petronia

Finished the Mirage of Blaze - no, not novel. I've likely neglected to mention that 5.5 is actually two disparate novellas, so the first half of the book, and saints alone know if the second half will give me as much trouble - last night. Was baffled to discover that it ends nothing like what happened in the anime. If I'd been a Japanese fan of the novels previous to the anime I'd have raged at how they handled it, methinks. ^^; T told me last night (when I went over to her place with the express intent of getting drunk on cheap wine) that when she first met me, geological eons ago at the Marianopolis Anime Club, I was really into CLAMP and SxS. This may well have been. I have no memory of the obsession, because I never wrote SxS, and I have to write for a fandom before I believe I'm really in it. If not it slips away, and I hit a worrying blank when I try to remember what I was doing with my time online. But conscious memory or not, it does leave an effect. And let me tell you: in the world according to me, there is no excuse whatsoever for leaving out blood and sakura when you are animating something that had blood and sakura in it in the first place.

I think in a certain sense, I'm more PO'd that they didn't do Sassa Narimasa and Sayuri-hime than that they left out all the Naoe/Takaya scenes. It's a good lesson in how to construct a novel where there's a plot arc and a relationship arc simultaneously, actually: the themes redouble and echo until you start believing the melodrama is tragedy. To add insult to injury I think she must have taken barely more time to write the thing than I took to read it. XD;;

(It also explains who those characters in the OAVs were. They're the Pure Land sect. Damned warrior monks and their spiritual barriers against exorcism! :O :O)