This post has its roots firmly planted (pun unintended) in this category; present-day incarnations include this recent article by The Anime Almanac, which pushed me to write this post as a result. It’s not like I’m singling the two of them out through my writing of this, — well, alright, maybe I do pick on lolikit a lot, but that’s just due to how far he’s gone — since their opinions are unfailingly pedestrian in their nature that you could pick an otaku, any otaku who thinks that they’re the most intelligent/unique/erudite critic on the internet since Yahtzee or Maddox, and get the same type of reasoned opinion out of them.

Before all of that, however, have a colour bar (click for larger version).

Happy Chinese New Year to those of you descended from the motherland, and may you collect more of those delicious red packets this festive season. I spent the reunion dinner eve in bed, with a majority of the New Year’s Day going towards getting more sleep in view of my erratic nocturnal schedule. While part of me felt like Nobita in that chapter of Doraemon where he decides to spend the first day of the new year in his room with gadgets in lieu of real human company, I figured trying it just this once wouldn’t hurt.

obligatory picture since it’s the year of Yuki Sohma the Mouse

In other news, the discussion over at In Search of Number Nine and a later post by Cameron Probert reminded me that I should stick to this rule in 2008: If comments don’t achieve their required effect after the first one, taking it to a post would be more productive given the growing length.

I picked up Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun. Yes, that Ninomiya-kun with the succubus, not the tragic yet hilarious metafiction in Minami-ke. Now, while I’m certainly not short of shows to blog about or watch this season since I’m keeping up with a grand total of 16, I’m tired of anime blogging. Not in the commonly understood “woe is me, this is a meta post about why I’m burnt out” sense, but in a “this is a post to let you know I’ve not lost it” sense.

I’m sorry CCYoshi, as much as I wanted this to be a counter-culture essay extolling the virtues of fanservice in Ninomiya-kun, there simply wasn’t anything to write about. Which is precisely why I like Ninomiya-kun, in any case:

one distinguishing characteristic of dango society is that they have no distinguishing characteristics

Looking at the abortion that was my previous post on Gurren Lagann, I concur that the concept of raving about GL in blog posts was something I certainly underestimated while trying to write about 9 episodes watched in one sitting. If bloggers could be reduced to incoherent wrecks by watching an episode a week, those 3 hours were probably like that overdose of speedball which killed River Phoenix.

This has to do with the little bit of crying that was present this episode, which also happens to be the penultimate episode of Fuuko’s arc. I’ve found it to be an initial downer, but the thought suddenly struck me in the middle of the episode — what if Fuuko didn’t get a Good End like Ayu? Until now I’ve been convinced that Key is like some kind of tsundere bully that trips you while you’re walking and then cushions the impact by throwing a pillow underneath, but what if they decided not to this time around?

That brief insight proved to be truer than I imagined, for the manly tears present in this episode certainly surprised me. It was like waking up to a sledgehammer being swung in my face by a masked figure at my bedside, and while I’m not about to be reduced to a raving tearful wreck just yet, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to say the same as confidently next week.

What I mean by “the point of adaptations” isn’t “the point where adaptations start sucking”, but more of like “what is the point of adaptations?” After all, regardless of how good or bad an adaptation will be, you’ll always have the grassroots insisting on the superiority of the original. The fanbase is fickle and insatiable, which means most, if not all of the discussions will result in a discordant clamour of “YOU NEVER SAW HOW BRILLIANT THE MANGA WAS”, or “YOU’RE BIASED BECAUSE YOU READ IT FIRST”.

Which brings me to two shows, both brilliant manga in their own domains: Bokurano and Claymore. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to review the anime for both seeing how they’re both based off a manga; furthermore, I’ve only read the manga for Claymore, and only saw the anime adaptation of Bokurano. So I have two questions:

What can be really constituted as perception bias? How should an adaptation from its source material, be it a visual novel, manga, or light novel, be truly judged? I find these questions to be of utmost relevance especially in this Autumn season for the top-tier, or at least what I perceive as the fandom perceiving as top-tier anime, i.e. Clannad and Shana II, happen to be adaptations too.

I saw the Shakugan no Shana movie yesterday before starting on the first episode of Shakugan no Shana II, and I’m glad I did. Aside from refreshing my memory on the whole series and whatnot, it also proved to be a timely reminder on why I’ve always adored the Shana series so much, and no, it has nothing to do whatsoever with her being a tsundere, I swear.

while I don’t see this happening in the canon anytime soon, the catfights have been upped a notch from where we left it, which is always a plus for me (click for hi-res version)

Nanatsuiro Drops has been an unexpected joy to watch, for as far as I can remember when I finally got it, which was probably around the second episode. Looking past the girly girl fa�ade and what seemed like clich� magical girl trappings, it�s been, like the proverbial child molester, something that�s touched me again and again. Or I could just be waxing lyrical about what�s been advertised, as per its tagline, �First love that encompasses you�.

So this is also an eroge adaptation that I actually like wholeheartedly and unabashedly. It�s really surprising, considering that my views on them haven�t been too favourable, or maybe it�s just the limited sample size I�ve gotten my hands on so far. ND has everything going for it by not harping on the �first love� thing, instead choosing to build on emotions and situations that we can all relate to, and boy, has it been a ride. This is without a doubt, realistic idealism at its best.

