Jeanne d'Arc in Manga is less Gender Normative

So I already commented on how the Anime about Jeanne d’Arc I’ve seen has disappointed me when it comes to Jeanne’s gender bending potential.  Well now I’m familiar with some Manga that actually does better.

First is Puella Magi Tart Magica, a Madoka Magica spin off.

In this one Jeanne does have shorter hair, and once she begins her mission dresses fairly masculine in her normal form. And even her Magical Girl form has a bit of a Knight quality to it.

But I would say the most Bifauxnen character in the Tart manga is Riz.  Even though her hair is long, in her normal form she has an Italian Cavelier look, which makes me think of characters like Regina in Paul Feval’s Bel Demonio (which I’ve so far only read in an abridged form called Woman of Mystery), and Nisida in George Reynolds Wagner the Werewolf.

I think it’s possibly over all the best Madoka spinoff Manga, I recommend it.

I also recently took an interest in the Requiem for the Rose King Manga, loosely based on Shakespeare’s plays about the War of the Roses.  I have however only been able to read the first 6 chapters.  It does quite a few interesting things, and Jeanne d’Arc’s crossdressing is a plot point in it. 

My 2017 Seasonal Anime Experience

This is not actually about all the anime I watched this year.  But my looking back at my first time spending an entire year watching at least some currently airing Seasonal Anime.

Technically I started the year finishing two 2016 shows I followed, Flip Flappers subbed and Izetta The Last Witch’s Simuldub.  Both I enjoyed immensely at the time, I’m not sure how they’ll fare looking back.

For the Winter Season I followed 3 shows to completion, all three of them Simuldubbed.

Dragon-Maid is a show of the year contender, it’s like the Sit-Coms I used to enjoy, but with kick @$$ Animation.  Apparently some people think the Dub downplayed the Yuri, the Dub I watched seemed pretty full on Yuri to me.

Tanya The Evil was incredible, I feel like it quickly surpassed Izetta as an Anime Alternate History World War premise.

ACCA I also really loved.  It’s different from what I usually watch in Anime but reminded me of some of what I used to enjoy in normal nerdy media.  A lot for the complaints I’ve seen from people who dropped the show early reminds me a lot of the hate The Phantom Menace got “whah I don’t want taxation disputes and senate scenes in my Star Wars” which only assured me that their opinions don’t matter.

I think as a whole I might have enjoyed the Winter Season the most.  The amount of shows I completed never became less, and some shows I watched since may long term stick with me more.  But in terms of how it averages out I feel like I had the most fun that season.

Later in the year I watched all of Gabriel Dropout and wished I’d watched it when it aired.

The Spring Season is the only one where I watched more Subbed then I did Dubbed.  But it again totals three.

Twin Angel Break was the best show of the Spring season, it was a great fun little Magical Girl show that felt old school and fresh at the same time.  I highly recommend it to any Magical Girl fan.

Eromanga-Sensei was a fun guilty pleasure, it's best watched if you also watch Digi and Nate’s podcasts on each episode after viewing it.

The only Spring show I watched dubbed was Attack on Titan season 2.  I enjoyed it, but not as much as I did season 1.

For the Summer season I started a number of shows I wound up dropping.  But again finished three.

Fate/Apocrypha is two core, I’ve been following it subbed, but also now got to see the first core dubbed. I’ve enjoyed it.

I also followed subbed to completion Princess Principal, which is also a show of the year contender.  I recommend it to people who are into Steam Punk, or Pretty Little Liars, or the books published by BlackCoatPress and talked about on CoolFrenchComics.

I watched Dubbed In Another World With my Smartphone.  I also really loved it, it got me into Isekai.  I watched some stuff that qualified before, like Tanya above and maybe SAO, but this was my first introduction to the proper Isekai formula.

