Fifteen Years Later

In June 2009, I wrote my first post for this blog.

It’s hard to believe that fifteen years have passed. When I started writing this blog there were a lot of anime bloggers out there. A few are still going, but most that I was familiar with have stopped blogging.

I’ve been writing this blog for so long that I’ve outlived some of Blogger’s features like Feedburner. If you were around then, you might remember the little counter in the right-hand column. At some point Feedburner glitched on my dashboard and disappeared and I figured they were out of business. (I just looked them up and actually they are still in business... but this blog now supposedly has a built-in feed so I probably won’t reactivate Feedburner, if I even could again for this blog.)

The industry and the people who write about it keep changing. This is normal. This blog had a slowdown in 2015-18 when I posted infrequently and thought about just stopping, until I decided otherwise and started posting regularly again.

My involvement in anime has been as a fan and also a translation rewriter and editor for a lot of years now. Like most interests, mine has waxed and waned and gone through many stages. It’s not the 110% obsession it once was, but it’s pretty strong once again.

I think when Boruto went on hiatus in early 2023, it threw me for a loop. For months I didn’t even log in to Crunchyroll to watch anything. It wasn’t that Boruto was such a gigantic favorite of mine; it was more that it continued the feel of the Naruto universe and my fandom was hooked into shounen story universes in general. So when it went on hiatus, I just took a little break from anime simulcasts altogether.

This year I really got back into watching simulcasts again, and now I look forward to each new anime season to see what there is to watch.

For me, watching the finale of Attack on Titan last year also felt like an ending of some kind. It was like the era of shounen series I used to watch such as AoT and Naruto/Boruto was over and now something new would have to show up.

Other shounen series I loved ended years ago. Gintama is a prime example. Something like Kaiju No. 8, as good and as fun as it is, can’t compare to a multi-layered complex story universe like Gintama’s universe.

One can’t expect a gem like Gintama to come along every day, of course. And I don’t keep up with all of the series that are out there. I could be missing something special.

Regardless, I’m still a happy anime fan these days. I don’t know that I have another 15 years of this blog left in me (lol) - but I’ll be here a while yet.

If you’re somewhat new to this blog, I’ve written a few posts about Neo-Shonen Fujoshi over the years. If you’re interested, here are some of them.

Nine Years Later

Ten Years Later

The Story of This Blog

Attack on Titan Ends

I can’t let Attack on Titan’s finale take place without saying a few words.

After years of waiting, the ending aired on November 4 in one spectacular 82-minute mega episode.

Attack on Titan holds a special place in U.S. anime history. It’s the series that literally saved the U.S. anime and manga industry after the great recession of 2008, when it looked like this imported Japanese art form had peaked and was on its way down.

Attack on Titan was the Kodansha hit that revived manga and anime in general in this country. It was the tide that lifted all boats, keeping the English localization industry alive until it could thrive again.

The hallmark of Attack on Titan, the one word that has always described the story and artwork is... intensity.

The visceral horror of the Titans is unmatched in anime. I’ll never forget the battle scenes between the Survey Corps and the Titans, the scouts propelling themselves with gas canisters and rappelling through the village to fight the terrifying skinless giants.

I didn’t keep up with the intricacies of the storyline as much as I should have. I never read the manga and there were such long breaks between seasons and cours that by the end, I could only try to recall how everyone ended up where they were when the final battle began.

It didn’t matter. The final 82 minutes of Attack on Titan was everything I wanted it to be.

The first half was the incredible final battle as Eren’s old friends try to stop him from destroying most of the world. As thrilling as it was, the last half was even better.

The last half was pure emotion. After the battle, the characters met in that timeless, liminal dreamspace where they could tell each other what their intentions were and how they felt about it all.

The most moving moments to me were, oddly enough, in the ending credit sequence. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but let’s just say the theme was... the more things change, the more they stay the same. The end credits play over scenes of the future, and as you might expect from the universe of the Titans, Eldians, Marleyans and others - it doesn’t turn out to be a utopia.

But the end of the final battle does bring closure for the characters in a satisfying way. One can only do one’s best in the lifetime that one is given. And, as corny as it sounds, it really is about the relationships that you form along the way. I don’t see any series ever being able to replicate what Attack on Titan has done. It’s a classic for the ages.

The Winter 2023 Season Ends With a Bang

The winter 2023 anime season is winding down, and the shows I was watching all ended on very intense notes.

Attack on Titan slipped in almost unannounced with the first half of its final final final we really mean it this time cour. The series will conclude with two one-hour episodes, the first of which aired this month.

And it was a marvelous, beautifully-crafted episode, perfectly balanced between action scenes and relationship moments. It may be taking literal years to finish this anime series, but if the concluding episode is as great as this one it’ll be worth the wait.

Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) is usually categorized as a shonen manga and anime. But I think the most applicable category for the series is horror.

When the story begins, we’re introduced to the Eldians who live in three walled cities and their adjacent farmlands. The civilization is medieval with most people either farming or working simple trades.

Outside the walls lurks incredible danger. The Titans are gigantic monsters that nearly wiped out humanity, and only the walls can keep them out. They resemble huge skinless human beings but with strangely floppy limbs and terrifyingly blank facial expressions. They eat humans.

The hero of the story is Eren Jaeger. His mother was eaten by a Titan and then his father, a doctor named Grisha Jaeger, disappeared. Along with his friends Mikasa and Armin, Eren joins the Survey Corps, a military unit that uses rappelling and jet pack-like propulsion equipment on their missions to survey the Titan population outside the walls.

The story is complex, involving politics and secret missions and betrayals within the unit and in the greater society at large. There are many twists and turns. Each turn of the story leads the viewer to ever darker truths.

The scenes where humans are eaten are shown in graphic detail. The horror is visceral and seizes your guts as you watch. Attack on Titan’s creator Hajime Isayama doesn’t mask the characters’ terror in any way; nor does he pull a “fade to black” before they’re eaten. You see it all.

