'Torrid' is the last word you'd use to describe these two. Even holding hands was an ordeal.

In all honesty, this is an intentionally misleading title, because none of the following anime romances can really be described as “torrid”. In fact, anime romance generally isn’t torrid at all. Romance in anime tends to be fairly subdued, and there’s an innate innocence about the emotions involved, especially compared with other mediums. Romantic J-movies tend to be obsessed with jun’ai (or “pure love”) and often come off as melodramatic or unbelievable. Western romance movies love to focus on the quirkiness and irony of love, and often seem to imply that love is an irrational response (although maybe there’s a corn chip of truth to this). And then there’s Western romance novels which sometimes don’t even bother to disguise the fact that they’re straight up smut. Their reputation as being targeted towards lonely housewives who are compensating for their own passionless relationship is well entrenched. Obviously I’m making vast sweeping generalizations here, which is necessary when trying to comment on how a genre differs across different mediums. But I want to make the argument that anime’s track record with romance is as good as any other mediums, which is something that I’m not comfortable saying about any other genre, with the arguably exception of the mystery genre (and the iyashikei genre, which is exclusive to anime and manga). This post, which features some relatively recent examples of anime couples that I really liked, contains major 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 | 12 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Clannad, La Vie en Rose, Nodame Cantabile, Spicy Wolf

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It's the busy review writing period, which is my half-assed excuse for not having posted anything on this blog for ages.

While everyone’s writing about the season that’s just started, I figured it’s a good time to go against the grain and look back at the season that just ended. Reviewing seasons is a completely different kettle of fish to reviewing a single series… there are multiple things to consider such as the number of “good” series (momentarily ignoring that there’s never a complete consensus about whether a given series is good or not), the variety on offer and whether the current trends are for the better or the worse. I don’t think there’s too much disagreement that Summer 2009 was last year’s best season (and arguably the best in anime for a long time), but in the wash-up, if our reviews are anything to go by, it was a season that had a lot of “good” titles, but only one “great” anime. (This post was originally going to be significantly longer, but I’ve split it into two parts. Arguably it weakens my argument, but it’s just much more manageable this way, and it’s not so blatantly tl;dr.)

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aria The Animation, Bakemonogatari, Hidamari Sketch, Nodame Cantabile, Ouran High School Host Club, Spicy Wolf

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This is happening a lot quicker than it did last year. This time last year there was a massive gap between the end of nominations and voting, which didn’t start until the 25th of Jan. This year, voting is going to be over before the 20th. Personally, I think it was better the way Kyomi did it last year (although I have a sneaking suspicion it was a consequence of him being lackadaisical)… well, not the massive gap between nominations and voting, but the fact that voting didn’t start until late in the month. It gives more people time to catch up and to stew over the anime they’ve seen in the last year. Some of the nominees haven’t even been completely subbed (to my knowledge and conveniently ignoring Crunchyroll), while, in my book, Bakemonogatari (which is going to absolutely clean up these awards) is still technically ongoing.

This year’s nominees are reasonable enough again. I can’t think of too many blatant exclusions (except for one which I’ll get to later). In all honesty, I’m actually less concerned with what wins than I am what gets nominated. Winning is, a lot of the time, about splitting hairs. Being nominated means that an anime has actually been recognized by a reasonably sized audience for excelling at something. 5 cm/s missing a nomination for the animation category two years ago still sticks in my mind. I’m not sure what was going through everyone’s mind during the nomination process (myself included, since I also forgot to nominate it). Since then, forum goers have been much more careful during nomination. I like to think AnimeSuki has learned its lesson.

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Copyright © 2010 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: AnimeSuki Choice Awards, Bakemonogatari, Clannad, Eden of the East, Eve no Jikan, Gundam (all), Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, K-ON!, Kampfer, Kara no Kyoukai, Kemono no Souja Erin, Natsume Yuujinchou, Saki, Spicy Wolf, Taishou Yakyuu Musume, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

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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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Not another blog post about Bakemonogatari.

It’s easy to complain. Fun too. But, equally important is being grateful. Obviously, this is easier said then done unless you have something to be grateful about, but I genuinely think that this season we, as anime fans, are spoiled for choice. It’s the calibre of anime which are on offer this season which reminds me why I became a fan to begin with. And those little reminders over the journey are necessary, especially if you’ve been in the game for a number of years. As an anime writer, it’s easy to become lost in the analysis and the details, to put the anime you watch and enjoy at arm’s length, which can make viewing them an unromantic experience. I mean, I still maintain that the onus is on the anime to provide you a reason to engage and to feel emotions while watching it… I’ll probably never move away from that viewpoint. But the idea that anime has the power to move you, to affect you in some way, to influence your thoughts and feelings… that’s a pretty amazing thing. And there have been a particularly large number of anime that have aired this season with that ability. (Minor spoilers for the tagged anime).

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aoi Hana, Aria The Animation, Bakemonogatari, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, Ouran High School Host Club, Spicy Wolf, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

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It’s still early days, but I genuinely think that there’s much more of interest on offer this season than there was last season. Maybe it’s little more than a matter of perception, but what this season has which last season failed to offer are sequels from proven franchises. It’s not a brilliant thing, since sequels are often innately unambitious, but I can look at titles like Spice and Wolf II and Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and say “ah, yes, I want to watch these”, because their predecessors were so good. Also, there aren’t too many series I’m following so far which are just out-and-out crap: even the worst series I’m watching have at least something I can enjoy or look forward to, whether it be classy music or mindless, over-the-top action. There is one exception to all of this, which is fast turning into one of the most epic disappointments I’ve ever seen in anime. I probably don’t even need to say what it is, it’s been so thoroughly discussed that you probably already know what I’m talking about.

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Copyright © 2009 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Aoi Hana, Bakemonogatari, Canaan, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Sora no Manimani, Spicy Wolf, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Umi Monogatari, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

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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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