Anime

Tsuki ga Kirei — final impression

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As the final episode proper ends, Akane is on the train to her new home, her father having been transferred to another office. It’s spring break, she and Kotarou have graduated from middle school, but she’ll be in another town in another high school two hours away by train. Kotarou is watching the train move out of sight as he reminisces about his first love, while Akane does the same. A bittersweet ending to a romance that week after week had me besides myself with anxiety, shouting at the television whenever one of them screwed things up again, or weeping in relief when things went right. I could have lived with that ending, not knowing how it would’ve turned out in the end, but with strong hints that it might not have lasted. As the credits roll, we get one last shot of the Moon, then fade to white and let the ending song roll.

Tsuki ga Kirei: the moon is beautiful

And yet… Would it be too much to ask to cheat? To have a proper, they lived happy ever after ending for the best, most real feeling romance in anime I’ve ever seen? Sure, first loves don’t last, it’s rare that you meet the love of your life in middle school and stay together all the way through high school, uni and getting a real job. It wouldn’t be realistic in a series that never went for anime clichés, but…

In my family at least, everybody’s first, serious relationship has resulted in marriage or kids. My brother met his girl friend in high school and they’re still together, with two children and a book published. As for long distance relationships, I met my wife online and we spent our first three years shuttling between Holland and england. It can happen. And surely now would be the time for one of those after credits codas the series had been using so well to check up with minor characters? Surely…
Tsuki ga Kirei: perfect ending

Yes. This, this is fine.

Tsuki ga Kirei is my anime of the season and this ending was perfect. It made romance anime relevant again by ditching all the usual cliches, setting the story in middle school rather than high school hence making Akane and Kotarou a little bit younger and more naive than otherwise and refusing to make any of its characters into clichés. Akane may be shy and somewhat anxious, but she is also the star of the track team. Kotarou might be an impressionable Dazai quoting book nerd, but he also likes boxing and he’s not into otaku stuff. Even the incidental characters, like Akane’s friend Aika, have some complexity to them, ie. she’s somewhat brash and loud, but genuinely cares when Akane loses her stress release stuffed toy. Tsuki ga Kirei never stopped moving the romance forward, starting the first episode with the two of them getting curious about each other, having them going out by episode three and out to the world by episode seven, ultimately ending, well, see above. I hope this will inspire other anime romances.

Tsuki ga Kirei: always the bridesmaid, never the bride

Remains only to say something about Chinatsu. Poor, poor Chinatsu. Akane’s best friend who made the unfortunate choice to fall in love with Kotarou just slightly too late to ever have a chance. That moment in episode seven where she sees Kotarou walk hand in hand with Akane, when she tried so hard to get his attention earlier, is heart breaking. She was the best kind of romantic rival, one who actually hurt as she lost, who wasn’t mean or stirred up shit for the sake of it, didn’t try to steal Kotarou, just a girl who struggled hard to reconcile her feelings with her friendship with Akane and ultimately succeeding. I wouldn’t mind an OVA in which she finds her own love as well. She deserves it.

Final impression — The King’s Avatar

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Well, they’re not wrong.

Ye Xiu was the best know professional player of Glory, until he got unnecessarily nastily fired from his team, so the first thing he does is duck into a nearby internet cafe, apply for a job as night manager and start playing Glory again, on the newly opened tenth server where, as the tweet says, he spents his time grieving nobodies. And that’s basically Quan Zhi Gao Shou/The kings Avatar, a series of imagined battles played out within the game interspersed with scenes of young men and the occassional young woman looking really serious at their monitor, with close-ups of exciting keyboard and mousing actions. And yet…

As Youtube anime critic The Pedantic Romantic argues, this looks a bit like Sword Art Online, only without the actually being stuck in the game and dying in real life if you die in Canada the game bits. What’s more, Glory feels much more like a real MMO than SAO’s games ever did. It was this review that picqued my interest enough to watch the first couple of episodes, something made easy because the Chinese television producer behind it, Tencent, released the whole series on Youtube for wordlwide viewing. What I like about this is that it keeps the focus on gaming and gaming culture instead of having to add some supernatural or fantasy element to it.

It’s also the first actual Chinese cartoon to hold my interest enough to finish the series; it was always one of the first series I watched on a Friday night or Saturday morning this season. Even if the stakes were low and the story this season was little more than Ye Xiu getting a band of new players with potential together to perhaps form a new team when he goes back to the pro-leagues, on an episode by episode base it was always interesting. just as watching an underdog succeed despite the odds, there’s also pleasure in watching an expert quietly finishing off supposedly superior players. If you should want to watch it, I’d advise against binging it, as then its flaws quickly become apparant: each episode is basically the same story of Ye Xiu kicking ass, there’s an over reliance on some stock fighting animations, etc. Watched one episode at a time it’s perfect brain candy if you like seeing somebody play an MMO perfectly.

