12 Days of Christmas – Day 2 – Long Live The King

When watching an adaptation of one of your favourite works, you’re always nervous about how it will handle all the most memorable scenes. Sometimes the show can do the original justice, sometimes the Disgaea anime happens. Going into Persona 4 The Animation, the scene I was most looking forward to was the King’s Game, being originally one of the funniest moments from the game. Of course it wouldn’t take too much effort to screw it up by accident, so it was also the scene that scared me the most. Luckily the show managed to take this event and make it even funnier, and it’s very interesting how they managed it.

Current Manga Rankings – 2011 – Part 1

I started reading manga a few years ago, and in that length of time I’ve acquired a surprising number of ongoing series. They have quite a bit of variety to them, from shonen to josei, weekly to whenever-the-hell-it-feels-like. I’ve had the chance to talk about quite a few of these series, and even reviewed some of them already. Since it’s the end of the year, though, I thought I would take the opportunity to rank all of my ongoing manga. This way I can discuss some series I couldn’t before, and I can state which manga I like the most and why.

30. Bleach

Here’s the thing about Bleach: it’s the one series on this list that I never read the old chapters for. It’s not something I would do by choice, but then again, I never really intended to start reading Bleach at all. One day I heard that the manga would be showing Gin’s bankai, so I read that chapter to see it and just didn’t stop. That’s a big part of why I find it so hard to get mad at this series. It takes a good deal of effort to feel anything towards it, really. I’ve been told that not caring about something is one of the cruelest things you can do to it, and that’s why it gets the lowest spot on this list.

Yerocha’s 2011 Anime Awards – Part 1

I’m sure some of you know that in addition to running a blog about manga, I’m also an anime fan. There are so many anime blogs out there that I usually leave it to the other bloggers and focus on manga. However, now that the year is almost up and I missed my chance to do the 12 Days of Christmas, I thought it would be a good idea to say a few things about the shows I saw this year.

Now I could do a Top 10 of 2011, but there’s a little problem with that. For various reasons, I wasn’t able to watch all of the really popular shows from this year. To give you an idea of the shows that aren’t included in these posts:

• Deadman Wonderland, Blue Exorcist, Toriko, Bakuman II and Usagi Drop were series I read instead of watched. The first three will be on the upcoming Manga Countdown, but it didn’t feel right to include them here when I obviously haven’t watched them.
• Tiger and Bunny and Fate/Zero are shows I just haven’t watched. I actually saw the first episode of Tiger and Bunny, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to watch the next episode. Fate/Zero just plain doesn’t appeal to me, though I may take a look after it ends.
• Mirai Nikki, Mawaru Penguindrum, Usagi Drop and Steins;Gate are shows I haven’t watched yet. I eventually plan to, and I considered holding off on this until then, but I wanted this to be out at the end of the year.

In spite of all that, there are still quite a few shows I watched this year that I wanted to discuss. And so I put together my 2011 Anime Awards. For each series I saw this year, I’ll give it an award and explain what I thought overall.

Persona 4: The Animation – Preview

Now, when I first heard about this series, my first thought was how the hell they were going to translate the game into an animated series. Between the free-roaming nature of the game and the great deal of content the average player would never see (romance options, the more obscure social links, etc.), I was very confused as to how you’d even go about translating a series like Persona 4 into an anime. Luckily, I remembered that there already is an adaptation of the series, and I’m not simply talking about the Hiimdaisy comics. The official manga, which is what gave the protagonist the name Souji Seta, was a largely faithful recreation of the game, and it gave me a good idea of how the anime could turn out.