I Am Completely Serious

Stop caring about OFF, Homestuck fandom. Stop doing that.

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:52:35 GMT

The game is definitely a joke. It is trolling you and you are allowing it to do so. Stop liking this game, your opinions are wrong, you should like something I like instead.

I know, you can like 7 Seeds and Hayate x Blade instead! 7 Seeds is like Homestuck if it went grimdark, and Hayate x Blade is like Ouran High School Host Club but all-lesbian and with swordfights. These things are relevant to your interests.

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In the tradition of JManga.

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:44:36 GMT

Every single purchase page in Square Enix's irredeemably badly-run online manga site includes a prominent link to a stern lecture about how scanlations are destroying "the future of manga".

There are even legal threats in there. "Oh, I see that you are considering giving us money. Well, I hope you're not also considering clicking away to read our titles for free on a better-designed site run by amateurs! Because if so WE'LL SEE YOU IN COURT YOU LITTLE SHITS."

The scanlations have been here longer than you have, guys, I really don't think they're the problem. The problem is a combination of technological incompetence on your part and the artistically stagnant and increasingly-irrelevant nature of your product. So, like DC Comics, only with more UST between dudes.

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John wants you to tell him about Homestuck, Aranea.

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:49:52 GMT

JOHN: ok. what's this story about?

JOHN: ogre sex, or salamander shipping, or something?

ARANEA: Nope! Although I would 8e happy to tell you all a8out those topics another time.

Aranea Serket: A huge idiot who cannot effectively convey her fannish zeal for things in under 2,000 words, thus making everyone else mistrust/hate the things in question.

I overidentify with Aranea! How many ineffective rambling rec posts have I even written about Vampire Game? Probably a lot.

(Okay, Vampire Game in one sentence: It's an inexplicably non-misogynistic vampire manga, sort of about Bella Swan attempting ineffectually to use Edward Cullen to destroy her enemies, drawn really badly and adapted into English by someone who thought jokes about anal sex and jell-o were just the very best thing.)

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JManga: A Eulogy Addressed To The Dead, And In Bullet Points

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:03:54 GMT

As of May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm (US Pacific Time) users will no longer be able to view digital manga content on JManga.com. At this time all purchased and free digital manga content will be erased from all JManga Member’s accounts.

You were brought into existence, JManga, by beings who desired to banish the internet again into the maelstrom from which it had formed. As such, your business plan was crafted as a formalized gesture of spite, towards a future in which your creators saw themselves diminishing in stature, becoming mere men, and old. And so they spake, and said,

can we go back to the eighties lets go back to the eighties okay.

(That's what they said.)

And then, JManga, they created you.

You were an abomination. And your life was not a good one.

* You were asking people to pay real-book-type prices for low-resolution scans of poorly-edited manga.

* Which were not downloadable. Not even with DRM. They could be accessed only from your servers, using your website and or your proprietary apps.

* As such - as any erstwhile user of Yahoo! Music or other such services well knew - we did not buy those low-resolution scans from you. We merely rented them, until came the day upon which you would shrug your shoulders, say "welp, I tried," and shut down your servers.

* You didn't actually try.

* Like, your website and apps were so bad? That I think they were meant as some kind of deliberate "fuck you."

* You didn't even release the mobile apps until last October.

* Wait, did the iPad app ever come out? (Edit: It didn't.)

* It's just kind of hard to believe you were serious about entering this market, is I guess what I'm saying, JManga.

* So, I don't really care that you're dead.

* Someone else should probably have delivered the eulogy.

(Tumblr Crosspost)

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What is with JManga and all these terrifying Harlequins?

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 16:03:52 GMT

Who thought it was a good idea to make a shitload of Harlequin manga in the first place? Why does it comprise like 3/4 of the josei catalog? Does anyone under the age of sixty even read Harlequins? It just seems like a huge demographic mismatch.

(those facebook like boxes)

Look at these awful titles:

The Italian Playboy's Secret Son

Sale or Return Bride

The Italian's Passionate Revenge (oh, no! Same Italian?)

The Sheikh's Reluctant Bride

The Sheikh's Contract Bride (the sheikh is keeping busy)

The Billionaire's Virgin Mistress

Married By Mistake! (okay, yeah, that sounds like a manga)

Purchased For Revenge (that, too)

The Forced Bride (this fucking genre, my god)

Cowboys, Babies, and Shotgun Vows (well that sounds crazy fucking romantic)

The Italian's Token Wife (you know it is exactly this sort of behavior that got you guys stuck with Silvio Berlusconi for like nine years)

The Billionaire Boss's Forbidden Mistress (no one forbids the Billionaire Boss! Mistresses, that is. No one forbids him mistresses.)

Pregnant by the Millionaire (she should have held out for the billionaire)

Royally Bedded, Regally Wedded (or maybe whoever this guy is)

The Sheikh's Ransomed Bride (geez sheikh how many of those do you even need)

The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride (new nationality here, so this story must be completely different from every single one of the others)

The Millionaire's Pregnant Mistress (is this the same as that other millionaire-baby one but retitled? No, it looks like it's different.)

A Date With a Billionaire (she gets a look at his cell phone while he's in the bathroom and the address book is just "virgin one," "pregnant one," "forbidden one," so she walks out and calls up the cowboy. The cowboy is such a good listener.)

Mistress Bought and Paid For (goddamn we are purchasing a lot of fucking women in these stories, what the hell is wrong with Harlequin)

To Marry a Stranger (the stranger has an eyepatch, so yeah this is basically a manga, sure)

Marriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby! (the scandal is that the baby is a reincarnated vengeful alien ghost, right? Because it's manga. Right?)

Claiming His Pregnant Wife (this sounds like a tagline given to a murder by an awful local news station)

Public Wife, Private Mistress (that's generally how it works yeah)

Traded to the Sheikh (I'll bet it was the Spanish Duke initiating this arrangement, I never trusted that guy)

The Billionaire's Secret Baby (oh we all know the billionaire sucks at keeping secrets)

A Wife in Time (I'm unfortunately pretty sure that this isn't about time travel, how are these even manga)

Princess of Convenience (that doesn't even make sense)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed IV - An Officer and a Princess (oh god so someone felt there needed to be three other manga about the royalty of someplace called Stanbury getting married over and fucking over? I bet there are white horses with frilly tack involved.)

