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---
layout: post
title: "The Self-Contradiction of Spice and Wolf"
tag: "anime"
---
I really enjoyed the 2008 *Spice and Wolf* series when I watched it, so I was excited to hear it was being worked on again.
After watching *Spice and Wolf: MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF*, I felt the reboot was completely justified.
I had to get used to the new art style initially, but all in all, it looked good.
The sounds (the effects, the soundtrack, and the voice acting) were generally very good, and they get extra points for re-casting the voice actors from the 2008 series.
The highlight of the show—as with its previous iteration—was Lawrence's and Holo's pairing and their interactions.
In this regard, the anime didn't fail to deliver; those two were just as fun to watch as always.
But despite all of this, I couldn't help but feel cheated by the shallowness and poorness of the overarching narrative.
Let me expand on this in this writing.
# Premise
Apart from being a semi-episodic, almost slice-of-life tale of a merchant and his wolf (girl) friend, *Spice and Wolf* is about Holo looking for her way home.
The way she goes about doing this is by traveling with Lawrence and seeking out folklore—stories about various pagan deities, which are adjacent or connected to hers and thus show her a way.
Additionally, the whole season is framed by a Mother (with the voice of Holo) telling the story to her Daughter about the duo's adventures.
They are alternately going bankrupt and getting chased by the church on the basis of witchcraft, while slowly progressing towards their destination.
This premise of seeking one's way through the study of tales and stories handed down via oral tradition is very interesting to me and has remarkable potential from a psychological perspective.
This is why it pains me even more to see it turn out the way it did—shallow.
# Stories Are Real
Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street.
Santa Claus brings presents to good kids.
The Hogwarts Express departs from Platform 9¾ at King's Cross.
These are widely accepted truths, which are, in one sense, just fabrications.
But I would argue that Sherlock Holmes' address matters much more than my address.
To my address, a couple of people come: those who know me and wish to visit me.
But Sherlock Holmes is known by millions, and Baker Street 221B is visited by hundreds on a daily basis for the sole reason that it's Sherlock Holmes' house.
Everybody says he lives there and even acts as if he lived there.
Similarly, Santa Claus is real because of the traditions tied to his name.
From a materialist-reductionist point of view, these stories aren't hard facts—they have no sensory evidence.
Yet they shape our lives more than, (for example), gravitational waves, which have empirical evidence supporting them.
Moreover, we have no reason to believe the future is real.
Quite the contrary: we're at constant risk of dying (although for the luckier amongst us, that chance is very low), so there may never be a future for us.
We have no sensory reading of tomorrow, yet we naturally act as if it were just as real as today—or even more real, when we set aside resources from today (for example, when we only eat half of that delicious spaghetti for dinner, so that the other half can be tomorrow's lunch).
Now, I do not wish to dismantle the utility of measured truths nor their validity; I just want to escape the narrow-mindedness of believing that they are the only things that matter.
Fiction is often used as an abstraction of reality to help us understand the world and ourselves.
Engineers, in particular, know the utility of abstraction very well.
For example, the story of *Star Wars* tells us about passion, politics, forgiveness, and virtue by showing them in action instead of explaining them.
The Emperor is the manifestation of the evil tempter, who corrupts a democracy, destroys a religious order, and manipulates a young hero into becoming his dark, half-machine, broken servant.
His character is an abstraction for evil that needs no explanation to be understood, but can be analyzed in great depth without expending it.
Abstractions like this are very important to us because they allow us to perceive very complex phenomena with our limited brain capacity.
Dispensing with *Star Wars* just because "in reality Darth Vader is just made up by George Lucas" would be superficial to the truths his character tells us about ourselves.
Quite the contrary, I find stories most interesting because they teach me something new about how humans (including me) work—not because they are accurate from a scientific point (be that historical accuracy, physical accuracy, etc.).
# Stories in *Spice and Wolf*
*Spice and Wolf* takes this meta-reality of stories and brings them in-universe to material reality, which I find to be an interesting choice.
Holo herself is a mythical beast from pagan traditions, who dwells in the wheat and is responsible for its growth.
But she isn't just an abstraction of the harshness of nature and the hardships of agriculture; she's a walking and breathing demihuman with a wolf tail and ears.
This could have been used as narrative dissonance (like the forest creatures in *Tonari no Totoro*), but instead, she exhibits her supernatural nature in front of all characters, not just Lawrence, thus dismissing this interpretation.
Worse than this, she isn't the only living pagan deity.
It's implied that all of them exist in one form or another, and their stories are considered 100% real (even though these stories are also transmitted through oral tradition).
Their magic is also real, as demonstrated by Holo on multiple occasions, meaning that her powers are not abstractions of nature's laws; they are "scientific truths" (in-universe).
Holo's journey—as I wrote before—is about finding stories adjacent to hers in order to find her hometown.
It is similar to how humans orient themselves in the world, with the use of fiction, by identifying as the characters and drawing from the underlying meaning.
The difference is that these pagan stories never seem to extend beyond the factual value of which geographical directions lead to Holo's hometown.
This may have been fine if it applied to all stories in this universe, but this is not the case.
The exception is the church's narrative.
We never get to really know this story, but we see its effects.
This narrative of the One True God is oppressive against the pagan gods and can't tolerate their existence.
While this is responsible for adding adventure to the story, it is never explained beyond the idea that this was what Christianity did in medieval Europe.
In the end, the church is reduced to power-hungry oppressors who use their narrative to achieve their goals.
For a story about stories, I find this to be a very shallow approach and a massive missed opportunity.
Oppressive stories do exist, so it makes sense to include the dark side of storytelling (which would be propaganda), but we never get to know what makes the story bad or inauthentic.
I don't think that our stories can be reduced to "true = good" and "false = bad."
In my opinion, *Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood* tackled faith-based exploitation much better in its third episode, *City of Heresy*.
Here we not a detailed display of how dangerous religious manipulations are—just listen to the promises of Cornello.
But in *Spice and Wolf* we're left to believe that members of the church are just after power and money.
And it doesn't stop there; when combined with the next episode, *An Alchemist's Anguish*, the picture becomes even broader: bad intentions may corrupt any enterprise, not just religion.
# The Contradiction
*Spice and Wolf* is, in the end, a work of fiction.
Its focus is on stories (other works of fiction), which are either factual and valid or oppressive and invalid.
But then again, *Spice and Wolf* isn't factual either.
Does that mean that it's also a self-serving story?
How is it that I still found it valuable, (albeit annoying), despite not being real in the material sense?
This is the self-contradiction of *Spice and Wolf*.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" ><generator uri="https://jekyllrb.com/" version="3.9.0">Jekyll</generator><link href="http://localhost:4000/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" /><link href="http://localhost:4000/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" /><updated>2024-12-15T00:03:34+01:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/feed.xml</id><title type="html">Derisis13’s temporary blog</title><subtitle>Just some nerd rambling</subtitle><entry><title type="html">Docker and Nextcloud</title><link href="http://localhost:4000/2024/12/14/docker.html" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Docker and Nextcloud" /><published>2024-12-14T00:00:00+01:00</published><updated>2024-12-14T00:00:00+01:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/2024/12/14/docker</id><content type="html" xml:base="http://localhost:4000/2024/12/14/docker.html">&lt;p&gt;This is part four of my server write-up.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" ><generator uri="https://jekyllrb.com/" version="3.9.0">Jekyll</generator><link href="http://localhost:4000/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" /><link href="http://localhost:4000/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" /><updated>2025-01-09T22:40:03+01:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/feed.xml</id><title type="html">Derisis13’s temporary blog</title><subtitle>Just some nerd rambling</subtitle><entry><title type="html">The Self-Contradiction of Spice and Wolf</title><link href="http://localhost:4000/2025/01/09/Spice-and-Wolf.html" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="The Self-Contradiction of Spice and Wolf" /><published>2025-01-09T00:00:00+01:00</published><updated>2025-01-09T00:00:00+01:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/2025/01/09/Spice-and-Wolf</id><content type="html" xml:base="http://localhost:4000/2025/01/09/Spice-and-Wolf.html">&lt;p&gt;I really enjoyed the 2008 &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt; series when I watched it, so I was excited to hear it was being worked on again.
After watching &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf: MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF&lt;/em&gt;, I felt the reboot was completely justified.
I had to get used to the new art style initially, but all in all, it looked good.
The sounds (the effects, the soundtrack, and the voice acting) were generally very good, and they get extra points for re-casting the voice actors from the 2008 series.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The highlight of the show—as with its previous iteration—was Lawrence’s and Holo’s pairing and their interactions.
In this regard, the anime didn’t fail to deliver; those two were just as fun to watch as always.
But despite all of this, I couldn’t help but feel cheated by the shallowness and poorness of the overarching narrative.
Let me expand on this in this writing.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1 id=&quot;premise&quot;&gt;Premise&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Apart from being a semi-episodic, almost slice-of-life tale of a merchant and his wolf (girl) friend, &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt; is about Holo looking for her way home.
The way she goes about doing this is by traveling with Lawrence and seeking out folklore—stories about various pagan deities, which are adjacent or connected to hers and thus show her a way.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the whole season is framed by a Mother (with the voice of Holo) telling the story to her Daughter about the duo’s adventures.
They are alternately going bankrupt and getting chased by the church on the basis of witchcraft, while slowly progressing towards their destination.
This premise of seeking one’s way through the study of tales and stories handed down via oral tradition is very interesting to me and has remarkable potential from a psychological perspective.
