“Is that Suppi-kun or are you just glad to see me?”
So this guy has been reading the TokyoPop novels. I’ve been reading some too recently and the 4th installment of the translated light novel series from Ichiro Sakaki (and Mugodan doing the drawings) needs to come out already. I read somewhere the release date is actually the 31st of January but I couldn’t find it anywhere online the day after.
At any rate, it is a totally different kind of read than what I’ve been reading. It’s like, lol. I mean it’s not even lol like crappy Magic: The Gathering novels or stories about Thrall and LORELOL. This is Ichiro Sakaki putting forward a really darn good fantasy setting with a fairly rich story about Driving Miss Pacifica. Albeit heavy-handed at times and sort of melodramatic to a point, I’m not sure I can sift through its popular brand of justice cleanly with what’s in the psyche of the Japanese fantasy reader. There’s a crossover between the two, I suppose.
Which is to say, it’s been a long, long time since I cracked open a fiction novel.
It was a Suddenly Raquel moment, to be sure. It’s a fluffy read. Nonetheless that did not stop the rather tranquil expression I carried while plowing through the short novels in a couple hours.
What would really be a Suddenly Raquel moment is they canceled book #4 like a ninja and we had to go find this out ourselves! Grr.
So. Onto the more serious topic: licensing limbo. The thing about ADV is not really worrysome, much like how I don’t worry about Geneon’s non-distribution of DVDs. The one fact remains: there’s money to be made. The question is how to make that money. As fans, we just want to be able to watch it, to own it, to enjoy it.
We want to avoid what has happened to the licensing quagmire that is Macross. It’s just cruel to show us how good something is and then to butcher it and yank it away. And it punishes no one except those who are actually paying the buck. I hope with all these corporate back-end maneuvering we don’t orphan anything.
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