Q is Chekhov’s Gunman

I’ve currently only seen three James Bond films in their entirety, the first two Daniel Craig movies and most recently earlier this year The Man With The Golden Gun.  But I’ve seen clips of over movies before and I watched a bunch of Bond relevant Video Essays on YouTube this year because they simply were what was trending a few times.

Bond has been a very influential franchise,  so I can see Bond’s fingerprints on plenty of other media I’ve consumed.  Lupin III has been called the James Bond of Japan, a few of the 60s and 70s Godzilla films are referred to as being James Bond influences.  There are direct James Bond references in the Anime Moriarty The Patriot. 

What’s interesting though is how one of the key signs that something is really leaning into the Bond influence structurally is if there is a Q analogue. When Batman Begins was being hyped up Nolan was very open about the James Bond influence, and a key factor always pointed out is Lucius Fox as played by Morgan Freeman being Bruce’s Q.  Nolan's love of drawing on Bond continued with Inception and Tenet which both have their Q analogues. 

And a thing I’m sure I’m not the first to notice about Q is how his role is essentially to provide Chekhov’s Guns.  Professor Agasa has been referred to as Detective Conan’s Q, and in several of the movies that is really on the nose, just like Q he introduces some new invention early on which then plays a key role in the climax. 

The wording of Chekhov’s Gun is that because something is seen early on it should be used.  But no sane person is really going around criticizing every time some innocuous detail from act one doesn’t come up later. No it’s considered good writing advice for the opposite angle, anything that plays an important role in the resolution should be set up earlier, that’s how you avoid a Deus Ex Machina accusation. 

So Bond style movies without a designated Q character still have a scene or two that like the Q serve the purpose of introducing something that will be important later. Maybe the protagonist themselves invented whatever gadgets they’re going to use. 

And this is why I struggle at being an actually interesting blogger. I make lots of observations like this I want to share, but they don’t always lead me to any profound revelation.  Rather than continuing this Chekhov’s Gun train of thought I kind of want to share other random Bond related thoughts I’ve had this year. 

Ya know the Obi-Wan Kenobi parts of Attack of The Clones could be compared to a Bond movie just as much as they can to Film Noir Detective films. Ewen McGregor has a similarly dry sense of humor to Roger Moore and Christopher Lee is the villain.

I watched a Book YouTube video that separated all the Bond Novels both by which they felt were the good ones and which ones’ namesake films are a reasonably faithful adaptation of at least the same basic sequence of events. And the only novel that was both good and doesn’t have a close enough adaptation is Moonraker, which is interesting for having a villain who is a surviving Nazi War Criminal, not the most original idea for a Pulp Villain but they annoyingly keep staying relevant. 

When it comes to the various pitches Bond fans keep saying they want for the next movie, I kind of hope the Period Piece idea is the one Amazon doesn’t do.  Because when the Bond Novels (except maybe Thunderball) enter the Public Domain pretty much everywhere but the United States in a decade, period piece films that directly adapt those noble distinctly unlike how the Movies have typically been are exactly what people independent of Amazon will be able to make without Amazon shutting it down.  

So I say an old fashioned Black and White mid 50s set Moonraker adaptation is exactly what some independent filmmakers should right now begin preparing to make. In fact you can already do it in Canada. Maybe give it a different name since Pop Culture so much associates that name with something distinctly NOT in the book. 

My other advice for people planning to make their own PD James Bond projects in a decade is if you want to avoid Spectre because of the question mark that might still hang over Thunderball, just use Paul Feval’s Les Habits Noirs translated The Blackcoats as your international criminal secret society. Their English branch is sometimes called The Gentleman of The Night and their leader The Lord of The Night is sometimes plotting to liberate Ireland from British rule which I mention because another Bond video I saw talked about the lack of Ireland in the Bond movies.

In some small ways certain writers have always gotten away with treating Bond like he’s quasi PD.  Like incorporating the Mycroft Holmes was the original M fan theory.  Is there any fictional character from the same era whose name happens to begin with the letter Q who was also a scientist/inventor?

Frieren and Goblin Discourse

As played out as this discourse may seem I feel like I have something different to say about it.

First, while I am of the opinion that it is problematic to have inherently evil fantasy races, I can be fine with it if it’s done passively, if it’s just there and never drawn attention to. But when you take the time to raise the question only to take the deterministic answer, that's when I’m bothered.  Freiren does do that, but it’s so far only directly relevant to one Arc of the Anime and not many more in the Manga form what I’ve heard so I can grit my teeth through those parts and just enjoy what I like. 

Freiren’s predecessor in the world of Anime in this discourse was 2018’s Goblin Slayer, that one I couldn't finish because it was too innate the entire premise of the show. 

What really bugs me about a lot of the people so determined to attack those criticizing Freiren on this issue is not that they aren't bothered by it but that they are talking about those who are as Normie Tourists bringing Woke Politics into Anime.  Frieren and Goblin Slayer stood out to Anime fans because it is precisely in the context of Anime that this is unusual.  I’ve yet to see a high profile Western Medieval style High Fantasy Show or movie with Goblins that are good actually, even in Game of Thrones the White Walkers were soulless monsters.  It’s in Fantasy Anime where the default is to humanize even the enemies. 

Goblin Slayer aired the same season as the first cour of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime which took the exact opposite approach to Goblins, that show has 3 seasons and a spin off now and a 4th is likely coming. We see a similar approach to conventional fantasy monsters in Tsukimichi Moonlit Fantasy,as well as So I'm A Spider, So What.  Mushoku Tensei is often alleged to be in its source material the origin point of the modern form of Fantasy Light Novels, and it has a major storyline about Demons not being evil. Even in Solo Leveling, a show recently bashed as mindless trash there is an arc where the Demons are revealed to not be all evil.  Hell, even Gate, a show I see a lot of Fascism in, does not depict any race intelligent enough to speak as immutably evil. 

It stretches beyond just Fantasy btw, in Wedding Peach the agonistic society literally referred to as Devils are ultimately proven to not be inherently evil, which is exactly how the Magical Girl genre always does it.

There is a lot of strawmanning of what everyone on the “Woke” side of this debate is saying.  It’s not about saying you can never have a society or tribe that is in their current state opposed to the greater good.  No one is saying it’s wrong to kill the Goblins that are currently attacking you.

There has been talk of what Frieren does as a “Subversion of the Subversion”, that saying Demons aren’t inherently evil has become so common now that subverting that is more subversive. But a Double Subversion that just goes back to a regressive status quo is not interesting beyond the initial shock value of it. But let me tell you how I think a Subversion of a Subversion could be interesting. 

I am a bit tired of Frankenstein’s Monster being made completely innocent, where if he kills at all it’s always either self defense or an accident.  In the original novel he is a sympathetic character, who is driven to his monstrous actions by how he’s treated.  But he still intentionally killed a child to frame an innocent woman and cause her to be hanged, as just one example. The fact is the Creature’s characterization in The Novel is both literally and connotatively that of what we’d today call an Incel. 

I definitely want the Creature to be redeemed of his sins by the end, but it'd be nice for people to stop pretending he was without sin. 

Visual Novel adaptations

Visual Novels are a medium of entertainment I’m unable to consume myself for reasons related to my ADD and perhaps other undiagnosed disabilities I may have, it’s not that I’m unwilling or lazy it’s that I’m literally unable.

But they are an artform I greatly appreciate because they have been the direct source material of several of my favorite Anime while even more are the parts of franchises that started as VNs. So I want to advocate for them as much as I can as an outsider.

However a lot of Visual Novel fans have decided to resent their Anime adaptations, even the best of them, instead of appreciating them in return.  And to some extent I feel it shows the immaturity of the western VN fandom that they are like this.  Could you imagine if the film adaptations of Jurassic Park and The Godfather and the many highly regarded Dracula and Frankenstein films were constantly being called garbage because people who read the books were defining them solely based on how much content in the books aren’t in the films?  

I’m going to put the various Visual Novel based Anime into different categories. 

First are VN Anime I consider absolute masterpieces, as stand alone works of art these should be considered top tier no matter how unlike their source material they are.

Robotics:Notes

Steins:Gate

Chaos;Child

Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works (the TV Anime by UFO Table)

Higurashi When They Cry (The original 2006 Studio Deen Anime and it’s 2007 sequel Kai)

Kanon (2006-2007 Two Cour Kyoto Animation version)

Clannad + Clannad After Story

Rumbling Hearts

White Album

Comic Party

Next are ones I like about as much as those, but I do have a sense they could be done better.  

YU-NO: The Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound of This World (2019 Tv Anime)

Fate/Stay Night Haven’s Feel (UFO Table Film Trilogy)

Air (Kyoto Animation TV Anime)

Shuffle 

To Heart

White Album 2

Yosuga no Sora

Next are Anime I do consider flawed in some way, but still also see immense artistic value in.

