Paper Moon

http://dividedbyxero.deviantart.com/art/Soul-Eater-Moon-Battle-So-Far

I love dividedbyxero's artwork so freakin' much, but this is particularly brilliant.

So excited for new Soul Eater Not! tomorrow. I don't even care if we get another nine-page chapter of Tsugumi hatching romantic plots revolving around omelets or whatever. Which to be fair is never an unlikely possibility, because Not! may be a lot of things but quality manga it most certainly is not, but IDGAF I enjoy it anyway, especially the parts about the main Soul Eater cast members.

Speaking of which! terajk is posting some excellent short Soul Eater fics on her journal right now.

Also! The Not Prime Time multifandom fic exchange (for fandoms that are too large to be eligible for Yuletide but still small enough to not be megafandoms) is currently accepting fandom promotions. Soul Eater, Fairy Tail, and a whole bucketload of anime, manga, TV, movie, and video game fandoms are going to be eligible this year. So if you have a fandom that you would like to promote before the nomination process officially begins, here's your chance.

Related: Does anybody have any good Lucy/Erza fic they could recommend? I'm dying for some friendship!fic or femmeslash, either flavor.

Unrelated: Pop Culture Boyfriends. Highly tongue-in-cheek and yet surprisingly revealing in terms of the pop media landscape that teen and twenty-something girls are devouring at the moment. Granted, I was surprised to see only three pieces of Western media in there (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and A:TLA) and VERY surprised to see no Homestuck references.

So speaking of Homestuck... I started re-reading parts of it a couple weeks ago when I was down and out with the flu, and sadly I believe that my love for Vriska/Tavros has been rekindled all over again. I say "sadly" because this is the most unfortunate thing that I have ever shipped. EVER. Because it has got to be one of the most disasterous relationships in the history of epic speculative literature ever created EVER. To put this trainwreck of a romance in context: Vriska and Tavros are alien trolls from an another planet in an alternative universe, and products of a culture that requires them to, at some point, have a hate-fueled "black romance" mating with another member of their species. Most teenage trolls seem to dream of having, as another troll puts it, the type of epic black romance that results in "blood rivers runnin through star systems and all nebulizin like liquid fireworks, beautiful and heartbreaking all at once." And yet even by troll standards Vriska and Tavros have a romantic arc that is such an utter disaster that the other trolls consider it to have crossed the line. Even by troll standards. This relationship isn't just a trainwreck, it's a trainwreck and a volcanic eruption and a hurricane and a tsunami and the sun collapsing into a black hole and swallowing the entire solar system all at once. And it all started so innocently, too: Vriska and Tavros were both nerdy teenage trolls who liked to roleplay, cosplay, and even play a certain children's game involving collectible tiny monsters. But then their relationship quickly escalated into murder attempts, spiderweb bondage, amputations, and eventually - of course - a duel to the death. They were poison to each other and even worse, they didn't just manage to doom themselves, but their trainwreck of an aborted romance managed to doom most of their friends too, at least to the point where it directly resulted in Tavros's RP partner getting killed and Vriska's RP partner permanently maimed. And yet - AND YET - for some reason I still have ~so many feelings~ for this pairing, horrible as it was and as horribly as it ended. I think that the horribleness of it all is part of the appeal, of course - who doesn't love a good tragedy? - but I also am kind of fascinated by the way that these two characters stuck together despite Vriska being Vriska and Tavros being so utterly terrified of her, how Vriska believed in Tavros until the bitter end and how Tavros wouldn't stay away from her despite every other troll telling him to do so, and how the fandom around the pairing does some much more insightful and interesting things with the disabilities of these two characters (NSFW) than the canon text ever did. It also doesn't help that despite everything, there is so much about this pairing that is so blackly hilarious - from Vriska's cosplay fetish to ROCKET WHEELCHAIR to "Well I'm lying on the floor in Vriska's room and we're both wearing costumes and I'm not explaining this very well, am I?" to That Thing that Vriska Did With Tavros's Severed Legs - that it's kind of hard not to laugh at it, just like it's kind of hard not to laugh at any of the doomed, doomed romantic pairings that Homestuck loves to revel in.

TL;DR version: This is the worst thing that I have ever shipped, and I have recently fallen in love with the pairing all over again, and I REGRET NOTHING.

Fortunately The Serendipity Gospels updated last week with so much deliciously horrible Vriska/Tavros shipping that it is glorious. Glorious.

The true story behind that incomprehensible GanGan cover illustration, courtesy of C-so.

( Comic and translation behind the cut. )

Original source: C-so's pixiv (http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=25352973), also her website (http://shirayuki.saiin.net/~c-so/enter.html).

