Category Archives: anime

May’s Live Mahjong Event: Where a Boy Becomes a Mangan

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The United States Professional Mahjong League is holding another free play event this Sunday, May 16. If you’ve only played mahjong online and live in the New York City area, this is your chance to play against live opponents in Japanese-style mahjong aka “riichi” mahjong. Saki was right when the show said that playing on the internet and playing live are subtly different due to the external factors, and it’s an experience I recommend anyone try out. And it’s free!

Sadly I can’t make it this time around either, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying yourself.

Now if you’re really not sure whether you should be hanging with the “big boys,” no one is particularly amazing at mahjong to the extent that you’ll feel helpless. This is indeed one of the strengths of mahjong. You might see me talking about the game pretty often now, but realize that I’m not good at the game. It would be a stretch to call me “intermediate.” But I still win some sweet hands and have lots of fun. If you have experience playing at all, even if it’s just a little, you’ll likely do fine, and no one will admonish you for forgetting some rules.

But if you’re really worried about not knowing enough to play, or you know so little that you’d prefer to read “Baby’s First Riichi Mahjong,” then take heart in the fact that they’re also holding a tutorial event for absolute beginners on Sunday, May 23. The rules can seem quite overwhelming, but actually mahjong is a game you can ease yourself into with just a bit of patience.

The location for both events is:

Simple Studios
134 W. 29th Street (b/t 6th and 7th)
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001

Don’t forget to RSVP on the forums, particularly with the tutorial session, as space is limited.

Wait, Where Am I?

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The other day a startling realization hit me.

While I’m still watching anime as I always do, my intake of older and classic anime has been on the wane as of late. When I look at the shows I’m currently watching, Heartcatch Precure, Durarara!, Giant Killing, among others, they’re largely new-fangled series. This solution is as simple as watching older series, but my concern lies more in the possibility that I was getting caught in the seasonal trap without realizing it, that I was starting to get new-series tunnel vision. While I think it’s important to watch what’s new, I don’t want my perspective too shaped by simply what is there “now.”

I also realized easy it is for anyone to get caught in the seasonal trap if you’re an internet-based anime fan. Its ease of access is like a warm embrace and it’s all too simple to just let it happen.

Though actually, I have been getting my “classic content” through manga. I’m on an early shoujo kick, picking up volumes of Attack No.1, reading Swan, getting all of Rose of Versailles, but seemingly at the expense of reading newer titles. It’s like with anime I’ve planted myself with the present, and with manga I’m entrenched in the past. It’s not quite what I’d call a “routine,” but before I knew it these had become my fandom habits.

I’m perfectly aware that there’s nothing really “wrong” with the way I’m doing things, but it’s still something I’d like to change before I get too comfortable with it. After all,  “Running water never grows stale.”

I’d Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill For That Ability

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Heiwajima Shizuo of Durarara! is a man of many traits. He’s a berserker. He’s a man who wants to be a pacifist but can’t seem to get it down. There’s one quality in particular that I want to focus on however, and that is how unusually perceptive Shizuo can be.

All of us to some extent set up walls and barriers in our lives. Sometimes they’re to keep people out, other times we reinforce them and build upon them and even decorate them to the extent that we expect others to see us as these walls. But Shizuo’s personality is such that he sees the “truth” more readily, as if his senses are more animal than human. Wall-building is not a trait he’s familiar with, so he ignores it entirely. He’s naturally attuned to human nature, even if he isn’t aware of it.

Shizuo’s perceptiveness reminded me of  another show I’d been watching alongside DRRR! last season, Kimi ni Todoke. In it are two characters who could best be described as “simple-minded,” but it’s that simple-mindedness that allows them to sense deception or the absence of true honesty, much like Shizuo.

The first is Chizuru, the tomboyish friend of the main character Sawako.

The second is Pin, the loud-mouthed, belligerent teacher.

In both cases, you can see how much finely-tuned their instincts are to seeing past the elaborately constructed walls of human life when they interact with the character Kurumi. Kurumi is seen as beautiful and sweet, but her looks hide a manipulative personality. When Kurumi tries to turn on the charm with both Chizu and Pin, they can’t help but feel that something is amiss, even if they can’t pinpoint it. They can see the walls for what they are.

Personally speaking, I really wish I had a trait like this. Or maybe I do, and I don’t realize it. Or maybe I don’t, and I’m just kidding myself.

Well They Do Say That Presentation Matters

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A recent episode of Iron Chef America had veteran Masaharu Morimoto taking on Chopped judge Geoffrey Zakarian in Battle Sardine. Morimoto, whose specialty is not only Japanese food but fish in particular provided a formidable challenge for Zakarian. During the tasting portion of the competition, Morimoto served “sardine tacos,” held together with what appeared to be colorful paper. Upon closer inspection however, the paper started to look a lot more familiar.


