Reality Check: Awful jealousies + Harsh yearnings = Gory ending WTH
So I'm bored out of my wits here and here goes one of my selfish penned-down personal musings...
Oh, how I wish I was back in high school humming the lyrics of Hey! Say! BEST's School Days as I negotiated the quarter of a kilometer walk to campus every day. Who says you can't learn something useful or even insightful from a song? I'd beg to disagree. 100%. Foreign language songs have always had a calming effect on me. Even the Tagalog ones. But the ones I always set my playlist to in my iPod are the ones that I’ve collected from scores of Japanese CDs that I’ve begun collecting about seven years ago. My to-chan would always buy me a couple of CDs from his business trips in Japan and he would always ask the store clerks for recommendations on what were the popular songs of the season. The clerks were always somehow bound to recommend a Johnny’s artist in the suggestions and my to-chan would always buy about three CDs at most. If memory serves me right, the artists of those first three CDs were Arashi, Ai Ōtsuka, and FLOW. I now have 49 CDs from Japan alone and a third of them have been ordered online. My to-chan even says that a quarter of them are his personal faves and choices and that I had to relocate some of it to the den for my to-chan’s easy access.
On another note, I just finished watching an anime that an otaku friend of mine lent me the other day while I was having a break from my résumé revisions. The ending proved a bit more than I could swallow. “School Days” proved to be every bit the mixed reception that viewers like me would be pondering on the mental state of high school students today. I mean, I do live in the ‘land of the free, home of the brave’ and yet we have a long history with social tragedies giving rise to psychologically-infused violence. That bungled hostage rescue attempt in Manila didn’t even amount to a quarter of what has happened over here State-side so far. Well, back to that “School Days” anime… I found it strange that some lyrics in that HSB song were like reflected in the anime. Though the anime starts off with a happy, romantic note, it rapidly descends into a twisted tragedy which was like a reality check for people like me. The song on the other hand is very, very cheerful but espouses classic themes of wishful thinkings and hopeless romantics. The anime has an engaging cast of characters who increasingly become locked headlong into a tragic, gory fate by the time you’ve watched the final episode. Well, only two of them meet a gory fate. I’ll ask that you watch the anime instead of me spoiling it for you. So I can’t help but think that the song was almost part of the anime as a theme song or let alone was partially inspired by the anime when the song was being written/conceptualized. That’s more wishful thinking on my part. Hehehe. After all, the “School Days” anime was released in the fall of 2007 - right about the time when HSJ was just debuting. The BEST song was released around 2009. It’s amazing how a stray amount of wishful thinking could make you connect stuff believably. The TEN JUMP performance of this song was quite enjoyable to watch and it left with a feeling how the boys have bonded well despite being divided into distinct sub-units who could very well perform in their own concerts in the future (it seems that Hey! Say! 7 has already done that). The pairings were a joy to replay all over again: Yabu-kun & Ryūtaro, Daiki & Yamada, Kei-san & Chinen, Takaki-kun & Keito, and Hikaru & Yūto. I found the Yabu-Ryūtaro especially to my liking. *sighs* I envy those who can have a near-sibling relationship like that pairing effortlessly demonstrated in that concert.
I leave for the land of the Canucks the day after tomorrow. I think I’ve already outgrown my PlayStation days seeing as I haven’t played (re-played is more like it) my favourite game titles on it… so I might consider selling it if things work out well for me in Saskatoon. But what I’ll miss the most is this CD-filled, Johnny’s Artists-laden room of mine. I hope to spread the gospel of Johnny’s fandom in Canada. I hear there are more Asian (particularly Filipino) communities over there. I’ll try to continue posting stuff from there. Have a good weekend ahead of you, minna.