My Review of Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

 Joy & Pain: like sunshine and rain. 

I can't say what exactly one could label this anime when you get right down to it. Romance? Yeah ok. Comedy? Most defintely. Harem? Yes and no. When I added this series to my schedule at the last minute, I thought of it as nothing more than another harem adaptation and something that could fill-out my Saturday anime-watching schedule until I got bored of it. I had no expectations of it as it was a last-minute add. Like everyone reading this review, I had my doors blown off by the end of the first episode and knew that I had stumbled upon something special. The show promised that it was going to be subversion/commentary on the light novel romance formula, but ascended to become something unique in its own right. It focused on makeine—the Japanese word for the unlucky girl in the love triangle—and it showed a look of love, compassion, and dignity for these characters rarely shown in light novels or anime. The comedy and heart in this series is so balanced that one could find yourself shaking with laughter and holding back tears in the course of one episode (hell, the first episode itself is a prime example). I think it is ironic writing this review almost a week after the death of Frankie Beverly, but I could not help but have the words to his song Joy & Pain in my mind throughout this anime's run. 

Remember when you first found love how you felt so good.

Kind that last forever more so you thought it would.

Suddenly the things you see got you hurt so bad, so bad. 

How come the things that makes us happy makes us sad?

Kazuhiko Nukumizu Is a lonely highschooler whose only friend in the world is his sister and who really enjoys light novel romances, despite never being in love himself. While eating alone at a cafe, he witnesses one of the most popular girls in his class, Anna Yanami, get rejected by her childhood friend who decides instead to date one of her other friends (who may be even more popular). Nukumizu watches the painfully-embarrassing aftermath of this and his and Anna's eyes meet awkwardly after she is caught drinking out of her beloved's cup after he has rejected her and left for the victorious heroine. Thus began one of the most intriguing relationships in recent-anime history. While Anna, Lemon Yakishio (track star who gets rejected by a guy who goes to Nukumizu's cram school), and Chika Komari (who gets rejected by her Literature club president/senpai), form his harem/girl posse(?). I suppose the anime concludes by simply letting us know they are his friends—though it becomes clear that Anna has plans to play the long-game into getting a relationship upgrade when the time is right.

Love can be bitter, love can be sweet.

Sometimes devotion, and sometimes deceit.

The ones that you care for, give you so much pain

Oh, but it's alright, they're both one in the same.

I think one of the big things that stops this harem anime from being a conventional hare anime is that only one of the female protagonists has any interest with being the male protagonist's boyfriend—and she's deliberately taking her time in a very savvy way. A "harem" anime where the male protagonist is not in any love triangle/polygon with the female protagonists. All the other girls are in love triangles of their own and Nukumizu's primary function is to act as support for them aka be a friend. Only Anna shows any romantic interest in him, but is not going to jump the gun until he is able to return those feelings. With all the love wars mostly happening on the other-side of our not-harem, we are more looking at how Nukumizu acts as a friend with people who are not his sister and how he slowly learns more about himself through this process. Each girl is given an arc where their losing romance is allowed to play-out and those arcs (specifically Lemon & Komari's) are explorations of how these girls who were deeply in-love reconcile with being in the friend-zone and they each show their own unique takes. We get a little of this with Anna, but not a lot as I can guess her story is the most deeply intertwine with Nukumizu himself, so we'll have to wait for the sequel to learn more about her. In any case, the arcs of Lemon and Komari were masterly-done and really show the debt this series owes to its spiritual predecessors My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU & Kaguya-sama: Love is War. 

Listen, don't it seem we go through life going up and down?

Seems the things that turn you on turn you around.

Always hurting each other

(If it ain't one thing it's another)

When the world is down on you, love's somewhere around.

The other thing we need to mention here is the production. Good lord I knew A-1 Pictures was good, but this was Steph Curry in the Olympics good from them. They went all-in on making this little known light novel series the masterpiece that it was visually. No expense was spared on detailing every scene and individual action to its finest detail. Rarely have I ever seen a comedy this well-animated before. I feel bad for the production committee for Gimai Seikatsu which was adapting a very somber light novel romance this year of it's own and while going for an art house-feel, did not achieve the same artistic peak that this anime did. The voice actors here are mostly on the newer-side and they each rose to the occasion. It's not too surprising that the anime studio behind franchises like Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, Idol Master, and Lycoris Recoil could make a good anime, but this was on a different-level even for them. It seems A-1 Pictures took the hard lessons they learned from their disastrous production of 86 and turned their operation completely around. Still amazed that there was no pause this season, despite the high quality of animation. I guess it also helps when one of the financiers on your production committee is the Central Japan Railway Company (JR Toukai Agency). That might be a first. 

