100 days of enemy recs: 3. Weiß Kreuz

[melannen]

Oh random number generator, you do have your ways.

So I was really into reading Weiß Kreuz fanfic for, like, three months about fifteen years ago. It was the sort of fandom where if you mentioned reading the fic but not knowing the canon, people who did know the canon told you that this was a good idea and you should stick with it, so I guiltlessly stayed away. Basically I know enough to know the canon is a glorious mess spread across about five different media and occasionally deliberately inconsistent with itself because reasons? I still poke in to the AO3 tag sometimes just to check in but that's it. So I give no guarantees as to the accuracy of any of the below!

Basically the show is about a team of four people who appear on the surface to be cat-loving florists, but they know a secret - That the rich and powerful, they take what they want, and sometimes the bad guys make the best good guys, so they provide... murder. They murder people. Weiß are assassins working for a semi-government-sanctioned secret organization that that kills criminals that are beyond the reach of the law. Schwarz is another team of assassins (these ones have psychic powers) that work as bodyguards for the main crime family they oppose (the use of German terms is very subtle and nuanced as you can tell). Everyone has complicated and angsty backstories. It's an anime soap opera with murders. It had a fairly large slash fandom for awhile when the anime episodes were coming out in English, and it's still ticking along. People shipped everybody with everybody, good guys and bad guys and all together and there's even a third team of girl assassins if you want a little bit of het in there.

I will admit that I'm looking back at my old del.icio.us bookmarks for this one, so while there are a lot of possible enemyships, I am going to stick to only one here: each of the main teams had a teenager on them, and Weiß's teenager, Omi, eventually discovered that he was secretly the heir of *both* the organization that was running Weiß *and* the organization that was running Schwarz; some plot stuff happened; he embraced his heritage and its moral ambiguity, took on his birth name of Mamoru, grew up and took over leadership the organization, running his own assassin teams, and ended up with Schwarz's former teenage assassin, Nagi, as his personal bodyguard. I think? I think that was all canon, anyway. At least, there is some good fic where adult Mamoru is the leader of the secret organization and Nagi is his bodyguard and they have sexual tension complicated by their pasts, so I will rec some of that for this one, because believe it or not that's at least easier to explain than the necessary backstory for the other enemyships I remember from this fandom.

(...also I was going to exactly date when I was in this fandom c. fifteen years ago by looking up a wip I read at the time that was still updating then, but I found it on AO3 and it's... still updating now... WK will always have a small yet special place in my heart, even if I don't think I'm going to go get caught up on that fic that's now approaching 1000000 words.)

• My Bodyguard (8139 words) by emungere
  Chapters: 2/2
  Fandom: Weiß Kreuz
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Naoe Nagi/Tsukiyono Omi
  Summary: After the last episode of Kapitel, Omi meets his grandfather and makes a new acquaintance online.
  
  Okay I have not read this one in fifteen years but when I scrolled to it on AO3, fifteen-years-ago me was like "Oh yes, that one's a good intro to the pairing setup, you should rec it!" And who can I listen to if not fifteen-years-ago me? (Even if she still needs to finish her wips.)


• Sailing to Hirugashima (3626 words) (+60000 word sequel) by Daegaer
  
  Fandom: Weiß Kreuz
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Naoe Nagi/Takatori Mamoru
  Additional Tags: Space Opera, Alternate Universe - Space, Friendship, space travel, Psychic Abilities
  
  
  Space AU? Space AU!! Am I going to be reccing a lot of space AUs in this series? I sure hope so!!


• You Again (7160 words) by Lady_Ganesh
  Fandom: Weiß Kreuz
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Naoe Nagi/Tsukiyono Omi
  Additional Tags: Future Fic, Awkward Romance, Competence Kink, Telekinesis, Clairvoyance, Father-Daughter Relationship, Telekinetic sex, Oral Sex
  
  Twenty or thirty years post canon, two men whose complicated past is now long in the past meet up again over a bomb, go out to dinner, etc. Just a nice story that feels very settled in a way this fandom rarely does but that the characters ought to deserve.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I probably won't read these, but thank you for giving me a summary of the fandom premise. For many years I'd occasionally see it mentioned, but never managed to actually grasp the premise. I kind of thought it was about somebody called Schuldig living up to his name. BTW is there a reason why it is called "Kreuz" in the title? Seeing the fandom name always makes me cringe a little because the adjective doesn't agree with the noun as it ought to, but maybe the two aren't meant to be a unit?

[melannen]

Schuldig is one of the other Schwarz members. He's a telepath, flamboyant, sociopathic, and the name's ironic because I get the impression he is incapable of feeling or understanding guilt. He's probably Western fandom's overall favorite so the impression is understandable! But canon is actually mostly about Weiß and the Schwarz characters are just recurring antagonists. I think.

WK does a lot of that Anime Catholicism where it's really clear they enjoy the aesthetic but don't really come from a deeply Christianized culture. I enjoy the crap about of it, tbh, because I like getting a taste of our own medicine and also it's just fun, but ymmv. The Kreuz in the title is part of that. I'm not really sure it's that relevant otherwise though! I think it's just like someone throwing "zen" into the title of a Western thing for the cool value.

Schuldig is German and I think some of the rest of Schwarz's angst backstory is linked to (fantasy) Germany but tbh I'm not really sure why all the bad German otherwise, except the cool factor, I don't think Weiß actually has any connection to Germany.

