Kappa Roll

And not the pretentious literary douchebag kind of experimental ramble! Since I'm now kappalicious on dreamwidth and sarolynne on lj, I have to play with this crossposting craziness and see if it works as easily as it seems. SO!

First! One day, I will have it straight who's who between the people I know here and the people I know there. That day is not today. For the time being, I'm subscribing a bit haphazardly (so if I miss people, sorry--I'm distractable), and adding people who add me, and we'll get everything else sorted out in the future.

And second, so this post isn't a complete waste of space, I'm going to give a quick run down of what I've been reading lately and whether or not I recommend it. Because. Well...

1) Naruto - Still following it. I'm also one of the like five people in fandom who still enjoy it. I'm not going to say too much about it, since I imagine most people already know and hell, I'll say more soon enough anyway.

Do I rec? At this point, if you haven't started Naruto, I'm not going to tell you you should. I do enjoy it, but I'm not about to tell people to catch up with 400+ chapters of on going shounen sprawl.

2) Bleach - Still following it to. Not going to say much about it for both the reasons above, and at this point, Bleach makes me want to punch babies.

Do I rec? Only if you don't like babies.

3) Nurarihyon no Mago - Okay, now we're to things that I don't talk that much about and that aren't wildly well known. This one is a shounen manga that doesn't even have fifty chapters to it yet. I've been following it for some time now, and I like some of what it's got going on. Mostly, the integration of demon stuff and real world stuff. Folklore elements have always been a kink for me, and those are there for me here. It follows Rikuo, who's a quarter demon (which means he's a demon for a quarter of the day--more or less), and the grandson of the leader of an army of demons, and his heir. He has to win people's trust, and earn their devotion, and all that standard shounen stuff.

It's not always awesome with gender stuff. There are a couple of good female characters, but they could use some more time and development; they're also obviously being written within a certain context, which limits their roles. I don't know that they're normally handled badly, but I could stand to see girls getting rescued less often. (Though, to be fair, it's not always so much that the girls needs rescuing as the humans needs rescuing.) A couple of female characters have should some signs of becoming interesting/relevant in the future. I won't say I'm optimistic, but I do have some hope.

So it's fun, but not one I read for my feminist jollies.

Do I rec? If you're looking for a cute, fairly normal shounen-y thing for fun? Sure. Go ahead. Particularly if, like me, you have a soft spot for demons and such. The art is weird, but I find it endearing. However, the scanlations currently available are not all of great quality, and the beginning is a bit slow. You have to give it a shot, and get through the first few chapters, and I can't say I blame you if you don't.

4) Fairy Tail - I am still reading this. I did a big long write up on it a while back, and it still stands. I don't hate it, so I'm kind of costing along with it as it goes. I don't know how long I'll stay with it, but who know?

Do I rec? This one also depends what you're looking for, but it's probably not high on my pimp list unless I know for a fact that it's an art style you like, and it's going to hit your buttons in a good way.

5) Skip Beat - I've also talked a bit about this recently. So the short version. I absolutely love it. It just makes me happy. It even makes me happy in a feminist way sometimes. But mostly, it makes me happy in a gloriously cracky way. I never would have thought I'd like a shoujo showbiz manga.

Do I rec? Absolutely. The art is pretty awful, and I found it easier to start with the anime, but it is absolutely awesome and worth dealing with proportions to make whoever ran the rack in the Spanish Inquisition cry tears of blood in sympathy for their poor attenuated bodies.

6) Y: The Last Man - Yes, I just read a Western comic. And honestly, I loved it. I don't know that I'm going to dive into them as a media again, because there is something about the general aesthetic that just doesn't rock my world, but I got through this one just fine. It probably helped that it's not epically log.

I plan on doing a nice long ramble about this sometime soon, because it deserves it, but I'll try to keep it brief here (soul of wit and all).

I was not totally optimistic about the premise--that there's one dude left on the planet. Not just one dude, actually, but one man and one monkey are the only male mammals left. It just seems like the kind of thing that lends itself too much to either preachy politics or masturbatory fantasies. And, well, this one does get a bit political, but I didn't mostly mind. I was occasionally torn over the stuff with the Amazons because on the one hand, they do kind of come off as an analogue for radical feminists and while I don't always agree with them (or like them), I don't necessarily think they deserve to be painted as insane and violent. On the other hand, the violence and insanity does seem not inappropriate given the dire circumstances that these women are in, and it's pretty established that the women who went that way went that way because they needed something. Because they're traumatized and starving, etc. So it's not entirely unsympathetic.

I guess it would be a good summation to say it's not perfect in all regards, but its heart seems to be in the right place most or all of the time. If the gender stuff or the racial stuff or the homosexual stuff or the trans stuff isn't always pitch perfect, it's still pretty good to my own ears. I'm still a straight, white, cis girl, so I can't really say how bad it is with any authority; bad enough that it did ping be occasionally. Good enough that it felt like stumbling rather than failing. And, you know, it did actually INCLUDE all of those issues, which while it doesn't necessarily deserve cookies and praise, in our cultural context, still might deserve some honorable mention.

I loved many of the characters. Not always Yorick--I'll tell you what, the author got the entitled, douchey, liberal white boy character down cold, and like most of them, the entitlement and self-importance makes him annoying from time to time. I think he grows well, and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be annoyed by him like that. His companions certainly are. But 355 is a pretty awesome character, Alison grew on me, Hero is interesting if not lovable (the same can be said of Alter), and some of the more secondary and tertiary characters like Natalya, Other Beth, P.J... well, there are a lot of good female characters in there. And when almost the entire cast is female (for obvious reasons), you start to realize just how many women there aren't normally in most titles.

There are also a lot of good details. Like, a looot of them.

However, it is depressing. We can say, it's not terribly depressing as apocalypses go, but that's about the most that can be said for it. There's a very high body count. And I'm depressed for the dogs and cats and bunnies and ferrets and lions and so forth. More so than about the humans. The whole way, you feel like humans have a fighting chance, but not really so much with other animals.

In any event. It was a really interesting and fairly enjoyable (if sometimes depressing) read.

Do I rec? Yeah, I think so. I mean, seriously, what do you think. If you read this far, you probably have an idea about it.

There are probably some other things I can add to this, like novels and what have you, but I think that's probably enough for now, right? XD