Finally remembered the last thing!

     After I failed to remember my last MDZS thing to add it to the previous "oh I forgot some stuff" post, I finally remembered it.

    It's that I was stunned to see that Crunchyroll has added the animated version of MDZS to streaming.  They didn't exactly put any effort into its presentation on the page for the series, though:  there's literally no description of the story (I can only think of one other show I've ever clicked on that left that space entirely blank, and that was something that was simulcasting so I had assumed they had no idea how to describe its story) and for the first two seasons the episodes have thumbnails and titles but no episode summaries.  Then for the final season and the quasi-fourth season (made up of mini episodes of things that happened during the earlier seasons that apparently they just left out) they have episode summaries but no thumbnails.  Everything about the show's page on Crunchyroll is just sort of "wtf." 😰  (Okay, actually, it seems like episode summaries are only available on the console version of Crunchyroll, as I just went to the version on my computer to double-check something and found no access to episode summaries at all.  Which is particularly weird all around, but maybe I'm just failing to navigate the PC version correctly.)

    The second time I clicked on it to have a look at the wtf-ness of it all (several days later than the initial time), I noticed something appalling in the descriptions of the episodes in that final season:

Forgot a few things!

     I forgot a couple things on my previous MDZS-related post.

    First, I wanted to mention that I not too long ago watched the anime Raven of the Inner Court.  Like The Apothecary Diaries, it originates in Japan but its setting is inspired by ancient China.  Unlike the other, though, I was pretty disappointed by Raven of the Inner Court.  The body count of bystanders was pretty high, the romantic elements were far too highlighted and far too shallow (at least in Apothecary Diaries Jinshi is trying to pretend he's not head-over-heels for Maomao, plus he actually has a personality and is extremely entertaining to watch), but I think my biggest problem with Raven of the Inner Court is that the anime's pacing is terrible.  They were clearly rushing to get through as much of the plot from the light novels as possible; if they'd spent twice as many episodes on the same amount of story, it would have surely been better, or at least had a lot less of "wait, who's that again?" syndrome.  (Having better character designs with more distinction between characters and a higher animation budget would definitely have helped, too, of course.)  However, as some of my problems with the story were definitely built-in to the original work, I'm not going to bother reading the light novels to get the original version, since I plainly wouldn't be satisfied with it, either.  And I'm obviously not its primary audience (since I prefer queer romance), so that's fine.

    So why do I mention it?  (And especially in a MDZS context?)  Because two of the male characters in it had names that made me sit up and take notice, especially in connection with each other.  Now, keep in mind that this is their names as written in the subtitles.  Unlike Apothecary Diaries, which gives its characters Chinese (or possibly just Chinese-like) names that can be pronounced in Japanese, Raven of the Inner Court gave its characters...how do I put this?  The Japanese versions of actual Chinese names.  If you ever do something like look for MDZS merch on a Japanese storefront like Mandarake, you sometimes find the names transliterated as they're said in Japanese, which gives really weird different names for some of the characters.  (I think "Lan" becomes like "Aoi" or something, going on the meaning of the character used (blue), instead of matching the sound.)  So, there is some uncertainty in my mind as to whether the names in the subtitles on Raven of the Inner Court should be viewed as the names intended by the author of the light novel or not.  (And since I don't actually care, I haven't bothered to look into that.  I would expect that it's either easily found out just on Wikipedia or something...or it's basically impossible to find out because nothing's ever been said in print.)  But either way, whether it's just the subtitles or the author's intent...

    ...two of the male characters are named Wei Qing and Wen Ying.

    Given that the lead of MDZS has the birth name of Wei Ying and one of the major female characters is Wen Qing, it feels like that cannot be a coincidence.

    It still could be a coincidence, of course.  (Or it could be someone in the translation-to-English pipeline deciding to throw in some MDZS references.)  But it's just so weirdly overlapping that it's hard to look at it as coincidental.  (And I did at least look up when the light novels started being published, and it was definitely after MDZS was published, so it's not impossible.)

    Then the other thing was....

    The other thing was...

    ...

    ...I've forgotten it.

    😭

Well, *Maybe* Netflix Doesn't Hate Me?

     So.

    I mean, they're still taking down The Untamed.  That's definitely a mark in the "they must hate me" box.  (Though if they'd put up the "Special Edition" version instead, that would go a long way towards removing that mark.  I've been very curious as to how in the world they can try to make it work at only twenty episodes long.)

    But...

    When the first episode of the new (Netflix-exclusive and at least partially Netflix-funded) anime of Ranma 1/2 went up, I checked out what it said regarding the cast list.  I already knew it was confirmed that both seiyuu for Ranma and the seiyuu for Akane were back, but...wow.  Just scanning the cast list, I saw that it wasn't just those three:  both of Akane's sisters, Ranma's father, and--most importantly after Ranma him/herself!--Ryoga were all back!  I couldn't recall the names of the seiyuu who played Akane's father, Kuno or Shampoo, though, so I wasn't sure about them.

