GFT Retrospective #126: Valentine's 2013
a.k.a. The Retrospectre.
Happy Bastille Day (yesterday) to my twenty-one French Ticketholders-to-be, and happy New Comic Book Day to all!
If it's summer in your hemisphere right now, what you're feeling unfortunately isn't the fires of passion, but the fires of...actual fires, or maybe just a general feeling of heat and sweatiness because climate change (or global warming, or whatever politically correct language you want to boil it down to so you feel better) is real, and it's pet-cookingly hot right now for me as well.
On a lighter note, though, it's also convention season, and after Warner Bros. got Zaslav'd to pieces for financial gain, reducing Rooster Teeth to a barely functioning archival husk of its former self (among other things, but I'm following a specific thread here), a beloved piece of indie animation found sanctuary with Viz Media and has been sharing semi-regular updates on its renewing infrastructure, until a recent image of a multi-colored gift box sparked the fandom (including me) into new speculation about the impact of a little social movement that has been brewing since the collapse. And now....
Yes; RWBY, #greenlightVolume10 is real!
So you can expect more RWBY Tuesday content to come next year, including that look at the comics I promised...three years ago!
Team CRWBY dropped their announcement on Independence Day, but my YT algorithm is trash right now, so I didn't see the announcement until this week, but I wanted to share it anyway because I'm kind of excited, and here seemed like the perfect place, because fairy tales.
GFT Valentine's Day (2013)
The Wild Hunt
As can be gleaned from this banner, the first (and to date, only) Valentine's Day issue of Grimm Fairy Tales was collected in Different Seasons Volume Three, along with Christmas and Halloween 2010 and St. Patrick's Day 2013 (the latter of which I will be reviewing next week).
Also, keep the following text from the end of the 2008 Annual issue in mind going forward...or don't; whichever perspective makes this story cooler for you is fine:
In the current story proper, Sela is "back from a forced vacation" (Myst, Limbo, and prison), wearing her GFT #75 cover outfit that has gone through some subtle design changes before settling back on the original here, and wielding her sword (shown here with colored gems embedded in the hilt, though we haven't been shown the origin of that just yet in Retrospective continuity because Sela hasn't met up with Druanna's blacksmith friend. She's helping Samantha (who still really sucks at her job) defeat a six-armed lizard monster that looks halfway between a Flesh Reaver and Alicia's Arena beast, when it pisses her off by crushing her glasses, hinting that they might be of some importance to Sela (or providing a convenient plot device to foreshadow the flashback of forced exposition that is to come? Yeah; that one seems right...).
Back at the Inner Sanctum, we see that Sela has moved in (never mind that Britney, Hook, and Baba Yaga can pop in and out at any time now) and just has her own jewelry drawer of backup glasses there, because it's not their utility or the object itself that's important (or the pair she scooped up while the Titanic was sinking), but the reminder they represent.
Cue flashback to a time before Sela was the Guardian Of the Nexus, when Shang mentored her by sending her away to Japan to be mentored by someone else and providing little to no contextual information (because Shang will always Shang) to keep her secluded from the threat of the Dark Horde. Cue also the retconfusion of Sela remembering this incredibly vividly despite having endured centuries of mind-wipes, Sela only having been made aware of her powers as a young adult despite receiving the Book Of Provenance from Shang's girlfriend as a child (see Baba Yaga and Legacy) after watching her father die and spending yet more centuries in stasis bonding with it, the issues upon issues of "I've never used magic to fight before, but I'm really good at it without thinking," and anything else I forgot on short notice. But Sela has a strong instinctive will, which is why the Horde kept having to brainwash her over and over again, so I guess it can all fit?
