@B0bduh

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What do you think about the lack of genre diversity in anime? Why do you think animation companies don't try to broaden the medium by making shows about medical dramas/mysteries or a political drama?

I'd assume it largely comes down to demographics and a need for safe returns. I don't think many production committees want to invest in a show targeted at a demographic that doesn't exist yet and doesn't necessarily exist at all. Especially when anime already has an ingrained economic model that assumes people will buy extraordinarily expensive products as collector items, something many people outside of anime's existing market would likely be much less willing to do. Then there's the fact that anime often is intended as an advertisement for other stuff, which would be less effective when the anime itself isn't something that would appeal to anime's existing audience.
There's likely a host of other reasons as well - I can only make guesses based on what I know of the model.

How do you feel about the "best girl" mentality of watching shows? Or am I misunderstanding it and it's no different from "favorite character"? I assume you've been using it in jest.

Yeah, it's just silliness for me. I don't advise taking that stuff seriously - there are bad ways to get invested in characters, and the "best girl" thing in particular often betrays some ugly attitudes about women while also furthering the isolating "boy's club" atmosphere a lot of online spaces can lean towards. There's a pretty important difference between "this character is awesome" and "this character is the perfect woman I will treasure her forever."

Saw that you were a fan of Urobuchi so it took me by surprise when you grouped F/Z with Attack on Titan as a "kid action show that people watch because of the serious aesthetic"... wondering what your overall thoughts on the show are.

I think the first half of Fate/Zero is very mediocre - poor pacing, a lot of very lifeless direction, and a huge amount of tedious worldbuilding. The fights don't mean anything at that point - they're exchanges between ciphers that don't result in meaningful plot change, which is actually one of the main problems I have with Kill la Kill as well.
The second half is significantly better - it hones in on the solid personalities of the central characters, it picks up in pacing and focus, and it actually addresses a number of interesting ideas. On its own, I'd give the second half a solid 8/10.
The whole thing is kind of hamstrung by its attachment to the arbitrary, convoluted Fate universe, and the first half is frankly hard to get through, but overall I still think it's a pretty good show.

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Do you ever watch sports? (Big 4/Olympics/World Cup)

I caught some of the Olympics when it was on, but not really, no.

I'd like to contest that. In terms of game elements it hinted at deeper things than the usual game-based anime - hitbox manipulation, glitches. And the MC is unique for this sort of thing, embracing this fantasy world and not caring to return home. His deceptiveness was characterized well too.

Kirito also embraced his fantasy world and didn't want to return home. Whether that ends up being interesting or not will come down to whether the show explores the social/psychological reasons for and consequences of a decision like that - something the first episode gestured towards, but didn't necessarily guarantee.

No Game No Life thoughts?

Eh. It's a pretty standard light novel adaptation. I'll give it another episode, but the game elements were nonsense, the characters were pretty standard, and it was fanservicey as hell. If it actually digs into the social issues it brought up in the first episode it could be interesting, but it seems more likely that was just an opening for something a lot less impressive.

Oh good, I wanted to ask you how you felt about the apparent Chihiro end we're getting in the manga but I didn't want to spoil you. For the record, the final arc was really badly paced and a lot of people seem to think this came out of nowhere, so that's something to take into account.

Yeah, I haven't read any of the manga, so this is all very funny to me. Given the end of season 3, I figured Keima would basically have to do some soul-searching and figure his shit out before approaching Chihiro - apparently the manga diverged into a massive second arc, and now we're right back there? INTERESTING.

What made you come to like anime in the first place? What is it about these Japanese cartoons that draws you to them?

Originally, it was the fun visual aesthetic, the kinds of exciting stories they were telling, and the fact that they contained dramas with actual driving narratives. At this point, I just like anime - some of it's quite good, most of it's pretty bad, but on the whole it's just inherently enjoyable for me to watch. And at its best, anime can deliver on so many aesthetic levels with so much creator control and artistic flair that it's kind of astonishing.

If the entire experience of a work is subjective, how is translation possible? A translator can't really help but impose their own interpretation of the text. Or are we simply at the mercy of these translators? Shouldn't they be almost as important as the writer?

Translation is hard and important! You can never perfectly translate a work's intent and effect - you can simply try and make a very similar work that will affect people in similar ways. That's one reason why I'm strongly in favor of localization - trying to stay extremely faithful to the mundane text of the original generally results in writing that translates none of the visceral impression of that text, and it also just results in worse writing. I'd rather watch a show that differs slightly from the original but is a stronger work for it than a show that stays extremely faithful but always maintains a distance through its stilted prose.
Of course, the fact that good writers include natural, important subtleties in their scripts that can be easily lost through too-liberal translation means this is always a balancing act. But I tend to lean towards a liberal translation.

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Regarding Shiki, while it didn't bother me (because I think the camp ultimately won me over), do you find it problematic that anyone who doesn't have a ridiculous(ly awesome) hairstyle is automatically reduced to unimportance?

Most anime already does this anyway, and in general I'm really enjoying the show's campy, flamboyant choices. I think a lot of great anime does this thing where it embraces its artificiality so thoroughly that it arrives at a sincerity in the absurd - Utena's probably the best example. And Shiki in particular exists in a traditionally schlocky space (horror, and this gothic/retro horror with a side of thriller in particular), so it all feels very natural.
Hell, you could even argue the way the hair highlights specific characters kind of fits with the "no privacy/small town rumors" theme they're running with, but I think these creators just love awesome hair.

How was high school?

Very solid, actually. I had some sadsack romance drama, but I also had a really great group of close friends that I'm still close with (one of them's one of my housemates, another lives about a mile away, I still record music with a third, and I screen good anime with a fourth).

