BEST NEW SERIES

Nozomi no Densetsu, without a doubt. I don’t think anyone quite saw this one coming, and in a way I’m glad we didn’t. GAINAX’s masterpiece was one of the best-kept secrets in years–which is made even more impressive by the fact that they chose to simultaneously broadcast it on American TV as well. Every aspect of this show so far has been a masterpiece. The manic enthusiasm of Gurren Lagann crossed with the emotional depth of Evangelion’s twisted psychology… This is very much an adult show, and embraces that. There’s a reason it’s skyrocketed to the top of the charts both in Japan and America. It’s the first anime since Cowboy Bebop to be really socially acceptable to watch in America, and is practically the talk of the nation these days.

And you know what the best part is? We’ve got the whole second season to look forward to next year. (But dear gods, what a cliffhanger! GAINAX are horrible people!)

BEST CONTINUING SERIES

There were some really fantastic series continuing this year, with FMA’s stellar finale and some of Naruto’s best arcs, but the real standout was Eden of the East. The announcement of a full second season at the end of the second movie was thoroughly exciting, and lived up to its promise. The world it painted was rich and fascinating, and extremely poignant. Everyone who saw it came away with a hell of a lot to think about, and deeper for it.

BEST MOVIE

Oh wow, Fuyu no Tobira, no question. Mamoru Hosoda has knocked another one out of the park. We all thought Summer Wars was brilliant, but it was nothing compared to this–especially given the turnout! And now the American premiere of it has opened to stellar box office results, not to mention the pundits saying it’s a shoo-in for Best Animated Picture. Not since Spirited Away has an anime movie been this widely-accepted. I personally think that Hosoda could well be the next Miyazaki.

BEST BLOG

This is gonna be cheesy of me, but… the entire goddamn blogosphere. You guys really stepped up to the plate, and made some amazing posts. The whole community seemed to really cohere this year, and swelled immensely in size. There were occasional bouts of drama, but nothing out of the ordinary. On the whole, you guys just fucking rocked this year. Mad props.

MOST INTERESTING BLOG

The OEG. We never figured out who exactly they were, but they sure stirred things up a lot. And, in the end, they were successful, on a much broader scale than even they intended, I think. We all underestimated how powerful our own viral marketing schemes could be, and… Well, frankly, we have the unofficial OEG panels at Fanime, AX, and Otakon to thank for a lot of the publicity. Sure, it resulted in a fuckton of trolling, but… go to any anime convention these days, and you’ll find a mind-boggling decrease in the quantity of idiotic narutard-style otaku. The fandom as a whole seems to be finally growing up, and the OEG may well have been the catalyst.

SADDEST MOMENT

The return of Jason fucking Miao. Goddammit. The one blemish on an otherwise glorious year. I won’t spend any more time on this cumdumpster than I need to.

HAPPIEST MOMENT

Do I even need to list this? I think everyone knows what’s going to be said.

Everyone was horrified when ghostlightning announced BusterBeamSlice’s illness. We all anxiously followed the hospital mess on Twitter, and were right there with him as he waited in anguish for the diagnosis. And when we heard the news…

Well, that’s when the magic happened. There wasn’t any one real leader to it. We all just kind of spontaneously rallied. And what resulted was a truly beautiful effort. I’ve seen fundraisers. I’ve seen charities. But this… this was something special. There’s a reason that baby is alive and healthy today, and the reason is every single one of you. You’re all beautiful people.

Fuck, listen to me! I got into this business to troll all of you, and here I am singing your praises! Shit man! This must have been one hell of a year, to get me talking like that.

And you know what? I have this weird kind of feeling, like 2011… 2011 might just be even better. We’ve got so much forward momentum. So much to look forward to. So much potential. All we have to do is… not fuck this up.

.lolikappa

BEST NEW SERIES

Well, the best new series this year was only barely from Japan. It was a pretty stellar new series, but… It was definitely one of the more awesome surprises of the year, we can all agree on that. The Anime Expo announcement that the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender were partnering with Production I.G. to make a new series set in a modernization of the setting… well, it was pretty awesome. The series so far has been pretty good, but seems to be missing some of the charm of the original. Hopefully the coming months will see it improve, just as the original improved drastically after a fairly shaky start.