As if that wasn’t enough, we see other gruesome and violent scenes including a child being torn to pieces by a pack of dogs (simply because she’s an Eldian), torture, maiming. The civilization is primitive and human suspicion of “the other” is on full display.

The characters go through a lot and by the end of the story - where we are now - they are spent and bitter. The layers of betrayal and all the awful revelations about who the Titans really are have worn them down. And in doing what they believed to be right, they’ve become killers and worse.

This first of two “special episodes” that will conclude the series includes a quiet scene in which the corps - friends who became enemies who now come together one last time for the final battle - discuss their plans to stop one of their own from destroying civilization.

In the course of the discussion all of their regrets come out. Apologies are made and accepted. They’re aware that it’s unlikely that all of them - or perhaps any of them - will survive the coming fight.

The weight of the past is heavy.

In this episode, one of the main characters sacrifices herself to buy time for the corps to escape the Titans and reach the battlefield.

There is one hour remaining in the Attack on Titan anime series. The second special episode is set to air sometime this fall.

Some surprising news about Boruto - it’s going on a long hiatus.

Boruto’s last two episodes were very intense. Although everyone narrowly survived an encounter with the villains Code and Momoshiki, the series’ first part ended before the much-anticipated timeskip.

The anime has caught up with the manga (more or less... apparently they could have animated a few more scenes from the manga and not stopped where they did, but whatever), so they’re now calling the first 293 episodes “Part 1” of the series. No announcement as to when Part 2 will begin airing.

So my mainstay anime is gone for now. I’ll be honest - there’ve been times when Boruto bored me. It was in fillers the entire year of 2022 and generally the storylines haven’t been as compelling as they were in the parent series Naruto.

But they are definitely leaving it on a high note, having set up the future conflict between Boruto and his adopted brother Kawaki. So I’ll look forward to it whenever it returns.

Finally, My Hero Academia’s sixth season came to a close with Saturday’s episode. This arc was called the “depression arc” by the manga fans and now I see why. After a massive failure by the heroes to defeat or even contain Shigaraki and his legion of villains, the public turned against the heroes.

It was a depressing arc, but public opinion began to turn back in the heroes’ favor by the end. The series returns for its seventh season in October.

Bleach returns in July with the second part of the Thousand-Year Blood War arc. Until then, there’s not much that’s new that I want to watch. I’ve gone through Crunchyroll’s Spring 2023 guide and didn’t see anything that stood out.

So I’m going to finish the other series on my watchlist (Spy x Family, Heaven Official’s Blessing, Bureau of Paranormal Investigation) and then maybe watch some old favorites and then... we’ll see. There are a number of classic anime series I haven’t watched yet. Maybe it’s time to add them to the list. ;-)

2022 Anime Year in Review

For me as an anime fan, the year of 2022 had its ups and downs, with the year ending on a decided upswing.

As well as Attack on Titan (more on that below), the year began with - as always - eternally... Boruto.

I’ve complained about Boruto before... that it hasn’t developed Konoha’s new generation as deeply as the original characters, and the plot arcs aren’t as compelling, and there’s a lot of filler episodes to boot. The filler aspect can’t be helped, as the manga is being created at its own speed and there’s nothing else to be done until the manga gets ahead enough in the story.

Boruto has been in filler episodes for the entire year of 2022. Most of the year we were in a filler arc that actually began at the end of 2021, believe it or not. Briefly, this arc had Team 7 on a mission in the Land of Water that involved a prison break on an island, pirates, a clan war, etc.

So many deaths took place in this arc that it became a downer to watch on top of being filler to begin with. The final episode was a surprise though, as Boruto offered to sacrifice himself in order to stop an ongoing bloody war between factions on the island. His rationale was that both sides - including the one he’d been on - bore responsibility for the conflict and that if his sacrifice would bring an end to the bloodshed, he was willing to do it.

It was a tense and thrilling episode, one of the best I’ve seen in the series. One thing that filler arcs can do is to deepen the characters if you put them in potentially life-threatening situations, and that’s what happened at the end of this too-long filler arc. I’m not sure I can say that it was worth it, but it did bring the character of Boruto further along and showed us his new maturity and leadership.

According to manga readers, when Boruto comes out of fillers we’re in for a treat. At some point thereafter the series will time-skip ahead and the new generation will then be teenagers.

This is exactly what the parent series did when it went from being Naruto to Naruto Shippuuden. Naruto went on a three-year training journey with his master Jiraiya and returned to the village at age 16, and the series’ most satifying storylines came after the timeskip.

If Boruto follows that same formula for success then I’m all for it.

As to movies, the only one I saw in the theaters was Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. It was a fun diversion and a decent addition to the Dragon Ball universe. It was especially nice to see Piccolo and Gohan featured as the main characters as they didn’t get a lot of chances to shine in the DBS series.

I also streamed a couple of My Hero Academia movies. I tend to forget about movies based on anime series, and in fact, there have been three MHA movies released so far.

In autumn two of my favorite series came back: Bleach and My Hero Academia.

Both series returned with really intense arcs. Bleach is covering the final arc of the manga, which includes Ichigo’s true origin story... which makes it even more amazing that it’s taken ten years for the arc to be animated considering its importance to the overall Bleach story.

My Hero Academia is currently in the middle of an enormous battle arc involving all of the superheroes, the students, and a near-unbeatable villain, Tomura Shigaraki, plus Shigaraki’s entire army of bad guys. A city has been destroyed and several heroes have died and the arc doesn’t even appear to be close to its conclusion yet.

This fall I also started watching Heaven Official’s Blessing, an example of Chinese danmei or boy’s love. I haven’t finished the first season yet even though I only have a few episodes left. I think it’s because I know there’s a second season coming and my binge instinct has kicked in. I’d love to roll from S1 right into S2, but that’s probably unrealistic since there’s still no date set for the start of the second season (though a trailer for S2 has been released).

Recently I added Spy x Family to my currently watching list. I’m intrigued by this non-shonen series that appears to be wildly popular. Well, that and the male lead is quite the biseinen, isn’t he? It’s been fun so far.

As to the industry year in review... quite a bit happened.

