The Anime Music Tournament 2013 Bracket Charlotte – Round 1 – Polls 1-8 “Analysis”

By TheBigN

Very late with this one, as the first four polls have already closed, though I was a little busy with other things, namely having a good time at Otakon 2013. That being said, let’s get into the swing of things again. 

Gunslinger Girl: Finale

 

The final volume of the Gunslinger Girl manga arrived today.

The first surprise were the words “heartwarming conclusion” in the blurb on the back cover.  The second surprise was that Yu Aida really did pull it off (perhaps the third surprise is seeing Jean finally treat Rico as decently as she has long deserved). God, I’m a softie, and I’m sure all the Kool Kids will snicker, but I found this final volume to be a fitting conclusion — the complete opposite of the carnage and mayhem of the previous volumes. Yes, it has its melancholy aspects, and many beloved characters do not survive the series, but it really does end on a note of hope as the weeks of bloody terrorism give way to a peace movement with echoes of the one that emerged in Northern Ireland, and the Social Welfare Agency takes on a new role.

This volume, called “Finale”, brings the series to a close, showing the fates of the survivors, and laying many ghosts to rest, giving each a witness to recognize their passing.

I’ll agree that the epilogue lays it on way too thick, but for Triela, I’ll forgive almost anything.

I’m so glad that Seven Seas picked this series up from ADV Manga, and saw it through to its conclusion.  In twenty years of manga reading, this series stands out in the way it breathes life into its characters as it tells their stories.

 

“You’ve Got Real Life In My Anime!” example #5234621

By TheBigN

There is an interesting read that’s in last week’s (I think) ESPN the magazine on racism in soccer, specifically focusing on how racism has permeated throughout Italian soccer fandom. One interesting tidbit is a note on cultural conflict between Northern Italy and Southern Italy where as the article seems to put it, the north is very right-wing, traditional, and focused on preserving tradition, which somehow the south seems to threaten by being the “less wealthy” of the two, as well as the portion that has more immigrants migrate there. And there’s one specific right-wing political group, Lega Nord, mentioned whose goal is to have the North split from what they see as an “economically dependant” south. Which reminded me of Gunslinger Girl’s main antagonist faction The Five Republics Faction, and this article helped provide a lot  more sociopolitical context in the many factors that lead to the complicated setting of the series, as well as some of the motivations behind the characters especially in the last couple of volumes before the final one that’s recently come out.  Granted, all this information was available beforehand if you knew where to look, but I didn’t think that an article on sport would lead me to it though.  You never know, I guess.   I’d recommend reading the whole article even if you aren’t a fan of the show or of soccer, as its incisive writing regardless.

And now for something a lot less serious. From Aida Yuu’s twitter.

Do androids dream of electric teddybears? Gunslinger Girl manga omnibus v6

by dm00

Triela armed for bear.

Well: that’s pretty conclusive.

There’s not a lot one can say about the sixth omnibus collection of Gunslinger Girl without bringing in spoilers, but I am going to try to avoid them.

This book is full of ghosts. You know it’s going to be grim by the time you get to page three.

Triela, whose self-awareness has always been a critical part of this series, has a couple of truly wonderful moments in conversation with Hilshire. The bumbling Hilshire (along with Petrushka’s Alessandro) has replaced Jose as the center of sanity among the fratelli. The choices that Hilshire and Jose make in this volume might not be the ones you have been expecting.

And damn, Alessandro (Petrushka’s fratello) is in full Sherlock mode. In a book that’s been nonstop action for 200 pages, I think it’s a brilliant move to have the climax come in the form of a drawn-out conversation.

Triela, Hilshire, Petrushka and Alessandro appear to be different replies to the stories of the characters who find themselves using others as tools. Some embrace that exploitation, some are torn with guilt as they see themselves doing it, some reject the exploitation at first, but then their focus returns to the ends they think justify their means.

The action is just a little confused — there are a lot of second-generation cyborgs in the action sequences, so there are a lot of new characters. There’s a lot of young people among the Padanian terrorists, too, so it’s sometimes hard to know who is who, especially when you add the new fratelli to the mix.

The book has many pages of “the world of Gunslinger Girl” — cultural notes about Italy.
Jason Thompson just mused on the topic of manga as travelogue in his column at ANN. It’s easy to see Aria as a tourist brochure, but surprisingly, maybe Gunslinger Girl is one, too.

There’s one more volume to go, even though there aren’t many loose ends left (and there are a surprising number of threads brought into play in this volume). I’m wondering if the next volume is going to be a “20 years later” sort of epilogue to the series.

The final volume of the series will be released in July. When it is, I expect to re-read the series from beginning to end.

Impressions on a Year 2008: Awesome OPs/EDs

By TheBigN

Part 1: Interesting People

This year was insane with the amount of anime openings and endings that I liked, and it was hard to narrow down the amount to a “reasonable” number… so I didn’t really attempt to. But these ones here (coupled with Youtube videos) are the ones that stick in my mind the most over the year visually, aurally, or both. That being said, there is a list of Honorable Mentions at the end of the post to include OP/EDs that were also good, but stuff I could easily leave as well. I’m much more critical of music than I am of anime, but doesn’t mean that I have standards. 😛

Season of Sequels, Black Lagoon and Much, Much more

By NomadOtto

Alright, I realize that I haven’t posted in two yonks, but…. eh, I really have no excuses, other than that Black Lagoon is a pain to read and I wanted to finally beat Rome: Total War (Which I did, mostly because by having sufficient cavalry you have hit the “win button” for every battle except sieges). In this post, I’ll talk about my picks for shows for the new season, but, first, Black Lagoon, well, to be more specific, the Black Lagoon manga. You see, I’d watched Black Lagoon a while ago, and really liked it, so I decided to pick up the manga, which turned out to be one of those things that sounds like a really good idea until you actually get into the meat of it. You see, anime adaptations of manga generally don’t have everything that happens in the manga, and so reading the manga usually gives you a bit of extra material, plus, if you’re familiar with the series from the anime, you can get into the swing of reading stuff easier. However, in other cases, pretty much the entire manga is covered in the anime, and so you’re probably going to be bored by reading it again. The problem with Black Lagoon is that it does have new stuff, it’s just that’s it’s spread throughout the manga, concentrated mostly at the tail end of the books that I got, and my tolerance for reading it is low, because the language is hard. Blah Blah Blah, you don’t care, this isn’t LJ, and you want the review, well, check below, oh my droogs.