If there’s one arche­type peo­ple fall back far too eas­ily into, it’s the tsun­dere. But really, this per­son­al­ity attribute is nei­ther that sim­ple nor cheap…

[Sora]

Since my post on explain­ing the real life psy­chol­ogy of yan­deres, I’ve been on the hunt for a rec­og­nized psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der that would clas­sify the tsun­dere. Unfor­tu­nately, no such con­ve­nience seems to exist, and while the tsun­dere may be the most overused anime char­ac­ter arche­type of recent years, it is also com­plex enough that few series have truly done it jus­tice. Read the rest of this entry »

Mecha has been an insep­a­ra­ble part of anime cul­ture ever since Mobile Suit Gun­dam inspired the first gen­er­a­tion of Otaku. But while I’ve met a lot of mecha fans over the years, most of them are under the impres­sion that there is no prac­ti­cal rea­son to have mecha — that it’s purely a mat­ter of look­ing cool, and mecha chang­ing the future of war­fare was merely a fan­dom dream. I blame this as amongst the rea­sons why mecha design in many recent series has been stray­ing more and more from main­tain­ing a degree of semi-realism (just com­pare Gundam00’s against the original’s). The Rule of Cool goes a long way, but it’s always nice when you don’t have to shut off half the brain to love the cool factor.

But is there a rea­son to have mecha? Even the fin­gered hands and human pro­por­tions of Japan­ese mecha? It might still be a sci­ence fic­tion fan­tasy due to the cur­rent imper­fec­tion of gyrosta­bi­liz­ers, but mechas do make actual sense. And with the right tech­nolo­gies, they really could change the future of war. Read the rest of this entry »

It doesn’t take long for most vis­i­tors to my blog to notice the tarot theme; although it should be noted that while ‘tarot’ is com­monly mis­con­strued as syn­ony­mous to Major Arcana, the 22 card Major Arcana is merely part of the tarot, fol­lowed by the 56 card Minor Arcana that is roughly the equiv­a­lent of today’s nor­mal play­ing cards (just swap the Page & Knight for Jack). But there’s no doubt that the Major Arcana is the far more pow­er­ful suit within the tarot, and while most peo­ple rec­og­nize the Major Arcana as only a medium of for­tune telling, its use as a div­ina­tion tool is merely a lim­ited pre­sen­ta­tion of the arcana’s true potential:

The Major Arcana is the card suit of life. Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Misa-chan is any­thing but your tra­di­tional girl. She’s aggres­sive assertive, inde­pen­dent, and bold; she is part-timing to earn income for her house­hold despite still being a stu­dent; most of all, she is the Stu­dent Coun­cil Pres­i­dent of a for­merly all-boys school, tak­ing lead­er­ship over an over­whelm­ingly male pop­u­la­tion. Even fem­i­nists would be proud of her accom­plish­ments, as Misa-chan stands out as the obvi­ous first place wher­ever she goes…

Except when Usui it around, whose mere pres­ence instantly demotes her to sec­ond place. As this is from a pop­u­lar shoujo manga, do girls have a thing for being in sec­ond place? No, don’t think that way for even a sec­ond. Read the rest of this entry »

The first time I saw Shugo Chara, my child­hood self retook con­trol of my mind in excite­ment. After all, which kid would not want their own Shugo Chara? But the amus­ing part comes when I watch it along­side Arakawa…

[ lulu ]

The main theme of Shugo Chara was about accept­ing and believ­ing in your own dreams. Sure, it might sound child­ish — easy for a kid to claim their one true life call­ing when they barely know the basics of respon­si­bil­i­ties and com­pet­i­tive­ness in soci­ety. But at the same time, what Shugo Chara fea­tures is an issue many of us will spend much of our lives strug­gling with. After all, the task of ‘under­stand­ing and accept­ing your­self’ is one that becomes increas­ing dif­fi­cult as we age; it starts with the Shugo Chara of child­hood, moves onto the Per­sona of ado­les­cence, and then con­tin­ues on into the Arakawa under the Bridge of adult­hood. Read the rest of this entry »

For the longest time I won­dered about why I read Zero no Tsukaima, which might be bet­ter than its anime adap­ta­tion but is still pretty sub­par in just about every aspect. Then I remem­bered some­thing a friend said: “does it mat­ter whether or not I’m actu­ally play­ing a game as long as I feel like I am?”

