various things, #890786

[charmian]

1. Seriously, LIMERICKS? Isn't there something more useful LJ staffers could be doing? WTF?

2. Posted elsewhere my thoughts on SW3 CG scenes (tl;dr version: LOL, and man, they really changed around some of the non-historical relationships), Aoi Hana (tl;dr version: too lacking in structure?, or maybe I just hate slice of life. Bailed after two vols), and Saiunkoku spoilers (tl;dr version: stuff happens, but a lot of stuff fails to happen yet. As usual recent Saiunkoku reads a lot better if you like the higher officials).

Comments

[charmian]

Yeah, the scene to scene transitions might be a factor there, in making it more difficult to follow the story.

Like I said, I find that the way the emotion is portrayed is too understated for me. It simply doesn't come through for some reason, and it becomes hard to follow, but I could have taken that had the plot structure been more clear.

Ah, is that what it's about? It's sort of hard to tell that from the beginning, but as I said, I bailed after two vols, so perhaps I didn't get to the part where that starts.

Cast: Well, you have to recall that Saiunkoku is a nineteen volume long light novel series and seventy episode long anime series! It didn't start off with that many characters, and is formed into fairly suspenseful plot arcs with a great deal of conflict. Also, "what the story is about" is fairly clear from the start (seemingly, although it changes later, which is a problem with the novel series) The cast of Aoi no Hana isn't incredibly large, but I felt too many characters were introduced at the beginning.

RoT is kind of a different sort of animal: it's not character driven, but strongly plot driven (and also it's kind of like 'fan-fiction' therefore, you probably know who most of the characters are already: In other words, Cao Cao can just waltz in with the various Xiahous and Caos at his side because we know who Cao Cao is and are waiting for him to arrive before he even gets there), thusly the events are at the center, so it's not as big of a handicap that the characters are numerous. (And plus, it's like 30 vols at this point. The author doesn't actually start off introducing a ton of characters at once, but with action scenes that don't involve too many characters)

I \disliked the art of Honey and Clover, so I stopped reading it, though I intend to start reading it at some point.

[lennan]

I do like Aoi Hana, but I also find that the transitions are very strange, especially in some chapter to chapter ones where the problem is exactly as canis_m stated, that they're really confusing. And there are a number of times I haven't been sure who's monologue was whose as well.

I wasn't confused by the number of people being introduced though, but I'm pretty good at keeping people straight at first go, so that might be part of the reason I wasn't so confused. I do find a lot of the emotions to be very spot on, actually. I've also seen the anime in addition to reading the manga and this might have made keeping track of the story initially much easier because it clarified things for me. Or I might have become used to the way things go in the manga. But I definitely think that the anime makes things a lot more solid, at least for me.

[charmian]

The transitions are bothersome. I really dislike that kind of thing in manga. Did you read it in Japanese, though? Were the monologues still confusing there?

It just annoyed me because I didn't really see a reason for there to be so many, though.

[lennan]

Yeah. It was confusing in the Japanese, but a lot of that is because the speech patterns aren't really that different from each other. Or rather they're much subtly possibly because most every one is a girl. The monologues were only really confusing when they were transitioning from one scene to the next or one chapter to the next. One scene, the volume I can't remember was a transition where I wasn't watching the personal pronoun and so missed that the monologue was Fumi and not Aa-chan. The really confusing one is I think in volume 4 where I'm pretty sure now that the person who's monologuing is Kyouko, but the story events are transitioning to Fumi and Haruka where Haruka is going to tell Fumi that she thinks that her sister's lover is a woman. That really threw me, at first. Another one is I think is where the scenes transition between the end of Volume 4 and the first chapter of the next, where the scene moves forward with regards to the Mishima play but then backtracks to Aa-chan and Fumi's conversation regarding Fumi's confession. After that I mostly read the English translated chapters since I have no access to the raws. But it's mostly the monologuing that really trips me up.

I don't mind the monologues per se, but I wish that she wouldn't use them as transition points, since that's the only point where I really have a bone of contention with the series. Used sparingly like that it's fine, but she does it a lot.