Year: 2016

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This Ain’t the Left Hand of Darkness

You know, I like Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash. It’s about a bunch of amnesiac Japanese youths dropped into a fantasy world and forced to kill monsters to survive. Yeah, it’s like the hundredth variation on the “trapped in an RPG world” subgenre, except this one isn’t a power fantasy about the uber-l33t players replacing their pathetic offline lives with an awesome new virtual existence. No, this one actually examines what it would be like to have to kill another living being for the first time or lose a close companion or any one of a number of video game experiences that would be traumatic in real life. In other words, it treats the RPG world experience like a war movie.

I like the show, but it ain’t perfect. I’d say the worst thing about this anime is that every week I forget Ranta is an awful human being and every week he reminds me of that very fact. I’ve never liked fanservice – if I want porn I can get porn, anime studios – but I’d take a gratuitous shot of Yume’s naked asscrack every week (and holy shit was that ever gratuitous) over yet another tired line about how Ranta’s female teammates only have worth if he finds them sexually attractive. He could at least vary up his misogyny and insult women for having a different waist to hip ratio than men or having slightly higher pain thresholds or whatever. You know, really open up new horizons of animated sexism.

This is probably the thousandth time I’ve heard the joke that goes “you have small breasts, therefore you are worthless” on various anime series. Even if I thought that joke was funny, I certainly wouldn’t think so after hearing it repeated in one form or another since the 90’s – which is probably the last time someone laughed at that joke, by the way. You know, because it was already old and the person hearing it couldn’t believe someone was still using that joke.

I complain because I actually do like Grimgar. This Ranta thing is like a mouse turd in a bag of chocolate chips. I realize that the light novel author has mental health issues and might not be aware how jokes work (for instance, that they should be funny), but that doesn’t make this part of the show suck less.

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Lost in Japan

Remember Kappa Mikey? It was about an American cartoon character moving to Japan to work in the anime industry. It made really obvious jokes about Japan and anime, so it wasn’t exactly good. However, the unequivocally great thing about it was the catchy theme song from Beat Crusaders.

Uh, remember Beat Crusaders? They broke up in 2010.

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The Commissar’s in Town

I kind of liked Total Eclipse, once I’d gotten over the gratuitous fanservice boobery, so of course I’m checking out the prequel series Schwarzesmarken. There’s definitely something worthwhile in this alternate history story of East Germany being invaded by aliens in the 1980s. I did also like Deutschland 83, after all.

However, let me call your attention to the introductory graphic explaining the Cold War to the viewers:

Cold War map of the world showing Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea as not being in the US camp

If you’ll notice, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are very clearly not in the American sphere of influence on that map. Is this a stealth resurrection of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

Yes, it is. In this alternate history, Japan also lost the Second World War, but it kept its imperial regime and some of its territory. Of course, such a thing is utter bullshit. If Germany was beaten so badly that it was partitioned, then there was no way Japan would have gotten a negotiated peace. I’d originally assumed Article whatever of Japan’s pacifist constitution had been repealed in light of the alien invasion, not that pigs had been flying.

The type of Japanese military geek who would write a story set in East Germany is also the type of mildly right-wing jerk-off who views the Japanese Empire with nationalistic nostalgia. I mean, it’s at least entertaining, so it’s automatically better than GATE: Thus the JSDF Fought There.

Setting that aside, since this is an anime about East Germany fighting aliens in the 80’s. I of course had to make a fanvideo scored to Der Kommissar. What else was I going to do? I had to stick the video behind a password-protected Vimeo thing because of the zealousness of copyright protectors. It’s released under the auspices of that anime podcast I’m in.

Anyway, this music video is dedicated to those unsung heroes of the alien war – the Stasi. Password is “bundeswehr”.

Show those greedy capitalists what we think of their copyright regime, kameraden!

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The boy who quantum leaped through time

I’ve been watching way less anime lately. Of the handful of shows I’m watching this season, I’d say Erased is the best. It’s got a pretty cool opening, as is to be expected of Asian Kung-Fu Generation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9G20wV0KHE

Erased is about a 29 year old pizza delivery man who has the involuntary ability to go back in time to fix tragedies. Normally he only returns for a few minutes but when something really bad happens he ends up as a 10 year old boy again living the weeks before one of his classmates was abducted and killed.

There seems to be a lot of stories lately about pathetic single men in their twenties returning to their childhood to fix their lives. It’s obviously a wish-fulfillment fantasy – if you look at the biographies of the writers, the ones who don’t have agoraphobia or social anxiety are horrifically underemployed Millenials. This desire to return to a simpler time and set right what first went wrong is the desire of a person who feels like a grownup loser.

It’s a specifically male story, as women are pretty much raised from birth to expect to play second fiddle in their own lives. The traditional route of female adulthood is of subordination to others, after all, to future husbands and to children that must be raised. Offhand, I can only think of one female lead who time leaps back, in the manga Again!! In that case she was just inadvertently brought along when the male protagonist got a chance to fix his high school shit, and otherwise didn’t want to time travel in the first place.

Of course, the writers of stories that get adapted into anime clearly aren’t doing too badly. But the stories couldn’t have gotten so popular if their audiences weren’t finding in them something to relate to. This type of story could only have been written in an economic climate where the young can expect to be underpaid and underappreciated for not being born in better times. It’s the basic story of the 21st century so far. Kind of a depressing thought, isn’t it?