Umineko

School Days

Steins;Gate 0

Chaos;HEad

Fate/Stay Night (2006 Studio Deen Version)

Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works (Studio Deen Film version)

Tsukihime

If there’s a VN Anime you like I didn’t mention it might be because I haven’t it yet, I’m still holding out hope for Muv-Luv getting a Dub.  Or I may not think of the source material as sufficiently qualifying as a VN like Neptunia or all those Gacha Game Anime.

I also for the sake of simplicity excluded ones that are just Hentai OVAs, plenty of them I do have thoughts on, but now isn’t the time for that.

All that also excluded that Anime that are spin offs rather than direct adaptations.

Another post about Anime Screenwriters

There's a Pokémon YouTube Channel I discovered recently called Funyarinpa Foundation that has some good videos talking about various writers of the Pokémon Anime.  I highly recommend their videos on Aya Matsui, Hideaki Sonoda and the 44 minute Serena videos talks about a writer associated with her episodes.  He's also discussed Takeshi Shudo in a number of videos, YouTubers talking about Shudo is far from uncommon but his perspective is still a unique one.

Reiko Yoshida is a writer I've talked about on this blog before and I keep discovering more about just how uniquely prolific she is. She's not the only writer to have written for both Dragon Ball Z and some classic Mahou Shoujo. But add to that her importance to the Digimon Anime, and that she wrote a Studio Ghibli film The Cat Returns, and the Anime adaptation of classic Shoujo Yuri Maria-sama ga Miteru, and unique 00s hidden Jem Romero x Juliette and multiple 2010s "Moe" shows like Girls Und Panzer and High School Fleet and most of what Naoko Yamada directed for Kyoto Animation.   And I find it hard to imagine anyone else who has such a wide variety of Anime in thier resume.  But there are many who know a lot more then I do.

And that's just stuff I'm familiar with that I consider her one of the main writers for. There are so many other shows she wrote a smaller percentage of episodes for, from Angelic Layer to Pokémon Journeys.  And then even more I still haven't watched any of.  

Her role in the history of the Magical Girl Warrior sub-genre is interesting for how it helps build a genealogy. She wrote for Cutey Honey Flash alongside veterans of both Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach. After that she then wrote the Tokyo Mew Mew Manga from 2000 through early 2003.  This seems to be the only Manga she ever wrote, she is mainly an Anime writer. Tokyo Mew Mew I view as kind of a key transition in the history of Magical Girl Manga and Anime, as someone who took way to long to even learn of the show's existence I quickly noticed ways in which it anticipated aspects of Pretty Cure. 

I just learned while writing this that she wrote a third of Shirobako. 

As the most popular and highly regarded Anime about making Anime I do appreciate the role the writing part plays in the show. The show starts with an Anime already currently airing so it's lead writer's job is presented as mostly done till he's called back in when the director wants to change the ending.  The second core follows an Anime form the start of it's production and so we see more of what the writers do with the guy we meet only briefly in the first cour serving as a mentor to the young aspiring writer who's a friend of the protagonist. 

The lead writer of Shirobako was Michiko Yotoke.  She also has ties to the Magical Girl genre having written 3 episodes of the Pretty Sammy TV Anime and 11 episodes of Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and the Scenario for Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, and a number of shows that others might be more inclined to count as part of the genre then I would, most notably Princess Tutu which I do count more then I do say Utena.  Besides that she's written for a lot of stuff I've seen but not many I'd consider favorites.  Though normies might be interested in that she wrote 8 episodes of Cowboy Bebop. 

A Fantasy World needs to feel Alive in order for me to become invested in it.

Magic Knight Rayearth is in my opinion one of the most overrated Fantasy Anime.  There were some aspects of it I did enjoy, but what really stifled my investment was how the world never felt lived in, our heroes on their journey only ever visited one village.  It really felt like the only people who exist in this world are the ones who play important roles in the story.

And that is one of the most important things in selling a Fantasy Setting to me, it’s what Tolkien and Lewis excelled at and even Game of Thrones early on took some time to consider.

Whether or not the world actually feels alive, feels like it is filled with people and cultures worth fighting for is more important to me than whether it actually feels “Unique” or distinct from other Fantasy settings.  

This is a factor in why I don’t get tired of the modern trends of Isekai and Quasi-Isekai in Anime.  More cynical Anime critics keep mocking how they are all the same discount Dragon Quest worlds, with identical looking medieval towns and D&D Fantasy Races.  But I don’t care because even at their most generic each of those succeeded in making its world feel alive.

This is perhaps one of the most blasphemous opinions you can have in the Anime Community, to suggest that one of these Classic Shoujo Isekai, one written by the Clamp Team, actually has worse world building then In Another World With My Smartphone.  But that is my honest opinion.  Even the modern Isekai that even I haven't gotten into beat Rayearth in this area. 

No one is more disappointed that I was disappointed in a Clamp Anime than I am.  I like Cardcaptor Sakura. I love Angelic Layer, I recall liking the TV Anime version of X and I've enjoyed Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle so far [Update: I also really want a full Anime adaptation of Angel Sanctuary].  So I really expected Rayearth to live up to its hype, but it didn’t. 

Some of the most misleadingly named Anime are the LN adaptations with really long titles.

Take for example the currently airing My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's at 5 episodes in how the Assassin protagonist compares to the Hero does not feel like remotely the point at all.  Now this could change later, but I don't see how it could ever over take everything else the show is currently about.

But for a more nuanced example let's look at my personal favorite Anime that has this kind of title, In Another World With My Smartphone.  The protagonist's Smartphone is a prominently used plot device but it's not what the show is about.  For myself and I think most other fans it's true distinctive feature is it's approach to taking the non Monogamous resolution to it's Harem.  It's no longer the only Anime or even Isekai to do that at all, but it's distinct approach to it still stands out to me as the best which I already wrote a blog post on.

Since it's so popular to insist Mecha shows aren't actually about the Giant Robots, I should be allowed to argue that the Smartphone Isekai isn't actually about either the Smartphone or even really being an Isekai.

As far as I can tell the first Anime with this kind of title was My Little Sister Can't Possibly Be This Cute, and it is indeed one of the least misleading, it conveys that the story is about the relationship between a brother and sister that may or may not go in an incestuous direction  But even then is Kirino's "Cuteness" really a deciding factor in why anything happens?

So why does this happen?  How the do the stories that devote the most words to titling themselves most often get it wrong?  I can't even say this is an example of why you shouldn't prioritize plot over story in how you title something because I often don't even think they're the best descriptions of the plot.

Remembering how a lot of Light Novels started as Web Novels on random websites, I feel like these sentence long titles were often originally writing prompts the author was using to get themselves started but never something all binding to what the story became.

But it's interesting how there are Anime with single word titles where I still struggle to deduce how that word at all describes the show.  Yet none of those titles feel actively misleading in the way one of these sentence long titles that at the very least does accurately describe an aspect of the story.

More Detective Conan episodes are up on Netflix now.

 With it being a new themed collection, it becomes necessary to start explaining to new comers what the chorological order of episodes is.  

So far it's pretty simple, the first two episodes of the show start the Black Organization collection, then watch all 11 currently in the allies and rivals collection then return to the Black Organization collection.

Part of me is a little disappointed this drop was all episodes already part of the Funimation Dub.  yeah that Dub isn't legally streaming right now but I have them DVD.  It is interesting to compare though.  Now that we have all these very early episodes part of the new Dub the moonlight Sonata Murder Case being missing stick out, it may not be important to understanding any recurring guest start but it's arguably the most important to Conan's character development, and it will be called back to in the next Heiji case.

The second Cour of this selection will almost certainly start out still in the firs 123 as well.  The first 2 hour episode is bound to be included since it's the second Ran suspecting Conan episode and second featuring his parents and introduces he Gunam Inspector.  And then there are some more Heiji episodes including the introduction of Kazuha.

Once it does leave the first 123 I wonder if they'll include the case that immediately followers Haibara's introduction, it's important to cementing her as a main cast member and is the first appearance of Officer Sato though she doesn't do a lot in it.

Update: They went the Boston rather then Southern option for the Kansei accent, the first time I've seen that in awhile.

Episodes 5 and 10 are the ones I'm most surprised to see included, I didn't think they'd be in any collection.  Episode 10 is now an episode I've seen with 3 different English casts since for random reasons it's the only episode I've seen of the original Singapore Dub.

Higurashi still holds up as the best Horror Anime

The Studio Deen adaptation from 2006-2007 primarily but most Higurashi content has some value.  I rewatched it for October of 2025 for the first time in a few years and it more than holds up.

This post will contain spoilers for the entire franchise and maybe even also other When They Cry stuff.  

There is no single central thesis here, I want to talk about a number of Higurashi related thoughts I’ve been having lately.

