Anime A to Z Project: Akira

Recently I decided to alphabetize my anime collection.  That’s one of the extremely odd things I do for fun, organize things.  Alphabetical organization is nice and easy, I don’t have to worry about trying to fit anime into just one category whether it be genre, animation studio or region 1 distributor.  Weird, I know.  I would do the same to my manga, but there’s just too many volumes to be able to do that in one day.  I probably couldn’t even manage it in one weekend.

Basically, if you’re wondering what the basis of my Anime A to Z Project, that’s it.  I re-organized my anime collection in a fit of OCD.  I also decided that’s how I’m going to watch my collection, until in a fit of pique, I change my mind.  That, or simply decide I feel like watching something out of order.

The subject for today’s post is Akira.  I’m in a weird middle ground of anime fans where I’m too young to remember Akira showing in movie theaters or the initial dub for it, but I’m just old enough to have heard of Akira, and received a copy of the newer dub for Christmas while I was still in high school, I think.

Having just watched it again, I think Akira is still pretty relevant.  Sure, it doesn’t have the prettiest looking characters ever, but that’s not the point and would actually detract from the movie.  The main characters are a group of punks that run around on their motorcycles at night.

Personally, the biggest draw in the movie for me is Kaneda.  He’s something different than your current typical shonen hero: he’s COMPLETELY normal.  There’s no superpowers, and no latent abilities whatsoever.  The only thing that sets Kaneda apart from everyone is that he’s the leader of his gang and his awesome bike.  For the rest of the movie, he has no idea what’s going on, and he’s just doing the best he can to try and save the guy that he’s used to protecting.  As long as I can get behind at least one character in a movie/series, I will watch the entire thing, and I am completely behind Kaneda.  He’s thrust into a complex situation with absolutely no preparation for it.

So go watch Akira.  It’s considered a classic for good reason.  Also, it’s now on blu-ray, so it’s easily available.

Cat Soup’d or This Cannot End Well…

I have a mischievous streak.  I’m also extremely shy, so that streak usually stays hidden unless I’ve known a person for years, or if I become instantly comfortable with that person.  The way this streak manifests among people that I’m cultivating to become otaku is that I “make” them watch Cat Soup at some point.

If you haven’t seen Cat Soup, I’d recommend it with a warning: unless you have an idea what’s going on, you won’t know what’s going on.  Heck, even if you know what’s going on, it still won’t make sense.  It’s a very random movie.

Cat Soup could be summed up in the following way: it’s the journey of two kittens to retrieve the girl kitten’s soul from Death.  Alternatively it could be summed up as two kittens journeying to the grocery store to buy bean curd for Mama cat.

Basically I trick people into watching Cat Soup by giving them the technically correct summary.  Then I sit back and watch their head explode.  I do try to be somewhat nice about it by only really showing it to people once I think they’d be ready for it.  I don’t want to scare them away from anime forever.

My latest victim was a coworker who’s been chatting me up about anime and manga.  I’d lent him Cat Soup a month or two ago and he’s just now gotten around to watching it.  Every week, he’d tell me he was going to watch it, and I’d nod and think to myself, “yeah I’ll *know* when you watch it, hehehe.”

He claims that he has something worse than Cat Soup, that he’s going to dig out for me to watch.  I guess I’ll be waiting for that to see what happens.  I think I have a trump card already for that though.  My next act may just be to convince him to watch the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie.  Oh hohohoho!

A Sound Soul…

I’ve been taking advantage of Funimation’s streaming site to watch Soul Eater.  They’d been releasing episodes on a pretty regular schedule, so I’ve been able to watch the entire show subtitled, and hopefully help the American industry by doing just that.

Soul Eater is based on manga by Atsushi Okubo, which is being serialized in America by Yen Press.  The animation was done by Bones, and it premiered in Japan in April of 2008.  Currently as you might have guessed or known, the North American license is held by Funimation, who will be releasing the first box set of the anime next month.

From this point on, my review may contain some spoilers.  I promise it’s nothing major.

The basic premise of Soul Eater rests on the DWMA, a school for meisters and weapons.  They study and train to keep the big bad from returning to the world and wreaking havoc.  The secondary goal for some meisters is to make their weapons into a “Death Scythe,” or a weapon that Lord Death himself would use, by taking the souls of 99 Afreets (think evil demons) and 1 witch.

