Kuudere-Kun's Saving Padoru Padoru

Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas is a movie I haven't seen yet but basically know what it's about and what happens in it from watching YouTubers trashing the movie for different reasons.

I have mixed feelings about the movie because I know the people making it are very politically Conservative, the kinds of Christians I'm very often specifically arguing against on my other blogs since I'm a Communist and LGBTQ Ally.

However I try very hard to view these disagreements as a disagreement within the family.  I still value much of what I've learned from the likes of Kent Hovind, Chuck Missler, Chris White and Rob Skiba, and those individuals are in some ways to the right of Kirk Cameron.  And of all the recent trend of Evangelical movies, this one is kind of the easiest to separate from their politics.  And the BreadTubers as much I love them are taking a lot out of context when they try to paint the film as if it's main message is F*** poor people.

What Kirk says near the end about "imbuing old symbols with new meaning" is what the Church has always done.  And I find it amusing how people while mocking the movie want to call that deceptive when they promote Death of The Author elsewhere.  The first people the movie is actually against are those Christians saying we should reject Christmas for being UnBiblical, he's trying to say if it bothers you so much make it Biblical.  It's what Peter Hiett is doing when he says to "watch the Harry Potter movies looking for Jesus" in his Acts 17 sermon.  And it's what I sometimes do looking for Jesus in Anime.

And that's where I come in.  Because I see that quote from the movie as partly his call for others to continue doing what he started.  And who better then me to start creating Biblical meanings for uniquely Anime related Christmas traditions?

One uniquely modern Japanese Christmas tradition you might notice in Anime from time to time is eating KFC at Christmas time.  It apparently had it's beginnings in an old KFC marketing campaign.  Well Chicken is commonly interpreted as being a Levitically clean animal, Chickens aren't directly mentioned in Scripture but when comparing birds that are clean to birds that aren't Chickens seem to fit in with the clean ones, being similar to Quail, Turkey, Geese and Ducks, some of those were already common Christmas meal options in the West.  In fact it's even become acceptable in modern Rabbinic Judaism to eat Chicken instead of Lamb for Passover.  The rest of that connection should be self explanatory.

I said last year that in the context of it's position in the conversation about what makes a Christmas Movie I consider Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's to be the Batman Returns of Anime.  So I seek to make it a personal tradition of mine to watch that Anime every holiday season.  The Christian meaning I see in it is about the same as I usually do in the rest of the Magical Girl Warrior Genre, themes about Love and Found Family and saving even the villain of the story.

However my main event tonight is what has over the last few years become a Christmas tradition of the Anime Meme community.  For those of you who don't know what Padoru Padoru is, here are some links.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/padoru
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gKr96s8sxk

It doesn't take long at all to connect this to Christianity.  Because the character who started it all is the historical Roman Emperor Nero re-imagined as a Cute Anime Girl because..... well because Anime.

She is sometimes refereed to as "Saber Red" or "Red Saber" which can create confusion with Mordred in Fate/Apocypha.

Nero is traditionally viewed as the first Emperor to persecute the Church.  I have argued that the Neornian Persecution is actually ahistorical.  But Fate/ is not aware of any of that niche historical dispute, and they didn't ignore the issue either.  They included the Persecution as part of Nero Claudius's backstory, but also gave her character depth and nuance.

Even the sin of persecuting Christians is one Jesus can and Will forgive, it was after all Paul's sin which is why he called himself the Chief of Sinners.  So this image of one who once persecuted the Brethren of Christ thousands of years later joyously celebrating the Birthday of Christ fits perfectly what I believe in as a proponent of Universal Salvation.

Jango Fett knew exactly what he was doing.

So one of the things I sometimes see from really dumb uninformed Prequel haters is an accusation that Jango Fett was really incompetent for sub contracting the assassination of Padme.

The fact that anyone would say this is weird to me because it's really obvious if you payed any attention to the plot that what happened in exactly what was supposed to happen.  Jango was not actually hired to kill Padme, that's just what Dooku wanted Newt to think  A Jedi being lead by that dart he used to kill the female shape shifting assassin to Kamino to find the Clone Army was absolutely essential for Sidious and Dooku's actual plan to play out.