Higurashi is at the forefront of VN Anime being irrationally hated by VN purists.  In a way it’s the most actually contentious as shows like Steins;Gate and KyoAni’s Key adaptations are the ones even the strictest VN purists have trouble denying are good Anime.  Shows like Tsukihime, Chaos;HEad and Umineko have a seeming lack of defenders other than me because only fans of the VNs watched them at all.  Then there are the truly niche VN based Anime that it feels like only I care about one way or the other like Robotics;Notes and YU-NO. 

Higurashi meanwhile is an Anime that when most of the casual Western Anime Fandom didn’t even know what VNs were was un controversially deemed the Greatest Horror Anime, if there is any one Anime general Horror Fans should start viewing as required watching for the Genre it is Higurashi. Now wider VN awareness has made people more aware of the critiques of it as an adaptation which combined with a generation of Zoomer Weebs who think 00s Studio Deen Anime hasn’t “aged well” has weakened its legacy. 

I have a playlist on YouTube called Anime Defined.  

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CWxmx4wepj2gZet-357KQT3bgJjLErC

None of the videos in it are my own but they together help educate people on how Limited Animation is the Feature not a Bug. Over the course of the 2010s it became increasingly more common for some TV Anime to be able to seem like they aren't limited Animation.  Which has bred an increasingly common generation of Fans who refuse to see the Artistic strength of TV Anime of older eras.  Studio Deen in particular having their entire legacy denigrated like this I think is because in the late 00s and 20tweens they were making the last truly Tezuka/Dezaki style Anime.

When it comes to Fate/ there was a time when I myself shamefully agreed with people who thought Deen’s versions looked bad. But I’ve come to appreciate how aesthetically they suit the original vision of the Nasuverse far better.  I still prefer UFOTable Anime for their overall handling of the story itself and their Animation/Arstyle is far from bad either in general or for the Nasuverse specially, the Nasuverse is flexible enough to modernize while still maintaining its true spirit. 

With the history of Higurashi Anime however the more modern they get the less they feel like Higurashi to me.  The Kira OVAs were already a downgrade visually but still essentially true in spirit.  The Last Period guest appearance was fun but I’d hate an entire Anime of them looking like that. And the very Goopy approach to Gou and Sotsu is very off putting, conveniently enough though I found it most tolerable for the very characters that those shows ultimately focused on the most. 

There is more to what makes an Anime work visually then just Animation, Artstyle and Character Designs.  There are also all the things a Live Action Director also needs to consider, the staging and framing or scenes, which in this case the Source Material gave the Anime little to work with. Deen’s Higurashi adaptations also excelled in this department and again comparing Gou and Sotsu really makes that clear. 

It is particularly the revisiting of scenes during Satokowashi that I find Gou’s staging objectively inferior in every possible way.  This is ironic because narratively Satokowashi is the part of Gou I actually like (well the first 5 episodes of it at least).  

Its revisit of the final confrontation between Takano and the Game Club is just in a completely flat setting with the Club members all standing next to each other like they’re posing for a picture.  In Kai this is on a slope with the victorious protagonists looking down on the defeated antagonist, and by the time that Shot is fired Hanuyp is standing in front of Mion who’s standing in front of the rest.  It is so incredibly Cinematic yet Gou just lazily has them standing around.

That’s the most egregious example but I feel essentially the same about all of them, from when Keiichi first remembers Onikakushi to Okunogi giving Takano the gun. It is so comparatively uninspired. Maybe the only reason I’m not similarly critiquing these elements of this Arc’s original scenes is because there is nothing to compare them to.. But it’s equally possible they were just lazier with the scenes that had been done before, or worse yet afraid of being accused of plagiarizing Deen.

For the VN Purists the core critiques of the Deen Anime is what it left out. Since I originally watched the show blind and followed everything just fine and understood all the nuances and subtext and didn’t feel anything was missing you aren’t going to convince anything left out was necessary. And honestly the more I’ve come to know about what was left out there are indeed some scenes I do wish could be animated some day, but there are others I honestly prefer being dropped.  

In the core story of Higurashi Frederica Bernkastel is an unnecessary complication, the Lore fact that Rika is kinda technically a different character when she speaks with the deeper voice is something I’d honestly rather not be the case, I prefer it to just be a matter of Rika showing a hidden side to herself. When Bern showed up in the Umineko Anime I knew she was a form of Rika somehow just from seeing her character design, I didn’t need the name itself to have already been in Higurashi. 

I’m also not a big fan of the cliche twist of revealing two twins had been permanently switched at some point in their childhood. We can debate endlessly whether or not this adds anything to Mion and Shion’s story but to suggest that it’s necessary to understand why Shion goes down the path she does in Eye Opening is absurd to me, what the Anime gave us was sufficient for me to understand her descent into madness when I watched it blind and it’s still sufficient now. At any rate it’s also not contradicted in the Anime, it just isn't brought up. 

Because of the nature of what kind of story Higurashi is, there is a fan theory that when it comes to the smaller detail differences every adaptation of Higurashi can be equally Canon because we know some of these Arcs played out more then once but with small differences. 

This works mainly for the Question Arcs.  The last two Answer Arcs are the last two fragments in a way that makes it so even their basic sequence right from the beginning can only happen once each. They are the Ten and Ketsu of the Higurashi Kishotenketsu. The ambiguity is the first two Answer Arcs.  

The Atonement Chapter in its entire final act is equally unique.  But the gist of everything up to the moment that Keiichi fully remembers the ending of Onikakushi could have played out more than once and then led to worse endings. 

Eye Opening on the one hand definitely is a variation of Cottondrifting, However it’s very final moment, everything Shion is thinking as she falls to her death in the VN and Manga is meant to to Metaphysically mark her Soul and ensure she won't go down this path again. But interestingly enough that’s one of the things the Anime left out, there is a brief moment of her wishing she could do it again, but it’s nowhere near the same. So perhaps Anime Eye Opening simply is a different Fragment and is perhaps what Shion’s death usually looks like in Cottondrifting Fragments.  The implication of this metatextually is that perhaps Shion’s spiritual salvation is dependent on that Fan briefly breaking her fall, which is the kind of random arbitrary Deus Ex Machina I like actually.

Another way in which what the Anime leaves out could play into this Fan Theory is that at the start of Onikakushi Keiichi in the VN is implied to be subconsciously remembering a prior version of these events because of the “I’m Sorry” bit.  This being left out of the Anime could mean that Anime Onikakushi is that earlier Fragment. 

With both Rei and Kira I don’t care much for their heavily fanservice opening episodes but I enjoy the rest of them.  Outbreak is my least favorite Higurashi Anime by far. Gou and Sotsu I have incredibly mixed feelings on. 

When Gou was first airing I was not into it for the first Cour and a Half and oddly felt alone in that looking at the online discourse I was exposed to.  Then Episodes 18-22 I did find a genuinely compelling story and felt maybe this could all prove worth it.  I was then mostly bored by the last two episodes of Gou.  For Sotsu I was right back to feeling how I first felt about Gou for 13 episodes.  But I then really enjoyed the last two episodes only to find that they were what the broader fandom hated, turning on what came before only because they now think it ends badly. 

I then spent 4 years mostly ignoring the existence of Gou and Sotsu except to clarify their exclusion from what I meant by calling Higurashi my favorite Horror Anime.  Which was exasperated when the Deen Higurashi Anime were dropped from HIDIVE and Gou-Sotsu became the only legally stream able Higurashi Anime.

This October I rewatched much of Gou and Sotsu including what I had failed to watch Dubbed before and it softened my overall opinion somewhat.  I have come to accept this new English Cast for Higurashi but I’ll always prefer the original Dub cast.  Then after letting that rewatch sit for a few days while watching a lot of Higurashi YT content, both Video Essays and Abridged Parodies, I decided to sit down and do a rewatch that was of just specifically Gou 18-22 and Sotsu 14-15. And it turns out I enjoyed that experience with no notes, those 7 episodes work great as a 2 and a half hour movie. They tell the core story of Gou-Sotsu, everything else was needless at best, skipping over the specifics of what Satoko did during these loops makes it much easier to digest her villainy. 

I think for five episodes Satokowashi did a good job of building up this conflict between Satoko and Rika.  And I relate to Satoko now more than ever before. Others before me had said she can be read as having ADD or ADHD in this story and as someone with ADD myself (a factor in why I prefer Dubs and can’t read Visual Novels) I very much see it.   And that’s why all the Fandom the mocking of how much emphasis is put on the Studying bugs me, Satoko is undiagnosed so doesn't have the actual medical terminology to explain her problem, but even if she had many Neurotypicals would still fail to understand how much more difficult this can be for someone with a learning disability. And I don’t know if any schools in the 80s knew how to help someone like Satako but it certainly wasn’t a rigidly authoritarian meritocracy obsessed conservative one like St Lucia.

The last two episodes of Sotsu are where others turned on it mainly because they hated the very Genre of this story suddenly changing, and that’s exactly where I’m the opposite, I never needed a Higurashi sequel to be another Mystery, and certainly not to be Horror.  The most highly regarded Higurashi OVAs are the ones that were just Slice of Life fun with maybe a little drama sometimes. I don’t want the franchises I like to have Genre consistency, I want them to have Character consistency. The actual core story of Gou and Sotsu does justice to these characters while taking two of them in a new direction. It’s the rest of it that hurts the characterization for the sake of forcing a new mystery.

It’s easy to dismiss enjoyment of the last two episodes of Sotsu as purely superficial, yes it’s objectively a “well animated” fight, but if that was all it had I wouldn't have kept loving it so much even on the 3rd time watching it. 

There is a moment in Lindsay Ellis’s video on Guardians of The Galaxy 2 where while showing the fight between Gamora and Nebula she says “maybe you haven’t been in a literal fight like this with a family member…. but you’ve probably been in a fight that felt like this”.  And that is why this fight between Satoko and Rika works, especially when watched soon after watching the first 5 episodes of Satakowashi, for all the timeline-universe jumping fantastically Dragonball Z madness the underlying core emotion behind it feels real and raw and relatable.  That’s exactly what I come to Anime for.  It’s what actual Battle Shonen Anime I feel fails to live up to, but when their visual language is borrowed in these more Emotionally driven kinds of Anime it works perfectly. 

However, Gou when viewed in its intended watch order is a crappy sequel.  Why isn’t Rika’s first move to try and recreate the last Fragment? or at least make a move against Takano? Instead the focus for three arcs is on recreating a classic Arc but SHOCK it ends differently this time. Cat-Deceiving chapter hints at actually new scenarios only to rush through them to end on the big reveal.  Sotsu spends 13 episodes revisiting those events from different POVs with the only things close to actually new ideas being ones I never wanted.  And the answer to the question of why so many things happened differently is basically just someone pushed a magically make you insane button on a different character each time.

I don’t see the value in a “what if Mion went full Level 5” scenario to begin with.  But having her mostly just do again everything Shion did only sometimes slightly differently is the most unimaginative way you could do that. It did make me laugh how she even repeated the blunder of accidentally killing Oryo with the Taser before she could question her. 

A Mion scenario as the second fragment of this new Loop could have fit into the real story at hand if Rika had ever actually gotten to react to it.  Instead Mion kills her instantly and given the preconceptions Rika entered this with she probably assumed that was Shion the entire time she was being choked out.  Maybe the fact that Mion went Level 5 could have been the thing that truly revealed to Rika how different this new game board is, certainly a more emotionally impactful character to do that with then Oishi.  Instead it happened solely because Satako was morbidly curious. 

A lot of my issues with Gou scenarios are that they should have had Rika be the primarily POV character from the start for the Question Arcs.  That would be a true inversion of the original structure where we don’t get her perspective till the Answer Arcs. But that wouldn’t have lent itself to the marketing gimmick of being able to allegedly be both Remake and Sequel at the same time. 

I’m really not qualified to explain in depth why it was so problematic to revisit the Teppei abusing Satoko storyline this way. As a Universalist Christian I do not have a problem with the basic concept of redeeming Teppei, in fact I like how his new Dub actor plays this more cheerful version of the character at the end. But creating this scenario where Satako fakes the abuse this time really sours the legacy of what once was one of the most powerful and effective depictions of this issue in Anime.

So yeah, I don’t think there’s any Anime I have more truly conflicted feelings towards then Higurashi Gou and Sotsu.

Shonen and Battle Shonen

Shonen is a Manga Demographic term that sometimes gets mistaken for a Genre term in the west.  What people typically mean when they mistakenly use Shonen as a genre term is Battle Shonen.  But even what that means can be itself a bit arguable and I suspect another case where that’s not what they call these kinds of Manga in Japan.

I tend to refer to Battle Shonen as a genre I’m not very into with Dragonball Z being the only Battle Shonen Anime I’ve watched to any significant degree.  The shows I’m intending to tell people I haven’t watched when I say that are Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, One Punch Man, My Hero Academia, Black Clover, Demon Slayer and JJK.  Interestingly I know that at least one of those isn’t even technically Shonen but Seinen. 

Most of the Shonen Manga based Anime I’ve completed are shows I didn’t even originally think were Shonen but rather Seinen.  Death Note and Future Diary are in particular the shows that forced me to rethink what I assumed Shonen meant when I learned their Manga were officially Shonen.  I was associating the term Shonen exclusively with kids shows, that’s not why I’m not into Battle Shonen, I absolutely love watching some kids' shows like Classic Mahou Shoujo and Pokémon. If there is a show other than DBZ I’ve watched that can be considered a Battle Shonen it’s probably one of these “I can’t believe it’s not Seinen” shows. 

And there are a few Shonen with enough female perspective Melodrama to make some at first think they're Shoujo like Karin aka Chibi Vampire and Shattered Angels.

Pokémon not being considered Battle Shonen isn’t because of the Shonen part, it may not be a Manga original franchise but it has Manga and they are Shonen and there is no dispute the target age demographics of the Pokémon Games and Anime originally was principally Shonen.  It’s not a Battle Shonen because even though Battles are a part of Pokémon's appeal it’s not the structural foundation the same way it is in a Battle Shonen. 

The other important Shonen I’m into is Detective Conan and the kinda same universe series Magic Kaito. In order to call them Battle Shonen you’d have to get pretty abstract about what it means to battle someone. 

Maybe some of you think Detective Conan should be part of the could pass for Seinen category, and I’m not saying it can’t pass for Seinen. But I do not see it as difficult to pass for a kids show.  For all the desire some have to deny that it’s a kids show it really doesn't do much more murder and violence than Batman The Animated Series did. 

There is also Full Metal Alchemist.

OVAs were a big part of why the Anime industry is different from Western Animation.

The technical definition of OVAs do exist in Western Animation as well.  OVA stands for Original Video Animation, it refers to Animations that were directly released to home video.

However straight to video releases in Western Animation are usually feature length, with 70 Minutes being the standard for the line of Direct to Video DC Animated movies that started in 2007 but 90 minutes for the 2008 Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight movie. 

The Anime OVA industry that started in the 80s and reached its height in the 90s had some OVAs of comparable runtime to those, like Lupin III The Fuma Conspiracy. But the standard was getting something basically the length of an episode of a TV show or maybe just a little bit longer, maybe a full 30s minutes like TV episodes pretend to be but really aren’t due to commercials. 

And that’s what I think the western mindset has trouble relating to, paying the full price for a VHS tape or DVD and only getting one single episode feels unthinkable to us.  Remember Video Rentals never became a thing in Japan, no one was renting these before deciding if they were worth it, and largely because of that the standard price to buy a VHS was a lot more expensive in Japan than it was in the US even factoring in the Yen v Dollar exchange rate. So these Otaku were willingly paying a lot of money for just 30 minutes of content.

English localized releases of OVAs when they happened at all usually came later when they could put multiple episodes of a series on one tape or disc. So even Americans who got into Anime through bargain bin English Dubs of 90s OVAs never experienced what following OVAs was like in Japan.

I at first thought the one thing that could be a true Western OVA was Pryde of The X-Men, but then I learned that was a TV special first.

So when recommending an Anime from that era to someone not versed in how the Anime Industry works, they may ask if it’s a Movie or a TV show even though many really are neither but something harder to explain the concept of. 

Today the OVA is basically dead.  They still exist only for Hentai and the occasional bonus episode of a TV series included with its BluRay Release which fits the technical definition but isn’t being distributed the same way. However when they died is difficult to pin point, they lasted longer than I initially thought. 

One could argue they ceased to be the same as what they originally were as soon as DVDs replaced VHS as the standard format of Home Video releases.  I wonder if that is something that took longer in Japan then it did in the US or happened sooner?  The youngest movies I ever watched in a VHS format were from 2002 (Spider-Man and Attack of The Clones) but I'm pretty sure Return of The King had VHS releases in 2004 however I recall by 2005 at least all my local Video Rental places only had DVDs. 

But while their golden age was past plenty of original OVA releases happened in the 00s like Studio BeeTrain's Murder Princess.

I had in a few Blog Posts proclaimed Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar from 2009-2010 the last OVA series. But I kinda knew that was not quite true even at the time.  Code Geass Akito of The Exiled and Gundam The Origin were OVA projects of the 2010s I was well aware of, and while they are part of established franchises they really cannot be dismissed as mere bonus episodes.  

However they are series where every episode has about a 70 Minute Run Time. So in that sense they are OVAs technically but not quite the same as the Classic OVAs I’ve been talking about. The Gundam Unicorn OVAs are close to that but a little shorter.  The War on Geminar Episodes were 45 minutes per episode, also a little longer than what the average originally was but not feature length. 

