thuvia ptarth

I forgot to post this with the story: These two songs were my Tatsumi headspace soundtrack.

K's Choice, Weak (Skunk Anansie cover)
Tom McRae, Human Remains

Tatsumi's headspace is decorated with many creepy charming mementoes of time spent with Tsuzuki.

Title: Love Song
Rating: Completely innocuous. Except for the blood.
Characters: Pretty much everybody
Spoilers: Only in the sense that this will be incomprehensible if you haven't gotten at least half-way through either version of the series
Words: 525

( You are waking into the dazzle of noon with a stretch and a yawn and the memory of the warmest smile you've ever seen. )

WTF Productions has two vids I hadn't seen before, All That Could Have Been by Kasra and Freeptop and Come Clean by Starherd and Kasra.

"Come Clean" is a Fruits Basket vid that doesn't quite work for me, although it's got some lovely moments. It's a Yuki character portrait which does a great job at evoking Yuki's loneliness and melancholy and showing how he changed over the course of the series; there's some especially good setup at the beginning showing the impact of the Zodiac curse. But the vid shows the change purely in the context of his relationship with Kyo, without a single shot of Tohru, which ... doesn't work for me. The vid was made for Yaoi-con, which I guess would explain this, but I just can't follow an argument that far from canon. The vid's slightly repetitive in slots, and I found myself thinking that it would have been better if the vidders followed the structure of "Possession," one of their Yami no Matsuei vids, and had made the story three linked character portraits instead of one: you can see the beginnings of Kyo argument already, and the applications to Tohru are also pretty obvious. I'm not sure how fair that is as a critique, since obviously it's asking for the vid to be something it's not even trying to be--but it's a frustrating vid for me to watch, because it doesn't quite work as what it is and paradoxically would work better if the vidders' goals had been more ambitious.

I'd still recommend it to fans of the series, although it's probably not going to be compelling to people who haven't seen Fruits Basket, since a lot of the impact depends on context and since the character designs for FB aren't always terribly individual.

"All That Could Have Been" is much more successful. This is a terribly sad Subaru character portrait which uses footage from Tokyo Babylon and X; obviously, it concentrates on the Subaru-Seishiro-Hokuto triangle of doom. (Okay, it's really the Subaru-Seishiro-Hokuto-Cherry Tree quadrangle of doom, but the word "quadrangle" just undercuts the implications of tragic grandeur.) Lots of rain, darkness, grasping or reaching hands. Really lovely. I need to watch this again to figure out what to say about it. But I do think this one would work even if you're unfamiliar with the source.

Ermac Studios, Lord's Prayer (X OVA/TV)

This vid is set to "Vater Unser (Psalm 23 Club Mix)" by E Nomine, which is a German techno remix of the 23rd Psalm. This strikes me as just right for a series with more crucifixion imagery than the average Gothic cathedral. X is about an apocalyptic battle for the fate of the world, and this vid makes a good introduction, despite the use of potentially spoilery clips.  The most spoilery are from the OVA, which is included as "Episode 0" in the collected episodes, the producers apparently being of the opinion that if you can't make a character development psychologically plausible, at least you can put in lots of foreshadowing.  In addition to this, you will be spoiled for the death of a character who practically has "Sacrificial Lamb" tattooed on their forehead from their very first appearance.

I do particularly like this as an introduction to X because it uses visually/technically striking means to convey key aspects of the series: the repetition of distinctive imagery, the opposition of paired characters, a sense of urgency and threat, a sense of peace and hope. The first section starts with a pulsating set of clips that fade to black almost before they're visible--boys raising swords, swords wrapped in ribbons, wheels turning--giving the sense of some great epic being set in motion.  The second and longest section flashes transparencies of character shots over long tracking background shots of opposed pairs of characters, interspersed with enough action clips to show that the opposed characters will end up fighting each other; the transparencies repeat in the same order (different shots, same characters) over each different background, which is a neat visual encoding of the idea that all the struggles replicate the same larger battle in microcosm.  The different sets of images are also linked by similar internal imagery: circles and globes (stars in circles, moons, rings of dragons swallowing each other's tails, a girl's face caught in a circular rifle scope) and hands reaching or clasping.  We end, finally, with a series of longer clips which offer a coherent narrative--or at least a particular and comprehensible longer action--for the first time: a winged girl slowly letting go of a man's hands as she rises into the air, beating her wings; feathers drifting down as deep bells toll and a man recites the Lord's Prayer in German.  It is, finally, the change from the first two sections' rapid alteration of clips to the slower, more meditative ending that makes this linger for me.

Bits I particularly liked: The transparent overlay of Kamui's face in the curve of the moon as he looks down from Tokyo Tower; the moon caught in a ring of dragons as wolves bay in the background.

Katherine Montgomery, Anthem X (X TV)

This is spoilerish for the same things as "Lord's Prayer."

I found this while spelunking at AnimeMusicVideos.  I thought, frankly, it would be a trainwreck; I can't think of many songs less reminiscent of X than the knowing old-fashioned tart-sweetness of Rufus Wainwright's "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" with its comic oompaloompah rhythm.  I started watching it with great skepticism, thinking, "This shouldn't work at all," and then thinking, "And yet, strangely, it does." By the end, I had been thoroughly brainwashed: "Cigarettes and chocolate milk! Yes! That explains the weird Gothic noir sweetness of X perfectly!"  I wouldn't have thought this suited to an audience unfamiliar with the source, but it seemed to work for geekturnedvamp.

I'm not sure how describe this.  It starts off as light-hearted and comic, and it never does lose its sense of humor, but it does get darker and sadder and in some ways sweeter as it goes on.  I showed it to geekturnedvamp because she mentioned one of the things she liked about anime vids was the reliance on symbolic objects rather than just people and actions, and this one has some very nice use of objects -- from the opening traffic light and heartbeat monitor to the eponymous cigarettes to all the sweets that stand in for chocolate milk, sugar buns and candy sticks and the face of the sweetest girl in the world.  By the end, chocolate milk is associated with metaphorical sweetness, and cigarettes with pain and sadness, and this sounds very by the numbers, but it works.

( Things I particularly like )