Book Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Since this is really late I'll be brief, I was aware of this book when it was first a serialized novel online but was always too busy to get around to reading it. I've also been hesitant to try it out since I've seen reviews of the later novels (the book was later picked up by a traditional publisher, hence why my library had a copy) that say they've gone downhill. The good news is that this book could be read entirely on it's own so if you're nervous like me worry not, no obligation to keep reading!

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by  Catherynne M. Valente, illustrated by Ana Juan

Manga Review: Magi (volumes six through ten)

Funny enough, when I posted my review of the first five volumes of Magi I thought "yeah, I'd really like to read more of this" and went back to my library website where I found volumes nine and ten. I requested them and kept scrolling (my library, like every other one I've known, doesn't always have an author's work appear chronologically in searches) only to realize that nope, volume ten had only dropped the previous week but they had never gotten six through eight! I had a similar situation with Gundam The Origin some people might recall so I do plan on submitting a purchase request for everyone else who wants to read it (my library doesn't just ask for the title and author, I have to put in things like original publication date, publisher, and ISBN which seems like a safeguard against spam but a really inelegant way to do it). So, scanlations were used for those missing volumes and man I am glad for professional translations, I have known some scanlation groups who do a pretty good job but these were inferior to the Viz ones in style and word choice!

Magi by Shinobu Ohtaka

Webcomic Review: Cucumber Quest

While Cucumber Quest has a fairly large following I'd imagine that Gigi D.G's first comic, the Hiimdaisy (her old pen name) Persona 4 fancomic probably has an even wider name recognition and that's how I first found her work. I really liked that series of comics and was sad that it's unfinished (for the uninitiated, I really like this fandub of the comics) and I'm still surprised by the notoriety of it, I believe that the English dub for the Persona 4 The Arena game even had a reference to one of her jokes in there. So it wasn't a surprise to me that this work is also influenced by classic RPGs, although it might be an even stronger connection than I first thought.

Cucumber Quest by Gigi D.G.

Anime Review: Rage of Bahamut: Genesis

This is another title that wasn't on my to-watch list for the fall initially but good buzz, and some persistent friends, convinced me to try it out. Hmm, it seems as if I've been saying that about quite a few shows that aired this past fall....

Rage of Bahamut: Genesis

Winter Anime 2014 Round-UP

It's that time again and finally, between the fact that most of my anime ended the week before Christmas and that the rest all took a week or two off for Christmas and New Years (which I do completely understand) I was going a bit mad over here with nothing to watch. I tried out a number of things, half rewatched some others, convinced myself to not start rewatching even more shows, and just am very glad that I'm back to having a regular schedule of having anime magically pop up every few days to watch. As per usual, let me first spend a few minutes on what shows I'm continuing from the fall season (at this point I've more or less dropped Tokyo Ravens and don't even ask about Space Bros, I'm at least a full season behind):

Kill La Kill: Oh damn, when KLK (along with these other two shows) took a two week break I wasn't that impressed where it ended. Some new things had been revealed, the second half was set up, but a couple of major things I expected to happen, well, didn't. They still didn't happen here but the story has finally done it's "major upset to motivate the second half" and this should make things quite interesting, at least for the next few episodes. I still am torn about KLK in many ways, the story has grown on me, I like the soundtrack, I like the characters, yet dear god it's just so much fanservice each week. And no guys, I don't think you can really say "these super skimpy outfits empower the female characters!" when, well, unless I'm wrong this is a show with a mostly male staff and guys, characters don't technically get to decide what they wear. Cosplayers? Sure, people on the beach in skimpy bathing clothes? Absolutely, but not fictional characters, not really, and that's putting aside the "okay howcome it's empowering when I wear little clothing but not when I wear baggy clothes that I really like?" detail. It's a problematic show in a lot of ways yet it's also really fun, just be really really careful where you watch it since it's rare for it to go more than 10 minutes without hitting NSFW territory.

Nagi-Asu: Finally, we're back to the plot! For those just tuning in, Nagi-Asu is a semi-fantastical, semi-coming-of-age story about a group of kids from the sea who are going to school on land and it was slowing down right before the mid-season cliffhanger a few weeks back. However the story is moving forward once again and quickly, as predicated by many viewers we have had a timeskip (although, given the character designs if I hadn't been told how many years it was I wouldn't have guessed) and it works out much better than I would have expected. The show is at it's strongest when it treads the delicate line between happiness and sadness and for once I think the show made a good call to focus on middle schoolers, instead of an older age group, for a romantic story given just how tumultuous that time of your life is without all the additional problems. And those additional problems are why I love the series actually, it takes a while but the fantastical setting finally comes into play and both creates new problems for the series and uses it as a metaphor for others, I would love for the series to focus on the fantasy a bit more this time (which I think it will given the slight change in setting) and it's gone from being a show I was unsure of to one of my favorites of the season.

Samuari Flamenco: Oh man SamFlam, what are you doing now? To recap, SamFlam started out as a show about a regular guy who wanted to be a superhero except, well, since there's no such thing as super-villains he was doing stuff like stopping people from littering. I didn't like it at first, lead Mayoshi's viewpoint grated with mine but as he changed and grew (both in thinking and his ability to not get beat up by hooligans) and it progressed rather nicely until about a seventh episode which honestly felt like the end of the series with everything wrapping up. Then, completely out of nowhere, the series underwent a huge genre-shift (less of a shift and more of a "gets in a monster truck and jumps across the arena" actually, social media was fun that day) and then it played around with these new superhero tropes, seemed to get comfortable with those as well, and then in episode 11 it seemed to shift over into a new one again and frankly I just don't like the current setting. It's sentai, which I have nothing against, but it plays all the ideas and tropes too straight, there's too little of that real-world connection the first two arcs had (and Goto who serves as the series comedic straight man) and without that I'm finding it boring. I'm sure we're going to go through another shift and I just hope it comes soon and that I like the show more again after it!


