Month: June 2018

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Book Club Special Features

Anime Book Club: Kino’s Journey ~The Beautiful World~ Week #2

Good morning, all. I’m trying to get this out a bit early today since I’ll be out of the house for a while on Sunday afternoon. I would also like any newcomers to know that posts for previous weeks will be open indefinitely; even if you’re starting late (or seeing this post several weeks or months after the fact), I’d love to hear your thoughts on the episodes and I see every comment that gets posted, so it won’t be overlooked. Additionally, I did a few tweaks on the back end of the site which should make it a little easier to post comments and subscribe to comment threads, so you can get notified when someone replies. There’s also a way you can subscribe to the site itself and be notified when new posts go up; there’s a spot to enter your email on the right sidebar (just below the calendar). I’ve tested it out and it works.

This week we’ll be covering episodes 3 and 4 of the series. I felt that the two episodes last week worked out to be a pretty good pair, with a sort of a shared theme being “why do people kill others?” This week, if I’m remembering properly from my earlier viewing, there’s also a kind of similarity between the two episodes, but I’ll save that for the discussion.

Previous Weekly Discussions:

Week 1 – Episodes 1 and 2

Episode 3 – Bothersome Country – Crunchyroll – Hulu – Funimation

Content Warning: Use of military weaponry.

Kino encounters a setback while traveling which doesn’t present an immediate solution, so decides to sleep on it until they come up with some way to address it. While Kino is napping, Hermes feels the ground begin to rumble. They first suspect an earthquake, but the source of the shaking turns out to be something much less natural – it’s a huge country on wheels, traveling across the land on an unstoppable, never-ending journey.

Kino hails the country and they seem very welcoming. They’re met at ground level by a diplomat, who then accompanies them above and gives them a tour. The country is very clean and modern, and runs on caterpillar tracks that are almost always in motion (if they stop for too long, the giant generator that powers the country will overheat and explode). There are cameras hovering outside the metal borders that send back images of what’s going on outside. The top floor is a beautiful park – the one place where the sun shines and people can enjoy the natural light. The children about to graduate from primary school are even painting a striking mural on the outside wall of the country, depicting the most memorable sight they witnessed during their days in school. Kino is impressed by the place’s modernity and the many creature comforts (like clean sheets and hot water – very important to a traveler who’s used to drinking from dirty streams and rarely getting to bathe). The place seems like a dream.

It’s a few days into Kino’s stay when the host country encounters an obstacle – another country whose border wall spans the area between two mountains. This country is understandably unhappy about potentially having their assets (infrastructure and agricultural fields) crushed beneath the wheels of a giant vehicle, and once negotiations go sour (almost immediately), they open fire. While the missiles don’t have much of an effect on the strong outer walls of the moving country, they do begin to mark up the children’s mural. Kino volunteers to take out the missile tracking system in order to prevent any further damage, and is hailed as a hero when their shots deftly hit their targets (with no loss of human life in the process). After the ordeal is over, Kino continues traveling, having used their time aboard the moving country to avoid their earlier setback.

  

Episode 4 – Ship Country – Crunchyroll – Hulu – Funimation

Content Warning: non-lethal gun violence and a stabbing injury.

Shizu and Riku continue to look for a permanent place to settle. At the shore, they encounter a giant ship whose population is there to trade for supplies. This famous “ship country” is as mysterious as it is huge, and this piques Shizu’s interest. He and Riku board the ship to both gain passage to the Western continent and to see what, if anything, its cloaked figures are hiding.

Once aboard, Shizu is given a choice by the country’s leaders: either join them and serve as an overseer to the workers living in the ship’s belly, or join those workers in their labor and living conditions. Shizu chooses the latter. The people living in the ship’s internals seem perfectly kind and welcoming to the traveler in their midst. They provide Shizu with a guide, a very quiet girl named Tifana or “Ti” for short. Ti doesn’t say much, but she does show Shizu around the ship, including some abandoned areas in disrepair. Shizu becomes concerned because there are so many seemly essential areas of the ship that are falling apart, flooded, or otherwise inaccessible and it’s soon clear that the country won’t be afloat for much longer unless something is done to address the maintenance situation. The working population (who as Shizu begins to notice, don’t actually seem to be doing much or have anything to do in the first place) seems unconcerned, and claims that the overseers will take care of them. Shizu decides to discuss the issue directly with the leadership.

The overseers are specifically uninterested in talking the matter over, and send one of their members to silence Shizu. That individual turns out to be Kino, who also boarded the ship some time ago and chose to aid the overseers when given the initial option. When Shizu explains the situation with the ship he then invites Kino to join him in his quest to get the overseers to see reason. When they arrive atop the leaders’ tower, however, the situation becomes even stranger. The overseers ask Shizu whether his concern over the populace indicates that he plans to become their king. When he answers somewhat in the affirmative, the overseers collapse into nothingness before their eyes. Shizu brings the ship ashore and sets the people free, but instead they become angry and return to the ship’s underbelly. They’ve never known life outside the ship, the land doesn’t have the comforting tremors that they’re used to, and who does Shizu think he is, anyway? As they’re leaving and the doors are closing, Ti remains. She was an outsider to begin with, abandoned by her parents and shunned by the other humans on the ship. The overseers, really a complex AI system, raised her. Now they’re abandoning her, just as she was abandoned by her blood family. It’s only after a tense few moments that Shizu invites Ti to join Riku and himself on their travels. Kino leaves, perhaps to meet them again someday after Shizu finds a permanent settlement.

   

 

Discussion Thoughts and Questions (feel free to share additional ones in the comments!)

I mentioned in the opening of the post that I felt that these episodes, much like last week’s episodes, had some similarities that made them a surprisingly good pair. Last week we talked a lot about the morals, ethics, and rules-lawyering related to how the act of killing is seen and portrayed in the different countries and stories depicted in episodes 1 and 2. This time the initial similarities between the two episodes is more visual and physical – they both involve countries that are constantly on the move and the unique issues and problems that occur as a result of this. As one would expect, though, both takes provide some unique insight into the types of consequences that occur as the result of such a massive conglomeration of parts and people being anything but stationary.

Episode 3 is interesting to me because of how conflicted I was by the end. The citizens and leadership of the moving country all seem very nonchalant about the inevitable destruction involved in their constant travels. The diplomat expresses some minor sadness about the huge tracks they leave in their wake (“Anyone who travels leaves their mark behind”), but since the consequence of their not moving is their inevitable destruction from their overheating generator, it appears that any other ethical dilemmas resulting from their continued movement are outweighed by their duty to survive. This is all well and good until they literally trample over another country’s agricultural fields to make their forward progress. The walled country is nominally given a choice – either get out of the way willingly, or by force – but is this really a choice? On the other hand, the walled country seems like it’s populated by grade-a jerks – it’s not because they start shooting off missiles at the moving country, because that to me seems like a typical, expected response. As we learn at the end of the episode, however, they tried to extort Kino when Kino attempted to pass into their country, by attempting to take one of Kino’s weapons as a “toll.” It sounds as though the wall they put in place was explicitly to facilitate the strong-arming of people attempting to pass through, so perhaps the world would be better off if that country had a hole bored through said wall.

