enchanter: (Sanzo smoke)
image

This review focuses primarily on the performance of the actors, is entirely subjective, and is more a collection of my thoughts about Saiyuki Kagekiden: God-child than an actual review. Despite my sometimes critical opinions, I absolutely loved it and squeed like a fangirl the whole way through. I really don't think anything here counts as a spoiler, mostly because if you're into Saiyuki but you're not familiar with the Kami-sama arc, you must be living under a very big rock (possibly on top of a mountain, too). :D That said, read at your own risk! ♥

clickity click... sparing your f!lists ;) )

By the way.


I'd offer my nonexistent firstborn and my black, black soul to whoever has the power to make a Gaiden musical. It'd probably be the last thing I saw before I died of heartbreak, but. >.>



UPDATE

I said I was kinda sorta disappointed with Ayukawa Taiyou's portrayal of Gojyo because reasons?

I take it back.

Yes, he overacts here and there. Yes, his voice is all over the place sometimes when he sings and he doesn't always manage to carry the notes as he should.

It's 'cause he gets so emotional about what he's doing. o.o Watch the video (it's around 1:08, but his interactions with the little Mitsu are precious and hilarious too ♡) He's saying he made meaningful memories and had so much fun, and that time they spent rehearsing was amazing, and then his voice breaks and he very nearly loses it. He's so happy about getting to meet such wonderful people and about everything they've done together. It made him cry. And I'm undone, so yeah. ♡

He's so young and such a precious dork, andandand. So yeah. He needs to work on his craft; we all do, always. But, oh dear.
enchanter: (Default)
OMG, the Reload Blast spoilers are killing me. Whom do I have to beg for scans? I can offer the firstborn I don't have or, I don't know, anything really. Argh. ^^;;;
enchanter: (Default)
Title: This Time
Author: Rhea [personal profile] enchanter
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Gojyo/Hakkai, Kenren/Tenpou
Summary: Gojyo remembers, even if he doesn't realize it. (Burial arc, reincarnation fic, prompt: intertwined)
Wordcount: 3,300, one-shot, complete
Warnings: none
Notes: Written for [personal profile] absolute_negation for this year's [community profile] valentine_smut gift!fic exchange. Big thanks to Johanna for beta and encouragement. Saiyuki belongs to Kazuya Minekura, and I'm just playing. :)

On AO3: It was weird business, saving someone's life. Weird enough to seriously mess with a guy's already messed up head.
enchanter: (Tenpou/Kenren - Flame)
Look look! My beautiful, beautiful Saiyuki valentines. ♥ I feel so lucky, having received three.

"The Sea of Samsara" by [personal profile] kikyo, Goujun/Tenpou ♥
and two stories by [personal profile] 7veils: "Appetite" (Gojyo/Hakkai) and "Venerable" (also Goujun/Tenpou - yay! When I put that pairing on the list, I honestly didn't expect to get two fics featuring it :D). ♥

Thank you~~~
enchanter: (Tenpou/Kenren - Flame)
Aaaaaaaand I'm back. Not without problems this time, actually - the car broke down 60 kilometers from home. :P We took it as a sign that the vacation should have been at least a week longer. ;)

I woke up on Friday morning to over 20 Saiyuki fics over at [community profile] valentine_smut. I had to read my gifts on the iphone, not having taken the laptop with me; I have since read most of the fics twice but have yet to comment properly. I got four gifts this year (three as of yet anonymous and one from [personal profile] chomiji who is made of awesome. ♥ There were so many Goujun/Tenpou fics! Surprised and very pleased. :D

Miraculously, we got to snowboard every day for a week despite the weather being less than awesome for the first half of it. I missed the mountains like crazy and now can't wait for the summer when we're going back there for some serious climbing. My two snowboard virgins didn't manage to kill themselves on the slopes; they actually managed to learn well enough to keep up with us. Made me very proud. :D ♥

Had some of the best food in a long time while there, too, and tonight is sushi night. :D If only I didn't have to go back to work tomorrow morning, life would be quite perfect. :P

Happy belated Valentine's and hugs to everyone. ♥
enchanter: (Tenpou)
Deadlines... actually met all of them, for once. o.O;

Phew. ♥ In 24 hours, I'll be driving to the mountains, and to hell with everything else. :)

And actually, coming back next weekend to a batch of brand new Saiyuki fic is going to be the perfect ending to my winter vacation.
enchanter: (Default)
It's sunday evening and I am translating a load of mind-numbingly boring crap when all I want to do is write fic. *headdesk* Feels a bit like working on my dissertation back in 2006, when every word was bled rather than written because my mind was elsewhere.

