Count Cain: Families Can't Get Any More Dysfunctional Than This

"...You're wrong. It's ... not that I can't escape from my father!
I ... don't want to escape!! I am in the palm of his hand ...
and imprisoned within an endless ring. No matter what he does
to me ... every part of my body and soul belongs to him!
That's the way I have been molded!"
--Dr. Jezebel Disraeli

Man, this is one fucked-up manga series. I thought Naoe & Kagetora in "Mirage of Blaze" were the most seriously screwed-up characters ever, but everyone in Count Cain makes the two of them appear completely sane and reasonable by comparison. Thing is, N&K's descent into madness occurred over the course of four centuries, while the characters in Count Cain managed to do it in one lifetime. Quite the accomplishment, if you ask me.

I doubt this story will ever become an anime. It's just too damn disturbing. Victorian England is the perfect stage for such dark storylines that are about to unfold, and appropriately enough, the hero of the story is a poison specialist. He's also a child of incest whose mother tried to kill him, and his father physically & mentally abused him after her death. Together with his servant Riff, he solves various mysteries involving murder, ghosts, vampires, poisons and other macabre stuff.

Cain Hargreaves (in yellow) and Riffael Raffit. Don't worry, it's just fanservice, not yaoi.

The first two volumes are pretty standard one- or two-shot story fare. Once the author got approval for a longer series, however, other characters begin to appear that tie into a sinister plot by a secret organization known as Delilah which has its roots in the Hargreaves family's skeleton closet. Jack the Ripper

(Post in Progress. Will finish later.)

A Heartfelt Thank-You

Thanks to everyone involved in the anime fansubbing and manga/manhwa scanlation process. If it weren't for you, only about 1% of the best anime and manga/manhwa would be known outside of Japan.

All of the anime I've purchased on DVD was first viewed by me in fansub form, and I've noticed that fansubs are usually translated more accurately than the "official" versions. How can I make this assertion despite knowing only a handful of Japanese words and phrases? There are instances of proof that can be found on some of the DVDs themselves. Interviews with the original Japanese voice actors make reference to language used in certain scenes that can be found in the fansub but not in the official release. I for one find it impressive that fansubbers do a better job than the pros, and your dedication and hard work is much appreciated. Thank you.

I can't read kanji for shit, so I can't attest to the accuracy of Japanese-to-English scanlations. Quality runs the gamut, from barely readable scans and mangled grammar to work so clear and perfect it could easy pass for the real thing. That being said, even crappy scanlations are better than none at all, especially when a beginner group picks up a project in hiatus and keeps it going until someone with better scans, translators and editors comes along. Thank you all.

Thank you all your hard work. Please continue to take care of us, the anime & manga addicts who await your new releases with rabid anticipation. Though it may not be expressed enough, we are all deeply grateful for the worlds of joy and wonder you have opened up for us.

Domo arigato gozaimasu! Ganbatte!

Death Note: How to View It

Light: Boku ga... (I am...) L: Watashi wa... (I am...)
Both: Seigi da!! (Justice!!)

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." --John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902)

Say one day you come across a notebook that contains the following instructions:

1. The human whose name is written in this note shall die.
2. This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person's face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
3. If the cause of death is written within 40 seconds of writing the person's name, it will happen.
4. If the cause of death is not specified, the subject will simply die of a heart attack.
5. After writing the cause of death, the details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

Would you snort "yeah, right" and pitch it in the nearest waste receptacle? Or would you test it out just for the helluvit? If your answer is "yes" to the second question, whose name would you write -- even if the possibility of that person actually dying might seem astronomical at best? And if s/he actually does die in the timeframe and manner you specified, what would you do then?

"Death Note" is the story of a young man named Yagami Light confronted with this very dilemma. At the start of the story, he's a senior in high school with perfect grades, manners and metrosexual good looks. His dad is police chief, and while his family isn't rich, they have a nice house and live a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Since Light is so smart and does so well at school, his family has high expectations as to his future.

Yagami Light as we first meet him.

Light suffers from ennui. He's bored, bored, bored. Kind of emo too. He sees evil and corruption all around him and heartily wishes that something could be done to fix it. While he's contemplating the wretched state of the world, a thin black book literally drops out of the sky and past the school window. This intrigues Light enough that he goes to find it, and DN would be one of the shortest mangas/animes in history if he'd trusted his bullshit meter after reading the instructions inside. Fortunately for the DN franchise that continues to rake in big bucks on DVDs, mangas, live-action movies, toys, etc., Light wanders disconsolately home with the notebook stuffed in his backpack.

