Was this post inspired solely by the fact that Tuxedo Mask has an attack in the manga called “la smoking bomber” and reading way too far into that?
You decide.
sailor moon
[Five] The Sailor Moon S movie is pretty bad but it still means a lot to me
At least we’ll always have Mamoru’s comical, “Merry christmas! And a…happy new year!” line. The Sailor Moon S movie really is a holiday classic.
The Queen’s Gambit and what we talk about when we talk about “anime”
Prior to watching the latest Netflix thing that everyone is talking about, The Queen’s Gambit, it was pitched to me by several people as “basically an anime.” Half of the time I saw someone talking about it on social media, or heard one of my friends chatting about it, The Queen’s Gambit was placed side-by-side with an anime-style narrative. I even joked about this myself, saying that it was Shion no Ou — a psychological thriller anime series about a girl who plays shogi — with substance-abuse issues.
The Queen’s Gambit isn’t the first live-action television series that has been compared to anime, nor is it the most frequently-referenced piece of media in a side-by-side comparison. In my esports travails, “anime” often becomes a short-cut for a specific type of narrative, usually in reference to a scrappy upstart team or player making their unlikely way through a gauntlet of strong challengers. Elizabeth Harmon, the wide-eyed lead of The Queen’s Gambit, follows a similar narrative, albeit with a lot more nuance, especially when it comes to her being a prodigious woman in a remarkably male-dominated field. (Watch the show. It’s good.) The constant comparisons of The Queen’s Gambit to anime television series also offer a framework for discussing what we mean when we talk about “anime” in the west, why it’s referenced as a narrative framing device when it’s actually a medium, and maybe a bit of pleading on my part to use a different comparison.
Is The Queen’s Gambit anime?
Are esports anime?
Why ask questions with such a seemingly obvious answer?
[Three] A Sailor Iron Mouse appreciation post (and early Takuya Igarashi and Junichi Sato) — Sailor Moon Sailor Stars
When you’re a hot-shot television producer but you forget your business cards so you just end up yelling.
[Twelve] VHS tapes and DVDs in Harvard Square — Sailor Moon: Sailor Stars
Pour one out for Mamoru Chiba’s eye.
Last year, I began a full and complete rewatch of one of my favorite anime series, Sailor Moon. This year, I finally finished it.
I’ve previously waxed poetic on why I love Sailor Stars despite it being a bit of a disjointed mess. I’ve also written about how it’s inspired other anime visually — like the blocking of the Puella Magi Madoka Magica finale. This post isn’t about that.
Instead, it’s about another facet of why Sailor Stars is my favorite Sailor Moon season. Outside of the typical factors we use when rating anime — sensible things like animation quality, production, narrative coherency, overarching themes and symbolism — the circumstances and context of how we watched it and who with frame our emotional attachment. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling, and no other anime season inspires it in me quite like Sailor Stars due to how ridiculously difficult it was for me to watch it.
atelier emily 