Round 1 Strangers: Ah! My Goddess
Ah! My Goddess
Vid Used
- Shining Collection by VicBond007 (VicBond007@AOL.com)
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=9703
recommended by thefourthvine
How to download from AMV.org:
Note that vids hosted at www.animemusicvideos.org require membership to download them. This will only slow you down about 5 minutes and is totally worth it. Here are instructions for signing up and navigating the AMV.org site:
1) Go to http://www.animemusicvideos.org/home/home.php
2) On the right side, click the blue link that says "Become a member!"
3) At the bottom, click "Sign up for your membership"
4) Scroll down and click the top acceptance link
5) Fill out the informatsdion in "Registration Information" at the top. You can ignore the other sections. Scroll to the bottom and click "submit"
6) Working from memory now, we believe you have to go into your email account and click a verification link to activate your new account.
7) Make your way back to http://www.animemusicvideos.org/home/home.php and login to your account
8) Once you're logged in, paste the vid's address into your browser
9) Scroll to the bottom where there is a DOWNLOAD section. Under "Link" you will see either "Direct" or "Local" (or both). Click on that word.
10) The next page will explain pledging money. This is great if you feel like pledging, but you don't have to. At the bottom will be three buttons--two that say "pledge" and one that says "proceed." Click "proceed."
11) Now, SIT AND WAIT. After approximately 10 seconds, the download window will automatically pop up. You don't have to do anything but wait. It will come! Save the vid wherever you please.
Grokker Synopsis
This fandom’s synopsis was provided via Wikipedia since we didn’t have any Grokkers for it, so if you do know more about what’s going on specifically in the vid, you’re encouraged to share in the comments!
The manga tells the story of college freshman Keiichi Morisato, who, because of his pure heart, has been chosen by Yggdrasil, Heaven’s computer system, to receive a single wish. The "angelic" goddess Belldandy is sent down to Earth to ask for his wish, and tells him that he can potentially wish for anything that he wants, from becoming a billionaire to destroying the world in an instant. First, Keiichi thinks that this entire meeting is a prank set up by his senpais, but during their short meeting, he soon realizes that she's the only person who truly understands and appreciates him. Being enchanted by her, Keiichi wishes that someone like Belldandy would stay with him forever, under the condition that the offer is valid. Ironically, he does not fully comprehend the outcome of his wish, and is stunned on realizing that Belldandy will now be living with him. The manga/anime follows their relationship as they become closer to each other.
The varying anime series feature the main characters and are based on the same basic plotline as the original manga, but each has taken a unique interpretation on this concept - described below - and, as such, should be considered separate canons. The only exception to this is the more recent TV series, which follows the plot of the manga closely.
Being a mechanical otaku himself, Fujishima frequently bases whole chapters, or even story arcs, around mechanics, focusing especially on motorcycle mechanics. Most notably, readers discover that Keiichi Morisato is a member of his college's motor vehicle club, which is always under threat of being put out of commission by a rival motor club. There are also several story arcs related to racing found earlier in the manga; the concept of racing is also a significant plot device in each of the anime canons. Both Keiichi and Belldandy are exceptionally gifted at racing (Keiichi because of natural ability and Belldandy because of her ability to "talk" with the machines). Most of the other main characters have exhibited some degree of skill in racing and/or mechanics, making the idea of mechanics a significant device for character development and growth.
Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah_My_Goddess
Stranger Synopses
Stranger 1
All I knew about this fandom was:
Before watching this vid, I knew absolutely nothing about this show.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
Ah My Goddess tells the tragic story of Diamond Forehead, a gifted young orphan girl raised by the Circle of Shapes (a group of people with special powers, like pulling psychic ropes out of each other’s abdomens). She thinks everyone has the powers she does, until she is asked by the Circle to infiltrate a regular school as a normal girl. She isn’t quite sure why they asked her to do this, but she doesn’t care because there she meets Hunky, the normal boy of her dreams. She does her best to impress him with her boobs wits, and even joins his sidecar racing team. Using her powers to make them win races isn’t what the Circle of Shapes had in mind when they sent her to the school, however, and pretty soon they come and get her in their giant flying teacup. Unbeknownst to them, Hunky follows Diamond Forehead and discovers who she truly is. Then, the Circle of Shapes turns her incorporeal so that Hunky can’t make out with her. This pisses her off to no end, and she gives half her powers to Hunky so that he can be part of her world. This doesn’t work exactly like she’d planned it to, and several people die. But after it’s all over, she can finally be with Hunky and they go off to destroy monsters together. Of course, having magical powers makes Hunky a little less than faithful and after Diamond Forehead catches him making out with the Green Fairy, all seems lost. Will Hunky and Diamond Forehead ever know the love they deserve? Can they live in both worlds? Probably not!
Stranger 2
All I knew about this fandom was:
What I knew about it before: ZILCH!
Here's what this fandom is really about:
This show is about a family of gods and goddess (like the Greek gods) that live on a different realm. They send their youngsters to earth to live here as humans so they can have compassion and understand what humans need and want when the young god/desses come of age and are able to protect Earth.
In the vid I watched-
The young goddess, lives as a school girl on Earth and travels between the realms, it becomes harder and harder for her to conceal things from her friends and also the boy she has a crush on. The girl and boy are also is part of a tandem motorcycling racing team (for lack of a better description). She's torn between her friendships and responsibilities on Earth and those within the God Realm, but lives her life as normally as possible.
But her life is thrown into turmoil when her Motorcycle Partner is infected by a psychotic pixie, causing him to fight her and finally rip the magic right out of her. He uses this to try and rewrite the physics of the world and bring out the psychotic pixie's realm. Their love for each other is too strong and she and Motorcycle Partner save both realms.