In a way this is very parallel to what I explained about Palpatine's real goal in The Phantom Menace.

Now, Jango does die because his Jet Pack malfunctioned.  But being beheaded by one of the top Jedi Masters on the Council is still more dignified then being accidentally knocked into the Sarlaac pit by a blind man.

Quinton Reviews just made a Prequel Video.  And it's annoying, he's saying many correct things about how they deal with politics and war but insisting on making dumb generic criticism of their "film making" quality.

The Prequels are Better movies then you Deserve needs to be required viewing for anyone who wants to talk about the Prequels from now on.

Turn of the Century Magical Girl shows.

I've already talked quite a bit on this blog about how the late 90s and early 2000s were a transitional period in Anime.  Often with a particular eye on the Magical Girl Warrior sub genre.

Something interesting I've recently noticed is two now relatively obscure shows that were airing at the turn of the Millennium.

Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and Corrector Yui were airing at about the same time over much of 1999 and 2000.  Both qualify as Magical Girl Warrior shows with somewhat distinct twists.  But certain differences in their aesthetic and tone result in my kind of viewing Jeanne as the last Magical Girl show of the 90s and Yui as the first of the 21st Century.

Perhaps I should try harder to explain the difference I'm thinking of.  But it's kind of a ,"you'll know what I mean if you've seen enough of them" kind of thing.  That Yui doesn't from what I've seen so far have a Tuxedo Mask analogue is one minor example.

Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne was a Toei show airing with a lot of carry over creative staff from Sailor Moon and Cutey Honey Flash and so definitely feels like it's their spiritual successor, (it also has a connection to Wedding Peach via Sukihiro Tomita).  And would be the last show to really fill that role till we got the Live Action PGSM.  It's also hard not to see it as partly derivative of Saint Tail.

Corrector Yui is not a Toei show, Toei was prototyping the Pretty Cure aesthetic around this time with some Magical Girl shows of the non Warrior variety like Fun Fun Pharmacy, Yume no Crayon Oukoku and Ojamajo Doremi.  But for a Magical Girl Warrior show this one kind of feels the most like PreCure before PreCure.

And beyond the Mahou Shoujo realm Corrector Yui is kind of .Hack and Sword Art Online before either of them existed in any medium.  It's not the first Anime to deal with the Internet obviously, I've talked about others on this blog already.  But it is perhaps the first to really reflect how normalized the Internet had become by the end of the 90s.

It always fascinates me when I can see one era ending and another beginning at the same time.

My Top 17 Anime of the 20tens

The sheer volume of Anime I’ve seen favors the last decade, about half of everything I’ve completed.  Probably a natural result of that it was within this last decade I started watching Anime full time.  Still my absolute favourites lists tend to favor stuff at least a little older, but that’s subject to change, I think in the future I may start considering more 2010s Anime to be 3x3 worthy once they’ve stood the test of time.  And that is all the more reason why making a list of just this decade can be useful.

I’m deciding to do this list of the decade as beginning with 2010 and ending with 2019, like most decade lists.  I am however one of those nerds who thinks Decades should perhaps properly be defined as beginning with 1 and ending with a 0,.and that's why about a year from now I may make an updated version of this list that is for that Decade.  The slight shift in which 10 years are eligible might not be the only reason it’d be different, my mind could change on especially Anime of the last couple years in that time, and simply what I’ve seen may increase, there are still some key shows of the Decade I haven’t seen yet.

The list may sometimes be arbitrary in terms of when an entire franchise is one entry and when I’m just counting a specific installment.  But there are reasons.  If so far pretty much all of that franchise’s Anime incarnation is within said Decade that helps it count as one entry.  But also whether or not the franchise is an anthology by nature matters.

I don't usually like to do Honorable Mentions.  But for this I feel the need to include Sword Art Online and Attack On Titan.  I can’t call them personal favorites but their status as two of the big mainstream Anime of the decade has made them in different ways important to my Anime journey and I’ve gained plenty of enjoyment from both.

17: SSSS.Gridman

A masterful homage to Power Rangers style shows.  And perhaps has some of the best villains of the decade.

