Andrew and I often criticize shonen for ruining story pacing and suspense. I’ve wrote one article about the problems of anime/manga storytelling. Andrew, recently, wrote critiques of One Piece and Bleach. We often discuss what Bleach and other shows could do to tighten the storytelling and build suspense. The pull-back almost all shonen do, just…
Tag: Anime
JapanPowered isn’t just about anime (even if the bulk of it is). You can find all different types of anime in this section.
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…
Arpeggio of Blue Steel
It is common to refer to ships as female. Now what would happen if warships and submarines were equipped with sentient artificial intelligence? Arpeggio of Blue Steel is one of the more unique anime I’ve watched. The Fog is a fleet of sentient warships and submarines equipped with technology that is centuries ahead of anything…
Another
Class 3 had a problem. People had the nasty habit of dying. Of course, exchange student Koichi Sakakibara had little idea of this little problem when he joined the middle school class. It seemed strange how a girl with an eye patch was ignored by everyone. It was as if she did not exist. Once…