Where do we see ourselves as we watch anime?
Analytics and Commentaries
Hanekawa Tsubasa and Me; or, Why I Blog about Anime
Song of a Distant Idol: Performance Intimacy and Love Triangles in Macross Frontier
Love songs are a weird thing. By nature, they’re an expression of the most intimate of emotions, but the majority of the time they’re conveyed at a distance—sung from a radio, through headphones, or on a stage—and as a performance object to be heard by many, not one, thus stripping them of the personal emotion they ought to host.
But, for a little under two minutes in the middle of Macross Frontier, a love song connects.
Days Will Pass: The Endings and Beginnings of Love Live
As you may or may not have heard, μ’s, the idol group that has stood in the spotlight of the Love Live! franchise, will be performing their final concert on March 31 and April 1 of 2016 before breaking up to pave the way for the franchise successors, Aquors. For some, this is just the natural flow of the entertainment industry—but for others, including myself, the ending of μ’s feels like a loss more profound than your ordinary pop stars fading away.
Although a new chapter of Love Live! is beginning, somehow I think this ending will ring bitter for a while to come…
Owarimonogatari: The Mathematics of Happiness and Misery
In the end, what we turned out to be studying was neither mathematics nor Euler. Life is not a zero sum game; even darkness and light, happiness and despair will never entirely cancel each other.
It is our fate, perhaps, to live with both.
Glasslip and Fragments of Meaning
If a tree falls alone in a forest, does it make a sound? If a story has meaning, but no one is able to understand it, does it truly have meaning? If we are all marbles rolling around on the floor amidst the marbles of many other stories, is there meaning before the moment when we collide and change courses? Is the meaning in the moment of impact, the moment of change? Or is it something more fundamental and tied up with the very act of existence? And, most importantly, is there anything of value to be gained from searching for this answer.
I Went Through the GATE…
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the closing lines of the oft-quoted, oft-anthologized, oft-ridiculed poem by Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— | I took the one less traveled by, | And that has made all the difference.
GATE, much like writers who choose to use “The Road Not Taken” as openings to their columns, takes the more-traveled road as a matter of course—yet, in doing so, it makes way for the discovery of a few rare mushrooms along the path and one big one with a bad smell that covers the whole forest. Now, I don’t mean to be coy here; I enjoyed GATE a whole heckuva lot. It’s a fascinating blend of things I found engaging and off-putting, likable and awful. At the end of the day, though, I’ll always give three cheers for a show that manages to succeed in spite of a fundamentally misguided base premise. There’s something awfully human about a show like that—even if you might not want to emulate it.
The Precure Final Trials: Heartcatch Precure Does Monogatari
It’s one thing to catch the hearts of others; it’s another entirely to catch your own.
Watching as Myself: Anitwitter, Me, and Sound! Euphonium 8
Up until episode 8, Sound! Euphonium had been one of my favorite shows of the current anime season—beautifully produced, delicately written, nostalgic in the extreme, thoughtfully reflective on the nature of competitive high school music programs. But, when episode 8 hit the Anitwitter waves, there was…a shift in focus I wasn’t expecting. And the effects of that shift were, well…I didn’t realize what they were for a while, but I thought the overall arc of my experience with the episode was interesting enough that I ought to bring my immediate reactions over from Tumblr and make a more reflective piece out of this fascinating experience.
Thank Kanbaru: Personal Narratives, “Feminist Anime,” and Normalized Media Portrayals
Let it be known that asking me questions of ask.fm is like is a sneaky way to get me thinking about topics you’d like me to cover in a blog post…this was originally an ask.fm answer, then grew too large for the ask.fm and so became a tumblr post, then kept growing and became more of a philosophical manifesto/personal story than I had originally intended, and thus here we are. To begin, I know I’m treading on sensitive ground here and so, of course, I’d love to hear feedback in the comments. [1] For me, this is very much still a topic I’m learning about and pondering through. But here’s where I am right now.
Mage in a Barrel 