This is a beautiful rejoiner to a certain faux-leftie ‘country’ song:
bonus: Billy Bragg is strong on trans rights, always a reason to support an artist.
8th Episode nervous breakdown
This is not how a well person texts:
Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!! is the most darkest entry in the Bang DreaM franchise so far. Instead of nice stories about starting a band together, this one started with one breaking up and things did not improve from there. This episode again was as emo as your average Roselia concert. The focus this time was on Soyo, the ex-member of Crychic who seemed the most put together. Seemed. To be honest, I distrusted her friendliness and cheerfulness from the start. She seemed to be in denial about how badly Crychic had ended, a bit obsessed with getting back in touch with Saki, the one who broke it up in the first place. She seemed friendly and helpful, but there was always something manipulative about her.
After episode’s seven’s concert, what should’ve been a triumph turned sour because Soyo got upset they played Crychic’s old song. Soyo got upset because Saki was in the audience and she got upset hearing it. So this episode she spent ghosting her team mates and guilt tripping Mutsumi, another ex-member in bringing her to Saki’s home. Which did not went well. Saki confronted her with the truth: Crychic was not coming back and trying to revive it for her own selfish reasons would just hurt everyone. That Soyo took it badly is an understatement.
by contrast, Tomori is moving forward, even inviting Anon in to her house. I liked how we got a slow pan of her bedroom with all its various collections neatly stashed away. Also liked the detail of her serving Anon milk, when you’d ordinarily expect some sort of tea. With five more episodes to go it will be interesting to see how this will all get resolved.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve
Even to this day I occasionally find myself trying to “similarize”. I stare intently at a piece of the floor, blink to imprint it in my mind, then try to teleport to it. That’s the way van Vogt described it in his Null-A novels which I read as a very impressionable teen. I completely get where Ian Sales is coming from:
There are occasional moments when The Players of Null-A does that that thing which made 1940s and 1950s science fiction so compelling at the time: those wild shifts in scale, where battle fleets comprise hundreds of thousands of warships, and journeys cover thousands of light-years in a single hop. It’s horrendously implausible… but never quite manages to break suspension of disbelief. It’s a technique sf no longer uses, perhaps because these days the genre uses tropes differently, often uncritically, with no real knowledge of their meaning or history. But that’s an argument for another day.
Reading The Players of Null-A, I was bemused at how easily I’d been taken in by van Vogt’s writing as teenager. The two Null-A books, and a later sequel, Null-A Three (1985, Canada), are predicated on general semantics, a quack “behavioural system” proposed by Alfred Korzybski, as was “non-Aristotelian logic”, in the book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933, USA). It’s complete nonsense, a sort of self-help by-your-own-bootstraps perversion of Kant’s “ding an sich” — which is given a far, far better fictional treatment in Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015, UK).
His writing, like that of other utterly self confident bullshitters like Heinlein, is catnip to a certain type of bookish, smart teenager. He had that trick of taking you the reader in his confidence, flattering you that you were capable of understanding what he was talking about even though it was complete nonsense. A thing like general semantics would’ve come across as obvious crackpottery had you encountered it in any other context. It being used as the premise of a science fiction story actually gave it a certain credibility. There must be something in it if it can be used for science fiction!
It was a different time. I still have the read to pieces Meulenhoff omnibus edition of the Null-A novels my parents gave me for my fourteenth birthday, but I haven’t read them in decades. When you’re fourteen you don’t notice van Vogt is just a terrible writer; it’s the ideas that enthrall you. Nor do you notice how outdated and dumb those ideas are. When you’re reading science fiction for the first time everything is new and exciting, no matter how hoary it really is.
Good Christian Music
Christian music doesn’t have to be hateful or suck, as Flamy Grant here proves:
It’s sent her to the top of the charts which means there are a lot of Christians out there not afraid of inclusion. As she puts it:
“I think one of the reasons my song resonated with people is because people are tired of all the religious gatekeeping, and ‘Good Day’ is an anthem of inclusion,” she said.
She continued: “I’m so grateful to everyone who is sharing my music, and I hope it does a small part to drown out the message of exclusion and disgust for queer people that has come to be a defining marker of conservative American Christianity.”
In a world where it often seems Christianity is just a synonym for bigotry, it’s good to see inclusion win.
Anime Worth Watching — Summer 2023
In no particular order.
Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru made ni Shitai 100 no Koto
Previous series have taught us that the office work culture in anime Japan is bad enough that getting hit by truck-kun to reincarnate in a fantasy world is preferable and that the best you can hope for is a kindly kitsune taking pity on you. For poor Akira, a three year veteran of working for the blackest of companies, it’s the zombie apocalypse that finally liberates him. Now he can finally run through his bucket list of things he wanted to do before he was forced to work nearly 24/7. A fun concept, but what makes it really worth watching is the execution by new studio Bug Films. See Sakugablog for what makes this production so special. Best looking anime this season.
Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!!
I already raved about this series; if you like idol-adjecent anime this is a great entry point in the world of Bang Dream. I really love Tomori, who seems very much to be neuroatypical, and her relationship with Anon, the transfer student who wants her to join her band. Anon as well as their classmates respect Tomori’s bounderies even as she gently pushes her to take a step out of her comfort zone. The way Tomori herself also seeks friendship by sharing her latest obsessions, like her penguin bandaids is adorable and slightly sad. What sets it apart from other Bang Dream series is its darker tone: it starts with the implosion of Tomori’s previous band and it has scarred her. Anon herself also has a bit of a dark past while the ex-members of Tomori’s band are equally scarred by its breakup. Anon here is the outsider who can see through the group’s dynamics, the catalyst who can get them to change and grow again.
Watashi no Shiawase na Kekkon
Long abused and neglected Saimori Miyo is forced by her family into an engagement with Kudou Kiyoka, who has scared off all his previous marriage partners and has therefore the reputation of being a monster. Three episodes in and it’s clear how much the neglect and abuse of her family after her mother died has stunted Miyo’s personality. Nothing more than a servant in her family home, she’s meek, quiet and terrified of making a mistake that will see her sent back there. She’s wary of kindness and confused when her fiancé asks about her preferences. Her abuse has not been magically fixed by escaping her family or the love of a good man; she’s still damaged by her experiences. There’s also a tension in the way others, like Kiyoka’s elderly housekeeper see her meek personality as that of the perfect yamato nadeshiko. Even more so than MyGo this is a melancholy, sombre anime that’s occasionally hard to watch.
Horimiya: Piece
Horimiya got an adaptation two years ago that took thirteen episodes to cover the entire manga and the romance between Hori and Miyamura. To do so however it skipped a lot of chapters less relevant to the central romance. This new season adapts those. I actually like this, even if it could be argued that a two cour season would’ve been a better way to adapt it. There’s a mellow vibe to this season as it goes for comedy rather than romance. Episodes have been grouped thematically: the first one was about the class truip to Kyoto e.g. It does have the same weakness as the manga, as every now and then I have to remember who this character actually is. Having the hair colours actually visible helped a lot there.
Genjitsu no Yohane: Sunshine in the Mirror
A brilliant idea to make a fantasy anime starring Yohane, the chuuni one from Love Live Sunshine who pretended to be a fallen angel. Having failed to become an idol in fantasy-Tokyo she returns to Numazu, her hometown, where she gets “summer homework” from her mother: she has to find out the one thing she really wants to do. Also, there’s a sinister noise plaguing the town that only children and failed idols can hear, while something is corrupting the animals of the nearby forests. So far this plot has been mostly confined to the background while Yohane meets up with the rest of the Love Live Sunshine cast. Most of them have similar personalities to the original, but most noticably Mari is very different. As are the relationships between the characters, especially their relationship to Yohane herself. Yohane/Hanamaru shippers eat good here. One minor dislike I had was how much the first two episodes made Yohane out to be a lazy failure; that could’ve been dialed back a bit. I’m also a bit wary of Lialapse, the huge dog that’s supposedly Yohane’s sister and which only she can hear speaking.
Last season ended on a high for me because it had half a dozen romance anime that were as good as or even better than their source manga. Skip to Loafer, Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia, Watashi no Yuri wa Oshigoto Desu!, Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu, Jijou o Shiranai Tenkousei ga Guigui Kuru, Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi o Suru were all excellent as were the slightly more formulaic Otonari ni Ginga and delayed from the previous season Kubo-san wa Mob o Yurusanai. It has been a long time since a non-isekai genre so dominated a season. Nor should we forget there was both Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo and Birdie Wing: Golf Girls Story both sticking the landing in their respective romances.
In contrast, this season has regressed to the mean, with isekai and related shows dominating again with no real outstanding shows in it unlike you can tolerate Mushoku Tensei. Which I can’t. There aren’t that many series I’m at all enthusiastic about or looking forward to seeing each week, except for the ones above. Lots of shows I wouldn’t mind watching, but little interest to actually start watching. But maybe there are shows that I’ve missed that you like?