#i was trying to post evangelion art but it kept not showing up in the tags 😑 if this one does ill try that one again

[tomaturtles]

Oc brushtest doodles :)

[serndest]

Jenny Anxious (Loose Digital Line and Wash)

My first posted fanart, & my first artwork of a girl (at least, on my full-on art account)!

Actually, I sketched & painted it from last Tuesday to last Thursday. The rest was deciding what to type in my post🤓...& life😥.

I’ve been meaning to make a fuller drawing ever since last year, when I got into the show (Fun fact: I didn’t grow up with MLaaTR. Didn't, don't, and likely won't have cable🤷‍♀️). Personally, I like her self-conscious, slightly shy side.😊 I was really shy as a teenager and her hurt crying in Raggedy Android took me back to that time.😢

She’s one of the first girl characters that I find approachable & fun to draw: an expressive character, fun shape language, and lending herself well to great gestures.

Experience

Sketching so loosely like this was quick, fun, and freeing, but the painting took a while. Painting isn’t my strong suit, so I kept it as a simple complementary harmony (even the floor is a mix of red-orange, cyan, and black).

Behind-the-Scenes: Inspiration, Mindset, & A Self Critique

There were a couple of inspirations for this sketchier, line and wash style. Technique-wise I was inspired by the animation philosophy of Jim Tyer by having color hold the line drawings together. Art style-wise: I was inspired by the character concept art in the 1993 Neon Genesis Evangelion Proposal: watercolor/ink/gouache-like coloring, some with a single color around the character. (link if you’re curious: https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion_Proposal#Gallery)

Mindset-wise, I wanted to try to make myself keep moving forward. Once I moved forward, I would not go back to fiddle! From sketch/drawing to painting to even this post.

Now, self-critique: The coloring fortunately turned out fine, but the lines aren’t dark enough from a distance/at a smaller size, especially on the facial expression. I should try going back with 1) the same pencil brush but darkening up where needed [could be the quicker route, since no need to readjust to another brush. however, need to build up a bit more], 2) using a different, even darker brush near the end, whether Fresco’s Natural inker or Fine grain [no need to build up lines, but more of a brush behavior instead of a pencil behavior]. Another possibility: to try to keep my process quick, maybe I could try something like a Quentin Blake technique, with a loose sketch for laying out and free-flowing final lines. Maybe it will help hit 2 birds w one stone and help with my storyboarding drawing skills.🤔

Art Supplies

Software used: Adobe Fresco

Brushes used:

Sketch: Pencil [default Adobe Fresco pencil brush]

Jenny white matte: Small chisel & Natural brush 1

Paint:

Watercolor wash soft (Floor & mouth)

Watercolor wash flat (“Clothes,” hair & background spot)

Watercolor round detail (Tongue)

Basic watercolor (Skirt & belly button)

[asuka--langley--soryu]

Hey! I’ve watched all of the show, the nge movies (rebuilds included) and the nge manga and I was wondering if you know of anymore canon/offical nge stories or content. I’ve seen some light novel series at my local bookstore but in general idk if there’s more Eva stories and series out there and what’s actually worth reading. Thanks! I love your blog!

short answer: there is SO much (too much) nge spin-off content and for the most part all of it is both non-canonical and unnecessary. off the top of my head the only thing I wholeheartedly 100% rec is khara’s ‘until you come to me’ animation (amv?), which is really beautifully done and, also, free.

also ive drafted this post like uh......4 times now and kept accidentally losing it so VERY sorry for the wait!! if it seems a lil slapdash i was tired of writing the same stuff again and again lol

extremely long answer under the cut (and links will be in a rb). somehow this became a fully fledged field guide to nge spin off content bc i am physically incapable of brevity so w/o further ado or whatever:

ok so i’ll try to make this as comprehensive + comprehensible as possible but,as I said, there is a loooot of content and I, shockingly, have thoughts on most of it. let’s organize by categories

Manga:

Every single nge spin off manga is bad in shades and variations, ranging from ‘just kind of uninteresting’ to ‘genuine human atrocity’. Raising Project is probs the most well known and is one of my least favourite pieces of content that has ever been put onto this earth. it coalesces all of the worsts parts of both evangelion and evangelion fans and can’t even manage a decent art style on top of that. there is nothing redeemable about raising project.if you see a copy out in the world please do me a favour and tear it apart w your teeth <3

Aside from That, the other big ‘alternate universe’ manga are probably Angelic Days, Campus Apocalypse, and maybe Petit Eva. I do not care much for Angelic Days or Campus Apocalypse but they are definitely not as deeply repellent as sirp. Petit Eva is, as far as I’ve seen, kind of your usual chibi comedy stuff so if youre looking for something extremely lighthearted that might be for you? I havent interacted w Petit Eva pretty much at all frankly so I’m not exactly sure whats going on there.

Shinji Ikari Detective Diary is another AU manga which I have actually been meaning to read for like......ages but have never gotten around to. It’s (as you can probably guess) a mystery series, which I’m usually into, and I havent personally heard anything bad about it, so I’ll cautiously rec looking into it. if you do and find some good scans feel free to send me way <3

finally, there’s Tony Takezaki’s parody manga, which is just like...a bunch of parody/satire comics. I do actually own it (bc I loooovvveeeee genocyber) and the art is great and its genuinely funny (given you like takezaki’s weird, kind of raunchy humor). He has a comic making fun of fan service that ends w fuyutski beating the shit out of gendo as ‘real fan service’ so like. I do genuinely recommend this one.

Novels:

Not a true ‘novel’ but Eva 1 + Eva 2 is an anthology featuring some essays, as well as comics and illustrations. It is a lot of silly shitty fanservice though, so ymmv. I dont own it (yet) but its on my radar literally exclusively because of Obata’s fucking incredible cover art.

The actual ‘novel’ that youre probably talking about is ANIMA, which is a canon divergence exploring a future where Shinji managed to completely circumvent Instrumentality. I haven’t picked up the last volume since it came out last year, so I can’t speak on it as a whole, but I like ANIMA well enough to recommend it. It reads kind of like an extremely dedicated sci-fi/cyberpunk fanfic, frankly, with that same kind of wildly convoluted but entertaining plot and much more of a focus on idealised character interactions and the ‘wow cool robot’ of it all. Actually, its kind of entirely ‘wow cool robot’ tbh, or at least the best parts are, but Ikuto Yamashita (the writer) was nge’s mech designer so that’s no surprise.

the writing is nothing stellar and it can get fanservicey in a very eyeroll kind of way, but if you go in w reasonable expectations it’s pretty entertaining. like i said, it feels very fanfic but in a ‘200k wordcount crazy worldbuilding fix it fic’ kind of way.

ANIMA expands waaaaaAAYYY more on the evas, which can be cool but does definitely indulge in some ridiculous mecha shit and, i cannot stress this enough, a lot of deeply convoluted and absolutely fruit looped sci-fi plot shit. it does actually literally feature something called ‘Super Eva’ and iirc mari is a cat girl who pilots some kind of wolf robot so yknow... ymmv

theres a buuunch of illustrations included and all the concepts for the evas are very cool and the concepts for the kid are very bad. probably it should be illegal for him to draw asuka ever again

Video Games:

there are too many nge video games. way too many. did you know about the typing game??? what about the multiple STRIP mahjong games???? or the pokemon/tomogatchi game where you hand raise an angel from birth while playing as KAJI???? the detective game where kaworu straight up fucking human murders gendo???

they wrung nge for everything it was worth in the 90s, though ig having a million fucking titles was probs super useful for all that tax fraud

some highlights:

Battle Orchestra: this is the only one i’ve ever really played and it is very fun and very of its time. a pretty straightforward fighting game but ft a big combat polygon

Second Impression: this is the second nge game to be released and i am fucking obsessed with it. what i would not give for there to be a translation available. as far as I have ever been able to tell its sort of a vaguely canon ‘side story’ about joining a band and also befriending a new girl who eventually transforms into a giant fucking horrifying bug angel. its a kind of proto kaworu storyline but gross and i want it so SO bad.

rei ayanami raising project: this is I guess basically a pet raising game except the pet is pre-series rei ayanami. you get to choose what clubs and hobbies she has and the coordinating pictures are genuinely incredible and ill 100% be posting some later. nonsense but there IS a dress up portion so like. might be worth.

Girlfriend of Steel 1 & 2: GOS 1 has the rando brunette that you see all over the place and so like idk shout out to her i guess and if you want to know the context behind that feel free to check it out, but it frankly seems extremely fucking boring and also has GOD awful asuka characterisation so. pass.

GOS 2 is the one where you can kind of date kaworu and afaik thats the only notable thing about it

Angel Rising: this is the pokemon/tomogatchi kaji game and despite how baffling it is conceptually i do actually love the artstyle and am deeply considering playing it myself. also, it does apparently give some good insight into Kaji. a new english translation came out last march so its like actually one of the most accessible of all of these somehow.

Evangelion 2 has the ‘Classified Files’ which is a tenuously canon supplemental info dump, but god is in his heavens and thats all fully available + translated online so we do not have to bother playing Evangelion 2

Secret of Evangelion: I actually know almost nothing about this but ive heard it may have some interesting info on instrumentality? it is very VERY much On My Radar and may be worth checking out 

there are so, so many others but i am just so tired.

Animation:

There are a few Petit Eva OVAs which are all in the same silly slice-of-life style and seem mostly whatever except for an episode which is, as far as i can tell, entirely about up-skirting asuka so like. yknow what actually fuck petit eva

MORE IMPORTANTLY in like 2015ish Studio Khara had the ‘Japan Animator Expo’ where they released anime shorts made by a bunch of different people. it’s actually where me!me!me! came from, and plenty of other very very cool shorts were put out during the expo’s run. Another Impact and until you come to me were both part of the Expo and are extremely fucking good. Another Impact got a lot of hype, which was well-deserved but DID briefly spark a whole ‘live action nge’ thing which is, actually, my manchurian candidate sleeper cell trigger phrase. until you come to me is much less ‘flashy’ and didn’t get as much attention, but its so so beautiful and you should all go watch it immediately.

if you have managed to bear reading through this whole thing just know that you are my favourite and im giving you a lil kiss on the forehead

[popwasabi]

“End of Evangelion” and the tempting nature of oblivion

(TW: Suicide, Self-harm, Pain, Depression, Mental Health, Death)

“End of Evangelion” is a perplexing movie to say the least.

Not that the original classic anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion” series ends on exactly the most conclusive note itself, but “End” takes everything that transpired in the series and literally destroys it.

The films ends with Earth experiencing the long foreshadowed Third Impact and all of the planet returning to the primordial “soup,” as fans call it, with its main protagonist Shinji Ikari and comrade Asuka Langley Soryu as the only remaining humans left. A pseudo, twisted rebeginning of Adam and Eve’s Genesis.

The film is fairly divisive among the fans to say the least. Some fans consider it a masterpiece for its nihilistic tone and mind-bending illustrations of body horror and others despised it for being too dark and confusing with no clear explanation of anything that happened in the film’s events. Hell, even the movie’s fans have a difficult time explaining what exactly happens in the narrative.

I was somewhat in the middle with it after I watched it the first time not super long ago. It was certainly abstract, and I like plenty of stories that don’t make it easy for me to understand. The animation is definitely the franchise’s best and I enjoyed the character moments between Shinji, Asuka, and Misato. But it was also, as stated before, dreadfully confusing and still to this day hard to makes heads or tails out of with its plot.

