If there’s one thing that anime sorely lacks, it is weirdness. And I’m not talking about the kind of weirdness that is the hallmark of spectacularly crazy anime like M.D. Geist or Crystal Triangle (weird only because of the haphazard approach to plot construction), or …Read more »
The rise of yuri as an identifiable subgenre of anime and manga has brought some distinct oddities with it. One of the biggest oddities—and the one most relevant to AOI HANA: Sweet Blue Flowers in a roundabout way—is that yuri very rarely deals with actual …Read more »
The noble machines of sporting martial combat roll across the landscape, sporting their insignia—here an anglerfish, there a fresh pot of tea—their maidenly crew carefully moving them in formation as they challenge one another in the glorious feminine martial art of tankery, to bring glory …Read more »
It should come as no surprise that manga is a rich medium for exploring gender issues; boys' love/yaoi content is famously infamous within fandom, and girls' love/yuri is becoming almost as recognizable, if not as emblematic for manga, as its male/male counterpart. Yet for all …Read more »
Ah, university life. Whether a distant, quasi-fond memory or something you've only been given a small reprieve from this summer (for those of you still in high school and yet to know the joys of university life, the phrase "Abandon hope all ye who enter …Read more »
The best episode of Dance in the Vampire Bund is the first episode, a tense affair on a mythbusting variety show on the topic of vampires that culminates in a bloody revelation that yes, vampires do exist, and they want to set up camp in …Read more »
A glance at the cover of Chōhei Kambayashi's Yukikaze —with its heavily armed airplane and fluorescent speed lines—might give the impression that this is a tale of a man and his plane, and their adventures gallivanting across the skies. Happily, Yukikaze is not another high-octane …Read more »
Given that modern Japanese culture is fairly preoccupied with the interface between fantasy and reality, fantasy—whether it involves the construction of an entire new world, as is common in Western fantasy, or simply the layering of a fantasy world along with the real world—is a …Read more »
Part short story collection, part novel, Hiroshi Yamamoto's The Stories of Ibis is largely a story about stories. It lurks somewhere in the interstices between the framing story of an android telling stories a la Scheherazade to a storyteller and the stories she tells. It …Read more »
Housuke Nojiri’s novel Usurper of the Sun is a novel of first contact, of enigmatic artifacts and ineffable extraterrestrials, of cognitive science and astroengineering. When high school astronomer Aki Shiraishi notices a tower on Mercury during its transit of the Sun, she immediately finds herself …Read more »
When They Cry 3: Umineko no Naku Koro ni (“When the Seagulls Cry”) is not, in the strictest sense, a sequel to the events of the first two When They Cry/Higurashi game/anime series. Indeed, most of the main cast of Umineko are in no way …Read more »
Are you, dear Baccano! viewer, so confused at the large cast spread across three time periods that you're having trouble placing who's where and when? Or, perhaps, you feel as though you are watching The Sting , except it's more confusing? Is the eponymous "stupid …Read more »
Caleb Dunaway
