Sweet Dreams

16. A manga/an anime that isn't licensed but SHOULD be.

Oh, now here's an easy question: Ginban Kaleidoscope! I want this anime to be licensed so, so much, but I doubt it'll ever happen. It's kinda old (from around 2005 or 2006, I think), and it's a sports (figure skating) anime, which doesn't seem to do very well over here for some reason. Then again, I never thought the second season of Someday's Dreamers would ever make it here either, yet somehow it finally got picked up (thank you, Sentai Filmworks!), so maybe I shouldn't abandon all hope for GK. (Oh, that reminds me that the second season of Story of Saiunkoku would also be a nice licensing pick as well.)

As for manga, my top choice would probably be Naoko Takeuchi's The Cherry Project, which also happens to be about a figure skater. Hey, Codename: Sailor V and the reprint of Sailor Moon are both big hits, so why not license another one of Takeuchi's titles, even if it is old and features a sport? Second choice goes to Kagen no Tsuki by Ai Yazawa of NANA and Paradise Kiss fame. I still don't understand why it hasn't been licensed, especially since the live-action movie based on it was. It's only three volumes long and by a fairly popular mangaka, so it doesn't seem like much of a risk to me. My third pick is either Appare Jipangu or Epotoransu! Mai, both by my favorite mangaka Yuu Watase. The majority of her series have made it over here, but not these two. Again, they're both short -- three and two volumes, respectively -- and by a popular artist, so why not, Viz?  (Okay, Epotoransu! Mai isn't all that great, admittedly, but one of the male love interests is a Sailor Moon otaku, and that's cool. :P And it's still pretty decent, just not as amazing as some of her other series.)

Hmm, what to talk about...?

Oh! Last Saturday, Mom wanted to check out the back-to-school sale at J.C. Penney's, so we went to the mall. The sale itself was actually fairly disappointing -- all I got was a pretty purple shirt and an awesome ombre purse (kinda like this  one (in silver), which I almost bought instead, but a different style) -- but we stopped by Waldenbooks while we were there so I could pick up the first volume of the skating manga Sugar Princess, which I've been eagerly waiting to come out.

Was it worth the wait? Oh, yeah! I think I'm actually going to like this series even better than The Cherry Project, and I love The Cherry Project. ^_^ It feels like Maya's journey to become a skater is going to be more realistic than Chieri's was. Chieri's talent was that she was really good at copying other skaters, including their difficult jumps. That made her kind of perfect for pairs skating, but I like how Maya's actually learning how to skate, instead of just copying. Granted, she's a bit unnaturally good at it -- she is scouted when a skating coach sees her (kinda) land a double axel without any kind of training at all, after all -- but it's not like she's landing triples and quads yet. Plus, I think Maya and Shun are more interesting leads than Chieri and Tsuzuki were. I'm rather enjoying how their relationship is progressing. I just hope the series will be finished, since according to Wikipedia, it's been on hiatus since December 2006 while the mangaka worked as an artist on a video game. :( Only two volumes have been completed so far.

What's also neat about this manga is that between the chapters, the mangaka (Nakajo Hisaya, of Hana-Kimi fame) has drawn beautiful portraits of real-life skaters, like Mao Asada and dance team Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat. Some look more accurate than others -- Ilia Kulik looks like like a generic manga bishounen to me, but he is a real-life bishounen -- but they're all gorgeous, and you can bet I'll be make avatars out of them. I just wish they were colored. :( I suppose I could try coloring them myself, but some of the costumes are really detailed, and I'm not great at coloring on the computer. (I'm not great at coloring, period. :P) Oh, well.

I've always wanted to learn how to color on the computer, so since I wasn't in much of a writing mood today, I decided to fool around with one of my graphics programs to figure out how. Here's the end result:

I think it turned out okay for my first time. The skin color is a bit too dark, I messed up on the bangs, and the dress was a pain, but other than that, I'm pretty satisfied with it. ^_^

(BTW, it's a pic of Asuka Chieri (a.k.a. Cherry) from Takeuchi Naoko's The Cherry Project, which I finally found scanlations for thanks to blue. She looks a bit like Usagi, doesn't she? ^_^)