Book Review: Manners & Mutiny

Lord this blogging schedule is so off now, but I really want to power through and talk about some books that I read recently that I adored without falling farther and farther behind. So let me get back on track with a steampunk novel (is it just me or does it seem like steampunk has faded with as a fad? Genuine questions!) that I sadly did not adore.

Manners & Mutiny by Gail Carriger

Manga Review: Millennium Snow

Title: Millennium Snow
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Hakusensha (JP), Viz Manga (US)
Story/Artist: Bisco Hatori
Serialized in: Lala in 2001, Lala DX in 2013
Original Release Date: June 3, 2014
Review copy provided by Viz Media
Review originally posted on The Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses 

Bisco Hatori’s name may not be well-known in the west but her most famous work, Ouran High School Host Club, still finds new readers and viewers every year who enjoy the comedy mixed with bits of romance. Millennium Snow both predates the series and was finished after it. Hatori took a break from it to work on Ouran and it shows: the story doesn’t feel disjointed but the first two volumes have a very different tone and goal than the latter two do.

Anime Review: Seraph of the End: Battle in Nagoya

With this I am finally caught up with my fall season reviews, wahoo! Straight onto the winter season reviews next week since one show I was watching (a short) has already ended and after that, geeze, maybe I'll have time for a few backlog show reviews too! Hmm, guess that means I'll need to actually finish up a few of them first....

Seraph of the End: Battle in Nagoya

Anime Review: Seraph of the End

No matter how much anime I watch, at heart I'm still a book/comics fan and I'm much more likely to spend an evening binge reading 20 or so chapters of a manga than marathoning a single show. Which is how I was already familiar with this story, I was actually sad to realize that this first half of the anime ends precisely where I left off in my binge reading, I watched the show to see the parts of the story I hadn't read yet!

Seraph of the End (Owari no Seraph)

Book Review: Waistcoats and Weaponry

As a general heads-up, no anime/cartoon review on Monday since all of my plans to watch something have fallen short this week and I'm feeling rather grumpy about it honestly.

Like many things in life, author visits/book-signings seem to be something that happens sporadically and in groupings. I only found out about this one a week beforehand and was rather grumpy since I do own the Parasol Protectorate omnibuses and would have liked to get them signed but they were several hundred miles away from me and I didn't trust the post office to get them up to me in time. I only found out because the local indie bookstore that was helping with the events posted it in their newsletter, Carriger never goes on tour on the East Coast and didn't announce it on her blog until just two days in advance! Grumbling aside, it was a good talk and I was quite happy to spot this book just a couple of weeks later at my other library system since I still recalled some of the things Carriger said in her talk that were rather pertinent to this book!

Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger

Manga Review: Moon and Blood (volumes 1-4)

Got another review from Emanga tonight, decided to get through as many of their supernatural titles as I had for the Halloween season. And hopefully everyone guessed from the title that this one has something to do with vampires, no werewolves yet oddly enough but regardless let's get to the review!

Moon and Blood (volumes 1-4) by Nao Yazawa

Summary: Sayaka is rather surprised one day when she finds that a previously-unmentioned friend of the family is staying with them and that he is her age, good looking, and a bit quiet. Kai's quiet, the readers find out, because he's a vampire and rather conflicted that he and his senpai are hiding out in Sayaka's house to feed on her family. But soon the two of them are going to have slightly more pressing issues to deal with when they find some vampire hunters from their past have tracked them down.

The Good: I'm not wholly sure if this was the end of an arc, the end of the story, or something else (I tried to find out but all i could find was a Vampire Knight fanfic) but I felt like volume 4 was a good stopping point actually which is usually my biggest problem when I review parts of a series instead of the whole thing at once. The characters figure out secrets, deal with some problems, the status quo is changed, and I was pretty satisfied when I finished reading. I'm not exactly sure where the story intends to go next but I can deal with a slightly ambiguous ending especially for such a short story.

The Bad: As a quick note, for some reason each volume is only 90-ish pages instead of the standard 120-180 length for a manga volume (I don't believe my downloads were missing pages since I wasn't confused by the plot) so it feels like you're only getting half as much manga as expected. Although I will admit the story fits the length well, I'm simply confused why it was split the way it was. Other than that, I hadn't actually spent a lot of time talking about the plot and that's because it's fairly basic, there's a girl, she falls for a new guy slowly, he's actually a vampire (and troubled over it of course) and since this is manga there are vampire hunters as well with which he has a tragic past. It's all done well, better than some examples I can think of, but for those who are looking for a new and really interesting vampire story should keep on looking.

The Art: For some reason Ai, out little girl vampire, reminded me a bit of Karin from Karin/Chibi Vampire but other than that the art styles are rather different, the art is a bit rounder and the cheekbones of the characters are much longer. Regardless, it works well, the characters look distinct from each other, the paneling flows well, everything has enough details that it doesn't seem like the manga-ka was rushed for time so I was fine with it.

In the end I give this 3 out of 5 stars for being an enjoyable read but not something I expect to revisit anytime soon. All four volumes are avaliable on emanga's website and it appears there is also a print version as well for some of the volumes.

Anime Review: Valvrave the Liberator

I saw a few episodes of this back in the spring when it was first airing, I believe four, and then had to give up since I just couldn't get through the rest of the episodes without the intense urge to snark commentary at whoever was online with me at the time. And some of the things I had heard about the show were far from great as well so I wasn't in any hurry to finish it up. But as fall starts to roll around, the second half of the show hits the internet in just a couple of weeks, I started to get curious about it again and, well, since I only had 8 episodes left and I already knew all the headdesk worthy plot twists what did I have to lose except about four hours of my free time, right?

Valvrave the Liberator

Summary: In the future humanity has enclosed the Sun in a dyson sphere where they live and there are three main factions, ARUS (which seems suspiciously like a militarized United States), Drossia (who pretends they're not actually space nazis), and innocent little Jior who of course wants nothing to do with the growing hostilities between the two. But as Haruto and his classmates discover when their school's module is attacked and they discover power mechs lying hidden beneath it, powerful enough to change the course of the entire war, something doesn't add up here.....

