Tamaki sempai

Ouran High School Host Club

Certainly hasn't failed to pull laughs yet. All the characters are funny in their own way, maybe except for the worryingly incestuous and (what is it again...mmmmmmmm....like yori...you have yuri and then you have...ah yaoi!) yaoi relationship of the two Hitachiin twins. I'm especially liking Fujioka Haruhi for his (or her) rather broad wisdom on the ridiculous lifestyle of the richest of the rich.

And maybe this anime could be considered a distant relative of the spontaneous sex change genre? I'm referring mainly to Ranma 1/2 which offered up more possibilities with the introduction of the boy/girl mechanism. And with Ouran, it could be quite interesting. Probably more witty and elegantly executed than a boy simply turning into a girl just like that - like the anime where a boy is rejected after a confession and randomly turns into a girl overnight. Hmm. Anyway, screenshots.

Getting stabbed in the heart by orange arrows is a regular occurrence by the lookies


Tamaki sempai filling the corner with ominous Put Down Shadows


Randomly amusing

Funnily enough all the stabs and put downs can be sourced from none other than Fujioka. Strangely satisfying.

The Kusanagi of Momoru Oshii

Ghost in the Shell

The Sky Crawlers

The Foolish Traveller

There was this foolish man who travelled around the world, making his way through towns and villages. He met inhabitants, who more often than not took advantage of him. One could call him foolish, for he was swindled by many a person, giving away his money, his shoes and his clothes.

Soon he was completely naked and making his way through a forest to avoid humiliation. He came upon a goblin. This goblin said he wanted to eat, and the man gave an arm and a leg. But the goblin was not finished and soon the man was left as a single head. After eating his eyes, the goblin told the man he would give a present in return.

He dropped a single slip of paper. It had something written on it.

バカ

baka

The man was overcome with tears, streaming heavily from his eyeless sockets. "I have never been given a present in my life, I thank you."

And the goblin left the head, leaving the man to die.

Kafka On The Shore - one last time

Time weighs down on you like an old ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

*****

Pointless thoughts

Weird day.

• I woke up early especially for the Saturday training session
• I found that the pickup car had already left, five minutes earlier than arranged
• This wasn't going to stop me; I ran over to the central station and took the train instead
• After 3 stations prior to my stop, an announcement declared that the train would be sat in the station for a very long 25 minutes. My attempt to arrive on time was shattered.

I ended up following the crowd heading to another train, trying to find a member of staff (who simply told me that I could get a taxi instead). So it could have been the case that I would have dejectedly picked up another rail ticket back home. But it happened that the crowd I followed was the 'Hillwalking Society' and the man at the doors of the train recognised me.
"Are you coming then?"
"Yeah. Fuck it."
He makes a smile and laughs as I get on. I think he may have been faintly surprised.
"Where is it you are going again?" I say.
"The Isle of Wight!"
"Ahh." I felt the tinges of doubt regarding this change of plan. "How much is it to get across on the ferry?"
"About £12."
So I check through my wallet and discover that I do in fact, have enough cash to include a ferry ticket, a meal and the train back. With the money account sorted in my head, nothing hindered me; the anger I felt about the train schedule a minute before evaporated. I had to think sensibly about money (for the sake of conscience, borrowing money is a last resort) but otherwise I left everything to impulse. And it was a fantastic day.

I may have missed a training session. But I don't think that visiting the coast of an island, finding a place from your childhood memories long ago, exploring the ruins of a Cold War base and seeing magnificent light beams across the wide and open sea was a bad way to go. At all.
It was fortunate that the day was a glorious one, making ever more new friends along the way. But it could have been a rainy and miserable one. But would I for a moment consider that unlucky? That is not my way of thinking, or at least it isn't any more. I don't hold the scales of luck over the events or results that come from opportunity, rather over opportunity itself. If I can get more than a hundred of such opportunities like this throughout my life, then I will consider myself lucky.

On the subject of the value of regret, whether it be consequences or even a missed opportunity:

Pointless thinking is worse than not thinking.

Sleeping long, whiling away in dreams, an ominous warning that you will soon implode and be thrown into the great puppet theatre of this world. Denied. This man is incompatible with it.

Personal Statement

It is peculiar when you are drafting a personal statement and you write a sentence which suddenly sparks a narrative of your life about two paragraphs long. I might try and compress that into a sentence when I do a final write up - 'self pity just ain't a word in my dictionary any more'. Of course it hasn't been for ages, I might have to look up the definition again to check what it is.
But I must bear one thing in mind: sensitivity to those who are still searching for that 'point'. By finding my 'point', I may unintentionally forget to perceive carefully the minds of younger people.

