Archives for April 2010

Is anime going to die?

I’m sure many of you have read a recent editorial posted on Bang Zoom!’s Anime TV web site. The relatively short article (which can be read here) consists of Bang Zoom! president Eric Sherman’s bleak prediction of the future of anime – that the continuation of illegal downloads will bring about the demise of the industry.

I don’t have the time or patience to read through the nearly 200 comments on the post, nor the many comments about it on other sites. So I’m just going to discuss my own thoughts about it here…

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The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya (volume 10 is now publishing!)


Cover of The Sneaker issue containing the first Haruhi chapter in three years

After a three year hiatus since the release of volume 9 in mid-2007, the Haruhi novels have finally started publishing again in the latest issue of The Sneaker magazine. Chapter 1 of volume 10, “The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya,” is out!

Scans and info after the jump. I will continuously update this post as translations, images, and other resources for volume 10 become available…

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Moe exists only in the heart

I’ve written about many of the popular debatable topics among anime fans, such as subs vs dubs, cel vs digital, and Western vs Japanese animation. However, I’ve recently realized that I haven’t written about one of the newer debatable topics – moe. Though I’ve mentioned moe in many of my posts, I have yet to actually write a post specifically about it. So here goes…

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How important is anime viewing quality to you?

Like many things in the fandom, preferences for the quality of anime viewing, whether it be fansubs or official releases, is something that varies among fans…

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What the anime blogsphere has taught me

As I tally up the amount of hours a week I spend either writing my own blog posts or reading the posts of others, I sometimes feel that such immersion in the “anime blogshere” is perhaps not the best thing to revolve my daily schedule around – instead of spending so much time expressing and exchanging my thoughts online, I should go out into reality and experience real human contact rather than just online. Not only would it give my already terribly near-sighted eyes a break from the computer screen, I could also learn to better express myself verbally instead of just through typing all the time. But while it does have its downs, anime blogging has also helped me in a number of profound ways…

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Favorite anime groups

I’m sure many of us have listed our favorite anime characters at some point. But what about favorite groups instead of individual characters? What I mean is favorite groups of characters in a specific series, as in favorite duos, trios, foursomes, etc,. I don’t think lists of favorite anime groups have been done much before, so I decided to give it a go…

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Do you watch anime for the story or the characters (or both)?

The idea that, in order for people to like an anime, it has to have a good story AND good characters, sounds plausible. However, that’s not the case for many fans – often times, they’ll like one of the two aspects in a series and not so much the other. For me, there are many anime I like for both the story and the characters, but there are also just as many I like for only one of the two…

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On dropping anime

Deciding when and for what reasons to drop a series varies among fans. Some fans drop anime almost immediately if they don’t like the first episode, while others stick with it for the entire series even if they’re not thrilled with it. Since I rarely drop anime, I decided to reflect on exactly why…

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First impressions of the spring 2010 anime I’m watching

Usually I write my seasonal first impressions reviews separately, but this time I felt it would be better to put them all together on one post…

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“When” do you blog?

Similar to a previous post of mine called “‘How’ do you watch anime?” I’m curious as to when fellow anime bloggers decide to blog, not just in terms of a specific schedule, but more importantly, things like whether they wait for inspiration from other sources, do they blog about any random thing that comes to mind or do they stick to a structure, do they have to be in a specific mood to blog, and other things of that nature…

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