The Pelican Brief was (to the best of memory) the first "grown-up" movie my parents took me to see when I was younger. I barely remember it now, except for one character's death scene that stuck with me for some reason. Now, the time has come to read the source material, both to correct my status of having seen the movie before reading the book and to restore canon knowledge to my fan brain.

Spoilers follow for the novel version of The Pelican Brief.

The Pelican Brief is . . . fine. Not great, not terrible. Just okay. My main issue with the story-line is that the only reason it maintains suspense for as long as it does is simply that Grisham doesn't allow the characters to talk about for a good chunk of the beginning—like, more than half the novel, I think. On the one hand, this makes sense, as it avoids the "as-you-know" type of dialogue that we tend to hate around here. But it left me feeling out-of-the-loop. I'm used to characters sharing the same level of knowledge that I do, by virtue of following alongside their perspective. But in TPB, knowing that the characters had some huge clue that I didn't ruined the sense of suspense for me. Rather than discovering clues alongside the principle actors, I was just . . . waiting for them to tell me.

A technical aspect that frustrated me is the way Grisham sometimes starts new scenes using pronouns for a paragraph or two before naming the character who's actually being followed by the action. This mostly didn't matter when Darby was the focal character, since she comes very close to being the only named female character in the entire novel. But when it starts out with "he" I had a big range of characters to wonder about. The professor? The journalist? The FBI lawyer? Another FBI person? The president, or his prime lackey, or that prime lackey's lackeys? The White House janitor or his policeman son? Khamel or one of the other bad guys? When your novel has so many characters, and nearly all of them are one sex, you don't get to open scenes with bare pronouns. It's disorienting!

I'm glad Grisham isn't reading this, because I'm fairly short on positive things to say. He does convey a strong sense of danger to Darby, thanks to him not being afraid to kill characters off violently. I like Khamel the terrorist; he actually has one of the less stereotypically straightforward mindsets out of all the bad guys, and doesn't derive much pleasure from his assassinations. It's just a job to him, and doesn't really bare any ill will towards his victims. His killings are also memorable simply because of how brutally efficient they are. Matiesse is an interesting example of taking a real world character way over the top and not having it seem cartoonish. His wish to avoid contact with people outside of the staff he relies on, to the point where his living space is divided into places he can walk, and places everyone else can week, show how secluded his money has allowed him to become. His thirst for wealth has driven him away from the very land he owns and wants to drill; he thinks he is above the rest of the world, but his plan still gets exposed by people in the society he tried to leave behind, and thanks to the initial efforts of a mere student. It's good symbolism.

But a lot of the politically oriented characters are pretty baldly flat characters, only out to fuel the agenda of their political parties . . . which, okay, applause, he pretty much predicted the U.S. government through the 2010s, but that doesn't make for an interesting read. I also super-duper don't like that Darby is apparently into older men, especially not with her having an affair with her professor when the novel opens. Eeeeew.

Well, short review, but it didn't really live up to the hype for me. What can I do?

—doctorlit is disappointed that not a single pelican appeared on-page. The title implied pelicans would be present. Zero out of ten, not enough pelicans, would not read again.

"You get that pit bull off my [butt], keep him away from me, and I'll forget the pelican spoiler." "You get that pit bull off my [butt], keep him away from me, and I'll forget the pelican spoiler." "You get that pit bull off my [butt], keep him away from me, and I'll forget the pelican spoiler."

Continuing the series of posts that could roughly be described as "Thoth gives his thoughts on various stuff from the Fate-verse why is he still doing this nobody cares," I'm talking about Volume 1 of a light novel nobody's heard of that I actually rather liked and would have liked quite a lot more if... well, I'll get to that soon enough.

If course, LEM2 had my attention pretty much from the word go. When I talked about Fate/Zero, I described Waver and his Servant by saying "they actually ARE the best. I'm not even kidding, it's not up for debate." So an entire series that shows Waver 10 years down the line and all grown up was always going to be of interest, seeing as he's one of my favorites. And then there's the fact that he adopts the role of a magical detective, a grumpy, inadequate Sherlock Holmes with a shy and awkward girl with some quite interesting talents serving as his Watson. I mean... come on! That is so much my thing that I'd almost say this series was written specifically for me.

