Category: Special Articles

[Short] Shikimori-san 2-3

by Amunchet, posted in Special Articles, Weekly Summary

Amun’s Note: I’m going to be doing some “Short” reactions for various shows that aren’t getting seasonal coverage.  I’ll also give my verdict of “watch”, “skim”, or “skip”.  This will be sporadic but let me know if you want a particular series, and I’ll try to watch it if I haven’t already dropped it!  Hope you enjoy!

Shikimori-san came into the season with a surprising amount of hype for what looks like a generic rom-com….which after 2 episodes, it definitely is.  But by golly, there’s something about it that’s made me want to watch it first every time it’s come out.  Episode 2’s sports (and fame) experience were plenty fun (although I could have done without the sick bay scene).  Episode 3 is standard date-gone-wrong fair – although it ends at his house?!  Didn’t see that coming (or befriending his parents…5D chess move right there). 

I think the charm from this show comes from its simplicity.  Are we going to break any new ground?  Nope.  But it’s plenty soothing, and for that I give it: “Watch“

I watched Black Clover so you don’t have to: The 151 Episode Shonen Check In

by Lenlo, posted in Black Clover, Currently Watching:, Finished Series: Action, Reviews by Lenlo, Special Articles

Bleach. Naruto. One Piece. The Big Three, a legendary trio of Shonen anime/manga that dominated the community for over a decade. Properties so successful that they continue to inspire creators to this day. However all things must one day end and only One Piece remains in its original form. The mangaka Eiichirou Oda is still chugging along to this day. As Bleach ran its course, My Hero Academia rose to fill its shoes. And as Naruto: Shippuden wrapped up in 2017, the manga ending 3 years prior, the question became: What would take its place? Running for over 150 episodes straight, there is one series that has clearly made a play for that position. But does it succeed? This is the story of Black Clover, its first 151 episodes and the troubled production found within. Is it worth it? Should you give it a shot? Let’s find out together.

Welcome to the first, and possibly only, edition of Shonen Check-In. How’s that for a pretentious start eh? Had to get people hooked in early. Don’t worry, this isn’t that kind of post. The long and short of it is that, for various reasons, I decided to catch up on the first 151 episodes of Black Clover. Like many I dropped it early back in 2017, in the first cour in fact, maybe even the first episode. Between Asta’s screaming, the questionable production and the almost… blatantly generic plot, I had 0 interest in another new Shonen. But over these last 3 years Black Clover has somehow survived and the fan base has only grown. They sing its praises, they keep saying “It gets good, it gets good!” Well I am here to check that assertion. I watched Black Clover so you don’t have to. But maybe… maybe you should.

(Disclaimer: This is not a review, there is no number score, I just wanted to talk about Black Clover damnit.)

Continue reading “I watched Black Clover so you don’t have to: The 151 Episode Shonen Check In” →

Tian Guan Ci Fu – Animation Appreciation

by Lenlo, posted in Random Anime Recommendations, Special Articles

Welcome everyone, to round 2 of me making a fool of myself to talk about Chinese animation, this time featuring Tian Guan Ci Fu or Heaven’s Official Blessing. Just like the last series we talked about, Fog Hill, odds are you haven’t heard of it. And if you have then congratulations, you anime hipster you. Just like last time, this isn’t actually a review and is in no way meant to be taken as such. In fact the series is still airing right now, having just shown its 4th episode on Bilibili. Rather I just want to talk about its production and the cool things going on in the Chinese animation scene right now. So let’s just jump into that shall we? Directed by Haoling Li and made by studio Haoliners Animation League, this is Heaven’s Official Blessing!

So first up, who the hell is Haoling Li and Haoliners Animation League? Unlike Samsara Studio from my last post, these two have actually been around the block a few times. Haoliners is based in Shanghai, China, and according to their website was founded by Haoling Li in 2013. Prior to this, Haoling Li primarily worked as a storyboard artist on projects for Shanghai Television, though I was unable to find which ones. Meanwhile Haoliners is a different story, their earliest works being Lu Shi Dai and Man Tou Riji, the second co-produced with Studio Lan. Since then they have done steady work, airing consistently on Bilibili and QIY streaming platforms, slowly growing their staff. It wasn’t until 2018 that they achieved their “western debut” so to speak with their contribution to the anthology series Flavors of Youth.

