Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’m delighted to announce that this week I actually did the goddamn thing, and checked out around half a dozen of the season’s new airing anime. Gundams, shonen hits, anime-originals; you name it, I watched it (so long as your names coincide with the handful of buzz-heavy productions I actually screened). The fall season is proving to be a historically odd moment in anime production; we’re receiving a wide array of prestige productions, but the industry is in complete crisis mode in terms of staff and scheduling, meaning even some massively hyped productions are already showing cracks. We’ll likely be seeing a variety of production collapses in the weeks to come, but for now, this appears to be one of the most stacked anime seasons in years. Let’s break it down!
Tag Archives: Bleach
When Bleach Was Great: The Ballad of Ichigo and Rukia
Hello everyone, and welcome to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re going to be engaging in a somewhat unusual exercise, as I’ve been assigned a unique request: expand this tweet on Bleach characters’ Ichigo and Rukia’s suitability as a couple into an entire article. I was initially intending to decline, because it was a tossed-off tweet about a series I hadn’t fully read in decades, more intended to be an emotionally charged stab of nostalgic resentment than a critical thesis. But upon further reflection, it does feel like there’s a bit more meat to this feeling than “the couple I liked didn’t get together.” Framed more generally, the narrative failings of Bleach stand as a handy example of the narrative pitfalls of shonen storytelling altogether – so let’s dig into this topic a little, and see what we can suss out.
Spring 2021 – Week 5 in Review
Hello everybody, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve sadly got a pretty quick Week in Review for you all this week, as I didn’t actually get around to too many films. On the other hand, my house did push through a fair amount of anime, even beyond our continuing voyage through One Piece. I’m still keeping up with My Hero Academia, even if it seems like the world at large has moved through several Next Big Things since then, and we also made a final push through the last peaks of Bleach’s adaptation. Shonen series have basically consumed all the time slots I was previously dedicating to exploring western cartoons and prestige dramas, so while I feel a little guilty that The Wire and The Sopranos and whatnot have to wait, I simply cannot imagine I would be having more fun with them than the Straw Hats at the moment. You guys will get your turn, I just gotta see what Luffy does over the next seven hundred episodes first. In the meantime, here are my scattered weekly thoughts!
Winter 2021 – Week 11 in Review
Hello all, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. I had a fairly light week in extracurricular film studies this time, as my free time was mostly just spent hammering out the last act of Control, and also playing even more Slay the Spire. Look, the game has twenty difficulty levels for four different decks, and is specifically designed to tell me I’m awesome for learning to draft Magic cards in middle school, so me and it will likely remain acquainted for quite some time. In the meantime, I did manage to sneak in my second Dario Argento film, as well as an interesting but flawed recent attraction, and yes, even more Bleach. Without further ado, let’s break ‘em down in the Week in Review!
Why It Works: Let’s Explore the Finer Points of Anime Power-Ups!
I’ve got another fairly breezy Why It Works column for you all this week, though this one certainly plays into a fair number of storytelling and conflict-building fundamentals. When and how characters overcome their previous limitations is actually a pretty important part of shonen narrative design, particularly since audiences have been primed to assume “sweet power-ups” will always be a part of that genre’s narrative bargain. Today let’s highlight a few broader categories of character improvements, as well as what sort of narratives potentially suit them best. Let’s get to it!
Let’s Explore the Finer Points of Anime Power-Ups!
The Best Anime Next Steps
There are a lot of anime out there! Literally thousands, with over a hundred more being released every year. There are new hits every season, and old favorites that have slowly lost their topical sheen. Given all those shows, it can be understandably hard to pick what to watch next – anime, like every other medium, is full of stuff that will disappoint you, and everyone’s tastes are different.
My own tastes in particular are a little weird – I like arthouse stuff and intimate character studies and occasional cathartic message-focused shows. But fortunately, there is indeed such a thing as “normal” taste in anime, or at least the most common preferences shared by fans outside of Japan. And today, I’m hoping to help that audience – or more specifically, hopefully, You.