The Good: The last time I talked about a show which seemed like it was trying too hard to be the next Code Geass I was discussing Guilty Crown and man was it terrible. Valvrave as well isn't quite CG but thankfully it's better than GC by a long shot and actually an okay show by the end. In the last third the show starts to find it's feet and the characters become a tad less ridiculous and more competent which greatly helps and it starts explaining some of it's absolutely nuts backstory (I have to admit, I did not expect the show to turn out to be NEARLY this crazy when I started it and I do have to give it some credit for that). Finally, one large thing this, GC, and CG have in common is that at the heart of it there are two characters who stand larger than the rest and each of them does it a bit differently. In CG we have Lelouche and Suzaku who are formiddable enemies to each other, in GC we have Shu the unwilling protagonist and Gai the leader whose mantle Shu takes up. Valvrave has Haruto, again a bit of an unwilling protagonist and L-Elf, a strategist whose been waiting for a moment like this to launch some plan of his and it actually pulls off that balance much better than I would have expected, they come to depend on each other, plan on each other, and yet don't still fully trust each other (nor should they) and that was an interesting character dynamic to watch unfold and something I had been looking for in anime was curious why no one had done it yet.

The Bad: To be blunt, there is a rape in the show, I don't want anyone to go in not knowing that since it's not anything you could have guessed after just the first couple of episodes. I am frustrated and confused for why the writer decided that the violence against a female character HAD to be rape instead of just, violence (even if it was creepily hinted at a bit earlier on, gaaaaaah). Other than that elephant in the room, the show's main problem is that it thinks it's a serious show with meaningful themes and quite frankly it's not. It's a bit of a mess, makes quite a few things unintentionally hilarious (you know it's a bad sign when everyone tells you you HAVE to stick around after the credits of the first episode), and a number of plot events are just so illogical that it's simply impossible to take the show as seriously as it wants you to. And for some people they might be okay with that, if I had been with friends I would have enjoyed this quite a bit just for all the snark potential it had but if you don't want that then avoid it, there are far better mecha shows out there.

The Production Values: I'm rather curious why the show changed it's ending song halfway through the season since I loved the first ending song, it worked nicely and even though the second song did grow on me I simply liked the first better. And I also loved the opening song, it was catchy, bouncy, upbeat, everything I want in an action OP and I feel like it reflected the show well also since it wasn't serious, just fast paced and a bit crazy. As for the visuals, I'll admit the main reason I watched the show (both times) was because I wanted to see some eye candy mech fights and everything did look pretty good. It was rather colorful, I didn't see too much CGI although it must have been there with all the mechs, and I liked all the designs so all in all this was the part of the show I had the least problems with, hurray!


In the end I can only give this show 2.5 out of 5 stars for the unnecessary rape scene and for just completely missing how silly it is and how that doesn't fit at all with the tone it was going for. Do I plan to watch the second season? Maybe??? There are so many shows coming out this fall that I certainly won't be twiddling my thumbs like I was this season so I'm not sure I'll have time, although I'll likely make time for it at some point and finish it up then and see just how crazy it decides to go (I'm betting on pretty far).

Summer 2013 Anime Round-Up

First things first, Gatchaman Crowds doesn't air until tomorrow so I'll be updating this post for that tomorrow, heck I would have had this up earlier except apparently crunchyroll doesn't let you use multiple guest passes in a one week period which threw a wrench into my plans. Second, normally I talk about the shows that carried over for me from last season but I actually wrote a rather rambly write-up of the spring season over on my tumblr which covered those shows. TL;DR, still following Space Bros and Doki Doki Precure but other than that I'm starting with a clean slate, let's get started then! oh one more thing, each of these impression is made after seeing just one episode of the show, some of these shows do have a second episode out by now but I just didn't have time to get to them.

Blood Lad
Vampire boy is obsessed with Japanese stuff.
This is an aggressively shonen show from the way the visuals are designed (lots of sound effects on screen, word bubbles at times, things you usually see only in either a 4-koma or shonen based adaptation, I'm trying to figure out why Brains Base has pushed this show back by an entire year since it certainly wasn't because of the art!) to the humor (look at this girl! she has boobs! and not much else on!). Heck even the character designs are a bit more shonen-y than usual now that I think about it and it's been so long since I've watched a show like this I had forgotten, this isn't really my type of show (and yes, this is technically based off of a senien manga, knowing that doesn't make it feel any less shonen plus sometimes you do get weird overlaps with those categories). I'm going to give it a couple more episodes to see if I warm up to it, the entire Manga Bookshelf seems to really like the manga and their tastes often line up with mine and it's certainly a a different take on vampires (but let's face it, by now almost every story with vampires is "a different take!") but at this point I don't see myself following it's entire 10 episode run.

Blood Lad has been licensed by Viz Media and is streaming on their site and on hulu so Canadian viewers are sadly out of luck this time.


Danganronpa the Animation
Super highschoolers trapped in murderous school.
Initially I thought "oh I'll give this a shot since I'd rather watch this than read the summaries/translations and don't have a PSP to download the game/patch (plus, these games never get licensed in the US)" and then NISA licensed the game (and someone else got Steins;Gate in the same day which had previously been my basis for "these games that super popular anime are based on don't get licensed"). Well then, don't have much reason to check out the show then (even if I don't have a PSP Vita to play the actual game on) and I'm a bit relieved, this just didn't flow well for me. It's odd but I dislike books and tv shows with this kind of setting, murder-mystery with the player character having warped morals by the end, but I do like games with it (I adored 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors which is a bit similar, I joked to friends that the setting and some of the characters kept giving me flashbacks). There it's fun to play as an asshole-ish character and see how much you can screw everything up, it's less fun to watch other people do it (although I know that mountains of Let's Play videos out there contradict me on this point). So with all of that in mind, I wasn't able to take anything seriously enough to enjoy it, and you're clearly not supposed to take a lot of this story seriously to start with, and hopefully someday I'll be able to give the game a try and enjoy it much more.

Danganronpa the Animation has been licensed for streaming by Funimation but the first episode won't be up until this Friday the 12th.


