My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, also known as My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected and Oregairu seems to be far away from lending any fictional insight into the plight of middle-aged men. After all, the anime has its focus in the title: teen. SNAFU explores the difficulties of first love, one of…
Author: Chris Kincaid
Trigger’s Triumph: The Hero’s Journey in Kill la Kill
Kill la Kill, released in 2013, follows the Hero’s Journey template, as Joseph Campbell outlined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces with interesting tweaks to the timeless formula. I’ve already written about how Kill la Kill satirized and leverages fan service quite a while ago. I decided to revisit this work after a…
The New Emerging Trend in Anime
For the past decade or so, moe has dominated. Moe designs seek to create a feeling of attachment with the audience, eliciting desires to protect a character. Moe character designs achieve this through various techniques, chief of which are the eyes. Moe eyes are large and dominate most of a character’s face. Eyes are the…
Immortality Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be – A Free Light Novel
I wrote Immortality Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be for fun several years ago. It languished on my file server, destined to never see a reader along with various other half-baked, mostly finished novels and nonfiction projects–well over 30, including the books I’ve released if you are curious about the number. The story was…
Death to Kanji! The Movement to Eliminate Kanji During the Meiji Restoration
Ask most English speakers about what makes Japanese so hard to learn and you will most likely hear kanji. The Japanese writing system consists of kana, or a phonetic script, and kanji, which are pictorial symbols Japan inherited and adopted from China. During the Meiji Restoration (beginning around 1868 following the end of the Tokugawa…
The Importance of Journals
Journals help with mental health, self-development, and, for the purposes of this essay, understanding history. Few people start a journal with the belief that mundane, daily concerns will prove to be a historical treasure. After all, who wants to read about teen angst, small concerns, trifles, or anything else some stranger wrote? I’ve kept sketch…