Month: August 2020

Posted on in anime, Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: A Goodbye To THE NIGHT-OWL WITCH

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. 

The Night-Owl Witch (Maya-san no Yofukashi in its native Japanese. Its only official title, as it was never brought over here to the Anglosphere in any legal capacity) is a story with very few moving parts. Our lead is Maya, a nerdy shut-in who spends most of her nights on her computer talking to the manga’s sole other major character, her best (and quite possibly only) friend Mameyama. Maya is a witch, a fact that matters to the story only occasionally. The real heart and soul of The Night-Owl Witch is in the first, not the second, part of its title. Maya is a withdrawn otaku with terrible sleeping habits who spends most of her life on her computer. As a career anime blogger, I cannot help but relate.

More than that, though, there is something surprisingly honest about the depiction of Maya and Mameyama’s friendship. Mameyama, to put it bluntly, has her shit together much more than Maya does. Maya essentially relies on Mameyama for much of her emotional well-being. Not deliberately of course, but it’s the sort of not-entirely-even friendship that anyone who’s grown up online will be all too familiar with. Mameyama also ends up serving as Maya’s conscience of reason a fair bit of the time, and not always successfully.

But whether it’s succumbing to the engineered gambling of a gacha game or the common nerd lament of clothes being, just, like, way too expensive, Maya’s real resonance comes from her general experience.

That of someone who has friends, but no friends around. The bittersweet plea of many the world over who certainly have people who understand them, just not in person. In as much as a fairly light character comedy can be said to have one, The Night-Owl Witch‘s core conflict is this; the gap between Maya’s very real friendship with Mameyama and the loneliness she feels in spite of that.

The series, as is common for slice of life manga, is set in this kind of experiential loop, where each chapter starts from essentially the same premise. A loop sometimes formally termed “the endless everyday”, and the subject of much examination both within critical spaces and within the medium itself. (A brilliant triumph over this cycle is the primary reason that A Place Further Than The Universe is among the best anime of its era.) The Night-Owl Witch is not that ambitious, and as such never formally resolves the character arc Maya’s circumstances create. If a half-complete character arc can even be said to be one in the first place.

What it does do, though, is explore the many shades of emotion present in Maya’s circumstance. From the comedic to the melancholic to everything in between. Over its 39 chapters we get a surprisingly thorough feel for Maya as a person, as someone who is coping with her situation as best she can despite the burdens of societal pressure to be “normal”. (It’s not a stretch to call Maya spectrum-coded, intentionally or not, but many such NEET characters are.)

Maya’s discomfort with society at large is rendered in many ways, both stark and completely silly. Sometimes within the same chapter.

If there’s a main complaint to be levied against The Night-Owl Witch, it has to do with that last word in its title. We see rather little of Maya The Witch over the course of its run. There’s not much insight into what witches do, what their society is like, why Maya lives in a cheap Tokyo apartment instead of among them, if there even is an “among them” to live in, and so on.

But those are setting and lore questions, more valid a concern is how little we get to see of Maya as a proactive character. She uses her magic in tangible, productive ways only a handful of times over the run of the series. Each one is, without fail, a highlight. In one instance, she a cherry blossom all the way to Mameyama’s home, several prefectures away. (Well, she messes up and blows a plum blossom instead, but the sentiment is the same.) In another, she hovers nearby to monitor an argument between a couple that looks like it might turn ugly, and giving the girl involved in said argument a scarf to keep her warm.

In the penultimate chapter, she causes it to rain to aid for her search for a kappa. In each of these cases, the art style subtly shifts, “de-chibifying” Maya and making her look more like what is presumably her actual appearance; her insecurities stripped away in these brief moments of mystic self-actualization.

….even if they’re often somewhat immediately undercut by the practical consequences of Maya’s sorcery. (It’s established fairly early on that trying to do too much with magic too quickly causes digestion issues, and if you don’t think that’s milked for comedy here you don’t read many manga of this sort.)

Thus, The Night-Owl Witch is perhaps a good manga held back somewhat by the limitations assumed of its genre. Yet, for the criticisms I have and could further make of it, it’s been a companion in my life for the nine or so months that one-man operation Shurin’s 3am Scanlations has been translating the title. The manga has in fact been complete in its home country for several years, but Shurin’s scanlations only concluded earlier today, thus bringing the manga’s unofficial English run to its end.

Mangaka Hotani Shin has since moved on to their new title Maku Musubi. But, I suspect I’m not the only person with some fondness for The Night-Owl Witch‘s title character, since an unrelated character in that series looks an awful lot like Maya herself, if clearly quite different in personality.

Earlier, I mentioned the “endless everyday”. I am wary of framing the device (or even the term) as a negative. The good thing about a series of this sort ending is that one is free to, if one wishes, to imagine the late nights Maya and Mameyama stretching on into infinity. Perhaps one day we’ll meet them again. In our hearts, if nowhere else.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Relentless Ribbing and Queer Longing in SCHOOL ZONE

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. Each column ends with a Final Verdict, telling you the reader whether or not I recommend the series and why.

In my brain, there is an elitist impulse telling me that calling School Zone a “yuri manga” doesn’t quite feel right. The term is generally taken to imply actual romance, which isn’t really what’s going on here. But as the genre’s anglosphere definition has broadened somewhat over the years (and swallowed the older westernism “shoujo ai”), we can appreciate that it does include stuff that’s a little harder to fit in just a single box. School Zone, primarily, is a character comedy, centered around our two leads; a pair of quirky schoolgirls named Sugiura (“Kei”) and Yokoe. And later, some other characters who are mostly paired up in similar fashion. Kei is fairly serious, snarky, and is short with a blond crop cut. Yokoe is a screwball, is on the taller side, and has long greyish-black hair. As far as your basic pairups for this kind of thing go, they’re a match made in heaven.

But as mentioned, School Zone is mostly a comedy. 51 of the series’ chapters are available in English, at the moment. (Only in scanlation form, although the series was announced for a pickup by Seven Seas as I was planning out this column. So there ya go.) Of those, the vast majority can broadly be termed “antics”. The two give each other a lot of guff in the same way lots of close friends do.

This sequence here is typical; Yokoe says or does something dumb or outrageous, Kei reacts. It’s a fairly simple setup, but it’s good fun, and carries much of the manga.

