Societal roles are interesting to look at. They’re things which are forced upon us, but because of how early we learn them, they feel natural and correct, making it hard for people to resist them even when they want to. It’s easy to compare social roles to the roles in stories, and few stories have more well defined roles than fairy tales and plays. Both Revolutionary Girl Utena and Princess Tutu—two shows with a common ancestor in Sailor Moon—look at roles in fairy tales and theater, the ways in which they converge and diverge in doing so gives room for a wide variety of interpretations on the subject.
Month: October 2016
Fall 2016 Week 3 Recap
Writing these takes an awfully large amount of work, though I suppose that’s mostly due to how many shows I’m watching, so I only have myself to blame. Anyways, this was a pretty good week for anime. I should be watching Kizu Part 2 by the time this post comes up, so next week should start off well. I’ve been rewatching all of Monogatari for an upcoming essay, but it’s taking a bit longer than I expected so there might be a long break between my soon to release essay and the Monogatari one. That’s enough talking about my plans for now, let’s look at this week’s shows:
Fall 2016 Week 2 Recap + Week 1
Seeing how many shows I’m watching this season(16, and it’ll be 17 if I pick up Keijo), I figured now was as good a time as any to start writing about shows weekly. Making dedicated posts is too much work though so I figure I’ll just do a weekly recap. Weeks start on Mondays by this schedule, so Week 2 goes up to October 16th. Series will be ordered based on my current ranking of them. No pictures this week as I hadn’t decided to do this yet, but they should be here from next week on.
Anime’s Embrace of Absurdity and Camp
One of the many things I love about animation is the number of different ideas it can portray. Live action can only show that which can be displayed in real life which leads suspension of disbelief to often be broken when live action tries to portray more “out there” concepts. Animation never looks real, which means that the gap between normality and abnormality within the medium is much less jarring than it is in live action. Anime tends to be very aware of this benefit of animation, and because of this many anime embrace absurdity to its fullest extent.
Thoughts on Summer 2016 Shows
As I said in my Fall 2016 Expectations post, Summer was a great season for me. I didn’t like everything I watched, but I enjoyed quite a bit, and just like last season I’d like to go through the shows I watched. I’ll go through them from worst to best, and talk about why I felt the way I did about them.
Departures and Separation in K-On!!
Almost anyone can tell you saying goodbyes is a painful experience. No one wants to leave behind those they care about, and Slice of Life anime frequently cover the feelings caused by goodbyes. In shows where the main draw is the characters and their relationships, it’s almost necessary to deal with the emotions that come about when the characters are separated for a prolonged or indefinite period. K-On, as an amazing slice of life anime, does more than just touch on this topic — it devotes most of the last quarter of its second season to this point, along with its movie. K-On displays the emotions caused by parting better than almost any other show I’ve seen, while saying important things about these departures at the same time.
Floating into Bliss 