I think the title is supposed to be more like "Weiẞ's cross" or "Weiß and the cross" than "the white cross" but idk if the makes the grammar better.

[ratcreature]

You know, with the possesive it could then mean Weiß's burden. This is like a Rorschach test... I've never gotten into any anime or manga because I dislike that style of cartoon, and just can't get over it, even for the fun, tropey things I'd enjoy. (I know it's got great variations, and I like some anime influenced things, but the typical anime look just clashes with my preferences. *points to icon*)

[melannen]

I think that's more or less what it's supposed to mean! But it doesn't have the possessive either, does it? Can "kreuz" mean "burden" in German without it being explicitly a Christian metaphor the way it would in English?

My understanding is that the art in WK is particularly obnoxiously of a style, and also that the animation is pretty objectively bad, which is part of why I never sought it out. I really like some manga styles but some I just can't. (I feel the same way about American and European comics though.)

[ratcreature]

Well, in German for a possessive it would need an apostrophe to be fully correct, because it already ends on an s-sound. In general in German we don't do 's for the possessive but just an s at the end of names (though English influence has led to liberal apostrophe sprinkling), but if a name already ends on an s, ß, or z you don't write a second s but just an apostrophe, and the name doesn't sound any different, for example "Hans' Haus". In spoken German you sometimes hear it like "Hanses Haus" so some people spell then "Hans's Haus" but that's not how you are supposed to write. So it should be written Weiß' Kreuz if it was meant that way, but it sounds like the possessive.

And I'm fairly sure that the usage of Kreuz for a burden comes from Christianity just like the English "it's his cross to bear" etc. but afaik the most common German usage eith that is "es ist ein Kreuz mit..." (literally "it is a cross with...") for something or someone being difficult, obstructive or obnoxious and generally hard to bear, so the image there isn't directly somebody carrying a cross around (though that saying also exists), and these days most people might even equally think of lower backpain, because Kreuz also means the lumbar region.

[melannen]

Huh, interesting! So it probably is meant as the possessive and they just left off the trailing apostrophe for design reasons maybe? Since the alphabetic type was mostly decorative on the original Japanese materials anyway, presumably.

Google Translate gives the German for White's cross as "Weißes Kreuz" (it also guess I wanted German for that English text, which is creepy.)

Now I wonder if the English "cross" as in grumpy, which doesn't carry any obvious Christian reference, is related to that German use! According to Wiktionary, even the verb "cross" as in "to the cross the street" goes all the way back directly back to the Christian cross.

[ratcreature]

I always thought feeling cross came from "crossing somebody" which presumably comes from the road arrangement. And that has to be pre-Christian, no? I mean at some point it must have meant just the symbol or the two lines crossing.

[melannen]

Wiktionary says that the word "cross" (in English, and probably also German) was a borrowing from Latin that came with Christianity and had only the religious sense until about the 14th century, and then it started to replace the existing Germanic words for non-religion-related things that resembled crucifixes. Before that the words for things that crossed in Germanic languages were related to old English "thwart"/old German "quer" (from the same root as Latinate "torque" as in twisting). Whereas Latin crux goes back to the same root as Germanic "scharf"/"sharp". Which is super interesting and I would not have guessed!

[ratcreature]

German borrowed it in the 8th century from Latin and it apparently also was very religion focused for a long time. Surprisingly when I looked it up the noun Kreuzung for a road crossing came only into use in the 19th century apparently, and even the verb "kreuzen" for the directional movement only in the 17th from nautical terms (it also means cruise in German, when you sail against the wind). Before that it was apparently just religious stuff, like putting somebody on a cross or making the sign of the cross, which now got replaced by "kreuzigen" and "sich bekreuzigen" as the previous one got all the plain geometrical and movement meanings.

Now I wonder what people used for their intersections before that if they didn't say "Kreuzung"...

[melannen]

Querstraße maybe? Is that still used in modern German?

[ratcreature]

Straßenquerung could work. Querstraße also exists but it is used to describe a smaller street in relation to a main street like an intersecting street not the intersection. Word order matters with these smushes in German. But yeah, probably something with "quer" as root, that seems to be an old word. Now saying just "Querung" on its own seem a bit out of style, usually for crossing something, you now say "Durchquerung" or "Überquerung" or "Unterquerung" depending on the context, but it does exist on its own.

[makamu]

Thanks for the recs and the memories and for having the same favourite pairing I have always followed the most (other ones I liked were and are Aya/Youji and Ken/Omi). And I am oddly relieved to hear that I need not go on the hunt for canon (it looks more complicated than it did twenty years ago).

[melannen]

I wouldn't know about canon! If I wanted to write I would probably have to track it down, because canon is complicated enough I'm not sure you could write just from the fic, but luckily I never wanted to write in WK (except a vague wistful desire for an Eroica crossover.)

[makamu]

I wouldn't know about canon! If I wanted to write I would probably have to track it down, because canon is complicated enough I'm not sure you could write just from the fic, but luckily I never wanted to write in WK (except a vague wistful desire for an Eroica crossover.)

You are right and in my case, the tendency to want to know what canon does with characters even when I know that I will go complete AU (don't ask...) would probably trip me up even worse...

[to_do_list]

I did watch the anime back I don't even know how many years ago, when it was just released and all of my fandom connections were strictly in Russian... What a trip down the nostalgia lane. Thank you!

The conversation in comments about various meanings of cross were fascinating, I did not know any of it back then and it adds so much meaning now. Both the ideas of burden and the crossing of roads seem to fit so well.