Yukariki's Blog

"Dinosaurs came and wrecked the city
But then I ambushed
and attacked them with my psychic powers"

Those strange lyrics are the first thing you hear in this album -- in Japanese of course. What does that stanza mean? Putting your literary criticism hat on, you try to remember your poetry teacher's droning words on how to analyze. And then, you give up and try to analyze the rest of the lyrics in hope for better understanding:

"Soon, the Ice Age came
Bringing along its long winter
And me, feeling so weak in the morning,

I yawned.

Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean
What the hell is "Pacific"...?
Memories of mine stolen
came back to me
The CIA, KGB, and FBI
The communists were spreading conspiracies to them!
Somebody,
please set me free!

A flying voyager ship
is wrecking the planet
You've lost your mind,
And turned into a psychopath
The roads are blocked and the destination's far

Sick and tired of waiting, I played with my Gameboy

Oh, North Star,
Supernova,
Please let there be a meteor storm...
Someone stop that girl
from suiciding!
Oh, bullet train, railroad tracks,
tracks of fate
Please tell her
When morning comes,
Where and how will I cope?

I yawned.

Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean
What the hell is "Atlantic"...?
Memories of mine stolen came back to me
The CIA, KGB, and FBI
The communists were spreading conspiracies to them!
Someone,
please set me free!"

This is where you give up.

Welcome, readers, to lyrical nonsense verse. Like Alice, we have fallen into the rabbit hole and find ourselves humming along about the communists spreading conspiracies to the CIA, KGB, and FBI. The geniuses behind the album and this song, “Sumatra Guards” (don't ask), are the group, Soutaiseiriron -- which translates to "Theory of Relativity".

Einstein must be very proud. After all, he said, “I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.” I think today’s world is humorless; I’m not sure how we can live in a boring world, but we do. We take life too seriously and don’t want to make mistakes.

Thus, music has become boring and stale. Stereotypes of genres have sadly become pervasive these days: rock is a playground for hardcore angst and anger; hip-hop is all about the breasts and money; classical music is stiff and feels more like a machine; and let’s not even talk about pop. Are we that boring?

Apparently, yes.

We are so entrapped with cathartic lyrics that we think nothing else. Could the same be said with other media: literature, anime, films, and even life? The idea of literary criticism encourages critical thinking -- a good trait that we all agree -- but I think we have been disillusioned by its premise. Especially when we become artists.

So instead, let’s think in songwriter Yakushimaru Etsuko’s mind: gosh, what the hell is a “Pacific”?

It reminds me of a certain question: “why is a raven like a writing desk?” There is no answer and that absurdity makes us smile and laugh. In reality, we don’t want to be restrained by the written code known as law; we just want to laugh and sing.

And the song agrees; it makes a statement against the seriousness of lyrics: have some fun, jeez! Play with your lyrics instead: add in random references to Gameboys, intelligence agencies and bureaus, anime conventions, and old children’s shows. Nonsense verse combines random, incompatible images and ideas into one scene as if it’s normal to do so.

That’s why this song rules.

As artists, we don’t always think about the hero’s journey or other archetypes -- critics and readers do -- but the ability to express our honest, fun-loving feelings to the world. Yakushimaru’s “Sumatra Guards” is not only that, but it’s fun to listen and sing to. We can get something out of it, but it doesn’t have to be cathartic; it should make us imagine -- something Einstein argues is more important than knowledge.

And that is the essence of art.

---

Source of lyrics (along with a different take on the song): http://sprigidigmusic.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-decided-to-take-break-from-usual.html

Anime Relations: Serial Experiments Lain, Kamichu!, Hidamari Sketch, Sketchbook: Full Color's, Hidamari Sketch Specials, Hidamari Sketch x 365, Hidamari Sketch x 365 Specials, Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆, Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆ Specials, Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica, Saki Achiga-hen: Episode of Side-A, Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, Shining Hearts: Shiawase no Pan, Uchuu Kyoudai, Shirokuma Cafe

Spring is the season of beginnings! The season where everything is reborn like an infant!

Fuck it, I want to rewatch stuff. I'm bored of watching new works from the deep chasms of obscurity. All of these are re-watches and these may not even be done by April because iyashikei anime is supposed to make me relax:

1. Finish Puella Magi Madoka Magica at Good Friday [done]
2. Finish Kamichu!
3. Finish Serial Experiments Lain
4. Watch Hidamari Sketch
5. Watch Hidamari Sketch x365
6. Watch Hidamari Sketch TRIPLE STARS
7. Watch Sketchbook: Full Colors -- I'm thinking of regrading it.

Though, I will be watching the following in early April though very very slowly:

8. Shirokuma Cafe (April 5)
9. Saki: Achiga-hen - Episode of Side A (April 8)
10. Haiyoru! Nyaruko-san (April 10)

I may review Shirokuma Cafe and Nyaruko-san.

