Archives for August 2011

Life brings changes…

This is more of a personal post today, but I don’t mind sharing it and hopefully you’ll find it worth your while…

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Female characters versus male characters

Lately I’ve been thinking of making a new list of my top 10 anime characters, since the one I wrote two years ago is a bit outdated. Along those lines, I once again realized that, for whatever reason, at least 80% of my top 10 characters are female. This in turn got me thinking – how many of my other fellow fans have a preference for just one gender of characters, and can we provide reasons for our preference?

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Should any anime be called a “classic”?

Just as there are numerous books, movies, songs, and other cultural works considered “classics” by many, I’ve often wondered if certain anime should be labeled in a similar way…

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My top 5 anime of the season

For lack of a better post today, I decided to try something new and pick my current five favorites amongst the seasonal anime I’m watching (with inspiration from kevo’s ongoing “Anime Power Rankings” project)…

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6 things that have disappeared from anime over the past decade

Being the form of media that it is, anime, like all things, can’t help but change along with the times. There are many things that were common in the anime world a decade ago that have more or less disappeared nowadays. Today I feel like taking a look at six of those things and figuring out why they’ve become so rare…

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What I’ve learned from fan translating

As some of you probably know, for the past couple of months I’ve been part of a translation group that’s been working on providing an English release of the latest Haruhi novels (volumes 10 and 11). We finally completed the project earlier this week. Baka-Tsuki, the group that had provided fan translations for the previous nine novels, could no longer work on the series, so myself and a few other dedicated individuals took on the task. I translated and edited one chapter myself (72 pages) and edited two that were translated by someone else (222 pages). Since this was the first major translation project I’ve worked on, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about the experience…

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What determines how long our anime fandom lasts?

It always puzzles me when I hear someone say “I’m not into anime anymore. I got tired of it,” especially when I knew that person used to be what I’d call an anime fan. I’m not talking about people who simply don’t watch anime as much as they used to due to time or other constraints – I’m talking about people who loved anime and then, either suddenly or gradually, it was completely pushed out of their life. Although it’s difficult for a die-hard fan like me to understand someone “getting tired of” anime when there’s such a variety of genres and so many thousands of titles to watch, it happens all the time just like any other hobby. So today I’m going to see what things could determine the staying power of someone’s fandom…

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