Eccentric Family (Uchoten Kazoku)
Humans, Tanuki, and Tengu live in Kyoto.
Based on a novel written by the same man who wrote the original The Tatami Galaxy novel this first episode didn't grab me as much as it seemed to grab some other people which was actually what I expected, Tatami didn't grab me until I tried watching it again about two years later after all. Although I suspect it won't take me nearly as long to get around to the second episode, while this first episode might not have grabbed me and taken me for a ride like other shows have done it was still interesting enough to make me curious about the rest of it. This was an introductory episode, we see a lot of the main cast, get a sense of the different factions in Kyoto, possible conflicts and mysteries are mentioned but nothing super exciting has happened yet, it's all set-up. But I am curious what this show is setting up and I like Kyoto quite a bit so I'm not going to turn down a chance to see it as a setting. So, unless the next few episodes are deadly boring I'm going to stick with this one and see just what it develops into.

Eccentric Family is streaming on crunchyroll.


Gatchaman Crowds
Super-powered humans fight rubix cube aliens.
While it didn't start out that way this ended up being my most anticipated summer show and it's not perfect but so far it's pretty fun. Well, fun if you consider being on a rainbow colored roller coaster for 30 minute fun (although strangely enough the episode was just 22 minutes long, not 25) and it's already clear that this series is a shorter one since the pacing is frenzied and feels even faster with how bouncy lead character Hajime is. I really do hope the next few episodes slow down a bit since there was a lot to take in here, it's the complete opposite of tsuritama (which shares a good chunk of it's important staff) and I can easily see how the fast pace and Hajime are putting people off, although it seems to have no connection to the original Gatchaman so newcomers like myself don't have that to worry about. Regardless, I'm in this one for the long run since I'm just in the mood for a super-colorful, fighting aliens show with a female lead, fingers crossed that it ends well!

Crowds is streaming on crunchyroll and currently unlicensed, however considering that Sentai recently licensed the original series many suspect they'll license this series as well. 


Kinmoza! (Kin-iro Mozaic)
Cute girls have intercontinental friendship
Not initially on my to watch list but after hearing so many people call it adorable I had to check it out and yep, that was a pretty adorable show. I liked it so far, this first episode is a flashback to how the main characters (a Japanese girl and a British one) met and became friends (in a rather romanticized Great Britain) and yep, not much happened but it was adorable none the less. I want to give the second episode a try but I have to ask, what is it going to do now? Are these girls with their friends going to form a club about Great Britain things? (since forming a club is all the rage now in anime-schools) Just do slice of life daily cute things with some culture shock? I'm okay with either of them but would like to know what they're going to do since I am worried about getting bored quickly, this isn't my normal type of show for a reason after all.

Kinmoza! has been licensed by Sentai and is streaming on Crunchyroll.


Free! Iwatobi Swim Club
Boys strip and swim.
I almost feel like this series needs no introduction considering how much the PV for it was being bandied about across the internet with various cries of "YES!" and "OMG IT'S OBJECTIFYING US [men]!" being thrown around. So to make things clear, no this anime was NOT made because tumblr wanted it (guys just look at it, you think that you can animate something with that much detail in the amount of time that passed between tumblr flipping out and the premiere? Hell no) and it doesn't really objectify men either, Zac of ANN articulates quite well why not so I'm just going to link to his review (it was his first so scroll of the bottom if you don't see it immediately). So, my thoughts? Well, fanservice in general isn't my thing (neither is swimming, I like the gymnastics part of the summer olympics much better) but I'm glad that they made the show so campy since that made it pretty fun to watch regardless. I doubt I'll continue it since there's so much else out there I want to watch right now but if I want to watch a mindless, well-animated show with a sense of humor then this one is at the top of my list.

Free! has not been licensed yet however it is streaming on Crunchyroll.


Makai Ouji: Devils and Realist
William doesn't believe in demons, oh-well.
So a few months back when this anime was announced I went off, read the manga, and started worrying. I've seen a lot of people compare this one to Black Butler and Pandora Hearts for thematic reasons (they both have the Victorian England inspired setting with gothic elements) but structurally they're the similar as well, they're all shows whose manga took a heck of a time to get to the meat of the plot (I gave up on Black Butler before finding out if it ever got there actually). So, judging from what I know, the pacing of this episode, and what was shown in the OP and ED (which by the way has a heck of a spoiler for one of the characters) this one is probably going to have a fast pace and either an original ending or an inconclusive one (which I think is more likely) since I can't really think of a place to end it as the manga currently stands AND the story is bland enough that I doubt it's going to sell well enough for a sequel. Which is rather sad since I tried out since I liked the premise, demons trying to become the new king of hell by bothering a British kid, and while the manga did grow on me it really wasn't because the characters or the plot turned out to be super interesting, the style just got a bit better and I liked the eye-candy. At this point I'm willing to give the show another episode or two for the eye candy reason (even though I'm not that happy with some of the voices in here, it's been a while since the voices have been the complete opposite of what I've imagined), the character designs really do look great in full color I'm most likely going to end up dropping it by the end of July.

Devils and Realist is unlicensed but streaming on crunchyroll. Seven Seas manga also picked up the manga recently and plans to release the first volume in early 2014.


Servant x Service
Civil workers work.
Hmm, this series didn't grab me as much as I had hoped a series about working adults would which makes me a little sad. Of course, one of the most common comments I've seen on this show is "Working!! but less zany" so perhaps that's what I should be watching instead, heck I have much more experience with weird food-industry work than weird office/government work (the libraries I've worked at have been fairly tame comparatively speaking). In any case, this looks to be a straight-forward, slice of life (in the really literal sense) story of a few different civil workers and for the moment I'm going to give it a few more episodes to see if the characters click with me but I feel that if the characters don't click with me then there's going to be no point in watching the show.

Servant x Service is streaming on crunchyroll and unlicensed.


Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji)
Boy enrolls in agricultural school, hijinks.
The lone noitaminA show of the season (since now it's AnoHana's time to do reruns) and a bit more anticipated than most noitaminA shows since it's based off of a manga by the creator of FullMetal Alchemist. I read a bit of the manga a few years back and while it wasn't bad I just wasn't really grabbed by it either which was the same reaction I had here. We've only had one episode to meet the characters and see the setting so not much has actually happened, although the egg gag got old really fast (guys, I'm a girl, I know EXACTLY where eggs come from), although that did end in some really excellently animated food which really makes me wish there was a food anime with that kind of animation out there. However, since it's not bad by a long shot, noitaminA, and could certainly get more interesting once the characters start developing and such I plan on following this one for the long run (literally, it's split cour so 11 episodes now and another 11 next January) and I'm really hoping that the show ends up growing on me (it is set at a farming school after all....).

