12 Days of Anime, #7: Going Pro

I don’t know what I’m doing here, guys. Don’t have a goddamn idea. I started out on friggin’ reddit with a post about Nisemonogatari, and now I’m ANN’s official Monogatari analyst. That’s worth noting, right? I’m happy about how things have turned out, but am generally too stressed and busy to actually revel in it, which I guess is how this writing thing goes no matter how you’re doing? I hope?

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12 Days of Anime #8: The Pain and Triumph of William Massachusetts

In all the awful roar GamerGate has created, it’s sometimes hard to remember that the angst at its core is actually a real and tangible thing. Many people do come to games because they feel the world “isn’t fair,” or that they have no talents relevant to it – and shows like Sword Art Online or Mahouka tap into this unhappiness, and to the desire for control it creates. Log Horizon is smarter than both of those shows, and so when Log Horizon addresses the fundamental sadness at the heart of “gamer pride,” it does it with both empathy and a larger scope of understanding. William Massachusetts knows what he is, though his view of the larger world is fractured and flawed. And William Massachusetts is proud.

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12 Days of Anime #9: Kakyoin Doesn’t Trust Babies

I certainly had my issues with Stardust Crusaders, but whatever my quibbles with the narrative structure, I can’t deny that no other show featured one of its protagonists desperately trying to outwit a killer baby. Well, except for that one scene in Cross Ange, but let’s not go there. There’s not much to say about this event – I know what I like, and what I like is apparently Kakyoin staring daggers at infants as they plot murder in their crib.

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12 Days of Anime #10: The Rise of Ask Bobduh

So I guess I’m a narcissist, or something? I dunno how it happened, but my ask.fm profile has somehow become one of the central parts of this whole internet-personality gig I’ve got going on. Answer a couple thousand questions, and suddenly everybody wants to know what you’ve got to say!

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12 Days of Anime #11: MISTER JUSTICE

It was really, really tempting to make this entire list out of moments from Samurai Flamenco. I mean, it’s not like the show’s lacking them – from Miami Ballerina to “THE POLLS GIVE ME STRENGTH” to “actually it’s Flamwenco,” Samurai Flamenco is clearly a rich treasure trove of beautiful, inspiringly ridiculous moments. In the end, I settled on just two moments, and the first clearly had to be the proud, majestic MISTER JUSTICE.

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12 Days of Anime #12: My Neighbor SAO

Hey guys! Yeah, I’m participating in the 12 Days of Anime – an aniblogger project where bloggers put out one post reminiscing on some anime-related moment or memory from the year on each day leading up to our day of pagan tree worship and reverence to our god, consumerism. Considering I already put out basically a post a day, this may not be the most intelligent of choices, but I don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of making many of those. I’ll probably alternating these more or less between personal moments of stuff I either worked on, did, or failed to do and straight-up Perfect Moments in Anime, so look forward to a broad scattering of posts over the next couple weeks. Today I’m starting off with one of my many not-so-bright ideas – going on a journey with Sword Art Online.

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