Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

As I posted my summary of the anime I’d seen in the first three months of this year, I knew I was days away from leaving on my second long vacation in less than a year’s time, getting away once more from Blu-Ray players and broadband connections. Having found a new video player program for my iPad, and contemplating six sea days in between Mexico and Hawaii and five sea days in between Hawaii and Vancouver Island, I didn’t intend for this to be altogether a “vacation from anime.” (I was also thinking a bit of reports that multicultural television in Hawaii had happened to show some anime in the 1970s and that that, more than memories of Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and some other “localized” cartoons in the 1960s, had got a first few fan-types thinking there were some interesting animated series in Japan... However, it wasn’t until my last day or so in Hawaii that I happened to think “now wasn’t ‘Kamehameha’ a term in Dragon Ball too?”) On coming back, though, I did decide at last I had to start turning in earlier to get to an early start-of-the-day meeting at work yet feel refreshed in the morning. I could still watch two episodes of anime in a weekday evening, but that began to feel a bit too extravagant with less time in general available in those evenings. I suppose having limited time to watch all the anime that’s caught your eye could be better in a certain way than having got to the point where you just can’t find anime that interests you, but there might be the eventual risk of feeling overwhelmed by what you can’t quite get around to.
( Back to one beginning: Pretty Cure )
( Forward to a follow-up: Major 2nd )
( A super robot wrap-up: Getter Robo )
( Return to streaming: Love Live Nijigasaki Next Sky and Nijiyon 2 )
( Return to Blu-Rays: Machine Robo Revenge of Cronos )
( Beginning once more: Patlabor OVAs and Movie )
( Extra unusual service: Akiba Maid War )
( One concluding surprise: Dead Dead Demon's DeDeDeDe Destruction )

Three months ago I was back to normal (again) when it came to my access to anime. More than that, people were getting enthusiastic about upcoming series. While I still had intentions of watching an older title or two at a higher tempo than usual for me, I was ready to try a number of new shows. Things didn’t work out quite that way, though.
( The dominating force: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End )
( Old and newer: Galactic Gale Baxingar and Summer Time Rendering )
( Actual continuations: Spy x Family and The Ancient Magus’ Bride )
( Further elaborations: Soaring Sky Pretty Cure and Gundam Build Metaverse )
( Respectable to a fault: Pluto )
( Theatricalities: Cyborg 009, Gundam the Origin, and Love Live! )
( Does it count?: Scott Pilgrim Takes Off )

Two months ago I was tapping in as usual to the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game when, in the course of reading the news updates, I ran into an announcement the game would be shutting down. Having plugged away at the game since it became available in English, the news was a bit of a jolt. No more than a few moments later, though, I was at least telling myself the game really was a time sink for all that I liked it well enough to keep playing, and through an intervention of sorts I’d be getting that time back even if only to fritter away on an assortment of things now. I’d also been thinking that in the summer I’d be at a point at last where I wouldn’t be able to tap into the game every day and would just have to deal with missing out on the daily and weekly items for a while. Having the game shut down altogether before that at least settled things there for me.
( Shutdown preparations )

So far as “drifting back to the way you used to do things” goes, three months ago I was once again contemplating having put myself three months behind everyone else watching new anime series for a good many seasons. The singular case or two in seasons just past I did relinquish “waiting for the all-clear from other fans” I’m afraid I did get more or less stung by production delays or just plain curdling opinions. However, with my grand (or just grandiose) plans to “watch sample episodes from all the years since Mighty Atom got on TV” leading to thoughts of “trying to concentrate just on that to better experience time’s march,” wondering about winding up six months behind everyone else had me thinking it might be time for a bigger gamble at last. It just might have helped that not that many shows from the season just complete seemed to have wound up attracting real enthusiasm; there was anticipation for a certain number of impending series, though.
( Deepening adventure: Daltanious )
( Speedy pickups: Legend of the Galactic Heroes Die Neue These and Spy x Family )
( The surprise: Cyberpunk Edgerunners )
( Mechanical and magical girls: Gundam the Witch from Mercury and Delicious Party Pretty Cure )
( Filling diamonds: Love Live Superstar and Taisho Baseball Girls )
( Two big names, one happy chance: Mob Psycho 100 III, Do It Yourself, and Chainsaw Man )
( Multiple movies, too )