All three of these shows are streaming on crunchyroll, KLK also goes up on hulu fairly quickly and Sam Flam (both of which are licensed by Aniplex) has slowly been going up as well. Nagi-Asu has also been licensed but by NIS America instead.


Okay, time for the new stuff!

Anime Review: Galilei Donna

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

Galilei Donna

Manga Review: Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden (volumes one through ten)

So, many years ago (I almost want to say this was back in the OneManga days) on a whim I decided to try out this series even though I wasn't that big a fan of Yuu Watase's other series. I liked Alice 19th but I'll admit that series was total fluff for me, tried the original Fushigi Yuugi, didn't like it, and was a bit confused by the tone/story Ceres Celestial Legend was telling (having read about how that series ends, yep not one for me). But somehow this one worked better for me, it was just my kind of fluff in an art style I liked and I went through everything I could find pretty quickly. So when I spotted the first nine volumes at my local library I checked them out and discovered that very ironically they didn't even cover up to where my scanlations had ended, thankfully volume 10 was already on order and that did progress farther but I couldn't help and laugh, it's actually a pretty good example of why trying to keep up with current manga releases using only libraries is nigh-impossible (as of writing Viz has put out volume 11 as well and the final volume is due out in English this spring). But regardless I had it all and really was curious if I would still enjoy this fluff years later or not, the fact alone that I checked it out should give you a good idea of what I expected my answer to be.

Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden (volumes one through ten) by Yuu Watase

Summary: The year is 1923 and Takiko is adjusting to life in a new town after she and her mother move away from Tokyo to help her mother's tuberculosis. They both know the end is near and Takiko is furious that her father is still on his trip to god knows where and not with them. And when he finally reappears in their life he's a changed man, possessed by a fervor to finish translating the ancient Chinese text he was researching, The Universe of the Four Gods. The story itself is surrounded by stories and when Takiko is accidentally sucked into the book her father is horrified to realize that she is now the main character in the story who will team up with other super-powered people to summon an ancient god and that the path to get there is filled with danger. 

The Good: Yup, this is still my kind of fluff and more or less the closest I ever get to having a "guilty pleasure." I like the art and Takiko is a confident and strong-willed main character and actually does use her naginata skills more than just once in the first chapter (as opposed to the "look they have a weapon and used it once so they're a Strong Female Character!" trope, obviously she doesn't compare to all the super-powered people around her but she does use what skills she has). The pacing flows pretty well, Watase knows to give the character's a breather between big fights/revelations, they never feel too long or like the story is just dragging it's feet, and the story manages to flesh out all of the main characters just enough to make them sympathetic and distinct. It's not a super deep read and while I can't call it great I can easily say I enjoyed it and that it's certainly not terrible.

The Bad: Not all tropes are bad, on one level they're just short hand terms to describe common plot occurrences. However, common plot occurrences are just that, ordinary and predictable and this story is rather trope-y. None of the characters are super deeply fleshed out and often, especially earlier on, fall into the "he's the hot headed one and he's the calm, silent one" archetypes and Takiko is also really fixated on the fact that her father had wished for a son, not a daughter, early on in the story which gets tedious. This isn't a story with a super deep story either, Takiko has to gather the seven celestial warriors to summon Genbu and that's what they do, obviously they run into trouble along the way but it never deviates that far from the basic plot (although I did like the side-plot of Takiko and her father rather well and thought it fit in well with the rest of the story).

The Art: Part of the reason I consider this "my kind of fluff" is because I really like how the story works, it's rounded, soft, detailed shojo where all of the characters look great even when they're in the middle of an energetic fight scene. It's funny because I recall not liking how some of Watase's other works looked (like the original Fushigi Yugi and Ceres) but when I looked at them again for this review the art didn't actually look that different (well, aside from the male characters having those super long cheekbones that every male shojo character in the 90s had). The characters are distinctive enough and Watase designs some really cute costumes for everyone, I have to admit that even I have started eyeing a few of the characters going "yeah, that would be a fun cosplay....."


So obviously I intend to read the last two volumes (if I can I'll review both at once so don't expect anything before April or May) and I suspect I'll probably end up buying this series as well. While not the best thing ever it is just the kind of thing that I like to relax and reread every now and then. It is also available on Viz Manga's website and they have a preview of the first chapter for those who are curious about checking it out too, no account required to see it.

Manga Review: Akatsuki no Yona

In the past few years I've gotten library cards to even more libraries and I've been able to see that some of them have had a very devoted staff member, or perhaps more than one, whose been championing buying manga for years now and I've had a chance to read quite a few things which are harder to find these days. Some of my favorite finds have been in what I've dubbed the "epic shojo" category where the stories are large, the casts are huge, and each conflict is multi-layered and complicated to the point where the line between hero and villain can get very blurred indeed. Which has lead me to wonder, where did all these stories go? Was this some fad of the late 80s/90s, similar to the "Girl Power!" trend in the West from around the same time? But in the West we have a thriving YA book market which must have been inspired, both the characters and the writers, by that culture so why don't I see at least a few epic shojo manga out there today? After thinking for a bit I realized that this is close to being an "epic shojo", although with a distinctly post-2000 flavor, so not all hope is lost yet!

Akatsuki no Yona (Yona of the Dawn, The Girl Standing in the Blush of the Dawn) by Mizuho Kusanagi

Princess Yona was a naviie and a bit spoiled young princess who was doted on by her father and protected by her bodyguard Hak (even if they had a bit of a tsundere relationship). The only thing she wanted in life was to marry her cousin Soo Won which was oddly forbidden by her father (also that her hair wasn't as flaming red but that was even less likely to happen). No matter, she planned to ask her father again after her sixteenth birthday party but upon arriving at the king's room she finds him dead, stabbed by Soo Won and who frames her and Hak after they flee the palace. Broken she tries to adjust to life outside the palace and finds that with her father's death a veritable political maelstrom is brewing with each of the five clans that make up the country weaseling around trying to gain power and favor with Soo Won the new king. After a period of mourning Yona snaps and finds the strength to vow revenge against Soo Won and that she will find out the truth behind the things he said about her father and why her father was keeping secrets from her. But to get revenge one must have power and she's going down an odd path for it, on some odd advice she turns to an old legend for help. The story goes that centuries ago her country was founded by a great dragon and that four of his fellow dragons blended into the human population, waiting for the day their king will return to seek them out. So far this plan is working surprisingly well, although it seems like there was a lot more truth to that old legend that even Yona realizes.

