So this has always bothered me. A lot of anime, manga, and Japanese video game characters are fourteen or fifteen years old. Makes sense, that’s the primary target audience. That in itself isn’t what bothers me — what bothers me is the huge, huge difference there usually is between the portrayal of the fourteen-year olds and the fifteen-year olds. At fourteen, characters are depicted as innocent, naive, and both childish and childlike. In some cases, I find their behavior applicable to people as young as eight, which is kind of ridiculous. At fifteen, characters become much more mature; they are tougher, hardened to some extent, and a little more serious. Usually, I can very easily imagine those characters being seventeen or eighteen, or sometimes even in their early twenties. Does such a dramatic shift really happen between the two ages?
One year difference? Riiiight.
[View the rest of this entry…]
Three months after this series finished, and I’ve finally finished the review for it. Finally.
I had such a hard time writing this. It’s hard to find a reasonable voice when all you can remember is everything that sucked. It isn’t an objectivity issue since you obviously can’t be objective writing something that’s completely opinion, but it’s still hard to fashion your opinion in a way that doesn’t make you seem like some fanraging idiot. After all, reviews are also supposed to be subtly persuasive, and it’s hard to be persuasive if you sound offended or butthurt about how terrible something is. It’s the same reason people tend to take the opinions of fanboys with a grain of salt. Don’t be overzealous. Write intelligently. Well, I tried.
Honestly, when this series first ended, I wanted to write a long, raging rant about how much I hated the ending and how terribly disappointing the entire thing was on a variety of different levels. But then I put it off and eventually didn’t feel like it anymore. I got the urge again as I was writing the review, and subsequently, the review spiraled into a bunch of sarcastic remarks. Some of them got edited out. Some of them didn’t. I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about it.
I do this for fun! This is fun, see? Fun!
Here is my review for Gundam Wing: Episode Zero. I meant to do it earlier when I was reviewing all the rest of my GW manga, but Episode Zero must be special since I still own it and I sold everything else. I really want to go rewatch Gundam Wing now, but all I have is some ghetto VHS tape of the final five or six episodes… and there’s no longer a working VCR in the house. I do have Endless Waltz, so I guess I could watch that, but I wanna see the series, man. Then again, maybe I should just go rewatch Gundam SEED (for the fifth or sixth time) instead since I do have access to that, and I’m supposed to be filling in the SEED wiki portions of Anime Vice while this fellow does Wing.
And now it’s time for my rant about Comcast even though I’m sure that there isn’t a single person that would sing praises for them!
[View the rest of this entry…]
Finally saw this OAV the other day, so here is the review. I’m still kind of surprised at how good it was. It’s good enough that I’m actually considering checking out the Astray spin-off stuff, which I’d avoided before mostly because the Astray girl characters were annoying as hell, but I guess they wouldn’t really be using those characters anyway (right? right?).
What I really want though is either for someone to license and release the Gundam SEED Destiny: The Edge manga series or for someone to freakin’ finish scanlating it. I usually just say that I deny Destiny’s existence and don’t treat its events as canon, but I guess I’m still desperate to find something that takes that shitty storyline and makes it (somewhat kind of maybe) tolerable. From what I’ve read of The Edge, it seems like it has that potential. Of course, part of that is natural just because The Edge’s retelling focuses entirely on Athrun’s POV instead of jumping onto Shinn’s sorry sobstory. Athrun being my favorite character from the series probably helps too. :\ Still, if the Astray side stories can get translated, then why not The Edge? (Probably because everyone finally realized that no one likes SEED in the States and doesn’t care, probably.)
Well, I finally got around to marathoning through Gundam 00, so here’s the review for season one. I’m still a little behind in the current season (I’m on episode 8), but I’ll probably be caught up by tonight. I’m pretty disappointed with the series in general right now though. The first season’s ending was terrible, and the second season so far hasn’t really made up for it. I really wish they had just cut out half the nonsense in the first season and filled it with all the relevant stuff they’re trying to fit into season two. They could have ended the series in 25 episodes, and it would have been better. I guess I should wait until the second season’s done to pass final judgment though.
