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tryslora · 8 months ago

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What I'm Reading Wednesday...

On the Duck Prints Press reading server, it’s What I’m Reading Wednesday where we all share what we finished in the last week, what we are currently reading, and what we think of these books.

I figured hey, why not bring that to the rest of the world for myself. Because I love yelling about my current reads. And I’ve always got several things in motion at one time, between physical, audio, and ebooks, plus things I’m reading for specific reasons.

Here’s the summary from the last week in visual format (the actual discussion is behind the read-more):

Fiction

I am currently reading Many Drops Make a Stream by Adrian Harley (from Duck Prints Press). There are so many things to love in this book. The world building packs so much into such a small space. The culture clash between human and shapeshifter is wonderful (and Harley’s shapeshifters truly have a culture all their own). I thought it was going to be a quick read because it’s short, but the language and depth of information have me going slower and savoring every word. That said, I’ve also reached the point where I want to take it in faster, so I find myself spending a little extra time every time I pick it up, just to get a few more pages!

Manga & Graphic Novels

I have one manga and one graphic novel in progress.

I’ve been reading The Complete Elfquest, volume 1 by Wendy & Richard Pini for a little over two weeks now. We have several of these volumes, and my intention is to read one chapter/issue a night, so I am able to savor them slowly, but also get through them. Reading this first volume is like coming home into a fandom from childhood. The first chunk of it was also collected in the original Warp Graphics compilations, and I can’t remember how often I read those back in high school. I’m reaching the parts now where I probably only read the individual issues once or twice, so it’s familiar, but not to the point where I’m like oh yes, I remember gazing at that panel for hours. I still love these elves, and this story, and I cannot wait to get home each day and be allowed to read a chapter. I’m looking forward to when I reach new-to-me material.

I watched the 24 episode anime The Apothecary Diaries and I wasn’t ready to let it go when it was over, so I started reading the manga by Natsu Hyuuga and Nekokurage. I finished volumes 5 & 6 this past week and am currently reading volume 7. I have the remaining already published volumes waiting for when I’m done with this. I adore Maomao and Jinshi, and am incredibly excited to get to the point where canon moves past what is in the anime. That said, getting to revisit events I already watched on TV and linger over what was said and the exact expressions has been soooo good. (And yes, I know the light novels also exist and will be rolling into those in ebook form after the manga; I might be a tad bit obsessed).

Audiobook

A while ago I thought “I should read some TJ Klune” so I checked the library list I had for audiobooks, and the first of his Extraordinaries trilogy was available in audio. I listened to it. I was addicted. I’m now on the third book—Heat Wave—and I find it very very hard to put it down. I can’t listen while working, only while commuting, walking, or doing chores—things that don’t require me to actually think so I can multi-task. But hey, it’s a GREAT way to get me to do my PT since it means fifteen minutes more of audiobook listening! Nick, the POV character, has ADHD and I flail a lot over pretty much everything he thinks and does. I love every character in this series. I love how Klune is using superheroes as an allegory for the queer experience and for racial issues, but at the same time, is actually addressing those issues explicitly. I both want to listen faster to find out what happens, and linger so it doesn’t end.

Ebook

I have been reading Wayfinder by CE Murphy, which is the second in a duology. This is a romance, yes, but it’s another fun culture clash book, this time between humanity and faerie, and I am so here for that. Murphy is an author I used to read a lot from, and I’m trying to work my way through her back catalog slowly because I’ve always enjoyed her style. Accessible and fun. This series is about a woman who has always been able to hear lies (a Truthseeker), and how her talent develops, and how she works with the faerie kingdoms to try to help them (despite some of them not wanting help, and the original situation not being the one she’s actually needed for).

Non-fiction

I have been working my way through three non-fiction books.

One is A Year of Zen by Bonnie Myotai Treace. I had been looking for a journaling prompt book, and decided to give this one a try. I made the difficult decision to write directly in the book itself, then the additional decision to let myself fail if needed. So if I don’t get to answer a prompt on a day, I just answer it the next day. One prompt per day. It’ll take me more than a year to go through it, but that’s okay. The idea is to have me think and write a short paragraph every day, and not feel guilty about messing up. It’s working surprisingly well. Learning to let myself fail has been a big part of my process this year, and hopefully I am learning to let go of some of the anxiety about things needing to be matched and rigid.

The one I am stalled on right now is The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris. It was recommended as a book that therapists like to use for themselves, not merely recommend to their patients, and it reminded me of the radical acceptance I’m supposed to be practicing (and apparently am, despite myself, according to my therapist after she listened to me). The problem is, it has exercises (doesn’t everything?) and I stalled out because I didn’t have time.

Time is a theme, y’know? And that’s what happened with the last non-fiction book. I’ve been working through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, taking it as a self-guided 12 week course. I’m currently on week 5. However, I did a week of just doing morning notes before I really got started, then I took a week off when everything went haywire in my schedule because of the power outage. So it’s been about seven weeks so far. This week, as I worked on exercises, I found myself really digging in to my emotions about this book. And in the end, I decided that while I can see the value in some things, the book itself is giving me more anxiety about everything to do with my writing, while at the same time making it impossible for me to find time TO write (while following the advice it gives). So. I am no longer doing it as a course, with exercises, but I will finish reading it. And if an exercise appeals, I’ll do it. It’ll still take time, because I’ll probably still read one chapter each weekend, but I am already feeling WAY less stressed and I only made this decision last night.

So…

That’s it for me! What are you reading?

#what i'm reading wednesday #duck prints press #reading #books

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serendictment · 1 year ago

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October Books

1. The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima

9/10. I have a small hole in my heart that is Japanese literature shaped, and the fact that it took me this long (and a requirement for a class) to read this was a crime. I enjoyed it quite a bit, especially with how happy of an ending it was. I really needed that pick me up after September.

2. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

4/10. I wanted to love this and by no means did I hate it, I just dislike the class I had to read this for. Also, because of other people in that class not participating, we were getting quizzes each class on the book, which turned reading it into studying it which just wasn't great. It was still well written and I quite enjoyed the usage of language and how the dialog was written.

3. No Longer Human (Manga) by Junji Ito

9.5/10. No Longer Human is genuinely one of my favorite novels to date, so when I first heard of the manga version I knew I had to read it and I was by no means disappointed. Ito's art style is perfect for this novel and I love the changes that Ito made to the story (Takeichi's suidide, meeting Dazai in the mental hospital, and the ending in general). I also especially loved how at the very beginning we see Dazai and Sachi sitting on the river bank and then at the very end we see the newspaper on Yoichi's kite detailing his death. It was tragic, but it also felt like closure. I'm not sure how problematic it is to say, but I do, unfortunately, relate to Yozo due to multiple things he has said (particularly about the clown like persona, and the feeling of not being human, though that's for another time). I don't want to keep going on, but know that I definitely can.

4. Goodbye, Eri by Tatsuki Fujimoto

8/10. Loved the art and the story, especially how it's only learned near the end how Yuta's mother was actually rather abusive/harsh with him. Honestly, the ending did confuse me a bit with Eri being a vampire (I'm not sure if this is a hallucination or real?) but the explosion at the end made me oddly happy.

5. Chainsaw Man volume 13

7/10. Loved the 'Goodbye, Eri' reference after Mitaka became the war devil. Other than that, amazing art as usual. Angel, Kobeni, and Cosmo/Halloween Devil, I still miss you.

6. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

?/10. I definitely didn't. . . hate it. . . but I'm not sure if I liked it. I'm conflicted. Yeah. Ari and Dante's getting together was cute though. . . okay next book.

#books #reading #bookblr #the sound of waves #yukio mishima #tsow #their eyes were watching god #tewwg #zora neale hurston #no longer human #osamu dazai #junji ito #no longer human junji ito #goodbye eri #tatsuki fujimoto #aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe #aaddtsotu

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alki-studio · 1 year ago

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HxH manga rebinding! (vol. 1)

(project master post here)

Let me just start this off with that from my 7 years of experience bookbinding, a LOT went wrong with this project. Like, almost everything that could've went wrong. It is not to my usual standard of work, though I tried to make up for errors where I could.

Nonetheless, I'm doing this for practice and to document my progress, so here's how it went!

⍔ (More final pics at the end) ⍔

I absolutely adore the cover of the first volume as-is. It's really great graphically: the palette pops and gives a clear hierarchy to information in different areas, the illustration of Gon on the frog is super cute, it's overall just fun.

My first design decision was to retain the green/yellow/red color palette. I don't think I've ever done anything with these colors, I don't really gravitate towards them, so I definitely wanted to keep them in the design.

