American Gaijin
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Should I Continue Watching Anime?
There’s a “rule” that whenever you see a question in a headline, the answer is “no”. It’s not quite so simple in this case. The question maybe should be posited a little broader: Should I continue studying anything about Japan, including Japanese? I’ve asked this before, but the reasons for my question are different now.…
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Liminal Anime
So it’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve finally processed my feelings on “Love Live” and similar anime, and now I will inflict it on you, who may even read this. Anyone who’s watched anime for any length of time knows that there are a few different broad classes of anime. There’s “Slice…
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Happiness
This will be another of those posts where I intend to take full advantage of the fact that no one reads this. As you might have gathered from the last few posts, “Love Live” hit me hard. The thing about that is, there’s no obvious reason why that should be the case. I’m a middle-aged…
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What I Hate about Love Live
I really like Love Live. But it’s not perfect. I mean, it’s really not perfect. Some things about it are bad. In fact, they’re so bad that they pull me out of my suspension of disbelief and it takes a bit to pull me back in. What bothers me is not the girls. In all…
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A Logical Inconsistency
I have a character flaw. I like to play sudoku, and I’m actually pretty good at it. I have a sudoku app on my phone, and though I may make a few too many mistakes (I have this annoying tendency to put a number in a square where the number already is, because I’m not…
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Shine
“Love Live” continues to throw me for a loop. But at least I think I’m starting to understand why, now. It comes down to one word: “Shine”. When I was a child, I was driven. Very driven. I was the smartest child I knew, and probably the smartest child of my social circles, which were…
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Nijigasaki
This morning I wrote a post in Japanese. It’s probably not very good and odds are I’ll hide or delete it at some point. But it’s really the only way I’m going to be able to practice, well, one of the few anyway. So I’ll probably do that a lot more frequently. Turns out my…
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Sadness, Depression, and Hope
Anime sometimes makes me think. Most of the time, I don’t think it’s supposed to, being honest. I think it’s generally supposed to be light entertainment, or tell a story, or basically fill the same role that live-action TV does in the west. I think it may be a character flaw of mine that I…
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Why I love “Love Live”
I just watched “Love Live”. It’s a cheesy and rather stupid anime, with lots of plot holes. It telegraphs plot lines from even the beginning, and so far from what I can see, the different incarnations of “Love Live” are essentially the same plot with different characters and location. It’s cheesy and it’s stupid and…
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Idol
The thing that got me into anime (after mostly eschewing it for years) was the OP for “Oshi No Ko”, “Idol”, by Yoasobi. I didn’t even encounter it on its own at first, I saw a music youtuber analyzing it, and thought it was so amazing I listened to it, and have probably listened to…