About

The Blogger

I’m Owen S, aka saturnine, and I like anime.

Well, it’s probably not as simple as that. I can roughly attribute my present-day appreciation and subsequent connoisseur attitude towards it to the Doraemon and Dragonball manga I read in my youth, two works which still hold very dear to me. How this works in the larger sum of things I have no idea, but when I finally settled down in late 2006 and caught up with Nanoha, Shana, Haruhi et al., I then decided that this was the hobby for me.

I’ve always loved stories of the textual kind. Literature, children’s fiction, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, call them what you may — I accepted all and sundry. Well, except for the bodice rippers. A guy has to have his standards. It was this very fascination with the journeys that went on in my head while I poured through these volumes that I brought to anime and its various subculture like manga, doujinshi, Touhou, and so on.

When I started out blogging back then I had lofty ambitions of educating what I perceived as a less critical anime blogosphere, and portraying anime as not just Japanese cartoons, but Japanese visual culture, to borrow an often-abused, circumlocutious term. I still have those ambitions, but they’re on the backburner as I’ve learned more about this idiosyncratic, almost understated community. I’ve found fellow bloggers that are just as, if not more critical, and I’ve finally come to terms with how there isn’t a need for anime to be in a constant Schrodinger-like state of depth.

Ten bits of trivia:

I enjoy throwing in random non sequiturs when I write about myself.
In explanation of #1, I have a soft spot for paradox, irony, and self-satire.
Based in KL, Malaysia.
Figurehead/standard bearer/founder of The A.B.C. (see below)
Personal motto is “I think, therefore I am superior”.
Currently waiting to enter university as per #5.
I maintain that no genre is inherently inferior to another.
A newly-made adult with reservations about the future (like everyone else).
A self-proclaimed anime apologist.
One result of #9 is that I have a fondness for inventing taxonomies.

The Blog

Cruel Angel Theses started out with a ♥ behind its name before turning into its present day incarnation after a move from the excellent, albeit painfully restricted Wordpress.com. Having just started blogging for three-odd months, and being the type who likes to fiddle with things more than he should, I contacted Randall of ikimashou.net, who graciously provided the hosting.

The blogging itself I took to like a fish to water. lolikitsune of the now defunct newly resurrected not dotq provided for it in my very first post, and it was a matter of going through the motions after that, a task made much easier with trackbacks and the Animeblogger Antenna, the latter of which I’m grateful for bringing in that much-needed traffic during CAT’s early days.

The blog name, to my delight, is #1 and #3 on Google as of October 2007. A cross between the groan-worthy pun on Evangelion’s OP title and a desire to write lengthy, analytical posts on anime, CAT hasn’t fallen far from the tree in its present incarnation: I still work in the lamest flavour text/comments for my pictures and throw in the odd allusion or two to song titles whenever I can help it, and I still enjoy rambling on in a decidedly verbose, caustic manner about anime and its ilk.

If you’re wondering where to go if this is your first time here, check out the comprehensive Tag Cloud on top. Browse through the dynamic Live Archives above. Feel free to drop me a line through the Contact form above if you have anything to say about the site or my posts — while I may not be able to reply to each and every e-mail I receive, you can be assured of it being read.

The Tagline

Several levels of heartbreak and its successor, Now with several more levels of heartbreak, came about as a personal joke thing. It was in reference to Kanon, more specifically to the 2006 adaptation by KyoAni, as I decided that it embodied the concept of “heartbreak” in both the bad and good meanings of the word very well.

Realising then that this was applicable to a lot of good anime, I then decided to adopt it as an aesthetic by which to judge the anime and manga I would consume, and in turn blog about. Several levels of heartbreak is really a reference to how much depth a piece of work can have, and whether there’s more to it than meets the eye, or whether what it shows is all there really is.

Whether it’s something that makes you laugh one moment and cry the next, something that interweaves fluid action with existentialist themes, or even something that makes you shift uneasily in your seat while maintaining a light-hearted tone, it’s all on more than one level, and it’s definitely heartbreaking.

The A.B.C.

The ABC, known also as the Anime Blogging Collective, or whatever backronym tickles our fancy at any given time, is a gathering of anime bloggers brought together by yours truly through a common goal of synchronising blogging efforts throughout the blogosphere in the hopes of fostering community, discussion, and traffic on issues we deem pertinent enough to warrant our time on. Having decided at one point that plain vanilla blogging was getting tedious, I contacted Impz of THAT Animeblog to work on a topic together.

The readers responded with enthusiasm. Before I knew it, I was coordinating the next blogging effort through Gmail, and then through Google Groups when the list of people I wanted to work with expanded. The ABC is presently at 30-odd members, and we’re always looking for new members; membership is on the non-negotiable conditions that you have a blog, and are able to substantially contribute to an idea, concept, or question through your opinion.

The ABC can be found here if you’re interested in applying. Expect a processing time of a couple of business days.