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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2020 First Impressions – Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, Pet, and Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

Life’s been busy lately. In addition to the new anime season, I’ve been attempting to keep up with the Awesome Games Done Quick stream, which has become a wonderful Winter tradition that I look forward to every year. I’ve been a fan of video game speed runs for a long time, ever since discovering TAS (tool-assisted speed run) videos way back in the day. It’s difficult to strike a balance between watching the new anime I’m excited about and experiencing the video game speed run culture I’ve grown to enjoy; in the end, both things are fleeting. Yet, the thing about new anime is that people talk about it on the internet, and there are a lot of spoilers, so sometimes it’s better to spoiler-proof oneself than to worry too much about whether the blindfolded Punch-Out run will be successful.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2020 First Impressions – Magia Record, ID: Invaded, and Seton Academy: Welcome to the Pack!

Now that Winter season premieres have kicked-off, it feels good to be back in the swing of things again. There was quite a bit of real-life stuff that kept me away from my writing over the past couple of months, so the fact that the timing worked out with my availability is a big relief for me. I’m hoping to stay as “on top” of things as possible this season. It’s always been my goal to watch and write about each premier before their second episodes come out. Thus far I haven’t been successful, but I’ve been close a couple of times in the past so I’m hopeful that I’ll achieve the goal someday.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2020 First Impressions – Somali and the Forest Spirit, Asteroid in Love, and Darwin’s Game

Oh yes, it’s that time again – time for new anime to debut and impress all of us anime fans! Despite forgetting to write about my most anticipated series until the last minute as usual, believe me when I say I’m usually pretty on top of what’s being released; my excitement exists even if that’s not always evident from what’s written here. Now that a couple of series have popped onto their various streaming services, it’s time to dive in and get excited.

Of course, there are just a few book keeping items to get out of the way, especially if you’re a new reader. These impressions are just that – impressions of first episodes, and not meant to be reviews of entire series. That said, I believe anime generally try to put their best foot forward early on, so if there are troubling things present in episode 1 (for me, that generally means overt sexism, racism, gratuitous violence, or other various content markers that tend to indicate stories that I’d find insulting in some way) I certainly want to mention that, and will be less likely to want to watch more of the series. And before anyone says anything about it – yes, I always end up with more than enough series to fill up my time, and don’t consider myself overly picky in any respect.

In any case, on to the new anime!

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Previews Reviews

Winter 2020 Anime – What I’m Looking Forward To

As usual, the new anime season kind of crept up on me. In my defense, the holidays late in the year take up a lot of my mental energy, and my job lately has been a real test of my patience (transitioning to a new position, yet still performing many aspects of my old one in addition while trying to learn the new processes). So maybe you readers will forgive me for being kind of absent for the last few weeks. Now that I have a day off and fewer weekend plans for a while, maybe anime can take the top spot on my priority list for a while (at least until Anime Detour prep ramps into high gear in a couple months… sheesh).

As with all my other seasonal previews, some of the things that sound interesting to me on paper may not pan-out at all come broadcast time, while series that don’t sound that compelling might turn out to be instant classics. That’s really the fun of discovering anime series as they appear on the many streaming services to which I subscribe – finding the good stuff where you don’t expect it feels like uncovering buried treasure. Anyway, below are some things that I’m interested in.

Note: As usual I’m using the confirmed/probable English titles of the anime in order to make it easier for readers to locate legal streams of the anime in which they’re interested.

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Favorites Special Features

A Decade of Favorites – 2010

Halloween 2010. Guest-starring my friend Anthony!

I’ve been through a lot over the past year, and it’s just now occurred to me that we’re about to enter a new decade (well, depending on how you count your years… due to work-related reasons I’m more inclined to start a new set of 10 things on a “1,” but I suppose that’s pedantic and also completely beside the point). This decade has definitely been an interesting one for anime series and movies. At the beginning of the decade the industry was still in the process of shoveling itself out from beneath the the remains of its busted economic bubble and because of it there were a few years where there just weren’t as many series being released. That’s not to say that there weren’t still some very good and memorable ones, but there were few enough that a decently-motivated person could catch all of the year’s stand-out series without investing a lot of extra time.

Nowadays we’re comparatively inundated by anime (at last count this year we were somewhere around 150 anime series, and that number doesn’t include films, ONA series, or OVAs… yowzers!). I’m continually both thrilled and frustrated by the fact that, as much as I would like to watch every better-than-average anime series that comes around, it’s almost impossible for me to do so without sacrificing something else in my life. Still, I’ve seen a lot of anime over the past 10 years, and looking over lists of the various series and films has been a good reminder of how much good the industry has been able to accomplish with its storytelling, even while sometimes struggling financially and in areas related to the treatment of its workers. Like many other bloggers, I think it might be fun to look back on some of my favorites over the years, as we prepare to plunge forward into a new decade.

