Looking back on 2023

 For starters it’s my second year as a Detective Conan aka Case Closed fan, the only Movie I hadn’t already seen by the end of 2022 was the one that wasn’t out yet, which this year I as expected had to wait till November to see.  I enjoyed movie 26 but it might be the hardest movie to recommend to franchise newcomers. This year was also big for Conan fans in getting 50 new Dubbed episodes on Tubi, and the Dub for movie 24 The Scarlet Bullet was finally seemingly just before Christmas for Digital Purchase on Amazon PrimeVideo.  And on the main show some long awaited developments in the main storyline.

For Pretty Cure, Soaring Sky I do think is probably the best show we’ve gotten since Hugtto but I wasn’t able to finish it for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality.

The Pokémon Franchise gave us both Paldean Wings and Path to The Peak which were each very good.

Lupin III vs Cat’s Eye was decent, and this year also had some movies I still haven’t been able to see yet, like the Sailor Moon Cosmos movies and the second SAO Progressive movie.

And outside the realm of Anime was the Willow series which I mostly enjoyed but Disney decided to bury. And from Star Wars I enjoyed both Mandalorian season 3 and Ahsoka.

But let’s look at regular Seasonal Anime now.

Winter had 9 shows I watched to Completion, not all as they were airing, plus two that finished then from prior seasons.  Two of the sequels were In/Spectre which is still pretty cool and Vinland Saga which was also good.  

Tomo-Chan is a Girl was a fun RomCom, I’m not as into the main premise I think a lot of other people will be but I enjoyed it’s Kuudere character. I already made a post about her as a great new addition to the Kuudere Canon.  

Buddy Daddies is a show in an unfortunate situation because I suspect it will ultimately be mostly forgotten in Spy x Family’s shadow even though I think it was a more overall satisfying show.

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady kicked off this being perhaps the best year for Yuri since 2018.  It was a great show, very funny but also genuinely emotional.  And it ended in such a way where there is room for a season 2 but it won’t feel unfinished without one.

Onimai was awesome was awesome.

Uncle from Another World, Ningen, Fruit of Evolution season 2, and Rougo were all fun Isekai.  

I’ll share my thoughts on both seasons of Eminence in Shadow up front here, it’s good but I’m not gonna be as inclined to list it as a favorite as some other people are.

The Super Mario Bros movie and Across The Spider Verse were both great western Animated films.

Spring dropped an instant classic with Heavenly Delusion which I do hope gets a season 2. 

Honestly there are a lot of shows this year I haven't finished or watched yet but which I still might.  Like Tsundere VIllainess, and the second season of Tonikawa and Bofuri.

My Love Story with Yamada-Kun at lv999 was a very good RomCom Anime.  Dead Mount Deathplay was a fun new Reverse Isekai Premise.  Season 2 of Witch from mercury was also great but not something I have particular thoughts on.

My thoughts on Psycho-Pass Movie Providence I already tacked on to the end of my Dystopian Sci-FI post from earlier this year.

Yuri Is My Job was very fun as well, it kind of felt like a true throwback Yuri in the best way possible.

Mahou Shoujo Magical Destroyers is one of those shows that had a strong start but I don’t really like where it ended.

The main show I have complex thoughts on for the spring season is In Another World With my Smartphone season 2.  As someone who’s been season 1’s most vocal online evangelist since it aired back in 2017 I don’t like reporting that I felt disappointed by season 2, but I kind of do.  Part of it is how the Dub had to replace some cast members, but in a way that tried to keep people from noticing which only made those performances sound more forced.  It’s the kind of failed recasting I do not blame on the actors.  However I don’t think that’s the only reason I think this period in the story in the original LNs was perhaps a low point.  Also the confirmation that Leen is going to become one of the nine wives I don’t like.  I like Leen but as a mischievous perverted little gremlin side character, I don't think her as a main Waifu will work.

For another digression outside of Anime I watched The Flash and I did like it, but I don’t feel like going out on a limb for it.  My view that the accusations about Ezra Miller are pure Transphobia hasn’t changed.

The Summer season was pretty fun too.

Zom100 technically isn’t a show I completed but that’s because it’s one indefinite hiatus, it’s a fun show with blatant Marxist Subtext which I highly recommend.

Am I Actually The Strongest? Was another fun Isekai.

Liar Liar feels like a distinctly more light hearted take on the Battle Royal inspired genre, Death Game set up but without the Death, which it turns out appeals to me perfectly.

Rent-a-Girlfriend season 3 was great, the more frustrating aspects of the series were toned down this season to focus on our main characters actually achieving a goal and dealing with some real emotions.  I never agreed with the hate on the first two seasons but for season 3  anyone claiming they watched it and that it’s no better is simply lying.

Jobless Reincarnation season 2a was also good, don’t listen to the haters.

Fate/Strange Fake Whispers of Dawn was a neat little special and I wild definitely watch the full show when it airs.

For more non Anime digressions season 2 of Apple’s Foundation series was great, it massively improved on what I already enjoyed about season 1.  Now you have to accept that it's not Isaac Asimov’s vision at all, but once you accept it as its own thing it’s a perfectly enjoyable and interesting Sci-Fi show, perhaps the best the west has had since Caprica.

Dungeons & Dragons honor Among Thieves was also a more enjoyable movie then i expected, it’s the closest any Western Fantasy show can come to the appeal of an Isekai or “I can’t believe it’s not Isekai'' style Anime since it has that living in a Game world Vibes.  But without distinctly Otaku Elements has an even broader appeal.

Venture Brothers Radiant is The Blood of The Baboon’s Heart had a pretty satisfying movie if it indeed is the send off for that franchise it’ll have been a fitting one.

The Fall season I’m most hesitant to even cover here since it isn’t over yet.  

I did watch two Netflix Anime in October, Good Night World and Pluto which were both awesome, and then November had a neat Slime Reincarnation ONA.  Besides that there’s only 4 shows I’ve watched to completion, one I already covered up above.  There are a number of shows I put On Hold that I feel there’s a strong chance I will return to like Frieren.

I’m In Love With The Villainess was fantastic, another required viewing for Yuri fans.

Tearmoon Empire was also cute and fun.

16bit Sensation Another Layer was a great show with Deep Cuts for someone like me who's spent the last two years researching the history of Visual Novels and Dating Sims and related game genres.

For one last non Anime addition I saw  Rebel Moon Part 1 but I’ve decided to stick to Mastadon for expressing my thoughts on it.

I suppose Suzume can count since it’s not originally from 2023 but the Dub I watched probably is, it was good.  I could also add Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War - The Kiss That Never Ends, which was very good.

If I included everything I watched for the first time in 2023 but which is actually older this post would be twice as long.  A lot of them were via browning Tubi.TV.  Some of them I’ve already discussed in various Blog Posts.

If anything new is added before midnight on Christmas Eve I’ll add an Update.  In the meantime Happy New Years.

Update December 28th: Well I just finished BOFURI season 2, which also happens to be my 900th completed Anime.

Sometimes a single Show gets Sole Credit for a Trend it's only the most well known example of.

The almsot over current Fall 2023 Season of Anime includes not one but two Fantasy shows where part of how the story starts is the idea of beginning at or after where a traditional Epic Fantasy story ends [Update: turns out it was three actually].  They are massively different from each other in almsot every other way from vibes to art-style to what subgenres they fit into to.

But the thing is nether is actually the first Anime that can be described that way, it also applies to Dead Mount Death Play earlier this year, to The Devil is a Part Timer several years ago, and I feel confident I recall one or two others in recent years who's names now escape me doing it [Update: Endro is one of them].  And yet if this concept becomes even more popular in the coming years I suspect a narrative will develop that Frieren (one of the two currently airing) started the trend even though it didn't since it has a respectability or at least staying power that A Returner's Magic and those shows which came before it largely do not.

Because this has happened before.  It's like the Great Man Theory of History but applied to popular pieces of Media rather then people.

Take how Sword Art Online is blamed for the broader Anime trends that those above shows merely fit into Sub Genres of.  There were shows that actually qualify as Isekai airing during the same season and in preceding seasons.  Even if we distinguish what modern Isekai is like from what we usually got in the 90s and early 2000s then still War on Geminar from 2009-2010 largely fits the modern criteria, and in Japanese it even has the word Isekai in the title.  

But even if we go back to the era of SAO's original Web Novel publication a decade prior, 2002 had other fully immersive VR Video Game themed stories like .hack//Sign and all the way back in April that year's annual Detective Conan/Case Closes film The Phantom of Baker Street.

