I Am Completely Serious

Yes, I could have bought it off Amazon.co.jp, but where's the challenge in that? Anyway, I now own volumes 1-4.

I also bought my back-to-Japan plane ticket yesterday. Procrastination is magic - the price had dropped $150 since last time I checked, and there was a flight with only one connection. It's Northwest again, though. I hear if you collect enough We're Sorry We Suck vouchers from Northwest, they give you one of those little carts they use on the tarmac!

I have presents for everyone but Papaw. It is impossible to buy presents for Papaw, especially in Japan.

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There's a mangaka called MATO I like, because she did the art for the weirdly-dark but still-insanely-cute Pokemon comic Pokemon Adventures and shut up I hate you all. And a while ago I was looking blankly at the doujinshi section in Book-Off, and somehow - despite the fact that I still haven't memorized the kanji for Okano Reiko, despite the fact that I've expended a lot more energy on her - recognized MATO's name on one of the spines.

This was a Gundam Wing doujinshi called "Kaze no Yukue"/"Where The Wind Is". I've also been very slowly watching Gundam Wing recently. So I can affirm that, in context, this doujinshi is extremely hilarious. There are slight Quatre-related spoilers under the cut.

I can't scan stuff myself right now, but I found some scans from a couple of the stories on other people's pages - this page has stuff the "Shinigami-kun" stories, which chronicle the travails of a tiny Shinigami version of Duo attempting to prey on the normal-sized Duo, Heero, and Quatre. Parts two and three have translations, but part one - which features the Shinigami's rapture at discovering Heero's affinity for exploding - is obviously the most awesome. I have thus made my own very-crappy translation of it.

Edit 1/2/07: The scans below have been updated with some corrections from szzzt. Thank you, szzzt! May all your tiny Shinigami in the new year be cute and ineffective!



(Note that this is seriously a very crappy translation - there are a lot of places where I wasn't sure of stuff, and I completely made up Quatre's dialog on the last page. He's obviously raving, but I can't figure out what he's raving. (It involves eyes.) My notes with the raw text are in this .rtf file, if anyone wants to explain anything to me.)

Wow, this post has a lot of tags.

( It's 4:45 AM, and that means it's time for a ridiculous manga scan! )

Hidenori Kusaka and MATO do not like being asked to be "more product-focused"! They particularly do not like this to happen when they are engaged in the climax of the really angst-ridden portion of the plot! Hidenori Kusaka and MATO will make this very clear to the readers, by means of a less-than-two-page sequence completely divorced from the rest of the storyline!

I finally got volumes six and seven in from ILL yesterday, and I read them last night, and it was almost unbelievably slashy* and I was right about everything it just all came out at the end of volume six, and now I can completely truthfully say that I'm using Pokemon comic as one of the primary sources for my senior research.

I think I'm going to ruin some people on scans_daily's day when I've got some more free time; I don't feel up to explaining the awesomeness of this manga right now and without plenty of visual aids scanned in.

* and I looked up the illustrator, MATO, last night, and saw that she does Gundam Wing doujinshi for-Christ's-sake, so it's not my imagination

Today, I abuse inter-library loan.

Tomorrow... my trust as President!?!?

* see battle here