Happy Holidays 2024

The boys of Prince of Tennis (and I) wish you a happy holiday season!

This blog will return in 2025 with my Winter 2025 Anime Season post.

See you in the new year!

Donghua Lands in the West - Master of Diabolism

Donghua is landing in the animesphere, big time.

Crunchyroll has uploaded the first two seasons of The Master of Diabolism. Following on the heels of Heaven Official’s Blessing, this is another Chinese animation entry - and boy’s love to boot - that looks poised to succeed in the west.

The description of the story from Crunchyroll:

After attaining the state of immortality, Wei Wuxian’s rule descends down the demonic path of Mo Dao. Ultimately, his reign of terror is overthrown, but the tumultuous fall leads to a chance for redemption. 13 years later, Wei Wuxian is reincarnated and reunites with his former classmate, Lan Wangji. Together they’ll unravel the mysteries of the supernatural world and forge an unexpected bond.

If you read Chinese light novels and/or manhua (manga), this description probably sounds familiar. That’s because The Master of Diabolism is actually based on a well-known boy’s love light novel series and manhua series that has been available in translation from Seven Seas for some time.

I’m not sure why they changed the title to Master of Diabolism when the English language novels and manhua were already known as Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, but there it is.

And if you were wondering just how popular this Chinese boy’s love stuff is... take a look at the 4.9 stars from over 7,000 ratings for Grandmaster vol. I. These stories, in English translation, are doing better in the west than Japanese boy’s love stories have ever done.

I’ve added Master of Diabolism to my Crunchyroll watchlist but who knows when I’ll get around to it. I’m still absorbed in the fall season releases, most notably Blue Exorcist, Dragon Ball Daima, and The Prince of Tennis II U-17 World Cup Semi-Finals. Those are my favorites of the season. I’m also slow-watching Blue Miburo and Yakuza Fiance.

It’s been an excellent anime season. In particular, Blue Exorcist has started a very serious story arc with high stakes for the protagonist twin brothers. Dragon Ball Daima is just a delight and PoT II U-17 World Cup Semi-Finals is a welcome return to a nice enjoyable story universe for me.

Even better, the upcoming winter 2025 anime season looks amazing so far. I’ll post about my watchlist come January but I already have a number of picks. 2024 is ending strong in terms of anime and 2025 will be starting just as strong.

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.

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.

The Merger of Funimation and Crunchyroll and Why Anime Is Still Not Respected

For the past few months, I’ve been receiving emails from Funimation regarding the transition of their anime titles to Crunchyroll.

Funimation and Crunchyroll have the same parent corporation - Sony. As such, it was inevitable that one streaming site would be folded into the other. Unfortunately, the transition process has been clumsy so far.

The Funimation emails stated rather grandly that I could go ahead and cancel my Funi subscription if I was already a Crunchyroll subscriber. However... what they didn’t say was that I wouldn't be able to stream Funimation’s entire catalog at Crunchyroll yet if I did so.

... Which is still the case, and it's now May 2022. It’s been months since the official announcement, but Funi’s titles are being switched over to Crunchyroll at a snail’s pace.

I began to look into this by going to Funimation’s website. Despite maintaining a Funimation subscription for years, I haven’t used it much. My term for it is my “emergency Funimation subscription,” as Crunchyroll doesn’t license one hundred percent of all anime series. They get maybe ninety-five percent (or at least - ninety-five percent of what I would be interested in), and the other five percent was always licensed by Funimation, so I always paid to keep a streaming subscription at both sites.

I looked at the FAQs. Here are two examples of FAQs from Funimation’s website:

Then there's this page:

Once again, they say that we can go ahead and cancel our Funi subscription if we also have a Crunchyroll subscription. But at the same time, they state that “many” (note: not all) of Funimation’s titles will be available at Crunchyroll “by the end of March 2022.” It’s now May, and titles are still in the process of being moved to Crunchyroll.

None of this was really giving me the info I needed, so I signed into Crunchyroll and found this page that lists the Funi titles that are now available at Crunchyroll as of May 17.

The link to this page is here, if you want to read it. This post elicited many comments. I am in total agreement with two of them:

"Some_weirdGuy" [Premium Member]
3/11/22
Gotta say this cause I'm seeing is a lot of "why are people complaining/guys chill out/everyone have patience" type comments -- Why are you doing that? stop that :X - They are a multi-billion dollar company, you are a paying customer, they can shine their boots just fine without your licking. They could have easily uploaded all this content on the back end behind a hidden flag, have everything ready, have all the information/answers written up and ready to go in advance, and *then* in one go make the annoucement and turn it on - thats absolutely possible, reasonable, and indeed what gets done elsewhere. They actively chose to have a messy/confusing, half-baked public rollout - So lets not make up excuses and verbally give them a free pass, they should do better, thats basic quality control/standards. :/ if people have complaints, let them complain, it's absolutely justified to expect better in these circumstances.