Sometimes many artists are coming up with similar ideas at the same time organically for reasons that can't be chopped up to one innovator who everyone else copied.  A common term for this kind of thing is a Zeitgeist.

Take for another example how throughout the 2010s every Incest Anime was viewed as part of a trend started by Oreimo.  Oreimo season 1 was again not even the only Incest show of it's season. Yosuga no Sora was also a pretty big deal at the time.  And earlier in the same year we had Kiss X Sis as both OVAs and a TV Anime.  But what bugs me about this is how people forget that Little Sisters being already a thing in Otaku culture is partly what Oreimo was about.

Or we could talk about the narrative that Neon Genesis Evangelion "Altered Anime Eternally".  In that case it's not so much a specific trend or genre or trope that Eva is given sole credit for but the entire landscape of modern Anime.  I absolutely agree that 1995 was the beginning of an Era of Anime.  But Eva premiered in the last season of that year, the prior 6 months had already been filled with TV Anime and Movies and OVAs that were ground breaking and game changing in their own ways, and to a lesser extent so had the 6 months prior to that.  Eva was just one final Cherry on top of a very innovate Sundae.  (Also Metal Fight Miku was a completely original TV Anime in the Summer of 1994 that had no connection to any prior IP in any medium that was popular enough to get an English Dub.)

However It's not just in the world of Anime this happens.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a show I was once and kind of still am a fan of, it was my favorite TV show of all time before PLL and Anime entered my life.  But the narrative often presented by many of it's fans that it was not just the first Girl Power TV show but also the beginning of what I'll call Semi-Episodic Television in general, annoys me.

That narrative forgets that La Femme Nikkita started airing at almost the exact same time in January of 1997, and that Xena Warrior Princess had been on the air since September of 95.  "Neither of those is about a Blonde High School Girl with a superhero like double life" you may retort.  Well The Secret World of Alex Mack started in October of 1994 and lasted 4 season overlapping with Buffy.

And all of that is without even getting into the Girl Power Anime that was already officially available to American audiences.  Sailor Moon's DiC Dub debuted in Canada in late 95 and was on American TV by some point in 96.  The early episodes of Slayers were dubbed by the end of 95 as well, also Bubblegum Crisis had been released in the States in 91 and 92 and was Dubbed in 94.

But speaking of Sailor Moon perhaps it's hypocritical of me to say all this now when earlier this year I tired to defend the notion of Sailor Moon single handedly creating her genre (whatever you call it), well really Codename Sailor V in 1991.  The thing is 1990 had the first Devil Hunter Yohko OVA which technically fits all the requirements for being a Magical Girl Warrior but really doesn't fit in Aesthetically or Thematically.  And 92 also had the original video game debut of Galaxy Frauline Yuna. Then there's other niche things like Dream Hunter Rem.  So I still agree with distinguishing the Magical Girl Warrior genre from the Sally the Witch style sitcoms or the Idol variation.  But Sailor Moon merely the biggest not only piece of the puzzle of how that genre formed.

And all this is part of why even when a trend does seem to Chronologically have a pretty undisputable singular starting point I still oppose dismissing everything that came after as mere copycats.  Yuki Yuna Is A Hero and Daybreak Illusion and Blue Reflection Ray each feel to me like shows their creators were trying to say something with, and that they would have tried to make in some form even without Madoka Magica coming first.

Re:Creators rejects Auteur Theory

Artists tend to be biased in favor of Auteur Theory since it serves their interests, they want to feel an absolute ownership over what they create.  So I did not expect to ever watch an epic Fantasy story where rejecting Auteur Theory is explicitly the moral of the story.  But that's exactly what the Anime titled Re:Creators is.

Spoilers for Re;Creators will naturally follow.  But first here's it's spoiler free Synopsis on MyAnimeList for those who haven't heard of it before.

Humans have designed countless worlds—each one born from the unique imagination of its creator. Souta Mizushino is a high school student who aspires to be such a creator by writing and illustrating his own light novel. One day, while watching anime for inspiration, he is briefly transported into a fierce fight scene. When he returns to the real world, he realizes something is amiss: the anime's headstrong heroine, Selesia Yupitilia, has somehow returned with him.

Before long, other fictional characters appear in the world, carrying the hopes and scars of their home. A princely knight, a magical girl, a ruthless brawler, and many others now crowd the streets of Japan. However, the most mysterious one is a woman in full military regalia, dubbed "Gunpuku no Himegimi," who knows far more than she should about the creators' world. Despite this, no one knows her true name or the world she is from.

Meanwhile, Souta and Selesia work together with Meteora Österreich, a calm and composed librarian NPC, to uncover the meaning behind these unnatural events. With powerful forces at play, the once clear line between reality and imagination continues to blur, leading to a fateful meeting between creators and those they created.

Also here is Mother's Basement's video made when only 7 episodes out of 22 had aired.

https://youtu.be/kwS1mX_Clfw

Now my analysis begins, again beware of Spoilers.

 

First of all on a pure Symbolic level two of the relevant Creators in the story are literally dead when the story begins, both the creator of our Antagonist and the creator of who I feel is the real Protagonist of the show, it's Kuudere Gandalf.  It is quite literally about Characters living on beyond the deaths of their authors.

But more directly relevant, when various authors aware of what's going on start trying to write new retcons to power up our protagonists, they discover that something truly becomes Canon only when the audience accepts it.  So in the rules of this universe Han indeed Shot First.

This is one of those Anime where the Antagonist is much more who the story is about then the Protagonists.  And indeed the Antagonist is a character who's abilities mostly don't come from her original author.  She's basically an Internet Meme Character who gets new powers every time someone makes a viral YouTube Video about her.  Also she began as an AU Fan Fic version of another character.

I'm in the difficult position of being a Star Wars Prequel Trilogy fan who's not a supporter of Auteur Theory, Worley and Nerdonymous were all about Auteur Theory.  I don't defend the Prequels because I think George Lucas's artistic vision is the definition of good Star Wars, if that were the case I would also like the Original Trilogy.  In fact the only OT film Lucas directly created as much as he did the Prequels is the one I like the least, heck I even like most Disney Star Wars content more then I like A New Hope.

I love the Prequels because of the work countless artists put into making them and how the fans later expanded on the world they created.  Rick Worley's pious devotion to Auteur Theory is what lead him to becoming a full on J. K. Rowling Simp.

Auteur Theory was coined in the 50s or 60s by French Philosophers but before then it was basically the premise of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and why that work has a history of resonating with people who find her political world view repulsive like Zach Snyder and ColdCrashPictures.

However traditional Death of The Author isn't exactly what Re:Creators is arguing either, rather it's arguing something far more Communist in nature.

1. Being rooted in Classical Liberalism the original Death of The Author Essay is focused on the validity of Individual Interpretations not Collective Fandom interpretation.

2. The original DoTA Thesis also still insists there has to be a basis in the text, the reader can't just make something up out of no where or based purely on Vibes.

Both those restrictions are defied by what Re:Creators depicts.  The collective Audience absolutely has the power to add something with no basis in the original.  And Collective Interpretation is the point.  It's a system where Fanon is the Canon.

A Certain Raildex Watch Order Post

My recommended watch order is a version of the "simplified chronological order" which is the term other people use for an order like this.

Unlike past posts where I've given my watch order for this franchise I want to really break down and explain my logic more. 

A Certain Scientific Railgun (Season 1)

A Certain Magical Index (Season 1)

A Certain Scientific Railgun S

A Certain Magical Index II

A Certain Scientific Railgun T

A Certain Magical Index III

I have chosen not to include A Certain Scientific Accelerator because I kind of don't recommend it at all.  It's not horrible, a true franchise completionist will probably be able to get something out of it.  But it doesn't appeal to me much.  It's chronological placement is between Index I and II but it aired between Index III and Railgun T.

I also didn't give the movie a placement simply because it's not really canon at all.  I do like the movie a fair bit, but I wouldn't prioritize when to watch it.  Index season 1 has everything you really need to know for it.

In the spirit of this watch order not being strictly chronological, I won't make my arguments in their chronological order either.  I'll start with why each season of Railgun should be watched before it's numerically corresponding season of Index.

Railgun Season 1 simply is a better entry point to this world.  I do recommend skipping episode 2 on your first watch since it's both filler is gives an unfortunate first impression of a certain character.  But other then that season 1 of Railgun is a fantastic fun little SciFi show that only ever seems under whelming in the context of the major heights achieved by it's sequels.

One YouTube video I watched defending the Broadcast order as ideal insinuated that Railgun leaves some things unexplained because it assumes you already watched Index.  But especially as far as their respective season 1s go I really don't see what they're talking about.  Railgun is far better at organically explaining how the Esper stuff and Academy City's technology works, and the Magic stuff isn't relevant to Railgun.  Sometimes I think we Nerds assume anything that can be read as a reference to something you've already seen in the release order can only work that way when the truth is they can often work either way.  

Railgun also simply is the better show by a significant margin, so much so that I can imagine the existence of people who'd like Railgun but not Index while I can't imagine the opposite.  The way less Fanservice (by my definition Railgun has no Fanservice but I know some might disagree) the better pacing, the usually more intelligent fight scenes, the fact that it could almost pass as a Shoujo, all give it a broader appeal.  

So while there are reasons the order I listed above is best if you do watch both, if you aren't able to get into Index don't worry, nothing in the Railgun sequels absolutely depends on having seen any of Index, it can all stand on it's own.

But the reason why Railgun S should be watched before Index II even beyond all those above reasons is mainly episodes 6 and 7 (or episodes 30 and 31 of Index as a whole as some sites might number them).  This two parter is Kuroko focused and it will hit harder if you have the increased knowledge of her perspective on the Sisters Arc that Railgun S provides.

The particular reason why it's better to watch Railgun T before Index III isn't even much because of either show's main cast.  Episodes 4-6 of Index III is The Battle Royal arc which in the release order (and even more so for Index onlies) introduces a lot of new characters a good deal of whom die in this same arc.  Now the Anime should have given this arc more then 3 episodes to begin with but even if it had I'd still say it works best with the prior investment in Item, Member and School that Railgun T provides.

Now some will tell you you the later part of Railgun T requires having seen Accelerator first because of Scavenger but here's the thing, I had seen Accelerator first as it aired and I'd forgotten about Scavenger by the time their Railgun T episodes were Simuldubbed.  Railgun T on it's own makes a perfectly fine introduction to them and for me is entirely what endeared me to them, it refers to them having had a bad experience with Accelerator but it's not difficult to guess what entailed, we don't need to have seen it just like we never needed to see the Kessel Run.

Now as I said if you do watch both there are benefits to watching at least some of Index before the second and third seasons of Railgun.

The reason Index season 1 should be watched before Railgun S is The Sisters Arc.  This arc is to a large extent the same story told from different POVs.  But it is Tomou's POV that presumes the audience will be as uninformed as Touma is, the S version does have some dramatic irony going on, not so much it can't be followed at all on it's own, but enough that it adds to the experience to have already seen the other version.

The reason to watch Index II before Railgun T is mainly again episodes 6 and 7 since they explain one key aspect of what's going on with Kuroko during the Daihasei Festival.  There are also a few things that reference the events of Index's Daihasei Festival arc while the reverse never happens.  In fact if you are someone who generally hates Index and is a Railgun fan only these are the only two episodes of Index I'd remotely suggest a Railgun fan can't simply ignore.

Thing is the Railgun T Daihasei Festival also via one character references a Railgun story still not animated at all, so there is no avoiding an Anime only feeling like they missed something.  

Sometimes the Second Episode is the Problem that the Three Episode Rule protects against.

Some attempts to deconstruct the Three Episode rule focus mostly on defending the first episodes.

But a main reason I consider it important is how often I consider the exact second episode of a show to be one of it's worst.  Maybe some of you are thinking "well you don't need a Rule to not give up that quickly".  The thing is it's very easy for me to imagine finding a story's initial set up to be the only part of it that's good.   With American LA TV shows it's definitely happened a few times where I found a first episode pretty fun but as soon as they settled into their regular weekly routine I got bored of it.

Now when it comes to Anime where the second episode can give a potentially harmful early impression.  There are fortunately some that are episodic enough where I'm very willing to just recommend skipping the second episode entirely, at least on your first watch.

That is most heavily the case with A Certain Scientific Railgun.  What is so frustrating about the second episode isn't exactly something never in other episodes, but that's the only one where it's the main plot of the episode, and goes further with it then the show ever will again.  And it's not even filler in the Monster of the Week sense, but it fortunately has no actual connection to the Level Upper Arc.

The second episode of the 90s Sailor Moon Anime actually was skipped by the original DiC localization, so we have documented proof that it wasn't actually needed (thing is other episodes DiC skipped were among my favorites).  With Sailor Moon I'm kinda willing to tell people to just watch the 3rd episode first.

But in less episodic shows this goes back to the structural reasons the three episode rule exists.  The firs 3 episodes are often like an extended first act of a movie.  The first and 3rd episodes contain the most vital things that establish the world and initiate the plot.  The second episode can often be mostly necessary but less engaging connective tissue between them.

I also want to acknowledge the early Pokémon Anime here. In that case I really like the second episode but I know not everyone considers it great because of Suede's Pokémon Journey's review of it.  The second episode is to me filled with lots of fun stuff and it's certainly important set up and world building.  But it is indeed not as "tightly" written as episodes 1 and 3.

Poly Anime needs to diversify

Back when I first defended In Another World With My Smartphone season 1's Poly plot twist as an inherently progressive step forward I also said that we need other types of Poly representation in Anime as well.  And now that we have two Polygamous Anime airing in the same season it's time for me to restate that.

I'm enjoying both Girlfriend, Girlfriend season 2 and 100-Girlfriends so far.  This is not me condemning either of them, I find Weeb Revolution's overly cynical analysis of them rather annoying.  It is simply me demanding more. A Harem that takes a Non Mogamous Resolution will always get points from me over the most that don't.  Cat Planet Cuties is a show I wish I'd known about sooner.

The first alternative likely to enter one's mind is Polyandry.  Post 2017 Anime already had an opportunity to drop some Polyandry rep and rejected it in how the 2019 Anime adapted the first Boogiepop and Others Light Novel.  But even that would have been among side characters to the main plot, Shoujos and Otomes deserve the same wish fulfilment fantasies that these Shounen and Seinen Anime are providing to their target audiences.

But more importantly then that I want scenarios where it's not just 1 person with multiple other binary gender partners.  One thing firmly baked into post Haruhi Anime culture is the idea of a show built around a core cast of 5 with 2 guys and 3 girls.  How about one of those where it's also a Pansexual Polycule, I recently watched Gamers from 2017 and it feels like it should have just gone there.  But also the mainstream Binary Genders shouldn't be the only ones in on the fun either.

But even going back to the topic of Heteronromative Harems that take the "marry them all" option, there are a lot of assumptions involved in assuming they can only appeal to someone projecting onto the one guy or girl and not the other gender involved.  In the world of online Erotica I've seen a lot of evidence that people of either Gender can be into the idea of sharing the object of their affection, and I don't just mean in the Cuckolding fetish type way either.  One old Meme is that written porn is for women, well I've read a lot of written Porn that is Polygynous.

It's frustrating how many criticisms of Non Monogamy as a concept still assume the alternative has to be Polygyny in it's worst most blatantly Patriarchal forms.  I watched one Youtube video recently where some guy felt it made sense to refute Gen Z Polyamory culture by talking about Bride Price and stuff going on in Africa.

But returning to the topic of recent Poly Anime I think about that scene where Shino asks Naoya if he's thought about how he was gonna support two people, and how at no point did anyone think to question the assumption that it has to be the guy alone providing the financial support.  Because even in how to do Monogamy Japan is still fairly old fashioned in it's default thinking.  When Marriage is still being defined by a Patriarchal starting point actually doing Polygamy is a lot more viable for the wealthy.  But obviously a Communist Polycule is going to take a more Collectivist approach.  From each according to their ability to each according to their needs.

Light Novels should be adapted as Movies rather then TV Shows more often

I say this as someone who is in general biased for more serialized modes of storytelling and in fact that bias has played a role in why I like Anime so much to begin with.

But the Anime that embody the strengths of serialized story telling are usually Original TV Anime (and some OVAs and ONAs), and Manga adaptations.  And a lot of Visual Novel or Video Game adaptations work being adapted into a more serialized format because their structure is often like something serialized so that the player can be given convenient places to take a break.

LNs however are kind of the Japanese equivalent to YA novels or airport novels except shorter in length, their original narrative structure is usually much more similar to Movies then to a TV Series.

My problem with the broadcast order of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is that it butchered the structure of the original LN which actually is a good stand alone work of art on it's own even if it had never gotten sequels.  The chronological first 6 episodes of Haruhi are the adaptation of that LN and I kind of wish someone would just fan edit them into a movie (both a Subbed versions and a Dubbed version).

