The Garden of Discordia

It is an annoying habit of a certain segment of Swedish youth, that they sit on the train (less common on the bus, but it happens) and compare their ringtones. This was especially bad when everybode had those awful midi bleep-bleep tones... on the other hand, now they just sit on the train and listen to mp3's from their shitty phone speakers because they are too lazy to use headphones. In short: Teenagers suck

When my friends and I gather, however, we tend to compare not the phones or the noises they make, but the amount of anime/jrock/kawaii things we've managed to hang onto them lately. Bling a la mode fujoshi, so to speak*

Currently my cellphone - which, though it is a cheap piece of crap with no battery time, is a flip open phone thus I love it - contains the following decorations

( My geekitude, let me show it to you )

There turned out to be something wrong with my APH Marukaite Chikyuu Kansha Matsuri file - it only blips for two minutes, but the subs were completely messed up after that -_- So I had to download a subtitle editor, and for that to work some Microsoft .NET framework thing and then I had to fix the subs andaaargfh...

But it was worth it, in the end. This was a great VA event, and the fans seemed super enthusiastic too. Older than I thought, but at least we got to hear Mein Gott! live

I have also come to the baffling realization that Chibitalia's voice actor is one feisty lady, who totally out-semes both Austria's and Prussia's voices (I'd NEVER guessed Prussia was played by such a thin, shyish kind of guy. Great acting, dude)
In fact, she may have out-semed everyone on that stage. Except Germany, who looked very nice in his tank top and had to go all DOWN BOY! on France's pervy antics. Lots of bleeping there, yes.

...and Namikawa Daisuke keeps on being tiny and adorable. So cuuuute~

Eta: About time... they've released the list and deleted these three. And yet, I can't help but boggle at the 1) attitude of some people on the Yuletide comm and 2) the fact that they couldn't come out and say it, straight out that the obvious offenders would go. (Not after the list was posted) Instead we get a lot of "this is not a matter of concern" mumbling.

For some reason that completely elludes me, this year, the Yuletide team has decided to only go after what is archived at Archive of Our Own when determining which fandoms are eligible for Yuletide.

Or, all right, they explain how it is to make things simpler for the mods, but this has consequences.

For one thing, Hetalia Axis Powers is - at the moment of writing this - a Yuletide fandom. While Discworld isn't.

HETALIA AXIS POWERS? One of the top three, if not the biggest anime fandom right now?

I can definitely understand that it takes way too much time to scrape through every corner of the internet. But. There is one big place which everyone knows about and where it is rather easy to get a general overview of whether a fandom is "rare" or not. Hate it or love it, a quick overview of fanfiction.net isn't that big a hassle. They could probably find volunteers who report 10 000+ fandoms

Hetalia has 19 747 fics at ff.net alone... while Discworld has 1470. And ff.net isn't even the main "home" for Hetalia, since it is an almost 80% LJ-based fandom (in english) with a huge Deviantart-following too. And, you know, all over the rest of the net too...

The kink meme alone has filled up 14 posts so far. 1 LJ post = 10 000 comments. Even counting multi-comment fics, requests and comments, that's a lot of kinky fics. Plus there's loads of stuff posted at the main comm every day.

Ranma 1/2 is also on the list (10 000) and freaking Sailor Moon which has a whopping 33 088 fics!!!

Dude, this was the fandom that ate the anime/manga part of the internet in the mid-nineties and a lot of those fics are still up. Granted, the death of Geocities decimated the old anime fan sites bigtime, but it is still nowhere near a rare fandom; neither is it completely dead. I only follow a few SM communities and very sporadically at that, but there's no doubt that one could find at least one fic a month to read.

Now, don't get me wrong, please

I know and enjoy these fandoms, I've been in them all! But there are SO MANY rare anime/manga fandoms out there! In some cases, not-one-single-fic-in-English rare - why not give them a fair chance instead? =(

While I can understand that the AO3 wants to spread and find new fandoms, I find it incredibly sad that the one time of the year when the really tiny fandoms have a chance to get some excellent fic written for them, the chance is shrunk and might even be completely wasted.

I usually look forward to Yuletide because I hope that "classic" fandoms such as Discworld and Pet Shop of Horrors get a much-needed dose of new fic.

I hop to find something new and unread (omigosh! 20:th Century Boy's is on the Yuletide list! Aw-so-me-e *crosses fingers and hopes*), perhaps even discover something I've read/seen and never imagined one could fic

And what do I get? The 60+ posts a day fandom is on the list. Nothing in the recend admin posts a la:
"Of course we'll remove obvious large fandoms, this is a computer generated list with inevitable bugs!"

If all they want with Yuletide is to promote the AO3 archive, then I honestly wish the challenge hadn't ever moved there.

If this is just a glitch due to the automated lists, then it would be appropriate if they posted about the issue and asked people to help rule out the most obvious big fandoms.

We'll have to wait and see, but this looks bad on all counts

This Saturday, Alitna came over and we watched Hetalia. Ok, and a bit of Shugo Chara, we couldn't watch anything else due to lack of DVD player.

But! I got to use my Hetalia pasta plates for their correct purpose for the first time ^_^ It's a good thing I bought those, actually, because I realized while unpacking that they're the only deep plates I have. As opposed to coffee cups, of which I have what feels like five dozens -_-

I'd really forgotten how much they chop things up in the anime, it gets quite confusing at times - and I've seen the thing at least four times!

