Month: September 2016

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Reach For The “Sky”

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Sky_Wizards_Academy

This one is a combination of magic and survival shows, kind of what might happen if “Chrome-Shelled Regios” and “Blade Dance” merged ideas, so we end up with “Sky Wizards Academy” (“Kūsen Madōshi Kōhosei no Kyōkan”, “The Instructor of the Aerial Combat Wizard Trainees”).

In the alternative world of the future, humanity was driven off the land by the threat of magical armored insects and now lives in aerial floating cities. Its defenses lie in wizards who fight the insects with magic in mid-air. They are able to float and soar about and use a variety of weapons to dispatch these ‘Devil Beetles’. Continue reading

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Feeling Okay About Not Keeping Up With New Anime

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Yurie (Kamichu!) trying to turn on the TV while sitting in the kotatsu.

I empathize with Yurie. (image from Kamichu!)

May marked the 10 year anniversary of me starting to blog about anime and related things. I was a college sophomore then but I am now 30 and don’t have the same level of energy and enthusiasm. I have barely watched anime over the past four months. The only ones I’ve seen since mid-May have been as part of a weekend Skype group and they’ve all been older series and movies including Princess Tutu, the Space Adventure Cobra movie, Kamichu!, and currently His and Her Circumstances (Kare Kano).

Each quarterly season of new anime series contains many shows I have a medium level interest in watching but few have driven me to keep pace with weekly episodes to the ends of their respective runs. Readers who have followed me for a while might have noticed this trend. I have finished watching only 6 of the 13 anime series I discussed in a summer 2015 impressions post and made little to no progress on the many series I listed in an end-of-2014 post. Continue reading

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COMMENTARY – You “Drive” Me Crazy

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mdv2

I have given a review of “Valkyrie Drive Mermaid”, a show that I could not fully like or embrace for a variety of reasons, but it allowed me to get into a discussion with my anime friends about what it is and isn’t. But first, a small side story:

The last time I went to AX, I attended a session regarding yaoi manga, as I felt I needed to know more about it. The person there referred to it as “Youth Activities On Ice”, so people could discuss it without causing confused looks from those who did not know what it was, especially parents. Do you really want to talk about your enjoyment of BL manga in front of Mom and Pop? Since there was no such acronym for yuri, I made one up: “Youth University Required Instruction”. The point is that potentially my definition of yuri is not what other people think of yuri and IS Valkyrie properly classified as ‘yuri’? Continue reading

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Baby, You Can “Drive” My Car

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Valkyrie_Drive_Mermaid

There are two anime genres I do not really like: yaoi and yuri. It’s just that it comes across to me as letting me know it’s OK to watch two guys or two gals expressing how they feel about each other in a rather intimate manner. I guess. But this show that I saw, “Valkyrie Drive Mermaid” (“Varukirī Doraivu Māmeido”) has two gals making out, but it’s a real means to an end and not just to show canoodling…..although that splash panel up there makes me a liar, eh?

The world that they live in is fraught with peril. Some girls are infected with the A Virus (no, not ‘a’ virus, the A Virus.) “A” means “Armed” and some ladies can turn into weaponry. Those are known as Exters. The other part of the virus gives us a Liberator. When these two get together, via some foreplay arousal, the Exter goes into “Drive” and becomes the weapon, although you have no idea what she will be: a sword, a mace ball, a powerful rifle. It’s pot luck at best. Continue reading