About this double-feature with Impz over at THAT Anime Blog: For those of you not in the know, there’s all manner of bloggers, about 20 give or take, that can be found over at #animeblogger @ irc.irchighway.net on a fairly regular basis. Now the average age in the channel is anywhere from late teens to early twenties, and naturally, when you put a group of people with that median age together in a space for prolonged periods, fun stuff happen — it’s like a younger, self-absorbed Survivor in action, but with more e/n and angst thrown into the mix.

The topic of elitism came about due to my being bored and wanting to spice things up a little bit. Much like Lelouch and his Order of the Black Knights, I wanted to see how easy it was to bring about revolution discussion, albeit in a very roundabout way, regarding the topic, and what better way to start then by applying the label to myself? Unfortunately, I rubbed all of two people the wrong way in the process, and this is where the fun began.

As some of you might now know (if you didn’t already), I’m a Darker than Black fanboy. It’s all about Hei and the extent of adoration that heterosexual males like myself can profess without veering into dangerous territory, which means that I think that posts like these are lame. I prefer rational discussions rather than brilliant diatribes myself, though (for an example of the latter, check out Randall’s posts here and here regarding the fiasco surrounding Kodomo no Jikan), so here’s my case on why I vehemently disagree.

By the way, TJ Han showed me something he wrote almost a year ago that’s similar in subject and invited me to link to and laugh at it, but the only thing I found hilarious were the mismatched pictures, and I wish he could write like that more often, because it was awesome surreal humour that’s so unlike the more reserved tone he’s been taking on recently, and would also resemble Kyoya acting like Tamaki all of a sudden.

Since Cruel Angel Theses’ one month anniversary is but two days away, I thought I’d take a quick recap on the posts I do and come up with some insight as to how or why I say the things I do, be it critique, reviews, or opinions — also, studying has been tiring (insert Konata face here) for someone who doesn’t like/isn’t really used to slogging away at books, so to take things off my mind I thought what I’d do was, I’d offer a bit of meta-critique, as it were.

First of all, though, allow me to point you to this well-written post from The Anime Blog. Basically what Rachel proposes, in the article, is the coining of two new terms that might help explain the differences anime fans the world over have with regards to taste.

1,000 hits in 12 days! Definitely wasn’t expecting this. Thanks once more for all the relentless support. Past few days have been a bit tiring and my PC’s power supply unit was force-fed the red pill the night before, which sucked. That makes it the third PSU in like 6 months, but at least the warranties cover it. I had Sociology again today, and you know what that means — I was bored and started scribbling stuff on my notepad. I was able to multi task this time so despite sitting right in front of the lecturer it appeared like I was taking notes.

the characters don’t fit at all, I’d use Fuuka and Fumika, followed by Evangeline and Patch- I mean, Yue for extra damage.

So I was sitting through my 3 hour Sociology class today, and it was a drag. A drag not because of the subject itself, which is really quite interesting by nature, but because my lecturer sucks. Not in the traditional sense that means “incompetent failure” but more of the “can’t stop going off on a tangent” sense. She’ll get off-topic because she’s trying to give us practical examples (seeing how we’re doing Crime and Deviance I don’t think really I need that, thanks).

And when I get bored I generally look out the window, play with my pen, scribble on my notepad. Today was pretty different though — she printed out the powerpoint slides for the day’s notes, and while I was reading ahead of the class as she was bringing up E/N Story #971 I stumbled upon Robert Merton’s “Strain Theory”. Seeing how this is pre-university stuff I hope it isn’t too hard to follow — Merton basically tries to explain why certain people deviate, and the different types of deviance that follows. The study was done on young working class males in the USA, 1940.

Props to Impz and his band of merry men for sparking off the discussion. Demian in his response, however, overlooked what I believe is a key angle of how anime wouldn’t make it to mainstream, and that’s what I’m going to address in this post. Will also be commenting closely on drmchsr0’s, uh, “character-driven” response that, while being theoretically valid, has critical flaws in terms of practical implementation.

I agree with Demian that anime will never make it to mainstream, but for different reasons altogether — the medium itself is what makes it an inherent impossiblity. I don’t know how many of you might have experienced this, but I personally have difficulty getting my friends to watch anime, even after I tell them that the DVD of Honey and Clover does not contain porn.

There are opinions, and there are opinions about other people’s opinions. This is one of the latter, and if you’re the type who ignores the message as a whole in favour of focusing on one sentence/paragraph, you should give this a pass. Newsflash — this post is not, I repeat, not an attack on your liberty to have an opinion or an attack on your person. This is meant to facilitate discussion, and I hope the responses I get, if any, will focus on my opinion too.

So this is Another Post About Lucky Star�. In an attempt to find it unfunny I watched the speed sub, the quality sub, and was this close to watching the joke sub, if it wasn’t for all that talk about smegma, ass cheese, and “that’s not mud” during the food scene. Funny != disgusting, and I didn’t feel like sitting through 20 minutes of memes masquerading as humour. I still laughed the second time round, in any case.