Monster: A Treatise on Screaming

After hearing such good things about it, Alice and I finally got up the courage to tackle this monster of an anime (ha...ha...ha...), which comes in at 74 episodes.  Below are our reactions and feelings toward this masterpiece.

Pokemon Origins

Last Friday I made a very poor life decision. I sat down and watched all four episodes of Pokemon Origin, and now I've sank myself back into the pit of Pokemon-obsessed nerdiness that overwhelms all reason and completely eats one's consciousness, because that is what happens with me and Pokemon. Oh, and also I just stared playing Pokemon X, so that Soul Eater summary thing is going to have to wait a bit longer >___<

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: And What a Fabulous Adventure It Is

Recently Alice convinced me to watch JoJo's Bizarre Adventure with her- and what a Bizarre Adventure it was!  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this show certainly delivered...something!

Soul Eater reread (Ch 23-61)

Hahaha, here I was thinking I'd churn this out pretty quickly but nope, it's been a month since the last part. Oops.

Look, it's that one character... that I completely forgot about... from the part that no one remembers in the anime! Since the Asura-in-the-basement arc was the last full arc from the manga that got adapted into the anime, it was the last really coherent bit of plot that I remember. This next storyline about Arachne and so on was only partially adapted, and then everything got muddled by anime-ending and I just didn't bother trying to keep any of it in my head. But onwards to the manga chapters:

Code Geass: We Tried

So we finally got around to watching Code Geass, which has been touted as an excellent military/political drama/mindgame-type show.

So let's get a few things straight.  We liked the show, we really did.  But...probably not for the reasons we should.

Shingeki x Free....?

This blog is not dead - I promise.  We're finally done with costume-making, back from Otakon and ready to spew inanity or vitriol (though in this case, I refer to the former).

So inevitably, when two shows air together, people tend to lump them together in their brains.  This becomes particularly amusing when the shows are not even tangentially related to one another.  Shingeki no Kyojin and Free! are prime examples: Bloodthirsty titans and angst?  Meet shameless fanservice and hilarity.  This is a little collection of some of the wonderful Shingeki and Free! crossover stuff that I have stumbled across.

Or horrible, whichever

Damn it Levi now the song is stuck in my head AGAIN

ARMIN YOU ARE NOT HELPING

Credit where credit is due

These fandoms, why

bless these magical tumblr people

These aren't even Free! Shingeki crossovers anymore, I don't even care

So not sorry for any of this

I'll have an actual blog post next time, I promise.  Mostly.

~Kathryn

Soul Eater reread (Ch 0-22)

Soul Eater is finally ending! I've been waiting for it to properly end for like two years now. You see, I have problems with waiting for manga to end-- sometimes they just drag on and on and I simply don't have the patience to wait through new chapters. I mean, I understand that ending a long-running series is difficult in the best of times, but these kind of shounen battle manga can easily fall into a trap of too-many-battles-HOW-BORING. (Bleach, I am thinking of you right now) Soul Eater was definitely hitting that stage when I stopped reading. Besides, this was a monthly manga, meaning it took even longer in real time to get through the boring stuff. Hence the two year wait for it to end-- uughhh TWO YEARS!!! 

(Alright, it could have been worse. It could have been like Detective Conan. I've been waiting for Detective Conan to end for the better part of a decade and it still hasn't.)

Hence in celebration (??) I'm going to reread the whole manga from start to finish so I can figure out exactly what actually happened at the end (and also to tell Kathryn because lord knows she's never going to do it herself)

Swimming Anime - A treatise on double standards

If you pay much attention to anime blogs/tumblrs/various social media outlets, it is likely that you have come across the phrase "Swimming Anime" at some point in the last three months or so.  Here is a brief summary of the events that sparked this strange set of circumstances.

Fairy Tail: no, no, no.

Fairy Tail, the amount of really terribly unnecessary and awful fanservice in your last two chapters have filled me with a nigh undescribable level of disgust and rage. I kind of do want to continue to read you, for some increasingly mysterious reason, but it is really hard to read a manga when I am constantly facepalming at how gross it is.

Look, I don't really ask for much when it comes to mindless, generic, please-just-waste-some-of-my-time shounen. I really don't. And since I've gotten 300+ chapters without dropping Fairy Tail, it's not like there's nothing decent in there. But the last couple of arcs are getting more and more disgusting with fanservice, and if its going to continue down this path, we will rapidly reach the point where even the cutest of cartoon cats will not save this manga from my eternal contempt and loathing.

And considering my ridiculous weakness for cartoon cats, that's saying something.

Cosplay is eating my life

Alright, I haven't made a blog post in....over a month.  Part of the reason involves a cosplay that I have been trying to put together for ACen next week (while the other part involves the considerably less fun "applying to medical school" shebang).

I realize this is only tangentially related to anime, but bear with me- I will have plenty to say about this season after I'm done with the Craft Project from Hell that is Maniwa Houou's costume (and applying to medical school, of course >___>).  Priorities, man.

