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Genius at work

As I mentioned, I read The Count of Monte Cristo for that anime podcast I’m in. The novel was so long – 1200 pages – that I kind of had to take a break from reading for a while after. I don’t really have an analysis of the book so much as some scattered musings.

First of all, let me just mention that if anyone wants to read the unabridged English translation then I recommend the Penguin Classics Robin Buss version over the free Project Gutenberg ebook. It turns out that Project Gutenberg uses the first and original translation from back in the 19th century and so feels rather stiff and creaky. The Buss translation is from 1996 and it feels a lot more natural. The book was meant to be a sensationalist page turner when it was originally published and it’s the Buss version that made the story flow that way for me.

Overall I liked the novel but it’s clear that Dumas was being paid by the line. The story could have been a lot shorter and it’s striking how much of The Count of Monte Cristo isn’t actually about the count of Monte Cristo. That, and the story is full of garrulous characters and lengthy descriptions of people and places. Thankfully the book never goes full George R.R. Martin, though.

I find it interesting how short the chapters are, since most are only around ten or so pages. This is unlike a lot of modern novels, but it actually reminds me of the short instalments that are normal in really long fanfiction. This is an apt comparison since both this story and long fanfics are or were both released serially in sequential instalments.

The story itself is very cosmopolitan in outlook. Dumas shows off how au courant he is with contemporary theatre and literature, as besides the expected references to French texts, Dumas casually drops references to Shakespeare, James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, Byron, and 1001 Nights. I wonder, was Dumas the Bourbon Restoration version of a movie nerd today making a film that drops allusions and references to a smorgasbord of modern pop culture?

Also, I did some very rough back of the envelope calculations to figure out how much the treasure at Monte Cristo was worth. I had to find out the exchange rate for livres to British pounds since the historical currency converter I use doesn’t have French currency. It turns out the exchange rate varied from place to place and the only one I could easily find was for Dover. I then had to convert the pounds to present money. With those caveats in mind and accounting for inflation, the count’s treasure amounts to $5 million US in 2015. It’s a decent number though not exactly fuck you money. Still, the economy was smaller back then and that fortune formed a greater percentage of the total amount of money floating around at the time.

As an amusing side note, the book mentions twice that Italian cuisine is the worst in the world, and it phrases it in a way that seems like a widely-held opinion. I wonder, would Dumas have been referring to Italian cooking as we think of it today? If so, what specifically did Dumas and his contemporaries have against it? Maybe it’s all the tomato sauces and the unfamiliar mouth-feel of pasta.

Finally, let me end in remarking that the novel contains more scenes than I expected of men trying to blow their brains out.

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Where have you been?

Well, seems I’m doing a podcast now with a bunch of other peeps. PodCastle in the Sky compares anime with a non-anime cultural work. The first episode compares the adaptation Gankutsuou to the original work The Count of Monte Cristo. We’re kind of pop culture nerds so we mention a lot of other stuff like The Battle of Algiers, Isaac Asimov, Law & Order, and Boyz n the Hood. Check it out if you’re interested.

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The terror of fantasy

Witch Craft Works kind of has an image problem. Nothing in all the marketing I’ve seen for this anime indicated it was anything besides a typical high school comedy-romance with a twist – he fights ghosts, she’s a superhero, it’s a school for magic, whatever. In this specific anime the twist is that the male protagonist is the damsel in distress. “Don’t worry your pretty little head over it” is basically the central message repeated over and over to our hero. Otherwise the show’s early episodes have the sort of things you’d expect from a high school anime – a student council with ridiculous amounts of administrative authority, a beloved school idol, teenagers running wild, and so on. All of that was to be expected in this setting. What I didn’t expect was to discover that this anime was also about the War on Terror.

The rising sun peeks out behind wrecked skyscrapers
Not a picture of Ground Zero.

Continue reading “The terror of fantasy”

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It’s witchcraft

Promotional picture featuring the titular Yamada and all 7 witches

I watched the entirety of Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches over the weekend. It’s about a teenage boy discovering that he and other students at his high school have powers related to kissing, with the first one being body-swapping. It’s a decent comedy – I actually laughed at several places, especially at the scene where the protagonist’s friends experiment with the limits of body-swapping with each other.

However, while the show is pleasant enough, it’s nothing absolutely great. There’s not a lot that makes it really stand out. The fanservice isn’t explicit or prevalent enough to draw in the pervs, the romances are too low-key to really get the ‘shippers, the comedy peters out near the end and is replaced by plot drama seriousness, and the plot drama stuff itself isn’t really that compelling. I think this is one of those shows that people will forget about in a few years.

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The brave ones

Braves of the Six Flowers is the shit. The shit.