    Anyway, with that encouragement, I decided to give it a try.

    The opening credits visuals were fantastic, though the song accompanying them was merely so-so.  Unlike the opening credits of the original anime, which had one of the best OP songs ever, in my humble (or not so humble) opinion.  (I did not care for the new show's closing credits, visually or musically.  They weren't fitting for a fast-paced comedy in a martial arts setting.  They'd be fine for a more tame, slower-paced rom-com, though.)  Hopefully someone will post an edit of the OP to Youtube, pairing the new visuals with the original song.  That would be epic.

    For the most part, the episode was pretty much exactly the manga, as I recall it.  (Admittedly, it has been a great many years since I read the manga.)  But as I recall the first episode of the original anime was also pretty manga-accurate.  (Again, it's been many years.)  It wasn't until much later in the show that it started going off-book.  (To the extent that they changed the eventual love interests of at least two characters!)

    The first thing that made me sit up and go "whoa!" was when the Jusenkyo guide spoke.

    He's no longer using horrible, broken Japanese.  He's still got an accent, but it's not as egregious, and his Japanese is no longer broken.  (And yes, I don't speak the language, but I can recognize when the speech patterns are radically different.)  Likewise, the subtitles for his lines were not in broken English.  This is an enormous improvement, and I am desperately praying it will extend to Shampoo.  (He otherwise sounds the same, so I'm assuming that Koichi Yamadera is voicing him again, because why wouldn't he, when he's already back as Ryoga?)

    As the episode progressed, I became pretty sure that Mr. Tendo is indeed being played by someone new, but...I mean, it's been a very long time since the original anime.  His original seiyuu might not still be active (or even living; I know both Happosai's and Cologne's seiyuu have passed away, though Cologne's passed away so early that they had to recast her for the OVA, so that's a slightly different issue), but in the long run that doesn't matter.  Mr. Tendo is not a central character, and the original performance did not particularly shape him in any way.

    The various returning cast members sometimes have very different performances, other times remarkably similar ones.  Like, Kasumi in episode one could literally have been the same voice clips from Kasumi in the old episode one, because what need is there to change anything about her old performance?  Her voice was basically perfect from the start.  Kasumi is mostly an open book of a character, so it's not like there was anything to learn about her from later seasons and layer that into her first season performance.  On the other hand, Nabiki's performance (across the first two episodes) ranged from "basically identical" to "nuanced by knowledge of where the character is going" (especially in terms of her interactions with Kuno).

    Where there were major changes, unsurprisingly, were with the two leads.  In addition to the fact that both of Ranma's seiyuu were still early in their careers when the original anime was made and thus have naturally improved their craft over the decades since, there's the fact that they know so much more about the character now.  Particularly in terms of everything that's revealed by the return of Ranma's mother later on, things that the character himself is obviously painfully aware of at all times.  (The same deeper knowledge is likely part of the reason that the performance for Genma Saotome is also much differently nuanced.)  Akane's performance is likewise more nuanced, in her case not due to secrets to be revealed in the future (she really doesn't have any to speak of) but just being able to better understand the character due to having seen how she behaves and reacts in response to the myriad future events of the show.  Her lines to the doctor in the second episode were definitely Akane's performance highlight so far.

    So, yeah, this seems like a super-encouraging start so far.  Admittedly, the original anime didn't necessarily need a remake, because even where it went off the rails it still fit the tone of the original manga.  (Unlike the anime of Urusei Yatsura which by the time I stopped buying the DVDs (about halfway through the series) rarely even visited the original wacky, frenetic comedy of the manga.  It was still good, usually, but...very different.  I just don't know if I can watch the new version of that because the characters' voices were so integral to them, particularly Ataru's, and...well, Hi-dive doesn't have an app on Switch or Playstation, so it's not even an option for me at the moment.)  But getting the later seasons right and gently correcting some of the material that was mistakenly seen as acceptable in the '80s...yeah, I can get behind that.

    However.

    It still has a serious problem.

    One that is wholly Netflix.

    Namely, names.

    More specifically, how the subtitles handle those names.

    It is, sadly, not uncommon for translators to decide to "adjust" how characters interact with each other.  It's not unusual to hear the seiyuu use someone's family name, only to see the text onscreen use their given name.

    This is carried to an extreme in the Netflix subs for Ranma 1/2, particularly where the character of Kuno is concerned.

    No one--and I really do mean no one--ever calls Kuno by his given name.  No one uses it but he himself.  His peers call him "Kuno," his kohai call him "Kuno-sempai," Nabiki calls him "Kuno-chan," Kodachi of course calls him "oniichan" (or was it "oniisama"?), and as I recall his father calls him "Tacchan" or something similarly humiliating.  No one other than Kuno himself uses "Tatewaki."