In the beginning of Soul Eater, you’re introduced to 3 teams.  Maka Albarn is a scythe meister, and Soul Eater Evans is her weapon.  They begin the series with their 99 Afreet souls, and are after a witch named Blair.  However, when they take Blair’s soul, they find that she wasn’t a witch and that all the work they’d done up to that point is now nullified.  The next team consists of Black*Star, a meister who’s training to be an assassin, and his weapon, Tsubaki, who has multiple forms.  They had a chance to get their Afreet and witch souls all in one go, but Black*Star passes his chance to instantly make Tsubaki into a Death Scythe.  The last team consists of Lord Death’s son, Death the Kid, and his weapons, Liz and Patty Thompson, who transform into guns.  Death the Kid’s purpose is to create his own weapons rather than let them be created for him, as Lord Death’s successor.

As Soul Eater will be a new release next month, I won’t be going much more into plot.  After some accidental research on wikipedia, I am aware that the anime takes a pretty drastic right-turn from the manga.  I’ve only read the first volume of the manga as it’s been available here, so I don’t have much of a frame of reference beyond that right now.

I personally found Soul Eater to be entertaining with a good cast of characters, and some eye-catching character and world designs.  It’s rather simple, but that also makes it easy to follow which is a plus for me, because I’m usually just looking for something entertaining when I watch anything.  It can be thought of as shonen anime with it’s themes of friendship and fighting.  I’ve been working to spread it around to some friends also, which means that I’ve watched some of the earliest episodes as many as five times, which means that I find it easily rewatchable.  That’s always good in my book.

My favorite part of Soul Eater is definitely the characters.  I think that Maka is one of the best female characters that I’ve come upon on anime recently.  She’s capable, smart, and fights beyond her own fear.  The boys in her class treat her as an equal rather than someone who constantly needs to be rescued.  Unfortunately she also falls into that tired anime trope – where are her parents?  Her father, Spirit is currently Death Scythe and stays by Lord Death’s side as his personal weapon, and her mother is completely absent.  There’s nothing said about the whereabouts of Maka’s mother until nearly the end of the series when Maka receives a post card from her.  I did think that the fact that Maka’s mother and father are going through a rather messy divorce while Maka lives on her own with Soul was weird.  Maka’s father is a deadbeat dad who’s going through a divorce because he can’t stop going to men’s clubs and flirting with pretty much any woman he sees, but he shouts his devotion for Maka every chance he gets.  Having a father that consistently threatened to embarass me in public does give me some sympathy for Maka and her plight, at least as far as her father goes.  Maka’s weapon, Soul Eater is obsessed with being “cool.”  There really isn’t much more to him than that.  Later on you’ll see Soul’s inner struggles in the form of a demon with a giant head and tiny body.  This gets to be pretty integral to the plot.

My favorite character is Black*Star, who manages to be the complete opposite of what he should be.  He trains to be an assassin but his ego demands that he shout his presence to the world, especially when it’s detrimental to his mission.  Later in the series, he’s aware of this, but it does him no good, he usually thinks about it after he’s already shouted.  Black*Star is the “man who will transcend God,” and allows nothing to obstruct his path to greatness.  He has some great development over the course of the series.  One of the best things the writers did was to hand Black*Star a taste of defeat and the opportunity to overcome that.  His weapon is Tsubaki, who takes the form of multiple ninja tools, but mostly she’s a chain scythe.  She’s quiet and exceedingly polite, and the only person who can put up with Black*Star for any amount of time.  She offers him absolute support, constantly.  I don’t remember any point in the series where she doubts him verbally, although it doesn’t keep her from flat telling him when she thinks he’s done something wrong and needs to fix it.

Death the Kid is very nearly topples Black*Star from being my favorite character.  His obsession with symmetry is his major trait.  This obsession is so strong that it gets in the way of his battles, causing Kid to abandon his weapons, Liz and Patty in the middle of fights to go check that his toilet paper looks nice, or to make sure that painting in the foyer is lined up just right.  Good thing Liz and Patty are capable of fighting on their own, and some of the scenes where they switch between being the gun and being the wielder of the gun are some of the best action scenes.

