Btw

It reads like a Taiwanese Soap Opera! But with attractive, beautifully-drawn anime characters instead of...dunno, live actors. Rich families, power struggles, manipulation, marriage, divorce, parental death, interfering matriarchs. Plus a high school host club.

I just finished Ouran High School Host Club.

It was about time I got myself a new favourite anime/manga series. Now its 8.7 rating is not surprising at all. This one tops both lists. The anime (and probably what has projected its popular image) is a brilliant parody comedy with awesomely-developed characters, yes--but the manga (chapter 40 onward, as forumers have said) has the meat. If I hadn't been so sleepy I'd have wept through majority of the last twenty manga chapters.

Perhaps part of me is a hopeless sucker for the reader-wish fulfillment. For much of the time I was reading, I was imagining it from the POV of the female lead. But hey. It's damn good entertainment. You deserve to have it once in a while, don't you? (This is something the manga does like to explore--deserving goodness, earning goodness. No surprise that the climb to the climax was heart-stopping and actually literally had me gasping in my seat--without there being any action!!) Fiction is a salve for living in a world that's duller than we want to admit to ourselves.

I'd recommend this series to anyone. Even those outside the target demographic, if they won't mind skipping the non-plotty chapters dedicated to the teen girls for which it's written xD though, paying attention to the state of things in Ouran Academy and minor characters does pay with interest. Everything--including many surprisingly small details--returns in a powerful way if you sufficiently soaked up and revelled in the richness of the character development throughout the series.

This is for: those who like opulent settings and rich guys. Romance fans.
This is not for: those who dislike emotionally-charged (sometimes -heavy) plotlines.

Trope page time~ fittingly since what compelled me to read it was this page...seriously. Though I guess the signs were piling too (if signs are to be believed): in the past month alone it has been mentioned by 1) a deviantART friend while we were squeeing over a Wreck-It Ralph character, 2) a Facebook friend commenting on a status about another anime, 3) every single TV Tropes page I visited last weekend and 4) a random forum post I stumbled upon searching for posts about another character.

Gagghaghghgahh (fangirl incoherence)

Just picked up Ouran High School Host Club yesterday, and damnnn has it been a ride. As you can see it is two-something. I was watching till half an hour ago. I now have 9/26 episodes to go. Never before has any anime drawn such obsessive watchig from me! I swear!

Goodness, have I mentioned how I love stories of rich people set in opulent environments? And just--the LEADS. Aaagahhghgghh they are both such appealing characters...so much fun to watch...and I really couldn't help but root for them the instant the right clues were dropped (which were pretty blatant and which appeared within the first episode already).

It's QUITE a change after watching so many male-oriented "harem"-containing anime in a row (CLANNAD, Asura Cryin', Haruhi), though I wouldn't say I prefer one over the other. For one, the male-oriented fanservice there became female-oriented fanservice here. Not to mention the...very obvious shift in gender ratios.

Only issue now being that, as I just discovered, the anime aired when the manga series (original) hadn't ceased publication yet. In fact it went on for a whole four years after publication. So now there's an 80% chance that the writers didn't give it a filler ending and that it will essentially NOT END

T_T

I WILL ATTACK THE MANGA THEN. But probably not till after OTDOTS (whose last chapter now stands at about 40,000 words and of which about one quarter remains to be written).

(P.S. HARUHI X TAMAKI. I haven't shipped anything so hard for...EVER. It has ALL MY FEELS)

I now know disillusionment

Long sigh. I guess rereading the last bit of (still unnamed) Umbrella Story has put me off working on it completely. On the bright side OTDOTS is getting there; I have about a third of the chapter to go.

But on Umbrella. It's a combination of things, I suppose:

First, I feel my characterisation really swung off track very fast very far and it's all become a giant author wish fulfillment deal in which I have a cast of ideal characters interacting with their world and with each other in the most ideal way. I throw in plot events without warning just to fulfill objectives; I stumble into the trap set for only the most amateur.

