and Bob’s colossal strength should be more than any father could ever need in order to protect his family. In a way, these powers reflect the things we as normal viewers might stereotypically wish we had in our everyday lives. Wouldn’t it be great to be fast enough to get away with pranks? To not have to worry about what might happen to you going out on a Saturday night regardless of what you were wearing? To be able to stretch far enough that you could be in three places at once? To be strong enough to protect everyone you loved?

But the point that is very quickly made is that no matter how incredible someone is, no one is ever strong alone. From the beginning of the movie, Mr. Incredible starts losing to the machine that Syndrome made. It’s not until the entire family starts working together that they’re able to defeat both the robot and Syndrome. The toll it takes on Mr. Incredible when he thinks his family has died is also indicative of how important familial bonds are to us. The Incredibles really drives home how much of a superpower familial love is.

Now, those are conventional families portrayed by media. When it comes to less traditional forms of family, Steven Universe and Gravity Falls have it made.

Steven  of Steven Universe is the offspring of Greg, a human, and Rose Quartz, a sentient alien rock called a Gem that we would typically gender as female on sight. Because of his dual lineage, Steven has a very interesting familial structure. His mother gave up her physical form so he could be born. Steven lives not with his father (although his father does run a car wash nearby) but with Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst—all of whom are also Gems—as one of the team members of the Crystal Gems. It was decided this would be the best living situation for Steven because only other Gems could possibly hope to teach him to control his own Gem powers.

When the series starts, the viewer knows very little about Gems. As the series continues, we learn that they come from all sorts of situations and backgrounds, and that the Gems Steven’s mother led to earth are considered radical in their ways of doing and thinking by “homeworld” Gems. We learn that Amethyst was artificially made, that Pearl would be restricted to servitude instead of being allowed to engineer, create, and fight the way she does as a Crystal Gem team member, and that Garnet—who is made up of two other Gems that are in love—wouldn’t be allowed to exist as a fusion of these Gems. Steven’s family is full of diversity. It is the acceptance, communication, and love the characters exhibit in every episode that keeps it going and allows them to fight off homeworld Gems still hoping to invade and colonize the Earth.

Gravity Falls is a show that balances relationships between blood family members and non-blood family members more brilliantly than any other piece of media I’ve ever seen. 

The series centers around a pair of fraternal twins, Dipper and Mabel, who get shipped up to their Grunkle (that’s Great Uncle turned into one word for the purposes of a joke in the series) Stan’s tourist trap The Mystery Shack in Gravity Falls, Oregon for the summer. Once there they meet Soos, the handy man of the shack, and Wendy, one of the gift store attendants. The only people related by blood are Stan, Dipper, and Mabel, but when the apocalypse happens in Gravity Falls as the series finale, and Dipper, Soos, and Wendy break into the Mabel’s dream prison to save her, they are referred to as “The Pines Family” by their adversaries.

And that description is not inaccurate. Series creator, Alex Hirsch, recently discussed a couple of the relationships between the characters on The B Movies Podcast, saying how he really made it a point to fill relationships that are usually fraught with tension with love instead. This is evident in key relationships, such as the twins themselves and the father and son type relationship Soos and Stan have as well.

It also seems to fit, because no matter what happens in the show, Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Soos, and Wendy always get through it together.

And if that’s not enough to convince you how powerful and important the portrayal of warm, loving familial relationships is, refresh yourself with this scene from Lilo and Stitch:

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, whatever language you speak. I hope your loved ones are near and that you can see them today, because life is heavy and life is hard and it’s so much lighter when they’re there to help you through it. May you find many a loving portrayal of family in your media and in your living room this coming holiday season.