Thursday, February 7, 2013

"Basic" Character Information: Rikumaru Musaki



           

            Born from a quiet village in the mountains, he was a good spirited young boy, still too young to stray too far by himself, much less hold a sword, as would the older children. Of course, that wouldn’t stop him from trying. His mother would always catch him playing with the older kids, horsing around. She would never scold him, but take him in her harms, and tell him to stop trying to grow up so soon, that he’ll miss the days when life was simple. He wouldn’t fight, but rather snuggle close to his mother, feel her soft, loving skin touch his, and look into her soft, warm hazel eyes. “Okay mother.” “I’ll stay young for you.”

             His village was small, but did well throughout the seasons. Every day, he would help his family on the farmland and even helped other families, with the day to day running of the village. The older children and men would leave at times to work for other villages, bringing back supplies and money to help the village foster. Life was simple. Life was…Right.

             Then, They Came. One Night, a lone corpse appeared in the center of town. No one knew who, or what it was, as it had been battered and mutilated to the point of being unrecognizable. As the town began to crowd around the corpse, it slowly began to twitch. Then, it gurgles out the words “The Red Hood comes", then it resumes its death. As the villagers stood wondering what this could mean, it is Maru’s mother that screams first. The villagers turn to her only to freeze in fear as she stands before them, with a colossal of a man clad in blood red garb looming behind her, Maru’s mother being skewered through with a giant spear. The hooded figure stood still, its seemingly metallic garb gently swaying in the wind. The hooded figure then raises “his” spear, hoisting Maru’s mother into the air, then slamming her into the ground, slowly pulling the spear out of her now lifeless body.  In that instant, the entire village went to war against The Red Hood. In that instant, the end of the village began.

             Fast, and furious, was this Red Hood, striking down each villager with not only brute strength, but of grace betraying years of experience. Nearly every able-bodied villager joined the fight, and when it seemed as if the Red Hood would finally be defeated, another Red Hood appeared, then another. It was then the adults began to flee, only to be cut down with impunity.
  
            Crying into the night, Maru ran, faster and faster, not looking back, even as he heard the screams from his village, the sounds of blade hitting blade, blade hitting flesh. Faster, faster he ran, the branches and bushes of the forest scraping and clawing at him seemingly, ripping into his clothes: The soft cotton shirt his mother spent days knitting; the comfortable shorts she sewn together, being ripped and torn, just like his world at this moment. The forest was lit, from the light of his village burning. Suddenly, something caught his eye, and he averted his eyes slightly, to focus on that which he thought he saw...Nothing. Then, when he refocused on the path in front of him, he stopped in his tracks. A Red Hood stood before him. With tears in his eyes, he straightened up, and stood ready to fight, most assuredly to die, the last of his village. And that he did, impaled at the end of the spear, similar to the spear that killed his mother. What happened next was most unexpected. The Red Hood was attacked from behind, by Maru’s mother, who limped from the shadows, spear in hand. Maru’s mother, still bleeding out, appeared different as she stood in front of the Red Hood; gone was the hazel color in her eyes, for they were now a deep yellow. Her once loving, caring hands that have held Maru, were now scaled and clawed. With each labored breath, small embers emanated from her mouth, as she stepped towards the Red Hood. As The Red Hood turned around, “he” seemingly paused, as if contemplating “his” chances. The Red Hood raised “his” spear, ready to do battle with Maru’s mother. Upon seeing this, a rage filled Maru, as he lay dying, the spear wound pumping blood into the soft ground. His last sight would be his mother fighting this…monster. Without realizing, he crawled to his feet. With each clang of the spear-to-spear combat, he flinches, but keeps moving towards the Red Hood. His hands begin to tingle, his back begins to burn. His eyes begin to slightly blur, then re-focus as he lunges at the Red Hood’s back, letting loose a roar not of a scared young boy, but of an otherworldly beast. He attacks the Red Hood, swinging madly at “him”, catching him unawares. The Red Hood stumbles, only to knock Maru’s mother away, so that “he” may focus his attention on the boy. The Red Hood takes one hand and snatches Maru up by the neck “He” raises Maru in the air, and readies his spear to impale Maru, assuredly for the final time. It was at that moment, time seemed to slow down for Maru. To his right, he sees his mother’s altered form lying on the ground, likely succumbing to her wounds. He looks down at his hands, now the same scaled and clawed hands as his mother. He looks at the Red Hood, trying to find some semblance of a face, anything. All that stares hack is an angular hood, and some sort of metallic-like cloth. Maru sees himself in the reflection of the “armor”; he doesn’t recognize the image that stares back at him. The scales reaching up to the crook of his elbow; His puncture wound, still bleeding out, forming a pool under him;  his clothes that his mother made for him, shredded and torn, reflecting the state of his life at that moment. His eyes, no longer the same soft brown as his mother, now glow with an emerald hue, with a tint of gold. Nothing is as it were. At that moment, he remembered his mother’s words, on missing the days where life was simple. Rage grew within him. He snapped back to the reality of the moment, as the Red Hood raises “his” spear to deliver his death blow. The rage, a fire within him, began to grow. He screams at the Red Hood, but with that scream, fire spewed from his mouth, blasting The Red Hood in “his” “face”. Immediately, the Red Hood drops Maru, and staggers off, falling into the bushes, and spreading the fire to the trees, setting the forest on fire. Maru laid on the floor, reaching out for his mother. The forest is burning around him. He tries to crawl towards his mother, but cannot find the strength he just has a moment before. The last image he sees is his mother’s lifeless body, and the forest he’s always wanted to explore, burning around him.  Surely, this was the end of the short life of Rikumaru Musaki… 

