Anime 2020 wraps up

Also here is the introductory post for this series.

https://mithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2020/01/anime-2020.html

Assault Lily Bouquet episode 11 was pretty intense.

I’m conflicted over whether or not I should end this series with this post or not.  Next week the last episode of ALB will be literally the only show left, and it might actually take two weeks the way this Simuldub has gone.  Maybe if I have enough to say about how this ends for it to be a post all its own I’ll include this tag on it.  But this post I think will be the end of this as a weekly occurrence on this blog.

I have decided not to continue Yashahime beyond those first 13 episodes.  I only put it On Hold because I may watch more later.  The show is a good show, it’s just not a Genre’s I’m into.

The Day I Became A God had a good ending.  I’ve decided to give this show a 9 on MAL.  But be warned it becomes a Tear Jerker.

Warlords of Sigrdrifa’s finale was better than I expected, I did not think all that Tsun would have such a big payoff, I might even be willing to call it a Eucatastrophe.  I’m also giving this show a 9.

2020 was a hectic year, but at least it provided some decent Anime.  I’m still gonna consider Railgun T the Anime of the year.  But if I had to pick a favorite among ones that aren’t sequels or remakes/reboots then I’m really unsure, there are still some I haven’t seen yet that I intend to.  Recency bias has me currently thinking one of these Fall shows I’ve spent the last two months finishing.  Also I still haven’t seen either Fate/ franchise film that came out in Japan that year.

In April I’ll be starting another weekly Anime Tag, in March I’m gonna try to write a number of Posts I’ve been putting off.  Meanwhile let’s hope 2021 is a much better year.

Yuri and Lesbian Vampires as we approach the end of Anime 2020

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear episode 5 is a lot more enjoyable when you try not to think about the ideological ramifications of it. I went and watched the first episode of Vlad Love. There isn’t really anything wrong with it, but as someone who got pretty burnt out on Vampires right before I went all in on Anime, this isn’t compelling or interesting enough. Vampires of course have a strong association with Lesbianism independent of Anime. What I am perhaps uniquely positioned to notice is how often Yuri Vampires kind of break with Yuri conventions. To the point where I kind of feel like some non Anime non Japanese Lesbian Vampire fiction actually has more Yuri appeal. Carmilla itself can work as a Yuri Anime pretty well if you made a direct Anime adaptation,( instead all adaptations of Carmilla feel the need to “update” the story even though the original was ambiguous enough to allow a perfectly Woke interpretation). Or the film The Moth Diaries. The real major Yuri Genre show of 2020 was Adachi and Shimamura which has a Simuldub starting right now. Looks like shows of 2020 are gonna be Simuldubing all through 2021. I’d really prefer shows they didn’t start dubbing till they were in fact done and aren’t Toonami/Adult Swim broadcasts to just be dropped all at once. This show I’ll probably wait to binge, or at least wait till I can do the 3 episode test. Well next week is likely to be the end of this series as a weekly feature.

Also here is the introductory post for this series.

https://mithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2020/01/anime-2020.html

Anime 2020 some penultimate episodes

Follow my Anime viewing in real time at these links..

https://myanimelist.net/profile/JaredMithrandir

https://twitter.com/JaredMithrandir 

Also here is the introductory post for this series.

https://jaredmithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2020/01/anime-2020.html

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear episode 4 was nice.  Also the first episode of this show is chronologically between episodes 3 and 4, so people who share my preference for watching things linearly should take note of that.

Assault Lily Bouquet episode 10 was adorable.

Episode 13 of Yashahime was the last to air in 2020.  I get the sense that Muroku and his wife were characters from Inuyasha, in which case they were not incorporated in a way that created any continuity lock out.

I’m not sure what to think of The Day I Became A God episode 11, a lot of it wasn’t easy to watch, but it wasn’t meant to be.  This is a rare situation where how good something is depends on how “realistic” it is, and I don’t have the real world experience to judge that.

Episode 11 of Warlords of Sigrdrifa was a good set up for the finale.

I'm done covering anything on Toonami for awhile

I watched the first three episodes of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear and they were pretty fun.  

Still I won’t be prolonging this series for a show who’s simuldub started that late, Anime 2020 as a weekly event on this blog will end when I finish the Simulsdubs I started during 2020.  

I’ve completed TONIKAWA and gave it a 9, it’s a very satisfying little Romance with a lot of fun fluff in it.  I also liked Pause and Select’s little video essay on it.

Episode 12 of Yashahime was okay.  I’m not sure how much longer I’ll keep following this show since it still isn’t my genre of Anime, there are a lot of shows where how they start I can find fun but once a long term status quo sets in things get boring if the Genre is less inherently interesting to me. 

So I’ve learned this New Moon thing was a thing for Inyuasha, so that makes me less concerned with the gendered implications of having one of our heroines lose her powers once a month.

Warlords of Sigrdrifa episode 10 was pretty good.  I still feel like this Odin might actually be Loki, even though they did identify one of the pillars as Loki.

The Day I Became A God episode 10 was also good.

The finale of Sword Art Online Alicization War of Underworld was the best kind of bonkers.

