I think today I'll obsess over Gundam Seed. Why? Because the DN Angel anime doesn't start until tomorrow, so I can't obsess over that for a while. Fortunately, Athena and I got connections so we may be able to get raw episodes. We were going to try to join a fansubbing group, because we had heard that it's nearly impossible to get raws otherwise, but things were all wacky and stuff. But like I said, we got connections.
Anyway, the fansubbing group we were going to join if we had been able to figure out what was going on with IRC or something is Aoshi Fansubs. They happened to also work on Gundam Seed, but that's not why we downloaded it. But we had kind of been on a Gundam Wing kick because Clay mentioned it in an email and then we started obsessing and remembering how much we liked it. We tried to do a little campaigning to see if we could get Dad to buy the whole series for us on DVD, but we weren't bold enough and then there was a slight financial crisis.
So here we were, Gundam Wing deprived, and then we ran out of anime. Seriously, fansubbers need to work it out so by the time I've run out of episodes from one series, there are new episodes from another one *grin* I mean really. There were no new episodes of GetBackers, Spiral, Petite Princess Yucie, Licensed by Royal or Wolf's Rain. Something's not right about that. Okay, so there were a couple of new GetBackers episodes, but only two episodes and several days equals lots of time with no new anime.
So we were bored and then we remembered that we had put some episodes of Full Moon o Sagashite and Gundam Seed on Heather's computer in hopes of watching them with the whole Posse later. Actually, Gina had reminded us of Full Moon o Sagashite. And Clay had mentioned Gundam Seed along with his first mention of GW. So we got those episodes and watched them and they were really good.
The problem we had had with Gundam Seed before is a problem that seems to be just a part of the whole Gundam thing. There are about eighty million characters, all of whom are introduced in the first episode, thus making it nigh impossible to figure out what the spoon is going on. That's why, despite having seen the first two episodes long ago, we weren't extremely interested in watching any further. But then in the third episode, things calm down enough to tell you what happened in the last two episodes and the story goes on and it's all interesting and stuff.
I can't go into a whole lot of detail without giving away stuff. Well, I guess it's nothing anyone would mind knowing before they see the series, but I always prefer not knowing anything about a series before I see it, so I'm not going to explain story stuff. Aoshi Fansubs actually did a reasonably good fansubbing job, except they mispelled all the names. Of course, given that they probably didn't go searching all over the web for official Japanese merchandise (not that I'm obsessed), they did the best they could. The spellings of the names are really wacky in some places.
I mean with names like Athrun, Yzak, and Dearka, it's kind of hard to get them right based on katakana. Not to mention Mwu and Fllay. Fllay is an enigma to me. She actually doesn't show up in the first episode, and we can't figure out if she's supposed to be the Relena or the Dorothy of the series. At any rate, she is one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen in my life. Minmei from Macross didn't annoy us so much, but this girl...wow. She's so completely clueless and self-centered and stuff. And she's really mean to Kira (Kira's the main character and he's played by Hoshi-sempai). And she doesn't seem to really think before she does anything. And she's really biased. She's like the typical rich girl who only cares about herself that you'll find in American high-school shows like Saved by the Bell and stuff, only way, way, waaaay worse.
But that's not what confuses me. There are characters like that all over the place. What really confuses me is that we went to the official Gundam Seed website and they had a bunch of votes for stuff. One of them was the obligatory favorite character poll. Fortunately, she wasn't first (that was Athrun, and I really can't complain about that). But she was second. And there were considerable gaps between vote counts. (As a note, Raww le Kleuze (the obligatory blond masked man) was third and Kira was fourth.) And then in the vote to see who the fans would like to see Kira hook up with, she was number one. That was appalling. She is really mean to him.
There was a time when she yelled at Kira and then later found out more about the situation and apologized to him and didn't even try to say, "But I'm still right!" or anything, so I thought she might start turning cool. But then she went psycho again. It was really almost scary how psycho she was, except that it was mostly just facial expressions and she didn't do anything. She did start sounding rational in episode 12, so there may still be hope.
And she's always clinging to Kira's friend Sai (I don't know if I spelled that right; he's not on any of the merchandise I've seen). Sai reminds me of Elton John. It's very rare for an anime character to remind me of a real life person (except for Keiji in DN Angel, who looks and acts almost exactly like our cousin Jonathan), but Sai... I mean, he has really short sandy blond hair and he wears these not-quite-sunglasses that just make him look like Elton John. It's wacky.
Lacus, on the other hand, would make an excellent match for Kira, except that she's engaged to someone else, which really makes you wonder because the opening sequence really makes then seem like a couple. Athena and I were worried about her because she's played by Rie Tanaka, who we've really only heard a lot of in Rizelmine. Normally, that would be fine, except that she plays Kyoko, who represents all the is evil and disgusting and wrong about the Rizelmine anime (although she is kind of a fun character). She's also going to play Towa in the DN Angel anime, a role we felt should have gone to Kotono Mitsuishi, but that's no reason to be biased against another of her characters.
So anyway, Lacus finally showed up and it looked like she wasn't exactly going to be the Relena of the series, but more like she would be the Minmei of the series. That would have been very strange, because Minmeis are for Macross, not Gundam. But while she does sing a lot, she doesn't win wars by singing. Also, she was strangely not annoying. She seems to win wars by telling people to cut it out. It's kind of fun. She is a bit extra sweet, but, unlike many sickeningly sweet characters, she's assertive and she knows who she is and has no angst. She seems to know who everyone else is too. So I actually like her, which I find to be rather odd.
And now Akira Ishida's got two characters working for him to bring him to the top of my list of favorite seiyuu, because right now I think Athrun is my favorite Gundam Seed character. I really can't quite tell though, because I like Kira a lot too. I think I can relate to Athrun a lot. He acts very much like your typical mecha pilot hero, calm and collected and he knows what he's doing and he's not going to get all emotional over things because he's fighting a war and can't afford to get emotional. But there are times where for just a couple of frames you can see under that shell he's created and tell that he's really struggling. It's more obvious earlier on because of what's going on; he hadn't had time to set up the wall. But still. I like him a lot.
I would obsess over Athrun some more, but I'm not sure what I'm willing to give away just yet. So that's it for now. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to talk about the DN Angel anime, and we may have a new DN Angel layout in commemoration. Kind of funny how Athena and I get to have a DN layout despite Pam being the only other Posse member to have read the series. I mean, it's not like I'm the only one who can post here.
Last HHSLJET communication at 05:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Once again I must apologize to the small number of people who actually read this for not updating. Most of those people probably know why. Basically, last Friday I just wasn't in a rambling mood and then the weekend was incredibly stressful and that stress carried on until Tuesday and then yesterday I just forgot.
Anyway, now I'm back and hopefully this kind of thing won't happen very often. Although one advantage of not updating for a week is that now I have a bunch of stuff I could write about. The problem is choosing which thing.
Oh! While I'm thinking about it, I have a quick follow up on the Akira Ishida seiyuu/Akira Ishida manga artist thing. We found an interview with the manga artist and he said he was from Hiroshima. So we checked the voice actor's profile and he's from Aichi. If I remember correctly (I never got around to checking), Aichi is north of Tokyo, while Hiroshima, as I think many people know, is south of Tokyo. Now unless he's was born in one place and raised in the other and is using each different one for the different interviews, I'm going to stick with the idea that they're different people.
My entry about Akira Ishida (the voice actor) was mostly a rant about how he doesn't sing. I never really went into why I like him so much. So here goes.
The first time we heard him was when James showed us an episode of SailorMoon SuperS, in which Mr. Ishida plays Fisheye. Because Fisheye is extremely gay (for those of you who haven't seen SMSS, he actually does kiss Mamoru) and very much an okama, he sounds very much like a girl. In fact, we thought he was played by a girl. That is, we did, until we saw Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which he plays Kaworu, and looked up all the voices.
Then we heard him as Ren in Fushigi Yuugi and we knew he played Xellos in Slayers. Xellos, being a favorite of many, many people, was someone we figured we probably wouldn't care much about. It's just one of our things where if something is really popular, we don't tend to like it. There are a few things that manage to get us over that prejudice, and Xellos happens to be one of them, but that doesn't really have any bearing on this story, because we heard Xellos after we saw Saiyuki.
Anyway, we weren't really impressed with Mr. Ishida until we watched SailorMoon SuperS a second time. By this time, we had forgotten what Fisheye sounded like and we still weren't too familiar with the voice actor. We heard Fisheye start to talk and he still sounded like a girl to us. So we went back and checked our Fushigi Yuugi tape and listened and we knew it was the same guy, but it was still weird. So we took our microphone and recorded a clip of each one onto our computer and went back and forth listening to them and were in awe.
