#jan 2016

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE (2016)

Hi dear,

So it's about this tweet interaction. Basically someone posted a picture of Harry looking gray (in color) and asked "Is he grey?". And a Briana UA responded by saying "No he's not gay but continue to force a sexuality, I guess".

Basically the joke is that the Briana UA thought the person meant "gay" not "grey" and so they were calling them out. This was right in the middle of babygate, just a couple of weeks before F was born.

Centenary of the Final Withdrawal From The Gallipoli Peninsula - 10 January 2016

There was really no reason for them to make Ajin exactly what I wanted out of an anime/series, and yet it happened anyway. A list of why sometimes I feel like Ajin was made for me:

I saw it by accident. I went to an internet café in Japan with a friend to chill for a little. It was a local one with manga and a screen that was often playing anime music, but they had never showed anime on the screen when I had been there previously, and I never saw anyone watch anime in later times I went, but that night some people put episode 1 of Ajin on the screen (only the second episode had come out at that point) soon after we got there. I never intended to watch the series. In fact, I had looked at what anime were airing that season, and planned to watch Erased. (I haven’t yet.)

My friends who got me into manga and anime in the first place did it by introducing Fruits Basket and Final Fantasy Advent Children. My favorite characters were Hatsuharu Sohma (split black-and-white hair) and Reno <3 Cloud (spiky blond hair, animated in 3D). I fell in love with Kai as soon as I saw him. 

In my life in Kesennuma at the time, there was one teacher who was always excited about English class even though his students weren’t; a six grade boy who actually asked me to teach him some karate; and a younger sibling of some of the kids at karate that always made me happy to be there. All three of these people were named Kai. 

In the first episode of the anime, we see that it’s set in Saitama. I had just been living in Saitama for a year. In fact, now that we know it’s set around Iruma, that’s only 30 minutes away from where I was living, if you have a car. I almost went down for the Military Base Open House where the series is now set that Sakurai also attended, and now I’m really kicking myself for not going. 

It was great timing for my language abilities vs the language used in the show. I had tried to watch anime without subtitles in the past, but didn’t catch very much of it. The series was coming out weekly on Netflix in Japan, without subtitles, but I could still watch it. (I did eventually start watching it on aggregator sites because I think it came out faster (Sat/Sun instead of Tues), and it did help to have subtitles. 

I decided I had to read the manga right before the episode that introduced Kou. I had seen posts about him in the tag from manga readers and for some reason though I wouldn’t like him (probably because he replaced Kai), but I love him, and having the manga impression of him probably also helped to minimize how the his anime characterization affected my opinion of this character.

My friend and I (the one who had been at the café with me) had already decided we wanted to go to Kyushu for Golden Week holidays that year. 

This is subjective, but the series has great representation of asexuality alongside the rest of the spectrum, and every relationship is so complicated and drives the story so deeply without being laughable.

That said, Ajin is also great because it manages to have so much humor. The faces are great. And the author is so weird and makes all kinds of pop culture references to video games and TV shows (half the characters are named after K-On!) and yet it still works.

Gamon Sakurai is just a MASTER of dropping hints and yet leaving you with no idea of what’s going to happen. A few theories, like Gen’s scar, Satou’s video games, Kou’s parents, etc., have been proven true along the way, and it seems so clear how everything’s been planned out since the long run it’s been since the manga began publishing, and yet it’s not set in stone enough to assume the ending and drop the series. This on top of the fact that it’s working out despite the fact that the original author seemed to have it going in a different direction; it’s still managed to be reconciled (though we don’t actually know what the original author’s plans for it were, that I know of). 

Ajin aren’t human, and yet they are still completely human. The IBMs and the regeneration give them advantages, but they’re not any stronger and they still die like humans. Not to mention, lots of stories have very emotional points when a character is about to die, but Ajin is the only one where you have those points over and over again and it doesn’t feel like cheating the story. 

Oh, and Ajin always seemed like a natural follow-up to two other series that really influenced me leading up to it. The IBM particles always remind me of Dust from His Dark Materials. And Kei and Kai seem like recastings of Cesare and Chiaro from Cantarella by You Higuri. 

The fandom has also been amazing- I’ve loved making friends and interacting with the few people from all over who also love the series. I’m so glad I’ve been here and met all of you, and I just can’t believe what a coincidence it all was.