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

generaltofu 2 Comments

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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Youjo Senki Episode 4 – Cult of Personality

Owningmatt93 3 Comments

Before I began writing these episodic articles, I never realized how much a show could change over just the course of a few episodes. From episode 1 to episode 4, Youjo Senki has gone through an unbelievable transformation from a show with a disorganized lack of information to a more thrilling show about politics, religion, and morality. Some of the original complaints I had in episode 1 were only those of that episode, and others weren’t really relevant to the upcoming story, if only because I had no idea what kind of story this was. While I think the show’s themes are still a bit mixed, episode 4 has started really delving into Tanya’s personality beyond the fact that she’s an evil militaristic girl that just wants to follow the rules.

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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 3 – Jigsaw the Deity

Selie 3 Comments

How about we play a game?  I transport you to an alternate dimension with amazing powers and then do you promise to learn your lesson?

I’d have to say that the second episode of Youjo Senki was a very interesting twist from the first. The idea of God (or Being X as Tanya calls him) giving our salaryman protagonist a second chance through trial by almost literal fire was a nice way to take what I initially thought was a simple but interesting idea and layering more and more interesting levels onto it.  However, while we did get some much-needed explanation and characterization, as GeneralTofu pointed out, we also had more questions.  What is The Empire and how does it function?  What changed Tanya to invoke God’s name even through she adamantly has been against him, even denying the existence of a God.  Well luckily, we’re starting to get the answers.  Episode three explains to us primarily two things:  That The Empire is a meritocracy and that Tanya has been forced into her newfound religious slogans.

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Log Time Podcast #22 | Haibane Renmei Discussion — An Exercise in Forgiveness

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This week, we talk about Haibane Renmei’s exploratory style of storytelling and world-building, how it interacts with different cultural and Biblical mythologies (no Onii-sama Jesus this time, sorry), and how it ended up being unlike what any of us expected (both good and bad).

This podcast was recorded on January 19th, 2017.

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The Backloggers’ Bizarre Adventures | Gaia Online Shenanigans [Part 1]

thebackloggers 2 Comments

The Backloggers take an adventure into the past to explore Gaia Online and how much it’s changed… or not.

Take a trip into the depths of the depravity, exploring how sometimes the past is better to just be left forgotten and undisturbed.

Buckle in folks, this is gonna be a ride.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Thanks to VEM311 for editing this video! Check out her channel here!

Youjo Senki Episode 2 – Devout Follower of Rules

generaltofu 3 Comments

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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The Backloggers 2nd Anniversary – The Road Ahead

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Hey everyone! Hope you guys are having a pretty good start to 2017 after the train wreck of 2016. We kicked it up near the end of 2016, but if you think that’s the end of our surge of posting, well, you were wrong.

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

generaltofu 8 Comments

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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Youjo Senki Episode 1 – Distributing Information to an Audience

Owningmatt93 7 Comments

Japan, are you doing okay? You wanna talk about something?

This is the second season in a row where we’ve had an anime about a “European” conflict involving both magic and standard military technology. From what I read in the synopsis, my perception was that the setting would be more modern than it was historical, and that is partially my fault from not looking at the PV close enough. Just from looking at it, you can tell the weaponry is not fully modernized, and the stylistic designs of the uniforms are not modern at all. I will also fully admit that mixing militaristic ideas with fantasy elements is not really something I’m innately interested in. Although, what I am interested in is looking at a non-realistic portrayal of the less glorified aspects of war. Using fantasy elements as a way to emphasize the physical and mental destruction caused by war is something I’d love to see from this show.

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