Silver Spoon remains unlicensed but it is streaming on crunchyroll.


Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3
Cute girls form war games club.
Wow I have seen mixed reactions on it, I honestly tried out the show because I at first saw some people saying it was fun and then others saying that, as a result of the gun culture in the US, it made them uncomfortable and I wanted to form an opinion on my own. And I have to say, even though I'm not a big fan of guns I can easily see the appeal of running around shooting each other with fake guns (probably because a lot of my friends in high school did just that) but this show still came off as a bit odd. It's trying too hard to emphasize the juxtaposition of  "they're cute girls! And they like imitating Rambo movies!", honestly it wouldn't have felt as weird if it hadn't done that. Which puts me in an odd position of being interested in watching another episode but probably not sticking with the show for the long run, this is just turning out to be an odd season for me.

C3 has been licensed by Sentai and is streaming on Crunchyroll.


Watamote
High school girl has delusions of popularity
Yet another show that wasn't initially on my to-watch list but decided to give it a shot after seeing a number of other people mention it. And, ehhhhh, I don't think I'll be continuing with it after all. As many other people have commented, so far this is a dark comedy with only one joke, oh look how Tomoke has no friends/no social skills/doesn't even know it! Sure I've seen people like that in my years of high school and college, although usually the painfully socially awkward nerds I saw instead of not talking at all had no idea when was a good time to talk or that they weren't actually funny (and most started getting better at it after a few years!) and I was never like that, so I'm not getting that much kick out of the "oh ha-ha, it's like someone you know!" humor which I think I should be feeling just a bit. However I did think it got one point especially spot on, when Tomoke is mocking all the girls in her class who hang out with guys and look cute, calling them bimbos and sluts, and yet you get the feeling that she really wants that in her own life. That I think a lot of people of all genders go through, I know that on some parts of the internet there's a lot of "oh I'm better than other girls because I am/do_____ instead!" (my first thought actually was of this meme but apparently this was actually a parody of the situation, still gets across what I meant however) which also feeds into a lot of other assumptions about what's feminine, what's not, stereotypes (both as a result of media and as a reaction to said media) and all kinds of nasty stuff. I have no doubt that giving Tomoke that viewpoint was quite deliberate but that's not enough to keep me interested in what happens next sadly.

Watamote has both it's anime and manga licensed in the US, by Sentai and Yen Press respectively, and the anime is currently streaming on crunchyroll.

Book Review: Timeless

And I finally, after several years of trying to achieve this, have finally read all of the Parasol Protectorate series, wahoo! So, same drill as before, talking about the summary of this book involves some good sized spoilers for the first few so only continue reading if you've read the first few or just plain don't care, although considering just how large this one is I'd recommend against that.



Timeless by Gail Carriger

Summary: Alexia and Conall’s daughter, Prudence, has been born and as predicted she has the ability to borrow a vampire or werewolf’s abilities which causes a whole slew of trouble given her surroundings. So its not without misgivings that Alexia accepts an invitation from the oldest vampire queen of them all in Alexandria, near the God-Breaker Plague of Egypt, and heads south hoping to resolve the mysteries of her family once and for all. 

The Good: In retrospect, Carriger started seeding many of the subplots that would appear in Heartless and Timeless rather early on and I’m impressed. I’m sure some might find the ending overly neat but considering how many of the characters in the series actively try to create neat endings for the people around them this shouldn’t be surprising. As for the actual book, I had always been worried how Alexia’s pregnancy, and subsequent offspring, would be handled but it all worked rather well here. Alexia still acts like herself, she and Conall truly love Prudence (which is in line with their characters), and the child is important to the story but not a plot device. Considering that I was expecting her to be left on the sidelines while the adult characters went on more adventures this is much, much better than I had hoped and for me that’s why the series ended so satisfactorily, it was smarter than I expected and that makes the story work for me better than almost any other ending could have. 

The Bad: In the end I do wish we had gotten a bit more information about both Alexia’s father and Floote. That storyline was also foreshadowed fairly early on but I think it needed not exactly more foreshadowing but more details revealed earlier on, especially considering how important it ended up being. Also, I feel like Madam Lefoux’s character ended up changing quite dramatically through the story, and well, it felt a little uneven by the end. Granted there is a timeskip between this book and Heartless, plus considering how Heartless ended a change in relationship makes sense (and she was changing in Blameless as well), but I almost feel like the Lefoux of Changeless is a completely different character from the one of Timeless. I’m not sure what I would have liked done differently but something does feel off and I feel like it could have been handled in a smoother fashion.


So I'm giving both this book and this overall series a 3.5 out of 5 which might be a bit low but there were just enough rough spots in the series to bother me yet despite those it's rather solid fun and I'm glad that I now own the books and would recommend them to a number of friends. Well, after making sure that my friends are okay with the implied sexytimes in the books but frankly considering how, uninterested and easily bored I am by sexytimes usually if I don't mind them then no one else I know will. With that in mind, if you like supernatural urban fantasy in Victorian London with some romance then give these a shot, hopefully you will have a better time finding the books than I did!    

Book Review: Heartless

And moving right along we've reached the penultimate book in the Parasol Protectorate series so there's not much I can say to introduce it now, just the usual warning that due to how this this series is set up by summarizing the book I spoil a large twist from earlier books. Thankfully this one isn't as bad as the others, nothing jaw-droppingly surprising happened in the third book but if you haven't read the second book yet then just read that first and then look at my reviews in case you aren't sure if you want to continue.


Heartless by Gail Carriger

Summary: Alexia and Connall are back together and finally know what their baby will be, something different from either of them, a skin-stealer, and that's why the vampires have been putting up a fuss about their marriage from the very start. So, even though that is resolved now, their lives aren't quiet enough to let them simply prepare for the baby's arrival, the politics of London's supernatural society continue to shift and change and cause rather major problems for everyone involved. 

