And I'll hold onto you while I can

Read:

A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur - A women in her late 20s with massive credit card debt discovers that she's a magical girl. The magical girls have a union! They're very concerned about climate change! There are illustrations with each chapter! This is interesting and fun, but slight, but mostly what it made me think about is translation audiences and assumptions made for those audiences. As in, who is the assumed audience and what do we assume they know about a place/a language? What do we assume can go transliterated rather than translated? I'm often thinking about that, because I read books and watch things translated from so many languages, and for different audiences, and they all seem to come with different sets of assumptions. This one transliterated rather than translated: 'unni' (it means older sister/girl who is slightly older than the speaker, right?), 'noraebang' (I had to google this and it seems to mean kbox). I watch the occasional Korean thing, but I wouldn't say I have a particular cultural competence there; I do feel this is more on the side of the assumption that a general audience will know what these things mean, because Korean stuff is so mainstream in English-speaking culture now, the same way someone translating a French novel might assume any random would know what 'monsieur' means.

My other main thought is that Ah Roa and the main character should kiss.

Watched:

Three episodes of Cinderella Closet, a very silly Jdrama on Netflix. A young woman (Haruka) moves to Tokyo, bumps into a very pretty crossdresser (Hikaru), and befriends him and asks for his help to glam up for a date with her coworker, but Hikaru is maybe also interested in Haruka... This has standard Jdrama overacting and is definitely not good, but it is 100% my kind of garbage. Seems like it's based on a manga, which I haven't read. Hikaru is indeed very glam, and I like his outfits.

Two episodes of The Summer Hikaru Died on Netflix. This is AMAZING! Eldritch horror romance! Flirting with the monster who has taken the form of the friend you have unspoken feelings for! The horror of day to day life in a small town! The raw chicken, I'm shrieking.

This is so unsettling, and so beautifully animated. The flash cuts and sound design combine so well to capture the horror of whatever Hikaru is, but also the daily horrors Yoshiki experiences of uncomfortable interactions, and the horrors of adolescence, and the horrors of having that first intense crush with desire you don't know how to deal with. And also in a weird way, the horror of being a monster. The scene with the arm (how should I describe that?? supernatural fisting??) in episode 2 is spectacular.

I finished my reread of Bleach and I've now watched through episode 273, which I think means I've watched about 80 episodes of Bleach in a couple of weeks. Unhinged behaviour. I think for the most part the animation of the lust arc was pretty good! Captured a lot of the feeling of reading it, though it was faintly amusing they didn't show the exact moment of Ichigo stabbing Ishida, which blunted that impact a little. It had not ever occurred to me before that Ulquiorra's final attack on Ichigo was because he was moved by Orihime desperately wanting Ichigo not to kill Ishida, but I feel like that's the implication in the anime, and I'm willing to internalise that interpretation of it. It certainly works with the things Ulquiorra says just before he fades away (oh man, and with Orihime stepping forward to try to grab his hand a moment too late, that always gets me; tbh the arc is equally good for Ulquiorra/Orihime or Ichigo/Orihime).

Back to the rest of the fights and blergh Yammy. Not that I dislike what the manga does with Yammy, but the thing with this whole arc being so long in the manga and yet the anime expands it even more is that sometimes the anime gives an entire fight scene to something briefly touched over in the original and it's often kind of boring.

Like everyone else on the planet I have now seen KPop Demon Hunters. It's cute! I see why half a dozen people I follow on Tumblr are now gaga for it. It commits to its premise 100%. Sony animation is doing some real interesting stuff and making some fun choices.

I got to the end of the sword beasts filler arc of the Bleach anime. I was not so hot on the Zanpakutou Unknown Tales arc, but I can see why the Beast Swords arc is more highly regarded. It was fun and had a lot of heart. My favourite was probably the episode where Hisagi's sword had to take care of a baby, but there was a lot of good stuff. And back on to the actual plot of Ichigo vs Ulquiorra next episode.

I'm well into the last arc with my reread of Bleach. It really is messy. I think the fullbring stuff improved on reread, but this arc is actually less enjoyable on reread. It's so messy, and the overstuffed group of villain characters curbstomping the shinigami is not exciting, and idgaf about squad zero, and Yhwach is a boring villain. The Unohana stuff is so much worse, too; before her fight with Zaraki I thought maybe her clear and obvious grief for the captain general would make me buy the whole thing more, but I really don't.

But at the same time, there is still that stuff I love - Ikkaku and Yumichika running through the rubble, trying not to get blown up; Yumichika nearly saying the true name of his sword in desperation before he gets knocked out; Shiba Ganju showing up on his hog to get that just like old times feeling; Byakuya helping Rukia de-freeze after her fight; Renji increasing the amount of leopard print in his outfit.