New Look

This blog picked up some odd code or malware, hence... no more San Francisco skyline template. :(

Will be tinkering with the new template over the next few days, so bear with me.

Vote for the Bleach Simulcast!

Here's a way to support legal streaming simulcasts of anime - and it won't cost you a dime.

Crunchyroll is trying to get 100,000 digital signatures on a petition to send to Japan to GET BLEACH SIMULCAST HERE IN THE U.S. - JUST LIKE NARUTO SHIPPUUDEN. They have one week to collect these signatures.

Click here to submit your digital signature:

http://www.crunchyroll.com/petition/wewantbleach

This is a golden opportunity to show the Japanese creators and producers of the anime we love that we support the industry.

I just signed the petition.

Who is with me? =D

Edit: They got their 100,000 signatures by the deadline. Hopefully this means we're getting the Bleach simulcast soon! :)

Seiyuu Chart for Hakuouki

A blogger named Hashihime has done a fantastic chart of the seiyuu for Hakuouki:

http://hashihime.atspace.com/etc/hakuouki/hakuchar.html

I love the set-up of: 1) character picture; 2) character name; 3) seiyuu name; 4) seiyuu picture, and; 5) seiyuu's other anime credits. I wish there were charts like this for every anime series!

Hakuouki Ending Theme

My new favorite anime ending theme. :)

The Girl of Prophecy

In recent Naruto Shippuuden episodes, the fact that Naruto is Konoha's "Child of Prophecy" has been a topic of discussion again.

Obviously, Naruto is the main character of Naruto Shippuuden and it makes sense that if anyone is going to be the "Child of Prophecy" in the series, it's him. Add to that the fact that this is a shonen series, and it really couldn't be anyone but Naruto who would be the chosen one. So I don't begrudge our favorite orange-jumpsuited ninja for this: but it did start a train of thought in my head.

A few years ago, I bought one of those calendars where you rip off a page each day. This one happened to be a Star Wars calendar. One of the daily pages caught my imagination, and I ended up taping it to my refrigerator (excuse the poor-quality scan):




That's Padme in the foreground and center, with Anakin behind her on the right, and Mace and Obi-Wan behind her on the left. It's just one of those publicity-shot type photographs of the lead characters in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, one in which someone probably said, hey, let's mix it up a little, put Padme in the front. It's only a picture: but the image, if you really look at it for a moment, brings to mind a startling question.

What if Padme had been the main character of Star Wars? Or her daughter Leia, for that matter?

Why is the "child of prophecy" always male?

And oddly, this is where a strange dichotomy arises between American and Japanese entertainment. Because many American genre and science fiction stories like Star Wars and Iron Man and the like actually do female characters a greater disservice than Japanese anime - where you will get a few kunoichi, some tough tsundere mecha pilots, or other strong female characters with super powers in most of the shonen stories. Just where you think American entertainment would come through with strong female characters, it often... doesn't.

I say that Star Wars did female characters a disservice, and perhaps that's a bit harsh. I'm old enough to have seen Star Wars in the theaters when it first came out, and I'll never forget the audience's reaction when Leia blew open the wall in the holding cells with a laser gun while Luke and Han just stared at her. She was a female character with spunk, and that was new. But Star Wars - I mean the whole thing, the two film trilogies - could have done more with its female characters. (Interestingly, the strongest female character in the entire Star Wars universe was created for the novel series, which still continues - Mara Jade, the Jedi Knight who becomes Luke Skywalker's wife.)

And I mention Iron Man because it hired an Academy Award-winning A-list actress like Gwyneth Paltrow... just to use her as arm candy for Robert Downey, Jr. Again, women as lust or beauty objects, or as support for the male characters in the telling of their stories.

In terms of being an anime fan: is it my own fault for loving shonen and action stories? I like watching stories where things actually happen. Slice-of-life stories put me to sleep. To encourage more female characters being featured in anime, am I supposed to watch series where there are 13 episodes of four high school girls doing... not very much? I think I'd rather see Ichigo throwing a Hollow into a distant mountainside - in fact - I know I would.

The Japanese have a terrible saying: "Men do, women watch." In four words, you have the reason for why the main characters and the interesting characters in anime (to me, anyway) usually turn out to be boys and men. They're the ones doing things; the girls and women usually just watch them do things. I don't prefer it this way - I want to see strong female characters doing things, too. But there don't seem to be many manga and anime series that offer this.

On Yumeka's recommendation, I've recently started watching Noir:




Though I've only just started watching this series, this is already what I see about Noir:

A. The two main characters are female.
B. They are both professional assassins, who make no apologies for their line of work.
C. The story is clearly focused on the two women; the male characters are secondary.

This much alone already places Noir in highly exclusive company. Most anime series I watch place female characters in the usual roles: love/sex interest, girlfriend, friend, mother, or other supporting roles. Noir starts from the premise that women are interesting and substantial enough to be the main characters; that their lives matter enough to be center stage. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.