Category: Special Articles

Every year, about a month before the fall season, I hold this poll in which you can force me to blog one of the upcoming autumn seasons. In this contest, you can either force me to blog an awesome-looking series, or a series that I normally would never consider covering. I’m a bit earlier than usual this year (blame impatience).

Either way, during the previous years I asked you to simply drop a comment with the series you voted for. Unfortunately, because last time people cheated I had to find a different way to do it. I didn’t want to post a simple poll (I really want this contest to be between my readers, instead of people who visit random sites and click on random polls), so I settled with an online survey, which can be found here:

http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=KBDEML_aef4ec97

Here are some concrete rules:
– To make a valid vote, visit the above link and leave the titles of your selection. You can select up to two series from the upcoming Autumn season.
– The anime with the most amount of votes in the end will be blogged for at least 12 or 13 episodes.
– Here and here are lists with the shows that are scheduled to air.
– This year I also decided to drop the “No direct sequels”-rule, so you can also nominate series as Index II and Sora no Otoshimono II.
– I haven’t tested this out yet, but at the online survey you should be able to modify your answer after having voted.
– I accept any series with an airdate between September 20th and November 11th.
– The poll will end at September 30, 23:59 GMT. All votes that arrive after that will be ignored.

You can find the results here:

http://www.kwiksurveys.com/results-overview.php?surveyID=KBDEML_aef4ec97&mode=4

Counted together, it makes for this list:
Bakuman : 83
Psychic Detective Yakumo : 82
Togainu no Chi : 57
Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai : 53
Toaru Majutsu no Index II : 44
Star Driver Kagayaki no Takuto: 41
Kuragehime : 37
Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt : 25
Iron Man : 24
Tegami Bacchi Reverse: 16
Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru: 13
Otome Youkai Zakuro : 12
Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai : 11
Sora no Otoshimono Forte : 10
Arakawa Under the Bridge 2: 7
Shinryaku! Ika Musume: 7
Yosuga no Sora: 6
Hakuouki 2: 4
MM!: 4
Motto To Love Ru: 2
Super Robot Wars OG: The Inspector: 2
Tantei Opera Milky Holmes: 2
Fortune Arterial: 1
Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls: 1
Pokemon Best Wishes: 1

nb: the series in italics are invalid (why Kannagi?)

I’m about to go on a short vacation to Exeter (UK). During that time, I can probably get my hand on some internet connection, but the blog will mostly be dead. You can still use the forums, of course.

I’ll be back next Saturday.

So, for the people who haven’t noticed yet, since about a week the forums are back. You can find them at psgels.co.cc. I know that the first time I tried putting forms to this site it rather failed, but I’ve learned a lot from it and hopefully set it up so that it won’t die out after a few weeks. It’s already looking pretty good with a lot of activity, you can also find the latest updates on the side-bar at the right.

To be honest, at the start of the Aniblog tournament I didn’t think that I’d be able to get so far. I’m really surprised at how many people turned out to support htis blog. Even the ones who never comment but simply read this blog occasionally: thanks. I’d also like to thank Scamp, RP and mefloraine.

Now, since I’m not got at these “thank you”-posts, I’ll just stop here.

Hey, thanks everyone for voting so far. I’m going to bother you one more time.

The final match is against Kurogane. Be sure to check out his blog before voting here.

Silly puns aside, we’ve reached the semi-finals. Yay!

Today’s opponent is without a doubt the strongest I’ve had to face so far. Heck, they already existed before I even knew what an anime blog was. As usual, you can find the link to the tourney here:

http://aniblogtourney.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/semi-finals/

And also, don’t forget to check out Sea Slugs Anime Blog, if you haven’t already done so. 😉

So yeah, I made it to the quarterfinals of the Aniblog Tourney. Thanks everyone for voting so far.

This time I’m up against Impz and his posse. Be sure to check it out before voting, but chances are that you already know about it.

Anyway, for the THAT groupies who have come to check out this site: welcome to Star Crossed. I’ve been blogging series weekly for about four and a half years now. I also write series reviews and first impression, all of which you can find in the sidebar below.

For the readers of this blog:
Okay, so it’s finally this blog’s turn at the Aniblog Tourney. You can vote here, and also be sure to check out the blog I’m up against: Just as Planned. 🙂

To the ones who came here from the Aniblog Tourney:
Welcome at Star Crossed Anime Blog, an episodic blog that I’ve been keeping for nearly four and a half years now. Aside from episodic posts (I try to blog around twelve series each season) I write a bunch of other features as well. Here’s a small list of them:

– Anime Reviews – (reviews of a wide variety of anime, OVAs and Movies. An alphabetical list can be found here: (#-G), (H-L), (M-Q), (R-Z)).

– Seasonal Previews – (previews of upcoming seasons, with a lot of focus on directors and scriptwriters. Since the past two seasons there also is a Movie and OVA edition).

– Monthly Summaries – (a list of my personal impressions of all airing series that I’ve been keeping up with for every month).

– Top 10 Anime – (A few Top-X lists, including my favourite anime, OPs and Horror series).

– Some quick first impressions – (Impressions of the first episodes of newly aired series).

