Some thoughts on the delays

by psgels, posted in Special Articles

I really want to apologize for the lack of updates. I’m currently trying to catch up on Uchoten Kazoku’s episodes. I should have an episode review of them ready tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d like to talk about what it means to be blogging, and the moment that every single blogger dreads: the lack of updates. This is a very personal entry, but I hope that it helps both myself and others who are in similar situations. For those of you with a tl;dr mindset: I have no intention to quit blogging; I still really like tihs blog, and nothing about that has changed.

In my nearly eight years of blogging, I have seen a lot of blogs coming and going. In general, the short-lived blogs quit because the author loses interest: it’s a nice little experiment, but either a loss of enthusiasm for anime itself, or the inability to just blog regularly is usually the reason for these blogs to close down. For the longer-lived blogs, the reason usually is that people grow out of anime; they change and the priorities in their lives. I’ve also seen a handful who come back after a hiatus of a few years, but that usually just ends with a few posts.

As for me, I still identify as a blogger. It’s true that we just had the worst Spring Season in the past ten years, and a pretty abysmal Winter Season as well, but I really noticed that that didn’t diminish my love for anime. There were plenty of series that still captured me, ranging from Aku no Hana, Shingeki no Kyojin to From the New World and Chihayafuru. And the current Summer Season is really showing that Anime is far from dead. Series like Uchoten Kazoku, Tamayura, the new Rozen Maiden: I already love them and I really want to cover them.

So yeah, the problem is where to find the time to blog everything. I’ve said before that I’ve been very busy, both with my full time job, and that I’ve got a much bigger social life than what I used to have now. I always was a bit vague on what that actually meant, so let me elaborate a bit on my schedule.

I actually just started my new job last week. It’s a job of 36 hours per week. Mondays through thursday I work eight hours, and on fridays I work half a day. On fridays and during weekends, I usually have some sort of appointment with some friends of mine, or attend some public events that I know that people with similar mindsets attend as well. On weekdays I’m usually at home around 6pm, and done with dinner around 7pm, ideally.

The thing is, that it’s not like I don’t have the time to blog anymore. I know for a fact that if I use my time well, even with all my appointments, I can blog 12 shows per week and even have time for a movie. It’s also not like I don’t have the energy for it. I know from experience that I can get energized while watching a good episode. This season is full of those series! The problem is that I spend way too much of my time on the internet, browsing pointless videos that serve no point whatsoever. I’d say about 20% of it is useful: checking mail, keeping up with friends, that kind of stuff. However most of it is just random goofing off; spending way too much time on facebook, or watching stupid Let’s plays on youtube.

Let me get on a bit of a tangent here, because I also dabbled in a bunch of western games during the past half year. This is sortof relevant to this post, because I noticed that playing these games only increased my laziness in the long run. The thing is though, that gaming nowadays sucks for me. And it’s not like I picked bad ones. I’m talking about games like Minecraft, Civilization, the Binding of Isaac. Games that sound good and full of depth on paper, and I used to be a fan of civilization in the past, but every single one of them gets bogged down by repetition. Minecraft had me mining the same rock for hours after each other. Civilization starts off interesting, until you have to do the same tasks over and over again and games take waaaay too long, and the Binding of Isaac also isn’t really random once you realize that all you’re doing is running through a bunch of rooms and shooting things. It’s also a problem that I’m not good at gaming, so it takes me even longer than the people

Another example of this: platformers. I recently played Rayman Legends, after being a big fan of the first two Rayman series. But there too, the levels just kept looking way too much like each other and halfway through the level designers just give up and start to recycle previous levels. This is the same repetition I see at all kinds of other platform games: everything is just way too similar after playing a bunch of levels. There is way too much repetition and way too little creativity. Even Skyrim got tedious after killing the umpth zombie.

NB: as a honorable mention, these are western games that I do consider to be good:
– Portal: It’s short, witty and keeps you interested; the hype is very annoying, but this is what games should aim to be. And I mean the philosophy of variation, not just literally paste Glados in every game. That totally misses the point.
– Temple of Elemental Evil: a western RPG, half broken without a fan-made patch and a bare-bones story. However, what I loved is what you could completely customize your own set of characters and most importantly: you are encouraged to make these characters flawed and incredibly diverse, making it ridiculously fun to do all sorts of creative things with them, and watch them grow. The only downside: the more characters you have in your party, the less experience you get, the more you need to grind. Grinding is evil!
– Beyond Good and Evil: short game, divided into four arcs. Every arc is different and focuses on a different element of gameplay and has a different atmosphere.

