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Issue 7 - August 2015 Jose Sanchez was born and raised in Miami, Florida on March 10,1968,where he still lives today with his wife Aliana. At the age of six, he was introduced to fingerpainting. By first grade, he had picked up his first pencil, but it was not until the summer of 1977 when Star Wars hit the movie screens across America, that his imaginative spark was truly ignited! Like so many other people that were influenced by the cult phenomenon, he was too. So much so, that this led him to seriously explore and develop his talent for creating art further. As time has gone by and he has honed his skills, he has been notably influenced by the works of and artists such as: Stephen Youll, Donato Giancola, Chris Moore, Tim White, Jim Burns, David B. Mattingly and Michael Whelan, to name but a few.

He attended Lindsey-Hopkins Technical Education Education Center in Miami, Florida where he received a certificate in Commercial Art Technology-majoring in illustration and minoring in Graphic Design. Jose would ideally like to see himself one day working professionally in the motion picture industry as a Concept Artist. He had previously worked on a low- budget SF/Super flick titled: "Shadow Runner", designing the individual character's spaceships. "They tend to depend more on technology than they do on their own superpowers". He is also interested in the publication and gaming markets. To one of his many credits, which have included several fanzine covers and one semi-prozine cover and interior artwork.

Also appearing in the official LucasFilm Star Wars Insider magazines: "City Patrol", was chosen for publication in the March/April 2006/issue #86.

“Oil Bath”, “Artoo”, “Pair of Jawas” and “Land of the Rising Suns” in April 2014/issue #148 now being published by Titan Publications and online at starwars.com on the Jan.15,2014 Blog article: Bantha Tracks: Best of the Year, Online edition: “AT-AT Driver” and in the Blog article: Bantha Tracks: Art Galaxy, March 2014 “ Djas Puhr-Settling The Score!”

Much of his art can be currently seen at efanzines.com. 2 Breaking It All Down: The ‘Zine – is edited and written by Alexander Case. Letters of Comment can be sent to [email protected]. If you’ve never sent a LoC to me before, please put “LoC:” at the start of the subject line, so it gets filed in the right place. I also sporadically appear on the Bureau42 Greatest Science Fiction Tournament podcast, available through the Bureau42 Master Podcast Audio Feed, which can be found on iTunes and Stitcher. My YouTube Channel, where the web-series that this fanzine is spun off from. can be found at http://www. youtube.com/user/CountZeroOr Contents Letters of Comment 4 Thoughts on the 2015 Nominated Novels 7 203 – Fantasy in Anime 9 Documentary Review: The Ackermonster Chronicles 16

3 Letters of Comment My apologies for the short length and lack of proofreading, as I’m trying to get this issue out the door before .

First up is a letter from Taral Wayne.

I sent a brief and perhaps flippant word earlier. I’ll try to comment at greater length now that I’ve done the day’s computer chores.

First rule of fandom. Never apologize for a late issue. Everyone has late issues. Having an issue on time is by far the less likely thing.

Secondly, everyone apologizes anyway...

In fact, I’m facing the fact that I’ll have to apologize myself for being late with the next issue of Broken Toys. For 39 issues my hexa-weekly fanzine came out on a monthly schedule. I will probably be so late with issue 40, though, that it may really come out six weeks after the previous one! But I have no social life to speak of, so have little better to do than observe schedules.

The main problem presented by the desire to loc your fanzine is that while I dabble in many of your interests, none are near the top of my list of priorities. Some aren’t on the list at all. Anime, for instance. I discovered it back in the early 1980s. Some bastardized versions of Force-Five and Speed Racer were showing on the local television stations around 4 in the afternoon, and sometimes there was nothing better on, so I’d groan and watch them. One or two years later, the Chuck the Security Guard Show presented Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa” and I was hooked! The show wasn’t really run by a security guard named Chuck, of course. He was a local stand-up comedian who pretended to be the stations security guard, secretly broadcasting himself, his buddies and any weird shit that he found. He did that too. He had all sorts of oddball folk singers, street artists, and bizarre little art on the show.