Wife By Agreement (well, that's a pleasant first)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed II - The Blacksheep Prince's Bride (there's supposed to be a space in "black sheep" you terrible prince)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed III - Code Name: Prince ("dude that is the shittiest codename" "look do you want to have a goddamn frilly horse wedding or not")

To Woo a Wife (this is really fucking progressive for these things)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed I - The Expectant Princess ("i am expecting to give birth to a secret fucking agent")

Billionaire Bachelors: Stone (maybe the billionaire bachelors are like, elementally-themed, and they're a team of chosen warriors who fight evil together? Because it's manga.)

In The Arms of the Sheikh ("oh baby i have three or four wives already" "that is so hot")

The Celebrity Doctor's Proposal ("oh baby i want to surgically alter your vulva to be more symmetrical, and also marry you maybe" "no i am going to go see if the sheikh's got any spots open")

Million Dollar Men II - Millionaire Husband (these guys are the Monthly GFantasy knockoff of the Billionaire Bachelors)

Million Dollar Men III - The Millionaire's Secret Wish ("man i wish i was a billionaire bachelor, they have that cool elemental thing going on and takahiro sakurai voices one of them in the anime")

Million Dollar Men I - Expecting the Boss's Baby (there are three dudes on the cover of this one, I'm confident that it's mpreg and not just an establishing shot of this crappy hero team together)

Angus's Lost Lady (gonna pretend this is about some cows)

Daniel and Daughter (uh)

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How I explained my obsession with Homestuck to Mom.

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:57:24 GMT

"It's like manga without the misogyny."

(I no longer read new manga without having seen at least three reviews from trusted sources affirming a complete lack of misogyny. Because I work at a criminal defense firm, and my tolerance for sexual predators is pretty thin by the end of the day.)

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I am arbitrarily angry at the whole world.

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:34:03 GMT

Except Andrew Hussie, Tamura Yumi, and Juan Santapau. They're fine.

Recommend me some really bad manga to read, and assuming my energy levels are reasonable, I will endeavor write rude things about them here.

(Bad manga that are available for illegal download, because I cannot spend my Christmukkougatsu shopping money on bad manga.)

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I give thanks for the amazing insights that I have while sleep-deprived.

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:07:40 GMT

Oh my god, Heart of Thomas is basically one of Karkat's troll romance novels.

Thomas ><3 Juli
Juli ><3 Eric
Eric ? Juli
Oscar <> Juli

They are all doomed because of their failure to arrange things sensibly for bucket-filling purposes.

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A Fairytale for the Demon Lord, by Kim Yong-Hwan

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 02:24:19 GMT

Today I learned that I will read anything, no matter how careless and incoherent, if you make the dark lord the protagonist. There needs to be like, a twelve-step program for villain addiction.

Once upon a time, there was a magical princess destined to save the world, who was kidnapped by the demon lord and cast into an eternal sleep. A knight came and rescued her, only to have her stolen away from him again. To get her back, he was forced to turn himself into the demon lord. GOTO Once upon a time.

The manhwa ends without making it clear whether this story actually forms an endless loop. I only kept reading because I wanted to be sure on that point. So, screw you, manhwa. The art is really inconsistent, making it difficult to recognize recurring characters from one appearance to the next, and impossible to tell that it's deliberate that the knight's appearance is becoming more demon lordly. This person did not have the necessary art skills for the plotline he wanted to do.

(Why can't I find any books where the wicked queen's the protagonist? Aside from Superior, which doesn't really count.)

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Manga: Absolute Boyfriend, Accel World, and Vampire Knight

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:20:34 GMT

Absolute Boyfriend, by Watase Yuu

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, Watase Yuu became envious of Chobits, Video Girl Ai, Saber Marionette, and the rest of the loser-guy-gets-a-sexbot genre, and decided that she would make her own loser-girl-gets-a-sexbot series. It was exactly like all the others, except by Watase Yuu. The end.

Accel World, by Kawahara Reki, Aigamo Hiroyuki, and probably the Devil

In the future, everyone has an internet port installed in their necks at a young age, which allows you to enter a Second Life-like virtual reality. An insecure fat kid named Haruyuki plays virtual reality games to escape from daily bullying. His skill at gaming attracts the attention of the most popular girl in school, who invites him to join a secret game called Brain Burst, which confers special real-world powers on its players.

Though Haruyuki's uselessness and social anxiety are impressive even for a shounen manga hero, he is nonetheless constantly surrounded by blushing big-eyed girls who stare deeply into his eyes and tell him all about his good qualities. Which I guess he demonstrates offpanel, to avoid any risk of making the reader feel outclassed. Even his game avatar is initially a cartoon pig. When in battle, he switches to a skinny robot which is literally faceless, to make it easier for readers to project themselves into the fight scenes.

I hope that this manga represents the industry's apex of cynical calculation, because the thought of what lies beyond this peak cannot but terrify. It was, obviously, released in conjunction with a light novel series, an anime, a video game, and at least two other separate manga, in a hideous supernova of corporate evil.

Vampire Knight, by Hino Matsuri

Vampires, as we all know, desire nothing more than to go to high school. Those bastards absolutely love going to high school. I mean, they never learn anything - they barely even go to class, that would cut into their brooding time - but it affords them the opportunity to fondle the throats of virginal teenagers, which is all that's really important.

Yuuki is a human girl who is simultaneously in love both with Zero, a short-tempered tsundere human boy, and Kaname, the gentle but ambiguously ominous vampire boy who once saved her life. It takes only a bare modicum of genre knowledge to realize that any relationship she might form with the Kaname is horribly doomed - especially once Zero turns into a vampire himself to up his exoticism and danger to appropriate levels. Unusually, this does not stop Hino Matsuri from taking Yuuki as far as possible along the wrong track without actually showing her having sex with Kaname. (It runs in Hana to Yume, which I don't think lets you do that.)

