Theory about newcomer seiyuus’ popularity

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I have a theory for a while now, that game company presidents, anime company presidents, and Kodansha, Shueisha/whoever are the people ruling on anime and game industry, actually have secret talks, to agree on which newbie seiyuu they’ll decide to push in a short amount of time. To artificially make her/him more poplar. Just like how cars, phones, and various manufacturers or service providers make secret agreements on high prices, or to give their products a fixed lifetime so you’re forced to buy a new one after a while.

The recent example illustrating this is Ichimichi Mao/M.A.O

Kaden Shoujo sucks!!!

There’s a difference with things like Robot Girls Z or Kancolle which actually tries to incorporate the ships’s history to the character and this. The Toaster girl is literally a random schoolgirl carrying toasters. And then there’s the stereo speakers that are just two girls sitting on stereo speakers. Even I could have done the chara design for that game.
Things like Kancolle are lazy cashgrabs to a certain degree anyway, but this is the epitome of cash grabbing laziness. This is an insult to mecha musume and it’s variants. This is everything wrong with Japan right now. It’s disgusting.

Something about Kodomomuke

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Something always strikes me when I read Pretty Rhythm’s director saying “Pretty Rhythm isn’t for kids, but it’s not like it’s for adults either”. It also strikes me I read people saying one of their favorite little kids anime is so good because “it doesn’t feel like a kids show” (I use that argument myself a lot too). It’s the fact that this feels obvious to me: I always thought a good kids show must feel that way.

A handful of little girls shows I know have bittersweet endings. Sometimes it’s not limited to endings either, as kids shows like Princesse Sarah, Rémi Sans Famille, or Pretty Rhythm, are like this during their whole run. I’m not saying that kids shows must necessarily educate kids or have deep morals and dark twists at the ending. But they do need a bare minimum. And come to think of it, I feel that way about any show in general, aimed to kids or not. Or else watching TV would just be a waste of time.

It really makes me sad when I see kids shows like Pop Pixie these days or whatever it’s called, and that every single episode is pretty much “We lost the ice cream machine, we can’t eat ice cream anymore!!”. It really sucks a lot of kids shows these days deal with pointless preoccupations like these.

I think I rewrote that post at least 4 times. It turned out shorter than the first version too.
I hope I did a good job passing my point across. As a side note, I only learned the word Kodomomuke a few months ago.
Also, I used a Futari wa Purikua/Pretty Cure picture for this post. It’s not like it’ll start up a genocide if you get it wrong, but try not to mix up Purikua/Pretty Cure with Pretty Rhythm, which I often write about. They don’t have much in common besides being kids shows.

Something quick about the way I like first episodes done

I watched Nobunaga The Fool and Wizard Barristers. The latter had my favorite start. They didn’t expose too much things. It was easy to follow, it flowed well, and didn’t try hard to end on a cliffhanger.
I don’t really care either way, and I don’t judge stuff on one episode so I’ll keep watching Nobunaga The Fool. I was planning to watch it ever since I heard about it anyway.

Not sure how to explain it, but I wish it’d leave us some things to interpret ourselves instead of introducing every character(even those who won’t appear immediately), and plot devices. The scene at the end of Nobunaga The Fool episode 1, with every character and silver loli saying their own version of “…it’s starting” was particularly useful yet useless.
Actually I think I figured out why irks me. I’ve never disliked the blueprint of the typical first episode of a mecha show. I never found myself to have grown tired of typical lines like these. I don’t mind the cliffhanger at the end right when the protagonist gets into the mecha. It’s just that Nobunaga The Fool’s was a really mediocre take on this typical mecha anime episode 1 blueprint.

I’m really looking forward to the rest of Wizard Barristers. Too bad it’s only 12 episodes.

Reading manga in Japanese is so much better

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Saying it like this seems stupidly obvious but I think it’s the kind of thing you only realize once you actually experience it. I’m reading JA – Joshi ni Yoru Agriculture in the subway these days and having a blast. It’s also easier to imagine the characters speaking in Japanese with the seiyuu voice you think will fit best. I guess the fact that JA is an excellent manga also comes into play. It has the same artist as Zettai Joousei by the way, which is another manga I loved, one of the few stories with a “become my slave!” tsundere that isn’t extremely annoying. Sadly it got axed pretty fast.

This blog is three years old

Unlike last year I didn’t forget about it, and my exams weren’t in the way. Though last year I could have always written a post in advance, I didn’t think it was worth it. I am finally starting to feel just a little bit proud of this blog though, so this year I’m doing it. I don’t really have anything interesting to say though so I’m just going to write about what comes to mind.

Yesterday, I watched D-1 Devastator. It was a pretty cool, good old 90’s ova. It was a mix of Obari, Back To The Future, and Speed, which was actually released after it! I also think I got an idea for Alteisen’s upgrade in the next OG game. It’s going to use double drill stakes. I also watched the first of the two s-CRY-ed recap movie, without subs. As you may know these days, anything that isn’t streamed by Crnuchyroll/any official streaming site, rarely gets subbed, as most of the subs you can find are rips of said sites, or remixes of them, just like Marisa Stole The Precious Thing. I probably never heard the original version of that song. Anyway, it was really fun seeing Kazuma again spin and hear him yell his cool attack names. It was really nice hearing Straight Cougar misspell names and talk like crazy. Also Scheris is easily my favorite Hirai female character. Lunamaria sucks compared to her. Nice thing I didn’t watch s-CRY-ed when it originally aired in 2001, but only in 2008 or something when it aired on Nolife, or I don’t think I would’ve been to handle all the nostalgia, truly a great show.