Favorite Monogatari characters? Least favorite characters?

Favorites: Hanekawa, Kaiki, and Shinobu. Hanekawa's one of my favorite characters altogether, and the other two aren't far off.
Least Favorites: Araragi and Mayoi.

Any Ping pong early thematic assumptions?

After one episode? We've got the clear contrast between Smile and Peco, we've got the dissonance between the haves and the have-nots, we've got that lovely repeated "is it our stop?" "no, the stop after next" to provide a little guidance. We've got obvious lines of trajectory that Wenge basically laid out at the end (Smile retreating inward out of lack of interest and deference to his friend, Peco needing a few hard knocks). We've got coming of age and acknowledgment of the self and gaining some direction and ambition.
I like what we have. We're starting in a position where the two protagonists are actually bad influences on each other, which I think is great. And the execution was phenomenal.
I think this is going to be a very good show.

What's the most obscure anime you've seen?

I haven't watched any obscure anime. Seriously - the least well-known thing would be, like Mind Game or Cencoroll, and those are both perfectly well known. Hell, at this point it might be something like the Love Hina Christmas Special.

Don't you find Aku no Hana to be funny? I can't help but chuckle when trying to watch it.

Yeah, Aku no Hana's got a great, deadpan, occasionally absurdist or self-parodying sense of humor.
Not that it's parodying the show overall - it's drawing attention to the artificiality of its perspective. The whole thing exists in this incredibly oppressive atmosphere, and then occasionally it'll reveal that the town isn't REALLY like this, this is just the protagonist's incredibly sad and melodramatic inner reality. It's basically the same thing OreGairu does, except instead of the show existing as a counterpoint to its protagonist's overt attitude (though it does do that as well), it runs a counterpoint to his entire visceral view of the world.

Did Kill la Kill live up to Gurren Lagann after all?

Nope. It was much less coherent in narrative, character, and theme, plus it had no trump card like Rossiu. It was also clearly more scrappily produced, but the ways Trigger worked around their lack of animation were actually so interesting and inventive that I wouldn't dock it for that.
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How much time does it take to answer all these questions, and do you regret it? Do new questions constantly pop up and bug you while you're writing something else?

Nah, they're nice. It's basically the same as all the other stuff I refresh too often - I tab to it and distract myself answering whatever pops out at me. I've got a huge pile of questions I haven't gotten to yet, I don't feel pressured by it or anything. Right now I'm just doing a couple between bouts of image-gathering for my Kill la Kill review, and image-gathering is pretty much the most tedious part of my essays anyway.

How do you feel about the possibility of watching Majouka or others as if they're parodies (even if the author didn't intend it). After you pointed out how the MC was like your parody of Kirito, I couldn't help but crack up while watching it.

If it's fun to watch it that way, go for it! That's basically what I did for my Free! writeups, though honestly I grew tired of it waaay before the show ended - if a show keeps being bad in the exact same ways, it's hard to even enjoy laughing at it after a while.

Where do you think that subjectivity end and objectivity begins when talking about the quality of an anime?

When you begin talking about what voice actors play certain roles and what staff is associated with a show. If we're talking craft, it all exists within invented, subjective frameworks.
That doesn't mean these frameworks are meaningless (obviously, I wouldn't do this stuff if I didn't think some art is worth praising for specific reasons), and plenty of them are extremely widely accepted or long-held, but it does mean they're not objective in any universal sense. When I say "this show has great characterization," I mean "this show has great characterization according to the system and values of characterization I have internalized as a student of western literature who has grown up in a specific time, place, and cultural climate" or something thereabouts. And I can generally articulate why certain things work for me, and why I think the characters in Evangelion are "better" than the characters in Clannad even though many people cried their eyes out at Clannad. No art is universal, but given certain assumptions, I think some art can be more resonant than other art.
You see how many caveats I have to put in here? That's why I think trying to argue about objectivity is stupid - I try to articulate what works for me and WHY it works for me in the hopes that other people's experience of art will be enriched through my personal experience of it. Putting picket fences around "objective" markers of great art according to certain standards of art criticism is a thankless task that makes nobody happy. Generally, the thing I find most interesting about stuff I consider bad is not the way in which it is bad - that's easy. Generally, it's WHY PEOPLE LIKE IT ANYWAY - THAT is really interesting to me, because it gets at what we come to art for in the first place.

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Any real agreements/disagreements with this "Anime I Hate" list (http://mecha-guignol.com/anime-i-hate/)?

I think the Soul Society arc was fine (though I read it instead of watching it, which likely helped), and of what I've seen, I agree that Type Moon is pretty much inherently awful and antithetical to everything I associate with good storytelling. Everything else there I more or less agree with to the extend that I even have opinions on the shows involved.
I normally disagree with Landon on almost everything though, so I guess that list's an outlier.

Maybe you've already answered something like this, but what's your favorite example of video game storytelling?

Just little things here and there. The mood Shadow of the Colossus creates, for one - that feeling of majesty, resignation, and guilt. The moment in Bioshock when you realize half the things you've been taking for granted because "this is how videogames work" were actually functioning narrative devices. The finale of Braid. The way Demon's Souls makes you feel legitimately afraid of the next room because there are legitimate stakes involved. How in Katawa Shoujo you actually get to Rin's route by being so tone-deaf, apathetic, and antisocial that no one else wants to hang out with you.
Basically when gameplay actually generates human narrative, which is an incredible, incredible rarity, and something extremely hard to engineer. I do not envy game developers the future task of cultivating these moments, and shifting them from glimpses of a better medium into a fully realized art form.

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