That much more prone in recent months to thinking ahead to what anime I’ll watch once I’ve got through what I’m viewing now, I happened to reflect on plans to spend the last weeks of September on a bus tour. With certain preparations, I’d be able to follow certain series on the road; others would have to be dealt with before leaving. In the end, though, I decided to just finish everything in advance; “taking a vacation from daily viewing” could seem a bit appealing too. When we had to be bumped to a slightly later tour that might have become a bit easier, but I then had to consider how I’d been hoping to at last get back to watching some upcoming shows as they streamed and would now have to catch up on them and, perhaps, not post this summary at the very beginning of October. Then, it turned out the tour had to be cut short, and I returned to my routines and a summary I’d already been typing up. Where sometimes the jumble of titles I report on is organized by the order I began watching them in three months ago, here they’re organized by the order I finished them in.
( A speedy yet rewarding review: Mob Psycho 100 )
( Going theatrical: Belle )
( Augmentation completed: Den-noh Coil )
( Adventures completed: Shinkalion Z )
( The legend continues: Legend of the Galactic Heroes Die Neue These )
( A family caper: Spy x Family )
( Taking a chance: RWBY Ice Queendom )
( Swinging for the green: Birdie Wing )
( A tasty adventure: Delicious Party Pretty Cure )
( Back on stage: Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club )
( More than what might have been: Daltanious )

Flareups in the past several days of “complaints about the translation of anime, manga, and related works into English” got to the point where I couldn’t miss them. I do try to keep an even strain about this, prone to telling myself “these light entertainments aren’t worth getting so upset over” (and perhaps I’m not that far gone from the days of “the first upslope of anime and manga popularity” I was around for to have forgotten the possibility of not setting up extra walls against others getting into it too), although I can worry that people get so upset because it’s a distraction from getting upset over bigger and more ominous things.

In the midst of all of that, though, I was working my way through the story segments of yet another challenge event in the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game when one of the teenaged girls was translated as saying something a little too coarse for my very scrupulous nature to repeat. That’s not to say I can’t imagine other characters in the franchise using the phrase, but I suppose it didn’t match my own sense of the girl in question. I didn’t “fly into a rage and resolve to learn Japanese so I don’t have to depend on anyone else’s skewed take on things,” but I do have to admit that for at least a moment or two I might have come a little closer to comprehending the indignation of others on disagreeing with “cheap translations of works aimed at an audience not quite a long-refined market for foreign art.” (So far as not having made the effort to learn Japanese, there’s a little matter of lazy streaks too.)

At just about the last moment in a self-set evaluation period of a new mobile music game in the Love Live franchise, I sorted out I could collect even the most valuable daily reward in School Idol Festival All Stars without having to plug through ten two-minute rounds every day, and supposed I could keep playing it a bit longer. More unfortunately significant there than that, though, was that it wasn’t long after that until I’d holed up in protective isolation and was being set up to work from home. That did make it a bit easier to spread my game sessions throughout the day (even as “play at home” promotions got offered), and I levelled up my teams little by little and delved into the game’s story content.
( It’s already been a while )

2013 marked fifty years since Osamu Tezuka adapted his Mighty Atom manga to animation on television, and I did spend part of that year keeping up with the posts on a weblog that marked the anniversary by looking at all the years in anime since. So far as the conventional wisdom sloshing around went, there remained outcroppings in those commemorations of “anime just isn’t what it once was”; for that matter, too, I did eventually take in a stronger reminder or two there had been animation in Japan before Tezuka, perhaps in advance of criticisms he put the industry on a path to overworking underpaid artists. (However, his work in comics may do more to protect him in the estimation of others than William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s work in theatrical animation did to protect them against judgments of their own television work from the 1960s.) In getting past that anniversary year, though, I can look back and think some series from it have wound up impressing me, even if I can’t quite single one out as better than all the others.
( My selections )

I suppose I look at the "Manga Bookshelf" site fairly often. Seeing the eye-catching title "Last and First Idol" on its front page, though, left me with an impression of having been lucky to have had something so precisely combining diverging personal interests catch my attention before the steady march of new content could push it out of sight. Sean Gaffney's review had explained the electronic release from J-Novel Club was a collection of three short stories using idol singers and other tangents off the anime-manga nexus to set up some pretty hard science fiction. I could amuse myself wondering how many other people have not just some interest in idol singers (I might not have quite as much as some, but it seems "enough") but also some awareness of a science fiction book from the beginning of the 1930s, less a conventional novel than a "fictional history" of its near to a very far future, named Last and First Men by an English author, Olaf Stapledon.
( An existential widescreen yuri baroque proletarian hard sci-fi idol story )

Three months ago, as one more "quarterly review" of anime viewed meant working out one more explanation why I'd more or less missed out on what seems the modern game of watching new series on a weekly schedule through official streaming, I was at least thinking things might be different in the summer. In those three months I wasn't away on a long vacation, and yet in just their first week or two I realised I'd once more sit out the game.
( The latest explanation, and RWBY )
( Starting off at last: Little Witch Academia )
( Getting around to it: Ano Hana )
( Mirror experiences: Zeta Gundam and Gundam Double Zeta )
( One conclusion: Mobile Suit Gundam Char's Counterattack )
( A peculiar experience: Chargeman Ken )
( Again at last: Love Live Sunshine )
( A nostalgic discovery: Star Gunman Bismark )
( Another conclusion: Gundam Unicorn )