redwoodalchan | Entries tagged with fandom

And I can't even watch the far-superior "Shiki" afterwards, because I left it at home! Sigh....

Ahem, I first watched this show when I was a teenager, and I remember liking it but not thinking it lived up to my expectations. As the years have gone by and it's processed further, though, I've become quite angry with it. So I decided to tune in again, to see if it still holds up, and maybe redeem it in my eyes (though frankly, that almost certainly won't happen at this rate).

At the current rate, I think it's a dead ringer for a sporking. I've actually been compiling notes of things to talk about for a sporking of this show, in fact. Since it's an incredibly violent show I figured I'd pitch it to Mervin first to see if she's okay with it (obviously I wouldn't show any pictures of naked people or violent scenes) and if she doesn't give me the green light I'll probably still spork it on my own journal or something. I've got a bone to pick with this series, and truthfully it goes beyond the story's actual quality and content (though they both suffer from obvious flaws). I'm just so sick of people treating it as some sort of high water mark of mature anime, while series that can do the exact same thing it can and be smarter and more mature about it languish in the shadows of obscurity!

Current Mood: cold

Why? I mean that. What actual reason do you have for thinking the OVA is better? I'm just dying to know, because I cannot for the life of me engineer any reason that makes sense.

Birdy is awesome in both so that can't be it. Is it Tsutomu? Tsutomu actually strikes me as less of a wimp in "Decode" and more of a normal high school boy. He's certainly no less helpful to Birdy than he is in the OVA. And if you liked the balancing act of the OVA where Tsutomu was the brains and Birdy the brawn, well, "Decode" doesn't do that because it's reductive, and both Birdy and Tsutomu have to feel like people and not just constructs that compliment each other.

As for Tsutomu's high-school friends, they're so much more likable and interesting in "Decode" that there's no comparison. The boys actually have hobbies and personalities that don't revolve around porn, and he's got more friends who are girls, and they too have hobbies and personalities that are actually relevant to the story--it's not like in the OVA where Tsutomu had one female friend who existed basically to be his love interest. His love interest in "Decode," for that matter, is clearly shown to be a nice girl who seems good for him and the things they bond over are actually explained.

Is it the villains? I fail to see how that could be it. Geega and Bacillus are, if anything, actually more interesting and fun in "Decode" than they are in the OVA, and better integrated into the overarching plot. As for Shyamalan, he's easily more threatening than Hikawa ever was--and is more complex to boot. It is true that the OVA gives much more screentime to Christella Revi herself, but even in the original OVA Christella Revi didn't have much of a personality other than being a generic supervillain, so it's not like it's a great loss to have her mostly in the background. And once again, "Decode" if anything expands upon her more and makes her more interesting because she's actually shown to have a history of wanting to use her skills to make things better for her own people, something the OVA version conspicuously lacked. Or are you one of those people who thinks that bad guys who have tragic or sympathetic pasts or motivations are inherently weak and wimpy, and would rather your villain be a two-dimensional cutout than show even a hint of vulnerability or sadness?

It's true that "Decode" has very different art and music than the OVA, but it's not inferior on that score, just different. I know some people get nostalgia kicks from the 90's animation of the OVA, which I can't say for myself because I'm not old enough to remember most 90's anime. Still, nostalgia alone is not a good reason for declaring something objectively better--Pokemon fandom is a testament to that. And as for English dubbing, there is no comparison--"Decode" has the superior dub, all the way.

The one criticism I hear of "Decode" that seems actually somewhat well thought out and that I might actually be able to understand is that it's slower-paced than the OVA. This is perfectly true--certainly the OVA was able to tell a story in four episodes the equivalent of which took "Decode" thirteen episodes and change. However, the reason why "Decode" is slower paced is because it actually takes time to introduce and develop the characters and set the scene, and flesh out its themes. The OVA barely bothered to do any worldbuilding or give its aliens any sort of culture or background, and all the characters, human and alien, were painted in broad strokes. As a result, it doesn't have the well-developed alien worlds and histories or the deep, rich, nuanced characterizations that make "Decode" so enjoyable for me.

So is it just personal preference? Then why in the hell would you try to argue that the OVA is objectively better? Why do so many of you hate on "Decode" when "Decode" is the one that gives us an alien world that's actually developed, characters that are actually complex and nuanced, and surprisingly on-point social commentary? I'm really starting to think that you're just like the nostalgia whores from Pokemon, and are bashing "Decode" because you were already a fan of the OVA which it dares to deviate from.

