More Girl Metal
In continuing to look at Japanese girl metal bands, I just found Doll$Boxx. This has the same gimmick as the others, a cutesy look with harsh music.
In this music video, they poke fun at otaku.
Sailor Moon’s Prime Directives
I always get a kick out of this.
In the animated version of Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury gets a miniaturized supercomputer that fits in a compact, a device that doesn’t appear in the manga—and which seems kind of superfluous, since she also has a computer with a heads-up display built into her sailor suit.
The creators of the show apparently wanted some computery-looking English text to flash across her compact’s screen … so they simply stole it from RoboCop, except with a typo.
From this, we know that the sailor scouts follow the same Prime Directives as Officer Murphy. No word on whether there’s a secret, fourth directive that prevents them from arresting OCP employees.
Art
Featured image: “OC: Yuna” by mikitori.
Dude, That Is So Metal
In Jake and the Dynamo, we are gradually drawing closer to the first appearance of Magical Girl Metal Huntress Van Halensing, the vampire-slaying rock idol.
I’m not a particularly musical person, so to figure out how to make this work, I’m currently trying to give myself a crash course in J-metal girl bands. This is the kind of stuff I’m thinking of when I refer to “monster metal,” the magical girl-inspired rock popular in Urbanopolis.
Babymetal – Yuimetal (left), Sumetal (centre), Maometal (right).
Reading Festival, Berkshire, Britain – 29 Aug 2015
There’s Babymetal, of course, a technically proficient band fronted by three girl idols. They’re starting to get big even here in the US, which is a major accomplishment for J-idols, who usually get a cold reception in America. They just spent April touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I understand that their shows are quite a spectacle, with fireworks, intricate dancing, and of course those gothic lolita outfits.
Walpurgisnacht
’Tis April 30th, and April 30th is the eve of the Feast of St. Walburga.
This is, naturally, the most important feast in the official magical girl calendar, since, even though Japan has its own witchcraft folklore, magical girls find their origins in a bowdlerized version of lore borrowed from the Occident. Walpurgisnacht lends its name to the final boss in the mold-breaking 2011 magical girl series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as pictured above.
Today, therefore, is an appropriate day to watch anime, eat the stale candy corn still left over from Halloween, cosplay as a sailor scout, light a bonfire, stomp on Tokyo, or sell your soul to Azathoth so you can create wormholes to alien planets via the manipulation of non-Euclidean geometry. But do not call up that which you cannot put down.
According to legend, Walpurgisnacht is the night of a witch’s sabbath in the Harz Mountains. The day is celebrated in tongue-in-cheek fashion, similar to Halloween, in Germany, Sweden, and the Czech Republic, according to Lonely Planet.
The Catholic Encyclopedia has the hagiography of St. Walburga, a nun and sister of St. Boniface who lived from ca. 710 to 777. I am unclear as to how her holy day became attached to legends of witchcraft and devil-worship; as usual, internet sources on this subject are mucked up by current urban lore, which makes the old lore decidedly murky. Gothic Horror Stories, for example, tells us that Walpurgisnacht shares its date with the pagan holiday Beltane. This may be, though speculations on the matter are, I assume, about as accurate as the common falsehood (or, at least, unfounded speculation) that Halloween traditions are derived from Samhain, a Celtic holiday about which we in fact know next to nothing, since our only and scant information about it comes from Christian sources of the tenth century.
(On Halloween and Samhain, the History Channel delivers the usual unfounded claims. From the other side of the aisle, The Federalist makes equal and opposite errors. Skeptic actually does her homework and delivers an unusually well-balanced and well-researched essay.)
Anyway, whatever the real history might be, the lore is that Walpurgisnacht is a night of witchery, and this lore finds its way into horror stories and ultimately makes its way across the Pacific to appear in a reference, now almost entirely detached from its roots, in a magical girl cartoon.
Enter the Wrongthink Sci-Fi Giveaway and Get You Some Freebies
Robert Kroese, author of Aye, Robot
Kroese explains. You get seven books just for entering, including Brian Niemeier’s Nethereal
There’s also a chance to win seven additional novels when you enter.
At the time of this writing, there are two days and five hours left to the giveaway, which you can enter here. Tell them the Deej sent you. In fact, use my link, which gives me more chances to win.
EDIT: I just realized I watched this Robert Kroese from the ground floor, too. He used to run the Mattress Police blog, and I remember when his first novel, Mercury Falls
Hat tip to Carlos Carrasco.
Art (and Crafts!)
Featured image: “Magical Girl OC Plush” by Nikicus.
I didn’t know until this very moment that I need a Pretty Dynamo plushie, but now I do.
JAKE AND THE DYNAMO Chapter 26
The Morning After: Jake’s in the doghouse after Pretty Dynamo catches him with Sukeban Tsubasa!
JAKE AND THE DYNAMO
CHAPTER 26: THE MORNING AFTER
After changing back into her magical form, Tsubasa left by the window. Jake had to press himself into the corner at the foot of his bed so she could—with her eyes squeezed shut—dash past him and leap to what she considered safety. Soon after she was gone, he closed the window, finished undressing, climbed into his pajamas, and lay down.
After all the commotion, the room seemed strangely quiet. His heart thudded in his ears, the only sound.
He tossed back and forth for several minutes, but no position felt comfortable. He had been having trouble sleeping for the last few months. Over the previous week, whenever he had slept, he had slept soundly from sheer exhaustion, but now that he had spent a weekend without anything trying to kill him, his insomnia was back.
The bed with its disarrayed and rumpled bedclothes felt desolate and empty. Thanks to Dana, he didn’t even have his Triceratops toy—not that he actually slept with the thing anyway; he just set it on his pillow on the rare occasions when he made the bed. Most of the time, it was buried somewhere under the covers or squeezed between the mattress and the wall.
He rolled over onto his stomach. In an ill-defined way, he had an inkling of why he couldn’t sleep. Now that he had come firmly and irrevocably into his adolescent years, going to bed alone at night had grown into a crushing, almost intolerable burden. It was worse now because he had tackled a girl in this very bed only a half hour earlier, an event that had provoked a bizarre mixture of fear and desire, leaving his nerves frazzled. He could still smell Tsubasa in his bedclothes: she smelled like roses and sweat—heady, salty, and exciting. The scent made his stomach ache. Continue reading “JAKE AND THE DYNAMO Chapter 26”
Tomorrow …
I’m getting pinched by school projects as we’re coming to the end of the term, and I wasted too much of my Easter weekend writing that gargantuan post on Shugo Chara! instead of writing my reports.
Nonetheless … look for Chapter 26 (finally!) of Jake and the Dynamo tomorrow. I don’t think I better make a definite promise, but … look for it.
Notice it, senpai. Notice it.