An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: September 2019

Titles I can’t make up – Battle Divas: The Incorruptible Battle Blossom Princess (Light Novel Review)

I implore anyone who wants a good takeaway from this review to read it the whole way through.

Battle Divas is one of the more… unique experiences in literature I’ve had lately. Which isn’t to say its plot and characters are unique. Far from it – if you’re a fan of anime, you’ve seen the broad strokes of this story before about a million times, including the broad strokes of the characters: the mild-mannered and usually ineffectual male lead who’s actually amazingly badass, the spitfire love interest who won’t admit she more than hates said lead, the cool love interest who won’t emote if her life depends on it, the slightly less popular aggressively pervy love interest; these are all familiar. Similarly familiar are the trappings of demon kings, chanted-up magic, evil empires, battles being decided on the force of singular champions with kickass powers, super-powered cat fights breaking out at the drop of a hat and causing massive property damage, innocent situations that look compromising found at the exact wrong moment by people who don’t feel like listening to explanations, and so on.

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Summoning Rituals Make Poor(?) Matchmakers – Familiar of Zero Spoiler Review

Familiar of Zero is an action-comedy about a teenage boy, Saito, who is summoned as the familiar of a young mage girl from another world, Louise.

Louise is voiced by Rie Kugimiya. If you don’t know who that is, that’s fine; I myself am not usually one to follow actors or voice actors; I’d rather see/hear the character. She is, however, very prolific and very talented. I first heard her work (though I didn’t know there was any significance to it at the time) as Alphonse Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist, but she is perhaps best known for her Tsundere voice roles. And more than that, her short, flat-chested, loud-mouthed Tsunderes with firecracker tempers. Louise is exactly one of those roles. That is, in fact, how and why I found this show. I liked Shana (Shakugan no Shana) and Taiga Aisaka (Toradora!) and was in the mood for another enjoyable character in the same vein.

What I got was Familiar of Zero. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.

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How Much Lore Does It Take to Justify Cute Ship Girls? A Prelude to Azur Lane

The upcoming Azur Lane anime is… something that is weirdly in my interest. I was never really a gacha game or phone game sort of person, but I’ve been playing around on Azur Lane for most of a year now; it has some decent character writing and is overall very friendly to casual players. When I heard they were going to make an anime based on the game, though, I was… less than thrilled. It would be cool to see some of my favorite characters moving around and doing things in a more fully realized world, but adapting video games, at least ones that aren’t visual novels, into other media has historically been very thorny. True, anime does this a little better than Western media; Granblue Fantasy the Animation was… not exactly what I’d call good, but it does look a little like Citizen Kane when you put it next to the filmography of Uwe Boll (probably the West’s most famous or perhaps infamous adapter of video games). But in any case there would have to be care taken and effort output in order to make an Azur Lane anime good.

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Surveying the Damage One Character can do to a Show – Kaze no Stigma Spoiler Review

Kaze no Stigma is a show that started out with a lot of potential, but squandered it by making some very basic mistakes. The setup involves a society of magic users that exist secretly in what is essentially our regular mundane world – the backbone of at least a sizeable subset of the broad genre of “Urban Fantasy” that combines magic and monsters with the trappings of the mundane world. Good so far. Our main character is Kazuma, the scion of a house of fire magic wielders who was kicked out of his family because he was, himself, incapable… and who returns with a new mastery of a different element, Air. That’s a pretty good setup for a character. The show puts him in a position to help his former family in their time of need, but of course he should have some conflicted opinions about that, considering that he was bitterly mistreated. A good treatment would let us learn more about the character through his struggles, understanding what happened to him in the interval to lead him to this new power and how his trials shaped him and will continue to shape him going forward.

Kaze no Stigma… does not deliver a good treatment of this material. There’s more to worry about outside of Kazuma, but I’m going start with him because his problems are the most numerous and varied and his waste of potential the most striking.

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The Many-Worlds Interpretation Makes for Surprising Drama – Noein Spoiler Review

Quantum physics comes up surprisingly often in media. Perhaps it’s because it’s on the arcane end of current science, and thus it’s fairly easy to use it as a line of plausible BS to cover for whatever the writer wants to happen.

Noein may have its fair share of ‘might as well be magic’, but I felt like it took it a more serious look at what its ‘quantum’ arcana would actually imply, and ran with the storytelling possibilities of applying quantum realities on the scale of human events.

You Got Your Exploration of AI and Humanity in My Shipgirl Action Show! Arpeggio of Blue Steel Spoiler Review

A lot of shows try to be more than one thing. It makes sense, letting them find appeal on some tracks even if others fall through. And all too often, reaching for more than was necessary causes the work to fail on all marks. Similarly, you sometimes get shows that aren’t smart, but want you to think they are, resulting in a pretentious mess that didn’t need to be one and could have worked if it embraced a simple core. These are pretty common results.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is exactly the opposite of that.