    Everyone in the subtitles was using "Tatewaki."

    Even Akane.

    Literally everyone.

    No one used "Kuno" except Kuno himself when he was listing his whole name.

    This is completely backwards.

    That is deeply, deeply wrong.

    Deeply.

    If they keep that up, it's going to make watching the show particularly painful.

    So...

    ...yeah, the jury is still out on whether or not Netflix actually hates me.

    (Pretty sure Kuno was recast, btw.  He definitely sounds radically different from how I recall him sounding.  But the performance was good, and the voice is fitting for the character, so that's not a problem.)

Randomly....

     I have lately been watching the anime The Apothecary Diaries.  (Or rather, over the past four or five days I've binged the show, but as it's simulcasting that just means I've watched the first ten (or was it eleven?) episodes and caught up to its current status.)

    It's really good (so far), and obviously it must be doing well, because Goodsmile has pre-orders up for Nendoroids of the two leads, and a Pop-up Parade of the heroine.  Without knowing how the story will end, I'm not sure if I want to spring for all three, but I will probably have to get the Pop-up Parade because of the following weird brain logic.

    I was thinking about the figure and mentally commented to myself that the Pop-up Parade of Maomao might fit in nicely next to the Pop-up Parade of Wei Wuxian...and suddenly I found myself thinking how cool it would be if Maomao was the reincarnation of Wen Qing.

    So now I suddenly and totally headcanon that she is, in fact, the reincarnation of Wen Qing, and I kind of want to write a fanfic wherein Maomao meets the still-existing fierce corpse version of Wen Ning, who recognizes her as his sister, and he's thrilled to get to see her again after so many centuries.  I don't think I ever could write that, since The Apothecary Diaries is set in a much more realistic world without magic and monsters and the undead, but it could be a fun cross-over regardless of that.  (Uh, aside from the fact that it might be a little dubious to have a cross-over between an actual Chinese IP and a Japanese IP that's merely set in ancient China. (Okay, technically I don't know for a fact that The Apothecary Diaries is originally Japanese, but...I feel like if they were just adapting a Chinese novel or whatever then the characters would all have family names, and yet they don't, which is just really weird to me.  They all just have given names, unless Crunchyroll is purposefully screwing up the subtitles so that a whole lot of people with two single-character names are being treated as having one two-character names, which is equally implausible.  There's also the fact that if it was based on a Chinese novel or comic or whatever, then you'd expect a Chinese animation studio to be doing the adaptation, not a Japanese one.))

    Long story short, now that I've come to the weird brain conclusion that Maomao is Wen Qing, I almost feel obligated to buy the Pop-up Parade of her. 😅  (Especially since lately I've been putting together Nendoroid dolls to represent various other Mo Dao Zu Shi characters besides the two who have official rep, but I have not so far done one for Wen Qing.  Just Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli and Wen Ning.  I did spot a dress I could buy that would do for a Wen Qing Nendoroid doll, but finding a Nendoroid with hair that could do for Wen Qing is another matter entirely, and much more difficult to pull off.)

    On an unrelated note, some time ago, I reported on some crazy activity that seemed to be entirely one (or more?) bots loading my blog's main page over and over again.  And then later on I reported that the bot seemed to have moved on after more than 11,000 pageviews.

Heaven Official's Blessing, Season 2

     So.

    I went on YouTube last night for the first time in like a month.  (What can I say, I'm not a big "watcher."  I prefer writing, reading and gaming.)  And in the tier of suggested videos on the topic of Mo Dao Zu Shi there were two videos announcing Season Two of the animated adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing.  (This feels a little like the world laughing at me, since I put up a post barely more than a month ago that, towards the end of the post, said how I was sure they would never continue adapting it.)

    One of those videos had the Crunchyroll logo on it.

    As in, the same people whose subtitles were so awful that they rendered the US Blu-ray release of Season One entirely unwatchable.

    I have to hope and pray that they're merely saying "yes, we'll be simulcasting this" and not "hey, we have exclusive international rights to this" because I cannot watch the rest if they continue the garbage they pulled in the subtitles on the first season.  Admittedly, it shouldn't even be possible to continue trying to pretend there are no ghosts in adapting a novel wherein about a third of the characters are ghosts (and we actually see, in flashback, the progression of one of the characters from child to young adult to ghost flame to powerful ghost) but I don't trust these idiots to have the sense to realize that it's impossible.  It's certainly obvious that whoever was in charge of the subtitles had not read the novel.  (Are they going to keep on trying to pretend that Qi Rong is an epithet rather than a name?  What will they do when he shows up and becomes a major character?  I don't know how much of the novel will be included in Season Two (and don't actually recall precisely when Qi Rong first showed up in the ghostflesh anyway) but chances seem high that he'll be in it, whether in the present as a ghost or in a flashback to while he was still alive...though I think he did show up in the present first, then get shown in the past.)

