Author: Tiberius

Here, you will find a variety of opinions in anything and everything concerning entertainment. Movies, games, animation, music, TV; if it's a form of entertainment consumed by many, I may have written about it or I plan to do so in the future. Unless otherwise specified, expect weekly updates each Friday.

True Crime/Noir Media

TiberiusLeave a comment

My third favorite genre

There’s no question by now as to what I like. Most of my posts here have a video game or animanga focus, but let it be known that I have more in store than Japanimation and rhythmic button-pressing. It’s the title of this post which I should clarify. While I used to gravitate mainly mobster/organized crime centered media, for the most part the characters and organizations therein were largely fictional or fictionalized. Stop me if this sounds familiar: mobster movies tend to require a bigger commitment compared to video games like the Mafia series, select GTA games, or the video game version of The Godfather. All solid series and franchises in their own right still, but even within a genre we each have our preferences.

But obviously fictional media interpretations of the Mob didn’t come from nothing. Crime fiction as a genre’s always been there, just look at the westerns. Lawmen, gunslingers, outlaws, big names like Billy the Kid, Bass Reeves, the Earp brothers. Whatever the criteria is for crime media, if it involves someone stepping on the law to get to a goal while someone else representing the law is stopping at nothing to stop them, then by all accounts it’s a crime movie… which probably means Lord of War falls into that too by my standards.

Yuri Orlov may as well have been Major General Smedley Butler: they both had rackets on three continents.

And this is quite apt, as Yuri Orlov was said to draw inspiration from the real life Merchant of Death Viktor Bout. And he’s not the only fictional criminal to be based on a real mobster. Sometimes the real life mobster themselves is fictionalized. If you know anything about Prohibition, you no doubt know about Al Capone and his ability to fool the cameras at least until St. Valentine’s Day. And since that time and following his death, countless movies have come out with him as the prime inspiration.

As for how I got to this genre, that’s really hard to say. At first, I thought it was from the GTA series, but looking back that’s probably inaccurate in my case. Movies? Kind of… my grandma does have The Godfather trilogy and numerous westerns, but I didn’t see some of these until I was at least 12. TV? Definitely not, my mom barred me from watching Family Guy until I was a teen due to sexual content. So in lieu of a true origin, I’ll explain some of my favorite media pieces from this genre. Starting with a game that puts you in the same boat as the law instead of against it.

Post-WWII, Los Angeles, war hero turned LAPD lawman Cole Phelps fights crime in the City of Angels. This is how it starts, but later in the game a conspiracy spearheaded by some of the city’s top officials is underway. The game gives the player glimpses of this in a string of newspaper clippings that can be found during gameplay, coupled with an interspersing of Cole’s service in the Marines during the war. Once everything is put together by the end, you have a near-perfect storyline.

I say near-perfect because the development of this game bogged down its own potential. A video game director who’s behavior would be welcomed in a Brazilian junta; a poorly populated 1940s rendition of L.A.; a finnicky motion capture technique that made interrogation impractical; a piss-poor implementation of a penalty system; and most disturbing of all, a dead studio.

Mechanically, it had great and interesting ideas, and if given the room to spread (read: taken out of McNamara’s hands at the time), these ideas could have inspired future developers for the better. Instead, it and the firing of Jason West and Vincent Zampella of Call of Duty fame unearthed a culture of toxicity that the video game industry is still trying to shake off. No matter the intention, eight years in the inferno for a paradoxically half-baked product tells anyone reading up on Team Bondi all they need to know about how things were handled from beginning to end.

To my knowledge, we haven’t had a story that nightmarish before or since then, but there’ve been several close calls. Needless to say, the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded at Bondi is why I put L.A. Noire so low on my personal tier list. Without the crunch and a better management of time (and perhaps sacking McNamara), L.A. Noire could’ve turned out better than what we got in our timeline.

For a series I’d put firmly in the middle:

So far, I’ve had three different hot takes:

  1. Kratos was right mostly
  2. Boruto’s not that bad mostly
  3. Chainsaw Man is predictable

We’ve got another on the list: The Godfather is Mid. And depending on who you ask, this is either sacrilegious or moot. It’s an influential novel and movie trilogy. It adds nuance to otherwise dastardly characters. It’s a source of inspiration for numerous directors on the big and small screens, but to me, much of this is a little lost in translation. It’s like playing GTA III after reading a list of all the game that have drawn inspiration from it, narratively or mechanically.

It’s not so much that I think it’s unbelievable (as in the laws of logic would never allow it), or that I think it’s terrible (clearly false), or that I’m saying it’s overrated, though others have said that before. It’s more like before and since The Godfather, there’ve been truckloads of mobster movies that I think did better than The Godfather. It might be the emphasis on subtlety that bogs it down for me, but a visual medium like film–while capable of telling instead of showing–should still show instead of tell, or in this case, show more than it tells. From what I remember it was 2/3s tell and 1/3 show.

But it does its job phenomenally well. Inspiration, references, inside jokes (even bad ones); I haven’t found a single person who hasn’t heard of the franchise in one form or another. It took the tropes of the old 1930s and 40s noir films and put new spins on them while also inventing some of their own. Watch a mobster movie or TV show made in recent memory, there’s a good chance that it’ll draw at least one thing from Mario Puzo’s novels or Francis Ford Coppola’s movies.

At this point, I’ve thrown shade at a big movie, suggesting I think there’s something better. Well, not exactly better but more so one I like a whole lot more than The Godfather:

For this one, I was a bit late. The other stuff I’d known about for years; I was first introduced to Black Mass the year it’s film adaptation released.

Channel: Warner Bros. Pictures

In the lead up to the release I read the book by Boston Globe journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, intent on getting the full story of it’s star, James “Whitey” Bulger. Interestingly, the movie released a few years after the F.B.I. closed in on him in the summer of 2011 after 12 years on the lam. At first, I thought that the idea was exercised shortly after his arrest in California, but ever since the book was published in 2000 (and of course re-released 15 years later for marketing purposes), different ideas were thrown around to get an adaptation off the ground, but they didn’t exactly take off until 2015.

For my take, I’m sort of glad we got the final product that year as opposed to, say 2005. The movie mostly focuses on Whitey’s activities between 1975 and the mid-80s, but the epilogue detailing Whitey’s and his associates’ fates after the fun’s over is what sticks with me. Some of them snitched and got comparatively lenient sentences, others were thrown in jail for life or were sentenced with lifelong shame for colluding with Whitey Bulger himself, and the rest of the snitches were released earlier than the others for cooperation and continual good behavior.

As for Whitey himself, well as previously mentioned, an unnamed source warned the F.B.I. field office in L.A. that he was seen in Santa Monica, and he faced the consequences of his actions to the tune of two life sentences plus five years and a civil asset forfeiture of his riches totaling $25.2 million and another $19.5 million in restitution. Unfortunately for him, he’d fully serve these sentences on October 30, 2018 when he was bludgeoned to death by another inmate. Seems it was only fitting that his end was as grizzly as his life and leadership of the Winter Hill Gang.

