(no subject)
A few things:
1. Much to my surprise and delight,
winkingstar has podficced me! Specifically the Northanger Abbey snippet I wrote for Yuletide, Catherine's Fairy-Tail, which is absolutely the last thing I would ever have expected anyone to be interested in podficcing and therefore makes me even more gleeful about it.
2. Okay, I try not to be that kind of terrifying fan who runs around shoving things down people's throats (I guess those you who have literally had me shove these books physically into your hands can feel free to laugh at me here) but some of you may remember that time I read the Twelve Kingdoms books, fell madly in love with Fuyumi Ono's brain, ranted all over LJ about the perfection of Yoko Nakajima's character arc, etc.? FOR ONCE I AM NOT ALONE and now you should all go read izilen's Ten Reasons to Read the Twelve Kingdoms post so you can all fall down the rabbithole too.
The official news that Tokyopop is folding and the third Yoko book is therefore pretty much guaranteed to NEVER COME OUT in English actually broke me enough that I decided to do a reread on the Yoko books, this time using Eugene Woodbury's fan translations as a comparison to the Tokyopop ones I already read. In general, I think I agree with the assessment that the fan translations are better, with one nitpicky detail - I actually really like Tokyopop's decision to use 'king' as a gender-neutral term, rather than using 'empress' for the female rulers. Kingship is gender-neutral in the Twelve Kingdoms universe, and that's important to the story!
I have also now read the one Tokyopop never got around to publishing, The Shore in Twilight, The Sky at Daybreak, and - man, guys, I am SO ANGRY they never got to this one, because what Fuyumi Ono does in this series continues to be more and more impressive. This is the book where she just comes right up to the questions she's been flirting around in all the previous ones and forces the characters to acknowledge that the system of the way the world works, divine mandate of kings and all, has serious problems - makes, in many ways, no intuitive sense. And there's no way, as far as anyone knows, to reform it. Those are the rules. Break them, and your country suffers. So you find loopholes. You lawyer your way around the rules. I cannot admire Fuyumi Ono more for this - it's so brave and so fascinating to set up a system of rules for a magic kingdom and then deconstruct them in this way, and I can't think of another story that does it with quite this level of cold logic.
This is a book about how you can't just afford to obey the rules and keep your own house in order and close your eyes to what's happening elsewhere, because sooner or later it's going to rebound on you. And Yoko's intuitive sense of responsibility, the way she brings this point home and makes the rest of the rulers acknowledge it, makes me love her even more than I already did, IF THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE. (But we all know that I've got my #1 Yoko Nakajima Fangirl badge pinned onto my metaphorical shirt all the time, so.)
This is also, I should mention, a book in which the most important dynamic is between a lady general and the lady king she's come to ask to help save her country. Plus, a genderqueer king! (At least, that's how I read the king of Han.) And Yoko hilariously blackmailing Shoryuu into doing what she wants! And Shoukei and Suzu being background awesome! In short: DAMMIT TOKYOPOP, I would really have liked to own a physical copy of this book.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/239159.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
1. Much to my surprise and delight,
winkingstar has podficced me! Specifically the Northanger Abbey snippet I wrote for Yuletide, Catherine's Fairy-Tail, which is absolutely the last thing I would ever have expected anyone to be interested in podficcing and therefore makes me even more gleeful about it.
2. Okay, I try not to be that kind of terrifying fan who runs around shoving things down people's throats (I guess those you who have literally had me shove these books physically into your hands can feel free to laugh at me here) but some of you may remember that time I read the Twelve Kingdoms books, fell madly in love with Fuyumi Ono's brain, ranted all over LJ about the perfection of Yoko Nakajima's character arc, etc.? FOR ONCE I AM NOT ALONE and now you should all go read izilen's Ten Reasons to Read the Twelve Kingdoms post so you can all fall down the rabbithole too.
The official news that Tokyopop is folding and the third Yoko book is therefore pretty much guaranteed to NEVER COME OUT in English actually broke me enough that I decided to do a reread on the Yoko books, this time using Eugene Woodbury's fan translations as a comparison to the Tokyopop ones I already read. In general, I think I agree with the assessment that the fan translations are better, with one nitpicky detail - I actually really like Tokyopop's decision to use 'king' as a gender-neutral term, rather than using 'empress' for the female rulers. Kingship is gender-neutral in the Twelve Kingdoms universe, and that's important to the story!
I have also now read the one Tokyopop never got around to publishing, The Shore in Twilight, The Sky at Daybreak, and - man, guys, I am SO ANGRY they never got to this one, because what Fuyumi Ono does in this series continues to be more and more impressive. This is the book where she just comes right up to the questions she's been flirting around in all the previous ones and forces the characters to acknowledge that the system of the way the world works, divine mandate of kings and all, has serious problems - makes, in many ways, no intuitive sense. And there's no way, as far as anyone knows, to reform it. Those are the rules. Break them, and your country suffers. So you find loopholes. You lawyer your way around the rules. I cannot admire Fuyumi Ono more for this - it's so brave and so fascinating to set up a system of rules for a magic kingdom and then deconstruct them in this way, and I can't think of another story that does it with quite this level of cold logic.
This is a book about how you can't just afford to obey the rules and keep your own house in order and close your eyes to what's happening elsewhere, because sooner or later it's going to rebound on you. And Yoko's intuitive sense of responsibility, the way she brings this point home and makes the rest of the rulers acknowledge it, makes me love her even more than I already did, IF THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE. (But we all know that I've got my #1 Yoko Nakajima Fangirl badge pinned onto my metaphorical shirt all the time, so.)
This is also, I should mention, a book in which the most important dynamic is between a lady general and the lady king she's come to ask to help save her country. Plus, a genderqueer king! (At least, that's how I read the king of Han.) And Yoko hilariously blackmailing Shoryuu into doing what she wants! And Shoukei and Suzu being background awesome! In short: DAMMIT TOKYOPOP, I would really have liked to own a physical copy of this book.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/239159.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.