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[liralen]

Jet, a few months ago, decided that he couldn't watch the second Cardcaptor Sakura season because of one of the kids going "bad" as he puts it, and making all kind of trouble for Sakura herself.

But he's in tennis camp all week and by the time he gets home, he really wants to just sit and watch something.  And on Monday he said, "Mom!  Can we watch Sakura?  Please?!"



So we have been, and while he's still puzzled by why the kid is doing bad things in order to get Sakura to do stuff and get stronger, he's accepting the fact that the kid is actually doing something good in the long run.  And it's been very sweet for me to be able to see the rest of it.  I do wonder, sometimes, if I love Yue and Yukito so much simply because Sakura and Toya do or if it's cause of the pain under the Pretty.

Jet still doesn't get any of the relationship things, at all, but he understands when Shaoran gets embarrassed. 

It's kind of interesting to watch that while I finish off the scanlations of xxxHolic and buy the new manga book as well.  I'd finished off Tsubasa RC in one mad rush, and have read all of what's out of xxxHolic as well.  I'm falling back in love with xxxHolic and the gentle pace and tone of it.  The pain is just as deep and fierce as in Tsubasa RC, but feels more deeply poetic for me.  I just leaked tears for a lot of it and some of it was just for the quiet, close conversations between Watanuki and Domeki and how they work with each other so closely now.

I may succumb to reading all of Fruits Basket this way, too. It's just too easy.

I also read probably 600k (file sizes I think, not words) of Saiyuki fic (mostly by cjceqi and mjj) (cjceqi's ending to the whole mess (go down to If and And) was just astonishingly well-written) as well as ordered the whole first series of the manga in some attempt to get past the problems I've had with the anime disks I have of the TV series.  When intrigued by what I was reading, I picked up both Tales from the Teahouse and the second book of Journey to the West that I'd half finished.  It's always funny to see/read Saiyuki as, basically, an AU fanfic of Journey to the West.  With some of the canon mixed up in order to make a better story, the characters sexed up, modernized, and altered a bit to make them easier to grasp, and all of it shortened up to make it more interesting. I'll admit I keep wanting to read "Goddess of Mercy" as "The Iron Goddess of Mercy", perhaps more because of the tea than anything, and it is only a particular aspect of her.

But getting back on the learning curve has felt good. I don't have the grasp of Saiyuki that I really want.  The details, the feelings I have are more from the classical, implacable, Confucian Chinese Kingdom of Heaven, not the beautiful, vicious thing that is implied through the fics (and I hope the manga). 

But I so do not need more fandoms, especially an at-its-heart Chinese fandom.

Especially since I am finding that I do have enough of a grasp of Tsubasa and xxxHolic to make people go, "Oh yeah."

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Chapter 20 for Twin Souls, and stark_black has been a great help at a hard point of it.  Sadly incandescens machine is kaput for a bit.  But I'm having enough... thoughts... with this one that it may well not get all written before her machine is back.  So it may well be a blessing in disguise.  (Oh, damn... I turn on iTunes and get Johnny Cash's Pain, eh, the irony.)  Twin Souls is going to have about 10,000 hits on ff.net by the time this chapter gets out, so I might as well put in thank yous along with the fact that the chapter is likely to be twice as long as most other chapters.  There's a lot of stuff that I'd rather resolve than let lay.

What's interesting is that by reading other fandoms, before the springkink burst of stuff, I mostly just translated that into stuff for Twin Souls or bleach fics for other people.  But now that I've tasted these other fandoms, it'll be interesting to see if I can go back to just the one.