got_quiet | Entries tagged with anime

I haven't been reading as much this year as last. My concentration has been hard to wrangle for a while. And it was not particularly well wrangled before. But I did finish a decent Sci-Fi book recently.

( Some book, show, and music reviews )

So in my last post I mentioned that I had seen a Haikyuu movie and I just assumed that it was old content, but after chatting with my brother about it he was like, uh, no, none of that is in the anime, you watched something completely new. Welp, lol.

My only excuse is that
1) It's been a long time since I saw the series.
2) The movie starts with a flashback scene and there are many flashbacks throughout
3) The last anime movie I saw was a rehash so I thought that was maybe a thing and
4) look, a lot of volley ball games look the same ok?

But no. The Battle of the Trash Bin was COMPLETELY NEW CONTENT and I was just watching it the whole time going "oh it's interesting how they're kind of mixing the old episodes, oh I don't remember this scene huh I guess it's been a while." I fucking gaslit myself.

So yeah, I actually saw a BRAND NEW Haikyuu movie! And I should probably watch the series again or something so I remember the whole context behind the match, or at least the tournament arc.

Even though it's been a month, I'm just now trying to get in order the things I brought back from Japan. So here's part 2 of that, all the fannish stickers and paper I got.

( Graphic Heavy )

Current Mood: silly

Eugh god.

Jet lag is such a pain in the ass. The worst part about it (I might be repeating myself here but I am sooo jet lagged I don't care) is when I come back it takes forever to recover because I've got nothing going on at home and can just pass out at 5PM every day after work. So it's been a while since I came back from my last trip to Japan and I'm still fighting off sleep during the sunlight hours so I don't wake up at midnight like I have the last few days. Even though I've been trying to stay up things are just not resetting.

Here's a review: Spending 18 hours in transit sucks ass.

But going to Japan is still worth it. This trip was part leisure and part business. It's very rare that I get to Japan twice in so short a time span. It will be a few years before I get the chance to go again. And this time I was solo for a large portion instead of hanging out with family, so since I didn't need to worry about anyone but myself on the leisure leg I went a liiiiiiittle bit wild on the merch. Compared to some people I'm sure I was still modest about it but since I don't buy too much stuff during regular times coming back with a pile of things this time felt like a major splurge. I ended up picking up some cheap kimono, and some tea supplies.

( Books I bought )

Current Mood: sleepy

I'm going to avoid spoilers in this post because I think the movie just came out in the US, but if anyone wants to talk spoilers in the comments I'm down. The only scene I mention is the first one.

I just came back from watching Studio Ghibli's latest movie, The Boy and the Heron, and it was absolutely wild. It's shot up immediately to top three Ghibli films for me though my feeling is that maybe after I've slept on it I will have a more sober reaction to it. I haven't watched much of Ghibli's new stuff. I think the last of theirs that I really sat down to watch beginning to end was The Wind Rises, which was ok but not remarkable for me. This movie though goes balls to the wall. There are a lot of familiar Ghibli elements in it: travel to other worlds, getting spirited away, a child's relationship with his parents, confronting death, etc, but the way it chooses to depict all this is through some psychedelic dream logic adventure that moves well beyond the stuff in Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle into a Paprika-like parade of open ended ideas imo.

It also straddles the line between a children's film and very much not a children's film. The first scene is almost as rough as Grave of the Fireflies and after I saw that I was like fuck what am I in for, but it calms down after that, although trauma and PTSD still appear.

The Japanese title is quite different. It's 君たちはどう生きる (Kimitachi wa dou ikiru) translated literally to "How do they live." The appearance of that title after a dramatic fire made me think it was more a "how can they keep on living" situation but it wasn't as dark as all that. (The depiction of the fire was also one of my favorite visuals of the movie) The title actually comes from a book that has very little to do with the movie at the plot level, but I can see the connection. How Do They Live was a didactic book on morality and ethics for young upper class boys published in the 1930s. The main character of this movie, a young upper class boy, has to make some major decisions about how he wants to deal with the shit world he's found himself in. The only concrete connection between the two is that Mahito is given the book by his mother, a way of encouraging him to do his best to be a good person.

The worldbuilding is a bit of a fever dream but also feels like a lot is grounded in Japanese tradition that I only caught in little tidbits as an elementary student of the subject. The "hell" that Mahito falls into, the hunger of the birds that are trapped there, etc. The nature of stone and wood is explicitly laid out which is hard Shinto.