Experimentation follows. Since Light wants the world to be a better place, he tests it out on people doing bad things and soon learns that the Note really works. Yeah, he's horrified to realize that he's just killed someone at first, but concludes almost immediately that he now wields the perfect tool to fix everything rotten in the world. Never mind he's now got a tag-along in the form of Ryuk, the shinigami (Death God) who dropped the Note in the human world to alleviate his own boredom. Turns out that because he's used the Note, Light can no longer go to Heaven or Hell, and Ryuk will write Light's name in his Note and take his remaining lifespan when he dies.

Does Light care about such petty details? Nah. As if the thought of a 17-year-old with godlike power over life and death isn't scary enough, Light goes all creepy and megalomaniacal on us, complete with evil laughter and glowing red eyes. Right off the bat, the "God of the New World" shows us his dark side, and from this point on his friendly, straight-A student demeanor is nothing more than a mask. Killing peeps who need killin' is now his bidness, and damn, bidness is good.

The God of the New World and his apple-eating shinigami buddy Ryuk.

So now Light spends his nights doing homework, studying for the Japanese equivalent of the SATs, and killing off criminals he sees on TV and in his dad's work files. Yup, Light's a hacker too, or maybe his dad just uses his wife's name as a password. Either way, bad guys are dropping like flies from heart attacks all over the place, even in jail. It's blatantly obvious something's going on, and the media is taking notice. Light has become something of a folk hero known as "Kira" (Engrish for "killer", lol) and has fan sites on the Internet where people ask him to kill jerks who've wronged them. But guess what, law enforcement has taken an interest too, and the top criminal investigator in the world decides that Kira's murderous rampage must be stopped at all costs.

Enter L, my favorite DN character. He's so cool he only needs a letter for a name. Only a handful of people have actually met him face-to-face. They're not missing much, actually, as the guy's a total slouch with messy hair and baggy clothes who sits all balled up on a chair expressionlessly consuming sweets. Seriously, a diabetic could go into a coma just from seeing this guy make sugar-sludge coffee and wolfing down an endless parade of cakes, cookies and whatnot. L also bites & sucks his thumb, talks/thinks in a monotone, is fucking brilliant, and his financial resources put Bruce Wayne's to shame. In other words, he's a perfect foil to Prince Charming, Yagami Light.

Kira's nemesis, the enigmatic & googly-eyed L.

After setting up Kira to kill a man on live TV, L does a voiceover and taunts that he's narrowed down the city where Kira lives and how Kira's revealed he can kill with nothing more than a face and name. He challenges Kira to kill him too, but of course, without knowing L's real name or what he looks like, Light can't do a damn thing except throw a major pissy fit (much to Ryuk's amusement). L mocks him some more, and they both simultaneously proclaim eventual victory, ending with, "I am Justice!!"

All this (and more I haven't covered) in just two episodes! The anime keeps an excellent pace through most of the series and managed to hold me in suspense even though I'd already read the manga and knew what was going to happen. Lighting and color supply dramatic effect, like when Light goes into red Kira mode and L in Kira-busting blue. A good deal of the dialogue is actually mental voice, for Light must scheme constantly to keep one step away from getting caught while trying to discern the real identities of his enemies and killing criminals at the same time, and L & other characters can't voice their suspicions or plans either. This kind of thing can easily get tiresome, but DN handles it so well that the thought dialogue adds quite a bit of tension. In DN, "as within" is definitely not "as without". Lighthearted conversations belie a seething roil of treacherous thoughts and murderous intent.

I should probably say here that of the three DN versions -- manga, anime and live-action movies -- I vastly prefer the anime. I'm glad to say the anime follows the manga pretty closely (with the notable exception of the final scene). My kids like this show too and I bought the English-dubbed DVDs for their sake, but I'm not too fond of the voice acting for L. It's not terrible, but
the dude puts too much emotion into it and makes L sound kind of snide most of the time instead of the dispassionate monotone used in the original Japanese.

The movies? Ugh. I checked out the first one, and my curiosity as to how L would be portrayed was the only thing that helped me endure the suckage until his eventual appearance. The camera panned up, the dude spoke, and I promptly bailed forthwith. "Oh, hell no," read the screenplay of my mind.

Yes, I know the DN movies are hugely popular in Japan and that the actors portraying Light and L are teenage heartthrobs. Me, I took one look at sneery, snotty movie-Light and thought, "No fucking way." Movie-L looked like he'd just crawled out of bed all squinty with a massive hangover. Maybe if I was a teenaged Japanese girl I'd have reacted differently, but this forty-something American mom only shook her head in disappointment. I had such high hopes, too. *sigh* The only good thing I can say is that movie-Ryuk and the effects associated with him were fucking awesome. The CGI was flawless. I even showed my kids the part with the apple being eaten in midair because it was so freaking cool.