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Canadians are turning into Newfies

At least, that’s how it sounds to me. This article from the Toronto Star makes several claims regarding linguistic changes in standard Canadian English, though the accent samples included sound to me like they were provided by people from Newfoundland.

Having said that, I do have to admit that I have a tendency to merge i and e when pronouncing “milk” as “melk” and so on.

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Goddammit Saekano

From Crunchyroll:

In an exclusive interview with Web Newtype, Shun’ya Senga of Design Coco and Tomoaki Atogami of Aniplex hinted that more life-sized figures of the heroines of Saekano -How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend- may be in the works.

During the interview, the two men discussed the creation process and the difficulties inherent in transforming a 2D character into a 3-dimensional sculpture, such as the challenge of accurately reproducing Megumi’s undergarments (which are never fully revealed in the TV show).

You’re really making it hard to be a fan of your show, Saekano. And I was looking forward to season 2. I still am, actually, but now I might not admit to it so openly.

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The Near-Final Frontier

I’ve been playing Star Trek Timelines, the new mobile F2P game that’s only been out for a few days. I never play these types of games, but I’ve read about them and I’m aware of all the little psychological tricks it’s using to hook me in. But on the other hand, when I click on Worf he says “Today is a good day to die.” Plus, if I keep playing I’ll get to unlock Odo and Chakotay soon. How am I supposed to resist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7idyOAqYZlI

The premise is what you’d expect – some time-space hooey is afoot and Q has dragooned you, nameless Starfleet captain, into flying around fixing the problems when past, present, and alternate timelines collide.

The game’s only been out for a few days, though, so some of the kinks are apparently still being ironed out. For instance, I think the beginning is a bit too complicated to just jump into – Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is noticeably slicker (speaking of another mobile F2P game that I just got into over the holidays) – but zooming around in a Constitution-class starship scanning planets is fun enough by itself.

It’s curious that so far I’ve yet to find a characters from the Bakula Enterprise that’s been voiced, considering that characters from the other series have had voices. Not all of them (Yeoman Rand and Keiko are mute, for instance), but enough that I notice. Perhaps there’s something in the Enterprise actors’ contracts that puts a kibosh on video game adaptations? I do notice that the J.J. Abrams movie versions aren’t included, which I assume is because the game’s contract covers only the TV shows.

Anyway, I’m probably going to keep playing this grindy clickfest until I vomit. It’s Star Trek, how could I not?

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Thank you, Clickhole

I don’t read Clickhole regularly, but I acknowledge that when this absurdist satire of clickbait articles is on point, it is on point. Sometimes I have trouble breathing from how much I’m laughing. My latest favourites:

Making A Difference: These Barely Legal Teens Got Together And Cleaned Up Their Local Park

Whether they were pigtailed petites with daddy issues, all-natural Latinas, or twink teen boys, every single one of them showed up bright and early to make a difference. No matter their background, these barely legal teens united to clean up over 100 pounds of waste and install a new plastic play structure, and Modesto residents took notice[.]

Think Bullying Is Okay? So Do I. Let’s Be Friends.

Remember: By doing nothing, you are personally contributing to a culture of bullying. You are complicit. And that’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, because I actually don’t really care about whether or not I’m part of the problem.

Quiz: Will You Make A Suitable Bride For Oscar Isaac?

This last one is a brilliantly bizarre fairy tale disguised as a Buzzfeed quiz. I don’t know who writes these things, but they’re goddamn geniuses.

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A People’s History of Middle-Earth

I finished reading The Last Ringbearer. It’s a story completely unapproved of by the Tolkien estate which tells the story of the end and aftermath of the Lord of the Rings trilogy from the viewpoint of the orcs. It’s pretty much only available through non-standard channels in English, though I understand it’s sold openly as a published book in its original Russian.

I quite liked the opening when it was a revisionist retelling from the perspective of the losing side, leavened by long digressions into the history of Mordor and the ecology of the land, but in the middle it turned into a standard fantasy quest, which I wasn’t into. It’s clearly deliberate parallelism to the One Ring mission. After that it turned into a Cold War spy novel before ending kind of ploinkingly with almost the same climax as the original trilogy.

Reading the book was an interesting experience. I’m not sure it’s something I can recommend, particularly since I don’t know who I could even recommend it to – the story keeps switching genres and I don’t know if a typical fantasy reader would appreciate this literary legerdemain. That, and a Tolkien fan would probably be really ticked off at how the story of Lord of the Rings has been cruelly hacked apart and sewn back together as a cynical propaganda piece by the victorious West.

The book ends with an essay from the author defending his fanfiction – I do not use this term pejoratively, but it really is the best term for this work – and criticizing the fantasy genre’s demand for Manichean struggles between good and evil. This leads me to believe that he may not be widely read in the modern fantasy genre. There are numerous English fantasy works that put a gritty spin on fantasy, the most famous probably being A Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. Game of Thrones in its TV incarnation). Those works may not be as widely known in Russia, but it seems such an obvious idea to put a cynical spin on fantasy that I’m sure there are Russian writers who are doing the same thing already.

Anyway, that’s that. I read The Last Ringbearer. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t like it. I just thought it was kind of okay.