What I watched in July: Digest Version

TRSI licensed Rose of Versailles.  Sentai licensed Mawaru Penguindrum.  Signs of the Apocalypse?  Excellent!

b Best Student Council:  My initial thought was, "What is with the puppet?"  I was having puppet flashbacks to Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.  Eventually, I realized, "This is just the kind of show where someone walks around with a puppet all the time; just deal with it or stop watching.  "You're with the Best Student Council now.  You shouldn't be hanging around with a no-good puppet like me."  The puppet does end up being more than just a gag, but you have to put up with all the general wacky hijinks until then.  Your call.  This one was a lot of fun to watch/listen to in the background while doing other things.  I don't know if I would have liked it as much if I had to concentrate hard on every minute of it.

b Cosmo Warrior Zero: Oh, Leiji Matsumoto and your MANime.  It's ridiculous, and I really like it.  Lest you think I'm talking about a comedy, Zero is actually supposed to be a manly space drama, I think, and it does take itself pretty seriously most of the time.  There are some moments where you'll have to just abandon your brain, but it's a fun ride.  Except for the bits about genocide, which aren't fun at all.

What about the survivors?  There's a whole world that needs you out there.. . . You're not the only one who lost a family.
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We have to do this.  That's the only way to mourn for the people who have died in the war.
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Poor fool.  Why do you have to blame it all on yourself?

b Mariaholic: Your mileage will very wildly.  If you can't stand bullying, especially when it seems completely misogynistic, then you shouldn't even try this one.  If you have a fairly thick skin about these things where your comedy is concerned, and you are a longtime anime fan who is knowledgeable about jpop culture, you might have an enjoyable time.  You will, of course, be offended sometimes because that's part of what this show is all about, but you might also be amused.

b Tatami Galaxy: How good are you with crazy?  If you don't mind the out-there art, the bonkers premise, and the wild execution, you might appreciate this one.  By the last episode, you feel like the ending is earned, gosh darn it, even if it doesn't, you know, totally make perfect sense.  This is the story of a loser guy who goes to college and keeps falling in with the wrong crowd and then calling do-over and trying different choices to see if his life turns out more the way he wanted it to be.

b Windy Tales: If you can deal with the sketchy animation and you don't hate slice of life and aren't completely against a bit of magical realism, you might enjoy this odd-looking little show that peripherally deals with some people and cats who can control the wind but mostly just deals with life and growing up.

b Young Animator Training Project: This series of shorts by different young creators is kind of fascinating, especially if you like random things and short stories and variety in your anime viewing.  The result vary in quality, but that sort of adds to its charm for me.

Some thoughts on Afterschool Charisma 2-5

"Most of the people in the world aren't clones.  Nobody knows what their destiny is." v. 4

Well, yes.  Wow.  I'll try to do this without spoilers.  The story of a boy who is the son of a scientist and his trials and tribulations in a school full of clones of famous historical figures gets serious.  There is a lot of stuff happening here, much of it disturbing.  Such brutality and wrong-headed insistence on biology as destiny right next to greed and politics and all manner of evils large and small. It can be jarring right next to the silliness of teenagers being teenagers.

"I guess this proves that just because we're clones doesn't mean we're geniuses!"
"I agree!"
"It's all our originals' faults!"
"Yeah!!"
"Way to bond over stupidity."

I am afraid of these flashbacks because I really don't want to see how a bunch of nice clones turned into the bitter and desperate (and desperately weird) people they were in the present.  And also, how could they do that?!  Some of them were probably trying to protect in their own ways, but others of them were just twisted and bitter and jealous.

There were a couple of moments where I wondered, "Is this a Japanese thing?" (Example, situation in 4 that ends with the line "You can't take someone's life over a thing like this" on page 145 and several bits in volume 5 that have me wondering, "Why do you lend yourself to this?!"  I tend to assume in these situations that there is some cultural thing I am missing.)

Sometimes the series is a bit clumsy with how it handles things, but the bits with Shiro and his "dad" growing up were stunningly nuanced, especially the more you find out. And the complex, older body-guard guy Kuroe is still a favorite.  I am more curious than ever about who he really is in light of recent events, but, as many critics have pointed out, sometimes you can't tell if the characters are supposed to resemble each other or if the artist just isn't always very good at drawing different faces.

