#edit the manga apparently already has an English translation

[origami10]

Just got back from visiting Iceland for the first time, and not only were Into Oblivion by Arnaldur Indriðason and 北北西に雲と往け (Hokuhokusei ni Kumo to Ike) by Irie Aki weirdly good preparation for learning more about Iceland, it also really made me want to reread the Scandinavia and the World comics by Humon~

#SATW #Iceland #fingers crossed an english translation of the manga happens sometime- the Hokuhokusei one #edit the manga apparently already has an English translation

[saffronapplemanga]

Tenjou Renka: Kin no Oujo to Hi no Kusushi - 天上恋歌～金の皇女と火の薬師～

HISTORICAL, ADVENTURE

Tenjou Renka ~Kin no Oujo to Hi no Kusushi~ by Aoki Tomo

(6 volumes, ongoing)

JP only - English summary in this post

Links to my other manga posts here

I can't remember where I first saw this, but Tenjou Renka caught my eye a while ago with this cover. Look at it — it's gorgeous. Like I said in my Tenmaku no Jadoogar: A Witch's Life in Mongol post, I've been really getting into historical fiction so this manga looked like something I'd enjoy. I'm currently reading Yona of the Dawn, which Tenjou Renka has some similarities to (ye olde Asia, princess on an adventure, etc.), and I've been having the best time! I plan to give my thoughts on that too, but there's a lot more content with that series and I've been taking my time reading it.

The full title of Tenjou Renka roughly translates to Heavenly Love Song ~The Princess of Kin and Medicine Man of Fire~. I was excited to read this manga because it seems we have a cool falconer princess with some lovely art! So, how did it do?

Twitter reading thread here. Thoughts after the summary.

***SPOILERS FOR VOLUME ONE***

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In the first few pages, we see a precession from the country, Kin, making its way to the allied country, Sou. Here we meet our nomadic princess, Aira.

There are rumors that Aira is to wed the prince of Sou... except she herself doesn't know this??? Awaiting the arrival of their allies, Sou greets them with a show of fireworks. Aira, however, runs straight over to one of the fireworks craftsmen and gives him a big old hug... before saying a word to the royals... when she's supposed to be an ambassador of sorts from Kin... and there are talks of her marrying the prince that's literally standing right there... uh...

What are you doing... She said, "I didn't get the chance to thank you! I'll never forget that night!" GIRL, YOU'RE GONNA GET THIS MAN EXECUTED!!! He's gonna get guillotined! He's gonna get the noose!!!!!!!!!!!

We go back in time a few days, and long story short, Aira and company got attacked mid-journey which led her to fall off a cliff and into a river. The fireworks craftsman, Hakurinshi (or as Aira calls him, Rinshi) finds her washed up. He takes her to his hut to treat her and her falcon. When she wakes up and says she needs to meet back up with her brother. Rinshi tells her to follow him so he can show her something. He lights a firework, which Aira had never seen before, and signals her brother to their location. Reunited, Aira turns to thank Rinshi, but he's already gone. Flash forward to the current day, she sees her savior and takes the opportunity to finally thank him... by aggressively hugging him... in that situation. *sigh*

If you see me spell something wrong, no you didn’t. Twitter, where’s my edit button???

Unsurprisingly, this is bad. Rumors start spreading, some Sou royals and citizens are not happy, and Rinshi gets called in by higher-ups to explain himself. Aira has completely fallen for Rinshi but ends up getting scolded by her brother Uju. He tells her to forget it and that Rinshi is from a different country and class. And he FINALLY tells Aira that there were talks of her being wed to the Sou prince, Kouou, but it's been tabled for now. (Why tf was Aira the last person to find this out?!) She's shocked at this information but Uju says that they wouldn't go through with it if she didn't want to. It isn't until she mulls over the new information and what she did at the palace does she realize, "Oh no, I was super rude to the prince and made an awful first impression!" ...UM, DUH?

*Deep breath*

Prince Kouou shows Aira and Uju around and he reveals that he's a two-faced jerk to only Aira just like I expected. (Aira, why didn't you tell your brother that Kouou wasn't to be trusted?! WHY WON'T ANYONE COMMUNICATE???) Apparently, he thinks the marriage is still on and that it doesn't matter what they want. It's their duty to go through with a political marriage if that's what's decided. Aira has to continue doing ambassador/goodwill duties for the next few days at the Sou palace so they'll be in town for a bit longer.

The last bit of volume one has the people of Kin falling ill from poisoned food. Aira is one of the few who hadn't eaten yet and was spared, thus leaving her to take charge and care for the sick. She goes looking for Rinshi for help since he was able to take care of her and her falcon before. What was weird to me was that she asked him to teach her how to care for the sick instead of asking him to come with her to where they all were. Rinshi is the one who said he was coming with to help, and Aira was surprised by this...

Instead of wasting time at his place learning how to play doctor, take him with you dummy!!! Also, the Sou palace knew what happened but they were like, "Oh no, it's getting late and it'll be morning by the time the doctors come to help!" DON'T YOU GUYS HAVE DOCTORS AT THE PALACE??? WHAT??????

The resolution to this section of the story was also annoying. Plus, no one was at risk of dying. They just threw up and felt sick.

Why THE HELL would you, the cook who prepares everyone’s food, including the Kin royals, use some random plant you don’t know??? Fire him immediately. This isn't poisoned food, this is food poisoning smh.

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***END OF SPOILERS FOR VOLUME ONE***

I usually try to give manga a few volumes, but honestly? I made it halfway through volume 2, skimmed the rest of the volume, and gave up. I'm going to mention minor spoilers here btw.

It doesn't make sense. The setup for the drama doesn't make any damn sense. I can't even be mad at Aira, at least not completely, because I blame her family/handlers for not teaching her ANYTHING before sending her off to be an ambassador and putting her in these situations! Literally, her handmaiden was teaching her things about the Sou royals she should've already known while they were at the Sou palace... Like... excuse me? I also don't like how there are info dumps.

Aira's handmaiden is teaching her info about Sou AFTER she just did a ceremonial thing at the palace. You should have taught her this stuff before!

We do find out that Aira's tribe recently won independence 8 years ago, so they're kind of "new royalty" but they should still know to tell her to watch herself in Sou. If there was some Sou custom they weren't familiar with that she messed up, or was awkward because she wasn't a princess from birth/comes from a more "primitive" country, then okay. But that's not what's happening here. I mean, even if you weren't promised to the prince, YOU'RE A PRINCESS WHO'S AN AMBASSADOR IN AN ALLIED COUNTRY!!! You didn't even greet the prince and king!!!!!!!!! That's just Manners 101!

And I’m a nobody!

I don't want to compare to Yona of the Dawn, but it's a little hard not to. I'm very early on in Yona of the Dawn (mid vol 5) but even then we see that while Yona is extremely naive, scared, and sheltered, she's not stupid. And in her case, she wasn't prepared for the events that resulted in her life being turned upside down. For Yona, it came out of nowhere. But for Aira, they planned to go to Sou. They knew this was happening. She should have been more prepared to do her duties as the princess of Kin, yet she fumbled it within seconds of her arrival at the palace. It doesn't make her funny or charming. It just makes her look dumb.

There are some parts that DO make sense. Aira being able to stand her ground adds up because she comes from a nomadic tribe.

Action scenes!

A lot of people in Sou, both noble and peasant, call the people of Kin savages/barbarians. Some nobles ask ignorant questions like, "I heard your people live in caves? Is that true? What, you can move your homes? How strange." And honestly, that's realistic. I cannot tell you how many times I've been asked if my family lives in tents and rides camels to school/work.

The start of the show here is Rinshi, hands down. He's known as the local weirdo who collects random plants and rocks and the like.

Mood, tbh. Throwback to my Yotsuba&! post about how me and my friend drove all the way from Tokyo to the Sea of Japan just to go rock collecting.

In reality, he's just a quiet guy with unbound curiosity. He wants to travel and see new things, learn new things, and collect new things so he can learn about those too. Rinshi wears tinted glasses to protect his eyes from light damage, which happens to a lot of craftsmen. But they’re are an unusual thing that no one's ever seen before and just adds to his "weird" status. I swear this man is ahead of his time.

Dreaming of all the cool stuff out there in the big wide world. I'm rooting for you buddy.

He also just seems like a genuinely sweet guy and would make for an awesome male lead!

The author, Aoki, clearly has a great love for Chinese history. This isn't even their first manga with this setting. On Aoki's Twitter, you can see all the research they do. They even get recreated armor/clothing to take reference photos!

Mad respect.

Remember kids, reference is important!

Tenjou Renka is amazing for seeing historical clothing and settings, as well as culture. However, I feel like these things take priority over the actual story.

We love well-researched historical fiction!

I was curious to see what other readers thought of the story, and while unsurprisingly there were people who really enjoyed it, some reviewers share my sentiment.

This reviewer is basically saying how Aira doesn't realize her own position/the situation she's in and just causes so many problems.

This person says that the girls feel immature/juvenile and it's a real shame because the historical aspects are well-researched.

But yeah, this was a title I was excited to get into, but it just left me frustrated and disappointed. I mean, listen — a foreign princess betrothed to the prince falls in love with a local weirdo and they both want to travel the world and learn new things? It’s so frustrating because this manga has the recipe… Tenjou Renka had so much potential, but the contrived drama annoyed the hell out of me. So much didn't make sense or could have been avoided, and that really soured any good it had. I can see a lot of people enjoying this, but unfortunately, it's just not working out for me. I would like to flip through the later volumes if only for the clothing and setting design.

Not even best boy Rinshi can make me keep reading. I hope you collect all the stuff your heart desires.

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If there's any Japanese-only manga you want me to check out, let me know! No promises, I'll only read what I'm interested in, but I'll take suggestions into consideration. Preferably, shorter manga or newer manga with a few volumes out since I like to take breaks from longer series I'm reading :)

#Tenjou Renka: Kin no Oujo to Hi no Kusushi #天上恋歌～金の皇女と火の薬師～ #manga #manga recs #manga recommendations #manga discussion #shoujo manga #少女漫画 #漫画 #おすすめ

[magicalgirlsandcerulean]

Episode 9's blog post (Spoilers under the cut!)

This post by Balletta is dated 8th June 2021. It apparently took him 8 hours to write...which is why I took so long putting this post out. (I had to skip a lot of the descriptive stuff and it still took me over 4 hours to do this post...)

There are also some tweets from Hishida below, including one regarding ep. 10. If you don't want any info about ep. 10 until you get to it, skip reading tweet 2.

Due to the nature of the ep., there is a mention of suicide below.

Hishida's tweet 1:

そういえばF蘭９話でゲスな男の久ニさん役で鳥海浩輔さんが出演してくれました。僕にとっては初監督作の陰陽大戦記でタイザン役を演じてくれたとても恩のある方です。ありがとうございました。そして明日放送の１０話でも非常にお世話になった方が登場します。これも逃れられない縁なのでしょうか！？

Now that you mention it, F-Ran episode 9's male sleazebag Kyuji was voiced by Kosuke Toriumi. For me, he had the role of Daizan in my first directorial work, Onmyou Taisenki, so I have a big obligation towards him. Thanks a lot. Also, episode 10, which is airing tomorrow, has a person who's taken extreme care of me. Is this an inescapable fate?!

(Who is this he's talking about? Read on.)

Hishida's tweet 2:

まさか福山潤くんに会えるとはね。りっくん、生まれ変わってギャンブラーになってました…w #フィクションです

Unexpectedly, I was able to meet Jun Fukuyama, huh? Rikkun was reborn as a gambler...LOL #ThisIsFiction

"Rikkun" = Riku Tachibana, protagonist of Onmyou Taisenki.

Hishida's tweet 3:

美梨香ちゃん、プリチャンのルルナ…。僕はキャスティングには関わっていません。

Birika-chan is Pri-chan's Luluna...My casting has not changed.

Pri-chan = Kiratto Pri-chan. Luluna and Birika share the VA Hibiku Yamamura.

On to the post (note Balletta goes backwards and forwards in time a lot in this post, so with that on top of my omissions, it's a bit hard to keep track of):

Post's name: "The Perverted and Slightly Sad Episode 9". (You know why it's perverted, but the "slightly sad" will be revealed later on. Balletta specifically uses a word for "slightly sad" used by teenage girls, ぱおん.)

Balletta starts by giving various greetings (this matches last time's), asks if everyone enjoyed Fairy Ranmaru ep. 9. It's Uruu's second turn, so he's going to give real-time thoughts and comments on the ep.

The ep starts with Uruu painting "blue roses" (according to Balletta). "収録の時に、第3話の時みたいにうるうくんの英語から始まったらどうしよう…と台本貰うまでドキドキしてたのはここだけの秘密です…" - "It's a secret between us that when we were recording, I was nervous until I got the script, wondering what would happen if we started with Uruu-kun's English like in episode 3..."

Balletta goes on to discuss how people call Uruu "Blue Rose" (from Tiger and Bunny). People have been making this connection ever since the key visual (the one with the fairy forms) dropped. Even now, when watching the anime on Nico Nico Douga, he'll think: "Hi, Blue Rose's older brother!").

He skips to Uruu's mother's suicide scene. Her wings are broken like glass and Balletta thinks this is when Uruu's heart was broken too. This is also where he thinks Uruu's ideal of "always be proper" was born.

The blushing Homura, being healed by Bakkun and reading an article on Shiina's manga, is "transcendently cute".

It's at this point where Balletta starts introducing quotes from the discussion with "ワン！トゥー！！スリー！！！" ("One! Two!! Three!!!") (<- For the curious, there are 6 of these in the post, but they're not entirely the same.)

Balletta wonders in small text if there was tongue or not during the CPR scene...

"この時のうるうくんの表情が完全に悪役の悪い顔になってて、正直自分もアニメ見てて「うるうくん！顔わるいなぁー！！」ってなりましたね！" - "That time Uruu's face looked like a villain's, and straight up I also saw in the anime, 'Uruu-kun! You're making a bad face-!!'"

Balletta is relieved Homura has been revived.

The sloth's lump is moving...

Balletta introduces Birika and the plot of the week. "不倫！ダメ！！ゼッタイ！！！" - "Adultery! Don't do it!! Absolutely don't!!!" (he repeats this through the post and counts the times he says it - the editing Chesarka from the future says he ends up with 3 instances of this)

Balletta recaps that Uruu is good at painting, as we know from ep. 1. It seems to be the same painting, but then he puts red paint on top. This made Balle-san think of Homura so much, he couldn't concentrate on the painting. In short, FIRE (insert flame emoji, obviously referencing Homura's shirt).

5 to Heaven synced up on how they thought during recording. When Uruu is talking to Birika and she says "心が清廉だからだよ" ("Because you have an honest heart."), they all thought, "心が清廉、どうも清怜うるうです。" ("You have an honest heart - thank you, Uruu Seiren.") Balletta thinks they increased their bonds as a result. (Note "honest" in this case is "seiren".)

