Tides

Planetes is a great show on the whole, but certain parts of it aren’t looked at enough, particularly its ending credits. Through a triumphant-sounding song combined with visual imagery and impressive time-skipping techniques, every time you finish an episode, you’re treated to cheery reminder of what drives the main character despite everything he goes through. Whilst he may grow older and suffer setbacks in his life, his childhood dreams still exist. And although he is far from fulfilling them in his current position, that doesn’t mean he can’t grab whatever he can get whilst waiting for the day said position now longer restrains him.

Whilst the ending only captures a small part of what humans go through whilst growing older and is never given physical form within the actual show, it is still an impressive piece of animation that shows exactly what you can accomplish with credit rolls. Most anime credits, whether they be openings or endings, are lifeless on a visual level – telling us nothing other than "this exists" without any actual meaning to its existence. Always saying "hey, this character is in the series" or "hey, we’re foreshadowing a plot twist that will totally become relevant nine episodes in". Planetes’ ending credits rises above those trappings and not only breathes life in its visuals, but even if you don’t know the main character on account of never having actually watched the show, you can still get an idea of who he is and what you have to look forward to as you follow his journey of making it as a space garbageman just by watching said credits alone.

Most people skip ending credits after finishing an episode. If more of them were Planetes’, they’d be less likely to do so.

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Most shounen or seinen manga theme which popular in public are about adventure, action, martial arts, horror or drama theme mixed with love or friendship elements. Reader can be expected hooked by story development or cliffhanger situation at the end of chapter and want to know what happen to main character on next chapter. This repetition theme is good for publication but get boring if mangaka unable to improvise his/her story into different level or story development. For example, Fairy tail or Case Closed (Dectective Conan). Nevertheless, those series still popular today due by their rich art.

Kaitou Le Vin, however, introduces genres that rare to be exploited, action, thriller and deception. The setting is similar to "Mission impossible" series but it only focused for rare wine. The story evolve around wine burglar group with same name. Each member is a specialist in their field, such as actor, tech geek, female fatale, jack of all trade and leader.

In addition, they are perform mission for good cause or gentlemen thief style. Their client often victim or original owner of target wine which lost the item ages ago and it fall into wrong hand today. It was Kaitou Le Vin’s duty to return the bottle wine safely into the client.

The first mission is good one and expect to be more exciting in next story arch.

→ Full review (on All About Anime)

Attack on Titan has been heavily hyped for a long time, and as a result, it comes with high expectations in terms of quality. Given the subjective nature of any form of art, series can often fail to live up to this either because they were proclaimed to be far better than they could ever realistically be or because the characters just aren’t as well rounded as they should be.

Based on the AMVs on YouTube, you would be forgiven for thinking that Attack on Titan is simply a collection of blood stained battles with impossibly tall foes. Indeed, such scenes are not uncommon in the show and it certainly is not one for the faint of heart. In fact, the bloodshed at times nears the levels prevalent in the early success of VHS anime such as Akira and Ninja Scroll. This is not however all there is to the show.

The main characters all come with a lot of baggage and succeed in avoiding the pitfall of simply being ‘cool for cool’s sake’. Mikasa in particular embodies the modern ‘strong female lead that has long been a staple of anime, and the mix of her general drive and emotional responsiveness to the other main lead, Eren, makes her a real stand-out.
In summary, the show is almost mis-sold by the bloody fan videos and an almost simplistic synopsis. Dig beneath all this and you will find a real gem of a series that more than deserves the tag of ‘modern classic’.

Rating: 5/5

→ Full review (on Matt Doyle Media)

The off the wall harem comedy known as D-Fragments (or D-Frag! for short) has been gaining some notoriety online on late. The general set-up of the show is nothing particularly unusual: a delinquent starts his new high school with a desire to make a name for himself, but is forced to join a game creation club run a group of near-psychopathic women. With only a slight twist on so many other series, this should come across a just another generic show. It should do, but it doesn’t.

The heart of the show is in the wonderful cast of characters, and in particular their eccentricities. While it would be true to say that at a base level not one of them is original (one even has more than a passing physical resemblance to Revy of Black Lagoon fame), each of the various leads does an admirable job of drawing you into their weird and wacky world … with one exception.

Sakura, the pink haired tomboy of the group, is given a lot of time to grow in the source manga. Some of her scenes with the aforementioned delinquent, Kenji Kazama, not only give away that she is a legitimate genius, but also give a wonderful insight into how her mind works. In the anime however, a lot of these scenes are either cut completely or altered to the point that Sakura becomes nothing more than ‘that pink haired on that likes water’. The writers obviously realised that this an issue however, as the eight volume of the manga came packaged with an OVA adaption of the popular ‘Shrine Water’ story arc, itself a vehicle to further progress Sakura as a character.

