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Because anime is produced on a shoestring budget. If you compared it to video games, it's like supporting indy games and Steam.

Do you like anime? do you wan't the anime industry to keep producing content? do you wish higher quality stuff was made? but at the same time, not want to purchase Blu-rays and DVDs? For me, discs don't serve a purpose, I am a watch-one-time consumer. If it weren't for services like Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Funimation, none of my money at all would go back to the industry. The way I see it, some licensing money is better than no money at all.

>What I also don't understand is /r/anime is so against fansubs. In my experience, they come out hours sooner, and are sometimes much more professional than Crunchyroll translations.

Translation quirks don't have much meaning to me. Crunchyroll's translations are good enough. I rather contribute as much as I can than be hung up on tiny issues.

>I know that "whole seasons" on DVD and Blu-ray are an inherently American thing, but the idea of buying less than 4 episodes at a time for full price is horrifying. No one should pay that much money for that little content. I don't fully understand the Japanese economy, however, so maybe expensive anime has the same reasoning as expensive fruit.

Read this: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2012-03-05

Anime is a niche market, and unlike western tv, it's mostly funded by disc sales.

It's been a little while since I shared anything here, so I've got two new Things for everybody. First, I finally got the chance to write one of my thematic overview pieces for ANN, and went with the endlessly heartwarming Shirobako. I got a lot of positive responses to that, which was nice to see, and overall it's just a weird and satisfying feeling to be seeing my usual style over at ANN. And I also just finished a small followup essay to the crazy-defensive reactions my UBW review provoked, titled "You're Watching It Wrong". This one goes into the motivation beyond a variety of forms of fan violence, but I tried to keep it as positive as possible.

So that's what I've been up to, along with getting to review both Euphonium and Oregairu weekly. Busy times!

I have watched and written about roughly fifteen shows in the last 2.5 days. I now perceive colors as flavors and sounds as smells. I don't know if the world is beginning or if it is ending. What is even happening anymore.

Anything by Idea Factory really

Idea Factory. The company that brought us gems like Mars of Destruction, Skelter+Heaven, Diabolik Lovers and more, maybe even worse shows. If there is a company I stand by regarding how terrible their content is, it's Idea Factory.

Yuri Bear Storm will contain a character called Life Sexy. That is the most Ikuhara name ever.

It's been a busy week for me. I finally finished and wrote a piece on Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 after putting the show on hold half a year ago, aaand I reviewed Unlimited Blade Works. That second one had fairly predictable results - crazy Type Moon fans piling over each other to rant in the comments, and even some spillover onto my other pages. There's just something about Type Moon, I guess.

Well, obviously my opinion on that phenomenon doesn't end there, but I feel like discussing how series like Fate are designed in such a way that they tickle the most rabid of fandom urges would be an essay all by itself. And one I probably want to write at some point!

I wrote a goddamn mega-review of Eccentric Family for ANN. It was my fourth time watching the show, but it held up extremely well. And the book that comes with the current collection is fantastic - not only does it have interviews with all of the core staff, it also has specific reflections from the writer who composed every episode on their specific episodes. Good stuff.

>treating the post-9/11 landscape and those who grew up in it as a second-wave "lost generation"...

The problem with this is that Watanabe explicitly said that the Japanese view international terrorism incidents as a sort of distant problem. That is, there is no such thing as a "post-9/11 landscape" in Japan because 9/11 (and Islam-fueled terrorism) has little overt relevance to Japanese society (of course, that won't stop us Ameri-centric viewers to maybe find meaning that would be lost on Japanese viewers, but that's a different thread altogether.)

That is to say, there is no real life analog in Japan to 9 and 12's terrorism, in the same way that the Kiga Group's terrorism was a mirror of the Sarin Gas attacks.

Or did I misinterpret what you said?

I'm looking for somebody who can read Japanese to help me scanlate <strong><em>Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome</em></strong>, the manga written by Morimi Tomihiko (The Tatami Galaxy, Uchouten Kazoku, Penguin Highway) and drawn by Kotone Ranmaru (artist for Red Data Girl, manga adaptations of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Blood-C).

I've never scanlated manga before, but for the same reasons an unread copy of The Tatami Galaxy sits on my book shelf, I decided to take on this project out of my adoration for the original author. And because the raws are available.

I have already taken care of most of the technical work for the first 52 pages or so- I've removed all of the previous text, I've redrawn the erased areas a bit, and I'm in the process of fine-tuning the cleaning. The only thing left is to translate, proof-read, typeset, and run some basic quality control. I can take care of everything but the translations seeing as how I can't read an ounce of Japanese. So I'm looking for a translator.

Skimming through the raws leads me to believe that the work is quite Japanese culturally and mostly centers around life in Kyoto (big surprise) and drinking- an incredible amount of drinking. As a result, I'm ideally looking for somebody who can pick up on those details/background and help me make note of them. There's also quite a bit of dialogue, so I'm also looking for somebody who can perhaps pick up on a bit of the wit and elegance that the author has shown in previous adaptations of his work. Neither is a requirement though.

I've considered asking in other places, but I figured I might as well ask here first. Please respond here or send me a message if you're interested in any way.

Every time I've visited Japan I've always made a point of taking a day trip to <strong>Kamakura</strong>.

While the area itself has become rather touristy (it's about an hour-long train ride away from Tokyo, making it a popular destination), the city has put a lot of effort in preserving its shrines and temples as well as its more traditional aesthetic. Seeing as how this is an anime-related subreddit, it's worth noting that it's also the setting where Elfen Lied, Squid Girl, and Tari Tari take place. There's a lot of small shops and places to hike, if that's what you're looking for.

What's also great is that it's just a few minutes away from <strong>Enoshima Island</strong>, which was not only a model for Spirited Away, but the setting of Tsuritama and Ping Pong the Animation's ED. The last time I visited was before I got into anime, so don't think that's all it has going for it. It's a really beautiful place, provided the right weather (depending on the season, be sure to always carry around an umbrella).

