Theme Spotlight: Tabi no Tochuu

When it comes to music, Spice & Wolf wisely stays true to its more historical fantasy roots and avoids overly modern songs, instead opting for timeless melodies and strong, sweeping vocals that resonate with of music lovers of every era. Natsumi Kiyoura's 'Tabi no Tochuu' does this flawlessly, starting soft and evocative and moving to a full blown ending with multi-layered vocals. The atmosphere is perfect for the invented world of Lawrence and Holo where the simple and purely beautiful shine through without the help of excessive distraction and technology.

The landscapes in the anime celebrate the beauty of the natural world, and the music works perfectly to compliment the visuals.

Fun Stuff: 30 Day Shipping Challenge

I certainly had fun last time with Shipping Rouelette, so here's another fun thing to try with the joy of shipping: the 30 Day Shipping Challenge! Perfect for blogs, twitter, and fan communities, the 30 Day Shipping Challenge is a conversation starter about favorite and least favorite anime and manga pairings, who's hot and who's not. Of course, you can expect opinions to vary and arguments to start, but go ahead and like what you like and hate what you hate: you'll probably find plenty of people who share your opinions as well.

Since I'll be posting all thirty questions, I might as well knock all the answers out briefly for my own entertainment. Shipping is something I love to support, and since it comes with the territory of fanfiction writing, I have plenty of my own couples that I follow through thick and thin!

Day 1: What is your current favorite ship?
None other than Kurogane and Fai from Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle by my favorite mangaka group, CLAMP. I love a pairing with a complex history and emotional baggage, and these two fulfill all the requirements. On one hand, you have teasing, happy Fai, whose smiles mask a painful history and a wish that may end up destroying him, and on the other you have Kurogane, a gruff and temperamental man who sees through the facade and tries to reach the person Fai is afraid of revealing. A beautiful pairing in every way, and the best (in my opinion) that CLAMP has written.

  

Day 2: What was your very first ship?
Rogue and Gambit from the old X-men animation on FOX. I used to watch that show all the time with my brothers and swooned over the cajun charmer and his troubled Southern belle sweetheart. Of course, the fact that Rogue can't touch people with her bare skin keeps the romance rather tame, but the show found a way to sneak a few kisses in. THANK GOD! 

Day 3: A pairing that needs to happen now.
America and England from Hetalia. England is clearly hot for the United States, but America has a tendency of ignoring the atmosphere and shooting his former caretaker down. Poor England! But if they can work through their issues, they'd make an excellent alliance, so let's get to work on that, America!

Day 4: The pairing with the most chemistry.
Holo and Lawrence from Spice & Wolf. As I mentioned on my posting on this series, Holo is practically oozing with feminine wiles, and she uses them to quite an effect on her traveling partner. Even Lawrence himself is overwhelmed by the chemistry half the time, and it just keeps getting better as the episodes go on.

Day 5: The pairing with the least chemistry.
Emil and Marta from Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Don't get me wrong, I like both characters. Just not together. Marta is way too much for meek Emil, and even when Emil mans up, it still feels like he's being led along by the nose by her. I prefer Marta with Emil's Ratatosk identity, which puts them on more equal footing (once Ratatosk lessens up on the jerkiness).

Day 6: The best kiss. Hiro and Nowaki's kiss in Junjou Romantica after Nowaki comes home from America and Hiro keeps him from leaving the apartment after treating him coldly. Hiro does his best to resist, but gets pulled in by Nowaki's charm. And who wouldn't? That kiss is smokin, as is the one in the library when they make up 100%.

Day 7: The most heartbreaking scene. Tomoya proposing to Nagisa in CLANNAD. And everything that comes after. But that scene in particular gets me every time. *Sniffle*

Day 8: The pairing with the most baggage.

Seishirou and Subaru from Tokyo Babylon and X. Without getting too spoilery for Tokyo Babylon which will be posted on soon, their past relationship involves a lethal bet, a few missing eye balls, hidden identities, betrayal, broken arms, a dead twin, and a more than one death wish. Oh, CLAMP. 