Some descriptive bits later, we get to this sentence: "第1話から今回の第9話までに、うるうくんの心情や見えている世界が大きく変わったことを意味しているのではないかと自分は思いました！" I thought from ep. 1 until ep. 9, the world he is seeing has changed greatly!" A bit further down: "先程も話した、第1話から第9話にかけて、うるくんの心情や見えている世界が大きく変わってきていると言ったもう一つの理由がこの言葉なんです！第1話では世界に対しても常に正しくあるべきと考えていたうるうくんが、第9話に至るまでに色んなことがありました。

過去のトラウマ、火焔族への憎しみ、焔くんに対しての嫉妬。" - "That's another reason why I said earlier the world Uruu-kun sees has changed greatly from ep. 1 to ep. 9! Ep. 1, where Uruu-kun thinks everything should be correct about the world, to the Uruu-kun in ep. 9 who has had various things happen. Past trauma, the hatred of the Ignis clan, the jealousy which he feels towards Homura."

Balletta can't believe how Birika's mother came back and had a kiss mark on her neck. He gets so angered he starts making puns on his own name (bareru means to leak a secret, while barebare means a transparent lie) and ends with "あ、どうもバレッタです。" - more along the lines of "Ah, sorry, I'm Balletta" than the previous "thank you"s - before returning to the previous discussion.

Some more description later, Balletta mentions the appearance of Sirius. "素晴らC！いや！すばらシリウス！！！" - "SubaraC (shii)! No! SubaraSirius!!!" (subarashii = wonderful) He then discusses Sirius's musings.

End A part. Balletta stops for a bit to note "You only noticed all this incredible impressions and comments are [for] the A part? Didn't you see the previous post?" He also comments Hori's post was short and that was fine. "ま、イケメンだからいっか！！！（うるうくん達が）" - "Well, they're handsome, so what?!!! (Uruu-kun and co. are)"

Now to the B part. Balletta notes there's a piece of art that is a pot in the art gallery. Pot quota: check.

Some description (and more yelling about how adultery is bad and unforgivable) later: we get to the kiss scene. This transformation is voiced differently to the one in ep. 3 in terms of the pan upwards part and the sound effect of boots scratching you can hear during the "Taboo rescinded! Love! In abundance!" callout. "自分もリアルタイムで第9話見てて、「あれ！？ボイス変わってるし、音が追加されてる！凄い！！」ってテレビの前でなってました！ありがたい限りです！" - "Even when watching ep. 9 in real-time, I was in front of the TV, going, 'Huh?! The voice changed and a sound was added! Amazing!!' I'm nothing but grateful!"

Hotel Tsubo returns. "なんかもう毎回このアニメをリアルタイムで見るたびに「今回はどこに壺が隠れてるかなぁ〜♪」ってなってる自分がいてビックリしますよ笑" - "Basically every time I watch this anime in real-time, I'll be like, 'Where will they hide the pot this time~?♪', so I'm surprised. LOL"

"そしてそんな「HOTEL壺」では、美梨香さんの母親と久二さんがS○Xしてるシーンが出ましたね。申し訳ないけどもう一回だけ言わせてくださいね…

ふざけんにょ！！！" - "Also, at that Hotel Tsubo, Birika-chan's mother and Kyuji have a scene where they're having s_x. I'm sorry for saying this, but please let me say this once...stop screwing around!!!" (The "screw" pun is intentional on my part.)

Enka scene. Balletta calls Uruu "sexy & beautiful" because of his black lace wings and strong gaze.

Head back to Bar F. "バックンはこのアニメの癒し…

いつもありがとうバックン！" - "Bakkun [being] in this anime is healing...thanks as always, Bakkun!"

Some description later, around the part where Uruu's mother says Uruu is just like his dad...you can see germ-like objects that look like water fleas and Uruu gains some damage from them sticking themselves down his throat. There are various versions of this scene and after all the yelling from recording them, he felt considerably more passionate.

Some more description later, Balletta doubles back to the scene slightly beforehand. where Ranmaru and Chilka are in the same place.

Balletta then continues for a bit about the plot and is at the scene where Kyuji is relieved he's free of the old hag when he goes, "ワン！トゥー！！スリー！！！ 「エヘッ、ぱおーん！」 こんの野郎ーーーー！！！ぱおーんじゃねぇんだよぉー！！！！！ガオーってライオンだらけの檻の中にぶち込むぞぉーーーー！！！となったのはこのブログだけにそっと記しておきますね。" ("One! Two!! Three!!! 'Ehe, that's kinda sad!' These bastards---!!! This isn't 'kinda sad'!!!!! I'll throw you into a cage full of roaring lions----!!!...This blog became a place where I can quietly write this precisely [because I can], huh?")

Balletta discusses the final scene and then draws attention to Takara's scene by going, "「あっちゃー、もう一山残っちまったかぁー」 えっ！？何が残ったの！？" - "'The worst is yet to come.' What's coming?!" (<- Translation using the CR line)

He then tells everyone to look forward to next time's Fairy Ranmaru ep., says he's finished, that was ep. 9's comments and impressions, apologises for his long post again and puts some promotional stuff I've already covered on magicalgirlsandcerulean (in order: character song CD, the live show in Sept., Sweets Paradise, Vivid Army, Otasuke Heaven, BD/DVD 1, the curry plate, Bakkun plush, key necklaces, Fairy Ranmaru's official Twitter + YouTube). He then ends by saying he's done (again) and he's Yutaka Balletta, who voices Uruu.

Takara's comment: "原稿用紙40枚やで～気合い入れて読んでや～" - "You took 40 sheets of genkou youshi~. We read it with effort." (referencing the line where he apologises for his long post: "今回また2回目の当番回だったというのもあって気合い入れまくった結果やっぱり長文になってしまいました！ご容赦くださいまし！！" - "This time was the 2nd time I was in charge [of the post], so the result was, of course, me putting in effort! Please forgive me [for my long post]!")

Update: Minor fixes for accuracy and clarity.

#Fairy Ranmaru #Fairy Ranmaru spoilers #Yutaka Balletta #Uruu Seiren #Masakazu Hishida

[neveda]

Death Note and Godliness, or, Who's the Real God — Kira (Raito), or L Lawliet? A Short Cross-Linguistic Overview.¹

Abstract: this short linguistic overview on Death Note is going to include Hebrew and Japanese, in an attempt to prove a point. It is also going to include IPA, so, if your device can't show IPA symbols, it's a You problem.

Introduction

Death Note is a Manga series, on which an Anime was based. The anime series has one season, and just under 40 episodes. To those unfamiliar, here's a recap: Raito Yagami (or Light Yagami in English) is a gifted child who grew up to be more successful in high school than you, is smart as fuck, and also athletic. He's Toni Kroos with a complete Abitur and parents who aren't athletes, and he also was born in Japan, and not Eastern Germany. But they're both Ugly But Some People Find Them Hot. Light is bored af because he's still got that gifted shit going well for him in high school, and he's very clean, and doesn't like to see people (or beings, which soon will be explained) littering.

Ryuk is a Shinigami (death god in Japanese lore) who does like littering. He's also very bored of doing shifts and killing people. Both Light and Ryuk are really bored. Completely unfittingly, the first chapter/episode (i don't remember tbh) is titled "Boredom".

In the anime, death is done by shinigamis, but instead of like, reaping or whatever death is doing in some beliefs, they write names in their notebooks called "Death Note". This is a clear reference to people writing names in notebooks and circling them with hearts, as i have demonstrated in another article.²

Back to Ryuk, the littering Shinigami. Ryuk, in his deep and painful boredom, decides to sow some wind, and thinks, that since he's not your conventional reaper, he won't reap storms.

Thus, Ryuk, while sitting on a cloud like some angel in these ugly stickers that would stand for lots of copyright lawsuits had the renaissance ninja turtles were alive, lets go of his Death Note and litters the Earth.

It falls in Light's school grounds, he even sees it from the window (he apparently doesn't have my dad's 10-6 eyesight and can't read or see what exactly is ht e thing that falls. In true Non-ADHD fashion, he proceeds to listen in class, and waits patiently until he has time, goes downstairs, and picks up the litter, aka the Death Note. Light, unaware this is s Death Note, understands that the sky can't litter, and decides to look inside, in case someone wrote his name and circled it with hearts. It is not the case, as it is, as mentioned, a Death Note.

fig. 1 – the Death Note user's manual

Light is quite curious. First of all, why doesn't it have his name with hearts? (Because he's narcissist). He takes it home to take better look at that black elementary school-like notebook.

In his Man-cave, he takes this better look he was planning on taking. and sees the user's manual in fig. 1.

He, of course, thinks it's a joke. Because he's very Smart, he thinks it's a dumb joke.

This doesn't, however, prevent him from trying it anyhow. While he is very curious, and Very Atheist and shit, he still doesn't take unnecessary risks, and writes the name of a criminal who appears on the news.

And, surprise! The criminal dies and Light is sure it's a coincidence, but Ryuk, the Littering Shinigami, visits Light and says, "Aye, it's the real deal m'dude. M'ma'am, with great power comes great responsibility, don't forget that" and eats Light's apple whole. No one but Light can see Ryuk because of something something.

fig. 2 — light and ryuk walking (and flying but very low) down the street.³

Light, the Good (non) Samaritan he is, uses it on other criminals, with some weird muscle seizures while writing. His second use of the Death Note is also noteworthy, when he saves a woman being harassed and assaulted by a biker, whose name he already heard before.

After that, Light begins looking up all criminal databases, and writes criminals' names that he finds in the Death Note. He does that without adding a CoD⁴, so it'll be clear someone is behind all these deaths; in my article,² i mention how i believe he does it both as a plot device, but also because he's very uncreative.

This gets into his head, however, and he proclaims he's gonna be God of that world. A perfect world with no crime and all that. He calls himself Kira (basically pronuncing Killer in Japanese, where there's no L sound). He says he's justice, god, blah blah blah idc.

Enter L. L is a detective like Sherlock but smarter, better, and not as Gary Stu as Sherlock. Also not British and doesn't look like a dead groundhog covered in vegemite.

L doesn't show his face, but only a letter. L. But he kinda seduces light to kill a killer Lindon B. johnson but only with Ls (Lindon Lee Lindman?) whose been captured but nothing about him was published. Very secret, much undercover. L knows now where Kira (Light) is, which is, well, in some areas in Japan (as in, he knows which area, idr which).

L is the second main character, with Light. Because if this, we will not cover Light's girlfriend who's all misogynistic stereotypes into a character, Makami GodFetish who nuts when someone says Kira; Near and Melo who are like L but kids.

This article is my attempt of explaining why, in my opinion, L is God, and not Light.

Death Note and Godliness, or, Who's the Real God — Kira (Raito), or L Lawliet? A Cross-Linguistic Overview.

Shinigamis are sort of gods. They're Death Gods, and can't be killed.

Light is killed at some point. In the manga it's pretty saddening and like, dramatic. L also dies (:sadyeehaw:), but I still think he's the God in the story.

While others might give the canon and use quotes, I'm using my preferred method of, as you might've guessed from the title, linguistics. Now, i don't have Linguistics degree nor do I know Japanese, but for this article, i use Hebrew and English with simple Japanese to explain my theory of why L is God.

I shall start with the Japanese name, Eru. Eru is the Japanese pronunciation of the name of the letter L (ʔell→ʔeɾɯ̥). It is canonically translated in English to ell, and his symbol, L, is depicted in both manga and anime afaik.

If so, L's name is El, which, coincidentally, is the romanization of the Hebrew word אֵל (ʔel) , meaning God.

And so, L = El = אל = god.

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to prove, through linguistic comparison, how L is God. I find myself to be very correct and I hope you too. If not, it's okay, it's not like i can relate to it, idk what it's like to be a dumdum.

I hope you liked it and that it'll help y'all when in academia.

Yours,

Me.

¹ this article was written after exchanges with a colleague of mine with Linguistics degree who's watched Death Note, in which i have expressed how i believe L was God all along because of his name. I then proceeded to write this article and ignored her for more than an hour. Sorry sis, ily.

² lmaoo never written that article. Will do if somebody asked me to tho.

³ fig. 2 was edited by me on my phone with an outdated system, and i couldn't change the direction of the labels. Not ashamed to admit it is a Me problem.

⁴ Cause of Death. While I do wish Light played some CoD (Call of Duty), he didn't. If he did, he wouldn't be bored as he'd be a gamer, and have games to play before he's all bored and starts using that Death Note.

#death note #l lawliet #death note manga #yagami light #light yagami #raito yagami #yagami raito #lawlight

[aseriesofunfortunatejan]

Another novel commentary

Not an actual commentary - just a couple reactions I wanted to share, mostly because not many people care. Still, I think there are probably a lot of people who watched Another because it was such a classic and didn’t even know there was a novel. Hell, I’d been fed the lie that it was an anime original and that the manga was an adaptation of the anime for years... for some reason.

I haven’t read the third novel, Another S/O (Où est le mort ? / Where is the dead? in french) yet so this is only about the main story: Volume 1 “Celle qui n’existait pas / She who didn’t exist” and Volume 2 “La fille à l’œil de poupée / The girl with the doll eye” in french. I like to cite the french titles because I think they are pretty cool, and I believe they did not exist in the original and english versions.

I will not be including spoilers of specific deaths and events but I will speaking as if the person reading this already knew Another.

Let me start by saying that reading Sei Hatsuno’s commentary at the end was quite the wholesome experience. They seemed to truly admire the author of the novel I’d just read. I liked that.

So... if it wasn’t already clear, I seriously enjoyed it. As someone who’s been kept from reading by mental illness despite it having been my passion for years, being able to read and enjoy Another put me in a good mood. (Basically, I live in fear of what’s coming now that I’m done. Damn...)

I was able to appreciate how good of an adaptation the anime actually was. I mean, more often than not, the anime isn’t so great and “you should really read the manga/novel/whichever came first”, right? Honestly, I don’t feel like all these years of loving Another from the anime were a lie. Though it was short, it was simply enough a good adaptation. A few elements were changed here and there, yes - but I believe it stayed true to the essence of the story, and those differences are what make me want to say you should read the novel AND watch the anime. Yes! Both are actually very good. It makes perfect sense when that one character dies earlier in the novel, but the scene of their death in the anime was actually a pretty good one that efficiently showed how students from Class 3-3 felt at the time.

And yes, the rumours are true... Akazawa - best girl Akazawa... barely exists in the novel. And it’s true, it’s sad. She was seriously interesting in the anime, and despite not having watched it in years, I have a strong memory of her. Still, it’s clearly not a flaw from the novel - it’s a quality from the adaptation(s). What little we see of her in the novel serves to show, discreetely but efficiently, Sakakibara’s negative feelings towards kids his age. He regularly mentions “not liking girls like her”, but the truth is, he doesn’t like the popular guys either. There needed to be characters like Akazawa and her friends because Teshigawara was an exception, meaning that he didn’t represent properly his distate for “cooler” kids. At the end of the day - and I say that with nothing but love in my heart - Sakakibara is just a nerd who coincidentially got bullied in his previous school. He tries to be cool about it, but deep down, he knows.

It’s true that I loved him, though. I didn’t have strong memories of him from the anime (which, again, I rewatched multiple times, but not in a good few years) but I remember liking him already. He was a pretty compelling character, and I liked reading through his well-hidden insecurities while still having him try his best rather than falling into whatever stereotype he could. I’m not that person who likes to ship the obvious straight ship, especially not when the characters are teenagers, but his crush (that he won’t fully admit to having, but once again, deep down, he knows) on Misaki was cute and worked.