This is why it pains me even more to see it turn out the way it did—shallow.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1 id=&quot;stories-are-real&quot;&gt;Stories Are Real&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Santa Claus brings presents to good kids.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The Hogwarts Express departs from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;These are widely accepted truths, which are, in one sense, just fabrications.
But I would argue that Sherlock Holmes’ address matters much more than my address.
To my address, a couple of people come: those who know me and wish to visit me.
But Sherlock Holmes is known by millions, and Baker Street 221B is visited by hundreds on a daily basis for the sole reason that it’s Sherlock Holmes’ house.
Everybody says he lives there and even acts as if he lived there.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Similarly, Santa Claus is real because of the traditions tied to his name.
From a materialist-reductionist point of view, these stories aren’t hard facts—they have no sensory evidence.
Yet they shape our lives more than, (for example), gravitational waves, which have empirical evidence supporting them.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Moreover, we have no reason to believe the future is real.
Quite the contrary: we’re at constant risk of dying (although for the luckier amongst us, that chance is very low), so there may never be a future for us.
We have no sensory reading of tomorrow, yet we naturally act as if it were just as real as today—or even more real, when we set aside resources from today (for example, when we only eat half of that delicious spaghetti for dinner, so that the other half can be tomorrow’s lunch).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Now, I do not wish to dismantle the utility of measured truths nor their validity; I just want to escape the narrow-mindedness of believing that they are the only things that matter.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Fiction is often used as an abstraction of reality to help us understand the world and ourselves.
Engineers, in particular, know the utility of abstraction very well.
For example, the story of &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; tells us about passion, politics, forgiveness, and virtue by showing them in action instead of explaining them.
The Emperor is the manifestation of the evil tempter, who corrupts a democracy, destroys a religious order, and manipulates a young hero into becoming his dark, half-machine, broken servant.
His character is an abstraction for evil that needs no explanation to be understood, but can be analyzed in great depth without expending it.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Abstractions like this are very important to us because they allow us to perceive very complex phenomena with our limited brain capacity.
Dispensing with &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; just because “in reality Darth Vader is just made up by George Lucas” would be superficial to the truths his character tells us about ourselves.
Quite the contrary, I find stories most interesting because they teach me something new about how humans (including me) work—not because they are accurate from a scientific point (be that historical accuracy, physical accuracy, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1 id=&quot;stories-in-spice-and-wolf&quot;&gt;Stories in &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt; takes this meta-reality of stories and brings them in-universe to material reality, which I find to be an interesting choice.
Holo herself is a mythical beast from pagan traditions, who dwells in the wheat and is responsible for its growth.
But she isn’t just an abstraction of the harshness of nature and the hardships of agriculture; she’s a walking and breathing demihuman with a wolf tail and ears.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This could have been used as narrative dissonance (like the forest creatures in &lt;em&gt;Tonari no Totoro&lt;/em&gt;), but instead, she exhibits her supernatural nature in front of all characters, not just Lawrence, thus dismissing this interpretation.
Worse than this, she isn’t the only living pagan deity.
It’s implied that all of them exist in one form or another, and their stories are considered 100% real (even though these stories are also transmitted through oral tradition).
Their magic is also real, as demonstrated by Holo on multiple occasions, meaning that her powers are not abstractions of nature’s laws; they are “scientific truths” (in-universe).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Holo’s journey—as I wrote before—is about finding stories adjacent to hers in order to find her hometown.
It is similar to how humans orient themselves in the world, with the use of fiction, by identifying as the characters and drawing from the underlying meaning.
The difference is that these pagan stories never seem to extend beyond the factual value of which geographical directions lead to Holo’s hometown.
This may have been fine if it applied to all stories in this universe, but this is not the case.
The exception is the church’s narrative.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We never get to really know this story, but we see its effects.
This narrative of the One True God is oppressive against the pagan gods and can’t tolerate their existence.
While this is responsible for adding adventure to the story, it is never explained beyond the idea that this was what Christianity did in medieval Europe.
In the end, the church is reduced to power-hungry oppressors who use their narrative to achieve their goals.
For a story about stories, I find this to be a very shallow approach and a massive missed opportunity.
Oppressive stories do exist, so it makes sense to include the dark side of storytelling (which would be propaganda), but we never get to know what makes the story bad or inauthentic.
I don’t think that our stories can be reduced to “true = good” and “false = bad.”&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &lt;em&gt;Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood&lt;/em&gt; tackled faith-based exploitation much better in its third episode, &lt;em&gt;City of Heresy&lt;/em&gt;.
Here we not a detailed display of how dangerous religious manipulations are—just listen to the promises of Cornello.
But in &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt; we’re left to believe that members of the church are just after power and money.
