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beccastareyesYou know, I can't decide if this is the hell of a PMS case, or the side effects on my SSRIs' side effects have come back and the primary effect has stopped working. If I'm going to feel like I need 9-10 hours of sleep, I could at least have the courtesy of not feeling like some hidden project is going to jump out at me when I'm awake.
If this doesn't pass in a week, I'll reschedule my appointment with my psychologist.
Anyway, so I promised a post about anime club and what we are watching, so here goes.
Welcome to the NHK
Welcome to the NHK is kind of a darkly funny story about Tatsuhiro Satou, who is a hikikomori, a young person suffering from social anxiety so badly that he has pretty much shut himself into his apartment for the past two years. After unexpectedly answering his door to see a young women handing out information about treating hikikomori, Satou finds himself trying to prove that he is Just Fine, Really.
I say it's darkly funny because I've got social anxiety -- nowhere near to the degree where I'd end up shutting myself into my apartment, but enough to feel at least some empathy for Satou. And yet, some of the things he does are just deliberately overwrought. Laughter is a reaction when one is mildly uncomfortable, I suppose.
Welcome to the NHK is also kind of vicious in noting some of the stranger aspects of Japanese fan culture. In the first episode, Satou starts to wonder if the NHK (a TV network in Japan) was part of the conspiracy to create hikikomori by making TV programming that encourages shut-ins. Satou later meets up with an old friend from high school, who ended up being his neighbor, who is a video game maker, and we get some commentary on hentai games and moe.
Kino's Journey
Kino's Journey feels sort of like an old-school SF short story book. The overall story is about a girl named Kino, who travels around the world with her talking motorcycle, Hermes. The world is currently broken into many small city-states, each with their own customs. I say it reminds me of an old-school SF short story book, because each of the episodes seems to have a theme or message. The first one, for instance, features Kino entering a country seemingly run by robots. When she finally finds people, all of them run away from her. She finally confronts a man who doesn't, and he explains that the country had unlocked the secret to telepathy, and discovered that none of them could stand one another, and that the only reason he could talk to Kino was that she was a traveler, so he couldn't sense her thoughts.
It's very well-done. I'm enjoying it. It probably says something about me that I assumed Kino was male until I saw the flashback episode, even though Hermes asked if the guy in the first episode was in love with Kino.
XXXHolic
CLAMP series! XXXHolic is about Watanuki Kimihiro, who is plagued by spirits. He meets a witch, Yuuko, who grants wishes for a price. She agrees to help him with his spirit problem in exchange for his help around the shop -- which turns out to be one part cooking, one part running her errands, and one part helping fight spirits and other things.
I confess, I ended up ditching the manga after the first issue since it seemed like it followed the recipe of :
1. Flawed human has a flaw.
2. Flawed human goes to Yuuko for help.
3. Yuuko gives help, but tells her client not to do something in exchange.
4. The client, being a flawed human, does it anyway.
5. Something awful happens.
6. Watanuki feels bad.
7. Yuuko doesn't.
Never was a fan of those kind of monkey's paw things, even when I was a kid. (See: I always felt bad for the kids in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, since I felt like being a brat didn't deserve the punishments given by Willy Wonka. Strangely Matilda and Fantastic Mister Fox didn't bother me, perhaps because those were adults, who had the chance to grow out of being a little brat.)
It also helped that I don't believe in destiny, unlike Yuuko -- who honestly felt like she knew her advice would be misused and did it anyways, since you cannot change fate. I get less of that vibe from the anime. (Yuuko didn't bother me in Tsubasa, perhaps because there she was dealing with something other than Flawed Normal Humans.)
The Twelve Kingdoms
Here I've read the books for this (well, the first two, at least). Youko Nakajima is a Normal Japanese Schoolgirl who is dragged into a fantasy world, along with two of her classmates, Yuka Sugimoto and Ikuya Asano. (Both of Youko's classmates were added in the anime, perhaps so that Youko wouldn't spend so much screentime alone). Unlike some other Normal Japanese Schoolgirls in Fantasy Worlds, so far, Youko and her classmates have been nearly executed by the state, nearly sold to a brothel, stolen from and being chased by demons. Mostly because their one contact (who knows what the hell is going on) has gone missing. Add to the fact that Yuka is a complete and utter psychopath mostly kept in line by the fact Youko has the sword and the ability to speak the language, and things aren't easy for Our Heroes.
A lot of the amine club seems to think Youko is being whiny, but I kind of like the change -- I mean, if I was suddenly flung into a strange world where people were trying to kill me, steal from me, or sell me into slavery, I'd be pretty upset, and generally trying to go home, even if my home life was nothing to write home about* -- at least, no one was trying to kill me!
* Youko's dad is so old-fashioned that she can't wear pants, and was generally expected to grow up and marry well. Both her parents were pressuring her to dye her naturally-reddish hair so that they'd stop getting calls from the school. Youko also generally related to her classmates by being nice, but having a spine of a wet noodle.
Mushishi
Another kind of slow-paced series, about a man, Ginko, who goes around studying mushi, spirit creatures that live everywhere. Interesting, but the last couple of episodes have been a bit repetitive -- 'mushi making kid sick, Ginko comes, and cures the kid'.