Day 9: The most believable relationship.

Colette and Lloyd from Tales of Symphonia. They're childhood friends, Lloyd is extremely devoted to Colette to the extent where he places saving her above almost everything else, Colette is determined to see through her duty for the sole sake of protecting the world he lives in so he can be happy, and she's pretty much the easiest person for him to become soulmates with in-game. In the animation, the scene where he finds out she's lost her voice is one of the most touching I've seen.

Day 10: Why aren’t these two married?

Rita and Estelle from Tales of Vesperia. They're best friends. Rita is tsundere for Estelle. Their life goal is to raise a child together. Even Yuri refers to them as 'Ristelle'. Just get married you two!

Day 11: What is your dream pairing?

Eirika and Seth from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. The ultimate lady-and-her-knight pairing. Plus their conversations are adorable.

Day 12: Who had the best wedding?

Alistair and Lady Cousland from Dragon Age. It doesn't happen in-game unless you download a mod, but the mod is AWESOME. It's a beautiful royal wedding, and the looks on Alistair and Lady Cousland's faces are absolutely perfect. Well worth the download.

Day 13: What is your favorite movie pairing?

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy from the movie adaptation of Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice. Both the Colin Firth and the Keira Knightley versions portray it excellently, especially the first proposal scene where Darcy gets shot down. This is definitely one of the most classic pairings of all time for a reason!

Day 14: What is your favorite book pairing?

Jena and Costin from Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing. All of her books are must-reads for fantasy fans, and this relationship is my favorite of all her couples. And Costin spends the majority of the novel as a FROG, and it's still one of the most romantic and well done pairings I have ever read.

Day 15: What is your favorite real life pairing?

My brother and his wife. One day I would love to be as happy as the two of them.

Day 16: What is the absolute worst pairing?

Ike and Elincia from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn. It's not a canon pairing, but plenty of people support it as the traditional princess/hero set up. Which is nice and all, but what the heck about Soren and Geoffrey who clearly have feelings for Ike and Elincia respectively? And what about Ike's hatred of nobility, titles, and living in court? There's no way it would work, in my opinion.

Day 17: A pairing you never thought would work, but did.

Makoto and Chiaki from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I thought she'd managed to mess it up with all her time skipping, and then I was convinced he was going to leave her without a proper goodbye. I was so relieved when the end indicated that they had a fair chance of reuniting in the future.

Day 18: What is the cutest pairing?

Kaoru and Kenshin from Rurouni Kenshin. Kenshin himself is adorable as it is, but the genuine feeling he shows her in the last few arcs is truly moving. I would trade places with her any day; who wouldn't want to be the most important person to Kenshin?

Day 19: A pairing you’ve rooted for since the beginning.

Taiga and Ryuuji from Toradora! They started the series with feelings for two completely different people, but I was always pulling for them to realize that all of their sexual tension was aimed at each other. Although I do feel a bit sorry for Minori, who loved both of them, although she takes the high road and wishes for their happiness together.

Day 20: The can’t-stand-the-sexual-tension pairing.

Kyo and Tohru from Fruits Basket. After exploding with unresolved sexual tension the whole series, it was agony waiting for him to get a hold of his feelings and accept the kindness she gave him. It probably took a lot out of him to hold back for so long.

Day 21: A pairing you like and no one else understands why.

Hawke and Sebastian from Dragon Age II. My favorite is pairing fem Hawke with Fenris and male Hawke with Anders or Isabela, but I also have absolutely no problem romancing Sebastian. As a total pervert, my friends don't understand how I can be okay with the chaste relationship that goes along with him. I just think it's cute, is all.

Day 22: A pairing you hate and no one understands why.

Again, Emil and Marta. I almost always go the canon route, so people are usually surprised that I refused the game's official couple.

