Parasha: Howl's Moving Castle, April 11th Reading
On the one hand, I can sympathize with the discomfort while someone's kicking up piles of dust and so forth... but on the other hand, man, ungrateful much? Sophie's cleaning up the place herself, and all the guys (in which I include the demon) can do is bitch? Poor Sophie.
Also, checking the containers to see if they're pieces of girls? *shudder* Active imagination, much?
I do feel a bit *less* sympathetic for Sophie's cleaning though, when she expects to just go messing around in people's bedrooms, too! Maybe that's just a weird personal quirk though. It's hard to quantify just why rationally invading a bedroom is worse than invading the rest of the castle, but... it is! I think so, anyhow.
And for someone afraid of getting chucked out, Sophie's awfully ready to yell at Howl and insult him! Especially when she suspects him of having gnawed-on hearts just collected in his room, and has just found out that he really IS a wizard quite capable of doing magic, thankyouverymuch.
"You'll find every spell of powers has at least one deliberate mistake or mystery in it to prevent accidents." That seems... counterproductive, but I guess then again I'm not a wizard! Well, maybe if they're blatantly easy to spot, to just keep a magician from getting careless, but still.
"He was only an hour in the bathroom the next morning." ONLY an hour. Good grief. Okay, taking an actual bath in a bathtub eats up some time, so I guess I could have given him some leeway on that, but he doesn't even have that excuse since we find out shortly that he has a shower stall as well. Although he could just decide to soak, anyhow. At any rate, I have no idea what I'd do in a bathroom for an hour, other than that, and even regular bath shouldn't take THAT long.
I like Calcifer's convoluted ideas of hints vs. information, and what's allowed. So hints are allowed, and he's allowed to point out when generally he's given a hint, but not allowed to actually say "this is a hint" and... he'd do well as a rules lawyer in an RPG.
So on the one hand, at least we find out that Howl's not doing anything unbelievably evil like killing girls to devour their hearts (if anyone really believed that at this point), but that's about as far as the "yay Howl" sympathy stuff goes, because dude. I mean, I'm sure (I hope!) it's not intentional on his part, he thinks he's in love and all that, and doesn't INTEND to make a girl love him just to break her heart. But yeah, still.
Oh man, the "I haven't touched a thing" is stupid, but on the other hand, you'd think it'd be pretty obvious (given that she scrubbed the shelf and everything) that things had in fact been touched, even moved around.
I do like how we get little touches and pieces about the characters in small subtle ways. We find out Michael's last name is Fisher from a girl at the door. And here, while Howl is tinting his hair and such, we find out that his hair is naturally "mud-colored" and normally keeps it flaxen (at least at the time we meet him), and that Sophie's hair should be strawberry blonde when she's not currently being all old.
As for the aftermath... about all I have to say about it is sheesh, WHAT a drama queen. And how very stupid, considering that he very nearly killed Calcifer, just because he's sulking over his hair being reddish! Okay okay, so it's more than that, it's more about his lady friend, but still. SHEESH. Drama queen.
And... the cat's out of the bag about Howl's lady. Oh dear. Again, poor Sophie.