Category: Other Posts

Posted on in anime, Manga, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

Remembering Akira Toriyama

Header image from IMDB

“The future of the planet is in your hands, may you fight with honor.”

When it comes to one’s personal journey through the world of anime and manga, every story is different. But, for many of my generation, those stories have a very similar start. It’s something like this; huddled in front of a slightly too-small CRT every weekday afternoon, you are transported to craggy canyons or alien worlds. Punches and kicks with planet-shattering force are thrown. Kiai yelled with immense force. Beams and blasts streak through the sky. If you’re lucky, you might get to hear a classic “ka-me-ha-me ha!” or see a character literally glow with power as they go Super Saiyan. This was, is, and will always be Dragon Ball Z. For many, many children, it was their first introduction to anime as a concept; if not the literal first—Pokémon beat it to the punch for me personally by a few months—it was definitely one of the first. That matters, and it’s the reason Dragon Ball, and Akira Toriyama‘s work in general, continues to hold such a strong grip on the popular imagination.

As you likely already know, Toriyama himself, the man responsible for that gateway into this wonderful world, passed away earlier this month, as per this announcement yesterday. This is the part of growing up that’s often danced around; as you get older, your childhood heroes will pass away. The paradigm-shifting shonen mangaka responsible for Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and a number of other works (perhaps most prominently, character art for classic JRPGs Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, gag manga Dr. Slump, and latter-day work Sand Land, which is receiving an anime in just a few weeks), is not the first such icon to pass on, and he won’t be the last, but that doesn’t make it hurt less. Not when the man contributed something so important to so many of us.

Toriyama’s work is of such impact that terms like “iconic” are rendered cheap in their usage. The man designed and drew Goku, perhaps the single most recognizable superhero figure on the planet after Superman himself, and to an extent, that is the kind of achievement that speaks for itself. Shonen manga before and after the success of Dragon Ball Z are notably different things, and the man’s influence can be felt when reading basically any contemporary action-shonen to this very day, either directly, or indirectly via the generation of mangaka that Toriyama influenced, the most prominent of whom are likely One Piece‘s Eiichiro Oda and Naruto‘s Masashi Kishimoto.

His work in video games should not be neglected either; as many have pointed out, much of the modern Japanese “western fantasy” aesthetic can be traced, either directly or indirectly, to Toriyama1, via his work on Dragon Quest. Because of this, his influence extends to almost the entire modern genre of fantasy anime and manga. That this fact could be considered his secondary legacy speaks to the enormity of Toriyama’s contributions to Japanese, and indeed, global popular culture (just ask anyone from Latin America). This is without even getting into more marginal but still important stuff; the legions of Linkin Park / Dragon Ball Z AMVs that dotted early video-sharing websites, Dragon Ball Z Abridged as a foundational piece of internet humor, the very fact that “it’s over 9000!” was one of the first internet memes, a proudly irreverent tradition that continues to the present day (and one I like to imagine that Toriyama, originally known for Dr. Slump, appreciated on some level if he knew about it). The man was a legend, plain and simple; if you’re a nerd of a certain age, his work was inescapable.

I do feel that I’m perhaps getting away from why I wrote this column in the first place, which was to share my personal experience. Without getting so into it that it’s inappropriate, watching Dragon Ball Z with my stepfather is one of relatively few happy memories I have of the man; he’s still around, but we are, fair to say, estranged, and haven’t spoken in years. Of Toonami‘s main lineup, DBZ was the one show he didn’t find either too kiddish or faintly baffling, and I remember watching the earlier parts of the series with him on his VHS set with the bold, cheddar-y orange covers. (Later, he got a separate set with the “uncut” versions and we watched those as well, much to the displeasure of my mom.) Even as the show itself progressed on Toonami, we would occasionally watch episodes together, and I remember in particular enjoying the later parts of the Cell Saga with him. My experience is not, in any way, unique. It is the experience of literally thousands and thousands of people across the planet, all united by the cultural current that was Dragon Ball. That is why Toriyama, and his work, are special, and why the world is just that much darker without him in it.

I am cognizant of the fact that anything I have written or could write here is not going to be “enough,” just like any one person’s words are not going to be “enough.” My hope is that by telling you this and by sharing my own experiences, I can be part of a chorus of tributes and outpourings, a veritable Spirit Bomb of remembrance. I think Oda, who, in an obituary post, compared Toriyama to a great tree, said it best. Trees, when they finally fall to the forest floor, continue to nourish the communities around them even after they’re gone. In the same way, Toriyama is not truly dead, because the spirit of his work lives on.

