the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
Of course, Apple is releasing their new operating system today. I generally try to wait a few weeks before I join the herd, because sometimes Apple likes to rush the stands, so to speak, and as a result of their manic upgrades some users (not me!) have ended up with freshly-scrubbed hard drives that are as clean and innocent as they were on the day they were born. Unpacked. Whatev. Anyway, I'm sure Tiger is grrrrrrrrrrrrrreat! and I can hardly wait for the privilege of giving Apple more money. And I'm looking forward to completely relearning everything I know about how my computer works. Again. I believe that constant education is the only finger in the Dutch dykes of despair. In related news, I recently told nokiirat that I have never had any problems with my computer, and she seemed to think it was funny. Possibly because, for awhile there, I was reinstalling the system every two weeks and I eventually had to send the computer away to what I am assuming was Gandalf to get it permanently fixed, but -- all of those problems were my fault. No, all of them. My iMac was an innocent victim. It would often try to warn me, via large, soothingly pastel, multi-lingual warning dialogues, that I was causing it injury. I learned my lesson, though, and since that last exorcism I haven't messed with anything. And no problems. I don't have to restart unless I want to, I can run the entire Adobe Arsenal (TM) at once, nothing hangs, nothing freezes, nothing displays buggy behavior. OS X, in its various incarnations, is totally unlike the Ancient OS of the Elder Days; it's really as versatile as it is pretty, just like they say in the papers. There are no program gaps, no substandard ports, no greedy shareware authors, only a few greedy shareware authors, and wide-ranging developer support. Buy it! Steve Jobs will love you, and he's significantly hotter than Bill Gates.
Also I think Tiger comes with Konfabulator built right in. I am looking forward to this to an extreme degree. Although I think I'll probably have to do a clean install due to the meddlesome presence of APE, which runs ShapeShifter. Which I never use anymore. And hopefully Tiger won't be striped, so I won't need it (rant: WHO IN THE NAME OF GOD THOUGHT OF PUTTING STRIPES ON AN OPERATING SYSTEM?! WHEN HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SITTING AROUND WORKING ON A COMPUTER, AND SUDDENLY SAID TO YOURSELF: "HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD MAKE MY USER EXPERIENCE MUCH MORE EXCITING AND PROFESSIONAL? STRIPES ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE!!!!!!" HUNH?? HUNH??? HAVE YOU EVER DONE THAT?! HAVE YOU?? THEN WHY DID THEY PUT STRIPES ALL OVER OS X?!?!?!).
Ben Folds is a dweeb.
I watched the first episode of [hahaha!] Tsubasa Chronicle and then wrote a review. I held it in abeyance until I saw another episode; sometimes I can be a little harsh (shut up, you) and then I later end up changing my opinion... or, at least, the degree to which the opinion is held. Didn't want to do that this time, and waste valuable portions of my life trying to edit in things that had changed or improved over the arc of the series. Fortunately, I saw a second episode, and decided that the 'review' was all-systems-go, to wit:
MY TOTALLY COMPLETE & INCLUSIVE REVIEW OF THE TSUBASA CHRONICLE ANIME SERIES:
[ That means: Nokii, stay away. It's scaaaaaary. ]
A little more than two hundred years ago, a small and mostly harmless country erupted out of the compressed substrata of discontent and oppression laid down by the long, unlawful arm of colonial Britain. At the time, the colonies that would eventually compose this new republic were only part of the vast holdings of the British Empire (a power so broad, unwieldy, and entirely merciless that it was still many decades before the sun would even begin to set on its shadowed greatness), and without the supporting crutch of this Empire, and the Empire's many allies, the small acolyte quickly began to flounder. As a result of the lack of obvious and logical leadership, undesirous of another administration based on the British template, and despite (because of?) a long and bloody war with Britain, this new country lacked cohesion. It had no centralized government, its citizenry was less than united, and it found itself further destabilized by the presence of slavery in its midst, an institution already the source of bitter contention in some parts of the emerging state. The world waited, breathless, while the territories that composed this recently liberated land squabbled amongst themselves, hoping that a strong government would shape itself out of the general confusion. If this upstart nation proved itself incapable of self-sufficiency, then it seemed more than likely that the entire globe would eventually be carved up among a few powerful and ravenous imperialist countries, who were intent on exploiting the resources of the new world even as they sublimated the rights of the colonies they created. It was a time of change for much of the planet's population, and a time of watchfulness for the rest. With survival the goal, it was time for the new nation to take upon itself the burden of power and emerge triumphant.
