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Anime

Liminal Anime

So it’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve finally processed my feelings on “Love Live” and similar anime, and now I will inflict it on you, who may even read this. Anyone who’s watched anime for any length of time knows that there are a few different broad classes of anime.  There’s “Slice of Life” anime, there’s “Cute Girls doing Cute Things” anime, there’s “High School Rom-Com”, there are the action “Shounen” anime which involve a lot of fighting and girls with unrealistic bodies, Shoujo anime which involve… Read More »Liminal Anime

Happiness

This will be another of those posts where I intend to take full advantage of the fact that no one reads this. As you might have gathered from the last few posts, “Love Live” hit me hard.  The thing about that is, there’s no obvious reason why that should be the case.  I’m a middle-aged guy from Texas who has about as little to do with the lives of even an ordinary Japanese schoolgirl, much less a group of them that are involved in a “school idol project”, as a… Read More »Happiness

What I Hate about Love Live

I really like Love Live. But it’s not perfect. I mean, it’s really not perfect.  Some things about it are bad.  In fact, they’re so bad that they pull me out of my suspension of disbelief and it takes a bit to pull me back in. What bothers me is not the girls.  In all of the series, they are characterized really well and realistically.  There is just the right amount of comedy and drama, and they have believable personalities and backstories. What bothers me isn’t even the premise of… Read More »What I Hate about Love Live

Shine

“Love Live” continues to throw me for a loop. But at least I think I’m starting to understand why, now. It comes down to one word:  “Shine”. When I was a child, I was driven.  Very driven.  I was the smartest child I knew, and probably the smartest child of my social circles, which were somewhat extensive.  I was reading at a very early age.  I was doing math at a very early age.  I was running intellectual rings around my parents, and everyone I knew, before even reaching my… Read More »Shine

Nijigasaki

This morning I wrote a post in Japanese. It’s probably not very good and odds are I’ll hide or delete it at some point.  But it’s really the only way I’m going to be able to practice, well, one of the few anyway.  So I’ll probably do that a lot more frequently.  Turns out my vocabulary is a little bigger than I thought, I guess. The post was about “Love Live, Nijigasaki school idol club”. As I mentioned, I really like the “Love, Live” franchise.  I’m a large part of… Read More »Nijigasaki

Sadness, Depression, and Hope

Anime sometimes makes me think. Most of the time, I don’t think it’s supposed to, being honest.  I think it’s generally supposed to be light entertainment, or tell a story, or basically fill the same role that live-action TV does in the west.  I think it may be a character flaw of mine that I think as hard on it as I do, and I’m pretty sure that most of the time, this makes me something of an outlier at best, and a pariah at worst. Nonetheless, it does.  It… Read More »Sadness, Depression, and Hope

Why I love “Love Live”

I just watched “Love Live”. It’s a cheesy and rather stupid anime, with lots of plot holes.  It telegraphs plot lines from even the beginning, and so far from what I can see, the different incarnations of “Love Live” are essentially the same plot with different characters and location.  It’s cheesy and it’s stupid and I loved it. But why did I love it? Well, one reason is, it had heart.  It was cheesy and stupid and it really tried to treat the girls as real, emotional people, and not… Read More »Why I love “Love Live”

Why I Love Anime, But Not Anime Fans

I started learning Japanese in 2018, which is about six years ago.  I haven’t progressed nearly as far as I’d like, but I guess one could make the argument that the slow burn was helpful in making sure that what did stick, actually did.  So maybe it was the right pace for me, even though it’s really frustrating for me. I stayed away from anime for the longest times, because I didn’t like the “community”. Maybe a year or so ago, I started to watch anime for real, and found I… Read More »Why I Love Anime, But Not Anime Fans

Good Riddance to Bad Localizers

Or, I finally found a reason to learn Japanese. One thing I’ve noticed as I study Japanese is that the translators often aren’t very good.  They tend to make choices that seem designed to water down the message the mangaka is trying to send half the time. For example, one of the first animes I watched was “Sound! Euphonium” which was a great anime, one of the best.  At one point there was an interaction between Kumiko and Asuka.  Kumiko says something translated correctly as “Welcome back” or some such. … Read More »Good Riddance to Bad Localizers

I Love, and I Hate, Anime.

Over the past few months, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been watching a lot of anime.  I’ve been trying to be a little selective about what I watch – a lot of it is poorly animated trash, a lot of it is just mid, and some of it is truly a work of art.  The anime that’s a work of art has actually changed my life in many ways, and the rest of it has pretty much been a waste of time. Some anime has been a surprisingly emotional experience… Read More »I Love, and I Hate, Anime.