In-person conventions returned, including Anime Expo and the San Diego Comic Con, two of the largest. Funimation’s anime catalog began to be transitioned into Crunchyroll, a process that is still ongoing.

Kadokawa bought a majority stake in Anime News Network. And speaking of buyouts - Right Stuf was bought out by Crunchyroll. Shawne Kleckner headed Right Stuf for over 30 years and this one surprised me. I know the pandemic was hard on merchants but Right Stuf was one of those vendors that always felt solid to me. They even had their own in-house production company, Nozomi Entertainment. I’m sorry to see them get swallowed up.

The biggest industry news by far was Disney’s acquisition of Bleach. Since then they’ve also acquired the second season of Tokyo Revengers, but so far, nothing bigger than that. It could be that they’re waiting to see how Bleach does before making any greater inroads into the animesphere.

With all these ups and downs, this year is ending on a high note for me as an anime fan. I’m watching a lot of anime each week, just like the old days.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Attack on Titan.

You might recall that around this time last year they announced that the “final cour” of Attack on Titan would stream beginning in January 2022.

Well, it did. Half of it. The final cour was split in two, with the last episodes set to air in January of 2023.

Like everyone else, this past winter I watched the episodes expecting to see the end of Attack on Titan. Instead, rumors began to leak that the second half would be delayed, which was confirmed at the end of the last episode that aired in April.

Other series have had very lengthy delays between seasons: Haikyuu comes to mind and there are others. Attack on Titan though is a premier title and this delay really surprised me. It’s a series that has a huge international audience and the expectation was really high that the series would be concluded this year.

I say that, and yet... here we are at the end of 2022 with Attack on Titan set to stream its final - let’s hope - episodes starting next month. Because next month it’s January again, already.

Another year in the animesphere has passed and it was a good one. Next year looks good as well, so let’s get ready for it. :-)

An Appreciation of My Hero Academia and What I’m Watching Next

A couple of months ago, I was watching an episode of My Hero Academia when I thought to look something up. Sure enough, I was within a few episodes of the end of Season 5 - meaning that I was about to run out of episodes to watch.

The manga continues on, of course, but the next anime season begins in October 2022. Without realizing it - just watching and enjoying the series over time - I’d managed to finish all the available anime episodes.

Looking back, I understand how it happened. My Hero Academia is very easy to watch. Without a lot of dramatic cliffhangers or extreme violence and intensity, it’s an example of modern shonen at its finest. There are exciting action scenes, comedic scenes, and believable character development in a school setting that somehow manages not to be boring.

School stories aren’t my favorite, particularly the slice of life ones. The school in My Hero Academia is a training academy for teen heroes, so it’s not the usual high school hijinks. The students are put through actual life-threatening exercises from the beginning, and we get to know the core group pretty quickly.

Besides the main character, Midoriya, there’s the fierce Bakugo with his permanent outdoor voice and over the top reactions, the loyal Uraraka, earnest Iida, the lively Kaminari and Kirishima, and so on. The obvious comparison would be with the early seasons of Naruto and its shinobi academy, and they are similar, and for more than the obvious reasons.

My Hero Academia’s ensemble of characters, in their group dynamic, is the most engaging I’ve seen in a shonen anime since Naruto. I think the modern setting factors into that. Whereas Naruto is set in a ninja village following a great war, and the village is a rather grim place where enemies could attack again at any time, My Hero Academia’s present-day urban environment is more relaxed, even though villains with their evil use of their “quirks” are definitely dangerous.

At first, UA High is a commuter school, but eventually the students move into dorms on campus. The "found family" dynamic really kicks in then. What I especially like is that everyone accepts everyone else. You know that they would save even Mineta, the standard-issue annoying little perv, if he was in danger, because he’s one of the family.

My favorite character is Shoto Todoroki. His quirk is that he’s half cold, half hot - literally. He can eject ice as a weapon from his right hand, and fire from his left hand.

Shoto comes from a troubled family, one of those families that looks perfect from the outside but is broken on the inside. His father, Endeavor, is the No. 2 hero in Japan, after All Might. What the public doesn’t know is that Shoto’s mother has been institutionalized for years in a psychiatric ward ever since she burned Shoto with boiling water, leaving him with a red scar on his face.

She was sent over the edge by Endeavor, who was physically and mentally abusive to her and to their children, including little Shoto. In a moment of panic, she burned Shoto, thinking that he was Endeavor coming towards her.

After Izuku Midoriya, I would say Shoto and Bakugo are the second main characters. Together they add some spice and interest to a cast that is headed by a somewhat bland Izuku as the protagonist.

So... I’ve caught the My Hero Academia bug, like many other anime fans. But the anime won’t be back until October, so what can I watch in the meantime?

I’ve noticed that Crunchyroll has a few recent BL offerings. One of those is the awkwardly-named The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, a supernatural mystery series.

From the site: “Mikado Kousuke, a young man working at a bookshop who seems normal at first glance, is actually the owner of a peculiar ability to see eerie things. One day, Hiyakawa Rihito appears in the shop where Mikado works. Hiyakawa declares that it must be destiny as the job he has come to do is none other than an exorcism! When Hiyakawa discovers that Mikado can see spirits, he forces Mikado to help with the exorcism. He then requests that Mikado continue to work with him, but...”

The series is rated pretty highly at 4.5 stars overall. True, the number of people voting is small, but then we BL fans are a select group. ;-)

The second BL series - or actually, it looks like a one-off - is Yes, No, or Maybe?

This one also has an overall good rating, but reviews that indicate a lot of triggering stuff in terms of sexual consent issues. I’ve seen Level-C and Ai no Kusabi so nothing can shock me in that regard, but that was back in the day. We’re in a more woke era these days, even where yaoi is concerned. I’m not sure about this one... may watch it, or may not.

Finally, on Funimation, there’s Sasaki and Miyano. This series is getting weekly episode reviews at Anime News Network which is unusual for a BL title, so I’m intrigued.

