Kuwabara Mizuno will pay for making me lose sleep :O

[petronia]

Or maybe that was the cappuccino I drank at 7PM last night. ...But anyway! I went to see GitS: Innocence at the Festival de nouveau cinéma last night. I'll probably watch it again this week, because helvetius in her infinite wisdom sent me a CD copy. XD Theatre-sized screen if you can get it, though. Mamoru Oshii is still the only person ever to make a film that provides an experience similar to reading William Gibson's early novels. Which is obviously not to say that he's the only person to make a good cyberpunk film, any more than it is to say that Gibson wrote the definitive cyberpunk novel, or even that the parallel I'm compelled to draw has anything to do with the culturally-stripmined concept of quote cyberpunk unquote. In fact Innocence suffers from the same basic issues as all Gibson's novels, namely plot-as-plot-device and narrative dwelling on the metaphysics of the brand name of the futuristic Japanese gum stuck to the character's shoe instead of the actual route he took to get from point A to point B, but it's really about the beautiful scenes of cognitive dissonance you wend through in order to reach the arbitrary ending. Not to mention I live to analyze futuristic Japanese gum wrappers. It's all a matter of taste IOW; you'll like it if you liked the first one. XD

(Also, cannot wait until the Google plugin is available for my head, so I too can converse in nothing but portentous and witty literary quotations appropriate to the situation at hand. Seriously, now. Where do I sign up for the beta?)

Then I went home and watched the second episode of the Mirage of Blaze OAV. I've forgotten what it was, to lose sleep due to an overwhelming urge to beat fictional characters over the head. >_> That being said a lot of the context that made it painful viewing for me - like the fact that I thought for two books that the way Naoe kept asking Takaya to clarify if something he said was "an order" was cute, CUTE DAMN YOU KUWABARA - didn't make it into the preceding anime, so I really don't know how it would strike anyone else on my flist. Maybe all it takes is being more of an angst fan. I don't think I am one, fundamentally; I don't have a kink for hurt/comfort, and I actively avoid stories in which characters who don't deserve their fates suffer unduly and come to tragic ends because God/society/life is unfair. I can manage Mirage of Blaze, because (like Swordpoint, say) the characters actually behave quite badly and make a lot of their own problems, so I don't have to feel as sympathetic. XD I mean, IMHO Minako should've stabbed Naoe in his sleep a few times and maybe cut some strategic bits off - what's he going to do, die? - but the fact that he was massively wronged doesn't really absolve Kagetora from being a passive-aggressive frigid manipulative little dipshit from beginning to end. Um. I'm not emotionally over-invested, I swear. But this ceased some time ago to be an anime and is now a series of books I'm reading, and due the language issue the experience of reading them is not like how I read now - an art perfected to the point of boredom - but more like reading when I was nine or ten, i.e. a lengthy, difficult and immersive commitment. A book meant something back then, not just three hours' worth of mental fodder before the monkeys move on to the next source of entertainment. Am I the only one who feels like this?

(And anyway Minako does nothing of the sort, because she's the Virgin Mary an aspect of Kannon or something. I could rant about how Naoe's so fucked up he actually constructs a whole pint-sized religion ALL IN HIS HEAD so he can have Catholic guilt without being Catholic, but that's a wee bit too much analysis of something no one else has read.)

Afterward it occurred to me that I have a real thing for professionalism. Section 9, the Meikai Uesugi-gun, Schwarz, the Turks, the retrievers and transporters and what else in GetBackers... It may be a devotion to the team ideal, or personal work ethics, or even just an ability to recognize when one's interests happen to coincide with that of others, but what I like about all these characters is the ability to set personal conflict/feelings aside and get the job done. Or, less innocuous and much more frustrating, the ability to completely disregard any UST one might have with one's team members or partner in favour of getting the job done. But a dash of frustration is what keeps fans coming back, isn't it. >_>

Comments

[luxetumbra.livejournal.com]

Kagetora from being a passive-aggressive frigid manipulative little dipshit

YES! God he annoys me. Yet I still sort of like Takaya, if only for his "wah, why are you being mean to me?" cluelessness. >:D

A book meant something back then, not just three hours' worth of mental fodder before the monkeys move on to the next source of entertainment. Am I the only one who feels like this?

Again yes (sadly). It's the rare book now that makes me feel the same way I did when I was 10 and reading "The Dark Is Rising" for the first time. I thought about those books and that universe for years after I was finished. "House of Leaves" is probably the closest thing to that experience that I've read recently.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

"Wow. I was quite feeling sorry for you back there, but now that you've opened your mouth my urge to bitchslap you has skyrocketed."

I like Takaya too. He's just a know-nothing kid whose uniformly sucky life continues to get suckier. :/ It depresses me because their relationship in the earlier books was so affectionate and trusting and non-soul-destroying, it's a bit like watching friends go through a messy breakup complete with screaming and recriminations (without having had the relationship proper). But I think I'm going to have to read the books before I manage to figure out how much of him even is Takaya at this point.

Susan Cooper! So did I. I think she had a huge influence on what I thought fantasy lit should be.