Times like this I really wish I could read Japanese. I’ve been keeping up with the monthly Aria releases and I seriously have to scour the nets to find discussion groups that can explain the subtler nuances to me. *sigh* Tokyopop speed those damn translations along man! At your present rate of release it’ll be three years before I see the end of Aria in a legitimate english translation and that BURNS! BURNS WITH THE RIGHTEOUS BURNING OF BURN!
I’ve also been staring at the monthly raws of Gunslinger Girl and been able to more passably get what the hell is going on. The anime is….alright. It’s a different anime house and Aida is more actively involved which means the side effect of the girls looking more like they do now in the manga as opposed to his original art style. It’s also lighter. I wonder how much of that is being influenced by the current trend in anime to not be so violent when it comes to shows that depict children. At least it’s not being censored like crazy like a couple of other shows were the past season. I’m watching the fansubs but I already made up my mind when they announced it that I would be getting the second season when it was released in the US. The question really is will I wait for a boxed set or buy the individual dvds? I’m also hoping with ADV Manga the way they currently stand that they’ll release a few more volumes with the English release of the dvd’s because that seems to be their strategy, release with the shows release to garner more attention and sales.
I am an eternal optimist, it means I get disappointed a lot.
I read all of Fairy Tail the yesterday. It’s cute. Cute and pretty plotless, but I like the characters nonetheless, though sometimes, especially in Natsu fights it gets hard to interpret exactly what the hell is going on in the fight scene.
I also read the first three-and-a-half volumes of Her Majesty’s Dog. This is also cute and fairly generic when it comes to a school setting, but that’s okay as well. Sometimes I enjoy reading a well worn genre and enjoying the subtle changes and touches an individual author puts in. Otherwise I’d just pick one damn manga from each subgenre and overused plot and stick with them alone and declare from atop a mountain that they are the one true and awesome version of this type of manga.
And that’d just be boring man.
I picked up Love Monster and also devoured all nine volumes available of that one. I’m a sucker for monsters of myth and legend and this is right up my alley, though sometimes the main characters make me want to smack them upside their damn heads. It’s not the greatest manga in the universe and writing about cliches it has plotnesia, fake harem (sure there are a lot of characters chasing her, but she picked from the beginning even if he is a dick), Mary Sue main character and villain of the week syndrome. So yeah. But I still really dig it and am dying to see how many more boy toys it tosses in before we come to the obvious conclusion that was painted for us in the first book.
Though seriously why is it that in reverse harem’s the girl almost always already picks a guy or the alpha picks her and the rest of the manga is all about the struggle of her giving in to the fact and normal harem’s it’s okay for a bunch of alpha females to fight over the guy including even living with him. How’s that fair? Just once I’d like to see a Tenchi style reverse harem where the guys willingly move in with the female, not because they’re coerced in by money from a third party and that there actually be a struggle over who is going to be the main squeeze. I mean to this day Tenchi has never resolved who he gets with (though it’s pretty obvious the answer is all of them) and there’s never been an OBVIOUSLY IT’LL BE GIRL X. I’d like to see that for myself because even Ouran Host Club shows Haruhi has a preference from fairly close to the beginning.