Day 23: A crazy love triangle/quadrilateral that worked out great.

Eagle Vision, Hikaru, and Lantis take the best route in the Magic Knight Rayearth manga: make it a threesome! Or at least that's what Hikaru oh-so-innocently implies. All three people seem to have feelings for one another, so it all works out.

Day 24: A crazy love triangle/quadrilateral that worked out badly.

Watanuki, Himawari, Kohane, and Doumeki from xxxHolic. Watanuki likes Himawari, Himawari mildly likes Watanuki but is bad luck to him, and Kohane and Doumeki both really like Watanuki. SPOILER: Watanuki ends of having to freeze his lifespan and never leave Yuuko's shop to sort out the craziness of Tsubasa, leaving him an eternal teenager while all his friends grow old. Himawari gets married to someone else, Kohane and Doumeki get hitched so they can produce offspring to watch over Watanuki after they die so he won't have to be alone. Watanuki himself potentially takes a third option and develops feelings for Yuuko depending on how you read it, but I've always interpreted his love for her as intense devotion to an important mentor (since Yuuko already has Clow, and is never going to return to the shop no matter how long he waits judging by CLAMP universe rules). SPOILER END.

Day 25: A pairing that was/would-be adorable, but could never work out.

Franz and Albert from Gankutsuou. Poor Franz is in love with Albert, and Albert would certainly benefit from loving him back since Franz is the sensible one of the two of them, and if Albert had only listened to Franz from the start, a lot of bad things would not have happened. However, Albert likes Eugenie, and has hero worship verging on an intense mancrush on the Count, so Franz is out of luck.

Day 26: A pairing that you hated and ended up loving.

Gin and Rangiku from Bleach. I didn't understand why people supported them until I got to the backstory. Gin is still a jackass, but he's her jackass. Sometimes, you just can't help who you fall in love with.

Day 27: A pairing that you loved and ended up hating.

Harry and Hermione from Harry Potter, because I fell for the main character/main girl allure. But as the series progressed, I just wasn't getting romance vibes from their characters, and ended up switching gears with them.

Day 28: A pairing that you will never understand.

The people who support Fai and Chii from Tsubasa. Um, guys, remember a little person called Hideki who is Chii's person just for me? Or how CLAMP doesn't break up canon pairings even in the space-time? Or how Fai made Chii to resemble someone he's related to?

Day 29: What ship had the bed proposal?

I've actually never seen or read a bed proposal to my recollection, so this one I'll have to pass on.

Day 30: Your favorite pairing forever and ever and ever!

Ike and Soren from Fire Emblem. *Pokes 'What's not to love about love?' post*

Economics Have Never Been This Cute!

 Last semester, I had to take a course in Micro Economics as a pre-requisite for the Intro to Marketing course I needed for my Public Relations minor. To be honest, I was completely dreading this class. I am OK at math as long as I can write the problems down, but I have a problem retaining numbers in my head. If you asked me right now to add 167 and 56 without pencil and paper, I wouldn't be able to. It's over two-hundred, but that's about all I can tell you.

I ended up pulling an A- in economics, but it was a challenging battle. There were just too many charts and kinds of markets and types of competition to consider for my liking, but I did learn a few valuable lessons from the class. One: Everything has a cost. If not a monetary cost, than at least a cost in missed opportunity. For example, me typing this blog is taking away time I could be using watching even more anime, which is a cost I can live with, but a cost all the same. Two: My brain is not wired to understand graphs as more than squiggly lines with random letters and numbers sprinkled within.

Believe it or not, this actually means something.  The only part I still comprehend is zero.

