2010 Acadime Awards: Best Actress in a Supporting Role

For anyone who doesn’t know what this is about, I tried to run a 2010 Acadime Awards series back in February, but because I’m a huge flake, I failed miserably. However, I didn’t want to let all the contributions I’ve received go to waste, so I’m posting up the categories that already had writer contributions.

From this point on, there aren’t any posts that I’d done work on already, so I’ll just be posting the nominations and the winning write-up for each category. First up, one of my favorites, the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

SaiMecha! Submit Your Nominations!

SaiMoe is an annual tournament-style competition to determine whom the most moe anime character of the year is. Some people have a lot of fun participating in it each year, while others make their own English-language versions or alternatives like “SaiGAR.” Currently, set-up is going on for SaiMecha, a tournament to determine the most… well, the mecha that can get the most votes, I guess. Find all your info here.

Anyone can contribute nominations while they’re still open, and each person can submit up to fifteen mechs via email to executiveotaku AT gmail DOT COM. This post is to show off my noms in the same vein as ghostlightning and Schneider. These nominations are in alphabetical order by the name of the mech.

There are three general categories of interest for me when it comes to mecha: first and most importantly, their appearance. Second and equally important, their presence in the series. And third but still important, how they move. The third criteria has nothing to do with the functionality of their movement, but more to do with how that movement is animated.

Pokemon’s Fifth Generation Grants My Best Wishes For the Franchise – MINNA DAIJOUBU!

(Forgive my incessant switching between Japanese and English titles in this post. Watching the anime in Japanese and playing the games in English mixed me up.)

Some History

Exactly how I feel while playing.

I am a Pokemon lifer.

That sentence has never meant more to me than it does now. After all, being a lifelong fan implies that I’m still a fan, right? Between ages seven and eleven, Pokemon was my entire world. When I think of my childhood, I think of Pokemon Red and Silver. That’s why I so excitedly blogged my playtime in Red and last year’s SoulSilver. (Links at bottom.) And yet, I’ve been fighting all along with the question: do I really still love Pokemon, or is it a big nostalgia trip?

Hourou Musuko Abruptly Cut Short!

UPDATE: So it looks like there *will* be an eleventh episode of Hourou Musuko on TV, but it will be episode 12. 10 and 11 were fused together so there’d be room for this episode. Good news I guess!

Read about it here.

Ouch. It didn’t hurt me as much when Madoka Magica’s last two episodes were cancelled because I was behind on that show—and now it seems they’re finding their way back on the air anyway.

Hourou Musuko suffers a worse fate in that episodes ten and eleven have been cropped together to round out the season, so we can’t enjoy the full versions of the episodes until their BD releases, which will be in August and September. At least we’ll get a bonus twelfth episode as well.

What confuses me about all this is that Hourou Musuko wasn’t even skipped at all for the earthquake—episode nine aired as scheduled. Why do they need to cut it short?

There still seems to be a lot of confusion about this so I hope there will be further announcements to clear that up.

MIRACLE BERTHIER!

An attack set to a time signature! I’m really loving Suite Precure’s use of its musical theme. Episode six was all kinds of great. Looking forward to more of that orange-haired little girl!

2010 Acadime Awards: Best Actor in a Supporting Role

These days, there seems to be a lack of great male supporting characters in anime. The average series tends to feature far more girls than guys, and the men are usually either the main character or the main character’s sidekick. The only shows that have a significant number of male characters and actors tend to be aimed at women, such as Hetalia or Kuroshitsuji (neither of which I watched, by the way). Still, there was at least one excellent anime of 2010 that brought forward a slew of great male supporting roles.

(There were originally more nominees for this category, but the only ones I ended up writing about were the ones from Durarara!!)

2010 Acadime Awards: Best Mecha Design

Okay! Back in business! I hope you can still remember enough about 2010 anime to enjoy it!

Today, my good friend Schneider of Continuing World will be presenting the award for Best Mecha Design. While I decided on the nominees for this category, Schneider decided to write about all of the nominees himself and choose the winner, so really, this is Schneider’s Acadime Award for Best Mecha Design!

Dull Sword 4.44 and the Fate of the Acadime Awards

Maybe on my 4th anniversary I’ll post this site’s “version history” lol. (Yes, the numbers actually mean something.) And somehow I keep doing status posts even though I claim to hate them, but I guess it’s always been that way.

 

Art by zero

You’ve probably noticed how this site has been moving farther and farther in an obscure direction, which is a good thing because that’s what I’ve wanted it to do for a long time. (Maybe I’ll finally fulfill my dream of becoming anime kritik.) You guys have made it clear that you support whatever decision I decide to make with this site, so I’m very happy to know that I can make changes without feeling like I’m disappointing someone. Those changes will continue.

The next step for this site is to generalize its anime culture content more. As of now, I post almost solely on anime—before, I covered a broader field, but I tried to narrow it down to just anime last year. This year, I’m broadening it back out again. The trouble with doing that is that I have an established audience who doesn’t care as much about those other things, but I’ve gotten used to posts that no one reads and don’t mind it anymore.

So, I’ll talk a lot more about anime-related light/novels, continue my ongoing seiyuu-fanboying stint, maybe talk about some video games if I ever actually play them, bring manga back, etc. What I’m also considering is integrating the posts from some of my inactive side-blogs into this one so that I can finally shut those ones down. I’ll definitely be doing so for my “secret” manga blog, Is That You, Moatilliatta. Once I import the posts, depending on whether they show up in my feed or not, I’ll make a post linking to them so that you can check them out, since they’ll probably sort themselves out by original date of publication.

UPDATE: Looks like the posts all showed up in my feed LOL

 

Art by yuuki keisuke

While I’m talking about version updates, let me take this opportunity to once again welcome my co-blogger Thoughtcannon whom I’m not entirely sure everyone knows is writing here now lol. He’s already published some great posts here, which I’ve linked to below.

Ai-Pon and Spectrums of Cute

Freezing: Ender’s Game With Tits

Feels Good Man: Spring 2011 (assist)

For those who like to be able to keep up with everything I write (typing that sentence feels surreal knowing that some of you do exist, and I love you guys), here is a list of all the places you can find me right now and what you’ll get there (this site excluded).

Shameful Otaku Secret – I’ve been quite active on Otou-san’s site, where I’ve been posting about current shows, some episodically.

Scarlet Monochrome – Since I’m pushing all anime-related content, no matter how small, to either this site or SOS, Scarmono should become a site entirely for either personal stuff with no connection to anime, or music.

Cirno and Purple Steve – This is a web serial I’ve been posting twice weekly for the past three weeks. I like the way it’s been turning out so far, so if you’re interested in reading some silly experimental short fiction, then by all means give it a go.

Modal Hsoul Productions – Despite existing for about two months, this site is just now becoming active. I’m considering it my main operations hub for all creative works. Currently I’ve been posting short stories there, but it will eventually be linked to all of my future projects, so if you want to follow my writing career, follow this site.

Lately I’ve been focusing mostly on my fiction writing, but it clearly hasn’t detracted all that much from my anime blogging, so no matter what I say, don’t expect this site to go anywhere soon. As for social media outlets, I’m still on indefinite twitter sabbatical and with any luck, I’m never coming back. A lot of people are still contacting me on twitter, so I’m still checking it regularly, but if possible it’d be great if you could contact me through one of the ways mentioned on my about page instead.

 

Art by yukaman

Now, the thing you’re all wondering about: what the fuck is up with the Acadime Awards? Last I mentioned, I promised they were still running, and that was over a month ago and the second post never came out. Well, I did work on a few posts and nearly finished them, but never did finish them, so they never came out. I kept assuring myself I’d get around to it because I don’t want the work of all the contributors to go to waste, but clearly I have no real desire to continue working on the series.

So, instead of doing it properly, I’m just going to post the winners of each category and put up the write-ups from the contributors, and maybe add some other comments of my own in some cases. I apologize again for my being such a huge flake and promise I won’t let something like this happen again.

To those who have not yet completed their write-up or didn’t start because they weren’t sure of the fate of the program, I leave it entirely up to you to decide if you want to still finish. I’m just going to post the completed ones that I’ve received one at a time until I run out, and then I’ll post any others I receive after the fact. The posts can be expected to begin as early as tomorrow.

And, that’s all for now. Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who’s still reading me through this period of relative obscurity, and will be happy to see some of you follow the many other writing projects I’ve got going on as well.

Feels Good Man: Spring 2011

I get to be in a cool position for Spring 2011. More than ever before, I know a lot about most of the shows that are coming out this season. It helps that I read a lot more manga last year than I used to, but it’s just coincidence that several of those being adapted are among my favorites. This isn’t a pro season preview post like you can find other places, but hopefully you’ll learn something useful to your decisions about the next season here. And my co-blogger, Thoughtcannon, will be helping me out.

Thoughtcannon: I on the other hand have read exactly jack squat in terms of manga and am mostly going into this season based on wits alone. It takes a keen eye and a sure foot to separate the anime wheat from the anime chaff. I have neither superlative appendage, which is probably why I watched all of Heroman, 07-Ghost, and the 2nd season of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu. Most likely I will also watch every piece of tripe that comes out in Spring as well…including sequels…especially sequels.

Light Novel Adaptions vs. Anime Originals (vs. Manga Adaptions)

Generally, I think—and public opinion supports—that Original Anime (that is, ones that were first conceived as anime and not based on any other work) tend to be of higher quality than anime based on other works. This isn’t always true, but I’d say it’s about 80% true.

Original Anime tend to be the best because they put the most consideration into animation as a medium. The poster child for that idea is Cowboy Bebop, which wouldn’t work in any other medium. It takes every element of being an anime into consideration and perfects it.

My favorite Original Anime