You May Have Missed It: Good Shows from 2017

Hey again everyone – been gone a while but the end of the year gave me some motivation for another article. Partially inspired by finishing up some shows and partially inspired by my panels of an almost identical name, I decided to have a good to look at some of the more obscure shows from 2017. Now my twitter and reddit friends might be familiar with some or all of these – that’s fine, this is mostly for the casual viewer who didn’t have the time to sort through the countless number of anime that came out this year. So hopefully this thread will give you all some good suggestions. As an additional note, I will try to only list shows I’ve seen to give a more fair assessment, but will also include some I may have missed out on myself, given the buzz I saw for them. Of course, I won’t be including the big names like My Hero Academia or Konosuba – that would kind of defeat the point. This list will go from Winter 2017 to Fall 2017, according to anichart.net. (Additionally, all pictures for the shows are taken from MyAnimeList).

Serial Experiments Lain and the Future

Hey everyone, back again with another Lain post that I’ve had floating around in my head for a while. This post is going to be more based in speculation and how I think Lain relates to things that may come down the line – more of a brain dump for my own benefit as well as anyone who’s had similar thoughts. I continue to be obsessed with Lain and continue to want to learn more and think about it more – like I’ve mentioned previously I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of writing about the show. That kind of looking to the future is partially what inspired this article anyway. I think there’s a lot that could be said in regards to Lain and how society and technology may continue to advance forward.

Serial Experiments Lain and Rumors

Hey everyone, been a pretty slow year so far for the blog posts. I’ve been steadily gathering ideas from new shows I’ve been watching as well as getting inspiration from other sources and while I can’t say I’m going to go full force and start writing an article a week, I can say that I have been wanting to write about Lain more. I hope I always have Lain as a source of inspiration because I feel like there’s still so much I’d like to write about it that I just haven’t gotten to yet. For now, though, I’ll focus on the Rumors aspect of the show, which just so happens to be LAYER 08’s name as well.

Character Focus: Chitose Karasuma

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR GIRLISH NUMBER (ANIME)

Hello everyone, back with another recent(ish) character that I really thought I should write about. Girlish Number turned out to be one of my favorite shows of 2016 for a myriad of reasons, chief among them being that my sense of humor is actually pretty dark at times so a cynical show like this (from the same author of OreGairu, no less) was up my alley in a pretty big way. And Chitose was a major contributor to that. I realize that it was playing up the cynicism to a severe degree, but that’s what made it so entertaining and I think that even in the steeped cynicism of the show, Chitose came out on top (We won! A HA HA HA HA HA)

Character Focus: Kururi Futamaru

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR SCORCHING PING PONG GIRLS

Hey everyone – it’s been a while since my last Character Focus. Hell, it’s been a while since my last article. But I’ve been watching some more stuff and I found some more inspiration to write. Funny enough it came from one of the least likely places I would have thought – Scorching Ping Pong Girls, a show from Fall of 2016. It involved a lot of cute girls doing ping pong things. But hidden within that was actually some very good character development, at some points even reminding me of Ping Pong: The Animation with its writing. One that stood out the most was the green haired gothic lolita, Kururi Futamaru

Makoto Shinkai is NOT the New Miyazaki

There are NO SPOILERS for either director’s work in this article. 

Hey everybody, been a while since I’ve written something. As I haven’t really watched too many shows this season, I haven’t been really focusing on the “Character Focus” section of the blog and while I MAY want to write something soon, I want to finish the show before I approach it. ANYWAY. This is about something else. Something I thought had been put to rest a few years ago, but something that apparently rears its head from time to time whenever Shinkai is back in the news. And of course, that is the comparison between Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai. It seems like with the success of your name, the comparisons are coming up yet again and I wanted to voice my opinion on the matter.

Image from “your name”, 2016 film by Makoto Shinkai

Update of the Opinions

Hey everyone, another update here.

Gonna make this small enough to fit into a single paragraph. Basically, I feel like the criteria I have set for myself on the “Character Focus” have kind of limited me to a very small pool of characters that are almost exhausted, or ones that I would need to rewatch the series to write properly on. So they’ll be moving away from a “bi-weekly” format. I don’t know if I’ll replace them yet, I’m hoping to continue on with some other kind of semi-regular article that isn’t reviews. Good news though, I’m doing at least 3 panels at Anime USA 2016, so come check me out if you’re there! Thanks as always for reading.

Random Thoughts on “your name”

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE FEATURES SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE YOUR NAME, WHICH HAS NOT YET BEEN RELEASED.

As promised in my Anime Expo article, I will be talking about Makoto Shinkai’s new movie “your name”. I took some time to think about whether I wanted to write this in the first place; given that I have no one to talk about it with outside a select few thousand people who viewed it at Anime Expo with me, where I had the pleasure and the ability to watch it a month and a half before anyone else. But I decided that I really wanted to see what my own thoughts were like when jolted down given my single viewing and then hopefully compare them when the movie actually releases and I’m able to watch it over and over and over again. So, yes, there will be spoilers so only read if you’re morbidly curious about the movie itself.

Anime Expo 2016: Post-Con Thoughts

Hey everyone, I’m back with another convention post as I just got done with Anime Expo 2016, certainly the biggest convention I’ve ever been to and also the biggest anime convention in North America. It was quite a few months in the making, giving that I was traveling across the US from VA to CA and the cost was nothing to scoff at either but the whole thing went off well enough, as far as getting to the con and getting back safely after the con was over. Of course, though, there were a few things I got to do and I suppose the easiest way to do it will be to go day by day.

Character Focus: Satone Shichimiya

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR BOTH SEASONS OF THE SHOW LOVE, CHUNIBYO, & OTHER DELUSIONS.

Hey everyone, I’m back again with another Character Focus article. It’s been a while in the making, as I’ve been a little stuck on who next to focus on. There are some options that I would like to revisit the shows for, but then again some of the shows are very long… anyway, today I thought I’d go for a bit of an off-kilter pick, for reasons I’ll explain later in the article. Today’s is about Satone Shichimiya, from Chūnibyō demo Koi ga Shitai Season 2 (Or, as it’s known in the US: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions). So let me get into the reasons as to why I want to write about her.