Category: Editorial

Ideas, opinions, and hopefully coherent ramblings

Editorial

Robots are in my Blog! 0080 and the Gundam Tradition

Well, this is quite a turn of events, isn’t it? No matter how diverse or focused a fan’s interests may be, it would be hard to call oneself a dedicated anime fan without exploring the beast known as Gundam. By “beast”, of course, I’m referring to one of the most massive and well-respected franchises in anime history. It’s the good kind of beast, a creature that must be tamed in order to reap your reward, like a secret boss with a legendary drop item.

That said, I don’t think I’ll get anywhere with the metaphors today, so I’ll stick to giving my first real impression of this universe of epic proportions.

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Editorial

On Setting and Atmosphere

It can get a little tiring thinking about plot and character all the time, can’t it? The Araragi Theory of Bakemonogatari, the Nasu-ified story of CANAAN, the theme of the value of life (and, well, brotherhood) in FMA: Brotherhood – while all of these things are good by themselves, they can easily lead to a mentally-taxed viewer.

Well, when you look at it objectively, being mentally taxed isn’t exactly a bad thing. If anything, it’s good to have stuff to think about while watching anime, but as everyone knows, sometimes it’s nice to just kick back and relax. But what is it about these shows that lets us do that? Aria is an extreme case, but even so, what is it about the show that causes it to be such a stress reliever? The characters and story are part of it, but surely that isn’t everything. When I started questioning why I fell so easily for a show about baseball girls in the early 20th century, though, I knew it was time to get to the bottom of it.

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Editorial

When Subjectivity and Objectivity Clash: Looking Back on Hatsukoi Limited

When 99% of the population consumes some form of creative media, we do it from our own perspective. When we think about what we liked or what we didn’t like, our own personal opinions are likely to hold more sway over the quality of the work itself, and our final opinion is usually somewhere in between the two extremes. Since anime bloggers are not professional critics trained to ignore their opinions for work, we usually do the same.

As you can figure, though, this can lead to trouble. J.C Staff’s Hatsukoi Limited was praised quite a bit while it was airing in the Spring, and I don’t deny that it has its own unique charms, but try as I might, I can’t seem to change my opinion that something didn’t work for me.

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Editorial

Age, Innocence, and an unnecessary comparison between Card Captor Sakura and Kyou no Go no Ni

Innocence in fiction is a funny thing, depending on how you look at it, because everyone’s definition is different. Some might say, I don’t know, that something like this is innocent; others might only see innocence in a thing like that. A lot of that has to do with perspective, but in my viewing of Card Captor Sakura – believe it or not, it’s only my first time through – I realized that there’s one very important variable that can be attached to a person’s definition of the word. I’m talking about age, and how it ties into a viewer’s experience, triggering emotions like nostalgia or admiration, even if the work never requested it.

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Editorial

Why So Serious? The Equilibrium of Exposition and Comic Relief

Serious business is serious. And it’s also important. Very important. Life, after all, is usually pretty serious, and since many works of fiction take on darker subjects than real life contains, it’s only natural that stories should be suitably heavy-hearted. However, the funny thing about seriousness is that there’s a very fine line between “serious” and “too serious,” and I’m sure we’ve all seen far too many times cases in which the creators of a show fail to notice that line.

The problem is, understanding how much seriousness to use is ridiculously important, to the point that a careless mistake can destroy an otherwise good story. And yet, the right balance between dark and light subject matter can make a good story even better. It’s one of those simple aspects of a work of fiction that’s easy to understand but hard to master.

Of course, this all begs the question: how serious is too serious?

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Editorial

Nostalgia Blinds…but it also Heals

Shh! This is supposed to be relevant!

Believe it or not, I’m not here to beat this dead horse, nor am I interested in whatever dorama was stirred up long before I knew that the anime blogosphere existed. Incidentally, I read that post when I first discovered aniblogs, which was before I knew wildarmsheero – I enjoyed it devoid of its original meaning.

But I digress. To summarize, DarkMirage wrote something about the bias that many fans have toward older series, and the fact that nostalgia can blind. It used to bother me when I was still in elementary school, innocently enjoying my Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker when the so-called vets would harp endlessly on Link to the Past. It also bothered me when I first started watching older anime, and I wondered how some of the Ghibli classics like Nausicaa could ever be better than modern anime films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

In other words, I agreed with the sentiment without having put it in words, I agreed with it when I first read that post around a year ago, and I still agree with it today. But it’s also important to remember that nostalgia isn’t necessarily harmful.

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Memories of Eternity