The last of the Detective Conan OVAs came out in 2012.  While all of those OVAs fit the “bonus episode of a TV show” description in terms of their content, the way they were released does seem to have been like classic OVAs.  Then there's the Rei and Kira OVAs from the Higurashi franchise (and Outbreak which I don't recommend).

Today the role OVAs used to play is now filled by ONAs, but many ONAs are also functionally the same as a TV Anime in how they come out, plus the full season binge releases. 

RetroCrush now has Anime as recent as the 2010s on it.

Any time you create a place dedicated specifically to old nostalgic stuff there will inevitably be disagreement on what’s actually old and nostalgic enough.  The older you get the less significant a passage of time a single Decade feels like.

So here I am in 2025 objecting to 2014 shows like Terror in Resonance (which I do like, this is not about hating on it) being seen as remnants of a bygone era even though in 2005 I absolutely did see 1994 stuff that way. 

However this is justified by the connotative differences I see between the different words we use to convey this idea. 

A Classic is something a piece of Art can become instantly, Frieren is a good example of a contemporary Anime gaining Instant Classic status in the eyes of many. We associate the term with old stuff mainly because the Classics of older eras have stood the test of time and so there is less dispute that they are indeed Classics.  But then people call anything of a certain age a Classic even if it was never highly regarded at the time or in hindsight thus diluting it's meaning. 

Retro however to me implies more than just age in a very different way.  

As a Millennial I don’t know if this is unique to me or not but the first time I heard the word I was under the impression it specifically meant the 80s, as in something could be too old to be Retro just as much as it could be too young. I now realize that was never officially what it meant, it was just a product of living through an era when that was the most popular Decade to be Nostalgic for. Strangely that era seemed to begin while we were still in the 90s and hasn't fully gone away. 

However what remains in my perspective is that to be Retro implies not just being old but being old in a way where what’s coming out today isn’t even made of the same stuff anymore. 

Anime has in a lot of ways stagnated (In a way that Western Entertainment media has not.), the trends that are defining Anime now are for the most part the same trends that were defining it in 2014. Both in terms of popular genres and artstyles.   I can absolutely see what someone might mean by looking at 2014 American movies and TV shows and saying "they don't make em like that anymore", I would disagree with that making them inherently superior or inferior but I can see how one would say that.  With Anime however they definitely are still making them like they did in 2014.

I could show Terror in Resonance to someone who hadn't heard of it before even though they are fairly versed in Anime history and tell them it came out last year and they would have no reason not to believe me. However that same hypothetical person in 2015 would not be so easily tricked by a 2004 Anime. 

That said it’s not like I can give a solid objective explanation of what it is Anime I consider Retro have that the rest do not. Being Cell Animated rather than Digital helps, but plenty of Early Digital stuff feels Retro now too thanks to how early Digital Animation hadn't standardized how it worked yet. 

I'm glad Terror in Resonance is on a Free Website, but it’s also on Tubi.Tv where I feel it fits in better. 

Lex Luthor is proving a surprisingly difficult character to get right.

I like James Gunn’s Superman movie.  But I’m a bit annoyed by how over half the discussion of the film is about the film’s Lex Luthor with many saying it has the most perfect understanding of the character, when for me how the film handled Luthor is what I liked the least. 

First of all, as someone who likes the CEO Lex Luthor, it bugs me how many modern takes seem to feel forced to include the CEO element when they really just want to do the Mad Scientist.  This is what the Zach Snyder and James Gunn's takes on Lex Luthor have in common, to them the time as a CEO is just a step in the origin they want to get out of the way as quick as possible.  

I want years, maybe even over a decade of Lex Luthor secure in his CEO position before any type of downfall or prison time happens, that’s what we got in the 80s-90s DC Comics and Superman The Animated Series.  Lois and Clark is an interesting middle ground where I’d ideally want multiple seasons in a TV Series but at least getting a whole 22 episode season is better than only one single movie.  For comparison David Xanatos in the Gargyles Cartoon is a good way to handle things. 

However there is another issue I have with this take on Lex Luthor that would apply whether it’s a CEO or Mad Scientist take on the character.   Which is why I still prefer Batman V Superman’s Lex to this one. 

I dislike the very thing so many people are praising right now.

I don’t want Lex to be single-mindedly obsessed with Superman in the way The Joker is with Batman. He should hate Superman only because he’s in the way, Superman currently takes up a large percentage of his energy, and it can over time become somewhat personal.  But this desire to make destroying Superman the only real goal he actually cares about is something I hate.

Gunn cited Allstar Superman as an inspiration and yeah that comic is largely where this way of characterizing Luthor comes from.  And I honestly don’t mind it so much in that story as its own stand alone thing.  But as the primary characterization of Luthor in what’s supposed to now be DC’s main Cinematic Universe, it’s really dull and short sighted. 

In the early history of the CEO Lex Luthor I prefer the way he was written by Marv Wolfram over John Byrne, making him a CEO was Wolfman’s idea in the first place and Byrne it turns out was a Right Wing Conservative so always out of touch with why most Superman fans think Superman’s best enemies are Corporate War Mongers and Slum Lords.  After that I again liked how he was handled in season 1 of Lois and Clark and STAS. I liked Lionel Luthor on Smallville (at least the first 3 seasons) as a glimpse of what a fully developed Lex Luthor could be like. And interestingly enough I liked the take on Luthor in season 2 of The Joker Blogs which is not official but an internet Fan Film project taking off of The Dark Knight universe. 

Ya know what story originally with a non CEO Lex Luthor that could easily be rewritten as a CEO Luthor story?  Superman IV The Quest for Peace.  Luthor’s plot in that film could easily lend itself to a corporate War Profiter, and then you could also make him the guy buying the Daily Planet as well. 

Low Church Fantasy

I’ve noticed a trend lately of YouTube videos analyzing how fictional religions in Fantasy settings often don’t feel authentic to how real Regions function, including one focusing specifically on the lack of Schisms. 

So I want to talk about something that perhaps only I care about.

Fantasy religions Aesthetically based on Christianity are always specifically based on High Church Christianity, usually quite specifically Roman Catholicism. More disorganized local spirituality in Fantasy stories are usually more inspired by Animist polytheism like you’d see from Indigenous Tribes of North America or the Sami or local Shintoism. 

This probably has to do with the simplified understanding of Christian History where there is no Protestantism till the Middle Ages are over so therefore it’s assumed Baptist or Quaker inspired communities would be out of place in a Medieval Europe inspired Fantasy Setting.  

However I have seen plenty of Fantasy settings that extend their real word inspirations into the Renaissance, Enlightenment or even Victorian period. Like all those Otome Villainess settings, or really any with a Magic Academy element.

But besides that Medieval Proto-Protestants of different kinds did exist, most relevant here would be the Waldenses/Waldensians. Talking about the Waldenses as Low Church Proto-Protestants is made more controversial than it should be because of how they factor into the imagined revisionist histories proposed by Landmarkists.  I do not believe in the core Doctrine that often lies behind Baptist Successionism theories (that being in the “True Church” requires an unbroken chain of Believers Baptism back to the Disciples), so whether or not there is direct continuity between the Waldenses and 15th Century Anabaptists doesn’t concern me. However I am convinced there is plenty of solid evidence that many Waldenses (they were probably not always all the same) were Credo-Baptists who practiced Congregational Polity. 

There's also the Lollards from English History, some of them were more Low Church then the others, Wycliff himself was certainly not a Credo-Baptist but I think some later Lollards did come to that conclusion.

George MacDonald was a Congregationalist Minister who was a huge player in the origins of the Fantasy Genre being a cited influence on both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.  The way Goblins tend to be depicted in Fantasy began with him and he also arguably wrote the first Isekai. Unfortunately his influence was filtered through a Catholic and an Anglican. His position on Church Polity is not the deviation from the Established Church of England MacDonald is most well known for, and indeed Universal Salvation is also something I’d like to see in the Fantasy Genre more often.

The major impact this could have on both the Mechanics and Lore of a Fantasy Setting is the question of Apostolic Succession.  High Church denominations believe the Spiritual Authority Jesus gave the Apostles is only truly inherited by the Clergy, while Low Church Christians believe strongly in the Priesthood of All Believers.  Today most major Baptist denominations are Secessionist on the question of the Spiritual Gifts meaning they believe the more explicitly Supernatural Manifestations of that authority don’t really happen anymore. However most Pentecostal and Charismatic denominations are also Low Church in form, and the Quakers have their Inner Light doctrine. 

So you could easily still have your Catholic Church like institution be the one wielding the most political power in Society, seeking to restrict the knowledge and use of Healing Magic (and other forms of what a Final Fantasy player would call White Magic) to the Clergy, even having most Adventurer Guilds refuse to give proper Healer licenses to anyone the Church doesn't approve of.  While the Low Church Schismatics are teaching that such Magic can be called upon by anyone who has Faith. 

