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Through Death Note 3 and Bleach 4. Conflicted. I don't like reading Japanese in English, though I suppose the second- third- and fourth-guessing of DN reads easier in English than Japanese. (Probably doesn't make much sense in either language, and DN's implausibilities are more staring in English- the unquestioning naivete of top FBI agents being especially wince-worthy.) But mostly it's the feeling of reading blind. What's this Chad thing? I find that his name is Sado, but google fails to inform me if the Chad reading is the mangaka's or the translator's or what. Which irks me.

If I were completely innocent, I'd be buying more DN. It rivets. It resonates. Where is this obsessive relationship going to go? The main characters may not be likable but they're unlikable in creative ways ie they don't have innocent singing girls fed to their animals to prove how magnificently Badnasty they are. Oh, and I don't get the feeling I'm *supposed* to like them, which is why DN trumps CLAMP for all time.

But I'm not completely innocent. Read the spoiler ages ago before ever I knew I was going to read the manga. I know nothing other than the bare fact but suggestions are that the bare fact was not the ultimate and inevitable culmination of the obsessive relationship- which would have been cool- and was in fact the mangaka famously following his mangaka nose yet-once-again. So. Is it worth reading past v.3? Is there good stuff yet to be found before the spoiler?

Equally Bleach signally fails to move me so far. Must I spend another $50 before the characters start getting intriguing? In other people's opinions are they already intriguing and am I just not on Bleach's wavelength? I don't care about Ichigo. I don't care about Rukia. I don't care about Orihime. I don't really care much about anyone. Maybe I should just go back to my long-haired shoujo heroes? Maybe I should put in a request to

shiny_monkey for a complete Kohri no Mamono no Monogatari?

What say all of ye?

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Chad is the mangaka's reading. (Bleach mangaka has a fondness for Westernisms, specifically Western music and somewhat non-intuitive Western celebs - Ichigo's father's favorite celeb is stated to be John Lee Hooker.) When Ichigo first meets Chad (later flashback) he mispronounces 'Sado' as 'Chado', and is corrected. "Well, I'll call you Chad anyway, it sounds cool. You know Chad [last name of celeb I've never heard of]? ...No? Dude, you live under a rock!"

DN: nose following, to the max. I jumped ship five chapters past spoiler and wish I did earlier. ^^;

Bleach: If I were you I'd read up to volume 6 and take stock, I think. I was going to say yes you're probably not on the right wavelength but on second thought this might not be the case. Plenty of people only care about the Soul Society characters/plot and the magazine popularity poll tends to bear it out - certainly the doujinshi scene is SS-centric. However SS is swordfight-plot-twist-swordfight-swordfight-politics-swordfight-swordfight-shocking-plot-twist for 15 volumes. My guess is that you'll like the plot aspect (which is slow enough to get going) and not be able to page though the swordfight aspect fast enough. You'll have to decide if it's worth it for you. ^^;

KnMnM is ... like nearly all the other titles from that publisher, or like Don't Cry Hong Kong. There's a lot of stuff on the razor edge between friendship and love, but it doesn't really cross the line.

I found the first 10 volumes or so a gratifying emotional wallow, then the style seems to take a step back - shifting from emotional and relationship close up to sweeping historical panorama, which threw me for a loop. I don't love it as much, finished, as I did unfinished. The character designs, on the other hand, are very nice.

Razor's edge is where I'm at these days. Complicated or romantic male friendship gets short shrift in English lately; nobody seems to know how it's done. I mean, look what a mess Robin Hobb made of it. Best you seem to do is get side-glances of Was that there or did I just see it? as in

paleaswater's blinking at Death of the Necromancer. (I didn't see it but if you were in that mindset, I suppose you could.)

Manga at least shows you those meaning-charged glances, and the guys are indeed beautiful. Yes, I've been reading too much Shinohara Udo but so what? Sex no longer excites, which leaves the delicate attachments of unspoken friendship as the only locus of eroticism. Minekura makes her living off of that. They are so *not* doing it, actually, but I know nothing as erotically charged as, say, Hakkai and Gojou's one-koma snapping at each other the epsiode before last.