Misaki is not like other girls. She has an eyepatch, she’s grieving AND she’s an introvert. I like to joke about it but that, too, works. That weird kid in class who’s silent and has multiple traumas exists in real life, and it didn’t feel exaggerated when it came to Misaki, to me at least. In my opinion a small flaw of the anime is that it made her look too stand-offish and ghostly, whereas the novel (the french edition of which doesn’t have illustrations) would have you think she looks pretty normal, and the eyepatch is what’s weird. She’s pale but “I have pretty skin and I’m japanese” pale, not “my skin colour is #FFFFFF” anime pale. Either way, since he’s a NEEEERD, of course Sakakibara would get kind of a 👉👈 crush on the introverted girl who doesn’t get along with the mean girls he worries about.

So yes, it’s all solid in my opinion. So are the story and its twists. Knowing them ahead of time was an experience to say the least... I wonder how I would have felt about the few clues that were scattered ahead of time if I didn’t already know what they meant. I think those were pretty clever, though.

By the almost-end-of-it, I became worried that the ending would be unsatisfactory, that there would be too many unfair deaths, but it didn’t feel like that in the end. Sure, one death I’m pretty frustrated about... But I think I always was, even when it was different in the anime. (Why am I going through the effort of making this spoilers free?) It was violent for sure, because it’s Another, duh, but it felt right enough, and I’m not worried about leaving Sakakibara and my other faves in this state of things.

Speaking of faves - from memory, in the anime, I loved Teshigawara and Akazawa. Of course Akazawa is out the window (laughs) (actually doesn’t laugh), and I still liked Teshigawara. Well, uh... There’s that one thing he did I still need to wrap my head around, but I think we can heal from that, apparently we can. Still, I was glad that he was still actually a cool character. Another character I don’t remember having strong feelings towards in the anime, but I actually liked a lot in the novel, was Mochizuki. Baby boy. Baby. Silly baby boy. Baby.

Uhm... Well, the only thing I actually missed was that one beach episode from the anime. It doesn’t exist in the novel, but I guess it goes hand in hand with Akazawa not being an important character. So though I loved the novel, the anime has that going for it for sure.

Yeah, both are great. The anime is an amazing memory from my childhood (yes, my childhood). It was my first anime ever and though it’s been a while now, I rewatched it many times. I’m sure it’s not the best anime ever or whatever... But I now know that it’s a great adaptation, and I cherish it either way. As for the novel, I seriously had a good time reading it. The protagonist is good. The other important characters are good as well. Reiko felt a little more special in the anime in my opinion... But Sakakibara’s point of view of her was valuable in the novel. The story is told well. I definitely recommend reading it.

Like I mentioned in some of my first posts, there are points in the first volume where I could tell the writing was adapted to teenagers. But first of all, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re a teenager anyway, isn’t there? Huh-uh. Well, I’m not anymore somehow, and I got used to it, especially as there was less and less small talk and the story was in motion. Those weird impressions I had that the french translators had struggled a little bit with translating some japanese speech-mannerisms had long left me by the second volume. And I think it’s interesting how Sei Hatsuno’s commentary mentions (yes, I’m coming back to that!) it being both a thriller and a teen story. You can’t really help it when the main characters are middle-schoolers, can you? But there’s a reason Another is such a classic even in spite of that.

I’m glad this story exists and is part of my life. It’ll always stay a classic to me, both anime and novel.

#'yeah i'm gonna make it short' #another #another anime #yukito ayatsuji #jan essay

[linklethehistorian]

Linkle's Mini-Handbook of Relevant Bungou Stray Dogs and General Fandom Terms You Might Want to Know (Part 1/3)

In light of the fact that my long-awaited article on Fifteen is going to be coming out soon, I have compiled for the less veteran fans of the series a small handbook of series-specific terms that tend to differ between the novel/manga and the animated series, as well as some of the most essential terms used in general fandom spaces, that have a chance of appearing in or being quite relevant to said work of mine.

If you are very savvy in the series or do not limit yourself to one medium or the other, you will probably already know most if not all of these words and their meanings, but in the event that you do not, I hope that this little guide might be of some help to you!

I will obviously be going into the greater detail of some of these story elements in the novel, but a quick pre-release primer surely cannot hurt.

Needless to say, there will be some spoilers to Fifteen in here so, if you don't want spoilers...come back later, please? If you don't mind the spoilers, though, then jump below the cut! ^-^

Bungou Strays Dogs-Specific Terms

1. Fifteen: The commonplace, shortened version of the title, “Dazai, Chuuya, Fifteen Years Old”, an officially canon light novel written by the series creator, Kafka Asagiri, of which the first editions were originally handed out in theaters during a specific week in March 2018 to movie-goers who were looking to see the animated film DEAD APPLE. It is this novel that a year later was (extremely poorly) adapted into the anime’s third season as a mini-arc. An expanded but otherwise unaltered second edition of the original novel was released in August of 2019, including a new a bonus chapter, an afterword, and several illustrations by Harukawa35. A direct sequel light novel, Stormbringer, will be releasing on February 27th of this year (2021).

2. Arthur Rimbaud: The true name of the ability user who goes by the alias of Randou throughout much of Fifteen; anyone who has read the novel or even fan posts made by people who have will probably already be aware of this, but seeing as his identity is never truly, properly, fully revealed in the anime, it is still something worth noting here, as I will be alternating between his different names quite a lot for variety’s sake.

3. Paul Verlaine: The name of Randou’s former partner prior to joining the Mafia — and Chuuya Nakahara’s alleged elder brother (literally) — whose identity was, as with many things, wrongfully cut from the animated adaption.

4. Gifted/Gift/Ability User/Ability/Special Ability: The catchall phrases for those with special supernatural powers in the series, “gifted” tends to be the word favored in the animated series whereas Ability User tends to be much preferred in the manga and light novels, but in this case neither are exclusive, as there are points when one is used in the other and vice versa. Likewise, “Gift” and “Ability” are terms used to describe the powers themselves, with “Special Ability” sometimes also working as an alternative to either — primarily in the manga and light novels.

5. Hyperspace/Subspace: The names that the light novel and the anime use for the pocket-dimension ability owned and used by Randou/Arthur Rimbaud, respectively. I may also alternate between these terms for variety, but I suspect I will be using hyperspace more often as it is the one I have always personally preferred.

6. Transcendental/Transcendent: A special type of ability user more powerful than all other gifted in the world, whose members number only in the tens. Arthur Rimbaud is one of them, and as such, is practically invulnerable to at least all others not sharing this status with him, if not all natural-born ability users in general. In fan translations, the term usually used is “Transcendental”, but the official English edition of the only other light novel to make mention of their kind simply calls them “Transcendent”.

7. Abilities Secret Service/Special Abilities Department/Gifted Special Operations Division: All commonly used names for the division of the Japanese government of which Ango Sakaguchi is a part, normally preferred by the manga, light novels, and anime, respectively. Chief Taneda Santouka is the organization’s leader.

8. Soukoku/SKK: Literally meaning and often translated in official English releases of various entries in the series as “Double Black”, Soukoku is the name given to Dazai and Chuuya as a duo whenever they worked together as partners in crime; however, in the fandom, it is also more often than not the name used to signify a perceived — usually romantic — relationship (or in fandom terms, simply “ship”) between the two. Other names used for this pairing include but are not limited to “Double Black”, “SKK”, “DaChuu”, “ChuuZai”, or just “Dazai x Chuuya”, although all of these except Soukoku’s shortened abbreviation, SKK, are far less common occurrences.

[Since apparently Tumblr has a lovely, lovely word limit to posts now, for General Fandom Terms, see the next post here. :)))))) Thanks.]

#linklethehistorian #bungou stray dogs #bsd #bsd novels #fifteen #arthur rimbaud #bsd arthur rimbaud #randou #spoilers #bsd spoilers #writing #my writing #fifteen article #general terms

[hizashiswife]

Death Note Analytical Essay

    !!PLEASE READ!! This is an essay I wrote in junior year because my teacher told me too and in the end she refused to grade it. It’s been half a year but tiktok wanted me to leak the essay so here Tumblr can have it.  Also I don’t state everyone’s name because this was for only my English teacher at the time. Maybe one day I’ll come back and edit it but for now here you go. Also I don’t think I state if its a manga or anime because I didn’t want to risk a 65 year old white woman rejecting the essay about anime but here we are. Enjoy.

     One wouldn’t expect a series about a notebook of death to have many references to religion connecting to it. Death Note is a story written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, is about a seventeen year old top student, Light Yagami, finding a notebook in which if you write a person's name with their face in mind, they will die. How does a series about a killer notebook have anything to do with religion? Throughout the show and books there are many biblical references and allusions to religions. Specifically christian religion. 

     A summary of the series, the Death Note belongs to a Shinigami, [English translation: God of Death] to which the main Shinigami in Death Note Ryuk finds himself bored in the Shinigami Realm. Shinigami’s use the Death Notes to shorten humans lives, and whatever lifespan they took from the human, their lifespan lengthens. Ryuk decides one day to drop his notebook in the human world for whoever picks it up, they become the owner of the notebook. Light Yagami just so happens to spot the Death Note from the classroom window as it was falling. This interests him and after class he goes to retrieve the notebook. When he first reads the rules he is skeptical at first, but when temptation gets the best of him, he writes down the name he sees of a criminal from the local news channel that was at that moment holding a daycare hostage. Since it's a live broadcast they’re quick to state when the criminal dies and how. At first it shocks Light, but then he finds himself writing down the names of more and more criminals. He sees it as a way to punish them for their crimes, rid the world of evil, and soon become the God of a new world. When it becomes apparent that these criminals aren’t just dying, since they all die from heart attacks, Light gains popularity as Kira [English translation: killer] and this catches the attention of the greatest detective in the world. L. Lawliet. Throughout the series his real name is unknown as no one really knows his identity. He goes by a number of fake names such as Hideki Ryuga, L, and Ryuzaki. He starts to suspect Light of being Kira until one day he finds himself unable to prove that Light is Kira. It gets to the point where Light helps in the investigation. Light always saw L as a burden in his ridding the world of evil and tried to kill him on multiple occasions. Until one day when it becomes evident that L is well aware of Light being Kira, he just doesn’t have the evidence to prove it, he completely gives up. Not long after, Light succeeds in the death of L. Before L died he had asked Light to succeed him if he were to pass in which Light declined. Though once L dies, he takes L’s place to make it look as though he never died. Unknowingly, L had already had two successors in their teens fighting for L’s spot in an orphanage for gifted children. Since he died he didn’t get to pick between the two being Mello [Mihael Keehl] and Near [Nate Rivers]. Mello always wanted to prove himself worthy and was upset to find out that L never chose a successor. Mello and Near are given the option to work together, to which Near has no issue with the idea of working with Mello, but Mello states that he and Near could never get along. With that Mello leaves the orphanage and years later as an adult joins the Mafia to gain information on Kira. Near goes about it a different way staying hidden behind the shadows like L. Both Near and Mello are seen as two different personalities of L as Near is good with problem solving and Mello is good when it comes to risky decision making and adapting. The two end up working together by almost not working together, though unfortunately Mello sacrifices himself to catch Kira. Though Near wouldn’t have solved the case without him and soon proves Light is Kira. It also becomes apparent that Mello and Near combined is what helped solve the Kira case, because together they are smarter than L. Light then tries to kill him, but is soon shot multiple times by a police officer working with him and not long later Ryuk writes Light’s name in the Death Note killing him from a heart attack.

     The first religious recurring theme that can be noticed is apples. How does a fruit have symbolism in a show about murdering criminals with a killer notebook? In Death Note Ryuk, the Shinigami, has an addiction to eating only apples. It's worth mentioning that only people who have touched the notebook or a page of it can see and hear  the Shinigami that owns the notebook as well. Therefore, Light is the only one at the moment who knows of Ryuk’s presence and feeds him apples.  If he stops eating apples he has what is almost like withdrawals in which his body twists. At first it's quick to  oversee. One will think that Ryuk loves the taste of apples from the human world claiming that “They’re so juicy” (Ryuk). Though, when one thinks of apples and religion they think of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. In the world of Death Note, if one writes the name of someone in the death note, they can neither go to Heaven nor Hell. The Shinigami Realm works for the in between Heaven and Hell. In the story of Adam and Eve, they are tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, often seen as an apple. Now Ryuk often eats apples, and at first Light gives him the apples as long as he gives him information on the death note. From the beginning Light was tempted to use the notebook to kill criminals. Throughout the series he can be seen continuously falling into temptation by using the notebook. Almost as if the death note is the forbidden fruit for Light himself which also ends his life towards the end of the series. Ryuk can be seen as the serpent as well because throughout the series he attempts to have Light make the Shinigami eye deal. The Shinigami eye deal is a bargain with a Shinigami in which you gain one of the powers that the Gods of Death have. They can see the name of a person and their lifespan just by looking at their face. The bargain comes at the price of losing half of the dealer's lifespan. Light often thinks about it, but doesn’t bring himself to ever make the deal as he sees it being too risky. Another example of this is during the first opening of the show, there is a recreation of the famous painting by Michelangelo, The Creation Of Adam. Though instead of seeing God and Adam, you see Ryuk in God’s place and Light in Adam’s. In Light’s hand he holds an apple as if passing it on to Ryuk. 

     Throughout the series, one never gets to see the way Light’s name is written in Japanese. It’s typical for Japanese names to have different meanings depending on which characters they’re written with. One of the first times we get to see Light’s name is when Misa Amane, who serves as a second Kira, due to her admiration of Kira because he killed the man that murdered her parents and Light’s eventual girlfriend. She also has possession of a death note, and sees a Shinigami named Rem. Unlike Light, she made the Shinigami eye deal which made L believe that there were two Kira’s due to the fact the first Kira needs a name and a face to kill. Light got most of the criminals due to the fact they were broadcasted on television and his father [Soichiro Yagami] worked for the police while he was currently also working with L on the Kira investigation. With his father being chief of the NPA, and Light being one of the most intelligent characters, he easily hacked into his father's files. Misa uses her eyes to spot Light in a crowd due to the fact, a owner of a death note’s life span cannot be seen by a human with Shinigami eyes. With this information she goes home to look him up. Throughout the time period before she finds him online she is seen calling him moon. That is due to the fact Light’s name is written with the character for moon. His full name translates to “night god” or just his name Light, can loosely translate to “god of darkness”. This can also show a parallel the bible verse “No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). This shows that Light can easily manipulate people into believing he is a top student and even tricks the whole Kira investigators, except L into believing he was innocent.