From MyAnimeList: High school student Yoshikazu Miyano is saved from a group of bullies by Shuumei Sasaki. Miyano is - secretly - a fudanshi, a boy who is into boy’s love. When Sasaki discovers this, surprisingly, he doesn’t judge, but instead enjoys the boy’s love manga that he borrows from Miyano. (I assume things proceed from there. ;-))

With Tricornered Window and Sasaki and Miyano, I have enough for a personal BL fest in my home, lol.

Finally...

You may have wondered why I haven’t mentioned Attack on Titan’s final cour - the end of the series - given my coverage of the series over the years.

Yes, I will watch it. The series is so violent and brutal that I have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it. It’s like an assault that you steel yourself to withstand. I can’t put it off too much longer though, because I don’t want to come across spoilers on the internet.

Anime fans are the best. Seriously, even though it’s been a year since the first cour, I haven’t read any spoilers at all for the final cour of the series. But that can’t last forever, so I’ll definitely be steeling myself soon to watch the end of Attack on Titan.

Anime in the Covid Year of 2020 – Attack on Titan Returns, Muhyo and Roji, K: Seven Stories, Haikyuu, and Thoughts on Boruto

It’s been a year where anime seemed almost beside the point, and yet, by the end of it — for me at least — it felt relevant again in a new way.

Back in March, the production of Boruto went dark for a few months, as workers in Japan hunkered down in the pandemic as did those elsewhere.

When Boruto started up again with new episodes in summer, I recall feeling a little guilty almost. Like, there’s a pandemic on, and I missed anime, but not to the point where I wanted animation workers to go back into production offices and get sick drawing my entertainment.

There’s never been an experience like the pandemic of this year, and some of my reactions to things were all over the place. I’ve since settled down, remembering that people in Japan - like people here in the U.S. - actually wanted to return to work, so it’s okay.

The big news about Boruto is that Masashi Kishimoto is returning to write the manga. I’ve written here before about how Boruto has never lived up to Naruto, but the totally obvious reason for that never occurred to me before I heard this news.

One of the main reasons that made Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden so awesome was its storytelling, its amazing world-building. Konoha, the ninja village of Naruto and his friends, felt as real as anything with its large group of characters and all of their fascinating backstories. Not to mention the ninja universe itself, the five great shinobi nations and their histories.

When the Boruto manga began, I recall reading that Kishimoto was going to be less involved with it, but I didn’t really get that he wasn’t writing the story, and nor was he doing the art.

Well — no offense to the people who were, but — now I understand why Boruto’s storyline moved so slowly and had so much filler (or what felt like filler).

The fact that Kishimoto is taking over again would be cause for unmitigated celebration... save for a rumor I heard. The rumor is that the two most important characters in the Naruto/Boruto universe are getting killed off.

If this turns out to be true... let’s just say that I will genuinely freak out. Although it makes sense in story and mythic terms to have Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, the two main figures in the backstory of Boruto’s universe, die so that Boruto and Sarada and others of the new generation can step up, for me personally that would leave too big of a hole in the whole universe. It would basically hollow out Boruto for me, because the series has for too long traded on our nostalgia for the old characters and their history without building its own standalone resonance with solid storytelling and character development. Without Naruto and Sasuke, Boruto would be like an aftereffect in the Naruto universe, one without a lot of meaning for me.

I can only hope that Kishimoto doesn’t do it.

On a lighter note, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation had its second season on Funimation this time instead of Crunchyroll, so what I call my “emergency Funimation subscription” came in handy this summer. (I keep a paid subscription year-round to Funimation for those occasional anime series that Crunchyroll doesn’t license.)

Muhyo and Roji is one of those anime series that is enjoyable and not too cliffhangery when a season ends, meaning you can look forward to it coming back at some point without being anxious about it. It’s weird that Crunchyroll had its first season, but Funimation got its second season. Apparently, both companies will be under Sony’s umbrella soon, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way in the ultimate sense.

In this covid year of 2020, a lot of us ate comfort foods while stuck at home. The same principle was followed for entertainment. People watched their favorite movies and TV shows for the enjoyment of the familiar.

I did the same with one of my favorite anime series, K, or rather K’s final iteration—K: Seven Stories, a post-series set of six episodes that beautifully finishes the K universe.

K: Seven Stories is a send-off or coda that brings closure to the entire world of K in a way that respects each character and each clan in all their quirkiness. The characters that intrigued you the most while watching the two TV seasons and the movie K: Missing Kings are explored in greater depth. Knowing how the main story ends, the opportunity to see these characters in their full humanity adds poignancy to the viewing. Even Gojo Sukuna, the young brat in the Green Clan, gets a full episode where we see how he longed for a sense of family and found it in the Greens, the most oddball clan of them all.

The final episode of K: Seven Stories is wonderful. It presents a mysterious situation where characters you know are dead are somehow alive again, and everyone is enjoying themselves in a sort of timeless Groundhog Day world where each day is fun and there are no lasting consequences for anything you do.

Eventually, of course, everyone tires of it, and begins to seek answers and a way out. The final scene brings the curtain down on K as the mysterious observer who has briefly appeared in all six episodes reveals his/her identity as the one behind the timeloop. The universe of K ends with its most emotional episode, one that has the characters affirming life even with its painful losses as something beautiful to be treasured. I love K. It’s a seriously underrated anime series, one that I wish more anime fans would watch.

That being said — a weird thing happened recently with K’s producers, the Go Hands animation studio. Some Go Hands designers were found to have plagiarized character/costume designs from other sources for its upcoming Tokyo Babylon 2021 anime series based on CLAMP’s original Tokyo Babylon series from the 1990s.

This amazes me for two reasons. First, K had awesome character and costume designs, meaning that Go Hands is perfectly capable of doing great original designs themselves. In fact, one of the distinctive things about K was that director Shingo Suzuki was also credited as K’s character designer — which I imagine has to be the only time in anime when those two very different jobs were performed by the same person.

The second thing that makes this odd is that CLAMP has always been known for fantastic character and costume designs. Couldn’t they have asked CLAMP to do these new designs?

