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ladyyatexel · 3 years

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I Went On A Manga Binge

So you don't have to

For those of you who have wisely avoided the shreds of it I've left around the blog thus-far, I had some weird notion to go re-experience Yu-Gi-Oh uuuuuh a week ago? We'll go with that. Time is meaningless.

I'd been able to read a good portion of the early manga at the end of highschool, and somewhere in my stacks and stacks of paper is fanart from this dark time, so you know I cared. I also still own a Dark Magician action figure somehow, so. I'd also watched a large portion of the anime with my brother because it had been laced with some kind of crack and we couldn't look away? I remember when we both were just like shit, wait, don't change the channel, I can't stop looking at it. And the next thing we knew we were waiting for new episodes and I was doing research on the Japanese original because I was that kid.

Anyway, unnecessary backstory out of the way, here are some... let's call them Observations and Consequences of having read somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 chapters (and growing) of a manga primarily hinged on card games from a spectrum of sources ranging from boringly lawful to sketchy as fuck.

Surprise actual character that develops in typical shounen fashion being Jounouchi. My limited experiences with the 4Kids dub and only early manga had not painted him in a particularly good light. I don't know if episodes were being aired out of order or if I had just missed the ones that established that he was making shit up as he was going along, but Wow I liked him a lot more going through the manga than I ever did watching the (dubbed, heavily edited and censored and thrown into a slurry machine) anime. I'd managed to come out with the impression that he was just as reasonably experienced with the game as Yugi back in the day. Wild.

I'm now reading every single comic-style post on Tumblr backwards.

Striking inverse to first point, wow, I don't like Seto Kaiba. Though he gets points for his general philosophy of the future, and the line I read in my sketchy online combo of scans and scanlations in which he said, "If God is in your way, you run him down," was Metal As Fuck. I somewhat shame-facedly admit to enjoying him a lot more as an Abridged Series character. (I watched Abridged as it came out back in the day! The experience of watching the anime with my brother had been so fresh that I got all the in jokes about the way things were edited and dubbed, it was great. Series remains influential part of my life to this day, which is hella weird.)

I almost understand how Duel Monsters works now. I don't want this.

That said, wow a lot of the decisions made in the anime made everything a lot more ridiculous than the admittedly already ridiculous original. I got the distinct feeling in the manga that the Duelist Kingdom stuff we were seeing was designed to be used and exploited in ways that don't make sense in an actual cardgame just played on a table like a normal person and this was part of testing everyone to think higher, differently. Maybe this is obvious to everyone already, I don't know. I had always liked that it was very, 'Not so fast, I'm going to blow up the moon to change the tides,' but I'm not really sure the anime gave enough explanation that this was an extra layer added to things for that event? You can see people actively getting used to it in the books, and people who aren't considering the real or 3D nature of it getting owned, but my memory of anime version is everyone just like, 'oh, shucks, fuck me, I forgot to consider the phase of the moon before i played this card, can't believe I forgot.' No one calls Yugi on any of this stuff because it's valid play in that situation. Plus Yami Yugi had mad trickster energy in the beginning and it suited him to think of ways to do things inside these little simulation boxes the way it suited him to set perverts on fire. I imagine the real card game trying to emulate this element as something that would be to its detriment, but I neither know nor particular care haha

Ryou Bakura.

Really, though. I think he became kind of casualty of 'wow, we have a lot of characters who really aren't able to do anything in this story anymore,' despite the fact that his whole inner life could have been as interesting as Yugi's. I always like thinking about the possibilities of stories in which main character falls into magical world and is given magical item and told they're the hero and then they find out they've been the bad guy the whole time. The first several volumes of manga were about the quiet weirdo kid that no one talked to who was always blacking out and turning into a fucked up version of himsef because he was so attached to his ancient Egyptian jewelry, so like, Bakura could have much the same shit going on. I want to know what's happening with him so much. He clearly doesn't love being possessed, but he's also so drawn to the ring. Despite it having stabbed him at least twice and him knowing it's a danger to him and his friends, he keeps being pulled back into it. You see so much more of him being like, 'Oooh, a creepy thing, I love that! :D' in the manga than ever in the anime, which I'm all about. Also more blood. I'm very about that as well. Though my memory of the anime also made it look very much like normal regular daily Bakura was just a weird facade in places before he ever would have been. I think that was it trying to compensate for what people didn't see from the Toei anime, but okay whatever, that I love everything about this guy is not news, I don't need to talk about Bakura excessively here, I'm pretty sure that's gonna show up on my blog by itself

On a related note though, damn, more of these people need to talk to each other. Can we have some existential crisis support clubs or something. Can we get like some apologies or something? "I respect you as a duelist." "Cool, but you literally built a tower designed to specifically assassinate me and my friends? You were supposed to get Better after I retaliated by putting you in a coma, but you kinda didn't." "Why would the coma have made it better" "I just told you it didn't" ---- "Sorry I went along with the plan of your evil parasite stabbing you, misled you, and then also jumped in and took up some real estate in your head too." "I understand, I also have an evil thing inside me that does things while I'm blacked out." "...no, I was conscious for all of that." "Oh." "..." "..." "..." "Do you like Ouija Boards?" "sure okay" ETC. Like damn we are reading shounen manga because no one is talking extensively about their feelings here and I'm tapping my foot angrily.

Holy shit there are so many mythologies happening at once. The ancient family guarding the Egyptian Pharaoh has a surname that's a Mesopotamian goddess. None of the god cards make any Egyptian sense except Ra, and just like. Baaarrrrely. Somewhere either Evil Ring Bakura or Mar/lik makes a reference to cremation and spirits being taken to heaven with smoke which several things, but definitely not Ancient Egyptian. Marik/Malik meanwhile is clearly trying to head Arabic, along with Rishid, but then, hey, our sister is just Isis. Goddess McGoddess. Sometimes they're the same goddess! Her name could be Isis Isis or Ishtar Ishtar. Meanwhile, all the obviously 'occult because Christians think it is freaky' stuff. ~ancient egyptian pentagrams~~~This isn't a complaint, I guess so much as a 'Wow, I can kind of see the cultural spot the author was coming from and where he was aiming' kind of thing.

Wonder where things would have gone if the card games had not been latched onto the way they were.

Managed to forget how gross the pre-cardgames stuff was on the sexual harassment front. I'm glad there was a sort of explanation of everyone drifting away from being dick heads and that that decision was made. It got way more comfortable to read after no one was bringing Yugi p*rn on VHS.

Yugi looks better with a nose, glad we got that upgrade.

Interesting to watch the series style shift as it goes away from being horror to being over the top cardgames and friendship (with blood!). The first picture of Mokuba is fucking Jarring. Also noticed that the nicer a character is, the less their teeth are defined.

Glad manga did not go as completely off the fucking the rails about Marik's face. I never got as far as seeing him back in the day because college occurred, but I remember seeing pictures and stuff and being like, "what in the Fuck happened to that dude, I think the house style has collapsed in on itself"

Things the author Really Likes: motorcycles, belts, SHOES, holy shit the shoes. These are some of the most lovingly rendered sneakers I've ever seen. All the detail on his characters goes straight to their feet and then it's stretched upward until it forms stiff peaks. Gently fold in 3000 years of trauma and bake face down in a crumb coat of scattered mythology. Remove when you roll two zeros.

Where the fuck am I going to put the extremely large omnibus volumes of this comic I purchased in order to balance out how much I would be reading for free on the internet. I should have grasped that a three in one edition would be Thick and yet somehow I was still :O when it arrived. Have I strategically purchased volumes that contain my favorite parts, maybe, what's it to you will i eventually get the whole thing because incomplete book series gnaw on my soul? yes

Wish the transition from "I've murdered several people in delightfully karmic ways" to "all you need is friendship in your heart and cards in your hand" Yami Yugi/Pharaoh had been discussed more/transitioned better. Buddy, where did you get this approved for television high horse? Please go back to strangling people with yo-yos or at least tell me why you stopped.

I still can't tell anything that looks like a big robotic monster apart from any other big robotic monster. My dude, I can't tell cars apart, all these monsters look the same.

