Simoun (2006) Ep 2 – Aoi Izumi
Or, that time I visited the spring.
"Anime was a mistake." — nobody, ever
Or, that time I visited the spring.
This week, an angry man barricaded the exits of one of Kyoto Animation’s studio buildings and started a fire. Thirty-three workers died in the attack. The rest of the seventy employees on site were hospitalized in varying condition. When SunshineDuk messaged me to tell me about the arson and massacre, I was in the middle …
Fate is back at its most excessive (visually, dramatically, squickily) in Fate/stay night Heaven’s Feel ii lost butterfly. This is the second installment in a film trilogy adapting the longest and most fucked up of the three main arcs of the visual novel that started it all. While this particular series has been more cogent than …
Hi everyone! It’s time for our monthly ‘state of the blog’ post. I’m going to keep it brief. The short version is this: while I greatly enjoy writing for Against Moe, I don’t particularly have the time to drive social media or monetization. Shortly after this announcement, I will close our Twitter and Patreon pages. …
Exuberant hijinks and melancholic narration meet in Honey & Clover, a sentimental show about art students, inspiration, and love. Its calm moments are poignant; its loud attempts at humor obnoxious (but still funny). Honestly, it’s a bit shrill in its first episode, and I don’t love it. I also don’t like stories about men deciding …
Uchiage Hanabi, Shita kara Miru ka? Yoko kara Miru ka? Roughly translated means: Skyrockets, Should we see it from the side, or the bottom? Uchiage is a movie produced by SHAFT, and directed by Akiyuki Shinbo. If you’ve seen some anime, then you know what you’re in for: Head tilts, right? There are some head …
If Inferno Cop and One Punch Man went back in time and had a kid, well, first of all, the world would work very differently from how we think it does. But secondly, that kid would be Astro Fighter Sunred. It combines the latter’s superhero parody with the former’s terrible production, but somehow it turns …
One Punch Man is a beautifully animated super hero series that seems to concern itself singularly with one somewhat weak gag: the main dude Saitama is too strong. He’s so strong that he defeats any enemy with one punch. Life has lost its meaning and thrill to him because no super villain comes close to …
It’s been a while since I last blogged about Dragon Ball, in part due to scheduling issues. Since last time I’ve only seen seven more episodes. Now I’m here to repeat the same tired warnings: don’t watch this show, it’s sexist, it’s dumb, yada yada. Since Last Time Dragon Balls Well, as I’d feared, they …
If Cowboy Bebop went back in time and had a baby with Golden Boy, well, first of all, the world would work very differently from how we think it does. But secondly, that baby would be Trigun. Vash the Stampede is a wandering outlaw who embodies the best of Kintaro and the worst of Spike, …
Is this a hot take? K-On! is a Moe Hellscape Let’s get the obvious out of the way: my “Why Against Moe?” article used the K-On! girls for its featured image. The series—a pseudo-comedy about a high school band that spends more time goofing off and enjoying snacks than it does engaging with music—is an …
Continue reading “K-On! is a Compassionate, Anti-Ableist Triumph”
Darker than Black has a large cast and an intricate world. It probably takes more than a single episode for the characters’ motivations and stakes to become clear and for the show to hit its stride, but if you don’t mind a bit of a jumble, the first episode of Darker than Black is pretty …
Death Note in its first episode carries many of the trappings of greatness. From opening theme to ending theme it is packed with mood and philosophical questions, delivered at a decent pace. The storytelling is good, with a lot of scene-setting done tastefully or even sometimes subtly. This may not sound like exuberant praise (“just …
If you ever wanted to watch a show that would make you want to run back to Sword Art Online with your tail between your legs, try sitting down with its genre sibling Overlord. This is MMORPG anime done horribly wrong, and that’s saying a lot, because the theme doesn’t tend to produce good shows. …
Steins;Gate 0 was a bit of an odd request for this category, since it’s a … continuation? spinoff? … something related to a show that aired a decade ago; that said, I went with it, and now I feel like I should go back and give Slayers NEXT more kudos for being eminently understandable. Steins;Gate …
There comes a point when an anime is so gratuitously extra, so ludicrously edgy, that it becomes completely unclear if there is any deeper theme, meaning, or even narrative progression beneath the bloody piles of mangled sex demon corpses. Devilman Crybaby reaches that point rapidly, and it never looks back. None of the characters have …
If Neon Genesis Evangelion didn’t meet your lifetime quota for shows about wimpy boys deciding to pilot mechs because they’re horny, let me introduce you to a show with an equally bizarre name: Darling in the Franxx. This show has everything: sizeism, public sexual assault without consequences, tragic romance, epic fights, post-apocalyptic dome cities, a …