If not for the fact that it was never actually translated to English officially. I've been reading an unofficial translation, and it is terrible. Just... awful. I mean, it can be read, but there's no sense of style, and the prose all-too-often feels awkward and stilted, which sometimes makes it hard. Then again, the anime/manga/etc community tends to value accuracy over style in their translations, which is something I can never quite forgive them for. Because it's a fundamentally wrong approach, as seen in the best translations, which are more concerned with keeping the spirit than the wordings.

Anyways, allow me to take a break from that rant to rant about something else: Type-Moon's localization policy. Or should I say, lack of one. Type-Moon is a company that is arguably ate the forefront of their industry, and their games are among the most recognizable Visual Novels worldwide. Sure, they don't have quite the same recognition as Phoenix Wright, but they're in roughly the same tier as Dangan Ronpa or 999, games that are markedly more western in their approach.

In my assessment, FS/N is probably the most traditional Japanese VN to get a real foothold in the west (Emphasis on Japanese: we have our own VN industry over here, although whether any of them have reached Fate's level of success is debatable as well), largely through word-of-mouth and its fantastic anime adaptations. And while that's not uncommon for VN-adapted-works, like CLANNAD and Steins;Gate, Fate is notable for its dedicated fanbase, many of whom have actually invested a tremendous amount of time into the source material.

So it's bewildering that in light of the fact that they have an army of international fans that will go to frankly insane lengths to get their hands on their work, even playing entirely untranslated versions of tie-in games, that Type-Moon continues to have little to no interest in international releases for their works. To date, not a single one of their Visual Novels has been officially translated, and it's only thanks to some brilliant work from MirrorMoon and Beast's Lair that we've got translations that are as good as they are. Which is... honestly pretty good, most of the time, especially considering that the original works have an infamously quirky style that can even throw people in Japan for a loop.

The only reason we even got an international release of Fate/Grand Order, the free-to-play mobile spinoff (which is one of... maybe four spinoffs ever to be translated?) is because of a loud and repeated outcry from fans who had to fight tooth and nail to get what they wanted. And even then there are issues: f'rinstance, in FGO, Artoria's name is rendered as "Altria". Now, Artoria is an English name, a female version of "Arthur" because famously in Fate King Arthur is a girl. Altria is what happens when you take the Japanese version of the name (which is altered to account for Japanese phonetic rules, in much the same way that "mele kalikimaka" is as close to saying "Merry Christmas" as you can get in Hawaiian) and translating it literally back into English without Anglicizing it to reverse the original conversion. In short, it's a "google translate" translation: technically correct but ignoring the meaning.

What kind of professional translator would possibly make this mistake? Oh, they didn't. They knew full-well the proper way to translate the name, but Kinoko Nasu, the series' original creator, actually mandated that they use the wrong translation.

So I think it's fair to say that Type-Moon just hates us English-speakers and wants us all to die without having experienced their works.

Anyways, I was supposed to be giving my thoughts on a work here... so let's get back to that.

In the 10 years since the events of Fate/Zero, Waver Velvet has become a charismatic eccentric. He's one of the Mages' Associations's Twelve Lords, but largely through political dealings, as despite a keen intellect and an an ability to analyze and understand magecraft that is genuinely impressive (and makes him an excellent teacher at the Clock Tower) he's all-but utterly devoid of natural talent as a mage, having to resort to far more mundane techniques to get results. Remember that bit in Fate/Zero where he says a more talented mage could have used a far more intricate method to get their results than his primitive alchemy? Yeah, he's still very much doing that sort of thing. He's also, despite his outwards-facing charisma, a total mess in private. And yes, Fate/Zero fans, he still has his T-shirt.

Our protagonist is his assistant and apprentice, Grey, a shy girl who lived a strange and sheltered life before moving to London to become a student at the Clock Tower, and who has some quite remarkable abilities of her own (in fact, Waver makes a point of saying that if there's a fight between mages, he'd be dead long before she hit the ground). She is, as I said, the Watson to Waver's (or should I say, Lord El-Melloi II's) Holmes, serving as an audience surrogate when the narrative needs an excuse to explain something to us, but she is an interesting character an in her own right and I genuinely want to learn more about her.