I didn't have a piece of leather large enough in any of these colors-- all the leather I use is industry scraps and remnants, so I don't really purchase full hides. So, I had to get creative with it:

I did have enough of this laurel green leather to cover a front and back board, but I'd need to hide the seam along the spine. I also have this really cool tie silk jacquard, I want to guess it's from the 80's (I got it for a dollar at a flea market). Technically I'm using the backside of this stuff, but I like it better because of how vibrant the colors are. I only need a thin strip for the spine, so I cut out a matching green, yellow, and orange section.

Here are some reject cover material contenders: different leathers, vintage kimono silk, and snakeskin!

I didn't want to just copy the cover for the board design, so I looked at the panels for some inspiration. My favorite panel from volume 1 is actually of the tunnel from the Hunter exam (left), but since this is the first volume, I really wanted to pay homage to this being the beginning of Gon's journey. So, I included this panel of Whale Island (right), along with a wave pattern.

Here's the design I sketched out, and it carved into chipboard:

Normally I'd just sketch directly onto the chipboard I'm carving, but I wanted to have a template to use for gold foiling. This is my first attempt at doing so; I don't actually have the proper tools for traditional hot stamping, so I'm using a hot foil pen (video on the tool/technique).

First mistake: Trying to brute force the original cover off the block. Lesson: Use a heat gun.

Removing the text block from the original softcover was pretty straightforward, except I originally tried to get the cover off the block by gentle tearing/cutting away at the original glue, which resulted in me just destroying the attached page anyway. This volume doesn't give you many "junk" pages to sacrifice, so it meant I'd have to glue my end paper onto the last page of the volume D:

For the other cover, I hit it with a heat gun for a few seconds, and it peeled right off.

Here's a progress shot of attaching the leather to the boards, smooth sailing there:

Second mistake: Not backing fabric with Heat n' Bond Lesson: Always make bookcloth properly

I have made my own bookcloth before (video on how to do it), and really, truly, know better than to apply liquid glue to fabric. Nonetheless, I was stupid and did it anyway. I even diluted the glue with water, thinking that would mitigate the effects of glue seepage? It didn't. My spine fabric lost all its vibrancy and was just an ugly, goopy mess.

Before I attached the board and spine to the block and endpapers, I added the foiling. At first, that came out pretty well, but then I lost patience, and started freehanding Whale Island on the back.

Third mistake: Not sticking to the template Lesson: Stick to the fucking template (and start saving for a CNC)

The drawing itself was fine, so normally this wouldn't be an issue, but because I have Whale Island sitting on top of a raised embossed silhouette, it was painfully obvious that my drawing wasn't in the position or scale it was supposed to be. My freehand lettering also leaves something to be desired, though I don't think the template would have helped a lot with this either. Honestly, for a position-sensitive blind transfer for lettering like this, using a CNC like a Cricut or Silhouette would be best. This might be my push to finally invest in one?

The endpapers are actually paper I had marbled myself, a while back, and met the green/yellow criteria. Attaching those to the block went smoothly, though I had to slightly glue over the panels at the back of the volume T^T... I used some of the spine fabric for head/endbands as well. It's... pretty ugly up close. Glue seepage, and the next mistake.

Fourth mistake: Gluing the entire fucking block upside down Lesson: Anything but that

The cosmetic mistakes on the cover this book are pretty forgivable, but the inside is a genuinely disgusting mess. I was working on getting this done before a friend came over, and was pretty happy to get the block glued in and the whole thing in the press before she arrived. I decided to take it out of the press show her when she arrived, only to realize I HAD GLUED THE BLOCK UPSIDE DOWN. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I tried to remove the block nicely, but the glue was already half dry and tacky and it was an awful awful mess, and I was already SO DONE with the project. So, I just cut the block out along the middle of the endpaper, and stepped away for the evening.

I really wanted to use the marbled paper I made, and I had no scraps to use over the seam where I had to flip the block, so I had to find a complimentary alternative. I just used some chiyogami, with, once again, green/yellow/red. Slapped that on the seam. Probably could've done a better job with it.

I had been saving the original covers, and wanted to incorporate them, so I decided to use them as sort of bookmark pages? Not sure how to call it, but like how hardcovers with a paper cover will have those folded flaps on the inside usually with an about or review section.

As for the cosmetic fixes:

First thing I did was properly make bookcloth with the sliver of extra silk in the right colorway that I had, and glued that over the lumpy fucked up original spine. It's not perfect by any means, but it's definitely a lot better.

When I started writing this, I had only done gold foil on the covers. But as I was looking back at early design process photos, I remember how much I wanted to incorporate the red into the design, which mine was absent of. So, I started to accent Gon and the frog with red paint.

It looked absolutely horrifying.

So I kept painting, and painting, and painting, trying to make it look good, and it was 4AM and I was tired, and I'm used to oil paint so I forgot you can't just leave ugly globs of paint wherever and wipe them up later, and it just kept looking worse and worse.

I got jumpscared by this monstrosity this morning:

Don't paint while tired!!

I tried to salvage my awful paint job the next day, and kept adding more colors and paint into the design until I had ended up just repainting the original cover. I didn't get the lettering perfect or anything, but I got it to a presentable point at least. I really wanted to make some semblance of a re-interpretation of the original illustration, but oh well, the painted version was a necessary fix.

It's not perfect by any means, (honestly, it's not even good either), but I did what I could, and I'm ready to move onto the next project. Here's the final pictures!

Thank you for reading this far! Please leave a comment with any thoughts or suggestions, they really encourage me to keep going :D

#bookbinding #hunter x hunter #hxh #hxh manga #gon freecss #bibliophile #manga rebind #alki studio

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talenlee · 7 months ago

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Story Pile: Oshi no Ko

With 2023 over, there comes an inevitable wave of conversations for those of us who watch anime slow, to ask: Hey, what was good back then? What anime was there, now fully complete, that is worth going back and watching again now there’s a full set of episodes to engage with? And that brings with it a ranking system and a conversation about best and worsts. I tend to think of this in terms instead of favourites – of what thing was it that I liked the best, or spoke to me the most deeply. I figured I’d talk about that in April, in my month.

One of the anime that was considered in contention is the anime Oshi no Ko, which is a – it’s about – it’s –

Hm. Hang on.

If it is time for me to talk about Oshi no Ko, a manga and an anime and technically a movie and a music video clip, then it is time to set up some basic boundaries for the audience. It is an anime with a pretty pervasive and well-defended culture regarding spoilers and their importance, though, and while I think having access to information about this series is one of the best ways to keep from giving up on it, I want to make sure you know good and clear up front that I am going to be doing spoilers about what’s included in Oshi no Ko. Not a lot – but definitely stuff from its first episode onwards, where the big twist of the series – as much as it can be considered that – is explicitly and clearly spoiled. If I’m going to talk to you about this series, I need to talk to you about this series and not about what the series pretends and implies it might actually be.

Problem with that is that brings with it its cousin, the content warning. And while normally, I can kinda just smooth things over with the phrase ‘oh lords, there’s a lot of anime bullshit going on here,’ I think it’s best to be a bit more specific in the context of Oshi no Ko. That means I’m going to talk about:

Death of a parent, particularly directly experienced

Murder, but you know, this is very low key and it’s allowed, as a treat

The ongoing experience of stalking and its ramifications

Cyberbullying and suicide attempts

Uncomfortable age gaps we summarise as ‘anime bullshit’

Sibling and parent-child incest

part 1: what it is

Oshi no Ko is a manga and anime from the pen of Akasaka Aka, the author most notably otherwise of Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War. It’s an anime ‘about the idol industry,’ focusing on the story of one Ai Hoshino, but shock! Surprise! After the first volume slash episode of the story, Ai dies! It’s not about Ai at all! It’s about her son’s quest to find his father and kill him.

I’m simplifying, but I’m not lying.

Oshi no Ko is an anime about the entertainment industry of Japan, as told by the entertainment industry of Japan. It’s that particular genre that I love where there’s a vision of economics and material realities of a space. The system that makes the media that the series is about is a system that works on layers, and maybe sure, a character may be perfect for a job but what if that job doesn’t exist ten stages later in the production process?

But okay, I feel like I’m not explaining this well, which makes sense because Oshi no Ko is a staggeringly hard anime to explain. I resent a great deal the people who simply said ‘you should watch it’ like that explains everything – I did in fact watch it and took a month break between episode 1 and 2, because I was so disappointed with the direction the series was taking at that point. Let me start again.

