I’ve recently watched Magical Lyrical Girl Nanoha. Ok, it’s been more than a while, and I’ve then watched A’s, but still have the last three episodes to watch… I’ve been occupied lately, and the show is not entirely engrossing.

The show is somewhat anachronistic; the art style is more reminiscent of early 90s anime. Alternately, it kinda looks like Digimon in a way, it feels like something rushed out to make money, or shoved into its slot to fill it after something else got cancelled. The models, that is, the characters are not very well drawn, but are cute. I nearly had an aneurysm in the beginning when each character has like a mad mad hair at the front, with a bunch sticking out, and it’s “Aligned” to the side, and the moment they shift their head slightly the hair really jumps a bunch to the other side.

The graphics of backgrounds, the city-scape, it’s very blocky, the number of different characters in most scenes is exceedingly small (1-2 in a lot, 4 is like “Whoa!“). The characters are often static and talk to themselves, or we have Nanoha’s waking up sequence, which while cute repeats itself. It really feels like on the production front, this show is exceedingly flat, and didn’t have a lot poured into it.
Not to mention, some of the seiyuu, like Arf‘s seiyuu, Natsuko Kuwatani, just sounds so annoying. “Fate-o Chan!” Blergh.

(This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a medium amount of spoilers in this post.)

Well, it’d be remiss of me to judge a series only based on its superficial values, but it’s also important to note them, because they affect your overall impression and enjoyment of a series. Moreover, as in this case, it had lead me to believe certain things regarding the amount of effort and time given to this series, which in turn are also reflected in what I will address next, the story.

The characters are not that fleshed out, and as had been pointed out quite hilariously in Ore no Imouto, Nanoha fulfills the saying “Shooting and crying”, all that good jazz of shooting her friends, for their own benefit!
The world feels empty, due to the backgrounds and such; the world does not feel lived in. There are barely any passersby, so most scenes are empty, and the collateral damage  lacks people and thus also a lot of impact; we’ve got big explosions and the only thing we see as a reaction are the sounds of sirens closing in and Nanoha running away…

Of course, remember what I said about number of characters in a scene? There are very few characters, and very few in a scene, much of the characterization of characters is not shown, but told. And a good advice in stories is “Show, don’t tell”. We have characters sitting in a room and talking to themselves, or us hearing their thoughts, so we know they think/feel a certain way due to being told, rather than coming to a conclusion about it on our own, as a result of the characters’ actions.
We also get some note regarding Nanoha’s father, but it doesn’t get more than touched upon.

And of course, the “Big Mama”. Fate’s “mother”. The evil witch. This is handled sort of like a Disney film (BTW, watched Tangled last weekend, and it was good!) . She is crazy, she has motivations which need to get us to sympathize her, but in the end, she’s inhuman and alien to us. Not because we can’t understand her motivations, not because we can’t get the tired trope of “The end justifies all means! All of them!” but because she’s as mad as a hatter, and that she does many things that help her cause not one iota, and only serve to alienate us. And then she dies, like most evil (step-)mothers in Disney movies.
And Fate, fulfilling her trope of obediency and mother-love just becomes as alien as the mother to us, or nearly.

The show has some good moments, the show has some charm. But you mainly keep watching the show because it’s “light”, though the art-direction in the end is not just not very well executed, but “Heavy”, and so are the plot-lines. Somehow, I kept watching it, and I didn’t suffer, but I also didn’t enjoy it that much. The second season was much better.

Score: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha gets 5.5/10 butchered English phrases. You can watch it, but you probably have better things to do with your time. I’ll try to watch the movie soon and see if it’s better. Also, 5.5 is not an F, it’s “Average”.

(Guy’s Note: Well, Hobby Search not loading its pages in English means the “Figure Friday” of sorts post I was meaning to make will be postponed for sometime during the week (or next Friday).)

For those who don’t know, Domu is an anime written by Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira, and had been written (and serialized) between 1980 and 1982. I’ve read the graphic novel version translated by Dark Horse, unsurprisingly. The story follows an accursed housing block in Japan. Accursed you ask? There’s an astonishingly high number of deaths and disappearances around the block, and they send detectives to investigate the matter. And things escalate into a psychic duel.
And this covers the general plot of the story, which you could probably find out online with minor poking.
(This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a LOT of spoilers in this post.)

So, there isn’t actually much story in this manga. It’s kinda like a horror movie in this regard – you have a psychic old man who’s killing people, and it’s unclear from the title of the manga – “Domu: A Child’s Dream” and a small comment by a visiting psychic, whether the old man is trying to fulfill children’s dreams, or he’s killing them because they compete with his dreams? Anyway, he’s killing them in order to get their things which kids want, toys, a shiny hat, etc.
And then you have a small girl with awesome psychic powers whose family moves into the housing block, and then the two resident psychics fight it out, with some detectives coming to try to get to the bottom of all this.

You know how you can distill any story down, but there’d be a lot left outside? Sure, I could tell you of the kid she befriends, the retard who helps the small girl and her friend, her friend’s drunk father who’s controlled by the old man… but it’s all incidental. It’s not “Story”. It’s not what the story is about, it’s not really “plot”, it’s just “stuff that happens”. I adhere to the notion the story is what the story is about, not just “what happens”. So this story, it really could be summed in about two to three sentences.

But this is unsurprising. Horror “stories” are not about what the story is about, it’s not even about what happens. Horror stories revolve around atmosphere. They revolve around 2 minutes of looking at a close-up of a character while nothing happens, and seeing the fear in their eyes; their anger as they are pushed against a wall, and as they fight for their survival. It’s the shock we experience as things go “Bump” in the night (and also “BAMF!” ).

This works very well in movies, where things can be drawn out. This also works well in books, where they take the time to scare us, where we pull page after page and get sucked in, as we can hear the characters’ thoughts, as we can read those descriptive words that add no content but add atmosphere (Hurriedly, desperately, out of breath…), but in a manga, where there’s very little talk or thought bubbles, and almost everything is action? Well, it’s the kind of horror you get from Alien versus Predator when you take the humans out of the equation. It’s an action story, and there’s nothing to reinforce the atmosphere – not enough dark shots, no ominous music.

Domu is a nice manga, with ok drawing, but there’s not enough meat in it, and it’s not scary, or even very emotional in its resolution. It does feel a bit like a real housing block with the gossiping neighbours and the atmosphere of that, of the ordinary suburban life. But it’s not scary, and it’s more like X-Men than Scream.
Horror storytelling had advanced since, and I’m not sure if manga is the best medium for horror.

Domu: A Child’s Dream gets 6/10 screams from me. Well, more like 3.5 as a horror manga, but it’s an ok book.

BTW, do you think manga is suitable for horror, and if so, which good horror manga have you read? I can see suspense in manga, since I’ve read thrillers in manga (Deathnote).

Well, we’re in the middle of the current anime season (Fall 2010?), and I thought rather than wait for all these anime to end, I’d say a couple of words regarding several series I’ve been watching, meaning to watch, etc. There’d obviously be longer posts after these shows end. Or at least the current seasons…

Ore no Imōto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai – for short, Ore no Imoto, or even shorter, Oreimo. In English: My Little Sister Can’t be This Cute.
This show is like Genshiken (blog post) in a way. A show about otaku, exploring them. It is more comical though. Episodes 5-6 were a bit weird, but the show had definitely taken on slightly less hijinks and crazy anime lovers attitude, and a somewhat more “Slice of Life” stance. I have high hopes for it to keep going strong. I love it thus far. Good show, enjoyable cast, cute characters, some good laughs (albeit some weird moments like when Kyosuke fought their father..). But overall? WATCH IT. Right now.

Hyakka Ryoran Samurai Girls – Beautiful Flowers Samurai Girls or some such in English?
This show is beautiful. It often looks like some high quality video game, complete with effects. The drawings’ quality is of the highest caliber. There are effects of ink blots that look nice during battles, but are mostly used to hide the private parts of characters during the show. This happens quite a bit. This is a super soft ecchi show, ala Queen’s Blade. You can already tell those ink blots will be coming off in some future DVD release…
The show is mostly devoid of story, even 7 episodes in, and whatever is there is sparse, and is just an excuse for the pr0n. The voice acting is not that impressive either… so it has Rie Kugimiya, but there’s a limit.
Watch if you want beautiful drawing of beautiful 2D girls. Pass otherwise.

Shinryaku! Ika Musume – Invasion! Squid Girl
I did not watch this show. But, after watching the following video on YouTube, I just know I’ll have to watch it… Do watch the video!

I also need to watch Toaru Majutsu no Index season 2 (A Certain Magical Index, see first season post), but I just hadn’t had the time… been sleeping a lot lately. A lot!

I’ll also get you some preliminary thoughts on Highschool of the Dead, later though.

So, what did you watch? What did you like? What did you hate? Tell me what to watch, and what to avoid!

~jiiiiiiii~

(So I’m joining up to help fill in the blog here on occasion, and this is a cross-post with my own small blog adventure: Wishray Fountain. *shameless plug*)

I’ve been watching this show, Lie to Me*, since it began, and I’ve got to say some things about it. These things are more than just the usual: you should be watching this, it’s good television, and the drama is engaging. Instead I want to talk about magic and chemistry.

By all rights this is a show that should flop. A lot of its scriptwriting is rather humdrum, some of the characters are cardboard cutouts, and it on occasion breaks down into a formulaic pile of dog poo. However, much like House, it goes beyond all that and you just end up liking it in the end.