            Yet he still breathed. Unconscious, and still bleeding, although slowly, but still alive somehow as he was happened on, by a surviving mob of the young and infirmed, the only ones incapable  and disallowed of fighting from the burning village, led by one older girl. “Check him!” She yelled, as they moved quickly through the forest. “He’s still alive, but we can’t carry him!” whined one child. “He’s gonna die anyway! He’ll slow us down!” chimed another. The older girl swiftly walked to Maru’s body, and scooped him up, and glared at the younger children. “I’ll carry him; we are not leaving someone to die in this forest, especially someone who hasn’t had a chance to live through this night.”  So they continued through the night, moving swiftly and surely, walking almost nonstop until they were away from the forest, away from the village, away from the death of that night.

"Basic" Character Information: Ciel Hikaru



           The blood that stained the Red Hood from Ciel’s battered body rips into “his” armor. “He” staggers. Ciel, kneeling before “him” bleeding out onto the snow, is holding what seems to be a crimson shard, a shard made out of his blood. The Red Hood staggers for a moment, then as quickly as “he” appeared and attacked, turned and walked off into the night. Drained of all his energy Ciel fell to the ground, only to crawl to his father’s body. As his last actions alive, she gave Ciel a note. The note was a letter, addressed to Ciel, inviting him to come to a village far to the north, explaining that his "abilities" would be put to far better use than in his quiet farmland village. "Find him", his father’s last breaths were. "Find the dragon, and join him. He will protect you." 


            Weeks passed before he reached the village gates. He passed out right at the feet of the entrance guards. He woke up later, in a dimly lit room, with two people sitting in chairs beside him: One, a young boy, looking barely older than Ciel, with silver hair, and a large white robe draped over him, the other, a slightly older looking boy with purple hair and a slight scowl on his face. Looking into his eyes, you could see the silent fury slightly beneath the surface. The silver haired man spoke first. “You are safe now. I am Rikumaru Musaki, welcome to my home." Before Ciel could speak, the man continued. "Don't explain. I know what has already happened. I am sorry. I had hoped you and your father could have made it here before what had happened, but he sent me a letter saying that you would be safer if you didn't make the trip. Kanine here was making preparations to escort you, but....." He stood up, turning to walk out. Before he left he added, "I know what you can do. You will stay here, to learn how to protect yourself, and why the Red Hoods hunt us. "Hoods, as in more than one?" Ciel asked, eyes wide. Without responding, Rikumaru turned and left Ciel alone with the purple haired man. He looks at Ciel, and smiles a bit, the smile, adding a bit to his loom of sheer madness. "Try and get some rest, I'll be back to stay with ya." Ciel, nods slightly. He then opens his mouth." Is the he always so serious?" The purple haired man laughs. "Hell no! He’s never serious...It's just that, well...The Red Hood that killed your village, wiped his village the same way, and nearly wiped my village too, plus there's a whole army of those Red Hoods, looking for him. Looking for you." Ciel sat there, stunned. “Like you, his whole world, gone in one single night, all because of something he had no control over, something he didn’t know he had. The way he sees it, he killed his family.”


