In continuing my burgoening tradition of watching something new every week, I finally gave in to the cultural zeitgeist (which makes it sound like I was resisting the cultural zeitgeist but, to be honest, I was just ignoring it like I was ignoring every TV show and movie for the last couple years) and watched Dandadan. It’s been on my radar for a while, even if all I really knew about it was “there’s a supposedly old lady with tall hair who carries a metal baseball bat?” based on some images I’ve seen on the internet, but one of my friends told me it was actually a really cute love story in addition to the slightly-more action-y episode-to-episode events and I was sold. Who doesn’t want to see a cute love story these days? So I watched it with that in the forefront of my mind, got swerved almost immediately, and then swerved more and more as the first season played out. It was a wild ride, but now I’m a diehard fan and dying on the inside because I’ve got to wait who even knows how long for Season 3 to come out. I suppose I’m lucky in that I only started watching it after the second season had been released so at least I didn’t have season 1’s horrific cliffhanger dangling over me for months and months while I waited. Which, if I had to levy a criticism at the show, it would be the way they’ve chosen to pace things. Not every episode has problems with it, but there’s enough that I kept feeling like I was being jostled around by the ending theme of the show, which is too bad because the opening and closing themes of both seasons are great and the sort of thing I chose to watch each time. It didn’t really impact the quality of the show for me, but I also can’t imagine this show coming out on a weekly schedule and would have been infuriated multiple times if I’d been watching it one episode a week.
Continue readingAnime
Dorohedoro Is The Weirdest Anime I’ve Ever Watched And Enjoyed
Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.
Continue readingFinal Thoughts On Hunter x Hunter: For Real This Time
I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
Continue readingI Finally Watched Frieren And I’ve Got A New Favorite Anime
Over my birthday weekend (a week and a half ago as I’m writing this), my friends introduced me to Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, an anime that I’d heard about a while back but never really gotten around to watching. I’m terrible at watching things by myself, I’ll freely admit, but I almost watched Frieren back when I first heard about it because the premise of it was incredibly compelling to me. Frieren is an Elven mage who saves the world with her adventuring party and then goes on a personal journey afterwards only to discover upon her return that her treasured companions are not as immune to the passage of time as she is. A mere fifty years of idle spell collection was a lifetime for her friends and now she has to cope with not only the regrets she feels but how to live amongst humans who live, grow, and pass in so very little time. The anime has it all: the unintended consequences of power vacuums, repeating the mistakes of the past because humans don’t live on the same time scale as the demons they’ve been fighting, an ancient being struggling to answer the impossible questions of (effective) immortality, and a constant dose of heart and connection to tie it all together. Exactly my shit in ways I couldn’t anticipate before watching it, to the degree that it has probably become my favorite anime, supplanting Delicious In Dungeon from just last year.
Continue readingWrapping Up Fruits Basket
At far too late at night (an admittedly subjective time), I finished Fruits Basket with my friend. We started Season 2 a few weeks ago, but got caught up in it as the second season came to a close and wound up watching the last season of it in about a week as we crammed it all in before she and her husband would be entirely unavaiable due to traveling for a wedding. I was desperate to finish watching it, swept up in the story as I was, and she was willing to sacrifice sleep to share one of her favorite stories with me, so we burned the candle at both ends and now I’m at a loss for what to do with myself once again. Less so than with Final Fantasy 14, but, unlike Final Fantasy 14, I still find myself thinking “I can’t wait to watch more Fruits Basket” and then remembering that there’s no more for me to watch and getting utterly devastated as a result. I wouldn’t really compare the two since one is a video game that took me 1100 hours to get to the end of the first major story arc that has completely reshaped the way I spend my free time every single day and the other was a 60-some episode anime that took a few months to watch only because we took a bunch of time away after my friends went to Japan for their honeymoon and I got super caught up in Final Fantasy 14’s story line (which didn’t leave much room for anything else, especially during a period when I was so emotionally exhausted even before dealing with the emotional complexity of Final Fantasy’s story). Feeling at a loss after Final Fantasy 14’s story is a result of not just storytelling but the end of something I’ve been doing for half a year, but the feeling following Fruits Basket is entirely due to the strength of the storytelling, the memorability of the characters, and the uncompromising manner in which the truth of the characters is laid out by the end of the show.
Continue readingI’ve Been Inspired By Anime To Do More Therapy
Almost exactly a year ago, right after Akira Toriyama passed away, I wrote about Dragon Ball and how formative my introduction to manga was. Since then, I’ve mostly held off on rereading the series so I could do it during a time that I was capable of properly feeling joy (rather than just ignoring the pain I was in for all of last year), but I have spent a lot of time, on and off, thinking back to my childhood library and my introduction to the series. And comics (specifically the ones that didn’t appear in the “funny pages” of the newspaper my parents got) as a whole, since those were all sorted together. Surprisingly, out of basically no where, some of those memories became relevant again. You see, in the early days of my local library putting comics out in a place that kids like me could easily see them, there was one other manga series available for people to borrow. I avoided it at all costs because, even then, I was aware of the expectations placed on me by my parents that I avoid anything that might be construed as “girly” or “soft” and the image of a young woman and two young men on the cover screamed “romance” to me in a way I absolutely couldn’t have verbalized as a child. So, rather than invest in my emotional intelligence (which, coincidentally, was something my parents wanted me to develop despite them often signaling that it wasn’t a masculine trait like all the others they tried to cultivate in me), I invested in my creative intelligence and passed over the inexplicably named “Fruits Basket” manga in favor of the action-y one that was filled with fighting and whatnot.
