My Brother’s Husband – An Instructional Guide to Being an Ally

June 27, 2019June 29, 2020Selie Leave a comment

Back when Ryan Lewis and Macklemore were writing the songs for their album The Heist, Ben Haggerty (Macklemore) was having a hard time coming up with the lyrics for “Same Love.” He finally decided on an idea of telling the story from a gay individual’s perspective. However, when he showed this to Ryan Lewis, Ryan shot it down immediately. He stated to Ben that there was no authenticity behind these words, and that if he really wanted to make an impact, he should tell it from his perspective. Ben rewrote the song with this in mind, taking his own perspective and feelings of support for the gay community and translating them musically. The song went on to be an anthem for the gay community and a banner for allies to rally under as they pushed harder to finally enact legal gay marriage in the United States.

As someone who likes to write in his free time, I always suffer trying to find how to write characters that aren’t the same background as me, whether it’s a different ethnicity or a different sexuality. To be honest, it genuinely is an impossible thing to try and do this by myself. I can’t understand the struggle or the abuse people have gone through for being gay because I’m just not. That is why I always talk to those around me from these backgrounds in order to help me understand on some scale, and then constantly keep the conversation going as I write. Any writer who is gay would far better be able to detail how that feels than me, and we should encourage them to write those feelings. However, for those of us that are allies, I feel that if we want to express these types of characters in the stories we tell, we have to make damn sure we do it right.

That is why I love My Brother’s Husband as a series. This short but endearingly sweet manga very much acts as an instructional guide for the ways allies can help and make the best of being the support class in the Equality Squad. Gengoroh Tagame in this manga shows people, such as myself, how to be that ally that the gay community needs, how to accept them and work with them to make a better place.

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Doom Patrol – My Love of Weird

May 1, 2019June 29, 2020Selie Leave a comment

It’s been a bit but I wanted to make a piece. Partially because of the extreme guilt of not being vocal and sharing with you guys who have supported us but also because I’m trying to turn that guilt into something really beautiful, if I can. So, I’ll do what I do best:

Here’s a gush piece.

DC recently decided to wall off a lot of their content on their own streaming platform called DC Universe, possibly because they saw Disney do the same with Marvel. Now, granted, I’m sure that there are some benefits for doing this. For instance, with a branch specifically for assisting shows to get created, there are some things that may not have had the money or chance otherwise. That said, it really sucks for a lot of people because there’s no reason to pay for another service that you’ll probably check out once every blue moon.

Well let me tell you about how freaking blue that moon is for me right now.

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[Season Sampler] Senryuu Girl Episode 1 – Cherry Blossoms

April 9, 2019April 9, 2019Owningmatt93 Leave a comment

There’s no better way to start off Spring season than with a show that seems to truly capture the perfect essence of the meaning of “spring time”. You have the trees and flowers blooming, the lack of any sort of “hey, it’s cold and miserable” mood that always seems to come with many anime based in the winter months, and most importantly (for anime at least), the general school romance that seems to always flourish during this time of year.

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The No Cry Challenge

March 28, 2019Selie Leave a comment

Hey anime peeps. It’s Mythos!

This is a little different but I wanted to share a more personal piece I wrote about the importance of expressing emotion.

It’s not anime related so I’m hosting it on my personal blog but I figured if you liked some of my other posts, such as the Psycho-Pass one, you might like this.

Thanks!

Selie

When I was in college, my roommate at the time introduced me to a challenge that was being spread around Reddit. It was called the No Cry 19 Challenge. It was a playlist of videos that was guaranteed to make people cry. They weren’t all sad, though many were, but were just extreme from an emotional sense. Extremely sad, extremely happy, and just a whole range of emotions. The comments were fun to look at as you saw a wide range of individuals detailing out how far they made it, with many falling off within the first ten videos.

The challenge was fun but it also made me realize two ideas. The first, is that it’s a universal thing to need to cry, and through empathy we’re able to share in those emotions other have. This sounds super philosophical, like some hoity-toity shit, but the fact of the matter is…

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Kase-san and Pure Yuri

February 18, 2019Selie 1 Comment

A beautiful and absolutely wonderful discussion of a great manga. I genuinely could not say it better than this person. Please check out their piece and their blog!

Abby Says Words

This essay contains spoilers from Kase-san and Cherry Blossoms.

