Sabishiiko

I didn't originaly plan to write on this series. My fellow fan writers may of wished I hadn't, no one seems to know what to think of a full length novella (it's not done yet) or a crash course in Scottish history.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4220509/1/

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4131911/1/

Loki and Heimdall debate the nature of evil

I may as well write this one out as well.

NDB was a real departure for Anime, at least as far as I’ve seen. In my opinion Nabashin decided to take every established criteria for anime (and story building in general) and do the exact opposite.
I loved the musical format. It’d be great to see more musical anime but I don’t expect to. I’m not sure the show went over that great in general though it won deserved prizes from the industry. I think a basic appreciation for the musical format is needed. Sadly the majority (not all, but the largest number) of anime fans probably wouldn’t have ever experienced a musical in their lives unless they happen to belong to a family that ritually indoctrinates their young with The Sound of Music ever year at Christmastime. (I don’t like Julie Andrews, but I love musicals/plays)
For a second reason why we probably wont see many musical anime; singing animation usually translates as Disney, and certainly with good cause, no one in anime land wants to do anything remotely Disneyesque. I don’t blame them. I’d want to stay as far away from Disney as possible myself. I really wish Studio Ghibli had someone else to go through to distribute their films here.
NDB is about as far from Disney as can be for animation. The humor is in much better taste. (I’m serious damn it!)
Actually it’s sort of a kiddie porn version of The Monkees go to Japan. Really, a strong allegiance to that era of American/British music is loud and clear. A lot of little things throughout remind me of Help, Hard Days Night, and The Monkees TV show. Nabashin must have missed the Monkees movie Head, probably a good thing, though the last few episodes have a similar futility.
Not even Nabashin’s own conventions were sacred. He broke his rules as well. After eight episodes of disconnected mayhem he suddenly slapped on a four part story arc with tongue-in-cheek seriousness. Four episodes was just too long. Two episodes maximum should have been enough for the band break-up dilemma. Like stated above, it did sort of mirror the futile ennui of the mass band break-ups at the end of the sixties. Like poor George at the end of his rope with Paul “I’ll play it anyway you say or I won’t play at all if that’s what you want!” during the harrowing Abby Road recordings. Painful.
Ichiro getting progressively more and more lame was also annoying as all get out. (I’ve noticed he’s a lot harsher in the Japanese than in the English translation, at least towards Mako) Ichiro holding up the bank with machine guns (“No Singing! No Dancing!”) was really a great scene.
It’s a shame episode 13 never got made. A return to the irregularities of normal abnormality in Nerima land would have recovered things a bit from the four episode crucible. Still, episode 12 is wrapped up pretty as a package. Running the opening song at the end gives the impression of continuance beyond the show itself, which it needs. It’s like a folk hero saga.
Hidiki looks a lot like a (very) young Van Heflin. If NDB really broke up, Hidiki would probably turn out just like Jeff Hartnett in Johnny Eager.


This is for all the lonely pandas
Thinkin' that Ichiro has passed them by
Don't give up till you drink from the bamboo cup
He'll love you more as time goes by....