As it stands, this is really the only mobster story that concerns an Irish mobster instead of Italian ones, and I’m always looking for stories on other mobsters the world over, not necessarily Cosa Nostra style. As of writing this, I’m trying to do some research on the Triads and the Yakuza for a story idea I have set in East Asia and concerning some of these characters. Fingers crossed, the research I do on these serves me well when I open a new Word document and get to typing. And it’ll also serve me when it comes to researching organized crime in other parts of the world. I know that they’re all there, it’s just that perhaps that I’m a New Yorker, a resident of the city where arguably the Mafia started and thrived, the origins of the Mafia and subsequent media genres thrives in this city, and most mobsters here being Italian or Jewish (see Kosher Nostra/Jewish-American organized crime for more details) sort of colors my view and at times my expectations of organized crime rackets, even fictional ones I hear about or create myself.

I also want to give a few honorable mentions to a few other properties I either haven’t seen but heard were good or I have seen but haven’t given them a proper ranking yet.

  • Casino (1995) — owing to what I’d been talking about with mobsters inspiring Hollywood, Frank Rosenthal’s gambling prospects were an interesting choice that I believe paid off quite well.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — it meets my personal criteria of a crime movie and while I’ve neither read the book nor watched the movie, the premise seems like it’s worth a watch or read or both. If you’ve read the book, watched the movie, or both, don’t spoil me. I wanna go in blind.
  • To Live and Die in Los Angeles (1988) — also meets my criteria, but deals more with high crimes. I’ll rank it properly once I see it… in 10 years.
  • Fargo (1996) — The cinematic equivalent of you don’t have to do anything wrong for a plan to cock up disastrously. If anything, if anyone before this thought the Upper Midwest was to chaste for criminal behavior than digging through news archives of high profile crimes should change that perception. Fun fact: I watched this prior to typing my third manuscript. I anticipated a few scenes where the characters would pass the time talking about recently released movies and this was up there along with Waterworld, Fatal Attraction, and Pretty Woman. Fargo didn’t make the cut, as I recall.
  • Miller’s Crossing (1990) — You can’t really go wrong with the Coen brothers. The synopsis itself sounds quite complicated, wait ’til I see it in action; and finally;
  • No Country For Old Men (2007) — another Coen bros. flick, I saw this at a relative’s house a few years ago, and as cool as it was then, I think it’s worth a rewatch. I don’t know why films did and some still do this, but quiet mumbling as dialogue interspersed with operatic action noise is goddamn annoying. Dramatic or not, it makes me feel like I’m getting long in the tooth when a dialogue scene is near mute while the action scenes have the loudness of artillery volley fire.

Quite a list to try and rank properly. Maybe I’ll come back to this in the future.

Long-awaited Update

TiberiusLeave a comment

Doing what I should’ve done about a month ago.

Hello, subscribers and tourists catching this on the fly. I’m known as the one who publishes ironically non-controversial takes on entertainment, mostly video games and animanga as of late. As I recall, the only hot takes I have on hand are these three:

1. Kratos did nothing wrong (sorta)

2. Boruto is slightly above average, and;

3. Chainsaw Man was predictable (to me)

And some others that might be expressed in the future. I’m writing to inform you all of something I should have updated everyone on in October 2023. After ten long years, I’d finally self-published my book. It’s called Dawn of Freedom. It’s a fictional crime story set in the early 2010s in New York, which was modern-day when I wrote it years ago. I’d struggled trying to navigate the publishing world and had to rewrite the manuscript multiple times, but I pushed through and saw it come to print. If you’d like to check it out, I have an Amazon link below for you.

PROOF: Dawn of Freedom https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJSWNHSG?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Available in print and ebook form.

The Hunt for Unsung Manga

TiberiusLeave a comment

I’ve come across a lot of manga series over the years, and while I don’t remember all of them, if I had something similar to My Anime List, I’d probably rank the ones I’ve read or heard of in terms of read (past tense), reading, going to read, or no interest; and based on what I’ve recommended across this blog this year, I’d say that there’s going to be a lot of series that the average manga reader has never heard of or can’t find through conventional means. However long you’ve read manga or watched some of their corresponding anime, you’ve undeniably heard of series like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball, or One Piece. And you know some recent trendsetters by name: Attack on Titan, Sword Art Online, KonoSuba, My Hero Academia, etc.

But be honest with me: before reading some of my entries from this year, did you ever know about Wave, Listen to Me? Or Rokudenashi Blues? How about House of Five Leaves? Mashle? Black Torch? No? Well, that’s to be expected. Some of these have only recently gotten their well-earned press and praise and the others rode that ship ages ago. Rokudenashi, for instance, is from the 1980s and it shows.

Only JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure still looks like this.

This quest of mine to find and screen through manga we’ve never heard of or haven’t heard much about is in equal measures personal and exciting. Personally, I don’t mind much of the series that get praised online these days or even IRL, but sometimes the praise can be a bit much. Although I enjoyed Chainsaw Man, my previous excursion with Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki subconsciously colored my perception of the anime. It took me a while to realize how similar they were in structure, but fortunately for Tatsuki Fujimoto, CSM is more comical in comparison. Takaki’s manga seems to have been a victim of the times.

As for the excitement, call it the general sense of joy that comes with discovering something new. And it’s not these are hard to find. Google and Bing are likely to have them indexed and sites like Mangadex may have it in the archives. As for discovering the series myself, some series were the result of accidental Google searches. Others came from digging through the Manga Plus front page or reading an article about supposedly underrated series.

This one specifically came from when I was trying to Google Do You Love Your Mom, AKA the MILF-sekai.

Alternatively, there’s online forums dedicated to discussing manga, the most common one for me being Reddit. It is worth keeping in mind that sites like this will have a younger audience (i.e. early middle school to middle high school age), so what was popular when you were graduating is gonna be seen as old by the time some of these users are your age. I’m writing from personal experience and the weight of this gap is felt for me, but hey, at least Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon still make the rounds, even through memes.

Another point to bear in mind is availability. There’s a difference between knowing the name of a series and knowing where to read it. Mangadex is a weeb’s go-to for series that are running but can’t be easily found, but there’s a chance the series in particular is available to the public in some form or another elsewhere. The only barrier in that aspect would perhaps be the age of the reader or just a trip to the local bookstore. Any Barnes & Noble employee worth their salt would know better than to let a high schooler go home with a raunchy series, but let’s be real there’s always a loophole. Grab a friend who’s older than 18 or go online like everyone else.

Going back to Mangadex, there’s no shortage there of the big four genres of Shonen, Seinen, Shojo and Josei, but if you want something 18+/hentai, then Mangadex will not help you. Even these sites have their limits, and that’s fine. Digging through a pirate site that’ll have what you’re looking for is tricky. In my experience, some pirate sites are overridden with pop-up ads that open a new tab bursting with malware, and it isn’t always when looking for hentai. Some Korean manhwa get scanned and translated into multiple languages by groups advertising these services on donation/contributor sites like Patreon, and many of the pirate sites that they end up on are all third party hosts.

Other sites like Webtoon or Toomics do host them free of all the issues that come with a pirate site, but sometimes have a string or two attached. I’m not lambasting these sites for putting walls up to entry. That’s what deserves praise. It may sound odd of me to admit to pirating while also condemning it, but I’ve been clear on where I stand on that. For some things that, thanks to the passage of time, have grown increasingly difficult to find conventionally, piracy is the most convenient* way to experience it firsthand; and I apply these same rules for series that have concluded or ongoing series that aren’t available in your region (*it’s not always reliable though).

