Afterthoughts – Yona of the Dawn

Yona of the Dawn was first put on my mental radar by way of a few Tumblr blogs I follow. Simply reading the synopsis, there’s every chance I would have skipped over it without a second thought but the look of this show is striking in a really refreshing way. So thanks for not letting me miss a good thing, Tumblr-chan!

To be honest, everything about this show is pretty radical, so it’s a bit ironic that it pretty quickly put me in mind of another classic high fantasy adventure, Fushigi Yuugi (which is deep down our schedule in a few years as a classic review a la Captain Harlock). It’s a pretty rare sub-category of the Asian high fantasy fare that skips out on being incredibly Japanese and instead takes a ton of inspiration from Chinese mythology and style, including some pretty popular classic stuff like The Twelve Kingdoms or Saiyuki and, to a lesser extent, Dragonball. It’s a combination that seems to work pretty well whenever its attempted; even though I’m not a Saiyuki fan by any stretch, that’s all down to personal taste, and I even still admit that it’s a good show.

But we can’t just watch cool fantasy adventure shit all the time. October is nigh and it is once again time for the brave men of 4kYeah to delve into the crypts and find what horrors lurk therein. Stay tuned for our imminent third year of Obligatory Horror Anime Review Month, Hell on Earth.

• Moof

Afterthoughts – Noragami

Noragami was one of these shows that sat on my “to watch” list for months before getting around to it. I’m glad it turned out to actually be pretty alright. Otherwise, I might’ve been hella grumpy.

I actually first got interested in Noragami back at last year’s Anime Banzai when two good friends of mine did cosplay of two of the characters. That same time is approaching and I’m getting honestly excited. Banzai serves as a bright beacon in the year, the experiences of the convention weekend serve to buoy my spirits for the rest of the year, so if you’re going to be at the Davis Convention Center this year, there is every possibility that you will encounter a Wild Moof lurking in the halls. I’ll release a full list of my planned itinerary when they announce the finalized panels listing but if nothing else, I’ll be looking forward with much anticipation to the “We Are Fairy Tail” panel.

If you are also there, we could be con buddies. I’m a great con buddy. Just ask the poor Fairy Tail cosplayers whose hotel room I crashed with my legendarily loud snoring.

• Moof

Afterthoughts – Wizard Barristers

Another of Xevabis’ choices, Wizard Barristers is the E-True Hollywood Story of wizards in Tokyo but not like regular wizards with huge fuck-off beards and funky robes but modern wizards, who apparently get their fashion sense by driving though the front of a Hot Topic whilst covered in hot glue.

This is a rarity in the recent weeks of the Weekly Anime Review, a show where our opinions genuinely diverge. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Polar Bear Cafe, as evidenced in the historical record, but I didn’t hate it the way I did Persona 4 or K. Xevabis thoroughly enjoyed it, Robert Xombie had a middling opinion, and I fell just on the wrong side of the Like/Dislike border. It’s all down to personal taste, too, which is odd, because I can’t remember a time that I hated the art direction of a show that he liked. Even in the quagmire of misery that was my Persona 4 the Animation viewing experience, I had to admit that the look of the show was totally killer.

I dunno, it’s entirely possible that the character designs give me too many unpleasant reminders of seeing Kite and Mezzo Forte, both of which I saw and neither of which I enjoyed. There’s a coded admission in that last sentence but whatever. The point is that I never once enjoyed looking at Wizard Barristers and try though I may have, I had no luck getting invested in the characters nor the plot. Everything about this show that is totally in my preferred genres was a complete non-starter, whereas the other two had far better luck.

Which I guess makes this a useful review. At the end of the day, I don’t feel bad being the one dissenting voice, because oftentimes the discussions where disharmony rings are the ones you can actually benefit from.

• Moof

Afterthoughts – Sword Art Online

This show got crazy popular everywhere so there’s a real possibility I don’t need to introduce it but for the sake of the uninitiated, Sword Art Online is the story of 10,000 gamers who play a new virtual reality online game but all is not well in the digital realm of Aincrad as the players in the world are trapped. They must defeat all 100 bosses on the 100 floors of the game world, a ginormous floating castle filled with monsters and towns. If they die in the game, the VR headset that is preventing them from moving their real bodies will send a powerful microwave that fries their brains and kills them IRL.

