Manga Review: Carat

So, I'm out of town for the weekend and it didn't occur to me that the retirement home where I was staying wouldn't have wifi or even an ethernet jack. Elderly people use the internet right, they can't all be luddites. In any case, I now feel rather hip using my laptop in a coffee shop eating something not-coffee, talking about an unlicenesed manga title that probably not many people have heard of

Carat by Watanabe Yoshitomo

Summary: Two girls, Yuni and Melissa from  Carat have been chosen as candidates for the next queen and now have to fight each other over jewels that have been unleashed on Earth, the first to collect five wins. Buuuuut the girls don’t really want to fight each other, they’re best friends after all, so they both recruit someone to fight as a magical girl in their place and thus is the start of a truly bizarre adventure.

The Good: In case the summary didn’t make it clear enough, this is a magical girl parody and one I found much more amusing than ones such as Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan or Puni Puni Poemi. I think it did help that I read some of Sugar Sugar Rune recently, since this has a really similar identical set-up, but I think that a lot of fans of the magical girl genre have come across these tropes before and can easily find the humor in it. The story is also well paced, it’s not too long, doesn’t draw anything out (except the ship tease), as I said earlier I liked a lot of the humor so this ended up being a quick, fun little read for me which was good. 

The Bad: I will admit that I wanted a few things to be a little more conclusively resolved by the end (heck, I wasn’t expecting the ending to be as odd as it was so it caught me off guard and I didn’t realize at first that this was the end) but I should have seen that coming considering this is a parody that plays almost no trope straight. Some of the jokes, especially concerning the villains, became a bit too repetitive by the end, and I would have liked to have seen at least a little more character development than actually happened (I hadn’t realized the story was so short when I started or I would have nixed that hope) but overall it was short enough that it didn’t have time to develop any huge problems.

The Art: The art was not exactly generic, since there isn’t really a “this is how all magical girl stories look!” style but if I was to read something else by the artist I wouldn’t even notice since there was nothing that stood out and made the style distinctive or even recognizable. I liked all the designs, they were cute and everything was certainly consistent enough for everything to look like it was from the same story but it didn’t stand out the way the art in other series has for me.

Licensing Chances: This is something I’m going to add in for unlicensed manga that I talk about (probably not anime but I might) and sadly I think that this series has next to no chance to being licensed. It is pretty short which does work in it’s favor and it’s from the publisher Mag Garden (ie, no company has “dibs” on it, although this does mean Kodansha Comics can’t license it and since they got a lot of Del Ray’s old titles which included a fair amount of shojo/magical girl titles that is a shame) but I noticed something weird about that. I went to Wikipedia, looked up what magazines Mag Garden has (a shojo one and a shonen one, ______ and _____ respectively) and as far as I can tell every title from those magazines that was licensed in the US was done by TokyoPop who hasn’t been around in a few years (I’ll believe they’re back when they do more than sell back stock through Right Stuf). I have no idea if they had a special contract or if they were just a good fit for each other (which is more likely the case) and sadly this does fit in best with TokyoPop’s line of titles, much better than any other company currently out there. So at this point I doubt we’ll be seeing this in English, if you want to buy it you’ll have to do so in Japanese.

Now that that’s out of the way, I give this 3 out of 5 stars for being fun, something I would pick up since it’s so short, but probably not something I would go to the trouble of importing (honestly if shipping was cheaper than it was then I’d be much more likely to consider importing manga from Japan, curse you Earth having an ocean and a continent between me and comics). However, even though I said I probably wouldn’t be able to identify the artist since the art style wasn’t very, stylistic, I do plan on looking up and seeing what else they’ve made, I wonder how their sense of humor translates into stories that aren’t straight up parodies.

Anime Review: Katanagatari

This is one of those titles which I heard about when it was coming out, thought "cool", saw it was licensed, thought "even cooler" and then waited for a legal stream to show up which never happened. So, since this technically is the spring noitaminA show (it's a rerun and, considering how odd the original airing was, one hour long episode each month for a year, I'm mostly okay with that, sad that it took up the entire timeslot though) I had to at the very least give it a shot and I was really hoping that I'd like it when I went into it.


Katanagatari (literally, Sword Story)

Summary: Several hundred years ago a legendary sword smith made a 1000 swords, most of which were preparation for his crowning works, the 12 shikizaki blades and it's said whoever possesses those 12 could rule Japan. Togame, a strategist for the emperor, is off on a quest to find and retrieve all 12 and after two failed attempts she's come up with an unusual plan to get the rest back, to team up with the son of the man who foiled the last rebellion, Shichika, and make him fall in love with her so that he won't be tempted by anything to steal the swords. Of course, since he's a practitioner of a martial art that uses no swords and can't seem to use one himself perhaps she didn't need to bother with that part....

The Good: I was rather surprised to notice at the end that the story took a completely blank, flat character and made them into more or less a rounded character by the end, which I'm sure was entirely the story's intention but it actually worked out better than I expected! Actually the whole story worked better than I expected, it is a bit predictable at parts (especially since I had heard one or two rumors about the ending) but it was fun, the character banter was a heck of a lot easier to follow than Bakemonogatari (probably because it didn't involve all those stills filled with words), and I really liked how the show looked. Fun isn't precisely the word I'd use to describe this show but it was more than enjoyable, I'd watch it again, and I'd recommend it to friends because of how well it all fits together in the end, even if no particular element especially stands out/is especially stunning.