As a note, the scanlations are quite a few volumes behind the Japanese releases and I have both skimmed through some of the Chinese scans I was able to find and track down a few people on tumblr who are reading the Japanese raws and translating bits and pieces and summarizing others. So I am going to talk about where the scans are up to and where the story seems to be going after that since after looking around it's become clear that the "major" arc the scans are on wasn't the "main" arc of the story but rather the first major one and I can see what the second major arc is now (and that knowledge also lets me guess at how the rest of the story beyond that arc will play out as well).


I feel a bit odd writing such a long summary and honestly that does cover at least one, maybe almost two, volumes of the manga but given how the story it setting itself up (it's going to take probably years in-verse, doesn't have a "first episode twist/reveal", etc) I feel like it's just one of the stories which needs a lot of background before you can discuss it. I'm also torn about how I feel about the pacing, on the one hand when I was reading the series I had no problems with the length or progression of each arc (and while each arc is longer than the previous one so far no arc has been so long this has become a problem), I always end up worrying that a long series or even just a series with long build-up will scare off potential fans*. It's not quite epic in scale, yet at least, but as I mentioned above if Yona collecting the four dragons was supposed to be The Major Arc of the story then this would be a little different. Instead the story is becoming a classic "let the king-to-be see the people he will rule from the vantage point of one of them" with Yona realizing that there were some terrible things going on under her father's rule and trying to figure out why. Was her father unknowing, unable to fix them, or did he know but not care as the peasants seem to think? It's certainly nurtured the seeds of doubt that Soo Won planted when he told Yona that her father had been keeping many secrets from her and now it seems like the country is in a much more delicate position than she ever could have guessed.

Speaking of major arcs, as of the current manga in Japan Yona has managed to find all four of the dragons and form a band of badassery with them and when I was glancing through tvtropes I realized something about the story, we the readers know more about that legend than Yona does. It's both subtle and not, as of the scans each of the dragons has chosen to follow Yona partially because they have their dragon ancestor yelling inside their head that the time has come to follow their king, very unsubtle, but Yona doesn't know that. She thinks they've all chosen to follow her since she's won them over, which she certainly has done as well, but that combined with a note on tvtropes (more or less, Yona like the dragons' descendants also has an improbably strange hair color, red like the Red Dragon King) makes me wonder how much more there is to that legend and the idea that Yona might actually be fulfilling a prophecy of sorts, not simply taking advantage of it for her own needs like she believes, certainly gives the story a different, more epic, feel to it. I'd be frustrated if this gave her an 11th hour superpower, especially given the circumstances she's already been through, but I doubt the story will do that.

To talk about Yona herself, I rather like her as a character. While it does take more than a single chapter for her to process her father's death and choose what her path will be, I believe it was closer to a volume's worth of chapters, it felt like a very natural progression and she has ended up being a complete badass and a determinator as a result and I always love to see characters grow into those roles. Actually, some of the scenes make me wonder if  Mizuho Kusanagi ever wants to write a horror manga since the way some scenes are drawn, when Yona is at her most intense and prepared to kill someone, there's this "pause" like the pause right before a scare that I feel like makes them extra effective. I was also rather pleased that despite the fact Yona has a good sized reverse harem going on (six people currently, seven if you count Soo Won) there's not much romance in the series. Of course, with Soo Won committing familicide the story established that Yona and Hak would one day be the OTP pretty firmly (first guy wins and all of that) but other than a couple of tsundere-esque advances on Hak's side the story has been relatively romance free which I like. Of course, I would like there to be, you know, more main female characters, not just ones who show up only for one arc but given how large the cast has already grown and all the juggling it takes to show everyone's viewpoints I'm not holding my breath here.


So yes, Akatsuki no Yona isn't quite the same as the epic shojo of the 80s and 90s but it's slowly growing into something similar, just with a 2000s flavor of styling. And when I say that I mean the artwork, pacing, types of characters and their interactions, and I'd argue that humor has been incorporated into more and more genres of manga in the past decade, a la Fullmetal Alchemist's very serious tone at points broken by a single panel or two of humor. You can find all these things in older manga of course but if this is what the next few years of epic shojo look like then I think we're in good shape and just hope that I can find more of it!

As for it's chances at being licensed, well, I'm not super hopeful. As noted earlier, it's already getting to be pretty long and since it's a long proven fact that each successive volume of manga in a series will sell less than the first (I wonder if that's the same for regular novels in the US as well) that's going to make publishers a bit shy. It's published in Hana to Yume which means that Viz could get it which I do think is it's best chance, they've published other manga from that magazine in their Shojo Beat line and that's really where it fits in the best. However, the manga-ka has already had two series published in the US (NG Life and Mugen Spiral, I've tried a bit of each and didn't care for either), by TokyoPop, and I have no idea how well those series did. Other publishers would know, they'd have access to places like BookScan which could tell them, and if they sold poorly then I think that would be the final nail in the coffin in getting a long, adventure-first-then-romance, shojo manga published over here. Finally, this is just me but I do wonder if the fact that Viz already has a longer, 10+ volume, shojo that features a red headed heroine (who hates her hair color) caught up in royal family politics with the word "Dawn" in the name would make them nervous about splitting the fanbase and diminishing sales for both series, although there's no way to ever ask them this**.