The way that Mahito's trauma manifests was also incisive. I would have liked his relationship to have evolved with his step mother more concretely, a lot of the growth there happens internally while he's not actually interacting with her, but it was still a satisfying conclusion. She could have so easily been a villain in this and she wasn't to my great relief.

Because so much of this movie can feel like one wild occurrence after another, it's hard to even talk about. Where do I even start? I think I'll be watching this one again. I can totally see why Ghibli refused to put out any teasers or significant trailers. Watching with no idea wtf is happening is the way to go.

Current Mood: enthralled

The next two months are peak work related stress time so that's fun. I still spend some time doing frivolous things because one of the ways I express stress is avoidance, horray! I just feel physically ill while doing it.

Anyhoo!

I watched episode one of Chainsaw Man and looked like an interesting enough setup. I'm watching without subs, so I'm missing chunks of context, but immersion is both good practice and a good way to trick myself into practice. I'm way behind in Demon Slayers though because I picked up a whole chunk of Chainsaw man a while back and haven't had the time to hunt down to Demon Slayers episodes more recently. I'll get to it eventually.

Finally finished a round of Against the Storm on Viceroy difficulty. It was only my third try but I've been very lazy about ramping up the difficulty because Veteran is an easy and chill time and I've never lost, but Viceroy you suddenly have pay a little attention to your resources and can't just build every building willy nilly. The game gets significant balance and gameplay updates on the regular, and generally it feels like it's going in the right direction. I've been thinking there's some space to write some fic even though it's very much not a narrative canon, because the worldbuilding is interesting, and all the houses start with three people in them so instant threesome opportunity.

After playing through a bunch of Hyperlight Drifter I looked up whether or not it had more than one ending and was disappointed to learn that it didn't. I did enjoy the ending that we got. It's the mix of positive and sad that seemed to saturate the whole game from the beginning, but my desire to improve my completion rate was driven by the possibility that there was more narratively, and since it sounds like there isn't I don't know if I want to spend more time trying to complete more of it. Overall it was a great game though. Very cool art and music and a tight and challenging combat system.

The books finally coming out of hold on Libby I'm failing to read before they go back into the pool nowadays, but I did finish up one more book before the crunch choked out my reading habits.

A Marvelous Light is another M/M romance. It's set in late 19th century England and the worldbuilding is the familiar trope of everything being as usual except magicians live among us doing magician things but generally staying out of the limelight. Some spoilers below:

( spoilery reactions )

I don't know how I feel about these settings where magicians are chilling out in England and everything else is the same. I do like what I assume is late 19th century settings and I used to like magic is among us type of settings, but in terms of their worldbuilding it can be frustrating when nothing new is going on with the trope. It's very hard to match Clarke, who seemed to effortlessly fold magic into the world without having to rely on excuses of secrecy to avoid thinking about what magic in the world really could mean. But I do wish more people would try.

I got a haircut a couple days ago because my brother's wedding is coming up and I didn't want to be in photos with a half-assed mullet, but I went to someone new cause my usual barber was on vacation, and I don't know how I feel about the cut. I feel a bit like... an Asian Hitler when I look in the mirror. Hopefully this is just my weird anxieties about my appearance and no one else looks at me and thinks the same lol. It's a bit of a messy cut too, like the edges are kind of rough... but still better than a mullet I guess. Maybe I should figure out how to give my hair some body, but I just.. cannot be assed to do anything but put shampoo in it.

I went to the Demon Slayer world premier tonight! It showed the final two episodes of the previous season, and the extended first episode of the new one, which felt about as long as two episodes. I think a number of people (including myself honestly) either forgot or didn't know exactly what would be shown during the event. I was pretty sure we'd be seeing new stuff, but my memory is ass and when the Entertainment arc episodes started showing I wasn't sure what I was getting. It didn't help that the episodes were not really cut for theater, and so I ended up sitting through three credits rolls throughout the whole thing. A handful of people, maybe 4 or five, ended up leaving at the end of the Entertainment District arc, presumably unaware that there was more, which really sucks for them because the whole point of the event was to get a sneak peek at the new content.

Even if the show had just been the old stuff, watching the Tengen vs Gyutaro fight on the big screen was great. And I think this was the first time I saw those episodes with subtitles, so there were a couple points where I was like... oh, that was what they were saying lol. It was a little frustrating cause whenever there are subs on I think to myself. I fucking understand all of those words and the grammar and it makes perfect sense to me, but without the subs being able to catch the meaning is tough. It's the 90% rule in action I guess.