What the new nation did instead was hit the books. Its government championed, as an underpinning, an economic structure known as "capitalism," which had recently been set forth in print form by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (total coincidence?). Capitalism encouraged a free market, open trade, and no legal restraints on the growth of newly-forming corporations, none of which seemed to the freshly-minted government to be bad ideas. Capitalism was further recommended by its unpopularity in Great Britain, whose government refused its siren song of soaring profit through the mechanism of competition, and remained faithful to mercantilism and the continued importance of bullion (an idea Britain didn't give up on completely until the 20th century). Although the leaders of this new state could ultimately agree on very little -- including that pesky question of slavery, which would plague the country for years to come and eventually begin a war so wrath-filled and blood-boiling that its percussive legacy would permanently divide the populace for centuries after its conclusion -- they decided, nearly unanimously, upon capitalism.
Of course, I don't have to tell you the rest of the story. America progressively became so completely synonymous with out-of-control greedy imperialist evil-with-a-capital-E that we'd have given those staunch old Redcoat commanders the fantods back in the day. That invisible hand that Smith went on and on about, and in which the founding fathers had so much faith, eventually (to quote George Carlin) began to give many of us the middle finger, proving repeatedly that what looks like chaos to the external, uninformed observer generally turns out to actually be chaos, after all. Practically speaking, the only part of that story about the birth of a nation that has any bearing on the anime-izing of one of my favorite manga is the last sentence. That thing about becoming powerful world leaders and whatnot. When we took our heads out of our good, god-fearing English asses and actually got around to leading, the rest of the world followed, for reasons that are not entirely clear when peered at from the lofty height of the 21st century. Nation after nation left behind ancient systems of commerce and trade to participate in our buy-and-sell circus. What's perhaps more surprising, in retrospect, is that capitalism began to be accepted by nearly everyone as natural and inevitable. The resounding failure of Communism in Russia had something to do with this, of course, as did the fact that, despite having perhaps the worst policies of any single country in the history of the world, America grew with the outsized vigor of a giraffe with Marfan's Syndrome for a couple of centuries. That seems to be pretty much grinding to a halt now, though, doesn't it? And as far as I'm concerned, as depressing as our own downfall will be, when it inevitably happens (and of course it will happen. Rome wasn't burned in a day!), what depresses me further is that we seem to be dragging the entire globe down with us.
By which I mean that Tsubasa Chronicle couldn't have been worse if it had been made in Texas.
I have decided that anime is, first and foremost, a mass media outlet centered exclusively around the exact amount of money, in American dollars, that production companies can milk out of unsuspecting fans before the fans catch on. Although each anime series is obviously different, and some are of course much better than others, the entire medium seems, bizarrely enough, to be the ultimate expression of that unbridled capitalistic opportunism that made America what it is today. Crap.
Only the most perfunctory attempts at characterization are made in the anime translation of Tsubasa. Only the most basic, bare, and awkward bones of a plot poke through the shoddy graphics. The voice acting, for what may be the first time in history, is terrible. The opening and ending themes are a spectacularity of horridness, and the ambient background music is -- oh! Indescribable! I didn't think there was anything worse than Enya, going into Episode One of Tsubasa Chronicle. I was wrong. Japanese "musicians" overlaying what they apparently believe to be ethereal chanting on top of what is certainly out-of-date, herky-jerky 'techno' drum machine clatter smashes Enya's badness flat like a mosquito under a sumo wrestler. And sounds like it to boot. I would say something here about the anime being sound and fury that signifies nothing, but I believe there are some depths to which even Shakespeare should not be required to sink. In the small, cheap, noisy penny-arcade of the anime, the characters ding around with the clueless precision of pinballs. Yuuko's careful explication of hitsuzen is fruitless, in the anime; there is nothing cosmic, magical, or even mildly frightening about the characters' quest through the worlds of CLAMP's florid imagination. There is no need for a lecture on the inevitability of fate when you're riding the arcade carousel.
