zombie nerdrage of doom

The sheer amount of unfathomable contempt I am currently feeling has driven me to dig this blog out of the grave in which it has been quietly rotting. I am feeling petty and cruel and nerdoutraged.

Over the past few months, I've become a regular follower of ANN. It's a very convenient place to get narrowly-targeted otaku news, and I'm pretty fond of the House of 1000 Manga and Answerman columns. Occasionally I read the reviews as well. I have Strong Opinions about anime, and it's interesting and at times kind of refreshing to read someone else's view that is more coherent than pseudo-readable tumblr mob babbling and gifs. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I do like consuming full sentences every now and then). Also, not going to lie, it feels nice to have my own opinions vindicated by someone who actually bothers to write their shit on the internet.

But. Today, one ANN reviewer posted their review on Hoozuki no Reitetsu Episodes 1-7 Streaming. And. Ok, you don't find the humor appealing. I can let that slide. I am personally enjoying this particular season immensely and Hoozuki is contributing greatly to that. To me, it is an unexpected delight of a show, given that I'm not usually fond of office/gag comedy, even if they are supernaturally themed. Alright, but humor is always hit and miss, and to each their own. If you didn't like the show very much, then it has nothing to do with me.

But let me quote these parts of that review, this thing that I cannot forgive:

"There are precedents for Hozuki of course. Bumbling King Enma, ruler of the afterlife, has his roots in Dragon Ball Z's version of Enma—a big bluffer seated perpetually behind his desk."

....I'm sorry? What was that???

"Hell as a harried bureaucracy drowning in paperwork was an invention of Yū Yū Hakusho. "

....are you fucking kidding me.

"There's Momotaro and his entourage, various traditional Japanese monsters and occupants of Hell, a mythical Chinese beast of some sort, and many more. None of them are amusing, except in passing (Momotaro's dog, pheasant, and monkey take to torture with disturbingly happy enthusiasm), and some are downright awful (the man-crazy, bodybuilding horse and cow women who guard Hell's gates)."

You aren't even trying, are you.

"It's possible they'd be funnier if we were more familiar with their original myths, but the treatment of mythical figures we are familiar with argues against that. Satan is a cruelly unfunny parody of the blustering American and Beelzebub is equally devoid of laughs as a parody of European aristocrats."

I don't even know what to say to this. I really don't.

Seriously, a reviewer who can't be assed to realize that King Yama and the Infernal Bureaucracy do not, in fact, originate from Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho shouldn't be publishing reviews on anime, especially on a series as strongly derived on Japanese culture like Hoozuki. How can you even claim to be a fan of anime if you simply watch and watch and not put forth even the slightest fucking effort into actually absorbing and digesting what you consume? I can't even call this willful ignorance anymore; you are just a stupid fucking asshole. You are literally one fucking google search away from not making a complete dumbass out of yourself. (Also since you're actually a proper staff reviewer that ANN has hired, your name is permanently attached to this dumb article for all of posterity. At least try to cover your ass a little bit when you write, why don't you?)

And I really don't even want to get into this, but the sheer amount of egocentric ethnocentrism in the comments about western Satan and Beelzebub make me really mad. If you don't give enough respect to Japanese and other East Asian cultures to acknowledge that they actually exist outside of media that you consume for you pleasure, you don't get to criticize how they choose to parody elements of western culture such that they appeal to their own tastes and sensibilities, alright?

You know what else makes me unhappy? There are 22 comments about this article while I'm writing this, only one of which pointed out the sheer factual incorrectness of attributing relatively accessible parts of Buddhist mythology to Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho (no, I will never get over this). This means that there are scores more of dumbasses who think the same, or aren't willing or able to make the logical conclusion that these things are recurring cultural allusions instead of a goddamn anime reference. I freely acknowledge that I am a fucking weeaboo; it is something I simply cannot deny at this point in time. But I have rarely felt so utterly contemptuous of these-things-that-are-supposedly-of-my-kind but are kind of just narrow-minded, culturally ignorant trash. Are you lacking in a brain, or could it be that your head is shoved so far up your ass that the only things that could ever possibly cross your field of vision are the things that you shit out yourself?

I'll admit that I'm just being incredibly petty and vindictive here. Ranting is what a private blog is for, after all, and just as Kathryn has her thing about anatomically incorrect skeletons, Chinese mythology is something I hold near and dear to my heart. I've been utterly charmed by the Infernal Bureaucracy ever since I got my grubby, twelve-year-old hands on an English translation of Journey to the West. This cruelty is the cruelty driven by intense nerdrage.

But, you know, actually attempting to know source material will never hurt you. You learn something and expand your worldview! And at the very least, you'll certainly get a lot more of actually watching this:

than you ever will out of watching this:

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 >___<

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Princess Tutu (the least helpful I-just-finished-an-anime post ever)

So, I went to the beach for a week, which was about as exciting as one would expect for going to the beach in the middle of winter. But during this time I did manage to finish Princess Tutu, a really rather good albeit girly and cutesy magical girl series featuring ballet and fairy tales.

Now, I could talk about the usage of fairy tale structure and contrast it with those in Utena, or describe the variously clever frame stories in it, or try to extrapolate various take away lessons from the stance this show takes on stories/fate/roles/etc, or simply gush about its pretty art and fantastic ballet and classical music soundtrack.

But I'm super lazy, so I won't. Instead, I shall just leave these skeletons dancing ballet here just so that Kathryn can rage at the anatomical inaccuracies:

Shiki

It's winter break time, so Kathryn and I can properly marathon anime in decent company! We recently barreled through Shiki, this horror anime from 2010 that various Things have been yelling at us to watch for a while now, so here is a nice dual post.

Shiki is the best horror series I've seen in a long a time, and easily the best vampire anything I've ever seen, ever. As a general principle, I really really detest vampire stuff, considering what our Modern Generation tends to do with them, etc etc. No, not only the Twilight bullshit; I think my loathing began somewhere with the Interview with a Vampire series? I don't really care at all about vampires and their vampire society bullshit and in general it just pisses me off. But I liked Bram Stoker's original novel well enough, and the really old traditional horror/superstition stuff is pretty nice. Shiki is more like that kind of stuff-- weird shit going on, mysterious deaths unexplained by conventional reasoning, things that go bump in the night, increasing body counts, and so on.

Alice finishes Penguindrum

(Kathryn wouldn't let me read her last post until I finished anyway, so it's probably mostly her fault)

Ok, so I've already seen Utena, so it's not like I wasn't expecting total mindfuckery and weird shit and symbolism and what-the-fuck-is-going-on. Not that I'm fully clear on all of that too. That's ok, really; it is what makes this show so special. I will leave to others to fixate on and overanalyze over and drive themselves crazy with. But there's a few things I am still stuck on. Namely:

PENGUIN KNITTING