In any case, you would think I had enough of economics when the semester ended, but I needed a new anime to watch, and fate led me to find Spice & Wolf. Of course, I didn't really know what it was about at this point. I simply looked at the cover featuring adorable, wolf eared secondary protagonist Holo, and decided that it looked too cute to pass up. I'm such a sucker, I know. If I had known ahead of time that it had a lot to do with economics and business sense rather than just wolf-human hybrids, I may have hesitated a bit, considering that the wounds of Micro Economics 101 were still fresh on my mind. However, I am very, very glad I didn't. The things I learned in class helped me appreciate and understand Spice & Wolf all the more, even when the schemes of traveling merchant Lawrence and his companion/pagan wolf god Holo got layers deep in technical trickiness.

The cover is more cute than smart, but the story has a good balance of both.

Spice & Wolf is set in a fantasy world that greatly resembles historical Europe during the heyday of the Church and mercantilism, although the clothing style used is not particularly unique to European culture or even that old-fashioned in appearance. The hero, 25-year-old Kraft Lawrence, is a traveling merchant looking to earn enough money to start up his own brick-and-mortar shop, and makes his living trading, buying, and selling between towns and cities until the day his dream comes true. At the onset of the story, he arrives in the small village of Pasloe in the midst of their annual ritual to pray to the harvest god Holo for bountiful crops, an act that would be considered pagan by the increasingly powerful Church, which unsurprisingly mirrors many aspects of the Christian faith. The citizens of Pasloe have not embraced the new faith, but all the same they are losing interest in worshiping Holo and relying on her for assistance with their planting and gathering.

Kraft Lawrence. He's actually quite younger than he looks, but  didn't have access to Just for Men.

On his first night in Pasloe, Lawrence is resting in his cart and notices something is amiss with his goods in the back. When he takes a peek, he sees a naked girl (yup, nudity, but with Barbie doll anatomy) with wolf ears and a tail napping among the wheat. He reasonably freaks out, especially when the girl claims she is Holo herself, the 600 year-old deity who has been guarding the harvest of Pasloe over the years. When he asks for proof, she reveals that she can shift into her wolf form with the sacrifice of wheat, and does so when Lawrence insists he won't be convinced otherwise. Of course, seeing the huge, snarling wolf she turns into scares him even more. Silly Lawrence.

Holo as a wolf. Only time will tell if she will start riding motorcycles and imprinting on children.

However, Holo is nothing if not charming. She once made a promise to a townsman to watch over their crops, but she realizes she is not needed by the people anymore, and that she has already fulfilled the promise to the best of her abilities. Her wish is to return to her mysterious homeland in the north to see what has become of it, and she bargains with Lawrence in order to get him to take her along on his travels. Lawrence has several reservations about this, especially since having a pagan god in tow might spark the interest of the Church, but already a part of him is intrigued by the sharp and intelligent Holo. He agrees to take her along, while of course covering her ears and tail from the casual observer.

A moment of freedom on the road.

From here on out, economics and business strategy becomes a major factor in the story. Lawrence isn't just a traveling merchant to provide Holo a convenient way to get to where she's going; it's his way of life and mode of being, and his mind is always whirring away with thoughts of risks, opportunities, and profits. As the two make their way across the lovely countryside, he begins to educate Holo on the basics of business-- when to buy, when to sell, what to purchase and sell in which places, and how to bargain and haggle. Holo is a fast learner and has plenty of acumen and natural powers of persuasion, and begins to assist him in the market in order to help him maximize his profits. Together, they form a strong merchant team and work together to bring Lawrence closer to his goal of having a shop.

However, the world of business is capricious, even to those who know it best. Holo and Lawrence (but mostly Lawrence) take a few risks they probably shouldn't and often find themselves on the verge of an economic crisis. Of course, there is usually a complicated and mind-boggling way out that they need to put their heads together to find, but these challenges teach Holo and Lawrence how to be true partners and trust each other, even in seemingly hopeless situations. Unfortunately, on top of all the money matters, minions of the Church often become aware that the cute young woman at Lawrence's side is not what she seems, and Lawrence often has to save Holo and his wallet from corrupt influences. Holo is fairly adept at handling herself-- she's survived on her own for several centuries, for goodness sake!- but sometimes there's only so much a girl trying to hide the fact that she's a wolf deity can do. She makes up for it later in the season, when she frequently needs to use her wolf form to save Lawrence's hide when he's backed into a corner by baddies.

