Today is a writing day for me. I’m working on the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo, and it’s coming along. As with the first one, it always surprises me somehow how long the action sequences take. I attack the city with something on a whim, and several chapters later, I’m still trying to clear out all the bad guys.
On the occasions I take breaks, I’m continuing my way through the Lyrical Nanoha franchise. I’m in the midst of the third anime series, StrikerS, at the moment. I will of course discuss it when I’m through.
Now, to be up front about everything, I don’t know who this guy is. By his own admission, he doesn’t know a whole lot about anime. Nonetheless, I find his analysis of Crunchyroll’s trainwreck of a promotion for its new, original animated series to be largely insightful.
One of his lines here I absolutely love: “That’s what your whole career has been about? I thought you were an animator.”
Some of those opposing Crunchyroll’s project are, I think, wrong-headed. For example, I follow the account @animeoutsiders on Twitter; they claim to have insider knowledge (which they may or may not actually have) of Crunchyroll, and accuse the company of doing something ingenuous by creating its own animation studio and producing original animation, rather than throwing money at Japanese studios.
Just watch this video. Watch it and pay close attention to what the creators of Crunchyroll’s upcoming original magical girl show, High Guardian Spice, have to say about it.
At first, it doesn’t look too bad, if we can overlook the mediocre artwork and ignore that the title logo looks as if it came off a bottle of nutmeg. The show’s creators start out by telling us that their new series is about some girls who live in a city and go to school to learn magic. Sounds pretty formulaic. But, obviously, other franchises have seen success with the same premise, so this is not in itself necessarily a problem, even if it’s not breathtakingly original.
But then notice what else they tell us about the show: it has a “modern reflection of the world”—even though the art suggests a historic or fantasy setting. And then they tell us the characters and cast are “diverse” and that half the people involved in the show’s creation are women. And, ironically, they tell us that the “writers’ room” is all women—because, you know, they’re “inclusive.”
I’m currently reading up on the FN Five-seveN, as I decided to give Jake one in Jake and the Dynamo 2: Dead to Rites. I always meant to let the poor kid have a gun sooner or later. It just took me longer than I expected.
Urbanopolis doesn’t disallow personal weapons; it’s just that they’re mostly worthless, since shooting a magical monster with a conventional firearm is a good way to earn yourself an instant, fiery death. And human-on-human crime is relatively rare, partly because implacable external enemies have bred unprecedented human cooperation and partly because most every serious crime is considered a form of treason that can get you a drumhead trial and a rapid execution.
There’s a bit more military action in this volume than in the one previous. I might need to bribe Kai Wai Cheah to read parts of it over for me to make sure it’s halfway plausible.
We’re going to have a livestream tomorrow, during which time I will be discussing the upcoming release of Jake and the Dynamo. Please join us. It should be at 3:00 eastern daylight time. The link to the stream should be posted at the Superversive SF blog ahead of time. If it isn’t there, you can look for it here, as I’ll be sure to wring it out of the guy so I can post it myself.
Current word is that the “hard” release date for the book, including the hardcopy, is September 1st. The eBook may be available before then. Again, I’ll keep you posted.
UPDATE: Time has been changed to 3:00 central, or 4:00 eastern.
A surprisingly solid sequel to an uneven first effort.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s directed by Keizô Kusakawa. Written by Masaki Tsuzuki. Starring Yukari Tamura, Nana Mizuki, and Kana Ueda. Seven Arcs, Japan (2005). 13 episodes of 25 minutes (approx. ). Not rated.
I am continuing to work my way through Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha now that it once again enjoys a U.S. license. Although this is a well-known and much-venerated series, I have to admit this is my first time through it. It had not had a legal release in North America for some time, as I understand it, and I also admit I had avoided it in large part because of the somewhat exaggeratedly negative review by Carl Kimlinger, as I mentioned in my review of the first series.