Continue reading “Tian Guan Ci Fu – Animation Appreciation” →

Fog Hill of Five Elements – Animation Appreciation

by Lenlo, posted in Random Anime Recommendations, Special Articles

Hello everyone and welcome to a rather weird post about a Chinese series you probably haven’t heard of, Fog Hill of Five Elements. Now odds are you have no idea what I am talking about, and I don’t blame you. Not only are subs for this notoriously hard to find, but the ones you do find probably aren’t that good. A Graphic Design Service Subscription does not suffice in finding them. Part of that is just the difficulty of finding Chinese translators, since the Japanese translation scene is well established at this point, but another part is that no one really knows this show exists. And let me tell you, if for no other reason than the animation, the goal of this post is to change that. So lets dive in.

First up, a little about Fog Hill. As far as I can figure, Fog Hill was originally created by Hun Lin in this little 5 minute YouTube video here. Whether he made the whole thing, VA and music and all from scratch himself I have no idea. I don’t even know if Samsara Studio, the animation house behind Fog Hill, is his studio or just one he is working with. Since this is their first project and all the information is in Chinese, as an ignorant American I just don’t know. But what I do know is that 3 years later, in 2020, Fog Hill got a full 8 episode ONA season that is currently being released right now. Directed, Scripted, and Coordinated by Hun Lin, this is clearly a passion project. And even if I can’t understand the words, I can understand hype. And this? This animation is hype.

Continue reading “Fog Hill of Five Elements – Animation Appreciation” →

Introducing youngbloods, Vol. 2: Armitage!

by SuperMario, posted in About, Special Articles

Target acquired, lock, engage. Joining my brothers in arms, it’s your girl, Armitage! 😀

Hey, everyone!! After days of brawling and bloodshed, I have finally emerged as a joint victor of the Battle Royale for the coveted position of ‘New Blogger’. I am grateful to the brave fallen and look forward to making acquaintance with the living, here at Star-Crossed Fleet.

I am in my final year at Uni but I have decided to instead follow my passion for stories. I will be pursuing my dream to be a novelist, you see. Ever since I was a little child, I have loved fictional characters and the incredible lives they lead. And anime was one of the first mediums to make me feel that way. Hence, I have decided to give blogging a shot.

Some of my favorites include: Hunter x Hunter 2011, Honey & Clover, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu and 3-gatsu no Lion. I look forward to talking about seasonal anime and more with you all and vow to fight to death, defending my shit taste over yours! 😛

Thanks for having me!! <3

 

Introducing Amun

by Amunchet, posted in About, Special Articles

Hello! Call me Amun – good to meet ya!

The kind bloggers of this site have graciously allowed me to join their ranks. A bit about me – I’m a 30 year old Happa who is gainfully employed as a programmer/manager/pointy haired boss/whatever (you’re here for anime, not a resume).  As discord embarrassingly revealed to the other writers, I currently play League of Legends, though I was sufficiently addicted to WoW in the past (afl lock, yessir).

My anime instincts tend to wander towards shonen, with good characterization and world building as musts.  I’ve been watching anime now for about 15 years (I tend to be anime only with resorting to manga when there is no hope for future seasons *sniff*).   The show that got me hooked was Hikaru no Go, and I haven’t looked back since.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here’s a small banner for some of my top personal picks.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy my thoughts and if not…flame me until I get better!  (+1 for everyone who can name all anime shown in the banner…+2 if you caught the previous pun).

Let’s watch some anime together!

Announcement Time – Writers Recruitment #2

by SuperWooper, posted in About, Special Articles

Applications are closed. To everyone who submitted, thank you for your interest!

In June of 2017, I applied to be part of the team here at Star Crossed. Now, nearly two years later, I’m writing our new recruitment post. Time flies when you’re blogging anime.

With Aidan’s recent departure, it’s time for us to shore up our roster a bit. More writers means we’ll be able to cover more series, include more perspectives in our First Impressions posts, and perhaps introduce new features like Lenlo’s Throwback Thursday. Seasonal anime will always be our bread and butter, so we’ll be asking new recruits to give us a hand starting with the Summer 2019 season. If you watch anime week-to-week and want an established platform to write about it, then we’d love for you to apply.

Text blogging isn’t a glamorous job in this era of video sharing sites and social networks. If your application is accepted, your only rewards as a writer will be a sense of accomplishment and the rare message from an appreciative commenter. Keep at it long enough and you may even get one or two not-so-appreciative messages! Mario, Lenlo and I will be grateful to have you, though. We’ve all got different tastes, so you’re sure to find somebody you click with. We’re also flexible regarding upload schedules and show selection, though we’ll begin to expect a bit more once you’ve settled in.

