In which what has been seen is discussed
'Ello all. How yall been? Good? I have been trying to keep up on everyone's adventures, but due to a weird spate of illness last week (which took me out of school on Monday and out of work on Tuesday and made for a very interesting day on Wednesday), I am a bit behind.
In EVERYTHING.
Though I am catching up, losing Spring Break to Things and last week to Stuff did not help. It helps that work is pretty quiet this week and I finally gave the kids their third quiz (Phonology and Morphology! Man, did they hate me for those phonology bits!); the downtime both things provide will give my brain time to get back into gear, just in time for the semester to end. ~Yaaay~ (Seriously, who gave it permission to be April already? Really, 2009? Really?)
So let's talk about things I've been watching.
What? It's a valid segue. Somewhere. :)
Back over Christmas Break, hoshizora hit me up on IM with "Hey, you should watch this show, Macross Frontier! It's cool!" Only without sounding so inane, most likely. ;) So I found it on Veoh and watched the first two episodes with him and then--
Well. Ever see someone walking a dog down the street? And the person is leaning back and the dog is straining ahead? That was the two of us on this series. He finally had to go, "Okay, you can go, but I want to watch these episodes with you." Which we did. And then in chat with Mari and Ray I was like, "Hey guys hey guys hey guys there's this shooooow"...and after a few weeks, they agreed to watch it with me, and then a few more weeks passed and we watched more...and more...so I ended up seeing it twice in the span of a few months.
The basic premise of the show is--crap, a little hard to spell out. So there's this guy, Alto Saotome, who is a pretty pretty Princess who wants to fly in a real sky. And there's this girl, Ranka Lee, who is cute as a button and has emotion-sensitive green hair and a dream to sing. And there's this other girl, Sheryl Nome, who is the Galactic Nymph and Idol to many people, who comes to their ship Frontier to give a series of concerts. Events lead to them all meeting each other just as the Frontier convoy starts to come under attack from an insectoid race known as the "Vajra"...and then the shit really starts to fly. Oh, and there's Luca and Michael and KLAN KLAN (who is made of awesome) and Nanase and Ranka's older brother Ozma Lee and Cathy Glass and Leon and Grace...oh, and the most adorable green squishy phone ever. IT DANCES!
Which makes no sense if you know nothing about Macross. But that's okay, Macross can be summed up in three things:
1. Valkyrie fighters, which can switch between a rocket plane and a mecha fighting mode
2. Music as the most powerful force in the Galaxy
3. A love triangle
Macross Frontier--or "Mafu," which we've taken to calling it occasionally--has all three of these things in spades. And because it was made to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Macross, there are shout-outs GALORE to previous series. I caught a few on my own (PINEAPPLES NOOOO) and hoshizora supplied a few more and we got a coupla more off Wiki, but it really is for fans.
However, because Mafu is also being made now, numbers 2 and 3 above get turned and twisted a little bit. Music does remain the most powerful force in the Galaxy, yes, but that whole idea frequently gets lampshaded and mocked and on a few occasions, becomes deadly. And the love triangle ends up being one of the most amazing renditions of an OT3--that is, a love triangle maturing into a stable triangle--I've ever seen. (Canonically. I'll go argue you the Rukia/Ichigo/Renji OT3 in another corner, but you kinda have to be an OT3 person to see that. Whereas this is...harder to deny.) There's this moment in episode 15 that sums it up beautifully: a single song becomes a battleground that merges into a duet that merges into a three-way exchange and then I explode in hearts. Like so: <33333333333333!
Actually, the whole show makes me explode into <333s, especially during the final episode, where just about every emotional string they can tug is tugged and done so well that you're happy the show did it. It was an IMMENSELY satisfying final episode for me and the group, though I understand your mileage may vary on that. But having watched it twice in such a short time, I can really say that the show doesn't feel like it hits sour notes. I know there are a few BZUH? things--Brera, for example, and it really took two watches for me to figure out the whole Macross Quarter thing--but even so, it delivered on so many levels it's easy to not fixate on its flaws.
Also, the music is fuckin' awesome, both the pop songs and the instrumental bits. Some of the pop is Engrish-heavy, but it grows on you. And one song (or rather, both versions of one song) in particular is now on my list of "go tos" for crying my eyes out. Yoko Kanno FTMFW!
So if you can buy into those three things above that make up a Macross premise, it's worth checking out at least the first five episodes. NOT THAT I'M RECOMMENDING IT. Because I don't do that, ya know. ;)
Basic plot summary: Toradora! is the story of five high school students, focusing primarily on Aisaka Taiga (girl) and Takasu Ryuuji (boy) and their outcast ways. See, Ryuuji has creepy eyes, and Aisaka will EAT YOU for looking at her wrong, even though she's approximately the size of a china doll.