This is enjoyable angst-ridden shoujo with 200% the FDA's daily recommended intake of unresolved sexual tension. Unlike those other two manga I just discussed, however, it's not as slick a formula thing as Hana to Yume would probably like it to be. Hino cuts off plotlines at odd times, suffers from a problematic inability to make her male characters visually distinct from one another, and forgets to establish characters who will be important until the chapter in which they became important. (At one point I think she actually does this in the notes-from-the-author sidebar.)

This won't bother you if you're skimming over the other stuff to get to the scenes between Yuuki, Kaname, and Zero which is probably the sanest thing to do. While their relationships make perfect emotional sense, if introduced to even the slightest whiff of logic this series would disintegrate.

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Manga and book.

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 03:33:59 GMT

The Riddlemaster of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind, by Patricia McKillip

Roughly my zillionth reread. These really are her harshest books, both in terms of what she puts the heroes through and how much she makes you feel it.

Uchuu na Bokura!, chapters 1-13, by Hiwatari Saki

This is by the artist of Please Save My Earth!, and started its run about five years after the last volume of PSME came out. Hiwatari's art improved a lot over the course of PSME, and was even better in Global Garden a couple years after this. So, I don't know what happened here. Some kind of stylistic atavism? Everyone's head is shaped weird.

The story is her favorite one: a timid, insecure girl is fought over by men and tormented by her own inability to assert herself. It's a little milder than PSME here, though. A girl named Haruko, whose mother has recently passed away, begins receiving harassing notes at school accusing her of being a witch. Which she is, though she has no obvious magical powers, aside from her ability to talk to her familiar, a cat named Silk, in her dreams each night.

Promptly, two boys come to her aid. One is short-tempered but clearly in love with her, and I'm just going to call him New Shion; the other is easygoing and clearly wrong for her, so I'll call him New Jinpachi. Three female classmates - her delicate best friend, a hyperactive ganguro girl, and a mysterious Chinese exchange student - also step up to help her find the bully.

There is initially some question as to whether Haruko is just imagining the whole witch thing, and thus an unreliable narrator, who may even be sending the notes to herself. Which is interesting! But then the Chinese girl turns out to be a witch, New Shion starts talking to the cat, and we get scenes where the True Culprit says ominous things. So, for conflict we're left with mean anonymous notes meeting Haruko's human wall of a support network and being brushed aside. And it's pretty obvious who's sending them.

I can't find scans past chapter 13, but I feel like I've got a pretty good idea what's going to happen. This is apparently what it looks like when Hiwatari phones it in: there's nothing really objectionable going on, but it's hard to care.

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Kimi no Kakera, volumes 1-4

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 02:48:03 GMT

I cannot rule out the possibility that Kimi no Kakera is a deadpan satire of all the most revolting elements of the moe aesthetic. It's not impossible; there do, after all, exist shounen magazines which appear to exist at least in part as some sort of practical joke. All the available evidence, however, suggests that this manga simply a collection of all the most revolting elements of the moe aesthetic. It's by Takahashi Shin, creator of Saikano, who is evidently even madder than that might suggest.

Every single panel.

It shares with the unpleasant Letter Bee both its MacGuffin - a missing sun - and its pornographic fascination with the suffering of wide-eyed, androgynous children. The protagonist is Icoro, a princess who, for reasons not entirely clear, is forced to do menial jobs to support her little brother while being heaped with verbal abuse. She is also constantly starving and cold, never gets a full night's sleep, has no friends, and was born incapable of smiling or laughing. When these various indignities build up too heavily upon her, as they do every two or three pages, Icoro cries massive, bulging, physically-improbable eyefulls of tears, so that it sometimes resembles a face less than a molten Venusian landscape. It's usually snowing, though.

If you worry that watching a Princess cry in the snow might get a little tedious, fear not, for sometimes she also wets herself. Also, there are other children to be tormented. These include her little brother, who is blind, sickly, and probably doomed; two emotionally stunted child soldiers; and an amnesiac boy whom she names Shiro, because he can't remember his name. Shiro, like Icoro, is missing certain emotional responses - he's incapable of crying or expressing grief, even when seriously injured, or explaining to Icoro that she is the first friend he's ever had.

Unfortunately, Shiro loses his memory again every time he's forced to fight to rescue her from something, meaning that he is constantly forgetting about her. Given that, with the exception of her doomed brother, he is literally the only character who doesn't abuse her (even her cute animal sidekick hates her), this sets off even more weeping on her part.

At one point, at the climax of a particularly intense cycle of abuse-and-weeping directed at Icoro, two sets of her tormenters - the child soldiers and some evil adults - are fighting over which gets to kidnap her. She bursts into tears so effectively that everyone has to stop to look at her. She's a virtuoso. She says, "I feel sorry for you all!" and launches into a tearful speech about how pathetic all of their lives are.

One of the child soldiers, later, spends a good deal of time thinking reluctantly about this. He begins to admire Icoro for this; her pity of them, in fact, strikes him as the highest emotion to which one could aspire. He sees something deeply profound in it.

I've been formulating a theory about moe.

Here's the thing: "cuteness," on some level, is just the instinct that makes us want to take care of children. We get a warm feeling that's triggered by, you know, kid stuff: small stature, large eyes and head, high-pitched voice, affectionate behavior, emotional vulnerability, poor cognitive skills, and physical weakness. These qualities trigger affection in adults because kids are a burden and we can hurt them, but our biology and social conditioning are telling us we have to take care of them.

(I did not set out to make this sound unpleasant, but am now at a loss as to how to make it sound any other way.)

The relevant idea is that "cute" is a symptom cluster, but that a character doesn't have to have every single trait to qualify as cute. Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh, Gon from Hunter x Hunter, and Haruhi from Ouran High School Host Club are all cute, even though they respectively are smarter than you, can kill you, and don't care about your problems. They possess a large enough number of the other suggested qualities to pass the test.

It's my theory that the aesthetic defining "moe" distinguishes itself from just "cute" because its diagnostic criteria are less flexible. There's one thing that's not optional, and that's vulnerability.

