The Not-Anime I'm Currently Watching

So all the anime series I was watching have ended for now. Until Bleach’s Thousand-Year Blood War arc returns in July, I will have to find other things to watch.

The Mandalorian just ended its third season on Disney Plus. Disney’s Star Wars streaming series have been hit or miss with the critics, but most seem to agree that The Mandalorian has been a quality show throughout its run.

I agree. It’s a great representation of everything that makes Star Wars, Star Wars. From the callbacks to minor characters from canon to sound effects and visual cues (think of the “wipe” effect at the end of a scene) to familiar vistas from the movies, the series evokes the true feel of the Star Wars universe.

The storytelling has also been solid. In this third season there wasn’t any overarching, season-long goal for Din Djarin, the titular main character, until the final few episodes. That’s when the scattered tribes of Mandalorians returned from the diaspora and resolved to take back their homeworld of Mandalore.

The main mystery of the third season was... why was Grogu, a.k.a. the Child, back with Din? At the end of season two he joined Luke at his secret Jedi academy, but now he’s traveling with Din again. At one point a character asked Din about it and his response was something like, “It’s complicated.”

Unless I missed it, there was no further explanation given. Maybe Luke kicked him out of the academy, lol. Who knows, but by the end of the season Din and Grogu forge a deeper family-level relationship, so it doesn’t look like he will be returning to the Jedi anytime soon.

In addition, I’ve picked up an old cable series.

I went on a business trip to Seattle earlier this month and Silicon Valley was on some channel on my hotel room TV. I watched a few episodes and got hooked.

I find Silicon Valley - the state of mind it represents, not the series - fascinating. If you’ve never been to Silicon Valley, the location on the map I mean, I can tell you that you won’t find any center there. It’s made up of a number of suburbs spread out across the San Francisco Bay Area’s Peninsula and South Bay areas, which includes Menlo Park (where Meta/Facebook is headquartered), Mountain View (Google’s HQ), Cupertino (Apple), Palo Alto (Hewlett-Packard), and so on.

When I say suburban, I mean office parks surrounded by residential neighborhoods with strip malls (meaning a strip of small businesses and an adjacent, often limited parking lot) at many intersections, and miles of streets leading to these places. There’s no walkable “downtown” area in most of Silicon Valley; you really need a car.

There’s a very funny You Tube video from a Silicon Valley software engineer that skewers the whole SV lifestyle and the Bay Area in general (warning: NSFW for crude language).

Title: Surviving the Bay Area
Creator: introvertedmadness



I especially love the “flexing your Tesla at the local strip mall” bit. There’s nothing like owning a $100,000 car... and only being able to show it off at the nearby 7-11.

Back to Silicon Valley, the series. I vaguely remember when it first aired. It was on cable and I didn’t have cable, and back then there weren’t as many streaming options for shows. I mean, today I can buy all the seasons and watch them digitally on Amazon Prime. The complete series is also available on DVD.

Other than my Silicon Valley (the state of mind - the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit - what it all represents) fascination, the series itself isn’t one I would normally gravitate to. It’s about a bunch of smarmy start-up guys and I understand it features a quantity of sexist and racist humor.

I don’t know if I’ll want to watch the entire series, so I’ll buy the first season on Amazon Prime and see how it goes.

Seven Years Later

Anime Expo is this weekend.

And—like last year—I’m not going.

Not making a statement or anything. I think it’s part of the process.

If you’ve followed this blog over the years, and especially in the past year, you know I’ve been going through changes as an anime fan.

I was into anime 1,000% from 2006 until last year. Last year, I felt a cooling in my interest, which continues to this day, though anime is definitely still a part of my life.

Case in point: Arslan Senki (The Heroic Legend of Arslan).

I’d stopped watching Arslan Senki in its first season because my life got busy. I enjoyed the series and always meant to get back to it.

A few weeks ago, I picked it up again, finishing the first cour of its first season. And found out there was a whole second cour I didn’t know about.

I marathoned the second cour in two evenings, all 12 episodes.

I’ve been so out of it as far as keeping up with what’s new each season, it then took me a while to discover that Arslan Senki has a second season that will begin a few days from now. When it does, I’ll be watching.

This past year has been like that. I watched the third and final cour of Durarara’s second season, and continued with new seasons of series I’d been enjoying like K, Haikyuu, The Case File of Young Kindaichi Returns and Kagewani (pictured at the top), but didn’t make the effort to search out new series.

I also marathoned the third season of Junjou Romantica on Funimation—and really liked it, a lot more than the first two seasons. So anime still holds surprises for me.

And to this day, I still totally love Kuroko's Basketball. One of my favorite ways to relax is to rewatch my favorite episodes/arcs from the series, especially the second Seirin-Touou game and the Seirin-Yosen game episodes.

I’ll continue to watch the series I enjoy. Not sure I’ll make huge efforts to find new anime series, as I’m enjoying the ones already on my list and my free time has been taken up with writing fiction and learning Japanese.

