Ladies and gentlemen, the Carpenters.
Hello again everyone. I'm back with yet another update about the current state of my life. I've actually been dealing with a little bit of depression this month, hence the somewhat melancholy music video I chose for the opening of this post. There was a time when I used to sort of look forward to November, but nowadays this time of year just bums and/or stresses me out. Maybe it's because I've worked too many years in retail or because I've simply gotten older and my outlook on the world has changed. Either way I haven't had the most pleasant month.
Anyway, as a follow-up to rewatching the InuYasha anime last month, I decided to spend the first few evenings of this month watching its sequel, Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon. If you haven't seen that sequel, it's not a great series but it's not terrible either. As I recall, a lot of the episode reviews of Yashahime on the Anime New Network were pretty negative. And while I think some of ANN's criticisms were a tad harsh, I also think that a good chunk of it was well-earned. Of course the main reason to watch Yashahime is Inuyasha and Kagome's daughter, Moroha.
The writers of Yashahime did a great job with her character. They screwed up just about everything else with the series though. Half of the show's first season was made up of recycled chapters from the InuYasha manga that they couldn't fit into InuYasha: The Final Act, which in my opinion was lazy and uncreative. Plus Moroha's two cousins, Towa and Setsuna were just very unappealing as central protagonists. Towa was too naive and Setsuna had just a little too much of her father's "charming" personality.
I once tried writing a Yashaime fanfic that attempted to fix some of the major problems of the anime. I abandoned the project for two reasons though. The first and biggest reason is because the manga version of Yashahime is about five to ten times better than the anime. I don't really know what it is about the manga that works more than the anime, but it is just way more appealing and I felt like the story I was trying to write couldn't top it. I have to give major kudos to the manga's author, Takashi Shiina.
The other reason why I abandoned that Yashahime fanfic is because it kept getting spammed with all of these weird guest reviews on FFN. The story would get like three or four of these reviews a day, and they were all from the same person, or it might've been a duo. Either way, the amount of these reviews got so out of control that I felt like I had no other choice but to delete the story from FFN. By that point I had already given up on finishing the story anyway because of the Yashahime manga. If I do end up trying to write another Yashahime fanfic though (and I have been thinking of writing my own sequel to the manga), it'll be an AO3 exclusive.
On the subject of my writing though, lately I've felt like a lot of my recent stories have been missing something. For a while I wasn't sure what that something was, but then last night as I was parking my car in the garage it hit me. It's been quite some time since I've had a story that I would consider a passion project. I mean sure, I care a lot about most of my current stories (at least the ones I've reposted on AO3), and I fully intend to finish them at some point. Still, it seems like it's been a really long time since I've had a story I've been really excited about and have been really driven to finish. The last story I worked on that I considered a passion project was my Sailor Moon fanfic, Life After Life, and that story was finished a few years ago. I'm also a little concerned that maybe I've run out of good ideas.
Well, I think that about does it for this post. Until next time, I hope everyone has a good holiday weekend.
