Log Time Campfire Cast | Let’s (Shounen) Jump Right Into It

Welcome to our first Campfire Cast! These are going to be an offshoot of our current suite of stuff where we talk about pretty much anything and everything anime and manga-adjacent that we’ve been into recently or recent events in the industry.

In this one, we talk about shounen manga and anime series, some Japanese originated video games, and even share how we all got into anime to begin with and why. Also, there’s some random discussion about the English alphabet, but that’s just par for the course for us.

Audio Links: iTunes | SoundCloud

This podcast was recorded June 21st, 2019.

Intro/Outro Music: The Elephant by A Shell in the Pit

Fallout 76 – The Importance of Seeing our Homes in Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9FGaan35s0

If you’ve listened to our podcast, you’ve probably heard us say a million times that I and the other two Backloggers are originally from a state in the USA called West Virginia.  Huntington WV, to be exact, similar to some other good, good podcast boys.

Plain and simple, we love our home. While I left it a few years back, I’m always homesick for it. Growing up, I took for granted just how freaking beautiful the state was, and the amazing opportunities I was granted by being in a state where even the most major city was not even a mile away from massive forests and rolling mountains.  Camping, hiking, and many other things were second-nature to me. I’ve mentioned it before but Yuru Camp legit had me crying remembering what I had to leave behind for better opportunity.

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I mean, that’s the capitol building for the state.  And that mountain right behind it is the start of the surrounding forest.  Nature be everywhere.

See, my home state is poor.  Very poor, by United States standards, anyway.  As beautiful as it is, West Virginia has been taken advantage of by hundreds of companies that mined it for its natural resources and then took all that money and ran.  We prospered while those companies were here, but they’re mostly gone and so has our fortune. The unemployment rate is higher than the national average and the state government is constantly misappropriating funds.  However, we’ve always been a strong people. We were birthed out of a fighting spirit, seceding from the Confederacy and joining the Union in the American Civil War because we were against slavery.  We were the first ones to start the Railroad Riots of the 1870s because we weren’t going to lie down and let companies destroy the lives of their workers, and we continued that tradition of fighting for the little guys even this year, with the Teachers’ Strikes that started a national movement for better pay state by state for teachers.  We’ve always been a strong people, though we suffer a lot.

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12 Days of Anime 2017 [Day 10]: Doki Doki Literature Club – How We View Media Can Refine Our Perspective

Now, I’m going to start this off with saying that I realize that this may not feel like it meets the definition for “anime” for some, but personally I feel that Doki Doki Literature Club is close enough and unique in its own way to at least consider it a part of the “anime-esque” media, considering it greatly pulls from the convention of Japanese visual novels. Oddly enough, I could probably be writing this about the actual Japanese visual novel Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi (Totono) and make the same sort of comparison, but without any translation for it (something which I hope happens at some point), this is what I have to work with.

Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is questionably innovative in what it does for this reason, but that doesn’t make it any less gratifying to see it play out in of its own. There’s something to be said about how we perceive media, and I think DDLC makes an excellent observation about that which can change how we view certain works in the future, while also giving us appreciation for the past works that led up to the creation of a better one. It becomes a sort of love letter to the creators and players of these sorts of games, which I think is pretty neat in its own regard.

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12 Days of Anime 2017 [Day 6]: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc – How Our Own Desires Can Change Ourselves

Not all changes in someone’s perspective are necessarily beneficial to us; sometimes those changes cause us to experience more despair and pain. Unlike many of my previous 12 Days of Anime posts have shown and also contrary to the title of the game, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Danganronpa: THH) isn’t exactly a story brimming with positive moments from people undergoing changes within their lives. That’s not to say the game is nothing but unhappy events, but as expected from a narrative that’s mainly about high-schoolers trapped in a death game scenario, there’s definitely a lot of negative events that transpire and occur to the characters within it.

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