Inferno Cop is a slideshow, for the most part, with close to zero animation. The GIF above is as action-packed as it gets. I criticized Sailor Moon for not animating characters walking; Inferno Cop doesn’t animate characters doing anything. There’s his fiery mane, and there’re some real simple translation effects, and that’s about it. As …
Yesterday, on Free Comic Book Day, an international holiday celebrating the fall of the French in Puebla, Against Moe turned one month old. I wanted to take today to look back at the last month and talk a bit about where we’re headed. Also, I only watched 3 episodes of Dragon Ball this week so …
Some might say that Neo Yokio isn’t really anime. It was produced by Japanese studios, but it was created and written by Americans. There is no original Japanese audio track. The argument could be made that this is an American cartoon, set in New York, starring Jaden Smith. I might have even made that argument …
Flying Witch is about a 15-year-old girl who moves to the country to live with her cousins. She’s a witch, but also a high school student. Despite vast magical knowledge, she’s socially oblivious and comically bad at directions. These drawbacks are moe staples, and I worry that, despite on all other fronts seeming to be …
In Chobits, Hideki is a horny farmer who, upon moving to Tokyo, stumbles into the world of personal computing. Only the world in this show is a bit different from ours, and “personal” here means “sexy gynoid.” The most baffling thing about Chobits is that despite the ubiquity of these sex doll computers, society seems …
If you crossed Air Gear and Code Geass, you might expect to find something not unlike Symphonic Psalms Eureka Seven, a mecha show predating both those titles wherein Transformers surf waves of light in the sky. The first episode follows the genre’s formulae very closely. We start mid-dog fight, then meet our protagonist (a civilian …
Several years ago, a “friend” of mine sat me down to watch the first fifteen minutes of one of the One Piece movies. I think it was called Strong World? He assured me it would be super awesome and also would make sense without any context. As it turned out, neither of these things were …
If you’ve ever wanted to watch a slapstick show about pirates whose cannon balls phase through ships instead of damaging them, who use anachronistic baseball metaphors, who wear anachronistic eyegear, oh and who are made out of extending Immovable Rods mistakenly referred to as “rubber,” then One Piece is just the slapstick show for you! …
A week has passed since I last wrote about Dragon Ball, and I find myself five episodes deeper in this lengthy and cringe-inducing saga. Last week we left off with a couple questions. Since Last Week Bloomers Bloomers consistently trades in her own sex appeal, which is an interesting choice for someone who seems to …
A question I get a lot is, “against what?” And of course I have readers who know exactly what moe is, but there’s still a question: why? I’ve been doing this for almost a month now and I felt like my next serious piece should address some basics. What is this blog’s occasion? What is …
Ouran High School is a private academy for the children of parasites, as well as one arguably lucky poor kid with a merit-based scholarship. Haruhi cares about family, studies, and resource management. Haruhi basically lives in a separate world from the rest of the students. Until one day Haruhi accidentally encounters the Host Club, a …
Continue reading “First Glance: Ouran High School Host Club”
Hajime no Ippo is a show about a professional athlete making the mistake of training a petty bourgeois scion to fight. Rightly derided by his working class classmates, Makunouchi Ippo spends his days helping his mother grow their family’s profits, isolated from the masses. His only encounters with his peers occur on the road home …
In 2008, atomic warfare led to cataclysmic events that destroyed most of Earth’s inhabitants and inhabitable land. Future Boy Conan and his grandpa survive alone on an island, fishing and doing somersaults in peace, until one day a Mysterious Girl who can Talk To Animals appears on the coast. Shortly thereafter, Bad People in Stupid …
B Gata H Kei (localized as “Yamada’s First Time” because it’s hard to translate such an intricate pun) is about a sophomore. Yamada looks good and feels good, and has decided that in high school she is going to sleep with 100 guys. (Why? Affirmation and pleasure! Why not?!) The problem is that she’s a …
I have a lot I want to say about Violet Evergarden, but this is a First Glance post, so I am going to try to limit myself to my impressions from the first episode. Violet Evergarden is about a child soldier struggling with PTSD and limb loss in the aftermath of a Great War analogue. …
Preamble: Due to a variety of circumstances, I find myself shackled to a promise to watch and blog the entirety of Dragon Ball. I am watching one episode every weekday morning. In the interests of not flooding this otherwise austere blog with 153 posts about a terrible 80s “kids” anime, I will be blogging Dragon …
If From the New World were brighter, sandier, and less good, it might look something like Children of the Whales. Here we have yet another old, insular esper community that employs hierarchy and stricture to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Yet again, some children take a day trip by boat, and, yet again, they find …