Seriously, there's a lot of pantswetting in this manga.

Chiyo is acceptable as moe - she hurts herself a lot, scares and embarrasses easily, cries, etc. Gon and Haruhi, however, are not, because they're too hard to hurt. If the "cute" ideal is a harmless object of affection, the moe ideal is, I think, a helpless object of pity. We feel pity for the same reasons that we think things are cute - it's an alarm bell telling us to help someone who's been hurt. And we feel it most strongly and convincingly for individuals whom we feel sure are unable to protect themselves.

I'm obviously not suggesting here that moe manga and anime are all abuse narratives; with a certain obvious exception, most of the manga on these lists seem to be fairly light-weight. However, embarassment is a major theme in all of the ones I'm familiar with,* and three - Utena, Rozen Maiden, and Hayate the Combat Butler - also involve slavery. And while it's not like that stuff's unheard-of in shoujo manga, another genre known for its devotion to the ideal of cute, it's not ubiquitous the way it is here.

So, this begs the question - what's so attractive about this sort of story? Sometimes it's perfectly innocent: a lot of those manga listed up there are just slice-of-life narratives about people who get embarrassed easily because they have really strong emotional reactions to everyday situations. That's appealing because they imbue familiar landscape with greater depth; and there's also, I think, something comforting about reading about characters so impossibly emotionally helpless. It's similar to the impulse that creates shounen manga protagonists who suck at everything until they get given a magical orb. The reader feels better about his/her own ability to handle him/herself, reading about some character who bursts into tears over the immense significance of having been given a ride home or something.

On the other hand, some of it's obviously just fantasy material for people - okay, mainly guys - who fear adult relationships. They're attracted to vulnerability because a woman capable of taking care of herself is also capable of leaving you, hurting you, not wanting you. Hence little girls blushing up at you from four feet above the floor.**

And this is how we get to the scene in Kimi no Kakera where a starving and beaten Icoro desperately scrapes food off the floor, while her animal sidekick cruelly berates her for it. If pity is the highest form of love, then the more misery and humiliation heaped upon a character, the more lovable s/he must be. I imagine Takahashi concluding this scene, sitting back with a satisfied look on his face, and thinking, "beat that!"

-

* There are four I don't know - Lucky Star, Strawberry Marshmallow, Toradora!, and Minami-ke.

** To be fair, I'm sure there's an element of fantasization about fatherhood in there; Japan's currently toxic economic and gender-role situation means marriage and kids aren't an option for a lot of people. This is the problem with a culture wherein men have to have full-time jobs to support their families, and women have to be stay-at-home-moms, and women have to live with their parents until they're married, and single mothers are the worst thing ever.

But you can't gloss over the problem that a lot of this stuff is pretty sexualized. I'll leave this discussion to Jason Thompson, though.

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Nobody ever tells me anything.

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 03:36:28 GMT

tactics volumes nine and ten are up on JManga.

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I figured it out.

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 18:35:27 GMT

I had previously expressed concern about how people who are already dead can die. It's because people in Bleach die and go to Yami no Matsuei, and people in Yami no Matsuei die and go to Bleach.

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Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton; Superior, by Ichtys

Wed, 30 May 2012 03:45:28 GMT

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

It's a Regency romance novel with cannibalism! The characters are all dragons, who eat each other:

"You wouldn't dare," she said. "To be known as the Exalted Lord who ate his mother when she was strong and well?"

He's expected to eat her when she dies naturally, see. There'll be troubling social repercussions if he doesn't wait that long - he'll probably have to rusticate for a season or two.

Also, when female dragons lose their virginity, they turn pink, and if they turn pink before they're married they are Fallen Dragons and cast out of their homes, and other dragons can eat them with impunity. The children of the poor are also eaten pretty much whenever by the upper classes, as are elderly servants, and their wings are often bound to keep them from flying. The more other dragons you eat, the bigger you get, so that dragons of the upper classes are the only ones who regularly grow longer than seven feet, making it easier for them to dominate the lower class dragons, and by the way are these metaphors clear enough.

Yet it's not an obtrusively didactic book. The cannibalism and turning pink is gracefully established the rules in the first couple chapters, without any special emphasis, and Walton follows them precisely throughout the book - but none of this actually changes the character of the Regency era as-seen-in-romance-novels much. It just reads like a Georgette Heyer novel. It's appropriate to call it satire, but it's that sneaky kind of satire that can just as easily be enjoyed as an example of the medium it's poking holes in.

Superior v 1-9, by Ichtys

The hero Eksa has been sent to destroy the Demon Queen Shira, with whose forces the humans are at war. Shira sees him coming, and on her second-in-command's advice decides to spy on him a little to ascertain his weaknesses before trying to kill him. She does this pretending to be a weak demon-in-distress who needs his protection. This works pretty well on Eksa, who actually wants to make peace with the demons, and hates killing.

Though the Demon Queen finds this idea baffling and contemptible, she against her will falls in love with him in chapter one. Her thinking on this is basically, "Darn it, this is going to make it hard to kill the guy... Oh, well." Still hiding her identity from him, she goes off and has adventures with him, Shira struggling with alien human ideas like "you can't eat everyone you don't like" and Eksa anxiously trying to make peace between the demons and the humans.

Because all fantasy-manga adventurer parties should consist of four people, I guess, they shortly acquire a womanizing swordsman guy and a short-tempered magician girl. Because all fantasy-manga adventurer parties require a Boss Fight to look forward to at some point in the future, Shira makes a golem that looks like herself to take her place while she stays with Eksa, and the golem turns on her, declaring itself the true Demon Queen. Its name is apparently just Copy, though. It should change that.

It's honestly pretty stupid; though it starts as comedy, there are volume-long collapses into limpid angst. Most of it is a pattern of Stupid Pratfall, Stupid Angsty Fight Scene, People Express Inane Ideas About War While Weeping For Like The Whole Chapter. All kinds of sparkly shoujo tears; the whole cast does it.

But I finished it up because Shira does stuff like this:

I find this refreshing in a shounen manga heroine. It ends at volume nine in the middle of a plotline, but there's a sequel series called Superior Cross, which I may go ahead and read.