Anyway, repetition. It can be incredibly evil. It can trap you in this routine that you can’t escape from. The more you get used to it, the more you keep looking for options that offer easy kinds of repetition. However, there are enough examples of good repetition. This is the type of repetition that is fulfilling. Think about getting out of bed at the same time each day, doing exercises on a regular basis, spending time on your hobby (in my case blogging). The annoying part is that the evil repetition easily has power over your will and motivation to focus on the good repetition, and once you lose that focus on the good repetition, getting back is impossible unless you put in effort.

You can’t just say “I’m going to do better”. That won’t work, you’ll usually succumb to the evil repetitions usually within seconds. You need to completely change your mindset, and actually DO it, not just talk about it. Acknowledging the problem doesn’t work, while wasting time on the internet I see way too many people just joke about it, without offering any practical hints of how to get over it (9gag is by far the worst offender of this, and everyone should actively block that evil website).

So I was wondering what you guys do in order to get out of a slump? For me, I noticed that with other parts of my life, the concept of fear or impending doom was a good motivator, and at this point in my life I have learned how to turn fear into positive emotions. I haven’t learned how to create it and make use of that, though. Go ahead and share some of your experiences.

Uchuu Kyoudai – 62 – 66

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

Thank god I finally managed to catch up to this series. And don’t get me wrong, Space Brothers is awesome, but it’s also so intimidating to fully watch through. I remember that a few years ago, when the average series length started to change from 26 episodes to 13, that I lauded the series that went on really long. At this point, I see that things just are not so simple: ideally, series should go on for like 26 or 39 episodes (on average, there are always exceptions): that way they aren’t cut off early, they’ve got their time to build up their story, but they are also forced to be concise. As much as I love Space Brothers, it drags. A lot.

These episodes comprise two arcs: the first one focuses on Sharon, the second focuses on flight training. Sharon’s arc was really good here. I nearly got a bit teary-eyed when Serika brought the bad news to her, that she really should see a doctor. In terms of character-develooment, these episodes added so much to Sharon’s character.

The pilot training, I get why it’s important, but I also feel like it’s reusing a lot of things from previous arcs. It was nice to see this one character who appeared months ago to reappear again, but this is the second time that Mutta ends up with an instructor that everybody finds weird but is actually secretly brilliant. It’s again some sort of astronaut training.

Don’t get me wrong, these episodes raised plenty of good points. I mean the past number of episodes showed the first real hints of why Mutta will set himself apart. First of all he now has the motivation with Sharon, plus he also has the instructor who can bring him to the top. I also like that it criticized the ranking system for astronauts due to the arbitrary assignment of teachers, and it did give some insight about flying a jet and all. Overall the episode just was not THAT interesting to watch. Build-up is awesome, but you do need to keep in your audience’s attention.
Rating: 4,5/8 (Good)

Rozen Maiden 2013 – 03 & 04

by psgels, posted in Rozen Maiden 2013

I love how different this series turned out to be from the original Rozen Maiden! It still has the same characters, but the atmosphere, the execution, and the themes are completely different here. That’s what a good sequel should be: avoid the tried and true and go into its own direction! It also really helps that this direction is much more mature now.

These past two episodes: they’re really well detailed! Heck, over the span of three episodes we’ve just seen one doll, and even she appeared at just the end of the third episode. In the meantime we get a full look into the life of the grown-up Jun, and into his mind. Because of this we can really see how meeting with Shinu is subtly changing him. There’s enough tension between his job, and taking care of Shinku as well, not to mention how Shinku said at the end of episode four that this can only last for seven days. The whole interplay between young and old Jun is also very good.

What’s also different: there is quite a bit of symbolism added in the narration, ranging from that kid’s story that always pops up in the middle, to various visual symbols when characters are explaining things. The question now is what will happen next: they’re obviously building up to something. Will they be able to use this build-up?
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

Tamayura – More Aggressive – 03 & 04

by psgels, posted in Tamayura

Seriously. This is one of the cutest anime that I have seen in a long, long while. I mean, over these entire two episodes, I just kept going “d’awwwwww” at just about everything the characters did. That is very rare for me: usually I hate series that aim to be cute. The big reason for that is that 90% of those characters are not characters: they’re either cardboard cut-outs, they try to play up their cuteness too much, plain stupid, contrived, and just plain underdeveloped. Tamayura has something that makes the entire cast different from that.