Now, why is that? It is the magic of the actors doing their job amazingly. Tim Roth has been great in every role I’ve seen him in (a certain crazy monkey comes to mind!). He makes Cal Lightman a very real and quirky + interesting character. You’ve got Kelli Williams who makes Gillian Foster sparkle, and the chemisty between the two on screen is compelling.

Right, and here is where it all falls apart. The rest of the cast seems capable enough, but they just don’t come together in any interesting and engaging way. Every time they are on the screen (with one exception) I’m like, GET OFF THE SCREEN AND GIVE ME MORE OF WHAT WORKS DUMMIES. The exception is Emily Lightman (Hayley McFarland) who exists solely to play off Cal and Gillian anyway, so that works too.

Now I could go step-by-step and explain what works and what doesn’t but I’m not going to spend the time or energy to do so. Instead I’m going to finish by talking about what really matters: the content of the show that drives the drama. The show is a drama, about the character and when it focuses on that its really shines. When it addresses the science of the “microexpression” and lie detection more directly it’s not as good, but it’s thought-provoking and meaty (full of substance – Guy). It’s one of the more mentally engaging shows I’ve seen in recent years. They just have to make the science more subtle, tied closer to the drama, and break it out of the formulaic approach. The show does so all this at times, but never maintains it.

It’s hard to find good sci-fi on TV, and I’d say this qualifies. Now if it could just get a coat of polish to cover the imperfections, we’d have a real winner and possibly a runaway hit. Here is hoping for a tighter, cleaner, more awesome Lie to Me* around the corner – and I’ll keep watching waiting for it.

The sweet sweet fate not blogging "Saves" you from.

I’ve gone in a past post on my figure purchases up until that time (back in September 2009). It came out to $374 back then, and well, it’s gone considerably higher since (especially with the purchase of a limited figure such as Saber Alter Maid version by Alter, reviewed here). Anime also takes time, even if it’s something I find enjoyable. So the blog also costs you time (and this is aside from time spent on it!).

I know some people write blogs and don’t really read others’ blogs, and for the next week or two I’m afraid I’m also going to be a part of this group, at least to a degree. More importantly, there are people who read others’ blogs without writing their own, and what I am talking about? They suffer from it even when they do not blog themselves.
This is so because the real way blogs cost you money is not directly related to the blog and blog-writing itself, but what it entails. Back when I still wrote Figure Friday (I am still trying to see how to get it back to life, it’d probably include resuming Tumblr posts and then collecting those posts every 1-2 weeks), I spent several hours each week looking at all of the new figures released and announced, all the new sales, via HobbyLink Japan, Hobby Search, Neko Magic, Kumo’s blog, and many others.

Now, my cynical personality and attention to details helped me stave off the desire and urge to buy all the neat figures I came across. But the lack of much disposable income had probably played a major part in it. You will see new figure enthusiasts get any figure that is merely “nice” or “neat”, and while there is nothing wrong with doing that there’s a reason they stop after several months: Running out. They run out of space for all those figures, or they run out of money to spend on these figures. And then they only buy the figures that they really want.
Of course, how quickly figures sell out is actually a scheme by the manufacturers to combat this, so you’ll feel you have to get it now or you never will, so you’ll pre-order before you have enough time to think it through.

A wish, by no circumstances to be confused with reality.

When you don’t blog, you don’t see new figures, new books, new video games, new DVDs, whatever. When you don’t blog, you don’t know of what you’re missing (including anime), which maybe sad, but you’re also not getting tempted to buy all those things you don’t really want and are likely to regret or not enjoy as much later. And if you’ve missed any anime while “it was happening!!!” (what’s the big deal about being part of something “While it’s happening”? Good movies/books are nearly timeless), then in a couple of months’ time people could tell you if it truly was worth watching, so you won’t waste your time on things that turn out to be annoying, like Angel Beats! turned out

And now I’m back to blogging, and now I have a new job, and I will need to demonstrate restraint, because “Disposable income” is a lie. There is always something else you can do with the money should you save it now. Such as save up to move out, or buy a car, or purchase an ace computer, or a new desk, etc. No income is truly disposable. Respect the money you earn…

…which is so very hard with sales such as this one…

Zombie Jesus lives too! Well... sort of?

Grrrrr. WordPress just ate a couple of paragraphs I wrote…
Anyway, there are two ways to get back to posting: Go with “I’ll post whenever I feel like it”, so you’d make a post without feeling an obligation to keep on posting, which I dislike (and also, once I resume posting, it’s not an obligation as much as a snowball; can’t stop!). The other method is to bite the bullet. Stop procrastinating, and just resume blogging. Delve head-first.

There’ll be a blog post coming once a week, gauranteed. Even if the skies fall or Cthulhu and the lost city of R’lyeh resurface. I will try, and I think in most weeks will succeed, to get two posts up. I’ll be aiming for Sunday-Tuesday for one and Thursday-Saturday for the other. Some weeks may have three posts, but I’m not promising. I’m too wise for that.

Expect a figure review or two, some editorials on geekdom in Israel and how I became a geek, some anime reviews and even some first impressions. My opinions on movies, series, manga, games, etc. And also Ewen’s Corner’s return and another guest blogger.

This blog will resume its life, and hopefully, you the readers, the old ones, and any new ones who come along, will find it worthy to read the new entries, and perhaps also the old ones.
I will try to hunt down and update my blog-roll over the next week and a half, and will reply to all unanswered comments in the next two days.

Today, well, it is today by now, will be the first day of my new job. I have one course left in order to graduate with my B.A., and I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months with miniatures, which I’ll also tell you guys about.

So, how’ve you all been?

The hype and excitement over Starcraft 2 is quite crazy, and it’s not like Blizzard even had to do a lot to fan it. Well, that’s not entirely true, they fanned it by not speaking too much about it, and letting gamers who were honestly excited do all the promotion on their own. This is a winning technique, when you already have people going crazy for your next release, no matter what you say or do.

Raynor. Jim Raynor. Human badass.

I really started playing serious video games in my own home when I was in fourth grade. One of the first few games I’ve received was Warcraft 2, and then its expansion (which I didn’t enjoy much with the crazy magic difficulty). I still remember after my father installed it he tried to play and couldn’t get things done, and I got things working from the first few minutes of playing the campaign – I found it intuitive; same as some years later my cousin had Age of Empires and didn’t know how to get things done, and I sat down and within a couple of minutes got the hang of the game.

Starcraft, the first game? I only got to play it at a summer camp sort of thing I went to, with a focus on war-gaming, geeky fantasy movies, etc. I was the only kid there who had not played the game before, yet when all the others got teamed up, the computer I was on was the one which had me controlling both armies of my “team” on my own. Oy. I only picked the game up a couple of years ago, nearly a decade after the original was released, and had fun with its campaign. It was neat.

Warcraft 2's cover art. Sure brings back memories.

Warcraft 3 suffered from a big issue many video games suffer from: The campaign does not train you to play against other people. Take first person shooters, playing the campaign never trains you to play against other people, it teaches skills like caution and conserving ammo… or in WC3: Slow advance, whereas even the basic computer AI will rush and smack you if you try this approach. I know rushing and hotkeys are a big part of SC and WC3, but to a degree, it almost feels like those with better hotkey command don’t need to be masters of tactics, and tactics only really hit in when both players are of equal hotkey skill.

So, I much prefer turn-based strategy games, on the whole, mulling over my options, making decisions, without losing things in the heat of combat. Which I might be more ok with if there was less hotkey action going on. Furthermore, while older strategy games were intuitive, the tech tree of SC1, or even WC2, once you are plunged into a free-for-all game on the internet (and thus have all the options available to you) is overwhelming. The addition of a screen which shows what’s going on is going to be very helpful.

So now I am going to go and pick up a copy of Starcraft 2, and I hope I won’t lose too badly online (though I usually do ), and am eagerly awaiting Diablo 3

In the year 1999, a movie is released; it’s called, “The Matrix“. In this film viewers are introduced to a technique called “Bullet-time“. A year or two later, and dozens of movies which do not benefit or have a plausible explanation for the usage of bullet-time are produced. Most of us grow weary, as bullet-time no longer elicits amazement, but is delegated to being a gimmick.

It is now the year 2010, and in 2009 a movie called “Avatar“, directed by James Cameron, is released. This movie comes out in 3D, and although it’s not the first movie to come out this way, it is buoyed by waves of PR and marketing and mass hysteria. This signals the beginning of the high-budget 3D movies’ assault, which had been planned in advance; which is evident in how many of the 3D movies coming out this year had already been in production when Avatar hit the silver screens world-wide.

The 3D is neat, it’s pretty convincing, and in one scene I moved my hand forward to move aside some banners which were hiding Woody. But to be honest, our mind is a great computer, and one that always falls for optical illusions. We’ve been capable of tricking it into seeing 3D for quite some time. Heck, taking the special glasses off I didn’t see non-3D, just a bit blurry as there were double-edges going on.

Last, and most important in regards to the 3D experience? The glasses. I already wear glasses to correct my vision. The 3D glasses are heavy, and my nose actually hurt by the time the movie ended from the weight inflicted upon it. It was also quite amusing to see how fearful and strict the orderlies were, for fear we’d steal them.