Over and over you can be sure

There will be sorrow but you will endure (You will endure)

Where there's a flower, there's the sun and the rain

Oh, but it's wonderful, they're both one in the same.

I don't think that anyone working on this anime knew it was in for the critical reception it got. It seems the light novel author Takibi Amamori was caught off-guard with him stepping-in to write an original anime-only episode for the finale rather than anything from the light novels. I suspect he will be busy for the foreseeable future. I feel like after this series, the whole industry has been put on-notice that these new creators aren't going by the old rules anymore. The fans only stand to benefit.

My Thoughts on Season 2 of The Dangers In My Heart - The Best Shonen Romance I Have Ever Watched

 

It has taken me a long time to find a TV shonen anime that I thought was better than Please Teacher (I was much younger when I watched it, don't judge me). To be sure, the shonen genre has not historically had romance as the top-priority, but through the years the idea of showing romantic relationships from the point-of-view of teenage and young adult males, for teenage/young-adult males has been a rising phenomenon since the 1980s and rise of works by people like Rumiko Takahashi. This trend continued into the 21st century and we see much romance work in the shonen demographic. The problem is a lot of them are not that good or convincing. While we get an excellent romantic comedy like Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, More realistic or straight-forward romance have been more of a mixed-bag or rather a stale-bag. 

One of the most annoying things for most western audiences is the stock Japanese romantic archetypes: the extremely shy, extremely chivalrous male and the either equally shy or extremely "forward" female protagonist. These stock tropes are often taken to their extreme in manga and anime. In recent years creatives in the industry have endeavored to break-out of these clichés (most notably in LGBT fiction) and recent works have started to subvert things. The success in winter 2024 of A Sign of Affection shows that western audiences are craving for a more familiar, honest relationship between the main couple in these shows.

While I'm not a big expert or connoisseur of romance fiction, I have been fascinated at how anime and manga handles these the subject. Growing up with the format, I did not care about this when I was young, but as I age and wanted more emotionally-mature work, the limitations of shonen anime/manga becomes more apparent (this is less the case in shojo, but the rule still applies). I am more at home with seinen anime obviously given my age, but I think that seinen is marginally better at relationship and josei is probably as good as it will get when it comes to romance in anime and especially manga (which makes it very unfortunate that josei manga are the least likely works to be adapted into anime). When I watched My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 in Spring 2023 it had a similar effect in the shojo demographic (for me) that the subject of this review has had.

The first season of The Dangers in My Heart was an interesting affair. The synopsis and 1/3 of the first episode is a fake-out and it reveals from the second half of the episode, the beginning of the love story of Kyotaro Ichikawa and Anna Yamada. The world of these two are very different on the surface, but their awkwardness and emotional vulnerability brings them together. They are learning to love themselves while falling in love more with each other. The first season is showing how alienated and afraid of himself Kyotaro is and how Anna, his classmates, and finally he starts bringing himself out of this alienation. 

This season sees him go step by step to become the person he truly wants to be and that his sister alludes that he use to be. The realism of his insecurities and that of the people around him is as realistic as I have seen in awhile. He doesn't magically improve himself overnight, but almost each episode showed some improve meant in him that felt earned. The people around him are not nearly as terrible as he thought they were when he met them and the idea that he could not love someone like Anna is easily disproven without feeling so unrealistic. Though the story is from Kyotaro's pov, it could have easily have been from Anna's pov and not lose any of its power. Because we are not in her head the way we are in Kyotaro's we have to infer her emotions and inner-thoughts from her visual cues. The way she goes out her way to match him and emotionally and his trying to do the same despite how different personalities were is a key point to where we know they are going to become a couple. Even the male gaze is not played for fetish, but feels visceral and awkward as we see it from Kyotaro's point-of-view.

An interesting aspect of this show is the meta-dialogue it has with Kimi ni Todoke. In TDIMH, there is a parody version of KnT that Kyotaro & Anna are both fans of. The in-universe version of KnT's Shōta Kazehaya becomes the conscience "inner voice" for Kyotaro and gives him very honest advice on what he knows he wants or what he knows he needs to do. It is up to Kyotaro on whether to listen to him or not. The irony is that Kyo is obviously more similar meta-wise to KnT's Sawako Kuronuma. Both Kyo and Sawako have become withdrawn and had their self-esteem crushed by events prior to the stories’ beginning. The key to both stories is that they encounter friends and romantic partners who help change them for the better. Now a key difference is that the former title is a shonen romance and the latter is a shojo romance so the temperament of both stories will be different. Also, the drama that Sawako faces is almost-completely external, while it was just one external incident that motivates the internal trauma of Kyotaro. For the more old-school knowing anime fans, Kare Kano is worth a look to compare to this anime.