    Honestly, rather than being excited about a second season, I'm depressed, even a little distraught.  I don't want to see it only released in the US in a butchered form.  In this day and age, why is butchery on that level even still a thing?  Who would think it was a good idea to hand over the rights to their show to a company who would rather invent the word "immor" than admit that a ghost is, in fact, a ghost?  (What is even up with that, anyway?  I mean, did the translation team at Crunchyroll look at the changes that were made to MDZS in the live-action adaptation and decide that meant that Chinese TV didn't like having the undead exist?  If so, they were being morons, because that was obviously done because whoever made the decisions about the live-action adaptation didn't want a hero who was a necromancer.)

    In further mockery of, like, everything, this morning, while this is all still fresh and stewing in my brain, I go to the VN dev server I'm part of on Discord, and see that someone has posted a Twitter thing about how Crunchyroll (allegedly) sold the private information of its subscribers, and has agreed to a class action lawsuit payment to all American customers.  Which will probably be about $30 each.  About half of what I wasted on that Heaven Official's Blessing Blu-ray. 😒

    Now, the flip side of "I may not be able to watch it due to ghastly subtitles" is that I might not want to watch it.  I know it's coming from the same animation studio that did the animated adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi, and from what I've learned of that adaptation (mostly by reading a fanfic set in the animated canon) I would likely hate it.  Especially because that adaptation has a real hate-on for Jiang Cheng (who I'm very fond of (admittedly in part because I watched The Untamed before reading the novel)), and makes all kinds of changes to make him worse (e.g. changing their mock duel to a real one) while simultaneously doing I don't even know what with the novel's actual villain (on top of entirely removing his time undercover in the Wen Clan, it seems they changed the sworn brothers oath to sometime during or even before the Sunshot Campaign?) on top of which it has "everyone has the same face" syndrome.  (Admittedly, that's a problem in the adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing, too:  Nan Feng and Fu Yao are literally just palette swaps of each other, but the different coloration helps to tell them apart a little, and their behavior most of the time does likewise...but when you get into the heat of the final confrontation in the ruins of the Banyue Kingdom, it's almost impossible to tell them apart because they're both concentrated on the business in hand and when they're all business they're virtually identical in behavior, plus it's at night so the low lighting makes their color schemes harder to tell apart.  But that's nothing compared to the notion of trying to figure out the difference between the members of the Lan Clan, who all dress identically!  That's the advantage of the live-action adaptation:  no one can look at the live-action Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi and get them confused, despite their identical garb.  Whereas in the comic, I have to flip back to an earlier page that specifies which is which and compare their slight differences in hairstyle to figure out which one is talking.  (Uh, sometimes.  Other times Lan Jingyi is obvious by his behavior because he's such a feisty little guy. 😆 ))

    Uh...okay, that paragraph just sort of took a side thought and ran with it until it died in a nest of parentheses.  Sorry about that.

    My attempted point was that there's every chance that, moving forward, they might make similarly devastating changes to the story and/or characters in Heaven Official's Blessing.  I can't know that they will, but it's a possibility.  Though admittedly I can't even think exactly what changes they could make that would be comparable to the ones they made to Mo Dao Zu Shi:  the closest equivalent to Jiang Cheng in Heaven Official's Blessing would probably be both Feng Xin and Mu Qing, I guess?  (Certainly, they've both got a bit of his tsundere vibe of "pretending not to care about the hero.")  But I don't even want to say anything about either of them right now, because as of the end of Volume 7, they're the two characters I'm most unsure about in terms of...well, everything.  I don't even want to say how I feel right now about them or what I hope will happen because what if that changes when the final volume comes out?  (I want so desperately to do what I did with MDZS and find a fan translation for the rest of the story so I can find out how it ends, only at some point Seven Seas stopped putting the online chapter numbers on the table of contents, so even if I did find one, I'd be at some difficulty figuring out what chapter to start with!  So I have no choice but to wait until late November! 😭)  As to the story, it's not as straightforward as the story in MDZS, so it's a little hard to know what changes would be most egregious to me.  (Also because I don't know the story as well, what with having only read 7/8 of it, as opposed to MDZS, where I've read the whole novel twice, watched the live-action adaptation once (and rewatched about 2/3 of it), and read the first half of the comic adaptation, too.  (Which reminds me, I wanted to do a post about the latest volume of that...)  Plus obsessively thinking about it an unhealthy amount of the time, because that is how my broken brain operates.)

