Book Review: Persona

Persona by Genevieve Valentine

Comic Review: Cleopatra in Space (volumes one and two)

It's a little surprising I haven't blogged about this series before, I read the original webcomic Celopatra in Spaaaace! (there's a review for it somewhere) but it totally slipped my mind to check and see if the local library had any of the graphic novels for it. The third volume was recently released but my library did not in fact have it yet so I'm only covering the first two volumes here!

Cleopatra in Space by Mike Maihack

Manga Review: Spirit Circle

This review is a bit later than I hoped, both in the context of this week and in general since Crunchyroll was a bit slow getting the final chapter up. I'm not sure why, they were fairly up to date with the rest of the chapters, but I have noticed that there are some, less popular CR series that don't update quite as regularly as others (by that I mean, not consistently same day, two days later etc than the Japanese magazine release). I don't think that contributed to the manga's relative unpopularity however, I have just had the hardest time convincing people to try this series so, once more with feeling! This is one of my favorite series from the last few years and dammit if it's never gonna get a physical release you should at least read this digital release since who knows how long CR will hold this release.

Spirit Circle by Satoshi Mizukami

Book Review: The Scorpion Rules

Yep, missed another post Wednesday, my evening schedule was a little different this week so I ended up trying to write too much one evening and it didn't work. Also, honestly the reason I used to churn out so many posts was because I'd stay up as late as it took, I'm really trying to get better about my sleep schedule so I'm doing that less. My thoughts on Vinland Saga should go up by a sane time Saturday though!

So, Erin Bow. I adored Plain Kate and had quite a few problems with Sorrow's Knot (and ultimately didn't like it because of those problems). After SK I thought "well, maybe that first time was a fluke, me liking it anyway, since I didn't even see the prose I adored in PK in SK" and when I saw it was more or less set in a dystopia that really didn't make me excited for the book. But it got good buzz so it ended up on my to-read list after all and here we are, I finished it which is always a good sign!

The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow

Anime Review: Classroom*Crisis

Okay, baby-steps to getting these reviews back on time, baby steeeeps. Oh and I'd like to note, while I still have over half of my summer shows to review, this is the last of the "this was good for sure" tier of shows. Nothing else was terrible, I don't have the time to finish terrible, full seasons of anime, but going forward I had quite a few more problems with the next few shows on the list.

Classroom*Crisis

Webcomic Review: Kiwi Blitz

Sorry for the delay guys, ended up having a much more full work day than I expected yesterday and wanted to make sure this review was actually coherent before I posted (which I'm sure everyone will grudgingly admit they prefer)

While I don't regret trying to review a webcomic every month, since I'm not worried about running out of comics to talk about anytime soon, I am starting to realize just how delayed all of my regular comic reviews are becoming now. Partially since I alternate them with movies/tv shows every week anyway, since I usually don't consume enough of either of those to have a full review each week, I'm really wondering if I should come up with a new plan so I can talk about even more, wonderful comics here....

  Kiwi Blitz by Mary Cagel

Movie Review: Expelled from Paradise

I had barely even heard of this movie before a friend texted me that he was in town to see the movie at a special, one-night only event (on a night I worked of course) and I was wondering how the heck I could see it myself since this is the rare anime film that the JICC hasn't screened. But then suddenly it popped up on Netflix so my problem was solved! Now, Aniplex, since you did that for the Madoka Magica movies as well, think you can toss Garden of Sinners up there as well?

Expelled from Paradise

Manga Review: Gundam: The Origin (volumes one through six)

I remember when this title was announced by Vertical a few years ago (it was actually a license rescue from Viz from ages ago) and it was something that sounded cool and exciting but not only were the books completely out of my price range at nearly $30 a book, the print runs were going to be tiny, 2-5,000 books (I want to say closer to 2.5k than 5) so there was no chance I could ever own the series, even once I had a chance to save up some day in the future. Well, thankfully the series did much better than expected so the print runs are larger and it's gone to re-printings (especially since my paychecks still aren't big enough to cover these books!) and this past summer I found volumes 3-5 at my local library. I got a librarian to show me how to use the book request system to ask them to buy the first two volumes and they obliged and even tossed in volume 6 as well. While I was waiting for my holds I discovered that the website Comic-Walker was also posting the chapters, completely independent from Vertical so their translations may be different but it's still a chance for more people to check out this series since it really is one of the best manga series I read in 2014.

