There's nothing we can do

Following up on my last post…

I wanted to check the veracity of my assertion that Megumi Hayashibara volunteered to sing Osorezan Revoir for nothing, and found this. 

http://www.patch-cafe.net/?p=276

This is amazing. A fan had kindly translated Megumi Hayashibara’s blog from the same time. (click to show content) 

I don’t even know what to say. It is very rare for singers and the franchises that they sing for to have such a powerful and lasting bond. And yet this entry honouring Mankin is probably the most stirring love letter in recent memory. It seems that Megu-chan understands the characters on a very profound level, and moreover, she really really respects Anna. Which is all you could want as a fan, because it could’ve gone so, so wrong with someone who didn’t accept her the way she was.

And now I’m just pathetically sad because someone who loves the series this much and who did such an amazing job should be able to work on the arc that means so much to her, but Mankin may never be adapted again, and it’s…just…feelings. ;____;

Posting again, because life slowed down just long enough

Finally got around to reading Shaman King: Flowers. I am literally in stitches every other panel. (Horohoro, I bleed thinking about how your life went so terribly downhill. The marimo. The hobo clothes. Your choices. XD) This was a very good idea. I literally cannot believe that I didn’t know this existed. 

As I recall, the way the original Shaman King ended - the epilogue, not the proper ending or the fake-out ending, though both were epic - already slayed me several times over with its horrific takes on the fates of its protagonists. Now, we get to see how these screw-ups continued to live on peacefully (??) in the aftermath, in various states of bohemian poverty.

Predictably as a result of long-term exposure to this band of misfits, even the delightful, charming Hana became a delinquent. I cannot with this series. It is determined to run every single one of its characters into the ground and I LOVE it. 

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In case you missed the news, Shaman King is the best Shonen Jump series ever and Hiroyuki Takei is a progressive, retrogressive, jaw-dropping piece of work. At times like these I sincerely wish I could link to Jason Thompson’s old journal entry which explained the charm of this series perfectly. Instead I will try to do it myself, envy me not.

Keep in mind that this is a series that I read probably 4 years ago so I can only sketch out the details roughly.

In a nutshell: 8 or so reasons why everyone who loves Shonen Jump, who hates Shonen Jump, who loves art, who occasionally jams out to Shiina Ringo, or maybe Bob Marley, and enjoys strange mecha, and the sound of laughter, should read the Shaman King manga (and avoid the anime, although it’s not so bad, really, just worse)…

*Spoilers are rampant. But I consider it a necessity. Think of it as a bid for fans who would never pick up the book to begin with. The premise of the series itself is not interesting so it’s hard to describe how good this series is without giving away, in part, how it subverts your expectations.

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I also read something else today! :)

Lest I forget.

True Loves! Better than advertised. I was about to pass on this because I don’t generally like this style of art + handlettering but that was kind of a fickle reason wasn’t it?? So I gave it a try and found it a surprisingly fun way to pass the time. It’s a light biscuit after the heavy meal I just wrote about. 

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Haven’t read enough Fumi Yoshinaga.

Might need to fix that. XD

I finally got around to reading All My Darling Daughters, which to be honest I was side-eyeing for a very long time. Ever since the Yoshinaga bandwagon pulled into town it’s been hard to take critical reviews of her work seriously. Personally I will admit to having read a surprisingly small amount of Yoshinaga’s work, not representative, and I may have been forever traumatized by the adaptations of Antique Bakery for which she wasn’t responsible. XD Sorry. So it was hard to evaluate whether one of the most lauded titles of the year was worthwhile to check out, especially given the tagline which strikes fear into my josei-wary heart. “At best, maudlin family drama, and at worst it would reaffirm traditional values of womanhood that I find droll or alienating,” I thought. “What should I do?” 

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Nevermind here we go

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Spend an hour writing an epic fucking essay about 7Seeds and Basara

It gets deleted. 

FFFFFFFFFF

I will probably restore it little by little as the days pass…

What a Wonderful World - not - or maybe it is.

I will never be able to read Inio Asano without thinking of Nijigahara Holograph, which was very good and intensely disturbing and has stayed with me even though it’s been years. Something about the way he depicts his characters, who are all uniformly and intensely ill even if no one says so explicitly. Everything is a glass window - a lot of times mental illness is depicted as this fog state but for Asano every vision and memory is incredibly lucid, and calamity is portrayed as the people that you meet everyday, everymen, yourself and myself, a society that moves forward with eerie calm.

This is not that book. This is a series of shorts from a very young author who is subversive but still too afraid to throw his readers into the unremitting darkness so he fixes it up with a pat ending each time. Be yourself, love yourself, get happy, start a band, end a band, live on. Plus the plots epitomize the very worst from an author that has an inexplicable fondness for aimless musicians who do nothing and reminisce about times when they did even less. Days later I can’t think of any story that I really remember.

Seriously what is with these beautiful anthologies that are not at all representative of the authors’ works? I am still smarting from Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream. >__< Let’s have some consideration please.

Metropolis! In which everyone is Duke Red.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a Tezuka work, and it kind of figures, I’ve forgotten how exhausting they can be. XD His older works are big on ideas and move pretty quickly, so they feel a bit weightier than mainstream manga today. Plus the reader has to do a little bit of legwork in terms of interpreting the events through the appropriate cultural and anthropologic lens.

I usually have to sit down a little bit afterwards, not so much because I’m blown away by the sheer virtuosity of the work but rather more like “crap I shouldn’t have eaten that crueller after finishing those chicken pot pies, I’d better give my bloodstream a rest.” So it is today. Metropolis is made of the same awful stuff as the better, more outrageous volumes of the Phoenix series. There are so many visuals that burn into your head, so much genre bending and so much bad science, and the overall feeling is that you have read the history of mankind in half an hour, which is just…gosh, so selfish of you, Tezuka. XD Will you leave any book unwritten?

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Taking this for a test run…

Liking the layout already. Mostly this will be where I keep random thoughts on comics (mostly Japanese or small press) and maybe even some BOOKS?! I’ve read recently.

I am not used to writing up proper reviews so there will be NONE here. My own personal favourite review sites are just blog entries made by shamelessly biased comics nerds anyways and while they’re hardly scholarly works they often contain the best and most intriguing unpolished ideas. Basically crack. And I mean Tumblr is the home of crack, right, or am I mistaken? :D

I’m kidding. This blog will be incredibly serious.

…Why Sakura-ai? I’ve been watching a lot of vintage series and Suiyoubi no Jouji has been tearing me apart lately. No literally that is the reason. While virtually everyone is an asshole in this show I feel particularly bad for the asshole that I relate to the most so I named this blog after her. There is no correlation, but I enjoy naming blogs in such a way that they hold a mirror to particular epochs in life. Right now I am obsessed with classic J-dramas, reading too many comics, getting too attached to celebrities that I will never meet, and ruining my own productivity. And now I’m on Tumblr too!