Fall 2014, Week 3: Highlights of the Week

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I guess it’s that time again—three weeks into the season—for the weekly rundown. At least for now, while I’m still trying to cut shows from my schedule, the individual entries might be a little shorter (at least I’ll try to keep them so). I’m down to 15 shows, which is manageable for watching, but not for blogging. So far, nothing’s stuck out like Zankyou no Terror last season as worthy of weekly posts, but we’ll see…

Anyways, wow, week three already? It feels like the season just started to me.

Inou Battle

Inou Battle identifies the worst kind of person.

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Gundam Build Fighters: When Toys Come to Life

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Gundam Build Fighters [Sunrise, 2013], as a glorified toy commercial, stands at the fascinating intersection between art and commercialism. As most involved in the anime fandom know, these foreign cartoons are almost always little more than an advertisement for their source material, and Gundam Build Fighters has the slightly more unique distinction among them by being an ad for model robots rather than an narrative product.

This in mind, it is all the more marvelous that Gundam Build Fighters is simultaneously a triumph of creative narrative entertainment and intelligent advertising—but more than that, it’s a beautiful affirmation of the importance of fun, play, and sheer joy. How incredibly ironic that such a blatantly commercial enterprise should leave us with the final message that to sacrifice the love of something in the pursuit of material success is the worst kind of destruction that can be inflicted on our souls.

Gundam Build Fighters

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Anime Artwork Adventures #5

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Sorry for the dead spell of posting! Midterms just finished up on Wednesday, and I was busy studying for them (and watching Gundam Build Fighters). I think I’m also just a little bit burned out from posting—between writing a lot for classes this year and the absolutely (for me) torrid pace at which I was putting out content starting in the middle of last month, my brain’s just a little bit fried. So, it was nice to take a weeklong break to just watch some fun stuff, not do any heavy blogging, and not fail my classes. Again, sorry for the delay! I’m on midterm break now and I’m hoping to come back refreshed and ready to write.

By way of an apology, I’ll also let y’all know that submitted a informal proposal to write an academic paper on Revolutionary Girl Utena for a final paper for a class. I haven’t seen Utena before, but if the proposal goes through I’ll have the opportunity to watch it, research it, and write about it in detail. And, of course, I’ll definitely get that piece up here when it’s complete. Something to look forward to in like…December…heh.

On to the pictures! They’re back in full numbers this week!

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First Impressions: Fall 2014 Anime (Part 3)

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This is the third and final iteration of my Fall 2014 Anime first impressions. I do apologize about them being so spread out, but there were just so many shows…(Part 1, Part 2).

Well, well, we’ve finally come to the end of all the premieres. It feels like it’s been a quite a while since the season kicked off, what with Amagi Brilliant Park and the Ghibli series getting orphaned and YuYuYu having a really late premiere. However, it’s all over now and the time of separating the wheat (keepers) from the chaff (drops) has come! All of the impression below are based on the first episodes only.

Twintails

Literally the worst thing possible.

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First Impressions: Fall 2014 Anime (Part 2)

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This is the second installation of my first impressions for the fall 2014 anime season. You can read the first iteration here. When it’s up, part three can be found here.

Alright, I’m ready to tackle the rest of this season’s premieres. Or, I thought I was and then I realized that I have a lot more shows left to watch than I realized. So there will be a part three coming sometime in the near future!

No obvious drops in this batch of seven shows, which is kind of a bad thing seeing as I still have six more premieres to watch. That’ll put me at 23 shows total for the season, which is a full ten titles above where I want to be. I might have to do some sifting through and figure out which titles overlap in certain categories of shows. But anyways, here we go!

Kokkuri-san

Fear Kohina, the newest Jedi master.

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First Impressions: Fall 2014 Anime (Part 1)

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I’m still less than halfway through all the premieres I wanted to check out and this post is already long, so I figured I would split up my first impressions this season. I dropped 3 of the 10 shows in this initial slew of episodes, which is a fairly high atrophy rate for me.

Still to watch: Twintails, Amagai Brilliant Park, Your Lie in April, YuYuYu, Garo, Donten ni Waru, Bahamut: Genesis, Roja the Robber’s Daughter, Akatsuki no Yona, Trinity 7, Chaika: AB, Kokkuri-san

When Part 2 is ready, you will be able to find it here (Part 3).

I Can't Understand What My Husband is Saying

I swear I am not like this.

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selector spread WIXOSS, Episode 1

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Y’all know I was looking forward to selector spread WIXOSS after the first cour ended solidly in the at the end of the spring season. Episode 1 gets us started back up in what seems to be chronologically only a few weeks or so after the events of last season’s finale, and I was happy to see that we got good end-of-season WIXOSS instead of episodes 2-5 WIXOSS.

The stage is set. Open!

selector spread WIXOSS

Yuzuki, I have missed you.

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Dual Review: Problem Children and Dream Eater Merry

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I’m back to school these days, and last week I had a paper due that I really didn’t want to write. This is also know as the prime conditions in which I marathon a lot of anime, so of course I wound up cranking through a couple shows, finishing both Dream Eater Merry and the exhaustively titled Problem Children Are Coming from Another World, Aren’t They? I’m not reviewing them together solely because I finished them in the same week (although that’s part of it), but more because I had somewhat similar responses to them.

Both shows finished with a 5/10 rating (Rankings).

Dream Eater Merry

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