The young goddess takes her place among her sisters as a protector and defender of Earth and leaves the Earthly realm behind for good.
The show is about families and coming of age and the struggles that all people face in dealing with their families and your place in both the world and in your family. It's also action oriented with the young goddess's family fighting evil Gods and the psychotic pixie.
There are a few interesting aspects to the show - the Gods and Goddess travel in ships controlled by harp like devices and seem to control a kind of magic with hand movements and symbols.
In the world, there's the motorcycle racing, with high tech side cars where the turns are partially controlled by the movements of the person in the side car.
Stranger 3
All I knew about this fandom was:
(Did not specify.)
Here's what this fandom is really about:
So there are people who can grow wings fighting some sort of cosmic battle. You can tell the angel folks from the regular folks because they all have some geometric shape on their foreheads like a diamond or a triangle.
The main character is a little blonde girl who seems to be torn between her duty to the cosmic fight and her regular life on Earth, where she has a boyfriend who enjoys some sort of bumper car-racing sport. Oh, and the transformation between normal girl and angelic being predictably involves nudity, which can be embarrassing when it happens without warning in front of the normals.
There is somebody with one black wing and one white wing who is probably half good, half evil. And there's a lady with butterfly wings who is apparently evil entirely, as she goes and kisses the normal boyfriend to make little blonde girl feel alone and betrayed.
Although little blonde girl probably deserves it because apparently she has an angel boyfriend on the side.
But in a twist, the normal boyfriend joins the cosmic battle, becoming an angel person thing alongside her with the aid of some kind of painful looking technology. And they beat butterfly lady and go home and live a happy snuggly normal life with the other
angels watching over them, the end.
Stranger 4
All I knew about this fandom was:
...She's a goddess? Also, I suspect that there is a human male protagonist and a romantic subplot.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
Once upon a time, there was a gray and yellow fairy who was totally capable of pwning your ass. Fortunately, she was too busy shooting lightning bolts at heavily-bolted portals to bother giving you the ass-kicking you probably deserve. Things blew up, lightning tried to eat some guy's head, and then she turned into a mortal girl, more or less, and she and Lightning-head Guy became racecar drivers. They went to high school together, and there was much High School Drama involving random kissage and jealousy. Also, people grow wings sometimes.
The goddess-fairy-girl was pretty confused about this whole monogamy thing, so she and her friends played Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board* until she acquired the Cluestick of Righteousness and proceeded to save the world from sinister people with blue diamonds on their foreheads. One of the most intriguing of the blue diamond people was
a female starship captain with a crew of female minions. If there is no femslash fandom for the starship captain, please, do not shatter my illusions.
The combat went on for a long time, in a number of different terrains, including a shopping mall, where a high school boy witnessed an artificial whirlwind of awesomeness. Also, people like to play in the forest, even if they have wings and/or blue diamond foreheads, but the appeal of drag racing cannot be denied.
The world was threatened, but the goddess-girl waved her hands around and the female starship captain helped her do some magic. The most amazing thing is that you can be a totally all-powerful divine being and also be a high school student. The drama may wear on you sometimes, especially if you get dragged to the citadel of the whatevers high atop the thing, but rest assured that goth girls always confide in random boys. The goth girl is the fairy, did I mention that?
Anyway, things got kind of nasty when one of the high school boys ripped out the magical entrails of one of the whatever girls, and scary blue light started to spill out over the landscape. But everyone invoked their divine powers and/or hugged each other and/or grew wings, and then it was all okay. One more long, lingering hug, yays!
* Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_as_a_feather,_stiff_as_a_board
Stranger 5
All I knew about this fandom was:
The name, and the fact it's an anime.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
This is a love story. With epic fights. Good and evil. And goddesses. And no, Joss has nothing to do with it. See? No vampires!
We have this girl, who runs motorcycle races, and how cool is that? She has long, beautiful light brown hair, and is in love with the black-haired boy, his partner in motorcycle races. Is not an easy love, because there's that black-haired (and probably black hearted) bitch who's trying to get the boy too.
Nevertheless, motorcycle boy is faithful to his heart, and when his brown-haired goddess is in danger, he runs to save her. He becomes a god, himself, and fights to free her loved one.
And the big fight, of course, is good against evil. And we can recognize the good ones because they are those with blue diamonds in their faces. Yes, I know, nice to have so easy way to see which ones are the good boys and girls.
We need to understand that fights are a matter of faith, and prayers are their ammo. The fights are more mystical than anything else. We can see them praying to call their powers and gather strength.
Big waves of mystical power are sent and, at the end, the enemy is defeated. Good defeats evil, and we can see our heroes getting their prize: the right to be in love and together.
Stranger 6
All I knew about this fandom was:
The show is titled Ah, My Goddess!
Here's what this fandom is really about:
At the risk of sounding prejudiced, I’ve never quite gotten into anime or manga; something about the style just doesn’t grab me. As far as I can see, there are two styles of anime and manga: the kind where everyone has eyes the size of hubcaps and noses the size of peas, and the kind where everyone has cheekbones sharper than a Ginsu knife. Ah, My Goddess! is of the Hubcap Style. Let’s get started, shall we? Feel free to mock my confusion and wrong conclusions.
So there’s a girl with long brown hair and wildly flowing bangs? And she has a bindi on her forehead that changes shape? And she participates in a kind of racing involving a low-slung go-cart/motorcycle with a sidecar? She’s the counterbalance for the boy, who’s driving. (What, girls can’t steer?)
Okay, then it looks like some free-floating… being (again with the long, flowing hair, but this time it’s white instead of brown) turns Our Heroine into a goddess? Maybe? Since that’s the title? Or… okay, she’s doing something with a stave and she’s wearing some kind of skin-tone costume with blocks of color on it. And there’s tai chi in a wooded glade with (I think) Our Heroine and a blonde girl.