The Good: Even though I'm about to outline why I thought this book was rather weak it was still a fun read and I was interested to see that some of the side characters are becoming steadily more important with more time and characterization spent on them. I'm used to stories that are more or less one long story broken into chunks of some kind (episodes, books, updates) and therefore don't add onto the main cast as much since the story is already going. This series is a bit different since you could split it into a few stories all within a larger story and that gives it a chance to elevate these characters without taking away from the rest of the cast, I rather like this and wouldn't mind seeing other stories do similarly.

The Bad: Looking back on this series as a whole this was the weakest book in it and in some ways I wish three and four had been rewritten to combine the two since no big plot revelations really happened in either and this book feels like it's just tidying up a few loose ends in preparation for the last book/setting the stage by creating a few extra conflicts for it. Speaking of that, I've just been a bit unhappy with how Madame Lefoux has been portrayed this entire series. Perhaps I should have waited until the Timeless review to bring it up but she feels like an entirely different character if you compare the second volume to this one or the fifth, and not because of growth but just because it feels like Carriger changed her mind about her partway through and either couldn't or didn't rewrite everything else to be in line.


Sorry this is a bit short but unfortunately I was unable to finish writing this while I still had the book in front of me so some of the plots of 3/4/5 are starting to blend together in my mind and I don't want to talk about something which didn't actually happen in this book. Since it's a bit weak I'm going to give it only a 3 out of 5 (which I know I give to a lot of things but a 3 is average and, well, most things are average), onto the final one!

Book Review: Blameless

So I finally, finally! got a hold of the rest of the Parasol Protectorate series, it just took me a while to realize both that the nice hardcover editions could be bought secondhand on Amazon for a reasonable price and that I had a birthday coming up where I hadn't really requested anything. In any case, expect reviews for the other two books in the series pretty soon as well, I ended up tearing through all three books in less than a month. Oh and as was the case with the first two books, a plot even from the end of the second book is critical to setting up the third book so this review is going to have more spoilers than usual even though I've done my best to keep them as vague as I can, just avoid the summary.


Blameless by Gail Carriger

Summary: Following the reveal at the end of the previous book that Alexia is pregnant she is out on her ear with Conall accusing her of unfaithfulness and living with her family who are being, well, her family. Confused as to how this actually happened Alexia decides to track down the only group of people who know anything about prenaturals, the Templars, all while dodging a large number of assassination attempts from the vampires.

The Good: This book manages to both have Alexia leave England to explore more of Europe and yet still include the most interesting characters (either as part of her entourage or by including a POV back in England). I think that’s always the hardest part to pull off when a story is set in a different location than the previous installment was and Blameless pulls it off better than a lot of stories do (although in retrospect we don’t actually see a lot of the rest of Europe, maybe that’s what the Parasol Protectorate Abroad series will be about). Also, while I’m sure someone out there will disagree with me, I thought the pregnancy plotline was handled fairly well, especially since the “oh the lady is magically pregnant and it’s scary!” plotline is sadly more common than you’d think. Alexia is her normal self, the pregnancy is unexpected but doesn’t threaten her health and, well, it’s not very scary. It’s treated fairly sensibly and much better than I expected it to.

The Bad: As just about every character points out, this is a rather flimsy reason to separate Conall and Alexia, although since it was necessary for the Templars to actually appear on page sooner or later (both because of what they know and because of their connection to Alexia’s father) and this was a good fit for that plotline. As an aside, it is slightly frustrating that it’s nigh impossible to have a good summary of these books without spoiling the events of the previous one, although that’s not really a problem with the books, especially considering that I enjoy books that are that plot reliant normally.

Book Review: Team Human

Another book which I had to coax the interlibrary loan system to give me (and then make a special trip to the library to get) which I'll admit I was hesistant about reading when I first heard about it. I was a bit grumpy that this wasn't the 1930s book that Justine has been working on for a while and I still haven't finished SRB's Demon's Lexicon series so I wasn't sure how well I was going to like her contribution. Heck, even though I had read Justine's Magic or Madness trilogy, How to Ditch Your Fairy, and Liar I wasn't the biggest fan of her work either, why was I excited about this? Internet hype and the fact that I really like the blogs of both of them I guess, but the more I heard about this book and the few snippets I read of it made me more interested in it which is always a good sign.

Team Human by Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan

Summary: In the town of New Whitby you might have a larger than normal vampire population but life for its human residents is the same that you might find in any town and for Mel is had been rather vampire free. That is until a vampire decides to transfer to their high school (for unexplained reasons), her friend Cathy falls hard for him, and then it's up to Mel to keep her friend from going completely over to the night side and to try and cheer up her friend Anna whose dad has mysterious vanished. So life is a bit busier than usual but nothing she can't handle, or so she thinks until things start getting really weird in New Whitby.

The Good: Hmm, character with parents who are at least semi-active in her life, ditto for siblings, has an actual group of friends which is mixed gender and has to do homework before a lot of her adventures? Ladies and gentlemen I give you one of the most accurate portrayals of the average American teenager in years and it's from an urban fantasy (oi realistic fiction, you're looking a bit bad by comparison). So the setting worked, the characters worked, the plot had enough hints and clues to make it predictable but not in a way that it was so obvious to take all of the fun out of the story. 

The Bad: There were one or two lines by the characters that betrayed the fact that neither author is a native USian (I think someone said like "a dime for your thoughts" or something like that, tiny detail and the fact that that was basically the only time I remembered that is a good thing). I also do wish that the book had had a small line about how exactly someone is turned into a vampire, again a tiny detail in the grand scheme (and perhaps it was in there and merely mentioned so quickly I missed it) but I would have liked it. Other than that, I'm sure Mel comes off as too rude and prejudiced for some but, well, that's pretty typical human behavior (not to mention teenager) in the face of the unknown and potentially dangerous sad to say. Plus, you know a character like that is going to change (if they're the main character) so while I winced a few times I knew it was going to be for a reason in the end.


So four out of five stars and going on my to-buy list for sure. The book is a stand-alone so it's a complete story and it really is nice to read a stand alone after reading a whole bunch of books from various parts of their series, it's rather satisfying to see a beginning, middle, and end all in one place.  

