Here it is again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about…the web stats post! Get all the numeric goodness below the fold!
Also, sorry for being slow with this (if anyone even cares, that is). This may be the last thing that I need to catch up on from my month of hell when I was finishing my masters.
April:
May:
So, you may be lucky and have a theater close to you showing it. Well, if you live in Canada or California that is.
Funimation has announced that they are screening Evangelion 1.0 on 70+ screens in North America, starting off with Anime Expo in Los Angeles on July 2-5, then moving to Seattle July 3rd (for a week), Houston on July 16th, Phoenix on July 17th (for a week), San Diego Comic Con July 22-26, and then 4 locations in San Diego and Riverside, CA on July 29th.
Then the movie is showing in Boston August 14-17, followed by a screening in 67 Canadian theaters on September 30th.
So we have 67 Canadian locations, 6 California locations, plus Houston, Phoenix, Boston, and Seattle. Not a very good selection of sites if you live East of the Rocky Mountains in the United States (except for you damn Bostonians). It’s not even currently scheduled to screen in what seem to be obvious locations such as New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, or Atlanta (to at least make a trip non-suicidal for those in the east. I mean, who is going to fly out to San Diego or up to Canada to see a movie?)
So alas, the rest of us will have to wait for the DVD release on November 10th.
Two issues tangently (or not so tangently) related to anime and manga have suddenly popped up their ugly heads and are causing quite a debate, both within and outside of the anime community this week: the conviction of a US comic book collector for having “Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality” and the possible ban of so-called “rape games” in Japan. Both issues have been topics of heated discussion.
However, both of these topics largely deal with the same issues: what to do material which a vast majority of people may and probably do find patently offensive, yet which do not physically harm anyone in their production, sale, or usage?
Those on the side for banning such things basically argue that the mere existence of these materials are harmful to society – that “rape games” create a social acceptability to abuse women, and that child sex depicted in manga create a social acceptability to abuse children or view them in an overtly sexual manner. Those on the side of not banning these things are essentially arguing that, since no harm was done to anyone in the production of the work, that banning such works amount to “thoughtcrime” and censorship that is worse than the work that is being banned. Personally, while I empathize with those who make the former claim, I’m pretty firmly in the camp that it’s hard to make something illegal if no harm is done to anyone while producing it.
On the issue that is more well known at least within the US – the comic collector’s case – anime and manga fans have the problem of misunderstanding exactly what the medium is as well as perhaps those who are, shall I say, highly emotional about the topic. The first problem has to deal with the age old problem that, to many people, “anime,” “manga,” and “hentai” are all the same thing or interchangable terms when clearly they address different things, as obviously not all anime and manga (indeed, the great bulk of it I would imagine) isn’t hentai. Yet, that’s perhaps the most well known type, so that’s just what people associate with it.
The second conflation that I’ve seen which complicates debate on these issues is the difference between arguing whether something should or shouldn’t be illegal vs. whether something is or isn’t ethically or morally OK. I’ve found that those who argue that it should be illegal often conflate the position of “it shouldn’t be illegal” with the position of “I have no personal ethical or moral problem with it.”
All of this leads me to the title of this post which is, of course, a comment people seem to make whenever something like this comes up, which just makes people misunderstand anime and manga even more, and thus makes it more difficult for it to reach mainstream acceptance. I suppose the easy path would be to, as a community, just say “we’re not gonna put up with this stuff,” but that ignores the more complex issues at hand in these cases.
Yay! My hellish last month of getting my masters is over! The only thing left is for them to mail me my piece of paper.
However, that also means that I should actually have time to do, well, anything animated related as the number of episodes I’ve watched in the last 2 or 3 weeks can probably be counted on my fingers. I know I’m rather behind on everything, so I’ll need to catch up. However, now that I don’t have to spend several hours a week working on the masters (and several more hours studying for the final oral exams that wouldn’t die), the blog should be back up and running like usual in a few days.
Here it is again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about…the web stats post! Get all the numeric goodness below the fold!
I thought about adding this into my review for Toradora or adding it to my podcast review, but I thought this would be better written out in it’s own post, as it basically is an editorial.
I’ll say it right front: I was a Ryuji/Minori shipper in Toradora until the very, bitter end of the show. Of course, it became increasingly obvious as the show drew closer to the end that this would not come out to be, and I knew it was a longshot from the start. However, I had hoped that the show may dare to not follow the predicted path, but alas, the ending was once again predictable from the time the first episode aired.
However, this editorial isn’t going to be about my complaining about a lack of Minori ending, per se. Instead, I think the main problem with the ending of Toradora is that Taiga and Ryuji’s transformations from liking Kitamura and Minori to liking each other is sudden and largely without any obvious foretelling other than, simply put, that it was their destiny, as the two leads in an anime, to do so.
It’s April Fools Day. Beware any blog posts that you may read over the next 36 hours.
Edit: I should note that it’s April Fool’s Day somewhere, not necessarily here (yet).
I know this has absolutely nothing to do with anime, but I just got done watching (on the teevee) my alma mater, Syracuse, beat #4 Connecticut 127-117 in six overtimes. Only 3 other games in the history of NCAA basketball have ever gone that long – two six overtime games in the 1950s and one seven overtime game in 1981.
And just to give some perspective: Syracuse didn’t lead in any of the first five overtimes. It’s almost unfathomable how a team could push a game to six overtimes without ever leading in any of them except the last. Also, eight players fouled out – four on each team – with Syracuse having to use 2 players who combined probably haven’t played a full game worth of minutes for the whole season.
And Syracuse played last night (and has to play again tomorrow in the Big East semifinals). It was truly epic.
Since I’ve been going through my redesign, I’ve also been thinking about how to possibly improve other aspects of the site as well. One of the things which always seems to bubble up every now and then are how I score anime series.
Right now my method is to give a score to story, animation, music, coherence (if applicable), dubs (if applicable), and my own gut score, weight those scores, then average them into a final score.
The things I like about this way of scoring is that it makes creating the final score less arbitrary (it’s an average instead of a “here’s the score”) and the final score is very specific. However, the negative side to this is that the final scoring may be too specific and sometimes there may be a temptation to “fudge” the sub-scores in order to get an final score which I think is more appropriate.
So, I was thinking that I kind of have four choices:
I’m kind of wavering between the two, but I wanted to find out what people who visit blog find to be the most useful to determining whether they may want to watch a series or not. As a result, I’ve created a poll with each of these 4 options (and an “other” option, in case you come up with something I haven’t thought of). If you want to explain your opinion further, feel free to do so in the comments as well.
Review Score: What Do You Think?
Total Voters: 13
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