Category Archives: anime

Context context context

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I’ve come to realize that a lot of what I would consider to be the best scenes in anime cannot stand alone, or at least have a difficult time doing so. They require prior knowledge of everything that has happened beforehand and to have proper empathy for the characters on-screen.

The best scenes are payoff, and this is often why when one shows their favorite anime scenes to someone unfamiliar with the show, it won’t have nearly the impact.

There are exceptions of course. My favorite being the following scene from Macross.

Misa: Your baby’s so cute! May I hold her?
Miria: I made this baby. If you want to hold a baby, go make your own.

I guess it’s better to say that dramatic moments are better with context.

Bastards

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I got to the New York Anime Festival at around 5pm, and went to see if there was any Ogiue doujin in the dealer’s room.

Apparently it all sold out in the morning.

You bastards.

Susanna Hopkins: Cute because of her gender?

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Speaks loudly and randomly in a foreign language. Has no sense of personal space. Difficult to predict and kind of disturbing at times.

Now, am I describing Sue, or am I describing Kuchiki?

I mean, I like Sue (and Angela as well), but I have to wonder how much she gets away with in the eyes of us Genshiken fans on account of her being female.

Also, yes, I am looking forward to upcoming episodes. Ogiue and Sue are an incredible comedy duo.

BONUS GAME: Picture the conversations Kuchiki and Sue would have while on a date.

Why is Jagi the most philosophical Hokuto brother?

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Answer: Because he uses Hokuto Lacan Geki.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Keiko

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Sasahara Keiko, sister of Sasahara Kanji, is non-existent in the anime Genshiken 2.

Essentially, they’ve turned Kuchiki into a surrogate Keiko, giving modified lines that she would have been delivering to Kuchiki instead. I think this is really a shame because Keiko becomes a pretty good character in the second half of the Genshiken manga and that while the overall effect for the sake of the plot is the same, their wildly different character types result in two wildly different deliveries of the same information. Keiko fills a role that Saki can’t, being both normal (if you consider ko-gal to be normal) AND unreliable, and she gets quite a few good lines and even a chapter devoted to her. Probably the best example of Keiko goodness is in Volume 9 of the manga with her interactions with both Ogiue and Ohno.

All this considered, I’m not exactly sure why they’ve done this, seeing as Keiko has appeared as late as the third OVA episode. There are a number of possibilites though. Maybe Keiko’s voice actor, Shimizu Kaori, was unable to fulfill the role. Maybe they figured Keiko wouldn’t be a popular character. Maybe they thought the cast would have gotten too cluttered. Maybe they really like Kuchiki. It’s all speculation though.

At the very least though, I can say that reading the manga and watching the anime are two similar but different experiences. I, of course, recommend doing both.

DEFEATED

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You are already working

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Now You’re Playing with Moe

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I’d like to see a show where every the origins of every character’s moe facets are explored and shown on screen.

You would get to see the entire childhood friendship from day one to day they’re no longer kids. You’d get to see the exact environment that would turn someone tsun and dere. It wouldn’t just be a part of their personality from day one.

Basically, I think, the result would be that you get to see more of the characters’ parents, which is perhaps not something that happens often in this sort of anime.

“What is anime up to these days?” “Let’s find out!”

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I think at some point, I stopped watching new anime purely because it lined up with my own sense of aesthetics and storytelling, and began watching it more so that I could see how anime is doing. I still enjoy it though, so don’t get the wrong idea.

I’ve found that few shows ever violate my standards of taste, and I think the reason is that I’m treating it less as entertainment and more as friends with whom I can keep up. “How are you doing, magical girl genre? Oh, you’re marketing to older men now! Ahahaha you crazy card.”

It’s a strange place to be.

Fansubs, Digital Distribution, Shenanigans

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This post is perhaps far too late, and even then, lots of people have more knowledge and insight than me, so I won’t really bother with explaining about WHY the anime industry is in danger. To sum it up, the people in charge need to catch up to modern times. That’s about it.

All this talk though has reminded me that Nintendo is planning on a service for their Wii where a person can purchase something from their online shop FOR another person. You buy, say, a virtual console game, and then the game gets sent to the person you bought it for. And I think this would be a great system to implement somehow for anime.

There’s little doubt that a good number of anime fans love to spread word about their favorite anime, and having the ability to purchase episodes for your friends (because they’re lazy or refuse to watch but you just know they’re going to like it!), I think, would only be embraced by people.

Granted, once the episodes are obtained, it’d probably be pretty easy to pirate them. Maybe there could be some kind of reward system for recommending a show to someone, a way to earn goodies like Naruto headbands or copies of Iroha Gokko and Anato no Tonari. Barring that, I look at the Wii again, with its library of virtual console games, and the fact is, people are ACTUALLY buying them, including the NES ones. You can download the entire NES library for like 50mb onto your computer, and people are still buying NES games.

I know that selling old games isn’t exactly like selling new anime, though.

Except perhaps when the anime isn’t new at all, and it’s just never been released here.