Spice and Wolf - "To our profits!"

Spice and Wolf is quite unusual.

It's set in a European-style fantasy world... Society is at a sort of pre-modern phase where harvests have come to be stable, traveling merchants go from city to city and there's a church that insists on religious orthodoxy. In previous days, the peoples of the world used to pay fealty to pagan gods and spirits of the harvest, but that of course died out with the advent of the church.

Sounds like a not-too-unusual brand of fantasy at first, but here's the catch: There's no swordplay to speak of and, with the exception of Ms. Wolf Sage Spirit, there is no magic. Most of the anime is dedicated to haggling, forging business partnerships and just turning out a profit. There really is hardly any action at all.

It is, in other words, something that has absolutely no business being as great as it was.

The premise of the story is that a traveling merchant meets one of these pagan ex-deities along the road, who calls herself a wolf sage spirit. She asks him to bring her north, to her birthplace, for reasons she keeps to herself. The merchant agrees and they begin to travel.

I've found that in any story where you're going to be experimental and try something new, the first thing you need are intensely likable characters. You can't make a show about mercantilism with the Gundam 00 crew and expect success, after all. So let's start with the two mains...


This is Craft Lawerence, the Spice side of the equation.

The first thing most people would notice about Lawrence here is that he's voiced by Jun Fukuyama, aka Lelouch. This is the first time I've really heard Jun outside of his Lelouch role and it took a few moments for me to get my head around the fact that the guy isn't out to viciously take over the world using any and all means.

He's really not what you usually expect from a merchant character. He isn't really all that greedy and he never cheats anyone. He certainly keeps careful track of his money and wants to get rich, but his ambitions are thoroughly wholesome (i.e. he wants to make enough money to settle down, get married and open a shop). It seems that his ideal deal is one where all parties involve profit handsomely and part on amiable terms, with the understanding that further business may be conducted in the future, which gets him into trouble. There's a certain intangible quality to the guy that just makes him thoroughly likeable. His thoughtful mannerisms as he considers a deal and his understated emotions with Horo just make him into the sort of guy you yourself would like to know. It's a rare thing for a character to hit a perfect note, but when one does you always remember them.


This is Horo. As mentioned, she's a Wolf Spirit (which is why she has Wolf ears) who was worshipped by a village for a few generations as a harvest deity, though she herself doesn't make any claims to divinity. She portrays herself as a spirit who just used her powers to help some humans out for a while, until technology progressed to such a level that she was no longer required. She isn't really bitter about this and is in fact pretty cheerful and mischievous throughout the show, but there's a certain unstated sadness to Horo that comes with the knowledge that her time has passed.

She's a bit of a counterpoint to Lawerence (or perhaps Lawerence is the counterpoint to her), in that she is pretty self-indulgent, a bit suspicious and extremely shrewd. Oh, and Geass fans will notice she's voiced by Kallen.


It's really when the two get put together that they really become magnificent. They're rather openly attached to each other, but their relationship is like an incredibly elaborate dance where each is trying to playfully outwit or outdo the other with misdirection and jokes. This isn't the typical anime affair where both parties are just too shy to actually say or do anything about it, but rather that they both seem to have more fun that way. They take a peculiar sort of joy out of making each other jealous and defying each other's expectations ("Why do you want me to stay with you?" "Because you owe me money").

It's a fun thing to see unfold as it goes along. If the show were nothing but these two, I would still highly recommend it.


Where things get even more interesting is in the money aspect. Lawerence sells furs in one town, buys pepper and moves on to the next. Horo helps him out with her sage wisdom (and, very occasionally, wolf magic) and the two are a money-making team. The world they're in is mercantilistic and he has to do things like deal with tariffs, fluctuating currencies, guild regulations and avoid church interference. The show is lovingly researched and structured, but it never gets so obtuse with the financial bits that you lose track of what the hell is going on and the characters make it engaging enough to be pretty dramatic. I never thought I'd be able to cheer for a guy to find a decent price to sell his pepper at, but they somehow pull it off.