BEST CONTINUING SERIES

Slim pickings here. Fullmetal Alchemist’s asspull of a conclusion was an incredible letdown to all but the craziest fans. No one really likes where Evangelion 3.0 is taking the series. Naruto and Bleach have both taken turns for the worse with both going on simultaneous filler seasons again. So this award is going to have to go to Bakuman. It hasn’t improved too drastically, but it has been consistently funny and engaging, with interesting characters and an original look into the manga and anime industries. It will never be anywhere nearly as popular as Death Note, but it’s continuing to be fun.

BEST MOVIE

Now this one I’m excited about. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. Wow. What a fucking masterpiece. Kyoto Animation has truly set a new standard for epic trolling. Sure, the stunt got them shut down for good, but… I would’ve killed to see the looks on the faces of the thousands of fans crammed into the theaters on opening day when an apologetic manager came out and informed them that the film itself had disappeared! Sure, it’s terrible that some of the managers were beaten to bloody pulps. Sure, it’s sad that we lost one of the most gorgeous animation studios of all time. But damn was it funny.

BEST BLOG

This one. It may have been a shitty year, but that meant plenty of shit to mock. With LKs 1 and 2 working side-by-side for most of the year, we managed to… okay, so we barely got out a post a week, at best. Between the two of us. But all of the rest of you sucked even harder, so… yeah. Fuck you.

MOST INTERESTING BLOG

The OEG. The spectacular clusterfuck of drama that surrounded the last few rounds of it were an absolutely fascinating debacle–kind of like watching a train wreck, where the train is made of everything that is wrong with otaku. I think everyone can agree that the game turned out to be a massive failure, with “otaku” everywhere claiming to be so even more, in a retaliatory backlash… I think the real failing came when digiboy and Funeral, after being revealed as the bloggers behind the mask, let themselves get pulled down to the level of the people trolling them.

SADDEST MOMENT

Ghostlightning announcing the end of WRL in light of how much time he has to spend taking care of BusterBeamSlice. It was completely understandable, but still rather sad. We miss you, GL. Especially after otou-san retired earlier in the year… we lost two powerhouses this year. : [

HAPPIEST MOMENT

There wasn’t a ton to celebrate this year, but CJ did get into her top choice college. That was cool. And from her reports, the anime club she’s started there is doing dang well. She still won’t have sex with me, though. Slut. : [

SO ON THE WHOLE, we’re not doing that much worse than last year, but nor are we doing any better. Con attendance was down. Two more major studios closed their doors. We didn’t have any particularly memorable series.

Frankly I’m not left particularly optimistic for next year. Let’s hope things improve… otherwise, well, I’m seeing less and less reason to keep watching anime, or keep blogging.

.lolikappa

Time for some anibloggerality:

Munto sucks as of episode 7; Kyoto Animation turned the once-intriguing Yumemi into a puddle of moe moe jelly and basically sexified everything. lelangir approved; I just want more Gass. Too bad the guy’s dead because he finished pumping his gas. Har. Har. All he wanted to do was BANG BANG take your akuto. *badabum tshhhhhh*

Clannad After Story’s ending is officially balls, I don’t care what the game-playing purists say. Maybe it’s a good adaptation. A good adaptation of shit is still shit. I’m not saying Clannad’s shit, I’m just saying that this scenario is possible. I do know that the execution viewed objectively was weak, and I do know that the ending felt like Mai Hime 26. Only this time there was no Mashiro-chan to fix things, just a loopy plot that somehow had something to do with some nonsensical dreamscape that just didn’t make sense. Also Fuuko is Fffffffffffffffffffuuko. There—you got it, the invective I promised not to deliver.

Anyway, since that’s all the anime I’ve watched recently, I guess I’ll move onto juicier topics like my life. (I’m just too squeezable for my own good. Some might even call me ‘fruity.’)

Yesterday I helped SAKI relocate her bunnies to a new home, if you know what I mean. You probably know what I mean because I mean what I’m saying, and words are words. Which have meanings. Yeah. There was lots of bittersweetness for various reasons, but mostly it was a good day. I read the first chapter of Twilight whilst lingering at SAKI’s place and I must say, it’s a Shaft production waiting to happen. The sickening overabundance of adverbity is not so dissimilar from Shaft’s overabundance of Photoshop filters—meaningless, trite, a disguise that obfuscates none of the shittiness beneath the underneath.

Ate some delicious curry chicken katsu for lunch (apparently, SAKI’s family is more weeaboo FUCKING AWESOME even than I, and as such eats Japanese foods with more regularity than I—which is to say, more than once a year at anime conventions), which was accompanied by several doses of “oh my god I need to not laugh my food across the table.” I hummed some Loituma and got someone else at the table to struggle against the urge to laugh food across the table, and just now I broke the limit of cluttery anti-flow a lolikit can inject into a single sentence and it just keeps going oh my god I’m going to turn into Faulkner at this rate can you believe it? Tick-Tock.