But, as with more than a few movies I have revisited this year, 2020 helped me contextualize one aspect I think the story is concretely trying to get across.

(We’ll save discussion of “Rebuild” for another day...)

At my lowest points not long ago, I had this frequent vision that would crawl across my mind.

I imagined being up in the clouds on a beautiful sunny day, but I wasn’t floating or flying. I was plummeting, falling like a bird without wings at a speed that would definitely kill me once I got to the ground. But I never imagined actually hitting the Earth like a meat-bagged, human sized asteroid. I only ever imagined the falling part. The wind reaching a terminal velocity and the air rushing past my body and you know what look I had on my face?

Happiness.

I was confused a bit by why I kept imagining this moribund fall into oblivion over and over again. I wasn’t suicidal, though I certainly have had thoughts of self-harm plenty of times before and general detachment from life. But why the fuck was I so happy? I’m about to die after all!

What I have come to realize in recent years, as I’ve developed a better understanding of my mental health and what makes me tick, it wasn’t that I wanted to die so much as I wanted the freedom that comes moments before it. The feeling of finally letting go and letting fate/gravity do the rest.

Years of my life failing at various aspects of societal expectations and career obligations from not being able to get the girls I wanted to date so badly, relationships ending poorly, not quite applying myself the way I should’ve in college, and working a plethora of unfulfilling jobs since graduation made me yearn for that release. Just that feeling of saying “fuck it all” and giving in to the void.

I wanted to stop feeling out of control. The way the world is structured often feels like you are on a wild, rapid river flowing in one very stark direction but you desperately want to go the other way. You keep fighting and fighting it and realize after a while you are just swimming in place, you tire out and either float where the river wants you to go or you drown. I wanted neither of those things, I just wanted control and unfortunately part of life is accepting that a very large percentage of it is beyond your power to alter.

2020 made this feeling starkly apparent once again as we were hit with a once in a lifetime global pandemic that has killed 2.21 million people and counting. As common people struggle to find ways to handle the loss of loved ones and the fallout from economic instability those tasked with protecting us have more or less ignored the cries of needy. Hell, they’re fucking miffed that we would even have the audacity to ask for $2000 of our own fucking tax dollars to put a band-aid on the situation. Combine this with an extremely volatile two-party system and late stage capitalism, we are about as out of control as ever in terms of how much we actually can course correct our destinies in a period like this.

It is why so many irony-pilled millennials and gen z-ers are posting dank memes about meteors colliding with the earth over the course of the year. We’ve lived through two recessions, two forever wars, and now a pandemic in our lifetimes while paying off our crippling debt with slave wages and yet boomers still wonder why we are near universally depressed as a generation.

(Seriously, everybody needs a fucking therapist right now...and also to dismantle the fucking system that’s making us depressed!)

This is what I feel is the real heart of “End of Evangelion.” The movie is a lot of things, obviously, but, after the events of this year and looking back on the more depressing parts of my life, I feel this film is about the tempting nature of oblivion. Giving up when things are clearly beyond your control so you can get that sweet but twisted, fleeting sense of freedom from it all.

Director Hideaki Anno didn’t feel too entirely different about the state of life when he made this series and certainly by the time he made “End” he was in a very dark place.

So, quick history lesson, “Neon Genesis Evangelion” debuted in 1994 and quickly became a classic among fans of anime and the giant mech vs monster genre. Critics loved it for its exploration of mental health and depression and of course plenty enjoyed the hell out of it for its giant monster/robot escapism as well. Fast forward to the conclusion of the series, critics and fans especially are far more polarized. I won’t try to explain exactly what happens in the ending and frankly I don’t think anyone can, but that confusion led to quite a bit of outcry by the fans.

Hideaki Anno, the series’ director, received tons of hate mail and death threats following the series conclusion. The fans hated how abstract it was, how it had an undecisive ending and chose to dive into the mind of Shinji instead of conclusively describing the events of the Third Impact with plenty going as far as to say he had “ruined” his own series for them. This made him unfortunately quite depressed himself over the ending he felt creatively fairly content with.

(I think it should be clear who Shinji is mostly likely a stand-in for in this anime...)

The fan reaction was toxic to say the least and all too familiar for many creatives who didn’t adequately satisfy the insatiable vapid needs of their fandom. Anno did not take this well to put it lightly. A man who was known as a delinquent in high school and expelled from the Osaka University of Arts much earlier in his life, and dealt plenty with his own bouts of depression, Anno had plenty of his own demons to sort out and quite clearly wanted to explore that mental state in “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

I’ll be honest and say that I myself was not fond of the ending either when I watched it the first time as a freshman in college, and even went as far as to describe it as everything that was wrong with anime to friends in the years that followed for a while. I felt it was confusing and “fake deep,” existential for no reason other than because it just wanted to and people were “dumb” if they liked it.

When I rewatched it again as a much older adult when it came on Netflix last year, I found it much more fascinating and interesting. A sort of abstract introspective into the mind of a troubled teenager, who I had written off many years prior as a “whiny baby.” Though I wouldn’t say I completely understand it still, I get it much more now and I think it has a lot to say about depression and mental health.

Unfortunately, most fans did not have that reaction back then and as a result Anno made his true conclusion “End of Evangelion” as a response to that negativity.

(You’re welcome, nerds.)

As mentioned before, “End of Evangelion” is an extremely nihilistic film that seems to one up each dark moment as you traverse its spiraling narrative. It’s a film where things never get better. If you go into it blind expecting that big last minute heroic save the day moment, it’s always teased and never comes. Things just end very badly for everyone. Nobody gets a “happy ending.”

While the ending to the original series is strange for sure, it does end on a light note that can be interpreted in a number of different ways but ultimately positive. With the way fans reacted to it Anno decided to write a big “fuck you” to them by, in many ways, smashing his toys so no one could play with them again. He even went as far as to splice in the actual hate mail he received into the movie to quite clearly show to the audience, as their favorite characters met their grissly ends, that this was their fault.

(“Gee, I wonder what that was all about.” ~ a fan walking out of the theater back in 1997.)

In a way though, Anno created something strangely beautiful from that reaction. “End of Evangelion” is about giving up in some ways and accepting our inevitable doom. There are no easy answers, no workable solutions to achieve a happy ending because sometimes in life there isn’t one. Despite last ditch efforts by Misato, Shinji, and the crew of NERV the world still ends through the Third Impact. But tonally it’s not quite pessimistic; it’s actually positive, in a very twisted sense of course.

Set to the song “Komm Susser Tod” by ARIANNE, the film’s apocalypse can almost be described as a celebration. With people “popping” and turning into the primordial soup they all largely have smiles on their faces as they kind of get what they want whether it’s a desire to reunite with loved ones, to be with people they have crushes on, or happiness that they have sought for so long in the embrace of others. Everyone’s depressed! But now they are happy because it’s finally all over, they don’t have to give a shit anymore.

As the planet lights up like a Christmas tree, there are images of suicide and death that rapidly cross the screen in the form of the Angel’s final transformation but again, nobody is truly sad about it. They all have some kind of twisted smile or joy that they get from it. It’s a shocking film, if you’re not already prepared for what’s going to happen, and provocative to say the least.

(Can’t decide if I recommend watching this high or not...)

I had no idea what any of it meant at the time when I watched it several years ago (I watched it well after I had seen the original series), and to be fair there are many ways fans have interpreted what exactly took place in the film and have debated endlessly on its meaning for decades now. But at least in my interpretation, after everything we’ve been through this year, “End of Evangelion” to me is about the sweet release of not giving a fuck anymore.

Whether it’s about Anno feeling that way about his own life or the expectations of his fans or both, the film quite clearly doesn’t care about what people may or may not have wanted for Shinji and the NGE characters and is perfectly fine with the way it all comes “tumbling down.”

(He just wants to be with his boyfriend, guys.)

This past July 4th, city fireworks shows were prohibited in my area because they wanted to limit mass gatherings due to COVID but this didn’t stop people from buying plenty of their own to fire off. In what amounted to a collective “fuck you” to everything and 2020, beginning pretty much exactly at dusk people started firing off their at home lightshows like they were mortar gunners in World War I and did not let up until well past midnight. The entire Southern California night sky was lit up not to unlike the thousands of crosses that filled the screen during the Third Impact of “End of Evangelion” and though it could certainly be interpreted as a moment of people patriotically going “Yea, America!” that night, my head canon was much different. It felt like tens of thousands of people across the region just saying “Fuck it” into the night sky at everything; COVID, our horrendous government, police violence, pending World Wars, environmental disaster, and our collective impending doom from it all.

As these fireworks hit their zenith around 9pm I broke out my phone and started playing “Komm Susser Tod” from the movie and it felt perfect. Everyone just wanted to feel that freedom in the moment, that freedom of not giving a damn anymore. To be removed from expectations, from control, from hatred, from pain and it was kind of beautiful in a sick way.

And that’s what “End of Evangelion” feels like to me now; kind of beautiful in a sick way.

(Not saying the LA skyline looked like this exactly but it felt like it haha...)

There are still many ways to interpret Hideaki Anno’s cult classic, and it’s part of its charm but I think the take away fans should have is definitely not that suicide is ok but that we get it. We understand why people have those feelings and why it feels freeing to desire the void and oblivion. It’s a pity that the series most toxic fans didn’t get that clue through the original finale but Anno, not a person who likes  being shoved around, clearly created perhaps the most twistedly beautiful “fuck you” to that in anime history.

As we enter 2021 all I can say is it’s ok to feel like this, it’s ok to desire freedom from the relentless gloom and doom of the world and people’s prying expectations of what they think you “should” be. No one blames you. At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to survive the apocalypse we have zero control over, so the least we can do is be a bit nicer and considerate of one another. 

At least it’ll make the Third Impact more pleasant whenever it eventually comes...

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Congratulations on surviving 2020! Have fun in 2021...

[beneaththetangles]

Snow White with the Red Hair: An Appealing Image of Respect and Honor

Our guest post today comes from author Audie Thacker, whom you can also find writing about anime and other topics at Speculative Faith.

-----

I almost didn’t start watching this series.

When I first saw some notices about it, I had either finished or was close to finishing Yona of the Dawn. Seeing how much the girl in the image for SWRH looked like Yona, my first reaction was that it was some kind of cheap copy of Yona, so I dismissed it as something not worth watching.

Why did I finally give it shot? Maybe just because those notices kept showing up, but even that’s not really much of an answer. For whatever reasons, after a few days or weeks of spurning the suggestion, I finally gave in and gave it a try.

And from the first image of the first episode, I was drawn to it.

That first episode opens with a very close view of a dew drop on a leaf, and reflecting in the dew drop was the sky and the tops of several towering trees. It’s a very well-made image, displaying how much care had been put into the art and animation for this series.

After that, what kept me hooked was the interplay between the two main characters, Shirayuki and Zen.

Romance stories often rely on certain tropes, things that are common in such stories, situations that can provide tension between the two love interests until the end when they finally realize that they don’t want to live without the other. For example, the misunderstanding the makes one person angry at the other, the ex who shows up out of nowhere just as the two are starting to make some progress in their relationship, or the secret that one of them keeps from the other that they fear would ruin the relation if it should ever come out.

