Category Archives: anime

Saki 08th Mahjong Team

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As a promoter of mahjong anime alongside my comrade-in-tiles Sub, it was inevitable that I would follow the new series, Saki: Episode of Side A (aka Achiga-hen). Taking place in the same setting as the original Saki anime and manga, the series follows another set of girls working together to take down their fellow tile slingers with yuri subtext so heavy that it might as well be called yuri supertext. Despite its origins and the many similarities between the two Saki series, however, they end up feeling quite different.

I know that this has very much to do with the fact that the manga for Episode of Side A is not drawn by the original artist, Kobayashi Ritz, but by Igurashi Aguri of Bamboo Blade. The girls in Achiga aren’t quite as exaggerated in terms of their personal attributes, which lends them more of a well-roundedness to their characters. In a certain sense, this can be seen as quite a good thing, as Achiga does come across as simply a more tasteful, somewhat more subtle form of Saki (though the yuri is decidedly less subtle), but at the same time I’ve noticed that it becomes more difficult to pick and choose favorites compared to the original series, to think of the characters as iconic extremes. As a quick and informal experiment I asked people on Twitter who their favorite Achiga characters are, and while I received a few responses here and there, it seemed like people thought they were merely okay and much preferred that original cast, and I think that says something.

If you look at the differences between the characters of Saki and Achiga just merely in terms of how they show their mahjong, the original cast of Saki just has way more characters with specific gimmicks and powers. If you look at the main crew of Saki, every single girl in Kiyosumi hassomething. Saki has her tendency towards kans. Nodoka is the pinnacle of the “digital-style” player. Yuuki has tacos and an affinity for the East Wind. Mako can access her memories of mahjong matches like a data bank. Even Hisa, who is the most normal of the bunch, still has her easy-to-summarize gimmick of “intentionally making bad waits.”

In contrast, three out of the five Achiga girls have no identifiable gimmicks. The main character Shizuno appears to just have “tenacity,” and even the Matsumi sisters’ abilities aren’t as wild as Koromo’s ability to always win off of the last tile. Taking this into consideration, I have to wonder if Achiga was set up to intentionally show the “common man,” the more down-to-Earth players.

One of the side effects of having less bombastic characters is that, because Saki primarily conveys its mahjong matches through the use of mahjong super powers, and Achiga‘s characters with their softer abilities can’t be utilized as much in that sense, it becomes harder to clearly identify the attributes that will make a character your favorite. It’s not impossible to pick one of course (Sagimori Arata the bowling girl here), but there’s not much to instantly catch your attention. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I think it’s more than possible to make up for a lack of thrilling game-breaking magic, and in fact I’d probably prefer a series which places the game more in the characters’ psychological states than their special abilities (see the obvious example of Akagi), but Achiga doesn’t really add anything to make up for it in terms of the mahjong, and in fact just blazes through the games, making the yuri aspect seem that much more prominent.

I know there’s this idea that Saki is really just all about yuri, but while I think that it’s certainly a prominent aspect of the series I also think that the mahjong itself as a vehicle for simplified character expression played quite a role in attracting people to Saki as well. I don’t expect people to actually learn the rules of mahjong, and there’s nothing that says tenacity has to be less amazing as a character attribute than using a mahjong Sharingan (and probably shouldn’t be), but the degree to which the mahjong gets skipped over or rushed through in Saki: Episode of Side A sure makes it seem that way.

(But don’t get me wrong, I’m still enjoying the whole thing.)

The Most Excellent Depiction of Chihiro in “The World God Only Knows”

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“Average characters” are a dime a dozen in anime and manga. Whether they’re a girl who’s good at sports and bad at math, or a boy who sleeps in class and never attends clubs, whether they’re main characters or supporting ones, the archetype of the “average person” is often taken as practically a blank slate or a convenient neutral point, which makes it all the more impressive when an anime or manga does an excellent job of portraying the average without making it feel boring or rote. Gundam AGE is one such series which pulls this off successfully, and another is The World God Only Knows, particularly with the character of Kosaka Chihiro.

