Whatever, it gave me the opportunity to walk and work out a 100 Ghosts plot which I am now writing. And it bores me rigid, just as the Seimei stories do.
There must be some energy in plotted rational left-brain stories like this, but I can't discover it. Not even the satisfaction of writing a story is enough. The whole exercise leaves me indifferent. There's no sex and no in-jokes involved, and energy for me usually comes from the erotic or from the intellectual joke ("Let's do a triple crossover and not tell people that's what it is.")
Maybe it's because my appreciation of the series is all rational intellect as well. There are very very few emotional/ erotic hot spots to be found in 100 Demons- those parts of a series that resonate obscurely but powerfully, like Hakkai and Gojou's understated friendship and total understanding in Saiyuuki, or Goujun's red eyes and unplaceable strangeness in the Gaiden, or Yousaburo's sacrifice in Phantom Moon Tower. It *is* a cool work, though when it wants to it can be as sentimental as Rainy Willow. There are a lot of stories about finding your family and your real home, for instance. But the handling is so restrained you don't realize that this is actually a major theme of hers. In any case Ima Ichiko doesn't pull the stops out in a way that invites teary or hot-eyed emotional response. Certainly her major characters have little in the way of dramatic emotions either; they're still, rot it, neurotic characters in a social comedy before they're anything else, so they can't do the dramatic things that would make them of interest to me. Interest must be found elsewhere, and just at the moment I can't think where.