For something ongoing, general or NSFW audience notwithstanding, if you’ve got the means to do so, it’s heavily implored that official releases are supported and as tempting as it is to head for the raw, untranslated version, I won’t act like I have the authority to stop you but for some series, unless you can read and speak fluent Japanese or Korean, I don’t recommend pulling double duty running the dialogue and speech bubbles through Google Translate. Depending on how it’s written, straight translations will contain slang and references that are gonna get lost that way. Translate has gotten better over the years, but it’s no substitute for a structured class. And finally, these languages have scripts that can and do show up as calligraphic works of art. I find it beautiful, but tracing the damn characters into Translate, especially on mobile, gets tedious quickly.

Now I’ve not abandoned or wholly used uncommon means of getting to my favorite series. I recently downloaded the Shonen Jump app on my phone and I have a tab on my computer logged into Manga Plus, and true to the title of this week’s post, I’ve discovered a new manga series that I’d like to explore further called Beat & Motion.

Take this as more of an exploration for how to discover new or underappreciated series and my experiences doing so. My method of doing so, though, is quite slapdash and haphazard, so if there’s a more sensible way of going about this, use that method to the fullest extent. Only go on sites you trust, and please use a VPN of some kind. Opera and its GX variant go a long way, but if you have the means to my recommendations come from those that I’ve seen sponsored on YouTube including but not limited to Dashlane, Atlas, Express, Nord, and Private Internet Access. I like to think everyone is in wide agreement that nothing ruins the fun of reading manga/watching anime more than when a simple mouse click puts you on a site with malware on it.

But of course remember to have fun with what you find.

Black Lagoon Motherf[sheep noises]r

TiberiusLeave a comment

*gunshots*

This series needs no introduction. It’s famous in the animanga circle for its name, its reputation, its characters, its violence and most of all its f[Boost mobile chirp]ng swear count.

Channel: Edwin De Paz

It’s mostly famous by its anime, but it started off as a manga by Rei Hiroe in April 2002 and has run ever since in the Seinen manga magazine Gene-X, for far, far longer than the anime and its OVA ever did. The clip above (which is understandably though unfortunately age-restricted) is one I will see sometimes on YouTube or Reddit because of course. It’s badass, it’s f[monkey screeches]ng awesome, but around the gratuitous gory action is an appropriately mature story.

I don’t remember when or how I learned of Black Lagoon, but I think it was through some WatchMojo clips about anime gunslingers that introduced me to the series, and it wasn’t until I was in the middle of college that I got around to watching it properly. Before we begin describing the series, no matter your opinion on subs or dubs, I heavily implore you to watch it however you can in English. I mean zero disrespect or offense to the original Japanese VAs, but the writing of the dub makes all the swearing necessary. F[gun cocking]k hits far harder in this anime when accompanied by the sounds of a firing range in comparison.

The premise is this: in the mid-1990s, Tokyo-based salaryman 25-year-old Rokuro “Rock” Okajima and a department chief are hijacked in the South China Sea by a trio of pirates onboard the Black Lagoon PT boat and calling themselves Lagoon Company. The chief leaves Rock to his fate and he joins up with Lagoon Company’s members consisting of Vietnam vet Dutch, Chinese-American gunslinger Rebecca “Revy” Lee, and South Florida computer programmer, Benny.

As the fourth face of Lagoon Company, Rock is the glorified diplomat if Dutch is unavailable, especially since there’s an equal or greater amount of time on land than on sea, mostly in the fictional border city of Roanapur, Thailand. This base of theirs is also home to many more organized crime syndicates the world over including but not limited to Colombian cartels, Russian and Sicilian mobs, the Triads, and the Yakuza.

As for the cast of characters Lagoon Company faces, it’s quite a mixed bag. Just about everyone in the story is motivated by coin, though there’s a fair few who have their own ideals and tenets, not all of them savory or agreeable. Criminals, extremist organizations, drug lords, and general psychopaths are drawn like moths to flame.

Hiroe’s inspiration for Black Lagoon was inspired in triplicate: news reports about piracy in the South China Sea from the 1990s (hence the setting), the writing drew from a variety of influence like Stephen King and James Ellroy, filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, and overall crime noir and Hong Kong action cinema, and other mangaka like Kenichi Sonoda who created Gunsmith Cats (another series I wish to cover one day) and Akihiro Ito who created Geobreeders.

The characters and setting are all diverse in appearance and in skillset, especially protagonist Rock who skirts by on a lack of battle sense with the powers of negotiation and diplomacy. The setting of Roanapur among other places would make the guy an ill fit since he’s not really seen as bloodthirsty as the others, but then again, the wider cast of characters is exactly that unpredictable, or (spoiler incoming) you wouldn’t really expect a guy like this to be an arsonist, would you?

Speaking of which, this speaks to the creativity of Hiroe, understanding that there’s no bog-standard look for a criminal. Some dress in suits, others are tattered, and the rest are casually dressed. The same goes for some of the child characters in the show. Conceptually, almost everything is thrown into the kitchen sink when designing a character and putting them in the story.

As for the chapters themselves, Hiroe has stated in interviews that unlike mangaka who release weekly chapters, he employs a slower approach, often taking as long as a month to release a new chapter, and normally for two reasons: to avoid burnout experienced by mangaka of several popular series still running, and also for mental health reasons. For what its worth, if the research for the series has him glued to news screens and snippets combing over crime on international waters, then it can get daunting keeping it plausible yet exciting. Or if its a series of other things that see him taking multiple hiatuses from Black Lagoon, then whatever happens, the series already gets high praise online and in real life from Japanese and western audiences alike, and not to sign a Death Note of sorts, but even in the worst case scenario, his flagship series will progress toward an ending, even if it isn’t him specifically who will finish it.

Someone will be there to finish it, with him or for him. And no matter what, Black Lagoon started with a bang and I sure hope that when it eventually ends, it ends with a f[swords clanging]ng bang.

This week’s recommendation is the YouTube channel RunJDRun.

https://www.youtube.com/@runJDrun/about

RunJDRun is the gaming channel of John David “JD” Witherspoon, son of late comedian John Witherspoon. Beginning in June 2009, he hosts Let’s Plays primarily on this channel either by himself or with friends, but also has commentary videos on video games or just in general. JD also has a podcast that he co-hosts with his friend Paul. He normally uploads daily, and like his father, he also has TV appearances and performs stand-up from time to time in the Los Angeles area.

Boruto: TBV Chapter 3

TiberiusLeave a comment

Trickle down exposition

I haven’t forgotten about this month’s release of the latest chapter. Just spent the last two days studying it and organizing my thoughts so far. Based on what I saw of this chapter, we have more exposition of what we saw in the first two chapters followed by a last-minute twist.

Of the things introduced and explained in the chapter, Boruto expands on what the Uzuhiko technique. The basics are that it’s tied to the planet’s rotation. If hit with the Jutsu, the afflicted will be hit with a semi-permanent sense of “the spins,” so to speak. It can run for as long as the Jutsu caster (read: Boruto) desires, or until the afflicted (read: Code) dies — and this new teenage Boruto seems to be happy with the latter.

A technique that causes whoever’s hit by it to nearly infinitely spin in some manner… that sounds familiar…

Honestly, not the first time the franchise made a JoJo reference.