Part of this is because the narrative of Oshi no Ko is complex but the plot is pretty simple. The difference here is that the plot is the sequence of events that make up the story, one after another, while the narrative is how that plot is revealed to the audience. Lots of stories you know tell the plot out of order – any time there’s a last minute twist, that’s because part of the story is being told after its immediate occurrence. The example I normally use is that the start of the plot of Hamlet is that first, Hamlet’s father is assassinated, then Hamlet’s mother marries the murderer, then Hamlet returns home and sees a ghost. Except we don’t see that story in the order; the narrative presents it almost in the opposite – Hamlet returns home, finds his mother has remarried, and then thanks to seeing the ghost, learns his father was murdered.

The plot of Oshi no Ko is a woman is murdered, and her twin children dive into the entertainment industry in response to this tragic loss.

The narrative starts not with the woman but with her obstretrician, who meets her in secret because she shouldn’t be having kids, because she shouldn’t be having sex, because she’s an up-and-coming idol, and idol culture is incredibly puritanical and controlling of women’s bodies and identities. When he’s murdered by her stalker, he is reborn as her baby child, and spends a few years growing up and getting to know her better, before her stalker returns and kills her. He’s left with a burning want to take vengeance on the person he sees as responsible for this idol slash his mother’s death, and that means hunting down his new biological father, comparing their DNA to prove who he is, then killing him. Also through this whole sequence, he has a twin sister who is also a reincarnation but even though it is very obvious she is the reincarnation of the Littlest Cancer Patient he took care of years ago and made him a fan of the idol in the first place, he doesn’t learn that, and the audience only gets it confirmed in the ‘second’ episode.

Oshi no Ko is an anime that starts by telling you it’s going to be about a really cool woman investigating a mystery while trying to navigate the Japanese entertainment industry that wants to chew her up and spit her out. Then, surprise! It’s actually about a cat and mouse game between her two year old son and his biological father! Then, surprise! It’s about watching him and his sister navigate the entertainment industry, for competing reasons – her want to be like their mother, and his want to murder their father! Then, surprise! It’s about all these other characters and all these economic realities of how media gets made!

Once the first episode has gone and stuffed its central character good and hard in the fridge, the story that follows jumps forwards ten whole ass years to follow Ai’s children, the reincarnations of her old fans. Named Aquamarine and Ruby because Ai is extra as hell and also the god damned best, they make friends in performing arts schools, they connect with other actors and they get involved in the creation of media while trying to build a connection with one another. Each child is holding an enormous secret, which is really funny when you think about it because both of them just think they’re the reincarnation of someone else, which in the real world, is a thing that a lot of people just think is true anyway, for everyone. The first season doesn’t actually resolve much of the murder mystery plot, and has a rough start about treating women badly, but as it progresses, Aqua demonstrates a truly fantastic grasp on alienation in acting, and Ruby shows its counterpoint: Feeling things incredibly hard in the pursuit of being able to project an authenticity.

They both do this by lying a lot!

Oshi no Ko is a lot of things, and it’s quite good at a lot of them. Part of what it is is the incredibly disappointing twist of realising what it’s not going to be, or how it might sometimes pivot to something else, something wildly different, for completely inexplicable reasons.

part 2: the things I really like about what it’s doing

If you’ve looked at the scroll bar you know you’re in for a long one here and I want to get my praise for this series out of the way up front. Oshi no Ko season 1 is an anime I really enjoyed watching, and it has a bunch of things I really like in it. Presented without much context are some of those things.

I love Aqua and Ruby as characters. Set aside the reincarnation element, you have two kids with a deeply fucked up relationship to their mother thanks to the murder, whose whole lives twist around that woman and therefore, one another. Ruby appreciates what their mother made, the image she could construct, and Aqua appreciates – he thinks – what their mother was, the person she was under the image. Of course, that’s stupid – we see Ai’s inner mind on this and we know she was creating the image because she was choosing who to be, and who she wanted to be was someone who could talk about love and be beloved. It’s great.

In a show full of great women characters I like a lot like Miyako (cool hot adopted mom), Karina (That Bitch grown up into your high school crush), MEMcho (we all love entertaining lies), I want to bring special attention to Akane. It’s pretty easy for a character like Akane to play her part in the story, then close that off and step out; you have the online bullying victim encounter, the almost loss of her character, and then – like the rest of the crew on the reality show, if you want! – she can step out. But instead Akane takes initiative and works on doing something different, and in the process we get two things I really like. First, is she makes herself a conspiracy wall, and I love a character with a conspiracy wall. Second is, she walks into the next scene and she takes an assumption about the world that the main characters have and piledrivers it to pieces.

See, the assumption about Ai – it’s even in the opening theme – is that she’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a star come down from the heavens to the earth. The stars in her eyes are part of this — shown to fade out when she dies. It’s not that her eyes look materially weird, it’s there’s a way she presents herself that the show symbolises with the stars as being fundamentally engaging. Aqua and Ruby both ruminate on how nobody can do what mum does. Then Akane steps into a scene and shows how they’re wrong. Being like Ai is a thing you can learn, it’s an affect, and it’s something that someone can choose to do. Being Ai was a choice, and I love when characters are shown to be the results of choices not destinies.

Aqua’s hot. I love the chameleonic ability to shift into roles, I love the dull understated affect of a boy who is thinking of murder and trying to be normal about everything else. I love the moment in the B-Komachi play where he pulls out the glowsticks and does what he can to support the group. It’s not necessarily part of his plan – he’ll have other ways to get into the idol industry, he doesn’t need B-Komachi to succeed. But he shows up and supports his sister and his friend and his other friend, and he is affected by Karina’s performance. Which again, in that moment, she chooses!

There’s a lot of idol culture experience this anime makes look really cool. In the OP there’s the sea of glowsticks, which first look like eyes peeking out of the dark and then become a roaring sea almost like fangs or thorns. The actual song performances in Oshi no Ko kick ass. We Are Star Train (god don’t know how to romanise that one properly) and the OP Idol especially. Idol really goes so very hard, I love it so much. And yeah, this means 2023 had two different banger Yaosobi songs headlining anime I liked a lot about shows with fucked up mum situations. Don’t think too much about it.

This series sure seems to be about love, and what that means. More than I would consider most things that ‘want’ to be about love, Oshi no Ko wants to dig into questions of what you love and who you love and what you express. Is love a feeling? Is love an action? Is love a choice? These are not easy questions to answer in the context of an anime trying to also make sure you pick up the next issue.

I love the breadth of what the story bothers to include. In a lot of media I know that characters are there to serve purposes, like story machinery. A set of gears turn and a piece is put in the proper spot and then they’re done, and the machinery can move on. In Oshi no Ko I don’t know who’s done and I don’t know who’s coming back. A mystery story can be very hard to do well, and part of what’s going on in Oshi no Ko is multiple competing stories which means pursuing the mystery is something being chased through these other competing needs. It’s not sitting around forcing focus on a drip feed of clues, it’s doing things in the mean time.

Really really like this show!

And I feel like if you ever talk to me about it, you wouldn’t believe me!

part 3: Guess We’re Talking About Incest

I mean I don’t have to talk about incest, but in the context of talking about Oshi No Ko I kind of do have to talk about incest. You may not want to talk about incest. In which case, you want to jump down to the next image bumper, and just ignore this whole section. After all, incest isn’t a topic some people want to talk about. The purpose of this big chunky introductory paragraph is to make sure you don’t just stumble into the next paragraph without being very, very aware that I’m about to talk about incest.

Anyway, incest is a mainstream kink that’s more commonly referenced than feet.

Now I think the reaction to this is split into three basic groups. One, ‘no, it’s not,’ two, ‘oh yeah, Game of Thrones is popular,’ and three is ‘oh yeah it is isn’t it.’

For anyone in the first group, I’m not talking about pornographic material. I’m talking about how mainstream, common, well known and prestige material regularly invokes incest and incestuous themes as a thing to titillate. I mean that ‘stepsister’ and ‘stepbrother’ tropes are extremely common. I mean that calling one’s sexual partner ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy’ is so common that evangelicals do it. What I mean is that in the context of sexual fantasies, ‘one person having sex with twins’ is so fantastically common that I found it showing up in episodes of Magnum PI. An ongoing clock throughout my childhood, which shows up any time there are celebrity twins, was people talking about the idea of sharing a pair of famous twins. In my childhood, it was the Olsen Twins, with people literally maintaining a clock on how long before they were legal.

And now you may be stopping me to go hey hey hey, hey those things are different. Stepsiblings aren’t proper incest. Sex with twins isn’t proper incest. And that impulse, that intuitive counterpoint – that these things ‘don’t count’ is stupid. Two related people having sex with a third person is, what, not showing and demonstrating a level of sexual intimacy that passes muster? Do you imagine they do not touch one another in the act? Is there a garbage bag set up to ensure nobody’s fluids get on anyone else? Because the point where you’re saying there’s incest and there’s proper incest, you realise you are just arguing about degrees, not about categories.

