Highest Rated Comments


Jonathan_Clements13 karma

Well, corny and farfetched anime are corny and farfetched, but anime is an entire medium. You might as well ask us what we find so special and entertaining about "books", or "films". Trust me (and trust a whole bunch of angry reviewers), we have plenty of anime we can't stand. We are not apologists for the whole genre by any means. In fact, in the eyes of some of our detractors, we despise almost all of it.

Everybody's taste is different, and I am sure there is an anime for you, mergerr, you just haven't run into it yet. There are thousands of anime, and I bet there is one out there with your name on it.

As for the fetish... even though modern fans have often grown up with anime/games/manga as the norm in their lives, I think there is still a sense of resistance and defiance. Many anime fans are still created out of a sense of pushing back against the Disney machine or similar home-grown modes of storytelling. Sometimes, this means they simply accept the cliches of the Bandai machine instead, or something similar, but nevertheless, I think many anime fans are looking for something different, and certainly find it.

This doesn't mean anyone should watch The Gigalo.

Jonathan_Clements12 karma

In China, the food, the bookshops, and the fact that I speak enough of the language to communicate on a human level.

In Japan, the civility and the culture. Honestly, I come from a place where people stare at you if you read a book on the train. My first train trip in Japan, when I was just 20 years old, and suddenly everybody else on the carriage had their nose in a book. I knew I’d found my people. Oh, so yes, the bookshops, too. I am sensing a pattern here.

In Finland, the women. You would not believe your eyes.

Jonathan_Clements11 karma

I think I might disappoint you, makka-kit, when I say that Kill la Kill didn’t make that much of an impression on me. I did notice the fan-service, of course, but it didn’t strike me as any more or less fan-servicey than that in, say, Queen’s Blade. The transformation scenes were plainly a wobblier, bawdier variant on Sailor Moon, itself a homage of sorts to Cutie Honey. I don’t like fan service in general. In fact, I don’t even like the term fan service. It’s not just about the objectification, it’s the implication that if the show sucks, it’s the fans’ fault!

Jonathan_Clements10 karma

Ha! Are you aware of the misery and pain that goes into choosing the title of an anime magazine? There were weeks and weeks of fighting over Manga Max, and dozens of rejected titles. My advice, which nobody ever heeds, is to do everything you can to keep the words anime or manga out of your magazine title, because they become limiting. If your magazine is called Anime Planet, then people will complain if you cover manga. You’ll be called names if you run an article about a live-action film. I’m getting flashbacks…

The first three genre magazines I think of – Newtype USA, Otaku USA and Neo (in the UK), all avoid using the words anime and manga. But I bet Helen has something to say about this, because she’s the one who came up with Anime UK…

Jonathan_Clements9 karma

  1. I certainly watch “as much as possible”, although things get prioritised if there’s paid work involved. So if I’m writing sleeve notes, or articles, or introducing films at a festival, they jump right to the front of the queue.

2a. As I once said in Newtype USA: “For its wartime echoes and its maudlin pathos; for its superb voice-acting and peerless script; for its kamikaze students and its red-haired Russian bad girl; for the misleadingly dumb beginning, which lurches into a gripping space war drama; for all these things and more, Gunbuster is my favorite anime.”

2b. Worst anime? Oh, that’s very hard, because after the first few thousand, one develops a sense of there being a crackle of static and white noise, born of all the things you’ve turned off without finishing, or done your best to scrub away with mind bleach. It seems unfair to single out any single title as the worst, particularly when you also reach a Worst Event Horizon, where something can be so bad that it’s good again – e.g. Sins of the Sisters. So “worst” needs to be not necessarily terrible, but not terrible enough...

  1. Macross. A song can save the world.