Tengu Toppa Gurren Lagann
This series is just... over the top. I mean, it was like the writer took every shounen/seinen cliche and dialed them up to 11, and added in a lot of seemingly-unintentional-innuendo-laden fight dialog. And it works surprisingly well, because it is so over-the-top it cannot help but be hilarious. (This is about the same way I feel about Nextwave). The series features a human civilization forced underground by the beastmen. Main character 1, Kamina, was obsessed with getting to the surface -- and fighting the Beastmen once he got there. Main character 2, Simon, is mostly just trying to keep up with his friend.
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uncreativity, if you haven't seen this, I recommend doing so.
Here is Greenwood
Oh, for the days when all the anime one got was childrens' TV, and the badly-dubbed random episodes of Ranma 1/2 that your friend's father copied off of Blockbuster tapes. Okay, not really. Here is Greenwood is an older series -- so old that the club has it on laserdisk, and we couldn't figure out how to turn on the Japanese audio track on it. We ended up watching the dub, which just added to the zany slice-of-life comedy of a group of high school boys living in a dorm. And by zany, I mean 'Shun looks and acts enough like a girl that the class president told the newcomer that Shun secretly was a girl, and the newcomer didn't figure it out til he noticed that Shun was using a urinal'. And the guy who keeps a motorcycle in his room. And the class president's roommate, whose sister is Azula-level crazy and ends up kidnapping Shun's little brother.
I kind of want to read the manga, but it seems to be out of print in the English language. Oh, cruel fate!
FLCL
... do I need to describe this? Because I can't.
If this doesn't pass in a week, I'll reschedule my appointment with my psychologist.
Anyway, so I promised a post about anime club and what we are watching, so here goes.
Welcome to the NHK
Welcome to the NHK is kind of a darkly funny story about Tatsuhiro Satou, who is a hikikomori, a young person suffering from social anxiety so badly that he has pretty much shut himself into his apartment for the past two years. After unexpectedly answering his door to see a young women handing out information about treating hikikomori, Satou finds himself trying to prove that he is Just Fine, Really.
I say it's darkly funny because I've got social anxiety -- nowhere near to the degree where I'd end up shutting myself into my apartment, but enough to feel at least some empathy for Satou. And yet, some of the things he does are just deliberately overwrought. Laughter is a reaction when one is mildly uncomfortable, I suppose.
Welcome to the NHK is also kind of vicious in noting some of the stranger aspects of Japanese fan culture. In the first episode, Satou starts to wonder if the NHK (a TV network in Japan) was part of the conspiracy to create hikikomori by making TV programming that encourages shut-ins. Satou later meets up with an old friend from high school, who ended up being his neighbor, who is a video game maker, and we get some commentary on hentai games and moe.
Kino's Journey
Kino's Journey feels sort of like an old-school SF short story book. The overall story is about a girl named Kino, who travels around the world with her talking motorcycle, Hermes. The world is currently broken into many small city-states, each with their own customs. I say it reminds me of an old-school SF short story book, because each of the episodes seems to have a theme or message. The first one, for instance, features Kino entering a country seemingly run by robots. When she finally finds people, all of them run away from her. She finally confronts a man who doesn't, and he explains that the country had unlocked the secret to telepathy, and discovered that none of them could stand one another, and that the only reason he could talk to Kino was that she was a traveler, so he couldn't sense her thoughts.
It's very well-done. I'm enjoying it. It probably says something about me that I assumed Kino was male until I saw the flashback episode, even though Hermes asked if the guy in the first episode was in love with Kino.
XXXHolic
CLAMP series! XXXHolic is about Watanuki Kimihiro, who is plagued by spirits. He meets a witch, Yuuko, who grants wishes for a price. She agrees to help him with his spirit problem in exchange for his help around the shop -- which turns out to be one part cooking, one part running her errands, and one part helping fight spirits and other things.
I confess, I ended up ditching the manga after the first issue since it seemed like it followed the recipe of :
1. Flawed human has a flaw.
2. Flawed human goes to Yuuko for help.
3. Yuuko gives help, but tells her client not to do something in exchange.
4. The client, being a flawed human, does it anyway.
5. Something awful happens.
6. Watanuki feels bad.
7. Yuuko doesn't.
Never was a fan of those kind of monkey's paw things, even when I was a kid. (See: I always felt bad for the kids in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, since I felt like being a brat didn't deserve the punishments given by Willy Wonka. Strangely Matilda and Fantastic Mister Fox didn't bother me, perhaps because those were adults, who had the chance to grow out of being a little brat.)
It also helped that I don't believe in destiny, unlike Yuuko -- who honestly felt like she knew her advice would be misused and did it anyways, since you cannot change fate. I get less of that vibe from the anime. (Yuuko didn't bother me in Tsubasa, perhaps because there she was dealing with something other than Flawed Normal Humans.)