The humour in the show is pretty much spot on if you’re looking for something that borders on the bizarre, and Kenji is perfectly cast as the sane straight man that has to deal with his club mates’ destructive nature. In all, this makes for a thoroughly entertaining, but ever so slightly insane comedy that stands out far more than it has a right to. Be warned though, if the idea of a board game based around gathering intergalactic porn magazines offends you, you’re onto a loser here.

Rating: 5/5

→ Full review (on Matt Doyle Media)

Aniplex of America in recent years has been purchasing the distribution rights to many of the more popular series. When distributing their content they create expensive collector’s edition that can cost upwards to $200. Is it right for them to be doing this to the common fan of the series that may just want to own Fate/Zero on Bluray for a reasonable price? Or is it their right to charge however much they want to because they own the distribution rights?

The prices Aniplex of America use seem to reflect the Japanese Anime Market mindset, where they charge a large amount of money, because if they get at least a couple of people to buy it they will have made their money back. Though these prices seem to mainly affect their series on Bluray and not on DVD. An example of this is you can get the first 6 episodes of Aldnoah Zero on DVD for a retail price of $39.98 USD, while the Bluray edition is priced at $94.98 USD. Though this can be added to the extras added to the Bluray release.

So, do you think that Aniplex of America’s pricing is fair to the common anime collector? If yes, why do you think that? Also if Aniplex of America created a line of Value Blurays would you be interested in purchasing it?

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Yaoi and shounen-ai genres (also may known as BL-Boy’s Love) depict male/male romantic and/or sexual relationships in manga. Yaoi and shounen-ai have an extremely common trope. When the person initiating the relationship (term for the initiator is ‘seme’) tries to kiss/grope the other party (uke) or force sexual intercourse, the victim of the harrassment blushes and has a throbbing heart inside while externally screaming out "No!" and trying the shove harrasser away. This situation is called ‘romanticised rape’ and is shown in the form of ‘true love’.

In yaoi, with this trope, the tension between the seme and uke is tried to be constructed and when seme acts too possesive, stalks uke and forces kisses or sexual intercourse, it is easily represented as "Loving so much that not being able to control one’s self", however, it should be realised that this is what ‘sexual harrassment’ literally means. Yaoi is a great genre with big potential; sexist clichés used as a plot device only creates the oppressing gender norms and ruins the yaoi’s possibilites to open up a door wich genres like shoujo or josei cannot do easily.

Writer’s note: "Doki" is the Japanese sound corresponding to "thump" in English.

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Ichigo Kurosaki from the anime Bleach gets thrown down a path of violence, death, and corruption. But it is a path he believes that he must take if he wants to protect his friends. The path he chooses though is a road littered with enemies. With each enemy seeming to be more powerful than the one preceding it, Ichigo continuously needs to become stronger.

Each time he grows stronger, however, the source of his power becomes darker, and he soon realizes that his soul is partially possessed by an evil spirit—his inner Hollow. The presence of his inner Hollow burdens him, so much that he almost loses control of his body, and meanwhile, he is suddenly faced with an incredibly powerful foe. As a result, Ichigo doesn’t know what other method to turn to, other than by controlling and using his inner Hollow to boost his power.

Is it logical for the hero of a story to use or join sides with evil in order to bring about a desired good. Or does this confuse society, and make the line between good and evil too blurry? And most importantly, is it moral to use an evil means to meet a just end?

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Nisioisin, the creator of such anime, manga, and light novel works as Zaregoto, Medaka Box, Katanagatari, and The Monogatari Series, writes in such long, descriptive, and tangential strokes that it wouldn’t be unfair to say he likes hearing himself talk. Amidst his stylistic tendencies tough, a core theme recurs throughout all of his stories. It is one that he is sympathetic to, one that may be described as “Nietzschean.” Without knowing better, many people believe there is an absolute, irreplaceable, inviolable, and ultimate truth.

That truth, to these people, demands them, without objection, to conform their behavior and beliefs to truth. In both their respective works, Nietzsche and Nisioisin express and illustrate what they believe is the actual reality: That those demands are all just self-delusions. Like an abyss full of nothing, nothing in life has meaning. Morality doesn’t exist in nature. There is no such thing as objective good or right, objective wrong or evil. Morality is all arbitrariness in self-denial. It is all stuff that people made up.

Yet as Nisioisin characters like, but not exclusive to, The Monogatari Series’ Kaiki Deishu and others point out in one way or another. Life having no inherent meaning doesn’t make it completely pointless. Quite the contrary, it means that life is full of endless possibilities. All people need to do is acknowledge and embrace the arbitrary. They should believe, behave, and act on what they feel.

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