Since its beginning, Kaiba has presented little reason for hope regarding the future of its universe. Though there is allegedly some sort of rebellion pushing back against this transhumanist-by-way-of-capitalist hierarchy, from our position on a pleasure barge, such interference has amounted to nothing more than fireworks seen from a great distance. We have witnessed the full solidification of class stratum while safely ensconced in a luxury cruise liner. And though these circumstances have provided distance, they certainly haven’t offered comfort; in fact, our position has only made this world’s crimes seem all the more horrifying.
Category Archives: Essay
Misadventures in Dungeons & Dragons
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m trying something a little different from our usual fare, building off my recent articles on the continuing adventures of Vox Machina. A few readers have expressed interest in reflections on my own misadventures with tabletop gaming, and so that’s what I’d like to bring you today: an earnest, undoubtedly embarrassing look into my own attempt at collaborative storytelling, complete with both the original text I was working off and my own retrospective reflections on how it all went down. If that doesn’t sound like your jam, don’t worry, I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled reviews and essays next time. But if you are interested in tabletop storytelling, or at least eager to laugh at how bad I am at it, feel free to stick around!
Bloom Into You – Volume 6
Bloom Into You’s sixth volume begins with the curtain about to rise on our play-within-a-comic. After an entire series spent playing the part of her sister, Touko will in this performance be playing the part of someone who rejects that philosophy outright, and chooses to embrace their own fledgling, uncertain identity. It’s simultaneously a gradual step and a terrifying one. On the one hand, she’s only playing the part of the person Yuu wishes she could be, in the context of an established, inauthentic performance. But on the other hand, she will be performing this new self in front of a vast audience, essentially the entire student body that she has sought to “fool” all this time.
Planetes and Ordinary Happiness
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stare up at the stars, secure and certain of your place within their grand design? To not see the cosmos as a sprawling reflection of all the opportunities you’re conceding, all the moments you’re wasting with every second not harnessed to your true purpose? To truly know who and what you are, your current self and your ultimate intended function? In a universe as vast as our own, the idea that each of us has some destiny that we must seek, some specific route that was made for us among the countless potential paths we might tread, feels more like a hopeless lament than a call to action. And yet some truly do seem to have found their calling, treading confidently forward with certainty at their side.
Chainsaw Man and the Cost of Kindness
It feels uniquely Chainsaw Man-appropriate that three volumes in, Denji could look up and see “Kill Denji” plastered as the volume title of the manga that’s literally about him. The kid just can’t catch a break – not from his enemies, and not from his allies either, for whatever that designation is worth. Aki treats him with nothing but contempt, his other coworkers view him with a mixture of fear and loathing, and the woman he believes he is in love with is simply exploiting his obvious, easily manipulated desires. Pretty much the only person who doesn’t hate or desire to manipulate him is Power, which is an undeniably sad place to be.
The Necessity of Shingo Natsume
“My style is to have no fixed style. Other people would accuse me of having a style, though. It may be that I understand myself the least.” – Shingo Natsume
I’ll admit, I got off on the wrong foot with Shingo Natsume. My formal introduction to his work was One Punch Man, a show that seemed to me an embodiment of anime’s increasing artlessness and lack of narrative ambition, the growing divide between animated aesthetic form and meaningful narrative, emotional, or thematic content. It was simply “man punches hard” animated as beautifully as possible, and “man punches hard” is a story anime has told countless times, a story perhaps only outnumbered in its evocations by “me horny.” And as the years have gone by, it seems this divide between form and content has only widened, with modern animator troves like Jobless Reincarnation offering nothing of substance, while sequels and indistinguishable light novel adaptations dominate the wider landscape.
Bloom Into You – Volume 5
The first word I’d use to describe Bloom Into You’s manga, particularly in contrast with its animated adaptation, is sparse. Panel compositions are often defined by their vast, empty spaces, leaving plenty of room for the characters’ lingering, unspoken thoughts. This is a fine choice for a story like Bloom Into You, a story so preoccupied with the sense of deficiency or emptiness that haunts its two leads. Emptiness is what Touko sees when she considers what the future might bring – a wholly empty sky, the nothingness where her voice trails off, and the blueprint of behavior left by her sister ends.
Sanctuary, Destiny, and The Deer King
If you were to make a list of the most distinguished animation directors of all time, Masashi Ando would be one of the first names included. In spite of never serving as a director himself, Ando has collaborated with and elevated the works of practically all the greatest film directors of the past thirty years. Ando has worked as character designer and animation director on some of Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon’s most esteemed films, and has continued to cement his legacy by collaborating with the next generation of talent, with his guiding hand on animation direction contributing to Your Name’s global success. As such, when it was announced that Masashi Ando was working alongside fellow Ghibli alumni Masayuki Miyauji in directing a feature film, at least a touch of hyperventilating was in order.
Witch Hat Atelier: Magic and Its Misuses
The first volume of Witch Hat Atelier was absolutely delightful for all sorts of reasons, ranging from its charming heroine Coco to the ornate illustrations that bring her world to life, imbuing every page and panel with a vitality born of soft line and incidental detail. But what most impressed me about this manga, so much that I in fact centered my first reflection on it, was Atelier’s insistence on treating magic as a practical, practice-oriented craft, rather than some fantastical power that some gain naturally and others could never possess.
Chainsaw Man – Volume Two
The second volume of Chainsaw Man is a good deal like the first: irreverent, incendiary, and too preoccupied with the base necessity of things like food and shelter to concern itself with high-minded heroism. As Denji and Power are drawn further into the machinations of the Public Safety Bureau, they remain emphatically indifferent to its goals, finding more motivation in the prospect of boobs or gum than the pursuit of justice or civil order. And how can you blame them? What has justice or civil order ever done for them, either when they were wild and desperate on the streets, or now as imprisoned agents of the state? If Denji and Power come across like beasts, it is only them reacting to a world that’s already assigned them that designation, a world that wouldn’t accept them even if they played by its stultifying, hypocritical rules.