Episode 68 - Unexpected Details
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Welcome back to the podcast, back to what may be the only piece of evidence that an unnamed show about a girl with a green ribbon in her hair who travelled across… universes, let’s say,ever existed. Okay, let’s go back to the “universes” comment. I don’t know what the exact world should be, to be honest. The mechanisms of her jumping back and forth were hardly ever explained, even something as fundamental as the sort of palace she was going to was left entirely up to interpretation. What type of jumping was this? Never mind what caused it. What were we doing at all? Those questions were left entirely unanswered.
Maybe those answers would have come up in later episodes, episodes that were never made because of a cancellation that made perfect sense. Who knows? The point is that we don’t.
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Jade didn’t react to the woman from before. Her outfit had changed. On one hand, it was the same dark earth tones as what she had worn in the market in that other episode, but the cut of the dress was more in line with the Wild West, that aesthetic that Wyatt fit so perfectly into. Surprisingly, that woman did as well. The dress sat perfectly against her body, and her blonde hair was swept back into a high bun. The bun did look too tight. The hair on her head pulled taut as if it were about to rip out from the roots. But she didn’t seem to be in any sort of discomfort, nevermind the one associated with such intense hair pulling. Sometimes hair just sits like that when it’s pulled back. Mine does the same thing.
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I’m sure there’s some worldbuilding-related creative wisdom that argues against what the show does. I’m sure the conventional logic is to give the audience something to hold on true, and then you have to hold true to that mechanic, but the show never explained to the audience what all was happening. Jade is just a discarded kid who just happens to have the secret to some grand magical ability. She was a kid who benefited from being alone and neglected, which maybe is another reason why the show didn’t want to explain how this all worked.
There’s a fine line between comforting kids that are alone and encouraging that isolation or in any way suggesting that the rejection of caregivers might come with something a kid would deem desirable, like magical powers or a new and exciting life without chores or homework. And that sounds alarmist, I know. I mean, I might disprove my own point here. I never envied Jade, per se. I never wished to be more alone than I was just so I could travel the cosmos or universes or whatever she was doing. I didn’t want the adventures, frankly.
I wanted the hug. Jade always got a hug at the end. From her uncle, but a hug is a hug after all.
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Wyatt tipped his hat at the woman. “Good evening,” he said.
Except I don’t think it was evening. The sun was high overhead, but how else do you draw the Wild West. The sun–the light that gives life to the world but also threatens death–is a critical part of the Wild West’s atmosphere and ambiance.
Either way, the woman looked at Wyatt then at Jade. And at that point, you would expect her eyes to go back to Wyatt, to the man who had just addressed her and was trying to speak with her. But they didn’t. They stayed on Jade.
And her expression was just as hard to read as Jade’s was as if the two characters were cut from the same cloth or designed by the same artist or gone to the same school to study a lack of emoting. The audience could see it, and maybe the woman could as well, which is why the corner of her lip began a slight tip upwards. She caught it though before it could get too high.
“Sir,” she said, though she kept looking at Jade. “What can I help you with?”
“I’m looking for my brother,” he said, as if that were enough.
It shouldn’t have been, to be frank. The Wild West was a time of disconnectedness. There was no internet or phone calls. Letters could take a long time to get where they needed to go, and with people moving about, there was no shared history or previous interactions to ground recognition in. There was no reason to suppose that the woman knew who Wyatt was talking about, but she nodded all the same.
“He died,” she said.
Her words were blunt, cold. It was a simple declaration of facts that accomplished what they had to but ignored the wider context. It ignored the need to recognize someone’s humanity, specifically the hurt and the heartbreak that might come with losing someone like that. And there are times when overlooking that sort of thing could be understandable: not a great thing to do but the result of forces no one can influence. But this was the dead man’s brother. Some things could have been assumed or guessed, even.
“When?” Wyatt asked, his voice cracking.
His heart was breaking. You could see as much. It was apparent, though he did his best to hide it. He did his best to keep his face set and his back straight, but the weight of the loss was starting to bear down on him.
“Just last week,” she said. “Or I think it was last week. Time blurs together here.”
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If I had to guess, there was supposed to be some reveal that Jade wasn’t a part of our world. She was a found child and constantly on the search for her real home, for the parents who could handle her. As if the disconnect from the parents we saw wasn’t a choice on their part, but they were just so overwhelmed by her power that they shut down. They weren’t supposed to be the villains, I suspect. They were victims as well. And Jade was meant to set the world right and to free them from whatever was plaguing them, giving them all the ending they wanted.