Whatever you feel about the Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE manga, it is not small in stature or narrow in scope, and it is certainly not counterfeit. As the global presentation of CLAMP's canon, and all the lessons and histories contained therein, it gives you the most potential bang for your buck as a fan (or will, presumably, once we get an ending). Each world is a different story with a dark lesson. Every word, deed, and compositional pen stroke of every character is fraught with meaning. When you read the manga, CLAMP addresses every aspect of the needy fan persona -- the fixation on costumes, the immature longing for depictions of first love, the sofa-based adoration of sacrifice in the face of danger. These things were evident in the first two chapters of the manga. They have been entirely left out of the anime.
And we keep lining up at the stanchion, waiting for the milking machine.
This is a bad, bad show, folks. This is a seriously bad show. This isn't just bad in the sense that it's juvenile, although, God knows, it is. It's not bad just because its cacophonous "music" appears to have been concocted by third-graders on cafeteria duty. It's not even bad because it's poorly made and cheaply executed, although it's those things, too. This show is not just something that you try out and then give up on, and maybe bitch about over IM. It is a horse of a different feather entirely, a dissolute outsourcing of its producers' greed, a construct that exhibits all the flaws of something created exclusively for profit. What makes Tsubasa Chronicle so very special, so very knock-your-socks-off dispiriting, is that the company responsible for it did not even feel the need to try. They knew CLAMP fans would swallow the line, bait and sinker. They didn't put any effort into writing scripts for the episodes because they know we have the manga memorized, and could fill in whatever blanks they left. They didn't budget money for great effects because they know they don't need to -- we're gonna keep watching, and buying, and probably bitching and moaning, and they don't care. They've got their piece of CLAMP to shill; what it's worth is of no consequence to anyone.
This is most evident, I think, in the anime versions of the character designs. In a bold and sweeping move, the production company chose to completely ignore the new, stylized, artistic aesthetic present in the TRC manga, and use creaking, ancient, illustration-type designs that date back to the beginning of X/1999 and RG Veda instead. CLAMP hasn't represented eyes as gigantic hairy headlights for years now, but because most (ignorant) fans still identify those big bug-eyes with the CLAMP "brand," the anime designers decided to use them. Remember, this isn't about quality or authenticity, or even about making a successful, self-contained anime continuity. This is about money, and how to get it, and how to make more after you've taken that first truckload to the bank.
In terms of the concrete characteristics of the actual show, I have to say that Syaoran and Sakura stand out prominently as terrible little animated actors. They spend two-thirds of their time on camera gazing at each other with big wobbly eyes and communicating via a system of squeaks and whistles that apparently passes for the primary mating ritual in the hallowed traditions of anime courtship. I don't find them terribly compelling to begin with (I'm not eleven) and these moments of more or less dead air didn't endear them to me, singly or as a couple. One or two of these cutesy flirting cuts would be stereotypical of the genre and merely puerile, but the repetitiveness of their gross little-kid affections really becomes something out of the ordinary after a few hundred thousand million (at least that's what it felt like) iterations. What makes this Pavlovian behavior all the more entertaining is that it stands in place of critical plot points, most of which would likely have taken only a few seconds to unspool, and all of which are of vital importance to the story. That is frankly unacceptable. What fans are left with is an image of Kurogane as a stupidly average ninja with a nice crazy laugh and bad manners, and Fai as... the Emperor of Ice Cream. There isn't a dead man to be had in his animated Celes, and his Ashura-ou could be slacking on the throne, catching up on his beauty sleep. Kurogane possesses no depth or basic sense of self, the elementary aspects of his character that were established in his first scene in the manga, that memorable sequence in which he effortlessly dashes enemies to the earth with his katana like the force of nature that he is. Fai, for his part, is as bland and boring as grocery-store mozzarella, which he actually physically resembles in many respects. He doesn't seem to be hiding anything. He doesn't appear to be pretending innocuousness, also a quality that emerges within the first few manga panels in which he appears. The characters look bad, their voice actors run the gamut from mediocre to awful, and they've been given nothing to do within the loose confines of the episode's "plot" -- which, to be honest, consists of the wobbling and squeaking, inarticulate introductions to the supporting cast, Sakura's seriously underwhelming wing-ectomy, and not much else -- besides run around like headless chickens.