And then more racing, which seems to involve navigating a course lined with the little traffic cones, and there’s some product placement for Shoei helmets, which I kind of dig, because when was the last time you watched an animated thing with specific product placement in it? Toy Story, maybe?
Okay, I am so beyond confused it’s not even funny. Everyone’s standing around in these skimpy costumes doing “wax-on, wax-off” on top of lighted disco-y floors, and there’s a winged black-haired girl (the titular goddess? I HAVE NO IDEA).
And then there’s an interlude where Our Heroine is remembering things like winning a race, and watching butterflies when she was a kid, and backing away from some people (her family?) and she’s wearing a school uniform? And also falling asleep under a tree with her head in some guy’s lap? Is he a True Love she had to leave behind when she became a goddess or whatever?
We might be back in the present, I think. Or no, wait, this is another girl entirely, because her bangs are blunt-cut instead of floaty. She has a wicked gash on her upper arm, and a clean-cut boy (you can tell because he has movie!Harry Potter’s haircut) cleans it off for her. And like in every piece of fan fiction EVER, injury-tending leads directly to kissing, and Our Heroine (who’s witnessing this how?) seems shocked. Oh wait, is this guy Our Heroine’s racing partner?
Oh, snap! Blunt-Bang Girl just turned into a wicked pixie wearing a costume that makes no attempt at covering anything! And a small sun explodes? And a string of purple lettering is waved about like a lasso, but then somehow expands into a ring that overtakes a city? And the wicked pixie (who used to be Blunt-Bang Girl) is swept into a purpley-black cloud?
Our Heroine flies around and apparently saves the world, yays! And then she returns to the wooded glade from before and hugs a man (Clean-Cut Boy?) while a long-haired brunette girl (Blunt-Bang Girl? But I thought she was swept into the purpley cloud-thing!) sits on a tree branch and watches. We don’t see her face, so I can’t even tell if she’s resentful or what!
In conclusion: A young girl has a forbidden teenage love, and forsakes him for a life of low-slung motorcycle racing, when a powerful being tells her she’s the early incarnation of a goddess, and she must fight to save the world, oh noes! An evil goddess tries to seduce our heroine’s racing partner, but is not successful. Our heroine saves the world. I think. HALP.
Stranger 7
All I knew about this fandom was:
I knew nothing about this fandom. I didn't know this movie existed.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
"Ah, Goddess!" is a very dramatic piece of movie magic that deals with the very real tragedy of head traumas involved in motorcycle crashes. A bunch of kids ride motorcycles around at reckless speeds and then crash. Unfortunately their poor, weak psyche's can't take it! They then begin to imagine they have wings. All sorts of wings! We have angel wings, butterfly wings, manly-evil wings... lots of wings.
There is also a subplot about the S&M porn star. She walks around in a bra and panties with accessories the entire show. She is also upset a lot. I'd be upset too if I were the S&M porn star in the psychological motorcycle movie.
Another thrilling subplot is the virus! We can tell when people are infected with the virus because the symptoms include face markings... usually blue triangles. (That's pretty convenient if you want to avoid the plague... unfortunately judging from all the blue triangles on people's faces though, they haven't avoided the plague very well.) The virus means you are more prone to have wings, technicolor waves of virus goo shoot out of you, and you get cranky a lot. It's a pretty intense infection. The only way to combat it is
to dance while emoting negative emotions. If you can cry while dancing, that's an almost sure fire cure!
The main girl and guy of this movie (who I've named Hansel and Alicia) are able to defeat their mystic plague and motorcycle head trauma by falling in love! They like to have really kinky sex in public under trees. This seems to help the head trauma more then
the plague, but they're not complaining. They have their post public sex cuddle only to have the final twist of the movie revealed! Hansel's evil little sister Pinky McPink Shoes has been taping their love making sessions and selling them to the S&M porn star!
Poor Hansel and Alicia have overcome virus goo and psychotic breaks only to become the Internets newest sexy couple. How unfortunate.
Stranger 8
All I knew about this fandom was:
Jack. Couldn't have even told you if it was drawn or live action.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
So there's this girl, we'll call her Racecar, since she drives one of those streetcar things that look like luge. She's in high school as I intuited from the vaguely high school-like places that they flash on, the letter jackets, random milk chugging, and the cute little school girl uniform that Racecar wears in her Clark Kent persona. Because while she's a normal schoolgirl most of the time, albeit with a magic shape-changing bindi, she's also part of a superhero organization that fights evil.
The organization is led by this fierce looking dark haired girl who runs a control tower/base station complex and her main field operative, a gender ambiguous guy (sometimes with breasts) with long grey hair, a red robe, and a tendency to translate everything for the hearing impaired. Other members include random girls who freak out at the control tower and a tiny dark haired girl who dresses like the Pink Power Ranger and carries a ginormous gatling gun when in superhero form. Which is really kind of awesome. "You have magic? Well I have an M61 Vulcan with 6,000 rounds per minute. You want some?" Racecar and Pink Power Ranger (plus gatling) fought off a Balrog at one point in a giant battle in the sky.
On the side of the bad guys, there's Boy!Storm, who controls wind and lightning, and has used his evil powers to capture the blond angel-winged spirit form of Fierce Girl in a lightning ball and kidnap Racecar using a tornado. He is also skeezy, may be a teacher at the school which Racecar attends, looks vaguely like Racecar's father in her flashbacks, and tried to molest Racecar in the garden before some random chick with long blond hair rescued her.