(And I guess this is an example, albeit a sticky one, of prototype theory.)

You need to be prepared to think about incest in this kind of sticky, dimensional zone way, because it’s not like Oshi no Ko provides a clear and unambiguous relationship to what incest means and its ramifications in the setting. After all, these children are the reincarnations of other people, which I assume happens all the time and it’s just that Ruby and Aqua are just rare examples of people who remember their previous lives. They are, legitimately, Ai Hoshino’s children, and it is entirely normal and natural for a pair of babies to nurse on their mother. It is not sexual to nurse on their mother. There is nothing sexual inherent to nursing at all, it’s literally a job of the body, and treating it like it’s inherently sexual is really messed up. But these two do treat it as if it is sexual, because to them, it is, and at that point you have infants without sex drives or the ability to act on those sex drives who are entirely, 100%, sexually interested in their mother.

If you want to argue Ruby isn’t interested because she says it would be fine for her to nurse on their mother, note that she’s only using that idea to tease someone who she is actively trying to make feel bad about her getting to do something sexual that he does not. It’s ‘but we’re both girls’ level argumentation.

Don’t worry, though, because as the story unspools (and I checked ahead in the manga for this one), there’s an eventual conversation about how Aqua and Ruby are going to kiss (it’s for a movie). Aqua is uncomfortable about it, and Ruby expresses that hey, you don’t need to feel bad about kissing me, you can just imagine it as the doctor you are kissing the child patient he had.

Who was, again, a child.

At the time these characters have this conversation they have been siblings for sixteen years. They have grown up together and been directly associated as siblings together their entire new lives, even if there’s thirty years before it for him and twelve for her.

To be as blunt as possible about it, I don’t care about the incest. Incest, as a kink in media, is not only widespread and mainstream and incredibly common, is also something I only ever see complained about when it’s a queer woman who brings it up, especially if that queer woman is talking about an entirely fictional character pairing. It’s possible some queer nonbinary people I know have talked about it too and gotten attacked, some things get complicated. It’s hard for me to see a kink referenced in Friends and then see a conspicuous trend of shitting on women for talking about it and imagine this is coming from any kind of good faith criticism from a coherent societal other position.

The incest kink is in Oshi no Ko, in much the same way that age gap kink was in Violet Evergarden, except in Oshi no Ko it’s, like, more tasteful? And the actual kink in question is handled in a way that doesn’t make me feel creeped out. Like, I can see the kink, the subversive element of the story, and how the story winds up there and think ‘oh yeah, that’s part of the complicated relationship in this story space.’ And it’s been a long time since the story brought up nursing motherhood as if it was a kink space because it very much is a kink space. To cruelly summarise, the incest doesn’t detract from the story because the story is already so aggressively weird for seemingly no purpose but to set up this kind of kink narrative. It’s a Christian Baby hypothetical, but for brotherfuckers.

Basically, if you’re here to have this kink tickled, it’ll probably do it but it didn’t stand out to me as doing a good job of it, but also didn’t do it in a way that made me ask questions about the story. This is a thing the series wants to be about and it’s having fun with it in a supernatural and fantastic way. It’d be like arguing about Loki’s sexuality in Norse Myth, or about what genders Sun Wukong was on — the parameters of your conversation are so wildly inadequate for the task.

part 4: Trust and Motivation

I try very hard to not be dogmatic about interpretations of media. I have the impulse, time to time, to tell someone ‘that��s stupid,’ about interpretation of media, because they may have missed something obvious. This can be really telling when I’m dealing with people who have recontextualised a piece of media without some very important information. There are quite a few people who struggle with interpreting the universe of the Pokemon franchise because they forget ‘this is for four year olds.’ A lot of what’s ‘wrong’ with Steven Universe is because it’s a cartoon for children. More than a few times I’ve dealt with students who don’t understand American media because American public health is so bad (and counterpoint to that, I’ve dealt with Australians who don’t know that they have public health care because they’ve ingested American media). The maxim I work by is that anyone I see talking about media is negotiating with that media, and that means their biases are coming to bear in trying to talk about the biases that are in the work.

I don’t tend to like long-running anime.

It’s not just because it’s a bigger investment of time like I’d assume is a problem for me. It’s also that anime that runs over a long time tends towards being anime with a plot that’s less focused on things that I think matter. I would rather an episodic series of series, like Slayers, where each season brings with it a new whole distinct story, than the more sprawling, deliberately processional ongoing myth-arc structure of a show like, well, Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War or Oshi no Ko. The fact that Oshi no Ko has a full season that doesn’t actually conclude any of its story arcs and merely says ‘tune in for next season’ is something I found incredibly frustrating. Mystery stories promise a resolution and if you can’t do a resolution in twelve episodes chopped up weird to include a movie, what trust can I have in there being a resolution worth waiting for?

Complicating that further is that sure, fans of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War would say that trust is important in this artist, in this writer, because look at all the work, the doujin work too, in making that work hold together across its extensive sprawl! And to that I would ask why we need to sprawl? Is the manga of Oshi no Ko concluded, does it include some brilliant twist and we’re all just waiting to get there?

No!

No, Oshi no Ko is still going and it’s not wound up its conclusion and it’s got seasons worth of anime to go to get there, and that makes me extremely suspicious. This series, this season, was worth the twelve episodes of time I spent on it. That was really good! But if the story then says that I need to give it not another season, but another pair of seasons, maybe three extra seasons, maybe an ongoing, steady sprawl of seasons, to get to the end of its story I suddenly lose a lot of interest. How am I going to trust it was worth it? How is it going to be worth it?

At that point, I have to stop thinking the resolution is the reason to care and instead the focus should be on what the show is doing moment to moment and instead of relying on the driving mystery to instead focus on what, as best I can see, the story wants to be about and what that story can be relied upon, trusted, to bring me, all while it radicalises me into thinking that maybe every entertainment industry everywhere needs to be burned to the ground and everyone with the job title CEO for a media corporation should be hung inverted in the streets with nails.

Bear that in mind here, I’m trying to not just be like ‘well, this show is doing X because it’s Y.’ There’s more to it than that. There’s my biases at work. For example, I think that Oshi no Ko is a pretty horny series. I think that the way the show depicts mouths – Ai’s in particular – wants you to pay attention to it. Characters are sweatier, and thirstier and breathier than anime normally represents. There’s a focus on eyes – sure – and how people look at things and look at one other that speaks to ideas like their inner lives, their conception of what they’re dealing with. One of the characters whose eyes you never see is treated as being breathtakingly inscrutable.

These are details I focus on. These are things I think indicate that there’s a deliberate intention in this series to look at characters as whole people with individual motivations and wants, and those wants are informed by the things they’re familiar with and the things about themselves they may not have interrogated. This level of intentionality makes it hard for me to ever treat stuff in Oshi no Ko as being accidental or just a meme or chosen at random. Not that there can’t be things like that in the work, but it just feels so thoroughly constructed to me that everything that’s in the story is there for a reason.

Couple the intentionality of the story with the horniness of the story and there’s this creeping step-step-step up to the point that yeah maybe the incest kink and the age gap kink and the hot pregnant lady in the first episode and the way girls ogle one another and the lizard eyes are all things that are in here for a reason and that reason may be because this show likes those things and wants to include them. Maybe the reason this show is the way it is isn’t part of some grand conspiracy.

part 5: is this a dril tweet?

Now this is where we do verge into a conspiracy theory, something I cannot prove and also do not want you to imagine is necessarily true. It’s more a story, a story that makes something make more sense to me. It involves talking about What Japanese Culture is doing, and I want you to remember any time someone like me, especially someone who can’t speak or read Japanese, says that, you are being told a story.

This story is about my journey trying to understand Oshi no Ko.

I couldn’t work out why Oshi no Ko worked the way it did. Specifically, I couldn’t work out why the first movie-length episode was about a character being isekai’d into reincarnation in his own world, as the child of someone who he had already met, and how that idea then failed to play meaningfully into the plot of the story afterwards for a whole season. There’s nothing in the story that benefits from the addition of this element; indeed, if you skip the first episode, it barely comes up in the series as a whole. There’s one moment where Aqua references it, and Ruby doesn’t make it focal outside of that first episode.

At the same time, it was central to the first hour of the story! It was so important that the story bent its structure around making sure that pre-Aqua Aqua met Ai and had a positive opinion of her. That doesn’t seem necessary at all, after all – if you remove the supernatural element and merely have Aqua and Ruby as the children of a talented idol performer who was tragically murdered, does anything about their motivations need to change? They can both still be precocious children following in the wake of the mystery of their mother’s murder. A story could even be built around finding the videos we know Ai made about her feelings and her history – instead of building ninety minutes of television around the importance of one character so you can feel upset and shocked when she died.

