I finally managed to get through Magical Girl Site. Although I was not impressed at first, I kind of got into it. It’s reminiscent of Magical Girl Raising Project, except with (in my opinion) a more interesting storyline.
Action sequences definitely not as good, though, and it breaks its own rules, and it’s trying too damn hard, tossing in gratuitous sadism for no other reason than to be “edgy.” It does have a few redeeming qualities.
I’ll see if I can write up a full review tomorrow.
I stumbled upon an interesting blog post at The Emperor’s Notepad. There, his imperial majesty addresses the subject of “deep point of view,” a technique of narration that is currently in vogue. His post is entitled, “Deep POV Is Shallow,” and I recommend perusing it.
I can’t recall if I’d heard the particular term before, but I recognize the technique: it means writing in third person, but sticking with a particular character’s point of view and remaining in that single point of view throughout a scene, with no “head-hopping.”
His majesty explains that he believes the technique is over-used because an omniscient third-person narrator can be more useful in many cases for setting scenes with less dreary dialogue and fewer awkward tags. He makes his case well.
As long as we’re coining phrases, I’m going to say that my own preferred technique when writing in third-person is “descending POV.” Readers familiar with my work may notice that I usually begin by setting a scene, and then move in to focus on an individual who becomes the consistent POV character for that particular scene.
But I’m not strict about it. Sometimes I cheat, of course: Jake and the Dynamo opens with an omniscient narrator and then descends into the POV of the Dark Queen for the first scene. In the second scene, it remains in omniscient POV throughout, but sneaks into Grease Pencil Marionette’s head near the end. Most of the rest of the book is from Jake’s POV, with occasional diversions to the Dark Queen, Chirops, and Marionette. A few characters are not allowed, for arbitrary reasons known to the author, to be POV characters at all, ever. Among them is Pretty Dynamo.
My preferred method is analogous to a film setting up with a location shot. The inability to do this is his imperial majesty’s primary complaint about so-called deep POV. So as an answer to both him and the writers he criticizes, I will claim it is actually possible to have one’s cake and eat it too on this matter. Although an admittedly new author, I have never yet received a complaint about the way I start with an omniscient narrator and then focus in, though I did just once receive a compliment for it.
I just made progress on Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites! So far I’m 92% complete on the Writing phase. 21 Days remain until the deadline.
I’ve upped the projected word count from 90,000 to 100,000, though realistically I expect it to overrun that. I’m currently inserting a chapter into an earlier part of the book, a chapter I just realized needs to go there. Once I’m done with that, I’m on to writing the the scene with the fight against vampires in the torch-lit catacombs.
There is no more important choice a man faces in his life than the his choice of waifu.
Before time runs out, I ask you to join me in contemplating—within the context of Jake and the Dynamo—who is best girl.
This is extremely important.
Will you choose the brassy and cocky Pretty Dynamo? The arrogant but highly skilled Sword Seamstress? Or perhaps the delinquent Sukeban Tsubasa, bad girl of magical girls? … Or maybe you go for the tortured artist type, specifically a tortured robot artist, Grease Pencil Marionette?
Remember: your future, and all our futures, rests on your decision.
Featured image: “Magical Girl” by Yii-shii.
The universe is a tomb, and Lord Shadow is the one to give us all our proper burial. There are those who serve him willingly, and those who serve him unwillingly, but there are none who do not serve.
Rumiko Takahashi is, after CLAMP, probably the most prolific woman in manga. In the U.S., she’s probably best known for Ranma 1/2 or Inuyasha, but I think her seinen comic Maison Ikkoku will always be her masterpiece.
I discovered this title several years ago while browsing the Shady Bookstore Down the Street, which was a short walk away from where I used to live in Utah. It was the kind of little store where you could pick up any number of unexpected literary gems, manga, Z-grade Kung fu movies, and Wiccan paraphernalia. It’s thanks to that bookstore that I own the first volume of the lovingly drawn and criminally obscure comic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and the special edition of the uneven but fantastically imaginative comic The Sacred and the Profane, and have seen Super Dimension Fortress Macross in the original Japanese.
While I was hunting through the manga one day, I picked up an old, flopped volume of Maison Ikkoku that presented a selection of chapters out of order. I read that one volume probably a dozen times and knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had the whole series. The entire run was released, in the original right-to-left format, by Viz Media in 2003. I found the bulk of the series on Amazon and then acquired the missing volumes from questionable, don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you booksellers.
I waited until I had all of it and then binge-read the entire thing on a Saturday in about thirteen hours. I laughed, I cried … it moved me, Bob.
The manga was originally published in 1984, which makes it ancient according to the short memories of weeaboos. It takes place in a run-down tenement house based on a real place where Takahashi lived while going to college. Her original plan was to make this a round of stories focusing in turn on the various quirky residents. However, she kicked off the manga with the tale of a luckless college student who falls hopelessly in love with the tenement’s widowed manager. Takahashi soon found that this was all her fans were interested in, so she retooled the series as a romantic comedy focusing on the fumbling Yusaku and the beautiful but hot-tempered Kyoko, with the rest of the residents as assisting characters.
The result is one of the best romantic comedies of all time, that happens to be a comic book. Yusaku Godai is a more-or-less standard loser hero, the kind who tries his darnedest and still ends up humiliated, in public with no pants (or similar). Kyoko is yet another version of one Takahashi-sensei’s favorite character types, the stubborn woman who won’t admit her feelings for the male lead but still goes ballistic if she sees him getting within ten feet of another girl. Takahashi’s huge body of work, which almost always contains some variation of this pairing, is probably largely responsible for shaping and popularizing the “tsundere” in manga and anime. Her romantic pairings are so consistent in formula that there is an entry for “Takahashi couple” over at TVTropes.
