Speaking Haganai’s Language

Ugh, I should’ve made posts on Ben-to 4 and Fate/Zero 5 this week, but I’ve been lazy about blogging altogether and also that NaNoWriMo things is happening. On that note, you can read my story as I write it over at talesfromthe711.tumblr.com. It’s a series of short stories involving 7-Eleven convenience stores. Meanwhile, omo has been doing great posts on those shows, although not covering what I want to.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai gets better every week, proportional to its gain in characters. Watching episode five with a friend was a great idea and I can honestly say I enjoyed this week’s episode. Not that I suddenly think the show is “good” or anything, but here’s where it gets weird: I mostly enjoy this show for the voice acting.

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.

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!!)

The Theme of “Going Against Type” Runs Deep In Hourou Musuko

Hourou Musuko is the story of a boy who wishes he were a girl and a girl who wishes she were a boy and the cascade of drama and gender confusion surrounding themselves and their friends. It’s safe to say that I’ve never seen a gender-bender nearly as good, nor as effective and in many ways relatable. Knowing all that, this should’ve been obvious.

Horie Yui...?!

The Bakemonogatari/Durarara Kamiya Sister Phenomenon

Just a quick post on another funny seiyuu connection I noticed.

Kamiya Hiroshi plays the voices of Araragi Koyomi in Bakemonogatari and Orihara Izaya in Durarara!!

Araragi Karen

Throughout Bakemonogatari, Araragi’s two middle-school sisters make several appearances, though they don’t end up doing much (being major characters in the later novels).

Araragi Tsukihi

The new Durarara!! OVA introduced Izaya’s twin younger sisters who likewise haven’t had much screentime yet, but are also major characters later in the novels.

Orihara Mairu

I thought it was interesting that both Kamiya Hiroshi characters had two younger sisters. Doesn’t seem like a strong connection? In both shows, the more energetic sister is played by Kitamura Eri and wears a hooded yellow jacket, while the younger/introverted sister wears green.

Orihara Kururi

When You See It, You’ll Shit Bricks – Look-Alike Roles

One of my most memorable moments as a fan came last October while watching Beyblade: Metal Fusion dubbed on Cartoon Network early one morning. The character whose image you see above, named Daidouji, was on the screen, and I joked that “he looks like he’d be played by Koyasu Takehito in the Japanese version.” Realizing that Koyasu is in everything and it might not be such a stretch, I then researched the matter and was stunned to find that he was, in fact, voiced by Koyasu.

The only thing I had to go on with this guess was the character’s appearance. Koyasu just happens to have an assload of characters that look exactly alike. Check out a few of these to see the image I had in my head when I pinned him as the voice of Daidouji.

I’m Making “Seiyuu Cards”

Ridiculously attentive readers may have noticed the “Seiyuu Cards” page I put up a few days ago. This idea bubbled up out of my desire to easily compile the roles that I care about from different creators without having to wade through ANN or MAL pages. Originally this plan was to include all creators, and may yet still, but for now I’m focused on seiyuu.

Making these seiyuu cards is fun for me because I lack the words to talk about seiyuu regularly. It’s not easy to put into words why, for instance, I love Hanazawa Kana’s performance as Nessa in Fractale so much, beyond “she’s so adorable!” Any other aspect of the series I could break down intricately, and I feel like my inability to talk about seiyuu betrays the depth at which I care about them. These days, seiyuu alone can be my reason for watching a series (see Fractale again).

Click to enlarge

Is Nakata Jouji Taking Wakamoto Norio’s Place?

Wakamoto Norio is one of the best-known and best-liked seiyuu in the Western fandom, renowned for his thunderous and booming voice that lends to unforgettable villains and comic performances, as well as for his smooth, “sober” voice that makes him one of the coolest cats around. According to ANN, he’s the 14th-most prolific Japanese seiyuu, and indeed, his name can be seen on an incredible number of cast lists, often playing joke and cameo roles that’re obviously written with the purpose of having him play the character.

A couple of years ago, it seemed like everywhere I turned, there was another Wakamoto role, but then last year that all but ceased. I can’t remember hearing Wakamoto’s voice in a single 2010 anime, and I watched quite a few of them.

I Hear Japanese

A lot of anime fans probably don’t grasp this, but they really don’t ‘hear’ Japanese. I was watching subbed anime for a good while before I started to realize that what I had been hearing was actually a voice in my head reading off the dialog. It takes having read a significant amount of subtitles to stop doing this.

December's Forty Fandoms – Part One: Rie Kugimiya + Introduction

Introduction: Last night, during a conversation with Ghostlightning, I found myself unable to really remember everything I blogged about this year or everything I watched, to which he replied that ‘you need help.’ He also pointed out my huge number of posts, though, noting that I had probably written ‘about 200 posts this year.’ He was dead wrong, though, because as of (but not including) this posting I have written 323 posts in 2009. I made a joke about how I ‘could do forty-two posts by the end of the year for a 1:1 post-to-day ratio’, and since jokes about this blog have a startling habit of becoming reality, I decided I really wanted that ratio.

So here’s the deal – it’s too early for my top 100 anime list to be ready, but hey, why should I have to talk about individual works? After all, while I’m a fan of many anime, my top 40 shows hardly coincide with the ‘top 40 things I’m a fan of.’ That’s the purpose of this list – I’ve taken all my fandoms and put them in order of how big of a fan I am to create a top 40. So what you’ll see is directors, shows, franchises, actors, and so forth, placed together in a big list. The only thing you WON’T see is music – the way I think about music is too different from the way I think about other media, so it’s not here. If any of that’s confusing, then just read the posts, and it should all come together.

Because this is a list of fandoms, it can be difficult to talk coherently about, so I’m going to use a format. I’ll talk about 1. The History of My Fandom, 2. The Reasons For My Fandom, 3. The Nature of My Fandom (this will be seen more further down the list.) 4. The Level of My Fandom. So let’s get started!