Mega Megane Moé
Hell and Heaven Moéltdown
Posts tagged Shuffle
[Rapidfire] Shuffle! returns, selling out, Howl’s Moving Castle and emotional connection
Jun 15th
The rumors of my blogging laziness have been greatly exaggerated.
In the midst of the working world and of real life another Rapidfire post rises from the ashes to inject a thousand-odd words of anime ranting and raving into the bloodstream of a starved anime fan.
Well, in all honesty I hope you’ve been reading elsewhere too, so you shouldn’t be starving, but in any case, I’m just starting to go off on random tangents, having already written all the content out of my head (yes, the pre-jump section comes last here) and now desperately typing random, fourth-wall referential content in an attempt to fill space.
In case you’re interested in what’s on board for today, there’s a news section announcing a new Shuffle!-like substance for the PC, a short metarant involving ads and websites, and a good long analytical-type thing about Howl’s Moving Castle – one of the popular Miyazaki films – and the power of emotional connection versus logical appeal.
Well … uh … how about that Nagato?
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Harem Personality Quiz: ask your blogger what harem anime is right for you!
May 17th
So you wanna watch a harem anime. Or maybe you’re just amused by my post title.
In any case, the harem genre is one that enjoys a negative reputation from anime viewers, mainly due to the core nature of it being one guy surrounded by many girls waiting to jump him – rather pandering, even I will admit.
Of course, such a stereotype is the same as assuming that all shonen action shows involve men in spiky hair screaming, or all shoujo romances feature blond-haired ambigously-gendered prettyboys surrounded by sparkles and flowers, or, more pertinently, that all anime is hentai. So it’s my job today to recommend some of the better harem-type shows out there with a fun little activity – and I don’t mean fun like your teacher’s definition of “fun”, trust me, so it’ll be OK.
The problem with the harem genre, and the reason it has gets a bad rap from so many people is that, admittedly, it does vary wildly in quality. There are piles of pandering shows which are nothing more than the stereotype I mentioned above. But not all of them belong in this pile.
Rather, many shows have a harem setup only in appearance, and belong to a greater genre I usually term the ‘visual novel’ shows, after works like Kanon or Tsukihime that were originally visual novels, that have a skewed male:female ratio for sure, but have a more refined (or at least more refined pandering to emotional fools like me) taste.
So here’s a little quiz I devised on a boring weekend to help you determine which visual-novel / harem-type anime might suit you. Amuse yourself, at least to see if you’ve seen what I’ve recommended and whether it suits you or not. It’s all about what personally appeals the best in such a diverse genre like this.
Enjoy! (Yeah, everything’s after the jump. Keep going…) Read the rest of this entry »
Twelve Moments in Anime 2007 – #9: Shuffle! 16
Dec 17th
The “12 Days of Christmas” series is a joint feature by some members of the Anime Blogging Collective recognizing twelve moments, twelve series, or just twelve things about anime that we’ve enjoyed over the past year, that really make us enjoy loving what we do, and that is being an anime fan. Feel free to join in the list-making fun too if you wish. We hope you enjoy this feature.
Connection is one of the most powerful things of anime. It can turn the mundane into the interesting, and the interesting into the legendary.
For your average impressionable teenage boy, being able to connect to an anime isn’t very hard, especially in a sea of harem shows full of equal amounts of uninspiring, bland if not unusually nice guys.
Even with all the escapism offered by such shows, there comes a point where as cute as it is to see another “gee well I like X but don’t feel like confessing for another 23 episodes” premise, the raw cliche factor of it drags down the entire feel of the show.
And so when something different, a different view on the topic comes up, it’s enough to make me sit up and notice. A character with a viewpoint, a reasoning different than the norm, and a viewpoint interesting enough to really drive a point home.
One might say that trying to learn anything about real life from anime, especially the incredibly unrealistic harem genre, is ridiculous. But sometimes, you come across a gem in the rough.
Enter Shuffle! 16.
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Can fillers be filling?
Aug 29th
Paradoxes and deep posts are so much fun.
Fillers are quite often one of the most dreaded parts of anime that cause us to sigh, roll our eyes, press the fast forward button and/or maybe write a long drawn-out post complaining how this is the twentieth episode we’ve had with Absolutely Nothing Happening.
They come in many interesting if not always entertaining flavors such as The Beach Episode (pictured), The Convienently One Episode Long Conflict, And Now For Some Of Our Other Characters That Still Exist, and everyone’s favorite, The Recap.
Now naturally the entertainment value depends on many different things, such as originality, quality, and how many fillers you’ve seen in a row. But from a story perspective, I’ve always struggled with the stigma of filler as something completely devoid of content.
Maybe it’s a faulty definition of filler, but I’ve found that filler episodes, per se, may actually be necessary to the overarching feel of the series in the end in leaving a good impression. This may not be the case for more shonen material (Fights O’ The Week) or whatnot, but at least in my specialty genre, romance/harem/harem-likes, I almost find filler to be useful at times.
(Minor blatantly obvious spoilers for Da Capo and huge ending/plot spoilers for Shuffle ahead.)
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Artbook Check! Haruhi and Shuffle!
Aug 4th
Another step towards complete anime geekery (one might say, to abuse more Japanese words, hikikomori-dom) is made with the purchase now of even more completely incomprehensible things from Japanese bookstores. The Haruhi Suzumiya artbook ‘fanbook’ and Shuffle! On the Stage artbook ‘visual guide’ were purchased for a combined total of less than 20 dollars, thanks to the awesome factor of a Los Angeles chain of stores called “Book Off”, which I found had lots of cheap things (these), lots of really cheap things (a $1 section including English manga, random Japanese artbooks and magazines, and a Gran Turismo 2 guide. Old-school’d.), and lots of really strange things (a strange manga title I didn’t bother to look into: “Rape+2Ï€r”). That are cheap.
While I am unable to provide pictures for these two I can still review them and provide some information, of which was sorely lacking when I tried to research these two the day before. (when drooling over them at twice-the-price Kinokuniya.)