Erotically charged is not exactly what comes to mind when I think of Koori. It's good-natured and sweet and more than a little bit twee, inspite of all claims to darkness and complexity. I'll tolerate a lot in the name of pretty pictures, so I read it. But it doesn't seem at all your sort of thing, though you have liked things that surprised me before.

Erotically charged is not exactly what comes to mind when I think of Koori.

LOL!!! Erotically charged is not exactly what comes to mind for any title from that publisher.

Still, if razor edge is where you're at these days, I think you'll enjoy KnMnM. In my evaluation, it tends to sweet, silly, and tear jerk-y, and wallows in 'good hearted but dumb or innocent prevails over evil' tropes. It's very much a fantasy romance in it's style. In contrast, Bingo (which I know you have seen at least one volume of and didn't care for) tends towards sarcastic and comic, anything by Minekura tends towards emotional tension and steamy implications, and Shinohara Udo tends towards more realism and angst.

I need to get more Shinohara Udo. Sigh. And get caught up on G-Defend. And get back into Minekura. And finish the two whiners arc. And find some copious free time ... LOL!

Yes well, I do find my erotic charges in very unlikely places. Sweet tear-jerky romance might very well do it, since that's what I write myself when I have characters in love.

Well, as with all things, your manga mileage may vary.

Re: Bleach, c'mon, it's a shounen fighto manga, where each chara has their sheshal costume and their speshal skillz and so on. If you're not into shounen manga in general, that's not gonna appeal. If you're sorta kinda into shounen, it's okay as it's somewhat more plotty (and less sexist porker) than many are. (And if you're wanting to look ahead/decide via mass fanscans on disk, any number of us could provide.) I expect following it in tank format is better than the hiijous slow crawl of weekly installment updates, where 3+ chapters at a time are devoted to one fight scene. It also might be easier to sort out the Cast of Thousands that way.

Re: DN. A lot of people abandoned it post-spoiler, so there's an Air of Superiority about the people who Stuck It Out in the Face of Spoiler. I'd continued to follow it for a while, but I also got bored sans the Heated Gaze of Justice. (I'm a shallow pool here, yes.) Frankly, I found that Otsuichi and Ooiwa kenji's "Goth" to be a much more thoughtful (and possibly more honest) treatment of a similar theme.

Re: Koori. I like. Also Silver Diamond. But again, it's all an individual thing. If you can get someone to set you up with the B6 Koori set, then you should just go for it. It's out of print now, and the new printings are A6. Scrambling after individual volumes has been a royal pain in the ass (still missing one here ;_;).

I've been addicted to dumber shounen than fight manga though I admit throwing a female mangaka into the shounen mix does complicate stuff somewhat. Or a lot, actually.

My eyes aren't up to reading Japanese scans on screen; they'll barely manage print. By A6 you mean bunko? which I'll do if I have no choice. Hi Izuru didn't suffer *too* badly from being read that way though Ima Ichiko did. That format does the mangaka a huge disservice IMnsHO.

Lux'd to avoid even a hint of a spoiler: Was it ever explained why The Heated Gaze of Justice has such weird eyes? Cause it's blind or something?

Along that line, and oddly enough, one of the suspects for pseud-writer of DN was Yuuko Asami (as explained here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsugumi_Ohba)), although I personally don't see why anyone would have thought so. (Asami did "Wild Half" in Jump back in the '90s.)

Anyway, yes, the new Koori run's the smaller A6 bunkos. I'm still not used to this glasses-needing thing, and my last attempt to tackle a manga in bunkoban was grrrr-worthy. The print is too tiny; the kanji in these look like featureless blobs, furigana like flea spit. I can't stand it . . . wideban editions are much better. T_T

No, unlike Justice the Concept, he's not blind. He's just . . . odd. When eccentricity is raised to an art form in this fashion, it becomes inexplicably slashy (as BL mangaka like Yamakami Riyu also have discovered). We learn that the orphanage that produced him has suspiciously similar oddities of his type, but the whyfor of that was never explained either, at least not by the point when I began to experience lack of interest in what happened next.