Looking at it more makes me want to cry

So here are some of my recent additions to Shit Cosplayers Say:

"Nooooo I need to finish this katana before I go to church!"

"So that's what happens when you superglue your fingers together..."

"I really really hate inconsistencies in the anime art...PERFECTION IS IMPOSSIBLE. There is no right answer to the arrangement of the diamonds on Maniwa Houou's head."

"Cosplay when my parents are not home involves me running around in my underwear trying everything on."

"Cleavage tutorial that increases breast size by two cups?  Hell yes."

"Oh god oh god did I really just sew through my finger, now I have to take all these stitches out!"

"Good thing she's half naked, her costume is easy."

"Okay, I looked up "doppelganger cosplay" and got a picture of two Lara Crofts making out."

"Cosplayer problems: trying to fit six people in full costume in one car."

At this point my feelings on this cosplay are kind of like this:

Let me SLEEEEEEP

And this:

Goddamnit threading needles

A real post will come....later.

~Kathryn

Manga reflects my life far too closely

The Ravages of Time (undignified fangirling time)

This is me.

Alas! I find myself in danger of disappearing off the face of this blog (not that I update much anyway). You can blame this almost entirely on the Three Kingdoms 2010 drama, which is a ridiculous 95 episodes long, each episode being twice that of your typical anime episode. Goodbye, life. 

Speaking of which, before I turned into a horrible anime/manga obsessed freak, I was a Romance of the Three Kingdoms obsessed freak first. Chinese history, awesome battles, battles of wits etc, what is there not to love? I'd like to think I'm a lot less obsessed now than I was, but every now and then (like now), I'm hit with this utter, uncontrollable fit of Three Kingdoms fanaticism that basically destroys my patience for anything else until I somehow find something more interesting to distract myself away from it. 

There are Three Kingdoms adaptations all over the place, and they vary unbelievably widely in interpretation and quality. The 2010 drama is really quite enjoyable, lengthy though it is, but by far my favorite adaption is the Hong Kong manhua Ravages of Time.

Katanagatari: A Pleasant Surprise

So it was recently recommended that I watch Katanagatari, which aired once a month starting in 2010 (and is going to be re-aired during the spring 2013 season - in only a few days, actually, yay for my timing?).  I was quite hesitant to start watching it.  Fifty-minute long episodes?  What is this, white people TV?  After much inner debate, I decided to just suck it up and watch the first episode.

A weeaboo's dilemma

tl;dr

Kekkaishi

Ghost doggies!

Ok, that's a gif from the anime, which I haven't actually watched, but it's cute and relatively representative of how much I liked this series? Really, Kekkaishi kind of blew me away in how good it was, which really shouldn't be a surprise since it's been on my to-read list for a good two or three years now as an excellent shounen manga written by a woman with good character depth and plot development etc (ie something to fill the void in my heart left by completing FMA).

It starts out episodic and really really slow, which is why it took me a while to get into it. Actually, I'm pretty sure this has been the third time I started reading Kekkaishi, but I've only finished it for the first time just now. So yes, the pacing is a bit wonky at first. But the plot builds up more and more as you go further down the story arcs, and from chapter ~150 onwards I was basically finding myself marathoning reading this manga until 2am until I was done with it.

Awesome weird monsters!

And yes, Kekkaishi is completely completed, which is probably the best thing you can say about a long-running shounen series. Unlike a lot of shounen, it doesn't drag near the end-- if anything it gets more and more interesting. It also avoids that annoying shounen pitfall where you know the story ends with the main character beating the Big Bad in some kind of epic showdown, something that even the great FMA had. So yes, I loved the ending-- it didn't all tie up in some cheap fight; it was very positive and satisfying and hopeful; there was still a twinge of sadness/melancholy to make it kind of hit home a bit harder.

Also have I mentioned how much I love reading shounen stuff written by women? It is orders of magnitude less disgusting than most of the usual stuff. There is very little fanservice, except for one part when the main character accidentally peeks on his crush when she's bathing. He then spends the entire next chapter beating himself up over it for invading her privacy-- a far cry from, say, One Piece, where purposefully peeking on women is trivialized into nothing but a joke, reinforcing the idea that that kind of behavior is acceptable and normal. Also there's this ridiculously funny boob joke in there that shows no cleavage whatsoever but had me giggling for a good two minutes. That's impressive!

Kekkaishi has an anime, but it's 50+ episodes long and only covers up to the end of the first major story arc, around chapter 120. Which is a shame, because things get so much more interesting and cool afterwards! The whole manga is 345 chapters, meaning Kathryn will never read it and she will never get to all the cool fun parts of the story. Shame, shame. My dear friend, you are missing out.

Amnesia: I kind of wish I had it after watching this

So somehow I started watching Amnesia, a currently-airing show based on an Otome dating sim.  This is completely unlike anything I would normally watch, so I'm going to blame Tumblr for throwing screenshots at me and luring me into it.  I blame the special eyes.  (MY BRAND)

International Women's Day

Happy International Women's Day! As we all know, Japan is seriously like, ridiculously sexist in many ways, and this is often reflected in the culture that it produces! Despite this, there are still a lot of really awesome women in the anime/manga industry and they make really really fantastic things.