I don’t know where Chuck got the tape. It was more than three generations old, and the sound warbled terribly. It was in the original Japanese from start to finish, and the picture jittery. Yet it was so different from anything I’d seen before – even wretched crap like Force Five – that I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. I later learned that there were other Miyazaki films, and that they were only available in fan bootlegs in North America. I cast my nets into fandom and made the necessary connections to start collecting Miyazaki’s other films. Each acquisition was a story in itself. Princess Mononoke, for instance, I located in the big Japanese department store in Seattle on a trip there one year. The story demanded $70 for it! That’s outrageous today, and was even more so in the late 1980s. But generally that’s what imported anime cost in those days. I regretfully walked away from it. To my surprise, I found a small Japanese video rental place across the street. The proprietor agreed to copy the tape for me on the spot, for only $20! He even colour photocopies the packaging for another $2!

Years later, Buena Vista made a distribution deal with Studio Ghibli, so now you can buy all the classic Miyazaki dubbed in English – no more Japanese only, or butchered sub-titles! I’ve replaced my tapes with DVDs and think have almost all the Master’s work in my collection. However, I may have missed one or two since Ponyo. Sometimes it is a bit hard to keep straight which work are his, and which are merely another of Studio Ghibli’s directors.

My interest in other anime, however, has declined enormously. There was quite a lot of good stuff that I once enjoyed – Ranma 1/2, Lum, Cowboy Be-Bop, , Bubble Gum Crises, Nadia: Secret of Blue Water. But 4 with a few exceptions, I grew tired of all that – the frivolous humour and exaggeration, the cute, aggressive girls, the fast cars and the big guns grew formulaic. Then came the invasion, and all the lackwit shows based on games. I lost interest in all of it. Apart from Miyazaki, I’ve kept only Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, Akira, and Grave of the Fireflies, I’ve kept nothing.

Except Wings of Honeamise. I don’t know why I liked that so much – I was never able to decide what the point of the story was. It was your mention of the film – or a fanzine named after it that you reviewed, at least – that inspired this concise reminiscence.

Mad Max? I saw the other three films on TV. The first was interesting – an austere, grim prediction of a post- disaster near-. The next two seemed like punk circuses, as though Mel Gibson had been replaced by the Three Stooges and the plot confused with Ben Hur. I have no interest in seeing the new one. Best I say no more.

I can’t really speak about video games, either. I had a couple of adventure type games, early on – The Neverhood, Circle of Blood (about Templars and clowns that leave bombs) – and played them both all the way through. I only got half way through Toon Struck, though. When I was staying with friends out of town, I was bored late at night and played a car chase game of some sort – I turned off the other cars and just drove recklessly around town, crashing into store windows, running over pedestrians, stuff like that. But a couple of hours of that was enough for me. I have never played any other shoot’em up, chase ‘em, blow’em up type game. No D & D, no Sim, no nothin’. I did once buy a copy of The Incredibles for $2 ... but I never installed it and have no idea what it’s like. I don’t even know if it’ll run with Windows 7. There just never seems time enough in the day to find out.

Understandably, this may well be the only loc I write on Breaking It All Down. Maybe if you ever have an article on Fraggle Rock or , I’ll give it another try. But you have to meet me half way here...

Thanks for the letter!

You know, I probably should write something about Fraggle Rock (or maybe The Storyteller). HBO taking on funding Sesame Street would certainly make it timely. Also, Disney is putting out a collection of all of Miyazaki’s work (not just films, but several episodes of TV shows he directed), plus some documentaries and an art book on Blu-Ray. I’m strongly considering picking that up (funds permitting).

Next up is a letter from Lloyd Penny!

Dear Alexander:

Many thanks for Breaking It All Down: The Zine, issue 6. And thanks for publishing some of Jose Sanchez’ works. I’ve seen it with other fanzines, including, I think, Probe in South Africa. Getting published this way will definitely give him lots of exposure.

Way to go, getting your BS in IT. (Doesn’t quite sound or look right...) We won’t be going to Sasquan, so I don’t have a vote. I hope the Puppies’ mess doesn’t affect the awards too much...no matter what, there will be lots of fall out after the ceremony.

My letter...since Frostcon, we’ve done a number of local cons. Ad Astra, Anime North, and we’ve done well. Coming up are ConBravo! in Hamilton, and Unplugged Expo in Mississauga. Both are general conventions, but the dealers’ room in both could be lucrative. Fingers crossed.

