Summer 2023 Watchlist

Finally summer is here, and I can start watching new streaming anime again...

However, there is nothing that is actually new on my list. There are only new seasons of anime series I’ve watched before. I combed the anime summer offerings for new series I might be interested in and found nothing.

But hey, new episodes are new episodes, and I’ll be glad to have something to watch again each week.

My most anticipated series is Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War – Part II: The Separation. This is the second cour of the Thousand-Year Blood War arc. It’s going to be hard to watch because this is where Uryu Ishida parts ways with Ichigo and his other friends in order to side with the Quincy - his own kind.

The production team did a great job with the first cour last year. I’m anticipating another great season of episodes this time as well.

A couple of things here. First, Rurouni Kenshin is an old favorite of mine, and there are still a lot of fans of the story. As you may or may not have heard, manga-ka Nobuhiro Watsuki was charged with possession of child porn in 2017. This brings up the age-old argument of whether one can separate what the artist produces from who the artist is (see Why It’s Difficult to Separate Rurouni Kenshin from Nobuhiro Watsuki).

There’s no easy answer to that question, and each of us has to come up with his or her own personal answer. The second issue is that this is a remake of the original story as opposed to an all-new story. Which begs the question: do we really need to see a remake of the original? The original series was good, and the prequel OVA series Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal was an absolute classic. I’m not sure why they’re remaking something that doesn’t need to be remade. As such, this probably won’t be on my watchlist.

I remember watching the first season of The Devil Is a Part-Timer! (Hataraku Maou-Sama!) back in 2013. Then I don’t recall hearing about it again until now, when I saw that its third season is about to begin. The second season apparently streamed in fall 2022 and I didn’t even notice.

From Crunchyroll:

Foiled by a hero when he’s inches away from conquering the world, the devil finds himself in modern-day Tokyo. With no real-world skills to speak of, the devil is forced to make ends meet flipping burgers at a fast food joint! To stall any further plans of world domination, the hero tracks the devil’s trail and takes on the lowly tasks of a telemarketer.

It’s been many years since I saw the first season, but I remember it as being a very funny show. I’ll have to get caught up with season two so I can watch the new season.

Finally, Yamishibai is coming back.

Yamishibai is one of my favorite weird little series. Each standalone episode is around five minutes long and most are creepypasta-ish slices of horror in modern Japanese settings.

“Yamishibai” is a wordplay based on the Japanese “Kamishibai” or “paper play.” The animation looks like paper cutout figures in motion against equally crude and unreal-looking backgrounds. The effect is remarkably unsettling.

This will be the 11th season. If you’re a fan, you probably remember the final episode of Season 10 in which Narrator-san broke the fourth wall and became a character in the story. That episode was so much fun and such a surprise that I thought Yamishibai was over; that they were ending it on the perfect note.

I’m happy to be proved wrong. Welcome back, Narrator-san. I’m glad to see you and your paper world again. ;-)

The Story of This Blog

As this blog approaches its 500th post, in its fourteenth year, I thought I’d look back on how it got started and talk a little about why I’m still doing it.

By the time I started this blog in 2009, I’d been an anime fan for about four years and had been working as an editor in the industry for nearly three years. I needed an outlet for my passion for anime and blogging felt like the way to go.

The name Neo-Shonen Fujoshi had a specific origin. Well, the fujoshi part was my idea - not a stretch since that was obviously what I was and am - but the “neo-shonen” part might require some explication.

I say more about this in my 2009 post Neo-Shonen Fujoshi Speaks! – but that year I went to Otakon and attended a fascinating panel by Daryl Surat, a longtime anime journalist and podcaster. (His blog, now a podcast, is still going: Anime World Order.)

The panel was called “Kenshiro to Kenshin: The Neo-Shonen Revolution.” Surat talked about how shonen anime used to be ultraviolence fests featuring grotesquely muscle-bound heroes like Go Nagai’s Violence Jack:

But then the tide turned, and less beefy, prettier-faced shonen heroes like Rurouni Kenshin became popular.

If the point was to broaden the audience for shonen to include women and girls - well, it worked. And so that’s how this blog came to be named. I’m a fujoshi who’s into the “neo-shonen” heroes - not those other guys. ;-)

The early years of this blog were a mish-mash of serious posts about being an editor in the industry, anime and manga reviews, musings on anime and manga as art forms, gushy posts about Japanese seiyuu, my fiction writing, etc. I grouped posts under tags such as Daily Dose of Kawaii and Incongruous Things.

Incongruous Things was an especially fun group of posts. It included the “A Very Handsome... Voice Actor” category that presented photos of attractive seiyuu. Other posts were of the “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other” variety and other such silliness.