If you start digging through the archives, you might notice a lot of missing screenshots. Apologies for that. I’ve had a lot of issues with image hosting in the past.

In any case, welcome on the site. 🙂

The future of this blog: I have no idea, to be honest. Tomorrow I’m going to say goodbye to my lazy student life, and start a five-month internship. It’s going to be the first time in my life in which I’m full time busy with something. After that, I’m planning to find a job, and move out of my father’s house. 2010 is very likely going to be the year with the biggest amount of change in my life, and I’m going to have much less time to work on this blog.

However, I have no idea how much that amounts to. I have no idea whether I’ll still have the time or energy to blog twelve series every week, and I may have to cut back on that amount. In the same way, I don’t think you can expect me to churn out reviews on other anime at the same speed that I’ve been doing for the past years now. If there are delays in posting, it’s also simply because I won’t have as much time on my hand as I once had.

However, I do want you to know that I have no intention to simply quit this blog. At this point I like blogging and the community too much to just go on a permanent hiatus and stop writing. Unfortunately, with my life about to go through huge changes and with the anime industry gearing more and more towards moe and fanservice, I have no idea how I will be thinking about this in a year’s time.

As for my to-watchlist, I might as well give you an update on its status, for when I do get the chance to watch more of it, I’m about to get to the stuff I’ve been really looking forward to: when I started it out, combining it with any additions I made in the process, I had a list of 209 series to go through. At this point there are only 63 series on that list left. As soon as I get to fifty I can get to the stuff that I’ve really been looking forward to (you know, the Honey&Clovers, etc). First I still want to finish off a few sequels or spinoffs before that, though.

If you’re wondering what’s up with this post: I was actually asked by the marketers of AnimeTV to review their first episode. It’s awesome to see such a request from a professional company, but at the same time that’s not going to stop me from giving it a fair review. AnimeTV basically is presented by Johnny Yong Bosch and Christina Vee, and it shows reviews of mainstream anime and interviews of important people in the American anime business. Right from the start it’s clear that it’s aimed at teenagers, rather than a wider demographic, so I’m not exactly the target audience, but here’s what I think about it:

Episodes are split up in three parts. The first part is called the “Hima segment”, where a panel of four people basically discusses what they’ve been watching, reading or playing. Basically a round of quick recommendations. The first part is a pretty nice recommendation for the Strongest Disciple Kenichi; it discusses why it’s more interesting than your average shounen, and even though it would have been interesting to see them discuss some of the lesser parts of the manga, it piqued my interest. After that there was a nice part about a new manga from Clamp and how they refuse to do cute stuff.

The segment completely derails after that, though. An overly obsessed Naruto fangirl starts rambling a completely incoherent story that clearly wasn’t prepared beforehand. In about one minute, she basically did just about everything that you shouldn’t do when making a quick recommendation: it’s incredibly disjointed, nonsensical for people who aren’t familiar with the Naruto franchise, instead of talking about what makes it good, she starts shipping her favourite couples, she imagines herself in the storyline and she actually spoils part of the storyline (way to go in a segment that’s meant to get people interested in a franchise…). This is the kind of talk that you’d expect in a bad fanfiction forum, not in such a professionally produced video like this.

After that another guy talks about the Yugioh trading card game, but he never really says anything about it. If I watched this video without knowing about it, I’d still be clueless. He just rambles on and on about how he pwns at the game, but that’s about it. People from Revision3: you wanted my opinion on this bit, and here it is: dump these two dimwits and replace them with two people who do know how to voice their opinions properly. You’ve got such a great opportunity to record a program to promote anime in a professional environment. You can’t waste it on these two people.

The next segment shows an interview, as we get to see inside the Bang Zoom studios (the same that was invaded by Conan o’Brien a few months ago, apparently), and an interview with a voice actors and one of its executives. This may just be me being outside of this show’s target audience, but that interviewer got very much on my nerves. He placed too much emphasis on himself, and too little on the actual people he tried to interview. I’m not sure whether teenagers would appreciate that style of interviewing more, though. When the interview actually gets to business, I guess it’s interesting enough, though not anything special. The second interview was a bit cheap, because the guy who was interviewed also worked as the producer of AnimeTV. It must not have been hard to get an appointment with him…

The third and final segment is an actual review of a mainstream anime, and I think that this is the best part of AnimeTV. What makes it more interesting than your average review is that the creators basically put four people in one room, and all of them have different opinions on what they watched. This is actually a pretty good way to collect different opinions. The fanboy and fangirl are back, though, and while they’re a bit better here, they pretty much stated the obvious and the girl again couldn’t resist to comment on the hotness on one of the male characters.

My basic issue with AnimeTV is that while they have nice ideas, a lot of the reviewers and interviewers don’t really make use of the unique opportunity here. They’re part of the Invision 3 network, which also has many other shows that are not about anime, and thus it has the potential to get non-anime fans curious into the franchise. If you then have a rambling Naruto fangirl going on and on about how she’d like to marry one of the characters, then that’s only going to have the opposite effect. With good reviewers however, it has the potential to be an interesting show.