-To be Continued-

From Dreams to Paper, from Paper to Screen, Maru and Ciel live again

  With this brand new desk, lamp, and nudging from a new member of the family(?), I finally found my urge to write. My only issue being that I wish I could separate the story that I've been dreaming about for years, and my usual RL musings/rants. Hopefully I can find a way, without creating a separate profile or something of the sort. this feels good, to have the passion for writing.

  Part of what kept me from moving forward with my story was the fact that I couldn't come up with a good introduction, a good origin for my first character, my original Role Play character. I always had the base idea of who he is, his overall characterization, but I went through so many iterations, so many beginnings it got frustrating. I'm a bit jealous of my best friend, as his Role Play character has been the same forever, only changing one aspect to simplify everything else.

Bastard.

  Anyhoo, the story I've been dreaming of in bits and pieces is going to try and encompass all of the characters my friends and I created over the years, maybe tweaking certain concepts to fit the story (and keep it from turning into a Mary Sue, author avatar, fanfic) While throughout our experiences roleplaying, and even in the books we read,  the characters were tweaked/built to fit into the realms we Role-played in, they still kept their originality, which is what I'm going to focus on, instead of normal Role-playing (which I am considering returning to, for inspiration and storytelling practice) which usually involved creating or changing the character to fit the world, I will be building the world to fit the varied characters that we created, we've cherished, we've always thought about. I have a good idea on how this will start, but no clue how to connect one dream to another, and even less on where I want to end up. I just know that Kazuki Hyo, and Ukyo Mido and going to die like the bitches they are. You can take that as a spoiler or not, but trust me, fuck them.

  I hope to devote at least an hour a day into working on something related to this story, be it tweaking characters, committing memories to paper, or brainstorming with my friends on ideas they've had for their original characters, because this is as much their story as it is mine. If I'm going to weave this tale using Maru's friends, his brothers-in-arms, it makes sense that I go to my friends to help bring their characters out.

  I think I found my spark. This is exciting.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Stargazing...and other stuff

 So, it's 3 days before my 25th birthday, and like so many times before, I'm sitting in the dark surrounded by the images of days gone by. Or something like that. I was asked by my better half whether or not I was panicking or at least scared about my birthday. She was shocked when I told her I wasn't. She then alluded to how I may feel this way, because most people do, freaking out about they haven't accomplished anything yet, a quarter of their life gone, yadda yadda. Here's how I see it: All I've wanted in my life, all that truly mattered to be, was having that one special person in my life, having a good circle of friends that I care about, and living independent from my family. Everything else, while they may be important, not what I count towards feeling whole inside. I can look at myself in the mirror on my birthday and say that I have a good woman for support and love, I have some of the greatest bunch of assholes scalawags around me, and I live (relatively) on my one, away from my family, in a nice quiet house in a nice secluded neighborhood. I've had a steady job for over a year now, and I'm close to graduation. I don't stargaze. I walk around the city looking up at the big, nice apartments and get jealous at what I don't have, I look straight ahead, at my next destination, whether it be a straight path, or up a hill, or down  a few stairs. I don't panic at how I'm not where I "should" be, I relax thinking about where I'm not anymore.

 I guess I can chalk it up to being appreciative of the simpler things in life.

 Speaking of simpler things, I guess I reached a pinnacle of thinking when it comes to evaluating my beliefs and values. I see myself as a sort of traditionalist, but I guess I'm more of a moderate when it comes to my personal leanings. This is significant, only because it makes that giant file cabinet of thoughts in my head easier to classify. Maybe another time I'll go through what exactly I think about, theologically and politically. I think they deserve their own posting.

