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

Funimation Is Finally Redundant and Fall Season Update

Hello again! It feels like a long time since I’ve posted.

I was distracted from the end of September until mid-October getting ready for a convention where I was one of the official authors. I had to order promo cards and arrange for my books to be sent to the convention, etc.

Now I’m back... and just today I took care of some leftover business with my anime subscriptions... namely Funimation.

Last year I wrote about the Crunchyroll-Funimation merger and how clumsily Sony was handling the whole thing. It took so long for Funimation’s catalog of titles to be transferred over to Crunchyroll that after a while I literally forgot about it.

I’ve done this before. I paid for a subscription to the Anime Network (anyone remember them?) back when they were the only site that streamed Zettai Karen Children (Psychic Squad). I kept the subscription long after I bought the entire series on DVD until I finally remembered to cancel it.

So after my convention was over and I had the time to take care of some things, I recalled that I still had my paid Funimation subscription and decided to check whether every series I cared about had been transferred to Crunchyroll by now.

I actually hadn’t logged in to Crunchyroll in months. Remember, my mainstay anime Boruto is currently on a long hiatus. The most recent cour of Bleach ended last month, but Bleach is on Hulu now and not Crunchyroll.

For years, logging in to Crunchyroll was a daily thing for me. It felt odd to log in again after months away.

It was a task to compare the Funimation and Crunchyroll catalogs. (It had been even longer since I’d logged in to Funimation.) I looked at my watchlists on both sites and tried to remember if there were other anime series on Funimation that weren’t on my watchlist but that I’d wanted to watch.

I’d kept the Funimation subscription mainly for four series: 1) Dragon Ball; 2) Junjou Romantica; 3) Hetalia; and 4) Heaven Official’s Blessing.

Funimation had all of the Dragon Ball series, while Crunchyroll only had Dragon Ball Super. I was relieved to see that Crunchyroll now has all of the Dragon Ball titles.

After I’d cross-checked that Junjou Romantica, Hetalia, and Heaven Official’s Blessing were now on Crunchyroll as well, I suddenly remembered The Prince of Tennis, one of my old favorites.

The Prince of Tennis has always been on Funimation but not Crunchyroll - or at least not consistently on Crunchyroll. However, the good news is that the whole series is now available on Crunchyroll... for the moment anyway. I get that licenses can and do end, but it’s good to know that Crunchyroll has it for the time being.

So I canceled my Funimation subscription today. I will be saving a whole $5.99 a month (lol). Well, it starts to add up if you include my now-deceased Netflix DVD subscription which was $7.99 a month.

And speaking of Netflix DVD... I was hoping that Netflix would have some kind of offer for loyal DVD subscribers after Netflix DVD bit the dust, something like a special discount for Netflix streaming for example. And then in early October I received an email from them that offered three free months for streaming with ads and $6.99 a month thereafter, which I’d say is a good offer from them. I also have a whole 12 months to accept the offer, which is cool.

Now that I’ve logged back in to Crunchyroll and updated my watchlist to include all the titles ported over from Funimation as well as everything I wanted to watch in the current season, I feel plugged into the animesphere again. And I have a ton of stuff lined up to watch.

I have to wonder when the Funimation site will be shut down for good. I’m not sure what it has these days that Crunchyroll doesn’t have. I hope people who still have paid subscriptions there will do what I did and cross-check their watchlists with Crunchyroll. Honestly, there doesn’t appear to be any reason to pay for both anymore.

Fall 2023 Watchlist, Bleach, and Death of the Red Envelope

It’s fall and this blog is back from its summer hiatus! Hope everyone is well and thriving...

While I was off, I published a new book (The Female Gaze: Through a Different Lens), saw some movies, and tried to speed through my Netflix DVD list (more on that later).

If you read this blog, you know that I’ve been feeling a little distant from the anime scene and re-evaluating what anime and manga mean to me. Except for Bleach’s recent return I haven’t been watching anything regularly.

It got worse when I looked at the upcoming fall anime season and saw that there is still a ton of isekai series in the animesphere. I have to wonder: is isekai really that popular, or is it a trend that I simply don’t get the appeal of?

Regardless, I did find a few series that I think I’ll try out.

Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions
(Kamonohashi Ron no Kindan Suiri)

From Anime News Network:

An unusual private investigator and police detective duo team up to solve a series of thrilling mysteries!

From My Anime List:

Despite lacking the skills suited for his role on the Metropolitan Police Department investigative team, Totomaru Isshiki wants to solve murders and help people. Following the advice of one of his seniors, he ventures out to enlist the aid of the reclusive Ron Kamonohashi.

Five years ago, Ron was the most promising detective from the illustrious Detective Training Academy Blue; yet for reasons unknown to the public, he sank into obscurity.

Totomaru expects a well-dressed, composed man; but what he gets is a messy-haired and uninhibited eccentric. After years in solitude, Ron barely resembles his former self and he refuses to even hear out the detective. However, as quickly as Ron rebuffs, he flips on a dime and dives headfirst into the current serial murder case.

The true reason Ron withdrew from the detective world was not from lack of desire, but rather from something out of his control - and Totomaru might just be the key for his return to his former calling. Together, the wide-eyed officer and deranged detective tackle each mystery that comes their way.

My New Boss is Goofy
(Atarashii Joushi wa Do Tennen)

From ANN:

Kentaro Momose’s new job may be stressful, but his new boss is more laid-back than he looks.

From MAL:

Momose, a 26-year-old office worker, recently changed jobs after being harassed by his former boss. He is concerned that his new boss will also use power harassment to make his life miserable. Momose tries to hide his concern about facing a similar situation with his new boss, Shirasaki. To Momose’s surprise, however, Shirasaki’s inherent airheadedness immediately alleviates all of his concerns, giving him a sense of relief.

By the way, there’s no BL overtones at all in that pic - none at all. ;-D

Heaven Official’s Blessing Season 2
(Tian Guan Cifu Er)

From ANN:

Xie Lian reunites with Hua Cheng when he’s sent on a mission in the Ghost City.

... Which reminds me, I still need to finish season one on Funimation. Another first season I need to finish is Spy X Family. The second season starts on Oct. 7, but as of this writing, Crunchyroll hasn’t announced that they have the license yet. I expect that will change soon.

Also, I thought My Hero Academia and Boruto were supposed to return this October. I looked into it and found that My Hero Academia is set to return with Season 7 in Spring 2024, while Boruto has a new manga arc, “Two Blue Vortex,” which began in August. However, no word yet on when the anime will return.

The second cour of Bleach’s Thousand Year Blood War arc, which began in summer, is winding down now, and it’s been great. The episodes have been my only weekly touchstone as far as having a regular anime schedule goes and I’ve had something to look forward to each Saturday because of it. It’s set to end on Sept. 30 with a doubleheader of the two final episodes.

And now for the end of something else. After 25 years, Netflix DVD is closing down its subscription service.

Before Crunchyroll was legit, before almost any anime you wanted to watch was legally available, Netflix DVD was one of the few ways you could watch anime legitimately and guilt-free. For a small monthly fee the whole universe of entertainment that was available on DVD discs could be sent to your door.

I watched more anime movies than series in the early days. (There was nothing worse than trying to binge a series when you had to wait for the U.S. Postal Service to bring you the next disc - it felt like forever, lol.)

But the anime movies more than made up for it. I’m pretty sure I first watched Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal via a Netflix disc, as well as Embracing Love: A Cicada in Winter.

The trend for or against DVDs went back and forth through the years. First, it was streaming will kill off discs. Then it was outsmart the expensive streaming services by rebuilding your disc collection! There was validity on both sides of the argument.

From the FAQ page at Netflix DVD:

Q. When is the last day you'll ship out discs?
A. On April 18th, we announced that after 25 years of shipping DVDs, this will be our Final Season, and we'll ship our last disc on September 29th, 2023.

I found two answers intriguing:

Q. Can I purchase discs from DVD Netflix?
A. We are unable to sell discs from our rental inventory.

Q. Do I need to return any remaining discs after the last shipping day?
A. You will not be charged for any unreturned discs - please enjoy them for as long as you like! If you do choose to return the disc, we will continue to accept returns until October 27th, 2023.

