Ladies and gentlemen, Yes.
Greetings all. I'm back again with another one of my monthly update posts. For the last few days I've been rewatching what I have of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime to celebrate the Halloween season. Since I have Halloween off from work this year, I plan to celebrate the day with a small marathon of vampire movies before watching the final disc of the Stardust Crusaders arc on Halloween night. Many years ago, my dad asked me why it is I like vampires so much, and back then I couldn't give him an answer I could really put into words, but today I can. The reason I like vampires is because they generally make great villains... and at times, descent antiheroes.
However, I don't go in for any of that young adult Twilight-type crap where the vampires have a secret civilized society and there's romance and some convoluted feud between clans. There is an unfortunate tendency to over-romanticize vampires. Anne Rice may be the worst thing to ever happen to vampire fiction, because I'm sure that it's due to her influence that stories like the damn Twilight saga exist. No, DIO from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is the gold standard of what a vampire should be. Other good examples are the head vampire from 'Salem's Lot and the character known simply as "The Space Girl" from the alien vampire movie, Lifeforce.
As for good examples of an antihero vampire, the one that always immediately springs to mind is Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows, which is a terrible series, but it's just so bad it's funny. Actually, the movie version directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins is pretty good.
Anyway, it's been a pretty good month so far. For one thing, we've had the premiere of the Psyren anime.
It still blows my mind that this manga has finally gotten an anime adaptation after twenty years! And it deserves one. Sure, it was never a perfect series, but it hit a lot of the right notes for me. Towards the end, it got downright Lovecraftian. The only major problem with Psyren was that it debuted in Shonen Jump back in a time when there were like over a thousand titles running in the magazine. The series just got lost in all the noise. As a result, the finale of the series was rushed because the people at Shonen Jump decided to give the series the axe.
So yeah, I've had a blast watching the Psyren anime so far. I also read a review of the first three episodes on ANN, and the reviewer's biggest complaint was that the production quality wasn't all it should be. Personally, I don't think the show looks that terrible. I'm far more concerned about something else when it comes to flaws with this adaptation. After watching each episode so far, I've thumbed through the volumes of the original manga to get an idea of where the anime is in the story (because it has sadly been a few years since I've read the manga), and I've noticed that the anime has cut some things. Of course an anime adaptation cutting out parts of the original story is fairly common, and so far most of the bits of the Psyren manga that were cut from the anime have been fairly insignificant. My big concern going forward though is that the adaptation may end up cutting much larger and more significant parts of the original story.
It sadly would not be the first time an anime adaptation cut too much of the original source material. One example that immediately springs to mind is the adaptation of another sadly lesser known manga from the 1990s, Ceres, Celestial Legend by Yuu Watase (the author of Fushigi Yûgi, which may be a more familiar title to some of you reading). The anime adaptation of Ceres cut two entire story arcs from the original manga, one of which introduced an important supporting character. Said character did show up in the anime version, but only in one or two episodes near the end of the series, and she was reduced to a very marginal role. All of that content was cut to get the story to fit into twenty-four episodes.
A much more notable example is InuYasha: The Final Act, which cut numerous chapters from the later volumes of the original manga in order to get the final arc of the story to properly fit into the allotted number of episodes. Those cut chapters would later be recycled to make the first season of the Yashahime anime, which is arguably an even worse crime. So I'm really hoping that the Psyren anime won't make the same mistake. The studio producing the anime has stated that the series will cover the entire manga, but this manga is sixteen volumes long. For them to properly cover the entirety of the story, they'll need at least two seasons, and both seasons will need to be twenty-four to twenty-six episodes long instead of the paltry twelve to thirteen episode seasons we get nowadays.
In other news, I beat Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave and have since started replaying it from the beginning, and at a much slower pace. This is because I missed certain story events the first time around. Of course I'm playing the game at an even slower pace because of the DLC they announced for the game. Here's the trailer for said DLC for anyone who cares.
Now the first wave of this DLC is kinda "meh". The four main characters gain much better weapons during the course of the story (though a couple of said weapons are missable). The second wave with the new playable characters is a little more significant (I don't give a crap about the new outfits). But the third wave that gives us the stories of the other four major characters, that's basically half the game! The fact that we didn't have this content at the game's launch explains why I was left with so many unanswered questions about the game's story after finishing it the first time! They basically only gave us half of a supposedly finished video game and are now making us shell out an additional thirty-five bucks to get the other half! And I paid them the damn thirty-five bucks because I'm now way too invested in the story not to!
Before I thought of video game DLC as a way of breathing new life into a game that's already been beaten, but right now I can't help but look at it as a racket. The really irritating thing though is that I feel like I can't finish this second play-through of Fortune's Weave until this third wave of DLC comes out, and we don't know exactly when it will come out next year. Actually, the Nintendo eShop says the third wave will release on 12/31/27, but I'm really hoping that's just a placeholder date.
I think that about covers it for this post except for one last item. A friend of mine on FFN who's been helping to edit my Sailor Moon fanfics reached out to me with his personal email address so that we'd have a better way to stay in touch. He thinks FFN is on its last legs, and quite frankly I don't think he's wrong. The main page for FFN is a joke now! The site looks, well... way worse than this place, if I'm being honest. So now that this friend of mine and I have exchanged email addresses and thus now have a more directly way to send and receive documents for editing purposes, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother with FFN much anymore. I'll probably just post stories more exclusively on AO3.
That wraps it up for this post. Until we meet again next time.