Gundam: The Origin (volumes one through six) by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Book Review: Earth Star

Well I certainly fell off my schedule this week, I wish I could say that next week is going to be better but I'm not sure. Well, in one way it will, I realized that part of the reason I was so tired and unmotivated to write my reviews was because I had had so much free time at work lately that I was literally writing them all up in my head two or three times before I had a chance to start typing which, especially when it comes to my 1-2k write-ups, explains why I felt so exhausted. That's not the case anymore which would help but on the other hand, my computer is slowing down more and more by the week which isn't helping here, it literally took me a quarter of an hour just to open up blogger so I could write this intro. Thankfully I already had this review prewritten because trying to write in bits and spurts and waiting for the computer is even more difficult than it sounds.

Earth Star by Janet Edwards 

Anime Review: Psycho-Pass 2

There's no reason to make this introduction overly long, I put this show on my ANIME I DISLIKED: 2014 EDITION list before it had fully finished airing and now that I've had a chance to finish the show I can say that it fully deserved being on that list. Since I am discussing a sequel, there will be quite a few references and spoilers to the first season of the show; this is not a review to read if you're considering starting the series, this is a review to convince you not to watch this season and to explain the many many things that went wrong in it. And on that note, there will be some rather large spoilers for this season as well, I just don't feel like I can adequately explain the sheer stupidity here without laying it out exactly as it happens.

Psycho-Pass 2

Movie Review: Interstellar

Normally this film would fall into the category of "movies I'm interested in but not enough to pay DC theater prices so I'll wait for the DVD" but, much like Princess Kaguya, this is a film where the experience of seeing it on a big screen is part of the draw. Or in this case, seeing it on a 70mm film playing IMAX theater at work with the sound so loud it was literally rattling some of the building (not an exaggeration, I had to deal with the rattling first hand when I was covering for a coworker). Even with an employee discount the ticket price still made me wince, was it worth it in the end?

Interstellar

Book Review: Earth Girl

Curse summer colds, I never caught colds this much when I was in college, must be the general public making me sick. Regardless, one other big change from my college town is that apparently the District of Columbia has a law about being in the teenager section of a library if you aren't a teen or accompanying one. So far I haven't seen it enforced yet, and I can still pass for 19 if I try, but it is making me a little more hesitant to go in and browse around and instead I'm getting more and more of my books off of my never-ending "to read" list. Which is probably a good thing for me in the long run but I feel oddly out of touch without that chance to just see what's new on the shelves or simply has an interesting cover.

Earth Girl by Janet Edwards

My favorite books of 2013

I'm sure some people looked at that title and wondered if I got the date wrong, nope! Since I get so many books from libraries it takes a little while for me to get to everything and, since last December the list of books from 2013 I wanted to read was greater than the list of those which I had, I decided to revisit the idea halfway through 2014. I'm actually not done posting all my reviews of 2013 books yet, who knows if I'll ever be done, but all of the ones on this list I have reviewed previously so let's get started! Oh and, unsurprisingly, not only is this a short list but it's also all YA, I really am trying to read more broadly but I'm having a hard time finding adult fiction that simply entertains me as much as YA that's not straight-up non-fiction.

TV Series Review: Almost Human

I've gotten so used to watching American tv shows that are 22 episodes long that I had forgotten that a lot of them actually start out shorter and more episodes are ordered part-way through the run (I think it's called a back-end 8 or something). So that's why I was a bit surprised when I was catching up with Almost Human and realized that the next episode was going to be the last for this season at least, I wonder if the writers were as surprised as I was! Actually, I was looking through wikipedia when writing this (to see if there was any news on a second season yet, there's not) and remembered that not only had this show started up weeks after it was supposed to (in late November of all times) but apparently one of the showrunner's left the series for creative differences and Fox actually aired the episodes in a different order than the remaining showrunner intended, that's never a good sign when a developing relationship between two of the characters is supposed to be at the heart of the show. Or when the show is heavily plot based so really, don't do that guys!

