Anime roundup 8/23/2013: Your Princess Is In Another Reality
In this week’s viewing: Space Brothers gets drop-kicked, Day Break Illusion causes a lecture on honorifics, and more!
Anime roundup 8/16/2013: Take Heart
In this week’s viewing: Hunter x Hunter lays on the foreshadowing, Space Brothers, of all shows, does something mindbogglingly, cringingly offensive, and more!
Anime roundup 8/9/2013: The Zero’s Journey
Hunter x Hunter #90 – Nodding to old sf tropes once again, the new Chimera Ant king is after both braaaaaaaains and our women. And he demonstrates how mustache-twirlingly evil he is by killing two henchmen before he’s five minutes old, although Neferpitou did have a point about how the king and the guards don’t […]
Anime roundup 8/2/2013: Take a Number
Gatchaman Crowds #3 – This is the first sf work I know of to grapple full-on with the implications of widespread social networking. In any medium. You can point to any number of stories where blogging and online interaction are a standard part of the present and future, but it’s just there in the background. […]
Anime roundup 7/26/2013: The Safety Dance
Gatchaman Crowds #2 – Gatchaman Crowds has declared its thesis topic, which is the gamification of human interactions as mediated by the Internet. Gamification is, broadly, the application of game-like scoring systems to Internet sites which are not themselves games. You might get points for every post you make in a forum, or achievement badges […]
Anime roundup 7/19/2013: Expository Lumps
And now, the rest of your season premieres! For those who were eagerly awaiting Symphogear G or the new Milky Holmes, I regret to inform you that they haven’t been picked up for international streaming. Monogatari Second Season premiere – Tsubasa Hanekawa leaves her adopted family’s house for school one day, and a giant spectral […]
Anime roundup 7/5/2013: The Moving Finger Writes
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 […]
Anime roundup 6/28/2013: Fall of the Guardians
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 […]
Anime roundup 6/21/2013: The Great Chain of Beating
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 […]
Anime roundup 6/14/2013: Strange Aeons
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 […]
Anime roundup 6/9/2013: Meeting the Enemy
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, […]
Anime roundup 6/2/2013: Graduation Day
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 […]
Anime roundup 5/26/2013: In the Long Run We Are All Dead
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 […]
Anime roundup 5/19/2013: Ant Misbehavin’
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 […]
Anime roundup 5/12/2013: Failure Analysis
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 – […]
Anime roundup 5/3/2013: Photoeugenic
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 […]
Anime roundup 4/28/2013: Tribal knowledge
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 […]
Anime Roundup 4/21/2013: Fee Fi, Ho Hum
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 […]
Anime roundup 4/14/2013: This Will Be on the Test
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 […]
Anime roundup 4/7/2013: Stop the World, I Want To Get Off
First, a little awards news: Nominees for the Seiun for Best Media (roughly equivalent to Hugo nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation) include two anime series, Bodacious Space Pirates and Eureka Seven AO. E7AO is a particularly unsurprising choice– I’ve never seen a TV show that so desperately needed a viewer advisory on the front of […]
Anime roundup 3/31/2013: You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Plotlines
From the New World, end – If there has been one theme running through every episode of From the New World from the beginning, it’s been that there is always another way to make the situation even more dystopian. And if there is a second one, it’s been how Saki is able to keep standing […]
Anime roundup 3/24/2013: High Anxiety
Space Brothers #49 – Yes, international viewers who may not be familiar with the southwestern US, there are rattlesnakes near Amarillo, and yes, if you’re going to be walking through the wilderness around there for several days, someone in your party should be carrying a gun. The only thing unrealistic about the way it was […]
Anime roundup 3/17/2013: Showdown time
So here’s how this works: Every week, I commentate on the latest episodes of various anime series, and then we all discuss further in the comments! Then in April, From the New World will end and a whole crop of new shows will start, of which one or two may be added to the regular […]
The story so far: Space Brothers
Hello there! I’m going to be doing weekly discussions of current sf anime episodes and previews of upcoming shows in this slot. Since we’re going to be dropping right into the middle of a few series, I’ll start with a look at where they stand now. Let’s begin with the one that’s earned a slot […]