What Potte is trying to do: that really invoked empathy from me. Perhaps my own shyness connected with her, or perhaps it was because of how much development she already has. These two episodes really were about overcoming shyness, and they really did that well. Even beyond Potte, that one teacher was a very nice touch, about how it took him like, 20 tries to ask what he wanted. And the whole performance. It was so bad, yet so adorable!

The new character already feels right at home after four episodes, and the great thing is that she doesn’t feel forced in, but it was more than logical for her to appear. The rest of the cast, Potte’s friends, they’re close to her and all, but most of them don’t share her passion for photographing,and the ones that do are either much older or younger. Here she managed to find someone of her own age and experiences to connect with.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi – 03 & 04

by psgels, posted in Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi

This series could have gone wrong so easily. Seriously, from the outside it looks like your average show with a bishie and a cute girl, but it’s just consistently interesting. What this show is really good at is playing with the motivations of its characters: everyone here has this interesting backstory. And it just keeps getting better.

What this show is very bad at is making its action scenes believable. I mean I know she got help and all at the end of that third episode, but a 12-year old should not be able to smash through a bunch of well-muscled adults so easily. Even if they are zombies. But yeah, I can’t really stay critical at that scene, because everything else really had me charmed like no other. I did not expect that turn of events, let alone that that guy died!

And then there was episode four. I mean, at first it was a bid dodgy what the creators were trying to do there with the characters traveling around and all, but they really wasted no time to further explore the setting. This episode was most likely unrelated to the plot and all (aside from perhaps the last part), but it continues to use its setting really well, with that huge city full of dead people, showing how the walking corpses try to deal with the fact that they’re not alive anymore.

But yeah, this is a great mystery-series: it makes you hungry, it brings the kinds of twists you don’t expect, and the revelations are predictable, yet they are brought in a fresh way that you still don’t see coming when they do.
Rating: 5,5/8 (Excellent)

Shingeki no Kyojin – 15

by psgels, posted in Shingeki no Kyojin(Attack on Titan)

After the first big action-oriented arc, Shingeki no Kyojin is in its intermezzo arc: the arc that does not focus on action, but instead is aimed at exploring the background of something, in this case the titans. Arcs like these don’t have action: they can’t depend on flashy graphics or fast-paced entertainment to keep the viewer busy, so their subject material really needs to be interesting here more than ever now.

Many series before have attempted to first show enemies as ruthless monsters, only to show a bit of humanity into them. My experience told me that this is very hard to really do well. The obvious solution would be to just hint that these beings also have some sort of humanity in them. Gargantia did that for example, but that was way too quick to really come of as convincing, especially how they used it. Shingeki no Kyojin has an intersesting approach here, by using this nutcase of a character really well.

This is new: a character who is so desperate to see the titans from a different angle. She’s fully aware of what they did, yet she forces herself to bond with the titans she caught, even though there are no hints whatsoever that they’re actually taking note of her and recognizin her. It’s like herding a bunch of amnesiac tigers, only ten times worse. And this actually worked.

In one way, Eren is a great main character. I mean, there is not much to his character, but as an observer he works quite well: he’s hardly ever in control of the situation, which gives the side cast tons of different oppotunities to shine and show themselves off. You way too often have these main characters who try to hog all of the spotlights, but he stays very surprisingly away from that.

Also, that final sentence of the episode intrigued me.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Gatchaman Crowds – 02

by psgels, posted in Gatchaman Crowds

Regarding the argument that this isn’t Gatchaman: I’d like to disagree, slightly. I have not seen the original Gatchaman or anything, but I’d personally like to see this as a modern rendition of Gatchaman with a lot of creative liberties taken to it. For those who say that it shouldn’t use the name “Gatchaman”, but instead just go with its own story, let me ask you this: would this show have gotten enough sponsorship deals if that were the case? I mean, this could have easily been away from Gatchaman and all, but sometimes compromises have to be made, and to me it’s the kind of compromise that doesn’t really bother me. Plus, this series contains a TON of homages anyway.

Anyway, Gatchaman Crowds. You can really see that this comes from the director and writer of Tsuritama: a bright and colourful world, combined with characters that are this really strange combination between idiot and straight-faced. I mean that lead girl at first reminded me a lot about Haru, but she moves more and more away from him. Haru only had his powers. This girl actually accomplished stuff, and she doesn’t take things at straight value. She doesn’t just attack stuff just because people tell her to. Not to be rebellious, but because she uses her head and observes.

In this episode Gatchaman also showed its themes: it’s about social media, quite a modern topic when you compare that to other series (a lot of series could take place in the year 2000 just as easily), hence the “Crowds”-part of the title. It’s about how social media continues to make a larger and larger part of our lives and most bizarre of all, they seem to be making the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg the ultimate villain. Okay.