I've decided to start grading translations, by the way; as you may have guessed from the panels above, none of the various scanlation groups that have worked on this get more than a C from me.

(Hoshin Engi is in same situation, and I include the regrettable official Viz translation in this judgment. I seem to recall that some scanlation project working about eight years ago did a decent job on the first few volumes, but I can't find those particular scans now.)

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Hoshin Engi, by Fujisaki Ryu

Tue, 22 May 2012 03:12:23 GMT

Hahaha, I love this manga.

Houshin Engi is a shounen manga based loosely on the Chinese novel The Creation of the Gods. Dakki, a powerful fox demon, has enchanted the Yin emperor Chuu-oh and is destroying the empire by means of her peculiarly high-spirited atrocities - cheerily throwing huge crowds of people into pits of snakes, making excitable cooking shows in which she feeds people to their parents, etc. She's just having so much fun! Sadly, the immortal sennin of the Kongrong Mountains don't appreciate the mess she's making of China, so they send a sennin-in-training named Taikobo to defeat Dakki and her followers.

You know that thing about shounen manga, where the hero is pretty much the strongest guy around by the end of volume five or so? That doesn't happen here. Taikobo is genuinely not very good at fighting, and usually achieves his goals by getting people drunk or getting them mad at him. (He's really good at getting people mad at him.) The fighting he mainly pushes off on the stronger allies he makes throughout the series; he's mostly a stategist rather than a combatant.

There's a scene late in the series where his team is getting beaten up, and one of them insists that he help, only to find that he's passed out from the strain of an earlier, more minor fight; another character points out, reasonably, "He's never really been all that good, you know." This manga ran in Shounen Jump from 1996 to 2000, and I'm pretty sure that the magazine no longer permits this sort of behavior. (He's obliged to get some power-ups for the Final Battle, which I found disappointing.)

Dakki is an extremely enjoyable villainess, and she always remains a threat, and more powerful than Taikobo. This is refreshing, given that characters like her have a habit of being shown up by male villains at some point. Doesn't happen here! However, like Taikobo, Dakki doesn't go in much for physical force, meaning that she doesn't get many traditional fight scenes. She prefers to get things done by manipulating the people around her. It becomes clear pretty quickly that she commits her worst crimes not for their own sake, but for the outrage they engender in Taikobo and the other protagonists. Their hatred is a tool she's using to achieve another goal. (Though she does seem to enjoy watching people get mad at her.)

Though the series has a lot of dark moments - a big chunk of the cast is dead by the end - it's consistently funny even during the finale. A lot of the humor is self-referential; the characters all know that they're in a manga. Taikobo at point wins a fight by transferring himself and his opponent into a 4-panel newspaper comic, and Dakki complains that the plot of the anime diverges too far from the manga. Another guy, defeating Taikobo, temporarily turns the series into an earnest high-school sports comic.

The most powerful Sennin the world, an evil clown named Shinkoyo who declines to take sides in the central dispute, evidently derives his power from the fact that he has read the script. He's constantly feeding information to both Taikobo and Dakki, "to keep things interesting," and provokes fights between their forces when things slow down. When Taikobo and company are gearing up for the final battle, Fujisaki has failed to provide a reason for Taikobo's lazy mentor Roushi to get himself over there - so Shinkoyo kidnaps him, on the grounds that it just wouldn't look right if he missed the finale.

Various other notable things about this manga:

* There's no heterosexual romance. The only non-comic-relief and non-immediately-doomed male-female relationships are parent-child ones, and the one that gets the most page-time is abusive. What's up with that, Fujisaki.

* Dudes do stare soulfully into each other's eyes a lot, though.

* There's a huge cast of characters, but they're nearly all guys; I think there are maybe ten named women, and probably seventy guys. Here, I'll try to list all the women: Dakki, Kibi, Kijin, Chuu-oh's first wife, Nataku's mom, Sengyoku, Ryukitsu Koushu, Hekiun, Hekiun's sister, Supumama, Ko Hiko's wife and sister, Venus, Queen, Madonna, one of Otenkun's subordinates, Yuukyou, Jyoka. Okay, I'm wrong, that's eighteen - but I just found a character guide and counted the names, and it looks like there are about a hundred and thirty characters total. Also, two of the women I listed have no dialog, two more die in the chapter they're introduced in, and another is already dead the first time we see her.

* Taikobo's second-in-command Youzen looks suspiciously similar to Kurama from YuYu Hakusho. Nataku (you knew some version of Nataku was going to be in this comic) looks and acts kinda like Hiei.

* Taikobo rides around on a timid talking hippo named Supushan, who has a Supupapa and Supumama and comes from Supu Valley. How the Moomin family ended up in feudal China is not clear.

* This is a small spoiler: So this manga has the plot of ElfQuest? The sennin turn out to be the descendants of aliens who landed on earth long ago, and the final conflict is whether they should attempt to remake their homeworld on earth, or not. They're basically the wolf riders?

* This is a big spoiler: So I think Taikobo probably has the most complicated origin story ever? He actually beats out the various Syaorans and Sakuras in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. Maybe there's some really warped Marvel comics character who's worse, I don't know. I've written down the steps necessary to produce Taikobo. I may have missed some.

1) A space alien named Fukki lands on earth and chills for a few million years.

2) Fukki meets Genshi Tenson in the form of a small child and has its soul split into two pieces. One of these pieces is put into the human baby Ryo Bo, who will grow up to be Taikoubou; the other half becomes Genshi Tenson's original apprentice Oh Eki.

3) Oh Eki, who by this point doesn't remember that he's a space alien, is traded to Youzen's dad, Tsuten Kyoshu, in exchange for Youzen. He is locked up in a magical prison that turns him into a youkai (this seems to just mean that your ears turn pointy) and raised there by Dakki to be evil and have trouble getting through metal detectors. His name is now Otenkun. He wants revenge on Youzen, Tsuten Kyoshu, and Genshi Tenson, roughly in that order - but not on Dakki, whom he basically hates, but thinks of as his mother.