  1. My first question is related to that line of thinking – what are your thoughts on the justification either side has to their position (moving forward to ensure the survival of their country and citizens, versus the right to build a wall and collect (perhaps unreasonable) tolls on others)? It’s stated in the episode that every country (much like every person) causes some degree of bother or inconvenience to others simply by existing. Do you think that this is enough justification for what transpires?
  2. Throughout the episode, the term 迷惑 (meiwaku – trouble, annoyance, bothersome) is used repeatedly. It’s a concept that’s culturally important to Japanese people – they don’t want to be a source of “meiwaku” to others. Do you think that this term and concept adequately indicates the degree to which each country is affected by one-another?
  3. It seems to me that there might be other solutions for the traveling country’s issue of their overheating generator; that its overheating could be addressed in some other way, if they decided to expend some resources studying it (they’re clearly technologically advanced enough to do so). How do you interpret the fact that they’ve chosen to let it be?
  4. I found myself interpreting this episode (as well as episode 4) in terms of things that countries do and have done in “real life.” While there hasn’t yet been a case where a country has physically driven over a neighboring country (that I know of), there are almost countless cases of countries having invaded others, imposing their will and leaving much more than footsteps behind. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Episode 4 was compelling to me not so much due to the makeup of its moving country, but more so for the consequences to its bottle civilization which after many generations eventually came to the surface. Like the moving country from episode 3, there are clearly some issues that could have been addressed at some earlier time that would have allowed the ship to remain functional and the populace to have a greater concept of the outside world and their potential opportunities to exist elsewhere than beneath the ship. The AI may have avoided simply becoming overseers and chosen instead to educate the children further on the ships functions, ensuring that generations to come could maintain the vehicle and prevent it from deteriorating. The AI could have explained the existence of the outside world and allowed more freedom. But of course, perhaps as an effect of the AI not being human itself, this didn’t happen and the two groups settled into an easy, though eventually self-destructive, relationship. Looking at how things ended up in the episode, it’s almost as if Shizu was a virus, disrupting the balance of the relationship and altering the makeup of the ship’s “body” going forward.

I don’t have as many structured questions related to this episode in particular (though I would love to hear people’s general thoughts about the episodes as well – please don’t feel obligated to stick to a “script” if you have any personal responses to share), but I did have a couple of thoughts:

  1. Much like in episode 3, I found myself relating this country’s situation to real-life ways in which countries haven’t done right by their own existences. Specifically, I was struck by the concept that the “broken parts” of the ship have been left in place to deteriorate rather than anyone taking the initiative to replacing them. I think this is a powerful concept that relates very closely to some of the things my country (USA) has approached some of its many social issues. What are your thoughts?
  2. More than once, a character (in at least one case it’s Riku, the very wise talking dog), refers to the ship country as “this country, or rather this ship…” I personally found it odd because it’s both a ship and a country, but do you find any particular significance in the fact that they corrected themselves in this way?
  3. Shizu unfortunately finds out that, while making a change he thought would be positive for the ship country’s people, he acted without knowing the entire truth of the matter. I find this to be a very telling realization especially since I feel this is something which occurs in relations between actual countries. It begs the question – while it is natural to want to correct injustices as we see them, what can or should be done (if anything), if the people being affected by injustice don’t see it as such?

I didn’t get much into Kino’s specific motivations this week, but I feel that there are at least some things that happen in episode 3 that might make it interesting to explore that a little further, so feel free to discuss that as well. This series continues to fascinate me, especially when doing these deep-dives. I hope everyone else is having a fulfilling watch-along so far, too!

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Special Features

Father of the Year – 2018

Not a great example of loving fatherhood.

This Mother’s Day, I rummaged through the anime I’d watched over the past year or so and chose an example of an anime mother who I thought was worth talking about. Parents in anime tend to exist in the background (if at all), so I thought it would be interesting to feature some of the few that make meaningful, impactful appearances in some of my favorite shows. It was difficult enough to find a mother character who had enough screen time and was actively involved in story activities, but for some reason I thought it would be easier to find an example of a great dad. Maybe it was because I had the idea in my head that most dads are men, and males tend to make up the bulk of anime protagonists, so therefore there should be more fatherly-type men from which to choose.

I was surprised, then, to discover that identifying a great father figure to feature was leaps and bounds more difficult than coming up with a mother figure. As a long-time anime fan I feel like I should have known better, but I think this is definitely a blind spot of mine. I began to realize that, while male characters abound in all sorts of anime, many of those male characters are children or teenagers (or they act like them and have the same level of responsibility). Having children, being gainfully employed, and doing all the other things that are required of parenting are beyond the scope of what many anime protagonists are asked to do (saving the world, being the butt of the joke, or even just surviving high school are lofty enough goals for most characters). In addition to that, if parents exist at all within an anime series in many cases the father of the family is mostly absent, working late or at least trying to enjoy a beer and the newspaper rather than get overly-involved. There are of course counter-examples – shows like Poco’s Udon World, Sweetness and Lightning, and Bunny Drop all feature dads or father-like figures as primary caretakers for young children – but those are exceptions rather than rules. While it seemed like this type of story might become more of a trend, they’ve tapered-off lately. Which is inconvenient, because that would have made for an easy post!

I started trying to think outside the box a little bit, towards male mentors in anime. Mentorship, especially in sports or competition anime, is an important role that I think fulfills the spirit of what I’m trying to feature. I imagine there’s an easy answer to this in an anime series or movie from the past year, but I suspect it may be from a series that I don’t watch. My understanding from friends of mine is that My Hero Academia has cultivated this sort of relationship between Deku and All-Might, as Deku’s actual father is not in the picture. Maybe I’ll give that series a watch this year and have something to write about for next year. As for the anime that I have watched (and there’s been quite a bit), it was not working out as a good source. All of the characters who came to mind had as part of their character some sort of problematic aspect to their personality or actions, which in my mind removed them from consideration as one of the best father figures.

One character that fits into this kind of problematic pseudo-parental role is Elias Ainsworth from The Ancient Magus’ Bride. Elias, an ageless magical entity, becomes guardian to Chise, a teenage girl with magical powers. He helps to instruct her in ways to hone her abilities and provides an environment that’s relatively safe and constant (at least more so than she had previously). It’s living with Elias that Chise is introduced to her true potential. This would seemingly be a great starting point for an examination of important male mentors, if not for the fact that the relationship between Elias and Chise is much more complicated than that of a parent and child. Elias technically has ownership of Chise, and it’s made clear that she’s something of an experiment for him. They’re also painted as potential lovers, though as two emotionally incomplete souls even that becomes difficult to fathom within the snap shot that the anime provides. There are unequal power dynamics at work that, as much as I truly enjoy the series, I have a difficult time overlooking. It’s intriguing and dangerous, but not so appropriate if you’re looking for something paternal.

Reigen flies off to go be an adult.

A character who gets a bit closer to my mental ideal is Reigen Arataka from Mob Psycho 100 (technically okay for me to reference since there was an OVA episode focused on his antics that was released earlier this year!). Reigen is a scoundrel, a liar, and a phony, with only a bag of table salt and some middling charisma on hand to dupe people into thinking he can exorcise malevolent spirits. At first glance it seems like he only associates with Mob, his young “protege,” for the potential boost in business – Mob is the only one of the two with legitimate telekinetic skills, and Reigen can at least recognize that having Mob around is advantageous to his bottom line.

Despite his many faults, though, Reigen has something that not many anime characters have and he wields it like a weapon – his superior maturity. His skepticism towards the theatrical and cliche opponents that appear before himself, Mob, and their companions serves as the backbone to a series that isn’t so much about cool dudes with powers fighting each-other as it is about self-reflection and the duty of gifted people to recognize the worth and talents of others. One of my favorite “Reigen” scenes occurs in flashback near the end of the series, where young Mob first visits Reigen’s office in search of some help with handling his abilities. Reigen imparts a piece of good advice – having special powers doesn’t make one any less human, nor does it put one on a pedestal above others. Rather than domination, the goal of any person should simply be to achieve a state of kindness. For a series known for its killer animation and sometimes ridiculous situations, that idea cuts surprisingly deep. My only real qualm with Reigen-as-dad is the fact that he’s essentially a con artist who not-so-secretly takes advantage of his young protege’s talents, and that still doesn’t sit well with me even though I love the character and the series.