Milky Rose?!

Ladies and gentlemen, the US TV debut of Yes! Pretty Cure 5 Go Go!

Now as to why in the world Iron Chef Japanese would be incorporating a popular mahou shoujo series into his plating, I don’t have an actual idea, but I do have a few theories, some more outlandish than others.

Perhaps he has a daughter who’s a big fan of Precure, and this is his clever nod to her. Or perhaps Iron Chef Morimoto is himself a fan of the series. It could also possibly be that he chose it because the girls of Precure have colors which match well with the sardine tacos.

Or maybe he just grabbed whatever he could and this was the result.

Still, I think a lot more food could stand to be served on top of anime.

I Have the Answer. What’s the Solution?

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Do we really know why anything is popular?

Whenever an anime or manga is super popular, be it with “casual” fans or super hardcore 4channers or die-hard bloggers or anywhere in between, someone eventually decides to ask, “Why is this popular?” The question can be interpreted positively, encouraging people to express why they like that work so much. It can also be interpreted negatively, giving way to sweeping generalizations that categorize a work’s fans in a particularly unattractive light.

As a quick demonstration: Why is Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu so popular?

We can posit why Gundam isn’t popular “here,” or why Captain Tsubasa is popular “there,” but after a while I just have to wonder how often we’re putting the cart before the horse, completely blinded by hindsight and trying to draw conclusions from something most people might have trouble expressing in the first place, even if you asked every Naruto fan why they like Naruto so much. And in a way, when we accumulate more knowledge and experience in anime, we paradoxically move both closer and further away from the truth.

Not saying I don’t enjoy the speculation, nor am I telling people to stop, but popularity (or lack thereof) can be such a difficult entity to grasp and manipulate that I’m sure we’re all wrong more often than not.

Also, I know this doesn’t just apply to anime or manga or even fiction. Asking why stuff is successfully popular is applicable to just about any topic where  group enjoys or uses something.

No, really, why is  Baka Test so popular? I liked it well enough because of the way it embraced the otaku/moe/anime humor and really ran it to some logical extremes, but why is it considered the #1 light novel series of 2009?

(Ooohhhohohohoho…)

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In a dream I found myself watching an episode of a Slayers anime. It wasn’t an OVA or a movie as it featured the TV series cast, though it did make a reference to the OVAs. In the one scene I “watched,” an unidentified character who knew Lina Inverse’s history notices a sleeping Lina and decides to mess with her. She gets close to Lina and then whispers a Naga-style laugh into her ear. No effect the first time, so she tries it a little louder, which startles Lina out of her slumber and puts her on edge.

When I woke up, I thought about my own history as a Slayers fan and recalled that, despite my anticipation I had never finished Slayers Revolution or even watched its sequel, Slayers Evolution-R. I laid there thinking that, for someone who once prided himself on having watched as much Slayers as he possibly could, this was quite a disappointment that needed immediate rectifying.

Then I checked Hulu and saw that both series are on there, and I thought, “This is a pretty good time to be an anime fan.”

So Then Maybe Sesshoumaru is Darkseid?

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Warning: Inuyasha Spoilers

Despite the fact that Inuyasha: The Final Chapter ended recently, I have not seen very many people talking about it. I know that can’t possibly be the trend across anime fandom as a whole, though. It’s Inuyasha after all, the show so popular it all but defined Adult Swim anime alongside Cowboy Bebop.

I already know about the ending from having read the manga, but remembering just how long and encompassing Inuyasha is, and how much detail that is ideal for a fan-made Wikipedia about the subject exists, I took a look over at the Inuyasha Wiki, reading up on what swords Sesshoumaru uses, what the heck people’s attacks are, as well as the character who deservedly has one of the longest and most complicated entries on the Wiki, Naraku.

As I read Naraku’s entry, his description started to remind me of another famous villain. He’s powered by negativity. His power is seemingly infinite. He increases his power and transforms thoughout the series. He has a vast army of demons under his control which he can absorb in order to regenerate and heal (which the heroes manage to turn against him). At the very end, in a desperate situation, he switches to a strategy of pure revenge and destruction, abandoning his tendency towards elaborate scheming.

Naraku is like the manga equivalent of DC Comics’ Anti-Monitor.

The End of the Otaku Diaries, the Beginning of More?

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In their concluding post of the Otaku Diaries, Hisui and Narutaki of the Reverse Thieves reflect back on their experiment: the ups, the downs, what could have been done differently, what they learned, and what they’d hope to learn in the future should they take up the task again. I hope to see them take a swing at it at least one more time, but that’s up to them.