I did not understand what it was doing or why, because who comes up with ‘reincarnated as the baby of a girl I just met, and having some weird intimacy issues around that’ outside of a hentai doujinshi specifically about satisfying that, singular kink?

Turns out, at least according to Mother’s Basement, this is a common phrase used in Japanese idol culture. The idea of wanting to be reincarnated as the child of your favourite idol is a thing that’s been a meme in the culture for about ten years. Hah! Fool on me, I see! I was just not clued into the culture of idols in Japan, which is a supremely fucked up space and not because of this single idea. This single idea seems like supernatural fantasy kink, honestly imagining nonsense about people you’ll never meet is a lot better than y’know, actually inflicting that on the people in question who are in many cases real humans. It is strange, though — it’s like such a singular idea it feels like a meme, like a joking repeating of an incident everyone is vaguely aware of, or connected to.

Dot dot dot.

Ten years ago, and a few months as of the time of this writing, dril tweeted:

here’s a list of touhou girls i want to have as a Mom someday & here is a copy of that list in case you accidentally throw it in the gabarge

Dril, September 14, 2013

Now hold up hold up hold up hold up. I don’t know a line of cause or effect here. What it looks like to me, knowing a natural flow of meme structures in my language space, is that sometimes someone will make a joke, and it will spread and be shared wildly and now I can talk about walrus fairies vanilla essence goncharov and you know what I mean, and if you don’t know what I mean you have no idea what I mean.

The story for how this looks to me is that dril made this joke, and someone shared it on 2ch because it was funny (it is) and then that led to people who got the joke making reference to that joke and that became a common enough thing on 2ch that it spread to the idol niche and now it’s seen as their thing to joke about wanting a character as a Mom Someday, even if nobody cares or would want to care!

That story is pretty wild, though I want to make it clear it’s just a story. It’s nothing that I can prove, and I don’t have the skills to prove. An equally possible version of the story is this was already a meme for how people referred to their idol interests and dril made a joke about that where it being decontextualised from idol culture in Japan to American fan culture around Touhou was the bit. It’s also possible both ideas stem from another, earlier, thirdier, secreter thing. It’s also also possible they’re both unrelated and it’s just that the time was right for that kind of joke. I can’t say and you shouldn’t treat what I’m saying as ‘dril shitposted so hard that Oshi no Ko came into existence.’

The idea of being reincarnated as your favourite idol’s kid, to have her as a mom someday, is a thing that you have to already know about or you’d have no reason to reference it. Without knowing that it’s a thing people say, though, its presence in the story is completely inexplicable. When it’s in the series, it’s a Funny Bit, a Bit that’s about how important this weird kink-interest (kinktrest) is to the speaker. It’s about ‘imagine that common thing we all say, and what might flow from that.’ There’s no sense to it because part of the point is a relentless desire to have this scenario that is pre-negotiated by common conversation! Part of the joke is, after all, being so invested in the idea that you’re prepared for people to ignore or discard it!

part 6: conclusion

2023 was a year I consider weaker for anime. When I set up my blog entries to make sure that I’m not just banging on the same theme over and over, I have two slots: Anime (Good) and Anime (Cringe), where I know that if I’m going to talk about the anime I think of as unequivocally good, I want to space those out. It’s important to me to not dwell too much on good things at once to not lose perspective but also so you don’t notice I praise the same things the same way all the time. Oh, it’s about choices is it? It’s all about choices? Well who woulda noticed that! I wonder if Talen is going to like this anime about a hot boy he can project onto who also has an awful relationship with his father and some extremely damaging power fantasy like he’s looking at Unit-01 rampaging through the NERV base thinking ‘This would fix me,’ as he’s been doing in his head for twenty five years.

I think that Oshi no Ko might be my favourite anime of 2023. I also think, with all these words out there, with all this hindsight, I think that’s embarrassing. Oh, not for me, I’m great, no, but for 2023 anime. I think that as good as the best bits of Oshi no Ko are in the context of the series, there is so much stuff in Oshi no Ko that could just be improved by not including it. Hell, consider the importance of the premiere movie, and how I have a hard time not thinking this series is improved by not watching it. This is a semi-complete story with a premiere episode so bad that I stopped watching it for a month. It is an anime that can accurately be described as taking a story about an interesting woman then killing her so it can instead become a story about two men involved in her murder. This is an anime about the idol industry and related entertainment media that somehow doesn’t seem like it’s going to conclude with the main characters storming an executive meeting with abbatoir bolt-guns so how satisfying could its ending ever really be?

There are other 2023 anime I’d recommend more highly. I’d say that you should check out Apothecary Diaries first for an anime that’s more straightforward about how it’s enjoyable and what you should enjoy about it (though you know, just as much weird content warning shit). I’d say Overtake is an anime with a better and more tightly contained story that doesn’t leave you with a giant ‘we’ll get to this later’ end point. As much as I have come to despise it, I’m sure you could watch Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End and have a better time engaging with its immaculate vibes and its central character who’s a woman.

I can’t pretend, though, that I don’t care about this story and its characters. I want it to go well. I want to see Kana and Akane hate each other in ways that feel tinged with horny (because everything in this series is tinged with horny). I want Aqua to talk more about how his obviously damned soul might as well be put to some use tinged with fatalistic violence (because everything in this series is tinged with fatalistic violence). I want more of the music, oh my god, the music, that OP goes so fucking hard.

I may be literally waiting for years for it to be done and then I may need to work through the anime slow and steady as they drip it out, which seems incredibly inefficient to me. I may never get the conclusion I want out of this incomplete mess with its weird choices and its eerie haunting of sexy dead mum mouth.

Still love it though.

Maybe it’s just that Aqua is really hot.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Anime #Oshi no Ko #Media #Story Pile

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cocogum · 4 months ago

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Volume 1 cover ideas that Cathiane could've used instead of the Great Wave manga cover we got ✨️

#and yeah thats all of them #krosmoz #wakfu #ankama #wakfu the great wave manga #the great wave manga #wakfu manga #the great wave #wakfu the great wave #wakfu the great wave volume 1 manga #the great wave volume 1 manga #the great wave volume 1 #wakfu scans #wakfu scan

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ttt4527 · 2 years ago

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遅ればせながら皆様今年も宜くお願い致します

大寒波到来が漫画「望郷太郎」(23日より8巻絶賛発売中です)を彷彿させますが御身体御自愛防寒でお過ごしくださいませ。コレも何かの御縁 26日より新宿京王百貨店で個展が開催されます。是非皆様よろしくお願い致します.

We hope everyone has a great year ahead of you!

The arrival of the cold wave reminds me of the manga "Mochigo Taro" (volume 8 is on sale from the 23rd), so please take care of yourselves and stay warm. This is also a good opportunity for you to see my solo exhibition at Keio Department Store in Shinjuku starting on the 26th. We look forward to seeing you there.

‥………………………………………………………………

【小孫哲太郎作陶展】

2023年1月26日(木)〜2月1日(水)

京王百貨店新宿店6階美術・工芸サロン

午前10時〜午後8時＊最終日午後3時閉場〉

全日在廊予定です

#ceramic

#ceramicsart

#scratch

#paint

#collorfull

#pottery

#陶磁器

#線彫

#掻き落とし

#色絵

#bokyotaro

#bokyotarojp

#tetsutaro

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specialability · 2 years ago

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2022 Reading

So it seems that my total is ~41 books read, although it's difficult to count. Thirty-eight different titles, although the web novels are often 3-6 volumes worth each. Manga is even harder to pin down, Naruto alone is 72 volumes and there are a lot of manga I read and don't keep track of or are ongoing. I don't remember what I was doing in June, I must have been reading something. Links are to novelupdates for webnovels and some to the publisher if they might be slightly harder to find.

January

Dune by Frank Herbert (reread)

Children of Dune

Dune Messiah

February

Hikaru no Go by Yumi Hotta & Takeshi Obata (reread)

Cried at the end, as one does. Recommended for fans of sports/trading card/proxy battle fans but also fans of dramatic men who carry hand fans.

March

Bu Tian Gang by Meng Xi Shi (web novel, DNF)

Qiang Jin Jiu by Tang Jiuqing (web novel, on hold)

Unseen Immortal of Three Hundred Years (web novel, translation stalled)

Spring Trees and Sunset Clouds by Wei Liang (web novel, Exiled Rebels translation)

post I made about these

April

Female General and Eldest Princess by 请君莫笑 (web novel, melts translation)

post about this great sweeping yuri romance

May

Otherside Picnic Omnibus Vol. 1-3 by Iori Miyazawa

I had trouble falling asleep after reading these they were so freakin scary. In a very good way. The yuri is also excellent and falls within the category of 'fucked up people finding love in a fucked up world'

Scum Villain's Self-Saving System Vol. 1 & 2 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (Seven Seas trans.) post about it

Stray by 年终 (web novel, Kinky Translations)

Interesting unusual danmei in a more western fantasy setting. Post about it.