Despite some real annoying bits I enjoyed Peacemaker Kurogane. As is usually the case, if I can get caught up with the characters I’ll be hooked, and that is often what Anime has going for it, the close attention to character personality balance and individual development.
I was really interested in a Japanese historical fiction because I honestly don’t know a whole lot of Japanese history. Maybe it’s because I don’t know that much about it, or maybe the marriage between historical and fictional realities was too unevenly yoked, I just didn’t get the feeling that it rang especially true. Something seemed very off about Tetsu and Saya’s last scene though I really couldn’t tell you what. It seemed unrealistic to me. Since I saw this on Anime on Demand (which chose not to air ep. 6) I don’t have access to commentaries or the Japanese/subtitle track so perhaps I am missing some small nuance, however, it just didn’t seem to work.
Inner conflict and friction between characters builds dimension, interest, and moves the plot forward, no doubt, but this is one seriously dysfunctional group of people. Even many of the minor characters are so loaded with excess emotional baggage that it made the writing seem a little heavy-handed. This probably IS realistic, but it doesn’t help the story.
Luci Christian is always excellent, she has done many of my favorite voices, Tetsu no exception. However, Kevin Corn turns in the best performance ever! What a perfect voice to depict someone rapidly becoming completely unhinged. (“Master, your head, it’s not here!”) I really felt sorry for Suzu. It reminded me of the ending of The Man Who would be King with Peachy carrying Danny’s head with him all the way out of Kafirastan. Although I’m sure the Japanese culture attaches its own symbolism to such a situation.
I know actually that most voice work is done solo, the actors don’t necessarily have to come in contact with each other at all during an entire series, still, it was great to have Greg Ayres and Jason Douglas fussing with each other again. Their voices work well together whether the actors necessarily have to or not.
Something about Shinpachi makes me think of Micky Rooney. Is it the voice or the freckled scrappy personality? Just what the world needs, Andy Hardy goes to Japan.
On the other hand, as much as I really adore Chris Patton’s work (he voiced my first favorite – and still favorite - anime character) I pray to the gods of voice direction that he never again voice a character that sounds like a male southern belle with bipolar disorder. Susumu is the poster child of a minor character with way too much emotional baggage. His sister, Ayumu comes across as one of the most realistic characters in the show, funny since she is fictional while Susumu is based on a real person. I like the flashback with Susumu a little kid, Patton doing that awful accent and trying to sound like a 5 year old at the same time.
I’d like to know whose idea it was to use such broad southern accents anyway. They don’t work for me. It’s not that I’m not used to them either, I spent my childhood summers in Hillbilly country in Arkansas. They just really seem out of place, or unnaturally exaggerated, in the same way that I haven’t heard a decent Brit/Scot/Irish accent done since that cursed Harry Potter came out.

PLUS : Some Le Chevalier D'Eon Reviews

Over the weekend I was watching the commentaries from Le Chevalier D'Eon and Jose Diaz used the term FUBAR which I haven’t heard in about 15 years. What a wonderful term, almost nobody knows what it means and it just sounds cool, not to mention highly appropriate. Take my life for instance... In the last three weeks I lost a filling and then managed to break the remaining part of the tooth, broke small bones in my left foot – so now I’m hobbling about like an idiot, and, after not raining for months we get veritable monsoons which reveal that the windshield of my car has developed a serious leak, soaking the entire front floor and seats.
There has also been a death in the family, my step grandfather, who, despite being an important person in my past, I had not seen for 24 years. I can’t even begin on that subject right now. At the moment there is too much anger, regret, and the bitterness of reopened, long term family strife to say anything useful.

In any case, these are the circumstances precipitating the weekend escape to Anime land, i.e. Le Chevalier D’Eon. I liked this show, although I didn’t expect to at first. I like Durand best of course, (sucker for tragic hero characters) and hated for him to die but it had to be so, besides, the character could hardly have functioned in the coming ‘age” so it was merciful in a way.
Voice actorwise I think Tyler Galindo completely steals the show, and I hope to hear Amit Patel again soon. What a really creepy voice.
Best line is, D’Eon : Palis Royale, that’s where I got my training as a boy.
It’s seriously hard not to say, yeah D’Eon, was that a double major then?
Worst line, Durand : It appears they are all really fast walkers.
Ergh, Guardiolla couldn’t you of protested that line? That’s as bad as Fakir in Princess Tutu : He’s not lost, he’s just somewhere we don’t know!
At the same time I would of loved for Durand to pat Robin on the head and say "Ah, don't worry about it Robin, it's nothing to loose your head over! heh heh heh."