With you on both DN and Bleach. After spoiler in DN there are new characters introduced that put a twist on things. I still like DN, but I am not as rabid about following it online as I had been. (This might have more to do with time constraints and my growing hatred of computers. ;p) I've purchased the first few translated volumes of DN and still enjoy them.

Bleach is a series I just couldn't get into at the time. That might change in the future, but it strikes me as very formulaic without the character interest to make me sit through the formula.

My problem with Bleach is that I have become far too fond of it, which makes it difficult for me to argue its merits sensibly. I apologise. I would agree with Petronia in that the Soul Society arc is where it really takes off and gets more complex plotwise, but I think you are less swordfight-tolerant than I am.

As for Death Note: I've actually really gone off that. I went through about three volumes, and while all the characters are intricate, and complex, and intelligent, and as you say there is a lack of drowning the puppies, I just don't really like any of them enough to care.

(Maybe I'm just feeling guilty for reading Saint Seiya Episode G. I know, dubious art, little plot, much posing, but oddly interesting to find out how it's going to end up. Okay, so it'll end up with the Gold Saints victorious and the Titans put down, but you know what I mean.)

My problem with Bleach is that I have become far too fond of it, which makes it difficult for me to argue its merits sensibly. I apologise.

Known in the trade as Being A Fan. No apologies needed. 'Only those whom the adder has bitten can tell each other how it feels.' As for DN, well, as far as I've gotten I'm there rooting for the Heated Gaze of Justice to, y'know, effect justice. If I believed it would happen eventually I'd be there till the end.

Thank you for understanding my sorry state. (Adder knows viper, as I believe has been remarked somewhere or other.)

I think you were being too despairing over in your lj about the impossibility of sl0ring a series to the uninitiate. However one may feel one is babbling incomprehensibly away about a thing, salient details generally do emerge that either ping with the listener or don't. It may be no more than the words 'dragon' or 'ponytail' or 'guy in Chinese robes', but if the predisposition is there, there'll be a reaction. Granted there *are* people who enthuse without any concrete information at all, which gives the impression of grasping mist; but I figure they're not really recommending, they're just enthusing to the converted.

Mmm, true. And I promise that if any dragons do show up in Bleach, you will be the first that I will tell about it.

Thank you. Should you ever want to check out existentialist angsty shikigami, I recommend Ze.

So noted. Who's it by, and what is it? (Besides, well, manga.)

Shimizu Yuki, she of Love Mode. It's a manga about a family of onmyouji types who employ kotodama, the power of words to become reality, in order to bring misfortune on selected clients ('There's a lot of call for that sort of thing' one says casually.) Because using kotodama curses can or does recoil on the sender they have shikigami, in this case the classic made from paper ones, who take the hit for them and/or heal them when they're wounded. Healing takes the form of touching with a mucous membrane- OK, it's BL, deal- usually kissing except with the female onmyouji and her shikigami and we won't go there thanks very much, even if the mangaka does.

There are three onmyouji and three shikigami living in the branch house where our naive and domestically gifted half-blood hero shows up, but the oldest onmyouji and the youngest shikigami aren't paired up. The oldest guy- Waki- is the one who made the three shikigami (he's a paper master so-called) and he spends most of his time so far drinking sake and amusedly watching the world go by, except when he doesn't. The youngest shikigami has existential issues about what's he good for and why's he alive, partly the result of having no onmyouji to protect and partly because jeez, he's made of paper and can't forget it.

There are unexplained power issues and backstory going on in the family. The youngest onmyouji is supposed to be head of the house but he left home for reasons unknown so it's his older brother who runs the family (we must assume younger guy is legitimate and older guy is not) and older brother also angsts a lot and has a Kyoto-ben-I-think speaking shikigami, inherited from his grandfather, who also runs away from home for a bit. So. Like that.

That does sound intriguing. Thank you!

Sado is written as 茶度 (which I guess could be translated as tea time) and Ichigo figured the kanji for tea had to be pronounced as "cha" which is the more common reading for it. So he just started calling Sado "Chado" which became "Chad"

While I like Death Note now that I have stopped reading it I find I'm not missing it.

