Dream with Our Eyes Open

What have you just finished reading?

Volume 8 (the latest volume) of the manga series Bunny Drop. This tale of a little girl who is adopted by her adult nephew (yes ... you see, her father was the guy's grandfather) does a time skip after volume 4, and the viewpoint shifts from 30-year-old bachelor Daikichi to now-teenaged Rin. I'm not enjoying the later volumes as much as I did the first four, but it's still a fairly interesting slice of life series.

Also: volume 13 of the manga series Black Butler. The last couple of volumes followed young Ceil and his faithful demonic butler Sebastian as they take an ill-fated voyage on a luxury ocean liner. The cover, presented here, shows all you really need to know, IMO (although it really depicts an event that happened last volume). Yes, that is sweet little Lizzie, Ceil's fiancee, in her petticoats, wielding two cavalry sabers. She's good with them, too. What was she fighting? Zombies, basically. This is Black Butler, after all. This volume opens with a capsule flashback of Lizzie's upbringing. We also find out the Straight Dope about the Undertaker.

What are you currently reading?

The third omnibus volume of the manga Gunslinger Girl

What do you think you'll read next?

Probably John Scalzi's Redshirts. I've been going through tor.com's Star Trek TOS re-watch (this is a couple of years old), which is getting me into the right frame of mind, I think.

What have you just finished reading?

Lots of stuff! Rosemary Sutcliff's The Shining Company and Sword Song, vol. 3 of the manga series A Certain Scientific Railgun, and the aforementioned book I had to re-read as an assignment. I think I'm giving up on Railgun: it's just not working for me. I will write it up at some point and discuss that. This is one of the few series I've just had to drop.

What are you currently reading?

Nothing but little filler things: fanfiction, catalogs, bits of the second Bleach character book (mainly so I can sleuth the kanji in the characters' names with my basic kanji dictionary). That's because I'm processing the things I just read – always happens when I read a lot of things one after the other.

What do you think you'll read next?

I just got the third Gunslinger Girl manga omnibus (comprising vols. 7-8 of the original tankoubon): that will probably be next.

In modern-day Italy, a shadowy but seemingly benevolent organization takes in young girls whose futures are hopeless: Henrietta, the only surviving member of a family that was slaughtered; Rico, who was born without limbs and whose parents were increasingly unable to care for her; Triela, a child of mixed race from Tunisia who had been kidnapped and spoiler and squick/trigger warning used as a victim in a snuff film; and so on.

In truth, the Agency for Social Welfare (excellent choice of name: so bland and boring, no?) "treats" these girls by surgically altering them and brainwashing them to forget their former lives, turning them into near-unstoppable assassins that the agency calls cyborgs. This process also shortens their overall lifespan considerably, although because the program is still pretty much experimental, good data on the life of a cyborg is not really available.

Each girl is paired with an adult male "handler." Given that this is manga, this set-up could have been skeevy as hell, but although the sexual element is not totally ignored (Triela, who seems to be around 13, is definitely grappling with romantic feelings toward her handler), it's mostly a very minor element in the relationships. The pairings are called "fratellos" – that is, basically, a set of siblings.

There's an ongoing plot involving a terrorist group, which provides opportunities for the agency to use the girls' powers (although they are also involved in some very cold-hearted murders for general political expediency). We are shown the terrorists' interactions with each other, during which they discuss their political philosophies, so that they are not just faceless targets. Personalities and relationships, in fact, are the focus of the series: the girls' relationships not only with their handlers, but with each other. We get lots of scenes of their training and their down time in their dorm, when they talk about life in general as well as what they have been doing.

Despite a persistent feeling that this is all going to end in tears, I'm fascinated by this series and am enjoying it. The attitude of the trainers toward their doomed charges makes me think a bit of CLAMP's Clover, while the brainwashing and training of the girls recalls similar scenes in the childhoods of the azi (programmed clones) Catlin II and Florian II in C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen, who are destined for security work.