Almost Human

Anime Review: Valvrave the Liberator Season Two

To refresh everyone's memory, I started the first season of this back in the spring, dropped it a few episodes in (since I dropped shows left and right last year), was really glad I dropped it when I heard about the rape scene, and then got kind of curious about it again. I dropped it four or five episodes in the first time which is rather late for me and, well, sometimes I want to watch shows with amazing world-building with deep characters and other times I want to watch flashy, fluffy mecha shows. So I finished it and decided that since it was one of the few shows I wouldn't have to wait a week to watch each time, well, why not?

Valvrave the Liberator: Season Two

Anime Review: Galilei Donna

This has been a bit of an odd year for the noitaminA timeslot. In the winter we had two continuing shows, Psycho-Pass and Robotics;Notes and in the spring the entire timeslot was taken up by a rerun of Katanagatari (which baffles me since the only thing new were the credits and I don't believe it was getting a rerelease). The summer had another rerun, AnoHana (which did originally air in the timeslot and was promoting it's new movie, it still felt like a bit of a slap to have reruns two seasons in a row however) which was accompanied by Silver Spoon (which will be back in just a couple of weeks) and then the fall had two anime original stories, Samurai Flamenco (which is also continuing on in the winter) and this entry. I was fairly excited about it since the art looked nice and the summary made it sound like a family coming back together to go on a quest (which means adult characters, wohoo!), sadly only one of those things turned out to be true.

Galilei Donna

Shorts Review: Coicent and Five Numbers

Got something that I haven't done in a little while for tonight. So about a few months ago I decided to go through the entire anime catalogs of crunchyroll and hulu and then organize my to-watch list for the foreseeable future and I came across a number of weird things. Series which most but not all of their episodes online, series split across multiple sites, that kind of odd thing and also I found a few shorts which had been licensed for the US and I neither had ever seen nor heard much buzz about. These two were picked up by Section 23/Sentai Filmworks and I have seen one or two reviews for either these titles or similar ones which left the reviewer mostly unimpressed. Generally this is a pretty good sign I shouldn't bother trying them out but, since it was only going to take an hour to watch both of them, I decided to go for them anyway and see what kind of off-beat, one-off stories Japan is telling these days.

Coicent
Both of these are going to be free-form instead of structured due to their short runtimes, in this one a high schooler with his class, Shinichi, visits Nara as a school trip in the 26th century and apparently Nara has turned into a bit of a Disney theme park with parades and technology augmenting some of the more traditional attractions (like the ever-present and not exactly explained deer). Shinichi hopes to fall in love on the school trip and, well, that's where the story gets weird about five minutes in. The rest of the story seems to concern a girl whose a reconstruction of a girl from 2700 years ago, couldn't figure out if she was actually an android however, and um, somehow the two fall in love, a deer helps. Honestly this story feels as if the creators thought of a setting/visuals they wanted to use and then tried to string a story together later. The plot and the characters (both our lovers and villains) are thinner than tissue paper, it's paced much too quickly, and sadly I didn't think the CGI was particularly well done (it's from 2010 and I'm confused why it's all CGI yet the promotional pictures are traditionally drawn, same with Five Numbers by the way). With all that said I can't really think of any reason to recommend this to someone unless they want to watch something truly strange and random*.


Five Numbers
Five people wake up in a prison, having all done something worthy of getting a life sentence, and try to escape especially when they discover the truth behind their prison. Okay so we've all seen this story before, people trapped in a place with no idea how but must escape, prisoners trying to escape, and this one was actually kind of interesting and well done until the last five or so minutes, then it just got weird. Before that however it was paced well, revealed the character's backstories, set up conflict, resolved it in a way that made sense with the themes previously established, it just had a really weird ending and I want to look the writers/director in the eye and go "you did everything right up to that point and then you blew it? Come on!" Funny enough I wasn't going to bash the CGI here since I thought this was an older title but nope, this is from 2011 and while the characters move a bit better here the level of detail and shading is practically non-existent which, given the kind of CGI I'm used to as someone who sees a lot of American movies, made it look cheap and lazy.