So let’s backtrack a bit in regard to the Rasengan. So far we have the following users:

  • Jiraiya
  • Minato Namikaze
  • Konohamaru Sarutobi
  • Naruto Uzumaki
  • Boruto Uzumaki
  • Sasuke Uchiha*
  • Kakashi Hatake

For Sasuke, he used it as a demonstration before asking Boruto if he could develop it himself. After that, he went through an intense and heated training session from Konohamaru before revealing to Sasuke the results of admittedly three days of training. Before him, Naruto worked on the Jutsu with Jiraiya’s guidance for little over a week, and before him, Minato developed the Jutsu over the course of three years.

Furthermore, Minato’s direct legacy has accidentally or deliberately put their own spin on the Jutsu, no pun intended. Naruto developed the Rasenshuriken, a powerful Jutsu that was unfortunately shelved as a double-edged sword, at least until the Akatsuki brought Pain to the Leaf Village.

For Boruto, the first of several variants had come in the form of the Vanishing Rasengan, though he didn’t acknowledge it until he, Sasuke, and the Gokage fought Momoshiki in the other dimension.

So this Jutsu keeps Code immobile yet conscious to answer a question on Boruto’s mind: the location and status of the Ten Tails. Keep this nugget in mind, it’ll be important toward the end. Just as the interrogation gets moving, Leaf ninja respond to the rogue ninja in their village, among the responding party is the object of Boruto’s vengeance: Kawaki. Speaking of Kawaki, he was in contact with Shikamaru who gives him the go-ahead for a kill order, but the opportunity is missed when Code summons a claw grime to escape through.

Earlier I wrote that Boruto was asking about whether Code knew the location and status of the Ten Tails. Out of concern for the safety of the world? Well, let me clarify: the tone of voice suggested by the panel was less of a desperation and concern and more of a boast, as if to say that after 2.5 years of training and keeping an eye out for Code, Boruto is finally one step ahead. This is where that twist comes in: before Code could get away, Boruto planted a mechanical toad on Code’s person.

Credit: Shueisha, Mikio Ikemoto, Masashi Kishimoto

Kawaki lost his chance to deliver the final blow and will most likely blame Boruto for allowing him to run off, but the last panel reveals why he allowed him to get away. Observe:

Creator: Shueisha, Mikio Ikemoto, Masashi Kishimoto

So now we wait for the week of November 20 to learn how this happened to the Ten Tails. Was it Boruto’s doing? Borushiki? Did he learn it from Sasuke? However we get to that answer it will likely be over the course of the next few months. As far as this chapter goes, it steadily creeps back into the trickle down expositional method that seems to be more emblematic of Kishimoto than Kodachi who seemed to employ what I believe was a healthy zigzag pattern of storytelling.

Clearly, I’d like to see more of this from the succeeding chapters, but it’ll probably be until at least January or February when we get more of these types of answers, and while this is largely fantasy, some of the answers to be revealed may ironically be less fantastical than whatever theories are out there proposing. But we’ll get them soon enough.

How I Found VTubers

Tiberius1 Comment

Like most things, it was slow and steady

The topic of VTubers is somewhat old hat as of writing this so nothing I write will be new, but my posts since the beginning have mostly always been like that so structurally, nothing’s changing. As for the topic itself, others have mentioned VTubers in the past before and more succinctly so I won’t go into the history as much here. But in case you’re curious on what VTubers are, Gigguk is down below to catch you up to speed. Granted, the video is from October 2020, but all things considered the landscape hasn’t changed all that much.

Channel: Gigguk

All in all, there’s some debate over the beginning of VTubing, but it’s widely accepted that the VTuber Kizuna Ai is the one to spread the idea and popularize it worldwide. Kizuna Ai debuted in November 2016, and many more have followed, mostly of Japanese origin though several from outside Japan, notably the U.S. and U.K. have had their own similar debuts. It wasn’t until 2020, that I was exposed to many of the VTubers mentioned in the video above and the talent agencies (known as tarentos in Japan) that host them and these days many of the notable and newer ones have in some manner populated my feed.

Call me paranoid and nonsensical, but I’d never had that much trust in a machine or any such program. The irony to this was that when I was in Army boot camp initially, I was set for a military occupational specialty (MOS) that would’ve had me working with telecoms networking at the time and here I am with a man vs. technology complex. It’s not all that special, humans have always looked at the strange and foreign with suspicion, but for me it’s just irrational. When I was 16, I binged all the Terminator movies in the lead up to the great disappointment known as Terminator: Genisys and I’ve always chalked that up to the reason I look at new tech with the stink eye.

Nowadays, I don’t really mind the direction AI tech is going since most of the time we’re merely putting in silly prompts and in my case, general history questions. Could we one day mess around and find out Skynet style? Who knows? We’ve got to wait and see. For my exposure to VTubers, it wasn’t around 2019 going into ’20 that I’d gotten more exposure, mostly by proxy through the Trash Taste Podcast when the boys invited VTuber Mori Calliope to the show.

Channel: Trash Taste

And it wouldn’t be the only time a VTuber appeared on the podcast or even individually with the boys on their own channels. Speaking of Kizuna Ai, Joey had her on his channel a few years ago. Gigguk did a few rare collabs with the likes of Hime Hajime, and followers of CDawgVA, the thickest Welsh boy, are very familiar with his dear friend Ironmouse and the pathetic VTuber Rainhoe. These are all jokes, of course. Check them all out when you have the time.

I’d say that VTubers like these helped introduce me to others in my feed as well as the talent agencies that host them. As explained by Gigguk in the first video here, some of the appeal of VTubers comes from the personality themselves and/or the associated lore, other times there’s something unique that comes with VTubers especially in the realm of video gaming where you’ll find a lot of them, and the rest of the time they’re recounting humorous or embarrassing stories or otherwise screwing around. No matter how many clips I find in my feed, this one of VTuber Amano Pikamee making a JoJo reference is always a personal favorite of mine.

Channel: Giobun

But even outside the realm of traditional entertainment, sometimes YouTubers outside Japan have jumped aboard the trend themselves for a variety of reasons and purposes. Back in April, I recommended the YouTube channel Rev Says Desu for his commentary on controversies in and around the anime community, notably in online forums like Twitter. Rev himself uses a VTuber model in his videos and often due to the nature of the content within his videos, he’s normally subject to demonetization at the least and harassment at the most, largely because many of the people he puts on blast from Twitter are a minority of firebrands. Most of Twitter isn’t like that I’m aware, but this is more of a problem of popular and social media giving a lot of power to people who demonstrate that they shouldn’t have it. An age-old bugbear that should’ve been exterminated years ago.

On a more lighthearted note, the messing around, joke around, fun type of VTuber is the kind that has its appeal the world over and has inspired individuals outside Japan as well as English language options being made available for Japan-based VTubers, including but not limited to those associated with the Nijisanji and/or Hololive agencies, sometimes spawning collabs and memes especially in forums like r/Animemes or its sister forum r/goodanimemes. For a while, Gawr Gura and Watson Amelia were featured quite a bit in these subs as one example.

Creator: phdpigeon

And there’s lots more fanart and such to go around.

For my mileage, I’ve come to accept that VTubers are another arm of Japanese pop culture jumping ship and spreading to the rest of the world and rapidly. As Gigguk had mentioned in the above video, some would argue that it’s a fad, a passing fancy, but 2024 is down the street and we still have VTubers debuting these days long after Kizuna Ai helped break the mold, most likely with aid from pioneers from years before. Whatever comes after VTubers I think it’ll be a while before we see it.

