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This week, we talk about how Jun Maeda affected Charlotte, highlighting the positives and negatives of his writing style along the way.
Our plunge into Maeda was a ride, trust us.
Spoilers
Nerawareta Gakuen – A Film Where Frame of Reference Matters
My methods of choosing what anime I want to watch next are probably abnormal compared to most. Sometimes I become interested in a show by reading a blog post, or sometimes the selection is completely spontaneous and random. Nerawareta Gakuen fell more into the former category for me, as I originally discovered it through a video created by Digibro, an anime blogger/reviewer. While I can’t find the exact video that originally inspired this post, I found another video of his that reflected the same viewpoint.
Log Time Podcast #11 | Baccano! Discussion — To Which We Say, “Baccayes!”
Log Time is the podcast of The Backloggers where we talk about anime, manga, light novels, and how people become crazy, homicidal killers when they gain the unlimited power of immortality.
In this episode, we go over how Baccano!’s format affected the perception of the show and discuss the wide variety of characterization present within the show, all while providing some comedic humor along the way (the comedic part may be open to interpretation).
Also, I hope we’re getting better. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback for us or the site!
Articles are also coming soon. Keep an eye out for those!
Log Time Podcast #9 | Mahouka Discussion — A Certain Irregular Jesus
Log Time is the podcast of The Backloggers where we talk about anime, manga, light novels, and how we ventured on a journey to enlightenment through watching anime.
In this episode, we talk about the themes present within the plot, the unique world building elements, and how the main character slowly became Jesus in Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei, a popular anime adapted from a light novel of the same name.
Aspects of Fansubbing – Editing can be pretty difficult
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.
Little Busters! – A wonderful coming-of-age story that doesn’t sell itself as one
…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.
My Favorite Hilarious Troll Moves I’ve Seen in Anime
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 
trolling 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!
Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Revisionism and How Studio Shaft “Felt Like Destroying Something Moe”
Let’s talk about genre for a second.
Now bear with me, I’ll get to the fascinating twists and the dark plot of Madoka Magica soon, but I want to get a little information across first. For film genres, or any art form for that matter, there are a few different stages that a film can go through. Generally, it starts with an Experimental Stage, where the genre is starting out and the rules haven’t been made just yet. As an example, think of westerns before they all typically started having one man for good facing off in a high noon duel against the bad guy.
After they finally establish what works, the Classical Stage begins, which is where all of the tropes and ideas generally come from. Eventually, people get tired of those tropes, though, and start the Parody Stage. For westerns, this was Blazing Saddles. This stage makes fun of the over-used tropes that start to appear within a genre.
Finally, we get to one of my favorite stages: Revisionism.
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Kill la Kill – Feminism, Sexuality, and WHY IS EVERY EPISODE MORE INTENSE THAN THE LAST!?
Important note from author: This is a much older piece and no longer really depicts my true feelings on Kill la Kill. I will keep this up as I do think I had some good points but if you’d like to see how I feel several years later, please read this linked article after reading through this one where I critique this article in-depth and come at it with a more mature understanding, disagreeing with myself on particular points.
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Let’s talk about feminism and sexuality. For those that inwardly groan at the mention of these sometimes over-discussed topics, I can promise you that there will be massive fan-service and tons of ridiculous action. Fair? But a warning up front: Given the show we’re discussing, this isn’t exactly going to be safe-for-work at all times. I’ll also try to be vague about many particular instances in the show, but this will be a spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t seen, or cares to see, the show. Now that we have our NSFW tag and SPOILER ALERT included, let’s begin.
The Backloggers 