"Saryrn"
3/23/22
Can we speed this up a bit, a lot of us have canceled funimation a bit too early it seems as your original announcement made it sound like funimation was moments from shutting off the lights. However at the rate you seem to transfer the shows it sure seems like some people will want to keep funimation for at least one more month if not more at that rate. If it truly is this slow of a process can you at least be more up front about it and announce your intended move schedule, like these shows this week, these shows next week, ect so people can plan accordingly. If you really wanted to calm a lot of the stress people have down, can you just be upfront and let us know what shows will not be making the jump just incase we want to watch them one more time before funimation site truly does shut down. For instance just at the top of my head, I keep waiting to see if slayers is making the jump, I haven't seen it in years and was looking forward to rewatching it before this merge was announced.

Of course, neither of these comments received answers from Crunchyroll. I looked to see which of the Funi titles that I've watched or wanted to watch were now at Crunchyroll. As of May 17, the latest update, both seasons of Muhyo and Roji are now at Crunchyroll, but Sasaki and Miyano, which I’d been meaning to watch, is not at Crunchy yet, nor are Hetalia or Heaven Official’s Blessing. It does look like the entirety of The Prince of Tennis has been moved to Crunchyroll.

If you’re not familiar with the Prince of Tennis series, well... the main canon series took a long time to wrap up. I think the anime caught up with the manga too many times... there were delays... so the canon story had to be finished with OVAs. Then the new Prince of Tennis (Shin Prince of Tennis) manga series began in 2009. There are also several movies that are part of the canon, plus several post-main series seasons, etc. I’ve been in a Prince of Tennis mood lately, so I guess it’s ready at Crunchyroll now for me to pick up from wherever it was I left off at... which I’ll have to figure out. It’s been a while.

This fumbled rollout of Funi titles at Crunchyroll may seem like a minor thing to gripe about. Considering that Crunchyroll began as a pirate site before going legit, and that Funimation’s streaming platform was the buggiest in the business (they did gradually improve it over the years), I understand that this slow transition of titles doesn’t sound like a big deal in comparison.

But in a way, it is. Anime occupies a unique place in the U.S. entertainment industry. It is a significant piece of the entertainment business now in the U.S., not only in terms of revenues generated, but also as something that brings in and engages young fans - diverse fans - the fans of the future, the ones everyone is trying to cultivate. My point is that it’s not pirate sites operating on the fly anymore. Sony is a billion-dollar corporation, yet sometimes the industry still feels like people making VHS copies for their college anime club, with the same level of professionalism and dedication, in other words, not much.

I believe anime could compete on the level of Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if presented in the right way to the American audience. I really do. So it frustrates me to see this kind of unprofessional treatment of paying customers, as if we should be grateful that we don't have to hunt down fansubs on You Tube anymore and that this is a good enough effort. We're not going to get out of the entertainment ghetto this way, so I hope Sony steps up and takes care of this issue soon.

Ten Years Later

Once upon a time, there was a young American girl.

Her grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Japan, making the girl a third-generation Japanese-American.

She grew up in a white neighborhood in Southern California, a child in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s. Not that long after WWII, with Pearl Harbor within living memory of most people.

She felt American inside, even if some people she met saw her face and considered her a foreigner. Her parents, who spoke both English and Japanese, only spoke English at home, perhaps to ensure that she would be seen as American as possible by other Americans.

They never taught her anything about the culture of her grandparents and ancestors.

She didn’t mind. After all, she was American.

Many years passed.

One evening, she was watching the Starz Network and saw something she’d never seen before.

It was something called anime — animation from Japan.

It blew her mind.

Not only was the story adult in tone, but it was what she knew as slash — a romance between two men. She had no idea that entertainment like this existed outside of fandom, and from a foreign country too.

Japan. A country she was connected to by blood made shows like this. She was staggered to find this out.

But that wasn’t all. The Starz Network also had other anime series.

Slowly, as if being drawn in against her will, she began to search out more anime to watch.

It was her first exposure to Japanese manga and anime art styles, and what she saw changed her whole view on art.

She particularly loved how some anime series created entire universes one could lose oneself in — the setting, characters and stories forming whole worlds in themselves.

She fell in love with so many characters... and the seiyuu who played them.

She attended many anime conventions, discovering the love her fellow fans had for anime.

... And that sometimes, one could meet a Shonen Jump editor in real life that you’d seen in an anime.

She started a blog so she could write about her love for anime and manga.

And she began taking Japanese lessons, finally starting to learn the language of her grandparents — and discovered what her name was in Japanese (ジャン 鈴川).

Since she’d worked as an editor before, she began freelancing as a translation rewriter/editor for the U.S. companies that published manga and anime-related books.

She edited many books in the field:

Even the yaoi light novels she loved to read... she became the editor of some of those books as well.

The world she entered when she became an anime fan expanded her sense of storytelling and setting, and inspired her first published novel.

That novel set her on the road to other fictional worlds, and other series that she is still writing today.

Her love for anime and manga gave her a second career in editing, as well as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream — to be a published fiction writer.

It brought her full-circle in terms of acceptance and appreciation for her heritage as a Japanese-American.

So be open, and stay curious as to the world around you. Because one day, you may be watching television or surfing the Internet and not expecting your life to change, but — it can.

A gift that takes your life in a new direction can come to you, unexpected, sent to you by the universe with hidden hands.

Thank you for reading this blog for the past ten years.