That doesn’t sound like a terrible way to end the show. Narratively, it makes sense, but at the same time, well, does it really erase all that was done? All those feelings Jade had about being alone, the scars that go far deeper than the human eye can see. Even if it was part of some larger plan, the hurt remains. It wasn’t a plan Jade chose for herself, and even if it was, that wouldn’t change the feelings of rejection and inferiority that have to come from such clear signs that you are unloved by those around you. If something is inevitable, so are the consequences. And I think we forget that.
I think we hide behind this idea that things work out the way they have to, that things need to be a certain way, and that allows us to hide from the real damage around us. The world around us makes for a convenient veil to shield our eyes. It beckons us to turn to the parts we want to look at and ignore the full picture.
It’s not so much a lie but a distortion of the truth. A twist of the light. One that helps us sleep at night.
Well, most of us can sleep at night. The rest are left alone in the dark.
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Wyatt shifted his weight on his feet. Logically, he probably thought this was a possibility. His brother might be dead. And that would explain the silence. But then again, I don’t think he could have prepared himself for the specific details he was facing like how close he had come to seeing his brother or how the woman in front of him was handling the whole thing.
And that led him to the only logical question. “And who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?”
Logical question. It was the next step in the conversation, though who should have taken it–was it Wyatt’s duty to ask or the woman’s responsibility to identify herself. It didn’t matter so much, though. The step just needed to be taken, progress needed to be made. And Wyatt seemed more than willing to help the woman over that threshold.
But once again, the act was more than acceptable. It was the unanticipated details that struck him.
“I’m his widow,” the woman said.
Her voice adopted that unnatural purr again. The word that should have conjured up sadness or some feeling of darkness was sweetened on her tongue. But that was not the only thing that sent a shiver up the man’s back. The implications were far worse.
And to drill the point in, the woman sneered and added, “Brother,” with a painfully fake curtsy.
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I have unintentionally brought up that familiar question of what this show was trying to be. What grand moral was it trying to convey? But I guess shows don’t necessarily have to have morals. Sometimes you just want to enjoy a story.
But I don’t think this show’s whole purpose was to be enjoyed. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when I try to hold to that conviction, a bunch of contradictions come hurling at me. They strike me down, but they don’t make themselves known.
Is it because Jade had so much agency? Is it because… Is… Actually, I don’t even know how to finish that thought.
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As a creative, I will admit that I don’t stop to think about morals when I write. Themes, sure. I build my stories around themes. But I think a theme can be a declarative sentence, not something I need to teach you or something I need you to believe. Like sometimes anxiety burns. I wrote a story with that in mind once. Or another idea I had, sometimes you have to walk towards the next step in your life no matter what it might bring.
Okay, that one sounds like a moral, but there wasn’t any agency in that. It was just something that happened to you or something you did when backed into a corner. It wasn’t a prescription, just a nod to the inevitability of it all.
Sometimes stories are just roadmaps to what will happen, not what you should hope could happen. Sometimes it’s just a description, not an attempt to guide your paintbrush. Sometimes things are just bad, and a good story might just say, “Yeah, dude. I know.”
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Wyatt’s mouth started to move. Words started to form on his lips, but they never fully stitched themselves together. There always seemed to be one or two pieces missing.
That might have been the shock. But then again, he said to Jade that his brother had wandered this way for a woman. It should follow them that he might be leaving a widow in his wake. But did the woman in her earthly dress seem like a widow? It might have been hard to get a black dress, one could say. And a dress of neutral tones strikes the right chords for a mourning dress. Or was it in the way she spoke? The uncertainty of the timing of an event so life-altering? Well, if her world was that shaken then time would be unmoored too. And the days already blended together in a place like that.
The woman nodded. “He didn’t tell you about me?” she asked.
Wyatt snapped to reality, eager to defend his brother’s honor as a man and husband. It was a somewhat familiar action, a pattern he could naturally fall into.
“He did,” Wyatt said. “The specifics seemed to have escaped me.”
He started towards the house but stopped halfway. “Forgive me for imposing,” he said.
It wasn’t his house. And by most standards, it wasn’t even his brother’s house anymore. It belonged solely to the woman, to the stranger before him only briefly intertwined with him.
“It’s not imposing,” the woman said. “Come inside.”
Wyatt started to. Once again, that was the next logical step. That was how to move the moment forward, but then he remembered the girl he had brought along and turned to her.
But before he could say a word, the woman added, “Her too. Come on little one. You know the way, don’t you?”
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Maybe this show was meant to be forgotten. Maybe it was meant to fall away. There are so many stories in existence with varying purposes that there has to be at least one that was solely meant to be forgotten.
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Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, produced, performed, and edited by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show, please leave a review, tell a friend, or post about it on some mysterious online forum. You do you.