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Category: Anime

Home Category: Anime (Page 2)

Otaku Links: New year, new links

January 5, 20181 commentLauren Orsini

Happy new year, readers! Did you miss me? Regular posts resume Monday.

  • Here are the people whose combined vision became the Land of the Lustrous finale. I love how SakugaBlog is able to get behind the scenes of our favorite shows.
  • Buddhist Iconography in Land of the Lustrous. A comprehensive account absolutely worth the long read. This would make a great anime convention panel.
  • Wanted to highlight Gabriella Ekens’ review of Kino’s Journey episode 11 in particular, which was among the most interesting of this inconsistent show, because it addresses Kino’s gender.
  • Crunchyroll’s 2017 co-productions. Did you know Crunchyroll didn’t just stream, but produce shows like Recovery of an MMO Junkie? I was surprised not only by the titles, but the quantity.
  • Anime Feminist’s top picks of 2017. With feminist reviews and trigger warnings to keep you from accidentally watching something you’ll hate. Definitely read my Kemono Friends love letter.
  • MangaDou is a service that helps you learn Japanese with manga. I read manga at home and try that way, but it doesn’t come with homework or extras like this service does.
  • Forget Bitcoin—These Guys Invest In Magic Cards. The wallet I used to keep my bitcoin in was hacked; at least with physical cards you don’t have to worry about that.
  • The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens. I’ve been spending more time on Tumblr because it feels like it’s less about status (follower counts are private). I liked this story about its very young, very female userbase and what draws them to the service.
  • Logan Paul’s fans are reacting to news the only way they know how — vlogging. Polygon has the only take on this scandal worth reading. It’s about the psychology of parasocial relationships, or why Paul’s young fans are inclined to support him no matter what.

Top image via Hisako Akagi via SakugaBlog.

Eight Years of Otaku Journalist, Part 2

November 13, 2017Lauren Orsini

Tomorrow is November 14, 2017—eight years to the date that I started this blog.

I was 22 then, getting my Master’s in Print Journalism at American University. I had temporarily broken up with my college boyfriend (who you know as my husband, John), and a lot of things were up in the air. So when my professor instructed us all to buy domain names and start portfolio sites, I thought, why not start a blog? There’s never a right time, anyway.

Otaku Journalist was first called LaurenRaeOrsini.com. It was supposed to be a general portfolio in hopes that I would be palatable to the largest number of employers. But when I graduated with my MA to zero job prospects except retail, I decided to treat my blog as my job, writing about my favorite topics in anime and fandom analysis. In the following eight years I’ve worked a number of freelance and traditional writing and web development jobs, but Otaku Journalist has always been the place at which I center my core interests and identity.

This year is the first one, I think, where my career is finally where I want it to be. I’m self-employed with income so stable I no longer think it’s helpful to write income reports. I’ve come a long way and I have a memory like a sieve, so it’s great to review my top 20 most popular posts as the “cornerstone content” I’ve come to be known for. Last week I reviewed posts 20-16. This week I’m going over 15-11:

15. Why every anime fan should be worried about cartoon porn laws

Nov 5, 2014 | 10,882 pageviews

Getting into the five figures! This topic is so important to me that I wrote an updated version for Forbes last year: Am I Going To Get Arrested For Bringing All This Cartoon Porn Into The US? I sort of hammed it up in the title here, but I actually did bring back doujinshi with me—I just mailed it from the Shinjuku post office to avoid getting stopped with it at the border.

Generally, I wrote this piece because I was hearing a lot of sentiment that people getting arrested for hentai doesn’t apply to fans of nonpornographic anime. But since authorities have mistaken PG manga for porn, and adult manga for child porn, this is a problem for everyone. I’m just grateful the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has our backs.

14. Maybe you’re the reason anime is dying

Aug 21, 2013 | 11,317 pageviews

This is certainly one of the most provocative post titles I’ve written on Otaku Journalist. Even though this post is 4 now, people still talk about how anime isn’t as good as it used to be. I refined this same idea in a 2015 post: The “good old days” of anime.

