Week fifteen! In which things start coming together.
And it be poll time again!
Take a break before the next volume?
- No break (Oct 14)
- One week (Oct 21)
- Longer (Please specify)
0
voters
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Two-to-one vote for a break this time. Thud must have inhaled some miasma, and will be dearly missed.
Either way, we stopping for a break now.
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Yeah I was sick for a while so my mindset wasn’t all there. I’m slowly catching up as I picked it back up today. That said I probably won’t join for the next two volumes as I’m visiting Japan next month.
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I didn’t vote in the poll, but the break has been helpful as it’s made it easier for me to catch back up post-holiday…
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Moving on to the penultimate volume!
(Be aware I’ve made a very slight tweak to the stopping point. Ain’t nothing gonna make me move next week’s, though. 
)
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Penultimate reading of the penultimate volume!
Definitely not gonna tweak this week’s stopping point. This is pretty much the last good stopping point for the remainder of the manga, and that includes the end of this volume.
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With this reading, we’re heading into the manga’s final act. We’re on the home stretch now.
And as we’re finishing a volume, time for one last spacing poll:
Take a break before the next volume?
- No break (Nov 11)
- One week (Nov 18)
- Longer (please specify)
0
voters
And a bonus poll! Since the final volume is longer than any of the previous volumes, I’ve also split it into more weeks in my schedule - that is to say, five instead of three (which is, perhaps, a bit more than the relative length of volume seven really calls for). Do we want to change the pace for the final volume? One point for is that we’ve all had some practice with Miyazaki’s style of dialogue, so perhaps we can manage a higher speed. Point against is that we’re about to run smack-bang into possibly the most philosophical parts of the manga, so it might be best to keep it spaced out so that our brains don’t reach capacity.
How long should we spend on the final volume?
- Five weeks (average 44 pages per week)
- Four weeks (average 56 pages per week)
- Three weeks (average 74 pages per week)
- Other (please specify)
0
voters
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Four or five weeks is fine for me!
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For the first time, we’ve voted to go straight on to the next volume, so on we go! The vote on whether to spend four or five weeks was tied at one-all, giving me the casting vote… so I decided to stick with what I already had, albeit with a slight tweak to this week’s stopping point.
I felt like a four-week split gave slightly better stopping points, but at the expense of finishing the series with the club’s two longest single-week readings. Plus, this volume’s second half is packed with Patrick Stewart Speeches* and Hannibal Lectures. So much philosophising. So much speechifying. A five-week split at least gives us a break between two of the talkiest sections.
So then. Let’s start volume seven!
* Except Patrick Steward voiced Yupa, who doesn’t deliver one in Nausicaä, making this trope name a little ironic.
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I have been fighting for “no break” since June. 
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Moving on to the score’th week! In which, uh… things… happen.
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Week 21! Three weeks to go! Take a break from last week’s feels with some hardcore speechifying!
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Penultimate reading. In which our hero rides historic on the Fury Road, shiny and chrome.
Oh, what a day! What a lovely day!
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It’s the final reading!
Requiem plays
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Just wanted to say thank you to @Belthazar for running the club and for all the trivia along the way! I enjoyed it!
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I watched the anime this evening as a follow-on from the manga. I had forgotten both how different the hand drawn art style is from late period Ghibli films, and also how often it saves costs by background characters being completely unanimated, panning across still artwork, and the like (nowhere near to the extent of TV anime of the time, of course, but still more than late period Ghibli). I might be biased because I saw the anime long before I read the manga, but I think I prefer the anime overall. I think it tells a more coherent story with a better ending, and the atmosphere of the opening scenes in the Sea of Corruption is much more impactful with the colour, larger scale art, and the music.
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It tells a more coherent story by leaving out 90% of the subtlety. 
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It’s only 10% cynical instead of 100%.
I’m nearly done with reading 世界から猫が消えたなら so I can finally start reading the last volume of Nausicaa.
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I finally caught up yesterday and finished reading the story. Some parts were pretty hard to parse, but I’m glad I was able to follow through in the end. It’s good to read back the comments everyone made of the finer points, as it’s quite easy to make a mistake here and there.
Next up is rewatching the movie and working my way through other works I have in 2024.
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