Anyway, the first episode of the new season was hype. It looks like there's going to be little to no Inosuke and Zenitsu in it though. I've managed to remain spoiler free from the manga so I'm looking forward to whatever heart wrenching plot comes up, and of course the fights.

---

I'm also trying to decide if I want to join a fic exchange. I have always enjoyed the gifts I've gotten from exchanges, but have also almost always been disappointed in the fic that I wrote myself. Writing is stressful and I'm too much of a perfectionist in my own work. I'm not really comfortable pretending writing doesn't make me miserable either. I think one of the first exchanges I ever did, like a decade ago, I had in the note that writing it was tough and the only comments I got was that it was rude to say so lol. Plus back when I tried exchanges I had the luck of getting non-commenting defaulters multiple times in a row. So maybe once has a giftee ever acknowledged the gift I gave them.

Eh, I stopped trying to participate in exchanges a long time ago, and I should probably stay away.

The work thing I am anxious about has been adjusted so I have less time to prepare and I am now more anxious! Very cool! It's going to be fine really. I do this every single year and it's always fine in the end, but until it's fine I will be anxious.

Haven't been doing much more than distracting myself about the work thing because of this. I did start watching a short anime called Barakamon. It's a slice of life show about a shodo (Calligraphy) master who has a bit of a crisis of confidence and retreats to a rural island town down south. There are a lot of gags about old technology, nosy neighbors, and swarms of local kids with no sense of personal space teaching the poor main character the joys of pulling his stick out of his ass and having some fun with life. It's cute, kind of dumb, but fun. It was recommended to me because the language has some pretty heavy accents, so it didn't work out very well as a study tool considering I could barely understand what everyone was saying. The accents were as interesting as promised though.

I haven't had much time for doing anything else. Tried to steal a few hours to play VNs since I'm well behind on that, got over my rage moment with Lost Ark and am chilling a little more about that. I've dropped my play time down significantly but still managed to get exactly one run in with the current content (Valtan) before the patch that opens up the new current content lol. Valtan is also a lot more reasonable than Argos but at the same time the next tier of gear means I need to spend time researching optimization, and I both don't have the time, or the desire to do the thing that I hate the absolute most in all of videogaming, which is number crunching and homework. I want flashing lights and twitching gameplay. Not spreadsheets!

Nothing much else is going on except, you know, the crushing weight of the country collapsing down upon us. I'm not sure if knowing we haven't hit the nadir yet is a good or a bad thing.

Anyway, once the work thing is over I'm hoping I get a little more active again and have some time to nerd out more and read mutual posts more closely.

You ever do that thing where you start a post but don't finish it, but when you go to finish it it's out of date so you end up rewriting half of it without finishing it, ad infinitum? I've had one of those sitting in my drafts for what feels like a month now, so I'm just cutting it up and posting pieces of it before this results in my never posting anything ever again, which has happened to me in other places.

I caught an episode of Mashiro no Oto and was intrigued, so I went and picked up the whole series. It's a story about a depressed kid who's grandfather dies. The grandfather was a shamisen master and the MC, Setsu, of course picked it up from him and is some sort of shamisen prodigy. He's also however completely removed from the shamisen world and doesn't know anything about performing or competitions or whatever, so no one knows about him either. The story is kind of about him being able to "find his sound" and his frustration with asserting himself vs living up to the reputation of his grandfather and the pressure of his parents, who are absolute pieces of abusive shit.

( More plus some music )

I've also been keeping up with each new episode of Kimetsu no Yaiba / Demon Slayers when it comes out. This one I'm 1000% into. The fights are so fucking good, and every episode is like injecting raw shonen energy into my veins. The only problem is that I haven't watched a show as it was being released in FOREVER, and this show in particular is really fucking with its viewers by putting out cliffhanger episode after cliffhanger episode. The wait is causing me mental anguish, but unlike Mashiro no Oto I absolutely don't want to spoil myself with the manga on this one because I don't want to dilute the hype.The last season was tops for animation. Just awesome combat scenes all around. The pleasure quarter arc just finished and I don't know if they're going to pick up with a new arc right off the bat. If not I'll need to find something else to watch. Maybe give Kill La Kill another shot.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #12 is about recasts.

