This is the WORLD where I write my musing about manga/anime/video games and make comments on certain aspects. It's just a little something to stir up a conversation so please don't take me TOO seriously on the things I write here. I'd love to hear your opinion so feel free to comment.
- Created By red:leaf
Genre Time Freeze
Has anyone played Legend of Dragoon? It's a pretty decent game and highly underrated. The voice acting is real terrible though. Like in this scene. I die every time. WARNING: Minor spoiler.
My friend has this theory about LoD, that time has stopped some thousands of years prior to the events you actually play in. The plot of Legend of Dragoon is super involved with THE PAST. And when I say THE PAST, I mean like 5,000 years ago or some ridiculous number like that. (I'm obviously not fact checking these things....) So my friend's theory is that time stopped in THE PAST because how the heck can 5,000 years past and civilization hasn't advanced past medieval structure?
He has a good point.
I mean, think of how far we've advanced in the last 30 years alone.
And then I was having a Lord of the Rings marathon (to celebrate the release of the Desolation of Smaug) and they mention how there hasn't been a King of Gondor for 1,000 years. They're still fighting with swords and spears too. Maybe Middle Earth is also in a time freeze...?
And thinking over it, this seems to be problem is fantasy genres that are set in the past--time stagnation. All forward societal and technological evolution comes to a stand still. J.R.R. Tolkein semi-addressed this in terms of language. The language evolved over time and space but apparently nothing else did.
I noticed this in steampunk genre too. Coal was a relatively short energy time period and was quickly passed over for petrol.
Sci-fi genre seems to be quite the opposite of this stagnation. It leaps and bounds forward in societal and technological evolution (although where it lands in debatable). What it does well is reference its past. Mostly I figure this has to do with making a reference point for readers. Couldn't fantasy do much a similar thing?
Square Enix Copy
My friend and I were talking about the new slew of Final Fantasy games last night. Apparently they're making a FFXIII-3. In it, Lightning has to save the world in 12 hours. Sound impossible? No, because she can time travel.
...
So basically they're making a Majora's Mask for PlayStation.
Yep, that's what it is.
EDIT: (2/21/14) Turns out there is NO time travel. You basically just marathon the game. I don't know how I feel about that....
Review: The Host
The Host by Stephanie Meyer has nothing to do with anime or manga but I thought I'd have a go at writing a review about it anyway. Why? Part of it is to prove to myself that I can be an objective editor and I'm not a completely flaming ...Why Human?
Last night, I was browsing through some art and got to wondering: Why are we always anthropomorphizing stuff?
Example: Anthropomorphizing a wolf to a person. (Which is so overdone, might I say.)
Why can't it be the other way around? There's plenty of human-->animal designing out there but what about human-->object? Talk about design challenge. I've done object-->human for a design class and that's a lot of fun (and a bit hard).
But I guess....who would care what a person looks like as an object?
Which just makes me think of Harry Potter for some reason....
Comparison of Howl's Moving Castle, Book and Movie
A friend of mine bought me Howl's Moving Castle for the recent holidays and probably like most others who also know there's a movie with the same title, knew the story by the anime counterpart.
I couldn't help it as I read, comparing the movie and the book. Sometimes that's half the fun, figuring out what was tweaked or taken out. Michael became Markl, the black door lead not to war but to Wales, and Suliman went from being a missing man to a present, threatening woman. The book is certainly an enjoyable read, although at times, a little hard to draw together the finer details (I am a bumbling reader, though, and consider that more my problem and not altogether a problem of story). My conclusion was that you can't lump the two together. The anime is so distinctly Miyazaki.
Howl's Moving Castle has all of Miyazaki's hallmarks. That strong female with (eventually) short hair, a nod to nature, and a very strong anti-war message. It interested me that the two plots were almost an inversion of one another. War wasn't a looming environmental factor in the book; it was probably mentioned three or four times, outright only once. Yet in the movie, it was the driving environmental factor, and most of the plot got tangled up in it. Important points, like Sophie being able to break her own curse, and Howl's and Calcifer's contract, remained intact. I had read when doing research for my thesis that Miyazaki had stepping into the film project after the previous director left and rewrote the whole thing. I never knew how much he had rewritten until I finished the book.
Another intriguing point was that images that I found a little creepy in the book were altogether gone in the film. Turnip the scarecrow was pretty genial in film. He's helpful and well-liked by the other characters. In the book however, he was a bit frightening and freaked out anyone else who happened to be around. Calcifer was much more menacing in appearance in the book than in the film. Thinking through the movie, Howl might have been the scariest character, or blob men. But that's your call.
I usually like movie adaptions of books. Sometimes I may not agree with their editing choices, but I generally understand why people do what they do in film. What it comes down to is that Howl's Moving Castle as a book is nothing like the film (and vise versa) except at its bare bones level. Sometimes with movie adaptions and their books, you have to choose which one you like better. But that's definitely not the case with this particular set.