For the Fall Season, I probably won’t be finished with them by the time I post this.  Definitely with the Simuldubs, of which after dropping some I’m down to three, Anime Gataris, A Sister’s All You Need and Code:Realize, the last of which I also recommend to BCP fans.  I am enjoying all three of those shows.

Fate/Apocrypha’s finale might air on New Year’s Eve, but the fansubs might not be up before the year’s over.  No matter how much it’s ending might disappoint, it’s been a fun ride, only those into other Fate/ stuff are likely to get into it, but still a fun ride.  If I’m able to see the last episode before the year ends I’ll add an update at the bottom.

Yuki Yuna is a Hero’s prequel series was great.  And I’ve seen 3 out of six episodes of season 2 as of writing the first draft of this, it’s also good so far, but I’m on edge to see how it ends due to Madoka Rebellion related fears.  It turns out there is a break before the last episode so I definitely won’t be finishing Yuki Yuna before the year ends either.  Having seen episode 5, with only 1 episode left, it could still go either way.

It’s an experience I do not regret, and for the most part hasn’t interfered with my ability to also watch old shows, both ones I’d seen already and hadn’t.  Maybe when a new season is starting and I’m still watching some shows I wind up dropping later I might feel too busy.  But once things settle down I have plenty of time.

I also this year watched SAO for the first time, and Toradora and three Miyazaki films, to name a few.  I spent October watching some Halloween relevant Anime and November devoting some more time to magical girls.

And Smartphone again got me into a whole new Genre.  And from there I watched No Game No Life, Problem Children, Outbreak Company, the first season of The Familiar of Zero, and Overlord.  All of which I enjoyed.

And it was this year I started watching more Gundam then just the 00 series.

And that’s leaving out stuff I watched for the first time this year because it was this year the Dub dropped.  As well as re-watching stuff I already liked, if there is anything I found more time for it’s that, but I still did a decent amount.

Update December 31st 2017:

Well, I was able to watch the final episode of Fate/Apocrypha before the year ended.  It was a very enjoyable show, but I wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't already into Fate/.   I gave it an 8 on MAL.

My final thoughts on Pretty Little Liars

For a while this may be my last post on the subject of PLL.  I have my doubts I'll bother with the Perfectionists.  So I want to give some final thoughts before the year ends.

I wasn't quite watching the show exactly from the beginning, but I did jump on before season 1A ended.  When I started the show I was still calling Buffy my favorite TV show of all time, but a more relevant context is that my favorite currently airing show at the time was The Vampire Diaries.

By the time unmAsked aired it had become my favorite current TV show.  It was during Season 4B, which I still consider the show's best half season, that it became my favorite TV show of all time.  And it's still my favorite western TV show, as well as favorite live action TV show.

Once Ali was made part of the regular cast, the show lost some of it's original mystique, but remained pretty entertaining for awhile.

For the first nearly 6 and a half seasons the show provided the best Lesbian representation on TV.  Then came Game Over Charles and the show's legacy within the LGBT community was tainted indefinitely.  It was real sad watching Heather Hogan's passion for the show deteriorate.

I still enjoyed plenty of the last season and a half, including the final episode.  But it wasn't what it once was.

In a lot of ways revealing CeCe to have been the second -A could have been perfect, if they just hadn't added the whole Charles narrative.  There is something about introducing her and using her as a red herring repeatedly, then seemingly explaining her role at the season 4/5 cliff hanger and besides a cameo or two mostly forgetting about her till the big reveal came, that worked perfectly.

And I could have been fine with the main villain of the show being a Trans woman if she hadn't been the only Trans representation the show had.  Charlotte is a great villain, and the show does make Patriarchal Transphobia the cause her issues, but her being the only representation Trans women have on the show is still really problematic.

None of these issues with the show's final act were enough to destroy all the enjoyment I had and make it no longer my favorite American TV show.  But it is really unfortunate that it had to end that way.

My recommendation of the show to others shall always be that the first 4 seasons are perfect.

Sometimes looking back is part of moving forward

I've a done a post on Why I like Prequels, and one about how they've been part of Genre fiction as long as Sequels have been.

Today I want to address how sometimes the Anti-Prequel mentality is expressed in very Progressive terms, Progressive fans feeling that going backwards narratively is counter-intuitive to moving forward.  Like the BrosWatchPLLToo people in their opinions on Star Wars.

What they're forgetting is a lot of good liberal and leftist movies have been period pieces, the left looking back at our intellectual ancestors.  Showing how things have changed for the better and yet some problems still remain.

And sometimes societies do regress.  A Prequel is often the best opportunity to tell a cautionary tale of how that can happen.  And that's exactly what the Star Wars Prequels are.

In the post about Prequels having always been around, I decided not to go further back then Alexandre Dumas, since that's where modern Nerdy Genre fiction is born in my view.  But for the purposes of this post I think it shall be necessary to go back to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's history plays were not written in chronological order.  Eight of them can be viewed as a consecutive chronicle of English history from the rise of the House of Lancaster to the fall of the House of York.  Those eight plays are commonly divided into two Tetralogies.

However the Tetralogy about the history of the War of the Roses was written first, in fact Henry VI Part 1 is often considered the birth of the History genre, the few arguable examples that might predate it are not Shakespeare.

Some question whether or not the plays within that Tetralogy were even written in order (the three Henry VI plays originally had different names, they weren't always numbered).  The way Henry VI Part 3 ends feels kind of like it's a Prequel to Richard III.  Though Richard III's negative reputation already existed by this time, and he was even the subject of one of those possible Pre-Shakespeare history plays I mentioned.  So the original viewers of the Henry VI trilogy might have viewed them as a Prequel to that play.

The point I'm going for here however is that the very first play where Shakespeare dealt with the subject of Henry V was Henry VI Part 1, where Henry V is already dead when the play starts, but his legacy is constantly mentioned, he's viewed as symbolic of a lost golden age, a theme of the play is the death of Chivalry.

So later when Shakespeare wrote the Henriad, it's interesting how he arguably deconstructed that very legacy as it was presented in his first History play.  Henry V is depicted as being a manipulative war criminal.  And that makes the Henriad just like the Star Wars Prequels, where the idealized memory of the Jedi is presented as being much more complicated, and even Yoda did not live by what he later taught Luke, that a Jedi should use his power only for defense, Yoda drew his Lightsaber first when he confronted Darth Sidious.

The Chronologically first of these eight plays was Richard II.  Most of Shakespeare's plays about monarchy really had no choice but to be written consistent with the Divine Right of Kings doctrine of Anglican England.  Thus bad Kings, whether outright evil or just incompetent, are usually usurpers, people who shouldn't have had the Throne in the first place.  From King John to Richard III to Macbeth to Claudius in Hamlet.  It is Richard II that is the odd one out, Richard II is depicted as a bad King even though there was no dispute he was ever the rightful one by birth.  But Henry IV taking the throne at the end doesn't solve things either, he quickly starts doing the same things.

So basically it is the Prequels of Shakespeare's history saga that allows them to be read as possibly anti-Royalist, or as close to being that as he would have been allowed to get away with.

George Bernard Shaw was not quite as hostile to Shakespeare as many make him sound.  His preface to Caesar and Cleopatra includes a lot of praise.  That play is the only play Shaw wrote specifically with the idea of addressing Shakespeare.  Shaw was also someone much more progressive then Shakespeare could ever have been allowed to be.  So it's interesting that in his attempt to take a more modern approach to a Shakespearean subject, he chose not to write a remake or a sequel, but something that would effectively serve as a Prequel to two of Shakespeare's plays, Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra.

Ya know, I think the most, intentionally or not, progressive book of The Chronicles of Narnia saga was A Horse and His Boy, a book written as a prequel, sort of.