For anyone looking to watch these, Section 23 has had them out on BR/DVD for a while now or you can do what I did and watch them on hulu instead (they're listed on The Anime Network's website but that's just an embedded hulu feed so non-USians/people without a proxy are out of luck there).






*Hell even then I'd probably recommend Kyousogiga instead but that's just me.

Book Review: When We Wake

Took me a bit longer than I would have liked to get to this book, considering how big a fan I am of Healey's other works, but I got to it within the year which is an improvement for me! That said I was a little nervous about it, it's a completely different genre from her other books and my track record with YA science fiction is surprisingly spotty (occasionally I find books I've already read in the library and can't help but shudder and move on) but thankfully this was one of the better books.

When We Wake by Karen Healey

Summary: In the near future Tegan was an average Australian teen with family and friends she loved. And then she wakes up, horrified to find out that she was killed in a botched assassination attempt and, thanks to the forms she had signed donating her body to science, has now become the first person to be successfully woken up after 100 years of being frozen. And the world has changed in a lot of ways in 100 years but one thing that hasn't is that games of politics are still played and it seems like everyone wants Tegan on their side for less than savory reasons.

The Good: THIS is why I say that dystopias are an easy, lazy way of setting up a plot most of the time, while Tegan's new world can't precisely be called a dystopia (it doesn't have the all controlling government aspect) it is an even more deeply flawed and twisted world which makes it all the more realistic. So yes I am celebrating that this is a horribly depressing book, often when I read I think "so what point in this story would I want to live in, the beginning, middle, or end?" and here I wouldn't want to live in either of Tegan's presents, especially because of how horrifyingly real some of the things talked about (rising temperatures, first world countries dumping their pollution and garbage on third world countries and then blaming them for not having the resources to deal with it, etc). Moving on from that, I was happy to see that Tegan manages to have a best friend in here who is a girl and their not fighting over a romantic interest (I'm sad how rarely this seems to happen in fiction these days) and that ended up being my favorite relationship of the story (second to Tegan's relationship with the scientist who revived her). And that also sums up the world she woke up in, while it might be crap the social issues that plague us today have gone a long way towards being resolved and she sees this as the one bright hope in this brave new world of hers.

The Bad: While the ending is a bit ambiguous I was alright with that but I've now heard that Healey is working on a companion novel which retells the story from the point of view of one of the other main characters and I'm suspicious of it. Will this add anything new to the story or continue on past where this one ended? Which would indicate something was missing in the first place and, well, I rather like the ambiguous ending so I'm a bit worried at how this book plans to end. Strictly speaking this isn't a problem with WWW but I've known a few series, mostly anime, where a sequel has completely messed up the ending of the previous installment so I'm twice burned extra shy now. Other than that, some groups did come off as rather flat and it's a bit hard to believe that there seems to be so little activism/people weren't able to prevent what happened to the world (since there truly is some amazing technology in the works right now to prevent the world from becoming an overheated and polluted wasteland) but I'm a bit of an optimist so I'm supposed to question whenever someone creates a story with a bleak world and apathetic people.

So I give this book 4 out of 5 stars for being heart-breaking in a good way and something which caused me to need a lot of chocolate and cute fluffy things to read when I was done, that seems to be the trend with the 2013 books I've read this year (looking at you The Summer Prince). 

Book Review: The Summer Prince

This is a book that I was really hoping to have a chance to read (futuristic Brazil sci-fi? I'm in!) and I was surprised that I found it so quickly at my not-so-local library, although I feel like they either do a better job at getting YA books faster or at least make their new books more visible. And even without already knowing about this book I think I would have picked it up anyway because of how gorgeous the cover is, normally I'm a little leary of putting green and yellow right next to each other (it can make things look sickly really easy) but, if the cover here doesn't fully convey it, it makes the cover just pop and I hope a lot of other people pick it up for either of those reasons.