 So, because living in New York (and living in general) is expensive, I've dusted of my (softmodded) PS2 and begun hunting down all the old games I've always wanted to play. So far, so good. Right now I'm starting YuGiOh! Duelists of the Roses. It's a strategy game based of that soul sucking piece of crap card game (which I used to play religiously when I hated myself), as well as being loosely (looser than my ex-girlfriend) based of of the historical War of the Roses. I love this game, mostly because I love strategy games, and this keeps me away from playing Disgaea, which if you knew was the gaping void for all of my friends who've played it. I wish they remade this game, give it HD graphics, an achievement system, give it some dlc cards, make it longer by adding more characters from the GX or 5D series (not Zexal, cuz that shit can like the shiniest part of my sack). Of course, that would involve effort, and caring about the fans when  you already got their money. Working with my PS2 makes me miss my modded Xbox, and wish I had it with me (or rather, wish it was cleaned out so I could have brought it here). More importantly, I wish I had the time and money to invest in tricking my stuff out, maybe maintaining them so they can last in the long run.

*sigh*

I don't have time for much of anything. But, that's because I'm taking 3 classes this term, and that's killing me.
At least I'm making decent money.

3 days.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Brief Thoughts

   Just some quick ramblings before I head off to work:

  • Blogger being a part of the Google metavirus is a bit more cumbersome than helpful. Seriously, who actually uses Google+, or one email account for everything?
  • I'm turning 25 in 5 days. I'll expound ton thoughts/feelings at the appropriate time.
  • Slowly but surely, I'm starting to dislike my roommates. I've grew up in an apartment with 4 females, and I've never heard this much whining and bitching about the most innocuous shit. If I wasn't such a nice guy (actually being a jerk takes effort I'm not willing to put in yet) I would have flipped 'em off, moved out, and left them both to deal with their own problems, which surprisingly enough make me seem well adjusted.
  • I am happy to say that I have found a "kindred spirit" (seriously, how gay does that sound? No wonder only women who have no other redeeming qualities say that) in a friend from work. Unfortunately he quit (can't blame him) but we keep in touch enough to actually have a friendship going. What makes this stand out, is that we should have been friends years ago, during the heyday of my circle of friends. I say this because we have similar tastes in music, we play almost the same games, but more importantly, he knew what Bible Black was. That alone is mind blowing. Even more importantly, he rekindled my love of anime/manga, and that's always a plus.
  • Fucking New York Comic Con.
  • Madara "fuck-damn" Uchiha (Naruto) is inching towards that Kratos (God of War) heat with me. What I mean is, its getting to the point where I want him to die, just because he's too much. He, as a reanimated corpse, reversed the spell/jutsu that would have sent him back to wherever the hell souls go in this series. It's like...The sun is rising, and Dracula is starting to burn, and then he says, "fuck this!" and makes the sun go back down. How do you do anything against that?
Heading to work now.

Friday, August 31, 2012

With Arms Wide Open.

 It really has been a long time since I took the time to write down my thoughts. It took me forever to find this page, I just remembered I had it. i don't know what else to say for an introduction, so lets just get into it, shall we?

 I think I might be at my breaking point. These past few years have been harsh on me, and my very soul, if you can believe it. I'm fighting wars on multiple fronts, and as they say, you can't win them all.

Raise your hands if you've ever felt like nothing you do seems to get people to like you, or at least not hate you.

 Raise your hands if you've ever felt like nothing you ever do is good enough, or will ever be good enough, to appease some people.

That's how I've felt for practically all my life. This is how I'm feeling right now, as I type this. Sometimes, it's a matter of oversight. Other times, it's damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. Most days, it's because I "don't listen". Every time, it's because I don't love enough. At this point, after hearing all of it, I'm almost inclined to agree. Maybe I should just stick with the labels I'm given: "Asshole". "Prick". I mean, it's what brought me to the dance, right? It's how I've survived in this world of naysayers and charlatans, beasts and harlots, sycophants and heathens. Maybe I should stop trying. Maybe I should just be what everyone else thinks I am. Would that make you (them) all happy? Maybe I should show you (again them) all how much of an asshole I can really be. Maybe I should (Kinnikuman reference incoming) dial up the memories of your (all of them) past and show you who the real assholes are: The father, who would rather lose a son than accept him as a man, as an equal? The mother, who has turned her back on her duty to protect and love? The sister who has chosen to lie with devils than stand by angels? The brother who has given up on his dreams? The friend who would rather appease his ego, than protect those who have stood by them? The Betrothed, who would rather condemn a man to pariah-dom, than accept the differences that make him who he is? Who would rather see the world end, than see herself step down from her pillar of divinity?

