I wanted to feign ignorance about the massive e-penis battle called Aniblog Tourney, but in three days we will be going head-to-head with some Super Care Bear blog called Dah Fook. You have to be a true fan to remember their URL by heart. They may know their way around Photoshop, but there was once a time when I was young and nubile and thought myself a graphic designer as well. Once my grand and glorious leader Jura returns from his pilgrimage to the land of beautiful little boys, we’re sure to have something up our sleeves in terms of website design… I hope. For one thing, I really want to allow nested comments.

In eager anticipation that I am absolutely correct, I have some preliminary designs already in the works:

I’ve done away with all the unimportant tagging, clouding, and other neat features that make this site look more professional and decided to go with the personalized blog look. After all, I’m the only one that matters anymore. Not only will it convey the sarcastic humor I’ve grown accustomed to in a more loving way, but it will increase the cuteness factor by about ten fold. I guess the forum module has to go, in order to make room for the massive amount of hentai I’ll be using the server to back up. Hentai is hotter when it’s streamed. I’m not paying for the bandwidth, so who cares? I’ll also be streaming random J-pop music to distract the readers from pointing out rather obvious grammatical errors and the like.

Oh, the possibilities are endless. I’m sure there’s seven portions of happiness waiting for me at Uncle Josh’s ranch!

Moral of the Day: Fuck it, fire it.

A few months ago, I may have admitted that I hate sequels, but a recent discovery made me change my mind. Whilst talking to the few scattered anime fanboys located in various back alley apartment buildings across Southern Virginia, it occurred to me that any time a sequel, spin-off or remake was mentioned their eyes went dead; almost as if they were shooting blanks. As far as they knew, the ‘F’ in Zero no Tsukaima was a decorative piece, there was no Dragonball before Z, and Nazo no Kanojo X is a sequel.

Case in point: Eureka Seven AO. All I remember of the first series was surfing robots and masturbating to Anemone doujinshi. Yet somehow, I was beating all these naruto/bleach fantards in general knowledge; despite the fact that Eureka Seven aired on cable television. If I had to somehow describe this sandbagging with an analogy, I would have to liken it to a wild mustang mounting a chihuahua.

The lack of good conversation partners is almost making me regret getting banned from all those anime forums.

So back to Eureka Seven Ao. The series starts off with a blue-haired Renton assembling the key pieces of his multi-colored hairem starting with his childhood friend, some skinny girl with asthma. Somehow the story has shifted from a fantasy world full of living rocks that spew green energy, to the real world, a dystopia divided by political strife, satellite television and seagulls. When was the last time you saw a real animal in the first Eureka Seven other than those weird-ass sky fishies?

So in commemoration of the Avengers movie opening tonight, I decided to browse through my old blog and pull up something that is no longer relevant. Note that this was written over six years ago.

Oh, and speaking of American comics… what’s with these Original English Language (OEL) manga that’s been filling up bookshelves in the manga section? Two years ago, I took it for a passing fad, but now every comic-book publisher appears to be releasing their own versions of “Home-Made Japanese”. Some of them steal the Japanese right-to-left format (I see no reason to do this since English should be read left-to-right.) and after reading the shitty stories within some of them I’m beginning to wonder if Americans are just trying to adapt all the wrong aspects of Japanese comics…?

The Hair
To quote the Shopping Blog on the thankfully-deceased Garnier’s Manga Head advertising campaign, “Looking for a wild new hair style? Garnier suggests a new style based on the popular Japanese Manga comics.” If you’re too new to the manga scene to have missed seeing the L’Oreal line making such beautiful asses of themselves, their “Manga Head” page featured images of poorly drawn dragonball-esque characters, possibly submitted by primary school students all across the United Kingdom, all with one unique characteristic: gravity-defying hair. Accompanying these awful flashy pictures were images of real people imitating the hair style with Garnier’s Fructis Style product.

So there we have it. Clear proof that one of the defining points of manga to the ignorant west are the buoyant hairstyles. There is a bit of truth to this; it would be be nigh impossible to find a manga in any shounen publication that does not make use of the pointy hair, the floating bangs or the middle antennae. However, fans of more true-to-life artist such as Ikegami Ryoichi(MAI THE PSYCHIC GIRL) and Marita Masanori (Rokudenashi Blues, Rookies) know this to be not true. […] Still, their knowledge doesn’t seem to extend beyond the scope of the hair.

The Eyes
If you were to make a comic and you wanted to call it a manga, but your Japanese vocabulary is very limited and you couldn’t draw a decent manga setting if hell came after you… how else could you affirm its status as a manga? The answer is of course, the eyes. Apparently having the eyes take up more than 40% of the face constitutes any drawn image as an official Japanese character. Sometimes giving them Japanese names like Sora, Tsubasa, Bob and the like makes them all the more authentic.

Big eyes are definitely a Japanese drawing trait, and it wouldn’t be a lie to say that the trend of bigger white:pupil ratio is influencing the drawing styles of many new and upcoming American comic artists. What separates them from the slew of other American manga-artists is that their work is still labeled “comics”.

So where exactly is the fine line drawn? I’m sure it must be the language barrier or in the inking. Maybe it is the Japanese’s heavy usage of tones to create atmosphere and moods, made obsolete in American comics because of our preference of having everything in color, or could it be…

The Setting
OELs are interestingly enough always about silly relationships, furries, vampires and goths, geeks, all of the above, or about the actual medium itself: Japanese anime and manga. In that sense, I guess there isn’t much differentiating them between their Japanese counterpart. Well, except for one thing….

The OELs are just fucking awful. A futuristic setting with samurais and gunslingers is fine… if you’re Japanese. If you’re an American, you’re better off making a story about Jedis. At least you’re playing on your own field then. It just doesn’t seem right. I used to expect class whenever I read American works, but these OELs are just killing me.

Americans are just too engrossed with making their comic more than just a “comic”, into something called “manga”, that they overcomplicate it with silly American wisdom when what they really need is something nice and simple. They could start off by making a decent story and calling it a comic. [M]any people in America have come to expect their manga to have depth (and pretty art), maybe with a slight scattering of humor throughout every chapter in moderate amounts to prevent it from becoming all serious and no play. The American “manga” I have read either take it too far with the humor, or go nowhere with the depth. It’s overall a bland read, and I sometimes stab myself at night so that I’d never pick up any american OELs again.

Anyways, It’s 6 in the morning and I’ve gotten sleepy. I’ll check back later and this post will seem very retarded in the afternoon.

And I now leave you with a picture.

Oh, so true...

You know a team is doomed when the only two members with special powers are dumb as shit. It’s pretty funny to see them try to make heads or tail out of Amae Koromo. I mean, they couldn’t possibly believe they were the only siblings with special god-like powers in the world. That would just be too unfair.

I also really like how Koukaji Pro is the trauma which stands in the way between Akado Harue and the world of professional mahjong. Koukaji must have raped Harue pretty bad. I wonder what her special power is? From Koukaji’s initial appearance in Saki, it’s hard to tell that she’s the strongest female in the world of mahjong.

There are a few bad things I have to note. The producers are trying to cram way too much into each episode. I really would’ve liked to see some mahjong playing instead of the defeated dazed looks of their opponents trying to pull their head out of their ass. Sometimes the character portraits look like lima beans instead of the plump moeblobs of the original Saki. I credit this to the art style of Saki Achiga-hen’s mangaka, and to Studio Gokumi. You can’t win them all!

I don't want to watch this show again just to screencap.

I woke up from two episodes of Jormungand yesterday and went back to playing Skullgirls. So far, everything has been completely true to the manga: the characters suck, the story sucks, the setting sucks, the action sucks and Jormungand sucks.

Actually, I’m confused at why they chose to animate this series in the first place. I read the manga way back when, and determined it wasn’t worth my time; thereby objectively denying its existence. So it surprised me to find eleven volumes of Jormungand on Amazon.co.jp nearly three years later. Could I… Did I make another mistake? Was it actually a better comic than I remember it being? So thanks to the Internet, I wasted no time getting my hands on the first two episodes to prove me wrong. My well-rested eyelids can attest to the fact that I was on point for a change.