Kondo share some philosophy using a well-loved bookmark.

One of the last bits of middling inspiration I had was that Masami Kondo, one of the two protagonists from the series After the Rain, might be an interesting subject to try to tackle, since he’s actually a father (*gasp*) and also ultimately serves a mentorship role. Kondo-san is the middle-aged manager at a family restaurant; he’s divorced with a young son. As we enter the story, one of his employees, a high school girl named Akira Tachibana, has concluded that she has romantic feelings towards him and refuses to take no for an answer. There’s a lot of the typical mental denseness that comes with a story like this since it takes a while for Kondo to realize that Tachibana is nursing these difficult and inconvenient feelings. When it finally dawns on him he just becomes more awkward about it and manages to keep from addressing the situation directly. There are also some tense moments where it seems as if the pursuit of this relationship at face value might take place. It’s only after a certain point in the story (a little late for my tastes, honestly) that both Kondo and Tachibana realize that each has some emotional emptiness in their life (Kondo gave up writing fiction, and Tachibana was a track star until a major injury sidelined her), and it’s misguided emotions related to that emptiness that are fueling thoughts about their specific relationship to one-another.

Kondo, despite how good-natured his character is, probably would never have been my first choice as a focal subject for this post, because the series itself has a troublesome premise (or at the very least plays a bit of bait-and-switch) and while watching it I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop (and crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t). Once I finished watching it and confirmed that it wasn’t actually aiming to feature a problematic romance, I did take the opportunity to look back at the series in retrospect and was able to appreciate the characters a bit more. While Kondo is initially portrayed as kind of a hapless goof, the kind of dad who shows up in uninspired TV commercials or old sitcoms, he proves himself to have some self-awareness, as well as some canny insight into his life and a decent grasp of what Tachibana is experiencing. While I can certainly look back on my own life and remember what it was like to experience some of the high school indecisiveness and misguided longing Tachibana is suffering, I can understand firsthand Kondo’s feelings towards having given up doing things that he loved for the sake of existing in the “real world.” He’s someone who shares his life lessons willingly, and chooses kindness rather than bluntness. There is something very comforting and inspiriting about that. It’s that lack of straightforwardness which is partly what makes me hesitate, however; I would have loved for Kondo to give Tachibana a proper “no” earlier in the series, to make it clear that there could never be a romantic relationship between them, rather than finding multiple ways to skirt by and avoid her awkward attempts at affection. There’s something about that which keeps me from fully forgiving the character, unfortunately.

Mike, Kana, and Yaichi.

After spending so much time scouring my mental anime catalog and ultimately feeling underwhelmed by my choices, I was honestly considering ditching this post entirely. Disappointing, but sometimes you just have to move on in life. It was then that my experiences reading manga arrived to save the day. Earlier this year, I finally got around to reading the first volume of My Brother’s Husband, which deals with the subject of homosexuality and prejudice in Japan. The protagonist is a man named Yaichi, a fairly average guy who’s divorced and works from home so that he can parent his young daughter, Kana. One day a very large Westerner arrives at the front door. The man’s name is Mike, and he’s the widower of Yaichi’s estranged gay twin brother. Yaichi gets to know Mike, and through doing so, starts to learn more about the brother who became a stranger to him.

The manga itself is excellent and I would recommend it to almost anyone, especially those who are interested in supporting LGBTQ+ stories and storytellers (the author is one of the more famous members of the LGBTQ+ community in Japan), or people who just enjoy slice-of-life stories. It does a good job of explaining and demonstrating some of the specific ways in which homophobia presents itself differently between Japan and the West, and it also demonstrates the beginnings of character growth that are the result of challenging one’s assumptions. The most important point as far as this post is concerned, is that I got the impression while reading this manga that Yaichi’s story, his reaction to learning about Mike and coming to terms with who his brother was, would have turned out quite differently if Yaichi weren’t also a father.

As it usually is with these types of stories, the rambunctious child character is the one who steals many of the scenes and becomes the heart of the story even though they’re not the main character. Kana is immediately drawn to Mike, has no qualms about asking him loads of very straightforward questions about his life (including things about what it means to be a gay person), and is almost immediately accepting of any answer she receives. I’ve heard many people in real life, those who are nursing some sort of phobia towards people with various sexual identities, gender identities, or whatever other arbitrary marker they’re angry about at the moment, get extremely bent out of shape about how normalizing various types of romantic relationships will only confuse children and cause them to, I don’t know, also not conform to society’s arbitrary definition of what’s “normal.” In my experience, however, it’s the children with minds still open and malleable, who have very little trouble parsing a straightforward answer about what being “gay” or “transgender” means. Kana doesn’t know not to be curious or ask questions. She’s not so concerned with what being gay means in the greater context of society. She’s simply excited to know a foreigner who knows things about distant lands (like Canada) and who’s willing to spend time with her and show her love.

Though Yaichi is initially put-off by Mike’s looming presence, especially since he’s a reminder of a relationship in Yaichi’s life that deteriorated due in part to his own prejudices and can now never really be repaired, watching Kana take to Mike so readily gives Yaichi a chance to question his own thoughts and motivations. it gives him the opportunity to realize that it’s not necessarily natural or automatic to look at someone like Mike and be concerned about what his existence means to the balance of society, or to think that Mike should just “get over it” and integrate like everyone else. Because of his love for Kana and due also to Kana’s boundless enthusiasm and open-armed acceptance, Yaichi starts down the road of becoming a better person.

Yaichi’s definitely not a perfect person, but the manga is as much about his attempts to learn and be a better person as it is about anything else, and watching him learn from Mike and Kana demonstrates the real potential and power that a father’s love can have. Ultimately, I think that’s a good thing to try to celebrate.

I’d be interested to hear whether this past year left you feeling impressed by any anime (or manga) dads. Please let me know in the comments!

Categories
Book Club Special Features

Anime Book Club: Kino’s Journey~The Beautiful World~ Week #1

Hi everyone! Anime Book Club is back in session with the first two episodes of Kino’s Journey. Just to let everyone know the drill, what I’ll do here is summarize the episodes in question, and then post a few thoughts and some potential discussion points. Feel free to post your own thoughts, whether related to the questions or not, in the comments on the post. I usually try to have these posts up around noon or 1pm CST each Sunday afternoon. Feel free to post any time during the week and share the posts around in case anyone you know might be interested in getting in on the discussion! As the weeks go on, I’ll post links to previous weeks so they can be referenced easily.

Just a few notes: I know the WordPress comments system is not the most convenient to use. While I don’t really have the time to make changes to that currently, I’ll be looking at it for the future. For now, just know that if you’re a first time commenter I’ll have to approve your comment before it shows up, but once you have an approved comment any subsequent ones should show up without being approved after that. I had this in place because I used to get a lot of spam and rude/abusive comments; if there’s an uptick in that again I might have to move back to heavier moderation. Also, and this is related to the show itself, I’m going to adopt a gender-neutral approach to referencing Kino’s character when writing about them. The Crunchyroll subs are not good about this (to my memory), but it seems to me that it’s in the spirit of the story itself to refer to Kino in this way. I don’t plan to play gender police in the comments but I’d ask that you at least consider this point as I’ve seen it made very well across the anime blog-o-sphere and it’s more inclusive.