People also criticize how passively Pro Monarchy the Fantasy Genre often seems. Well I’ve written before about how Congregationists were the harbingers of modern Democracy and Socialism, so perhaps having some Low Church Schismatics is also how to bring about a Revolution in a Fantasy World. 

Baptists and Quakers also have a long history of opposing Slavery, the Southern Baptist Convention were the exception not the general rule. A Fantasy story inspired by the history of The Baptist War in Jamaica could be interesting. 

Maybe Fate/Stay Night is supposed to be a little confusing?

I’ve come to an epiphany lately about the nature of Fate/ Watch Order disputes (and perhaps the same applies to other franchises), a lot of it is about which Fate/ project to start with will leave a newcomer the least confused for the shortest amount of time.  Which Anime is quickest to get to some kind of accessible explanation of what the Holy Grail War is and how the Nasuverses’s Magic System works. 

No one is willing to consider that maybe being confused is a deliberate artistic choice, that maybe part of the fun of this entire genre is being thrown into a world you at first don’t understand. People have gotten so invested in hating on J.J. Abrams style Mystery Box story telling that they are overcorrecting into rejecting any kind of story telling that doesn’t explain as much as possible right away. 

In my last Fate/ Watch order post I’d already softened my past advocacy for starting with Fate/Zero.  What I did say was that even if you want to start with the Studio Deen Anime because it’s the only adaptation we have of the first Route, you still should start with Episode 0 and Episode 1 of UFOTable's Unlimited Blade Works because they are the most faithful adaptation of how the VN starts regardless of Route, then you can start Deen/Stay night with episode 3.

A recent video about Fate/ Watch Orders I stumbled upon, (that I think may be AI at least in it’s Voice Over), specifically said Episode 0 was too confusing, it was a bad place to start because it seemingly expected them to already know all this stuff.  But the original VN also began by being from Rin’s pov over that exact same period of time but probably taking even longer to get to the end of it. That is always how we were meant to be introduced to this world. And I think that was a very bold choice that fans need to start having more artistic respect for. 

Maybe the people who can’t handle being out of the loop for that long simply aren’t this Franchise’s target audience. 

Episode 0 of Unlimited Blade Works shouldn't have branded as specifically Unlimited Blade Works, it's 100% before the point of divergence between the routes, and then so is 99% of episode 1. 

And honestly thinking about all this has made me care less about Watch Order correctness in the first place.  Maybe recommend your friend to start with whatever Fate/ Anime you think they would like the most. If they’re a Magical Girl fan who doesn’t mind the lewder takes on that genre then have them start with Prisma Illya, it actually was the first Fate/ Thing I watched and I was not confused in any way that made it hard to follow. 

Maybe there is even a kind of person for whom Fate/Apocrypha would be the Fate/ Anime they’d enjoy the most even if they jumped into it with no prior Nasuverse context. 

There are certainly people for whom Lord El Meloi’s Case Files would be the best Genre for them to enter the Nasuverse through. 

My past advocacy for starting with Fate/Zero was never simply because it was Chronologically first but because as a story bout Adults rather then High Schoolers it will be more accessible for many potential viewers.  And that theory has been vindicated by the vast majority who have watched it first.  The only thing that's come to bother me is when Video Essayists come to conclusions about what the show has to say about Saber's character and ideals when they haven't seen how her story concludes. 

She Professed Herself Pupil of Gandalf

She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man is a Winter 2022 Isekai Anime that I gave an 8 out of 10.  I’ve watched the entire show twice and some of it more than that, all Dubbed of course.

I’ve talked before about how Tolkien’s influence on the Fantasy Genre is generally more indirect in Japan and especially Anime adjacent media.  So this show beginning with a pretty explicit LOTR reference is in fact uncommon.  The main character clearly based their Gaming character on Gandalf.  But he winds up stuck in a Cute Anime Girl form by the end of the Pilot. 

Now one could view that as a pretty surface level reference, and indeed for the most part the show and its world is clearly based on the typical Dragon Quest inspired JRPG and Record of Lodoss War references the rest of the Isekai genre is, with a brief Magic Academy subplot.  But there is something else in the early part of the show I at least think Tolkien would have appreciated.  

This also fits into the Sub Genre of Isekai where this Fantasy was once a VRMMORPG Video Game that somehow became a real tangible physical material world like Log Horizon and Land of Leadale. 

So there is a question at first as to whether now that adventuring in this world is in fact dangerous if our protagonist will take the risks entailed to help deal with the Crisises it is facing. Or consider this world that began as a mere game worth taking such risks for. It’s not all that explicitly asked but the subtext was clearly there.

There is a scene in episode two where the protagonist stops to look at some flowers, observe how pretty they are and that they smell nice and decides that this beauty is what is worth protecting. It may be just a coincidence but to me that moment is very Tolkien.

Shun in Spider Isekai is NOT a Deconstruction

So I'm A Spider, So What! Is an Anime where I like all the characters, it has a great cast.  It’s currently the first time I’ve ever listed a show’s Title Character as one of my favorites on Anilist (the others I’ve considered are all Spin Offs, so main protagonists who started as supporting characters).  And it’s also now the first time I’ve ever listed any Male character as one of my favorites, much less the male lead.  Those are two different characters in this case. 

In my recent watching of YouTube videos covering this series I’ve seen at least two different people describe Shun as a Deconstruction of the Hero Archetype.  And this just shows how watered down the concept of Deconstruction is in modern Internet Discourse.

I don’t agree with people like Study of Swords that Genre Deconstruction doesn’t exist and can’t be a valid reading of any Anime. I oppose viewing Madoka Magica as a Deconstruction but I do think some Anime can be viewed that way, not this one however. 

It is not unusual at all for a Hero to make mistakes that have consequences, or for them to have spent much of the story unwittingly working for the real villains, or for other characters to chew them out for their Naive Stubbornness.  But in Anime especially, that Naive Stubbornness is often vindicated in the end, and now that I know all the spoilers for what this Anime hasn’t gotten to yet I can say with confidence that is where Shun’s story is headed. No one thinks Frieren is deconstructing Himel because of how the child Demon plot played out.

Kouki’s storyline in Arifureta especially in season 3 would be much more legitimate to describe as a Deconstruction of the typical JRPG Anime designated Hero.  But to me personally it doesn’t come off as an at all meaningful Deconstruction but more having the official Hero fail just to subvert expectations (even though it's exactly what I expected) and make the protagonists look better by comparison.  I enjoy much of Arifureta but I’m not gonna list it as a favorite. 

How inclined one is to read what happens with Shun in the Anime so far as a Deconstruction says more about the viewer than the story.  It tells me you're the kind of Nerd who thinks Batman’s No Kill rule is stupid and that Superman is boring and unrelatable. The kind who care a little too much about Aragorn’s “Tax Policy”. 

A lot of this obsession with reading Shun as a Deconstruction is tied to how a certain very vocal kind of Anime Fan simply doesn't like him as a character.  Indeed I maybe should have included him in my prior post about disliked Male Anime Protagonists but I’m glad I didn’t because I now have a more distinct perspective on him I want to share here. 

For what is right now still most of my life I saw myself as a Cis-Het Male, and even after I started seriously questioning my Gender Identity I remained only attracted to Women or at least very Femme Presenting individuals. But in the last couple of years I have come to realize that my orientation may be just as fluid as my identity, that I can be attracted to certain men in a very Androphilic way, or at least certain male Anime Characters. 

So any claim that it’s inexplicable or unbelievable how many girls like Shun will not fly with me because I am attracted to Shun, I like his personality and how he looks (in the Anime the LN art I’ve seen of him isn't the most flattering) and I specifically like him over any of the other Cis-Male characters in this series or most from other series more conventionally considered the Hot Guys of Anime. And I’m attracted to him in a very Feminine way, I don't fantasize about being a Seme bending him over I fantasize about being his Oneesan Mommy Dom (Which is conveniently a role none of the Girls in his canonical Harem fill).

Superman 2025 is a good movie

In terms of feeling like the Superman Comics I'm a fan of it's better then any prior Superman movie in Live Action or Animation for that matter. 

There are small nitpicks I could complain about.  I don't think saying this Superman has been active for only three years is enough time to explain how developed this world seems. 

It does bug me how often modern Superman depictions have Lex be a CEO to start only to get arrested and made into the Mad Scientist. If you want Lex and his role in this world to be an allegory for Elon Musk and the cult of personality surrounding him then he should NOT be an actual legit scientific genius. 

But all of that is more Meta issues then anything about this film as a a stand alone film, which it does work in-spite of also being the launch of a new Universe. 

I'm going to elaborate on some of my thoughts on the early Detective Conan movies.

The first movie, The Time Bombed Sky Scraper is a perfect Cinematic introduction for Conan because of two things.  It has a cold open depicting the end of the average Conan episode is like.  And it's about Shinichi Kudo more then any other film.

