12 Days of Anime: The Shojo Hero Takeshi Natsume

Wohoops, totally forgot to link this one! I published one of my 12 Days of Anime posts over on The OASG, The Shojo Hero Takeshi Natsume where I talk about Natsume from Natsume Yuujinchou (Natsume and the Book of Friends) and how he really is a shojo lead. Not a transplanted shounen lead, not a shojo "romantic lead" guy but just, a shojo lead!

Book Review: The Raven King

Whenever I review a story which is a later installment in a series I always wonder how to approach it. Part of it is that I truly don't know who my audience is, are you readers folks who haven't tried the series at all? Planning on getting to this installment but haven't yet? Folks who've read the story and are looking for discussion? I honestly have no idea! So I think I'm just going to write about what I liked in this book and the series as a whole since yes, of course I liked it if I read the first three books before it and kept going. I've also been fairly vocal in my praise for this particular series so consider this an endorsement for it as well. It's been years since my review of The Raven Boys, I don't particularly want to go back looking for that review, but Brit Mandelo on Tor has written up a nice series of essays about each of the books (some spoilers, especially the later books in the series) so I would go check out their take on The Raven Boys to see if it's your kind of "teenagers go on a literal and metaphorical journey" type of tale. 

The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

Comic Review: Ghosts

Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier

Anime Review: The Morose Mononokean

The Morose Mononokean

Anime Review: Kiznaiver

My original plan was to talk about both this show and Little Witch Academia 2 back to back since it's really interesting to look at a story that has all of the typical Trigger hallmarks and one that doesn't, even though they're both original stories! That didn't quite work out, and I'm not going to compare the two of them since they're more dissimilar than alike, but I still find it interesting that Trigger tries every year or so to make a more typical anime series and yet never quite hits that mark.

Kiznaiver

Anime Review: Seraph of the End: Battle in Nagoya

With this I am finally caught up with my fall season reviews, wahoo! Straight onto the winter season reviews next week since one show I was watching (a short) has already ended and after that, geeze, maybe I'll have time for a few backlog show reviews too! Hmm, guess that means I'll need to actually finish up a few of them first....

Seraph of the End: Battle in Nagoya

Anime Review: Noragami Aragoto

It's a little awkward that I'm just now starting on the fall shows this late into January so let's get started my favorite [one and done] fall show from this past year and one of my favorites of the entire year as well.

Noragami Aragoto

Anime Review: Seraph of the End

No matter how much anime I watch, at heart I'm still a book/comics fan and I'm much more likely to spend an evening binge reading 20 or so chapters of a manga than marathoning a single show. Which is how I was already familiar with this story, I was actually sad to realize that this first half of the anime ends precisely where I left off in my binge reading, I watched the show to see the parts of the story I hadn't read yet!

Seraph of the End (Owari no Seraph)

Book Review: Prudence

Well this is later than I wanted, both for this week and in general. I think I read this book back in April or so, my library got the book surprisingly fast, and I'm not sure why I forgot about it since I have plenty to say about it....

Prudence by Gail Carriger

Book Review: The Shadow Cabinet

There was actually a novella that came out in-between this and The Madness Underneath called The Boy in the Smoke and looking at this post I think I did actually read three of the four stories but I have no idea where. If you can also find those stories I do recommend reading them at some point since Stephen remains an important character in the series but I don't think it's vital that you have to read them before you track down The Shadow Cabinet.

The Shadow Cabinet by Maureen Johnson

Webcomic Review: Skin Deep

There are only a handful of webcomics that I tried out nearly six years ago when I got into the medium that I'm still following now, both due to me becoming bored of them and due to the comics actually finishing. Skin Deep is one of those rare titles although I remember that not because I had an immediate, deep connection with it (although the characters are also college freshman!) but because I remember getting a pop-up malware ad on the site and panicking quite throughly in my freshman dorm room (I think I went so far as to take the battery out of my laptop to make sure nothing was going in the background). Fortunately this didn't color my experience reading the comic or make me resentful, but I am glad that these days the majority of ads I see on webcomics are ads for other comics which are 100% less likely to give me malware.

Skin Deep by Kory Bing

Anime Review: Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta

As a general explanation before I get into the reviews: Yozakura Quartet is based off of a manga by the same name and the manga is still on-going so this series does not have a hard and fast ending as I expected. The manga was adapted first into an anime in 2008 of the same name is apparently terrible and should be ignored, that one is the one that Sentai Filmworks has licensed in the US. Over the past few years Studio Tatsunoko has been making a few OVA series as well as another full anime series that adapts the story much more faithfully and is the one I'm talking about here, the main tv series Hana no Uta (Song of the Flowers), Hoshi no Umi (The Sea of Stars), and Tsuki ni Naku (Howling/Crying at the Moon). This is the order you should watch them in, I promise it's for the best but it can be a little hard to find Hoshi no Umi online these days since it's been a few years and none of these series were even licensed for streaming. Since there is no official license, I'm going to try and use the actual Japanese terms for the various supernatural aspects of the works instead of English terms the way I usually would for consistency. The subs I saw used "dæmon" instead of yokai and "Sakura Newtown" instead of "Sakurashin" but since everyone will at least hear those same words this seems to be the best way to avoid confusion!

Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta

Comic Review: Seconds

For some reason I had a hard time writing this review, I can't tell if I'm in a slump these days or if I've simply come across a lot of hard-to-talk-about stories lately.

Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Anime Review: Durarara!! x2 SHOU

This was a bit of an odd show to be air. As I think I talked about in my Yuri Kuma Arashi review, studio Brains Base is hardly worth mentioning these days and Durarara!! was their best selling show ever, I think Natsume and the Book of Friends was a close second but DRRR!! sold like gangbusters and everyone expected a sequel to be announced in a year or so. Come five years later and a lot of the core creative staff has moved onto an entirely different studio to produce this show and it makes me wonder what was going on behind the scenes for that to happen. We'll likely never know (short of getting someone important drunk which is always a possibility!) and even odder is a recent episode of the podcast ANNCast with "Aniplex Guy" who says that the US support for the show helped get this second part made. There have been cases before where an American company has helped fund a sequel (like with Big O) and Aniplex of America is special since it's a branch of the Japanese production company but this would be almost the first time simple support for a show has helped make it possible. Plus, I had always heard that DRRR!! DIDN'T do as well as they expected, they even switched over to their more premium releases afterwards so that change in marketing always seemed to support the rumor. So I guess you can say that the story surrounding the show is more confusing than the show itself, although given that this show tends to explain itself fairly well after a point maybe that's the least surprising point.

Durarara!! x2 SHOU

Manga Review: Spirit Circle

Funny story, I actually had this post all ready to go last night and completely forgot until 11:30 to actually hit post so I decided to wait until morning. Which means, this post originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses!

This is one of the many manga I first tried out when I was using friends' guest passes on Crunchyroll and frankly my luck for finding good series on there was pretty terrible. Honestly it still is but I'm lad I stumbled across this one, I actually had no idea it was by the same manga-ka as The Biscuit Hammer and after I enjoyed this series so much I was convinced to try The Biscuit Hammer again and I think that one is growing on me too!

Spirit Circle by Satoshi Mizukami

Anime Review: Mushi-shi: The Next Passage (part two)

Happy New Year guys, may my posts be much more timely this year! Although I could have put up this review on Monday, if I wanted to forgo watching the last Mushi-shi episode. As everyone knows by now, Crunchyroll has been having some trouble lately, recently they announced they were the victim of a DDoS attack and I suspect that's why both their website and apps have been giving everyone trouble for about a month now. There have been a few days where I haven't been able to get my phone's app to work at all during work and that's the only time I have for watching anime and since Mushi-shi has been so consistently great I did consider just writing up this review and amending it after I saw the last episode. But that didn't sit right with me and it did end on one of it's best episodes, fingers crossed that I also find more time for anime watching in this new year as well!

Mushi-shi: The Next Passage (part two)

Book Review: Give Up the Ghost

This book is one of many that has been on my to-read list for years and yet my local libraries never had a copy of it, someday I will figure out why sometimes a library has a book I want and sometimes none of them do but clearly that day has not yet come, thank goodness I keep moving to new areas I suppose!

Give Up The Ghost by Megan Crewe

Radio Drama Review: Welcome to Nightvale

As Alex Hoffman of Sequential State said recently, while it's easy to review books and tv series which have set beginnings and endings it's much, much harder to do that with a perpetually on-going series (specifically webcomics, especially since they, like this one, start out as works of love not profit). But, since Welcome to Nightvale just had it's second anniversary I think it's only appropriate that I talk about it and explain why such an odd thing has captivated me. I started listening to it on my all-too-exciting trip to Otakon 2013 with a friend who was also curious about it and about halfway through the episode she turns to me and says that tumblr makes so much more sense now (I HAD been wondering where that "guns don't kill people, we're all immortal!" line had come from) and I must admit that now that I follow the show it's fun to see how it has been popping up everywhere in little ways. I attended one of their live shows (which was surprisingly fun for being 97% audio based!), bought a copy of "Condos" and was rather happy that they released their two year anniversary show as episodes in the main podcast (although I assume that their other ones are more-or-less canon this one certainly is). And so, this review covers them from episode 1 to episode 49, the second half of said live show, not just because that's the end of a grand arc but because episode 50 only came out this week and this show is also how I bribe myself to do my laundry ("no nightvale unless you actually iron your work shirts!") and I haven't had time to do laundry yet, how I do laundry the two weeks of the month this show isn't on is an enduring mystery.

Welcome to Nightvale

Anime Review: Noragami

When I started the winter season I took a screenshot of the anime chart and put checks next to all the series I wanted to see and Xs on the rest. All except this show however, I drew a few question marks over it since I had read the first chapter of the manga, it really didn't click with me, yet I kept seeing people whose opinion often matched mine be really excited over it. I was also confused why the promo images kept featuring this girl who I didn't remember from the manga at all so I gave it another shot, checked out the second chapter and yep, there she is and hey I rather like the story focusing on her a bit more too. Of course this means I have to give the anime a chance now, especially given that it's the legal option to check out this story, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Noragami

Book Review: IQ84

Sometimes, usually no more than once or twice a year, I'll read or watch something and choose not to review it since I feel like there's just no way I can talk about it. That's how I felt after I read my first Murakami book, A Wild Sheep Chase, and yet despite that I was interested in IQ84. Not necessarily because of the story but rather at how widely praised it seemed to be, I was just curious what exactly had grabbed seemingly so many people. So when one of my groups of friends, which happens to have a book club in it, decided that this was going to be their next book I hunted down a copy at a local library and got to reading a book so large I felt like it counted as an actual self-defense weapon when I had to walk home late at night by myself.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami