Good Things Come To Those Who Wait (March Mecha Madness For 2010?)

All good things come to an end

The latter half of 2009 has left me mecha starved with only a couple of titles (Basquash which was a huge disappointment and the awesome but alone Shin Mazinger), but 2010 is already looking up with the announcement of a new Votoms OVA (that makes 2 very recently with Pailsen Files in 2007) to finish off the story once and for all right around the same time as Gundam Unicorn is set to debut.  The way things are going it’s looking like 2010 is already going to be more active than 2009 as far as my blogging is concerned.  

What The Hell Happened With The Fall Season And How To Survive The Rest of 2009 (With A Curious Leadoff)

Ugh those tracks you just can’t stop repeating but you don’t care because they are so damn good you might as well let them stay playing for a week.  It’s that Senju Akira again and his dastardly slow building music that just keeps on building:

I could listen to that all day and perhaps maybe I’d rather listen to that all day then watch any one of the new anime series we have coming out this season.  And that’s what I’m really here to talk to you, but by all means let the song be a mood setter.  ghostlightning states “FFFFF We Hate the New Season” and calls it fail fall 09, but he doesn’t necessarily ask the question.  What is the question? Is there a question?  Well I certainly have one and it’s a certain “what the hell happened?!” as far as the last couple of seasons we dealt with actually.  Last season gave us a certain gem in Bakemonogatari and I’m sure people found something to suit their interests as well, but for mecha fans like the ghost and I it’s been pretty slimpickings.  There don’t seem to be any particular heavy hitters for the remainder of 2009, and in fact it’s arguable that the entirety of 2009 slipped by without any of the heavy hitters we’ve had almost every season from 2006-2008.  Have we been spoiled, or is the boom over so to speak?  Finally is it just me or have the bigshot companies just suddenly decided to collectively say, “2009 isn’t looking so good, let’s wait until 2010 before we spring the big stuff on them” and if so could the crash at the end of 2008 had something to do with the anime industry playing so conservatively this year?  I don’t pretend to have all the answers and hate to leave people hanging, but if indeed this is already it as far as the big 2009 titles go I wouldn’t mind sharing my survival strategy with everyone instead.  It’s a fairly simple one that should be adaptable to most people’s standards:

Gundam Antagonists And Sexual Deviancy (Do They Go Hand In Hand?)

The top right corner features the image in question that has sparked some pretty interesting discussion

A lot of people have expressed surprise and even shock at this picture of Alejandro and Ribbons hugging that has been inserted into the special edition volumes of Gundam 00 and with it a new layer on top of an implied gay relationship between the two main series villains.  It sort of doesn’t come as a surprise given how they talked to each other, but then while discussing this idea with a friend I started to think more about it and realized that maybe, just maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise in general.  As I looked back on the history of Gundam Villains I’ve started to notice in them what appeared to be at least one or more tendency’s towards a sexually deviant fetish or impulse, along with a tendency towards the sociopathy that most Gundam villains have been known to suffer from to a degree.  Consider the following that I came up with and maybe have a thought about it yourself and whether it is just sheer coincidence, me thinking to hard about it, or a clear and consistant pattern in building the personality of a Gundam Villains:

Note that this article will be posted on both Animehistory and We Remember Love

The Wrestler Thoughts (A Next Generation Rocky)

So I just finished watching The Wrestler (I know this has nothing to do with anime, but I still like to talk about my western movies as people probably already know so please hear my out)  on my cable services On Demand feature and I realize that I’m about a year too late for this, but this movie was so strong that I felt I still had to say a few words regardless.  Here is what it basically all came down to for me in the end.  Randy “The Ram”, while his career may be one of the most fake and showy of them all, comes across as one of the few honest people in this movie, while everyone else in the “real world” comes across as fake or unrelenting to an extent.  I remember thinking early on in the movie as I saw The Ram and his opponents doing there thing in the ring that this profession is brutal and almost masochistic, but then I came to notice that after the match they were clearly all comrades and professionals who had nothing but the most honest and heartfelt respect for each other at the end of the day.  They were able to leave the profession in the ring when they hit that dressing room and support each other and be the best of friends, but the people in the “real world” as we came to see refused to leave their work where it belonged and ended up being far more brutal on The Ram in his civilian life than anything he endured as a pro wrestler.  Hard to believe, but consider this:

More Big News Everyone (The Horn Blowing Continues)

And we get a trailer

Wow the show is brand new and yet is already making me feel nostalgic.  I’m really liking how the character designs look when animated too.  Simply amazing so far.

Big News Everyone! (Gundam Unicorn Finally Blows It’s Horn And We Get A Cast Listing)

Who is Full Frontal?  Find Out By Watching Gundam Unicorn (Hint: His voice may sound familiar)

Obviously people know that Gundam Unicorn is my most anticipated upcoming series this year, so the moment some real news broke about it I just had to be there to get the scoopu.  Here’s our cast for Gundam Unicorn:

How To Make A Successful Anime (The 5 Golden Rules)

Following the events of Welcome To The NHK the dynamic duo of Sato and Yamazaki would go on to publish the best selling anime of all time based off of the failure of their self-published eroge

Man moe series sure are popular eh?  It sometimes can seem like it’s all that really sells these days and you know what, I kind of want in on this now.  Japanese Otaku culture really is pretty easy to read and manipulate and I figure as long as you know how to follow just a few golden rules that you can stand to make a lot money in this industry.

Straight Up Saturdays (Yasuhiro Imagawa Is The Director To Beat/A Further Look At Shin Mazinger)

Yep, I definitely think so.  I’m hard pressed to think of another director still in the TV anime business that is so capable of marrying style and substance for the purposes of creating a gripping opera full of both drama and comedy.  Consider this latest episode of Shin Mazinger:

Right from the start Imagawa is giving us a taste of what is yet to come by showing us the end of this latest arc.  Tragedy is in the air, but we know naught how we get there.  Such is the purpose of that which is yet to come

My little angel from the very first episode.  Here she actually has lines and we learn that her name is Lorelai and that she is at the Kurogane House doing an errand for her “papa”?  You don’t have to squint to notice something about the picture above and the adorable little girl shrouded in what may very well be Imagawa’s vision of heaven’s light.  The idea of Lorelai as a symbol of purity has been planted and yet it constrasts with what we see above…..or does it?

Shiro is immediately smitten and it’s love at first sight, hence the title of the episode “First Love? The Beautiful Lorelai”

The Top 5 Zany RAEGING Internet Reactions To Endless Eight Iteration #3 And My Thoughts About Them (Now With More Novel Spoilers)

The Sighs of Kaioshin Sama

This past week has been quiet interesting when it comes to Haruhi and some of the raging, defensive and just plain bizarre reactions to Haruhi Second Season’s fourth episode (the one that many feel is one repeat too long) that I’ve seen, and I’ve found that a lot of them keep repeating and getting recycled as well, as if to try and match the nature of the arc itself.  Obviously being the fandom watcher that I am I’ve come to feel that there’s enough material here to warrant an article.  And so here we begin with:

I’ve Seen Your Face Before My Friend (The Top 3 Anime/Game Characters That Look Like Other Ones)

But I Do Know Who You Are

Over the years there have been a lot of similar character designs in anime, after all there’s only so many ways in which you can give a character a wacky hairstyle and all kinds of accessories before you run out of ideas.  What of the ones that seem like borderline copy pasting though.  What about the ones that come out in such short intervals between one another that you can’t possibly imagine how one didn’t inspire the other because it was popular.  There have been a lot of these, but here are my top 3 personal favourites from over the years.