Brings back memories, though. There was that flash web game back then in which you got to undress Hakkai, and it was probably the only thing that kept me sane throughout that month and all those 110 pages of point 12 Times Roman worth of EFL methodology. Even though I still have the link to that game in my eljay somewhere, the page doesn't exist anymore - it doesn't get any more disappointing than that. :P

This rather random and entirely devoid of substance bit of mental garbage is brought to you by yours truly who's currently reforging her take on procrastination into a new level of art form. Sigh.

Four days until vacation. Merciful Goddess help me. :P
enchanter: (Gojyo - Alive)
...but I'm not. :P

My Valentine Smut submission is done and in beta, and of course now that I finished it I'm second guessing like woah. I'm planning to try to do another one before I submit and see which one turns out better. At least now that it's done I don't feel the pressure of the deadline so much anymore, so I can have fun with something else and see what happens.

Most likely I'll still be out of town on posting day, so I'm keeping fingers crossed for a working mobile connection so I can check out the fics on the way back. Can't wait. *_* A whole batch of brand new Saiyuki fic, again, so soon after Yuletide is always something to look forward to. :D

I'm anticipating two very intense weeks before my vacation, with lots of work during office hours and probably even more in the evenings. Little sleep and lots of stress ahead. Fortunately the semester ended on saturday, there aren't any more classes until early March, and I managed to get grading done and over with so at least the students are out of my hair. :P The next semester is looking to be more interesting than this one, seeing as the class I'll be teaching is actually closer to what I do for a living (web design) than what I've been teaching in this one (app design). It's fun, but if I'd known how stressful and time consuming it would turn out to be, I'd have thought twice before signing up for it. :P

Have a good week, everyone. ♥
enchanter: (Default)
1. It's still true that if I find the right song, I can write almost any fic (given enough time, that is).

2. It's still true that every time I try to write a light, funny fic, I end up with the opposite. One day I'll learn. Past experience says it might not be in this lifetime, however.

3. I need a beta reader for Saiyuki. Not having one results from having always been a lurker before who was too much an antisocial chicken to get to know people. :( Talking meta or fic ideas has always helped me write better stuff, and not being able to do that right now is a real downer.

4. The neverending quest for the right word/phrase is still as satisfying as it is frustrating. Went over to the old journal to read through some of my old fics, and it does show two things: one, when I wrote more I was better at it (duh) and two, I wish I were a native speaker of English, or at least could write like one. >.< I might have stopped writing for some time but I never stopped reading, so my vocabulary range hasn't shrunk all that much. But. I've been told it's hard to tell that English is my second language, but I can tell. I never thought I'd be insecure about that of all things. It's probably because I've been reading so much excellent fic lately, and it makes me realize how far behind I am language-wise. Highly motivating, but freaking scary too.

5. Me being me, I completely forgot I'm going snowboarding on Feb 7th, which means almost a week less to turn in the VTS assignment. One will get done for sure--almost done in fact--but I wanted to do two. Might still happen, if work doesn't get any crazier than it already is.

On a non-fandom or writing related note, winter is here. It's freezing. Now just need more snow (at least in the mountains, please!) for the perfect snowboarding conditions. ♥
enchanter: Tenpou/Kenren (10k FTW)

...because I have too much time, apparently. Reposted from Tumblr.

You could spend ten years analyzing the symbolism in Saiyuki, much of which has been done over the years better than I could ever hope to do it, so I'm not even going there. But! There's a whole 'nother level of it when you go to the bottom of it - the language. English translations are awesome except when they don't do justice to the amount of meaning in some of those lines.

So if you'll pardon me, I'll be taking a leaf out of overanalyzingsaiyuki's book, because I'm still hung up on Kenren's death scene like OMG. The feels. My heart should be dead by now except I know it isn't because ow owowowww.

image

(my own manga scan for the purpose of this post)

Disclaimer: I'm not complaining about anyone's translation and I don't claim I could do better! This is not the point. I'm a Saiyuki obsessed linguistics nerd with a penchant for overanalyzing things, is all. Also, both English and Japanese are foreign languages to me, so.
 

