The question is: are idols born, or are they made of the circumstances of their universe? In Macross, you might say it’s a little of both.
Analytics and Commentaries
My Boyfriend is an Immortal Pilot
It’s important to the thesis of this piece that I note I tried to write the entirety of this post while listening to “My Boyfriend is a Pilot” on repeat. I couldn’t do it. “My Boyfriend is a Pilot” is incredibly awful writing music.
Age & Responsibility: Reflections on Hanayamata’s Sally Tokiwa
Where do we see ourselves as we watch anime?
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.
Mage in a Barrel 