A Certain Slant of Light

One last round-up post for the new year, and then I think I’m caught up! (Or so I like to hope.) I have been disgracefully lax about posting about TV shows this year, which is too bad because I’ve watched a lot of really good television.

( Brideshead Revisited, Gankutsuou, The Good Place, Grantchester, The Librarians, Parks and Rec, Shetland, Underground )

I also watched The Crown, but I ended up moving that one to a separate post because I went on about it so long. Watch this space!

I’ve already posted about most of the movies I saw in September (trying to prevent the backlog that overcame me after August! I still haven't posted about Menashe), but here a couple about which I didn’t have quite as much to say.

First, The Women’s Balcony, a delightful Israeli film about a small orthodox Jewish congregation in Jerusalem after the women’s balcony in the synagogue collapses halfway through a bar mitzvah. The collapse injures the rabbi’s wife and sends the rabbi into a state of nearly catatonic shock, which creates a power vacuum… into which steps a charismatic young ultra-orthodox rabbi, who sees this as a chance to win this comparatively lax congregation (the women don’t wear head-coverings) over to his views.

It’s a real ensemble picture - a portrait of a community as much as a portrait of any of its individual characters. I really enjoyed it, but then I’m fascinated by anything that offers a keyhole view into the lives of the highly religious.

I also popped over to the theater to see Lego Ninjago, of which I perhaps expected a little too much on account of how much I loved Lego Batman. It’s good goofy fun (with mechas!), but the father-son reconciliation plotline needed to give more weight to the destruction Garmadon caused - not just in his son’s life, but to the city of Ninjago - in order to have real emotional heft.

And I rewatched My Neighbor Totoro! Because Julie had not seen it *gasp*, which clearly needed to be corrected as soon as possible. It’s still a delightful, delightful movie - a perfect melding of fantasy and reality, with fantasy elements that seem to grow right out of the beautiful landscape, and the whole thing grounded by one of the most realistic depictions of childhood I’ve ever seen onscreen. Mei is such a four-year-old, oh my God.

Inspired by the movie question. I’ve done an even worse job posting about TV than I have about movies this year (I’ve done a pretty terrible job posting about everything this year), so I thought at least I’d do a TV round-up so I’d have some record of what I’ve seen.

...And then I realized I actually had a lot to say about most of them (hence the fact that I didn’t write about most of them: I wanted to do them justice), so I’ve divided the overview into parts. Today: anime!

Puella Magi Madoka Magica. A show that I probably would have loved if I hadn’t heard so much about how it was amazing beforehand. (In fact, let me put a SPOILER tag here, just in case anyone else would like to watch this show without any spoilers.)

I did enjoy it, but I went into it aware that it was The Harrowing Magical Girl Anime that Will Leave You Broken, and I suspect it’s much more harrowing if you go into it expecting happy magical girl times and instead get a show which is, basically, about selling your soul to the devil.

I’ve heard people complain that this show is about how it’s bad for girls to want too much, but I think that’s a misunderstanding. It’s not about wanting too much. It’s about wanting something so much that you’re willing to sacrifice everything to get what you think you want, only to discover that your heart’s desire gives you no happiness because, well, one of the things you sacrificed was the capacity for happiness.

I find the show’s themes fascinating, but I never got attached to most of the characters (well, I did have a soft spot for Kyoko), probably because I knew beforehand that it was going to end badly for pretty much everyone.

END SPOILERS

Sweet Blue Flowers. Loved this one! poeticknowledge recommended it to me; it’s a sweet, slow-moving slice-of-life anime about two childhood friends, bubbly A-chan and shy Fumi, who lost touch when Fumi moved away but reconnect when Fumi moves back into town at the beginning of high school.

Their friendship provides a touchstone for the show, and it keeps coming back to it, but it also ranges out quite widely into other parts of their lives. Fumi gets a girlfriend; another girl is in love with Fumi’s girlfriend; Fumi’s girlfriend is in love with yet someone else, but maybe also in love with Fumi, and generally quite confused. The show is sensitive to emotional nuance in a way that a lot of television isn’t, and the slow thoughtfulness is lovely.