This may be a series with high re-read value (and would definitely be if everything was as strong as the bits with Shiro and his dad), but it may turn too action/adventure-y with new twists and reveals becoming more important than long-term plotting and nuance.  In other words, it will be a "what happens next" kind of series rather than a "how do I need to go back and look again and reinterpret the past in light of this new information" kind of series.

Sometimes it gets all bogged down and confusing (the whole Kai flashback thing being a pretty good example because WTH).  I really want them to have chosen the name Kai because it is a homonym to the Greek letter Chi written X and often used to mean a variable.

In conclusion, the pacing and tone are sometimes uneven, but I reserved the next volume at my library as soon as I finished 5.

Yukikaze

So I just finished the first Yukikaze novel, and there are three things I want to do

• destroy all machines
• read the sequel
• watch the anime

I have thus far managed to stave off the anime craving because I can't marathon it right now since the class I'm teaching still isn't done, and I'm going home to visit my parents over the holidays, and they have a basement theater with surround sound, which has proven itself an awesome place to watch things in surround sound with lots of dog-fight action.  Self control.  Self control.

The novel was really more of a collection of short stories, loosely swirling around Yukikaze, a plane in the future that fights on a planet called Fairy, the front of the war between humanity and the JAM. Yukikaze's pilot is Lt. Rei Fukai, a socially maladjusted person if there ever was one.  To say he is bad with people is to lie like a dog.  His job, being an observer who never helps, actually calls for people like him who don't really mind being avoided and even hated by other soldiers.  He doesn't care about other people, really.  He trusts his plane and sort-of trusts Major Jack Booker, his direct supervisor, the only person who even tries to connect with him.

The stories often use other points of view, which is good because being inside Rei's head for very long would be profoundly disturbing.  Not that the other POVs are all sunshine and puppies.  That maintenance guy's story was so chillingly horrifying I just had to stop reading for a couple of days when I finished it.  This quickly became a book I couldn't read at night for fear of nightmares (and I don't even really have nightmares) even though there is very little gore.

Frankly, it was amazing how much dread and menace the author built using such a dry style.  Just the facts, ma'am.  So why did the facts scare the bejeebers out of me?  Because they were so plausible.  So very, very plausible.  And that ending!  Poor Rei!  Sequel!  Soon!  Well, as soon as I defrost from the icy, creeping fear this collection caused . . .

Hey, they like our light novels, too

I'm a fan of sci-fi writer John Scalzi, and so is Japan.  I got quite a kick out of him (and his fans) getting a kick out of the Japanese cover of one of his books that sort of straddles YA and adult sci-fi because it's the other side of the same story told in told in the definitely adult The Last Colony only this time from the POV of a teenage girl.  (It's actually vaguely similar to the parallel story with different POV thing in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.)

Yes, I'm a huge geek, but I find it sort of sociologically fascinating to see an American book I've read and enjoyed re-interpreted, re-covered, and re-marketed in another culture that I also happen to be fascinated by.  Something to think about, anyway.

Chilling and beautiful summer reading

Dear Yen Press,

Have I told you how much I adore Kieli?  I really, really do.  I can't figure out if it's the atmosphere of sweet, awkward melancholy or the dreamy quality of the storytelling (interrupted by brief and disturbingly clear instants of graphic violence and action).  Is is the reflective mood?  The detached but sad tone?  The brisk pacing that seems languid at the same time?  The spine-tingling weirdness that creeps in sometimes?  The amusing and crotchety relationship between the lead characters?

Well, a lot of it is the characters.  I love the idea of a beat-up old radio possessed by a foulmouthed, dead, young soldier as the sidekick/mascot.  Nothing cute and cuddly here.  It fits with the story surprisingly well, though.  As much as I wished him peace, I was glad the Corporal decided to stick around and play fairy godmother/conscience/voice-of-reason/brow-beater/babysitter.  And I still giggle every time he calls Harvey Herbie. 

Harvey is great.  He's hardly a hero anymore if he ever was; he's too tired and grouchy for that.  There is so much potential when you're dealing with a character over a hundred years old who has seen every imaginable horror of war and its aftermath.  He's been on the run for 80 years; he can't stay in one place because people will notice he doesn't age, or he'll end up getting hunted down.  He's really tragic and also really crabby.  Who wouldn't be?  And of course he doesn't deal well with people, and is especially out of his depth with fourteen-year-old girls who start following him around and causing trouble for him by being so dang young and curious all the time.  What about her could possibly make him choose to continue living his pathetic existence?  He sure doesn't know, but you feel that connection, and it feels so real and right and realistic, if I can use that word about a book set on a post-apocalyptic world where perpetual motion machines exist as part of the premise.  What is it about Kieli that makes it impossible for Harvey to really leave her alone?  It's not like he doesn't understand her loneliness; he just doesn't understand why she needs him.

Neither does she, really.  Like most fourteen-year-olds, she can be kind of annoying, but this is her first time seeing anything outside her hometown, and there is so much to see outside the walls of that convent school.  Is she tagging along because Harvey's the first person she's met who can also see ghosts?  Because he represents a sort of freedom and escape?  It can't be pity; I don't think pity could cause someone to risk life and limb and future to save another.  Is is co-dependence?  Doesn't really feel like it.  Who needs who more?  I don't know, but I really can't wait to read volume 3.

One quibble I have is about your marketing tag-line, the part about it being an uncommon romance.  I've read the first two novels, and I'm glad to see it's really not that, although there were some hilarious and endearingly awkward questions in volume 2.  The author is kind of genius about this because we as the readers know what Kieli knows and why she is asking, but Harvey doesn't, and the sheer snort-inducing power of that scene was kind of staggering.  I would like to hope that before any actual romance happens, Kieli is allowed to grow up a little more.  (And Harvey, too, though it seems odd to want a 100+ year old man to be more mature.)  That's hardly your responsibility, though, since you're just providing great translations of a haunting story.

I just hope volume 3 comes out on time because I need it to still be warm outside when I read Kieli.  If I can't sit outside in the sun while reading it, the horror and bleakness can get to be too much because I'm not much of a horror fan normally.  So please bring it out in September as planned.  I have it pre-ordered.

Thanks for keeping the series going.  I can't wait to love on the enticingly-titled volume 3.

Sincerely,
TMIA

Rewatching Toward the Terra (again)

The anime club I attend is watching Toward the Terra, and I keep waffling on whether I should stick around for the last hour (when TtT shows) or go home early. It has great rewatch value, but it's hard to watch TtT once you've seen it all the way through. The attrition rate is, um, emotionally taxing when you know the particulars in advance.

Because I am a perverse individual, the sheer difficulty of being introduced to character after character with difficult, painful, and deadly (short) futures ahead, I want to make myself stay. And all the many things I missed or didn't have time to think about the first whirlwind time through are worth seeing again (and again). I think I may just need more emotional distance the next time through.

This is hard, hard, soft sci fi. Ouch.

Jihai

Hooray for CMX!  I love that they're still bringing over great eclectic stuff.  I also like that some bookstores still stock at least the first couple of volumes, so I can see if I'll like the series.  One series I like that just finished up (with volume 3) is Jihai. 

I'm not entirely sure what audience it was aimed at, but I think most people who like sociologically-based sci-fi or alternate world fantasy would probably be part of the target audience.  The plot kind of made me think it was aimed more at boys, but the execution and artwork made me think maybe it was aimed at girls.   I liked it a lot, regardless.

Also, I am a big dork because I didn't realize that this is a later work by the same author who wrote another promising CMX-released sci-fi series I liked but haven't finished called The Flat Earth/Exchange, which I mentioned in another blog post about memory and artificial intelligence.

Volume 3 was a hard read because I wasn't sure how things were going to end.  The main character is an artificial human whose programmed lifespan is running out, and that was hard and sad to read about because by then I was quite invested in all of the characters.  I felt like I couldn't respect the story if it had a strained and artificial happy ending because a lot of hard choices and intrigue were happening in volume 1 and volume 2, and I didn't want to be disappointed by a weak cop-out.  No worries.  No spoilers.  It ended quite satisfactorily, especially for a three volume series. :)

Keep 'em coming, CMX!