So in the spirit of things, here's short list of cool things that you should read/watch that were created by women and with awesome female characters:

The saddest thing...

--From Cat Street, a very nice slice-of-life-y shoujo manga about people not functioning in society slowly resocializing themselves.

(I'll do a proper post later this week, I promise! :P)

Saiunkoku Monogatari

My appetite for animated Chinese-inspired period dramas has been whetted by Twelve Kingdoms. Hence I'm dragging my roommates into (re)watching Saiungoku Monogatari, which roommate C dragged me into watching back during freshman year of college. But that was years ago, so I've basically forgotten everything except:

1. Very pretty fake China!
2. The girl wants to be a government official
3. Emporer Tamaki (from Ouran)
4. Pretty boys (see above image) whose names I can't remember
5. Political intrigue (???)

It turns out that is a pretty good summation for a hefty portion of Saiunkoku, but it's still an extremely fun anime to watch. It is extremely girly shit, yes, but as with every type of genre, girly shit can be really awesome sometimes.

Mononoke: sans Princess

I finally got around to watching Mononoke (which I mistakenly believed was related to Princess Mononoke for far too long - this incidentally also makes gif hunting very difficult).  This is one of those shows that is visually stunning, complete with bright, opalescent colors, but is simultaneously so utterly terrifying.

Based on the three-episode Bakeneko story arc from the horror anthology Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, Mononoke follows the travels (and inevitable exorcisms) of the mysterious Medicine Seller.

Twelve Kingdoms --- damn you, Tangorin!

I started watching Twelve Kingdoms not long ago-- it's based on a series of light novels by Fuyumi Ono, who wrote Shiki as well. Since I enjoyed Shiki so much, and I've heard lots and lots of good things about Twelve Kingdoms re: worldbuilding, character development, female characters, etc, I decided to go ahead and start watching the anime because I decided that I needed a break from all of this science fiction and/or depressing mecha shit Kathryn keeps shoving down my throat.

I'm not very far into the series yet, but it's quite enjoyable. It's mostly set in a ancient Chinese-inspired fantasy world with interesting looking youma and unicorns and shit, but it's not very over the top and it's very visually coherent. Also has a pretty soundtrack. 

Anyway, yesterday this happened:

Here is one of those aforementioned unicorns. Kirins are these cool unicorns who can also turn into people and have cool chimera-ish things as their mommies. Each of the twelve kingdoms has a kirin that is responsible for choosing the king for that kingdom. Both king and kirin are immortal, but if the king starts being a shitty king, the kirin gets ill with a disease called shitsudou and dies, and the king dies afterwards too.

This kid is supposed to be the kirin of the kingdom of Tai, but as an, um, unborn fruit on a tree (look dont ask it gets complicated) he got reverse-spirited-away and ended up growing up as a kid in Japan while that kingdom when to hell. He's back now, but he didn't really grow up knowing he was a magical unicorn from a fantasy world, and is now a bit confused as to what he is, etc. 

As am I. It's a language thing. Giraffe? What do giraffes have to do with anything? We were talking about East Asian mythological creatures. Why bring up giraffes? I do not understand. Let's look it up!

Oh ok it all makes sense now. The word for giraffe in Japanese is also "kirin". I get it now.

Wait.

Wait a minute.....

THAT IS TOTALLY A SENTENCE FROM TWELVE KINGDOMS.

DAMN YOU DICTIONARY

YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I'M WATCHING RIGHT NOW

Bokurano

Next up is Bokurano, an anime which aired in 2007 (before I actually started watching anime properly) and came highly recommended. 

You know, this picture kind of makes it look like it is a show about a bunch of kids being kidnapped by sentient chairs

what the hell did i just read

Since we finished watching Shiki back in September, it reminded me of how much I enjoyed Fujisaki Ryu's art and such. So I went and reread Houshin Engi (more on that later, possibly much later), and now I'm looking at some of the other stuff he did.

And.....uh..... what. 

Outlaw Star

I've been rather terribly remiss in posting to this blog, my apologies. orz

Back in last October or so, one of my poor-anime-buddy roommates (henceforth "R") talking me into watching Outlaw Star, a show she remembered watching when she was a child, which to her had the same kind of nostalgia as something like Sailor Moon has for me. At the time, I was desperately trying to negotiate with her to get her to finish watching Baccano with me in her rare willing-to-watch-anime moods (a poor anime buddy indeed!) so of course I agreed, despite space opera really not being my cup of tea at all. And, well, 90s art and dubbing etc.

Sword Art Online, Please Go Die In A Hole

So I have finally (FINALLY) finished this damn show, after having forced myself to watch it once a week since it started airing in July (good god have I really wasted this much of my life on this travesty).