Does what it says on the tin. Adorably cute despite the occasionally awkward English.
What happens when you attempt to report that Trump tweet
On his personal twitter account Trump threatened to destroy Iranian cultural sites and if you try to report this tweet as threatening physical harm, this happens:
2010s: the Rise and Rise of Isekai #12DaysOfAnime (12)
The rise and rise of isekai is the most important thing to happen to anime in this decade.
Not that the concept of isekai is new to this decade of course. Stories about people being dragged away with the fairies or kidnapped by the gods are as old as storytelling itself. Even if we limit ourselves to anime, there’ve been series Like Rayearth, El Hazard, Escaflowne, Fushigi Yuugi, Garzay’s Wing coming out decades before the current isakai boom. So what sets the current crop of people being transported to another world from the older kind?
Formula.
Like so much that’s bad in anime, you could blame it all on Sword Art Online. There had been other stories about people trapped in a videogame before (.Hack), none was such a monster as SAO turned out to be, both in Japan as over here. It came out at just the right time, as streaming had become mainstream and it had everything a proper wish fulfilment series needed. You had the protagonist, a video game nerd the sort of people who watch anime could easily identify with and the setting, a fantasy video game world ala World of Warcraft, but in virtual reality, which a lot of the people watching it would give their eye teeth to be trapped inside in of. Add a handful of potential love interests and ultimately quite a nice romance between Kirito and Asuna. And while it’s often treated as if it was the worst anime series ever, it had a certain quality to it. The first story arc was what hooked people on the series and while everything went downhill afterwards, it pointed the way forwards.
And again, while it wasn’t the first, Sword Art Online also popularised and made mainstream what I call the Otaku Industrial Comples. It started as a self published web novel, was cleaned up and rewritten as a series of light novels, then finally got manga and anime adaptations. If you look at any isekai series published after SAO, you see the same route over and over again. And for every one that got an anime adaptation, there are zillions more that remained as web novels.
The way these series are created, largely by fans for fans with the most popular taken up and getting light novel and manga adaptations before being turned into anime, shapes them intimately. The reason that all those isekai animes seem the same is because that is what survives this meatgrinder. Readers and publishers both aren’t looking for originality or quality, they just want more of the same, variations on a formula, some clever new hack on an old story, as long as it’s not too different.
So what you get are variants in set up, where the protagonist’s gimmick may be different but the worlds are all the same and the stories all follow the same pattern. You got your over powered protagonist, either reincarnated into or transported to a fantasy world shaped by Japanese RPG tropes, usually with some sort of demonic overlord threatening humanity, but where the bulk of the story is made up by the hero becoming an adventurer, complete with guild issued card. Sometimes the hero is just supremely overpowered that nothing is a challenge, sometimes he has a hack power everybody else thinks is worthless, sometimes he is a demon lord himself, or a sword, or a hot springs, but in any case he’ll become an adventurer with a team of powerful but not too powerful female team mates. Who often are some sort of slave, but happy slaves as he is a good master.
You expect all this to be mined out as quickly as any other subgenre suddenly becoming popular and spawning a host of imitators, but so far it hasn’t burned out yet. There were about half a dozen isekai series in last season alone, few of them particularly interesting. and next year will be more of the same.
To be fair, I don’t actually mind reading or watching the occasional mindless isekai series myself. There is actually something comforting watching this sort of unchalling, by the numbers series, where you know the hero will always win, no challenge will be particular difficult and if anything else, there will always be some cute girls to look at. But what I’m really looking forward in isekai is the rise of a new subgenre, not yet present in anime: the otaku girl who finds herself reincarnated in the world of her favourite boys harem game, as the villainess. There have been several light novel and manga series using this gimmick in the past couple of years and they’re all more interesting than the usual isekai story. Especially My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, where the protagonist reincarnates as the six year old villainess and sets about evading her bad ends, without ever realising she’s building herself a harem in the process. the anime version comes out next year: I cannot wait.
This is day twelve of Twelve Days of Anime 2019.
2019: not quite finished yet #12DaysOfAnime (11)
2019 was the year of this ridiculously cute dance.
2019 was also the year of watching much less anime for me. There are various reasons for that. I’ve become more discerning in what I want to watch, I’ve found myself watching other things more (football, tokusatsu, etc) and I’ve found myself just not that interested in keeping up so much. Even when I watched anime, it was mostly the low effort series I found myself watching, rather than the ones where you actually have to keep your brain actively engaged.
So I’ve started but not finished series as Mob Psycho 100 season 2, Dororo, Yakusoku no Neverland, Fruits Basket or Carole and Tuesday. Instead, what I watched were things like Endro, Miru Tights or Sounan Desu Ka?, none of which required much effort to watch. Anecdotically, I’ve always heard that the average anime fan watches seasonal anime for roughly two years, so this seems right on schedule, having done so since Fall 2015. Whether this is the case for me I’m not sure yet, but in any case it leaves me struggling to say much about this year.
