Poll #1432144
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 55

Best totally awesome anime/manga character ruined by a totally awful Engrish name:

If I were a better person, I would be distinguishing between the just plain Did Not Do the Research linguistic sins ("Jacuzzi Splot") versus the Chalk This One Up to Good Old-Fashioned Linguistic Barriers names ("Gopher").* But I'm not.

Anyway, feel free to add your own nominations in the comments. Requirements: It must be a totally awesome, complex, fascinating, dramatically "heavy" character who is saddled with a name that makes it difficult or nearly impossible for non-Japanese speakers to take said character seriously.

* I'm sure that, for Ohkubo's intended audience of Japanese speakers, "Gopher" is quite the brilliant name. It's a double-whammy Biblical pun (animal theme + "gopher wood") plus a sly linguistic nod to modern office slang. Unfortunately, the word "gopher" just has extraordinarily silly conotations for English speakers. And even more unfortunately, it sounds exactly like the word for "waffles" to, oh, anybody who speaks a Romance language. Which, yes, of course - I know, you know, we all know that Ohkubo isn't writing for an international audience, he's writing for his Japanese audience - but still. Unfortunate linguistic coincidences are LULZ no matter where they come from.

Shakugan no Shana II -

What HAPPENED to you? No, seriously, what? You're going all Sorezore no Tsubasa on me, and that is not. cool.

Take a deep breath and repeat after me:
1. Yoshida is not a cowardly wimp. She wasn't afraid to take on Shana herself. I have no idea why you decided that she would suddenly turn into an emo helpless wimp when faced with Konoe.
2. Shana is not an emo crybaby. She should be kicking Konoe's ass, not curling up in a fetal position (yes, really!) and sobbing.
3. Wilhelmina is hardcore. Remember her behavior last season? She was willing to kill Yuuji just to keep Reiji Maigo out of Bal Masqué's hands. And now all of a sudden she's more concerned about learning how to cook a hot meal for Shana rather than, I dunno, kicking Konoe's ass? Who is this person, and what have you done with my Wilhelmina?

Next, Baccano.

I hate you and I love you.

I love you because you saw fit to depict the most grisly, graphic, and gruesome five seconds of ultraviolence that I have ever seen committed to animated film, and yes I've seen all of the Hellsing anime and Gantz. I love you because you sandwidched this scene between a slapstick comedy bit featuring two different characters, and a schmoopy romantic scene featuring two other characters, and somehow this worked *perfectly*. I love you because I'm finally starting to see the payoff regarding your decision to tell the story out-of-order, which frustrated me at first, although now I'm starting to warm to the idea. And I love you because you let Chane beat up Ladd, and that was kind of awesome.

I still hate you because I just can't take a series with such horrible Engrish names seriously. I feel like I want Jacuzzi Splot to be my favorite character, but I can't because his name is Jacuzzi Splot. Likewise with Firo, Maiza, Szilard, and all of the other wretched names of supposedly Anglo characters in the series. And a train named "The Flying Pussyfoot." Good god people, would it kill you to do a little research?

Plus, racist depiction of black characters is still racist. :(

Well, it's that time again. October means the start of new anime series in Japan, and everybody and their dog is throwing up a "fall preview" post on their blog or livejournal. I was thinking of doing that too, but first, I went back and looked at what shows I predicted I would watch last spring, and laughed a bit at myself. Then I started thinking and writing, looking back on a year of watching free anime in wonderful Japanland, and, well...

I guess it's the normal procedure to wait until December to do an "anime year in review" post, but I think that fall would actually be a better time for me to do so. First, in Japan as in the United States, fall is the nominal start of the Year in Television. Second, I arrived in Japan last fall, so if I wanted to write about a year's worth of anime, of course it cover the span of time from autumn to autumn!

So without further adieu, here is my year in anime. ( Behind the cut. )

And, to conclude this amazingly long post...

Recommendations?

Level One: If you breathe air, you will probably like this series.
Seirei no Moribito/Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
Romeo x Juliet
Dennou Coil


Level Two: Recommended, but your mileage may vary.
Gurren Lagann (must love old-fashioned schlock done right)
Code Geass (must love old-fashioned schlock done horribly, horribly wrong)
Claymore (must be able to love a good story despite terrible art)
Hataraki Man (must not be grossed out by onscreen depictions of people eating natto)
Moonlight Mile (must have tolerance for slow pacing)
To Terra (must be able to love that old-school space opera)

So, if I had to sum up all of the above in one sentence, it would be this:
Everybody should watch Seirei no Moribito.
That is all.

