Kurogane's Anime Blog

Found this over Twitter:

Working!! seems to be the latest victim of some bloggers who delight in harshly criticizing certain animes. Since I’m relatively new to this world, I didn’t really notice this trend until last year, when I saw that suddenly many bloggers were making fun and criticizing the anime Kampfer – I almost decided not to watch it, but something caught my attention. That was that in a very short span of time, several blogs had panned it, often in a similar style and only after watching one episode. Of course, after watching it I realized it wasn’t half as bad as they said it was. In my old blog I termed this the “wolf pack mentality” of some bloggers.

Here we should make a distinction between not liking an anime and bullying. It’s fine if you don’t like K-ON or Working! or Kampfer and write about that. You comment why you don’t like it, fine. However, many people just enjoy bullying both the show and its viewers. It appears that certain blogs exist with the sole purpose of criticizing shows all the time, and I wonder why those people watch shows they don’t like – is it only so they have material to criticize? And if you only watched a couple of episodes and then dropped it, why keep talking over and over about it?

In fact, this is related to elitism. You don’t gain respect -that is, you don’t look like you have good taste- if you don’t criticize a show every week. Elitism, criticism and taste equating that there are some shows, especially popular ones, that you must criticize just for the sake of building and maintaining a reputation. I dealt with this in another essay.

Personally I’ve been trying to avoid this, to actually look positive, ever since I started this blog. There is a scene in Aria the Origination where Alice-chan is talking with Alicia-san and she asks why Alicia never gets angry when Akari (or even Aria-shachou) makes a mistake.

I want to do something like that. I prefer to focus on the positive qualities of any show I follow – it doesn’t mean I won’t say I didn’t like something, but I won’t insist on that, I don’t want some black aura coming out of my blog. And if I don’t really like a show, I will just quietly drop it, maybe comment why I dropped it, and end of the story. For example, Queen’s Blade. I dropped it, I didn’t like it. Should I make fun of it -and its viewers- every week?

Source: My extended anime “tweets”

QFT’ed.

This is why when people ask me about Omamori Himari or Negima anime… OH WAIT THEY DON’T EXIST.

Watch everything that sounds remotely interesting to you.
Drop those that suck after the 3rd episode.

After all, who coulda thought that Hanamaru Kindergarten would end up one of the hits of last season? Certainly not by just reading these silly season previews I reckon.

That’s why I never really write them out for my blog. You never know what turns out good and what turns out shit in the end.

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Just feeling philosophical today. Pic is semi-related.

So. Dance of the Vampire Bund 01 is a talkshow. Since this is Shinbo(kastel) I guess this is to be expected. I already had my reservations about it, but this pretty much solidifies my worst fears about it.

To be clear, I’m not a hater of Shinbo’s works, but there are some times I wish he doesn’t try so hard to give everything an original spin. I have been following the manga way before the anime project was announced and I am quite a fan of it, so I guess I am pretty appalled and weirded out at how he kicked off the show.

It’s true in the manga the vampires publically announce their existence on national TV, but it was done via official means, with press conferences and statements by the vampires and the government. Now instead, Shinbo decided to make them appear on some trashy Japanese variety TV programme to lure out a wild vampire and make a great big mess out of it. I don’t think that will translate to good PR for the vampires at all. In fact I just think the whole exercise is an excuse for Shinbo to use cheap cuts and cinematography, with the second half of the episode descending in to cinéma vérité style.

While I didn’t like it at all, I guess fans of Shinbo will probably like it better. I am just hoping this doesn’t happen for the rest of the season. DitVB is a nice manga, and I would like to see it being given a proper adaptation. Then again, I guess Shinbo can get really creative with the censorship….. time will tell.

Part 2 as promised. Happy New Year everyone!

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First part of my 2009 in Review article. Only shows I’ve completed watching are in this list, divided in to four tiers of descending “accumulative entertainment value”.

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Actor Keanu Reeves (The Matrix, Animatrix, Johnny Mnemonic) told MTV News that the proposed live-action Cowboy Bebop film project is currently being rewritten. During a press event for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee film, he said, “There’s a draft of the script, but the writer did such a great job [that] in order to make the movie, you would need half a billion dollars. […] So the studio went, ‘This movie is fantastic and it would cost half a billion dollars. So he’s doing a rewrite.” Reeves added that the producers are “just trying to pull it back” in scope, and “the only challenge was to make a satisfying western narrative.”

Source: Anime News Network.

You know what they should do? Just sign Josh Whedon on and make a Firefly x Cowboy Bebop crossover. That idea’s so radical it might just bloody work!

Imagine, Captain Reynolds squaring off with Spike…. River and Kaylee and Edward…. Faye and Inara sharing some ‘women’ stories. ヽ( >∀<)ﾉ AHAHA AHAHA AHAHAHAHA

Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of you guys want me to cover SaiMoe this year, but frankly to say after three years, a lot of the novelty’s gone for me. Especially after last year’s Kagamin’s win, which was actually the first year I’d thought SaiMoe had a decent winner.

Well, that’s not to say I won’t cover it, but don’t expect me to cover the pre-lims. It’s too much work and I’m in for a busy period now (final year of my studies), so if I do cover SaiMoe 2009, it’ll probably be when the group finals or the tournament proper starts.

In the mean time, Moetron is offering daily coverage about SaiMoe, or you can always go to the usual Animesuki forums thread for results updates.

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Canned Dogs recently posted an article about Akamatsu commenting on the recent increase of popularity of the Negima manga, which he says;

Akamatsu’s opinion is that the current direction of the manga is good as the battles have been pretty compact and it’s good to have an increase in readership even if just for a short period of time.

However he feels that it’ll be safe to return the manga to normal again, as the popularity would probably not drop sharply after having become so popular now. As an analogy he says it’s like how he doesn’t want to rapidly do shoryukens, he wants to use some hadoukens to zone too.

And I would like to respond with; “Thank the heavens!”.

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1. Seirei no Moribito
2. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
3. Lucky Star
4. Seto no Hanayome
5. ef -a tale of memories
6. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
7. Potemayo
8. Baccano!
9. Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight!
10. Minami-ke
11. Dennou Coil
12. Hitohira
13. Nodame Cantabile
14. sola
15. Code GEASS: Lelouch of the Rebellion.

This list was seriously delayed because I decided to write a blurb for each title, which got too long after I ran out of suitable adjectives for all of them. Suffice to say, I greatly enjoyed all the titles in the list, each in their own way.

Honestly though, I’m surprised I didn’t see much accolades for Seirei, which clinched top spot for being a solid watch from start till finish. Well, it wasn’t an attention-grabber as much as Gurren Lagaan and Lucky Star I guess.

For the record, I managed to watch 50 titles in 2007, completed 33, didn’t finish 7 of them, and the rest are shows from Fall 2007 that are still running.