Toy Story 3? The movie in the beginning was quite charming, which is what I expect from Pixar shorts. The main event was quite touching in bits, but suffered from the Disney Ending (evil character is evil and vanquished, the minions are just misguided, and later we all forget what they’ve done before – no harm, no foul). The cast was shrunk to the main characters, same as per the second movie, which allowed for more air-time for the characters that mattered, and zero time to all those who had been axed.

I shed a couple of tears. It was touching.

Score: Toy Story 3D: 7.8/10 growing-up moments. The 3D? Still on the fence about it.

Is not what? When a mystery show is not a mystery show.

I love House M.D. I’ve been watching it every week on the cables for several years now, and have just watched the last episode of season 5 (brilliant!) and the first half of season 6. Now, House M.D. is billed as a “Medical Mystery Show”, but it’s not. After season 3, it seems the writers had figured out for themselves how much it’s not either. I’ve said it before, but it’s still true: All stories are human stories. The mystery is almost incidental.

 When we re-watched season 1 (re-runs in preparation for season 4), my mother remembered the “solution” to each of the cases. I usually didn’t. But that’s because in my mother’s mind, the important thing, and thus the core that she remembered was what the mystery, and its solution, were.

I didn’t remember the mysteries, because they were only catalysts for the important thing. The interaction between the cast of characters, and House’s personality. Seeing the ridiculous, often funny, often amusing, sometimes deep, that he’d throw at us, and at his “friends”.

In season 4 or 5, first Wilson and then Cuddy comment on the manner in which House works, how from a seemingly random thing that occurs he makes the connection. A deus ex machina of sorts. If this were truly a mystery show, then this would be horrible, as the solutions are such that are not only very remote and unlikely, but the kind that you as the (non-doctor, or even doctor) watcher could never figure out on yourself – which is the opposite of what mystery/suspense shows want – they always want to make you feel as if you’ve got a chance.

But this is all ok, because you don’t watch the show for the preposterous medical anomalies. You watch it for the people. It’s almost like Gilmore Girls in that sense!

So, do you watch House M.D.? What do you think of it?

Summer is the season where traditionally students are let off from their chains at school, to go home for two months and go to sleep somewhere between 4 and 5 AM, and wake up around the time they’d usually return from school. Well, it’s been 2003 the last time I had a proper summer vacation, aside from the time I had after finishing my time as a medic and beginning university back in 2007. Yeah, that’s a time where I had time off…

Mindless Anime Characters Celebrating their Youths! Thanks to Yi for the picture.

Well, summer’s here, and as you can imagine, and perhaps see from the slower pace of posts, I don’t really have time off, again. I am currently finishing my last major tests’ period for my B.A. which involves tests, home assignments, and papers slightly longer than 20 pages. I mean, the sweat I get is mostly stress-sweat, and not anything as exciting as the sweat as I flaunt my youthfulness energy around! Besides, who speaks that way aside from people who had underwent lobotomies and characters in anime who celebrate and must commemorate their youth! Then again, is there a difference between the two groups? That is, lobotomized people and stupid anime teens?

Now, I’ve already went to the sea once this season. And I am planning to go back to playing tennis on a regular basis, and Israel is hot and either dry and very sand-stormy, or extremely humid, so I’ll probably be sweating enough. Don’t you worry about me Well… there’s a good reason houses without air-conditioning are so rare in Israel, and then they have a lot of fans.

Anyway, this is a season that will mark a change in my life. I am one course away from finishing my degree, so I will begin looking for some sort of job (probably something computer/tech-related..) this summer, in order to begin earning money.

Normal blogging schedule should resume by this weekend. And you should really read the previous post about the question at the heart of every story. I think it’s a really good one

Understanding this question can often shape the way you look at a story. Things that you did not understand their “Why?”, the reason they occured, and that had seemed meaningless, are suddenly seen in a new light. You construct the story and give it a theme, of answering the question, of resisting the question, and so on.

Most interesting is the analogy of coloured glasses, or a point of view. Many people see a different story being told, a different theme. And in many cases, there are many “legitimate” answers, and switching from one question to another can help you consider the story from different directions.

An anime I absolutely love is Code Geass. Many people have found Code Geass, and especially its second season to be lacking, in some way. I try to get them to look at this “question” that the series poses as its theme in order to help them see the series as I see it, and hopefully appreciate it as I do. The question Code Geass poses is this, “At what cost victory?”

The first season is quite light-hearted, in a way. We see what Lelouch is willing to do, who he is willing to quash, what he will do in order to secure victory, and the world he is looking to establish. The second series is where the question which the protagonist thought he answered decisively in the first season returns, and the protagonist is told that his answer is unsatisfactory, his resolve untested, and that he must demonstrate further conviction.

And so, the second season has Lelouch meet with hardships at every turn, and Lelouch suffers losses. The second season asks the same question, and shows us what Lelouch is not only willing to inflict upon others, but what he is willing to give up in order to win. The second season is all about “At what personal cost victory?” and Lelouch finally answers decisively, in a way that cannot be ignored.

Likewise, Mai-HiME, an anime that I love, has a relatively unsatisfactory ending, I agree. It might also feel like the first half of the series and the second are not in accord, but I disagree. The question this series poses is “What will I do for the sake of Love?” You can also pose it as “Which love is stronger, for my friends-comrades, or for my “Dear Ones”?”
Once you look at it like this, it’s pretty clear that the first half of the series is there for a very real purpose – not “just” so we’ll care for the characters, but so the conflict the question generates will be meaningful – if the choice is obvious, then the story falls flat.

In this case, the first half of the story serves as build-up for the characters to care for one another, and for us to care if they will sacrifice their relationships with one another. Thus, the ending, with Mai fighting her close friend, is part of the answer to this question. That they all end well, and previous “costs” are wiped away cheapens it, but the nearly-ending does fit with the story until that point, according to this question.

Yes, that’s another word for “Question” in this sense, “Conflict”. The question both drives the conflicts in the story, causes the main characters to clash with themselves, with their friends, and with the society that surrounds them, and is the engine that drives the story forth. If there is only one answer, it may be futile to resist, and the story can be about resisting the inevitable. If there is only one answer, and choosing it costs the character nothing, then there is little interest in the story.

Shigofumi, and “Science Fiction”, could be seen as having a big question, “When people die, and they get to send one letter from beyond death, what will its effects be?” Now, this is a situation. In the case of Shigofumi, it’s the premise of the story, but not the question the story answers. Being more of an episodic series, the series poses different questions every arc: “You’ve found out you have cancer,” or “You are bullied.” The original situation is the background of the series, and we see the issue explored, but it’s not the story’s question. Well, according to me.

Finally, if the paragraph above seems weird to you, as the “Questions” posed within Shigofumi are not questions, that’s because you can simply append “What do you do?” to them. A question need not be something we ask, but a situation that is present, demands action, and cannot be ignored.
Slice of life or SitComs also have such questions. We face questions all the time. What is “SitCom” if not a series where we have a “Situation” or “Question” (often two) in each episode to generate interest and friction?

In the end, stories are (almost) always about people.

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• Shigofumi – From Hello to Heart-Wrenching in 20 Minutes [TIL] (geekorner.wordpress.com)

Today is the 4th of July, and today I had to stay awake for 26 hours. This makes me think of fireworks. There’s fireworks to be had in the USA (happy Independence Day to all of my American friends!), and there are fireworks slowly going off in my mind, demanding that I rest my head.

Seeing as this is the situation, and that a long weekend is coming up for you guys, but a lot of tests for me, I’m going to postpone my post on “The Question at the Heart of a Story” to Wednesday (or Thursday if I keel over), and instead, shower you lot with a condensed version of an anime review, or an omnibus of pre-episodic blog reviewing content.

Ok, the above probably didn’t make a lot of sense, did it? I’ve discussed my meta-experience of watching Toaru Majutsu no Index (A Certain Magical Index) on this blog before. Last month I finally finished watching the series.
Now, as I’ve covered on that blog entry, I wrote down my thoughts on each episode, sometimes after it ended, but sometimes (and this really disrupted my “flow”), I stopped an episode to jot down my thoughts as I had them, and later I wrote down how things panned out – did they get answered, or did the water get even murkier?

What I’m going to share with you are those thoughts. You can look at them as 24 episodes’ worth of an episodic blog’s review of a series in one post, but that is obviously not what they are. These are the thoughts I had during the time I watched each episode. I sometimes had thoughts on an episode as a whole. A good episodic blog would have taken each of those thoughts, and wrote at least a paragraph on them. It’d have found thematic strings between the disparate elements and connected them.

An editorial blog (such as this one) would have taken all those endless strings and weaved the ones the writer (that’s me) finds more interesting into weaving a compelling whole.
In the case of this series, it somewhat feels as if it’s based on a light novel series, as you can point to distinct “chunks” of the series that are different in focus and even theme than others, and are discrete. The arch-angel “arc” for instance was quite horrible.

Needless to say, this post will spoil the ENTIRETY of the series! BEWARE!
Thoughts after the jump!

Episode 1:

1. “Fleming’s motion principle” for “Railgun” in episode 1. Need to check it up.
2. Nice that things actually affect the world, Misoko’s lightning causing there to be a power outage the next day. Also nice that he obviously knew her from before.
3. Loved Index’s face when the protagonist took the food
4. “You’re kind of making fun of me, aren’t you?” about 10:20 in, such a cute voice.
5. Index has such cute faces! Kawaii!