I’m not going to go into the rest of the characters, because that would make this a ridiculously long post, and it’s pretty long already.  I did have some problems with this anime.  There’s obviously a structure for a large overarching plot, but the episodes themselves felt choppy to me, and didn’t really have much connection from one episode to the next.  You can pick up the series at nearly any point without missing out on much, which is both a strength and a weakness.  It’s a strength because that does make it more accessible to more viewers.  It’s a weakness because that takes away any kind of reason to watch all the episodes.  The first dozen or so episodes felt very disjointed to me, and that bothered me some while I was watching.  I did like the three seperate introduction episodes for the three main teams.  That was a good way to introduce the world, and the main players, and it didn’t take away from their particular character development by trying to mash the introduction in with the ongoing plot.

Once the plot got really rolling, it was good.  The pacing was nice, not speedy, but quick enough to keep me intrigued.  In the second half, though, there’s a lot of new characters introduced and lost in the shuffle of the greater plot.  There’s a big lack of character development that is understandable if you think of the episode limit, but it’s still a shame.  I would loved to have seen more of the other DWMA students, or the members of the opposing factions.

Personally, I would have liked to seen more character development overall.  I thought the characters were the best part of Soul Eater and some of my biggest problems with the anime stem from how characters were handled.  In particular, I didn’t much like most of Dr. Stein’s story – who I realize I have not mentioned up until this point.  I think this review is long enough already, so maybe I’ll go more into that in a seperate post.

I also would have loved more of the world.  There were tons of questions I had that I would love to have seen answered, like how does someone determine if they’re a meister or a weapon?  Is it hereditary?  Does it happen randomly, or can it be obtained with training?  What makes someone a witch?  Etc etc.  I imagine these questions may be answered in the manga, so I might keep up with it to see if that’s the case.

Overall, I enjoyed Soul Eater.  I’d recommend it to pretty much anybody.  I know that I showed it to some friends that haven’t watched much anime at all and they got a kick out of it, and the husband later thanked me for showing his wife an anime that had a good female character in it.

Claymore – Final Thoughts

I finished watching Claymore a few weeks ago.  I haven’t read the manga at all, but I did already know that there was some raging over the ending.  The impression I got is that the anime closed a door that the manga left open, and I can see how that would be irritating.

I found the ending irritating without even having read the manga.  I’m not going to spoil much of anything, because I think Claymore is still fairly new, and if you wanted to spoil it, you could go look it up elsewhere.  I will completely admit to being lazy.

As you may know from earlier posts, I initially did not like Claymore much, but I kept watching it anyway.  As the series went on, I found myself gradually drawn into the story.  By episode 8, I was fully invested in the series.  I’ll readily admit that I still find the supporting cast more interesting than Claire, the main character.

The ending seemed rushed though.  There was no real resolution, and the big bad just shrugged and walked away.

Also, a petition for a second season of Claymore has been started by enterprising fans.  I went ahead and signed, figuring, hey it could be alright.  I’m not exactly sure where Claymore could go from it’s end, but it was an open ending.  The big bad could easily be the main villain again, and chaos can ensue.  I haven’t read the manga, and honestly I doubt I’ll get to it any time soon as I have plenty of manga I’m keeping up with already, and I tend to read shoujo slice of life drama/romance over action manga.

In conclusion, if you’d like to see a good action anime with women that kick ass, watch Claymore.  There’s plenty of action there, and pretty decent story to go along with it.  The ending is pretty meh though.

Wild Wild Rock

Recently I decided to sit down and finally watch all of Saiyuki Reload.  I’d had the set for some time, I just hadn’t watched it, which is the case with quite a few other series that I own.

Saiyuki Reload is a direct sequel to Saiyuki following the same basic plot. Sanzo and his party are journeying to India to halt the resurrection of Gyumaoh.  This plot is the basis for all the Saiyuki series, the only real difference is the major arcs that end up happening.