With all that said, let’s get started!

Episode 1 – A Country Where People Can Kill Others – Crunchyroll – Hulu – Funimation

Content Warning: Gun and crossbow violence and related blood.

While traveling to their next destination, Kino and Hermes (the talking motorcycle or “motorrad”) encounter another traveler resting along a riverside. The man is on his way to a nearby country and is very excited to make his way there because he has heard that killing other people is legal. Having come from a country where even small infractions are heavily punished for the good of the public order, he is looking forward to the freedom of being able to kill those who upset him. When asked, Kino declines a request to help the man bring his supplies into town, and goes on their way.

Expecting death and destruction, Kino is surprised to find that the country where people can kill others is very orderly, with pleasant people who welcome travelers to stay in their midst. The countryside is lush and beautiful, and the country specializes in a particularly ridiculous multi-layered crepe cake that seems counter intuitive to the place’s hardcore reputation. This doesn’t seem to Kino or Hermes like the type of place where people would want to kill others, let alone somewhere where they’d have the opportunity to do so. But there is an unsettling undercurrent to many of Kino’s interactions with the citizenry – each person seems to have a weapon (whether a gun or other item) at the ready, and those items are, as they all state, for killing people. None of the citizens seem particularly hesitant about that fact, either. A town elder even puts an offer of citizenship on the table for Kino, since Kino seems like someone who would be able to kill others.

The town’s specific nature is revealed when the man Kino met earlier arrives and claims he was deeply insulted when Kino refused to help carry his supplies. He’s now a citizen, and immediately takes that to its logical conclusion by threatening to kill Kino over this matter. It’s then that the citizenry, brandishing their various tools of death, fully articulate the nuances of their local laws. While murder isn’t prohibited by law, that doesn’t mean that it is allowed, and those who attempt to murder others will then have their own lives taken. The man is taken out and Kino goes on their way. Outside of town, another man asks about the details of the country where people can kill others, and Kino gets the impression that he’ll be a perfect fit there.

  

Episode 2 – Colosseum – Crunchyroll – Hulu – Funimation

Content warning: Gunshot-related death, seen from behind a barrier.

Kino arrives at the gates of a country that’s been described as beautiful and clean, but soon realizes that things have changed greatly. All travelers who enter the country become entrants into a tournament at the country’s colosseum. The winner becomes a citizen and can amend the country’s laws; losers may only leave with their lives, depending on the mercy of their opponents. This rubs Kino the wrong way but they decide to stay and participate in the tournament, which is set to begin very soon. As Kino travels to the holding area, its clear that the country has been in a steady decline, with garbage strewn across its vacant streets, and crumbling infrastructure all over.

Kino proves their gun prowess early on, readily defeating their opponents without killing them. Soon Kino reaches the finals and faces off against a man named Shizu, someone who proves himself to be very skilled with a sword. Throughout their time in this country, Kino learned more about how it reached this particular state – as it turns out, the current king killed his father, a good but strict king, and allowed the country to fall into hedonism and violence. Kino gets the impression that Shizu has some specific investment in winning the tournament and accomplishing some change, though Kino also has a specific reason to be there. It’s when Kino declines to yield and reveals a hidden weapon that the two combatants learn that their goal is the same. Kino fires a final shot, which “misses” and kills the king. As the winner, Kino proclaims as their new law that all the citizens will fight to the death, and the one remaining will become the new king. Kino then leaves the country to its own devices.

On their way out of town, Kino and Shizu have a final meeting. Shizu was the exiled prince of that country, and wanted revenge on his father. Kino was also there seeking revenge. It just so happened that their goals resulted in the same outcome.

   

 

Discussion Thoughts and Questions (Feel free to share additional ones in the comments!)

In the opening to episode 1, Kino describes the feeling they get when they are feeling most down – it’s it’s during those bleak times that the world reveals its beauty to them. This becomes a theme throughout the series (hence its subtitle “The Beautiful World”), which I think is good to keep in mind just in general. I find this to be a comforting thought nowadays when there are so many bad things happening in the USA – though there are people committing atrocious acts, there are people who continue to work to reveal the truth

  1. In episode 1, there seems to be some linguistic ambiguity regarding exactly what the law allows in terms of killing others. Despite the fact that I’ve watched the episode multiple times, it doesn’t exactly sit well with me when Regel states that killing people isn’t prohibited, but it also isn’t allowed. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
  2. When the violent man describes the country he left, he talks about its strictly-enforced rules and extreme public order. At the end of the episode, the peaceful man describes having left a country where he had to kill in order to survive. It seems to me that the author is making a statement about the efficacy of laws and how having more laws and harsher penalties in place does not necessarily result in people having a positive mindset. I was wondering what others’ opinions were on this point.
  3. Regel seems like an interesting character whose existence is still ambiguous by the end of the episode. The violent man describes him as a terrorist who killed many people, escaped prison, and went into hiding in this country. In person, he seems much like the other citizens – living a quiet life, but being able to kill when required. This may be a little bit of a leading question, but what does this say about our perception of/empathy toward others’ acts?

I’ve always thought the “Colosseum” story arc was sort of interesting, as it reveals something different about Kino. Going into the series I think it’s common to think of Kino as more of an observer – we get a perception of every country through Kino’s eyes, and Kino generally seems to take more of a hands-off approach to things that are going on there, or at least doesn’t offer any direct criticism against some of the more disagreeable aspects. The people of each country reveal themselves to be good, bad, or (more often than not) much more complicated than the simple conceits of their local ordinances might imply. This episode reveals Kino to have feelings and actual skin in the game. They’re angry about how the woman and her husband on the cart were treated in a country that they were so looking forward to visiting, among other things that we can speculate about.

One thing I also like about this episode is how Kino’s thoughts in the opening carry throughout the story. Kino states that “every now and then you should use your abilities to the fullest. If you don’t, your skills become rusty.” Obviously this becomes very true and Kino’s firearm skills (as well as Kino’s diplomacy and mercy skills) get a workout. It’s been long enough since I watched it first that I don’t recall whether or not each episode starts off with such a lesson, but I find it interesting that both so far have begun with a particular thought or lesson.

  1. Kino appears especially angry when they’re stopped by the guards at the gate of the country and given a breakdown of the rules. I think there’s some ambiguity as to what specifically this anger stems from (that the country was not as advertised, that the rules are unfair to spring on travelers/unfair in general, that Kino was already aware of the false advertisement and has some other reason to be angry about them, etc.). What’s your opinion on this?
  2. In the final moments of the episode, Kino states that “revenge is ludicrous,” and Shizu agrees. Yet both of them participated in the Colosseum tournament for reasons of revenge. What do you think about this obvious contradiction?
  3. While there isn’t much detail regarding this part of the story until the end, Kino’s two encounters with the woman on the horse-drawn cart (as well as her husband), is interesting to think about. During their second encounter, after the woman’s husband has been killed in the tournament, the woman tells Kino “you should definitely stop by that country.” How do you interpret this statement, considering what the woman has experienced prior to it?

I hope everyone enjoyed these first two episodes. I think they’re a great starting point for our discussion and a good lead-off into what’s a very interesting anime series. Again, feel free to link this post around to people who might be interested in participating, and happy viewing!