Sword Art Online was actually adapted similarly to Haruhi in this regard except in that case the inserted short stories written later to flesh out the original arc made the Anime more chronological rather then less.

The fact that some LNs are short story collections is perhaps the counter point to this thesis.  I suppose the short stories could be adapted as OVAs or ONAs.  But some movies are made as collections of shorter stories rather then one feature length story.

We've already seen success in adapting LNs as movies rather then TV shows.  The Live Action Boogiepop and Others movie, the Kara no Kyoukai films, the SAO Progressive movies of which only one I've gotten to see currently.  Aura: Koga Maryuin's Last War which I think is a pretty underrated entry in the Chunibyo genre.  And most successful of all The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.

But I also think about the niche examples where the serialized format combined with wanting to make a lot of progress in one season has hurt a story structurally.  I'm The Villainess, So I'm Taming The Final Boss rushing to the end of the first novel in only the 4th episode killed my initial enthusiasm for that series.

There are exceptions, Fate/Zero and Fate/Apocrypha are LN adaptations and I don't see how they'd work as a string of movies.  Some LNs do seem to be written from the start with the idea of being adapted into a TV Anime.  However more often then not in Japan the Anime is glorified marketing for the source material not the other way around.

The point I'm making is perhaps most proven by the Raildex franchise and the popular discourse around it.  

A Certain Magical Index's first LN was also written to originally stand alone if no sequel was greenlit, that is the plot of the first 6 episodes and they too feel like they could've been a movie.  I enjoy the Index Anime just fine but I'm a notoriously easy person to please, and I can definitely see how every arc that is given only 3 episodes or less to play out (Deep Blood, Tree Remnant, Crystal Fleet, all of season III) could have used more screen time to flesh everything out.

A Certain Scientific Railgun was serialized from it's inception and so the Anime is able to improve upon the Manga in the same way many past Anime based on Manga have from Sailor Moon to DBZ to the original FMA Anime by adding much needed episodic filler episodes and the occasional filler arc that is just as peak fiction as the Manga yet purists hate on them anyway.

Railgun works as a series because the source is also a serial, Index would have been better as movies.

It is true that sometimes even the LNs will split an arc across more then one LN.  SAO started doing this as early as Fairy Dance, and Boogiepop did it back in the 90s with Vs Imaginator, and Index has indeed done it a few times.

So those being adapted as a movie per LN can at first glance be mistaken for those misguided times Hollywood has split the last novel of a YA saga into two movies.  However Across The Spiderverse was pretty universally praised in-spite of ending on a Cliffhanger.  And in the world of Anime we have prior precedent for this with the Nanoha Reflection and Detonation movies being one story split across two films, and then the latest Prisma Illya movie also ended on a cliffhanger.

Maybe 20 years ago the idea of devoting a 20+ novel saga to movies rather then TV would have seemed unthinkable.  But now we live in a post MCU world where Cinema itself can be serialized.

Railgun T has only one problem

 A Certain Scientific Railgun T is an Anime I'm loving more each time I rewatch it.  Railgun S as a complete work of Art is still the greatest Masterpiece of the Raildex franchise.  But Railgun T being a bit less intense and more episodic is perhaps proving to be more rewatchable.

The Daihasei Festival Arc was perfect, and most of the Dream Ranker Arc very fun, lots of cool one offs that expand the universe, and for the most part even what it's main plot winds up being is very interesting.  But I have one thing against it.

And that problem is a Spoiler so don't read ahead if you don't want to be spoiled.

The fact that the show does in fact declare the Doppleganger to not have a Soul really really bugs me.  And honestly it makes me wonder if anyone anymore knows what that word even means.

The Soul is not actually something the existence of which is debatable, what's debatable is if it's immortal or not, yet it's clear many writers of modern fiction think it's definition is the thing certain religions say still lives when the Body dies, but it's not.  The Greek word translated Soul is Psyche.  Even the most Hyper-materialist ancient Greeks like the Epicureans did not dispute the Psyche existed, what they argued about was if it's immortal or not.

Anything that has a Psyche has a Soul, anything that has Self Awareness has a Soul.  Most important of all though, only a being with a soul could ever be suicidal.  A life form running on pure animal instinct or AI programing could never develop a desire to end it's own existence.

The concept of an AI wanting to die but being unable to act on that directly because of it's self preservation programing is an interesting idea for Sci-Fi to explore.  But to then turn around and proclaim that entity doesn't have a Soul is absurd.

And to top it all off the Doppelganger's Psyche even proves to be immortal still existing after it's body dies.  So I honestly am baffled and have no idea what definition of the word Soul this Anime was possibly using.

A Certain Magical Index Deconstructs Meritocracy

During the Index account of the Sisters Arc back in season 1 we are shown how the official propaganda of Academy City is that any Esper could reach Level 5 if they try hard enough.  But in Index III at the end of the plotline with the Item characters it is made clear how only certain people had the potential to be a level 5 and those in charge mostly know who they are.

And this was always heavily implied, by the Sisters Arc itself Misaka was selected for the cloning experiment as a small child long before she was officially known to be a Level 5 yet the implications of that don't ever seem to be something that's occurred to her.  We've also seen that Accelerator and Mental Out were also already singled out to be experimented on as small children.

And now I feel compelled to return once again to The Last Jedi/Sequel Trilogy discourse.  The fact that so many online leftists think it's more Left Wing for anyone to be equally a potential Jedi shows how actually Liberal their mindset still is.

Leftists are Materialists, we acknowledge that some people do have innate natural advantages to being able to be successful that most people don't have.  We are the opposite of Nazis in that we reject that those with innate advantages should actually be considered more valuable.  But to deny the innate advantages exist ultimately serves the interest of Conservatives, it lets them convince themselves those already with power must be the ones who earned it.

Meritocracy is the justifying ideology of Capitalism.

The Raildex Anime are better social commentary then any Dystopic Science Fiction precisely because they are avoiding the usual Aesthetics of Dystopia. It's world is different from the real world but about the same in how Free or not Free it's society is.

Daihasei Festival chronological watch order

I have constructed what I think is the closest thing possible to a Chronological viewing order of the Daihasei Festival episodes of A Certain Magical Index II and A Certain Scientific Railgun T.

For Index II ,two numbers each are listed since some websites number them by number of Index II specifically but others by of Index as a whole.

Railgun T Episode 1

Index II Episode 8/32

Railgun T Episodes 2&3

Index II Episodes 9-13/33-37

Railgun T Episodes 4-15

The consistency of the Raildex Anime are pretty amazing, almsot exactly a decade separates when these two Daihasei Festival Arcs were animated and yet jumping back and forth between them doesn't feel jarring at all.

It makes all the more jarring how much not like the other shows the Accelerator Anime looks.  I wonder if that show will have it's own Daihasei Festival Arc if it lasts long enough?

[Update: It didn't take me long to regret this order, lots of things won't line up.  Strict Chronological viewing isn't my actual recommended watch order for Raildex anyway.]

Frankenstein needs more Anime

My Halloween Anime recommendations post at the start of the month wound up being dominated by Vampires to a large extent, partly that may be the lingering influence of my personal involvement in the 20tween Vampire craze, but I think it's largely that Vampires and Pointy Hat Witches are the most popular iconic Halloween monsters in Japan.  And a good number of Vampire Anime includes Dracula himself in some form.

It doesn't surprise me that Mummies are not as popular in Anime because Japan simply wasn't subject to the recurring bouts of Egyptomania that the West has.  Japan knows enough about the popularity of Egypt to often use it as the basis for a generic desert setting which may include Mummy style enemies in video games.  But taking those Egyptian things outside of the desert isn't something Japan is as keen to do.

However the lack of Anime representation for Dracula's greatest rival does surprise me.  Frankenstein in Anime has had that Toei TV movie in the early 80s, a very unconventional insertion into Fate/ lore and similarly with some other more niche shows that also amalgamize a bunch of Victorian classic literature together.  Dracula in Anime has Frankenstein dwarfed and even Carmilla makes more appearances.

I am one of those who likes to observe that in the original Novel of Frankenstein in the grand scheme of things Victor's real Sin isn't creating life but abandoning it right after he creates it for not being exactly what the expected or wanted. It's about the moral responsibility that comes with bringing life into the world.

And that is why the lack of direct Frankenstein adaptions in Anime surprises me, because that moral theme is in Anime frequently, in fact it's embedded into Anime as we know it from it's foundation.  Yes I am arguing that Umatarou Tenma is an echo of Victor Frankenstein in more then just the vague way every mad Scientist gets compared to Frankenstein, as is Precia Testarossa.  And then of course there is how Mewtwo can be compared to The Creature.

