Monogatari Day:

Today's Monogatari day.  Coalgirls released Owarimonogatari in blu-ray, while RH released a high quality version of the first Kizumonogatari movie.  Two things we've been waiting months for released on the same day.  Synchronicity.  Meanwhile Koyomimonogatari was only released a week or so ago, so this timing is pretty amazing all around.

Now everyone can enjoy Kizumonogatari, then enjoy Owarimonogatari, and finally rewatch Koyomimonogatari for the first time in high resolution.  Monogatari day for releases, but a Monogatari week's worth of shows to catch up on.

The first movie is pretty worthless on its own, it ends before anything has really begun, but boy was the art beautiful.  More graceful than ever before seen in the Monogatari series.  Particularly Shinobu burning, it makes you wish she always looked like that, even though I doubt Shinobu would be very fond of such a fate.  Hopefully the second movie will also come out subbed this year, in which case we can be treated to something a little more substantial and dialogue heavy.

Meanwhile, I finished volume 5 of Unlimited Fafnir and have started up on 6.  I'm done with my Tales of Phantasia music so it's on to Rebirth now.  These long running projects don't die very easily.

Jun Maeda is going to die pretty easily, though.  At the tender age of 41, he already needs a heart transplant just to go on living.  However, heart transplants aren't much of a cure.  If you're lucky you'll live another ten years, but no one just gets a heart transplant and then lives out their normal lifespan which they could have expected to have originally.  It's just a temporary, expensive, delaying tactic before the bell really tolls.  Rather than a heart transplant, he should look into some innovative mechanical heart devices like this one:  https://www.rt.com/usa/345886-artificial-heart-backpack-transplant/

Is there any indication that this mechanical heart couldn't work indefinitely?  After it's gone 18 months, what danger is there really?  Even if it's prone to break over time, couldn't you just regularly replace it with a new mechanical heart before the warranty wears out?  I don't understand why this is being talked about as a nice stopgap between transplants when it already appears to be superior to a transplant in every way.  No chance of rejection here, no need for immunosuppresants.  Jun Maeda should just become a cyborg already.

If he does die as expected though, it will be yet another case when a young artist dies well before his contribution to humanity has run dry, and likely well before he was able to enjoy everything there is to life either, something he of all people has a right to after all he's done for us.  No sane God would ever create a world where such a sick joke could play out.  Jun Maeda is probably the best man on Earth.  Between his writing and composing for Air, Kanon, Clannad, Little Busters and Rewrite he's done more for mankind than anyone else I can think of.  The characters he creates and the messages he sends are some of the deepest and most moving anyone has ever spelled out in history, and he tunes it to some of the best music ever composed.  He's an ubermensch.  Before him we're all worms, worms.  But here he is, at death's door, at age 41.  Less than half the lifespan the rest of us get, even though we've done nothing to deserve it.  There are rapists and drug addicts who live longer than this.  There are guys with AIDS who live longer than this.  It's just such a farce.  Why do we even bother?  The virtuous aren't rewarded with anything and the vicious are never punished by anyone or anything.  Not only is there no justice in this world, it seems to be the devil's justice, where specifically the best people on Earth are hunted down and made to suffer and die first, while all the hindmost, like Hillary Clinton, are promoted to our highest positions of honor and prosperity.  This murderous, rapist enabling thieving scumbag is all set to be the most powerful person on Earth, heaped with all sorts of accolades and praise as our first woman president, she'll be written about glowingly in the history books, and is already 70 years old with grandchildren and counting.  Everything is going her way.  So while Jun Maeda is looking forward to his certain doom, she's looking forward to election day where she'll win in a landslide because that's just how far gone America is.

Would God really design life like this?  Is this really intelligent design?  It's about as unintelligent as you can get.  The very laws of physics need to be redone before justice will ever reign.  If we could code new simulated universes with morality written in to the very base code, like, it's impossible to harm someone else physically or take/destroy their property, everyone is always perpetually young and healthy, and can only die by their own hand, etc, life may be worthwhile.  But the world we live in is ridiculously unacceptable.  Only the devil could approve of a creation like this.

While we're at it, only the Devil could have designed Bleach to end in the next chapter.  Nothing makes sense anymore.  This silver arrowhead that came out of nowhere and can magically power down Ywach and make him easily killable again has its own fatal flaw, why couldn't Ywach see it coming with his future sight and choose a future where he dodged that arrow?  It's just an arrow like any other before it hits, so it makes absolutely no sense that it worked through the completely uninspired idea of just shooting it at him from behind.  As though Ywach's million eyes could possibly have missed a plan as dull as that one.

Nor does it make sense that any such arrow even exists in the first place, or that all these dozens of other warriors wouldn't have gathered together with Ichigo in order to confront Ywach with all their united strength, and Ichigo had to fight Ywach essentially alone.  Nor does it make sense that still, even at the very end, there were tons of captains who never went bankai.  It isn't just that I want to see their cool supermove, it's about things making sense.  A guy reserving his trump card for the end makes sense.  A guy who never uses his trump card and ends up losing makes no sense.  All the characters who didn't use their bankais during this arc (or the previous ones) are now blithering idiots, inexplicably stupid warriors, who had the opportunity to contribute more to the fight but completely blew it by doing nothing even though the solution was sitting there right in their hands.

While Gerard and Haschwalth and Lille were still up, there was a good opportunity for the remaining captains to show their stuff and beat these guys with the final unused bankais of the series.  Instead they were inexplicably cannibalized by their own master, Ywach, who didn't seem to benefit in any way from such a decision.  After all, he can't even dodge a simple arrow shot at him from behind, much less counter Aizen's illusions or do anything else of note.  If anything he became infinitely weaker after that decision, so how can such a move possibly be justified?

The last few chapters of Bleach have been absolutely horrid.  The plot twists are just ridiculous and completely unacceptable.  Both sides of the battle were acting insanely and completely to their own detriment, in a way that even a 2 year old could foresee so there's just no excuse for anyone's decisions anymore.  I'm sure the remaining chapter will also suck.  There's just no way to redeem an ending this messed up and with this many plot holes still unfilled.  Hopefully it can do something right, though, and at least make the Orihime + Ichigo pairing canon.  That's all I can hope for at this point, and I have a sinking feeling that even this wish won't come true.

I can't believe that Tite Kubo really wanted his manga to end like this.  Which means, inexplicably, it was axed by the editors of Shonen Jump.  This is a series whose latest volume has already sold 400,000 copies in Japan alone.  Who knows how many more English fans, or other international fans, will pick it up later.  It's still one of the highest selling, most popular, and most successful series anywhere.  Even if you're completely heartless and have no interest in ending a classic story in the right way, even if you have no concern with Bleach's enormous legacy in Japan and the wide world, it's still making a tremendous profit with the release of every new volume, so gratitude or love don't even have to enter into the equation.  Cancelling it makes no commercial sense, just like it makes no artistic sense to end the story so suddenly.  I can't believe they even have the right to cancel such a series.  Like, even if shonen jump refuses to post the chapters in its magazine anymore, why couldn't Tite Kubo just draw the books and sell them directly anyway?  His 400,000+ fans would have been happy to keep reading him.  Screw the magazine, who cares about what it thinks?  None of this makes any sense, unless the Devil designed the world simply to screw everyone over in every way imaginable.