Type-Moon Weekly News Roundup: Remaining Sense of Pain

This Saturday post is the weekly Type-Moon news in addition to the regular APB post on Sunday. If you have any suggestions for what to highlight on the Type-Moon Weekly News Roundup drop me a line via email or Twitter.

Mysterious Heroine X Assassination Note: How Many Sabers Are There? (Update #7)

hisui_icon_4040 I decided to finally do it. I would try to catalog all the various Saber variants there are. The fact that there are more and more variants of Artoria Pendragon has gone from a few different versions of the main heroine to a running joke that has had an official term for characters who look like Artoria: Saberface. In Fate/Grand Order there are units whose whole gimmick revolves around doing more damage to Saberfaced characters, certain characters will target Saberfaced characters, and there was even a whole event centered around Saberfaces.

All of this attention is clearly because Saber is a popular character but it has also engendered an equal amount of resentment for all the focus the Saberfaces have gotten. As a major aficionado of Saber, I decided to catalog how many Sabers there are. I went to all the different version of Sabers as well as the different costumes those characters have.

As always a few caveats on any list I make:

1. I am pretty much purposely invoking Cunningham’s Law here. I am almost surely missing an official iteration or two. I plan to update this list whenever I get the chance so new additions are always welcome.

2. I realize some of these are the same character in different outfits. The main thing is that over time some iterations of Saber in costume have become characters in their own right. Lily Saber and Saber Bride are 100% this case in action. Therefore I have just decided to make all different versions their own thing but readily admit that this list could easily be condensed.

Let’s see how bad this really is.

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Manga of the Month: Tokyo Tarareba Girls

Tokyo Tarareba Girls by Akiko Higashimura

Are you in the Olympic spirit like me? Then enjoy Tokyo Tarareba Girls! I’m sure a dramedy about single 30-somethings discussing their lives and loves isn’t the first series that seems relevant to an international athletic competition, but these women have a plan: get married before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

From the creator of Princess Jellyfish comes a hilarious and searing look into the concepts of youth, beauty, love, sex, and society’s expectations on women, especially as they age. Successful screenwriter Rinko and her friends meet-up to commiserate their “old age” and play the what-if game of continuously rehashing their past decisions and speculating on how things could have turned out differently. Their feelings about their failed relationships and their desires to find love are complex. They embrace society’s demands of them while also trying to reject those demands; it’s a tough and true place they find themselves in.

Funny, heartbreaking, a little too on the nose at times, and over the top at the right points, Tokyo Tarareba Girls speaks with authenticity about the actual experience of your 30s VS what you thought it would be like in your 20s. Just because life didn’t turn out the way you planned doesn’t make it wrong, but will Rinko learn this herself by the end?

~kate