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In a desperate bid to read something I knew I would enjoy, I re-read the Ukiah Oregon series by Wen Spencer this week. Although I did notice some flaws on this second reading that I'd completely ignored the first time, I still enjoyed it. Loved it. Enough so that I turned around and forced the first book on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quoth_the_ravyn before gushing at length about the series to laura_josephsen.
During both the re-read and the gushing, I noticed a large number of similarities between the series and FFVII. The main character, for instance, is very much like Cloud -- real Cloud I mean, not FalseZack!Cloud. Cloud as he is before crisis, and then again later after he remembers himself. The parallels are so large that I'd almost be willing to bet that if you love FFVII, you'll at least like Ukiah.
In any event, this realization has led me to the need for still more gushing about all that the two series share (and how awesome that is).
The story largely follows Ukiah. In the present, Ukiah is a twenty-one-year-old private investigator specializing in missing persons. Not just specializing: he and his partner are known as the best in the business, and Ukiah in particular is considered an infallible tracker. This is explained (but not dismissed) as a side-effect of him growing up as a feral child. In fact, Ukiah has only been part of human society for eight years; before that he ran with a wolf pack outside Ukiah, Oregon. That's how he got his name: he was caught in a humane trap, and his adoptive mother named him after the town.
In this bizarre background we find the source of at least some of his parallels to Cloud. Like Cloud, Ukiah doesn't interact well, socially, with others. Cloud because he started out as something of a social outcast, and went on to spend a chunk of his formative years in a glorified test tube; Ukiah because he spent his childhood running wild without either speech or human companionship. As a result, both tend to be silent, and to let his body language do much of his talking. Both have come to let what they do define who they are. Less obvious is the fact that both have a protective streak that's bone deep and a mile wide. Both would do anything for someone they love, for family, and for much the same reasons: they went without affection for so long that it's even more precious now that they've found it. I read an article once about how, come ACC, Cloud has become far more inclined to touch. It pointed out how he is rarely seen in the film with Denzel or Marlene or any other child where he is interacting without also touching: putting his hand on their shoulder, tousling their hair, or simply holding their hand. That's a big step -- a big change -- for him, and it's something noticeable in Ukiah as well. Now, there's a deeper reason for that, plot-wise, but it's a definite indication of how human contact has become important to both characters.
Throughout the course of the first novel we -- and Ukiah -- come to learn that his tracking abilities are not really a result of his upbringing. As the reader, we are skeptical from the start because Ukiah doesn't just track based on footprints or scents, which could possibly be explained by his background. No, Ukiah can touch an item of clothing the missing person wore and know things about them on a DNA level -- things like if they're predisposed to be blond or tall or blue-eyed. He can tell blood type and when they last had sex. He can tell if they're sick, and how long they've been ill. Further, he has an eidetic memory that's so unusally precise that the term pales in comparison to what he can do. He can take a literal minute to flip through a six-hundred page novel and then tell you what was on every single page. If he looks through a day planner, he can recreate it down to the last doodle and position of the sticky notes. He can be lost in thought while someone is talking to him, and then recall the conversation -- the one he wasn't paying attention to -- in order to respond. He can remember things that happened around him while he was unconscious. In short, his ability to recall is both incredibly cool, and incredibly bizzarre.
For his part, Ukiah is aware, in a vague sense, that this isn't 'normal' or fully explained by the Wolf Boy background, but he is also... unconcerned. He's different, but he doesn't have enough of a scale for comparison to realize exactly how different. He knows so few people, has experienced so little of the human world, that it's easy for him to think he just hasn't met anyone like himself yet. Or that his abilities are just unusual in the same way that synesthesia is unusual. In actuality, of course, it's much more complicated than that, which is where the sci-fi aspect of the series comes into play. It's also the source of the other huge parallels with FFVII:
Ukiah is part alien.
In fact, if his personality and choices didn't make him an analogue for Cloud, his background would make him an analogue for Sephiroth. Like Seph, Ukiah was purposefully engineered to be a perfect blend of human and alien. Like Hojo, the aliens took a human woman, did some fancy science, and impregnated her with a half-human half-alien baby. The difference is that the resultant child wasn't intended to be a perfect warrior, but to be a perfect breeder. To be the perfect link between the alien race and the human one so as to produce fully compatible hosts.
The alien -- and ultimate villain -- in the series is a race called the Ontongard, a hive mind that takes over by, essentially, infecting host lifeforms. They have made a long history of traveling from planet to planet, taking the form of the dominant life on said planet, and spreading out until they've consumed or subverted everyone. Then they turn all efforts to building new ships, until they've consumed all the planet's resources, at which point they move on looking for more planets to cull.
Jenova, anyone?
As with Jenova, although the Ontongard can take the form of a human or a rabbit or a wolf or what-have-you, each individual cell is still alive and part of the collective, and will seek to rejoin the collective. This makes it very difficult to kill them: you shoot one in the head and it goes down, but only until it can regroup and heal itself. Furthermore, as with geostigma the host body can fight the infection, so more often than not simply infecting a host leads to death. Hence the need to create these perfect breeders: beings which cannot, themselves, be infected, but who will in turn produce offspring that have no immunity.
With that sort of setup, the parallels are fairly obvious, but there are still more. While the two stories ultimately go in completely different directions -- Ukiah spends a lot of time trying to foil individual plots to further the infection, and never once picks up a sword -- there are a core of plot elements that are essentially identical. As I said above, if you like FFVII, I highly recommend the series -- if nothing else, you can play spot the similarities.
quoth_the_ravyn before gushing at length about the series to laura_josephsen.During both the re-read and the gushing, I noticed a large number of similarities between the series and FFVII. The main character, for instance, is very much like Cloud -- real Cloud I mean, not FalseZack!Cloud. Cloud as he is before crisis, and then again later after he remembers himself. The parallels are so large that I'd almost be willing to bet that if you love FFVII, you'll at least like Ukiah.
