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Anime Reviews Reviews Short Takes

Short Takes – Jingai-san no Yome

Married to a monster – and loving it!

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Read my First Impressions Here!

Review: Tomari is a typical teenage boy who finds himself in a very unique situation; he’s selected from among his peers to become the spouse of a giant fluffy creature called Kanenogi-san. It isn’t long before he realizes that his situation actually isn’t all that unique and that he’s one of several classmates who get to play house with a decidedly non-human partner. They all attempt to navigate married life with partners who are anything but typical.

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Personal

A Few Meager Words for a Hero I Never Met

It might seem a little weird for me to have much to say about Zac Bertschy; I’ve never met him, and our online interactions were limited to a few isolated tweets back-and-forth some years ago. But when I learned of his untimely passing yesterday, after the initial shock had began to dull I began to ponder all the ways in which his words and writing had influenced me over the years.

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Personal

Looking to the Past

For a long time I meticulously maintained a MAL page where I’d keep track of the obnoxious number of anime series I was watching at a time. Every season I’d watch anime I liked, anime I didn’t like (I was big on watching things ironically at the time; I’m sure I was completely insufferable), and older anime I’d heard about that I thought might fill in some of the many gaps in my viewing history. The nice thing about using the tracker was that it helped me stay on top of what I’d seen and what episodes I still needed to download and watch. And I have to say, doing things this way exposed me to a lot of anime series that I enjoyed and barely anyone else remembers, which is both very cool yet somewhat lonely at the same time.

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Previews Reviews

Spring 2020 Anime – What I’m Looking Forward (or Backward) To

Oof, it’s times like these where I feel like it’s a good choice to anticipate the good in life, rather than spend too much time being dwelling on the frustrating and terrible aspects of the present. Granted, there are extremely serious things going on in the world right now and sometimes being able to make the choice to set that aside is more of a privilege than we might recognize, but I’d like to at least give it a try. And what better way to do so than to talk about brand new seasonal anime? Honestly, my awareness of this new season has been less than optimal, since I’ve been dealing with a lot of real-life stuff. But there are tons of resources out there that have helped me get up to speed and have reignited my interests to the extent that they’re able to be reignited.

Yes, I know the season has already started. Like, really really started. But I still haven’t begun watching any new anime (because life has just been… so much), so technically as far as this site is concerned, this is still timely. And technicalities are how we manage to keep our heads above water (or manage our sanity).

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Opinion Personal

Charting a Course

How deep into the anime fandom would you say you’ve delved? If I really push it, I can trace my fandom back to somewhere in the mid 1990’s, when Sailor Moon and Akira were first popular in the US, and perhaps even earlier to when a friend of mine commented that my character doodles looked like “Japanese cartoons” – it turned out it was mimicking some of the designs from one of several anime that had been wiped of Japanese culture for the consumption of American kids on Nickelodeon. While I know that anime had a minor presence in the West even prior to that, the era of anime alongside Saturday morning cartoons really marked a big jump in its fandom cache. I don’t say all this to imply that I’m somehow “more” of an anime fan than any particular person, I just want to point out that I have the benefit of time and exposure to a lot of series that have since become much less available to newer fans.

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Special Features

The Best Anime to Take Your Mind off Things

Well, so I guess the title might be a bit deceiving. For a lot of people, anime is an aspect of their escapism, a way to forget the problems of the real world in favor of plunging headfirst into something funny and entertaining. For me, fiction is a way to help myself navigate very real feelings in a way that’s relatively safe. Still, with what’s going on out in the real world lately, sometimes I’m just in the mood for some goofy bullsh**t or some material that doesn’t mean to chip away at my fragile emotional state, and anime definitely has that covered too. Here are a few of my suggestions for shows that are just entertaining and don’t necessarily require anything additional from the viewer.

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Uncategorized

Strange Times Indeed

Hi readers, how have you been holding up? I hope everyone out there is able to stay healthy and that any quarantines, work-from-home measures, or shelter-in-place orders aren’t getting you down too much. In Minnesota, today marks the first day of a couple of weeks of enforced shelter-in-place, with leeway for necessary activities like going to the pharmacy or shopping for groceries. Restaurants with delivery or drive-through options are also operating. People are still allowed to “be in nature,” meaning we can walk outside and in local parks, which my husband and I have taken advantage of a few times already since we’re both now working from home. As much as I like being able to roll out of bed and log in to do my job, though, the social isolation and relative lack of bodily movement required of sitting at my kitchen table and tapping away at my laptop definitely has its downsides. Thank goodness for Nintendo and Animal Crossing, as I still get a chance to interact with my friends that way.

You’d think this would be a great time to catch up on some anime, and for many folks I think that this is the case. The anime club I attend has gone online-only for the time being (thank goodness for streaming apps!), so I’ve gotten a little bit through that venue. I was all ready to put together a schedule and indulge, but as you might have guessed from the lack of updates here, I ran into some (emotional) road blocks that made it difficult to want to do anything, much less consume anime and talk about it.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2020 First Impressions – Master List

Hi, all. I decided to do something a little bit different this time around. Because I’ve been combining several first impressions into each post, I thought it might be a good idea to post a master list of links to the locations of each specific series for individuals who are looking for a certain review. I’m also taking this opportunity to rank series by their first episodes in three categories – series I’m enthusiastic about, series that I might check out if I have time, and series I’m not interested in. I’ll also include some follow-up thoughts on each of those.

Just as a reminder, unless stated otherwise, these are based only on the first episodes I watched for the First Impressions reviews of the material. There are many cases where I may not have thought the first episode was that great, but might watch some more of the series anyway because something or another intrigued me about it. The various episodes are not otherwise ranked within the categories.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2020 First Impressions – Shorts: Room Camp, Natsunagu, and Breakers

Well, the outside world has been a bit of a dumpster fire lately, but at least there’s still anime to watch! In all seriousness, I’m not really someone who sees anime as “escapist” entertainment; for me, it’s something I actively engage with and not just so I can “turn my brain off” or feel good (though no hate to anyone who consumes their anime for those reasons). But sometimes things happen in real life that make you want to just step back for a little while and indulge in something that’s expected and predictable, and no matter what anime series I’m watching, the familiar cadence of the exaggerated Japanese language style and colorful characters are comfort food for me.

One thing to note about this post is that neither Breakers or Natsunagu are available on any official streaming platform in the US, so I went about obtaining them the “old-fashioned” way. If that bothers you, those reviews are the second and third ones in this post so they are easy to skip.

Categories
First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2020 First Impressions – ARP Backstage Pass, OBSOLETE, and A3! Season Spring & Summer

Ah, well here we are are the end of this season’s premieres (barring Netflix premieres… which I just can’t bring myself to break the Netflix late-cast embargo to review). It’s definitely been an interesting season, though I honestly could say the same for just about any anime season. After this I plan to post a Winter premiere wrap-up with links to all series first impressions (since they’re combined into various posts with one-another and aren’t as easily-searchable) as well as my own rankings based on those opening episodes.

I just found out about the anime OBSOLETE, and while it’s technically outside the purview of this particular season (it started airing in early December on YouTube) I decided to include it to help round out this post a little bit. Symmetry is pleasing to me (as I expect it is to a lot of people). I’ll also plan to include a post about some of the shorts airing this season, though in a couple of cases they’re not being officially streamed anywhere so I’ll have to improvise if possible. With that said, onto the post!