The trip itself is a full day trip if you spend it leisurely, there's plenty of places to eat on the way there and back. Don't stop yourself from just picking up some 7-11 soba if you're in a rush-- well, at least that's what I did. Don't feel obligated to make this trip either, there is already a near infinite amount things to do in Tokyo before traveling beyond its borders.

Just because a Visual Novel is rated 18+ (like White Album 1), that does not essentially mean it has to be focused on sex scenes.

Calling any 18+ game and Eroge would be correct, but I feel like your definition of Eroge is a game that focuses on sexual appeal.

Games like those are actually called Nukige. However, that tag obviously does not encompass all 18+ visual novels.

Now I agree with you that White Album 2 is a better story that White Album 1, but it has nothing to do with the fact that White Album 1 was written as an 18+ story.

It's not like such a thing had never happened before in real life. ANN actually credits the person doing series composition for Shirobako as having written 5 episodes for Polar Bear Cafe; I don't know if the editor situation is directly inspired by that (or if ANN's accurate on that), but the point is that this kind of thing does happen. A lot of this show feels like it was directly inspired by the staff's personal experiences making anime. Obviously it's sensationalized a bit, it is a show after all, not a documentary. Would it have been nice to hear the editor's actual reason, yes, but I'm not sure how you'd squeeze that in, in such a way that it isn't obviously Funny Story trying to cover his ass.

>the lines being all about "following your dreams"

This also bugged me. The scene did hit me hard, I can't agree on the rest, but that line felt really awkward and transparent.

Did a little research, came back with the ANN previews. The ratings include "1 out of 5", "worthless", and "nope nope nope nope nope". And then of course /u/Bobduh's segment proclaiming that the show is "distinctive only in its hatefulness."

Oh god, this is all like one giant dinner bell sounding off in the sector of my brain that loves to dissect things that go horribly, horribly wrong. But I suppose I could come to resist it.

^^^^and ^^^^yes ^^^^i ^^^^actually ^^^^hope ^^^^to ^^^^watch ^^^^an ^^^^episode ^^^^or ^^^^two ^^^^of ^^^^crime ^^^^edge ^^^^later ^^^^tonight ^^^^if ^^^^possible

The hype for Psycho-Pass came from the creators rather than some rabid fanbase. The talk of banning moe, a masculine mindset, and attempt to counter current anime trends. Urobuchi is a factor I suppose (people expected suffering), but it's arguable about just how good he is (yes there's madoka, but his other ventures into anime didn't fair too well, and it's difficult to say whether Fate/Zero was so popular because of him or because it's Type-Moon). The dialogue in Psycho Pass hasn't exactly been stellar either.

I think the best way to describe Psycho-Pass as we've seen is that it's just kind of plain. It's a fun and interesting watch, but with all the elements in it, it's gone eight episodes without doing something particularly special. Heartstrings hasn't been pulled, no drama is to be had, as violent and gory as it can be, it hasn't resulted in any strong kind of suspense. With all the potential for something thematically to pull it together, it simply doesn't do anything about it. In that last respect, it's particularly bad when it comes to the Psycho-Passes and the Sybil system.

The creators apparently wanted to create some sort of anime paradigm shift, and it would be interesting to see if Psycho-Pass would be successful in that respect. But the follow through on that has resulted in pretty much a normal, somewhat gory, standard cop series.

1. Hey, I'm Bobduh. I live in New England, consider myself a decent enough person with a possibly unhealthy level of dedication to his hobbies, and work as both a proofreader and professional watcher of Japanese cartoons. I don't actually have any idea what I'm doing.
2. Eva, Madoka, Utena, Katanagatari, Tatami Galaxy, and a whole bunch of others. I like shows about the human spirit - shows that demonstrate at us at our worst so we can feel the honest triumph of challenging those odds. I like shows that don't pull their punches, but have absolute faith in people regardless. I like shows that make me cry.
3. Sometimes I watch with friends, but normally I watch by myself, and actually take notes while watching. This seemed like a good habit for a while, but it certainly doesn't help me overcome my problems actually finishing shows.
4. I used to discuss stuff here more, but have somewhat fallen out of the habit. At this point I'm almost too busy writing about anime to write about anime - most of my random small thoughts go to twitter, and most of my long-form ones go to either my blog or ANN. The internet is a hungry beast!

If you want to delve deeper into anime than what we can offer, I'd highly reccomend Anime News Network's weekly podcast. They bring on people relevant to the english-speaking anime community and the interviews really go "behind baseball", eliminating a bunch of mystery and humanizing the whole industry.

Two recent ones I recommend are a guy who breaks down anime like we do and makes a living speaking at conventions (dream job? Dream job) and Carl Macek, who was responsible in large part for Robotech and getting the localization industry off the ground here in America.

Utorrent is a pretty big mess these days, it became a horrible bloatware full of ads and crapware. I'm not surprised it attracted the attention of your anti-virus.

I would recommend using Deluge instead.

There's nothing to emulate! You install the game itself, and it has a native Mac client.

And thank you. I got into that particular school in March, but I waited until now because the other school I was applied to waitlisted me a week ago. I don't really mind, though, since I was already leaning heavily towards the first school anyway (it's cheaper and has engineering programs more in line with my interests.)

Live action Tonari no Seki-kun TV show has been greenlight this is truly the golden age of live action adaptations.

A couple weeks ago I compared Shirobako to Parks and Rec but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. Both are optimistic, but that's not concrete enough to be a good reason. In fact, they're quite different on the surface:

• Parks has characters who (mostly) hate their job doing it anyways; Shirobako is all about people who love their job even if it's not always glamorous or rewarding
• Parks relies on political and social commentary through satirical caricatures of characters and occasionally main characters for some of its humor; Shirobako plays it mostly straight with characters as they struggle with their lives
• Leslie Knope knows exactly what she wants to do and how; Miyamori by the end of the series, still doesn't exactly have a concrete answer to "why anime?"

But after reading /u/Bobduh's review it finally clicked for me. And it should've been obvious since the same sentiment is literally spoken by the main characters:

>What makes work worth doing is getting to do it with people that you love.

