I'm going to take a quick break from jobhunting and gaming for a while, and talk about something that means a lot to me.

Slayers!

Y'know, the funny thing is, there aren't any anime shows that I'm really interested in right now. And haven't been since Fullmetal Alchemist. The problem is that more and more anime is getting licenced, which includes a lot of stuff that it just... well, crap. Bleach is good, but frankly I prefer it as a manga, where I can control the pacing a lot easier. So when I try to think of good anime, I think of Slayers.

About this time last year, I introduced a friend to Slayers. Unfortunatly the tapes (yeah, they're old copies, back when things were on VHS) were very worn out by this point, and snapped in the VHS player. I didn't worry. They were old tapes, and they'd served me well, each having been watched at least ten times. I knew that I could download them instead nowadays, which is what I've finally got around to doing right now.

Ah, Slayers. I'm a huge fan of fantasy, and Slayers is one of the few genuinely good fantasy parodies. It's a send-up of everything D&D related. It's utterly outrageous, genuinely witty, and just downright works.

It's influenced a lot of my work. In Feral Claw, a lot of the characters' costumes have a Slayers-esque influence, meaning that although they don't look like any of the characters, they'd easily fit in with the setting. Some characters like Calice would fit right in.

It's influenced my RPG games as well, letting me remember that (after years of playing angsty things set in White Wolf games) the games are there to have fun with. As it stands, most of my games are now humour-based.

When I read the novels (translated in 2004, a series of 15 of which only the first six were actually translated and released), the style influenced later works, like Space Warrior Hitachi, which later grew into a current audio play project.

And best of all, when I watch it, it makes me smile.