A girl with no particular hobbies or skills who prefers to get advice from magazines and gossip about her latest crush, Chihiro comes across as a character many anime fans looking for larger-than-life personalities might be disappointed by, the sort of girl people associate with “boring reality” whom they might want to avoid in their entertainment. This is made clear even by the main character Keima, himself a fan of the extreme contrasts in personality quirks common to dating sims, who considers himself an enemy of the “real,” and who describes Chihiro as the equivalent of the random character you see in the background while having a conversation with one of the main girls in a game.

What is particularly compelling about Chihiro, however, is how her averageness is utilized in the story to give her more depth as a character. Chihiro, especially as the story continues, knows full well how more often than not her “passions” are anything but, and it is this self-awareness combined with a newly found sense of general confidence which allows her to explore her own identity more thoroughly.

At the conclusion of her original arc which centered around her aloofness and a desire to feel “special,” Chihiro takes up guitar on a whim. Over the course of the series she forms a band with some of the other girls while also improving her skills, though the band does not become her identity. She is not “Chihiro the Guitarist” the way other girls such as Nakagawa Kanon and Shiomiya Shiroi are “the Idol” and “the Bookworm,” respectively, but unlike those characters the guitar didn’t have to be a guitar. It could have been pottery or gymnastics or any other activity, though perhaps her instrument of choice and the decision to take up music in the first place also stand out as decisions typical for an average girl. The important thing is that starting up a band becomes a way for Chihiro to learn more about herself, and to prove to herself that she can actually stick to something and see it through to the end.

The idea of creating a band from the ground up and working at it might suggest the classic theme of “hard work breeds success,” but I don’t think that’s the case for Chihiro here. Just as she is not the Guitarist, she is also not the Rock Lee. It is less about how effort can overcome a lack of natural talent, and more about how the act of making an effort at all can create positive changes in a person such as Chihiro. There is success, but it is success on her own terms, and as Chihiro says herself, “I suck at singing as well, but in my life, I’m always the vocalist!” Chihiro is not only a character, but also an on-going process, and that makes her fascinating.

The Fujoshi Files 43: Core

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Name: Core (コア)
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Kiddy Girl-and

Information:
Core is a maid in the service of Shadow Worker and the “sister-princess” of G-Society (an organization dedicated to restoring to power to those who can trace their ancestry back to the Earth), Letuchaia. In addition to her regular duty as a maid, Core is also tasked by Letuchaia to spy on the other Shadow Workers of G-Society, using a surveillance camera hidden with her glasses. Core cares deeply not only for Letuchaia but also Letuchaia’s brother Pauki.

Fujoshi Level:
While spying on male Shadow Workers Torch and Shade, Core can be seen getting increasingly excited over their close and personal relationship. Though Core is not a full-blown fujoshi, she definitely carries the spark of one.

The Fujoshi Files 42: Alexia Cole

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Name: Cole, Alexia (アレクシア・コール)
Alias: Alisa (アリサ）
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Kiddy Girl-and

Information:
Alexia Cole, better known as Alisa, is a receptionist for the Galactic Trade Organization alongside her friend and colleague Belle. Often spending her free time at work at the Touch & Go Cafe, she gets along with the two maids there, Ascoeur and Q-Feuille, as well as its owner Mi Nourose. Possessing a large bust and a cheerful demeanor, Alisa is in fact the descendant of Liquide Cole, a receptionist for the predecessor of the GTO, and also the daughter of the powerful Cole Zaibatsu.

As a fujoshi, Alisa’s room is adorned with yaoi posters, and on her days off she visits “Say You Cafe: Beyond Loads,” a cafe which doubles as a training ground for male voice actors. Alisa writes BL stories for the purpose of having the voice actors-in-training perform them. Her favorite actor there is “Top.”

Fujoshi Level:
In addition to her custom scripts, Alisa does not keep her love of yaoi entirely restricted to her personal life, storing a giant stash of BL manga behind the reception desk at work.

My Dream Spinoff: Boss Borot the Animation

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On the most recent Speakeasy Podcast, the Reverse Thieves discussed spinoffs/re-imaginings/sequels of series we love, with the caveat that they had to have definite endings, and asked listeners to come up with their own examples. It was actually a difficult question for me at first because what would have been my top two choices, Genshiken and Eureka Seven, are now currently enjoying sequels themselves. Obviously fortunate for me, but still a monkey wrench into the question at hand.

