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Conventions Special Features

Anime Detour 2024 – Panel Materials and Convention Thoughts

Hi all! I’m about a week out from Anime Detour 2024, which is my “home” anime convention in Minneapolis. I’m sure there are those of you who have sought out this post for my panel materials and such, so without further ado they’re linked below:

Shiny New Anime: PowerPoint Presentation (please note: this presentation requires a full version of PowerPoint because of the embedded videos. If you’re using the online viewer, please download the clips separately if you want to see them).

Shiny New Anime: Hand Out

Shiny New Anime: Clips

AMV Contest: YouTube Playlist (note that not all entrants list their AMVs on a streaming site and it’s not an entry requirement for them to do so, and sometimes if they do they will wait to “premiere” them until the conventions they’ve entered them in have occurred. This playlist includes entries that were available when I put the playlist together, which is the majority of them but not all).

Now, read below for more of my thoughts and reactions to this year’s convention!

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First Impressions Reviews

First Impressions: Delicious in Dungeon

Streaming: Netflix

Episodes: 24

Episode Summary: Adventurer Laios and his party find their dungeon crawl cut short when one of their party members, Laios’s sister Farin, is chomped up by a red dragon. As her final act, Farin uses magic to whisk Laios, Marcille, and Chilchuck safely to the surface. Now, having lost most of their supplies and looking at pawning their equipment to get the funds they need, Laios turns to an idea he’s been kicking around for a while. Rather than bringing their rations with them down into the depths of the dungeon, why not just kill and eat the creatures who call that dangerous place home? It would hopefully allow them to reach Farin before she’s digested, at least.

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Meta Personal

Happy New Year!

Hey all, I hope everyone had a satisfying end to their year and are at least trying to be ready for whatever unpredictable nonsense that 2024 is likely to throw their way.

Normally I’d want to take after Anime News Network and most of the other blogs that I follow and put together some sort of “year in review,” but the honest truth is that, after about April/May I didn’t watch very much anime at all. I had all these notions that, while on maternity leave I’d have nothing but time to sit in front of a TV with my husband and baby and binge watch shows, but with the lack of normalized sleep, each day flowed into the next and all I had the mental energy for was to keep a constant stream of Seinfeld episodes running in the background. I have since become somewhat insufferable in my use of Seinfeld references in everyday life, but I was always a little insufferable anyway.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 31: Some You Already Probably Know

Well, somehow I managed to make it to the end of October having put up a post each day about some of my favorite obscure, and less-obscure spooky, supernatural anime. Having gone back to work after having a baby, I consider that quite a feat (especially since I have maybe 2.5 or 3 hours of semi-useful awake time after I get home from work to cram in everything I need to do, including chores and what-not). Today, since it’s now everyone’s favorite spooky Autumn holiday, I thought I’d take it easy and throw out some recommendations for a few series that are more popular and easier to find. I want to throw folks a bone who don’t want to deal with gray-area media legality. I hope everyone has enjoyed this spooky season series, and if you know of a particular spooky series I didn’t cover, feel free to throw the title into the comments. I might do something like this again next year!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 30: Some Shorts and One-Shots

Have you ever had a memory that you weren’t exactly sure was real? Recently, when I was coming up with the list of episodes and series to cover throughout October, I faintly recalled an OVA I’d seen some years ago. All I could remember about it was that it involved people fighting using calligraphy, and that the title probably started with an “S.” Not very helpful. I first checked over what I had saved on my large hard drive of archived anime, and no dice. Then I tried to Google search based on various keywords. Nope. It wasn’t until I took my entire lunch break today to go through My Anime List year-by-year that I finally figured out what it was. Hopefully the result will be worthwhile to my readers!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 29: Otherside Picnic

There are relatively few anime series that star adult characters, so when I find one I definitely take notice, even if the end product is somewhat uneven. Take Otherside Picnic, a series that stars two college-aged heroines who become friends (and more). At its best, the series is creepy and unsettling; at its worst, it’s merely enjoyable. But overall it’s a fun ride with some amusing characters who find themselves in some spooky situations.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 28: Shiki

There’s almost nothing as satisfying to me as revisiting something I enjoyed in the past and realizing just how correct I was about it. Case in point: Shiki. I watched the series as a simulcast in one of the earlier incarnations of Funimation’s video streaming service. I had a backlog of episodes and spent an afternoon catching up to the current simulcast episode so I could watch it week-to-week from there (I believe episode 11 or 12; it was somewhere about halfway through the series). I’d been lukewarm about the series at first until that point; then I was hooked. But there are a lot of series I watched around that time period that I probably wouldn’t enjoy nearly as much more than a decade later. But I had the opportunity to watch Shiki again within the past couple of years and I think I may like it even better now.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 27: Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek

Mou ii kai?

Mou ii yo.

Thus begins a game of kakurenbo.

When you’re part of a group for a long time, you get to see the culture of that group develop and traditions emerge. The anime club I attend has always had a Halloween event where, rather than watching the typically scheduled anime (the series that people have voted on for that particular semester), there’s a costume contest and selections of spooky one-off anime to watch instead (some of the selections I’ve featured so far on this list have turned up in the past). Oftentimes folks will watch something as a younger attendee of the club that they’ll want to return to again a few years later; since many of the special event episodes that we watch are more obscure/lesser-known that your typical mainstream anime, I’m sure it leaves a stronger impression on many people. The first time I saw Kakurenbo was at one of these events many years ago.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 26: Blood-C

Hey look, it’s time for vampires again. Or is it? Over the years there have been a few different entries in the Blood franchise, which began in 2000 with Blood: The Last Vampire. In that animated film, a teenage girl named Saya battles vampire-like creatures on behalf of some mysterious American handlers, while allegedly (as we discover later) being an immortal vampire herself. In 2005’s Blood+, an alternative universe retelling of the general details of the film plays out over 50-something episodes. But we’re not here to talk about either of those versions today. Instead I’d rather share my feelings on the “black sheep” of the family, 2011’s Blood-C.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 25: Den-noh Coil Episode 9 “Miss Michiko From The Other Side”

It’s no secret that I love Den-noh Coil (or Dennou Coil if you prefer the classic romanization of the title). One look at my user icon across the various social media I use on a regular basis would tend to make that obvious. If you know, you know. And like many of the best anime out there, the series is structured in such a way that it deftly balances both the speculative ideas it’s trying to present, as well as the plot and character moments that define its emotional core. The first half of the series is largely spent world-building, laying the groundwork for the more plot-focused second half. Because of that, the first half features a lot of characters, locations, and moods that are tied together by the use of the cyber glasses that the characters wear. And because the first half is so focused on “dabbling,” it’s no surprise that one of the episodes is a great Halloween watch!

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