Manhwa Review: Travelers from the Moon

And here we have the third and final manhwa that I found at my library recently, really there's not much else to say to introduce it. I have to admit that all of this has sparked by interest in what else is out there, I had always wondered how large the manhwa industry is in Korea and it must be larger than I had previously thought, but I'm not sure where to go from here to keep looking into titles.

Travelers of the Moon by Lee Na Hyeon

Summary: “There’s nothing more important than friendship!” In a world where vampires are nearly extinct, Yuh-Ur wakes up one morning to discover that the injured bat her father brought home from a trip is not only fully healed but also a vampire. Unsure what to think about this she becomes even more worried by this development when it appears that a fellow classmate has been attacked by a vampire, although Ida doesn’t seem like the type to go around hurting people….

The Good: Plot-wise this was the strongest of the three manhaw I had checked out, feeling neither like a rip-off of something else and having a plot that made sense and did make me curious about what happened next. The characters also had a pretty good debate about whether or not to trust Ida and their ideas and experiences fleshed out the side characters much more than I was expecting. There is a limit to how much story you can tell in one volume in an on-going story but this story did a lot more in it's first volume than a lot of stories I've read.

The Bad: I did wonder if the first chapter was meant to be a one-shot that later got picked up for a full story since it focused on a completely different character, Ida’s personality seemed rather different, and Yuh-Ur didn’t even make an appearance. I also had a hard time keeping all the character’s names straight, partially due to the odd order and pacing of the story and finally, while there certainly is room for a longer story I think I would have been happier if this had been a single volume work. That’s just personal preference on my part, although perhaps future volumes would be able to explain the series’ odd title. Also, that quote in the summary is the only bit of information on the back cover of the manhwa and you really need more than that if you hope to get buyer/library goer's attention.

The Art: The art is rather conventional, no odd panel shape or placement, lots of screen tones used to fill in objects and backgrounds, there’s not a lot worth noting. While I do have complaints on how the story was paced the panels themselves flowed well and all in all I don’t have any complaints about the art, just no praise either.

As a heads up, I'm heading to a con tomorrow and Sunday so tomorrow's review will be up rather early. I would say that Sunday's review will be up late but since I'm posting this one near midnight anyway (I will blame my brother's graduation for that one) I don't think most people will notice a difference there. 

Webcomic Review Month 2012: Dream*Scar

Apologies that this is a bit late folks, I've got family over and there's a wedding going on twenty feet from my bedroom tomorrow so I'm likely to be updating late again then. I swear I love these comics and am not trying to slight them or anything, life is just a little hectic now (plus I am home for the first time in two months, I'd like a few hours of laziness).

Anyway! Just one comic tonight since my other either finished/I wanted to give them another year to see what they would turn into, I'd much rather review a comic after it has really gotten going and I can say with confidence that it's worth seeing where it will go rather than recommend one more on feelings/predictions. And last year's review here.

Dream*Scar by Heather Meade

Vix has grown up in a world where vampires, werewolves, and all sorts of magical creatures announced their presence to the world years ago but, even thought there have been hints that she's not entirely human herself, she never really thought that world concerned her. But after a tragedy at her school she has to go on the run, discovers that she's not human and that she's possibly someone vital to bridging the gap between worlds.

I'm guessing on that last line there but there have been enough hints that Vix is even more special than simply being not human, one being that she's the star of a story, that I think it's a reasonable guess. So far the plot hasn't really stood out from many other "character discovers they're not what they thought they were" story but I really like the characters and especially how they talk. The way the characters interact and talk, especially the teenaged ones, really has the kind of silly, realistic feeling to it. It's not a style that everyone likes but I do. Currently the art looks gorgeous and it didn't start off to badly either. It's certainly gotten much more polished as the series goes on, the coloring and shading have improved the most, but the original art is also nice enough that it doesn't feel like you have to drag yourself through the comic to "where it gets good" (and I have had to do that with some comics because of their art). The story has moved a little slow so far but I'm confident that even at this slower pace it's worth following and keeping up with.   

  

Book Review: Changeless

As a quick heads up, it looks like there won't be a review tomorrow since I've had just a hard time getting a hold of tv shows/movies to watch. I hate to miss an update like this but I just don't have anything and, looking ahead, I'll have plenty of stuff for the next month or two afterwords. My school has simply spent the first month and a half playing movies I have no interest in and I've had a time and a half getting a hold of Life on Mars (plus I kinda thought that Once Upon a Time and Grimm would be done by now and now it looks like neither of those will be finished until May). Again, sorry to do it but after this I don't foresee this problem popping up for another few months at leas.

So, as for the actual review, I read Soulless quite a while ago and hadn't gotten around to the sequel since I was having even more trouble finding a copy of that then I had of the first book. No idea why but I eventually had to utilize the inter-library loan system to get a copy of the book from half-way across the state and it looks like I'll have to do something similar to get the next few books as well. It's a shame that it's been so hard for me to find these books, it's a fun series, it's regular adult fiction (or possibly romance fiction, I'm not 100% sure) which I don't read that often so it's a nice change of pace and I just don't know what my libraries seem to have against it, maybe it's the publisher?

Changless by Grail Carriger

Summary: Picking up where the last story left off, Alexi is now married to werewolf Alpha Lord Conall Maccon and has settled into her role of prenatural (ie, completely unmagical to the point where her touch turns werewolves and vampires into humans again) adviser to Queen Victoria. Recently there have been some strange events that have puzzled everyone in the supernatural society, a "normalization field" where all ghosts in it are exorcised, vampires become human, and werewolves are unable to transform. Conall chooses at this time to run off to Scotland to deal with pack business with a personal connection for him and Alexi has to chase after him, especially since the normalization field is tracking north to Scotland as well.

The Good: Alexi is a clever and competent lead who is quick on her feet and holds her own in arguments, I really enjoyed her as a main character, she's just fun to read about. I also like a lot of the supporting cast, special mention goes to newcomer Madam Lefoux whom I have heard is a reoccurring character in future books, although I was a bit sad that the change of setting meant that some characters got less page time than they had in previous books. The story does a good job at expanding the setting and further establishing it as an alternate reality and I hope that the next book expands it even farther.

