Why Context Matters – A Meditation on Lucky Star

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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.

Even More Awesome EDs, ~2011 Edition

More EDs! These ones missed the first list for one or more of these reasons: I forgot about them; I didn’t want to include two from the same show; I counted it as not awesome enough because I was being a lazy dick; I haven’t actually seen the anime it comes from but know the ED by reputation.

TO MAKE THIS LIST, if I can actually think of how the song or video goes, it’s got a good bet.

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 – 5. Sakata Gintoki & 6. Kobayakawa Yutaka

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

5. Sakata Gintoki – Gintama

Seiyuu: Sugita Tomokazu (Performance: 5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Takeuchi Shinji, based on designs by Sorachi Hideaki). On an ordinary basis, most of the character designs in Gintama aren’t very attractive – they only become such when the animators decide to make it so. Gintoki is, if nothing else, the most recognizable, and probably the coolest character in the show. He’s known most for his naturally wavy silver hair and the way that he wears his strange outfit (the logic of which is made apparent in an episode where Gintoki explains to Sorachi-sensei that a shounen hero must be recognizable by his silhouette alone). His black-on white clothes with red trim on the black part and blue wavy designs on the white part is a striking and cool outfit that I could see looking good even in real life.

The Step Between 'Favorites' and 'Obsessions'

I’m sure it happens to all of us – we watch an anime, and it completely bowls us over in it’s awesomeness. The show changes our perspective on how great anime can be and effects us on emotional and personal levels we may not have thought possible, etc. After watching a show like this, we might have to totally redo our favorites list just because this show rocked so hard, we have to wonder if the rest of our favorites deserve to compare, even if we can’t figure out if we can really put something above the shows that we’ve been obsessing over for years.

I’ve tried to beat this problem by constantly evolving and changing my favorites list to always reflect my current emotions, and the biggest way I did this was the creation of my ‘heart’ and ‘head’ scores. These scores were basically made to account for ‘obsession.’ When I watched Infinite Ryvius, I reacted in the way described above, but I instantly knew that I wouldn’t be ‘obsessed’ with it. I created the heart/head split so I could still express how amazed I was by Infinite Ryvius and give it a ’10’ without having to compromise the fact that the show didn’t hold the same standing in my heart that, say, Toradora did.

Now I’m looking at this on another new front, and I’m starting to think that maybe all of these favorites shouldn’t be on the same list at all. Now, I’m thinking of a divide not between ‘head’ and ‘heart’, but a divide between ‘favorite’ and ‘obsession.’

How come *I* must know where obsession needs to go?

I Have Reached Otaku Nirvana

This coming Thursday, I’ll be on my way to Baltimore to attend my third straight year of Otakon. In light of this, I put some effort into watching a spot of fine anime to get my otaku juices moving – after all, for about three weeks, I’d been neither watching nor blogging anime, since I was busy writing my novel. What I found, however, was that the juices hadn’t halted at all.

There’ve been a few times in the past that I started to falter in my anime love due to underexposure. The most memorable of those was in 2008 when I was away from anime for a while, and only got back into it after a marathon of Lucky Star with No Name and my brothers rekindled my interest. It’s been quite a while since I’ve spent as long as I just did without any anime or blogging, so I thought it would be important to re-awaken my fandom up to the necessary level to be excited for the con.

I can't wait to attend the 18+ yuri panels~

But what I found was that in truth, I hadn’t lost the slightest bit of enthusiasm for anime. Watching great shows didn’t feel like some kind of reminder of how awesome anime was – there was never a doubt in my mind that I had awesome stuff to watch. After all, these days, I’ve loved everything I’ve seen – I haven’t felt the ‘jaded’ feelings that I had in parts of 08 and 09 at all.

The big one I had to do was rewatch Lucky Star again, once more with No Name and my baby brother, but the feeling was nothing like it was almost two years ago when I last watched it. I didn’t feel like I’d forgotten anything about the show – it was like I’d never stopped watching it to begin with. That’s not a big surprise with all the outside interaction I’ve had with the series, such as writing about it, looking at images, collecting goods, etc, but it was an interesting feeling that a show which had utterly revolutionized my way of thinking last time now felt like common sense, so to speak.

I’ve taken this to mean that I’ve reached otaku nirvana. I no longer have to worry about burnouts or rekindles. I’m just 100% otaku, 100% of the time. And otakon is gonna kick ass!

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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Fuzakenna Productions Presents: "LUCKY MECHA: ULTIMATE WAR" (IMAGE HEAVY)

3 5 Figmas. 4 Revoltechs. 1 Nirvash TypeZERO. A battle for the ages. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this. GENTLEMEN, BEHOLD!

(NOTE: It is suggested that you take your time in viewing this and do not rush it, for best results. PROTIP: Imagine your own sound effects!)

Bandai's Lucky Star Volume One is the Most Disappointing Thing I've Ever Read

Seriously. I’ve been neglecting buying this thing for a while, and thank God it was only when my dad offered to get me something at Barnes and Noble that I finally picked it up, cuz I’d hate to have spent my own money on it. There are no shortage of reasons that this is a disappointment, some of which come from the Bandai release in particular, and others inherent in the manga that prove, in my opinion, the vast superiority of the anime.