Category Archives: Essay

A Thankless Passion: Look Back

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Why is it that we create art? Certainly not for the adulation of the crowd; for beyond the theoretically accommodating audience of your close family and friends, there is little chance you’ll be impressing anyone without putting in thankless, outrageously time-consuming practice for any hope of positive return. Doubly so for financial incentives, which have frequently eluded even the most popular and historically celebrated of artists. Is it simply so difficult for us to express our feelings plainly and move on with our lives? Is there some form of egoism inherent to our species, that we must believe our particular thoughts are so noteworthy they demand public distribution? Is making art just another way of fearing death?

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Misadventures in Dungeons & Dragons: Part Three

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today my buffer of reader bounties is so well-stocked that it would be an act of supreme hubris to write any further ahead, so I figured I’d instead check back in on my early adventures in Dungeons & Dragons, and see if we can sift some lessons out of my early mistakes. It’s been over a year since I last published one of these pieces, meaning looking back is only getting more embarrassing as I get more practice – but of course, improvement comes in much greater leaps and bounds early on, when there’s so much more you don’t know, but could easily learn through experience. It’s true of most things, but especially true for the mix of preparation, performance, and improvisation that is DnD: until you’ve actually hosted a live table session, there’s really no way of knowing precisely what you will and won’t need prepped to support you.

That’s the primary divide we’ll today be reaching, as we charge past the end of The Festival of Saint Agatha, and on into The Dreadful Tale of Castle Blackmire. Saint Agatha was my first adventure ever, save precisely one session of guest DMing our prior campaign, and thus I was basically guessing regarding the level of detail I needed to write into every quest. My first takeaway was a clear “need more prep,” meaning Blackmire would include more fully realized expository copy to more easily set scenes, and also more clear mechanical definition for conflicts I had previously, foolishly assumed I could “just figure out on the fly.” I am not a master of swift improvisation; my DnD work demands preparation to come alive, and balancing that level of preparation is something I’m still working on today.

When last we left off with this endeavor, our party of Dante the tiefling sorcerer, Arachne the half-elf/half-spider ranger, Garu the human rogue, and Dylan the crustacean paladin had successfully derailed some kind of sacrificial ritual, preventing the emergence of a dark harvest god and saving their friend Lugdug in the process. With both my main side quests for the town of Nettlebarn resolved, I figured it was time to pull the trigger on the town’s concluding drama, and get the team marching towards the city of Yhaunn, which would ultimately become their home for the trials ahead.

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Ishitani Ascendant: One Piece Fan Letter

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Among the many talents that have benefited from Toei’s renewed dedication to One Piece’s anime adaptation, there are none more spectacular or consistent than director Megumi Ishitani. Having first directed the final episode of Dragon Ball Super, she has since made an indelible mark on One Piece, affirming her talent through directing what is likely the series’ all-time greatest episode during its Wano arc. That episode revealed the absurd range of her aesthetic genius, the eye for storyboarding and cinematic embellishments that make every work she creates feel not just like an episode, but an event. That episode also embodied her unique talent for drawing diverse dramatic threads into one cohesive, thematically resonant whole – to basically synthesize One Piece’s appeal down to its purest essence, the yearning for connection and quest for liberation that are the story’s most poignant and central themes.

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Passion in Motion: A Handful of Favorites

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Hello friends, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I recently received a request to write some sort of “sakuga article,” meaning an article relevant in some way to the exemplary individual cuts of animation we anime stalwarts refer to as “sakuga.” This has been a source of some consternation to me, as I don’t generally consider myself particularly studied or well-informed when it comes to the specific craft of animation in the abstract. I know enough to describe why a cut feels evocative or impactful to me, but my specialties are first and foremost writing-related, followed by filmic technique, with animation following behind.

