Anime I’m Still Watching This Season

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In alphabetical order here are the shows from this season I’ve kept watching weekly. Which ones are you watching?

2.5 Jigen no Ririsa is your most basic of otaku bait romcom shows. Our protagonist is only interested in fictional woman until a girl enters his manga club who loves cosplaying his favourite character so he becomes her photographer. Not only that, there’s also a famous teenage model who is his childhood friend and is in love with him. Very much a lesser sort of My Dress-Up Darling.

Bye Bye, Earth: Lablac Belle is the only one of her species in a world of intelligent animals, lacking fur, scales or fangs unlike everybody else. She wants to find her roots but has to overcome all kind of challenges to even be able to start her journey. While the plot is a standard sort of ‘hero’s journey, what sets this apart is how dense and interesting the world is as well as how uninterested the series is in explaining it to you. A breath of fresh air after years of (pseudo-)isekai shows insisting to tell you what an adventure guilt is and how the ranking system works in their very first episode.

Dungeon no Naka no Hito. As Clay is busy conquering the dungeon her father disappeared in, she accidentally breaks one of its walls revealing a bed room? Turns out the monsters in the dungeon are its employees and the dungeon’s caretaker is eager to recruit Clay to help her run the dungeon. This is basically Dungeon Keeper: the workplace comedy.

Elf-san wa Yaserarenai.. Various fantasyland creatures have moved to our world and are now having trouble keeping their figure amid all the temptations of modern Japan. Luckily diet expert and massage therapist Naoe-kun is there to help. A half length fetish show with half naked elf and orc women trying to lose weight and failing. The manga is better but I’m not proud.

Giji Harem. Rin is the star actress of her high school drama club. Eiji is her senpai, working behind the scenes doing the set design and building. They quickly become friends and one day as Eiji bemoans his lack of a harem, Rin starts acting out various harem anime archetypes for him. That’s the hook but what keeps me watching is the gradual deepening of their relationship and Rin’s giggles of pleasure when she’s having fun with her senpai.

Gimai Seikatsu. Yuuta and Saki are classmates but then their parents remarry to each other, leaving them siblings. Warning signs usually start flashing at this point as you’re preparing fro some thrashy pseudo-incest, but instead this sofar has been a thoughtful, interesting series about two strangers learning to live together. I fully expect some sort of romance between them before the series is over, but it will be earned.

Hazure Waku no “Joutai Ijou Skill” de Saikyou ni Natta Ore ga Subete o Juurin Suru made. Just from the title you know it’s another thrash isekai show and you are right. Protag-kun’s whole class is summoned to another world to play hero for a manipulative goddess but he’s thrown into a dungeon from which no escape is possible for his thrash powers. Go to the head of the class if you already knew he’s actually overpowered and emerges from the dungeon out for revenge. I liked the manga version of this and the anime is decent enough to follow, though done in a weird mixture of 2D and 3D animation.

Katsute Mahou Shoujo to Aku wa Tekitai shiteita: the sub boss of an evil organisation falls in love with the magical girl opposing them. Hilarity ensues. By Studio Bones, this is a gorgeous looking half length show.

Koi wa Futago de Warikirenai: Jun is childhood friends with twin sisters Rumi (sporty, romantic) and Naori (intellectual, nerdy). After Rumi dates, then dumps him at the end of the first episode it’s Naori’s turn for the second episode, after which the series settles in a deliberately manipulated romantic triangle between the three of them. Fun little show and it won my respect when in an earlt episode Naori’s skirt was blown open by the wind, Jun got a handful but we as viewers did not.

Madougushi Dahlia wa Utsumukanai. Reincarnated after dying of overwork, Dahlia is a magical tools engineer now, having started her own business after her father passed away and her fiancee broke off their engagement. Slightly stiff animation but a beautiful setting and the promise of romance makes this worth watching even if the setup is a bit cliched.

Make Heroine ga Oosugiru!: an ordinary boy gets involved with various losers of a romcom love triangle as they struggle with what to do now. Funny but also suprisingly touching at times. Also one of the most gorgeous looking and animated series this season.

Mayonaka Punch: cancelled Youtuber teams up with a vampire coven to get famous again, after which the head vampire gets to drink her blood. Great characters, great animation and great sense of humour.

Na Nare Hana Nare: six girls from different high schools come together to do cheerleading together. A bit uneven and eight episodes in it’s still unclear where this is heading, but on an episode by episode base this always puts a smile on my face.

Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan. The most hyped series of the season but this is isn’t as good or funny as the hype would have it. It relies a bit too much on SHOUTING as humour.

Shinmai Ossan Boukensha, Saikyou Party ni Shinu Hodo Kitaerarete Muteki ni Naru: Rick used to be a clerk for the Adventurers Guild but two years ago quit to become an adventurer himself, despite his low innate abilities. Having been trained by the most powerful team in the world, he has taken his license exam and is now on a fetch quest with them for a certain set of jewels. One of the series where the initial premise is quickly made irrelevant for a more generic plot. I do like that one of the stereotypical early bullies he needed to defeat to become a real adventurer returns to be an ally in his quest, having realised his strength.

Shoushimin Series: Kobato and Osanai want to be normal teenagers, but keep getting dragged into mundane mysteries nevertheless. Based on novels by the same author as Hyouka. None of the characters in this really convince as actual people and the various mysteries are incredibly dull but somehow it works. The care and attention given to the animation here by CloverWorks helps.

Shy: Tokyo Dakkan-hen: second season about the superheroine who is indeed as shy as her name implies. If you liked the first one you’ll like this as well.

Tokidoki Bosotto Rossiya-go de Dereru Tonari no Alya-san. Alya likes Kuze but is embarrassed to show it, so only says it in Russian. Little does she know Kuze can actually understand her. A fairly straightforward romance series that also wants to say something about the pressures family can put you under, Kuze having noped out of being the heir to his prestigious maternal family, leaving his little sister to take up the burden. She’s also in his school, masquerading as his childhood friend. Cue misplaced rivalry with Alya. I would like this better if Alya, supposedly highly capable, was allowed to do more and not had to be rescued every time by Kuze.

VTuber Nanda ga Haishin Kiriwasuretara Densetsu ni Natteta: when vtuber Kokorone Awayuki accidentally forgets to turn off her stream after she signs off and proceeds to get drunk and rant while still streaming, it becomes the breakthrough in her career she needed. The gap between her usual polite, sweet persona and foul mouthed ‘real’ nature proves to be irresistible. Fun for everybody who, like me, fell in the vtuber rabbit hole during the Covid pandemic.

Joyce Brabner 1952 — 2024

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Joyce Brabner, writer, activist and the widow of Harvey Pekar passed away on August 2 this year, after a long struggle against cancer. For The Comics Journal, Andrew Farago wrote an excellent retrospective on her life and career in comics. Particularly interesting I found evaluation of Our Cancer Year, the graphci novel she wrote together with Harvey Pekar about his first struggle with the disease and the impact it has had:

Misery enjoys company, however, and readers and creators connected with their memoir on a personal level. “Our Cancer Year was a seminal work of graphic medicine, a growing field of medical humanities combining comics and healthcare, before there really was such a thing,” says Brian Fies, whose autobiographical account of his mother’s illness, Mom’s Cancer, was serialized online in 2004 and published in a collected edition in 2006. “Along with a few other graphic novels such as Justin Green’s Binky Brown, it was a prototype for an outpouring of deeply personal, acutely revealing nonfiction comics centered on their authors’ experiences with illness and treatment. Graphic medicine is now taught in medical schools and discussed in academic conferences around the world, and Our Cancer Year was the soil in which it took root.”

Not everybody can say they helped create an entire new field of comics non-fiction! Our Cancer Year was coincidentally the first work of hers and Harvey I ever read, a few years after it first came out. A pity it no longer seems to be in print. This is also is the case for the most important non-Pekar projects she was involved in as an editor, the Real War Stories and Brought to Light antiwar comics she did for Eclipse, both of which are excellent as well.