The production quality has certainly been boosted and the music and editing is really incredible. The way that they introduce the episode title at the end of every episode is masterful at tying the theme of the overall story together. The voice acting is to be commended on how they really go hard for the nuances of Japanese teenagers to an almost painful degree.

When I look at this franchise, I feel like it offers a hope. It tells a favorite type of love story for me: the main character has to remember to love themselves as much as they love their beloved. One is hopeful that more shows that subvert the old standards of anime romance are adapted and/or created. I can't wait until the next season of this anime is made. This show is process, redemption, love.

My Goodreads Review of Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik

Finally got this one out of the way after procrastinating on it for eternity. Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I have made the leap from myself to the dawn.
I have placed my body alongside the light
and sung of the sadness of the born." - Poem 1

"only thirst
silence
no encounter

beware of me, my love
beware of the silent woman in the desert
of the traveler with an emptied glass
and of her shadow's shadow" - Poem 3

Ever since reading her poem "The Awakening" (in Spanish: El Desperatar) in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology, I had been curious to read more poetry by Alejandra Pizarnik (who was part of the odd, troubling trend of suicidal white women poets of the early to middle of the 20th century) and was recommended this volume. I like that this is a very straight-forward, but still high quality collection of brief poems (the best to read, but hardest to write). These poems are from relatively early in her equally- short career as her more famous work was still 3 years ahead of her. Given that I am reading this totally in-translation (without the original Spanish version) I have to trust that the translator Yvette Siegert did the best she could to keep the original meaning of the poem as one inevitably loses the wordplay that the poet had intended when translating. I don't know if I'll read more by Pizarnik, but I loved the alchemy which she uses in the lyrics of this collection.

"beyond the reach of every forbidden region
lies a mirror for our sorrowful transparency." - Poem 37

"This repentant song, standing guard behind my poems:

it belies me, it has silenced me." - Poem 38

View all my reviews

Goodreads Review of The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

 My first book review in over a year is bound to be rough and this thing feels rough. Got to start from somewhere, I guess. 

Happy New Year.

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Been a minute since I have done any type of real serious reading, but here I am.

This year is the last year of the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent. For the last 10 years that I have been on here I have been saving a bookshelf of books by or about people of African descent here on Goodreads if you wish to check it out: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

This book was on my radar from the time it came out, but I needed it in a reasonable price-range before I decided to read it given it's length. It is the second-to-last book published during Toni Morrison's lifetime and it is an edited publishing of her 2016 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. As the title suggests, she uses the idea of the other or othering and how in the U.S. context slavery and it's afterlife helped to create "the other" as we have it in America today.

"One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered. Literature is especially and obviously revelatory in exposing / contemplating the definition of self whether it condemns or supports the means by which it is acquired. How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example."

She spends the book using various examples from literature like Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to show how whites "other" black people, but she also uses people like Harriet Jacobs, Camara Laye, and most noticeably herself to show how Black writers push back against the attempts to dehumanize them. This book also reminded me that I need to read Paradise ASAP.

"I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy."

This book is like a career-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and a lot of what she brings up here will be familiar to those who have read that book or The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. I confess, with this being the first book that I had to sit and think on in some time, I had a time trying to say something here that was different from the other non-fiction books of her that I have read, but the fact is that this book is transcript of a lecture she gave so it was no surprise that there would be little surprise here if you are familiar with her non-fiction writing. I will say that if you only know Toni Morrison from her novels, this is the perfect place to start for seeing what her thought-process is in condensed form.

I wish I could feel like this review was up-to-snuff with how I usually do, but this is what I have in the tank at the moment.

View all my reviews

Chihayafuru vol 1 by Yuki Suetsugu - manga review

Back into the Goodreads thing. We'll see how long this goes...if things pick back-up for me this blog itself may move to a better place. I've been waiting to do this review for two years so I am glad to have it off my chest. Chihayafuru, Vol. 1 by Yuki Suetsugu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[I originally wrote this part of the review in July before the last chapter had been published]
Since the announcement that this manga was coming to an end this August, I felt it was time for me to read it and watch the anime adaptation. Now I am not big into sports anime/manga and while I'd heard of this title for years, I had no interest in ever reading it...until 2020. In one day, the author of this manga gave me all the reason to want to read and watch this that I needed. I am going to review the first three volumes of this manga, watch the anime and read remaining volumes of this series, but I want to use the beginning of this review to talk about something else: my appreciation of the author as a black anime/manga fan.