I’ve spent more time this past year on my writing career, and also on my Japanese studies—particularly learning kanji. In my work, if I can learn the kanji, it’s a huge boost in income for me. So there’s great incentive there. ;-)

Another interest that has captivated me is Star Wars.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan my whole life. I saw the original trilogy when it came out in the theaters, and the new movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens has brought all the old feelings back.

I’m especially intrigued by the fandom that has arisen around “Reylo,” the Rey/Kylo Ren pairing. There’s not only fan fiction, but a significant number of meta essays and posts on the topic.

So, I have no grand pronouncements or conclusions in this post, which marks the seventh anniversary of this blog. I’m still an anime fan. I still want to write about anime, though not as much as before. So this blog will continue.

A housekeeping note: I closed this blog to comments last year, as I was checking here less frequently and didn’t want to leave comments hanging without my moderation. Blogger unfortunately hides all past comments when you do this—it doesn’t let you close to comments going forward and also leave the past comments visible. If I get more active on this blog again, I will open to comments as before and the past comments will be visible again.

That's all for now. I'll post again when the mood strikes and I have something anime-related to say.

Until then, best wishes to all, and if you're going to Anime Expo - have a fantastic time. =D

The Girl of Prophecy

In recent Naruto Shippuuden episodes, the fact that Naruto is Konoha's "Child of Prophecy" has been a topic of discussion again.

Obviously, Naruto is the main character of Naruto Shippuuden and it makes sense that if anyone is going to be the "Child of Prophecy" in the series, it's him. Add to that the fact that this is a shonen series, and it really couldn't be anyone but Naruto who would be the chosen one. So I don't begrudge our favorite orange-jumpsuited ninja for this: but it did start a train of thought in my head.

A few years ago, I bought one of those calendars where you rip off a page each day. This one happened to be a Star Wars calendar. One of the daily pages caught my imagination, and I ended up taping it to my refrigerator (excuse the poor-quality scan):




That's Padme in the foreground and center, with Anakin behind her on the right, and Mace and Obi-Wan behind her on the left. It's just one of those publicity-shot type photographs of the lead characters in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, one in which someone probably said, hey, let's mix it up a little, put Padme in the front. It's only a picture: but the image, if you really look at it for a moment, brings to mind a startling question.

What if Padme had been the main character of Star Wars? Or her daughter Leia, for that matter?

Why is the "child of prophecy" always male?

And oddly, this is where a strange dichotomy arises between American and Japanese entertainment. Because many American genre and science fiction stories like Star Wars and Iron Man and the like actually do female characters a greater disservice than Japanese anime - where you will get a few kunoichi, some tough tsundere mecha pilots, or other strong female characters with super powers in most of the shonen stories. Just where you think American entertainment would come through with strong female characters, it often... doesn't.

I say that Star Wars did female characters a disservice, and perhaps that's a bit harsh. I'm old enough to have seen Star Wars in the theaters when it first came out, and I'll never forget the audience's reaction when Leia blew open the wall in the holding cells with a laser gun while Luke and Han just stared at her. She was a female character with spunk, and that was new. But Star Wars - I mean the whole thing, the two film trilogies - could have done more with its female characters. (Interestingly, the strongest female character in the entire Star Wars universe was created for the novel series, which still continues - Mara Jade, the Jedi Knight who becomes Luke Skywalker's wife.)

And I mention Iron Man because it hired an Academy Award-winning A-list actress like Gwyneth Paltrow... just to use her as arm candy for Robert Downey, Jr. Again, women as lust or beauty objects, or as support for the male characters in the telling of their stories.

In terms of being an anime fan: is it my own fault for loving shonen and action stories? I like watching stories where things actually happen. Slice-of-life stories put me to sleep. To encourage more female characters being featured in anime, am I supposed to watch series where there are 13 episodes of four high school girls doing... not very much? I think I'd rather see Ichigo throwing a Hollow into a distant mountainside - in fact - I know I would.

The Japanese have a terrible saying: "Men do, women watch." In four words, you have the reason for why the main characters and the interesting characters in anime (to me, anyway) usually turn out to be boys and men. They're the ones doing things; the girls and women usually just watch them do things. I don't prefer it this way - I want to see strong female characters doing things, too. But there don't seem to be many manga and anime series that offer this.

On Yumeka's recommendation, I've recently started watching Noir:




Though I've only just started watching this series, this is already what I see about Noir:

A. The two main characters are female.
B. They are both professional assassins, who make no apologies for their line of work.
C. The story is clearly focused on the two women; the male characters are secondary.

This much alone already places Noir in highly exclusive company. Most anime series I watch place female characters in the usual roles: love/sex interest, girlfriend, friend, mother, or other supporting roles. Noir starts from the premise that women are interesting and substantial enough to be the main characters; that their lives matter enough to be center stage. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.