About Me

Newfoundland, Canada
I've been a big anime fan for about 10 years or so now. My five all-time favorite animes at this point are, in no particular order... Puella Magi Madoka Magica, El Hazard: The Magnificent World, Love Live!: School Idol Project, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. However, there are hundreds of anime shows that I like. The main purpose of this blog is to provide meta-commentary on anime, and the anime industry - to try to cast a critical, though appreciating, eye upon this entertainment genre that I believe has tremendous potential, but can also be easily wasted. I have always been a fan of animation in general - in the 80s, I grew up on western cartoons like He-Man, She-Ra, Transformers, and G.I. Joe. Through out the 90s, I was a hardcore comic book fan, for the most part. I'm also a big fan of Star Trek. Right now in my life, though, anime is my principal entertainment passion.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Why is "The World God Only Knows" struggling so much?


The most hardcore anime fans, such as many regular posters on Anime Suki, usually have a pretty good idea of which animes will be successful, in the sense of ratings, DVD/Blu-Ray sales, and related merchandise sales. They keep persistent track of which animes will be coming up in the following season, which animation studios will be handling each of them, how popular the source material (if there is one) for the various animes are, and the overall vibe surrounding each of them. They tend to have their finger consistently on the pulse of the anime industry, the anime fandom, and key related fandoms (manga fans, light novel fans, eroge fans, etc...). I myself follow anime somewhat closely, but I don't keep tabs on this wondrously wider world of the modern otaku with quite the admirable thoroughness and zeal as these folks do.

So... when an anime does significantly worse than initially expected or hoped for by these hardcore anime fans, it becomes an intensely intriguing intellectual curiosity for me. This was true when the heavily hyped Umineko anime bombed, and it's also true now with TWGON (which is the acronym I will use through out the rest of this post to refer to The World God Only Knows) likely suffering a similar fate.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

K-On!! Review Part 2 of 2



First off, apologies to long-time readers for not getting to this sooner. I know that I scrounge up regular readers about as well as Afternoon Tea Time scrounges up new members for the Light Music Club, but still, Ritsu would not have left you hanging for almost two months, and I should not have either. 

That out of the way, I'm going to pick up this series review where I left off at the end of Part 1. Just to remind everyone, Part 1 of my series review dealt with the first 13 episodes of K-On!!, while Part 2 will deal with the second half of the anime. And also to further refresh memories, Part 1 of my review dauntlessly delved deeply into the inner conflict and workings of this anime's leading group: Azusa, Mio, Mugi, Ritsu, and Yui

There I spoke at length of the ideological conflicts pitting the lighthearted procrastinators Ritsu and Yui against the relatively stern and serious Azusa and Mio, with Mugi caught inbetween. I perhaps exaggerated the severity of that conflict, as the second half of this anime quickly resolves it, and is mostly free of it.