However; if one reads something like this for enough chapters to get attached to the characters, the question will inevitably come up. What kind of relationship, exactly, do Kei and Yokoe actually have? The series’ tagline sells it (somewhat asininely) as a “miserable yuri comedy”, so they’re clearly crushing on each other at least, right?

Well, the “miserable” in the manga’s admittedly-overwrought tagline might come from the fact that that doesn’t seem to be the case. Namely, the “each other” part. Yokoe definitely has it bad for Kei. As for the other way around? That’s a lot less clear. The two value each other a lot, and one gets the sense that neither quite wants to take their relationship to the next level because they’re afraid of losing what they have. That’s explicitly the case for Yokoe (as we’ll get to), and it wouldn’t be out of character for Kei either. There is plenty of evidence that the feeling is mutual, but neither character is willing to push it forward. Kei even takes steps to deliberately walk it back.

School Zone runs in what is ostensibly a shonen magazine, but while the situation of a possibly-mutual infatuation that both parties are scared to act on certainly transcends the boundaries of gender and sexuality, it hits especially hard for young queer women. A group for whom not knowing if another girl is hitting on you or just being friendly and you’re reading too far into it is even more common than it might otherwise be.

Even within School Zone itself, Yokoe and Kei’s closeness is occasionally called out as weird. And even if the characters doing that have the best of intentions or are simply curious, it’s not hard to make the connection that this is one reason that they may be unwilling to commit to being more than just friends.

Indeed, throughout other character pairings as well, this kind of longing that seems like it might work out but won’t definitely work out shoots an odd undercurrent of melancholy through what is otherwise a pretty upbeat and goofy series. It’s an interesting contrast, and puts School Zone a cut above those series that are content to be merely formulaic, if perhaps still very squarely in the area of the school life comedy.

Not all of these characters are equal, of course. School Zone‘s biggest demerit is its place next to YuruYuri on the shelf of manga that inexplicably find siscon characters funny.

Yeah, why?

Even then though, that character, Tsubaki, is also paired up with a hyperactive gyaru who seems hellbent on breaking her out of her shell via sheer overbearing girl power. So who’s to say where, exactly, that storyline is going to end up.

And in a twist that genuinely is kind of amusing, her sister, Hiiragi, is subjected to much the same thing, despite going to a different school in another part of town. (I have a suspicion, though I obviously can’t prove it, that the mangaka may have realized there’s really not any comedy to wring out of the siscon character archetype. Hiiragi and Tsubaki have barely interacted since then.)

Hiiragi’s partner-in-antics is also much more on the obnoxious side, but, hey, it seems to work for her.

But as fun as these other characters can be (or not be), it’s still Kei and Yokoe’s story. The manga’s strongest moment thusfar has been its 49th chapter. A flashback where we get a walk through Yokoe’s memory; an aborted half-confession framed by some surprisingly complex panel layouts and shadowing. Panels are slashed in half or inset to contrast the external reality and the internal monologue, or spaced far apart to denote time passing.

It is, above all, sad. A kind of dejected blueness you just generally don’t expect from something that bills itself the way School Zone does. The series seems to have an intuitive understanding that life is not just one thing. Thus, despite their quirky personalities, the two leads of School Zone feel like fully realized people, truly what sets the good slice of life manga apart from the simply decent.

School Zone is still serializing. So it is impossible to say if Yokoe and Kei’s peculiar relationship will ever become anything else. But it’s hard not to root for them. That School Zone makes you do that is, itself, its success as a story.

Final Verdict: Strongly Recommended, with some caveats. One must weigh the “ech”-inducing but thankfully only intermittent siscon characterization of Tsubaki against the otherwise fun comedy and, especially, the more serious explorations of pining the series gets into in its best moments, when deciding whether or not to pick up School Zone.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

Weekly Anime Writing Roundup – 8/25/20

Hello folks! Not much to say in the lead-in here, we’ve got an old groupwatch ending, a new one starting, a couple stray articles here and there. Nothing too crazy this week but I’ve been able to keep up a good clip. Still not entirely sure about the film thing I mentioned last week, for now I’m just going to have Twitter vote on a choice and perhaps let donators and patrons suggest the films to me in the future? Something again to consider.

On with the roundup!

Twitter “Live Watches”

The Rolling Girls (#anitwitwatches) – This is over now! I’ve covered my thoughts extensively elsewhere but I still love this show a lot. I have a bit more to say further down, you’ll see why if you don’t already know.

Revolutionary Girl Utena livewatch – Progress on this has been slow just due to it being a bit hard to find the time. That said, the couple episodes I watched this past week have been some of my favorites. Check this out for a moment where the emotions run so high that both I and my screenshot software have a breakdown.

Sailor Moon (#FightingEvilByGroupwatch) – And here’s the newcomer! I literally just finished this up as I’m typing this so I’m still collecting my thoughts. I like the series so far, though it hasn’t immediately hit me in the same “oh god this is my shit” way that I was the first time I saw, say, Pretty Cure. That’s not really much of a knock though, these three episodes were all pretty fun and the show absolutely oozes 90s which would make it a fun watch all on its own. Side note: this groupwatch was started by my friend @himawari_town_ on twitter. Go give them a follow if you’re interested in this sort of thing! And check the hashtag! Lots of people have neat things to say about this show. Or heck, consider joining in yourself! Lots of options here.

The Geek Girl Authority

The God of High School Recap (S01E08): close/friend – Kind of a slower more transitional episode compared to last week. It’s solid as far as such things go, but gosh do I just want to see shark man get the tar beat out of him.

Deca-Dence Recap (S01E07): Driveshaft – I’ve finally found a surefire way to get people to watch this show and it’s this image.

They huuuuug! 😭

Burn The Witch Announced for Crunchyroll Fall Lineup – I don’t normally link this sorta thing but my hope is that Burn The Witch being easily legally available in the US miiiiiight possibly lead to us eventually getting a TV anime? Not that I’m unhappy with how the film looks, the trailer’s really promising and there’s not a single sign of whatsisname from the manga, which makes me hopeful that he’s been mostly written out.