One excellent series I did watch but never heard anybody talk about was Rilakkuma to Kaoru-san, a stop-motion (!) series brought out on Netflix, which I discovered purely by accident while browsing through their anime catalog. I put on the first episode and before I knew it had watched the entire series. Thought his series about a living stuffed teddy bear, his friends and “owner” sounds whimsical at first, there’s actually a hard headed realism to the series. The titular Kaoru-san is a twentysomething office lady working a dead end job with co-workers who are only there to get a man, only to be nagged by her mother to come back home and take over the wine farm. Lonely, borderline depressed and the butt of everybody’s joke, she survives on the love of her stuffed animal companions. A somewhat bitter series to be honest, but sometimes that’s just what you need in the endless sea of ganbare! and youth drama.
But that’s all I have to say about 2019.
Stats: 131 series in my library, quite a few less than in the last few years, 59 watched. As said, I watched a lot less anime this year than I used to.
This is day eleven of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: summing up.
2018: year of moe #12DaysOfAnime (10)
2018 started with a high school girl indulging her penguin fetish.
Sora yori mo Tooi Basho was the anime of the year for me. Tamaki Mari is a very ordinary second year high school girl who one day suddenly realises that she’s a very ordinary second year high school girl. She wants a cause and finds it in Shirase, obsessed with getting to Antarctica, because that’s where her mother died three years ago. Together with Hinata, who dropped out of high school and who was looking for something interesting to do before she takes college entrance exams and Yuzuki, a child actress/idol whose company though it would be a great stunt to send her there, they do go to Antarctica. Free from the usual anime bullshit, this is by turns incredibly fucking funny and emotionally devastating, especially the penultimate episode, when Shirase comes to terms with her mother’s death.
Another early 2018 anime that left me emotionally devastated: Devilman Crybaby. That came out very early in January on Netflix. For about a week after my Twitter timeline was full of happy, queer monster girls as everybody watched and got invested in it. So on the last weekend of my holidays I sat down and watched it too and realised it was all a lie. There were no happy endings, just the bleakest depiction of humanity self destructing I’ve ever seen in anime. It took me a good solid day of happy fun slice of moe series to get my mood back up again.
Luckily there were a lot of those. Yuzu Camp was about a girl who likes to go solo camping in winter, as well as about the camping club at her local high school, who go camping together. It was all incredibly comfy and good natured and made even something as mundane as eating ramen at a campfire look epic. Mitsuboshi Colors was about three little girls getting up to mischief and was hilariously funny in how shitty these three could act. Hinamatsuri had a similar sort of energy to it, if more deadpan. It also took a right turn into the plight of the homeless in Japan halfway through, which sounds strange but worked. There was Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san, about a girl who loves eating ramen and her friend/stalker who loves her very much. There was Slow Start, about a girl who had to skip a year between middle and high school and is terrified people might find out and Hakumei to Mikochi, two literal little women being only a few centimers tall living together in a magical world. And then there was Uma Musume: Pretty Derby about literal horse girl idols who do actual horse races followed by idol concerts. It was better than it sounds.
Comic Girls was a show about an anxiety ridden high school mangaka who on the suggestion of her editor starts living in a dorm with three other high school mangaka. Equally insecure and thirsty, Kaos was actually a thinly disguised, hopefully exaggerated version of the original manga’s creator. Most of the show was well animated, fluffy fun, but Kaos’s anxiety is handled seriously. The same goes for the attraction Kaos has for one of her dorm mates. It’s this that made comci Girls standout from the crowd of slice of moe series this year.
In 2018, both Aikatsu and Pripara revamped themselves, starting new series. Aikatsu Friends mainly followed the same formula as the original Aikatsu and Aikatsu Stars, but Kiratto Pri☆chan changed its magical idol setup for more of a Youtube idol setting. Neither were officially released here and the fansubs for the latter have been disappointing too. There was also Layton Mystery Tanteisha: Katri no Nazotoki File, a kids detective show starring the daughter of professor Layton. Venerable youkai manga Gegege no Kitarou also got a new series. But the biggest kids show remained Precure and Hug tto! Precure was one of the best entries in the franchise. Unabashedly queer, giving us the first boy precure, who was introduced as genderqueer and who had a boyfriend in the brother of one of the Cures as well as what was clearly a lesbian couple with Emiru and Lulu, as seen above. It was of course never spelled out as such but it was there.
Biggest anime “controversy” of the year was about Zombieland Saga, when one of the characters, the cheerful Lily, was revealed to be trans and to have literally died of gender dysphoria. First, there were the usual rightwing assholes who insisted it was all made up by the “sjws” at Crunchyroll, which is par for the course if no less irritating for it. But then things got surreal. One particular image of Lily, with a badly photoshopped gun in her hands and the text “shut the fuck up, terfs” became widly used whenever some transphobe spouted hatred on twitter. This image then was used as evidence of how transphobes are “oppressed”, used by a transphobic SNP MP in the British Parliament!
Statistics: 183 series in my library, 131 watched. I started having trouble keeping up with seasonal anime in the latter part of the year, as I started a new assignment and just couldn’t bring myself to watch anything, let alone series I had to actually pay attention to. There are quite a few good series I still need to finish, like To Be Heroine, High Score Girl and the new FLCL sequels.
This is day ten of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2019 is not actually over yet.