Reading Wednesday: Late!

• What are you currently reading?
Anna Karenina - Most of my book club hates Kitty & think she is terrible, but I don't?! She's 15 & things are sad for her. idk. :[
I'm most of the way through chapter 2 right now. I rolled my eyes a lot at the horse-racing chapters, where Tolstoy makes Vronsky riding a beautiful horse a metaphor for this entire book. He couldn't control her fully! Then she did something unexpected! Then she fell & broke her back & he felt bad about it for the rest of his life! It was just kind of like...WELP. GUESS I KNOW WHERE THIS NOVEL'S GOING.

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs - reading this b/c it's this month's pick for beer_marmalade. I wasn't there when the book was voted in, so I didn't know much about it. Urban fantasy is usually NOT my thing (I am so uninterested in fairies/FAE, omg), but I am really liking this so far. Protag can change into a coyote, runs her own car repair place as a mechanic. Is friends with/surrounded by werewolves. I AM INTRIGUE.

I have a subscription to Give Us This Day, & now that it's Lent, I'm trying to focus on that a little more. I really appreciate the diversity of people/sources used to write the reflections in these prayer books. Women, people of color, lay-people, BLOGS, etc. It's just...very welcome.

Lots of news articles about the CIA/Benghazi/WikiLeaks/congressional hearings/etc. I think I have finally figured out a small plot-point in my fic that I wish I would have figured out a long time ago! Anyway, it's really useful to me to be able to clip articles/PDFs that I find browsing the Internet using EverNote, & then be able to read them later, even on my phone.


• What did you recently finish reading?
Runaways/Young Avengers: Secret Invasion - I liked this a lot more than the first YA/Runaways crossover. The plot was more interesting & I liked the manga-esque art. Still probably like Runaways more than Young Avengers, ;_;

Young Avengers: Dark Reign - Hated pretty much all of this, oop. Now I just have to wait for Children's Crusade to come in at the library!

Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio - This is super important in the history of manga! A very influential shonen-ai piece about boys living in a German boarding school. It felt very Gothic. The art was very consistent & quite beautiful. The story sometimes almost overwrought.
It begins with a suicide that ends up overshadowing the entire book. Also content warnings for strong allusions to a past history of sexual abuse.
I'm really glad to see this translated into English & released in the US. It does cost $40, so I'm also really glad that my library has it, lol.


• What do you think you’ll read next?
I'm a little behind on comics, so probably catch up on Angel & Faith, and then go get whatever's waiting for me at the comics shop. Still need to catch up on Batwoman and TMNT.

Persona 4

I'd originally started playing Persona 3 back in January 2012 while I was on medical leave. I liked it, but the game requires characters to shoot themselves in the head with a gun every time they summoned a Persona character. I wasn't in the best headspace, so I stopped playing it because I really did not need to see that so frequently. Maybe some day I'll return!

Anyway, I started playing this game courtesy of the_andy.
Persona 4 is an RPG that takes place in modern-day Japan. My character and the other playable characters all attend the same high school in a small Japanese town.
The protagonist (in my game, "Kevin McHale," lol) moves to Inaba to live with his uncle and cousin for a year. He doesn't know his uncle very well, so things are a little awkward at first, both at home as well as at school, where he has to learn to make new friends.

As I manage the protagonist's social life (through a game system called "Socal Link"), I also work part-time jobs to earn money and life skills (Understanding, Expression, Courage, etc.) and try to do well in school.

A couple of gruesome murders happen about the same time the protagonist moves to town. His uncle is a detective for the police department, but the protagonist and his friends keep trying to solve the murders on their own: mostly because the protagonist has the ability to enter another world through television screens - a place where people are taken during the time when they disappear from the real world but before they are killed.
The protagonist and his friends are able to create and use their own personas to fight against enemies in this world only after they have "faced" their own shadow selves, and confronted some of the true feelings within themselves that they had previously tried to deny and ignore. (Examples: Yukiko doesn't really want to inherit her parents' famous inn; Kanji is bisexual.)

The opening that plays every time I turn on the PlayStation is totally boss, and it's pretty representative of the game. Since it plays every time, it always feels like I'm watching an episode of anime.

The gameplay is much better than the beginning of Persona 3 especially; things are introduced at a slower pace, and things like Social Links and Personas are explained a little bitter, in my opinion. I think that I'll have a much easier time of it whenever I return to Persona 3.

The music is great. The voice-acting is also great.

My character is better able to summon (adopt) and create different personas based on how strong his social links are with the people in his life in the real world. THIS UNSUBTLE METAPHOR AMIRITE?!

Things That Suck
The thing that prevents the game from being perfect for me is its treatment of women. The students' homeroom teacher and some of the boys (Yosuke especially) are constantly making comments about wanting to be with girls/being attracted to girls, and it is always played for laughs.
The only character who consistently refuses to play along is Yukiko, which is probably one of the reasons she's my fave (that and just about everything else makes her a dead ringer for Rei Hino/Sailor Mars; she's the person in the background of the DW icon on this post!).

Another thing that's awful was the inclusion of Teddie, an obnoxious blue bear, as a "cheerleader" in a corner of the screen during every battle in the "shadow world" of the TV. TV will yell at the protagonist when people's HP are low, when someone gets KO'ed, and also cheer everyone when they're doing well. IT'S SO OBNOXIOUS. I get tense during video game fights anyway and the last thing I need is a grating voice screaming at me.
At a certain point in the game, the cheerleader changes, though, thank God.

Future
I'm not finished yet with the game; I'm at the end of August right now.

I tweet about this game pretty frequently whenever I play it! Lately, there have been a couple of great plot twists, and I expect they'll only get bigger/more epic as the characters get closer to figuring out who the killer is (they'd briefly succeeded in preventing the murders, and then everything got blown to shit).

I suspect this will be a game I buy for myself and replay in years to come! It's rare for me to connect so deeply with a video game outside the Final Fantasy franchise.

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If you don't do video games, there is also an anime helpfully titled: Persona 4: The Animation. If you live in the US, I believe you can watch it for free at Anime News Network (&/or Hulu?!) right now. I'm at work, otherwise I'd link.