Welcome to Week 10!
If only the show looked this good all the time…
Hunter x Hunter
Spring 2014, Week 7: Highlights of the Week
Welcome to Week 7!
It was the least bad episode yet, but they insist on including painfully awful lines like this. In other news, magic battles (FINALLY) next week!
Spring 2014, Week 6: Highlights of the Week
Welcome to Week 6!
Another week of the worst advertisement for a product ever: “Play WIXOSS! There’s no way to win and if you lose, your life is ruined forever!”
Hunter x Hunter: Episode 126
The title of this episode is “Zero x And x Rose.”
This will be a short post, because trying to applying simple language to this show, which I am more and more convinced is flirting with the purest incarnation of the glory of narrative fiction and the visual medium, is ultimately a futile and foolish exercise. And yet…there is no way that I can simply sit back and allow this moment to flow like water and be forgotten. It is true that the beauty of any point in time is that it passes on; we can never hold time still, for it ever marches forward, relegating the present to the past and bringing the future to the present. And yet…as a writer and as a person, I cannot help but try to hold time still for just a bit, to recall the memory of a moment which surpasses the limits of this time we face.
Winter 2014 Midseason Report
While I’ve only been watching simulcasted anime for three seasons, the Winter 2014 season is probably the weakest I’ve seen. This is mostly due to a number of very inconsistent shows. I’ve seen batches of shows that were consistently excellent or consistently mediocre or consistently bad, but Winter 2014 has brought many shows that just can’t make up their mind if they want to be good, bad or just run-of-the-mill. It’s a frustrating phenomenon, which makes those shows that are consistently good much more valuable to us viewers. So, which shows are falling more on the good side than on the bad? Read on to find out. Here’s a hint:
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Hunter x Hunter Impressions: Archetypes in Action
Note: at the time of writing, I have watched through episode 76.
I was about to start off this post by saying I didn’t know why I began watching Hunter x Hunter, but I remembered before I started down that erroneous path. I began watching this popular shounen when someone on Crunchyroll began a topic debate on whether Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood or Hunter x Hunter was better. Now, I had heard good things (not great, but good) about Hunter x Hunter before, but when someone asked this question and people began saying that HxH was the better of the two, I was intrigued. Why?
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, in my book, is one of the best anime I have ever watched. It’s one of three shows which I have esteemed enough to spend my hard-earned money to own. For me, buying an anime is a sign that I have claimed ownership of the show, that I validate it and respect it. While there are a few anime which I personally like more than FMA: Brotherhood, I have not yet seen another show that deals with the diversity of themes, portrays the range of emotions, has the intensity of suspense and action, all in one, like it. To challenge FMA: Brotherhood is to challenge the best anime has to offer. I had my suspicions about a simple shounen (one I had seen classified with Bleach and Naruto) being able to take on the crown jewel of anime, but people seemed to think that the claim was justified. And so, I began to watch.
Mage in a Barrel 