We decided that any guy who can sound that much like a girl is very talented and deserves to be on our list of very favorite seiyuu.
I think the thing that really made me fall in love with Akira Ishida though is when we saw The End of Evangelion. James decided he really wanted to show it to us even though he knew we can't handle too much violence, and I guess we decided we could handle it for some reason or another. His copy was in raw Japanese, of course, and Eva is a mecha series. Mecha series are incredibly hard to understand without subtitles, and this was Evangelion we were talking about. That one's hard to understand even with subtitles. It probably doesn't help that we had just come back from seeing A.I.
At any rate, here we were, watching this movie, the world is being destroyed, we can only understand about a fourth of the dialogue...okay, probably more than a fourth, but this was a while ago. And then I hear a voice that says it's okay. I don't remember the exact quote; it was a while ago. It was the first thing Kaworu says, and I had completely forgotten about him, even when he said that. It took a minute before I figured out who was talking.
And somehow, it really felt like everything was going to be okay. Maybe it was my weird mood from watching The End of Eva right after A.I., but it was very comforting to hear that.
So I decided that anyone who can say that it's okay and really make it seem like everything is okay deserves to be at least number three on the list. I've already mentioned that we don't give up on favorites so easily. Back then Yuuji Ueda was number one and we were determined that he would stay that way.
Akira Ishida still hasn't been able to make it to the very top of our list. Soichiro Hoshi is too cute and Toshihiko Seki is too...Toshihiko Seki. I don't know, he just seems like the nicest guy in the world in every picture we see him in. But once the DN Angel anime starts, we'll see what happens.
Last HHSLJET communication at 05:06 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, 2003
Today I'm going to talk more about D.N. Angel. Why? Because I like it, of course.
Well, that and the fact that today we found the official DN Angel homepage. Fortunately, it only just opened on Monday, so we didn't have to go crazy that this page has been here all this time and we didn't know about it. And the conspiracy theories begin again.
But before I go into those, I'm going to talk about voice actors. The official homepage still only has a little bit of information on the manga and the anime, but it does have a more complete cast list. And we were sad. We were hoping, and I don't know if I mentioned this before, that either they'd get the original voice of Daisuke's father (Toshihiko Seki), or they'd get Soichiro Hoshi, because that would have been really cute. Instead, they got Masaki Terasoma. He's in almost nothing. So it's really hard to find something to download and listen to him. If only the Posse would watch more Tokyo Underground...
They listed the voice of Takeshi, so we finally know who will play him, but we have no idea who he is. We may have to do a search.
They also listed two characters whose names were completely unfamiliar. This is a problem. We're supposed to know everything about DN, and here they are having two characters whose names we don't recognize. They could have listed Keiji or Funabashi or Ritsuko or even Miyuki or Yuuji. Or even Menou! But no. They have to have these two people. The only thing we can figure is that they're new or from the novels. So now of course the first thing we have to do when we get back to Los Angeles is see if Kinokuniya has the novels, and if not, special order them.
Now I'm torn. My loyalty to Hoshi-sempai says I should be outraged that he's no longer in DN Angel. But the reason I liked him to begin with is because he was in DN Angel, and I trust Yukiru Sugisaki to choose good voices. And I've watched Athena play Kingdom Hearts and fell in love with Sora. And the more we watched Sora, the more we thought of Daisuke and how perfect it is that his Japanese voice will be Daisuke.
And this is where the conspiracy theories begin. I think that Yukiru Sugisaki and Tetsuya Nomura (the character designer and director of Kingdom Hearts) are in cahoots. Because not only is Sora very much like Daisuke, but there are a bunch of Kingdom Hearts pictures (postcards and things) that seem very Yukiru Sugisaki-esque. Okay, so it's really not much to go on, but let me have my delusions for a while.
At any rate, it would seem that Yukiru Sugisaki's been playing a lot of Square games for PS2. Unless all the suggestions for stuff came from her fans and/or assistants. There are two people writing the music for DN Angel. One of them, Tomoki Hasegawa, wrote the music for Legend of Galactic Heroes and a bunch of other stuff; we're still trying to find stuff. The other, Takahito Eguchi, wrote the music for Final Fantasy X-2. He also wrote music for The Bouncer and a few other video games. So of course we had to look at the credits to our FFX image CD, and he wrote Tidus's song! That made us very happy. He also wrote Yuna's song, which is also very good, but it's not Tidus, so I don't care as much.
So far, the DN Angel anime is turning out to follow the same pattern as the other Yukiru Sugisaki anime series. Megami Kouhosei and Rizelmine both had excellent, if fairly unknown, casts and fabulous music. The scripts are where both of them had issues. We can only hope the director does not allow the same pattern in DN Angel.
And now a little bit about the DN homepage! It's got lots and lots of pretty pictures. All manga pics, none from the anime. Except for the one on the page about the anime. And it looks like it's going to have information on Yukiru Sugisaki herself, as well as stuff about merchandise. And there's going to be a special section. Usually that means wallpaper and stuff. So we're pretty excited, and now we have to check it every single day. It's our new homepage, actually. I suppose I should put the link.........nah.
Last HHSLJET communication at 05:36 p.m. on Thursday, March 20, 2003
Now it's time to talk about my favorite voice actor, Soichiro Hoshi.
Actually, it took a pretty long time before Athena and I even really knew who he was. We were surfing some Japanese websites and we came across Kosuke Okano's site (he plays Recca in Flame of Recca) and he had a link to Hikaru Midorikawa's site. Since Mr. Midorikawa is Tamahome and Fushigi Yuugi was our favorite series at the time, of course we had to go to his site.
So we spent some time there and then went to see whose sites he had links to. He had a link to Soichiro Hoshi's site, which we decided to check out because hoshi (with different kanji) is Japanese for star, and stars are cool. From that site we found out that he played Kain Blueriver in Lost Universe, a series we still have yet to see the rest of, and he's the Japanese dub voice of Ferguson in Clarissa Explains It All, which we used to watch all the time. So we were a little excited, but we had no idea what the man sounded like.
We had another experience with Mr. Hoshi when we were looking up Yuuji Ueda. I don't remember if it was before or after we found his website. But this online place Laox had a bunch of essays written by a bunch of seiyuu, Mr. Hoshi being one of them. Again we checked them out because hoshi means star, but we didn't read very far, since we still weren't sure who this guy was.
Probably the first time we actually heard him was when we saw Tenshi ni Narumon! (I'm Gonna be an Angel!). He plays one of the friends of the main character. The character was pretty cute, but not cute enough for us to care.
Then Kat got us into Saiyuki. She asked us to pick up a volume of the manga for her at Kinokuniya, so we got one for her and one for us. We translated it so she could understand what was going on (now she likes to read manga herself, without translations), and we got a little bit hooked. But only a little because it was only one volume of manga, and it was hard to understand. We decided to look up the main cast because we figured it would be a while before we actually saw the series anyway. We saw that Soichiro Hoshi played Goku and by that time we had seen the name enough to go, "Oh, that guy!"
And then, wonder of wonders, almost as soon as we got back to college with our fast connection, we managed to get the first episode of Saiyuki, and fairly soon thereafter the second and third. Unfortunately, the first three episodes, while not bad, are not enough to get someone obsessed. Still enough to tell that there is definitely some potential there, but that's about it.
That's when Becca came in. She's the one that lent us her D.N. Angel manga. I'm not sure how, but we figured out that there had been CD dramas made and we looked up the cast right away. That's when we found out that Soichiro Hoshi played Daisuke. He instantly shot closer to the top of our list of favorite seiyuu, but having only really heard him as Goku, we weren't sure if he would make a good Daisuke.
We decided we needed to hear more of him, so first we downloaded Argento Soma. This was a very strange experience. Mr. Hoshi plays Ryu Soma, and anyone who knows who that is would probably have a hard time thinking of the same guy playing all the cute little guys he plays, such as Goku and Daisuke. It was very much a brain-hurty thing.
Now, while Daisuke is clearly our favorite DN character, we can't focus solely on the one voice actor. We needed to hear more of everyone. Satoshi was played by Tomokazu Seki, and since he's Chichiri, that wasn't a problem. The hard part was finding Masaya Onosaka, the voice of Dark. He also played Vash in Trigun and Jadeite in SailorMoon, which would have been great if we had access to anything other than the English dubs. So we looked him up and found out that he was in Angelic Layer. We also found out that he was in Prince of Tennis, but that just wasn't an anime for us.
So we finally got volumes three and four of DN from Mom and we needed something to listen to while we translated it. We were in major obsession mode (there actually are different levels), so an ordinary CD wasn't enough. We wanted to hear DN voices. So we listened to episodes one and two of Saiyuki, because not only was Daisuke played by Goku, but Daisuke's father was played by Sanzo. And then we decided to take a break from translating and watch Angelic Layer, because then we could hear two more DN voices, as Tomokazu Seki and Masaya Onosaka are both in it.