What struck me strongly after a few episodes of SWRH is that these kinds of typical tropes are either missing, or given a creative twist.

There is one early episode that plays on the idea of being spurned, where it seems as if Zen has banned Shirayuki from the palace. But one of the things this series does differently is that instead of having Shirayuki wallow in this misunderstanding, going away to feel miserable and alone, she determines to hear from Zen himself about what’s happened, and does so even when it seems like her own life may have been threatened.

So, I watched one episode after another, finding myself very much enjoying the series, until at the end of the first season I was ready to put it among my favorites. In fact, SWRH is the subject of the first review I sent to Speculative Faith.

What was it about this series that drew me so strongly? Why even did I keep thinking about it, pondering what I had seen in it?

After all, while this is a pleasant series, most viewers might think it’s not a deep series. A person watching it would likely not put it in the same category as an Evangelion, or a Fullmetal Alchemist, or a March Comes In Like A Lion, the types of series that have complex situations and complex characters. SWRH is for the most part just the slow unfolding of a nice romance.

Yet it’s how that romance unfolds that I found so entrancing.

I’ve mentioned one thing that drew my attention—the lack of the normal sources of conflict in such romance stories. But there’s more to this. What I was watching was two people who treated each other well, who respected each other, who honored each other’s efforts, who trusted each other, and who wanted to help and support the other in any way they thought was best.

This is a day of hyperbole and exaggeration. It’s everywhere, and it’s wearisome. An ad for food can’t just be about how good the food is, but about how someone is so obsessed with it that they can barely function without it, and must scale mountains and cross deserts and even fight karate-kicking koalas in order to have this food. I usually find I’m kicking against that kind of thing, trying to be more thoughtful, or maybe cynical, in my views of things.

So, it seems as if I’m going a bit against myself when I write this: SWRH is one of the few, the very few, romances I’ve seen, either in real life or in fiction, that has left me thinking that if I were in a relationship with a woman, I would want it to be like the one in this series, that I would want to treat her with the same kind of honor and respect, as well as affection, that Zen treats Shirayuki.

In our culture, relationships are a shipwreck.

For example, the divorce stats are horrible, and that’s dealing with divorce and separations merely as stats, and not as real-world events with real-world and far-reaching consequences.

But I don’t even have to look only at stats to see how bad things are. I can look at things I’ve seen and heard my own self: people dating each other who seemed to care only for themselves instead of the other person, husbands and wives who speak to each other with irritation and even anger, times when seemingly innocent words sparked a fire of disagreement between a couple that did not soon die down, separations and divorces that seemingly came out of nowhere. All of it has shown me a rather bleak picture.

While things are better in the church, they really do not seem to be much so. Perhaps, as some sources indicate, the divorce rate among those who are “committed Christians” is not as high as among those who are considered “marginal,” but at 38 percent that still seems rather a high percentage.

One little anime series is not going to cure these things, but at least for me, it’s given me some things to ponder on. Here are some examples.

There is an episode where Shirayuki is taking a test to see if she’s able to be a court herbalist. It’s a test that lasts a couple of days, and she has to watch over the plants in a greenhouse. At one point, the head court herbalist tells Zen that as a prince of the country all he has to do is to say the word, and Shirayuki will be accepted into the position no matter if she passes the test or doesn’t.

I’d guess that many people might consider that if Zen really did care about her then he would do anything in his power to ensure her position, even throwing his weight around a little to make sure she got it.

But that’s not what Zen does. He’s seen her prepare for this test, and knows that she would not want the position if she could not earn it honestly. Plus, he knows that she’d be very upset with him if he did use his authority in that way. He respect her efforts and her wishes, even if that may mean she doesn’t pass the test.

In a later episode, Zen and his crew travel to inspect a fort, but when they get there they find the soldiers are seriously ill, so along with Shirayuki they have to find out what’s happened.

Shirayuki and Zen work together to fix this situation, but in their own ways and with their own expertise: Shirayuki uses her knowledge to find out what’s making the men sick and is able to get them back up and going again soon, while Zen and his people set out to deal with the bandits who were really behind the cause of the fort’s problems.

But maybe even more significantly, this episode shows that Zen and Shirayuki can correct and even scold each other without the other person taking it personally and getting all offended about it. Shirayuki tells Zen to stay away from the sick soldiers while she’s trying to learn what’s happened, and while he does kick against it a little, he eventually accepts the advice and stays away. Later, when Shirayuki has exhausted herself in taking care of the recovering soldiers, Zen gently scolds her a bit for not asking for help when she was wearing down.

This is something else that can be uncommon in real life, where the person being corrected can all too often take the correction as an insult, an attack, and become offended at the one daring to tell them they are wrong. And this problem is all too often made worse when the person doing the correcting will do so in a way that seems to belittle the one being corrected. When the person doing the correcting is demeaning and insulting, or prideful and superior, that can make the correction all the harder to accept, even if it is needed.

The scene that really caused me to begin thinking the first time I watched through the series was the proposal.

We have certain popular images of how a marriage proposal is to be done. Two of those images are what I’ll call the Buffoonish and the Beggarly.

By Buffoonish, I don’t mean unintentional mistakes—I can understand any man making an unintentional buffoon of himself in such a situation—but an element of silliness and even foolishness that’s inserted on purpose into the proposal to make the occasion seem less serious than it should; for example, the man who has “the question” pop up on a screen during a sporting event, or the man who has “the question” written in the sky by an airplane.

The Beggarly is clearly shown in jewelry store commercials: the man and woman are walking in the park, chatting about this or that, then suddenly he drops to one knee, looks up into her face with puppy dog eyes, and with a pleading voice pops “the question”, and of course the lady in the commercial thinks it’s all moving and romantic, and the ad ends with the two of them kissing while the jewelry store’s jingle plays.

Only one word is needed for me to sum up my reactions to these two images…

Barf.

When Zen knelt before Shirayuki, it wasn’t as a pleading puppy, and when he gave words to his feelings for her, he didn’t make a joke out of it. There was a necessary gravity to the situation and to his words, an acknowledging that what he’s saying and what he’s asking of her were not insignificant, but rather that they were serious and important, that the moment and their responses would bring great changes to both of them.

A proposal can be an occasion for joy and merriment, but for a man to make a joke of a marriage proposal or to act like a beggar is to demean and disrespect both the occasion and the woman he is asking.

The Bible’s relationship advice is often kinda sparse, usually addressing people already married with advice like, “Husbands, love your wives”, and, “Wives, submit to your husbands.” Zen and Shirayuki are not yet married, but in showing two people greatly respecting to each other, honoring each other’s positions and efforts, listening to each other, supporting each other, and sharing with each other their desires to walk by each other’s side for the rest of their lives, this story does give us a fairly good example of how that advice might look in practice.

=====

Audie is a Christian of undetermined denomination. He hangs out at Reformed Anime Hub a lot, usually peacefully. Usually. Like all writers, he likes to pretend to himself that he’s a writer, and sometimes, on rare occasion, he even actually writes.

[ajora]

Since I’m here and running on 3 hours of sleep and the inability to brain, and youtube decided to recommend this to me, let’s talk about the 90s era of anime fandom.

I was a bit peculiar in that I always sort of knew what anime was. The Mysterious Cities of Gold aired when I was in elementary school and I was so in love with it that I... really ought to make an entirely different post on it, heh. There was also Maple Town and, when I traveled with family, Robotech and Star Blazers. I pulled Arcadia of My Youth (the 1982 Harlock OVA) off a Blockbuster video shelf when I was a pre-adolescent and that pretty much sealed my interests in space pirates. And when you see enough animation, you get to identify certain markers and patterns that Western animation lacked. So, falling in with the local university anime club in the early 90s, at the dawn of publicly-available internet, was kind of a given.

Evangelion was one of those shows I saw almost immediately after the episode aired in Japan (for mid-90s values of “immediately”, which was, I think, a week or so after it aired? and then the tape was shipped to the US to be rented out in Japanese food markets*). It wasn’t dubbed or even subbed at the time**, the group I used to hang out with had a guy who would summarize what was being said for us. And because it started off as typical shounen mecha anime, I lost interest really fast and didn’t keep up with it.

Wow did Evangelion end up not being at all a typical shounen mecha anime. It wasn’t until years later that I gave it a try again.

* Fun fact about Japanese food markets in the pre-torrents days: there were ways you could get subscriptions to manga series, serials, and so on. Just fill out the form and turn it in to the mart owner, who would put in the order for you. I got my Orpheus no Mado collection from the Houston Japanese food market near where I was living at the time. It was also how I kept up with Utena while I was in art school.

** God I have memories of sending money orders for fansubbed anime VHS tapes.

[dewbond-blog]

Don’t @ Me: Ten of my Anime Opinions

New topic time! Welcome to Don’t @ Me, where I rattle off a list of anime opinions that I have. From the hip, with little actual thought put to them. These are raw opinions that could change tomorrow, or never at all! Most all of it’s an excuse to do an easy blog post and keep things up to date. My first ten are after the cut!

1. Fanservice shoved into an anime where it doesn’t belong can ruin a good series (Fairy Tail) but Fanservice, in general, has pretty much kept the anime industry alive through the all the highs and lows. Tits and ass move merchandise, accept it.

2.  Neon Genesis Evangelion’s impact and effect on the anime industry is marrow-deep, and it should be praised for that. It still doesn’t forgive the fact that Shinji Ikari is an idiotic main character and the story is so far up its own ass it should have choked to death.

3.  People hate Sword Art Online because it got too popular way too fast. It’s ok to not like Sword Art Online, and it’s ok to lambast the ripple effect it has had on anime and the Isekai genre in general. Sword Art Online is a cornerstone anime for a whole generation of fans and it deserves respect for that.

4. Darling in the Franxx’s 21st episode completely pissed away any of the goodwill it had by chickening out and not committing to the “making babies is important” message of the story, which was actually an intriguing and interesting thematic thread whether you agreed with it or not. That is the worst thing about that show, not the “make babies propaganda,” not the Ichigo character, not the fact that it was Evangelion fanfiction.

5. I fucking HATE Shinmai Maou no Testament, but its depiction of its ecchi fanservice is probably the best in the entire genre and it has my respect for that. But it is also a “me too” cash grab trying to chase High School DxD‘s success, but refuses to do any of the groundwork in creating memorable characters and an interesting story.

6. If Netflix wanted to, they could completely dominate the western anime industry by dumping all those millions to get Japanese studios to create new seasons of favorite shows. “Haruhi Season 3″ or “Devil Works Part Time Season 2” exclusively funded and on Netflix would almost certainly cripple Funimation and Crunchyroll.

7. One Piece will probably end up being the stronger story and manga, but Naruto’s character arcs and themes are very well done, and it should be praised for taking risks with some characters and not keeping to a status quo. (LOOKING AT YOU FAIRY TAIL)

8. Mobile Suit Gundam either needs to reboot the Universal Century timeline or put it to bed for good. It’s not interesting to new viewers, depends too much on decades-old anime that haven’t aged well, and is way too complicated to really give a damn about.

9. Fate Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works should have had the courage to either keep the Rin and Shirou sex scene from the Visual Novel in or completely rewrite it. After everything they go through in that story, the fact that they don’t fuck is more ridiculous than a blonde hair guy using swords as projectiles.

10. Another World with my Smartphone was actually a pretty fucking good Isekai story in comparison to some of the stuff we’ve gotten in recent years.

