An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

I Dream of Demons – Dream Eater Merry Spoiler Review

Dream Eater Merry is… actually hard to put in a nutshell. It came out in 2011, based on a manga that ran from 2008 all the way to 2020 (so naturally the one season we have will not be covering the whole thing). Its style and aesthetic feels as though it’s in a transitional phase between the heavier shadows of the early 2000’s and the bright colors and high white saturation you’d tend to see later in the 2010’s.

As to its concept, like many good concepts it’s at once wildly original and done to death overdone. On one side, we get the “monster who fights monsters”, and to extent the backbone of the masquerade supernatural battler, the sort of thing that was around long before Shakugan no Shana but that Shana made really popular. On the other hand, dealing with exiles from the world of dreams as they intrude upon, practically invade the physical world, overtaking humans as they do? I have to admit, I haven’t heard that exact pitch before.

Which is kind of interesting. Dreams are a funny thing – though we can put high confidence on the idea that they’re just processions of junk data before the mind’s eye, we can’t really prove or in fact explain much about them, and not for lack of trying. The idea that the sleeping mind connects to something real and beyond common human experience, as well as a mystical significance to dreams, is as old as dirt. The idea of something from the other side bodily crossing over to cause trouble isn’t exactly novel either, but making that the backbone of an action-adventure story? It’s a different sort of action-adventure story.

Let’s not waste any more time, and dig in to Dream Eater Merry.

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Lesson 1: How to Not Write a Shoujo Fantasy RomCom – I Want to Escape From Princess Lessons Spoiler Review

Alas for the Fantasy genre. As a branch of speculative fiction, it’s meant to be a wild playground for the imagination. The genre of myth, magic, monsters, and all sorts of unreal things… has been concentrated, codified, and reprocessed into focus-group friendly form, so that finding something creative and different when the only limit is the creator’s imagination is just as hard as finding it in more grounded genres, if not harder.

In the land of Anime, when the word “fantasy” is uttered these days the first of these ultraprocessed bricks of content to come to mind is no doubt the Shounen Power Fantasy Harem Video Game Isekai Fantasy, and while at times I have defended that good things can come out of even such an overplayed formula, I’ve also dredged up enough of the dreck of the genre combination for the time being.

But there is another repeatable demographic that I’m sure marketing teams love that also exists within the Fantasy space of the Anime sphere: the shoujo fantasy romance. It still takes place in what’s usually a quasi-period setting almost but not quite entirely unlike Europe, but rather than the ages of knights and heroes, it’s more the ages of ball gowns and courtly intrigue, a world in the style of Louis XIV’s Versailles rather than the Dragon Quest series. The stories, rather than being about “the strongest” trouncing monsters, demons, or anyone whose face he doesn’t like with some ultimate cheat power, will instead usually focus on the leading lady in some troubled relationship (whether it has trouble forming or trouble maintaining), with high rank and prestige on one side if not both, ranging from Cinderella stories to the sordid polygons of the Otome Games that call this particular portion of Fantasy home.

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Sleepless in High School – Insomniacs After School Spoiler Review

Sleep troubles suck. I’m mostly going to leave it at that since the more outre and sensational cases of insomnia become the sorts of things that you end up losing sleep over, but suffice to say that it’s seldom a pleasant condition.

This week’s subject, Insomniacs after school, is about a pair of kids with sleep issues, learning to appreciate the silver lining of the night and getting to know each other in the process. Unlike a certain other after hours show that will not be mentioned again this review, this one features no blood-sucking, but it should be engaging all the same.

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Everything Becomes Locked Room Murders – The Perfect Insider Spoiler Review

It’s no secret, I enjoy a good mystery. Detective fiction is hard to produce, resulting in some very notable misfires, but at the same time when it’s at its best it’s the greatest game between creator and audience there could ever be.

And, one of the greatest staples of mysteries is the Locked Room Murder: a murder committed in a setting where, with the location of the corpse locked from the inside, no culprit should have been able to get in or out of. Locked Room Murder mysteries, done well, always lead to some wonderful, creative, and often sordid solutions.

Without further adieu, The Perfect Insider.

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Terminator: the Musical – Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song Spoiler Review

The future: war between AI and Humanity has devastated the Earth. However, one light is flung into the past in order to set things right and prevent the worst from actually coming to pass. As per the title of my review, this is the pitch for both the Terminator franchise (particularly the first two movies) and Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song.

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Livestream Call of Cthulhu – Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show Spoiler Review

When last season began, I had a decision between Kamitsubaki City Under Construction and this show, in terms of what I wanted to do my seasonal write-ups for. In the end, I decided to go with Kamitsubaki City and leave Necronomico for exactly this moment. So in a sense you could say that it informed my decision to do a Lovecraft month this October at all.

I’ve saved it for last, in part because working ahead meant starting October reviews before Necronomico even finished airing and in part because I feel like digging into this show – that not a lot of people seem to have watched despite it being newer and that tanked itself on debuts thanks to initially airing to Westerners with cruddy AI subs – was going to be a little bigger or perhaps more meaningful than my other entries.

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