Episode 2:

1. That fire monster is called “Innocentus”, heh. More like “Executioner.”
2. “If you don’t want to follow them into the depths of hell, the only other option is to drag them out!”
3. End of episode, what’s up with a one leg pants? And erm, so the teacher only looks young, or is she actually something like 8?

Episode 3:

1.  LOL, PS2 8MB memory card
2. The “song” reminded me more of Jigglypuff’s song than anything else, heh.
3. Healing section was a bit too long for how interesting it was (not interesting enough).
4. Magic is from another world and destroys the minds of those who use it, good or bad. Very Cthulhu-esque.
5. Also, like Discworld, the books have power in and of themselves, which humans can’t control.
6. Magic is, forgot the word, begins with T? Not exactly ‘transformative’, something that changes the rules of the world, something insidious.

Episode 4:

1. Combat, especially Katori’s movements, was great. But too long, and too much talk, and what was up with the music at the end?

Episode 5:

1. Johan’s pen, a pope? And when he pushed his finger into her mouth to destroy the seal, it was like something out of a hentai show…

Episode 6:

1. Talking about their lives as if this were a story, “This long prologue”, not exactly breaking the fourth wall, but making an analogy.
2. “Confirmed to be a distorted interpretation of Christian doctrines..” take that Innocentius! Someone did say, there’s one religion, but the politics got in the way.
3. “Constructing an anti-Christian weapon” LOL!
4. “Eli eli lama shabacktani” was pronounced wrong, it’s not “EH-li” but “eh-LI”, it’s in Hebrew, BTW.
5. Index is such “Super-moe”, how she shuffled her steps, ran, her facial expressions, her voice… anything is designed to achieve the moe! How her skirt is too long, her sleeves, from looking at her from above..
6. Touching moment towards the end of the episode, and then we begin to truly unravel what every “Serious anime” needs, a CONSPIRACY!

Episode 7:

1. About 3:45 in, there’s a run of all of her moe-faces, crying and smiling from before, heh.
2. “Losing memories is a privilege that belongs solely to mysterious, wave emitting girls”, “Wave-emitting” accompanied by him swaying as a noodle, anime style.
3. Perv friend, “Don’t tell me it’s a trap… her chest is a bit too flat for a girl” LOL!
4. Erm, there’s a corpse lying on the ground and no one is paying it any attention? O.o

Episode 8:

1. Ok, the lying corpse getting ignored gets discussed.
2. BTW, where did that stuff from innerside and outerside of the coin come from? I got it, but it was a bit out of nowhere.

 Episode 9:

1. When Index is asleep or her other personality is present, she looks older. Her young age is more an effect of her facial expressions than other things.
2. If she is from the English church, then how come she’s from the Roman Catholic Church? They’re Anglicans!
3. Almost like a cartoon, when the car dropped on Touma
4. What a power, he can create anything, including mental commands…
5. Erm, one bullet did a lot of damage to the wall, how did multiple shots not kill Touma?
6. YAY! It got addressed, consistency matters.
7. Super-science! His arm got reconnected, wow. And the Alchemist’s power got explained. Though so long his mind can think it, he can distort reality to fit. Hm. He needed the tool to perform a form of self-hypnosis.
8. Hm, how old is Index? She had an adult “partner” 3 years ago, but as was said, some take the roles of siblings, others of teachers or parents, hm.

Episode 10:

1. Damn, this is a bigger gun than Yoko’s!
2. When he says “Such misfortune”, it so reminds me of “I’m in despair!” from Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei.
3. The sisters are weird, and narrateful. They tell you what they think, why they do things, would be a different form of society if everyone did that.
4. Crazy maid time! This anime needs to collect all the moe types after all, sister, maid, gun-girl, shrine maiden..
5. Himegami Aisa also talks using “Story terms”, regarding Touma.
6. Imoutou’s eyes are dead, when she smiles, it’s so creepy. Funny talking to someone who tells you when they are angry or excited.
7. Imoutou shows emotions at the end, with the cat, and Accelerator.

Episode 11:

1. The screenshots in this episode, how people stand over one another, it all is so rich with sexual innuendo.
2. The sound of Touma’s exerted breaths is really more of a wheezing.
3. Misaka Mikoto and the “sisters”, very much like the Rei Ayanami clones? Heh.
4. Well, at least they’re all connected, one brain, one hive-brain in a way, radio connected, heh.
5. This show keeps revolving around “Memories”, Index’s, Touma’s, Misaka Imotous’.

Episode 12:

1. Note, accidentally watched episode 12 first.
2. Ah, now it makes sense why Sensei is talking, she was asked about what are Esper powers.
3. It’s so funny how they pronounce “Schrodinger”. Heh.
4. While sensei is talking to Index Aisa eats all the meat, heh. They love food, all three of them.
5. Hrm. This ends with an Esper being the same as the alchemist, they just make their thoughts into reality.
6. She smiles as she talks of destroying the research facilities, but she is sad within, she’s trying to save her sisters.
7. “To those scientists, level 6, something they’ve never seen, must be pretty enticing.” Yeah, scientists are junkies of the “New thing”.
8. Er, why is this a problem you started, Misaka, you’re just taking the blame. Others decided to start the experiment, or gave it approval, adults.
9. Tree Diagram got destroyed, does this mean that Academy City is operating in the dark?
10. Why do they call them “Sisters” now, when this is how they refer to nuns? Cause that’s the project name and they’re not really Misaka’s sisters, imoutou?
11. “Put up your dukes”? What does that mean? Your best cards, your guns?
12. “Don’t try to stop someone’s will with your half-assed actions!”
13. She thinks she’s a villain, cause she let people be killed, she thinks she killed them. Later Accelerator will show us a real villain.
14. Just like with Kenshin, “You went easy without realizing it”, heh.

Episode 13:

1. Teacher is teaching in the bathhouse, seemingly for our education, or just cause sensei can’t shut up
2. So cute, the shower part, where they wash one another, and drink the same way, etc.
3. Hm, so anyone can become an esper?
4. Almost harem comedy in parts. Index is angry at Touma and other girls, and now Himegami is jealous too?
5. “System=those who aren’t deities that reach the sense of the heavens” HUH?
6. Heh, “We still don’t understand the world, but if someone appears with a status superior to humans, this person would be able to understand God’s answers.” This is the connection to above, they don’t understand how 0-levelers who can’t gain powers exist, if they did, it’d help them understand God – the view of Science as revealing God’s plan.
7. Good scientist Touma is: To kill an experiment, let us prove one of the underlying assumptions is wrong.
8. Misaka has a good point, even scientists have bias, and will think that something may not mean their assumptions are wrong.
9. But I can see the answer! If a level 5 defeating Accelerator were not enough, have a level 0, Touma, defeat him!
10. Accelerator is willing to take on the whole world’s military, was he crazy to begin with, or he is willing because his power will allow him to win?
11. He is a “Rule breaker”, he breaks the laws of reality. Kind of like magic above, eh?
12. The evil dude has a crazy look, crazy eyes, obviously.
13. “My life is what means the most to me, which is why my desire for more power has no limits.”
14. When Misaka asks him why he needs more power even though he’s the strongest, he looks sane. He sounds sane, and thoughtful.
15. Eyes not the same size = sure sign of insane evil.
16. He already killed 10,031 of her by this stage, heh. Does he dream of her face?
17. “Letting out all those heroic lines”, the story theme continues. The God theme weakened but still present.
18. Accelerator’s power is also a problem for Touma, as he changes the vectors, he’s basically shooting bullets, but so what if Touma touches the bullets? The speed is already there. He just can smack Accelerator if he touches him.

Episode 14:

1. What sort of genius should Accelerator be in order to calculate in real time the winds in all environs?
2. “You’re saying I’m so sexually deprived that even under general anesthesia my hand went for a girl’s breasts on its own?”
3. Misaka: “What kind of character do you hope I’d be?” heh.

Episode 15:

1. This is what happens when you don’t have a memory and for all intents and purposes you’ve never went to the beach before. You think a jellyfish is a hat…
2. That’s what anime taught me, anyway.
3. The beginning of the episode has Touma and Index especially domestic.
4. His family moved, so he won’t see the house he was born in, at least not if he won’t tell them he lost his memories. Perhaps he should confide in them? But then they’d ask how, probably.
5. Err, his cousin looks like a clone of Misaka Mikoto…
6. His family all looks like clones, his mom looks exactly like Index, heh.
7. Touma dressed like Hannibal Lecter, heh.
8. Heh, the “president of the USA”, what stance would (s)he take? “Yes we can!”
9. What’s with the outfit of the Russian mage?!
10. Angel Fall, it distorts reality, causing a disconnect between content and appearance, is appearance not part of content though? That’s part of what symbolic magic is based on.
11. “Ways to stop an angel fall”, did the angel not fall but the ritual is causing him to fall, or it fell and this is to just stop the effects?
12. Now we know why one of Touma’s best friends is also a level 0.
13. Also, it’s unclear what happens when the “musical chair game” will end. Will it be that appearance will become content, will, say, Touma’s cousin’s body truly change to that of Misaka Mikoto, will Misaka Mikoto’s personality become that of his cousin, what?
14. Hm, so what IF the appearances get switched? Will his cousin adopt the personality of Misaka, or merely her form, what’s wrong with her adopting that form, if most people couldn’t notice?
15. UNCLEAR!
16. Well, at least it didn’t end up being a dream episode, heh.

