labingi

I’ve been compiling a mental list of favorite pairings for years, and I thought I’d write some of it out. We can also make it a “meme”: I’d love to see your list linked in the comments!

What I mean by a “love pairing”: two people who come to love each other so deeply that this relationship is pivotal to their lives. I’m a friendship bonder, and I’m not distinguishing between sexual and non-sexual love. I am leaving out literal and metaphorical close family relationships (parent-child, siblings). Expect big spoilers (like character death & ending) for any story mentioned. Below the cut are some favorite picks, some ranked, some unranked, with explanations.( Read more... )

Fantastic Children: An Anime That Deserves... More

I recently came across a rec for Fantastic Children, a 2005 anime I had never heard of. It intrigued me enough that I put down some serious money on a DVD set, as it’s hard to find streaming. And... I understand why it’s forgotten, and it’s a shame because it has immense potential. Like the Star Wars prequels, it fails in the execution. This is an anime that deserves novels worth of fic to flesh it out. On Ao3, it has... two short fics. Alas. Goodbye Fantastic Children; we barely knew you.

Truly, it’s good in a lot of ways. If you like philosophical, complex, somewhat relationship and psychology-oriented anime with a strong Please Save My Earth vibe, it is worth a watch. Spoiler free: A group of mysterious children keep re-appearing across the centuries. What do they want? Perhaps our spunky boy hero can find out. Spoilers beneath the cut ( Read more... )

If you’re in the mood for some horror anime this Halloween, you may want to check out Kara no Kyoukai (Boundary of Emptiness), a series of seven anime films (Ufotable, 2007-2009) based on the light novel of the same name. Each film is a standalone story, forming the loosely arced tale of a dark and quirky detective agency investigating magic-related crimes, usually grisly ones. As character drama, the series has its moments, but it is most notable for its dark, violent, intricately plotted mysteries showcasing strong female characters. Not for kids.

The central characters are Shiki Ryougi, a somber young woman with amazing supernatural fighting abilities; Mikiya Kokutou, a kind young man who was her high school friend; and (to a lesser extent) Touko Aozaki, their boss and a powerful, offbeat sorceress. The arc narrative—sometimes more central, sometimes less—concerns Shiki’s nature and how she grapples with her incredible powers and her desire to kill. In the course of Shiki’s search for her place in society and sense of identity, the team encounters numerous murderers, sorcerers, destructive spirits, and so on.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Aku no Hana (Flowers of Evil) (2013) is a truly different anime. This 13-episode Zexcs production, based on the manga by Shuzo Oshimi, is a dark slice-of-life teen drama. I generally detest slice-of-life teen drama, so I’m not just idly gushing when I say this series is (mostly) fantastic. It owes much of its originality–and controversy–to its use of rotoscoping in place of traditional animation. This technique, in which live-action footage is traced over, puts Aku no Hana artistically in a bit of an uncanny valley between cartoon and live action drama. The effect unsettled me at first, but the whole story is meant to be unsettling, and in the end, I found it the perfect mix of realism with a creepy, otherworldly overlay.

Aku no Hana starts out as an adventure in Schadenfreude. Shy middle-school boy, Takao Kasuga, has a crush on the beautiful and accomplished Nanako Saeki, and in a moment of bad judgment, he steals her PE uniform. Unfortunately for Kasuga, this momentary lapse is witnessed by Sawa Nakamura, a borderline psycho from his class who is desperate to find another authentic “sicko” like herself to relieve the tedium and hypocrisy she sees in middle-school life. She blackmails Kasuga into performing more and more bizarre acts in exchange for her silence about the uniform. And Kasuga, like the clueless, emotionally sensitive boy he is, lets himself get buried in increasingly unconscionable webs of deceit. All this is just the jumping-off point for an in-depth psychological investigation of Kasuga, Nakamura, and Saeki, none of whom is quite what they initially seem.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Angel’s Egg (1985) is an OVA I profoundly like—but I may be weird. Whether this collaboration between artist Yoshitaka Amano and director Mamoru Oshii will appeal to you depends strongly on what you look for in anime. If you like the meditative, beautiful, and atmospheric, you may be in for a treat. However, if you like your stories to have some sort of plot and pacing and make sense, you may wish to look elsewhere. One thing is undeniable: the visual artistry of this almost thirty-year-old anime stands up elegantly across the decades.

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

Ano Hi no Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai (aka. Ano Hana: That Flower) (2011) is a very pleasing slice-of-life anime with a supernatural twist: five teenage friends are visited by the ghost of a friend, Menma, who died in an accident when they were children. Through revisiting her death, they must come to grips with their feelings about Menma and each other and find a way to move on.

Read the rest at the Geek Girl Project.

I have only seen about two-thirds of Cowboy Bebop (the first five episodes, a couple in the middle, and the last half of the series). That's all I'm going to watch for now, and I think it's enough to form some thoughts. Having seen the end, I understand better now why this anime is so well loved, though I remain bemused by its ranking as one of the best of all time (again, I haven't seen every episode). It would not be in my top five; it would be in my top ten. If I restricted my rankings to anime from before 2000, it might well make it into the top five.

