Let’s talk about Christopher Handley for a minute. I don’t really want to, as I don’t much care to advertise my views on the matter. But there seems to be, as Anime Almanac’s Scott VonSchilling notes, a bit of an imbalance in popular opinion of the Handley case. Which is fine, of course, but it always bothers me when the underdog side of an argument isn’t standing on a solid foundation, as seems to be the case here.
So, if I may, I’ll make an effort at clearing things up a bit.
Good literature, I think, makes us feel our membership in the human race. It engenders within us an empathy and a love for living things that can be hard to come by during the natural course of our everyday lives. That’s no small feat, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so averse to selling short the pursuit of entertainment, a very potent and available kind of self-reflection.
By that definition, Bokurano is good literature.
I’ve had my say on Fate/stay night, the visual novel that has, evidently, rendered me too jaded to enjoy VNs with a certain abundance of moe proclivities. But what of the sphere? Allow me to examine the reactions (and the general thoughts on visual novels) of bloggers more popular than I am, one F/sn route at a time.
I really should stick to Fate/stay night, I guess, but this quick-and-often blogging, once resurrected from hiatus, has its own momentum. Also, I read Onani Master Kurosawa in one go last night, so it probably deserves some attention beyond the usual Twitter gibberish. But what can I say that you, my tight compadres of the sphere, haven’t said better already? Truly I am always last to the sausage fest party.
A while back, I conceived of my semitransparent internet writing process as such:
Twitter (brainstorming) –> pontif.us (drafting and annotating) –> Super Fanicom (relatively polished final products)
If a comment is too long for Twitter, or seems to warrant elaboration, I’ll go into more detail here; if I’m working on a post here that goes over 600-700 words, I’ll move it over to Super Fanicom…
Because this isn’t technically accurate, and I need something more apt to link to from the about page, allow me to amend.
So maybe I exaggerated; I do have a few comments to make about the end of Toradora! I mean, it felt strange not doing so anyway; it seems obligatory (as Cuchlann observes as well).
Eons ago, I wrote the following:
…if [Taiga and Ryuuji] decide to try romance, will they listen to Ami for once and realize that, once they’ve started, there is no going back?
And, what do you know, they even touched upon that.
From this post:
I’m not sure if this train of thought is common or not, but when I witnessed Rika’s weakness [Honey and Clover] for the second time, when I saw her damaged body and even more damaged mind, when I saw how she didn’t want Mayama to get hurt and how she couldn’t forget the pain of her loss…when I witnessed the spectacle that is her character, I realized something.
I realized that, in every sense of the word, she should be moe. She should be the girl that the viewer want to protect, that he wants to be with.
But she isn’t. Because the cruelty of her situation is far too severe to be made a mockery of using cute catchphrases and excessive snow.
I happened upon a post in Fred Gallagher’s personal blog, wherein said member of the webcomic aristocracy discusses Twitter and its application to the online writer. The crux of the matter is this:
When it comes down to it, Twitter is just another way to create content. The problem is that it can really impinge the other content creation you should be doing. It’s not just the constant distraction it can be, but the fact that it’s too easy a way to throw out some of those random ideas and thoughts that you really should be saving to pull together in a far more thoughtful and meaningful way.
I think this is why I have had even less of an inkling to write rants than i used to. You only have so much time in a day, and so much attention. I really need to be more selective in how that attention is spent. Twitter, as good as it is, is not really the kind of content i want to be producing. It’s like throwing out one liners rather than writing a full story.
This is, as I’ve said, a note-blog — a noteblog, if you will — and its posts-per-day count will vary widely. Some days my mind stops working, other days (like today) it’s a font of un-wisdom. I wonder which sort of day the masses will come to prefer (if any).
Ahem. In this post, Nazarielle touches upon some concerns I’ve been having with the masterfully melodramatic Clannad ~After Story~. I’ll probably write a treatise on the subject soon, including a look at the show’s aesthetics, but I figure making a few notes on Nazarielle’s post here will save me time later.