--Leslie Knope, Parks and Recreation

To me the best news in a while are that one of my favorite manga, Franken Fran is being licensed by Seven Seas

I got 9 episodes deep before I called quits. On the other hand, I started reading the scanlations of the alternate take, which is pretty great.

This show chased a lot of folks off with its initial episodes and the lead character being a "Would actually steal candy from a baby" oaf. He isn't "cool" or a "bad boy" sort of guy one may secretly want to be. He's a brick wall who has gotten to just do whatever he wanted, with a personality to match.

Mike Toole's most recent ANN column actually covers the show a lot, as it does get into an area that is important for considering this sort of show. By and large, it is not for otaku, and really not even much for episodic episode comments (though I make those anyway). It's a show for older folks in Japan and the like, to have on maybe in the background or to catch every now and again, plus a bit of a star vehicle for Ken Matsudaira.

One sort of needs to orient themselves appropriately, I guess, were they to get anything out of this material. But, I watched the whole pantheon of classic cartoons from the baby boomer years on back, since I had a lot of access to those as a kid, so I'm alright returning to that sort of execution and how one tries to maybe bring back an older style to anime today.

I think the show has had a swell line of episodes lately, and it seems to have settled in and found more and more of what it wants to do revolving around the sumo setting. The show probably is not worth powerwatching through more than a dozen episodes to get caught up, and even then what one would get to on the other end is not going to blow them away or anything. But, as something for me to put on the television on a weekend afternoon, it's not been a bad time, and ideally these recent episodes mean it is turning the corner and may even get better before its through.

Nah, nah, this is a different thing. It just so happens to coincide with the upcoming Sailor Moon Crystal, which will be the "remake" you speak of.

All the info is here, but basically what happened is that Viz licensed the entirety of the original anime and they're going to be releasing two episodes of it, visually re-mastered but otherwise uncut (read: not the horrendous DiC dub) every Monday on Hulu. The first four episodes are up now. So basically, if you haven't seen the series yet, now's as good a time as any to start.

This will no doubt breed an entire new legion of fans for Viz to absorb money from when they release the entire franchise on Blu-Ray, with a re-done and hopefully actually good English dub, later this year. They are a crafty lot, those Viz guys.

Check ANN's season preview guide, at the bottom of each preview they list where the show is being legally streamed. If there is nothing listed then the show (probably) isn't being streamed anywhere.

This would be a better question for the Monday Minithread, so I suggest reposting your question there as well.

I think you're mostly referring to titles, but with the whole kanji multiple pronunciation deal in Japanese, this also applies to characters. Almost every Japanese name is some sort of pun or dual meaning reflecting the character.

Here's the ones I know offhand from the shows I enjoyed.

• Each of the Sailor Soldiers has the kanji for their planet and a brief description of their personality for their name, or some other astral pun.

• Mami Tomoe (PMMM) - References two traditional Magical Girls, Creamy Mami and Hotaru Tomoe, with whom she shares many qualities. THEN it also references her role in the series. Mami a homophone for the English word for Mommy, which accompanies her buxom character design.

• Faye Valentine (Cowboy Bebop) - As I wrote: Fickle, mischievous, mysterious, aggressive and manipulative, referencing the classical fairy. Zero. Scruples. Sexual, enticing, and maybe, prey to her own whims and emotions. What a perfect name for this character.

• Ami Kawashima (Toradora) - Sailor Mercury's civilian name's kanji reads something like "beautiful of the water". Kawashima's means "beautiful river island", with literally the same given name. This is relevant in that the airs Kawashima assumes mimic Mizuno's true demeanor, and also is called out by Taiga in the episode Ami is introduced.

> "Who does she think she is? Tall and beautiful with a name like a Sailor Soldier?

• Dragonball names are famously related to foods or silly English words. Garlic Jr? Emperor Pilaf? C'mon now.

The list goes on and on and on and I'd encourage you to look up the meaning of your favorite characters. Everyone is something. Heck, even Kirito is probably a dumb pun on "To chop off", Kiritoru.

Yes. Every anime DB site is user-submitted. Nobody is getting paid to put that info on there, it's all community built like the wiki in /r/anime (yes, including the 50-bajillion staff and cast listings at ANN). Some sites like Hummingbird are progressive where they can leech the API from another site--so if you got a brand new anime added to MAL, then export your list, then import it to Hummingbird--their system will adopt the new entry. But someone still submitted that information in the first place.

So Toei trademarked Kamen Rider Ghost a few days ago, now that is all fun and dandy considering this Rider would be an actual Ghost Rider, but another thing happened with that, his transformation item has been confirmed to be socks. Now we've had some interesting things in the past: Fruit themed locks, rings, animal themed medals, alphabetic usb sticks, switches, but I think socks is the weirdest one yet.

After the first episode I was a bit hesitant that it would devolve into more of that, just melodrama and dragging out the worst in people. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised and infinitely prefer what Death Parade turned out to be instead.

The genre switches in the first half of the show kept the premise fresh before focusing in the last half on what the show had been building up before. The worldbuilding is pretty vague, but it's not really important or detrimental to the show, since the focus is mostly on Decim and Kurokami. The ending comments between lotus-hair-guy and Nona reflect the scope of the show: Decim's choice is just one individual's choice, and the status quo is unlikely to change anytime soon. But Death Parade insists that even so, it matters.

The final two episodes were excellent, driving home at the emotional core of the show that was hinted at throughout every episode before. I'm just going to leave this here since /u/Bobduh always seems to pluck the words from my brain and arrange them in the best ways.

Even after recency bias, I still give Death Parade a 9/10. Excellent show, wonderful message, spectacular finale.

It seems you guys were interested in my post about Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and the form of Radio last week so I'll try to make this a regular thing. I can't get into a big post I made last week since I have a busy plate, but starting next week I plan on tackling the entire 5-parter stretch of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in order, starting from The McCormack Matter. Again, all episode can be found here https://archive.org/details/OTRR_YoursTrulyJohnnyDollar_Singles and the site, Archive, has a lot of other radio dramas I recommend such as Suspense, The Shadow, and The Whistler. I have no idea yet whether I'll take on episodes on a more individual level or try to tackle a few each week since I typically go through 2 in a day.

