Obsessivity

Continued from The Book, version 0

The novel, when it began to take form, was more about hacking than industrial espionage. My protagonist, Malcolm, a former FBI agent turned corporate security consultant, needed help in that area. After a few attempts at a workable sidekick, I created Andy. Mid-20s, female, sarcastic and attractive – a geek idol. I discovered that I could write Andy’s dialogue better than Malcolm’s, though the two together usually worked. My critique group always liked Andy scenes.

So I slogged away at writing, and finished what I called a first draft, though it needed a lot of work. When I came to review it, though, I began to realize just how much the book had changed over the course of three hundred pages. It wasn’t the book I’d started out writing – which in itself wasn’t really the book outline that had been my original motivation.

And the more I looked at it, the more I thought the problems unfixable.

One problem was that Andy had taken over. Malcolm was just not as interesting. And the romantic aspect of their relationship, which had become important, worked okay, but it didn’t generate any tension, after the early times. Instead it masked the natural adversity between the two.

During the early writing, I’d hit on another obsession: the wonderful romantic comedy Still Breathing. Joanna Going’s character had the smart, ironic side that I saw in Andy, and very much her appearance. For a time, that felt inspirational. Later, the identification I made between the two was limiting, because I found myself wanting a traditional romantic comedy happy ending for Andy.

She had lost her edge.

And that was where I left the book. Not only did I not see any hope for its future, but I switched obsessions to EverQuest, and from that there was no ready return.

Current obsessions: (anime) Simoun

I’m writing these entries for me. I don’t expect anyone to find them, much less to read them. But in the event the site appears in search engines, I’d really like to make the spoilers at least a little less obvious. So, with help from a friend (my JavaScript/CSS is way out of date) I’ve hacked a spoiler plugin to hide spoilers behind links.

I’ll try to avoid unhidden spoilers, but I apologize in advance if some slip through.

Current obsessions: (anime) Simoun

A short – but quite sweet – series. Yet another “yuri based on a silly premise because we can’t really have girls liking girls, can we?” shōjo anime. About as silly a concept as Simoun – but as a comedy it doesn’t need to take its excuses seriously.

A somewhat effeminate (but straight) boy, Hazumu, is wandering in the woods after being spurned by a girl he’s been in love with for a long time. While there, he’s smacked by a wayward spaceship, and the alien on board – who just happens to be studying earth love – repairs him and returns him. But incidentally turns him into a girl, for reasons never explained. That’s silly plot twist #1.

Silly plot twist #2 is that the girl he confessed his love to – she can’t see boys. Not that she doesn’t like them, she can’t see them – anyone male is a grey blur to her. Hazumu was the one exception, because he always seemed so feminine – but since he was a boy, she was afraid he’d fade, too, which is why she turned him down. Now that she’s a girl, however…

With Hazumu’s closest female companion deciding she’s also been in love Hazuku from early childhood, and her best (male) friend also attracted to her, the series becomes a very odd harem anime. Add in the annoying sister in the form of the alien’s companion to get a complete set.

Given such a silly and purely comedic background, the series is surprisingly tender as well as funny. The harem really is more for form than substance – the real romantic ties are between Hazumu and her two girlfriends. She is an admitted coward, and painfully indecisive, and hurts them both with her inability to commit. The final episode (there are only twelve) is very touching, and has a wonderfully ambiguous ending.

One thing that’s not funny or touching – something I find quite disturbing, personally – is the reaction of Hazuma’s father to her. Incest fantasies are not something I thing belong in a light / comedic show.

The series is already licensed. I hope the distributor does as good a job with it as it deserves.

Current obsessions: (anime)Simoun

I don’t want to start griping here about everything I read, but some writers annoy me because I know they’re better than what I’m reading.

Many writers don’t really understand point of view. I’m sure I will gripe about that some time. But one thing all decent writers understand is the need to decide on a mode of writing going into the book. Maybe you’ll pick a single point of view, which means nothing happens that is out of your main character’s perception. Maybe that’s too limiting, and you’ll go for multiple points of view. You need to know before you start, because if you write ten chapters in one point of view, then leap into another character’s head, your readers will be wondering why.

Maybe you’ll decide that you’re going to write in the first person. It can be very immediate, and very involving. Zelazny mastered the power of the first person novel. It makes for a great identification of the reader with the protagonist. It’s even more limiting than single point of view – nothing can happen at all that’s out of the protagonist’s awareness (although well-written single point of view should also be that way), and the reader has a sense that there has to be a “me” telling the story from the end, which is something of a spoiler, especially in a thriller. So it is easy to make the story predictable.