Then I remembered another idea I had some years ago: an anime starring Boss, the bumbling side character from Mazinger Z and his eponymous mecha, the Boss Borot. Sure, we got Shin Mazinger with its more charitable portrayal of Boss wherein he showed some competence and a fair amount of courage, but he was still ultimately on the sidelines. What I would like instead is a show where Boss and his Borot are in the spotlight, and a villain appears that he has to deal with more or less all by himself.

The way I picture it, the villain would be this diabolical mastermind who would always envision the mysterious pilot of that “round menace” to be some genius tactician who can read five moves ahead, when in fact Boss probably defeated him accidentally. It would be a relationship similar to Inspector Gadget and Dr. Claw, or if we want to just stick to anime examples, Boss would be like Yurika from Nadesico or Captain Tylor (though I’ve never actually seen The Irresponsible Captain Tylor so I’m hesitant to make that comparison only on what I know from listening to others).

I’m not really sure if there should be a Penny to provide competent support, though. Maybe his henchmen Nuke and Mucha would be help enough.

In any case, I even thought of the main hook for the opening theme.

“BORO BORO BORO BORO BOROTTOOOO”

-Kageyama Hironobu (in my imagination)

Gundam AGE as Healthy Failure?

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I’ve been enjoying Gundam AGE quite a bit since it began airing, and I think it’s a solid show (thought not without its flaws) which successfully utilizes its main premise of a battle being fought over multiple generations. The second generation hero Asemu is a far cry from his dad Flit when they were similar ages, and through hindsight it ends up highlighting what made Flit unique in the first place. As it turns out, though, Gundam AGE isn’t doing so well in the ratings, and it apparently has failed to reach the kids demographic it was trying for in the first place. At this point, it’s pretty easy to just say that the mistake was marketing to kids, that they shouldn’t have repulsed the older fanbase through the kiddier designs and the like, and that the solution is more UC (or things similar to the Universal Century stories), but I think this would be a huge mistake.

Putting aside the fact that this is not the first time that a good Gundam series has disappointed in the ratings (see Gundam X and even the original Mobile Suit Gundam) and just assuming that nothing the show does now will turn it around, the kind of risk that Sunrise took in gearing Gundam AGE towards a younger demographic is, in my opinion, the healthiest kind of failure there is. Well, if you consider it in terms of profits lost I’m sure there would be some disagreements, but what I mean by healthy failure is that they didn’t have to do this, but saw that there is a potential market from a new generation far removed from the original 1979 anime, and made a concerted effort to appeal to it. It reminds me of Sunrise’s recent hit, Tiger & Bunny, because that show was a surprise hit to even Sunrise themselves, and I have to wonder if it encouraged them to take more risks. Obviously I don’t know if AGE was in planning before or after T&B, but there seems to be this general spirit of experimentation which I’d rather not see stifled because of this setback.

When Sunrise did research into why kids weren’t getting into AGE, they arrived at the conclusion that kids these days don’t understand or know about wars and space colonies. It seems like an odd result, but assuming that this is the problem (or perhaps more accurately that modern kids don’t care about space war by default), the thing I want to point out is that there are ways to work from this information without just abandoning it entirely. If the children of Japan today are ignorant of wars and space colonies, then perhaps one of the goals of a Gundam which targets them should be to introduce those concepts  as if they were entirely new. In other words, if it’s unfamiliar, make it familiar.

Perhaps an easier solution would be to just find out what the kids like and transform the premise to fit the current trends, but I don’t think the solution has to be an all-or-nothing endeavor, even if Gundam AGE may have toed the line too much. Heck, I think looking back at the previous alternate universe of G Gundam could provide some nice possibilities, not so much because of the martial arts aspect, but the premise of having Gundams from various nations each with their own special abilities, which isn’t that far off from the cast of a collectible card game/monster battle show.

Ao is His Father’s Son (Eureka Seven AO)

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Eureka Seven is one of my favorite anime ever, Eureka is one of my favorite characters ever in a show full of incredible characters, and I consider the pacing of the show to be among the best I’ve ever seen. It’s a tough act to live up to, and so with the new Eureka Seven AO currently running in Japan, I wanted to at least give it more than one episode before I started talking about it. Not that I thought that the first episode was bad and needed a second one to “give it a chance,” but my experience with the original told me that this may very well be a show which continually ramps up and whose threads (plot, thematic, or otherwise) are only barely visible in the beginning.

