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Medium Matters: The Ancient Magus’ Bride
Way back a long time ago, as an experiment I started tracking The Ancient Magus’ Bride manga in real time, picking up the new books as they came…
Oh, So Meta: Excel Saga
I’ve always been interested in things that are self-referential, or meta, if you prefer. This goes back to my college days, where we studied cybernetics. Sure. The Basic…
Oh, So Trope-ical: Raised by Wolves
Well, no, I don’t literally mean raised by actual, you know, wolves, since, you know that doesn’t really happen, the myth of Romulus and Remus aside. But what…
Gender Bender: Alice Murata
Shuzo Oshimi is my favorite mangaka. I may have mentioned that. He’s been working on a new book called Welcome Back, Alice. Hmm … the title of this…
Gender Bender: Neon Genesis Evangelion
All right, I suspect people are going to expect me to talk about Kaworu Nagisa here. Dude is pretty interested in Shinji, isn’t he? (wink wink nudge nudge)…
Gender Bender: Paradise Kiss
If you weren’t watching, Paradise Kiss is an earlier work by Ai Yazawa, the mangaka who gave us Nana. (It has to be an earlier work since she…
Gender Bender: Mizu
There should be a name for American shows that are informed by anime style but American tropes. After watching Blue Eye Samurai, I think they should be called…
Story Drop
Man, I like writing these. I mean, you know what I do here is write about anime and manga from my perspective as a writer, right? Well, lemme…
Gender Bender: Mei Aihara
For reasons I’ve been thinking about Citrus again. Well, actually the reasons are pretty simple. Mei and Yuzu Aihara are simultaneously classmates, step-sisters, roommates, and lovers, and if…
Oh, So Trope-cal: I Can’t Say “I Love You”
Look, if you’re writing a popular romance manga, or an anime made from a popular romance manga, you often have a big problem: How do you keep the…
Killer Ending: Kids on the Slope
You may not remember Kids on the Slope, the series by Shinichiro Watanabe. You know, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Carole and Tuesday … yeah, THAT Shinichiro Watanabe. Not…
Character Analysis: Kaguya Shinomiya
Kaguya-sama Love is War is one of those shows that knows what it is and isn’t any more than that. Dude it’s a rom-com, with emphasis on the…
How to Build a Series: Knights of Sidonia
There are some shows that are constructed so cleverly that I would give anything to be a fly on the wall during their development meetings. In fact, I…
Character Analysis: Eikichi Onizuka
I tell you no lies: I was watching Great Teacher Onizuka on a relatively unknown streaming service when it dropped on a much larger and more famous service.…
Killer Ending: Your Lie in April
It’s fun to watch something like Your Lie in April that looks on the face of it like a piece of fluff, but when you peel back the…
The Power of Two: Kaguya-sama Love is War
Most of the time when you look at a narrative couple they fall into one of two types: They are symmetric, meaning they have similar strengths and weaknesses,…
Oh, So Trope-ical: Pinocchio
Yeah, yeah, you’re saying to yourself that Pinocchio wasn’t an anime. First of all, that’s not entirely true. In fact, there have been TWO Pinocchio anime series, one…
How (Not) to End a Story: Love, Chunibiyo, and Other Delusions
There’s something so cute about Love, Chunibiyo, and Other Delusions that make it close to irresistible, isn’t there? Yuta is basically such a nice young man, so earnest…
The Power of Three: Darling in the Franxx
Everyone loves a good mecha story. Well, at least the manga/anime target audience – slightly-nerdy teen-aged Japanese boys – loves a good mecha story. Consequently, there are lots…
Rotoscope and You: Onimusha
Onimusha is something I wouldn’t ordinarily watch. I don’t like stories that are based on demons, or based on fighting demons with magic artifacts, because once you get…
Oh, So Trop(e)ical: The Dirty Old Man
It seems like just about every anime comedy with a romantic plot or subplot has at least one dirty old man. Well, not ALL of them. Those that…
Animation: How Many Fingers?
Sometimes things come together in weird ways. Like, really weird. So in my Intro Communication class this week – Which was weeks ago as you read this but…
Character Analysis: Takeo Goda
If you look at My Love Story!!, the first temptation is to look at the main characters, Takeo Goda and Rinko Yamato, as a pair. For instance, she…
Character Analys(e)s: Loyd, Tor, and Anya Forger
In certain ways all three main characters from Spy X Family are really simply constructed. Watch me now: Loyd is a heartless spy but isn’t really heartlessAnya is…
Story Drop!
