Deep-Dive Discussions

Trigun:  Call Now and We’ll Double It.  Double the Bullets, Double the Action, and Double the Dollars.

Selie 1 Comment

So I’ve finally moved in about one thousand five hundred miles away from where I used to live and have a full-time job with slightly odd hours so it’s been a bit harder to make updates.  On top of that, I had a bit of writer’s block while writing this and ended up solving it by starting up a second blog for my own passion project of creative writing at StoryTimeWithMythos.  However, I will say that now that I’m moved in and finally have some free time, I’m dedicated to updating for you guys with more interesting articles and the like.  The next few articles will be more about specific subjects rather than saluting an anime from my youth as I enjoy those a lot better and feel they’re much stronger discussions.  

Trigun

Even today, one hundred years after the remnants of the pioneers finally explored the frontier and civilization started booming, we’re in love with the idea of The West.  The Western genre has covered a historical hundred-year gap from the end of the frontier to today with films and shows that explore the ideas from that time in America. It was that wonderful part of history where those who made a mad dash for land carried a gun, lived by their own hands, and occupied lawless towns near inhospitable and harsh wastelands.  It’s not just America that’s been fascinated by this idea either.  Many countries around the world have loved to make their own ideas from this setting.  In fact, the reason the once_upon_a_time_10famous subgenre of Spaghetti Westerns is called as such is because they were Italian films.  Nowadays, you don’t see many westerns being made.  Cinema fell in love with the later genres of the 20th century that took hold after the boom of space odysseys in the late 60s through the 70s that changed science fiction from pop serials to the big hit movies of the later decades.  However, that doesn’t mean the genre has died out.  Recent films like The Good The Bad, and the Weird put their own unique twist on the genre and Clint Eastwood even stepped back into his old shoes to do an oscar-winning and absolutely beautiful revisionist version of the Western in Unforgiven.  One of my favorite ideas that has evolved from the Western genre, though, is to take the plot, style, and characters of the Western and apply them to a new frontier to explore.  Particularly, in the case of Trigun, I’m referring to the Space Western.

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Summer 2015 Anime – Watching

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As this post comes rolling through, it seems that half of the Summer 2015 anime has already aired and most people probably have already formed opinions about what they’re watching this season. As standard procedure though, I’m going to roll out what my thoughts are on these series and tell you why I continue watching the anime that I’ve chosen.

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Aspects of Fansubbing – Editing can be pretty difficult

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To make up for how long the last post ended up being, I’ve decided to make a slightly shorter post re-hashing an article I wrote on my Tumblr a while back. I’ve gained further knowledge about the topic since I’m actively involved within a fansub group, and I can now further apply that knowledge to the topic I’ll be writing about.

To start off, I’m not an editor for a fansub group, so I can’t say that I know everything about editing or even that I’m doing it right, but I do know how editing is theoretically supposed to work. For example, taking subtitles from an actual simulcasted release of CrunchyRoll (CR) or Funimation and making a few line changes does not make you a fansubber in my eyes (although that’s a great way to start into the editing portion of fansubbing). While this isn’t what the post will be about, it does factor into the problem that I will describe below with a single picture.

Also, spoilers of Golden Time ahead.

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Little Busters! – A wonderful coming-of-age story that doesn’t sell itself as one

Owningmatt93 2 Comments

…Hey Riki, have you discovered the secret of the world?

*NOTE: This post contains HUGE SPOILERS about the visual novel and anime of Little Busters!/Little Busters! Refrain. If you have any intention to play or watch the anime without having the story ruined for you, stay away from the main content of this post. It won’t hurt your understanding of the concepts if you do decide straight into my post, but you’d be doing yourself an injustice by not reading the story first.*

Visual novels are a pretty interesting medium in regards to all of the other mediums within Japanese culture. They’re not quite stories, but not quite games; they are both combined  to create a story told through audio and simple images. As a lover of both mediums, I get really excited when someone tells me about a good visual novel, considering lots of visual novels are… pretty lacking in the story department. Although, since it’s a medium that isn’t particularly common to find outside of Japan, you can mostly distinguish good novels from bad ones by simply looking at if they’ve been translated into English. Yet, the community always translates a certain company’s content as soon as possible.

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Spring 2015 Anime – Plan to Watch

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Well, looks like it’s that time again. This post may seem a bit late, but unlike what I’ve done in the past, I feel that it’s been a more productive and informative experience to talk about the shows a little bit after episodes have been aired. The original way I’ve done this is to write before the airing shows start and talk from a more predictive stance, and while I think that it’s interesting to be able to look back at my opinions before a show starts, I realized that it’s not exactly fun for others to read, nor does it feel very fresh.

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Waifu Culture: A Troubled Marriage

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Way better than my try at this idea.  If you’ve read my post, definitely read this one as well, as it’s much more detailed and better written.

The Afictionado's avatarThe Afictionado

waifu bar

[First, I’d like to apologise for using a pseudo-meme as the opening image. Second, I would like to forewarn that this post contains mention of sexual harassment and child abuse]

There is nothing wrong with loving fictional characters. When everything else in a story goes to pot, the characters and the emotional attachment we have to them are often what keeps us hooked and allows many a show that would have otherwise run itself into the ground to soldier on. The characters are what we hold dear to our hearts and imaginations, and as they are non-existent conceptual beings created for the purpose of art, copyrights aside, they are in a way ours as soon as they hit the public sphere. I’d say no harm has ever come from loving something, but if you get deep enough into some subsets of fan culture, it can have some weird outreaching connotations.

