Last time, Utena beat Saionji, attaining a position as a leading student as well as a love interest within Anthy. On this episode, she has to do this all over again. Duality 101 strikes, where Utena becomes the princely upstart all the girls swoon over and Saionji swings his sword alone when nobody but Touga can console him. But that difference in status clouds their similar treatment of the woman in front of them. Sure, Utena may not slap Anthy…
Yes, I’ve looked through this current anime season. No, I wasn’t interested in blogging most of them. So in this case, it’s time to dig up an old show and light it anew. Utena has been argued over for over a decade and a half with little consensus on what the imagery symbolized or which characters were in the right, not helped by the creator’s refusal to answer any questions with a coherent response. This show stands alongside Evangelion, Lain,…
Black Butler: Book of Circus Did you know that Black Butler is a shounen? I always thought it was a yaoi. Hell, the first 30 seconds of the show feature a man wearing high heels, but I guess that must just be something young boys are into these days. Regardless of its demographic or genre, the first episode of Book of Circus fails to impress on any level outside of its background music. While it’s a foregone conclusion that this…
Akame ga Kill! So there’s this guy named Tatsumi who has the unfortunate distinction of being a dead ringer for Mikoto from Raildex (right down to the v-neck sweater). He and two others have been sent from their rapidly dwindling village to seek from protection from the corrupt, incompetent Capital of their country. But that’s not important. What is is a gang of super assassins known as Night Raid led by the titular character and her very large sword able…
I’m noticing on other blogs that this is the point where they’re jumping ship. Frankly, I can’t blame them one bit. This second arc is really setting off an example of what happens when a so bad it’s good show just becomes bad. I remember watching shows like Secret Life of the American Teenager and Valvrave purely on the basis that they were funny to laugh at. But then, the writers had the idea that their show would suck less…
One of my associates made a rather poignant statement when he expressed the appeal of Kenzen Robo Daimidaler. He noted it was a love letter to all the shitty OVAs released in the 1990s. I don’t think the word ‘love’ aptly describes the contents of the letter Daimidaler wrote. Instead of wistful nostalgia and gentlemanly kisses to a long ago love, the ‘love’ letter is written crudely with a lot of eager rhetoric detailing weird, bizarre things it wants to…
Of all the scenes I remember in the original How to Train Your Dragon, it was the moment where Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is confronted by his father Stoick the Vast (Gerard Buter) about befriending a dragon. Eventually it comes to a head where Stoick declares “They killed hundreds of us!” and Hiccup retorts “And we killed thousands of them!” I was struck odd by the peculiar disparity of the casualty numbers between Vikings and dragons; as if Hiccup was insinuating…
I remember what I said last week about the textbook comparison, and that analogy is in full swing here. With all of the sporting events in this episode, the show always goes into such detail about what the characters are doing as if this really is an example in a hypothetical Magical Physics book. They always discuss it in terms like “Watanabe is manipulating her relative position using a particle-based form of magic that allows her to say in place-blah”,…
After a break, I hope the show has changed enough so I have new things to disc— “Well, criminals and terrorists are cowards to begin with.” “And that big brother… well, he’s a badass.” “It’s very becoming, and you look lovely, but I don’t think it’s appropriate.” “But it’s like gender doesn’t even matter anymore… looking at you, Miyuki…” “Onii-sama…” —well, nevermind. I didn’t write an article for last week due to a combination of illness and sloth, with hallucinations…
SOMEBODY DIDN’T WRITE AN ARTICLE THIS WEEK (says the man who hasn’t written on M3 in over three). So Mahouka’s first arc was fairly remarkable in that it somehow made Sword Art look marginally intelligent. Oh sure it was fun to make sport of Tatsuya’s blatant over-powered Gary Stu shtick for a couple weeks but then suddenly everybody became overpowered, completely confounding the whole “Blooms Vs. Weeds” plot angle they’d been playing up. Then Mibu and the French Dadaist terrorists…