This is one of those premises that might have turned out really cheesy, a la The Running Man but thankfully it turned out more Hunger Games-y. There’s a lot of emotional heft to the setting and characters that is never treated lightly, even in the lighter comedic scenes. When people die, you really feel it down in your bones, especially when they start killing named characters you’ve grown attached to. The other thing that I personally felt the show really did well with was the breakneck pacing of the story. A lot of shows will slow down the plot to purposefully give the illusion of more time passing than actually does. SAO does the opposite and scenes in the first story arc will sometimes smash-cut to days, weeks, or even months later. I’ve been hearing detractors complain about that in forums and comment threads basically since the first episode aired, that everything feels rushed. But this storytelling method worked hella good for the Harry Potter movies.

My thinking on the topic is the awesome writing advice to show the audience your character’s most interesting life moments. SAO could spend more episodes prolonging the time that Kirito and Asuna spend level-grinding – maybe even in a few brief montages – but that would put the actual plot and character development on hold, which I feel would hurt the show overall. Instead, we hurry up and show the important parts, the adventures and battles that really mean something. And that’s why I’ll still be talking this show up when I’m 80.

• Moof

Afterthoughts – The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

It didn’t take very long for my cohosts to start splitting their opinions on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, as the first season starts with a “zero episode” about a crappy student film made by the main characters that was intentionally animated to look like a crappy student film, complete with purposeful flubs and continuity errors.

We refer to the show a bit as a subculture thing that never broke into the mainstream, a crazy juxtaposition compared to Death Note the previous week which was so mainstream-popular that it’s being remade as a live action series in Japan and being optioned for a Hollywood remake to be produced by, among others, that one Japanese guy who was in Heroes.

That was a tough mindset for me to adjust to. 7 years ago, you couldn’t attend an anime convention without running into a conga line of dancers alternating between the Haruhi dance and Caramelldansen. That seems so long ago, now, as it feels like it’s been forever since season 2 and the movie came out. Haruhism was a massive global franchise that apparently just kinda dropped off the face of the planet sometime in 2010.

– Moof

Afterthoughts – Death Note

This classic anime review is the first in our much-hyped project to bring all our old anime reviews that went down with our Blip.tv ship when that was torpedoed by some pissy admins who thought we were lame.

Death Note was the very first anime review ever posted on the 4kyeah site back in 2008, back when I had to invent AnimApril to get my interests featured on the site, because before Xevabis and I started the Weekly Anime Review with Hyperdimension Neptunia (podcast coming back soon!) the only anime-related thing to be even recorded for the site was Day of Sigma, a review that never even saw the light of day until a few weeks ago when it became episode 89 of the Weekly Anime Review. Considering my buddy Casey first brought me onboard after founding the site because I was a known Japanophile, it seemed a waste to just have me playing Al Unser Jr.’s Turbo Racing or whatever.

So that’s the true story why we have a dedicated month of anime-related stuff. . . on a website that is now mostly just anime reviews every week, with the occasional movie or music review.

– Moof

Afterthoughts – No Game No Life, part 2

Another specter creeping up from the semi-released past comes the latest 4kYeah anime review, the last of our Take-Two Reviews. With the new podcast, we’ll probably just do a generic Top 5 list thing next January.

No Game No Life occupies a bit of a strange place in my mental space. On one hand, I totally get where people like Hideaki Anno and Hayao Miyazaki are coming from when they talk about how modern anime is dumb, pandering, garbage with no originality or artistic merits; there are enough boring, samey high school harem drama stories pandering to the Platonic ideal of The Otaku that it can appear that the industry is indeed nothing but crappy harem shows.

But then something like No Game No Life or Psycho-Pass or Fullmetal Alchemist will come along and turn that notion completely on its head.

A large proportion of anime series that air every year hit on some pretty common well-tread tropes but the same can be said of video games and Hollywood films as well. Nobody says that the glut of trashy romcoms like Bridesmaids or Knocked Up should spell the death knell of Hollywood movies, because despite there being 90% “stuff that is dumb” there will always be the true artists, making true art that their crews honed in the Judd Apatow battle trenches.

No Game No Life is kinda like Interstellar for me: proof that the media zoo that spawned it is worth protecting and letting thrive, because when the caged apes are done hurling feces everywhere, they may just smash all the right keys on their typewriters to produce some seriously Shakespeare-level shit.

– Moof

Afterthoughts – Kill la Kill, Part 2

So we’re going back in time for this installment of the Weekly Anime Review, back all the way to January when we recorded our best-of choices for 2014 after watching yet more episodes of them. This was when our old video-based workflow fell apart, though, so the footage has just sat around, gathering digital dust since then. So we grabbed the audio from it and put it to work!

I don’t know that there’s much more I can say about Hiroyuki Imaishi or Studio Trigger, they’re new players on a giant board but have already proven to be masters of their craft. Where most anime are retreads of existing concepts or remakes of other ideas or even existing stories, these guys seem to be able to take a handful of existing tropes and put them on display in fascinating new ways.

