Days Will Pass: The Endings and Beginnings of Love Live

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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…

Love Live! Continue reading →

Aniwords – The Great Waifu Carousel

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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.

Here’s the link~

Danmachi

Hyouka, Episode 16

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So, we’ve arrived at the penultimate episode of the Kanya Festival arc and the answers to all the mysteries are starting to slowly unveil themselves (some courtesy of Oreki). The Classics Club is still functioning as four separate units, but their moments of togetherness are starting to outnumber their moments of separation. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything is smooth sailing…

Hyouka Continue reading →

Anime Weekly: Fall 2015, Week 10

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I don’t know when the season turned into “Concrete Revolutio, Miss Monochrome and some other shows,” but that’s about where I am at this point. I’m still enjoying everything else I’m watching, but those two shows are just too consistently good for me to compare them to the rest of the season’s offerings.

This week, you’ll hear a lot about my issues with the other stuff airing. Hopefully it’s at least somewhat enjoyable…

One Punch Man
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Aniwords – Mean Girls, Anime Style

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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.

Here’s the link~

Hanamonogatari

Hyouka, Episode 15

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Ultimately, I think Hyouka is a show about what happens when people run into each other, meet each other, talk to each other, get in each others’ way, and—finally—change each other. It’s never a graceful process and sometimes it can be annoying and hard, but so much of the people we become comes from the people with whom we have contact.

This episode of Hyouka is about that.

Hyouka Continue reading →

Glasslip – DVD Review

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My latest review for the Fandom Post is live, and it’s on Glasslip, the show I recently wrote 3000 other words on. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Bless, we already read your thoughts on Glasslip, why do we care to read more of them?” The answer: between writing my essay and writing this review, I somehow stumbled onto the Japanese aesthetic concept of “mono no aware.” I won’t bore you with definitions here, but suffice it to say that it’s an exceptionally good way of thinking about both Glasslip‘s content and its execution. So, if you want to read me wax even more philosophical on Glasslip, head on over to the Fandom Post!

That…probably wasn’t a very good sales pitch, huh.

Here’s the review!

Glasslip