Try not to die.
Punch It
I recently main-lined the manga One-Punch Man, about a superhero who’s so idiotically overpowered he annihilates his enemies in one blow. By the start of the story he’s actually pretty bored with his work. The series is freaking hilarious, it’s got an indie comics sensibility with wacked out heroes like Licenseless Rider, whose only “superpower” is riding a bicycle, and villains like Fuhrer Ugly and a thinly-disguised refugee from Dragonball Z. I feel like I’m reading a Japanese version of The Tick except the story is actually going somewhere.
Anyway, I suggest checking it out.
The curse is lifted
So you know what I said about only watching mediocre anime lately? Well, I just saw the first two episodes of the anime Bakemonogatari (Ghost Story). So now what do I say?
I say, “Holy fucking shit.”
Seriously, this show is incredible. I could tell you what it’s about – a high school guy helping female classmates remove curses from themselves – but a story is more than its plot. Bakemonogatari has style oozing out of every pore. The dense symbolism, the quick flashes of meaning which forces me to play quick draw with the remote, the peculiar camera angles: it’s all in the service of a larger aesthetic mission. Bakemonogatari actually has something to say, and I appreciate that fact even more when I think back and realize that it’s been so long since I was able to say that about an anime.
It’s even got fanservice, which normally I would consider a bad thing. I would define fanservice as stuff added to a narrative purely to gratify the audience and with not much regard to how it fits into the larger story in terms of theme, character, and so on. Mostly, fanservice refers to gratuitous depictions of female sexual signifiers, which is to say, tits and ass. Plus all those other female things that heterosexual men are supposed to salivate over, like, I dunno, ankles. However, the show portrays the female form so blatantly (and from such off-kilter perspectives) that it removes the stink of prurience from the act of beholding the feminine.
Normally, the term “shameless” is a pejorative description. To be shameless is to be without a proper sense of what is appropriate behaviour (propriety being a relative concept, of course). Bakemonogatari is not shameless about its frank and upfront display of the female body. It is, instead, unashamed. The show is not afraid of the female body, and because it’s unafraid, it can show exposed female flesh as being the same as exposed male flesh, which is to say, an everyday and unremarkable sight.
Therefore, I was mistaken when I said that this show has fanservice. Fanservice is gratuitous. Bakemonogatari is merely honest.
Familiarity breeds addiction
I’m addicted to mediocre storytelling. Well, not always, but it seems to be a thing with me lately.
Recently I got caught up to the latest issue of Nisekoi, a middling manga full of clichés and lazy stereotypes. It’s got decent art but the story itself has nary an original twist to it.
However, that’s exactly the point. The series is your basic high school romance-comedy full of misunderstandings and secret crushes and ridiculous coincidences. Trust me, series like this one are a dime a dozen.
Because it’s predictable, though, it’s also comfortable to read. There’s not much that needs to be done besides turning the page. Theme? Symbolism? Emotional truth? This is just a story about a boy and a girl pretending to date so that their rival gangster families won’t go to war but which quickly turns into a story about the couple hanging out with their high school friends. Nothing to see here, just move along. And don’t think the too-familiar plot can carry the series on its own, either.
It’s not just this manga, either. I’ve already mentioned that I’m a sucker for flashy yet empty giant robot anime, but I’m also reading Magician’s End, the final book in Raymond Feist’s progressively crappier fantasy book series. Mostly I’m finishing the books out of a weird sense of duty to my younger self.
Meanwhile, the critically acclaimed, though somewhat heavy TV series Orange is the New Black and Les Revenants are waiting for me to finally get back to watching them. But wait, I still haven’t caught up to the latest episode of that TV show where the Headless Horseman runs around killing people with a machine gun.
I’m reminded of what this scientific study claims, that human brains like novel music as long as it’s mostly predictable.
So don’t blame me for my tastes, I’m only a human being.
And in case you were wondering, that Headless Horseman show is called Sleepy Hollow.
Happy Belated Ada Lovelace Day
Skeevy fact about computer programming: The programming language ADA was named after Ada Lovelace, she without whom I would not be typing this blog post and you would not be reading it. In reaction, the later programming language LINDA was named after Linda Lovelace. To recap, one programming language was named after a feminist pioneer in the field and in response another programming language was named after a famous porn star who happened to share the same last name. Keep it classy, programmers!
