Nopy's Blog

Produced by Osaka Animation and directed by Shintaro Ishihara (Taiyo no Kisetsu, Hi no Shima), To Aru Futsuu no Anime is a 26-episode action-romance-comedy-psychological series.

The story focuses on a regular high school boy named Ken Nakajima that lives by himself because his parents are on a permanent business trip abroad. One night, while walking his pet pig, Buhi, Ken spots a bright light followed by a girl falling from the sky. He runs up to catch her and she floats into his arms, but is unconscious. Suddenly, a mysterious man named Zeus appears and demands that Ken return the girl so that she can be brought home before the universe is “shut down”. He refuses and just as Zeus is about to strike him down with a lightning bolt, Ken is engulfed by a bright light coming from the girl’s pendant and gains the power of the Titans.

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Recently, there has been a lot of talk surrounding the transformation scene of Rebecca (Becky) from Dog Days. Two main opinions have developed from all of that talk. The first is that the scene is too sexually suggestive. The second is that transformation scenes like Rebecca’s are commonplace in magical girl anime and nothing to be concerned about. Both sides seem to suggest that magical girl transformations are starting to encroach on ero-anime territory. Considering magical girl anime were originally made for young girls, have transformation scenes gone too far in trying to attract male viewers?

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Now that I have your attention, I have a question for you: what do you think is the best anime of all time?

While I could look at the numbers at any anime list site, I want to hear directly from you. Back in the late 90′s practically everyone would tell me “Evangelion”, but times have changed and people change. Please leave a comment with your answer and reason, or if you’d like, write a blog post explaining your answer and link to it in the comments. Ask your friends what they think too.

For the record, here’s my answer.

It’s hard to deny that anime has good music compared to other animation. For example, I don’t think a song from Spongbob Squarepants or Ben 10 would ever make it onto the Billboard Charts, but you often hear of anime music reaching the top 10 on Japan’s equivalent Oricon Charts. With music oriented anime like K-ON! achieving huge success, that got me thinking: does music affect the popularity and success of an anime, or conversely, does an anime affect the popularity and success of a song?

In a recent post, I listed 10 anime series with good music that made it onto the Oricon Charts. Most of these series were very popular when they aired, but it’s hard to determine if that was soley because of the music or if the anime was already good. Ideally, to figure this out, we would need to put a crappy anime on the market with good music and a good anime with bad music, then watch the Oricon charts. Unfortunately, I don’t know any pop stars or anime studios that would help me, so I’m settling for the next best thing: watching Senki Zesshou Symphogear.

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A while back, I was compiling a list of the most powerful books in anime. I didn’t get very far because quite frankly, there aren’t many popular examples. Instead, I had another fun idea: who in the world would be most suited or likely to possess the most powerful books in anime? A few days later, a huge news story swept the Korean peninsula: Kim Jong-il dead from a heart attack. For one of the most popular (not in a good way) villans of our time to die of a simple heart attack sounded suspicious to me… like something out of Death Note, wouldn’t you say?

If you haven’t heard of a Death Note before, see the below image for a run-down of how it works:

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I am a big advocator of not wearing outdoor shoes while indoors. This was ingrained into me as a child by my family and my elementary school. Whenever you walked inside, you take your shoes off, it’s just common sense. My reaction to one day discovering that one of my friends and many others wear their shoes indoors was much like in the video above.  I don’t think I need to point out the practical aspect of changing shoes when coming inside; instead I want to explore the significance of shoe lockers in anime.

I’m sure many of you have noticed the rows upon rows of shoe lockers near the entrances to all schools in anime. While they are mainly used to store shoes, the writers of anime seem to have taken a liking to using this area as a setting for events in many stories. The consequences usually range from broken hearts to broken school buildings. Listed here are some of the things I’ve seen shoe lockers be involved in.

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When you visit any online anime community, you will see a lot of Japanese terms being thrown around such as moe, ecchi, shounen, shoujo, yuri, and yaoi. Sometimes terms are used incorrectly or their meaning has been twisted but those have become the norm for English-speakers, some examples include hentai and otaku. All of these terms have been around for a long time, but when I look at them, I notice that something which was found in almost every anime discussion has practically died. What I am referring to is the term “kawaii”.