There's an old addage that money corrupts that often pervades fiction. It's a literary tradition that reaches back to Shakespeare's Timons of Athens and beyond, so I expected the other merchants to be a pack of jackals... and so I was quite surprised when Lawerence said that he'd testify in a court of law against a company, the immediate response was not 'okay, time to kill you'. It actually took me a moment to realize that maybe the guy just didn't want to profit off of violence and death. Everyone cares about their bottom lines and profit margins, but even when hired thugs are sent out to slit Lawerence's throat in the dark they feel awfully guilty about it. It's a weird portrayal of old world spiritualism and morality combining with modern concepts of self-interest. The Spice with the Wolf, in other words... and I found that really intriguing.

(I feel compelled to mention, since I think I may in fact be one of the few people in the world who is equipped to properly notice this: the scene where Lawerence goes door to door asking friends and business partners for money is, in fact, taken directly from Timons of Athens. I would write a bit about the underlying meaning of that, but I'm already such a nerdy guy so...)

I will be the first to acknowledge that the enjoyment of Spice and Wolf does take a few rather obscure tastes, or at the very least a willingness to give a fantasy concerned primarily with high romance and the tides of commerce a chance. But if you're willing to broaden out your horizons just a little bit, I think you will be well rewarded. There's more ...

The Schemers - "All conditions have been cleared."

I think one of the most interesting things about the whole anime scene is seeing the marketplace of ideas at work. A new sort of protagonist or way of telling a story will be put out there and proven as being good and then, within a few months, you'll have new animes trying to build upon the new concept by trying to make a fresh and interesting take on it. Now this isn't the same thing as stealing, as unlike with Mass Effect, the new owners are making use of technique rather than actual material.

Try to think of the first episodes of Haruhi and Druaga to get what I'm talking about. The idea for the whole misleading-first-episode thing came from Haruhi and then the Druaga people said 'hey, this could work for us' and made that classic 'Jil's dream' episode. By taking a cue from the Haruhi folk, the Druaga people were able to make a complete masterstroke.

One idea that's been making the circulation lately is what I think of as the 'schemer character' and I'd like to talk for a moment about the interesting way in which this has been bounced back and forth...

The most well-known schemer characters are probably Yagami Light and Lelouch, so let's start with them.



Light is, as far as I can tell, the original schemer. If there is some sort of pre-Death Note figure that inspired him, then I am not aware of him.

Light is probably one of the most interesting characters I've ever seen. He's an ordinary upstanding man who believes in things like justice and equality who stumbles across the power to kill a person by writing their name in the book and immediately sets out to make himself into a god. What sets Light apart though is that, while he is a crazed serial killer, he's also in possession of a cold and nearly flawless intellect. He will hatch elaborate and occasionally ridiculous schemes to fool the police and take borderline super-villain-ish pleasure when they succeed. But what is most important is that he is the series' protagonist.

I will never forget the scene where Light was trying to discover the real name of that female detective whose husband he had murdered. How he weaved an elaborate web of lies to gain her trust and then...


Light is consistently portrayed as being a creature bereft of normal human emotion and, because the series is told from his point of perspective, Death Note essentially drags the viewer through the darker and uncomfortable corners of the human mind.

But even through Light's virtues, you can already see the flaw... if he's the absolute sort of evil, it becomes difficult after a while to have any affection for the man. He's just too remote from the average human being. At no point is he an unbelievable character, but he's just still not a character that many people can really relate to.

And that is really what brings us to Lelouch...



(Note that I am talking about the Lelouch of the original Code Geass season, not the second season which ruined the character)

On the surface, Lelouch is a lot like Light. He had a relatively ordinary existence until he stumbled across a tremendous supernatural power that gave him the ability to fundamentally alter the world. There are of course many more differences (Light wants to be a god while Lelouch is more of a conventional conquerer, etc.) but you can nevertheless see how the base of the Light character template is being employed for Lelouch here.

But what makes things interesting is that while Lelouch is cold and ruthless, at no point is he inhuman. One of Lelouch's first acts in the series is to murder his half-brother in cold blood, but that's not really what got my attention about him. Rather, it was this...


When Lelouch recalls what he did later in the day, he throws up. Lelouch justified the murder at the time by essentially saying it was to serve a greater good, much in the same way that Light did when he was on his killing sprees, but there's always a part of him that constantly screams that what he's doing is wrong. Sure he'll hatch Light-like schemes to get the better of his rivals and often destroys those close to him along the way in order to further his plans, but his sins gradually become a sort of tangible burden upon his shoulders. By giving the concept of Light a conscience, Lelouch really becomes a tragic hero in the old sense.

Both Light and Lelouch go down the route of being rather intimate pictures of amoral geniuses though, which is why I find this man to be particularly fascinating...


This is Toua Tokuchi and he's pitcher for the Lycoans. And yes, you read that right.

(It would probably be more accurate to call Toua the successor to Akagi, but I haven't seen Akagi yet so...)

One Outs is a show that really deserves its own blog post, so I won't go too much into the details here, but Tokuchi is the same sort of brutal genius that Light and Lelouch are. The gist of the story's premise is that every time Toua gets an out he makes 5 million yen but for every point he gives up he loses 50 million yen. He obviously never kills anyone (or at least he hasn't yet), but his technique is to wage elaborate campaigns of psychological warfare and deception in order to not only beat but also completely destroy the opposing team.

If you think that sounds stupid because it's baseball, then I don't want to hear it. I hate baseball as much as anyone else, but the point of One Outs isn't baseball.

What's interesting about Toua though when you compare him to Lelouch or Light is that he's completely opaque. He's the protagonist, but the show never presents his thought process or we hardly even get any idea of his motivation. Rather instead, most of the show is told from the perspective of the batters that have to go up against him as they try to second guess themselves. The show is really about what it's like to be pitted against a cold and malevolent human intelligence, rather than to show what that intelligence is like inside.

But again, I'll talk more about it later... I think by now you can figure out what I'm saying.

It's this sort of community of ideas and concepts that keeps the quality of Japanese fiction so damn high. Imagine for a moment if instead of 'hey let's take the basic Star Trek formula, give it a female captain and throw it into a different part of the universe' they had said to themselves 'what actually made TNG so good and how do we take that idea and do a new take on it?' Or imagine if Mass Effect had actually looked at the spirit of its influences instead of just going down the wholesale plagurism route.

If more of that sort of thinking went on over on this side of the Pacific, then I think that maybe we'd have something that's just a bit better than the gimmicky drivel that pollutes our bookshelves and televisions these days. There's more ...

The Tales of Beedle the Bard - "Clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else."

I've been meaning to write something about this for a while.

Beedle the Bard didn't generate nearly as much hype as something with the name 'JK Rowling' attached to it would normally generate. This is at least partially because of the content, for the book is a series of short stories intended for wizard children in the Harry Potter universe with academic commentary by Dumbledore. It was written for charity and probably took her about a week to put together. Still, one has to wonder to wonder if JK Rowling's sun has set. I guess we won't know that for sure until she releases another real book though.

But in any case, while Beedle the Bard is a decent enough read it is also rather forgettable.

The fictional author "Beedle the Bard" is modelled after Shakespeare, betraying JK Rowling's English geek roots. The theme of his stories is one of wizard-muggle harmony, which I guess is meant to extend into a general message of tolerance. The character of Beedle sort of bothers me, in that he's a bit too clean and good. The Dumbledore commentary constantly emphasizes that he's ahead of his time in terms of his progressive beliefs about Muggles, but the problem is he's too ahead of his time. There isn't a drop of prejudice in any of the stories. A bad decision, in my opinion. A drop of prejudice would have added a lot of character to the guy.

Anyhow, I've now gathered all their cover images, so the first story is "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot"...


It's probably the worst story. It's about a guy who has a pot that follows him around making noises every time he refuses to help a Muggle with his magic until finally the wizard succumbs and decides to be nice. The Dumbledore commentary afterward is mostly a bunch of historical junk about muggle prejudice... but um... wait, what is the lesson here? You get the idea that it's supposed to mean 'if you don't help others, then it'll hurt you in the long run' but what I got out of it was 'if you piss someone off enough, they'll do what you want just to get you to stop.'

Maybe that's intentional and JK Rowling was just trying to call attention to Dumbledore's silly idealism... but it didn't really feel that way when I read it. It felt more like she was trying to make a Point.

"The Fountain of Fair Fortune" is the second story in the book...

It's about three witches and a knight looking for the aforementioned fountain. It's a nice little story without so many of the thin moral attachments of the first. It's just a story of four people on a little quest, overcoming obstacles with some humour along the way. Nothing to get too excited about, but it certainly isn't bad. Dumbledore's commentary afterward is also good for some more laughs, what with a story of Hogwarts students putting on a play.

Still, I got the feeling reading this that it was JK Rowling on autopilot. She could spit out a dozen stories just like this if you locked her in a room for a weekend. I guess this is what it looks like when a fairly talented author rests on her laurels.

Next up is "The Warlock's Hairy Heart"

Rowling seems to have put a bit more effort into this one. You've got a Warlock who doesn't want to have anything to do with women, because he believes that such unions spawn weakness. As you can see from the story's cover image, it gets surprisingly gruesome, all things considered, and is probably the one story amongst this lot that gives me hope for Rowling's future works. I think she really has the potential to hit readers hard with a 'mature' storyline.

There's an artificial moral in this one too, mind you, but I guess these are meant to be kid's stories.

The last original story is "Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump"...

This is about as bad as it sounds. It's full of tolerance babble and isn't a particularly interesting story either. There's a king, a witch and a con-man and it goes on and on. Dumbledore's analysis does little to improve it.

In two words: shit sucks.

Also included in the book is "The Tale of the Three Brothers"...

Which has the best cover image, but which you have already read in Harry Potter 7. And that story is in itself inspired by the Pardoner's Tale by Chaucer. It's probably the best of the stories in Beedle, which should tell you a lot. Still, what made the story so interesting in the books was the fact that it was of immediate relevance to the plot. On its own, it wasn't exactly awe-inspiring.

So I guess the real question with Beedle is whether anyone would take two looks at these stories if the name JK Rowling weren't attached to them. And the answer is probably no. They're passable, but extremely bland. If you're as big a fan as I am, then lower your expectations a bit and pick it up. But make no mistake: it's skippable. There's more ...

Gundam 00 - "I believed, perchance, that our fates would once more be intertwined!"

I have a strange relationship with Gundam 00. It's got beautiful animation and superb mech design, which is something I'm pretty vulnerable to. I've always been something of an enthusiast for a good mech. Seeing a flying bipedal machine having a midair swordsfight with another flying bipedal machine is just undeniably cool. I have known this truth ever since I first saw Heero fight Zechs in a snowplain when I was 14 and it's still true now with Gundam 00.

But the problem with Gundam 00 is... um... everything else. Fuck, what a mess. So submitted here for your approval is my very own 'Top 5 things I hate about Gundam 00'...



5) The Innovators


There have been a lot of secretive evil organizations in 00's course. It's hard to really keep track... there were those guys that that guy was talking to back in season 1. The Observers I think they were called? Whatever happened to those guys anyway? And then there's that Mei-Ling girl who's always going back and forth... but oh well, even though they're probably being used by someone else, the Innovators have taken center-stage in 00 and it's hard to think of a less credible antagonist.

It's not just that they're a bunch of girly-men... the problem is that they're that particular brand of villain whose egos never seem to deflate a bit after their asses are kicked. "Muhahaha," says the Innovator after it gets blown up once again, "The inferior humans cannot stand against us!" You'd think there'd be a chink in the ideological armour after a while.

4) Saji


The obligatory pacifist-in-a-warzone character. Nothing really needs to be said about him. He's like everything anyone has ever complained about in a Gundam character combined into one thoroughly unlikeable person. And no, his relationship with Louise does little to improve him.

3) Setsuna's retarded backstory



Gundam 00 gave up trying to do political commentary about halfway through season 1, which is something we should all be thankful for. But the damn writers can't seem to resist the urge to trudge through the Middle East a bit while they go along their merry way.

It would really have helped if they had at least done a google search before they dove into it. "Kurdistan was under attack and so I had to kill my parents for the Jihad" makes no fucking sense. Maybe they could have put just a bit more effort into it... made it so maybe Setsuna's parents were collaborating with the Iranians (I think it was the Iranians that invaded the Kurds there?) or... something. Because just making him say 'God told me to do it, so I did!' is about as shallow a reading of Middle Eastern cultures as you can get.

2) Marina Ismail



If you were to put Relena and Lacus into a giant blender, you would probably end up with a bloody mess of torn flesh and shattered bone. If you were to then take this mixture and filter out all the bits that made the two characters above so powerful and compelling and then use the remains to build a new person, you would probably end up with Marina.

I think what bothers me most about her is how passive and weak she is. While everyone else is off playing at war, she's busy being motherly to those stupid orphan kids, spouting tripe about war being bad and, of course, worrying about Setsuna who is forced to fight, even though he only wants to live in peace! Gag.

