( Behind the cut: Eureka Seven, Fate/Unlimited Codes, Fullmetal Alchemist, Kyou Kara Maou, Shakugan no Shana, Soul Eater, and PUPPIES! )

Hmmm, I think that's it for tonight's scanspam. For the record, I was going to go the extra mile and scan this piece of terrible beauty for y'all to enjoy...But then I got tired. And the darn poster is too wrinkly to make a decent scan of anyway.

Oh hey look, I never got around to posting last month's Mini-Goddess panel. Oops. So anyway, here are two months' worth of Mini-Goddess, still being published on the spine of monthly issues of Afternoon. In case you missed any of the previous panels, you can find them all linked here.

( Behind the cut! )

We also got a few nice Mara scans this month. I'm working on getting those online right now.

Coming up next: Another huge multifandom scanspam post! There will be Eureka Seven, Fate/Unlimited Codes, Fullmetal Alchemist, Kyou Kara Maou (Daikekyuu 3 - I has it), Shakugan no Shana, Soul Eater, and THIS, which I feel completely justified in believing was drawn exclusively just for me.

Oh, and a brief word about today's Tsubasa chapter:

It's official. He's his own grandpa. Not even joking, here: He is literally, actually, his own grandpa.

This in addition to being Oedipus. Which means that in upcoming chapters he is going to have to kill his own father in order to complete the hookup with his own mother. Except that now we know that his father is also... his son.

Yep. The father is also the son is also the father is also the son is also the--

OH SHI--

I have actual good things that I should be journaling about. The epic new chapter of Ah! My Goddess, tonight's impending Soul Eater finale, how this actually gets more and more brilliant with each installment, the finale of Kyou Kara Maou (and oh crap I am sooo behind on scanning that shizbit)....

But instead, here, let me get some crap out of the way first.

( Crap. )

Went to the bookstore today. Hooray!

I picked up Ah! My Goddess volume 38, with Chrono on the cover. In the manga canon, I guess she's officially strawberry blonde, now.

So I guess Crono is important enough to rank among Rind, Chihiro, and other supporting characters who have gotten their own volume covers. I'm... not sure how I feel about that. I mean, Crono is just so... stupid. But oh well. There are enough better characters in the cast that I really don't care whether Crono deserves her moment in the sun, or not.

The big surprise was an announcement in the back of the book: the Ah! My Goddess "Total Illustration Artbook 1998 ~ 2008" hits the shelves on Christmas Day! Holy crap!! I can't believe that date wasn't announced in last month's Afternoon. Uh, way to advertise your release dates well in advance, guys. Or not.

Speaking of release dates... How to Make Deathscythe was supposed to hit the shelves today, too. But of course, Squeenix has yet to ship any copies to any bookstores in the southern Nagano area. Of course. This always happens, argh! But that's what I get for living in a backwater.

Oh hey, and since I do live in a backwater, today was the first day that I found a copy of Mutuality on the bookstore shelf. Of course I immediately bought it. ;) Yes, yes, I know, the book has been out for three weeks already. But hey, backwater living! Gotta love it.

Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar, Mutuality is the big giant artbook collection of all of CLAMP's illustrations for Code Geass. And it is, absolutely, in a word, stunning. Worth every single penny. Say what you will about Code Geass - and you know I'm not shy about repeatedly stating that I think that it's utter shite, albeit extremely entertaining shite - but it's impossible to deny that CLAMP's artwork for the series, both production designs and promotional materials, really do represent the pinnacle of modern manga artistry. (If you can stand how overwrought they are, that is.)

Anyway, the book is gorgeous, almost mind-blowingly so, and contains many paintings so visually complicated that I could stare at them for hours and still not be able to appreciate every single detail. The best part of the book, however, is an extensive section of all of the early, rejected character designs that CLAMP churned out. Some of them are outright LOLarious. And some of them are extremely... telling. I know that I've written about this phenomenon before, when the original Lelouch and Suzaku character designs were first revealed in an issue of Newtype. But it still *fascinates* me to observe the process that CLAMP applied to evolving those two character designs from their rough versions to their final versions.

( Really long entry in which I ramble about anime character designs, racial coding, and yes, I actually tie Code Geass to Avatar and all of the ugly racewank it's generating. )

Edited to add: Now with visuals! Hooray!

