An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Sky Fairy Dormitory – WorldEnd: What are You Doing at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? Spoiler Review

WorldEnd (I am not typing out that whole title every time) is a post-apocalyptic tale that’s pitched to be a little more… complete than most, starring as it does Willem Kmetsch, said in this setting to be the last surviving human. The grim oppression of such a scenario, as would be familiar to the likes of Girls’ Last Tour or a few downer endings, is defused significantly by the setting and supporting cast.

For one, while humans are basically extinct, civilization endures with other humanoid races on a series of islands floating in the sky – mostly animal people as we see when Willem intercepts a mysterious blue-haired girl and shows her around for a day, hats required to hide that they don’t have horns or anything.

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Crash & Burn – The Magnificent Kotobuki Spoiler Review

What is The Magnificent Kotobuki?

It’s a show I don’t think many people of heard of. Heck, this is my job and it managed to fly under my radar until now, no pun intended. It’s an anime original, which is usually interesting, a sort of Aeronautical/Flying Ace themed variant on the Western, what with the show starting in the spitting image of an old-timey saloon.

In its pitch, it promises a sort of military action adventure. In its style, it promises a sort of “cute girls doing cute things” overtone and we can just all hope that it pans out more like High School Fleet than the Mecha Musume shows.

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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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