OK, I was going to write about this on my own LJ, but...
I was thinking lately about the OVA for Read or Die, which has just the best premise in the entire world. The main character is a book-obsessed young woman who, in her other life, is a special agent for the British Library, codenamed "The Paper" (yes, my icon) and who has the ability to manipulate paper.
She isn't a typical special agent: she has glasses, dresses like a stereotypical dowdy librarian (sorry to all cool librarians reading this), and even when being dangled by a thread over New York, is ultra-polite in that very well-brought-up Japanese way. There's lots of action, which she can be good at if she doesn't have her nose in a book, and the three-episode show is lots and lots of fun, with James Bond-inspired opening credits. The manga, on the other hand, sucks rocks, as everything you love about Yomiko (her sweetness, her intelligence, her iron will when it comes to getting that book back) is trashed in favour of a shounen-style story with lots of bouncy girls and abusive relationships.
However, the OVA is really enjoyable for putting a very unusual and fun female spy forward. And, IMHO, the whole thing is worth watching just for the bookshopping sequence at the beginning.
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Female Spy Heroes
Tue, Nov. 2nd, 2004 11:37 am (UTC)I was thinking lately about the OVA for Read or Die, which has just the best premise in the entire world. The main character is a book-obsessed young woman who, in her other life, is a special agent for the British Library, codenamed "The Paper" (yes, my icon) and who has the ability to manipulate paper.
She isn't a typical special agent: she has glasses, dresses like a stereotypical dowdy librarian (sorry to all cool librarians reading this), and even when being dangled by a thread over New York, is ultra-polite in that very well-brought-up Japanese way. There's lots of action, which she can be good at if she doesn't have her nose in a book, and the three-episode show is lots and lots of fun, with James Bond-inspired opening credits. The manga, on the other hand, sucks rocks, as everything you love about Yomiko (her sweetness, her intelligence, her iron will when it comes to getting that book back) is trashed in favour of a shounen-style story with lots of bouncy girls and abusive relationships.
However, the OVA is really enjoyable for putting a very unusual and fun female spy forward. And, IMHO, the whole thing is worth watching just for the bookshopping sequence at the beginning.