Edit again: Another thing just occurred to me. I originally wrote this post with the intent to debunk the "Aang looks white" meme, but there's a more insidious meme out there that can be addressed here as well. That would be the "Avatar characters are raceless" meme. The most common justification for which seems to be the idea that because the main Avatar characters have such varied facial features, they aren't meant to all be of the same race! Mai and Ty Lee look so completely different, that they couldn't possibly both be of the same race, right? WRONG! This is a stupid idea, because it assumes that there's never any physical variations between people of the same race. It is an insidious packaging of the same old racist belief that a) only white people have varied facial features and b) all Asian people look exactly the same. Oh, barf. The character designs in most anime series, as well as in Avatar, directly defy that idea. But, you know. Viewers are still people, and people are still stupid.

Edit the Third: Just added a bunch more images, including scans of CLAMP's original character designs for Lelouch and Suzaku.

Edit the Fourth: Ampersand links an old essay by Matt Thorn about the same dealio, and a fascinating discussion ensues in the comments.

I hereby declare this week Scanspam Week, as I have a lot of backed up scans and images to spam this livejournal with.

First up, a little something for Code Geass fans.

Here's Marianne, everyone's favorite badass, sword-and-giant-mech-toting, hottie MILF and former Empress of America. She hunts, and drinks beer, and plots treasonous conspiracy Just Like the Guys! Click the thumbnails for high-res scans:


2.68 MB

2.56 MB

1.22 MB

Sarah Palin ain't nothing but a Marianne wannabe.

BTW these scans all come from the October issue of The Sneaker, in which this month's Code Geass illustrated novella is a prequel story about - you guessed it - Charles, Marianne, and Bismarck.

Bonus scan: People would seriously pay money for this?!

Jason, blogging on possible endings for Code Geass:

...everyone dies except Milly and Rivalz. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth after typing that– we watched 52 episodes to end up there?

Well, considering that we've been following the Mahabharata script so far, YES, actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it all really did end with everybody dead, except for two or three incidental supporting characters. And what a fittingly awful-but-hilarious ending that would be.

(52 episodes? Ha! Try slogging through a million gajillion Sanskrit slokas only to find that the whole thing ends with only the puppy, the leper, that other teacher that everybody forgot to care about, and the zombie fetus surviving.)

Seriously, though. Code Geass had the Sauptikaparvan and the Mausalaparvan last week, and there are still seven episodes left. The show has only one direction left to go: Increasingly lolarious character deaths, and lots of them.

P.S. - 2chan has started referring to Lelouch/Suzaku as "Lulukuru." Which, in turn, Newtype magazine recently romanized as "Rurukuru." I know that the English-speaking world surely must have coined some worse pairing name-smushes, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. I really can't.

Next, Sadinotna on the Girl-Wonder forums:

Princess Tutu (essentially "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" as a children's show)

Yes. This.

Code Geass R2 episode 05. Tsubasa chapter 189. Just when I thought that the WTFery could not be topped, we get Code Geass R2 episode 06.

I'm going to do what I did last week, and just quote Jason again:

If the end of Empire Strikes Back was a ten on the “I am your father” scale, this was clearly a negative fifteen.

Even if the revelation was "uncle" and not "father," this still merits a Quote for Truth.

So, the bonus drama CD that came bundled with the second Kyou Kara Maou sountrack...

Hehe, WOW.

I have to admit, however, I am always annoyed when major plot revelations like this are confined to tie-in media. I mean, if I'm watching the anime series, then I'm watching the anime series. I shouldn't have to buy all of the artbooks and soundtracks and other related media in order to piece together a huge freakin' part of the plot. I prefer it when tie-in media enhances the experience of the watching/reading the primary source, so to speak, but not when it becomes essential to understanding the primary source. Side note: Another reason why the Marvel/DC model of super crossover events annoys me, and that's also the major annoyance that I had with the Star Wars prequels. But that's a rant for another time.