The Bad: Unfortuantly a good bit of the conflict in this story arises simply from miscommunication and it's just not a good thing when you have to have characters willing not act in their best interest to draw out a plot. To the story's credit however this was only done by side characters and Alexi is quick to point out how stupid this all is so none of the main characters had to grab the idiot ball for this to pan out (well, mostly, there is some towards the end to create the conflict for the third book which made me wince). There were points in the later half where the story moved a bit too slowly, again mostly because of some obvious and infuriating miscommunication, but the first half moved quite quickly. Also, really don't understand the choice to shove Alexi's half-sister into the story and make her travel with them as well, I really don't understand that choice and don't think she needed to be in the story at all.

I really enjoyed this installment and as soon as my to-read pile becomes a more reasonable size again I'll put in another request for the next book. The fifth (and I believe final?) book in the Parasol Protectorate comes out in March so I don't think I'll have time to read all the other books before that, as was my original time, but hopefully some library will have a copy of it once I get through the next two. 

Anime Review: Red Garden

I remember about a year ago a friend and I were watching this show together and we got about halfway through before it was just too much of an effort to coordinate our schedules, plus I think I was enjoying it more than she was, and I didn't have enough time to try and find it online to watch the rest of the show. But recently the first few episodes were shown at my anime club (for "mindf*ck night," although really it isn't one at all) and I decided to pick it back up to watch during the Halloween season. I was able to find the dub online (on hulu) but not the sub so now I've seen half the show subbed and it completely dubbed, I think that's a first for me.

Red Garden

Summary: Claire, Rose, Kate, and Rachel were average high school girls who all ran in different circles although they did all have a common friend, Lisa. So when she is killed all of them are upset and then become even more upset when they learn they were actually killed along with her and now have to fight monsters nearly every night to stay alive. Each one reacts differently to this truth and the overall larger conspiracy that they have fallen into.

The Good: I've seen a number of monster-of-the-week and you-are-the-only-one(s)-who-can-fight-these-monsters kind of stories and I think this story does the best job at showing how people would really react to that. Some of the girls break down, others manage to keep living normal lives and, while it might be annoying to see just how broken this leaves some of them, it feels a lot more realistic than the majority of this genre. It was also nice that each of the girls have a very different group of friends and all of them got enough screen time to fully flesh out those relationships and see how they change throughout the series. While this story does have a central plot line I think the strongest part of the show was the character parts instead. 

The Bad: Towards the very end of the series it got really strange and, even though it was well-foreshadowed, the sudden expansion in the scale of the plot didn't quite work. The story went from a story of four girls who are fighting to live and dealing with the psychological effects to a centuries old, fur-vs-fangs feud and it didn't quite work. I kept yelling at the characters to try and negotiate instead of just fight, which is never a good sign, so by the end of the story I actually felt less emotionally connected to the characters and in a sense relieved it was over. 


The Audio: The English dub is, okay, you can easily tell it was produced in that time period between the god-awful English dubs and today's pretty darn good dubs. The weirdest bit however is something that's in both the English and Japanese version, random, musical-esque bits of singing*. It sounds kinda awful in both languages, apparently the Japanese version was bad on purpose so that's why the English version was bad but that's based on the word of Steven Foster, someone who isn't well liked by the anime community lately for writing a bunch of sub par dubs in the past year. The opening song was okay and both of the ending songs were really weird, none of which were translated even though this was a licensed Funimation stream, not a simulcast stream where they can't always get approval to translate the songs. The Japanese dub didn't really stand out to me either but I would probably recommend that one in the end since the character's voices in the English version just varied too much to sound natural.


The Visuals: The opening sequence is a bit reminiscent of Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (also produced by Gonzo) with all the unmoving patterns but the rest of the series looks more normal. The characters are lankier than most anime characters (although they look much more realistic than say, Clamp's "noodle people") and almost all the characters have really big noses as well, some of my friends joked that you could tell this was set in America by the noses. Odd designs aside, the art was consistent, the setting seemed like a good representation of NYC and the many fight scenes looked pretty.

I also saw the OVA for this series, Dead Girls, which was, well, um, not very good. It didn't feel like a part of the series at all, rather like Gonzo had a (kinda) cool new idea for another series and just reused all the character designs. It did answer a few questions from the final but it raised a dozen more and was neither needed nor coherent. Booo, Funimation has put out this series as part of their super-cheap SAVE line so I plan to get that some day. 


*and now that I think about it, there never has been a musical anime has there? I don't normally like musicals but that could be interesting.... 
 

Anime Review: Blood-C

Back when the summer season was starting up this was one of my most anticipated series. I wanted to give Clamp another chance since this seemed like something they could do well, take an existing supernatural/horror/gore series, genres they're familiar with, and do a short series on it. The character designs looked nice, the trailers seemed interesting enough and I like a lot of series that Production IG has done. But, as a Clamp fun, well, this just didn't seem to work.

Blood-C

Summary: With no connection to Blood+ and only a possible tenuous connection to Blood: The Last Vampire, CLAMP takes a crack at Production IG’s franchise and turns vampire slayer Saya into an ordinary school girl who is the only one who can fight the Elder Bairns and try to keep the town safe. But the town is a strange, empty place and some of the people around Saya are stranger still, not that she has anytime to notice with the vauge flashbacks of strange memories she sometimes gets.

The Good: Once things are finally explained towards the end of the series Saya becomes an interesting character and I do wonder just what course of action she’s going to take in the upcoming movie (coming out June 2012 in Japan, it'll be a few months later still until fans in the rest of the world can see it however). The series also employs a trope that isn’t used too often and it takes a little while for the viewer to figure out what trope it is which is good, sometimes it feels like every big “plot twist” is too easy to spot these days so it’s nice to see some where it really is a twist.