Lawrence telling it like it is.

Luckily, Spice & Wolf isn't all about making and losing money. At the center of the story is the relationship between Lawrence and Holo, which has as many twists and turns as the economic market. Holo has feminine wiles out the wazoo, and she certainly knows how to use them. She tends to be a bit hot and cold with Lawrence, alternating between playing mind games with his affections, showing him genuine love and respect, acting frosty, and getting jealous over interloping women. Lawrence is at first baffled at being bombarded by all of this at once, but as the series goes on, he begins to realize that while she is a deity, Holo is like a human woman underneath it at. She wants to be loved and taken seriously, but doesn't want to be treated like a fragile creature or have anyone else surpass her in his heart. First and foremost, she is well aware that his lifespan is a mere second compared to hers, and that whatever relationship they have will be fundamentally different on her side as well as his. As he gains a bit of wisdom and experience, Lawrence figures out how to navigate her different moods and give right back to her what she gives him in teasing.

A tender moment for our pair.

Do I smell a LOVE TRIANGLE?

One of my favorite and most agonizing arcs, which I'll be spoilering in this paragraph, was when Amarti enters the scene and misinterprets the Holo/Lawrence relationship (with a little help from Holo and Lawrence themselves). Although Holo is in debt to Lawrence, he takes this to mean that Lawrence is holding her against her will, and decides to become a knight-in-shining armor to set her free. He declares his intention to propose to Holo and repay her debts to Lawrence, and Lawrence, instead of just going like 'yeah, whatever man,' decides to engage in a little competition with him. If Amarti raises enough money in a certain time frame, Lawrence will surrender Holo to him. Bad idea, Lawrence, bad idea. Amarti is a little twit for one, and secondly the town where they are resting just underwent a huge boom in pyrite trading. Amarti is earning money left and right, and Lawrence is struggling to make ends meet after losing all of his money in a bad deal involving armor. To make matters worse, Holo pretends to side with Amarti, an act which Lawrence falls for since Holo is in a desperate mood after finding out from Lawrence and a local chronicler that her hometown may not even exist anymore. Of course, Holo's defection ends up being a huge scheme between Holo and the chronicler in order to build trust between Holo and Lawrence, but Lawrence doesn't know this, and almost goes half-crazy trying to keep Holo at his side. It's difficult to watch, but it was wonderfully suspenseful and ended giving Lawrence a lot more character, especially in regards to his feelings for Holo. Arc spoiler over! 

Now time for a warning. As much as I enjoyed the relationship dynamics of this show, the technical theory regarding business and economics is really difficult to understand, even if you have prior knowledge in the field. Trying to watch the show in Japanese made it even harder. By time I had read the subtitles, I didn't have time to think the situation through properly before the next set of subs popped up. I would recommend switching to the English dub when things get complicated, unless you are an economics expert, a quick learner, or are close to fluent in Japanese. The English dub isn't bad at all, so it really isn't that much of a sacrifice, and it certainly gives an advantage when it comes down to figuring out what the hell Holo and Lawrence are talking about when they put their business hats on.

So would I recommend Spice & Wolf? Yup, but only for people who actually enjoy the brain power it takes to maneuver the story. It may be a drama and a romance, but it is foremost an intellectual series that requires an understanding of the explanations of business strategy and basic economics to fully appreciate. If you enjoy these things already or think you're up to learning a little while enjoying the excellent setting and characters, go full steam ahead. But if it's one of those days when you want to curl up in front of the TV without having to think or do anything but watch, save Spice & Wolf for another occasion. It's an adorable and moving series, but you'll have to invest some effort to reap the profits, so put that thinking cap over your wolf ears before settling down to enjoy the show.

Next up will be buddy cop and shounen-ai classic manga/OVA FAKE.