People seemed to enjoy my previous reflection on my time in anime club, even though it became more a stealth examination of the complicated emotions that come from wanting to belong to a group. I hope folks didn’t mind a little bit of a bait-and-switch. This time, though, I’d like to talk about something a little bit lighter, though I can’t promise that my musings won’t wander a little before the end.
Now that it’s no longer April 1st, I figure I’d be clear that this is meant to be a funny gag and not at all indicative of what I find “best,” though I do unironically love Inferno Cop and think it’s a very fun way to spend an hour or so of your time. As for everything else… I’ll leave that to you to decide.
Hi everyone! I thought today would be a great day to talk about some of the best anime ever made, because who doesn’t love learning about great anime? I know my taste is the best on the internet, so this ought to stand for all time as the definitive best-of list out there.
Me, about a week ago: “Wait, crap, the new anime season is about to start!”
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to get into a rhythm with my anime writing, and I think, compared to some, eh, historical periods of time around the blog, I’ve been doing okay. I achieved my goal of writing first impressions of all the new (non-sequel) series from Winter 2021, kept up with several of them for a least a few weeks, and naturally let ones drop off as I lost interest. It was pretty much an ideal situation for me, as I see it. I also had time to write a few longer-form, more philosophical posts, and that made me happy even though I suspect they tend to be a little uncomfortable to read and thus of less interest to people just looking for information on new anime (which is fine).
Hi folks. As some of you may have heard, we’ve been in the middle of a pandemic for a while (I know, it was a surprise to me – not). I help staff a volunteer-run anime convention called Anime Detour that takes place in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota during non-Covid times. We got kind of the short end of the stick in this whole situation, as the pandemic began to reveal itself around mid-March last year about two weeks before the in-person was scheduled to be held. When it was clear the convention was going to be canceled, we didn’t really have the time needed to put together an alternate event in the time frame that we were given. Now that we’re a year into this mess, most of us who participate in conventions have gotten to have at least some experience with online events, and it’s with that knowledge gained that Anime Detour has elected to run an online event this year.
This has been known for a few weeks now, but since the schedule for the event is now available I thought I’d pass the information along to my readers since my partner and I are participating in a few of the scheduled events. You can check out the full schedule and other details here, but below are the specific panels that we’re participating in. Times are Central Daylight Time, US:
Friday, April 2nd, 7:30 PM – Anime By Numbers
This is an anime trivia game where each answer is a number. Typically this is a team challenge, but of course it works a little differently online. We’ll have participation from a couple of guest panelists who will choose a couple of answers, and it’s up to the online audience to guess whether the actual answer is lower than both guests’ answers, in-between them, or over both. Hopefully this will be a fun time and give the audience a way to interact in a manner they would not normally be able to.
Saturday, April 3rd, 1:30 PM – Shiny New Anime
J.C. and I do this panel at many conventions throughout the year (typically), where we look at the anime we really enjoyed over the past year. We’re both dialing things back a little and expanding them this year – we’ve decided not to spend time talking about any sequels beyond short mentions, while also expanding the timeframe a little to encompass some series from late 2019/early 2020 that we didn’t get a chance to talk about with all the convention cancellations and stuff. We’ll still have fun clips to share (assuming the streaming situation works – I’m testing that out with tech later today), and gushing words to say about our favorite anime.
Saturday, April 3rd, 7:30 PM – The Precipice of Fanservice: How Much is Too Much?
A discussion about everyone’s favorite subject in anime – fanservice. J.C. and I will be joining Dave, our head of programming, to talk about the various manifestations of fanservice in anime and when/how those depictions might add to or detract from the viewing experience. I think this will be a pretty interesting discussion (I obviously have a lot to say on the matter, and so do my co-panelists!).
This is free and open to anyone who can access Twitch and YouTube, so even if you’d never be able to (or want to) attend a convention in the Upper Midwest United States in person, you can attend this! If you find yourself lacking in entertainment options this Friday and Saturday, we’d love to have you stop by.
I’ve attended an in-person anime club for quite a while now, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned that these sort of group organizations have kind of a bad rap. There are some YouTube personalities who’ve discussed this at length, and while I don’t doubt that they may have had some negative experiences (they’re hard to avoid when you put a large group of very different people together who are extremely passionate about something), personally I don’t share those feelings. My memories are more the sort that involve making friends, watching great anime, going to conventions in large groups, and generally just having a venue to immerse myself in what has become my primary hobby. Rather than contribute to the pile of “anime club horror stories” that exist on the internet, I’d prefer to write about some of the more positive, or at least truly interesting or thought-provoking things I’ve been able to experience as the member of an anime club that’s existed for multiple decades. I’ve been blessed to know many different people over the years, and have had the great privilege to watch various eras of anime fandom pass by, changing the ways in which we consume what we love.
Whew, it’s been a while since I’ve felt like writing something about what I’m watching and not about something more abstract (though I enjoy, in my own way, putting my emotions to the page in a way that intersects with anime – I hope readers will continue to indulge me). We’re at that point in the anime season where I’ve settled into a decent-ish routine and I’m starting to look ahead to the future (the new season starts in just a few weeks, folks). I’m also prepping for an online convention, and while I’m only really responsible for about 1.5 panels the one I’m mainly involved in is focused directly on great new anime from the past year, so I’ve got to squeeze in some of the shows I’ve missed somewhere. So obviously I’ve dropped a few things I stopped vibing with, and have put a few other series on hold since I’m fairly certain they won’t make the cut-off for my recommendation panel and so I can finish them later. You know, this almost feels like my typical Spring time cram session. Almost.
I’ll try to stay away from revealing major spoilers for any of these, but in all cases I’m at least a few episodes in, so keep that in mind.
Note: This post contains spoilers for recent episodes of SK8 The Infinity (episodes 7 and 8 specifically).
It will come as a surprise to no one that much of my sense of self is tied up in my life as a hobbyist. I entered my mid-20s as a mediocre college graduate, employed but not in a field I was passionate about, and began to develop my passions elsewhere by watching a lot of anime and writing about it. I also did fan-art (sometimes) and played some video games here and there. At least as far as those activities were concerned, I felt pretty good about myself. I’d always been praised for my artistic ability as a kid and for a long time I had deluded myself into thinking that I was better than most people, at least when it came to drawing anime-inspired cartoon characters (and any art teachers who may have critiqued my chosen subject matter were just art snobs with nothing to tell me). And as far as video games were concerned, I always managed to play through the most popular ones and when I was younger I’d even give tips and walkthroughs to my friends who were stumped. I spent a long time on the phone walking people through the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, that’s for sure.
Setting foot into the broader world disavowed me of a lot of those assumptions about my own skills. I was never too broken up about realizing that I was “just okay” at video games, because it became clear as I got older that I had less and less time to devote to the sort of sprawling, epic RPG’s I’d loved as a teenager. This felt to me more like an artifact of getting older, and while that’s disappointing to have to confront it’s also predictable. I still play and enjoy games when I get around to them, but I never had dreams of being some big-name gaming journalist or live streamer, so I’ve just never been left with a major sense of loss.
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.
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.
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!