Not to say they’re perfect, Dead Leaves is still nonsense and the Imaishi brand of over-the-top-ness isn’t a sure thing for everybody (i.e., my cohost Xevabis) but even their detractors will admit that they’re doing interesting things.

It’s companies like Studio Trigger that will keep anime alive and evolve it to stay relevant. All the navel-gazing experts agree that the current style of anime is headed for an evolutionary dead-end as more and more shows get buried under more of the same tropes until we end up with the Most Perfectly Moe Anime Evar. It’s guys like Hiroyuki Imaishi who will fight on the fringes and be safe enough from the fall to keep the industry alive, even after a major crash.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s high-time I return this soapbox.

– Moof

Afterthoughts – Persona 3 the Movie Part 2: Midsummer Knight’s Dream

Normally, we get Xevabis to handle these Persona-related posts since he’s our resident Persona Fanboy but he specifically asked me to handle this one, since he’s already talked himself blue in the face about all things Persona. Persona persona persona.

So, Persona 3. It’s the only Shin Megami Tensei game I’ve ever attempted to play, though I made the horrible mistake of playing it after a dozen Xbox 360 games that feature autosave. I never finished it, so let me say this; looking back, the single best innovation in games in the last 20 years was the one that saves you from your own dumb ass having to replay 3+ hours of game.

The story was interesting, though, and I was more intrigued with it than I have been with any new classic JRPG since. So gladfully, they decided to make a 4-part film series out of it, so I’ve been able to start joining my cohost in the Persona-love.

Longtime fans of 4kYeah may know that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Persona 4, owing to the annoying character Teddy. If anything, Persona 3 proves that this franchise doesn’t need cuddly comic relief characters to be good; in fact, I would argue that the stories are remarkably improved by their absence! Persona 3 continues to be a fantastically dark psychadelic adventure story. And it’s no less trippy the second film ’round to see these kids summoning monsters by pretending to blow their brains out.

Xevabis is a fan of Persona regardless but I especially recommend these Persona 3 films as I’m not the biggest fan and even I think they are baller as fuck.

– Moof

Afterthoughts – A Certain Magical Index

The next episode of the Weekly Anime Review is one that I had planned right from the start of the series but it’s taken 85 episodes to fit it in because I wanted to keep the focus in brand new stuff where possible. So here it finally is, our thoughts on the first four episodes of A Certain Magical Index.

This is another one of these shows that I started watching when it first came out, way back in the historical year of 2008. A fansub group that I follow(ed, they’re dead now) did it as one of their regular shows they subbed everything from – sequels, spin-offs, and movie included – and I got hooked pretty quickly.

I could use this space to talk about the show but you’d be better served by the actual podcast embedded above for that, since you’ll get my cohosts’ input as well. I’d much rather talk about fansubbing, a thing that still seems to be a thorn in the side of the industry and community overall.

I used to be one of these kids who had a minimum of four torrents downloading at any given time, as my catalog of subbed anime .mkv’s can attest to, so obviously I was on one side of the flamewars of Fansubs versus Prosubs. Even a few years ago, you couldn’t toss a PokeBall down a corridor at a genre convention without hitting an hour-long panel of nerds arguing for one side or the other. Unlike most Fansub faithful, I understood that the Prosub side of the equation was probably the more morally correct one and was inevitably the future of the industry if it were to survive and flourish but my particular issue was that the Prosubs companies were often still Japanese (gasp!) and informed by Japanese thinking. When Fate/Zero first came out, the only option  for a physical copy was a $600 two-part collector’s edition Blu-Ray set, because that’s how shit gets sold in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Being a cheap-ass who has bills to pay and food to buy, that put a physical copy of an AMAZING FUCKING ANIME FOR SRSLY YOU GUYZ completely out of the question. And while the overpriced collector’s items are still around, Aniplex seems to finally be trying to get their heads in the American Pricing game.

The other argument I had was that not enough attention was paid to series by American translators and dubbers, especially smaller stuff like Ookami-san or (a favorite of 4kYeah’s) Heaven’s Memo Pad. Hell, I don’t know that there even is a dub available of the controversial subcultural megahit My Little Sister Can’t Possibly Be This Cute, despite being one of the most talked-about anime of its day.

Ever since the online anime streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, and especially Crunchyroll) got their shit together sometime in the year 2014, fansubbing has really gone downhill, and that’s probably for the best. You can still find guys like HorribleSubs trolling the corporate side of anime but the quality of translations have come up quite a bit, so there doesn’t seem to be much point when you can click a link and watch a well-translated anime and actually be contributing to the industry.

Not sure whether I should be sad or not.

– Moof