    I feel like there's more to say here, but...I've run out of steam and lost my train of thought.  (What little train of thought I had to begin with, that is.)

    I guess, in conclusion, all I can say is to hope that the second season of Heaven Official's Blessing is as accurate as the first one, and that it's given better subtitles than the official Blu-ray of the first season got.  (Or, contrariwise, to hope that if the subtitles are every bit as bad, then that the adaptation is as awful as the subtitles.)

    I have to say, though, if the subtitles do turn out to be that bad, I may cancel my Crunchyroll subscription in protest.

IWSG - Connecting Tissue

 

        So, the other day, I was watching a fan-edit of the recent Disney+ mini-series Obi-Wan Kenobi adapting it down to movie-length, since it had originally been intended to be a movie rather than a six episode show.  (Yes, I know, I know, questionable at best.  But I do have a Disney+ subscription, and had already seen the mini-series, so...)  Seeing only one half of various planting-and-payoff scenes really left me thinking about something that I'd already been thinking about lately, vis-à-vis the title of this post, "connecting tissue."  (And yes, this will eventually circle around to my own writing insecurities.)

    I've noticed that a lot of times different versions of the same material (whether a fan-version like that edit or an official adaptation of an already completed novel or other work, or a simultaneous treatment of the same story in two different media), although the same story beats are covered, the connecting tissue is radically different.  Sometimes this is because the setting has changed (compare, for example, the different material in West Side Story compared to its original, Romeo and Juliet), sometimes it's just because of the difference in media (for example, a narrative style that spends a lot of time simply explaining things behind the action requires creativity in adaptation) and sometimes it's because the adaptor has their own purposes in the adaptation that are not representative of the original in one respect or another.  (I feel sure that the movie of Starship Troopers would be an ideal example there, since the book was pro-military and the movie was not, but to be able to actually say so definitively I would have to actually read the book, and I will pass, thank you very much.)

    The adaptation that has been most on my mind lately is the series streaming on Netflix right now under the title The Untamed (which I suspect is not an accurate translation of its actual title, which is different from the original novel's title) and its original novel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.  (I've mentioned this on the blog before already, and will definitely mention it again, 'cause I'm ever-so-slightly obsessed right now. 😅 )  Now, I'm not done reading the novel yet, because the final volume of its official translation won't be published until next April.  (It remains to be seen if I can even wait until December for the next volume, or if I'll hunt up a fan translation to read the parts I'm so desperate for.)  But one thing that strikes me about it is how different much of the connecting tissue is.

    The story takes place in two time periods:  the five-ish years leading up to the hero's death, and the events taking place after his resurrection thirteen years later.  (Not a spoiler; his death is the opening of the novel, followed immediately by his waking up alive again after thirteen years.)  In both the live-action drama and the novel, there are a few significant story events in the present and then we dive into the past for some backstory on the characters and their history.  (In addition to the two versions I've experienced, there's also an animated adaptation and a graphic novel adaptation, but I have not watched/read them, so I don't know if they followed that formula, though I'd expect they do.  I might see if they've been translated into English once I've finished reading the novel, though.  I'm very curious about the other ways adapting the material was approached.)  The live-action show takes the approach of doing the entire past sequence in one exceedingly long go, whereas the novel sprinkles bits and pieces of the past into the present, as appropriate to the present context.  (Some of these bits and pieces take up about half a volume of the novel, so they're not insignificant spans.)  In addition to drastically changing the way the audience perceives the characters (the secret enemy mastermind whose identity you only learn in the final episodes of the show was exposed about halfway through the second volume of the novel, for example) this has radically changed the tissue connecting the characters.  Surprisingly, while the show did not feel padded in the least (despite its 50 45-minute episode runtime), there's actually a great deal of padding there, and most of it is fleshing out the relationships between the characters in the past, giving greater characterization of the supporting cast than the novel has time for.  (Also, in some cases, giving more full coverage of events the novel couldn't show, since it never leaves the hero's side, aside from summations of events he didn't witness.)  Various other changes were also made (primarily replacing the romance between the two leading men with longing glances and homoerotic subtext, an unfortunately necessary change due to the stance of the mainland Chinese government towards LGBTQ+ content), especially in enlarging the roles of the female cast, but it's the the expanded content with the entire supporting cast that really sticks with me, the extra connecting tissue.  For example, so far in the book, in looking at the relationship between the hero and his adoptive brother, it kind of feels like his adoptive brother always found him something of a nuisance, whereas in the show, it's clear that they were as close and affectionate as real brothers:  sure, they quarreled and got on each others' nerves (well, mostly it was the hero getting on his brother's nerves, really), but at the end of the day they would also have given up almost anything to help each other out.  I think that's the relationship we're supposed to see between them in the book as well, but because it doesn't spend as long dwelling on it (after all, that's not the relationship we're supposed to be focusing on!) and showing them getting along happily, it doesn't come through as clearly.  (This could also have to do with the translation; while all translation risks the loss of nuance, the little I know of the subject suggests that Chinese is especially going to lose a lot of nuance in translation to other languages.  Anything live-action doesn't lose as much in translation because the actors' performances are in their faces, bodies and voices, not just in the words they're speaking, so there's more there that survives the translation process.)