(Momentary digression: sometimes the premises of light novels and manga make me go O_o. How many of them revolve around a character with a minor physical defect that earns them the intense scrutiny of their peers if not outright outcast status? High school was fucking hard enough as it was. Yes I realize where it comes from, but man.)
Anyhoo, Taiga and Ryuuji run into each other at the start of a new school year, setting off a crazily strung together LOVE WEB. See Ryuuji likes Taiga's best friend Minori, and Taiga likes Ryuuji's best (and somewhat only) friend Kitamura, and then Kitamura's friend Ami gets introduced and it turns out she likes one of them, too, and I don't know the love interests of Minori and Kitamura yet but I'm sure they'll pop up and THINGS WILL GET EVEN MORE CROWDED AND INTENSE.
So raynos, himawari, hoshizora and I are in chat this Saturday, talking about future anime we can all try to watch together. Mari mentions, quite offhandedly, that she's been watching Toradora!. "Just another high school romance anime," she says, and it doesn't even go on the possibilities list.
Sunday morning-ish, I wake up to a message from hoshizora saying, "I'm gonna check out Toradora!, 'cause I read a great review of it at this link I will conviently drop for you!"
I checked out said link, then immediately went to Veoh and found me some episodes. I watched the first two while he downloaded, and after the second said, "Here's the links. We need to watch the second episode together, at least." So we did, and there was flail!
See, while the show is going to be about the love web, right now it's mostly about Taiga and Ryuuji. Who call each other by their first names sans honorifics <3. Who give me a weird Ichigo and Rukia vibe, though I figure any tsundere female and outcast-y male with a heart of gold will do that at this point. Who make such a terrible yet pefect pair of conspirator, since they both kinda suck at what they're doing, even if they give decent advice for the other half. It's amazing to me that they meet in episode one and by the end of episode two are tied closely into each other--yet the show sells it, and sells it well.
I've only watched five episodes so far, so it's hard to say I recommend it. Though when I mentioned it on Twitter, I got a lot of "Toradora! YAY!", so that's something in its favor. And its first two episodes are really stunning. 3-5 have been slightly more generic, but from what I've nosed out through poking around on Wiki and TV Tropes, the stunning will return in spades. I look forward to it, even though I am being very careful to ration the episodes out, since I do not have the time to do my customary SWALLOW IT WHOOOLE sort of watch.
Basic plot summary: An epidemic of organ failure occurs just a little into the future, taking down a chunk of the Earth's population until Rotti Largo of GeneCo perfects the artificial organ and begins to sell them. Replacing one's organs becomes so highly thought of that people begin to do it electively, because after all, it's what's on the inside that counts. However, if you default on your payments to GeneCo, they'll take back that organ--and your life with it. Against this backdrop is a young sick girl named Shiloh, whose father Nathan has kept her confined to their house--or so he thinks. One night Shiloh is accidentally caught outside. This is the same night that Largo learns he is terminally ill. It is also the night of the Genetic Opera, when the voice of GeneCo, Blind Mag, will give her last performance (of her life, as it turns out). But really the threads of this night tie back to seventeen years ago, when Marni, Shiloh's mother, married Nathan instead of Rotti--and died soon after...
Man, this is really a post of its own in the making. 'Cause--well, there are works you watch and enjoy and that's it. There are works you become fannish for. There are works you become fannish enough for that you want to add to the fandom around it--fanfic, fanart, meta, what have you. And then there are works that crawl into your head, where you want to pull it apart piece by piece to understand what makes it tick and why its curled up so sweetly on your hypothalmus. Repo! would be in that last category for me.
Over at TV Tropes (motto: You Had A Five Hour Break, But I Eated It), Repo! kept randomly showing up on Tropes pages. So I finally went and checked it out, and went...yugh. Musicals/rock operas, I like 'em. Musicals/rock operas where a plot point is a character's face falling off, I like not so much. The Tropers who wrote the page were very upfront: this show is not for those who can't handle gore. I am really not a gore person.
But it was a musical, so I could just listen to the songs, right?
Except in the process of listening to the songs, I dug up some YouTube clips...and wanted to see more. Anthony Stewart Head singing is a helluva selling point. The clips I watched, incidentally, were Zydrate Anatomy and a clip of "Legal Assassin" that has now been taken down. ("Night Surgeon" would make a good, if somewhat confusing, substitute for the latter.) Both of them sold me based on the performances of the lead guys. Both of them--WARNING WARNING WARNING--have short clips of a scalpel being drawn across skin and other bits of blood and uck. In "Zydrate," all of this comes towards the middle-end at a very specific point in the music; in "Legal Assassin," it's just...there, woo!