This was fun! I’ll probably do this again sometime soon! Please feel free to share on your blogs some of your “from the gut” anime opinions!

[joh-gaming]

Accidental Storytelling

I wasn’t going to talk about this , especially in this blog, because the one known evidence I have, keeps getting ignored by certain groups and it isn’t video game related anyways. But this time it is.

I will try my best to provide visual evidence of what I’m talking about, but I may just be reading too much into the short. If you’re interested, please continue to read, if not, then just enjoy that amazing short.

The short starts with the Shooting Star show praising JUST D.Va, they don’t even talk about the others. Mind you, these scenes used amazing 2D art to showcase the battle, aftermath and press conference. It is there where we can clearly see some type of animosity.

D.Va is hugging all the attention, D.Mon looks fed up as if that’s how things usually go. It is interesting to see a character that the community has built up just as much as the development team, get a short showcasing her personality traits. I don’t want to say we were wrong in our assumptions, I mean the whole Dorito Gremlin and Hana being kind of trollish seem part of her “kit”, but you know who she reminded me of in this short? Futaba from Persona 5. I honestly realized that if I were to use arcanas to define Hana, I would pick The Hermit.

Sounds contradictory to what the arcana itself represents right. I mean Hana is the one that gets the biggest spotlight, she’s the one they use for all the marketing and everything, when the hermit tends to avoid the spotlight. But as the short goes on we see her alone. Yea there’s that guy with her who’s name I can’t even remember (Dae-Hyun) but he is nothing but a plot device in this short. Sure you can write your own story about him, I mean it’s not like he’s an empty slate, he clearly wants to be part of the glamour media showcases while Hana calls it overrated. The short is meant to say that even the greatest need help, but did she? She did it alone, the whole thing. And I’m OK with this, except this wasn’t intentional.

When you listen to the director’s commentary, you can tell they were going for "lesson of the day” but it failed because the character took over. One thing needs to be clear about Hana, she’s a prodigy even after the retcon (however minor it was). That and the fact that there are no models for the rest of the team, but just like we saw them in 2D we could have gotten something on that vein at the end, instead she was back at base alone, while media kept spinning the results making her look even more badass. I think she prefers it like that because it paints a target on her, leaving her team “mostly” safe.

I wouldn’t even blame the rest of the team for being jealous of Hana (I wouldn’t unless she got credit for something I did) but to leave her alone after that close call? They really don’t care about her and it seems like she knows. Another thing that makes her comparable to Futaba is the headset. I’ve seen plenty of Futaba fanart with a majority using the headset for music, in context she uses it to block everyone out. Another thing is her commitment, her drive is another shared trait.

If I were to have a character be a catalyst for change (to Hana’s personality of taking the responsibility all by herself) I would use Mei, Tracer or even Soldier 76. Those three sound like people she would actually listen to, we already have the in game talk between Mei and Hana anyways.Tracer remaining positive regardless of what she’s been through and Mei herself as well.. to a degree. (no pun intended) and Jack having failed already and trying to do things alone again (until he ran into Ana) could also help Hana realize she can’t do it alone forever.

The point of this post is not the “flaws” of the short, I don’t think it has any. My point is to highlight the importance of character building, a good character can take over the narrative you’ve created for them. I know this because I make characters, I write stories and not every character I’ve designed for a particular purpose goes and executes it, they usually do something else. I did mention I wanted to talk about accidental storytelling before but the character wasn’t a video game character, well that character is Asami Sato.

She was conceived and designed to be a spy, a villain no less. Just look at her visual design, she does give those vibes and they even started working on that but here’s the interesting part, the delivery of the lines by Seychelle Gabriel more than anything else, changed the tone of what was going on in the scenes. While the intention might have been to get close to Korra in one way, she ended up getting closer to Korra in a whole different way. Many groups say this was forced, but I don’t think it was. It was accidental and when they saw the fan reaction (the positive one) they just went with it but didn’t commit to it in the show.

It’s interesting ‘cause many point to season 3 as the starting point of their relationship while I point to season 2. Sure Asami was having her own problems in season 2 but one thing started to become clear. Asami always supported Korra while Mako had trouble saying yes. Mako had different views on just about everything Korra did, this might have also been accidental. Of the two, Mako was a far more defined character. His background had way more nuances while Korra was a bit controlled since they protected her most of her life. So when you have the idealistic Korra clashing with the realistic Mako, it makes sense but it was portrayed so often that it kind of backfired I think.

I’m getting sidetracked here, this was supposed to be mostly about D.Va’s short, but the case remains. Accidental storytelling exists and it is usually for the better. Nevertheless, it doesn’t come from one person, in the case of Overwatch, the community makes the game way better than it actually is (I think its gameplay is competent, but most of the hero kits are poorly designed and terribly balanced, not to mention the game shouldn’t exist on consoles and they even managed to make loot boxes popular in mainstream games) and the voice actors brought a lot to the characters.

Honestly I hated Sombra when I finally saw her, all the build up for THAT? I was very disappointed. (The short was great though) but then Carolina’s lines gave her a particular personality, she actually is a troll. Then the fans started doing some fun stories with her and the talon crew and she’s currently one of my favorites. Anyway, this is just my opinion, hope you find it at least somewhat interesting and if you have examples of accidental storytelling, feel free to reply.

P.S.

I do get the whole Evangelion vibe/inspiration with the Shinji and Rei types next to Hana, Hana herself being kinda like Mari I assume (only saw the first Evangelion series without Mari) and D.Mon being Asuka.

[drink-n-watch]

This is a post that first appeared on Bloodthristy Little Beasts as part of a collaboration with Jordanne. However, as Jordanne has recently made her blog private I figured I would repost this top 5 on my blog since I did enjoy writing it

I hope you guys enjoy it too. It’s exactly what it says on the tin, The 5 first mangas I remember reading. You should know that I read all of these in French so I can’t vouch for their English translations but I assume they’re EVEN BETTER!

5) Gunnm – Battle Angel Alita

This steampunk despotian high action adventure with heavy religious overtones and a badass female cyborg heroin was my first manga and my favorite for a long time. Yukito Kishiro has said in interviews to have been strongly inspired by Frank Miller’s work and it shows. There’s this sense of foreboding and classic “noir” aesthetic that seeps out of every page. I must say, as a dorky teenager with occasional goth tendencies, it really spoke to me.

The narrative can get suffocatingly bleak at times. Even in its brightest moments, the story aims for the lesser evil rather than anything close to good. You may see hints of Madoka or Yuki Yuna in there. I would call it a precursor to the magical girl narrative and Alita certainly fits the tragic heroin trope. This manga is a classic for a reason.

I must admit, that I did try to reread it recently and just couldn’t quite get into it like I use to. I’m not sure which one of us hasn’t aged well. It could also have been a question of timing. This said, I still smile whenever anyone mentions loving this manga and if you are interested in brutal dystopian sci fi, you will certainly find something to enjoy in this manga.

4) Blame

Blame was amazing. It’s another dystopian sci fi…I guess I have a type. I’m gonna recommend Evangelion next!

I still love Blame. Not necessarily for the story or characters, but for the presentation. Blame is brilliantly executed in manga form. You see, the story is somewhat nebulous. We are thrown in the middle of an ongoing quest (if you will) with no establishing narration or exposition. In fact, there is little to no exposition at all throughout the series. Most of the story has to be inferred through the images and dialogue. Also…there’s almost no dialogue! You can go through entire volumes with roughly 3 pages worth of text.

To top it off, the images look like this:

Dark line art, with fluid detailing and heavy emphasis on shadows….

Blame is an experience. There is absolutely no way to explain the impact of reading this manga to another person and no way to capture it through anime. It’s one of a kind. This series opened my eyes to the potential of the medium. I had never seen anything like it before and suddenly, possibilities seemed endless.

I enjoy comic books in general – and find that they allow for experimenting with narrative styles more readily than in conventional formats. However, even in comic books, I had not encountered anything quite like blame. Even the black and white (by necessity) images and smaller manga page size seem to add something to the narrative.

When I was recently asked to pick the manga that describes me best – this is the one I picked. I also have to be experienced first hand!

3) L’Homme qui Marche – The Walking Man

The Walking Man is a one shot manga that you should read… OK so what it really is, is a haiku in manga form. At least it is to me.

This is a simple story, almost a non story really, that follows a businessman as he goes for a walk through his neighbourhood and just contemplates on life and existence. It’s basically a simple plea to stop and smell the roses. A love letter to all the little miracles that we take for granted. Most of it is one again conveyed through images…

Look it’s not that I don’t like reading words or anything but if you’re going to have a manga, might as well take full advantage of the visual aspect, right? No listen…I said I can read!!!

Honestly, if you’re having one of *those* days at work, you should find this book. I was perhaps a bit too young to fully appreciate it at the time but I could still tell that it was something special. A little compact shard of serenity and peaceful contentment to carry around with you through those harsher times.

2) Naruto

Yup, one of the first manga I read was Naruto. And I still like never ending shonen with genki male protagonists. I have since moved on to other titles in the genre (HxH being my favourite) but Naruto is what opened my eyes to one of the most prolific and popular manga and anime types.

I loved it. It’s what you think about when you think stereotypical Japanese comic. Super powers with weird names that get shouted out in battles. Occasionally awkward translations. Huge casts of characters. Never ending story line. Ninjas!!! The straightforward format, happy go lucky mood and slapstick comedy felt light and easy to digest for my younger self. It was a much brighter and more lighter counterpart to those american superhero comics. And much funnier too.

Then things got real… Naruto mixes in some truly brutal scenes and unthinkable betrayals with it’s lighter moments, in a way that american comics hadn’t quite caught up with at the time. I remembered being floored and staring at pages in disbelief. By now, this is somewhat par for the course. HxH or FMA take it much further. However, back then it felt novel.

Sure you could probably pick up Fairy Tail or One Piece for a very similar experience nowadays. For me though, it was the young Hokage wannabe that started it all. In fact, as I’m writing this, I’ve convinced myself to go reread them. See you all in 6 months!

1) Akira

Akira was one of the very first animes I ever saw. This is probably a common experience for a lot of cough, older, cough fans. I did like it. I liked it quite a bit but also…I kinda felt like I had to like it. It was a bit odd and not that easy to follow, but I was afraid that admitting it had some serious plot holes would simply prove that I “didn’t get it”. And I desperately wanted to get it. At the time, in my neck of the woods, there weren’t really any alternatives. You had a handful of animes to choose from and Akira was the gold standard. If you didn’t like that, you just didn’t like anime. For some reason, little me had firmly decided to like anime.

It wasn’t until some time later that I stumbled across the full collection of large bound full colour volumes at the library and decided to give it another go.

It changed everything! Of course, trying to condense 6 very large volumes into a single movie was going to be difficult no matter what but the experience was simply not the same. The rich story (um…dystopian sci fi….) the layered and complex characters, the intricate political background and mesmerizing plot twists, all of it had completely been lost in my viewing of the movie. I had to go through these manga to finally get it but once I did… I never looked back. 

Extra mention

Natsume’s book of Friends

I actually finished Natsume’s book of friends volume 21 yesterday – sigh…… so it’s hardly one of the first I’ve read. I just want to mention it because, well I love Natsume and mention it whenever I can. Please read Natsume – it’s beautiful. Also, it is NOT dystopian sci fi. It will give you a new appreciation of the little miracles all around us. 

