There comes a time when a blogger must take a break–when blogging becomes a chore instead of a joy. I’ve reached that point, and have even felt the stirrings of animus towards anime. Last season, I only finished three shows. This season in particular strikes me as odiously mediocre, though I’ll heartily endorse Aho Girl. The series occasionally pushes the envelop too far in regard to the humor driven off sex, but it’s genuinely funny.
Here’s my latest post on Beneath the Tangles, in which I discuss a theme which took away from the ending of the show. Click on the link below!
Before I get into why I dropped Berserk, let me talk a little bit about a fantasy series I used to enjoy: The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I really enjoyed the struggles of Richard Rahl, the Mother Confessor Kahlan, and the Wizard Zedd. Like Berserk, it had some unsavory moments–some very unsavory moments indeed. Yet, I felt that the great storytelling outweighed the bad.
Then, I ran into Goodkind’s full-blown Objectivist philosophy in book eight, The Naked Empire. Few moments in my reading life have depressed me as much as Richard Rahl inveighing against self-sacrifice as an evil. Apparently, people should always act in their self-interest, and any sacrifice of one’s self-interest is immoral. Never mind that the heroes frequently risk their lives and suffer quite a lot. Also, many good people had sacrificed their lives for good causes by this point in the series, and the fantasy world’s universe includes God, who no doubt rewards the righteous. The idea of self-sacrifice being a moral evil simply did not compute in my mind. Despite having read 6,454 pages of Goodkind’s work–the equivalent of reading War and Peace about four and a half times, I put down the series and never picked it back up again.
I just wanted to wish all of my dear readers a happy Independence Day! Please, enjoy the video put out today by the channel Lord Drako Arakis. He has some great anime sketches set to old military songs and sea shanties. His sketches for “The Invalid Corps” are perfect!
Tomorrow, check out the blog Beneath the Tangles in order to check out which show surprised me the most this season and which was my favorite.
Medieval Otaku 