To cut straight to the chase, the main character Ao is clearly implied to be Eureka and Renton’s son. As a result, I feel like Ao inevitably draws comparisons to Renton, but also that the show obviously wants you to do so. The first episode of the original Eureka Seven was all about how Renton wanted to escape his boring, do-nothing town and join the fabulous rebels of Gekkostate, whereas Ao has to deal with the constant materialization of skub coral and the destruction it causes. On top of that, both have parents whose legacies at first seem larger than them, with Renton’s father Adrock being regarded as the greatest hero who ever lived and Ao having to cope with the fact that even mentioning his mother and her turquoise hair on the island garners animosity. The difference between the overbearingly positive reputation that Renton had to deal with and the overwhelmingly negative one that Ao must live with draws an additional interesting parallel, but I feel like it does so while making Ao seem like his own character.

It also doesn’t hurt that Ao’s relationship with his friend Naru is distinctly different from Eureka and Renton’s. It seems to be built on this strong friendship which goes beyond the immediate conventions of the island where they live, and I actually have it in my mind to judge anything related to Eureka Seven based primarily on how it handles its main romance. The reason is that when Eureka Seven was originally airing, during the breaks there would be commercials for the Eureka Seven: New Wave PS2 game where the slogan for the game was “Another Boy Meets Girl.” This of course implies that Renton and Eureka were themselves a “boy meets girl” story, and the fact that their romance was so unbelievably strong supporter that concept. In that respect, and many others, I continue to look forward to Eureka Seven AO. No guarantees it won’t wipe out (see what I did there), but I feel like it’s definitely off to a strong start.

The Fujoshi Files 41: Oshiroi Hana

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Name: Oshiroi, Hana (白粉花)
Alias: Muscle Deka (筋肉刑事）
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Ben-To!

Information:
Oshiroi Hana is a high school student and member of her school’s Half-Price Food Lovers’ Club. Along with fellow club members Satou You and Yarizui Sem, she engages in fiercely violent late night battles in supermarkets around Japan to get bentou for 50% off. Despite her lack of martial prowess, Hana is still able to achieve success through a combination of good timing and a knack for avoiding direct conflict. She is friends with student council president Shiraume Ume, who is in love with Hana. Oshiroi is likely aware of this.

Oshiroi is known online for her BL novel Muscle Deka (“Muscle Cop”), which she populates with characters who are (thinly-veiled) references to fighters in the supermarket half-price food fights. Changing everyone involved into sweaty, beefy musclemen (including the women), her stories tend to involve Satou Saitou being brutally violated by other equally large men.

Fujoshi Level:
In order to garner inspiration for her novel, Hana cuts out and pastes photos of guys’ heads on top of pictures of bodybuilders. This is especially the case with Satou.

Created Equals

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Warning: Spoilers for Aquarion EVOL in this post

Amidst fears that a television series starring the matron saint of anime femme fatales would be mired in an inescapable well of sexism, Lupin III: The Woman Named Mine Fujiko manages to assuage those worries through extremely sharp characterization. Say what you will about nudity or Fujiko as an object of sexual desire, but the show makes it clear that they all have the skills and the smarts to succeed in their mutual world of thievery. Even if trust is at a premium (as is often said), there is no shortage of respect between Fujiko, Lupin, and the rest, and with mutual respect comes a sense of equality.

I’m not about to decry anime and manga as being polluted with unequal male-female relationships, as I can think of many examples to counter that idea, enough so that they don’t collectively turn into “the exception that proves the rule,” but this very idea of representing gender-egalitarianism has me thinking about what goes into portraying such relationships. For example, if a boyfriend and girlfriend each alternate being “dominant,” then is that “equal” or is it merely just multiple instances of inequality? Does breaking things down for comparison defeat the idea of equality between a guy and a girl by putting too much emphasis on haves and have-nots, or is ignoring it a bigger mistake?

As far as recent anime goes, the other show besides Lupin: Fujiko which has me really considering the concept of equality among opposite sexes is Aquarion EVOL, particularly that of Yunoha and Jin, the (literally?) star-crossed lovers who seem to have taken Pixiv by storm. Yunoha is an extremely quiet girl whose very shyness translates into her power (invisibility), and when she meets Jin (an enemy spy whose power is to keep others away), the two form a bond which gradually grows stronger.

