Ladies and gentlemen, Queen.
The reason I chose the above Queen song as the opening of this post is because I reread the third volume of the light novel series, Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online. At the start of this year I decided to read one volume of that series a month partly as a personal challenge to myself. Of course one volume a month means I won't be done with the series until January, but it is what it is. Anyway, if anyone reading has actually read the third volume of AGGO, you can probably guess why I felt the above Queen song was appropriate. I'm not going to say anything more than that because I don't want to drop any spoilers.
Anyway, I am certainly glad this month is finally just about over. It's been kind of a difficult month for me. One of the reasons is stuff that's been happening at my current day job, but that's not a conversation I intend to bring to this particular forum. For one thing, these are kind of small problems that have actually been going on for a few months now. Plus I prefer to save my rants about my day job for my personal log.
Besides, the biggest issue I've had this month is it has just seemed like I just haven't had as much time for myself as I normally do. It seems like there's been some sort of major disruption every week or so that just totally interferes with my own plans. A prime example is this blizzard that hit the area where I live last Wednesday. I had the day off from work that day, and my original plan had been to use the day to binge-watch a season of an anime series I have on disc and have been rewatching for most of the month, but that blizzard brought sixty to seventy mph winds with it. Since that's the kind of weather that can (and usually will) cause power outages, binge-watching that season became out of the question.
Sure enough, there were intermittent power outages during the morning of the blizzard, and then by the afternoon there was a blackout that lasted for five hours. Then exactly a week later, just as things in my life had mostly gotten back on track, our refrigerator suddenly died. Apparently it had a part in it that was defective and finally decided to break down. In any case, the following day my dad had to spend the entire morning getting the fridge cleaned out and its contents moved to a temporary location where it wouldn't spoil. He did this on yet another one of my days off, and that caused major disruptions to my plans for that day.
Of course the month hasn't been all bad. In spite of all the various obstacles I've had to deal with, I did manage to finish watching the anime series I mentioned before, Symphogear. For those not familiar with that title, it's a magical girl series that's kind of a quasi-musical. I've actually been watching it every March for the last three or four years now. Now, I will be one of the first to admit that Symphogear is not great art.
Is it at least the greatest magical girl anime ever made? Hardly!
Is it perhaps a little too heavy on the fan service? Probably!
All this being said, there are three good reasons to give Symphogear a try. For one thing, a magical girl series that's also clearly a yuri series, and they're not even subtle about it. One could argue that this is just a result of the overabundant fan service mentioned earlier, but it works. The bigger reason to give Symphogear a try though is the simple fact that the series is just absurd! Every season is a little more bonkers than the last. By the time they get to season four and they start fighting the forces of the Bavarian Illuminati, the series starts to feel like it's being written by a conspiracy theorist who wears a foil hat and rants on street corners when he's not writing for anime shows.
The third reason to watch Symphogear is the music. A lot of the songs in that show are pretty damn good. Here's a selection of my three favorite songs from the series.
Exterminate (Opening of Season 3)
Glorious Break (Song used for the finishing move of Season 3's final battle)
METANOIA (Opening and finishing move of Season 3
So yeah. There you have it. I think that's enough said on the subject of Symphogear.
Besides watching all of Symphogear for the third or fourth year in a row, I've also used much of this month to repost my old series of Digimon fanfics on AO3. The response has been minimal but fairly positive so far. I mainly started reposting my old Digimon fanfics because I'm currently a little blocked with the big Sailor Moon fanfic I've been working on (and the disruptions I mentioned earlier have not helped at all). For the record, I'm not reposting all of my fanfics on AO3, just the projects I intend to continue working on. I have no intention of shutting down my FFN account, but I'm sort of making AO3 my primary venue as it were.
In a lot of ways I like AO3 better than FFN. For one thing, I can list more than four major characters for each story. Plus I can list each story I post as part of a series, which is a feature FFN could definitely use. Of course there are a couple of areas where FFN has AO3 beat. For one thing, AO3 could really use a private messaging system like the kind FFN and even this site has. of course what AO3 could really use is a file-sharing system like the kind FFN has. I have a beta reader for my big Sailor Moon fanfic on FFN, and in order for him to do edits I still need to send him chapters through FFN's Doc X system. It'd really help if AO3 had something similar.
I think that about covers it for this month. Until we all meet again next month.
