Random Things, 2/3/15
It’s been too long since my last post. In the meantime, southeastern New England has been hit by about three feet of snow in the past week. Thankfully the impact of the snow has been gentle. We’ve never lost power or internet, and apart from not being able to attend classes, life goes on. It does kill the desire to write posts though, even as I write other things. So I will emulate others like Fred at Frederation and Medieval Otaku by doing a random list post. Hopefully this will spark more energy in me.
1.
I’ve noticed that with anime, I have a hard limit of five shows per season I will follow beyond the first few episodes. I’ve slacked a bit with the preview posts this year, and I’ve already chosen my five. They are:
The Rolling Girls. Imagine Kill la Kill and FLCL mashed together with none of the downsides of both. No flagrant T&A, and a narrative as well as style. Honestly, check this one out if you haven’t; it’s wonderfully joyful and stylish too.
Unlimited Fafnir. It’s Infinite Stratos, but with better characters and better writing. It’s similar to Invaders of the Rokujyouma in that it uphelds the harem tropes, but is a lot smarter than normal.
Kancolle. I can’t explain why an anime with such an absurd premise is so cool. I just get it on an almost celluar level.
Assasination Classroom. Absolutely loved the manga, like the anime.
Saekano. More of a dislike watch. It changed from the first episode, but arguably for the worse. Less and even no fan service or dirty talk, but you just have the unlikable characters, and all they do is talk. Kind of hoping it gets better, expecting it to get worse.
I don’t count Military, mostly because it’s three minutes long. A lot of the other shows are meh to me. I haven’t really seen any of the other Christian bloggers write on the new series this season, but if they do and a series I haven’t watched gets better, I may try it. I can’t really find myself following six plus series a season though.
2.
Non-current anime I’m watching: Rideback.
The first few episodes have been much better than I thought. The robotic motorcycles are a lot cooler than you’d think, and it’s one of the series where the heroine has serious justification for why she’s a riding prodigy; she’s an ex-ballerina with superb balance and body skills. I also like how the series shows the joys of riding as well as the coolness. Motorcycles are fun, and hopefully that joy will heal the troubled protagonist of the series.
3.
Non-anime things I’m watching: Shaw Brothers Kung-Fu Movies.
Kung-fu movies are, well, odd. They are often sumptuously made, with great cinematography and incredible fight scenes. You’re use to them being these cheap, funny things that you watched as a kid, but when you pick up a modern collection of them and sit down to watch, you realize that they work as movies, too.
Yet for all of this, the weirdest thing is that they seem to be written by eight-year old boys at times.
A great example of this is Heroes Shed No Tears. It’s the story about a student, who is given a sword marked with a teardrop on it. It’s prophesied this sword will stop a great calamity, and he is told to seek out the best kung-fu leaders of his time and meet them. Especially the mysterious man with the box, who is possessed of thirty-nine different weapons, and is a kung-fu god.
The story is borderline crazy. People become sworn brothers in seconds, and enemies all the same. They fall for tricks that a perceptive twelve-year old would see through, and events happen one after another with little sense. In one of the most hilarious scenes ever made in cinema, a disgraced woman asks her lover if he loved her dancing legs. When he says yes, she cuts one of her legs off and hands it to him, hopping out of the room when she is done. It is absurd like nothing doing.
Yet it goes past absurdity into awesomeness. The main villain is devastatingly effective in how he manipulates all of the heroes and manages to make them defeat themselves. After the cheesy scene mentioned above, you have a hard scene where her lover grieves her as she dies, and then vows to cut out the heart of another disgraced hero whom he had a feud with. The man with the box is insane; the first scene of him has him kill people from such a far range it felt like he was overwatching for the kung-fu equivalent of a sniper rifle. There’s this weird paradox where it’s awesome and yet its horrible all at the same time, and many kung-fu films are like this. And this is one of the sober ones!
When it gets weird, like the legendary Taoism Drunkard (aka Drunken Wu Tang) it gets weird.
Taoism Drunkard is about the monk Rat Face (who looks like a rat) who gets kicked out of his temple. He’s told to get enough donations to fix the mess he’s made, as well as get a new male virgin as a monk candidate. Meanwhile, Old Devil, who has powerful kung-fu involving a cannonball that shoots mini cannonballs, wants this insignia found deep within a temple or something. I started to lose track of the plot by then.
Call in Cherry Boy, and his surprisingly masculine grandmother. While the Watermelon Monster manages to hold off Old Devil (and you have to see the Watermelon Monster to believe it) Cherry Boy must team up with Rat Face in order to beat him. There’s also a pair of cultists, a rat car that Rat Face drives around, bodies that obey no laws of physics or gravity whatsoever, and more. No really, watch the trailer. That stuff is crazy.
4.
Cool geek thing of the day: Power Records.
Back in the day, you used to be able to find a surprising amount of geek audio dramas for children from the company Peter Pan records. They had a sublabel called Power Records, which made 7″ book and record combos for children. They would adapt Marvel and DC comics as well as TV Shows and movies into short, well-produced children’s drama. With the advent of Youtube, you can catch all of them in all of their 1970’s glory. These weren’t made for adult fans, but are incredibly entertaining all the same.
You can find a neat blog about them here.
5.
Christianity.
It kind of sucks, being in a period of decline. It feels like Christianity as a public force is in disarray and held captive to a few tribal factions. You have the bald-headed, beard-wearing Reformed, the mommy homeschooling brigade, the High-Church intellectual faction, the “I can’t stand Catholicism so I’ll be Orthodox but not Putin Orthodox” converts, and more. It feels like you have to reduce yourself to fit in somewhere.
It doesn’t help either that I discovered that I’m not really fond of people. I’ve been trying to attend church for a bit, but the thought of going into one and having all the parishioners eyeball me when I don’t raise my hand to declare I’m new really makes me worry. It’s like I want to go there, do whatever the Protestant version of receiving the sacraments would be (praise and worship and communion?) and get out before people try and corner me. Mostly because I doubt sometimes that conversation would be enjoyable, and because I’d have to hide my likes and dislikes.
Even know, I don’t feel completely at ease. One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that Christians will absolutely savage someone who fails to live up to the faith, even in minor ways. Mark Driscoll was an eye opener for me, and now we have a progressive version in Tony Jones. Just the glee and the scapegoating and the endless moral recriminations made me wary of fellow believers. It was personal, in a way which I didn’t like.
So I have to resist my own tendencies more. Maybe the danger is not in trusting God too little, but trusting people too little.
7.
Is it wrong that this is my ideal of the perfect church?
Not in it being secular books. The original novel had them remember books of the Bible. But Truffault’s Fahrenheit 451 always made me a little sad in the end, and between it and Haibane Renmei shaped my idea of the church. The sense of outcasts existing on the fringe of society, in a small community keeping a Book inside their heads and hearts, waiting till the day when the world will collapse under its own weight and they are needed again; what a lovely, romantic image.
Or in Haibane Renmei. To wake up into a new life, with the old one gone. To follow all the little rules, but they are each occasions of joy. To wait patiently while one by one your friends leave to their new lives, and new friends arise.
I know reality isn’t so romantic, but I wish we could be a little more this, and a little less “meet in a ratty building and act bored together.” Just a little romance, even if large doses are unhealthy.