5 Never saw the latest Mad Max movie, and probably won’t...anyone remember Tom Hardy from a past Star Trek movie? A young Romulan man cloned from Picard, if I remember properly. More and more, SF movies coming out and we ignore them. Few, if any, catch our interest. We’re too busy writing and creating to passively consume. The movies haven’t changed, but our interests have, it seems.

Can’t comment on any of the anime sets or video games, so I may have to fold it up here. Take care, enjoy Worldcon, and see you with the next issue.

Yours, Lloyd Penney.

I do remember Tom Hardy being in Star Trek: Nemesis. I’ll admit that Hardy didn’t quite get on my radar until Inception, along with an odd little film he did calledBronson , where he played a mentally unstable British convict who liked to get in fights, and which had vignettes set inside the title character’s mind where he directly addressed the audience. It’s available on Netflix Instant in the US – not sure if it’s available in Canada. And that’s it for LoCs this time – to be fair I had a fairly short turnaround, so that’s nobody’s fault but mine.

(That reminds me, I should do an article about SF and Fantasy in Prog Metal…)

Also, one of the webshow hosts I mentioned in my article way back in issue #3 were at ConBravo – Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug was there, and did a live installment of his web show there. Nash Bozard, another webshow host, and frequent collaborator with Linkara, also did a very good keynote speech, which made it on YouTube.

