hello 2021

Hey all. Long time no talk, right? I’ve definitely been neglecting this blog for some time now. A lot has happened in the time that I’ve been away. I went to Japan for a month and had a wonderful time. I came home inspired to write and get back into things…annnnnnd fourteen days later basically everything in the United States shut down.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a particularly social person. But we’d come back from Japan missing our friends and looking forward to being able to see them again. We’d been looking forward to the things that we did weekly. I missed Tuesday Shadowrun, I missed Thursday Anime Night, and I really missed going to the speakeasy on the weekend.

We got to do each of those things at least once before the pandemic forced everything to close down.

Writing Woes: character names…FANTASY EDITION

Hey all! Things are going pretty well in my neck of the woods. Got some nice work done on 404 while in the car on the way to and from Door County last weekend. And I’m getting through the short stories for Unfading Daydream! Hooray!

Today’s post is one I’m revisiting. Last time I handled this (in Writing Woes: naming characters), I only really covered regular names.But there’s another beast that rears its ugly head from time to time…fantasy names. Why am I handling this now? Because a friend of mine mentioned that his DM for his Thursday campaign needed to think of 50ish names for characters.

That’s a lot of names to come up with.

So…here we go~

Now With a Paper: Death Note, a Shakespearean Tragedy?

Hey all! Today’s post is a requested post from Arken. They wanted to see the paper I referenced in Death Note: Shakespearean Tragedy? – so I’m actually going to post it. I will say that this is an old paper – I wrote it in 2008 while I was in college, so it might not be the best paper out there. I’m not editing it or anything either.

I will say that I remember it being a trip to figure out how to properly cite anime and manga in an academic paper.

So here’s the paper~

Obviously, there will be spoilers for Death Note from this point on.

Shakespeare in Anime: A comparison of Death Note and Richard III

One would think that between anime and Shakespeare the parallels would be slight.  However, with the anime Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and many tragedies, but mainly Richard the III by William Shakespeare, the similarities are there.  In Death Note, a prep school student by the name of Light Yagami finds a Death Note on the ground outside of his school.  Upon reading inside the notebook and discovering that it allows a person to kill another person with only the knowledge of their name and face, Light decides to try it out and confirm the notebook’s powers.  Once he does this, the true owner of the Death Note, Ryuk, a shinigami, or rather, death god, appears to Light and scares him half to death. After realizing that it does, indeed, kill people, he takes it upon himself to rid the world of evil and become the new world’s God.  His decision to use the Death Note in that manner eventually leads to him being found out and his eventual demise. In Richard the III, the tragic hero is Richard, the duke of Gloucester.  In the play he is bitter towards his brother, King Edward IV, and in general, everyone’s happiness at the end of the bloody civil war, the War of the Roses.  Throughout the play he manipulates those around him and kills everyone who is ahead of him in the line for the throne. At the end, he is defeated by Richmond, who takes the throne as King Henry VII.