A Tale of First Series: Heroism and Binaries in Record of Lodoss War
Heroism is something I find myself coming back to a lot in these especially trying times. After all, we hear about heroes from time to time, and yet so few of the stories we see are about heroic people. The hopelessness of that reality is hard to fathom even as I sit here contemplating a TV show that has little interest either in the ambiguous and oft-hidden heroisms of reality or the gritty heroisms of fantasy. Record of Lodoss War just isn’t that kind of show. For those that don’t know, the 13-episode OVA (original video animation) Record of Lodoss War (1990-1991) is the first anime adaptation of Ryo Mizuno’s novels of the same name, themselves based on transcripts (or “replays”) of RPG sessions created by the Japanese gaming company, Group SNE (co-founded by Mizuno). This particular anime production generally follows the plot of the first novel and loosely borrows elements from several others (primarily in its final five episodes). A later anime series (subtitled as Chronicles of the Heroic Knight) ran for double the first series’ length and attempted to retell the story through a more faithful adaptation. This background should give you an idea of the kind of story you’re walking into when you pop in those delicious RLW DVDs (or VHS tapes, if you’re so lucky to own them).
Podcasting in the Time of Corona
We’re 40+ days into social isolation here in the grand northern territory of Bemidji. Life continues unabated. There have been a mere handful of COVID-19 infections, everyone is supposed to wear masks, and online classes are expected to continue, making those 40+ days of isolation into 7 or 8 months without normal social interaction, friends coming to your office door to chat about something mundane, or the musings of students in out-of-date classrooms. All hail coronavirus for its may gifts of disruption and death (76,000 and counting in the U.S.). It is, of course, hard to look at the world around us under almost any circumstance. We’re witnessing in unexpected, undesirable, and exceptionally disturbing ways the influence the political system can have on our ability to live, whether in the literal sense of working for life or in the more fanciful manner of extracurricular whatsit that makes life enjoyable. Not in the sense of restricting movement, mind, but in its ability to deprive us of the resources for survival during a legitimate medical emergency and to use the political system to forcibly remove access of those resources, giving so many the choice between bankruptcy or the risk of death for themselves, loved ones, or strangers. As an academic, I’ve always had a keen sense of the impact of the political process on our lives, especially now. We have always faced what we will likely see in the near future: state budget cuts and other funding decreases that will see many of our friends and colleagues on the streets, salaries slashed, programs destroyed, etc. That awareness is clear in the halls of academia, in brief face-to-face meetings with your next door neighbor, in meetings, and at social gatherings. The political is inescapable there — as it is for many people outside of those privileged halls. And it is now clearer than ever as we read the news about our profession that the future we face is not the one we had hoped for.
Project Announcement: Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States
Hope is hard to come by these days. The pandemic continues to take lives by the thousands, the U.S. political system is (at best) totally broken, Americans left and right hate one another and seem frequently incapable of agreeing on even the most agreeable things, and the various aspects of Civil Rights have not been realized. For many Americans, it all seems…hopeless. These are the same feelings I’ve experienced since 2016 on an almost daily basis. There’s this never ending sense that we live in a dystopian nightmare for which there is no end in sight. This is not helped by endless news cycles of terror and apathy and political punditry, by our social media cycles of misery, or even at the local level of politics. Hell, my small town made the news for being one of the first cities to vote to ban refugee resettlements. But is it really that hopeless? Is hope truly dead, or is there a a trend of hope throughout U.S. history that we’re ignoring? I’d like to find out.
Fragile and Varied Masculinities: Road Trip and the Odd World of the 2000s
The 2000s were weird, y’all. Really weird. If, like me, you’ve taken a strange trip down the road of 2000s romantic and (teen/college) sex comedies, you’ll have noticed the curious similarities between so many of them. The 2000s trend probably began with the release of American Pie in 1999, a film that I actually quite enjoy mostly because, unlike most sex comedies of the long-noughties, it actually bothers with the (admittedly incomplete) effort to rehabilitate its immature male protagonists. 1999 was, after all, a transitional year, and sex comedies in the teen/college bracket are, naturally, transitional narratives. In almost all cases, that transition is into some form of adulthood, even when the characters are well into their adult years anyway. Unlike American Pie, though, Road Trip (2000) contains numerous false starts, owing that failure to its inability to grapple with its underlying ethical quandary: what does a man do if he’s the one who has cheated on his girlfriend? But let’s step backwards through time for a hot minute…
The A-Z Book Survey: Or, Now You’ll Know My Secrets
The blog adventure continues. Today, I’m taking on the A-Z Book Survey, which I found on The Perpetual Page-Turner blog (run by Jamie!). It’s an oldie, but since it appears on the Blog Challenge Project masterlist, I figured fun should override currency. Below, you shall find some vaguely amusing insights into my reading interests and habits. You may use this information for nefarious purposes if you so choose. Here goes:
Why I Generally Dislike Ebooks
Remember when ebooks were a strange Internet phenomenon that lacked the critical infrastructure to make them viable alternatives to paper books? I do. And I remember the great push to make them accepted in the halls of publishing, something which many publishers fought against. Today, ebooks are ubiquitous. Nearly every paper book is released alongside an ebook of some kind. While they haven’t taken over the industry as some predicted — and it is possible their invention helped increase the amount of piracy — many readers seem to love them. They have likewise become a staple of the independent (self) publishing market, supported by phone apps and dedicated eReaders. In short, ebooks have had a huge impact, and they’re not going anywhere. Despite their ubiquity, I don’t read ebooks all that often. In fact, I only do so when recording a podcast interview or when I am roped into something in which ebooks are the only option. In fact, I personally can’t stand reading ebooks, and here I’d like to talk about why.