By Sorrow-kun on April 1, 2007
Here’s an interesting phenomenon that has, for various reasons, been brought to my attention: people commenting on anime series and episodes they haven’t seen. It’s something that really makes no sense to me, for reasons that are (I would have thought) obvious. People claim they are able to get enough of an understanding of a given anime that they are able to form opinions of it purely from screenshots, blog reviews, episode summaries, Youtube clips and comments in episodes, but claiming this really dismisses the fact that almost all of the impact of anime is emotional, and I consider it disrespectful to anime as a story-telling medium that people think that the act of watching it can be substituted by reviews, interpretations and analyses.
Continue reading “I don’t understand how people can comment on anime they haven’t seen”
Posted in Anime, Review writing
By Sorrow-kun on March 26, 2007
Posted in Anime
By Sorrow-kun on March 18, 2007
Since I don’t really take a great interest in the Anime-Reactor.net community, I can’t say I know a great deal about the process by which these awards are decided, so there’s no real point in me commenting on that. These awards are just as weighty as any other community decided “awards”, but they have a little more permanence in the fact that winners of the award receive a little sticker in their AniDB entries, and that’s something that they can never lose with time. As is the case with most such awards, it’s more for the fans than anything else (or anyone else, like the creators), who can momentarily boast that they’re favourite was slightly more popular than the second best vote-getter and savour in any momentary glory of such a victory. But, sarcasm aside, I always do find it worthwhile to discuss which anime made an impact in a given year. I wouldn’t push our site to publish its annual reviews if that wasn’t the case…
Full results here: AnimeReactor Community Awards – 2006
Continue reading “AnimeReactor Community Awards 2006, results and discussion”
Posted in Anime
By Sorrow-kun on March 11, 2007
Warning: This post contains Death Note anime spoilers (up to ep 20)
Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t write a half-way-through “review” (and this isn’t a review, since I’m purposely keeping it too informal for it to be labeled such) about a currently-airing anime such as this. But I know I can get away with it on this occasion since there’s almost certainly going to be no shortage of staff members wanting to review this series once it’s over. Generally I’ll post thoughts about a given series I’m following after each episodes on forums and I browse through these comments after the series is over to collect and organize them into something that resembles a review, but I haven’t really been doing that with Death Note for various reasons. But, since I have almost no intention of reviewing it, I figured this was as good a place as any for me to voice my opinion of it.
Continue reading “Is Death Note on its way downhill?”
Posted in Anime
By Sorrow-kun on March 4, 2007
Warning: this post has Kanon 2006 spoilers.
I think I’d probably surprise a few people after a certain post I made on the ASuki forums, but I actually think the “horse race” mentality in harem/dating-sim anime has its place… sometimes. For those who don’t know what it is (which isn’t a surprise, since I’m almost of the suspicion that it was coined as a response to a post I made), the “horse race” mentality refers to a type of commentary by fans who are following a given anime (usually harem and/or dating-sim types) where multiple potential love interests still exists going into the final few episodes of the series and the majority of interest and discussion surrounding the plot revolves around which potential love interest will eventually be chosen. The “horse race” mentality is the mentality that permeates through such discussions. The problem with the “horse race” mentality is that such anime will tend to divide fans depending on who their favourite girl is, so these discussions usually very quickly devolve into mindless squabbling about trite matters such as which girl is better and why the other girls are back-stabbing bitches, etc, etc. Some people have fun with these discussions. As an outside observer, I can’t help but see them as fanboy-ism on a very low intellectual scale… which is bad since fanboy-ism is unintellectual by its very nature. But, such discussions have their place when talking about series like Shuffle! and Da Capo where that’s the main interest in the plot… usually out of default because the other elements in the plot aren’t very interesting, or in the case of Shuffle!, it’s purposefully orchestrated to be that way on the part of the creators to get people talking. They don’t have their place in discussions on Kanon, where there’s far more to the story than the standard “who-will-he-choose” cliche… well, not to the extent where it’s the determining factor in the audience’s judgement of the series.
Continue reading “My thoughts on the “horse race” mentality in dating sim anime”
Posted in Anime
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