There’s a really good anime series in which the main character is killed in a car accident in the first episode. After making a bargain with supernatural forces, they are returned to life. You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m talking about Yuu☆Yuu☆Hakusho, but I’m not. No, Yu Yu Hakusho is not what I’d call …
Before there was One Punch Man, there was Lina Inverse. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I thought I’d start today’s First Glance with a little storytime. A week ago I found myself at a nerd party, drinking hard lemonade, elated to encounter other fans of Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’d mentioned I was launching Against …
So much happens in the first episode of Inuyasha that by the end, much like time-jumping shrine heiress Kagome, you may be unclear on how things will proceed from this point. If there’s one thing that’s obvious, though—made apparent somewhere between the creatures in the opening animation and the fact that Kagome’s first instinct on …
Sometimes, us young people forget that we can look to older texts for insight. Our forebears put a lot of work into cataloguing their knowledge of the world, and it’s important to go back sometimes and take in that knowledge. For example, Sailor Moon—a relic from a bygone era, penned by an ancient generation—answers a …
Dragon Ball is old, and it’s for kids, and like the other old kids shows I’ve written about here (Kirby, Pokemon), it’s not particularly gripping. We’ve got a hodgepodge setting, super basic fetch quest plot, juvenile comedy… there’s just not that much there. The 1986 visuals certainly don’t help. I shouldn’t say that Dragon Ball …
All Gundam shows can be sorted into two categories: those wherein characters have fairly normal hair, and those wherein characters have absurd hair. Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is my first experience of the latter, and I have to say I greatly enjoyed the first episode. It juggles a huge cast and introduces a number …
Continue reading “First Glance: Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans”
Microbes are typically measured in micrometers, but in Moyashimon—a show about students at an agricultural university—they seem to span about five centimeters. Curiously, nothing else in this series is four magnitudes larger than its real world size, and the main character Tadayasu is the only one who can see them. Maybe his Mystic Eyes of …
Magical Girl Madoka Magica is an excellent show, and you can watch it on Netflix. The following is not a review of the series so much as a tango with some of its themes. Spoilers abound. The men in Magical Girl Madoka Magica are weak, to start off on a gendered foot. There’s three of …
Hoshi no Kirby (“Kirby of the Stars”) is light fare. A bunch of silly creatures live together in relative harmony—despite incomprehensible social relations between the king (Dedede), the minister (Fumu), the police, the army (Meta Knight), and the primarily sheep-herding peasantry—until one night an octopus demon starts eating all the sheep. Then they have to …
The “realistic” takes on Pokemon are as stale as the franchise itself, and this shit has been around for over two decades, so I’m not going to bore you with snarky comments about ten-year-olds beating up and capturing wild animals. I won’t belabor the flaws in world-building, premise, or plot. I’ll just say this. Pokemon: …
Kyousou Giga is special, and I feel like I should give it an award. The first episode has five frame jumps. (At the end, it’s still unclear which setting—if any—will contain the action for the rest of the series.) There are multiple pairs of characters with the same name. There’s a romance between a man …
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo is a trippy sci-fi adaptation of the famous Alexandre Dumas novel. In the year 5053, some guy named Albert travels to the moon where this sexy blue-skinned vampire aristocrat seduces him into pardoning a serial killer on death row. The first episode is slow, with little spoken exposition and …
Kaiji, like most of my friends, is depressed. The world seems rigged against him. Alienation under capitalism has driven him to the brink. He wiles away his days with cheap booze, and he takes out his frustration by vandalizing the cars of bankers. In another life, he might make a great working class fighter. Unfortunately …
Jungle wa Itsumo Hare Nochi Guu … where to even begin. There’s a boy who lives in a jungle. He likes video games and bananas. His mom’s an alcoholic, and the neighbors joke about the two of them fucking. His adoptive sister eats everything, and has a whole world inside her where the things she …
Houseki no Kuni (localized as “Land of the Lustrous”) focuses on the conflict between beings made out of organic gemstone and the mysterious moon people who want to collect them for jewelry. The first episode has a lot of world-building, and it’s delivered fairly smoothly, naturally and at a good pace. This is aided by …
Emiya-san Chi no Kyou no Gohan (“Today’s Menu for the Emiyas”) doesn’t have the word “fate” in its title, so I assume it is supposed to work as a standalone show for audiences completely unfamiliar with the Fate franchise. For the uninitiated, Fate is a megapopular series of manga, light novels, mobile games, and anime …
Continue reading “First Glance: Emiya-san Chi no Kyou no Gohan”