I think one of the really fun things about Outlaw Star is that from a narrative standpoint its construction is totally obvious. It’s fun and it’s goofy, and it has good characters and Aisha’s enormous AHEMs; those are the reasons to watch it, so far as I am concerned. But when you break it down […]
Read more "Let’s Cook a Series: Outlaw Star"I don’t do reviews. I mean, I did one, once, of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, but that was because it was fairly obscure and I told everyone I bought the DVD, so when I saw it – it was hugely fun – I thought I should say something. For, you know, closure. This isn’t a […]
Read more "Bonus Post: Carole and Tuesday"Some things I keep coming back to. This is one: the number of interrelationships among N characters is N(N-1)/2, so the complexity in number is basically exponential as the number of characters goes up. Of course, another way for the complexity in character interrelationships to increase is to have the writers deliberately throw in a […]
Read more "The Power of Two Times Two: Scum’s Wish"There are certain pairs of characters that it’s just a blast to watch together. I’ve written about Elias and Chise from The Ancient Magus’ Bride several times, and Lupin and Fujiko, and Kyon and Haruhi, and Kobayashi and Tohru. I even popped out something about Satsuki and Sendo from Short Sunzen, if you’ve ever heard […]
Read more "The Power of Two: Rock and Revy"This blog and my writing career have a long-term love/hate relationship. On Mondays (usually just after midnight Eastern Standard Time, because I hate to wait), I drop a main post on the blog’s theme, which is me talking about anime and manga from my twin perspectives as a writer and a trained animator. But at […]
Read more "Another Writing Drop (!)(!!)"Normally I try to stick to material that is fairly familiar to a lot of people because, well, a lot of people have seen it. That means I don’t have to tell you who the heck Spike or Fuu or Haruhi is and I can just get to the damned point. In truth, using familiar […]
Read more "Metastable Relationship: Short Sunzen"I spend a lot of time talking about character combinations. That’s not an accident. Character shapes conflict and conflict drives story. It’s that simple and that hard. I started out looking at character trios. First of all, I think they’re more interesting than pairs: a trio has three relationships to look at while a pair […]
Read more "The Power of Two: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya"