My Goodreads Review of The Promised Neverland, Volume 20 (and the series as a whole).

 My farewell to this series. There is always a sense of reward and sorrow when a good series you read or watch come to an end and you are done with it. That is me now with The Promise Neverland. My love of manga is partly because of the franchise so I feel I owe a debt to it. So here are my thoughts:

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 20 by Kaiu Shirai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Around now, seven years ago...
I was drawing the prototype storyboards of The Promised Neverland that I would later submit to the Shōnen Jump editorial department. I was confident about my idea. But there were many elements of the story that didn't have the standard "Jump" traits. It had a female protagonist, and it was plot driven instead of character driven.
Even as I look back on it now, I strongly believe that depending on the editor, my submission could have been rejected on the spot." - Kaiu Shirai, October 2, 2020

Aquí se Puede

[I will get to the actual volume in this review, but this is the meta-portion:]

The Promised Neverland, along with One-Punch Man & Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to read manga after spending so long avoiding the format despite being an anime fan for most of my life. Now manga makes-up the near-majority of the sequential-art that I read. That was not true in April 2019 when I decided (very correctly in hindsight) not to wait for a second season of the anime and read the manga from where the first season ended. This story was a very interesting look into the dystopian/horror genre in anime/manga. It was also a very interesting look into two things that I tend to note on in anime/manga/light-novels: the depictions of Black people in the format and the use of involuntary servitude (e. g. slavery, serfdom, etc.). The use of those elements in the plot were different and predictable in this story.

To quickly address the former: Despite the standard-line of manga abiding by the artistic concept of Mukokuseki (無国籍), which is to say of no one ethnic o national origin, it has always been clear that in-practice this just meant making characters look generic and white (interestingly, you don't see a lot of characters drawn with "Asian" features unless they are from China or Southeast Asia). When Black characters did appear in the early days of anime & manga, it was usually in the blackface minstrelsy style. This only started changing in the 1980s—and it was a slow change. Nowadays, it is expected of Japanese illustrators to draw more realistic depictions of Black/dark-skin characters—but every so often there are relapses. While I think that the artist Posuka Demizu did a good job at drawing most of the Black characters in this book (this was a very ethnically diverse non-mecha series), I still can't get my head over why she retreated back to the old stereotypes for Sister Crone. The character was dead before I started reviewing the manga, but I was planning to lodge my complaint on that when I reviewed the series in-full.

I have to say I was more fascinated in how it depicted slavery. Technically, it does not really depict slavery as the kids are technically raised as livestock on farms rather than chattel on slave plantations, but the way that places like Grace Field were organized in the story were plantation-adjacent (especially when we learn what their true purpose was). I think The Promised Neverland, along with Shadows House (can't wait to review this book on Goodreads one day. Another dystopian/horror series that uses serfdom instead of slavery), are some of the better analogues to involuntary servitude as oppose to most depictions you see from series originating from light-novels (a Japanese media format with much less quality control) that tend to depict slavery through the lens of male power-fantasy. I think the display of how othered and de-humanized the humans in the demon world were was especially well-done.

[Ok, now on to the actual volume]

With all that said, the finale was less about a final battle, but with the final reckoning of the price of freedom for the stories heroine. While most of the resolutions for the characters are satisfactory (unless you're Isabella), Emma's luck of getting out of all obstacles in the story unscathed ends here, and she is forced to give-up something substantial (view spoiler)[her memories (hide spoiler)] to the deity that controlled the over-arching events of the story in order to obtain the passage of the humans from the demon world to Earth (which in the current day of this volume is uncomfortably looking like where our current world is headed). Despite this price, Emma agrees that the bigger goal of liberation is the most important. The last line from that other comic—The Complete Persepolis—rings true here ("Freedom had a price"). I may have wished for something happier and not bittersweet, but the ending we have here is solid.