We were on episode three. CLAMP series tend to have the same grouping of voice actors, so as soon as we saw Ohjiro (I'm not really sure the official spelling *pout*) we figured he'd be played by Nozomu Sasaki, who's in Rayearth as well as Card Captor Sakura. He didn't talk in the first scene that showed him though. But then Misaki met him and he started talking. And we're like "Wait..." and we listened to him talk some more. And we're like "That sounds like..." but we weren't sure because we hadn't really heard much of him. But then we saw the credits. I can't remember exactly what happened, but I'm sure there was much squealing as we found out that Ohjiro was in fact played by Soichiro Hoshi.
Ohjiro instantly became our favorite character, which was great because he's exactly the kind of character who would have been our favorite anyway, except that he's in love with a twelve-year-old, the perv. (He's seventeen.) And we decided that Mr. Hoshi would indeed make a good Daisuke and he became our most favorite seiyuu. I've already mentioned that it takes a lot for someone to replace a previous favorite.
So then we started looking for interviews and stuff, and we read those essays at the Laox website, which are adorable! Mr. Hoshi is seriously one of the cutest people I've ever seen. He's actually thirty years old, but he looks to be about seventeen, and only because he recently changed his hairstyle so he doesn't look fourteen anymore. I guess he gets a lot of fanmail saying how cute he is because in that Saiyuki memorial thing, Toshihiko Seki teased him about it. They put a mask thingy on him because they were playing a trivia game with the Saiyuki fans and the seiyuu team got the answer wrong. So they made Hoshi-sempai (yes I'm calling him that, because Mr. just seems so wrong) wear the mask. And Mr. Seki told him he was incredibly cute in that tone of voice that says, "You know I'm only saying this because I know it gets on your nerves." It was adorable!
And when Hoshi-sempai came out to sing his image song he seemed so nervous and tired and everytime I saw it I said, "That poor, poor boy," despite the fact that he's ten years older than I am. And when they sang "blow winds" he kept looking back at the dancers behind them. He's such a little kid! It's so cute! When we go to Japan, he's going to be our little big brother.
Last HHSLJET communication at 09:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19, 2003
If you're an active member of the LDS Church, you may have come across a talk entitled "Saturday Morning Cartoons." If you're not, here's a brief summary: Basically, it's about how you can't let yourself be distracted by unimportant things, which, by itself, is a very good message. But here's the story. This family wants to make sure their kids have goals and are working towards them, so they have a talk with their kids each week. The one kid wants to be a doctor one week and a pilot the next. The parents have no problem that the kid changed his goal, that's allowable, but they were shocked to find out that the reason he no longer wanted to be a doctor was that he didn't want to risk missing his Saturday morning cartoons. And thus Saturday morning cartoons became a symbol of any insignificant thing that distracts us from our true goals.
Now, anyone who knows me would know that I would go through the roof on hearing that. First and most obviously, most of my life revolves around cartoons. My main goal is to go to Japan and be a voice actress, working on cartoons. If Saturday morning cartoons are a distraction from that, then something is seriously wrong with the world.
Now I can kind of see where the person giving the talk was coming from. Most people consider cartoons to be a brainless form of entertainment, and in some cases, that's true. However, my other argument is that cartoons often have excellent messages that, if people would learn from them, would make the world a much happier place. Yu-Gi-Oh may be so sappy it gives cavities, but there are some good things to be learned. It's like that book, "Everything I Ever Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten."
When I was little, I watched stuff like Care Bears all the time. And from those shows I learned things like determination and how I can do anything if I really put my mind to it. At least, I think it's from those shows, because I remember hearing those things all the time in cartoons and from it, I've gotten a lot out of life. I wanted costumes, so I got some help from Mom and learned how to sew. We wanted to watch more SailorMoon so we started teaching ourselves Japanese. And yeah people thought we were crazy sometimes, but we didn't let that get to us because our cartoons taught us that it doesn't matter what other people think. All the things they tried to teach us in the Young Women's program at church are things we had already learned from hours of cartoons. Even things like Tiny Toons and Animaniacs taught us these lessons.
The thing is though, not everyone picks up the lessons. I'm almost sure it was mostly subliminal. Or the "Learning is repitition" thing. But I've noticed how I can really like something and watch or listen to it over and over and not realize what it's trying to tell me.
For example, around the end of summer break and the beginning of the new school year, people were giving me problems. Aw, heck, it was all summer. And then one day, or on the way to Utah or at some point, we were listening to the song "open up your mind" from Saiyuki. And in the song, in plain English, it says, "You can take another look from the other side." And I thought about it. And I tried it. And it gave me a whole new perspective. It was still kind of annoying though, because I wanted to be mad at people. But I realized that they had their own problems to deal with, and being mad at them wouldn't help anything.
And while I would like to point out that that song came from a cartoon, I probably shouldn't be that shallow. (Sorry; I couldn't resist.)
But it's not just cartoons. There are good messages in all sorts of places, if people would just look for them. The trick is actually learning from them. Eheh.
Last HHSLJET communication at 09:19 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Hello. My name is Alethea. And I have...a problem.
Actually, I've long since gotten over this addiction, but I was reminded of it yesterday and felt the need to talk about it today. Athena and I over the summer developed an addiction to Yu-Gi-Oh.
Now honestly, I think Yu-Gi-Oh is a good program and I would totally let my kids watch it, assuming I had any. Even the dub is pretty good. It seems really cheesy, and often I have a tendency to blame things like that on the fact that I'm watching the dubbed version, but I've seen the Japanese version, and it's not much better. The sappiness is all in the lines, and I'm thinking it's not poor writing in adapting the English translation.
Fun4Kids, from what I've seen of their work, does some pretty decent translating. Not that I can really tell, seeing as how it's nearly impossible to come by a Japanese version of any of the things they've done, but usually there's kind of a feel you get when something is done poorly. And the voices they get actually seem to fit the characters for the most part. (Don't get me started on Pokemon's Butch.)
For example, Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh is played by Hikaru Midorikawa in the Japanese version. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the name, he's played such favorites as Fushigi Yuugi's Tamahome, Gundam Wing's Heero Yuy, and Slayers' Zelgadis. In the English version, he's played by Eric Stuart. And listening to Eric Stuart playing Kaiba, his voice quality matched Mr. Midorikawa's very well.
No, the problem with Yu-Gi-Oh is not the dub. It's the fact that it has characters getting suicidal over a little card game. There are so many times I want to grab the character, smack them repeatedly and yell, "IT'S JUST A CARD GAME!!!!!!!"
Sadly, the card game angst is what got us addicted. It was the episode where Yuugi battled Kaiba in front of the castle thingy place before he could go participate in the finals and fight Pegasus yadah-yadah-whatever. We had been weakened by the fact that we had just translated volume 5 of the Saiyuki manga, in which (and I may have mentioned this before) a character rips his eye out because of angst. And then Kaiba makes a move such that if Yuugi wins the card battle, Kaiba will die. Because he stands on the wall of the castle, on the other side of which is a cliff and then a bunch of rocks and the ocean. And if Yuugi wins, the force of the hologram being destroyed could knock Kaiba off the wall, thus causing his untimely demise. Yes, the shockwave from a holographic explosion would kill Kaiba.
And for some reason, that was enough to get us to watch. Maybe it was because we wanted to find out what it was about a stupid card game that would cause someone to angst so much. And actually, when you get more of the back story, it does make more sense. However, I still hold that it IS JUST A CARD GAME!!!!!
It wasn't until much later that we finally saw the following episode (they were showing them out of order; what would I do?). And it was one of the sappiest things I have ever seen in my entire life. Yuugi was catatonic because he almost killed Kaiba over a stupid card game. (At least he realizes there's more to life.) And now that Kaiba has defeated him, Kaiba took some of his star thingies that he needs to qualify to go into the castle. So thie other chick Mai comes and says she has extra and ends up challenging him so he can have them, but he's still catatonic, so Teah (not sure on the spelling) says she'll fight Mai, despite having never really played much before.
Teah pulls from Yuugi's deck the Shining Friendship Card. That's right. The Shining Friendship Card. And she says, "I wish this card was like our friendship, because then it would be the strongest card in the world." I think it was actually sappier than that, but it's been a while. And I must commend Lisa Ortiz on a beautiful delivery of that line; she sounded sincere. I can see it being extremely difficult to sound sincere with a line like that.
Fortunately, Mai was there to say things like, "Oh please, don't make me puke." And yet Mai was touched by Teah's devotion and threw the match. And despite this being one of the sappiest things I've seen in my entire life, I was crying at the end.
