InAnimete: Part 15 - Cowboy Bebop

A generic phrase used to describe a lot of media, and I'm certainly among those who have used it, is "It had some good ideas, but..." and them something along the line of "needs more fleshing out/limited expression/rushed/budget cuts/etc". I mean, that's the most common criticism I've seen for really damn good anime like Angel Beats. Cowboy Bebop strikes me as an inversion of this.

InAnimete: Part 14 - Chobits

Oh, Chobits. A show about walking, talking computers who look like attractive young women. It is a recipe for shit. I have generally mixed feelings about the show, mainly because I feel the show really finds its feet halfway through, but overall I like it. That said, it has some real fucking problems, mainly with objectification and poor characterisation. This is gonna go some strange goddamn places. Consider yourself warned.

InAnimete: Part 13 - Black Butler

Well, I took last week off due to sleep irregularities spurred by late-night (early morning, really) game releases and the fact I was playing said games for most of the week. Oh, and family, friends, life, watching anime, etc. Life'll just get you sometimes.  And then Christmas happened, and even though I don't celebrate it, it was a chance to catch up with family and time got away from me. That said, let's dive into the Victorian demonic-horror of Black Butler.

InAnimete: Part 12 - Chrono Crusade

I'll say ahead of time that this article is probably going to be a fair deal shorter than my usual. Why? Well, part of it is that I'm starting this piece at 2 on a Monday afternoon to be finished by Wednesday, so time. The much bigger element is that I can't remember much of the show in a coherent manner. I have images and snippets, and this anime has a great way of making striking images, but a lot of the logic of the story is lost to time in my mind unfortunately.

Any remotely competent or professional blogger would either go back and watch it to remind themselves or would alternately just not talk about the anime. If "competent" or "professional" are among the first words you'd use to describe my work, welcome to Red Television. It's great to have new readers. In keeping with my usual tactic, I'm going to talk about this show I barely remember, with the aid of TV Tropes and Wikipedia.

Welcome to a world of demons, nuns and horribly misappropriated historical events. Guess which one I'm going to be ranting about the most.

InAnimete: Intermission B - Race

So some stupid Missouri fuckers concluded in a non-trial that a man who represented a system which has a hard on for killing more African-Americans than the fucking Teliko was completely innocent. America fucking terrifies me. To those who are going to tear the fucking system down, I salute you and you have my utter and complete support and respect.

Sure, this is coming from a middle-class, white, Australian guy, so that's worth not that much. I am a world away from the situation in Ferguson in more ways than just geographically. Sure, my country doesn't have a great history of racial equality and multiculturalism, but I'm hardly in a persecuted minority (being of Irish heritage hasn't been much of a "thing" in my lifetime, so I'm not even going to pretend that that counts).

There isn't anything I can really do to help justice be achieved in Ferguson, and I'm not going to spend an entire post empathising with people I can't possibly know the experience of. It's a hard truth, but White Privilege is gonna influence anything I write, and I don't want to write something that could be confused with fucking Kipling. So I'm going to use this as a good time to expand on some ideas I've been thinking about for a while.

So, what can I talk about? Well, I do this thing where I talk about anime and nobody reads it, so maybe I should do that again. Let's talk about race in anime.

I swear to fucking Christ I am well rested and of reasonably sound mind right now, so if you're still confused from last time, I apologise and empathise. I was out of my fucking mind. I am now slightly less so, having gotten a little sleep. I am going to do something like last time, and use a thesis statement to focus my ranting. This one may be a little more to the point:

InAnimete: Part 11 - Needless

Oh, Needless. This show has everything I detest: underage girls dressed in almost nothing, a frustrating and utterly pointless protagonist, sexualisation of children in the plot of the show, poorly explained super-powers, a sci-fi setting, and a camera which is constantly trying to peer up skirts, among other issues.

And the show is fucking fantastic. Actually, fantastic might be a bit much for the anime along, but the continued narrative and development in the manga really puts this over the line of "pretty good" for me. I suppose this could be considered a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. It really muddies the water of what a "good" anime is by my standards. With that out of the way, let's get into it.

InAnimete: Intermission A - Relationships

Hudson's Note: Over the three days this was written, I had been waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning to watch Suede's stream of "The Rose of Versailles". It was worth it. The price, however, was my piece for the week being beyond human comprehension. I maintain my policy of not editing finished articles (bar this note) with the exception of spelling errors so...good luck, reader.

Well, I just finished My-HiME, an anime about high school girls who are given secret superpowers and thematically related mechs. However, this anime manages to overcome the fact that the previous sentence describes it and manages to become absolutely fucking fantastic. I've also started (but haven't finished) a show called Midori Days. I'll explain the premise of that one a little later, but the main thematic connection between the two shows is the amount of emphasis relationships have on the plot.