What are they going to do with their inventory of thousands of discs?? My first thought when I heard Netflix DVD was closing down was - Can we buy the DVDs? Apparently the answer is no. I hope that they’ll donate them to libraries, senior centers, retirement homes, etc.

And... “If you do choose to return the disc...” So the last disc is a freebie? I have Doctor Zhivago at home now. If I hurry up, watch it, and return it to Netflix and change my queue, maybe I can get a DVD I’d really like to keep...? I mean... that is what they’re saying, right?

There’s actually a serious consideration here. Besides the doomsday prepper aspect of what if the internet goes down and streaming disappears there’s a certain negative outcome that can be counted on to happen in these situations.

Every time technology changes and a new delivery mode of entertainment takes over, some art gets lost. When cassette tapes replaced vinyl records, not all of the music that was on records got transferred to the new technology. The same when CDs replaced cassettes, and when MP3s replaced CDs.

An example: through the years I’ve rented Kadokawa Mystery & Horror Tales, a series of Japanese short horror tales, from Netflix DVD. Each disc featured several creepy short videos that I would watch with English subs. I’m not saying they were Oscar contenders but I will miss them. Where else will I be able to watch something like this?

It’s not Netflix’s fault. They can close down their business if they want. But the loss of their huge DVD inventory, which included the foreign and the obscure, the indie and the exploitation movies - all the not-so-popular or weird things to watch - will make it more difficult to discover something unusual, or even just something that isn’t American.

Not everything is on streaming. It may feel like it sometimes if you go through Netflix’s or Hulu’s or Amazon Prime Video’s seemingly endless film and video offerings, but everyone who is my age remembers that small indie or foreign film from the 1960s or 70s that you can’t find to watch anywhere now. Maybe it was available on VHS but not on DVD, so it’s certainly never going to be available on a streaming platform. Essentially, it’s gone.

So Netflix DVD closing down isn’t just Netflix closing down its DVD division - it’s a loss of access to certain films and TV series and a narrowing of choice. I really do hope that they don’t simply trash those discs, because even creepy obscure Japanese horror stories have their place.

The Death of Long-Running Anime

I’m in a null zone right now in regards to anime.

It happened unexpectedly when Boruto suddenly went on hiatus with little notice. Boruto was my Sunday morning habit until it wasn’t, and that absence really made a difference.

Something else occurred in April this year that brought this home to me. I was on a business trip in the Sea-Tac area of Washington State and had planned a few free days in downtown Seattle after the business part of my trip concluded.

After I checked into my hotel, I was startled to discover that Sakura-Con was being held that same weekend. I went to the convention center to register for the con’s last day, only to find that registration had closed an hour before.

Sakura-Con was on my radar for years as an anime fan. I’d always figured I’d go to it sometime. It’s not on the level of Anime Expo or even Otakon, but it’s at least at Fanime level as far as the numbers go. I’ve been so out of the loop on anime news that I didn’t even know that Sakura-Con was going to take place while I was in the Seattle area.

And that brings up another thought. I haven’t watched any new anime series in quite some time. I don’t care for isekai and unless some old favorite miraculously comes back from the dead like Bleach I find I’m not interested enough to try anything new.

It’s not a quality issue... I think. I think it’s a difference in the types of stories being produced these days.

My favorite anime series have been long-running shonen stories like Naruto, Bleach and Gintama, stories that go for hundreds of episodes where you can really get into the characters and the universe that they inhabit.

There isn’t anything that feels like that kind of story now in the anime world. There’s no brilliant Fullmetal Alchemist or cool Gundam 00 to watch anymore, to look forward to every week.

It could be that that particular kind of manga or anime story belonged to a certain era - and that era is now gone.

This young anime fan puts it perfectly.

Title: The DEATH of Long Running Anime
Creator: Blank Thoughts
Warning: Some salty language



I can’t fault art forms for evolving, and nothing in life stays the same. I do miss this kind of story though.

Ironically... I am attending an anime convention this weekend. I made the arrangements months ago. I don’t know what it will feel like to be at a post-pandemic full-on anime convention again. I’ll post my con report here when I return.

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. ;-)

Another Year Around the Anime Sun

It’s a new year and I keep adding new anime series to watch.