    Thinking about all that extra material surrounding the various characters in The Untamed/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation puts me in mind of a similar-yet-different case, that of Sailor Moon.  That seminal '90s magical girl IP is an unusual (but not unique) case:  it was being simultaneously developed as both an anime and a manga.  (Manga being the name for Japanese graphic novels, for those who aren't nerds like myself.)  As with many in the West (most, probably), I saw the anime before reading the manga.  (Though I didn't see it when it was first brought over, thinking it looked stupid.  And, honestly, it kind of is stupid, but a glorious, wonderful kind that's very lovable.)  After loving the show, I decided to read the manga, and was astonished by how short it was.  (It doesn't sound short, I suppose, being about twelve volumes long, but...Cardcaptor Sakura's twelve volumes covered three seasons of very uneven length--about two and a half seasons, really, with only two story arcs.  Sailor Moon's twelve volumes covered five full seasons, each with its own story arc.)  I was also very disappointed by it at pretty much every turn, because it spent so little time with the characters.  Everything was just rushing willy-nilly towards the next fight, and no time was set up on the connecting tissue letting us get to know and care about the characters; only the heroine got much time devoted to her, and even she wasn't as fully characterized as in the show.  A recurring villain on the show who spent a long time throwing monsters-of-the-week at the heroines before finally being dispatched in a truly epic fashion was killed at the end of his first appearance in the manga; in fact, all the henchmen who had been significant opponents in the show became the monsters-of-the-week instead...and yet in the case of the henchmen of the first arc, the manga expected us to feel considerably more sorry for them than the anime did, despite doing literally nothing to give them any personality!  If it had spent more time on them as characters, giving them more tissue to connect them to each other and to the heroine's boyfriend (who they had served in his previous life), maybe we would actually have felt sorry for them, rather than just being told we ought to feel sorry for them.

    On the other hand, sometimes adding extra connecting tissue may be a bad thing?  When The Untamed increased the amount of time the audience spent with two of the female cast, that only made their eventual deaths that much more painful.  (Though at least restructuring the story meant that their deaths were at about the 2/3 mark rather than closer to the end, as I have a sinking feeling that both their deaths will end up in volume 5 rather than volume 4.  Getting almost all the tragedy out of the way by putting all the past events together was helpful in that regard.)  Though whether that's a good or a bad thing is perhaps subjective:  I mean, I know some authors actually want to make their readers cry, and certainly moving the audience can't be bad as such, but...I dunno, maybe it's just that I'm a weakling who doesn't like feeling bad.

    I've been mulling over a lot of this lately because of my current writing project, in which that connecting tissue--the material that's so necessary both to flesh out characters and bind them together--is a big question mark on the current outline for the story.  For pretty much all the characters who have a side-story (the ones the hero can romance), all I have for that side-story is "dunno what it's gonna be about" or "something to do with them commiserating over this thing they have in common" and no clue about how to go about writing that connecting tissue, or how to draw the characters closer to each other as the side-story progresses.

    This is, of course, because I've really bitten off way more than I can chew, agreeing to co-write a visual novel with dating sim aspects when I don't even particularly play dating sims, let alone know how to write one, and the unfamiliar setting isn't helping, though I do at least feel a lot more comfortable in the setting than I did when I started, thanks to all the research (and all the examples I've consumed).

    I'm about 13k words into the script at this point (counting notes and speaker notations), and really feel like I'm doing a miserable job of it.  My collaborator (who is the other co-writer, the project lead, and more) said they thought it was acceptable, but...I don't feel like it is, and I'm terrified of when I get past the bare-bones structure we have planned already and reach the connecting tissue that I just have no idea how to fill in.

    And I feel like this has actually led rather well into this month's suggested question:

September 7 question - What genre would be the worst one for you to tackle and why?

    There's actually a lot of "worst" genres for me, but this one I'm trying to work in right now--a subcategory of the romance genre--might be the actual worst.  As an aroace person who never had a romantic relationship to have the "no, this is not for me" epiphany from experience, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't know how to deal with writing romance, or even people in relationships.  I basically only know what I get from media I've consumed, so I basically see romance in two very disparate stages:  hornyhornyhorny and so-established-as-to-be-boring.  I know that real people don't actually see romance in only two shades--lust and taken-for-granted--but that's all I ever get of it from popular culture.