     Throughout the series, Light has managed to prove himself innocent to L. At first before him and L had physical contact, Light finds that he is able to control the behavior of criminals before they die. With this he makes them write suicide notes directed towards L. L immediately puts them together and gets Kira’s message. Eventually when he makes physical contact with Light, he asks him to help him solve a piece of the case with him, to which he talks to Light privately showing him the suicide notes and what he makes of them. Though since he’s ninety-five percent sure that Light is Kira, he adds a fake suicide note to throw Light off. Light see’s through his plan though and makes it seem like he was using logic to make out how the suicide notes were written to make him look innocent. Though it may work on any other person, it only makes L suspect him more. It is common throughout the series that L says that he thinks it’s a two percent chance that Light is Kira. Though what he really means that no one sees, is that when he states a percentage, such as three percent, he actually means ninety-seven percent. It’s his special code. There eventually comes to a point where he actually doesn’t believe Light is Kira until he finds more evidence on him. Eventually towards the middle of the series, L realizes that he can not do anything to prove that Light is Kira. He knows that Light is Kira but he has no evidence. One of the last times he’s seen in the series, he’s standing in the rain on the roof of the building that he owns meant for only the people who work on the Kira investigation. Light is the one who finds him soaking in the rain. When he asks L what he is doing, L states “Oh, I’m not doing anything in particular. It’s just, hear the bell”(L.Lawliet). By this he means a church bell. The church bell does have a significance behind it in this series. He then continues by saying it’s unusually loud that day, which Light finds strange due to the fact he can’t hear anything. He wonders if it's a church, possibly a wedding, but gets cut off by Light before he obviously gets to say a funeral. Light convinces him to go inside and they start to dry off. While drying off, L gives Light a foot rub, which at first could be seen as just a kind gesture. Though, it’s a parallel to how Jesus Christ washed Judas feet before he betrayed him, and he sacrificed himself.  L knew that Light had betrayed him, and that once he finished, he would die. Though Light doesn’t kill L himself, and instead Rem is the one who kills him. Rem killed L to protect Misa due to the fact she had fallen in love with Misa, and killing a human for the sake of love for a Shinigami is deadly for them which caused her to die as well. L ends up passing away from a heart attack in Light’s arms as he stares down at him, with an evil smile on his face. L sacrificed himself so that his successors Mello and Near would solve the Kira investigation. 

     Lastly, church bells play a small significance in the series of Death Note. As explained earlier, before L dies, he states that he can hear the sounds of a bell. Specifically a church bell. Light says that he doesn’t hear it, but while watching the show, the audience can hear the sound of a faint church bell. In the episode after his death, the church bells are heard once again with the sound of a child's cry. It then goes on to L successors being told that he has passed away to which Mello instantly realizes it’s Kira. He refuses the opportunity to work with Near as he can not see himself getting along with him in the future. Four years into the future Near is head of the SPK (Special Provision for Kira) and goes under the alias N, very much like L does. He knows about Light being a fake L due to the fact neither him nor Mello gained the spot of being L. On the other hand Mello joins the mafia to gain information, even eventually obtaining a death note himself by kidnapping Light’s sister and trading her for the Death Note in the police's possession. While trying to retrieve the note once again, Light’s father makes the Shinigami eye deal to find out Mello’s real name and write it in the death note. Though when the time comes, he can not bring himself to kill Mello, and gets shot in the process by one of Mello’s henchmen, before Mello then blows up the entire hideout he was in. This caused all the other investigators to have minor injuries, though Soichiro Yagami passed away. Light cared for his father to die peacefully, that he made Misa become owner of his death note, so that his father could see his lifespan so that he’d die believing his son wasn’t Kira.  While this happens, we find that Mello had escaped the explosion but was now seen with a burn scar from the left side of his body which reaches from the center of his nose to his waist. In this period that he is seen again, he’s with Near and the SPK, not fully working with them as he points a gun to Near’s head when he angers him. Near only challenges him by telling him, “Mello, if you really want to shoot me, then go ahead and do it” (Near). Mello can be seen hesitating, but one of the SPK members convinces him not to shoot him, because if he were to shoot Near, the rest of the SPK members would shoot Mello as well, and what good would it cost if he wanted to find Kira, which causes him to lower his gun. When Near first speaks to Light, he warns him about Mello stating that he has no photos of him, which in this moment it is found out to be a lie. Near had a photo of Mello the whole time and the real reason Mello was at the SPK headquarters was to retrieve that photo that he knew Near had possession of. After Near gives it to Mello without hesitation, the two silhouettes are shown against a stained glass window. As music plays eerily in background the sound of a church bell is heard. Mello states that he will not work with Near, but he gives him the information about the death note, to pay debt for giving Mello his photo. The two make one last agreement before parting ways. It’s almost playful as they smile, agreeing on a race to find Kira and that one of them will be waiting at the finish line. That is the last time they are seen together. Mello soon sacrifices himself knowing that if he died Light is Kira. Mello not long after dies during a kidnapping of one of Light’s allies, Kiyomi Takada. During the confrontation with Near and Light, he ends up confessing to being Kira thinking that everyone in the room would die since he had another ally Teru Mikami who addressed him as Kira, who had possession of the death note as well. Turned out Near had been investigating him as well and replaced his death note with a fake one. He turns the page in a book to show Takada’s name had been written by Mikami a minute after she had been killed by Light, since he always kept a page hidden in his watch. He proves that Mello knew the whole time and the only way he could prove it was by working with Near separately and sacrificing himself in the process. The bells during their last meeting was foreshadowing that one of the two would have to make a sacrifice, like L had.

     Throughout the series of Death Note, many references to the Christian religion. One such example is how Ryuk is a symbol for the serpent and temptation. Another is the scene in which L serves as Jesus and Light serves as Judas. The symbolism is very subtle, but can be spotted throughout the storyline. Death note has a lot of Christian symbolism that can be spotted while the viewer is observant, and while it can be very dark, it showcases the religious themes flawlessly. 

#death note

[ae0nx]

FRUITS BASKET ‘19 EPISODE 24 VS FRUITS BASKET ‘01 24-26 (PART 2)

Link to Part 1 here

So just to start it off again... I just wanna reiterate...

When I think of the True Form Arc, I think three simple points are vital to be shown:

Kyo’s true form is to be revealed to the audience and to Tohru

Kyo’s past with Kazuma and his mother/(partly)father

Tohru still accepting Kyo and declaring her love need for them to be together and share each other’s pain and joy

Also, if you’re more invested in my review of the 2019 version, scroll further down as most of this is gonna be the 2001 rewritten bits recap. Sorry?

-------------------------------

- Again, I really appreciate that the 2001 version left us with that pre-transformation cliffhanger. It’s a really great separation and keeps us on the edge of our seats. Plus, gives the horror and effects of Kyo’s transformation much needed time. I love the 2019 version too but it could’ve been excellent with a WHOLE episode dedicated to Kyo’s true form transformation rather than just half of one... Plus, aren’t these events are supposed to take course during an entire night leading into morning? 

I can’t decide which iteration of the Kyo transformation I like the most. I just know that the manga version doesn’t live up to the animated versions...

They’re both pretty horrifying and scary and look incredibly painful. I’d probably give it to ‘19 cos Kyo had tears in his eyes as he was transforming which hurt my heart and also just cos you know it’s in high def andddd the transformation isn’t a cloud, it’s fire embers. This is great gore-y content and I’m a little desensitised cos I had to watch/read this scene three times in one sitting so... 

I loveeee Tohru’s resilience. Kazuma’s here saying soliloquies and philosophical questions and Tohru just takes off after Kyo! And the manga and ‘19 version definitely wanted to highlight this message to the upmost: Tohru’s love is so STRONG. And BADASS. But, a part of me also loves the time ‘01!Tohru takes to evaluate the situation cos in all fairness... it is a very shocking reveal (if Tohru wasn’t already shocked enough from them turning into animals)

I like how in ‘01 anime we don’t get the inner monologue of Tohru evaluating what she saw. It leaves the whole notion of Tohru chasing after Kyo a little more mysterious as to whether she will or not. And the silence says it all anyway. Only the sound of the falling rain... I like it better. I tend to lean towards scenes with more action and less dialogue as someone who apparently learns better through visuals rather than dialogue. 

Akito appearing like a fuckin ghoul out of nowhere is still ridiculous haha but I have to give kudos to the ‘01 English VA Chad Cline. He definitely elevates the scene when he says this one sentence:

- I also like that this event (and also Akito) feeds into Tohru’s insecurity of not truly being a part of specifically Kyo and Yuki’s world. Not truly understanding them. She’s been living with them for almost a year by now(?) and I’m sure she felt because she knew the worst secret of them already there couldn’t have been anything even worse. And in a way, she feels cheated? ALSO KYO JUST TURNED INTO A FREAKIN ALIEN CAT MONSTER. I know Tohru’s very much aware that she still has much to learn about them but she couldn’t have predicted this. And it kinda puts her on the level of being an outsider once again. I like that it concentrates on Tohru’s own feelings towards her place rather than just her feelings towards Kyo. 

...I’m gonna get into some heavy 2001!Shigure defending, so I’m sorry if you don’t favour this iteration - stick with me for a sec lol

I’m ignoring all the ‘it’s not accurate, it’s not real’ chants in my head because... LOOK HOW DEJECTED HE LOOKS.

...

2001 gave me everything I wanted from Shigure as a character. Yes, he’s very interesting and conniving and fun as he was originally depicted. But... this Shigure has emotions and is fully showing them! That’s all I FUCKIN WANT. I just want him to show that even though he’s making these dangerous moves and manipulating people for his own benefit, that he has a conscious that is eating away at him and eventually will break. It may be too early in the story for an event like this to take place but I do appreciate that it’s shown. I get very frustrated with the fact that Shigure stays somewhat the same throughout the course of the manga but I guess the only person who does stay the same in the story is the narrator...

- I don’t know if the director of the 2001 version knew that they only had one season to translate Fruits Basket somewhere in the making of these three episodes, or even before. But, it definitely shows with the choices they make with the inclusion of Shigure, Uo, Hana, Kagura and Yuki in the search for Kyo. It’s almost as if they read future arcs and felt to just mash an iteration (or bastardisation) of it to try and conclude the whole story... which was quite a desperate move.

I also like the way this scene closes.

👌🏾

I actually really like this moment from Kagura! She’s actually being mature! And rational... and sort of letting go of Kyo at the same time. I do think if Fruits Basket ‘01 was given another season, it would’ve been fleshed out (obviously) but it’s such a great moment. Again, these are all signs that the end was nigh and they felt they had to tie up all the character arcs that were involved very quickly and I don’t necessarily blame them for trying. It just made them look a bit silly when looking from a 2019 view.

- But yeah, Yuki being involved is a no-no. He felt the most out of place when it comes to ‘characters that should’ve not been involved’. He makes a point when he finds Kyo about how they should both stop running away but it’s not fully fleshed out enough before this event for me or anyone else to care about. It’s kind of unfortunate cos I quite like the concept of Yuki being there especially tying in to how Yuki comes to a realisation of himself and Tohru’s relationship. 

- Also, are Yuki and Kagura tight like that? Lol for him to go rushing after Kyo basically cos she asked? mmmm.... 😓

This is actually my favourite moment from the 2001 version of the True Form Arc! It’s visually stunning and haunting and just... interesting. I like that they included the cats. Cats that would normally gravitate to Kyo but are now taking the voices of haunted figures of his past. Whether it’s in his head or not. 

In general, I felt Kyo’s mental anguish in the ‘01 version was a lot more artistically styled and creative. Very creepy and even more sad.

I do like that Tohru went to her mother’s grave for comfort/guidance before finding Kyo. I probably would’ve included a scene like that myself in the 2019 version as it adds a preliminary to Tohru’s future conflict between her love for her mother and her love for Kyo. AND it also adds time between the night Kyo transforms and the eventual sunrise when she finds Kyo. How far is Kyoko’s grave from the Sohma house? Lol

But yep, Uo and Hana being there was irrelevant but it’s pretty funny that Hana’s waves were used as a last minute explanation as to why they felt they had to attend Kyoko’s grave. But, I guesss the writers wanted to use this as a moment of Uo and Hana letting go of their ‘daughter’ to let her become a woman (reminds me of Yuki’s comment of how he saw Tohru as a woman when she ran after Kyo) and go after her man. It’s a conclusion... but it’s meshed with so many other themes and conclusions that it ALL DOESN’T MATTER. Plus, I don’t really like this as a thing; Uo and Hana will always be Tohru’s surrogate parents. ALWAYS.

Anyway, look at this beautifully depressing visual that ‘01 gave us for THREE EPISODES *sips wine*:

But seriously, while the visuals are so drastically dark compared to rest of the ‘01 season and are dragged out for sooooo longg, it is a very beautifully, depressing design. I love the way that all background music is edited out. Everyone is crying. Everyone is confused. The sound of rain is a constant throughout it. Honestly? It almost broke me cos the heaviness of it is exhausting, haha. And I have to commend it on pure shock value cos ‘01 Fruits Basket was barely dark until this arc. I think that’s what essentially made me adore it when I first discovered the ‘01 anime. I hadn’t read the manga so I didn’t know any better, but the darkness and pain in this arc is so beautifully shown and I feel like people forget that when critiquing the ‘01 version.

They jam packed a whole lot of character arcs in here when really the story should be focused on Kyo and Tohru’s reaction to Kyo. And I honestly, don’t blame them. It’s just too much at once that you don’t get to appreciate any arc at all because it’s not pushed to it’s full potential. It’s mostly just a feeling of sadness... that you later equate into genius...  because it’s sad? Which, I guess, could be seen as manipulatively clever? But now that we have the 2019 version, I think people will be more likely to decipher the bad from the good. Like, I have :)

- BACK TO 2019 VERSION: Wow, Kyo, really took out a whole cliff, huh?

I honestly got impression from the manga that Kyo did push and injure Tohru enough for her to get a huge amount away from him but not so far that she fuckin DIVES INTO A LAKE. My God, this was a bit dramatic lol

Ouch... that wound looks worse in the anime than the manga...

QUEEN TOHRU. I love everything about this.

You guys know I LOVE a good parallel and look at this couple meeting each other’s needs and taking their first steps. I can’t. I’m going to be crying into my wine soon. Nothing needs to be said about this scene, except excellence in ALL AREAS.

🎵TEARS STREAM.

 🎵DOWN YOUUURRR FAAACEEEE

🎵AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII....

I can’t get over Kyo’s face in this moment. I just- MY HEARRRTTTT. GOD TAKE ME. PLEASE. Couples that cry together, stay together. Omggg.

Even if we can’t agree on much when it comes to 2001 vs 2019, we can both agree that Tohru stays being an ethereal goddess. OUTFIT APPRECIATION. LIFE APPRECIATION. I’m so tired. haha.

So in conclusion, I think 2001 succeeded at showing all the three main points of the True Form Arc. I just think it got the message of this being a Kyo/Tohru centric tail a bit misconstrued because they wanted to make this a general zodiac tale of them finding freedom and release through Tohru. And it definitely takes away from the Kyoru centric storyline that runs through the True Form Arc. And while I think the True Form Arc could’ve used another episode in the 2019 version, it’s quite clear that 2019 wins this battle in all areas of it being a more whole and complete yet emotional and stunning version of the True Form Arc.

I would go into what happens at the end of episode 26 in the ‘01 version but it honestly kinda angers and frustrates me? And I’m mentally exhausted soooo, I might go into it some time next week before the next 2019 episode drop. Also, I’ll tie up some thoughts of the ‘01 version of Kyo and Kagura’s date. This was fun! Only took half a day to organise my thoughts, ahaaaa.

#fruits basket #furuba #fruits basket 2019 #fruits basket 2001

[freevoidman]

Okay I’m reading through Porg’s update so some of y’all can save your braincells and here are some great highlights (under a readmore bc i couldn’t help but tear into a few things she suggested):

Flat out ignoring that Vergil had changed by the end of the game as a result of V and Urizen’s separate experiences.

In trying to make V and Urizen their own character, she throws out the idea of Vergil being manipulated by the Qliphoth/Urizen (??? somehow??? even though the tree is implied to be non-sentient i believe???), with V being a Devil hunter looking through the remains of Mallet Island (which was completely blown up, turned to rubble, and then swallowed by the sea, so... that can’t happen), finding the cane which makes him youthful and not sick but... having the cane makes it so he can only kill demons through the cane??? for some reason??? And he needs the Qliphoth fruit to heal himself and free him from the curse???