Your Happening World (Kingsday is bogus edition)

Anime, history, LGBT, socialism, Your Happening World
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  • 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Fujoshi: Fujoshi, which literally means “rotten girl,” refers to a type of anime fan who is especially interested in imagining male homoerotic subtext in her favorite media. But while the term “fujoshi” was only coined in 2001, rotten girls and their male counterparts, “fudanshi,” have been around since the Edo period. In “The Forgotten History of Fujoshi,” Keith and Mari Minton—two self-professed fujoshi—shared some of the fascinating origins of a subculture that is typically somewhat misunderstood.
  • The Ostrogothic Military: Whether the Ostrogoths themselves were an army, the nature of the army’s settlement and salary in Italy, and ethnic identity’s role in the formation of the army are all discussed. The army itself has rarely been studied as a separate institution, which may be because, throughout the Ostrogothic kingdom’s short life, the military was inextricably bound up with the nature and the fate of that polity.
  • Alternate Futurescape: The Bubblegum Crisis We Never Got: Where Bubblegum Crisis’ Knight Sabers were a mercenary team that’d take any job for the right price, FutureScape’s “Night Saviors” were advertised as “Four girls who will accept no money in their never ending battle against the Boomers!“ Fans familiar with Bubblegum Crisis and the Knight Saber mercenary group that were mostly motivated by revenge would probably have been a little more than shocked to see them instead portrayed as a super-heroine team fighting for “freedom and justice” under the new name of “The Night Saviors”.
  • X-Force by Cory J Walker: Great, 90s nostalgia drawings of various X-Force characters.
  • Your audience doesn’t think you suck: To make your audience happy, you don’t need to be the most talented person. You don’t need to invest tons of cash into a project to make it watchable. You need an idea that you believe in and the enthusiasm to power through and put it out into the world.
  • The Left’s Long History Of Transphobia: Trans people generally lean left because we feel that we have to, but we’re also aware that liberalism won’t protect us when the chips are down. It’s easy to oppose an enemy that is consistently hateful, and at the end of the day trans people know where Republicans stand on whether or not we should exist.

First impression: Grimoire of Zero

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A young witch hires a Beastfallen tiger man to be her bodyguard and occassional (involuntary) bed during her quest for her stolen grimoire.

Grimoire of Zero: tiger men make the best beds

Zero kara Hajimeru Mahou no Sho/Grimoire of Zero is a classic quest fantasy, which is unusual in anime. The first episode is mainly setup, with a meet cute when our nameless tiger man protagonist — on the run from a murderous witch — lands in the soup of Zero. She saves him, he runs away when it turns out she’s a witch as well, then she shows up again to steal back her soup. Long story short, she recruits him for her quest to get her grimoire back and the end of the episode has them setting out together. What makes all this fairly standard setup sparkle is the interaction between the Mercenary and Zero, who hit it off immediately. It’s hard to do this sort of banter well, to have two people snipe at each other without it coming over too spiteful or too artificial, but this episode managed to keep a light, funny tone to its banter.

Grimoire of Zero: grim and gritty background

The light tone of the interactions between Zero and the Mercenary does clash somewhat with the grim and gritty background it is set against. We’re in a world were witches are real and persecuted by an almighty Church, burning them to death. So far, so Catholic, but while I’m feeling sympathetic to the witches, at least some of them do seem objectively evil. Meanwhile there are also the Beastfallen, human/animal hybrids created by witches and which occassionally pop up among normal humans, as in the case of our tiger man Mercenary. Who seem to be hunted by humans and witches both from what we’ve seen from the Mercenary’s background. It feels inconsistent with the lighter, cuter mood between Zero and Mercenary. How the show will reconcile this will be interesting to watch.

First impression: Eromanga Sensei

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Based on a series of light novels by the writer of My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute and this time the twist is that the brother isn’t related to the little sister he fancies.

Eromanga Sensei: hot for sister

Really, you don’t need to know more than this. Our protagonist is really, really fond of his little sister and wants to fuck her. She’s a NEET and has been holed up in her room for a year, ever since their parents died. He is a light novel author who has been writing since middle school to make money to feed himself and his sister. His novels have mostly sold on the strength of the illustrations by one Eromanga Sensei and — surprise surprise — it turns out to be his little sister.

Eromanga Sensei: girls love dick

The first episode was a bit coy about what it wanted to be, but luckily the first minutes of episode two made clear this show is trash and no longer hiding it. Having read the manga spinoff I know more or less what’s coming and I’m fine with a bit of this sort of trash to watch, but really, there’s nothing much worthwhile about this one.