1) Who else could be #1?


If you can take Mr. Bushido seriously, then something is wrong with you.

Gundam 00 is really just an incoherent mess of bizarre plot devices, wooden characters and random retarded bullshit. But in that intricate web of awful, the Mr. Bushido farce really takes the cake. Back when he was just Graham he wasn't exactly an interesting character, but ever since he put on that fucking mask it's just been unbearable. On and on he goes about fate and the way of the warrior and his thirst for revenge... it's like they took out the manual of cliche anime badass traits and crammed as much as they could under his stupid mask.

Is there a point to this stupid fuck? He's in no way relevant to any of the factions or political groups... he's just there to inconvenience Setsuna by appearing at awkward moments to challenge him to a ONE ON ONE FIGHT. He's sort of like Gary from Pokemon, really. Ich, whenever I see a stupid fucker running his mouth about Bushido's BADASSERY I just want to destroy this world and everything in it.



There's more ...

Mass Effect - "Now where have I seen that before?

So let's make our inaugural post about something I'm going through right now... Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is an RPG by that great titan of RPGs, Bioware... if you haven't ever played a Bioware RPG before, you're doing yourself something of a disservice as they are truly excellent. Up until Mass Effect, however, Bioware's games were based off of preexisting intellectual properties... DnD for Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars for Knights of the Old Republic. This is the first Bioware game I've played that's consisted of a completely original universe and I had high expectations, considering that what they did with other people's ideas had already been so bloody good. Free of the constraints of preexisting universes and canon, you would think Bioware's creative minds would soar. And sure enough, Bioware did come up with an impressively massive and detailed universe... which ended up being a compilation of every single bit of Western science fiction made in the last decade.

I guess fan fiction writers can only ever be fan fiction writers.

I'm not actually finished with Mass Effect, but the average science fiction fan doesn't have to get very far into the game to realize that there's something familiar about everything you see.

You're a ship's captain working on a state of the art vessel built by humans that incorporates technology borrowed from a semi-hostile alien race to create a state of the art stealth system...


Humanity in the universe is a relative newcomer on the galactic scene and most other races regard humanity as an upstart species that's trying to elbow its way into the stars. There's a council of aliens ("The Council") that's basically an intergalactic UN, but humanity doesn't fully recognize its legitimacy and is rife with strong anti-Council sentiment...



The bad guys are a race of robots who were originally built to perform menial tasks but who later turned on their masters when (whoops!) they gained self-awareness...


Their goal is to reawaken a sleeping race of ancient robots who awake every 50000 years to purge the galaxy of organic life...



There's also a space bug species that swarmed around the universe for a while...



And last, but certainly not least, you also run into an evil corporation that tests mind control spores on an unsuspecting human colony...


It's really quite sad. I don't think I've encountered a single original idea in the whole damn game (unless you want to count blue skinned lesbian aliens, which I do not). Even when they try to make an original spin on a old (and tired) idea, it ends up being stolen. Let's take for instance the Zerg (I know Heinlein gets credit for the original idea) derivative race, which they call the Rachnids. The twist for those things was that they didn't really mean it when they tried to swarm the galaxy over and it was all an accident and they didn't realize they were attacking sentient life. They sort of realized why they would end up being wiped out for that and expressed a desire for lasting peace. "Hm," thought I, "I guess that's kind of an interesting."

But then I realized that that's taken pretty much directly out of Ender's Game.

I don't have a problem with homages, but I think most people would agree that the business we're seeing here is taking things just a bit too far. It's sad really. Bioware is still as good at making compelling characters as they always have been, but they're just drowning them in all this derivative crap.

I'll finish the game and all that, though you have to sort of think to yourself: "Maybe Bioware should have stuck with Star Wars after all"
There's more ...

"Uh, excuse me, Admiral... but I'd like to introduce someone to you."

So this is my new blog, Unity Plaza.

The intended purpose of this blog is to make my old blog a bit less hodgepodge. I thought it was kind of silly for me to have a blog that had my writing and political thoughts on one hand and my ramblings on gaming, books and anime on the other. Things make more sense that way, in my opinion. Plus I can update a blog like this a bit more frequently than I can update my writing blog. My goal will be a few brief updates a week. Topics will vary, but I intend to go between books, anime, games and anything that I consider to be not particularly serious.

So bookmark us and stay tuned. There's more ...