How did she make V’s backstory even more confusing and complicated how the fuck did she do that

Almost immediately after bringing up the cane, she instead changes it to be one of the rings he’s wearing because she wants her “precious V” to use weapons other than the cane, which makes all the prior paragraphs about the cane’s curse and only using it pointless. She’s the one writing this fic, why can’t she edit her own work so it’s more cohesive?

Despite saying that V should be a Devil Hunter, she doesn’t explain why someone who is supposed to be killing demons would form a pact with at least three to fight demons. Her rewrite dismisses Visions of V, and she even states later that the manga is a waste of time as it won’t ever be translated into English (which 1) is not a limiting factor to reading it as many people have translated it already and 2) doesn’t dismiss it’s value at building up V’s character, who she supposedly likes the best).

Also, for someone who complains about DMC5 being a rehash of DMC3, she’s sure doing her best to change it to a rehash of DMC1 (Vergil being controlled by an outside force, bringing back Mallet Island, bringing back Mundus [the cane is supposed to be tied to Mundus]).

V apparently can’t be human because she wants to give him a devil trigger, despite having 3 familiars and his own strength. Okay I guess?

Also it’s really fucking sick how she describes V changing, because it’s apparently V fusing with Nightmare? Devil May Cry has never been one for body horror but she straight up says she was inspired by “The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986), Bloodborne, and Resident Evil 7″ for the transformation imagery and I wanted to nope the fuck out of there real quick.

Her segments of actual fiction writing and dialogue are really bad it’s almost like a parody Youtube skit.

She switches between prose and script writing randomly, it’s really odd. She does it primarily with Dante i’ve noticed? Here’s an example I wrote of what she does:

“Hey, don’t stress out about it will you?” Says John following a few steps behind VINCENT: Don’t get your panties in a twist

And that just happens... randomly? Like, there’s no indication why she’s doing that it just happens.

She straight up writes notes in her fic about the controls for character actions in-game what the hell--

She also shamelessly puts in a link to artwork that clearly isn’t her’s (and I highly doubt she got permission to post about) to try and show what V’s Devil Trigger would look like. I couldn’t find it because I don’t know how pixiv works, but that’s just a shitty move, especially with how she treats artists on tumblr when they draw art of Vergil.

EDIT: Porg has now straight up copy-pasted the art into her fic without the artist’s permission which is, we all know, fucking theft. While it is good artistry, is just a weird mashup of Vergil’s and Dante’s. It’s not all that unique and I don’t understand why she had to reference a bunch of body horror shit when all the Devil Triggers in game are essentially just a large flash of light and a seamless transition between forms??? It’s good art, I’m not trying to bash the artist, but... Porg, you could’ve been a little more original here rather than just ripping off another artist’s designs...

Everyone in her fic acts super casually to seeing Vergil alive in the Qliphoth and it’s like... honey, no.

Vergil acts WILDLY out of character holy fuck. Like, I know I should have expected that but this is NOT how Vergil would act in the slightest. She’s pretty much writing an OC.

Building off of this: EVERYONE acts OOC and... it’s not exactly cringey, but it is perfect proof that Porg doesn’t know what she’s doing and hasn’t properly analyzed the characters.

Dante acts weirdly... detached? There’s no sign of him acting like his normal goofball-y self, and he’s much more serious than normal. He actually acts more like cannon Vergil than himself, actually. (He also knows CPR apparently? Which... is a skill he would really never bother learning, so...)

Nero doesn’t act nearly as emotional, and acts calmly for some reason. You can’t feel any of his emotions behind his dialogue, only through the adverbs added to the tags)

V is too informative. He knows way too much about random shit that... no one should rightfully know. I’ll mention it more later, but... V doesn’t act like himself and I don’t really know how to explain it.

Vergil is essentially her OC. Seriously--he’s not as brooding or snarky, he’s far too open and apologetic, there’s practically no sense of rivalry between him and Dante. Weirdly, he acts more like canon V than fic!V does, despite the fact that Porg wants to establish V and Vergil and separate characters. His actions also make no sense when put alongside his canon personality. We aren’t reading anything about Vergil, we’re reading about Porg’s weirdly idealized version of him.

I’m going to make a break in the post here because I feel like this is the part that needs the most attention:

Porg goes OUT OF HER WAY to dedicate a GIANT portion of this chapter to her own OC: Nero’s mom. There are several long paragraphs of establishing the relationship between her OC and Vergil, talking about leaving Fortuna, how they were ‘happy’ and then saying that after a hurricane (inspired by hurricane hugo, you’ll see later) she got separated from Vergil, never reconnected with him, GAVE BIRTH, died from a demon attack with Nero staying near her corpse, and then Nero was found by humans and taken off the mainland to be taken to an orphanage on Fortuna. She wanted a massive amount of time to be taken out of the fun parts of playing Devil May Cry to establish a relationship that would never come back and essentially turn into a 15 minute soap opera inserted into a game about having fun killing demons.

Alright back to the noted highlights.

Porg confirms in her fic that the universe of Devil May Cry happens in the US, and that Fortuna is an island along the southeast coast and I want to fucking rip my eyeballs out at this point.

The ONLY REASON why she is doing this is because she lives in Florida. I know she does, and she just wants to imply that this is all happening near her home turf. How anyone who lives in Florida thinks an island like Fortuna can exist is beyond me though, because playing through 4, most of the buildings are inspired by Italian designs, and no one in the states would build an entire island with italian designs. I’ve been to Florida multiple times--there’s no buildings there even REMOTELY designed to match Fortuna.

EDIT: I have been informed that Porg actually lives in Pennsylvania, not Florida, which makes both more and less sense. Why Florida? Why not a hidden island up on the east coast? Why does this have to be taking place in the states at all Porg???

Yeah, let’s take Nero off the MAINLAND OF FLORIDA after a DEVASTATING HURRICANE and send him to an orphanage on an ISLAND which would’ve been hit the hardest by ANY hurricane. TOTAL SENSE. 

She tries to make her own timeline for the series using actual real world dates and events and it’s terrible (she references Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and confidently states that 3 took place in 1990, despite all evidence for the actual dates of events being fan theory established through circumstantial evidence).

There’s so much horror movie inspiration here--not cheap horror, but really twisted shit that... doesn’t fit with Devil May Cry’s tone at all? In the slightest? She references Jacob’s Ladder, plus all the other body horror media I wrote above.

Straight up just tears Vergil’s arm off which sure, I guess we gotta make THAT a parallel between Nero and Vergil. They can have a father son moment over being physically maimed.

In the scene immediately before this, Urizen picks up Vergil by the head and roots around Vergil’s memories (somehow???) to show him all the ‘bad moments’ in his life to traumatize him. She describes it as the audience getting flashes of him falling to hell, charging Mundus, being Nelo Angelo, etc. 

This causes Vergil to cry and beg for Urizen to stop. Then Urizen rips off his arm. So. Yeah. Another point for the OOC!Vergil/OC-taking-Vergil’s-place board.

Also this point ALONE made me realize that Porg does not know how much time, effort, and money needs to be put into making assets. Like, the entire fic she was stressing that everything be done in 5′s HD Graphics--including the ruins of Mallet Island, so I have to assume she’d want these little snippets in HD too, which would be a massive money hole creating these assets for one scene that lasts maybe ten seconds total.

I know I stated it in one of my earlier posts, but most of what she’s writing would fit better with a sequel for the reboot series, not DMC5. It would make her OOC writing of Vergil make sense, all the horror movie inspiration and body horror shit would fit better there, especially all the crappy dialogue too.

She somehow made Griffon even MORE annoying than in cannon.

BTW if I had to listen to poetry while fighting the final boss of a video game, I’d sooner turn my PS4 off. Not that poetry isn’t cool and all, but it cheapens the final fight and distracts you. It wouldn’t work.

EDIT: I realized this point made no sense without context, sorry. Porg made the Book of Urizen (the poetry book by William Blake referenced multiple times by V) either weirdly prophetic or made it out like Blake had inner knowledge of demon powers or... something along those lines, and V magically has the knowledge that reciting poetry from the book about Urizen will... harm him? Weaken him? Open a gate to hell (she mentions a portal appearing near him)? It’s very unclear, but she essentially rewrites Urizen as the final boss, and makes it three stages (V [Griffon recites some verses, which is what the first point was about], Vergil and Dante [this is where Vergil gets his arm ripped off btw], and then Nero) with all three of them reading poetry from the book to deal the “final blow” to Urizen. I’d much rather have Vergil be the final boss than have to go through a three-stage boss fight while every character I play as recites poetry to kill the boss.

She mentions Dante using Sin DT against Urizen but I’m pretty sure with her fuckery of the game’s events Dante can’t GET Sin DT? Because there’s no fight between Nero and Urizen where he’d intervene?

COMPLETELY IGNORES VERGIL’S DEVELOPMENT OF WANTING TO TRAVEL WITH HIS BROTHER THROUGH HELL TO ELIMINATE THE QLIPHOTH FUCK OFF.

Also she changed the lore of the Qliphoth so that it sprouts semi-naturally around every 500 or so years? So... shouldn’t leaving the Qliphoth roots be fine now? Since it’s natural?

Nico acts like growing back arms is totally normal

Wrote an INCREDIBLY shoe-horned in moment in the van with Dante filling Trish and Lady in about finding Vergil and everything that happened where, once again, Trish and Lady act almost completely nonplussed that Vergil is alive after 20+ years in hell, with about 9 of those ten years being trapped under Mundus’ control and corrupted by the Demon King

Seriously why is no one surprised in this fic that Vergil survived? Dante has a brief moment before finding him, but everyone finds out and accepts it like flipping a switch (once again--ESPECIALLY DANTE, which is NOT how the grieving process works)

Porg states that the ending is trash because the twins are fighting in hell, but completely ignores that most of Dante and Vergil’s lives have been built on conflict and they like fighting demons, especially Dante. Both of them were happy and doing what they love.

She also completely ignores through this entire thing that Dante was really fucking depressed in the novels leading up to 5 but hey I don’t even know if she can read.

I can vaguely agree that Trish and Lady were sidelined and they should’ve had a bigger role. However, I can’t fault the directors for not doing this, because they were already developing three playable characters with their own unique fighting styles. She writes all this shit about the story, writes notes about controls and mission layouts, but forgets that it takes a lot more than pressing a single button to code a game.

She just doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Seriously, none of these things are cohesive or edited properly, and despite her saying she wanted better for Vergil, or Nero, or Dante, or V, she writes all of them incredibly out of character and doing illogical actions. I just... I don’t get it.

The best part is--I can’t even tell her about these things, or give constructive criticism. She moderates the comments on her fic and isn’t afraid to delete anything she doesn’t agree with or can’t make a ‘passionate rant’ about.

#devil may cry #derelict-stranger #thephantomporg84 #i'm doing y'all a favor here

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Rakugo v4

This took way longer for me to get to than I wanted. Oh well. Thankfully I feel like I enjoyed it a fair bit more than the last volume or two.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

I want to try and keep the manga/anime comparisons to a minimum [fake edit: haha yeah that’s not happening], but at the very least, I think this volume felt a bit closer to the anime than the last volume or so, which was nice. The thing that stuck out to me the most, though, was how the conversation between Kikuhiko and his master happens in the first chapter of this volume, after Sukeroku had already been expelled. It’s been like a year since I watched the anime so I might just be misremembering, but I could have shown that that conversation happened before Kikuhiko even went on the family tour thing with his master, which is why I said in the last post that it felt strange that it hadn’t happened yet.

For the most part, the manga just continues to feel like a slightly less substantial version of the anime, which I think I’m simply getting less and less bitter over. I shouldn’t really be expecting it to feel exactly like the anime, or anything. I think it does the most it can with what it has to use. But I still do appreciate how the anime fleshed out the material, especially in moments like Sukeroku and Kikuhiko walking Konatsu along a path, which had a full shot devoted to it in the anime, but was more of a side-note in the manga.

On that general note, that whole sequence, of Sukeroku and Kikuhiko living together temporarily and taking care of Konatsu, is still one of my favourite parts of the story, at least from this arc. It’s just so wholesome and wonderful, even though as you’re reading/watching it, you just know that it won’t last forever.

I’m almost surprised at how similar a lot of Miyokichi’s scenes are to how they are in the anime. I mean, she definitely comes across as having more depth and sympathetic qualities in the anime, but from how I saw some people talking about it, I expected her to feel WAY worse in the manga. She’s still one of my favourite characters, to be honest. She’s the sort of character you both hate and love in equal measure. I can’t help but instinctively dislike her for being the sort of person to abandon her family, but I also can’t help but sympathize with her position of being a woman in a heavily patriarchal society that gives her no real freedom. In a more meta way, it’s depressing that, especially in the manga, she’s framed heavily as being a sort of femme fatale character who exists to cause drama and conflict, so I’m glad that the anime treated her with more respect, enough so that apparently it changed how Kumota wrote her part in the ending chapters.

The rakugo performances in particular still feel like the part that suffers most heavily from being portrayed as a series of silent black and white images. There’s just so much nuance and emotion that you can only really add with the benefit of voice-acting and artistic direction. They work as well as they could in the format they’re in, but it’s hard not to notice stuff like how in the performance of Nozarashi we get later in the volume, the part where Yakumo adopts the feminine role in the story is subtle enough, and happens fast enough, that you might not even consciously notice it unless you’re paying attention, whereas in the anime it’s impossible not to notice his complete change in demeanour and confidence.

On a [kind of] more negative note, although the final part of this volume is still one of my favourite parts of the whole story, it still includes some of the content that shows of Kikuhiko’s more obnoxious and, to be blunt, sexist side. I still really don’t like the scene where he cuts Konatsu’s hair and explains ‘the role of women in the theater’ to her. Mostly just because it feels like the narrative is framing what he says as being totally normal and reasonable in and of itself, and not simply an artifact of traditional values. It’s certainly realistic to how people thought back then [and, well, still do, in a lot of ways], but the whole ‘yeah, the woman’s role is just to look nice and be on display for the hard-working, male rakugo performers’ part still rubs me the wrong way. There’s a lot of interesting conversations to be had about how things like gender roles play into Kikuhiko’s character, but even though he’s still a sympathetic person, you still gotta admit that he’s got some awkwardly traditional values about things like this. And as we saw even just in volume one, these are values that he holds onto for basically his entire life.

I have a whole lot of complicated feelings toward Sukeroku around this part in the story. On the one hand he’s incredibly sympathetic, I support his values in how he approaches art and how he thinks society should adopt to change, but he’s still the sort of person I probably wouldn’t like being around in real life, and, similarly to the whole deal with Miyokichi, I just hate seeing a parent actively refuse work while indirectly making their young child work to provide for the family. It’s just an uncomfortable situation all around.

But on the flip side, I still love the way the story handles and portrays Kikuhiko’s own complex feelings towards him. Their whole dynamic is one of the more engaging parts of the whole story. The balancing act of love, hatred, respect, envy, condemnation, and idolization is fascinating to watch unfold.

I’m pretty sure that the next volume will cover the rest of this whole flashback story arc, and the first chapter of what would be adapted in the second season of the anime, so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve been very curious for a while now to see how the climax of this arc gets handled in the manga.

