In keeping with the grand tradition of attempting to ensure a stream of content continues its way to you lovely folks who read this thing, today I'm going to talk about another one of my favorite things ever. Well, two really. It'll make sense, I promise.
Am I going to make this yet another theme week? Maybe I will! Or will I? You'll just have to wait and find out.
Let me preface this by saying that I love Dungeons & Dragons. Ever since I was a small child, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons boxes nestled precariously at the very top of the bookshelves far beyond my reach taunted me. I had no clue what it was, but I knew it had to be awesome. How did I know this? Because it had dungeons. AND DRAGONS. To a six-year-old kid, those things are inherently awesome.
Now I'm not going to give you the full history of my sordid love affair with D&D, and by extension tabletop gaming. Pretty sure that belongs somewhere else, and isn't important to this story. What you should know, though, is that I grew to love reading the Monster Manual. Before I was allowed to play, and before I could find people to play with, reading a tome full of information about monsters was one of the coolest damn things I'd ever encountered. The 2nd Edition book was more than just a collection of stats - it made them feel alive. It told you what kinds of areas the monsters inhabited, the things they ate, and how they interacted with one another. This was a book that felt like an actual encyclopedia from another world, telling you about everything in it that might possibly try to kill you.
That one book spoke volumes about the world it was based upon. That experience, and the impression it left on me, is one of the reasons why I love The Slayers so much.
Honestly I can't remember how or when I watched it. I know it was after I'd been into anime for years. It was one of those things I always heard about, but never really understood. It was one of those 'legendary anime all must watch', with no more explanation than that. It must have been sometime while I was in college, probably around the time Slayers Revolution was going to come out, or sometime right before. All I knew was that this was one of those shows everyone went on about, like Read or Die (which I'd already seen, and that's another love for another time).
The Slayers is basically what you'd expect to see in a high-level D&D game filled with teens and run by a rather clever adult. Give kids incredible power, and hell yeah they're going to abuse the shit out of it! Lina Inverse is a fifteen-year-old prodigy who levels entire cities without thinking. She runs around doing what's best for her, without giving a shit about anyone else.
Yet, watching the way she goes about her business, it's the same kind of feeling I got when I started reading Doctor Strange - everything she did had a sense of purpose that, even if it wasn't explained, followed a set of consistent rules.
In the first episode, after blowing up a bunch of bandits, she goes to a nearby town, grabs all the precious gems she looted (yes, looted), and does what any irresponsible magic user would: tries to increase the value of the gems by temporarily infusing them with magic, and using the dusty remains to maximize the gold she can get.
For all of the goofy shenanigans that occurs in the show, there's still a deep amount of thought put into the background elements. Magic is a very real thing, but it follows a lot of rules that can be difficult to follow. More importantly, magic comes from somewhere. All of it. Good, bad, the power comes from some place and the simple act of using magic can be a bad thing, depending on the source.
Then we move on to the first antagonist, who never really stops haunting the group. In some form or another, he keeps coming back, either in the form of something he left behind, or some revelation about what he was working towards. We quickly learn though that he was a very complex character, and incredibly human. Was he really evil, or had he been a genuinely good person his entire life, despite all the horrendous acts he'd committed? These are questions you get to ask yourself, and I'm sure could still be debated to this day. Our antagonist isn't alone here though - we get to ask the same questions of Amelia (one of my favorite characters), and Zelgadis, who might as well be her foil.
Anyone who has ever played a game of D&D can immediately connect with the show. It's got everything we'd expect, and adheres to a very Gygaxian setup. Heroes go somewhere, tear up the town, get a bunch of cash from killing things, probably get fined for wrecking the town, and get chased out. Yeah they're the heroes but if only they hadn't come to town maybe Timmy's dad would still have a shop. That sort of thing. They're horribly imperfect characters with flaws we can identify with, and whose actions we totally get because if we had those kinds of powers that's exactly the kind of shit we'd be doing too.
I love the setting. The characters. The magic. Every time I watch this show, and I've seen it a few times mind you, I get ideas for new things. It gives me that itch to play or run another game, to put together a setting, or to examine old settings in a new light. It's short, lighthearted, and knows when it's time to push the laughs aside and get serious long enough to deal with real problems, before returning to relaxing with a light-hearted adventurous romp through the countryside.
It's got dungeons. It's got dragons. It's got magic and fighters and clerics and paladins and everything. There's ancient mysteries and demons threatening to destroy the world and things from beyond this world trying to desperately claw an opening into ours so they can invade. Honestly, it's got a little bit of everything.
If you love anime, do yourself a favor. Watch this show. It's seriously freaking good. And there is, of course, a reason I bring it up - another show has recently come around that took the community by storm. You might have heard of it?
Well, if you haven't, you will by the end of the week.
... oh hell I just committed to a theme week again didn't I?
No comments:
Post a Comment