So I would like to see Anime take it's distinct approach to these issues and apply it back to the original.

Ages of Video Games

After making my post on The Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of Anime I started thinking about the same thing in regards to Video Games.  But thoughts aren't as deep though.

Video Games are an even younger medium then Anime and so frankly I think we're still in Bronze Age.  Gaming still hasn't even reached a true Modern Age.

I'm going to go ahead and say the Golden Age began with the release of Pac-Man.  The Action Button YouTube Channel has a good video on Pac-Man breaking it down and documenting it's importance in Gaming History.  All I can add is that I'm a lifelong Nintendo Brand Loyalist and so me being willing to give the honor of being the Action Comics No.1 of Video Games to something that isn't a Nintendo Franchise should really prove how strong the argument for it is.  But don't worry Donkey Kong can still be the Detective Comics No.27.

I'm next going to say that the Silver Age began in 1996.  For those of us who are card carrying Evangelists of The Church of Nintendo the importance of that year as ushering in a new era of Gaming is established first by Pokémon Red and Green then by Super Mario RPG and finally by the launch of the Nintendo 64 including Super Mario 64.  Meanwhile Kirby Superstar and Donkey Kong Country 3 were good swan songs for the side scrolling Golden Age.

But I'm also an Otaku, and in the world of Bishoujo Video Games 1996 saw in January the first Visual Novel Shizuku, then the second Visual Novel Kizuato and the dating sim Welcome to Pia Carrot released the same day.  It also had another important dating sim in Kakyuusei. Sakura Wars also left a big impact.  And then at the end of the year on the Feast of Stephen Elf dropped YU-NO A Girl who Chants Love at The Bound of This World a game who's impact on the culture can't be understated and the west's ignorance of it explains a lot of what we get wrong.

96 also had the first Persona Game.

For PlayStation fans however 1997 is the year that console finally made a name for itself with Symphony of Night, Mega Man X4, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics and SaGa Frontier all coming out in one year.

For Bishoujo games it was an ultimately less important year then 96 but does put a few developments on what 96 started with To Heart completing the original Visual Novel trilogy, then Dosei being the first non Leaf Visual Novel and Moon being the first game from the team that would go on to create Key, and the launch of the Age studio.

Finally the current/Bronze Age of Video Games started with the Wii-U,/Playstation 4/Xbox ONE generation.

The Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of Anime.

I notice a lot of online Anime Discourse, at least back in 2016-2017, talking about what was the Golden Age of Anime treating that term as just meaning whatever is the best when that's not actually what the concept of a Golden Age means.

The Golden Age of something is it's first era of greatness, some stuff can have came before but they're basically Pre-History in the grand scheme of things.  No fan of Western Superhero Comics actually thinks the Golden Age had a higher baseline level of quality then fully developed modern Comics, or that most of the absolute best Comics ever made were made then, but they call it the Golden Age anyway.

Likewise I am going to say the Golden Age of Anime began with the premier of Astor Boy in 1963 and ended with the final episode of Lupin III Part II (Red Jacket) in 1980 even though I am personally into very little from that era.  

I will then define the Silver Age as spanning 1981 through 1994 and maybe even the first season of 95.  

The Bronze Age is then 1995-2010 (or maybe it wouldn't be completely wrong to include the Fall of 94) while the current Modern Age began with 2011 and is still going on as I write this. 

Significantly over 50% of all the Anime I've completed on MAL is Modern in this definition.  Partly because how much Anime gets made each year keeps increasing, but also because it was a years into the Modern Era that Anime became a full time interest of mine.

However I would have to say the Bronze Age is probably the age I currently like the most, it contains most of the few Anime I actually do have Childhood or YA Nostalgia for.  And there are so many interesting kinds of Anime I feel were only made then.

Now my definition for the Golden Age is perhaps the most self explanatory.  That it ends right before Millennials begin being born makes it easy for us to see it as the Antiquity of Anime History.  

The Silver Age is then contemporary with the Earliest Millennials growing from Babies to starting High School.  But I'd also say the key 1981 milestone to kick off this age was Urusei Yatsura while the swan song of the Silver Age was Sailor Moon S the last season of that Anime with Tomita, Yanagikawa and Sumisawa on the writing staff.

I already have a Post on this Blog about Anime in 1995 showing what a game changing year it was. But the argument for starting the Bronze Age in Fall of 94 would be Macross 7 & Magic Knight Rayearth and how DNA seems ahead of it's time as an absurd Harem premise. And I also already have a post on 2011 Anime showing how it launched many of the trends that define modern Anime Culture.  And even in that post I had not yet accounted for Psycho-Pass or some other shows I watched more recently, or how for Detective Conan the Holmes' Revelation Case can definitely be considered the start of the Modern Era for that show and Movie 15 the first movie to truly feel like modern Detective Conan movies.

But 2010 as the end of an Era is also interesting to break down.  War on Geminar was the last real OVA saga, since then OVAs have only been for bonus episodes of TV shows and Hentai.  Oreimo season 1 was the last real Otaku Rights show before Otaku culture became too tolerated for such a premise to feel relevant anymore.  White Album and Yosuga no Sora were the last Anime adaptations of retro Visual Novels made before modern Anime styles got in the way of such adaptations feeling Retro (I love YU-NO's 2019 Anime but I do wish it could looked more like a 90s Anime).  For Pokémon Diamond and Pearl is the last generation I personally feel can be considered a classic gen.  Legend of The Legendary Heroes was the last major Fantasy Anime before the influence of SAO and LN Isekai took over (a few shows and movies with the vibes of these kind of Fantasy still get made but they get drowned out).

For both Superhero Comics and Anime the change from Golden to Silver is shockingly clean, with if anything a brief gap that feels like neither rather then a transitional period that feels like both.  With Anime it's only the change from Silver to Bronze I consider debatable at all, Fall of 94 and Winter of 95 can each go either way.  I similarly do consider the transition from Silver to Bronze for Comics the most stylistically complex (other transitions are only debated more by DC nerds because this is the only one where the continuity didn't change).  None of the shows airing in both Fall 2010 and Winter 2011 I consider defining shows of either era.

What to call the era the follows the Bronze Age after it's no longer Modern is what isn't so standardized.  For DC Comics it's the Post-Crisis era, I'm of the generation of DC fans who grew up with the Post-Crisis era being the current Modern Era.  But when did the Post Crisis era end?  During the early-mid 2000s we felt like it was still the Post-Crisis era but in hindsight a lot of what was special about the Post-Crisis era to many who consider it their favorite era of DC comics was already being eroded by 2002, I consider the reviving of Oliver Queen in the Quiver arc from 2001 a key turning point.

So with about 15 years seeming to be the average, we Anime fans may well be near the end of our current era, which is perhaps what a lot of people tired of certain current Anime trends are hoping for.  But we probably won't notice the change as it happens just as DC fans didn't and just as I don't think we noticed the huge shifts happening in 2010-2013.  Madoka Magica was a big deal immediately, but how soon did people realize just how much it had completely changed the game for it's Genre?  Maybe the upcoming Madoka movie will help end the very same era the original show helped start?

But what will we call this era?  DC fans were lucky being given a convenient name early on, though it was originally used to denote continuity changes more so then an era.  We have been using some terms to describe the modern state of Anime, but they tend to refer to specific subgenres of what's going on now rather then all of it.  What do Dark Magical Girls, Isekai, VRMMOs, Magic Academies, endless Fate/ Spin Offs, and Battle Royal/Death Games all have in common?

I know sometimes the Post Crisis era is also called the Dark Age of Comics because of Watchmen/DKR influence.  And indeed some of those Anime trends are Dark but not all of them, Isekai is usually the opposite and plenty of classic style Mahou Shoujo have coexisted with the Madoka Clones.

Maybe "The Light Novel era" works.  LNs were a thing during prior eras and they portably will still be in future eras just as the Edgy Anti-Heroes of 90s Comics didn't just disappear.  But it does feel like this is an era where even some things that aren't LN based often seem like they are because of how pervasive their influence is.

Occultic;Nine subverts the Flat Earth Atheist trope

First of all this post is going to spoil some of the central twists of the Anime Occultic-Nine, if you haven't seen it already I suggest you do so quickly, it's very underrated and is only 12 episodes and it's both subbed and dubbed on Crunchyroll, and it's a fitting show for Halloween month in my opinion.