In any event, this realization has led me to the need for still more gushing about all that the two series share (and how awesome that is).
The story largely follows Ukiah. In the present, Ukiah is a twenty-one-year-old private investigator specializing in missing persons. Not just specializing: he and his partner are known as the best in the business, and Ukiah in particular is considered an infallible tracker. This is explained (but not dismissed) as a side-effect of him growing up as a feral child. In fact, Ukiah has only been part of human society for eight years; before that he ran with a wolf pack outside Ukiah, Oregon. That's how he got his name: he was caught in a humane trap, and his adoptive mother named him after the town.
In this bizarre background we find the source of at least some of his parallels to Cloud. Like Cloud, Ukiah doesn't interact well, socially, with others. Cloud because he started out as something of a social outcast, and went on to spend a chunk of his formative years in a glorified test tube; Ukiah because he spent his childhood running wild without either speech or human companionship. As a result, both tend to be silent, and to let his body language do much of his talking. Both have come to let what they do define who they are. Less obvious is the fact that both have a protective streak that's bone deep and a mile wide. Both would do anything for someone they love, for family, and for much the same reasons: they went without affection for so long that it's even more precious now that they've found it. I read an article once about how, come ACC, Cloud has become far more inclined to touch. It pointed out how he is rarely seen in the film with Denzel or Marlene or any other child where he is interacting without also touching: putting his hand on their shoulder, tousling their hair, or simply holding their hand. That's a big step -- a big change -- for him, and it's something noticeable in Ukiah as well. Now, there's a deeper reason for that, plot-wise, but it's a definite indication of how human contact has become important to both characters.
Throughout the course of the first novel we -- and Ukiah -- come to learn that his tracking abilities are not really a result of his upbringing. As the reader, we are skeptical from the start because Ukiah doesn't just track based on footprints or scents, which could possibly be explained by his background. No, Ukiah can touch an item of clothing the missing person wore and know things about them on a DNA level -- things like if they're predisposed to be blond or tall or blue-eyed. He can tell blood type and when they last had sex. He can tell if they're sick, and how long they've been ill. Further, he has an eidetic memory that's so unusally precise that the term pales in comparison to what he can do. He can take a literal minute to flip through a six-hundred page novel and then tell you what was on every single page. If he looks through a day planner, he can recreate it down to the last doodle and position of the sticky notes. He can be lost in thought while someone is talking to him, and then recall the conversation -- the one he wasn't paying attention to -- in order to respond. He can remember things that happened around him while he was unconscious. In short, his ability to recall is both incredibly cool, and incredibly bizzarre.
For his part, Ukiah is aware, in a vague sense, that this isn't 'normal' or fully explained by the Wolf Boy background, but he is also... unconcerned. He's different, but he doesn't have enough of a scale for comparison to realize exactly how different. He knows so few people, has experienced so little of the human world, that it's easy for him to think he just hasn't met anyone like himself yet. Or that his abilities are just unusual in the same way that synesthesia is unusual. In actuality, of course, it's much more complicated than that, which is where the sci-fi aspect of the series comes into play. It's also the source of the other huge parallels with FFVII:
Ukiah is part alien.
In fact, if his personality and choices didn't make him an analogue for Cloud, his background would make him an analogue for Sephiroth. Like Seph, Ukiah was purposefully engineered to be a perfect blend of human and alien. Like Hojo, the aliens took a human woman, did some fancy science, and impregnated her with a half-human half-alien baby. The difference is that the resultant child wasn't intended to be a perfect warrior, but to be a perfect breeder. To be the perfect link between the alien race and the human one so as to produce fully compatible hosts.
The alien -- and ultimate villain -- in the series is a race called the Ontongard, a hive mind that takes over by, essentially, infecting host lifeforms. They have made a long history of traveling from planet to planet, taking the form of the dominant life on said planet, and spreading out until they've consumed or subverted everyone. Then they turn all efforts to building new ships, until they've consumed all the planet's resources, at which point they move on looking for more planets to cull.
Jenova, anyone?
As with Jenova, although the Ontongard can take the form of a human or a rabbit or a wolf or what-have-you, each individual cell is still alive and part of the collective, and will seek to rejoin the collective. This makes it very difficult to kill them: you shoot one in the head and it goes down, but only until it can regroup and heal itself. Furthermore, as with geostigma the host body can fight the infection, so more often than not simply infecting a host leads to death. Hence the need to create these perfect breeders: beings which cannot, themselves, be infected, but who will in turn produce offspring that have no immunity.
With that sort of setup, the parallels are fairly obvious, but there are still more. While the two stories ultimately go in completely different directions -- Ukiah spends a lot of time trying to foil individual plots to further the infection, and never once picks up a sword -- there are a core of plot elements that are essentially identical. As I said above, if you like FFVII, I highly recommend the series -- if nothing else, you can play spot the similarities.
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 02:54 am (UTC)From:I'm just getting hung up on the "designed to be the perfect breeder" aspect of this, for some reason.... like, "eidetic memory, perfect tracking, and 70s porn soundtrack music starts inexplicably playing whenever he walks into a room"
Don't get me wrong; this sounds very cool. My brain is just, as always, picking up the most cracktastic elements and giggling madly about them.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 03:57 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 04:30 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 08:56 pm (UTC)From:I think Cloud is kind of oblivious in canon, so it's easy to imagine it in a Ukiah-ish situation. (What, you mean you were coming on to me for YEARS??)