I have been here, just elsewhere
16 Jan 2012 04:29 pmThe past few months have been... well, there they've been. So instead, I'll list what's fit for quasi-public consumption. Reading list!
First, the manga.
Kamisama Hajimemashita: read it for the female protagonist. It's shoujo done right.
The summary sounds like yet another stock premise from the land of girl's (and boy's) manga: our hero has a single parent, who up and abandons the kid, for reasons of debt, in this case gambling-related. Thus, by the end of the first chapter, Nanami has gone from being the poorest girl in school with a gambling father to still the poorest, but now abandoned by her father, and homeless thanks to the loan sharks confiscating everything. Stuck in a park with her one duffel bag and nowhere to go, she rescues a man from a barking dog, and in appreciation he... gives her his house. Which turns out to be a shrine. A rather forgotten and run-down shrine, at that. Which comes with its own shrine guardians, one of whom is a former wild fox and is mightily displeased that the shrine's god not only has not returned (after an absence of twenty years) but sent this girl in his place, as the new land-god.
( Kamisama comparisons, and Dengeki Daisy, Sengoku Strays, and a hope there'll be more coming from Rinne no Lagrange. )
I realized the other day that the first anime I saw was ten years ago, with Spirited Away. Outside of Miyazaki, it's taken ten years to be able to list this many good heroines in one post. Here's hoping in another ten years, such heroines will be so common that I can't fit them all in twenty posts this long.
First, the manga.
Kamisama Hajimemashita: read it for the female protagonist. It's shoujo done right.
The summary sounds like yet another stock premise from the land of girl's (and boy's) manga: our hero has a single parent, who up and abandons the kid, for reasons of debt, in this case gambling-related. Thus, by the end of the first chapter, Nanami has gone from being the poorest girl in school with a gambling father to still the poorest, but now abandoned by her father, and homeless thanks to the loan sharks confiscating everything. Stuck in a park with her one duffel bag and nowhere to go, she rescues a man from a barking dog, and in appreciation he... gives her his house. Which turns out to be a shrine. A rather forgotten and run-down shrine, at that. Which comes with its own shrine guardians, one of whom is a former wild fox and is mightily displeased that the shrine's god not only has not returned (after an absence of twenty years) but sent this girl in his place, as the new land-god.
( Kamisama comparisons, and Dengeki Daisy, Sengoku Strays, and a hope there'll be more coming from Rinne no Lagrange. )
I realized the other day that the first anime I saw was ten years ago, with Spirited Away. Outside of Miyazaki, it's taken ten years to be able to list this many good heroines in one post. Here's hoping in another ten years, such heroines will be so common that I can't fit them all in twenty posts this long.