I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
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I Finally Watched Kiki’s Delivery Service And Spent Weeks Thinking About The Ending
After talking about it for a few years, I finally sat down with some friends to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Given that this is one of my friends’ favorite movie, I let her pick the version we watched and so we settled in to watch a high-quality VHS rip of the original US publication of the movie. My friend cited music and some artistic choices as the reason for this selection and I, who had a vague idea of what the movie was about (burnout/depression/growing up/loss of creative spark), went along with it. I’d never seen the movie. I didn’t have an opinion. I knew that a lot of people had very specific and very strong opinions, but I didn’t really know why. After watching the movie though, I kind of get it. The specific songs chosen back in the day lend a very particular feel to the movie and, since one of them is right near the start of it, I can understand how changing the song would change the tone of the movie rather strongly. I also understand that the decision to make the cat, Jiji, speak again at the end of the movie is important to a lot of people and that it significantly changes one of the final notes of the movie, not to mention how a viewer might feel as they watch the credits roll and move on with their life. I only very recently saw the movie for the first time, so it wasn’t a very formative experience for me and while I am tempted to see how the more recent edition of the movie feels with the altered music and a story that ends more closely aligned with its Japanese source, I don’t know that I want to spend another couple hours on it (this isn’t a statement about the quality of the movie or anything, just a reflection of that fact that I don’t like to rewatch movies in quick succession). I will probably watch the movie again someday and maybe then I’ll watch the more recent version just to compare how it feels, but I really don’t expect my opinion to change that drastically since most of how I feel about it has little to do with the song selection and more to do with how burnout and creative work is depicted.
Continue readingDigging Deeply Into A More Civilized Age
While I might have started listening to Media Club Plus first thanks to what felt like a premise made specifically for me and my podcast listening time opening up right as it started posting, the podcast that actually got me to stop avoiding media discussion podcasts as a category was A More Civilized Age. I might not seem like it, but I’m a pretty ardent fan of Star Wars. I mostly avoid it because the online fandom is, perhaps, the most toxic and miserable fandom I’ve ever seen and not only do I want to avoid being associated with it in any way, shape, or form, I don’t want to ever catch its attention. The worst of them have way too much time on their hands and these miserable fucks have driven numerous people off the internet already, so I want to avoid them at all costs. Still, I love a good bit of Star Wars and while I might have some mixed feelings about the modern media landscape of the franchise (especially after all the books I’d read as a child and teen got launched into the uncaring and non-canonical oblivion that is “Star Wars Legends”), I figured that listening to some media-savvy folks discuss it might be a great way to push myself to finally sit down and watch some of the TV shows. I’d already tried and failed, after all, since I let myself get caught up in a bunch of online message boards that listed each episode in what was supposedly the “correct” timeline. I bounced off it pretty hard when I tried that method since none of it made any sense and it was a pain in the butt to cycle through seasons for the next episode I was supposed to watch. This podcast, though, declared that they were watching it in release order and, this January, when I ran out of other things to do, I resubscribed to Disney+ and started working my way through the show and the podcast in tandem.
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