extremely brief anime rec

[rushthatspeaks]

Thrud recently (last month) asked me to encapsulate the premise of Bleach so she could put it in a neat little blurb for the Vericon program, and I said "It's like Yami no Matsuei crossed with Naruto, only without the gay of Yami no Matsuei and without all those ninjas." And Thrud stared at me. And I said "Shinigami. It's all about the shinigami. And the high school non-romance. And the weird sense of humor." And Thrud continued to stare at me, and then asked me to kindly write the blurb myself, which I did.

This was before I had seen any of the anime, so that I was depending on a weird combination of the first bits of the manga and fan discussion for my information, but everything I said was accurate. However, the reason I'm recommending the Bleach anime is unique to said anime, and is in fact utterly idiosyncratic and different from anything else I've ever seen in a way that gives me great delight. If you know any Japanese, this one is a must.

So one of the main characters, Kuchiki Rukia, is a shinigami. She is wise and ancient of years, and takes no crap from anybody, and in general is a nice change from most women you get in shounen series. She uses 'ore' as her personal pronoun, but there's no doubt about her being a woman-- she just has that much attitude. And I have never heard her refer to the protagonist as anything other than 'kisama'. She has a marvelous deep contralto.

For reasons I do not wish to bother to go into, she winds up attending the protagonist's high school.

If you know Japanese, or if you've seen enough anime to pick up on some stereotypes, you have to hear Kuchiki Rukia's high-soprano, 'atashi'-using, giggly gods-awful imitation of a high school girl. I laughed until I hurt myself. She just can't get it quite right, and it's ever-so-slightly out of kilter, and it manages to be from every shoujo series ever and from a bizarre alternate dimension at the same time. It's the best linguistic joke I've encountered in anime. foleyartist1, run, don't walk.

The plot also appears to be pretty good, but I will admit that I have not been paying attention, because every time Rukia opens her mouth on school property I fall over again. At any rate, there's definite potential for something or other nifty there, and I'm sure I'll get around to noticing it eventually.

Comments

[homasse.livejournal.com]

*giggle* Rukia's switching cracks me up each time. And her visual aids. OMG, the visual aids!

And the plot is pretty good; I like the anime so much I bought the manga, and will read it once I've finsihed all the FMA manga out so far (two more books left to go...next one, hurry up already!)

[homasse.livejournal.com]

*Psst. Tell R I just sent her the next chapter of FMA to be beta'd. You can beta it to, if you want. XD