Tsundere? Her? Nah...

October must be Tsundere Appreciation Month here at BtNHRV. Sorrow-Kun‘s random twitter thought seemed to have generated much discussion and debate amongst the readers of this blog. I happen to think that there’s no direct correlation between tsundere and sexuality or promiscuity. Each character is different; it is our reaction to them remains constant across series.

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Akira | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Bakemonogatari, Clannad, ef -a tale of memories, K-ON!, Kugimiya Rie, Lucky Star, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Seikimatsu Occult Academy, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun, Toradora, Tsundere, Working!!

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When omo, writing for his site Omonomono, gave his final impression of Angel Beats, he talked about seeing it fall under its own weight, and likened it to what a “failed” attempt to make ef – a tale of memories might look like. It got me thinking about the concept of ambition in anime, and the role it plays in the creative process. I’ve spent much of my time online in the post-Angel Beats week defending my ultimately positive impression of the series. Several bloggers have come to the conclusion that Angel Beats is a poorly executed work (which I won’t disagree with) that needed more episodes (this I’m not so convinced about). In one of the rare instances, this is a case where I think, to oversimplify to the point of being insulting, it needed less stuff… ie, less substance. But, more important than anything else, it needed direction. (Above image found on moe.imouto, NSFW.)

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Angel Beats!, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, ef -a tale of memories, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi

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Anyone who’s seen Saturday morning cartoons would be familiar with amnesia as a plot device. There’s a certain popular formula: a character suffers a bump on the head and forgets who he is, where he lives and who his friends are. Of course, this is quickly resolved before the end of an episode, and the character either recalls his memories one by one over time, or, in the slightly less believable cases, a subsequent bump on the head jolts things back into place. (This is beautifully lampshaded in The Simpsons in an episode where Homer fights Drederick Tatum. Bart tells Homer, in a surprisingly earnest father-son moment, “make sure he punches you an even number of times so you don’t get amnesia”.) (This post contains moderate spoilers for the tagged titles.)

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Angel Beats!, ef -a tale of memories, Ever 17 - The Out of Infinity, Kanon, Silent Hill

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The probability of BtNHRV receiving a DMCA injunction from minori just rose twentyfold.

There’s been quite a hubbub in the eroge-playing community this week, sparked by minori (ef, Wind, eden*) inducing an edit war on TLWiki’s eden* page. Now, for those of you who remember, minori was one of the first eroge companies to block website access from foreign IPs last year after the Rapelay controversy exploded, citing a fear of “violating local laws and causing trouble for foreign fans” as motivation. A year has passed since then, and the minori website has remained shut to foreigners. Last week, minori emerged from its isolationist shell to delete the eden* translation project in its entirety. For a more detailed and comprehensive account of the events, please read these articles. The gist of minori‘s argument: We hold the copyright to these games, and we don’t want them to be translated. Therefore, we’re going to delete all of your translations and request that you stop. Reasonable, right?

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Akira | Permalink | 25 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: ef -a tale of memories, Eroge, minori

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Squandered opportunity, staring you in the face.

This morning, I was having  a rather pessimistic discussion with an Australian friend of mine over the future of the eroge industry. I ominously predicted that at the current rate, we could expect to see the death of eroge in about twenty years. This spilled over into a general conversation about the state of the anime industry, and the need for just about everyone to begin reconsidering what anime should be about.
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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Akira | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Anime, Aria The Animation, ef -a tale of memories, Eroge, Moe, Mushishi, Spicy Wolf, Yamakan

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Like I mentioned earlier, I (sadly) have more than a passing interest in these types of awards. The 2008 Tokyo Anime Fair Awards were just announced to, as far as I can see, reasonable disinterest. I can see the logic behind the choices behind these awards, even if I don’t particularly agree with all of them (in all honesty, I surprisingly haven’t seen most of the winners, so it’s hard for me to have an opinion either way). But as Kaioshin Sama from When Anime Past Meets Present puts it, if you don’t like the results of a given set of awards, why not make your own. But it’s not like I’m taking his advice (I’m starting to sound like a tsundere now), I’ve been playing with this idea for months.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, Detroit Metal City, ef -a tale of memories, Kaiba, Kaiji, Kannagi, Kara no Kyoukai, KimiKiss pure rouge, Kurenai, Mouryou no Hako, Natsume Yuujinchou, Nodame Cantabile, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Shigofumi, Spicy Wolf, true tears, Yakushiji Ryouko no Kaiki Jikenbo - Ryoko’s Case File

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I’ll admit it, I do have more than just a passing interest in these types of awards. Obviously one affords as much credibility to a set of awards like these as one agrees with the results, and it always surprises me just how much people RAGE when they don’t, c.f. SaiMoe and its multiple incarnations. Then again, there’s more emotions involved in SaiMoe than there are in these.

This year’s list of nominations is a little more “credible” than last year’s, where, for whatever reason, titles like 5cm/s and Baccano! were snubbed in categories that they could have possibly won had they made it past the nomination round. There are a few titles here and there that I would have liked to have seen given nods, but for the most part they’ve captured the likely winners, which isn’t an all-too-easy thing to do in something that’s determined by an open popular vote. Anyway, this post is an attempt to predict the winners, which is much more challenging than just telling you who I think should win (but I’ll tell you that too ). Particularly with the AnimeSuki Forums, which is a real mix of varying tastes. I haven’t done any counting of the current votes, but I have flipped through the thread, so I have a (highly) vague idea of what people have been voting for at this stage.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 23 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Allison to Lillia, AnimeSuki Choice Awards, Aria The Animation, BAMBOO BLADE, Clannad, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, Detroit Metal City, ef -a tale of memories, Gundam (all), Itazura na Kiss, Kaiba, Kaiji, Kannagi, Kanokon, Kara no Kyoukai, Kimi ga Aruji de Shitsuji ga Ore de, KimiKiss pure rouge, Kurenai, Macross Frontier, Mnemosyune Mnemosyne no Musume-tachi, Mouryou no Hako, Natsume Yuujinchou, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rosario + Vampire, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Shigofumi, Shion no Oh, Spicy Wolf, Strike Witches, To Love-Ru, true tears, Tsubasa Chronicle, Zero no Tsukaima

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My first post on BtNHRV was centered around the eroge adaptation. More than a year has passed since then; being older, wiser (hopefully), and having played more eroge than ever, I feel as if I should revisit the subject again, as the near-absolute failure of the sub-genre perplexes me.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Akira | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka, ef -a tale of memories, Eroge, School Days

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We touched on it a bit in our Year in Review article, but 2008 did have a lot of sequels and 2009 so far seems to be following that trend. Is it more sequels than usual? Well, I haven’t bothered sorting through the data, but it sure feels that way. The difference between last year and years before isn’t so much that there have been a crapload of second seasons, but that these second seasons have cropped up in places where one wouldn’t initially expect them, and there have also been a rise in prominence of third seasons. We’re currently into a third season of Minami-ke and a fourth season of Marimite. Last year we had a third season of Zero no Tsukaima and the third season of ARIA. Later this year we’ll have a third season of Nodame Cantabile. I’m not going to bother with the question “has there been more sequels of late” because I’m not prepared to do the number crunching to answer that question… at this point in time anyway. My question is, is the proliferation of sequels a good or bad thing for anime as medium for creative storytelling.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Clannad, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, ef -a tale of memories, Full Metal Panic, Maria-sama ga Miteru, Minami-ke, Nodame Cantabile, Zero no Tsukaima

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