OK, maybe it isn’t actually dead, but it certainly isn’t anywhere near as popular as it used to be, at least from my experience.

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Seeing a recent episode of How I Met Your Mother got me thinking: since when did body pillows (or dakimakura as some of you like to call them) become weird?

In the episode, Lily’s husband, Marshall, leaves for a few weeks to take care of his mother after his father passed away. In Marshall’s absence, Lily decides to throw some of Marshall’s clothes on a body pillow to hug while she sleeps, but then things get weird and she starts treating it like a person. Later in the episode when Marshall’s mother is asked how she’s holding up, she replies, “It gets a little lonely. My friends suggested a body pillow, but *laughs* I’m not a lunatic.”

To me, body pillows are just as essential as a head pillow and a blanket for a good night’s sleep. I know a lot of people don’t use them, but my parents came from a place where body pillows are found in just about every bed so I’ve had them for as long as I can remember. They help keep you warm and comfortable, and they give you a sense of security, like a security blanket in pillow form. Apparently, body pillows also help with back problems, so if any of you have that, you should look into getting one.

So where did the idea that body pillows are for “lunatics” come from? Well, as far as I know, it’s because of things like this:

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A few weeks ago I was invited by Jamillah Knowles to speak on the Outriders programme on BBC Radio 5 live to help introduce listeners to the idea of OS-tans (Jamillah, if you’re reading this, thank you for having me on the programme). I sound a little nervous in the clip, but if you guys are interested in hearing it, you can find it here.

Now to get on with what I wanted to talk about. Thanks to Jamillah’s excellent investigative work, it seems that Nanami Madobe, the first so-called “official” OS-tan of yester-year, was not officially endorsed by Microsoft Japan. Shocked? Yes, I was too. Thinking back on the release of the Nanami Madobe theme and the news surrounding her, this answers a few questions.

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Since my blog reached its 2nd anniversary recently, I thought I’d take a look back at what I’ve accomplished. While I was happy with how much its grown, I was a bit disappointed in myself for neglecting it from late May until now. In the past ten weeks I’ve made 10 blog posts, but some of them were more like announcements rather than actual posts. Looking back on my first three months of blogging, I averaged 15 posts per month and covered three main categories: anime, figures, and magazines. Anime posts kinda dropped to the wayside shortly after Toradora simply because I couldn’t find a series as awesome to talk about and most of my recent posts have been going to FG. Figure and magazine posts held up for a while but posting frequency started dwindling as time passed.

Now I’ve decided to bring my blog back to life and hopefully get back to those 15 posts per month. The problem is that there’s so much stuff I can write about that I didn’t know where to start, so I decided to take a look at what people have been searching for on my blog and here are the top 3 results:

I have to admit I was pretty surprised at these results. To those 8547 people who were searching for hentai, I’m sorry to disappoint, but there is none on this blog. “Hikikomori” is understandable because of a previous blog post I made, but the only Queen’s Blade I have here are a few shots of Megami Magazine and Nyantype Magazine posters. The first time the word “anime” appears is 12th on the ranking, but the actual search term used was “anime+hentai”. Sadly, figures and nendoroids don’t even make the top 20, with the 20th item being “anime+girls+no+clothes”.

Based on the above information, it seems a lot of visitors come here searching for hentai or ecchi material. If that’s what people want, then I could post about all the Megami and Nyantype magazines that have been piling up plus some extra stuff, but I’ve decided to ask you guys, my readers, for your opinion. To me, it’s you guys, who actually read what I write, that are most important to me, not some random people looking for naughty pics. So I’d like to ask: what would you like to see more of or updated more frequently on my blog? Traditionally, I’ve written about anime, figures, and magazines, but if you browse through the archives, you’ll find I’ve dabbled a bit into other things like artbooks, games, manga, and even my personal life. I’m looking forward to hearing any thoughts you might have.