Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA ILLYA 2wei! #001: Illya Saves Anime

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hisui_icon_4040 The anime industry is in a sad state of affairs. There is nothing but incest and idols shows being made. There has not been a major shonen success in years. Shinichiro Watanabe has been banned from making any anime. There is no hope.

But a single light can save anime. It is the light of a young lady. A magical girl. Not Sailor Moon (I mean Sailor Moon could have saved anime but they will never be able to re-release that show because of Stars). Not Cardcaptor Sakura. No one likes CLAMP anymore. Yes it is Illyasviel von Einzbern and Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA ILLYA 2wei! They will save anime. Forever.

OK. Other than picking Akikan! or Yosuga no Sora I don’t think I could have picked a worse title to “save anime.” So we can now officially put the “this is the title that will save anime” meme/joke/platitude to rest.

So instead lets talk about the new season of the Illya as a magical girl anime.
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Happy 7th Birthday Reverse Thieves!

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You know that chestnut of a scene in a sitcom where a person totally forgets their anniversary then has to scramble to pretend that they remembered the big day all along? In many ways, that is what this post is.

So yeah, we sort of forgot about the anniversary of the blog this year. In a way, it was the blog itself that made it so easy to forget.

The first five years of running the blog (and then podcast) seemed like more of a struggle; every few months was a desperate battle to build an identity and gain a following. Realizing we got into a bit of predictable pattern by our sixth year jump started a few changes in the site.

The Case Closed and Postmortem podcasts definitely came out of that. They’re not as popular as the SWAT Reviews but these new short podcasts make good and vital bookends to our first impressions.

Alain started the Riot Control Reviews because people love hearing about horrible things. If anything people are probably saddened that he doesn’t watch even worse shows at the start of the new season. Alain has also tried out video reviews of manga chapters with A Chapter a Day Keeps the Doctor Away on YouTube; it is currently on hiatus.

Our big push for 2014 has been to make the content on the blog and podcast more accessible. All the podcasts are now available on Stitcher and YouTube. We recently started a Tumblr account which cross-promotes all our content as well as other original musings.

A minor change but one worth noting is we started using our real names a bit more. Part of it was Kate being more comfortable with using her real name in print and part of it is being mildly tired of people mixing us up. (Also as always Kate trying to point out once and for all she knows next to nothing about Type-Moon no matter how much people insist otherwise.)

We don’t know what the future holds for the site, we certainly aren’t going anywhere, but how much things will continue to change rather than just honing what we have now will remain to be seen.

What do you all think about how Reverse Thieves has changed in the last seven years? How long have you been visiting? What’s the the #1 reason you visit the blog and/or listen to the podcast?

-Alain
~ kate

Prego, Ragu, and Anime Pacing

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hisui_icon_4040 If you really like arguing with people on the Internet there are a treasure trove of topics that by merely off handily mentioning them can cause a maelstrom of debate without even the smallest amount of effort. Beyond that each fandom has it own unique hot buttons that can ruffle the feathers of that group more than anyone else. Anime fandom is hardly an exception. Moe, fan service, the proper use of term otaku all come to mind as easy kegs to spark with any congregation of anime and manga aficionados. But one thing that always gets anime fandom riled up is hardly unique to the fandom but seems especially divisive among anime fans none the less.  It is constantly brought up in reviews and any discussion of a series big or small, shonen or shojo, popular or obscure. It is probably not extremely more significant in anime and manga fandom but since I am neck-deep in anime and manga fandom I see it more here. That is the issue of pacing.

Unlike art, story, music, characters, or presentation it is rarely something that is given a quantifiable number score. There might be someone out there that says Evangelion has a score of eight in pacing but Azumanga Daioh has a four but I have never seen them. More often than not it gets brought up in an overall review or around the half way mark of a series when its airing. That said I have seen it as a topic of debate as early as the first episode of a series and it usually just becomes more and more of a topic of discussion as the series goes on. The longer a series is the more the topic comes up and the deeper the arguments are. It gets to the point where it seems like you cannot bring up a long shonen series without the topic coming up.

The thing is there seems to be little consensus on any given series. Really long series tend to garner a good deal of resentment over their pacing and pacing eventually breaks down to arcs of the show being judged individually as well as pieces of a whole. Very short series tend to get off lighter with some noticeable exceptions. Everything else seems to be a tempest in a teapot. I have recently seen people call Kill la Kill perfectly paced, far too hyper, and meanderingly lethargic. I remember the debate over Penguindrum’s pace being rather fierce. People will remember the soccer episode of Eureka 7 more than the Alamo. But why? What causes such a fierce debate? I have wondered that because for all the discussion there seems to be no easy answer to why two people will have such different opinions on pacing.

It turns out tomato sauce might have the greatest insight into why this is always such a topic of debate.

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