I really love the commentaries, although it was painful listening to Jessica Boone never remembering what ermine were and trying so hard to, (and they aren’t rodents, they belong to the weasel family – but that’s just me being typically anal retentive about details.)They need to do these interviews earlier in the day or something, the actors are loseing their minds by this point.
I get the feeling the cast would rather have ditched doing the commentaries if at all possible, but I hope the directors continue to drag them into it. Maybe the actors would get into it better if some creativity were involved. It’d be fun to get a couple of the “characters” to get in there and run commentaries, or interview each other. Think back to Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok and how much fun it would be to have “Hiemdal” and “Frey” interview each other on a commentary. Of course they’d be beating the crap out of each other by the end and both would be saying all kinds of terrible things about the other characters.
Imagine D’Eon and Maximillian doing a commentary as if they were actually real actors themselves.
“Geez dude, and what’s with the giant butt mark you left on my bed in episode #_? How wide was that?!”
(For the sake of reference, in one episode Max sends a telepathic projection of himself to hassle D’Eon, D’Eon insists he was really there and, as proof, there is a crumpled place on the edge of the bed as if someone had been sitting there.)
By the way, that's got to be the ugliest dress ever!

It’d be a lot of fun. It’d also be fun to have a character interviewed by his or her actor, (Although that's probably asking a lot of someone) That sort of thing has been done before in print, (Leonard Nimoy interviews Spock), but I don’t think in this genre. I guess the problem there is that someone would have to be hired to write the scripts and then that person would have to be paid. The actors would probably have to be paid more for it too since that would be more like actual performing rather than bribing them with wine and locking them in the studio for half an hour at the end of the day. So it probably won’t happen, but I’d sure like to hear it if it did.

My cat is missing.

This is a bad time in San Antonio for a cat to be missing. For those not in the area, in the past several months there has been an ongoing cat massacre. It is unclear how many animals have fallen prey to this human predator (or predators) as, for the most part; those remains thus far recovered are, to put it gently as possible, not complete.
I first heard about this sometime last year, the city put out a reward and some sort of public awareness campaign and the killings seemed to stop.
I last saw “Con” the day after Christmas. Not a huge surprise at first. Cats are like that. The winter months are a busy time for little kitty hormones after all, and I’d long suspected that there was another family he visited occasionally. But he’s never been away this long before.
Last week it was reported that the killer had returned. Cat parts were turning up in the north west side of town. It’s hard to know what to think.
Con, (his name was supposed to be Khan as in Shere Khan from the Jungle Book, but apparently the vet’s secretary took spelling into her own hands) was very wary of strangers, even children. He would even run from me if I came across him away from the house. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting their hands on him, although, like any animal, he lived for his stomach. He was a huge orange American longhair. I had to keep his tail trimmed short with a puffball at the tip or he’d never keep himself clean. He seemed very proud of that puffball. Despite his skittishness away from home, he was devoted at home. He never scratched, never hissed, would even allow me to bathe him with the garden hose like the dogs (which he thought he was one of). He sprawled out on his back on the couch like a dirty old man and slept for hours so long as anyone was home. I used to have to sneak out of the house because he’d come running when he heard my car leaving as if not wanting to be left behind.
When he was a kitten I was in the middle of re-shingling the roof myself. Every day I went up there to work Con followed me up the ladder lay nearby and watched. (No doubt it was quite a spectacle; I am only a 5’4, 130lb girl,- an old man came out and laughed at me) so the friendly company was welcome.
I know what most people would say, and I want them to know I agree. It is totally irresponsible to have a pet that roams the neighborhood at will. I did ensure that he was ALWAYS up to date on his shots, clean as possible and treated for fleas, etc. regularly. I did not intend to have a cat in the first place. I was approached by a person of slight acquaintance with a box of kittens. Knowing this person’s track record, I knew this terminally flea invested ball of matted orange fluff that couldn’t even meow yet and was by no stretch of imagination the 6 weeks she insisted he was, would survive otherwise so I took him. All of his siblings were dead within 3 weeks. My current situation prevented me from keeping him inside so when he was old enough to look out for himself he had to be an outdoor cat. He did roam, but not too far, and generally I knew where he was going and he’d be there for breakfast at 7 am every morning. He’d stay home, curled up in the yard somewhere all day or inside on the weekends and evenings, then it was dinner and he would be off to do his cat duties. This was how it was for four years.
I will not have another cat here, not even out of pity. It was inevitable in an ever growing metropolitan area full of all things detrimental to the safety of animals, much less people, that this day would come, and some would say I asked for it. But that fact makes my heart no less heavy.