Flat Earth Atheist is the TVtrope term for when a character is written like a strict hyper rationalist materialists even when in a setting where denying the Supernatural is a lot less rational then it is in our world.  Occultic;Nine is a show that at first one might think is going to feature that trope but actually doesn't.

In the opening episodes both Gamon and Sarai are skeptical of the supernatural, the rest of the main cast are all pretty ready to believe in the paranormal so those two are the Skeptics representation.  While both are skeptics it's only Sarai who gives off that smug Reddit Atheist energy, he's the character who a genre savy viewer will expect to act like Fred in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. Gamon's skepticism is a lot less central to his identity.

So that's why it's interesting how in episode 7 following the reveal that they've all been Ghosts for 3 episodes it's Sarai who's mostly accepted that the evidence as pointing to that being the case even before it's made truly indisputable.  While it's Gamon who's in denial, but his denial is framed as Emotional coping not a product of whatever his ideology was.

So it's an Anime where the true Rationalist accepts the facts even when they go agaisnt his prior world view and the "Flat Earth Atheist" was never actually that much of an Atheist.

Halloween Anime recommendations by Streaming App

It’s time for me to do another Halloween Anime Recommendations post. This time the structure shall be by what legal streaming sites (if any) you can watch them on, cause I think in my prior versions of this the need to say it for each entry separately and then add edits when changes happen later made them difficult to read.  But it does mean some shows may get mentioned more than once if they’re on more than one website/app.

I’m starting to write this many months in advance with the plan to post it on October 1st 2023, I intend to double check and make sure everything I say here is on a given website/app still is, but if anything slips through the cracks I apologize.  Also knowing my luck something could be taken down the day after I post this.

I’ll start with the Freest Anime Streaming Site, RetroCrush, because getting people to access what's most accessible is one of my main goals.

The Vampire Princess Miyu OVAs from the 80s are still there, and last I checked, still only Dubbed which is sad because it’s one of the few things where I don’t particularly recommend the Dub, the Dub is adequate, it certainly could have been worse, but sounds stiff at times.  But besides occasionally awkward Dub voice acting they hold up really well, with a nice mood and atmosphere amplified by really distinct sound effects.

Boogiepop Phantom is is there which I wasn’t expecting.

They also have Go Nagai’s The Devil Lady which I recently watched and is pretty good.

The movie Hells is pretty fun as well.

Honestly there’s probably a lot more on Retrocrush I’m just not familiar with yet, my tastes in Anime are pretty modern, fortunately they have a Halloween Collection of their own featuring the shows I just listed.  And maybe if I’m lucky before October is over they’ll add some of the stuff I plan to talk about at the bottom of this post.

A number of Anime on Retrocrush are sometimes also on similar Free apps like Tubi, MidnightPulp and Filmrise, but I don’t feel like keeping track of which.  Since almost all Anime on any of those is also on Retrocrush with the most notable exception being Case Closed/Detective Conan which isn’t a Horror show but has the occasional Hallween episode.

Of the 50 episodes on Tubi none work as a Halloween episode. Of the original 123 on Filmrise Episode 20 A Haunted Mansion Murder Case would probably be the first.  Season 2 Episodes 6-7 Mountain Villa Bandaged Man Murder Case also works, episode 24 qualifies but it’s not one of my favorites.  Season 3 Episodes 7-8 have Ghost in the name.  Season 4 Episodes 2-3 is another Mountain Villa set up, however I feel episodes 6-7 is the most traditional Halloween episode among them since it’s Dracula themed.  Season 5 episode 6 is also worth mentioning.

I recently learned that Cowboy Bebop The Movie is essentially the Die Hard of Halloween movies and it’s only on Tubi.TV.

Pokemon has its own Free Streaming App PokemonTV, not all of the Anime is on there and much of what is often changes, but the earliest Seasons usually are as well as most spin off series not part of the main Anime.  The Early seasons have a few Spooky focused on the Ghost Pokemon, and the Generations Miniseries has one for one its Gen4 entries.

On Adult Swim’s App and Adult Swim On Demand should still be Housing Complex C which last year very quickly earned its status as an essential Halloween recommendation, it finally cracked the code of how to make Lovecraftian Horror work in a visual medium. 

HIDIVE still has some of the best Halloween Anime, but it now lacks a couple key Anime that it used to have.

On the subject of Zombie Anime, as I’ve said before, if you want something that feels like a Moe Anime take on George a Romero watch School Live!.  But if you want one that feels more like a Zack Snyder Zombie Movie go for High School of The Dead.

One of last year’s recent additions to the Halloween Anime Canon is Call of The Night which isn’t actually scary at all but is still pretty watchable and has the right vibes.

Monster Princess is a fun and trashy Halloween Anime.

Lunar Legend Tsukihime’s 2003 Anime is not liked by most fans of its franchise, but I found it enjoyable and certainly fits the season.  

Rozen Maiden also has nice Halloween vibes.

Vexations of a Shut-In Vampire Princess will start airing on October 7th six days after I plan to post this.  So I don’t know if it’ll actually be good or not but I’ll check it out.  [Update: this show isn't what I expected, it may still be good but I don't think it fits as a Halloween show.]

[Update: The Eminence in Shadow season 2 happens to begin with a Ghoul arc.]

Honestly I wouldn't recommend subscribing to Amazon Prime just for the Streaming Anime that comes with it, but between all the good non-Anime stuff on Prime (like Britannia which can be a fun show to watch for Samhain) and saving you shipping and handling on Amazon orders there isn’t much of a reason not to get it.  In which case there are a couple Anime you can watch there specifically.

Elfen Lied I dedicated a full post to back in August..  In short it gets dismissed a lot today as the ultimate substance-less edgelord Anime, but there is a real Heart to it that those critics are ignoring, I’m even willing to call it downright Wholesome at times.  But however you interpret it there are certainly many who’d find something like it fun to watch for Halloween.

Vatican Miracle Examiner is a 2017 show I didn’t finish, but I’m willing to recommend it to people who have Prime on its first 4 episode Arc alone.  It’s like the ultimate absurd B-Movie horror premise, I don’t want to spoil where it goes, just trust me.  If only it had a Dub.

Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarock seems interesting.

In addition to the Anime that comes with Prime you could also Digitally purchase some stuff if you can afford it, like Lupin III Secret of Mamo (I don’t know which Dub the Amazon purchase comes with) which has potential Halloween appeal.  The original Vampire Hunter D is also Purchasable that way.

Hulu has some options but I wouldn’t recommend subbing to Hulu for Anime alone.  Some of what is and isn't on Hulu seems to rotate a bit, it has a lot of the same stuff HIDIVE does but I’ve never noticed any of the Halloween stuff I mentioned above on it before.  It also has some CR overlap.

The original Hellsing (not Ultimate) is another Anime I consider fun for Halloween.

Seraph of The End: Vampire Reign is a show I had fun with once a few years ago but haven’t rewatched it since.

Blood-C is amazing, I was enjoying it from early on but then was totally blown away by where it went.

Wandering Witch is about a Witch but usually isn’t actually scary.

Netflix is one of the more expensive but it does have some solid options.

Vampire in The Garden is a show I enjoyed in the Summer of 2022 but forgot to talk about when October came along.  It’s the kind of show I would have had a lot more to say about if I could have seen it during the height of my Vampire fixation in 2009-2014.

Monster is a classic 00s Anime that is on there now after lacking a legal streaming option for years.

Fate/Apocrypha is a show I cautiously recommend with its unique takes on Frankenstein and Dracula and Jack The Ripper.

Zom 100 is a new show from this year that I haven't watched any of yet myself so I don’t if i can recommend it, I may try it during this month.

And Netflix also has some Resident Evil content.

Castlevania is a show I have mixed feelings on, including being mixed about if to even count it in an Anime discussion.  And its spin off Nocturne went up just a couple days before October started.

[Update: Good Night World released on Netflix on October 12th wound up having some Halloween appeal.]

Crunchyroll, some may argue I should’ve started there since it’s used by pretty much every Anime fan willing to pay for a legal streaming App at all.  It has a greater volume of stuff then HIDIVE, I’m not sure I want to write mini reviews of everything on there potentially relevant.

The one I most actively recommend is Garden of Sinners aka Kara No Kyoukai which sadly still isn’t dubbed but is fantastic regardless.

Gankutsuou is a classic no one should miss out on.

Sankarea is very good, I could have sworn it was on Hulu when I first watched it but now it’s only on CR.

In/Spectre is another one I'll go out of my way to recommend since some prominent Canadians have been stupidly hating on it, don’t listen to them it’s awesome. 