Day 14 - Current (or most recent) anime wallpaper

( Hetare Hetaliaaa~ )

I like it, it's just so happy. On my computer at work, I also have a Totoro wallpaper, because it's cute and not as busy.

Ehehe. I have vacation this week, which has so far been spent doing... nothing much. Whatever happened to the days? 'neways, meme time!

( Day 5 - Anime character you feel you are most like (or wish you were) )

( Day 6 - Most annoying anime character )

This is also not quite meme-related, but I would like to point out that hating/loving certain voice actors (or even haircolors) isn't quite such an arbitrary point as hating/loving regular actors. Seiyuu (japanese voice actors) tend to be type-cast a lot more, just as anime tends to follow a dramatic color scheme, or the seme/uke lenght pattern or other things. They're animated characters, after all, so why not draw them in a way that is a short-hand for how they behave? Of course, if you invert it, you can easily play with the audience's expectations.

Thus, when a cute girl opens her mouth and has a high-pitched, slightly whiny voice, it sets my teeth on edge and I know I probably won't like her. The same way when one of the guys is voiced by Koyasu Takehito has a smooth, darker voice and a slightly creepy laugh? I know he's most likely to be a cool villain, an anti-hero or at least on the side of good, but still somewhat of a bastard and I'll probably like him...

And then of course we get characters like Gokudera, who has gray hair. Wtf? He's a hothead who fights with dynamite, how can he have gray hair -_-

This post is basically about my reactions for three anime things lately.

The first refers to the fact that Shojo Kakumei Utena is going to come out, remastered, on a US DVD box. I sincerely hope that this means an eventual UK release, because then I shall break my rule of not buying useless physical storage media that demands specific hardware to be viewed* and splurge on it.

Everyone should give Utena a chance. Anime fans, feminists, fandom fans, people who love storylines, people who have prejudices towards anime, those interested in film (for realz, the anime is a brilliant example of limited animation techniques used really well), fans of psychidelica and swordfightin and roses and Freudianism and awesome music. Basically, everyone should see Utena. Then they may go out and hate it (how???) but damn, give it a chance. It's a classic. It's p-r-e-t-t-y. It's slashable (male and fem both) like whoa, and that not counting the canon couples.

Alternate names for Utena are Revolutionary Utena or La Filetté Revolutionnaire, so hey, francophiles are another target audience.

The "oh hope" refers to the fact that Toei has started optioning out the rights for the Sailor Moon anime again. And, I mean, hot damn if Sailor Moon doesn't hit all my nostalgia buttons. The manga is gorgeous and good - I have a review in Swedish here. Also so damn out of print, I'm happy that I own it in both English and German.

Anyway, the anime is less gorgeous, lots of examples of not-so-well used limited animation and general budget restraints, but it's also got good music & girl superheroes who fight for love, justice and friendship.

I would totally shell out some serious money for a DVD box. Unfortunately, I'm not quite as serious as the japanese (un-subbed) reprint boxes demand: Between 7000 to 10 000 yen = 580 to 830 SEK (remove a zero to get euro prices) for each box set, plus freight and most likely 25% swedish VAT. Especially there's two box sets pro season and five seasons.... Naaaah.

But hey, it's apparantly on TV in Italy and Albania already, so hopefully it will show up in a slightly cheaper DVD set soon. With, uhm, subtitles in a language I understand kthnx

The fail & blahrgness refers to the Hetalia dub, which is 1) changed and more localized, and apparantly manages to be more offensive than the original and 2) just a bloody dub, so why care?

Of course a US company screwed up the dub. They tend to do that, to a greater or lesser degree and the more they change things, the higher the probability for complete fail.
(to be fair, Swedish dubs are also crap. And don't get me started on the anime subtitles, oh lulz the fail)

The moment I heard that they'd dub Hetalia with accents I knew it would get bad, not just "meh".
It's not like the nations actually all speak English or Japanese (there's even a joke about that in the manga) soooo why would they have accents?
What we do get in the original manga is an accent on China, which is pretty fail in its own way. In the manga there's a whole bunch of regional dialects which are all part of the characterization. These aren't accents - these are, for the most part, tropes in anime and japanese television. Various English accents would have worked much better to convey the same feeling

Then there is of course the parts of the US fandom acting as if the English dub is as important and canon as the original. Um, 'kay, this might work if it's an exact translation and if they do some kind of effort to find similar voices to the original (which they rarely do).

Otherwise? Who gives a damn. There's a japanese Harry Potter dub out there somewhere, it doesn't affect the original movies in any way. Neither does a potential, oh I dunno, Swedish or France or Russian dub of Hetalia. It's a translation, sometimes a localized adaption. And in my not at all humble opinion, localization generally sucks - it sucks if it's done in books, it sucks if it's done in movies and it definitely doesn't suck less just because it's done in anime.

So, please, watch the sub unless that sucks too. Then just stick to the fansubs

* as opposed to, um, books. Which only demand that I keep my eyes

It's been con-time! And I have cosplayed! And though I cannot sing and the quality pretty much sucks, I want to upload the clips of moi and various other people singing series-specific songs and doing other silly things =D

Embedded youtubes beneath the cut

( Austria (me) sings Tomato song )

( Austria and N. Italy sing the Tomato song )

( America slurps milkshake )

( N. Italy says whee! )

ETA: Whoa, what happened to my connection? Speed, speed speed =)

( The Cold Pasta War - US, UK, RU, DE )

( Tamaki of Ouran sings Det Gör Ont )