So I’m almost desperate to revive this blog after two months of dead-dom ^^; I’d have liked to write something about the stuff in the current season, but I’m not watching a lot, and while I do like what I’m seeing of Tamako Market, I haven’t quite mustered enough thoughts to merit a post quite yet. On the other hand, I just got a nice comment on my old tl;dr Clannad post, and I also happen to have been foraging into the original Clannad Visual Novel, with a fair bit of loose thoughts surfacing along the way. So I think I’m just gonna ease back into this blogging business by musing out loud a bit in that direction

It’s a little hard to evaluate the first season of Clannad. It was kind of all over the place, and while the comedy was epic, the drama was somewhat forced more often than not. You could argue that KyoAni already did a reasonable job considering they had to mush like 10 full arcs worth of parallel storytelling into one linear-ish timeline, but digging into the original VN you’ll find just how much slower the pace is and how verbose every detail ends up being – and, inevitably, how many valuable and tasteful nuances end up being lost in the anime. This scene in particular:

Never struck me as anything particularly evocative or really anything more than the resolution of another brainchild of Key’s peculiar fascination with solving unrelated problems with sports matches. But while playing the VN a curious feeling stole over me as the beautiful BGM rolled in when Tomoya scored the final basket. Unlike the anime, there was no animating. Nothing, in fact, other than a BGM, a single static picture of a basketball court, and text describing the match from Tomoya’s perspective. It’s actually pretty illuminating how incredibly simplistic the Clannad VN engine is – even the simplest renpy games often have more advanced features. Where the anime had Kyoani’s expert animating to give superficial appeal to, the VN was almost wholly reliant on the writing. In the end, the way the story up to this point worked out plus all that additional text detailing Tomoya’s thoughts going through the whole thing gave the conclusion of this random basketball match in the VN an odd sort of radiance quite absent in the adapted version.

In fact, unlike in the anime, the choir club people never even came to the match in the VN. In Fuuko’s arc, there wasn’t even a basketball match in the first place, and the choir club folks had their change of heart about the club advisor dilemma anyway. In the VN more so than in the anime, the basketball match didn’t really have any utility at all towards its original stated purpose: Sunohara’s idea of showing the choir club folks that you can’t use a handicap as an excuse. Instead, it became something of a vindication for the Tomoya-Nagisa-Sunohara trio. It didn’t matter that it was all a random idea and no one else was really invested in it in the first place. They set their sights on something, they worked hard for it, and they made it happen. The aftermath for a moment filled me with the heady feeling of their success – they did it.

An important difference in the story up to the match in the VN versus the anime is that, necessarily, the anime had Tomoya and Nagisa (and Sunohara) get to know plenty of people after having wound their way through Fuuko and Kotomi’s condensed arcs, and so by the time they arrived at the basketball match plot point they had already gathered a sizable circle of friends. In the VN there was no such thing. There was Sunohara and Tomoya, comrade delinquents and commonly regarded bad company, and their not-so-unlikely friendship with Nagisa, who was herself an outcast of sorts, and the entire story revolved around the three of them, united in their exclusion from the rest of respectable society. On how their comradeship inspired Nagisa to strive for a simple dream, on how that striving for that simple dream slowly struck its chord with Sunohara and Tomoya’s own hidden-away desire to transcend their aimless lives, and how that quiet resonance drove the two to help, support and root for her. They goofed around all the time and none of them probably really knew what they were doing, but they strove, they were met with obstacles, and they fought to move on. More so than the anime, Clannad the VN dwelt intensely on the outcast perspective of school life, on how people tend to fall out of respectable and/or cool cliques due to circumstances they cannot control, how debilitating an effect it can have on you to be constantly frowned upon, and how in spite of it all, you can still find your moment. This was that moment for the three of them.

It wasn’t even anything like a planned triumph, it achieved practically nothing in the grand scheme of things, Nagisa’s drama club wish remained in shambles, but these qualities made it all the more fitting somehow. It was a triumph nonetheless, their first after all the setbacks they’ve had. After wandering aimlessly on the edge of respectable society for so long, this was their first full cycle of establishing a common goal, working towards and fighting for it together, and seeing it come to fruition. As Tomoya scored the game-winning basket, his monologue summed it all up perfectly. This symbolized everything: Tomoya with his injured shoulder, shooting for basket in an awkward throw that no proper, self-respecting trained player would ever do, clinching their victory. An awkward, rag-tag, disregarded group, doing things their own clumsy way, could achieve their own triumph as well. “Via different paths… to the same heights”. It was here that the realization hit me that this amazing BGM piece that I had always loved, had been named after this moment all along.

