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>>Folken Lacour de Fanel>>Who & Why Basic Stats Age
The
equivalent of 25 Earth years Gender Male Birthday Purple,
17th Moon (Equivalent of February
17) Birthplace Fanelia,
Gaea Height 193
cm Weight 78
kg Affiliation Zaibach Debut Episode
1 Voice Johji
Nakata Observations It's a sad fact that I didn't realise how hot either of the Fanel brothers was when first I saw them. I couldn't help it; I think I was blinded by the reflections off Allen Schezar's hair. But I was shamefully slow to come around to appreciating Folken. Okay, the teardrop tattoo does make him look as though he's trying to be a Pierrot doll. Okay, he's really overdone the hair-wax. And okay, he has the Mullet From Hell. (Viewers of the sadly-defunct MTV Europe show Up For It Live - Eddy Temple-Morris, where are you now? My sister wants to marry you - will understand that a mullet is a very unfortunate haircut that is short on top and long at the back. Non-viewers have just received an explanation, so that's all right.) And
yet, and yet. He has the sort of deep,
almost lugubrious voice that gives me a
funny feeling in my tummy (just so that
doesn't sound too pathetic, I
am paraphrasing a Red Hot Chili
Peppers lyric). He is as morally dodgy,
achingly lonely and teasingly enigmatic as
the Cigarette-Smoking Man while being as
just plain sexy as Agent Mulder. He is the
only person who can tell Dilandau off.
(Even General Adelfos only attempts that
at one remove, in a letter.) Dear God,
he's cool. Well,
for one thing, you've gotta admire the
guy's mind. He must have the most
amazingly flexible, adaptive and
acquisitive intellect. Coming from a
country with a mediaeval level of
technology, where there's apparently one
guymelef which no-one has used for over a
decade, he advances through education and
independent research to the point where he
single-handedly invents fiendishly
complicated things like the Stealth
Manteaux, all sorts of fate-adjustment
doohickeys (including one embarrassingly
named the Destiny Vibrator; oh dear) and
those nasty liquid-metal claw
weapons mounted on the Alseides and
Oreades guymelefs. If you've ever
wondered, the flamethrower is not a
separate attachment - if you heat the
liquid metal sufficiently (using an
Energist, what else?) it becomes a
directible jet of flame. We're talking
about inventive intelligence on a Leonardo
da Vinci level, riding the resources of
the Industrial Revolution. Do not
challenge him at Tetris. Folken is the
ultimate Renaissance man, and the idea of
renaissance, literally 'rebirth,' is
central to his character. Just
to get a bit off topic for a while, do you
ever wonder why Escaflowne and
Scherazade need cloaks? I mean, apart from
'because it looks cool.' And even apart
from my friend Kevin's reasonable
observation that it helps them look more
like real knights in armour, creating the
full illusion of a human warrior scaled up
to gargantuan proportions. There is no
functional reason. I think it must be like
hanging fuzzy dice from the rear-view
mirror of your car. I like to think that
Folken looked at those cloaks, thought
'Okay, pretty but pointless' and set out
to think of a way that they could be made
not only functional, but a distinct
tactical advantage. As a matter of fact,
series creator Shoji Kawamori originally
wanted all the mecha in the series to have
stealth cloaks, but others working on the
project convinced him otherwise, so the
idea really did evolve backwards like
that. (Hey, I actually managed to bring
that back on-topic!) For further meditations on Folken, and information about the people important in his life, please read through the rest of this shrine. Most of it makes more sense than what I've thrown together here, or is, at least, less oestrogeny. |
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