One of the challenges that I face on my treadmill odyssey is keeping my mind occupied. I’ve got books, and a Kindle, and television (which I can tolerate in small doses), but the best thing that I’ve found so far is to watch sub-titled movies or television shows on my little Sony Dash. The Dash looks nice, and having the subtitles means that I can follow the dialog without turning up the sound so much that it bothers the other occupants of my home.
The next challenge, of course, is to find the a steady supply of subtitled shows to watch. The best solution that I’ve discovered–although I will gladly take suggestions for better solutions–is watching serial anime from Japan. Each episode is short enough and peppered with enough commercial breaks that there is always a convenient breaking point if I need one, but the episodes are entertaining and tie together into long story arcs that give me some motivation to stay on the treadmill and keep watching. I’ve even been tempted to watch some of them when I’m not on the treadmill, but this would set a dangerous precedent.
I’ve written before about Trigun, a story that revolves around Vash, a peerless gunman with a heart of gold, a $60,000,000,000 (yes, that’s the correct number of zeros) bounty on his head, a complicated and troubled past, and a brother who has a small army of minions, weapons of mass destruction, and concrete plans to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet except himself and Vash. It’s exactly the sort of story that Homer would probably come up with, if Homer had spent more time thinking about space colonization, donut-loving gunslingers and the difficulties of running a successful insurance company when some jackass is nuking cities now and then, and less time trying to find ways to blame the gods or men who don’t pay enough attention to their wives for every little thing that goes wrong. In any case, there’s enough grist in this setup to keep the mill grinding in a lively manner for about ten hours–probably longer. I understand the books went on for quite a bit longer than the show, but I’ve never tried to find them.
One of the mysteries of Trigun is why it is called “Trigun” at all. There aren’t any characters or anything else named Trigun and as far as I have been able to tell the word never appears anywhere in the script. The answer, I believe, is because Vash has three handguns. The first–and the only one that nearly anyone ever sees–is an enormous .45 LC breaktop that he wears on his hip. (Don’t bother telling that there’s no such gun, or that making a .45 breaktop would never work because the stress on the hinge would be too much–it’s a frickin work of fiction, there’s advanced technology involved, and I just don’t care.) Despite his global renown as a gunman, this gun is often unloaded, broken, in the shop, or packed away somewhere safe. If you want to see what he can do with it, you’ll have to wait until episode 5 to see him actually fire the thing, but it’s worth the wait–the sequence where the faces of the hostages Vash is trying to protect are reflected in the barrel of his revolver when he draws it for the first time deserves some sort of award and will probably be stolen by other directors ad nauseum. The second and third guns are revealed much later, but I won’t spoil it any more than that.
OK, I know nobody ever clicks on the links… so I’ll have rehash them for you. By the time we see Vash actually shoot a gun for the first time, people are starting to doubt that he’s who they thought he was because he just seems like a goofy kid, not a terrifying, merciless gunslinger who kills in the blink of an eye, but then, for reasons that are not germane to this discussion, he pulls his gun as he is diving headlong to the ground and fires five shots before he hits the ground, each perfectly hitting his target, which is the size of a fist and is hurtling past at 120 miles per hour. There is some who believe that the fifth bullet left the gun before the first bullet strikes the target. It all happens so fast that it takes forty seconds of super slow motion to cover less than 1.5 seconds of real time. Thus it is established that Vash has skills.
Similar to Trigun, there’s no clear reason why the serial Bleach is named “Bleach”, except perhaps that the main character has hair color that looks suspiciously like something that required L’Oreal’s deep involvement. I am not the only person who has pondered this mystery; apparently it is a question that comes up quite often, but the creator of the story has never publicly offered any reason other than that he thought the name was pretty cool.
After a few minutes of the first episode, in which Ichigo, a typical teenage boy, banters with the ghost of a young girl who recently died but has who not yet passed over into the next world, the viewer begins to suspect that this will not be a formulaic teenage comedy of manners, but might instead take a different path. Then a demon appears, apparently eager to consume the girl’s fresh soul, but it is foiled by Rukia, who, it can be said with complete accuracy, both floats like a butterfly and stings like a katana-carrying, samurai-trained killer bee, who dispatches the demon and saves Ichigo and the dead girl. I was a little surprised that Rukia didn’t follow up on this introduction by mentioning that she was out of bubblegum, but I guess that’s not part of bushido, and it can also be explained by the fact that she didn’t know that Ichigo, unlike most humans, can actually see her. Anyway, from there things just continue on from there in a perfectly logical manner.
Bleach is a typical love story–well, I assume that there’s love at some point, although I’m still less than half of the way through and the central protagonists are not currently on speaking terms–between Ichigo, an average teenage boy who can see dead people and who is pursued by demons and Rukia, an ancient yet cute reaper of human souls, also known colloquially as a death god. It’s pretty much a rehash of Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is a regular guy, and Juliet is a supernatural entity from the world beyond death whose brother is more or less a Tybalt-like jerk, if Tybalt had a talking sword that transforms on his command into a swirling maelstrom of 1,000 all-shredding steel cherry blossoms. Their relationship is not made easier by the cultural tension between Rukia’s supernatural cohort and Ichigo’s high school buddies, and the fact that they are all pawns of powerful forces conspiring to destroy the twin universes of the living and the dead certainly keeps everyone on their toes, but before you can say “Harry Potter” Ichigo is sneaking off into the spirit world to run errands for Rukia (after loading a spare soul into his body so his friends and family won’t know that he’s gone, naturally) and Rukia takes the form of a human so she can steal Ichigo’s sister’s clothes and impersonate a 15-year-old transfer student in order to hang around with Ichigo and his friends during the day.
One of my favorite things about Bleach is that each named character has a signature hairstyle and look. I believe that a lot of thought went into this, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of sorts to cater to people who want to look like the characters. Pick your favorite Bleach character and do a search, and I’m confident that you’ll find people dressed up like that character and/or who are eager to help you dress up as that character. Be aware, however, that there are no exceptions to Rule 34 and I can’t be held responsible for what you find.
But I digress.
Maybe next time I’ll explain where I was going with all this, but it’s time to greet the dawn by watching a few more episodes and walking a few more miles.