At some point either before or after all this, Otenkun's soul is split into three pieces. The pieces are physically identical, have the same abilities, and seem to have a communal memory, but they have different goals; the first two are mainly destruction-oriented, while the last just really likes sitting in a dark room and plotting.

Each Otenkun represents, I guess, one sixth of the original Fukki, unless the first one represents one quarter and the second two one eighth apiece. Maybe the most reasonable thing is to assume that the broody one represents one quarter?

4) Meanwhile, Ryo Bo's family has been murdered on Dakki's orders. Genshi Tenson takes him in as Oh Eki's replacement and renames him Taikobo. Taikobo wants revenge on Dakki.

5) One of the Otenkuns publicly humiliates Youzen, kills Youzen's mentor, and kills Tsuten Kyoshu; Youzen kills him. A second Otenkun kills Hiko and yells a lot at Genshi Tenson; I forget who kills him, but he dies pretty content with his day's work, which is surprising considering that he accomplished rather less than Otenkun 1, who died still raving at Youzen.

Anyway, at this point either one third (two one-sixth portions), one quarter (two one-eighth portions), or one-sixth-plus-one-eighth of Fukki's soul has been houshined. We don't actually see either of the extra Otenkun-souls when the hoshindai opens, though.

6) Kibi kills Taikobo and his soul is captured by the third Otenkun before it can reach the houshindai. So that he can go back to the world of the living, Taikobo reluctantly merges his soul with Otenkun's, causing them to regain Fukki's memories. But the resulting being looks and acts like Taikobo, except that he now apparently considers Dakki his mother. Whaaat.

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Unrelated but of interest if you have read Ooku.

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:28:49 GMT

Or probably any other fictional narrative involving Tokugawa Tsunayoshi:

I guess I at one point knew this but forgot about it: Rikugien, my favorite landscape garden in Tokyo, was apparently designed by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. The garden plaques and pamphlets describes Yoshiyasu as being known mainly for his contributions to the arts. I do not think that this is, in fact, the case. At the very least, he's a sub-villain in the 47 Ronin narrative, which is better known than the man's poetry. Probably anyone with an interest in the period has opinions about whether he was sleeping with Tsunayoshi.

For purposes of comparison, Koishikawa Kourakuen was designed by Mito Koumon.

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Things I've Read Recently

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:04:35 GMT

I haven't read much recently. Busy working, panicking, dreaming about airplanes.

The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

I'd read this before, but I didn't remember much of it. William de Worde encounters some dwarves with a printing press and accidentally invents the newspaper, just in time for a secret conspiracy to frame the Patrician for a crime. William does not especially like the Patrician, and is not even on very good terms with truth all of the time, but nonetheless feels he'd better start investigating. It will fill some space, anyway.

I mostly enjoyed it - I mean, it's by Terry Pratchett - but this book has a lot of callbacks to earlier books. (I don't even recognize all of them! I'm a bad Discworld fan.) Also, Pratchett's usage of nonhumans-as-representatives-of-minorities is, um, pretty awkward, particularly in that it gets into What These People Need Is A Honky territory.

Petshop of Horrors: Tokyo, volumes 1-8, by Akino Matsuri

Sequel to Petshop of Horrors. Count D has moved the titular supernatural petshop to Shinjuku, where he proceeds to dispense pets and poetic justice to the people of Tokyo.

The original series was tightly episodic - with the exception of a short wrap-up arc at the end, each chapter was a self-contained story about Count D, a customer with a dark secret, a monstrous pet that the customer perceives as human, an exasperated police detective named Leon Orcot, and Orcot's grade-school-age brother Chris. Each time the pet restores some sort of karmic balance, generally violently, and each time Orcot is left confused as to exactly where that guy's torso went. There was an overarching story of sorts, but it was developed intermittently and without much special emphasis throughout the series; Orcot at one point goes through a major personal change in one line of dialog, without noticing that he's done it.

That hasn't changed in the new series, but the justice D dispenses has gotten a lot milder. In the first series, roughly half of the pets he sold destroyed their owners. That percentage is much lower in the new series - it's like he's turning into a hero-of-justice-slash-therapist-slash-confessor. There's also more comedy, and it's gotten a lot sillier. I did not much like the Santa Claus chapter.

The character dynamics are pretty much the same - Detective Orcot's role as D's frenemy is taken by an ambitious Chinese businessman named Wu Fei, who owns the building that houses D's new shop. Chris's role as peacemaker between the two is played by Wu Fei's meek assistant Chin. (Because Chin's in his fifties or sixties, a shapeshifting kitten is brought in to be the Cute Kid Who Gets In Trouble. I hate that kitten.)

Unfortunately, Wu Fei does not work as well as Orcot as a foil. He's sneaky, secretive, and cruel, which is, you know, a bit similar to D? And he's not very sympathetic, partly because he's a jerk, and partly because his motives are pretty opaque. Orcot begrudgingly liked D - possibly not entirely platonically - but understandably disapproved of the whole "serial killer" thing. Anyway, it was pretty clear why he was always hanging out at the evil pet shop.

Wu Fei doesn't like anyone, and doesn't actually mind too much about all the murders. It bugs him more that D closes early to go to bakeries. Lots of jokes about this.

So our secondary protagonist is kind of unpleasant, and it's a problem. There have been hints dropped that his grandfather had some sort of deal with D's grandfather, but it's hard to care about that? Which is also a problem, given that this storyline appears destined to become the series' main plot.

In short: I like it about half the time, and I hope that Wu Fei turns out to be a magical capybara that thinks it's human or some shit.

City of Diamond, by Jane Emerson/Doris Egan

Reread this again. Ending still unresolved cliffhanger.

Bless me, Count D, for I have sinned: Sometimes I wish Doris Egan's screenwriting career would implode so she'd write the sequel.

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I have fallen badly behind in translating Minekura's blog.

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:00:30 GMT

And this will continue for the foreseeable future. However, Minekura's birthday was the 23rd, and for reasons that will become clear, I felt an obligation to share her post on the subject with the Anglophone world. Also, her pictures, and her font-size selections.