Having said that, I do hope that after this, Kenji Nakamura is going to work with another writer than Toshiya Ono. I mean, Toshiya Ono is a good writer who knows his build-up, but he’s also very childish and I do feel that Kenji Nakamura is at his best when he tackles mature topics and storylines. But yeah, with the two series that really set him apart (Bake Neko and Mononoke), he really was aided by a set of excellent writers, among others Chiaki J Konaka and Tomoko Konparu, who really know how to oo original plots like no other. The part where this immaturity was the most annoying was near the end of the episode, where that one person seemed to suggest that ambulances weren’t necessary with the use of that social network. And yeah, that is looking down on real paramedics. A lot.

Also, that one scene where the people fell from the stairs. What happened there? The animation was really clunky and it was hard to make out what on earth that alien-thingy did there.
Rating: 4.5/8 (Good)

Silver Spoon – 02 & 03

by psgels, posted in Silver Spoon

I’m back from London. It was really big, but also great. And Kero, Sachin and Smurph: you were awesome. It really was great to meet you!

And now I have the daunting task to catch up to everything again. Starting off: Silver Spoon, the latest Noitamina-series. Thank god, afte the past spring season had that Katanagatari-rerun. Next autumn there will be two new original series and a second Psycho Pass season has been announced, so the timeslot will be back in its glory again.

But first: a Moyashimon-esque series about farming. On the surface the two series really are similar: a guy joins an agricultural school, with a lot of quirky characters. The difference is how both series look at quirks. In Moyashimon, all of the quirks were played straight, and you got to love the characters because of that. In Silver Spoon, there is more lurking underneath the quirks.

Silver Spoon toys with your assumptions. In that way, you could see that this comes from the same writer as Full Metal Alchemist: one moment it’s serious, and the other it’s silly. And it uses the serious moments to build up for its jokes, only to bring the characters back to reality again by showing the harsh realities of farming that a lot of people like to pretend aren’t there.`I mean, the thing with the vererinarians being able to kill animals? Powerful stuff. The combination between comedy and drama was probably done best with the piglets.

I wouldn’t immediately see that Silver Spoon is better than Moyashimon at this point. The big danger for this series is that it will start getting too melodramatic, which is something that Moyashimon managed to avoid on the whole. The main character’s background… it feels a bit too angsty for my tastes. It’s there where there was no comedy whatsoever, which felt a bit out of place.

Another thing that this show does quite well is the balance of the cast. There are a lot of characters here, but they’re all quite different and colourful, especially when you look at the main side characters. Though granted, some of the minor side characters are walking cardboard cut-outs.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Short Hiatus

by psgels, posted in Special Articles

Hey everyone, the next few days I will be gone on a holiday to England, including London where I’ve managed to make an appointment to meet up with a few readers and Salisbury, where I’m going to try and get into Stonehenge, although that turned out to be quite annoying to take care of if you don’t have a credit card….

Anyway, I’ll be back later. Take care, everyone.

Uchoten Kazoku – 02

by psgels, posted in Uchoten Kazoku

Yeah, what can I say? Uchoten Kazoku stands with head and shoulders at the top of non-sequels this season. It could have easily been the second Noitamina-series this season. For those who don’t know: this was originally written by the guy who wrote Yojou-han Shinwa Taikei, and with this it really is clear: this guy is a really good writer. This has by far the best script of the entire season: it’s just way more eloquent than every single other series.

And then there is PA Works that managed to breathe this to life really well. These episodes are all scripted out really well, starting with random dialogue, a bit of conflict here and there, and then ending with a very powerful climax. What also surprises me: these two episodes were very different: first the drama was about that old tengu. The second was about the family of the main character, and what kind of impact the father had on it. Powerful stuff.

This show knows its build-up very well: there’s just so much in each episode, but everything somehow adds up to each other. Every character gets a chance to talk about his or her feelings and gts the chance to be fleshed out really well thanks to that excellent dialogue, with the result that there are already a ton of likable characters within just two episodes. I really liked the frog in this episode, the mother was really charming, and even the two tanuki from that other family were different from the usual brats: they were brats, but the way in which they transformed, plus their place in their own family made them also interesting to watch.

A lot of characters here are Tanuki, and a lot of the characters really have this animal side to them. The only one who doesn’t is the main character, or rather he is very much different from the rest of the cast. You can see he’s a tanuki with how he treats his own transformation powers, but aside from that I miss that animal side of his.
Rating: 5,5/8 (Excellent)