It’s pondering the deeper implications of simple questions time again! Frankly, I’m not sure I did the topic as much justice as I wanted, but you write and write again. Maybe someday I’ll finally land on something I feel is my seminal commentary on fandom conversation.
We’re back at it again with Mob Psycho 100, a show I never really thought I was going to get a chance to talk about on a theme level because it was just so disjointed. But here we are, as it turns out, “Be kind,” is a rightfully powerful unifying force. It’s pretty neat to see how such a simply idea can bring together so many scattered thoughts and make sense of them. And for it to be one as important as kindness is pretty cool, too.
There’s gold to be found in the heart, and treasure to be found in the working of it.
Hello, hello! Let’s talk about murder! Or, more specifically, how murder looks (in 91 Days). I’ve been wanting to write something about 91 Days‘ visuals for a while now, but despite some attempts at cinematographic motifs, the show never quite gave me a concrete visual paradigm to explore. But, somehow, I came up with this kind of topical approach, and while I think it could use some refining in the future, I also think it’s pretty good!
Someone let the highly sentimental version of me out of the box this week, and the result is this piece. Ultimately, it just comes down to another rendition of me trying to plead for people to be nice to each and me winding up utterly failing to capture the incredible feeling of wonder I got from watching people’s responses pop up by the dozens (the dozens!) on Twitter, but I think it does alright anyways.
New Game! has kind of sneakily become one of my favorite shows of the Summer 2016 season, but it’s not just because of the great character designs or the pretty colors. Instead, I think there are some elements to the show that really ground it in a semi-reality and make it feel much more substantial (even if it’s only softly so) than your normal cute girls doing cute things anime.
Shows like Absolute Duo have shown I’m weak to anime where the central relationship is solid, and Konobi falls into that category. And so I wrote about what makes Usami’s crush on Uchimaki better than your average anime blushing.
Guys, let me tell you, I’ve got absolutely no clue what makes me pop off for almost two thousand words like I did in this column. I was just planning for it to be regular length and by the time I’d finished chasing down all the threads I’d started out with I ended up with this monster of a post—although, to be fair, I think it’s a rather good one. I hope you guys like it! I think it explores some interested ideas.
Tongue-in-cheek title aside (I seem to wind up with a lot of those for these columns, not sure why), this probably ranks up there with the more ambitious posts in terms of attempted idea communication that I’ve done for Crunchyroll. It’s also potentially one of the most flawed (depending on what you think of some of the underlying assumptions I made in writing it), but haven’t I always said that flawed anime can be interesting? I hope this post is, as well.
I didn’t mean to write two posts in a row about the role of setting in certain anime—it just kind of turned out that way. In the spotlight is a somewhat broader selection of shows than I’m normally accustomed to writing about, as I try my best to encapsulate the general character of the anime made by studio P.A. Works. in a single column. Surprisingly perhaps, I think I wound up having more of a solid case than even I expected at the beginning of my writing. You guys will have to let me know what you think!
Mage in a Barrel 