One of my pet peeves is the writer who writes in the first person, but introduces material from outside, in chapters or scenes which don’t involve the narrator. Patricia Cornwell did some of that, and it was an annoyance – until her books got too irritating for me to try to read them, so it’s no longer an issue for me. Stuart Pawson does it, and his writing is otherwise excellent.

Basically, if you can’t tell the story in the perspective you’ve chosen, you’ve picked the wrong perspective (or failed at creating the story), and mixing styles only proves that to your reader. If you’re writing a first person book, let the reader discover the facts as your protagonist does, not be privy to secret knowledge. If the material absolutely can’t be skipped, you need a multiple person point of view, and all in third person.

I like reading Michael Connelly. His thrillers are dark and moody. His protagonists are heavily flawed, at odds with the world around them. As he’s gotten more success, though, his writing has become a little more egocentric. Instead of keeping his series protagonists unique, he’s got them inhabiting the same world, meeting and playing off each other. And back into and out of the real world – where Clint Eastwood played agent Terry McCaleb in Blood Work, now Connelly has dragged the movie and Eastwood back into the book, with Eastwood attending McCaleb’s funeral… even pointing out canonical errors in the movie. It takes a lot of nerve to do all that, and it’s too jarring to ring true. But that isn’t my biggest problem.

Michael Connelly writes Harry Bosch books in the first person – and does a good job of it. He writes most of his other thrillers in multiple person point of view. When he decides to involve Bosch in another series, he really has two choices that would work: show the FBI (or whomever) from Bosch’s internal perspective, or add Bosch as one (third person) point of view to the other setting. Well, he does neither: Bosch’s contributions are still first person, and the rest is not, and it just doesn’t work. We’re trying to be Heironymous Bosch, but we know what he doesn’t know. We know everything that’s going on off-camera. Even from the mind of the villain wondering what Bosch is up to.

So, that’s The Narrows. I can’t say I’d recommend it. The Poet deserved a better sequel, and Connelly deserves a better (or more aggressive) editor.

I finally finished watching Samurai X – Trust and Betrayal. I’ve had the DVD in the queue for a while, but I haven’t done anything with it – mainly because I knew it would take a lot of attention, and I was too busy playing WoW or EQ2.

It’s a brutal movie (created from a set of OVAs), and somewhat predictable (or at least I’d expected most of the turns), but it’s still very good. The level of gore compares to that in Kill Bill, but here it serves a purpose, and there’s a real plot.

Trust an Betrayal is a prequel to all of the Rurouni Kenshin works: movie(s), manga and TV anime. It tells of how and why Kenshin becomes a manslayer, and why he vows to turn his back on killing and make amends. Beautifully tragic, though some of the impact there is lost by it being predictable – and by knowing something about Kenshin’s later journeys.

It does make me interested in seeing the series, although not as a high priority. It’s very unlikely that the series can compare to this movie.

Current obsessions: (anime) Simoun

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, one of the changes in the world was the sudden apparent irrelevance of spy agencies. Politicians spoke of a “peace dividend” – which was pure hype, and many spoke of drastic expenditure cuts at the centers of intelligence. Whether those happened, I don’t know, but there was certainly a period when few had any firm idea of what the future held for intelligence services. Maybe – likely – that contributed to our lack of readiness when the problems of the Middle East spilled over into terrorism. Although it’s also likely that it was far too late at that point. Certainly the only voices in the early ’90s who did seem to have an understanding were pushing for urgent reallocation of resources to that region.

If we didn’t know what spies were supposed to be doing, neither did spy fiction writers. New fiction was set in the past, at the height of the cold war. Even John le Carré, one of my favorite writers and the grandmaster of spy fiction, wrote a couple of books that were either retrospectives or seemed to lack his flair. He’s found his voice again, since then – and a level of anger that makes his books more compelling than ever – but for a time I feel that his writing fell far short of “Tinker, Tailor” or “The Constant Gardner.”

That’s when I started thinking, well, what would you do with a spy evicted from the cold war? Obviously, you could send him to the new hotspots, but those were going to be covered quickly enough by the masters, as soon as they had found their new understanding. What about a spy who’d been sidelined by the “peace dividend”? What would he do in real life?

Which started me thinking about industrial espionage. It happens, but not many books are written about it. It just isn’t sufficiently violent or sexy to make a good thriller, in general. So I started wondering how it could be, and eventually, began to wonder whether I’d be interested in trying to write it myself.

