Apparently, this is my week for consuming new media.

Still reading Battle Angel Alita: Lost Order, and still being amazed by the writing, the wonderful facial expressions in the art, and the way the main female protagonist action-girl isn't sexually objectified by the narrative, but also isn't de-sexualized.  In something like two thousand pages, I can count the number of fanservicey cheesecake shots on my hands -- and with one exception before the beginning of Last Order, none of them are gratuitous -- the use of that image in that place has a part to play in the narrative, saying something with regard to the story.  And the gratuitous image was the mildest of them; just a choice of angle.

The primary villain of the first manga series is also a brilliant and terrifying construction.  I hate him.  I mean, I really hate him.  I have seldom encountered a character who I loathe more than this guy, so I consider him a very impressive achievement, from a writing perspective.  I can't even say his name is how much I hate him.  I've had to resort to calling him Professor Flanfuck; which is shorter than "you infuriating flan-eating motherfucker," which Megan will testify is the epithet I yelled at my computer screen.at least half a dozen times while reading the series.



I have also, over the course of this last week, gotten six episodes in to two very different shows.  One is Slings and Arrows, a darkly comedic Canadian mini-series-thingy about a production of Hamlet (in this story arc; the second season is The Scottish Play and the third is King Lear), in which all of the characters are delightfully human and terribly screwed up.  It's been so long since I've really been involved i the theater in any way that I'd all but forgotten the magic of it, and watching Slings and Arrows has restored that memory.  I'm enjoying the dry wit greatly.

The other show is Zero no Tsukaima, or Familiar of Zero, about an alternate-earth Europe in which magic is real; and an incompetent young schoolgirl magician accidentally summons a teenaged Japanese boy from our world and binds him as her familiar.  There's a lot of comedy, but also some interesting plot notions (summoning things accidentally from our world seems to be An Ongoing Thing, the ramifications of which make me very curious); and a surprisingly in-depth and sensitive analysis of class issues -- all the more remarkable in that, while having a nuanced examination of classism, they're also mining the same subject for a lot of their comedy, and it works.  The interaction between peasants and nobles produces the best dramatic tension, the funniest jokes, and sets the tone for the dynamic relationship between the noble heroine and her totallty-unconscious-of-class familiar.



Now, to focus on the day's writing.  Wish me luck!