Second, my writing is boring. Indulgent, sloppy, boring. It became an encyclopedia; that explains the gargantuan word count. 350,000 words of what? Things no one would care to know because I haven't hooked them, haven't given them reason to root for the world and the characters.

Third, after finally seeing past my own bias, I think the characters aren't that interesting. Or likeable. Sure their dialogue and interactions were fun to write, but I feel that part of that - and part of what made me think the characterisation worked - was an illusion born of love.

Fourth, (plot related) changing the personality of the main character via plot-induced character development, in order to avoid "Mary-Sue" or "Canon-Sue" accusations, made her harder to enjoy writing. Well, too bad. She sucks as a character then. Goddamnit.

Get it yet? I think my worst fear has been realised. I'm bored of it. I'm bored of them. Passion drives my writing, and once I'm bored of the concept, once I find I can reap no joy from writing it, I no longer feel any desire to. That's what has happened with dozens of other stories I began.

Part of it can very definitely be blamed on my newest-conceived project, for now called Revolving Door (hah another nonsensical one). Another part on all the anime I watched. They make it look so dull.

And my declaring that one of my stories is dull is its death knell.

I think this is all partly because Umbrella Story was born of a whim, a wind, a spark. Like I told so many friends, I knew that once that wind was gone I'd lose the story completely. That's why I hurried to finish as much of it as I could before the A's. That's why I insisted on finishing it before returning to OTDOTS - because some part of me knew that turning to another story too soon could well make me lose the wind I'd caught. I gave up holding OTDOTS off mid-December, and it looks like that's exactly what happened.

Another part can simply be attributed to the fact that I created it two years ago. It was rich and pretty to Sec 4 me; I thought it was the best my Muse could find. Now it's found better, and I have something richer, prettier, to wrap my heart around.

Maybe it's something to do with reading right before falling asleep.

Either way, all ways, I should be glad I only have two epilogue scenes to go, and hope it comes back to me, the way it suddenly did when I finished the Leviathan trilogy. Let me drag myself through these two final scenes, and see at the end if I still feel like proofreading.

/dejected

"I love you / or I do not live / at all."

Posted by Theophilus on FB. The entire poem is beautiful but some lines themselves alone make the heart ache.

The Ivy Crown
William Carlos Williams

      The whole process is a lie,
                  unless,
                          crowned by excess,
      it break forcefully,
                  one way or another,
                              from its confinement--
      or find a deeper well.
                  Antony and Cleopatra
                              were right;
      they have shown
                  the way.  I love you
                              or I do not live
      at all.
      Daffodil time
                  is past.  This is
                              summer, summer!
      the heart says,
                  and not even the full of it.
                              No doubts
      are permitted--
                  Though they will come
      and may
      before our time
                  overwhelm us.
                              We are only mortal
      but being mortal
                  can defy our fate.
                              We may
      by an outside chance
                  even win!  We do not
                                  look to see
      jonquils and violets
                  come again
                              but there are,
      still,
                  the roses!
      Romance has no part in it.
                  The business of love is
                              cruelty which
      by our wills,
                  we transform
                              to live together.
      It has its seasons,
                  for and against,
                              whatever the heart
      fumbles in the dark
                  to assert
                              toward the end of May.
      Just as the nature of briars
                  is to tear flesh,
                              I have proceeded
      through them.
                  Keep the briars out,
      they say.
                  You cannot live
                              and keep free of
      briars.
      Children pick flowers
                  Let them.
                              Though having them
      in hand
                  they have no further use of them
                              but leave them crumpled
      at the curb's edge.
      At our age the imagination
                  across the sorry facts
                              lifts us
      to make roses
                  stand before thorns.
                              Sure
      love is cruel
                  and selfish
                              and totally obtuse--
      At least, blinded by the light,
                  young love is.
                              But we are older,
      I to love
                  and you to be loved,
                              we have,
      no matter how,
                  by our wills survived
                              to keep
      the jeweled prize
                  always
                              at our fingertips.
      We will it so
                  and so it is
                              past all accident.

