Christopher Kincaid's Blog, page 7

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Explains the Crisis of Middle-Aged Men

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, also known as My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected and Oregairu seems to be far away from lending any fictional insight into the plight of middle-aged men. After all, the anime has its focus in the title: teen. SNAFU explores the difficulties of first love, one of anime’s favorite themes. But the story offers many parallels with multiply-divorced middle-aged men’s difficulties. As with my other, longer treatments of narratives, this one will contain sp...

Trigger’s Triumph: The Hero’s Journey in Kill la Kill

Kill la Kill, released in 2013, follows the Hero’s Journey template, as Joseph Campbell outlined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces with interesting tweaks to the timeless formula. I’ve already written about how Kill la Kill satirized and leverages fan service quite a while ago. I decided to revisit this work after a decade to see how well it holds up. Trigger’s animation remains frenetic. They use Kill la Kill’s simplistic character designs to good effect, exaggerating for maximum humor...

The New Emerging Trend in Anime

For the past decade or so, moe has dominated. Moe designs seek to create a feeling of attachment with the audience, eliciting desires to protect a character. Moe character designs achieve this through various techniques, chief of which are the eyes. Moe eyes are large and dominate most of a character’s face. Eyes are the most expressive part of the human face. People connect with each other through connecting gazes. Considering this, it makes sense that moe designs aimed at maximizing character...

Immortality Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be – A Free Light Novel

I wrote Immortality Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be for fun several years ago. It languished on my file server, destined to never see a reader along with various other half-baked, mostly finished novels and nonfiction projects–well over 30, including the books I’ve released if you are curious about the number. The story was just for me and my own fun. But after suffering from a pile of rejections for my “serious” writing projects, I dusted off Immortality to revise it. I had no goal with the r...

Death to Kanji! The Movement to Eliminate Kanji During the Meiji Restoration

Ask most English speakers about what makes Japanese so hard to learn and you will most likely hear kanji. The Japanese writing system consists of kana, or a phonetic script, and kanji, which are pictorial symbols Japan inherited and adopted from China. During the Meiji Restoration (beginning around 1868 following the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate period), intellectuals and statesmen aimed at modernizing and reforming the entirety of Japan so the country could stand up to and stand beside the na...

The Importance of Journals

Journals help with mental health, self-development, and, for the purposes of this essay, understanding history. Few people start a journal with the belief that mundane, daily concerns will prove to be a historical treasure. After all, who wants to read about teen angst, small concerns, trifles, or anything else some stranger wrote? I’ve kept sketch journals since I was a teen, and I don’t want to revisit any of them! Yet, these journals, centuries later, reveal minds, customs, events, and liter...

In All Things, Do Not Have Preferences.

“In all things, do not have preferences.” Miyamoto Musashi wrote this in his work Dokkodo: The Way to be Followed Alone. His work is a collection of practices he learned in his life.

The statement struck a chord in me. I’m an opinionated person despite my best efforts. I view my knowledge as an asset, which leads me to “teach” and otherwise have preferences about many topics. Most of my preferences are half-baked at best. Musashi’s idea to not have preferences extends to opinions and toward you...

Why are Anime Girls so Horny?

Anime girls are horny because they are written by men who want to fulfill male fantasies. /EndTopic. See references below.

Nah, there’s a lot more to the true answer, but the above statement is also one of the answers.

Views on female sexuality has shifted across cultures and time periods. Many researchers view the suppression of female sexuality as a result of multiple reasons. The methods used to suppress women depends on which reason dominates the culture and time period: genital mutilation,...

You’re Now My Darling, a Dive into the Darling in the Franxx

Darling in the Franxx was hyped when it released in 2018. Animated by Trigger and Cloverworks, the anime had a simplistic style the supported moments of intense action. Most of the story focused on the characters as they struggled to survive, understand their purpose, and grow up. As a mecha, Darling in the Franxx leans closer to Eureka Seven than to Neon Genesis Evangelion with its themes as I will explore. In fact, as an old Eureka Seven fan, I would consider Darling in the Franxx as a Eureka...

Disappearing Anime and The Problem of Preservation

When Crunchyroll and Funimation merged, many anime didn’t make it back to their merged catalog. Among them was one of my favorites, Eureka Seven. This bummed me because I was thinking about revisiting it. Fortunately, I have the series on DVD, but not many people have that option. I will include the list of the discontinued titles at the end of this article. Fullmetal Alchemist the original series sits on the list. I have that collection too because in many ways I prefer the original over Fullm...