Other bad guys include a woman with long dark hair and butterfly wings and her son, who is a peeping tom. Butterfly had a mano a mano battle with Ambiguously Gendered field op, and they were both getting pretty nasty. Peeping Tom goes to school with Racecar and Pink Power Ranger, but he creeps about in forests spying on girls doing "magic." He also drives a streetcar. Peeping Tom and Butterfly are engaged in some seriously incestuous interactions with all the kissing. Other signs of Peeping Tom's evilness include him pulling a stream of magic runes out of Racecar's body and then using them to create a giant black wave that envelopes and demolishes the countryside, and also that he has a giant scarab embedded in his hand, a la The Mummy, which is creepy.
Now back to Racecar, our protagonist. There are a startling number of similarities to Buffy here, starting with her death and subsequent revivification by her friends, kneeling around her dead body in a circle. While dead she got to talk to all the other dead spirits, but her friends pulled her out of heaven and back into the fight. When she revives and puts on her ass-kicking outfit, she breaks out Buffy's magic ax, only Racecar's version also shoots magic beams of light that destroy evil.
And here's where it gets complicated. Racecar and Peeping Tom are in full-on, emo, Romeo and Juliet style, tragic love. He may have died at one point and been brought back too, or maybe it was a dream sequence where she went to hug him but passed right through his body. Either way, very emo, very tragic. At one point in the big battle in the sky he even saves her from the giant magic ball of evil, but he still destroyed the rest of the countryside with his black wave of death, so I'm really not feeling too sympathetic. Racecar has confided this love to Pink Power Ranger, but I don't think anyone else knows.
Ok, so, in sum: Racecar is a schoolgirl but lives a secret life as a superhero in a superhero army. Peeping Tom, his mother the Butterfly lady, and Skeezy Boy!Storm are evil. But Racecar and Peeping Tom have a destined love - much like Romeo and Juliet - and keep their love secret from all the others, except the Pink Power Ranger, who doesn't approve, but supports her friend Racecar anyway. Also there's a lot of incest.
Stranger 9
All I knew about this fandom was:
I've never seen an episode, know nothing of the main characters or plot arcs, have never read a story in the fandom. My entire familiarity with this fandom comes from vids.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
In a world not totally unlike our own (though not exactly like our own, either), there exist two races of people:
Ordinary Folk practices as the aforementioned motorcycle sidecar racing (and maybe school, too, although obviously they don't have a lot of time for that, what with all the magic and motorcars).
But that is a problem, because Diamond-head has a boyfriend amongst the Face Tattoo Folk, too. His face tattoos suggest to me that he is not a man to be trifled with, and he's kind of possessive and grouchy. Also, he's like two feet taller than everyone else in the whole world and yet there's no uke in sight for him. Poor Diamond-head!
This whole dual boyfriend problem gets Diamond-head down. Her friends, including her Ordinary Folk Boyfriend, try to fix her with some mystic massage and chanting, but it turns out her clothes are allergic to chanting and they dissolve. She ends up naked, and everyone is very upset about this, especially Ordinary Folk Boyfriend. (One way in
which their world is apparently not like our world is that being someone's boyfriend doesn't necessarily mean you ever expect to see her naked; I suspect third base in this world is a ten-second hug.)
So, unable to deal with the unexpected nudity on top of her love life troubles (and the way Ordinary Folk Boyfriend has seemed oddly uninterested in motorcycle racing ever since the nudity incident), Diamond-head returns to her people, vowing that henceworth she will work magic rather than being worked by magic. But her new job is boring, and she misses Ordinary Folk Boyfriend and the ordinary magic they shared.
There is, of course, angst. And wistful dreaming.
Eventually, she realizes that Tattoo Face Folk Boyfriend is skeevy, and furthermore weirdly into birds and little girls. Obviously, Diamond-head's place is with the Ordinary Folk. And one special Ordinary Folk guy in particular.
So she returns, only to observe Ordinary Folk Boyfriend having an encounter with a hot but obviously bad girl who hides her face tattoos (the first warning sign of evil, folks) and has butterfly wings (most of you will remember that Smashing
Pumpkins wrote a song about precisely this problem - god, how many men have to be seduced by evil butterfly-winged women before the government will do something about this problem?). The bad girl kisses Ordinary Folk Boyfriend, after which he becomes infected with the face polygon virus.
Now Diamond-head has two guys with geometry lessons on their faces, and obviously this threatens the natural world order. It could lead to a caged death match between the Tattooed Boyfriends of Diamond-Head, and from that kind of battle, no one emerges the winner. Can the universe be saved?
But! Just in the nick of time, Diamond-head gets together with her other Face Tattoo Folk girlfriends, and they sing and summon their inner angels and/or wings and save the universe (unless they destroy it or totally rewrite it - I'm not entirely sure).
The important part isn't the universe, though. What matters is that Diamond-head ends up in the arms of her Once Ordinary Folk and Then Tattoo Face Folk and Now Probably Ordinary Folk Again Boyfriend, embracing tenderly and lovingly in a peaceful wooded glade. (Note: in this universe, this is probably a home run with the bases loaded, if
you get my drift.)
While some mysterious brown-haired schoolgirl wench spies on them from a tree.
So, yes, Diamond-head and Mr. Diamond-head are probably destined for years of therapy, but the key message of this anime is: true love conquers all. (With some help from face tattoos. And wings. And magic. And stuff. But really it's mostly just the love.)
Vid Used
- Shining Collection by VicBond007 (VicBond007@AOL.com)
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=9703
recommended by thefourthvine
How to download from AMV.org:
Note that vids hosted at www.animemusicvideos.org require membership to download them. This will only slow you down about 5 minutes and is totally worth it. Here are instructions for signing up and navigating the AMV.org site:
1) Go to http://www.animemusicvideos.org/home/home.php
2) On the right side, click the blue link that says "Become a member!"