> I don't know who JO is

JesuOtaku, A.K.A. Hope Chapman is a retired video reviewer that now writes for ANN.

While his directing repertoire is definitely a little lacking, his MAL page does very little justice to encapsulate everything that he's worked on. Consider checking his ANN page or his IMDb page as well.

> How does a 12 episode anime so completely lose track of itself so fast?

You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that the final episodes bear the mark of a "changing of the guard" in writing staff. As far as I know there's no documentation to prove it, and Takahiro is still listed as series planner from start to finish, but...it wouldn't surprise me to hear, let's just put it that way.

Takahiro's involvement really only makes the end result more baffling, in a way. I don't know anything about Akame ga Kill (his other original creation), but he also had heavy screenplay involvement with Samurai Flamenco, a show that was practically the Houdini of thematic coherence; every time it seemed like it was about to go entirely off the rails, it found a way to somehow fit whatever puzzle piece it was currently working with into the bigger picture. Compare that to this and it's hard to believe that even one of the same people was involved with Yuuki Yuuna.

This feels like some kind of strange milestone, considering the first anime essay I wrote was the Nisemonogatari fanservice one. Feels pretty good. I'm also planning on transitioning off of Wordpress's free service and onto one where I can run my own site with Project Wonderful ads and whatnot - fuck it, I want to quit my day job. Gonna make a real go at this writing thing.

In related news, I am tired all of the time.

Even if I hadn't watched Sailor Moon first, I could have easily told you which episodes were storyboarded by Ikuhara. It's the ones that feature a tangible objective, a plot that doesn't rely completely on coincidence, heavy empowerment of the main heroine, engaging and realized side characters, lots of violence, a long and unnecessary car chase sequence and no Tuxedo Mask (whom he hates.)

Episode 6 is also very notable for not having Tuxedo Mask intervene in any way. Always having someone to be there to rescue you is a huuuuuuge part of Sailor Moon. I'd talk about why/how is it used/inverted within Sailor Moon (Power of Friendship) and why is it a staple of magical girls everywhere, but I'm really trying to stay grounded in the episodes at hand. Though if you want to connect it to Madoka, start here: Spoilers for Madoka Magica.

CRYSTAL HYPE QUESTION OF THE WEEK. The designs for the characters change a lot through each episode and stray pretty far from the original manga. How do you like the character art so far, especially compared to the official Crystal versions?

There's a short from The Animatrix I recommend watching: A Detective Story. It is done pretty much entirely to look like old newsprint.

The episode director from this entry of Space Dandy is Hiroyuki Okuno, who has been around for ages. Specifically, mainly working as a key animator for a number of decades.

A lot of folks really liked A Detective Story, and given that this episode was practically straight out of an episode of The Twilight Zone in conjunction with Okuno's animation history knowledge to be able to pull something screwy from Watanabe's directing background, I am fairly certain that would have played a role on some level.

Horizon is a solid adaptation of four books that comprise two volumes. Given that the average book length is 843 pages long, there's a lot condensed into the anime. This guy handled series composition, and by the looks of, he works with the director most of the time. I wouldn't be surprised if he worked on Mahouka too.

Saki is a strange case where the anime often overtakes the manga. Or rather, they make the anime when there isn't enough material. So some anime-original content has been made canon, as a result. There wasn't any drop in quality, so I think the guy is a competent enough at writing scripts. If he's working on Mahouka, I wouldn't be worried. Unless you're a purist that wants the anime to be the same as the novel, but I don't think that's the case.

> do you know if there's a freaking episodic watchers guide to this shit?

8thsin's translator notes are probably a good place to start.

When you're done, I highly recommend giving this ANNcast episode a listen.

> and in that respect aiming to orient itself as a kind of more modernized (well, for the 1990’s) Cream Lemon.

Nice catch because both the first and last episode are based on manga from Cream Lemon's character designer and animation director Mon-Mon. Who also did the story and design for Dream Hazard. Mon-Mon's website has been lost for years so there's a NSFW webarchive if you want to browse.

Don't know what you've tried to help you get to sleep, but if you tend to be staring at computer screens before bed try f.lux or something similar to reduce the amount of blue light which tends to keep you awake. Or just read a book instead.

Oh man, I dunno. The first VN I ever played was Fate/Stay Night, and while I liked it quite a bit, it didn't make me think "why yes, the visual novel is a great medium". In fact, I don't think I've ever played a VN that made me like VNs, just a few that have had compelling stories independent of their presentation. Not that I've played all that many anyway.

Wait, no, what the hell am I talking about? Go play Katawa Shoujo. It's free, easy to wrap your head around, and an excellent story.

Nice post. I actually wrote up my own long piece on FLCL which can be read here. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

I see FLCL as a coming of age story just told in the most insanely off the wall way possible. In the episode commentary for episode 6, the director said, "Kids who act like kids, and don’t pretend to be adult, are actually more adult." I think that's the key theme. Noata keeps trying to act like an adult but learns that being a kid and being true to yourself is actually more adult than bottling everything up in an attempt to be mature.

Seems to me one of the voice actors had some kind of medical issue and had to bail. Yeah, here it is:
https://kotaku.com/darling-in-the-franxx-voice-actor-hospitalized-with-rar-1825913868

No idea whether this has anything to do with it. I tend to assume this kinda stuff means the production has hit a snag, but I have no idea whether that's the case here or not.

So, what, you're just gonna EVALUATE the correctness of things that I say? What are you, some kinda things-people-say-correctness-evaluating guy or something?

No, you're quite right, I'm talking out of my ass. In terms of scale of commercial success, I'd have pretty much no idea how to order even the subset of anime that I'm interested in. I guess there are several of those multiple-hundreds-of-episodes shonen shows like Naruto, and I assume they're huge deals. I tend to think of Attack On Titan as roughly in the same league, and Steins;Gate as kind of a runner-up... still a big deal, but perhaps a smaller big deal than some of the bigger big deals. But the vagueness of terminology here should give you some idea of how much I REALLY know about it.

