Time for my second Crunchyroll column! This time I take a stab at JoJo, investigating its art design and love of horror classics and all that good stuff. Morioh is a wonderfully terrible place.
Why It Works: The Rolling Hills of Morioh
Category Archives: Essay
Why It Works: Reigen’s World
Welp, looks like I’m writing at Crunchyroll now. I’ve got a new column over there starting up this week, and opening with a closer look at just one element of Mob Psycho’s first episode. If all goes according to plan, that’ll be the general style – deep dives on specific ideas or characters or elements of craft that pull our favorite shows together. I’m very excited to start on this project, and hope you enjoy my first piece!
You can check out my first article right here.
Keep on Vibrating, If You Must
I knew I was in for some shit even just by reading the genre tags for this one, which included a nice mix of things like “anal,” “bestiality,” and “dystopia.” And Keep on Vibrating certainly didn’t disappoint there – the seven stories here offer a pretty consistent mix of prostitution, violence against women, and occasional scatterings of war and cultural decay. Keep on Vibrating doesn’t quite match the overtly misanthropic tenor of Denpa Teki na Kanojo, but its author sure has a lot of violence in his head. And that’s about all there is to it.
(incidentally, there’s definitely going to be some NSFW image links in this one, so watch out!)
Is The Lost Village Actually A Comedy?
I mean, you and I know the answer to that. But The Lost Village’s style is awesome and unique and very worth digging into, and so today I’ve got a huge friggin’ article exploring the specific nature of The Lost Village’s charms. I loved this show, and I had a ton of fun talking about it here. The craft of comedy is just really fascinating in general, and I’m sure I’ll return to it again at some time. But for now, let’s just celebrate the glory of Lovepon and Friends one more time.
Is The Lost Village Actually A Comedy?
Goodnight Punpun – Volume 1
Solanin is a story about young adulthood, written by Inio Asano at the point when he was experiencing the feelings he was transcribing. It’s a great story, but it is very much about that moment – that specific kind of freedom, that specific kind of fear. A Girl on the Shore is similarly concerned with the specific emotions of a listless, emotionally deadened adolescence, and that story ends when its exact emotional moment concludes.
Goodnight Punpun is a work that seems to be striving for true emotional universality. And so Goodnight Punpun is about a bird.
The Heroic Spirit of My Hero Academia
Time for a new essay! This one focuses specifically on My Hero Academia, but is more generally about a spirit of optimism in fiction that I find really compelling and valuable. It was frankly kinda tough cutting down all the various topics I wanted to cover into one editorial-sized piece (I could easily write another entire article about the ambiguous ways idols interact with this concept), but I’m pretty happy with the result. I hope you enjoy the piece, and wish you luck finding some spirit of heroism in your own life!
The Heroic Spirit of My Hero Academia
Yuureitou – Volume 1
There’s something ugly lurking in Yuureitou. It seeps in from every corner, lurking in too-close panels of drifter Amano savoring his darkest instincts, or his new friend Tetsuo reacting with uncommon violence or disdain. It’s there in the way the panels themselves fetishize Tetsuo, who seems uncomfortable in his own seemingly unwanted skin. It’s ingrained in the manga’s horror tones and exploitation roots, the way it crosses sex with violence so callously that you’d almost guess the mangaka thinks they’re one and the same. And it erupts in vivid, hideous bursts, as the story’s characters are made instruments of fear by lurking, bag-faced men.
The Loneliness of Denpa-teki na Kanojo
I’m a big fan of stories about people who are in a bad place. Characters who distrust the world around them, or who have been hurt in some way that makes it impossible for them to see good in others. Stories about characters put against the wall, who struggle against difficult but understandable odds. Many of my favorite shows fall in this range, from fantastical stuff like Madoka and Evangelion to the more mundane struggles of Oregairu or Monogatari. The characters in these shows have been hurt by the world, and so they can’t trust that the world will ever extend a hand back.
A Girl on the Shore – Part Two
“It’s so good to learn that from right here, the view goes on forever.”
– The Mountain Goats
A Girl on the Shore’s second half opens with more of its slow, wide-open panels, images of Sato and Isobe’s empty town shot from the distance it’s experienced. Sato’s tedium comes across in long sequences of repeated shots, as she slumps at her desk or stares out the window. Isobe’s self-hatred clutters pannels together, as the teacher reaches out to him and he slaps her hand away. The contrast of intimate cuts and wide-open spaces suits these characters; Sato sees herself as a willowy non-presence, whereas Isobe is claustrophobic, labeling himself unlovable and struggling to breathe.
A Girl on the Shore – Part One
“We used to wait / We used waste hours just walkin’ around / We used to wait / All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown.”
Inio Asano certainly has a way with words. Or it might be better to say he has no way with them. His stories seem translucent, any wisp of authorial voice appearing only in the fringes of unvarnished naturalism. He gives his characters’ interiority the drama they believe it deserves, but any magic in his stories is the magic of the world as it is. Characters interrupt each other and start again, tossing out simple observations and losing their trains of thought. You can feel the wind blowing between the staggered refrains of his mixed-up kids.