Yami Yugi fascinated me way more in highschool? Maybe because it was still super early and the anime was like 'we need to torture you about his origins WeEkLy. Now I'm just like 'wait hold on, can we go back to Bakura and Marik for a minute, there's some extreme unpacking to do here?' Those two are paying so much more in baggage fees here my guy wow

Violently uninterested in any of the spinoff media

#yugioh #yu gi oh #ygo #there you go i can't imagine any other way you would decide was necessary to tag this #perhaps now that i have thrown this up i can #something #i don't know how i was going to finish that sentence #shut up lady

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patheticphallacy · 5 years

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Throughout every year, I don’t just read. As is made obvious by my Film Friday and Music Monday series, I love to talk about pretty much everything I come into contact with- films, TV, video games, music- you name it, I enjoy it!

In this post, I won’t be talking my favourite books of 2018, but I will be talking about pretty much everything else I enjoyed this year, starting wiiiiith….

F I L M S

Bohemian Rhapsody: a very divisive one. I went with my sister to see it and it was such a lovely experience; I know some people hate the way bisexuality was portrayed, but I loved it.

Set It Up: I love Zooey Deutch. Also, if you ever want to see people acting drunk and doing it accurately, watch the pizza flirting scene, cause it’s amaaazing!

Venom: this film was trash and I love it! The cryptid love story we’ve all been waiting for Marvel to commit to since the original Spider Man noughties films.

Thor Ragnarok: ya girl can’t remember if this was a re-watch in 2018, but I’m including it. So beautiful and colourful. Infinity War could never have characterisation quite like this film :]

Baywatch: I realise I’m just exposing my terrible taste in movies, oh dear. I put off watching Baywatch because of all the criticism, but I actually loved watching this with my dad. It’s funny as heck, has looooads of eye candy to satisfy my bisexual heart, and I actually love all the romances! [also Logan Paul gets dragged in this film]

Howl’s Moving Castle: My first Studio Ghibli [don’t yell at me] and I loved it! More than the book, actually, which was a surprise. I love Sophie, and Howl lives for the drama, which I can respect.

Kubo and the Two Strings: This is amazing. So soft and wholesome, amazing stop motion animation, an incredible look into feudal Japan and Japanese culture, and just left me feeling so warm inside!

Clue: I am so ashamed that I only watched this film for the first time in 2018. It’s so funny, to the point where I literally cried watching it, and I’m glad I watched it with my sister, who makes everything we watch together even better with her commentary.

The Duff: I am so glad this adaptation was good, even if it did get rid of all the sex positivity talk from the book. It’s super cheesy, but the romance is developed well, and I loved Mae Whitman as Bianca!

The Shining: My sister forced me to watch this after years of being a chicken who only saw the clips from Twister [the best disaster movie, holla] and was bored by the book [don’t come after me, my opinions on things are pretty all over the place and I stand by my dislike]. I have a great picture of my sister drinking a glass of milk and melting down all her easter eggs to dip strawberries into as we watched the film.

T V A N D A N I M E

My Hero Academia: I watched the dub and I love it. Clifford Chapin as Bakugou? Amazing. Clifford Chapin giving a whole rundown of Bakugou’s character that made me love my angry misunderstood boy even more? SHOWSTOPPING, SPECTACULAR, OWE HIM MY LIFE.

Runaways: Seeing Gregg Sulkin and Ariela Barer portray my favourite couple in comic book history destroyed me. Ariela Barer killed it with every single outfit, and she’s only a year older than me, so I’m hoping we’ll bump into each other one day and we will fall in love. A girl can dream, okay?

Over the Garden Wall: My third re-watch of this animated show! I go hard for the Southern Gothic!

The Alienist: This show is so so dark, and I still haven’t quite finished season 1, but it’s incredible as both a period piece and a crime drama. Also has disability rep, Jewish characters, a man questioning his sexuality, and a woman in a main role who kills it, which is pretty new to me for a period show!

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood: Uh, no offence, but this is the superior FMA anime. I’m still not quite finished, as I’m still reading the last few volumes of the manga, but boy I love the dub. I tend to watch this while I do other things on my phone or blogging, so I always lean towards the dub.

The Haunting of Hill House: Would I die for the Crain siblings and also the fact that the fifth episode at the funeral was filmed in 5 shots? YES. Did I actually die during that scene in the car in episode 8? 100%. I cried from fear at that scene. I had to go to sleep because it scared me so much. A beautiful ghost story, one that has cheap Hollywood jump scares quaking.