Incidentally--I'm so NOT a shonen guy that I wasn't even sure I was using the term properly. So I Googled it and ended up looking at a Kotaku article which says: &quot;Some popular examples of shonen anime and manga are Dragon Ball, Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, Watamote and Attack on Titan.&quot; Now--again, maybe it's just me and I don't understand the subtleties. But that list gives me a real one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others kind of a feeling...

A bit late for this week, but it seems Toei will continue to inflict Sailor Moon Crystal on the world for another year.

Classroom Crisis was confirmed for Summer. Apparently it's a romcom focusing on working high school students, written by Maruto (WA2/SaeKano).

I wasn't expecting romance for this, but it could be fun. Between this and Charlotte, Summer's only looking better.

So after getting a bunch of Ultraman shows, Crunchyroll now has Godzilla: Destroy all Monsters. I was going to watch it anyway on my own accord sooner or later, and anyway this isn't available in my region, but I support CR getting Tokusatsu.

Trigger's Ninja Slayer From Animation got a <strong>PV</strong> / <strong>ANN article</strong>.

I get that the LN is written by two Japanese, who pose as Americans and the LN itself is full of Western misconceptions about the ninja, but the PV looked bad. I get that the 4:3 Aspect Ratio is a throwback to the 80s, and they're not going to animate the show in that aspect ratio. If anything the PV looked overstylized, it's Kill la Kill style and almost no animation all over again.

I just want LWA2.

Aha, okay. If you're thinking along the lines of Samurai Champloo the staff continuities ought to make it worth checking out, at least..

Fuse: Memoirs of a Huntress is a standalone anime movie based on a novel. The movie tells its story in less than two hours. Here are a couple things that I thought it did right...

• Women and men: Hamaji is good at her job of hunting, without seeming as if she's invincible or infallible. She interacts with a girl who becomes a friend, as well as a woman who becomes an enemy. Many of the combat-capable characters are male, and they range from average to stubbornly determined.

• Realism in characterization: Ooyama is an older sibling, a guy who has a job to do, and a single adult who's trying to romance a woman. He respects his sister and helps her do her job. In a cast that includes some exceptional warriors and supernatural characters, he might be the most ordinary person.

I thought the movie's main villain was interesting, but I'm also not sure what to think about him. [A few spoilers...](/s "His name is Shino, and he's a sort of werewolf. He sometimes seems like an individual who will do anything just to survive in a hostile world. At other times, he seems to be a crazed killer. It's tough to say whether he genuinely loves Hamaji, or whether he is not capable of genuine love. I'm not sure whether I think he's sympathetic, cruel, or somewhere in between. Perhaps it's best to just call him conflicted.")

I'm the reverse for you. Mid-2000's there was an aisle with a fuck ton of manga while now, it's contained to a a couple of cases with limited selections. Mainly due to Barnes & Noble having fiscal losses over the years.

A prime example of what I'm talking about for a Borders in the hey-day around '05 for me. I always got Harry Potter for the midnight releases and hung out with my friends at the cafe table sending 1 person to the [pre-teen filled] manga aisle to swap out a new volumes to read while we waited for midnight.

Since Borders folded, only Barnes survives and the one closest to me has manga limited to 3 cases. Before that same store had 6 cases, 3 endcaps, a cardboard display, 4 of those spinny plastic displays, "mature" manga taking up a few shelves in another part of the store, and the bottom display of the magazine rack section for those animanga mags (top display was gaming & computer mags).

In keeping with ANNCast bringing on Brian Ruh to discuss the new edition of his Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii book, and I had mentioned being very close the other week when I watched Tachiguishi-Retsuden, I can now all but say I've seen all of Oshii's feature films in both animation and live action form. All I have left is The Sky Crawlers, which arrived the other day and I'll probably drill through it either tonight or tomorrow if I have time.

And I have absolutely no idea what to do with that kind of, well, filmography now I suppose.

I suppose, given my habits, what I'm getting at is I figure I want to write something, you know? Not a book, by any means certainly; that's Ruh's gig, and he's way more knowledgeable with far more relevant experience. But something, given the spread of the material. The first thought of course always perhaps goes to try some kind of ranking approach, but that seems kind of off-putting to some folks in the growing days of Buzzfeed list spam complaints and the like.

And admittedly I am a little ahead of myself here having not seen one of the puzzle pieces, and then wanting to perhaps at least read the new parts of the Stray Dog book. But I by and large enjoy what Oshii tends to do (with some extreme stumbling blocks at times depending on the film in question) and the style he has adapted, and trying to perhaps pay a kind of small service to that by writing... something.

There's a sense of trying to wrap my head around what I could hope to do that would be relevant or interesting even in the wake of the quite brand new book, I suppose.

> I wish we could get an AMA with a Funi rep to ask how they determine what series to buy, and if there's a process by which they do it.

Adam Sheehan and Lance Heiskell pop up on ANNCast twice a year, and they're worth listening to if you want insight into NA distributors. Funimation has actually pretty much outlined they're licensing process. Prior sales for comparable titles is the big sticking point. That's why you don't see Funi jumping on Kuroko's Basketball or Free! even though they're ridiculously popular with Funi's surprisingly large female contingent. Sports anime is dead zone of anime in the west.

A good, spoiler-free review of the series on ANN that I found

I felt like each iteration of the series got better. The original ONA was wacky and fun, the 2012 ONAs added background and showed us that there was a lot more going on, and the 2013 TV series brought everything together into a really amazing and heartfelt story.

I hope that they'll give us more from that wonderful universe (multiverse?) they created. But really I'll be watching whatever Rie Matsumoto does next!

> and Kokoro Connect.

He was actually the supervising director for it, with Shinya Kawamo presumably doing the bulk of the work, since it doesn't seem to have Oonuma's style. Dusk Maiden of Amnesia or Nou-rin are better examples of recent shows directed by Oonuma. Although Dusk Maiden has two directors listed at the same tier, like Prisma Ilya.

I like the "User Ratings" section on ANN (example.)

The score itself doesn't mean much, but the distribution (the shape of the diagram) gives me a rough idea of whether the show is actually liked.

