.hack//GIFT

If you have seen .hack//SIGN or the .hack//games or, best yet, both... And you want entertainment... .hack-fucking-GIFT is for you. I laughed myself silly. It's great because all the characters talk perfectly like themselves, and act mostly like themselves, but they are drawn in absurdly goofy style.

Plus, you just have to laugh when Subaru smacks Ginkan for arguing with her, and then while Kurim goes on talking, she apparently just keeps beating him because she likes it. That's the best part. (Well. Besides Balmung's suffering. That's pretty good too.) She does that several times. I wanted her to do that throughout the anime.

It's pure crazy. And yet it sounds so like them -- same voice actors, and they all talk in the same tones -- that if you close your eyes you can almost see their expressions. I could HEAR Subaru and BT having that solemn conversation about what it means to be young, and jealousy... just not while racing each other at fifty miles an hour with Ginkan stumbling along behind them, desperate to achieve the honor of stalking Subaru despite her obvious attempts, sometimes with an axe to the head, to make him shut up and go away.

MASTERFUL.

(By the way, Kite: good going on never noticing that Tsukasa was a girl until he pointed it out to you. Even though you were sitting next to him, naked, in the hot springs, and he had boobs and everything.)

Tsukasa defies gender pronouns.

And for anybody who knows why this makes me happy: Mia pounced Elk. Bwahahaha. I bet he was baffled. Later.

Now I'm going to think about how to add my various sundry plot elements into an actual plot for a Sutepuri fanfic (note: I've discovered about myself that even if I'm just throwing an idea out as a random thought to be discussed for lack of an actual plot, if forced to defend it, I will come to like it a lot. Damn.) and play Final Fantasy Tactics. What a combination.

Pimping

Attention intelligent fanfiction authors, and fanfiction readers who occasionally like to read intelligent fanfiction, I submit to you the following:

ffgeneral

This is a fanfic community Goo-san and I have just created based on "gen fiction". Fics that don't revolve around romance and have no plot, fics that explore characters and don't sabotage the series they're written about, fanfics that -- I know this is anathema, but -- fanfics that have a point.

If you're a gen writer or fan, please join!

Of Saints and Shadows

I want this story to go back to being about Octavian, because the more I read about his new girlfriend, the more she annoys me. Why does she have a starring role here? She's obviously just a plot device.

Go find yourself a Jillia, Octavian. What you are mistaking for "class" in this girl is actually just a symptom of her forgetting to put on the same personality every morning.

He's going to die, I know it, but not before he makes her a vampire, because it's being disgustingly obviously set up since word one. I just have this to say: Meaghan better not be the star in the sequels.