Between Yunoha’s diminutive size in multiple respects (in a series full of toned and busty girls, her proportions are significantly more subdued) and her personality, Yunoha can seem to carry a potential problem that is similar, yet in a certain sense opposite to that of Fujiko in the sense that she can come across as the girliest girl, harmless and pleasant and easy to dote upon. Yet, despite the awkwardness of some of her interactions with Jin which can come across as her being dominated (notably the part where he tries to kidnap her out of love so that she can be the mother of his children and save his woman-less population from dying out), I don’t get that sense from their relationship.

While Yunoha can seem weak, and even her willpower and inner strength aren’t particularly impressive, Jin in many ways seems even weaker despite the basic idea that he’s an extremely skilled pilot and a deadly fighter. There’s something to his personality, perhaps a combination of naivete and extremely subtle yet numerous emotional scars, which make even his “domination” seem weak. In that sense, I find their relationship to be a very equal one, but in the sense that the two seem to grow to understand each other, a resonance between similar, yet complementary individuals.

One of the big ideas I keep running into when it comes to portraying a character well with respect to their gender is “the right to be a weak character.” By that, I mean how weakness (mental, physical, emotional, etc.) is generally thought of as a trait which makes one character “lower” than another, and which implies that their appeal is in their “lower” status, but at the same time that weakness can resonate on a more “equal” level with those who perhaps find themselves similarly weak. I think this is probably part of what makes arguments over moe so volatile, but let’s leave that for another time.

(Please don’t argue over moe.)

Mysterious Girlfriend X is Somewhat Different in Anime Form

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I’m actually a pretty big fan of the manga Mysterious Girlfriend X, so I naturally had to check the anime out. While it followed the manga very closely, I still came away with a somewhat different experience (though not necessarily a bad one), and it has something to do with some of the choices they made in adaptation, as well as the very act of adaptation itself.

Mysterious Girlfriend X is definitely a weird concept that just isn’t for everybody. The story centers around a high school couple, Tsubaki Akira and his girlfriend Urabe Mikoto, and their connection through saliva, specifically the fact that Urabe’s drool seems to have paranormal properties related to empathy. As boyfriend and girlfriend, rather than kissing, they exchange saliva by finger. I’ve seen it argued that the series is solely for people who have a saliva fetish, but I think this is really shortchanging the series and its viewers, because the reasons for following it aren’t as overly specific and narrow as “liking drool.” The appeal is more basic than that, as you have this thrilling and bizarre romance between an established couple who share a bond that seems to go deeper than anyone else’s.

That said, I found the experience of watching the whole saliva exchange to be different between the anime and manga in a way I’m not entirely for. In the manga, the drool is kind of a visual motif, drawn very simply, something that while ever-present is almost just like a rendered symbol. In the anime, however, they go out of their way to make the drool glisten and glow, to give it depth and dimension. The real killer is the sound, because in addition to all the effort they put into it visually, they also tried to make it sound as loud and slimy as possible. Again, drool is definitely a part of the series, but I think a little too much attention is given there.

Another thing that makes the anime quite different is the lack of manga-style paneling. This is kind of unavoidable, as anime is a different medium that works along different rules (unless it went out of its way to mimic the panel-based structure of manga), but Mysterious Girlfriend X has really fantastic page composition and paneling, especially in its smart usage of the contrast between black and white. I even used it in my article about decompression in comics. Take a look at the page above, and you’ll see that even if you took every one of those panels and animated them together, it would simply lack the overall structure of the “columns” created by the characters. When you then add color to the film-like style of the anime, it just makes for a different impression.

There are also a couple of more minor things to note. The first is that the elaborate dream backgrounds, which are fully drawn in the manga, are rendered in CG in the anime. A practical change of course, but one which kind of takes away that impressive bit where you realize someone drew all of that. The second is that the voice actor for Urabe doesn’t sound like I imagined she would, though that’s more on my end than anything else. Her voice actor also seems to be quite new at this, showing something of a similar effect to Omigawa Chiaki in her days as Maka from Soul Eater.

I’m still going to keep watching Mysterious Girlfriend X, of course, and I’m probably going to enjoy it. I just wanted to say something about the subtle changes that are present, and perhaps how this speaks to the things that can occur in adaptation from one medium to another.