So, Fanlore (which is in no way synonymous with the Fandom History fiasco, despite the efforts of the FH creator/troll) is looking for knowledgeable people to talk about that eternal question:

What do we call this stuff?

I find myself torn, really. I mean, a big part of me says "this should be simple, Categories are like tags, so you create as many Categories as there are Kinds Of Stuff and slap all that are applicable on any given wiki page".

Another part of me says "but that will make the Category structure really unwieldy and hard to navigate!"

One thing I'm sure of is that I do not think Anime should be merged into Cartoons, nor Manga into Comics. The latter are names for specifically Western art forms, and using them for non-Western forms would, in my eyes, be a nasty sort of erasure, given the cultural history involved.

Kind of like using Manga as the Category for something that's really manhwa. Given the cultural history involved.

And so I come back to "a Category for everything". Actually, I'm not at all sure that's a problem. I don't think it would be that unwieldy, in the end. And trying to limit the Categories implicitly assumes that the world is only as big as X number of categories. Which is just plain wrong.

So, what do you think? What Categories do we need?

One of the things I feel the fic-urge to do is rationalize Sage mode. Because Kishimoto made an everloving hash of it.

The idea that using external chakra is dangerous is well established, in this universe, and it makes a certain amount of sense. Our initial examples of it, after all, are people drawing on the chakra of demons (the tailed beasts) who seem to be extremely hostile. The consequences of being overwhelmed by an external chakra are, sensibly enough, uncontrolled transformation.

Then Kishimoto had to go and get weird. First we have the notion that ninja are not already using "Nature" chakra when quite a few things about ninja practice in general are firmly based on philosophies that emphasize the ways in which human chi is not apart from the world's chi: both clan-specific practices like the Hyuuga's Not Really Tai Chi At All, and general practices like the hand seals themselves. This, however, can be rationalized somewhat by supposing that the "nature" chakra involved in sage practices is more intense or concentrated a drawing-in of external chakra. Concentrated enough to potentially overwhelm someone, just like the tailed beasts' chakra can, and cause similar uncontrolled transformations.

Then we have what I consider the greater problem that Nature = Toads. Apparently only the toads know how to do this thing, because Not Really Mt. Kouya At All, the only place sage-ness is taught in the whole world since we never see anyone but Jiraiya and Naruto using it, is populated solely by toads. And, just to clinch it, being overwhelmed by nature chakra will cause one to turn into a toad! Just a toad, no variety, Nature = Toads.

I'm sorry, whiskey tango foxtrot, say again?

I can buy that toad mountain is one of the places renown for these arts. I can also buy that Jiraiya becomes toad-ish when using sage arts, because his assistants/batteries/transformers are, after all, toads. Having his form be toad-flavored quite makes sense in light of this. But that's as far as I'll go. For the rest, I say there must be a solid dozen or so places that teach sage arts in different ways, and Naruto only winds up with toad eyes because he was taught the particularly toad way.

And that brings us to the next problem, which is the notion that one must be perfectly still to gather nature chakra. This is such a smashingly obvious case of "I need it to have a drawback for plot purposes, and it can't be difficulty because Naruto has to totally ace learning it, because he's the Chosen One now" that I can only throw up my hands. There's no excuse for this one and a good deal of precedent against it in Asian esoteric and martial practices; I hereby ignore it.

And I note that Kishimoto, after using the sage arts to show how Cosmic and Enlightened Naruto is becoming, abandons it and goes right back to the tailed beasts. The entire arc involving Pain might as well never have happened; all the consequences were erased or not shown to have any effect. It's like this bizarre quantum loop of time outside the rest of the progression. I can't help suspecting this is because Kishimoto finally realized just what a corner he painted himself into with this whole Apotheosis Of Naruto kick he had going. I mean, really, what do you do for an encore after that, to wrap up all the dangling ends?

You go back to what works, that's what. I propose to follow this example, sans the detour in the first place.

So, here's a question: What is the most demanding kind of scene for you to write/draw/vid?

Up until today, I would have said, for me, it's a fight/game/sex scene, and yes they really are all three the same thing in my writing. You have to figure out the point of the scene, and figure out the action, and make it interesting and fresh. Tab A Slot B is no more interesting in a sports match or a sword fight than it is in a bedroom. I often find myself blocked or hanging on this kind of scene, especially if it's pivotal or has to advance the character development (which is the only reason to be writing it, in my opinion).

But!