As one of the artists that worked with her and Pekar puts it, it’s easy to think of her as simply “Joyce from American Splendor“, a trap Andrew Farago here neatly avoids. Even if you only knew her from American Splendor, Farago gives an excellent overview of how much she mattered as her own creator, not just a supporting actor in Pekar’s comics.

Notes from Glasgow I: overall impression

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It’s been a week since the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon which means it’s about time to give my impressions of it. This was the first con I actually physically attended since Dublin in 2019. I had hoped to go to New Zealand the following year but as we all know Covid happened and physical cons were off the table for a while. There have been other (World)cons in between of course but none of which had tempted me. If not for Covid I might’ve gone to an Eastercon, but the risk never seemed worth it until now. The added hassle of going to the post-Brexit UK also doesn’t help. Nor do the expenses of going to a foreign con: hotel, even with the con’s discount was seven hundred quid or so for a week, the plane journey was another five hundred euros and various bits and bobs that needed replacement like suitcases etc also added to the cost.

I’m aware that this is a bit of a moan to open with, but that was my mood going into the convention: not actually looking forward to it all that much because of all the hassle it would involve. Especially worrying was the rise in the number of Covid infections you saw happening in the months and weeks before the con. Having stayed Covid free these past four years and whileI have been vaccinated and was going to wear masks, it still seemed a risk. And I was right to worry, considering the number of people who did get infected at Worldcon; fortunately I seemed to have gotten away with it myself even though I wasn’t always as strict to mask as I should. Mask wearers in general were in the minority at the con, though there were vastly more people doing so than in the general public; I only saw half dozen people masking coming through Schiphol e.g.

Speaking of which, despite being four hours early for my flight and therefore having handed in my luggage way in advance of the actual boarding, the KLM still managed to not send it to Glasgow on the same flight as I was on. I flew out on Wednesday, watched everybody else get their luggage and then was told by a very nice chap that they hadn’t bothered to put my stuff on board but it would arrive with the next flight. Ultimately I would only see it again on Thursday night. Never was I so glad as to have put an extra set of clothes in my hand luggage. The return journey went smoother, fortunately, save for the little matter of having bought so many books that my suitcase was over the weight limit: literally too heavy for the baggage handlers to be allowed to handle. So the nice woman at the counter just gave me a second suitcase — one of these small ones Easyjet passengers apparently abandon at the counter when it turns out they have to pay extra to bring it on as hand luggage — to put the overflow in.

A bad start to the convention trip, but at least I managed to get registered at the con on Wednesday so I could avoid the crowd on Thursday, when the queue almost reached the station next to the convention centre… Thursday was a bit of a loss because of the luggage worries, so I spent most of it volunteering at con ops, mainly herding people in queues and answering questions. This is always a fun thing to do at any con and usually gets you a ‘free’ t-shirt.

Also a good way to meet new people, though I found it more difficult this year to actually meet people, new or old. To be fair, I hadn’t made any plans to meet up in the first place, but the sort of spontaneous encounters I’d had at the 2014 London Worldcon or in 2019 in Dublin were rare to non-existent this time. Whether it was due to the way the convention was set up or just me not having the skills anymore after five years of not going to cons, it just didn’t work out for me this time. The one exception being that a few of my friends attending had remembered my birthday on Saturday and had spent most of the day trying to chase me down to celebrate. Which was appreciated even if it was somewhat embarassing to be serenated in the middle of the Dealers Room…. Thanks Jos!

The con as a whole was good, I managed to get to some excellent panels and buy some excellent books, or rather comics, as there was one dealer with a lot of interesting UK and US comics. The weather was nice too, hovering around 16 degrees centigrade, mostly cloudy with occassional spots of rain. I had prepared for Dublin style weather, so brought proper trousers and a sweater and raincoat just in case, but none of them were needed. Shorts and t-shirts were sufficient and the few times it did properly rain I had a brolly. The hotel I used in any case was less than fifty metres from Glasgow Central so no real need to get covered up anyway. On Sunday and Monday, as the con was winding down somewhat, I took full advantage of being in the centre of Glasgow and went for a bit of a shop and also in search of a proper dinner rather than depending on the overpriced con grub for a change.

