#309 - Wondering if I should have taken a nap earlier.

[reileen]

Vienna Teng and her crew gave an amazing performance at Schuba's on Friday, as they always do. (I have video evidence of this fact, but alas, it doesn't even begin to capture the magick of the moment.) I stalked caught up with her later and got her to autograph my copy of Inland Territory - yay! She also thanked me for my review of the album, which I think she found through the forum - double yay! And I found out that the reason they haven't played "Augustine" live yet is because they haven't really found an arrangement that they really liked for it. So now I await with bated breath the fateful day that she gives a live performance of "Augustine."

The opening act, Ben Sollee, was pretty damn amazing too. I'm not sure if his music, which could probably be described as "country on cello", is my thing or not, but lemme tell you, he's damn good on the cello.

After the performance, I crashed at lysis_to_kill's place with Lauren and Melissa. We watched Crash, which isn't exactly a "fun movie night" kind of film, but I'd heard about it back in HON301 and Lauren had brought it with her, and no one really cared which movie we watched so I just took charge of the viewing materials. (I'd say that this is such a typically Leo thing of me to do, but then, Melissa and Lauren are both Leos too...) Crash is an incredibly uncomfortable film to watch because of the way it takes on a lot of major racial issues in America, and the characters of the large main cast fall into a lot of grey areas. Some are more redeemable - or redeemed - than others.

By the time we finished this movie, it was getting kind of late, but somehow we decided that we wanted to watch something else, so we popped one of the DVDs I had for the first season of The Big Bang Theory and watched the first episode. Much lulz were had. I seriously need to watch the rest of this series; it's flippin' hilarious and I love all the geek jokes even if I can't understand half of them. (Tangentially related - I also need to finish watching Firefly - I think I'm on the second DVD of the boxset that I got for Christmas two years ago. I'm so bad with sitting down and just watching shit.)

Despite the late bedtime, all of us were up before 8:00am, WTF. However, the early wake-up was sweetened - literally - by a pack of cook-it-yourself Cinnabons that Liz managed to pick up in the fridge aisle at Jewel. OMG SO GOOD AND SO UNHEALTHY FOR YOU. I'm afraid to find and buy these for myself, because I'll probably be eating them all. The. Time.

***

So, the final chapter of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro was released on Friday. I'm sad that MTNN has to end, but if we had to get an end, this was a pretty good end to get. And Matsui is supposed to be releasing a new series this July - I'm not sure if it's a new ongoing series or a one-shot, though.




There were a lot of people on nougami_neuro complaining about the abruptness of the ending. To an extent, I concur with this sentiment. We go from having seen Sicks being destructinated by his own plane, courtesy of Neuro Airways (motto: "It's no mystery why everyone flies Neuro Airways! (Because Neuro would just torture them if they didn't.)") and then all of sudden everything ends in the next three chapters? There were definitely some aspects that felt...rushed or crushed in, to me. And I think I bitched about how I wished that we would be able to get a demonic counterpart to the Sicks story arc, since while we knew that the Sicks arc was shaping up to be epic, it didn't feel as though that it was going to be the UBOUD of MTNN.

At the same time, the ending is open enough that, although the series' run is finished, we get the sense that the story itself is still going to continue. (Much like in the anime, actually.) Neuro did come back from hell, after all, and he stalked down Yako in the plane she was riding just to scare the shit out of her, as per the usual. And Kasai, bless his soul, is still alive and itching to burninate! (He has Neuro the Demon Godfather to thank for granting his wish to live longer than Sicks.) So there's some potential fanfic fodder right there. Yako's grown into her own pretty awesomely, as well - and I'm not just talking about the fact that she kind of got just a wee bit sexier. I mean, she's obviously no Michiko Malandro (I'm not sure who would be), but it's adorable to see older!Yako doing her thang. Godai seems to be happier without Neuro around though, haha.

But, for me, I'm still really happy with the relationship payoff between Yako and Neuro in MTNN 201. It was just so refreshing to see this critical stage of the evolution of their relationship, from master/slave to boss/employee to something that more resembles an admittedly dysfunctional friendship. We've seen all along that Yako, despite herself and despite the beatings she takes from Neuro, does respect and care for him, and with the release of 202, we see that the respect and care (for a certain definition of "care") is mutual on Neuro's end. It's like a romance story without the romance. I'd say that I'm surprised that a shounen series like MTNN didn't go the usual route and pair up the main hero and the heroine, but really, if you start at the beginning and get through a few chapters, you'd know instantly that MTNN isn't your father's shounen series - not in the least because the narrating character is female. I'm a Neuro/Yako shipper, but I think I would've been really disappointed if Matsui did have some sort of romantic thing popping up between Yako and Neuro.




Fare thee well, Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro. It was sweet while it lasted. Now if only someone would pick up the tankoubon for English localization!

-Reileen
I run but it stays right by my side