Hello, hello, everyone! I’m here with a couple big announcements about Mage in a Barrel today! I’m really excited about some of the changes I’ve been making around the blog and what it means for the future, so let’s dive right in!
Of course, it only seems right to kick off big news like this with some help from the site’s two long-time mascots, Maka Albarn and Chitoge Kirisaki.
“Thanks for stopping by!”
“I-it’s not like I’m glad you visit or anything…”
Early this morning, I awoke to find myself with a Twitter notification (among literally dozens) from my friend and fellow aniblogger Namhur of Fiction Realm, alerting me that I had been cast in the role of question-answerer for a number of anime-fandom related questions. Now, after my valiant retreat from 12 Days of Anime due to Toradora! taking over my blog in mid-Decemeber, I had been hoping for a chance to participate in another aniblogger community project. Additionally, I enjoy imposing my super opinions on what it means to be an anime fan on the poor fools of the internet world. So, listen up pigs! This is no mere answering of questions! This is a manifesto to the anime world!
Obligatory Caution
Well, it certainly wasn’t KimiUso‘s best, but it landed much closer the show’s good side than last week’s episode did. As I’ve said before, KimiUso is an impressive show in its ability to oscillate between episodes that leave me unimpressed and episodes have a profound emotional impact—going from last week’s episode to this week’s was a classic case of this weird dynamic between Good KimiUso and Kind of Meh KimiUso.
And, the thing is, KimUso can have moving episodes while still faltering in some technical aspects. There were places in this episode that my brain was chirping at me, but my heart was still being worked on. To me, that’s an accomplishment, and I think KimiUso can do this when it leans on its strengths to compensate for its weakness. It’s perhaps not the best model to follow, but it’s the one that’s working for the show.
With the premieres of new shows taking up most of my writing time lately, the five ongoing shows I’ve carried over from the fall have taken something of a back seat. Which, you know, is kind of a shame considering how good these five shows are. I didn’t want to let a whole week go by without talking about them at all, so we’ll have a short Highlights of the Week this week to chat about Garo, Shirobako, Your Lie in April, Log Horizon, and Akatsuki no Yona.
My schedule for this season is still coming together, but I’m hoping to aim for ~4 posts/week: Yona and KimiUso episodics, Highlights of the Week, and some kind of craft/editorial piece over the weekends. We’ll see how that goes. But, for now, on to this week!
Alright, Part 2 of my Winter 2015 first impressions is here (Part 1 available here)! For me, this was the bigger selection of shows I was excited for and, as you’ll see, there were both some really easy keepers and some really easy drops. There really aren’t too many bubble shows this season after the first week, and Isuca is the only show left to air that I care about. I’m currently at 16 shows (including carryovers), but I’m expecting that number to go down by 2-4 shows. The spread is pretty good, too, with both Mondays and Wednesdays being empty. Anyhow, this was a very, very good batch of shows. Lots of fun times ahead in Winter 2015!
Still to Watch: Isuca
Obligatory Reminder: Garo is also still airing, and you should be watching it.
This piece was originally published in the tri-weekly Crunchyroll Newsletter. You can read the article, and others on the Newsletter page.
There are lots of ways to build an anime. You can take a particular thematic thread and spin an entire narrative out of that single thought. You can seek to provide titillation for a target audience and use every possible chance to create it. Or you can take a few indomitable truths about the way we humans live and infuse your story with them. This final way (although these three are by no means a comprehensive list) is the way Shirobako has chosen; however, in a different way than many anime have chosen. Where great fantasy epics explore the vast darknesses and lights of humanity, Shirobako illuminates the ways in which we work and communicate in the modern world.
Winter 2015 is here. It’s so here. So far, really, so good. There hasn’t been anything that’s compelled me to drop it outright (although a few shows have come close), and most of the shows I was truly excited for showed up well. Add a crop of decent premieres to five solid to excellent ongoing shows and you’ve got a pretty darn good start to the season. Either that or, after a fall season that failed to conclude with a show above 7/10, I’m just really happy to see some new anime.
Still to Watch: Kofuku Graffiti, Durarara!! x2, Isuca, The Rolling Girls, Aldnoah.Zero 2, Fafner of the Blue Sky, World Break, Death Parade
Ongoing: Shirobako, Garo, Your Lie in April, Akatsuki no Yona, Log Horizon
Just a reminder that Shirobako is ongoing, that you should be watching it, and that it’s hard being in anime world.
Man, this was a weird episode for KimiUso. For something like this to follow the beauty of episode 10 and the solidity of episode 11…it was like an entirely different show, even from what I felt were the weaker episodes at the beginning of the first cour. While KimiUso has always struggle with executing its comedy and doing so in a manner that didn’t interrupt the flow of the episode, this episode was an almost shocking departure from the general level of competency KimiUso typically exhibits—the flow, simply, was horrid.
Hey, guys! So, a bit of an announcement today—I recently started writing for a news/review site called the Otaku Review. I’ve been doing a lot of writing for them in the last month, including both news articles and my very first reviews of physical media.
You’ve probably already read most of the news stories already, but if you’re interested in the reviews, I’m compiled links to all the stuff I covered in December. Hope you enjoy!
Sorry for the delay in this post—Toradora! kind of took over and everything else went to the backburner. I also heard that this episode of Akatsuki no Yona was a good one, so I didn’t want to rush through the episode or the post.
Having seen this episode, that was a good choice. One’s of Yona‘s greatest strengths is its phenomenal ability to balance oppositional fundamental forces, pairing them, contrasting them, synchronizing them, and clashing them against each other. This episode, though, was much more personal in its choices—a bit of a shift from the more universal balances we’ve seen to this point. And, brilliantly, the focus was on the senses: on touch, sight, and sound. I don’t have any superlatives left for this episode after spending them all on Twitter, so let me simply say it. This episode was very, very good.
Mage in a Barrel 