I think that The Promised Neverland will always have a mixed reception because of the second season of the anime. If you only watched it through the anime, than you view it along with the Matrix sequels as the sequel tainting the whole franchise or season 2 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as one of the great disappointments of anime. But if you only read the manga, or like most people, watched season 1 then read the manga it is one of the greatest series of the 2010s. The "Goldy Pond arc" of volumes 7-11 was the highlight of the series to me (and why I was so disgusted with season 2 of the anime totally cutting it out). While I do think I have read better manga since I began this series (that I have not yet covered on Goodreads), this is the second series where I covered most of it on Goodreads after Demon Slayer which I finished last year and one of the best manga I have covered so far.


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 The Blog looks a little weird right now, that is because of a glitch not letting the sidebar be, well, on the side. So this will have to be the set-up for the time being.

My Review of Kimi ni Todoke - Season 3

[I originally posted this back in August to another site that I was using to track my anime & manga, but it got weird as it turns out the moderators there were out of control with their power so I am reposting this here. Maybe later on I will share my interesting experiment/experience this year of trying to interact with the online anime community after 10 years of not doing that.]

Few anime go as long between seasons as this one. In the time between season 2 and season 3, the landscape of anime romances has changed a lot—partly due to the influences of this series. The manga came to an end and a lot of the tropes utilized in this series would show-up in other series. I think the big impact is the way male-targeted romance series got better over time due to the legacy of this show. Shounen & seinen romances like Insomniacs After School, Call of the Night, and possibly the most interesting example for me—The Dangers in My Heart are just some of the series that owe at least a partial debt to this series. And we haven't even talked about other shoujo romance series. As much as I could talk about the legacy of Kimi ni Todoke, lets get to season 3 itself. 

While the hard work of becoming a couple was resolved in season 2, this season was Shouta and Sawako trying to discover what that means. While they come to terms with that by the end of the season, you could argue that the real focus was the deepening ties and relationship re-evaluation between Chizuru and Ryuu. We already knew about Ryuu's feelings, but now Chizuru was made to starkly and painfully reflect over her relationship with him and it's evolution over the years. This dynamic is the near-highlight of the season. And then we get to Ayane. If Gimai Seikatsu thinks that they have anime's saddest gyaru, Ayane here was trying to give her a run-for-her-money. Her ongoing issues with her self-esteem was given much-needed help by season two's ensemble darkhorse turned (male) hero of this season Kento Miura who was the only person capable of getting through to Ayane (well...almost the only person). As Shouta was in his feelings for most of the season, Kento stepped-up as the only sane male character in the show. Shouta was really out of it in this season as he seemed to not understand how to cope with just being the emotional support for Sawako and nearly destroyed their relationship out the gate before he gets some much-needed wake-up calls from some very unexpected places. This group went on shaky-ground this season, but all came out stronger than before. 

Getting back almost all of the original voice actors was a miracle and it really put me back into the series. The series music was good and always matched the mood of the show. Having the staff from the first two season work with modern equipment really makes a difference and I was always impressed that the composition of the series did not lose the aesthetic of the first two seasons. They could've gone for a more "contemporary" look given they had Netflix money to play with, but one always appreciates keeping the original manga's vision. I also noticed that because each episode was an hour, the story lines could be told in intersecting ways that we normally don't get in your usual thirty minute episode.

All-in-all Kimi ni Todoke uses it's simple, to the point, but sincere storytelling to remind everyone why it is still the gold-standard of shoujo romance in the 21st century. Where other series have done too little or too much, it gets the recipe perfect. I hope they adapt the whole manga and the sequel, but until then I am happy with this.

My Goodreads Review of One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes

 Haven't read a Christmas story or any LAngston Hughes in a while, so "two birds with one stone." This story reminds me a lot of At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov.

One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminds me of a story my grandmother told me of growing up poor in rural Virginia. While the rest of the United States was in the come-up of the post-WWII economic boom, her community was as poor as they ever been. The youngest of 10, her mom would tell her and her siblings that Santa Claus tried to get there gifts in the house, but accidentally left the. In the fields and hillsides around the house and they had to search for them there. Of course there were no gifts, but they would look in vain anyway.