From last season’s Baka to Test to Shokanju to this season’s Angel Beats, the game inspired premises are becom­ing more and more obvi­ous. Is this just a coin­ci­dence? Does the ‘game-like’ story/setting have an appeal of its own? After all, the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of anime-fans are also those who grew up play­ing video games, espe­cially the styl­is­tic clas­sic adventure-party RPGs that range from table­top D&D (Stan­dard RPG Sys­tem for Japan­ese) to Final Fan­tasy. So I’d say there’s some­thing spe­cial in mak­ing the viewer feel like they’re immersed in a well-paced game, espe­cially when it not only takes less time, but also saves you from the bore­dom of grind­ing and side-questing.

But what makes a story ‘game-like’? Is it just the con­cep­tual sim­i­lar­i­ties like NPCs, recov­ery exams points, and lev­el­ing up? Well, it’s all that and much, much more. The game-like story shares a great deal with both the clas­sic adven­ture and shounen gen­res, but to truly give the excite­ment of play­ing a RPG your­self, there’s a cou­ple of bases you to cover and bal­ance. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s one thing Sora no Woto made me keenly real­ize, it’s that I have dis­tinct modes for watch­ing anime. It took me halfway through the sea­son and sev­eral attempts at recal­i­bra­tion before I real­ized what the anime really excelled at for me: it’s tone of approach. Much like your car has to shift gears in order to enjoy the road, a viewer has to shift gears in order to enjoy the show. Most of the time though, we sim­ply watch the anime through our automatic-transmission “D” shift, let­ting the anime work the gear­box from behind the scenes and switch­ing seem­lessly between the “char­ac­ter devel­op­ment arc” and the “story-driven arc”, occa­sion­ally shift­ing back into “set­ting descrip­tion”. But some­times it doesn’t quite work that well. It may be caused by the anime’s sub­tle and/or cryp­tic approach, or the delay of infor­ma­tion being pre­sented (Sora no Woto’s case), or sim­ply the less than desir­able pac­ing and directing.

But did you ever watch an anime you’re not quite enjoy­ing and think the other way? That maybe you’re expect­ing things from the anime which it was never meant to be and need to lock it down to only a few gears like in “D1” mode? Or maybe one of your gears is either dis­con­nected or out­right miss­ing? There are some things that are obvi­ous: you don’t watch Gur­ren Lagann for real­ism and artis­tic eye candy (although super robot lovers dis­agree), and you cer­tainly don’t watch Clan­nad for thrilling action; some­thing is def­i­nitely wrong if you’re expect­ing dra­matic story ten­sion from K-ON!, and the moment you pick up a Sun­rise series you should know bet­ter than to keep run­ning the gear labelled ‘plot/setting con­sis­tency’, espe­cially in Code Geass. Well, many of this applies to a lot of other shows as well, even if you haven’t real­ized them yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before I get labelled as some Yan­dere the­o­rist like meflo­raine: no, I’m not a Yan­dere expert. Heck, I’m not even a Yan­dere fan, even if Kaede from Shuf­fle sits on my MAL top 10 favorite char­ac­ters or that I tend to like a lot of yan­dere char­ac­ters or that I argue for them when— okay not help­ing my case.

Of all the char­ac­ter archtypes lying about out there, Yan­deres seem to be the most mis­un­der­stood and hated, far more than even the most sadis­tic vari­a­tion of tsun­deres. Obvi­ously, I can’t judge other people’s pref­er­ences on the mat­ter, but I always felt like peo­ple are tak­ing Yan­deres the wrong way. When most peo­ple think of yan­dere they instantly think of “they will mur­der you! Nice boat style!” Uuu­uuu— I feel bad for them already. After all, they just wanted to be your bestest friend for ever and ever and ever. That box­cut­ter busi­ness? It’s not going to hap­pen unless you cheat on or betray them, and in some cases you might be just a bit deserv­ing of what’s com­ing… I mean, Makoto (School Days) sure does.

But even then, it’s not quite that sim­ple. I knew that Yan­deres (and Yan­gires for that mat­ter, see their MAL club for word break­down) were on the extreme ends, but even I didn’t quite under­stand the issue involved until I read this TIME mag­a­zine arti­cle on Bor­der­line Per­son­al­ity Dis­or­der. Yeah, psy­chol­o­gists once thought of this as a fatal dis­ease, how’s that for you sick-girl Moe lovers, not to men­tion all the Dam­aged Goods and Katawa Shoujo fans.

Read the rest of this entry »