Akira Toriyama Is Gone

Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, has passed away.

He was twenty-eight years old when the Dragon Ball manga was first published in 1984.

The Dragon Ball universe is such a legendary franchise of the Japanese manga and anime world that it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around this loss. Whether Dragon Ball was a favorite of yours or not, as an anime fan there’s no denying its impact around the world. People who never watched anime in their lives know who Goku and Vegeta are. Dragon Ball touched every part of the globe.

It could be said that Dragon Ball was the beginning of shounen manga, which of course led to the shounen anime shows so many of us love.

I came to the Dragon Ball universe through Dragon Ball Super, which I loved, after which I watched Dragon Ball Z and most of the movies. I have yet to watch the original Dragon Ball series (I didn’t mean to watch the series in reverse order - it just happened that way).

It’s the characters that I enjoy the most about Dragon Ball, wildly original characters like Beerus and Frieza, as well as main characters Bulma and Vegeta and Gohan and so many more.

The Dragon Ball story is epic. It was the original franchise-level story universe before there was Naruto or One Piece or any of the others.

The reactions are still coming in but I’ve seen comments from fans that are epic in their own way. People are mourning but also giving Toriyama-sensei the best kind of sendoff, like saying they’ll gather the Dragon Balls and call on Shenron to bring him back, or that he’s now in the Lookout heaven with Dende and Mr. Popo.

Rest in peace and power, Toriyama-sensei. Thank you for giving us your very best.

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.

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. :-)

Time for a Super Hero – Dragon Ball Super Style!

I’ve been doing a lot of catching up lately. For example, I’d only seen the first Thor movie and had to watch the second and third Thor movies before I saw Thor: Love and Thunder, because I knew the fourth movie wouldn’t make any sense to me otherwise.

So when I heard that a new Dragon Ball Super movie was coming out, I hurried to watch Dragon Ball Super: Broly because I somehow missed seeing it when it came out in 2018.

Broly’s backstory is that he is from Planet Vegeta, home planet of the Saiyans. He shows promise as a small child, but is exiled by King Vegeta who fears that he might surpass the prince (a.k.a. Vegeta, our favorite surly Saiyan).

Broly trains on a deserted planet with his father for years until they are rescued by two of Frieza’s underlings, Cheelai and Lemo. The two take the father and son to Frieza, who enlists them to fight Goku and Vegeta on earth.

Some other things happen, but it’s all in the service of getting to the Big Fight Scene. Once that begins, the plot flies out the window and fighting takes up the rest of the movie. It’s Broly versus Goku and Vegeta, Broly versus Frieza, Gogeta (Goku and Vegeta together in their transformed state) versus Broly... the movie then ends with a five-minute denouement that more or less wraps everything up.

The fight scenes in Dragon Ball Super: Broly are fantastic, but the movie lacks what really makes the Dragon Ball universe special: the characters and their histories with each other that give such depth to their relationships.

And this is what the new movie Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero has in spades.

First, a fun new villain is introduced. Dr. Hedo is the super scientist grandson of Dr. Gero, creator of Androids 17 and 18. Magenta, son of the Red Ribbon Army’s late Commander Red, recruits Dr. Hedo to attack Goku and friends, telling him that Bulma’s Capsule Corporation is a front for evil aliens. He actually just wants revenge against Goku for destroying the Red Ribbon Army.

Dr. Hedo is a slimeball, but with his own sense of morality, albeit twisted. He’s addicted to Oreo cookies and milk, which Magenta keeps him supplied with as he wins him over to his side.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Dragon Ball Super movie without Whis and Beerus.

Goku, Vegeta and Broly are training on Beerus’s planet, oblivious to the threat to earth. After Piccolo tells Bulma about the army’s plot, Bulma tries to contact the three Saiyans but Beerus carelessly tosses an empty ice cream bucket over the communication receiver’s antenna, meaning Piccolo and Gohan will have to lead the fight against the Red Ribbon Army without them.

Piccolo was Gohan’s master teacher and this relationship is what gives DBS: Super Hero its emotional depth. As usual, Piccolo feels that Gohan has let his training go despite being Goku’s match in strength and even possessing the potential to surpass Goku someday.

Now the earth is threatened by Dr. Hedo’s super-powerful androids Gamma 1 and Gamma 2, with the ultimate enemy waiting in the wings... Cell Max. Can Piccolo and Gohan and the other Dragon Ball Super heroes defeat the new Red Ribbon Army?