So I tracked down the movie and watched it. As it turned out, it wasn't that bad, even the bit where the face falls off. (Which was pretty much like I expected them to do it--it basically looks like the character got their face dunked in some chunky spaghetti sauce.) There were two scenes I did some hiding for, but the gore that happens in them is pretty explictly set up in both cases, and you have ample time to get hiding in both of them. There is some I've caught on rewatch--
Oh yeah, rewatch. Well, bits of a rewatch. I need to have time to set aside to watch the whole thing again. And just that puts it on my DVD list, once I grab a moment to do that online shopping I've been putting off. (Already bought the soundtrack. Had to, the damn songs are quite catchy and make great car music.) Which is pretty good for a movie I didn't want to watch because it's gross. (It is gross. The two scenes I hid from? One involves evisceration--and dancing!--and the other involves a person plucking out their own eyes. Nope, not watching. Not to mention the random other carvings.) But for all that is gore-y, it also has:
*an interesting aesthetic - it's told through both drawings and live action sequences
*an operatic sensibility - more than just a lot of singing, it means that it can be very broad in places, which compounds nicely with the modern musical sensibility it has in the music itself. I can see why it got panned, yet has built up a base despite that.
*tragedy - by the bucketful! and it makes for some very interesting characters, particularly in the "events of seventeen years ago" crowd. That it's the middle of a trilogy doesn't surprise me. And while it may seem very weird to make the middle first, it makes sense in this case.
*dark halves - I don't want to call it a kink or an obsession. But I have a...fascination...with good people who have very dark halves. And yes, I like Sweeney Todd, too.
*Paul Sorvino, Anthony Stewart Head, Sarah Brightman - the trio of "adult" leads really do an amazing job.
*Joan Jett being uber-hot - for her, like, minute scene? she so is.
And more!
I don't recommend things usually. In this case, though, I think my sister would enjoy this. (And she will send me an e-mail with <3 GraveRobber <3 if she does watch it, I betcha.) Otherwise...I dunno. I don't know if I could recommend it, because there seems to be such a huge checklist to run down beforehand. I fell into it not wanting to watch it, after all. So...yeah.
Won't stop me from writing up a thought dump about it sometime soon. Whee, lack of audience - SO NICE <3!
*whew* I have got to learn to write shorter posts.
And because I need to record this: five weeks of swimming!
In EVERYTHING.
Though I am catching up, losing Spring Break to Things and last week to Stuff did not help. It helps that work is pretty quiet this week and I finally gave the kids their third quiz (Phonology and Morphology! Man, did they hate me for those phonology bits!); the downtime both things provide will give my brain time to get back into gear, just in time for the semester to end. ~Yaaay~ (Seriously, who gave it permission to be April already? Really, 2009? Really?)
So let's talk about things I've been watching.
What? It's a valid segue. Somewhere. :)
Back over Christmas Break, hoshizora hit me up on IM with "Hey, you should watch this show, Macross Frontier! It's cool!" Only without sounding so inane, most likely. ;) So I found it on Veoh and watched the first two episodes with him and then--
Well. Ever see someone walking a dog down the street? And the person is leaning back and the dog is straining ahead? That was the two of us on this series. He finally had to go, "Okay, you can go, but I want to watch these episodes with you." Which we did. And then in chat with Mari and Ray I was like, "Hey guys hey guys hey guys there's this shooooow"...and after a few weeks, they agreed to watch it with me, and then a few more weeks passed and we watched more...and more...so I ended up seeing it twice in the span of a few months.
The basic premise of the show is--crap, a little hard to spell out. So there's this guy, Alto Saotome, who is a pretty pretty Princess who wants to fly in a real sky. And there's this girl, Ranka Lee, who is cute as a button and has emotion-sensitive green hair and a dream to sing. And there's this other girl, Sheryl Nome, who is the Galactic Nymph and Idol to many people, who comes to their ship Frontier to give a series of concerts. Events lead to them all meeting each other just as the Frontier convoy starts to come under attack from an insectoid race known as the "Vajra"...and then the shit really starts to fly. Oh, and there's Luca and Michael and KLAN KLAN (who is made of awesome) and Nanase and Ranka's older brother Ozma Lee and Cathy Glass and Leon and Grace...oh, and the most adorable green squishy phone ever. IT DANCES!
