Beheneko: The Elf-Girl’s Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster! beyond being a mouthful is also an ecchi, uh, handful. For the longest time I’ve avoided ecchi stories. They weren’t my thing, and they remain not my thing. But as an anime writer and armchair academic, this genre has been a blindspot for me. I’ve watched…
Category: Anime
Texas Senate Bill 20, Obscenity, and Banning Anime and Manga
Texas’s state senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 20 which aims at AI-generated child pornography but can also end up banning many anime and manga titles in the process. Texas has joined many other states, such as Ohio and West Virginia, in efforts to crack down on materials deemed obscene. Ohio and West Virginia have…
5 Steps to Handle Your Anime Backlog
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. –C. S. Lewis While C.S. Lewis was talking about books, the sentiment also applies to anime. Revisiting stories allows us to see those stories in a new light. While the stories remain the same, we change. And as we change, we…
Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance, 3D Animation’s Not That Great
Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is a pure 3D computer-generated short series which takes the perspective of the “villains” of Gundam. The story follows Iria Solari, of the Zeon people, as she tries to survive against the Earth Federation Force and their new wonder-weapon, the Gundam. The Gundam series likes to play with the grayness of…
Gushing Over Magical Girls and The Stretch of Art
I cannot recommend Gushing Over Magical Girls, but the story has its merits and has more going for it than it appears on the surface. The story plays with the magical girl genre in uncomfortable ways. Enter Utena Hiiragi, a shy middle-schooler who admires magical girls. In the story’s world, magical girls appear on television…
Too Many Losing Heroines! Makeine
Too Many Losing Heroines!, also known as Makeine takes a different perspective on the usual romantic-comedy story. In a normal shonen romantic-comedy (Notice that young men, the main audience of shonen, also enjoy romance), the male protagonist is the one involved in the romance triangles, squares, and dodecahedrons in the case of harem stories. When…