*which is silly given the size of the Game of Thrones and Doctor Who fandoms out there, plus if you're not willing to take some time to let the story set-up then clearly this is not a good story-fan match for you.
**the other series in question is Dawn of the Arcana which I tried out and did not like the relationships so I stopped. I'm told it gets better but I was so disgruntled by the time I finished the first chapter I didn't see any reason for ever picking it back up.

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. 

Movie Review: Children Who Chase Lost Voices

Aaaaand I'm already off schedule, I've got no excuses for that especially since I already feel bad that I only review Makoto Shinkai's movies a month after crunchyroll has their special "watch all his movies for free worldwide" days in the middle of March. Some year I'll figure out a way to remind people in advance about that but for this year anyway I just took the chance to see his latest film (also the only work of his I hadn't seen, this is the third or so year CR has done this and I caught all his others in previous years). 


Children who chase lost voices

Summary: Asuna is a dutiful student and a good daughter but a lonely one who spends a lot of her free time after school not just at home taking care of chores but also at a secret fort she made in the mountains where she listens to a radio with a crystal left by her father. On her way to her secret fort one day she's attacked by what appears to be a rabid bear, is saved by a mysterious guy, and becomes friends with him over the few times she sees him. But after a time he doesn't show up again and Asuna begins to unearth the truth, Shun and the "bear" were really from the underworld Agartha and even though she now knows he's dead she travels there anyway for a chance to see him again.

The Good: I was really worried that Shinkai was just going to rehash his earlier films when I worked out what the theme of this one was (relationships seperated by death) but he doesn't! The theme here is still in a similar vein to Voices of a Distant Star and 5cm A Second but it's changed and progressed since then, that's normal and a good thing! I would like to see him move even farther from this theme with his next work but that's a different kettle of fish, I do like that he did something different and I think he handled the different kind of setting well. But, even though I liked the setting and the details of the story, which are always rather important aspects for me, I did have a number of problems with the actual story which tempered my feelings on it quite a bit.

The Bad: This story almost works, almost, and that's always a frustrating state for a movie to be in. The basic concept behind it, that Asuna is so lonely, not because the people around her are mean but because they simply aren't there, that she ends up traveling to the underworld for a chance to meet again a guy she had started to form a friendship with, that's great and when the story focuses on that it's also great. But that's not enough to fill an entire movie's run time so the movie threw in the other two subplots and instead of adding to the story they took away from Asuna's story and I think weakened it. I feel like this movie could have been better structured if they had spent more time working and remolding the story around Asuna, I feel like it lost it's focus partway through (and took forever to get going, through and through the pacing was just off) and that while it did regain it by the end that the whole story suffered because of it. As a result all three of the main characters feel only partially fleshed out by the end and while I would watch the movie again I'd only be watching it for the potential I see in it, not what was actually achieved.

The Audio: Crunchyroll was only streaming the Japanese dub and about half a month later on neither the voice acting nor the music stand out as memorable to me. I don't recall being frustrated by any of it or thinking it didn't work, I believe I even remember liking the music, but there are some tv series/movies out there where I can easily remember the music weeks after I've last heard it and this simply wasn't one of them.

The Visuals: Visually it's pretty easy to see why a lot of people were saying "Shinkai is trying to make a Ghibli film!", I swear Shin looks like he was plucked out of Tales of Earthsea and Mimi looks an awful lot like another cut Miyazaki designed critter. But there are still more visual elements that are clearly and distinctly Shinkai than anyone else's, the character designs look similar to his past ones, there's the rich use of color to the point where every scene has practically the entire rainbow in it, and of course his trademark sky scenes are present (although not as many as I was expecting which made me a little sad since his sky scenes are absolutely gorgeous and what I've come to expect from his films). After watching mostly tv anime it's nice to watch a full film every now and then and realize just how far the visuals can go in terms of design, detailing, colorwork, and animation (not that the animation seemed notable here) and remind a lot of us why we fell in love with the medium in the first place. 


So, while I would rewatch I think I would only rewatch once, with someone who understands stories better than I do, and would not buy it and would only recommend it to some people. So I give this movie a 3 out of 5 for being okay but really not as great as it should have been.

Movie Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

As I mentioned in my 2012 in Review post, I saw The Hobbit over the holidays (which I'm sure everyone is so surprised about after I re-read all the books first) but I didn't see it in 3D HFR like I hoped (I had a chance for 3D but I had no idea if any of the theaters near me were playing it in the HFR so I decided to see it in 2D). Oh well, I've got two more chances to do that and I can now say that this review is completely free of talking about that stuff since apparently the rest of the internet is sick of it by now (psssh, non-technology-geeks).


The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Summary: Before the one ring of power went on it's final journey with Frodo it belonged to his uncle Bilbo Baggins for a time. How he got the ring is a story but how he ended up under a mountain far from the Shire is an even more interesting story.

The Good: I was really surprised by some of the new stuff in this film, I've never read the appendixes (to Lord of the Rings) or The Simarilion so I didn't know the specifics of what Gandalf was doing when he was separated from the group and from the little bits shown in this movie I'm really excited to see what happened. All of the acting seemed spot on (and the extra material really helped me understand why Thorin acted the way he did, I remember being confused by his actions especially near the end of the original book so this is a really great thing) and all of the dwarves seemed to have a good amount of screen time. Not equal amounts of screen time of course but by the end I felt like I knew what at least half of the dwarves were like, in the book they really weren't that distinguished from each other so again, this was a really great thing.

The Bad: Good god, did I accidentally watch the director's cut instead of the theatrical one? I did like some of the stuff that wasn't in the book The Hobbit but was in other material* but some of the stuff that was completely original (I have a friend who thinks tha the pale orc was in LotR but this subplot was completely new) was unnecessary filler and there was plenty of other stuff can could've been trimmed down (like the dwarves at Bilbo's house or the parts with Radagast the Brown). Honestly it's enough stuff that I almost want to recommend people to wait for the DVD to come out (and given that the film came out almost a month ago it might be out of theaters soon anyway) but even then there probably won't be a shorter cut of it on the disc. I can't remember being this frustrated at a movie for this problem (tv show or anime? Sure, but even then few I've enjoyed have had THIS much filler) and I'm convinced you could make this a two hour film without losing anything, this is a huge problem. 