Note, however, that I typically tend to check those for a finished series, of which I've watched an episode, but I'm unsure whether it's worth my time. Trying to use that kind of score to choose an anime probably wouldn't work. Just watch a couple minutes from each of the season's new series; it's by far the most efficient way to choose stuff that you actually like.

With the Crunchy x Funi anouncement came another anouncement from funi that they will have <strong>broadcast dubs</strong> for: <strong>91 Days</strong>, <strong>Orange</strong>, and <strong>Mob Psycho 100</strong>.

Looks like I'll be watching these sooner than I thought.

Tonight's movie will be <em>Chinatown</em> at 10 PM EST as chosen by /u/kuramhan. Come join us -- it's a classic.

Channel link.

I suppose the first part of your post is a matter of personal taste, but the idea that VNs all have terrible H-scenes and boring first-person male perspectives is a sampling problem. It's admittedly a very understandable simpling problem given the number of VNs that fall into that, but there are plenty of VNs with either very relevant sex scenes and a fantastic story (Saya no Uta), no sex scenes and a fantastic story (Planetarian), and/or a variety of character perspectives beyond a simple first-person male lead that improves the experience (Saya no Uta again). There are also lots of VNs with great stories regardless of their first-person perspective.

I'm not even a very seasoned VN reader, so I'm positive there's even more. I've spent a lot of time on the Fate VNs instead of reading other stuff, which aren't all that good.

See if there's some sort of colour temperature modifier like f.lux or red filter for any screens you stare at late at night. Blue light tells you the sun is up and keeps you awake.

between working on the lady's condo, factorio, and one of my cats coming down with an acute kidney infection i haven't had time to sleep, let alone anime in more than a week. hoping this week calms down a bit.

I'd actually rate 8/10, but the Nana joke was too good to pass up. They never explain in the dub that Hatchi means "eight" and Hatchiko is the super-famous dog from history who has a statue at the intersection in Shibuya.

My reactions to Hatchiko reminded me straight away of Usagi or other characters in Sailor Moon. She was placed in a difficult position (usually as a result of her choices) and then made a decision. My favorite one was to go back to Takumi for the third time. That's a weak, cowardly, immature choice, but all I felt was empathy for the girl.

I don't like to judge characters. It's clear that Nana K. doesn't understand the difference between love, sex, and romance, but that's not something I'll care about. Many young girls in the real world do confuse the two all the time until they learn some self-respect. I'm happy the show portrayed that so well.

Never seen Flowers of Evil or Colorful. I may.

Sound of the Sky has the same thing. It's not about moe, but about how each character copes in a post-apocalyptic world. It's about the characters finding true value in life.

Duolingo is pretty great when it comes to french, plus it's super addictive! I was able to get around France pretty decently after about 6 months of regular use (and by decently, I mean I was able to order baguettes and ask locals to take my photo - so success?).

My experience with French doesn't really go past high school/awkward attempts at speaking when on holiday, but my sister's studying French at university and used duolingo to keep up with bits of vocabulary over her summer break. It's a free site that offers lessons in a bunch of languages at a range of levels, though I'm not sure how advanced it really gets. I'd have to ask my sister to get a better review than that, but it's something at least?

>King

I think there are better novels that showcase the strengths of his writing- The Dark Tower series, The Shining and The Stand come to mind. In On Writing (which I'll recommend to anyone who wants to learn about the craft of writing) he pretty much spells out that he prioritizes functionality over profundity/artistic flourish for clarity in storytelling, but it still is quite startling what he can achieve within that framework.

It's always been my opinion that King receives far too little credit for his work just because he's a genre author, but then again the pop art/art critic divide is as old as time and apparent in all media.

I don't usually read books but I've been given a list of books that I'm required to choose one from and read. Any suggestions and reasons why one of these is worth reading would be greatly appreciated!

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Fountainhead by Ann Rand

Native Son by Richard Wright

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

If the issue is with waking up, I'd recommend using the app Sleep as Android. It does some sleep tracking and wakes you up at certain moments in your sleep cycle to get the best night's rest.

Here is a very well written alternate perspective on that which sums up everything that was wrong with the 2nd season extremely well.

Shirokuma Cafe is probably what you have in mind. I don't think it's ever been explicitly stated whether it was directly inspired by this incident.

Picked up Greg Egan's Axiomatic (a collection of hard sci-fi short stories), and haven't really put it down since I started.

The concepts are all just so fucking cool - Ever wondered what life would be like if you received a diary at birth, written by you, that chronicled every single day you'd ever live? And so did everyone else?

Or what goes on inside the head of an assassin who, along with an infinite set of inter-dimensional permutations of himself, hunts down an infinite set of troublemakers?

Like, I can hardly summarise this stuff, let alone imagine how difficult it must have been to conceptualise and write.

But yeah, that's my spiel. Can't recommend the collection enough, and if you're not up for reading the entire set, at least this single 9 page short.

Oh, and one last thing... I'm almost done with this, and I'd love to read more like it. Any suggestions? I've read Gibson's Burning Chrome, Assimov's I, Robot, and Ellison's collection Dangerous Visions recently, and enjoyed all of them (although in the case of the latter two, they were noticeably dated).

Crunchyroll anime award nominations are bad. No attack on titan for anime of the year? I wasn’t huge fan of series, but this past seasons was amazing.

Then you have really strange nominations with O Maidens and Carole & Tuesday. It’s like these people who picked nominations just wanted a balanced male/female ratio.

Also Beastars didn’t get nominated for anything? I suspect most awards will go to Demon Slayer. This is basically just the normie awards where things like MHA sweep.

https://www.crunchyroll.com/animeawards/en/vote/index.html

A lot of the stuff Crunchyroll streams stays in their catalog afterwards forever. So they've got current shows, and then a lot of shows that you'd only ever watch if they were airing, that no one will ever care about again.

