Why you’re supposed to hate Makoto in School Days. An #Anitwitwatches post

A really amazing thing happened this week during #Anitwitwatches. I got suckered by a show. I consider myself a pretty astute viewer. If I have my critical viewing powers engaged, I consider myself pretty hard to manipulate. I mean I can be tricked by an ending, or by a second act turn, but I’m usually […]

Is Shinji Ikari really an anti-hero?

This is the third time I’ve started this post, and each time, I’m not sure where to start. So I’m going to start at the end: I don’t think Shinji Ikari reaches episode 20 as an anti-hero. What I want to make clear is that he starts as an anti-hero. In fact, he starts as […]

Reflections: How Sloths Reproduce?

I told Inskidee that I was going to do it, and there I did it. You were probably thought this was going to be an instructional lesson about sloths and their reproduction. Or you might have thought that I was going to make a clever reference to some sort of anime. Well, I’m not doing […]

The Otakusphere: Taking a turn for the meta, Dragonball Z and some darn cold fish

Have you ever had a week where it feels like you failed at life? Yeah. Me too. I’m not sure quite how to deal with it, so I’m drinking an Elysian Bifrost, which is a pretty good winter ale, and I took a tour around the Otakusphere. I didn’t get very far before I found […]

This is the dark heart of Evangelion

Sometimes there is a single moment in a show where it writes its main theme large for all to see. That moment comes when Shinji is isolated in the darkness with only himself (and his mother) in Episode 16. I know a lot of Eva’s titles are meaningful, but the title on this one has […]

In My View: Babylon does a bad job dealing with suicide

If you read nothing else in this post, please read this next few paragraphs. If you are feeling suicidal, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 if you’re in the U.S. You can also send a text message to 741741. If you’re in the U.K., here are some numbers. I don’t […]

The Otakusphere: Good tunes, sad times and some Sailor Moon fighting

I’m glad there are people in the world that still like Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad. With all the talk about sports anime going around, I’ve been thinking that Beck might just be a sports anime with guitars. While I love the manga, it’s the music in this show that really sells it. The art and […]

Shinji Ikari is a giant cockroach. Where Evangelion and Franz Kafka meet.

Way back when in the old days, I wrote a series of analyses where I tried to group mecha pilots into two categories based on how they interact with the government. On the one hand, you have Arthurian heroes who are gifted a magic piloting robot powers and have a choice about what kind of […]

What would it mean if Evangelion was a new Gospel?

I officially made it past the halfway point. I reached episode 14, and I’m ready to talk about angels. For the one or two possible people reading this that somehow isn’t familiar with the debates surrounding Neon Genesis Evangelion, a lot of people make a lot of hay about the religious symbolism in the series. […]

Here is where we talk about Freud and Evangelion

For a third time now, I’ve become entranced by an image out of Evangelion. The image comes out of Episode 12 “The value of a miracle is… / She said, “Don’t mke us suffer for your personal hatred.” We see Rei, Shinji and Asuka standing in the elevator divided by the bars in the gate. […]