1: I must admit with some embarrassment—but also with proper credit!—that this hadn’t immediately occurred to me, and it took being mentioned in this tumblr post for the idea to fully sink in. Still, this shuttershocky person is absolutely correct.

Rest in peace Akira Toriyama, 1955-2024

Posted on in anime, Manga, Other Posts

I’m Burned Out, and I Want to Talk About It

Header image from Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I haven’t finished it, so please no spoilers!

This is not a goodbye. At least not permanently, but things are going to be slowing down significantly here on Magic Planet Anime, and that very well might be permanent.

There are a lot of reasons for this, which we can broadly sort into the emotional and material. The former are more relevant to why any of you actually read this stuff, so let’s start there.

I have been, as I alluded to in last year’s Year-End Ranking article, very depressed for quite a long while now (we’ll get to why in a bit), and it’s seriously impacted my ability to keep up with seasonals on a simple schedule basis, and it’s also really dented my ability to follow even very simple plotlines of what I am watching. I get very bad “brain fog,” and it sucks. I frequently miss entire lines of dialogue and find myself having to rewind what I’m watching, etc. This has also dinged how much I actually enjoy these anime, because if I’m not keeping the plot straight I am having a much harder time parsing anything deeper than the literal goings-on. The haze is real, and it sucks.

By and large, I still like most anime I actually finish, but the amount of anime I do finish per season has been dropping for a while now, and even if I like a show, keeping up with it can feel like a chore because of all this. At this point, I’m a fair bit behind on even some shows I’ve really enjoyed this season, like Yohane the Parhelion. Instead, I’ve increasingly turned into one of those people who watches random old anime I hadn’t previously seen. (Not for nothing is my Devil Lady article one of the better things I’ve written recently.)

None of this is to say that I’m about to turn into one of those people who only watches Patlabor and berates others for watching anything made after the switch to digipaint, but it’s hard not to notice the change. And I guess, really, that is what this article is about. Because while this is not a goodbye, it is definitely the start of a different, slower phase of Magic Planet Anime’s existence. I do still want to write, but I want to feel like I don’t have to write quite as much. Possibly not nearly as much. Accordingly; another part of what I’m doing here is just giving myself permission to write a less if it will (hopefully) make what I actually do write a little better. I have no delusions about turning into the greatest anime critic who ever lived overnight, but maybe I can finally dream up some things to say about anime that are not “this sucks”, “this is pretty good”, or “this is weird;” a pattern that I feel I’ve been stuck in for the past good while. There is more to this medium than those three points on the chart.

All this to say; I need to do some soul searching. I don’t really have a strong idea of what I want this site to be or accomplish anymore, and that really sucks. I feel like “I just want to write about anime” is not quite enough anymore. So I’m putting a lot of it on hold. I’m definitely not going to be doing any weekly watches this season—although you’ve probably guessed that by now—and my other columns are going to be very sporadic things. Probably coming out in occasional fits and spurts when I manage to get my head sorted for a week or two. I want to get a Year-End List out again this year, but beyond that, I really don’t want to promise anything at all.

With a few half-exceptions; I have a few commissions that I still need to finish, and my ongoing podcast projects with Sredni are going to continue (however slowly or quickly that may be), but otherwise, I am releasing myself from all of my imagined writing “commitments.” All I have done is stress myself out for no good reason, at the end of the day. I want to care more about whether what I’m writing is any good than I do if I’m putting out 2 articles a month or 20. My hope is that, however many or few pieces I write over the remainder of 2023, those that do go up will at least give you something to appreciate or think about. There will be more articles this year, and I’m hoping that maybe putting the brakes on my attempts to be ‘relevant’ will make those articles that do come out more interesting, whether they’re involved analyses or off-the-cuff ramblings.

So, those are the personal reasons. What about the material ones?

Agh.

Dear reader, have you ever been considered a legal non-entity by your state government? No? I recommend avoiding it, if at all possible.

I don’t want to go into too many details here, but suffice it to say, the ten-car pileup of health problems, legal issues, and the intertangling thereof that plagued me last year has only gotten worse this year. This is definitely a massive contributing factor to my stress, and I have spent a decent chunk of this year so depressed that I have genuinely wondered if I’m ever going to sort this out, and I’ll cop to having contemplated suicide more than once.