Criminal Minds: I included that specific poster because it has my three favourites on it. I’ve managed to watch over 4 seasons of Criminal Minds since December 1st, while I was completing uni reading and research for essay, and I honestly must congratulate myself for my dedication. It’s cheesy and not entirely accurate, but I love it anyway, and would willingly give my life for Dr Spencer Reid without thinking twice.

M U S I C

Reputation by Taylor Swift: A 2017 release I only truly appreciated this year. I had a rough time with a lot of stuff, and listening to Taylor Swift validate being angry kind of made me feel better? In a way that I don’t want people to look too deep into, thank you very much, I still uphold my Hufflepuff standing, but I am allowed to be angry and frustrated with the way people use me [thank you to all the Slytherins in my life for teaching me that!] [favourite song is End Game]

A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships by the 1975: Anxiety! Online culture! Matty singing more about addiction! I love this album, and cannot wait to see them at the O2 in January. I’ve been listening to them since midway through November nonstop. [favourite song is Sincerity is Scary, but my favourite 1975 songs are probably [So Far] It’s Alright and Medicine]

MANIA by Fall Out Boy: Fall Out Boy are really still killing it! This album has religious undertones throughout, which I loved, and it’s so loud and angry! Hell yes! [favourite songs are Stay Frosty Royal Milk Tea and Heaven’s Gate]

The Now Now by Gorillaz: Really, all of Gorillaz albums got me through this year. I spent at least a month only listening to them and watching all their music videos in chronological order. [favourite song is Fireflies, but my favourite Gorillaz songs are Melancholy Hill and Every Planet We Reach Is Dead!]

V I D E O G A M E S

So…. the only video game I got into, again, was Night In the Woods? Woopsie?

Night in the Woods is about an anthropomorphic cat called Mae, who moves back to her home town of Possum Springs after dropping out of college. While it focuses mainly on Mae’s friendships with Bea [a snarky smoking alligator]; Gregg [a fox, and her childhood best friend]; and Angus [a bear, and Gregg’s boyfriend], there’s also major themes covered that I love in these small-town set stories, as well as stories in general: mental illness, family struggles and found families, and ‘the slow death of small town America’. It’s SOOOO GOOD, and I highly recommend it, especially for the story.

There was another bit of video game news I thought I’d talk about, as well as put down here certain games I have yet to watch people play, but am planning on doing.

THE LAST OF US 2 YAAAAAAY! I am such a big The Last of Us fan, so much so that I literally cried when I first saw the trailer/footage from the second game. The return of everyone’s favourite lesbian, Miss Ellie Williams, and everyone’s favourite gruff dad, Mr Joel Miller, so I’m buzzing. So so excited.

Now, two video games I swear I’m going to get to:

South Park: The Fractured but Whole: The Mysterion episodes of South Park have always been my favourite, so having a whole video game centred around them as superheroes? A DREAM. I also can’t wait to see Craig and Tweek, and Butters [who is my favourite South Park character besides Kenny!]

Finding Paradise: this is the sequel to To The Moon, one of my favourite video games of all time, so I am highly anticipating getting to this finally! I just need to know what’s in that pill bottle, okay?

And that is all of my favourites! What films, TV shows, music and/or video games did you enjoy in 2018? Anything you’re excited for in 2019?

Thank you for reading, and happy new year!

Favourites of 2018: Films, TV Shows and More! Throughout every year, I don't just read. As is made obvious by my Film Friday and Music Monday series, I love to talk about pretty much everything I come into contact with- films, TV, video games, music- you name it, I enjoy it!

#2018 #albums #anime #fall out boy #films #movies #music #night in the woods #tv shows #video games

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prime89 · 7 years

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Whitewashing in cinema

Disclaimer: these are my objective opinions on the topic and to why I think it is an issue. It is meant to be taken as such. This is not meant to be a critique of any particular work, as quite a few I have not seen. Second, this is long winded. You have be warned.

So I see that the annoyance for the day is the “whitewashing” of Death Note, which bothers me somewhat less than the whitewashing of Ghost in the Shell. So this got me to start wondering why. Probably because I watched far more of GitS than Death Note, and I liked the characters better. But that’s personal preference. And it’s not like this is the first story to be adapted like this. We have movies like the Ring, the Grudge, Seven Samurai, or possibly the biggest offender, Power Rangers. And perhaps Power Rangers is the best case study to find out why this goes wrong.