But this post also has a second prong, and it’s that we need to be kind to new fans. If the Anime Origin Stories project has taught me anything, it’s that we were all newbies once. If we are snobby about new anime compared to the old classics and turn our noses up at people just discovering anime for the first time, nobody’s going to want to be an anime fan anymore.

13. Why Gundam Build Fighters means now is a great time to get into Gunpla

Oct 21, 2013 | 13,233 pageviews

This article was John’s idea. It was still a few months before we started Gunpla 101, and he suggested that I keep testing the water to see if people were interested in Gunpla content from me. I probably didn’t have an idea to write about this week and went with it, because this is not the kind of deep analysis I preferred to do in 2013. But hey, it was popular!

By the way, you’ll notice that a lot of these older popular posts have exactly 0 comments. That’s because I switched to the Disqus commenting system per reader request in 2014, which overlaid a lot of the WordPress native comments that were here before. If I look at the editing screen for this one, for example, I can view eight comments that used to be here.

12. Fashion, Femininity, and Fascism, but Family Foremost: The Themes of Kill la Kill

Feb 12, 2014 | 13,721 pageviews

I rarely allow guest posts on Otaku Journalist—in fact, I think I have only allowed one guest post ever. This essay by my friend and neighbor Grant is the only post on Otaku Journalist that I didn’t write myself. Not only is it a great piece by a talented writer, but PBS Idea Channel linked to this essay in their video about Kill La Kill, and the views for this post skyrocketed.

I just notified Grant that his essay is one of my top 20 most popular posts, and when I did I asked what he’s working on now, since he’s also a professional writer. He said, “an essay on Gurren Lagann and libertarianism for a pop culture anthology.” Pretty cool. Still, not sure I’ll ever do guest posting again, because it means putting somebody else on my top 20 popular posts list!

11. Christmas present ideas for anime fans

Nov 17, 2014 | 15,179 pageviews

This is why picking the correct SEO keywords matters. The posts that say “gift ideas” and “holiday gifts” may be more PC, but they never get as much traffic as when I say “Christmas” because when it comes down to it, that’s what people are typing into Google.

I really enjoy putting together this list every year because as anime fandom gets increasingly mainstream, the merchandise gets so much more varied and better designed. I remember when I was 14 and the only, I repeat only, anime T-shirt you could buy at Another Universe was the Nerv logo from Neon Genesis Evangelion on a black background in a men’s size large.


It’s still NaNoWriMo, so once again I’m going to conclude this post with my word count as of the night before this post went up: 20,730. Almost halfway there!

Previously:

  • Eight Years of Otaku Journalist, Part 1

Eight years of Otaku Journalist, Part 1

November 6, 20175 commentsLauren Orsini

Eight years ago in November, I pressed “publish” on Otaku Journalist for the first time.

My first post, “Welcome” is so laughably vague compared with how specific I’ve gotten over the years. Today I’m not only occupying a specific niche topic; the main purpose that Otaku Journalist is still around is to help others with their niche (usually geeky) pursuits, too.

Eight years is an incredibly long time to have a blog. I’ve gone through four visual redesigns and countless directional shifts, in which I prioritize different topics. But I don’t blog in a vacuum and it’s always been my readers who have set the pace.

With that in mind, I’m going to take the rest of November to look at the 20 most popular posts of all time on Otaku Journalist, according to the Google Analytics tracker I first placed in the site code on November 14, 2009, and share my own insights.

Let’s get started with #20-16 this week. We’ll end with #5-1 on November 27.

20. How to start a career in anime journalism

Sept 29, 2010 | 7,458 pageviews

It goes without saying that the older an article is, the more time it had to build up pageviews to get on this list. But I think the reason this article is on the top 20 is because it stars three big names—Colette Bennett, Patrick Macias, and Gia Manry—who are still active in the industry.

Seven years later, Patrick Macias and I co-edited an edition of Otaku USA magazine. I still chat with Colette about our Korean skincare routines. Gia moved to my city to work for Bethesda, but I only recently met her and her husband for the first time at an Otakon happy hour. I will always be grateful to the three of them for giving me a chance when I was nobody, and somehow still popping up in my life now and then almost a decade later.

19. Why is the media covering Space Dandy while other anime get ignored?

Jan 6, 2014 | 7,627 pageviews

You’ll see that a lot of the top 20 have these question-format titles. This particular one has not aged well. Anime is practically mainstream these days, with the New York Times reviewing Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name like they would any other blockbuster.

Space Dandy marked a sea change in how anime was produced. More and more, we’re seeing not only simulcasts, but co-productions where an American company funds a Japanese anime project and the resulting production is equally marketed toward an overseas audience, too. To this end, I’ve noticed more and more shows have Crunchyroll listed as a producer.

18. The truth about Boys’ Love and rape culture

Oct 14, 2013 | 8,237 pageviews

The likely, ugly truth is that people Google “anime” and “rape” and this pops up. It’s definitely a fetish thing, but my article is clearly not about that and I guess people are still clicking.

Like most older posts, I read this one and think I could rework it to be better now. It takes a while to get to the point. It makes it sound like anime fans invented slash (actually, Star Trek fans probably did). Plus, I think at this point, I still felt a lot of shame about enjoying BL, while today I realize it’s a fairly simple concept—just one of many sexual fantasies people enjoy.

17. How to make money anime blogging

Aug 28 2013 | 9,066 pageviews

I believe this is the first time I ever wrote about affiliate marketing on Otaku Journalist. Today this is one of the cornerstones of my career, through Gunpla 101, my candle blog, and this one.

You can tell just how long it took me to develop techniques to make affiliate blogging profitable. First I made $150 in eight months, then I made $150 every month. (Now I make $150 every couple of days, or once a day around Christmas. For more on how I did that, you can read way more recent articles.) There are also some references to projects I no longer have, like my “free guides” which actually became the chapters of my book Otaku Journalism. I hope that my more recent courses and posts on the subject surpass this post’s popularity, because I have absolutely refined my blog money-making techniques a lot since then.

16. How to write anime reviews people actually want to read

Dec 17, 2012 | 9,469 pageviews

Amazingly, I wrote this post before I was even writing reviews professionally. (I started as an Anime News Network reviewer in 2014.) So this advice isn’t using the full extent of my knowledge and experience on writing reviews week after week for four years. Some of it I don’t even agree with anymore (who cares about audience reception, actually).

Even in 2012 I knew that it was important to give reviews a recognizable grade, but this is the hardest part for me even now. I wrote a blog post about it in 2015: My Biggest Weakness: Grading Reviews. I tend to write a review that says what I really think and then give it a higher grade than it deserves to get the hecklers (who are just coming to check the grade and not to read the whole review) off my back. But lately I’ve been working with my editor to give more critical grades that better reflect what the episodes deserve.


Since this is NaNoWriMo, I’m going to conclude each post this month with my word count as of the night before this post went up: 8,253. Still on track!

‘My Girlfriend is Shobitch’ and what we teach teen girls about sex

October 16, 20173 commentsLauren Orsini

I would have thought there was nothing that would convince me to watch an anime with “bitch” in its title. But then Vrai, my colleague at Anime Feminist, gave it not a good review exactly, but certainly a better review than I’d expected:

“[T]here is a shockingly workable idea in this premise. Kosaka is a really likable heroine, and her approach to sex is both uncommonly depicted and relatable (I certainly remember trying to frame sex as academically as possible as a high school honors student because I was terrified of it).”

I wish this title had been translated to Vrai’s suggested, “My Girlfriend is Too Much to Handle.” The non-word “shobitch” is short for “shojo bitch,” where shojo means virgin (keep in mind it is a different character set than the one that means “girl”) and the Japanese interpretation of the English word “bitch” is really more like our word “slut.” (Remember the femme fatale “Bitch-sensei” in Assassination Classroom?) The title is purposefully contradictory—describing a girl who is inexperienced, but acts like she isn’t—and the show discusses a contradiction of another sort: media messages about sex having no basis in reality.

The leading lady is Kousaka Akiho, a brilliant student. She excels at everything she puts her mind to. So when her classmate, Shinozaki, asks her out, she decides she’s going to be an A+ girlfriend, too. Cue a comedy of errors as Kousaka pores over health books, explicit podcasts, and every possible media message about what men want in order to appease her new beau—even though it backfires and makes him uncomfortable instead.

Kousaka is intensely relatable. Research and practice worked for her grades, so why wouldn’t they work for love as well? She puts her whole heart into everything she tries. She’s clearly intelligent. Her studious nature paired with her inexperience in the ways of love lead to her taking every pop culture message about the objectification of women quite literally.

As a teen girl, I learned for the first time that my body was not my own. If I didn’t put the right clothes on it at school, I could be sent home to change so I wasn’t a “distraction.” But the mall gave me a contradictory message, as all the stores predominantly sold girls my age crop tops and low-cut dresses, all of it made from cheap, nearly see-through fabrics. Women’s magazines showed me how different outfits, makeup, and workout routines would make me “sexy.” They showed me “50 ways to please” my man. TV shows like the OC taught me that my virginity was the best “gift” I could give a guy, and if I didn’t, I was cold, and if I did, I was slutty.

As time went on, the messages contradicted themselves. When I was 14, I was walking with my mom when a trio of construction workers wolf-whistled at me. As I smiled and waved at them, my mom scolded me. But a couple years later, when I was walking alone and ignoring a man who said hi and asked me to smile, he began shouting that I was a cunt. It was confusing.

Is there anything more perplexing than being a teen girl? You look at your new body and it feels startlingly removed from your identity. You’ve seen curves like this in advertisements, as a product to buy or sell. They certainly don’t mesh with your own perception of yourself.

It’s not perfect, but “My Girlfriend is Shobitch” ends up almost being a meta-discussion about how we teach teen girls about sex. Not once during this episode does Kousaka consider what she can get out of a relationship with Shinozaki. She only knows that pleasing her man, the way Cosmopolitan magazine tells us to do, is the most important test of her character to date.

And Shinozaki? Well, god bless the boy, he doesn’t know what to think.

 

This premise of this show wouldn’t work if the male lead simply went along with Kousaka’s overtures. After all, Kousaka is only doing what she’s told men love. We have to give Shinozaki credit for seeing Kousaka as a person, as somebody he genuinely wants to get to know. While the episode begins with Shinozaki’s specific sexual fantasy about Kousaka, it seems to be within the context of Kousaka’s shared enthusiasm and agency. But in real life, Kousaka doesn’t seem to believe she has any agency, or any right to enjoy sexy stuff herself. In other words, there’s a very clear divide between what Shinozaki is supposed to want and what he does want, which at this point seems to be to make Kousaka as happy as she’s trying to make him.

Kousaka is a good student and has mastered the messages teen girls are taught. She knows that male pleasure is paramount and she’s just a means to an end. Hearteningly though, this episode demonstrates that this isn’t a message that benefits anyone. There’s some hope that over time, this will become clear to this surprisingly cute couple.

A caveat: after just one episode, it’s way too early to recommend this show, or even to gauge whether it’ll even stay watchable. (It could certainly do with a lot less of Shinozaki’s handsy childhood friend.) Also make no mistake that this is an ecchi show, with panty shots and lewd camera angles that would objectify Kousaka even if she wasn’t trying so hard to objectify herself. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the ways this show shines a light on all the messages a teen girl internalizes. It proves just how contradictory and silly they actually are. Like discovering the monster under your bed is really just a shadow, it’s sweet relief.

My Girlfriend is Shobitch is streaming on Anime Strike. 

I love anime. Wait, what is anime?

September 25, 20177 commentsLauren Orsini

Last week I interviewed some of the staff at Noir Caesar, an American studio that portrays black experiences through the medium of anime and manga.

I was especially interested in talking to them because what Noir Caesar is doing appears to reflect a sea change in the definition of anime, and I really liked the response that Noir Caesar’s music director, Will Brown, gave me, about the American-born music genre hip hop:

“One of my favorite hip hop DJs is in Japan and Japanese. Does that mean he’s not a real hip hop DJ because he’s in Japan? I tell people that and they start to see how silly the argument is that if something isn’t from where it originated, it’s not authentic. It’s an almost prejudiced perspective. Art is art.”

It’s a positive sentiment, but one some fans may be slow to accept. Just last year Reddit’s r/anime deleted a post about “Shelter,” an animated collaboration between artist Porter Robinson, anime studio A-1 Pictures, and Crunchyroll, claiming it was off topic. “‘Anime,’ they assert, is not a ‘style’ of illustration or animation,” Kotaku’s Cecilia Anastasio reported on the deletion. (It’s worth pointing out that after plenty of backlash, the forum reinstated the post.)

In the meantime, anime collaborations keep getting more global, and by extent, more difficult to define as purely Japanese entertainment “intended for a Japanese audience,” as r/anime states. Since 2013, when Space Dandy was simulcast for the East and West concurrently, it’s been clear that animation studios and Japan were thinking about a worldwide viewership. When director LeSean Thomas worked with Japanese student Satelight Inc on Cannon Busters, it evidenced that anime can be co-created by foreigners, too. Is fandom ready to take the next step, to accept that media created by Noir Caesar in America, can also be anime?

At about this point in the debate, which does happen more often these days, I insist with mock-seriousness that I require all anime creators to present a DNA test, proving 100% Japanese ancestry, before I will accept what they’ve created as “anime.”

To put it less glibly, I don’t believe purity is an important element in any entertainment medium. I love sequels and fanfiction, riffs and parodies. I believe that anime itself came out of a stylistic dialogue between animators in the East and West, ever since the “god of manga,” Osamu Tezuka, named Walt Disney as one of his chief inspirations. (And Disney certainly felt the same way—just look at the similarities between Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion and The Lion King.)

That ongoing cross-cultural dialogue brings us to the topic of this past weekend, Neo Yokio. Drawn in anime style and utilizing some of recent anime’s most well-known tropes, it is absolutely partaking in this cultural exchange solidified over the last 80 years. Like RWBY before it, it’s a US show with a distinct artistic and thematic style that is unmistakably anime.

As an anime fan of a certain age, I especially enjoy how NY is not very good. At Otakon 2011, I attended Anime News Network’s panel on anime journalism. One of the panelists said, “Anime has always been cheap and weird. But that’s part of why we like it.” This quote has stuck with me for six years, and it’s my go-to phrase for describing what it is about anime that resonates with me so deeply. It sure is weird—glaringly so—and I became a fan because it was so different than any other entertainment available to me. As for cheap, I mean tightly budgeted: the concept of sakuga (portions of animation rendered with special detail for emphasis) could have only come about because so much of the animation in anime cuts corners normally. For me, these are not simply qualities of anime, but some of the medium’s defining traits. Perhaps instead of defining anime by its creator’s or audience’s race, we can go with these cross-genre qualifiers—though even there, anime is so all-encompassing they’d be hard to nail down.

They say you get more conservative as you get older, and I’m excited to see what new spin on anime finally makes me say, “That’s NOT anime,” while the kids embrace it wholeheartedly.  (I really hope that by then I can finally afford a lawn to chase them off of.) Based on the way the definition of anime has expanded, it’s likely that day will someday come. But for now, all of the characteristics that have widened the definition of anime—like increasingly diverse creators, influences, and audiences—have simply lowered the barrier to entry for anime fandom, and made it a more inclusive and accessible medium. There’s no way that’s a bad thing.

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