And I almost forgot:

11. Shugo Chara is almost done. The first season, that is. [done]

Eleven works, haha. Ha. Ha.

EDIT:

Adding new works. Great.

12. Shining Hearts: Shiawase no Pan because of seiyuus
13. Uchuu Kyoudai

Anime Relations: Chou Henshin Cosprayers, Chou Henshin Cosprayers vs. Ankoku Uchuu Shougun the Movie, Chou Henshin Cosprayers Specials

This is my reaction:

Anime Relations: K-On!, K-On!: Live House!, K-On!: Ura-On!, K-On!!, K-On!!: Ura-On!!, K-On! Movie, K-On!!: Keikaku!

Is Overdrive a genius...!?

The protagonist, I believe, is living in a cavern, designed to deter emotions, current trends and fads, and culture. Kira Kira begins with him suddenly watching a rock concert. Everyone crowds around and the spotlights centers on a rock band called “Star Generation”; whoever named the band must be watching Lucky Star while listening to The Who’s “My Generation” album. Nevertheless, they start rocking.

The protagonist cowers in front of the concert; it is his first orgasm in his lifetime.

Kira Kira is an eroge, written and published by OVERDRIVE, and I shall liveblog my progress in this work. It, of course, deals with rock bands and I must warn: To any K-On! haters, run. Run far. It is inevitable I will make dozens of K-On! jokes. There are minor events that I forget, despite playing it yesterday; Macross Frontier can create magical black holes in my synapses. Nevertheless, this is just a prologue: an introduction to the events, characters, and themes. I shouldn’t be missing out enough detail and, really, people should play the visual novel as well.

We return to Maejima, before his ravishing at the rock concert. An ex-top tennis player, he is facing an existentialist crisis, possibly after watching the dreadful Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace in 3D; seriously, any dedicated Star Wars Original Trilogy fan find themselves in a pit of despair. What’s more: his girlfriend is breaking up with him. As it turns out, she is trying to grab some stuff from his room. I’m not sure what kind of stuff she left in his room; I’ll leave that up to the readers’ imaginations. Maejima wants to get back with her, but long story short: his moves were not enough.

What a surprise. That whole scene reminds me of Hiroko’s arc in Amagami SS; the guy himself got friendzoned by his ex-girlfriend; I expect the Tea Club people to barge in and give me treats.

Depressed Maejima is depressed. This goes for a while.

On the other hand, Kirari is not. With that recognizable and cute voice of hers, she stands at the employees’ parking zone of Maejima’s part-time workplace like a drug dealer. Maejima ushers her in after he heard from her words that she is a new employee of the eating place. The boss realizes Maejima is a visual novel protagonist and makes him Kirari’s teacher; at first, she breaks a box of glasses, but not to worry -- Maejima is there. Kirari strives to work hard; her motto: prease, don't slay lazy.

It turns out Kirari, as the two characters walk home, is part of the club that Maejima is supposed to be in: the Second Literature Club. Worrisome about the merger of the literature clubs, Kirari fears its disappearance. Thus, she plans to make something interesting for the cultural festival to mark the last days of the club.

Enter Murakami: Maejima’s tennis partner, who quit at the same time, is a go player and he finds their prospects for their sexual organs worsening. During the morning religious seminar in the Catholic school they attend, Murakami lays out his plan: let’s make a punk rock band! With three chords, anyone can play a punk rock song. Singing is shouting and vice versa, according to the Holy Bible of Punk Rock -- it is of course written by the legendary punk rock band, The Clash. The nun lecturing the seminar hears Maejima and Murakami speak out loud; Her wrath is too empowering and She warns them immediately during the seminar; I believe the two Ms got Holy spankings from Her. Murakami lectures him about punk music and the “Indies”; his information is not too shabby, but Wikipedia is more informative. Maejima is not convinced.

Remembering his promise, he goes to the Second Lit Club. Then, he hears Chie calling out to him. Chie, a smart student with the dread of repeating the grade due to logistics, is voiced by Shikkoku no Sharnoth’s Mary Clarissa Christie’s VA and I will love to dedicate a paragraph on how amazing her voiceacting skills in that work is, if not for the time. She appears for a minute long and says that the Second Lit Club’s members are not available. What a waste, Chie says. Nevertheless, she is happy to see her childhood friend, Maejima, back.

Around this time, Sarina enters and she is a rich girl with little to no background information provided in this chapter. How enigmatic; her name sounds like sarin and she resembles Mugi from K-On! I begin to hum Triple H’s “ROCK OVER JAPAN” and think about Minako Kotobuki’s voice singing it; what a wonderful idea! Is KyoAni here?


"As the Countess leaned over me and her hands touched me... a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal."

