Category Archives: Essay

Yuri is My Job! – Volume 5

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the adventures of Hime and her compatriots at Cafe Liebe, as we bound beyond the confines of Yuri is My Job!’s anime adaptation, and onward to the trials of the Miman-penned ongoing manga.

It’s certainly a pleasure to be back – after all, the original premise of this work is inherently fascinating to me, digging directly into the complex relationship between the genres we love, the characters we idolize, and the ways we formulate our own identities. From the parasocial complications of performing selves for an assumed audience, to the inherent commonalities between stage performance, adolescent identity-forming, and the nuances of crafting a public façade that feels both amenable to others and authentic to one’s own feelings, this story has been digging into core questions of both authentic self-expression and finding yourself through art, topics that could not be any closer to my own heart.

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The Complete Crepax – Volume 1

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It is always a pleasure to be introduced to a vibrant, fully realized artistic voice, to learn of a wholly distinct perspective on storytelling and human psychology. I consider it something akin to a moral duty to continuously check out new artists, for the simple reason that it is only through such far-flung trawling that I can hope to better understand our capacity for self-expression, and to better express whatever humanity I might possess through the works I create. As such, I’m happy to today be sharing my own experience of the works of Guido Crepax, as contained in the first volume of his collected works.

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Misadventures in Dungeons & Dragons: Part Four

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am once again beyond up to date on my outstanding reader bounties, meaning it’s a fine time to reward myself (and you all? I hope???) with a fresh reflection on my fledgling dungeon mastering career. When last we left off, the party was approaching Castle Blackmire, and my DMing prep work was already on sounder footing relative to the initial Festival of Saint Agatha. There is simply no way to avoid the gauntlet of data and experience provided by actually running sessions; even among DMs, what amounts to “sufficient preparation” can vary wildly, depending entirely on your own comfort, knack for memorization, ability to improvise, and conception of what exactly you and your players want from your campaign.

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Witch Hat Atelier and the Cruelty of Prudence

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As we return to Witch Hat Atelier, our first title page sees our young mage bedecked in flowers, with even our adorable squirrel-caterpillar creature in attendance to celebrate the fun of an approaching festival. The intent seems clear – after the heavy, portentous drama of the last few chapters, both Qifrey and his students have clearly earned a moment of rest. Witch Hat Atelier is perfectly comfortable stretching towards fantasy action or large-scale drama, but its heart resides in the day-to-day interplay of these young witches, as both their collaborations and the manga’s distinctive realization of those actions demonstrate the inherent thrill of bettering yourself, of marching determinedly towards your next skill horizon, and of making sure to be kind to yourself and stopping to smell the roses along the way.

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Direction and Atmosphere

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I was recently asked to write a piece on direction and atmosphere in anime, in line with my previous piece regarding the priorities of Laid-Back Camp and similar shows. I initially struggled with the concept, as that older piece is largely self-contained, and focused mainly on evangelizing for shows that don’t prioritize narrative action. A lot of my pieces at Crunchyroll were basically predicated on the question of “how do I get someone who’s only watched Naruto or Demon Slayer to enjoy Hyouka,” meaning they were content to end on the suggestion of branching out and letting their readers arrive at their own conclusions. But you folks are a very different audience; anyone who is interested in my thoughts on Wong Kar-wai probably doesn’t need to be convinced dramatic minimalism can be compelling, so I won’t waste your time with an entreaty on slow cinema’s behalf.

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Blue Flag – Volume 4

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Seiya storms the barricades as we open Blue Flag’s fourth volume, first challenging his brother Touma on his reckless actions, then turning his barrels towards our other leads. As in his first appearance, Seiya cuts through all this adolescent anxiety like a hot knife through butter, casually dragging Taichi aside and challenging Futaba on her relationship with the pair of them in one easy gesture. When high school dramas only feature high schoolers, their perspective can get a bit myopic, naturally embracing the sense of consequence and finality that attends untested adolescent emotions. Emerging from childhood into anxious self-awareness, adolescents can naturally feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the choices before them, seeing in each choice made an endless hall of potential doors that have all slammed painfully, permanently shut.

This is understandable; not only are they thinking about how their presentation and actions affect others’ impressions of them for basically the first time, they’re combining that understanding with the natural anxiety of high school, the first time in most of their lives where the stage after this one isn’t known or guaranteed. So they really do have the chance to screw up their lives in lasting, consequential ways, making it all the harder to make any key decisions.

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Witch Hat Atelier and the Perils of Ambition

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The cover of Witch Hat Atelier’s seventh volume sees Coco journeying forth with lantern in hand, charting the unknown while looking nervously over her shoulder. She has been integrated into this world so quickly it’s almost dizzying, and her magical future looks bright, but it is natural at times to feel out of sorts or floundering when you’re on a journey of discovery. Coco’s earnest desire to expand her understanding is perhaps the single greatest quality a would-be artist or craftsman can possess; for after all, the essence of the seeker is not mastery, but curiosity. Granted, endless curiosity can gradually foment endless ambition, and when your urge to know more outstrips your understanding of what you have already gained, tragedy can easily result.

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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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