From the category archives:
I don’t usually reflect on my own history as an anime fan, but something occurred to me the other day. What is the significance of a gateway anime? What kind of impact does a person’s first experience with a medium have on their enjoyment and preferences of that medium? Most fans who choose to pursue anime seriously become more well-rounded over time, but I think that the early experiences are given less credit than they deserve.
{ 11 comments }
[arsenixc]
Fiction would be in a sad state if jargon did not exist. In this case, I’m not referring to the fan-made terminology used in reference to various bodies of fiction: I’m talking about the jargon used within fiction, the internal laws that most fantasy and sci-fi stories rely on.
lelangir’s recent post on the matter makes for an enlightening read, exploring the role of mechanics in a story’s narrative structure. There’s no doubt that the internal mechanics of fictional worlds can be more than just feigned depth – speculative fiction would have a hard time speculating if it couldn’t act independently of the laws of common sense. As lelangir notes, consistency is more important than plausibility: it’s foolish to expect realism from Lord of the Rings, but a story that is consistent with itself lends the structure and framework needed to build whatever needs to be built around it.
Having said that, there are more than a few pitfalls to the elaborate universes created by writers of fiction, and they extend far beyond the issue of plot holes. The creation of a universe is not only a challenge in terms of maintaining consistency, but it also requires enough context within the plot for the viewer to see the relationship between the mechanics and the story’s intention.
{ 9 comments }
What does it take to change the world?
A now-famous anime character by the name of Light Yagami once asked himself that question when he witnessed the horrors that humans are capable of. If you’ll allow me to take things out of context and talk about a story I haven’t read in 3 years, you’ll see where I’m going with this.
He was just a kid, ultimately. A genius, maybe, but still only human. But even so, did he stop? Did he hold back? He dared to do something that few of us could ever do – and he paid the ultimate price because of it.
Was he a hero? I’m not quite sure. An anti-hero, maybe; or at least that’s the term we use for people like him. But practically speaking, every reader finds a different answer to that question. Some would sympathize with him, understanding his hatred for the scum of society; others would despise him for his self-righteous attitude. Like Hakim and Hachi from Planetes, it would be unfair to paint one as right and the other as wrong.
…Are you tired of reading yet? Wondering why I’m talking about Death Note when I barely even remember the story? Maybe your ears will perk up when I mention the Otaku Elimination Game.
{ 37 comments }
Ah, the good old favourites list. It’s a tradition as old as anime itself – perhaps older – but it hasn’t lost its significance over the years. Your Top 5 list is the first thing people will notice about you on MAL, aside from your profile picture and your total completions. It’s the first thing that comes up in conversation when you’re meeting up with your fellow otaku at a convention, and a good list might make the difference between a good first impression and an awful one.
However, contrary to popular belief, there is more to creating a Top 5 list than selecting your 5 favourite anime. In order for a list to be effective, you must consider several other factors, which include – but are not limited to – an anime’s critical reception, popular reception, and cultural significance.
Does that sound pointless to you? Are you silently thinking that a favourites list should be nothing more than a favourites list? Skepticism is understandable, but if you’re willing to bear with me for the next thousand words, we just might get to the bottom of this.
{ 30 comments }
I’m not an English major. I probably will be at some point in my life, and I have some sort of intrinsic attraction to the act of looking beneath the surface, but that’s a different point entirely. What I’m trying to say is, I’m by no means a scholar on this topic: and frankly, the use of the word “criticism” in the post title was likely enough to give more than a few of you false hope when you saw it on Anime Nano.
However, the title reflects exactly what this is: a non-critical look at the act of literary criticism, and the way we apply it in the anime blogosphere.
{ 18 comments }
Anime is serious business. We know it, we joke about it, and then we go back to knowing it anyhow. The amount of content in the blogosphere is absolutely tremendous considering how many writers we have, and in a medium such as blogging, it’s easy for the less-known to become lost in a sea of obscurity. After all, it took me months to shift away from DarkMirage and RIUVA, and I had known of Owen’s blog for ages before I actually thought to look through the archives since he was on temporary hiatus. And if I had the community itself to push me forward, then what about the readers that rely on blogrolls and AnimeNano to find new sites?
The funny thing about blogging is that a blog’s age often has very little to do with its quality. Confidence is often only found after the writer has had a bit of experience, but there’s nothing saying that an obscure blog is bad – as a matter of fact, it might be better than many of the bigger blogs out there. Therefore, I’ve decided to hop on the bandwagon and link to what I consider to be some of the community’s biggest stars that are more or less still in the shadows.
{ 19 comments }
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