 |
|
|
Sunday, September 2, 2001 Bespeckled
Charmian: that is indeed the PSoH ML in question, and the e-mail certainly makes it *sound* as if approval depended on the content of the reply. But all they want to know is how one discovered the series and what one likes about it, and I can't begin to imagine what response would form grounds for a rejection. o_O The real purpose seems to be social, i.e. discouraging lurking and making the residents aware of the newbies coming in.  Sunday, September 2, 2001 Ittai doko de...? ('Japanese schoolgirls tied up having sex' should *not* be giving me hits. And I won't even touch the milling multitudes searching for FF8 pr0n in all variations afforded by fancy. It's bishink you people want! Bishink! XD) Sweet saints, I am so tired... spent half a day trimming the ivy (ugh, aphids) and re-painting the front porch banister. Then had to go schlep about in Chinatown. Re-read the end of PSoH before returning the books: the more I thought about it the less sense it made. ^^; It's the sort of series which by rights should have the fandom arguing over its intentional opacities for years to come. Currently trying to blunder my way onto a fan ML to see if this is indeed so, but they want me to write an acceptance essay first(!!). And I'm in no shape to attempt long e-mails. I'm only blogging in order not to disappoint my curious and friendly visitors. :P Test tells me that I'm quote a Unitarian Universalist unquote (read: muddled but content). The second closest match was Neo-Pagan, which is *sort of* correct. I have certain instinctive, unvoiced and mostly unquestioned beliefs that fall right outside of the secular Western logic by which I live my exterior life. They don't make sense, but sense isn't what I'm after. Friday, August 31, 2001 Re-reading myself ...It occurs to me Akino left herself an odd little out in the very last pages of the manga; one that makes me blink with the implications. Surely she didn't mean to continue it at some point? Friday, August 31, 2001 And this time around ... I feel guilty for being human. ;_; Sarah, I never thought I'd say this, but your latest Bush Administration link was a most apposite balm to my heart. ^^; By the Rood, that was a downer of a final volume. Beautiful, haunting, all that, but... T_T As for the shounen-ai, Charmian, it's *one* interpretation, and not too far-out either. Going by the feel of the thing, it's not much less 'slashy' than YamiEi. Which doesn't mean people should write yaoi fanfiction for PSoH. They shouldn't. The clarification of my opinion is spoilersome, but let's say that the idea makes my head hurt. Mind you, I know without having to check that people *do* write yaoi fanfic for't, which is why (ho ho) I haven't checked. -_-; This is one series where I don't wanna hear it from the fangirls. I don't think it's even a shoujo imprint, it's whatever you call the female equivalent of seinen. PSoH was designed for adults to read: adults of whatever age, that is. As for referrals, I get a lot of 'em looking for fanwork and multimedia and whatnot, about half of which are hentai-related. This one, however, rather takes the cake in that respect. XD (D is a terrible influence on me. Watching him eat makes me hungry, and I've gained five pounds in the week since the wedding. I've also been neglecting work and mail to read. Still, this marble chocolate Pocky is amazing. Am I the only dork to find myself handling the things like play cigarettes? ^^;) Thursday, August 30, 2001 Why did I even expect blogging by twelve noon? XD I print out lengthy email exchanges and keep them in my desk drawer, to give them the same mythological weight as a physical correspondence. For a Comp Sci major, I can be a luddite. Thursday, August 30, 2001 And regarding the digression Wednesday, August 29, 2001 This is an odd feeling Or maybe it's the end of Basara. Which I woke up this morning thinking about, and then I re-read it and thought about it some more. And the more I thought about it the more down I got - even though the ending was not an unhappy one, strictly speaking - because the broad lines driving the character development were becoming clear by that point, and there were some that simply didn't run in cheerful directions. (Spoiler-free, yes, but to be honest I don't feel like dissecting the details of the manga either.) Tamura-sensei, Tamura-sensei... if there's one part of the woman I can't fault it's her sense of planning. Angel Sanctuary felt *that* in control for about 75% of its run, and then it overreached itself on the home stretch. As for Basara, I went into the grand climax with a set of expectations, I came out with them more or less intact - and then I had to wonder, what was the source of all my suspense then? (Because I whimpered my way through #24 and half of #25. ^^;) --And the answer was, of course, that it really was wide open at the end. In all the respects that counted (except one**, the source of half my depression, but let that be). But the magazine editor in my head had said circa #5 or so, "Well it's going to be a happy end of course, Bessatsu shoujo comic, what the f*** were you thinking?", and that was that. Not that