MADLAX OU TANJOU!

Some Hard Thinking After Five Years of Anime Blogging

I must’ve come to certain conclusions after doing this for as long as I have.

I’ve wanted to write this post forever—doubly so after ghostlightning did it. Being the extreme person that I am, I wanted to go all-out and make some ridiculous list of attractive anime characters which didn’t skimp on details—but I’ll never actually write it. Plus, doing so many characters washes out the impact of how hot they are.

A surprising (read: fucking huge) amount of deliberation went into picking the hottest female characters. Which girls have I found hot in the past? Do I still find them hot? How hot are they in comparison to my number one choice (the only one I was already sure of)? It actually helps that I’m doing this post after having majorly taken a step back from anime watching, because I can’t go on what I’ve watched recently, nor specific hot scenes that could cloud my judgement. I have to instead consider the character in a sort of void space—in my purest idea of them—and decide how much I want my dick in that.

Anyway here’s the three hottest female characters animated in the past five years.

I Love My Pink Gay Elf

This is Chris Chiaki, my pink, canon gay, high elf archer. He’s one of my alt characters in the massive multiplayer RPG, Tera Online. He is fucking fabulous.

A lot has been said about the character designs in Tera Online—thankfully most of it positive. Reading complaints about the designs, I’ve never seen the word “sexist” used, which gives me hope that people do in fact know the difference.

Tera is a gigantic ball of smut. Characters are designed on the principle of maximum fanservice. Most of the females don’t usually wear pants, nor much of anything, especially at higher levels. Male Castanics look like Korean boy band members with their chests and abs always showing. High Elves are pretty as all fuck and get ultra-gay outfits. For guys who aren’t secure enough to RP a gay man or a woman, there’s also the Aman and Human males, who look more like what you’d expect male characters in games to look like (Devilman and Chris Redfield, respectively).

Haro Is Useful! (Also Hi, I’m A New Writer)

Hello, I’m Conrad’s (Digiho’s?) younger brother, Iconclasm (AKA Victor). I’m finally being forced to do posts for his blog because I actually keep up with current anime while he’s busy snorting pony crack and doing… whatever it is he actually does. I’m a big mecha dork and I generally end up enjoying any show I sit down and watch. I’m not totally sure what kind of posts I’ll be making, but I will try to make them not suck.

Brony Media Overview [Tons of Embeds]

Image by Paradise Wonder

My quest through Equestria Daily‘s media section is finally over after more than two months. I only made it back through June 2011, but due to a series of events, I lost my place, and EQD’s page system makes it difficult to go through their archives. Besides, the further back I go, the less high-quality media there is, and these days so much is produced that I hardly find time for my archive plumbing. Therefor, I’m calling it here.

I’ve listened to several hundred songs, watched at least a hundred PMVs, a few dozen animations, YTPs and flash movies, not even getting into the dozens of games I’ve played and thousands of images I’ve looked at. I’ve gotten deep into brony media culture, and I’m only going deeper. Here are my findings at current depth.

Amazing as Equestria Daily is, the site is unreliable. After all, it’s a blog, not a database, and only wants to be as much. My tastes don’t always agree with those of the EQD review staff. They post up plenty of shit PMVs and tons of generic electronic music that has little in the way of pony—not to say that their tastes are generally bad, just that I intook more than enough crap that I didn’t care for, while finding other stuff that I did looking on my own.

(Totally not butthurt because nothing I’ve submitted to EQD has ever made it :p)

Nevertheless I can’t discount how valuable it is to have a site that delivers large amounts of worthwhile content to an incredibly wide audience. I only hope that a good portion of that audience goes to find things on their own as well. This might be an insane demand actually, because I know firsthand that keeping up with EQD alone is incredibly time-consuming (even if, like me, you don’t read any of the fanfics they post). You probably have to be a jobless, schoolless pony fanatic like myself to intake as much pony as I do while accomplishing anything else.

There are no words to describe the whole of pony media, except that all of it contains pony (and even then, that assessment is questionable at times). Pony media spans every medium and genre, and probably creates a few of its own. There’s pony stuff that I like in every form, and getting into all of it will be a nightmare.

This post will contain a list of each song, video, etc. that I’ve downloaded or favorited on sites like youtube, deviantart, fimfiction, etc., largely without comment. I’d like to say things about them all, but it will be just gushing unless I could dedicate a full post to each item.

Here is a bit more than the tip of the iceberg of all the pony stuff I like. I’m sure I’ll eventually make a full-on canon of all things pony which I enjoy in the future.

In order to keep this list from getting too crowded, I’m limiting it to one item per artist. You’ll see something like “JHaller’s x, x, and x,” while featuring the work which I like most. Everything is largely out of order, but I tried to position the best stuff at the top of each category.

Aquarion’s Critical Juncture

I’ve been on something of a self-imposed hiatus lately thanks to powering my way through Integral Calculus (aka Calculus 2 in most places) for the first time in my life ever. I mean it’s what eats up most of my time by virtue of it being the only subject I do study groups for.  Oftentimes I’m a week behind on anime which restricts me from posting much of anything relevant…what was I talking about again? Oh right, Aquarion Evol.

It's a testament to the sweetness of this coupling that 99% of the Yunoha pictures out there aren't of her getting reamed by a fat dude.

So yeah I love this show with a strange, rather unexplainable burning passion especially considering I haven’t seen the original series. As rational as I am there is something about the idea of destined lovers that always stirs up the hopeless romantic in me. The problem is most shows just have the whole OTP, generally non-canon with the show, just whoever the main character happens to meet first or met when they were a little kid. Aquarion is different, Apollo and Silvia’s (Apollonius and Cellane’s) love is fated for 12,000 years, reincarnates and returns again and again, and is rekindled aknew each time. They aren’t just fated childhood friends, they are fated lovers that even death cannot keep apart. They’d be star-crossed lovers if they weren’t so darn good at finding each other time and again. Their love is so fated that they made another anime series just to cash in on the first for them to be together again.

Which brings me to Aquarion’s critical juncture. The question must have been building up in the back of the viewers mind for some time now, but the most recent episodes epic flashback brings the conflict to the center stage. Who or what is Amata? I feel like we’ve come to the point where it needs to be addressed. Is Amata the reincarnation of Apollo or is it Kagura? Or is it some weird homunculus combination of the two? We must first bear in mind that this is a Kawamori anime and he delights in upsetting expectations. What if Amata really isn’t remotely related to Apollo? Is Kawamori going to try and upset the notion of fated love established in the Sousei no Aquarion? It seems like a Kawamori thing to do.

Who is it going to be?

However if Amata isn’t Apollo than why does he have the “Wings of the Sun”, or are those not them? Furthermore we’ve only seen Kagura manifest anything resembling wings once and they didn’t look very sunny to me. On the flip-side, were the memories that Mykage awoke in Kagura false or implanted memories? To be fair his obsessions focus mostly on Silvie (rather than Silvia or Cellane) and I don’t think once name himself as Apollo (or Apollonius). Yet, that could also be legitimate if Silvie, Amata’s mother, was also a resurrection of Silvia, or in some way carried the blood line (or fate line?) of the two. However, Silvie’s kidnapping raises the question of whether Amata and Kagura could in fact be siblings, which could give some legitimacy to the theory that they both partially contain Appolonius’ soul.  We might even be willing to cast doubt on whether Mikono is really Silvia (though I’ve seen little evidence to the contrary or to anyone else being Silvia (though how awesome would it be if it were Brownka or Zessica)). These are the facts and theories I play around with when I consider who is the true reincarnation of the fated lovers, and it’s an example of just how invested I am in the goings on of Aquarion Evol. How Aquarion built that investment with excellent execution and just fucking fun and creative as hell episodes is a story for another post. In the meantime I’ll just ponder these ten and two thousand years, and hope you all will ponder them with me.

It's fun to dream sometimes.

NISE 4 – I DIED. (CLICK THE IMAGES)

Wow, Hanekawa looks way cuter with short—

The Courage To Watch Nisemonogatari 2

If I ever felt like a show as going to give me heart problems, I certainly felt it watching this. The -monogatari franchise still feels to me like the “old friend” that I described in my Finish or Fail post on the show two years ago, but like an old friend, our relationship has only grown in inside jokes, collective laziness to get anything done, and perversion. This has become the anime equivalent of watching porn with a friend.

The Courage to Be a Lolicon (Nisemonogatari)

What Kicked Ass In 2 0 1 1

Was 2011 a great year for anime? What’s exciting is that a lot of people seem to think that it was. It made me happy to see a community less convinced that anime was going downhill and more convinced that it was climbing back up. From my perspective, it wasn’t as stellar a year as 2010, though being such would’ve been an incredible achievement. 2011 had only a couple of shows that I loved and only one that I’d consider among my favorites, but those shows appeal to me in such a way that they signify a future full of more things that I’m going to love (and with the Bakemonogatari sequels on the horizon, that looks pretty damn likely).

But I don’t want to just talk about 2011 in anime, because I was interested in such a variety of things this year. I’m going to talk about everything that I found really awesome about my 2011.