While we don’t have an explicit location, by context clues the short story here takes place in small-town central Maryland. The only major city named is Baltimore where they could actually afford to build a movie theater for Black people, this town that the story is set in only has a whites-only movie theater. A severely over-worked & underpaid mother is trying to by something for her son to have for Christmas despite being cruelly-underpaid by her white employer whose home she worked in on Christmas Eve! It is her young-son who has an unfortunate run-in with a Santa at a whites-only movie theater lobby that learns the harder lessons of Christmas in the Jim Crow Great Depression era.

This was a short, but bitter story. Nothing big-traumatic happens, but we do get a little loss of innocence here. One does wonder if Hughes meant for this to be a cynical comedy or serious which I can’t tell, but this story does give me a little to think about.

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My Goodreads Review of Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1

 With all the sorrow of this month, I still haven't forgotten to take some time to honor our Indigenous family this month and I have an excuse to read American comic books again—something I hadn't done in a long time. 

Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I haven’t read an American comic book since 2021, so I know I was going to be a little rusty on reviewing one now. I am so use to manga now that several times while reading this I had to stop myself from reading the speech bubbles and text box from right to left. The fact is, I still have fairly substantial back-catalog of western comic books that I need to read and given this is November, good reason to read this short-anthology celebrating Marvel Comics’ Indigenous heroes. This is not the first time reading a comic anthology about Indigenous people as I previously read and reviewed This Place: 150 Years Retold an excellent historical narrative anthology on the history of Indigenous people in Canada. Like in that book, the illustrations vary in quality, but the stories are a good introduction/sample. I really wish there was more here to read, but better than nothing.

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My Goodreads review of Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa

 This is my proper into to this poet and more of a check on my to due list as much as anything. Hopefully I get in the mood to read more of his work some day.

Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Tangled in the bell ropes
of each new day,
scribbling on the bottom line
of someone else’s dream,
loitering
in public courtyards
telling statues where to fall.” - from “Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror”

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who I knew by reputation before I ever read him. I finally read his work when I read him as part of the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and was impressed by what I read. Trying to find something to read by him was difficult, but I chose this book as it was just long-enough to serve as an introduction to him and was early-enough in his career before his more notable works on music and war (he was a Vietnam War veteran). The book was written as a homage to his Jazz heroes, and reflections on his early life in Louisiana and as a soldier abroad (though he never makes a direct reference to his time at war here).

I liked this volume generally. I didn’t have any poems I hate, but there where at least half the poems I really liked. I think the second part of the book is stronger than the first, but I think this is a good volume of early-1980s poetry. Eventually I will likely read more by him one day.

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My Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Been awhile since I read something and been so angry—in a good way—at what was being written about. I felt so enraged about the crimes talked about in this book, but I think it is good to feel righteous anger at this. Well here is my Goodreads review/thoughts on this book.

  The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.


What is the duty a writer holds to their audience, themselves, the process? James Baldwin wrote a book of essays trying to answer that in Nobody Knows My Name in 1961 while working on his novel Another Country and as his direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was deepening. Now in 2024 we have Ta-Nehisi Coates writing the same sort of book about being a writer and this being a mea culpa about a section of his landmark essay The Case for Reparations in which he listed West Germany paying reparations to the State of Israel which he received immediate blowback for. Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel/Palestine and writes what he sees and feels and it is a harrowing and deeply soul-searching travelogue. This book is 230+ pages, but it felt like it could've been 500 with the emotional weight it put on me. I am still taking in the information in the book, but I really was moved by this book and want to process it.

Senegal

No one has the right to erase my culture, because a community without a culture is a people without human beings" - Léopold Sédar Senghor

Étoile de Dakar - Titeur

Back in 2020-21, I lost quite a few of my family members while the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing—chief among them my paternal grandmother. I hadn't seen her in person in years and she had been the one who kept so many stories of our family history. It dawned on me that with her gone I would be losing a lot of those stories so I decided to do some amateur genealogy and family history research to preserve the names and stories the best I could. When an African-American takes a consumer DNA test, what they are shown, among other things, is that they share ancestry not with one specific African ethnic group or tribe, but with multiple—sometimes over a dozen. One may share a plurality of ancestry with one ethnic group, but that still is not a lot. This makes claiming ancestry with one group based on biology a bit hallow given that you are related to a lot of different groups. Then you have to remember that most of your known history and culture only concretely begins in North America in 1619. Alex Haley has a lot to answer for. Still, it has always been for that reason that African-Americans have historically taken the lead when it comes to Pan-Africanism and countless figures from Alexander Crummell to W.E.B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey (West Indian, but still important to African-American history) and so on have dreamed of a strong independent Africa and possibly a place to return to. Liberia and Sierra Leone were founded from such aspirations.

In 2022-23(?) (we are not told of when he went to Senegal, but it was before he went to the Middle East) Ta-Nehisi Coates makes his inaugural journey to Africa—specifically the Republic of Senegal and he spends his time there wrestling with the fact that he was physically in Africa, but it was not the mythical paradise his Black Panther father had told him about growing up nor was it the raging uncivilized hell-hole that white Americans have always told everyone it was. One feature of this book is that while he is telling us about his real-time experiences, he is also giving us background information and lessons on how and why he is experiencing things or what he is writing against. In this case it is hundreds of years of anti-Black racism distorting the history of Africa to justify slavery and colonialism. He is doing this while trying to reconcile if he and the Senegalese people he spends time with can truly close the gap with each other across cultures and histories. He is hopeful, but a bit uncertain. Ironically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed similar feelings in Americanah on interacting not just with African-Americans, but with other Africans in the novel. Blood ties can only bind people so much and one has to ask what else makes peoples, peoples. He comes to an understanding with himself about these things—what slavery and apartheid has done to him & colonialism and neo-colonialism has done to people in Senegal—and realizes that there has to be a little caution to being so hasty to want an imagined utopia so hastily....but we'll come back to that. There is hope here, as an Americanah, that a real connection in the African diaspora can be made on tangible ground, regardless of reality or myth. This Senegal section was the one that connected to me on the most personal record even if I don't have quite the naivete about Pan-Africanism that Coates has.

South Carolina

Marvin Gaye - Save the Children

"If...we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish." - W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History" Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

I remember the 2020 era of Black squares and everyone promising to do better with "The Blacks." What a time! Before the year was even out, the reaction had begun and the first wave of book banning laws were being drafted. Whether it was called "woke" or "CRT" or now "DEI". It was basically a ban on teaching about whoever you didn't like whether it be Black people or LGBT people. One of these places that passed book banning laws was the state of South Carolina a state that had implemented a particularly brutal form of slavery, had one of the most violent reactions to Reconstruction, and fought racial integration particularly hard. The state house in Colombia celebrates all kinds of the worst people in human history and in Chapin, South Carolina the Lexington-Rchland 5 School Board and high school teacher Mary Wood were entering a showdown over Between the World and Me. Coates' book along with works like The Complete Maus, The Bluest Eye, and The Diary of a Young Girl are favorite targets of the right-wing school censors. That particular school board is prone to extreme right-wing parents. This chapter really has Coates reflect on his own time as a student, as well as the history of South Carolina and a deeper meditation of who writes the histories and who decides what histories are read. TNC goes to the school board meeting with Mary Wood that ultimately decided her fate: that we she would be allowed to keep teaching BTW&M. A battle won, but a temporary victory as the forces of white supremacy don't stop working just because they suffer a loss. We would do well to remember that.

Israel/Palastine

"But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. - James Baldwin "Open Letter To The Born Again" (September 29, 1979)

Marcel Khalife - My Mother

So here we are to the heart of the book. I tried to explain what parts 1 & 2 of this book were about because it is here in part 3 that the sum of both narratives reaches a dark conclusion. If part one ("On Pharohs") was about one of the most hated and wretched people of the world trying to connect to each other in a supposed homeland of paradise, but question if there can be such a thing as a utopian homeland; If part 2 ("Bearing the Flaming Cross") is about the fight to control the history, narrative, and basic information of this wretched people constantly; part 3 is a cautionary tale about another very despised people who manage to establish a homeland and promote their own narrative about it...at a terrible price. They make their land and their narrative according to the designs and whim of the very people who had spent thousands of years persecuting them. A freedom achieved not though good faith, but through the use of colonialism and apartheid against another group of people.

I'd known about this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians all my life, but it was witnessing the brutality against the Palestinians between 2009-2012 that made things clear to me on this issue. While for me it seemed clear, for others it as taken a lot longer to see and with genocide as the trigger. But this section is where Coates brings all of his journalistic efforts to bare as he goes through a very intimate look at how antisemitism and Zionism found a common goal with each other and the Holocaust became the perfect pretext to accomplish a two-fold goal:

1. Get the majority of Jewish people out of the West (something the Holocaust had two-thirds accomplished) and 2. Set-up a colonial state in the Middle East to keep the Arabs in-check. The natives (in this case the Palestinians) would be the only real losers so nobody would care.

Accomplishing this would see the United States as the main model (along with Apartheid South Africa after 1967). The genocide of Indigenous people in North America and the régime of racial segregation laws that spread throughout the United States of America and targeted only non-white people and effectively turned a quarter of the United States into an undemocratic totalitarian state. Imagine if Jim Crow-era South Carolina or Mississippi was transported to the Levant and funded by the United States and allies. The catalogue of atrocities, by which I mean not just the physical violence, but the violence of the state itself against through its laws and customs against all it deems outsiders or minorities that is so galling to comprehend. I currently live just across the highway from the former plantation that my family was enslaved on. I have talked with grandparents and a great-grandparent on their experiences living under the Jim Crow régime. I even found an old newspaper advertisement for the auctioning of one of my 3x great-grandparent and his siblings. It truly hits one to see such a legacy being alive and well today to be used against another people funded with my tax dollars (I had an antebellum-era newly-freed 4th great-grandfather who was taxed $5 a year for being a "free person of color" in Virginia. That money was used to fund the continued enslavement of his brother and family). It's made all the more tragic that the people doing it would by conventional-wisdom be the last folks to do this.

I had always suspected this as my knowledge of world history expanded, but being a victim does not preclude you from being a victimizer. Kendrick Lamar said, "Hurt people, hurt people." Alas, he was more right than he knew. Coates realized that even the victims of the Holocaust could endorse apartheid and ultimately genocide. It is a tragedy that Coates lays out in magisterial detail from the moment he begins this section at Yed Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem) to the ending with Palestinian-Americans in Chicago. This is as much a long-form journalistic narrative and history as it is an example of writing to haunt...speaking of which.

To Sum It Up

The book's stated goal was to show young writers how to write to haunt the reader as Rakim the MC haunted him as a listener. Like Between the World and Me, this book is written as an epistolary non-fiction essay. For all his atheism, Ta-Nehisi Coates is seemingly trying to make the case for being the successor to Saint Paul as far as the use of letter-writing to tell his stories. I am not a big fan of this format, but I still appreciated what he wrote here and I was definitely haunted by it.

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My Review of Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

 Joy & Pain: like sunshine and rain. 

I can't say what exactly one could label this anime when you get right down to it. Romance? Yeah ok. Comedy? Most defintely. Harem? Yes and no. When I added this series to my schedule at the last minute, I thought of it as nothing more than another harem adaptation and something that could fill-out my Saturday anime-watching schedule until I got bored of it. I had no expectations of it as it was a last-minute add. Like everyone reading this review, I had my doors blown off by the end of the first episode and knew that I had stumbled upon something special. The show promised that it was going to be subversion/commentary on the light novel romance formula, but ascended to become something unique in its own right. It focused on makeine—the Japanese word for the unlucky girl in the love triangle—and it showed a look of love, compassion, and dignity for these characters rarely shown in light novels or anime. The comedy and heart in this series is so balanced that one could find yourself shaking with laughter and holding back tears in the course of one episode (hell, the first episode itself is a prime example). I think it is ironic writing this review almost a week after the death of Frankie Beverly, but I could not help but have the words to his song Joy & Pain in my mind throughout this anime's run. 

