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.

Go Go Curry: Going Strong, Carrying On

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Today, May 5th, is the anniversary of Japanese curry restaurant Go Go Curry, and to celebrate this auspicious occasion in Manhattan they’re making it so that ALL medium-sized curry dishes are $5. I think by now my feelings on Go Go Curry have been well-established, but just in case, if you’re in the area and have never tried it, I highly recommend you do so. It’s on 38th St between 7th and 8th Ave in Manhattan.

They’re also giving away FIVE free topping coupons on top of that. And I know that unless you really like the Go Go, five coupons is a bit much to use up in a month, but they’re great to hand off to your friends, especially those who have never tried it before (just keep in mind you can’t use them in the same day you order).

As for me, it doesn’t really matter what special they have for their anniversary, I’ll be there simply to celebrate its existence and to dine on the best Japanese curry around.

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.)

Dairy Influences: A Personal Look At “The Far Side”

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In his latest comic, the author of Gunshow Comic pays tribute to cartoonist Gary Larson (while also making a reference to his own series, The Anime Club, which I talked about previously). The Larson style was instantly recognizable to me, as I am actually a long-time fan of his classic one-panel newspaper comic The Far Side. Seeing this parody of the man’s work, it makes me want to reflect on the influence that his surreal humor had on me and my development in art and life.

Long before I could even really call myself an “anime fan,” I was a fan of The Far Side, calling it “my favorite comic” for years, and to this day I consider it to be the very best one-panel-style strip in history. For those unfamiliar with it, The Far Side was typically a single-panel (though it would sometimes split itself into two or more), and would be a mix of suburban stereotypes and off-kilter humor that took normal situations and twisted them just enough so that the mild absurdity would be magnified ten-fold. The comic also often featured humor based on biology, a direct consequence of Gary Larson himself being a biologist as well as a cartoonist, and while it had no real recurring “characters,” it did have a number of iconic designs and stylistic flairs. Bespectacled pudgy boys and their bee’s nest hairstyle mothers, animals standing and talking like people (particularly cows), and a tendency to have bulging eyes be an attention grabber were all common sights The Far Side. In a way, it was like a precursor to the Perry Bible Fellowship.

I would provide an example image, but Gary Larson has personally wrote letters asking everyone to not post his comics online, and while not 100% perfect it has worked surprisingly well. And so, even though I know that explaining a joke inevitably ruins it (as author Stephen King demonstrated in his foreword to The Far Side Gallery 2), I’m going to try so that you can understand Gary Larson’s style of humor.

The comic is situated in the backseat of a car, behind the driver. The driver is staring into his side-view mirror, and as is the case with all side-view mirrors, there is text to inform the driver that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The object in the mirror, meanwhile, is an eyeball taking up the entire surface of the mirror. In other words, the object reflected is your eye staring into the comic’s panel (Again I apologize for my humor assassination).

So what did The Far Side do to me? When I first discovered it either fourth or fifth grade, I already loved to draw, but Gary Larson’s comic made me love art even more. It gave me a role model in art to look up to, and it gave me a direction to take in my drawing. I started actively trying to make things that would be seen as “crazy.” I created my own Far Side-style comic, called My Biz and also Crash and Bash Land, about horrible rides in an imaginary amusement park whose themes were violence and abuse of its customers. Both were as good as you’d expect a 10 year old’s attempts at Far Side knockoffs would be. Even after I discovered anime and became a “fan,” I held in my heart two dreams, to draw a full-fledged story comic like my favorite manga, and to create a humor comic that would appear in newspapers.

Today, though I no longer aspire to draw my own absurdist newspaper strip, I can see that Gary Larson had an enormous influence on my sense of humor, and for that I am ever so grateful, though my peers who have seen my brand of comedy in action may be inclined to disagree. You can even see The Far Side‘s effects on at least some of the drawings I have posted to Ogiue Maniax. And though I can’t tell you for certain, I think The Far Side probably even influenced my writing style through its combination of simplicity and eccentricity where even those who weren’t enthusiasts of biology could find a laugh or two.

Hold Right to Move Forward

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I’m a little late to the party, but I’d like to put down my own thoughts on whether or not video games could be consituted as “art.” My answer to that question is that video games already are art, and have been so for a very long time.

Before I start to elaborate though, I want to point out that disagreeing on one thing does not mean you have to disagree with someone about everything. I really like the way Roger Ebert writes, and just because I think he’s wrong in this respect doesn’t mean that it invalidates the rest of his opinions. He’s still very much someone I respect, and I think we on the internet could stand to remember that.

While I cannot tell you when exactly video games “became” art, I can trace back the history of video games and point out any number of instances where art has sprung forth in video games. When Space Invaders was released to arcades, it was one of the first video games to feature “characters,” creating an identifiable adversary to overcome. When Miyamoto Shigeru created Donkey Kong, he created an entire story told with simple animations over multiple “scenes.” Mario himself was a fusion of practicality and creativity, created from the desire to have a distinct hero whose lively animations would still be understandable given the limited technology.When  Pitfall debuted, it was not only a technical achievement, but also challenged players to revisit the game repeatedly, to identify with the characters in a way beyond the creator’s intent. When the Famicom was released in Japan, video game music legend Hip Tanaka took on the challenge of learning how to program in Assembly so that he could have finer control on the composition of his scores. When Kojima Hideo was told to make an action game on a system that couldn’t even handle having more than three moving objects on the screen, he created Metal Gear and laid the foundations for “stealth” in video games.

And that’s not even getting into the 16-bit era, or RPGs, or the modern advances we have today, with global communication between players working towards common goals, increasing levels of interactivity,

Art is created from the conflict between imagination and reality, when men are given a set of limitations and must find a way to work within their confines or to break from them, and that is the constant struggle of video game developers. Art is created when people are moved by what is front of them, and you will find a whole generation of people who can recall when video games brought them some of their greatest moments of joy and sorrow. Art is created when people are inspired, and I will tell you personally, video games have inspired me in innumerable ways.

Are video games art? Why, I can’t see why they wouldn’t be.