Manhwa Review: Full House

Just in case people didn't get the memo yesterday, I switched the comic and book reviews this week since I just hadn't gotten around to reading a comic as of yesterday so if you came here looking for a book review just go down to the next post. If you came here looking for a comic review then great, you're in the right place because I've got an odd one this week. Odd in the sense that, well, did everyone else know that the now-defunct publisher CPM (part of DC Comics) published manga and manhwa? I hadn't known that until a few weeks back when I stumbled upon a different title at my local used bookstore and was pretty surprised, I hadn't even realized manhwa was being printed in the US in 2004, heck the copyright page for this book (found at my not-so-local library) says it was on it's second printing too, madness! Which is also a good word to describe this story.....


 Full House by Soon Yon Won

Summary: Elle is an aspiring screenwriter living in a house that her late father had designed and is quite attached to it. She's confused and enraged to learn that the house has been sold and she's to be evicted as it's new owner, world famous actor Ryder Baye, prepares to move in yet somehow she ends up pretending to be engaged to him despite the fact that they hate each other's guts.

The Good: Well, it is a bit more unusual to come across manga/manhwa published in the US with adult characters (certainly not impossible but it's usually not what you find first) s that was, nice. I also ended up liking the character Miranda, Ryder's manager, more than I expected for her almost talent at looking at a bad situation and being positive about how it can work out well (and how this weirded out the other characters just a bit) and her scenes were the most fun to read.

The Bad: As a general disclaimer, I'm not a big fan of the "slap slap kiss" romance trope in general, I don't even get why fans will ship two characters together who (obviously to me) hate each other and call it "unresolved sexual tension", this just isn't my area of expertise. However, I think that a lot of people would agree with me that the slap slap kiss go on just far too long. Several times that situation goes down, things start to defuse, the characters walk away, aaaand then one comes back and it starts up all over again! I feel like the author just had no sense of timing (since I feel like slap slap kiss does require a bit of comedic timing to work well) and because of this I can't believe that the characters will ever have feelings for each other. This could be the rare work which doesn't pair up the characters in the very end but as it stands Yon Woo would have to do a lot of writing, and more convincing writing than right now, to make me fully believe that Elle and Ryder could actually fall in love with each other.

The Art: This is a bit random but is it just me or does Ryder look an awful lot like a lady on the cover? I'm well aware of the bishonen trope but if anyone was to pick up this story and think it was a lesbian love story between a pretty girl and a more androgynous girl I wouldn't blame them. Not that you would make that mistake once you looked at the back cover (on which the characters look more like high school students than adults) or within the story itself, although at that point you might be having more trouble with figuring out the reading order of more than a few oddly laid pages (the rapid fire pace of the slap slap kiss made it even worse for me).


This one gets a 1.5 out of 5 stars since I didn't like it, don't think anyone can convince me to read more of it and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even if you like this sort of romance I will go out of my way to find a better example of it for you to read, although this does mean that the series has won the dubious distinction of being the first CPM work that I've actively disliked, I'm almost impressed. 

Book Review: Madness Underneath

EDIT: Well this is a first, apparently this is part of a four book series, not a trilogy as I originally thought, so I'm having to change some things in the The Bad section. Doesn't change my feelings on the book but obviously if the series isn't a trilogy I can't refer to it as such!


 In case anyone is confused, I'm switching the book and manga reviews up this week since I only had a chance to grab manga/comics from the not-so-local-library on Wednesday, was sick on Thursday for a lot of the day, and just haven't had a chance to read anything beyond the second volume of Swan yet (and since it's been so long since I talked about the first volume I didn't feel like I would write a very good review). However, I have read this book, the sequel to 2011's The Name of the Star which was one of my favorite books that year and I've been dying (ha-ha, it's a book about ghosts) to read it since it was released in February and can certainly talk about that instead. However, much like Swan, while I remember the plot I had a hard time remembering some details about the individual characters which is never a good sign....


The Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson

Summary: It's only been about a month since the American Rory was attacked and nearly killed by an ex-British-policeman-ghost-hunter (who was a ghost himself) at her London school and while she's not exactly eager to go back she's not happy where she is now either. But it appears that the British police have gotten wind of what else happened during the attack, namely that Rory has gone from someone who can simply see ghosts to someone who can kill them with a touch, and they want her back in London, and Rory isn't too happy about any of that. 

