manga: Planet Ladder Vol 1

This seven volume classic shoujo is by Yuri Narushima, the same mangaka as Young Magician, so I knew going in that it would probably be hopelessly complex and confusing. I was right.

The day teenaged Kaguya’s adoptive father is arrested for embezzlement, she gets a strange call coming from a man she doesn’t know saying that he will come for her that night. That night-after a lengthy conversation with a ghost woman during which Kaguya sensibly tells the friend she was on the phone with to call the police because of strange people in her house-two men, silent bishounen Seeu and the more seasoned warrior Idou- come for her and battle each other, despite apparently having been friends and fighting on the same side in a war 300 years ago. In the aftermath, Kaguya and a chunk of her house end up in another world. With her is an even more silent young man who was with Seeu, and who appears to be an automated construct.

Like Young Magician, Planet Ladder dumps you in the middle of the plot when it’s well under way. Unlike Young Magician, Kaguya is just as lost as we are. The automated boy now traveling with Kaguya appears to be the reconstruction of a one handed boy from her memory. There’s a silver haired woman in a carriage who Kaguya remembers in loving detail. Kaguya’s tarot readings-which she has frequently-always end with the last card being blank. And did I mention the ghost woman and the old friends and war buddies turned enemy?

Naturally, volume 2 is the only volume of this that I don’t have.

Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith

This is a collection of short stories, mostly romantic in some fashion or another. The stories are as well written, and the voice as engaging, as the Precious Ramotswe books, but the individual stories didn’t grab me the way the full length books did almost immediately.

Many of the stories are engaging and the characters sympathetic, but it didn’t click the way I wanted it to, and a couple of the stories and uses of humor actually made me a little uncomfortable.  I am also deeply confused as to what i was supposed to get out of some of the stories, such as the one with the allegator, and the one with the angel

Good, but I probably had my expectations set too high for a short story collection.

(no subject)

Probably not news to many, but apparently, Fox is leaning towards renewing Dollhouse, and cancelling Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Granted, I have yet to see any of s2 of SCC-spoil and suffer terrible consequences too creative for me to think of right now-but this does not help with my faith in humanity.  Or Network TV.

Babylon 5 1.1-1.8

I have, I think, figured out why I often find it hard to latch onto space scifi, or if I do latch on to it, to like it different reasons than others seem to. When I watch space scifi with humans and aliens, I seem to want to know more about the aliens, and less about the humans. It’s rather like how I like Crichton in Farscape, but often think of him as an excuse to have all the aliens, human looking and otherwise. The shows, however, seem to make the natural assumption that since I’m a human, I’m more interested in the humans. I don’t blame them, though that only seems to be true for me with Stargate: SG-1.

Babylon 5 is a classic 90s scifi series about a space station designed to help promote peace between all the known races in the mid-23rd century, created after a war between Earth and a race called the Minbari. I haven’t learned a lot of character and race names yet (almost too many characters to keep track of, and I’m bad with names to start with), so bear with me. Possibly the most striking thing about the series, watching it for the first time in 2008, is how incredibly dated the FX are. They’re pretty decent when it’s just the FX, but when it’s FX mixed with live action, you get things like the most hilarious lightning I’ve seen. So far, I find most of the episodic plots forgettable to ok enough. The characters and their stories, though, are largely engaging.

The alien preference seems to be holding steady, though, as the only human characters who’ve really caught my attention so far are Ivanova and the blonde telepath. Ivanova because she’s superstoic and I like stoic second-in-commands. The telepath because I find it interesting how she seems to dislike and fear the Psi-Corps, yet she also buys into their doctrine regarding behavior, and that telepaths are dangerous and must be controlled. I find Sinclair, Garibaldi, the doctor, and Sinclair’s girlfriend all to be perfectly fine, if a bit typical so far, but not as attention grabbing as those two, or the aliens.

But the aliens! I adore Londo, the loud ambassador with Shi’ar-like hair who seems to be a noisy braggart and more than a little ridiculous, but who’s also rather jaded to the world, and knows how to work systems to his end. Then there’s his opposite number, a lizard-like ambassador whose race seems to have been the enemy of Londo’s, and who is almost as much of a loud braggart, but who’s rather scheming and surprisingly thoughtful at times. I also really like his super-efficient and long suffering (even after just the first day on the job) Na’Toth, who is listed in the credits, but has only been in one episode so far. My favorite, though, is Delenn, the Zhaan-like representative of the Minbari, who keeps a lot of secrets, both about her own rank, and apparently about the war.

There are several things that jar me on the human/alien front. I get why they specifically refer to everything in Earth time, because all the races have different measurements of time, and they need something to all use, but some descriptions startle me. For example, at one point, Garibaldi, who’s a security officer, is asking an alien to describe someone, and asks if they were humanoid, or looked like an alien. I mean, for starters, he’s the alien to the person he was talking to, but the wording overall was weird. Then there’s the fact that it sometimes seems that the less human an alien looks, the more likely it is to be evil. The most “Uhm…what?” moment for me, though, is when there’s a firefight and Sinclair, Ivanova, and Random Helpless Alien Ambassador (RHAA) are being shot at. RHAA is shackled and doesn’t look like she can move very fast, while Sinclair and Ivanova are uninjured and not shacckled. So Sinclair covers Ivanova while the head for cover. Now, I strongly endorse Ivanova not getting shot and/or killed, but you know, she’s clearly very physically capable and wouldn’t be second-in-command if she couldn’t handle herself in a fight. If I were Sinclair, I’d be trusting her to get to cover while I helped RHAA. Instead, we see RHAA crawling for cover, and then she’s never seen again. And so I spent the next few minutes going “But what about poor RHAA? Was she shot? Is anyone going to unshackle her? Where’d she go?”

So, fun series so far, if mostly for the characters.