There you have it. These five series managed to capture my imagination and kept me reading manga for years to come. I don’t know that they are my favorites but I certainly did enjoy all of them. Maybe you will as well.

Actually, I also once found a hardcore eroge mange on a bus… It was clean (as in not soiled…) – don’t worry. I didn’t include it here. Maybe I will next time.

Irina’s First Five Mangas This is a post that first appeared on Bloodthristy Little Beasts as part of a collaboration with Jordanne.

[vanilla-blessing]

Ownership of Pure Illusions in Flip Flappers

In a recently translated interview, Kiyotaka Oshiyama, the director of Studio 3Hz’s Flip Flappers, confirmed that all of the distinct worlds within the show’s dreamlike alternate reality called Pure Illusion were based on the subconscious of different characters, but kept secret which places matched which people. 

“It’s not mentioned in the story who’s world each of the different episodes’ Pure Illusions are, but if people watching were thinking “I wonder if this world is that character’s?” then that’s just what we were aiming for. Of course, as the creators we have some sense of which is which, but we’d prefer to not say it outright. There are various hints mixed into the visuals, so hopefully people will try to puzzle it out themselves.” Oshiyama (tl by @HugBdrill)

I’ve posted my scattered thoughts on this topic before, because exploring characters through symbolism and metaphor in the environment is Flip Flappers’ entire deal, and the show makes it challenging but not difficult to interpret the meaning of Cocona and Papika’s adventures. For the sake of mahou shoujo science, I’ve collected my best guesses as to who’s Pure Illusions were who’s during Flip Flappers’ run. Spoilers for Flip Flappers below if you haven’t seen it yet.

Ep 1  - Cocona

The first journey into Pure Illusion dumps Cocona and Papika into an abandoned version of Cocona’s hometown, buried under an enormous amount of ice and snow. Despite appearing cold and barren on the surface, they discovers that the snow tastes sweet on the inside. It’s an almost embarrassingly direct look into Cocona’s self-imposed isolation, but once Papika inserts herself into her world, the ice starts to break.

Ep 2 - Uexküll

After following Cocona’s flubber-bunny Uexküll into a vacuum cleaner, Cocona and Papika (wearing an Alice In Wonderland dress) grow rabbit ears and tails and develop a fixation with biting hard objects. They venture through a giant vacuum cleaner and are later saved by a very masculine Uexküll. They’re dust bunnies under the influence of Uexküll’s outlook on the world, where a vacuum cleaner is a dangerous threat and Uexküll’s self-image projects himself as some kind of bearded Martian Manhunter.

Ep 3 - Sayuri

The first two Pure Illusions were easy to connect, but the third one is where clues stopped showing up immediately. After getting desynced during the impedance process, Papika is separated from Cocona and thrown into a Mad Max-inspired desert. The girls battle each other with Bruce Lee’s martial arts style before undergoing an incredibly extended and gratuitous magical girl transformation, complete with embarrassing one-liners and dramatic posing. They fight with flashy, bright attacks while random bystanders meaninglessly commentate in the style of action shonen. Although most western viewers notice the Dragonball Z and Mad Max nods, there’s nobody immediately obvious to connect these inspirations to. We learn in the last episode that (a version of) FlipFlap’s scientist Sayuri has collected what can be identified as Mad Max and Sailor Moon posters in her room, which matches her love of anime and cinema that was only vaguely hinted at before.

Ep 4 - None They get sucked into a hole in the sun but we never see the Pure Illusion inside.

Ep 5 - Yayaka

Called the “horror episode” by some people, the Pure Illusion that shows up in this episode borrows well known atmospheric horror elements of movies like The Shining, lightning and rain, jumpscares, clock towers at midnight, and unnaturally moving girls with shapeless faces. However, these leads go nowhere because there’s nobody we know for sure that has any interest in horror. Thankfully, there are even more influences - it also represents a clearly repressed, rule-based society, with extremely overt yuri overtones. The all-girls school (with the exact same layout as their school) also proves to be the most dangerous adventure they have yet. This matches Yayaka pretty well, since she was raised by a literal cult and forced to do missions for them her entire life, but still has not been able to connect meaningfully with her only friend, Cocona. While inside the Pure Illusion she shows obvious embarrassment and brags about her tougher mindset, which would account for the more dangerous and gloomy tone. At the end of the episode when Cocona breaks the loop by ringing the bell at midnight, it coincides with Yayaka starting to break her routine mission parameters with Asclepius, and beginning to open up to her only real friend.

Ep 6 - Iroha

This is the first time Flip Flappers openly states that the Pure Illusion they entered was in fact someone’s mind, but you can sort of tell right from the start. Even though their upperclassman Iroha’s name was never said until this episode, the first location they fight in is obviously painted and resembles the paintings we just saw her making. A literal portal to Iroha’s traumatic memories of her auntie cements this as Iroha’s Pure Illusion. Also, Iro means color, which is another theme of this episode - switches, fades in and out, and violent clashes of color are everywhere. Flip Flappers in general does these effects all the time, but this is the episode where subtle color shifts are most important.

Ep 7 - Cocona again

Same empty hometown as the first episode, but instead being of filled with snow, it’s lush, bright, and filled with different versions of Papika. As Cocona wanders around trying to find the right Papika, they ask her outright: What is Papika to you? Does it have to be her? Is Papika just a friend? This episode even sneaks in the famous train shot from Evangelion to further drive home its self-reflective nature. In the end, Papika rescues Cocona and reveals that she had been searching for her all along, and Cocona was the one who was lost.

Ep 8 - Bu-chan A futuristic city created by a tiny scientist that is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt. The world exudes an obvious obsession with robots and butts. Tiny scientist bemoans the destruction of his life’s work, and describes the futility of rebuilding when everything will just get razed to the ground next week. Maybe Bu-chan is a bit more bitter towards the girls constantly damaging his brain than he lets on?

Ep 9 - Toto/Yuyu

This one is probably the most of a stretch, since there’s not much to really go on. It’s a featureless world with no walls, just a white floor and white ceiling that strongly resemble what we see of Asclepius’ labs. The only thing inside it beyond empty space is the excessive defense mechanisms around the fragment itself. The only real theme is that it’s confined, and the only unique aspect of it is an ever-present echo, which is especially odd given the lack of walls. Confined and dangerous draw similarities with what’s probably Yayaka’s Pure Illusion, which put together with the echo would fit the naming convention of her coworkers, the Amorphous Children (Yuyu, Toto, Nyunyu). As artificial humans they lack defining characteristics which would explain the lack of, well, anything. At the very least it establishes that they have minds like steel traps.

Ep 10 - None Nobody goes into Pure Illusion in this episode.

Ep 11 - Mimi

We’ve already seen this Pure Illusion in Cocona’s dreams, but it’s a very safe bet that she’s been visiting what remained of Mimi -  a reflective pool showing her dual nature, and a boat that sails through every other Pure Illusion. In this episode she breaks holes in the real world to show her omnipotent power and lack of respect for barriers. Later on, Cocona and Papika fight Mimi on bits of land covered by her favorite white clovers, which are extremely relevant because flower language is rad as hell and they paid special attention to it.

Ep 12 - Remix Mimi makes it clear that she was responsible for the recurring themes of the witch claw and red hands that made every Pure Illusion dangerous. She revives every defeated enemy and teleports everyone throughout the previous Pure Illusions at will.

Ep 13 - Salt We see glimpses of it in episode 12, but Salt’s Pure Illusion is the monotone gray, realistic world grounded in modernity that Cocona wakes up in. He’s a dour guy, so it contains none of the fantastical elements of any Pure Illusion and it’s filled with pessimistic versions of everyone else. What a fun guy.

Ep 13 - Cocona and Papika In the last scene, we see Papika take Cocona into a cloud of rainbow butterflies that fly freely between Pure Illusions and lead them to the real world.

I have absolutely no idea what the PI’s in the ED are supposed to mean, or who they refer to. Don’t @ me about them.

-qb magical girl reporter @queuebae

[kendrixtermina]

My Abuser’s been convicted

He’s not going to jail, though he did get a sentence on probation. But he’ll have to spent years working on a remore Island to pay off the fines & debts. It’s as if he were going to jail. 

If weren’t if it was just this, like, he didn’t get convicted for the actual abuse but more a peripheral consequence thereof that came back to bite him. 

My emotions are kind of in a twist over this & how this fits into the moving on with my life. 

TRIGGER WARNING

The Backstory

He’s not being convicted for abuse - indeed, the best thing I can say about him is that he never broke a law. Never left any bruises, never did outright improper touching, kept me fed & provided with material possesions adequate to our overall living standards... and treated all this like it was something he deserved a badge for, or a horrible undue burden I had imposed on him. 

He had so little of a personal connection to him, most of what I know about his life I puzzled together from his few non-horrible relatives and what my mom was told. I never knew he played chess though I took an interest in it in third grade which came to an end over a soul-crushing experience. I didn’t know where he was in the birth order ( Second Born - Which makes some things about how my brother and I were treated and even named very creepy) I only recently found out that his father cheated with & eventually remarried a woman my father’s own age. There’s another thing I can’t disclose for ethical reasons, but, he kept humiliating me in situations related to my mathematics grades till he squeezed all joy out of the subject for me and in the context of what I know it proves that he just never had the slightest shred of empathy for me. 

Well, a parent is supposed to protect their children from their own bad experiences. Not recreate them out of sadism and jealousy. Heck, Im pretty sure he only f***d my mother to breed smart children that would perform well academically, never stopping about how his family is all academics, alternating between calling me stupid & inept, a lazy waste of talent or a person who was “smart but heartless”. I’m nothin but an object to him. He has: 

Threatened that my mom would kill herself if I don’t do his bidding. 

He’s forcibly grabbed me and showed his hand into the cleavage of my dress to supposedly show off to my mother how innapropriate the dress was. 

Expected me to hug & comfort him after spats with my mother. What am I his girlfriend?   

He’s reacted to me being bullied (and once even coerced into undressing by bullies!) by blaming and mocking me. I can still hear him calling me a clown, an embarassment and a “Make-Me-Laugh-Thing” and going on on how I basically couldn’t expect anything else

He called me a “rotten pile of nazi entrails” at age 11 for being unhappy enough to consider running away

He pushed me toward hobbies he liked & then tried to push the same ones onto one of my sisters, essentially “replacing” me post puberty. 

He’s continued to threaten to leave us & replace us with adopted children because we’re supposedly such “ingrates”

. If you cry in front of him, he’d accuse you of “threatre”.

 I’ve heard my mother cry about how his eyes would never sparkle as much for anything related to his family as they did for his job, how she knew he didn’t love her, was afraid he’d leave her without money & only valued her as a baby factory. He tried to push her into adoption & terrorized her children to pressure her.  I’ve come home to constant arguments and objects being thrown around. 

When I graduate from highschool a year ahead, he say there was “nothing to celebrate” because it wasn’t all As & proceeded to humiliate me in front of my siblings. 

He would frequently tell lies about me to my family (Sometimes I have nightmares about this)

He’s been known to throw me me into walls  as a teenager

Once, while he did that, my head very narrowly missed a hard metal radiator. that night, I crept into bed with my mother at the age of 14 because I was so terrified he’d KILL me. Now I know that he never would have, but he kept going on about how everything was dangerous & filled our heads with fear & how we’d kill our siblings if they as much as bumped into hard objects and he said that exact same thing over and over again, “Careful with hitting your heads”. 

