Cool Character Designs: Cowboy Bebop, Kekkai Sensen, & Noragami

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Space Dandy: The Man Without A Past

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Awesome EDs, ~2011 Edition

A couple of years ago I posted my “top 10 unskippable EDs”—titled that way because I used to skip EDs a lot of the time. Now I don’t do that unless it’s really bad. Anyway, all the embedded videos are broken in the old post and I watched a *lot* of anime in the past two years, so here’s a new list of memorable EDs.

TO BE ON THIS LIST I had to like the ED as a whole, meaning song and video both. There are some ED songs that I liked where the video is unmemorable (think Mawaru Penguindrum’s “Dear Future”—amazing song, boring vid). Some also might be awesomely bad.

These videos are alphabetized by the shows they came from. And no, I have absolutely nothing better to do, and yes, I’m very tired right now.

Digiboy's Character Database of Love – 17. Amae Koromo & 18. Julia (From Guest-Writer ghostlightning)

This is the ninth post in Digiboy’s Character Database of Love.

14 Shows With Kickass Character Designs

In a visual storytelling medium such as animation, character design is incredibly important, especially in this modern era where character goods make up a huge part of the anime market. Viewers have to be able to connect with a character design on some level in order to be able to connect with the character on some level. Many people let characters design largely factor into their willingness to watch a series, and I can’t say that I’m different – only that I’m very open to a wide variety of designs that will not limit my viewing too much. That said, even I have things that I find hard to watch when the designs repulse me enough (mostly graphically violent 80s and 90s OVAs), and of course, if I adore the designs in a show, it can do a lot to enhance my viewing experience. This post is about the shows that do this for me.

It is not, however, a post about individual character designs that I like. Indeed, there are a lot of shows that produce a single object of my adoration, or perhaps even a handful, but who do not extend this visual pleasure to the rest of the cast. One thing about the anime being produced today in the name of selling character goods is that most shows try and appeal to a broad range of people. For instance, while I love the designs of Lynette, Sanya, and Hartmann from Strike Witches, I am not as much a fan of the other designs, as they don’t hit into my ‘strike [witches] zone’. Even in a case like Bakemonogatari where I love most of the designs, I am still turned off by enough characters that I cannot truly say that I ‘love the character designs in Bakemonogatari.’ Therefor, I present this as a list of my favorite shows wherein I loved the designs of the entire cast.

Shana is one of my favorite designs, but I don't care for most of the other characters in the series.

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I Have Gone Through Many Favorite Anime

Yumeka asks ‘How many favorite anime have you gone through?‘ I reply, ‘a lot.’ It’s funny, you’d actually think that I would have written about this before, and I talked about some very similar things when I wrote the Roadmap to My Anime Fandom and the explanation of Why I Love Magical Girl Shows, but I’ve never outright chronicled the progression of my favorite shows. So, naturally, I have to. I also think it’s interesting how mine and Yumeka’s cross paths a lot.

The Early Era – This was when I was first finding out about anime (though I didn’t know Pokemon was anime until years of watching). During this time, I became an anime fan to the extreme, but I only knew about the shows that were on Cartoon Network, and a few movies that Funeral owned on VHS.

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100 Characters For 100 Otaku (Part Sixteen: 25-21)

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

It’s down to the top 25 in the “100 Characters For 100 Otaku” series! Truly, it feels like we are in the final stretch! Incidentally, if you’ve been reading all this time, I’m sure you’ve seen the hints at the bottom of the posts of characters to come. Have you been able to guess them at all? Today, I’m going to make them especially hard, and you have to post your guesses! Now, let’s get started with numbers 25 down through 21!

100 Characters For 100 Otaku (Part Ten: 55-51)

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

It’s the halfway mark in “100 Characters For 100 Otaku!” Did you think we’d make it this far? This is certainly the biggest post series I’ve ever done in one time-span! But it’s still very exciting! Today we’ll have numbers 55 down through 51 and things continue to get even more exciting! Let’s see what’s in store!

(sorry that this post was so late, today was a really fucking insane day, but at least it’s out within the time limit!)

Digital Boy Sings "Call Me Call Me" by Yoko Kanno and Steve Conte from Cowboy Bebop

This was done at the request of Zzeroparticle from the MyAnimeList club ‘Anime Music Piece of the Week.’ I mentioned my love and skill for singing this song, and so he challenged me. The sound reception on this (new) camera and the ability to hear my voice above the music was far better than expected, so if it sucks, it’s mostly my fault for sucking XD. I think it gets off to a rocky start, but is all-around a decent performance :D Nice to have a video of my singing a song that isn’t completely and utterly creepy XD. Now that I finally have a camera with which I can easily do these videos, expect more in the future!

(yes, I am aware of the huge zit on my forehead, the general disturbing nature of my beard, and how gross my desk is, if you can see it. If you were wondering, Funeral filmed this video on my new Canon Powershot SX110 IS)

My Top 10 Unskippable EDs

I think I’m going to start doing highlight posts on some of anime’s greatest OPs and EDs, since it’d likely be a lot of fun. As a way to sort of kick that off, this post is about some of the best EDs I’ve seen. EDs have a high tendency to be slower than OPs and feature less exciting videos, so I’ve had a long-time habit of skipping boring EDs after each episode, especially because I hate seeing the next episode previews. However, these are some EDs that are too great to skip. Now, while I never skip the ED when I like the song, it’s also rare that I stick around for the video, so to make this top 5 listing, it has to be a great song AND vid. Shows like Lucky Star with a different ed every ep don’t count.