Anison of the Week #1!

As I said before, I’ve been trying to work on my story lately. Unfortunately, I have developed writer’s block, and I do not feel like smashing my head into it until the wall breaks, so I’m giving it a rest for at least a couple of days.

However, I did have an idea for a new feature for this here blog!

I watch a lot of anime and I like Japanese things in general. I also have a deep, undying love of music and few things get to me like a good song does. Therefore, it should go without saying that I LOVE anime songs, also known as and hereafter referred to as “anison”.

More specifically, I like mecha/giant robot anime and I have a pretty damn huge collection of mecha anison. Many of them are old, too– I have songs that date back to the 70s. So I’ve decided that in order to liven things up a bit around here, I’m gonna open my giant playlist, pick a random song, and then write a little bit about it and the anime it comes from, and probably the artist if it’s one of my particular favorites. I’m thinking of doing this roughly once a week. I know it’s kind of an obscure thing to write about, but I hope you guys enjoy it anyway.

Iku ze! Let’s go! Okay Winamp, let’s shuffle!

This week’s anison is:

*drumroll*

Fukkatsu no Ideon, by Taira Isao!

Ah, good one– one of my favorite anison (warning: you will hear me say that a lot). It’s the opening song to a mecha anime called Space Runaway Ideon, from the creator of Mobile Suit Gundam, Tomino Yoshiyuki. It aired in the 1980-1981 season, so it’s pretty old by now, and rather obscure even among some anime fans. However, I’ve seen all 39 episodes and the feature-length conclusion thanks to the magic of the internet!

Despite it being a giant robot show, Ideon is not for the kiddies. In fact, it is one of the shows that led people to christen the director “Kill ‘Em All” Tomino. Given that, and if you’re an anime fan and have seen End of Evangelion, you can guess how Ideon ends. (In fact, Anno Hideaki more or less admitted that End of Eva was pretty much a total ripoff of the Ideon movie. But now I’m getting off-topic.)

It’s violent. It’s a mindfuck. The characters are frustrating with the way they constantly misunderstand each other. It was possibly the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, possibly because my husband and I watched the whole thing with a group of friends.

Anyway, I enjoy the opening song quite a bit. I’m not sure if I can adequately explain why. I don’t even know what genre of music this would fall into. It has such a different sound compared to most other anison, starting off quietly with some nice acoustic guitar and then kicking into a surprisingly upbeat song underscored by brass and strings and finishing off with a nice drum flourish.

The lyrics fit the series well too, with lines such as “the power of the legendary giant tears the galaxy apart”, which is very prophetic!

And on top of all that, it’s sung by one of my absolute favorite anison singers, Taira Isao. He’s not as prolific as some other singers of the time, but he did a great job with the songs he did perform, and this is certainly no exception. His voice is so unique and perfect for this song.

Now check it out!

The Ongoing Dilemma.

I don’t know what the hell to do. It seems like I can’t think about blogging if I’m trying to think about writing, and vice versa. It’s like too radical of a gear change for me to do very often. So at the moment I’m trying to decide which gear I want to shift into– story, or blogging?

To be honest, neither really sounds more appealing than the other. It’s true that I haven’t blogged in a long time, but you can’t really “finish” blogging, and I do have a story sitting around that needs to be finished. Also, there’s no particular topic that I really feel like blogging about, and forcing out a couple of blogturds merely for the sake of updating is not fun for me or for you guys.

So you’d think that this would make the choice to work on my story an easy one, right? Wrong.

Working on it is, more often than not, a chore. Pushing through this haze of uninspiration (is that a word?) and laziness is a pain in the ass. Some days, my characters don’t really communicate with me. Some days, I’ll sit down to write and my mind takes a sharp left turn toward something else, like giant robots. It’s also really difficult to keep bulling through chapters that I don’t like in order to get to the good stuff. But I know I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to get a first draft completed from beginning to end before I can go back and start editing out chapters or condensing them or improving them. This is my new mantra: Write now; edit later. But it sure ain’t easy.

I guess I said all that to say this: It’ll be a while before I get around to updating regularly again. 😦 But I certainly haven’t forgotten about it. Quite the contrary.