Sappy as it is, I think this show has some really good messages. However, I have decided that it's not worth the effort to wake up early enough on a Saturday to watch the spoony thing in order, and weeks of not watching it have cured me of my addiction. Until we meet again, Yu-Gi-Oh.
Last HHSLJET communication at 09:41 p.m. on Monday, March 17, 2003
For some reason, people keep asking what kind of guys Athena and I go for and then feel the need to add, "Not anime." What these people fail to understand is how thoroughly anime has been ingrained into our lives. We've been obsessed with cartoons since we can remember. We never went through a stage where we thought cartoons were for kids and we never gave into peer pressure when other people tried to tell us.
The first guy either of us noticed and thought, "Ooh, he's cute," was Thomas from Disney's Pocahontas. He happens to be played by Christian Bale, who is also very pretty, but we didn't notice Christian Bale. We noticed Thomas.
This isn't to say that we don't like real guys. We just spend so much time thinking about anime and manga that we don't know who's out there. There are some guys in our Japanese classes that are pretty cute, and there was a really good looking captain working at BYU Catering. Not to mention Sexy Para-Para Tim. But it always takes me a while to think of cute actors.
For the record, now that I'm thinking about it, some actors Athena and I both find to be cute (but rank differently) are Tom Welling, Michael Rosenbaum, the three guys from Gilmore Girls whose actors' names I don't remember all of (Dean, Luke, and Jess. I know Jess is played by a guy named Milo), Julian McMahon and, um...well... There are others, but I don't like them because of their looks alone. Like Gregory Smith. He's kind of cute, but not really high up there. But he plays Ephram in Everwood and therefore I like him.
I still don't understand why I have to drool over real guys though. I don't have a chance with any of these guys anyway, so I might as well go for the really sexy ones. Dark Mousy. Now there's a man. He has kind of a stupid name, but that doesn't make him an less sexy.
Last HHSLJET communication at 02:13 p.m. on Friday, March 14, 2003
Sorry for not updating yesterday; I was freaking out. Not that it really matters; I'm sure all of about maybe three people check this thing.
But now I get to explain why I was freaking out. Athena and I were expecting a call from TokyoPop.
It all started one day when Heather was telling us about a survey TokyoPop was having. It's till going on right now, actually. They want to know what titles the fans want them to license. I'm not sure why Heather was telling us about this survey, because she knows we have a thing against translated manga. But it's definitely a good thing she did.
When we told Mom that we had a thing about translated manga, she said we were manga snobs. I like to think that's not the case, but she may be right to an extent. Athena and I like to be the ones who know all about our favorite serieses, and when the manga gets translated, suddenly we have a bunch of people telling us all about this series, which we're supposed to be the authorities on. I guess that can be considered to be snobby, but anime and manga are almost the only things Athena and I have to be the best at. I guess that's the problem with over-specializing.
I guess it could also be considered kind of hypocritical, since one of our main hobbies is translating manga. And then we give the translations to our friends. If everyone learned Japanese just to read manga, one, we wouldn't be special for being able to read Japanese, and two, we'd be out one of our main pastimes.
But anyway, Heather was telling us about this survey. And she said that all of her friends put either Saiyuki, D.N. Angel, or both on their list (you're allowed three choices). My first reaction to that was one of major distress. They can't translate Saiyuki and D.N. Angel! Those serieses belong to us! (Okay, so I know about a bazillion people would like to argue that with me, but that's what I was thinking.)
But then I made a realization that filled me with horror. Okay, not really, but let me be overly dramatic once in a while. Saiyuki and D.N. Angel are going to be translated one day whether we like it or not. And there will be no stopping it. And when I came to my senses, I made another realization. TokyoPop might hire interns.
So I ran up to my room (I really did; ask Athena or Heather) and went straight to the TokyoPop website. And, as I had hoped, they were hiring interns. We figure if the manga's going to be translated anyway, we might as well be in on it. So we spent the morning fixing up our resume so we could email it to them when we got back from class.
When we told James that we had applied for an internship, his first reaction was, "Will you actually be doing any translating?" His idea of an intern is that interns mostly just go around and do stuff like get coffee for the actual employees. From just about everything I've heard about interns, I have to agree.
TokyoPop is stationed in Los Angeles. This is quite fortunate because, while we are schooling in Provo, Utah, our family is in a suburb of L.A. So we told TokyoPop that and they want to set up an interview when we get back. And yet for some reason, maybe because I'm horrible at sending e-mail (meaning I generally don't), they wanted to set up a phone interview. That interview was yesterday.
So we spent the entire morning freaking out because we had an interview, and the whole rest of the day getting over the whole thing along with all the other stress from the week.
I think the interview went well, because they still want to meet us in April. Still nothing definite, but at least it's not a definite no. It was kind of hard to figure out what was going on. The woman conducting the interview (she was very nice) clearly had several things on her mind, but didn't let on much to what any of them were. I think they wanted to make sure we chose TokyoPop because we're truly obsessed with manga and not just because we need an internship to graduate from college. Or something. But dude, like Dharma told Greg, "I would do this for a box of donuts and a poke in the eye."
At any rate, I think I did learn one thing from the interview. James probably wasn't too far off.
Last HHSLJET communication at 07:31 p.m. on Thursday, March 13, 2003
As has been mentioned previously, Akira Ishida (the voice of Hakkai) doesn't sing in the Saiyuki Vocal Albums. Athena and I always found this to be rather annoying, especially after we got the Saiyuki Four Songs album that came out with the movie. It's called Four Songs, and yet it only has three. Hakkai's got some sort of a recitation thingie, which sounds rather like he's a beatnik or something.
While I guess it might be true that, had Akira Ishida sung on the vocal albums, we wouldn't have that beautiful mini-drama, it's still kind of annoying. It's become kind of a quest now to find Akira Ishida singing. I guess all we really need to do is get a Slayers album, or even just get the mp3s from Kat, but that's not the point.
So now everytime we find out about an image album from a series he's in, we do everything we can to find the tracklist and who sings each song. Apparently Shinkouhyou doesn't sing on the Houshin Engi image album. As for Samurai Deeper Kyo...well...we're not sure. Animaxis says there are nine character songs. But there are ten characters pictured on the cover. Possibly there's a duet, but the seiyuu database we go to does not list him as being on the CD. If we weren't poor college students, we'd just buy the CD and find out for sure, but we are. But dude, Tomokazu Seki's character doesn't show up until about episode 19 or 20 (out of 26), and he gets a song!
We have a theory that there's kind of a game going on between Akira Ishida and the anime people to see how he can avoid singing. Like with Samurai Deeper Kyo...
Animation staff: We're doing an image album. Ishida-san, what kind of song would you like to sing?
Akira Ishida: Do I have to sing? Give Hoshi-kun my song.
Soichiro Hoshi: Ooh! Can I sing? Can I sing? Pleeeeeease?
Animation staff: *heavy sigh* Fine.
Or something like that.
We figure at any rate it has something to with what Hakkai said in that mini-drama to explain why he wouldn't do karaoke. We were reading an interview about the Anime Tencho CD in which Akira Ishida does sing, but he's accompanied by Hiro Yuuki and Soichiro Hoshi. Of all the people in the CD, they interviewed...a few...and he was one of them. I find that amusing. But anyway, he said he was afraid he was messing up the other two guys, or something to that effect. And when they made all the guys at the Saiyuki memorial thingie over the summer perform Blow Winds, he was definitely the least excited about it.
There are a couple of times we heard him sing. The first was in Nurse Angel Ririka. I don't remember what he was singing about; it was just his character humming to himself, something about how great he is or something. The other time is in our Lagoon Engine mini CD drama. He plays the editor who comes to the main characters' house and cooks for them and stuff. And since it was a Christmas special, he was singing Joy to the World to himself. Probably not the best rendition I've heard, but Shintaro's not the type to be on tune. So either Akira Ishida was using that fact to his advantage, since he can't sing either, or he was faking it.
We need to get Haruka Naru Toki no Naka de CDs. When you play a main character in a love sim for girls, there's no way you're going to be allowed to not sing.
Recently another thing has been confusing us about Akira Ishida. There's a manga artist who goes by Akira Ishida, only he spells the Akira with hiragana, while the voice actor uses kanji. Normally, we would ignore it, since Akira and Ishida are both very common Japanese names. But there are two things. First, we know the voice actor is a good artist. Second, the main thing we know the manga artist worked on was Gunparade March, in which the voice actor plays the guy who, as of the first episode of the anime, appears to be the main guy. You'd think, having visited so many Japanese fansites for the voice actor, we'd know something. So maybe it is a different guy. Our search continues.
