Icon Ouroboros
Userpic meme from skuldnoshinpu
1. Reply to THIS post, and I'll pick four or five of your userpics that I like.
2. Make an entry and talk about the icons I've selected.
3. Other people will then comment on your entry and you'll do the same as I've done for you.
4. Thus, we will help create a NEVER ENDING STREAM of icon squee.
Of all my icons I could see this one causing the most confusion and curiosity. It's the faceplate of Zearth, the heroes' mecha from the anime and manga series Bokurano by Mohiro Kitoh (although this is the anime version of Zearth, slightly redesigned from the manga). Zearth is hax powerful and stupidly huge (500 meters, the largest measurable humanoid mecha in existance. Only the transformed SDF-1 Macross is larger even though I don't have an exact size stat for it). I was introduced to Bokurano through the Nico Nico Douga medley which mixed in Bokurano's OP at 4:02-4:23. After watching the medley I went around YouTube watching videos of all the songs that were sampled for it and found the original. I liked the song and was intrigued by the content of the video so I looked up Bokurano's Wikipedia page, and following that scanlations of the manga (it's unlikely to ever be officially released in the west). I loved the series and after reading it up to date wanted to see if I could find an image for a related avatar on a whim, which I did. I've never actually watched the anime since in most cases I prefer manga to anime but I revere the OP "Uninstall". I thought it was a nice song from the beginning but once you know the story of the series you can see how the lyrics of the song have relevance to it and it becomes so much more tragic and beautiful. The icon's name comes from how the word "Uninstall" is chanted during the chorus and the phrase underneath comes from one of the verses as it was translated in the fansub ("All the lives on this planet are essentially one/it looks like I'll have to act as a soldier who knows no fear").
Bokurano OP "Uninstall"
Chiaki Ishikawa "Uninstall" (full)
also, Uninstall done beautifully on Piano. I am completely gay for this song.
As for the series itself I would best describe the story of Bokurano as "what Evangelion wishes it was". If you want to watch the show that Evangelion fans claim that series is, watch Bokurano. Also bonus points for writing a manga where all adults/the JSDF are not completely ineffectual and irrelevant and everything is run independently by the kids (quite a rarity in my experience).
A funny GIF based on the end-of-level sequence in Super Mario Land. For those of you who've never played it it's similar to SMB's but instead of Toad you have what appears to be the princess (Princess Daisy, not Peach) but she's actually an enemy in disguise who transforms and hops away. OH! DAISY is part of the text displayed in the scene, SML's equivalent of the iconic "THE PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE". Ironically, none of the fake princesses walk forward to meet Mario so that can only be the real Daisy that Mario is judo-tossing. Over the past few years there have been art or jokes based around Mario's frustration over his inability to find the princess' real castle but this one uses SML imagery instead of SMB and wins my favour because I love Super Mario Land with every fiber of my being. I had another version of this GIF before I joined LJ but I couldn't use it as an avatar because it was too large. I found this version in a forum as someone else's avatar and saved it.
Osamu Tezuka's legendary creation, the Phoenix. I used an icon to pay tribute to the series, which I believe is the greatest thing ever printed. I wanted to use the names of the twelve chapters of the series as the keyword of the icon but the character field was too short and only allowed the first five. However I wrote the other seven in the comments box so when you look at my userpics page it does look like all the names are written in unbroken sequence. The actual source of this image is some guy's holiday photos of one of the Phoenix commemoration statues in Japan I found while browsing. I saved the image and later cropped it to make an avatar. He'll probably never find out. Maybe.
A promotional image of Ark, protagonist of the game Terranigma, one of my all-time favourites. This is a crop of the image on the game's cover, a panorama of Ark looking out over the hollow-Earth world that is the setting of Terranigma's first chapter. Because it's inside the Earth you can see the world curve away into the distance and rejoin to make the interior of a sphere. The name is "Creation of Heaven and Earth", the translation of Terranigma's Japanese name (Tenchi Sozo) and inspired the naming of my other Terranigma avatar, "Creator of Heaven and Earth", a picture of Ark floating on a cloud looking happily down to the Earth below. I named them because the first picture focused on the epic scale of the world and the second focused on the character. Incidentally a friend thought this was a piece of Chrono Trigger art, which is easy to assume because Ark and Crono have identical hair. More recently I've become dissatisfied with this icon. It's kind of small and blurry and has little context and I don't think I use it that much. If I have to cull some icons to make room again this will probably go.
