Busy Weekend

[chomiji]

The sis-in-law (the one who's married to a minister) had a rotten week: her employer is transferring her, with almost no notice, to a different facility, and as she runs a senior center (basically, daycare for senior citizens), it means leaving behind not only staff, but also clients. So she decided at virtually the last minute to come down (with our nephew in tow) and see the Young Lady's play (our daughter is crewing her school's not-quite-spring musical, Beauty and the Beast) Friday night, because she thought it would cheer her up. This meant I had to clean up the guest room, which was wall-to-wall wrapping paper bits and rolls still, from the last installment of Xmas. But when I got home, there was an Amazon box waiting: I have Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 11 [thanks, megan!!], and Takumi-Kun 2!

Saturday I was not feeling well - malaise about sums it up - and nothing much happened except meals out (lunch at Oriental East, which has great dim sum and forgettable service; dinner at Austin Grill, which is quite good for a chain) and the week's grocery shopping. The Young Lady was crewing again and had to eat leftovers for dinner. Oh well - it builds character!

Sis-in-law left early Sunday morning, and then sanada came to visit! We had brunch at Jackie's (retro American cuisine in a groovy-funky 1960s industrial setting) and talked manga nonstop. A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better. Then we went and saw the matinee of the play ourselves. Energy level good, one or two really good performances, scenery very uneven (the Beast's castle was very, very good, the village scenery was pretty lame), costumes pretty nice (althought the dinner plates were awful), and the special effects were much fun ... during the Beast's transformation at the end, petals fell from the catwalks onto our heads. They were meant to be rose petals, but all I could think of was (a) Sakura of Doom and (b) Nanao dumping baskets of petals over Shunsui. And the casting was the usual marvellous Blair High School racial mix: Oriental Belle, African American Gaston, Hispanic (I think) Beast, and so on. Dinner was what the Mr. calls "the meat place" - Brazilian BBQ.

Comments

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better.

I'll say! That and four meals you didn't have to cook yourself. :-)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

"Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 33, and Takumi-Kun 2!"

I want your time machine(though I have no idea what Takumi-kun is)

[chomiji]

Sad to say, eating out is our major hobby these days ... and definitely a major factor in why we're both more or less square in shape! I'm sure Washington can't compete with New York or San Francisco for number and variety of eating places, but we give it a good try.

[chomiji]

Hee! I fixed it! Of course SDK really is at 27, and this is indeed the second Takumi ... . I seriously doubt Takumi-kun would be to your taste, megan-san: pretty boys in a private boarding/prep school kissing a lot (and more - but the drawings fade away tastefully). It's my version of romance crack, I think. Now that I have more than one of them, I might blog it ... but the next one out April 1, so maybe I should wait. (I have several other things - manga and books, in queue to blog already.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think I'm sick and tired of most of the school-centric mangas regardless of genre, actually.

Personally, I still long for a Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow blog post(though, IIRC, you didn't like it quite as much as I longed for.)

[chomiji]

Oooh, good point - I should re-read it, which I meant to do anyway. (Now where did I put it? sanada had to watch me paw through dozens of stacks of stuff in my office looking for my Saiyuki doujinshi that I wanted to show her ... it's a sad state of affairs.)

You know, you're quite right about the school thing. Hmm. I guess I'll have to blog that point when I do write it up. I think the reason that's not driving me nuts is that the emphasis is more on Takumi's internal mental/emotional processes and not on the school hijinx.

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

Good for you! And square is the new, er, black! I'm aiming for spherical, myself. *g*

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for Amazon to send me the second book.

Looking at my backlog, I do still follow a fair number of books with some focus on school, but most are like Fruits Basket where every once in a while, the manga-ka goes "oh yeah, and sometimes they go to school" and the couple I have waiting for me to start focus on clubs...one is about a girl who joins the anime and manga club because her boyfriend is an extreme otaku and she wants to save him from the dark side, and the other is a romantic comedy about an obsessive compulsive and a slob, set around classical music.

But a few years ago, most of my collection was high school shojo-centric, with books like SDK, BOTI, Basara, RuroKen and a few others that weren't mixed in that were my favorites...now I've realized that most of it annoys me(it did then, too, but I thought it was what I was supposed to want to read-that and yaoi because that's what all the female fans read) and now it's almost all historical and fantasy and hybrids.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

12k is essentially the prefect example of how you take someone weak and whiny and annoying and turn them into something awesome. Youko int he first few volumes is about the most annoying thing to ever exist, yet, by the end of the anime, she's just aboutthe best thing ever.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

LOTS of actual character growth all around. Well, notreally Keiki...he does try, though.