The Twelve Kingdoms
Here I've read the books for this (well, the first two, at least). Youko Nakajima is a Normal Japanese Schoolgirl who is dragged into a fantasy world, along with two of her classmates, Yuka Sugimoto and Ikuya Asano. (Both of Youko's classmates were added in the anime, perhaps so that Youko wouldn't spend so much screentime alone). Unlike some other Normal Japanese Schoolgirls in Fantasy Worlds, so far, Youko and her classmates have been nearly executed by the state, nearly sold to a brothel, stolen from and being chased by demons. Mostly because their one contact (who knows what the hell is going on) has gone missing. Add to the fact that Yuka is a complete and utter psychopath mostly kept in line by the fact Youko has the sword and the ability to speak the language, and things aren't easy for Our Heroes.
A lot of the amine club seems to think Youko is being whiny, but I kind of like the change -- I mean, if I was suddenly flung into a strange world where people were trying to kill me, steal from me, or sell me into slavery, I'd be pretty upset, and generally trying to go home, even if my home life was nothing to write home about* -- at least, no one was trying to kill me!
* Youko's dad is so old-fashioned that she can't wear pants, and was generally expected to grow up and marry well. Both her parents were pressuring her to dye her naturally-reddish hair so that they'd stop getting calls from the school. Youko also generally related to her classmates by being nice, but having a spine of a wet noodle.
Mushishi
Another kind of slow-paced series, about a man, Ginko, who goes around studying mushi, spirit creatures that live everywhere. Interesting, but the last couple of episodes have been a bit repetitive -- 'mushi making kid sick, Ginko comes, and cures the kid'.
Tengu Toppa Gurren Lagann
This series is just... over the top. I mean, it was like the writer took every shounen/seinen cliche and dialed them up to 11, and added in a lot of seemingly-unintentional-innuendo-laden fight dialog. And it works surprisingly well, because it is so over-the-top it cannot help but be hilarious. (This is about the same way I feel about Nextwave). The series features a human civilization forced underground by the beastmen. Main character 1, Kamina, was obsessed with getting to the surface -- and fighting the Beastmen once he got there. Main character 2, Simon, is mostly just trying to keep up with his friend.
uncreativity, if you haven't seen this, I recommend doing so. Here is Greenwood
Oh, for the days when all the anime one got was childrens' TV, and the badly-dubbed random episodes of Ranma 1/2 that your friend's father copied off of Blockbuster tapes. Okay, not really. Here is Greenwood is an older series -- so old that the club has it on laserdisk, and we couldn't figure out how to turn on the Japanese audio track on it. We ended up watching the dub, which just added to the zany slice-of-life comedy of a group of high school boys living in a dorm. And by zany, I mean 'Shun looks and acts enough like a girl that the class president told the newcomer that Shun secretly was a girl, and the newcomer didn't figure it out til he noticed that Shun was using a urinal'. And the guy who keeps a motorcycle in his room. And the class president's roommate, whose sister is Azula-level crazy and ends up kidnapping Shun's little brother.
I kind of want to read the manga, but it seems to be out of print in the English language. Oh, cruel fate!
FLCL
... do I need to describe this? Because I can't.
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RE: Gurren Lagann
Date: 2008-09-25 09:25 am (UTC)Re: Gurren Lagann
Date: 2008-09-25 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 10:56 am (UTC)(Also: if anyone ever wants to complain about modern dubbing, there are plenty of examples like this that show it could be a lot worse. Kids these days... Why, in my day, if we wanted fansubs, there was none of this 'BitTorrent' or 'You Tube' nonsense. We had to give the shady creepy kid in the science fiction club blank video tapes, and he might remember to give tapes with copies of his fansubs back. Or it might be accidental (or accidentally-on-purpose) hentai.
Also, we had to walk uphill both ways in the
snowoppressive midwest summers to our anime conventions. ) </old anime fart>no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 11:11 am (UTC)Ha, modern dubbing is a treat considered what it use to sound like. Blargh. I actually like quite a few modern dubs. I understand this makes me less of a fan but I'm okay with that.
I still have some of my old fansub tapes. I really, really need to replace those with DVDs.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 11:21 am (UTC)I also am interested in how one translates things, so the subtitled track is interesting in that respect. Even if I speak almost no Japanese, it's still interesting to see how the translators are handling things like honorifics and dialects.
A dub has to be pretty bad for me to switch to the subtitle track and leave it there. (Slayers is one -- I didn't mind Premium's dub except all the female characters sounded alike, but I didn't care much for the casting and directing choices in the original TV series dub. Eric Stuart (Gourry) might not have been as bad if I wasn't used to him as Brock, and Veronica Taylor (Amelia) could have been better if she had used a voice more like the one she used for KareKano, and, of course, I love Crispin Freeman (Zelgadis), but I didn't care for Lina or Xellos's dub voice. I hope they do some revisions in the casting when Revolution is licensed and released.)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 12:21 pm (UTC)WRT Slayers: As someone who only watches the Slayers dub, I hope that they keep the cast that they had through the original Slayers. I love everyone, although David Moo took some time to get use to. I particularly loved, well, the main four (Lina, Gourry, Amelia and Zelgadis). *G*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 01:40 pm (UTC)