At the workplace, Kirari gets better at not breaking things; Maejima is impressed that his non-teaching is improving her balance. The weekends has arrived and people start gulping down beer; salarymen starts flirting with the ladies with the best pickup lines they can find; these men’s mothers will have liked to disowned them if they heard them. A bunch of punks start entering and ordering; Maejima’s lady colleague decides to get their orders. She hesitates and squeals; it’s Star Generation! The ladies, attracted to punk rockers, decide to molest these punk rockers; the men at first don’t like to be molested, but they find it touching. The sararimen, pissed about their flirts moving away from them, begins to brawl. Maejima tries to mediate between them, but the lead vocalist gives him the United States response in any negotiation: a punch in the face. This leads to Kirari screaming, with what I believe the best voiced line ever, “Oh no, Maejima-san is going to die!”

He lives and walks to the playground. Kirari arrives and plays the swings, trying to cheer Maejima up. The guitarist of Star Generation walks to them, apologizes, and realizes that the two employees are actually his fellow classmates. With that in mind, he gives them two tickets to their latest concert in a music cafe.

Maejima gives his ticket to Kirari because he is lazy and wants to be like Shinji from Episode 26 of NGE. Kirari reluctantly accepts, but it turns out her friend couldn’t come. In the end, both go to the music cafe for their first time. Surprisingly, it does not follow K-On!'s trail of having only female bands. Anyway, the events from the first paragraph happens and Kirari seems to have a lot of fun. This includes a witty observation from the protagonist: Kirari’s messy clothing looks like she got raped.

Kirari is inspired: why not they make a rock band based on the Second Lit Club members? It ends and K-ON!!’s first OP plays.

The prologue is longer than expected: I’m not sure why the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend is there at the beginning; wouldn’t it make sense to say, “Oh, what a terrible night to have this curse: I just broke up with my girlfriend just now”, to get over with it? I think there will be some symbolism from that scene, though I might be thinking too deep about it.

Time to remember to take notes for the second liveblogging session~

K-On! references (without third paragraph’s mention): 4

The Big Ben’s clock hands reach outwards to Londoners. It cries, “Help, I am being choked. I can’t see; I can’t breathe; I can’t think.” Yet, the women flaunting their silky dresses block the deafening yelp with their blue parasols; they keep on walking, high heels clicking along the stone path. All they hear are the horses neighing, men discussing, and beggars calling for God’s mercy. The world they live in has a color spectrum that has everything, but the color blue -- the color of sky, purity, and innocence. Muted colors replace brightness and vibrancy. Their world is monochrome with shades of color at times, like a colorized version of a black and white film. Men and women who have seen the blue sky long for it; what is tomorrow when all we see is smoke as a metaphor for poverty and starving children?

Thus, we deny tomorrow.

Today, tired students sit down on a chair, marveling at the new contraptions and gossiping on the fads. One particular teenager strikes the attention of pedestrians; there is something odd about her. Look closely and you shall see this golden-haired girl, with a dreamy smile, sipping her white cup of coffee. Refreshed, she opens her eyes and her left eye retains the color of the forgotten sky; the other eye makes Aristotle’s disciples fall in love with her -- a golden eye.

Her name is Mary Clarissa Christie, a homage to the real Agatha Christie. A gentlewoman of the 20th century, she is thoughtful and feminine. To find her in a less feminine yet in a more erratic euphoric stage, show her to the library: her eyes, especially the golden eye, shimmers as she opens up a first edition book, capturing the fragrance of the paper, and flips through a page as if it is undulating. Her attention, in such a mode, can only be stolen through her dear friends: Charlotte Bronte and Angelica Derleth. Charlie, as Mary affectionately calls her, is a fellow student, acting like a parent towards the two. Angie, the excited lolita, joins them as they recount love stories and the rumors running through the streets of London.

One such rumor indulges in a fantastical hellish monsters, named Metacreatures, crawling and devouring unsuspecting people late at night. It is nonsense to today’s society; everything like that sounds like a fairy tale -- just like the blue sky. Yet, these fowl creatures do prowl at night and latched onto miserable Mary’s tail. Alone and frightened, she hears the hastening steps of these creatures and her feet start swishing through air.

Shall she escape and live by accepting tomorrow or shall she collapse from exhaustion and die, thus denying tomorrow? Everyone else did, so why not?

She does not; that’s the difference between us and Mary.

She runs not just for her life, but to see another day -- a beautiful tomorrow. She imagines herself and her friends strolling through the park to see that ebullient sunlight sliding through the rifts of clouds to caress them. That is a beautiful tomorrow.

So how does Mary accept tomorrow? Trapped in a maze of monsters, she looks for an exit. All situations have exits; it is only a matter of finding them. Of course, it is not easy and takes more than a few tries. Happy endings don’t come easily as we like it to be; she suffers and wades through obstacles to get it. People who deny tomorrow are nothing but fools.