For complex reasons, a lot of the basic necessities of being an adult in the US (health insurance, a driver’s license or equivalent, and a steady income, just to name a few) are denied to me. That’s all been true for pretty much the entire time I’ve been working on this site, and maybe that, more than the fiddlier and more emotional stuff, is the real reason I should be setting much of what I do on this site aside for a while. Not that the two aren’t intertwined; I’m starting to hit my limit with how much more of this crap I can take, and it’s definitely been affecting me mentally, as outlined above.

So, all of that is the very long version. I hope you’ll forgive me for being reluctant to offer a shorter one this time around, I think conveying the context for why I’m doing this is important, since I didn’t want to feel like I was just abandoning all of my regular readers to the wind. And as a result, I really struggled with putting this article together. (I had to cut a bunch of stuff that I imagine would’ve come off as just overly self-deprecatory, among other things. I’m not trying to commit emotional self-harm, here.) But in spite of everything, I’m pretty optimistic. I think—much like last year—I really just need some time away, and to do some reflecting on what I really want to do with my life, and how Magic Planet Anime fits into those plans.

I think I’ve gotten my point across by now, more or less. To a future filled with fewer, but hopefully better articles. To my own mental health. And to a brighter tomorrow. If I round up, I’m nearly 30. But life doesn’t end there, and otakudom doesn’t have to either.

See you when I see you, anime fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Other Posts

A Short, Rather Silly (REVIEW) of The SONIC UNLEASHED Opening Cutscene

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Josh. Thank you for your support.

During the few years I’ve been operating this blog and offering commissions, I’ve gotten a couple that sit well outside my usual strike zone, the one indicated by my actual commission sheet itself. Of these, I’ve only ever taken three; the bizarre Toei/Marvel co-production Dracula, Sovereign of The Damned, the American cartoon Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart (which I’m actually happy I did write about, now that the cartoon itself seems to have been zapped out of existence), and this one, which, in some ways, might be the most unconventional of the three.

Sonic the motherfucking Hedgehog. The Blue Blur. 90s Attitude Personified. Central idol of perhaps the most devoted, and most polarizing, cult fandom of any video game franchise ever made, who has proven resistant to the changing tides of the industry, more than one notably bad game, numerous critical attempts to declare his franchise “dead” in some way or another, and of course, the internet’s over-developed cringe reflex which attempts to unfairly paint the aforementioned cult fandom as a bunch of depraved weirdos. (I’m a Transformers fan. I sympathize.) The guy has been through a lot. It doesn’t really seem to matter; the franchise has chugged along basically uninterrupted since 1991.

As for myself? I’ve been in and out. I played the original Sonic Adventure a lot as a kid, my family were early Dreamcast adopters and it was one of my favorite titles for the system. (I have played it more recently and don’t think it holds up super well, but if pressed, I’d still put it below only a few other Dreamcast games in a personal ranking. Mostly Panzer Dragoon Orta, which I played on the Xbox anyway, and Hydro Thunder.) I missed out on Sonic Adventure 2, when that came along, mostly because my middle school grades were slipping and my mom thought more video games would discourage me from improving them. By the time Sonic Heroes came out, I played it and liked it well enough, but it wasn’t a primary interest of mine anymore, and my record with the franchise has been spotty since then. (If you’re curious, my two favorite games in the franchise are Sonic Colors and Sonic Pocket Adventure.)

I have never played Sonic Unleashed, which I will confess, I had to actually remind myself was the one with the Were-Hedgehog gimmick as I was preparing to write this review. The fact that I’ve not played it doesn’t matter, given my assignment here, you see. I’m not reviewing the game, I’m reviewing the opening cutscene. A cutscene that I am assured is one of the strongest—if not the strongest—realizations of Sonic, both as a character and as an IP, in an animated format. Having now seen it, if that’s not true, I would certainly like to know what the actual candidates are, because the cutscene serves as a perfectly great little short film. It can’t rightly be called standalone, for obvious reasons, but the amount of style and polish here is admirable.

I’ll admit that I’m a little rusty on my Sonic lore, but I don’t immediately recognize the all-gunmetal space station that Sonic sets foot on in the short’s opening moments. But it’s clear from first blush that this is Eggman Territory. Dr. Robotnik likes painting superstructures red and stuffing them full of guns and robots. Both make their presence known in abundance the second our heroic ‘hog arrives. All of this, bluntly, looks pretty amazing. At just six minutes, the short is low on details like plot or characterization. But still, you get all you need to know out of Sonic zooming through hordes of Badniks and popping them to metallic smithereens with his homing attack. It can often be challenging to make action animation that consists mostly of zipping around actually look compelling, but it’s pulled off very well here. Inevitably, Sonic and Eggman confront each other directly, and Robotnik’s swarms of explosive weaponry are put to more personal use as he fights Sonic one-on-one in a mecha. It doesn’t really help; Sonic invokes the Chaos Emeralds and goes super, blowing most of it up.