And just to keep things extra depressing, see Mother Jones for a list of smart dames who got screwed out of receiving credit for their inventions.
Reboot Rebooted
Remember Reboot? Remember that it was set inside a computer, like Tron? It was the first fully CGI cartoon ever produced? It took forever for new episodes to appear? Not ringing a bell?
Well, just take my word for it that it existed. But guess what? Some company or other is remaking it.
Granted, that link is just to a press release and any number of things could happen between now and when funding is cut for the series. But hey, it’s potentially more Reboot. What’s to hate, besides the possibility of the remake being complete shit?
Also, apparently next year is going to be the 20th anniversary of the series. Boo to the inevitable passage of time pushing all of us closer to our eventual deaths.
The Roll which Crunches
As should be obvious, I’ve subscribed to the anime-streaming service Crunchyroll. I hadn’t realized it but having so much anime available the instant you turn on your TV turns you into a complete binge-watcher. Remember my project to count how many books and whatever I watched in a single year? Well, I’ve extended it to the end of 2013. Anyway, from August 2012 to August 2013 I watched 427 episodes of TV. However, in September – the first month of my Crunchyroll subscription – I watched 131 episodes of TV.
The subscription has really changed my consumption patterns. Anyway, right now I’m running through some anime in my back catalogue so I’m watching Durarara, which I really like. Basically it’s about a suburb of Tokyo, the people who live there, and the way that their lives intersect. It’s kind of like the movie Crash except not dumb. At the very least you should give the opening a look, the song is pretty catchy (and why the hell is YouTube not allowing embedding of any videos of the Durarara opening, anyway?).
However, I’ve only seen the first five episodes of Durarara. Contrast this to giant robot anime, which apparently turns me into an undiscerning nine year old. I watched the entire first season of Valvrave the Liberator in one day; some weeks before that, I marathoned Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. That’s twenty-six episodes in total over one weekend.
I completely admit that the stories in both series were insipid and unoriginal. Valvrave has something about space vampires and Gargantia has a crashed mech pilot trying to make a living on Waterworld Earth. The plot for both isn’t really important or distinctive but I still kept sucking down episodes. I suppose they’re deliberately designed so as not to engage higher brain functions – perfect for binge watching, in other words. The need to think while watching is probably the reason I haven’t seen anything but the first episode of Orange is the New Black. I like the show but there’s this psychic weight hanging over it.
Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse would have been another binge watch except it’s of the “pendulous and gratuitous tits” school of anime which is almost unwatchable for me. Dammit, if I wanted porn I’d get porn, I don’t need some Maxim-style softcore shit to get in the way of the story.
But do you know what’s unequivocally good? Squid Girl, a show about a dim-witted anthropomorphic squid who invades the land to punish humanity for polluting the sea but almost immediately gets tricked into working as an underpaid part-time waitress for a beachside restaurant. The narrative structure is very Azumanga Daioh in that it’s short vignettes about the main character’s everyday adventures. Highlights include when Squid Girl discovers umbrellas and when she finds out she’s an idiot savant at math. It’s very much a show about nothing, also like Azumanga Daioh, essentially being Seinfeld if the main character was a teenaged female cephalopod. Also like Azumanga Daioh, Squid Girl is so cute and sugary that I feel like I should brush my teeth after watching. Still, I’m laughing my ass off at every episode so far.
Return to Spice World
Following on from this post two days ago, I fired up the old YouTube to see if the original music video for Wannabe passes the nostalgia test.
Good holy god it goddamn doesn’t. The Spice Girls look like utter skanks. I keep expecting one of their chav boyfriends to wander into frame and punch one of the waiters. I’m astounded that I was ever attracted to them. The only one I still dig today is Scary Spice, but she was my favourite back in the day as well.
I acknowledge that I’m being rather classist and even somewhat sexist in my feelings. I can’t help my visceral reaction. But it’s a sad day when you discover you were actually pretty dumb as a kid.
Roma Victor
So I’ve finished everything that can be finished in the single player campaign of Red Dead Redemption. I feel hollow inside, like I’ve gained nothing but a temporary and meaningless accomplishment. I must play more video games to distract me from this realization.
Attack of the Fifty Foot Tall Cannibal Women
I’ve just finished watching the first season of Attack on Titan. It’s about the last human stronghold in a world overrun by giants. It be awesome. The lunacy of the fans is also awesome. Case in point, a fan video of the characters as the Spice Girls in Wannabe: