MattHotaling

As someone who has a bit more love for KyoAni works from the last decade rather than the current one I agree completely with your assesment of Clannad. Clannad complete story is nothing short of a masterpiece and would recommend After Story to anyone, if it didn’t mean they had to watch the first season which is much less strong as it’s distracted by the multiple heroines routes.
Also I’d call Nichijou nothing short of a postmodern masterpiece of absurdism.

I find a lot fan service oddly out of place in some shows, one that struck me recently was in K (project k, or whatever the proper name for it is), I found thematically the show seemed aimed at an audience that enjoys shounen-ai/BL content, but the show is still peppered full of T&A close up of the female characters. To me I feel that the fan service in this show was not only unnecessary but completely misplaced for the show’s audience.

I think this article for a great job differentiating between a visual novel that has sex in it and those where sex is the point. I think there is definitely more space for discussion about other visual novels that fall in this category like the works of KEY like Clannad and Air.

Honestly having played both OOT and MM both as kid and revisting them as an adult I think that MM feels a lot more focused and intentional. There are wide parts of OOT where it feels like the scope of the game got away from the designers and the game is less tight for it.

I think the major thesis of this article is flawed because the show was never intended for nor marketed at the traditional magical audience. Madoka Magica was not the ground breaking subversive work that everyone makes it up to be. It was airing at 230 in the morning and written by Gen Urobuchi, (a writer who’s most notable previous work is Say a no Uta, look it up); there was no pretense being made that the show was going to be the cute typical magical girl show.
While I think you make good points about the nature of horror in Madoka, and how it’s elements are executed, it’s unfair to call the show a subversive work, because it laid out plainly what it’s intentions were before show even started airing.

I think one of the major reasons that so many people find these comedy news shows so enjoyable and ultimately reliable is because the unlike a regular composed news anchors one would see on network news, Colbert and Stewart (or at least their personas) would be indignant, upset and emotional about the events of the news where a network anchor would present the news flatly.
Images, sounds, and video engage an audience’s emotions more more effectively than plain text (this is why newspapers decline as tv stands strong), but when these comedian newsmen directly show emotions the news consumer will like have their emotions affected and because of this give more importance to the news that they made an emotional connection with.

While I think it is very important to highlight progressive works when they appear, I feel that while your article presented Aoi Hana is the context of Japanese society at large it neglected to place the anime in the context of the medium.
While there are occasional genuine pieces that break through and get produced into anime, the vast majority of yuri and shojou-ai stories that get made into anime are aimed at the male gaze and fetishize the lesbian relationships in them. For every Aoi Hana or Revolutionary Girl Utena there are a dozen pieces like Sakura Trick, Strike Witches, or Yuru Yuri.
I think there is a lot of potential for dialogue in how can lesbian (and gay) manga and anime show explicit and sexual relationships without objectifing the characters involved.