This week’s recommendation is a channel known as The4thSnake.

https://www.youtube.com/@The4thSnake/about

I’ve mentioned this channel on other posts before. This channel is dedicated mainly to fighting games, their lore, and individual plot points, but takes it a step further by mentioning the plots of specific characters over the course of a series’ timeline, clarifying messy plot points, among other stuff. The4thSnake specializes in Mortal Kombat lore and collabs loads of times with another channel I’ve mentioned before: TrueUnderDawgGaming. And since Mortal Kombat 1 has been out for about a month at this point, both of them are set to capitalize on the new lore brought about by this latest installment of Mortal Kombat.

Rooster Teeth On the Ropes

TiberiusLeave a comment

It really hurts to see.

I close off this weekend threefold dive on a depressing note about a company that I have an interesting relationship with. Not interesting in a negative way, more like in the sense that I found out about the company by proxy, but didn’t dedicate myself to watching it regularly until I discovered a series that really grabbed me. Notably, this one:

To elaborate further, I recall in early 2013 hearing about Dead Space 3 and at the time, I used to binge watch the YouTube channel TheRadBrad as my one and only source of gameplay on that specific game. Later in the year, I came back to play catch-ups on my way into the 10th grade and at the time, ads on YouTube weren’t as problematic as they are today. One of those ads was about a bunch of geeks from a channel called Achievement Hunter dressing one of their kids up in a suit full of screens and monitors to mimic the Internet.

This ad ran for quite some time, but I remember furiously mashing the mouse on the Skip Ad button because I needed, needed to watch more footage of this Dead Space 3 gameplay. I hadn’t thought about that ad ever since and I think when I tried looking for it on the Rooster Teeth website, I couldn’t find anything on it, but over the years, I’d be further exposed to Rooster Teeth by proxy, from old Achievement Hunter guides and references to what was then the game with the Guinness World Record for Most F-bombs Dropped.

Developer: 2K Czech, Publisher: 2K, Channel: Rooster Teeth

It lost this record to Grand Theft Auto V by a mountainous margin, by the way. By 2018, I was in community college and a subscriber of WatchMojo.com, one of their videos being published during the New Year being that of a video about online animated shows that were worth a watch, the runner-up as I recall being the anime-style series RWBY spearheaded by the late Monty Oum.

In my research years ago, I’d learned that the martial artist and cinematographer had credits in machinima (not that one) after choreographing a video known as Haloid, a blend of elements from Halo and elements from Metroid including their star characters, Master Chief and Samus respectively.

He sneak-peeked the last series he would ever work on on Rooster Teeth’s main channel in November 2012, debuted its first episode in Fall of 2013 and continued to work on the series until sadly losing his life due to an allergic reaction during a standard medical procedure in February 2015, after which RT vowed to pick up the slack and keep the show going. In the beginning, the CGI used to make the show was imperfect but the fighting choreography was stellar and spectacular. I remember hearing from a different WatchMojo.com video that when Bruce Lee was on camera, the studios had to slow it down to capture his moves, and I remember rewatching scenes like that whenever I came across Monty Oum’s work on either RWBY or Rooster Teeth’s other flagship series, Red vs Blue.

Following Oum’s death, RWBY’s animation started to look crisper, but at the cost of the plot. When I tried looking for evidence of trouble under the hood for RWBY, I couldn’t find a lot of information that was still available after all this time. The controversies around just RWBY are enough for their own blog post that I may make in the future, but from what I remember and have read in forums, creatives at RWBY or just in Rooster Teeth would pitch ideas only for others to steal and discredit them later on. The accusations are serious and outside of Twitlongers and written descriptions of the associated actions, there’s not a lot of physical evidence that is guaranteed to stay up with a history of slamming legitimate critics and trolls indiscriminately, but that’s getting ahead of the game. Still, it sets the tone for what’s going to be covered in this post. I’ve covered how I discovered and eventually subscribed to Rooster Teeth; here comes the part where I unearth the parts that drove me away from them, and for many watching, the story may sound somewhat familiar.

Long time fans of RT may recall when Levar Burton’s daughter Mica Burton joined the Achievement Hunter boys for a short time and appeared so far in about two episodes, a Minecraft Let’s Play and an Off Topic Podcast episode.

During the podcast appearance, I believe she brought forth a criticism leveraged against her, but in a display of the Streisand effect, further criticism and harassment followed. In April 2018, she moved back to LA to continue a career in acting, for a long time, it was speculated that fan backlash caused her to leave, but both Mica and her father pointed the finger at RT for failing to defend her during this time.

Sometime later in December 2018, Machinima’s (yes, that one) old assets and Rooster Teeth merged into Otter Media which was then bought out by Warner Bros. When companies merge, often that means that multiple people in similar roles at different companies are now in those same roles at one company and so the summer of 2019 brought layoffs to Rooster Teeth Productions with some of the Achievement Hunter crew on the chopping block as well. About 50 people were axed by September of that year and the following month, after riding the waves of success with Rooster Teeth original shorts and skits earlier that year, the company came down and hard.

One of the original founders, Burnie Burns, announced that he and his then-fiancé, Ashley, were off to start anew in Australia, technically making him the second figure to be absent from RT content except for RVB, the other being a man I always referred to as the Ghost of RT with how little he showed up, Jason Saldaña.

Then again, r/roosterteeth explained that Jason’s not the kind of guy to get in front of the camera like that, being present in only two skits to date, while the rest of his work is either voiced or far away from RT. And fair enough, founding a company doesn’t mean being its face, and I think Jason is one of the only few free of any RT-related controversies, unless this is his testimony:

Channel: Rooster Teeth

The controversies, however, would further mount. I said yesterday that 2020 would be forgotten due to all that went wrong that year though that was in the context of a manga that debuted that year. In this context, a lot went wrong for Rooster Teeth and then some. During the summer BLM protests, the company and much of the entertainment industry as a whole in the West vowed to make changes and have conversations about racism after witnessing then-Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck after nearly nine minutes, Rooster Teeth being one of them.

After this, the company seemed to be on a right track, quickly amending this injustice after heeding comments made by the Burtons before and former member Fiona Nova at the time, but trouble was still brewing behind the scenes. Rooster Teeth hasn’t had the best approach to handling criticism before or since. During one Off Topic Podcast episode in June 2020, they used to go by the internet-wide mantra of “don’t feed the trolls,” only to go back on this and fight them hard which some believe led to the adverse effect of two of their members being exposed for unsavory behavior, Ryan Haywood of Achievement Hunter and Adam Kovic of Funhaus, another RT production.

This was exposed in October 2020 when Kovic was fired for what I think was trespassing, though his transgressions were lumped in with Ryan Haywood’s behavior which was even worse. Over the years, it had been found out through doxing on 4chan that he was grooming several AH fans, some of whom were under the age of consent. Many of them came out and recounted being threatened into silence and in late October 2020, AH’s Jack Pattillo and Michael Jones issued a statement that Ryan was gone from the company for good. Any and all instances of his history at the company were scrubbed, save for archives from the last decade, his Twitch channel was axed in January of 2021 and that was seemingly the end of that save for a brief return to the Internet the first week of January.

That being said, scrubbing the company of unscrupulous personalities while keeping good people in seemed to be especially hard in the years since. Not exactly limited to RT as a whole (as attested by r/Army among others), but of all the places to have nepotism and favoritism, a production company with as of yet incomplete series is one of the worst places to have it. Away from the behind the scenes controversies that are causing people to leave, some shows are tanking or were ruined by executive meddling. Their show, gen:LOCK hit the ground running in the first season, but the second season makes Seven Deadly Sins season 3 look like a Spielberg production.