Last HHSLJET communication at 04:08 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, 2003
On Saturday we got a happy happy package, which means today I get to write all about it. My original plan was to turn it into a rant about how Akira Ishida doesn't sing, but I think I'll have to save that for later, as I have quite a bit to talk about already.
It all started in May or June, actually. We found out from Kazuya Minekura's website that there was going to be a Saiyuki Vocal album, and from that site, we got the link to another site that had samples of each of the songs. We made the mistake of listening to them and had wanted the CD ever since. Sadly, we couldn't find it at Anime Expo. And since we found out there was going to be another one, we decided to wait until it came out and order both from CD Japan, thus saving on shipping costs.
The second vocal album was scheduled to come out in September, but for some reason it didn't. The internet broadcast thing did, however, and we got to see three of the songs performed live, making us want the CDs even more. And the second vocal album's release date was pushed back yet again.
We later found out that the release date was pushed back because of Kazuya Minekura. You see, since Hakkai doesn't sing (the punk!), there are two mini-dramas on each CD featuring him, each written and directed by Kazuya Minekura herself. And she hadn't written the scenarios for the second vocal album. After confessing, she said she had a feeling she would get a lot of emails to the effect of, "They're not releasing the CD because of your stupid little mini-drama!?" And I wouldn't blame any fans that sent them; I felt the same way.
So the end of January comes along and we finally, finally get to order our CDs. We also ordered the D.N. Angel Trilogy CD, as it is currently the only D.N. Angel CD with image songs. And the only one we didn't have. We had heard that Satoshi's song was the worst Tomokazu Seki song there was, but we liked it. The other two songs are fun too.
The rest of the Posse had ordered CDs too, because that way everyone can help pay for shipping and it's less expensive. When the CDs got here, we had to be very careful because we're selfish and want to listen to our CDs by ourselves first. We didn't want to risk anyone saying, "Let's listen to new CDs," and ruining our first experience listening to them. And because they came on a Saturday, it was a little tricky. So when the package arrived, I quietly signed for it and took it to our room and waited for Athena to get out of the shower, at which point we closed our door and didn't emerge from our room until we had heard all three CDs.
And after we heard the second Saiyuki vocal album, we were able to forgive Kazuya Minekura for taking so long to write the scenario, because, dude, it was worth the wait. The one mini-drama with all four of them is the funniest thing I've ever heard.
The first album was nice and semetrical: a group song, a solo, a mini-drama, a duet, a mini-drama, a solo, and another group song. The second one followed that symmetry until track five, which happened to be a Sanzo solo. We thought that was a little bit odd, but whatever. And then track six started. With the same intro as track five. This had us a little bit worried, but Sanzo started singing from the middle of the song, and he was singing differently than he had been. And after reading this rough translation of the track, you'll realize why.
As the song progressed, the dialogue started:
Gojyo: What happened to, “There’s not a chance in h*ll I’m ever going to do karaoke”? D*mn worldly priest.
Hakkai: There’s no use arguing.
Goku: And he’s really good. It’s wacky.
Hakkai: Because he’s a priest, I suppose. They spend a lot of time chanting.
Gojyo: Oh is that the problem? Is the fact that he won’t let go of the mic also because he’s a priest?
There's a pause and then,
Goku: Wah!
Gojyo: What?
Goku: Sanzo’s holding out his pinky!
Gojyo:I don’t wanna see it.
Hakkai: That’s the first step in chanting, Goku.
Goku: Uwah! He just spun around!
Gojyo: He’s really into it...
Hakkai: I wonder if it was really a good idea to let him drink.
Goku: Hey, has anyone entered the next song?
Gojyo: Uh-oh.
Hakkai: At this rate, Sanzo will sing the next one too.
Gojyo: This is worse than fighting youkai.
Goku: Hakkai, you sing! You haven’t sung at all.
Hakkai: I’ll pass. I’m not very good.
Gojyo: That’s fine. Karaoke has nothing to do with whether or not you can sing.
Hakkai:Well…I don’t know many songs.
Goku: Anything’s fine! What do you know? A folk song?
Gojyo: Well?
Hakkai:Dona Dona…
There's a pause as they stop to consider this.
Gojyo: Never mind then, Hakkai.
Goku: Gojyo, sing this with me, ‘kay?
Gojyo: What?
Goku: “Peace”!
Gojyo makes some comment, then they sing.
Hakkai:Hahaha… Ah! Do whatever, but Sanzo’s song is ending!
Goku: Eh!? No!
They all cheer as Sanzo finishes his song.
Sanzo: Hn.
And Sanzo makes this observation,
Sanzo: What’s this? No one’s entered another song.
And proceeds to enter the number for his other image song.
Goku: He entered something! He entered something!
Gojyo: He's got the number memorized!
Hakkai: Because he’s a priest, I suppose.
Sanzo sings for a bit before the commenting begins again.
Gojyo: I don’t believe this!
Hakkai: Someone else really does need to enter the next one.
Goku: Y-you’re right. Uhh… Hey! Where are you going, Hakkai!?
Hakkai: *laughs guiltily* Oh come on. To the bathroom, obviously.
Gojyo: Come back, alright? You’re not getting out of this, Hakkai!
A phone starts ringing and Gojyo fumbles around trying to find it.
Gojyo: Hello?
Woman on phone: Your turn ends in ten minutes. Would you like to extend it?
Gojyo: Huh, what? Already? Uh...no, it’s alright; we’re almost done…
Sanzo stops singing long enough to shout,
Sanzo: We’re extending it.
Gojyo: Oh wait! We’ll extend it.
Voice on phone: How much longer would you like?
Gojyo: Uh…thirty minutes.
Sanzo: An hour.
Gojyo: We’d like an hour!
Goku: AAAAAHHH!! Sanzo’s taking off his clothes!!!!
Hakkai:Because he’s drunk…I suppose.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I want to turn both CDs into mp3s so everyone can hear them. But on the other hand, I want people to support Saiyuki and buy the CDs. We'll see what I decide.
Last HHSLJET communication at 03:52 p.m. on Monday, March 10, 2003
Heather is actually reading the weblog. I was a little surprised to find that out, since she so rarely posts in our message boards, but hey, it's cool. She says my entries are really long. I'm not sure what I think of that. I mean, I can understand not wanting to read long journal entries, but when I actually get to talk about something without interruption, I tend to talk for a long time. I think it comes from being in a family of attention sponges and having to suppress my thoughts in order to not be ridiculed for taking away the spotlight.
Anyway, I thought I'd take some time today to talk about one of my weaknesses. I have two major weaknesses: cuteness and image songs. I've always know that I've liked both, but it wasn't until recently that I realized what a strong power they held over me. This entry is on cuteness. Perhaps later I'll talk about image songs.
I think part of the reason I didn't think of my attraction to cute things as a weakness was that I find so many things to be cute. I always Sabertooth in the X-Men movie was giant teddy bear. He's just too cute to be pure evil. You know Magneto's just using him anyway. I also have a tendency to say, "That's so cute!" far more than most people.
Of course, some cute things affect me differently than others. Girls are generally cuter than boys by definition, and therefore most people are more easily swayed by girls. At least, guys are more easily swayed by girls (I know this because I've been told on several different occasions). And girls...well, I really couldn't say.
At any rate, a cute little boy is far more powerful against me than a cute little girl. If an anime has a cute boy like Goku or Quatre or Omi or Sora or Daisuke, he's almost guaranteed to be my favorite. I mean, I like Sanzo and Duo and Ken and Riku and Dark, but...cuteness!
Quatre loses points because he's played by a girl though. And I do think that Sanzo is my favorite Saiyuki character, but Goku is definitely a close second. When we were translating manga, there was a guy who had just ripped his own eye out. Athena and I are very squeamish, so this was a problem. We get pretty hyper when translating, so we were screaming at the manga and making our family give us funny looks. And then Goku jumped on him and told him to cut it out. As we looked from one frame to the next, the reaction was something like, "You stupid idiot, how could you! What are you thinki--How cute!!" Goku has saved our sanity on several occasions.
But I didn't realize this weakness was a problem until one fateful Sunday before winter break. Almost everyone had already left for their various non-college homes, so all the whole stake was having a joint meeting. Usually, one of the students (Heather in our ward) hands out the programs.
I despise programs. I decided long ago that they're a waste of time and paper. This all goes back to when we were in Young Women and they decided that the young men and young women in the ward could help out the janitorial staff by going around after Sacrament Meeting and picking up all the obvious trash left behind by the congregation. Guess what most of that trash was! That's right, programs! I've hated them ever since.