I should note that by the time I got to putting pen to paper – or fingertip to keyboard – there wasn’t much left of the original “redundant spy” idea, and the book possibility mentioned above never really made it into version 1. But that’s what started the process.

Much later, I decided that yes, I did want to write. Short stories, a novel – I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to create something. I took a writing class, started working on ideas, and eventually wrote what I consider a decent short story while mapping out a novel. I met with a critique group who helped me focus my thoughts. I found that the area which had always scared me about writing – dialogue and relationships – was probably where my writing was at its best.

So in about 1999, I started writing in earnest.

Continues in The Book, version 1

Current obsessions: (anime) Simoun
Reading: The Narrows (Michael Connelly)

The fine folks at Doremi have released Episode 26 of Strawberry Panic!, and all is right with the world.

That was a good, and quite unexpected, ending. I like being surprised like that; doubly so when much of the series has been so derivative. Ending spoiler ▼ Disappointing, of course, for the wallflower, but there’s nothing like a nice, positive aishiteru to round out a romance. And my two questions going into this episode resolved into one.

Still waiting for the next batch of Simoun episodes.

Update to Ergo Proxy: I’ve read that the US DVD releases are going to begin next month.

Current obsessions: (anime) Simoun
Reading: The Narrows (Michael Connelly)

First 14 episodes subbed by Shinsen-Subs. Epsiodes 15-23 (final) by pino-no-usagi. (Pino’s rabbit.)

Ergo Proxy never made it to my “current obsessions.” That’s probably partly because I didn’t start watching it in earnest until the series was complete. Mostly, though, it’s because it didn’t hook me. Which isn’t to say that I was disappointed with it; that would be far from the truth.

In fact, it has been one of the most intriguing animes I’ve ever seen. Very well done, far more imaginative than most, excellent presentation. I didn’t feel much of an attachment to the characters, which is probably why I never had the same drive to see the next episode that I still do with Strawberry Panic! (I think less than 24 hours now…) or Simoun. But it wasn’t necessary for the story.

I’ve heard that it wasn’t a very popular series, and I think I know at least part of the reason why. It took itself far too seriously. In trying to center on philosophy it became very pretentious. Episodes 15 and 19 in particular were just… not exactly dumb, but far too contrived. So many episodes were entirely set in one character’s illusory world. It had the feel at times of a late night university drinking session, full of fake profundity. Or of a 1970s science-fiction novel, using metaphor to imply that reality is impossible to describe.

(One day I need to write about metaphor in cyberspace. Done well, it’s excellent. Done badly, it lacks credibility. Not directly relevant here, but related.)

Good music, both incidental and opening / closing sequences. The opening sequence was especially well-animated, but the closing sequence has the edge musically, being Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.”

If I had any problems with the style it was just how dark everything was. Not a problem indoors in low light, but hard to watch in some situations. Effective, but it could have done with just a touch more light. Great character design. Real is gorgeous, yet moody. Pino the child android with a soul is fun without ever being overly cute – and is certainly the character that I found most sympathetic. No clichéd anime schoolkids; Real and Vincent are working professionals.

I do hope this series is licensed. It will definitely be one I’ll buy.

Shinsen-Subs has put a lot of effort into exposing the philosophical references in the series. Each episode ends with a number of panels explaining what’s going on. Valuable and interesting, though it adds to the series’ apparent pretentiousness. pino-no-usagi, who have continued the series after Shinsen took an extended vacation, don’t have these, but I prefer their translations. As always, I have no idea of absolute accuracy, but pino-no-usagi’s English idiom is better, and seems to have the clarity that comes with accuracy. “Mosque” in Shinsen becomes “Moscow” in pino-no-usagi; whether this corresponds to modern Moscow is not clear.

Most of the above is spoiler free. This is a spoiler, though the reason why may not be clear to the end. Mild spoiler ▼ My main thought on Ergo Proxy, now that it’s over, is this: the series is the antibody to the plague which was Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Current obsessions: (anime) Strawberry Panic!
Simoun
Reading: The Narrows (Michael Connelly)

Strawberry Panic! fansub releases from Doremi Fansubs.

There are some themes running through the animes I most enjoy watching, but I’m not going to get into that now. Suffice it to say that Strawberry Panic! is a shōjo anime (i.e. designed for young girls) with a strong yuri content – more explicitly lesbian than most shows commonly categorized as yuri.

This may be about the most unoriginal anime I’ve seen. It does absolutely nothing that hasn’t already been done – and done better – by Marimite (Maria-sama ga miteru, the “classic” girls school shōjo anime, and the staple of shōjo and yuri fans alike). Nothing in Strawberry Panic! is especially moving – with the exception of the story of Kaori, which was somewhat predictable and calculated, but well done. And even that was better handled in Marimite.

But having said that, it has been a fun ride. Marimite’s melodrama could be hard to take at times, and there are some characters in Marimite’s cast who go well beyond credibly flawed into being truly annoying. Central character Fukuzawa Yumi’s lack of assertiveness and overwhelming angst is important to the story, but sometimes bordering on sickening. Strawberry Panic!’s girls are generally better-balanced, while still being varied; conniving or trusting, predatory or gentle. Lead Aoi Nagisa is clearly a copy of Yumi, but has flashes of strength when it matters.

I’ll have no trouble watching Strawberry Panic! again. Marimite, however, as much better as it is – there were episodes that I knew I’d have trouble with even before seeing them the first time. With such strong affections and sympathies that the show engenders, you know you’re going to be heartbroken when it’s time for the upperclassmen to graduate, and for partnerships to break up – which is stretched painfully over the course of half a season, not resolved in a single episode. I will watch Marimite again – it’s a wonderful series – but it won’t be any time soon.

Many of the relationships in Strawberry Panic! are quite explicitly sexual. Although Marimite is very romantic, there’s only one openly gay character (Sei), and her (tragic) relationship is in the past. Strawberry Panic! recreates Sei as Shizuma, complete with tragedy, but adds two more explicitly lesbian relationships, one touching and romantic, the other being a pair of stereotypical Evil Psychotic Lesbians (but who redeem themselves somewhat late in the series). Plus the hints of the old married couple (high schoolers who’ve been rooming together forever) across the hall, who have occasional huge fights, Mild spoiler ▼ Nagisa’s roommate Suzumi Tamao’s interest in Nagisa (clear to the viewer, but not completely understood by Nagisa, at least up to episode 25) and Moderate spoiler ▼ Yaya’s unwanted advances that threaten to destroy her friendship with Hikari.

Too much to be believable, in fact. But at the same time, it’s refreshing to see the akogare / admiration common in shōjo to be resolved into love Spoiler – names ▼ (in at least the cases of Shizuma / Kaori and Amane / Hikari – and I’d claim, also EPL Kaname) rather than left ambiguous. It makes for good romance.

So after 25 episodes, there are two outstanding questions: Spoiler ▼ who will win the Étoile election? and have Shizuma and Nagisa finally given up on each other? The answer to the second has to be yes, disappointing though that is, and to the first – I have absolutely no idea. An entire generation of Japanese teenage girls was no doubt unable to sleep until these questions were answered.

Or not…

But I do want to see that final episode, and refreshing the BitTorrent list at doremi-fansubs isn’t yielding anything.

I’m hoping to drop this series from my current obsessions within the next couple of days. Though I think I’ll rewatch it soon.

Added later: There’s one aspect of this show that I think is truly horrible. The ending theme is not animated. It’s two female singers performing a really cheesy duet. Actually, two, one for the first 13 episodes, the other for 14-25 (so far), but they’re equally cheesy. The performance is mock-yuri fan service. So fake it is painful to watch. I mean, seriously, I can’t watch it all the way through, it is so bad.

I discovered today at animenewsnetwork.com that the performers are Nagisa’s and Tamao’s voice actresses. Now I feel positively sickened that these two would do something so awful and so pandering to otaku. And… they’re even Mai and Mikoto in Mai HiME! Ewww, they need to stick to voice acting, or fire their agents.

Current obsessions: (anime) Strawberry Panic!
Simoun
Reading: The Narrows (Michael Connelly)

I’ve finally put Utena to bed… so to speak. 39 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena was a slog, but worth it – mostly. I don’t really see why it couldn’t have been 13, or at most 26.

Well beyond surreal into silly, a lot of the time, but within the limitations of what seems at times to be a parody of John Fowles, the story was quite good, and completely redeemed by the warped-but-powerful ending. Utena is a female lead with a lot of power, and very human without descending into a lot of angst.

Very mild ending spoiler ▼ Anthy’s transformation makes the ending work; it would be too ambiguous except that you know the new Anthy is going to succeed in her quest.

Current obsessions: (anime) Strawberry Panic!
Simoun
Reading: The Narrows (Michael Connelly)