[Mikou]

We haven’t had an anime sea­son this packed with bril­liant poten­tial since fall 2008 (although I doubt this could actu­ally match 2008’s record); darn it Japan, how dare you give us so many good anime to watch at once xD. Either way, con­tin­u­ing our joint activ­i­ties (Aorii [Major Arcana] and Honya [Lyri­cal Spark]), here is our fall 2010 impressions.

Sorted by my per­sonal rank­ing:
Ore no Imouto > Kurage­hime > Otome Youkai Zakuro = Baku­man = Yumeiro Patis­erre > Shin­ryaku! Ika Musume = Star Dri­ver = Arakawa > Index 2 > MM! > For­tune Arte­r­ial > Kaminomi > Yosuga no Sora > Soremachi.  Only series I’m still await­ing subs on is Haku­ouki 2 ;-;
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Wayyyy too many series to watch >.< [mosu]

Fall anime is usu­ally the best dur­ing the year, and fall 2010 is just spetac­u­lar; def­i­nitely the best since the leg­endary fall 2008 sea­son. In prepa­ra­tion for the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia anime club pre­sen­ta­tion and dis­cus­sion, we (Aorii [Major Arcana] and Honya [Lyri­cal Spark]) have decided to join up for a pre­view post~ (if you have an anime club you should totally do this). Charts here and here. Read the rest of this entry »

As a hob­by­ist world­forger, Lelangiric’s post and Eternal’s con­tin­u­a­tion on how the mechanics/setting of anime tends to fall short of expec­ta­tions actu­ally ticks me off a lit­tle bit. Not quite because of their view­points, but because mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, and much of recent scifi/fantasy in gen­eral, are a rather poor gauge on mea­sur­ing the lit­er­ary val­ues of set­ting cre­ativ­ity. But then, that’s also par­tially our fault as the viewers…

Expo­si­tion start: acti­vate lec­ture mode! (and who remem­bers this old yet remark­able anime?)

By and most in today’s series, we don’t have ‘set­ting’. More pre­cisely, we have a very much watered down ver­sion of ‘set­ting’ which is far bet­ter enti­tled ‘premise’. The dif­fer­ence between these two? A set­ting attempts to round out the details behind all the pri­mary con­cepts and mechan­ics it intro­duce. It goes beyond just those two ini­tial lines of con­cep­tual expla­na­tions and seeks to reflect the cast’s under­stand­ing of their World to the audi­ence, with­out inhi­bi­tions or con­ve­nient cutouts. On the other hand, a premise is a set of con­cepts and mechan­ics sim­ply handed to the audi­ence with min­i­mum scrutiny, and the viewer is expected to accept it in order to make the story work. ‘Premises’ can be upgraded to ‘set­ting’ through sto­ry­telling, but with­out intri­cate detail­ing and/or in-depth analy­sis, it will always remain what is it: merely a premise, a set of ideas and foun­da­tions, not a World.

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