So what do I say now that it's over? Thomas Jefferson's dream of an independent nation based on the tenets of capitalism ruined my fun. If that's the worst result of American's runaway world-leadership, I suppose it's not as bad as I thought. As for Tsubasa Chronicle itself? I have this fansite, to which I feel an odd obligation, so I'm going to download the series for a few more episodes -- just to say I made a go of it -- and then probably do my best to forget it ever existed. There are ways in which the busyness of manga can be represented in the crowded arena of anime, and also ways in which the garnering of profit from consumers is merely the office of the economy, and not something offensive. Give me an interesting product to buy, and maybe we can make a deal. I'm not opposed to paying for things that are worth at least a portion of their price tag. There's no need to change the world to give fans something to be proud of. CLAMP themselves have managed to forge a distinctive melody out of all that commercial noise, and it's one I've listened to for years now. Even though their work can be frustrating and difficult, I always experience a small rush of gratitude when I accept the delivery of a package full of CLAMP manga that I've ordered from an online bookstore. No matter what the latest story looks like, how it sounds, or how it unfolds in the myriad subtleties of CLAMPthink, I know that if I close my eyes and listen, I can hear that same old song. That's why I come back, time and again, to the "brand." It's something worth having, in an infinite market full of basically worthless alternatives.
...And I have to say, despite all my anguish over the anime as a lazy IOU for $39.99 per DVD, the last forty seconds of the first episode are absolutely fantastic. They make the rest of the show seem even drearier by comparison. Those final moments are everything the manga means but doesn't say, moving and breathing on the screen: Syaoran begging for Sakura's life at the feet of the Witch, Fai and Kurogane entering from stage right and stage left respectively, dripping curls of glimmering magic like tired old gods, their appearance accompanied by the unexpected and nearly painful sound of a heavy summer rain-shower, which is followed shortly by the elusive sound that the rest of the episode aches for the lack of -- silence.
Anyway. In an attempt to complete a ring of pure and endless irony, I tried to order myself the Tsubasa Charactere Guide from YesAsia (thanks again, you skeptical nokiirat!!!!!1!!!!11!!!!!1, but it was out of stock [ *crying* ]. Clearly, the gods must be crazy.
Also I think Tiger comes with Konfabulator built right in. I am looking forward to this to an extreme degree. Although I think I'll probably have to do a clean install due to the meddlesome presence of APE, which runs ShapeShifter. Which I never use anymore. And hopefully Tiger won't be striped, so I won't need it (rant: WHO IN THE NAME OF GOD THOUGHT OF PUTTING STRIPES ON AN OPERATING SYSTEM?! WHEN HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SITTING AROUND WORKING ON A COMPUTER, AND SUDDENLY SAID TO YOURSELF: "HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD MAKE MY USER EXPERIENCE MUCH MORE EXCITING AND PROFESSIONAL? STRIPES ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE!!!!!!" HUNH?? HUNH??? HAVE YOU EVER DONE THAT?! HAVE YOU?? THEN WHY DID THEY PUT STRIPES ALL OVER OS X?!?!?!).
Ben Folds is a dweeb.