the mangaka didn't blow shoujo guidelines to hell about fifty times, but heck. Then about the second time reading when Nagi pulled his haha-fooled-you-kids raconteur schtick, I caught myself thinking, well what if. In essence, I started having the same second thoughts as Ashlea in her fic (alleluia), written for the end of the Trigun telly series: every story two stories, the one that didn't happen, and the one that did. Not exactly the same, because in Basara the twin burdens of dramatic and moral necessity were distributed differently - but still. Which is the version that should have happened? As narrative inevitability? As poetic justice? In realistic terms as opposed to romantic? And then I had the same reaction to my issues that I had to the fic (which btw is *rather* brillant): so maybe they died. So? If there's a price that gets paid off that way, who does it get paid *to*, in the end? Who's proven right by that? Who's wrong? ...Dose of reality worth the happy end everyone was expecting? Of course, it's not like the end was the only instance of this. There were victories here and there that ran way too smooth on little wheels, as if Murphy's Law was in suspension. Tamura's not infallible, just a damned good mangaka. I know I think too much. I wish I could be a sparkly-bubble drown-me-in-syrup romantic like Sakurazuka Val sometimes - I don't know her in the least, btw - I'm at odds with her take on every series/fandom we're both in purely by reason of constitutional make-up, but then again only *one* of us makes the sites and writes the blurbs and does the scans and hosts the multimedia, so I have no right to yap about her. ^^; *And* my uncle is having a public chinanews.cn breakdown/tantrum because some Beijing official is being a bastard about his artistic directorship, and everyone else online picks *today* to be strong and forthright in their opinions, and I've just spent five paragraphs ranting uber-cryptically about something none of my friends have read. And I didn't even go into Asagi. Life is just... you've gotta laugh. Except I'm not in a laughing mood. Crisse de tabernaq, I need a drink. >_< **It was suggested to me yesterday that if the father hadn't caught Ageha that one time and Shido had woken up it could all have happened differently. *TWITCH* My friend, the farking-irrepressible optimist. Wednesday, August 29, 2001 Finished Basara YamiEi fansub, yay... I've been feeling lucky these couple of days, as I think about all the movers and shakers in fandom that I'm acquainted with: the translators, the news providers, the list maintainers, the tape distributors, all the webmasters. I feel at the forefront of the action, really, like there's always someone I can "yoroshiku-onegai-shimasu" if I have a fannish need. (Or maybe it's just because I've been making money this past week. XD I saw m'other friend Justin today and he remarked on what seems to be a visible change in mood.) There's not much *I* can do for others practically... although there is something I want to learn for myself: how to bind books. I want to be able to make "real" versions of the fanfics I'm most fond of, because I miss that hands-on aspect when reading on the computer. And I want to be able to give that back to the writers themselves - if I had the wherewithal to publish these people for real, I would. I'd do layouts and decorative borders and inside covers of cloudlike Japanese paper, and beg fanart from everyone I know for the illustrations. Oh, the dream... ^_^; Tuesday, August 28, 2001 Feeling a bit dizzy My father, soit dit en passant, thinks Count D is the greatest thing since sliced bread. o_o; *chants* Basara. Tomorrow. XD Monday, August 27, 2001 It just goes to show I did a little poking through the 'net today and discovered to my surprise that there was an entire fandom for the series - I mean, fic and art and everything - which had passed completely under my radar. Although my take on't seems to be a little different from everyone else's. Opinionators I came across online think it's about the people, I'm convinced that it really *is* about the animals. D abolishes the - perhaps not entirely false, certainly artificially maintained - distinction between beast and man, and chaos wastes no time in ensuing. Leon on the other hand is a most classic Western-thought humanist, which makes him a *deeper* stereotype than that of the loud American, so to speak... It's sharp writing as does it for the series: 'psychologically incisive' is the phrase that comes to mind. I don't mind its episodic short-story nature at all. In the hands of a past master, a Poe or a Saki or an O'Henry, the format itself is addictive. As for the piccie, it's turning out quite well considering how fast I'm working. (But then again, as long as I'm still living at home all I have to do is wander over to the shelves and pick out a book on cheongsams, a book on female nudes, a book on exotic butterflies, a book on Eastern unicorn legends...) I haven't finished the sketch, so if there's a fanciful bestiole you'd like to see just say the word. ^_^v I'm updating the MP3s, but I'm way too sleepy to answer email now, so I'll skip that part. Again. ^^;;; |