Monster by Naoki Urasawa (reread)

July

Tai Sui by Priest (E. Danglars trans.) If I had to pick one, this would be my book of the year. Post at chapter 66 and the end although I think it would take a full year of a university level course to pick this novel apart properly.

August

Smiley's People by John LeCarré

I read a bunch of LeCarré last year and had this one laying around that I hadn't gotten to.

Bleach by Kubo Tite (reread, yes all of it)

Jujutsu Kaisen by Gege Akutami (reread, only some volumes)

Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto (reread, all of it)

September

The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (reread)

The girl with the dragon tattoo

The girl who played with fire

The girl who kicked the hornet's nest

A Most Wanted Man by John LeCarré

October

all Pushkin Vertigo editions

Detective Kindaichi Mysteries by Seishi Yokomizo

The Honjin Murders

Death on Gokumon Island

The Village of Eight Graves

The Inugami Curse

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

Probably one of the best mysteries I've ever read, and I didn't even realize that the author was the same as one of my favourite horror light novels, Another. (He is also the husband of Fuyumi Ono!) I think it depends on the person whether you will enjoy the ending or not, but I very much did. This and a number of the other murder mysteries I read after it are all by members of the Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan club who were part of a new wave of "fair play" mysteries based on golden age classics. From there I transitioned into reading more classic mysteries that were referenced in these novels.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Shōji Shimada

Murder in the Crooked House Shōji Shimada

The Master Key by Masako Togawa

The Lady Killer by Masako Togawa

November

Honeymoon to Nowhere by Akimitsu Takagi

The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi

Death Among the Undead by Masahiro Imamura

Another modern mystery novel that stands out for it's original premise: a locked room murder mystery with the characters all trapped in a cabin in the woods in the middle of a zombie outbreak. Personally I think the romance could have been done without, and a female narrator would have been stronger, but overall very compelling.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett Turns out the movie is very accurate to the novel.

The 8 Mansion Murders by Takemaru Akiko

Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

One of the golden age mysteries repeatedly referenced by some of the newer mysteries and genuinely a bit scary at points.

December

Golden age detective stories ed. by Otto Penzler

Currently working on this short story collection. The intros to each story putting it in context are very interesting.

#misc #ruth reads books #ruth reads web novels #ruth reads manga

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threnodians · 2 years ago

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KAYLEIGH・31・SHE ﾉ THEY・ESFP-T・4W5

NEURODIVERGENT・CHRONICALLY ILL・DISABLED

PART-TIME ALAA FACILITY KENNEL ATTENDANT

AQUARIUS SUN & RISING・CAPRICORN MOON

NON-BINARY・GENDERFLUID・GENDERQUEER

ACEFLUX ﾉ AEGO-SEXUAL・DEMIROMANTIC

INTERESTS — ⟮in no particular order⟯

MOVIES — studio ghibli films・the lord of the rings・the hobbit・jurassic park films・stardust・moulin rouge・alien films・five nights at freddy’s・the last unicorn・coraline・pride and prejudice・final fantasy vii: advent children・demon slayer: mugen train・jujutsu kaisen volume 0

BOOKS﹠INTERACTIVE NOVELS — the silmarillion・the lord of the rings・the hobbit・the fall of gondolin・the hunger games series・scout・blood moon・fields of asphodel・shepherds of haven・the wayhaven chronicles・the night market

TV SHOWS — fallout・the last of us・what we do in the shadows・the x–files・midnight mass・the dragon prince・castlevania・avatar: the last airbender・the legend of korra・parks and recreation・stranger things・the witcher・the good place・a series of unfortunate events・the great british baking show・adventure time・resident evil: infinite darkness

ANIME﹠MANGA — haikyuu!!・demon slayer ﾉ kimetsu no yaiba・jujutsu kaisen・fruits basket ⟮2019⟯・tokyo revengers・sk8 the infinity・attack on titan ﾉ shingeki no kyojin・bleach・bleach: thousand year blood war・naruto shippuden・inuyasha・inuyasha: the final act・fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood

VIDEO GAMES﹠MOBILE GAMES — genshin impact・honkai: star rail・wuthering waves・mass effect 1・mass effect 2・mass effect 3・mass effect: andromeda・dragon age: origins・dragon age ii・dragon age: inquisition・the elder scrolls online・the elder scrolls v: skyrim・baldur’s gate 3・final fantasy vii remake・final fantasy vii: crisis core reunion・final fantasy vii rebirth・kingdom hearts i・kingdom hearts ii・fallout 4・the outer worlds・cyberpunk 2077・resident evil 2 remake・resident evil 4 remake・resident evil 6・five nights at freddy’s・horizon: zero dawn・horizon: forbidden west・spyro: reignited・the sims 4・love﹠deepspace・neko atsume・animal crossing: pocket camp

PETS — ⟮animal care is my passion⟯

nagini ⟮female ball python⟯・cole ⟮male blue-eyed leucistic ball python⟯・smaug ⟮male tarahumara mountain dwarf boa⟯・poe ⟮male kenyan sand boa⟯・coraline ⟮female harlequin crested gecko⟯・jinora ⟮female harlequin crested gecko⟯・pip ⟮female aptor leopard gecko⟯・luke ⟮male albino rabbit⟯ ・luna ⟮female black long–hair cat⟯・ruby ⟮female classic tabby cat⟯・sir reginald of bookshelf ⟮male orange cat⟯・oliver ⟮male grey cat⟯・sprinkles ⟮female chaco golden knee tarantula⟯

UPDATED — october 30th, 2024

#⟡ — kayleigh’s information

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jariten · 3 years ago

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September 2021 roundup!! First off from my faves this month its What’s Michael Fatcat Collection volume 2 by Makoto Kobayashi, and Lil’ Leo by Moto Hagio! What’s Michael volume 2 comes considerably later than volume 1 due to pandemic delays but it was worth the wait! Since this new release is a compilation of the first Dark Horse release the panels are flipped or rearranged to read left to right, and unfortunately some chapters are still missing, mainly the chapters that were in color or dual tone when they first appeared in Kodansha’s Morning. Lil’ Leo was also highly anticipated for me so I’m glad Denpa was finally able to pull it off! A cute change of pace for Hagio but I also found myself feeling a bit melancholic... Leo just evoked those memories of being a child who doesn’t really understand how the world works at all but still does their best despite the mistakes they make.

What Did You Eat Yesterday by Fumi Yoshinaga volume 16 also came! Because now I’m reading it how I’m supposed to (in small doses over time as opposed to all at once lmao) I feel its a series that I feel only gets better, and its something about how the cast ages in real time that gives it a special feel too. Kageki Shojo!! The Curtain Rises by Kumiko Saiki was also an amazing surprise!! Solid cast who have set out on a thrilling journey on the road to joining the totally-not-Takarazuka all female theater troupe. It had been on my radar for a while but for some reason I was completely confused about whether it was an original anime or a manga and didn’t understand how the manga was divided, didn’t help that I wasn’t really looking into it either. If you’re as out of the loop as I was: The manga was originally serialized in Shueisha’s Jump X, Jump X stops existing and Hakusensha comes to the rescue and the chapters that were serialized in Jump X becomes a “season 0″ released individually from the current serial which is currently in Hakusensha’s Melody. Don’t know much about the current serial bc I'm not sure if I’m gonna get the English version or the Japanese one (thought the translation was great tho!) so I’m gonna wait.

The current wave of delays has made the release dates listed on a lot of booksellers go completely haywire so I’m not completely sure what’s coming up anymore and I haven’t been impressed with the license announcements this month, but we’ll see what October brings! and the queue will be back tomorrow!

#roundup #recommendation corner #my scans #long post

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evenmoregreener · 4 years ago

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Questionnaire of Laruku from B-PASS magazine (March. 1995)

Another translation of a translation from Russian. This "interview" was translated for Russian l'arc fan-club in 2018. I haven't found any other English translations on the net, so I decided that it will be interesting for you to read something like this. All credits are down below, big thank you to the original translator, what a great woman!

The original Russian text has some typos plus English isn't my first language, that's why text might seem a bit of strange. About special signs: (translator's note) - notes of an original translator; "*" - my own notes; (?) - neither me nor the original translator understood the context. Please, enjoy!

