Stranger in a Strange Land

With nothing to do, the youth of today are reduced to just hanging around.

Do you have children? If you don’t, do you want to have children? How valuable is a child? (More than an adult?)

Moe-Mao and a Mobile Suit

Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight!, like Infinite Ryvius, isn’t directly about politics but still has a political edge. Leaving aside the campaigning, the referendum and the clashes with oppressive authority, there are also little touches here and there: the left-facing swastika in the eighth episode is one and the above declaration from Manabi herself is another.

Except that, unlike the reversed swastika, those of us who don’t speak Japanese can’t tell who came up with this allusion, as we don’t know if the phrase that Manabi uses is the Japanese phrase used to describe the real Great Leap Forward.

Figure 17: Attention! Deficit!

Author pointed out that I didn’t explain why I found Figure 17 ‘hard to digest’. It’s probably good that he brought it up, because I’m not sure I’d really considered that myself. Justify, justify . . .

A brief preamble is probably in order: Figure 17 takes a premise from the magical girl genre (the young heroine has to use her powers to collect some objects) and unites that premise with an unusually kinetic style of action (the objects are monstrous aliens) and a startlingly intense amount of emotion (’THE SCENE‘, for instance). It’s not quite The 08th Mahou Shoujo Team, but it may be as close as we’ll get, and I rather like it.

HoiHoi-san: The Joy of Merchandise

HoiHoi-san is a domestic goddess, but only on the scale of the Romans’ minor household gods. HoiHoi-san has light hair and wears squeaky booties. HoiHoi-san is a small, moe, robot. HoiHoi-san stalks the night, exterminating pesticide-resistant insects in a hail of bullets.

Need The Warld Ken About My Ramblings?

'Read yourself happy! Read yourself thin!'

I reacted positively when the idea of writing about Catcher on an anime blog was raised in certain quarters. It’s always easier to write about something if you have something else to compare it to, as you can dress up a simple list of points of similarities and difference and pretend that you’ve been thinking. Moreover, I like to compare seemingly unrelated things and - better still - lots of people have read The Catcher in the Rye. (The idea was/is essentially that people - anyone who wants to - could chip in, if they felt so inclined. Not that this is organised, or anything.)

Snapshots: Fall of the Free Planets

Spoilers ahead for Legend of the Galactic Heroes up to episode fifty-four.

A Matter of Manners

I’ve been told that if you slurp it you mix more oxygen into the tea to enhance the flavour. This is one place where you have to trade manners off against taste. Do we praise refined sippers for their ascetic prioritisation of appearance over pleasure, or blunt slurpers for their healthy disdain for pretense? I’m a slurper - in private - myself. Given that she’s using a teacup rather than a mug, and drinking at something like a garden party, Yoshika’s probably better off sticking her little finger out and sipping - unless she wants to stick her middle finger up at the Establishment!

(Having taken the tea into your mouth you’ve a choice: taste it at the front before shunting it to the back of your mouth, so that you get the lighter aspect of its taste followed by the bitter aspect, or attempt to hit all of your tongue with the tea at roughly the same time, so as to take both aspects at once.)

How I Failed Axiology 101

Objectively not great, but emotionally 3x better than any other AMV.

The (dis)connection between love for anime and anime’s good quality is something that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while, and Demian’s recent post on ‘Liking Bad Anime’ (hopefully to be followed in the future by Baka-Raptor on ‘Hating Good Anime’) was all the provocation I required. Yes, my post is a sterile piece of amateur thought and no, you don’t have to read it.

An apology is in order, as I don’t normally permit myself to write this kind of entry. Normally I try to briefly explain any necessary jargon, but I’ve just forged full steam ahead here, because I imagine readers who are interested will either understand any jargon that there is here (I’ve trimmed as much as I can), or look it up. I should probably also apologise for muddled thought, but there’s not much to be done about that.

Being a Karin Fanboy Is So Very Embarrassing!

My progress through a SEED marathon (for some reason, I find it easy to re-watch) was halted by a sudden whim: I wanted to revisit Karin. I’m glad I remembered the merits of this modest and genial romantic comedy. Karin provokes much moe (and it helps that the story’s told largely from her point of view), Kenta is not an entirely two-dimensional male lead (well, he is, but you know what I mean!) and nearly every stentorian declaration that comes out of  Winner’s mouth (surely he’s the antithesis of D?) extracts a guffaw from me.

VOTOMS: Clarke’s God Is Dead

Armoured Trooper VOTOMS is a simple show. I should swiftly add that by ’simple’ I don’t mean to imply ‘bad’ (it was good) or ’stupid’ (it wasn’t stupid), simply ’simple’, in its denotation but not any of its connotations. Armoured Troopers are simple mecha, tin cans with machine guns, the characters are simple people, the dialogue is frequently sparse (and better for it) and some of the show’s best images, such as Chirico carrying a sick Fyana across Sunsa’s airless desert with Zophie following behind him, are its simplest ones.