Remember when you first found love how you felt so good.

Kind that last forever more so you thought it would.

Suddenly the things you see got you hurt so bad, so bad. 

How come the things that makes us happy makes us sad?

Kazuhiko Nukumizu Is a lonely highschooler whose only friend in the world is his sister and who really enjoys light novel romances, despite never being in love himself. While eating alone at a cafe, he witnesses one of the most popular girls in his class, Anna Yanami, get rejected by her childhood friend who decides instead to date one of her other friends (who may be even more popular). Nukumizu watches the painfully-embarrassing aftermath of this and his and Anna's eyes meet awkwardly after she is caught drinking out of her beloved's cup after he has rejected her and left for the victorious heroine. Thus began one of the most intriguing relationships in recent-anime history. While Anna, Lemon Yakishio (track star who gets rejected by a guy who goes to Nukumizu's cram school), and Chika Komari (who gets rejected by her Literature club president/senpai), form his harem/girl posse(?). I suppose the anime concludes by simply letting us know they are his friends—though it becomes clear that Anna has plans to play the long-game into getting a relationship upgrade when the time is right.

Love can be bitter, love can be sweet.

Sometimes devotion, and sometimes deceit.

The ones that you care for, give you so much pain

Oh, but it's alright, they're both one in the same.

I think one of the big things that stops this harem anime from being a conventional hare anime is that only one of the female protagonists has any interest with being the male protagonist's boyfriend—and she's deliberately taking her time in a very savvy way. A "harem" anime where the male protagonist is not in any love triangle/polygon with the female protagonists. All the other girls are in love triangles of their own and Nukumizu's primary function is to act as support for them aka be a friend. Only Anna shows any romantic interest in him, but is not going to jump the gun until he is able to return those feelings. With all the love wars mostly happening on the other-side of our not-harem, we are more looking at how Nukumizu acts as a friend with people who are not his sister and how he slowly learns more about himself through this process. Each girl is given an arc where their losing romance is allowed to play-out and those arcs (specifically Lemon & Komari's) are explorations of how these girls who were deeply in-love reconcile with being in the friend-zone and they each show their own unique takes. We get a little of this with Anna, but not a lot as I can guess her story is the most deeply intertwine with Nukumizu himself, so we'll have to wait for the sequel to learn more about her. In any case, the arcs of Lemon and Komari were masterly-done and really show the debt this series owes to its spiritual predecessors My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU & Kaguya-sama: Love is War. 

Listen, don't it seem we go through life going up and down?

Seems the things that turn you on turn you around.

Always hurting each other

(If it ain't one thing it's another)

When the world is down on you, love's somewhere around.

The other thing we need to mention here is the production. Good lord I knew A-1 Pictures was good, but this was Steph Curry in the Olympics good from them. They went all-in on making this little known light novel series the masterpiece that it was visually. No expense was spared on detailing every scene and individual action to its finest detail. Rarely have I ever seen a comedy this well-animated before. I feel bad for the production committee for Gimai Seikatsu which was adapting a very somber light novel romance this year of it's own and while going for an art house-feel, did not achieve the same artistic peak that this anime did. The voice actors here are mostly on the newer-side and they each rose to the occasion. It's not too surprising that the anime studio behind franchises like Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, Idol Master, and Lycoris Recoil could make a good anime, but this was on a different-level even for them. It seems A-1 Pictures took the hard lessons they learned from their disastrous production of 86 and turned their operation completely around. Still amazed that there was no pause this season, despite the high quality of animation. I guess it also helps when one of the financiers on your production committee is the Central Japan Railway Company (JR Toukai Agency). That might be a first. 

Over and over you can be sure

There will be sorrow but you will endure (You will endure)

Where there's a flower, there's the sun and the rain

Oh, but it's wonderful, they're both one in the same.

