I finished it, but it was a fight. It hit too many pet peeves for me, and my issues with it may in fact be personal to a "oh holy jeebus not this again" sense of having heard this particular story before. Repeatedly.
It was ironically the FIRST book I read of two in which I went "Didn't I see this anime already?..." (the second was Cinder, which I read RIGHT AFTER this, but liked better.)
I'm not the world's biggest anime fan (something I am oddly enough often accused of, in a "didn't you watch blah blah blah?" at which point I stare blankly and blink: I suppose as a gamer and a reader and a writer I fall into the sort of stereotype people expect to spend all their time in the fandom).
Let me now explain why by listing all the tropes I've seen done to absolute death in anime that found there way into this book:
Blatant Use of Religious Iconography IN WEIRD WAYS!
ANGELS ARE EVIL!!!!
ALL THESE GOOD THINGS? EVIL!!! REALLY EVIL!!! HEAVEN IS PROBABLY EVIL!!! THEN AGAIN HELL SEEMS TO BE TOO! SO PROBABLY OUR HEROINE WILL REMAKE THEM BOTH!!!!!
SO IS THE CHURCH!!!! EVIL CONSPIRACY CHURCH!
FOR NO APPARENT REASON, OUR HEROINE WILL NOW SLEEP WITH A PRIEST!
HEROINE LOVES THIS INHUMANLY PRETTY AMBIGUOUSLY MALE (?) JERK DESPITE PRESENCE OF MORE INTERESTING JUST ABSURDLY HANDSOME BUT NOT SORT OF WOMANLY JERK!
It was about that point I bashed my head against the dashboard (my husband was driving) and groaned. And then Hubby went "Uh...sweetie? What did the Angry Birds do this time?" (I am often playing Angry Birds while he is driving).
At which point I summerized the story thus far (I was about halfway in) and then read him the description of said womanly man (???) angel, at which point he blinked at me and went "I think I've seen that one."
Yeah.
I don't even know if the author WATCHES the stuff (unlike the author of Cinder, who got her start as a fanfic writer so I KNOW she does) but she's clearly pulling on tropes that the Japanese just go bananas for when they decide to play with Western religion, and I suspect I just didn't go through a gothy enough phase to ever develop an intense love for it, and I've had to sit through too much of it (because I have friends who eat it up like candy. I have recommended this book to them: I think they will love it), and Angela is not sympathetic or interesting enough as a character to make me read on anyway.
Also: I hate the insanely pretty womanly man thing. I HATE IT. RARGH. It's almost enough to make me stop reading all on its own, because I REALLY HATE IT.
So that all sounds really nasty. Let me stress, however, that there are pet peeve issues at play here, which is why it sounds so nasty: it's Alicia going bananas over things that make Alicia go bananas pretty fast. I suppose I would call it a Your Mileage May Vary, under your old system, while admitting that my mileage is pretty damn low. But again, I did recommend it strongly to a few people who I know really, really like these kinds of stories and I think will probably be all over it like my cat on his scratching post after I cover it in catnip. And I don't mean that insultingly, as in a "here, you like crap, you'll like this" sort of recommendation. I think I just picked this up because the cover was preeettty and I tend to like "interesting reincarnation stories" and it was a bad pick on my part.
It makes me wonder what the ratio of people who like anime who ALSO read and like this book is to the people who don't watch and/or like anime at all and don't like this book? Probably not a really fair comparison, but you've made me wonder.
I can think of one SHU grad for sure who was a major anime far, but I kept having to remind myself it wasn't this author (the girl I'm thinking of looked like she could be your little sister, weirdly enough). But now that you mention it, I'm remembering a short story of the author's I read, and during the crit session, there may have been mention of anime influence, so you could most definitely be on to something.
Which would go a LONG way in explaining why this didn't click for me. Which should be a moot point, because anime is primarily a visual style, no?
