When you’re dealing with characters in writing, I mean seriously, do I have to say this? The more you have, the harder it is to keep them straight. This is especially true in the ensemble comedy, where each of the characters is supposed to carry their own share of the weight. It starts to get […]
Read more "The Power of Three Plus Two: O Maidens in Your Savage Season"One of the things that gets me about Spy X Family is how layered it is. It operates at so many layers of reality in its fictional world that it’s hard to keep track of them all. I think I’ll try to figure that out one of these days. But today isn’t the day for […]
Read more "The Power of Three Minus One: Spy X Family"Okay, I’ll be honest: Fruits Basket is not exactly in my wheelhouse in terms of what I want to see, right? I mean you take the rom-com thing and add in the Zodiac animal thing, and that should be a nopety-nopety-nope for me. But, ya know, they sucked me in. You know how. Some really […]
Read more "The Power of Three Squared: Fruits Basket"One of the cool things about a person in my racket – I’m a professor of Communication – is you can see the stuff we talk about in class coming out in anime and manga. Right? Art imitates life, right? Well, in a way it has to. If you are trying to write a believable […]
Read more "Fun With School: Citrus"One of the nice things about A Silent Voice is that it’s about kids growing up, and it treats the kids honestly as characters in that it lets them do it. Right? Not just Shoko and Shoya, but the people around them change as well as they confront their own bad behavior and resolve to […]
Read more "The Power of Three: A Silent Voice"I briefly ran out of reading material … no, that’s not quite right. You all know it’s been a rugged time for a lot of us and I got double rugged when my Internet and cable crashed the Friday night of a three-day weekend. Yeah, talk about sensory deprivation. So I jammed some disks in […]
Read more "The Power of Three: Princess Jellyfish"It’s been a while since I watched Arakawa Under the Bridge, so I may have a detail or two out of whack, but at the heart of it was a really complex and interesting relationship between Kou Ichinomiya and the girl only called Nino. They’re surrounded by many weird and wonderful characters, so unpacking what’s […]
Read more "The Power of Two: Kou and Nino"Love, Chunibyo, and Other Delusions was one of those things that was just so dang cute I watched it all the way through. Then, since my tolerance for cute is extremely low, I watched it again to see what the heck there was in it that made me watch it the first time. Fortunately I […]
Read more "The Power of Two: Yuta and Rikka"I’ve been watching something utterly inane called Teasing Master Takagi-san on Netflix. To qualify, “Teasing Master” is a title, not a verb: Takagi does the teasing rather than being teased upon. Let’s be frank: this is a one-note anime, and I have little tolerance for stuff that’s dull. If I don’t like something, Life is […]
Read more "How to Build a Series: Teasing Master Tagaki-san"Welcome to the NHK is one of those things I like a lot in part because it’s about grownups with real problems instead of kids with robot suits or magic wands. Not that there is anything wrong with robot suits or magic wands. They can make for good stories, too. They just usually aren’t my […]
Read more "The Power of Two: Tatsuhiro and Misaki"
Confessions of an Overage otaku 