The food on the whole at the con was better than in Dublin, but the prices were even steeper than they were then and six pound fifty for a pint of beer is not cheap; as with Dublin having a pint at the airport was markably cheaper…

What gets translated and what doesn’t — Martin’s increasingly petty rules about translation

Anime, Lost in Translation
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An interesting sentence from Shoushimin Series episode 4, at least from a translation point of view:

If his senpai has a senpai, that means Sakagami is a junior of a junior.

Why does senpai gets to be used untranslated, but kouhai gets translated to junior? You could make the case that it’s just that much less known than senpai that it still needs to, but for a series like this I’d expect the audience to already know it. This isn’t Pokemon after all, but a very dialogue heavy mystery show, one that’s not shy about using proper honorifics or the correct, Japanese name order either. A strange choice either way when you’d normally expect both terms to be translated or kept intact as a pair.

It raises the question of what you translate and what not, what the expectations are for things that English doesn’t really have an equivalent for, like the whole idea of senpai/kouhai, or the use of honorifics to refer to people. I was reminded of what writer/translator Zack Davisson said on the subject of food names two years ago:

One of my Translation Rules: Thou Shall not Translate Food Names. Food names, as a general language rule in the modern era, are kept in their native language. We collectively learned to say pho. We learned to say pasta primavera. We can say onigiri. Time to retire “rice balls.”

Onigiri and rice balls are in a sort of similar tension to senpai/kouhai and senior/junior in that the English terms are perfectly adequate translations for most uses, but don’t quite have the same meaning as the Japanese terms. Partially, as Zack goes into in his thread, it’s of course a question of familiarity: onigiri like senpai is well known enough on its own that it doesn’t need translation anymore in most cases. There is no one correct answer even if I prefer this sort of thing stays in Japanese.

Having an idea does not make you a creator

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Roy Thomas wants to claim credit for the creation of Wolverine and it has upset quite a lot of people:

John Romita's original sketches for the Wolverine

But 2024 is not 1974 or 1994, and in the wake of more high-profile attention on the neglected past generations of comics creators, it has become increasingly de rigueur for writers and artists associated with comics-based movies and tv shows to see at least a nominal reward for their contributions. There is money at stake, to say nothing of glory, such as it is.
Which is why it managed to generate a fair amount of attention – and a fair number of raised eyebrows – when it came to light at the beginning of April that former Marvel editor Roy Thomas would be receiving credit as a co-creator of Wolverine in the credits for the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine film, coinciding with the character’s 50th anniversary.

Apparently he’s doing so, according to the Zach Rabiroff article I’m quoting here based on the fact that he proposed the character originally, after which Len Wein and John Romita designed him together, with Wein and Herb Trimpe then using him in Incredible Hulk #180-181. Wolverine of course would only become popular a while later, when Wein included him in the roster of the new X-Men a year later and especially after Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Frank Miller got their hands on him. There was a hell of a lot of work done after that first appearance by at least a good half dozen creators, those mentioned above just the most prominent, before he became such a household character that Hollywood blockbusters could be made about him. But none of that, according to Thomas, matters as much as him having the idea for a having a little scrappy Canadian superhero guest star in those two issues:

Note that there are three points here to Thomas’s recollection about his role in Wolverine’s genesis. In his account, he proposed that there be: a) a Canadian character; b) named Wolverine; who was c) “a little like Wildcat or the Atom.”

Personally I think it’s bollocks. Even if this is the exact truth, having the idea for a character does not make you its creator. It’s Wein and Romita as the people who designed the character from that idea, together with Trimpe who first put him in action who deserve that credit far more. In a just world Roy Thomas’ name would be nowhere near it. Rabiroff’s article as a whole makes for fascinating reading, showing how complex establsihing creator credits can be for any character with a fifty year history even when obvious grifters are not trying to insert themselves in it.