Shikkoku no Sharnoth asks us to accept tomorrow. Yesterday is wonderful and so is today. The future is grim; it creeps writers enough to write dystopias and pessimistic look on the future. Yet, tomorrow shall come. When Big Ben’s hand rings that it is midnight, tomorrow has come. Mary dreads for tomorrows, but perseveres throughout the work. She has to accept a truth that everyone, including myself, always forget: tomorrow is beautiful. Look up to tomorrow; it gives us not just despair, but hope. In Mary’s world, the hope is personified through the sky. A barrier of clouds block the sunlight and the reflection of water to create the necessary spectrum of the color blue. Everyone wants to see the blue sky. If it does not appear today, we shall look for it tomorrow.

And tomorrow.
And tomorrow.

Let us not deny tomorrow. Instead, we should exclaim, “What a beautiful tomorrow.”

Anime Relations: Azumanga Daiou The Animation, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, Kidou Senshi Gundam, R.O.D: Read or Die, Cardcaptor Sakura, Macross, K-On!, Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica

As a self-depreciating creature, I know that I have many vices; I expected GTA: Vice City to be worse than I am, but I found selling drugs and owning striphouses a worthy business. One of my many vices is being a bibliophile -- bookworms whose shelves are infested with literature. We waste money on books;
I wanted to buy fifteen books, but ended with up three books costing $100~.


Possible future for me

I boast a Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, an array of Vintage Publishing classics, and from my childhood days: historic and science encyclopedias. There is even an intact copy of a 1998 Redwoods edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, its paper coffee brown and fragrance more aromatic than jasmine tea -- yes, I’m a sucker for classical literature. My teacher has an epigram concerning classics, “Classics are classics because, well, they are good.”

Of course, people can find it boring. Let's talk about anime: people exclaim opinions on works like Neon Genesis Evangelion as lackluster and prefer Panty and Stocking’s sex jokes instead. People may understand the appeal of My Neighbor Totoro, but are not amused by the first half’s slice-of-life situation; nothing really happens, except for a giant hamster orgasming over an umbrella. Even a person so infatuated with classical literature like me can’t stand Mobile Suit Gundam’s first half of one dimensional characterization; I watched the movie trilogy and I still suffered. The only exceptions to the Twilight cast in this regard are Char, his sister, and Lt. Bright; one has a fabulous mask, another has actual emotions and problems, and the other is a ferocious slapper. So is my teacher right?

The answer is, “Nope, but hey -- we should take a look, at least.”

Any connoisseur in the media must have seen the classics, regardless of their own opinions. No one reads a critic’s review if (s)he hasn’t seen old works. People should slap reviewers if they have not done so -- Lt. Bright, we need you now!


Lt. Bright slapping Amuro for having not watched Neon Genesis Evangelion

For a film reviewer, anyone who has not watched Citizen Kane deserves bullets streaming into their body by Scarface’s little friend. We also have to take note of genres. If you read reviews, you will realize that critics like to refer people to a certain work whenever possible. Stealing Beatnik’s excellent review on Macross, I quote his exact words: “Macross is the sexier version of Gundam, the carefree serenading romantic.” Nobody can write such provocative yet pragmatic comparisons, especially a “sexier version” of a work, without watching the original work first. Today, we have Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. Appreciating those works fully requires a basic understanding of the magical girl genre. I can safely say, “Madoka Magica is a depressive and satirical statement on Cardcaptor Sakura’s conventions while Lyrical Nanoha is the badass and friendliest version of Sakura.” We have to think about the works that define the genre and compare them.

Since K-On! is a well-known work for weeaboos claiming to have watched anime, I will exemplify my point through simple analysis. High school settings are a staple for slice-of-life comedies. K-On! acknowledges this setting; the bisexuals and lesbian cast -- Mugi is a lesbian; read the manga -- walk around school, suffering through real problems like exams and which cake should Yui eat.


Hirasawa Yui: confirmer of Radiohead's statement that anyone can play guitar

When I watched this work for the first time, the first thing I saw was Yui’s infamous falling scene, leading to a tight close-up of Yui’s butt covered by a skirt. Sounds like a rejected Azumanga Daioh idea. If we inspect the work as a whole, K-On!’s take on comedy is a lower, degrading version of the original work. This is coming from someone who actually enjoyed K-On!’s cuteness; high school girl comedies are a guilty pleasure to me. Yet, I cannot stand not pointing that out. Critical thinking must occur in evaluation. Is this work recommendable? Is this work an acceptable entry to the genre? To make comparisons to the original definer is necessary to evaluate a work.

Time to come back to my teacher’s statement. I must revise it to suit my purposes for this blog post. This goes to literature, paintings, music, and everything that has to do with art. It’s not as catchy, but it does the job:

Classics are classics because, well, they are groundbreaking enough to warrant a look.