1. Date of birth Hyde: 13th of Friday Tetsu: 3 of October Ken: 28th of November, Sagittarius Sakura: Secret 2. Blood type Н: Color of the blood - red Т: А or 0 К: АВ S: The hot blood of a man runs in my veins 3. Place of birth Н: Jelsarem's Rod Т: Kansai К: Alaska’s native S: Kingdom of Nerima (Nerima is a ward in Tokyo, where Sakura was born - translator's note) 4. Height, weight, shoe size, visual acuity Н: “?” Т: Small, light, 24,5 – 25 cm К: 178 cm, 56 kg, shoe – 25,5 cm S: 5 feet 8 inches, 120 feet, 10 inches, about 1,0 and 1,0 5. Body size Н: As in the previous Т: I don’t know К: I prefer В 85, W 58 H 88 S: “Nice body” 6. Which musical instruments and how many years do you play? Н: I've been playing guitar for 9 years Т: 11 years on bass К: From about high school S: Secret 7. Where did you work? Н: Mister Donats Т: At the record store К: Jewelry store, tutor S: Secret 8. Skills Н: Shaolin martial arts, second dan Т: Calligraphy К: Youth baseball S: Secret 9. Hobby and special abilities (besides music) Н: Bite Т: Radio controlled models К: Tetris S: To make people do something

10. Philosophy of life Н: Do not stick sticks into the rice Т: I sleep today for tomorrow, tomorrow I sleep for today. (a phrase from manga - translator's note) К: Hurry slowly S: Live today 11. Real name Н: Jiji Т: Teppi К: Jakenosuke S: Sakurajima Samuel Tarot

12. Favorite musicians Н: Depeche mode Т: Me К: The The (an English new wave band — translator's note) S: Ishihara Yūjirō (Japanese actor, singer, film producer - translator's note) 13. Favorite celebrity Н: Takeda Tetsuya (Japanese singer and actor - translator's note) Т: Me К: Isshiki Sae (Japanese actress — translator's note) S: Saburo Ishikura (Japanese actor - translator's note) 14. Respected people Н: Yoshitada Hirai * Т: Me К: Professor Ichinose S: Takakura Ken (Japanese actor - translator's note) 15. Favorite films and films that you’ve recently watched Н: The Omen. Recently watched Jurassic Park. Т: Favorite film – The Outsider, recently watched “Cría cuervos” (Spanish film of 1976 - translator's note) К: Perfect World, cried when watched, although usually I don't cry during films S: Jingi Naki Tatakai (Battles Without Honor and Humanity) 16. Favorite books (including manga) and books that you’ve recently read Н: Stephen King. Recently read compilation that’s called Night Souls (?). Pretty interesting. Т: «Harper’s Bazaar», Vogue Italia, recently read Matsumoto Hitoshi’s “Isho”. К: «Kirin», about motorcycles, novels for men. It’s a bit of awkward, but I buy Young Rose which I love to read for a long time. S: I can't list everything. 17. Alcohol and tobacco Н: Both, about 10 years already. Alcohol – a little, tobacco – one piece. ** Т: I don’t smoke. Alcohol – yes, except sake, I drink rarely though. К: I love Kassis, always have it at home, drink 2-3 times a week. I don’t smoke right now. S: Any alcohol, I can drink a lot. Per day I smoke more than two packs (Seven Star) 18. Do you love animals? Do you have any pets? Н: I do, but I have allergy. Т: I do. I had 5 dogs and one cat, now I don’t. К: I love obedient and loving. S: More than pets I love girls. 19. The concert that left the strongest impression Н: GASTUNK in EGG PLANT (legendary club in Osaka of 80’s - translator's note) Т: Shiki-Yakou (the name of tour Dead End of 1985) К: In Aichi Kinrou Kaikan (concert hall in Nagoya — translator's note) S: Radio concert Anikies (Dankon Anikies – fictional band that was made up by ken, sakura and kyo (Die in Cries), when ken and sakura were guests at kyo’s radio program «kyo MIDNIGHT　ROCK　CITY» on 9th of December, 1994 - translator's note) 20. Three most beloved albums Н: Some Great Reward of Depeche Mode, God’s Own Medicine of The Mission, La Vie En Rose of D'erlanger*** Т: Laruku’s new album, Tierra, Dune К: Black Sabath – Heaven & Hell; Cure - Disintegration; Kisugi Takao (Japanese singer and composer - translator's note) - Best collection S: Secret 21. Recently bought CDs and your impressions of them Н: No Т: Second Coming/The Stone Roses К: Suede (Britpop band - translator's note) S: Secret 22. Concert that you visited recently Н: Haven't been on the concerts for about a year, but sometimes before Shibuya live watched Modern Choki Chokies (a Japanese pop band from the early 1990s - translator's note) Т: Echobelly (a British rock band — translator's note) К: kyo-chan’s solo S: Secret 23. TV shows that you often watch and radio shows that you often listen to Н: Doramas and MIDNIGHT ROCK CITY Т: TV – BEAT UK, I don't listen to radio К: Yoru-ni dakarete (dorama of 1994 - translator's note), though it has already ended. I don’t listen to radio, since I don’t have one S: I’m interested neither in TV nor radio 24. Favorite dish, favorite color and flower Н: Japanese cuisine. Monochrome color. Flowers that grow well in an apartment, even if they are not watered Т: Sushi, tillandsia, cacti, I like all of the colors К: Favorite dish – ice cream, caviar, sushi. Favorite flower – orchid. Favorite color – silver S: Anton rib (dish that was mentioned in Kinnikuman - translator's note), sakura, black 25. Musical instruments that you can play and ones that you want to learn to play Н: Guitar, bass, acoustic guitar, would like to learn to play flute. Т: Several guitars and basses К: Guitar, bass, synthesizer. Would like to learn how to play saxophone S: Variety which you can find in stores 26. Thing that you want the most right now Н: Hot blood of some girl. Т: Sharp Zaurus P1-5000 К: Onsen, pool S: “?” 27. How do you spend your weekend? Н: Sleep Т: Vacantly К: Go back and forth S: Stay under the waterfall 28. What do you do when you are all alone at home? Н: Sleep and writing lyrics Т: Play the guitar, listen to music К: Watch TV… S: Drumming Japanese drums 29. A dream that you have seen lately. Н: Back at night souls of dead sheep were hurrying through the window, I was worried where they are going. I told Sakura: when the sheep will come back, let’s go after them, but they didn’t come back. Т: A dream where I somehow ended up eating sushi in America. К: Relocation S: In loincloth and a bandage on the head I wandered in a stormy sea. And that was awesome! 30. Most attractive feature Н: Compact, compact and compact Т: “?” К: Ankles. Strong side: strong legs. Weak side: often catch cold. S: 31. Role in the band. Н: Probably, bringing everybody together Т: President К: Am-group (?) S: Educator of the head of singing monkeys 32. Describe in one word what Laruku is Н: Cloudy sky after heavy rain Т: Rock band К: Rainbow S: Soul of a man 33. What do you expect from the other band members? Н: I’d like everybody to stay as healthy as they are now Т: Perfection К: Rainbow! S: Soul of a man 34. Where do you want to go abroad? Н: Paris Т: To America К: Any countries where I could live. To drive back and forth S: Country on the shore of the Japanese Sea 35. Where have you been? Where have you recently traveled? Н: During the vacation in September traveled to Nagano to visit Osamu's house four years later, I would like to live calmly in the district of Karuizawa station. Т: To Okinawa. It was beautiful. К: Morocco. It was hot. S: In Morocco I saw the waves of the Atlantic Ocean 36. What do you recommend to see in your hometown? Н: On the roof of Nisshou haitsu Т: A lot of yankees. К: The view on the fast stream S: Secret 37. Enjoyable things that you like during tours (except for concerts) Н: Food Т: Except for concerts, nothing (laughs) К: You can overeat S: Meet different locals with the soul of a man 38. What do you definitely do before the concert, what do you pay special attention to? Н: I am in a deep thought Т: I listen to Metallica at full volume К: Going to a toilet S: Warm up and stretch of the muscles 39. What do you pay special attention to before the interview? Н: I find out the topic Т: So as not to be late К: I try to be serious S: Worried about whether I can express and tell about my masculine soul 40. What do you carry with you all the time? Н: Watch and two bracelets because I like them Т: Nothing К: Bracelet, necklace - I feel uncomfortable without them S: Pants 41. Memorable thing Н: The bracelet that I bought when I first came abroad. I really wanted it, but pretended that I am not interested, and bargained. But since there is no set price, I don’t know if it’s cheap or not. Т: No К: Various guitars, they are associated with different memories. S: Secret 42. Three biggest news in the last six months Н: 1. Motoka’s wedding. 2. The house in front of my window was demolished. 3. Because of the house, which has now been built, the lighting has become worse. Т: Promotion trip; creation of an official fan club; award from the director! К: Couldn't go to the sea. Swam in a pool in Morocco. Was in onsen. S: Secret 43. Plans for the end of the previous year and the beginning of the new Н: Composing music and lyrics Т: Car driving and karaoke К: Continue visiting onsen. S: Polish my masculine soul 44. Your personal plans for 1995 Н: Enjoy work Т: Become an artist № 1 К: Necessarily swim in the sea. Master the butterfly S: Gain a soul of a man 45. Music that you listened to this morning or last night Н: Laruku’s new song T: Morning call from the manager K: Maribeth S: Pink Floyd 46. Dish that turns out well when you are cooking Н: Chinese cuisine Т: I can't cook К: Ikuradon S: Sashimi 47. The image of the ideal woman Н: An optimistic and domestic woman Т: No К: Fujiko-chan S: That looks like Shiraishi Hitomi (Japanese actress - translator's note) 48. Favorite sport Н: No Т: No К: No S: Judo 49. If I were born again... Н: I would like to become an astronaut and fly into space Т: I would like to be genius К: I would like to be a dolphin S: I would like to be a woman, in order to live and not talk nevermore about the "soul of a man" 50. Goals in life Н: Enjoy the rest of the years Т: It’s a secret К: Live a long life S: Soul of a man 51. One word for readers of our magazine Н: If you're not careful, I'll bite you! Т: Nice to meet you К: Hello, this is Ken. I'll continue in answer 52 S: Life in a loincloth and headband 52. Free theme Н: Woof Т: Nowadays Laruku are fully different! К: In 1996 I want to perform a lot at concerts. That is why we definitely will meet, so look forward! S: And this year there will be Anikies!