In any case, another Tatsuki picture as it didn't fit in the last post...Dragon Princess:


(upload rate is hellishly slow :@)

Discouragement

The alluring writing of Murakami is still failing to disappoint me. The book of 'Kafka on the Shore' has just come across two feminists who rapidly argue back with baseless accusations. As the book aptly puts the problem with these people is merely the lack of imagination; T.S. Elliot refered to these as 'hollow people'.

"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe." - Oshima, Kafka on the Shore

And this has truth, in the background of today's political climate everyone merely talks about terrorism and political correctness. Intolerance isn't breeding in Afghanistan, it is breeding everywhere and the one thing that intolerance truly stifles is the power of imagination.

I even find it in university, if you could go to one place on earth where you can get a large body of unimaginitive people (minus the more artistic of students), university is the place. Afterall it is more or less a big complex of buildings you hang around for about four years after which you apparently get presented a rolled up document proclaiming you 'capable' of doing an office job for fifty years. Then its carehome and dying without bothering anyone. I fear I have gone off topic already but I'm merely stating that a lot of undergraduates actually arrived at university with a natural drive to discover more of the world, then with four years passed their vivacity for learning has been snuffed out. "I have no need to learn anything else than this subject." "I have a degree therefore I am better than you." And where did that imagination, that drive and the very core of learning go? As I will say now, like some Confucius quote:
'Staying young is realising how to retain and keep close your love of learning.'
That is a thought that is close to my heart, bear in mind that I just gave you a gift. You are obligated not to lose that gift - go and learn to learn! Reading Kafka. would be a good start.

As for the 'hollow people', if they take over the world and turn everything a monochrome grey don't be discouraged. If you find the surroundings or the people too translucent and colourless, there is another world to bury oneself in, to push your potential, knowledge and grace without qualifications or positions: books, the foundation on which one's soul rests. I am not saying it is the only foundation but it is perhaps the very first, unchanging and immovable.


On a side note, I cannot deny that anime is an established form of literature to me as well. After Toradora! I finished Hyakko, a really unabashedly mainstream anime with mainstream characters. But I don't mind watching it - Tatsuki, an upper class student, has a gorgeous, upper class voice.

Tatsuki

Lucky Star is 3 episodes till the end, still haven't seen that Tsukasa Kenshin cosplay yet... And I just started Fruits Basket. It grates. And lastly, I started Minami-ke Okaeri in high spirits. After five episodes, these spirits are still around but they are starting to nap around and snore, the useless spirits they are. I guess at heart I am more a slice of life person. Okaeri is more a montage of unconnected events and people like the first season. But I get this nagging feeling that I'm not the only fan feeling the lack of...stuff.

トラドラ！ - Toradora!

Well, ok. This is going to be a difficult review of my own...as frankly I cannot possibly express how superb the entire series was. As someone said in the top review on MAL, "Sure, the content isn't the most original, but it took a very different route to get there."

A brief introduction: Takasu Ryuuji is an ordinary high school boy who is unfortunate enough to have the eyes of a delinquent despite being beyond one. On arrival to school, he bumps into Aisaka Taiga (known as the Palmtop Tiger for her small size and violent temper) who gives him her wrath. However one event leads to another and they soon make a pact to help each other get closer to their unrequited loves.


In my view, a lot of romance animes follow a standard formula; you have the festivals, the valentines, the hot springs, the beach, the falling ill and getting cared for, the awkward sleepover...name anything quite cliche and you might be completely right. Now it isn't like Toradora fails to include a couple of these but the situations have no trace of bandying about; there is no obvious fanservice (if Ami ever gets out her bikini it was her own intentions, not the director's) and there is no forced story or character development. These characters merely seem to develop on their own and like most dramas, things aren't always obvious to the viewer what the characters are thinking. This reinforces the realism in their behaviour which never fails to be more human than that of regurgitated characters. Their problems are very real, deeper than the shallow waters of the majority of the romance genre. I should really get to the point: this series turns into a drama.

Animation is another point I must reflect on. It was consistently clean and well executed throughout the series, apparently something that the studio (J.C. Staff) is quite devoted to. But I still haven't mentioned the very gem of the animation: the emotional expression of the face and the movement of the expression over a second or two was beautifully and deeply portrayed. You only get these moments maybe three times at most but when they come, you are blown off your seat. You can really connect with the emotional side of the character.

Such an intense yet sweet series. It was a fantastic watch.