Lost in Translation with Cipher Academy

When I was told even a professional translator found a cipher manga impossible to translate, I had to get in on the action. (Spoilers for Cipher Academy up to chapter 11 ahead!) Cipher Academy is definitely a difficult manga to tackle, for any translator. I mean, it's by Nisio Isin, he of Katanagatari and the...

How Cowboy Bebop Does Horror Well

Cowboy Bebop - a perennial anime classic which manages to span many moods, including horror. I've said before anime doesn't do a lot of horror and one of those reasons is because other genres of anime do it better. Cowboy Bebop nails this, particularly with Toys in the Attic but also with Black Dog Serenade....

Why Don’t People Like Anime Feminists?

Inspired by this Artifice post and...well, Anime Feminist itself. Obviously, some people do like anime feminists - hence the blog in question - but there are some who don't. Admittedly, my stance on the word "feminism" has been bugging me since 2015 or so, when someone asked me if I was a feminist. I said...

Are People’s Tastes in Media Crap?

Inspired by a years-old post which still holds relevance to this very day. (It also contains a mild spoiler for Hypnosis Mic not addressed by Rhyme Anima.) Does liking evil things mean you condone them? This is a moral quandary which I still have to sit with, as an admin of a Hypnosis Mic server...

The World Ends With You(r Relationships)

For this post, I wanted to take a different tack to the other post, because that was so clearly done on a time limit, to the point the final sentence doesn’t really make sense in context. So hopefully, now that I’ve had a reprieve from blogging, this post should be good enough for both me...

Do We Need the Terms Shonen/Shoujo/Seinen/Josei Anymore?

This is a reply to this Anime News Network article. If you were around when I was putting out an article a week, you’ll remember I kept stumbling over the idea of gender-based demographics, most notably through this post. …Well, the topic’s back again. Considering the biggest demographic categories are only for the ends of...

The Light Novels are Where It’s At for No Game, No Life

Last time on this NGNL saga, I wasn't particularly impressed by it...but I guess you could say that I found a kindred spirit through looking at the structure of the novels and their translation. How It All Began After picking up novels 1 - 4 from a branch of the library I don't normally visit,...

Golden Kamuy vs. Angolmois: Culture Clash

Golden Kamuy and Angolmois are two historical series which so far have aired back-to-back (and the former will bookend the latter once the fall season is over), so it would be quite the obvious compare and contrast topic… There seemed to be something connecting Angolmois and Golden Kamuy together, aside from the fact they’re both...

The Epitome of “Absurd, But Fun” (Phantom in the Twilight)

The problem with Phantom in the Twilight is…it's quite obviously flawed, so until you get used to it, you need to be prepared to yell at your screen a bit. Phantom in the Twilight is a bit of an odd duck. Its visuals sometimes go wonky, its ED is pretty much the only thing anyone’s...

Planet With is Crazy…But a Good Kind of Crazy…

Whoever decided to put shonen tropes, animal-shaped mechs and not entirely black-and-white moralities into a blender got to experience the fun mess that is Planet With. Planet With is so crazy, I don't think I can describe it in one go. As Terrance Crow puts it, "We're seeing a narrative involving multiple planetary systems, races...