Archives for April 2012

Spring ’12 anime thus far

The spring ’12 anime season started rather late this year, with some series already five episodes in and others only two or three. Because of this, I was debating whether to make my seasonal “first impressions” post or not. But since I ended up watching more shows than I originally intended, and I have a lot to say about them, I decided to go ahead with it despite being further into some shows than others…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 2: Reading

Here’s Part 2 of my ongoing Fundamentals of Japanese post series. In Part 1 I went over how to pronounce Japanese and read it using English letters (romaji). Now I’m going to discuss how it’s read using the three Japanese alphabets…

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Anime’s three “building” categories

An interesting thought occurred to me recently in terms of how anime series are structured. It seems that most anime series focus on “building” one out of three narrative aspects – either building the story, building the characters, or building the world. Some focus on two out of three, a few manage to focus equally on all three – but it’s intriguing to think about which of the three each series is most concerned with…

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Mirai Nikki review

It’s been a while since I wrote a standard anime review post (I believe the last one was for Steins;Gate in September). Since I can’t think of any theme-based post to write for Mirai Nikki, I opted for a general review of the series…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 1: Pronunciation

Welcome to the first installment in a series of posts I’m going to be writing about the fundamentals of the Japanese language. Part 1 will be an introduction to the post series as well as covering an aspect of the language I feel is the very first step one should start with when learning it – pronunciation…

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Sexuality versus violence in anime

This topic was a recent entry on AnimeNation’s Ask John column. It begs the question of why American anime fans are often vehemently opposed to moe, fan service, or any other type of anime that sexualizes its characters, while anime that feature extreme violence are rarely opposed and are instead praised. The opposite seems to be true in Japan, with the Japanese fandom adoring fanciful, cute series while the dark, violent series are fewer and less adored. So what determines this difference between how American and Japanese fans react to sexuality in anime versus violence in anime?…

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Finishing up fall-winter anime and picking up spring ’12 anime

I’m a little late with posting my thoughts about the last fall ’11/winter ’12 anime I finished watching, as well as picking what anime I’ll be watching this spring season. To get them done faster, I decided to put both on one post…

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