That Sunday, however, since members of the Bishoprics and Stake Presidency have children, there were two adorable little boys handing out programs. Without even blinking, I thought, "Oh how cute!" and took a program. When I got to my seat, I realized that I had a program and was disgusted with myself. I spent a few minutes wondering how on earth I could have let this happen when I realized. It was the cuteness. It was the cuteness.
Last HHSLJET communication at 05:17 p.m. on Friday, March 7, 2003
I've been operating under a new theory. Things have had a tendency lately to start sucking and then get better. My theory is something like this: When life starts to suck, if you decide it's not really as bad as you think (because usually it's not), then you get a blessing. And then later you get another trial. Kind of a vicious cycle, but if you learn from it, things can turn out to be really cool.
The beginnings of this theory came about one day when things were pretty cool. I had finally started updating the web log, we had gotten our homework done, we were being productive, and I was feeling pretty good about everything. Then the phone rang. Heather picked it up, talked for a while, then came to tell us it was Pam and she wanted to talk to one of us. Heather then proceeded to tell us that Pam's landlady had said that they couldn't keep Jeep (more on him later; for now you can check Posse profiles). And for some reason, the way Heather delivers bad news really gets on my nerves, so when I was done talking to Pam I spent a lot of time brooding about how Heather should not be allowed to deliver bad news anymore. I think I'm beginning to see how the phrase about killing the messenger came into being.
I realized that I was being stupid and took measures to calm myself down. I think it was then that I emailed Clay for the first time, although it might have been before that. I really can't remember how successful I was in calming down, but I do remember thinking that it was ridiculous to let a little thing like that ruin my good mood and by the next morning I was pretty excited that good things were going to happen.
Optimism is a good thing. When we got back from Japanese 322, we checked our email like always and had two very happy surprises, each of us noticing a different one first. The one that arrived first was from CD Japan. They had shipped our order and it's on its way here. So very soon we should be getting very happy CDs. The second was the first email from Clay, which was very happy because he complimented our Japanese and wanted to start a correspondence. I've already gone into that a little.
And I was really sad about Clay not emailing on Saturday. You see, I have a huge fear of being hated. I've lost a few friends, and in some cases I can see where I was being a jerk, but in others they apparently just couldn't stand me to begin with and there was something that triggered a huge fight. And since I've never been the best at making friends to begin with, these things have not helped. But then I thought about it and convinced myself that Clay probably has other things to do than email people and it wasn't anything against me. And then the next email came the next day and he was very friendly and he apologized for being late and I was happy.
And then on Tuesday, it had been a really hectic day already, since Tuesdays generally are. And then we heard something that really bothered us. I'm not going into details; suffice it to say we were more than annoyed. I spent a good deal of our evening class brooding about it, but I was clear-headed enough to tell myself that I wasn't going to do anything mean or stupid. And I realized that any problems this could potentially cause wouldn't happen unless I gave in to my annoyance and did something mean or stupid. And I realized things were okay.
As a reward, we got D.N. Angel manga and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne episodes. Yeah, I know yesterday I said it was because we sent Kat's manga, but I think that's only part of it.
My point is, things may suck, but they always get better. And if you realize that before they get better and are thankful, things get even better than they would have if you hadn't. At Family Home Evening on Monday, one of the guys there (okay, he was the only guy except for the member of the Bishopric whose house we were at) said that a guy he knows is the happiest, most spiritual person he's ever met. Why? Because he doesn't let things bother him. He knows things will work out.
I still think that if things really suck it's okay to cry and be hurt. It's important to get things out of your system. But I also think that it's important to realize that there is someone looking out for you and things will always, always work out. I could go on about this for hours, but I think I'll stop here. Maybe more later. Depends on what happens tomorrow.
Last HHSLJET communication at 04:01 p.m. on Thursday, March 6, 2003
We finally sent Kat her Pretear manga today.
As you all know (or would know if you'd read the previous entries) Athena and I were part of a cosplay group cosplaying Rayearth. Kat was also part of this group, which was fortunate because Athena and I hadn't seen all of Rayearth. Kat was kind enough to send us the last two tapes of the first part for our birthday, but, being a poor college student, she needed us to reimburse her for any further tapes. I started panicking as AX drew near, because Tarta and Tatra are in part two of Rayearth. To make matters worse, I agreed to make Gina's costume. She was our Lady Asuka, another character who appears only in part two.
So Kat sent us the first three tapes of part two anyway, with the understanding that we would pay her later. I was very relieved, because I always start dying around convention time, and having to make costumes that I was unsure of was not helping.
I can't quite remember how it happened, but somehow the agreement to reimburse Kat was changed to either pay her $10 for each tape or trade a volume of Pretear manga for each tape. We managed to find volume 1 of Pretear at Kinokuniya (they haven't had any Pretear manga since we bought that one), but we never got around to sending it. Then Kat told us we could read it before we sent it, so then we kept putting that off, which was dumb, because Pretear manga is good.
We finally read the Pretear manga (very, very good, in case I hadn't mentioned), and yet still we never got around to sending it. Until today. That would make it about eight and a half months we had manga unrightfully in our possession, since we bought it in June.
This is where we see that it pays to do what you're supposed to. We were in a penpal society when we were in high school, and it had been our experience that whenever we got around to sending something, something came for us. Today was no exception.
Gina was very excited when I agreed to make her Lady Asuka costume. She had agreed to be Lady Asuka a while before she asked, and I don't know what, but something happened so that she had to ask if anyone in our group could make the costume for her for a low price, as she, like many of us, is a poor college student. I offered to help, because I hate it when people are disappointed.
So even though she paid me for making the costume, she still insisted on getting Athena and I a present (Athena helped with the costume). We didn't get a chance to go through the dealers' room together while at the convention, but Gina still insisted on getting us something. So we asked her for copies of all of the Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne anime. Apparently, that wasn't enough, because she asked us if she could get us anything else (it's really easy to copy .avi files onto CD). So we asked her for volumes 1 and 2 of D.N. Angel. See, in the entry where I mentioned DN, I forgot to say that, while we have the translations of volumes 1 and 2, we didn't actually have the manga, because I had to agree to give Mom the sewing machine in order to get manga, and I wanted the continuation, dang it!
By the way, I've already said how much I suck at expressing my feelings, but I want to say that Gina and Kat are both totally awesome people and I love you both.
So anyway, Gina kept putting off her trip to the post office. This is something I understand completely, as can be seen in the first half of this entry. But she finally went to the post office on Monday, so when we got home after mailing Kat's manga, there was a very happy package waiting for us.
We actually weren't expecting to be majorly excited about the package, since we've already seen KKJ and already read DN. And yet we were very, very excited. It was so happy going through the first part of D.N. Angel again. It had been so long! And now it's ours. We're each going to read through it again, and then we have to decide what to do next.
We had been planning for a long time to make the rest of the Posse read the series once we had it. However, experience with Saiyuki has taught us to let people watch the anime first. That way the anime isn't as disappointing. But the anime of DN won't start until April. I don't think I want to wait that long.
So I think we'll put our faith in the animation staff and hope that the anime lives up to the most excellentness of the manga.
But we still owe Kat twenty dollars. Eheh.
Last HHSLJET communication at 05:09 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5, 2003
I'm in love with Toshihiko Seki. Not that it's unusual for me to be in love with someone who's completely out of my league. Actually, Athena and I have decided that when we're seiyuu in Japan, he's going to be like our dad, because really he's old enough.
But before I go on with that, a brief interlude as I explain why I westernize Japanese names. When I'm talking, I usually say the names the way I learned them. Like I usually say Seki Toshihiko instead of Toshihiko Seki. But I decided I should be consistent. So why not go with the Japanese style, seeing as how these are Japanese people I'm talking about?
The answer is simple, really. Almost every time I see a Japanese name written by a Japanese person in roman letters, the name is westernized. All our Yukiru Sugisaki manga says, "By Yukiru Sugisaki" in plain romaji right on the front. Yuu Watase and Kazuya Minekura manga are the same. Soichiro Hoshi, on his own website that he maintains himself, writes his name Soichiro Hoshi. Therefore, I have decided to westernize the names when I'm speaking English.
So anyway, recently our friend Kat went on a search for a duet between Tamahome and Miaka. Impossible, you say? Not if you look for songs from the CD dramas that came out before the series was animated. The cast was completely different, and guess who played Tamahome? That's right! Toshihiko Seki! So of course as soon as we learned she had a Tamahome/Miaka duet, we had to get it from her. Actually, we asked her about it several days after we found out she had it, but still.
Because AIM or filters or something is/are stupid, she couldn't send us the file directly, so she sent us to the site where she got it. She also got a Taka/Tasuki duet and a Luva song there, which she told us about because she knows the real reason we wanted the Tamahome/Miaka duet to begin with. We love Kat.