Whatever the case shall be, Sela winds up in the care of Kyoto, the all-seeing leader of the Japan faction of the Michi No, where she trains in combat with the Highborn and Falseblood monks, including three characters who will be incredibly important for this particular story: Gideon (the supposed most powerful and skilled Highborn warrior of his time), Genevieve (a.k.a. Gen, who is ostracized by some for being a woman and suspected Lowborn, because eugenic supremacy commentary was a theme for Zenescope in 2013, probably, and she wears glasses like Sela's...and Allexa's...and whatever visually-challenged person had to die on the Titanic so an Easter egg could happen), and Sato (the arrogant, bigoted skinflint prick who exists in every story about a utopian sanctuary so bad things can happen to good people). Because this is the Valentine's Day Edition, Gideon (a Mystic Highborn) and Gen (a Lowborn/Falseblood from Earth) are romantically involved (a cute but tragic take on the society-repressed, star-crossed couple trope that's common in Japanese romance media), and the bulk of the issue is devoted to trying to keep them alive when Sato leaks the temple's location (it's never shown or stated in the issue because the story is presented from Sela's point of view, but media literacy fills in the blanks pretty obviously) and most of the Order are slaughtered by an army of Bishamon-alikes. Kyoto, Gideon, Gen, and Sela (wearing a sexy but stereotypically Asian, red, white, and blue outfit) manage to escape, but not before Gideon is blasted with a brand and the army blows a Gjallarhorn-looking...horn that sends the Wild Hunt after him.
After several pages of running and fighting back against the summoned Super-Saiyan 3 oni-ghost and its pack of immortal wolves, giant insects, dragon-men, and demonic horses, the couple's love finally gives Gen reason enough to reveal her Falseblood power to...be Rogue and Mystique combined, essentially, and she becomes Gideon, sacrificing herself to the Wild Hunt to save him (to never be important again, probably), and Sela kind of inherits her glasses as a reminder that all lives are important regardless of bloodline or strength (but also less important because she wears them, knowing they'll get broken, and has a drawer full of copies that she keeps in someone else's house that a semi-omnipotent, evil witch has access to). This story was fun for what it was and full of dynamic, expressive art, but derivative and dumb. At least I get to talk about the Wild Hunt, though.
While here, it was given an Asiatic flair in keeping with the issue's setting, the Wild Hunt is a folklore motif of mainly European origin (fittingly popularized by Jacob Grimm's narrow identification of "Wilde Jagd" stories as remnants of Germanic pagan beliefs, though there are versions across numerous other European cultures, as identified by later scholars).
It typically involves a chase between a supernatural procession of hunters (spirits of the sleeping or dead, ghost-hounds, fairies, valkyries, elves, etc.) led by a mythological or biblical figure (most commonly Odin, but there are versions with King Arthur, the Devil, Frau Perchta, Baba Yaga, Santa Claus, and given the common interpretation of the Wild Hunt as a bad omen, things like Death's passage through Egypt in Exodus or the witnessing of the Four Horsemen in Revelations could be considered as fitting the Hunt motif as well). Sources (Google and Wikipedia) are vague as to what "leading the Hunt" means (being the Hunt-master vs. being the prey), but a slightly deeper dive suggests at least four purposes among the various versions of the Wild Hunt motif: a religious scare tactic against sinners (transgress, and Death or the Devil or whoever will literally hunt down your soul), an anthropomorphic pagan scare tactic to keep people from doing stupid things like going outside in a storm or walking in the woods at night (because telling children every fairy tale ever just wasn't good enough), a myth of daring feats (Odin or King Arthur hunting a formidable supernatural creature for sport), or a perpetual phenomenon that grows with each unfortunate witness or successful capture (an interpretation that can blur with the other three, considering damned souls and supernatural creatures can be counted among both the entourage and prey). Gamers might recognize "Wild Hunt" as the subtitle of The Witcher III, and though most know composer Franz Liszt for his "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2" from a couple of famous Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry cartoons, he also did a piece based on the Wild Hunt that uses Grimm's coinage as a title. Like the Rhapsody, it's intense and sounds absolutely insane to execute:
And that's it for me on this issue and its inspirations. Again, I hope my French readers had a happy Bastille Day yesterday.
This Friday, expect a Superman (2025) review, and things get green next week (if you go by Godzilla's marketing color) with the 2013 St. Patrick's Day issue and the final entry of the Heisei Era continuity, which I've heard is really good. Please Stay Tuned for that, and continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because tooting my own horn doesn't pay the bills, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
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Retrospectre,
Out.
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