3) At the bottom, click "Sign up for your membership"
4) Scroll down and click the top acceptance link
5) Fill out the informatsdion in "Registration Information" at the top. You can ignore the other sections. Scroll to the bottom and click "submit"
6) Working from memory now, we believe you have to go into your email account and click a verification link to activate your new account.
7) Make your way back to http://www.animemusicvideos.org/home/home.php and login to your account
8) Once you're logged in, paste the vid's address into your browser
9) Scroll to the bottom where there is a DOWNLOAD section. Under "Link" you will see either "Direct" or "Local" (or both). Click on that word.
10) The next page will explain pledging money. This is great if you feel like pledging, but you don't have to. At the bottom will be three buttons--two that say "pledge" and one that says "proceed." Click "proceed."
11) Now, SIT AND WAIT. After approximately 10 seconds, the download window will automatically pop up. You don't have to do anything but wait. It will come! Save the vid wherever you please.
Grokker Synopsis
This fandom’s synopsis was provided via Wikipedia since we didn’t have any Grokkers for it, so if you do know more about what’s going on specifically in the vid, you’re encouraged to share in the comments!
The manga tells the story of college freshman Keiichi Morisato, who, because of his pure heart, has been chosen by Yggdrasil, Heaven’s computer system, to receive a single wish. The "angelic" goddess Belldandy is sent down to Earth to ask for his wish, and tells him that he can potentially wish for anything that he wants, from becoming a billionaire to destroying the world in an instant. First, Keiichi thinks that this entire meeting is a prank set up by his senpais, but during their short meeting, he soon realizes that she's the only person who truly understands and appreciates him. Being enchanted by her, Keiichi wishes that someone like Belldandy would stay with him forever, under the condition that the offer is valid. Ironically, he does not fully comprehend the outcome of his wish, and is stunned on realizing that Belldandy will now be living with him. The manga/anime follows their relationship as they become closer to each other.
The varying anime series feature the main characters and are based on the same basic plotline as the original manga, but each has taken a unique interpretation on this concept - described below - and, as such, should be considered separate canons. The only exception to this is the more recent TV series, which follows the plot of the manga closely.
Being a mechanical otaku himself, Fujishima frequently bases whole chapters, or even story arcs, around mechanics, focusing especially on motorcycle mechanics. Most notably, readers discover that Keiichi Morisato is a member of his college's motor vehicle club, which is always under threat of being put out of commission by a rival motor club. There are also several story arcs related to racing found earlier in the manga; the concept of racing is also a significant plot device in each of the anime canons. Both Keiichi and Belldandy are exceptionally gifted at racing (Keiichi because of natural ability and Belldandy because of her ability to "talk" with the machines). Most of the other main characters have exhibited some degree of skill in racing and/or mechanics, making the idea of mechanics a significant device for character development and growth.
Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah_My_Goddess
Stranger Synopses
Stranger 1
All I knew about this fandom was:
Before watching this vid, I knew absolutely nothing about this show.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
Ah My Goddess tells the tragic story of Diamond Forehead, a gifted young orphan girl raised by the Circle of Shapes (a group of people with special powers, like pulling psychic ropes out of each other’s abdomens). She thinks everyone has the powers she does, until she is asked by the Circle to infiltrate a regular school as a normal girl. She isn’t quite sure why they asked her to do this, but she doesn’t care because there she meets Hunky, the normal boy of her dreams. She does her best to impress him with her boobs wits, and even joins his sidecar racing team. Using her powers to make them win races isn’t what the Circle of Shapes had in mind when they sent her to the school, however, and pretty soon they come and get her in their giant flying teacup. Unbeknownst to them, Hunky follows Diamond Forehead and discovers who she truly is. Then, the Circle of Shapes turns her incorporeal so that Hunky can’t make out with her. This pisses her off to no end, and she gives half her powers to Hunky so that he can be part of her world. This doesn’t work exactly like she’d planned it to, and several people die. But after it’s all over, she can finally be with Hunky and they go off to destroy monsters together. Of course, having magical powers makes Hunky a little less than faithful and after Diamond Forehead catches him making out with the Green Fairy, all seems lost. Will Hunky and Diamond Forehead ever know the love they deserve? Can they live in both worlds? Probably not!
Stranger 2
All I knew about this fandom was:
What I knew about it before: ZILCH!
Here's what this fandom is really about:
This show is about a family of gods and goddess (like the Greek gods) that live on a different realm. They send their youngsters to earth to live here as humans so they can have compassion and understand what humans need and want when the young god/desses come of age and are able to protect Earth.
In the vid I watched-
The young goddess, lives as a school girl on Earth and travels between the realms, it becomes harder and harder for her to conceal things from her friends and also the boy she has a crush on. The girl and boy are also is part of a tandem motorcycling racing team (for lack of a better description). She's torn between her friendships and responsibilities on Earth and those within the God Realm, but lives her life as normally as possible.
But her life is thrown into turmoil when her Motorcycle Partner is infected by a psychotic pixie, causing him to fight her and finally rip the magic right out of her. He uses this to try and rewrite the physics of the world and bring out the psychotic pixie's realm. Their love for each other is too strong and she and Motorcycle Partner save both realms.
The young goddess takes her place among her sisters as a protector and defender of Earth and leaves the Earthly realm behind for good.
The show is about families and coming of age and the struggles that all people face in dealing with their families and your place in both the world and in your family. It's also action oriented with the young goddess's family fighting evil Gods and the psychotic pixie.
There are a few interesting aspects to the show - the Gods and Goddess travel in ships controlled by harp like devices and seem to control a kind of magic with hand movements and symbols.
