Exclusive Insanity

Tonight, Cody and I will watch the four-part finale of Avatar. This is it - the end of the series! I'm both excited that I'm going to see it, and sad that it will all be over. I'm sure the final battle will be epic. I expect to see Aang take down Ozai while Zuko battles his crazy sister. And it had better be awesome, because the buildup has been incredible!

One final note: since joining the group, Zuko has gone on a private journey with Aang (one episode), Sokka (two episodes), and Katara (one episode). Toph only got a thirty-second clip where he burned her feet and a conversation during intermission on that play - and all Suki got was an extremely awkward moment outside of Sokka's tent.

Cleary Sokka is Zuko's favorite. He should try to make it less obvious, though.

This article makes me want to cry every time I read it. It makes me angry and sad, because it's true and it's happening right now, and people ignore it. Or convince themselves that it's not happening, or it's not real, or it's a lie. Or they find it funny - because maybe someone made a joke, or maybe it was used in a humorous way on Family Guy or South Park, and if TV says it's okay to laugh at it, why shouldn't we?

I think the best way to help change this attitude is to be aware and to encourage others to be aware.

Five episodes into season three! So, it may be too early to be making the impressions post, but whatever. Maybe I'll have two for this season. We'll see.

1. Aang has hair! His head looks bigger now. It's like it's the same size as everyone else's - imagine that! Now we need to see all of them bald.

2. Sokka + Rainbow = OTP forever and ever!!!

3. Zuko and Mai and their completely random and out of nowhere "HI WE R IN LUV NAO LULZ". I love it. No, I'm serious. This couple is freakin' awesome, just like I thougth it would be! Angry boy x sarcastic girl = win. The scene at the party where she sends him off for food had Cody and me in hysterics. Just the tone of their voices. Emo teens!

4. Best line so far of the above pairing: "You're so beautiful when you hate the world."

5. Beach volleyball is serious business, yo.

6. Are there seriously no therapists in the world of Avatar??? 'Cause, y'know, they kinda need them. Especially Azula.

7. Iroh is BUFF! Holy hell! And a sneaky bugger. But we knew that already. Stupid Zuko, making him cry...

8. Aang and Katara dancing = HAWT.

9. Why does Zuko's assassin have automail? And yeah, the forehead-eye is weird too, but seriously. Automail?

Thus far season three is even better than season two. Which was even better than season one. Which was pretty damn good! I am pleased.

Four years ago today, I asked the man of my dreams out for coffee. Now, I love him more than ever. Every year we've spent together is different, but especially this last one. We travelled to another continent, bought a house, and are planning our upcoming wedding.

But for today, we went out for coffee again.

Last night, Cody and I watched the last four episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender season one.

( Thoughts, as promised )

This series is definitely going to be a favorite. I'm glad we bought the box sets. Can't wait to watch it on the 52" with the surround sound!

Lately I haven't been watching or reading much. Cody and I have mostly been gaming. He had some MOD days on his last schedule too, which meant no evening shifts, which meant I wasn't reading manga in the evenings - I was spending time with him.

We did go to see Paranormal Activity on Sunday night. It was pretty creepy. The ending was a little cheesy in my opinion, but I guess it fit well. The guy in the movie was a complete idiot. It seemed the best way to get him to do something was to tell him NOT to do it. "This thing is dangerous. Don't try to communicate with it. Don't provoke it." Mr Macho is just so convinced that he can protect his house and his girlfriend without anyone's help that he does both of those things. Immediately. And repeatedly. He does not call for professional help as he has been advised. He does "his own research" and tries to act like an expert when he really knows nothing. They both suffer for his idiocy. God, what a moron.

Anyway...

One of the things Cody and I been playing together is Suikoden V. Which is a one-player game, so when I say 'playing together', I mean I'm reading the manual and telling him how to recruit the 108 stars while he plays the game. It's a really entertaining watch, though. I love the storyline. It'd make a really awesome anime series if done right. Now that it's been out a few years, I know it's never going to be adapted into one, but seriously, it'd be pretty cool if it was given the same treatment as Tales of the Abyss. I'm really looking forward to playing more, but I don't get to spend as much time with it as I'd like since we're going through the story together. I probably should've just played it myself. I wouldn't have gotten very far, more than likely, because I'm not the greatest gamer - but when I get involved in a story, I just want to keep going. Another reason that it would've been awesome if this was an anime.

Cody and I tend to have differing approaches to anime viewing, though, which sometimes makes it hard for us to watch stuff together. When I'm really into a series, I want to watch it all the time. As in, whatever else I do in my spare time gets shunted off to the side until I'm finished with the series in question. Cody is the same way with anime series as he is with games: he usually has a bunch going at once and switches around between them pretty frequently. So, if he's not in 'Suikoden V' mode, he has no interest in playing it, even though I'm dying to see more and find out what happens.

It kind of sucks.

We've also been playing some WoW lately. Cody and I started playing WoW because Tylor and Sarah play it and we agreed to try it. It's a really neat game, and a lot of fun. You can waste a lot of hours on it pretty easily. Thing is, Tylor and Sarah play on a PvP (Player vs Player) server. This means that enemy players can attack you whenever and you can attack them whenever. It doesn't sound unreasonable until you're a low level character trying to level up and some high level asshole comes along and kills you easily just because he's bored, and then sits on top of your corpse and kills you every time you try to get back up and run away. It is hella annoying and tends to ruin an otherwise fun afternoon/evening.

