On the radiance of a certain anime.
Storytelling
Aniwords – The Evolution of RWBY (Part 1)
As you guys well know, I’m rather fond of doting on shows that are… less than perfectly crafted. This goes doubly true for those rare cases where a show starts out a bit wobbly on its feet and then manages to carve out a distinctive path for itself. I’ve seen this happen a few times, but perhaps no show’s arc from underdog to champ has been as fun to witness as that of RWBY.
This week, the first of a two-parter on the show’s growth over the years—starting off by focusing on its storytelling!
Aniwords – The Lost Village and the Death of the Genre
The Lost Village wasn’t the best anime that aired this season, nor was it anywhere close to being my favorite, but darn it, it was sure a heckuva a lot of fun to write about. I’ve long since passed by my formalist fan days (I remember telling one of my college professors that I was a formalist LOL), but talking about The Lost Village‘s formal qualities is very nearly the only way I can think to approach the show—as should be clear since this is the third post I’ve written on its formal elements. In any case, I hope you guys enjoy this wild post!
Aniwords – The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Modern Anime, and Ambition in Storytelling
I read things, which make me think of other things—which make me want to write things. Thus goes the cycle of my Aniwords columns. Speaking of which, I’m actually at my one-year anniversary writing weekly columns for Crunchyroll, which is a pretty exciting thing! That’s a lot of consecutive weeks of writing (although there were two weeks where I didn’t write anything because of work), and I don’t know if I ever would have imagined I would have lasted this long—let alone still be coming up with new ideas of things to say each week.
(More exciting news after the break, by the way!)
Aniwords – Kiznavier & How to Say Things without Words
I don’t know how many of you guys are watching Kiznaiver (mostly because I’ve been very poor at writing up those weekly posts this season due to the volume of stuff I’m watching), but episode 7 was really, really good. Good enough to motivate me to devote an entire post to detail how it, and the rest of the show, uses visuals to communicate beyond what the writing says.
Premise as Plot in Re:ZERO
Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju and the Humanity of the Stage
Aniwords – Why You Keep Watching the Same Show Over and Over
I’m always sort of amazed how just watching one show can trigger a series of thoughts that tie a bunch of disjointed ideas together in my head. Thus it was with Hanayamata, and now here we are with a new Aniwords column on slotting in character archetypes into genre shows and why it all actually works.
Hysteria!: Existential Panic in the Storytelling of Angel Beats
If you believe in any sort of afterlife at all, it’s fairly easy to conceptualize our time here on earth as a sort of perpetual adolescence. At all stages of our conscious lives—whether teenage, young adult, middled-aged, or elderly—we’re haunted by the uncertainty of the world around us, riddled with the bullets of life, buffeted by the winds of of our emotions. It is, one might say, tough to be be alive and to make sense of life. And perhaps it’s a bit silly to take a story as patently juvenile as Angel Beats! [P.A. Works, 2010] as a microcosm for the full breadth of human life, but as TK might say, “Get chance and luck!”
Mage in a Barrel 