16: YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at The Bound of This World

An interesting historically significant Anime.  Aired in the last year of this decade and indeed seems like a product of its trends, but is really an adaptation of the first truly ambitious Visual novel from 1996.

15: In Another World With My Smartphone

I still feel compelled to include this one, it’s what got me hooked on Isekai and still the best approach to Polygamy I've seen in Anime so far.

14: Engaged to The Unidentified

This show is what got me into Slice of Life/Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

13: Yuru Yuri

For this decade my favorite Slice of Life/Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show.

12: Yuki Yuna Is A Hero

This will always remain a favorite of mine, it's played a key role in how I went from just casually interested in the Magical Girl genre to it being perhaps my favorite Genre.

Movies interlude Pokemon:  I like the XY and Z movies, have very mixed feelings on I Choose You and love Power Of Us.  Haven’t seen Evolution yet.

11: Citrus

Still my favorite Yuri of the decade, I don't care if you find that offensive.

10: Symphogear

Watch it

9: Sailor Moon Crystal

Yes, I went from being pretty hard on Crystal at first to now seeing it’s true value.  Just watch the Viz Dub so you know you’re getting the BluRay rips.  I’m including all three seasons here.

8: No Game No Life

For now I’m going to rank this as the top Isekai Anime.

Movies interlude PreCure:  All but the first of the PreCure crossover movies are in this decade.  I think the best of them are still the earliest ones.

7: Hugtto Pretty Cure

This is the best PreCure of the Decade.

6: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Usually I’m not likely to actually rank Madoka as the top Magical Girl anime of the era it started.  But for a list like this cultural influence should be factored in.  And my mind does constantly shift on how to rank Magical Girl Warrior shows.

5: Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.

This is right up there with Utena as the most important Feminist Anime.

Movie interlude final:  Three of the movies from my movies 3x3 are from this decade.  But they are also all capstones on series from the prior Decade.  K-On’s movie, the Gundam 00 movie and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.

4: A Silent Voice

The only proper entry a movie has on this list.  I saw it finally in the last few months and the only reason it isn’t on my movie 3x3 yet is because I haven’t updated it and can’t decide what to kick off.

3: Steins;Gate

This is probably my favorite strictly SciFi Anime, and perhaps my favorite piece of Time Travel based SciFi in any medium.

2: UFO Table Fate/ Anime.

It’s hard for me to choose between Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works.  The former is what I recommend as the ideal normie entry point to the franchise, but it’s precisely because I’m already an Anime person that the latter often satisfies me more.  The second Heaven’s Feel movie also did not disappoint.

1:  A Certain Scientific Railgun S.

I only watched any of Raildex pretty recently, but this show has quickly climbed it’s way to the top in my reverence.  I already made a few blog posts about it in 2019.  And Railgun S is definitely the height of that franchise so far.

I'm going to try watching Cutey Honey Flash

Cutey Honey is one of those franchises I know a lot about even though I haven't actually watched much of it yet.  I just over the last 24 hours watched the Sentai Dub of Cutey Honey Universe and that is the first Cutey Honey Anime I've completed.  I once a long time ago temporarily owned the New Cutey Honey DVD but watched only the first episode where my mind perhaps read too much into some parallels to The Dark Knight.

Cutey Honey Flash aired right after the 90s Sailor Moon Anime finished, taking over it's time-slot and involving a lot of the same creative staff.  It is known for being much more Shoujo in style and presentation then the franchise usually is, because Toei wanted it to fill the shoes of Sailor Moon.

It's not a highly regarded entry in the franchise from what I've seen. I think that's partly because the very demographic they were trying to appeal to with this change in approach instead felt insulted.  Lots of women liked Cutey Honey already as she was, so it felt kind of sexist to assume you'd have to turn it into Sailor Moon season 6 to appeal to young women.

Ironically it just may be the people most inclined to like this the best of any Cutey Honey show are people like me, Cis-Het Men who are tired of patriarchal assumptions about what does and doesn't appeal to the male demographic.  I'm tired of the assumption that a female Superhero needs to be constantly objectified in order for us to be interested, and that we're only minimally interested in romantic melodrama.  I am interested in the basic premise of Cutey Honey but would like a version where she isn't constantly ogled and groped.  And the very things a lot of women are tired of being told they're supposed to be into are things I'm tired of being told I'm not allowed to be into.

