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.