Follow my Anime viewing in real time at these links..

https://myanimelist.net/profile/JaredMithrandir

https://twitter.com/JaredMithrandir 

Also here is the introductory post for this series.

https://jaredmithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2020/01/anime-2020.html

War on Geminar was the first modern Isekai Anime

It's Japanese title is Isekai no Sekishi Monogatari, and it's full English title is Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar.  It is part of the Tenchi Muyo multiverse but it stands on it's own just fine, you can tell by the titles how the localization was banking on that connection more then the original creators were.

I've been planning to write something on this now overlooked Anime's importance to the Isekai genre for awhile, well before this current "Jobless Reincarnation is the grandfather of Isekai" nonsense started.

When I started hearing this stuff about Jobless I was prepared to call BS even if it's LN release date was as recent as 2010.  When I saw it was January of 2014 I went "........ have these people forgotten everything that came out before Konosuba and Re:Zero?"

Even when talking about a very specific kind of Isekai, Male Lead Harmey Medieval European Fantasy, this LN came out after Problem Children and Outbreak Company already had Anime.  No Game No Life got it's Anime that same year and it's first LN came out in 2012, Overlord's LN also came out in 2012.

One video promoting Jobless as this secret progenitor of these trends said it's LN came out a month before Knosuba's beating it to the getting run over by a Truck at the start trope.  Konosuba is a parody, the kind of parody that can only work if the tropes and genre conventions it is parodying have been entrenched for longer then a month.  The author would have had to have been working on Konosuba already well over a month before it came out.  Even if these are indeed the first two Isekai LNs to specifically use the run over by a truck prior to reincarnation trope, it's probably a coincidence.

Because using getting run over by a vehicle like that for the idea of death coming out of nowhere certainly happened before.  In Anime it goes back to at least Minky Momo in the early 80s.  Outside Anime it technically happens in Mean Girls in 2004 in a way that is Comedic like it is in Konosuba.  I should also note that the last Narnia novel has the protagonists of prior novels die in a train accident.  Also in the context of Meta Comedy Anime, Excel Saga began with the MC getting hit by a truck back in the fall of 1999.

What I mean by War on Geminar being the first "modern" Isekai Anime is how before then Isekai in Anime was still almsot exclusively Shoujo, with the most notable exception being El Hazzard which is still pretty far from the formula we post 2010s Anime viewers are used to.  And even if you consider a certain type of VRMMO story to be at least a close cousin of the genre, none that truly look like SAO existed in Anime form prior to 2011.

War on Geminar was a 13 episode OVA series released from May 2009 to May 2010.  And it being that old surprises me because it resembles the clichés and conventions and even aesthetics of the post 2016 Isekai scene so much it feels like something made specifically to be the Tenchi franchise's take on it like Pretty Sammy was for Mahou Shoujo.  But instead it actually came before all of those.

But it is also in my opinion worth watching for it's own sake regardless of how it compares to anything else.

The first episode is pretty unique in how it completely forgoes one of the points of using Isekai as a plot device for a fantasy story, having the person from our world be the POV through which we the audience learn about the fantasy world.  Instead it is told from the POV of people indigenous to this Fantasy world, doing it's world building like a non Isekai Fantasy story would, with the Isekaied character not even being the protagonist yet but an antagonist, an alien presence they need to figure out.

One of our main characters holds the title of Empress, and in the Dub at least speaks using the Royal We which I feel the VA handled perfectly.

Usually in SciFi and Fantasy stories if there is an Emperor or an Empire the real world inspiration is either Ancient Rome or 19th Century Brittan.  And maybe some Nazi imagery thrown in if you want no ambiguity that it's an Evil Empire.  However what interests me about War on Geminar is how this "Empire" actually seems kind of like the Holy Roman Empire.

Noir may no longer be my favorite Anime

Make no mistake it remains very important to me.  It remains my favorite of a number of Sub categories you can fit it into.  And probably remains in my opinion the most perfectly executed Anime of all time.

But in terms of my current relationship with Anime, with how I like to talk about Anime, it's not very representative of what my overall tastes in Anime are.  It became one of the first Anime to catch my interest back when I was much more of an Edgelord then I am now.

Still I do not consider it in conflict with my current Otaku Values, the ending is a happy one, it's perhaps as optimistic as a show with it's starting premise could be.  But when I'm using Anime references to explain my Evangelical Universalist Theology, as analogies for how I view The Gospel, Noir is of little use.

You may think "that's unfair, so what if Number 1 doesn't represent the whole, shouldn't it's uniqueness be why it stands out?"

And that's where I have to mention how it isn't as rewatchable to me as it used to be.  When it was literally the only Anime besides Saturday Morning kids shows I'd watched at all I could binge the entire show on a daily basis.  Now I have too many interests for any single show to take up that much of my time.  But when I do feel compelled to re-watch something even though I'd already seen it fairly recently, it is something much more inline with my general Otaku Values.

Perhaps A Certain Scientific Railgun is a good candidate, it's something that since I first watched it I've seen on average more then once a year, it touches on many different aspects of what I like about Anime, and yet is fairly Normie friendly, one I like to recommend to people as a potential entry point (though with the caveat of skipping the second episode of season 1 on the first watch through).

On the other hand, I have come to feel that Fate/Kaleid Liner Prsima Illya is the Most Anime.