Category Archives: Editorial

If you feel like dropping Rinne no Lagrange today, try reading a certain New York Times article

I (kinda) read this link I just saw on twitter.

This is it people. This is that rot, this is why I think when anime hits the Western mainstream it starts stinking, a foul smell like a soup of rotten rat and urban detritus, all finely mixed up and left for weeks in a swamp under the humid, hot sun in the jungle of some country in South-Eastern Asia. Anime under these circumstances decomposes, like fecal matter. It loses its actual shape, it becomes mere filth, probably rich in lethal virus, it becomes something absolute different to its usual shape, the one we know, its original form, as if subjected to high levels of ionizing radiation for a long time.

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Student Council what?

An opinion post about ANN and the way they keep referring to animes by the name given for the US localization

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Kill Me Baby and other underrated comedies

Earlier I was having a conversation on Twitter about Kill Me Baby and the remarkable voice acting. I especially like Yasuna and Agiri’s voices (just try listening to Agiri’s Character CD, not because of the music, but the tone of her voice). I really hope their seiyuus, Akasaki Chinatsu and Takabe Ai respectively, get more roles!

So this conversation reminded me of other shows like Nekogami Yaoyorozu and Kanamemo. What do these three anime have in common, apart from being comedies? That I truly believe they have been unfairly underrated. Now, of course some people don’t like comedy too much, others like one type of comedy and not another, but still with some exceptions (such as Nichijou, and let’s not deceive ourselves. Nichijou is remarkably good, but if Kyoani hadn’t be behind it, it might have shared the same fate as other comedies) most comedy or slice-of-life comedy animes are ignored at large. I mean, Kill Me Baby, Kanamemo or Nekogami are really good, better than the attention they have received might indicate. To the point of being masterpieces? Maybe not? However as far as I’m concerned words such as “masterpiece” or “work of art” are just little annoying pompous words and what matters the most is, or should be, the entertainment value, how it makes you feel.

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Would you want your kids to read manga?

Today during my daily walk I caught a glimpse of some kind of magazine or comic book which looked to be aimed at teenage girls. I didn’t really see it in detail, I was just passing by, but the style drew my attention. It was supposed to portray two young girls clearly wearing make-up who looked very modern (stereotypically modern), although to me they looked to me as if they were going to a rave party when a concrete mixer truck crashed and dumped all its load all over their faces. My contact with the non-otaku side of the 3D world, especially when it comes to watching TV or knowing what’s fashionable is limited, to say the most, when not approaching 0. But I’ve seen enough to know that this a style often shown in media aimed at kids nowadays. The model seems to have become the streetwise teenager or the party hard types – I’ve seen that even in the few commercials I’ve seen in the last few years.

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If you call it BokuTomo you are a damn Weeaboo

Exactly, that’s what I said. The other day I was having a conversation on Google+ about the acronyms Haganai and BokuTomo, ways to refer to Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, so I idly googled it and found a pretty bizarre post arguing that BokuTomo is not only plainly wrong (not the Way the Japanese have ended up abbreviating the title), but also a sign of Weeabooism (whatever that means).

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Bitterness: looking forward to hating an anime

What makes me describe them critics precisely as “bitter”? Here’s the perfect example. The other day I read this fall preview where one guy actually gave a list of the anime he was looking forward to hating this season, emphasizing he was going to have a lot of fun doing so. Isn’t this bitterness, doesn’t this mean that you actually hate this hobby, when you are looking forward to hating shows, rather than to enjoying shows?

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Oops, I’m finally watching Rosario + Vampire… despite criticism

Imagine you aren’t familiar with anime at all. There’s a dozen of anime airing at the moment, and hundreds of older anime you could watch. How to decide what to watch? Do you read some random blog, or do you actually pay attention to what a very serious-looking site such as ANN tells you?

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Example of limited innovation: Ookami-san and Amagami SS

Just as a follow-up top my last post on this which was pretty controversial, I’d like to give two examples of what I mean when I say that I like small changes and not radical artistic eccentricity, which is not what usually happens in anime to begin with, but rather what them critics persistently demand, and hardly ever get.

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The importance of genre conventions

In the mythology created by them critics about what we should expect in anime there’s a whole bunch of ludicrous assumptions often borrowed from literary criticism, usually emphasizing that good anime is anime that breaks the mold, that does something radical.One of their obsessions is doing away with conventions

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When you aren’t excited about your hobby anymore…

I think we all have lost interest in a particular hobby at some point in our lives. It happens. But I think there are times when you just have to admit you don’t like it and move on; but there’s also another case: being in denial. When you stop enjoying new things, when you stop being enthusiastic, and you only derive pleasure from criticizing and being bitter about it. When you write more about what you don’t like than what you enjoy.

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