In Reload, there’s no real other plot for around half the series.  Which is entertaining to start with, but maybe I’ve been a little too conditioned into expecting a plot thread from start to finish.  Having no real plot until the last three discs still bothered me some, to the point that I paused my watching of the series for a while.  Once I started watching again, however, I was hooked.  The plot for the rest of this series is that good.  One member leaves the group, the group attempts to go on without him, they all snap at each other, and decide they’re going to retrieve him, if only to kill him for the trouble he’s caused.  There was some great group dynamics going on, and if you’d watched the series up to that point, you might be surprised that the three left actually got angry at each other.  Once the group gets back together they get trounced by the villain and Sanzo’s scripture is stolen.  This is also a very good plot point as it forces our heroes to stop and think about their strengths and so on.  Getting defeated so easily really causes a great deal of sudden doubt, and a blow to their confidence besides.

It didn’t necessarily have a good ending, since there were at least two threads left dangling.  Good thing there’s another sequel.  At this rate though, you have to wonder: will the Sanzo party ever get to India?

The animation is quite a bit different from Saiyuki.  There’s a completely different color palette used, and the character designs have changed, partly to reflect their progress on their journey.  For instance, Goku looks the same except his pants only go to his knees, and they’re torn.  Gojyo is no longer wearing those weird poofy pants.  Sanzo looks the same.  Hakkai’s shirt isn’t tucked in anymore, and appears to be longer.  The animation is more consistent than the animation in Saiyuki.  Overall it’s an improvement.

One other thing to note.  Saiyuki is/was an ADV release, and Saiyuki Reload is a Geneon release, meaning they have different voice casts.  Honestly the ADV dub of Saiyuki wasn’t all that good as it tended to leave explanation for the plot out in favor of juvenile humor, but I did like the voice cast.  I gave the Geneon cast half a chance and while I appreciated that they seemed to try to get voices that were as similar as possible, I really don’t like having the vocal cast change on something.  So watching any Saiyuki series, I stick with subs.

This series does work well as a standalone series.  There’s no real need to have watched Saiyuki before watching Saiyuki Reload.  You get a feel for the characters and their relationship to each other quite well in this series without much background.  There’s really no reference made back to any of the events in Saiyuki that I saw.  If you could, I’d rent it.  It’s an old Geneon release and even years after it was first released, I couldn’t find it for what anime fans today would think of as a reasonable price.  I ended up buying it at a con for around $70.  I don’t think anyone beyond a Saiyuki fangirl like myself would be willing to pay that price with many other series being available for less.

No Rewrite Necessary

In a way, I fooled myself into watching Murder Princess.  I’d seen it on the shelves of Best Buy, and took a look at it and decided it didn’t look worth my time.  So why did I watch it?

I saw a trailer for Murder Princess on a disc of Claymore, and somehow got most of the story confused.  I blame myself mostly and the trailer a little bit.  I’m gonna say it was about 80/20.  In the trailer, I thought it showed the potential story of a runaway princess who runs into a bounty hunter with body switching.  Which is, in fact, correct.  However, I also thought the bounty hunter was male, which was incorrect.

It would have made the thankfully short series a lot more entertaining.

The basic premise is that there’s a kingdom under attack and the princess flees after the king is killed.  She runs into a bounty hunter and manages to push them both off a cliff, with the stress of imminent death  resulting in their souls switching bodies.

I really found just one thing likable about this anime.  When the bounty hunter is in the princess’s body she still kicks a lot of ass while wearing a dress.  I personally love the concept of the female warrior that manages to still be feminine, like Saber in Fate/Stay Night.  Admittedly my idea of “staying feminine” is really just more realistic wardrobe.  I happen to think that armor, dresses, and swords make for great visuals.

I’m going to try not to spoil too much of the plot.  Suffice it to say, the overall story is stupid and the characters are horrible.  The princess is only too happy to relieve herself of responsibility to her people, placing that burden firmly on the shoulders of the bounty hunter.  The bounty hunter half-heartedly threatened to just leave and then changed her mind in the amount of time it takes to read this sentence.  I thought the implied romance between the female characters was laughable and the villain was no surprise at all.  There was also a great opportunity for an incredibly awkward love triangle.  However the writers apparently didn’t see that opportunity or chose not to do anything with it giving preference to the implied love between the main female characters.

