Mere words cannot describe the unspeakable joy I felt when I held in my hands the Limited Edition Box Set that came with the first Region 1 DVD of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I'm sure that you're all tired of the hyperbolic religious references by now, so I'll just assume that you've already gone through the mental image of me squeeing like an over-excited and disturbingly hyper fangirl who happens to not actually be female.

I lack an actual method for providing clear and high-quality pictures of my purchase, at least until I get my camera fixed. And so, this entire post will contain merely pictures that are only tangentially related to the box set, inasmuch as they may possibly have something to do with it apart from being of the same series.

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Received word from Amazon.com that mine pre-order of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya special edition box set is winging its way to me even as we speak. (Well, as I type and you read, technically.)

This, after a weekend spent at Animania, where a very kind fellow member gifted me with a copy of the Newtype supplement from December 2006 that he had picked up somewhere. This was the Haruhi issue, filled from page to page with gorgeous pictures of the SOS Brigade and annotated in a language I did not understand, ie Japanese. I spent the past few days since then admiring the contents therein with the utmost care of a collector and fan. This was more than a simple magazine with pictures; this was Da Vinci's original notes, Shakespeare's First Folio.

My reputation for being a fanatical Haruhiist had apparently become common knowledge among the Animania crew. As this causes them to funnel the blessings of Haruhi onto this unworthy soul, I cannot complain.

I have thus spent the better part of a week hyping myself up for the R1 DVD box set. This is not something that will likely result in any disappointment, since all I really need for the payoff is having the DVD box set in my eager hands, watching the first few episodes in full DVD quality. Since that is the basic raison d'etre of the DVD box set in the first place, I cannot think of any way for the result to be able to actually disappoint me, save for it not arriving at all.

I have, thus far in my life, only been truly evangelical about three fandoms: Card Captor Sakura, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Discworld. Consider all the other fandoms and series which I liked, but not enough to want to spread. Consider all the effort I am willing to go through to obtain the latest Discworld book. Consider the time and money I have spent supporting my Card Captor Sakura collection.

Now imagine how excited I am about the box set of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

An idle thought occurs, that if Haruhi in her Melancholy can result in such conversion and devotion, what more can she accomplish if she ever progresses fully to Anger and Jealousy?

I've been in one fandom or another (occasionally more than one at the same time, in a sort of Internet version of polygamy) since about 1995, when the Internet seemed glorious and open and full of unlimited possibilities. (Technically it is still full of unlimited possibilities, but one would rather not know what these possibilities are.) It came as a surprise, a thrilling shock to me, that in terms of really liking a show or a book or a game, I was not alone, and like-minded people banded together via the easy communications online. After being used to the concept of being surrounded by those who simply Do Not Get It, who treat passion for a fictional universe as an aberration to be shunned, this was an overwhelming discovery; I had to have a quiet lie-down.

Since then, though, an interesting trend has long since made itself quite obvious to me, and I am sure to a great many other people as well, most of whom are probably more intelligent than I am and have created reams of thesis papers about the matter. Countless rainforests have been sacrificed and oceans of ink spilled (or if you're using a laser printer, almost enough toner dust to replicate the classic atmosphere of Los Angeles) to explore the question of why is it that fandoms tend to gravitate towards romantic pairings.

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Testing out a new plugin that lets me post various videos in horrendous quality from YouTube or Google Video. This is apparently called "Vlogging", or "Video Blogging", which is yet more evidence that the best way to save the English language on the Internet is to nuke all sites from orbit, since that's the only way to be sure.

So I've been labelled, some time back, as the "harem monster". This is mainly because I had wandered into #Animeblogger one day asking for new romantic comedy anime recommendations, and every suggestion tossed out I had already seen relatively recently. When asked to list those anime I considered to have seen too recently to be suggested, I rattled off maybe thirty to forty titles. (This was true; at the time, I had marathoned about thirty to forty romantic comedy and slice of life anime over the course of about three months.) This is apparently unique among anime bloggers or some such; I keep saying that I'm easily satisfied, but nobody seems to remember.