 

Categories
30 Day Anime Challenge Special Features

30 Day Anime Challenge #3 – My Favorite Male Character

Now that I’m back from my vacation (and through a tough and busy work week), it’s time to continue where I left off with this thought-provoking blogging challenge! Just a note: I might be over-cautious, but I believe some of my statements might give the impression that I just don’t like male characters, which is wrong. I do, however, appreciate certain character traits more than others, which is the point I’m trying to get across.

Takashi Natsume and Madara-sama.

Picking a favorite male anime character is almost as difficult as picking a favorite anime series, but maybe not for the reasons you might be thinking. Despite believing that even anime aimed at kids and teenagers can and does have appeal to fans who are older, I realized long ago that I’ve aged-out of being able to directly relate to the experiences of most anime characters, especially the typical teenage boys who seem to comprise the majority of anime protagonists. It’s certainly not a dig against teenage boys in general, but I can tell you that I’ve seen more than enough artful musings on male adolescence (or raunchy depictions thereof) to the point that the typical shounen character has kind of lost my interest. That already leaves me with a drastically reduced field of characters from which to choose. Add to that the fact that anime character behavior tends to be very archetypical in the first place, and you have an identity conundrum on your hands.

I’ve mentioned the term “toxic masculinity” before on this website. A rough definition of the term is the tendency in our society to encourage boys and men to behave in a very limited way which fits into a misguided masculine ideal, which then has harmful downstream effects to the aforementioned boys and men, as well as to girls, women, and others with whom they associate. Some examples of this issue are the idea that boys and men aren’t supposed to demonstrate certain behaviors or emotions, especially those that are more associated with femininity – crying a lot (or at all), being physically close with one-another – or the idea that boys and men can’t enjoy certain activities that are seen as “weak” or feminine – cooking, doing housework, taking care of children… making this list is just reminding me how screwed-up it is to assign gender to any activities, ugh. We commonly as a society value the expression of aggressive behavior in men and hold these as examples of how to accomplish things in our world – take charge, be a “boss,” get that raise, make decisions, battle it out (physically or otherwise) with people “competing” for resources, “protect” and dominate women, be a “hero.” These are the stereotypes that tend to make it into our mass media. There are some men (and women!) who naturally embody these ideals, and someone who can “take charge” is not necessarily doing anything wrong by stepping into a leadership role. But to many men and women, idealized gender roles can be a prison for their true selves which more than likely exist somewhere else on the spectrum of various human behaviors.

The issue that anime, as well as every other type of popular media, has is that it’s a product of the culture from which it arises (and I’m not trying to say this is just a Japanese cultural problem – it’s everywhere). Human culture has some pretty strong ideas about the boxes into which men and women should fit, and while there’s consistent progress in more egalitarian directions to various degrees, we still have issues with glorifying certain gender expressions, especially some of those toxic and destructive ones. Just look at how many anime are focused around dudes beating the crap out of their opponents, winning tournaments, and dominating one-another. Sometimes there are also women in these shows, but often their choice is to either play support staff, be sexy/available, or participate by adopting the overblown toxic masculinity of their male counterparts. This isn’t universal, but a lot of times when you mention “anime” to someone, this is the type of material that comes to mind. The iconic “sex and violence” descriptor that has haunted anime since they heyday of violent OVAs in the West is enduring in the public consciousness.

I’ve been heartened, though, by a recent trend more towards male anime protagonists who have helped to embody a softer, gentler side of masculinity. We re-watched the relatively-recent shoujo fantasy series Snow White With the Red Hair in my local anime club, and while I had watched it before it was this time around that gave me some more concrete thoughts on why I liked it so much more than many shoujo romances I had seen in the past. I was heartened by the portrayal of Prince Zen, the primary romantic interest and male lead. He’s certainly a typical hero on paper – a wealthy, attractive prince who excels in swordplay and smarts, and helps lead his country and make big decisions. What I found very fascinating about Zen, though, is that he’s also a character who puts a high value on things like friendship, kindness, and personal freedom. He wants to help others excel and provides avenues for them to do so, even if typical class barriers would normally preclude these people from . He’s gentle and kind. And, perhaps more importantly, he seeks consent on more than one occasion when he wants to kiss Shirayuki, the main character. Sure, he’s not perfect; Zen tends to be rash and misinterpret situations, which gets him into trouble more than once throughout the series. But compared to many male anime characters he’s definitely an example of a type I’d like to see featured more widely.

I tend to be a fan of male characters who are what I’d describe as “dad” characters – more mature, good-natured, nurturing and kind to others. The type of characters that remind me of my husband and some of the other male acquaintances in my life. Makoto Tachibana from Free! or Asahi Azumane from Haikyu!! are good examples of what I’m talking about.  Sora Kashiwagi from How to Keep a Mummy, who takes on a pseudo-parental role with the supernatural creatures who surround him and also helps his friends learn to love magical beasts is another great example of what I’m attempting to describe. They’re the type of characters who I would feel pretty okay with putting in the same ballpark as Fred Rogers and all share a kind of paternal quality which gives me a really warm, positive feeling towards the series they inhabit, even if some of those series are otherwise based around hot-blooded competition.

When it comes to my favorite male anime character, though, I have to say that my choice is slightly more complicated than the person just being sweet or “dad-like.” I think one of the best things that anime and other types of storytelling can do is to provide insight into the lives of people who are different from us. Even better, they can also often provide ways to understand our inner selves better and work through our feelings. I think my pick for this topic manages to embody those ideas quite well.

Takashi releases an entity’s name.

It was nearly ten years ago when I watched the first season of Natsume’s Book of Friends, the story of a teenage boy, Takashi Natsume, who is able to see spirits. While it’s easy to see why this could be considered a talent, for Takashi his ability has resulted in nothing but strife. Many of the spirits seem malevolent because Takashi is the grandson of Reiko, a person who is said to have tricked various spirits into serving her and then died young without releasing them from their service. In the opening episode of the series, we join Takashi as he’s being chased once again by a spirit who mistakes him for Reiko (spirits are very long-lived and don’t have many interactions with humans – humans from the same bloodline seem very similar to them). The sequence is very stressful and we feel Takashi’s terror. It isn’t until the second half, after Takashi learns how to return its name back to the spirit, that the series starts to reveal its true colors. As he breathes his life force into the appropriate page of the Book of Friends, there’s a flashback to the spirit’s interactions with Reiko, as well as its profound loneliness when Reiko never returns. Here a connection is made, and just as Takashi does, we gain empathy toward the creature and its fruitless search for its lost master.

I love the series itself for these moments, and the first episode already had me in tears. But it’s really Takashi’s personal story that makes me feel emotionally-attached to this anime. Takashi’s special talent caused him to be ostracized from the various family members who took him in following the deaths of his parents. He was housed grudgingly by most of them, his strange outbursts and fearfulness towards things that weren’t visible to others causing him to be seen as a troublemaker or incurably strange. While his treatment during these years isn’t what most people would deem abusive, at best I feel that his relatives’ disinterest in providing him with a loving environment constitutes neglect; at worst, possibly emotional abuse. When he’s finally adopted by the Fujiwaras (technically very distant relatives related to his grandmother), it takes him a profoundly long amount of time to open up towards them. They are incredibly kind people, but Takashi’s low self-worth and past experiences make him wary about getting too attached. While Takashi’s quest to empty the Book of Friends constitutes a large narrative part of the series, it’s his emotional development as a person that makes the series interesting and special.