It would be tragic, were it not the reality I face.

So here I am, sitting in the dark because my betrothed is essentially mad because I was talking to myself and she didn't like that I was trying to keep from arguing with her.
(Incoming rant)
1. It's absolutely OK for her to call me names, tell me she's disappointed with me and "fed up" with me, but I can't even have a mini-conversation with myself, without her getting upset and offended.
2. It's also absolutely OK for me to be accused of cheating on her, and endure her distrust for 3 years, with her feeling insecure, but her staying in contact with her long distance ex-boyfriend, who "Never cheated on her but only tore her heart out multiple times by leaving her for the same girl over and over", and who she also was caught planning on rendezvousing with in Europe, only for her to turn it into a commentary on how I "pushed" her into this position of trying to secretly meet with him to see if she "made the wrong choice".
3. It's absolutely OK for me to be told " I see why [redacted] cheated on you".

But alas! I can't be upset about any of that, because it's absolutely not OK for me to be any less than accepting.

You know what? Maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I deserve to be alone. Clearly at this point, I was meant to be alone in this world. I clearly can't have nice things. Or rather, I shouldn't.
Maybe I did deserve for [redacted] to sleep with one of my "friends".
Maybe I did deserve for my best friend to trade information about me to [redacted] for sexual favors.
Maybe I did deserve to have my heart broken every time, every day.
Maybe I deserve to be alone, to walk this earth with a void inside, screaming for someone to actually love me.

Maybe I am the Asshole everyone, no, she tells everyone that I am.

Maybe I should stop being the nice guy I try to be.

Maybe I should just let out every dark thought I've ever had, and let the world see the monster it created.

Would that make you (them once more) all happy? To have the mirror turned on you, for everyone to see how horrible you truly are? To see how terrible people you've become?

Or, maybe I could just have you peek at the mirror, so you could see who you've become.
Or?
Who you have always been.
 As I write this, I replay my entire life, and I acknowledge as well as accept that I've always been the villain. I have always been a jerk. But, When it is all said and done, I can at least walk away knowing that I have been open about who I am. Can most people be so cognizant about themselves? I am The Bad Guy, but I wish I didn't have to be all the time. I wish I can be The Bad Guy when I actually need to be, not when everyone wants me to be, to tell their story.

Hero to myself, Villain to everyone else.

I guess when the story of us ends- whenever it ends at this point- I shall be the magnificent villain, to your poised and elegant hero, a tale woven with the greatest of battles, the most dramatic of scenes, and the most captivating of expositions.

It is a dance I know all too well. We shall see if I remember the steps.

But, I would be remiss if I did not admit that I am at a disadvantage. Like a soldier who spent too long at peace, I fear as though I am Samson without his locks. I may very well lack the strength to tear down these pillars around me, these pillars of hate and fear, of betrayal and envy, of apathy and regret.  I pray I may find some of semblance of that lost strength, to bring down the world around me, to one last time bring down the sky around me, to one final time stand tall and shake the heavens.

Maybe before then, I'll find my peace.
Maybe before then, I'll find that sparkle in my eyes.
Maybe before then, I'll find that smile.

Until then,
With Arms Wide Open
I'll wait in silence.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

I really need to stop drinking Monster...

With most every classic novel comes some outlandish interpretations. Some people have wild fringe theories about Harry Potter as an allegory for young gay love and Lord of the Rings being about WWII and the atom bomb. But some of these laughably wrong interpretations stick. In fact, you were taught some of them in school.
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
Upton Sinclair's expose of the American meatpacking industry is largely to thank for the massive drop in cases of gastroenteritis (and rise of vegetarianism) around the dawn of the 20th century. When the book was published, the public, pretty keen on taking solid shits, was outraged by the novel's accurate depictions of the unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses and lack of regulations forbidding the practice of shoveling week-old entrails off the floor along with the cow shit and calling it sausage.
President Teddy Roosevelt took action as a result, leading to the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act and eventually the FDA, despite getting his meat primarily from large game he beat to death with a club (probably).

