Christopher Kincaid's Blog, page 19

Are Fans Entitled?

Steve Shives, a Star Trek YouTuber, released a video titled “Fan Service Leads to Fan Entitlement” where he outlines how catering to fans causes problems. He argues that fan-service, defined as giving fans what they want, can make fans entitled. Entitled fans demand the story, characters, and lore to develop as they want it to…

Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley

History tends to represent the voices of men and those in power. Typically, governmental officials, who are most often men, know how to read and write. And those documents are what survive. The majority of people in the past were illiterate and unable to write. Because of this, their voices disappeared outside of a few…

Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District

Geishas and the Floating World by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet examines the history and development of Tokyo’s red-light district of Yoshiwara. The name of the book misleads a little. Most of the book focuses upon the prostitutes that worked Yoshiwara. The authors note that geisha weren’t sex workers, but geisha did blur the line as…

Parallel World Pharmacy Review

Parallel World Pharmacy takes a different direction from the usual isekai. When medical researcher Kanji Yakutani dies from karoshi, he wakes up to find himself reborn in a medieval fantasy culture with all his medical knowledge intact. Fortunately, he was also reborn to a pharmacist family and, in isekai fashion, born to power. In his…

The Internet’s Spoiler Culture

Every week, some upcoming video game is leaked to the Internet. Either you have an entire ROM (read only memory) drop of the game, or leaks of screenshots and gameplay videos. For old-school gamers like me, it’s nearly impossible to avoid spoilers with how prevalent they are on the Internet. You see, I grew up…

After-Anime Sadness, Emotion Validity, and Responsibility

My article 5 Ways to Handle After-Anime Depression surprised me with the amount of comments people have posted. Feeling sad or empty after finishing a story that resonates with you is a common experience for anime fans. Now, many people would roll their eyes at this idea. “It’s a cartoon! It’s not reality. Save your…

Download “Tamamo” and “Kanzashi” for Free!

Start your autumn reading list by downloading a free copy of Kanzashi and my new book Tamamo! Kanzashi follows the maiko Mameko during the early 1900s as a murder threatens her future as a geiko (the Kyoto term for geisha). Tamamo‘s blurb: Tamamo grew up in the imperial court, where the space between words mattered…

Sketching Taoism’s Influence on Japan

Taoism, or Daoism depending on which transliteration system you want to use, like many Chinese imports, mixed with Japan’s culture and the native religion Shinto. Although calling Shinto a unified religion is an oversimplification, let’s just go with it for now. Like Taoism’s venture into the West, the philosophy took root in Japan more than…

My Top 5 Nostalgic Anime

Nostalgia has a bad reputation online. It is looked down upon because it isn’t objective. I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of nostalgia goggles: the idea that nostalgia keeps you from seeing how bad something is. Nostalgia’s warm fondness doesn’t have to keep you from knowing if something is objectively bad. What matters is…

The Value of Calm Silence

Because speech emerges externally from internal activity, whenever you are restless you speak thoughtlessly. You’re apt to be garrulous and flippant, speaking immoderately, talking too much, perhaps making up tall tales for the occasion, perhaps angering others by intemperate words. -Yamaga Soko Yamaga Soko (1622-1685) wrote many bits of wisdom to the samurai he knew.…