Tag: Unlicensed

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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 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 18: Level-E Episode 4 “From the Darkness”

While Halloween is typically thought of as a holiday revolving around spooky and scary things, I find that I have a lot more fun when there’s some spooky humor involved. Fear and laughter are often closely intertwined – how often have we experienced a jump-scare that leaves us laughing in the aftermath? It’s been a trend in my neighborhood this year for families to create funny scenes using the plastic skeletons that you can find for sale in the lead-up to Halloween. Some of my favorites have been a skeleton walking a skeleton dog on a leash, and a skeleton hanging off of a second floor balcony after falling off the roof during some roofing work (apparently). It takes a symbol of death and decay and makes it funny and fun!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 17: Aoi Bungaku Episodes 11-12

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.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 8: Hakaba Kitaro

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.

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