I was kept locked & isolated from other children & forbidden from leaving the house or going on school trips/ sllepovers until age 11

Blame me for everything that went wrong in the family (including one time one of  my sisters - then a toddler! -  gave herself a second degree burn. )

Destroyed my favorite toys to terrorize me, repeatedly threatened to kick me out or destroy my computer with all my writing on it

Never read anything I wrote, called it “satanic” and that it was “all lies” because I “knew nothing about people”. Repeatedly shamed me for my introversion & used it against me

called me ugly, crazy, fat, selfish, inept, stupid, a tool, immoral... anything in the book. After a while he noticed that “inept”, “selfish”, “pointlessly rebellious” and “easy to provoke”, as well as terrorizing my mom & siblings hurt the most & weaponized the shit out of it. 

Said I would never get laid & how ugly and unfuckable I am. Yes my own father. 

Once I DID get laid, of course... well, he didn’t use the word slut but he basically called me a slut.

Bisexuality is a phase, liberalism is a phase, atheism is a phase... I am a phase, because apparently, he gets to decide what the real me is that he supposedly “loves” despite repeatedly equating queer people with pedophiles atheists with nazis and sex out of wedlock with degeneracy. 

Tried to have me institutionalized/removed from the family over bogus claims. They ran all possible tests & didn’t find anything, not that I found this out until years later... years that I basically spent resigned that I was some kind of defective mutant freak incapable of bonding with other humans and basically hating myself from ages 9 to 13. (As to how I survived and what happened at age 13, I’ll just say “Art, Sarah and the Internet” and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”, respectively)

The constant condescension, dismissiveness, mockery,  and twisting of my words

Et cetera et cetera; That’s only what I’ve been unable to forget.

Think Humbert Humbert if he liked adult women & had his creepy obsession with procreation instead of youth. The exact same self-serving pretentiousness. That’s him. That’s exactly him. It’s like his throat spits acid instead of words; I used to say that if the happiert person in the room listened to him long enough, they’d end up suicidal. Or, if we go for maximum hipster, this hits the nail on the head:

But very later I have learned

To accept some friends of ridicule

My whole existance is for your amusement

And that is why I’m here with you

To  take me with your eyes

Given how tumblr’s full of  terrible stories of families where sibling bonds were poisoned & people wound up with depression, anxiety or CPTSD I got off pretty fucking lightly with my damn procrastination/self-motivation problem  (by the way a very common result of controlling or stage parents.) that I might be kinda sorta getting a grip on. Helps that I had at least one decent Parent.  

20 years I constantly felt like I was totally replaceable. The man definitely wanted his money back on me, or whatever stepford robot daughter he expected to get when he first put his filthy dick into my mom. 

Every single frustration is his life (that still ended with him being a wealthy, respected Doctor, mind you) he took out on me and the others. But he hated me the most (Though he was pretty shitty to mom and Isabel, too. The others, he simply neglected. Both sucked in its own ways.)

When I was younger, all I wanted with all the inrresponsibe childish stuff I did at times was just for him to get that he HURT me, not for his sake, but my own, to prove that I EXIST have FEELINGs as more than an object basically.

I never wanted his approval or love (I rather had the opposite problem that I felt gross doing thins he might approve of) in fact I felt uneasy around him early on and my first memories of him are of him treating me capriciously and pushing me to be his mini-me. (By contrast my earliest memory of my mom involves songs and  funtime in a garden and her explaining to me what a tulip is), but I guess I thought I had to “win” and prove my reality to him.

 I read up on narcissistic abuse on the web, I saw an university councellor who implored me to move out, but the decision was mine, when I ascertaind my theories so to speak. I realized that it was not that I was explaining badly or failing to be stoic enough, but that he was provoking & playing sadistic games with me. I was talking to someone who was going “lalala” and using everything I said or revealed as a weapon against me. I was just exhausting my energy there, and making my feeling catharsis & justified depending on his fucking aknowledgement. Thee’s no convincing someone who’s actively refusing to hear. 

When I realized that he would rearrange reality to fit is view of being alwys right, saw in full awareness how uch he bent and warped his story to suit his whims no matter what I said, that my revenge fantasies had value of catharsis without having to be implemented in real life, that they were, in fact, wasted on him, I left.

I realized that he was the only one who treated me as worthless and how much my other relatives loved me. I found out that I am perfectly typical specimen of a somewhat uncommon but not altogether outlandish personality type. 

On the occasions that we met, I did my best to ignore and avoid him, and he’d try to force me into interacting with him on the pretense of “politeness” and did the usual “Your bad for not forgiving me” shtick. 

After a while, I reached the point where I could mostly forget about him and not spiral into this blood vessel popping rage every time something reminded me of him. It was nice to not be mocked or yelled at or have new things I liked spoiled by him. I actually lost a bunch of weight just from all the frustration-induced-comfort-food-binging and family-dinner-avoiding-late-night-snacking i was no longer doing. Getting rid of him must have added years to my life.I’m sure moving out added years to my life But I didn’t want to give up on the things he already spoiled & posoned with impossible expectations, so  I was still living with the consequences of what he did to me every day while he wasn’t. 

Sometimes he came up as a logical cause - and nothing will change that not even this new developement - even though I tried & reached a point where im bored of discussing him and just want to forget he exist/ not think about him

So what happened

Well, what happened is really fucking poetic. 

You can’t come up with this shit. 

Sometimes RL writes the best stories and outdoes all fiction, or perhaps fiction authors understand the human condition well enough.

Tax fraud. He’s in trouble for tax fraud. Exept, he frauded no taxes. He pushes all his paperwork, organization and finances off to his wife and has been doing so for years. Can’t even make a bank transaction, never bothered, never lived on his own. Used to call it “traditional family” and “archieving more as an unit” but what it actually is is, he does his job (which he enjoys way more than wife or children) and mom does everything else, including part of his job - not the actual doctorring, but, he ouht to have paid a secretary for everything she’d do. He’d monopolize her for hours to talk job. We had only one parent, except when he came home, then we had zero parents. 

Finances, Parenting, Housekeeping, her own job... all this was done by mom. Lazy bastard never lift a finger, and everyone thinks he’s such a hard worker. He sure does he’d never shut up. 

So, my mom’s sister got struck with horrible disease, going from a hard working single mother to complete invalid in a matter of months. Terrible injustice, because she was a really good person. So, at the same time, the financial crisis hits spain - no jobs or future for her daughters. no help from their father cause he was a serial deadbeat. So, what my mom did was, reevacuate them all to Germany. They have their own place now, one of my cousins is now a nurse & earning her own cash for the family, but, at first, his meant having four extra people living in our house one of which was running up huge medical bills, two girls, my aunt and my grandma, all eating, showering, needing everyday commodities... 

My mom says in hindsight she should have taken a loan but what she ended up doing, perhaps carelessly, was give false numbers on her tax returns. To feed & care for her sick sister and unemployed family members/ now functionally parentless nieces, get the good education and stuff. 

She blames herself a lot more than I blame her; It was kind of a “chaotic good” act IMHO, if there’s a price there’s a price I see they can’t have everybody not paying taxes, but, she did it to FEED HER FAMILY, like, people are more important than money. I believe she was justified there (or I guess that’s my chaotic neutral showing). 

But - She was beating herself up over this & possibly risking the house loans & getting her husband into trouble - it was his money after all, police came & pretty much raided their house for the money, it’s a wealthy Doctor so they think he pocketed the cash for simple ol’ greed and blew it on gold chains or cocaine or something. Nope. He had no clue. (does he ever? He doesn’t know basic shit about any of us.) 

That alone didn’t do it - Instead, I suspect he rather enjoyed his favorite game of playing martyr and my mom, having a conscience, was gonna take full responsibility and accept jail. 

But here’s the kicker: They didn’t buy it. No one would believe that he wasn’t in on it, that he didn’t know what he was doing with his own money. They thought he was blaming his wife to save himself. That he pushed everything onto his wife to the point that he has no clue about his own finances seemed so silly they didn’t buy it. Like many times when I complained about him, his level of jerkass was believed to be too ridiculous to be true - It seemed more likely to them that my mom was simply taking one for the team. Personable, humbly pudgy lady, hardhearted slimey smartass who get lawsuits for being callous to patients before? Who’d you suspect of tax fraud? All the times I heard “Well he’s a doctor and you’re just a crazy little girl” turned upon their head. 

Irony is he’d never do it. And I say that as someone who hates his guts. Same reason he’ll brag about how women dig him and the children he makes but would never actually cheat - He’s too in love with the idea of his own rightheousness. He’s too proud. It’s what his ego is built on. In contrast to his wife, he’s all about them rules wether they’re moral or not. 

And, this is my suspicion because I didn’t wanna pry here, but, I guess he acted like not dumping her over this meant she’d sold him her soul, the usual “ingrate” shtick he pulls whenever he’s displeased- He must have said something outrageous and kellyanne conway levels of reality-bending - 

And mom flipped. At least, she says things happened to make her spill things she’d held back long. I’m not sure if she said this or if he arrived at this on its own, but, he seemed to arrive at the conclusion that this would not have happened if he hadn’t pushed everything onto his wife & actually been there for her. 

As my mom puts it, lots of stuff came together - an ex-co worker conspiring to run out of an old job, me not talking to him, the tax problem... and he couldn’t find a rationalization other than “You’re an animal and there’s a point to what everyone is saying”, and perhaps for the first time, he saw reality. She says it got through to him what he did not me, and by extension what he did wrong with everyone else.  Apparently, things have been rather different since that day.

He’s actually staying out of my way. I don’t have to worry about him inviting himself to my wedding. He’ll be working at the new job he took to collect the money he owes the ministry of finance, but isn’t insisting that my family comes along. So often, he dragged us across the country for his career & took us all away from our friends, but it seems that this time, my sisters get to keep their friends & mom gets to get the new job where she holds a leading position & is well respected. She even said he’d understand if he’s missed that particular train for good. 

Also when little Jana came to visit him, he seemed to actually spend time with her & organize a great & eventful holliday for her. 

  At least, that’s what my mom says. I’m so use to his fake promises of change, his false remorse, and his flashy gestures of ingratiating behavior - How would anyone ever know the difference for sure?

Especially the vacation for the child, he’d dne things like that before (regardless of wether the children actually enjoyed what he’d planned for them), flashy gestures to prove his “goodness”. flimsy words that “everything will be different”. 

I just don’t want to engage with it personally. 

But you know what makes me believe something changed? Because the person telling me this was my mom, speaking in her own voice - It’s not the dictated Voice Of God(TM), his majesty demanding that everyone accept his version of reality or accept the label of a selfish terrible person. 

It’s her own perspective that I’d sometimes hear when she was angry, a perspective that’s more optimistic than mine & wants to see the good in people; She doesn’t agree with me on everything, she still thinks his deeds were the product of ineptitude rather than malice, entitlement and objectification, but, it’s not like I need her to agree with me. 

The difference is still startling. That wasn’t his Paradigm or what I had experienced so far at all, looking at me leaving as a selfih capriciousthing I did to hurt them or he helping my fuckup self out and i better be grateful. 