I don't think that anyone working on this anime knew it was in for the critical reception it got. It seems the light novel author Takibi Amamori was caught off-guard with him stepping-in to write an original anime-only episode for the finale rather than anything from the light novels. I suspect he will be busy for the foreseeable future. I feel like after this series, the whole industry has been put on-notice that these new creators aren't going by the old rules anymore. The fans only stand to benefit.

My Thoughts on Season 2 of The Dangers In My Heart - The Best Shonen Romance I Have Ever Watched

 

It has taken me a long time to find a TV shonen anime that I thought was better than Please Teacher (I was much younger when I watched it, don't judge me). To be sure, the shonen genre has not historically had romance as the top-priority, but through the years the idea of showing romantic relationships from the point-of-view of teenage and young adult males, for teenage/young-adult males has been a rising phenomenon since the 1980s and rise of works by people like Rumiko Takahashi. This trend continued into the 21st century and we see much romance work in the shonen demographic. The problem is a lot of them are not that good or convincing. While we get an excellent romantic comedy like Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, More realistic or straight-forward romance have been more of a mixed-bag or rather a stale-bag. 

One of the most annoying things for most western audiences is the stock Japanese romantic archetypes: the extremely shy, extremely chivalrous male and the either equally shy or extremely "forward" female protagonist. These stock tropes are often taken to their extreme in manga and anime. In recent years creatives in the industry have endeavored to break-out of these clichés (most notably in LGBT fiction) and recent works have started to subvert things. The success in winter 2024 of A Sign of Affection shows that western audiences are craving for a more familiar, honest relationship between the main couple in these shows.

While I'm not a big expert or connoisseur of romance fiction, I have been fascinated at how anime and manga handles these the subject. Growing up with the format, I did not care about this when I was young, but as I age and wanted more emotionally-mature work, the limitations of shonen anime/manga becomes more apparent (this is less the case in shojo, but the rule still applies). I am more at home with seinen anime obviously given my age, but I think that seinen is marginally better at relationship and josei is probably as good as it will get when it comes to romance in anime and especially manga (which makes it very unfortunate that josei manga are the least likely works to be adapted into anime). When I watched My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 in Spring 2023 it had a similar effect in the shojo demographic (for me) that the subject of this review has had.

The first season of The Dangers in My Heart was an interesting affair. The synopsis and 1/3 of the first episode is a fake-out and it reveals from the second half of the episode, the beginning of the love story of Kyotaro Ichikawa and Anna Yamada. The world of these two are very different on the surface, but their awkwardness and emotional vulnerability brings them together. They are learning to love themselves while falling in love more with each other. The first season is showing how alienated and afraid of himself Kyotaro is and how Anna, his classmates, and finally he starts bringing himself out of this alienation. 

This season sees him go step by step to become the person he truly wants to be and that his sister alludes that he use to be. The realism of his insecurities and that of the people around him is as realistic as I have seen in awhile. He doesn't magically improve himself overnight, but almost each episode showed some improve meant in him that felt earned. The people around him are not nearly as terrible as he thought they were when he met them and the idea that he could not love someone like Anna is easily disproven without feeling so unrealistic. Though the story is from Kyotaro's pov, it could have easily have been from Anna's pov and not lose any of its power. Because we are not in her head the way we are in Kyotaro's we have to infer her emotions and inner-thoughts from her visual cues. The way she goes out her way to match him and emotionally and his trying to do the same despite how different personalities were is a key point to where we know they are going to become a couple. Even the male gaze is not played for fetish, but feels visceral and awkward as we see it from Kyotaro's point-of-view.

An interesting aspect of this show is the meta-dialogue it has with Kimi ni Todoke. In TDIMH, there is a parody version of KnT that Kyotaro & Anna are both fans of. The in-universe version of KnT's Shōta Kazehaya becomes the conscience "inner voice" for Kyotaro and gives him very honest advice on what he knows he wants or what he knows he needs to do. It is up to Kyotaro on whether to listen to him or not. The irony is that Kyo is obviously more similar meta-wise to KnT's Sawako Kuronuma. Both Kyo and Sawako have become withdrawn and had their self-esteem crushed by events prior to the stories’ beginning. The key to both stories is that they encounter friends and romantic partners who help change them for the better. Now a key difference is that the former title is a shonen romance and the latter is a shojo romance so the temperament of both stories will be different. Also, the drama that Sawako faces is almost-completely external, while it was just one external incident that motivates the internal trauma of Kyotaro. For the more old-school knowing anime fans, Kare Kano is worth a look to compare to this anime.