I didn't ask you to tell me about you.

I feel as if this has to become my slogan sometime.

writing-related rant

Umbrella SUCKS. It totally SUCKS. I couldn't get through ten pages of it without thinking "CAN WE GET ON WITH IT ALREADY". Don't hold your breaths for it guys; I'm not going to release it till I find myself actually enjoying it.

Well, I have diagnosed it, at least. It's boring. I can't wait for some scenes to be over. Then again it could be because I was reading the last 50,000 words of it, but I really did find myself at some points wanting to yell "WHO THE HELL CARES" and chopping, ripping the entire scene out. Except I was on an ebook reader on my phone, not a word processor, and found myself hopelessly shut off from any means of editing.

I think it's hobbled by a lot of static scenes filled with nothing but redundant musings that readers should be having for themselves, and a lot of useless ones that serve no purpose outside of showcasing the setting/world.

Important Lesson I: a lot of thinking only works when it's not a character who's doing it.

I think it has everything to do the fact that I'm not yet accustomed to writing in the limited third. Who stops in the middle of nowhere to give a history lesson about the building one stands in? It makes more sense in omniscient third because I could be speaking from a generic point-of-view outside the narrative frame. Limited? Naw. Why would she, while watching the sky, suddenly decide to ponder upon the meaning of life and religion and the history of the nation?

I mean, the main character has NO BUSINESS thinking so much. Not even if she just went through hell and heaven and the deep blue sea. Especially because she's not the type to think the shit out of everything she does.

Important Lesson II: prettiness is heavy.

Something I recently learnt from a book I read is that these expository passages are like huge ornaments that impede movement to such a degree that they aren't worth the beautification they afford. It works with OTDOTS, it being the standard Epic Fantasy fare, but not with Umbrella whose plot is supposed to carry itself along without much regard for the world. GAH WORLDBUILDING SENSIBILITIES.

I suppose the strategy for such is to omit whatever I can afford to. The imagination is a brilliant thing; it can recreate a full and lush world from a bundle of sketches. I shall take advantage of that brilliance! I shall not take my readers for idiots!


My action plan for the worldbuilding scenes is to remove them and consolidate them as a separate "guidebook" the way so many authors like to do. I see now why these companion guidebooks are so popular among authors. Worldbuilding in general is so important to me that I feel an urge to include it in narrative even when it'd seriously retard the plot progress. As for redundant, repetitive thoughts on why she lives and what she wants--DELETE. All of it is useless. If my story is effective, the reader would be able to work these points out by him/herself.

There are people who talk a certain way--and then when they sing, BAM new accent! Wow! Why do you sound like an American when you sing? It's cool? Oh, it is?

better get my characters tested

[I was polishing off old draft blogposts and came across this--which has recently become rather relevant because I've almost finished Umbrella now and it's becoming clear how the pitfalls of the Mary-Sue are ravaging my characterisation.]

This is the side-effect of wanting to create a strange character who's entertaining for being different--only to wind up enjoying her too much.

I'm just going to think on this for a while because I recently took out some hours of my studying time to write an essay on Mary-Sues, and spent much of that same time wondering about Umbrella Story. (Oh god I really do need a title that doesn't sound dumb when I write about it.)

Right now I'm half-convinced people are going to think Umbrella sucks for the very fact that I grant Ruthenia too many buffs in terms of character power. She gets away with things too often. She's like a free radical that chlorinates all the uniform alkyl groups in her environment. Is it justified by the nature of the content of the story itself, the fact that she must possess such agency if she's to handle the plot I gave her?

Really that's irrelevant if I think of it this way: she might be a Sue for the simple fact that I like her more than most of my other OCs.

How she is a Sue:

If her being the lone main character of Umbrella isn't enough of a factor (no one else comes remotely close in terms of centrality in Umbrella; even in Harry Potter the titular character has friends who enter danger with him), then I'm sure her backstory does. She was orphaned by a somewhat unreasonable law and her parents' martyr-like tendencies, conveniently 1) getting parents out of the way 2) for a reason 3) that "justifies" her hate of the authorities and drives the plot. She is a smarty-pants, a very smart smarty-pants. One could even say she's too smart--she's sixteen and she knows how to put together a steam car. We haven't reached Artemis Fowl proportions, but outside Umbrella I haven't more than two characters who can match her intelligence either. Is it justified by the average intelligence level in Umbrella? I want to think it is--her boss is smarter than her, she has friends as smart as her--but is it too much to give her this sort of intelligence all the same?

Also, to add, she is the "unpopular girl" in class, which means she's an attention-grabber, whether of good or bad. And the "popular kids" dislike her, so she's "sympathetic"! Oh!

All in all, I suppose the family background is incriminating already, but her intelligence and social position top it off. What else? She gets things so easily sometimes. I suppose that's laziness-to-detail-events in play, but I must fix that up. She just...does things that people dislike, and people grumble but people don't actively try to stop her. No. Everyone minds their own business and she goes and does everything she likes. Uh.

Of course I realise I can't possibly change any of these traits without direly spoiling the story. I know I won't have to fret over Sueness if I can make her believably handicapped in other senses, or if I make her interactions realistic.

How she may not be a Sue:

She's a braggart. I'm not sure how much that changes things, but if anything she knows what she's good at and acts like it. She is also rude. But again, while I don't really like or hate these traits (I do think they make an interesting character though), I think they'd make her very annoying to readers. Without doing anything for her Sueness. She is rude, she openly sasses authority, she is rebellious--semi-appealing and very Sue character trait.

I really must do some work.

Windows Live Writer

Ah, so. This application is interesting. Why’d I post from here if I could post from elsewhere? Cool formatting, I suppose. I think I’m falling sick. Or my body’s playing a prank on me. I didn’t meet a single person who was half as unwell as I am (which isn’t much actually).

Also, I had a strange dream last night. There were other dreams (one where I was in a game show that involved climbing a piece of cloth hanging over the sea and writing answers to stupid questions on the provided spaces on the cloth) but the main one was about us travelling.


Ok, see this? It’s a map (quite evidently). I got to look at a map of the place we were vacationing at (it was most definitely a place created by my dreaming mind). Dark brown parts are mountains and blue is sea.

We were on holiday at the cyan city, which lay in a valley between forested granite mountains. It seemed temperate but there were tropical trees. Or a mix of both. It was a cool place.

My family was with me; it looked Malaysia-like (Ipoh? But temperate.) We ate at a hawker centre where our table was situated right above a small drain. It began to rain and we watched the water pass beneath.

Because of the rain we decided to depart from cyan city for our next destination, red city, earlier than was planned. I begged our parents to let us stop by at green city (called “Castpoint” probably because I used the word “cast” too many times the night before). I reasoned that it was on the way; apparently I really like that city and it was an occasional stop we made when we travelled.
They refused and we went on to red city and then indigo city, which was really nothing more than a giant coffin-shaped greenhouse lying on a hill (I think it was called Farrow). Some angel with black wings resided within; he was named Henry of Farrow, something alike, and he was imprisoned in the house because once he left the world inside would die.

Then, of course, I moved to the game show dream.

the sexuality blogpost!

So, I recall identifying myself previously as asexual. Now I've discovered there's many more facets to sexuality in general, I might have a more nuanced description for what I am.

For the still-rather-crude description, I identify as genderqueer (will elaborate later), biromantic and asexual.

But that's still going too general. Pigeonholing feelings. I don't think it describes precisely what I feel, and the fact is that sexuality is a mess of things that, like species, people like to classify and organise to aid understanding.

Let me start with, um, conceptual interest. The romantic interest in a particular individual as an idea, a collection of habits, a personality. This would encompass--having crushes on people in books, people I've never seen, people known via the internet. In this case, I'll have to say I have more interest in males, but males who display conventionally feminine personality traits more than others. I like reading about a male who's pretty, refined and gentle. Females rarely interest me in this way unless they're striking, though I cannot off my head think of any female fitting into this.

Then, there's purely visual interest. Visual attraction to a person's face from a glance, real or fictional. Here it gets more even, and slightly stranger. A very clear pattern I've noticed: I'm rarely interested in real-life people this way. I don't find real people's faces that attractive on a whole, and much prefer stylised, animated ones of many styles and sorts. Following this, I've had single-glance crushes on both males and females, though a pattern holds--I'm more interested in the guys who look effeminate or gentle, and the girls who look masculine or powerful. In males, long hair, long eyelashes and formal attiring draw me. In girls it's almost the opposite--short or messy hair, masculine attiring, a rough-and-tumble look. Only female crossdressers work for me.

Now something slightly different from the above would be physical attraction. This isn't attraction to a person's face or attiring or projected image (though it can overlap); it's attraction to the body itself. This is best judged, I think, through picturing the respective genders in form-fitting attire. Now here, I have no interest male bodies at all; in fact I'm quite revolted by them. But girls, I find visually arresting. Particularly curvaceous ones.

Then there's romantic attraction--and this is hormonal? The attraction to a person whom I have gotten to know personally and feel interested in in terms of more than outwards appearance alone. Here I've got a greater interest in males than females, by number (though I can probably count off the number of people I've felt this way for on one or both hands). These are mainly my schoolmates, all in fact. There are passing fancies too, attractions of this sort that lasts no more than two days, but they're insignificant most of the time and don't cause any detectable change in myself or my behaviour.

The last level would be sexual attraction. This involves any physical intimacy (kissing, fondling, massaging) and, yes, sex of any sort. And I am not interested in any of this, at all. In fact I think I display a phobic response to anything of this sort. I don't want to be penetrated. I don't want to be kissed. I'm not interested in any intimacy of the sexual sort, at all. The funny thing here is that I like to read about the all the above except for sex itself; I like to watch animated kissing. But once it enters live action territory and, needless to say, personal experience, I want nothing at all to do with it. Even if the guy is someone I have a crush on or find visually appealing (though it may just be a case of not knowing anyone personally whom I find has a nice face).

I'm sleepy now so my writing's dumb and clumsy but you get the idea. At this point I'm still unsure about all this but I can't go around waving this full description of my sexuality in the faces of everyone who winds up discussing it with me!

questions

I just found a wealth of wonderful questions to answer.

Things like this just happen; you stumble upon a page online, and you somehow realise you could turn it from a really interesting read into a really fun activity.

I may set out answering shortly.

orange and thoughts

Contrary to what I claim I think I like the colour orange quite a bit. A lot of my artwork features it prominently. I like the colours of dusk (orange pink purple deep blue) together. I also like black-white-red. And deep blue-sky blue.

I choose this?

Ok then, I guess that seals it, I'll just be antisocial because I might be happier that way.

I love to share the things I know and think with others--but then as I've realised, that is all I like to do. Share the things I know. When I talk, I want to talk about something that entertains me, that I can add to. It annoys me when conversation turns to something I can't care less about or know next to nothing about, something I cannot contribute to.

It might be my fear of looking like the idiot of the group, standing there without a word to say. It might be that I don't like being left out. It might be that I'm bored but I'm faced with the pressure of the dilemma between cruelly forcing the conversation in another direction--and coming across as self-centred--or leaving them to go on, and myself pretending to care.

In any case, yes, I dislike being seen as introverted, but I could tell others that conversation makes me angry. Sure, let them think I'm a jerk, an asshole, but as long as I don't have to suffer through being locked out of conversations I have already joined it's worth it.