The artwork is more utilitarian than striking, but it gets the work done. It's very detailed and provides a lot of gun porn: wikis detailing what weapons each girls uses can be found easily online. There's a certain amount of male gaze – this is a shounen series – but it's not quite voyeuristic. We see girls changing their clothes, stretching (in spandex exercise gear), and in hospital gowns for procedures, but the treatment of these scenes mostly seemed to me more expository than exploitative. (And I was surprised to find that this was not a seinen series. The relationships between the girls and their handlers seems like prime moe.)

veronicacode tells us that there's a new chapter of Minekura-sensei's Wild Adapter out.

This hands me a problem, because I don't know of a translation site equivalent to saiyuki_manga on which I can read it. Anybody have a suggestion?

Oh Tokyopop. You were such ditzes, but you had such good stories. I'm glad that Viz picked up Loveless, but I wish someone would do the same for sensei's various series.

This looks like a lot of stuff, but more than half of it is Bleach, which has gone into a hyperpublish mode for some reason:

20th Century Boys and Bamboo Blade are about to end, and xxxHolic, Ouran High School Host Club, and Hikaru no Go all finished in the last year or so. Black Lagoon is still on hiatus, as is Wild Adapter (although the latest news says that will resume next year ... no English publisher in sight, though).

I'm trying to get moving on Kekkaishi again. I enjoy it while I'm actually reading it, but somehow it doesn't inspire me to much anticipation.

And other than that, I'm not feeling too excited about manga at the moment. (I don't dare get too excited about Saiyuki ... stay healthy, sensei!) But I don't have anything to substitute for it. It is a sad puzzlement.

Would I like DURARARA!!, anyone? Any other recs?

theskywasblue was kind enough to give me the letter T, for which I now have to name five favorite characters whose names start with that.

I have here four manga characters and one lonely person from mainstream fiction. (Actually, it's amazing that I'd have anyone from mainstream fiction!)

Tracy (real name: Eustacia) Quinn is the shy, brainy modern-day heroine of Rumer Godden's China Court, a romance in which the most prominent character is really China Court, the Cornish house in which the Quinn family have lived for the better part of a century. Tracy's only happy memories from childhood were the few years that she lived at China Court with her grandmother. The very ending is problematic, but I have always sympathized very much with Tracy's shyness and her love of the house and the garden.

Tenpou Gensui (Field Marshall Tenpou) is an ancient Chinese god who ends up on the wrong side of a political struggle in Heaven, in Katsuya Minekura's manga Saiyuki Gaiden. He's a brilliant man but also a slob and a bit of a space cadet. He has a keen sense of justice and right. In Minekura's main series Saiyuki (with its continuations: Saiyuki Reload and Saiyuki Reload Blast), Tenpou is reborn as Cho Hakkai. His lover Kenren Taishou (General Kenren) is reborn as Sha Gojyo.

Tokine Yukimura is the female co-lead of Yellow Tanabe's manga series Kekkaishi. She is a teenaged 'barrier master," the current heir of one family of skilled magicians who can protect others from demons by creating magical barriers. Tokine is intense, loyal, studious, and skilled, but the series constantly contrasts her finesse with her male opposite number's magical strength.

Tokito Minoru is a troubled and brash young man with a strange clawed and furred right hand and hardly any memory of his past. In Kazuya Minekura's Wild Adapter, he becomes the friend - and likely more - of the nihilistic young criminal Kubota Makoto. Together, they are trying to find out the secret of the strange drug Wild Adapter, which may have something to do with Tokio's weird hand. Tokito is frank, almost fearless, down-to-earth, and fiercely loyal to the very few people he trusts.

Taki Tooru is a middle school girl in Yuki Midorikawa's manga series Natsume's Book of Friends (or Natsume Yuujinchō). She is able to draw a magic circle that will allow her and others to see youkai, spirits/monsters that are usually invisible to most. She becomes one of the closest friends of Natsume Takashi, a lonely boy who has been tormented by his ability to see youkai. Taki (usually referred to by her family name, as are all the school-age characters in the story) is remakably brave. At first she is quiet and withdrawn as a result of a curse that was placed upon her; later, she becomes lively and more talkative.

