Now that we live in a day that permits it, there are a lot of representations of LGBTQIA+ characters in manga and anime. Some of them are good, some not so good; that’s how it goes when producers are throwing content against the wall to see what sticks. If you go back to the ’60’s, […]
Read more "Gender Bender: Sapphire"I keep telling people that Shuzo Oshimi is my favorite magaka. That’s not a lie. You might know him from The Flowers of Evil if you’re more into anime than manga. If you do read a lot of manga, there’s Flowers, plus Inside Mari, Welcome Back, Alice, Blood on the Tracks, and a lot more […]
Read more "The Eternal Triangle: Waltz"Darling in the Franxx is one of those things that popped onto the radar because it tried to do something we’d seen a million times – a mecha story – and jazz it up with a little soft-core porn. I mean one pilot is the stamen and one the pistil? Seriously, you’ve got to be […]
Read more "Character Analysis: Zero Two"Komi Can’t Communicate is one of those stories that chaps my ass when you get right down to it. You see Communication is my racket. I is a doctor of it. (I said Communication, not Grammar and Spelling. The old gag is that an English major knows how to spell and a Communication major knows […]
Read more "The Power of Three: Komi Can’t Communicate"There’s a special kind of antagonist we can call a monomaniac, right? The person who is focused entirely on one single thing that motivates everything they do. Bizarrely, you see monomaniac protagonists a lot. Luffy wants the One Piece, Ash wants to catch them all, Chihaya wants to be the best karuta player, Shoko wants […]
Read more "The Antagonist: Gendo Ikari"So let me see: There’s a boy. Isn’t that the start of a lot of anime stories? But this boy has a problem. Back in middle school he was, like, totally chunibyo. Yes, he thought of himself as a fearsome and mystical warrior. But when he got to high school it was time for him […]
Read more "One Story, Two Stages: Aura, Koga Maryuin’s Last War"There are a lot of good reasons to make the antagonist an on-screen character. An on-screen antagonist can have dialog, for one thing, and if they’re written well enough they can create some sort of sympathy or empathy in the audience. That creates an emotional response in the user when the antagonist inevitably loses. But […]
Read more "The Antagonist: The Faceless Foe"There’s a manga out there called Pleasure and Corruption. It is hard R-rated. Be warned. I’m going to be frank here. I’ve only read one volume of the manga so far. There are a number of manga I’ve only read one volume of. Typically it’s because I can’t see where the story’s going, or because […]
Read more "How To Start a Series: Pleasure and Corruption"You don’t think of Haruhi as being an antagonist. You don’t even think of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as having a meta-plot that calls for either a protagonist or an antagonist. It’s very slice-of-life, isn’t it? That’s all true. Melancholy doesn’t have a meta-plot, but it has plot arcs, even though they ultimately don’t […]
Read more "The Antagonist: Haruhi Suzumiya"I may not use the terms “main character” and “protagonist” in the same way a lot of people do. A lot of people use them interchangeably, but I don’t, because I think they are two different concepts that need separate names. So the main character, to me, is the people who the story revolves around, […]
Read more "Hidden Protagonist: Satsuki Kiryuin"
Confessions of an Overage otaku 