Go Hands is hardly the first case of plagiarism in anime and manga — it happens occasionally and it’s always unfortunate. Hopefully they will get beyond this, and we’ll all get to see Tokyo Babylon 2021 sooner rather than later.

Haikyuu returned this fall. I enjoyed this season, though I’ve lost track of which level of the tournament they’re at given the huge gaps of time between each season.

Haikyuu finally got hit by the curse that hits many anime series at some time or another: the badly animated episode. A few weeks before the season ended, there was one episode where the character faces looked a little off, and the comments ensued on Crunchyroll as you might expect.

Production I.G. is known for its quality animation, but many production companies farm out some of their animation work overseas to Korea or Vietnam. Not to blame the overseas contractors, because who knows where the fault lay this time, but it seems production deadlines affect even the best of shows.

So now, Haikyuu is over once again, and who knows when it will return for another season. There was a four-year hiatus before it resumed again this year. Let’s hope it’s not another four years before the next season.

Onyx Equinox is Crunchyroll’s first original series. The story is based on Mesoamerican mythology and represents a departure from the site’s main focus on Japanese anime.

I have a lot of thoughts about Onyx Equinox, so I’ll be doing a post on it in January.

One of the delights of anime is the short-episode series, like Yamishibai (returning in winter 2021!). It’s hard to resist a series with a good premise that gives you five-minute episodes. Who doesn’t have five minutes to watch anime?

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun has even shorter episodes — about a minute and a half apiece. Astonishingly, not only is it very funny, but its more serious episodes actually have me tearing up.

It’s about a young woman and her overeager, happy-all-the-time dog, and her evil but somehow adorable cat. As one Crunchyroll commenter put it, after watching an episode about the young woman’s former dog who passed away, “GREAT, NOW I’M CRYING INTO MY FOOD.” That's a tribute to the power of anime, seriously. What other form of entertainment can do that to you in 90 seconds flat?

And finally — Attack on Titan is in its last season.

Attack on Titan is unlike any other series, defying easy categorization. It’s shonen, sure, but its alternate Earth setting and those amazing, horrifying titans put it into a category of its own. Not to mention how the show’s popularity basically saved the U.S. manga localization industry in the early 2010s, and by association, anime in the U.S. as well.

The fact that Attack on Titan is ending makes me a little nostalgic. It was around the time of Attack on Titan’s initial popularity that I began to feel out of step with anime in general. My posts on this blog were spotty from 2015 to around 2018, when I came back to anime with renewed enthusiasm.

This is the 11th year I’ve been writing this anime blog. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog or the editing work I do in this industry. Like many, I suspect, this covid year has led to some soul searching for me as to how I want to spend my time going forward.

But for now, there will be no big changes. I’ll continue to blog here on anime and manga as my work schedule permits. I still feel that anime is relevant in my life, and every year there are series that surprise me. Anime can still surprise me with its variety and artistry, so there’s life here yet. And thanks for continuing to read this blog – it is much appreciated. :-)

Anime Expo 2019 - Convention Report

For the first time in four years—I attended Anime Expo in Los Angeles.

My last AX was in 2015. I was feeling burned out and not connected to the anime community the way I used to be, so I took a break to focus on writing fiction.

Last year, I came back to the world of anime and manga and all that it is... and could be. More on that later.

Day 0

Wednesday, July 3, was Day 0 this year. Anime Expo is getting so crowded with events that the convention actually begins on Day 0 at 6:00 p.m. Major publishers such as Dark Horse held their industry panels that evening.

The Day 0 evening is a bit eerie. The banners are up in the L.A. Convention Center hallways and the J.W. Marriott hotel, an official AX convention site, but the masses of attendees aren’t here yet.

My reason for being there on Day 0 was to catch up with eigoMANGA at their industry panel.

I interviewed Austin Osueke, eigoMANGA’s founder, nine years ago on this blog. I wanted to see what Austin has been up to and where he’s taken his company since then.

EigoMANGA publishes manga, comic books and games, some originally from Japan and others created here in the U.S.

For 15 years, the company has sponsored a workshop at AX called How to Draw Manga. The teacher/presenter is Mino Miyabi, and it’s one of the most popular workshops at the convention.

This year, eigoMANGA presented an anime film, First Squad: Moment of Truth, on Day 1. The preview looked good and I wanted to attend the screening, but unfortunately it conflicted with something else on my schedule.

If you get a chance, I think it’s worth seeing.

EigoMANGA is known among other titles for Vanguard Princess, a 2D fighting game that has now been adapted to comics as well. The company collaborates with Korean studios to produce webtoons, and has also produced a comics app, Comic Climax, that features many of the company’s properties.

There aren’t many non-Asian POC owners in this industry. Osueke has successfully run eigoMANGA for twenty years now. I look forward to seeing what he has in store for eigoMANGA’s next twenty years.

The Entertainment Hall at Anime Expo is where video and tabletop gaming takes place... along with a special feature I really like.

After watching anime for a while, one begins to notice that certain settings keep showing up. At AX, they actually built sets so fans could photograph themselves as if they were in these typical anime locations.

For example, think of all the scenes that take place while the characters are on the train.

Then of course, there’s the school rooftop.

And the traditional home with the low table and the screen door that looks out onto the garden.

The temple gate with blooming sakura trees...

And a post-apocalyptic scene for those end-of-the-world series.

I have my issues with AX and how it’s run in some ways, but these settings are awesome. :-)

Day 1

Day 1 began, for me anyway, with the Viz Media Industry Panel.

Photographs and video were forbidden, so I have no photos. The panel was held in Petree Hall, probably the largest panel venue in the convention center, and it was nearly full with several thousand fans in the audience.

There was a heavy emphasis on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, Sailor Moon and My Hero Academia—and almost nothing was said at all about Boruto. In fact, when a photo of Boruto was briefly shown on the screen I actually heard scattered boos.

I’ll be the first to admit as a longtime Naruto fan that Boruto hasn’t reached the level of its parent series yet in terms of drama and excitement. But give it time! With all the legacy characters and its fully fleshed-out ninja universe, it can’t fail. Its substantive story arcs have been good so far and there’s obviously room for the series to grow.