[chomiji]

>> I thought it was what I was supposed to want to read - that and yaoi because that's what all the female fans read)<<

Well, I'm sure that didn't help with your dislike for those things. Whyever would someone assume that there was any kind of "supposed to" for anything read for pleasure? I started with SDK because the Mr. brought it home, and no other reason. And then I got into Saiyuki and some of the others because sanada though I might like them on the basis of discussions we'd had on SDK and on SF&F novels. The only things that have deeply disappointed me thus far are Nana and most recently Wallflower, both of which have been highly recommended (which is another story for another time ... I want to think harder about why I loved Ouran and dislike that one).

I had no expectations at all for Basilisk, so the fact that it sucked wasn't upsetting.

[chomiji]

You a fan of the fantasy works of Diana Wynne Jones, by any chance? In one of her children's books (Charmed Life), a bitchy young girl is berating her cousins for being fat. They smile placidly and say "Fat is comfortable. It's much more of a nuisance looking like a china doll, like you do!"

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

Sad to say I've never heard of her. But she sounds like a Damn. Good. Thing.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Until a little over 2 years ago, I thought there were only 2 female anime/manga fans in the world(1 I knew online, 1 I knew in person) who didn't hate almost every female character ever and look for slash in everything they picked up...if I mentioned I liked two male characters or that my two favorite characters in a series, it was automatically assumed that I slashed them(I remember mentioning two characters one time and then getting a 30 minute spiel about how they were so perfect for each other, and being mystified as one was married and-though we never met her and she was only mentioned briefly-obviously pretty respectful of and committed to his wife, and the other was one of those who was basically walking around with a "personal property of *insert*" tattoo on his forehead

That's interesting about Wallflower and Ouran. I started out liking them about equally, but I've largely lost interest in Ouran(I think because the last few volumes I read were heavy on the Haruhi/Tamaki implications, and as much as I love Tamaki, I just can't convince myself that she wouldn't kill him inside a week) and now that Basara and Night of the Beasts are through running their main stories in the US, it's probably a toss up between it and Fruits Basket for my favorite shoujo that's still coming out. I wonder if it may be how the two turn over all the normal tropes for shoujo? Ouran turns all the tropes on their head, but also giddily embraces and revels in them...Wallflower has all the same tropes, but done in a way to show just how absurd they are. The slash is a good example. Ouran is rather like Hana Kimi, Yuu Watase, and some Fruits Basket(Ayame, Shigure, Haru) where it makes it clear that the characters are straight, but tosses around the slash left and right(a lot of other shoujo, too, but those are the ones you're familiar with off the top of my head) for fun. Wallflower is actually heavier on the slash than Ouran in some ways, but also has a very strong "but if they caught you slashing them, they'd rip your throat out" undertone to it. (As a side note, based on comments, I'm pretty sure the mangaka is a yaoi fan, unless I missed a comment directly addressing it, it's just the tropes and stereotyping that she's playing with.) And it does that with everything: the fan girls, the pretty girl, the hot guy, the playboy, the girlish guy, the shy girl, the serious guy, the "hot guy brings shy girl out of shell" stereotype, etc. If I'd read Wallflower the first year or so I was reading shoujo, I probably would have run from it, thinking I was being told there was something "wrong" with liking shoujo, but encountering it when I was starting to get tired of shoujo, it was basically the best thing ever.

Now, Nana? Came highly recommended to me, too. I struggled through about 3 volumes...thought rocker Nana and the characters from her old band were pretty cool, wanted to strangle girly Nana and do extremely unpleasant things to her boyfriend...even before he cheated(and he actually chose a girl even more annoying to cheat with!) I've actually had a LOT of manga recced to me-even in the last year or so-that I could tell just by how people were talking to me about it that I'd despise it, and they would tell me how I'd love it ever so much. Then again, they're some of the same ones who told me I'd like the Goong live action, and that was 24 hours or torture for me, and essentially proof that, while I like "alpha jerk and sweet girl" a lot in certain cases, most of the time, it's just "alpha bastard and spineless doormat, but it's ok because he has angst as an excuse."