I was a lot looser with the translation than usual this time, as I felt that the tone of this particular post would not be well-served by my usual stilted attempts at technical fidelity. (But if I screwed up something important, tell me so I can fix it.)

For context, Kinoko-no-Yamas are an inexpensive sort of cookie-ish thing. They're hard and crunchy, and thus not something a person with an artificial jaw could easily eat.

-

Black Swan

On March 23rd, I turned thirty-seven (or something). I received a lot of good wishes on Twitter and on the cell phone site - thank you all. I'm a very lucky person. I'm doing my best to pay you back, bit by bit. I'm working on a thank-you picture for all the people who commented on the birthday project on Minekura.net, which will be ready in a few more days.

Anyway, I'd might as well treat this blog like a blog, and talk about my birthday!

Because the day fell during a lull in work, we decided to get together and have a party. I was excited. When we got started, the current youngster in the group (though she's been working with me since the beginning of Gaiden), Ringo-chan (not her real name), told me that she was going to make a cake.

We've experienced Ringo-chan's astonishing cooking skills many times in the past. For example, last Christmas, after informing us mundanely, "I'm going to make a chocolate house!", she proceeded to produce something resembling a set of chocolate ruins, a deep crevice torn violently through the center. Into this crevice, she had crammed three boxfulls of Kinoko-no-Yamas, which were held down by a chocolate Santa Claus to prevent them from escaping. It was hellish scene reminiscent of Auschwitz.

...Incidentally, I assume that she did not actually expect me to eat any of this, given the state of my jaw.

Ringo-chan said, "This time, I'll make a cake Sensei can eat, too!" Confident that our anxiety was misplaced, Ringo-chan set busily to her task, her head held high.

...Her idea was this: she would take take a sponge cake and cover it with whipped cream, to form the surface of a lake. Atop, she would place choux-creme swans, swimming gracefully across the water.

The piece's title would be "Swan Lake."

Alone in the kitchen labored Ringo-chan, as the rest of us were assembling the evening's nabe. There was apparently some problem with the choux-creme; yet she perservered, molding her raw materials into a masterpiece.

Finally, it was complete.

So I think this is Medusa's head? The lake turned into a head.

The eyes on the head are gummy bears, and the beak is two Pringles. The "swans" crowded together on the top give me more the feeling of a tangle of snakes, all standing erect in the moment before they strike at their prey.

Here, look at it from the side.

...It's just terrifying.

For all the work that Ringo-chan put into this object, I'm afraid that I was unable to come up with any words of praise for it. In the midst of our shrieks of laughter, the great artist Ringo-chan stood unperturbed.

Ringo: Isn't it cute?!

Takano: (pointing a finger) The appropriate adjective is "sinister"!

- You get the idea. I will say this for it, it makes quite an entrance.

When the electricity in the room began to die down a bit, the skull of this newly-severed head was pierced brutally with candles, and then placed before me. As you see:

Ringo: Happy birthday, Sensei!

Ahina: The, the head! The swans are on fire!

Takano: Sensei, quick! Blow them out!

Minekura: Are guys forgetting about my jaw!? I can't blow anything out!

Everyone: - oh, right!

Yeah, the whole thing caught fire. With a lot of shouting, we managed to put it out with a hand fan.

"Oh, god, the smell!"

"Open some doors or something!"

...It was delicious! I love blackened swan.

In the middle of the month, drowning in work, I found myself was exhausted in both body and spirit. I'd been drawing so much that I felt blank, and above all else - there was my jaw. This massive artificial plank thing in my mouth, horribly uncomfortable. The dryness and pain made it impossible to concentrate as the deadline approached; when it was at its most intense, I wanted to rip it out and throw it at someone.

Yet I need it to eat and I need to it talk and I need it to work, and I'll be dealing with it all my life... And I thinking these sorts of thoughts, and I wear myself down to a grim-eyed acceptance. I'm thinking them now.

But I borrowed everyone's strength, and the manuscript is out; and for the first time in ages, I find myself laughing out loud with my friends. I've been given a great gift.

Thank you, Ringo-chan. Thank you, black swan.

I won't forget you. I mean, you're pretty much unforgettable.

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Recent search queries.

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:03:21 GMT

Often people come here searching for things, like "all natural shea butter soap washington state," with which I am unable to provide them. However, in the past couple of months, this blog has apparently been useful to people searching for the following phrases:

hitler manga
afterschool charisma freud
can i eat "wind egg"
shaving face with hirsutism
dreams that amonkey captured
menstruation horrors

I'm so very proud of myself.

Unfortunately, the following people were probably pretty much out of luck:

minecraft mob

Yes, that would be me. I am an Enderman. It was I who moved your dirt.

make fun of somebody's house

Well, that's not very nice.

baccano vino vs police fanfiction

This interaction would likely be too brief to merit a very long piece of fanfiction. And no, I don't have any.

blood navel catarsis

?

guy with fire powers from manga
manga girl childhood sad
sad manga girl
manga girls with powers
shonen with power ups

You guys are casting your nets too wide. Get more specific. Like, do you want an evil orphan-killing one-eyed guy with fire powers, or a friendly orphaned one-eyed guy with fire powers? Do you want a girl who's sad because she's leading a bloody revolution in a horrific post-apocalyptic Japan, or one who's sad because she's a timid magical Princess with self-esteem problems? These are all important variables.

real life mewtwo

I really don't think I can help you with that.

the strongest person ina all manga

Awww.

japanese ukeru quel kanji utiliser

Usually 受.

womens hipster glasses

You can't have mine. Try Zenni Optical.

face male female mangá

Pretty Face, by Kano Yasuhiro, maybe?

the adoration of jenna fox characters
the adoration of jenna fox characters traits
the adoration of jenna fox crib notes
the adoration of jenna fox notes
what are some character traits of jenna fox?
what happens in the book the adoration of jenna fox
what is the author's purpose in the adoration of jenna fox
what is the authors style for the adoration of jenna fox

I'm confident that this is exactly what you are looking for.

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This is basically a Petshop of Horrors chapter in itself.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:19:45 GMT

Bird brooch, $32,000.

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Manga-seekers and their search queries, part 2.

