Cannot sleep obviously

[petronia]

(Have work tomorrow argh. Why is it that flying west turns me into a productive morning person for a week or so, but flying east just messes me up?) Because I'm a mad dork, I bought phonebooks in Narita Airport to read on the plane and lugged them all the way home. Also scored various other manga and novels which I will discuss, but regarding the series I actually follow first:

1) GetBackers. "Voodoo Child" explained. No more CLAMP for you, Aoki-sensei, and while you're at it put down that DVD of Ring 0! Also, clearly KAGAMI x DARK!HIMIKO OTP OMG THEIRLOVEISSOREFLECTIVE. ...I think I'm going to have to finish my WIPs in this series before it josses me more than it has. Not that I didn't predict that there were more members to Fuuga, but.

2) Death Note. No more Lupin III for you, Ooba-sensei! Re-addicted myself to st00pid series argh, must find scans of chapters I missed. Also scored tankoubon 3.

3) Bleach. ......Considering I'm following the official French edition, I shouldn't even have bothered trying to read that, should I?

4) Prince of Tennis. Okay, Konomi-sensei, how about this? YOU WIN. The crack competition is yours, it is over, there was never a crack competition in the first place. You win like that salaryman at the beginning of Miike Takashi's Dead or Alive who did the line of cocaine reaching from one end of the warehouse to the other. HAPPY NOW?

Other books and manga:

(No Juuni Kokki I could find anyway, apart from the most recent one which I supposed wasn't requisite. Just grabbed things off the shelves, as had 4000 yen to blow and 1/2 hour to blow it in)

Murakami Haruki, "Kaze no uta wo kike"
Murakami Ryu, "Love and Pop"
Kikuchi Hideyuki, "Makaitoshi Blues" vol.6 (see, random, seriously)
Kikuchi Hideyuki, "Yuukenshou" (jidaimono ghost stories)

Death Note 3
Real 1 (this is Inoue-sensei's other-other series, and is about wheelchair basketball. By extension it is also about kids who have bone cancer and muscular dystrophy and horrific car accidents. Recommended for those who don't think Slam Dunk is dark enough, who going by the fanfic must be legion. >_>)

Pirated CDs, laugh all you like at the selection because I know you will:

Ono Lisa x 2
Sun Yanzi x 2
David Tao x 1
Lee Jung Hyun x 2
random kpop compilations x 3
bossa nova compilation x 1
BoA x 2
Jay Chou x 1
w-inds x 2 (shut up)
Tackey & Tsubasa x 1 (no seriously shut up, it's just a single)
Kylie Minogue x 1

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. I hadn't thought that that could be it. I thought she was just trying to mess with our minds, but I'm now worried whether she can pull it off.

Nine days? Well, how long is that going to be in manga time? Probably several volumes. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

DN is an analytical blank for me at this point. I can't judge whether she's pulling it off successfully, as I can't make a guess in the first place as to what the story may or may not be aiming for themes/ideas/moral-wise. I also can't tell what the characters are thinking, what's factually happening, and where any of this is going. Good times. XD;;

(What has changed IMO is L's characterisation. L currently is far more utilitarian in his moral positioning than he was at the beginning, I think, which I'd argue makes for a more interesting story not to mention more consistent with the internal tendencies of Ooba's writing, but there's definitely a shift to contend with. Ack, I shouldn't attempt sense, I don't think I've slept for 24 hours at this point. >_>)

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Yes, aren't they? XD I keep telling myself that I'm not going to blog about DN until it's over, only I have no idea when it's going to be over. I can follow the immediate plot, but I don't know how it's going to work thematically. I think it's that we have no idea about how the plotting is working that throws off all the themes.

Yes, L in the thirties got a lot greyer, which IMHO threw 50% of the readers off completely. But are there any tendencies at all in Ooba's writing? Other than to confuse the reader. >_> There are rumours going around that Ooba is a pen name for someone else, but I don't know.) Aaah, get some sleep, :o

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, she tends toward moral greyness, for one. ^^; And more general ambiguity/obliqueness. I also get a sense of thinly veiled cynicism - it always seems to me that DN "allows" Raito, L and Misa to be the "heroes" of the story despite their moral murkiness because they're "pure of intent": their motivation is idealistic and selfless, even if it leads them to accomplish terrible acts. It's as if Ooba/the series is saying that that's actually the best that can be expected of human beings given such a circumstance (and indeed we're now being shown the DN used for corporate greed and skullduggery, as if to stress that there are worse motivations than wrongheaded utopianism...). Plus a further level of cynicism in that said purity of intent is implied to be essentially immature.

Basically, it just reads to me like she has a jaundiced view of human nature. XD That's why I say it makes more sense for L to "go grey" in her writing.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Moral greyness indeed, but you see this a lot in mangaka. (Though a lot of people were upset by 33, because with L greyed, they lacked someone to root for.) I also see the "pure intent" storyline a lot in anime; we're supposed to admire the sincerity of a character's heart over whether what they're actually doing is with the right intent or whether it is actually a good idea (or perhaps I just read too much about revolutions and so necessarily am suspicious of idealists. Problem is that morality these days is so put around "selfishness" as being the cardinal sin.). But certainly the series is cynical, because now that the DN is being used by the whatever group it is now acceptable to the government. (And thus L and Light are now both vigilantes! But this time the reader is on their side. OMG, perhaps Kira had the right idea and the government can't be trusted to enact justice... )

if this makes no sense, ask me again when I'm awake ^^;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure you see a lot of Ooba's kind of moral greyness. In most manga "moral greyness" means you find out something about a villain's past and/or psychological makeup that makes him/her sympathetic, in that you can grok why they're doing what they do, and to understand is to forgive to some extent. Or a character is essentially moral and good but placed in an impossible situation and forced to choose between two evils, which inspires sympathy and pity in the viewer. However neither is the case in DN. Ooba enforces a deliberate neutrality: neither Raito nor L is an easy point of identification, thus the only readerly motivation you have is entertainment - "what's he going to do next?" - as opposed to wanting to see "poetic justice" being enacted because you're morally aligned with one side. IOW she forces the reader into an amoral response, which is disorienting. (Haven't I said this already?)

And yes, but once again, when most mangaka say "pure heart" they mean it unironically, from shounen manga up to those yaoi semes who're admirable for the purity of their feeling despite the fact that they're basically psycho rapists (isn't it a Japanese thing? >_>). I'm pretty sure Ooba is ironic throughout.

Re: if this makes no sense, ask me again when I'm awake ^^;

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I think there's a little of the first sort going on with Misa, in that she likes Kira so much because he's the "hero" who killed the murderer of her parents. Sometimes, though, I wonder if the point is that the trio (the traditional shounen hero-rival-love interest threesome) are not abnormal human beings, but normal ones, but then we get the traditional horror 'depravity of ordinary people' theme.

Am totally agreed on the "entertainment" POV. Was saying to a friend who quit reading that besides the confusing narration, the other "problem" with Death Note is that it lacks "heart," meaning an emotional core to the series, though there is a huge amount of intellectual interest that makes up for it. I haven't been reading the fic (don't really plan to yet), but I wonder how the amoral viewpoint changes the fandom response. A lot of people seem to be fangirling it normally, for what it's worth.