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Anime Reviews Reviews

Anime Review – KONOSUBA: God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World – Legend of Crimson

The Crimson Demon village that Megumin and Yunyun are from is facing a threat that could mean it’s ending. Kazuma and his gang follow Yunyun, who returns to the Crimson Demon village intent on saving it when they are faced with their greatest threat yet. – ANN

Availability: Theatrical Release

Episodes: 1 Film

Source: Light Novel

Review: Note: This review contains some plot spoilers for the film.

Sometimes it’s good to go outside your comfort zone; in other cases, it’s good to be reminded why your comfort zone exists in the first place. I had the opportunity to attend a screening of the Konosuba movie recently. To be honest, the extent of what I know about the series comes mostly from memes, gags, and general fandom osmosis, because the original anime adaptation was released when I was at a low point and I never found the time to go back and catch up with it. I assumed it wouldn’t be too difficult to get my bearings, especially since it’s difficult not to have some passing familiarity with the main characters and their foibles at this point in the anime fandom game. That, and when the cold hits in Minneapolis there’s really not that much else to do than join your local fandom friends in a fun indoors activity, so why not?

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30 Day Anime Challenge Special Features

30 Day Anime Challenge #9 – Best Anime Villain

Well, I’m back again for another entry in this thought-provoking prompt series, and boy is this a challenging subject. Villainy in storytelling can be extremely subjective; when a villain’s motivations are known and their character reads as sympathetic, their status as an iconic, cackling villain doesn’t always pan-out. Yet if the character is a mustache-twirling baddie who does terrible things for no good reason whatsoever (beyond acting as something for the “good-guys” to battle against), that usually feels unsatisfying. It’s the rare character that fits the stereotypical “villain” mold and yet is still nuanced enough to be worth talking about. It’s a conundrum, to be honest.

The more I’ve thought about the “best” (worst?) anime villain, the more my mind has been tempted to go abstract. I don’t think I could narrow the concept down to one character anyway, and considering the types of series I tend to gravitate towards (slice-of-life stories, or character dramas), my selection pool isn’t that great to begin with. So I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to talk about something I’ve been meaning to for a while – toxic masculinity.

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Reviews

What I’m Watching – Carole & Tuesday (Eps. 1-12)

Note: This post contains some spoilers for the series through episode 12.

This past weekend I got the opportunity to speak at GalaxyCon, a multi-media fandom convention in my hometown. We capped off our weekend presenting “Shiny New Anime,” a panel where my husband and I share thoughts about and clips of some of our favorite anime from the past year (on a roughly 12-month rolling scale… sometimes stuff a little bit older sneaks in there if it has a second season or we missed it the first time around). In the lead-up to a convention, I generally try to catch up and finish at least some of the series on my plate; my general viewing habits aren’t that great, and while I’m sure I’d get more done if I kept up with anime on a weekly basis, the reality is that aside from a few shows where being caught-up is pretty necessary (Attack on Titan comes to mind), I tend to watch anime in multi-episode chunks after-the-fact.

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Conventions Special Features

GalaxyCon Minneapolis – Panel Materials

Hi everyone! We had a great time at the inaugural GalaxyCon Minneapolis, and appreciate that they allowed us to run some of our anime programming there. Below are my panel materials from Shiny New Anime. There are only minor differences between this version of the panel and the one that we gave at Anime Fusion, but I was able to swap a couple of things out and added in a clip for Carole & Tuesday, which I was able to watch in the interim (well, the first half at least… thank you, Netflix).

Feel free to download these, share them, and enjoy them. If you re-purpose them in any way, please provide me credit. While I obviously don’t create the anime that are featured in the presentation, I do write up my own descriptions, put together the slide presentation, and cut all the clips which can get time-consuming! Mostly I just want to share my love and enjoyment of anime with the community, though, which is why I offer this stuff with pretty much no questions asked.

Shiny New Anime – Handout
Shiny New Anime – PowerPoint Presentation

Please let me know if there are any broken links, and thank you!

Categories
30 Day Anime Challenge Special Features

30 Day Anime Challenge #8 – Favorite Anime Couple

I’m sure some of you will recall that I was attempting the “30 Day Anime Challenge” at some point, right? Personally I just use the prompts when I can’t think of things to write about on my own; I’m not hung up on the 30 days being consecutive, obviously. In any case, while I catch up on some of my anime-watching behind the scenes, I thought I’d try to tackle some more items off of this particular list.

This subject is actually a little bit difficult for me, to be honest. I wouldn’t say that I seek out much anime where romance and character couplings are the primary concern of the story. Anime romance, like other genres, tends to center young people. While teens definitely have the potential to experience the full range of emotions that come along with love and loss, many anime stories focus more on overcoming the hurdle of confessing one’s feelings than the subsequent development of a relationship -and I’m honestly more interested in the latter. Keeping that in mind, it seems like that would narrow the potential pool quite a bit.

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