Point and laugh at the Billy Idol fanboi.

Okay, enough about the dreadful movies. Moving on...

After L verbally bitchslaps Kira before a live broadcast audience, DN becomes an intense cat-and-mouse game between the two of them. Light's dad and a few other investigators from his department form a special task force with L to catch Kira. L picks Chief Yagami's son as his main suspect right away and initiates surveillance, and when that fails to unearth sufficient proof, he stalks Light at college and tells him right out that he's L. In the tradition of "keep your friends close but your enemies closer", the two end up working together on the task force -- Light ostensibly wanting to prove his innocence but actually trying to find out L's real name so he can kill him, and L waiting for Light to trip up and expose himself as Kira -- thereby providing the perfect material for tons of fan-made yaoi doujinshi. *snicker*

DN is a 37-episode anime, and it would spoil things to tell much more of the plot. That being said, some spoilers follow as I continue musing, so consider yourselves warned.

What really sells me on DN is the characterizations. The main characters are twisty and complex. It's impossible to hate Light even as he's turning into the biggest asshole on Earth. (I came pretty close when he finally killed L, however.) His road to hell was paved with good intentions, and up to the very end, he truly believed in the rightness of his vision. He's an antihero in every sense of the word. He considers himself good and wants to create a perfect world free of evil and corruption, yet his ego blinds him to the fact that killing people is murder. The God of the New World has very human failings, and it makes the viewer root for and against him at the same time. L, his successor Near, and the task force knowingly put their lives on the line in order to chase down Kira, and their courage is repeatedly demonstrated in the series (along with their respective worries, self-doubts and personality quirks). The only character I truly loathe is Misa-Misa, a fluff-headed chick with her own Death Note & accompanying shinigami. Light accepts her as his girlfriend to keep her under his control but considers her annoying & stupid too. All I can say is, if she was real and I had to put up with her for any length of time, I'd risk of having her write my name later by giving the silly bitch a serious smackdown. Sheesh.

Amane Misa (with Light-as-Kira in the background). Irritatingly enough, she's still alive at the end of the series.

Equally appealing (to me, at least) is that DN confronts its viewers with moral and ethical questions about murder, use and abuse of power, and personal definitions of justice. The line between right and wrong is decidedly blurred here. When cute little Matsuda embarrassedly points out that yeah, Kira's a murderer, but crime rates have dropped drastically all over the world, you totally sympathize with the cops' inner conflict about catching and stopping him. Just how far would you be willing to go to create a peaceful world?

I'll wrap this post up by saying that DN is a classy, very well done anime with considerable visual & intellectual appeal. It's grimmer and more intense than your average anime, for while the comic relief may alleviate the viewer's tension, it tends to increase that of the characters involved. It's a bit like watching an animated version of "Silence of the Lambs" at times. If you're in the mood for something far removed from mecha or cutesy anime, "Death Note" might just be for you.

Now I shall tease you with the opening sequence of DN's first season!

Gintama -- Funniest Anime Ever.

Hijikata: Well, guys like us, you see, live our lives never knowing when our dying breath might be. We don't give a damn whether our comrades fall. I'll just kill that many more enemies for [them].
They don't need words of sympathy.
All I can do is fight alongside them until I fall myself.
All the way to the limit.

Since I'm extremely bored and feeling particularly obsessive today, I'm going to dive right into blathering about one of my absolute favorite animes. In case you couldn't tell by the post title, that would be Gintama.

Man, this show kills me, and my kids love it too. I've laughed so hard during some episodes that it almost made me pee myself. Yeah, there are some not-so-great ones, but the overall absurdity guarantees at least one belly laugh per installment. You won't be bored with highbrow stuff here -- it's puns, vulgarity & slapstick almost all the way, along with plenty of parody of other famous anime and (Japanese) TV shows. Booger-flicking, poo jokes and hemorrhoids abound.

The very first episode started off with a "Bleach" spoof which hooked me instantly, and I have to say it's only gotten funnier and more outrageous from there. There are some more-or-less serious storylines, such as the Benizakura arc, but none of them are entirely humor-free. Profound statements are uttered in the midst of freewheeling chaos. These interludes serve to show the genuine affection and respect the main & secondary characters have for each other despite the constant snarking. They show up for the rescue when it really counts. Everyone's a hero in disguise, don'tcha know? All in all, Gintama is a endearingly silly and heartwarming series that I can't recommend highly enough.

