I’m continuing my coverage of the My Hero Academia manga over at The Fandom Post, which means I’m not officially Relevant thanks to the anime airing this season. The anime’s reportedly only scheduled for 13 episodes, which is a bit weird for me as a manga reviewer—the manga, despite being fun, still doesn’t feel like it’s totally hit its stride yet in this third volume. Anyways, the manga is still good and I’m having a ball watch it get adapted into an anime.
Check out the full review here!
As I promised, here’s my full review of Hanayamata. Or… a close to a full review as you’re going to get, because I honestly didn’t have a ton to say about the series. I have most definitely seen shows in this genre before (I was even thinking about how Love Live!‘s structures follow many of the same patterns), and I honestly don’t think Hanayamata does much to rise above the general motions of the genre. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; in fact, I quite enjoyed most of the show. But it did mean that the show was very reliant on the effectiveness of its characters within the larger superstructure—aka Yaya is good.
Mamoru Hosoda’s (Summer Wars, Wolf Children) newest film is hitting US shores soon, and I had an opportunity to review a screening copy of the movie before release thanks to The Fandom Post.
I won’t spoil too much of the review here, but I will say that I wasn’t much impressed with Hosoda’s latest effort. It would be a stretch to say I disliked The Boy and the Beast, but the fact that it generally left me feeling apathetic and mildly disappointed perhaps says even more than a strong feeling of antipathy would have. The Boy and the Beast isn’t an awful film; but it’s not a very good one either.
Un-Go purports to be a show about truth—about finding, unveiling, and understanding truth in a world where truth is distorted, manipulated, created, and abused. The main character, Shinjurou Yuuki, is accompanied by a spirit with the power to demand a single truth from any human being.
Yet, it is perhaps the artificial intelligence, Kazamori, who becomes the most elegant image of truth in the world of Un-Go.
My latest review for the Fandom Post is live, and it’s on Glasslip, the show I recently wrote 3000 other words on. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Bless, we already read your thoughts on Glasslip, why do we care to read more of them?” The answer: between writing my essay and writing this review, I somehow stumbled onto the Japanese aesthetic concept of “mono no aware.” I won’t bore you with definitions here, but suffice it to say that it’s an exceptionally good way of thinking about both Glasslip‘s content and its execution. So, if you want to read me wax even more philosophical on Glasslip, head on over to the Fandom Post!
That…probably wasn’t a very good sales pitch, huh.
So, I’m pretty happy to announce that I’m now the official My Hero Academia reviewer for The Fandom Post, picking up from where I started with Otaku Review. I’m pretty happy about this, because MHA is a delightful little series filled with cute characters and a ton of energy. Are cute characters and energy all that’s required to get me to like things? Maybe, but MHA has a bit more going on. It’s also a series that very nearly crosses gender lines in its appeal—aside from a few throwaway moments (which is sad on its own) MHA generally does a really good job of balancing letting its guys and girls be awesome and cool. I’m starting to feel this manga might be, excepting those few moments, a great starter manga for kids of either gender—which is cool and neat all on its own.
Check out the full review here!
So, as I announced a fair bit back, I’ve started writing for The Fandom Post! I won’t really be reviewing a ton of stuff over there, but it’s nice to be writing outside of my normal wheelhouse on occasion. I kicked off my stint there with a review of Knights of Sidonia, which prior to watching I only knew as “that Attack on Titan show in space with CG.” Turns out, Sidonia is pretty good—overall, I’d rate it above Titan. The parts I enjoyed most, sadly, were the parts that were around the least, but it’s an engaging watch from start to finish and, with CG becoming more and more prevalent these days, it’s neat to see what Polygon Productions was able to accomplish.
Read the review here~ (I’m actually very happy with how it turned out.)
Decently executed trashy light novel adaptations is a genre I feel the anime industry has unjustly overlooked. Sure, there’s not much money to be made there if the sales of Absolute Duo [8-Bit, 2015] are to be judged and sure, there doesn’t really seem to be much of an audience or much appreciation for the genre, but someone still needs to give credit where credit is due. And director Atsushi Nakayama (in his first full directorial outing) and series composer Takamitsu Kouno deserve a lot of credit for making Absolute Duo a much better show than it had the right to be. As an almost consistently entertaining production, Absolute Duo gets a 4/10 (Ongoing Rankings).
1+1=2, but you don’t have much of an equation if the plus sign is missing and you certainly can’t get to a sum greater than the two addends that way. So it is with Your Lie in April [A-1 Pictures, 2014-2015], without question the most persistently frustrating, yet fascinating, show I have ever watched. Equally capable of presenting an etheral, emotional episode or an outright maddening one, KimiUso (an abbreviation for the show’s Japanese title, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso) is a show of brilliant gems sadly lacking the links necessary to completely finish the equation. But, in the final review, those jewels are still worth something on their own, even if their settings can’t quite match their brilliance. So, my final verdict for Your Lie in April is a 7/10 (Ongoing Rankings). 
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A rom-com that’s only sometimes romantic and very rarely actually comedic, but amusing and fluffy with a few sparks of genuine creativity.
Mage in a Barrel 