Dead Monday Q&A—Sixth Edition: Shirobako & Dating

February 23, 2015iblessall 4 Comments

Hello and happy Monday, everyone! It’s been quite a while since I put up one of these, but my ask.fm has been increasingly active over the past few months, so I figured it was about time to put up some of those answers for your enlightenment/entertainment.

As always, if you wish to ask a question yourself, check out my ask.fm page or leave it in the comments! As you’ll see, I take questions on a pretty wide range of subjects, from my personal beliefs to thoughts on religion or various anime, so don’t be shy if you want to know something!

“ANSWERS!?!?”

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Your Lie in April, Episode 18

February 19, 2015iblessall 6 Comments

And so concludes Nagi’s arc—complete with some truly touching revelations for her and her brother. To be entirely honest, I feel somewhat vindicated by the excellence of the emotional poignancy of the performance. I’ve been claiming all along that KimiUso is best when focused in on a single story, not splitting its attention in cursory reviews of each of its major characters. The stories still feel oddly disconnected from each other to me (Tsubaki at this particular performance is a great example), but everything we got from Nagi this episode was wonderful.

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Winter 2015, Week 6: Highlights of the Week

February 18, 2015February 18, 2015iblessall 20 Comments

Phew, it’s been a long, long week since last Wednesday. The retreat went really well last weekend, but now I’ve got a career fair coming up a week from today and then I’m hoping things will really have settled by the time that ends, hopefully leaving me with more time to knock out some of the blog posts I’m really itching to write.

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 19

February 17, 2015February 17, 2015iblessall 18 Comments

Well, maybe we won’t actually get to the final dragon before the end of the series. This episode stretched on a bit longer than I expected and, while I generally enjoyed it, Akatsuki no Yona‘s best moments don’t come from high stakes, life-threatening situations, but from the interpersonal relationships of its characters and their respective ways of seeing the world—and nowhere was this more evident than in the final scene between Hak and Yona.

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Your Lie in April, Episode 17

February 12, 2015iblessall 6 Comments

Yup, so that’s it. It’s finally confirmed (shocking…truth…) that Kaori doesn’t have much time before she dies. Yet, in true KimiUso fashion, we get a few really great scenes dealing with this new reality and then we breeze on back to the tried-and-~~true~~ nope still bad tonal whiplash techniques that we’ve been dealing with for 17 whole episodes. Frankly, I have to admire how consistently frustrating this show is to watch as it insists on horrid juxtapositions of great scenes and bad ones. Such is the KimiUso way.

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Winter 2014, Week 5: Highlights of the Week

February 11, 2015February 10, 2015iblessall 16 Comments

Well, that’s another week in the books! If I’m being honest, I sort of felt like this was a weaker week in general, although being as busy as I was makes it a bit harder to pin that on the episodes themselves—a lot of time my mental state when watching has a big effect on how I feel about stuff.

This is also just a note that I’ll be gone this upcoming weekend leading a retreat, so after the KimiUso post tomorrow (and maybe some pictures of some new stuff I got on Friday), I’ll be gone until next Tuesday. After that, I’m hoping my schedule will start to be less crazy so I can crank out some of the posts I’ve had on the backburner for a while. Until then, cheers~!

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 18

February 10, 2015iblessall 8 Comments

I think “Ties” was a good title for this episode, but I also felt like we spent a lot of time treading over thematic ground that was already covered last week. Jaeha, Ki-ja, and Hak all remain entrenched in their respective ideologies, although it was neat to see Jaeha and Ki-ja’s respective worldviews come into direct contact. Of more interest this episode was Yona herself, which is actually a focus Akatsuki no Yona hasn’t had in quite a while.

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Revolutionary Girl Utena: Reflections on the Girl

February 6, 2015November 19, 2017iblessall 3 Comments

This is the third in a series of three posts reflecting on the various roles of Utena Tenjou, the titular character of Revolutionary Girl Utena. These posts are adapted from an academic paper I wrote in Fall 2014. These posts assume the reader has completed the anime and thus contain spoilers. Citations will be noted in footnotes at the bottom of the piece.

Happily, the discussions of the previous two posts lead quite nicely into the topic of this final post. As you’ll see in the body of the post, I think Utena is such a tightly woven character that it is essentially impossible to discuss her heroism or role as the agent of change in the story without discussing the fact that yes, Utena is a girl. A girl prince.

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Your Lie in April, Episode 16

February 5, 2015iblessall 14 Comments

If you’ve come this far with Your Lie in April, now might be your last chance to turn back. That’s the feeling I get. We’re standing on the edge of the precipice of the deepest valley this show has yet looked into and, well, it looks to be pretty dark there at the bottom. And I’m really not just talking about Kaori’s frightening final line of the episode, but about the whole direction of the show.

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Winter 2015, Week 4: Highlights of the Week

February 4, 2015February 4, 2015iblessall 16 Comments

Cuts are finally complete at 11 shows for the season. With the end of the week bearing the bulk of the season’s weight, this is a manageable schedule for me with everything that’s going in real life and with all the project I’m hoping to do in the coming months with the blog.

It’s been a tough week-ish for the blog in terms of page views as it looks like my SEO ranking were pretty much reset with the new domain fully taking over. That’s…kind of a disappointment after it took literal months to build up my rankings to what they were before the crash, but I’m trying to look at this as a new challenge for me as I continue to hone my content creation and digital marketing skills. I’ve got a plan to work my way back up the list and a big part of it is continuing to create new, interesting content! Hope you guys enjoy!