Honey, Clovers, Sweet Osmanthus

by eternal on May 22, 2012

 [source]

Honey and Clover fans would be familiar with the ubiquitous Ferris Wheel and weathervane symbols from the anime adaptation, but there are several less explicit symbols that aren’t telegraphed in the OP/ED videos. I noticed while reading the manga that the sweet osmanthus–apparently a common flower in East Asia–features prominently in Yamada’s narration. (The flower’s orange colour and Ayumi’s hair colour is probably a coincidence, but it’s a fun coincidence at any rate).

{ 19 comments }

Chica Umino no Yuutsu

by eternal on May 5, 2012

I’ve always maintained that tone and atmosphere can trump plot given the right author’s touch. This was more or less the case for Chica Umino‘s first manga series, Honey and Clover, which successfully finds the middle ground between subjective narration and a show-don’t-tell approach to character development. It’s an odd but effective style that results in characters that range from translucent to opaque depending on the time of day.

Her follow-up series, March Comes in like a Lion, hereby referred to as Sangatsu no Lion or 3gatsu, is similar. Its plot is a departure from Umino’s previous manga: it follows the life of a teenage Shogi pro who also happens to be an orphan (or the other way around as the story quickly implies). Unexpectedly, the plot is roughly the same as every other slice-of-life or coming-of-age anime, featuring lonely protagonists interacting with an upbeat cast to discover a less lonely world.

{ 14 comments }

Eternal: Write About Homestuck

by eternal on May 1, 2012

There’s a silly webcomic by a guy named Andrew Hussie that you might’ve seen if you spend much time around /co/ or Tumblr. (I don’t, but I’ve heard complaints). It’s called Homestuck and it’s a fascinatingly meta take on RPGs and youth. Though famous more for its formal gimmicks and odd sense of humour, there’s a deliberateness in the structure that points to certain themes. The comic operates well as parody for parody’s sake, but spend tens of hours reading through it and you’ll start to see more. If you’re willing to brave minor spoilers, read on.

{ 15 comments }

Memories of Eternity v2.0

by eternal on May 1, 2012

Hey.

This is a heads-up that I’m going to try anime blogging again. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about the blogosphere, but there are still some great blogs that are worth following and I think I can gain something from this endeavour. Hopefully you can gain something from reading. Unfortunately, this will be a slowblog–post ideas are easy to come by but I don’t watch enough anime to fuel weekly posts. My post rate is likely to eventually drop to once per month.

Regardless, anime blogging was an important hobby for me in high school. Now that I’m older and know a thing or two about writing and movies and lit criticism, I want to see if I can do this properly. Enjoy the site.

{ 13 comments }

Third Time’s the Charm

by eternal on September 1, 2011

Time flies. It’s scary, it really is. One thing I’ve always noted about Honey and Clover–my favourite anime, if you’re new to this blog and don’t know me–is how terrifyingly quickly the years fly by. The fall festival leads to Christmas which blends into the snowy winter months and before you know it you’re watching the cherry blossoms again.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Today is the first of September, which means that this blog has been alive for three years. That’s quite a while. I started this thing at the beginning of my grade 11 year, looking to explore the anime scene and get my name out there like all of the other cool kids on the internet. It’s hard to say where I’ve gone since then. My annual anniversary posts are usually a tad wistful because of the way that they fall at the end up summer and the beginning of a new year. This one is a bit odd in that I’m still in Oxford until Sunday, so I guess I’m celebrating the end of my summer course and the beginning of the school year.

This past year was obviously terrible for my blog but it was fairly productive for me as an anime fan, leading me to learn the basics of fan translation and sharpening my writing skills with my work for The Nihon Review. More importantly, I have a renewed opinion of the anime blogosphere and a much clearer goal of where I want to go within anime fandom and in my career. By this point there’s no doubt in my mind that I have to become a writer when I finish school. I don’t know what I want to write yet but I absolutely have to write something. This sense of clarity, however broad it may be, is helping me to develop what my new blogging style will be. Personal and “update” posts like this will probably stop being written, but I’ll talk about that when I officially return to the blogosphere. My new theme got a bit delayed but it’s being worked on and it can’t stay unfinished forever.

In the meantime, let me thank all of you who kept this dead site in your feed reader for so long. I’ll be back someday. And to those who aren’t reading this: I’ll win you back within a year.

Semicolon-close-parenthesis.

{ 6 comments }

Anime North 2011

by eternal on May 27, 2011

No points for guessing who’s going.

Right. I’ll be at AN as always, though I don’t have anything too exciting planned. If you’re in the Toronto area and you plan on going to the con, feel free to say hi–I have these really tiny 18+ eroge stickers on my bag that no one will ever notice. Helpful, hmm? Itinerary is pretty straightforward, just the usual gaming and hanging around. I might stalk GipFace since he seems to want us to, although I say that every year.

Also, I suppose it’d be odd to write this post out of the blue and not address the fact that my blog is effectively dead. I admit it, first-year university killed my blogging schedule and forced me out of the internet, just as it did to everyone else. That said, I have a plan for the direction I want to take this blog in the future. I’m not expecting to resume writing until September at the latest; blogging is something that you need to incorporate into your daily life to succeed at it, so if I can’t do it during school I shouldn’t be doing it at all. However, I’ll be working on a new design for the site during the summer and I’ll try to clean things up. I’ll have the same address and blog name and everything, but it’ll be a reboot. Memories of Eternity v2.0.

Look forward to it. I’m getting old and bsns is getting srs.

{ 4 comments }