plus ultra

My latest anime flame is My Hero Academia or Boku no Hero Academia, though using the Japanese name makes me feel rather like a weaboo. As always happens when I consume a large amount of anime or manga within a short period, I get hopelessly hung over when there's no more left to consume. In this case, I've decided sensibly to pace myself with the manga (after binging through all three seasons of the anime) so that, like any good relationship, I can cultivate something that will last. MHA at first reminded me of One Punch Man crossed with Alice Academy, but it very quickly transpired that it was no ripoff. The characters are somewhat archetypal but at the same time very well fleshed out, likeable, and relatable. The lessons are simple but profound, and at the end of the day, it's just a feel-good (though lately evil has started to rear its ugly head) superhero manga. Midoriya Izuku breaks the well-established (read: ossified) Shonen protagonist mold in stunning fashion by embodying brains rather than gut. I thought Todoroki Shoto would be my favorite character going into the series, but to my surprise, it ended up being a tie between him and Bakugo.

By a happy coincidence, the MHA movie hit theaters here just as I became an established fan, and so I got the rare opportunity today of seeing an anime movie on the silver screen, as they call it. I was hesitant to go at first, because I was afraid I might find myself in the midst of a bunch of teenagers or creepy anime fans or some unspeakable mixture of the two, but to my surprise the audience was rather normal. It was almost surreal to see families of mostly normal-looking people, including respectable-looking senior citizens, coming out to watch an anime movie. The theater was packed. I had no idea MHA was so popular here. There was the occasional overweight kid with bulging love handles showing through an obscenely tight tee shirt, the occasional nerdy fan boy or girl who tried, with little success, to produce Japanese syllables in a native accent, and girls in hideous makeup cosplaying as Japanese schoolgirls (I imagine people cosplaying as FIITJEE students and have a good laugh), but overall the air was free from the overpowering stench of humans that one often associates with such a crowd. I'd go so far as to say it was rather refreshing being amongst a group of likeminded (in this respect) individuals who were all here to have a good time. It was obvious that everyone was a fan, because audience engagement (to use a polite term) was higher than I'd seen anywhere except at Harry Potter movies. It wasn't even annoying. When the previews ended and the Funimation logo appeared on the screen, I said, "Yes," under my breath, and to my pleasant surprise, heard a dozen voices throughout the theater say, "Yes," at the same time. I joined everyone in applause when the movie ended.

As Nixon might have said if he had been a weaboo rather than a crook, "I am not a weaboo." And indeed, I am not a weaboo, but I've lived in perpetual fear of being viewed as one ever since I learnt what it was. Happily, there's no danger of that happening before I turn thirty - or thirty-five, to give myself a generous grace period -, unless my inclinations take on a markedly more obsessive form. Speaking of Nixon, I finished watching a four-hour-long five-part BBC documentary on the Watergate scandal over five visits to the gym, in light of recent events, and was quite astonished at the fact that Nixon is looked upon as merely a mediocre president today, when he was an absolute unmitigated turd. Ford was an asshat to have pardoned him. I am increasingly convinced that Obama was not only the best president of my time but the only halfway-decent president since Eisenhower.

In the spirit of plus ultra, I shall go plus ultra and depart completely from the opening subject of this entry to talk about books. I'm reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves, who was the five-star author of the translation of Suetonius's Twelve Caesars that Nicky gave me on my birthday last year. It's a fictional autobiography of the emperor Claudius and is really a model work in its genre. As far as historicity is concerned, Graves took certain liberties with facts, but these generally took the form of favoring one classical historian's narrative or biases over another's. So in a sense there is little that is not documented by some historian in some age, except the glue that binds all these facts and histories together into a novel. I like to think Gore Vidal was inspired by Graves's work in some measure when he undertook to write Julian two decades later or any of his other historical novels.