Some of it isn’t technically “anime.” As in, I’ve found another Chinese series to watch.

This is the Chinese animated series or donghua called Bureau of Paranormal Investigation, not to be confused with Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation which I’ve discussed before.

This donghua... is kind of a mixed bag. I haven’t researched donghua and how long the Chinese have been doing animated series, but this one feels like it’s going for a Ghost in the Shell look, which it succeeds at... sort of.

The story appears to be set in contemporary mainland China. Shen La is a special forces operative. During a mission to capture a drug lord, the special forces team enters a cave of ancient spirits. The spirits attack and Shen La has a phantom-like spirit invade his body through his eye. Only Shen La and Sun Desheng, the mission’s undercover agent, survive the attack with the aid of a tall, mysterious white-haired man.

Both men are initiated into a secret paranormal investigation bureau and, as it turns out, the white-haired man Wu Mian is one of the bureau’s directors.

Shen La develops paranormal powers after the spirit enters his eye. Most of the bureau’s agents also have paranormal abilities, in particular Wu Mian who is actually over 2,000 years old.

Here’s the official trailer, courtesy of Crunchyroll Collections.



While watching this trailer you may have noticed that the art style is kind of... well, strange. Sometimes it looks awesome, and other times it has the appearance of having been hastily thrown together at 2 a.m. under a tight deadline.

Crunchyroll viewers definitely noticed. Here are a few of their comments:

-- When the animation is both incredible and shit at the same time.

-- 2D or 3D. Pick one!

The character designs are well-rendered and the background art is often intricately detailed, but the CGI is sometimes off to the point that you’re not sure what they intended.

For example, these yellow fields of grass, which have the look of crafting felt:

The style is inconsistent in other ways, too. The bureau’s main female agent is Bai Lu. Her design looks like a hot Japanese anime girl, which is jarringly unlike the look of the other characters.

A more pressing problem is the distasteful treatment of the overweight character Sun Desheng. He’s called “Fatty” by the others and is made to serve as both comic relief and object of derision. He’s originally an undercover police officer so he’s not without skills, but he’s always the one who acts cowardly and stupid in dangerous situations, including pushing that mysterious button on the wall just as someone screams not to push it.

Despite its issues, Bureau of Paranormal Investigation has kept me hooked so far. There are twelve episodes in the first season. I don’t think there’s a second season forthcoming as of yet.

The real surprise since the turn of the new year is Boruto.

Sasuke Uchiha is the second most important character in the Naruto universe. Simply put, he’s Vegeta to Naruto’s Goku, but his rivalry with Naruto is more intense and germane to the overall story.

The Naruto anime story universe consists of three series: Naruto, Naruto Shippuuden, and Boruto: Naruto Next Generations. Naruto covers Naruto and his friends when they were kids, Naruto Shippuuden when they were teenagers, and Boruto is about the children of Naruto and his friends - i.e., the “next generation.”

It all began with Team 7.

In the first series, Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura are the members of Team 7 at Konoha’s ninja academy.

Naruto and Sasuke are rivals from the beginning.

Later, Sasuke leaves the village on a mission of revenge related to his clan. Sakura begs Naruto to stop him. The two boys fight nearly to the death, but in the end Sasuke prevails and walks away.

In Naruto and its sequel series Naruto Shippuuden, Sasuke disappears for huge swaths of time but his absence is always felt by Naruto and Sakura, and by the audience. He winds up on a path of darkness seeking power over others, while back home in Konoha, Naruto gains power and abilities in order to help others and to defend Konoha and the entire ninja world.

In the story’s climax, Sasuke returns to help Naruto save the ninja world from destruction. However, following the successful outcome of the battle, he challenges Naruto for leadership of what’s left of the world. Sasuke is still coming from darkness and his final fight with Naruto - which mirrors their earlier fight when Sasuke left the village years before - is one of anime’s most memorable fight scenes. It culminates in a shocking conclusion:

Sasuke finally recognizes that his path was wrong and reforms. Naruto, due to his lineage from the First Hokage, is able to have a new arm constructed. The Uchiha lineage is also special, but like the irritating little cuss that he is, Sasuke leaves the village on a journey of atonement and redemption before the possibility of a new arm for him can be researched.