    I feel like I need to exclusively write stories featuring no romance whatsoever even in the background...and yet I really kind of want to write about beautiful people who fall in love with each other and happily manage to connect and maintain their connection.  I don't know why, but... 

    (Before I started thinking about all this, I'd have said that the worst genre for me to tackle would be horror because I'm so easily frightened, but at least I know what fear is, and what scares me.  I could probably write quasi-decent children's horror if I had to.  Realistic modern war as a genre would also be abysmal for me, but historical war and sci-far war are genres I've dealt with from time to time.)

Thermae Romae (Primae et Novae)

    Not too long ago, I logged into Netflix and found that the "we're promoting this today" product was a new anime, Thermae Romae Novae.  My reaction, of course, was "huh, really?  That's a weird choice to give a sequel to.  Didn't realize anyone even remembered that show..."

    Then I let the trailer play and I was like "wait, it's a remake?"

    Naturally, I added it to my watch list and just left myself a mental note to get to it later.

    So, I watched the first episode last night.  It's a weird mix of "clearly a lot of research went into this" and "why the *^%^& would they do that?!"  (Warning, this discussion will have some "spoilers" for the first episode, but...is this really the kind of show where there even is such a thing as a "spoiler"?  I mean, the premise is "the Roman who bathed through time," you know?  It's not about story so much as the humorous reactions of an ancient Roman bathmaker in modern day Japanese bathhouses.)

    I mean, right from the start, it's a little weird in the opening credits to have music based on Italian opera and visuals based on Greek vases.  (Sort of.  More the figures and the poses but less so the actual art style and not the coloration at all.  Hard to explain properly, esp. without having the visuals right in front of me.  (I've only seen it the once, after all!))

    Then we get the introductory sequence of "welcome to Ancient Rome" and the fly-over of the city, and I'm thinking that it looks pretty darn good.  The city looks about like it should, and the animation quality is good.

    And then we get a series of short scenes to further introduce the Roman people as a whole.

    Including a party-goer throwing up (either from too much wine or to make room for the next course, most likely) while his fellow-partiers call him back over...

    ...and the fellow partiers are lying on their stomachs on featureless couches.

    On.

    Their.

    Stomachs.

    I'll pause here a moment to let you fully take that in.

    The weird thing is, that's not the first time I've seen someone so completely misunderstand how reclining at the table worked.

    And the other was also Japanese pop culture, so I suspect there's some "classic" Japanese history text that made that mistake and generations of Japanese students have just absorbed it.  (Or maybe it comes from that movie about Cleopatra that Tezuka made?  I don't know much about that movie...)  Anyway, the other place was in a cute little manga called NG Life, by Mizuho Kusanagi, about a man from Pompeii who was reincarnated in modern-day Japan but still remembers his life as a Roman.  (It had a lot of other mistakes in it, esp. regarding the social role of gladiators, but it was still cute.)

    In both cases, it's hard for me to understand how no one with editorial oversight didn't look it up online and realize that the reclining position should look like this:

    I mean, that took me maybe five, ten minutes to get.  (Took me longer than necessary 'cause I was trying to get those Etruscan tomb frescoes showing all the young men at a symposium, only then it turned out the pictures weren't all that good at showing what I wanted...)  The pictures are, in order from top to bottom, an Etruscan sarcophagus, a panel from a Roman sarcophagus, a Greek vase (the reclining figure is on the lower tier), and a fresco from Pompeii.  (All the pictures above are from Wikimedia Commons, and you can click the pictures to go to the page with the full-size images and photographer credits.)  And that Etruscan sarcophagus is one of the most famous works of Etruscan sculpture of all time--one of the main things you think of when someone says "Etruscan art"--so there's not a lot of excuse for not knowing what it looks like.

    Moving on, after that absurdity left, then we had the bulk of the first episode following our protagonist, Lucius, as a child.  And there were still some little inaccuracies (I thought for a while that everyone was wearing these odd seashell necklaces until I realized they were supposed to be cloth pouches to hold their money, which is inaccurate in that you wouldn't wear that outside your clothes where the thieves can see it! (also inaccurate in that a child would not be carrying money with him unless he was specifically on an errand to buy something)) and the streets didn't have anywhere near enough people on them, but mostly it was looking good.  (There were still a lot of cultural awkwardnesses, of course.  I don't think bullies would have acted the same way in Ancient Rome that they did in mid-century Japan, you know?  I mean, I admit to ignorance about how the urban middle to lower class boys bullied each other in Rome, but...I don't think that was it.  And Lucius was on an errand to bring lunch to his grandfather, but I'm not so sure lunch was even a thing in antiquity.  I need to look that up; I had sudden panic as I was preparing my latest novel for release on itch.io as I realized that it was probably grotesquely inaccurate to have people eating a midday meal in the Late Bronze Age.  But I'm not sure when lunch, as we think of it, started happening.  I feel like for most of human history it was two meals a day:  one in the morning and one in the evening.  But I need to research that...)