On the other hand, though... squeeeeeeeeeeeee! ( Vague spoiler! )

Edit: As long as we're talking about plot bombs, try this one on for size: Code Geass R2 episode 5. Which perfectly distills everything that I love about this series, namely, it's unabashed awfulness. Money quotes from Jason:

Consider: this episode’s climax involved C.C. trapped in a tub of tomatoes (being used to make the world’s largest pizza) with Kallen (in an animal costume) desperately chasing after her. Shirley (dressed up in a waitress / swimsuit combo that the Umisho girls gawked at) is chasing Kallen, and the giant tub of tomatoes is being transported by a mecha piloted the third most awesome knight of Britannia (who apparently has nothing else better to do with his time). Meanwhile, the seventh most awesome knight of Britannia is chasing after a cat that almost got run over by said mecha. And I haven’t even gotten to the star of this show, because he ran out of breath and is on the verge of collapsing, his “brother” who has basically pledged to kill for the sake of their love, and mobile suit pilot turned housewife turned Duke turned teacher turned pin up model. And all of that connects back to Japan’s fight for independence from America.

Whew.

Code Geass R2 is awesome.

[...]

I’ve been thinking about the next level after train wreck. Code Geass R2 is definitely pushing that envelope. When one character wearing a ridiculous costume trips and falls because a giant pizza baking contest got screwed up and is seen by another character wearing a bikini and fishnets is considered a major plot point, it’s almost beyond train wreck status. Generally, a plot train wreck is something disastrous yet inevitable or awful yet fascinating. Maybe an earthquake? The G.W. Bush presidency?

I should stop myself before I quote Jason's entire entry.

Further evidence that Code Geass is the best worst anime ever:

This.

Cherry blossoms are blooming, school is starting, and new TV shows are on TV. Unfortunately there's not much that piques my interest this year. The only shows that I will definitely be watching are Kyou Kara Maou's third season, because it will be good, and Code Geass's second season, because it will be awesomely bad.

Code Geass, by the way, is eminently useful as a case study of how NOT to write an epic science fiction story about a dysfunctional royal family that tears itself apart and destroys the world in an apocalyptic civil war. (*cough*) So that's one reason why I can justify continuing to watch it. Also, pizza-tossing giant roller-skating robots piloted by bunny girls. That, too.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to Library Wars, because it looks really fun and geeky. It's basically Read or Die, but played straight. Er, if that makes any sense. Anyway, it's about a bunch of librarians that Save the World. But not in ridiculous over-the-top ways like the heroes of Read or Die. More like, in practical ways: i.e., with tanks.

Wagaya no Oinarisama, about a genderbending fox spirit, looks mildly interesting. Soul Eater looks like one of those rare shounen series with a kickass heroine, and coming straight out of a fantastic season of Shakugan no Shana I am definitely in the mood for a kickass heroine, so we'll see. Allison and Lilia looks to deliver in that respect, too - with a dashing lady fighter pilot and her treasure-hunting daughter - but the character designs look kind of bland.

Blah blah blah, there's a lot of exciting news coming out of the New York Anime Festival. Code Geass on Adult Swim, so now you can ALL enjoy the trainwreck of trainwrecks! Kyou Kara Maou manga licensed, but will we ever see the novels, and will anybody rescue the anime from the black hole created by Geneon's collapse?

But the one thing that really caught my eye was this: An X-Men shoujo manga. No, seriously. Money quote:

The first, X-Men, was described as a shōjo title — "X-Men meets Fruits Basket or Ouran High School Host Club" according to one panelist — features Xavier's Institute for Higher Learning as an all-boys' school, with the only female student being Kitty Pryde. The work will be aimed at a manga audience; while the characters will be based on famous X-Men heroes, the manga will not require any prior knowledge of the original X-Men comics. The manga is scripted by Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman, with art by Indonesia-based artist Anzu.

Okay.

That sounds kind of terrible.

But, I dunno. If they're really going to go all the way and rip off Ouran, I hope they recast Wolverine as Kitty's tranvestite mother. I mean, if you're going to make a terrible manga, you gotta make a really terrible manga. That's why Code Geass is so good. If it were a bit less awful then it would be merely awful; but it's SO awful that it's actually incredibly entertaining.

ETA: The official press release has more information.