Magic Planet Anime

The Idolmaster (2011): Full Review – Time is a flat circle and I know that because I was dead sure it had already been at least two weeks since I wrote the im@s review, but nope! It’s a very good show that I like a lot, and I’m glad some friends of mine got me to watch it. I don’t have a ton else to say beyond that other than what I said in the review itself, so get reading. By the way, there’s a not as nice looking mirror of this on Anilist if you prefer that, for some reason.

Under The Deep Pale Moon: Revisiting The Rolling Girls Five Years Later – It only occurred to me after I had already published it that this title is kinda misleading since while it has been five years since The Rolling Girls aired it’s only been just under one since I watched it, oh well. Either way; this show is a part of me now, I go through some effort to try to explain why I love it so much and to be honest I’m not sure I did it justice. This is going to be one that I’ll come back to a number of times over the course of my writing career I think. (See you all in 2025? One of my favorite pieces of anime commentary from someone who’s not me this year was a ten year anniversary article after all.)

Other Thoughts N Such

I have a plan to get a manga column called The Manga Shelf off the ground sometime soon where I just write a couple of paragraphs about whatever I happen to be reading, regardless of whether it’s finished, unfinished, bad or good. Look forward to that sometime this week?

I have been continuing with Eureka Seven, the series is going in some interesting new directions but I’m not sure I have a ton new to say on it. I’m 3/5ths of the way done, so look forward to the full review when I’ve finished!

I’ve also started watching Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS and gang, this show is bananas. I highly recommend it if you need a dose of goofy kid show energy in your week. If you want a small taste, please enjoy this thread I made about a recurring character who is a 37-year-old that looks like a gradeschooler and her deck themed around outdated fashion trends. Your guess is as good as mine.

Don’t have a ton else to say! Fall Guys has been consuming a fair amount of my time to be quite honest and that’s not anime so I’m not covering it here! (Or maybe I will, who knows.)

Kneel before your new God.

And goodness that’s about all! I had more to list here than I thought this week, but I suppose that’s a good sign.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Under The Deep Pale Moon: Revisiting THE ROLLING GIRLS Five Years Later

Whatever else may be said about it, there is almost nothing else like The Rolling Girls. From its circumstances of creation, to its odd hodgepodge of themes and aesthetics, to even its place in the broader continuum of 2010s TV anime. The Rolling Girls is a true original, one of the few directorial turns from Kotomi Deai and an unusual move from Wit Studio, best known for Attack on Titan. The show is not perfect; it’s weird, it’s wildly overambitious, it’s more than a bit of a mess, but I’d argue that almost none of that matters.

Since I first watched the series a bit under a year ago I’ve turned it over in my head a number of times. I’ve referred to it as the anime equivalent of record-collector rock; a sometimes (but not always) derisive term used to pin down music that mines on reference and stylistic riffing to communicate its ideas. I don’t think that’s an incorrect description, though even just a year later I recognize far more references in the series than I did the first pass around, but there’s more going on here. The show’s tagline spells things out about as clearly as the series ever deigns to:

Rolling, falling, scrambling girls. For others, for themselves. Even if they’re destined to be “one of the rest”

That’s a fascinating little poem, isn’t it? “Even if they’re destined to be ‘one of the rest.'” is a kind of inspiring that doesn’t really come from anime (or really, any pop media) that often. In some of its best moments, The Rolling Girls is a treatise on how support, “soft action”, and even simple determination can match up to more bombastic natural gifts. It took me months to realize it, but this is why the show’s central plot tokens–the Heart Stones–are revealed in the finale to not actually do anything.

This is not to say that The Rolling Girls is an anime about accepting your lot in life–that’d be absurd–but not everyone is Superman, and that’s fine. Some people want to be Superman, and might eventually get there, and that’s fine too. There’s an agnostic, nonjudgmental bent to the series’ storytelling that is incredibly refreshing even five years after it aired. The Heart Stones, the final narration tells us, respond not to skill but to passion. Which you can read a lot of ways; personally I think it maps rather well onto the difficulty of “making it”–financially, emotionally–by pursuing what you love.

And this makes some sense; up and down the show the power of both the bombastic Bests and everyone else comes not from some magic item, but from passion. The show’s fractured near-future Japan divvies the country up into some several dozen microstates, each driven by a love of something. The otaku paradise of Always Comima is the first example we get, and by the series’ midpoint we’re getting hit with wild rock ‘n roll pyrotechnics set to exploding Buddha statues.

The phenomenon of superpowered “Bests” is never explicitly explained, but seems unrelated. The character of Hibiki, perhaps my favorite of the titular Rolling Girls, is rooted in this discrepancy. The finale shows us the hard work she has to go through to catch up to the naturally-gifted Bests. As someone who has always considered herself a bit of a late bloomer and specifically not particularly naturally intelligent, it is maybe inevitable that I’d see myself in the show in general, and Hibiki in particular.

The narrative sympathizes with both the Bests and the Rest, but the fact that The Rolling Girls‘ final insert song contains the lyric “Let’s sing a never-ending song for the bastards of the world” should tell you who we, the audience, are intended to see ourselves in.

The Rolling Girls remains, at least in my experience, a touch enigmatic. It has a place in the wider trends of TV anime of the New ’10s, but it’s a strange one; somewhere in the farthest ring out of the FLCL-indebted high-concept action anime that were often some of the most intriguing (though not always the “best”) shows of the decade. (Flip-Flappers, Kill La Kill, PUNCHLINE!, FLCL‘s own sequels Progressive and Alternative. Hell, even Akiba’s Trip, there were a surprising number of these things!) It is united with them by its freewheeling, wild aesthetic sense. It stands apart because of its thematic core and because of its unusual setup.

There are very few other anime in which Nozomi and friends would be the main characters, but that they are here is something we should all be thankful for. Nozomi and friends, through their struggles, help save the world. Who could ask for anything more than that? Indeed, perhaps we, too, all the rest of us, may help save our own troubled planet. I have said it before and will say it again; everyone is a hero to somebody.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

Review: THE IDOLMASTER (2011)

“I believe in everyone!”

In the grand scheme of things, the 2010s are only just over. In every artform, at every level of discourse, there are discussions to be had and evaluations to be made. What defined the New ’10s, now that they’re in the rear view? Perhaps more importantly, what deserves to be taken into the future? 2011’s The Idolm@ster turns ten next year, but it remains the gold standard by which nearly every other idol anime since has been judged. If it’s not the best idol anime, it can feel, especially at its heights, like the only one that truly matters.