As of this writing, I've seen up to Episode 85 and am eagerly awaiting the next fansubbed offering. I really hope this show doesn't get canceled anytime soon.

General summary:

The story centers around a lazy, laid-back guy named Sakata Gintoki. He was once a feared samurai who fought against the alien Amanto who invaded Japan during the Edo/Bakumatsu period along with a few other characters in the series (notably Katsura). Now that the aliens are in charge and swords are outlawed for commoners, he's in charge of a company called the Yorozuya that includes a ridiculously strong, parasol-carrying Yato girl named Kagura and glasses-guy Shimura Shinpachi. Kagura owns an enormous alien dog that randomly bites peoples' heads and other body parts, and he's called Sadaharu. Together, the trio (and dog) do various odd jobs in order to pay the rent and fill the bottomless pit that is Kagura's stomach.

Expressing shock and horror at actually being offered a job, lol.

There's lots of zany peeps in this free-for-all. The local police, the Shinsengumi, are my personal favorites:

In foreground, from left to right: Okita Sougo, Commander Kondo Isao, Vice-Commander Hijikata Toshiro, and spy Yamazaki Sagaru.

Kondo (everybody calls him "Gorilla") constantly stalks Shinpachi's sister, Otae, a martial arts expert struggling to keep her late father's dojo going. He's regularly battered by her as a result. Short-tempered, chain-smoking Hijikata smothers everything in mayonnaise, including dessert. Baby-faced, sadistic Okita keeps trying to kill Hijikata in order to succeed him as Vice-Commander and has an ongoing rivalry with Kagura ("I'm the only one allowed to beat that girl"). These guys are a scream whether by themselves or while not playing well with others.

Then we have Katsura Kotarou and Elizabeth. Katsura is an anti-Amanto resistance leader wanted for terrorism by the Shogunate and hunted by the Shinsengumi. His duckish companion, Elizabeth, is something of a mystery. Zura's serious demeanor hilariously offsets his actions and bizarre outfits, like when he & Gintoki dress up in drag and when he's Space Captain Katsura (complete with fake scar and eyepatch).

This show has just too many wonderful characters to list. Even minor ones who only show up in one or two episodes are nicely fleshed out and have backstories of their own. Stereotypes are present, yes, but spoofed to the maximum and turned on their collective ear. Nothing and no one is sacred, not even Buddha!

If you know what scene this is from, you're probably rofling right now.

I've yet to sit down and read the manga, mainly because there are big, volume-sized gaps in the available scanlations. Maybe someday I'll be rich enough to buy them all. *sigh*

In closing, here's a crazy clip where the Yorozuya and Katsura are undertaking ninja training under kunoichi Sarutobe Ayame (who, incidentally, has a masochistic crush on Gintoki):

General Notes

First off, naming conventions.

In Japan, surname/family name comes first and would therefore be most commonly used in conversation. For example, "Bleach" character Kurosagi Ichigo's familiar name is Ichigo, but he's referred to in the original (Japanese) anime by most as Kurosaki, Kurosaki-kun, Kurosaki-san, etc. Close friends and family members call him Ichigo. English dubs generally switch the names around in Western style, a la Ichigo Kurosaki, which can be aurally jarring (not to mention irritating) if you're used to watching fansubbed anime and hearing it in the original Japanese.

Subtle variation in the use of names and honorifics in anime and manga is quite revealing of the relationships between characters. This is discarded altogether in official English anime dubs and is a bad thing in my opinion. A comprehensive overview of common honorifics is covered on this Wiki page.

To illustrate what I'm talking about...

In the anime "Mirage of Blaze", Naoe, so often dissed by his master Kagetora and other characters, is referred to as "Naoe-dono" by a high-ranking retainer of another kanshousa Lord. This was an expression of respect acknowledging Naoe as a person of status and power on the same level as the speaker. On the other hand, when Ishida Uryuu first confronted Kurosagi Ichigo in "Bleach", Ishida called him "Kurosaki" without honorifics as a deliberate insult. Since Ichigo couldn't care less about such things, it backfired, and in fact Ichigo routinely pisses off Ishida and even Soul Reapers by using their familiar names without permission. The effect of all this is entirely lost in the English dubs.

Enough on this subject for now.

General anime & manga notes:

Japanese manga is read right-to-left. Korean manwha is read left-to-right. After reading a lot of manga, webcomics and regular comic books require a bit of a brain shift!