Episode 16:

1. “How do lucky people feel? To always draw the winning lottery ticket, means you’re always going to have others draw the losing tickets.”
2. Erm, how do other people don’t see someone looks “wrong”? How does it work? They see Kanzaki as Styil, but they can recognize the content of those they know, how?!
3. Also, surprising how him touching someone doesn’t stop the illusion on that person.

Episode 17:

1. “No matter what misfortune awaits me, the road is for me to take!”
2. Heh. Back to pre-memory loss Determinator.
3. That coming out of the moon seems to be the spheres, the celestial spheres planets and stars rotated in.
4. “Power of God” = Gabriel, but she used the name Misha, which is Michael.
5. Also, why is the angel after Touya’s father? She thinks he caused the angel-fall, and by killing him she’ll return to heaven? But she wants to cause the catastrophe, which means she’s trying to complete angel fall, so what about his dad?
6. As a Christian I can’t defeat a Christian angel, however, my Christianity is a multi-religion Christianity style! Yeah, religion martial arts! LOLOL
7. “In a polytheism like Shinto, anti-deity magic exists, as well.”
8. Heh, a self-parody of spies and double spies and triple spies
9. “Such misfortune” is so much like Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei’s “I’m in despair!”

Episode 18:

1. “Touma, do you swear you feel nothing when you see my sleeping form?”
2. Boy, talk about a trap question!
3. Talk about a teeth-cracker, that name took half the screen!
4. I have the crazy eyes of a crazy killer! On that note, I should probably check Toradora!
5. The concept of “The Kamijyou Faction” is so ridiculous.
6. See, unlike Accelerator, the semi-crazy killer has emotions too.

Episode 19:

1. Accelerator being all thoughtful and introspective, though yeah, these dudes are so stupid. So someone beat him, he can still beat all of you.
2. Wow, a tiny girl stalking Accelerator, heh.
3. Hm, he bounced noise, turns out he bounced all noise.
4. Hm, the silly annoying music comes along with the lil girl’s voice.
5. Erm, TINY MISAKA IMOUTO!!!
6. And with much more emotions and animation in her voice!
7. Body compact, brain also not fully developed, repeating everything about herself, “grumbles Misaka grumbles Misaka.”
8. Also understandable she came to Accelerator, she was created for him, so he can validate her existence.
9. Also, the opening scene’s monologue is now clear, the “meeting” is not after August 31^st, but during August 31^st, after Midnight, the day the previous episode is in.
10. Also, a bit funny how the red on her cheeks is drawn so it covers empty space not on her face.
11. Wonder if people are returning the favour to Accelerator, since he used to beat them all, and now someone had shown them that he’s defeatable, though not by the likes of them.
12. “Delicious food is delicious” lolcat land, here we go!
13. If she’s the command center, if she were to die, would all Sisters lose contact with one another? What is her purpose?
14. Also, how can personalities be overwritten, is it science that can be used on everybody, or just the Sisters? Also, talk about rotten security, who let this runt out with a body that is not finished?
15. The end of the episode’s preview kills me, “This epic will begin” is not the right words to keep using at episode 19’s end.

Episode 20:

1. “I used to possess a human-like name before too.” Not a human name, but a name that made him look as if he were a human…
2. Accelerator speaks of “Humans”, but it’s not like a psychologist analyzing his own species, but like someone who no longer is.
3. “A Testament Machine”, again with the religious symbolism?
4. “Who the hell do you think I am?”
5. “I don’t have any computation capacity left to do a deflection.” He is a genius, he treats his brain like a computer, processing information. His ability is not automatic, it relies on calculating deflection and forces… Even if done beforehands.
6. The blood flowed from the back of his head before, and now the back of his head is still clean, the hair is not drenched with blood…
7. The Frog-faced doctor is taking care of a girl like Last Order at home? That’s interesting.

Episode 21: (Watched after an 8 month stop)

1. Anti skills? Again, who is the guy in the opening? Too many future storylines left open.
2. Well, now we see the blonde and the stone golem.
3. Very little actually happened this episode.

Episode 22:

1. Highest Masterpiece OP reminds me of the Black Lagoon OP.
2. “Cromwell”, someone remembered some history lessons and picked a suitably “English” name
3. Looks like a doll without her glasses and her open head. Now that’s freaky.
4. Kazakiri Hyouma reminds me of Yomiko Readman from Read or Die, while Himegami reminds me of someone from Shigofumi.

Episode 23:

1. It’s ridiculous how quickly this magician scribbles. That’s her true power.
2. Index using powers, woot!
3. About Physics: Kazakiri would be between the golem and Index and he should still hit both, just like Touma’s hand doesn’t cancel the motion of something moving.
4. What Kazakiri said also fits Touma, with his unlucky right hand.

Episode 24:

1. Touma punched her hard enough that she left a hole in the wall. What is this, some super-powered anime
2. The true mark of a shonen anime, the protagonist not only gets along with everyone, but within 3 minutes understands their true goals. This is because they are all so simple, and only think they are complex three-dimensional beings, and because the authors read too much pop psychology (machismo).
3. Well, guess she didn’t go splat to stop the golem, Kazakiri.
4. Seeing much more of Index’s thighs these last two episodes.
5. Well, now need to wait for the next season, both for Laura Stuart, such a young and a woman archbishop, also, Touma’s friend who is a magician, how can he be so close to Aleister Crowley?
6. Mysteries.

I’ve watched Kick-Ass in the cinema right after it was released, and I was thoroughly entertained. I nearly titled this post “Nicholas Cage: B (Movie) and Proud of It” because the last movie of Cage’s that I enjoyed was also a self-aware B-movie, Ghost Rider.

Now, there’s a funny thing about descriptors, that is touched in Philosophy of Language; the part where the reason they had received the name no longer applies. For instance, you might have got the term of distance “foot” from a real person’s foot, but if after the measuring was done (12 inches, or 31 centimeters) the measurements had changed, you didn’t then change the “size” it refers to.

Likewise, Kick-Ass enjoys the highest production qualities, and good acting and directing. Yet it’s a B-movie, partly because it makes a conscious choice to be one. Well, I’m unsure that today any movie is a B-movie that is not aware of its status, and it’s always better to embrace it for its full potential than to succumb to it unintentionally.

The over-the-top action sequences, with the goofy music? They’d be horrible, if they weren’t intentional, and thus hilarious. The closest thing is a homage to horror B-movies in Spiderman 2, when Dr Octopus‘ surgery goes wrong. And yes, the reference I am making to Spiderman is completely intentional. The actor has a face-structure reminiscent of Toby McGuire, the actor who portrays Spiderman, and he even has a voice (at least in the films), very reminiscent of his.

You have scenes such as climbing on the wall, or jumping across a roof-top, lifted straight from Spiderman 1.

It’s a good movie, it’s an amusing movie. If it weren’t so obvious it weren’t taking itself seriously I might have not liked it half as much. Then again, at some point, trying to adhere to genre conventions, even if they are those of “Non-seriousness”, becomes a very serious and demanding business.

Not only genres that are types of stories have conventions, or tropes, but also genres that are mediums, such as films, anime, or sub-categories of movies defined by their production values, with which specific content had often been associated. Such as the classic horror b-movies, or other films the Mystery Theater 3000 had mocked; they had similar content, and similar production values, till the genre is as much the production values as the content.

Score: 8/10 amusing yet stylistic beheadings. An inversion, a satire because it’s really not (it follows all the steps) of stories like Spiderman. The parody comes from the wink at the audience.

Angel Beats! started great. The hype-machine was in full force. Angel Beats was probably the anime with the most visibility this last season. But in the end, I don’t know how many people who did not watch it this season will even remember or speak of it in two years’ time. It could’ve been great. It wasn’t.

This series is about people who have died, reached a sort of a high-school purgatory, where they can live their lives as school-students. Otonashi, the main protagonist of the series wakes up without memories, dies to someone referred to as “Angel”(Tenshi), and is pressed into the “Rebels Against Gods” (The “SSS Brigade”). You see, if you live your life as a good school student, you disappear. The members of the brigade, having suffered horrible lives, or deaths they cannot accept, cannot accept the will of God (though it’s not really clear how not going to the next life is going to help… just because it’s doing the opposite of what God wants?).

 (This is a “Things I Like” post, and as such covers more my thoughts, and is less focused as an actual bona fide review. There will be a LOT of spoilers in this post.)

 There are a LOT of things I have to say of the series. Enough to probably cover several posts. So I’ll try to be fairly brief with each of my points, and move from the more general ones to the more specific ones.

In terms of production, this anime is really good. It has really good animation, it has capable voice actors, it has good special effects, and it has a pretty good music. The OP is really neat. It’s on a piano, and it actually sounds good. The series has some singers for an in-series band called “Girls Dead Monster” which is as stupid a name as any, but I suppose they really had to butcher English to get to “Girls DeMo”. The music is pretty neat, but not really connected to the show, and you can really tell Yui’s seiyu is not the one singing her role…

The real downfall of this series is its writing, and pacing, which are pretty terrible. The two issues go hand-in-hand. I can only surmise that the writers for this series had faced one of two possible scenarios:

1.  They didn’t write the whole series in advance, so each week had to plan what to do next week. This resulted in an episodic jumble when it’s a 13 episode series, so it should’ve been tight. We have the story-line not only not progress in a straight line, but some mixture of storylines that none knows where they are going, or what story-line or even theme they are on.
2. The author wrote the series in advance, found out he only had material for 8 episodes’ worth of time, and had to fill the rest with fillers.