The first interesting thing about Idolm@ster is how unselfconsciously normal it is. This is an idol anime with zero gimmicks, perhaps simply due to being from a time where you just didn’t need one. (Being adapted from an already-popular IP probably helped too.) Instead you have a large cast of characters, a shared dream of stardom among them, and some snappy sugary J-pop to soundtrack it all.

Despite these simple and few ingredients (and the aforementioned size of the cast), Idolm@ster never really feels like a marketing tool, even though on some level it is. The earnest, unfiltered look into the lives of twelve girls who are, at the start of the show, working-class entertainers conveys a kind of honesty more associated with rock documentaries than it is the idol industry.

This is not to say that The Idolm@ster is realistic–that would be absurd. Rather, it has a kind of focused idealism. The Idolm@ster does not depict so much the realities of becoming an idol (though they’re an influence on it), but rather the dream of becoming one. The series imagines a world where the truism that hard work and dedication can lead even the most humble of person to fame and fortune is not just true, but provable. This is an important distinction, because for all the mundanities it does depict, especially in its forehalf, The Idolm@ster is interested less in being about idols than it is being about people who want to become idols. It is a series, at its best moments, of character study, which elevates it above idol anime that come off as simply trying to sell something.

In an impressive feat of economy, over its 24 episodes nearly every member of its cast (including a few who aren’t members of the core 765 Pro group) gets at least one focus episode, a few get full-blown arcs. Chihaya’s, where she comes to terms with the death of her brother and learns to sing for herself, is probably the best, but several others are also very strong. This includes Haruka’s, also something of a broad-reaching arc for the group itself, which concludes the series. Not all of them quite get the screentime–or the consideration–they deserve, and The Idolm@ster‘s few flaws are always somehow tied to this. Makoto’s abbreviated story never reaches any satisfying conclusion; the gap between the masculine way she is sold to her audience and the feminine way she wants to actually present herself is never properly addressed, and it is the series’ sole serious misstep.

Importantly though not a single character feels like anything less than a fully-fledged person. Even those with somewhat silly personalities (such as Hibiki and her affinity for animals) have layers to them, and the show is keen to show off its writing in this regard. Haruka’s aforementioned show-concluding arc takes a sledgehammer to her surface personality as a hardworking ‘good girl’, only to build it back up with a healthy dose of magical realism (present in a few of the show’s strongest moments) in the penultimate episode.

But of course, as with everything, technique is only as valuable as the resonance it creates. The thing with The Idolm@ster is that even though, statistically speaking, most people watching it are not, and will never be, idols, it is shockingly easy to relate to what these girls go through. I suspect what connects with whom varies somewhat, but, going back to that character writing; every character’s motivation is simple, concrete, and dead-easy to get your head around. That means that when you see them struggle, you can put yourself in their shoes.

I love, for instance, Zombieland Saga, but most people are not (say) undead biker-delinquents, and struggles that stem from being one require a lot more levels of abstraction to really hit the audience in the heart. By contrast, and to return to my earlier examples, things like Haruka’s fear that her friend group is drifting apart, Mikki’s simple desire to be the center of attention, and Chihaya’s near-compulsive need to keep singing are all things that will touch different kinds of people in a very immediate and personal way. I write about anime because I love doing it, and I often find myself internally debating whether or not doing it just because of that is okay. Chihaya sings, as she eventually comes to terms with, because she loves doing it, and struggles with whether or not that’s okay. We are, by any reasonable metric, vastly different people, but The Idolm@ster‘s strength of craft is such that I can see myself in someone who is fundamentally very little like me because when she bares her soul at the climax of her focus arc, belting out “Nemuri Hime” acapella, I feel it in mine. What is art even for, if not that?

And that, ultimately, is what I intend to reflect here. This is a show that gets it. The appeal of a lot of anime is that everyone, fundamentally, can sometimes use a glimpse of a world where pop music or some other silly thing really can save your soul, and getting there requires a deft touch and a subtle command of high emotion. And Idolm@ster is very emotional indeed.

So, nearly ten years later, it feels safe to say that we can–and should–bring it with us into the ’20s and beyond. This is the one almost every idol anime since is still vigorously copying notes off of, and it’s easy to see why. Something this focused on looking forward could only age amazingly. “Onward to a sparkling future”, as one of the show’s many songs would put it. Are you ready?

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

Weekly Anime Writing Roundup – 8/18/20

Another Tuesday night edition. I’ve reconciled myself with the idea that as long as I get these up once a week it’s still pretty much fine.

Some stuff to lead off with here. I had the idea of possibly allowing Patreon patrons and/or Ko-Fi donators to suggest an anime movie for me to watch once a month. I’d put which of these suggestions to go with to a twitter poll and would then be obliged to write a review of the film. (I’d probably do this by just…having the Ko-Fi donators put the name of the film in their donation, but it raises the question of how to do it for Patrons. Something to consider….) How do y’all feel about that? You should let me know in the comments or on Twitter, it’s just one idea of several I’ve been batting about recently.

On to the List!

Twitter

The Rolling Girls Livewatch for #anitwitwatches – Another 1-episoder this week. One of my favorites in the whole series. I know “ACTUALLY IT WAS ALIENS!” is a hugely controversial plot twist any time it comes up but I’m kind of a sucker for it and I always thought it was implemented really well here. Episode 10 is surprisingly thought-provoking, actually. It’s really quite interesting how almost everyone older than 25 or so in the show’s setting is so anti-violence. It implies what the Great Tokyo War must’ve been like without ever actually showing it beyond a few miniscule flashbacks near the front of the series. I think that’s a really impressive trick.

Revolutionary Girl Utena livewatch – I got to a measly three episodes since I last wrote a roundup. (Stuff came up, it’s a long story) They’ve been fascinating ones, though. The episode where Nanami gets cursed by a magic cowbell (really!) is apparently kind of infamous and deservedly so. The followup, which is a heartwrenching character study of Juri (one of my favorite members of the cast), is excellent. The third one (which I watched standalone the other day) is not really as interesting to me but does mark the first appearance of “pointers”, little overlaid fingers on-screen that point at various things. Ikuhara picked this up from a live action filmmaker whose name is escaping me at the moment, it’s the kind of thing that is certainly a fascinating technique but also on a much more surface level, just kinda funny.