My main concern as of not actually starting the show yet is the apparent insertion of a Tuxedo Mask clone.  Honey already had love interests (both male and female) they could focus on.  I like Tuxedo Mask, but his clones in a lot of other Magical Girl shows I feel often seem to be missing the point of his character.  However this issue has not yet been enough to completely break my enjoyment of one.

The thing about certain of these 90s and early 2000s Magical Girl shows being made to capitalize on the success of Sailor Moon is that they actually have some of the same key creative minds behind them as the 90s Sailor Moon Anime.

The main writer of Cutey Honey Flash, Ryota Yamaguchi, was also the head writer of Sailor Stars.  The Series Director of CHF had previously been an Episode Director on Stars, and the Series Director of Stars (who also worked on prior seasons even going back to Goldfish Warning!) was an Episode Director on CHF.  CHF also had four other Episode Directors who'd been directing Sailor Moon episodes, one of them being the director of the S and SuperS movies.  We see a similar phenomena with the Assistant Directors.

To get the common Visual Aesthetic connection we could also mention Yoshiyuki Shikano, Miho Shimogasa, Shigetaka Kiyoyama, Katsumi Tamegai, Kenichi Tajiri, Hidekazu Nakanishi, Hashimoto Kazuyuki, Taniguchi Junichi and I'm sure more. (Masahiro Ando contributed to the movie at least.)

However not all of Cutey Honey F's former Sailor Moon staff were ones who's most notable contributions were arguably to the last two seasons.  Katsuyuki Sumisawa had been a Sailor Moon writer for the first three seasons then left to be the lead writer on Gundam Wing, but then he returned to Toei for CHF.  Some of his Sailor Moon episodes are personal favorites of mine, for example he did a number of the Ikuhara directed episodes including the Lesbian Animators episode from the Nephrite arc and the episode that introduced HaruMi.  He also wrote the two parter once known in English as Birthday Blues, which were episodes I greatly enjoyed.  He also wrote a couple key episodes of the Doom Tree Saga and it's Minako and Rei spotlight/attack upgrade episodes.  And in the future he will be the lead writer of the first 26 episodes of Corrector Yui, another show I've been meaning to watch but keep putting off.

Some people make it sound like Flash has the least Yuri appeal of any version of Cutey Honey.  But one of those was a person who also seemed to think Universe was lacking in Yuri so that I can't take seriously.  I don't want to get my hopes up going in, but given Sumisawa's involvement in some of Sailor Moon's Yuri highlights, and how much Gundam Wing appeals to Yaoi fans, I would not be suprised if Flash has some queer subtext most people are overlooking.

There is one Cutey Honey Flash writer who is more notable for what they've done since then what they did before, and that is it seems also the only Woman on the writing staff.  Reiko Yoshida would go on to write much of the Maria-Sama Anime, Girls Und Panzer, Romeo x Julliet, High School Fleet, and she's on the staff of the newest Pokémon series interestingly.  But most important of all she's the writer of almost everything directed by Naoko Yamada, they seem to be a pretty good team.

Update November 2024: However as far as the continuity of the Magical Girl genre goes, it is notable that Reiko Yoshida wrote the original Manga for Tokyo Mew Mew.

The writer of Noir

I've been becoming one of those who thinks that for both American movies and Anime we perhaps sometimes give directors too much credit (or blame) and the writers not enough credit (or blame).  And I have brought this subject up before, but I figure the best way to properly introduce this idea to my blog would be by looking at the writer of my absolute favorite Anime, Noir.

Noir is a good example for this subject not just because it's my personal favorite of an entire medium.  You see while I like every aspect of Noir considering how it was handled perfect for what Noir is, I would have guessed even before checking the credits that the writing is the chief thing that sets it significantly apart from other Bee Train shows.  And the credits verified that, it has the same director as several other Bee Train shows, and Yuki Kajiura does the music for most of them, but this is the only Bee Train show written by Ryoe Tsukimura.

