Oh, dude, this is so not on

You know that bit in the MoB anime with the boat in the middle of the lake and the mirrors and all? Book 7 ends right before telling you what choice Naoe makes.

...I mean, yeah, you know and I know. But at the time of publication? Cruel and unusual, man.

***

Sadly, reading up on the akchul history only serves to traumatize me more with the ghei. XO;;; (Shingen and Kousaka what?)

Feel my heartbeat (entry reorganized for legibility)

Annie - Heartbeat

Much as I'm still amused - and I am still amused - that Pitchfork named my favorite song off the Annie album #1 single of the year (which btw, canis_m, I think bars you officially from claiming you don't have indie cred XD) ...wow, dude totally did not understand the lyrics to "Chewing Gum".

Why I like this song: the cymbal shivers at the beginning that send real sympathetic shivers up and down my spine, exactly as if I were in the situation the song describes. Feel my heartbeat, feel my heartbeat, she sings and at 0:45 suddenly you hear it - and then at 1:00, ROMANTIC DISCO DRAMA.

Why I like this song: it's happened to me. How about you?

***

Xmas music will be taken down tonight. Hope that's all right? Up til 24th but I've stuck it here: Christmas folder. Check again, might be something new up there. ^^;

Actually this is just an excuse for me to complain again

Mirage of Blaze - わだつみの楊貴妃
Mirage of Blaze - Pearly Gate

Er, "Wadatsumi no Youkihi" if you can't parse that (great title for a book, actually - at first glance one a) understands perfectly what it means** b) has no idea why it would be called that, and thus is obliged to read the bloody thing to find out). Image Album 2, Book 10, i.e. the arc right after these here OAVs. Think of it as a next-episode preview.

The first track is an instrumental in the vein of all the MoB albums including the anime, i.e. reminds me rather of the Rurouni Kenshin Kyoto Arc OST. The second song sounds like... Roxette?... Make no mistake, the dramatic 80s pop-rock quotes are a deliberate aesthetic choice somebody made along the line, possibly because it's the only music capable of carrying lyrics reminiscent of Kuwabara Mizuna's catchphrases without some sort of inward collapse into irony. Insert own essay. Also, stupidly catchy and currently sitting in my 'amp most-played between Julee Cruise and DJ Krush.

I've really been itching to skip to said Book 10, actually. Because it is the next plot arc, and I do want to know What Happens; also because consensus seems to be that Wadatsumi no Youkihi marks the absolute nadir of the characters' - not angst, but wanktardedness. Angst I can take, at worst I sit there feeling sorry for them. It's the wanktardedness that gets me. There aren't a lot of series with parallel or even remotely analogous situations, but... if you've ever watched Berserk? You know how at various points in the anime there's just this overwhelming urge to straight-arm bitchslap Griffith and/or Gatts for being DELIBERATE WANKTARDS? Like that.

Which leads me to wonder how mah homie Golitzinsky would take Mirage of Blaze, given his completely non-sexual non-ironic born-in-wrong-century-on-wrong-continent 主従 thing. He still hates Griffith more than any fictional character he's ever encountered, and for that matter far more than any fictional character deserves. Yeah, I know he'd never watch it, but speculation is a wonderful thing.

** For once I knew what わだつみ means already - due to a song title, surprise surprise.

EDIT -- Okay, my nature compels me to be precise and fair. Griffith was a deliberate wanktard. Gatts lacked Clue, and when the big blunt stick hit him it was a day late and a dollar short to do any good.