However, I'm easily satisfied in much the same way a meat-eater is satisfied: give him a slab of steak, and he'll be perfectly happy. Present him with a stalk of broccoli, and he'll look at you as though sizing up how tasty your head would be in barbeque sauce. I am satisfied when the anime I watch has elements I like in it (in the right proportions), and I seldom ask for anything more. These elements are generally seen to be relatively easy to come by (comedy, passable plot/characterization, cute girls), and while I'd be happy with other factors to my tastes (intelligent concepts presented in a viewer-friendly yet accurate manner, some Moments of Awesome), they will come as a pleasant surprise, rather than something which I will actually expect. This does not actually mean that I am easily-pleased by all subpar works; just the ones which strike my fancy.

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I'm likely going to be taking a bit of a break from writing long and impressive run-on sentences on this blog. This will likely result in the Every Other Day schedule being disrupted, but I'm certainly not going to abandon the blog for long. If nothing else, I have the episode summary for Card Captor Sakura waiting, half-finished, and I'll be damned if I let all that screencapping effort go to waste. Every single screencap I had to cut for space that I would love to have drawn attention to for Tomoyo-chan, well, a reckoning shall come. Oh yes, Tomoyo-chan will have her eternity of glory for her Absolute Aura of Moe~

As for a reason why I'm taking a break, well, it's largely due to the realization that right now, the blog seems more like work than a hobby. I find myself unable to concentrate on any other leisure activities: "can't do this now, must work on the blog". I haven't even been able to watch anime for fun recently, although I will have to admit that this is partly because I'm splitting my free time between this blog and City of Heroes. Now, normally this would be fine; I've been doing that since I started this blog, and it hasn't conflicted that much, new Issue releases notwithstanding. But now, I find a more fun aspect of being an anime fan that I'd been doing for a long time before, and had taken a hiatus from for a year or so: writing fan fiction.

Apart from The CCS Story That Will Not Die, which I am technically still working on, I've gotten a few more story and character ideas for various other fandoms. If you're wondering, The CCS Story of which I speak was started five years ago, an Alternate Universe type of story where events carried forth almost as in the canon series, but with the addition of a new character whom I've tried as hard as possible to present as far from the stereotypical Mary Sue as possible. Now, I do not, in actual fact, have any particular hatred of Mary Sues, and indeed am guilty of perpetrating a few myself (mostly in stories written for my own indulgence, rather than for other people to actually read). But the purpose of this new character was not the same as a Mary Sue, who kind of warps the plot around herself like a sort of literary singularity. This new character (male, whom I'll call Ichiro, since that's his name) is supposed to be an outlet for the author, not of dreams of power, but of snark.

In other words, all those comments I make in my CCS episode summaries? Ichiro's purpose is to think them; he's far too polite to actually vocalize them, but thinking is all he needs to do for the words to appear on my computer screen. (And yes, Ichiro is essentially an author-insertion in that he shares my utter hanyaa~n over Tomoyo. He's ten, though, so it's not as creepy.)

So. I've rediscovered the fun in creating a new character for a series, despite all the apprehension I generally see with regards to Original Characters. This may be because I find it fun to come up with a character concept, and then, given the unlimited freedom I have to flesh out that concept, bounded only by my imagination, I also find it fun to balance that character. I'm an absolute stickler for canon details, and there is no greater joy in fanfic writing than to create a character who fits perfectly in a given setting, or at least as good as it's going to get with the invariably vague rules set down by the original creators. Occasionally I am of the opinion that I think about the inner mechanics of the world in far greater detail than the creators did, although probably for no net benefit. And even if I am theoretically allowed to overpower my creation, I very carefully refrain from doing so, because with great power comes great opportunities for angst. I am not an angst-writer; I live quite contently on the happier side of the storytelling spectrum.

Currently my character-creation fandom of choice is Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, mainly because I'm a sucker for magic explained by technology. I've created one character (named, quite randomly, Ivey de Lorien, in a nod to both the car references in canon, as well as the odd romanizations) mostly on a whim, and I realize that I may need to create another in order to tell my story (which will likely take extreme liberties with the HUGE GAPS in the fans' knowledge of the adminstrative structure of the Time-Space Administration Bureau). This is because I seem to have fallen, quite inadvertantly, into a particular writing style; I almost require an authorial mouthpiece best exemplified by the long-suffering deadpan snarky Straight Man archetype, the Tsukkomi to the entire world's insistence of throwing absurd situations at the characters. In other words, I have grown incapable of writing stories without including a Kyon.

