if i fail, let me be wormfood.

haikyuu!! (or, in the official viz transcription, haikyu!!) is a manga series running 402 chapters/45 volumes that focuses on hinata shoyo, a teenager who is inspired to play volleyball after seeing a player on TV who's just as short as he is. this is a criminally oversimplified summary, but i started all these posts with summaries, so here we go.

haikyuu!! is not about volleyball. i would even go so far as to say it's not a sports manga! that's my spicy fucking take, and i will stand by it. haikyuu!! is about learning that it's okay to fail.

( overall thoughts, no spoilers )

( manga spoilers through the end )

mmm, nostalgia. very tasty. tl;dr for this post: i thought about bleach, then i read a fic* on a whim, then i thought about it way too hard, then i read up on canon, re-read some chapters i remembered liking, skimmed the ending, and now i'm big mad about it.

in sum: bleach deserved so much better than it got. good lord.

( spoilers below, obviously )

( image-heavy below, screencaps that caught my eye! )

i subscribe to the rec center, which is a weekly email that gathers up articles on recent fandom goings-on, older things that might have been missed or are just cool, some fanart, and (of course) a handful of recs from a huge spread of fandoms; occasionally the rec lists are themed, and/or they do a fandom or ship explainer with recs to go with it (i did an overwatch explainer for them... wow, that was over 2 years ago now).

anyways, they put out a call for rarepair recs and of course, now i'm thinking about what exactly constitutes a rarepair.

( personally i'm a medium/medium well person, but, eh. )

i put on season 8 for background noise last night while drawing, ended up fast-forwarding through a lot of it because what i was really doing was just looking for those wash/maine interactions, and still found the season pretty enjoyable despite how ambivalent i've felt towards it the past few years.

( Read more... )

i figured i should start writing about books i read, too, since i've been reading a lot this year!

red, white & royal blue is an adult romance by casey mcquiston, released july 2019. alex claremont-diaz, son of US president ellen claremont, causes an international incident at the british royal wedding by accidentally shoving the younger prince henry into the wedding cake, prompting the US and england to do damage control by making it look like alex and henry have been BFFs all along, rather than icy at best. cue Tropes(tm), cuteness, etc., etc.

i enjoyed it! it was sweet and funny, and the political aspect of it in particular was pretty cool to read; the author did a lot of work to make the alternative-near-history political landscape feel grounded and realistic.

that being said, i have a very odd criticism: it felt like i was reading fanfiction for a property i'm not familiar with.

( spoiler-free! )