So after some buzz on the internets, a movie trailer, a bit of Urbana bus reading and an Asian Kung-fu Generation single, I decided I should probably finish Solanin. And since it’s pretty short, at two volumes and fourteen chapters in each, I managed to do it in one night. And well, Solanin resonated with me to an eery degree. It’s not hard to see why. After all, I’m right at the cusp of entering the life stage that the characters were struggling through.

And it’s sort of the perfect storm of things that I’m thinking about that made me much more receptive to Solanin than I otherwise would have been, even a few months beforehand. It’s just last week that I was deciding whether or not to work my ass off for a shot at grad school instead of staying the course and going into industry after graduation. And it was only a few weeks ago that I felt the mid-coop malaise that I usually get. And then there’s all of the graduation buzz for this year’s graduating class, signaling that my own graduation is only a year away.

Now, my situation is nowhere near as bad as what’s in Solanin. That’s not to say that the situation in Solanin is horrible. What makes it scary is that the things the characters go through is incredibly normal. I’m incredibly lucky to be majoring in something that I’m super interested in, that I’m relatively good at, and that won’t bankrupt me in the future. If I were studying something in which even one of those three criteria weren’t met? I’d imagine I’d be able to relate with the characters a lot more than I already am.

One of my friends joked that it seemed like I was the only one out of our posse with a future. But even then, no matter how well lined up things might seem to us, we’re still wracked with uncertainty and we’re still gazing at the sky while we’re walking, wondering what things are going to be like in a few years. Solanin’s power is in speaking to this part of us that might be buried inside of us. It draws it out and sets it in front of us for us to examine.

Solanin’s story and the reaction it got out of me reminds me of 5 Centimeters per Second. Solanin didn’t affect me emotionally anywhere near the degree that 5cm/s did, which left me in a depressed mood for a day. What 5cm/s did was set off a firestorm of reflection on how I considered relationships of all sorts, not just romantic ones, with distance thrown in. Similarly, Solanin made me think about what I was doing and where I was trying to go with the time that I had left as an undergrad.

It should go without saying that the sort of work that is able to push you to really think about what it’s presenting in the context of your own life rather than that of the characters is rare, powerful, and unnerving.

I was pretty blown away by Gundam Unicorn’s first episode.

I’ve watched a few first episodes of Gundam shows in the past year and I don’t think anything comes close to how I felt while I was watching UC’s first episode. Even though it’s not until pretty recently that I started traversing through what the Universal Century had to offer me, I considered myself a Gundam fan. Even though I was only halfway through Zeta, I could still feel the significance that Unicorn carried in being the first show set in the UC in more than ten years.

I think the production really surprised me. It was way above any other Gundam show I’d seen. 00 may have had HD sparklies, but UC made even GMs in combat look impressive. I was really happy to see the UC style and aesthetic rendered with modern animation techniques and technology. And the music! I want to know why they never got this guy to do music for any other Gundam show before.

Making my way through the Universal Century, something I’ve felt was off was the pacing of the shows. It was only slightly noticeable throughout the original movies and the OVAs, but it became pretty apparent in Zeta. Something about the way events are timed and episodes are constructed really bothers me. I’m assuming it’s just the way shows were written back then, since I felt 0083 flowed more naturally out of everything I’ve seen. Of course, it could be Unicorn’s origins as a novel shining through here. Not only that, but there’s a lot more symbolism in that episode than a lot of Gundam shows that I can remember.

What’s unfortunate is its release schedule. Thinking about it some more, it doesn’t really seem all that far off from a typical OVA schedule, but it still doesn’t make the excruciating wait between episodes and the completion of the series any easier. But, it does look like we’ll have our Kara no Kyoukai equivalent to obsess over every few months for a few days whenever it lands over the next few years.

But yeah, I certainly didn’t expect to start off 2010 with the best first episode of a Gundam show while also being the most impressive thing of the year so far.

I was looking forward to this route because I’d get to find out just what the hell this Unlimited Blade Works thing was all about. Like I mentioned before, I’ve been constantly reading all of this stuff about how UBW and HF are where it’s at, so I was very, very eager to finally experience creating over a thousand blades and whatnot firsthand. And Fate wasn’t even as terrible as I’d been bracing for, so I was waiting to be blown away.

That excitement was dampened by the realization that I’d have to go through a bunch of school life stuff again. This was my least favourite part of Fate and remains my least favourite part of UBW and HF. The biggest problem I had with this was that there was about as much of it in UBW as Fate did. I’d hoped that with all of the setup that Fate had, we could get through this stuff quicker. Just like Fate, UBW gets good when we get past all of this stuff.

UBW was a very interesting experience for me because it made me realize that my assumptions of what Fate/stay night was about were off. Before playing it, I’d heard that the other routes weren’t about Saber. This was baffling to me, because I’d always thought that Fate/stay night was about Saber. Everything that I knew about F/sn indicated to me that Saber was a central character, if not the central character. After all, she’s essentially Shirou’s ticket into the Holy Grail War and the only way that he can do anything.

Now, I’ve only played a handful of visual novels, so Fate/stay night was yet another interesting take on how interesting the structure of the story for a visual novel can be. Unlike Ever17 or Umineko, where the characters’ motivations and personalities remain pretty constant, Fate/stay night takes more of an alternate universe approach, where enemies in one route become allies in another and background characters from one route are thrust into the limelight in another.

