Petronia

1) Inner CLAMP character meme: I won't repost the whole thing because I want to put other stuff in this post, but I got Seishirou 67%, Watanuki 65%. XD "Secretly heartless, but cooks." Then I took it again and got a tiebreaker between Seishirou and Kurogane. I would guess this comes as a surprise to exactly no one.

2) I probably don't need to say this but it occurred to me on the metro yesterday and - you all know that Eclair out of Ouran anime isn't named after a dessert, right? Eclair Tonnerre, lightning and thunder. ^^;

3) I don't know if adding to the flood on fst is the responsible thing to do at this point (I've had to take it off default view orz), but maybe I'll post those double A-sides so to speak? I have about 3-4. I'm also mentally owing about five detailed album reviews with mp3s, and innumerable book reviews.

Spent a good chunk of my Sunday attempting to catch up on fandoms - twenty chapters' worth of TRC and Holic each, mostly. Still about a volume behind on Holic but am pretty much up on TRC now. I don't want to have to spend time reading CLAMP's glorified crackfic (for pete's sake) so much as I wish I could just download the images into my brain and instantaneously digest the information contained therein, but for now we make do with what we have.

Concurrently I was reading Aristotle's Poetics, which served to highlight how ancient CLAMP's grab bag of tricks is. To give them credit they're pretty much the only purists in their particular scene... I keep wondering, did ever an Athenian want to throttle Sophocles this much?

"WTF, I can't believe Oedipus put his own eyes out at the end! What is up with the eyeball obsession? THE MADNESS MUST STOP!"

( ...Spoiler cut, not that I say much of import. )

What else? Oh yeah, spoiler zone declared in the comments - WHERE IS THE FIC, PEOPLE?? It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be heartfelt. 以上です。

Less vituperatively, I finished watching the Ouran anime. Very much in the "homg must bring artificial closure as manga shows no sign of wrapping up!" mode, but intelligently done despite the rush. Basically they played it straight like the shortest distance between two points, which is not a description of the rest of the series, but if you love the characters (and "they" know you do) you'd be a fool not to ride the wave. The fluffy, pink, shoujo-coloured wave.

( More spoilersome observations. )

I should read the manga but I doubt the question arises there, which makes it sort of moot.

Some days ago my home computer caught a worm which proceeded to install a spam virus, so I was treated to the annoying sight of mystery emails outbound through my antiquated filter. Now it's freezing unpredictably at startup. I can't be arsed to cleanse the infection when the hard drive needs a reformat this badly so reformat it is. But it's extra work, and my installation disc of WinXP is so old (and so much of the hardware upgraded) I expect any number of things to stop working afterward. I owe various photo memes, music etc. but it may not happen for a while, depending. ^^;

It's only worrisome because I think it may have been idling on IRC that did it - that machine is essentially unprotected against threats newer than 2003 but it's dial-up and receives no email so there're not that many vectors for infection. It'll have better security once I get it up and running again.

Anyway, onto fandom talk that is less boring:

1) Everyone by this point knows I've been watching Ouran High School Host Club, I just haven't been blogging about it. Haven't read the manga as decided I could live with the vision of anyone who was this traumatised by revelations from the Utena fanbooks ("Oh, the pointing hand? We just wanted to make sure you noticed those bits of the scenery. Spent time drawing them in and everything. ...Miki's watch? Yeah, he uses it to time things. Look, at one point he forgets to stop it and it runs for the entire episode haha do you see what we did there!"). Besides series like this are always more random at the beginning than later on, and anime allows for reorganisation.

( More... )

2) Over the past several months I also watched Jewel in the Palace, which sucked up as much time as you'd expect from a 70-episode drama. The innovation of the series is portmanteauing several fields of appeal, I think, as follows:

1. old-school shoujo of the Ace wo nerae, Glass Mask (poss. Yawara?) type, where the spunky heroine ganbarus a lot to get ahead in her chosen field, plus well-born rival, love triangle, etc. Why is this sort of thing not being written anymore? Have all the female readers gone over to shounen now that WJ's discovered fanservice?
2. food pr0n. If I'd been watching by myself I would totally have been rewinding and taking notes. YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE IMPERIAL KITCHEN, GOODBYE.
3. political intrigue as per the regular run of Asian historical TV drama. More absorbing than most historical dramas, in fact, given that the script goes both "upstairs" and "downstairs", embroidering at will for maximum narrative effect. XD Reminded me of Dumas at times.

The bad: I'm not at all prone to disliking characters for being annoyingly perfect, virtuous, talented, etc., so if Janggeum gets on my nerves as much as she has over the course of the series I imagine she would drive people I know into frothing rages. XD ( Cut for implicit spoilers. )

What saves the character for me is the actress. She's not stunningly pretty, nor even the prettiest in the cast by far, but pulls off the unaffected likeability necessary to a character when the rest of the cast is perpetually occupied in singing his/her praises. *g* It's not hard to see that a man could fall in love with that smile. Which brings me around to Lord Min (or as I call him, Mr. Swordfighting Quotient), who is totally the fourth reason to watch this series. Watch, as he battles ninjas, busts up espionage conspiracies and works in the library! He supports her career choices because her self-realisation is as important to him as his own! I was on the floor. Shoujo love interests are not normally what you'd call realistic but this is not the usual run of shoujo love interest.

Besides after we finished watching Jewel we misguidedly started watching Stairway to Heaven and holee shit that is an hour of my life I'm never getting back. orz If Janggeum makes Haruhi look good what is there to say about the heroine of Stairway to Heaven, at least Janggeum has the horse sense to give back as good as she gets when she's fucked with.

3) Re: remixing fic - I love the idea, but to get the most out of the execution as a reader it would have to be a sterling remix of a fic I already love, and I can't remember it happening yet. Were talking at some point about currently stratospheric standards for what a remix is expected to accomplish - in dance music [1], I mean, but I think the attitude's carried over in my head. Possibly I'd have to personally run a remixing project where the signups are ficcers-I-know, rather than by fandom or whatever. [2] Or yanno, feel free to rec me your favorites. XD

[1] Speaking of which Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback (Linus Loves Remix)" is the first buzzy electrohouse I've loved in a long while. And this Tom Novy Ibiza dub thing isn't half bad either! High standards, see. marej, this is definitely not breaking the disco ball where I live. XD

[2] Not that this would be a ploy to get my own fic remixed or anything. Nothing of the sort.