It doesn’t have anything deep to say, it’s a just rollicking good fantasy adventure story. The animation is great and the backgrounds are lush and detailed, but that would just be putting lipstick on a pig if the pace of the story did not move so quickly. Even the fanservice is mild enough to be easily forgiven, though I still think it shouldn’t be there.

I appreciate the pseudo-Aztec setting, which is not something you see everyday in anime. The story isn’t anything original – six chosen heroes must band together to defeat a demonic invasion – but the series just puts everything together in a satisfying way. In this way it reminds me of Argevollen, though this show looks a lot better.

Praising a work as competent may sound like faint praise, but producing art that’s merely satisfactory is not as easy as it may seem. I was particularly aware of this fact since I’d watched Chaos Dragon before turning to this show.

The cast of Chaos Dragon posing all action-like.

Chaos Dragon has an interesting pedigree. The project was spawned from the tabletop roleplaying game sessions of a group of top writers. However fun playing that RPG was, it did not translate very well to a similarly enjoyable anime. I found the first episode cliched and uninteresting. There’s a country, it was conquered and partitioned, there are rebels fighting the occupation and there’s a dragon killing people. Ho hum. The bad guys were cartoonishly evil, the hero was impossibly good, the tragic origin was predictable, and the politics was naive and simplistic. Plus the animation was so-so.

I realize that black and white morality and naive politics are prevalent in much fantasy fiction, but just because something happens a lot doesn’t mean I have to like it. During the viewing my mind kept wandering as I added to my mental list of criticisms. I won’t be watching any more episodes.

Anyway, there you have it. One hit and one miss from the current anime season.

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Shadows of the black empire

Junot Díaz on the relationship between minorities and science fiction:

Look. Without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as people of color, nothing about fanboy and fangirl culture makes sense. What I mean by that is, if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t make sense; if it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense; if it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense; if it wasn’t for the extermination of so many indigenous nations, most of what we call “first contact” stories don’t make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understand that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible. We are… in the Green Lantern Corps? We are the Oath. We are all of those things. Erased, and yet without us? We’re essential.

That’s some good stuff. Maybe I should finally finish The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

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True romance

I recently watched the first episode of the anime Actually, I Am, which revolves around a love confession. It wasn’t my thing, but while watching I had to ask: do Japanese kids actually do this kind of thing?

Haru confessing his feelings to Shizuku: I think I like you. In a sexual way!
It’s from My Little Monster.

See, the classic love confession from anime and manga goes like this: a school-aged character approaches in private their secret crush (normally a classmate and one who they may not have even spoken with before) and tells them, “I like you, please go out with me”.

I’d never really thought about it, as this cliche is very common in anime and manga, but I realize now that this is a pretty damn awkward situation to be in. When approached by a near-total stranger – who you may only have spoken a few words in passing to before – and asked for a date out of the blue, the normal reaction is to tell them no. With this in mind, isn’t the classic love confession approach basically a recipe for rejection?

Considering it further, the love confession strategy seems like something a socially awkward person would do. They know they want to go out with someone but they don’t really know how to approach them so they go all in. They skip the getting-to-know-you part and go straight for the asking out part.

Really, a more reasonable approach, and one more conducive to success, would probably be for the besotted party to befriend and hang out with the object of their romantic interest first without immediately going for the metaphorical jugular.

It’s such an obvious stratagem that I have to wonder whether Japanese kids actually do the love confession thing at all. Is this basically just a cliche that mostly exists in the minds of anime and manga writers? One wonders.

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Show me the money

I’m currently finishing up the final episodes of Gunslinger Stratos. It’s about kids fighting in the future for a science fiction Macguffin. The series is based on a video game, which is quite clear from the finale because it feels like a boss fight. The episode title even sounds like it’s straight out of Chrono Trigger – “Showdown at the End of Time”.

The whole thing is full of cliches about friendship, fighting for one’s dreams, and some light distrust of adult authority. You know, the usual. The show also keeps making a lot out of the belief that humanity is doomed to conflict and war.

It strikes me, though, that probably most of the writers behind this show have never experienced a day of hardship in their lives. The closest they’ve come to war is watching it on the news, though it’s more likely that their experience of war comes from movies and other fictional depictions.

Pontificating pompously about a subject one has no direct familiarity with seems to me like a very teenaged and juvenile thing to do. Which makes sense since this show is made for juveniles and those juvenile at heart.

Anyway, I think I liked writing this post more than actually watching the last episodes of this show. I guess we have to get our enjoyment where we can get it.

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Deus vult

Haha, what the fuck? Knights versus Vikings versus samurai?

It’s a goddamn multiplayer Dynasty Warriors! With Dark Souls-ish fighting mechanics. I approve.