And Tsukimura is the only writer, a lot of other shows I've looked at there is usually one writer who does the most but still some separate writers for individual episodes.  But as far as ANN is aware Tsukimura single handedly scripted all 26 episodes and has the Original Concept credit, and his name is on the Copyright.

Looking at his other work, of what I've seen already it's all stuff I also like, but mostly not stuff I would have guessed had the same writer.  He was the head writer for Tenchi Universe (and worked on two other Tenchi projects), and while I'd observed before it kind of being similar to Noir in how it is structured as a 26 episode show, the nature and genre of the story in question is different.  Tenchi and El-Hazard get dramatic but they also have a lot of Otaku style humor that is absent from Noir.

What does perhaps anticipate the nature of Noir more is that he scripted 6 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Two of them are two of the key Juri and Shiori episodes, (their Black Rose episode and the first Ruka episode).  What perhaps shows the level of trust he had was that he's the only person besides Utena's head writer (who may be the subject of a future post) to write any of the final Apocalypse Arc, the two prater about the final Duel with Touga.

So in the future I want to watch some of his stuff I haven't seen yet.  Perhaps UFO Princess Valkyrie would be a good introduction for me to the Magical Girlfriend genre.

Update:  Well before that I decided to watch one mid 90s Hentai OVA he's credited as writing.  And there is a character in it who is absolutely the prototype of Shaoli from episodes 15 and 16 of Noir.

2022 Update: If you do want to learn more about Noir's Director check out this cool video from Trixie The Golden Witch called The Anime Director I Admire The Most.

November 2025 Update: I'm disappointed to have learned about a Blog Ryoe wrote in 2022 where he expresses that not intend the main relationship of Noir to be read romantically blaming that on the director and saying the last episodes was greatly changed from his script.

The Doom Tree Saga and the Magical Girl Warrior Genre

Earlier this year I had my somewhat chaotic post about my mind changing on the issue of comparing the Sailor Moon 90s Anime to the Manga/Crystal.  I have now come to a somewhat more coherent conclusion.

The core overall story is always more solid in the Manga/Crystal, there is a lot less (in the writing) to nitpick and some of the emotions simply land much better.  That said a lot of the "filler" you only get in the 90s Anime is still vital to why I'm a Sailor Moon fan in the first place and is material I still treasure to this day.

Sailor Moon is the founding franchise of an entire Sub-genre, the Magical Girl Warrior (Mahou Shoujo before Codename Sailor V were not warriors).  Like a lot of franchises that started genres it doesn't always fit what is expected of said genre a generation later.  Sailor Moon never feels like a Deconstruction of what the genre it created became the way some works do.  All of what I consider the core elements of the Genre are in early Sailor Moon somewhere when you combine the Manga and the 90s Anime.  But some of them are not a part of Sailor Moon as consistently as they are future examples of the genre.

That creates a scenario where something that is pure "filler" in the context of Sailor Moon could become important to the genre as whole.  And I think that is exactly the case with the Doom Tree or Makai Tree arc which spans the first 13 episodes of Sailor Moon R.

This Arc is pure Filler, it's based on nothing in the Manga and what makes it arguably not skip-able in the context of the 90s Anime version of the story could have easily been solved by a single episode.

However as an installment of the Magical Girl Warrior sub-genre, it is the beginning of the redeeming of the villains being an important part of the formula.  With Sailor Moon that was never really a thing in the Manga.  And earlier in the Anime there was a redemption of sorts for Nephrite but that wasn't in any way prompted by any actions of the actual Magical Girls, it just sorta happened.

This would not be the last time Sailor Moon did it, we see something similar in the R movie and it would be done selectively with villains of the Black Moon Clan and the Death Busters.  It is mainly in Sailor Stars where Sailor Moon really starts seeming like the rest of the genre in this regard.  But we have no way of calculating how dependent these later developments were on the existence of the Doom Tree Saga.

Outside of Sailor Moon this was becoming standard for the Genre as early as Wedding Peach in 1995, the Makai Tree saga aired on Japanese television in the Spring of 1993.  And the future lead writer and co-creator of Wedding Peach wrote 3 episodes of the Doom Tree saga.

So never underestimate the value of good filler.