(Of course, they still somewhat cheated by enlisting the help of Kyou-sama, who is obviously omnipotent /Kyoufanboytalk)

Anyway! So that’s that. There are a lot of other minor little nuances and subthemes peppered across the VN that you don’t find in the anime, but at this point I’m not sure that I’m ready to tell you yet that you need to read the VN or you’re missing out. Figuring out the structure of the VN at least has helped me to understand why the earlier parts of Clannad were sort of cluttered compared to the fluent coherence of the After Story parts. Still, let me read further first. I’m only on my second arc – Fuuko’s, after completing Nagisa’s. In contrast with the anime, the individual arcs are actually really long, so it’ll be awhile. I’ll post again if I chance upon something interesting like this one.

It’s been sometime since I got back from Japan after watching Eva 3.0, and I sort of promised a loot post so here’s a brief one :) Actually spent quite a bit this time, but the stuff are nice so.. totally worth it? Unsurprisingly, much of the expenditure went to Eva stuff. There were truckloads of em thanks to it being movie season. We found Eva posters, goods, and themed snacks all the way up in the mountains of Hakone – true story. Fear the Eva marketting machine. But yeah, watching the film totally got me into Eva-sucker mode. I bought the guidebook (? of sorts?) at the bottom right from the theater. They had other merchandises on sale there too, but the snaking queue was so frighteningly long I just went with the book (which had a separate, much shorter queue) instead. The rest – the two Rei-Asuka figures, the wall calendar (that’s the tall sheet at the back), the black hoodie jacket (the one with the Rei/Asuka picture print), and the two moonruned T-shirts – were acquired from Akiba. The two figures were from a shop in Akiba called Hobby Tengoku. Some of the (2nd hand?) figures you can get from the plastic box displays there are the cheapest I’ve ever seen anywhere. Both figures here together costed just a little under 1000 yen. The hoodie in contrast is one of the most expensive items in the picture, and it’s even a little tight. L size in Japan is apparently a little on the small side. Thanks to that expenditure, I bought the two moonruned T-shirts because I was feeling too cheapo at that point to buy the more expensive picture-printed ones. The moonrunes are episode titles from the original Eva by the way, the white one reading “The Final Messenger” (Episode 24 I believe) and the black reading “The Beast that shouted I/Love in the Center of the World” (Final episode).

The two little boxes under the white T-shirt and the figures are Idolm@ster stuff. The one on the left is an imas station radio show special disk thing that I bought on impulse and later regretted – a little, haha. Anyway it comes with a CD with some of the seiyuu’s antics and some unusual sounding songs, as well as a DVD recording of more seiyuu antics. The black box on the right is the DVD recording of the 2010 Idolm@ster 5th Anniversary live concert, and is the other most expensive thing in the picture. I’ve always wanted one of these, but I was too cheapo to buy the more recent concerts that were more costly, so I went with this one. It’s still 2 full DVDs though, with some minor extras like a photo booklet. The counter girl even had the nerve to point out that this was the DVD version and ask if I was sure I wasn’t going to get the Bluray. Thanks but no thanks, pretty sure I’m not ready to be a hobo yet.

And finally there is the cascade of cheap doujins in the mid-bottom-left. It was one of those buy 6 for the price of 5 things, so I just went ahead and got 12. All non-erotic because the erotic cheap stuff are almost certainly nothing but porn. The non-erotic ones on the other hand can be pretty cute and interesting. For example, the guy who made Nyoron Churuya-san also made a doujin called “Buu buu Kagabuu” – a 4koma which follows the adventures of Kagami (Lucky Star) who had inexplicably turned into a pig plushy. There’s also “YukinkoSOS” which portrays Yuki Nagato as a secretly super-dere girl constantly terrorized by her scary onee-chans Asakura and Emiri. In general really fun stuff :) There was also an “Azusa After” doujin portraying, I think, YuixAzusa in a Clannad-After like setting that I was considering getting, but that one was pretty darn expensive, so in the end I left it for another day.

And that about covers it! Japan was a pretty awesome place in late fall, cold enough to be fun but not quite enough to freeze, and seeing fall foliage for the first time ever was a huge treat. The people, too, were as nice as ever, and that in particular is something I thought really added to the experience there. I’ve always sought to avoid the weaboo stereotype by focusing on otaku subculture, but I think I’m ready to admit that I really kinda like Japan now. My friend likes the place too, so we might make yet another visit sometime next year.. when our finances recover. We’ll see.

It’s been a long and eventful year for me, where I was able to do a good bit of stuff that I wanted to do, but that left a truckload more stuff in the backburners. I hope to get to them in a timely manner. Thanks to the whole Mayan catastrophe thing being apparently false after all, a whole new year yet stretches ahead of us all. Here’s to it being a good and exciting one.