In this month's Not! Ohkubo decided to change the spelling of Anya's name again. No, that's not something that Yen Press changed for the English release and yes, the title page looks exactly like that in this month's GanGan too. Welp.

Meanwhile, in this month's Soul Eater chapter, EVERYBODY IS AN IDIOT except for Black Star. And how often does that happen?!

( So we begin just outside the moon's nostril. )

1. Free official Adventure Time books available for download or online reading at Scribd! "Wit and Wisdom in the Land of Ooo: Great Quotations from Adventure Time" and this enormous collection of episode storyboard books are free to anybody who wants them.

2. It's award season in Japan! So the nominations for the Japan Academy Prize's "Animated Film of the Year" were officially listed yesterday, and to nobody's surprise both the K-ON! movie and From Up On Poppy Hill made the list. Also nominated were a gorgeous Osamu Tezuka adaptation, this year's Detective Conan film, and a CGI film that is, no joke, actually titled "Tofu Boy." Also, The Manga Taisho Awards have also posted this year's nominations. I Am A Hero got nominated for the second time. Not sure how I feel about that.

3. Kate Fitzsimons is hilarious and her tongue-in-cheek comparisons of recent Sherlock Holmes TV, movie, and comic adaptations is a must-read.

Not! is on hiatus this month.

And this month's chapter of Soul Eater is very, very silly.

You know, there are times when Soul Eater is deliberately funny, and there are times when it's just plain unintentionally hilarious. This chapter is definitely an example of the latter. This whole chapter. This whole fucking chapter.

Here, let me spoil everything above the cut: Stein's eyeballs turn into bunny ears, Spirit makes a sword pun, Spirit tells another man to "use his body," clowns explode, Justin makes a French Revolution pun, Ohkubo makes an electricity pun, Sid misses an opportunity for a booger pun, Kaguya makes a bamboo pun, Kaguya makes a Buddhist bamboo pun, Kaguya makes another bamboo pun, a gigantic tower-monster fights a gigantic clown-monster, there are some Arabian Nights puns that are too obscure for even my Google-fu to dig up a explanation for, Waffles is openly turned on by ALL OF THE YELLING, and throughout this entire mess not one character - not ONE character - makes a single penis joke.

Where the hell is Black Star when we need him?

Also I am not kidding about any of the preceding paragraph, that is a 100% completely accurate summary of the entire chapter, minus a few unimportant details.

But hey, if you still want to read the detailed version of this recap, then here we go.

( From Stein's point of view, everything is sparkles. )

So, Makoto Shinkai. I used to not be a fan.

My first encounter with Shinkai was Voice of a Distant Star, which was based on a thought-provoking and utterly haunting premise (the length of time it takes to send and receive messages across the vast distances of space) but executed in the most anime-cliche-riddled, ridiculous way possible (cute teen girl in a cute school uniform fighting space aliens in a giant mecha and hallucinating the shit out of all of her emotional revelations really Shinkai?!?!). Then there was The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which was unbelievably stupid on almost every possible level - the characterizations sucked, the characters acted like plot-puppets instead of real people, the science-fiction elements were so stupid and poorly thought-out so as to be almost insulting the intelligence of the audience, and the dénouement of the film was anti-climatic yet at the same time utterly ridiculous. Yet for some reason this was the film that seemed to give everybody and their dog a massive throbbing boner for Shinkai and he was being praised left and right as "the next Miyazaki."

Well, I will say that Early Days was a very, very pretty film to look at. Gorgeously animated and just dripping with beauty from every frame. But the story and the characters and the sci-fi elements were just. so. bad.

I was so disappointed by The Place Promised in Our Early Days that I admit I decided not to waste my time on 5 Centimeters per Second.

But a lot of people whose taste I admire were gushing about Shinkai's latest film, Children Who Chase Lost Voices Deep Below, and the film was specifically recced to me as a film that was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE any of Shinkai's previous films. Well heck, I didn't like Shinkai's previous films, so as far as I'm concerned, "this movie is absolutely nothing like anything Shinkai has made before" is a good enough reason for me to try it.

And wow, you guys. This film. I have a lot of feelings about this film. ( More behind cut. )

Kathryn Hemmann writes about Bunny Drop, realism, "literature," and feminism. Great essay but I think that she gives waaaaaaaaay to much leeway to Bunny Drop's ending (which, BTW, is NOT spoiled in the essay, in case you're concerned about that sort of thing).

2011 comic book movies reviews vs. revenues. Lose your faith in humanity in one handy infographic.

After a one-month hiatus, Not! is back.  And how.



( 'Gang BANGer' is a pun with very different conotations in Japanese and English, unfortunately. )