Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

Even though I like to gaze upon anime and manga with an artistic and pretentious eye, one has to remember that this stuff is first and foremost is a business venture for some exec out there, and as a result these works get twisted to varying degrees to make them more marketable. One of the  ways in which these works get twisted is in their length. Anime length is typically restricted to episode counts that are multiples of 13, and manga length strives on reader surveys and runs as long as it remains popular. Incidentally, this is why I don’t read manga that often, since too much of it is just so goddamn long.

Length is critical is to a story. Besides it being the factor that determines for how long you sit in front any given anime or flip through any given manga for, it helps set the pace for the story. Sometimes the pace is perfect for the amount of volumes/episodes a story runs, and sometimes it isn’t. What it all comes down to is that some story writers have very clear idea of how much time they have to cram stuff in, and others have no idea when they’ll be cut. This stringent control of length obviously effects the quality of the storytelling, regardless of whether or not the story is “good” or not.

For those who don’t know, anime runtime is typically bought in packages of 12 or 13 episodes known as cours. While this may not be as transparent in older, longer running shows (probably because the system was different back then) this system became very apparent in the 90s with shows typically running for 26 episodes, and now with shows typically running for 13. This can of course be really restrictive on writers if they, for instance, have a story better suited for 17 episodes, but have 26 episodes to work with; or have a story best suited for 17 episodes again, but this time they only have 13 episodes. Obviously the former situation is better, but such restrictions often result in episodes made purely to fill up time. If these are good, that’s all fine and dandy, but whether they’re bad or good still effects the pace at which the show moves. As for the latter situation, what often comes about are stories in which things aren’t adequately explained and the way in which they end oftentimes makes little sense.

Naturally, if one is a skillful writer it’s not an especially tall order to write a story meant to fit nicely into a set amount of time (I think Sunrise just does this by making up shit episode by episode and hoping it all makes sense.) but it’s not an easy thing to do. There’s also often times pressure from sponsors to keep things open-ended for a sequel, or to change certain plot points due to marketing issues. What seems to be the most prominent pattern coming around due to these imposed limits (and of course other things like the shifting of audiences’ tastes) is we get shows that focus more on characters and less on story, resulting in a show which is a set of 13 individual stories in which things are started and resolved in the space of each episode. Sometimes there will be a push for drama near the end in attempt to punctuate the series. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way it’s the easiest way to deal with things.

I can’t write as much on manga, since I don’t read it as much, but what I’ve noticed with most popular manga (ie shounen, shoujo) is that until a certain defined point there will be a nice, somewhat thought out story, but after that point things will meander, or further story arcs will simply not be as good. This is obviously a result of writers not knowing when they’ll be cut off, and when they do get cut off the ending is either abrupt or non existent. Like with anime, because of this and other reasons stories have shifted to be more character centric rather than story centric, so the way in which things end is less of an issue. However, manga does tend to run on for too long for my tastes, and the material invariably becomes stale.

Some anime have found ways around the cour system by telling part of the story within the 12-epsiode TV run, then finishing the rest with OVAs, and I can say with some certainty that there are a few manga titles that can end whenever they please. But besides that, I think anime and manga would really benefit if their run-times weren’t so strictly controlled. Often times it’s not too much of an issue, but there are a good amount of a titles out there in which length has had a negative effect on things. I dream of a day when such limits are lifted, but that will of course never happen.

• Hayate no Gotoku vol 1
• Hokuto no Ken movie (x2)
• Gurren Lagann set 3
• Some book by some Jewish upstart who lived in Japan
• Kanji flashcards
• Gloves
• Hat
• Kure-nai OST (en route)
• Cymbals, requests (en route)
• Best Buy money towards a new monitor (lord knows I need one)

I got two copies of the Hokuto no Ken movie because there was some mix up between the parties buying the presents. I guess I’ll exchange one of them for the first volume of Kannagi.

I asked for level one kanji flashcards then I realized I knew all the kanji in them. I guess they’ll be good for review.

But yeah, a great haul! Only two of the things I asked for were not included, one of them being a CD I already have downloaded and the other being Kannagi volume 1, which I addressed above.

Merry Christmas!!

Original Post

They’re at a Christmas party, you see.

No, really, they do. That’s part of the reason I could in some ways relate to the main guy in Nyan Koi!. The similarities end there, however.

But yes, aside from making an attempt to get back on the blogging horse, why am I writing about Nyan Koi!? Well, amongst the sea of harem love comedies out there, Nyan Koi! stands out just a bit with its unique gimmick and sense of humour. Just a little bit, however. But before we get into all that, I may as well try to summarize the, uh, “plot” of the show in the next paragraph… like a real review.

Nyan Koi! is the story of Kousaka Junpei, an extraordinarily unlucky young man who happens to knock the head off of a statue of the local cat god, and incurs its wrath in the form of a curse. That curse being, Kousaka gains the ability to understand cats and has to help 100 of them with their problems, or else he’ll eventually turn into a cat himself. Considering he’s allergic to cats, one can see how this fate would be less than ideal. And since this is a shounen romance, there’s a harem of beautiful girls all vying for Kousaka’s attention, and are they sometimes related to the cats he has to save. This harem includes the traditionally sweet and caring (and primary love interest) Mizuno Kaede, the tomboyish childhood friend Sumiyoshi Kanako, the Yakuza heiress Ichinose Nagi, the eternally lost postal worker Mochizuki Chizuru, and the shrine maiden sisters Kirishima Akari and Kotone one of which is a by-the-numbers tsundere, the other of which is a creepy sadist and stalker. In addition to all of them are a whole host of wacky side characters like Kousaka’s family, the shifty priest that owns the aforementioned cat statue, and all the cats that Kousaka runs into.

Shounen/otaku romance shows can skew in a few directions, and Nyan Koi! skews towards being tongue-in-cheek. The show doesn’t take itself or what’s going on it terribly seriously. In fact, what keeps the show afloat is its use of humour, most of which relies on a lot of loud overreactions to things and in general has a habit of shooting everything over the top. As veterans of comedy anime will know, this isn’t terribly original (what is?) but it’s pretty funny if you get into humour like that. The romance section of the series is strictly by the book, but is balanced out well by the humour, and is sometimes a subject of joking itself. Like I said, this show isn’t terribly serious.

Despite the show’s cat gimmick, the girls are the real reason anyone is watching the show. The focus on helping the cats more or less goes away about half-way through the show, but they pop in every now and again to crack some jokes at Kousaka’s expense. The structure of the show falls back on traditional episodic TV-writing, so there’s not much in the way of serious cliffhangers or a strong romance plot that underpins everything. Characters will refer to past events, and their feelings and thoughts change over time, but things are primarily started and resolved in the span of each 24 minute episode.  This does the show well, since it’s not meant to be that serious anyway.

The characters are somewhat interesting spins on established archetypes, with my personal favourites being the flamboyant Ichinose Nagi and the wonderfully creepy Kirishima Kotone. Perverted mail woman Chizuru is almost up there, too. Mizuno is pretty typical, but she’s very cute and inspired mental cries of “moe~” every now and again. Sumiyoshi is a typical overbearing tomboy with a sharp tsundere edge, but did make her grand entrance in Mamba makeup, so that’s worth noting. As is typical with these shows, the side characters are a bit more off kilter than the main players, and provide a great amount of humour with their own antics. The show could do better with its talking cats, but they manage to pull of some pretty funny personalities with them, as well. It’s pointless to note whether or not these characters break any new ground (of course they don’t) but they’re all fun have a good share of humourous lines.

Design wise, things keep within modern anime convention, but have something of a sharp shounen magazine edge to them. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the animation, but it’s all well executed and never really looks lazy. The show’s direction changes between being hyper for humour sections, and being sedate for when the show decides to take its romance seriously. The background music isn’t anything of note, and the opening and endings are typical anisong compositions.

In the end, Nyan Koi! is pretty standard, but has a fairly strong humour element that pushes it beyond the norm just a touch. As one who partakes of shounen romance quite a bit, there are definitely shows I enjoy more, but Nyan Koi! certainly was not a waste of time, and was a pretty fun way to spend 24 minutes each week. If you’re looking for something light and fairly well executed, Nyan Koi! fits the bill perfectly.

Original Post

I guess this comic is a step back into–ahem–”classic” Mistakes of Youth formula–Rets says something weird, Tina questions it, and Rets overreacts. It’s not terribly good, but hopefully it’ll inspire chuckles, and maybe it gets my feelings about Railgun across in a more succinct manner than the blog post on the issue. The art isn’t anything to write home about, so I won’t say anything.

The more astute of you may notice that this comic is dated for the 20th, yet today is the 22nd. I was simply too lazy to post it. Anyways, the next comic is done, so you can expect that on Christmas.

Later!

To Aru Majutsu no Index was a show that inspired great feelings of disappointment in me. It did not set a new high for the amount of disappointment derived from a show, but it hit pretty annoying levels of This Could Be Way Better. Despite having a cast of well designed, quirky and cute characters along with a world that was fairly well thought out, nearly all of the show’s stories fell flat due to poor planning and stupid amounts of pointless exposition. It had entertaining moments, but on the whole the show was less than stellar.

To Aru Kagaku no Railgun is a lot better.

Despite being a touch put off by the shift in tone from Index to Railgun, I’ve come to really appreciate the show throughout the 11 episodes that have aired so far. Railgun takes the types of characters and world established by Index and presents them in a fun an interesting way, rather than being the test of patience that Index often was. The trick is that Railgun keeps it simple. Rather than telling the story with long 20-minute scenes of exposition, Railgun does well to show the story, as visual media should. This can in some ways be attributed to each series’ source material–Railgun is a comic and Index is a book. That said, I don’t think I’m being totally unfair in thinking that a studio should make some effort in successfully transferring a story from one medium to the next. This would not have saved some of the shoddy stories Index had (and boy did it have some shoddy stories) but it would have at least made the show a bit more watchable.

But yeah, Railgun is great. It’s a nice mix of slice-of-life antics with some nice stand-alone stories, and has recently shown it can tell a nice longer-form science fiction yarn well, too. This is all topped off with some really smooth animation and decently composed action scenes. It really is a shame that Index couldn’t even be half this entertaining.

Original Post

There was a comic before this one that I put up on Wednesday. If you don’t happen to follow the RSS feed and just reload the site on weekends, you may want to go back and see that one.

This is something that happened to me in real life. I’ve been wanting to use this anecdote as a comic for a while (something like three years) but never really found the right moment until now. I feel that Brad, after having been washed ashore in America after a grueling number of months manning the cash register at both Tora and a U-15 DVD shop, would be absolutely delighted to hear some American guy ask him if his MD Geist DVD was a “gay-mu”. In real life the man who posed this query to me was less of a Hitler dream child and more of a brown person, but I think portraying the assailant as he is in the comic enhances the humour.

The art isn’t really up to par. The drawings are lazy and the lighting didn’t come out as I wanted. I’m still really bad at determining where shadows fall, too. Also, you’ll notice Brad isn’t bleeding anymore. I forgot to add the blood, so just assume he wiped it off.

I dunno what’s going on next week. I guess I’ll figure something out.

Some weird things have happened to the sequels for both Natsu no Arashi and Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu. It’s almost as if they’re… not as good. Which is strange, since I’d say they both started off one-upping their originals. What happened!? I hate writing negatively about things so often, but this shit needs to be said.

Let’s start with Nogizaka Haruka. The first series was a nice and cute romance that hit some good buttons for me, and I came out thoroughly enjoying it. The main attraction of the first series was the titular Haruka herself–she’s simply an adorable girl who happens to like the crazy anime junk I do, which obviously makes her attractive to dudes like me. This new series started off pretty well, and raised the bar even higher with delicious amounts of fanservice, but around half-way through they totally forgot why their limited audience was even watching this show–that being, Haruka herself. I already addressed the show succumbing to harem tradition, and while I like the others girls well enough, they’re sidekicks. Second bananas. The diverted attention towards the other characters (especially Shiina, dear god) did knock the show down a bit, what’s really killing it is their attempt as a season finale.

The last season ended with some average-level drama that was all fun and good, and I felt ended the series well. There’s a very specific problem with how they’re doing that this time around, and it’s a complaint I have with the series as a whole, that being: Where the fuck is Haruka? I would think the people behind this TV show know that their audience is limited (The main girl isn’t some tsundere, there’s an actual romance between two people and not ten.) and they would know why they’re watching the show. If so, why divert attention from it? That’s not what people want. Honestly, I’d have no problem with this current arc if Haruka had more than five minutes of dialogue.

Next is Natsu no Arashi. The first series was a fun-but-not-perfect show that had some inspired drama and some good jokes, topped off by a tame-but-interesting SHAFTXSHINBO touch. This second season opened nicely with a bunch of fun time-traveling vignettes, but after a while they grew a little stale. At around that point they decided to switch to some drama again, and while I welcome said drama, how it comes about and how it’s resolved just doesn’t really move me. I wanted them to at some point address Hajime’s affection for Arashi seriously, but how it’s addressed and how it’s resolved is almost good, but not quite there.

A similar thing could be said of the production of the show itself. It seems SHAFT isn’t really giving it their all. It’s not like the animation is bad or anything, there’s just a lack of heart, I think. Kind of like Maria Holic–the “SHAFT Look” is there, but it’s merely cosmetic. It doesn’t seem like there’s much else to it.

As far as the story portion of both of these shows go (and this applies more to Haruka than it does Arashi) the blame can probably be left in the hands of the original authors, but as far as Natsu no Arashi’s direction goes, well, I really expect more out of SHAFTXSHINBO.

Hopefully this blog will become less of a Debbie Downer in a bit. Hopefully.

Original Post

In case you had forgotten, the last time we left Brad, he was stuck in a shady U-15 DVD store in the depths of Akiba. I hate subjecting the comic to continuity, but I had to find some way to bring Brad back to where the rest of the gang are. I figure if I do strike with continuity, I may as well be as out there as possible. As such, this is comic is also a part 1 of a two-part series. If I can produce a miracle, part 2 will materialize by the weekend.

The art is fine, I guess, even if the first panel is impossible. I stole some royalty free stock image for Lady Liberty.

That’s all. Later!

Guys I’ve been fuckin’ so many chicks lately you will not believe. AND THEY’RE ALL JAPANESE. If you want to get in on this awesome piece of Japanese asses just follow my 5 easy steps for being a fucking awesome cool dude with women.

1. When you meet your hot Japanese girl for the first time talk about how much you love anime and manga all of the time. She’ll think you’re so fucking sexy she may just drop to the floor right then and suck your cock.
2. Wear shirts with lots of Japanese on them. You don’t even have to know Japanese, but if you wear a shirt with lots of Japanese on it the girl will think you care a lot about her culture. But of course that’s a lie, since you just want to fuck her. If you wanna be super direct, I suggest this one.
3. When you go out with her only go to shops that sell Japanese things and only eat sushi and other Japanese food. But especially sushi. Japanese people only eat Japanese food, if they eat anything else they’ll explode into blood and die.
4. Speak to her in Japanese. Just like step 2, even if you don’t know a lick of Japanese, do it anyway. Some good words are baka and neko. If you say those over and over again you can talk about politics and shit in Japanese.
5. When you’re fucking her don’t use a condom, and pull out right before you climax so you can shoot it all in her face, just like in Japanese porn that you watch all time.

If you do this you’ll be a cool dude like me and bag Japanese women in no time.

Would have preferred Yebisu beer but couldn’t find any.

It’s a cheesecake because Misato promises service at the end of each episode.

Original Post

Yes, Rets is dressed as Captain Haddock from The Adventures of Tintin. Why? BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT.

The issue of pedophilia in Darker Than Black’s sequel is something I feel must be addressed. Spinning it off into other deviant directions is something I feel should not be addressed, but the script was headed in that direction so I did it anyway. I was kind of reaching with this one, but I hope it at least inspires a chuckle.

This comic is actually redrawn from earlier lineart. I liked the original lineart one day, then I looked at it the next day and it looked awful, so I re-drew it. Even after cleaning the new lineart, shit still looked wonky, so I made some adjustments. It looks kind of ok now, but not perfect. The backgrounds are once again cheap traces over some photos I took.

I drew Tina’s hair in a more flowing manner again, since I think that may suit her more, and I wanted to try my hand at drawing that sort of hair again. I think it goes against the Watanabe Akio style I’m trying badly to cop, but whatever. I’m mainly latching onto his style to try and find my own. I want to draw comics that look “anime style” (whatever the fuck THAT is) but my attempts at shooting for that stlye on my own have been failures. So I figure if I latch onto an estblisehd style, I may find my own. Lots of Japanese artists do it, so I figure there’s no shame in me doing it!!

Thanks to the power of Perfect Dark I found some albums by Omokage Lucky Hole–the groovy dudes who did the Natsu no Arashi opening–and they’re pretty good! Their Wikipedia page describes them as a “Japanese Funk band” but by my not-very-musically-inclined-ears they skirt a bunch of musical genres from traditional J-Pop pieces (albeit older styled ones) to some almost rap-sounding pieces. However, they have a sound that’s unified by their strong use of horns and the main singer’s voice. There’s some duds across the two albums I found, but on the whole they’re pretty  good, so listen to them! Not around Japanese people, though. Their lyrics are pretty dirty. I’d love to buy these albums, but I’m not in Japan at the moment so that’s something of a impossibility. But I will! Eventually.

And that’s it. Later bros.

Today is December 3rd, and you know what that means!!

It’s Nagi-tan’s birthday!!

She’s a little shy, but she eventually ate her cake. She did insist on the Rei cup, however.

You can celebrate Nagi-tan’s birthday, too! And in many different ways! Either do it the way I did it above, or this next way!

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