But if you're in here talking about something you're watching, I always check to see if Crunchyroll has it. Here--if you're curious at all, this is what they've announced for the new season so far. You gotta scroll down a little to where it says "new simulcasts" in their hard-to-read Christmas Font. Notably, there's a new Masaaki Yuasa thing, and a new Madoka thing, along with a lot of other shows at least one or two of which will probably be good by accident. I see there's a new Thunderbolt Fantasy show--am I mistaken or were you diggin' that?

I regret myself for underestimating the space consumption of manga. I had to buy a bookshelf and settled for a small one cause it was $40 cheaper. Come home, set it up, and there is only one shelf remaining. Never again.

>Now that the anime is over

Er, no it's not? We're only halfway through, and then there's a second season and movie on top of that.

ANN link.

Urobutcher's going to write the ~~script~~ concept for the series, someone else is going to compose and direct it. Hype level: Mild.

It's like they're paying Urobuchi to have his name on the bilboards, and only for that,

According to one of the VAs someone is going to die. Nobody is talking about coming back from the dead.

The game is going to have a PC port soon. Beta starts soon for Japanese/SEA(?) citizens only.

No episode this week. Precure is over, I tell you. Over! Stay tuned for next year, when it's replaced by idol-themed tokusatsu. That or a direct sequel to HapCha starring Hime.

Randomc has it listed as this Sat along with UBW and a couple other things.

Edit: Cross-checked with ANN's list.

Galaxy Angel is actually one of my favorite VN series. It's like one-part Space Opera, one-part Dating Sim with RTS elements. It's also nothing like the anime, and dated as hell, but it's definitely unique!

The super amusing thing is the very next day after this thread, Sega themselves released more information on the project. So I guess the E3 connection was the right wavelength to be on!

So the show will star Dreamcast, Saturn, and Mega Drive as main characters (which makes sense) as students in need of some graduation project, and they will have misadventures with all the other hardware somehow in the world of Sega.

Which on the one hand maybe could get really silly, but on the other Sōta Sugahara did a lot of excellent comedy work on gdgd Fairies that he looks to be applying here, and the scripts have Masayuki Kibe who writes GameCenter CX / Retro Game Master. So a compelling drama it won't be, sure, but I think it has even more promise now to be a solidly entertaining little show and the staff will certainly know their stuff to make something original and they won't just be adapting the light novel series.

I am definitely glad with the variety of hardware, as it is nice arcade boards like the Mark III or even little things like the VMU card are getting a character.

> when Sega gave up on consoles, so did I. I don't count that Wii experiment i had for a year. That was a mistake.

I'm in a similar boat, oddly enough - My most recent console is a Wii too, but even that is mostly Sega games like House of the Dead: Overkill and that NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams foray. I don't own many actual Nintendo games for it, and my Dreamcast is far more likely to get switched on or have new games dug up for it from random internet sales.

Whenever you get the chance, I highly recommend the Nausicaa manga by Hayao Miyazaki. The movie only covers about 1/5 or less of the overall story he wanted to tell and it's absolutely fantastic. And Hideaki Anno expressed interest in adapting the rest of the story once he's done with Evangelion. source

I think /u/The_Dvls_Advocate has a fantastic answer to your frustrations with NGE, and is generally what I would say as well (though probably better than I could say it). However, I want to say that if this

> “it’s wrong because change is bad.” Is basically the message.

was your take-away message than perhaps you should give it another shot? I'd say that NGE is very ambiguous about the notion of change, especially personal change. It presents a number of characters who are held back by issues stemming from problems and events in their past, and shows how these past problems come back to affect them time and again, but it also shows how these people struggle to break free of their restrictions. I would say that the question it attempts to ask is less "Is change good or bad?" and more "Can people change at all?" Moreover, I'd argue that it doesn't give a definitive answer, based on the ending of End of Evangelion anyways.

Here's a quote by the creator Anno when he announced the first Rebuild movie:

> ”Eva" is a story that repeats.
>It is a story where the main character witnesses many horrors with his own eyes, but still tries to stand up again.
>It is a story of will; a story of moving forward, if only just a little.
>It is a story of fear, where someone who must face indefinite solitude fears reaching out to others, but still wants to try.

Source

Edit: not trying to start anything, by the way, but just trying to explain that maybe you misunderstood certain aspects of the show?

There were rumors floating around that Shaft was always skirting around the budget.

A confirmed detail was that the studio was understaffed for the show, which could explain the increase of Akiyuki Shinbo's already large influence on the art and pacing.

I read the first one out loud, to my daughter, by way of preparation for the movie release (she'd already seen a bunch of Ghibli movies, and this was her first chance to see one in a theater).

The second book seemed less focused on female characters, and failed to find favor with my daughter for that reason; I've still never read it. :)

Hmm... in fact, Goodreads claims that there are three of them.

Oh your previous comment on Akihabara reminds me: If you've seen Akihabara and all its... it-ness, definitely try and check out the equivalent areas in Ikebukuro. You might already know all this, but its basically like Akihabara if it were targeting a female customer base rather than a male one. The first three places in this section were what we checked out, and I highly recommend it, as a counterpoint to Akihabara. Akihabara as a whole made me feel sort of skeezy and uncomfortable, and seeing the reverse version of it was weirdly comforting, in a way. I especially recommend checking out Mandarake in that link, it's a big basement that's jam-packed with fujoshi doujinshi (and fujoshi people) and it was an entertaining and fascinating novelty after having got a gutful of Akiba.

>One caveat is that the writer loves putting repeating sequences in her stories (for example, every fight in the VN is virtually the same)

From my understanding (I haven't read it either in Japanese or in English), the repetitive elements work a lot better in the original Japanese. Ixrec (TL for Inganock) is known/criticized for sometimes punching above his weight in translating, and not managing to capture the style of prose used by Japanese authors who are known for their writing style, like Sakurai.

Mangagamer has Ourai no Gahkthun licensed, and they have the guy who translated Grisaia doing the TL for it, so I'm really looking forward to that one, and think it'll probably be done much better than the two -What a Beautiful- games that Ixrec TLed.

I do vaguely recall there being some waifu mod thing for one of the civ games... but alas it's still not feudal Japan lol.