I also really like Takashi in a deeper kind of way related to some of my personal experiences that I’ll try to explain a bit. I read a book a while back when I was going through a tough time that discussed the behavior of abusive men and why they chose to act that way (the book is “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft, in case you’re interested in checking it out). In the book, the author dismantles the myth that unfortunately many people believe, which is that because some men are abused, they’re then doomed to repeat the cycle in their own relationships*. Not only does that remove accountability from the abuser, it serves to excuse their behavior somewhat and shift the blame to the victim, who in the eyes of some may not be doing enough to quell the abuser’s rage. The act of abuse, whether physical or emotional, is always a choice on the part of the abuser, and not the fault of the abused. It’s also true that, while some abusers use their personal history as an excuse, there are many other individuals with similar upbringings who use that upbringing as motivation to become someone different, who doesn’t reach towards abusive behavior to try to control the world around them. The big reason why I love Takashi so much is that, while the scars from his earlier childhood are obvious, he never uses them as an excuse to hurt. His experiences have instead helped him to build empathy with others, including the spirits whose situations he’s looking to fix, as well as with the grandmother who he only knows through brief flashbacks and very minimal evidence. There is something very comforting to me about the person that Takashi is, as well as who he chooses to become as he learns and grows throughout the series’ six seasons.

Takashi’s sense of empathy allows him to help spirits of many different types.

Takashi is not perfectly serene in his convictions and he’s certainly not shy to show his frustrations, especially with Nyanko-Sensei/Madara’s antics or the incomprehensible ways in which some of the local spirits act, but I think the fact that he yells and gets a little mad sometimes endears him to me even further. All of us get angry and frustrated sometimes, and to ignore that for the sake of peacefulness would be unrealistic. What makes Takashi a great character is that he doesn’t take his frustrations and weaponize them in ways that puts others down or causes pain. He instead gets motivated to solve the mystery of the moment, or learn more how he can help those around him.

If I had to pick one of the character’s faults to talk about, it would be the issue that Takashi has with trusting other people. Growing up, there was no assurance that the family members dealing with his presence at any particular moment would be the same ones taking care of him long term, so on the flip side Takashi doesn’t always start off giving a lot of consideration to the feelings of his current caretakers and friends. This manifests mostly when he goes off for hours dealing with spiritual situations without giving his family a heads-up that he’ll be away and they become worried. It’s hard work on his part, but as the series goes along he learns to have faith in his family, makes friends with people whose situations are more similar to his than he might have guessed, and starts to become a more considerate person. It’s possibly a little more than one would bargain for when checking out a cute series with quirky magical creatures, but it really speaks well to the heart and soul of the story. The focus on love, family, and repairing broken bonds definitely helps make Takashi’s character arc very compelling. I’m thankful that I was an anime fan at the right time to be able to watch his tale unfold.

So, who are your favorite male characters in anime? Do you agree with me, or are there other traits that really draw you into someone’s story? Let me know in the comments!

*The book references abusive men for the most part. I understand fully that not only men are abusers and the book acknowledges this fact, but the author’s experience working with abusers has revealed that the proportion of abusive men is much higher than that of abusive women, which is why I’ve kept the gender distinction here. Yes, I know, “Not All Men…” etc. Don’t come after me.

Categories
Book Club Special Features

Anime Book Club – Our Selection

Hi again, everyone. It’s time to announce our newest Anime Book Club selection. And the winner as of 12:35AM today is…

Kino’s Journey!

Unsurprisingly, this series got the most votes; two thirds of people who voted said they’d be interested in watching it, and that was far-and-away the most agreed-upon result. I think this will be a great watch, as well as a great starting point for some discussions.

Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World is a new animated take on the Kino’s Journey novel, which had a previous anime adaptation back in 2003 with a couple of additional OVA episodes a couple of years after that. I’ve watched both series, though I purposely avoided a re-watch of the original version before watching this one since I saw a lot of other critics comparing them and I wanted to judge this version on its own merits. I really enjoyed this one a lot. Perhaps after we’re done tackling this series, I might go back and re-watch the original at that point. In any case, I encourage you to go into this viewing process with an open and hungry mind!

I would like to start by watching 2 episodes a week. If that timing doesn’t work out well, we can watch more or less at a time. Each Sunday I’ll put up a discussion post with episode summaries, some of my own thoughts, and some potential discussion questions. Discussion can happen in the post comments section. I’ll monitor each post on an ongoing basis and make sure that people’s comments are approved (if you’ve commented here before, you should be good-to-go, but I have a basic filter going where I have to moderate new commenters so I can catch bad language, spam, or trolling from unfamiliar sources).

Because I’m going to be out-of-town this weekend, let’s start things on Sunday the 17th:

  • Episodes 1-2; Discussion starts on Sunday, June 17th
  • Episodes 3-4; Discussion starts on Sunday, June 24th
  • Episodes 5-6; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 1st
  • BREAK – I will be attending and presenting at CONvergence July  5-8, but since this is halfway through the series I may put up a short post where people can talk about their feelings so far.
  • Episodes 7-8; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 15th
  • Episodes 9-10; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 22nd
  • Episodes 11-12; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 29th
  • Final thoughts, etc. – Sunday, August 5th

Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World is available on Crunchyroll and Hulu. The dubbed version is available on Funimation if that is what you’d prefer (I’ll be watching the Japanese language version and my posts will be based on that).

Thanks again to everyone who voted, and happy watching!

Categories
30 Day Anime Challenge Special Features

30 Day Anime Challenge #2 – My Favorite Anime (So Far)

Once I feel comfortable around someone, I usually start letting things slip about my anime-related activities. In my day-to-day life I’m usually preparing to attend or coming back from an anime convention or some anime-related event, so it’s difficult to avoid revealing the nature of my activities if someone happens to ask what I’m doing over the weekend or if I have any vacations coming up. Once I reveal myself, If they’re familiar with anime at all often times they’ll ask me what my favorite anime is.

Do you know how difficult it is for me to answer that question?

I’ve been in the anime fandom a long time – more than twenty years, at least. In that time I’ve watched all or part of more anime than I can count (and my MAL and Kitsu profiles are not complete or up-to-date, so don’t go looking there for answers). If my watch-list were smaller, it might be possible to narrow it down to one clear favorite. As it stands, though, there are so many anime out there that I love for different reasons and my feelings about them change and re-form as I continue to journey through life. Below are just a few of my top selections, as well as some reasons why I fell in love with them. I’ve linked to their streaming location when available, and to their ANN Encyclopedia entry if they’re not.

Nichijou: My Ordinary Life – Anime comedies are really hit-or-miss with me. I tend to like a little bit of physical comedy mixed with some absurdity, and I find that the majority of anime comedies are either straight-up slapstick, extremely culture-specific, or just downright mean-spirited or fanservice-y to the point where I feel too bad about how the characters are treated to laugh at the gags. It seems like my “best fit” anime comedies are slice-of-life series that have some element of humor, or comedies whose humor are based on their strangeness or comic timing. I was a big fan of Azumanga Daioh way back in the day (it was one of the first digital fansubs I sought out when I got a decent internet connection, as well as one of the first anime boxed-sets I bought when it became available officially), and for a long time it felt like it was really the pinnacle of the anime comedy genre for me. It didn’t help that it was one of the first shows to feature a group of high school girls doing nothing in particular and thus spawned a ton of inferior copycats in the years following. Despite some elements that, in hindsight, were really problematic (the creepy male teacher, in particular), I still held onto very fond memories of the show.