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:52:18 GMT

Today, I once again help people who've arrived at this blog by way of search queries involving the word "manga." Also books and porn this time, though.

manga possession male to female blonde goddess

I think that you want either Global Garden or La Chevaliere d'Eon, but those terms do not perfectly describe either one.

freud manga

If you want a manga that has Freud in it, maybe Afterschool Charisma? If you want a manga that is Freudian, just, you know, get a copy of Shounen Jump.

manga characters shouting

Bleach is basically just people shouting stuff now, right? Read Bleach.

manga that have clone

A, A' - Clones as a metaphor for grief.
Global Garden - Clones as a metaphor for grief, and possibly incest.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle - Clones that like fly through dimensions and don't have souls and there's wings and time travel and you lose an eye doing that. (They are still a metaphor for grief.)

novel telepathic spaceship cat

Anne McCaffrey has much to answer for.

perfunctory frivolity :)

:)

shota torture gore

Go away.

yaoi manga half brothers fuck each other

The worst thing about this query is that I'm almost certain I've encountered a manga which fits its specifications.

shoujo with tragic past

Is this a trick question? All of it. All of the shoujo.

Two Bonus Queries!

elena most annoying character nalini singh

You know, I'm worried about your priorities if your primary problem with a book in which the hero threatens to kill a baby is the heroine.

what kind of girl lays eggs?

Nanami isn't that kind of girl!

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New Years resolution.

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:09:33 GMT

Over the past year, I've made a lot of long, grumpy posts about books/video games/etc that have disappointed me. (I've even got two sitting on the desktop unfinished right now.) I have written relatively few positive posts about stuff I like. My resolution is that for every discrete media item I take the time to thrash at, I will also talk about something that was good.

(I'm not going as far as "expend as many words on positivity as negativity," because I am a jerk and that is impossible. Perhaps it will be my son who finally brings balance to the force.)

To get started, I have recently read and liked these shounen manga which have "x" in their titles for no good reason:

Hayate x Blade, by Shizuru Hayashiya - A comedy shounen manga about a private girls' school with mandatory swordfights. The girls have to fight in pairs and get a gradually-increasing amount of money for each fight they win. The Kind-Hearted-Idiot-Type title character, Hayate, needs the money to save an indebted orphanage (of course!), while her partner Ayana, the Short-Tempered-Straight-Man, wants to redeem herself for having hurt her original partner.

Every plotline goes like this:

* Two girls are having problems with their relationship! Oh noes!

* Hayate tries to fix this in improbable and counterproductive ways. She hits on Ayana, Ayana hits her.

* Fight scene! "NOW I'LL SHOW YOU MY TRUE POWER" etc

* Hayate's plans have failed, but the girls probably work it out anyway.

The manga with the most similar tone is probably Ouran High School Host Club: it fulfills all the parameters of its genre, but it's always self-aware and never takes itself too seriously. It's gotten slightly darker as the series has progressed - little piles of angst have accumulated in every corner at this point - but Hayashiya has too much sense of perspective to let things get too heavy.

Hunter x Hunter, by Yoshihiro Togashi - So you know how at the end of Yu Yu Hakusho, Yusuke, Kurama, and Hiei go into the demon world where everything's all brutal and decadent and better-drawn? And there's no longer any standard shounen-manga black-and-white moral conflict - just people with conflicting loyalties doing battle and betraying each other in increasingly baroque ways? (And Mukuro!) And then it ends really suddenly without quite resolving in a satisfying way. (And Mukuro gets -ed over.)

Hunter x Hunter is essentially Togashi trying for a re-do of that last arc. Its protagonists, Gon and Killua, are two adorable little martial artist kids who are not exactly sociopaths. They care about their friends, and Gon has kind of an abstract allegiance to the idea of not murdering anyone without a really good reason. But he'll do just about anything else. There's not a lot separating them from the mass-murdering villains - and there's dialog making this explicit. They're just on different sides, is all.

There are no innocents in this series. At one point a character becomes bodyguard to a defenseless young woman; she turns out to be a rapacious collector of black-market human body parts, and is never in any physical danger against which she needs protection. The cast consists almost exclusively of people who would be villains or, at best, the morally-gray rival in any other series. Hunter x Hunter a bizarre mutant species of shounen manga, in which the essential phrase, "I'll protect you!" is never once uttered. It's refreshingly honest.

HxH has been one of my favorite manga since I was in high school. I am currently engaged in probably my tenth re-read of the York Shin Auction storyline, which satisfyingly combines nearly every shounen manga element I like. My only serious problem with it is Togashi's inevitably weird treatment of his female characters.

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The original Battle Angel Alita is still basically the best manga ever.

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:59:08 GMT

I am not interested in hearing any arguments to the contrary.

Because James Cameron's priorities are screwed up, the movie he's been allegedly planning to make since the 90s is going to focus on motorball, aka the Inevitable Tournament Arc. This is a mistake; the motorball arc, compared to the superior Tuned arc, has few scenes in which Professor Nova mounts his head on things, cuts his head open with a buzzsaw, attaches a spare head to his stomach just in case Alita cuts off his main one (she does), or makes a merry-go-round, which is evil.

Also, no Lou, Den, or old-enough-to-talk-Koyomi.

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What manga is this?

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 04:34:01 GMT

There's a set of twin girls who have boyfriends who are also a set of twins. For the first chapter or two it's note-perfect as a slight romantic comedy, but then one of the girls is abruptly killed in some sort of accident.

Everyone grieves. But the girl is brought back to life as a mindless zombie with a vocabulary of only a few words, and they're trapped in a house with it; there's some kind of physical threat over them if they try to leave. The dead girl's boyfriend, breaking down under the stress, becomes obsessed with the zombie, convinced that there is meaning in its gestures and words, and that it still loves him.

...I've just realized that this sounds like the sort of dream that I'd have. To clarify, I am in fact describing an actual shoujo manga.

I saw it on some scanlation group's site maybe eight years ago. The group primarily worked on shounen, and if I recall correctly they posted a warning to their readers not to be fooled by the saccharine nature of the first chapter.

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