I don't care about recasts because I don't tend to care much about actors. For the longest time I didn't pay attention to them all and would get a little irritated if I recognized them from somewhere else, but now I'm just ambivalent about it. Also I don't spend too much time with live action, and I don't pay any attention to seiyuu, so yeah. I tried to think of maybe an anime or something that might be interesting done by a different studio but I wasn't sure about that either, since the style of each show is so intrinsic to its identity. I guess I'm just one of those people that doesn't get very enthusiastic about remixes.

Challenge #13 Share a favorite memory about fandom

There have been a lot of good times. There are so many moments in WoW I remember fondly. Crazy raids, fun RP sessions, etc. And some good memories are tied to who I've shared them with, like when I was a kid and my Uncle took me and my brother on a special trip down to Baltimore to attend Otacon. It was my first big con and it was a massive event for me. Or when my best friend and I watched a lets play of fatal frame together through AOL lol cause there were no other convenient chat programs back then.

But the number one best fannish memory I have was when I was sitting in the Ghibli museum watching the small short movie that they play exclusively there. And it's important to me because of the context of why I was there.

I decided to start learning Japanese my junior year of high school. I was a pretty depressed and withdrawn kid at that time, dealing with your typical typical high school bullshit and basically feeling like there was nothing to live for. Studying Japanese gave me a goal and something to be enthusiastic about again, so I went balls to the wall with it since I had literally nothing else to do with my life at the time. Soon after I came across a CD that I incorrectly thought was a short video about the cat bus in Totoro. It turns out it was just the soundtrack, and when I did some research I learned that the video was exclusively shown at the Ghibli museum in Japan. So then and there I decided that some day I was going to sit in the theater in that museum and watch that film. For a variety of reasons I struggled a lot with carrying through on things. I had this sense in my heart that I was person just not capable of success, but this goal I was dead fucking serious about.

Fast forward three years. I was now a sophomore in college, and had somehow not let go of my dream. I was taking Japanese in college, and managed to get get my ass properly into gear to spend my sophomore year studying abroad in Japan. And many months into the program finally I go to the museum with some exchange student friends, we have a fun day there, and at the end sit down in the theater to watch the little film that our tickets have given us an entry to. The museum has a small batch of films that they play in circulation so there's no guarantee that any particular one will show, but that day they showed the video of the little cat bus that I thought I was purchasing those few years back.

I watched the entire film through tears lol. It was so embarrassing because when the film was over I was still weeping and all my friends were like aw yeah we liked it a lot too, and I was like, yup... that's why I'm crying. It's not that this is the first long-term goal I've ever achieved in my life or anything, as small and insignificant as it is... I still get emotional thinking about it honestly because it takes me back to a very special time.

On the recommendation of Falllover I picked up a copy of Jhereg and I enjoyed it! It was like a murder mystery except backwards, where the mystery was about how to do the murder. I guess that makes it a caper story? Some of the writing felt a little dated, not thematically or anything but voice wise there's the sort of quippy dialog and humor that I associate with spec fic of a certain age, but it's not really a detriment, and the worldbuilding was interesting enough. There's just enough there to serve the plot it seems, and maybe to plant a few seeds for future developments. I'll probably pick up the second book too if my local bookstore has it. I need to go by to try turning around a few books I want to get rid of to make space anyway, as I am in severe need of Marie Kondoing my library. Like, severe. I ended up buying a new bookshelf over the New Years weekend to deal with the issue a little but I would much rather just get rid of some things.

The other thing I did over the New Years weekend was watch the entire fucking run of Demon Slayers. Like Season 1, Episode 1, through the movie, and then straight into the current arc to the most recent episode. It was a lot of show, but it was like catnip to me. I just needed some straightforward shounen combat, pure-hearted protagonists, funky monsters and cathartic tragedy. But I loved it. And somehow Zenitsu was my favorite, even though his constant screaming is neigh unbearable. He's just got my favorite character design of the three, and his terror is relatable, haha. I just wish he wasn't so obsessed with the ladies, but hey, shounen anime, I know what I'm signing up for. Also, Inosuke having a bijin face is just... the weird sort of thing I will always find entertaining. I'm a simple person who enjoys simple pleasures. I'm now waiting impatiently for new episodes, and digging around for fan art. Unfortunately I find fanfic for anime to not be to taste so I'm kind of stuck there.

( And here's the Cowboy Bebop Rant )