The Audio: I, like everyone else it seems, really love that Misty Mountain song (in all of it's different incarnations, from the dwarf song to the credit song to the fan version which takes 15 minutes to go through all of Tolkien's verses, plus all the other fan recreations of the song) and need to go buy it off of itunes. All of the other pieces of background music also worked very well but let's face it, the Misty Mountains is the piece that everyone is going to remember by the time the next film is out.

The Visuals: There was one weird thing in the visuals for me, in the first five minutes there's a panning shot around/through the dwarf kingdom which is entirely CGI and everything actually looked blurry to me. I asked the other people I saw it with and they said it looked blurry as well, I'm confused if they made the shot blurry on purpose (to hide unfinished CGI) or what, it really stood out to me. Otherwise, no complaints, the movie did a very good job advertising how gorgeous New Zealand is and how everyone should visit (what do you mean that wasn't the purpose of this?) and all of the sets and costumes looked great, can't wait to see more of that!

So, there was good stuff in here but it was buried under a lot of, well, superfluous stuff (and I'm kind of wondering how many deleted scenes there will be on the DVDs at this rate, how much stuff is there left?). So, only three out of five stars, please oh please let the next film have better editing.

 
*Bilbo narrating how the dwarf kingdom fell? Excellent, don't think there would have been a good chance to work that in later. Adding in the stuff with the council about the Necromancer? Also great, it even helps set The Lord of the Rings in context by showing just how long it had been since Sauron was a threat and how, by coincidence or fate, he began to rise again when the ring began it's journey for the first time in at least a century.

Book Review: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Initially I was going to have a separate post for The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King but I realized that even if I post two book reviews a week in December I still wouldn't have time to do all of those and everything else. So I'm still going two book reviews a week in December (well, theoretically anyway, going to have some major catching up to do once exams are done) but I did decided to cram all three of these books into one post. Plus, I think that most people think of these books together, not individually anyway and it's a bit hard to say "well I hope they do this" when I've not only heard the stories before but seen the movies. So I guess this makes this review a bit more introspective than normal, oh well!

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Summary: Bilbo Baggins is growing old and decides that it's time for him to vanish from Hobbiton and leave most of his worldly possessions to his nephew Frodo including a certain ring. The years begin to pass and their old friend Gandalf makes a startling and scary discovery, Bilbo's ring of invisibility is in fact the long-lost ring of power that belonged to the dark lord Sauron who has slowly been gaining in strength since around when Bilbo was adventuring. So a council is called and they decide that there is only one thing that can be done, to send Frodo along with a company of others into Mordor to destroy the ring rather than risk Sauron finding it again and in an attempt to destroy him forever.

The Good: It was rather interesting to re-read these books since I remembered thinking in the past that you could draw some parallels to the real war that was going on as Tolkien read those but I had forgotten just how brutal the Scouring of the Shire part was (probably because it wasn't in the movies and I saw those marginally more recently than the books) and that made it a lot easier to understand Frodo's fate/choice in the end. Before I had never quite understood why he did what he did but after rereading that part I get it now and I think it also marks very well this end of a mythological third age that the books talk about. And I really liked all of the meta-commentary on the history/timeframe that these books are set in, Tolkien borrowed heavily from Norse mythology for a lot of his setting and since I don't come across that much fiction which does that makes this (in a very odd way) make it feel fresher than a lot of the epic fantasy I've read.

The Bad: I had forgotten this but in the second and third books (when the fellowship is split in two) the entire first half of the book focuses on one group and the second on the other which feels rather disjoined and I'm glad they changed that for the movies. I can see why Tolkien did that but whenever there is a story with a lot of different viewpoints I always prefer quickly switching back and forth between the people/groups rather than seeing how an entire event plays out for one group and then switching over to the other group to see how it went for them. I also wish some things in the setting had been fleshed out more (there was a one-off line about how orcs were inferior copies of either elves or ents which I thought was cool but wasn't ever touched on again) but maybe things like that appeared in some of his other writings later. 


On a funny note, starting with the first book the stories kept referencing an appendix and I figured this was part of the whole literary agent hypothesis which the book sometimes indulged in and never went looking for it. That is until I was flipping through the final book to see how many pages were left and realized there was over 100 pages of notes and dates for these things, oops, shall have to find time to read those later on. And I think that after all of this I need to finally make an effort and read the Simarilon especially since I really liked how Tolkien has set up this rather epic (in the classical sense of the word) setting and I'd like to explore more of it. 

Book Review: The Hobbit

I've technically never "read" The Hobbit or any of the Lord of the Rings books before, what happened was that my dad read them all out loud to me, along with a few other books like Tom Sawyer, years ago and I decided that with the film coming out this year that I should go ahead, actually read The Hobbit and the other books as well (in addition to the obligatory movie marathon that is). So, right before I won a few contests and had a ton of books coming, I checked out an old looking copy of the book at the local library, was surprised at just how short it was and wondered how it was supposed to be split into two films.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Not the exact cover I had (a very plain green hardcover with some embossings, the spine actually had The Hobbit written in runes and left me hunting all around for the book at first) but this cover looks a lot like the illustrations in the book and apparently is based off a design Tolkien did (tvtropes says this is the dustcover of the first edition). Yes, my copy actually had illustrations in it which I believe were done by Tolkien himself. There weren't a lot of them, hence why I didn't give this review an art section, but it was an interesting touch and I liked it.

Summary: While Bilbo Baggins comes from a family of hobbits that sometimes has adventures, a most improper thing, he has never felt the urge to venture any farther from his hobbit hole than he has to and doesn't see that changing anytime soon. But an old friend of the family, the wizard Gandalf, drags Bilbo into an adventure with thirteen dwarves to reclaim a horde of treasure stolen from a dragon and Bilbo takes to adventuring better than he expected. 