So we're listening to these songs, which are really, really cool, by the way. And remembering how much we love Toshihiko Seki. It actually took us a while to realize how great he is. We had heard him as Duo Maxwell when James lent us Endless Waltz. (We had only seen the dub before that.) And we heard him as Tamahome in the one Fushigi Yuugi CD drama that we have. But we didn't realize how much we loved his voice until we heard him as Sanzo.
And now I must talk about how much I love Sanzo. We've heard people complain that he's a stick in the mud, which, well, he is. But there's one thing that makes Sanzo great. He will tell people when they're being stupid. And then either they'll stop being stupid, or he'll kill them. Literally. And because the summer we were translating Saiyuki manga for Pam was the summer our family went psycho, we loved Sanzo all the more, because we could have really used one of him.
Toshihiko Seki plays the part of Sanzo very very well. But the thing that makes Mr. Seki so great is that in almost every single picture we've seen of him, he looks like one of the nicest guys in the entire world. He always has the kindest smile.
We gave up breakfast cereal one week so we could pay to be able to download video clips from the Saiyuki memorial thing they had last summer from a Japanese site. For part of it, they did a live performance of a shortened version of episodes 15 and 16. And Toshihiko Seki was smiling as he read Sanzo's lines. It was great! And he grinned while he recited the Divine Purification from Evil thingie. And as the final parting words from the Saiyuki people, whoever was in charge had him, as Sanzo, yell at the audience. And before he could say the line, he hesitated and started laughing. (For those who are curious, the line was something to the effect of, "You punks are gonna follow me around forever, aren't you!?" Only it sounds a lot meaner in Japanese.)
When they asked Yui Horie (she plays the new character who was introduced in the interactive Saiyuki DVD, which we still don't have *pout*) what she thought of the guys who play the four main characters, she said that, while Mr. Seki isn't as harsh as Sanzo, he still watches over everyone like Sanzo does. And so we've decided that he's going to be like our Japanese dad.
Last HHSLJET communication at 04:36 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4, 2003
Okay, so maybe the daily thing wasn't working. Let's just say weekends don't count. There. Still daily.
I tried to write an entry on Saturday, I really did. But I just couldn't get into rambling mode. Maybe it's because I was sad that we hadn't heard from Clay yet. And yes, I'm calling him Clay, not Clay-san, from now on. For some reason when I'm speaking English it seems wrong to add Japanese name suffixes. So I stopped. Also, we're pretty sure Clay is guy, since he refers to himself as 'boku.' Either that or, since he named himself after a male character, he's trying to keep up that image. At any rate, I'm going to refer to him as he.
Anyway, we got an email from him on Sunday, and he apologized for replying late, so I felt better. I was still freaking out because now I had to figure out what I wanted to say in response, which is twice as difficult because first I have to figure out what I want to say and then I have to figure out how to say it in Japanese.
Okay, so that's not really true. It's usually takes about two seconds to figure out the Japanese, although there is some time spent agonizing over which particle should be used where. Most of the hard part was figuring out what to say. Although now that I think of it, a big part of that goes into figuring out not only what we should say, but what we can say in Japanese. I'm not sure how long it took before we finally finished the email, but our Megami Kouhosei soundtrack had almost ended for the second time. That CD is approximately an hour and a half long. Hopefully this will get easier as it goes on.
I've never been extremely good at expressing myself, even in English. Sometimes if I think long and hard, I can come up with and accurate summary of my feelings, although usually thoughts are limited to things like, "EEEEEEE!" and, "YAY!!!" and stuff. Usually I don't mind, but then when someone asks me why I like something I'm all like, "Uh...it's interesting...and stuff." And I'm horrible at summarizing stories. Which is why it's really hard for me to explain to someone how cool a series is. It can be frustrating.
Clay, on the other hand, somehow managed to express exactly why I like D.N. Angel in one sentence. (It also happens to be why he likes D.N. Angel.) I guess it's because Japanese is a very poetic language. I'm not sure I could translate what he said into English. And if I did, it would probably sound dumb. That's mostly just because I have a limited vocabulary. If I was a poet, it wouldn't be an issue, but we've already gone over that. I'd put up the Japanese, but I don't know if Clay would approve of my putting up bits of his email on the Net.
I think that's it for my rambling for today. One of these days I plan to have an entry about each of my favorite seiyuu. We'll see if that ever happens. At any rate, hopefully I'll get something up tomorrow.
Last HHSLJET communication at 04:52 p.m. on Monday, March 3, 2003
Let's see if I can get this thing updated daily, shall we?
So anyway, I mentioned in my last entry that we were unsure of Yukiru Sugisaki's gender. There are plenty of arguments that Yukiru Sugisaki could be either gender. As for being male, he draws himself as a guy, he plays lots of video games, and he was raving about how cute Maaya Sakamoto is. The one biggest argument, if you're really into completely and totally circumstantial evidence, is one extra in Critical Kid, the chapter of manga you find in the Neutral artbook. There are about a bazillion extras in Critical Kid, but all this one was doing, apparently, was waving at the camera. (Okay, so manga doesn't really have cameras, but still.) This extra looked a lot like the other self-drawn pictures of Yukiru Sugisaki, minus the bunny mask. Why draw yourself in your manga as a guy if you're not a guy and no one's going to know it's you anyway?
As for Yukiru Sugisaki being female, the biggest argument was that apparently some friends of someone who ran a D.N. Angel website had been to at least one signing and said she was a woman. Well, that's pretty strong evidence except that I don't trust anything I've seen on a website by an American fan, because misunderstandings can happen rather easily. Thinking about it, there are some other arguments for Yukiru Sugisaki being female. For example, she drew Brain Powerd, which was created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, the director of the Gundam series. In Brain Powerd, the mecha are piloted by girls. Mr. Tomino seems the type to want a woman to draw that type of manga. Also, Yukiru Sugisaki refers to herself as 'watashi.' A guy is more likely to use 'boku.'
So Athena and I were sticking with the idea that Yukiru Sugisaki is a guy, figuring eventually we'd come across an interview or something that gave a definitive answer. Finally our frustration came to a peak when Pam showed us the two-page D.N. Angel spread from Newtype USA that the creator of Dub This! had scanned. Newtype USA is translated by ADV, and we know from experience that ADV isn't always clear on genders. They decided the Yukiru Sugisaki is a woman, probably based on the fact that many American fansites refer to her as 'she.'
This was getting to be a major pain. We like to consider ourselves to be authorities on Yukiru Sugisaki in the US, and we were tired of being uncertain what gender our favorite manga artist is. So we took matters into our own hands and emailed a Japanese fan. We figure this person, being in Japan, would know, and even if not, at least we'd be on the same page as the Japanese fans.
Clay Salsamille runs a Megami Kouhosei fansite in Japan. I came across this site when looking for information on the D.N. Angel anime, and since it has a lot of information, I consider it trustworthy. So we emailed Clay-san. We did this last night, because yesterday's entry in the log kept the question fresh on my mind, and we were bored.
Clay-san apparently was very happy to get the email. We got a response just this morning and now we know the truth. At least, we know as much as Clay-san knows. Yukiru Sugisaki is a woman, and apparently is married. I'm glad Clay-san added that little bit of information, because now, while I'm a little disappointed that Yukiru Sugisaki isn't male, like we originally thought, I think it's sweet that she's married. And now we have a theory that Mamoru Sugisaki, the assistant who is rather prominently listed in every volume of Yukiru Sugisaki manga we own, is her husband. That would be so adorable!
I'm not quite sure why we wanted Yukiru Sugisaki to be a man so much. Possibly because we wanted some sort of hope that there are guys out there who won't bug the crap out of us. There are a few--our friend James, Pam's little brother Daniel, and a kid we used to kind of babysit named Chris (he took a little training, but he was pretty cool last we saw him). At least we know Toshihiko Seki is a guy. And he seems like someone we can get along with, but once again, that's a rambling for another time.
The best thing that came out of this is that now we have a penpal in Japan. Clay-san wants to hear back from us again and talk about lots of stuff. This is very exciting, because we always like to make new friends, and the fact that Clay-san is in Japan is a very nice bonus. Ironically, we don't know if Clay-san is male or female.
Last HHSLJET communication at 04:17 p.m. on Friday, February 28, 2003
Alethea here again. This web log is in sad, sad need of updates. So here goes:
On February 5, 2003, Athena and I were traumatized. We had just beaten Final Fantasy X and were listening to our FFX vocal collection to kind of stay in the Final Fantasy X Zone. And since sitting listening to music can be very boring, we were surfing the Internet.
