Awesomeness Has Flavor
Just a person trying to find a little awesome within this world.
Some Quick Thoughts
Reborn! Was good, but cliche with the whole "letter fell in trash by accident causing a misunderstanding thing". I like how each ring bearer of the shmion family shares a personality trait with one of the vongola. Yet enma just seems to be an emo version of Tsuna. I mean listen to him whine about the crap his family has gone through, the Vongola had to go into the future, and fight off a clarivoyant who was bent on conquering every parallel dimmension. Bitch ain't got no right to complain.

Beezlebub is great as always, it's the first time in a shounen manga the two opposing groups have faced off in volleyball. (At Least I think so). If you haven't read beezlebub check it out, it's a good shounen manga that's so far managed to keep it's humor. Also it has one of the funniest mind trips ever.

Bakuman was pretty good, though it's kind of weird seeing ohba and ohbata go from death note to a manga on the hardships and trials of making a manga. Of course this concept is pure awesome so it balances out.

Also I've been thinking about Rebuild of Evangelion lately, when do you think funimation is going to dub 2.0? I mean they did such a good job with the first one as well. Why is 3.0 going to be called quickening? Has Anno not seen highlander 2.
And Another Thing!
Stop teasing us with gin and matsumoto, it was the hook for one chapter and all we get is four pages of her zombie walking.
New Naruto and Bleach
The latest manga chapters have been released and. . . well.

Naruto was good, the twist where his mom showed up was interesting and it hasn't fallen into the predictable rut that most popular manga are in nowadays. Personally my opinion on naruto is, whenever it's focused on the titular it's consistently good. However the second it switches back to Emosuke it all goes to crap. So far Naruto's battle against his inner demon is going well, kind of like bleach's did. Oh shounen cliche.

Bleach was. . . ugh. I'm one of those people who are reading Naruto and Bleach to watch it end. I like Bleach, but it's just dragging on. Pick a plot and stick with it, stop pulling new twists out of your ass. This is pretty much the fifth aizen fake-out, we all know that everybody else is going to fail and ichigo will be forced to step in and win, he's the main character. STop taunting us repeatedly with the fact that Aizen is untouchable and every attempt to destroy him is useless. We get the damn picture! Seriously every plot twist within the last fifty chapters has been either an ass-pull or just plain stupid. WHy would Aizen kill off his own troops, theres overconfidence and then stupidity, it has been established that Aizen is a tactical genius who would see how pointless it was to kill harribel. Ah well, hopefully ichigo will go all hollow again and we can just watch the coolness and ignore everything else.
Top Ten Angsters of Anime
Did this last month, my first attempt at a scripted countdown.



Does going Berserk on your opponent prove awesome or just cliche?
It’s a climactic battle, one that could decide the fate of our hero and his friends. However despite starting out equal to the opponent, the fight drags out to the point where the antagonist has victory grasped between his fingertips. So what does our hero do? Use the power of love/friendship/teamwork to win. No of course not were trying to be dark and deep . . . or something like that. The truth is despite his training and preparation for this battle the hero had no chance of winning from the start, the only thing preventing him from being completely curb stomped was buildup to this exact moment. The hero gets pushed to the absoloute edge and all hope is lost. Until the heroes darker side takes over and pulls victory straight from his ass.

I’m talking about any scene in shounen anime where the hero is only able to beat the big bad after going completely berserk on his ass, then recovering only to finish him off. Is it a well played scene of how desperation can push us to our very edge, or a cheap solution to finish a long dragged out battle. Truthfully it depends on the anime your watching, some can pull it off well others it just seems like the hero is cheating.
First we must address the undeniable, the bulk of these scenes are insanely cool. The music, the action, the drama everything is ramped up a notch for these types of scenes. If the character is endearing to us, we feel for him when the tension of the situation causes him to snap. Most are perfectly content with just turning there brains off for a moment and watch the hero utterly destroy his foe in an unstoppable rage.
We may be used to it as well, because this trope is everywhere in shounen. Let me start with the most obvious example DBZ. What finally pushes Goku to finally defeat frieza, only his best friend being murdered in front of his own eyes. In DBZ all the training in the world didn’t equal a good super saiyan scream session. The strongest example of course is Gohan. In the freiza saga it is constantly commented on his secret power that can only be accessed in times of emotional stress. Then the cell saga came, and it was awesome. Goku, puts his trust into his son, but at first it seems Gohan is no match for the perfect cell. However the over-confident cell, seeking a better fights starts to antagonize Gohan and after crushing android 16 unleashes his rage. Which leads to cell being powered by the new Super Saiyan 2 Gohan. Of course then gohan had to get all nerdy and useless in the buu saga. *Sigh*

