Month: July 2010

The Otakon Pre-Game

Leave a comment

Check us out on Calaggie’s Pre-Otakon Podcast!

Otakon, otakon, otakon. Always surprising us up until the last minute it seems. Guest announcements were coming fast and furious over the last month or so. But now here it is, my favorite part of the summer. The two things that are vying for my attention the most are the Welcome to THE SPACE SHOW premiere and the halftime performance by Yoshiki & Sugizo which I am subjecting myself to the masquerade for. And as you can see from our tentative schedule, there are more than a few interesting things going on. We never have time for all of it, but hey we try our best. With press badges lined up, press conferences being planned, and maybe an interview or two to share things have shaped up very nicely. Say hello if you can find me! One or both of us will likely be in attendance at the The Great Otakon Podcast Picnic, too. I’ll be tweeting as much as I can, you can follow along on my adventures!

hisuiconIn less than a day we will be on the road heading to Otakon. As always with Otakon we get all the relevant information before the show but never soon enough for anyone going. That being said the guest line up it very solid this year. I can’t say I am Tomino-level excited for any of the guests (then again Tomino is the one of a kind crazy old man Tomino) but they do have a wonderful selection of Japanese industry guests. I look forward to seeing what each of them has to say about the industry. I am most interested in Takamasa Sakurai because he seems like such an unusual but potentially fascinating guest. There looks like there is always going to be something going on so I hope I find a little free time to eat and check out the dealers room even if I can’t buy much this year.  I will note that I am uncool therefore I will only be tweeting in the morning and the evening when I have access to someone else’s laptop. You can instead imagine me getting into much more fantastical adventures than will actually be taking place. Feel free to write stories about me hijacking panels and getting into fist fights with Vic Mignogna. If you are at the con we will have our home made Reverse Thieves badges to identify us so come up to us and say hello.

Friday
Riichi: Japanese Mahjong, Anime, and You panel
Michael Sinterniklaas Explains Everything About The Industry panel
Vertical, Inc Featuring Felipe Smith panel
Madhouse: Maruyama & Koujina panel
Anime Journalism panel
Opening Ceremonies
Takamasa Sakurai Q&A
The Evolution of Video Game Music panel
Aniplex panel
Anime, Lost in Translation panel
You Don’t Like Moe — And Here’s Why! panel
The World of Sailor Moon. Countdown to 20 years. panel
Bad Anime, Bad!! panel
Yoshida Brothers concert
Anime Cult Classics panel
J-Pop for Dummies panel
The History of Hentai panel

Saturday
Experiments in the Anime Industry: noitaminA panel
From Ayumi Hamasaki to Zilch: A guide to Jpop and Jrock panel
The Changing Faces of Anime panel
Welcome to THE SPACE SHOW premiere
Yuji Mitsuya Q&A
Yura, Kikuta, Shihori Q&A
Masao Maruyama Q&A
Podcasting for your Fandom
Welcome to THE SPACE SHOW Creators Q&A
The Mecha Fan panel
10 Anime You’ve Never Heard of but Must See! panel
The One Piece Podcast panel
Masquerade – Featuring Yoshiki & Sugizo Halftime Performance
The Otakon 2010 Gundam Experience: Life Beyond 30 panel
The Life and Times of Akiyuki Shinbo panel
Inuyasha and Beyond panel
Feminism, Fandom, and Fanservice panel

Sunday
Confessions of a Closet Otaku
Japanese Figures, Toys and Collecting
Home Made Kazoku concert
Dubs that Time Forgot

Paradise Kiss’s Hiroyuki: One Point on Two Triangles

4 Comments

Paradise Kiss is all about relationships. Friends. Co-workers. Family. Lovers. And Paradise Kiss goes a long way to showing that all of these relationships, minor or major, make a difference and effect your decision, consciously or not. Growing through experience plays a solid tune throughout the series. As each character goes down their paths, some having a better idea of where they are headed than others, no one is alone on their journey. Hiroyuki, the seemingly average man among men, plays pivotal roles in much of the story despite being not quite part of the group.

hisuiconI always took away the message of Paradise Kiss being that what we think we want, what we actually want, what we need, and what we get are all very separate things. No matter how much we may try to get them to be the same we discover life is about dealing with the fact that these four things may never meet up no matter how much we try to make them. All the member of Paradise Kiss kiss deal with these clashes of desires and realities both romantically and professionally throughout the series. But there is one character who on the surface seems out of place. Hiroyuki Tokumori seems to be a minor character who is both above this and apart from this. But on further analysis we see that he is not only a key player in all the lives of the main characters but also just as torn and effected by these conflicts as everyone else.

Continue reading →

Ongoing Investigations: Case #093

Leave a comment

hisuiconChi’s Sweet Home may be the greatest possibility of being a mainstream success with an older audience that manga will ever have. Everything about it is extremely friendly to the casual reader. It is flipped and in color which gives it a distinctly high end American newspaper comic feel. It is cute and delightfully innocent. The book is superbly designed. Everything is crisp and clean and the whole book is as well designed as the Japanese version if not better. So rightfully you will see tons of praise for this series on the Internet and it deserves all the praise it gets. That being said I ultimately found the series utterly boring. The whole books is kitten moe. The book utterly relies on you finding Chi adorable. But the problem with Chi is the problem you see with any moe show. People who love K-ON! love it with their heart and soul and everyone else wonders what the heck that crazy person is babbling on about. Now moe for humans quickly gets into weird and uncomfortable sexual issues for some people which thankfully are nonexistent in Chi. But the underlying problem still remains. If you collect cute pictures of kittens, post in Caturday threads, and/or are just in love with felines in general this book will be catnip to you. To me it was like one of those extremely profitable newspaper comics that I read and then just shrug my shoulders. I understand why it is so successful but I just seem immune to it’s charm.

As far as I know Kekkaishi 22 is my last pre-ordered volume, I must remedy that! In this installment we see the consequences of Tokine’s actions at the end of volume 21 plus the mysteries surrounding the scared sites just keep getting thicker. We also meet a character that I kept seeing in fan-art who is a member of the Shadow Organization’s special unit. As per previous suspicions and hints, someone in the Organization is behind the murders going on but we are still no closer to finding out who. There’s a decent dose of humor in this book despite the very serious circumstances of Tokine’s predicament. And this time around Yoshimori atleast asks first to be reckless before leaving, a step in the right direction maybe. We end mid-stream as Yoshi finally connects with Tokine and a major battle is slated to ensue. A good, solid volume.

Continue reading →