Find me another series where witches on broom­sticks dog­fight mecha; where super robot King Lear fights spirit sum­mon Mac­beth in a con­test of Shake­spearean tragedies… with Shake­speare participating.

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Well we’ve fin­ished trans­lat­ing 1st vol­ume and it’s a sum­mer anime, so here’s the review!

Siko­rsky really isn’t the best illus­tra­tor, but he gets better.

I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly impressed by Cam­pi­one! when my friend first dragged me onto the project, its first chap­ter open­ing up like a typ­i­cal harem romance-comedy and the sec­ond fea­tur­ing a clas­sic shounen contemporary-fantasy bat­tle. But I was promised GAR enough to slay gods and the mythol­ogy to come along, so I kept with it, and for once I was taught not to judge a book by its open­ing chap­ters either. It’s still a harem series, but when author Taket­suki Jou decides to fight blas­phemy with blas­phemy, lead by a male com­pa­ra­ble with the demigod heroes of Greece and a hero­ine that manip­u­lates every­one (espe­cially her team­mates) under her fin­ger­tips, this becomes quite the cre­ative endeavor into mythol­ogy — of Heretic Gods.

Fans of mythol­ogy, of super­pow­ered GAR leads, of a harem that just might actu­ally work? Well this is the story for you.

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Some­how, I tend go miss­ing for a while and then fin­ish edit­ing posts in batches xD

[Deisel-turbo]

In many ways, Moshi­dora could be seen as a fic­tion­al­ized, dra­ma­tized man­age­ment text­book that started off with pure tech­ni­cal­ity and even­tu­ally brought audi­ence sym­pa­thy to the screen. Many of its char­ac­ters were never given proper depth, and for much of the series it felt more like an aca­d­e­mic case study than a story. It’s hardly sur­pris­ing (in fact I expected it), as the name dic­tates that the entire theme was cen­tered around a sin­gle book. But just as its own Mar­ket­ing went, it accom­plished this goal won­der­fully. My only regret is that I didn’t have the chance to watch it years ago— because man­age­ment skills often come into play way before you expect it.

Ducker’s Man­age­ment is def­i­nitely not just for ‘busi­ness­men in suits’… Read the rest of this entry »

Cul­tural shock always inter­ests me— assum­ing I’m not the one expe­ri­enc­ing it xD

Expe­ri­enc­ing the dif­fer­ent man­ner­isms of far­away cul­tures can be bewil­der­ing, espe­cially when one has no clue how to inter­pret or respond to what is obvi­ously an extremely seri­ous ges­ture. Ikoku Meiro comes as one of the only anime I’ve seen which shows this in full impact, as Yune’s per­fectly pos­tured Dogeza left Claude com­pletely off bal­ance and, in his case, utterly out­raged. It’s not really sur­pris­ing either— the Dogeza, or any form of pros­tra­tions that’s so deeply set into tra­di­tional Asian man­ner­isms, had always been mis­un­der­stood by west­ern­ers not accom­mo­dated to the cul­ture. Read the rest of this entry »

Menma, always there yet out of sight… [Ayazaka]

Ever won­dered what AnoHana would be like if we, the audi­ence, couldn’t see Menma either? Would we believe Jinta from the start? Would we, like the rest of the gang, feel that he was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, stuck in the past, and slightly out of his mind? It cer­tainly would be a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, watch­ing the reunion of friends unfold from the other (and major­ity) per­spec­tive. But would it still be as inter­est­ing and grip­ping? Read the rest of this entry »

Because the anime comes out this fall~ ^o^

Fate/zero is the pre­quel to the pop­u­lar visual-novel and anime Fate/stay night, tak­ing place ten years prior with Emiya Kir­it­sugu, Shirou’s adop­tive father, as the lead­ing role in yet another holy grail war, a seven-way bat­tle royale between mages and their sum­moned heroic spir­its. It is a action-packed, thrilling adven­ture, pro­pelled for­ward by the tremen­dous ide­o­log­i­cal con­flicts between its carefully-sculpted cast of char­ac­ters. Writ­ten by Urobuchi Gen (main writer for Madoka and Nitro+ works), Fate/zero not only makes a fan­tas­tic addi­tion to the exist­ing FSN saga by enhanc­ing many of its key yet once glanced-over details, but also breathes life into its own set of char­ac­ters and con­flicts, unique enough to stand out as more than just a ‘deriv­a­tive work’. Read the rest of this entry »

Fore­warn­ing: this entire post is spoil­er­rific in regards to Madoka’s end­ing.

[Juru]

The end­ing of Madoka Mag­ica was strangely sat­is­fy­ing. I had pre­pared myself for dis­em­bow­el­ment and depres­sion, and I received… peace. There’s much to be said of the finale, with enough themes and ref­er­ences packed into it to write media/religious stud­ies research papers around. I imag­ine Mechademia will cer­tainly be pick­ing it apart for years to come (like Evan­ge­lion). But while the love and hope and all the won­der­ful con­cepts dri­ving the Mahou Shoujo genre for­ward ulti­mately pre­vails in the end of this dark and gritty series, one last ques­tion lingers on my mind: was the final sac­ri­fice really a neces­sity? Read the rest of this entry »

This is like the anime sea­son of bad par­ent­ing examples…

One could claim that anime has a pre­dom­i­nant stereo­type of bad par­ent­ing, and in some ways it’s true. Ohana’s run­away, debt-evading mother is hardly the first, not to men­tion Kimimaro’s dad in C; while Meme (whether Erio is really her daugh­ter or not does not change the fact she took up respon­si­bil­ity) is pos­si­bly even worse, almost com­pletely ignor­ing poor Erio’s exis­tence as she wraps a teenage illu­sion around her­self. They’re rather extreme exam­ples, but as I think back, too many anime series fea­ture a lack of ‘par­ent­ing’— espe­cially in the eyes of Asian tra­di­tion­al­ism, the very same that sparked the recent uproar over Tiger Moms. Read the rest of this entry »