Dragonball Z and anime like it started the trope, but we’ve barely touched upon how what kind of shounen it impacts today. Let’s take the two most mainstream examples, Naruto and Bleach. Both of the main character, Naruto and Ichigo have darker sides that tend to take over whenever the hero is losing badly, and for similiar reasons to boot. The kyuubi and Ichigo’s inner hollow only seek one thing, complete control over the hero’s existence. To the kyuubi this means freedom, to ogichi this means eating Ichigo’s soul. So when they are assisting there good sides in battle, it’s only to continue their existence and further there own goals. Of course both heroes have gone through training to control their inner demons but who knows how long that will last.

The mecha genre is in love with this trope as well, as we see it all the time. I mean what’s cooler then watching your favourite mech pilot completely lose it and tear apart his enemy piece by piece. The biggest example by far is Evangelion. Half the battles of the anime are solved by shinji relying on unit 1 going berserk on his enemies. This culminates into the second to last angel, when after all other mech pilots are destroyed with little effort shinji in the unit 1 attacks the angel with everything he has. However the five minutes runs out and shinji is royally screwed, until his mother takes over for him and literally eats his opponent. The Gundam series, GaoGai Gar and Code Geass are also guilty of resorting to the berserker rage to solve their problems.
Photobucket

Heck even Yu Gi Oh a show about CARDGAMES has a few moments of this. More specifically, DRAW MONSTER CARD! Nough said Jaden even does it in the last two seasons as well.

Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, D. Grayman, Full Metal Alchemist, Hitman reborn, etc. . . do any of these shows realize that rage is more likely to cloud your mind in battle then to help you in any form. I mean in shaman king they purposely avoid rage for the very same reason. Bleach seems to teach the opposite though, that tactics and thinking aren’t what wins battle. No the king is the one with the instinct, while the horse is the one who tries to think things through. Oh anime logic. Even american shows are starting to do this . . . cue avatar state. Just how far will the rule of cool stretch, and are these scenes epic, or just cheesy cliche. Ahh whatever I’m going to go watch bleach, they finally got out of filler.

Wait am I forgetting something? *Berserk* Oh well that’s pretty self explanatory, I mean it’s called berserk so I think the characters are going to go berserk numerous times.
. . . more days
Have you ever been waiting for something to come out and your just obsessed. I mean it keeps drifting into your thoughts when you least expect it. Your sitting there bored in class when suddenly, Bam! won't it be awesome when "bla" comes out. At first you look at the release date and think "Ooh it's not that long" But then the thoughts of that game/book/whatever keep coming into your mind. You could be thinking of something completely different and it always comes back to that. Release dates are evil, but understandably so. It's hard for a creative mind to release stuff on a tight schedule I admit that. Alot of quality stuff takes time to make, but the wait on our end is just as bad. You keep on thinking, "Won't it be so awesome when this comes out, why am I not experiencing this awesome?" However I did not realize the horror that was waiting until a few years ago. Okay I've always been impatient but last year it really hit home. I'm talking about Brawl.

Super Smash Brothers Brawl, that game got delayed and delayed over and over. By the time it was finally released, I was pretty much waiting for the website to announce another delay. The worse thing about it was for the most part the wait for Brawl was rather fun. Watching them announce which characters were new and which characters would return was great. However as the game delayed and delayed there was less cool stuff to announce, and eventually I just stopped checking the website.

Now this fall, a bunch of cool stuff is coming out. I own a 360, but I have always been a nintendo fan so I'm just going to talk about that. The two biggest games I'm excited about both come out from november to december. The First, Golden Sun DS, is a continuation of Golden Sun my favorite J-rpg hands down. I do not want to go to in depth, but basically it is all about two sides one trying to restore alchemy to the world and another to prevent it's return. The second being the new Zelda for wii. Now I realize we have had two different zelda for DS in the past few years. Phantom Hourglass being pure awesome, despite my dislike of the artwork. Spirit tracks . . . freaking slow trains. Well anyway I feel spoiled to get so many great zeldas in recent years. Of course none of these games come out for months.

Well anyway back to my main point, waiting sucks especially when you get really hyped up and obsessed over the thing you are waiting for. My advice, don't complain because more often than not it will end up totally worth the wait.

Oh Speaking of waiting, when I was a kid going over to my friends house to play playstation, we came up with a song to cope with the long wait times.

Waiting, Waiting, Waiting, Waiting, Waiting, Just Keep on waiting Waiting
It usually loaded by the eigth verse.

Labels: ,