6 Thoughts on the 2015 Hugo Award Nominated Novels Of all the categories of the Hugo Awards that were… affected by the Puppies, probably the easiest for me to deal with were the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, and the Novel category. The odds are high that nobody in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories were consulted about their inclusion in the slate, and it’s entirely possible that while they know that they’re nominated, they are still unaware of the circumstances surrounding their nomination. The other was Best Novel. These reasons are twofold, one for each author. The Kevin J. Anderson Reason Back when I was in Middle School and High School, I read loads of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. All of Michael J. Stackpole and the late Aaron Alliston’s -Wing novels. All of the Thrawn novels by Timothy Zahn. And, also, all of the novels by Kevin J. Anderson. Some of his material was alright. His Tales of the Jedi graphic novels, by Dark Horse Comics were enjoyable, though a lot of their appeal to me lay from the fact that they were set so far in the past of the Star Wars universe that they were almost indistinguishable from the world of the films. From his Jedi Academy trilogy on, his work became less enjoyable. There were glimmers of good ideas there – my favorite being the basic premise of the novel Darksaber, where a Hutt crime boss kidnaps one of the scientists who built the Death Star, in order to build him an off-brand Death Star super-laser, so he can extort planetary governments. However, the execution was lacking. Characters who should have been promising, like Admiral Daala, the commander of the research facility who designed the Death Star, and who had been out of communication from the rest of the Galaxy following the battle of Endor, were very poorly executed, particularly in contrast to the characters that Zahn and Stackpole had created. When reviews started coming in for the Dune sequels and prequels that Anderson had written with Brian Herbert, I came to the conclusion that Kevin J. Anderson was a writer to put on my “to skip” list. Seeing Anderson name on the novels from the Puppy slate that made it into the Hugo’s made it clear that book was one to probably avoid. The Jim Butcher Reason This one is actually easier to articulate. I have generally enjoyed the books in the Dresden Files series that I’ve read. I love hardboiled private detective novels, and I enjoy Butcher’s take on . However, I’ve got so much stuff to read, I’ve fallen behind in his series. I’m on book 4. The nominated work is book 15, and the Hugo packet didn’t come with book 5-14, so by raw necessity, I’m having to give this book a miss. From here, I’m moving on to the books I did read. Disclaimer: I will get into some spoilers. The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu Most of the works to get nominated for Hugo Awards, whether for Best Novel or any other written category tend to be from, for lack of a better term, the Anglophone zone. These books bring a particular series of cultural assumptions to the table that, in theory, most readers would be with as well. The perspective Liu brings to his work is very different. This is made fairly clear by the opening of the story, in the Cultural Revolution. The Revolution itself, and its societal repercussions on Chinese society really drive the story of the book. That said, in a weird way, it makes the twist of the book’s antagonist and their motivations very clear, especially if you are, in any way, familiar with the X-Men. Also, the antagonists’ ultimate goal – to open up the world for by undermining public trust in science so technologies that can oppose their invention cannot be invented. The MMO that the antagonists were using to recruit people to their cause left me also scratching my head at first, as the structure of the game didn’t quite work for me. In particular, players in the game seemed more committed to role-play than I’d ever 7 seen in any MMO I’d played before in real life. The book gave me enough information to eventually figure out how the MMO was working, while giving me enough info to help me figure out how it works. This is probably the most different of the three novels I’ve read thus far. It’s something that I couldn’t easily mentally categorize into one box or another, in terms of the various sub-classifications of SF and Fantasy. I definitely enjoyed it, and if the film adaptation currently in production in gets a US release, I may check it out. Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie Last year, when I was doing my Hugo Picks as a video review thing for my YouTube series (since I wasn’t a WorldCon member), I made Ancillary Justice my pick for the Hugo. Consequently, I was quite pleased when it won. Ancillary Sword made for another, similarly interesting read. While Ancillary Justice was more of a , with a fair amount of explanation of the society of the Imperial Radch, Ancillary Sword felt like more of a mystery. In particular, it’s a mystery that gets into the universe around the Radch, and the political tensions within it – so still political, but with a lot more investigation. As mystery novels join SF and Fantasy in my list of favorite of fiction, this drew me a little further in to the story than just the promise of more adventures in this universe would have otherwise. Between the investigation of affairs on Athoek Station, Breq’s efforts to make contact with the family of one of the crew of Justice of Toren, and the general enthusiasm of Breq’s new subordinate Lt. Tisarwat, I found the side plots much more engrossing than the side plots were in the first novel. The Emperor, by Katherine Addison I wasn’t quite sure how to take this book. It’s definitely a fantasy novel. We have , , and that is clearly magic, not just Sufficiently Advanced Technology. It’s also a story that’s about science and politics, and what happens when people unaccustomed to political power end up in power, and what that means, and how that can lead to change. I enjoyed the book, but I’ve always had the mental barrier, when reading Fantasy nominated for the Hugo, that there is an award for Fantasy novels (the ), and I mentally end up wondering if another SF novel could have taken that book’s place. Still, I did like the book immensely. Further, as someone who has Asperger’s Syndrome (which has been re-classified by the DSM-IV as an Autism Spectrum Disorder), I enjoyed the portions of the book that focused on Maia’s views of the complex and seemingly arbitrary social rules of the aristocracy. At those points I really empathized with the character, as his trials reminded me some of the similar trials I faced when I was younger, dealing with other similarly arbitrary rules of society (how weak is too weak for your handshake, when do you sit down when you meet with someone, etc.) All three books were definitely worthy of nomination for the Hugos.As I don’t exactly know the etiquette on this (speaking of arbitrary social rules you’re learning the hard way), I’m not going to say how I voted, but I will say that if you haven’t picked any of these books up yet, they’re definitely worth your time.

8 Anime 203 – Fantasy in Anime The past two installments of the Anime 20x series have been focused on series that had what described as prerequisites, shows that deconstructed other genres, and thus, while are good on their own, are better with some knowledge of the that they’re deconstructing. This also meant that unless you’re interested in getting into anime, they weren’t much of interest on their own. This installment should hopefully end up being more interesting, as I’ll be talking about the influences and different forms fantasy stakes in anime and .

Domestic Fantasy By Domestic fantasy, I’m referring to works of fantasy anime and manga that are inspired by the folklore and mythology of Japan. Japanese fantasy, as a genre, is what I would consider to be the part of anime and manga that evolved in a fashion closest to how fantasy fiction evolved, the same way thatTolkein, C.S. Lewis, and other writers borrowed from Norse, Greco-Roman, and Celtic mythology to create works which were then built on by subsequent writers. Japanese domestic fantasy anime has historically been based around period works, usually set during one of three periods: the Heian period, lasting from the establishment of the Imperial Capital in Kyoto to the rise of the first Shogun with Minamoto no Yoritomo in the Genpei War); the Sengoku (or “Warring States”) period, when Japan was divided by a catastrophic civil war with no real leader; and the Tokugawa Shogunate, where Japan was ruled by a military government headed by the Tokugawa clan. In recent years, the domestic fantasy genre has expanded into urban fantasy, with characters encountering Japanese spirits in the modern world. In turn, if I was to boil “Domestic Fantasy” in anime and manga to four important concepts, they would be Yokai, Kami, onmyoji and ninjas.