Bleach... hrm. You know now that you mention it I really do not like any of the characters per say. I think it safer to say I like the intereaction of them better. I know I like Bleach and I really like reading it (and watching it) but I really don't know how to explain what made me like it.

Are you still reading FMA?

I think the money issue is a big one, especially with these long-running shounen series. (Even KMM is like...20 volumes or more.) When you don't have a Book-off nearby to get these things cheap, you have to wonder, is getting into this 18+ volume series worth it.)

It's like that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine's favorite contraceptive was discontinued so she bought what was left and hoarded it. Each date after that she would ask herself. "He's nice...but is he sponge-worthy???"

Clamp is not sponge-worthy. Not at all.

Clamp is not sponge-worthy. Not at all.

Clamp? Mou! Clamp is like a former significant other who treated you v.v. shabbily and make your like an overwrought drama, whom you slam whenever they come up in conversation. Yet when someone else agrees and does likewise, you suddenly feel a perverse need to rise up and defend them -- even though they won't know or care, and they sure as hell don't deserve any defending. It's as though you must justify why you were once so besotted . . .

In other words, I have no idea where I'm going with this analogy. *cough*

(I still cuddle Tokyo Babylon as an isolated phenomenon.)

Are you still reading FMA?

Yes and no. I get the eps monthly but reading monthly eps is too scattered. I always have to go back and review what happened month before. So I save them up until I have 4 or 5 and read them all together.

Thing is, *if* a long series turns out to be worth it, it's one of the happiest reading experiences there is. Manga, no matter what manga, is different enough from Over Here that a long read constitutes a month in the country, as it were. Hi Izuru, Karin, Basara, Kou Josei even. It's when you get to 'almost worth it but not quite'- Kaori Yuki in all her avatars- that I feel used.

Sponge-worthy varies from person to person but I'd have to wonder at the values of someone who found CLAMP, the town whore, to be worth it. Now, at any rate. Ten years ago we were all younger and giddier; though I couldn't take them seriously ten years ago either.

Your wish is my command. How many volumes are there? Who published/publishes it?

Re DN: I admit that the sole reason I buy it and don't even read it (I literally just bring it home and put it on the shelf these days -_-) is for Obata's art. I've been hooked on it since Karakuri Zoushi Ayatsuri Sakon and it's only gotten better through Hikaru no Go and Death Note. I'm a whore for eye candy. Japan has made me shallow (or maybe just brought out shallowness that was already lurking).

tosuisha is the publisher, umm ... www.tosuisha.co.jp
Can't tell you how many volumes it is, my books are on a bookshelf behind 4 other bookshelves all waiting to be moved.

Umm, lessee.
氷の魔物の物語, 杉浦志保 (Sugiura Shiho). It's 24 volumes plus a gaiden, so 25 (ow, ow). Tousuisha / Ichisuki Comics. There are two versions, the original B6 and the newer A6 (bunkoban yuck).

So there you have it, K. Do me a Hi Izuru and send what you can find at the 2nd-hands. It'll probably be the bunko in which case a couple of vols will do me fine to see what it's like. Yoroshiku onegai shimasu as ever.

Ryoukai! Shall pedal down to the shops this weekend and see what I can find. =)

I am in your debt.

Obata's art

Yes. It really has style to burn. I'm sad sad sad that the story doesn't measure up because it looked to be going for some kind of classic.

Call it shallow if you like. Cardinal rule of Japanese life, as stated by Donald Keene I think: No significant content without significant form. It has to look good to be good. And even if it turns out not to be good, it still looks good, which is a consolation in itself. One better than the 550 page mass market fantasy paperback with the garish cover and the flabby word-processed prose that contains- a garish flabby story.

I can't disagree with that, honestly, especially as bad as my Japanese reading skills are. -_-

Do, do get Koori. It's a wonderful series. Yes, it's long, but the Sugiura obviously had it completely plotted before she began writing (or has genius instincts) so one doesn't have to wade through tankoubons of filler one-offs. Many of the characters will strike you as two-dimensional at first evaluation only to grow and mature in completely unexpected ways; the story keeps you on your toes.

Silver Diamond's really inventive as well, but I will reserve full gushing judgement until it's finished.

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