Shinichi Kudo is actually the same person as Conan Edogawa and is thus the main protagonist of all these films. But they are treated as separate characters in the credits for convenience in how to credit the Voice Ace actors involved.  But also when you look at these events from the perspective of the people who don't know everything the audience does, Shinichi seems more involved in some cases then others.

This movie features a flashback to a Shinichi case from before he was shrunken, a villain who is in part targeting Shinichi specifically, and the main villain is exposed in the end using Shinichi's voice, something we only see a few other times in the movies and each of those there is still more focus on other guest characters. 

The second movie The Fourteenth Target is the one currently on the TMS YouTube Channel and will be till the 13th.   It's one of my least favorite, it's especially underwhelming compared to the one before the three following it. 

My main issue is that I know in real life the shoot the hostage tactic is in fact not considered a good idea.  But other aspects of the plot do feel uniquely contrived.  

The third film The Last Wizard of The Century I have called the best of them all a number of times. I've considered walking that back slightly, it's definitely a 10/10 on the same level as the two movies following it. 

As someone who's read the classic Arsene Lupin Novels, this feels more like one of those then any Lupin III Anime does.

I also really love how it ends, by which I mean what leads into the credits not the post credits stinger. The way it weaves the remaining threads of the narrative together in a fairly intimate moment with beautiful music scoring it.  It's perhaps one of my favorite endings of any film.

The fourth movie Captured In Her Eyes is to start with one of the films I like to recommend as showing how you make something like a Film Noir without needing to be a period piece or use some fantastical excuse to pretend to be one. 

Now some may feel annoyed at the Amnesia plot rendering Ran not herself for much of the film.  But the pay off at the end is that we get to see her do something important to her character the prior films never got to include.

The fifth film Countdown to Heaven is the third film featuring Haibara Ai but the first that's really about her to any degree and as such makes a good introduction to her character.  But also if you want to slip it chronologically into your watch of the Black Organization collection on Netflix and Crunchyroll it happens between the Reunion with The Black Organization three parter and The Mysterious Passenger. 

So four of the first five films are still ones I consider the highest level of Detective Conan films.  But there are very few I dislike to any degree, they are pretty much all Fun movies.  

The next level would be movies 7-9 and 11, those would be the A Tier if I made a Tier ranking. 

Why Episode 425 Black Impact! The Moment the Black Organization Reaches Out is an important Detective Conan Episode.

Major Spoiler Warning.  

I'm about to talk about this episode in the Context of my relationship with it as someone who didn't watch all the DC episodes I've seen in order, so I'll be spoiling not just the episode at hand but episodes as recent as 2023.

Spoiler Alert!!

I had been watching through all the Black Organization relevant episodes is roughly chronological order up to the end of the Vermouth arc, but then really started jumping around more randomly. So for example I'd seen all of The Clash of Red and Black before watching this episode that started the Kir saga.  

So I found it interesting how Conan is kind of technically committing Treason in how he's working with these FBI agents operating in Japan without permission, removing evidence from Crime scenes and lying to cover for them to the Japanese police officers he works with more regularly and knows more personally. I found it curious how the Japanese audience was so cool with all that. 

Then I finally watched this episode, a mistake Conan makes early in the episodes puts his Family in danger and at the end the FBI and Akai particularly essentially saves them by taking the Heat for Conan's tracking device. 

And so Conan in indebted to them, and that a very Japanese sense of Honor can explain his loyalty to them. 

So I am glad this Episode is Dubbed now, I just also wish more of the prior episodes with these FBI character were as well to set it up. But I did also recently argue against Continuity Lock Out. 

More Detective Conan episodes are on Netflix now.

The new Dub is still great, awesome cast and good scripting, and each episode is a good one including two of my favorite of the entire series. I do want everyone to keep watching them so they'll make more. 

However I can no longer stay silent about how frustrated I am with how this is being handled.

I would be less annoyed by how many important episodes are being skipped if these weren't the only ones we can legally watch even just Subbed between 123 and 754.  If TMS would just make all of it available Subbed somewhere then I could direct people to the context they're missing. 

I was fully prepared for the amount of content we'd get today to be no more then what we got in terms of runtime.  However when they said this would end the Black organization collection I assumed it was gonna end with episode 345 Head to Head Match with The Black Organization: A Duel Mystery on a Full Moon Night the finale of the Vermouth arc.  

Episode 425 Black Impact! The Moment the Black Organization Reaches Out is a very good and very important episode but one I was willing to wait for since it's the start of an era of the show not an ending.  

For today's drop I would gladly have traded it for Contact with The Black Organization 309-311 and Four Porsches 338-339.  And of the episodes between Mysterious Passenger and 345 I would also for a collection branded as being about Conan VS the Black Organization consider them more directly relevant then The New York Murder Case, that case's relevance to the BO storyline is largely in hindsight, Contact is the episode that really first starts revealing what the BO is actually doing. And Four Porsches is most of the set up that 345 pays off. 

And if we could have had more episodes I'd next have prioritized Hidden Bathroom Secret 340-341 and 343-344 The Connivence Story Trap.  

The New York Murder Case I would maybe have saved for a Collection focused on key episodes of the ShinRan Romance storyline in which I'd include every episode where Ran suspects the truth at least up to The Desperate Revival 188-193, maybe episode 10, Ski Lodge Murder Case 84-85,The Memories of First Love Murder Case 100-101, The Locked Room in the Sky: Shinichi's First Case 162 (which is a double length episode), The Secret Rushed Omission 271-271 and again 343-344.  

If that is the theme of the next collection we get which I think it should be, but again being given only 12-13 episodes, I would skip those already covered by the first 123 and focus on the episodes the West hasn't officially gotten yet. 

Another theme the next collection could have is an FBI characters focus, Cinema Saturdays is doing the two most FBI centric movies in a row, and it would fill in some gaps. It could start with The Battle Game Trap 226-227, then 277-278, 343-344 and Four Porsches could also fit here, The Man from Chicago 258-259.  And then Shadow of The Black Organization.  Those being the options for just the first Cour of such a collection, the second cour would have to be the full Clash of Red and Black, not a single episode skipped.

Update August 26th 2025: Contact With The Black Organization has moments that could justify making it part of either a ShinRan or FBI themed selection, it'd be hard to argue that's the main point of the episodes, but I also feel it's hard to argue the Black Organization is the main point of the New York Murder Case. 

I've also recalled that a few things my memory associated with Contact actually happened in the prior two parter 307-308 On The Trial of The Silent Witness.  But none of the most essential stuff. 

Genre tags are applied too loosely on websites like Crunchyroll.

I'm singling out CR here because HIDIVE's much smaller library makes how the critique could apply there less annoying. 

It's bad enough these Anime websites are mostly using normal Genre instead of distinctly Anime genres.

It's most egregious with Drama.  Drama is something that's arguably in everything, Drama as a Genre to me is really primally the absence of anything else, or at least the absence of Fantastical or Action/Adventure elements.  

After that the same almost applies just as much to Romance or Slice of Life, I'm more open to Fantastical shows being counted as Slice of Life but it has to be something like Slime 300 as opposed to Reincarnated as a Slime. 

I guess the problem is on CR as well as Database Websites these Tags serve two different purposes.

There is when you are on the Page for the Show or Movie itself where I guess maybe some people do want to know if this Isekai has more Drama compared to other Isekai.

But I mainly use these Tags to search for shows.  And so I want clicking on Drama to be something that narrows things down, I'm looking for shows like Rumboing Hearts or Toradora or School Days, not DanDaDan or half of CR's Isekai.

Pokémon and Nintendo Fandom

One thing I feel is missing from how many people reminisce about the early days of the Pokémon fandom is how the Pokémon Fandom and the wider Nintendo fandom related. 

Pokémon is the only franchise represented in the original Super Smash Bros. that wasn't old enough to even have an SNES game, a few others had no NES games but only Pokémon had no SNES games.

The way Pokémon so quickly jumped to being arguably the most mainstream popular of all of them and certainly bigger than every franchise but Mario and Zelda did garner some degree of subtle resentment from the more long-time Nintendo fans.  Not me though, I was a Nintendo loyalist for years already before I heard of Pokémon but once I discovered Pokémon I quickly thought of it as part of the family.  But I noticed that for example early Sprite Comics predicated on being epic Nintendo crossover fics never included Pokémon.  And when there were Pokémon references it sometimes felt kinda mocking.

Today Pokémon isn’t different from other Nintendo first party franchises because it’s seen as too new, Pokémon is older now then Mario and Donkey Kong were when the first Smash came out (in fact so is Smash itself) and some even younger franchises are firmly part of the Nintendo pantheon now.  But Pokémon does feel a little different still in some hard to explain way.

Nintendo loves dropping Easter Eggs to their other first party franchises in various games, but Pokémon does feel a bit left out of that tradition, both in terms of being referenced and making references. Smash seems to be the only place Pokémon coexists with the other Nintendo franchises and it’s not first party only anymore. 