Also the animation is quite beautiful.

Natsume’s Book of Friends. Also love this one! I’m watching it with my friend Caitlin, which means that we’re seeing it in fits and starts because we only see each other every other month or so (she lives two hours away), but we’re really enjoying it.

It’s also a slice-of-life anime, sort of, except with a magical twist. The hero, Natsume, can see yokai (nature spirits? I’m not sure how to translate it. Denizens of the spirit world, who most people can’t see), which has isolated him. At best, people have thought he’s a liar; at worst, they decided he’s crazy, maybe dangerous. As a result, he’s been shuttled from relative’s house to relative’s house for most of his childhood.

But over the first season of the anime, his life finally begins to look up. It slowly becomes clear that the relatives he’s staying with like him, and are likely to keep him; the kids at school are friendly. After his long isolation, Natsume’s not sure how to respond: he’s friendly, but distant; he doesn’t want to be any kind of bother. But by the end of the season, he has opened up enough that a few friendships are just beginning to sprout.

And he starts to learn how to connect with the yokai, too, after a lifetime of trying his best to ignore them. From his grandmother Reiko (one of my favorites, and I wish we got more flashbacks about her) he inherited a book of yokai names, which would allow him - or anyone else who controls the book - to control any of the named yokai. He decides to give the names back, and in the process, he comes to know many of the local yokai. After a lifetime of fearing the creatures that he sees and hating them for keeping him apart from everyone, he learns that they are another potential source of connection.

Day 15 - Favorite female character.

Writing about Fruits Basket’s Kyo yesterday reminded me how much I adore the heroine of that series, Tohru, who is warm, welcoming, easy to please, and instinctively compassionate. She loves almost everyone she meets, and not because she ignores their flaws, but because when other people behave badly her first impulse is almost never to judge, but to try to understand where they’re coming from.

Everyone deserves to have a Tohru in their life. I have met a couple of people like this, and their genuine affection for everyone is a balm on everyone’s souls: they have this dual effect where people relax around them, because there’s no need to put up a front - they’ll love you without it - but at the same time, most people want to live up to their example, and behave better as a result.

Just reading about Tohru has a little bit of that effect.

And on top of everything else, she’s so persistent. When we first meet her in the very first episode, Tohru is living in a tent because her beloved mother recently died and the relatives she’s supposed to be living with are renovating. She’s working an after school job to pay her expenses, and it doesn’t leave her enough time to do her homework, and everything’s very difficult...and nonetheless Tohru crawls out of her tent all Determined Face. Things may be tough, but she’ll keep on trucking!

She’s such a source of support for everyone else, in fact, that she’s not sure how to ask for support herself. Before her mother Kyoko died, she was clearly Tohru’s rock, so her death has left a tremendous hole in Tohru’s life. Let me pause to add how much I love Kyoko , who adored Tohru and told her so often and enthusiastically. That rock-solid adoration is clearly the basis of much of Tohru’s strength: she’s had so much love in her life that she can shine it out like a lighthouse.

Much of Tohru’s character arc in Fruits Basket concerns her learning how to ask for help when she needs it. She doesn’t need to be strong for everyone all the time. Sometimes, they can be strong for her.

Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season).

Crap, this meme is clearly geared toward people who keep up with TV better than I do. I don’t think I’ve seen any shows that aired this TV season yet. Oops?

But for shows that are new to me, I’ve been watching Ouran High School Host Club and it’s pretty hilarious. My friend Rick tried to warn me off it because he thinks its sexist, and there are parts of it that definitely are… But at the same time, the thing he specifically brought up were the repeated shots of silly girls squeeing over the cute boys, and I actually enjoy the fact that show is aware that being squeed over is what its cute boy characters are for. It’s like a laugh track for squee.

Also, when plotlines deal with specific girl characters (rather than the squeeing masses who act as audience stand-ins whenever the boys do something purposefully adorable), they’re treated just as seriously as the boy characters are - which is often not very seriously, because the show basks in its ridiculous tropiness and over the top characters.

But even though the characters are so OTT, the show doesn’t shy away from emotional seriousness if the occasion calls for it - I’m thinking particularly of the episode “Operation Haruhi and Hikaru’s First Date.” Before that episode Hikaru (and his twin brother Kaoru) have previously been mostly comic relief, but the episode digs into their backstory in a way that doesn’t change their characters, but makes them suddenly seem more like real people.

But most of the characters have episodes like that: at the beginning they all seem like reverse-harem anime stereotypes (the show in fact introduces them that way; it knows its own tropes), and then slowly reveal more depth. It’s kind of fun to see the masks fall away.

Princess Tutu! I wrote my main Yuletide story for it, and man, is it a deeply weird show: a kaleidoscope of fractured fairy tales centered on a duck who becomes a girl who can become a superheroine (Princess Tutu!) who dances people through their emotional problems, in order to retrieves the heart shards of the Prince, Mytho.

Everyone is all about Mytho in this show, which is peculiar given that Mytho has neither emotions nor personality - I don’t mean that he seems kind of flat, a la Bella Swan, I mean that it is actually canon that he’s an empty husk of a person. He shattered his heart in order to imprison an evil raven and thus has no emotions. Our heroine, duck/girl/Princess Tutu Ahiru, is driven by the desire to return to him the shards of his heart.

But as much as I love Ahiru, who is all boisterous and determined and empathetic, my heart is ultimately given to Fakir. This is distressing, because Fakir is - and I say this with all love - a terrible human being, at least for the first half of Princess Tutu. I wish I could say that I liked him because of the character growth, but no, I was all about Fakir pretty much as soon as he brooded his way angrily across the screen.

In my fic, where he keeps calling Ahiru “idiot” every five seconds? That is actually a nice version of Fakir, because he undergoes some character growth over the course of the show. When he’s talking to Mytho in the first few episodes, he’s always saying things like “You’re so worthless,” “You don’t have to do anything but what I tell you,” and “I am an abusive jackass.”

Okay, he doesn’t actually say that last one. It is implied by the time that Mytho, who is in the process of regaining his heart, is all “I think I’m going to do the OPPOSITE of what you told me!” and Fakir smacks him across the face.

Fakir, incidentally, considers himself Mytho’s protector, like a knight who has sworn vassalage to his prince - Fakir and Mytho are, in fact, incarnations of two characters from a story, a knight and his prince. (This is reason #1 why I am all about Fakir. Loyalty kink all the way!) Fakir is astonishingly inept at protecting Mytho, in a “I think you are the person Mytho most needs protecting from” kind of way.

Eventually he realizes this! Having smacked Mytho, who he has sworn to protect, Fakir has a nervous breakdown about he is a terrible person who is completely failing at his self-appointed duty to protect Mytho. And then he tries to change his behavior.

This is, I think, part of the reason I like the character so much: the show knows perfectly well that Fakir has all the problems, and spends a certain amount of time smacking him in the face with the fact that he’s angry and scared and far too willing to let his (bad) behavior be dictated by that. He’s scared? Well, everyone else should be too!

Except Fakir is pretty inept at being frightening. Mytho doesn’t care about being insulted, and he doesn’t let being slapped deter him from his plan of action. Ahiru isn’t scared of Fakir either, even when he doesn’t like her. (Fakir not-liking someone looks pretty much like his “I am your sworn protector and will dedicate my life to you!”) And when he does like her, he actually makes an effort to...treat her nicely.

By Fakir standards, this means still calling her an idiot fairly regularly. It really kind of disturbs me that I like his character so very, very much.

Reason #2 I like Fakir: even though he thinks Mytho and Ahiru are both idiotic for their desire to help people, at the same time he immensely admires that quality in both of them. Contradictory characters for the win!

YAY the other library has the complete run of the Fruits Basket manga! (My hometown has two libraries. This is because my hometown is actually two towns, grown together like a delicious mutant strawberry.)

This is excellent, because apparently the Fruits Basket anime only covers the first half of the manga. No wonder the anime has such a strangely inconclusive ending! It's not actually a bad ending - it puts an important thematic cap on the season - but it does leave dangling basically every loose end that could possibly dangle.

What do I love about Fruits Basket? The fact that it is pure, distilled JOY, that's what. The conceit of the story is that the Sohma family is under a curse: some of its members turn into (totally adorable) Chinese zodiac animals when they're hugged by a person of the opposite sex.

Naturally, our heroine Tohru stumbles onto their house and accidentally hugs someone almost immediately, because she's just such a huggy person, always over-brimming with optimism. Seriously EPIC OPTIMISM. When we first meet her, she's all "I am living in a tent! Because my mother recently died and I have nowhere else to stay! Marching off to high school now! THINK HAPPY THOUGHTS!"

Later on, Kyo - the cat who is not allowed to be part of the zodiac - tells Tohru, in a moment of unwonted gentleness, that it's all right if she's sad sometimes. That people will still like her if she sometimes complains. Her beloved mother just died (Tohru's relationship with her mother is one of my favorite things about Fruits Basket - I have a lot of favorite things about Fruits Basket - it deserves its own post), so she's carrying a lot of pain, but she's still so upbeat. She's so kind, and so strong: I adore her.

Also I adore Kyo. Kyo is MADE OF ANGER and is constantly challenging Yuki, the zodiac rat, to fights, which Kyo always loses. Kyo is strangely incompetent at everything martial despite being MADE OF ANGER. Or possibly because he's MADE OF ANGER. Maybe there's a lesson here about it being easier to win things when you aren't blinded by fury? Anyway, he's basically the definition of tsundere - I feel that English should borrow this word, because it's so useful. Angry characters with secretly soft and squishy feelings! Hello, all my favorite characters ever! Veronica Mars! Jaye Tyler! Gaia Moore!

Anyway, Kyo's general tsundere-ness, hair-trigger temper, and instinctively negative reaction to everything make him a terrible romantic partner for Tohru. But...I nonetheless find Tohru/Kyo much more interesting than Tohru/Yuki, although Tohru and Yuki would clearly make a better couple because they're so similar. "More healthy" is not necessarily the same as "more interesting" in story terms.

Tohru is more outgoing, while Yuki has a bit of an Ice Prince thing going on - seriously, they call him "the Prince" at his high school - is this a common thing at Japanese high schools, calling some student or other the Prince? Because I just watched Princess Tutu (which I also mean to write about! Naturally I am ALL ABOUT Fakir) and there's also a character called the Prince, who in that case is literally a prince, but his classmates don't know that.

But, though Tohru's outgoing and Yuki's reserved, they're both kind and thoughtful underneath. They would make a great couple, a wonderful partnership.

Only, couldn't Tohru and Kyo have a whirlwind romance first? Which burns like a firework while it lasts, and ends in a beautiful explosion?

Maybe it will happen! I have the whole second half of the story to read in the manga! :D :D :D

The road trip consisted of eight hours of driving on Monday, eight hours of driving on Wednesday, and eight hours of unpaid baby-sitting sandwiched in between. I can hear you all dying of envy.

No, it wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds. The kids were much less high-strung than I was at that age (the five- and seven-year-old accepted it with remarkable grace when their little sister waddled into their blanket fort and completed a mission of MASS DESTRUCTION). And they were funny. We saw a commercial for the movie Boat Trip. The five-year-old watched it and then, very solemnly, repeated the last line: "How could you think I'm gay?"

Also, the little girl looked exactly like Hina Ichigo, from Rozen Maiden.

Rozen Maiden is an anime about talking dolls with magic powers who occasionally fly through gateways into dreams, which means it's kind of like crack for me. I didn't play with dolls much as a kid (I was a teddy bear girl) but for some reason I adore stories about living breathing talking magic dolls. And they fight duels! And they have beautiful clothes! And they have anime hair, which is like a character in itself.

I've been watching anime recently in an effort to become a well-rounded person (yes, anime is an integral part of well-roundedness. Really.), so I am looking for series that are good and don't have five thousand episodes, if anyone knows anything about anime. I'm watching Rozen Maiden and I'm planning to watch Chrono Crusade, which involves a nun fighting demons in the 1920s in Chicago (I think), using the power of an interestingly inaccurate remix of Christianity and her demon buddy.