Sweat-drops indicate anxiousness/nervousness. Vein pops are obviously irritation. When characters get really angry, evil purple waves come off of them and their eyes flash with lightning & stuff! Giant dragons and tigers loom in the background behind them! When depressed, it's black waves, and sometimes mushrooms grow on them too! Wouldn't that be awesome in real life? Can't forget nosebleeds, either -- when a character is turned on or aroused, blood drips or spurts from their noses (but it can in some instances be from eating chocolate, go figure). All these add hilarity to the proceedings.

Concerning religion and magic, anime and manga have little to no regard for accuracy when it comes to anything besides Buddhism or Shinto, and even then astonishing liberties are taken with the material. Hexagrams, crosses, pentagrams, runic-looking thingys, etc. are all thrown together willy-nilly whenever some mystical shit goes down. You never know what's going to show up. Think "Charmed" on crack. Catholic nuns in the anime/manga universe wear skimpy outfits and use spells & guns, and the priests are all sexy bishounen with guns who are sometimes vampires. I'm looking forward to encountering my first anime/manga rabbi, as the results are sure to be screamingly funny.

A big difference between English-subbed anime and fansubbed anime/scanlated manga is that the latter two tend to contain a lot more Japanese words (and made-up Japanese-ish terms). This can be a bit of a stumbling-block for newcomers, but good fansubbers and scanlators provide explanations for stuff like that. English dubs dumb things down and use English equivalents rather than series-specific terminology, i.e. "Soul Reaper" instead of "shinigami" and "Soul Cutter" for "zanpakuto" (yes, yes, more "Bleach" references).

Discrepancies between an anime and the books and/or manga it's based upon can be distressingly vast, sometimes to the point where it's a completely different story with only the characters' names remaining the same. Perfect examples of this are "Trinity Blood", "Mirage of Blaze" and the "Hellsing" TV series. Censorship is a significant factor in some cases, as with MoB. Lack of ratings for others (like TB) result in a hasty series wrapup leaving viewers scratching their heads and going, "WTF?" Then there's those anime shows that end in the middle of an ongoing manga or book series and leave everyone hanging. Will there be a new TV series or OVA once the plot has sufficiently advanced? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Or worse, the anime will stick in stupid filler storylines that both suck ass and fuck up the general plot (such as the dismal Bount story-arc in "Bleach").

Another irritation is when a good manga either goes on indefinite hiatus or is dropped altogether. This often happens with scanlation projects too, and there are some great titles I love that have no ending in sight because the scanlators dropped it or went under as a group with no raws floating around for someone else to finish the job. *sigh*

When an anime or manga is licensed, fansubbing and scanlation stops. Officially. If you know where to look, some licensed works are still being worked on and distributed online. Don't ask me who, what or where, 'cuz I ain't telling.

Some words on genres:

Manga and anime have a wide range of target audiences, and can be categorized by genre just like movies and books. Here's a list.

Action, adult (also ecchi & smut), adventure, comedy, doujinshi (fan-made works on established titles & characters, often sexual), drama, fantasy, gender-bender, harem (also reverse harem), hentai (more extreme than adult, ecchi & smut), historical, horror, josei (target audience females 18-30, usually smutty romance), martial arts, mature (more extreme than general action category, can have sexual content), mecha (think Transformers), mystery, psychological, romance (also shoujo, shoujo-ai, shounen-ai), school life, sci-fi, seinen (target audience males 18-30), shounen, slice of life, sports, supernatural, tragedy, yaoi, yuri.

Yaoi, shounen-ai, yuri and shoujo-ai deal with homosexual themes. Yaoi is the more explicit version of shounen-ai about male-male relationships, while yuri is more explicit than shoujo-ai regarding female-female ones. Personally, I have no interest in yuri/shoujo-ai, but I loooooove yaoi! *drool* Amusingly enough, yaoi is most popular with the female demographic, and I got hit dead on with that one, lol!

Two categories I didn't include with the above list (because I find them highly offensive) are lolicon and shotacon. These are about sex with children. (Die, child molesters, die!!)

Sex and sexual situations are quite prevalent in manga, and that's not counting all the freaky sub-classifications in hentai. The national age of consent in Japan is 13(!!!), but from what I've seen, most manga thankfully keeps that kind of thing in the 17-and-up range. Speaking for myself, it makes me uneasy when characters in sexual situations are depicted as looking much younger than the age claimed, and I avoid those titles on general principles.

Okay, I think I've covered most of the preliminary stuff. I may add more to this post in the future. Oh, and don't bother asking me where to find fansubs & scanlations because I'm not doing your footwork for you.