The primary problem facing me now is that we have just begun the plot of the third season of MSLN, and Immense Revelations are likely to be forthcoming. This increases the possibility for any actual plot in my planned fanfic to be directly contradicted by some future aspect, leaving me with the temptation to just declare the whole thing an Alternate Universe, or maybe some other department of the TSAB far removed from the events in the series, on the basis that in a bureaucracy, often the left hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

Or maybe I can just churn out characters for fun and concentrate on The CCS Story. Whatever works.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, can't stop the signal, AVPAS. Why would you want to, anyway?

Warning: spoilers. Considering I'm mostly talking about games which have been out for about a decade or so, I doubt I need to spoiler-cut these. (Don't worry, I won't spoil anything past FF8.)

They say that the first Final Fantasy game you play will be your favourite.

"They", in this case, meaning that inevitable comment when a discussion about the FF series turns into whichever is one's favourite. Invariably someone proves it wrong, just as generalizations are easily disputed with a single exception. However, I am not that exception, because even though the first FF game I played significantly (and completed) was the Super Nintendo US version of Final Fantasy 4 (then marketed as Final Fantasy 2 in the US), before that, my actual first FF experience was Final Fantasy 6, then marketed in the US as Final Fantasy 3. And even though I did not get past the very beginning of the Narshe Mines on my first play-through (being that I was distracted by Super Mario World, and kind of set it aside until I couldn't find the game), when I went back to play it and play it consistently, it rocketed up my list and ended up as number one.

Since then, I've played every other (numbered) FF game from the Playstation era, plus Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy 5 on emulator, and I'm currently working slowly through Final Fantasy 3 (the actual one) on my DS Lite, on and I still place FF6 as my top spot for FF games. I'm not sure if this is due entirely to nostalgia or if I can actually ennumerate the reasons for my love if only I had the necessary vocabulary.

If you're wondering, the ranking for the others go something like: 8 (putting aside the horrible battle system, the presentation of the story, if not the story itself, was worth quite a lot), X (all-around good, and I don't mind being railroaded), 7 (hey, Sephiroth is badass, and I loved Aerith), 4 (this may change when I check out the "better" translation job, but the story felt fairly bland, and with the exception of Cecil and Rydia, I didn't care about the characters that much), 9 (I didn't even finish it, mostly due to the presence of odd graphical artifacts when playing on my PS2 that made gameplay painful), 5 (the story didn't really grab me, and I hated having to grind to level jobs), and not counting 3 (which I'm still playing), X-2 (which was a series of minigames pasted together with the remnants of a plot).

(I'm not counting Final Fantasy XI. In fact, considering I loathed it, it's probably a good idea not to count it.)

But again, FF6 feels leaps and bounds ahead of everything else. I'm not sure why, or rather I'm not sure how to explain why. I could say that it's nostalgia: when I played through FF6, it was technically my first FF played, and my second really played and completed, and I had not seen anything like it before. It could be the story: I don't think I can really justify this to any objective degree, and this is both a case of personal inability to come up with suitable words, as well as the fact that it's really entirely subjective. It could be the characters: almost every (playable) character has a sidequest or backstory that makes up a large part of who they are, with the exception of Umaro and Gogo (and possibly Strago), who are, perhaps not coincidentally, my least favourite characters in the game. (Well, Gogo is great mechanics-wise, but story-wise… eh.)

And then there's Kefka. I'm a bit worried about the re-translations from Ted Woosley's rather LEGENDARY script, mostly because we have all the classic memorable lines that probably aren't very faithful to the original ("'Wait,' he says… do I look like a waiter?"). We first see Kefka as being a bit psychotic (and yes, I realize how silly that sounds), and it's not until the middle of the game (at the end of the World of Balance) that we realize just how insane he is, and the end of the game when his final motivations are revealed. It's no big surprise, but when you remember that this is the guy who complained about sand on his boots and then set fire to an allied castle, and then later poisoned an entire city, you realize that not only were the signs there all along, the scope of his madness remained a surprise thanks to prior expectations: "Surely he wouldn't be so crazy as to do that, right? … right?"