"Who's hungry?"
What it's really about:
It wasn't about sanitation or meat safety. Sinclair was actually trying to expose the exploitation of American factory workers and convert Americans to socialism.
He went undercover for several weeks as a meat packer and not only saw that working conditions in meat-packing factories at the time were horribly unsafe, but that there was massive corruption within the upper levels of management. The stockyards exploited not only the common man, but also the common women and children, who worked the same lengthy shifts and lost the same useful appendages to machinery without proper safeguards. At one point in the book, an employee accidentally falls inside a giant meat grinder and is later sold as lard.

A pinch of Mitch in every bite.
But much to Sinclair's frustration, the public's reaction was less "that poor exploited worker!" and more "HOLY SHIT THERE MIGHT BE PEOPLE IN MY LARD." They read right past the hardship of the workers and focused entirely on how gross the meat-packing process was.
Adding insult to injury, the passing of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act meant that taxpayers, not the meatpackers, were responsible for the $30 million a year costs of inspection, giving Sinclair further shit to gripe about as it added even more burden to the American worker.

"We have to wear coats now?"
It didn't help that Roosevelt didn't sympathize with Sinclair's socialist views, calling him a crackpot and stating that three-fourths of his book was the same bullshit everyone was apparently eating at the time. Sinclair would later take matters into his own hands, running for Congress twice on the Socialist ticket. He lost. Hell, he should have just run on the "No more shit in your hamburger" ticket. That seems like a pretty easy win right there.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
It's the defining anti-censorship book of our time. The image of government crews gathering up and burning books is as iconic in the free world as Big Brother.
In Fahrenheit 451, America in the future is a clusterfucked society and a nation of dimwits. Books are outlawed for promoting intellectualism and free thinking, which inevitably leads to objective discourse and debate, which are now considered politically incorrect because dissenting opinions make people sad. Instead of preventing homes from going up in flames, firemen have been reassigned to rifle through homes and seize any contraband books that remain.
Just about every critic and literary scholar on the planet viewed the novel as metaphor for the dangers of state-sponsored censorship. Can't see this as much of a stretch, considering it was about book burning (although, the title may have suggested that it was really about book warming, since, according to Bradbury's sources, the temperature at which paper combusts is actually 450 degrees Celsius, or 842 degrees Fahrenheit).

This didn't occur to him?
What it's really about:
Bradbury was actually more concerned with TV destroying interest in literature than he was with government censorship and officials running around libraries with lit matches. According to Bradbury, television is useless and compresses important information about the world into little factoids, contributing to society's ever-shrinking attention span. Like "Video Killed the Radio Star," television would kill the, uh, book star (he said same thing about radio too, by the way). An interesting rant from the author, considering that much of Bradbury's fame was a direct result of his stories being portrayed on science fiction shows.
Also,

"Featuring your host, a Martian-ophilic hypocrite."
For a science fiction writer who predicted the development of flat-screen TVs you hang on the wall, ATMs and virtual reality, he sure hates new technology. Along with bitching about radio and television, Bradbury also has something against the Internet. He apparently told Yahoo! they could go fuck themselves, and as far as he's concerned, the Internet can go to hell. He doesn't own a computer, needless to say. At least we can say whatever we want about him without getting sued.
What probably pissed Bradbury off more than anything was that people completely disregarded his interpretation of his own book. In fact, when Bradbury was a guest lecturer in a class at UCLA, students flat-out told him to his face that he was mistaken and that his book is really about censorship. He walked out.

Later, he accused the camera of stealing his soul.

Machiavelli's The Prince
If you've ever heard a politician or other powerful person referred to as "Machiavellian," you can guess it's not a compliment. That's thanks to a shifty-looking Italian diplomat named Machiavelli. He was bad enough that we turned his name into a pejorative adjective that means "cruel, amoral tyrant." Napoleon, Stalin and Mussolini were three of his biggest fans, and the Mafia considers Machiavelli the father of the organization.