Throughout the three series - Naruto, Naruto Shippuuden, and now Boruto - we’ve followed Sasuke’s journey as much as we have Naruto’s journey. He began as a simple shonen rival, a foil for the main character, but the story wouldn’t have worked without him since Naruto wouldn’t have grown as much without Sasuke challenging him as his dark counterpart. In a story universe with literally hundreds of distinct characters, Sasuke Uchiha is unquestionably the second lead as well as a fan favorite.

The big news is that a new manga story featuring Sasuke is being animated as part of the Boruto series, and in fact, the episodes are airing right now.

The story is called Sasuke Retsuden (English title: The Uchiha Descendants and the Heavenly Stardust). It’s set four years after the events in Naruto Shippuuden.

Sasuke goes on an undercover mission to track down a cure for Naruto’s sudden illness. To his surprise, Sakura later joins him on the mission. The two are already married at this point. What’s fun and new about this is that we have never seen what led up to their marrying each other. They were in Team 7 together as children, and Sakura - along with Naruto - hunted Sasuke when he was a rogue ninja. They were teenagers then, as they were when the main Naruto story ended.

Then there was a huge time skip. When the Boruto series began, Sasuke and Sakura’s daughter Sarada was a pre-teen already.

The Sasuke Retsuden arc is our first glimpse of the early days of Sasuke and Sakura’s marriage and longtime Naruto fans are losing their minds over it. The manga debuted in Japan last October and was immediately greenlit to be animated.

For the first time in ages I’m excited to watch Boruto every Sunday. The now “older” generation of Naruto and his friends are still my favorite characters and to watch an arc that is centered on the adult Sasuke and Sakura is simply a joy.

Another year around the anime sun has passed, and even a series I've been watching forever can still surprise me. I'd say this bodes well for the coming year. ;-)

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. :-)

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. :-)

Winter 2020 Watchlist - The Return of Haikyuu

After a few dry anime seasons - dry for me, anyway - I find myself watching more anime than ever. I wasn’t looking forward to anything this winter other than the return of Haikyuu, but suddenly my watchlists on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime are flooded with an episode or two of something to watch nearly every day of the week.

But first... the holdovers from fall 2019.

What to say about Babylon... A series that started off as fantastic has now unraveled into a morass.

I really hate to say that about this series, because it was dark and fascinating at first. A new ward in Tokyo adopts a law that makes suicide legal, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What prosecutor/investigator Zen Seizaki discovers is a conspiracy behind the law involving the ward’s mayor and a mysterious and ultimately terrifying woman - the true villain of the piece – Ai Magase.

There was a break between episode 8 and 9 that lasted one month. Last Monday was Episode 11. The series is listed at MAL as being 12 episodes long. We haven’t seen Ai Magase since Episode 8, the setting changed from Japan to the U.S. for some reason, and the show has gotten lost in philosophizing about good and evil in the abstract, seemingly forgetting its own plot.

I don’t honestly think they can wrap up the series in any real or satisfying way with only one episode left, but I’m invested enough to watch on Monday to see if they can do it.

And then there’s Boruto. One day, I’m going to write a whole post about how Boruto trades too much on our nostalgia for the original characters in Naruto without forcing us to care enough about the new generation of characters... but that day is not today.

Before I talk about Haiykuu... I’ve picked up two other series this season that are nice surprises.

Case Files of Jeweler Richard looks like it would be a light repast, something like the European pastries and royal milk tea the show’s lead character enjoys in his parlor. It is, however, deeper than that.

The fey and lovely Richard is a British jeweler par excellence. He speaks many languages in dealing with his international clientele. One day he’s saved from being attacked by drunken louts by a young Japanese man, Seigi Nakata, who becomes his employee.

Each episode focuses on a single kind of jewel and what its significance is, as a mystery gets solved. Pretty standard stuff, except that the stories so far have been more serious than you’d expect from the set-up. The first episode dealt with Seigi’s own grandmother, who raised him and supported him by – being a thief. The second episode featured a young woman, engaged to a nice young man, who is in severe conflict. It turns out that she is gay, and accepted the engagement in a desperate and doomed attempt to deny her sexuality and the hard road in life it often leads to in Japan.

