An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Protoculture Shock – Super Dimension Fortress Macross Spoiler Review

I have a tradition, in the month of March, to at least approach the Mecha genre. Giant robots are cool, there are a ton of shows featuring them, and of course it’s hard to resist the alliteration. This year, though, things are going to be a bit different… or rather, a bit more specific.

Welcome, my friends, to Macross March.

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Fragment of Nothing – Glasslip Spoiler Review

In 2014, Studio P.A. Works made Glasslip, a story about a group of friends in a world that’s at least somewhat mystical despite otherwise seeming like it belongs to the familiar, whose lives and dynamics are disrupted – possibly for the better – by the arrival of a stranger to their clique, with a heavy focus on the romances within the group. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you could bump the year up by four and change the name to Iroduku and give the same introduction.

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The Government Demands You Kiss the Girl – Love and Lies Spoiler Review

Why do we like dystopias so much?

When you get down to it, despite a reputation for being high-flying and forward-looking, science fiction more often indulges in – and often seems to be consumed by – not hope for the future or wonder at the possibilities of scientific advancement, but rather fear. Fear of the future, fear of technology, fear of the unknown, the works. For every inventive gadget or futuristic concept mankind dreams up there’s almost sure to be a scifi story about why this is a terrible idea and going to kill and/or enslave everybody. It often seems as though the genre of the future would rather flee into the past, delivering lesson after lesson about how anything that changes the status quo is bad, to the point where real people view emerging technology with extra heaps of fear and suspicion specifically because every time it crops up in fiction it’s somehow evil.

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