X, ep. 00-03

I'm very confused... did episode 0 air before the first episode in the TV series? Because it's very spoilery, plus, it makes absolutely no sense at all if you haven't seen the series. I mean, I was pretty baffled, and I've read the manga. The boy was just sitting in utter confusion, wondering who all those people were.

It was also incredibly strange seeing the characters animated. As always, the style is different from the manga, and though the characters all still look like the CLAMP characters, there's a sort of flattening that happens whenever manga is animated, a reduction of all the fine inky lines of the original. Also, Kotori's bangs look very silly animated, while they look all right as squiggly lines in the manga. It's also very, very strange hearing the characters. I've seen the X movie twice, but that was five years ago, and I've been reading the manga for the past six years (or, er, rereading when CLAMP stopped writing it), so none of the characters really had voices for me.

Kamui sounds much older than I thought he would -- he actually sounds incredibly like Heero in Gundam Wing, which makes sense. I had forgotten just how homicidal and antisocial Kamui was in the first few books. But he sounds very tough-guy-ish, and I guess I was thinking of a younger, higher voice. Fuuma sounds about what I would think. Kotori, amazingly, sounds less annoying that I thought, but then, I never liked her in the manga. The anime version is faring much better with me so far, but then, I suspect that's because there has been much less interaction between Fuuma and Kamui and Kotori so far in the anime. If I remember right (which I probably don't, because I haven't reread the first 15 some books for a really long time), the first five books at least spent a great deal of time on the three, and way too much time idealizing Kotori as the perfect girl. Bleh. Gah, even her name is cute -- "Little Bird."

I wince every time Sorata speaks. He is too high-pitched. I don't mind the accent, which is actually kind of cool, but there's a nasalness to his voice that is extremely irksome. I'm actually considering listening to the dub because it annoys me so much... Sorata was one of my favorite characters, so the voice incompatibility saddens me. Arashi is much more expressive than I thought she would be -- I was thinking of something more along the lines of the monotone Ayanami Rei in Evangelion. Hinoto also sounds a little strange, but I can't quite pinpoint why (and I love the whole Arashi-dono, Yuuta-dono, etc. thing. Now I want to dig up the original language manga and see if that's there... actually there's one in the store, I should do that). I liked Nataku's voice.. I think it's a female seiyuu doing a male impression (like Kenshin and Quatre's), which is a nice way of portraying Nataku's asexuality.

I'm amazed at how much of the imagery is the same as the movie -- feathers, sakura petals, the clockwork gears. I don't remember if the imagery is in the manga originally, though it probably is. And if not, I'm quite sure it's in the artbooks. I do sort of miss the images of a glass globe shattering in the movie (and the manga?). Wow, I really should reread the manga sometime.

Speaking of which, I'm still irked by the way they brought it over. I wish they would reissue the first few volumes -- they all have those silly music-themed subtitles that are nowhere on the original, and I think they're missing the neat Tarot card imagery. Plus, I loved the starkness of the giant colored "X" on the cover and associating the color with the character on the Tarot card and the spine and the Tarot imagery. And I liked how the little spine images all flowed together into one long mural thing.

( Spoilers for the eps and the X movie )

(no subject)

Day two as a book buyer: Coolness!!

I am quite happy that now instead of hovering over the buyers and surreptitiously checking out all the books in the order while trying to clear the table and everything, I am now the one going through all the piles of books ^_^. Imagine that. They are paying me to flip through tons of books. Wow.

It's reinforced a lot of things that I knew before from working behind the buying counter, though, and it's just so fun seeing the different books people have. Actually, the majority of people have really boring books, but that makes the nice orders that much cooler.

It perpetually amazed me that the people who always ask for cash or a combination of cash and trade credit will almost invariably be the people who have musty books from the seventies and eighties on topics that go rapidly out of date. Or they will be people who always underline and highlight their books and wreck the spines in the process. Or they will have an order of books that they've left outside for six months or something, so that the books have been rained on and all sorts of nasty molds and insects have had a chance at the books. Or they will have thrown all their books in a garbage bag so even if the books were nice beforehand, by the time they've gotten to us, they're wrinkled and bent and dented.

And it's amazing that these people all have the same kinds of books -- lots of old self-help books and old, cheap cookbooks (not even the pretty kinds with glossy pictures, or nifty ethnic cookbooks), old success psychology or business books. I get bored just flipping through them.

Or they will have stacks of CDs that look like they've been played with a record player, they're that scratched.

Then there are people who keep their books in pretty nice shape, but unfortunately read (or get sick of) the exact same books that everyone else reads and gets sick of and sells back to us. Then I get to cart around armfuls of bestseller genre books or general fiction to see if we need them. And I always feel kind of bad turning them away, because a lot of the new customers think, "But these are nice books! Why don't you want them?" and I have to tell them that we see about twenty of them a day.

And then there are the orders that make me drool -- beautiful, pristine picture books in gorgeous colors and dust jackets, young adult hardcover and paperbacks in like new condition, fat and expensive art books from Abrams and Rizzoli. And once in a blue moon, there comes a person who has absolutely beautiful fantasy books in great condition, and (the big surprise) it's stuff I read. That's when I get a little nuts and start putting my name on everything ^_^. We almost never see Emma Bull or Patricia A. McKillip's non-Riddlemaster books.

It's just so much fun trying to keep track of all this stuff in my head.

(and it doesn't hurt that the boss says I am picking it up quite well, although I still feel like I mess up very often)