In the world, there's the motorcycle racing, with high tech side cars where the turns are partially controlled by the movements of the person in the side car.
Stranger 3
All I knew about this fandom was:
(Did not specify.)
Here's what this fandom is really about:
So there are people who can grow wings fighting some sort of cosmic battle. You can tell the angel folks from the regular folks because they all have some geometric shape on their foreheads like a diamond or a triangle.
The main character is a little blonde girl who seems to be torn between her duty to the cosmic fight and her regular life on Earth, where she has a boyfriend who enjoys some sort of bumper car-racing sport. Oh, and the transformation between normal girl and angelic being predictably involves nudity, which can be embarrassing when it happens without warning in front of the normals.
There is somebody with one black wing and one white wing who is probably half good, half evil. And there's a lady with butterfly wings who is apparently evil entirely, as she goes and kisses the normal boyfriend to make little blonde girl feel alone and betrayed.
Although little blonde girl probably deserves it because apparently she has an angel boyfriend on the side.
But in a twist, the normal boyfriend joins the cosmic battle, becoming an angel person thing alongside her with the aid of some kind of painful looking technology. And they beat butterfly lady and go home and live a happy snuggly normal life with the other
angels watching over them, the end.
Stranger 4
All I knew about this fandom was:
...She's a goddess? Also, I suspect that there is a human male protagonist and a romantic subplot.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
Once upon a time, there was a gray and yellow fairy who was totally capable of pwning your ass. Fortunately, she was too busy shooting lightning bolts at heavily-bolted portals to bother giving you the ass-kicking you probably deserve. Things blew up, lightning tried to eat some guy's head, and then she turned into a mortal girl, more or less, and she and Lightning-head Guy became racecar drivers. They went to high school together, and there was much High School Drama involving random kissage and jealousy. Also, people grow wings sometimes.
The goddess-fairy-girl was pretty confused about this whole monogamy thing, so she and her friends played Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board* until she acquired the Cluestick of Righteousness and proceeded to save the world from sinister people with blue diamonds on their foreheads. One of the most intriguing of the blue diamond people was
a female starship captain with a crew of female minions. If there is no femslash fandom for the starship captain, please, do not shatter my illusions.
The combat went on for a long time, in a number of different terrains, including a shopping mall, where a high school boy witnessed an artificial whirlwind of awesomeness. Also, people like to play in the forest, even if they have wings and/or blue diamond foreheads, but the appeal of drag racing cannot be denied.
The world was threatened, but the goddess-girl waved her hands around and the female starship captain helped her do some magic. The most amazing thing is that you can be a totally all-powerful divine being and also be a high school student. The drama may wear on you sometimes, especially if you get dragged to the citadel of the whatevers high atop the thing, but rest assured that goth girls always confide in random boys. The goth girl is the fairy, did I mention that?
Anyway, things got kind of nasty when one of the high school boys ripped out the magical entrails of one of the whatever girls, and scary blue light started to spill out over the landscape. But everyone invoked their divine powers and/or hugged each other and/or grew wings, and then it was all okay. One more long, lingering hug, yays!
* Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_as_a_feather,_stiff_as_a_board
Stranger 5
All I knew about this fandom was:
The name, and the fact it's an anime.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
This is a love story. With epic fights. Good and evil. And goddesses. And no, Joss has nothing to do with it. See? No vampires!
We have this girl, who runs motorcycle races, and how cool is that? She has long, beautiful light brown hair, and is in love with the black-haired boy, his partner in motorcycle races. Is not an easy love, because there's that black-haired (and probably black hearted) bitch who's trying to get the boy too.
Nevertheless, motorcycle boy is faithful to his heart, and when his brown-haired goddess is in danger, he runs to save her. He becomes a god, himself, and fights to free her loved one.
And the big fight, of course, is good against evil. And we can recognize the good ones because they are those with blue diamonds in their faces. Yes, I know, nice to have so easy way to see which ones are the good boys and girls.
We need to understand that fights are a matter of faith, and prayers are their ammo. The fights are more mystical than anything else. We can see them praying to call their powers and gather strength.
Big waves of mystical power are sent and, at the end, the enemy is defeated. Good defeats evil, and we can see our heroes getting their prize: the right to be in love and together.
Stranger 6
All I knew about this fandom was:
The show is titled Ah, My Goddess!
Here's what this fandom is really about:
At the risk of sounding prejudiced, I’ve never quite gotten into anime or manga; something about the style just doesn’t grab me. As far as I can see, there are two styles of anime and manga: the kind where everyone has eyes the size of hubcaps and noses the size of peas, and the kind where everyone has cheekbones sharper than a Ginsu knife. Ah, My Goddess! is of the Hubcap Style. Let’s get started, shall we? Feel free to mock my confusion and wrong conclusions.
So there’s a girl with long brown hair and wildly flowing bangs? And she has a bindi on her forehead that changes shape? And she participates in a kind of racing involving a low-slung go-cart/motorcycle with a sidecar? She’s the counterbalance for the boy, who’s driving. (What, girls can’t steer?)
Okay, then it looks like some free-floating… being (again with the long, flowing hair, but this time it’s white instead of brown) turns Our Heroine into a goddess? Maybe? Since that’s the title? Or… okay, she’s doing something with a stave and she’s wearing some kind of skin-tone costume with blocks of color on it. And there’s tai chi in a wooded glade with (I think) Our Heroine and a blonde girl.
And then more racing, which seems to involve navigating a course lined with the little traffic cones, and there’s some product placement for Shoei helmets, which I kind of dig, because when was the last time you watched an animated thing with specific product placement in it? Toy Story, maybe?