Basilisk...*scowl* I had expectations. Saw the movie, thought it was pretty decent(the guy playing the main guy pretty much sleepwalked his way through it, but is a good enough actor that he still did well) and, since I liked the plot's take on "enemies as lovers" and had been told the manga was much better...and it was just fight-rape-porn. I'm not sure I would have realized, based on the first two volumes, what the central plot was meant to be if I hadn't known beforehand. I looked at the last volume when it came out and it never got better.

[chomiji]

Anything by DWJ is better than the best things by almost anyone else ... but my faves are actually not part of the "Chrestomanci" books. Of those, my favorite is The Lives of Christopher Chant.

Aditi Indian Kitchen on the lower level (food court) is where I get mine. How good they are in the absolute sense - I don't know. I'm a tyro when it comes to Indian food. I only like mild heat, and the Mr. doesn't care of Indian-style spices at all, so I rarely get it.

[chomiji]

> cringes <

We'll have to get the Peruvian roast chicken from the Chicken Place in Wheaton for you then, and you can dress it to your hot-blooded heart's content with their amazing green chili sauce. I have to dilute it 10:1 with ketchup ... .

[chomiji]

Not to worry ... I'll stick with my beloved Hong Kong/Cantonese and occasional forays in to Hunan, thankyouverymuch!!!

Sometime we'll finally get you to one of the Hollywood East locations and you can have their lovely shrimp wontons both in soup and in mild- to medium-spicy "XO" sauce. (Are you sensing a theme here? Yes, I must feed my friends ... I have to make them try everything I enjoy eating! And then I have to make them read everything I like reading!)

[chomiji]

One of these days I'll start remembering that you're a complete original in your tastes, and I won't feel so worried about things I rec that you don't like! Your reaction to Nana is so very like mine, ditto for a number of other things, and yet we so thoroughly disagree on the whole slash thing. It is a puzzlement. But it is what it is, that's all she wrote, end of subject.

As mentioned previously, until I encountered female roleplayers playing gay male characters online about 10 years ago, I had not a clue that I was not some isolated pervert for liking boys on boys, and that's why I'm so enthusiastic about it now. But that has nothing to do with what you like.

Do try to find Lymond - I really think you will love it. There are some slashy things going on here and there, but it's generally a very wildly het story, and with much angst and snark and politics and disguises ... . You can, BTW, get the newer quality paperbacks of them in good condition for less than $5.00 apiece on abebooks.

[chomiji]

You might want to check out the DWJ recs I did for smilla a little bit ago ... your mileage may vary on Dogsbody, which is a very sweet book but rec'ced here mainly because of the dog angle. The rest are things I'd happily rec to anyone who likes fantasy/magical stuff.

(And there are C.J. Cherryh recs there too, but I have no idea if SF is your thing at all.)

[chomiji]

Oh shoot!   > whacks self in head <   I forgot about the seafood issue, totally!   :-(

For the XO sauce, yes - you can get XO sauce on the usual range of main dish stuffs: chicken, tofu, etc. (as well as scallops, but that does you no good). But "Hong Kong Wonton Soup" with the shrimp dumplings is one of their signature dishes.

Yes, there's a Burmese place in Silver Spring that we've visited a couple of times with my friend Kat and her family - Mandalay. The Mr. and I sometimes have a yen for Korean, but the Young Lady is perfectly content to limit her Korean to the house-made veg mandoo at our local crazy family- and hippie-friendly cafe, Mark's Kitchen, owned and operated by Korean-born Mark Choe.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

As far as, strictly, you and I on slash, based on the conversation in the Comment Thread of Doom(and trying to avoid touchy subjects altogether), I suspect a lot of it boils down to one of us having primarily positive experiences in terms of female persence and power over us growing up, and the other had more negative experiences. As a result, I seem to be much more comfortable with female characters in general than you(I've noticed that you tend to shy away from discussion about female characters a lot in general, not just in terms of slash.)

My problem with slash is a purely feminist one, and is wholly limited to slash where there's canon het for one character: it takes a part of the female's role in the story, reduces or displaces her influence on the story, and gives it to a male. Any time I encounter anything that reduces, overlooks, or trivializes a female's role in the story, I react viciously and violently, and have to subdue most of my reaction, even if I hate the female in question. It has nothing to do with slash itself(if I disliked slash, there are a lot of things I wouldn't read now or wouldn't have in the past if I had issues with slash in general) and everything to do with female characters and roles. (And has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not I like and/or respect a person.)

