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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
Key the Metal Idol. It's weird. I liked it. It shares a shelf with Serial Experiments Lain and Boogiepop Phantom in my brain. It's certainly a product of its time, but that's underselling it a bit—because it was an OVA with months between episode releases, the production quality was relatively high. Also worth noting that translating music is very hard, and while the English versions of the few songs in this show aren't perfect, it's super impressive that they were able to make servicable translations at all.
I gotta bump the score up considering this was 1994. To call it experimental is an understatement. I'm giving it a 9/10.
Minor spoilers for Key the Metal Idol
There's something about series where the viewer is lead to believe something that isn't necessarily true, but the series never really pretends that it is. On a rewatch, the nature of Key's particular situation is fairly obvious, it just never explicitly tells you what's happening until the final two movies.
If you find yourself asking how Key is floating, or why she suddenly shows some emotion sometimes, or why there's a strong emphasis on the color pink, you're asking the right questions, and the show is gonna answer them.
I've been reading Seeds of Anxiety*, the latest Seeds of Anxiety/Fuan no Tane series by Nakayama Masaaki. It's a horror series with no overarching story, just a collection of little creepy moments.
Except I like to over-analyze the most random things. And some of the recent chapters were directly connected as sequels, and a couple locations and years seem to appear a lot. And one of his previous series, PTSD Radio, absolutely had a secret overarching story that we still have no resolution to dang it. Stupid magazine closing... It better get picked up by a new magazine soon so we can get closure, grumble grumble...
Anyways, point is, I like to over-analyze stuff sometimes for no reason. So I went ahead and made a Google spreadsheet noting every single chapter's location and year. Still have to fill in chapter titles, but... eh. Note, I used "XX" to note basically "nationwide" areas, and "??" for unknown. Also, I have zero idea where Ishiyama is.
Notes/thoughts from me over-analyzing this horror manga that probably has no actual secret overarching story
Some interesting takeaways: Most of the series takes place in Tokyo and Hokkaido, with a particular focus on Sapporo and the Suginami Wards. 28 are in Hokkaido for sure, with four more (Yamahana and the Chuou Line Overpass) being maybe Hokkaido. (There's a Chuou Ward in Tokyo, so that could go either way I think?) 25 are in the greater Tokyo area, with 14 specifically in Suginami Ward. Otherwise, most locations appear at least twice...
Except Kouchi City, which is the only city that's specified from a totally unconnected prefecture. Like seriously, just feels out of place. Even Saitama and Kanagawa, the other one-shots, are just listing the prefectures instead of cities?? I dunno, feels weirdly specific.
Meanwhile: there's 13 chapters set in 1998. 8 are set in 2013, so that's the next most common year. The earliest year is 1970, but not much happens in that (it's a kid who says he sees ghosts when he closes his eyes). However, 1975 is from Chapter 30, which ties into Chapter 7 of the very original series. (On that note, I think "Doutou" is the name for the east side of Hokkaido rather than a specific city.)
And then there's the year 2020... Two stories use it. And 67, "Venom Drinker", features a mask that grins when bad things happen. So it could be a reference to some nebulous event... Or it could be a reference to Covid in 2020. The old man mentions an earthquake, and the first story with the mask was in 2011, so that could've been the 2011 earthquake/tsunami. And this volume seems to have been published near the start of Covid, so... it's possible.
So yeah. That's what I did today. On that note, if you want a creepy but quick read, I encourage checking out his other works. This is the third Seeds of Anxiety/Fuan no Tane series, and PTSD Radio follows a similar "just brief moments of creepy stuff" except that one does have a secret overarching story. Overall though, the moments themselves are all typically pretty standalone. Each one is short, I don't think any of them are longer than 10 pages. I think that's part of what makes them so creepy: it's genuinely normal people living their day to day lives, and encountering these weird, inexplicable phenomena. The fact there's no grand narrative makes them feel more realistic and actually possible in a way.