The Good: Having now read the story myself I do think there is enough material to make two movies out of the story and that this isn't just a "money-grubbing move" by the studio, while short there is a surprising amount of stuff that goes on. The story itself isn't very complicated and doesn't have any real twists to speak of either but again, more happens in the story than you would expect and it's a rather satisfying read. By the end of the story you've seen Bilbo and the other characters get in and out of nearly half a dozen situations and it feels like a full, complete story.

The Bad: The pacing is bit odd at points, sometimes there are action scenes back to back to back and other times it seems like there's a long gap between events, hopefully with the movies adding in some additional stories the pacing will be smoothed out. One thing I didn't recall was how a large number of the characters are a bit unlikable and hard to sympathize with. Everyone knows that elves are snobs and I remembered that some of the people from Long Lake were less than friendly but for the first part of the book Bilbo seemed like he was a character being dragged around by the plot instead of interacting with the plot (tvtropes even lables him on the sliding scale of anti-heroes for this part) and I had forgotten that the dwarves also have their moments. This might not bother some people but I was rather surprised and I'm curious to see if they'll keep such things as Bilbo's early unlikability in there (I hope they do since it really makes him and Frodo very different characters).


As I said the book is a bit on the short side so there's not a lot to talk about without getting into specific plot points but I was happy to see that I enjoyed this more than I expected and I really want to go, (re?)read the Lord of the Rings, watch the movies, and then catch the new movie when it comes out in December. I suspect I'll enjoy LotR more, simply because I like complicated, political high fantasy, but this was still a fun read. 

Book Review: Huntress

Originally I was going to put up this review next week but I found a really good reason for moving it up. Malinda Lo, the author, is part of a group called Diversity in YA which is, exactly as the name suggests, a group of writers who want more diversity in young adult fiction (such as more books written by/main or secondary characters who are LGTBQ or PoC) and they're holding a couple of contests over the summer related to this. So scoot on over here and get reading!

As for the book itself, last year during the spring I was browsing at my local libraries and getting frustrated at how I just wasn't connecting with the characters in YA literature as much as I used to and that maybe I should start reading more adult fiction to fix this problem. Then I came across Ash (set in the same world as this book, it's a lovely retelling of Cinderella that I really need to go out and buy) which I had heard of and, after reading it, I thought that no, I hadn't outgrown YA fiction yet, clearly I just hadn't been reading the awesome books. So I was really happy when I finally got this book from my local library and, even though it's not a direct prequel to Ash (like I originally thought, one of the main characters in Ash holds the position of the King's Huntress which is where my confusion came from), I was very satisfied with this read as well.

Huntress by Malinda Lo

Malinda Lo has said that, since she is an Asian immigrant herself she always imagined her characters to have Asian appearances as well and was happy that she was able to have this cover reflect that. I hadn't realized that when I first read Ash (the setting, from the location to the food to the clothing, just sounded so European that I simply thought the characters must be European-esque as well) so I'm also glad that this cover does reflect what one of the characters really looks like.

Summary: All is not right in the human world, for the past two years the weather has been strange, all the crops have failed and this year summer has refused to come. The whole kingdom is worried and when an invitation from the fairy queen comes for the king his advisers tell him to go to her, hoping that she has an answer to their disaster. On the advice of his sages, the king sends his son Con, the sage in training Taisan and Kaeda, whom Taisan has seen in her dreams about this journey. It won't be a fast or easy journey to the fairy lands but it's the only thing they can do.

The Good: Huntress is a quest book and most books about a quest are rather lighthearted and fun, up until the characters get to their destination that is. Not here, in Huntress the tone of the book is subdued from the start and makes the problems seem even darker than they already are which is a refreshing change. Like Ash before it, the relationship between the two girls is at the heart of the story and, not only is it nice to see a pair of lesbians (especially since this is a world where LGB characters are easily accepted and any angst the two girls have is for different reasons than over the fact that they love each other) but mature characters in relationships as well. I can't say much about the ending since that would involve spoilers but I was really happy with how the book ended, it helped make the book feel like a very realistic fantasy enough though it was set in a very fantastical world. 

The Bad: Like many other quest books, the pacing in Huntress isn't always even or smooth and it gets less even as the story goes on. When the story starts it devotes a lot of time to every leg of their journey and gives a realistic sense of distance between all the locations. As the story goes on however, less and less time is spent talking about their travels and the characters seem to be traveling even faster over distances that are just as great or greater as the ones earlier in the book (using the map included in the book for reference here). And then, like every quest book, once the task is completed the journey back seems to take no time at all and that really bothered me. The book is so well-written in every other area but that one detail really nagged and bothered me when it was all done. 

So, the characters are mature (forgot to mention earlier but they're all around 18 so they're a bit older than your average YA hero/heroine, the average age seems to be 16) and it's the only book I think of that follows the quest arc-type yet isn't a cheerful, let's-go-adventure! kind of story and I love books that defy tropes. I still prefer Ash a little more, not sure why (guess I need to go reread it then) but this was a great book that I'll be sure to buy in the future.  And finally, here is a short story set after Huntress for those who want a bit more to read.

  

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Despite the fact that I like both the Harry Potter books and movies, I find myself waiting quite a while to see the newer movies. I’ve seen all of them but I just don’t find myself getting as excited about them anymore (maybe it's because of that one time I had a sticky foot drop down from the ceiling onto me during HP5, most random thing to happen to me in a theater ever). But after seeing this one I think I’m excited for the 8 ^th movie to come out this summer. Hmm, I’ve never seen one of the movies at a midnight release, I believe I need to go make some plans with local friends to do this now (it’s my last chance to do it after all).