Nichijou showed up in 2011, and it was only then that I felt like Azumanga had been supplanted in my heart as my favorite anime comedy. The show hits all of my buttons in the best possible way. It’s got moments that are incredibly absurd – an early favorite that people might be familiar with through memes or fandom osmosis is when Yuuko witnesses the school principal wrestling a wayward deer in the courtyard and then decides that no one would possibly believe what she just saw. At its core, though, it’s also a very weird story of different people learning to celebrate their own eccentricities and develop friendships with people whose personalities are often at odds with their own. There are probably some people out there who would advise me not to take a comedy anime so seriously, but the series causes me to feel much more than just the urge to laugh or the desire to get pumped-up over the great animation. It’s the human part of the show that really makes it stand out.

Mononoke – I fell in love with Mononoke the first time I laid eyes on it, though at the time I couldn’t have explained just why. The series came out right around when I was starting to get really serious about my anime fandom, and with its unique look and very Japanese aesthetic, it felt like a serious piece of art. I had one very bad experience trying to share that art with some friends at the time, though, and not having the words to respond to their criticisms, I kept my love to myself for a long time. It wasn’t until I was poking around YouTube several years later and found someone’s review of the series that I finally realized what it was about the show that touched me so deeply. The review was quite critical, identifying that all of the stories in the show seemed to hinge on the women in them suffering. It then dawned on me that the reviewer was sort-of half correct in their assessment, but I was interpreting things from a drastically different angle.

The premise of Mononoke is that the main character, the Medicine Seller, travels across Japan and uses his mysterious powers to exorcise malignant spiritual presences. He can only do so, however, after identifying the creature’s origins – origins which are never as straightforward as they may seem. Through investigation (and often also interrogation), the Medicine Seller gets people to reveal the circumstances that likely caused the mononoke to manifest. In all cases, the hauntings are the result of some injustice being committed against a woman, and often while the woman has been acting in some role that society has forced her to perform.

I was having a conversation with someone about the series recently, and we both agreed that “Bakeneko,” the original story arc which was actually a part of another anthology series called Ayakashi – Samurai Horror Tales is probably the “best” out of the series; it’s a classic sort of he-said-she-said story in which the man imagines that the woman he brought home came somewhat willingly, when in reality she was kidnapped by him, raped, and then starved herself in captivity, thus releasing her anger as a mononoke. Other story arcs deal with forced abortions in a brother, men fighting over the right to marry a woman because of her connection to a powerful family heirloom, and a sister who sacrifices herself in place of her brother (and the brother who goes on to act as though he is somehow virtuous). My favorite story arc, however, is called “Noppera-Bou” or “Faceless One,” in which a woman, who is accused of murdering her husband and his family, spends her entire life denying her own sense of self so that she can marry into a rich family for the sake of her gold-digging, status-hungry mother. In that case, the mononoke is revealed to be the woman herself, who in actuality has only “murdered” her own identity. I didn’t realize it at the time I first watched it, exactly, but that story in particular ended up being almost too relateable to my own life – it’s no wonder it made me break down in tears every time. I love the show for its ability to capture those feelings through beautiful and profound imagery. I hope maybe that reviewer will be able to take a second look sometime.

Kaiba – It’s not a secret that I love director Masaaki Yuasa’s work, and honestly I could have put anything he’s directed on this list. But if not for Kaiba, I’m not sure I would have been aware that he existed, so that’s why I chose to feature it here.

Kaiba is from the same general time period as Mononoke, a time when I personally was searching for general uniqueness in my anime entertainment. I’m more aware now that just because something looks different doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good or special, but to be honest it often means that some amount of care and planning was put into making it stand out and appear original and in many cases that can translate into how good or cohesive the series feels as a whole package. Kaiba is definitely visually-unique from its anime contemporaries. It has the look of an old Osamu Tezuka property, with its sort of cutesy, cartoonish character designs. One thing I’ll never forget is that in the ANN forum discussion thread for the series, one *very intelligent person* (*cough*) remarked that they didn’t believe the series should be classified as an anime, since it didn’t “look like an anime.” Okay. As is Yuasa’s way, the look of the characters was intentional on his part, mainly to avoid the audience developing preconceived notions about the characters. This was in part because the moé craze was coming into full effect at that time, and defining character types by their specific looks was starting to become a nuisance (nowadays I think we’ve just accepted it as a thing that exists and are okay with characters being developed in their own ways, but back then it was very annoying to many people). The other reason really has to do with the core of the story, which deals with whether or not the shape of one’s body defines the essence of one’s self.

The show takes place in some distant future where people store their memories and personalities on little storage chips that can be moved from body to body; as long as the chips are intact, that person could be “alive” indefinitely. The main character is someone who’s had his memories erased and is left with very few clues as to his identity. The first half of the series is episodic and helps to build the world and define the “rules” surrounding what people can and cannot do with their memory essence. It also reveals that, as one would expect, there’s a sharp class divide between people who can afford to switch bodies as they want, and people who can’t afford to store them in the first place and are priced out of immortality. The antagonist of the series belongs to a cult that shuns body-swapping all together, but who is hiding the shame of having transferred himself from his sickly childhood body to a more robust one, all at the cost of his mother’s physical existence. That’s a lot to take in, but in addition to all that there’s also a very compelling love story to pull the various threads together. I’m not certain I’d call this series Yuasa’s “best,” as it has some problems with pacing near the end and a lot of things are easily-missed. But it opened the door for me to experience his other projects and I am definitely a better anime fan for it.

Revolutionary Girl Utena – It honestly wouldn’t be a list of my favorite anime without including Revolutionary Girl Utena.

I’ve had an extremely lucky anime fandom life. I’ve loved anime for a long time, but a problem I had in my earlier years was getting access to watch more than a little of it. We didn’t have Cartoon Network in our cable package during the early Toonami days, so I missed out on a lot of what other anime fans had seen during my high school days. I also didn’t get into the VHS fansub scene until that was starting to go out of style. I did, however, start college in the early 2000’s, and in doing so happened to discover the existence of the University’s anime club. The first semester I started attending the club, they were watching Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’d shown up three or four weeks into the semester, though, so I had literally no idea what was going on in this weird, ritualistic pseudo-magical-girl rose-covered drug trip. Luckily my mind was blown in the most wonderful of ways. Even luckier, a friend in my Japanese class owned the first set of DVDs and loaned them to me so I could catch up in time for the next meeting. Over the course of the rest of the year, I soaked up the show in any way I could. I suffered along with the rest of the anime club through a set of VHS fansubs of the Black Rose Arc that buzzed every couple of seconds. I stomped my feet with everyone to the beat of “Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku.” And I gasped in shared shock at many of the revelations near the end of the series. Utena is profoundly unique in so many ways, and that first watch-through taught me that anime could be more than just fun and action-packed; it could also be art.

It wasn’t until later viewings that I began to realize just how much depth of meaning there was to the story, though. I’m not even talking about a lot of the visual symbolism throughout the series, though that too is worth the price of admission and will reveal to you a bit more insight into the show every time you watch it. What became clear to me, and what I (unfortunately?) related to much more on subsequent viewings, is how accurately the series portrays the situation of an assault and abuse survivor. I imagine that I’ll be talking a lot more about this show in particular as I plow through these daily topics, so I’ll refrain from going into much more detail than that. But for how much the show is lauded for its critical look at gender roles (as it should be), for me its story of a person leaving a life of sexual abuse is so resonant. There’s really nothing else like it in anime, as far as I have seen.

Den-noh Coil – I wanted to end this post with the series that I usually mention when someone presses me to pick just one anime series as my favorite. It’s not really the most artful series on this list, nor would I say it’s the “deepest.” It’s also got some pacing issues in its second half and an antagonist that I’ve never felt was developed very well. As a whole package, though, this series alone has managed to combine so many specific things that I love into one very wonderful, cohesive story, and so it’s always had a very special place in my heart despite its few flaws.