Okay, I am so beyond confused it’s not even funny. Everyone’s standing around in these skimpy costumes doing “wax-on, wax-off” on top of lighted disco-y floors, and there’s a winged black-haired girl (the titular goddess? I HAVE NO IDEA).
And then there’s an interlude where Our Heroine is remembering things like winning a race, and watching butterflies when she was a kid, and backing away from some people (her family?) and she’s wearing a school uniform? And also falling asleep under a tree with her head in some guy’s lap? Is he a True Love she had to leave behind when she became a goddess or whatever?
We might be back in the present, I think. Or no, wait, this is another girl entirely, because her bangs are blunt-cut instead of floaty. She has a wicked gash on her upper arm, and a clean-cut boy (you can tell because he has movie!Harry Potter’s haircut) cleans it off for her. And like in every piece of fan fiction EVER, injury-tending leads directly to kissing, and Our Heroine (who’s witnessing this how?) seems shocked. Oh wait, is this guy Our Heroine’s racing partner?
Oh, snap! Blunt-Bang Girl just turned into a wicked pixie wearing a costume that makes no attempt at covering anything! And a small sun explodes? And a string of purple lettering is waved about like a lasso, but then somehow expands into a ring that overtakes a city? And the wicked pixie (who used to be Blunt-Bang Girl) is swept into a purpley-black cloud?
Our Heroine flies around and apparently saves the world, yays! And then she returns to the wooded glade from before and hugs a man (Clean-Cut Boy?) while a long-haired brunette girl (Blunt-Bang Girl? But I thought she was swept into the purpley cloud-thing!) sits on a tree branch and watches. We don’t see her face, so I can’t even tell if she’s resentful or what!
In conclusion: A young girl has a forbidden teenage love, and forsakes him for a life of low-slung motorcycle racing, when a powerful being tells her she’s the early incarnation of a goddess, and she must fight to save the world, oh noes! An evil goddess tries to seduce our heroine’s racing partner, but is not successful. Our heroine saves the world. I think. HALP.
Stranger 7
All I knew about this fandom was:
I knew nothing about this fandom. I didn't know this movie existed.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
"Ah, Goddess!" is a very dramatic piece of movie magic that deals with the very real tragedy of head traumas involved in motorcycle crashes. A bunch of kids ride motorcycles around at reckless speeds and then crash. Unfortunately their poor, weak psyche's can't take it! They then begin to imagine they have wings. All sorts of wings! We have angel wings, butterfly wings, manly-evil wings... lots of wings.
There is also a subplot about the S&M porn star. She walks around in a bra and panties with accessories the entire show. She is also upset a lot. I'd be upset too if I were the S&M porn star in the psychological motorcycle movie.
Another thrilling subplot is the virus! We can tell when people are infected with the virus because the symptoms include face markings... usually blue triangles. (That's pretty convenient if you want to avoid the plague... unfortunately judging from all the blue triangles on people's faces though, they haven't avoided the plague very well.) The virus means you are more prone to have wings, technicolor waves of virus goo shoot out of you, and you get cranky a lot. It's a pretty intense infection. The only way to combat it is
to dance while emoting negative emotions. If you can cry while dancing, that's an almost sure fire cure!
The main girl and guy of this movie (who I've named Hansel and Alicia) are able to defeat their mystic plague and motorcycle head trauma by falling in love! They like to have really kinky sex in public under trees. This seems to help the head trauma more then
the plague, but they're not complaining. They have their post public sex cuddle only to have the final twist of the movie revealed! Hansel's evil little sister Pinky McPink Shoes has been taping their love making sessions and selling them to the S&M porn star!
Poor Hansel and Alicia have overcome virus goo and psychotic breaks only to become the Internets newest sexy couple. How unfortunate.
Stranger 8
All I knew about this fandom was:
Jack. Couldn't have even told you if it was drawn or live action.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
So there's this girl, we'll call her Racecar, since she drives one of those streetcar things that look like luge. She's in high school as I intuited from the vaguely high school-like places that they flash on, the letter jackets, random milk chugging, and the cute little school girl uniform that Racecar wears in her Clark Kent persona. Because while she's a normal schoolgirl most of the time, albeit with a magic shape-changing bindi, she's also part of a superhero organization that fights evil.
The organization is led by this fierce looking dark haired girl who runs a control tower/base station complex and her main field operative, a gender ambiguous guy (sometimes with breasts) with long grey hair, a red robe, and a tendency to translate everything for the hearing impaired. Other members include random girls who freak out at the control tower and a tiny dark haired girl who dresses like the Pink Power Ranger and carries a ginormous gatling gun when in superhero form. Which is really kind of awesome. "You have magic? Well I have an M61 Vulcan with 6,000 rounds per minute. You want some?" Racecar and Pink Power Ranger (plus gatling) fought off a Balrog at one point in a giant battle in the sky.
On the side of the bad guys, there's Boy!Storm, who controls wind and lightning, and has used his evil powers to capture the blond angel-winged spirit form of Fierce Girl in a lightning ball and kidnap Racecar using a tornado. He is also skeezy, may be a teacher at the school which Racecar attends, looks vaguely like Racecar's father in her flashbacks, and tried to molest Racecar in the garden before some random chick with long blond hair rescued her.
Other bad guys include a woman with long dark hair and butterfly wings and her son, who is a peeping tom. Butterfly had a mano a mano battle with Ambiguously Gendered field op, and they were both getting pretty nasty. Peeping Tom goes to school with Racecar and Pink Power Ranger, but he creeps about in forests spying on girls doing "magic." He also drives a streetcar. Peeping Tom and Butterfly are engaged in some seriously incestuous interactions with all the kissing. Other signs of Peeping Tom's evilness include him pulling a stream of magic runes out of Racecar's body and then using them to create a giant black wave that envelopes and demolishes the countryside, and also that he has a giant scarab embedded in his hand, a la The Mummy, which is creepy.