But yeah, it's a pretty great game. Here's the vndb for the game. You can scroll down to see some of the screen shots from the game to see if it's what your looking for. (The screen shots are SFW by default, but you can filter the NSFW shots on).

This stuff. As this very subreddit shows, all that's needed for a developed opinion is a willingness to delve deeply and critically. Whatever jumping off-point is fine.

> Oh yeah! Read past that and was interested by it all. Then the aliens and bureaucracy came and I was all "eeeeh". Like if Batman had to go to Gotham City PD meetings. Lemme know if I should really finish it.

There is a lot of worldbuilding, and the first volume in particular is crammed full of it, but I would say the end result is stronger for it. Without giving away spoilers, there's a scene towards the end of the second volume (which is currently drawing to a close) that is every bit as climactic as Homura's last battle. The author definitely has plans for the story, and part of the fun is following the clues left behind.

If the plunge seems daunting, you could try whetting your appetite with Interlude I: Underworld Dreams, which is a short (well, 21k words) self-contained story that takes place after the TV series but before TtS.

Get Undertale. It's one of the best games I've played this year just because of its great writing and combat system. It's a very refreshing game even if it gives off an oldschool vibe at first. The OST is amazing too. Also, you can date a skeleton. There's a demo available on the site which should give you a good idea of what the game's about.

It looks like mpv has a Mac version, and there's a "screenshot-template" option you can configure to format the resulting file name. For instance "shot-%F-at-%P" would replace %F with the media file name and %P with the timestamp.

I have no idea how well the Mac version works though, and if you're writing notes anyway it might not really matter.

Ping Pong got licensed

This is pretty much the biggest deal for me since I don't know when. I need a collector's edition with a limited edition Ping Pong ball or SOMETHING. I don't care how much money it is it PROBABLY won't be the 300$ they're charging in Japan.

This is too late to post on a news thread.

Why wasn't I informed sooner of this Ping Pong news???

Oh god there goes my money into a collector's edition that they're hopefully making.

Does anyone here have an account on RateYourMusic? I'm on there every free minute I get. They have a ton of useful charts (on music and film) and some pretty decent communities too.

Anyway, if you are, you should add me. Or if you don't, make one and add me!

I'm a fan of Sekien no Inganock. It's essentially kind of a modern fairy tale, although the main plot is told through episodic chapters that are sort of similiar to stuff like Mushishi.

It has some caveats though, for one the mind-numbingly stupid minigame (at least the fuwanovel download had a walkthrough, without that I would have just ragequit), another is the style of writing, and though I personally liked it, I can easily see how people can be turned off by such a large amount of repeated segments. One thing I can definitely say, the artwork is really great.

About your data loss.

I used to write up stuff in notepad on beforehand (my post is mostly done by friday already) but now I use MarkDownPad you can even modify the CSS so it has spoiler tags and the like, this way you can verify your post before you post it (admittedly Reddit enhancement suite also gives you a preview)

Spotlight Discussion

I'm working on my last 2 spotlights (Takahata and Tezuka), and am wondering what to do with my life. Should I scrounge up more directors to cover? Should I start doing more reviews like my Ping Pong and Monogatari pieces? Any other things you might be interested in being covered?

Also I've been solicited by Disqus and Sidelines about spreading my Spotlight series out to their websites. I'm wondering if anyone has experience/knowledge of the sites. Disqus just looks like a small reddit community, but Sidelines seems like a different beast.

I'm just a random kid who likes anime, light novels and japanese stuff in general. A few days ago, I played this game I really enjoyed. It's one of those retro-ish visual novel type games which is only available on mobile. The game's called '7 Years From Now'.

The reason why I'm suggesting it here is only because of the fact that its amazing storyline feels distinctly japanese. It has a lot in common with many time-travel/sci-fi mystery shows such as Steins;Gate and Erased and novels such as HakoMari. The game consists of multiple chapters. The first few are honestly pretty boring but soon it starts to pick up and by the end of the 6th or 7th chapters, becomes an absolute roller coaster. The dialogue feels a bit off because the translation isn't that good. But all said, this game has a lot going for it. Every chapter ends with a mind-bending twist/cliffhanger that's bound to get your heart pumping or your blood draining. The gameplay is the usual point-and-click/VN-ish you see in many indies. Speaking of indies, this game is pretty comparable to games like 'To The Moon' so if you liked that you're bound to love this too.

Okay, there's actually another reason as well. The game is LITERALLY UNKNOWN, like really, even if you google '7 years from now game', chances are you'll get kid's toys as the first search. It was never even mentioned once on reddit. So I dunno I kinda feel like this deserves much more recognition, so here's the Play Store link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.HirayaSpace.SevenYears&amp;hl=en_US

a few years ago (goddamn time flies) i exchanged watches with a friend of mine. if he'd watch tittygill, i'd watch a show of his choice - and he chose yu yu hakusho. you might think this was kind of a raw deal, as YYH is more than 4x as long, but as a disciple of the spiral, i am willing to go to great lengths to spread the gospel.

well since then i haven't ever been able to work up the gumption to crack it open - 112 episodes is a daunting amount of show... until recently i decided that my gym sabbatical was over and i needed something new to watch, and what better than a high energy 90's shonen battler?

so now i'm staring down the barrel of episode 8, having jogged through TWO episodes back to back yesterday. let me say: i highly, highly recommend this method of exercise for all my fellow flabby weeb fucks: download vlc for your phone, copy that shit into vlc, buy a pair of these, and get on a goddamn eliptical machine. work your fat ass off AND catch up on your PTW list at the same time.

hi, i'm a professional computer guy.

• consider the i5-6600k instead of the i7-6700k. you'll save some dollars and the i-7 is far, far overkill for what it sounds like you'll be doing. i went from an i7 in my last build down to an i5 this time around and i don't regret it at all. if you're not planning on messing with clock speeds, further downgrade to an i5-6500.

• consider an m.2 drive instead of the corsair SSD. this one is the one i'm planning on picking up. why? because new tech is cool.

considering that i'm already addicted to final fantasy record keeper, and f/go just seems like a fate version of it... i dunno if my battery could handle it. but FATE!