Eggman flees, as he does, to a different space station. There, Sonic seems to have him cornered, and he grovels on the floor for forgiveness. Except, surprise! The second Sonic relents, Eggman traps him in some kind of restraint, and points a massive beam at the planet below. This beam both unleashes some kind of Elden Ring-ass purple monster with something called the “Gaia Manuscripts” and turns Sonic into the Werehog from the game itself. Smash to logo!

All told, this is a decidedly compact endeavor, but it does make me wonder why they never pursued this particular look for Sonic cinematics further. (Hell, if you made a series that looked like this people would be over the moon.) Budget issues, perhaps? Some other factor?

We may never know. But for its six-minute runtime, the Sonic Unleashed opening is an admirably stylish piece of 3D animation. That’s all it needs to be.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Other Posts

The Future of Magic Planet Anime [1/28/23]

Hello again, folks.

As always, when we reach this point, I get nervous. You could pin why on a lot of things, but at the end of the day I think it’s just good old fashioned impostor syndrome. Whenever I write one of these “here is what the site will be like” from now on reports, I feel like I’m going to accidentally reveal some kind of crack in a facade, and the entire enterprise will come crumbling down.

I am, among many other things, trying to learn to be nicer to myself about this kind of thing. So, I am sitting here, convincing myself that you won’t all run screaming at a site status update. Progress! Probably.

Here is the very short version if all you care about is the “what:” frustratingly, I do not know precisely how Magic Planet Anime is going to move forward, but it is going to move forward. The site is not going anywhere. I’m not going to make a lot of strong claims in this article, but, barring something truly unexpected and catastrophic, I will say, firmly, that I intend to continue writing for you all. That’s the most important bit. Related to that; my only current ongoing project, the Darling in the FranXX mini-podcast, should finish through to completion just fine. The other project I need to get started on, the batch of commissions I’ve now had on the back-burner for months, I intend to start on today, and you should see the first of those within the next few days. Fingers crossed. (Honestly, if all you care about is what’s going to be on this site specifically, you can stop reading now. Things are about to get very personal, and I understand if you don’t want to hear about that.)

Unfortunately we must now get to the “why.” In all likelihood, most of you probably haven’t actually been shaking your fist in frustration at me to update the site every day for the past two weeks (which is how long it’s been since I posted an actual article. Even then, it was very brief). But, I struggle with anxiety, and that is how I often feel like people must be reacting. It’s such a simple thing that I feel ridiculous typing it out, but, yes, I often have to actively remind myself that, no, my regular readers are not going to hunt me down with pitchforks because I haven’t written an Anime Orbit article this week, despite my best intentions.

Nonetheless, I think it is worth explaining what’s been up with me personally. Because I’m aware I’ve been sending some mixed signals lately on social media and similar, so I wanted to actually illustrate what’s going on. I’ve usually maintained that the specific millieu of mental problems I have aren’t really anyone’s business but my own, and maybe that’s true, but I’m foolishly hoping that maybe by explaining why this happens to me, I can at least maybe make some of you feel less alone if you’re going through similar things. At the very least, it helps my paranoiac streak to have something to point to if anyone ever actually does demand an explanation from me as to why I haven’t been writing as much in a given period.

Firstly, it is the dead of winter, and I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Basically, I get sad when it’s wintertime. Nothing terribly complicated, there. At least conceptually. (I’m sure the actual neurological reasons behind SAD are incredibly complicated, but that is not my department.) Making things worse is that I normally take Vitamin D supplements for this, but I’m out of them these past few weeks and can’t really afford to get more. SAD conveys all the usual depressive symptoms; lack of energy, focus, and so on. Not to mention feelings of guilt, which, hey, I have been absolutely crushed under the weight of these past few weeks. Definitely feeling that one.

Secondly, my hands are kind of busted right now. Clearly, I can type, or you wouldn’t be reading this, but I have to pace myself a lot more than I’m used to and even as I’m doing so, I can feel the strain in my wrists, palms, and (in particular, for some reason) my left pinky finger. I am hoping to be able to get a brace or a heating pad or something for this soon, but money is a perpetual issue. (You may think that this is where I will once again shamelessly plug my Ko-Fi. You’d be correct.) In a more general sense, I get constant aches and pains all over the place. This is not the issue it would be if I had a physically demanding job—and I know that, because I used to have one. Shout out to Wegman’s—but it still does actively interfere with my ability to keep a consistent schedule. Even in times over the past few weeks where I have felt well enough to read manga or watch anime, I haven’t been able to actually write at length about it, even in the case of media I really like (eg. the riotous otaku action-comedy Ghostbuster Osamu or the surreal, titanic Make the Exorcist Fall in Love in the former case, or seasonal highlight the flashy, ludicrous High Card in the latter. Not to mention Jujutsu Kaisen, which I finally started getting around to.)

Finally, there are all of my other mental problems. A combination of general anxiety issues, my plurality—itself not a problem by any means, but certainly capable of exacerbating others, under the right circumstances. (I am now realizing, I have essentially never spoken about it on this blog before, so there’s a fun anxiety spike that comes along with bringing that up), and just me generally being kind of a mess. I really have to beg you to believe me that I have been trying to get all of this in order. I’ve been trying for years, really. But at the moment, I’m caught in a specific crossroads of this particular mental crucible, and finding my way to where I need to be has proven very difficult. As of a few days ago, I have been given some information that might help me finally get my health insurance in order—that’s been a whole other kettle of fish—which will hopefully help, once I can actually scrape together enough time and energy to act on it.

So! Yes! It’s been a time! I’ve been very stressed! Maybe none of you actually needed to know any of this and I’m way oversharing by posting this. That is a very real possibility! But, increasingly, I feel that making my specific disabilities (and they are disabilities) visible to others is part of my responsibility, not as a critic specifically but simply as a writer, and even just a fellow human being, in general. If any of you suffer from similar problems, you’re not alone. Maybe thinking I can even offer that much comfort is pretentious in of itself, but I certainly hope I can.

As for calling myself a “critic” in the first place; this is another, albeit secondary issue I wanted to address, more for myself than anyone else. I sometimes get self-conscious that, simply by virtue of having a blog, people will assign to me more weight or authority than I really want. Again, perhaps that’s pretentious, but it is a real anxiety I have.

Just to be very clear, going forward, even more than before, Magic Planet Anime is strictly my own thoughts, feelings, and conclusions, at the moment of writing them. I do not hold myself remotely to scholarly standards, and you should not take anything on this blog as the final word on anything of importance. (And art, even—perhaps especially—popular art, is important, make no mistake.) My hope, as always, remains that I can elevate what I truly love about this medium, and when faced with things I do not, at least express my thoughts coherently and earnestly. That really is all.

Thank you for reading all this. I hope to see you all in a few days with the first of this batch of commissions I’m working on. It’s a doozy.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Other Posts

(PODCAST) Revisiting Darling in The FranXX 5 Years Later, Part 1 – Episodes 1-5

Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.

Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.

The DarliFra retrospective gets off to a rocky start through some technical difficulties. Along the way, Julian and I discuss the comparative merits of the opening episodes of the series, and talk about easily the worst thing about DarliFra: the fact that a decent chunk of it is actually pretty good. Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service on your podcasting platform of choice.

You may listen to the Anchor upload directly, here, or on any service fed by the Anchor platform, such as Spotify.

You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

DARLING IN THE FRANXX 5 Years Later Podcast Mini-Series – Announcement & Introduction

As I write this opening paragraph, it is May 11th, 2022. By the time you read it, more than six months will have passed, and it will be winter of the following year. Such is the magnitude of this endeavor.

“This endeavor,” as you’ve probably gathered, is an investigation into the rise and fall of Darling in the FranXX. DarliFra; a 2018 split production between Studio TRIGGER and A-1 Pictures‘ Koenji Studio, who rebranded as CloverWorks during the project, was an extremely polarizing series even when it was new. Five years later, it has been solidly placed on history’s pile of Bad artistic endeavors. When it is remembered, it’s often as an embarrassment. (A random sampling of paraphrased scathing comments I’ve heard over the years; a fundamentally bad idea that should never have been made at all. A piece of pigheaded conservative propaganda, twelve hours of animated bioessentialism, late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s secret plan to get the otaku of Japan to have some kids, damn it. A total waste of time, when considered as either a piece of entertainment or a serious artistic statement.)

Depending on who you ask, it is either a rare black mark on Studio TRIGGER’s strong 2010s run, or the moment where they lost the plot for good and never recovered. On a personal level, its very existence indirectly led to the dismantling of a TRIGGER Discord server I used to moderate, and I know for a fact we were not unique in that regard. To hear some tell it, Darling in the FranXX is straight-up digi-paint poison. Nothing less than the whole anime industry’s recurring sexism given form and doled out in 24-minute installments over six months.

And yet, it’s not really gone away either. Winter of 2018 was not exactly stuffed with great anime premieres. We did get some good stuff, including A Place Further Than the Universe, my favorite anime of the 2010s full stop, but notable shows were few and far between. Most of that season was stuff like Katana Maidens or Killing Bites, or the ill-fated Marchen Madchen. Shows basically no one remembers and rather few people were excited for even at the time. (I’ll stick up for Katana Maidens, myself, though it only really picked up in its second cour.) DarliFra, though? That was a different story. People were invested in Darling in the FranXX. It was an event. As I write this, it’s still the 40th most popular anime on Anilist, outstripping fellow bonkers mecha anime Code Geass by several places, and TRIGGER’s own Kill la Kill by several more. It’s been catalogued by more people than such disparate hits as KonoSuba, Angel Beats!, Bleach, and even one of its own primary inspirations, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and well outstrips one of its others, Eureka Seven. Some of this can be chalked up to the age of the average Anilist user (and the age of the site itself, it was just starting to gain a foothold as a viable alternative to MyAnimeList back in 2018), but it does reveal the fact that DarliFra had an iron grip on the western anime fandom for a little while. Even just five years later, it can be hard to believe that! But it’s true, and the proof remains in the numbers. And beyond that particular subculture, it’s inspired everything from celebrity hair styles to New York Times-bestselling fantasy novels. Not only is it remembered, it has reach.

The question, at least to me, is of course, why? What was it about this show specifically that made so many people, even those who would normally be skeptical of its very premise, willing to at least give it a chance? How did it so badly lose all that goodwill? To me, a simple case of a series failing to live up to expectations does not explain it, especially since our third question must be; why has it lingered on in the popular imagination, even when many other anime that once had similar reputations have faded?

Well, as we’ll learn over the course of this project, there are a lot of answers to that first question. But the first part of the answer is just that it made sense at the time. TRIGGER were hot off the heels of the TV version of Little Witch Academia, and the now cult classic Space Patrol Luluco was only just reaching two years since release. People did not really talk about A-1/CloverWorks’ involvement in DarliFra quite as much at the time, although it did become the subject of some discussion once the show reached its halfway mark, as we’ll get to.

Those in the know were also interested in the director, Atsushi Nishigori, and to be fair, he’s an interesting figure. The public loves an auteur, someone who can put their personal stamp on a project and have it be instantly recognizable as their own. There are a fair few of these in the realm of anime, but Nishigori wasn’t quite one yet. Some ten years prior to DarliFra, he’d left behind a position at the flagging Studio Gainax to join A-1. There, he directed 2011’s The Idol Master, apparently out of personal passion for the franchise. It paid off; the series was extremely successful, and today, Idol Master stands as one of the best idol anime of all time, and the template for the girl group anime boom that followed. That series and DarliFra itself make up the sum total of his leading roles on TV anime projects. I have my guesses as to why this might be, but I’ll hold my tongue for the moment.

As for what form this investigation will take, well, I couldn’t do something like this alone. Instead, I’ve conscripted KeyFrames Forgotten co-host Julian M. Together, we’re tackling this in the only format we really know how—a podcast, which will be available here on Magic Planet Anime via Youtube uploads and hopefully a few other outlets starting this coming Tuesday, on January 10th. We’ll be covering the series in chunks; five episodes of DarliFra for each episode of the podcast. If you want to keep pace with us, you have until then to catch up. The podcast should be enjoyable even if you’re not actively rewatching (or watching for the first time, god forbid) the series, but that is how it’s “intended” to be enjoyed, so I do hope at least some of you will join us on this deeply silly endeavor.

You’ll hear from us again on the 10th.

You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

Anime Orbit: The HBO MAX Debacle is a Taste of What’s to Come, and not Just for Western Cartoons

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Here’s two things I rarely talk about on this site; western animation and media preservation. But they’ve been thrust to the forefront of the media conversation following HBO Max‘s utterly morally bankrupt decision to simply delete and delist a sizable swathe of programs, thirty-six as of right now, including a number of well-liked Cartoon Network series such as Infinity Train, OK KO! -Let’s Be Heroes-, Uncle Grandpa—which was briefly the last man standing of the whole purge—and once-and-future coverage recipient Mao Mao, Heroes of Pure Heart.

Obviously, for all involved, this sucks. Both for the fans, who no longer have a legal way to watch the shows in question, and for the creators, who are quite deliberately being shafted by this move, as HBO Max is removing the shows in question to save on residual fees.

But this is a blog about anime and manga, so you might wonder what, exactly, any of this has to do with anything I cover here. The simple fact of the matter is – everything.

Easy and legal access to subtitled (or dubbed) anime is a fairly recent thing, dating back to not much more then ten years ago. Before that, what anime, if any, were legally available in the English-speaking world was a total tossup. Dubs and subs were certainly made, many of them were quite widely-watched, too, but outside of mainstream action fare things got dicey fast. For every anime that got a solid English dub and ran on Toonami, there were many more that were relegated to DVD releases that tended to quickly go out of print once the initial runs were sold out.

As such, the fate of any anime that was not one of the very few that became a long-running staple of American television (a title held by Dragonball Z, Naruto, Bleach, and that’s kind of it), was, at least to the English-speaking world, generally up in the air. Plenty of anime have fallen into legal limbo in this manner, many of them not even particularly obscure. Obviously, this is less of a problem in recent years, with streaming services snatching up the distribution rights to all manner of anime, new and old, at least one, RetroCrush, even specializes in older anime that other services might not be inclined to pick up. So, at present, the outlook is pretty sunny, right?

But the question, of course, is for how long.

Make no mistake. We live in a largely corporate-run world, and companies do not do things For You, The Fans. They do them to make money. Presently, we are in the midst of a second anime-in-the-Anglosphere boom. There is some evidence that this one is less ephemeral than the rush of 4Kids localizations and Toonami pickups of the 90s, but there is also plenty that it really isn’t. It’s a mistake to assume that just because it has lasted longer so far that it will not eventually fizzle. Consumer trends come and go, and even more than that, besuited executives often make decisions based on charts and graphs that come across to those of us on the ground as, at best, cryptic. This is to say nothing of the fact that the anime industry itself is in a state of perpetual crisis, as the production bubble continues to balloon with no end in sight, something is going to give somewhere eventually. It is mostly a matter of time.

It is not doomsaying then, to ask the question. If, eventually, this bubble pops, and corporations on this side of the Pacific suddenly decide that investing in anime is not profitable for them anymore, what are we to do then?

Well, perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the media pirate.

To some of you, the very notion will seem ludicrous. It’s not like filesharing has ever gone away, but with the rise of streaming a decent amount of people in the world have convinced themselves that not only is the practice illegal, but that it’s also immoral. I strongly disagree with such a notion to begin with, but in cases like these, where legal access to the media in question is being actively prevented, it goes from a debatably excusable practice to one that is functionally a necessity. We here enter the paradigm of the media pirate as media archivist.

For anime fans, this should be more obvious than to most. Plenty of anime, even with the existence of RetroCrush et. al., have remained in legal limbo in the Anglosphere for years. For instance, if one wanted to watch Cardcaptor Sakura-by-way-of-ReBoot curio Corrector Yui, you were pretty much totally out of luck until very recently. Even then, somewhat sketchy Amazon listings for DVD volumes are not exactly the most accessible method of watching anything. The more obscure a show gets, the more dire the prospects are. Another magical girl anime from around the same time, for example, Cosmic Baton Girl Princess Comet, is simply not available anywhere, barring dubious secondhand BD volume pickups.

I could easily make a whole series of columns out of just listing anime that are not easily accessible, legally, anywhere in the Anglosphere, and sometimes not even in their home country. At this point, filesharing as an ethical imperative becomes almost obvious a conclusion.

Because if we continue to beat the drum of legal availability as king, a situation not unlike what’s just transpired on HBO Max is less of a possibility and more of an eventuality. That’s something we would all do well to remember.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Manga, Other Posts

One-Week Hiatus For all Magic Planet Anime Activities

Hi all. I’ll keep this short, as I’m wont to do when I have an announcement.

I’m going to be taking (about) a week off. That means no MPA articles of any kind—no weekly recaps, no One Piece Every Day—until, at earliest, next Thursday when the next Call of The Night episode airs.

I do apologize to anyone disappointed by this turns of events, and usually I’d here go into a long spiel about why this is happening and be very apologetic. But frankly the reason this time is very simple; I have been having an extremely challenging past few days from a mental health point of view. I won’t go into details, but it’s been bad enough to be, you know, noteworthy, even as someone who’s struggled with mental illness my entire life. I’m recovering, and I’ll be fine in the long term, but I just need some time to rest and not think about tweaking paragraphs and staring at my metrics page and that sort of thing for a while.

As always, if you want to support me during my time away, you can do so via my Patreon or Ko-Fi, and if you’d like to socialize a little bit with some other MPA readers, you can do so via the site’s Discord server. Y’alls comments on here really make my heart light up with joy. Every single one of you is seen and appreciated, and I hope to see you again when the hiatus ends.

Posted on in Other Posts

Short Hiatus Notice [5/8/22]

Hi friends, I’ll make this as short as possible. You’ve probably noticed that there was no Spy x Family recap yesterday. (It may still technically be “today” for a few of you, since this is going up at….1am, my time.) My initial plan was to simply move the recap to Sunday, but things have been complicated the past couple of days, and on top of that I’m not feeling terribly well. I’m instead going to be skipping this week’s recap all together, and there will not be an Anime Orbit Weekly this week, either. (I do encourage you to check out the Spy x Family episode regardless, it’s technically a “filler episode” in that there aren’t really any major story developments that aren’t a foregone conclusion, but it’s extremely entertaining.)

The next article that goes up will be the Healer Girl recap for this week, which itself may be up to a few days late. I appreciate your understanding in this matter, and if you’d like to support the site while I take some small time away so I can come back at full strength, as it were, that’d also be appreciated. (Although certainly, you have no obligation to do so and I don’t want to make it out as though you do.)

I will also note that I will still be reachable on Twitter and RetroSpring during this time if you have anything you’d like to contact me about.

Until I’m well again, anime fans.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

ANNOUNCEMENT: Seasonal Coverage Schedule Change

Hi folks. As is often the case with these short little update articles, this is more of a PSA than an article per se.

I’ll cut straight to the point: no one but me is watching CUE! I have spent some time going over the metrics and it simply isn’t pulling crowds. Not just here, it doesn’t really seem to be doing well anywhere. It’s a non-entity on reddit, Twitter, etc. The Internet simply does not care about this show.

Which is a shame, because I genuinely like the show. But it now being three weeks into the season I have to ask myself if I like it enough to cover it weekly for two entire cours when almost no one is reading what I write about it. The answer there is a firm “no.” I do what I do out of love, but I must make some sacrifices for practicality. It is just not sensible from any point of view to continue to devote this much of my time to covering CUE!

So here’s what’s going to change, in the briefest terms I can put it.

  • Weekly Let’s Watches of CUE! will stop.
  • Consequently, CUE! will become a show I cover occasionally on The Frontline Report.
  • Sabikui Bisco will be taking its spot as a weekly. I really like it, and it’s getting enough positive buzz that I’m confident my columns on it will be more widely-read than those on CUE!
  • There will be a short Let’s Watch post–my first for the series–on episode 2 later today. Regular coverage will pick up when the series’ next episode releases on Monday.
  • Because this will shuffle around my work schedule, The Frontline Report will release on Tuesdays for the remainder of this season, in order to keep all my publishing days in a row. Starting with the upcoming edition of the column, which will now be released on the 25th. (The day that the Frontline Report is released depends on a lot of factors, but one of them is what’s most convenient for me. If I’m publishing something on Sunday and Monday already, then Tuesday is the natural fit.) Update: None of this is true! I misremembered what day My Dress-Up Darling comes out on. They will remain a Sunday feature for the remainder of the season.
  • Recaps of My Dress-Up Darling will be unaffected.

The schedule will thus be:

  • Saturday: My Dress-Up Darling
  • Sunday: Frontline Report
  • Monday: Sabikui Bisco

I suspect most of you will be neutral on or happy with this change. For anyone who did enjoy my coverage of CUE!, I’m sorry that this has happened. I try to avoid switching things up like this in the middle of a season if I can help it, but, well, see my prior point about practicality. I hope you’ll look forward to its appearances in The Frontline Report, at least.

For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy the Sabikui Bisco coverage as much as I enjoy the series itself. I’ll see you later today with the Let’s Watch column.