In the aftermath of killing of George Floyd with myriad of people speaking out, I came across someone who I had never heard of make the case for black folks despite it not having no benefit to her. That person was Yuki Suetsugu, the author of this long-running manga about a traditional Japanese card game dominated by women. On June 4, 2020, Suetsugu sent out a series of tweets speaking out against racism and for Black Lives Matter and as I read these tweets it made me think about things. In my time growing-up in, growing apart from, and coming back into anime (and later stating to read manga). It is not surprising that people of African descent & dark-skinned people in-general are not the most well received in the media formats. That has a lot to do of course with how black folks are viewed in Asia generally compared to whites and it is reciprocated throughout the media in the continent which includes Japan. Japanese creators-now-have been a lot better about this than when I was young, but it still has far to go. The mecha genre and Shinichirō Watanabe are the outliers on this as non-stereotypical black representation has always been normal with that genre since Mobile Suit Gundam and that creator's anime Cowboy Bebop. Outside of those were example it is more usual to know manga and anime creators' racist views and neo-Nazi leanings. The long-held controversy over the fascist views of the creator of Attack on Titan is the most well-known example from recent times but given how Japan's failure to deal with its fascist, imperialist past is no different than the USA's, it is not surprising. What IS surprising is seeing an anime/manga creator who does not make mecha or is big into African-American culture (as far as we know about Suetsugu) actually speak out against anti-black racism. It is a small gesture, but one that I appreciate given how rare such a gesture from anyone in that industry is (and hey, you get to have my money).

[This portion of the review was written after the series had ended]
I suppose now I should actually talk about this first volume of the manga. The story is based around a girl living in Tokyo names Chihaya Ayase who is trying to find a purpose for herself and be out of the shadow of her older sister, an up-and-coming Japanese supermodel. When a boy from rural Japan named Arata transfers to her school she learns that despite his appearances he is very skilled in and participates in competitive Karuta: a traditional Japanese card game. They clash with, and then become friends with another boy named Taichi who is also a competitive Karuta player, and they join together to form Team Chihayafuru. They come together at a community center that teaches Karuta and they start practicing and decide to enter a Karuta competition.

This is not the first Josei manga I have read, but it may be the best-looking one easily. The is a very solid coming-of-age story and it was a good read. The idea of a traditional Japanese card game that uses poetry is quite different than even what most Japanese think about. Under this review I will post some videos of competitive Karuta and how it is played. All-in-all, I'll probably mostly be following this series thought it's anime adaptation, but I still have some manga volumes that I will read and review first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMh-V... Okay, so the guy is a bit extra in the beginning of the video and he has an accent, but he does a good job explaining exactly how to play the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X0JG... This is an English-subtitled commentary of a standard competitive Karuta match. IT gives you as broad an overview as you could hope for by actual people who have been top-ranked in the official tournaments held in Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_30EF... This is a full competition Karuta match, in Japanese.

View all my reviews

Drácula (1931) directed by Enrique Tovar Ávalos & George Melford

 I suppose I can come through with a Halloween movie review this year. This is the interesting Spanish-language version of Universal Studios' Dracula adaptation. The original English-language launched the career of horror actor Bela Lugosi, but many people note that the direction, set, and costume design of this version is superior. This is widely regarded as the "hotter & sexier" version that is more closer in that sense to the original. The gothic atmosphere played-up more and some of the acting is done better, but not much. Carlos Villarías does his best to try and match Lugosi, but that is what the English-language version has on this one, otherwise this would be 100% better rather than 80% better.

My Review of Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) directed by Rosine Mbakam

 What a beautiful little documentary this was. Chez Jolie Coiffure is a cinéma vérité documentary about an undocumented Cameroonian hairdresser named Sabine and her salon that she runs in an underground mall in Belgium. The film is done totally in the salon and it documents the daily life of Sabine, her employees, and her customers and it commentates on the wider community of African immigrants in Belgium. For me, it is an interesting look at how immigrant communities outside the United States deal with the issue of immigration, trying to get citizenship in a system that tries to make it impossible, and how folks deal with their everyday lives in the meantime. This is the first film I have watched by the film-maker Rosine Mftego Mbakam, but it won't be my last.