So, we've been getting more and more sick of this crap. We don't even play with Tylor and Sarah much because they're not really on when we are and they're also much higher level than us. Then deitysend mentioned that she plays on a PvE (Player vs Environment) server, where enemy players can't attack you unless you have flagged yourself for it. We were considering moving, but didn't want to rush it. Then some random guy decided to kill us and camp our corpses last night, and we moved our characters right then and there. Goodbye, assholes.

Tonight we're going to watch an episode (or two) of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I've read a lot of reviews on it and it's supposed to have awesome plot and awesome characters and is reputed to be epic and wonderful. Since I've read all of this, now this series is going to have to be really fantastic in order to meet my expectations because they are pretty damn high. We'll see.

So, a few days ago, I finished watching all four episodes of Tales of Phantasia.

( Thoughts )

Yesterday I finished reading Marmalade Boy, which I started the day before yesterday. It seems like lately that's what I've been doing when Cody's on night shift: reading manga. Last week I read Watashi no Messiah-sama, which was... odd. I read it on a recommendation, but I don't necessarily recommend it myself. This week it was Marmalade Boy.

( Thoughts (spoilerish) )

Marmalade Boy was not a bad series. It never tried to be more than it was, so it succeeded in being a cute little shoujo romance and a fairly enjoyable read. Not bad at all.

So, I went on Amazon looking for DVD sets and such. Just for the fun of it, here's what I found...

Yeah, nice try.

I need to get this one at some point... just for the sake of having the whole series

OMG I must get this! *orders*

Mine! *orders*

Still no sign of a completed series or box set... Viz sucks...

SO not fair that it's in box sets now that I have all of the individual DVDs...

This would've been tempting maybe three years ago?

This one has a better cover than my set. Bleh.

The only season I don't have yet. I want it. I just don't want to pay for it. Someone get me this for Christmas!

Oh SURE, now it's just ONE box set... Bastards...

I haven't gotten around to finishing this series yet, but I kind of want a box set of it.

I kind of want this one too.

I've concluded from this that I need to win the lottery so that I can buy whatever anime box sets I want.

I have nothing really to say about the Evangelion movie. It was okay. I'll probably go see the next one if it comes to theaters over here. If it doesn't, I'm sure Cody will download it and I'll see it anyway. I still have no interest in seeing the series, but I'm curious to see if the movies will change much about the story.

I have been playing a game on my PSP called Tales of the World. It's very good. It has a character creation system, so you can decide if your character is male or female and choose from a few options to determine what he/she looks like. It has characters from other Tales series, so my interest was piqued. I've already watched Cody play through some of Tales of the Abyss, and we've seen half of the anime. We also just bought Tales of Vesperia and played through the beginning - it seems kind of neat so far. I've never seen or played any of the others. I figured I'd download the anime adaptions that were made for some of the other games (Tales of Phantasia, Eternia, and Symphonia). So far, I've watched an episode of Phantasia and an episode of Eternia.

The Eternia anime seems boring so far and I hate the female protagonist. She's a bully and she gets angry over the stupidest little things. Her relationship with the main character is that girl-beats-on-the-guy-and-it-is-supposed-to-be-funny thing. I really find this irritating if the guy is actually way stronger than the girl and thus makes no attempt to really defend himself (which appears to be the case in this adaption). It's too bad because I really like Reid (the main protagonist) in Tales of the World; he's very friendly and is probably the only Tales character who never refuses an invitation to join your party. I wouldn't mind reading the manga for this one because the girl is more in-character (ie: less of a bitch) according to the game and it follows the main storyline instead of being a pointless side story, but it's only half scanlated and looks like it hasn't been updated in a while. Unfortunately, none of the Tales manga is available to buy in English.

The Phantasia anime is really neat - I read up on the story before watching it because I'd heard that it's hard to understand without some background knowledge of the game. The plot is really very good. I found the side characters - Arche and Klaus in particular, but Chester as well (mainly because of how he is in Tales of the World, since he wasn't in the first episode for long) - really interesting. Their dialogue is lively and engaging. The main characters, Cress and Mint, are kind of boring, but that's okay. The series appears to be crammed into far too little time - it begins partway through the game's storyline and leaves certain parts out in order to hurry through a fairly involved plot. The animation is very nice and the battle scenes are well done. I really wish they'd expanded this one into a 26 episode series, like Abyss. Even a 13 episode series like Eternia (which I really didn't think deserved it) would've been better. As it is, we have four OVA episodes, and I guess that'll have to do. After watching the first episode, I decided to buy the DVD on Amazon (this is the only Tales anime that was given an official English release). There's apparently a manga that has just started being published in Japan and seems intent on following the story from beginning to end without rushing, but only one chapter has been scanlated and releases are either extremely slow or completely stalled.

A side note about Phantasia: I've been leveling Chester (an archer) and Arche (a mage) to be steady members of my party in Tales of the World, and was kind of surprised to find that they came from the same Tales series. More than that, I was surprised to find out that there's a romance implied between them. They got one of those 'I hate you - no, wait, I love you' things going on, apparently, and I've heard that it works quite well. I like the idea. I'll be very interested to watch the rest of the series and see how it develops.

I watched the Phantasia episode with Cody (he's already seen the Eternia anime), and he wasn't as interested as I was. He does want to watch the Symphonia anime with me, despite the fact that I've heard it's not finished. I think there's another arc coming out in 2010 Spring - at least, that's what I've seen online. The nice thing about that one is that the manga is fully scanlated, so reaching a cliffhanger in the anime is okay. I can just follow the storyline in the manga to see what happens next. I've already read a lot of the major plot points online too (I love spoilers).

Incidentally, I'm looking for either Symphonia (GameCube) or Phantasia (Gameboy Advance) to play. After I finish Tales of the World, of course.