Thoughts on "Vampire Knight" the manga, post-chapter 93

The problem with having a popular running serial manga...

The story drags on and on and on until it is devoid of any structure and recognizable plot. And then personalities start to blur. The art is the only thing going for this series at the moment.

It's like a whole 40 chapters was forcibly added onto VK. What is this? Naruto?
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Edited 26 May 2013
Thoughts on Vampire Knight, chapter 23
W-ell. Personally I could not think of a better ending to tie up all the loose ends....well, maybe half of all the loose ends. Most of them are still pretty loose. The ending was bad but by chapter 70-something, it was a mess anyway so yeah.

I get the feeling the plot was meant to show that humans and vampires could coexist and even fall in love. But in the end, Kaname is just a sinister I(albeit pretty-boy-in-disguise) pedobear and Zero wears a  poker face with occasionally shifting eyebrows (acute or horizontal angles) and Yuki gets a better haircut near the end (which I quite liked)...but someone please explain how Yuki suddenly went from short -> long hair when she transformed into a vampire...in the space of seconds.

I'm still convinced the art was what got me going - though the whole idea of "vampire politics" was quite interesting on its own. And yet so predictable. And all the characters were all so hawt it was impossible not to imagine them in all sorts of kinky scenarious. Or even fluffy ones. Well, if the mangaka ever teams up with someone else who's written a good story, I'll be sure to read it.

Until then. VK!

Thoughts on "Vampire Knight" and "Vampire Knight Guilty"

Better than when I last watched it but still prefer the manga with the far superior quality of art.

Most of the blood in the anime looked even more fake than the stuff in Bleach.

Vampire Knight is a "love or hate" series. It can be easily criticized for just about every  shoujo cliche which exists and other cliches/classic traits which vampires possess. But I shoved all of that aside and just enjoyed it.

Having just finished Kimi ni Todoke, it was a relief to see a much darker series. True to its genre definitions, there is barely any fighting. Zero was transformed into the most powerful Vampire Hunter of all time and therefore barely needs to do anything to kill the evil weevil, Rido Kuran. A complete lack of actual action (hand to hand combat as opposed to characters looking at each other with emotionally-charged anime eyes) makes the pace of the story move faster but rather unexciting which is then filled with unsurprisingly truths such as X will kill Y or K was in fact Z's long lost cousin or X was the person whom Z's mother had an affair with and T is the bastard child. And so on.

The first 26 episodes are an inconsistent blend of Van Helsing and Enid Blyton adventurers. The villain is flavoured in similar way to Harry Potter's arch-nemesis, Lord Voldemort though Rido Kuran is defeated a lot more easily and Harry Potter's role is distributed between two equally precocious t(w)eens who possess more interesting capabilities.

If you enjoy your anime/manga with a dash of incest, Pedobears, ALL OF THIS, as well as very good art and morally dubious bishounen, then Vampire Knight will be an exciting ride.

I could slag off the inconsistency of plot or the animation, the tiresome cliches etc etc. But that would make this review tiresome.

So I've decided to commend Vampire Knight. As a long-running shoujo work which achieves a ridonkulous amount of fanservice in every chapter and with a rather winded plot, the characters still hold it together. Not all of them. But they each evoke some feeling from me. Moreover, it seems that Hino Matsuri also made a few stabs at meta-narrative style humour and shared a few jokes about shoujo manga with the readers, much like Gintama. The antics of "Idol"-senpai and "Wild"-senpai had me in stitches quite often. And thank goodness Kaien Cross is there to defuse the heavy tension which Kaname represents. I came to truly dislike the young Kuran vamp.

All in all, an enjoyable (and ongoing) effort by Hino Matsuri. I can safely say this is a really fun read/watch if taken with a pinch of salt.

Thoughts on BBC Panorama's "North Korea Undercover"

Cursory nod to the more popular articles and some varying points of view:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/15/lse-students-north-korea-bbc
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s1mfw
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/why-is-lse-making-fuss-over-panorama
• https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/bbc-to-immediately-withdraw-the-planned-program-issue-a-full-apology-to-lse

And so on.

I am not a fan of Panorama. It is BBC series which goes undercover to discover many sordid truths from drug and child trafficking to various scams to this main course, North Korea.

But I feel like the standard of the documentary just did not live up to the risk it incurred. What if the DRPK government saw this and banned all LSE students and staff, past or future from going and declared war on the BBC?

Journalism exists to undercover the truth and freedom of speech allows for a range of views. But documentaries are also sources and sources have a bias. There are limitations to what one can learn from a source.

In this case, it was a week long tour of North Korea's grandiose dream. But I feel that all that hidden camera footage and John Sweeney's reporting...it really failed to say anything significant. Thankfully, the documentary was redeemed by several interviews which Sweeney and BBC conducted with the North Korean defectors. Those were far more harrowing.

But Panorama does nothing. It raises awareness about the most secluded nation in the world. Our views on North Korea have absolutely nothing to do with how the North Koreans themselves. 30 minutes of footage taken inside North Korea is not going to tell us the whole story.


Why was there a North and South Korea in the first place? etc.

For anyone seeking to really "experience" dystopia, I would recommend helping yourself to Zamyatin, Solzhenitsyn or Orwell. Real life totalitarian states are more fiction than fact.

Thoughts on "Monster"

I gave it 10/10 right off the bat.

I also noticed how the minor characters started to look that same. And by that I mean not because I was not giving the series adequate attention (like clipping my toenails whilst streaming not that I'd ever do that but you get the idea) but the same or similar looking people with different names and different voices pop up. It's 74 episodes so I suppose there's only so many times you can draw fat, old man or elderly married couple. Believe me, there was FAR too many elderly, married couples in this series...since it revolves around the murders of elderly, married couples by a runty kid.

Well, I am off to write a dissertation so more to come later.