DS11 vs. Dean, color-coded.

Because this has been bugging me since I saw this particular set of examples on bad_penny, I've slightly reformatted them to clarify the various bits and pieces borrowed from Pamela Dean. (Addendum: I also found another plagiarized line that hadn't been in bad_penny's original report.)( Read more... )

flowers'n'stuff in the RK OVA

(The first OVA, "Trust/Betrayal", of course. This post is inspired by this site, which I found shortly after seeing the OVA for the first time and then obsessively watching it over and over again for about two weeks.)

There are a lot of flowers and plants specifically depicted in Trust/Betrayal. I mean, a whole lot of them. Several of them are recurring motifs, suggesting a strong component of deliberate symbolism. Once I've got this material straightened out, it'll probably form the core of the Beginner's Guide to the RK OVA which I've had in mind for a while, ever since my initial bewilderment at certain aspects as well as gradually realizing how many subtle things ADV got wrong. Not that I'm nec'ly getting stuff right either, but at the least, this is an attempt to clarify some things which were initially WTF for me. Most of the dialogue will be paraphrased from the original ADV subtitles.

Spoilers are inevitable. This is still a work in progress.( Read more... )

Kyouken 5.1 (main story)

The usual drill: this is a Rurouni Kenshin doujinshi from the Yamaguchirow circle. There are two sequels which continue the story; I don't have either one of them yet. There's also a brief mini-sequel within this volume, but I probably won't attempt to tackle that until the main story is finished: Kenshin's amnesia was induced by food-poisoning from hinky mushrooms; the Kamiya Kitchen Of Pain strikes again.

Meanwhile, it looks like Kyouken 8(?) should be showing up on eBay any time now... jpqueen has a listing for Kyouken 7, but the cover and publication date match up with kuroi-hoshi's Kyouken 4; on the other hand, maybe "Kyouken Urushi" does count as #7 after all? Yamaguchirow's front page lists the new Kyouken as "・「兇剣　捌（8）」剣心×薫", which certainly suggests that it's #8.( Read more... )