One of the really remarkable things about the Otaku Diaries was that it was a concerted effort by the Reverse Thieves to learn about their fellow fans, and to do so by collecting information in a structured manner. With anime blogging (or hell, writing blogging in general), it’s very easy to play fast and loose with facts and data, and to write based primarily on feel (I am guilty of doing both), so it gives me a degree of joy to see bloggers who actually want to discover more about their peers instead of pigeon-holing them in stereotypes or talking in too-broad strokes. The project wasn’t perfect, as they’d themselved admit, but it opened up new possibilities.

Obviously I’m not telling people they can only write about anime and fandom once they’ve gathered enough information on the subject, but I’d like to see others encouraged to try similar endeavors, to really reach out and try to learn about your comrades-in-arms. I could stand to do more of that myself.

On a final note, I think they’re onto something with the idea of interviewing people over Skype instead of simply writing surveys. Provided they can make the conversation easy-going (and I know they can), it would allow a lot more otaku to open up, and would also make the conversation more free-flowing.

Worth Thousands Upon Thousands of Words

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This picture is here for a reason.

The Aniblog Tourney has me looking at a whole lot more blogs than I normally do, and as I check out one after the other, I’ve noticed a recurring blogging style that many sites follow, and I would like to figure out where it came from.


I also have no recollection where this image is from.

The style is defined by its frequent back-and-forth switches between between text and anime-related images. Sometimes it involves screenshots, but more often the pictures are high-resolution fanart with some kind of humorous caption underneath.  At their most extreme, images and text will alternate at a frequency of one image per paragraph.


Like so.

Now it’s easy to point fingers at “episodic blogs,” but that’s a little different from what I’m talking about, as a glut of screenshots is practically par for the course for an episode review. Also, many times they’re placed at the beginning, with a summary and then opinions following. This 1:1 paragraph to text ratio seems far more common with editorial-style anime blogs.

So I’d like to know, where did this style come from? Using the Aniblog Tourney itself, I checked out the highest-seeded blogs in the tournament to see if it was their far-reaching influence which provided younger bloggers with a stylistic framework, but in all of the cases the connection would be tenuous at best.

I might be thinking about this too hard. Maybe the desire to alternate paragraphs with images at a constant rate goes beyond simply anime blogging to the fact that there exists a space between every paragraph, literary voids which beckon to gain prominence by having art emerge from them. Or maybe it’s that people take screenshots and download fanart in batches first, and then look for ways to apply all of the images to an existing post. I’ve felt that desire myself, as it becomes hard to decide which images to cut from a post, a decision almost as difficult as having to cut out extraneous paragraphs that kill the flow of a post.

Speaking of which, the reason why I don’t really throw in a large amount of images into my posts is because an excess of images has the potential to be detrimental to the writing itself, interrupting the flow of a post as much as a superfluous paragraph, if not moreso. Not to say that it’s impossible to write well with constantly alternating paragraphs and images, but you risk cutting off your writing at the knees just as it’s starting to go into a full sprint.

So if you’re a fan of the aforementioned style of blog-posting, tell me, where did you find your inspiration, if any at all? If you really enjoy those types of posts, what in particular do you like about them?

Maybe Scanlators Just Gotta Scanlate

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Lately I’ve been following a most insightful user on Twitter called otaku dog. A Japanese person running an otaku goods import service, otaku_dog has made his presence known on the internet through his desire to engage with the English-speaking anime fandom. While I have not tried out his “Otaku Personal Import Agency,” I have had a chance to have a few discussions with him via Twitter.

It was in one conversation that he talked about how he is not only a fan of anime and manga, but also American comics, particularly Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. He spoke of his desire to read more of it, but that the translation never finished and that in general translation projects of American comics tend to die down and never revive.

“American comics translating projects often do not continues to last….(;- -)”

I do not know if he meant official translations or fan ones. Regardless, it made me think about the scanlation and fansubbing community, and how for all of the negatives in those communities, from the egotism to the translations wrought with errors to the personality clashes and drama and millions of other problems fan translators can have and often do, things still get translated. It might be the most popular series which get the most attention, but we see translation groups occasionally gravitate towards  fairly obscure series, even if the motive is to garner attention and praise. This is a huge contrast to otaku dog’s description of the reverse and in a way it’s quite impressive.

One possible factor for this wide disparity might be the fact that Japanese comics generally have significantly less text than their American counterparts, particularly with someone like Neil Gaiman penning the work. This is related to the differences in storytelling through panels that emerged between the two countries, and even those from the Golden Age that were produced purely for the enjoyment of children and not today’s older audience tended to be densely packed with text, making translating American comics possibly more time-consuming.

The difference in text density between Japanese and American comics also makes me think about that old stereotypical moment from throughout the decades, where a parent takes a child’s comic book away because it isn’t “really reading,” and that pictures in books are a sign that it’s juvenile. If only those parents knew about the brevity of dialogue in manga…

(By the way, I’m well aware that the title of this post can be a bit misleading.)