She told me instead to convey her utmost thanks to the therapist lady and that moving out was one of the best things that ever happened (!!!), that this was super strong, mature & unexpected of me(aparently she and grandma had written me off as the family spinster and liable to set myself on fire besides XD ...Fair enough, actually, there were quite some misadventures ^^°) That she thought I even looked different since then when my facial muscles weren’t all contorted in anger & more of a glow  beingthere (which she attributed largely to my fiancé so far - and sure, he helped. I cannot stress the awesome enough.)

There was a total aknowledgement that I didn’t owe him shit and that the shit of the past justifies my not talking to him, no pressure, no judgement, no hope or expectation that we would ever get along, just - there were more gushy positive things that I can remember right now. I don’t wanna toot my own horn, it’s just what happened. 

And I’m not sure what to do about/with it. 

What now

It’s a strange feeling and I’m still processing it. I’m only now writing  post though I’ve known about it for a few days. I’ve just been doing things, talking to peeps etc....

In true 5 fashion I couldn’t interact with my BF after that and took a long nighttime walk for cooling/processing (I talked to him right after that tho)

It might seem callous - but, I’m unable to feel anything other than callousness towards this person, because else I could not have survived his constant guilt tripping. The dude just activates my eight, if you pardon the typology speak. 

All I feel is “Serves you right.” Serves you right for being two-faced, bit ya in the ass didn’t it?

Because, he spent all this time convincing the world he was this perfect person, and now they all believed him, and there’s no way Mr. Perfect don’t do his own taxes. 

I understand that it is objectively wrong for someone to be convicted of something he didn’t do. Maybe this is a childish idea of vindictiveness or justice, but, at its heart, that’s not what it’s about. It’s just that in a way it’s a validation of my reality and that I wasn’t making him up, things I kept saying... “If you don’t wanna leave him, then let him do his own laundry for a few weeks” 

It’s that it was for years like everyone thought he was perfect and I was the only one who could see his filthy side and now it’s out in the open. I hit him back. I made him understand. I got him to ignore me back/ leave me in peace. I helped my family be treated better - as a child, I had a hard time accepting that I couldn’t do that, that it wasn’t my place and that the last thing my mom needs is someone else asking her to pick sides or telling her what to do. It was a hard, humbling maturation process with ongoing slipups there to, like, detach, and leave it t me siblings & mom what was their business & none of mine and respect their choices. 

I stopped caring about the other things, too, at least, when I left. I didn’t want or expect him to ever aknowledge my world, my perception or feelings. It’s kind of some of the things I wanted once but didn’t want to want anymore and even if I did, it’s all burned & charred and I’ll never be able to show that person the trust necessary for an intimate relation, not after all the lies, fake apologies that couldn’t be bought without accepting that he was right bout everything after all, and all the emotional expressions so far being used as tools to hurt & control me. I still have nothing in common with him nor any reason.

After the conversation, I felt... purged, the awknowledgement that I somehow do have power, but at the other hand, this doesn’t really change anything for me. 

If he changes - great for him. Great for the family members still attached to him. But I don’t care about HIM, I have to care about me because he never did and nothing changed for me. 

The scary shadow that’s embedded itself in my consciousness so much I still hear it after 2 years of avoiding the man (half of which has been spent happily engaged) may no longer have any sort of physical counterpart in reality. 

So what does that mean for me? theres not a real enemy to push against. or there may or may not be it shouldn’t depend on tht. its not like i believe or need to believe in automatic karma

All in all, I have a feeling like World War II just ended and the Americans just arrived. On the one hand the bad guy were punished... not perfectly, but enough, hard enough to make them look pitiful, I’ve survived, but everything is still in ruins and irretriavably decimated. 

I never want to say never because I aknowledge that it is always possible for me to learn - I thought it was unlikely I’d ever get married and even less to a man, but I said it might be possible, and now ive come across this situation and this person where it makes perfect sense and is totally worth it. If I had said “cia, doesn’t fit my profile” the moment he suggested it, I would have missed this. 

Then again, I also hold that conflating  0% sure and 99% sure is one of the great errors of humanity - there is such a thing like reasonable doubt but that does not mean knowing nothing. Knowing almost everything is not knowing nothing. its just a fact of how our universe works sometimes - what is the position & impulse of an electron at any given moment? Can’t say, it’s uncertain to a measurable degree. 

We can’t disprove that there isn’t a big pink sucker on the backside of pluto but we have no reason to suppose it either.

And at that level of certainty,have to say  I would be unable to forgive the man or even feel anything other than hatred toward him if he wore the crown of thorns

I can’t ever trust him & emotionally reveal myself to him, too often has he twisted my words. It’s not about being obsessed with him either - there’s 7 billion peeps on this planet he’s welcome to make friends with im just not one of them. I’m generally not friends with people just for the heck of it. 

I mean, I get it. Mom says she may have been too hesitant to let me go, the counselling lady said something in that direction, I might be biased as her daughter, but, actually, I think she was right in her estimate/ justified in that reluctance, like, I get it, I’m a vaguely shizoid hyperdweeb and peopling is hard for me. Even if this high grade quality snowflake relationship there’s work - as hthere always seems to be, realistically - and don’t have this natural sense for what people expect. 

But though I reserve the right to declare this some premature epiphyny just in case and for personal effort, I’m... and a spent a while debating & deliberately decising the word choice here.... beginning to dare think that I might be able to like, handle that & make peace with it like I’ve made peace with my inner unapologetic  snowflakey emo child back in my teens. 

[tigerlover16-uk]

Anime I need to watch (April 2017 Update)

Wow, has it been a month already? Okay then, time to give my thoughts on the anime I’ve seen this month and then update my list accordingly. A LOT more to go through this time since I’ve been on a bit of a movie binge

Okay, first off I’ve just finished the Dark Tournament Saga of Yu Yu Hakusho, so I’m up to episode 67 out of 112. I got through it a bit slower than I thought because other stuff kept coming up. I’ll still give more of my thoughts on the show when I’m done, but I’ll say I really liked this saga. It was very well written, had some great fight scenes, and the story and character development were very compelling. If I have any complaints it’s that the saga sometimes felt like it dragged on a lot, it did feel like it took forever to get through even without the breaks I took. Also, Genkai suddenly showing up alive out of nowhere at the end of episode 66 was stupid and nonsensical and it better get a good explanation, because right now this just seems so forced and unnecessary.

In between that though, I also got the DVD for the series The Devil is a Part Timer in the post, so I took a day off to binge watch all 13 episodes.

The Christian part of me wonders if I should really be watching a show starring Satan as the main character and portraying him as actually not that bad a guy. But then again, the geek in my is just shrugging my shoulders and having fun with such a ridiculous premise as the devil working in a McDonalds parody. Weird feeling in the back of my head aside though, the show was pretty fun and charming. The characters were likeable, the humour was fine and overall it was just an enjoyable show through and through.

It’s not perfect, the second to last episode felt pretty underwhelming, and the final episode while not bad didn’t really feel like a final episode, though that epilogue was nice. And yeah, this feels like a story that was meant to go on longer than it did, but it’s been four years and no second season so I’m guessing we’re not getting any more of it in anime form. I guess I could give the light novels or manga a try, but it always irks me whenever I get into a show only to find out it was ended sooner than it should have been. But apart from that, I didn’t have any big problems. It’s a good show. Not amazing, but it was fun and a pleasant way to kill some time, and sometimes that’s all I need. Not much else I can think to say and I have a lot else to talk about.

Like I mentioned in my last update, I got the DVD for the movie Only Yesterday, one of the few Studio Ghibli films I haven’t seen yet, which only got dubbed fairly recently. So I watched it at the start of the month aaaaaaaannnd... it wasn’t for me.

Now before anyone comments, Only Yesterday wasn’t a bad movie. I get what they were going for with it, being a series of events from someone’s life and to paint a picture about what sort of person the main character grew up to be as she’s trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. I can definitely appreciate the value of what the film was going for... but, the whole thing was just too disjointed and not always that interesting for me to get all that invested. Looking back, I kinda find it hard to find the words to describe this movie and how I feel about it, it was certainly a unique experience for me I’ll give it that and I don’t regret watching it, but unlike all the other Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen I don’t really see any reason to come back to this one. It’s not even that I don’t like grounded slice of life stuff, Whisper of the Heart is easily in my top 3 Ghibli films. I can’t say Only Yesterday was bad, because it really doesn’t feel like a bad film, but it’s not something I care to watch again.

After that I think the next anime movie I saw was Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys, one of two Advanced series Pokémon movies I missed out on. This one I liked more... but it was just okay. Really, I don’t know what else to say about it. The story was okay, Noah was a good character but everyone else was just okay. The action and visuals were okay, barring some conspicuous cgi. Deoxys and Raquaza were okay. Really, it just like one of the more average Pokémon movies I’ve seen. I’m still glad I saw it, but I remember as a kid hearing about it from people and knowing a Pokémon I really loved like Rayquaza was in it, I guess I always thought that it was something bigger and more interesting than it was. Ah well, that happens.

Hmm. Two meh movies in a row. Let’s spice that up with another Ghibli film. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which was much more up my alley. I love the art style of the movie, it worked perfectly well for an adaption of this Japanese folk story and just really stands out among most other anime movies I’ve seen. I liked the characters and the story, while there were a few questionable parts here or there, was pretty good, and I did feel sad by the time things came to an end. It wasn’t really the best Studio Ghibli film I’ve seen, but it certainly did a lot more for me than Only Yesterday.

Okay, I think the next film I saw was Akira. And that was... um... ... what the heck WAS it?

Seriously, I still don’t completely understand what I watched. I’ve heard this movie was adapted from a pretty long manga that wasn’t even finished when the movie was released, and that a lot of stuff had to be condensed... it shows.

I’ll say that the visuals were great and when I understood well enough what was going on, the movie certainly had plenty of good moments. But it feels like there were a lot of scenes or moments haphazardly slashed out of the film at various points that would have made the story feel more coherent. I could understand the gist of what was going on after giving things some thought and seeing the whole film, but the story and various characters feel underdeveloped or just not explained well enough at times, it was hard for me to get invested and just enjoy the movie. It wasn’t a bad experience necessarily, but I think this is one classic that’s really not for me. I think I’ll try to read the manga at some point, but I honestly didn’t quite get the film. And this is coming from someone who was able to mostly follow Evangelion.

And after that bit of weird grittiness, I watched another Pokémon movie. Pokémon Heroes. This was honestly the only original series Pokémon movie I had never seen before the cast change, since I just never got around to it for some reason. And I gotta say, I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t as great and epic or had as much depth as stuff like Spell of the Unown or Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, but it was a really charming movie with some genuinely touching and sad moments. It was well animated, the villains didn’t have a lot of depth but they were more fun to watch than a lot of movie villains. Latios and Latias were pretty interesting, and Ash was at his best here. The whole thing with Ash possibly getting kissed by Latias at the end is a little weird, but hey, it wasn’t as creepy as say that kiss scene from Sonic 06, and this wouldn’t be the first time the anime has had a Pokémon crush on Ash. Ain’t that right, Bayleef? Apart from that though, this was a fun movie and I’d gladly come back to it sometime soon.

Wish I could say the same for the next Pokémon movie, Hoopa and the Clash of Ages... boy that felt hollow.