 Ms. Vampire who lives in my Neighborhood is a fun show from recent years.  Zombieland Saga is a show I still haven’t watched myself but I’ve heard consistently good things about it from those who have.  Holy Knight is a Vampire OVA I have mixed feelings on.

Dance in The Vampire Bund is interesting.  Its pilot works as a neat short story all on its own, I think many will who won’t like the rest of the show.  It’s also a shaft show so cna visually remind one of other Shaft shows like…. Omg it just occurred to me Monogatori could be Halloween relevant but I can’t watch it, it has no dub and is already Text heavy even before Localization.

Occultic;Nine and Chaos;Child are good recommendations if like me you’re feeling oddly Nostalgic for 2016 and 2017 this year.

Some stuff on CR may still be on Funimation if you're still subscribed to it (or if it even still exists in October), some may even still be only Dubbed there like Boogiepop Phantom.  Phantom beats the proper Boogiepop and Others Anime on pure Aesthetic, but both are worth a watch.

Witch Hunter Robin is an old personal favorite of mine that doesn’t get talked about as much as it deserves.

Of CR’s planned Fall 2023 shows starting in October, only The Family Circumstances of The Irregular Witch seems even close to relevant, but I have my doubts. [Update: turns out this is the kind of show who's one joke wears thin pretty quickly.]

[Update: Dead Mount Deathplay is a fun show with good Halloween vibes, and it's second part starts today October 10th.  Don't know if it's Dub will resume before October ends though.]

.......

Sadly there are still some Anime that can’t be legally streamed anywhere including some Halloween relevant options.  Occasionally a sufficiently old and niche one can simply be found on YouTube like Monster of Frankenstein or the Live Action Boogiepop and Others movie both of which I recommend.

I don’t want to publicly promote where I go to watch what I can’t officially watch for a number of reasons.  Otherwise I’d definitely direct people to someplace where they can watch Karin, a great early 00s hidden gem Vampire Anime.

The 90s TV Anime version of Vampire Princess Miyu is a mixed bag (especially its Dub which is indeed worse then what the OVAs got), but I do see value in some episodes so I am sad it’s not streaming anywhere.

Most of the Blood The Last Vampire franchise can’t currently be officially streamed, the original movie from 2000, Blood+, the Live Action movie and The Last Dark movie which continues the story of Blood-C, are all worth checking out. 

Detective Conan’s 25th Movie The Bride of Halloween is sadly still not officially localized for The West in any capacity.

But perhaps most tragic is the inability to legally watch Umineko When They Cry anywhere.  Like Tsukihime I'm nearly alone in considering it’s Anime good, but I consider it very good, I rank it much higher than Tsukihime. Its penultimate episode made me Cry.

And it turns out even Higurashi isn’t on HIDIVE anymore, along with Vampire Hunter D.  Two of the absolute must sees.  Night Walker is also gone.

I may add updates to this post if anything changes before October is over.

Unreleased Media shouldn't be counted as Lost Media

And yet it often is when I watch YouTube videos about Lost Media.

When you describe someone as being lost in the woods it's because that missing person is known to have gone into the woods thus it might be possible to find them there, maybe they aren't there anymore but they could be.  But if a person never left the house but was simply killed and buried in the basement, you're not gonna find them in the woods.

I'm interested in Lost Media largely as a subgenre of my more general interest in obscure media that has been influential in-spite of it's obscurity.  The idea that some piece of lost media could have had at least a subconscious influence on someone who saw it before it was lost that went on to make some influential art of their own thus making that piece of lost media perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle of the history of some popular Trope is part of why the subject fascinates me.  With never released to begin with Media we know that didn't happen, it was seen only by the very people involved in making it, and whatever influence an unfinished project of theirs had on their future work is probably already well documented.

Unreleased Media absolutely can be a fascinating subject on it's own, but it's a different animal from why Lost Media is so enigmatic.

So for example as an Anime Fan if Go For A Punch aka Saki Sonobashi was real, it fascinates me not just for how it could have been a neat creepy little OVA on it's own but also for how it could have had a forgotten impact on future horror Japanese Horror Media like Moon or Euphoria.

Pokémon: Path To The Peak is officially not an Anime.

It doesn't have a MAL page, each episode was released in the US before it was in Japan, the main Writer and Storyboarder both have non Japanese names, none of the characters have alternate Japanese names listed on Bulbapedia, and it looks artstyle wise a lot like a late 2010s Cartoon Network show.

Given the somewhat harsh opinions I've had on allegedly Anime Inspired Western Cartoons on this blog in the past, the last thing I expected was that the first one to get it right would be an actually officially licensed installment of an established franchise.  I thought the key would be an indie project like those pretty decent Western VNs that went viral in the 2010s.

But once again Nintendo understands the appeal of it's iconic IPs better then any other soulless corporation.  Pokémon is the one Nintendo brand that is as much of an Anime franchise as it is a Video Game franchise and they clearly get that.  For Mario it worked to let Illumination do their usual thing while playing into the 80s Nostalgia.  But Pokémon is first and foremost a 90s Nostalgia franchise and part of the infancy of Millennial Weeb Culture.

One of the things I said in one of those past posts is that a lot of my favorite Anime are Anime about Anime Fan Culture and so.one of the things I'd like to see is an "Anime" like that but which can make references innate to the Western Anime Fandom.  And that part of the appeal of this show, it isn't set in the actual Pokémon world but in a world like the real world.  

But it's also the Structure of a Sports Anime applied to the Pokémon Card Game.  Of course the trope about having a Parent who had a history with the same sport but left it for some reason does feel like more of a Western Sports Drama trope then a Spirts Anime Trope.  But how often does Western Media apply Sports Drama Tropes to a Nerdy Card Game? The very idea of applying the tropes of Sports Drama to Competitive Gaming is inherently an Otaku tradition, the closet normal Western Media comes to doing a Sports Drama for an unconventional Sport is Battle Rap and even that was only done twice and both had to have Eminem attached.

I also said before I would want such a Western Otaku Anime to reference more then just Weeb stuff, because most of us Weebs are combining our Japanese Media Interests with various other Interests we have.  So yes the way this show seamlessly melds some Western Ideas into the structure of a specific Anime Genre also fits.

I love how it reflects the way the first Generation of Pokémon fans now often have kids of their own.  Likewise I suspect Celestine's parents were Bronies.  

Celestine gives Non-Binary Vibes.  She has a very Tumblr Core Aesthetic which happens to fit her Rivals to Yuri role perfectly.

Sometimes it's good to not start at the beginning.

The thing I most lament about how Streaming is becoming the standard way all TV shows will be watched going forward is that younger generations are going to miss out on the magic of getting into a show because you stumbled upon a random episode flipping through channels.

I've talked on this blog before about how the first episode of Buffy I watched was This Year's Girl from season 4, an episode more then halfway through the show's middle season that brings back a character from the prior season.  Internet discourse about continuity lock out suggests an episode like that should be the absolute worst kind to start with, but I dug it, all the references to history I didn't actually know the context of just piqued my curiosity.

I've been thinking about this lately for a number of reasons.  I decided to watch The Devil Lady Anime Dubbed on Tubi even though I have still seen no Deivlman stuff.  But that's perhaps a bad example because from what I've heard this isn't necessity the same continuity as anything else.

But I also thought about it when watching the first two episodes of Ahsoka.  This show is arguably really meant to be Rebels season 5, but I only watched the first two seasons of Rebels, this show has clearly mentioned a lot of stuff from the latter seasons of that show.  And here's the thing, I may wind up not liking this show but that won't be why, I am following everything just fine, some stories start with characters with history being reunited but it isn't actually a sequel to anything that's just part of the set up.  Just like how my having never seen Bo Katan in any of her animated show appearances didn't hinder my ability to enjoy her in The Mandalorian seasons 2 and 3.

It's not surprising that Star Wars can work this way, because that's what it was going for from the beginning, George Lucas always intended for the original movie to be called Episode IV because he wanted it to feel like jumping into an old Saturday Matinee Serial in the middle.  Clone Wars went even harder on that aspect.

I also recently watched yet another AniTube video about the Three Episode Rule.  And this guy's take was that it may sometimes take more then three episodes especially for a show that's more then one Cour because he doesn't understand the Why of the Three Episode rule, it's never that the 3rd is the earliest that sells the show's full potential but that it often takes three episodes for the premise to be thoroughly set up, one of my favorite examples to demonstrate it with is actually Pokémon.  But that's besides my point here.