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Summary: Adapting material from the first half of the seventh Harry Potter book, Voldemort has once again risen to power and the wizarding realm (and those muggles who know of him) are cowering in fear. Guided by the mission Dumbledore left him, Harry (and Ron and Hermione of course) try to hunt down Voldemort’s remaining horcruxes  to bring about his ultimate downfall.

The Good: I’ve always thought that the movies were pretty good adaptations of the book (although I do prefer the books, more subplots) so no complaints on the plot here. The actors were also very solid* and Radcliff, Watson and Grint managed to hold down the movie pretty well on their own (and the point where they used the polyjuice potion was also well done, not sure if they used completely different actors with a voice over or what but that scene was still well done). So I’m happy I saw the movie and it has me all excited for the final film now, although I do hope it’s a little better in a few respects….

The Bad: I’m a by the book purist and I thought that the previous movies did a fairly good job at squeezing in everything necessary to advance the plot. This movie however went the opposite direction and made full use of the five hours total (two and a half hours here) to tell the story and the movie drags a bit. Tons of character development and little action work better in book form than movie and I felt myself getting bored in parts. The second part should be more action filled, plus the trio is back together, so hopefully that will move a little faster.

The Music: Aside from a few nostalgia inducing bits of music (like the title music, who doesn't hum along to that one?) I didn’t really notice the other music in the film. I’m sure if I heard the soundtrack I’d recognize a number of the tracks but I was more interested in the visuals than the audio here.

The Visuals: The visuals, especially the opening shots with Voldemort and his followers, that struck me as very British. Low lighting but very high saturation and the blues were more saturated than the other colors, something I’ve noticed in other British productions like Sherlock^ and Top Gear. A nice looking movie, very low key looking and the bleakness in the even tone lighting helped add to the general feeling of despair. But I am hoping that some of the settings in the second movie are a bit more cheerful, there’s a limit to how much doom and gloom I can take before I get bored.

So yep, back to normal reviews now, hope everyone enjoyed webcomic month and hopefully I'll find enough new titles between now and next March that I'll be able to pull this off again next year. Got enough reviews lined up (not all written, heck no, but planned) for something every day until almost the end of the month and then just play it by ear for, well, the rest of the summer and probably next fall since school is going to try and kill me again and that leaves little time for reviewing. But that's not for a while bit so see you guys tomorrow!

*even if the fact that Harry looks like a combination of my brother and one of my cousins keeps weirding me out. Actually, Harry in the first and second movies was a dead ringer for my brother at that time, apparently my mom heard little kids in the grocery store go “Mommy, is that Harry Potter?” Heck, my brother even has a scar or two on his forehead, although it looks nothing like a lighting bolt.

Webcomics that need to update more often

A short post tonight (mainly because it's been a busy day, so glad I've already got a few reviews written up for April, I need a buffer) and, like the title says, these are webcomics that update sporadically and really need to update more often (why? because they're good and there is always a need for good stories). These were just the comics I can think of that still seem to be alive (don't worry, there will be special posts for comics-that-shouldn't-have-ended) and look like they might update again in the near future. So, onto the comics!


Directions of Destiny
One of the earliest webcomics I came across that I thought was actually dead until lately but, since some concept art has gone up in the past few months, I think it might revive sometime (this already seems to be it's second incarnation so who knows!). But before all of that, could someone else whose seen Revolutionary Girl Utena look through this and see if I'm the only one getting major Utena vibes off of it? The shots with the elevator to the principal's room, the super powerful student council, the general setting of the school and the phrase "the direction of destiny" all really remind me of Utena, heck the idea of a power to change the directions of destiny sounds a lot like the power to bring about the world revolution*. Honestly that's all that has happened so far, we've met the characters, seen some mysterious things happen and heard mysterious phrases promising power, it's a nice start but really needs to move beyond it!


The Dragon Messiah
It's been a while since I read this comic (I didn't realize until a few days ago that it updated back in February so it's not dead yet) so I'm hazy on the plot but I remember it involved multiple groups of people, magic, elves, mysterious eyes, and one really kick-ass girl. So clearly I enjoyed this when I was reading it (I'll probably go reread it and hope that it really is going to resume regular updates soon) and it's also notable for being one of the comics I follow that's in two languages, English and Italian^ so, if it really does resume regular updates soon, there's no reason not to follow it if your a fantasy fan.

Key
Another one I intially wasn't going to include since it's been so long since it last updated (past the deadline the creator gave themselves and with no new deadline set) but it looks like they have been redoign the earlier chapters and that counts as progress. Another fantasy adventure, this one involving other worlds, conspiracies (or at least it looks that way), and a quest to forge a powerful lock before the worlds are overrun with demons. A very colorful comic (it's really pretty to look at, bet it would look lovely in print) the characters are a bit flat at the moment but hopefully plot advancement will mean character development as well. I don't know how much of the comic is going to be redone (I thought only the first chapter but it looks like the second chapter is being worked on now) but the comic isn't bad at all so if you like it I would say just go ahead and read the rest, you've got the time anyway!

No Rest For The Wicked
A comic that's been on shaky updates for well over a year (tvtropes says the author lives in the Phillipines and got hit by a bad typhoon back in 2009 which is understandable) I still want to link it here because it's a good example of redone fairy tales. This one takes the setting from a more obsure fairy tale, The Dead Moon, where the moon has vanished and Princess November (from The Princess and the Pea) can't sleep because of the lack of the moon (she's even more sensitive than in her original tale so this is really throwing her off) so she sets out to find the moon. She's joined by characters from other fairy tales in a world that's a mash-up of stories with a grim touch but isn't an overdone, full-blown "dark fairytale" which I like. Yes the story is dark but it isn't trying to hard to be dark, it's just trying to tell the story and this is how it goes, this is how you re-tell fairy tales people! Fingers crossed this one updates again soon, it's short right now but I really feel like it could go on for a while and want to see it finished. 

