My top 10 male anime characters

For the majority of my years as an anime fan, female characters tend to be my favorites more often than males. Anyone who’s seen my favorite characters list on my MAL profile can see that it’s pretty much just girls and cute animals XD I’m not sure why, but perhaps it has to do with the kind of anime I mostly watch – late-night series aimed at the general male otaku audience – which typically emphasize the personalities and backgrounds of the female characters and de-emphasize the males, since male otaku are more likely to be interested in the females. But while I don’t particularly care for bishonen and yaoi series whose target audience I more closely fit, I do watch a fair share of shonen, action, and even mecha series which offer stronger male characters than the moe/slice-of-life anime I usually watch. So today, I wanted to take a look at my ten favorite male anime characters…

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My 5 favorite anime of 2012

A little late this year but I couldn’t miss out on every anime blogger’s obligatory post of picking their favorite anime of the year. Since 2008 I’ve been picking 5 favorite anime from that year, except for last year where opted to participate in the AniBloggers Choice Awards and picked 12 favorites of the year. This year however I decided to go back to my previous tradition of only picking 5 favorites…

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My 12 moments of anime for 2012

Credit to linked pixiv user

Since 2009 I’ve been participating in the anime blogsphere’s “12 Moments of Anime” project, which consists of us counting down our best anime-related moments of the year every day during the twelve days until Christmas. As usual, I prefer to list my twelve moments altogether in one post rather than split them over twelve posts. I know I’m doing my moments post earlier than usual this year, but that’s due to my new blogging schedule of only posting once a week and in the coming weeks I’m already planning to review some seasonal anime that are going to be ending. So, without further adieu, here are my 12 moments of anime for 2012…

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Anime for people who don’t like anime

A recent post on Japan Powered talks about certain anime titles that even people who hate anime could watch and enjoy. The idea it’s bringing out is that, despite how much we love it, we know that all anime – from shonen to slice-of-life – is full of tropes and character archetypes we see over and over again. Many of these cliches we love, some we don’t, but generally what makes us stay fans is that we don’t mind such things in our anime or even have specific tropes we can’t get enough of. But for some people, anime-specific tropes such as bishy guys, moe girls, giant robots, wild fantasy battles, and cuteness for cuteness’ sake, just aren’t their thing. So today I wanted to think about what anime are virtually free of these cliches and seem to cater to universal tastes rather than otaku tastes…

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My favorite and least favorite anime cliches

As much as we love anime, there’s no denying that the medium is, for better or worse, full of cliches. But as I’ve mentioned in past posts, this isn’t always a bad thing; I’m of the opinion that a cliche doesn’t necessarily equal poor writing if it carries out an appealing cliche well or adds something memorable to it. Not only does anime have its own set of unique cliches not found in other mediums, but because it caters to a lot of different genres, it naturally has cliches to match all kinds of tastes. We all have our anime cliches we like and don’t like, so today I’d like to look at my favorite and least favorite ones…

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The ultimate anime questionnaire

I’m feeling under the weather today, so we’re having a light topic for this post. Some years ago on my old fan site, I made a questionnaire that covered just about every aspect of someone’s anime fandom. Today I’ll be making a long overdue updated version of it, and would also like to invite any of my readers and fellow bloggers to take part in it as well…

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50 questions

A list of 50 questions recently posted by AceRailgun has been making its way to various anime blogs, with the respective bloggers taking a shot at answering the questions. The questions are a mix of anime-related and personal questions. It looked like fun, so I decided to give it a go…

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What it means to be nostalgic – a tribute to old anime

As I’ve grown out of student-hood these past few years and moved on to being what the Japanese call a “shakaijin” (person of society), I’ve been taking the word “nostalgia” more to heart. I’ve often wondered, “How old does one have to be in order to feel nostalgic?” And while pondering this questions, I’d like to pay tribute to some old anime that hold particularly nostalgic memories for me…

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My 12 moments of anime for 2011

It’s now New Year’s Day here in the US, and like always, I want to do a “picks of the year” type post to celebrate. I started participating in the blogsphere’s annual “12 moments of anime” project in 2009. Since last year however, I’ve preferred to list my moments all in one post, unlike other bloggers who give each moment its own post. I usually reserve New Year’s to countdown my favorite anime of the year, but since I’ve already done that via The AniBloggers’ Choice Awards, I’ll be posting my 12 moments today instead. So, without further adieu, here are my 12 best anime-related moments of 2011…

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The AniBloggers Choice Awards: my top 12 anime of 2011

Since 2008, I’ve been selecting my top 5 anime of that year and posting about them on the blog around New Year’s. This year however, I’m trying something new with Kiddtic’s AniBloggers Choice Anime Awards project. Instead of picking only five 2011 series, I’m picking twelve, as well as an overall series of the year and licensor of the year…

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