Okay, so Xavier's school is still a school for mutants. Why is it an all-boys school, then? How or why Kitty is enrolled in an all-boys school is not explained. Oh wait, the press release makes it sound kind of like Xavier's school just happens to have an entirely male student body, and Kitty just happens to be the first girl enrolled. (Is it because she's the first girl mutant ever discovered?) Eh, it's really hard to tell from the press release. So Kitty gets caught in a social war between the popular kids (the Hellfire Club, led by Pyro, apparently) and the misfits. And she sides with the misfits. And then the misfits band together and form the X-Men. Hooray!

Sadly, this does not sound anything like Ouran High School Host Club. Mmmmm, needs more male cross-dressing, elaborate tea parties, and lesbian theater productions.

ETA 2: The more I think about this, the more dissappointed I am that Emma Frost hasn't been mentioned so far. Now, we've only got one press release to work from, so that doesn't mean that she won't be in the manga or anything... But if she isn't, what a waste! She would have been perfect as the Queen Bitch Popular Girl who starts out as the heroine's nemesis, turns out to be more complex over time, and then eventually becomes the heroine's reluctant ally.

I don't know how convincing of a shoujo nemesis Pyro can be AU-ed into. Then again, if they keep the detail about him being a dashing romance writer on the side... That will be kind of cool. ;)

ETA 3: The Beat has pictures of the preliminary designs for Wolverine and Jean. They look good! I can't tell how old Jean is supposed to be, though. Is she a student, or an adult?

I was looking back at my anime year in review post, and I realized that most of the shows that I recced (and ALL of the shows that I uber-recced) were from the spring 2007 season. There was almost nothing that really pushed my buttons in a good way from the fall 2006 season. I mean, I enjoyed Hataraki Man, Red Garden, and Kanon (the latter despite the I-knew-it-was-coming-but-still-hated-it ending), and I enjoyed Code Geass for all the wrong reasons, but... The fall season definitely didn't IMHO produce any truly great series like Seirei no Moribito, To Terra, or Romeo x Juliet. Looking back, I definitely felt like the fall 2006 season was a mushy pile of generic harem shows stacked on top of generic harem shows, but the spring 2007 season felt like a breath of fresh air to me. I mean: Juliet, Seto San, Balsa, Swena, Clare, Nadie, Nia, and Yoko were all on TV at the same time, and how awesome was that?! I felt like anime was finally moving beyond the moe moe moe moe moe moe endless trend of generic moe moe moe moe generic shows. Which isn't to say that moe shows stopped altogether - there was plenty of moe in the spring 2007 season - but that we finally got a variety of shows other than just endless episodes of moe moe and more moe.

And now, what does the fall 2007 anime schedule look like?

Yup. We're back to square one. It's almost nothing but generic harem comedies, and endless amounts of moe moe moe moe.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm annoyed that other than Shakugan no Shana (which YES contains moe but at least it has a PLOT and awesome female characters) and You're Under Arrest, there's almost nothing good on TV for me to veg in front of this season. Or at least, nothing "good" for me, as I have very little interest in harem comedies or moe.

On the other hand, American television is currently exploding with awesome (Avatar, The Boondocks, American Dad, South Park, The Simpsons, and Robot Chicken), so that at least makes up for the dearth of good animated television on this side of the Pacific.

Here's hoping that the spring 2008 anime season will bring back the bucketloads of win and awesome that the spring 2007 season provided. Isn't Haruhi Season 2 supposed to air in spring 2008?

Well, it's that time again. October means the start of new anime series in Japan, and everybody and their dog is throwing up a "fall preview" post on their blog or livejournal. I was thinking of doing that too, but first, I went back and looked at what shows I predicted I would watch last spring, and laughed a bit at myself. Then I started thinking and writing, looking back on a year of watching free anime in wonderful Japanland, and, well...

I guess it's the normal procedure to wait until December to do an "anime year in review" post, but I think that fall would actually be a better time for me to do so. First, in Japan as in the United States, fall is the nominal start of the Year in Television. Second, I arrived in Japan last fall, so if I wanted to write about a year's worth of anime, of course it cover the span of time from autumn to autumn!

So without further adieu, here is my year in anime. ( Behind the cut. )

And, to conclude this amazingly long post...

Recommendations?