At the beginning of the episode, Richard cautions Seigi that he is never to show discrimination or judgment toward any of their customers. This is obviously tied in to what the rest of the episode is about, but still, it seems like more than you’d expect from this kind of series.

Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga. With a title like this, you know first off that it’s a comedy. I was expecting it to be one of those satirical anime series where each episode is 8 or 10 minutes long like Skullface Bookseller Honda-san, but actually each episode is the standard 24 minutes or so in length.

Oda Nobunaga, the fierce Warring States general, the scourge of the era, has now been reincarnated in modern-day Japan as a dog named “Cinnamon” by his young female owner.

He’s not alone. The other Warring States generals are here too, and are also dogs: Date “Boo” Masamune, Takeda “Lucky” Shingen, Uesugi “Julian” Kenshin. They and Oda meet up at the local dog park to relive their old battles and reminisce about the past.

It’s light and funny, in part because each sketch or story only lasts a few minutes, followed by some quick funny bits, and then another little story. For a series that only has a single punch line (they’re dogs now!), the producers know that for it to work, they have to keep it moving, and they do.

And now, finally, after a one-season delay, Pet is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Pet was worth the wait. It’s an exploration of what could happen if people had the ability not only to reach into another person’s mind, but also to change their memories. The first episode leaves you a bit puzzled, but the second episode lays out exactly how the “crushers,” as they’re referred to, do it, and it’s a really wild ride.

I never did a review of Haikyuu when the first season came out way back in 2014, so I think I’ll do it now.

Haikyuu is the story of Shoyo Hinata, an enthusiastic, ever-striving volleyball player for Karasuno High. Despite his shrimpy height, he has outsize skills, particularly in jumping insanely high.

His uncomplicated optimism keeps him moving past obstacles, including the people who don’t believe in him. And his radiant smile could power a thousand suns.

As in all shonen sports anime - he has a rival, of sorts.

Tobio Kageyama is already a star in the high school volleyball world, but he has a problem. He’s not a team player, and in fact suffered a dark moment of humiliating rejection from his teammates at his former school after they tired of his self-centered arrogance. When he comes to Karasuno, he’s pretty dismissive of the chibi Hinata, but the odd couple soon becomes the cornerstone of the team’s offense.

Haikyuu - for whatever reason - had a four-year hiatus between this season and the third season back in 2016. I’ll be honest and say that I barely remember what happened in season three, as I don’t follow the manga. It’s not the only anime production that has had a huge gap between seasons (Attack on Titan had a similar long break), but from the more casual fan, in other words, someone who likes Haikyuu but who doesn’t wait with bated breath for each episode - the producers expected an awful lot of patience here.

In any event... Haikyuu follows the basic shonen sports story template to a T. A scrappy but underperforming high school team learns to work together, with each individual player fighting to overcome his own personal obstacles, until they begin to achieve hard-won successes and ultimately advance to the final round tournament of whatever sport it is they play.

Kuroko’s Basketball is by far still my favorite anime in this genre. Plus, the character designs are way more attractive in that series. ;-)

Haikyuu is geared toward more of a younger audience, in my view. The tone is clean and wholesome in that particularly Japanese way of encouraging boys to do their best, play fair, and support others in order to win. As a shonen sports anime, it’s a model of the genre, following the template nearly flawlessly.

So why am I not as enthusiastic about Haikyuu as I am, say, Kuroko’s Basketball?

Well...

Because it’s VOLLEYBALL.

Forgive me if you’re a fan of the sport, but I don’t find volleyball that compelling. As opposed to basketball, which is inherently exciting, volleyball just doesn’t do it for me. I am completely willing to own this as a personal fault. It’s the reason that I simply like Haikyuu, rather than love it.

In addition to all the new series for winter 2020, I should mention that Crunchyroll is adding value these days in terms of extra episodes of older series, OVAs, and movies. In the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed a number of Naruto Shippuuden movies, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet OVAs, and best of all - K: Seven Stories, a short anime series in the K universe I never thought I’d get the chance to see. I’m not sure why this explosion of bonus extras is hitting Crunchyroll right now, but it’s really a lot of fun. Keep it up, Crunchyroll. =D

The Greatest Magicmaster's Retirement Plan

Tadaima! I’m back again. And...