Still keen on applying? Hit the jump for details!

Continue reading “Announcement Time – Writers Recruitment #2” →

A Reflection: Ode to the other Mom in 3-gatsu no Lion

by SuperMario, posted in 3-gatsu no Lion, Special Articles

3-gatsu no Lion has just finished its 2nd season (on that notes, rest assured that Wooper will cover it till the end of this season and I’ll chime in to give a full post). After Burnt Field mini-arc – which was a solid arc by all means – it came rather natural that the last few episodes focus more on low-key drama instead of focus on another arc. All the better in my opinions since these last episodes elevate Hinata as one of the best girl on Earth and one side chapter that hit me hard on a personal level. So much that despite my laptop is currently broken and I still have two full reviews to write (that’ll come, I promise), I just wanna let this all out first. Keep in mind this is not a review, nor does this reflection piece have any point to make; just merely what I feel about it.

Consider how the second season ends in a satisfying note, I was quite surprised the show follows very closely to the manga’s structure, with only one chapter was adapted out of its order, and that chapter was “Other Home”, and for me it’s probably the best choice that Shaft made. Other Home sheds some more light to the crippled relationships and between him and the family members and the breakdown of the family. The trick here is the shift of perspective. This chapter gives a voice to the voiceless member of the his foster family. Damnit it’s such a brilliant character study in display here. The first notion that really grabs me personally is how this family represents accurately the family dynamic of Asian culture (East Asia to be more specific), so much so that it reminds me a great deal of my own and the one that the more I grow apart from it, the more I can look at it with different perspective. We have a Father who decides the best method to teach his own kids how to face their problem is to smirk “haha” and does nothing. We have a Wife who does housework everyday, stands there in the kitchen making dinner and wait for her husband and kids come home, even without anyone contact her. We have a Mother who constantly blames herself for raising her kids the wrong way, as if the way they turn out HAS ANYTHING TO DO with the way she raises them. And we have the only one member that tries her best to hold everything together since everyone else just stuck up in their own little worlds.

The framing device is pretty on point as well. We don’t hear any conversation between her and Rei, as if their conversation is just merely a facade, the mask that both of them put on. Throughout the chapter we rarely see her face, we see mostly behind her back, when she’s busy doing housework. Those motifs match with the way she smiles, and all the formal lines she about to say, but holds back. Here they sit, opposite to each other, afraid to look at each other’s eyes, and words come out their mouth are pointless. The home that never feels like a home. And it certainly shreds my heart when I realize that the only member Rei feels like his real family is their old dog.

And that comes to another brilliant part of this chapter, the chemistry (or the lack thereof) between Rei and her. I am always find one of the most intriguing relationship is the one like this. The one that always rely on other factors to work, and then when you pull these factors out of the equation, what’s left between them? From her perspective, her husband just agrees to bring another boy to live as a family, so what she’d do best is to support him. Then she sees her own children crumbled right before her eyes because of the presence of that boy, and the family keeps falling apart beyond her hands. Underneath all that she knows it all and she knows that Rei understands it too. What kind of emotions and what kind of behaviour will she act when she meets Rei alone, then? I love it that she has a dream that night that Rei were her own child. That maybe the closest distance that she ever regards him to be.

Announcement Time – Writers Recruitment Results

by AidanAK47, posted in About, Special Articles

Ladies and gentlemen it is I, your resident anime blogger AidanAK47 and I bring with me news. As those of you who visit our little abode might know, we have been running a recruitment drive to get more writers so that we can cover more shows each season. Thank you to all that applied for the position. It is great to see those who wish to contribute to this site and help keep it strong. But alas you could not all be chosen. The results are in and we have decided to take on two new writers: Lenlo and Superwooper.

Lenlo:

Hello everyone! I want to take this chance to quickly introduce myself and tell you afew things about me, so lets get started. I am a recent University Graduate with a degree in Computer Science, my personal focus being Machine Learning. I currently live in Texas in the United States but expect that to change soon. My hobbies include Fencing at the regional level, gaming with my current addition being Final Fantasy 14, and now writing. As far as anime goes, my tastes are pretty simple. I enjoy drama’s, things with a meaty story, and darker pieces with no guarnteed happy ending, things such as Monster, Mushishi, Sword of the Stranger and more recently Rakugo. I also enjoy a good romance such as Ore Monogatari and Your Lie in April, though those are harder to come by. Finallly, for this season I will be covering Stan Lees The Reflection and Katsugeki Touken Ranbu. Im looking forward to writing for you all!