The Geek Girl Authority

The God of High School Recap (S01E06): anima/force – Hey this episode was really good! GOH seems to be really picking up as it heads into its second half and I’m happy for that, an injection of good old fashioned Jojo-inspired campiness is exactly what this show needs. (And I do mean specifically Jojo-inspired, a lot of the villains introduced here seem to basically have stands.)

DECA-DENCE Recap (S01E06): Radiator – I seriously don’t know how this show keeps getting better.

Magic Planet Anime

It’s been another busy week over here! Which is a bit surprising because late last week or thereabouts I was feeling genuinely pretty dismal over the state of both the anime fan community on the whole and specifically myself. I’m pretty sure I suffer from some kind of mood disorder! But enough about that, several things (and of course, my good friends) helped me pull through, and I wrote about some of them.

to pick up the pen and sing again: Another Late Night “Idolm@ster” Ramble – Sometimes you’re watching an idol anime at 3am on a Surface tablet and it just makes you wanna cry. This is a writeup about one of those times.

in defiance of the Sun: The Eternal Midnight of ZUTOMAYO – This is interesting in that it’s not really an anime article except in a very peripheral sense. Zutomayo are a Japanese rock band that I’ve recently gotten really into, and I started wondering why, because I haven’t been into any music this heavily in a very long time. I reach something of a conclusion in the article itself, but it’s an ongoing process. I have to be honest I was a little sad this one didn’t get more readers! Hopefully it has a long tail. Stream “Study Me”, by the way.

Other Thoughts N’ Such

I have officially reached the halfway point of Eureka Seven! I’m torn between really loving the relationship between Renton and Eureka (much more than I thought I would) as well as the show’s weirder elements and being kind of offput at how Holland and honestly much of the rest of the Gekkostate crew are just kind of assholes. Like I get why they’re that way, but there’s a shocking amount of “40 year old man lays out 15 year old kid because he’s frustrated toward / jealous of said kid” in this show and it’s pretty unflinching! Not for everybody, this one.

I’ve also been rewatching Kaguya-sama: Love Is War!‘s second season (the confusingly subtitled Love Is War?) with my girlfriend. It is perhaps the perfect show to watch with your significant other, I considered doing a Twenty Perfect Minutes writeup on episode three, which is a fantastic spin-cycle of sincere romantic overtures, melancholy at the (apparent) impending breakup of a friend group. I may still do said writeup, but my hands need a rest for the rest of the evening I think. (I’ve got a lot more writing with my name on it tomorrow =w=;;)

Finally, I started the manga Bad Girl Exorcist Reina the other day. I may do a more substantial writeup on this at some point in the future, but as of now it’s kind of a mixed bag. (The good points: girl punches J-horror ghosts into submission. The bad points: a genuinely surprising amount of casual….I’ll just say ‘isms and ‘phobias instead of listing them out.) They seem to be dropping off in more recent chapters but the scanlation is only about 25 in, so I’m hesitant to make any strong recommendations at the moment. I do leave you with this image when deciding if you’d like to pick it up or not.

That’s all for this week, friends! I hope you’re doing well and you’ve enjoyed some of my work this week. Leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter if you’ve got any questions or just want to say hi.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

in defiance of the Sun: The Eternal Midnight of ZUTOMAYO

Depending on how often you use the site, and what your browser history is like, you may recently have seen this two-tone haired character staring out at you from somewhere in your Youtube recommendations.

That’s how I first learned of Zutomayo, at least. The rock group’s full name (Zutto Mayonaka de Iinoni) means something like “I wish it was midnight all the time” (or more liberally and poetically; “Midnight Forever”), a phrase that gives some indication all on its own where the group are coming from. If you want the traditional rock critic-delivered backstory spiel, there isn’t much of one for Zutomayo. The group consists of the pseudonymous ACA-Ne and a cadre of other musicians, and are only a few years old. (Their debut single “Bite The Second Hand” dropped in 2018.) Despite all this; the group are no cult act, at least not domestically, with their two EPs ranking high both on Billboard of Japan’s Hot 100 and the pickier Oricon album charts.

But I’m not that interested in explaining why Zutomayo are popular. I think that’s pretty obvious; they’re a really good band with impressive chops that also tend to put their songs behind compelling and creative animated music videos. That they are well-liked makes perfect sense.

I am interested on a more personal level, here. It’s not much an exaggeration to say that Zutomayo are the most I’ve cared about what could probably be defined as an actual rock band since I was a teenager, being someone who mostly grew up on top 40 and later hip-hop as my preferred music formats of choice.

I first became aware of the “Study Me” video not long after it went live. The first time I listened to it, I “only” liked it. I saved it to a youtube playlist I keep good pop songs in, but I didn’t have an immediate strong reaction to it. How doing that tends to work for me is that I play something a few times, eventually get sick of it, and remove it from said playlist. (Very sophisticated, I know. This is why I’m not a music critic in any serious sense.)

The second time I heard it, something….clicked. I don’t know if it’s that I was also watching the music video with full attention this time, or if it was just something in the way ACA-Ne yells “FUN-KY!” during the chorus, but I was completely blown away. I listened to it back to back several times in a row (something I almost never do) and immediately started seeking out other songs by the band. I’ve developed my favorites over the relatively short time I’ve known of Zutomayo, but it took until I stumbled upon a video by Youtuber Steve M. (I don’t normally like that kind of thing, but Steve’s video is one of the few solid sources of English-language information on Zutomayo and I think it’s quite good) for me to start really considering why this group’s music was resonating with me so much.

“Study Me” is a very defiant song. I’d argue you don’t need to understand a single syllable of the lyrics to get that; the music video’s background-character-gone-rogue plot makes it pretty clear. But Zutomayo’s songs, from the admittedly imperfect information I can gather via translated lyrics, often seem to traffic in two broad themes. One is alienation; from society as in “Study Me” or from other people via failed romantic or familial relationships, as in say “HAM” or indeed the aforementioned “Bite The Second Hand”. The other is defiant, sometimes radical self-reinvention, as in (again) “Study Me” or even “MILABO” which kind of appears to wed the two themes.

I’ve seen the popular theory floated that every one of Zutomayo’s two-tone-haired MV protagonists are actually the same character, either in alternate versions or at different stages of life. This is perhaps a little too heavy on capital-L Lore for most “serious” music consumers, but I think the idea is at least thematically sound. I won’t claim that I can “prove” that all of Zutomayo’s songs are autobiographical excerpts from ACA-Ne’s life, but she’s a good enough songwriter that whether or not they’re grounded in concrete reality doesn’t really matter. (And, this must be tempered with the claim I’ve seen from more than one song translator that Zutomayo’s lyrics tend to be….poetically circumspect, which can make concrete readings difficult even in the native language, but that’s not anything that’ll be news to say, fans of American indie rock. Plus, I’d argue that all truly great art is open to a plurality of interpretations.)

As a side note that I tried and failed to work into the main body of the article: the best scene in “Study Me” is where the camera zooms out and she sees all the footage of her alternate lives (or whatever they are) playing. You cannot change my mind on this.

Since properly “getting into” the group–that is to say, not long after watching that video– I sought out a fan community who have been nothing but pleasant to me (hello Zutomayo Zone!), which brings us to the present, and my own ruminations.

Alienation, failed relationships, distance from society, the pinpricks of light that constitute occasional and sometimes radical self-reinvention….it clicked for me sometime yesterday. I have no idea if ACA-Ne is part of the LGBTQ community (it’s not like anybody right now has any lack of reason to feel like it’s them against the world), but these are themes and ideas that tend to resonate with that community, which I am part of. Once I realized that, everything fell into place.

I’m not saying this character is necessarily trans, but come on one of the versions of her is a catgirl with striped blue and pink leggings.

Anecdotally, a good chunk of English-speaking Zutomayo fans I’ve met are queer or otherwise marginalized, and I would not be even remotely surprised if that holds true for much of the Anglophone fanbase in general. It is totally possible to read “Study Me” in particular as a defiant demand for understanding an acceptance–the song’s not called “Please Study Me”–and even if that’s a million miles away from its original intent, I’d argue it’s as valid a reading as any.

I have not made any secret of the fact that I’ve been in a rough mental spot recently due to recent events. Perhaps Zutomayo is just the music I needed for the moment. If that’s true, I wouldn’t quite say that Zutomayo saved my life, but it’s the closest any band has ever come. (An honorable mention should go to The Ataris, who got me out of a similar rut several years ago, but I never felt the same immediate connection to their music.) Given the specifics of my life and hell, just the world right now, I can completely understand, say, wanting to break out of the depressing shell you find yourself in and becoming a cute space idol instead.

Not that this song is exactly cheerful, but no one’s here for sunshine. The band is called “Midnight Forever“, after all.

This, of course, is not accounting for the more immediate appeal of Zutomayo’s music. I’ve often noticed that in particular I cannot quite tell if certain things in a given Zutomayo song are being played on “actual instruments” or if it’s actually very convincing programmed production. It usually at least sounds live, but it can be surprisingly hard to tell! Either way; the band’s timbrel palette is one of my favorites I’ve heard in years, especially the downright fatal bass on some of their funkier songs (“Study Me” once again and the slightly more recent “JK Bomber” come to mind here). This is without even mentioning ACA-Ne’s sharp, clear voice, which has a wonderful bright quality to it that I just don’t hear that often on either side of the Pacific.

I’ve since learned that Zutomayo are not completely without peers. One of the greatest music-related shocks of my life thusfar was learning that there’s an entire world of Japanese rock and pop that just kinda sounds like this–a non-Zutomayo track I’ve been greatly vibing with lately is Yorushika’s heart-rendingly depressing “That’s Why I Gave Up On Music“.

But there’s just something that, even after writing all of this, is unquantifiably special to me about Zutomayo. Maybe some of us just gravitate toward the nighttime, and maybe Zutomayo make music for those people. For those times when morning seems more like a curse than a blessing, I can think of no better act in music right now.

CORRECTION: This article previously stated the entire group was anonymous. This is only the case with lead singer ACA-Ne, who is only known by her pseudonym.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work for The Geek Girl Authority or my archived reviews on Anilist.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

to pick up the pen and sing again – Another Late Night “Idolm@ster” Ramble

A common, but under-examined aspect of the human experience is paralysis. The feeling of “I can’t do that.” The inability to move on, the shock of freshly re-opened trauma, the crushing mundanity and idleness of simple insecurity.

I recently lost part of my primary writing tool. This, coming off a rather difficult week of responses (sometimes disingenuous, sometimes genuine) to a certain piece and broken air conditioners in the midst of a heatwave, has not made for a productive, fun, or at times even tolerable writing environment, and I have felt quite drained.

As a counterbalance, I am trying to indulge my spur of the moment flashes of inspiration more. So I feel like it may be, if not productive perhaps, at least interesting and fun for me (and what should my writing be if not those things?) to look at something that has helped me overcome that drained-ness.

Which brings us to The Idolm@ster. The 2011 anime has been something of a constant background presence in my life over the past year. I have been working through it very slowly despite its short length. Not out of a lack of enjoyment but just as a mundane consequence of juggling other obligations. On some level though, perhaps I don’t want my time with these characters to end.

One of those characters is Chihaya Kisaragi, a personal favorite, and the focus of this piece. Chihaya has an interesting air about her that I’ve found fascinating since I started the show. I’ve talked recently about my love of outwardly-cool female characters who carry within them a deep, almost elemental sorrow. But I’ve struggled to articulate why I find the character archetype so compelling. I think episode 20, which is about Chihaya, has given me at least part of the answer. (Full disclosure! It’s actually as far as I’ve watched. I will feel a little silly if I post this and then episode 21 completely tops it, but hey, that’s the risk you run.)

The plot is fairly simple and I’ll summarize it here briefly for the benefit of the reader. The unscrupulous president of 765’s rival company 961 gets a hold of and leaks information about Chihaya’s past. Namely, that she had a younger brother who died when she was a child. The tabloid article’s writer near-explicitly blames Chihaya for her brother’s death, reopening an old rift between the idol and her parents and causing her to choke when she tries to sing. To greatly simplify (and rob the episode of its emotional impact, which is a borderline crime. The perils of criticism!) she is eventually coaxed back onto the stage by the pleas of her fellow idols, and by her own recognition that she sings as much for herself as she does for the spirit of her late brother or for anyone else. And furthermore, her realization that that is okay.

I do not, in any way, mean to compare the magnitude of my problems and Chihaya’s, but what this episode really drove home for me is that what I love about these characters is that they persevere. Our traumas change us, but what characters like this seem to say is “Yes, that may be so, but they do not destroy us.” As someone who is pretty deeply insecure about….well, everything, I admire that level of weathered strength. I do not envy it–those are two different things–but there is something genuinely inspiring about seeing someone who took such a rough, malicious public beating stand back up and continue her life’s work not because she has anything to prove to anyone but because she wants to.

There’s a deep confidence to it, but more importantly, a luminous joy. One hammered home by the wonderful magical realism present in the episode’s final moments. Her dignity and her passion are never in question. What Chihaya may realize is that ultimately; no struggle can keep a singer from her microphone forever. Her voice swells again, and the song plays on.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

Weekly Anime Writing Roundup – 8/11/20

So it is Tuesday–Tuesday night at that–and I am only just now getting to this. A late one just three weeks in to my new schedule! Alas. You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been a rough few days here at the lakeside temple for reasons I mostly won’t get into here. On with the anime! I’m also formatting these slightly differently now, using bullet points was making it impossible to justify most of my paragraphs, which was annoying me. Just a minor note!

Twitter

The Rolling Girls livewatch for #AniTwitWatches – We only watched one episode this week, #9, which is about the only thing in the whole show I’d call a “transitional episode” since it’s where the series switches over from being pretty strictly arc-by-arc and pivots into its finale. This, in fact, is my favorite part of part Rolling Girls (narrowly beating out the Kyoto arc). And to this day I’m amazed that they managed to fit four distinct arcs plus the three-episode finale all into a single-cour twelve episode show without having it feeling rushed. Anyway, I won’t spoil anything about episode 9 itself. It’s a doozy.

Revolutionary Girl Utena livewatch – I got to the start of the Black Rose Arc, as it’s called, in Utena, and LET ME TELL YA FOLKS, people are not kidding when they say this is where the show really starts to amp up the weirdness! I speculate somewhere in that particular thread that Utena might’ve been an influence on some of the folks at ’00s SHAFT just because a lot of the wild architecture and particular visual setups are really starting to remind me of that. Regardless, I’m having a ton of fun with the show and in fact will probably be livetweeting more of it right after I finish this writeup.

The Geek Girl Authority

THE GOD OF HIGH SCHOOL Recap (S01E06): fear/SIX – “It’s slowly improving” is not an exciting way to sell a show to someone, but I would argue that that’s basically what GOH is doing. I’m interested to see how the already pretty stylized fights change now that actual supernatural powers are involved.

THE GOD OF HIGH SCHOOL Cast Q&A – I got to interview some of GOH’s cast! Kinda! It was just a short text Q&A I sent their way through my contact at CR and their responses were in turn fairly short, but I still think it’s cool that I get to do this kinda thing. I’m really interested who this “mob boss” character Mr. Tachibana mentioned is and why the auditions for him were apparently so amusing. Did you know that Jin’s VA was primarily a stage actor before this? That’s neat.

DECA-DENCE Recap (S01E07): Differential Gear – I’m running out of ways to tell y’all that this is the best thing airing right now. Please watch Deca-Dence it’s so good.

Magic Planet Anime

Hoo boy.

Apathy Is Not The Answer: The Anime Fan Community Needs To Defend Its Most Vulnerable Members – ‘Lo and behold, the most popular article ever posted to Magic Planet Anime, by an order of magnitude. (Somehow I doubt many of these will be repeat readers but I’d love to be proven wrong). I wrote this in response to some developments over at Anilist–the details are in the article itself–and I was really not prepared for the blowup it caused. I have nothing much else to say about the issues discussed within, I don’t think it’s a perfect article, but I think I expressed a very simple plea for empathy as effective as I could. Some people, unfortunately, do not think that I should have done that.

In the two days since it’s gone up I’ve responded to a number of counterarguments and read many more. Some of which are….let’s be polite and say “a bit rude”. I’ve also read and responded to a fair bit of thanks. My hope is that the ultimate result of the article is that some people open their eyes to issues that they’d previously not considered and, secondarily, hopefully more people check out my work. I don’t consider myself an activist or political writer or anything of the sort, and it’s more than a little frustrating to be pigeonholed as some kind of ultra-left demagogue less than a month out from writing a decently positive review of goddamn Akiba’s Trip. What can you do, I suppose.

Other Thoughts N Such

I’ve got several things to talk about down here this week!

I finished Oregairu‘s first season. No real idea what to make of it! It’s interesting and I liked it more than I didn’t but I’m not in a real rush to watch season two or catch up to the (currently-airing) third. It’s one I’ll be turning over in my head for a while.

I have also resumed watching The Idolm@ster after quite a long break. This show is still very good for many of the same reasons I outlined in my article about it way way back when this blog was in its infancy, although sadly Miki is not as present in the show’s back half. I am still not entirely sure what to think of the rival idol agency and its comically evil president, but hey! Also in that article I briefly mentioned that I was enjoying 22/7. Haha, how things change.

And finally, I’ve also been working my way through Eureka Seven. E7 occupies a really odd place in the popcultural memory and I want to talk about that more when I actually review it (as I’ve been commissioned to do, thank you patron, you know who you are!) but I’ve been enjoying it so far. I particularly love the character of Anemone who is, well, a lot. E7 in general is quite the wild ride and I’m really liking its particular brand of weirdness, particularly now, as the first eight or so episodes of the show were a bit slow for me. Side note! Connoisseurs of Mecha Anime Discourse may know that a few years back the Darling in the FranXX showrunners were accused of essentially xeroxing Anemone’s entire design. Having now seen some Eureka Seven, I get the complaint!

and GOODNESS. That’s about all for this week! I’ve been busy, I suppose! To that end, well, I’ll just direct your attention to the footer below.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Apathy Is Not The Answer: The Anime Fan Community Needs To Defend Its Most Vulnerable Members

I don’t normally write things like this. I so don’t normally write things like this that I’m at something of a loss as to how to start this post. The specific catalyst for this post is a notice from Anilist moderators Mex and Electrochemist that they’re stepping down as staff members, but the issues here are reflective of a wider cultural problem in the English-speaking anime fan community, and one that it cannot afford to ignore in a world that is increasingly being forced to reckon with status quos that some of us (including myself) have long been privileged enough to take for granted.

This has been a recurring theme in English otakudom over the past several years. Recently, prominent fan space /r/Animemes finally banned use of the term “trap” to describe feminine AMAB characters. This specific issue has long been a point of contention in anime fan spaces, and it’s useful to discuss here as it both relates to my own specific experiences (I am a transwoman) and is a microcosm of the aforementioned broader problems. /r/Animemes did not take the “sudden” rules change kindly, and one can find a majority of its community mocking the staff even several days later.

Astolfo from Fate/Grand Order. A character who the term in question is often applied to. (It is worth noting that Astolfo’s gender identity is never explicitly disclosed by the text and is listed as “a secret” on their character card).

The arguments for the use of the term “trap” (and I do apologize to my fellow LGBTQ+ persons but I will be using the term in this post for demonstrative purposes) tend to come in one of several flavors. Given my preference for assuming good faith, I tend to believe that most people who defend the term genuinely believe these arguments. (There is certainly a contingent of those who do not but continue to use them in bad faith, but active malice is beyond the scope of this post.)

The first prominent argument is that “trap” is a “term of endearment”. Setting aside the curious logic that one’s intent in saying something absolves them of all blame regardless of what that something is, this is not true, and is a recent post-hoc justification for the term. The origins of “trap” to mean “a character treated as male by the text but who looks feminine or androgynous” are in fact rather murky.

The issue is that regardless of where it may come from, it has, in fact, been applied to actual AMAB people who present femininely (mostly transwomen, though hardly just us), evidence of which is unfortunately scattered to Twitch chats and the like. There is also a larger history of “trap” being used specifically against transwomen as a slur that dates back to at least the ’70s.

I don’t blame straight or cis persons for not knowing this (many queer people do not!), and I am not a linguist and am thus unqualified to say whether the two terms are etymologically related, but the conflation is certainly present. Thus, when transwomen see the term “trap” being applied to characters who share some of their characteristics, it can be hurtful. That is, ultimately, all anyone wants out of the issue, the acknowledgement that it can be hurtful and, ideally, willful abandonment of the term.

(As a side note and to deflect the obvious. I am aware of the minority of queer persons who call themselves “traps” and are attempting to reclaim the term. A distinction must be drawn here: that is the right of a queer person, not anyone else. Wiktionary in fact defines all of these senses of the term right in a row.)

The second is the frankly rather ridiculous claim that asking people to refrain from hurtful language constitutes a loss of “freedom of speech”. Freedom of speech arguments are tricky in general, because despite what one might assume, there is not actually a consensus on what the term means. (There is a lengthy section on Wikipedia’s page on the subject about how it is interpreted from place to place. It is a genuinely fascinating and difficult area of law, and I encourage the interested to look into it.)

Regardless, it is not commonly held to apply in opt-in/opt-out internet communities. Were Anilist, /r/Animemes, and so on, public forums of import, one might have an argument, but they are not. No one is advocating for a ban of discussing characters who this term may be taken to apply to, they are just being asked to use a less offensive label, something quite reasonable and simple to do.

But this, of course, is all quite specific. The broader issue is a lack of consideration. I do not wish to levy accusations here beyond the bare minimum, but I have spoken to many people, some close friends, who have been driven away from anime as an artform and from anime communities as a space because of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on. This is not to say that “everyone needs to like anime”, because that is certainly not true. But if you don’t think that the simple fact of people being shitty to others causes this kind of harm is at the very least, regrettable, then you’re not an anime fan, you’re a bigot. Anime fan behavior can put people off of an artform they might have otherwise loved, and if you are a reasonable person you must recognize that that sucks. For the many differences we may have, what unites anime fans is our passion for the art that we love. Depriving someone else of that passion is despicable.

It’s hardly definitive but I feel this flash poll, in which over half of my followers (who are mostly queer, anime fans, or both) responded in the positive, is indicative of general sentiment.

And this brings us back to that opening paragraph. I liked Anilist (and still like Anilist!) in part because it seemed like a place where the staff actually kind of, you know, cared. To see two of the staff members most active in fighting harmful rhetoric step down is heartbreaking, and feels telling. I have no insider information about Anilist’s inner workings, but Mex’s comments do not inspire great faith in me that the site will be a haven for marginalized otaku going forward. The worst part, of course, is that is exactly what the tiny minority of those who are actively hateful instead of simply apathetic–the ones who this post is not aimed at, because there is no convincing them–want.

I would here call on the members of Anilist’s administration to really consider if they want Anilist to simply be “another anime listing site” or if they want to expend the (admittedly not trivial!) effort to make it a genuinely better community.

But of course, this is not specifically about Anilist. This problem permeates the entire English-speaking anime fan community, an unwelcome and ugly relic of the era where the biggest places to discuss anime online in English were 4chan and related communities. A problem whose biggest offenders actively want to continue this status quo.

I have seen some sign that things are changing, with the rise of several prominent queer video essayists who work in anime spaces (including Digi-nee, who came out only after achieving prominence and managed to keep most of her viewers) being a good sign that there is still an audience for this stuff that hasn’t been driven off by the worst of the worst, but these spaces must be actively protected. Apathy is not enough, and standing idly by accomplishes nothing. I am not excluding myself from this call to action, it is easy to pretend that all marginalized groups are fundamentally the same (something, upon editing this article, I myself am trying my damnedest not to do) but the fact of the matter is that everyone needs different accommodations and the ugly undercurrent present in anime fan spaces affects us all differently even as the root cause remains more or less the same.

If I can end this with a plea, it’s this. Consider your words, consider who they may affect. If someone asks you to change your ways, listen instead of arguing. We need to do better, because pretending there is nothing wrong will not solve anything.

Generally I end my articles with a pre-cut footer template. Here, instead, I will simply ask that if you found this article any sort of helpful, consider following me on Twitter.