I watched the first episode of [hahaha!] Tsubasa Chronicle and then wrote a review. I held it in abeyance until I saw another episode; sometimes I can be a little harsh (shut up, you) and then I later end up changing my opinion... or, at least, the degree to which the opinion is held. Didn't want to do that this time, and waste valuable portions of my life trying to edit in things that had changed or improved over the arc of the series. Fortunately, I saw a second episode, and decided that the 'review' was all-systems-go, to wit:
MY TOTALLY COMPLETE & INCLUSIVE REVIEW OF THE TSUBASA CHRONICLE ANIME SERIES:
[ That means: Nokii, stay away. It's scaaaaaary. ]
A little more than two hundred years ago, a small and mostly harmless country erupted out of the compressed substrata of discontent and oppression laid down by the long, unlawful arm of colonial Britain. At the time, the colonies that would eventually compose this new republic were only part of the vast holdings of the British Empire (a power so broad, unwieldy, and entirely merciless that it was still many decades before the sun would even begin to set on its shadowed greatness), and without the supporting crutch of this Empire, and the Empire's many allies, the small acolyte quickly began to flounder. As a result of the lack of obvious and logical leadership, undesirous of another administration based on the British template, and despite (because of?) a long and bloody war with Britain, this new country lacked cohesion. It had no centralized government, its citizenry was less than united, and it found itself further destabilized by the presence of slavery in its midst, an institution already the source of bitter contention in some parts of the emerging state. The world waited, breathless, while the territories that composed this recently liberated land squabbled amongst themselves, hoping that a strong government would shape itself out of the general confusion. If this upstart nation proved itself incapable of self-sufficiency, then it seemed more than likely that the entire globe would eventually be carved up among a few powerful and ravenous imperialist countries, who were intent on exploiting the resources of the new world even as they sublimated the rights of the colonies they created. It was a time of change for much of the planet's population, and a time of watchfulness for the rest. With survival the goal, it was time for the new nation to take upon itself the burden of power and emerge triumphant.
What the new nation did instead was hit the books. Its government championed, as an underpinning, an economic structure known as "capitalism," which had recently been set forth in print form by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (total coincidence?). Capitalism encouraged a free market, open trade, and no legal restraints on the growth of newly-forming corporations, none of which seemed to the freshly-minted government to be bad ideas. Capitalism was further recommended by its unpopularity in Great Britain, whose government refused its siren song of soaring profit through the mechanism of competition, and remained faithful to mercantilism and the continued importance of bullion (an idea Britain didn't give up on completely until the 20th century). Although the leaders of this new state could ultimately agree on very little -- including that pesky question of slavery, which would plague the country for years to come and eventually begin a war so wrath-filled and blood-boiling that its percussive legacy would permanently divide the populace for centuries after its conclusion -- they decided, nearly unanimously, upon capitalism.
Of course, I don't have to tell you the rest of the story. America progressively became so completely synonymous with out-of-control greedy imperialist evil-with-a-capital-E that we'd have given those staunch old Redcoat commanders the fantods back in the day. That invisible hand that Smith went on and on about, and in which the founding fathers had so much faith, eventually (to quote George Carlin) began to give many of us the middle finger, proving repeatedly that what looks like chaos to the external, uninformed observer generally turns out to actually be chaos, after all. Practically speaking, the only part of that story about the birth of a nation that has any bearing on the anime-izing of one of my favorite manga is the last sentence. That thing about becoming powerful world leaders and whatnot. When we took our heads out of our good, god-fearing English asses and actually got around to leading, the rest of the world followed, for reasons that are not entirely clear when peered at from the lofty height of the 21st century. Nation after nation left behind ancient systems of commerce and trade to participate in our buy-and-sell circus. What's perhaps more surprising, in retrospect, is that capitalism began to be accepted by nearly everyone as natural and inevitable. The resounding failure of Communism in Russia had something to do with this, of course, as did the fact that, despite having perhaps the worst policies of any single country in the history of the world, America grew with the outsized vigor of a giraffe with Marfan's Syndrome for a couple of centuries. That seems to be pretty much grinding to a halt now, though, doesn't it? And as far as I'm concerned, as depressing as our own downfall will be, when it inevitably happens (and of course it will happen. Rome wasn't burned in a day!), what depresses me further is that we seem to be dragging the entire globe down with us.
