Tag Archives: Anime

Why Do Critics Hate Popular Shows?

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Management: This one should obviously go without saying, but it comes up so often in response to criticism that I figured I might as well give a more full response. A couple thoughts that I’d rather just link than constantly paraphrase.

Question:

Why are critics so against shows that are popular? Just because perfectly good shows likes SAO or Titan become popular, they have to pull at the seams and attack them? It seems mean-spirited and pointlessly non-conformist to put down shows just to look “critical.”

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Gunbuster and Finality

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Loss is a constant of living. As long as you live, as long as you continue to make connections and entrust others with your feelings, you will always be saying goodbye, always be letting go. And this can be a crushing reality – people can spend their whole lives seeking connections long past rekindling, and the grieving process is different for all of us. This letting go is perhaps not the cheeriest subject for a cartoon, but it is a powerful and deeply human one, and the ways we overcome the continuous goodbye of living can be inspiring in their own right. As is so with Gunbuster.

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Podcast: Anime News, Fall Romance, and the Year to Date

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So yep, I was on this week’s FAPcast with Kevo and Aeroblip of Desu ex Machina and Kelloggs of Pedantic Perspective. Lots of rambling on recent news (including thoughts about some encouraging western outreach stuff), the year in anime, and this season’s big romance standoff of Golden Time and White Album 2. Here’s the link again – check it out if you want to hear some more off-the-cuff stuff, or just listen to my uplifting, sonorous voice.

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Formative Experiences and Character Writing

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Management: Been a while since I’ve done a general criticism post, eh?

Question:

Are shows starring adults meaningfully different from shows starring teenagers? How about college students versus high school students? I ask because in many shows (Working! versus Servant x Service, etc), the differences seem largely superficial – the humor and character interactions all carry over.

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Fall 2013 – Week 3 in Review

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Unless three or four shows spontaneously turn terrible, this season’s ridiculous set of shows is going to kill me. I don’t even

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Fall 2013 – Week 2 in Review

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This season has way too many shows. It needs to stop that. Stop having shows.

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Attack on Titan – Final Review

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Welp, guess I better review the heavyweight.

Attack on Titan arrived at the head of quite the hype train this spring, based on both praise from manga readers and this impressive PV. Its OP inspired countless parodies, its sales were enormous, its cultural penetration extended far beyond the reach most anime could dream of. With good reason – most anime essentially self-marginalize themselves through overt anime-ism aesthetic choices that cut off significant potential markets. Titan does not do this – it’s an unapologetic action blockbuster with an evocative western aesthetic and a fundamentally compelling premise. Humans live in a massive renaissance-era walled city, titans try to break in, humans fight using sweet spiderman-esque maneuvering gear, action ensues. Let’s start with those strengths.

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Monogatari S2 – Episode 14

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Alright, time for another pretty, piercing episode of Monogatari. This arc has certainly not been a light-hearted one – pretty much the entire running time has been split between Nadeko being told off for acting passive and playing the victim and Nadeko secretly agreeing with her snake-shaped other self’s assessment of everyone else being the problem. As always, the apparition is just an unwanted, unacknowledged, or unaddressable part of your true self, and I’m really interested in seeing how they resolve this. Outside of Nadeko’s passivity, what is there to her? Well, the resentment towards others and possible underlying guilt, represented through the snake. Her childlike obsession with Araragi, who’s probably only appealing as a caretaker anyway. Her adolescent need to belong, and equally adolescent faux-sophisticated love of retro media. When you make her address her false self, who’s she even going to be?

Let’s get to it.

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Uchouten Kazoku and the Meaning of Life

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Management: Reviews are inherently an act of attempting to paint the personal as the universal, but this piece in particular is overtly meant to share my personal experience of this show. I hope you enjoy it.

“Coming of age stories” generally have a very specific connotation, particularly when it comes to anime. They tend to focus on adolescence – on the discarding of our youthful conceptions of self, and the beginning stages of establishing a true mature identity. But the reality is life is not nearly that simple. You do not simply discover yourself at some arbitrary point in your teen years, and from then on no longer feel existential dread about self or purpose. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly realize it’s time to Do Your Best for the rest of forever, and somehow find yourself continuously fulfilled by that one measly resolution.

Uchouten Kazoku understands this. It understands life and self-actualization are never so convenient as most stories’ linear narratives would like to pretend. It understands that living is not a coherent progression – living is what you’re already doing while you try and make sense of it all. And Uchouten Kazoku embraces this; the small lessons, warm friendships, and tiny moments that seem may inconsequential from an outside perspective, but that make up life itself, and when fully embraced, fully lived in, can swell to be heart-seizing moments on a monumental scale.

Uchouten Kazoku is likely the best anime of the year.

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Summer 2013 – Week 13 in Review

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And so the summer ends. I really couldn’t be more burnt out on talking about anime, considering I just finished three 8+ page essays on TWGOK, Uchouten Kazoku, and Gatchaman Crowds, but I’ll at least wave my hand in the direction of final impressions.

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