The story itself is... good. If it was translated better, it could even be great. Hell, I'd say a real proper translation of this actually might work as a viable introduction to Fate for people who don't know the world. Sadly, that's not what we have, and it took an awful lot of my Fate background knowledge to make sense of some of the details of what was going on, although the broader plot was plenty accessible.

As for what the story was, Lord El-Melloi is sent off by his half-sister-sort-of (their relationship is complicated) to answer an invitation to a mysterious castle built by a mage obsessed with Angels. Said mage has just died; the invitation is to the reading of his will. Several other mages have been invited as well, and all of them are hungry for whatever he might have left behind: the mage was particularly well-known for his work in restoring magic crests that had been damaged or rotted due to age beyond the point where others would have deemed repair impossible.

What he did leave behind, it seems, was a puzzle, and whoever works it out gets whatever he's left for them all. The competition is between mages, so it's needless to say that it's cut-throat: mages are almost by-definition sociopathic when the need arises, especially when it comes to preserving their legacies.

Which is when the bodies start showing up.

So yeah, it's a pretty classic mystery setup (isolated location, multiple guests, everyone has a motive, increasing body-count), but it's pretty well-executed all the same, taking advantage of the unique aspects of the setting in ways that I honestly didn't expect. Waver, as a mage, is often more concerned with why a murder happened rather than how: with so much complicated magic being thrown around, the "how" is neither as meaningful nor as easy to discern as it might be in a traditional detective story. Sure it still matters, but it matters an awful lot less when your suspects have almost infinite methods at their disposal and powers that may well violate causality. And of course, alibis are almost entirely meaningless, because it's quite possible that everyone can kill from a distance. Arriving at who from why becomes easier, even in a cast packed with motives.

The atmosphere is also quite suitable. There's a distinct sense of gothic horror all about the book, as well as a lot of drawing on real-world mythology. That's suitable for Fate, which is a pretty cold and cynical setting when you get right down to it.

Anyways, in conclusion to this mess of weak, scrambled writing, Casefiles is pretty good, I just really hope we can get a better translation sometime soon. This is most likely to happen if Ufotable adapts it, so... please. Ufotable. I am begging you. Make this an anime.

Yeah, this isn't a review. Unlike my thing below... my thoughts here aren't quite as collected. I finished watching Fate/Zero about... 5 minutes ago, although it has been a long time coming.

So this is me providing my thoughts as well as helpful answers to questions like "what the heck is Fate/Zero", "Should I watch it?", "When should I watch it?", and "Why does Fate/Zero put Heaven's Feel so far to shame that it's kind of amazing that anyone, even the author of Fate/Zero, still views it as positively as they do?"

Okay, not that last one, it's just that Heaven's Feel is so bad and it could have been good and I can't let it go, but enough about my personal issues, let's talk anime.

Fate/Zero was originally a light novel or a light novel series or something (I... don't exactly know?) by Gen Urobuchi, sometimes known as "Uro the Butcher." I've already said all this, but I'm reiterating it just to remind you that Uro's MO is ripping your heart out and eating it in front of you while you cry tears of pain and sorrow. If you don't want to watch characters suffer, you've been warned.

Now, we're not actually talking about the light novel, because nobody reads that because light novels suck and the ones I want to read never get translated (Hurry up, fan translators, The El-Melloi II Case Files look amazing). No, we're talking about the anime adaptation by Ufotable that came out in 2011 and caused everyone to look up and go "whoa, that Studio DEEN adaptation of Fate Stay/Night was really rubbish, wasn't it?" But the plot's the same.

And seeing as this is the sixth paragraph and I still haven't gotten into it, I should explain what the plot actually is. Fate/Zero is the story of the Fourth Holy Grail War, directly preceding the events of Fate Stay/Night. Unlike the Fifth Holy Grail War, which is a massive clustershpx, the Fourth Holy Grail War is... probably one of the few that was relatively close to what was intended. Or maybe not. It's hard to say. The point is, there are seven masters, all mages, except this time around most of them aren't children or otherwise clueless, and while Kiritsugu Emiya is ostensibly our hero, we spend a bunch of time with every Master in the war and each one really gets a lot of development and fleshing out. We know why they're willing to risk their lives in a war this dangerous, and why we should care.

