Kotoura-san Offers Friendship and Healing, But At What Cost

You’d think that by now I’d realize that Facebook is dangerous. No, I wasn’t drawn into a debate with relatives who don’t seem to understand that being an awful, ignorant person on all facets should not be a viable political platform. I was drawn, instead, to watching an anime. Usually those ripped video clips stuck between two white bars that say something to the effect of “When you break up with a girl in anime😂😂” don’t grab me, but this video did. Here, let me show you. (Content warning for child abuse and bullying.)

These are the first nine minutes of the 2013 anime Kotoura-san, and immediately after watching this I knew I had to look up the summary to see if it was worth investing any more time in. I had no interest in watching a series devoted to the further torturing of its protagonist; however, the summary wasted no time in saying that this series was a romantic comedy (what?) that focused on the titular Kotoura-san making friends and healing from her childhood trauma. What followed was, yes, that in generous helpings. But Kotoura-san was also filled with, in equal parts, a bunch of uncomfortable sexual harassment and an unsatisfying narrative resolution to parental negligence which only served to undermine the actual good things going on.

Spoilers below the cut. All the previous warnings still apply, with an additional one for incest.

Trailer Tuesdays: The Breadwinner

Who loves Cartoon Saloon? This lady does! Though some parts of Song of the Sea left me a bit underwhelmed, Cartoon Saloon’s aesthetic stylings and my lingering, overflowing love for The Secret of Kells have ensured my continued excitement over their works. Despite The Breadwinner taking a far less fantastical approach to exploring the world, its trailer has me intrigued as to how this adaptation will fare given its more serious nature.

Fanfiction Fridays: Coming Home, Finding Home by luoup

Things haven’t been easy in the RWBYverse, and with the way things are going they won’t be for a while. With the big bad getting her cards in place for her final hand, Season 5 is sure to be filled with even more pain and pressure for the cast. I’m not here for speculation today, though. I’m here… for comfort fic!

(via the RWBY Wiki)

Season 3 left everyone, but especially the students of Beacon Academy, reeling and looking for whatever safety they could manage to find. And since the CRWBY arguably completely botched Yang’s recovery arc (and gave no signs of going into anyone else’s recovery), I’m no longer trusting them to take care of anyone else. These kids suffered through their school falling to evil forces and their friends getting hurt and even dying—there’s no way everyone is as well-adjusted as they seem! Especially not the remains of Team JNPR! Today’s fic explores the long, hard path JNPR started on during the timeskip between the third and fourth seasons; the path that led them from being lost to being closer than ever and prepared to set out once again as Hunters.

Trailer Tuesdays: Icarus

Given that the world is already full of enough horror at the moment, I decided to forgo the bizarre thriller flick I found and talk about an upcoming animated feature instead. Most of us have a pretty good grasp on at least one or two Greek myths—even if you didn’t have a unit about them in school, they’re somewhat inescapable in popular media. With re-imaginings like Percy Jackson maintaining a modicum of popularity, it’s no surprise that studios continue digging down into the mythology wellspring. Today I present a new take of the story of Icarus that has as much potential to be enthralling and thought-provoking as it does to be boring and even offensive.

Sing: Less Like Broadway, More Like a Demo Tape That Needs More TLC

You guys, I really wanted Sing to be good. Like, really badly. Despite seeing ratings that were somewhere in the “meh” area, I remained hopeful—movies mostly about singing (in a non-musical format) aren’t for everyone, after all. Yet as the credits began to roll I found myself echoing a sentiment used by our very own Ace earlier this week: Sing sure was a movie. It wasn’t a travesty or entirely unenjoyable, but I left with the feeling that maybe the writers at Illumination Entertainment simply didn’t know what they wanted to do with the plot and were too attached to showing different animals singing and dancing to pare the story down into something more coherent.

(via We Make Movies On Weekends)

Spoilers below!

