I Am Completely Serious

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.

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.

My process for reading this manga is like this:

Me, reading an even-numbered-chapter: This manga is stupid. It's getting stupid all over me. I should have stopped reading when she killed [person].

Odd-numbered-chapter: OH MY GOD THAT JUST HAPPENED

Even-numbered-chapter: Aw, now it's all stupid again. Stop introducing unnecessary new characters and bring [person] back to life.

Odd-numbered-chapter: OH GOD THIS MANGA IS AMAZING AND I AM NOT BEING IRONIC okay, maybe sort of ironic

Chapter 65 is an odd-numbered chapter. It is possibly the odd-numbered chapter. I AM SO HAPPY THAT THAT JUST HAPPENED, IT IS GREAT AND WILL RUIN EVERYTHING.

(I am not talking about the fact that Cain Gil tells Jizabel Vincent "Get your personal life in order! Quit hacking up dolls!" Though that's pretty good, too.)

It's nice that there's a Forgotten Beasts of Eld manga, and everything, but you know what McKillip story was made for this? The Riddlemaster series.

Seriously, here are some character descriptions from book one:

( Various small spoilers below. )

In specific, Yumi Tamura's 7 Seeds. I just finished the part where she works a miniature zombie apocalypse into her apocalypse-already-in-progress. The zombie apocalypse is a homage to The Day the Clown Cried.

And it actually works.

There is no one more awesome than Yumi Tamura.

Mom has been teaching thegeekgene how to quilt. I think she should make a quilt like this.

that it has repeatedly forgotten that Break has gone blind in the middle of the arc about him/her coming to terms with said blindness.

I mean, LOOK AT THIS PAGE. WHAT.

Mochizuki Jun, you are even better than Kubo Tite at remembering your characters' disabilities.

And so I took two two-hour-long naps today, to make up for the fact that I haven't slept through the night in about a week.

THIS IS THE STUPIDEST BRAIN SURGERY SIDE-EFFECT EVER. WHY THE ARM.

I kind of wish I were having headaches or something; no one takes the damn arm problem seriously. Even I can't take it seriously.

I have this problem where I sometimes lose the ability to concentrate on TV. It was really bad when I was a teenager - from about age 13 to 18, I didn't really watch TV for more than 10 minutes at a time unless somebody tricked me into going to a movie. It was somewhat better by the time I went to college, but I would still usually have to leave anime club and stand in the hall a few times every meeting to rest.

It's just hard for me to process this stuff; I think my video card is, like, an IBM Mobile Chipset-of-Doom. Sleep deprivation probably makes it worse, given that I just tried to watch a two-minute YouTube video and couldn't make it through. I had to look away and fiddle with my teacup.

In terms of media I can mentally handle, I am reading Doris Egan's Ivory series; it's good! Not as good as City of Diamond, though. I also finished:

Jane Eyre - I liked the ending better than most of the book; the fact that Rochester is capable of being sarcastic while traumatized and seriously injured irrationally endears him to me. I have a Thing about this.

I discuss this book in a context of my own emotional responses because I don't feel I know enough about the other literature of the period to talk about it sensibly in its own context. I just feel insecure about attempting such things!

Andromeda Tales, Volume 1 - And I thought things happened quickly in To Terra. This would be four or five volumes worth of plot in another manga. And, oh my god, Keiko Takemiya! There is a female character in this, and you didn't put her on a pedestal to shout out a guy's name in anguish! She's armed, stoical, and has a mysterious past!

There are twin Children of Prophecy, one of whom is destined to save the world. But is it the one we think it is? Also, this takes place in a hostile desert land ruled by an evil king. I feel fairly safe in assuming that Yumi Tamura had read this before she started work on Basara.

The Adolescence of Utena (the manga) - This is significantly less compelling than the film, as was the case with the other Utena manga and the anime. I think it came last of all the Utena media in publication order, and it ends with an epilogue that seems intended to be taken as last chronologically - as in, trying to tie the series and the film together into a whole. I think. I probably need to reread it and rewatch the film to be sure.

Anyway, if that is the epilogue in question's intention, it feels earned.

1) I just made and ate gazpacho with a large quantity of raw garlic. My personal odor is presently pretty amazing.

It would probably be rude to take the leftovers to work for lunch tomorrow, wouldn't it?

2) The Disgaea manga is not very good. This is not really surprising - not everyone can get MATO or Himekawa Akira to do their licensed manga - but they could at least have found someone who could draw the characters.

3) This is a pretty okay headline.

4) Work is killing my soul. There are lists of personal property damages written on every flat surface, and on the backs of my eyelids. I feel as if no phone conversation is complete without reminding someone that they need to get something witnessed by a notary. When I ask Mom to pick up bananas at the store, I lay the receiver down feeling adrift: Even if she gets the bananas, they cannot possibly notarized. All meaning is dead in this world.

5) And my phone died again. That's the second one in three months.