For anyone who's been under a rock for the past fourteen years, Cowboy Bebop is about a motley band of bounty hunters patrolling the solar system in the late 21st century. They all have personal issues, and they all work pretty hard not to deal with them.

( Provisional Review with Spoilers )

Damn, has a work ever made so little impression on me? I netflixed Ghost in the Shell, the original 1995 movie, the other day on the theory that it's a classic I'd missed seeing since, well, 1995, and I really ought to correct that omission. I'd seen one of the later ones, and it hadn't made much impression, but I figured I should still see the original.

So I started watching it, and about 40 minutes in, it began to dawn on me that, indeed, I had seen it, unless the GitS universe does the thing with the blonde cyborg woman's torso more than once. The more I thought about it, the more I began to think that I had, in fact, netflixed this before (not more than year or two ago). I eventually stopped watching and sent it back. I still can't remember how it ends. I can't really bring myself to care.

I know this is a classic anime. And, yes, the animation is lovely--it reminds me a lot of Akira, but it's better, being newer. The story also steers clear of almost every annoying anime trope out there. Even its fan service, which is considerable, has the virtue of being plausibly anatomically proportionate. It's "good quality"; it just makes no impression on me. The plot/theme--cyborgs and the nature of identity and all--doesn't seem very original (not even in 1995). The characters are not annoying but have little personality and almost no chemistry with each other. It makes so little impression on me I evidently can't even remember I've watched it. Well, at least now I can say I gave it a shot (twice apparently).

Anime
Un-Go: Detective solves cases involving science (fiction) and magic in a near future/AU post-war Japan. Generally, I recommend this intellectual 12 episode series, though I agree with those reviewers who've said it would be better if it were longer. As it is, too little of its intriguing potential is explored. Its standout characteristic is its setting. Based on novels written shortly after World War II and set in the post-war Meiji Era, this science fiction transposition captures with an eerie melancholy the daily reality of living in the very early years of reconstruction from a devastating war. From the quietly toppled buildings in the background to the war stories nobody talks about to the moments of overzealous happy-bustling-business-entertainment, the whole series conveys a sense of lacquering over an ugly painting in the hopes that the shine with transform it.

( Very Few Spoilers )

Books
I dabbled significantly with By Way of Deception, which purports to be author Victor Ostrovsky's account of working as an intelligence agent in the Mossad. Apparently, Ostrovsky himself subsequently stated that he'd made up a lot. You can kind of guess. There are just things that don't track, like if the Mossad is so dangerous and globally powerful, how is it he managed to expose their entire institution with no reprisal?

That said, taken as a work of fiction, I found the book a fascinating example of how to conduct spycraft. I have never read/viewed a work of fiction in which the business of intelligence was conducted with such fearsome grace, though Le Carré probably comes closest.


And just about twenty years later than I should have, I finally read the first Discworld book. I think I missed my own best developmental window for this series (at least based on this first one: I know there a lot and they evolve). I probably would have loved it in high school. Nowadays, for one thing, I don't have time to read comedy. I need to read for catharsis, and with almost no reading time, that leaves little time for laughs without a cathartic payoff. I also found it impossible not to find the book almost 100% derivative of Hitchhiker's Guide or The Last Unicorn. But I did enjoy it; it's fun and light. Rincewind and Twoflower are both engaging characters, and the Discworld itself is interesting and probably the most memorable thing in the book. I also like the interdimensional bit on the airplane. I'll try the second one at least.

My recent posts have pretty much been about RL, so I wanted to catch up with tiny thoughts on what I've been encountering in narrative.

Reading:

A Song of Ice and Fire (book 2): (It's hard to remember the name of the full series when the books don't actually put it on the cover.) I'm quite enjoying this series. I haven't read fantasy to speak of in many years and have grown to expect poor quality, but Martin is good. His prose is functional and uninspired--and occasionally incorrect, which is a bit embarrassing in text that purports to use a somewhat old fashioned English among educated characters. (It really shouldn't be too much to expect that he--or his editors--know the difference between "lay" and "lie" or what "lest" means.) That said, the story and characters are excellent. I like the dialogism inherent in the many sides of the conflict and moral ambiguity embodied in almost everyone. It gives a very real sense of quasi-medieval politics.

Watching:

Fate/Zero with a friend I'm not getting a chance to see very frequently, which is vexing because the series has grabbed me. I'm only a few episodes into this one, but if it keeps up this level of quality, it will be a winner. The series is advantaged by being a prequel about the parents of the characters in Fate/Stay Night. This means that the main characters are... parents (and uncles, etc.). This is amazingly rare in anime. Even those few series that are about adults tend to be about adults who don't have kids. Parents in anime almost always seen from their kids' perspective, i.e. semi-mystical beings who are there to be sweet or evil or make you do homework. It's intriguing to see a series that's actually from the perspective of people trying to manage their own lives/problems/feelings and be responsible for their young 'uns at the same time.

( Behind the cut: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Akira, Grave of the Fireflies, Primer )