Dating sucks, particularly for those who like anime. In the US, anime and manga fans are still stigmatized as loser neckbeards (including girls!). While this unfounded stereotype is wrong and slowly fading, it still hangs on in many areas. Because of this, many anime conventions feature speed dating events to help anime fans meet. The…
Category: Otaku Culture
Musings III: On the Use of Premodern Japanese in Anime
Hard but hardly useful? As a master student of Japanese Studies, I am obliged to concern myself not only with modern popular culture and anime but also with the subject of Premodern Japanese. To be precise, I’m learning to read texts from the Edo period and older which use bungo, or premodern grammar. I’m also…
Musings II: Magical Girls, or, Empowerment VS Sexism
Magical Girls puzzle me; they make me feel intrigued and desperate at the same time. That is not just because of my, admittedly, relatively limited experience with shōjo (‘[for] girls’) anime genres – until recently, I preferred adventure fantasy, which is sadly, but undoubtedly, shōnen (‘[for] boys’) material of the most popular order. No, Magical…
Anime Review Tool
As many of you know, I don’t mess with review scores. But I know how popular assigning scores are for many anime bloggers. Well, I dusted off some of the things I learned in my statistics classes and put together a tool that might help you. It can be hard to quantify a feeling about…
Am I a Weeaboo? What does Weeaboo Mean Anyway?
My goal for JP is to cut through some of the mistaken ideas anime and manga fans have about Japan. As I dug around the net and academic databases researching for this article, I wondered if I really do meet my goal. Or, perhaps, I only add to the preponderances of misinformation and mistaken ideas…
The Sunshine Award Nomination
Thanks to Rekari over at Shooting Star Dreamer for the Nomination! These blog awards are a great way for bloggers to get to know each other. This is my first award nomination. “You like me! You really like me!” Reka gave me 10 excellent questions, but excuse me a moment. “Where was that dang-fangled thing…Blasted…