An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

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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AI Renai – Love Flops Spoiler Review

Love Flops (or Renai Flops, to use the fairly simple Japanese title) is a show that starts with a premise that’s strange enough: A random boy of otherwise little note has his day predicted with absurd accuracy by an AI fortune teller, including not one but five completely out-of-the-blue love confessions. Sounds crazy, right? And it’s an anime original, so there should hopefully be something interesting.

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Love Polygon of Two – Psuedo Harem Spoiler Review

Well, it’s February, and you know what that means – it’s a month where romance reigns supreme, and where I usually review at least a couple of shows that are of the romance genre, or that at least have something of a romance bent. Last year, I went for some of the more twisted takes, but this time around I thought I’d approach some material that’s at least a little more wholesome.

Take, for example, Psuedo Harem – a love story between a boy who wants to have a life like a harem anime and a girl who can play a million characters to be a harem of one.

Hey, things have to be at least a little weird to be interesting, right?

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Sentai Reversal – Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Spoiler Review

Evidently, I’m not the only one who thought that despite their gacha adaptations landing squarely in the pile of mediocrity for one reason or another, Yostar Pictures seemed to have some decent talent attached to it. After all, said studio has branched out from their initial fare to adapt a manga called Sentai Daishikkaku – more or less literally “Ranger Reject”, but known in the West by its thrice-excited localized title Go! Go! Loser Ranger!.

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