Which makes no sense if you know nothing about Macross. But that's okay, Macross can be summed up in three things:
1. Valkyrie fighters, which can switch between a rocket plane and a mecha fighting mode
2. Music as the most powerful force in the Galaxy
3. A love triangle
Macross Frontier--or "Mafu," which we've taken to calling it occasionally--has all three of these things in spades. And because it was made to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Macross, there are shout-outs GALORE to previous series. I caught a few on my own (PINEAPPLES NOOOO) and hoshizora supplied a few more and we got a coupla more off Wiki, but it really is for fans.
However, because Mafu is also being made now, numbers 2 and 3 above get turned and twisted a little bit. Music does remain the most powerful force in the Galaxy, yes, but that whole idea frequently gets lampshaded and mocked and on a few occasions, becomes deadly. And the love triangle ends up being one of the most amazing renditions of an OT3--that is, a love triangle maturing into a stable triangle--I've ever seen. (Canonically. I'll go argue you the Rukia/Ichigo/Renji OT3 in another corner, but you kinda have to be an OT3 person to see that. Whereas this is...harder to deny.) There's this moment in episode 15 that sums it up beautifully: a single song becomes a battleground that merges into a duet that merges into a three-way exchange and then I explode in hearts. Like so: <33333333333333!
Actually, the whole show makes me explode into <333s, especially during the final episode, where just about every emotional string they can tug is tugged and done so well that you're happy the show did it. It was an IMMENSELY satisfying final episode for me and the group, though I understand your mileage may vary on that. But having watched it twice in such a short time, I can really say that the show doesn't feel like it hits sour notes. I know there are a few BZUH? things--Brera, for example, and it really took two watches for me to figure out the whole Macross Quarter thing--but even so, it delivered on so many levels it's easy to not fixate on its flaws.
Also, the music is fuckin' awesome, both the pop songs and the instrumental bits. Some of the pop is Engrish-heavy, but it grows on you. And one song (or rather, both versions of one song) in particular is now on my list of "go tos" for crying my eyes out. Yoko Kanno FTMFW!
So if you can buy into those three things above that make up a Macross premise, it's worth checking out at least the first five episodes. NOT THAT I'M RECOMMENDING IT. Because I don't do that, ya know. ;)
Basic plot summary: Toradora! is the story of five high school students, focusing primarily on Aisaka Taiga (girl) and Takasu Ryuuji (boy) and their outcast ways. See, Ryuuji has creepy eyes, and Aisaka will EAT YOU for looking at her wrong, even though she's approximately the size of a china doll.
(Momentary digression: sometimes the premises of light novels and manga make me go O_o. How many of them revolve around a character with a minor physical defect that earns them the intense scrutiny of their peers if not outright outcast status? High school was fucking hard enough as it was. Yes I realize where it comes from, but man.)
Anyhoo, Taiga and Ryuuji run into each other at the start of a new school year, setting off a crazily strung together LOVE WEB. See Ryuuji likes Taiga's best friend Minori, and Taiga likes Ryuuji's best (and somewhat only) friend Kitamura, and then Kitamura's friend Ami gets introduced and it turns out she likes one of them, too, and I don't know the love interests of Minori and Kitamura yet but I'm sure they'll pop up and THINGS WILL GET EVEN MORE CROWDED AND INTENSE.
So raynos, himawari, hoshizora and I are in chat this Saturday, talking about future anime we can all try to watch together. Mari mentions, quite offhandedly, that she's been watching Toradora!. "Just another high school romance anime," she says, and it doesn't even go on the possibilities list.
Sunday morning-ish, I wake up to a message from hoshizora saying, "I'm gonna check out Toradora!, 'cause I read a great review of it at this link I will conviently drop for you!"
I checked out said link, then immediately went to Veoh and found me some episodes. I watched the first two while he downloaded, and after the second said, "Here's the links. We need to watch the second episode together, at least." So we did, and there was flail!
See, while the show is going to be about the love web, right now it's mostly about Taiga and Ryuuji. Who call each other by their first names sans honorifics <3. Who give me a weird Ichigo and Rukia vibe, though I figure any tsundere female and outcast-y male with a heart of gold will do that at this point. Who make such a terrible yet pefect pair of conspirator, since they both kinda suck at what they're doing, even if they give decent advice for the other half. It's amazing to me that they meet in episode one and by the end of episode two are tied closely into each other--yet the show sells it, and sells it well.
I've only watched five episodes so far, so it's hard to say I recommend it. Though when I mentioned it on Twitter, I got a lot of "Toradora! YAY!", so that's something in its favor. And its first two episodes are really stunning. 3-5 have been slightly more generic, but from what I've nosed out through poking around on Wiki and TV Tropes, the stunning will return in spades. I look forward to it, even though I am being very careful to ration the episodes out, since I do not have the time to do my customary SWALLOW IT WHOOOLE sort of watch.