Channel: Mrcheese

And wouldn’t you know it, behind the scenes drama had an adverse effect on the production of this series while others either went on silent hiatus or were canned without our knowledge. RWBY still has no news behind, the series Recorded by Arizal has been silent since January 2021 (which was one series I was really looking forward to), and Nomad of Nowhere from a few years before that only has one season, but was set up for a few more to follow.

Now, most studios behind a lot of our favorite series and movies have had behind the scenes setbacks before, and only a few of the productions have been muddled or ruined by bad decisions from on high. But RT’s acquisition and shifting of hands and responsibilities seems to be a case of ruinous overstretching, and axing many decent series only to see a good series start strong and end badly.

So the problems that have kept me from any such RT-related content comes from:

  • the failure of the staff to take care of their members
  • behind the scenes controversies
  • firing or letting the wrong people go (see: Vic Mignogna)
  • putting the wrong people in positions of power; and
  • letting the wrong people head delicate projects (see: Gray Haddock)

They did get a success boost during the pandemic focusing on their several podcasts, some of which I listened to at the time, but it seems that those may be the last few reliable sources of income with recent videos failing to garner the same views as they had in the early-to-mid 2010s while the ones that do are trounced with an abysmal like-to-dislike ratio visible only to those who use the addons.

Several YouTubers have made videos on RT’s decline and possible downfall which seems more and more likely now that they’ve been moving their popular series onto their website, citing ad revenue issues. I read one comment under a Clownfish TV video that claimed that much of what’s been going on with Rooster Teeth has also happened to Machinima about a decade ago.

If that is the case, then it serves as a lesson for what the people can do to avoid this next time if RT goes under. It just crossed the 20-year mark since its founding and while I was there mainly for RWBY and Achievement Hunter, I wouldn’t have minded the changes made if they were consistent and kept up with the tempo of the company based on what I’d seen since. New personalities with their own comedic takes and such can keep things new and fresh and even produce their own talents within or without the talent, as seen with the Red Web podcast or the game show Chump. So it’s not like RT can’t attract talent; rather the people they have to answer to above them appear to be chasing short-term trends hoping for long-term benefits and it’s anyone’s guess really as to whether that means good or bad things for a project.

As for the future of RT, that’s up in the air. The personalities that left in the years prior have found their success in other ventures, and I believe the ones still there will be able to stay afloat wherever they end up. They’ve got repertoires of content that would make for a better revival of G4TV for example instead of what we got last year, but it’ll be a hard day for much of the long-time personalities and the diehard fans and the shows they love. It’ll take a hell of a miracle to bring them back up to speed if it still can. If you want a channel that covers Rooster Teeth more concisely, I personally recommend this channel: TheSneezingMonkey for more details.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheSneezingMonkey/about

Undead Unluck First Impressions

TiberiusLeave a comment

This is a long-time coming.

If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you may recall months ago when I wrote about a manga where select people get random powers of negation, as in what would normally happen to someone else doesn’t happen to the negator themselves. Lots of luck? This person gets none. Mortal? Not gonna happen. Approachable? There’s a literal barrier that keeps you from getting close. This manga is known as Undead Unluck. Created by Yoshifumi Tozuka on January 20, 2020 (the events since, my god), it’s up to 18 volumes as of writing this with 11 currently translated for an international audience. It was recently picked up for an anime adaptation in August 2022, and it’s first episode debuted on October 7, 2023 on Hulu with weekly releases to follow.

It’s too early to tell whether it’ll run for 12-13 episodes or 24-26 episodes, so this post will be a first impression of the first episode and whenever the first season ends, I’ll review it in bulk with comparisons to the manga. If the title, didn’t give it away, I’m gonna spoil episode 1. So go watch the first episode if you haven’t already, then come back when you’re all caught up.

Speaking of which, the first episode is already markedly different from the first chapter. Being early 2020, no one could predict the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic then. On a side note: I first read about it in December 2019 and said to myself, “That’s unfortunate, but as long as it stays there [in Wuhan], we have nothing to worry about.” My words were delicious, thanks for asking.

Anyway, no one knew about the pandemic’s global impact in January, news was still getting out back then, and I bring this up because the manga starts in August 2020, deep into the pandemic with lockdown and travel restrictions in place across the world. This is reflected in the anime as the first scene shows the protagonist Fuuko Izumo set to self-delete from atop a trainline with only Andy, a.k.a. Undead watching from the other side. In the manga, she was surrounded by bystanders who were attempting to bring her back to safety but were stopped when she produced a knife.

Andy still walks into the blade and touches Fuuko’s face hoping to catch some of her Unluck ability, and like clockwork, the platform collapses beneath him, causing him to fall onto an incoming train. In the manga, they show the disruption of service due to the fall, but the anime skips past that and immediately shows Undead sprouting a new body from his head.

In the anime, members of an antagonistic agency (revealed later in the manga, I won’t spoil too much) show up to apprehend Undead, but he takes Fuuko with him and flees. In the manga, with the world still being populated, a civilian witness attempts to alert the cops on an out-of-context scenario involving a naked man and a young woman in public (honestly, much of the manga is just “Out of Context” the series; it’s unbelievable).

In both the manga and the anime, Undead and Fuuko stop at a building rooftop with Undead dangling Fuuko over the edge until she explains her Unluck ability. She explains it and although it was given a single page in the manga, the anime elaborated further on this. It starts with scenes alternating between Fuuko’s last connection with her parents before the accident, and scenes from the romance manga she was reading.

The anime had introduced them early, but by this point in the manga, after being saved from an accidental slip and fall from the rooftop, the antagonistic agency, represented by men in black suits observes their target making a run for it to an abandoned site. At the site, Fuuko’s jacket snags and she loses her beanie which kept her hair under wraps for years since no hairdresser or stylist could cut it without dropping dead. At the same time, Undead is maintaining as much skin contact with Fuuko while he cuts her hair so that he can test a few hypotheses, mainly is the impact influenced by duration or surface area?

Well, he doesn’t really get that answer since this agency of black suits tracks him down to his hideout and lops off his head. They put the head in a container and handcuff Fuuko, but the Unluck comes in clutch to save the two as one of the black suits gets zapped. Undead regenerates everything below the neck and removes the card he keeps in his head as a restrictor of sorts to cut them all down to size. Between the manga and the anime, this scene is a mix of gore and action.

The main guy in a black suit holds Fuuko at sword-point and threatens to behead her too if Undead doesn’t surrender his own head. Neither of them agree to that and when Fuuko breaks free and kisses Undead on the cheek, a meteorite decimates the abandoned hospital. With just a single cell of him left, Undead regenerates full and takes the black suit’s sword as a keepsake. Putting two and two together, he realizes that neither duration nor surface area have anything to do with the Unluck reciprocated and that it may be more connected to feelings of affection. Working with that as the going hypothesis, Undead, now christened “Andy” as a play on words (works better in Japanese) by Fuuko, half-jokingly proposes that they’ll both get their desired death if they have sex… which Fuuko is clearly not keen on as they both just met. And that’s where chapter 1/episode 1 leaves off.