The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Summary: 400 years ago the world became a nuclear wasteland and while humanity still survives most of the world does so in the ruins of it’s former glory. One of the few exceptions to this is the city-state of Palmares  Tres, a giant city in modern day Brazil which has thrived because of it's isolation and rules made by all of its ruling ladies. While they resist much technology being created by the outside world they have embraced some of it and become extraordinarily long lived and because of that few young people have any say in anything about their world. Many want their world to change but few succeed in the way that June and Enki manage, her by being a modern artist whose work is compelling and different and him by becoming the Summer King, the highest position any man in the city can hold which occurs once every five years and after a year of power will be ritually killed in order to reaffirm the authority of Palmares Tres' queen. 

The Good: Johnson creates a futuristic setting that is neither dystopian or utopian (that’s actually a dystopia) which helps make it one of the most realistic science-fiction settings I’ve ever come across. This isn’t a little detail either, the struggles and conflicts of the city are the center and heart of this story, it's Enki's reason for becoming the Summer King in the first place, and Johnson succeeds wildly in portraying a city where ordinary people live and are unsure of what future they should follow and where politicians have a mix of their own and everyone else's wishes as their goal. As for all the other parts of the setting, I’m a sucker for a story with strong settings and the way that the technology is integrated into everything and is explained so casually is what really makes the story for me. Johnson creates a setting that is mostly foreign to me but does it with such confidence and vivid descriptions that I had no trouble accepting it* and, once I figured out how the city was laid out, visualizing it. I also loved the kind of art June did, in real life I'm not a big fan of modern art (or post-modern, I'm not completely sure which one hers is) but two things made it work here. One is that I'm simply of tired that nearly every time there's a character in any story whose an artist that they normally sketch or paint, it just gets a bit tedious. And secondly because June's art makes so much sense in this setting, it's wild, it's thought provoking, it makes use of the materials in and around her city. It ends up being a perfect fit with her character, Palmares Tres, and with the entire story.  

The Bad: There was a lot of unfamiliar slang used in the book (I don’t know if it’s real, Brazilian slang or made up for the sake of the book) and I wish that there had been a small glossary in the back since I was never able to pick up on what some of the words meant when they were only used once or twice. I also wish the ending had been a slight bit clearer, I had a few questions which I don't I was supposed to have and just a paragraph or two could have cleared them up (unless I was supposed to have these specific questions in which case obviously the story succeeded). Finally, by the end I had a few problems with how Enki grew and developed. Some people might consider this a spoiler so I shall try to be as vague as possible, Enki does A Thing which ultimately results in a change in character, I'm not exactly sure it can even be called development since he doesn't have full control or choice over changing, and I felt like this short-changed the story in some ways. I'm entirely sure that this was all deliberately done, Enki is supposed to be a tragic character after all, when I remember where he started and the goals he had then, versus what he was like by the very end well, I wish that had been pulled off a little differently.


So for a story with an amazing setting, interesting characters (all of whom are non-white I should note, both due to the gene mods and from growing up in a culture which has more than just American or European influences), and two prominent gay relationships (plus a take on a love triangle which is a bit different than usual) I'm giving this book four out of five stars, plan on buying it someday and plan on checking out Johnson's other works. And while recommending this I'd also like to mention some books that I was reminded of while reading, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's Zarah the Windseeker which also has a great, vivid setting whose inspiration was completely foreign to me yet I fell in love with due to how confidently Okorafor-Mbachu described it and Karen Healey's The Shattering but for slightly spoilery reasons, it and The Summer Prince have one rather large plot element in common but it's done completely differently. 






 
*well, except for the one detail of people having children after they turn 50 and much later than that. But, given the passing mention of gene mods and that people’s skin tones must fit into a certain range of colors I can easily hand wave that and say that they just do something either to the uterus or eggs to make this viable. And really, I have just one problem with the technology out of a story which is chock-full of it and is one of the main plot drivers? That’s amazing!