Sexualized Saturdays: “I’m Not Bad, I’m Just Drawn That Way” or the Art of Demonizing Women

The movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit is probably one of my all time favorite movies and Jessica Rabbit is definitely one of my favorite characters. In the movie, Eddie Valiant suspects Jessica of being somehow involved in a murder that Roger Rabbit, her husband, was framed for. During the movie, she is accused of being everything from a seductress, to a gold digger, to an adulteress, to a murderer, but is proven to be nothing but a loyal wife as the movie progresses. She even tells Eddie that she’s “not bad, [she’s] just drawn that way” and in that regard Jessica has a point. Throughout the movie Jessica is viewed as a bad person largely because of how she looks. It seems in animation the more sexualized a woman is or the more she engages in stereotypical feminine things like wearing makeup and sexy outfits, the more likely she is to be portrayed as evil.

via stinkylulu

Disney is probably one of the biggest perpetrators of this negative trope. While their female heroines dress mostly modestly and appear to wear little to no makeup, female villains are usually portrayed as very sexual, wearing lots of makeup and are often drawn with seductive, heavy-lidded eyes. It doesn’t take much to see what female qualities are being demonized and which lauded as virtuous.

Fanfiction Fridays: Little Rebellions by CompletelyDifferent

Our Pearl is (relatively) happy, but what about the others?

So… Steven Universe, am I right?

This “Summer of Steven” has been a wild ride, opening audiences’ eyes further to the injustices going on on Homeworld, the internal struggles of the Crystal Gems, the increasing grey morality of everything, and how Earth and its inhabitants keep moving on through all of this. While the Crystal Gems are focused on the immediate problems on Earth—allowing Jasper to run around is probably not great for gemkind or mankind alike—today’s fic takes a look at the current situation from another point of view: the view of Homeworld’s Pearls.

Throwback Thursdays: Gargoyles

As adults, I think most of us have come to accept that the shows we loved as kids were maybe not as perfect as the haze of nostalgia made them seem. The nature of kids’ shows is that they tend to be pretty clumsy with their metaphors, absolutist with their portrayals of good and evil, and hesitant to address any concepts that are too “complex.” My last Throwback Thursday looked a 90’s show that was virtually unwatchable, even for nostalgia’s sake: a bland, shallow, under-developed money grab, cruising along on the wakes of better action cartoons of the era. All the way at the other end of the watchability scale is the show Gargoyles, a childhood favorite of mine that has more than stood the test of time. If you ignore the third season and forgive the bad Scottish accents, Gargoyles was about as perfect as a cartoon of its era could possibly be. It thrived on tough subjects and determinedly defied convention to make a truly exceptional show.

Muffled rap music plays in the background.

The Day Is Saved: A Powerpuff Girls Reboot Review

If you frequent the internet and social media, you may know that about a week or so ago everyone was creating avatars to “Powerpuff themselves”. What you might not know is that this little activity was to promote the upcoming reboot for the Powerpuff Girls. Does the show hold up? Is it funny? Does it fall into the same lazy traps as other shows like Teen Titans Go!? Find out after the jump.

Throwback Thursdays: Dragon Flyz

The 90’s was a weird time for animated children’s shows. Voice acting and animation standards were both painfully low, but because shoddy production didn’t cost much, it seems like if you could throw together a concept in under twenty seconds, network executives would give you a primetime spot. In 1995, Anthony and John Gentile, living as they did in this golden age of anything-goes production, presumably hit a massive blunt and then pitched something along the lines of “What if… Mad Max, except like throw in some Star Wars shit and like… there are dragons”. Out of this visionary dream came Dragon Flyz, a children’ show about a barren earth shattered by nuclear war, where a tiny group of survivors has built a floating city to escape the irradiated wreckage of what they call “Old Earth”. Also dragons exist now and you can ride them. How? Nuclear mutation. Don’t think about it too hard, okay, there are just dragons now and they understand English and it’s cool as hell. They eat lava.

This is very 90’s-level cool.