see no evil

Reading and watching: scruloose and I have made some more progress on listening to Rogue Protocol, albeit not a huge amount; this is not helped by the fact that for some reason this book is a bit glitchy on Hoopla (every now and then a few [?] words just get skipped).

I'm lumping all of my media intake together this week because I seem to be in/have been in an "only really focusing on a show or a book" phase, so I didn't start reading anything new until I'd finished watching Glass Heart. I really liked it! No fannish feelings at this time, but it was a lot of fun.

And then I watched this behind-the-scenes video, which has left me absolutely agog over the fact that none of the TENBLANK actors knew how to play their characters' instruments at all. My brain is shattered by this information. I've never been all that close to Being A Musician (and the only way in which I came at all close was as a singer), so I'm not looking at what they're doing with a professional eye and I realize that it may look rather less convincing to people who actually do play those instruments, but.

[ETA for badly-needed clarification: It's not that the main cast in this show are faking playing the instruments. It's that none of them are musicians at all, and they learned to play the specific material for the show well enough to visually pass not only as being able to play but as being very good (the male lead is explicitly a musical genius), with full shots of them doing bits of it rather than having body doubles or clever cuts or anything, AND doing some pretty heavy-lifting acting at the same time. (What I don't know is whether their performances pass as looking professional to actual professional musicians, but one of the supporting cast is an actual singer and seems pretty impressed with it.)]

(I've now showed scruloose and Ginny and Kas the opening of episode 8, which is a flashback to two of the characters meeting after one sees the other playing. If you have Netflix and want a quick non-spoilery look at what this looks like, check that bit out. The guy in the hoodie is the male lead, played by Satoh Takeru, who also executive produced this show. Having seen him pull off playing Himura Kenshin plausibly, I should perhaps not be this dumbfounded by watching him play a musician, but here we are.)

Anyway! Since finishing that drama, I've read KJ Charles' Any Old Diamonds and Jordan L. Hawk's The Forgotten Dead and am now reading These Burning Stars (Bethany Jacobs). I also currently have a non-fiction read on the go: Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Daniel Sherrell).

And cutting back to watching things, I've also now seen a few episodes (three?) of K-foodie meets J-foodie on Netflix, in which two passionate foodies, one from Japan and one from Korea, eat a lot of delicious things together. The bit I've seen has been entirely in Japan, but I assume some episodes (or possibly the second season?) will be in Korea.

Over the last...several months?...wildpear introduced Pumpkin and (to different extents) a couple of other teenagers to Fruits Basket. Pumpkin got the double anime experience, starting with the 2001 anime and then going on to the 2019 anime, and while they were still working their way through the latter, they also restarted it to show it to two different people, including M, Pumpkin's agemate among our local friends' kids. Throughout, wildpear texted me intermittent reaction updates, which was a delight.

Now that they're all finished (on the anime front), wildpear brought Pumpkin and M over for an intergenerational fandom yard hangout last week! (Of the 2001 anime, M has only seen the very ending, in a sort of "must know what the horror actually is". For anyone who doesn't know, the original anime is mostly really charming and has a lot going for it, with most of its weaknesses being pretty understandable given when it was made and where the manga was at that point, but its ending is a straight-up travesty and an abomination.)

Jumping ahead a bit: you may notice the absence of the manga in the above, which has now been resolved! I initially had been like, "Well, I have a lending set, and its day has come!", but by the time the visit actually happened and I'd unearthed said set (a combination of the five 2-in-1 hardcover volumes Tokyopop managed to release, and the rest of the series in the standard Tokyopop edition), I'd talked sense into myself and decided to make it a gift instead. I'm not actually sure the lending set had ever gone out of the house (other than wildpear, the only person who'd ever read my hard copy was my sister, and that predated the lending set, IIRC), and I didn't honestly need four sets* in the house, even if one of them is in Japanese. So that box has gone off into the world, and while I warned everyone that manga spines aren't as sturdy as anyone would like, they don't have to worry about keeping the books pristine for me.

Anyway! Seeing the three of them was lovely. ( cut! )