Some of Viz’s manga announcements made me sit up and take notice. In 2020, they’re releasing Prince Freya, about a girl who has to impersonate a prince to save her kingdom, and Blue Flag, an LGBTQ story about a four-way romance quadrangle. Both looked very good and I’ve put them on my list to look out for next year.

The title that made me and everyone else in Petree Hall laugh was The Way of the Househusband.

The Way of the Househusband is about a yakuza who decides to give up that way of life and become a househusband instead. It’s a premise that could almost write itself, really—think about it. ;-) Not only is it a hysterical concept, but the pages from the manga they showed on the big screen elicited howls of laughter from the audience. The story just looks like a lot of fun. The book is scheduled for release this fall.

The Yen Press panel was halfway across the convention center and started just as the Viz panel ended, so I ran out of the Viz panel early to get a seat for Yen Press.

Surprisingly, though Yen Press has a lot of titles and made a lot of announcements, I only found two that caught my attention.

Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina is a Kino’s Journey type of story. The second was one of those weird light novel titles that seem in vogue these days: The Penetrated Battlefield Should Disappear There: Bullet Witchcraft & Ghost Program.

The art is pretty and the premise sounds interesting. A soldier discovers that the magic bullets he uses on the battlefield will eliminate the men he shoots as if they’d never existed.

I was looking forward to The State of Manga panel later that afternoon, and it did not disappoint.

Dallas Middaugh is an industry veteran, having worked at Del Rey Manga, Random House and most recently for Crunchyroll Manga. He’s not only a fixture in this industry, but also a keen observer of trends and keeper of metrics on manga book sales.

Middaugh was instrumental in reviving the manga industry in 2012. I’ve written before in this blog about how Attack on Titan brought anime and manga back from the brink in the U.S. While he was at Random House, Middaugh approved the first print run of the Attack on Titan manga in 2012. In 2013, the anime series took off, and he ordered multiple printings ahead of the demand—which only kept increasing—resulting in the manga series being a huge success that symbiotically supported the anime series and vice-versa. The manga series and anime series became a two-headed phenomenon that spurred other publishers to start taking a chance on manga again.

In my opinion, when Crunchyroll turned legit and started streaming Naruto and Bleach around 2008-09... that was the first turning point in growing the industry in the U.S. But the success of Attack on Titan in 2013 was the second turning point. Its manga sales grew the manga aisle at bookstores from where it had dwindled down to a few shelves after the recession, to where it is today—an entire aisle filled with manga.

Middaugh presented slide after slide on manga sales. He stated that anime is a big driver of manga sales, but only if the anime series is a successful one. Shonen is a huge category, and Viz Media basically dominates the U.S. manga market.

When I visit the manga aisle at Barnes & Noble, the publisher logo I see on the most manga books is Viz’s logo. Second would be a tie between Yen Press and Seven Seas, with other publishers coming after that. Kodansha, surprisingly, seems to have few available titles for sale on the shelves despite being a big name publisher. But those are just my personal observations of a number of Barnes & Noble bookstores, and it may be different in other areas of the U.S.

Day 2

Day 2 was the unofficial Mamoru Miyano Day at AX. =)

The first of three events featuring Miyano was the North American premiere screening of the anime feature film, Human Lost.

Photos and video-taking were strictly prohibited... but fortunately Funimation took photos!

Miyano and a few production people appeared before the screening and spoke to the audience. Miyano’s speaking voice is higher and lighter in tone than most of his anime roles. The closest role to his real voice is Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club. I think he pitches his voice lower and deeper for his more serious roles, like in Human Lost.

Human Lost is a dark dystopian tale about a society where humans live longer—to age 120 or so—but at the cost of working longer as well. Except, of course, for the elite who don’t have to work at all, courtesy of the masses who do.

The movie engaged me as I watched it—I was never bored—but it didn’t resonate with me on a deeper level, aside from a few emotion-charged moments towards the end.

Following Human Lost, Miyano also had the premieres of Uta no Prince-sama: Magi Love Kingdom and the new In/Spectre anime series, so it was a wall-to-wall Miyano experience for his fans in attendance. ;-) But I had publisher panels to attend.

For me, Tokyopop’s Diversity in Manga panel was the greatest surprise of the whole convention.

Back in the day, I freelanced for Tokyopop as a copy editor and proofreader, working on over 40 manga books. My contact there was the managing editor, Vy Nguyen.

How Tokyopop wound down its North American office is already well-known, so I won’t go into it here. I recall hearing a few years ago that Tokyopop was publishing manga again, but even so, I wasn’t expecting what I saw at their panel.

The title of their panel, “Diversity in Manga,” comes from their International Women of Manga initiative. Tokyopop is now publishing OEL manga created by women writers and artists from around the world. And a lot of it is female gaze—stories about what women and girls want to see, told from the female point of view.

Editors Janae Young and Lena Atanassova, along with marketing director Kae Winters, presented the IWM titles with a lot of enthusiasm. Their love for these books came across right away. Books coming from the female perspective will do that to you. ;-) So fewer are published than male perspective/male gaze stories that there’s a great hunger for them.

Publishers who ignore women and their purchasing power are... extremely short-sighted, in my opinion. =D

Back to Tokyopop... not only are the stories diverse, but there’s a major yaoi/yuri and LGBTQ vibe to not only the IWM initiative but also Tokyopop’s current existing inventory of titles. They’re already publishing BL stories like Hanger and yuri stories like Yuri Bear Storm, and more queer-friendly titles are in the pipeline.

The IWM title that really intrigued me was Sword Princess Amaltea, written and illustrated by a Swedish mangaka named Natalia Batista.

In a civilization where women rule by magic, and society has been formed into queendoms, Amaltea is the second-born princess in the Galateas Queendom. She’s ordered by her mother the Queen to rescue a prince and marry him, in order to seize half of that prince’s queendom.