I really enjoyed Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. It has everything a Dragon Ball fan could want: great action scenes, nostalgic references to past storylines, appearances by old favorites like Krillin, Videl and Pan, Goten and Trunks (now teenagers!), and No. 18. (We don’t see No. 17, but I like to imagine that he’s still taking care of the endangered animals on that island.)

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero gives you one fun scene after another with characters you know and love, and a solid story that satisfies from beginning to end. It’s the perfect end-of-summer anime treat before the fall anime season begins, so go and see it while it’s still on the big screen. You won’t be disappointed. :-)

Dragon Ball Posts - Art Styles and Character Designs

Dragon Ball. So where to start?

It might be best to start with the obvious. This blog is called Neo-Shonen Fujoshi. Note the “Shonen” part of the blog name.

(For the full reasons why the blog is called “Neo-Shonen Fujoshi,” click here. It has to do with Daryl Surat and Otakon and Fist of the North Star and Rurouni Kenshin and a number of other things...)

Shonen anime is—along with BL/yaoi anime—my favorite kind of anime. I love Naruto. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is brilliant, a work of art, unforgettable. I enjoyed watching Bleach and Gundam 00 and many, many similar anime series.

I’ve known of Dragon Ball all the years I’ve been an anime fan. How could I not? It’s one of the biggest story universes in all of manga and anime. And it’s shonen, obviously—right up my alley as an anime fan.

So why, until my accidental initiation into Dragon Ball at Crunchyroll Expo, did I avoid anything to do with Dragon Ball all this time?

Reason No. 1

You can call this the Old Animation Style reason. Early on, in the mid-2000s when I was first getting into anime, I took a look at Dragon Ball and its 1980s look and went “...” Plus, it seemed to be aimed at children. So I kind of turned away from it.

You could argue that Naruto is also aimed at children, and you’d be right, especially about the early seasons. But I saw right away that Naruto Uzumaki lived in a big world. There were the other ninja students, adult shinobis, a Hokage, other ninja nations, as well as powerful enemies with amazing and scary abilities. I saw Naruto’s bigger world, its increasingly expanding world of ninja lands, characters, villains—and had no problem saying yes to all of it.

But we’re discussing art styles, not anime for children versus anime for adults, so let’s get back to it.

I began my excursion into Dragon Ball by first watching Dragon Ball Super. In other words, I started with the Dragon Ball series with the most up-to-date animation quality. Now I’m working my way backwards through the universe, with the original Dragon Ball series to be the final series I watch.

I just finished Dragon Ball Z a few weeks ago. Through the progression of the 291 episodes, you can clearly see the changes in animation technology. By series end, the visuals are looking pretty modern, and could hold their own against many anime series of today.

But that’s not to say Z’s earlier episodes were shabby-looking. They weren’t. From what I can tell so far about the Dragon Ball setting, it takes place in Earth’s future, and considering Z’s first few seasons were broadcast in 1989, the futuristic cityscapes and other designs are very well done.

So while the dated art style initially gave me pause, it wasn’t the determining factor.

Then why did I avoid watching the Dragon Ball series all these years I’ve been an anime fan?

Reason No. 2

I think it may have come down to the character designs.

I like to think, as an anime fan, that I’m not that picky about characters’ looks. If the story is compelling, it has me.

That said—if the character designs actively turn me off, it’s another thing entirely.

Take Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, for example.

I watched the first season of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The over-the-topness didn’t bother me, the craziness didn’t bother me, but those faces really squicked my eye.

And not to start a fight with One Piece fans, but those character designs too...

In sum—there are a lot of anime series out there, and only so many hours in the day. Personal choice is always an individual thing as an anime fan: we gravitate toward what we already like.

Now specifically, which character designs kept me away from Dragon Ball for so long?

It certainly wasn’t the non-human characters. In fact, the aliens are the best and most memorable character designs in the Dragon Ball universe I’ve seen so far. Piccolo, Frieza, Cell and Majin Buu. Each character’s design is highly distinctive and unforgettable.

But my favorite aliens are probably...

I remember staring in fascination at Beerus while watching Super. He’s like a purple Egyptian pharaoh cat-rabbit god, if that makes any sense, while Zenou-sama, with those blankly-staring eyes and child’s voice, is equal parts unnerving and endearing.

And Chiaotzu! So adorable!

I haven’t watched the first Dragon Ball series yet, so I’m not sure what Chiaotzu is, but he doesn’t appear to be a regular human being.

So the non-human, alien character designs are great. What about the human characters?

The women in Dragon Ball are fine: Bulma, Chi Chi, Videl, et al. And the child characters are really cute.

Okay, so that leaves... Yeah.

That leaves the two main characters in the Dragon Ball world.

Taste is individual, as I said before. And no, I don’t need my anime protagonists to be handsome in the conventional sense, or any other sense, though I hardly think it would be a crime if I did.

No, I have to say it: Goku kind of squicks my eye, and so does Vegeta. Maybe it’s a Saiyan thing?

And when I was first watching Super, and saw Goku’s default clueless expression—eyes staring blankly, mouth hanging open—I was not too impressed. This is the hero of Dragon Ball? I wondered if maybe you had to watch Dragon Ball from the beginning in order to love Son Goku. Maybe you had to know Goku as a child first, be in his corner from day one, to really get him as a character. Because, after watching Dragon Ball Super and now Dragon Ball Z, I still don’t feel like I know who Goku is.

In a way, it was good that my gateway into the Dragon Ball universe was Super. In Dragon Ball Super, Goku’s universe of family and friends were such a large and interesting group of characters that it didn’t matter that Goku himself didn’t interest me.

And it’s a good thing too that I found so many of the characters likable and funny, and the story compelling, and the anime so much fun that it made watching Dragon Ball Z inevitable, or I would have missed out on some great anime watching otherwise.

So those were my reasons for avoiding Dragon Ball early on, but those reasons are gone now.

Next up on my viewing list: Dragon Ball, the original series. ;-)

Not the Winter 2019 Watchlist Post Yet

This is not the Winter 2019 Watchlist post. No, it isn't. Because I haven't had the time to really look at the offerings for the winter anime season. Because...

You might think I'm busy with work. I am. And that I'm busy finishing the edits on my latest novel, Homestead. I am busy with that, too.

You may even believe that I haven't been watching anime lately because I'm too busy with all these other things. But the truth is...

... Wait, what's that picture that just uploaded itself to my blog?

And who's that guy, anyway? Wait--

--Could it be that my new anime obsession is an anime that is THIRTY YEARS OLD??

I've written about how I discovered the Dragon Ball universe at last year's Crunchyroll Expo, where Vegeta's seiyuu Ryo Horikawa was a guest and I saw the final three episodes of Dragon Ball Super. Those episodes hooked me in, and I marathoned the series a month or so after I returned home from the convention.

I knew I wanted to continue watching Dragon Ball, but I wasn't sure how to proceed after that.

Finally, I decided to watch Dragon Ball Z. My impression was that it was the most popular of all the Dragon Ball series, at least here in the U.S., and that it would give me the background on the universe and characters that I wanted.

It kind of has, and kind of hasn't. First, I thought that Z would start with Goku as a child, but instead it begins with Goku and Chi Chi married and their son Gohan as a five-year-old.

Also, Goku already has his friends - Piccolo, Tenshinhan, Chouzu, and Krillen, plus the old turtle master Muten Roshi, and Yamcha, and Bulma and her scientist dad, and...

In other words, I didn't start back far enough. After I finish with Z, I'll need to watch the original series Dragon Ball. ;-)

In the meantime, I've marathoned the episodes up to the Cell arc. In the last episode I watched, Cell had just sucked up No. 18 and was entering his final transformation. (I hope I didn't spoil it for anyone. Wait, can one actually spoil a series that ran thirty years ago?)

Along the way, as I've watched Dragon Ball Super and now Dragon Ball Z, I've been introduced to famous characters whose names I've heard forever as an anime fan.

Son Goku!

Vegeta!

Piccolo!

Frieza!

This is the beginning of a number of posts I am going to write about the Dragon Ball universe and characters. It'll be an intermittent series of posts that I'll wedge in-between my posts about other anime and anime-related things.

So stay tuned! More Dragon Ball and other anime obsessiveness is on its way. :-)

Fall 2018 Watchlist

So… Fall is almost over, but my watchlist was kind of limited this season anyway, so this won’t be a long post today. ;-)

I don’t know if I’m out of practice or what, but I barely even looked at the new anime offerings for this fall season. My list of current series that I’m watching consists of exactly three series.

Boruto is in the middle of perhaps its most challenging arc yet, at least as far as the lead character’s development goes.

Mitsuki, Orochimaru’s created son and the third member of the new Team 7 along with Boruto and Sarada, has to all outward appearances betrayed the team and Konoha. He has gone to the Land of Earth to assist in an experiment sanctioned by that crotchety old guy, the former Tsuchikage Ohnoki.