From the film Ninja The ninja part is fairly self-explanatory. Throughout and legend, supernatural abilities have been attributed to the ninja. In reality, the ninja were merely talented spies and assassins who were basically normal people who adapted conventional objects into implements of infiltration, exfiltration, disguise, and assassination. However, “ninja fiction”, as a genre of fantasy in Japan got kick-started by the serialized novel The Koga Ninja Scrolls (also transliterated as “Kouga”) in the late 1950s, written by Futaro Yamada. That 9 novel featured ninja with incredibly fantastical powers, like the ability to metamorphose their body to replicate the physical form of another. In the book, Tokugawa Ieyasu, orders the two most prevalent ninja clans in Japan, the Iga and Koga clans, to go to war with each other, in order to settle a dispute over which of his grandsons will inherit the throne. However, the male heir of the Koga clan and the female heir of the Iga clan have fallen in love, and find themselves caught in the middle of a feud that (in their eyes) serves no purpose. The Koga Ninja Scrolls has been directly adapted three times – as a manga and anime series titled Basilisk, and as a live- titledShinobi: Heart Under Blade. They’re all fairly good, though I’d consider the anime the best of the three. An English translation of the novel was published back in 2008, and is still in print. However, the re-interpretation of the ninja that the novel brought about has inspired myriad subsequent anime and manga, from the R-rated (18-rated if you’re in the UK) feature filmNinja Scroll, to the shonen anime and manga series Naruto, which started publication in the September 21st, 1999 issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, and concluded on July 6th, 2015.

Onmyoji

Onmyoji are a little tricker to explain, as the main works of folklore and the influential works in the genre aren’t available in English. Basically, Onmyoji are sorcerer-exorcist-soothsayers. The art, Onmyōdō, is basically a mix of Taoism, , and some esoteric Buddhism. Think of it like (to steal a metaphor from Big Trouble in Little China) a mystical salad bar, with the ancient practitioners taking the bits that works for them, and leaving the rest. In fiction, Onmyoji are primarily written basically like Doctor Strange. They have mystical Yasunori Kato from powers and usually end up doing battle with other practitioners, or malevolent (), or exorcising spirits. Probably the two most iconic Onmyoji in Japanese anime and manga are a one historical figure who has achieved mythic stature, and one figure who is completely fictitious. The historical figure is , who was a court Onmyoji during the Heian period. Due to patronage of the art (for lack of a better term), by emperors during this period, there were a variety of practitioners at this time, and consequently historical pieces featuring Onmyoji will frequently be set during this period, and some, such as the Onmyoji dualogy of films, feature Seimei as the . The fictitious figure is Yasonori Kato, the antagonist of the Teito (roughly translated – Tale of the Imperial Capital) serialized novels by Hiroshi Aramata, known in the west through the titles of the and anime adaptations of the work that have made it here – : The Last Megalopolis and Doomed Megalopolis, respectively. The novel, serialized from 1985 to 1987, was a multi-generational story following a series of occult conflicts between Kato and the Tsuchimikado family. Kato, an oni in Human form, has been cursed to walk the earth until the city of Tokyo is destroyed, with Kato using his occult abilities to (for example), trigger the Great Kanto earthquake, or manipulating the Japanese military into prolonging World War II so Tokyo is firebombed. The success of the novels lead to a boom in “Onmyoji” fiction, and in particular, what I’d describe as “Onmyoji Urban Fantasy” - stories dealing with Onmyoji facing supernatural threats in the present day. The manga series , by CLAMP is one of these works. Much as the Kouga Ninja Scrolls set a standard for how ninja were written in Japanese fantasy fiction,Teito Monogatari changed how 10 Onmyoji were written. Doomed Megalopolis and Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis both received US releases, on DVD, but are currently out of print. The novels have not yet been translated.