The women in this series are the major players and persons with agency—all the way. They fight battles, drink and carouse (leaving their menfolk at home to wait for them ;-)), wreak havoc, are knights and soldiers and highway bandits, plotters and schemers, both the good and the bad “guys.”

What about the male characters? Well, they kind of don’t do very much. ;-) They’re passive and wait to be rescued, and nobody pays attention to their opinions because they have no power anyways and are secondary to women who are the doers, movers and shakers in this world.

Batista leavens the acid touch of this role reversal with a lot of humor, so it would be hard to call this story man-hating—though I’m sure some will anyway. If you’re female though, you know how tedious it is to see characters of your gender always being passive, secondary, powerless... uninteresting. All kinds of female-centric stories are needed to break through the hold of male-centric storytelling, and Sword Princess Amaltea is a good, fun manga that fits the bill as well as anything.

I know all this about this series, because as soon as the Tokyopop panel let out I ran to the Exhibit Hall to buy all three volumes of Sword Princess Amaltea. I was so excited to talk to the editors and buy their books that I forgot I had the Square Enix panel on my schedule and missed it entirely. ;-) It was the kind of moment you actually want to have happen at conventions—that unexpected spark of the new in the midst of the familiar, something that really gets you going.

I don’t discuss my fiction much on this anime blog, saving it instead for my writing blog Atypical Romance, but as you might know I’m five books into a seven-book series about a future matriarchy where women rule society and civilization is composed of... queendoms. Like in Amaltea, my characters are multicultural, and as women have most of the agency, my protagonist is a mixed-race bisexual young man, Anming Lee, who chafes at the restrictions he lives under in the Queendom of Califia.

The first thought I had when the editors described Sword Princess Amaltea was: I’m not alone. I see so few female-superior, female-forward stories out there that it feels like a mirage at first when I finally stumble across one.

Much more on this topic later.

Seven Seas held their panel on Day 2.

Seven Seas had five panelists at their panel, including founder and owner Jason DeAngelis. When DeAngelis introduced himself, a small ripple of surprise went through the audience. I’m going to guess that he doesn’t do a lot of convention appearances, because it felt to me like everyone was startled to see him there.

Something I learned at this panel is that Seven Seas is a volume publisher—seriously. They publish hundreds of titles a year.

Since that’s the case, one can see why they publish everything from shonen manga to BL novels to hentai to tabletop games and, and... they really are a full-service publisher in all senses of the term. Their properties range from fan-servicy to literary and everything in between.

Some upcoming titles I found of interest: Ghostly Things, The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese, SCP File, My Androgynous Boyfriend and Metamorphose no Engawa.

In the Q&A session, someone asked DeAngelis how he came up with the name Seven Seas for his company. Interestingly, he said that he first imagined that he would be exporting manga in English all over the world—and so, “our ship would carry it everywhere”—hence the nautical-based name. Now, thirteen years later, DeAngelis feels it’s become a reality, happily enough.

Day 3

Day Three began with the Shonen Jump panel.

The Shonen Jump panel had the same feel as the Viz panel on Day 1, with a heavy concentration on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. I watched some of the earlier Jojo series years ago, and found it kind of extreme and off-putting... nevertheless, I know it has a big following.

Viz showed a video of Jojo’s creator, Hirohiko Araki, who thanked everyone for attending the panel and being a fan of his series. My main shock was seeing how completely normal Araki-sensei looks, compared with his wild and outrageous characters. He looked like a salaryman, even wearing a business suit(!).

The combined Kodansha and Vertical panel was in the afternoon. Though Ben Applegate’s panels are always a pleasure to attend, given his intelligence and humor—I found I wasn’t too interested in their offerings this time around.

Two announcements caught my attention. The first was Perfect World, a manga series in which a female interior designer meets up with her first crush from high school, who is now disabled and uses a wheelchair.

The second announcement was that Kodansha has license-rescued the Saiyuki manga series from Tokyopop. Saiyuki was one of the first series that brought me into anime/manga fandom back in the day and holds a lot of nostalgia for me. Kodansha will be releasing the series in hardcover with a new translation.

Anime Expo has had an Industry Lounge for a number of years now. The last time I attended in 2015, I recall it being a sad room upstairs from the Exhibit Hall that had a few tables and chairs and a water dispenser and nothing else.

This time around, there were desk stations with wi-fi access so people could plug in and work, and nice couches, so there’s been improvement. ;-)

The best thing about the lounge, aside from it being one of the few quiet places where you can catch your breath at the convention, is its location. It’s situated above the Exhibit Hall, with windows so you can look out upon the football field-sized space.

It’s hard to get the perspective from the photos, since I was angling to try to get the view all around—but hopefully you can get a sense of just how huge the hall was.

Speaking of the Exhibit Hall, it was while walking through there that I first saw a certain kind of bag... everywhere.

These bags had a plastic panel where you could stuff pins, keychains, plushies and other items to display your love for a particular anime series or character.

I finally asked someone what they were. They’re called “Ita Bags.”

I had a sudden insane urge to own one of these bags, seeing a use finally for all the weird little things I’ve collected at conventions over the years. I found the bags on Amazon, and will get one before I attend my next convention.

I don’t take cosplay photos anymore—I got tired of doing it—but I make an exception for one character.

If a cosplayer is game enough to try the Medicine Seller costume from Mononoke, I will gladly take a picture of her or him. ;-)

For reference, here’s Kusuri-uri:

Crunchyroll had a lounge of its own, offsite at L.A. Live.

I realize that it looks like no one’s there, but that’s only because I went early in the afternoon. There was a cash bar and a nice nightclub atmosphere, so I’m sure it got lively in the evening. I actually intended to go back that night, but got waylaid by going to dinner with J-Novel Club after their panel.

J-Novel Club’s founder and owner Sam Pinansky presented the panel, along with managing editor Aimee Zink.

JNC had many announcements. Like with the other publisher panels I attended, I’m only going to talk about the announcements that personally interest me. (For the rundown of all the publishers and their announcements, Anime News Network did a great breakdown which you can read here.)

Last and First Idol has been released in print! This hard sci-fi/Japanese pop culture crossover novel was one of my favorite reads of last year - and I highly recommend it.