But enough about yesterday—which concluded with a slew of torrenting and taquitos—and onto today. Because apparently, I’m just blogging my life here now or something.

This morning, I attended my philosophy lecture (History of Modern Philosophy, as you might recall from my course list; currently we are studying some B.S. Ethics), and for the first time in a long time I doodled something in my notebook that wasn’t abominable. Well, it might be abominable, but I was not abominated by it. Maybe my standards have fallen. Maybe I was just happy.

After that, I met up with a high school friend back from college on spring break. This was immensely pleasurable, as I missed this friend dearly. She noted that I was more comfortable in my outgoingness than I used to be. This may be the result of my time stuck in a cubicle last semester, or it might be the result of some decking action.

Speaking of decks, could I get some WOWers to level for me? Hurr hurr hurr.

I ate lots of pizza in the company of good friends and then I went home to mom to shit out half my fullness and sleep off the other half. Finally I made it back to the dorms, a place I’d been avoiding for a week as I tended my cat for my out-of-town father, unpacked ten gallons of clothing and damp towels, thought briefly about the fact that I hadn’t watched anime in weeks and how glad I was that I had no idea what the fuck was going on in the aniblogosphere, discovered that ghostlightning’s illustrious blog had attained the coveted 100th post, cursed my fate for now knowing some of what was going on in the aniblogosphere, and subsequently shut myself out of my dormroom, sans computer, in a frantic search for SAKI, who had similarly secluded herself away from a computer.

Apparently, she was in the library stacks on campus, in the deepest and darkest corner of the trollbooth, drawing ambiguously gay porn.

… I love my life.

EDIT: yes, yes, I’ll post her drawings, up in the Rule 34 section, once I feel giving. Right now, I’m not sharing. Use comes before generosity. Now to go fap to my potentially female self…

This is what I am up to: school. Work. SAKI.

It’s all good in the hood aside from some annoyingly depressing shit that’s going down. Yes, I’m just mentioning it to tantalize the drama queens among you and piss off the anti-drama kings among you. I’m not going to go into any further depth, not in the hopes of being enigmatic and intriguing but just in the hopes of rambling. It’s something to mention in brief and then to rationalize the in-brief-mentioning-of, because I want to take up room, but have no coherent intelligible interesting written words to share with you. This is why I am mentioning the annoyingly depressing shit. I don’t want sympathy.

I WANT WORDS!!

I would find even cooler ways to make this post even more meaningless while preserving its loquacious and overly-verbose nature, but if I get carried away I won’t be able to click “Publish” before midnight and it won’t be Pi Day anymore.

So eat your Ushios, enjoy your nonsense, and celebrate your Pie Overlords.

All is well with the lolikit, and he will return in true form at SOME POINT.

How can anyone read this guy? His postings are rife with grammatical errors in every other sentence, an obnoxiously obstinate insistence on misspelling transliterated Japanese words instead of correctly spelling those same words translated into English, unimaginative alliteration, the repeated mistake of referring to perfectly sane characters in anime as some variation on insane (we had “killer lolis” with Higurashi, and now we have “crazy chix0rz” with ChäoS;HEAd? Come on, big boy, you can do this! Comprehend that the lens we’re seeing them through is what’s insane!), tired forced memes (“oh geass no?” He doesn’t even put emphasis into these things anymore), acronyms without the <acronym> tag, abbreviations without the <abbr> tag, initialisms without the <abbr> tag, text-transform:uppercase lulz, lyrics from some dancing animu, the list goes on…

In one post alone he has managed to touch bases with all ten of his bad habits, several of them upwards of three times. This guy is a genius like Rock Lee—a genius of failure.

Couple thoughts… one, I’m sure that the fansubbers know what "hooking up" means… and it’s perfect is Tomoya was serious about him and Mei-chan being alone without any regard for their future. Though I just can’t picture that from Tomoya who passed up a Kyou buffet and can barely hold Nagisa’s hand. We’re to expect that he’s, uh, more of man with Mei?

Totally incomprehensible.

And to make things worse? This guy is watching Clannad. Now that I really didn’t need—or want—to know.

