After last week’s adventure with the word “best,” I thought it appropriate to come back again this week and talk about a similar, but slightly different word—”favorite.” Kind of fun how you can write entire columns on single words in a fandom context, eh? Hope you guys enjoy this one!
I will not deny that this title is perhaps something of a red herring. I regret nothing, as it is perfectly and appropriately descriptive—and because most of the people who comment on it won’t actually read it anyways. So now, if you’re wondering what this column is actually about, I’ve jumped headfirst (or maybe butt first) into the world of rhetorical criticism, with the anime fandom’s lexicon as my subject. In a lot of ways, this is just a introductory piece, but it comes at a nice time in the year. And it was fun to write. Hope you guys enjoy it!
Every time Christmas season rolls around, I start to feel bad about not having any ideas for a good anime Christmas post. So I’m kind of glad I was able to halfway write something related to both anime and Christmas this year, even if it might be a little bit of a stretch. Gundam, Toradora!, Christmas, and family themes aren’t necessarily the most obvious bedfellows, but I think I mostly made it work.
I’m a few days early, but Merry Christmas to all my readers! It really is wonderful to have you all around, reading and commenting. May the season (whether your celebrate Christmas or not) fills your life with love, your heart with hope, and our world with peace. 🙂
In my ongoing battle to negotiate the lines of blissfully unattached fandom and genuine media engagement, I’ve run into a lot of different facets of anime watching in which this weird dynamic is found. On the hot seat this week is characters—waifus, husbandos, best girls, and everything else—and thinking about the ways that the general marketplace of fandom and industry seem to be at odds with lasting remembrance of anything at all.
But, sometimes, you find the perfect seat on the carousel. This article is about all of that.
This topic’s been banging around in my head for a while since I started wondering what it was that attracted me to characters like Yuuko from AKB0048 and Miki from THE iDOLM@STER. As has been pointed out to me multiple times with both, neither are particularly nice people or the kind of person you would want as a coworker (or even as a friend, maybe!). Yet, some how I still found them enchanting. Likewise with Maka Albarn from Soul Eater, who I touch on in the article—why was it that my favorite episode of the show was the one where she’s at her very worst? Well, I think I at least somewhat cracked the code—and this piece is the result.
I’ve kind of been waiting for One Punch Man to put some thematic muscle behind its animation chops, and this episode did it (albeit via the graceless inclusion of the random whiny dude). So, of course, I gave the show its due and spent a little bit of time breaking down how One Punch Man‘s commentary works at illuminating the nature of heroism. I suppose I should point out—and I didn’t really touch on this in the original article—that the Hero Associations brand of heroism isn’t wrong per se. It’s functional and practical. It emphasizes results, and directs heroes for the benefit of society the best it can (the point raised this episode that the Association is funded by donations from the public is extremely interesting). But this post is about heroes! Enjoy!
As you are all aware, I’ve been in the middle of a big mecha anime kick for a while. After Gundam Build Fighters paved the way and I cruised through Knights of Sidonia like a madman, I’ve been spending most of my free anime watching time burning through what is probably anime’s most hallowed genre—that of the giant robot. So, in this week’s Aniwords, I spend a bit of time retracing my steps to this point (“someone tell me how I got here // from the city to this frontier”) and musing a bit on the overall experience of expanding the boxes of interest in which we dwell. Hope you guys enjoy it!
A little less than two weeks ago, a guy writing for New York Magazine threw out an article that ostensibly linked Twitter users who have anime avatars with a certain internet group, and there was a bit of a fuss about it. I kind of joked about it when the article came out, but I also spent some time musing about it—and so, as I do with most things I spend time thinking about, I wrote a column for Crunchyroll about it!
After a couple of weeks of idols, I’m back on the Serious Anime Writing train with my analysis of the Bishamon Arc of Noragami Aragoto. The nature of Noragami‘s gods and the way they interface with the humans in the show has always been the most fascinating element of Noragami for me, so being able to find the material to write this article was quite a pleasure. This arc articulated a bunch of things I’d kind of half-said about the first season of the show, and as it happens having the second half of the show around to finish articulating what Yukine arc started helped a lot in that regard.
Following up on last week’s post on the characters in idol anime, this week I lay out my thoughts on the Big Three Idol Anime—Love Live!, THE iDOLM@STER, and AKB0048. I had a lot of fun writing this one up, and it’s definitely up there among the posts for Aniwords that I’m most proud of. Let me know what you guys think about it! Kind of like that post about “anime that are important to you,” this is kind of a stepping stone post towards an inevitable huge post on a subject I’ve been thinking on for a while (aka AKB0048). Maybe if I write enough of these littler ones, someday I’ll actually write the big ones…
Mage in a Barrel 