The end result is, that this series not only did not maintain its momentum, but its themes, plots, concepts were all over the place, and it’s not like all were done well, they conflicted with one another.
In the beginning, the series was pretty good, and had a deep militaristic-rebel theme, and then it added the “past lives were bad” theme which was pretty touching, and reminded me of Shigofumi.
Then we had more comedy and hijinks. But I’m not talking about a comedic moment here, or a comedic moment there, but whole episodes of comedy. They managed to get touching moments into some (like in Eve no Jikan), but it wasn’t really enough.
Then we get mystery, the real plague of anime series (I’m planning a post titled “The NGE Effect”), which while we had drops before, get a heavy dose of internally inconsistent crap here. Some hopeful things, and an end which leaves me pretty cold, whereas things have ended better at episode 12 than 13.

That’s a cover of the basic series structure, its “themes”, and that is part of how bad writing manifested, but pacing and specific parts were also quite horrible.

“The Guild“, is the underground facility where weapons are being made for the SSS Brigade (or Front). The path to the place is riddled with traps, and we had each character but Otonashi and Yurippe die in order to help the final two make it to the end. There it truly gets hammered into us, “Why does it matter if they die? They will just stand up later.” which makes their “sacrifices” not really sacrifices. You feel pain, but that’s it.
The road to Guild is way too long, and should’ve taken considerably less episode time.
Then, in episode 8 we go to the Guild again. I felt trolled, sort of like how people felt about Endless Eight with Haruhi Suzumiya. This is an episode that totally broke the flow of the series in a manner that could not be repaired. This was an episode that if you’ll watch the whole series in one go you’ll feel wasted, and those who watched week by week felt very disappointed with, seeing as it meant two weeks of waiting for the next significant episode. This was.. inexcusable.

“NPCs and Death“, So, after they get Angel (Kanade) demoted from her role as president of the student council, a sadistic dude called Naoi replaces her, and he kills the SSS members, torturing them. Now, I can get torture and killing still hurts, because they remember the pain (like in that StarGate SG-1 episode where Baal tortures Jack by killing him time and time again), but there’s a serious issue here: If you can’t die and it doesn’t matter when you die on your road to The Guild, or to get the SSS’s objectives (as above), then why does it suddenly matter when they kill you? It shouldn’t.
NPCs are those “characters” who play a role in the world but are not human souls who suffered in the real world. Why do they not harm them? I mean, they’re basically not different from rocks and trees. But they can get excited, they can care and be angry… just like characters in a story. And if so, there is very little real difference between them and you. Admit it.

The Neon Genesis Evangelion Effect: Inscrutable Mysteries

“Mystery, The Matrix,” Now, the way they shove us a “The Mystery!” into every anime ever (almost) is pretty bad. The mystery here was all over the place. Is there God, where is God, what is this place? “How can we change reality?” It was all done pretty badly, with many questions not answered or not hinted at, or getting ridiculous answers. Episodes 11-12 were pretty much lifted from the second Matrix movie, The Matrix Reloaded, with shadows that “infect” characters and turn them into clones, with their edges being 0′s and 1′s (Agent Smith). “There’s an anomaly within this world.” With finally coming to a room with many computers, and someone telling you their plots, not making a lot of sense, and hearing that in a way you may have been here before. But without the deep symbolism of the Matrix.

On a side-note, God does have a role in this anime, in its absence. Now, we could sit around and discuss the “meaning” hidden underneath. People always try to come up with meanings, with the deeper truth and concept behind a series/movie/book they love. The truth is, there isn’t always something to be found. Sometimes the authors leave things vague on purpose, to support 2-3 possible readings. Sometimes they just leave it open because they have no idea where to go, and they hope if they leave many loose and unrelated theories around, the fans will pick those up, come up with their own theories; and then all the crappy writers have to do is smile enigmatically and not tell us what they had in mind. They had nothing in mind.
But still, if you look for anything, the important thing is that there is no God in this world, it’s all up to the people themselves.

Haruhi Suzumiya and...

 “Haruhi Suzumiya”, I’m sorry, to all of you who say the series shouldn’t be compared at all to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, because you are wrong. I am not sure the comparison will tell much, but it should at least be made. I actually think it might be more damning of the series if you find that the comparison is not appropriate. Why? Because the makers of the show had clearly wanted the comparison to be made.
Yurippe leads a “Brigade”, they have this badge on their arms, she has a hair-style reminiscent of Haruhi’s, and in some ways her leadership is reminiscent of Haruhi’s. The comparison should be made. Even and perhaps especially if they are nothing alike.

Perhaps the comparison is just there for us to buy into the series, by telling people, “It’s like the Melancholy…”, because Haruhi sells. Studios like selling.
The series has a smarter, more listening, more caring about others Haruhi in the form of Yurippe. It could be called “Haruhi Suzumiya from the eyes of a Kyon where Haruhi isn’t a horrible person”
Last, when Yurippe has the option of becoming the “God” of the world, then you can look at The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as an alternate reality where Yurippe had said yes. I find this line of thought amusing.

..Yurippe. Twins separated at birth?

“Comedy and Tragedy” , The writer should’ve picked one. There are scenes which are really funny, like the part where they get Angel to fail her tests. Repetition is one of the keys to comedy, and they really pull it off. Naoi is really funny at times like when he tells Hinata to think of himself as a toilet paper, to be washed away (via hypnosis). Much of it, like all the treks down to Guild are just stupid and disjointed, and are more fitting for an episode you watch one of every so often without an overarching plot (Such as Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, the main seiyu there being the seiyu of Otonashi).
On the other hand, we have the much stronger part of tragedy. The main way this is achieved is when we are told of the past lives of the different characters. This is almost always very touching. The second part of Otonashi’s past was really quite amazing. This is what the series should’ve done, with us learning a different character’s past in each episode. They should’ve really dedicated episodes 11-12 to this rather than the crap they did.
Overall, this is another place where the lack of thematic cohesion of the series raised its head.

“Plot Holes And Loose Ends“, Seriously, I don’t even know where to begin! From the fact that Otonashi understood what Angel told him when she first told him of her motivations, to him suddenly only understanding it again later, to where is the Principal (Though I think this may be a thematic fit: The Principal’s Office is empty, God is missing), to which NPC the programmer is, to the shared “hallucination” Hinata shares with Yui: There’s no other word to describe that he’s using their past lives to imagine their next. New life, remember? The ending of the series where we have Kanade and Otonashi look the same (probably so we’d recognize them. Still stupid), to the whole not harming NPCs, what happens outside the school.
The list just goes on and on. Don’t do mystery unless you’re willing to put the effort into it, people.

I'm sorry Kanade-chan, but we hardly knew you v.v

“Character Development, and Tenshi“, This series suffers from what I usually call, “The School Cast Problem”, where there are too many characters, so you don’t get to meet all. We even have some characters who barely have screen time, and a couple with seemingly identical personalities (Halbred-violent and Longsword-violent, as I call them). The biggest issue though is with Kanade, who is one of the poster-girls for the show. Most of the series she’s the enemy fought against, and then we find out some of her motivations and about her personality… and then, nothing.
She plays a plot-role when her personality may switch, which it eventually doesn’t. But after that, all she is is a tactical weapon. She kills the enemies, she doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t create any interest or forward motion in the story… this is horribly botched.

“The Last Episode“, Quite frankly, the last episode should not have happened. The series would’ve been overall better without it. We have Yurippe acting like a generic moe character, Kanade acting shy and fearful.. it’s like their personalities were completely replaced. I’m sorry, but if you mention it inside the episode it doesn’t excuse you. Moreover, it felt like an OVA for the most part. It was filler. The last revelation was somewhat touching, but it was just a botched moment. The series should’ve ended when everyone disappeared.

The last episode also had a chance to change the whole series. You could have had some great revelation in it that’d get us to rethink everything that had happened during the show, understand how it all ties up. Make us sit up and go “Wow!”, but there was no such moment. It was a slow relatively weak episode. Much more-so for the final episode of the series.

“T.K.“, I need to dedicate a special point to T.K., a “mysterious” character who speaks in broken English. His Seiyuu originates from Hawaii, so definitely knows English. As above, the excuse he doesn’t really know English does not excuse this character’s existence. He’s there to spout semi cool-sounding English phrases. He’s basically a “I’m so weird! I’m so cool!” kind of character. They all need to be taken outside and shot.

Just die.

This series started really strong, but then really really lost its way. It suffered from thematic changes, from lack of cohesion, from lack of internal consistency, from a lack of proper character development. It’d have been better as an 8 episode series. It had a lot of promise, but as it kept going, it kept fizzling.

This series could’ve been wonderful. But it wasn’t.

Score: 5.9/10 squandered promises. This is a 6, but not quite.

Post Script: The series had a lot of really great moments, a few really good episodes. But it didn’t add up to a good show. You could break it into two shows and it’d be better, after you cut some of the crap out. Do I suggest this series to people? It has good things, but it’s far from great. It almost hurts watching this show begin so strong and then make so many blunders.

The show kind of made a sucker out of me; most of its episodes ended with a cliffhanger that really had me hanging to see how they’d resolve it, what was happening. I kept waiting for the next episode. Where things usually took a dumb turn, or just weren’t explained, or a great episode was followed by a mediocre one, or an even flat-out craptastic one. The show drew me in, but didn’t leave me with much.