On another note, I still really like how the manga volumes have informative bonus chapters at the back that talk about different parts of the rakugo industry. It’s a nice little extra that you didn’t really get in the anime. This volume’s bonus was pretty interesting, since they never really point out or place much emphasis on the tengui hand towels in the story in general, so it was pretty nice to learn about what they’re used for, and how they’re made.

Also, as one final note, I still get tripped up at times by the general differences in translation philosophy between the manga and the anime. Neither are really better or worse, they’re just different enough that it’s kinda weird at times. As I’ve said, they don’t translate most of the industry terms, but they translate the names of the performances, which continues to throw me off immensely, but there’s also certain lines of dialogue and narration that are just translated slightly differently than they were in the anime, which is fine, but still. I can’t really remember if it’s actually any different, but I appreciated how near the end of the volume, when he’s talking about all of his complicated feelings for Sukeroku, Kikuhiko explicitly says ‘but sometimes I loved you’. Though on the flip side, I wasn’t a huge fan of how they translated one of Miyokichi’s lines to Sukeroku in regards to Kikuhiko as ‘doesn’t he like women?’, instead of ‘does he even like women?’. It’s a subtle difference, but I just preferred the latter translation of that line. It’s not really a major complaint or anything, though. I can’t expect the translation to be exactly the same.

Anyway, all in all I feel like I’m enjoying my time with this manga more as it goes on, even if it might not sound like it. I’m just getting more used to it, and figuring out how to take it as it’s own thing with it’s own merits. Either way, I’m still going to collect the rest of the series as it comes out in English, and I’ll probably keep writing about it. I think that when we get into the second half of the series, I’ll probably have more to talk about, since I think the anime skims over the second half a bit more than the first half, so there might be more ‘original content’ in it.

#murasaki rambles #showa genroku rakugo shinju

[sevenseasentertainment]

Seven Seas Collaborates with J-Novel Club to Bring Light Novels to Print

Seven Seas Entertainment and J-Novel Club are pleased to announce a new partnership in the publication of select Japanese light novel series.

Launched in October 2016, J-Novel Club is a digital subscription platform providing the official English translations for some of today's most beloved Japanese light novels. After their digital release, Seven Seas Entertainment will publish select print editions, and make them available for purchase through the same distribution channels as Seven Seas' ever-growing library of manga and novels.

The first two such light novel series to be brought to print by Seven Seas will be Ao Jyumonji's Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, and Chiyomaru Shikura's Occultic;Nine, both currently available in digital format from J-Novel Club.

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash Story by Ao Jyumonji | Art by Eiri Shirai Haruhiro awakens to darkness and amnesia, among a group of strangers who can only remember their own names...and nothing else. When they make it into the light, they discover Grimgar—a fantasy world that’s like something out of an RPG game. Without apparent skills or knowledge of their surroundings, Haruhiro and his newfound friends band together to form an adventuring party. Only by cooperating, using their wits, and learning new skills can they hope to survive in this dangerous land of monsters and magic.

Occultic;Nine Story by Chiyomaru Shikura | Art by pako What happens when eight eccentrics cross paths on a paranormal blog run by a high school NEET? A whole lot of weird! Gamon Yuta runs an occult-related site he hopes will one day make him rich. But before his dreams can come true, strange things occur when the lives of these nine oddballs collide. Can they solve a case that transcends reality and could alter the very fabric of our world?

"Seven Seas was one of the earliest adopters of light novels in North America, and although the category didn’t quite take off at the time, we are now seeing a steady growth in readership," says Seven Seas publisher Jason DeAngelis. "There are so many fantastic series out there, and in working with J-Novel Club, we can combine our core strengths to give light novels a high quality treatment along with broad book channel distribution."

"I saw the ever-growing demand for more releases of light novels in the fan communities, and realized that a new business model was needed to really take official releases to another level of quality and speed," said J-Novel Club founder and president Sam Pinansky. "Seven Seas has a long pedigree of publishing high quality manga and light novels, and through their partnership to print and distribute physical editions of our most popular series we hope to reach the largest audience we can, in every way that people want to read."

Seven Seas Entertainment will publish the first volume of Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash on June 6, 2017. Occultic;Nine volume 1 will follow on July 4, 2017. Both series will be printed at a large trim size and priced at 13.99/US and 15.99/CAN.

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About Seven Seas Entertainment Established in 2004, Seven Seas Entertainment specializes in bringing the best of Japanese manga to North American audiences, and producing original comics, graphic novels, and youth literature. Seven Seas is distributed by Tor/Macmillan.

About J-Novel Club J-Novel Club is a new digital publisher of light novels which opened its service in October of 2016, and has already begun releasing 10 light novel series. Through a subscription service, J-Novel Club Members can read the latest chapters as they are translated on their website j-novel.club or on their dedicated app, and once complete volumes are finished anyone can purchase full digital copies on their favorite Ebook retailer. Use coupon code “winterspecial” today for a 1 month free trial!

(( view on Gomanga.com ))

#Seven Seas Entertainment #manga #light novel #new license #J-Novel Club #Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash #occultic nine

[forgetfulsubs]

Otome Games and Drama CDs ~ Summary for January 2017

Happy new year! Heres to 2017 being a good year for otome!

This list has CDs first then Games, all listed chronologically with short translated info/themes for each entry! links to animate, stellaworth and CD japan for buying

[Last month’s here] [Next Month TBA]

Image heavy post beneath cut!

Hello this list is basically just supposed to be a monthly release list, with info for english speaking fans if none is available 

Entries for already covered series/well known series will tend to be shorter / not covered series will be longer to hopefully get some interest in them !

This list does not have R18 CDs on it as dauriculaire already does a list just for those !

Ctrl F will help you if you’re looking for a specific voice actor

Tell me if I miss anything!

without further ado…

On the 6th

V.S☆Rhapsody!! Vol.2 レナード (leonard)

☆CV : Keitaro Fujitani ☆LABEL : Citrolarme ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆SUMMARY/THEMES :“Miracle music” that would be, mysterious sheets of music holding magic powers… apparently if someone is to play the music written down on them, their every wish can be granted

Searching for the “Miracle music” scattered in this world, from another world came the “secret society of evil (temporary name)” and various would-be heros, and… you who unexpectedly got caught up in their fight… and as it turns out you’re actually a pretty rare human who has the ability to read the “miracle music”…?” This volume stars Leonard who is, in summary, a chuunibyou

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

On the 18th

「√HAPPY+SUGAR=VACATION」 4th 宙 (sora)

☆CV : Yūki Kaji ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : The second sequel / third season of Happy Sugar Darlin, this time it features the going on the titular vacation with the characters, In this one you go to New York with Sora

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「Dance with Devils-EverSweet- 」 Vol.4 シキ (shiki)

☆CV : Daisuke Hirakawa ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : Drama CD series for Dance with devils, takes place after you start dating the starring guy, in the CD he gets cursed so “If he doesn’t get love everyday… he dies?!”

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「クリミナーレ！X」Vol.4 ルチア Criminale!X vol.4 Lucia

☆CV : Takashi Kondō ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY :Mafia, The third season of Criminale, following CriminaleF

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

ミッドナイトキョンシー 天頂遊戯 第参ノ封印 Midnight Jiangshi ~ Tenchou Yuugi ~ Third Seal

☆CV : Ryōhei Kimura ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : Bloodsucking, youkai, Sequel to the original midnight jiangshi series, it’s about… Jiangshis

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「ディア♥ヴォーカリスト Riot」 エントリーNo.4モモチ “Dear♥Vocalist Riot” Entry no.4 momochi

☆CV : Toshiyuki Toyonaga ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : idols, music, Sequel to the dear vocalist series, here they have to put on a successful full house live show together… Or be broken up… The cd has 2 music tracks and 3 situation tracks

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

新撰組暁風録 勿忘草  第拾巻 Shinsengumi Gyoufu-roku Wasurenagusa volume ten

☆CV : Daisuke Hirakawa ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : A series that probably needs no introduction, Shinsengumi, pain and sadness this is the 4th(?) season of this series, an info post about it in general can be found here

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

明治吸血奇譚 月夜叉 紅 睦月の巻 レイガ Meiji Kyuuketsuki Kitan “Tsukiyasha kurenai” jan volume Reiga

☆CV : Hiro Shimono ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : Bloodsucking, meiji/history, Sequel to Tsukiyasha, later volumes have new characters! the volumes are numbered by the lunar calendar as opposed to… numbers interestingly

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

永遠花火～一途な想い、導く光～ -ACTORS ANOTHER SIDE- Eien Hanabi ~ Ichizu na omoi, Michibiku Hikari~

☆CV : Takuya Satou ☆LABEL : Exittunes ☆PRICE : 2100yen ☆INFO/THEMES : Actors is a drama cd series with situations based on vocaloid songs (wow something I have expertise in) this one is based on eien hanabi 

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

悠久のティアブレイド -Lost Chronicle-ドラマCD Happy Birthday [EVE] yuukyuu no tierblade -lost chronicle- drama CD Happy Birthday [EVE]

☆CV : Takuma Terashima, Kaito Ishikawa, Takashi Kondō, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, Tetsuya Kakihara ☆LABEL : otomate ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : Drama cd for the game yuukyuu no tierblade lost chronicle

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

On the 25th

恋色始標 FILM.1 小鳥遊 聖 Koiiroshihyou Film 1 Takanashi Hijiri

☆CV : Tomoaki Maeno ☆LABEL : Otomate ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : Sweet love story, “being dyed in his colour of love” this one features the school “prince” Hijiri!

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

RUNLIMIT ―CASE1 片桐 連―

☆CV : Kaito Ishikawa ☆LABEL : Otomate ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : Set in 2045, the goverment has began an experiment “runlimit” -- intended to remove human need for rest. You were randomly selected as a test subject but your 6 childhood friends join instead to protect you.... Runlimit ended up being called one of “histories worst experiments” the test subjects would lose their minds when night fell, and eventually die; with a “time limit”.

5 years later, you, now a supervisor of the project obtain a medicine to stop it...

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

渇望メソッド、梟は夜に哭く 一ノ仔 染谷 泉

☆CV : Tetsuya Kakihara ☆LABEL : Otomate ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : Sequel to the original Katsubou Method, I wouldn’t trust the cover

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「グリム街の王子様」 第四夜 スリーピ “Grimm no Oujisama” 4th Night Sleepy

☆CV : Yūto Uemura ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : inspired by the Grimm fairytales “in the town of Grimm, there’s a strange rumor that the fairy tale princes are living there. You meet them, and in the world of fairy tales, fall into a dangerous love… What should you do to awaken from this nightmare…?” 

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「CHU♥LDK」 Vol.4 氷真 Hyoma

☆CV : Takuya Eguchi ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES :Living alone for the first time, Due to certain circumstances, you end up staying under the same roof as one of the guys from your neighbourhood~  “Situation CD about staying over at his house♥”

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「THANATOS NiGHT」 Vol.3 オリバー (oliver)

☆CV : Morikubo Shoutaro (ooomg I didn’t notice he was in this) ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : About fallen angels’ feast -Gig-, it has a large focus on the music aspect and is supposed to stimulate your senses~

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「大正黒華族」 第三章 ルリヤ “Taishou Kuro Kazoku” Third act Ruriya

☆CV : Daisuke Kishio ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : Kemonomini, Taisho, Sad… For recuperation you, the daughter of a Zaibatsu family end up moving to “Shirayuri Estate” there, you meet 6 youths and end up “rearing” them…

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

「シアボイス-Rich Tropical-」 Vol.4 ユマ Cia Voice -RichTropical- Vol.3 Yuma

☆CV : Sōichirō Hoshi ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : Iyashi, “whisper CD”, “Situation CD where he heals you, tired, with a sweet voice~”

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

世風靡-逆転大奥恋絵巻- 第四幕 辰巳 Isseifuubi-Gyakuten Ōoku Koi Emaki- 4th Act tatsumi

☆CV : Tomoaki Maeno ☆LABEL : Rejet ☆PRICE : 2000yen ☆INFO/THEMES : “Situation CD about near drowning in love with a first rate handsome man” (oh my), set in the Edo period in the Ōoku

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

幻妖綺~狼ノ宝モノ～ Genyouki ~the wolf’s treasure

☆CV : Maeno Tomoaki ☆LABEL : Team entertainment ☆PRICE : 2000yen + tax ☆INFO/THEMES : Genyouki a fairly long lasting series about boys who turn into youkai, this one starts a wolf/ookami a returning character in the genyouki series. This was on last month's list as well, but turns out it got delayed late in december :(

Official website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

On the 27th

『壁ドン！ SONG♪』シリーズ9th Kabe-don song - series 9th

☆CV : Kazuyuki Okitsu ☆LABEL : Iris Quartz ☆PRICE : 2200yen ☆THEMES/SUMMARY : KABE-DON, CD has 2 situation tracks and 3 song tracks (one is an instrumental)

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

On the 31st

翼の十字軍 ～【好き】を言えない世界で【好き】を～ Tsubasa no Crusades ~ suki o ienai sekai de suki o

☆CV : Nobunaga Shimazaki, Yoshinobu Sena ☆LABEL : CUCURI ☆PRICE : 1800yen ☆SUMMARY/THEMES : Spinoff CD for the manga of the same name, set in a world where romance is outlawed for everyone between the ages of 6-18. The subtitle translates to "saying "I love you" in a world where you can't say "I love you"

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

Games

On the 19th

花朧 ～戦国伝乱奇～ Hana Oboro ~Sengoku-den Ranki~

☆CVS : Shintarō Asanuma, Kishō Taniyama, Hiro Shimono, Takahiro Sakurai, Daisuke Namikawa ☆LABEL : Otomate ☆PLATFORM : PSvita ☆INFO/THEMES : Historical, Fantasy, Vndb can be found here!

*both a regular (通常版) and limited edition (限定版) are both available

Official Website | Animate | Stellaworth | CD JAPAN

#drama cd #otome #otome game #drama cds #rejet #Otomate #kaji yuki #hirakawa daisuke #kondo takashi #kimura ryohei #toyonaga toshiyuki #shimono hiro #satou takuya #terashima takuma #ishikawa kaito #kakihara tetsuya #maeno tomoaki #morikubo showtaro #eguchi takuya #kishio daisuke #okitsu kazuyuki

[shinahbee]

May favorites 2021!

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GREETINGS

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June 05. 2021

Hello!

Finally finished with all my assessment tests and now I’m free to do whatever, except I can’t do much cause we are still in a third lock down, I’m really sad since all I’ve been seeing is plant nurseries updating their instagram stories of all the new plants they are getting in. Dammit can’t go.  I have 16 plants now, it all starts with one and then your space becomes a jungle.lol.

I still don’t have any drama recommendations for you so that will be blank for a while. As for manga/webtoons I have two I want to discuss that I’m currently reading and enjoying, I see the list I have since starting the monthly favorites again and um..there’s like 33 titles, and these are filtered titles meaning I have read more than that.lol. I hope you all are enjoying the recommendations, I realized from seeing this meme, that I always seem to not remember the names of antagonists in these stories and I end up giving them nick names; harry potter, incest red head, boss...(then found out his name is pilwon, started to call him pil-shit.lol), scum red head, pimp, ass hat, tarzan...etc. wow. Then this meme came along and explained everything as to why I do this and it made so much sense.

Replace " crazy general" with "scum" I wish I still remembered where I got this screenshot from, think it was on twitter.

So apparently I don’t care enough to remember is what it is, rightfully so because they are all scum.