Man, it’s been a while! Damn COVID … ANYWAY, here’s the flash fiction anthology 99 Fleeting Fantasies. It includes my piece Nidus of Alms. It’s available starting today…
The Power of Three: Welcome Back, Alice
I’ve made my appreciation for the work of Shuzo Oshimi very plain at times. Oshimi is the magaka behind The Flowers of Evil, Inside Mari, and Blood on…
What’s in a Name? Seihu High School
I always let myself do something stupid for an anniversary post, and since my anniversary was Feb 2, here ya go: Last year at this time I didn’t…
What Did I Just Watch: If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budukon I Would Die
Look, first of all, I’m not writing out that whole title again. From now on this show will be called My Favorite Pop Idol, and if the author,…
The Power of Three: Steins;Gate
I was thinking about Steins;Gate for a different reason when I hit on why it works narratively. Because it shouldn’t, you know. Steins;Gate is really kind of a…
Character Analysis: Honey Kisaragi
Let’s start with this: Honey Kisaragi, the android star of Cutie Honey, is an artifact of her age. She was born back in ’73. That was a turbulent…
Same Stage, Different Story … Or Not: FLCL
The original FLCL was a blast, a swirl of smoke and mirrors, of red herrings and mixed animation styles, that hid a very simple story, the tragedy of…
The Power of Three: Nana
Like a lot of media, not just anime, love of various sorts plays a large role in Nana. Well, it could hardly not, after all. You can call…
Character Analysis: Yui Ikari
Happy holidays to everyone who is celebrating a holiday anywhere. May the season be kind to you. Certain storytelling techniques absolutely fascinate me. One is meta, the use…
Character (Re)Analysis: Tohru Honda
This may be the shortest time ever between me analyzing a character and then coming back to look at them again. I mean, it’s not like I got…
Killer Ending: Black Lagoon
The ending of a narrative is supposed to do two things, resolve the central conflict and wrap up the loose ends. A good ending gets those two jobs…
Too Tired to Write
So, like, November is National Novel Writers’ Month, right? Take 30 days, write 50,000 words, right? (If you’re not sure what I’m babbling about check out nanowrimo.org )…
Character Analysis: Tsukimi Kurashita
Princess Jellyfish is one of those things that’s just so cleverly constructed that you have to wonder whether it was planned or it just worked out that way,…
The Power of Two: Shinji and Misato
The cool thing about Neon Genesis Evangelion from a writer’s perspective, and from the perspective of a person like me who takes a writer’s perspective on looking at…
Key and In-between II: Animeta
I like Animeta manga, at least through the first five volumes, for what it reveals about the animation business. One thing it reveals is the process, the various…
Key and In-between: Animeta
Key and In-between: Animeta Every time I find a reason to write about animation in anime – it’s been so long I feel obliged to remind everyone that…
Character Analysis: Haruko Haruhara
Warning: This post contains spoilers for FLCL: Grunge and FLCL: Shoegaze. If you haven’t seen them, read on at your own peril. The advent of two more seasons…
How to Build a Series: My Happy Marriage
Look, there are times when you can look at creating a story/series as being like cooking from a recipe. That doesn’t mean it’s going to work. You can…
Character Analysis: Yasu Takagi
Nana’s one of those things that just about everyone knows about and has an opinion about. Since it’s supposed to be the best-selling shojo title in history (yeah,…
Oh, So Trope-ical: The Hair Bra
The point of manga and anime is to get eyeballs onto content, whether it’s paid for directly (by buying manga) or indirectly (by ad sales during anime). In…
The Power of Four Plus One: Toradora
I haven’t done one of these in a while. This could be fun if I can keep track of the mess. But then again, that’s the point. Toradora…
Character Analysis: Isaki Magari
Let’s be frank here: Insomniacs After School is so sweet it could be named High-Fructose Corn Syrup. That’s not necessary a bad thing. When you’re making an anime…
How to Cook a Story: Komi Can’t Communicate
Somehow I keep saying that Komi Can’t Communicate was something whose premise didn’t appeal to me. I’m going to say it again: Shoko Komi doesn’t need a hundred…
Killer Ending: Your Lie in April
Your Lie in April is one of those stories that could have gone either way, Comedy (happy ending) or Tragedy (sad ending) and – watch my lips –…
Oh, So Trope-ical: The Gamer God
There are certain tropes that are so obvious it’s almost a waste of time to look at them. Oh, man, what’s the point of the Princess in Peril…
Off The Tracks: The Promised Neverland
I wasn’t planning to post this piece this week. I had something else, about Insomniacs at Night, I think. BUUUT, we ended up having an actual discussion last…