Old-School Manga and New-School Anime
Sometimes I have to look back at my taste and shake my head. I know why I’m still continuing with Attack on Titan, but I can’t even begin to explain why I’d picked up Prince of Tennis ad xxxHOLiC Rei again, but there you have it.
♦ I just spent the majority of last weekend being ridiculously confused by the entirety of New Prince of Tennis. I mean, I’d gotten the gist, but the actual details... yeah. Good times, good times. If somebody’d paid me a dollar every time I slapped my forehead or made WHAT gestures during that readthrough I'd be rich enough to buy the series off Konomi-sensei and then edit the balls out of it for consistency's sake. It’s like Konomi-sensei just doesn’t give a flying fulcrum about trying anymore. I’m not even going to touch the “plot twists” (the worst of which include Echizen’s forgotten ace big brother!! And YUKIMURA’S GUILLAIN-BARRÉ AGAIN WHAT THE FUCK), okay, can we just have some follow-through here? Is that so much to ask for?
On the other hand, I had a blast digging through the trawls of the Internet for PoT fics and enjoying Minagawa Junko (Echizen), Kaida Yuki (Fuji), and Nagai Sachiko (Yukimura)’s beautiful performances during the odd episode watch. On the other other hand, most of the doujinshi links I could find are either down, deleted, or locked behind defunct scanlation communities. Such is the condition of bit rot. Le sigh.
♣ I have fully caught up to xxxHOLiC Rei’s latest chapters (38, at the time of writing). I saw the end of the arc coming from at least fifteen chapters away, and yet I was still disappointed. For one, I’m really feeling the lack of ladies here, CLAMP. For another, I’m truly dreading the merge with Tsubasa World Chronicle in the next issue. I guess it’s a sign for me to really amp up my writing of those two CLAMP fics...
♠ Attack on Titan continues to have massive pacing issues. Back then, I’d read chapters 1-48 within a day and I had the worst time trying to figure out - and staying excited for - what exactly had been happening when; this recent arc utterly fails to improve my impression from that initial frustration. Isayama-sensei evidently still has not learned how to work gracefully with time dilation, even after four years of continual guidance from his editors.
All the same, of the three series I'd read last week I’m still the most excited for this. That’s... not actually saying anything, mind, but at least Shingeki no Kyojin is consistent with treating its characters are uniformly awesome and flawed, and relatively even-keeled with the testosterone-estrogen balance.
♥ In other news, has anybody watched Sailor Moon Crystal? Any initial impressions? I took a quick glimpse, and don’t think it’s for me, if only because the original anime adaptation was so powerful in my formational years. I’d read the manga a number of years after I’d watched the original anime, so it didn’t have nearly as strong an influence on me, but it still struck deep.
I think a part of my problem with Sailor Moon Crystal is that it’s taking the series that had established all the mahou shoujo tropes and modernizing just the wrapping. It’s delivering the same content to a vastly different audience than in 1992. I don’t expect it to feel fresh, because it’s not meant to; it’s a classic for a reason. But Sailor Moon Crystal’s pilot episode hasn’t managed to capture any of the charm that the over-exaggerated original adaptation had conveyed of the manga. I don’t know, maybe I was going into it expecting too much. I suppose we’ll see where it goes first before I make any firm decisions regarding my opinion of it.