My fears have been allayed. Perhaps the anime doesn't perfectly follow the source, but it's close enough to match my memory of events. Things are back on track again. Now everyone can enjoy the real Eminence in Shadow, and so long as it's real, there's no doubt this series will also be great. With 20 episodes of real content to work with this is going to be fun.
Now again I'd like to announce -- my top anime rankings are complete. There are 200 great anime franchises, each independent from the other, all full length series, all actually animated, and all actually existent in the world today. They're also all certified as great by my exhaustive efforts which have watched and rewatched all these series in full, save for the ones that have come out this very year -- and even those I'm sure are great because this isn't the first time I've seen them, I liked them already in their manga forms. I suppose I haven't rewatched Extreme Hearts yet, which is actually new to me, but I'm confident I'll enjoy rewatching it soon enough as well. So basically the list is complete. There are no mistaken includes like Cue! or Hatena Illusion left, these are all rock solid choices.
For people interested in this decades long effort to compile and arrange the best anime of all time into a guide for others to follow their own viewing schedule: http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2013/07/top-anime-rankings.html
Unfortunately, this ranking isn't perfect yet, because any new series is artificially ranked low until it's come out in full. The rankings will be even more instructive and beneficial once Eminence in Shadow stops airing and I can give it a fair ranking, which will happen sometime in 2023. But this guide is already useful so long as the series being compared are both older shows. It's as good as it can get right now. And now it's fully authentic! For the first time ever! 200 real shows!
Meanwhile, I re-read five of my own books speedily and happily, correcting some misspellings along the way, reinforcing my confidence in their quality. I started with the wyrd saga -- Dead Enders, Choice Givers, and Followers and Emulators. Then I read the book the wyrd saga referred to, Changeling. And finally I read Sellsword because it's always amazing and worth reading. When books are good enough and you haven't read them for a while it's easy to marathon through them. The only impediment to my reading speed was my kindle battery going out before my wish to stop reading ever happened. Actually I didn't even want to sleep so long as I could keep reading these books. All of them were great, but Followers and Emulators took the cake. As a mere string of words, with no color, animation, sound, voice acting or music to rely upon, it still drove me to tears twice. And this is a book I've already read ten times, it's not like I didn't see the emotional twists coming or anything. It's just that they floored me anyway. The emotions were so strong no defenses mattered.
The wyrd saga is not primarily a tragedy that's supposed to drive you to despair, though. It also gave me chills of fear when things were looking bad in their fights, made me laugh when people started teasing each other, and filled my heart up with warmth when various siblings and lovers confessed the strength of their bonds to each other. And of course there's Aiko's moment when she achieves her dream and it feels like you just crested Mt. Everest right alongside her. A rush of fulfillment like no other. Honestly, these books were so good, so gripping, and so moving, that I could easily see starting over from the beginning and just reading them all again. I never want to leave their world. It feels like I'm being ripped away from it and half my soul is left behind when I had to read the last page and there was no more story to hear.
I've said before and I'll say it again -- '100 Waifus' is the best book ever written, but the wyrd saga is three books (four if you count Changeling, so 3.5?), and combined they're even better. Just as everyone should take the time to read '100 Waifus,' they should take the time to read this trilogy too. Here, to make it easier I'll even provide the links:
http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2018/09/dead-enders.html
https://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2019/01/dead-enders-part-2.html
http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2018/09/choice-givers.html
https://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2019/01/choice-givers-part-2.html
http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2018/09/followers-and-emulators.html
No comments:
Post a Comment