The character designs for the girls and the rest of the main cast (the old man and the two minions) don’t even mesh.  It looks like a mashup of two completely different anime.  I tend to be very visually oriented, so that really hampered the anime for me.  I’d love to say if the character designs were more consistent, it would have improved the anime greatly, but honestly it wouldn’t have made a difference.

There was a conclusive ending however, with the girls going on to live happily ever after, maybe.  By that time, I had ceased caring.

So if you like anime with girls that kick ass, I’d suggest Claymore.  If you’re still somewhat interested in Murder Princess I’d suggest not necessarily buying it, I believe Funimation has it on their streaming video site.  I’d recommend watching at least the first episode or two before making any kind of purchase decision.

Disclosure: I provided the anime for this review by buying it.

Way of the Samurai Seven

I’m going to start this particular review with an apology for my horrible title.  I like to try to think of possibly clever titles that still relate to what I’m setting out to review, but I’ve got nothing better for this post.  That said, I’m going to be reviewing Samurai 7, a 26 episode anime series by Gonzo and released in the States by FUNimation.  I decided to review this partly because all the votes on my current poll are for ‘shounen action’ and partly because I’d written what I think was a good review for it previously which I deleted out of laziness.

Samurai 7 is something of an update to Akira Kurosawa’s classic the Seven Samurai.  I personally haven’t seen the Seven Samurai, which I plan to remedy soon, but I believe the basic story is this: a small village is set upon by bandits for most of their crops.  Given a deadline the villagers decide to hire samurai to defend their village from the bandits.  The storyline of Samurai 7 is the same, except for major advances in technology, such as there’s mass mechanization, and samurai apparently used to operate mechs.  Which is something I found pretty confusing.  I understand wanting to stick with the overall story, but the technological advances made no real sense to me being side by side with what appeared to be a vassal and overlord society.

The anime begins with the village, showing the visit it receives from the bandits, and the decision the villagers make to hire samurai.  They send out their priestess, Kirara and one of the villagers, Rikichi to go hire the samurai.  Once Kirara and Rikichi meet Kambei and Katsushiro, they begin gathering their group to take on the bandits.

I’m not really going to go into much more of the story than that.  Samurai 7 is definitely an anime worth watching.

My favorite character is Katsushiro, the young idealist samurai.  When you first meet him in the anime, he’s a samurai in name only, having never killed anyone.  He begs for the chance to be in the group of samurai defending Kanna village, and it’s only after having gathered four other samurai that Kambei relents and let’s Katsushiro join the group.  From that point on, Katsushiro is forced to mature and grow, through the battles he ends up fighting and more importantly through his thwarted affection for Kirara.  He ends up leaving the group to fight on his own, eventually returning to them and being one of the only samurai to survive the conflict.

I found the main female character, Kirara really irritating.  She immediately imprints upon Kambei and thinks only of him throughout the entire series.  She seems to reciprocate Katsushiro’s feelings, but you find out that it’s a kind of twist, and she’s really just thinking of Kambei.  The worst thing she does in my opinion is to push Katsushiro into his own private hell, only to later reveal, hey, she’s still all about Kambei.  The only good thing out of all this quasi-relationship drama is that Kambei does nothing to encourage her feelings, either of the times she confesses.  If he had encouraged and reciprocated, I would have ended up hating this series.  Kirara is also fairly useless.  She can’t fight, she puts herself in danger constantly, and spends entire episodes second guessing herself, and delaying the very important mission to gather defenders for her village.

Despite Kirara, however, this is an enjoyable anime in my opinion.  I would recommend buying it, especially if you happen to be a fan of samurai anime, or anime with swords.  There is a lot of good swordfights.  The animation itself is good also, except for  episode 7 where the quality takes a sudden and drastic dip.  Suffice to say, I hated that episode for the simple fact that I think the animation in that episode is terrible.  Luckily, it’s only one episode, and it’s over pretty quickly.

Well, I don’t think this is quite as good as that review I deleted, but it’s close.   Next up, I think I may just review the last book I read.

Quick disclaimer: the anime in this review was provided by the author.