Den-noh Coil is still surprisingly timely, despite having come out more than ten years ago (and been in development for several years prior to that, from my understanding). In its near-future setting, the characters utilize special glasses that interface with an augmented-reality system. This system is used for many functional purposes, like sending emails or accessing the web, but is also used to interact with virtual pets and other items that don’t have any physical presence. The characters are mostly children whose lives are permeated by the activities they do within the virtual world. Much of the story revolves around the urban legends they have about supposed obsolete spaces and mythical objects that might exist there. There’s also the very haunting idea that bad things might happen when one’s virtual presence becomes de-synched with one’s physical body.

Besides the obvious comparison to the defunct “Google Glass” and the fact that augmented reality using smartphones is currently beginning to come into fashion, the show also sort of correctly speculates about the existence of self-navigating vehicle systems (in fact, a main plot point in the show is that one of these systems malfunctioned and there’s been a subsequent cover up because of the resulting accident), as well as the strong bonds that can be formed between human beings and non-physical entities. In this case those entities are cute virtual pets, one of the primary reasons why I think the series hit me, an animal lover, as deeply as it has. There’s a point in the series where one of the protagonists is left to mourn the “death” of her virtual pet, and her parent questions whether those feelings are real or worthwhile since the pet wasn’t “real” to begin with. I think my reaction to that speaks a lot to the time in which I came of age, because upon reaching that point in the series I realized that I’ve always had feelings for fictional characters (as in, I’ve related to their experiences and felt empathy for them), and those feelings are so incredibly real to me despite the fact that the characters are nothing more than people imagined in my mind from a book or viewed on a TV screen. I think it compliments how intense fandom culture has become that many people would tend to agree that those feelings are as valid as any others. Once I arrived there, that revelation moved me deeply and is a treasure that I continue to hold onto. Den-noh Coil is the rare series aimed at kids that actually seems to respect the fact that they have emotional and complicated internal lives. It’s something that I can recommend to most people without caveats, too. And, in a petty way, it’s a great series to have in my back pocket for responding to gatekeeping asshats – it’s a relatively obscure anime, so I can throw it out there and there’s a good chance they haven’t heard of it, and will then leave me alone!

There were so many other “runners-up” that I could have added to this list. Puella Magi Madoka Magica for its total reformulation of the magical girl genre. Princess Tutu for being a wonderful examination of fairy tales and a series that I came around to very late. From the New World for its harsh reflection on humanity’s ability to discriminate and hate, as well as its hopeful take on our ability to eventually learn the truth and try to do better. Natsume’s Book of Friends for its ability to demonstrate empathy and the bond between friends and family. There is so much wonderful anime out there that’s shaped my views as a person, that it’s literally impossible for me to pick just one above all others.

Does anyone else out there have this same issue, or do you have a clear favorite? Let me know in the comments, and I hope all of my praise might have gotten you interested in some of these great anime series!

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30 Day Anime Challenge Special Features

30 Day Anime Challenge #1 – My Very First Anime

Maker:L,Date:2017-9-10,Ver:5,Lens:Kan03,Act:Kan02,E-Y

Ever since stumbling into anime blogging many years ago, I’ve always been fascinated by writers who can keep up a regular posting schedule and not leave their blogs to languish for months on end. I tend to write when the mood strikes me, and sometimes I simply have trouble coming up with something useful to say. One tool that writers use to get their brain juices flowing are writing prompts; simple thoughts and challenges to get into a creative state of mind. Well, bloggers have plenty of prompt-lists too, and I’ve decided to try one! I’m not sure if I can keep to a one-a-day schedule (I’m already late a day, since I wanted to do this for the month of June…) but hopefully this will help keep my mind nimble and ready to write about all those other ideas that bounce in and out of my mind randomly.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, prompt #1 is “What is the very first anime you watched?” For me this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, because I grew up in a time when a lot of what we would call “anime” nowadays was repackaged for Western audiences and thoroughly scrubbed of anything that could identify it as Japanese. One of my favorite recent discoveries is that Inspector Gadget, which was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid, was animated by TMS in Japan and existed partly due to a proposed Lupin sequel series that had failed to materialize. Besides that, my past is sprinkled with half-memories of one-off TV broadcasts of movies like Galaxy Express 999 and some of the fairy tale collections that used to air on Nickelodeon, which I realized long after the fact were produced in Japan.

It wasn’t until I was in about third or fourth grade that I started to get a sense of what Japanese animation was and what it looked like due to, of all things, comments on my drawing style from some savvy friends who were somehow more in-the-know than I was (clearly my weeb instincts were developed even if I didn’t quite realize it yet). I was too young at the time to really participate in the anime fandom that I now realize did exist, at sci-fi conventions I couldn’t have attended as a solo kid. Also, the internet didn’t exist in anything close to the form it does now, so online fandom networking was completely out of the question. Strike three was that I didn’t live anywhere near the coasts where being exposed to foreign entertainment would have been much more likely as a matter of course. It wasn’t until I was in middle school in the mid-1990s that I can definitively say my knowledge of anime’s existence and my still-limited access to it allowed me to anticipate the US release of a series that is probably the “first anime” of many people my age – Sailor Moon. I have to give partial credit where it’s due – I’m pretty sure that TV Guide had a mention of the show in one of their articles, and I read that magazine every week since, as a geeky kid, TV was my life. Obviously once I actually watched the show, goofy English dub and edited episodes and all, it was love at first sight.

Sailor Moon appealed to me because it offered me something different and unique; it was a cartoon series made for girls that allowed its characters to have different personalities and interests in addition to their heroic exploits. This sometimes lead to personality conflicts (both comical and serious) but almost always demonstrated how individuals with differing sensibilities can still function as a team. Usagi, the protagonist (known as Serena in the original US release, yikes) was a complete disaster in many (most) life situations, but ultimately saved the world with her earnestness and pure heart. As someone who was kind of a disaster in adolescence, too, it was comforting to know, with examples, that even without performing very well in school or being the “perfect” friend I still had worth as a person. I also loved that the show’s various story arcs always contained romantic sub-plots in addition to the exciting monster-of-the-week action; in an age when the term “chick flick” was thrown around as a derogatory term and “strong female character” meant an emotionless male action hero painted over with a female body, it was empowering to see that experiencing and prioritizing love and relationships didn’t detract from the heroism of the characters. In fact, it often served as their motivation and source of strength. I feel very lucky to have been in the right place at the right time in my life for the show to affect me in the deep ways that it did. Judging by how many women my age seem to have similar feelings towards the show, I know it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon.

After being thunderstruck by Sailor Moon I became a devotee of The Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday morning anime programming block, where they showed some really varied (and at times shockingly violent and risque) stuff like Robot Carnival, Akira, Project A-ko (both the surprisingly entertaining first movie and the later, weirder ones), and Dominion Tank Police. Eventually I became friends with other people my age who were into anime, the internet caught up with fandom (and then began facilitating and supplementing it), and now I can’t even keep up with the amount of anime I would like to watch that’s easily-available. I now consider myself a life-long anime fan, or at least for as long as anime is still being produced. But it was my lucky chance meeting with Sailor Moon in the wee hours of each weekday morning that gave me an inkling of the wonderful things I could seek out from animation from Japan, and it’s the memory of that early fandom passion that’s kept me devoted for so long.

How about you? What was your first anime? Let me know in the comments if you have any special memories you’re willing to share!