2016-12-22
The Ancient Magus' Bride is the one manga I'm definitely reading
I have a thing for urban fantasy, books like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, much of Charles de Lint's output, quite a lot of Tanya Huff's work, and so on. Unsurprisingly this has carried over into my anime watching. Adding a dash of fantasy and magic will attract me to shows that I otherwise would have bounced off of.
As with basically every manga I wind up checking out these days, I stumbled across The Ancient Magus' Bride through anitwitter, the general collection of anime people that I follow there. I took a look because it sounded interesting, and it wound up hooking me right away, pretty much straight from its opening.
The Ancient Magus' Bride is not quite classical urban fantasy, but it's close enough; it is full of the same mixture of magic and normality, of cities and faeries and deep otherworldly wilds. And like the best fantasy, it understands that these fantastic creatures are often inhuman and this magic is dangerous. Well, can be; sometimes it can be beautiful. Sometimes it is both at once. And the fae are not the only monsters in the world, because humanity can supply plenty of monsters all on its own. All of this makes Ancient Magus' Bride very much my kind of thing and I've loved exploring more and more of its world and history as the manga goes along, along with the great characters.
I don't know how the recent OVA would come across for people who haven't read the manga, but for me it does a lot to capture the feel of the manga in animated form. The moments that are new to the OVA still feel authentically true to it (which is no surprise, since the manga's author was involved in the OVA). It's not quite the same as seeing the manga animated (the OVA is a flashback story), but it still makes me unreasonably happy and I'm looking forward to the future OVA installments.
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-21
One nice thing Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! did
KonoSuba was not a particularly good show, but it was just funny enough to keep me watching in the winter season (apart from episode 9, which falls into the 'burn it with fire now' category). Part of what made it funny was some of its cast of characters and how they bounced off each other; they weren't great people, but they were generally flawed in interesting ways. In the process of this, KonoSuba did something that I have to grudgingly admire it for.
It would have been very easy for the show to make Aqua and Megumin into basically useless characters, people who could talk the talk but definitely not back it up when the time came to do things. They're both already overblown characters and somewhat puffed-up, so it would have been funny and more than that, it would have been entirely typical of the genre. But KonoSuba doesn't do that.
Megumin may be a chuunibyo, but she's also perfectly competent. She can only cast one spell once a day, but it's a very good spell, one of the most destructive spells going; if you can get Megumin pointed in the right direction, nasty things are going to happen to your enemies. As I put it on Twitter once, Megumin is basically a version of Lina Inverse who skipped straight to Dragon Slave and loves it so much that she refuses to learn or use Fireball.
And Aqua, well, Aqua may be petty and flawed and arrogant and foolish, but she's also (still) a goddess. Literally, as the show makes clear. She can and does cast high level magic basically on demand (sometimes foolishly, of course) and do things like purify an entire lake all by herself. Within her sphere of magic there seems to be very little that she can't do if she wants to, and more than once she saves the day when she acts.
KonoSuba could have fully embraced Megumin and Aqua as laughingstock. It didn't; instead it made them competent and powerful, albeit with limitations, blind spots, and flaws. I have to reluctantly give it points for this decision.
(The less said about Darkness the better, and the main character is relatively noxious and unimportant. To my vague surprise the Wikipedia summary claims that Darkness is actually pretty powerful, but in the show she's basically completely ineffective so I maintain my stance here.)
(This is a 12-days post.)