Basic plot summary: An epidemic of organ failure occurs just a little into the future, taking down a chunk of the Earth's population until Rotti Largo of GeneCo perfects the artificial organ and begins to sell them. Replacing one's organs becomes so highly thought of that people begin to do it electively, because after all, it's what's on the inside that counts. However, if you default on your payments to GeneCo, they'll take back that organ--and your life with it. Against this backdrop is a young sick girl named Shiloh, whose father Nathan has kept her confined to their house--or so he thinks. One night Shiloh is accidentally caught outside. This is the same night that Largo learns he is terminally ill. It is also the night of the Genetic Opera, when the voice of GeneCo, Blind Mag, will give her last performance (of her life, as it turns out). But really the threads of this night tie back to seventeen years ago, when Marni, Shiloh's mother, married Nathan instead of Rotti--and died soon after...
Man, this is really a post of its own in the making. 'Cause--well, there are works you watch and enjoy and that's it. There are works you become fannish for. There are works you become fannish enough for that you want to add to the fandom around it--fanfic, fanart, meta, what have you. And then there are works that crawl into your head, where you want to pull it apart piece by piece to understand what makes it tick and why its curled up so sweetly on your hypothalmus. Repo! would be in that last category for me.
Over at TV Tropes (motto: You Had A Five Hour Break, But I Eated It), Repo! kept randomly showing up on Tropes pages. So I finally went and checked it out, and went...yugh. Musicals/rock operas, I like 'em. Musicals/rock operas where a plot point is a character's face falling off, I like not so much. The Tropers who wrote the page were very upfront: this show is not for those who can't handle gore. I am really not a gore person.
But it was a musical, so I could just listen to the songs, right?
Except in the process of listening to the songs, I dug up some YouTube clips...and wanted to see more. Anthony Stewart Head singing is a helluva selling point. The clips I watched, incidentally, were Zydrate Anatomy and a clip of "Legal Assassin" that has now been taken down. ("Night Surgeon" would make a good, if somewhat confusing, substitute for the latter.) Both of them sold me based on the performances of the lead guys. Both of them--WARNING WARNING WARNING--have short clips of a scalpel being drawn across skin and other bits of blood and uck. In "Zydrate," all of this comes towards the middle-end at a very specific point in the music; in "Legal Assassin," it's just...there, woo!
So I tracked down the movie and watched it. As it turned out, it wasn't that bad, even the bit where the face falls off. (Which was pretty much like I expected them to do it--it basically looks like the character got their face dunked in some chunky spaghetti sauce.) There were two scenes I did some hiding for, but the gore that happens in them is pretty explictly set up in both cases, and you have ample time to get hiding in both of them. There is some I've caught on rewatch--
Oh yeah, rewatch. Well, bits of a rewatch. I need to have time to set aside to watch the whole thing again. And just that puts it on my DVD list, once I grab a moment to do that online shopping I've been putting off. (Already bought the soundtrack. Had to, the damn songs are quite catchy and make great car music.) Which is pretty good for a movie I didn't want to watch because it's gross. (It is gross. The two scenes I hid from? One involves evisceration--and dancing!--and the other involves a person plucking out their own eyes. Nope, not watching. Not to mention the random other carvings.) But for all that is gore-y, it also has:
*an interesting aesthetic - it's told through both drawings and live action sequences
*an operatic sensibility - more than just a lot of singing, it means that it can be very broad in places, which compounds nicely with the modern musical sensibility it has in the music itself. I can see why it got panned, yet has built up a base despite that.
*tragedy - by the bucketful! and it makes for some very interesting characters, particularly in the "events of seventeen years ago" crowd. That it's the middle of a trilogy doesn't surprise me. And while it may seem very weird to make the middle first, it makes sense in this case.
*dark halves - I don't want to call it a kink or an obsession. But I have a...fascination...with good people who have very dark halves. And yes, I like Sweeney Todd, too.
*Paul Sorvino, Anthony Stewart Head, Sarah Brightman - the trio of "adult" leads really do an amazing job.
*Joan Jett being uber-hot - for her, like, minute scene? she so is.
And more!
I don't recommend things usually. In this case, though, I think my sister would enjoy this. (And she will send me an e-mail with <3 GraveRobber <3 if she does watch it, I betcha.) Otherwise...I dunno. I don't know if I could recommend it, because there seems to be such a huge checklist to run down beforehand. I fell into it not wanting to watch it, after all. So...yeah.
Won't stop me from writing up a thought dump about it sometime soon. Whee, lack of audience - SO NICE <3!
*whew* I have got to learn to write shorter posts.
And because I need to record this: five weeks of swimming!