Now back to Racecar, our protagonist. There are a startling number of similarities to Buffy here, starting with her death and subsequent revivification by her friends, kneeling around her dead body in a circle. While dead she got to talk to all the other dead spirits, but her friends pulled her out of heaven and back into the fight. When she revives and puts on her ass-kicking outfit, she breaks out Buffy's magic ax, only Racecar's version also shoots magic beams of light that destroy evil.
And here's where it gets complicated. Racecar and Peeping Tom are in full-on, emo, Romeo and Juliet style, tragic love. He may have died at one point and been brought back too, or maybe it was a dream sequence where she went to hug him but passed right through his body. Either way, very emo, very tragic. At one point in the big battle in the sky he even saves her from the giant magic ball of evil, but he still destroyed the rest of the countryside with his black wave of death, so I'm really not feeling too sympathetic. Racecar has confided this love to Pink Power Ranger, but I don't think anyone else knows.
Ok, so, in sum: Racecar is a schoolgirl but lives a secret life as a superhero in a superhero army. Peeping Tom, his mother the Butterfly lady, and Skeezy Boy!Storm are evil. But Racecar and Peeping Tom have a destined love - much like Romeo and Juliet - and keep their love secret from all the others, except the Pink Power Ranger, who doesn't approve, but supports her friend Racecar anyway. Also there's a lot of incest.
Stranger 9
All I knew about this fandom was:
I've never seen an episode, know nothing of the main characters or plot arcs, have never read a story in the fandom. My entire familiarity with this fandom comes from vids.
Here's what this fandom is really about:
In a world not totally unlike our own (though not exactly like our own, either), there exist two races of people:
- Ordinary Folk are just like you and me. (Assuming you are not in fact a Face Tattoo Person; if you are, know that I honor and respect your native folkways. Please do not smite me with your fearsome wings and
magical swirly weapon thing.)
- Face Tattoo Folk are your basic super-magical-powered-like-unto-gods type people. They have various geometric shapes on their foreheads - probably the number of sides indicates your precise position in Face Tattoo Folk society, and since their world does bear a distinct resemblance to our own, there are likely whole doctoral dissertations called things like "An Investigation into the Subdialectic and Predialectic Implications of
Face Tattoo Sidedness in the Context of Modern Post-Magical Imperialism." Face Tattoo Folk can grow wings. And cast magic. And I think they have magical weapons, too. They kind of pwn Ordinary Folk, is my point.
Ordinary Folk practices as the aforementioned motorcycle sidecar racing (and maybe school, too, although obviously they don't have a lot of time for that, what with all the magic and motorcars).
But that is a problem, because Diamond-head has a boyfriend amongst the Face Tattoo Folk, too. His face tattoos suggest to me that he is not a man to be trifled with, and he's kind of possessive and grouchy. Also, he's like two feet taller than everyone else in the whole world and yet there's no uke in sight for him. Poor Diamond-head!
This whole dual boyfriend problem gets Diamond-head down. Her friends, including her Ordinary Folk Boyfriend, try to fix her with some mystic massage and chanting, but it turns out her clothes are allergic to chanting and they dissolve. She ends up naked, and everyone is very upset about this, especially Ordinary Folk Boyfriend. (One way in
which their world is apparently not like our world is that being someone's boyfriend doesn't necessarily mean you ever expect to see her naked; I suspect third base in this world is a ten-second hug.)
So, unable to deal with the unexpected nudity on top of her love life troubles (and the way Ordinary Folk Boyfriend has seemed oddly uninterested in motorcycle racing ever since the nudity incident), Diamond-head returns to her people, vowing that henceworth she will work magic rather than being worked by magic. But her new job is boring, and she misses Ordinary Folk Boyfriend and the ordinary magic they shared.
There is, of course, angst. And wistful dreaming.
Eventually, she realizes that Tattoo Face Folk Boyfriend is skeevy, and furthermore weirdly into birds and little girls. Obviously, Diamond-head's place is with the Ordinary Folk. And one special Ordinary Folk guy in particular.
So she returns, only to observe Ordinary Folk Boyfriend having an encounter with a hot but obviously bad girl who hides her face tattoos (the first warning sign of evil, folks) and has butterfly wings (most of you will remember that Smashing
Pumpkins wrote a song about precisely this problem - god, how many men have to be seduced by evil butterfly-winged women before the government will do something about this problem?). The bad girl kisses Ordinary Folk Boyfriend, after which he becomes infected with the face polygon virus.
Now Diamond-head has two guys with geometry lessons on their faces, and obviously this threatens the natural world order. It could lead to a caged death match between the Tattooed Boyfriends of Diamond-Head, and from that kind of battle, no one emerges the winner. Can the universe be saved?
But! Just in the nick of time, Diamond-head gets together with her other Face Tattoo Folk girlfriends, and they sing and summon their inner angels and/or wings and save the universe (unless they destroy it or totally rewrite it - I'm not entirely sure).
The important part isn't the universe, though. What matters is that Diamond-head ends up in the arms of her Once Ordinary Folk and Then Tattoo Face Folk and Now Probably Ordinary Folk Again Boyfriend, embracing tenderly and lovingly in a peaceful wooded glade. (Note: in this universe, this is probably a home run with the bases loaded, if
you get my drift.)
While some mysterious brown-haired schoolgirl wench spies on them from a tree.
So, yes, Diamond-head and Mr. Diamond-head are probably destined for years of therapy, but the key message of this anime is: true love conquers all. (With some help from face tattoos. And wings. And magic. And stuff. But really it's mostly just the love.)