What’s really fascinating is that these alternate universes aren’t equivalent in their importance in the story. In Ever17, each route is different, but it doesn’t really matter which order you go traverse through them since they all serve the same purpose. In Fate/stay night, UBW expands on what we’ve learned from Fate, both in the mechanics of the world and the development of the characters.

UBW is the route that makes it clear that Fate/stay night is about Shirou. You could make the case that Fate was as much about Saber as it was about Shirou. I don’t think you can say the same about Rin and UBW. Yeah, she’s the main heroine of the arc, but unlike Saber, we don’t really get as much illumination or focus on Rin. Instead, it’s Archer that takes Saber’s place in smacking some sense into Shirou.

That’s not to say that Rin doesn’t do anything to help Shirou along. She does, but in a way which is much less noticeable than Archer’s head-on antagonizing Shirou for his ideals. Essentially, the role that Saber played in Fate is split between Rin and Archer. And of course, Archer’s role in Shirou’s development is much greater, given that he’s speaking, as is revealed in the game, from experience.

I can see why everyone loves this arc so much, especially compared with Fate. While Fate is fine as an introductory story with the promise of other routes to follow, I feel like UBW is just as interesting when it’s considered on its own. I hinted at it before, but for me, it was Archer who made the route, not Rin. To be honest, I don’t really like Rin all that much, at least not compared to Saber or Sakura. But I guess I’ll have to head off to HF and decide whether or not it’s better than UBW before I can say that conclusively.

Let’s talk about Canada. My macroeconomics prof said that the defining trait of Canadians is that they’re boring. This is what separates us from the Americans. This is what kept us relatively safe during the global economic crisis. This is why we’re so nice.

So you may have noticed that there are a bunch of people in Vancouver who’ll be playing in the snow for the next two weeks. We just had a fancy ceremony to open the next two weeks and of course, the knee-jerk reaction is ‘herp derp China was better’. Which, I guess, is true. This ignores another fact that should be blatantly obvious.

Canada is not China.

I mean, it’s pretty clear. One of those countries has 1.2 billion Chinese people in it and the other has 33 million random immigrants. One stems from an ancient civilization going back thousands of years and the other is a relatively young constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. One is a burgeoning superpower and the other is a modest middle power. The opening ceremonies of an Olympics should reflect the culture of the host nation, so why are we expecting Canada’s to look like China’s?

China used their opening ceremonies to go through how awesome their history and culture is and to show to the world that it’s back. Canada is looking to present its culture, but not necessarily grandstand in it. And well, there is the fact that China has a much larger pool of cool things to draw from. This is why China had 2008 drummers in absolutely perfect coordination and Canada had punk tapdancers with shoes on fire.

Then there’s the cynical side of things. China is an authoritarian state and Canada is a parliamentary democracy. China has the authority and the will to trample over peoples’ rights and sink ridiculous amounts of money into showing the world how great they’ve become. Canada is beholden to the public and its actions are under constant scrutiny and there are always people displeased with what’s going on who have the right to make a fuss about it.

The intent of China’s show was much more clear as it was a show of force designed to awe the world. As a result, they did whatever it took, at any cost, to pull it off. And for the most part, they succeeded in making an amazing spectacle. Canada’s show is completely different in intent, which was more of a ‘hey guys, we’ve got some pretty neat stuff to show you’ sort of thing. This worked out because it meant that the scale and cost and execution didn’t need to be as grand. It was interesting and fun and pretty neat and that was all I was really asking for.

Now let’s see some frigging medals, Canada.

It’s probably God’s way of punishing me for reading stupid shoujo manga, but I’ve found that the groups who translate these series often do retarded crap that impedes my ability to read these jpegs that they upload. Groups who scanlate shounen and seinen series don’t tend to do this crap, but if they do, there’s usually someone else who’s able to replace them when they piss people off. Not so with shoujo groups. My suspicion is that it’s because these groups are made up of the same type of undesirables that invented fanlistings and webrings and hang out on DeviantArt.

The thing that magnifies everything I hate about these groups is their policy of not allowing any of their scans on any online viewing sites. Normally, this would not be a problem. I happily grab stuff from ZSS whenever it shows up in my feedreader or whenever their bots get updated. But there’s really no reason to keep people from distributing the stuff. Well, there’s no good reason.

The justification tends to be that the group wants you to view it in the highest quality possible and there’s some sort of mythical compression that ruins their beautiful scans or something. This is retarded, because you’re trying to read a scan of a piece of paper. This isn’t something like digitally ripping a broadcast stream or Blu-ray. You’re scanning paper; it starts out with artifacts.

Of course, I suspect that there’s a lot more wankery and self-aggrandizing crap going on. I remember one group who forced people into their IRC channel to download their stuff so they’d have a huge number of people in the channel. Groups who whine about compression think that compression degrades their amazing work, since they ended up using fancy fonts that would have been unreadable in print and need to be viewed at 1080p.

But the part that is the worst about forcing people to go to their site is that their sites are often an awful Invisionfree board that’s been mangled and skinned for whatever stupid series they’re translating. They don’t have the decency to use Wordpress or Blogger or something that has an RSS feed so I don’t need to visit their labyrinthine forums every day to see if they’ve stopped whining long enough to release something.

Yeah, fansubbers are stupid, but most of them don’t actively try to stop you from watching whatever awful shows they decide to translate poorly. Fansubbers have nothing on scanlators in terms of irritating crap they pull.