Merry Christmas from Between Linux and Anime. May your loot be plentiful in the coming year.

Edit: okay, there apparently is a series of ‘Special’ strips, and a series of ‘Summer Special’ strips. This is from the former. To the best of my knowledge, the ‘Summer Special’ strips are not available online beyond some teaser material.

First, an update regarding the status of this manga right now. So far as far as “regular episodes” (the stuff I’ve been translating) goes, only one extra chapter (13) has been released. In the interim, a series of Summer Specials were also released (yes, over the summer. I am aware that it is almost winter now, but it really should be common wisdom by now that I’m an incurable slowpoke. Plus, where I live, it’s still summer, and forever will be). I have decided to just go ahead and translate the specials, so here’s the first one, alongside the strip branded as chapter/episode 13. Note that chapter/episode 13 was published at the end after all of the summer specials. I’ll post the rest of the summer specials once I’m done translating them.

Across November through early December, “vol” 1 through 4 of Hana no Android Gakuen have also apparently been released. If I’m reading the site right, the comics will be available in print in the Japanese “Weekly Ascii” magazines dated 13 Nov, 19 Nov, 27 Nov, and 4 Dec, and are, to the best of my knowledge, not available online (not counting the sneak preview strips the source site publishes), so it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to work on those unless someone could provide scans.

Next, an update on my translating efforts. Some time ago I decided (probably partly from discovering the happily surprising fact that I’m on Baka-Updates) to try an up the quality of my work, so alongside this release I’ve made two changes to the way I work here. Firstly, I’ve outsourced some translating work to my friend JX, so I now have someone with better moonrune training on board as well as an extra pair of eyes on the final result pre-publish. Secondly, I’ve decided to put a little more effort into my cleaning and typesetting, where I actually do try and clean texts not enclosed in speech bubbles instead of just slapping a semi-transparent white box over them. Perhaps most visibly, I have also switched to much more appropriate fonts, and man, it’s amazing how much just a change of font can do. See the results below for yourself! Hopefully these changes improve the reading experience :)

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the new stuff. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

Notes: So Soni Eri/Moba is Shinagawa Sonia now? Maybe something in the Summer Special will explain this. Also, for context in case people forgot, Moto-rora is supposed to be married to Google-sensei (hence the more fun than when she’s with me part).

Now for Summer Special 1:

Notes: Interestingly, Soni Moba is still Soni Moba here. Also not sure if there’s a specific meaning to being in Spain in particular. Observant folks would notice that the first strip reuses an omake strip from last post. Also for folks who need the reminder: Matsushita Pana-chan is Panasonic, “Matsushita” apparently being the company’s former name. And yeah, they apparently have a lot of patents.

Sources are here and here.

These translations are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’m in Tokyo right now, and earlier today I just went down to the Wald9 cinema at Shinjuku to watch Eva 3.0. And man, so many feelings, so many thoughts, so many emotions. It’s always an emotional journey for an eva fan like myself uncertainly approaching a new film after so long, but it’s a really good feeling. Eva 3.0 with all its bells and whistles was phenomenal on the big screen, especially the blaring, orchestral soundtrack. The rumbling excitement, the intrigue and speculating, the enraptured attention, the awed wonder, all rolled into that profound sense of speechlessness that stole over me at the end when the credits rolled to Utada Hikaru’s beautiful song. It was over far too quickly.

I don’t want to say too much about the film itself quite yet. Surprisingly, I was able to follow the surface-level aspects of the show fairly well, so the lack of subs wasn’t too much of a big issue. All the same. there’ll be a lot to think about and digest, especially in the light of my analyses of the previous two films. In some sense the film felt a little like a troll, a very Anno-esque one I might add, where everything is rent asunder and you’re just thrust into the middle of the storm to be tossed around. And nothing is properly explained throughout the entirety of the film that we’ve all waited so long for. Yet, while the the show concluded on a cliff-hanger of sorts, the final scene had a curious, potent sprinkle of magic to it. The magic lingered and painted over the shimmering notes of the ED with it’s haunting, awed flavor. It was really nice that nobody got up and the lights didn’t go on until the whole thing including the credits and preview was over.

There will be a more detailed post, of course, a long time from now once DVD/Blurays are out and more rewatching and thinking can be done. In particular, I at least want to talk about Kaworu Nagisa, about some of my theories on him in the past, and how it connects with his somewhat vivid portrayal in the new film. For now, I think that’s all I want to say. I’ll be back probably next week with a loot show-off post of sorts. I’m being a little looser with my pocket this time so I should hopefully have a decent range of stuff to brag about :)