Ukio-e print of Yokai, from the Kami & Yokai Kami & Yokai are probably the easiest part of Japanese fantasy to write about, because they’re the broadest category, and because, as yet, there isn’t one defining work of Yokai fantasy, exactly. “Yokai”, as a term, is frequently localized in anime and manga as “goblins”, but probably a better comparison is with the Fey folk of British folklore. If treated properly and rewarded, they can be beneficial and helpful. If spited, they can destroy you, and they’re fickle enough that they may just destroy you anyway. Depictions of Yokai include everything from shape-shifting Tanuki (racoon-dogs) and Kitsune (fox-women), to mundane objects that have developed a life of their own after being in existence for one hundred years, like clogs, umbrellas, or sake jars. Probably the most accessible collection of stories about Yokai is Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, which is currently in the public domain. There is also the Japanese of the same title, which is available through the Criterion Collection. There was also a series of Japanese (special effects) films released in the US under the title of Yokai , made in the late ‘60s. On the anime front, the most iconic anime based around Yokai has, unfortunately, never been localized in North America. GeGeGe no Keitaro is an anime series about Keitaro, a Yokai boy born in a graveyard, and all his interactions with the humans in the world around him. Often these involve humans trying to pull one over on the Yokai, and getting punished for their transgressions, often quite severely. Other stories involve Keitaro protecting humans from malevolent Yokai. The first two anime series were directed by Isao Takahata, one of the co-founders of Studio Ghibli. Now, Australian readers may have a chance to get a hold of this show – the 2007 anime series (the fifth based on the manga) was localized for the South-EastAsia/Oceana market (which includes Australia), by Animax Asia. 11 “Kami”, on the other hand, is usually localized as “God”, and that’s a fairly accurate translation. That said, comparing the Kami with Athena, Aphrodite or Thor isn’t quite accurate. The Kami are probably best compared with Roman household gods or genius loci – ancestor spirits and spirits of a particular location. Spirits of bigger, more revered locations (like the ocean), would be more powerful than, for example, a river or forest spirit. Similarly, the size and scope of a Kami’s shrine will also effect how powerful a Kami might be. Probably the best example of a film where Kami and Yokai are seen together is in Hayao Miyazkai’s Spirited Away. Both kinds of spirits frequent the bathhouse where most of the film is set.The character of Haku in that film, when his true name is revealed, is also shown to be a Kami of a particular location (not going into details because I don’t want to spoil anything).

Still from the -inspired anime series Hero Tales Chinese Fantasy Here’s where things get a lot simpler. The next sub-genre of fantasy, in anime and manga, is what I’d describe as “Chinese” fantasy. However, the roots of this genre are based on Chinese novels and film. On the book side, the novels The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Outlaws of the Water Margin, are incredibly influential, in terms of the scope of those works, the action, with stories focusing on great men and the armies that follow them, and the often tragic fates of the protagonist figures in some of those stories. The other part is the wuxia genre of Chinese (and in particular Hong Kong) martial arts films – with traveling martial artists, monasteries of martial arts practitioners, and a corrupt (at best) or malevolent (at worst) government oppressing the peasants. And, of course, as an important part of this – very flashy martial arts techniques, including schools with secret techniques only to be brought out at a last resort, and elaborate training methods. While some works have taken more general genre conceits and put them in a modern (Ranma ½) or post-apocalyptic (Fist of the North Star) before, a few recent works of anime have come out that are more directly wuxia inspired. The anime and manga series Hero Tales, from (creator of ) is a great example of this genre. The novels Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit and Moribito II: 12 Guardian of the Darkness, by Nahoko Uehashi also fit in this genre as well. The first novel was adapted into an anime series directed by Kenji Kamiyama and animated by Production I.G. The Hero Tales manga has been released in North America by , and the anime by . The first two Moribito novels have received an English translation from Scholastic, and the anime series is currently available on DVD from Viz Media. Both anime series are available for streaming in the US from Hulu, and Canadian readers can watch Hero Tales through the Funimation’s web site.