Power Rangers, for any who don’t know, is a cut and re-edit of the Japanese Super Sentai series with a slightly altered story, American characters, and in the case of the first series, tokenism that even a 5-year-old could notice. So why did it not face as much backlash as current adaptations? It literally changed so much that it became, in part, an entity in it’s own right. Not just a change in character names, or countries, but it temporarily got to the point that it was a completely different show, and if not for cheap budget constraints, would probably have diverged from its origins altogether. Also, probably the biggest factors that contributed to its success were the facts that A.) It was a “kids” show (more on that in a minute), B.) In the age before the internet, a lot of people didn’t know it was an adaptation, and C.) Despite the tokenism being borderline racist (the Black Ranger was Black, and the Yellow Ranger was Asian), intentional or not, any representation was an improvement.

The same arguments can be used for Seven Samurai. While the core plot might be identical, the settings are changed enough to treat the Magnificent Seven as an independent work. And even in the pre-internet age, it was more likely that the adaptation lead back to the original than the other way around. This isn’t the case with GitS or Death Note. These are manga/anime that were marketed to a much older audience and achieved high popularity. This means that the audience would be more critical of the work. The second problem is that the plot is almost inextricable from the Japanese culture. Stories that are action driven tend to be easier to adapt. But GitS and DN deal with a lot of moral and philosophical issues that are tied to Japanese ideology and culture that don’t translate. When this happens, it alienates a lot of the fan-base.

Speaking of fan-base, a lot of the problem can be rooted in nostalgia-play and the quick marketing rut that Hollywood has gotten into. Most movies today are marketed to pre-established fans (I’m looking at you Disney). Instead of innovating and investing in new ideas, safely market to a group that will definitely watch. This is what the comic book movie boom runs off of, followed by the live-action adaptation route Micheal Bay and Disney/Marvel are doing now. Nostalgia and familiarity are sure to lead to huge returns. And it works well a lot of the time, so it keeps getting done. The problem with this is that they tend to bunch up after a while. There is a manga and anime, as well as several live-action movie/tv adaptations of Death Note. In Japan, and in the culture it was made to be in. Why not be satisfied with an English sub/dub of that instead of trying to transpose it completely? Similarly, the idea of a live-action Mulan remake bugs me because there already is a Chinese live-action movie. A very good one at that. But this is where the representation bubble hits.

Representation is a major issue these days. Tokenism is no longer par for the course, so grudgingly putting in a minority character to fill a quota is seen as almost more insulting than no representation at all. And complete erasure of the culture that makes the source material work is no less than disrespectful. The very name of the main protagonist of Ghost in the Shell is Mikoto Kusanagi. It’s Japanese to the core. If you tried to anglicize it, it would end up being close to Brittany Excalibur. It is literally an in-joke of the culture that does not work outside of it. Tokenism plays a part in this too, as people are quite tired of the “magical white savior” archetype swooping in, appropriating the culture, and outperforming those born and bred in the tradition/culture. It’s pandering, disrespectful, and downright demeaning. And this goes for in-story and out. This is why Iron Fist hit a snag in Marvel’s otherwise unprecedented success. It’s why Doctor Strange comes off as somewhat awkward. It’s why every adaptation of Tarzan feels more and more uncomfortable. And it’s not like every use of that archetype is bad or is received badly. Avatar (the James Cameron movie), the Last Samurai, and arguably Atlantis the Lost Empire are good examples. But why? The leads are immersed in the culture, but by no means are masters of it by the end, their prior experience and perspective prove useful to the culture, but do not end up overshadowing it, and in a sense, they lose their origin and are unable to return to who or what they are. Jake Sully arguably loses his humanity, and can never return to Earth. Nathan Algren does this twice, his integration and the subsequent genocide of the Native Americans is key to his alcoholism and character, and after spending time healing from that trauma and learning with the samurai chooses to not only fight with them, but not return to America. Milo Thatch, is odd as he is not a fighter, but an anthropological archaeologist. He serves more as a facilitator of the Atlanteans to their own history/lore than someone seeking to absorb their culture for his own desires. These characters can’t just take all the good parts and leave, which in itself is an analogy for imperialism. They give up a part of their own culture to become part of another.

#cultural appropriation #philosophical rant #please be nice #ymmv

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