I have an announcement today. It actually explains, in part, why I haven't been able to update this blog for such a long time, to be honest.

I’m happy to announce that I am the series editor for J-Novel Club’s light novel series, The Greatest Magicmaster’s Retirement Plan!

Here’s the synopsis:

In a world where the Fiends run rampant... Magicmaster Alus Reigin, the young prodigy that has defeated more Fiends and reclaimed more of humanity’s lost territory than anyone else alive, requests retirement from military service at age 16. But due to the twists and turns of fate surrounding his status as the No. 1 Magicmaster in the nation—the top Magicmaster out of more than 100,000—he ends up as a student at a special magical institute, hiding his identity and training his successors – a pair of beautiful Magicmaster girls! Not to mention continuing to defeat Fiends in secret... Get ready—the epic adventure of the Greatest Magicmaster Alus Reigin begins now!

It sounds like an isekai story, but it’s not. From what I can tell so far, it’s actually not set on Earth. I guess we might find out in Volume 7 that it’s taken place in an alternate Japan all along (lol), but for now, this is set in a fantasy realm.

I’m really pleased to be a series editor again in this industry. If you haven’t visited J-Novel Club’s website yet, you should give it a try. Many of their titles are isekai stories, but they also have general titles you already know from mainstream anime and manga like Amagi Brilliant Park and Kokoro Connect.

Most recently, the publisher scored a major title: Full Metal Panic!

The site has not only translated light novels, but translated manga series. It’s a subscription-based site, but the first part of every title they publish is available free to read for non-members. Each week, a new part of each story is published, so it’s basically a serialization site. When the entire book has been published, it’s compiled and then made available for sale as an ebook, not only from JNC but also Amazon, the iBookstore, etc.

JNC has some good non-series standalone books too. I’ve written here before about Last and First Idol, which I thought was brilliant. I’ve been busy working on Greatest Magicmaster so I haven’t had the chance to try many of their series, but I fully intend to. I’m currently reading Amagi Brilliant Park on the site and enjoying it a lot.

I’m also enjoying Greatest Magicmaster. Working with a series in a focused way, such as being its editor, is a privilege. You become deeply enveloped in the world and appreciate its finer points.

The main character, Alus Reigin, starts off… well, it’s a bit hard to like him initially. He’s pretty arrogant, being the No. 1 Magicmaster and all. ;-) But it’s clear even from the first volume that this story will be about Alus developing the parts of his humanity that he never could before, having served in the military since the age of six.

And he’s not all he seems at first, either. Later on in the first volume, we see Alus’ compassion come out in a flashback scene, which implies that he’s had to bury his vulnerable side due to his huge burden of responsibility this whole time. He’s a multi-faceted character with hidden depths, and I’m looking forward to continuing to follow his journey.

If you’d like to try out The Greatest Magicmaster's Retirement Plan, the link is below.

Now for a little update on my anime-viewing activities... I’ve continued to marathon Dragon Ball Z, and am basically near the end. Majin Buu – evil Kid Buu – has been defeated, while Big Happy Buu survived (yes! and the puppy too). Earth has been saved by Goku and Vegeta and company, so I guess the remaining episodes will be kind of a long denouement.

I should have more time now for this blog and my writing blog, since I just turned in the final work on Greatest Magicmaster’s first volume. I’m still in the midst of finishing the edit of Homestead, and hopefully I’ll be able to release it at the end of April.

Working on Greatest Magicmaster, and getting through the initial learning curve at JNC, took so much of my time that I’m even behind on Boruto. Before this, no matter how busy my schedule, I could always manage to watch Boruto every week. Not to mention that I appear to have missed an entire anime season - Winter 2019. -_-

But I’ve already started on my first Dragon Ball post. As I said before, it’ll be an intermittent series of posts on random things about Dragon Ball that I want to talk about.

It feels like I'm always saying this, but... stay tuned! More posts to follow.

And here's that link to J-Novel Club:

The Greatest Magicmaster's Retirement Plan