Briefly, as I hie me to my rest

The end of tankoubon 26 is not a good place to stop in the IniD manga. *thumps* Shigeno really has it out for the Lan Evo line, doesn't he? You figure one ran his dog over or something. Kyouichi got called a bad guy for spanking Takumi hard the first time around, but Shigeno didn't go and make him the deliberate-sabotage sort of evil - though you knew there'd have to be one sooner or later. Thinking realistically about the stakes.

Oh well, I see where this is going regardless. Kyoko to the rescue! XD;;; Cripes in a nutshell, at least Keisuke isn't a virgin okay, that sounded really weird out of context, but I assure you the sentiment is heartfelt. The whole Itsuki business just made me cry, and not in the good way. Also, Iketani is still moping over Mako, but Kenji - what's your excuse?

(OTOH - omg teh slash yeah yeah whatever. XD I have to laugh at myself, because I'm literally OTPing het and BL for the same bloody characters at the same time, which has got to be a personal best in fangirl doublethink. Seriously, though; during the few months '01-'02 I was poking about the Chinese fandom out of desperation, even they were OTTing Takumi and the Takahashis. Do you have any idea how blatant something has to be to get its Taiwanese fen to consider poly? XD;;; And they wailed about it, too! Dear saints alive, did they wail at the loss of their innocent girly OTP sparklies. But at the end, what it came down to was that they just couldn't bear to let anyone be hurt, wibble wibble...

...Sorry, I'm just flashing back to about the only thing that was actually amusing in my life at that point. Bad semester. Never mind me.)

What I probably should do is write an essay-ish thing on how machiavellian - and really when you think about it, Not Very Nice - Ryousuke is, in the Project D phase; and how at this point the most psychologically interesting twist Shigeno could possibly give his series is to make Takumi realise that Ryousuke is fallible. It would screw up Team D's dynamic to hell and back, and I'm a sucker for chaos. (To Shigeno's credit you get to see Ryou being fallible; just that Takumi doesn't. I know, the end of First Stage, but it's like it never emotionally registered...) Note that I think Kei is a lost cause, but possibly Takumi can still be saved, except then one considers seiyuu factor and being given gnomic directives in that voice and wonders if one wouldn't be blindly trusting as well. XD

In which Vladimir Vladimirovich does Prince of Hockey, sort of

Did mention, didn't I, that I'd been afflicted all week with skating-rink!Fuji? This is the result: tonight while eating maple syrup ham at Movenpick's with Ced and talking Habs vs. Leafs and real fansites for non-existent anime series (wanted to go see RotK but there were no early showing tickets to be had, believe it or not), I had one of those brainstorms that seem like a genius idea at the first, key word being seem. To wit, why not have an AU in which all the tennis boys are actually hockey players instead? You could have Fuji on skates, and it would totally solve the odd man out problem, because they'd have to continually rotate lines within each game anyway. (Bear with me.) It wasn't until I was on the metro home that it occurred to me that you'd have to explain why there was this bantam hockey team in Ontario or whatever completely comprised of Japanese teenagers behaving as such, given which in fact it would be much easier to write an AU Tokyo that happened to be bitterly cold in winter and chock full of outdoor skating rinks and high school hockey clubs. No, really. It'd be like Nabokov's Ada, y'know, in which Russia is actually Canada / Northern United States, and always has been, so you have characters like Baroness Something-skaya whose ancestral demesnes were in Milwaukee or whatnot. It makes total sense when one's reading, and I've always considered it the most delightfully offbeat metaphor for the immigrant experience (though now that I think about it, maybe Nabokov was just lazy like me and didn't want to bother separating his plot ideas that belong to different geographical settings either XD;;;).

Which then leaves the difficult issue, namely, who gets to be goalie? ...The obvious choice would be Kikumaru, actually, and Oishi is as obvious a defenseman as Momo is an obvious wing, so he wouldn't be too far off - except Eiji has the least stamina and most fragile concentration of the Seigaku regulars, and for his sins a goaltender is the only one who needs to be out there for the full sixty minutes. (Does a bantam hockey game last for sixty minutes? That's a good question. Do I need to get a life? That's an even better one.) So not Eiji, upon which I do rather confess myself stumped, and inclined to proceed by elimination. I'd ask for help but I bet none of you people are even following my train of thought, why do I bother to post the details of my travails? XD Fine, I'll just make up my lines like Ryuzaki-sensei.

( Hey, at least it's not curling. Though come to think of it... )

Thought of having a fourth line with the Ichinensei, but I'm not that cruel. ...Looking at this, though, either Fuji or Inui's got to go in goal, it's not much of a choice. ^^;

Yeah, that was pretty much the weirdest post ever. (What d'you mean, people don't really watch this schtuff for the sports? Of course it's all about the sports.) The next one will be Christmas music, though.