The Winter 2025 Anime Season

It’s a good start to 2025 with a solid winter anime season! Not only are some excellent series continuing on from fall 2024, but there are some choice new titles arriving soon.

But first... a wrap-up of the fall season.

Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War arc concluded with a bang-up episode. This was the third cour of four and it featured some of the best fight scenes in the series, including one with creepy Mayuri and an electrifying (pun intended) Yoruichi scene right at the end. And in case anyone actually thought a certain character had betrayed Ichigo and crew (... as if!), the final episode put that idea to rest.

The fourth and final cour of the Thousand Year Blood War arc, “The Calamity,” doesn’t have an air date set as of yet.

Blue Exorcist finished its Beyond the Snow Saga arc and last Saturday launched right into the new Blue Night Saga arc. Finally, the story is delving into Rin and Yukio’s parentage, a subject that has been a mystery up to now.

I’ll admit that I don’t normally find Blue Exorcist deep or hugely absorbing, but this arc will likely be an exception to that. The brothers’ relationship is the story’s most compelling element and what happened in their family’s past will explain a lot about their dynamics.

Alas, The Prince of Tennis II: U-17 World Cup Semi-Finals ended and the next season doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. PoT is an old favorite and I hope the next season won’t be too far off in the future.

I am slow-watching the Shinsengumi anime Blue Miburo, and I just finished Yakuza Fiance, which I wound up liking more than I expected. The characters are all violent and weren’t easy to relate to at first, but the main couple is engaging and there’s even a bit of love triangle energy between the girl, Yoshino, her yakuza clan’s big-brother type Shoma, and Kirishima, the semi-psychotic teenager from a different clan whom Yoshino is engaged to. There’s clearly more to the story than what was covered in 12 episodes, so there should be a second season coming along at some point.

And Dragon Ball Daima is continuing into the winter season! It’s wonderful to have a fresh Dragon Ball episode each week.

Which brings us to the new anime season.

Anime stories with tons of cute girls isn’t usually my thing, but I’m making an exception for Momentary Lily.

The reason is the animation studio. GoHands made K (aka K Project), one of my all-time favorite series, and on that basis alone I’m happy to at least give it a try. K featured a beautiful use of color in its production art, as well as some of the best male character designs I’ve ever seen in anime.



But the winter anime I’m looking forward to the most is...

Unnamed Memory was my favorite series of spring 2024. A romance story between a crown prince and a powerful witch set in a fantasy world, it featured solid romance, gorgeous character designs, interesting side characters, basically everything I enjoy in a story.

The anime’s first season reached its climax in episode 11, which should have been the happy ending, and it would have been if not for the episode that came after. I don’t want to spoil anything, but as a reminder magic is an element in the story and let’s just say that certain complications arose in episode 12 that necessitated at least a second season to put everything back the way it needs to be.

And finally, there’s a movie being released at the end of this month that I hope Crunchyroll or somebody has the good sense to license.

The original Rose of Versailles series has been on my to-watch list for about twenty years, or as long as I’ve been an anime fan. It’s a classic and I put it on my list because everyone said it was good, but I never knew until recently what made it different from any other shoujo/romance story.

The story description from Udon Entertainment for the manga:

“Oscar François de Jarjeyes is a young noblewoman raised as a son by her father. As commander of Marie Antoinette's palace guard, Oscar is brought face-to-face with the luxury of King Louis XVI’s court at Versailles. Joined by her servant André, Oscar is privy to the intrigue and deceit of France's last great royal regime.”

Yeah. Oscar is a woman masquerading as a man. It’s not just the gender-switch aspect that attracts me but also the seiyuu casting.

Oscar is being played by Miyuki Sawashiro, the sexiest female voice in Japan (as voted by the fans), and Marie Antoinette is played by Aya Hirano, one of my favorite seiyuu. She was Haruhi Suzumiya in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kaoru in Zettai Karen Children and its fantastic spinoff series The Unlimited, and Misa Amane in Death Note, among many other roles.

I’ve always admired Hirano’s talent and drive. She studied voice acting in New York and had her own rock band for a time. In recent years she has decentered voice acting, but hopefully Rose of Versailles will put her seiyuu career back on the map.

There are other new and newish anime series that are maybes to add to my currently watching list, but we’ll see how much time I have for them. I’ve got plenty to watch as it is. ;-)

The Fall 2024 Anime Season and What I Will Be Watching

The Fall 2024 anime season starts next week - and it looks like it’s going to be a very good one. :-)

First, I basically skipped the summer anime season. I was busy writing and publishing a new book, Daredevil Prince, and getting ready for GayRomLit, which took place the week after Labor Day Weekend.

