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.

Companion drabble for nestra's Flesh and Bone, post-"Devil's Trill":

( They belong to a crazy woman who cannot plot but who can draw way better than I can )

Cross-posted from fuda_100, however belatedly; although the first two may have ended up condensed too far for sense.

( An Unusual Assignment (AU) )

( Ringtones (music) )

( The Dark Is Light Enough (darkness; Gensoukai spoilers) )

For various ghost/Halloween challenges, cross-posted from 100_roadtrips, fuda_100, and x_100 respectively. 100 words each.

( Unhaunted (Saiyuki) )

( Memorial Service, 1997 (Yami no Matsuei, GenSouKai spoilers) )

( August 6, 1945 (X) )

Title: Rewritten on the Body
Fandom: Yami no Matsuei
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: So pretty I think about stealing them all the time. But no, not mine.
Summary: No challenge, and yet a drabble.

( 100 words )

Vid: Possession
Vidders: WTF Productions (Starherd & Kasra)
Fandom: Yami no Matsuei/Descendants of Darkness
Music: Sarah McLachlan, "Possession" (piano)

boniblithe recommended this vid to newbies as a way to get "a quick, visual feel for the anime series" in her recent overview of the Descendants of Darkness/Yami no Matsuei anime and manga for crack_van.

Quick visual feel, gorgeous tragic overview, same difference. Boni is an evil scheming woman. She should come with a warning label. This may not technically be a recruiter vid (it's got too many spoilers for that), but it plus the overview made me buy the entire series without having seen a single full episode, because, my god, the pretty! And the pain! And the pretty! And the PAIN! Theirloveissotragic! After I talked hesychasm into watching it by promising her pretty cartoon boys, the conversation went something like this:

hesychasm: OMG THE GAY.
untrue_accounts: And the pain!
hesychasm: AND THE GAY.
untrue_accounts: And the tragedy!
hesychasm: And the gay!
untrue_accounts: And it's ALL CANONICAL. There is no subtext. It's all textual. [I thoughtfully relate several key examples.]
hesychasm: I can't believe you did this to me when I have exams coming up.

So, okay, let's talk about why this vid works in slightly less incoherent terms.

General notes

• The first good decision the vidders made here was to use the accoustic version of this song, instead of the overfamiliar radio play version; the piano sounds sadder, lonelier, and more plaintive than the synthesizer and sound effects, and it immediately sets the mood. The second good decision was that despite this, the vidders didn't ignore the dual nature of the song, which can be read as either a tender love song or as a stalker's terrifying self-justification. The vid can be divided into roughly three sections: one focusing on Tsuzuki, the series' protagonist; one focusing on Hisoka, the second lead; and one focusing on Muraki, the antagonist, whose pursuit of both leads is explicitly expressed as sexual. (This sounds like the standard Evil Gay Character, but in my opinion the series avoids homophobia by virtue of offering plenty of sexual tension between the good characters as well.) All three sections interpret the song as romantic--but the first two present the romance as tender, if potentially tragic, and the third expresses it as obsessive and violent.
  
  
• The different sections are unified by the consistent use of imagery and color: section transitions are indicated by moon and leaf imagery and architectural setting shots; flowers cascade through scenes, each with a slightly different meaning (roses, cherry blossoms, autumn leaves); and each section alternates white (loss, but also connection, or at least the longing to connect) and red (danger, blood, sexual threat), before the vid ends in a sickly and ominous green. (This is all taken directly from the series, without any additional color manipulation I can detect--but it's the selection that makes the vid.)
  
  
• It's an unusually slow vid, especially for anime vidding, where the goal sometimes seems to be the inducement of epileptic seizures in the audience. Part of the deliberate rate is set by the song itself, but it's also established by the way the vid handles clip transitions: a visual clip will overlap from the ending of one sung phrase to the beginning of the next; the next clip will start in the middle of the musical phrase, and overlap to the next. When I went through the vid taking notes for comments, I was surprised by how few dissolve transitions there were; it feels like a piece where one scene melts into the other, but it creates this feeling by deliberate asynchrony of sound and image, rather than by actual dissolves--which avoids the greatest danger of too many dissolves, which can turn the emotional into the sentimental and the sentimental into the ludicrous.
  
  
• This vid got me to thinking about POV in visual narratives. I have no film background (I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to the Vividcon panels on basic terminology), so please excuse me while I reinvent the wheel. If you can apply literary terms to visual narratives, most vids I've seen have tended to stick to limited POV: they're focused on a character, or a set of characters, but for a given scene it's pretty clear whose viewpoint you're in. (This isn't done in quite the same way as it would be in prose, of course; from what I've heard, the few full-length cinematic attempts to do a character's POV more literally, by showing what he's seeing and never showing him, have tended to be resounding failures.)
  
  But this vid (perhaps this is common in vids that attempt series overviews?), I think, is in omniscient, which means that it can focus in a particular character, but that it has some flexibility in shifts of focus, from character to character, or from character to setting. What establishes this vid as one told in omniscient -- and as an overview and/or a mood piece, rather than a character study -- is the beginning, which is a set of establishing shots in sunset and autumnal fire. There's a full 27 seconds of landscape and cityscape shots before we ever see a human character: this establishes the mood and the situation, but it also informs the audience that this is the story of a world and not just a particular person
  

I'll try to avoid doing vid commentary for the blind, but I'm not sure I'll succeed.

( Series spoilers; very specific scene stuff )

That reads remarkably like a fifth-grade book report to me. Only, you know, with more sex and violence. Ah, well.

Title: Hisoka, Before
Spoilers: Pre-series; information established by "Vampire's lure" arc
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I wish.

Summary: Drabbles for fuda_100's Treasure Challenge.

( Pride )

( Breath )