12 Days of Christmas – Day 8 – Chained by Fashion

The characters in Hunter x Hunter make killing a form of art. We got our first glimpses of this back when Hisoka started pulling out his magic tricks, but in the most recently animated arc we got introduced to the rest of the Phantom Troupe. This is a group that could only be held together because the members are different enough to complement each other and get through just about anything. These differences even show up in their methods of killing, from the guy who massacres whole rooms with bullets that are fired from his hands to Chrollo, who likes to put as much effort into tearing apart one person as he can. But even after seeing each member show off their skills (…except Mummy Boxer…) the character who impressed me the most in this arc was still Kurapika. Through him we get to see that even if someone doesn’t want to kill, they can still make it into art.

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.