Japanese Reading Report: 16 February 2025

Another fairly sluggish week, though this time I have an excuse. I was working full time, so my free time was fairly limited, and I wanted to spend time on my weekend putting more game assets together. I was planning to finish Billy Bat by the end of this week but I ended up about 1.5 volumes behind that goal. That's okay, I'll have it done next week.

ＢＩＬＬＹ ＢＡＴ

Following from last week there were two big developments. Kevin Goodman's understudy, Timmy Sanada, is promoted to be the primary artist for Billy Bat, spreading his stories to mass audiences. Kevin isn't bothered by this at first (he was planning to retire anyway), but just as the events foreshadowed at the end of my reading last week occurred (yes, it was yet another unavoidable prophecy) we discover that Timmy can't hear or see Billy Bat, and that his entire act is a lie to revive and spread the Chuck Culkin Billy design , and to spread chaos through the world.

There were a number of points where the story teased the survival of Kevin Yamagata, however that plot point has still yet to deliver on that promise. A bit of a shame, but Kevin Goodman is still a great character, so it's really not a bother at all.

When I think about Billy Bat as a whole, I can't help but see it as a new spin on the common trope of multi-generational epics. Rather than focusing on genetics and lineage, Billy Bat is almost entirely (the Momochi family excluded) interested in people who make contact with the "meme". Kevin Yamagata is not genetically connected to Zofuu who was not genetically connected to his master, and Kevin Goodman has no relation to Yamagata. The only thing they have in common is an interest in art and the good (or bad) fortune to discover the bat during their lives. In fact the mid-story McGuffin, the Scroll, proves this further as its entire purpose was to teach anyone who found it to commune with the bats; it was basically a meme template.

So what I'm saying is that Billy Bat is the world's first multi-memerational story, spanning countless memerations from mankind's start (all the way to its end, perhaps?).

銀河英雄伝説

Once again my anime screen time this week was severely lacking. I think this anime is still pretty good, and whenever I watch it I am fairly engaged, but I just found myself needing to switch my brain off when I had any free time this week, so I didn't get a lot of progress.

So anyway, what happened this week?
There was a big focus on Yang Wenli and the Free Planets Alliance this week. While the story still alternated between both factions in a pretty balanced way, I felt that the episodes fleshing Yang's backstory were the highlights of this part of the story. We also got a better sense of the instability of the society he fights to protect, and it becomes unclear if his work will properly be rewarded.

There was one particularly strong episode on the Galactic Empire side of the story. The main thrust of the episode was that Reinhard and Siegfried had to prevent an aristocratic woman from killing Reinhard's sister, Annerose. Like the Yang episodes, it exposes the pettiness and fragility of the Empire's governments. Though Reinhard fights for the Empire, it's clear that he fights for his own purposes before anything else.