I may have to go back and see what I missed. But here comes fall season, and there’s going to be a lot to watch starting in just a few days - so here is my watchlist.

Part 3 of Bleach’s Thousand Year Blood War arc returns on Oct. 5. It’s been a year since Part 2 ended and I think we’re all ready for this one.

I haven’t read the manga so everything that happens is a surprise to me. I mean, I’ve heard a few things about how the characters end up (... and who with) but that’s it. I’m especially looking forward to this part because there’ll be more of Ishida in it. Uryu Ishida is one of my favorite Bleach characters and I always thought he was underutilized in the story, so more Ishida is a good thing.

Dragon Ball Daima is a new canon story set soon after the end of Dragon Ball Z. Something has happened to Goku and friends and now they’ve all turned into children!

Just... just look at this image of little kid Goku and LITTLE KID VEGETA.

There’s not a lot of story description available yet but those who are going to watch the series (which includes me) don’t really care, because... LITTLE VEGETA!!

Blue Exorcist returns on Oct. 5. I always enjoy watching the brothers Rin and Yukio, along with their friends from the exorcist academy, fight demons and that shadowy organization of villains. This fall, the series will cover the “Beyond the Snow Saga” arc, and in January 2025 we’ll be getting “The Blue Night Saga” arc that will finally reveal the secrets of Rin and Yukio’s birth (they’ve never revealed this up to now). So it’ll be six months of nonstop Blue Exorcist and I’m on board for it.

Believe it or not... The Prince of Tennis is coming back!

I’ll freely admit that I’ve lost the string as far as where the series is now. Years ago - and years after the original manga/anime ended - a new series, The Prince of Tennis II, began. If I remember correctly it’s about a competition that takes place the summer after the original series ends (in other words - they’re still not even in high school yet), but I don’t remember anything else about it really, even though I watched it.

Still - it’s Prince of Tennis - and even if I can’t remember much about this continuation story I still love these characters, so I will be there on Oct. 2 when Prince of Tennis II U-17 World Cup Semifinal begins airing on Crunchyroll. :-)

And finally... the description of this one initially put me off. Even though I write romance and “dark romance” is big now (dark romance usually meaning Mafia characters or biker characters with intense, violent, or otherwise dark elements to the plot), personally I don’t care for it.

... Until I heard who plays the main character in this anime.



IT’S HIM THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN VOICE

It’s Kaworu from Evangelion

Athrun Zala from Mobile Suit Gundum Seed

Cho Hakkai from Gensomaden Saiyuki (this is the role that made me fall in love with him)

Gaara from Naruto

... and Katsura from Gintama

It’s Akira Ishida, one of the OG seiyuu of the grand era of long-running shounen series and owner of one of the best voices in all of anime.

Even after all these years, it only took about three seconds to recognize THAT VOICE. And so despite my qualms about the story (and that old old character design - seriously, look at the art!!), I will be there on Oct. 7 to give Yakuza Fiance a chance. It’s Akira Ishida, I can’t help myself.

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

Seiyuu Appreciation Day - One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

One of these things is not like the others.

One of these things is not the same.

Here's Edward Elric.

And here's the seiyuu that played him.

Here's Naruto Uzumaki.

And here's the seiyuu that plays him.

Here's Arslan from Arslan Senki.

And here's the seiyuu that plays him.

Ehhhhh??!!

So... somehow... the producers of Arslan Senki actually hired a MALE seiyuu, Yuusuke Kobayashi, to play 14-year-old Middle Eastern Prince Arslan and not a female seiyuu.

I'll admit I was totally surprised when I looked up who played Arslan. I was thinking whoever voiced Arslan would naturally be female - the voice was husky and slightly hoarse just like Romi Paku and Junko Takeuchi.

Instead, it's... a guy.

Why is this remarkable? Here's why.

This is Al from Fullmetal Alchemist.

This is the seiyuu who played him, Aaron Dismuke.

He was twelve years old then. And then this happened.

In other words, he grew up and his voice changed.

This is generally why shonen heroes are played by female seiyuu. Their voices are set - they won't change. They can keep voicing pre-teen boy characters forever.

I'm not sure if I'm impressed or alarmed by Yuusuke Kobayashi's voice as Arslan, because he sounds like a female playing a young boy, and I'm not sure this is supposed to happen given that Kobayashi is, in fact, actually male. Watch Arslan Senki and see if you don't agree. XD

Seiyuu Appreciation Day - Mamo-chan!

I kicked around several ideas for my Seiyuu Appreciation Day post this month, but suddenly the 21st was upon me and it was too late to write any of them!