The Bad: The series is formulaic, in each episode they end up fighting someone for a sword and winning one way or another which does take away a little bit of the tension (apparently the original novels that the story is based on were being turned out by Nisio Isin at a rate of one per month so I can see why the story went this way). The formula starts to get a bit varied in the second half but it never deviates that much. Also, you need to be able to have a rather large suspension of disbelief for this show, especially when things are "explained" in the last episode and things don't make quite as much sense as they could.

Production Values: I'll admit it, one reason I wanted to try this show and like it was because of just how stylish it looked. It's hard to show exactly what I mean from just screenshots but they at least get across how distinctive the character designs are. There was one episode towards the middle where everything looked a bit off (the lines were all drawn differently and the animation didn't seem quite as smooth, it was especially obvious in a flashback which had scenes from every episode) but other than that, admittedly large, hiccup I liked how this looked. As for the music, I was watching fansubs from the original broadcast and I didn't care for either of the openings nor really any of the endings (there was a different one for every episode). Funny enough, I looked up the new opening and ending themes and liked those much better and I liked a lot of the background music as well (to the point where I got cross that about halfway through either the show or my fansubs stopped having the preview in them and since they always played my favorite track with the preview and dammit I wanted to hear more of it!).

So, giving this a 4 out of 5 for enjoying it quite a bit and I guess I need to plan on picking up NISA's very nice sets sometime in the future. It looks like it never sold well enough to get regular sets made, just the premium ones, and hopefully they'll stay in stock long enough for me pick some up, I think I even saw someone say that it seemed like they had stocked a few more at TRSI lately (if the company didn't look at this re-airing and expect to gain a few more fans like myself then they would be a bit silly).

TV Series Review: Doctor Who 7.2

And to wrap up the live action shows I was following live (as opposed to hearing about them years later and then scouring my libraries/Netflix for them), the latest half season of Doctor Who. Man, guys I hope we go back to full seasons soon, having only six or seven at a time just doesn't feel right, and since I see people talking about the 50th anniversary special in November but not about more episodes I guess we probably won't even get anymore this year beyond that and the Christmas special. 


Doctor Who

Summary: Still grieving after losing Amy and Rory and also Clara in the Christmas special the Doctor has become curious, why did he meet what seems to have been the same girl twice even though that should be impossible? So he tracks her down again, this time to contemporary England where the similarities between her and the others persist and she falls into adventuring with him while he tries to puzzle out this impossible girl. 

The Good: I was a fan who was already okay with Clara when the season started but I didn't have really high hopes for her. But lo and behold I ended up really liking her, more than I liked Amy at points but honestly Amy was never one of my favorite companions. And I seem to be in the minority here but I really liked all the individual episodes too, some of them had weird premises but everything actually managed to work for me. Best of all we got to really see the range of Matt Smith's acting this season, I find it hard whenever I watch something with an unfamiliar actor in it to always tell how much they're acting (especially since from the video interviews it seems like Matt is bit of a silly guy anyway) but here he had a great chance to show his range and now I want to see him play all kinds of different characters in future stories just to see what else he can really do.

The Bad: I think I've figured out why even though I like more of the individual episodes of Moffat's tenure more than RTD (or at least, with those episodes I tend to not remember half of them and when they come up in conversations they feel like something I fever-dreamed) but not the whole show, I just don't like how he structures overall story arcs. It's a bit frustrating how every time the companions are super-special-important people (which RTD didn't do as much, you could argue he did something similar with Donna in Turn Left but more or less Rose/Martha/Donna became special through their travels, Amy/Rory/Clara were already special because they were it feels like) and part of me always goes "how do you expect me to believe that this character is insanely special when we've only had a season or half a season to foreshadow that?" even if I know (logically) that few shows are even written out far enough in advance that they could sprinkle these clues to my satisfaction. And they did actually make an attempt to retcon part of Clara which I did like (although they revealed that at the completely wrong point of the episode, it just completely upset the feel to have the reveal at the very beginning but not get to the moment of the reveal until 3/4ths of the way through) but in any case, can we have some more characters who become awesome and amazing because of what they go through, not characters who start as mere plot devices to ignite a story and only later begin to feel real?

The Production Values: Gonna try renaming this section, in any case, this season looked pretty good, for once I have no complaints about how anything looked! Sure there were plenty of scenes where the effects weren't movie standard quality but nothing looked so off that I was drawn out of the show visual wise or sound wise, I'm a happy fan here!


Sooooo, I guess I'll give this a 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars and again, in a bit of an unpopular opinion, I'm not looking forward to November for reasons that come up in the last few minutes of the last episode so it's too spoilerly to state. It shouldn't take most fans long to piece together what's going on but if you aren't sure talk to me and I can fill in some details that I read prior to that episode airing. In any case, now that there's no new Doctor Who for a while I'm going to try and watch some more Classic Who so if anyone has any suggestions for what serials to watch leave them in the comments/shoot them to me on twitter. Ideally I want to start with the First Doctor and work my way forwards but I'll take any suggestions people give me!

Book Review: Prisoners in the Palace

So, every fan of any media goes through burnout sometimes, some more frequently than others and some not often at all. I tend to go through a book burnout about once every two years (I think the last time this happened was when I read all of those really blah science fiction books two summers ago) and I'm in one of those stages now. I'm not seeing much I like at the library (not surprising considering how many years I've been going to each of them), going through my to-read list I'm baffled why some of those books are on there, and just not getting much pleasure out of reading. I grabbed this one from my school's library before exam week since I needed something to read when not studying and, well, at least it was better than the two or three books I tried before it from my list and ended up returning unfinished.

Prisoners in the Palace by Michaela MacColl

Summary: Liza Hasting has just suffered two tragedies: her parents have died in a tragic accident and she is apparently left with no fortune nor skills to earn money with and will soon be destitute. Because of this she agrees to become Princess Victoria’s lady’s maid and, since she stands a better chance at paying off her father’s debtors if her lady becomes queen and rewards her, she finds herself acting as Victoria’s maid, confident, and spy on the things going on around her.

The Good: As far as I can tell this was a fairly historically accurate novel (which sounds strange since MacColl says in the author notes that she rearranged parts of Victoria’s life so that the story flowed better) and I can’t remember the last time I read a book set in/around the Victoria era which didn’t involve supernatural happenings, it was a nice change. Liza’s situation ended up being handled more realistically than I would have expected. Actually, the novel made me realize how much I missed the upstairs/downstairs going on at Downton Abbey and it makes me want to read/watch other stories with that same dynamic.

The Bad: In the end, even though this wasn’t a terrible read I just didn’t get anything out of it and I’m not sure why. Liza was an alright main character, although she lacked some spark that would have made her a memorable lead, but I did feel like Victoria was a really inconsistent character and it was hard to tell if she had grown at all by the end. The story was okay and worked yet, even seeing in the author’s notes that the pacing of real life events had been reworked to make the story flow better, it still felt a just bit too laid back considering what the stakes were. Everything just felt a bit flat about this book and, if I hadn’t just come off of two weeks where I couldn’t find anything that I was enjoying reading at all I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

So giving this just 2.5 out of 5 stars for being an okay book but not one I expect to remember long into the future. And crossing my fingers that I get out of this burnout soon, although it's going on for longer than it normally does. 

Manga Review: Olympos

So, on Wednesday I had my wisdom teeth out and, since this is a surgery that results in having four less bones in your body and several other bones quite sore as a result, they gave me some pretty strong painkillers to take for it. Painkillers don't last forever however and when you wake up in the middle of the night when said painkillers stop working you're not always at your most attentive. Which is my round-about way of saying that I accidentally took the wrong drugs on Friday (codeine is nasty stuff y'all) and spent the entire day out of it and even twelve hours after I took the damn thing I was barely lucid enough to get on twitter for half an hour and writing this review was way out of my range of capabilities. Funny enough I had considered writing a few reviews in advance just in case, I'd read this book already, heck when Yen Press announced it I looked it up online to see if it would interest me and read more of it than I meant to, so sorry folks, turns out that getting your wisdom teeth out is a bigger deal than a lot of people make it out to be.


Olympos by Aki

Summary: In the myths they say that the Trojan prince Ganymede was stolen by Zeus to become a cup-bearer for the gods but in these stories he was instead stolen by Apollo to ease his own boredom, something all the gods seem to have in excess. 

The Good: This might sound a little odd but I don't mind how much the gods have been changed up from their original incarnations and here's why; the Greek gods were first and foremost very human in their actions, hence why they were so petty, and getting bored is a very human thing. So, when you take immortal beings, which are still rather human like, and give them nothing to do of course boredom will result, it's an interesting take and I rather like it. 

The Bad: I remember when I first read some of this I really liked it but this time around, between which I had looked at a couple of other people's views and saw they were mostly lukewarm, I was just really bored. The story seemed dull, none of the characters really did anything, nothing essitentally changed by the end, it felt much more like a young creator trying to tell what would be a really hard story for an experienced writer to pull off well, it's just hard to write an interesting story that spends basically half of it's time naval gazing. So unless you happen to like stories like that, and I don't mind naval gazing a lot of the time, you should avoid this one.

The Art: The cover gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of art to expect, graceful pretty boys with little resemblance to either greek physique/clothing in general or the gods they're supposed to be (but the story does provide a reason for that which I'm okay with). The backgrounds are also basic however, it's clear where Aki's artistic talents lie, and it would have been nice to have had some more detailed ones, although given this is a story that's more about characters interacting than the setting, really it could have been set anywhere, it's not a deal killer. I did like however that Yen included the colored pages at the beginning of each volume, I do like how Aki works with color.


So, giving this just a 2.5 out of 5 stars and not really a recommendation given how dull it turned out to be. This is hardly the first time my opinion on something has really changed between when I first started consuming it and when I finished but, as always, I'm a bit confused how I had such conflicting opinions.