When one hears the phrase “blue literature,” one might first believe that the phrase describes literature with a lot of inappropriate humor. However, the adjective blue or “aoi” in this context refers symbolically to youthfulness. Aoi Bungaku or Blue Literature then refers to stories considered evergreen classics within the Japanese canon, and this is what the series contains.
As a long time anime fan, something I rarely experience is feeling “fooled” by something that I watch. There are certainly many anime with plot twists and turns, some of which spring up out of nowhere, but often enough the writing is on the wall if you know where to look (and if a twist is a complete and utter surprise with no clues whatsoever… well, that’s just poor writing). I do, however, enjoy being surprised by the media I consume, and then I further enjoy realizing that I could have figured out the surprise all along if I had just been paying better attention to the clues being dropped in front of my face.
In most cases, I’m perfectly happy to chalk up a difference in opinion as such and not get too hot-headed about it. As an anime fan, I’ve seen plenty of flame wars blow up over inconsequential nonsense over the years and I like to think I’ve learned my lesson. But there are still some times where I find myself grumbling over “people being wrong on the internet,” and the commentary surrounding the 2016 TV anime series The Lost Village was one of those situations.
The fun of long-running entertainment franchises is that they occasionally enter a stage where they become more like anthologies – playgrounds where many different stories are told using familiar characters. Lupin the Third is one such anime franchise. While the series has never really had a ton of continuity, the more recent series are a fun blend of ongoing storylines and one-off episodes that are more fun and occasionally fanservicey (of the type that’s more involved in signaling to folks who are “in the know” rather than the type that’s about nudity).
I felt like it was about time for some more vampires, so I wanted to revisit an interesting series from a couple of years ago that I really enjoyed. Mars Red is an animated interpretation of a live-action stage read (I’m not sure what makes this distinct from a typical play, but it’s how the source material is specifically described) and takes place in Japan in the early 20th century.
Rumiko Takahashi is probably best known for her more famous, long-running manga series. For my fandom generation, that would be Ranma 1/2, and for many others they probably have more fond memories of Inuyasha. Whether or not either of these is the case for you (or if you’re more a Maison Ikkoku or Urusei Yatsura wild card), you probably have a certain image of her craft in mind. However, like many artists, she has the ability to surprise with her storytelling range.
I always tell people that I’m a fan of sports anime, but that comes with the caveat that I’m extremely picky about the sports anime that I actually watch. If the tone is too juvenile or if the characters are too unlikeable (for a genre that relies so much on character interactions and growth, it’s wild to me how many contain just shitty characters), I won’t actually continue watching the series. So I suppose that I might not really be a sports anime fan, but instead just a general anime fan who happens to like some sports series (in the same way that I enjoy a few comedies, some mecha anime, etc.).
For many years I was kind of the de-facto anime provider for the anime club I attend. Mostly this was because I had been maintaining a version of this website for many a season, giving me insight into a lot of anime that wasn’t as popular with mainstream fandom but was still great and worth sharing with others. The other reason was probably because I was an adult with a job who could afford to constantly buy new anime DVDs (I’m not sure how that’ll go now that I’m paying for a kid, haha). Now that I’ve taken a slight step back from it for the time being (I continue to call myself an “alumni advisor” for the club but I think that’s just a title I’ve given myself rather than a label others would use) I’m getting the opportunity to see how tastes in anime have changed with newer fans. Or, how much they’ve stayed the same.
I’ve never been much of a Pokémon fan. I played the first-gen game when it was released in the US (as well as about three weeks worth of “Pokémon Go”) and I watched about a season of the cartoon series, but that’s about as far as my interest has ever reached. That said, one thing I’ve always appreciated about the franchise (in addition to its variety of cute creatures) is how ripe its setting is for all kinds of creative related media.
We’ve gotten more than a week into this Halloween list without talking much about Yokai, so I figure it’s about time to remedy that. Yokai are a category of spiritual entity within Japanese folklore. It’s a broad term that encompasses both malevolent and benign spiritual beings, with forms that run the gamut from inanimate objects to animals to humanoids. While the concept of Yokai has existed in Japanese culture for centuries, it was the late manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, who as a child was taught about them by an older female relative, who re-popularized them within a pop-culture context.