But seriously, I’m getting so sick of Sunrise’s Zombie characters. I was going to write a rant about it, but it seems even writing about it pisses me off, so whatever. 8| Raaaaage.
So I’ve reread and reviewed Gundam Wing’s Ground Zero, Blind Target, and Battlefield of Pacifists. All three are manga that take place between the Gundam Wing anime and the Endless Waltz OAV, and the latter two are written by scriptwriters of the series. These three books, along with Gundam Wing: Episode Zero, were among the first manga I ever bought, but I haven’t read them in years… it was really strange going back to them now, especially since it’s been just as long since I’ve seen the Gundam Wing anime. It was kind of nostalgic and kind of hilarious. I didn’t realize or remember how pretentious some of these storylines were. :P
I’ll be rereading and reviewing Episode Zero soon, and after that, I’m going to be selling them all to a friend. I was really fighting with the idea of letting them go — like I said, these were pretty much the first manga I ever bought — but I think after rereading all of them, I’ll be all right. Gundam Wing was one of my first major fandoms, so it makes sense that it’s hard to get rid of what I own. It makes me wonder what else I’ll be getting rid of soon, and it makes me wonder what I’ll be getting rid of in the future. I don’t buy too many things in general, but I get attached easily. And I’m a packrat. I’m not used to getting rid of things at all. Damn economy, eh? Damn it all.
I haven’t written a review in what seems like ages. I guess this is what I get for writing like four reviews a day for the first week or two. I went through almost all of the anime I think I remember well enough to give a proper opinion. So I scribbled out a super short review for a super short series of shorts. It’s kind of a useless thing, I guess. I seem to have paused in my watching of Spice and Wolf and Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, along with Yami no Matsuei, which I started for no reason that I can identify. I just haven’t had as much time as I’d like to chill and watch cartoons lately. Very sad. Doesn’t help that some of my time is eaten up by rewatching Code Geass and Gurren Lagann dubbed (gotta keep those TV ratings up, yo). I don’t want to review Code Geass R2 until the series is finished. Same with Soul Eater. I will most likely revise both my CG and Gurren Lagann reviews when I’m finished with their respective dubs and purge some of the fantarding currently present though.
[View the rest of this entry…]
Because living in the middle of no where sucks, it seems I won’t be able to see the Dark Knight until tomorrow. Much fail. Growing up with an AMC 24 where opening weekend titles often get eight screens, it bewilders me that I was met with a “sold out” sign, even if I was going into a one screen theatre that was a fifteen minute drive away from the house. Yeah, it isn’t anime anyway, but come on, it’s the goddamn Batman. :(
Anyway, to make myself feel slightly better, I was looking for Gundam Wing episodes to rewatch for the lulz. Veoh seems to be complete fail and YouTube’s not much better, but I did manage to find most of the first two episodes. It occurred to me that I haven’t seen very much of the series subbed, but oh man. First of all, Wing’s age is really starting to show. The animation for the most part really isn’t so bad, but the people are hilarious. I sure as hell didn’t notice this ten years ago, but the G-boys’ proportions are… accurate. They’re fifteen year old kids! It’s awesome! The voices in Japanese are ridiculous different; in Heero’s case, it’s disturbingly… spunkier? Is that the right word? It’s kind of odd when it’s his wannabe badass English voice you remember the best.
[View the rest of this entry…]
So recently, I realized that 4 of 5 of my listed favorite anime series on MAL are either mecha series (Gurren Lagann, Gundam SEED, and Code Geass) or include mecha in some way (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex). The odd one out is Paranoia Agent, which is last on the list anyway because I kind of included it on a whim. I find this kind of strange because even though I do like my giant robots, I’ve never thought that they had much influence on my overall impression of a series. After all, I don’t think I go out of my way to watch that many mecha series, and I certainly have positive opinions of wide variety of other series. But nevertheless, it’s the mecha series that hold up as my favorites. Is it just a coincidental statistic that 80% of my “top favorites” are mecha? Or 60% if you want to disqualify GitS:SAC for only having Tachikomas that are mostly irrelevant anyway? Or is there really something about mecha series that makes them rise above the rest?
[View the rest of this entry…]