(By the way, in putting this post together, I noticed that dead You Tube links abound in these ancient posts, lol... just so you know before you take a look at them.)

I lost any sense of being age-appropriate as far as my own age was concerned. For me, it was like being transported from middle age back to my teen years. I was giddy with delight over this utterly amazing and new (to me) entertainment medium I’d discovered and it showed in my posts.

But then, even this Blogger template that I still use is a throwback. If you were reading blogs fifteen years ago, you undoubtedly saw this template often (I think the template name is “Simple” or something like that). Every other blog in the late 2000s/early 2010s used this template since Google’s Blogger (then called Blogspot) was one of the earliest free blogging platforms. I would probably switch this template out for something newer, but I fear my blog infrastructure would implode if I tried to change anything about it at this point.

My original thought was to make this a serious industry person blog, but that went out the window early on... I was just having too much fun. ;-)

Then something happened. I became more serious about my fiction writing, particularly The Queendoms Series, a seven-novel series that I started writing in 2014. At the same time (perhaps related?) I began to feel a little burned out on anime. I’d been an intense fan for ten years, worked in the industry, gone to dozens of anime conventions across the U.S., and suddenly... the steam went out of everything.

From 2015 to 2017 I only managed to upload a handful of posts. I still watched anime and read manga, but I was consumed with getting The Queendoms Series books off the ground.

I was still working on the Queendoms books in 2018 when I began to miss posting here. Since then I’ve posted at least once a month, a schedule I know that I can maintain considering my various commitments.

I think I’ll conclude the story of this blog in a Q & A format.

Q: Does anyone actually read this blog? There aren’t any comments.

A: This blog still has a few readers, going by the feedburner count and blog traffic stats. I don’t count the random days when there are 500 “views” for no reason, as the round (and high) number tells me that it's a Russian bot doing its job.

When I began writing this blog in June 2009, I deliberately left Google’s indexing option unchecked. What this means is that my blog posts have never been indexed so that they can show up in Google searches.

I did this for a few reasons. Blogging was somewhat new then, and as I’ve said before I didn’t grow up with the internet, so I was wary of being too public with anything that I wrote. Also, I originally intended this to be an industry blog, so I didn’t really want anyone in the world to be able to stumble across it in a simple search.

Fourteen years on, I still feel the same way, though I obviously would’ve had many more readers through the years if I’d had my posts indexed for search. I do have my blog listed in my writer's/editor’s bio at some publisher websites and a few other places, which is generally how new readers find me. It’s kind of nice. You only get here if you were already familiar with my work in some way and followed a link here.

As for comments, there are hundreds. I lost most of my readers during that 2015-2017 period when the blog was on life support with only a post or two being uploaded per year. Since then, I’ve contemplated turning the comment function off entirely. If I do that, all previous comments will disappear, as Blogger - for some reason - hides all extant comments upon the disabling of the comment function. So if you have a burning desire to read comments from the early years of this blog, you might want to do it soon. ;-)

Q: If you don’t have many readers these days, why continue?

A: Because I enjoy it.

Q: Any regrets?

A: Yes, about the spelling of the blog’s name.

I named this blog before I studied Japanese with any seriousness. If I’d known about the long “o,” I would have used shounen instead of shonen.

Other than that - no regrets. =D

Rurouni Kenshin Now Available at Crunchyroll

Crunchyroll is on a roll. In the past few months the streaming site has started its own licensed manga service, began streaming One Piece and Toriko and now it's acquired the classic Rurouni Kenshin series in both sub and dub versions.

Rurouni Kenshin is one of those anime series that's been on my want-to-watch list forever. I've read the first few volumes of the manga and also own the live-action movie.

And then there's the prequel, Rurouni Kenshin - Trust and Betrayal.

If you haven't seen it, Trust and Betrayal is beautiful and well worth your time as an anime fan. It's on my personal Top Ten anime list of all time.

I watched the first subbed episode of the series on Crunchyroll today and though I enjoyed it, I'd forgotten one thing - Kenshin is voiced by a female seiyuu. I'd noticed this when I watched Trust and Betrayal but it didn't stand out as odd or take me out of the story there.

But watching the first episode of the series today, wow. Mayo Suzukaze was a member of the famous Takurazuka all-female theatre troupe before she began voicing Kenshin, meaning she'd done male roles as a theatre actor - but her voice as Kenshin is really noticeably a woman's voice. A woman's voice can work for boy-age boy roles like Naruto and Edward Elric but Kenshin Himura is 28 years old. It's a little trippy, but I'll keep an open mind and maybe I'll get more used to it as I continue to watch the series. =D