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FLCL and Revitalizing Creativity – Throwing S**t at the Wall Until Something Sticks

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7329_flcl

Innovation is an idea that’s a lot harder to produce than what it may seem.  Within an industry, you’ll see a significant amount of titles or products that all seem to look the same simply because innovation is difficult to create at all times.  However, that’s why innovation and creativity are necessary elements.  Without them, stagnation starts to creep in, possibly causing the failure of an industry.  It’s weird to think that the anime industry would have this problem, what with hundreds of shows and multiple unique ideas being produced every single year.  Even though some may say there’s a decline, numbers show that the anime industry has been happily growing since the 90s with more and and more shows and larger profits being made.  However, just like other inevitable phenomena — war, famine, another shitty parody movie that tries to be Airplane but fails — there are times in an industry that creativity and innovation are not as present or simply very much needed.  The early 2000s was a situation like this for anime.  The industry was just starting to grow after the mega hits of the late 90s, and needed something new in order to inspire others and rocket itself into the massive industry that it is today.  A few shows started to display interesting ideas that were based around older series (such as One Piece, Rurouni Kenshin, Gundam), but I would argue FLCL (pronounced “Fooly Cooly”) was that one big thing that had such massive creativity that it showed not only what anime could do, but how the industry could turn from a once blossoming tree, which slowly grows each year, into a gargantuan oak that eats orcs and takes down Saruman in the second act.  FLCL is inspirational because the show itself is an inspired work.  It wore its heart on its sleeve and showed a massive amount of references and wacky humor while attempting to combine interesting ideas from many different places.  FLCL’s philosophy is, in a sense, the same as a monkey’s attempt at art:  Throw as much shit on the wall as you can and use what sticks.  However, this works so well because what stuck was so polished and great that it didn’t matter if it was the weirdest piece of art a creature could excrete and smear on a wall.

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My Personal Favorites of 2014

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With the Winter 2015 Anime Season now coming to a close, I wanted to make a final post about my thoughts of the 2014 Anime Season as a whole. This will be a series of two posts, with this one focusing on the more positive aspects of 2014 anime.

Before I get into the post, I want to explain my reasoning for doing a particular post like this, as some people may just write this post off as me stating my personal opinions on these shows. Although that is partially the reason why those shows made it onto the list, I would like to mention there were several shows that I enjoyed in 2014, but out of all of them, these were the ones that I will personally remember as the years continue on. These are also the ones that I hold in high regards in comparison to all of the other shows of that year, and are shows I could recommend to anyone that is a fan of anime.

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Mai Waifu Vs. Your Best Girl – The Ideas of “Waifuism” Versus “Best Girl”, and how the Celebration of Characters can be a Good Thing if not Taken too far.

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Fair warning, while I try to be unbiased to an extent in my discussions, I feel this one is a bit more opinionated than my other ones.  I’m not deeply entrenched in 4chan’s /a/ or other anime communities, so my viewpoint about the terms “waifu” and “best girl” comes from a different perspective.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading my discussion!

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If you’ve ever watched Azumanga Daioh, there’s a hilarious scene where the creepy teacher of the school, Kimura, drops a picture of a beautiful woman from his coat pocket.  The students pick it up and comment on how she’s very beautiful and looks like a nice woman, wondering who she might be.  The creeper of a teacher suddenly appears from behind them and exclaims in deadpan, broken English that she’s “Mai waifu.”  The students freak out, not only over his sudden appearance, but that such a beautiful and charming woman would be married to a suspected pedophile and scary man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AgDbAT56I0

Originally, the terms “waifu” and “hazu” were borrowed from English in the early 1980s in order to better define modern marriage in Japan as the original Japanese term for wife, “Kanai”, means “inside the house” and the term for husband, “shujin” or “danna”, means “master”.  Obviously outdated, “waifu” and “hazu” were adopted to show a modern expression of equal treatment.  While Japanese otaku definitely would have used the term before, fans of the show Azumanga Daioh thought the juxtaposition of a possible pedobear with a wonderfully nice woman, as well as the teacher’s broken English response, were so funny, the term “Mai tumblr_l5balcNZfe1qcaxovo1_1280Waifu” came to become a meme for the people of the Internet.  The term means that a female character a person enjoys is so loved by that person, they claim to be “married” to them.  People have also used it to refer to their favorite character in general, disregarding gender and including male characters in a humorous, but endearing way as also their “waifus” and sometimes “husbandos”.  While for some, the level of love towards their fictional character is just a fun aside to their own lives, many on the Internet latched onto the idea of having an actual love interest in their two dimensional favorite characters.  This in itself is not bad as I feel we’ve all been there to certain extents.  I know I personally love at least half of the main characters Joss Whedon has ever written and, given the chance, I would absolutely date Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly and I’m a hetero male.  However, it’s important to note that these fantasies can be taken too far.

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Winter 2015 Anime – Plan to Watch

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This is a revision from my previous posts on Tumblr since these shows are now halfway completed.

As the previous post was more about how I thought a particular show would be perceived, this post will kind of confirm or deny some of those thoughts that I may have had, without necessarily saying that the show is good or bad. I didn’t want to do a full re-post of it, as I figured that would be pretty boring and would give some misconceptions about how I do things.

With that said, let’s get into some airing anime discussion!

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