Well, I havn't updated in a while.
I finally got some of my stories posted on FF.net

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3982468/1/ A full length story

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3992294/1/ One scene centering on Loki and Mayura

As ever expanding selections at video stores and overwhelmed booksellers can attest, Anime fandom is a rapidly growing culture. It has become a vast community of widely diverse individuals connected by a common interest in Japanese animation. We become a part of this community, acknowledge it or not, when we become fans. Like any community, belonging places on its members a certain level of responsibility.
The Anime world is not always a peaceful place, it has extremes and subgroups, fanatical supporters and rabid detractors, but there is nothing more destructive to any culture than an attack from within. Fan subbing is just that, an irresponsible act of internal sabotage on the distributors of anime and the fans themselves from within the community.
It is difficult to imagine how anyone could not realize that bypassing legal, professional channels, ignoring copyright law, as well as the natural rights of artists, actors, and animation companies, in order to distribute for free a near official quality product that distribution companies have gone to effort and expense to produce for legal sale would not be OK. It’s not a new concept. Video and audio piracy has been around for as long as the technology that makes it possible to produce it. It’s readily available in nearly every country, but that makes it no less wrong. Fansubbs, like illegal music downloads, are especially insidious. There is no middleman supplier to raid or illegal merchandise to impound. Safely ensconced in the privacy of their homes with the power of modern technology at the touch of a keypad gives some people a glorious feeling of being above the law.
It is even more difficult to understand the temerity with which these individuals voice their indignation when the rightful distributors attempt to protect themselves. Distributors, pursuing only their legal right for compensation have become victims of incredibly virulent hatred to the point of death threats against themselves and their families from so called fans.
Not even the media producers which should recognize their professional brethren with some sort of loyalty have been of any support. Vulture like as they scan for scandal they have focused on the ,supposedly, terrified nine year old whose parents were made to pay a large fine for illegal downloads, ignoring the fact that the majority of those caught were significantly older, or why a nine year old was visually consuming large quantities of material usually rated fourteen and up. It is the obligation of parents to teach their children right from wrong, including obeying the law. If they are willing to hide behind a child’s innocent age to negate their responsibility for the child’s actions, perhaps a fine is just the wake up call they need.
In December of 2006 a large coalition of Japanese audio-visual rights holders approached YouTube.com in a very orderly and, for the Japanese, straightforward, letter requesting measures be taken to prohibit fansubs, remove those that were already there, and track the perpetrators in an effort to stop them. Also, they asked that it be made clear to users that such activity was illegal and should stop. It hasn’t stopped. Distributors of Anime have been asking politely for years for fansubing to stop. That they have waited this long to enforce their legal rights is cause for fan appreciation, not abuse.
While it is true that most fan subbers do not make a profit, other than the undoubted, and certainly significant, adulation of their supporters, it doesn’t take a genius to realize the impact their actions have on the industry.
It isn’t hard to imagine that if a company invests time, money, and manpower into a product it has a right to expect a fair compensation. Gouging a hole in that companies ability to make a profit by producing and distributing its product at low or no cost will eventually destroy the industry. There will no longer be any reason for that company to continue it’s efforts and it will disappear. The entire community suffers as a result.
It is said that Anime is overpriced. If you become accustomed to getting things for free, that might be an easy thing to think. Price is not some arbitrary cudgel with which Anime distributors punish fans or test their perseverance. Besides the cost of legal rights to the shows, and the team which negotiates them through the endless maze of corporate procedure, there is a vast army of individuals from highly trained translators to lowly technicians to be paid in exchange for not always the most enjoyable or rewarding of work. Many of these people started as fans themselves and put a large percentage of their love for the Anime community into what they do. This makes it all the harder when their supposed fellow fans disdain their efforts and make them faceless corporate scapegoats when they don’t get their way.
While high demand raises price is a hard fact of reality, the reality that theft raises price is an even harder fact. Undermining the profit of any company is the same as stealing from them and you can bet your year end inventory based bonus that said company will have no recourse but to raise prices to offset the loss. And yet, most Anime distributors have made surprising efforts to make their products more affordable, accessible, and of higher quality.
There are fans who feel their tastes aren’t reflected by the choice of titles the distributors are releasing or, without regard for the tremendous effort involved, that they are too slow between releases. There are better and legal ways, of confronting these issues. Most distributors seem more than willing to listen to fan input and actively solicit it. Believe it or not they really do want to market an item that the fans want to buy.
Fan subbers themselves often feel they are well intentioned. The titles they distribute aren’t licensed in their country or otherwise available in their language. With complete sincerity they vow to cease operation as soon as the Anime, or Manga, becomes officially licensed. They fail to hear the question, why license and produce an item that is already available for free? Despite the gratitude of those relative few with whom the fan subbed work is shared, the rest of the fan community is robbed of future enjoyment. In addition, the original Japanese creators, producers, writers, actors, are not receiving their legal or monetary due. If fan subbers feel no allegiance to their local distributors and persist in snubbing the many fine writers and actors that work for them, they could at least show some small loyalty to the original creators.
There may be a lot of fans who are going to say “Gee, I didn’t know!” and stop downloading fan subs, or at least download fewer, but there are many who will continue to blatantly abuse the fruits of modern technology as if the mere fact of their fandom entitles them to instant gratification at any cost. They will not be stopped without increasingly harsh legal measures unless the anime community itself excises the cancer like greed and selfishness that will eventually destroy the legal import and distribution of Anime.
Fan subbing is an insupportable practice. It’s not only damaging, but potentially deadly to the industry it professes to revere. It’s not merely a corporate problem. It impacts the whole community that all Anime fans, in some capacity, are part of. The privilege of which does, and should, necessitate the owning of some degree of responsibility and accountability towards it.