JNC is now releasing many of their light novel and manga series in print. I think this is a great development for them, as the market for light novels in English is only getting bigger and better.

Two of their upcoming releases that intrigued me are Animeta, about a woman who, inspired by anime, decides to become an animator; and Marginal Operation, about an otaku who loses his job and becomes a mercenary.

One of the company’s biggest announcements was that there will be a Kickstarter campaign, the company’s first, for an omnibus print run of Invaders of the Rokujouma!?, a favorite of JNC readers. The campaign will begin in fall 2019.

Sam, Aimee and a number of JNC translators and editors went to dinner after the panel. After Uber-ing to Little Tokyo, a few miles across downtown LA, we waited for two hours to be served at a trendoid Japanese noodle shop.

I’d intended to go to the History of Fujoshi and Boys Love panel that was scheduled for 10 p.m. A few of us hastily Uber-ed back to the convention center after dinner, arriving at around 9:50 p.m.

I reached the theater-like room where the panel was held, only to be told there were no seats left. If there’d been even one seat, my industry badge would’ve gotten me in, but alas... it was not to be.

If anyone reading this attended the panel that evening, please leave a comment and let me know how it went... I’m really sorry I missed it. :-(

Day 4

Sunday, July 7, was Day 4 of Anime Expo.

The last day of AX is when you realize just how exhausted you are. I’m always impressed by cosplayers who make the effort to dress up on the last day. It was enough for me to get myself to two panels before going home.

“The Environment of Foreign Nationals Working in Japan” panel wins the convention prize for the most deceptively-named panel.

It was basically 90 minutes all about one Japanese gaming company, Cyber Connect 2, that is recruiting thirty foreign nationals to work at their Fukuoka headquarters. From the panel’s name, I’d expected a more general talk about working in Japan and what it’s like.

Instead, it was an hour of VP Taichiro Miyazaki extoling the benefits of working at Cyber Connect 2 and the beauty of Fukuoka, including its fine weather and great cuisine, complete with slides showing Miyazaki-san eating bowls of ramen in local restaurants with great gusto... followed by thirty minutes of what living in Fukuoka is like and details of the positions the company was looking to fill.

To be fair, Cyber Connect 2, from his description, sounded like a good place for foreigners to work. The company provides translators on the job and free Japanese lessons, along with visas to work in Japan. I just wish they’d named the panel “Cyber Connect 2 Is Recruiting Employees from Overseas” and been done with it. -_-

My final panel of the convention was Global Stories: Netflix Anime. And it was then when everything came together for me—my thoughts about female-centric stories and our place in anime, manga and other books, and filmed entertainment.

I took the above photo before the panel began, since no photos or videos were allowed during the panel. It was a huge ballroom and looks empty, but it eventually filled to about one-third capacity. The last day of AX is always like that. People are checking out of hotels, dashing to the Exhibit Hall for a final shopping trip, and the like. And if I recall correctly, Netflix’s panel was a late addition to AX’s schedule, so that didn’t help the attendance either.

So not too many people were there, but it was still a respectful and interested audience for the creators of Cannon Busters, Trese, and Seis Manos.

Cannon Busters, an animated series directed and written by LeSean Thomas, is about a droid, a robot and a fugitive on a journey through a dangerous world. Trese is set in a dark, gritty Manila, and is based on an award-winning Filipino comic book series. Seis Manos, set in Mexico, is a violent martial arts revenge tale from the creators of Netflix’s Castlevania anime series.

“Dangerous... dark... gritty... violent...” I think I see a trend here. =(

Don’t get me wrong. I looked at the panel and saw three talented men of color, already successful names in the business, who were getting their chance at an even wider audience through Netflix and its global anime push.

And I have no issue with dark, gritty and/or violent stories. There’s darkness and violence in my own fiction.

So what bothered me about the Netflix panel? It wasn’t the Netflix panel specifically, or I should say solely. It was my sense from the entire convention that half of us are still not being seen, heard or catered to, despite our equal purchasing power, in an art form we love as much as anyone.

At some point during the panel, a thought came to me. If we don’t get our stories out there, nothing is going to change.

What do I mean by “our stories”? I think that’s still being defined by all of us who are creators of female-centric stories, whether it be OEL manga, cartoons, web comics, novels or animations.

One of the problems we face is that we’ve all grown up and been inundated with male-centric stories, myself included. When I discovered anime in 2005, it was shonen stories I fell in love with. The anime industry has done shonen stories for so long now that they’ve got it down to a science, and so they are excellent entertainment.

So it’s natural that some of our work is imitative or reactive to what already exists—it can’t be helped.

As women and girl creators, generally speaking, we have yet to discover our own kind of stories—our voices. What we would produce without being imitative or reactive to male-centric stories.

There are already great female creators out there, but more are needed, and that will only come about when there’s a critical mass of female-centric products in the marketplace. So in a sense, quantity will drive quality.

This is where the Internet comes in. There’s never been a better time in history for women to use the tools in place to get their work out before the public. As more and more of us do this, new standards of excellence will emerge and female-centric stories, female gaze stories will become part of the landscape—as they always should have been.

Not only in the anime and manga space, but throughout the art and entertainment world.

When my novel Kaminishi was published by Dreamspinner Press, I discovered the joy of being a producer. As I write these words, Comic Con is going on in San Diego, and over 100,000 fans are having a great time going to panels, shopping in the Exhibit Hall and meeting the creators of their favorite movies, TV series and comic books.

That’s a wonderful thing. It’s fun being a fan of something. I’ve been a fan, a consumer of a lot of movies and TV series, anime series, books, etc., for decades.

But there’s nothing like the feeling when you become a producer of creative work. No matter how small your audience, your readership may be—the creation of a story in whatever form means you’re now in a different space. You’ve brought a story idea to life, into being, and shared it with the world.

If you’re thinking about telling the stories that are in your head, I urge you to do it. Just do it. Because I need them and the world needs them, and if you do—the anime and manga, films and TV and books we all love will never be the same again.