So here instead is the most dorkalicious seiyuu music video you've ever seen. Feast your eyes on Mamoru Miyano and his No. 1 hit single "Shine" (the theme from Uta no Prince-sama - Maji Love Revolutions).

Seiyuu Appreciation Day - The Other Guys

In the current endless run of flashback fillers in Naruto Shippuuden, we're seeing more of Neji now than ever before.

I miss Neji. :-(

Look at Neji's picture above. Now imagine you hear his voice.

...

Were you able to hear him? Neji's seiyuu, Kouichi Toochika, has a very distinctive voice - soft-spoken with a certain husky timbre.

Neji is only one supporting character in the Naruto universe and he even got killed off - but I can still hear Neji's voice if I call up the character in my mind.

Most of the time in these seiyuu posts I talk about the big-name seiyuus, the stars, because they're the ones I see most in anime. But sometimes you'll hear a voice in a supporting role that really catches your attention.

One such supporting character was Kensuke Fukui, the point guard for Yosen in Kuroko's Basketball.

Fukui only has a few lines in several episodes when Yosen battles the main team Seirin in the semi-finals. I didn't even know the character's name until I looked him up for this post - I only thought of him as "the point guard from Yosen with dishwater blond hair and a nice voice." Since that's a mouthful, it's good that I know the character's name now. ;-)

The seiyuu voicing Fukui just had a really nice voice and I noticed it. Warm, masculine, sexy. I looked up the seiyuu and found to my surprise that Kaito Ishikawa has played two main roles in series that I watched, and I didn't recognize him.

First, he was Tobio Kageyama, the second main character in the volleyball anime Haikyuu.

Kageyama is one of the best male tsunderes I've seen in a while. ;-) I mean, look at that expression. XD I couldn't believe Ishikawa played Kageyama and I didn't recognize him as Fukui, but the next surprised me even more:

Ishikawa was Ledo in Gargantia! I didn't recognize him from that role either! And Ledo was a difficult role. You'll recall that the character comes from a different universe and has to learn the language, speaking it hesitantly and with an odd cadence at first.

Ishikawa also played Nine in Zankyou no Terror and has done main roles in other series. So even though I didn't remember his voice from the two big roles I'd heard him in, I heard Ishikawa's voice in this small role as Fukui in Kuroko's Basketball and enjoyed it enough to notice and look up who the seiyuu was.

Often you'll see big-name seiyuu playing special characters in an anime, like in the last Shirobako episode when the director finally comes face to face with the elusive mangaka whose manga MusaAni is adapting. I didn't have to look it up to know it was Takahiro Sakurai playing the mangaka, since I can recognize his voice. =D

But seiyuu who play big roles will also play smaller roles without any fuss or fanfare, like Kaito Ishikawa playing Fukui. Actors love to ply their trade, after all, and every role is another chance to do what they love best.

Thinking of warm and distinctive masculine voices makes me think of Kenji Hamada, who plays Teppei Kiyoshi in Kuroko's Basketball.

Hamada's voice is so distinctive, I've recognized him in two small roles in other series since I first heard him in Kuroko's Basketball.

And then there's Hasumi Itou, whom I've mentioned before, who played Kaoru in Hakuouki, Chizuru's cross-dressing long-lost brother who we see in makeup and a kimono for many episodes until he finally reveals his evil little male self. ;-) Itou is the seiyuu who did that weird, unforgettable scene where her voice slid from fake-female to low-male without a hitch, just a pure slide from one to the other.

Aside from Hakuouki, Itou only has one other credit, as Aoi Toosaka in Fate/Zero. She is definitely a seiyuu to keep one's eye on.

Of course, one of my favorite seiyuu who never gets a main role but is always one of the other guys in a series, is Nobuo Tobita.

Tobita was the star of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam decades ago, and since then has only done supporting roles. But his beautiful gentle voice remains one of my favorites and hearing him is always a treat.

Finally, talking about supporting seiyuu and being one of the other guys wouldn't be complete without mentioning Shizuka, who finally got a voice acting job in last week's Shirobako episode. Shizuka, you'll remember, was the only one among her college friends who hadn't succeeded in the anime industry yet.

In honor of Shizuka getting her first role, here's a photo of Shizuka's seiyuu, Haruka Chigusa.

In the episode, Aoi Miyamori is in the recording studio when Shizuka walks in to record her role. Miyamori is shocked to see her friend, then nervous for her as she reads her lines, and then finally cries in relief and happiness when Shizuka finishes the acting job without a hitch and to the director's approval.

It was all done without words and was beautiful to watch. Ah well, might as well show you Miyamori's seiyuu's picture as well. Here's Juri Kimura. :-)

Again, if you're not watching Shirobako, you're missing a gem. =D