The Goth Club

Racist pun in the title! Wooo! Afterall, this post is a review of a Japanese anime series about vampires (of the bajillions that already exist).

Japanese Cover - Spot the difference

American cover

Dance in the Vampire Bund is somewhere between a political intrigue thriller and high school romance, with a touch of excessive supra-martial arts action thrown in. Of course, as with all anime, there’s the standard lolicon / ephebophile content by having panty shots and cleavage galore from school girls in ludicrously (although not innacurately) short school dresses. DitVB takes this a step further by following along on the standard Poppy Z Brite mantra of it’s ok for them to actually be hyper sexed up twelve year olds… so long as they’ve been dead a few centuries before hand.

Give it three more weeks and the manga series will be out to capture the Twihard otaku market

Essentially, the narrative sees vampires coming out into the open in a way rather similar to that of True Blood. Crappy TV news show appearances.

From there the male lead, Akira Kaburagi, quickly finds his idealic highschool life and somewhat fuzzy memory of childhood (because amnesia is so amazingly common in Japanese teenagers) as the Vampire Queen, Mina Tepes (picture above) waltzes into his life to remind he that he’s been promised to her… oh, and he totally forgot he was a werewolf!

At least she'll never go saggy... because she's a vampire... that doesn't age... *cough*

(Don’t worry, these aren’t plot spoilers, it’s all in the first book / two episodes)

The plot is actually rather well done. Unlike numerous other vampire based anime with teenage appearanced vampires, such as Rosario + Vampire or Karin, Mina actually is into her third century and actually acts somewhat like it, with the exception of her crush on Akira… and let’s face it, we all know plenty of adults that do amazingly dumb things if they think they’re about to get it on with a teenager *cough*

Which is why the consistent “titillation” of the audience with a scantily clad twelve year old body just makes no sense. Cheap panty shots are generally the domain of an anime or manga series that stretching for time and appeal to cover up it’s near total lack of depth or character development.

At least this one is covered and not likely to get you arrested for reading this article

Whilst DitVB characters are somewhat archetypal, the plot line of vampires basically becoming the corner stone of a reviving economy and demanding economic and political concessions to secede from a sovereign nation and form their own (hence the “bund” in the title) are not. The political sub-plots are handled with sincerity and aplomb, easily quite mature in their content and the way that they are handled (assassinations, kidnappings, turnings, etc.) without resorting to cheap gimmickery. Likewise, the relationship management with other clans of monsters.

Sadly, the cheap gimmicks seem to be there to stay for the highschool romance story line. i.e. the must have learning to cook in home-eco class, LOL the vampire queen fails because vampires don’t eat food… Not only could that be seen coming a mile off, it was entirely unneccesary to the development of other plot lines which were far more engaging.

It’s almost as if the author, Tamaki Nozomu, wanted to write a serious vampire story for an adult audience, and was instructed by the publishers to ensure that there was content for teenagers as well to ensure it was a commercial success… which is doubly odd because it was initially published in a monthly magazine aimed at mature adult males. Actually, that’s probably why there’s so many of the lack-of-tit-illating shots.

Either way, it’s actually an engaging series, so queue it up, get some pizza, and prepare for a marathon screening session because this is a damn site better than any of the crap Stephanie Meyer churns out… I hear her next series is going to involve Angels… that sparkle.

For those of you that don’t want to wait for someone to license this title, but feel guilty about downloading content from Pirate Bay, there episodes are currently available for free on Funimation’s Dance in the Vampire Bund YouTube Channel.

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To be fair to myself, if I'd seen the poster for this movie, I really wouldn't have bothered...

At the end of last month, I had far too much bandwidth left and a surfeit of free time due to a bit of a SNAFU regarding the bookstore I just purchased. I thought to myself, what a grea time to catch up on all of those movies that have come out recently about vampires that weren’t written by Stephanie Meyer, and other miscellaneous Japanese schlock horror. So I popped over to the BigPond movies site, as my local VideoEzy that was choc full of Korean porno closed last year, and just searched for “vampire”… This was my first mistake, as the fist movie that wasn’t part of the Twilight series to show up was Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant.

I can only presume there was an emphasis on “ass”, because that’s about as much as was being alternatively sucked or kissed by the central protagonist, Darren. (more…)

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I was reading an interesting article in The Age the other day about how and why  (opinion mouthpiece, ex-catholic ranter and supposed comedian) Catherine Deveny got fired. Oddly enough, it wasn’t over the photo pasted right below this paragraph. Yeah, I’m surprised too.

Hot damn! That sure is alluring!

At the Logies, perhaps the most subprime example of how far the Australian TV industry has its head up its arse, she tweeted the sorts of things that one would normally lean over and drunkenly whisper to the other people on the table. But because she tweeted it, it got out into the public and came back to bite her in the arse. Now I’m not going to bother analyizing this or explaining in greater detail waht happened. Read the related coverage for yourself.

But it did get me thinking that this stuff actually is permanent. It’s still there on her feed, and will be permanently. And then I thought about my friends who have recently become parents and actually already created social network pages for their kids… yeah, you thought it was bad enough when they showed your new boyfriend your baby photos in albums. (more…)

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For starters, no, this blog is not abandoned… I’m just having real trouble being motivated enough to do things for it lately. However, today strikes me as a day for procrastination, so I’m writing numerous articles and scheduling them. My apologies to people if they’re out of date by the time they post.

There are two parts to this review: There’s my rant about why, from an organisational perspective, this is a bloody shambles and could be done way better. There will also be the part where I go on about it as someone that attended it and had a bloody good time. Please keep in mind that one is my professional opinion, as an events manager, and the other is personal, and the two should be treated separately. (more…)

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