Anime

Log Time Podcast #3 | Spring 2015 Anime (cont.) — Unmasking the Mysteries of Love

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Log Time is the podcast of The Backloggers where we talk about anime, manga, light novels, and where grown men get really giddy over shows that were specifically made for girls because damn if they can’t be good love stories.

In this episode, Owningmatt and Mythos wrap up some talk on Dungeon, get nostalgic over high school band camp with Hibike! Euphonium, laugh over stereotypical bad guys in Show By Rock!, love on some love stories in Ore Monogatari, and gush over great writing in Yahari.

Also, please ignore the fact that we complain about the audio.  It was mostly just in our headphones and not the fact that we were going crazy.  We found out Mythos had a really crappy connection with his mic that all the audio was routing through so everything’s fixed now.

Intro and Outro song: “Platform” by Or4nges

Spring 2015 Anime – Plan to Watch

Owningmatt93 Leave a comment

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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Log Time Podcast #2 | DanMachi Overview — Trapped in a Dungeon with Spooky Protagonists

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Log Time is the podcast of The Backloggers where we talk about anime, manga, light novels, and constantly find ourselves inappropriately making jokes about terrorism.

In this episode, Owningmatt and Mythos talk about Dungeon, fantasy as a genre, how classic chivalry relates to modern fantasy stories, and reminiscence on the awesome anime of 2013.

Intro and Outro song: “Platform” by Or4nges

Log Time Podcast #1 | Spring 2015 Anime — Let’s Get This Terrible Party Started!

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Log Time is the podcast of The Backloggers where we talk about anime, manga, light novels, and randomly divulge into jokes about taking potato chips and eating them.

In this episode, Owningmatt and Mythos talk about their thoughts and feelings on the Spring 2015 anime season as well as how to use plot devices and what is this generation’s introductory anime.

Also, due to Owningmatt’s nervous habit of clicking pens, clicky pens are now banned from the podcast.

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

Selie Leave a comment

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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.

Selie Leave a comment

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

Owningmatt93 Leave a comment

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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Genshiken vs. Genshiken Nidaime:  Old vs New.  My Nostalgic Ramblings and how Changing Views in Otaku Culture Show a Great Future.

Selie 5 Comments

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Every now and then, the anime industry loves to poke fun at itself.  Sometimes, this self-awareness from the industry is like Watamote (the real name is way too long to type), where it makes us uncomfortable with how accurate it is to our own awkward lives, basking in our memories of awkward situations and episodes, completely departing from realism to the chagrin of those around us.  However, other times, the industry uses a softer approach, taking our wonderful memories of reveling in our nerd culture and both poking fun and celebrating their importance to us.  Genshiken and Genshiken Nidaime are anime of this latter approach.  Genshiken or, as it’s subtext defines it, The Study of Modern Visual Culture is a manga/anime about a college club of the same name and their experiences loving, hating, and discussing all of the merits of otaku culture.  The series takes all of the games, anime, manga, etc. that we know (as well as some fakes ones it invented so wonderfully that they were spun off as their own anime) and takes pride in using their likeness for comedic and celebratory effect.  In fact, a surprising thing from this series is that it doesn’t just parody other anime, games, manga, etc. with alternative names or other ways to get around copyright.  For most references, the series straight up calls out the names of the anime and shows actual gameplay of certain games.  Genshiken was always very upfront about what it referenced and used each name or character from a different series as a badge of honor, showing how the creators, like their readers, were also otaku of a high pedigree.

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My Favorite Hilarious Troll Moves I’ve Seen in Anime

Selie 2 Comments

All right, so Madoka was a serious and depressing topic last time, so I thought I’d go with a pick-me-up for this next discussion.  So!  Let’s talk about my favorite hilarious troll moves I’ve seen from anime.  Now these are just my five favorite trolls that I wanted to point out, and I’m limited by what I’ve seen, so I won’t make this a list of “The Top Five of All Anime” or anything that conceited.  Also, another limitation on this list is that I’m only including what I consider as funny image00trolling in anime, i.e.  playing a joke on the audience for a bit of fun, rather than for a sudden plot twist in the story that changes everything, or a scene that is a big middle finger to the fans such as Sword Art Online S1 and its main antagonist’s final spiel. (Also, I’m looking at you, OreImo.  The lesson here is if you wanna write a story, but your publisher doesn’t want it written the way you want, get a new publisher.)  As such, I’m also excluding any major plot twists from anime that greatly influence the story, such as Madoka: The Rebellion Story or other twist endings that change everything in general.  These are all great, but they deserve their own discussion since the anime industry really loves to take a left turn towards the end of their series, whether they need to or not.  Since this isn’t including any major plot twists that dramatically change a series, this discussion will actually be relatively major spoiler free, but we will be going over material that’s in the middle to end of some anime so SPOILER ALERT if you care about minor spoilers for a series.  Now, let’s get this crazy hootenanny, shindig started!

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