One of the places I like to go when I've got nothing to do is a list of links to various Japanese anime-related websites. So we were there, scanning the list for anything that might be interesting and saw that Masumi Asano has a website. She plays Hiyono in Spiral, one of our favorite female anime characters, and Aoi in Rizelmine, a series which is...interesting...but the manga is by Yukiru Sugisaki.
And here's where I go into my Yukiru Sugisaki tangent. Yukiru Sugisaki is Athena and my most favorite manga artist ever. I'm going to say Yukiru Sugisaki is male for now, since, while there are rumors to the contrary, I have various reasons to believe that he is male and rather few indications (especially reliable ones) that he may be female. And since I need a pronoun, I'll go with he.
Anyway, he's the creator of D.N. Angel, which is our most favoritest series in the whole world. Our sophomore year of college, a friend asked us to translate her D.N. Angel manga for her. We had heard the title because our friend James thought it was an excellent play on words, but we knew nothing about the series. We're always willing to read new manga, so of course we agreed to translate it. It was pretty interesting, and by about page 26, we had fallen in love with it. By page 48, there was no turning back. We were completely hooked.
So of course, since Yukiru Sugisaki was now our favorite manga artist (which is impressive because once Athena and I have a favorite, it takes a lot to surpass that favorite), we had to get any and all manga he had drawn. We now have (and have translated) volumes 1-7 of D.N. Angel (soon we'll have volume 8. Soon...), 1-5 of Megami Kouhosei, and one each of Rizelmine and Lagoon Engine. Any time I'm stressed, all I need to do is pick up something he's drawn and start reading, or even just look at the pictures, and all my stress goes away. It's amazing.
As for Rizelmine, the anime is really wacky. It's fine when it follows the manga, but when it tries to make stuff up on its own, it gets really dumb, sometimes even disturbing. Dude, Tomonori, she's twelve! (In reference to the beginning of episode 19. Oy.) The manga, on the other hand, is adorable and happy and fun. Unfortunately, they changed Aoi's (remember I was talking about Masumi Asano) personality. In the manga, she's total fangirl. Shoujo manga is her Bible, and she gives Rizel advice based on her "scripture study". It's great.
D.N. Angel of course takes main priority. We have all three CD Dramas (like radio plays only on CD), the artbook, the postcard set...that's about all we've been able to find, except for the image CD, which will be on its way as soon as CD Japan gets its new shipment. Soichiro Hoshi became our favorite voice actor becuse he plays Daisuke in the CDs. He's another one of the names we'd heard several times before but didn't really know any of his work until reading DN. Actually, Ken'ichi Suzumura and Toshihiko Seki, also favorite voice actors of ours, were both in DN as well, and became favorites partially because of that. Although Toshihiko Seki makes a most excellent Sanzo, currently my favorite anime character.
As soon as we found out it was going to be animated, we started following the Kadokawa site (they're the people that publish Asuka, the magazine that runs D.N.Angel) very closely, as well as doing various searches to find any information we could possibly get a hold of. And Mom very kindly went to Kinokuniya to get us the issue of Asuka that has the announcement as well as the one that announces the director, character designer, and script writer. So we're obsessed.
Okay, so anyway, we were at Masumi Asano's site, just kind of browsing. She has message boards, as do many Japanese voice actors, and one of her message boards is specifically for information involving her works. As it turns out, she's going to be in D.N. Angel. But wait...she wasn't in D.N. Angel before. They changed the cast! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
And so we were traumatized.
The thing that really gets me about them changing the cast is that the new cast is going to totally, totally rock. So now, while I can rant about them changing it, I can't rant about it for long, because the new cast is awesome. I mean, they got Akira Ishida to play Satoshi. I look at pictures of Satoshi and wonder how they could have ever cast anyone else. Tomokazu Seki did a good job, but really. This part was practically made for Akira Ishida. Not quite sure how I feel about the new voice of Dark though.
They got Miyu Irino to play Daisuke. We had heard him in Spirited Away (he plays Haku), and we loved him then...but he's not Soichiro Hoshi. We're torn. Irino-kun also plays Sora in Kingdom Hearts. We hadn't played Kingdom Hearts yet, but we were about to (we had just beaten FFX, after all). The game was on top of the PS2, and the picture was depressing, because Sora, being the main character, was on it. So I put Final Fantasy X on top of it. If you've beaten FFX, you know why that didn't help matters. So I ended up taking a piece of cloth from the Hayate costume I was making and using it to cover up both games.
But I know the cast rocks. I'm still worried because they got the script writer from Rizelmine and the character designer from Megami Kouhosei, both of which are excellent manga but not so good anime. And I've seen the changes in character design, which were stupid. Very, very stupid. (You just shouldn't change the hair color of one identical twin. You just shouldn't.) I hope the director leaves those as the only changes, but based on the summary of episode 1, they may not be. I'm afraid. Megami Kouhosei and Rizelmine had excellent casts as well.
But if all goes well, we should get an image song by Akira Ishida. Definitely looking forward to that. But that's a rant for another time.
Last HHSLJET communication at 05:20 p.m. on Thursday, February 27, 2003
Hello! Alethea here. This thing has gone for a long time without any entries, so I figure it's about time I put one here. Although I'm taking a slight risk here, because of what I want to talk about and the fact that we're going to try to get a lot of BYU students to come to our site pretty soon. The proper attire for the proper occasion, that's all I'm saying.
Anyway, at Anime Expo, I had my first experience cosplaying in what I like to call 'a skank costume'. Athena's and my cosplay group try to get the entire cast of a series cosplayed at AX every year and this year we had chosen Rayearth. Since Athena and I look very much alike, we thought we would look best cosplaying Tarta and Tatra from the second half of Rayearth. For those of you who haven't seen Tarta and Tatra, let me explain. Tatra's not quite as bad; she wears your typical female genie type costume, with the harem pants and the bare midriff. Tarta, on the other hand, basically wears a bikini.
Tarta and I both being the younger sister, I got to cosplay Tarta. It was quite the experience. Making the costume was...interesting. It didn't do much for my self-esteem either. I had to try on the top to make sure it wouldn't fall off and I realized just how flat-chested I am. It didn't help when Mom came home and found Athena's Tatra top on the ironing board and said, "I hope you didn't make this for one of you, because you can't fill it out." Thanks, Mom.
That problem was easily solved by buying flesh-colored leotards, to which we pinned the tops. Safety-pins are a cosplayer's best friend. Especially if said cosplayer had to make ten costumes and didn't have time to to all the finishing touches. My Tarta costume had at least sixteen safety pins in it. And I think I look adorable in it, despite my lack of a few inches around the chest.
Based on the reason schools often require girls to wear at least semi-modest clothing, one would assume that the problem with wearing a skank costume is that the wearer would be hit on by all sorts of undesirable men. I didn't have that problem at AX. Our current theory is that many male AX attendees are fanboys and therefore afraid of girls. Although the leotard and flat-chest may have contributed a great deal. The closest I got to being hit on was when we were standing in line for the Nobuhiro Watsuki panel and a guy from the TokyoPop booth came to me, said, "Nice costume," and handed me a t-shirt, which TokyoPop was giving away anyway. I don't know if the guy liked my costume, liked the lack thereof, or just thought I looked cold and needed another layer. At any rate, I got a free shirt.
I think the most common question asked of cosplayers wearing skank costumes is, "Aren't you cold?" In my case, the answer was yes. Despite having a leotard and dance tights, I was very cold. Stupid air-conditioning. It really makes you appreciate costumes from series like Fushighi Yuugi that have lots of nice warm layers. Although I understand that SailorStarlight costumes are very warm. Probably because vinyl doesn't breathe.
Probably the weirdest thing about wearing the Tarta costume was the lack of pants. I didn't really feel naked like I thought I would, but every time I'd bend down to put my bag down for a picture I'd think, "Wait a second, I'm not wearing any pants..." Then I'd remember who I was cosplaying.
Overall, I think it was a good costume and I felt very cute wearing it. We had more pictures taken of us in those costumes than any of the others this year (hm, I wonder why). I did think it was strange that one woman asked us to pose with the little boys (like around age 6) that were with her. But hey, if the kids like Rayearth, it makes a lot of sense, especially since Kat was with us cosplaying Fuu.
Next I want to cosplay Fin Fish from Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne.
Last HHSLJET communication at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, September 27, 2002
Okay, this is Anki speaking. This is more or less a test entry to make sure that I uploaded everything to the proper places and that I've got all the coding right. So yeah. Thingy. Enjoy our blog, and the insanity that is sure to come with it. Oh, and as a note...I'm sorry about Gojyo's weapon and the fact that it makes entries hard to read in places. I couldn't figure out how to fix that so it wouldn't cause problems.
Last HHSLJET communication at 01:42 a.m. on Wednesday, July 17, 2002