Outsider
Again, checked this one recently and was surprised to see it had updated, I didn't even remember this one until I was talking science fiction with my dad and thought that one of the ideas sounded familiar. We have a classic tale here, Earth has finally ventured out into space only to find that there are many other species out there and they are at war with each other. Trying to stay out of the war (since we are completely outgunned), Alexander Jardin is the sole survivor of a scouting mission to find out more about these two groups and is picked up by the ships of one group (the Loroi). Since the space administration here was smart and trained all it's people in case such a situation happened, he is now tentaively Earth's embassador to this group and is trying to figure out who blew up his ship, get back to Earth, and not commit them to a side in this war without being absolutely sure this is what they should do. So a nice set-up, story is still in the early stages at under a hundred pages long#, but I like it and hope that it keeps going, more science fiction for me please!


Picatrix
Yes the link is broken, don't know why and I can't find the mirror site for this comic to post instead, if anyone has it please tell me! Anyway, another fantasy story, this one concerns Winnie Foster who has just been sucked into another world of magic, angels and demons and just isn't having a good day. It's hard to detail more of the plot without spoilers (also since we've apparently had a major timeskip) but it's got a plot that wouldn't be out of place in a manga and with manga-style art as well. I read it more as fluff than anything else (fun and filling but not something I muse about between updates) and I do like the comic. It was supposed to come off hiatus in January but then the artist was doing another comic for the Yen Press contest and then that one stopped updating so I really don't know what's going on now. I'm hoping that things will get back to normal soon but, if the main website is down, that's not a very good sign.....




Again, no post tomorrow since I already know tomorrow is going to be hell but then Tuesday and Wednesday you get the "Comics that shouldn't have ended (and thanks for never giving a reason why they stopped updating!" pages, expect a bit of ranting and more sarcasm than usual but I've kinda been looking forward to those posts actually.....





*If the writer/artist here isn't a fan of Utena and just managed to make this comic incredibly similar all on their own I swear I will eat my hat, my good hat too.
^I've actually seen a number of comics that are in multiple languages, sometimes because of the author (like here, I think the author is actually Italian) and then other times by friends, like scanlations except legal I suppose.
#According to tvtropes it averages out to eight pages a year, suddenly I'm a bit more scared for this comic.

Webcomic Review: Dreamless, Garanos, Inverlock, Saturnalia, Strange Someone

On an unrelated note to start with, Diana Wynne Jones, I've reviewed several of her books and she is one of my favorite authors of all time* passed away yesterday and I'm crushed. I knew she had cancer and had stopped the chemotherapy treatments since they were so hard on her body but I was still hoping that she would just quietly live for a number more years (she was 76) and write a few more books but it look like that wasn't meant to me. Feel like a reread of some of her books are in order now...

Anyway, finished webcomics! I have come across a few of them over the years (I suspect they're a little harder to find since there isn't as much buzz about a finished series, also webcomics take years to tell) but not that many so here's a quick rundown of the ones I know about.

Dreamless
A shorter comic with an interesting premise, when Elanor goes to sleep she doesn't dream but instead sees the life of Takashi, a boy in Japan who was born on the same day she was and the same thing happens to him. The comic is about the two of them living their everyday lives, growing up with each other and falling in love with each other but, since this is US/Japan in the 1940s, there are a few barriers in the way of getting together. It's a romance in the end but with the pretty art and nice pacing I liked it, I know it's avaliable in print now but I'm not sure how many volumes/issues it has.


Garanos
A fantasy comic about a young woman, Garanos, who is traveling searching for her kidnapped fiancee and fulfilling her destiny in the process. It's been a little while since I read this one (and I remember it took a couple of tries before I got into it in the first place) but I remember not being blown away by the plot or the artwork. The plot certainly works, and the art just isn't to my style (it's the shading and I've always been picky about that kind of stuff)  but it didn't do anything super amazing and I thought the ending had a bit of a cop-out regarding the romance aspect. I still recommend it for anyone whose curious, it's just not my favorite webcomic out there.

Inverloch
By the same author/artist of The Phoenix Requiem (and artist of Dreamless actually), Inverloch  is high fantasy involving elves, mythical animals, magic, and a quest for a missing person. I did like the story a lot (not sure if I liked it enough to buy a print copy of the comic, it would probably all depend on the price) and it was a good story, even if fridge logic brought up a couple of unfortunate implications about the characters later on. Despite that, fantasy fans should love this one, the art is cute and it flowed pretty well.

Saturnalia
Oh I have a few issues with this comic but not because of it's content/story actually. You see, the story ends with the main character dying but, if this was any other comic, they wouldn't have hit their head on the pavement and died but instead hit their head and woken up later, continuing the story. As I understand it, the author got a chance to work on a published comic instead and had to end this one early to do so^. And it's a shame, the setting had really been established, more characters were introduced, and the plot seemed like it was really going to go somewhere, and then it stopped. This one is technically over, not abandoned, but because of the ending I would caution people trying it out since it is such a frustrating one.


Strange Someone
A quick comic, only four chapters long or so, that happens sometime after the events of Sorcery 101, this comic covers two of the minor characters there, Jeff and Connor. The story is that you have budding writer Liz who is stuck in writer's block and ends up talking to Jeff to get inspiration for writing a doctor/nurse romance and get's caught up in some of the supernatural going ons. I didn't realize when I read it that it was connected to Sorcery 101 (makes a lot more sense once I figured it out) so I would primarily recommend it to people who are already reading that comic but newbies to the 'verse can probably follow along as well.



Finally, I mentioned that The Phoenix Requiem finished up literally hours after I posted the review so I'm not going to bother reviewing that again (and yes I did notice that half of these comics were done by her, proof that people can turn out multiple complete and good webcomics!).


*(The Dark Lord of Derkholem may be my favorite fantasy book of all time and when I found out that The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land was being re-released I ran for my mom and got that preordered immediately, I remember it was pretty popular with my friends in high school too.
^and, to add insult to injury, the other comic was an OEL called Yokaiden which I reeeeally didn't like when I read it, so the fact that Saturnalia ended for that one annoys me.