Part three of Kosuke Fujishima's new Mini-Goddess strip, which is being published on the spine of montly issues of Afternoon. In case you missed any of the previous panels, you can find them all linked here.

( Behind the cut. )

There's no random manga page this week, sorry. The artwork was okay, but the real highlight of the story was that Welsper finally returned (yay!) and basically spent twenty pages walking around and being a complete asshole. Which is great, because without Aoshima around, there aren't nearly enough unmitigated asshole characters in this story arc. I mean, assholes bring comedy to the table. Amnesia is overused as a comedy plot device, but an assholeish character? Wins every time.

Oh, and in other news? I decided to check out the Baccano! manga, because Baccano! is awesome, and because I heard that the manga would focus exclusively on the second novel (the "Railroad Incident" plot), which is the best part of the saga.

All I can say is... wow.

I didn't know that it was possible to take a series that is so awesome and adapt it into a manga that's so awful. I mean, the artwork looks like it was drawn by an eight-year-old. The characters are impossible to distinguish, particularly the male characters. The action scenes are a mess of speedlines and barely-drawn figures barfed all over the pages. And the thirty pages of the manga that I read managed to take a really tense scene from the anime/novels - namely, Miria and Isaac standing up to the mobsters trying to take them hostage - and somehow managed to make it completely boring.

When Miria and Isaac are being boring, then you know that your manga sucks.

In short: I think I'll pass. I can barely read the novels (LOL anything written above a third-grade reading level, which is about my reading fluency in Japanese), and the non-linear narrative of the anime frustrates me, but... the manga is just too crappy for me to continue to subject myself to. Thirty lousy pages was enough. No more. No more!

I WILL give the manga credit for using the phrase "NONSTOP クライムアクション!!" in the Dengeki Comic Gao Table of Contents description blurb. クライムアクション = "climaction" or "climaxtion" (it's kind of hard to Englishfy, but trust me, the word is beautiful in Japanese). Oh, Japanese. I love you and your tendency to create beautiful portmanteaus from English words.

Baccano! is a short thirteen-episode series based on a long-running novel series, so... Well, given the amount of material being condensed into the anime, it could turn out very awesome, or very sucktastic. I watched the first three episodes tonight. Due to the non-linear, disjointed style of the narrative, Baccano! really is a series that has to be consumed in chunks of two or three episodes at a time, rather than spaced out with just one episode per week. Or else it's just impossible to keep track of all the characters and plots going on. I mean, this opening credit sequence doesn't even begin to list all of the main characters:



Anyway, impressions. The good:
1. Killer premise. Highlander in Prohibition-era United States.
2. Killer soundtrack.
3. A huge cast of characters that range from fascinating to at least mildly interesting.
4. Holy shit Hellsing-like moments of OMG WTF ultra-violence.
5. Funny bits that are actually funny.
6. Sponsor annoucements done in flawless English. I guess to enhance the illusion that this is a series set in an English-speaking country?

The bad:
1. Blackface.
2. Disjointed, non-linear, non-chronological narrative. It gets frustrating at times.
3. WTF Engrish names. Seriously. One of the main characters is named "Jacuzzi Splot." I kid you not.
4. The animation quality went to the toilet during episode 3. Firo's big fight scene, which should have been the highlight of the series so far, looked like absolute crap.
5. I love melodramatic over-the-top characters. Unfortunately, about five of the main characters in Baccano! fit that description, and they all sound the same when they talk. It's like the voice director was only capable of giving one direction, and that was, "Sound over-the-top and hammy!" It works when used sparingly in an anime, like with Itsuki performing his one-man version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It doesn't work when most of your main cast sounds like Itsuki performing his one-man version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when delivering even the most innocuous lines of dialogue like "Cows are herbivores." (Yes, that's an actual line in the second episode, and yes, it was delivered in the most hammy, melodramatic way possible.)

Oh, and the first fifteen minutes of the first episode? The most boring fifteen minutes I've ever seen animated. (And I've seen the entirety of Winter Garden!) Seriously, it was so terrible that I almost gave up on the entire series. But after the commercial break in the middle of the episode, things suddenly start to get awesome, and so far they've stayed awesome throughout.

So if you give this series a try, you gotta plug through the first fifteen minutes of the first episode. It will be painful, but believe me, it gets better. It really does.