The production quality has certainly been boosted and the music and editing is really incredible. The way that they introduce the episode title at the end of every episode is masterful at tying the theme of the overall story together. The voice acting is to be commended on how they really go hard for the nuances of Japanese teenagers to an almost painful degree.

When I look at this franchise, I feel like it offers a hope. It tells a favorite type of love story for me: the main character has to remember to love themselves as much as they love their beloved. One is hopeful that more shows that subvert the old standards of anime romance are adapted and/or created. I can't wait until the next season of this anime is made. This show is process, redemption, love.

My Goodreads Review of Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik

Finally got this one out of the way after procrastinating on it for eternity. Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I have made the leap from myself to the dawn.
I have placed my body alongside the light
and sung of the sadness of the born." - Poem 1

"only thirst
silence
no encounter

beware of me, my love
beware of the silent woman in the desert
of the traveler with an emptied glass
and of her shadow's shadow" - Poem 3

Ever since reading her poem "The Awakening" (in Spanish: El Desperatar) in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology, I had been curious to read more poetry by Alejandra Pizarnik (who was part of the odd, troubling trend of suicidal white women poets of the early to middle of the 20th century) and was recommended this volume. I like that this is a very straight-forward, but still high quality collection of brief poems (the best to read, but hardest to write). These poems are from relatively early in her equally- short career as her more famous work was still 3 years ahead of her. Given that I am reading this totally in-translation (without the original Spanish version) I have to trust that the translator Yvette Siegert did the best she could to keep the original meaning of the poem as one inevitably loses the wordplay that the poet had intended when translating. I don't know if I'll read more by Pizarnik, but I loved the alchemy which she uses in the lyrics of this collection.

"beyond the reach of every forbidden region
lies a mirror for our sorrowful transparency." - Poem 37

"This repentant song, standing guard behind my poems:

it belies me, it has silenced me." - Poem 38

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Goodreads Review of The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

 My first book review in over a year is bound to be rough and this thing feels rough. Got to start from somewhere, I guess. 

Happy New Year.

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Been a minute since I have done any type of real serious reading, but here I am.

This year is the last year of the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent. For the last 10 years that I have been on here I have been saving a bookshelf of books by or about people of African descent here on Goodreads if you wish to check it out: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

This book was on my radar from the time it came out, but I needed it in a reasonable price-range before I decided to read it given it's length. It is the second-to-last book published during Toni Morrison's lifetime and it is an edited publishing of her 2016 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. As the title suggests, she uses the idea of the other or othering and how in the U.S. context slavery and it's afterlife helped to create "the other" as we have it in America today.

"One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered. Literature is especially and obviously revelatory in exposing / contemplating the definition of self whether it condemns or supports the means by which it is acquired. How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example."

She spends the book using various examples from literature like Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to show how whites "other" black people, but she also uses people like Harriet Jacobs, Camara Laye, and most noticeably herself to show how Black writers push back against the attempts to dehumanize them. This book also reminded me that I need to read Paradise ASAP.

"I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy."

This book is like a career-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and a lot of what she brings up here will be familiar to those who have read that book or The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. I confess, with this being the first book that I had to sit and think on in some time, I had a time trying to say something here that was different from the other non-fiction books of her that I have read, but the fact is that this book is transcript of a lecture she gave so it was no surprise that there would be little surprise here if you are familiar with her non-fiction writing. I will say that if you only know Toni Morrison from her novels, this is the perfect place to start for seeing what her thought-process is in condensed form.

I wish I could feel like this review was up-to-snuff with how I usually do, but this is what I have in the tank at the moment.

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