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…

[Read more…]

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…

[Read more…]

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…

[Read more…]

Can anime affect our personality?

An interesting post via MkMiku questions whether anime, and our attachment to certain characters, can in fact influence our personality in real life…

[Read more…]