Much of the video was him talking about the difficult situation of convincing someone to sit through maybe 20some episodes to get the one that they feel really sells the show.  And the possibly of recommending to just skip right to that episode(s) never crosses his mind.

Even most of my earliest Anime memories involve watching something not from the beginning because I stumbled upon it on Adult Swim or that old AniMondays SciFi Channel block or even watching random episodes of a show On Demand when it only had the most recent 2 or 3 episodes, Noir, Madlax, Code Geass, Gundam 00 ect.  But I mainly don't try to recreate that experience today because....

1. I'm a MAL addict now and on MAL how many episodes you've seen is supposed to be from the beginning unbroken.

2. The randomness was the magic of it, I didn't start Buffy with that episode because it was what someone recommended, probably no one would have ever recommended to start there, I just happened to flip by the WB a night they were airing it.  And I had similar experiences with many other shows from Xena Warrior Princess to House M.D.

However in the last 2 years I have given myself a similar experience via Detective Conan aka Case Closed.  

I first got into it watching some of it's non-Canon movies, ironically the set of movies I now consider among it's weakest but they were good enough to get me hooked.  When I started watching the actual series I did start at the beginning, and then used an online filler free guide for some of it.  But it wasn't long before I mostly decided what to watch pretty randomly.  On MAL I'm listing myself as having seen only 134 but that's only unbroken from the beginning, I've probably seen over twice that actually.  And even those first 134 I didn't watch in order.

That is a pretty episodic show most of the time so naturally it does have plenty of good places to jump in randomly.  But honestly I feel even most episodes about one of the ongoing plotlines do a good job at being accessible to new viewers.  I'm still far from seeing all the episodes and I probably never will but this experiencing older stuff almsot on a randomizer feels like what it was like watching old Procedurals via random Syndicated reruns.

Right now if I did have to recommend a jumping on point I'd say it's among the 50 episodes currently on Tubi.TV (the Subbed and Dubbed are uploaded as if they were different shows) but not quite the first of them.  It's Makoto Kyogoku The Understudy episodes 993-995, it's not filler it actually does tie into a lot of ongoing plots but strictly not the main one, yet I still think it's a great first impression of the show.

But if you're a more Retro Style Anime fan who'd rather get into a show from the 90s in it's classic 90s look then among the first 123 episodes (which are on Filmrise and Crunchyroll but not Dubbed) I'd recommend The Kamen Yaiba Murder Case or The Locked Bathroom Murder Case.

Unfortunately the many good jumping on points that exist between episodes 123 and 754 aren't available on any official streaming sites.  There is also a Dub of the first 123 (numbered as 130 via longer episodes being split up) that isn't officially streaming anywhere.

Stan Lee once said that every Comic could be someone's first, but that didn't stop him from telling stories heavily budling on earlier ones, what he did was tell readers where to go to get that context.  And now we have all kinds of Wiki and Fan websites that help catalogue all that trivia.  

So if you think episode 8 of season 2 of some show is the best episode to get someone hooked with, just tell them to start with that episode, or a few sooner if you feel some emotional set up is necessary.

Elfen Lied is Wholesome Actually

I've watched the show a second time now and it holds up on the rewatch.  On some level I feel bad about waiting so long to watch it because of how so many people made it sound.  But on the other hand maybe it's good given the nature of the discourse around this show that I can provide the perspective of someone who didn't watch the show at all till I was already 37 in 2023.

Right now everyone who's made Youtube videos on the show either never liked it or are expressing some kind of shame that they liked this edgy shock value show when they were an edgy nihilistic teenager.  I'm old enough now that I'm not only well past whatever Edgelord phase I ever had but also past the following phase of feeling the need to go in the opposite direction to make up for it.

Elfen Lied isn't a 10/10 Masterpiece, it is often a lot darker then the baseline of what I usually want from Anime and I don't always like what I think it's trying to say.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone without heavy qualifications.

But there is another side to this show being left out of most of the online discourse about it.  There is a strong Found Family theme that gives the story some real Heart and makes it outright Wholesome at times, and that does provide Hope, a meaningful ray of light in all that darkness.  

And it is also sometimes just really funny, but not in an MCU way. Especially the scenes between Nana and Mayu.

I'm not sure why I personally value Found Family stories so much.  My own family background is a normative Nuclear Family and both my parents were good parents, I never wanted to run away or anything, and my extended Family is filled with some pretty cool people too.  I think it's tied to how I understand The Gospel, how it's partly about Gentiles being Adopted into the Family of Israel.

The show is visually Edgy mainly in it's over the top Violence.  There is a lot of Nudity but it's never actually framed as Erotic.  The flashback sequence providing Mayu's backstory is pretty tame actually, they are ambiguous about even if things went any further then what we saw.  And what little we saw is purely framed as being disturbing not as fanservice.

The show also has genuinely good misdirection sometimes, completely unlike Rian Johnson style "Subversions".

And the Dark content is justified. It acknowledges how Ugly the world can be but with a cast of protagonists who don't succumb to it.

The elaborate opening sequence of the Naked Girl escaping her prison and easily bloodily massacring all the gun wielding soldiers absolutely can work as a Female Power Fantasy.  As does what they keep doing with Bando, they set him up as this hyper violent misogynistic sociopathic pure avatar of Toxic Masculinity, and then proceeds to have three little girls, Lucy, Mayu and Nana each completely Humiliate him.  It's magnificent.

At anyrate I'll leave you with this Meme I made.

Penny Dreadful on Showtime

Now that Showtime is on Paramount+ I'm finally checking this show out, 4 episodes in at the moment.

In my repeated discussions of the Anime Community's Three Episode Rule I've at least once said that it maybe shouldn't even be limited Anime, that many Western shows also have Pilots that aren't exactly their best episode.  In the case of Penny Dreadful though I definitely see it even fitting the YGG's observation that it is often 3 episodes for a show's Premise to be clear.  In this case it takes 3 episodes for the main protagonists to officially form their little pact, and episode 3's take on The Creature managed to be both unique and surprisingly respectful to the original novel at the same time.

I was aware of this show as it aired, seeing some conversations about it on the old IMDB Boards.  I was annoyed that it named itself for this obscure medium of 19th Century Entertainment but then took it's characters from the usual 19th Century Novels, I wanted to see Varney The Vampyre finally get some Hollywood spotlight.

I also remember hearing that The Creature was using the name Caliban from The Tempest, so watching this soon after finishing The Witch Form Mercury is amusing

I'm not sure how much of it I'm gonna watch.  Sometimes it's been pretty Entertaining, sometimes it's boring.

Update: Episode 6 really draws my attention to how The Creature is kind of an Incel.

Tedium doesn't bother me as much as it does other Gamers

 At least people who make YouTube videos about Video Games.

Take for example discourse about The Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.  When I first discovered that online group think considered it the hardest Dungeon that made sense to me, it was the one that I remember taking the longest to figure out, but I never felt it was bad design, I always saw it as a difficult puzzle that was rewarding to figure out, I didn't need this modern genre of Zelda Dungeon Design breakdown videos to convince me it had a good design, I always knew.

What shocked me was when I learned a large part of why so many people were allegedly frustrated by The Water Temple was that they hated needing to go into the item menu every time they put the Iron Boots on or took them off.  Because that never bothered me at all, I just did it without even thinking about it all that much.

There is a limit to how much Tedium I can take however.  In Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door I hate how much back tracking I have to do in Chapter 4 specifically, that is the worst part of the game as far as I'm concerned.  But it's the only place where it really bugged me that much, in Online Discourse I've found even fans of TTYD tend to criticize it as a game almsot defined by excessive backtracking.  Not only does most of it in other chapters not bother me but I also genuinely love the entire General White Joke in chapter 7, it's the kind of genre self parody that I love the Mario RPGs for.

And I've noticed many other examples of this watching YouTube reviews of Video Games, the reviewer expresses annoyance at something being Tedious that doesn't bother me at all.  I don't specifically remember all of them right now but I know it's happened a lot.

But there is one more thing I want to comment on that perhaps isn't actually the same as all this but I feel is related.

YouTube Reviews of Video Games love to treat Cut Scenes not being skippable as an Unforgiveable Sin.  But to me allowing them to be skippable would be the Sin.

Number 1. I would almsot certainly sometimes skip a scene by accident.

Number 2. No matter how little you value the story parts of a video game they are part of the experience for any Game that has them.  Many artists put a lot of work into making those Cut Scenes they deserve to be watched.

Number 3. To those who maybe only want to skip them after they've been seen them once and don't want to see the same pre Boss Battle scene over and over and over again.  Get Gud and stop losing.