The winter anime season is practically upon us, and I’ve yet to wrap up Izetta, Trickster, and Flip Flappers. But, these shows ought to be finished and reviewed with the other fall anime choices of mine on or before January 7th, which appears to be the new season’s official start. And, I’ll have to reveal my favorite anime of last year!
Many upcoming shows caught my eye:
- ACCA: 13-ku Kansatsu-ka
- Chain Chronicle
- Chaos; Child
- KonoSuba 2
- Little Witch Academia
- Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid
- Onihei
- Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu 2
- Spiritpact
Of these, Chaos; Child, KonoSuba 2, and Shouwa Rakugo 2 derive from solid franchises. Chaos; Child is the fourth installment, which began with Chaos; Head and continued with Steins; Gate and Robotics; Notes. Any otaku worth his salt needs to watch Steins; Gate, Chaos; Head only ranks behind Welcome to the NHK for having a great hikikomori protagonist, and I myself need to remedy not having seen Robotics; Notes.
Of the other six, it would not surprise me to drop four or five of them. Little Witch Academia mainly finds itself on my watch list because it derives from Studio Trigger. Chain Chronicle and Spiritpact might be entertaining fantasy adventures. Onihei finds itself there because I can’t pass up taking a chance on samurai anime. (After all, the samurai genre made me an anime fan to begin with; though good samurai anime seem harder and harder to find.) Nor can I pass up a good dystopian anime, hence ACCA. (One never knows when one will come across another Psycho-Pass or Shinsekai Yori.) Lastly, who would not take a chance on a show with a dragon maid?
There you have my brief reasons for what I’m going to watch this season. Now, let’s move onto the resolutions half of this post! I took a long hiatus to recalibrate my writing and to give myself a little break from anime. For the future, I intend to include more posts on older anime, both from the recent past, the 90’s, and the old school years. (The 90’s will never be considered old school to me–no matter how much time passes.) So, you ought to see articles like “Notes to Old Anime” in addition to posts detailing my thoughts on currently airing ones. An essay on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress and the French Revolution is in the offing, and maybe essays on the following:
1) Ginga Nagareboshi Gin (aka Silver Fang) – Two articles are circulating in my mind: one on the over-seriousness of the series and another on why I liked the Jack London-esque beginning more than the Daniel P. Mannix-esque middle.
2) Legend of Galactic Heroes – I really want to write about what I see as the true inspiration behind the anime, and it’s not WWI.
3) Galaxy Express 999 – A true gold mine of compelling ideas, but I’ll try to not write too exclusively on it.
4) Ashita no Joe II
5) Denno Coil
6) Fate/Zero
7) Kuromukuro
8) Donten ni Warau (aka Laughing under the Clouds)
9) You’re Under Arrest: Full Throttle
Then again, most of my essay ideas come from books, so I also want to revive my reviews of spiritual and Catholic books (a post on Fr. Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World and Fr. Basil W. Maturin’s Christian Self-Mastery are upcoming), medieval works and works about medieval times (I’m halfway done with Dan Jones’ The Wars of the Roses, a history on the wars which inspired George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books), and the Nihongo no Hon series of mine–a valuable exercise in Japanese. I’ve also set up the long shot goal on Goodreads of reading one hundred books this year. One down, ninety-nine to go. 🙂
May you all have a Happy New Year and happy blogging!
Medieval Otaku 
“Legend of Galactic Heroes – I really want to write about what I see as the true inspiration behind the anime, and it’s not WWI.”
YESSSS
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Considering your enthusiasm, I promise to get around to this article sooner rather than later. 🙂 It’s always good to run into fans of LOGH.
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Lord of the world! That´s promising. I love your blog resolutions. Happy New Year!
P.D: I started LOGH a while ago, and at first I was amazed, but then the Cult of Earth and those Dark Bishops caused me to lost my enthusiasm and when they became more and more central in the story, I stopped and turned to other shows. That said, I´ll be looking forward to your review.
P.D.D: Just yesterday I started Ashita no Joe on your recommendation: the first episode was interesting, and the music/drawing/animation style fits well. I´ll comment when finished.
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Happy New Year to you also! I enjoyed Benson’s Lord of the World so much that I went on to read his Paradoxes of Catholicism and am in the middle of Come Rack! Come Rope! The three most striking things in Lord of the World are how well Benson understands the Secular Humanist worldview, portrays the struggle of maintaining the Faith, and his compassion for the enemies of the Church.
I can see why you might have a problem with the Cult of Earth in LOGH. I thought that it only had the most superficial appearance to the Roman Catholic Church. Also, it was explained to me that the Japanese have far more animus towards corrupt Buddhist priests than the Catholic Church and that Buddhist priests tend to be the intended target of such portrayals. A famous Japanese historian, not Catholic himself, actually had high praise for the Japanese martyrs under Tokugawa, saying that their constancy was in the fullest spirit of the Japanese character. Enduring this period of tribulation as well as a perceived resemblance between Buddha and Christ has earned the Catholic Church much respect among the Japanese people at large.
I hope that you enjoy Ashita no Joe! It was my greatest find of recent years, and I love how markedly Catholic the story and motifs were.
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What a post you gave us,plus the beautiful “You’re Under Arrest” image.Thanks.
Mind if you read a fanfic story I gave,under your last post about the “Fight Against Evil- and Vampires”?Could you write to me what you feel about it?
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Yes, sorry that I haven’t gotten back to you yet about the story. Please feel free to email me at medievalotaku@gmail.com if you have any other stories you’d like me to read.
I’m glad that you liked the post. 🙂
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Very interesting.
Regarding some shows you mention, some impressions, commentary, etc.
Izetta, as suspected tried to include some shoujo-ai elements. These war and magic series seem to have one or another problem frequently. Fanservice, shoujo-ai, etc. Maybe they are trying to appeal to some specific otaku sector.
Same with Flip Flappers. I’ve read that some episodes were dedicated to explore the concept of classic shoujo-ai school anime, but with the twist of showing these as some type of creepy envorionments or situations.
About Kono Suba I hope viewers don’t run into another brothel episode, for obvious reasons.
About the maid show, months ago I was reading the manga, and when in-story Christmas was approaching, the maid and her friends of the same species showed disgust towards the celebration and the Lord. So they are some type of villain protagonists but presented as cute characters. I dropped the manga after that. Recently, I was reading about the surprise of some people about KyoAni adapting a yuri show. It seems that the titular maid has taken a liking towards her human companion.
Psycho-Pass is a show I didn’t finished. I didn’t liked the oppressive atmosphere. It seems that there is an impllied (?) sex scene between two female agents, but I didn’t get so far in the series, but I remember some disturbing paintings mixing nudity and grotesque motifs that a female villain made in the first episodes. They could have avoided showing these. Shin Sekai Yori, I avoided it because the yaoi and yuri scenes. They really took the dystopian element regarding relationships seriously, it seems.
Welcome to the NHK. I watched the series when I didn’t read more before watching a series. That was years ago. The concept and critique of the pitfalls of the otaku subculture and the hikkikomori problems are good, but they didn’t need to show the contents of the images the characters saw (nuidty) nor display the sexual fantasies of the main character in screen (when thinking about the posibility of the girl co-protagonist being pervert, in the first or second episode.)
LOGH is a good show. The story is interesting and the topics too. Regarding content, is surprisingly clean, save from some action scenes that get rather violent and nudity in these episodes (I don’t know details because I got to know about these before watching the series proper): 40, 58, 65, 89, 93. (From Imdb), also, in the recap Ovas and the Ovas about the protagonist from the empire in his school or academy years.
You’e under Arrest is a show I remember watching in the dubbed version, when the “trap” character was changed into a female one, I think. The character design’s, as seen in the image you posted, are good, classical examples of 90’s anime style.
The book articles sound interesting too.
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That’s too bad about Miss Kobayashi’s etc. I might have to at least postpone it unless I hear that scene has been excised. Excel Saga’s manga had a similar scene, but the anime repudiated it as distasteful. Reading that scene makes me think that the dragons are supposed to stand in for demons.
The yuri in Izetta and Flip Flappers was of a very subdued sort. Plainly, the characters loved each other, but neither anime gives evidence of romantic feelings. At the same time, the animators did give scenes fans of shoujo-ai are sure to love.
I think that trap characters are silly for the most part. Occasionally, the fact of them hiding their sex is important to the plot, like in Gankutsuou, but this is not true for the most part. I need to continuously remind myself that the trap character is a trap in YUA, except in certain scenes played for laughs.
I hope you like some of my articles coming up in recent weeks.
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Reading more about the series, it seems that the maid’s species has various evil characters. Also, is made clear that said maid likes her human companion in an sexual way, although the human constantly rejects her advances. The first episode accordng to reviews seemed to give focus to some fanservice scenes.
Certainly that’s a problem. Many series do that, trying to be in “good standing” to both fans and people that don’t like that genre, but as expected that isn’t a viable position to take.
Recently they include them in a more “serious manner”, or are presenting them as a new fetish in the list of these fetish archeypes in series.
Yes, I’m waiting for these.
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[…] I was only keeping up with four shows this season. Usually, I manage seven or eight. Revisiting an earlier post made me remember that I had not yet tried out Little Witch Academia TV or Onihei. Having […]
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