In his defense, he cleans up well.
The reason for this is Machiavelli's The Prince, one of the most notorious political treatises ever written, designed as an instruction manual for the Florentine dictator Lorenzo de' Medici to help him be more of a bastard. Completely disregarding moral concerns in politics, the book serves as a levelheaded discourse on the best way to assert and maintain power, noting that it's better to be feared than loved, and that dishonesty pays off in the long run as long as you lie about how dishonest you are.
Machiavelli's masterpiece is equal parts brilliant and irresponsible, showing tyrants how best to run a country like a video game.
What it's really about:
Actually, Machiavelli was totally just trolling. Far from being the spiritual patriarch of the Gambino crime family, he was a renowned proponent of free republics, as noted in a few obscure texts called everything else he ever wrote. The reason The Prince endured the ages while the rest of his philosophy gathered dust in the back of an old library warehouse is chiefly 1) it's really short, and 2) it boils the blood. By far the best way to get a book on the best-seller list is to write something that pisses everyone off, but the drawback is that it steamrolls the message of any work that's only meant to be understood in context.
The context in this case is that the Medici family to whom he dedicated his love letter is the same group who personally broke Machiavelli's arms for being such a staunch advocate for free government. He worked for the Florentine Republic before the Medicis marched in, mowed down the government and mercilessly tortured him, and then he sat down and wrote The Prince from his shack in exile, assumptive with some really bendy handwriting (on account of the arms). When you learn about that, it kind of adds a new layer of meaning to the text -- it suddenly sounds like it's dripping with sarcasm.

Not everyone was in on the joke.
For centuries, the consensus on Machiavelli's best-known work has been that he was just trying to brown-nose his way back into the government. But a deeper study of his full body of work reveals that this is a pretty absurd ambition, considering not only did Machiavelli repeatedly say that "popular rule is always better than the rule of princes," but after he wrote The Prince, he went right on back to writing treatises about the awesomeness of republics. Considering also that he was no stranger to the literary art of satire, scholars these days are turning to a more likely scenario -- Machiavelli was the Stephen Colbert of the Renaissance.
Part of the blame might also be leveled at the shitty job that people have done in trying to translate his work into English. It's from Machiavelli that we get the notorious phrase "the end justifies the means." A much more accurate translation from the original Italian is something more like "one must consider the end," which kind of means something totally different.

At least he got a badass statue.

#3.
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Anybody who grew up in the 1960s (and still remembers anything about it) can tell you what Lewis Carroll's classic childrens book was really all about: A girl takes a "trip" down the rabbit hole and finds herself in a surreal world where animals start talking to her. After she eats some "mushrooms," everything starts to change sizes before her eyes. She meets an over-stimulated "white rabbit" and a stoned caterpillar smoking a "shitload of drugs."
We didn't really need Jefferson Airplane to clarify it; Alice in Wonderland is the Fear and Loathing of fairy tales. It became one of the most important allegories of the 60s counterculture, with scenes that accurately correspond to the sensation of every mind-altering substance known to man. The Beatles drew heavily from Carroll's work during their fucked-up phase (1962-1971, according to historians), and acid still comes in tabs with the Cheshire Cat printed on them.
What it's really about:
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the very conservative Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Anglican deacon and professor of mathematics. He wrote Alice in the 1860s, a time when the most radical thing taking place on college campuses was complex math. While that sounds innocent enough, Carroll thought it would lead straight to Satan. Yes, the book that launched a million acid trips was written by the biggest square in the universe for the nerdiest reason imaginable.

NERD.
All the weird drug-trippy stuff that's been misinterpreted since Woodstock is, we're sorry to say, really just an elaborate satire of modern mathematics. Dodgson was old school when it came to math, because right up until his time, math professors still taught from a 2,000-year-old textbook. That all began to change in the mid-1800s, when a bunch of irritating young people invaded academia and started bringing new concepts to math. Weird new concepts. Like "imaginary numbers" and other crazy stuff.
What incensed Dodgson was that math no longer had any real-world grounding. He knew that you could add two apples to three apples to get five apples, but once you start thinking about the square root of -1 apples, you're living on the moon. The Rev. Dodgson thought the new mathematics was completely absurd, like something you'd dream up if you were on drugs.