One prequel I did briefly mention in my earlier post was Paul Feval's La Louve (The She Wolf) a prequel to his earlier Le Loup Blance (The White Wolf).  A novel that happens to be about the first female masked vigilante.

In the world of Anime, the most progressive, and praised by progressives, installment of the Lupin III franchise is The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which was also a prequel set in the 60s.

Season 1 of Agent Carter was a pretty feminist show, and it was both a Prequel and a Period Piece.

The reason Prequels don't work out so well for Star Trek is because there is too much continuity.  Yes you could argue Star Wars has just as much, but Star Wars is mainly a series of movies, so not that much of it actually matters.  Star Trek was a TV franchise first and foremost, which means continuity was being added to on a weekly basis.  So with Star Trek the best way to free itself of the continuity shackles should be to leap forward a century, that's the best way to get a relatively clean slate.  But they keep refusing to do that.

Much of what The Last Jedi did (that progressives like) it couldn't have done without the Star Wars prequel trilogy having been told first.  It needs the Jedi's dramatized failure in order to work.  So it's an example of looking back being needed to move forward.

But I still think the Prequels are the most progressive Star Wars movies, the new Disney films may have more diverse casting, but they also often remind me of how in their own way the Rebellion was just as Fascist as the Empire in the OT.  Every Star Wars story that takes place after ROTS is ultimately a Pro-War story, and that hinders my enjoyment of them.

I enjoyed Ordinal Scale

I watched it recently as the Dub finally became available.

A lot of Yuki Kajiura fans have felt her SAO stuff has been some of her weakest stuff.  But this movie had some tracks that blew me away, that's the Yuki Kajiura I know and love.

The climax of the movie a lot of Fanservice, which I mean (mostly) not in the perverted sense but in the Rogue One sense.  However I felt like it was earned and pretty awesome.

The thing that bugs me is purely a meta issue, that this wasn't adapted from one of the Light Novels but was a newly created in-between story.  They chose to save the next Light Novel for the next TV season of SAO.

I feel like a lot of Light Novel based Anime would be better served by being movies rather then TV shows.  Most TV Anime fit their serialized structure because they're adapted from a serialized source material like Manga, or were created for the TV format.

But most Light Novels are by that very definition not necessarily very large novels.  They may be telling a serialized story, but not in a a very episodic fashion.  With Haruhi for example I think Disappearance is the best Haruhi Anime, and the the 6 episodes based on the Melancholy Light Novel could have made a decent movie.

SAO is no different, much of the criticism of the first three arcs is predicated on how the stories feel dragged out in order to fill 12-14 episodes.

So getting a movie could have been a good chance to see if the film format would serve adapting them better, but instead we got an original story with no source material to compare it to at all.

However, given what I hear about the Light Novels, we might not have gotten so much Asuna if the movie had been based on one of them.

Alex Drake

This is going to be an awfully short post for one I'm so late in making.  But I should before this year is over talk more specifically about PLL's final twist.

I'd heard about the Twincer theory before, mainly from the BrosWatchPLLToo people bringing it up.  I never took it seriously, they already satisfied the people who expected some sort of Twin reveal.

So as I was watching the final episode.  We got to the point where Spencer woke up, and was looking at her "reflection" and I instantly thought "they're trolling the Twin theorists" because the finale had already done that kind of meta trolling a few times.  Then I noticed that the mirror had some little holes in it and found that odd.

Then the hand dropped, and my brain just froze, I was stunned.

That reveal was pretty damn well executed, and Troian gave a great performance because she is the greatest actor of all time.

But it still feels cheap to me, to have the final Big Bad of the show be a character who effectively only existed during the last episode.

I also agree that it was dumb to have it be Toby rather then the Liars who figured out which Spencer was real.

The last episode was fun but flawed.  Doesn't matter that much cause as I've said before it's about the journey not the destination.

Yuki Yuna is a Waifu

Well, I did not see this one coming.

The Shintoism is strong in this one.