Young Animator Training Project 2013/Anime Mirari 2013

I feel a little weird only talking about three out of the four shorts for this year's Young Animator Training Project but these three have been out for a while and I can't even find raws of Ryo (Studio Gonzo's short) after looking around. I know it must be somewhere since I saw someone commenting along the lines of "Gonzo was, ....Gonzo" which honestly doesn't make me want to search out the short, bad Gonzo is usually pretty boring and more than slightly terrible in the writing department. So, if I do ever find it I'll watch it and add onto the review, in the meantime let me tell you about everything else! 




Young Animator Training Program 2013 (Anime Mirai)

Aruvu Rezuru - Kikai Shikake no Yōsei-tachi (Alv Rezul - Mechanical Fairies, also seen it written Areve Rezere): This was an odd entry, this was made by Studio Xebec to fill in a slot that had previously been taken by Studio Perriot and I remember this showing up on anime charts for last summer, no idea if it was supposed to be a single OVA back then or a full series and was reduced to an OVA. The charts were listing it as a full series and it’s based on a light novel series, yet out of the three I was able to see this was easily the weakest. This one felt like a pilot for a full series and, while the others felt a bit like that as well, they managed to also feel complete in 30 minutes, this one felt like we had just started a series and that we wouldn’t have everything explained until it was done (or even the basic concepts fully explained until episode three). The concept was kinda cool, perhaps it was moved from the summer so it wouldn’t compete with the slightly similar in concept Sword Art Online, but the writing felt amateur, weak, and cliché-ridden the whole way through. Oooooh, mysterious organizations! Slightly incestuous sibling relationships which are okay because they’re not blood related and then plot shenanigans to make it even more “okay”! (which in case your wondering, even if you’re not related by blood you still feel pretty creeped out by that stuff, if my step-brother ever acted like this I would smack him in a heartbeat) The art was fine, although I was confused why Shiki always looked like she was drawn in a different style than the background, props, and other characters. I’m rather sad I didn’t like this since when I first saw it on the charts I thought it sounded rather cool, too bad it’s execution was poor.

Death Billiards: Studio Madhouse has made a lot of great things for many years so it’s no surprise that they made something great this time. The story goes that two men, one young one old, show up at a bar with no memory how exactly they got to it and have to play a game of billiards with their lives on the line. They don't know much more than that but it’s soon clear that pool is a game they both have strong memories of and that there is obviously more to the game than it first seems. I’ve seen a lot of people not like the ambiguous ending but I rather liked it, given the sense of mystery that permeated the rest of the short it makes sense that it wouldn’t explain everything to it’s viewers (or even it’s characters, of the other two characters present one of them doesn’t know the final outcome of the game either). I’m satisfied with this as a short yet I can also see it being fleshed out into a full, episodic series with an underlying story revealing more about the bar and it’s two attendants, although I have absolutely no idea how likely that is to happen.   

Young Witch Academia: Hotly anticipated since it’s from the new studio Studio Trigger which, if I recall correctly, is formed from a number of people who used to work at Studio Shaft, and people were also excited because it looked just plain fun and it was! Akko has wanted to be a witch since she saw a fantastical magical show when she was young but now that she’s actually at magic school she finds the lessons either boring or just plain impossible. This story could have easily been stretched into a full length film but here neatly fits into the 22 minute run time with good pacing and nice visuals, the OVA almost looked more heavily influenced by American Saturday morning cartoons than anime in places and had a really distinct look the entire way through. And the animation itself looked fantastic, very few still shots and lots of complex movements, if this is the future of animation via animators in Japan then I think we’re good! Lots and lots of fun and I’m excited to see what else Studio Trigger produces, I think they have their first full series coming this summer but it sounds like there isn’t a lot of information about it out yet. Oh and it's legally on both youtube and crunchyroll now so catch it at one of those places when you have half an hour to spare.