Whatever.

Current Mood: crappy
Crossposts: http://sweettalkeress.livejournal.com/29248.html

{ visit my post } { visit the thread }

Current Mood: blah

Soooo…inspired by a spork of a Corific by Guardian’s Song from many moons ago, I decided to try my hand at inventing French toast pancakes and serving them to my parents and grandfather. They actually came out pretty good.

Here’s the recipe (which is borrowed from a French toast recipe by Robert Irvine that I found online):

Whisk together in a bowl:

4 eggs

¼ cup milk

Blend in another bowl:

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

Combine with wet ingredients. Stir in with spoon or whisk:

Enough sweet bread (i.e., challah, brioche bread, etc.), cut into small pieces, to form a batter with the consistency of cookie dough

Spoon batter into a hot, greased frying pan or griddle, flipping over when a brown crust forms on each side. Don’t worry if the outside gets very dark—it should still taste fine. The inside will likely be fairly doughy and moist. This is okay.

This much should serve some 3 or 4 people, assuming the pancakes are made a little larger than a deck of playing cards. You can also increase the amount of batter by adding more bread, egg, and milk, though this will probably make it less sweet. Serve with maple syrup, fruit, or whatever else you want (you could probably even add cheese to make a more substantial meal).

Current Mood: artistic

It's that "Try to catch me ridin' dirty" song that everyone knows about, which I remember being super popular when I was a young teenager. Rap Critic's now done an episode on it (and it's really great)!

If you don't have time to watch the video, the gist of the review he gave is that the song is technically very competent and enjoyable to listen to, but the actual content leaves something to be desired (as it's ostensibly about racial profiling but the guys in the song actually were committing crimes).

Current Mood: giggly

Here it is. Contains potential first-season spoilers.

Mostly all I'm getting from this is that whoever this person is, they completely missed the point of the series (case to point: "Birdy the Mighty: Decode" is NOT an action series--it is an action series in about the same sense that "Heat Guy J" is an action series and if you knew anything at all about the person who made it you'd know he doesn't DO straight action series). However, it's still pretty funny, and an absolute goldmine of "Birdy the Mighty: Decode" screenshots, which I'm grateful for since I'm putting together a powerpoint about this show for a panel on its creator.

Also...I'm glad I'm not the only one who picked up on how creepy Shyamalan is. I wouldn't go so far as to outright call Shyamalan a pedophile or a date rapist (since he never actually rapes anyone in-story, at least as far as we know), but this person isn't wrong when they say that there's something not quite right about the way he treats Sayaka....

Current Mood: cold

So, having watched the AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL AND SPECIAL "Birdy the Mighty: Decode" just last week (and that's not sarcasm, BTW), I decided to check out the 4-episode OVA it was (loosely) based on as well so I'd have a point of comparison (very important considering I'm planning to feature "Birdy the Mighty: Decode" in an anime panel I'll hopefully get to present at cons this upcoming season).

( Read my thoughts )
Other characters appear to be forerunners of many of the characters in "Decode's" first season. Tsutomu's classmates had greatly expanded roles in "Decode." Tsutomu's crush from the OVA, Natsumi, seems to have been split into two characters for "Decode," one of which got her name and appearance and the other, Sayaka, got her personality and role as love interest (in the first season, anyway). Tsutomu's two male friends, who do nothing in the OVA other than try to get Tsutomu to look at porn, seem to have been developed in "Decode" into two specific characters, who fanboy Shion Arita (Birdy's alter ego, who is a model and idol singer) and abandoned buildings in equal measure. Tsutomu's other friends seem to be "Decode's" own creation and have no equivalent in the OVA. In the villains' camp, Hikawa from the OVA appears to be a forerunner of Shyamalan, the main villain of "Decode's" first season, as he, like Shyamalan, is a human who makes contact with the aliens and experiments with a thing they're also interested in because he thinks he can control it (though exactly what he's doing differs--Hikawa created a serum that can turn people into super soldiers, which he plans to unleash on Tokyo, while Shyamalan is seeking out a weapon of mass destruction that he wants to use to kill all but a select few humans). One key difference between them is that while Shyamalan is obviously a villain he's much better than Hikawa at looking like a nice person. There are two reporters in the OVA who investigate the various alien-related crimes, and may have influenced the character of Muroto in "Decode." Pretty much every other character who appears in "Decode" seems to have been created specifically for "Decode."