You know, I don’t really mind that the movie didn’t have a strong story. If they wanted to make a movie that was all about spectacle and showing off as many legendary pokemon in a big battle as possible, I’m all for that. There’s nothing wrong with a dumb movie, as long as it’s something fun. But honestly, the plot was so thin and unengaging, that when it got to the clash of legends, everything just felt kind of... bland. Like, there were good moments, but overall the fight just felt empty and not as spectacular as a battle of this scale should be. There was no sense of scale or tension, it was just... meh. There were a lot of interesting ideas for a story here, but everything felt underdeveloped and that it would have made more sense as a long arc of the show.

And then there were plenty of stupid things in the movie, worst of which being that literal deus ex machina of a climax. I’ll give Pokémon the First Movie this credit, it had a lot of dumb moments, but the movie at least felt interesting and enjoyable. This... ehh, I just couldn’t find it all that satisfying. And I really wanted to enjoy it. Honestly it’s not often I finish a movie feeling pretty empty, but here you go.

Thankfully I did have time for one more Pokémon movie, Jirachi Wish maker, the last Advanced generation movie I hadn’t seen. And luckily it was decent. Nothing great, more around Destiny Deoxys level quality. In that it was really average and a little slow at parts, but it had plenty of good moments to it and it was overall charming, which felt like a needed breath of fresh air considering I watched it immediately after Hoopa and the Clash of Ages (Came in the post together). But this post is going on pretty long so I can’t go into much more detail.

And then the last film I watched was The Last: Naruto the movie.

(Deep breaths).

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Naruto these days. I discovered the series when it was still airing on Jetix in my country (Back when Jetix was still a thing), and I quickly grew to love it. For a long time it became my favourite show of all time, even briefly eclipsing Dragon Ball Z as my favourite anime (Given time and retrospect and watching Dragon Ball and Z again, no, they’re still my favourite, but back then that’s how I felt). I really loved the series and I kept up with every update on the story, and despite not enjoying a lot of the stuff with Sasuke after the fight with Itachi I enjoyed everything in the manga right through the Invasion of Pain story arc... and then things gradually started slipping off the rails for me.

I won’t give you a full detailed account of my personal history and how I felt about the series as things went on, but I kept up with news on the story and checked in on the manga right up until it ended, and from the conclusion to the Kage summit arc right to the end, soooo much stupid and bad stuff happened that just left me confused, annoyed, baffled and angry that Naruto honestly just turned into a chore and then a big disappointment, and I was only following updated on it because I was too invested to not want to see how it ended. I legitimately don’t think I’ve ever been angrier at a plot twist than I was with the whole Kaguya is the big evil mastermind reveal than I have been with any other reveal outside of One More Day. It got to the point that while it ended, even though things I wanted desperately to see for the longest time like Naruto becoming Hokage and getting together with Hinata ended up happening, I just wasn’t satisfied and in fact all I could feel was empty and upset that the second half of the series had turned out so badly.

The final third of Naruto was honestly the most frustrating experience I’ve had with any piece of media I’ve ever loved outside of maybe a lot of the nonsense Marvel’s been pulling like OMD and HYDRA Cap. I’ve been feeling melancholy about the whole thing for years, just feeling down and empty and wishing things had turned out better. I never even saw The Last despite it sounding like the story I’d been wanting to see.

Recently I’ve been feeling more and more nostalgic for it, especially between the whole announcements of it’s follow up Boruto and the Shippuden anime FINALLY coming to an end. So, I recently ordered up the DVD, and yesterday I watched The Last: Naruto the Movie for the first time.

And for all the ups and downs and mixed feelings, all the bitter feelings I’ve had over Naruto... I enjoyed the movie. It wasn’t perfect, but it was beautifully animated, had some great fight, the story was good, and as someone who considered NaruHina their number 1 OTP for years, to the point it’s actually what got me to start reading fanfiction, the movie was really touching. It was satisfying seeing Naruto and Hinata finally getting together, and that final scene especially was just beautiful.

I won’t go into full detail, because if I feel like it I might do a sort of review on the movie at some point, but I’m very glad I watched it. After the last several years, it felt like the closure I never really got with this series. I can’t force myself to sit through or enjoy a lot of the stuff towards the tail end of Naruto, but for what it’s worth, looking back... I’m still glad I got into it. I’m glad for all the fond memories I have of the franchise. I’m glad for all the good in Naruto, and all the good times I’ve had being a fan. I’m glad that Naruto got to fulfil his dream and earn the happy ending he so very much deserved, and got to be with a woman who truly loves him. And... I’m glad for The Last. That it exists, and that I finally watched it.

Honestly, I think now I want to go back and watch some of the series when it was good, for old times sake. And when the DVD for Boruto comes out in June on Amazon, I think I’ll watch that movie too. Who knows, if I like that maybe I’ll check out the anime or manga follow up too. Less likely, but who knows, I’m feeling nostalgic now.

I may not be able to call Naruto my favourite show anymore. And I won’t call the second half of Part II of the manga and Shippuden good. But I think now enough time has passed that the bitterness I’ve been feeling over the series has finally faded, and I can be happy to still call myself a fan of Naruto. It’s not perfect, it should have ended up better in the later stages. But when it was good, it was something magical to me, and I choose to remember it for all the joy it brought to me.

So, to close it out... thanks Kishimoto. Thank you for all the times your series brightened up my life. Good luck with whatever you do next.

Well, I guess that’s all I really needed to say for now. This was a... fairly productive month for me. Hopefully next month will be even more so. Until then, I’ll just leave things at the updated list. I’m just gonna go finish Yu Yu Hakusho now. As always, if anyone has any recommendations for anime I haven’t listed here, please send them my way.

One Punch Man (Seen four episodes a while back, looks good)

Mobile Suit Gundam

Outlaw Star

Cowboy Bebop

Digimon Frontier

Digimon Data Squad

Digimon Fusion

Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s

Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal

Yu-Gi-Oh Arc-V

Sailor Moon (Watched the entire first season and was about halfway through season 2. Should really get back to watching the full series) Sailor Moon Crystal

Yu Yu Hakusho (Up to episode 67)

Ranma 1 ½

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (2012-onwards series)

Hunter x Hunter (2011)

Fullmetal Alchemist

One Piece

Astro Boy (Any series. I just want to be able to say I’ve watched something from this franchise).

Kill La Kill

Gurren Lagann

Fairy Tail (What? Why’re you looking at me like that? I like cheesy stuff like this, alright!)

Little Witch Academia

Tenchi Muyo!

Death Note

Yuri On Ice

Fist of the North Star

Soul Eater

Code Geass

Food Wars: Shokugeki No Soma (I watched about 9 episode, need to catch up)

Your Lie in April

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Mob Psycho 100

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Phoenix Wright anime

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

Movies:

Your Name

Garden of Words

Paprika

Tokyo Godfathers

The Boy and the Beast

5 Centimeters per second

Millenium Actress

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro

The Digimon Adventure Tri Movies

Yu-Gi-Oh: Bonds Beyond Time

Yu-Gi-Oh: The Dark Side of Dimensions

Pokémon the movie: Black and White.

Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend awakened

Pokémon: Kyurem vs the sword of justice

Pokémon: Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction

Pokémon: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel

Pokémon: I Choose You

Ghost In The Shell

Memories

Perfect Blue

Naruto: Ninja clash in the Land of Snow

Naruto: Legend of the Stone of Gelel

Naruto: Guardians of the Crescent Moon Kingdom

Naruto Shippuden The Movie

Naruto Shuppuden: Bonds

Naruto Shippuden: The Will of Fire

Naruto Shippuden: The Lost Tower

Naruto Shippuden: Blood Prison

Naruto: Road to Ninja

Boruto Movie

[writetoremainsilent]

4/30/19-5/4/19 a thicc update

This is nostalgic, isn’t it? 

Some overall things: watching Evangelion, working on my Pokemon Fanfiction (lol), re-listening to Tool songs (they go hard), and discovering this nice math-rocky song called Shibuya by Covet. I also drew quite a bit this week.

4/30/19: Had my coffee lab today, and felt nice and energized from the coffee. I then had my tennis class and did not do well, because the two guys I played against were slice kings. 

Then I had geology, which was pretty mild. I paid attention for the most part. 

I ate at the cafeteria that day, and brought some food home for Wally and Allen. If I remember correctly, I spent the majority of the rest of the day watching shows with Wally and Allen. Bakemonogatari is a very good show. This is going to be a consistent theme for the rest of the week.

5/1/19: Scary..May’s already begun. I remember making this post last year. It’s still scary, even more so this year because I actually have to apply.

So, I’ve been doing these ‘stories’ for my art instagram posts lately, and today was disappointing because...

I pre-wrote a caption before actually making a post. It’s about a boy who steals from his father, except in this case he’s stealing ‘time.’ So the big joke is that the boy is just trying to hang out with his dad, but ‘cuz it’s thievery it’s implied to be bad. Funny. 

The problem with waiting this long to write the posts is that I remember very very little.

I studied most of the day for my dinosaurs test on Thursday, though.

5/2/19: Tennis was fun. I played doubles, and sucked. My teammate kept joking “wow, we suck” but I saw through her. She meant me. 

After that, I had my dinosaurs midterm, which was regrettably more difficult than I’d expected.

I ate at the cafeteria and then went home.

I spent the rest of the day drawing and finishing Bakemonogatari with Wally. It was a very good show. Delicate and artistic, it weaves a tale that can be explained simply but shown brilliantly. 

And how it shone. 

5/3/19: After my one class of the day, I went to a sushi buffet with Wally and Allen. It was very enjoyable. I finally kind of learned how to use chopsticks. I love sushi places with vegetarian options.

We went home and watched some Run with the Wind, which I think Wally and Allen are enjoying a lot more than I am. 

As some time passed, I watched The Tatami Galaxy with Wally, which is a show that I started almost 2 years ago but didn’t get around to finishing. We made it up to where I got to last time before I felt too tired to continue. It’s a good show. Directed by the same dude from Devilman Crybaby and Ping Pong the Animation.

5/4/19: Today was kind of lazy. 

First, I watched Evangelion with Wally.

Then, I took a nap, and had this horrible dream. It wasn’t even horrible, but my friend Hana had tagged me in some DawnxMay (meaning they’re romantically implicated) fanart post on Facebook (Dawn being the female Pokemon protagonist from the Sinnoh games, and May being the female Pokemon protagonist from the Hoenn region). 

I had chatted Hana (in the dream) about it and we joked about how it was a difficult ship (relationship) to canonize. We started talking about our favorite ships from high school, and something in the back of my mind was just begging to be remembered, but I couldn’t for the life of me. It gave me this aching rush of nostalgia: sights, smells, where I was, what I was feeling, and crushed me and flattened me like a hydraulic press. The dream-induced nostalgia was so strong that I woke up with a headache and some tears in my eyes. 

Basically, I hate nostalgia. I have talked about this at length. There are things from my high school: feelings, moments, and fleeting realizations that will probably never consciously re-surface, but will always haunt me with the millisecond flashes of deja vu that they always attack me with. I’m weak.

Also, I hate naps. 

I went off to play tennis against a wall.

On the way back from tennis, my bike tire popped, so I had to walk back.

When I got back, we went to Taco Bell. I dropped off some food for my brother and we headed home. 

I finished The Tatami Galaxy with Wally today. It’s a very good show, one of my few 10/10s. 

And that’s it for this update. I’m glad it was this week I chose to slack on, because little happened.