And it doesn’t stop there; when combined with the next episode, &lt;em&gt;An Alchemist’s Anguish&lt;/em&gt;, the picture becomes even broader: bad intentions may corrupt any enterprise, not just religion.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1 id=&quot;the-contradiction&quot;&gt;The Contradiction&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt; is, in the end, a work of fiction.
Its focus is on stories (other works of fiction), which are either factual and valid or oppressive and invalid.
But then again, &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt; isn’t factual either.
Does that mean that it’s also a self-serving story?
How is it that I still found it valuable, (albeit annoying), despite not being real in the material sense?
This is the self-contradiction of &lt;em&gt;Spice and Wolf&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name></name></author><category term="anime" /><summary type="html">I really enjoyed the 2008 Spice and Wolf series when I watched it, so I was excited to hear it was being worked on again. After watching Spice and Wolf: MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF, I felt the reboot was completely justified. I had to get used to the new art style initially, but all in all, it looked good. The sounds (the effects, the soundtrack, and the voice acting) were generally very good, and they get extra points for re-casting the voice actors from the 2008 series.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Server Setup Part 3 - Docker and Nextcloud</title><link href="http://localhost:4000/2024/12/14/docker.html" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Server Setup Part 3 - Docker and Nextcloud" /><published>2024-12-14T00:00:00+01:00</published><updated>2024-12-14T00:00:00+01:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/2024/12/14/docker</id><content type="html" xml:base="http://localhost:4000/2024/12/14/docker.html">&lt;p&gt;This is part four of my server write-up.
In the last part, I wrote about networking on my home server.
This time, I’ll let you in on a little secret about how I share one drive between my various applications without ownership/permission problems.
I derived this configuration from the Nextcloud, Servarr, and smbd documentation.
@@ -414,7 +505,7 @@ I also set up an ISCSI target on this disk but I have yet to put it to use.&lt;/
The other 1TB is non-redundant and is used only for containers, caching and as a local backup storage, which saved me a lot of time already.
The local backups are further reinforced by an offsite copy, at a family member.
They are both running BTRFS for its advanced features.
Various workarounds are in effect on the redundant array to ensure compatibility with Nextcloud, for which all files need to be owned by a specific user and group.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name></name></author><category term="home server" /><summary type="html">This is part two of my server writeup. I’ll discuss how I organized the storage of my server starting from the hard drives, touching on file systems and redundancy, and even going into the folder structure, permissions and shared folders.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Host System</title><link href="http://localhost:4000/2024/05/06/host.html" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Host System" /><published>2024-05-06T00:00:00+02:00</published><updated>2024-05-06T00:00:00+02:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/2024/05/06/host</id><content type="html" xml:base="http://localhost:4000/2024/05/06/host.html">&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post was supposed to be published in December 2023, but due to technical dificulties I didn’t do it at the time.
Various workarounds are in effect on the redundant array to ensure compatibility with Nextcloud, for which all files need to be owned by a specific user and group.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name></name></author><category term="home server" /><summary type="html">This is part two of my server writeup. I’ll discuss how I organized the storage of my server starting from the hard drives, touching on file systems and redundancy, and even going into the folder structure, permissions and shared folders.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Server Setup Part 1 - Host System</title><link href="http://localhost:4000/2024/05/06/host.html" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Server Setup Part 1 - Host System" /><published>2024-05-06T00:00:00+02:00</published><updated>2024-05-06T00:00:00+02:00</updated><id>http://localhost:4000/2024/05/06/host</id><content type="html" xml:base="http://localhost:4000/2024/05/06/host.html">&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post was supposed to be published in December 2023, but due to technical dificulties I didn’t do it at the time.
It’s remained an important part of my server writeup, even though some of it is no longer representative of my setup.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is part one of my server writeup.

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<div class="wrapper">
<div class="home">
<h2 class="post-list-heading">Posts</h2>
<ul class="post-list"><li><span class="post-meta">Dec 14, 2024</span>
<ul class="post-list"><li><span class="post-meta">Jan 9, 2025</span>
<h3>
<a class="post-link" href="/2025/01/09/Spice-and-Wolf.html">
The Self-Contradiction of Spice and Wolf
</a>
</h3></li><li><span class="post-meta">Dec 14, 2024</span>
<h3>
<a class="post-link" href="/2024/12/14/docker.html">
Docker and Nextcloud
Server Setup Part 3 - Docker and Nextcloud
</a>
</h3></li><li><span class="post-meta">Nov 25, 2024</span>
<h3>
@@ -71,7 +76,7 @@
</h3></li><li><span class="post-meta">May 6, 2024</span>
<h3>
<a class="post-link" href="/2024/05/06/host.html">
Host System
Server Setup Part 1 - Host System
</a>
</h3></li><li><span class="post-meta">Dec 19, 2023</span>
<h3>