About Me

Newfoundland, Canada
I've been a big anime fan for about 10 years or so now. My five all-time favorite animes at this point are, in no particular order... Puella Magi Madoka Magica, El Hazard: The Magnificent World, Love Live!: School Idol Project, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. However, there are hundreds of anime shows that I like. The main purpose of this blog is to provide meta-commentary on anime, and the anime industry - to try to cast a critical, though appreciating, eye upon this entertainment genre that I believe has tremendous potential, but can also be easily wasted. I have always been a fan of animation in general - in the 80s, I grew up on western cartoons like He-Man, She-Ra, Transformers, and G.I. Joe. Through out the 90s, I was a hardcore comic book fan, for the most part. I'm also a big fan of Star Trek. Right now in my life, though, anime is my principal entertainment passion.
Showing posts with label A-Rise. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A-Rise. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Love Live! Review, Season 1 First Half

Somewhere, Captain Ginyu cries a tear of joy...
My apologies for the lateness. But better late than never, right? That's certainly one of the ideas that Love Live!: School Idol Project tends to promote, given the context behind the screenshot above. In this blog entry and series of Love Live! reviews, I intend to delve deeper into this particular anime series, in order to explore many of the ideas it puts forward, both explicitly and implicitly. To help with this endeavor, I will be breaking up my Love Live! reviews into four parts - two parts for each season. 

This part is "Season 1, First Half" and it will cover the first 6 episodes of Love Live! Season 1. I used a similar "break up" review approach with Angel Beats!, Sola, and True Tears in the past. So hopefully this will work with LL! as well. But there will be one key difference...

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Honoka Kousaka Creates A-RISEing Love




It's been a long, long time since I last blogged on anime. And when I last blogged it was over at Rabbit Poets, but that site has been relatively inactive in general for quite some time now, which is why I've decided to resume blogging here.  And what has inspired me to start blogging again? Quite fittingly, it's that most inspirational anime show of all, Love Live!

There's been a lot of discussion about A-Rise taking on a much larger role in the Love Live! anime with Season 2, Episode 3. They are now, at last, interacting directly with the nine singing goddesses of Muse. Many, including myself, suspected foul-play, since hey, it's kind of a trope for underdog upstarts like Muse to be on the receiving end of foul-play from the empowered established elite rival, which definitely describes A-Rise.

And so in focusing on possible villainy, I think I missed something paradoxically both obvious and subtle. It's subtle in that each instance of it is easy to dismiss or chalk up to a different interpretation. But it's obvious in that when you add these instances altogether, it points towards yuri as telling as Akemi Homura interacting for any more than a minute with Kaname Madoka.