That didn't take long. Now I'm back to having nothing to read again. In this book, Touma fights an overpowered witch with the help of another overpowered witch, so it all evens out and Touma wins in the end. The reasons for the fight are as silly and throwaway as ever -- a witch decided Touma was having a negative influence on another witch, Alice Anotherbible, so decided to murder him, while the good witch of the west or whatever thought that was overly harsh since Touma didn't mean badly by anyone. This series can't escape its 'battle' premise so throws together these sorts of fights endlessly. They're shallowly entered and just as quickly exited again. So for the next volume he'll be fighting someone else for some other dumb reason. It never ends.
This is one of the longest light novel series ever made and it's all occurred in less than a year of 'in-game time.' The amount of deadly fights Touma has gotten into within such a short period of time sets a new world record for ludicrousness. I wish the author would move on from all the fights and give us a love story between Touma and Mikoto, then wrap it all up. It's not that the fights are bad, per se. They're well written. There's a lot of good humor interspersed. But surely enough is enough. This is volume 55 or so (based on how many side story novels you count). Surely any worthwhile story can be told in 60 volumes. Right? So let's aim for an ending already. . .
Meanwhile, I finished my rewatch of Shiroi Suna no Aquatope. The last four episodes aren't good. They suddenly start preaching about environmentalism, the importance of career/education over personal bonds, and gay tolerance. The story flipped a switch and went from storytelling mode to preaching mode. But it's only four bad episodes in a 24 ep series. Mostly the series sparkles.
It's impossible to care about the environment while simultaneously not implementing a birth licensing system worldwide which would ban the poorest countries on Earth from flooding the Earth with their endless progeny. Everyone knows who threatens the environment today -- it isn't Japanese with their 1.0 children per woman birth rate. Or Europe, or America, or China, or Russia, or anybody in the 1st world, all with a 1.0 children per woman birth rate. So why are they preaching to us about how we need to save the environment? We've already done our part. Somehow Africa isn't expected to do anything at all.
It's also tiresome hearing about the bleaching of coral reefs or the extinction of some particular species of crab. Who cares about your 1st world problems? There are real people starving to death all around the world. People suffering real problems like famine, plague, war and death. Address their despair and suffering first. Get in line. We'll start caring about your stupid sea turtles once every human is properly cared for. How about that? Why don't you spare some time to fret about them?
Right now, in America, 100,000 people a year are dying of drug overdoses. All of these people were suffering so much they felt drugs were the only escape from this cruel world. That's a massive failure of society to take care of our own. And don't tell me we aren't to blame for individuals' choices. All choices are made within a context of people's environments, over which they had no control and did not themselves create. We created that environment that drove them over the brink, over the cliff of despair and death. We who perpetuate this system which they could not abide. Who continue living after their death. Do you think these people were born wanting to overdose on drugs? That it was their original dream while growing up with their siblings and parents? No. Clearly all these people lost their dreams long before then. Or had their dreams taken from them. You can never trace exactly who is to blame in every single situation, nor do we have the time to do so when you're talking about 100,000 people a year. But statistically, when a country moves up from around 10,000 overdoses a year to 100,000, you know that somewhere during that timeline we clearly did something wrong, or the death rate would not be tenfold what it used to be.
We know, statistically, that the environment must be responsible for these 90,000 excess deaths per year, and that therefore 9 times out of 10 whoever most recently died of an OD is our fault. Saying that it could have been some loser who kills himself no matter how utopian we make our society is, is just playing a game of cups with the blame. You have ten dead people and one dead person you're not responsible for. Claiming that under every single cup is the dead person who only has himself to blame just because we haven't lifted the cups up yet and seen which corpse is under which cup is disingenuous. We cannot look away from a new World War I of deaths every year and keep insisting that fucking sea turtles need our help more.
I care far more about what humans have done to drive other humans to despair and death, untold mental suffering before they finally pulled the trigger, than what humans have done to the atmosphere or the poor poor glaciers. I have my theories -- the breakdown of the nuclear family as the purpose of life has left too many people adrift with nothing meaningful or good to do, and too many of those people give up after seeing society has reserved nothing for them. Not a plot of land, a job, a future, a wife, a child, an iota of respect, nothing. You even took away God and heaven from them, so that they really have nothing to look forward to. And you replaced it with drugs. Here, take some drugs. This will cheer you up. Brilliant.
Virtually every person in America has contributed to this awful situation. I'm one of the only people fighting against it, and my web traffic says it all about the rest of this country. The blood is on all of your hands. You caused this. You built this. You drove them all off that cliff. And yet you think now is the time to start preaching about the wonders of gay sex or higher education. As though that will help a damn person currently drowning right in front of us. If you have time to preach, how about preach something that will save 100,000 lives a year? Start there!
I'm sitting here with solutions that could save 100,000 lives a year whenever we wanted and no one will listen. Instead they want me to listen to them about crustaceans and rising sea temperatures. It's Marie Antoinette all over again. "Let them save the whales!"
Okay, enough about Shiroi Suna no Aquatope. The point is I've successfully fulfilled my promise and rewatched another series I rated great. Next in line for this treatment is Edens Zero. I've waited and waited for a blu-ray copy to come out with a decent filesize and it simply isn't happening, so I guess I have to watch it as is, the tv broadcast version. More important than getting to see everything in bluray is fulfilling my promise and certifying that every series in my top 200 anime is good enough to be enjoyed not only once but twice. For a brief moment last year I actually had rewatched every single great series in my rankings, but then new stuff came out and I of course fell behind again. Someday I'll revisit that triumph once and for all. There won't always be new great series coming out. Eventually even One Piece has to end. And on that day I'll be waiting to pounce.
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