Ｓｏｕｒｃｅ

Getting back to this blog, I actually get comments now, which means the around 200 views a day I get aren’t only bots and search engines. Also, my report about Ryukishi07’s conferences at Epitanime last year got linked on Tvtropes’s Umineko page. I’m so poplar. Speaking of that I’m writing another one right now about this year’s guests, Urobuchi Gen and Nitro + boss Kosaka Takaki, so look forward to it. I’m still trying to write about less popular anime, like Pretty Rhythm, my current favorite show. I’m even blogging the 3rd season Rainbow Live even though I dislike episodic blogging.

I hope I’ll keep having fun writing on this blog.

Bimbogami ga!! & References

I love this manga, it’s one of my favorite shonen manga, as in I like it just as much as Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Hokuto no Ken or City Hunter. I like it that much. It does everything it does perfectly, it has romance, great characters and it’s hilarious. The manga is finally getting published here too. Anyway, I love Bimbogami Ga so much and yet I’m not planning to watch the anime. I don’t feel like watching it. Besides the lack of time and other things, the reason I’m about to talk about now is the fact that from the bits I’ve seen of it, there’s way more parodies than in the manga. The panel on top is from volume 12’s afterword, and it seems to confirm my assumptions.

I like parodies and references when they contribute to the plot, and if they’re actually funny. If you don’t get the reference, the scene should be funny, and if you do get the reference, the scene should be even funnier. This is my definition of a good reference or parody. I don’t like the act of putting references just for the act of doing it.
I like it when they stay in the show’s continuity. Like, if a character says a line that was used in a popular show, you could turn that scene into a parody by drawing the character in the same style as the character who said the line originally. (This happens a lot in the manga.) A really good example of a show with good continuity with parodies is Seto no Hanayome. If you’ve read or seen that you should easily get what I mean. An example of references I don’t like are the ones in Nyaruko.

What does an anime director do?

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I don’t understand people who judge anime before it aired, by the director or by the studio working on it. But I admit myself I don’t really have a concrete idea of what exactly an anime director is anyway, since I never really cared. I really don’t care who works on a show. If I like it then cool, if I don’t like it then too bad. Anyway, I do have a precise definition of it now thanks to Nolife. To put it simply, the animators working on an anime each have their own way of drawing, their own animation style, their own way of doing scene transitions, etc. The role of the director is to check everything they draw and make it coherent, by correcting it if necessary, in order to make the audience feel like it was all made by a single person.

Now, through a few transitions, I could start talking about how a lot of people these days say Kakumeiki Valvrave is similar to Code Geass because they have the same writer, while really they don’t really have that much in common. Plus we’re only 2 episodes in!

A TV anime’s length

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Mondaiji already ended last week. It was so short. Way too short. I know I keep saying that you shouldn’t judge shows without watching them first, but there’s one thing I always keep track of before a show starts: I believe the longer a show is, the stronger chances it’ll have to be good. You need time to make a good show, in order to develop the stories and characters. The shorter the series, the harder it is.

I’m always surprised to hear someone tell me they stopped watching Aikatsu simply because they learned that it’s 50 episodes and that they don’t have the courage to stick with it until the end, while I’m thoroughly delighted each time I remember this fact, thinking about all the fun I’ll be having. There’s very few 10~13 episode anime that are all time favorites of mine. It needs to be at least be 25~26 episodes. And even 26 episodes feels short to me at times.

As an example, Madoka Magica aired two years ago. I think it was a good show, but I certainly don’t like it as much as some people who would call it a masterpiece. There’s a good chance I would’ve liked it more if it was 26 episodes. Of course, OVAs and movies are a whole different story.

I wonder why there’s no manga on Chess

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Last time I was at uni studying. There was some students playing chess on the desk in front of mine. I never learned how to play Chess, I asked myself why. It never interested me. As much as it is portrayed both in real life and in fiction as the most intellectual game ever, it always seemed very primitive to me. In the end, no matter how complicated it gets, the only strategy in Chess is predicting your opponent’s moves. No more no less. Sure there’s different tactics, like the stuff I just read on Wikipedia about the Indian Defense and whatever, but it’s still about predicting.

After that, I started to look up if there was a manga on chess. And there isn’t as far as I know. Sure there’s some with Chess elements, and a lot of manga use it to show some sort of intellectualism possessed by the characters like I said in the first paragraph, but there isn’t a pure Chess one. Like you know, the typical shounen manga about a young boy who has a hidden talent playing Chess called La Main de Déesse and how his father left him a king piece before disappearing, the boy now plays Chess in order to find the truth about his father’s disappearance. It’s because you can’t do such a manga with Chess, or maybe you could but it would be extremely difficult. You won’t be able to make the matches exciting, make the audience’s blood boil, or make the boy pull off crazy moves that would make the readers want to learn them and use them themselves while playing, because such moves simply doesn’t exist in Chess. You can’t do the Yu Gi Oh or Saki of Chess.

After that, one could think it’s because Chess isn’t popular in Japan enough, being overshadowed by Shougi. Everyone says Shougi is the equivalent of Chess but as I don’t know how to play both I can’t really confirm this. Anyway, even then there’s only a few manga on Shougi. The only one I know of is Shion no Ou. And the anime was awesome, though I never finished it. I should do that and also read the manga someday.

I feel like it’s the first time I wrote a post that could be so full of crap, I’m nervous just like Wendy wearing a mini skirt. It was fun though.