The Good: I still rather like Rory as a character, even though she does a lot of things I thought were dumb (and would have thought were dumb at her age) and I was surprised at how much I liked the London group as well, I hadn't remembered that. I was also happy that the story didn't immediately drop the school aspect of Rory's life or pretend that she could miss a month at a very high level school and still be doing fine in her classes, it was a touch of realism I don't often find in books of any genre and appreciated it.  

The Bad: I had some problems with how this book was laid out in regards to how it's going to fit into an entire series. There's no villain like there was in the first book until the very very end and, while that and another subplot might make for interesting conflict by the end, at this point they feel much less threatening than the villain of the first book which isn't generally how you're supposed to make it work. I was also hoping for a connection to the first book's villain which again, might happen in a later book (especially since the characters have mentioned how confused they were by the reveal and I doubt Johnson would have reminded the reader of that if she didn't plan to use it later on) but nothing happened here. And that's my overall problem with this story, it feels like the stereotype of the middle book in a series or trilogy, not much happens until the very end (where something happens that will make everything easier/harder for the main characters in the next book) and lacks both the plot and character development that the first book had. 



I was actually a bit less frustrated with the book before I, erm, laid out exactly why I was unhappy with it, but this was still a disappointing read none the less. I'm going to give it 2.5 out of 5 stars and hope that the third book, which I imagine will be out sometime next year, will be worth it.    

Anime Review: Encouragement of the Climb and Senyuu

As I've mentioned before it can be a bit hard at times to make sure I've watched/read enough so that I have enough material to make four full reviews every week and for this week, well, I just didn't have time to watch another full series. I realized this in advance and when I was wracking my mind for alternatives I hit upon one, how about I try out some of the shorts (series that have episodes which are five minutes or less) that crunchyroll is streaming and see if any of those tickle my fancy and talk about multiple ones to make up for a full review. So that's what we're doing this time, since crunchyroll only started picking up those shows in the past year or so (or perhaps studios only started making a lot of shorts a year or so ago) I doubt I'll be able to do this again any time soon but it was a change of pace and it was nice to be able to get through an entire series in one evening and still have time to do other things.


Encouragement of the Climb

Encouragement of the Climb is a series with 3:30 minute long episodes that focus on Aoi, a quiet high school girl who wants to live her high school life quite unadventoursly but is reluctantly dragged back into mountain climbing (really hiking) by an old friend from middle school and she finds herself enjoying the sport again. I saw the first episode back when it first aired in the winter and I was rather lukewarm on it then but now that I had a chance to watch all the episodes in one go I really warmed up to it and it ended up being a really cute show. Bear in mind that it's not a sports show, rather it's a "cute girls do cute things" show and the cute thing in question (usually) has to do with mountain hiking. It never gets overly saccharine and I think that the 3:30 length is perfect for it, the episodes do feel a bit short but something happens in each one and during it's quick 30 second outro the show even shows a still or two advancing the story a little longer. So I give this a recommendation and would certainly watch a second season of it, just in one batch like I did with this, not week to week.

Senyu

A long time ago there was a demon named Satan Rchimedes and he caused trouble for the human world until he was sealed away. Now there are demons running amuck and causing trouble again so all  of the descendants of the hero who sealed him have been sent on a quest to defeat this new evil.  Now I know this doesn't sound like a bad premise, especially since the story doesn't take itself seriously at all and I know that a lot of people liked it but I just did not like this show at all. The humor got overly repetitive, was forced, the situations were rarely amusing, and even though the story was trying to break/invert some common fantasy tropes the problem is that genre-aware fantasy has been around long enough that it has it's own stereotypes and tropes which the series followed too often. I know this one has a second season coming out this summer but I won't be checking it out at all, even  if the episodes are just four and a half minutes long.

Movie Review: That Guy...Who Was In That Thing

And I'm back to having stable wi-fi, yaaay. Although I know that I'm making at least two other large trips this summer (and Otakon which I'm not even going to attempt blogging during), crossing my fingers that my internet will be a little more stable for that. In any case, I had to scramble a bit for this review anyway since I was planning on talking about the Fifth Doctor classic episode and it turns out that it's the one episode I've already seen/covered, Earthshock. So I went and looked at my list of movies on Netflix I eventually wanted to watch and found this one which I had seen some people talking about on twitter recently and, since it was only an hour and some change long, figured that it would be a good fit.