[chomiji]

>> you tend to shy away from discussion about female characters a lot in general <<

My first inclination was to say "Nu-uh! No such!" - but you know ... since I started seeing sanada and smilla in RL, this is the first time perhaps in my entire life that I've had more than one FTF girlfriend who wasn't also a relative. And that's not even counting ones like you that I only "see" online. That is flipping amazing to me, to have so many female friends. And that's not even counting my gaming buddy Camille, who's finally becoming a confidante after knowing her nearly 20 years.

This is also probably why, as my shrink noted, I do not tend to seek out solace from my RL female support system, especially my stepmother. I love her a lot, but there's no inclination in me to seek Mommy when I'm miserable. I can include my old friend Kat along with my sister (especially since I've known her since high school), and I'm starting to put some of my online friends there as well ... but my sister is my younger sister, so ... .

On the other hand, there aren't that many manga heroines that I'm finding to be peer-level at all - I like BotI Rin, but she's my daughter's age! (And realistically acts it.) And I don't think you and I have that many novels in common yet ... tell you what, I have to try to re-read Wheel of the Infinite, and you can blog it, and we can talk about Maskelle. (I didn't think that much of Kade.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I've just noticed that, in conversations on manga in general, you seem to mention a female character if one comes up, then quickly turn the conversation to the male characters connected to the female character. The only real exceptions that I've noticed seem to be Shaga and Kousuke(unless we count Akari, but even though I think of Akari as female myself, she is technically a male.) (And I'm not including characters we mutually dislike, such as Tokito and Akito.)

I don't really seek my RL support system, male or female, a lot either, and I grew up close to my mother and we still are close, even though we somewhat drive each other crazy(shall we simply say that a fantasy loving bookworm who's wardrobe only very grudgingly has anything besides jeans and plain shirts, and who's never had a serious romantic relationship at 27 simply is not what she imagined when she had a 2 year old with curly, strawberry blonde hair who loved pink dresses?) I'm actually pretty introverted and solitary in real life.

I don't really have many characters who would be peer level with me, either...I'm younger than you, but still a decade(or a little more) older than most female manga leads(even Rukia, who's far older than either of us, is still written to be read like a 16~ girl.) I don't really need to connect with characters, just to like and understand them.

At this point, I'd have to reread Wheel of the Infinite to properly blog it, and I need to reduce the backlog some, first. I am trying to get ahold of Death of the Necromancer and Riddlemaster of Hed, though, and I'll be blogging those and the other Ile-Rein books when I read them. Ravenna was much more interesting than Kade, but I thought Kade was fun, if maybe a little full of herself.

[chomiji]

(One other thing I need to throw in here - I thought of it while writing my review of the Chabon book: On the one hand, discrimination against women (and later on, against older women in particular) made my mother's professional life miserable. On the other hand, it was other girls who mocked bookish, four-eyed, chunky young Cho - and boys who played space explorer with me and talked SF&F to me, and my father who took me to the bookstore and the planetarium and taught me to use hand tools and listened to my problems - even, later on, about menstrual cramps and crushes on boys, BTW.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I don't think what's been coming up means that women should like all female characters(I certainly don't) but rather is referring to the idea that women tend to automatically shy away from female characters and automatically assume the males and their relationships and storylines are the more interesting ones, and paying less attention to the females because of that assumption, and I do think that spawns a lot of slash. I also think that many women are uncomfortable with women for whatever reason. It's something that I see with both slash and het fans. It likely is from generations of our being told that men and their relationships are more interesting and important than women and their relationships, but instead of trying to break free of that, it's just reinforced by most sides of fandom. In that context, I do think there's something subconsciously self-hating to it. The thing is, anywhere I look, I can literally trip over male relationships that are important...I have to literally hunt for anything that bothers to give importance to a relationship between females...even mother/daughter is treated as far less important than father/son, mother/son or father/daughter. Without a female presence-romantic, maternal, platonic, mentor, whatever-something has to be amazingly fascinating to hold me. Why? Because fiction is drowning in guys and guy relationships. Even most shoujo ends up being more about the guys than about the girl. Decent female characters, especially in something that actually gives them importance, is a lot harder to find.

But yes, slashing does often come across as self-hating to people who don't slash, both male(even moreso there, based on RL experience) and female. Not strictly because of the "making a male you're attracted to even more unavailable to you" but because of the "females removing females from the equation" aspect.