Let me know if you would like me to give you a letter too! (It may not be until tomorrow morning, though.)

So it's been a bit more than a month since whymzycal assigned me these seven things! Life has been rather complicated during that time, to say the least.

Saiyuki Reload Blast

Saiyuki Reload Blast

Saiyuki Reload Blast

Saiyuki Reload Blast

is returning!!!!

(As of the March 28 ZeroSum! Thanks to veronicacode for the first heads-up I saw this morning! And I do hope this means that Minekura-sensei is feeling much, much better!)

(And yes, I know lots of people have already posted this, but I just had to say something!)

The way this meme works is that you ask to do it, and then I give you four fandoms so you can tell us all about your favorite characters .

theskywasblue gave me: "... Saiyuki ... Bleach .. Lord of the Rings and ... Have you read Good Omens? (I don't know if you have, sorry! If not then your favourite character from any work by Diana Wynne Jones.)"

Actually, I have read Good Omens and I am fond of Pepper, but I don't think I can find any pictures of her. So ...

High school kendo instructor Toraji "Kojiro" Ishida (English name order is used) is perennially out of money, and he's also threatened with the loss of his job because his team never seems to get anywhere. When his former kendo upper-classmate, now also a kendo instructor, challenges him with a prize of a year's worth of sushi if Ishida's team can beat his in a year, Kojiro is galvanized into action. When he manages to convince petite, unworldly kendo prodigy Tamaki Kawazoe to become part of his five-member girls' team, he figures that he's well on his way to winning.

Although Kojiro's situation starts the series off, the vast majority of the screen time is given to the girls on his team. In addition to Tamaki (who is also a huge fan of the imaginary anime series Blade Braver, which becomes significant from time to time), the girls' team features "Team Mom" Chiba Kirino, a cheerful, hard-working girl from a family that runs a deli; her best friend Sayako Kuwahara, the tallest and strongest girl on the squad, who wants to become a rock guitarist; sweetly pretty Miyako Miyazaki ("Miya Miya"), who is actually a bit of a thug (and has "pink" and "black" sides, similar to Hatsuharu's "black" and "white" sides in Fruits Basket); and later on, Satori Azuma, who is very talented at kendo but a complete ditz and a failure at just about everything else. There are also two boy kendoka: Yuji Nakata, who is a pleasant, athletic kid, and Danjuro Eiga ("Dan-kun"), who is played as complete joke. Dan-kun is Miya Miya's boyfriend, but after the first volume or so, he is always drawn as a simplified, unattractive chibi super-deformed figure ... and this fact actually gets mentioned from time to time in the story, smashing the fourth wall to bits.

The overall story arc is about the girls' getting better at kendo, of course, and in the first couple of volumes, especially, the manga explains a lot about modern sport kendo and how team tournaments work. Several arcs cover actual tournaments, where the girls are challenged not only by the skills of their opponents but also by some less-than-sportsmanlike behavior. But the heart of the manga is "slice of life" mini-arcs about the girls: Kirino's attempts to keep things going when there's an illness in her family, Miya Miya's problems with her female stalker-with-a-crush from middle school, Tamaki's efforts to save enough for a boxed set of her beloved Blade Braver, and so on.

The striking thing about this, to me, is how girl-centered it manages to be without being terribly "girly." OK, Miya Miya's part-time job is in a cutesy boutique; in the latest U.S. volume, the girls go on an expedition to a big shopping mall; Kirino and Saya insist on giving everyone cute nicknames; but otherwise, their concerns and activities were very approachable to geek-tomboy me. The girls talk together about schoolwork, kendo, their families, and each other - almost never about fads, clothes, or boys. Dan is the only boyfriend in the picture, and he's part of the squad - and played for laughs. The whole thing passes the Bechdel test with flying colors.

This seinen series has become a complete comfort read for me. The artwork is loose and sloppy (rather like Gravitation but with a more shoujo flavor), but it has a lot of heart.