By which I mean that Tsubasa Chronicle couldn't have been worse if it had been made in Texas.
I have decided that anime is, first and foremost, a mass media outlet centered exclusively around the exact amount of money, in American dollars, that production companies can milk out of unsuspecting fans before the fans catch on. Although each anime series is obviously different, and some are of course much better than others, the entire medium seems, bizarrely enough, to be the ultimate expression of that unbridled capitalistic opportunism that made America what it is today. Crap.
Only the most perfunctory attempts at characterization are made in the anime translation of Tsubasa. Only the most basic, bare, and awkward bones of a plot poke through the shoddy graphics. The voice acting, for what may be the first time in history, is terrible. The opening and ending themes are a spectacularity of horridness, and the ambient background music is -- oh! Indescribable! I didn't think there was anything worse than Enya, going into Episode One of Tsubasa Chronicle. I was wrong. Japanese "musicians" overlaying what they apparently believe to be ethereal chanting on top of what is certainly out-of-date, herky-jerky 'techno' drum machine clatter smashes Enya's badness flat like a mosquito under a sumo wrestler. And sounds like it to boot. I would say something here about the anime being sound and fury that signifies nothing, but I believe there are some depths to which even Shakespeare should not be required to sink. In the small, cheap, noisy penny-arcade of the anime, the characters ding around with the clueless precision of pinballs. Yuuko's careful explication of hitsuzen is fruitless, in the anime; there is nothing cosmic, magical, or even mildly frightening about the characters' quest through the worlds of CLAMP's florid imagination. There is no need for a lecture on the inevitability of fate when you're riding the arcade carousel.
Whatever you feel about the Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE manga, it is not small in stature or narrow in scope, and it is certainly not counterfeit. As the global presentation of CLAMP's canon, and all the lessons and histories contained therein, it gives you the most potential bang for your buck as a fan (or will, presumably, once we get an ending). Each world is a different story with a dark lesson. Every word, deed, and compositional pen stroke of every character is fraught with meaning. When you read the manga, CLAMP addresses every aspect of the needy fan persona -- the fixation on costumes, the immature longing for depictions of first love, the sofa-based adoration of sacrifice in the face of danger. These things were evident in the first two chapters of the manga. They have been entirely left out of the anime.
And we keep lining up at the stanchion, waiting for the milking machine.
This is a bad, bad show, folks. This is a seriously bad show. This isn't just bad in the sense that it's juvenile, although, God knows, it is. It's not bad just because its cacophonous "music" appears to have been concocted by third-graders on cafeteria duty. It's not even bad because it's poorly made and cheaply executed, although it's those things, too. This show is not just something that you try out and then give up on, and maybe bitch about over IM. It is a horse of a different feather entirely, a dissolute outsourcing of its producers' greed, a construct that exhibits all the flaws of something created exclusively for profit. What makes Tsubasa Chronicle so very special, so very knock-your-socks-off dispiriting, is that the company responsible for it did not even feel the need to try. They knew CLAMP fans would swallow the line, bait and sinker. They didn't put any effort into writing scripts for the episodes because they know we have the manga memorized, and could fill in whatever blanks they left. They didn't budget money for great effects because they know they don't need to -- we're gonna keep watching, and buying, and probably bitching and moaning, and they don't care. They've got their piece of CLAMP to shill; what it's worth is of no consequence to anyone.
This is most evident, I think, in the anime versions of the character designs. In a bold and sweeping move, the production company chose to completely ignore the new, stylized, artistic aesthetic present in the TRC manga, and use creaking, ancient, illustration-type designs that date back to the beginning of X/1999 and RG Veda instead. CLAMP hasn't represented eyes as gigantic hairy headlights for years now, but because most (ignorant) fans still identify those big bug-eyes with the CLAMP "brand," the anime designers decided to use them. Remember, this isn't about quality or authenticity, or even about making a successful, self-contained anime continuity. This is about money, and how to get it, and how to make more after you've taken that first truckload to the bank.