Also, the English dubbing is MUCH, MUCH better in "Decode" than in the original OVA. Give me Luci Christian as the heroine and evil Todd Haberkorn any day.

So yeah. I enjoyed both of these shows, but I definitely think that "Decode" is infinitely the superior work. Apparently that's a minority opinion. I sorta chalk this up to the same reason we have nostalgia whores in Pokemon fandom--many of the people who have seen "Decode" are huge fans of the original OVA and hate on "Decode" because it's different. I guess in that sense I can admit bias because I hadn't seen the OVA before watching "Decode." Oh, well....

Current Mood: amused

This started as a response to a "Heat Guy J" review I saw on TVTropes, but it isn't limited to "Heat Guy J" fans (or else this rant might not exist...).

( Warning: some mentions of abuse (not depicted) )

Current Mood: cranky

You know one thing that really grinds my gears? People who can't tell the difference between liking something they see in media and condoning it. People who think that liking a nasty or unpopular character automatically means that you would support that character in real life.

And, I recognize that there will always be people for whom the likes of Edward Cullen really are their perfect men. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the notion some people seem to have that merely liking a character automatically means that you support/want to have sex with that character, regardless of your actual reasons for liking him or her. The hatedom against Snape from the Harry Potter books seems to be a classic example of this--there seem to be a few people who will always believe the worst of Snape's fans, as though the mere fact that they like him and find him sympathetic means that they support him calling Lily a bad name or picking on Harry. There have even been people who've tried to peg fans of Snape as racist (which admittedly partly had to do with the genuinely bad behavior of a few people who happened to like Snape, but STILL).

But that's simply not how it works. I like lots of characters who do lots of really reprehensible things, but I recognize that their behavior is wrong and don't try to emulate them. Liking Legato Bluesummers from "Trigun" does not make me a mass-murdering cannibal out to destroy humanity. Liking Clair Leonelli from "Heat Guy J" does not make me a mad bomber. Liking Mao from "Code Geass" does not make me a deranged psychopathic manchild who'd cut up her love interest with a chainsaw. Nor would I condone the behavior of any of these characters if I met them in real life. So why should liking Snape make anyone a racist? In all likelihood, there's a goodly amount of people (such as myself) who like characters such as the ones above, probably only because they're not real and their actions have no real-world consequences. Isn't part of the point of fiction escapism? And isn't part of escapism the idea that you can get close to things that horrify you while still remaining perfectly safe?

In addition, there is a difference between merely liking something and liking nothing except that thing (the latter of which I'd argue actually is cause for concern). As much as I love Mao, for example, I'd like to think I'd be freaked out if I met someone who went on about how he was the GREATEST ANIME CHARACTER EVER!! and every other anime character was worthless. In a similar vein, the mere fact that I happen to own a Cannibal Corpse album shouldn't mean anything by itself--but, if I refused to listen to anything that was not Cannibal Corpse, then I could see how my family would be worried.

...Yeah.

Current Mood: cynical

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: annoyed

This one I didn't make, either. I found it while browsing an old 'Heat Guy J" comm on LJ which appears to be pretty much dead.

Current Mood: accomplished

One thing I've come to notice from walking in sporking circles is that not only do multiple sporkings of the Hunger Games trilogy apparently exist, but someone's started sporking Divergent on Das_Sporking as well. Now, I can't attest to the quality of either of these works, but from my understanding both series have their good points and their bad points--they're not notoriously awful works like Twilight or the Fifty Shades series, which a good chunk of people enjoy ironically if at all. I'm beginning to think that part of the reason people are so eager to spork them is less anything specifically pertaining to their actual content (though that may have figured in, at least when this trend began) than that it's simply become "cool" to spork stories like that. Something about them makes them an easy target nowadays, in other words.

Current Mood: cranky

So, if you happen to be at Genericon on Sunday morning you'll get to hear me talking your ears off about how wonderful "Shiki" is. I'm all in a dither! :D

Current Mood: ecstatic
Crossposts: http://sweettalkeress.livejournal.com/26185.html

Reading Cori Falls' "Never Too Late" gets hilarious if you go to school about an hour away from the city of Rochester, NY....