Again I'm sorry for all this venting. I find myself calm and satisfied at the end of each post. It works in a way no private diary can.

try defying gravity~

I thought I'd change the lyrics in the sidebar. They've been from On The Wing for what are probably a good 4 years. And I still love it dearly, yes I do--it makes me feel things I cannot anywhere else--but so does Defying Gravity, which I will have to say, to me, stands on a level apart from almost all other songs I've ever heard. Most songs fade a bit after hundreds of listens. Not this. It makes my heart burst every single time.

just a declaration

The world outside fiction sure is dank and depressing. I think I'd die in a world without it. And if I didn't die, I'd kill myself. Not meaning to be morbid but fiction is the reason I am eager to live. Literally. It is my distraction and my cure.

year 2012 in art

Since it's traditional to reflect on New Year

It's the new year! 2013! An ugly number; some mathematician is bound to disagree with some substantiation.

Am I going to reflect on the year that just passed? Summarise it? Hmm. I'm lazy to but I think it's important. Or it gives me a sense of completion.

What's 2012 to me? Shallow as it sounds and because it's the first thing that came to mind, it's the year the world discovered Carly Rae Jepsen. Important to me because she's the second female pop artiste after Katy Perry whom I will claim to be a fan of. It helps that I fell utterly in love with Call Me Maybe. It also helps that she did a collab with my favourite male artiste early on. Her and her sugary tunes and buoyant beats.

It's also the year of Gangnam Style and one billion hits on a single video: some part of me is proud just because he's Asian, which is odd because that means I'd be proud of anything of note done by any member of half the human population. Which I would be. But yes, an Asian artiste and an Asian song, topping our local top 100 list, which has seen only songs in English so far. Not only that--all top three songs were debut singles. All got popular via viral spread online. All three were by non-Americans. This is globalisation revealing its countenance, I think; this is the internet and social media and improved information--and cultural--transfer between nations. It's not perfect and provides substrate for the contempt of some, but I think it's quite glorious what we've come to.

What else besides this? It's the year of the Avengers. One two hour movie and we have explosions of fanart, fanfiction, fan-stuff all over the internet. More internet. It's been quite a phenomenal year in a very soft, intangible sense. It's the year of One Direction and the revival of the boy band.

It's the year I began to stay up till one o'clock in the morning regularly. The year I got a computer that was as good as my own. The year I began downloading my anime instead of streaming it--all because of my first experience with downloading--Avatar--and my thirst for quality which was so painfully lacking on streaming sites.

It was the year I admitted to myself that I wasn't all straight. Refreshing, really. This was the year I decided it didn't matter anyway because love is love, between any people, and the sexual nature of that love comes in different degrees. It's not yes-or-no.

The year I began to hate my sisters for real. Or at least become wary of them. I do fear them, I fear and abhor them, but we're still living together and there's little I can do.

It's the year of the A levels, how could I forget. My mind's tried so hard to forget. It's the year I decided I didn't quite care for all that hard work anymore, and that I should learn to be happy again, and that any job requiring of me good grades will probably be one too stressful for my enjoyment. I learnt I loved Biology this year. I wrote my first 21 mark Literature essay this year.

This year is the year of Umbrella Story. Can't doubt it, I wrote 250,000 words of it this year--more than the full length of OTDOTS. OTDOTS took a backseat this year; it's not as easy to know what to do, now I haven't touched MapleStory for two years (speaking of which, it's also the year Wizet ruined MapleStory, the game I once knew). I fell in love with my characters again, and again, just by writing about them. And that--in turn--because it was also the year I read the Leviathan Trilogy, which primed me, which relit that blaze of interest. Which made me want to create and characterise people like that.

I've lost track of the things I want to say. This is the year of all sorts of things--like any other yet not at all.

Curiosity will never let me go

I'm not even sure why I love this so much.