    And we got through this prefatory material pretty smoothly, and then we get Lucius as a grown man, freshly returned from studying in Athens...so he can be a better bathmaker.  Of course, Athens was not exactly known for its baths.  That was a Roman thing.  It was known for its architecture, though, and Romans loved the cache they got from having studied in Greece (esp. for rhetoric or poetry), so that wasn't too big a deal...

    ...but then Lucius stops to pay his respects to his father and grandfather, represented by these little full-figure statuettes standing where the household gods should be.

    That is a huge "no."

    Yes, Romans did keep statues of their deceased family members--male ones, at least--but they tended to be busts, and they were pretty much only brought out for funerals.

    They were not the equivalent of the Buddhist altar you often see in homes in anime and manga (I won't speculate on how accurate that is to Japanese reality, because how would I know?), and they certainly weren't kept in place of the household gods.

    Very, very awkward.

    Then Lucius goes to the baths, where he runs into one of the bullies who was picking on him at the beginning of the episode.  The bully having grown out of being a bully and wanting to apologize for his earlier behavior felt a little forced in an era so far before psychological counselling, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, so I'm okay with that.

    I'm much less okay with him using the "thumbs up" gesture in such a modern way.

    Specifically, after the bully-turned-butcher apologizes, Lucius asks if he'll give him a discount next time he visits his butcher's shop.  And the guy gives him a thumbs up.

    That.

    Is.

    So.

    Wrong.

    Firstly, at some point since the gladiatorial games went the way of the dinosaurs, people forgot what the signals meant.  Thumbs down actually meant "put your sword away," as in "let your opponent live."  So, the thumbs up was "kill the guy!"  Therefore, what in the heck would it even mean in this context?

    I can't even imagine.

    Either way, a gesture associated with the brutal fighting in the coliseums would be entirely inappropriate and unnatural in a friendly conversation inside a bath.

    So...yeah.

    Basic reaction to the first episode is "they got so much right that the things they got wrong really jump out at me, screaming and yelling and waving their arms."

    I still plan on watching the rest, of course, but I think it's going to be a "one episode a week" thing to build up my strength again.  (Thankfully, while I'm moderately knowledgeable about it, and used to be pretty good at the language, Ancient Rome doesn't mean the same thing to me that Ancient Greece does, so it's not as big a problem as it could be...)

    Anyway, today I decided to pop the DVD in the player and rewatch the first episode of the original anime (which was from 2012, so I guess this was sort of a 10th anniversary thing?) to see how it compared.

    And I very quickly understood why they wanted to do a new one.

    The first one wasn't really...well...animated.  It was more like sprites sliding around, and lip-flap animations when someone was talking.  I mean, they were much better lip flap animations that you get in most visual novels, but...the difference between that and the lavish animation in the Netflix anime is mind-blowing.  (The original also didn't spend as long setting the scene and just plain showing Rome, so it had less time to make mistakes.  Though the conclusion of the episode made some pretty massive mistakes, in that the Romans did know how to make glass bottles, and also had pottery wheels, so whether those clunky bottles were supposed to be badly made glass or badly made pottery, either way it was wrong.)

    To give you an idea of the difference, visually...

    Here's the promotional images for the two versions side by side.

    Huh...actually, that's not so informative.  You can't really understand what I'm talking about without seeing a clip of the original and then watching the trailer for the new one.  (The main thing you can see here is that in the original, Lucius is blond, which would actually have been pretty unusual for a Roman.)

    Honestly, I think the original was made super on-the-cheap as a promotional thing for the live-action movie, as the teaser poster for it was on the wall when Lucius arrived in Japan in the first episode.  I can't even imagine how this would work extended into a single, movie-length story.  And with everyone being Japanese, I would think it would kind of squash some of the fish-out-of-water when Lucius arrives in the present, since his original basic reaction of "these people look like no one I've ever seen before" would kind of not work if everyone involved is of the same ethnicity.

    That being said, I think a live-action take on this could be really cool (in small chunks only), if you did it right:  get together an appropriate cross-section of humanity for the Rome sequences (keeping in mind that Rome in the time of Hadrian would actually be pretty diverse, due to the spread of the Roman empire and slaves being brought in from all quarters of the empire and then freed, not to mention free people moving to Rome for better opportunities, plus just plain tourism) and have them all speaking in Latin, then the stuff in Japan is of course in Japanese and featuring only Japanese people.  If I were a teacher at a college, I would so try to get the Classics and the Drama departments together to do something like that.  Just to see it, you know?

    (The world should now be very grateful that I do not teach....but if anyone does make a video like what I just described and posts it to YouTube, please let me know, okay?  I want to see it...)