"Anime was a mistake." — nobody, ever
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Gravitation is an 18-year-old anime about gay people making music, but whoever’s writing the script doesn’t know the first thing about making music and probably also doesn’t believe gay people are real. Even here, in the first BL anime to make it big in the mainstream, with a serious story that will ostensibly revolve around …