Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, end – By golly, they managed it. The big fight scene and enough time left over to wrap up all the loose ends, including what Earth was doing as one big ocean. Everyone, finally, from cultists to pirate queen, getting together to work in the same direction. Heck, even talk […]
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet #12 – Is it an act of insubordination if you refuse the orders given by your superior officer’s ghost? Or does that mech fight just count as damaging government property? There’s only one episode left, and you can feel it. Not just in the climactic fight as Ledo formalizes his […]
Hunter x Hunter #84 – One of the recurring features of shōnen series is a tendency to look at characters exclusively through who they can and can’t defeat in a fight. The shōnen world can be arranged like the early zoological idea of the Great Chain of Being, only with every lifeform in existence ranked […]
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet #10 – So the magical glowing trails from which all the fleets of Earth draw their electricity are, basically, squid dandruff. Next it will probably turn out that the lightbugs die after a while and need more squid to replenish them. Better hope there are other outposts, or at least […]
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet #9 – Now Ledo knows what, or rather who, he’s been fighting… almost. The descendants of the human/squid symbionts went to space, copied the wormhole technology, put on some better armor, and have been fighting Ledo’s ancestors ever since. But are the ones on Earth the people who stayed behind, […]
Hunter x Hunter #81 – Watch that fight scene in isolation, and it’s just another case of insanely exaggerated martial arts. But watch it with the weight of 80 previous episodes of struggling and training, and it’s amazing. We’ve seen the learning process behind every move they made in that couple of minutes. Here’s the […]
Hunter x Hunter #80 – The Chimera Ant queen has just collected the brain of a man so misanthropic that he founded an entire country just to give him a base from which to make everyone else miserable. Chimera Ants are strong enough to be able to defeat a Nen user without knowing about Nen […]
Space Brothers #57 – Everyone caught that piko-piko is the Japanese onomatopoeic equivalent to “beep”, right? So we all know how the author picked Pico’s name? Well then, let’s talk about a slightly less obvious one: Takio Azuma, one of the astronauts coming up to take the next shift at the moonbase. He’s almost certainly […]
First, some big news for those of you in Spain and Portugal: Crunchyroll expanded its offerings for you as of May 9th. The specific list of shows involved isn’t accessible outside your countries, so I can’t tell you what to be excited about getting access to, but go have a look! Space Brothers #56 – […]
Hunter x Hunter #77 – Giant ants! Giant mutant intelligent ants! Giant intelligent ants which eat people and then practice Lamarckian evolution! I expect to start hearing a theremin any minute now. I can think of a lot of relatives to this particular menace, but none that work quite this way. Certainly you’ve got giant […]
Hunter x Hunter #76 – Hunter x Hunter was previously adapted for TV in 1998-1999 for a series that ran to the middle of the Yorknew City arc and stopped. Various direct-to-video continuations (none of which made it further than Asia) moved it along in dribs and drabs over the next few years to the […]
More international streaming sites have announced their spring simulcasts, and I’m afraid it looks like the entire world will get to see a couple of high school romantic comedies, but most of the good sf this season is stuck with limited releases. So the lineup for this column for the next while is going to […]
A big stack of first looks this week, and then it’ll be time to make decisions about what to add for the regular weekly commentary. Those of you worried about the absence of Attack on Titan, fear not– there have just been announcements that it’ll be streaming at both Crunchyroll and FUNimation, and I’ll have […]
Every three months, like clockwork, Japanese TV remakes itself. A bunch of shows end, a bunch more start, and many continuing series bring out new opening and closing sequences. Most anime series run for only three or six months. Throw in that there’s no such thing as rerun season, and that’s a lot of space […]