Dodgson to new mathematics: "Get the hell off my lawn."
So he decided to write a book about a world that followed the laws of abstract mathematics, purely to point out the batshit lunacy of it. Things keep changing size and proportion before Alice's eyes, not because she's tripping on bad acid, but because the world is based on stupid postmodern algebra with shit like imaginary numbers that don't even make any sense god dammit. "Alice" was the sensible Euclidian mathematician trying desperately to keep herself sane and tempered, while "Wonderland" was really Christ Church College at Oxford, where Dodgson worked, and its inhabitants were just as barking mad as he thought his colleagues really were.
#2.
Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Before there were hippies, there were beatniks: the goateed hipsters in berets and black turtlenecks, playing the bongos and writing shitty poetry. During the late 50s, these pseudo-intellectuals crowded every coffee house and jazz club with an open mic night.
Jack Kerouac is responsible for every last one of them. His semiautobiographical novel, On the Road, made being a nonconformist trendy and inspired an entire movement he coined "The Beat Generation."

Crazy, baby.
The book is about Kerouac's bromance with a former car thief with a knack for free verse, and chronicles their adventures across America, as they abandon square social expectations for a more hedonistic lifestyle filled with sex, drugs and jazz. It wasn't just a beatnik bible, either. Major counterculture icons of the 60s, like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, were said to have "dug it." In fact, it's generally believed that hippies are really just beatniks with worse hygiene.

And worse taste in fashion.
What it's really about:
First of all, Kerouac hated beatniks; he thought they were a bunch of posers. Anyone who wanted to be a part of "The Beat Generation" completely missed the point. In his mind, those who were "Beat" were beaten down by society's demands and struggled to find their place in the world. It was not something you chose to be because it would help you meet chicks.
As far as his time On the Road, he hated that too. Kerouac spent roughly seven years roaming the countryside looking for answers. He never found any, and it's pretty clear in the book. Yes, there were some wild times that seemed like a blast, but it got old after awhile. Nevertheless, it was that side of his character everyone celebrated even though he tried to put it behind him.
Kerouac was a Catholic who grew to have pretty conservative politics, so he was always resentful of inspiring what would become a cultural revolution. And keep in mind, Kerouac wasn't even describing events that took place during that time. Since the novel came out in the late 50s, everyone assumed he was describing the thought and feelings of that era, but the events of the novel took place almost a decade before. He wasn't even writing about the era he supposedly defined.
#1.
Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche is probably the most-recognized name in philosophy behind Socrates and Aristotle. But his notoriety with the layman is mainly due to the people he inspired -- Ted Bundy, Mussolini and Hitler. His seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is about as cheery as anything Nietzsche ever penned. It popularized the quote "God is dead" and illustrates Nietzsche's disdain for the concept of traditional morality and his prediction that some kind of master race would soon drag itself out of the slime and rule the world.
He refers to the rightful owner of the world as the "superman" and the "splendid blond beast," and anyone with a passing interest in modern history knows exactly where that line of thinking is going.
Hitler, who might otherwise have faded out of history as just another square-mustached college dropout, picked up a copy of Zarathustra and was inspired to do a little more with his life. Some years later he distributed copies to his soldiers and went about arranging a big-budget live stage adaptation known as "the Holocaust."
What it's really about:
If Nietzsche wasn't too busy being dead, he would probably have had a few words with Hitler about the fuehrer's liberal interpretation of his work, due mainly to the fact that Nietzsche hung around with entirely the wrong crowd. His sister, Elisabeth, and good friend, composer Richard Wagner, were both as Nazi as the goose-step.

This portrait of Wagner comes courtesy of a dockside caricature artist.
After Nietzsche died, Elisabeth inherited the rights to his works and went about diligently re-editing them with a "kill all the Jews" subtext. It didn't help that Nietzsche's thought-baton was then picked up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger -- you guessed it: Nazi.
Nietzsche actually hated anti-Semites, having refused to attend his sister's wedding because she was marrying a Nazi, and even wrote that "anti-Semites should be shot." We have his sister to thank for the "blond beast" confusion. She, Hitler and decades of disapproving philosophy students interpret this as an allusion to the Aryan race. In fact, Nietzsche was just describing lions.

After all, does this look like the mustache of a racist?
And as for the "superman" thing, rather than referring to some genetically pure German dictator, Nietzsche was just making a generic statement about people who believe in the subjectivity of morals and seek to find their own values in the world -- a concept wholly incompatible with just following the whim of some guy with a hate-boner for some specific race. Interpreting Zarathustra's message as a call to raise an army and purge the world of undesirables is something akin to believing that Animal Farm was really a warning about farm animals taking over the world.

Wait, it isn't?