Honda Tohru is magic. She really is. Just magic’s away peoples’ problems. It’s happy ending, all the way. The worst part is it leaves me with a dopy smile on my face after every episode. (Talking about Fruits Basket here in case you hadn’t caught on.) The whole thing, is dopy and heart warming. Not in the same way, say, ARIA is, but in a ‘we shall overcome’ lighter waving way.

Another good bit about FB, from an analytical standpoint is the onigiri symbol coupled with the fruits basket game metaphor. Like all good symbolism it’s woven into episodes at various places, from just a onigiri popping up randomly at a scene change to being explicityly told about the game. It’s a source of hope of the possibility of fitting in and is part of the overall cuteness of the series, maybe. It’s hard to see it in the big picture. Even though I’m watching FB for the third time, I’m only 16 episodes in this time around, and everyone knows the real drama of a series occurs in the last half. That’s the climatic moments leading to the resolution and closure of the series. I seem to be talking a lot about plot lately.

One last bit about FB for today, is that when I started watching the one (Hard to believe it was only one episode watched for all this spiel.) episode I watched today, I accidently had the english sound track on with english subtitles. So then, for the first time, the differences between the english opening theme’s lyrics and the translation of the japanese opening theme became apparent. And they don’t match at all. Both of course fit into the theme of the music, but what really suprised me is how that with the different words, the exact same meaning and feeling was conveyed, With the few (admittedly text only) dubs I’m somewhat familiar with this is rarely achieved. This time though, I think it was fantastically done. I wonder how much of it was the music and how much the lyrics to the music, but the similarity in overall meaning with different words, just wow, really surprised me.

Living in England, where the weather is consistently shit, the sunny tropics of the south east seas seems nice, which is probably why today again I’ve watched some more Black Lagoon. Not too much to say about it today. I finished the first series (first twelve episodes) and you know how Rock was kidnapped there? Well, I’m pretty sure I remember Revy saying she was never gonna help him if he got kidnapped, but she did. Some sort of approval of Rock on her part? Perhaps. Their character interaction after the initial fight from the submarine shit does seem to be getting better. Then again, that could just be the fact that Rock’s getting used to things. Even though he always says that he’s not used to the job.

So right, after I finished the first half of BL, I started on the next bit, whose proper name escapes me but does technically count as another series. This is my second time watching that half now, and I remember the first time I watched it I didn’t think anything in particular about the Romanian twins being excessively fucked up or anything like that. Then awhile back I was talking to my friend in the ’states and he commented on it as being really screwed up. I wonder if I’m bad at noticing things things, but apparently mutilating bodies and whatnot, at the time, didn’t seem too bad or something. Needless to say, this time it’s a bit more eye-opening, but maybe I’m paying better attention to things now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 8:41 am and is filed under Black Lagoon, Fruits Basket, Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.