neon anima

I've entered a perfume hyperfixation. Started reading a book Snek got me called Scent and Subversion that details popular modern perfumes. I wish it went more into the history of scents, where ingredients were sourced and how/why they were used, but I'm sure I can find other books for that.

I'd ordered a bunch of new decanted samples right before Christmas. Lamb recommended Dioramour and Parfums de Marly's Delina. I got those along with Oriana, Meliora, and Valaya by Marly, Versace's Bright Crystal, Bvlgari's Omnia Crystalline, and Guerlain's Insolence.

Delina is a current perfume community darling (my hyperfixations usually come with plenty of Youtube content) and it smells like the beautiful, powdered pink princess crown it's said to. Not saccharine, but very delicate, sweet, and doll-like. It's a sweetness that's neither gourmand nor fruit, which I'm always looking for. Call me uncouth, it's a little reminiscent of VS' Lovespell—but grown-up and sophisticated. If Lovespell were a wine instead of fruit juice.

Marly's Valaya and Oriana were much more intriguing to me, though. Oriana is sweet, rich, and velvety. Gourmandish but it doesn't smell like a straight-up dessert. I'm really not about smelling like food right now.

Valaya is ethereal and alluring. It's clean, softly musky/ambery, a touch floral. I find that all this brand's scents round out and blend smoothly together in a way that makes them smell abstract, like their own little self-contained universes. I don't want to smell like food or a flower, or like any thing, apparently. I want to smell like a mood, a feeling, an aura.

Insolence and Dioramour are nice, authentic florals. I like florals, I don't love them. They make me want to lie down in a cloud of them and daydream, but they don't feel like "me" and I don't feel compelled to wear those scents. I keep buying floral samples mostly because want to get better at telling florals apart. I know I can identify honeysuckle and rose, but everything else just smells like A Flower to me, especially when there's more than one.

I bought Oriana and Delina from a Canadian wholesaler that had them for a great price and in a Boxing Day sale. I probably shouldn't have spent it because I'm still drowning in car repair payments and my LEEP medical bills, but I did have a little Christmas money leftover.

i'm going through an anime hyper-fixation, after watching .hack//sign and finding it the only anime besides evangelion i could binge. i couldn't say exactly why except for pure nostalgia. .hack//sign was on toonami in the late 90s and the few scenes i caught where the show jumped between a fantasy mmorpg (fairly new concept at the time) and drab, real-life players left a lasting impression on me.

at the moment, i'm going back and forth between rose of versailles, berserk, and gasaraki.

berserk (ep. 14/25) is one of the queerest anime i've ever seen, which took me by surprise. it's always fun to discover this aspect of a thing beloved by straight men. there are, of course, all the scenes where guts clutches his sword at the hilt near his crotch, dialogue emphasizing how big guts' sword is and how much he loves swinging his sword—which could be visual-metaphor-for-kids type imagery, but i tend to think there's so much of it that it has to be challenging gender with this element alone. once is a nod, twice is a wink, three times is a theme, four times is a critique. or something.

and then! there is so much gender commentary in the characters of casca and griffith. casca presents in personality and appearance as masculine, but the visual cue of her lip color hangs like a barbie-pink asterisk throughout until her more vulnerable side is eventually explored. meanwhile, griffith is prettier than a girl but has all the qualities prescribed to the ideal, hypermasculine man—power, influence, battle skills, confidence.

the last few episodes i watched had me thinking about how pining is queer. desiring, defining others and the self through that desire, fixating and imitating and misguidedly idolizing based on who you're attracted to—queer as fuck! i love the ways casca and guts have grown closer in the last few episodes, based on shared outsider-ness and an admiration for griffith's determination to succeed despite his outsider-ness.

there are so many bits of dialogue you could ruminate on for days. like "the battlefield is a man's sacred ground and you, a woman, have desecrated it!" or charlotte giving griffith the male half of a trinket that's designed to "be attracted to" its female counterpart. in a setting where gender roles are rigid opposites, the show attempts to show the ways people try to define and justify themselves, while focusing particularly on the ways these three main characters attempt to carve alternative paths, knowingly or not.

speaking of queer, i finished rose of versailles last night. it was more balanced in its themes than i expected. i thought it would be a decadent shoujo story with oscar's gender-queerness thrown in as extra spice, but no, this show fucks hard with identity, duty, class consciousness, and shades of morality across a wide spectrum. it's not happy to merely let you hate the frivolous marie antoinette, who's also dignified and earnest, or love the impoverished and revolutionaries who can be as narcissistic and power-mad as the nobles.

don't get me wrong, it's also melodramatic as hell. unlike a lot of melodramatic shoujo, though, what it sacrifices in subtlety, it makes up for in genuine passion and beauty. and almost all the romance is tortured, tragic, or unrequited—full of queer pining!

then there's gasaraki (ep. 11/25) which definitely has nothing to do with gender (yet), but i'm enjoying it. i remember people on anime forums of yore ripping this one to shreds when it first came out. it was dull, too talky, too slow and ponderous. too full of philosophy and politics of war. which all sounded interesting to me, even at the time.

if evangelion asks "what are the psychological implications of teenagers who fight other-worldly beings inside giant, human-esque war machines?" then gasaraki asks "what are the sociological and foreign policy implications of teenagers who fight other-worldly beings inside giant, human-esque war machines?"

it's "slow," but it's atmospheric. the dialogue is heavy but always reinforces realism, which imo enhances the mystical and sci-fi elements. it offers a lot of insight into japanese culture, too. this all could be my oppositional defiance talking, of course.