The Bad: I never thought I would say this but 12 episodes was too many episodes for this series. The show tried to have nothing happen in the first three episodes to show how abnormal the town is but the fact is that almost all settings in anime, especially ones in fantasy, are strange so I didn’t even pick up on most of it until other people told me. I suspect that if the earlier episodes were really compressed, the pace of the later ones was sped up and the upcoming movie were combined into a 13 episode series it would have been much more tolerable and interesting. I only kept watching this show because NicoNico doesn’t offer it’s back catalog to nonsubscribers, if it wasn’t for that detail I would have dropped this show and waited for others to see if the characters got more likable or if the plot sped up/got interesting/actually showed up and said what was going on because that simply took way too long.

The Audio: Blood-C’s composer has worked on another CLAMP work before, X/1999 which was Naoki Sato’s first work actually. Anyone who has heard one of the X’x trademark themes (Sandame) will instantly recognize his hand in some of the more dramatic music during the fight scenes*. The BGM is solid, the OP is a mash-up of Japanese, Engrish and I believe French (and, if you can find translations, your first hint that things are not as happy as they appear), the ED is a ballad and Saya’s singing really does not work in this series.

The Visuals: The show certainly lives up to the blood part of it’s name, this is easily the goriest show I’ve seen the whole year and I saw Deadman Wonderland earlier in the year which had plenty of gory bits. Here not only is there tons of gore but it’s really well drawn gore, the artists don’t just splash red paint onto Saya, they make the blood run and clump the way real blood would if it was on skin or clothing, if it streaked or if someone tried to dry it off. Many of the monsters in this show also look quite disturbing one way or another (although some of them just look narm-ish) and I’m glad niconico was streaming the censored version, despite how bad the censoring actually was (black and white areas that would cover the entire screen without so much as a gradient). It’s easy to tell that CLAMP did the character designs since they all bear their (recent) trademark look of noodle people and as usual the men look more elongated and awkward than the female characters do. It’s clear from the visuals that this show had a high production quality level (screenshots of individual frames show that there was even some animation in the fights that was much to fast for most people to notice) and I wonder just how good the movie is going to look if this was just a tv show.

I was frustrated by this show, it had plenty of potential yet I didn't like the presentation at all. Still want to check out Blood+ sometime, the only reason I haven't is because it's rather long, but I really can't recommend this show to anyone since I disliked it so much. I do like slow paced stories when there is a good payoff and so far this story hasn't had a satisfactory ending.

*well let’s put it this way, this is the first time I’ve ever heard music by a composer, heard some other work by them and could tell it was by the same person. If someone as musically challenged as me can tell I think most other people probably can, it was actually a little freaky being able to tell.

Book Review: City of Fallen Angels

Well it's a bit odd for me to review a book in the middle of a series without first covering the other books but stranger things have happened on this blog. Actually, this book's existence is odd, the author had already completed a triology (the first three books in this series) and was going to write a spin-off comic book about one of the side characters and when that didn't pan out she started writing it as a companion novel and realized that it was actually a three book story, not a one book one. So now she's writing two series at once which seem to still be fairly popular, if the waiting list for the books at my local library is any indication (think I requested this book in late April and got it mid-June, I was about 14th in line and the book had been out for a little while at that point). Because of all of that, I would not recommend starting with this book if you want to read the series (and honestly, who starts with the middle book in a series anyway?) but if you're already familiar with the first three and are wondering if this book is worth checking out then here's a review for you.

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

Continuing with the same style as the past three books there isn't much to say about this one, except that Clary's obviously photoshopped green eyes (they're much more noticeable in person) are really creeping me out.

Summary: The cast from The Mortal Instruments returns and, after the chaotic events at the end of The City of Glass, some things are returning to normal and a new normal is being created for others. Clary begins to train as a shadowhunter, Jace has horrible nightmares that slowly begin to control him and Simon deals with having two girlfriends at once. Guess whose the main character in this story?

The Good: Having Simon as the narrator (well, most central character to this book, it's a third person narration) is actually a good thing since he’s snarky, a pretty nice guy, usually easier to sympathize with than the other characters and he’s outsider so he’s more in the loop than anyone else (as odd as it sounds, he hangs out with a wider variety of people than almost any other character). The book serves to further widen their world, even if almost no new characters are introduced, and it brings in one character from The Infernal Devices but does so in such a way that people who haven’t read The Clockwork Angel won’t be confused. People who are already fans of the series will love this book, it hardly feels like it's been two years since the last book came out, and people who like YA urban fantasy with plenty of romance will like this series as well, this book in particular isn't stronger than any of the other books but it isn't weaker than them either. 

The Bad: While trying to stay as spoiler free as possible I shall say this about the ending, I think they killed the wrong villain. It seems as if they killed off the much more interesting (and probably more powerful) villain so it's disgruntling that the characters will now (presumably) have to spend the next two books killing off the other villain (which also probably could have been avoided). Simon’s love triangle was also resolved awfully fast, incredibly conveniently as well, and yet the two girls (Isabella, shadowhunter who likes going out with downworlders who her parents would never approve of and Maria, a bi-racial werewolf in Luke’s pack who initially hated Simon for being a vampire) acted rather out of character for the whole thing*. In the end, it feels like this book wraps up neatly and everything is going fine and then oh hey guys, you forgot something, let’s watch it cause problems for two more books! At this point I'm just not sure how this is the start of a multi-book story, if the characters were smart this would have been a nice, one-off side adventure.

 

While I'm happy that my favorite side characters reappared after all (Mangus, Maria, I'm not that fond of the main cast) and I do think I liked this book more than Clockwork Angel I found myself yelling at the ending which isn't a good sign. I don't yell at stories when I don't want them to end or when it's a cliffhanger (I read manga/webcomics, I deal with cliffhangers on a daily basis), I yell when the characters do something dumb and I thought they were clever enough to think ahead. I will probably try the next book, just to see if my guess about the villain is correct, but I just don't find myself liking these books as much as when I first read them back in high school.   

*it’s true that I wanted the other pairing to happen but I do really think that Isabella contradicted herself, by saying it was okay for her to be non-exclusive but Simon couldn't (bit of a weird gender-flip take on that one actually, yes she does explain herself but it seems like a bit of a stupid excuse). And Maria was surprisingly mellow when an old flame of hers came back to town (in order to make this all really complicated) and this is despite the fact that she hasn’t gotten much more mellow since she was introduced, there hasn’t even been enough time for serious character development.