Boruto naturally has gone after Mitsuki, with Sarada, Shikadai, Cho-Cho and Inojin. Along the way, the kids discover that Ohnoki has created beings known as “akuta” that he wants to use as soldiers, so as to save humans from having to go to war.

It’s a classic case of doing the wrong thing for the right reason, which Boruto gets immediately.

More importantly, this arc shows Boruto’s first real betrayal by someone he trusted—Mitsuki. True, it’s a throwback to Sasuke leaving the village and betraying Naruto and the original Team 7, but it’s not a cheap easy copy of that storyline. Boruto and Naruto have had completely different childhood experiences, and the tension lies in what Boruto, with his happy privileged life and many caring friends, will do when Mitsuki leaves him and Team 7.

Yeah, you knew I would be watching this yaoi series. Right? :-)

Dakaichi: I’m Being Harassed by the Sexiest Man of the Year is a pretty typical contemporary yaoi tale. Handsome actor Takato has won the title of Sexiest Man five years in a row, but he’s recently been dethroned by Junta, an up and coming actor.

Takato, miffed to no end at being dethroned, treats Junta coldly at first, but Junta is really into him so eventually he relents and… CENSORED FOR HEAVY YAOI ACTIVITY

The first four episodes were funny and sexy and I figured it would continue in this vein. But in the fifth episode, events took a dark turn with the introduction of a quite villainous third character who does something unforgivable to Takato.

I’ll continue watching Dakaichi—the series as it’s airing is almost over now, but I got a late start on it—though I suspect not with the same lighthearted enjoyment as before.

And finally… one of those truly strange series, Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san.

It’s a slice of life, vignette-type anime series about Honda-san, who, without any explanation, is a skeleton who works as a bookstore clerk.

He’s not the only oddball. There’s one clerk who wears a Noh mask, another with a Jack ‘o Lantern on his/her head, etc. I’m not sure if the producers are intimating that everyone who works in a bookstore is abnormal, but… also, were they that way when they got hired, or did working in a bookstore turn them into this?? That’s the real question…

So that’s what I’m watching this season.

A note on upcoming posts. Earlier this fall, I actually did a lot of anime watching, but it wasn’t any of the current season’s series. No, after I saw Ryo Horikawa, Vegeta’s seiyuu, at Crunchyroll Expo in September and watched the final three episodes of Dragon Ball Super there with Horikawa-san in the audience, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. With the result being… this is hard to admit to, but… in October I wound up marathoning all 131 episodes of Dragon Ball Super in three weeks flat.

I just couldn’t stop watching it once I started. I have a lot to say about the Dragon Ball universe and characters, and that will be one of the upcoming posts.

Another post will be on which series from the past few years I missed while I was away that I am planning to watch now in a “catch-up” sense. And I’ll also be writing about series that I wish would return with new seasons already.

And then before you know it, it’ll be time for the winter 2019 watchlist post! Time flies when you’re alive.

Last and First Idol and the Origins of Everything

I attended Crunchyroll Expo 2018 in San Jose earlier this month. It was my first anime convention in two years. I decided to go as part of my return to the industry (more on that in an upcoming post).

As anime cons go, the Expo is new—only in its second year—and it was small, but with a good schedule of events and guests.

I hadn’t intended to, but I found myself at the Dragon Ball Super big event on Sunday morning.

Ryo Horikawa, Vegeta’s seiyuu, hosted the showing of the final three episodes of the series. A rather sweet older man, Horikawa spoke in halting English to the nearly-full ballroom, expressing his pleasure at being at the convention, and then the episodes began.

I’d never watched any of the Dragon Ball series, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t expect a realization about the origins of my favorite kind of anime.

First, the episodes were great fun to watch. The climax of the Dragon Ball Super series has whole universes getting erased in a gladiator-type elimination scenario. The final three episodes begin with Vegeta being vanquished, leaving Goku to finish off the final villain, Jiren.

The fight scenes are amazingly over the top, with Goku and Jiren hurling each other into asteroids and planets exploding and everything else you can imagine.

At one point, Goku looks like he’s down for the count. But then his assembled family and friends cheer him on, and Goku remembers what he’s fighting for... that he’s not fighting alone, or just for himself, but for every...

... Wait a minute.

He’s not fighting just with his strength alone, but with the hopes and wishes of the entire village.

He’s fighting for his friends.