Current Mood: ditzy

Am I the only one who's a bit frustrated by the tendency of some fans to treat the regions in the Pokemon games like they're exactly the same as the place they're based on? I mean, they're fairly obviously not--Unova, to cite an example I'd be most familiar with, may be based on New York City, but it clearly isn't New York City. If it were actually New York City it would have a stage theatre district, not a big-budget film studio. It would have a subway which everybody used, a park containing its central reservoir which everyone knew about, and a natural history museum that showed exhibits about dinosaurs and space rather than dragons. It wouldn't have tons of woods that anyone could get lost in between developed points--every inch of it would be developed with some areas clearly set aside to allow for greenery. It would have specific streets dedicated to Chinese culture, Italian culture, Jewish culture, and the list goes on. And near as we can tell, Unova has none of these things at all.

Similarly, if Sinnoh were actually Hokkaido it would mostly be a national park, which would be home to raccoon-dogs instead of Houndour. It would also have a train line that could take you to the other regions, but no such train line exists. If Hoenn were truly Kyushu it wouldn't have a community of people who live entirely in trees, or on the water. If Johto were really Chubu region (I believe that's what it's based on), it would have lead and zinc mines that made rural women living downstream sick. And so on. Even if you accept that certain facets of the culture of these places aren't shown because they're not relevant to the gameplay, the mere fact that there are pokemon living there, and that the cities have names unlike any seen in the real world (if, indeed, they're based on real-life places), makes it pretty clear that these aren't places that exist in the real world.

I mean, I get that the Pokemon regions are based on those of the real world, and I can even buy that their cultures would be similar to those of the real-world places. But some fans seem to want to argue that they're exactly the same, down to the last details of ethnicity and history, and I just don't get that at all.

So if you go up to someone who's cheering on a female character for beating up some male for talking to her or bothering her or whatever (something relatively innocuous, I mean), and you say "How would you like it if the genders were reversed," well, they'd have no defense at all. None whatsoever. If they were okay with a gender-inverted version then you could push them on why they thought it was okay for a boy to beat up a defenseless girl just for bothering him (because the boys in this situation, when you get right down to it, are usually defenseless). On the other hand, if they were not okay with it if the genders were reversed, then the question would become why it's okay for a girl to beat up a boy for bothering her, given that it so clearly isn't okay for a boy to beat up a girl for bothering him.

Current Mood: cold
Crossposts: http://sweettalkeress.livejournal.com/23582.html

So a short time ago I was reading this article about something completely unrelated, but one of the things the writer commented on in passing was that Twilight comes under fire a lot simply for being a book for girls. One of the people in the comments put in, quite sensibly, that a lot of people who don't like Twilight are offended by its undeniably offensive messages, to which the original poster replied that although there is, in fact, quite a lot to dislike about Twilight, in practice not everyone who's willing to talk about how much they hate it even brings that up, with many instead commenting on how it's a "stupid sparkly vampire series for stupid girls" (probably not in so many words, but you get the point). I even think this line of thought might be the origin of Mervin's "Hate it for the right reasons" video series (though there's no confirmation there).

I will say this makes the almost-obscene amount of time anti-Twilighters in certain sections of the internet spend comparing Twilight unfavorably to "Hellsing" all the more suspicious, because while "Hellsing" is popular with women and in some respects quite feminist, it's still technically written by a man, for an audience consisting primarily of men, and it shows.

Current Mood: cynical
Crossposts: http://sweettalkeress.livejournal.com/23215.html

( Introducing *drumroll* the Sad Sultry-voiced Villain! )

And yes, I'm well aware of the limitations of this label. For one thing it is much easier to apply to visual and recorded media than written media (though a book could provide cues as to how we're supposed to interpret a character's voice, of course). I'm also aware that different languages may complicate a character's classification as such--for instance, Mao from "Code Geass" and Furuichi from "Xam'd: Lost Memories" are Sad Sultry-voiced Villains in English but not in Japanese.

Current Mood: creative

This is something that's been on my mind about Cori Falls's story "Family Matters" for quite some time. Every so often I'll read through that story a bit just because it's cheesy and over-the-top. One thing that struck me about it is that Cori spends so much time in that fic talking about how wonderful Jessie and James's baby would be, and what all they'd do once they had a baby, and so on, that it seems as though she really wanted Jessie and James to have a baby there, but got overruled by canon.

If nothing else, she's (or was) as preoccupied with the idea of Jessie and James having a baby as I am with killing random characters' mothers in childbirth (that is, pretty damn preoccupied).