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This blog post will discuss, or at least raise the question, of what exactly is a Mecha Anime, and raise the argument that most anime where mecha appear are in fact not fact Mecha Anime.

China Miéville, for those who don’t know him is a British sci-fi/fantasy author whom I am quite fond of, and who is to put it succintly, an “Urban Author”.  China Mieville wrote King Rat, which also deals with London, and the city’s feel, and environs. China Mieville writes in a word called Bas-Lag, the first book deals with the city of New Crobuzon, and the politics of the city, its ethnic (of races) make-up, etc.
His book from 2009 (which I am dearly waiting to acquire) is titled The City & The City, and I assume you can see how cities stand at its core.

The point I am trying to make is, that while in most stories we have cities, in most of them these cities are a backdrop to the action, and don’t figure heavily into the narrative. They are not major characters in the story, and far too often are not even truly supporting characters.
Not so in Mieville’s books, where the city is often as important a character as any of the protagonists and antagonists who make up the story, and while it often doesn’t show itself in any concentrated manner, it appears in small ways interweaved with anything that occurs.

So, this is the point from which I wish to discuss mecha in anime. Just like in many books and series, the city is just a backdrop, or even glossed over completely, in many anime series, including ones that bill themselves as “mecha anime”, the mecha are not a core part of the story, and even if they supposedly are, it’s not often in the “right” way.

First, we have shows where the mecha are weapons, and the characters are pilots. But aside from the techno-babble that means nothing, we could have just as easily had the characters pilot airplanes, space-ships, etc. The mecha are what in the role-playing community we call “Colour”; like a movie’s set, it’s something we dress the story in but could easily replace it with something else, as its contribution is not unique, and often not that influential.
I think most shows fall into this category.

This is something that perhaps we may want to split into two parts: The first is shows where the mecha don’t really matter, and their usage is often small and quite minimal (I might argue that Code Geass will be put here). The second is where it’s a military and combat focused show, where the mecha have a lot of screen-time, and the characters care for them, etc. but they are weapons, and as outlined above they could be airplanes, magical dragons, or even Poke’Mon.

The Lancelot Knightmare Frame from Code Geass. Ready for Launch!

 Then we have series where the mecha figure heavily, or so it seems. We have characters address the mecha, the mecha we are given to know have thoughts and/or emotions; they are more than just tools. However, most of this is one-sided, and as such, the mecha are characters, but they are supporting cast, whose role is to illuminate aspects of the main characters’ personalities. Often, you could replace them for a mirror. That shoots big missiles.
Eureka Seven‘s Nirvash is like this, where we just have Eureka sort of monologuing to it. Much of Neon Genesis Evangelion is also like that.

And then we have stories that are truly Mecha Anime, where we have combat, where we have characters spend time and thought regarding their mecha… a lot of it does fall into combat anime where you could probably replace the mechas, but then again, I guess that means all those mecha/jetfighters/whatever anime is just combat anime. War anime.

And then, we have the other group, where the mechas make a large part of the story. You could still replace them in many cases, but they are mecha, and they are a significant part of the story. I think the best cases are where them being mecha is in itself important. Mecha are transgressive, mecha are liminal. What this means is that a mecha blurs the boundaries between human and machine. After all, we do need a reason to not use a tank and go with the mecha’s shape.

Eva Unit 01, in friggin' bandages!

In a way, much of what I say of mecha here is also true for robots, or androids (do go and watch Eve no Jikan/Time of Eve. Or better yet, go and read Asimov on which it is based). Mecha stories in this way have mecha appear in roles where they blur the lines, where it’s important that our protagonists pilot mecha and not something else.

This is where we truly return to Neon Genesis Evangelion. The mecha are not really mecha, which the new movies really make clear when we see the innards, the skeleton, etc. The mecha are people. Of course, such revelations can occur in one of two ways, but for both you need the concept to be there from the get-go. Either you reveal it in the first couple of episodes as part of the way the world works (has magic, has Poke’Mon, has space-travel, etc.), or you reveal it at the end for people to think back of the series up until the moment of revelation and reformulate their thoughts.

Of final mention of something that sort of straddles the line is the mecha as a metaphor to something else, which could often be replaced with something else, but sometimes not. Take Gurren Lagann, where the mecha is a supporting character that serves to emphasize, and is itself a metaphor for the spirit of Shonen.

There are many anime with mecha, but most are not Mecha Anime. And go and read China Mieville

Well, I’ve been away for the last several months, we all know that. We also all know that we do not all share the same interests, but many of us can find truly cool things online. Cool videos, (like Yi and the ove for Gaga‘s Alejandro), cool images (Mefloraine and the Pixiv obsession ), cool gadget news (Hikky) or cool blogs.

Speaking of "shower", an image playing on the old "My Neighbour Totoro"'s cover image, from Gelbooru.

So, dear readers. Why not post here about really really cool things you’ve all come across on the internet lately? Feel free to comment and exclaim with wonder about the lovely things your fellow commentors have found.

Also, I will update my “Links” page the coming week, so feel free to share cool sites, cool blogs, or other things worthy of my attention, and my Links page’s love in the comments as well

So, love you all, and the next entry will be “China Mieville and Mecha Anime”, the alternative title is “Not all Anime with Mecha are Mecha Anime”!

Edit: This is a post where you, the readers, get to tell me and my other readers what you are excited about. Just post it.

Foreward: This entry was written by myself back at April 2007. The last book was not yet written. I thought it’s interesting, so I am going to share it (with minor cleaning up); especially seeing what I covered in my 100th post, regarding slash-fic. Anyway, onward we go.

There is no sex in Harry Potter.
As far as we know, all the non-parent characters are virgins. We know Harry is a virgin, Ron is a virgin unless he got some action during his summer vacations, which is unlikely, living at home and far away from civilization and other humans.
Hermione is the most likely one to have had sex, seeing she spends her summer vacations amongst humanity, and we know very little of what she does during that time.

We know the characters’ parents, and parental characters had sex, but we only know of it because they have children.
This is a rather prudish way of handling things.

You will also note that we don’t have girls becoming pregnant during the year, none of the teachers seem to have kids, at all. If we’d go to Narnia for a bit (the first book), we’ll see it’s an idealized setting. The kids get to adulthood, do not have offspring, do not marry, and when they return they are once again children, who will agree to suffer through school and being told what to do, after being rulers of a kingdom!

So, idealized setting. No one smokes, people rarely cuss (if they do something, they curse, an actual curse, quite a message about not cursing others for young ones), and we have characters of all races.
Wait a moment, we have all races represented, but the vast majority is British. You say that is as it should be, in Britain, but where are all the immigrants, where are the vast numbers of Pakistani students? Or in JKR’s idealized setting while there’s equality, most people are British…
And Kraut is an ex death-eater, Nazi and war on muggles not of pure-blood, again with the World War II imagery.

Breeding plays a large part in Harry Potter. Breeding is sex, but yet, we somehow manage to avoid talking about sex, while talking about breeding, muggles, pure-bloods, mud-bloods, all the time.
Allegories to sex are also quite abundant.

We have one love scene in the series thus far, when Hagrid talks to the half-giant teacher of the foreign school. We see it and know we shouldn’t. Sex, or anything close to it, should not be seen. And who is participating? Two oddities, freaks of nature. Creations of a pairing that did not succeed, and theirs is a pairing does not even get that far.

Hagrid is a cross-breed, and he is located where all cross-breeds are. At the edge of the Forbidden Forest. If you’re thinking of Red Riding Hood and what the forest symbolized in that tale, you’re at the right place. The Forbidden Forest has Hagrid, Centaurs, Hypogriffs and man-eating spiders. Everything that is not natural, a cross-breed, an oddity of nature, a freak of magic, is located there.
It is also the place where most students would go to interact sexually. A forest near their boarding school. But it is forbidden, filled with dangers, and what is birthed there is vile (Voldemort’s feast on the unicorn blood signals his return). Sex is vile.

When the characters get to an age where sex is an option, we learn of a new room in Hogwarts, the hidden room which opens only for those who need it, and opens as it should be. It’s no happenstance we learn of it when the characters come of age. And yet, its obvious usage is left untouched in the text, because even as Harry grows, the target audience for the books remains the same age (aside from book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, which is a genuinely good book). An age where sex is only how you came to be (I’m quite surprised there are no actual storks delivering children in the series!)

There is always the transference of bodily fluids between Voldemort and Harry, which breaks the protection Lily, Harry’s mother, granted to him as she died saving him.
I don’t even know where to begin with. Mom to Harry, Harry to Voldemort, Voldemort cancelling Harry’s mother.

This is written just off of the top of my head, I’m sure if I actually read the text looking for it, I’d find a lot more.

Now we’ll address another issue. Fan-fiction in the Harry-Potter universe.
Fan-fiction is good to cover what is missing in the world. America, real relationships, what Hermione does during her vacations, etc. It can even cover sex.
But usually, the fan-ficcers seem to write idealized fan-fiction. Which makes one wonder why they bother.

Here’s a little tidbit. If you write Harry Potter – Snape slash, stop writing it as a forbidden relationship neither can stop. Write about it realistically. Child molestation. Rape. Pedophilia. Abuse of power and privilige.
You know what it’d be like? Just like the Catholic clergy who molested altar/choir boys, and it’s time someone got some realism into your heads.

