I Am Completely Serious

When you feel extremely shitty and cannot sleep, the appropriate thing to do is re-read all of Battle Angel Alita. All of it. I just got to the Last Order arc where Kishiro got grumpy and started drawing dicks all over everything.

SERIOUS BATTLE ANGEL ALITA SPOILERS: Aliens tried to contact us by sending a giant dickbot to kill us with its giant dick, because their observation of human culture led them to believe that that's pretty much how we roll.

Kishiro really doesn't get enough credit for the solidity of his worldbuilding. Never before have I encountered such a chillingly plausible first contact scenario.

Fortunately there were a couple SPACE KARATE dudes, who SYMBOLIZE SHOUNEN MANGA, because, that is how shounen manga works, it has some fucking SPACE KARATE in it. One of them became the Bodhisattva of PUNCHING STUFF IN SPACE SO HARD IT EXPLODES, but then the other, whose hair is a bunch of smaller robot dicks, PUNCHED the Bodhisattva SO HARD HE EXPLODED along with his whole temple. Then he PUNCHES the giant dickbot SO HARD IT EXPLODES.

Young vandals, this is the sort of craftsmanship to which you should aspire. This is what it looks like when a dedicated professional draws dicks all over everything.

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.

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)

"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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

( Cut for length. )

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.

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: ( Read more... )

* This is a big spoiler: ( Read more... )

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.