You can always depend on the stupidity of others. I was roaring about making a menace of myself yesterday over this but by end of the day I was too tired to rant. So, bottom line...
If you are idiotic enough to leave a 15 month old child loose in your running car and he locks you out, yeah, on general principle I'll probably help you get him out, but don't expect sugar coated platitudes or my sympathy for your obvious stupidity!
Also, please don't scream, wail, or writhe, nor carry on about calling 911 to cover up your own guilty conscience and embarassment.
If she had let him out of his car seat, why didn't she just pick him up and take him out the driver's side with her? Seeing that she lives a mere few blocks away I suspect he never was strapped in to begin with.
Why leave the car running? A huge new SUV so I don't think it's a matter of fearing the car wont start again, and the weather has been absolutely mild in the morning so no need to gripe about having to turn off the air conditioner. The truth is plain laziness, and for some reason, some people have some bizare notion that makes them feel all special and important to have the car sitting there waiting for them like some movie star's limo. There is, of course, always stupidity.
We had one parent actually come in to pick up her little girl and went back out to find her car gone. This isn't even a bad area. Still, the police came and promptly chewed her out for leaving her car running unattended and while they really could ticket her for that they wouldn't this time.
I wasn't much better I admit, I could only manage "Gee, it's a good thing you hadn't left your other daughter out there waiting like you usually do." But then guess who was stuck carrying around her screaming kid for an hour while she oozed and flailed about in a soggy panic as if there had been a sudden death in the family. Get a grip lady.
This is the same mother who sighs over her daughter's full volume protestations of everything that she doesn't know how she came to be such a little drama queen. Hmmm, I wonder.
The whole thing ended up a setup for insurance money, but still, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR KID IN A RUNNING CAR! I will personally hunt you down, or I would if I had the free time.

( Finished fan art )