91 Days – Episodes 2-3

♪ I’ll be spending Friday nights writing ’bout a gangster’s paradise… ♪

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91 Days had possibly the best premiere of the season, and two episodes later it continues to dig its hooks into me with twists, turns, mysteries, and conspiracies. You read or watch enough stories and you start to get a feel for where a narrative’s heading, but 91 Days has kept me on my toes with speedy escalation, a chessboard full of briefly glimpsed players, and a camera that just loves to build tension through canted angles and wide shots of empty rooms. I’m not sure where it’s all heading, and I love that about it.

Click here for the full post on Anime Evo!

orange – Episodes 2-3

I’m not sure if I’m happy or just relieved.

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Adaptations can be a minefield, but orange has so far met my expectations, endearing me to its cast and sucking me into its story all over again. It’s easily one of my Top Three favorite shows of the summer (nestled right alongside gangsters and puppets, go figure), so I’ve opted to cover it for Anime Evo this season. Also, sorry it’s a little late–I had a busy travel weekend and couldn’t find the time until today.

I’m in a unique position with this one where I’ve actually read the entire manga, but anime newbies can rest assured that, while these posts do assume you’ve seen the episode(s) under discussion, this is a manga spoiler-free zone. So viewers and readers can read on free of worries!

Click here for the full post on Anime Evo!

Panning the Stream: Summer 2016 Premieres, Round 2

One final explosion of titles before we settle into the new season.

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I somehow managed to stop hunting Pokemon long enough to write my second and final batch of premiere reviews. With one exception (baseball anime BATTERY, which I’ll cover in my Rule of Three if it makes it that far), the summer rush has swept on by, leaving me to sort through the silt and see if I can find some gold. I wouldn’t call it a deep season, but there’s variety and potential, and one show that has me positively giddy.

Hit the jump to say hi (and goodbye) to the rest of the summer premieres.

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Panning the Stream: Summer 2016 Premieres, Round 1

Let the taste-testing begin!

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I’ve been up to my ears in family gatherings, travel, and spotty WiFi this week, but I finally managed to watch enough premieres to compile them into the season’s first Panning post. We’re sticking with the new format I adopted for Spring: I’ll watch every new, licensed full-length show and talk about ’em, then roll them up into “digest” posts divided into three basic categories: “Guaranteed three episodes,” “On the fence,” and “Probably dropped.”

If a title catches your eye, you can find out where the show is streaming by using this handy search engine. Now hit the jump to ding the bell for Round 1—FIGHT!

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Tanaka-kun is Always Listlessly Defying Appearances

Delinquency is only skin deep.

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Welcome to Part 3 (of probably 5?) in my ongoing Tanaka-kun mini-essay series! This time we’re taking a look at how the show uses its characters to contrast appearance with reality, mining humor and conflict out of social expectations and preconceptions. And, yup—as promised last week, this has to do with gender norms. Hey, I gotta stay true to my #brand, right?

I mentioned last time that social norms are a subtle, pervasive source of conflict in Tanaka-kun, and in some ways all of our main high school characters are dealing with the fact that they don’t quite fit into the tidy roles they think they should. There’s a constant push and pull between how a person sees themselves and how other people see them based on their appearances, and these assumptions are often tied to ideas about masculinity and femininity.

General discussion of events from Episodes 1-10 below the jump.

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orange – Episode 1 (Meet ‘n’ Greet)

Prepare your heart for a summer full of feelings!

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Now that my schedule has settled down somewhat, I’m back to blogging weekly for the good folks at Anime Evo again! While I’m still not 100% certain if I’ll be covering orange or something else, this lovely, vibrant, pensive premiere bodes very well for the show’s chances. Either way, it definitely deserved a few extra words.

Click here for the full meet ‘n’ greet on Anime Evo!

Glancing Upstream: Spring 2016 Retrospective and Review

Gold and silver and bronze and on.

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Spring might have been lacking the standout masterpiece and shoujo gem that Winter had (Shouwa Genroku and Snow White, respectively), but it more than made up for it in sheer quantity, offering up a variety of lively, stylish, and just downright fun series. In that respect, this season feels a little like last summer: I’m not sure how many of these shows are gonna make my 2016 Top 10 list, but I enjoyed watching just about all of them.

In other news, I think this is the last time you’ll see my Totally Arbitrary Rankings used in a season retrospective. More and more I’m realizing I don’t love the ranking system–it forces me to list shows one after the other even if I think multiple shows may have all been equally worthwhile for very different reasons. It’s reductive and misleading but, more to the point, not that fun. So enjoy the numbers for today, bid them a fond (or not) farewell, and look forward to a new format from here on out.

For now, though…

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Tanaka-kun is Always Listlessly Growing Up

Taking the staircase elevator to adulthood.

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Part 2 (of ??) in my Tanaka-kun is Always Listless mini-essay series! This time I thought we’d veer away from specific cultural influences and talk about what the show does in terms of addressing adolescent concerns. ‘Cause what would this blog be without some good old-fashioned coming-of-age narrative chatter?

Given our high school setting, it’s not surprising that Tanaka-kun‘s cast spends a lot of time dealing with the bumpy transition from child- to adulthood. Sometimes this is about “grown-up” concerns like marriage or personal independence, but usually it’s more general than that, as characters struggle to find a balance between who they were/are, who the world thinks they should be, and who they want to be. In other words, it’s all about changes.

Detailed discussion of Episodes 2 & 4 and general references from the rest of the series below the jump.

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Moon Crisis Make Up! How Chiaki Kon Saved Sailor Moon Crystal

A miracle romance for the ages.

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Sailor Moon Crystal premiered to a lot of excitement, but the hype train soon ground to an unceremonious halt thanks to the show’s poor production values, breakneck pacing, terrible questionable changes to the source material, and general lack of energy. Some fans hung on. Many jumped off. With no real nostalgic attachment to the franchise and a ’90s anime I was enjoying much more, I wound up in the second group.

Then the Season 3 (“Death Busters Arc”) announcements rolled out: the show was moving from a bimonthly online (ONA) schedule to a weekly TV one, getting both a new series director (Chiaki Kon) and character designer (Akira Takahashi), and giving itself a Moon Prism Makeover. The hype train let out a low, tentative whistle. Curious but not all that optimistic, I gave the season premiere a try, and was shocked to discover it was actually…fun? Against all odds, Kon and her staff have breathed life into an adaptation that was dead in the water, thanks to a few simple changes that made a huge difference.

Click here for the full post at The Mary Sue!