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Light Through Glass: Rebels of the Neon God

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Rain splatters against the phone booth glass, drops falling like the embers of fireworks spiraling in the distance. Their trails are lit by an indistinct whirl of city lights, perhaps cars or fluorescent signs, made obscure and thus somehow entrancing, their uncertainty of form promising riches and wonders. The beads of water are like liquid jewels, a beautiful contrast against the soot-streaked interior. Two boys huddle inside, hungrily passing cigarettes between them, then inserting a screwdriver into the terminal. A waiting bag is filled with the phone’s bounty, loose coins a pale imitation of those glittering lights – but here in the city, all truly bright things are indistinct and out of reach.

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Sailor Moon and the Pleasures of Adaptation

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The past few weeks have seen me charging through Sailor Moon, which I’ve long considered one of the most egregious outstanding gaps in my anime education. The series pits Usagi Tsukino and her fellow middle schoolers-slash-sailor guardians against a wide array of foes, as they stumble their way through adolescence while also fighting off supernatural beasties on a seemingly daily basis. Though most episodes follow a fairly similar pattern, the show remains consistently heartwarming, and has been a generally rewarding ride – though not, I must admit, for precisely the reasons I expected.

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What We Do To Bond: Eva 3.0+1.0

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The world did not need more Evangelion. The original series and its capstone film still exist, and are still phenomenal; the Rebuild series could not recapture that lightning in a bottle, nor could it meaningfully improve on the artistry with which Gainax and their collaborators first brought their ideas to life. The original Evangelion was a masterpiece that permanently altered its medium, for better and for worse. The Rebuilds can only hope to echo or augment their predecessor, whatever power they might possess existing largely because they are positioned on the shoulders of a colossus.

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Common Faults and Monsters

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Like most films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Monster begins quietly, tracking the shoes of a child as they silently navigate a grassy embankment. The movement is furtive, hesitant; the boy we are following seems uncertain of his destination, yet cordoned in his wandering by fear of reprisal. Beyond him, electric lights glimmer in reflection upon a dark river, while the sirens of the city howl in the distance. We pull up: a firetruck, a bustling crowd, and a great burning building looming in the distance. How can such an aberrant form coexist with this gentle moment, this private odyssey of youth on the riverbanks? Odd how a panning of the camera can change a scene so utterly, make beauty into ugliness, or the terrible glorious to behold.

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Phoenix – Volume 3

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Phoenix’s first volume took us back to the dawn of Japanese history, detailing the selfish ambitions and overwhelming violence of the island’s origins, how “Japan was formed as a nation through invasion, war, and slaughter.” Its second volume sped forward to the end of human history, offering a vision of the future where our shortsightedness and distrust of the Other led to the destruction of not just our species, but life on earth altogether. Though the phoenix itself embodies hope of a better way, that hope is clearly a distant one; for as Tezuka has continuously demonstrated, individual acts of charity or enlightenment cannot halt the overall tide of tribalism, indolence, and desperation for personal glory that seems to define our greater nature.

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The Boy and the Heron

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thrilled to announce that we’ll be stomping our way through Hayao Miyazaki’s latest allegedly final feature, last year’s How Do You Live?, released abroad as The Boy and the Heron. Though its original title refers to a 1937 novel by Genzaburō Yoshino, it is apparently not a direct adaptation, and that’s frankly all I want to know about it. The film’s own promotion was limited to a single, ambiguous image of a man decked in a bird-like costume, implying both extraordinary confidence on Studio Ghibli’s part, and also an apparent desire for audiences to enter the film with no meaningful preconceptions.

That’s an easy enough request for me to fulfill; new Miyazaki films are rare events, and I count myself lucky that I’ve been able to admire this last act of his illustrious career in real time. From animating feats of fancy in Toei’s early films like Puss ‘n Boots and The Flying Phantom Ship, Miyazaki went on to spearhead some of the greatest TV productions of the ‘70s and ‘80s, before forming Studio Ghibli and becoming anime’s premier international ambassador. His remarkable catalog needs no introduction, and recent works like The Wind Rises demonstrate he’s still as passionate and determined to express a personal truth of artistry as ever. Let’s see what The Boy and the Heron has to offer!

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