Superwooper:

Hey there! I’m Superwooper, a 27 year old Education student and recently-minted anime blogger. When I’m not at school or working as a tutor to pay the bills, I’m usually attending Smash Bros Melee or Pokemon TCG tournaments. My list of favorite anime includes Cross Game, Mushishi, Seirei no Moribito, and Usagi Drop. I’ll be writing about Ballroom e Youkoso and Shoukoku no Altair this season, along with Space Battleship Yamato 2202 if the next few episodes appear online soon. I’m grateful to be writing for a blog that’s been a personal resource for years now. Thanks for having me!

So what does that mean for you? Well it means that more shows will get covered each season and this site will be significantly more active with content. Now I must ask for you readers to be kind to our new writers. Constructive criticism is welcome but blatant abuse will be met with the reception it deserves from yours truly. Now I doubt such a scenario will come to pass as I like to believe our little reader community has a little more class than others…well, mostly. Thus I hope this change will result in a more positive direction for this site. Our two new writers will be starting with us in this new summer season so we will be covering quite a lot from this point forward. May you enjoy reading our written musings on anime to come.

Announcement Time – Writer’s Recruitment

by SuperMario, posted in About, Special Articles

UPDATE: WE HAVE ANOTHER WEEK TO GO. THIS APPLICATION PROCESS WILL CLOSE AS SOON AS THE FIRST SHOW – KAKEGURUI – STARTS AIRING. WE WILL SEND EMAILS TO THE APPLICANTS AFTERWARDS TO INFORM THEM WHETHER OR NOT THEY MADE IT. THANK YOU.

I’ll be straight to the point, it’s time for us to recruit a new permanent writer.

The reason, you ask? Welp, as much as I don’t want to admit, each season I feel we left out too many shows that worth covering. Having another writer on board, along with the support from casual writers like Helghast Killzone or Bam, we’re aiming at 9-10 shows per season. With psgels is now returning on the site with his monthly summary, the site can finally be in an active mode. Having new writer also mean that more shows for you guys to follow and enjoy.

But I’ll stress this again, for those of you who wonder if this site is ever going back to the glory times before psgels left, I can safely say we won’t, nor we intend to. We run things differently now with all the respect towards his bloggings from before, and rest assured that we still inform psgels on any development/ change we plan for this site, such as this.

But if you’re tempted with the idea of blogging anime, let be warned: this is a job that have little to no reward, time-consuming and require a strong commitment and frequent update. If you frequent this blog you would notice that usually we have little response rate, we’d be lucky if we have 1 or 2 response per post. Writing a post can eat up a lot of your free time as well. Usually, it’s about 3 hours per post, and you need to write them constantly almost every week.

Now, are you still keen on giving it a shot? Then, to the application:

– Tell us a little bit about yourself, your favorite anime/ genre, what can you bring to the site (nah, we are not some kind of stuck up employers), and a sample post on any recent episode of your choice, or even a full review. The main reason for this sample post, apart from us having a good grasp of your writing style, is a little challenge for you guys to test yourself. “Try to write a post a same size as us (about 500 – 600 words), time how long it takes and ask yourself if you can really do that 3 times a week, for every single week of the year.” I’m just quoting roughly what Aidan said to me when I first approached him for the job and it did scare the hell out of me, but I survived. Ask yourself can you devote that much time each week to write reviews. If after you finish this sample post you still feel perfectly fine with all that, then you’re basically who we looking for.

One more thing that I suggest you do if you give this blogging a shot, just be yourself on your writing. Having a competent writing skills and good critical writing ability of course help, but having your own voice is what matters most. Let us know more about you through your post.

–Send your application to this email: redriver(underscore)2005(at)yahoo(dot)com with the subject: “[your username] psgels.net Writer’s Application”. The deadline will be until the start of next season (1st of July), meaning you will have approximately 3 more weeks to get involved. Depending on how many applications we get, we will try to email you back whether you made it or not as soon as the decision is made. If you have any question, shoot it down the comment section. We honestly don’t know how many applications we will eventually get, but it’s part of the fun. Remember, as long as you think of this blogging as your hobby, you’ll be fine. That I can assure. You won’t go far for things you don’t enjoy. So don’t be shy, give this a shot and good luck.