After today? I say that a medical emergency or touchy operation scene is even harder. I feel wrung out like a rag. Even when I'm writing good, hot smut, I don't identify with my POV character to quite this extent. I mean, some, so I have a good echo for when it's hot, but not like this.

*rueful* My Sakura has decided that she's never, ever, ever going into medicine after this, and I can't say as I blame her.

I was given the prompt "writing", and since I appear to have actually written Naruto fic, somewhat to my surprise, this seems like a good time to talk about it.

Writing is something that my brain seems to do almost on its own. Alarmingly so sometimes, especially when I'm dreaming! My dreaming mind seems to have zero care for whether something is scary or horrifying, just so long as it makes a good story of its genre. Every now and then I'm aware enough to actually observe that logic in action; my dreaming brain is really very particular about abiding by genre and narrative conventions. I could write some terrifying slasher films if I could do that while awake.

I'm distracted by other things during daily life, of course, which means most of my bunnies scuffle among themselves and pick a bloody winner when I'm falling asleep and waking up. The story puts itself together, piece by piece like dominoes or a jigsaw puzzle, and if, by the time I reach coffee, I still remember it, well there's what I'm writing that day. And I have to strike while the iron is hot, or the bunny may just bugger off into the underbrush never to be seen again. Or, as in this case, to leap upon me unawares two years later.

Not infrequently it's frustration that drives the strongest bunnies, and thus the Naruto fic. I just couldn't take it, any more, that the second half went in such annoying and implausible directions. Sasuke's sudden psychotic break, Itachi's sudden apotheosis, the disappearance of Inner Sakura, none of them ever made sense to me. And I've long wondered how hard it really would have been to change all that. Maybe if Kakashi, who's a war veteran and an ANBU veteran both for pity's sake, had just recognized where Sasuke's head was instead of approaching him like a normal teenager... And wouldn't it be fun to mix up the three "types" among students and tutors... I bet Sakura could totally handle an infiltration mission on Orochimaru... zzzzzz....

And, well, then I was waking up with the story kicking down the door.

6. What do you wish people who read your journal knew about you?

Now this one is a pretty interesting question. *thinks* I suppose information I'd want people to have going in, as it were, includes "pieces of my identity that may or may not be a good fit, or that I would wish people to be mindful of".

That includes being a voracious anime/manga fan given to outbursts of both fic and meta, both of which will be pretty concentrated when they happen.

Being a natural introvert (drained rather than energized by company, even if I'm having fun), and therefore given to disappearing sometimes when my available energy is taken up by things other than my journal.

Being a survivor, and thus inclined to incandescent explosions of rage when one of my buttons is stepped on. *thoughtful* I suspect this is also where my occasional weaponization of disclosure comes from; like the days I make a point of informing people I'm multiple just to get a shot of schadenfreude out of their cognitive dissonance.

Being a queer feminist and politically liberal, and therefore having zero patience with people attempting to legislate insularity and xenophobia, or to impose their "I'm doing just fine so the rest of the world must just not be working hard enough/smart enough/elect enough/me enough" views on everyone else.

I suppose I might include having been a chronic patient for too many years, and therefore deeply mistrustful of all doctors and anything they attempt to feed me, be it a drug or a diagnosis. If I've had to deal with a doctor recently that tends to come out, often under the "incandescent explosions of rage" heading. I try not to do that to people without some kind of warning, and it's hard to show the usual cues over the net.

Just for context, I'm a homeowning, cis-gendered woman in her late thirties who has lived in the US midwest all her life, and loves the land and sometimes hates the people, and keeps cats and a spouse.

Most recently from jennaria. This is about the speed my brain feels today.

Leave the name of a character/person from a fandom you know I'm in, and I will tell you--

* How I FEEEEEL about this character
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
* My non-romantic OTP for this character -
* My unpopular opinion about this character
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

Good fandoms for drawing characters from: KHR, Bleach, PoT, FMA, Getbackers, most of CLAMP's work, Utena, Kuroshitsuji, Meine Liebe, Sailor Moon, Trinity Blood, Trigun, Petshop of Horrors, ES21, Digimon (all seasons), HnG, Naruto, HxH, YYH, Angel Sanctuary, Monochrome Factor, YnM, Gundam Wing, Saiyuki, YGO, DN Angel, FF VII

Multiple prompts perfectly welcome.

Why did you choose your journal name?

That's... kind of a long story, actually. I've been through three now. The first was my legal surname, under which I wrote a lot of porny fanfic. I was young and naive, okay?

(And my legal surname is actually one that I chose myself and shelled out the money and not inconsiderable trouble to have legally changed. You only get one freebe, in the US, and that's if you're getting married. I didn't change my name when I got married, because I'd already done that and it was /my/ name.)

So then I thought I wanted something less instantly google-able. And I settled on the name I'd chosen for my personal website. After a while and some further thought, though, I realized that I had a lot of material on that site that had to do with my 3-d life, and that was still a little closer than I wanted.

So finally I settled on "branch". As in, a branch in the path. Branching out. Besides, most of my personal symbolism involves trees. But that was already taken! So I wound up underscoring it, which was a pain in the butt.

When I moved to IJ, I thought, you know, I want a name I can type all in one go, no underscores. But "branch" still being taken, I needed something related but different. Eventually I settled on "branchandroot", which had a nicely inclusive ring to it and could be said and typed easily. I still use "Branch" as my given name, but I like my journal name quite a lot. In fact, I wound up creating a separate domain of that name for all my fandom stuff, leaving the original domain for the 3-d stuff with no direct overlap at all, which is kind of necessary.

This one is easy enough even for the braindead, which is me right now. So!

Why did you join Dreamwidth?

Oh, let me count the ways. See, I'd already jumped ship to Insanejournal due to LJ's increasingly queer-unfriendly moves and the alarming ham handedness of them. But frankly I'd been eying the door since 6A sailed into sight and I espied the Jolly Roger. I'd actually been mildly hopeful for a little while, when SUP showed up, but that went down the drain fast. And IJ was a nice place, but I could already see that it was not in the best situation to absorb a serious exodus or expand smoothly. So I was in search of a home anyway, and deeply fed up with the BS I was finding in places like Wordpress development. So when word went out that DW was going forward after all, I jumped on it and did the mailing list and volunteered to sit on wet paint for closed beta and, um, kind of went a little bit nuts with the site schemes and journal layouts. ^_^; I do this every so often. It was a friendly, lively sort of place, and wonderfully low pressure, which was very important to me given the huge variability in my spoon drawer.

And, as things grew and got up and running, I kept finding cool people. New cool people, and some old cool people, and it was a really nice virtual place to be. Not without the occasional kerfuffle or stumbling block, but that's life. And I really like it, here.

So, I was re-reading and re-watching the first arc of Yami no Matsuei, and I have to say the differences are interesting.

For one thing, the manga actually has a totally different introduction: the pilot issue before the first arc. That introduces Tsuzuki in a considerably more serious and responsible light than the anime does. It doesn't play up his sweets-craving nearly as much, and it's made clear that it isn't just that no one wants to partner with a slacker like Tsuzuki--he's also the training wheels and counselor of the division, and all the new or unsteady transfers get sent to him.

It's also made clear that Tsuzuki, not Hisoka, is the one who's most willing to bend rules, to break into locked archives, to save people who should be dying, even if this involves lying through his teeth. And the division chief knows this good and well and condones it. Hisoka himself is presented in a businesslike and competent light from the start. The manga also did without the silly maneuvering the anime had to go through to make him drink one glass of alcohol by accident; the original drinking contest makes his resultant passing out and hangover far more reasonable.

The things that most caught my attention, though, were the differences in Muraki, and Hisoka in relation to him. The anime implies very strongly, right from the start, that a) Muraki wants to seduce Tsuzuki and b) Muraki raped Hisoka. The manga, by contrast, does not have any seduce-Tsuzuki moments in the first arc and states particularly that Muraki chose to use a wasting curse on Hisoka instead of "merely" killing him right then and raping him to make it look like a garden variety sex crime.

I actually have to wonder whether Muraki was intended to be a one-time-appearance villain. His madness is certainly presented in a straightforward fashion, far more simply than the eventual concatenation of his obsessions becomes; he is simply a doctor who despairs in the face of death and cracks. The mechanism by which he becomes able to absorb the spiritual energy and abilities of those he kills is never addressed, and there are no suggestions of the past he eventually acquires or that Hisoka has any particular fixation on his killer. Indeed, the manga presents Hisoka as already knowing he was murdered and fairly calm about knowing the one who did it.

All of which simply reinforces what I've always thought about the anime, which is that it's pretty and colorful, and the voices are nice, but it really isn't a patch on the manga.

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: I've noticed you've been posting about Getbackers recently- maybe some meta about that? I know nothing about that series, so if you could explain it a little & talk about why it excites you, I'd appreciate it.

It occurs to me that I never actually wrote up a review post for Getbackers, so this seems like a good opportunity to attend to that.

( The pretty, the silly, and the annoying )