One of many Gaiden things I'm hung up on is this one:

誇りを抱いて散るその日まで。(approx. romaji: Hokori o daite chiru sono hi made) With a sense of pride, until the day I fall. (listen here)


The interesting word choice here is 散る [chiru] - which means to fall or scatter as in, leaves or petals (oh the ever-present reference to cherry blossoms, which is very apt - the thing that falls at the peak of its beauty) but also 'to die a noble death' - which, in the context of Kenren's death... let's see: he clears the way for Tenpou, Konzen and Goku, saves Goujun's life and essentially sacrifices himself for Nataku (not that he has much choice at that point) - yeah, I'd say he fits in the definition all right.

This always makes me wonder about the translator's choice of wording in the OVA (and also in the scanlations I've seen): "With a proud heart, until you've completely withered".  Far as I know (and my knowledge of Japanese is seriously limited, but I'm a diligent student and an obsessed linguist) the word one would use for 'wither' would probably be 枯れる [kareru] to run with the flower metaphor, but that's not really what it means. 'Withering' suggests a slow process without purpose, rather just an inevitable consequence of the impermanence of life in general. While the feel of just about every death in Gaiden is the opposite - it's sudden, violent, and it's for something.

The English translation is great in the sense of being very poetic, but somehow to me it doesn't come off as strong as the original Japanese. Right now I'm reading the manga in Japanese (slowly! argh!) to find things like these, and they're all over the place, and they make the heartbreak even worse IF THAT'S EVEN POSSIBLE MEH and the story even more beautifully told.

Side note: the 'scattering' word 散る as a metaphor for dying is especially interesting in that it kind of foreshadows the manner of Konzen's death, especially since it can also mean to disappear or dissolve.


Oh. Minekura, you genius. *thud*

enchanter: Tenpou/Kenren (10k FTW)
Title: Down That Road
Author: Rhea [personal profile] enchanter
Warnings: None
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,500, one-shot, complete
Pairing: Kenren/Tenpou
Summary: This thing between them is a mutual agreement. The kind that knows what it is, that knows what it means without needing to be explained; the kind that tries not to make anything harder than it needs to be. A snapshot of Kenren and Tenpou's rather unauthorized foray into the human world for post-battle wind-down.

Notes: A little fic to start off 2014 on a Saiyuki note. Happy New Year, everyone!

Saiyuki in all of its incarnations belongs to Kazuya Minekura the genius, and I'm just playing with her creations, hoping I won't get shot. Thank you for reading!

Link: The guards stepped aside to make way for them, scurrying like frightened rats, and maybe it was justified because Tenpou breezed past them through the Dimension Gate like a hunting shark cheated out of dinner.
enchanter: (Default)
Title: Dreams You Can't Recall
Author: Rhea [personal profile] enchanter
Warnings: Not worksafe - smut, serious injuries, offscreen death
Rating: R
Wordcount: 10,500, one-shot, complete
Pairing: Tenpou/Kenren
Summary: Kenren's knack for attracting all kinds of attention is both an excellent smoke screen and a source of Tenpou's amusement--until the day it inadvertently backfires on him and the entire unit.

Notes: Smut. Blood. Hints of plot. The art of letting go. Sort of in that order. Set before Nataku's appointment as the Toushin Taishi. Pre-read by Shan. Saiyuki belongs to Kazuya Minekura, and I'm just playing with the people she created. ;)

Link: Sometimes, Tenpou thinks he has some notion of what's coming.

-life-

Dec. 11th, 2013 11:31 am
enchanter: (Default)
腹が減ったなら喰えばいい。痛むなら暴れればいい。苦しいなら叫べばいい。それが生きるって事だ。
enchanter: (Tenpou)
I wonder if anyone would still be up for that, but... I need a pair of eyes on a Saiyuki fic. Gojyo/Hakkai, 3,000 words, no smut I'm afraid (not in this one!) but kinda sorta established relationship, pre-journey. Anyone? Old fandom, I know. Couldn't help it; it's pretty much all I have in my head at the moment. :P :)
enchanter: (Coffee)
...and after gods know how many years, I can't stop reading Saiyuki fic, especially Gaiden fic of which there's plenty and its quality puts my writer self to shame. I might or might not even write one, if I feel brave enough and find some time one of these days. WTF, old flame? I'm enjoying this entirely too much. *snicker*

About me

enchanter: (Default)
Rhea

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