In between redoecorating a bathroom in my house, worrking on Onna! and getting ready for a talk last night at Gay Activist Alliance of Morris County, I managed to find just enough time to watch this DVD.

I’m really glad I did, too, because I had either missed or forgotten *so* much of what happens in these final episodes that I had to really pay attention to what was going on – and frequently rewind to catch something I had missed.

In other words – it was excellent.

Most of what I had missed had to do with Wendy, whose motivation makes much more sense to me now. But there had still been a bazillion details I didn’t catch – like the pile of books in the very last scene. They only translate one of them, but if you’ve been paying attention to the show at all, you’ll recognize them all. (And if you’ve read the Read or Dream manga, you’ll have a separate set of symbolism for them. Or the line Yomiko spouts at the end, which is translated as “Paper is in heaven and all’s right with the world.” Which made me laugh and walk into the dining room to tell my wife. Who looked up from her computer and told me that the original phrase “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world” was first in print in Don Quixote by Cervantes, not in a Keats ode, as I had thought.

There’s two key things here: 1) Yes, we really do have conversations like this in my house and; 2) The Paper/God thing was a pun. Yomiko made a joke. All’s right with the world, indeed.

Did I mention that this volume was excellent?

There were still many things I wanted answered at the end, but none of them were “Why on earth did so-and-so do such-and-such?” More of them were like, “Hmmm, what will happen when Nancy comes back?”

There are simply so many things I want to discuss with people about this series, and 99% of all of it is spoilers, so you all have to run out and get this volume, watch it and come to the Yuricon Mailing List, so we can gab about it until we’re blue! :-)

The *only* things that were not good were the low episode count and the retouched artwork (which in and of itself is fine, it just means that the artwork was crappy the first time around.)

Oh..and the pencil board was actually pretty good! It’s Yomiko looking all submissive and sexy. Unlike Nenene, Yomiko is pretty much a “good girl” so it fits and nothing in the picture squicks. Of the entire batch, this one is probably the best.

Ratings:

10, all the way around.

Everybody has a happy ending – even the bad guys – the cleverness factor would make Terry Pratchett jealous and the writers win, hands down, for being golden in my book.

No pun intended. :-D