Continue readingGetting Tired Of My Favorite Type Of Snack Media
For a pretty significant portion of my life, I was (at the VERY least) receptive to the idea that you sometimes just needed to get back up and try again whenever you failed. I’d grown up on that idea, caught in an inescapable bad living situation through no fault of my own, so it was a sentiment that appealed to me. Even as I got older, my problems changed, and everything stopped being a waiting game until I could finally escape it (like my home growing up), the message still resonated with me. I’m a pretty soft touch, after all. My heart is near the surface and moves easily, so any story about grit and determination and carrying on despite impossible odds could tug on my heart strings. That’s probably why I was pretty receptive to Shonen anime (“shonen” here being a genre of anime classicaly aimed towards young boys, featuring adventure and fighting and easily-digested morality typically dispensed around or within the aforementioned fighting, thereby showing the righteousness of the heroes’ ideals when they emerged victorious from combat against their hated foe) as a whole when I was introduced to it. So much of it features characters that are the living embodiment of “just try again/harder and you’ll eventually succeed!” and I was pretty much always down to watch whatever. Not everything needs to be high art and sometimes fun can be fun and a cheap tug at the heartstrings will play you just as well as a subtle and artful thrum. It never really bothered me, especially considering that I don’t actually watch a lot of anime as a whole, so I never interrogated it.
Continue readingThe Most Delectable Anime I’ve Seen This Year
Spoiler Warning for the first season of the Delicious in Dungeon anime.
Continue readingMedia Club Plus Is The Best Hunter x Hunter Analysis I’ve Ever Heard
I’ve mentioned this multiple times now, over the last year or so, but I started putting an effort into expanding my podcast selection from just Actual Play podcasts to include some of my other interests. The ones I mostly settled on, thanks to them being adjacent to my favorite podcast (Friends at the Table) in some way or another, both wound up being media analysis podcasts. I studied English literature and literary criticism in college and found them both incredibly fun, so it makes sense to me that I’d enjoy podcasts that basically do that same thing but with movies or TV shows. Which is how I landed on listening to A More Civilized Age and the subject of today’s post: Media Club Plus. I technically started Media Club Plus first, since I’ve been listening not only since the day the first episode dropped, but from the day they streamed episode 0 as a proof-of-concept in order to get people to drive up their Patreon subscriptions to the tier that would see them spin off the Media Club Patreon episodes into their own podcast. The selling point of the show was that the main cast would feature a few long-time fans of the anime Hunter x Hunter and one person who had not only watched very little anime at all but had never watched Hunter x Hunter and had only expressed an interest in it after listening to their friends talk about it all the time. The stream was an instant hit and while it took a few months to get the show off the ground, it funded in less than a month after the stream, thanks in part to a large number of people increasing their pledges (myself included) to help push the group toward their goal. Since then, not only have they put out twenty episodes of the main podcast (an episode every other week), but they’ve also published three Patreon specials with one more imminently on the horizon [which released between writing this and it getting posted], covering a selection of Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episodes. It has been a genuine delight to listen to the podcast go from a rough concept on a Twitch stream to the absolutely stellar analysis and insight that I make sure to never miss when it drops every other week, time allowing.
Continue readingDigging Into The Subtext Of Fullmetal Alchemist
Very recently, out of a desire to have something to do that didn’t require any input or attention from me (well, and to continue teaching Crunchyroll what kinds of stuff I liked), I started watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. This is easily one of my favorite anime since it is a remake of the Fullmetal Alchemist story that closely adheres to the manga by the same name, which is absolutely my favorite manga series. I am not a fan of the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime since it seems to go in some odd directions pretty much immediately (largely because the anime series was made well before the manga series was finished), but I know plenty of people who watched it and enjoyed it. I’ll admit a level of bias here since I started reading Fullmetal Alchemist as one of my first manga series right as the first two volumes were released in the US and I didn’t miss a new volume until the series concluded. I read through it at a very formative time in my life and the story has stuck with me for years, standing up to scrutiny each time I read through it again and sometimes revealing things I missed the first time. Which is what I’m finding now as I watch the anime and think my way through the bits of the manga that it skips past or trims to fit a different media format. There’s a whole major aspect to this story I never really considered all that deeply despite how integral it is to the setting. Sure, it isn’t something that’s addressed explicitly by the manga or anime, but it’s not only a major aspect of the setting and worldbuilding, but a active backdrop that helps develop every single character in the series. After all, the story wouldn’t be even close to the same if it wasn’t about power struggles and working towards the good of all within a facist, authoritarian state.
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