That Guy...Who Was In That Thing

Summary: There are many actors in Hollywood and only a handful will continuously capture the public's attention. As for the rest, well, they're playing smaller roles and even big roles but they're never quite as memorable, they're always just "that guy".

The Good: The way this movie was "pitched" to me was that it was about a group of character actors talking about the business which interested me, since character actors often look quite distinct, although as the actors themselves point out rather quickly that term doesn't quite mean what it used to. They were less "character" actors and more small to medium stars and it was interesting to be reminded of how small the pool of big name actors really is and just how many of the mainstream roles they get. Anime is similar, even though you can have smaller actors like these guys playing lots of guest roles on tv, or even a number or being part of the main cast of quite a few, if their not in the spotlight all the time it's easy to forget about them and that was interesting to think about.

The Bad: There are two big problems with this, it's too long and has too many people. There are 16 people interviewed here, all male, and 15 of them are white, I think most people can see what the problem here is (and when I saw the recommendation on twitter I also saw some people noting that it was all male and someone else saying that they had seen a similar movie recently but it had included some women, no idea on what the title of that production is sadly). And even when you have 16 people all talking about some of the troubles, both in general and personal, with becoming a recognized name in the industry that's just not enough to fill up 78 minutes without getting repetitive around the 45 minute mark. Sadly, between those two problems, plus a slew of technical problems I'm about to dive into, I just can't recommend this and was bored by a lot of this film. 

Production Values: Normally I don't have much to say about the production values of a documentary (partially because most people are unwilling to do anything extremely stylistic) beyond "okay they were competent, good!" However here, wow technically this was terrible. I wanted to give the filmmaker a tripod since they clearly didn't have one, for some reason they liked to zoom in and out on the speaker and sometimes didn't aim the camera quite right (I swear at one point we were accidentally staring at a grey wall for a few seconds), there was a shot or two where the actor was in front of a window and the poor camera was trying to figure out what exposure to shoot for and was changing as they were recording, I even heard an airplane in the background for one outside shot! Guys, I've made videos and yes it's frustrating to record something, see that, and have to rerecord but as it stands I, and most of my classmates from that class, have all made technically better videos with rather low level equipment, no budget, and almost no time, that's pretty terrible!


Sorry for no photo tonight guys, apparently Photobucket is down and I'll edit that in in the morning. In any case, I'm giving this movie just 2 out of 5 stars for being entirely too long, white, male, and for making me question the camera-person's technical abilities. If I can find the name of that other film I'll edit the review and put it in, for right now all I can say is that you can surely find something better to watch with your time.

Book Review: Where Mountain Meets the Moon

And now to mooch off of family wifi to see if I can get this review up on time. This is another book that I grabbed in desperation towards the end of the school year yet I wasn't able to read it until I got home and checked it out from my local library (silly school had me return the books a few days before graduation). Once I started reading I got a little nervous since it became clear that it was middle grade not young adult, and well, middle grade books just engage me less these days (considering I'm about ten years too old for them this shouldn't be a surprise). But, since I am still in a slump, plus this was on my list, and I was enjoying it, I decided to perserve and finished it rather quickly regardless.

Where Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Summary: Minli lives with her family on the Fruitless Mountain and, even though she knows why the stories say the mountain is so barren, after hearing another story from her father and on the advice of a goldfish she goes off to see the Old Man on the Moon and ask him herself.

The Good: I liked how the story was able to incorporate a half dozen other stories told by the characters into itself and create a history and a precedence for what Minli is doing that way. I have no idea how closely any of these stories resemble real Chinese fairy tales but they have the same feeling, the same kind of stories and storytelling, that “real” fairy tales I’ve read had and that’s not the easiest style of story to recreate.

The Bad: Since the story is middle grade it was a little too simplistic for my taste, that combined with the fact that it’s a quest means that Minli rarely faced true adversary or hardship and I do wish the story had thrown in a little more of that (even though I do prefer quest type stories to "defeat the evil lord" kinds of stories and liked how no villain suddenly appeared at the end for Minli to vanquish). But, since a middle grade book doesn’t need to be the most complex thing out there, nothing really does and when your readers are 11 this is doubly true, this isn’t a terrible thing and with the story’s quick pacing this also would have been hard to pull off.

I’m giving this one a 3.5 out of 5 for being a rather solid book, even if it wasn’t precisely what I wanted, and would easily recommend it to any middle grade reader who wanted something fantasy to read.