Month: February 2021

Categories
Game Reviews Opinion Personal Reviews

Threads Reconnecting: A Discussion of Supergiant’s “Hades”

Note: This post contains thematic and story spoilers for Supergiant Games’ Hades. If you’re thinking about checking the game out, I highly suggest you do so! Then feel free to come back and let me know what you think.

It’s difficult to resist the urge to refer to 2020 as a lost year, because for so many of us it feels like the culmination of a lot of bad decisions and missed opportunities. For me personally, it was a time period defined by stress without a healthy outlet. I couldn’t attend conventions and see friends, I could really go on vacation, I suffered an undercurrent of fear that something might go awry with my or my husband’s employment situation… and that’s even aside from the relentless thumping of day after day of exhausting election news. It was bad enough for long enough that I couldn’t even get myself to watch anime. For some, their hobbies are an escape; something that lets them settle into a pleasant state of mind and forget about the outside world. For me, it’s kind of the opposite in that I have to be in a certain state of mind to be able to focus and enjoy something.

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Categories
Opinion Personal

Anime Fandom on Our Own Terms

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, mostly for the purposes of looking at cool art and memes and keeping up on anime news. It seems like every few weeks lately, some bozo has blasted onto the scene with some dismal hot take about who “deserves” to be a part of the anime fandom. The last time this happened the commentary had a specifically sexist bent, but for whatever reason I decided to keep my mouth shut. It honestly gets exhausting to have to defend my place in anime fandom all the time so I usually just don’t take the bait; I’m old enough now and have seen the fandom landscape change and grow so much for the better that some troll’s short-sighted vision of how their preferred fandom should operate isn’t worth the oxygen it takes to argue about it. And if they don’t believe that women and nonbinary folks have been around and even acted as formative members of most if not all genre fandoms, well… they’re allowed to be wrong, and loudly.

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Categories
Reviews

My Favorite Moments – Week of 1/31/2021

So, friends, we’ve gotten to that point in the anime season where real life starts to get in the way, and it becomes a bit easier to see where one’s priorities are. I’m someone who thrives on regularity, so when I was suddenly asked to fill in for another position at my job due to pandemic-related absences, it threw things into pandemonium. Doing two jobs at once isn’t really my preference, though the second job is the one I used to perform so at least it didn’t require any training. But it did affect my work hours and the overall ability to schedule out my days, and while you wouldn’t think starting and ending the workday an hour later would be a big deal, apparently it was for my brain.

I’m not a great writer to begin with, but making it so that my evenings were shorter and with less time to edit meant that I wouldn’t have much time to turn my words into something passable, so I decided to just let things go for the week and deal with it later (avoidant personality for-the-win). While this job shift is likely to last at least a few days into this next week, I did want to try to at least come up with something to post, so here’s another selection of moments I enjoyed in the anime I’ve been watching lately. Perhaps at some point these posts will get caught-up with the present… but it’s me so I wouldn’t count on it!

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Categories
Reviews Short Takes

My Favorite Moments – Week of 1/24/2021

I thought I’d try something new this season since I’m attempting to keep on top of so many series. While I don’t have the time nor the energy to do a weekly recap for all of the anime I’m watching, I thought it might be fun to post periodically about all the specific scenes, story beats, or moments that bring me joy while I’m going through my watch list. In the future, I might not limit it to currently-airing anime, either; lately I’ve even managed to watch a few things lately from previous seasons, or re-watched anime just for fun (I know, right?).

This post will obviously contain spoilers: this time we’ve got spoilers for episode 4 of Laid-Back Camp Season 2, Heaven’s Design Team, Horimiya, SK8 The Infinity, and Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki. It’s my aim to avoid some of the longer-running, plot-heavy series like The Promised Neverland and Attack on Titan in these posts, mainly because spoilers are more touchy and it gets more difficult to talk about any current revelations without going back and discussing earlier points at length. This could definitely change in the future depending on what happens, though.

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