I apologize for this post, and so should Jason. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the first thirty minutes of my Tuesday doing. It wasn’t on any to-do lists, and it didn’t advance any of my agendas. It was a very spur-of-the-moment, Zaitcev-level reactionary type thing, and it just had to happen; moreover, the toilet seat cover.

Does he not know? I’ve been waging this war on my own for years.

Here you can see DS’s original post, annotated by yours truly.

FUCK REVOLUTIONS, I WANT TO LIVE

DS says some big things, and he’s pretty vehement, but personally, I’m not entirely convinced. This is a new stance, and he has just about no experience dealing with bad anime (maybe he can see Haruhi’s shores from his back porch). I, as someone with a long history of battling anime, would prefer it if someone with more dedication were to take command.

I’m not going to say that I am most fit for this role—I know there are haters greater than I—but I would expect someone with at least half as many credentials to step up to the plate (as opposed to someone with none). Without further ado, I present unto you my credentials:

Exhibit A
Exhibit B

While Exhibit B is an example of my level-headed approach toward serious topics, it is still a commentary on how fucking bad some shitty anime can be. Read it at least three times—it’s deep.

Exhibit C
Exhibit D
Exhibit E
Exhibit F
Exhibit G
Exhibit H
Exhibit I

Sometimes, as exhibited by Exhibit I, I can be an concise anime hater.

Exhibit J
Exhibit K
Exhibit L
Exhibit M
Exhibit N
Exhibit O

In before “fuck anime, I want to live”—Exhibit O is srs fkn bsns, and if you take it lightly then you are just one more growth stemming from the cancer that is killing the aniblogosphere and giving a bad name to anime fans everywhere.

Exhibit P
Exhibit Q

Yes, Exhibit Q was, in fact, trolling on my part. Up yours, Owen.

Exhibit R

I stand by Exhibit R to this day.

Exhibit S
Exhibit T

Exhibit T is easily the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

Exhibit U
Exhibit V
Exhibit X
Exhibit Y
Exhibit Z

DS isn’t Kamina, but that’s no reason not to keep rowing. Bad anime is the power and your hatred is a hatred that will—argh, you get the picture.

One day, I was playing with some fourteen classmates on a remote island. We were all Brittanians, our parents busy with the hard work of keeping Area 11 subdued. It was summer time… and, without out parents around to take care of us, we got shipped off to this island.

For the last two weeks, it’s been nothing but boredom. My classmates were all wrapped up in nonsense like fireworks and organizing parties… I alone realized the futility of it all. Of living our sheltered, meaningless lives out in Area 11.

… but that’s in the past now.

I found a cave, the day before we were supposed to return to the main island. Within it, what I found was…

… a secret.

I invited my classmates inside, and they followed, their interests no doubt piqued by the fact that this was the first time I’d spoken to them. Yes, they followed me inside, to the cave in which we met C.Beetle. C.Beetle seemed kind at first, asking us if we wanted to play a chess simul with him. We played… all of us, all fifteen of us… we played against him, and he won. We had thought for sure that we’d win on at least one board. … it was foolish. Well, we lost, and he won. So we handed over to him our ante…

… our left eyes.

It was like we were in a mirror and he was Nahash and we were Jabesh Gilead and he gouged out our right eyes. Except we weren’t in a mirror and it was our left eyes he took, replacing them with something he called JASS. Only later did we find out that this C.Beetle fellow was a half-11. He was Japanese. JASS was a mispronunciation. JASS was…. JASS was… “Zearth.”

We soon discovered that using the Zearth, we could manipulate people. It was as if we all has Sharingans or something. It was really cool to us at the time, since we were just kids. None of us knew… none of us knew anything.

And when we learned…

… what we learned was…

… nothing.

We were pitted against groups like us from other Areas. No one cared about class or origin, it was just Zearth vs. Zearth and every time we won a battle, one of our number disappeared. It was frightening. We were scared… we were terrified… but we won all our battles, and in the end, it was just me left standing. Me and C.Beetle. And he looked down at me and laughed because I was Brittanian and I was standing in a pool of Numbers blood and my classmates were all gone.

It wasn’t that I p-particularly… cared about them, or anything. S-stupid. I… I just happened to be in the same class as they.

But they were dead. And my enemies were dead. And I realized that everything I’d fought for was dead, and I didn’t know my own place in the world anymore. And so… so I have to present to you today something terrible, something awful: yes, within this box, is the left eye I myself removed from my own socket. This, Gentlemen, is my Zearth. My second left eye. My second left eye removed. My Sharingan… my battle trophy… my curse.

…

I… I just played a game of chess with my friends.