I wouldn’t go on a field trip with you for anything

I’ve had some cause to regret my decision to watch all the anime I have in my binder from cover to cover.  The order that I put anime in was pretty random and I have a giant chunk of Naruto to be watching in the middle.  I’ll admit that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to rewatching Saiyuki, as I labored under the impression that it wouldn’t stand up to the more recent anime I had been watching.

I was wrong.  I still enjoy Saiyuki mightily, and I’m glad it’s still in my collection.  It’s one of the few anime I own that I have watched multiple times, some of the others being Trigun, Magic Knight Rayearth, and D. N. Angel.  I suppose that in itself may tell you something of what I prefer to watch: anime that has lots of action, humor, and characters that essentially don’t change much.

Which sums up Saiyuki pretty well.  The Sanzo party does not get along throughout the entire series (and by series, I’m only referring to Saiyuki itself, not the latter seasons Reload and Reload Gunlock).  Sanzo himself is unflinchly direct to everyone, declaring that ‘anyone that gets in the way of my mission, I will kill.’  Every time they’re in the car, Goku and Gojyo fight in the back, while Hakkai laughs and makes a sarcastic comment about it being peaceful and Sanzo eventually gets angry enough to threaten to shoot the both of them.  In an episode where an enemy sent a fake Goku, the others knew he was fake because the fake didn’t declare immediately that he was hungry.

After some anime where the entire season is comprised of the hero constantly second-guessing themself and wavering on every decision, Sanzo’s directness is refreshing.  He doesn’t waver, he doesn’t second guess.  If he sees someone in his way, he simply takes them out and keeps on his way.  I like that.  I tend to get annoyed with wishy-washy characters, because really, how hard is it to just make a freaking decision and go by it?

I’ll admit that the beginning animation is a little painful to watch, as there looks to be LOTS of photoshopping, but as the seasons progress, the animation takes off and really improves.  By the end of the series the animation is superb and special effects actually add to the story rather than distracting from it.  I can see what will become echoes of later series in the animation in Saiyuki.  Although, Studio Pierrot also does Naruto and Bleach, the consistency of quality unfortunately does not stay the same as Saiyuki, which is rather unfortunate.  It’s not a very fair comparison though, given the length of Saiyuki compared to the lengths of Bleach and Naruto, both of which run much, much longer, and therefore probably have different costs associated with them.  However, that is beside my point.

Saiyuki is pretty much the way I’d imagine any ‘extended field trip’ for any four people that knew each other would go.  Everyone would shortly get on everyone else’s nerves, and do the same thing, time after time after time.  I don’t find that repetition boring at all, although I imagine that kind of storytelling isn’t for everyone.

Now to sit back and watch Saiyuki Reload!  I still need to buy Reload Gunlock sometime :\  Maybe after I’m done watching everything I have now..

The anime in this review is provided by the author.

Fansubbing and Fandom

Ah, one of the ever-present debates in modern anime fandom.  Fansubbing.  Good?  Bad?  Destructive?  These are all good questions and all deserve consideration.  The interesting thing about fansubbing culture is that a large group of people attempt to justify their absolute ignorance of performing an illegal act.

Let me repeat that in different terms.  No matter what excuse is offered, fansubbing is and always will be illegal.  It’s a violation of copyright, plain and simple, it doesn’t matter which country’s copyrights.  It doesn’t necessarily take money from creators, but it sure as hell doesn’t net them any more money either.

As an artist, this has always greatly annoyed me.  Basically it’s some whiny mooch’s argument against actually paying for someone else’s work.

Which brings me to the main argument.  Most avid supporters of fansubs will say, “I can’t afford anime, this is the only way I can get it.”  You know what, deal with it.  There’s tons of things I’d like to have, but I have bills so I have to budget.  Grow up.

The argument that follows that is usually, “When I can afford to, I’ll buy anime.”  Yeah right.  That’s completely believable.  Hmmm….NOT.

You might possibly be thinking, why such a bitch tonight?  No particular reason.  This debate pops up from time to time and gets me thinking on my own fandom.

I started in high school.  The only anime I knew of at that time were the ones on television like Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, and Pokemon.  We had no cable/satellite television so I was completely unaware of anything that was shown on Sci-Fi or Cartoon Network.  I watched anime in the morning, and I bought tapes from the local Wal-Mart of the Sailor Moon movies and Gundam Wing.  That would be before DVDs started hitting the market.

I remember the tapes being around twenty to thirty dollars, and having two episodes, maybe three.  There was no big video stores around me, so I had to be content with whatever hit Wal-mart.

I get up in arms simply because I have always been more than willing to shell out money for anime.  In fact I am still more likely to buy DVDs than watch streaming anime, and I’m more willing to watch streaming anime than download it.  It’s not morality, honestly.  I am simply very lazy.  It’s easier to buy in DVD form, because I can watch it whenever I please, and I can leave it paused for however long I need it paused.  Streaming anime is right there on the website and doesn’t take near so long as downloading.  I also don’t especially like sitting for long periods of time in front of my computer screen, which I’ll admit is a personality quirk.

On to more stylistic arguments.  I’m usually skeptical of the accuracy of fansub translations.  It really only takes watching the same video subbed by two or more groups to show just how subjective it is.  There’s been particular instances when I really wonder if the translation is accurate or if it’s the slant the subber decides to give it.  I have a bit of an ear, and I just get more skeptical if a word I’ve heard translated as having a mild connotation is suddenly given an extreme connotation.  Besides which, I will always believe that translations done by people paid to do translations will be more accurate simply because of pride in their work, and desire to do more work.  Especially in the current economy.

It’s sad to see anime companies attempt to serve their fans better by streaming anime before it’s released on DVD here, and even simultaneously with their Japanese airing, and to see fans just ignore those efforts.  “Fantitlement” is what it’s called.  It’s very existence is unfortunate, since this very fantitlement could kill the industry.  If that happens, I will be one angry anime/manga otaku.

How dare you stomp on my honor?!

I believe my roommate may be one of the few people who isn’t all that up to date on Bleach…and what I mean by up to date is that she’s seen the first three major arcs and some of the arrancar arc.  I gave up on keeping up with Bleach quite a while ago, deciding that I would just wait for DVDs and watch it then.  As much as it sometimes pains me to not be up to date on some shows, I’m pretty used to it, and still enjoy them months and even years later.

I’d assured her that we were in a good arc with lots of action and things happening.  I remember the first time watching these episodes, I ended up getting so drawn in that I felt compelled to watch more and more.  I believe that’s how I got through them the first time.

Now I’m hitting the magical ‘why did I think this was great again?’ area.  This is because we’ve seen a couple of the major fights.  Major as in the prior ten episodes have been building up to this fight.  Major as in dialogue heavy, mostly cocky bragging and ‘Impossible!’.  Seriously, how often do you need your opinion disproved before you learn to just shut up before you can say something else that’s going to make you look like an ass?  I can tell you why though.  There were many events, and the pacing of non-major fight events is fast.  So fast, that I was confused, but I was thinking about it, and that’s what kept me going through.  I’m not so much a fan of 5 episode fights and the tons of talking they require, but I do realize they are a staple of shounen action anime.

Which got me thinking on something else.  I have a book by Dianne Wynn Jones entitled the Tough Guide to Fantasyland.  In a way, reading this book gives you a guide on how to write a fantasy novel, making fun as it does of all the tropes of the fantasy novel.  Knowing that sometimes manga authors don’t have much control over their own creations, I’m wondering if they are aware of the tropes of shounen manga and in fact make sure to include them in their manga.

I think it’s interesting to reflect on.  You may argue what about originality?  Originality is great and all but remember that manga is still a business.  Originality is great as long as it sells books, but sometimes a story that’s a little more comfortably familiar is the better sell.

Now before any of you decide to jump on me for that particular opinion, I would like to defend myself a little.  Given a choice, I’d rather have the originality, if it exists.  I just like to make the arguments that I don’t see too often, probably because I presently don’t read too many anime/manga blogs or listen to many podcasts on the subject.  I’m working on fixing that.

After all, artists have to eat too.

*For anyone wondering, we’re up to the Ichigo/Byakuya fight.  Actually into the fight, but not yet at the point where Byakuya unleashes the second stage of his bankai.  I believe Ichigo just revealed his bankai and demonstrated his additional speed.  Besides all the speeches, and boasts, and counter-boasts.  *sigh*