For someone who wants a more concrete explanation, not that it matters, because debating over opinions is a great way to lose interest, I’ve broken it down to three simplified reasons:

• Nobody except for fat weapons otaku from a country with strict gun control laws would be interested in watching, let alone reading, a boring action/drama about arms dealing.
• The characters all look like snakes with their slitty eyes and narrow faces. I’m hoping that’s where the title comes from; because I really can’t see the connection between this shit and the Midgard Serpent.
• This series is pieced together worse than a Korean manhwa. 85% of Korean manhwa is made by taking the most choice pieces from the creator’s favorite Japanese manga. This is the same idea, except it seems the yellow bastard is Japanese.

I stole one too many pictures. I don't even know where this goes.

Shit, part of being an anime fan is assuming that your taste is infallible, and that your opinions are always correct. However, lately I seem to be wrong about most everything. Ore no imouto ga konnani kawaii wake ga nai anime was admittedly better than I surmised; and Kurata Hideyuki did not embarrass himself with the script like with Cloth Road, Read or Die -TV- or TRAIN+TRAIN. iDOLM@STER wasn’t a shitty fanservice anime, but rather a watchable emotion-driven fanservice anime. Black Rock Shooter did not turn out to be the noir-esque anime that I had envisioned, and instead was a bumpy road through preteen adolescence and nonsensical plot twists. Ayako Yoshitani cast as Nazo no Kanojo X’s Urabe Mikoto did not turn out to be the annoying shit-storm I had expected.

And when I’m this wrong, I like to fall back on something absolutely fail-safe.

Medaka Box is the latest anime from Gainax, and is based off a Shounen Jump manga by the same name. The premise is really simple, a well-endowed female rigs the election to become the student council president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer; and passes an edict making the term a “for-life” position. The only way a totalitarian regime like this would be able to sustain itself without resorting to the Big Brother technique, whose poor television ratings should indicate which structure not to follow, is to set up a complaint box for students in need of help to submit their dire requests. Popular media points out that in order for a superhero to increase gross revenue, they need a sidekick; case in point, Batman had Robin, Green Arrow had Speedy, God had Jesus, FDR had Oppenheimer — Medaka needs a random boy from the student body to help where help is not needed. From here it’s like the author stole the template from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu, since Medaka drags poor what’s-his-face by the throat into becoming her slave and tentative love interest. How this simple concept will turn into a battle manga escapes me, but I guess I’ll have to watch to find out.

By the way, if the lack of pictures haven’t already hinted at it, I have yet to watch the first episode of this series. I’m just rehashing everything from the vague memory of the one-shot I read three years ago. The funny part is, I was saying on mIRC, that shitty fanservice crap like Medaka Box, Kore wa Zombie Desuka, and High School of the Dead would get an anime before SoreMachi ever became popular. It seems I was wrong again.

So why is Medaka Box even becoming animated?

When I first heard Gainax jumped on board, I was wondering what happened to their good taste, and remembered… Gainax has always animated shallow fanservice crap. That isn’t to say that they weren’t well-done, since some of my favorite anime sprout from the fecal waste accompanying Gainax’s abysmal brain farts, but ever since Shikabane Hime I’ve lost most if not all faith with Gainax.

However, who really knows? With Gainax’s skills, they may turn Medaka Box into a decent series; but then I remembered who the original creator of said series is: Nisioisin. Yes, his name is a goddamn palindrome. Now, I hold a lot of respect for Nisioisin, not for his creativity or his writing skills, but essentially because he can output two miles of garbage in any given year. He is like a machine that does nothing but crap out romantic comedies camouflaged in different outfits. All in order to exfoliate a fresh-spin, apparently to disguise the obvious generic axiom of good storytelling: boy meets girl. Together with Go Zappa and Hideyuki Kurata, Nisioisin makes up nearly 54% of the otaku’s holy scriptures. I pulled that percentage from my ass, but you don’t need a mathematician to tell you it’s true.

So now we have Nisioisin and Gainax on board. That’s already a formula for failure. How can we mess this up further? Why not cast Toyosaki Aki as the main character? Let me put it simply, I have never liked this voice actress, and have yet to see an anime where I did not want to stab her character in the face with a pitch fork.

And that is why regardless of how awesome this show turns out to be, I will never ever truly accept it as anything other than shit. This is my fail-safe, because judging anime objectively sucks, and I can’t ever be wrong about my own opinion.