In terms of the concrete characteristics of the actual show, I have to say that Syaoran and Sakura stand out prominently as terrible little animated actors. They spend two-thirds of their time on camera gazing at each other with big wobbly eyes and communicating via a system of squeaks and whistles that apparently passes for the primary mating ritual in the hallowed traditions of anime courtship. I don't find them terribly compelling to begin with (I'm not eleven) and these moments of more or less dead air didn't endear them to me, singly or as a couple. One or two of these cutesy flirting cuts would be stereotypical of the genre and merely puerile, but the repetitiveness of their gross little-kid affections really becomes something out of the ordinary after a few hundred thousand million (at least that's what it felt like) iterations. What makes this Pavlovian behavior all the more entertaining is that it stands in place of critical plot points, most of which would likely have taken only a few seconds to unspool, and all of which are of vital importance to the story. That is frankly unacceptable. What fans are left with is an image of Kurogane as a stupidly average ninja with a nice crazy laugh and bad manners, and Fai as... the Emperor of Ice Cream. There isn't a dead man to be had in his animated Celes, and his Ashura-ou could be slacking on the throne, catching up on his beauty sleep. Kurogane possesses no depth or basic sense of self, the elementary aspects of his character that were established in his first scene in the manga, that memorable sequence in which he effortlessly dashes enemies to the earth with his katana like the force of nature that he is. Fai, for his part, is as bland and boring as grocery-store mozzarella, which he actually physically resembles in many respects. He doesn't seem to be hiding anything. He doesn't appear to be pretending innocuousness, also a quality that emerges within the first few manga panels in which he appears. The characters look bad, their voice actors run the gamut from mediocre to awful, and they've been given nothing to do within the loose confines of the episode's "plot" -- which, to be honest, consists of the wobbling and squeaking, inarticulate introductions to the supporting cast, Sakura's seriously underwhelming wing-ectomy, and not much else -- besides run around like headless chickens.
So what do I say now that it's over? Thomas Jefferson's dream of an independent nation based on the tenets of capitalism ruined my fun. If that's the worst result of American's runaway world-leadership, I suppose it's not as bad as I thought. As for Tsubasa Chronicle itself? I have this fansite, to which I feel an odd obligation, so I'm going to download the series for a few more episodes -- just to say I made a go of it -- and then probably do my best to forget it ever existed. There are ways in which the busyness of manga can be represented in the crowded arena of anime, and also ways in which the garnering of profit from consumers is merely the office of the economy, and not something offensive. Give me an interesting product to buy, and maybe we can make a deal. I'm not opposed to paying for things that are worth at least a portion of their price tag. There's no need to change the world to give fans something to be proud of. CLAMP themselves have managed to forge a distinctive melody out of all that commercial noise, and it's one I've listened to for years now. Even though their work can be frustrating and difficult, I always experience a small rush of gratitude when I accept the delivery of a package full of CLAMP manga that I've ordered from an online bookstore. No matter what the latest story looks like, how it sounds, or how it unfolds in the myriad subtleties of CLAMPthink, I know that if I close my eyes and listen, I can hear that same old song. That's why I come back, time and again, to the "brand." It's something worth having, in an infinite market full of basically worthless alternatives.
...And I have to say, despite all my anguish over the anime as a lazy IOU for $39.99 per DVD, the last forty seconds of the first episode are absolutely fantastic. They make the rest of the show seem even drearier by comparison. Those final moments are everything the manga means but doesn't say, moving and breathing on the screen: Syaoran begging for Sakura's life at the feet of the Witch, Fai and Kurogane entering from stage right and stage left respectively, dripping curls of glimmering magic like tired old gods, their appearance accompanied by the unexpected and nearly painful sound of a heavy summer rain-shower, which is followed shortly by the elusive sound that the rest of the episode aches for the lack of -- silence.
Anyway. In an attempt to complete a ring of pure and endless irony, I tried to order myself the Tsubasa Charactere Guide from YesAsia (thanks again, you skeptical nokiirat!!!!!1!!!!11!!!!!1, but it was out of stock [ *crying* ]. Clearly, the gods must be crazy.