As a longtime shoujo manga fan (well over a decade at this point) and a relatively new but passionate Yuri fan (Revolutionary Girl Utena was my first foray into the genre back in 2016), the Kase-san series seemed made for me. I was first exposed to the series through the animation clip produced in May 2017, a gorgeous, atmospheric extended AMV of sorts, and then was lucky enough to catch the Kase-san and Morning Glories OVA at AnimeNYC this year (and I got to see it with Yuri expert Erica Friedman, which made the viewing all the more delightful). The OVA left me speechless, and at the Q&A afterward, the director summed the premise of the shoujo series perfectly: he wasn’t focused on conveying a story about women in love, but one about people in love, regardless of…

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[Short Thoughts] KonoSuba: God’s Blessing Upon This Wonderful World (Seasons 1 and 2) — Thus, Hilarity Ensues

February 13, 2019June 29, 2020Owningmatt93 2 Comments

When someone mentions the words “comedy anime”, this is often one of the first recently airing shows that will be brought to the table when tossing out names for recommended lists or “must watches”. Not quite an MMO anime of the years past, and not quite an isekai anime of the current years, KonoSuba manages to both cater to the fans of those types of shows, while also simultaneously poking fun at all the ridiculous concepts behind said shows. It may even be tempting to call this type of show a “parody” or a “subversion” of the genres its mimicking. Honestly though, I don’t think either of those terms really fit what this show is.

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Please, Please Don’t Watch W’z

January 13, 2019February 1, 2021generaltofu 11 Comments

It’s the end of 2018. The year is coming to a close, with a new year and new anime just on the horizon. As I scan over the Winter 2019 season’s offerings, I spy a show called W’z that stirs something within me – it looks a whole lot like Hand Shakers, a show that, no pun intended, shook me to the core almost two years ago. I find a trailer, and sure enough, it’s the same style, aesthetic, and even the jarring gear-looking weapons. I’m having minor heart palpitations. Surely Hand Shakers didn’t get a sequel greenlit – a show that was as consistently panned by critics and viewers alike couldn’t have been given the blessing, let alone the budget, for a season two. I talk to my co-host Owningmatt93, and I’m assured by him that “it’s just the style GoHands does, man. All of their stuff looks like this.” Looking at trailers for, for instance, K: Return of Kings, it does indeed look pretty much exactly the same, aside from a lesser emphasis on a mix of 2D and 3D animation. My fears assuaged somewhat, I continue on with my look at what’s in store for the next few months.

It’s 2019. A new year, a fresh start, and a new season ahead of us for anime. It’s 2019, and I get this message in The Backloggers Slack chat:

…Wait.

…No.

No.

NO.

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[Season Sampler] The Price of Smiles 1 — Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

January 5, 2019June 29, 2020Owningmatt93 2 Comments

If you’re anything like me, you may have given this anime one glance and thought that it looked like a strange concoction of what people would regard as a “generic fantasy show” with very under-stellar elements regarding animation and effects. There’s nothing really that makes this anime stand on its own from just reading the synopsis and watching the PV. To older anime viewers such as myself, it almost looks like a cross between Aldnoah.Zero and Chaika: The Coffin Princess in terms of both style and elements presented to us throughout the show. Both of those shows were at varying levels of popularity and quality, but I think that while comparing Price of Smiles to those shows may be accurate in terms of plot setup and world-building elements, it’s also disingenuous to say that this show is exactly like either of those, as it does have a wide array of differences in terms of execution and tone that keeps it apart as its own entity.

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My thoughts on rape scenes in lieu of Goblin Slayer

October 14, 2018October 14, 2018Selie 4 Comments

Warning: This may be be difficult for some to read. If discussion about rape is too much for you, please go ahead and pass on this. I will always support mental health and taking care of yourself.

The anime adaptation of Goblin Slayer has come out this season and it’s raised a lot of discussion in the community due to some of the material in it with one scene in particular I’ve heard about. I haven’t seen the scene in question, nor have I sat down to watch a lot of shows this season but I wanted to take time to post my thoughts on rape scenes in general in media because I feel there are a couple of important things to think about when it comes to this discussion. Once again, this isn’t a direct commentary on this anime as I can’t do that. I’ve not seen it so I won’t say Goblin Slayer is completely acceptable or to burn it as filth or anywhere in-between.

So to get into it, while I think there are a ton of other factors to consider, I believe there are two big questions to always ask when creators put a rape scene in a series like this.

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Spider-Man – How a game about superheroes got super real.

October 12, 2018June 29, 2020Selie 1 Comment

So, in case anyone missed it, the new Spider-Man game on PS4 is just gosh dang fun. Every little detail of pretending to be Spider-Man swinging through the streets of Manhattan Island is one of my favorite experiences I’ve played in a game in a long time, and Insomniac keeps showing me why they continue to be amazing at what they do. It’s just so much fun to swing around, to beat up gangs of bad guys, or even to hop down onto the city streets and high-five a fan or finger guns a tourist as they snap a picture of you. It’s not only the systems and mechanics but also the atmosphere of the game, with decent portions of the game taking place on bright, sunny days and with wonderful and fully realized characters going about their lives across New York. So it came as a surprise to me, a person who was just enraptured and thinking about the gameplay, that after a few hours of playing, I found myself crying.