I’m still thinking about what to draw for my digital art, I might actually draw fan art for a character’s birthday next week, I usually don’t do this but I think the last one I made didn’t do this person justice.lol. I also plan on drawing some more shounen ai series art, like the draw 6 characters “seme” edition,  don't worry I haven’t forgotten about it.

Okay on that note let’s get started! Have fun reading!

Sheena

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DRAMAS:

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No dramas this month ...again

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MANHWA/MANGA/WEBTOONS

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Recap:

1) whose baby is it? (Ongoing)

2) Social temperature (Ongoing)

3) Salad days (Ongoing)

4) To be or not to be (Ongoing)

5) Path to you (Completed)

6) Here u are (Completed)

7) BJ Alex (Completed)

8) No way, vampires don't exist (Completed)

9) Unintentional love story (Ongoing)

10) Karasugoka don’t be shy! (Completed)

11) Semantic Error (Ongoing)

12) Tied up in Twins (Completed)

13) My Suha (Ongoing)

14) Crash into me (Completed)

15) Dine with a vampire (Completed)

16) Inner beauty (Completed)

17) False memories (Completed)

18) Hand in Hand (Completed)

19) Stanning 101 (Completed)

20) Private lessons (Completed)

21) Behind the scenes (Completed)

22) Turn off the camera (Ongoing)

23) Murderous lewellyn candlelit dinner (Ongoing)

24) Unrippened expression (Completed)

25) Oh! My assistant (Completed)

26) The good teacher (Completed)

27) My purrfect boss (Completed)

28) The sales department’s cupid (Ongoing)

29) Pearl boy (Ongoing)

30) Hold me tight (Completed) + side story (Ongoing)

31) The third ending (Ongoing)

32) Stigma (Completed)

33) December rain (Completed)

Updates on ongoing titles:

This is the section where I update you on the previous series I’ve talked about, each month can contain different series depending on what I have to discuss.

Murderous lewellyn candlelit dinner:

So this has been updated for a while now and I recently have just been catching up with it, last time I believed that I mentioned that shevon and lewellyn were interested in each other and apparently they did end up dating, but of course with caution on shevon’s part, as he knows that his boy friend is a murderer. Shevon had been offered a good opportunity to become a full fledged writer by a person scouting him, which honestly sounds fishy to me because this dude approached him by going to his place and just saying that he had been looking for him since he saw some his past articles that were not published during his free lance writing days.

It seemed like this dude was legit working for a good publishing company when shevon was invited over to visit. So of course he wanted to take that opportunity the only thing is that he had to come to this guys house to write as they don’t have work space or something...also sounding fishy...lol. I cannot even tell you how rapey this sounds, my fight or flight senses are tingling...

I honestly don’t remember what happened next but he wanted to tell lewellyn that he got a job as a witter when he took the opportunity and the b guy asks if he had someone waiting for him when shevon decided to leave, he didn’t out fight day he had a boyfriend/lover he just said that he a had a puppy waiting for him at home...I guess he was being cautious in case this dude gets murdered next if he were to introduce lewellyn to him.

I read a bit of the Korean raws and theres this part that did not make sense to me later where I’m sure this part is supposed to be a flashback, lewellyn was in jail and shevon was a policeman watching over him...I’m like okay I’m confused as to how we got here, guess I’ll have to wait to read the translations in English when they are released.

The sales department’s cupid:

Umm...I feel like I didn’t update this yet, it’s actually completed in korean, so i’ll give a small summary of some events that happened that I remember, the two main characters are seeing each other and of course people try to get in the way. There ‘s this pink haired new employee that really likes one of the characters and he wanted taejun to essentially hook them up, but taejun had feelings for that person already so he was reluctant, this of course causes an plethora of misunderstandings, lol the most basic plot point in all these stories, but they solved their issues and it turns out pink haired dude was already matched up with this other dude in their company...okay, I don’t know about you guys but this dude compared to the pink hair boy, he looks like a giant fridge, I’m like why the heck are these “ seme” type characters built like bank safes and the other dude is like a twig...this dude is going to kill him with his penis...lmao. This is one of my pet peeves in manga/webtoons where they can’t be the same size human, it just seems unrealistic. Anyways, the two main characters get together in the end. That’s it...to be honest it’s not all that great, I recommend it if you want something cute to read but the story itself was not really a stand out compared to other ones I’ve read.

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Welcome to Heaven (18+)

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Welcome to the wholesome stories of manga/webtoons, last month I talked about some of the more serious tones stories and it was something that brought up a lot of serious discussions that had to be brought to light. But for this month I’m going to talk about some wholesome stories that I am currently enjoying.

Warning some of these stories have mature themes so please be over the age of 18 if you do decide to read them!

Mr. Miss:

“After being outted by his first love in high school, Juho has been struggling in his romantic endeavors ever since. One evening after a distasteful phone call with a cheating ex, Juho sees someone has been staring at him. Juho recognizes Kang Jaemin, an old high school classmate. Juho and Jaemin briefly catch up on each other's lives when Juho makes a surprising offer for Jaemin to stay the night at his place to which Jaemin agrees. This chance encounter leads Juho and Jaemin to explore a connection they didn't get to have when they were in high school. Perhaps Jaemin's honesty will be enough to give Juho the courage to love and trust someone again.”

I went into this without having any expectations and I was surprised at how some of these characters are really well written, it starts off with jaemin who is an office employee who hates his job..Lmao don’t we all? And he was in a really crappy mood because of a situation that happened at work but he came across a cafe and noticed that someone was arguing over the phone aggressively. Realizing that it was an acquaintance from high school he approached him and they started talking again. That person was juho and apparently jaemin wanted to be friends with him during high school but of course the “ first love” of juho’s was a cock block and literally distance juho from others so he was not able to make any friends, all the friends he made were from that person’s circle...ok first red flag right here, if anyone does this to you tell them to f*ck off , they have no right to decide on who you can and can’t be friends with.

Any ways, jaemin wanted to reacquaint himself with juho and they began to hang out a few times where jaemin made it apparent that he was really interested in him. Juho however didn’t think jaemin was serious due to his past relationships not working out, so therefore he just thought jaemin was going through a phase of just wanting to hook up with a guy. I feel like i’ve seen this plot line so many times and it was getting a little boring, but of course jaemin didn’t spend an eternity questioning his sexuality like how other main protagonists do when they find out they are interested in the same sex. Jaemin knew that he liked juho and it didn’t matter what gender he was. So instead of accepting right away juho wanted to take it slow and wanted to just hang out with jaemin as friends for now. He told this situation to his gal friend “yejin” and she is one of the best well written female characters in BL that I have seen at all. This girl was not afraid to call juho out on his bull sh*t and trying to convince him that the only reason he can’t accept anything is because he’s afraid of getting hurt and he’s only dated assholes, so when someone great comes along he doesn’t want to accept the reality of it. Juho thinks by being “gay” he was ruining the life of another person just because he likes the same sex, and that is not okay, for even thinking that, since none of this is his fault, she said that he deserves to be with a good person.

She also got mad at juho when he was still thinking of his first love even though that dude screwed him over completely, she’s seen how much of a wreck he was when that happened and didn’t want him to get hurt again. She even wanted to take her girl friend with her to beat up the dude that hurt juho.lol.

I honestly love this girl. Every protagonist needs a friend like her, maybe then they would not get involved with sh*tty people...smh. Apparently she also knew jaemin, they had gone to the same cram school for art, and knew good things about him.

Jaemin said something to juho when they graduated high school that they should meet up sometimes, but juho disappeared because of a scandal involving that “first love” dude and there were rumors of him being gay and ruining that dudes life, so people were insulting him on graduation day, jaemin cut a lot of “those” friends out of his life because of that, it was his way of defending juho’s honor. Guys...jaemin is such a good person, he does so much for juho not expecting anything in return , he really wanted to support him as a friend if nothing else.

I think juho’s way of thinking is right considering all the things that happen to him having one failed relationship after another can take a toll on you mentally, I think what was more confusing for him is that his first love and jaemin both say the same sweet words but with different intentions. The first love guy obviously was manipulative and obsessive where as jaemin’s intentions were clear and honest since all he wanted was for juho to sincerely be happy. As a reader you can see all of this but juho can’t, so from his perspective being skeptical is a good thing because you’ll just never know what will happen.

As you read you’ll get to see the juho’s back story and how his feelings were manipulated by the first love character, let’s call him ass hat, I do know his name but he doesn’t deserve to be known, so i’ll address him as this. Ass hat and juho were family friends and theyre families were really close so essential they also became close, outside of ass hat’s friend circle, juho was not seen engaging with other people, until jaemin and juho were assigned to do class prep work together in the morning and they started talking only to get interrupted by ass hat. Since then juho and jaemin only had minor exchanges since every time he tried to talk to juho , ass hat would always be there to grab his attention. So one day jaemin caught juho and ass hat kissing in the classroom and realized that they were in a relationship so he kind of backed off. Until graduation he was smoking out in the back of the school and juho was called out by ass hat’s posy and ridiculed him for pushing his feelings onto ass hat, basically accusing him for coming onto a friend that wasn’t interested. Turns out ass hat got caught and didn’t want to suffer from his family ridiculing him for being gay so he accused juho of starting it fist....this mother f*cker...and this dude has the audacity to call him again and act like they can start over...wtf is wrong with you? What is wrong with these stupid people who don’t know when to quit...

Anyways, there was a classmate getting married and invited some people in high school to get together and they wanted to invite jaemin and ass hat insisted they invite juho...to make him look like a good person, but we all know that’s a f*cken lie. Jaemin originally didn’t want to go but he could not stand seeing juho be torn by this dude messing up with his life any further, trash needs to be taken out right way! So he went to the gathering and confronted ass hat and even got into a fight with him.lol. yas...good job boy! Juho should be the one to punch this ass hat but of course he’s experiencing so trauma that that cannot be fully healed, even with time. After the tussle juho was called over by the guy who hosted the gathering and juho went to jaemin and ignored ass hat when he thought he was there to see him..LMAO this loser, you’re so delusional...

After this juho came to love jaemin even more than he did before they started dating, it turned out jaemin meant a lot to him ever since he talked to him on the last day of high school ceremonies and how he encouraged him and wanted to keep in touch with him. Juho’s family found out then that he was gay and so they were not on good terms, the older brother went ballistic and threatened him, which made juho leave, after he left he went through several jobs until he came to work at this cafe, he saw jaemin walking in a crowd of people during university, but he didn’t say anything to him. Because juho had that fall out with his family he was thinking of how it would affect jaemin if he were to come out to his family. I like how jaemin made it clear that he was not going into this relationship with an end goal, he’s not thinking about how it’s going to end, he’s thinking about now and all the stuff that he’s going to have to deal with he will take care of it when that time comes. To be honest, he’s a fully grown adult and he can make his own choices, how other people will take it is on them, even if your family doesn’t understand your choice, they will eventually come around. they both made the effort to stop antagonizing over things that can't be changed and live in the moment.

Okay so I’ll end that here since it’s pretty much caught up with the updates, please read this series, I’ve never seen a more healthier way to go into a relationship as displayed with these characters, most of these romantic development scenarios always have load of misunderstanding and it gets really predictable and boring, but jaemin didn’t want to waste time misunderstanding and says that they need to talk about what’s bothering them now. That’s a really good way to handle things instead of us readers suffering a good 20 chapters of this going downhill because neither character know how to talk about their problems. So far great story and good development of characters and well written females! in shounen ai, I don’t know what it is but the women written manga/webtoons but they are always the bad person or the scum getting into between your characters and I did not like that portrayal it was kind of disrespectful, so hats off to this for having a great female character like yejin. I also definitely had friends like that in high school where I felt out of place being there and eventually cut ties with them, I didn’t like how they treated me and never contacted them after.lol. So this manhwa is incredibly relatable in all aspects in life.

Liveta (18+):

“Luna and Formicarium are rival factions plotting to seize a territory called Liveta. The Luna family have the upper hand in the area, and thus Victor Luna, notorious for his killing sprees, resides there as de facto ruler. Enter Yohan, a bumbling puppy-dog type who has become a Formicarium spy out of dire circumstances. When Yohan meets Victor under the guise of being his guard, he is expecting sharp edges and a fiery temper... But the first thing Victor wants to confirm about Yohan isn’t his trustworthiness, but the size of what’s in his pants.”

This manhwa is really interesting because I almost dropped this series right in the middle, but because I stuck with it, things got better after wards. I’ll explain that a little later.

So this series starts off by a dude running away from a gang of people chasing him and the dude was dead the next day, yohan was meeting up with van, who is a bodyguard for the district leader’s little brother named victor. Van is essential going to a meeting in luna for a couple days and needed someone he can trust to watch over victor for a couple days, hence he chose yohan from recommendation. Yohan is a “gray” which means that he isn’t a Luna or formicarium citizen, he and his brother were orphans when they were young and was assimilated into working in neural land, neither citizen of both the districts, but greys are not treated very well and are usually bullied by other district citizens and other grays. The districts usually waged war and the weaker ones joined the stronger ones and eventually ended with two districts that are the most powerful. The war became so tiresome they decided to leave the land they call “Liveta” unclaimed and neutral territory that separates the two powerful districts...so think of this like how Canada and the States are separated by the border, these two lands are separated by the boundary land “ Liveta”. As a protective measure both districts will have citizens get a tattoo of their district on their body to distinguish people in the neutral land once people started inhabiting the area from other districts.

Grays also assimilated into groups called the “cleanup crew” which they do cleanup work for the other districts as a way to not get treated badly and bullied by the district citizens. Basically you need to work for the people to stay alive. So yohan works as a cleanup crew member for many years to keep him and his brother alive, his brother is terminally ill and had to be hospitalized, so yohan only calls his care taker to check up on his brother from time to time while working. This will all be explained in chapter 14 in detail so don’t panic if you don’t really get it at first, there is so much history and detail you would think you were reading a shounen manga.lol.

So yohan was trusted by van to watch over victor as his bodyguard while he is away and yohan not only is a gray but is spy for formicarium, this was not something he wanted to do, but because it was a way for him to get his brother into better medical care he decided to see the district leader and made a deal with him. Yohan was in panic due to the rumours surrounding victor as the demon who massacred so many people that his family banished him to liveta. So that image of him alone was enough to make him fear for his life.

Van made it clear not to let victor go out at night and cause trouble, I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but later on in the chapter you realize that victor is sort of a sex addict, he goes out at night and look for one night stands to sleep with, he has these dark bags under his eyes due to insomnia and needs intercourse to wear him out enough to sleep. Lol. Omg. That’s so sad.

Yohan didn’t realize that until victor asks him to shower and take his clothes off.lol.

But because of this development, yohan and victor get to know each other really well to the point where they started to catch feelings for one another, at this point I was like, this is awesome...the story is moving along well, I like both victor and yohan’s developing relationship and them as characters. Then this sh*t happened....

