Author: generaltofu

SukaSuka Episode 4 – Ebb and Flow

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I have to be honest, when I went to watch episode 4 of SukaSuka, I was interested in where it was going to take me. Was the show going to take us on a long journey where nothing happens, but we learn a lot about the show’s world, as previous episodes thus far have done? Since we just saw Chtholly, Ithea, and Nephren go off to Island 15 to fight against the 17 Beasts, are we going to see some over-the-top action sequence, switching out our fairly consistent viewpoint of Willem for that of our battle fairies? Are we going to get some action four episodes into this season that isn’t just a brief sparring match?

Not to nab some of the thunder that Owningmatt93’s previous post signaled, but episode four is, interestingly, still more of the same, but in many ways, we also see the show shift slightly – steadily-paced world-building, getting to know the cast a bit better, and…a lot about lizard romance films?

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SukaSuka Episode 1 – Hopes as High as Sky Islands

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A brief note – I have gone into this show completely blind. I have not even read a summary of the show’s main plot. Everything I relate in this post should be taken as such.

This Spring anime season, there’s a surprising number of shows that at least look pretty promising – though as we all probably know by this point, there are a lot of series that look and seem fantastic from their PVs, which show off cool animation sequences, try to entice you with their (hopefully) endearing characters, attempt to seem like they could bring something new to the table, or some combination of the above. There’s a lot to wade through, so let me pitch a show to you for this season. It’s a LN adaptation set in a fantasy world with- hey wait, stop, I’m not done yet! Let me finish!

For those who may not know and need a strongly-paraphrased summation of the show’s premise, Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? Isogashii desu ka? Sukutte Moratte Ii desu ka?, or as the anime community at large has mercifully deemed it, SukaSuka, is a fantasy/sci-fi Light Novel adaptation taking place in a world of sky islands, where humanity was wiped from existence. In this story, we follow young Willem Kmetsch, who has taken on the job of being a military caretaker for a warehouse of advanced weaponry. What he doesn’t know, however, is that the weapons are, in fact, young girls. While the show might sound on the surface to be a groan-fest of typical fantasy isekai trappings and other tropes that tend to make shows less-than-enjoyable experiences, SukaSuka actually delivers in its first episode a surprising amount of good reasons to give it a chance – and by god, do I have high hopes for this one.

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Youjo Senki Episode 11 – All Fronts Coming Up Short

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For the week or so leading up to this week’s episode of Youjo Senki, I had been honestly pretty excited to see how the end of the previous episode would pan out. I found myself largely in the camp of Owningmatt93 with regards to my expectations for the ensuing battle between Tanya and Sioux; though the buildup and the climax of episode 10 did feel a tad hamfisted in introducing Sioux’s return, I felt pretty confident that “[the] battle [would] consist of more moral conflicts and ideological shifting on both of their behalves,” and that, in general, it would just be a pretty impressive showdown. With the way the show had been slowly creeping up on how Sioux had supposedly gained the power of Being X and was making preparations explicitly to take Tanya down, the resolution of this grudge match had to be something impressive, right?

Well…not exactly.
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Are We Scum for Watching Scum’s Wish?

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Although we aren’t quite finished with the Winter 2017 season yet, and I’m admittedly not entirely caught up on everything I started watching this season, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Scum’s Wish will handily secure the position of my Anime of the Season. I haven’t seen an anime in recent seasons that has so maturely dealt with ideas such as, but not limited to, sexuality, sexual identity, views of self-worth, and the various ways in which these factors affect people and their interactions with one another. It’s a drama unlike any other I’ve seen in the genre, and each week I have consistently come back eager to see what new element of the story is going to unfold before me. In watching the show, though, it’s impossible to get around one of the integral themes that some of the characters wrestle with – are they scum for using others in the ways that they do for their pleasure? By extension, are we scum for watching these events unfold, and using their pain and drama for our own enjoyment?

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Youjo Senki Episode 8 – The Hard Questions

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Episode 7 of Youjo Senki presented us with a view of the ongoing war not just from the perspective of Tanya and the Empire, but also from that of Entente soldier Anson Sioux. Among other things, such as giving a perspective from outside the Empire, expertly weaving in tonal shifts that made for a rather dramatic and fantastic episode, and fully fleshing out Sioux as a solid, memorable side character, episode 7 used these factors to give the viewer pause and to really consider the morality of the war.

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Youjo Senki Episode 5 – Tanya’s Wrath of God Battalion

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If previous episodes have been any indication, Tanya has had a bit of a rough time trying to balance out world events in her favor. Being X is definitely not doing her any favors, and Strategy and Operations Vice Director Hans von Zettour has been making sure that Tanya is advancing through the ranks in the way that is most beneficial to the Fatherland, not necessarily in the way that she would like. With her being placed as the head of the Rapid-Response Mage Battalion, which some might consider being tantamount to suicide, Tanya’s plan to spite Being X by surviving in a safe administrative position seems to be flying further out of her grasp with each passing episode. With this simultaneous advancement of position and wresting of power from Tanya seeming to be the show’s running theme for the last four episodes, I entirely expected episode 5 to give us much the same, and in some ways, it does. However, it also shows us a view of Tanya at the most powerful that she has been for this entire span so far, with no intervention from military or metaphysical forces.