Maison Ikkoku showcases all of Takahashi’s strengths with none of her usual defects. She tends to pile on extra characters in her series and then forget about most of them, a frustrating habit that fans came to call “Takahashi character death,” where characters would disappear without explanation, their subplots forever unresolved. Although Maison Ikkoku has a large cast and a lot of subplots, Takahashi remembers everybody and wraps up everything, and she does it in only fifteen volumes—which is a very short series for her. Although there are a lot of over-the-top antics in this series, the real-world setting and the target audience of adults required Takashi to bring her A-game: The characters are more realistic and less cartoonish than her usual, and their motives more believable: Yusaku is immature and lazy; Kyoko is still in love with her late husband.
Personally, I usually enjoy a Takahashi title for about four volumes and then lose interest. This is because she sets up the main plot arc and the most important characters in the first four books, and then coasts. The first volume of Ranma 1/2 is almost perfect as a graphic novel, and after that I can take it or leave it … and then when Happosai shows up, I leave it for sure, because I can’t stand it anymore. Inuyasha starts as a beautiful, bloody epic, but eventually falls into the standard shounen rut of fight-powerup-repeat. Maison Ikkoku, however, maintains its initial energy through its entire run. If anything, it improves over time, growing more serious as Yusaku has to move from being a college slacker to a productive adult if he’s ever to make anything of himself and win the woman he loves.
The setting in the early ’80s also helps the plot a good deal. I sometimes believe that modern information technology is antithetical to drama—and comedy. Just as Hollywood used to make romantic comedies surrounding the inconveniences of party lines, many of the shenanigans in Maison Ikkoku are driven by the fact that the tenement building has only one phone, which happens to stand next to the apartment of the biggest gossip.
Anyway, I love it, and it’s just as poignant, just as gut-bustingly funny, on subsequent readings as on the first. In the world of manga, this is my all-time favorite.
The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
—Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 15: “The Landscape Framed by Kozue.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
Watch for free.
The second arc of Revolutionary Girl Utena is like a variation of the first: it repeats the previous arc’s themes, but alters and develops them. The first arc focused on the members of the student council, dealing in turn with each of them and their psychological issues. The second arc focuses in on second-tier characters related to the council members, thereby further developing the characters we have already met.
This episode, “The Landscape Framed by Kozue,” is a variation of “The Sunlit Garden,” a two-parter that introduced the character of Miki.
Deep in their underground lair, Mikage and Mamiya, after the failure of the previous episode, hatch a new plan to install Mamiya in Anthy’s place as the Rose Bride. Since their “makeshift” duelists lack sufficient power to defeat Utena, they decide to tap the fighting skills of student council members: according to Mamiya, the council members have “swords” that have “crystalized” in their hearts, and which can potentially be extracted and used by others.
Meanwhile, the student council still exists, but is in a sort of standby state: Touga is still sitting in his room and wallowing in depression because his voice actor went to another anime Utena defeated him in the arena. His spoiled sister Nanami, with her banana-colored uniform, is now the acting president. But the council has received no new letters from World’s End, and no letters means no duels.
Miki, you may recall, is a boy genius from the middle school who is a championship fencer as well as a virtuoso on the piano, and who has a troubled relationship with his twin sister. He carries a stopwatch that he clicks compulsively, apparently representative of a desire to stop time or leave time entirely, and find his “shining thing,” an idyllic eternity he believes is waiting for him in the hovering castle above the dueling arena.
Continue reading “Theme and Variations: The ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’ Rewatch, Part 15”
Once again, it is Halloween, the second most important holiday in the magical girl calendar. Tonight, magical girls can go abroad without calling undue attention to themselves.
This year, I am dedicating International Cute Witch Day to Little Witch Academia. I much enjoyed the short film (it came out in 2013) some years back, but I admit I’ve not seen the widely popular television series that came after it and became available in the U.S. last year. It’s on my list.
For some reason, I barely remember what the short film was about, though I remember enjoying it. It was was an obviously Harry Potter-influenced story of quirky girls going to witch school, and it had some high-flying broom scenes with the kind of creative yet jerky animation for which Studio Trigger is known.
Speaking of Trigger, I finally got around to watching Kill la Kill about a year back, and it completely blew my mind. It might be the best skewering of the magical girl genre I’ve ever seen, because it not only mocked it mercilessly, but unlike the slew of grimdark shows we’ve had lately, demonstrated in the process that it actually understood what the genre is about. So I trust the studio to know how to handle magical girls.
If they could do magical girl warriors so well, they could probably do cute witches well, too, and the popularity of Little Witch Academia tends to confirm that.
The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
—Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 14: “The Boys of the Black Rose.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
Watch for free.
We return now to our irregularly scheduled, leisurely walk through that trippy classic, the Evangelion of magical girls, Revolutionary Girl Utena. This series of posts was on hiatus because of issues with my DVD player, both its increasing unwillingness to play DVDs and my sudden, inexplicable inability to take screenshots from it.
I’ve turned instead to the free and legal upload on YouTube from Nozomi entertainment. This is less than ideal, as it means a downgrade in picture quality, and I also see that they’ve cut out the end-credits animation, the bastards. But I will tolerate all of this for your sakes. Don’t ever say the Deej didn’t do anything for you.
The previous episode was a recap of the first arc, with a few tantalizing details thrown in. This present episode is the full-on start of a new arc, and thus it gives a lot of new details … creepy, creepy details.
Continue reading “That Creepy Feeling: The ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’ Rewatch, Part 14”