He wants to win the championship with his new school’s team, and show his former teammates that working together and not as selfish individual star players is the right thing to do.

I realized while watching Dragon Ball Super that shonen anime didn’t begin with Naruto, Bleach or Kuroko’s Basketball. It began with this guy.

I discovered anime in 2005, so maybe I can be excused for not understanding this before now. For not understanding that before Naruto and Sasuke, there was Goku and Vegeta. The origins of the whole meta shonen storyline, the hero’s journey from an egocentric reach for individual glory to appreciating others, from saving himself to saving the world—it began with Dragon Ball.

The origins of shonen stories may be obvious, but the originators of other Japanese cultural phenomena are less easily discernible. Take idols, for example.

Idols are a unique Japanese phenomenon. They sing and dance, but they’re so much more. Their striving to become famous is actually considered part of their appeal. They are actual and representational, in some weird way becoming more than the sum of their parts.

It’s rare that one reads a work of fiction that is entirely unlike anything one has read before. Most writers stay within a range of possibilities in their stories that is well-trod, recognizable—safe.

And then there’s Last and First Idol.

Winner of numerous awards in Japan, and published in English by J-Novel Club, Gengen Kusano’s Last and First Idol is a collection of three novellas about Japanese pop culture iconic figures: idols, gamers, and seiyuu.

The title story is about Mika Furutski, an aspiring idol who, despite working very hard at her craft, is only average at singing and dancing. She admires her fellow high school student Maori Niizono’s effortless excellence at these things and the two become best friends.

And then the end of the world happens.

But that doesn’t mean the story ends! It’s not the end of the story, not by a long shot.

It’s hard to convey how fascinating “Last and First Idol” is without spoiling it. Just when you think you know where the story is going, it takes another brutal and unexpected turn and you’re caught up in a new level of weird.

The same can be said for the second novella, “Evolution Girls.” Youko Sasajima is an everyday salarywoman in a safe boring job, when she downloads a game to her phone. A MMO game, Youko finds she’s good at it. Too good.

She’s an intelligent young woman and knows that game addiction is a thing, so she’s in no danger of getting addicted to this silly game. Right?

Before long she’s spending all her time playing the game, including at work, holding the phone in her lap so no one can see. She’s skilled, so she holds off on making in-app purchases, but the moment comes when she just has to power up, so she takes out her credit card and...

Soon she’s lost her job and stays home all day, playing the game. Bonus points are available every two and a half hours, so she sets her alarm and wakes up every two and half hours through the night so she can get the points.

Youko burns through most of her savings and begins existing in a zombie-like state where the game is her only reality. And one day, absorbed in the game, she walks out in front of a truck and gets killed.

Oh. You really thought the story would end there? This is where the true story begins.

Again, there’s no way to say any more without giving it away. But Kusano takes the overused “trapped inside a video game” trope, turns it inside out and basically reinvents it.

The final story, “Dark Seiyuu,” begins in the future. Seiyuu have evolved, along with the help of artificial intelligence, to the point where they can power space ships with their throat vibrations while singing. Genetically modified to sport special laryngeal sacs on their necks (while reading this story, I envisioned a giant turkey wattle), these souped-up seiyuu can manipulate sound, light and gravity.

Oh, and they also still voice act in the occasional anime here and there. ;-)

Akane Yomokura is a seiyuu and serial killer who murders other seiyuu to collect their laryngeal sacs. She’s “Dark Seiyuu”’s protagonist.

She begins hearing a voice in her head. She tries to ignore it, but it won’t go away. And then a hooded figure called the Dark Seiyuu releases a cryptic statement for the news media: “Seiyuu, listen to the voice.” This message presages a fateful event, one that changes the Earth forever and sends Akane Yomokura out into the galaxy in search of her nemesis - the Dark Seiyuu.

Remarkably, in Last and First Idol, not only the main characters, but all the villains and supporting characters are female. Male characters are almost non-existent. Without making a point of it, Kusano creates worlds where the agency of girls and women is assumed and unquestioned. They are neither fetishized nor sexualized, as female characters nearly always are to some extent, which is refreshing.

Author Gengen Kusano takes the idol, gamer and seiyuu concepts past all normal story limits, to the far edge of hard science fiction and beyond.

If you want to read a set of amazing stories you will never forget, pick up Last and First Idol.

Disclosure: I was J-Novel Club’s proofreader for Last and First Idol.

Amazon link: Last and First Idol

J-Novel Club link: Last and First Idol