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A Year of Shaft | Month 1: Rec

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A Year of Shaft – A Primer

2016 was the year that I leaned fully into my role in The Backloggers and started taking the blogging aspect of my position much more seriously. It wasn’t the smoothest of starts, but as the year went on and the posts rolled out, I felt progressively more comfortable with the medium, and I put out a number of pieces that I am fairly proud of. However, these posts were few and far between, and I was left feeling as though I could do more, so I decided to put this idea into action instead of my usual habit of planning something at length without actually executing it. For no particular reason other than personal interest, I came up with the idea for this project: A Year of Shaft. This is going to be a twelve post series covering the anime of Shaft, one release for each month of 2017. The anime selected will cover releases by Shaft from 2006 through 2017, with one of the twelve anime from each respective year. I realize that Shaft has produced works from well before 2006, but I was enamored with the idea of doing a yearly, chronological post project, so here we are. The project is not meant as a commemoration of any major event for the studio, but is more a project of personal interest, and an exploration of a studio I have little experience with outside of some of their more widely-known works.

Now, it’s important to note here that the anime I selected for this project is not at all meant to be indicative of the quality of Shaft as a whole, nor is it meant to be a showcase for what I consider to be the “best” works of the studio. On the contrary, when the anime released in each year allows for it, I have opted to try to pick a show that I have not seen before and which is not a sequel series, special, or OVA offshoot of an existing series, unless the year’s offering does not allow for me to abide by these rules. I’ve done this with the intention of going into each series as blind as I can and get a sampling of what Shaft was working on each year, and just getting a feel for it. With that in mind, the first anime in our romp through Shaft’s past works is the 2006 rom-com, Rec.

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Youjo Senki Episode 2 – Devout Follower of Rules

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Episode 1 of Youjo Senki introduced us of Tanya the Evil through the eyes of Viktoriya Serebryakov. We saw her battle prowess as a hardened Lieutenant for the country of the Fatherland, and we also saw her ruthlessness in terms of management and her drive to do whatever is most in line with efficiency for her country. However, we had no idea how Tanya got to this point, and the mysterious backstory of Tanya as a reincarnated salaryman was only briefly touched on. All in all, while the episode itself was solid in terms of hooking me into the show, it didn’t give us a strong frame of reference to base anything off of.

In the first post in this series, Owningmatt mentioned that “The underlying issue with this episode’s focus on characterization [. . .] is the massive amount of exposition being done about various events taking place in the setting, yet none of it really seems to explain the details needed for the viewer to really grasp the workings of the world itself.” This is a fairly unsavory issue for a first episode to have, to be sure – an unsteady flow of ideas and information about a series and the world that it attempts to build can be greatly detrimental to grabbing and holding the attention of viewers. Although this is the case for the series premiere, episode 2 of Youjo Senki corrects this janky world-building with a far more in-depth history of Tanya’s time before and after her transportation to this new world. And there aren’t any vague, unhelpful maps, either.

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Are We a Generation of Cyborgs? Cyborg Identities in Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass

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Cyborgs have always been an interest of mine. The idea of machine and human integration in various forms for human advancement fascinates me – as such, I love a good cyberpunk or sci-fi show centered around this idea and the moral and ethical discussions that arise from such human alterations. Heck, I even based some of my graduate studies writing on the exploration of various kinds of human/machine integration, using bits of Production I.G.’s dystopian cyberpunk crime thriller Psycho-Pass (2012). Somehow, with all of those boxes checked off, it occurred to me recently that I had never sat down and watched Ghost in the Shell (1995), which just so happens to be another science-fiction futuristic police drama anime by Production I.G. (and the film progenitor of an insanely popular franchise worldwide), and I figured it was high time I corrected that.

Ghost in the Shell reminded me a great deal of Psycho-Pass. The ways in which each of the two works depict crime prevention and the methods used therein is fascinating; the former’s bodily augmentations from Section 9 and the latter’s lack of such augmentations in favor of the Sibyl System and the Dominators presents an interesting contrast in the ways that these two futuristic societies have opted to dispense justice. However, likely because I had gone into the movie with a mindset thinking about cyborg identities and my previous writings, what was more interesting to me was the way in which both works presented cyborgs in their worlds, despite taking place roughly a century apart from one another (2029 for GitS, undefined year in the 22nd century for Psycho-Pass).

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An Alternate Look at Fanservice in Keijo!!!!!!!!

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Every time a new season of anime rolls around, I take some time to look through the season’s offerings and decide what shows I’m hyped about, what I might give a look, and what I will more than likely pass altogether. Generally speaking, I check out most shows’ available PVs and do some digging into the creative teams that have been working on the show. These factors are most often what inform my choices of what I decide to check out, and what to perhaps get excited about. What acts as a preliminary informant to me before I even get to that stage of digging, however, is the simple survey of show genres–in contrast to the great deal of digging I do for shows that I follow, I often don’t pay much mind to shows that don’t seem even remotely interesting to me as far as their purported genres indicate.

Usually, I tend to breeze past shows that are tagged as ecchi, for example. If a show is branded as “action, comedy, ecchi, romance,” more often than not, you can bet that I am not going to be following that show in the slightest. That being said, I don’t have anything against the ecchi genre–I know many people that are fans of shows within the genre as a whole, and I know that, in some senses, it can be fairly diverse in how it appeals to different audiences within the genre fanbase through various modes of sexual fanservice. There’s all sorts of arguments that people can make about the genre with regards to, for example, how it might appeal to a male gaze, which, if you really want to get into that, seems to ignore the existence of any alternative gazes (lesbian gaze, bisexual gaze, etc.). But that’s not a discussion I’m going to get into here. Everyone has their own opinions as far as genre goes, and they’re entitled to those opinions. Some people don’t like mecha anime; some people don’t like slice of life; I myself generally don’t like ecchi.

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