* Marked in credits to HYDE’s “Roentgen” album as an art director and designer. ** Probably he meant one pack. *** Was covered by HYDE in D’ERLANGER TRIBUTE ALBUM ~Stairway to Heaven~.

Translation from Japanese: Liubov Chachanidze aka Diana_ Translation into English by me (The Green Explosion inc.)

Original: https://diary.ru/~l20arc-en-ciel/p216393417_anketa-iz-zhurnala-b-pass-za-mart-1995-goda.htm

#laruku #l'arc #hyde #hideto takarai #l’arc en ciel #ken kitamura #ken #tetsu #tetsuya ogawa #sakura #yasunori sakurazawa #interview #translation #jrock

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doorbloggr · 3 years ago

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Sunday 25/9/21 - Media Recommendations #19

Contents:

Twilight Princess (Manga)

Dr Stone (manga/anime)

Lately, I have had a lot I want to write about on this blog, but lack that activation energy to actually start writing an article. Ideally I will at least word vomit more onto the blog in the coming week or so, because I have the topics in mind, just unsure how to start any of it.

Media Consumption has also slowed to a crawl, but I'm getting back into it. This week I wanna discuss a manga series I've been reading slowly as it has released, and an anime I have long been reading the manga for.

The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (Manga)

Akira Himekawa

Zelda fans have a unique schism between their fans that many other longer running series may not experience. Because most games star a relatively unique cast of characters, a unique spin on the world, gameplay, and even artistic style, what your favourite in the series is will throw you into a hard debate against fans of other games. There's this post i saw somewhere(?) once where it was said your favourite Zelda game is the one that came out when you were 12, presumably because this is the one you experience first, or at least earlier in your Zelda journey, and I can completely relate to that.

The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess was the first Zelda game I played, and it has been my number 1 or 2 in the series consistently. Compared to the games that came before it, it was darker, had a richer world, and just a grander scope. But today I'm not here to explain the game, I'm here to talk about the manga.

Akira Himekawa is a pseudonym for a pair of female manga artists that have been writing manga together since the early 90s, and I know them well for their Legend of Zelda adaptations. They have covered most of the main games everyone knows, Ocarina of Time, Majoras Mask, A Link to the Past, and even a couple volumes of Four Swords Adventures. Their most recent work has also been the most long and in depth adaptation, my first Zelda game, Twilight Princess.

Like all of their Zelda adaptations, Akira Himekawa's Twilight Princess follows all the same plot beats as the main games. The order places are visited, the main characters Link encounters, the dungeons and their bosses, but the mangaka add... more to the world. Link has a deeper back story explaining what led to the start of the adventure. What in the games are essentially blank slate NPCs become characters in their own rights with personalities and arcs and motivations. The Twilight Realm, which is essentially just a dungeon in the game, is fleshed out as its entire world, with society, and lore.

In the game, Link is cool, and a bit of a himbo, but the manga's take on him is so much more interesting. He's a brooding edge lord, with a damaged past. He's a do-gooder, but he's also flawed and suffers from caring too much. Link is a character full of regrets who constantly bounces between "become a hero to prevent the atrocities of the past coming back" and "give up so that you don't make things worse". I understand that the games leave Link as a blank slate so that players can fill in their own ideals, but seeing Link as a fully fleshed character with his own motivations is cool as hell.

The supporting cast is similarly fleshed out compared to the game's take. Zelda, Illia, and Midna have complex motivations and evolving personalities. Midna was already a great character, but the manga truly does not skip out on making her deep and interesting. The "Resistance", for those who've played the game, are all multilayered characters now, all with arcs that are actively explored as they actually go help Link on his adventures, instead of just telling him info and leaving him to it. The dungeons do not take nearly as much plot time as they do in the games, essentially minimal theme building and then boss, but this works better for the format in my opinion.

If you like high fantasy manga, or are just a Zelda fan, I highly recommend this series. I haven't finished reading it, but Book 9, which I think is the final in the series, has recently been released in English. Obviously playing the game first is a good background, but I think you could 100% enjoy the series without it.

Edit: Finished book 9 and there's definitely at least one more book to go.

Dr Stone (anime/manga)

Inagaki, Boichi; TMS Entertainment

Ok so must I remember wrong because I thought I recommended this one, but apparently I never talked about Dr Stone before, which is a complete travesty. But now I am both up to date with the manga and most of a season deep into the anime, and I have A LOT to talk about.

As those who have also read my dinosaur blogposts will understand, I am a big science nerd. Biology, palaeontology, space, chemistry, it's all so interesting, and sometimes I struggle to understand how a passion for science is not a universal human experience. I share that in common with the main character of a manga I've been reading for maybe a year now, Dr Stone.

In Dr Stone, the world of 21st Century humanity is brought crashing to a halt when a bright wave of mysterious light blankets the entire planet, and everywhere on the entire globe, humans have been turned to stone. 3700 years later, a young man who has kept his mind active within the stone forces himself awake and breaks out. Around him, nature has reclaimed the Earth and millennia of human progress has been all but buried.

Senku is a young man of science, and spent years obsessing over every scientific domain he could comprehend in order to one day travel to space. In this stone world, armed with this wealth of science progress in his mind, Senku begins efforts to restart the scientific age, and free every single person frozen in stone. He starts with a mysterious acid that breaks down the stone. Then he develops tools, machinery, electricity, and eventually, he wants to push humanity back to the space age within his lifetime. Senku may be a know it all, but knowledge only gets you so far. Thanks to the allies he makes, a wealth of expertise will be harnessed to bring his dream to fruition.

Dr Stone is a must read for anyone who enjoys Scifi. Although the rate at which progress is made seems absurd, every single scientific process the kingdom of science works on is real science. Although post apocalyptic themes establish the base for the story and the supernatural force that turned humanity to stone is the main adversary, Dr Stone is a very scientific story based on real Earth and its just... exhilarating!

The scope of the story begins on the small scale in primitive villages, but the story eventually reaches a global scale. There are adversaries at each step, those who wish to rule the Stone World with might, free of the tyranny science had in our age, and there are also those who wish to use science as its own form of might, but Senku and his allies want to use science for the benefit of everyone. So that one day, all of humanity will be restored, and that eventually, he will get to moon.

I will refrain from speaking any further on story specifics because you really should experience the plot for yourself. So I will end with the presentation itself. The art and format of the manga are beautiful. Character designs are rugged, stylised, and exciting, it's very easy to determine what a character is all about just by their unique appearance.

In the last week, I have begun watching the anime, as it has been long enough since I started reading that I can experience parts of the plot anew. The anime is very beautifully made, the world is lush and beautiful, and characters move in such a fun and interesting way. I'm watching the English dub, and characters sound exactly like the voices I had for them in my head.

If you have even an inkling of interest in Dr Stone after reading what I've said today, you should definitely experience the story for yourself, 1 billion percent.

#blog #blogpost #media recommendations #anime recommendations #manga recommendation #the legend of zelda twilight princess #the legend of zelda #twilight princess #twilight princess manga #akira himekawa #dr stone #dr stone manga #dr stone anime #boichi #inagaki

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