Notes

Oh god I’m fucking sick. I guess I don’t eat enough or something.

Movies

  • I went to the cinema one week ago to watch 5cm per second. It had been nearly
    one year since the last time I had seen it, and I found that the emotional
    impact it has on my current self, much more than a reaction to the movie itself, is an echo to my past watching of
    this movie, its relationship with my anime fandom and my memories of the past few years.

  • Actually, I have not watched it a lot —
    it was the fourth time, maybe the third — but that’s mainly because I
    don’t have an habbit of rewatching stuff. I think rewatching things you like is important, but I generally can’t bring myself to
    enjoy it as much as the first time, even when I’m supposed to be a fan.

  • It had been a very, very long time I didn’t cry while consuming fiction — actually, I don’t remember when the last time was. It felt like discovering a new feeling. Crying is really painful.

  • I guess Oukashou, because of the painful waiting it tries imposes on the viewer, leaves more of an
    impression on the first watching.

    One thing that I noticed is how touched I
    was by the kissing scene. It somehow made me feel how much of a lonely otaku who longs for a relationship with an idealized version of the opposite sex I still am (although that feels very ironical, I guess). Yes, it’s an inappropriate reaction.

  • Although I think it is not the part that impressed me the
    most when I first watched the movie, Cosmonaut was the most
    stomach-wrenching this time, for I can identify quite deeply with Kanae — for reasons some readers can guess. That, added to the realization that it had been one year since the last time I watched the movie, and that so much has happened in between, and I can still remember the physical pain in my chest. I can actually feel it as I remember.

  • The third part, and particularly the insert song, is the natural time for crying, and it didn’t miss. The people around me may have heard me sobbing. I have watched this sequence hundreads of times, I think, and it’s still as heart-wrenching as ever — more heart-wrenching that it has ever been, actually.

  • On the same day, I watched Kara no kyoukai 1, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Hana, and a terribly boring selection of
    awfully boring Japanese shorts.

    Rewatching Fukan Fuukei made me realize how empty it is. Actually, it’s nearly completely meaningless from a non-otaku point of view. Well, it’s still kinda beautiful.

    • Demo

    I recently read Demo, by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. I bought it without knowing anything about it when Jaren told Twitter that it’s his second favorite book ever.

    It’s a collection of short stories about young Americans who have young American problems. Also, superpowers.

    I guess I lack most of the cultural prerequisites to really appreciate Demo. That is, I have about no culture of American comic books, and I can’t
    really identify with most of Brian Wood’s characters, despite feeling how
    sincere most of their stories are.

    As a matter of fact, my unfamiliarity with American comics has been a difficulty.
    I felt like the characters were posing, like their speech was spoken out of a script for some sort of action movie, and the whole thing made the story flow pretty unnaturally.
    Not that the way they speak is less realistic than what I use to read — is there
    something less realistic than the tirades characters of romance manga are
    able to pull off in moments of emotion?
    It’s more that, while in manga, characters take poses too, they do not take the same poses. Accustoming to the poses of American comic books characters happens to require some effort on my part.

    As a result, the chapters I appreciated the most where probably not the best ones, but the ones
    in which, voluntarily or not, their authors gave some characters elements of personality or appearance that pertain to — or look like — the moe image.

    Still, I think I can see how it’s a masterpiece. I guess reading it again sometime in the future might prove more successful.