Reviews & Reflections

My Hero Academia Volume 2 – Manga Review

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So, I’m pretty happy to announce that I’m now the official My Hero Academia reviewer for The Fandom Post, picking up from where I started with Otaku Review. I’m pretty happy about this, because MHA is a delightful little series filled with cute characters and a ton of energy. Are cute characters and energy all that’s required to get me to like things? Maybe, but MHA has a bit more going on. It’s also a series that very nearly crosses gender lines in its appeal—aside from a few throwaway moments (which is sad on its own) MHA generally does a really good job of balancing letting its guys and girls be awesome and cool. I’m starting to feel this manga might be, excepting those few moments, a great starter manga for kids of either gender—which is cool and neat all on its own.

Check out the full review here!

My Hero Academia

 

 

I Could Never Stop Time, nor Could I Hold to Its Passing: Reflections on Glasslip

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It’s never explicitly stated, but at the end of Glasslip, at the conclusion to a brief and fitful summer, Kakeru Okikua leaves town to continue accompanying his famous piano mother as she tours the world… just as he has always done. Behind him, things have changed forever in the group of friends. It’s a momentary glimmer, but the effects will live on long after the sparkle has faded.

Glasslip is a reflection on the nature of time. It is about the impermanence of life, about the transience of our temporal existences, about the significance of these fleeting events of the past we call memory.

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Knights of Sidonia – DVD Review

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So, as I announced a fair bit back, I’ve started writing for The Fandom Post! I won’t really be reviewing a ton of stuff over there, but it’s nice to be writing outside of my normal wheelhouse on occasion. I kicked off my stint there with a review of Knights of Sidonia, which prior to watching I only knew as “that Attack on Titan show in space with CG.” Turns out, Sidonia is pretty good—overall, I’d rate it above Titan. The parts I enjoyed most, sadly, were the parts that were around the least, but it’s an engaging watch from start to finish and, with CG becoming more and more prevalent these days, it’s neat to see what Polygon Productions was able to accomplish.

Read the review here~ (I’m actually very happy with how it turned out.)

Knights of Sidonia

My Hero Academia Volume 1 – Manga Review

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Of course, right after I go on hiatus, I start having a bunch of things to post…ah, such is life. Except I wrote this review quite a while ago, so maybe it doesn’t count…? In any case, My Hero Academia (although I prefer the Japanese title, Boku no Hero Academia for no real reason) is a really fun series and I’m hoping I get the opportunity to review future volumes of the manga. It moves really well, the characters are cute, and there’s a great sense of energy. Definitely recommended if you’re looking for a shounen battler that feels fresh and fun (instead of like generic Shounen Jump stuff).

Check out the full review here!

My Hero Academia

Animator Expo Impressions (Part 4)

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For those of you who don’t know, Evangelion director Hideaki Anno’s Studio Khara, in conjunction with media company Dwango, has been running a cool little project called Animator Expo (there is an English language version of the site) for a while now. 30 short anime productions are planned for the Expo, with a new one coming out every week starting on November 7, 2014. So far, 26 (I’m behind) of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on numbers 15-20. Rather than giving them a standard numbered rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.

Previous Posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

On these five shorts as a whole: Definitely not my favorite batch of shorts so far, but with one new favorite and a couple of conceptually interesting videos, it’s definitely wasn’t a wasted group (at least for the most part).

Animator Expo

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Turn A Gundam – DVD Review (Part 1)

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Yet another physical media review completed—this time, it’s the critical and fandom darling of the Gundam franchise, Turn A Gundam (or ∀ Gundam if you want to stylize it properly). I quite enjoyed it, to be honest! It’s not my first Gundam, technically (if you count Build Fighters), but it is my first of the old-school, classic Gundam offerings. Overall, it’s definitely got a quirky charm to it that kept me interested despite its deficiencies.

Here’s the link to the full review!

Turn A Gundam

Hysteria!: Existential Panic in the Storytelling of Angel Beats

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If you believe in any sort of afterlife at all, it’s fairly easy to conceptualize our time here on earth as a sort of perpetual adolescence. At all stages of our conscious lives—whether teenage, young adult, middled-aged, or elderly—we’re haunted by the uncertainty of the world around us, riddled with the bullets of life, buffeted by the winds of of our emotions. It is, one might say, tough to be be alive and to make sense of life. And perhaps it’s a bit silly to take a story as patently juvenile as Angel Beats! [P.A. Works, 2010] as a microcosm for the full breadth of human life, but as TK might say, “Get chance and luck!”

Angel Beats!

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So, Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon or Not?

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It was a simple question—”Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon?” But simple questions don’t always have correspondingly simple answers, and so it is with Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?‘s ridiculous titular query. And why? Because Danmachi, in specifically calling attention to the issue of how one ought to interact with girls met in a dungeon, actually intiates a strange sort of dialogue with the question. Now, really, watching Danmachi for the answer to the question of whether or not it is morally permissible to attempt to hit on and/or physically pick up girls while traversing the depths of a monster-filled dungeon isn’t necessarily the way I’d suggest watching it, but it does provide an interesting lens with which to view the way the show.

Danmachi

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