For my impression, I say that if follows the manga as best as it can with a few nods to real life changes. Then again, for obvious reasons, the COVID pandemic and probably by extension the year 2020 aren’t going to be referenced very heavily in media unless it’ll be for alternate changes to reflect real life or for an alternate timeline of sorts. I liked what they did in just the first episode. This being, David Production, the people who brought us JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, I didn’t worry all that much about how it would look or turn out.

This studio tends to live up to their reputation and they made Undead Unluck look pretty good for the beginning. I didn’t think they’d expand further on the origin of Fuuko’s Unluck ability with the plane explosion, but from a narrative standpoint, it’s cool to see what we’re expecting going forward. The same goes for the scenes of Fuuko’s romance manga. This is connected to the plot many chapters into the manga, but without spoiling this again, DP seems to be playing the long game of adaptation with the foreshadowing in just this episode and likely more to follow.

If the anime is 1-cour running for 12 or 13 episodes, then the last episode should air on December 23 or 30 of this year. Alternatively, if it’s 2-cour running for 24 or 26 episodes then it should wrap up its first season by either March 16 or March 30, 2024. Whichever of those comes first, I’ll save a spot in my schedule for that and cover it in a post in the future.

Call me biased in favor of the series, but I’m glad to see something I cheerlead for in the beginning get one of its dues and I hope I can say the same for The Elusive Samurai when it releases in 2024.

Tomorrow I’ll be covering a media company that is on a slow and steady decline. Stay tuned. Here’s a hint:

Animation Deserves more Respect

TiberiusLeave a comment

It hurts to see it.

Normally, I have one topic ready to go every Friday and planned on several weeks in advance. This week and into the weekend, I want to try something different, something special. A lot has occurred both in real life and the entertainment sector that may become old and stale if I add them to the empty spaces on my planner document (which goes into March 2024 as of writing this), so for today, I’ll cover my thoughts on animation today, tomorrow October 14, I will cover an anime adaptation that I’d been looking forward to personally, and on Sunday, October 15, I’ll cover the misfortunes of a company that, honestly, feels like it’s been on life support for a while now, each with sneak peeks at the end. Unlike this one, no YouTube recommended channels will be featured for those posts–just this one. Now to begin proper.

Since I was a kid, I remember part of my day was complete or going expressly well when I could turn on the TV after speeding through my homework and catching up on my favorite cartoons. Funny enough, a lot of what I liked at the time is now remembered as genuinely creepy and weird. Observe:

And it wasn’t just this one. Courage the Cowardly Dog, Invader Zim, The Secret Show, Kappa Mikey, Martin Mystery, and several other shows that I was always convinced I was the only one watching. The draw for me, aside from a series of moving drawings, was that a lot of them were so unique. They had their own art styles, plots, some of them were spearheaded by comic book artists, such as in the case of Invader Zim’s creator Jhonen Vasquez and Kaput and Zosky creator Lewis Trondheim.

They also had an air of black comedy embedded in the structure of the series, often based on works published prior. When these shows were picked up by Nickelodeon or its sister network Nicktoons, they were often marketed towards children, though often needed to keep the darker elements under wraps to avoid censorship. Still, a lot of stuff got through the cracks. Like this scene: [content warning].

And this wouldn’t be the only time, shockingly, that someone’s organs were outside them.

For all the flack cartoons have gotten for being “childish” and “immature,” it’s easy to forget that the pioneers of old like Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM had darker themes in a lot of their old cartoons. Never mind the modern day creepypastas featuring Mickey Mouse and co.; think about how many old cartoons had gun violence in them. Where else do you think we get this meme template?

I bring this all up, not so much to rant about cartoons getting soft, but more so to contextualize why I think animation and cartoons have become something of a laughingstock in the West. Ridiculous violence and anthropomorphic animals aside, it’s not like this was all western animation studios were throwing out since the 1960s onwards.

Think about comic book adaptations, like all those of Batman or Spider-Man or the X-Men. All of those comics and many successors trusted their audience, no matter how young they could’ve been, to understand the complicated themes and plot points within. For one such example, the YouTube channel, Shady Doorags, frequently covers animation and animated shows and their many mature themes. Even shows that had a high child and preteen audience like Teen Titans was covered several times, and this episode he covered earlier this year seems to have been one of the more mature ones in the series.

Credit: Warner Bros., Cartoon Network. Channel: Shady Doorags (March 26, 2023)

When referring to mature animated shows retroactively, there’s now a distinction between a show that’s mature and a show that’s adult. King of the Hill, The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad are all mature and handle maturity in different ways, through satire, social commentary, the politics within certain hot-button issues (especially if those issues are still front and center today), or some combination of all these.

By stark contrast, some recent animated shows go straight for the fences without the maturity or class of some of the older shows. I need more fingers to count the themes in a South Park or King of the Hill episode, but I’d struggle for something like that show Fairview or Legends of Chamberlain Heights among others. The same goes for maligned reboots of well-beloved properties. You probably know about the 2016 reboot of Powerpuff Girls or Teen Titans Go! or worse Velma, or if not, you know them all by their sour reputations among fans of the original properties.

Whenever I look into the main sources of criticism, similar talking points come about. Lazy art-styles, crude and purposeless humor, mean-spirited humor, a grave misunderstanding of the subject matter, and often the worst of the criticism relates to pandering. Pandering to a demographic that had a hissy fit on social media; pandering to an underrepresented demographic, likely because that specific demographic is literally extremely few in number; pandering to demographics that suffer from an advanced case of white savior complex. The types that won’t really watch the property, but will lie on the internet to look more virtuous than the person they’re arguing with over the keyboard, even if they’re talking to someone who has volunteered before in the past.

Altogether, it brings back problems animation and fans of animation were certain they’d dealt with years prior and this new generation of animators seem to be fighting an old battle. I’m looking in from the outside, but some of the recent shows coming out don’t do burgeoning animators any favors, especially if you’re familiar with what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are responsible for. Sometimes I only know about it because channels like Clownfish TV have experience and expertise on their design philosophy.

When I started conceptualizing this topic, at first I was going to write from the standpoint of award shows, but then I remembered some of the shows I mentioned in this post in passing have gotten recognition from awards boards in the past and even now so if there’s a group of people I’m asking or nearly begging to respect animation, it may be the studios that greenlight them and some of the animators that work on them. From my old high school art class, I remember learning of the philosophy of knowing the rules before breaking them, as in, learn how to draw before you put your own spin on things, and this rings true for all of animation. There’s a stark difference between Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and the Pink Panther/The Inspector art-wise, and even animator-wise. Walt Disney and Friz Freleng were not the same people, but they both learned to draw somehow.

And this is true of today’s animators. You know the old saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a lot of skill, craft, and imagination to make a disciplined practice look so undisciplined. Think about how radically different medieval music is compared to Black Sabbath. And for animation, there was a lot of respect for the creators of this:

And the studios that brought us animations like this:

The simple and obvious solution for modern day animators is multifaceted, though to take an example from the military would be to look at who’s at the top of the chain of command. I would never doubt the capabilities of a studio today since most of the time they’re only doing what they’re told; rather my efforts would be better focused on the people they answer to. Clownfish TV mentions names like Disney’s pair of Bobs, Chapek and Iger, as well as investors ignorantly chasing lightning bolts with an open mason jar, confident that it’ll hit the bottle and not them.