Western Fantasy And here’s where things get weird. In the US, the literary evolution of fantasy can be clearly drawn to the Lord of the Rings and Conan as some of the defining works of and Swords & Sorcery respectively. I don’t need to tell you about “Frodo Lives” buttons and graffiti, or Marvel’s Conan comics or and L. Sprague de Camp’s Conan stories. Most fanzine readers are older than I am, odds are pretty good (not to draw attention to the age of a figurative “you”) that you were there, while I wasn’t born yet. However, in Japan... that didn’t happen. Yeah, they got Conan, and Japanese literary societies did translations and studies on Tolkien’s work. However, it never blew up. There wasn’t even the level of fandom Tolkein had in the US prior to the release of Peter Jackson’s films. Heck,Lord of the Rings didn’t get anything close to mainstream attention in Japan prior to Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Yet, there is a tremendous amount of Western-inspired fantasy anime and manga. What brought this on? Dungeons & .

Covers of the Japanese edition of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia - source: http://mystara.thorf.co.uk/jrc.html In an amazing way, the form of Western-style fantasy you see in anime and manga is what you get when Dungeons & Dragons, and similar fantasy RPGs capture the zeitgeist of a culture, without any of the influencing works having paved the way. They also managed to do this without the avenues RPGs spread in the US. In particular, miniatures wargaming clubs simply are not feasible in Japan, due to the close space concerns. Even college clubs can’t really command the space to do miniatures wargaming. So, instead, role-playing games spread through magazines related to , fantasy, and computer games. Additionally, because RPGs were being spread without the sort of “viral” method of spreading tabletop RPGs from the early days (A brings B into their game, B goes off to start their own game, inviting person D), the usual way of learning how RPGs work isn’t as viable. Instead, “how-to” information was spread 13 through “Replays” - transcripts of RPG sessions. These have actually caught on, in a way, in the English- speaking world with the advent of podcasts, with podcasts of RPG sessions (like Yog-Sothoth.com’s Horror on the Orient Express podcast) getting significant numbers of subscribers.

Art from the original OVA (Original Video Animation) Some of these Replays ended up becoming novels and, in turn, anime and manga themselves. Probably the most notable example of this is Record of Lodoss War. The story began life as Japanese fantasy author Ryo Mizuno’s D&D campaign, which then attained enough popularity to be released as a series of novels. I’ve heard rumors from people with connections in the RPG industry that Mizuno approached Group SNE, who was the Japanese publisher for Dungeons & Dragons, with the idea of publishing Lodoss as an official D&D , primarily for the Japanese market. SNE approached TSR, who at the time was of a mindset that if it wasn’t invented internally it wasn’t worth publishing, and turned them down. Instead, SNE and Mizuno developed their own Tabletop RPG system, Sword World, with the world of Lodoss and the larger continent of Alecrast as the main setting for the game. While Record of Lodoss War is probably the ur-example of the ideal tabletop RPG campaign adapted to the page and screen (with the Dragonlance and Midkemia novels running a close second), the anime, novel, and manga series The Slayers and it’s sequel series probably best represents the reality – semi-tongue-in-cheek adventures with characters running roughshod over the countryside, steamrolling every bandit in sight, until the GM comes up with a threat that gets everyone to take things seriously. However, there was one more big shift in the evolution of Western Fantasy in Japan, and that was related to computer and video games, and in particular, the games Wizardry and Ultima III: Exodus. Those games were smash hits in Japan, and inspired numerous imitators, in particular the and games. The Dragon Quest series in particular managed to achieve an incredible degree of mainstream success, to the point that games in that series sell about as well in Japan as games in the Call of Duty or Madden series do in the US. The tropes used in those games in turn inspired waves of fantasy writers and manga artists, particularly 14 thanks to the artists used by the designers for those two games – Yoshitaka Amano for Final Fantasy, and Akira Toryama for Dragon Quest. Amano’s book illustrations and Toryama’s manga art had attained both of them a considerable degree of notoriety in Japan. To put it in comparison, in the US, around the same time, it would be like getting (to use artists from around the same time) Chris Foss to do all the art for your science fiction game, Frank Frazetta to do all the art for your fantasy game, or Jack Kirby (or Steve Ditko) to do all the art for your game. This creates a really interesting situation, where we have what I’d almost describe as a “cargo cult” view of western fantasy. You get worlds where there’s a priesthood inspired by the Catholic priesthood, because D&D has clerics, but the conduct clergy is more inspired by Shinto clergy or some Buddhist orders instead of Catholicism – what TVTropes.com refers to as “Crystal Dragon Jesus”. In more recent years, things have changed even further, with the rise of popularity of Massively Multiplayer RPGs. This has, in turn, lead to sort of science-fantasy stories set within the worlds of those games, with narratives based around the players of those games – with a great example being , which I mentioned back in Issue #5. This is not to say that literary influenced western fantasy doesn’t exist in Japan. However, I’d say that Conan has much more of a significant impact. The novel, manga, and anime seriesGuin Saga by Kaoru Kurimoto, is inspired by Howard, which has in turn inspired Kentaro Miura’s Berserk.

The title character ofGuin Saga As far as what form Western fantasy will take in Japan in the future? With the success of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, we may get a new wave of Western fantasy novels, manga, and anime that takes more direct inspiration from Tolkien’s work, over the games and other derivative work which came later. Only time will tell.

15 Documentary Review: The Ackermonster Chronicles Notes: I received a free copy of this film on DVD for review at the 2014 OryCon. I’ve already reviewed this film for my Webshow – this review is based on that script, but is using the script verbatim. When I was in elementary school, two things happened that changed my life. First, I discovered science fiction and fantasy, through books and TV. These genres of fiction have changed my life, I would think for the better. Second, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a disability on the Autism spectrum, and which was rolled by the American Psychiatric Association, along with several other disabilities into the category of “Autism Spectrum Disorders” this past year, in the DSM-IV. Knowing about Asperger’s helped me understand some of the issues I had dealing with society and my peers, in particular with understanding the arbitrary social rules of life. As I got older, I read more and more of what I (thanks to my frequent viewing of the Sci-Fi Channel) referred to as Sci-Fi. However, as I learned more about SF fandom, I discovered that the term “Sci-Fi” was frowned upon by SF fans, and found myself confused by this. After discovering the term “Graphic Novels” to refer to comic books, I came to the conclusion that the switch had been made because “Sci-Fi” was a dismissive term used by, for lack of a better term, “the mundanes”, while SF and Speculative Fiction were more sophisticated terms. Even later, I discovered that the term was, apparently, coined by Forrest J. Ackerman, and of Ackerman’s role in fandom. I had heard of Forry but had never had an opportunity to meet him before his death, and consequently I ended up wanting to learn more about him. When I ended up attending a panel at OryCon that the director of the Ackermonster Chronicles was on, he gave me a copy of his film on DVD for review. The Ackermonster Chronicles, as a film, is one that, on the one hand, grants one of my desires by telling me more about who Forrest J. Ackerman was. On the other hand, if you picked up this DVD without knowing who he was, this wouldn’t help you a lick. This is, in part, due to the structure, or lack thereof. Most documentaries I’ve seen, from episodes of PBS documentary series like American Masters or Frontline, to current events documentaries like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, to documentaries about SF history and fandom like Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, have a common structure to them. You introduce the audience to your topic, and have various pieces of interview footage about the subject, along with footage of the subject. If the subject is a person, you have interviews with them (if possible), and if they’re a writer, creator, or artist, you present their work. All of this is interspersed with voice-over narration, by a professional if you can afford it, by the director of you can’t or if the topic is more personal (like Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father). The Ackermonster Chronicles doesn’t do that. Instead, the film is pretty much all interview footage, of Ackerman, of SF writers like & William Nolan, of directors like John Landis and Joe Dante, and of other SF fans who enjoyed Famous Monsters of Filmland. The interview clips are structured less in the form of a liner narrative of Ackerman’s life, and more like what you’d get if you hung out at someone’s birthday party, and prefaced each “block” of interview footage with “Hey, you remember that time when…?” It’s great if you know something about the subject. If you’re going in cold, though, it’s not helpful, and the thing with documentary films, is there’s always going to be someone who is going in cold – who just picks up a DVD from the shelf at the library, or scrolls across it on Netflix, and decides to watch it just because. This doesn’t help them, at least not unless they have the Wikipedia entry on Forrest J. Ackerman open on their phone or tablet while they’re watching the movie, which isn’t actually helpful. So, as a documentary, it works great for fans like me, who knows who Forry is, who knows about the Ackermansion and Famous Monsters, but not much more than that. However, when the ability to make that documentary work for many more people than that is just so close, that makes the film kinda disappointing.

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