Let me just remind you all that I don’t understand the concept of “threesomes” this development puts me off of reading manhwa many times. So what happens is that yohan and victor visit the bar that yohan likes to hang out in and ran into one of yohan’s friend, we are going to call him “Tarzan” lol. So Tarzan and yohan were part of the cleanup crew and got close due to being the same age. They all went to drink together and Tarzan asks how they knew each other and victor straight up says that they are sex friends..lmao. Yohan didn’t want victor to wander off again alone so he held his hand while they were drinking and this sets off a not so great memory of victor and his ex-boyfriend, and made victor impulsively suggest to Tarzan that they should sleep together tonight...and Tarzan accepts to much of yohan’s objection..lol. yeah this is such a stupid plot point, if you like threesomes, that’s your problem...but let me just say this, I don’t care how close you are your homies are, it is not okay to sleep with your home boy’s love interest/ partner...whatever. This is not okay, if it was a stranger and you didn’t know them, then that makes more sense to me, but you know this person...the next time you see them you’re going to be like, we all had sex together with the same person.

Lmao this was when I was like okay...I’m out, don’t think I’m going to continue. But then I checked out the raws and realized that it was literally nothing, maybe just added content to make yohan realize that he has feelings for victor whether he denies it or not. The story so far gets better from this point on...but knowing that I almost dropped this was pretty funny because of that ordeal. Honestly it would have been fine without it, because in the middle of yohan standing aside and just letting Tarzan and victor do their thing he was looking at a portrait of victor and his sister and it seemed like an important scene.

Then followed by them inviting yohan to “join them”. Ugh...I’m like how did you insert an important scene with this being here?

Anyways, yohan and victor’s relationship is developing really well and I love yohan, he is literally my ideal type manifested, there had not yet been a manhwa character that is remotely close to my ideal but he’s incredibly close to my type. Now saying this, Van is also my type as well, I’m glad he’s getting some character development in the more recent chapters because I want to know more about him too. i'm just saying read this manhwa if not for the plot then for the good looking men! there's plenty of them!

So I’ll stop here, but if you like a story that is BL but more heavily focused on story rather than people having sex for no reason then this is for you. I like stories that have more of that shounen anime feel but is still is clearly bl without having it shoved into your face. There are sex scenes because of victor’s situation being not able to sleep, so it’s not just showing sex for no reason.lol. though there still is a lot of fan service with the whole threesome thing.

Please give this a read if you are interested and of the age of 18. I recommend it.

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Trash segment (18+)

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a.k.a the part of the series where I shit on your favorite manhwa/manga/webtoon etc. Joking but not really, you have been warned.

This is the new section where you’re going to find titles that I dropped and the reasons why I discontinued the series all together, fair warning if you triggered by people criticizing your favorite series then you may want to skip this section all together. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and not every series that is “popular” or well liked by others will be like by all...therefore if there is content that makes a person uncomfortable enough to stop the series, that is on them and please don’t judge them for their morals.

So to recap, the series that I mentioned dropping so far are

Love or Hate

Yours to claim

Wistful summer

Anti-p.t.

The sound of fire

Okay so for this week I’ll only feature one since I could not really think of any that I recently dropped, this one I’m thinking of dropping as it stands now since I’m sure the plot will be frustrating if I read more.

Kiss damnation:

“A campus hotshot, Yoon Kyunghoo doesn’t enjoy investing much of his time when meeting up with people and prefers light and fun relationships with others. As he steps out to take a smoke, he coincidentally witnesses a gay couple kissing for the first time in his life. 2 months later, his sunbae invites him out to drink along with his co-worker Siyoon who Kyunghoo remembers from somewhere. As Siyoon removes his glasses, he then realizes that Siyoon was one of the gay couple he witnessed kissing before.Will Kyunghoo have some kind of realization? Will Siyoon have a change of heart towards Kyunghoo?”

When I first saw this, I thought the art looked really nice but the cover already says much about the story without me reading it.lol. As you can tell it’s a love triangle which already is a turn off for me personally. I’m a veteran of reading trash and now I just reject it as soon as possible.

Firstly seeing a couple kiss in front of you doesn’t make you gay...I’m like why is he having this realization having witness two men almost kiss.lol. The guy that kyunghoo saw was a friend of his sunbae who is a teaching assistant named siyoon. He was interested after he had a dream of siyoon trying to kiss him after a night out drinking. But of course there’s always that other dude being the main love interest, he of course is a professor from kyunghoo’s department. I’m like ...am I reading private lessons again? Lmao another dilf -like teacher not wanting to be in a relationship and is looking for only sex...I’m like not this again. Dude, just go to a brothel, why do you have to involve someone who has romantic feelings for you just to let them down?

This is manhwa plot garbage, I’m so tired of these dumb ass horny old men preying on younger males, it’s literally disgusting, and you would think they would have their shit together being older but it’s the opposite. Lol.

Anyways, professor glasses only wanted a physical relationship with siyoon , they knew each other because siyoon had him as a tutor when he was younger and that encounter made him have feelings for him, I guess because he admired him. Anyways there is only 6 chapters translated in English so I’m just going to quit while I’m ahead, cause I know where this plot is going, if siyoon ends up with kyunghoo then that’s fine but this professor garbage is going to get in the way of their development and it’s going to annoy the sh*t out of me.

If you like this, go ahead and read it but I personally don’t need a reiteration of private lessons when that already exists and I’ve already read that.lol.

oh this trash list is getting longer every month....

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ANIME

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Mashiro no oto:

“Setsu Sawamura runs away from his small home village following the death of his grandfather, the legendary shamisen master Matsugorou Sawamura. On his deathbed, Matsugorou told Setsu to give up the shamisen if he was only going to imitate others instead of playing in his own way. Grieving, Setsu heads for Tokyo, hoping that the big city can inspire him to discover his own unique playing style. But Tokyo defies his expectations by drowning out all other sounds with the deafening noise of its city life. Concerned about her son, Setsu's rich and successful mother, Umeko, waltzes back into his life and forces him to enroll in Umezono Academy. At the school, he meets Shuri Maeda, a girl who is fascinated by the Tsugaru shamisen and wishes to perform a song her grandmother once heard a long time ago. Shuri starts up a shamisen appreciation club and convinces Setsu to teach the members how to play the instrument. As he becomes more involved with the club, will Setsu be able to recover his love for the shamisen and discover the unique sound he lacks?”- my anime list

This is one of those gems in which anime and music crosses over and it’s really interesting to feature classical music with a classical instrument like the shamisen, this instrument is interesting cause it’s like the olden day version of a guitar and it only has three strings, but it looks really hard play. If I ever get a chance to try playing I would like to see how to play this instrument, I was always interested in playing the hard when I was younger and was thoroughly disappointed when I joined band and realize that instrument did not exist here.lol.

This anime has some interesting characters,  setsu is like a wandering musician following in his grand father’s footsteps in playing the shamisen, but also finding his own defining sound that resonates with people that listen to his music. In his journey he met people that were going through their own struggles and got involved with a club that was formed from a person who was interested in playing shamisen. This anime has a good small group of characters that bond together over music and its really great and whole some especially when setsu was able to let all of his club members shine in their playing, even if he had more experience and skill he didn’t be little their effort. So give this a watch, I think if you like music you’ll like this genre.

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MUSIC/PODCASTS:

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I haven’t talked about this series yet but I’m currently watching Tokyo revengers and I really like the girl who sang the ending song, her name is Eill, and I went down the rabbit hole of her music and now I’m stuck.lol.

Her sound is very much like Dean and Hoody if you know k-pop, you know that type of music I mean, but obviously she sings in Japanese, it just has that k-pop r&b feel. Please give her music a listen I’ve been loving all her songs!

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Ending note:

Alright! Finally reached the end, thank you all for reading my favorites, I would have added more recommendations but I think having two features will be better in terms of length because I like to elaborate on the series. Which some people have told me they hated, but I honestly don’t care, since I know there are people who like to be thoroughly informed if they don’t want purchase the series and don't end up reading it because it sucked.

Wish people told me to avoid the incest ones, I wouldn’t have spend ink and coins all together just because the series is recommended as a “popular” series. I’m basically doing the work for you by reading and making a review, if you don’t like it then don't read the post, I don’t know why that’s so hard.

But to those who actually read it and took some of my recommendations in consideration, thanks for reading and I hope you will continue to read these, I have a lot of them to talk about but I’m also trying to organize them by themes to make it easier.

With that being said, if There is anything you’d like to recommend me, in whatever category, feel free to comment below. Leave a like if you want to see this continue!

Thanks take care of your selves!

sheena

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SOCIAL MEDIA

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Instagram: shinb_art

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#monthly favorites #shounen ai #manga review #yaoi manga #bl manga #yaoi manhwa #bl manhwa #liveta #mr.miss #anime review #mashiro no oto #manhwa review

[recentanimenews]

Anime NYC 2019, Day One

A very busy start to Anime NYC this year. First of all, the line management seemed to be much better this year, though I do wish they’d let people into panel rooms before the actual start of the panel. The first panel I attended was the Shonen Jump panel, with the creators of Dr. Stone as guests. Since I can’t make tomorrow’s much larger Dr. Stone panel, I thought this would be a good choice.

They started off with some giveaways, notably to those with good costumes. We then got some Shonen Jump announcements. Most of the new titles had already been announced at NYCC, but they did have some new things to promote. Naruto is 20 this year, and Hisashi Sasaki talks about how exciting they thought the original proposal was, and that green-lighting it was a no-brainer.

Jujutsu Kaisen is out soon, and there were early copies of the manga at the exhibit hall. They also announced that the suddenly super duper popular Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba will be getting a speeedup to catch up with Japan faster – monthly releases starting in the spring. They’re also adding chapters to the “Shonen Jump Vault” for members.

Speaking of that vault, there was a passel of digital-only license announcements, all rattled off at the speed of sound. Robot x Laserbeam, Red Sprite, Love Rush!, Hi-Fi Cluster, Yui Kamui Lets Loose (from the Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan creator), The Last Saiyuki, Ne0;lation, Hell Warden Higuma, and Stealth Symphony (from the Baccano! writer). Most of these are 2-3 volume series from the last four years or so of Jump, and they would not otherwise get releases here. It’s nice to see them.

Also mentioned, and previously revealed at NYCC, were the new Bleach, One Piece and Naruto light novels.

After that we got Riichiro Inagaki and Boichi, the creators of Dr. Stone, as well as their editor Honda-san. Riichiro seemed very extroverted, and tried out some English on us. Boichi was more soft-spoken and quiet. Most of he questions came from the Viz team, rather than the audience, which I felt worked very well.

When the editor wanted to team up Inagaki with an artist (he had previously written Eyeshield 21 as well), Boichi naturally came to mind. Inagaki starts with the storyboards, which he calls scribbles but Boichi says are quite detailed. (There was a lot of “you’re the best – no, you are” during the panel, which was very fun.) Both also insisted they had the easiest job.

They were both very interested in science as kids, with Boichi saying he did a high school physics competition. He noted Arthur C. Clarke as an influence. They also discussed favorite scientists, including (inevitably) Einstein, but also Newton, Dawkins, Hawking, Carl Sagan (singled out by Boichi for making science “warm”), as well as the Japanese scientist who discovered Gibberellin, the seedless grape chemical (who is also the grandfather of Inagaki’s wife!).

Honda was asked what the Japanese editor does, and explained it was a lot of support and logistics – tries to make things possible for the creators. They were asked, given the location of the con, if Senku and company would make it to New York, and it was pointed out they would need a very good reason. Pizza? Could be a good reason.

Boichi was also asked about his very detailed art, and discussed how backgrounds and real-life detailed things take a lot of time due to the research, while characters took him less time. Boichi then stunned the room by stating that it took him one to one and a half hours to finish a page. For those playing along at home, that’s VERY fast. Even with three assistants, all apparently excellent artists.

Inagaki was asked how this differs from Eyeshield 21’s writing, and he said that, being a sports manga, he was far more beholden to rules and regulations with Eyeshield – here he can go wild a lot more. The Dr. Stone characters don’t have special powers like a lot of Jump characters, so he has to rely on science – it needs to strike a balanced tone between scientifically valid and fun. (When asked if Eyeshield 21 and Dr. Stone were in the same universe, the answer was a big NO.)

Boichi was asked about Dr. Stone’s memorable “gag faces”. Again, Boichi states they all are drawn up in the storyboards, and he just touches them up – while Inagaki insists his art is horrible compared to Boichi’s. Favorite character to draw? Kohaku, not just in terms of gag faces but all faces. He jokingly says “I don’t care about Senku.”

Asked whether anime will be invented by Senku, “not with the level of tech they currently have” seems to be the answer. Back to Honda, who notes how much fun editing is, mostly as he gets to read everything first. Indeed, with the finished chapter, he reads it before Inagaki! They then talked about the process for the new spinoff, which Boichi is both writing and drawing. Boichi also talked about using the old French-Canadian film Quest for Fire as a reference for the prehistoric landscapes.

Both creators seemed happy to be there, and were very receptive to the American fans.

The next panel was Denpa, who had as special guest TAa, the artist behind Today’s Menu with the Emiya Family. But first we had panel announcements, which included some stuff they’d announced at the previous Anime NYC – this year has been a “learning experience” for Ed and Jacob, but the schedule seems to be firming up now. They did have a copy of the Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji omnibus, which looks highly impressive.

Much discussion of titles out already or out in the next few months followed, including “Fate/Stay for Dinner” and Heavenly Delusion, which had an animated promo. The Girl with the Fierce Eyes also appeals to me, and it will be interesting to look at Shino Can’t Say Her Name and see if it can avoid getting as dark as Flowers of Evil or Happiness.

After mentioning they were close to launching a new website, we did get some new licenses. Baby Bar’s Bakery (a tentative title) is from Shogakukan, and is about a baby bear that also happens to be a master baker. It’s sweet and cuddly, and really big in Japan, collaborating with sweet shops and stores.

Fate/Go Chaldea Scrapbook is another Fate license, a one-volume manga from Kadokawa. It seems to be amusing takes of the FGO franchise – I spotted Mysterious Heroine X among the heroines in the art.

The big license, at least in my opinion, was L’il Leo. This Moto Hagio title from Flower Comics is about a kitten who grows up with a child and then decides that it too can go to school, get a job etc. It’s one volume, and apparently plays to Hagio’s strengths at bending the concept of what is human.

Lastly, we got The Men Who Created Gundam a two-volume series being released as one omnibus here. Part biography, part comedy, this series from Hideki Owada will tell the story of Gundam as it’s never been told before.

After this we had a few minutes to meet TAa, who will also have a livedraw session tomorrow. She talked about how happy she was to walk around New York and admire the buildings, and how stunned she was at the huge poster for her work in the exhibit hall. When asked if American Fate fans were different from Japanese ones, she notes that “all Fate fans are lively”.

After walking about the Exhibit Hall a bit, my final panel for the evening was “?! vs !? – The Great Debate”. Here Zack Davisson and Erica Friedman debated each other on important issues such as Honorifics, romanization, translation notes, localization, and regional accents. The panel was quite fun, mostly as Zack and Erica were mock-attacking each other all the time.

The audience also seemed to be having fun, though when scanlation came up it got a bit grumpy. Needless to say, both Zack and Erica are very pro-official release and anti-scanlation, and almost all the audience quesitons at the end were about that, with most of them being variations on “yes, but this is an exception, so I have to keep reading scanlations”. It did not go over well. Despite that, it was a highly enjoyable panel. Oh yes, and ?! and !? are meant to convey two completely different things. Apparently. Also, when Zack argued that shounen is pronounced “ooo”, when it should be ‘oh’, my first thought was of Seanan McGuire, and I wondered what Seanan Jump would be like.

This was a busy day, but tomorrow is even busier. Hopefully I will be able to give you a lot of news – the lines may be murder.

By: Sean Gaffney

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf