Light Novel Anime Trends Can’t Possibly Be This Interesting!

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Diary of an Anime Finished – Gatekeepers 21 and the Boogie-pop Worldview

In spite of being short(er), this post is all over the place, so I ask that you please bear with me. This post is part of the Diary of an Anime Lived and my Finish or Fail series.

I’ll take you back to a time when Gonzo was a well-respected studio whose shows all got licensed by virtue of simply being made by them—the mythical year 2002. That’s when Gatekeepers 21 came out, although it was about a year and a half later that the show became one of the oldest fixtures of my on-hold list. I’d caught the tail end of the OVA on TechTV’s anime slot back when that existed and liked what I saw enough that I’d always intended to buy it on DVD. Of course, there were a *lot* of things back then that I’d intended to buy on DVD.

Gatekeepers is an interesting franchise, being one of those from the late 90s/early 2000s that few people seem to remember or care about even though it must’ve done pretty well at the time. In what looks like an attempt to launch a franchise all at once (going by the data I have), it was released as a Playstation RPG, a short manga, and a 26-episode anime by GONZO all at nearly the same time. A couple of years later there was a sequel OVA and novel that I can’t help but feel weren’t the result of the franchise being a success, but of people that worked on it wanting to do more with it.

This Will Destroy You – The Lovecraftian Hell-Beasts Lurking Behind Every Corner in Haruhi, Bakemonogatari, and Index

Liable to end life as you know it at any given time.

…all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
-H.P. Lovecraft

Upon completing To Aru Majutsu no Index (post forthcoming) I noticed that this series contained one of my favorite plot elements, seen also in Bakemonogatari, Boogiepop, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – a trait no doubt attributed the certain style of light novel which all of these series are based on. In each of these stories, there lurks a power far beyond human comprehension – a force that can and will destroy you.

What's Cool About Light Novels Is They Remind Me What Stuff I Love

“Possibility, or what we refer to as Imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%”
-Kouhei Kadono, as translated by Andrew Cunningham, Boogiepop  Returns VS Imaginator Part 1

A little while back, 2-D Teleidoscope read Zaregoto book 1 and brought up the interesting fact that as he read it, he imagined the world and characters as an anime. Light novels feature illustrations in definitive anime/manga style and often feature characters and situations that seem to be torn right out of those mediums, so it’s only natural that we would visualize them that way – however, when I thought back on the images in my head from reading Zaregoto, I noticed something odd. The characters looked like anime, and the situations played out in an anime-like way, but the world itself looked nothing like anything I’ve seen in anime.

LEGEND OF THE GALACTIC HEROES FANS: I GIVE YOU THE REINHARD COOKIE (+ Anime Cakes)

Today is Funeral’s 22nd birthday, and for the past 5 days or so, he’s been cramming down Legend of the Galactic Heroes. 25 episodes in, he’s saying that he’s ‘more into it than he can remember being for anything’ and is already considering it among his top favorite anime of all time. When it came time for my mom, who designs cakes and cookies for all of our birthdays, to make him a birthday cookie, he didn’t even suggest any of his other obsessions throughout the year, such as Inglourious Basterds or Green Lantern, but went straight for Reinhard von Lohengramm. The rest, my friends, is legend.

Durararararara! (Oops, I stuttered) Episode 2

First things first, I think that Andrew Cunningham’s post on this episode is a must-read, especially if you are interested in how this anime corresponds to the original novels. I am going to try as hard as I can to make this post not end up talking more about things other than Durarara than the show itself, lol.

100 Characters For 100 Otaku (Part Nineteen: 10-6)

The nineteenth post in “100 Characters For 100 Otaku.”

This is it! The top 10! We’re almost at the end of “100 Characters For 100 Otaku!!!” I think it’s pretty funny how the fairly even, if not somewhat male-dominated list took a sudden shift in the top thirty to being most women, hehe. Let’s see if the trend continues as we dive into 10 down through 6! By the way, be sure to check out Mainichi Anime Yume where the author is doing his own 100 character list!

100 Characters For 100 Otaku (Part Fifteen: 30-26)

The fifteenth post in “100 Characters For 100 Otaku.”

We’re three-fourths of the way through “100 Characters For 100 Otaku!” Originally, the series was only going to be five posts long, with each containing twenty characters! I quickly realized this was not possible when I started writing the first post in my notebook, and decided to shorten it to ten posts, but once I transferred it to the computer, I knew it would have to be twenty! Today’s quarry are numbers 30 down through 26, so let’s check ’em out!

100 Characters For 100 Otaku (Part Fourteen: 35-31)

The fourteenth post in “100 Characters For 100 Otaku.”

Can you believe it’s been two whole weeks since “100 Characters For 100 Otaku” began? Neither can I! But it’s still a’runnin and heading on towards the finale! We’ve still got a good week more before that, though, so keep on stickin’ around! Today we have numbers 35 down through 31 to play with, so let’s get into it!

Andrew Cunningham on Translation vs. Editing and the Importance of Translators

For those who have never heard of Andrew Cunningham, he is a translator who has done such series as the Boogiepop novels, the Kino’s Journey novel, Gosick, Missing, Death Note: Another Note, Goth, Parasyte, XxXHolic Another Holic, and several of the stories in Faust. Cunningham has received massive praise for his work from the few out there available to recognize him, and is one of my personal favorite people around in general (to the point I will pretty much buy anything he translates, and I actually follow his livejournal.) While there is no way to make this a definitive statement, it’s best to just consider Andrew Cunningham the absolute king of Japanese-to-English translation, namely in the light novel department. He is also a member of Eastern Standard, a general anime blog he shares with two others, which used to be a review site.

Long ago, on his LiveJournal, Cunningham made some very insightful and interesting notes on the importance of a translator and the difference between translating and editing. It’s a must-read in my opinion, especially for light novel and video game fans – the last paragraph in particular being something that I cite often. I am reposting this both to spread the word on this as well as to have an easy citation source as opposed to an impossible-to-find livejournal entry.