Half HP productions, what were you thinking?

All right, audience, let's see if you can figure out what this show's about before I tell you.

Exhibit One.

Exhibit Two.

Exhibit Three.

So. What in the awakening hells is this thing?

If you'd like to read this out loud, to really feel the effect, you may want to take a large breath, because it's a:
Lovecraftian steampunk fantasy/sci-fi magical girl/anthropomorphic book big robot fighter mystery mystical action anime.

It's called Demonbane.
I blame the mercury in all the fish Japanese people must be eating.

You might have caught the "Lovecraftian" modifier there at the beginning. It's set in "Arkham City," the protagonist dropped out of "Miskatonic University," and the grimoire he meets is called "Al Azif." Whatever the main character's name is, he correctly identifies her as the Necronomicon.

Yes. By the way, Exhibit One was the protagonist, Exhibit Two features both him and the book, and Exhibit Three shows the "Deus Machina" (I'm not kidding, that's what they call it) the show's named after -- Demonbane.

Here's a quiz: Who's the better Herbert West?

or


If you said the second one is better, cut your wrists with some glass. I'll wait.
Just to be sure -- you said this asshat is the better choice? Go to the special hell.

Also, Herbert's specialty is robots, apparently, and not, uh, reanimating the dead. Like, you know, Herbert West did. In that short story, by the guy, Lovecraft.

Jesus.

So, you're Half HP, and you have an aborted child of a show on your hands, that didn't make it far enough in the creative crucible (that, to continue my conceit, I'll call the mother's womb) to have defining features. Oops. What do you do, HP? What do you do?



That's right. Fanservice. Unapologetic, asinine, unreasonable fanservice. For reference, the first woman is a nun, the second is a bookstore owner who does two things: show off her mammaries and refuse to sell the protagonist anything, claiming he'll get something even better later. The third is the book, who is A) underage, I think, and B) not a human, but an image projected by the book's soul, or something stupid like that. You know, they could have gone to the trouble of making her look just a little Arabic. I mean, it's anime, we're not expecting sensible crap here, just put her in a turban, it'd be fine.

Oh, right, remember I mentioned magic? Magic?. Yes, because the most powerful book in existence, with the keys to summoning Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep (lurker in the dark in the hizzie!), and possibly Azathoth, the blind god at the universe's center, needs to make out with an idiot and bind herself to him so she can do something. With sparkly blue magic circles appearing in mid-air for no reason I can understand.

Did I even point this out yet? Protagonist douche gets all green-hued and mismatched eyeballed when he morphs with Al Azif -- because we sinned greatly in our past lives, and the first two decades of Guyver weren't enough to even our karma.

You know, this started out with a funny, mildy irresponsible detective flunked from the magical studies section of the local university (their program is hell to get into, but they have a nice private library and, really, the ACT isn't that hard). But suddenly cute magic-girls were flying at me, and big robots showed up, and Howard Phillips is screaming, squamously, from his much-visited grave in Providence.

Incidentally, when I looked up where he's buried, I found out some grave robbers/pranksters tried to dig him up, but couldn't find the body (don't mock me, Lovecraft and Howard used italics to add emphasis to overblown sentences all the damned time). You know why? The desecration that is Demonbane spilled out into the dimensions of the great old gods, and retroactively destroyed the body, and the coffin containing it.

Will I watch the second episode? Yes. Why? No one's willing to suit up in latex, so I have to punish myself, I guess. Maybe if I watch enough, I'll never see Guyver again.

Perchance to dream, right?

I thought I would post a portion of the newest thing I have to do for creative writing class.  The assignment was "a piece in a (traditionally) non-literary form."  And, given our reading for the week, one of those forms is the epistolary -- despite the long tradition of false letters in literature. 

So, then, "Correspondence between Howard Fullbright, Archaeologist, and Alwilda Smith-Peters"

522 Cozen Square
Ridgewood, Massachusetts

7 March, 2006


Dear Alwilda,

I hope you are doing well, and that your sister hasn't locked herself out of the house recently.  I received your last letter this morning, and now sit under a window, which tapers to a point about three inches across at the bottom, with the last moments of day dying in the sky through it.  The weather has been terrible, which is no surprise, this far north.  Trees are just beginning to grow their leaf-coats, and the flowers are still gleams in their seeds' eyes.  Mostly it rains, and I suppose it's good for the plants, but I've grown to hate my macintosh, as I'm bundled it in almost every other day as we range the woods. 

Good luck recovering from your injury, by the way.  I never did learn to ride a bicycle, and I don't feel I've missed much.  I'm sure you don't agree, of course.  You've always waxed poetic, if I may say so, about the speed, wind, and freedom of near-flight you get with the cycling, and it's lovely to hear you speak of such things, and lovelier to watch your face color, then rise like bread as you recreate the sensations in your mind.  I have felt something similar these past weeks, leaning against the wind that swoops across the hills.  Often I feel a drunken silence in the glens and saddles, only to be struck again by the wind when I top a peak – it carries traces of phlox and columbine, and did even early last month.  It's encouraging, and the force of the hill-wind reminds me of you and your rushes down hills on your thin-beamed blue bicycle.

Charles D. continues to be rather rough-fisted, as I said last time.  He insists all the boys call him Mister Ward, and, frankly, I'm surprised he allows me to call him more familiarly.  An odd man, to be sure, but quite cut out for the sort of work we're in for up here.  He has a trunk filled with maps, and all of the New England woodlands and coasts; I don't mean a sort of valise, but a large steamer trunk, which fills his cabin with maple and cold iron smells. 

How is Jeremy Coldiron, by the way?  Did he win the election for sheriff?  There's a fellow here named Holiness Coldiron.  He told me, after much pressing, that a few of his family moved “south” (all he's willing to divulge, I'm afraid) two or three generations ago, to avoid “besmirching” (his word, not mine) the family honor.  That is the whole of what he will tell me regarding his family, but he is quite vocal about the expedition.  Every morning he comes by.  First he knocks on the door, peers in when it's opened, and says, “Have ye lost anyone yet?”  From underneath his stiff brown hat, rather like those the pilgrims in the portraits always wore, it seems very comic at first, but as the weeks have gone on it has grown disconcerting.  I never fail to shudder when I see that hat scuttle over a hill's rise, Holiness following after.  He appears sometimes at dusk, sometimes at noon.  Yesterday, for example, he stamped through a pool of last year's dead leaves, sending the taste of rotten maple and birch through the air, and asked me, “So where's ye damnable guide, Bookman?”  This is all he will ever call me, so I paid no attention to his odd “ye” and rather insulting reference to Charles, and pointed him to a disappointing cave the others hadn't given up on just yet.

The day has failed at last, Ra or Lugh slain again, as your fables would have it.  The locals call it “the Devil's racket,” and certainly the trees do rustle and creak here at sunset as I have heard them do nowhere else.  Every night for a week Davis has been dreaming horrors.  At least, from his shouts and rank sweats it seems that way.  He jostles and jitters when the sun sets now, thinking of what awaits him in bed, I suppose.  I've had a few odd nightmares myself, actually, but nothing to get so worked up about.  A few tentacled figures, covered in seaweed, and the odd mountain man turned cannibal chasing me with a hatchet.  Davis has just come through the door, in fact, and his trouser cuffs are wobbling – that's how hard he's shaking.  Perhaps the warm soup will help.  I should have some myself.



Any thoughts?  Some of you might notice an allusion there, hidden in the suspiciously-banal. 

Originally written in class, off-the-cuff, so to speak. Recalled in tranquility (possibly accurately), now:

~~~

I must, I'm afraid, cease censuring myself for a moment, so I can freely say, What the hell?

That is rude, and I apologize, but it was required.

Japanese punks, what's going on over there? You're not really punks, which makes of your title a misnomer. You just color your feather-fluff hair and sneer unconvincingly. You're more like goths than punks, really. Except your music is better, marginally. Which isn't saying much, I'm afraid. That's like saying your music is better than emo, which isn't hard to do, frankly.

I mean, your music isn't even very punk, honestly. Your lyrics are understandable, and any poseur-punk could have told you punk vocals require the sort of drug-chic best left behind in the 90s. You have been too influenced by pop, and while Japanese pop is more listenable than American pop, that does not absolve you.

Let's face it, Japanese punks, you're not, as a whole, asshole enough to beat out the Sex Pistols.

And, Jesus, the Sex Pistols were terrible.

So, I was checking to see who Mark Hamill was in Metalocalypse, and went to IMDB. Here's some news I discovered.

First, he's the senator. Nice.

He's the crazy-ass (well, worse than the rest) in an animated Conan story -- Red Nails. Red Nails was, arguably, Robert Howard's greatest story. I just read it yesterday, and it is fabulous. I look forward to it. The cast is crazy, including Ron Perlman as Conan, which works really well.

Oh, and Perlman was Hellboy, by the way. And there's a new Hellboy movie slated for 2008.

Also, he's in the Dungeon Siege movie, which, apparently, wasn't a horrible rumor. The main character is named "Farmer," which hurts me, physically.

The woman who will be playing Valeria in Red Nails is Numbah 5 (Abigail) in Kids Next Door, and Foxxy Love in Drawn Together. O_o