Well, here's the thing: it's a Japanese medium, and ergo everything you get is going to be filtered through their cultural tropes, and how they see our culture, if it's one of our cultural things they're riffing on. Sometimes this looks...very odd...to someone who grew up in a Western culture. Someone who had some reason to know (being of Asian extraction and having grown up partially overseas, in Japan) explained it to me like this once: our cultural "things" are as exotic to them as theirs are to us. So they like to use them in their media, but it doesn't...translate...exactly like you'd expect. Because sometimes what they think is important isn't important to us or because they're comparing it to something in their own culture that doesn't exist in ours. I've heard that from a few other people, too, but at least one who I expect has some real personal basis for saying it (which I don't: I lived overseas, but not in Asia).
Some people do this better than others. Hiromu Arakawa, the writer/artist who did Fullmetal Alchemist, does a VERY SOLID European quasi-magical industrial society (I'm a big fan and I'm picky about my European Magical Industrial Societies, as you know.) And I've, you know, not only grown up in a western society, I lived in Europe. I spent formative years in the sorts of places she was modeling her society on, and it looked fine to me. She did her homework (...mostly. Her occasional failure to get how Western audiences would react to her tossing Buddhist nonviolence into weird places in a VERY violent storyline shows nobody's perfect.)
Then you could watch, say Yana Toboso's Black Butler, which is a very good example of what it is--namely someone who clearly likes the visual style and some mythological things about a Western setting but doesn't actually manage to pull it off in a way that anyone who's actually familiar with the setting will buy as genuine. I made it through two episodes of the anime: I laughed myself sick. My husband thought I'd gone crazy. It's on Netflix: flick it on for about ten minutes and I think you'll see what I mean.
I have friends who EAT THAT STUFF UP WITH A SPOON. And they'd LOVE this book. So I recommended it to them.
I can't really define what it is without giving it more thought that it probably merits at the moment, but there's certain things that anime and its related mediums (manga, Japanese and other Asian country produced video games) tend to do Western religion, and they all do it more or less the same, and I see it in this book. I listed some of the things they tend to do (EVIL CONSPIRACY CHURCH! EVIL POPE/BISHOP THING! HEAVY STYLE POINTS FOR THE DRESS CODE! NO ACTUAL, Y'KNOW, RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL CHURCH MYTHOLOGY OR DOCTRINE EXCEPT IN A VERY VAGUE VISUAL SENSE! PRETTY PRETTY WOMANLY MEN!) I could probably make a very, very long list, and someone else has probably already done it better.
It's one of those things, I think, you either like or you don't. I don't really care for it but I can overlook it if there's something else going on that I find interesting. I didn't see anything like that here to get me past it.
It also depends highly on the kind of anime. You really can't compare Ponyo with, say, Grave of the Fireflies, which I only recommend watching if you want to hate life for the rest of the day. It's very good. And DEPRESSING.
Maybe Ponyo was not the best comparison: my husband reminds me that this charming "Chirrupy Take On The Little Mermaid" is now kind of depressing in light of what happened last year with the earthquakes.
It was ironically the FIRST book I read of two in which I went "Didn't I see this anime already?..." (the second was Cinder, which I read RIGHT AFTER this, but liked better.)
I'm not the world's biggest anime fan (something I am oddly enough often accused of, in a "didn't you watch blah blah blah?" at which point I stare blankly and blink: I suppose as a gamer and a reader and a writer I fall into the sort of stereotype people expect to spend all their time in the fandom).
Let me now explain why by listing all the tropes I've seen done to absolute death in anime that found there way into this book:
Blatant Use of Religious Iconography IN WEIRD WAYS!
ANGELS ARE EVIL!!!!
ALL THESE GOOD THINGS? EVIL!!! REALLY EVIL!!! HEAVEN IS PROBABLY EVIL!!! THEN AGAIN HELL SEEMS TO BE TOO! SO PROBABLY OUR HEROINE WILL REMAKE THEM BOTH!!!!!
SO IS THE CHURCH!!!! EVIL CONSPIRACY CHURCH!
FOR NO APPARENT REASON, OUR HEROINE WILL NOW SLEEP WITH A PRIEST!
HEROINE LOVES THIS INHUMANLY PRETTY AMBIGUOUSLY MALE (?) JERK DESPITE PRESENCE OF MORE INTERESTING JUST ABSURDLY HANDSOME BUT NOT SORT OF WOMANLY JERK!
It was about that point I bashed my head against the dashboard (my husband was driving) and groaned. And then Hubby went "Uh...sweetie? What did the Angry Birds do this time?" (I am often playing Angry Birds while he is driving).
At which point I summerized the story thus far (I was about halfway in) and then read him the description of said womanly man (???) angel, at which point he blinked at me and went "I think I've seen that one."
Yeah.
I don't even know if the author WATCHES the stuff (unlike the author of Cinder, who got her start as a fanfic writer so I KNOW she does) but she's clearly pulling on tropes that the Japanese just go bananas for when they decide to play with Western religion, and I suspect I just didn't go through a gothy enough phase to ever develop an intense love for it, and I've had to sit through too much of it (because I have friends who eat it up like candy. I have recommended this book to them: I think they will love it), and Angela is not sympathetic or interesting enough as a character to make me read on anyway.
Also: I hate the insanely pretty womanly man thing. I HATE IT. RARGH. It's almost enough to make me stop reading all on its own, because I REALLY HATE IT.
So that all sounds really nasty. Let me stress, however, that there are pet peeve issues at play here, which is why it sounds so nasty: it's Alicia going bananas over things that make Alicia go bananas pretty fast. I suppose I would call it a Your Mileage May Vary, under your old system, while admitting that my mileage is pretty damn low. But again, I did recommend it strongly to a few people who I know really, really like these kinds of stories and I think will probably be all over it like my cat on his scratching post after I cover it in catnip. And I don't mean that insultingly, as in a "here, you like crap, you'll like this" sort of recommendation. I think I just picked this up because the cover was preeettty and I tend to like "interesting reincarnation stories" and it was a bad pick on my part.
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I can think of one SHU grad for sure who was a major anime far, but I kept having to remind myself it wasn't this author (the girl I'm thinking of looked like she could be your little sister, weirdly enough). But now that you mention it, I'm remembering a short story of the author's I read, and during the crit session, there may have been mention of anime influence, so you could most definitely be on to something.
Which would go a LONG way in explaining why this didn't click for me. Which should be a moot point, because anime is primarily a visual style, no?
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Some people do this better than others. Hiromu Arakawa, the writer/artist who did Fullmetal Alchemist, does a VERY SOLID European quasi-magical industrial society (I'm a big fan and I'm picky about my European Magical Industrial Societies, as you know.) And I've, you know, not only grown up in a western society, I lived in Europe. I spent formative years in the sorts of places she was modeling her society on, and it looked fine to me. She did her homework (...mostly. Her occasional failure to get how Western audiences would react to her tossing Buddhist nonviolence into weird places in a VERY violent storyline shows nobody's perfect.)
Then you could watch, say Yana Toboso's Black Butler, which is a very good example of what it is--namely someone who clearly likes the visual style and some mythological things about a Western setting but doesn't actually manage to pull it off in a way that anyone who's actually familiar with the setting will buy as genuine. I made it through two episodes of the anime: I laughed myself sick. My husband thought I'd gone crazy. It's on Netflix: flick it on for about ten minutes and I think you'll see what I mean.
I have friends who EAT THAT STUFF UP WITH A SPOON. And they'd LOVE this book. So I recommended it to them.
I can't really define what it is without giving it more thought that it probably merits at the moment, but there's certain things that anime and its related mediums (manga, Japanese and other Asian country produced video games) tend to do Western religion, and they all do it more or less the same, and I see it in this book. I listed some of the things they tend to do (EVIL CONSPIRACY CHURCH! EVIL POPE/BISHOP THING! HEAVY STYLE POINTS FOR THE DRESS CODE! NO ACTUAL, Y'KNOW, RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL CHURCH MYTHOLOGY OR DOCTRINE EXCEPT IN A VERY VAGUE VISUAL SENSE! PRETTY PRETTY WOMANLY MEN!) I could probably make a very, very long list, and someone else has probably already done it better.
It's one of those things, I think, you either like or you don't. I don't really care for it but I can overlook it if there's something else going on that I find interesting. I didn't see anything like that here to get me past it.
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