It might be because Pokémon is by many thought of as a Multimedia franchise rather than a Video Game franchise first.  The whole Pokémon saying only their own names trope is an Anime invention that proper Pokémon games rarely incorporate and when they do only really for Pikachu. Except Smash of all places where Jiggleypuff also still does this (I do appreciate how Rachel Lillis name is immortalized as part of the Smash Ultimate credits).

In which case it does go both ways.  Comic Party is an Anime from OLM the same studio as the Pokémon Anime that I refer to as the Lucky Star of the early 00s, more specifically it is for OLM what Lucky Star is for KytoAnimation on a meta level. And yet Pokémon is the one OLM Anime left out of all that referencing even though it was by far their biggest franchise.  Perhaps because Nintendo didn’t want their new Crown Jewel being so directly linked to Otaku Culture. 

Pokémon is by money earned the largest IP franchise of all time, beating out even Star Wars and Batman.  So it’s perhaps the one franchise Nintendo feels they don't need to cross promote. 

On a Fandom level Pokémon’s long term ubiquity has made it now the opposite of what I observed in the early days.  Pokémon references inevitably show up in fan content related to other Nintendo and other Anime franchises.  But a Pokémon specific YouTube channel is not likely to bring up Metroid.

It’s a shame because I think there is a lot of fun you could have with fan theories based on connecting Pokémon to the rest of the Nintendo multiverse, like the parallelism I see between the Lake Guardians and the Golden Goddesses. Or how Kirby could be a Pokémon anatomically related to Clefairy and Jiggleypuff.  Heck one could go beyond just Nintendo and speculate on a relationship between Deoxys and Jenova.

And if Link isn’t out of place in Mario Kart then Pikachu certainly wouldn’t be.  If a Side Stepper can somehow drive a Go Kart so can a Krabby.

Keep watching Detective Conan

 Countdown to Heaven will still be on YouTube till Tomorrow Evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL039jPVS2k

I recommend doing a binge of the episodes on Netflix where you watch this movie between the Reunion three prater and Mysterious Passenger since that's when it originally came out. 

After that The Raven Chaser will be up for a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LtigIQlsqM

Then the other movies we'll get during August are announced to be  Sunflowers of Inferno, Dimensional Sniper (the only one where I'm unsure if it'll eb Dubbed or not) and The Scarlet Bullet.

And rewatch the new Dub on Netflix and/or Crunchyroll as often as you can.

Update August 8th: And we have an announcement now that more are coming to Netflix on August 21st.

https://tmsanime.com/news/more-detective-conan-coming-to-crunchyroll-netflix

Detective Conan Subbed

For the past few years the majority of the time I've spent watching Anime Subbed has been Detective Conan.  That's a franchise I got into via a decent chunk being Dubbed, and what is Dubbed I've mostly still only watched Dubbed unless the Dub didn't exist yet when I first watched it.  The exceptions to that being just a handful of early FUNimation episodes.

Of the theatrically released movies that only ones I haven't watched Subbed are the ones that were already Dubbed when I first got into Detective Conan in early 2022, plus the most recent one I haven't seen at all yet.  Those being the first 6 movies and movies 19-23.

This will soon changed as it's now confirmed TMS is putting Countdown to Heaven the fifth movies on YouTube Subbed. I intend to watch it each movies when it's on YouTube, I may not always be able to make the Saturday Evening premier, but some time in the following Week I with it on YouTube. So it looks like that means all of the first 6 movies I'll be watching Subbed finally.

Watching something Subbed is easier when I've already seen it, I already know the gist at least of what is going to be said.  4 of the first 6 movies I've watched 4 times each now, the other two twice each all the way through.  One of this four is Countdown to Heaven.

I honestly am kind of excited, watching movies I already love a great dela in a new way.  I'm pretty sure the DVDs I own also have Subs, but even if I did watch those they would probably be different from hat TMS is about to put on YouTube.

I am of course not opposed to the films being Redubbed with the new Cast on Netflix, though I would prioritize trying to make Dubs for ones not Dubbed yet.

Weird phrasing that only happens in English Translations of Anime.

The first big one of these is “Thanks a lot”.  In my experience in any context but Anime that exact phrasing is always sarcastic. But it’s used for genuine expressions of gratitude in English Dubs of Anime all the time.  However even after being highly into Anime and noticing this for nearly a decade now my ears still can’t get used to hearing it being used non sarcastically.

Another is “That’s my line”, again anywhere other than Anime that phrase would be associated with borrowing someone else’s catchphrase. But in Anime Dubs it is often used with a clear intended meaning of “that’s what I was about to say” or “that’s what I should be saying” or something like that.  And again even though I've been consuming Anime doing this for years I still can't really get used it.

In both these cases I think it’s largely a product of Dubs needing to match the Lip Flaps.

However the Hentai example I have I don’t think I've encountered in Dubs, it’s all been Subs and Doujin Scanlations. 

Sex Friend and Sex Friends when plural.

This really feels like an example of text translations in a hurry jumping to use the first result Google Translate would give and sticking with that.  Especially since most of these Sex Friendships I’ve seen it used for do not seem very friendly.

I usually try to avoid profanities on this blog, but all the suggestions for what should be said instead of Sex Friend are pretty Profane.  So I apologize.

Fuck Buddy and Fuck Buddies for plural are perfectly synonymous with Sex Friend/Sex Friends but are terms English speakers actually use in such contexts.

In some cases though even that isn't right for the tone of what’s actually going on.  It sometimes feels more like “personal slut” or “fuck toy” is the intended connotation.

Continuity Lock Out is an overrated concern.

This is post is possibly largely repeating things I've already said, but it bears repeating in light of what is my concern this month.

I first got into reading comics picking random issues from the Death and Return of Superman storyline, and the first episode of Buffy I watched was This Year's Girl.  The allusions to continuity I didn't understand didn't make me go "I'm so confused I can't follow all this stuff" they made me curious about the continuity and want to know more. 

And I know I'm not alone, I've seen people express similar memories for how they got into DC Comics, and I know from the Sailor Business podcast that someone once got into Sailor Moon from Crystal Clear Destiny being the first episode she watched.

This is why I have no hesitation in suggesting the Detective Conan episodes currently on Netflix can be a great entry point for new fans.  Yes there are allusions to events from episodes not on there, but nothing that actually difficult to follow.  Any one of these cases could make a perfectly adequate jumping on point. 

My own Detective Conan experience has been largely jumping around and not even trying to watch them in order. 

What I said in June still stands, I do wish TMS however limited they're going to be in what they Dub would at least get absolutely everything Subbed somewhere.

But either way, I continue to recommend absolutely everyone watch the episodes on Netflix. Or even start with the 3rd one on Netflix since the first two episodes have some early instalment weirdness to them (and the first has some Fanservice I promise the rest of the show doesn't do).

Update: Here is a recent Bluesky post with a similar sentiment.

https://bsky.app/profile/ladyemily.nebula.tv/post/3lwsnbeqtr22p

Now is the time to finally get into Detective Conan

I know a lot of people potentially interested are overwhelming by how massive it's episode count is, and also how little of it is available in the U.S. in an official capacity.  But the new project TMS is doing is designed make it accessible to potential new fans, especially if you follow it in real time start starting on July 3rd.

https://tmsanime.com/news/detective-conan-coming-to-crunchyroll-netflix

It's not exactly the strategy I would have used, but I think it should be good enough.

If you have both Crunchyroll and Netflix I would advise prioritize Netflix because they're quicker to cancel a project if it doesn't immedicably show very high numbers very fast. So please give them your traffic first. Even join Netflix specifically for this if you can.

I am concerned by wording others overlook that imply the new Dub might only be on Netflix.  I know I said last I'm not particularly for this Show, but if it is getting a new for this select batch of episodes, Netflix is where the casuals who's need a Dub are more likely to be.

I'm trying to remain cautious in my optimism.  YouTube having only one Movie at a time is a disappointment, but I imagine they will be releasing them digitally or something afterwards.  

I've also noticed noting in the section on the movies promising Dubs, only the series itself.  Which is fine I've gotten particularly used to watching Conan movies Subbed. 

I do wish they went through the movies in order rather then this random one. The first two are recent ones that I do not consider the best first impression of what Cinematic  Conan can be. Countdown to Heaven however is a great film from the Golden Age of Conan films, so that finally being up in an accessible fashion within a month is great. 

I'm also not setting my expectation to high for how many episodes we'll get.  I'm even prepared for the July 3rd bath specifically to have as few as 10, though I hope it's a lot more.  And I also hope unlike the failed Tubi project there will be a more set predictable schedule of when we'll get more episodes. 

Regardless, I implore even remotely interested in any of the Genre Conan fits into to take this opportunity and finally give a show a chance. Trust me that once you get into it it'll be worth it.