Then again, if we’re looking at the investor angle, as risky as it is to put your eggs on an untapped market, it’s equally risky to go for the diminished returns for obvious reasons. Call it the centrist approach, but why not blend the two together? Put a few eggs in the new and unforeseen while keeping the rest in safety boxes, only moving when things go consistently south. If the new thing fails, you still have some pennies, and when the old things lose favor, you can pull out before you lose everything. Oversimplified solution? Well, again I’m no expert. It’s just something I could see myself doing if given the resources to do so.

For this week’s recommendation, I bring you to the channel sydsnap.

https://www.youtube.com/@sydsnap/about

The channel, run by Sydney Maneetapho (née Poniewaz), covers anime and manga, but a more adult-oriented type variety of each, namely hentai. Sydney often recommends some of her own favorite series often for the sake of some guilty pleasure, but also because between all the exposure and nudity, some of the authors and artists behind these hentai have credits writing manga for general audiences, such as in the case with the author of Don’t Toy with Me, Nagatoro-san. She’s even interviewed several names in the adult entertainment industry, like retired porn actress, Kaho Shibuya, or active porn actress, June Lovejoy. If you’re looking for some recommendations or would like to learn more about topics of this nature, most of sydsnap’s videos cover this in detail or alternatively, a donation can be made to her associated Patreon page to get past the censors.

I will return tomorrow with an impression of a long-awaited adaptation.

BLACK TORCH Had Potential

Tiberius3 Comments

Wasted potential sadly

Regular readers know the nature of this blog: obscure, unheard of, niche unsung series; and occasionally something popular that’s ongoing. Following that trend, I bring to you a manga that not only had a small fanbase for its duration, but was also cancelled before it could spread its wings and take proper flight: Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki

I caught onto this quite early in 2017. It’s first chapter was included in a manga published by Viz Media about upcoming series at the time, and fun fact: this same manga showcase series had the first chapter of Demon Slayer in it.

Black Torch is about a young man named Jiro Azuma, a street punk who has the gift of Eliza Thornberry — talking to animals. One day, he meats a Mononoke taking the form of a black cat called Rago who tells him (with a cynical tone) that there are many more Mononoke like him who exist to cause chaos in the world. One of them mortally wounds Jiro and Rago possesses the boy, bringing him back to life and they defeat the Mononoke that killed him, only for he and Rago to be subdued by a special operations unit trained in shinobi martial arts for the purpose of tracking and eliminating evil Mononoke.

There’s some nuance to the plot. In Japanese folklore, Mononoke are perceived the same way as demons here in the West; wicked creatures who lurk in the dark and take possession of the innocent. The concept is similar in Japan, though in Black Torch, as seen in Rago and one or two other characters, not all Mononoke are pure evil. And for Rago’s case, well, he’s a cat and I think cat owners can relate to this aspect.

So let’s rewind and assess that for a bit. A demon that takes the shape of a household pet takes possession of an adolescent after he dies in a violent manner, and both the demon and the young man are recruited into a special division of demon hunters whose mission is to destroy the evil demons, sometimes working with the good ones or those not powerful enough to be a world-ending threat. Where have I heard that plot before?

You can chalk this up more so to coincidence than an outright ripoff of sorts. Black Torch ran for five volumes between December 2016 and March 2018. CSM debuted December 2018 and is still running today. No doubt you’ve seen what the community regards as season 1 of the anime. I know I did. 12 different ending themes; imagine being the accountant for MAPPA.

It’s easy to make it look like I’m jealous that a manga that tried this first failed while another one succeeded, but delving deeper into the Black Torch manga reveals why. It was more than just the framework of the manga. Yonks ago, I learned that a dispute between Takaki and the publisher were why his manga was axed so early in its run. In my research for this post, I found that online discourse has its own opinions for why the manga suffered. In animanga spaces around forums like Reddit, some believe that it was trying to copy Bleach but was about a decade late and a yen short. Others thought it was a case of style over substance. And a third opinion, by this blog called Tower City Media Video, proclaims that the second biggest killer was pacing. I’d like to go over these points, though I won’t be talking about the publication issue since most of the time that stuff is handled away from public eyes, presumably to keep the press from ruining an ongoing process.

It’s not like there’s no market for edgy manga. Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man and even Black Torch have that approach among others, but they all do it differently. Chainsaw Man does it by having the protagonist be an orphan with missing limbs thanks to his deadbeat dad’s irresponsible debt to the Yakuza, and when the boy can’t make a dent in that he’s chopped into pieces until best boy Pochita possesses and revives those pieces. Black Torch goes more for a rug pull of sorts. Jiro lives with his grandfather who generally has the strength of other old men in manga like Golden Kamuy’s Youichirou the Manslayer or Naruto’s Third Hokage. In fact, there’s a scene in the manga where Jiro is forced to fight his grandfather who plans to kill him and then end his own life for failing to protect his grandson from the Mononoke as well as letting a Mononoke possess him, only to walk it back as a test of conviction when Jiro fights back just as hard, as explained by this Screen Rant article.

As for style over substance, this one is a bit of a stretch for me personally. There’s no shortage of good looking series that don’t have a lot beneath the surface, but that’s not a problem I recall from Black Torch in particular. Really, without the space needed to take flight, the hints that there was a deeper story than we realize are mostly lost. I mentioned earlier that it shows that this unit of shinobi is willing to work with some of the Mononoke so long as they’re harmless, but that may also hint at a sort of mutual exchange between unlikely partners. But now that the manga’s been long cancelled, who knows whether that’s the case?

The final one by Tower City Media about turtle pacing was something I didn’t notice at first, but after reading that article and looking back, if the manga could’ve done better to pick up the pace, it probably wouldn’t have been cancelled so soon, if at all. Rago the cat isn’t the only animal Jiro talks with. In the beginning, he used to have a dog that he often spoke with while washing her, and I recall in the third volume that while he was traipsing about the woods, he spoke with a snake.

I joke, but Orochimaru wouldn’t look all that out of place in a manga like this.

If any of these points are true or there’s another factor contributing to Black Torch’s cancellation, then what may have helped Takaki would’ve been to trim the fat, get a move on with the pacing, and add more character to the characters. Jiro Azuma does well enough to make himself interesting, but he couldn’t carry the manga by himself, and going back to coincidences between Black Torch and Chainsaw Man, both had their own version of the super serious stoic type, but thankfully for CSM, Aki wasn’t copy-pasted twelve times over.

For all of Black Torch’s faults, it was at least able to end with a whimper as opposed to a bang. At least it didn’t run around like a headless chicken trying to end with an overdue bang. When I bought the manga during college, Viz charged $10 per volume up from $8 from around 15 years ago, and at five volumes, $50 plus tax is cheap for a cancelled series compared to the 20-something box sets of Demon Slayer or the 72 volumes in triplicate box sets for the Naruto manga. But of course, if you want the story that did it better, it’s not too late to catch up on Chainsaw Man.

It’s a month divisible by 2 and for this month’s recommendation is Escapist Magazine.

https://www.youtube.com/@theescapist/about

Beginning as a video game journalism site by Nick Calandra in 2005, The Escapist has branched out into general media with classic series like Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation, Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition, Movie Bob’s the Big Picture and many more. Although they have a YouTube channel (linked above), they also have a website where their series are hosted before being made public on YouTube.

www.escapistmagazine.com

No, they’re not sponsoring me, impressive as that may be. I’m just a fan.