1. Reply to THIS post, and I'll pick four or five of your userpics that I like.
2. Make an entry and talk about the icons I've selected.
3. Other people will then comment on your entry and you'll do the same as I've done for you.
4. Thus, we will help create a NEVER ENDING STREAM of icon squee.
Of all my icons I could see this one causing the most confusion and curiosity. It's the faceplate of Zearth, the heroes' mecha from the anime and manga series Bokurano by Mohiro Kitoh (although this is the anime version of Zearth, slightly redesigned from the manga). Zearth is hax powerful and stupidly huge (500 meters, the largest measurable humanoid mecha in existance. Only the transformed SDF-1 Macross is larger even though I don't have an exact size stat for it). I was introduced to Bokurano through the Nico Nico Douga medley which mixed in Bokurano's OP at 4:02-4:23. After watching the medley I went around YouTube watching videos of all the songs that were sampled for it and found the original. I liked the song and was intrigued by the content of the video so I looked up Bokurano's Wikipedia page, and following that scanlations of the manga (it's unlikely to ever be officially released in the west). I loved the series and after reading it up to date wanted to see if I could find an image for a related avatar on a whim, which I did. I've never actually watched the anime since in most cases I prefer manga to anime but I revere the OP "Uninstall". I thought it was a nice song from the beginning but once you know the story of the series you can see how the lyrics of the song have relevance to it and it becomes so much more tragic and beautiful. The icon's name comes from how the word "Uninstall" is chanted during the chorus and the phrase underneath comes from one of the verses as it was translated in the fansub ("All the lives on this planet are essentially one/it looks like I'll have to act as a soldier who knows no fear").
Bokurano OP "Uninstall"
Chiaki Ishikawa "Uninstall" (full)
also, Uninstall done beautifully on Piano. I am completely gay for this song.
As for the series itself I would best describe the story of Bokurano as "what Evangelion wishes it was". If you want to watch the show that Evangelion fans claim that series is, watch Bokurano. Also bonus points for writing a manga where all adults/the JSDF are not completely ineffectual and irrelevant and everything is run independently by the kids (quite a rarity in my experience).
A funny GIF based on the end-of-level sequence in Super Mario Land. For those of you who've never played it it's similar to SMB's but instead of Toad you have what appears to be the princess (Princess Daisy, not Peach) but she's actually an enemy in disguise who transforms and hops away. OH! DAISY is part of the text displayed in the scene, SML's equivalent of the iconic "THE PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE". Ironically, none of the fake princesses walk forward to meet Mario so that can only be the real Daisy that Mario is judo-tossing. Over the past few years there have been art or jokes based around Mario's frustration over his inability to find the princess' real castle but this one uses SML imagery instead of SMB and wins my favour because I love Super Mario Land with every fiber of my being. I had another version of this GIF before I joined LJ but I couldn't use it as an avatar because it was too large. I found this version in a forum as someone else's avatar and saved it.
Osamu Tezuka's legendary creation, the Phoenix. I used an icon to pay tribute to the series, which I believe is the greatest thing ever printed. I wanted to use the names of the twelve chapters of the series as the keyword of the icon but the character field was too short and only allowed the first five. However I wrote the other seven in the comments box so when you look at my userpics page it does look like all the names are written in unbroken sequence. The actual source of this image is some guy's holiday photos of one of the Phoenix commemoration statues in Japan I found while browsing. I saved the image and later cropped it to make an avatar. He'll probably never find out. Maybe.
A promotional image of Ark, protagonist of the game Terranigma, one of my all-time favourites. This is a crop of the image on the game's cover, a panorama of Ark looking out over the hollow-Earth world that is the setting of Terranigma's first chapter. Because it's inside the Earth you can see the world curve away into the distance and rejoin to make the interior of a sphere. The name is "Creation of Heaven and Earth", the translation of Terranigma's Japanese name (Tenchi Sozo) and inspired the naming of my other Terranigma avatar, "Creator of Heaven and Earth", a picture of Ark floating on a cloud looking happily down to the Earth below. I named them because the first picture focused on the epic scale of the world and the second focused on the character. Incidentally a friend thought this was a piece of Chrono Trigger art, which is easy to assume because Ark and Crono have identical hair. More recently I've become dissatisfied with this icon. It's kind of small and blurry and has little context and I don't think I use it that much. If I have to cull some icons to make room again this will probably go.