Also, "Dancing Mad" is the Best Final Battle Music Ever. It's not as (Internet) radio-friendly as "One-Winged Angel", but the first and last movements of that piece are just awesome. (If you can, grab the Black Mages version. The rock guitar at about 8:40 or so brings so many memories of desperately healing against Fallen One.) Kefka's leitmotif is all over that piece.

Sephiroth is more photogenic, and I certainly do not begrudge him his appearance in the Kingdom Hearts series, if only because it works better for him as an opponent rather than the Giger-esque final battle form of Kefka, but dammit, Kefka makes the cliche of being insanely evil work. I suppose it helps that we see him from the very beginning of the game with his personality not really changing that much, compared to the "wait, where'd they come from?" of FF4's Zeromus, FF5's Exdeath, and FF8's Ultimecia. (Also, the "wait, that's the real villain!" point comes at the end of the World of Balance, which is either close to the end of the game, or in the middle, depending on how much time you want to spend in the World of Ruin collecting your party members.)

And at the very end, during the ending sequence, when they show a montage of the characters escaping from the collapsing Floating Continent along with items which represent them on a sepia tone while their leitmotifs play, I am reminded once again: these are the characters whose stories are told in the game. They are the ones who have been through just about everything the plot has thrown at them, and they have come out of it with a better understanding of themselves and each other. From Terra's acceptance of her Esper half, to the brotherly love between Edgar and Sabin, to Setzer coming to terms with Daryl's disappearance, to Locke finally finding closure with Rachel and a new beginning with Celes, to Shadow's acceptance of his betrayal of Baram… these are the characters whom I, as a player, can actually feel proud for knowing.

The famous opera scene is not the highlight of the game; it's an example, among so many others.

The screenshot has little to do with the topic at hand. I was just pressed for a screenshot to head the entry.

Most people who've seen me in the IRC channel, or who know me outside of the Animeblogger community, are aware that I'm a diehard player of the MMORPG City of Heroes/Villains by Cryptic Studios. I've been playing since December 2004, and I'm still learning new things about the game even now. Still, I'm fairly comfortable that I have the broad strokes down, or at least enough of it to fake it.

While thinking about the characters of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS and their given roles in a team, I found myself wondering how well they would actually work together. However, since my knowledge of team dynamics with Special Abilities comes entirely from CoH/V, I figured that it would be a fun exercise to associate the various archetypes to the characters.

If you don't know anything about CoH/V, and don't want or care to know, then feel free to skip this entry. This post falls almost completely under the category of "I just had an interesting thought, and I must inflict it on as many people as I can".

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Once again, there is the hunt for the good-quality raws of the show, which preclude it from being blogged about as soon as it airs. The explanation for this raw hunt, which does not happen with many other shows, goes on mostly about different regional broadcasters and how the main raw providers in Japan live in certain regions that MSLN StrikerS does not air in first. Therefore, we are making do with what we have.

Many thanks, as usual, to those who provide the raws on the usual places for those who know next-to-no Japanese, and thus cannot look for them ourselves.

I've gotten used to the pacing of the show by now: in this episode, we sacrifice a bit of the action for a larger chunk of plot. And considering the plot appears to tie into the first season (as well as obviously the second season), I consider this to be more than a fair tradeoff.

While there's the training sequence in the beginning, we don't actually see a lot of training being done by the Newbies this episode; most of it is offscreen, and we just see them exhausted at the end of it. We also see Vita and Signum, while Shamal and Zafira fail to make any appearances.

And finally, we learn the name of the main villain, or at least the person who seems to be the main villain based on all available evidence. This veritable cornucopia of plot is utterly commendable, and eased my worries, the previous episode, that this one would have concentrated on training and nothing else.

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A rather short summary this time. So short, in fact, that I will be eschewing many of the details, as the full impact of what has happened has yet to truly sink in.

Despite the brevity of the entry, spoilers will be under the cut. Well, the fansubs are already out, but in case someone hasn't seen those yet, I should be considerate.

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