Saturday, October 19, 2013

私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い! (Watamote): A Love Letter of Sorts to a Miserable Girl, and that little bit of her in all of us

Kuroki Tomoko (Picture stolen from somewhere on the internet. Credit to whoever's responsible for it.)
Preface: I wasn't sure how I should go about this post. Perhaps as a serious review of the anime, an episodic summary, or my usual smattering of random thoughts, mixed with a dash of pedantic social commentary. Or perhaps as a love letter of sorts, to a person who would never be able to read it because she's really just a fictional character- and yet to everyone out there who identifies with her. Watashi ga motenai no wa dou kangaete mo omaera ga warui! (私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い!, literally 'no matter how you look at it, it's your fault I'm not popular')- otherwise simply known as 'Watamote', continues the trend of  having a ridiculously long title. It also has the honor of being one of the most negative shows I have ever watched.

Monday, October 7, 2013

"Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl" (2006): In Which I Pretend to be a Raging Social Anthropologist

Osaragi Hazumu (center), Kurusu Tomari (right), and Kamiizumi Yasuna (left)
I set out to watch "Kashimashi: Girl meets Girl" with the express intention of watching a show with gender-bending being a major part of the theme. In case you're a puritan, gender-bending is generally understood to mean the switching of a character's gender within a story. Why a gender-bending tale, then? My choice was largely random, though I suppose my having completed the ultra violent Black Lagoon a while ago left me needing a dose of hormonal re-balancing, but I wasn't ready to go for all-out romance (I'm looking at you, Amagami) just yet.

...I stepped away for a glass of hot water, and now that opening paragraph makes a lot less sense than it did while I was typing it out. Come to think of it, it rather feels like a liability if employers were to google for my name and read this instead... oh well. Less self-destruction and more inconsequential proselytism, then.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

World War Z(ucchini)

The Z in World War Z, I presume, stands for "zombie", and not, contrary to what you may have found yourself doing throughout much of this film- "zzzz"- the onomatopoeia for snoring, in case the first thing you think of is mosquitoes, in which case I'd advise you to get a pet frog and keep it by your bedside.