Okay.

Thanks to the wonder that is Birthday Money, I now have volumes 4, 6, 7, 10 and 12 of Death Note.

Yeah, I decided not to be a weeaboo and bought it in English. I only started buying manga in Japanese because most of the stuff I wanted hadn't been translated; there's a better selection these days, and it's cheaper and better bound so I guess I can actually start buying books in a language I can read as well.

(Though I'm still going to get books in Japanese if the series hasn't been released, hello Weiss Side B, or if the Japanese versions are ten million times nicer - my four volumes of the Japanese Paradise Kiss are frankly gorgeous. Don't much like the series, but the books are very handsome indeed.)

Despite wandering the streets of London for several hours and checking out damn near every bookstore I found, I haven't managed to find the rest of the series. Which struck me as kind of odd, given how popular the series is. Or maybe that's the problem, I really don't have any idea. All I know is that it took me several hours to find about half of it and I had to come home because it was raining and I was tired.

So I've ordered the rest of the series off Amazon (I should probably have bought the whole thing that way, but that wouldn't have been as fun) and I promised myself that I wouldn't look at volumes 4, 6, 7, 10 and 12 until I had the rest of the series, but I am weak and wanted to see my shinies so I - well - I already read them all.

The end result is that I have NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON.

... except L is every bit as awesome as I thought he was going to be and makes me want tea and cake and - um - I appear to have taken a fancy to Near.

I can already tell that it is awesome, though. I can also tell that my initial assumptions that it would not be a series I'd try and write fic for are pretty well on the money. Some stories strike me as so complete in and of themselves that no matter how much I love the characters, I can't at present really see enough openings to make for good case-based fic of the kind I love to write. I tried that when I was in the Angel Sanctuary fandom, and all I could manage was character studies...

I suspect that this is one of the reasons why my love for Weiss Kreuz has proved so enduring. (Also see: Ken Hidaka.)

I know that the characters are, to put it kindly, not as well-developed as they could be and it has plot holes you can comfortably drive a Mack Truck with 'wide load' plates through. I know the original series could charitably be described as odd. But the things that made it such a strange little series are precisely what makes it so appealing to me as a fan writer.

The things that made it a pretty weak series are the things that make it, for me at least, such a joy to write fic for. Weiss Kreuz is a sandbox. Yes, you can still go OOC, and a lot of fans do, but the characters aren't so precisely defined that there's no room for development. The series plotline is pretty crazy, but the series premise gives fan authors a lot of scope to play around, without warping the canon beyond all recognition. It's a very accommodating series that way.

There aren't many fandoms you can say that about.

Um - YEAH. Death Note.

I'm not that bothered that I already know how the series ends. The Internet saw to it that I knew that long before I decided to get a hold of the series. Then again, I'm not exactly spoiler-averse. In fact, I love spoilers so much that when I read novels I usually only get fifty or so pages in before skipping ahead to see how it ends. The only novel I haven't done that with recently was The Princess Bride...

In fact, this image of HONKIN' GREAT SPOILER WARNING was what finally had me deciding that I needed this series. Ah, swimming lessons, you were funny enough before I'd seen the original scene, but now you are even better. Also, there's Silentreaper on Deviantart (I wanted to understand her comics) and someone on a community I frequently visit has this icon. I've seen plenty of L icons, of course, but that one pushed me over the edge.

Anyway.

I also made ramune happen courtesy of a Japanese grocery store (YAY, it’s been years since I last had ramune!) and stocked up on Japanese incense sticks again, since it's six months since I last brought any and I was running kind of low. There's this one new agey store near Forbidden Planet which I always get mixed up with another on the next street which stocks Japanese incense - it's the only store I know of that does. 99.5% of the stock is useless to a dyed in the wool skeptic like myself, but the incense is awesome and maybe some day I'll buy some jewellery there. I don't believe it does any good, but it's pretty.

Plus, I've been a good girl and actually bought copies of all those Guns n' Roses albums I downloaded. Well, it seemed only fair.

... I need a new CD rack for my Western music.

My parents have had a bit of a windfall and are apparently giving me some more money, too, which means that yay, I can have another shopping trip soon! Maybe I'll buy something practical with that. Like a CD rack.

Or a Death Note artbook.

Near + Rubber Ducks = OTP