Level One: If you breathe air, you will probably like this series.
Seirei no Moribito/Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
Romeo x Juliet
Dennou Coil


Level Two: Recommended, but your mileage may vary.
Gurren Lagann (must love old-fashioned schlock done right)
Code Geass (must love old-fashioned schlock done horribly, horribly wrong)
Claymore (must be able to love a good story despite terrible art)
Hataraki Man (must not be grossed out by onscreen depictions of people eating natto)
Moonlight Mile (must have tolerance for slow pacing)
To Terra (must be able to love that old-school space opera)

So, if I had to sum up all of the above in one sentence, it would be this:
Everybody should watch Seirei no Moribito.
That is all.

Video of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra recording the score for Gonzo's Romeo X Juliet.

This anime is absolutely fantastic. This music is freakin' fantastic. And I looooooove the opening song by Lena Park, a Japanese cover of the always-excellent "You Raise Me Up." The closing song is actually really "meh" for me, but whatever. Not every Gonzo anime can have an ending theme performed by Jean Jacques Burnel, now, can it?

In other news, I am so happy to have a good anime series to enjoy this season, as opposed to, you know, a bad anime series to enjoy. Oh, Code Geass, how I love to hate you.

(*is counting down days until the Romeo X Juliet soundtrack hits the stores*)

Holy shit.

That was a beautiful moment of WTFery. It was a transcendent moment of WTFery. It was like jumping a shark on waterskis made beautiful by the addition of giant robots and Pizza Hut and a machine gun.

This is why I watch Code Geass. I don't care about any of the characters. I stopped caring about the plot ages ago because it's so damn poorly written. What I do care about, however, is the sheer entertaining awfulness of the whole thing. At first, I thought that nothing could top the insanity of Episode 5. Then I thought that nothing could top the giant-pizza-tossing robot in Episode 21. And then said sheer entertaining awfulness is taken to brilliant new heights in this episode. Just brilliant I tell you.

One reason why I classify this as a WTF moment is that it completely derails the story. It's one of those moments when the metaphorical train that is the plot of the series is chugging along all nice and good, and then all of a sudden it jumps the tracks and plunges off a cliff and explodes in a big fireball of firey doom. And now the rest of us who are watching the series are left thinking, well, where does it go from here?

To illustrate what I mean by "derailing the story," let me give a few hypothetical examples:

Imagine if in the middle of Attack of the Clones, Anakin Skywalker had suddenly been eaten alive by a velociraptor.

Imagine if in the middle of an episode of Ah! My Goddess, Belldandy had dumped Keiichi, confessed her love to Aoshima, and run off with him for a Vegas wedding and a honeymoon in Tijuana.

Imagine if, during the pre-war council at Hastinapura, Yudhisthira had suddenly walked in carrying an AK-47, proceeded to mow down Duryodhana and all of the Kuru elders, and then shoot Krishna just for good measure.

That's what I mean by "derailing the story." In all these instances, we, the audience, are left scratching out heads in the aftermath, asking ourselves, "Well... What now?"

Yeah. That's kind of like what watching episode 22 of Code Geass felt like.

In other news, here's a little something from people who actually know how to write a decent epic story:
New Fate/Stay Night Realta Nua opening!

Today I totally heard background music from Tsubasa Chronicle being used on a television news program.

To put this in context: The news program was one of those human interest stories about a woman who got a blood infection from her dead toenail and ended up having to get her leg amputated at the knee.

As I actually have a dead toenail on my foot right now, I found this program slightly disconcerting, use of recognizable anime music or not.

Oh Japanese television, please never change.

PS, for those of you watching Code Geass: Most hilariously awful love confession since Star Wars Episode II? I think a solid case could be made.

Proof that Kadokawa/Bandai are marketing genius: You, yes you, can vote for the dub voices used in the English version of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi.

Proof that Shakugan no Shana is awesome: Because yaoi makes any bishoujo series even better. Also, self-parody ending credits FTW.

Proof that physics is awesome: These icons. 'Nuff said. ETA: Also these.

Proof that even shudder-inducing internet perverts have their awesome moments: This is still funny.

And finally, proof that Japan is FLIPPIN' INSANE:

( Warning: Extremely large images behind the cut. Saber fanboys, take heart! )