It’s time someone got some realism into this world. And JKR has the temerity to say she does not write fantasy, pfft.

P.S. I always forget stuff. It was discussed at length elsewhere (not by me), but this entry would be remiss without it. If we accept that this is an idealized setting that tries to transfer some morals to the young readers, what does it truly tell us? Harry and his gang often bend the rules, outright break them, and are often then rewarded for their behavior (House cup). This tells kids the end justifies the means and that the question is what they can get away with, breaking and entering, lying, spying on others, suspecting adults, etc.
Also, if we take another deeper look at “Fairy Tales and Harry Potter”, as in Red Riding Hood and the Forbidden Forest, then how about Umbridge as the Evil Witch?

2010 P.S.: Hagrid picture’s there at the top because he’s The Big Bad Wolf, and that’s got sexual undertones all over the place. Also, it’s true, if we look for it, we can find hidden messages in everything, so can’t take it too far.

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Sometimes you come across something that is perfect. A moment frozen in time that you can return to time and time again. Books can be good at that. Such a perfect book for me when I was a child, that I still read every several years, is The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren who is best known for writing Pippi Longstocking.

I first read this book in the third grade. A story about life and death, a story about living under occupation, of fighting for freedom where freedom should be assured for you, for life after death, about death after death. It is a story about sacrifice, of growing up, of love, of loving your older brother, of being loved by your older brother. It is a story about being weak. It is a story about mythology.

What is the plot about? Karl adores his big brother Jonatan, and they die, then they get to live in this land beyond death, but treachery and an evil tyrant loom over the peaceful valleys. And things progress from there.

 When I tell you that the book is perfect, and that I really love it, I mean it. Look on its Amazon page, out of 53 reviews, 50 give it a five stars. That’s almost unprecedented. We have two copies of this book in our household, as I was unwilling to give the book to my younger siblings to read. This book, it is just mine.

This book does not cut corners. The protagonist is a ten-year-old boy. I read it as a nine-year-old boy, the first time. And yet, as you can see, those are some really heady issues that the book does not shirk from. You get to face these issues squarely as Karl, the protagonist, does. This book speaks to children without making light their capability to understand these topics. As such, it’s also a book that you’d be perfectly happy to read as an adult, because it’s a book that speaks in the language it does, not trying to speak to children or over their heads.

I don’t have much to say of this book, because I have SO much to say of the book. I could write thousands and thousands of words about the book, but it’d be best if you’d read it. I could write thousands upon thousands of words regarding the book, but I’d rather do it in a discussion with you guys, and not here from my position as a blogger.

I have said often before that one of the main criteria I use to judge books is its emotional impact. I can use that criteria to judge this book. Both using that criteria, and not using that criteria, this book is just about perfect.

This book gets a 10/10 score, and only because I can’t give it 11.

So what are your favourite childhood books, and why? And do you think you’ll still enjoy them today?

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So, here’s the deal. Slash is a form of fan-fiction written that for the most part covers (male) homosexual relationships between two characters, from the same fantasy world, or even crossing boundaries (pun). Yaoi is anime/manga focused on homoeroticism.
So far, so good?

These are porn, and the characters written within them often fail to portray people of the gender they seemingly portray, not unlike lesbian pornorgraphy (pornography with two (or more!) women, mostly aimed at men, as distinct from pornography aimed at the lesbian community).

Now, I’m going to leave aside the discussion of whether Porn is or isn’t bad, but if we’re honest, fiction written in order to get people sexually aroused and which people use in order to get sexually aroused? I don’t really see any term to use to describe it aside from pornography.

My other claim which is a bit more controversial (that is less to say, it’s more of an opinion), is that there’s a “gender-swap” going on. The men in yaoi/slash, while they are males (biological distinction), are not men (social distinction). What they are, is women, or to put it in a crass but catchy manner – they are chicks with dicks.

This is not surprising, because it seems most slash is written by femles for females. It also seems more fan-fiction is written by females, so how much that distinction is significant is questionable, but… it’s written by women, and it’s mostly written for women. This is not unlike steamy purple prose dime-novels with flowery sex scenes.

It is also somewhat of a thorny issue, because what exactly makes for a “male character” or one with “male attributes” (I will use “male” here instead of “man”, the social distinction)? There are many men and women who will stand up and say that these attributes so long held as belonging to the “other” gender describe them. But I feel there’s something we can notice and still distinguish as being a male character or a female character.

I have read some slash, and I have read some femslash (like slash, but lesbian), and for some reason it kept nagging on me.. these characters do not behave, do not court, do not struggle or think in the manner which I attribute to male characters. It is often quite subtle, and I am the last person to argue for essentialism (that men and women are different from birth, and have different personalities because of their sex). And yet, the personalities, the stories, are the ones which “belong” to the other gender.

The counter arguments against “our” group. I put “our” in scare-quotes because many of us will not side with what is now being attacked, and on another because even if it describes the majority it seems to be in part because that majority is male. Majority of bloggers and die-hard geeks, not the majority of people…

Yuri and Lesbian porn, that is, pornography with two female characters which is aimed at the male audience. This is an easy target, because as all porn, most of us know that this is not how people actually behave, this is not normal human behaviour. Likewise, these are not female characters on screen, and some may argue are not even human characters.

Japanese government and anime, the ethical discussion is interesting, but a large part of it is sociological and off-grounds for our purposes, but if the written word can be pornographic, so can anime/visual novels. This is without talking about whether pornography is inherently wrong; some people who do hold this position thus try to claim these things (and also slash) is not pornography. I disagree.

The point of pedophilia is very apt if you look at say, Harry Potter slash, because not only do the young characters have intercourse, you’ll find many Harry/Snape and other stories. And it’s not like yaoi in general and anime in particular is not heavy on the “lolicon” hinting.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the issue.

This marks the blog’s 100th post, and as always, sharing is caring. Share if you agree with the post, share if you strongly disagree with the post, and share if you want other people to also read it. Twitter, Facebook Like, links, etc.

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Well, Portal is two years old, and recently, I assume to celebrate Steam becoming available for Mac users, Valve/Steam had released Portal for free, for about a week.

What is Portal? Historically, it’s a small game that came bundled with Half Life 2: The Second Episode, also bundled came Team Fortress 2. I passed on this game, and never did pick up Portal alone.

Portal had won numerous accolades, and if I had to describe what kind of game it is, it’s a puzzle game, and as many puzzle games, it’s also a platformer. It’s a 3D platformer, but that’s not entirely new, as there had been Rayman 3(D) before. It’s also a first person platformer, which is slightly rarer. Here is a 2D platformer flash based version of Portal someone made online. The maps from this version were later added to the actual game.

Portal, is a game that in a way is based on the physics engine of Half-Life 2, and is a game where you have two weapons: Your wits, and the portal gun. Do try to keep your wits about you. Your Portal Gun (Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device) is capable of shooting two portals, one for entry and one for egress. You can easily cross chasms or walls in this manner, or leap a great distance forward.

Most of the game is designed like regular puzzle games, where you’re met with a challenge, and in order to pass it must utilize both what had been learnt before and add something else on top. Some stages merely teach you new things (like dealing with balls of energy) in order for you to be able to utilize them in the tests to come.

Tests, yes, for you are a test-subject, and aside from messaged scrawled on walls in the later stages, the only company you’ll keep is a voice that will give you instructions, details, and advice. Well, sort of. You do get a Companion Cube for one stage, but it’s not much to speak of.

I’ll be honest, the game had got much accolades for its “story”, but there is next to no story to speak of. What there is is a bare-bones story that could be covered in the space of, 3 lines? Probably. What the game has, and this is why I also consider this post to be something to consider when thinking on the issues of “Story versus Story-ful” (some posts/thoughts I plan, don’t know for which blog yet), is atmosphere. The game has a lot of atmosphere, and due to also being relatively short (you can finish it in 2-3 hours), the very bare-bones story and the very rich atmosphere do make you feel as if you’re engaging in a story, in a world with depth.

In a way, Portal is cool. It is pretty cool, but I feel it’s been blown out of proportions, ala the “Scott Pilgrim kind of cool“. It makes you think, and the stages add just enough to help you feel like making progress, and short enough to not get bogged down.

Image Guides to Stages.

This brings me to the small down-side to Portal: The last two stages. The last two stages are both harder, and much longer than those who came prior. You do get distinct “areas” within them, but still. The stages are long, and it’s a bit tiring. Well, the stages before don’t have much of a down-time either: Finish a stage, enter an elevator, depart from same elevator and begin the next stage.

The other small caveat is that this game is a puzzle game, or is for most of the game. Lava pits and such are something we’ve all known for many years, but at some stage you must avoid stationary turrets who shoot at you, and the game ends with a boss fight which doesn’t really fit the mood and the flow of the game up until that point. It is a sort of a platformer boss-fight, where you don’t really fight the boss but need to puzzle out how to beat them, ala Rayman or say, Zelda.

This game is fun, and I came to it late, and there was no cake left for little old me (This is obviously me drinking from the geeky kool-aid). Portal 2 is apparently expected this holiday season.
Portal gets 8.5/10 jumps through the time-warp. A good way to spend a couple of hours, and there are bonus maps and challenges to do as well if you just want a little more time with it.

Next post is the blog’s 100th post! I’ve got something planned, and as always, sharing is loving, so please share the post if you like it.

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