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!

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 17

February 3, 2015iblessall 20 Comments

Man, was this one of Akatsuki no Yona‘s best episodes yet or what? Great character comedy, some cuteness, ideological and thematic tension, a new character, plot progression—it was all here and with the freshness that only a new setting can bring. A port town is the perfect place for a stare down between destiny and freedom and I’m incredibly excited to see how Yona brings Jeaha into the fold. (Oh, and the new OP got me real hyped this episode—consider acclimation complete.)

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Winter 2015, Week 3: Highlights of the Week

January 28, 2015January 27, 2015iblessall 17 Comments

More shows dropped this week (including Isuca‘s premier managing a paltry 51 seconds before I gave up on it), meaning my schedule for this season is more or less set. There are still a few shows that could get knocked out, but I’m pretty happy with everything on a daily basis, so there would have to be some serious stumbles for any of the remaining bubble shows to get dropped.

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 16

January 27, 2015January 27, 2015iblessall 5 Comments

Well, to be totally honest, this episode would have been a total disappointment if not for the post-festival scenes and, even then, this was probably one of the weakest episodes Akatsuki no Yona has produced. Unlike the comparable comedy-laden, mostly plotless episode spent in Ki-ja’s village, there were not cultural constructions at work until the very end—meaning that, due to the relatively dull nature of the war games, the episode was relatively boring, something Yona‘s never really fallen to even in its weakest moments.

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Winter 2015, Week 2: Highlights of the Week

January 21, 2015January 20, 2015iblessall 21 Comments

I wasn’t sure about this after the first week, but now…I’m sure. I have too many shows on this schedule, especially in the later half of the week. What’s killing me are the five ongoing shows, but none of them are even close to drop territory. Here’s what did bite the bullet this week:

Koufuku Graffiti fell victim to both “not really feeling inspired to go back to this one” syndrome and the “schedule too full” curse despite a warm premiere.
Military! basically sucked for three whole minutes.
Junketsu no Maria was sadly dropped—best wishes to Maria!
Assassination Classroom is getting close to drop territory, but isn’t quite there yet.

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episodes 13-15

January 20, 2015January 20, 2015iblessall 13 Comments

So, I realized that, as far behind as I was, if I tried to write individual posts for these episodes I would never ever ever catch up. I’m also not sure I could really make full episode posts out of each of these episode (14, I could have, I think), so it’s nice to be able to just focus on a few moments from each and then move on to the next one. In any case, we’ll be back on schedule next week. Woo!

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Winter 2015, Week 1: Highlights of the Week (Ongoing Shows)

January 14, 2015iblessall 11 Comments

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!

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 12

January 6, 2015January 6, 2015iblessall 4 Comments

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.

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Fall 2014, Week 11: Highlights of the Week

December 17, 2014December 17, 2014iblessall Leave a comment

Well, I’m on break from school, but that also means I’m back to my part time job, so fitting in blogging around that is going to mean a few less timely posts than before. Ah, the irony that being on break is going to interfere more with my blogging schedule than being at school. Something about not be able to control your own schedule is so…lovely.

Thank you for this gem, Argevollen.

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Akatsuki no Yona, Episode 11

December 17, 2014December 17, 2014iblessall Leave a comment

I know when I usually say, “This will be a shorter post,” it’s not, but I actually expect that to be true this time. As enjoyable as this episode was to watch, there wasn’t really that much going on, as most of the stuff with depth involved Ki-ja and simply expanded on the issues he has managing external expectations of his destiny and his internal desires to be useful to Yona. His dragon nature and his status as the hope of the White Dragon village both influence the ways he thinks about Yona and his role by her side. I’ll try and unpack his particular emotions from this episode a little more, but if you really want to see what I believe the core of Ki-ja’s character is built on, I encourage you to read my post from last week.