Also, while Kiritsugu Emiya is ostensibly our hero, are actual heroes are the Master Waver Velvet and his Servant Iskandar, of the rider class. Because they are just... the best, they have an amazing dynamic, and Iskandar in particular steals every moment he's onscreen and at least a few where he isn't.

Okay, that was a joke, but they actually ARE the best. I'm not even kidding, it's not up for debate. I mean, you're welcome to disagree, it's just that there's no way in a million years you're changing my mind on this, I wrote in Iskandar as my lust object on the official PPC census, that is how much you're not going to convince me otherwise.

But jokes and personal foibles aside, the war is very well balanced. Not to the point that you could root for anyone, but everyone has understandable reasons to do what they do. I never felt like I couldn't at least sort of understand a character, or at least the ideals that they represented. Because as always, Fate is all about ideals.

But since we've been on plot for awhile, I'd just like to take a moment and say one thing: This anime is beautiful. Ufotable is one of the few studios that's been able to consistently mix CG and traditional animation in a large-scale way and have it actually look not just passable, but actually good, and genuinely artful. Okay, it does fall down a little bit in a scene or two, but Cowboy Bebop at horrific cutaways to PS2-level CG animated space stations and that's still a classic. And most of the time, this show just looks so, so good.

So now that I've talked up how both amazing and gorgeous this show is, and I am just now mentioning that it's available on Netflix right now to watch and enjoy, here comes the Hard Question: When should I watch Fate/Zero?

Honestly, that's not as easy a question to answer as you might think. See, Fate/Zero is first on the timeline, but it somehow still manages to spoil bits of Fate Stay/Night, in particular major aspects of the Fate route that everyone's already had spoiled for them, and even more major elements of the Heaven's Feel route that you might not have had spoiled for you yet, as well as, of course, spoiling a lot of other minor things, and a pretty major aspect of Fate lore. Furthermore, while Ufotable did their best to make this show accessible to newcomers, the original light novel really didn't, and assumed you were already entrenched in Fate's world and lore. There's only so much someone adapting a work can do, especially when they already have to cut it down to fit into 24 episodes of video. So parts are somewhat confusing and may not make a whole lot of sense to people who haven't already had an introduction to the universe, even though they do their best to give you at least a good chunk of that introduction.

And of course, seeing as Unlimited Blade Works is based on a VN route that assumes you've already had a ton of exposition, it doesn't really give you that either, especially since the adaptation is set up as a sequel to Fate/Zero. Of course, you could watch Studio DEEN's 2006 Fate Stay/Night anime, but that was rubbish and everybody knows it.

So what I recommend, frankly, is one of two things. 1) Either invest the time in reading the visual novel, and then go watch this (and maybe Unlimited Blade Works, because man that adaptation is beautiful even if you already know what will happen), or 2) Just say "to hell with it", bite the bullet, and watch this adaptation. Maybe follow it up with Unlimited Blade Works or something else. Sure, you'll be confused, and this recommendation is tantamount to heresy in the Fate fandom, but you'll get the gist of everything, and honestly, I think Fate/Zero might just be the very best of everything Fate has to offer, so as much as I love Fate Stay/Night, flaws and all, if you are going to watch/read/play one and only one thing in the Fate universe, I think that Fate/Zero is what you should pick.

I will say that your pretty spot on, and it's true that the fate/ series will give Homestuck a run for its money.
I would play the VN, but I need to see whether it's available in Australia.

Kinda funny that you hit the text limit as well, left me a bit confused till I saw your next post.

...Okay, this is super weird. Firstly, yeah, I messed up an italic tag, sorry about that. Secondly, my post got cut off!

I think I hit the text limit. Thankfully, you didn't miss much important. I had a spoiler copy at the end, and also information about how to get your hands on Fate Stay/Night. TL;DR, it's not officially available in the US, you have to pirate it, the fan translation's good, Reddit has a guide to get you going, you can google it, and you may also want to get a walkthrough if you're a Busy Person With Things To Do, though I suspect playing through the proper way might be more fun (I played with a walkthrough myself).

So yeah. That's it.