Morality and Agency in Eureka Seven AO

“Could my body be any more inconvenient?”

source: Pixiv

Every move you make is carefully planned. You are limited in your capability, your capacity, your reach. To reach beyond what is allotted to you is met with struggle, strain, and pain. You cannot be frivolous in your actions, for each moment is carefully meted out as though you’re incapable of the responsibility yourself.

How would this color your outlook on life?

In A World Of My Own: The Anisphere Beyond The Kitchen Window

[Insert witty quote here in desperate attempt to link picture with post.]

Suppose you glance at Twitter. What, pray, do you see?

It will most likely be your timeline; with its short textual messages reaching desperately towards the bottom of the screen.

Within this, a reply is relatively easy to spot, and its context easily understood by expanding the conversation. From time to time, however, one might see a reply that is not so average. A tweet, perhaps initially seeming a non sequitur and without the characteristic mention at the beginning, that is nevertheless a reply.

These fascinate me for a number of reasons. One of which is that they offer a glimpse of another’s timeline. A peek into another’s world.

xxxHolic and Duping the Audience

Watanuki Kimihiro

source: Pixiv

xxxHolic is a difficult series. The manga has a convoluted continuity tied up in several different franchises. The anime adaptation is easier to follow, but has its own hurdles with the extremely stylized designs animated on a modest budget. Truth told, I procrastinated on this series when I’d seen the roughness of the animation coupled with the relatively comedic tone of the first few minutes of the first episode. It wore through slapstick and familiar Japanese comedy routines, setting up certain expectations as I watched. I let my preconceptions doubt the story. I was wrong.

Trappings, Signifiers, and Characterization: What Kuranosuke has to do with Chihaya

Or: Better Understanding Through Looking at Gender

A brown-haired girl sits in seiza, looking into the camera wearing a blue and pink kimono

I got into a conversation in another part of the anisphere about female main characters. The blog post was here and it compared Tohru of Fruits Basket to Sawako Kuronuma of Kimi ni Todoke (the inferior Sawako, if you ask me… Sawa-chan <3). At the culmination of the comments dialog I came to some interesting realizations about gender performance in our animated heroines and heroes. See, we talk a lot about the need for “strong, female characters”, but as Kate Beaton noted, they don’t always serve. I would like to take this time, instead, to proffer up an examination of how a close look at gender helps flesh out both simple, straightforward characters and more complex ones.

Colloquium: Anime We Would Really Like to See

I expect the storyboard on my desk by next Tuesday.

tiboreau: Last week We Remember Love aniblogger Ghostlightning challenged his readers with an ultimatum. Don’t like some of the anime that airs each season? Well, what type of anime would you like to see—and be creative! Inspired by both the challenge and Ghostlightning’s own creative anime concoction, a few of Altair & Vega‘s writers were motivated to share their own anime concepts. We hope you enjoy!

Eureka Seven & Taran Wanderer: The Pastoral Ideals of Ignobility

“Renton, people shouldn’t use up any more energy than what the sun shines down upon us. When you try to use up more than that, you end up having to dig for scubs to drain energy from, or having to build towers. You don’t have to do that. People can survive on what little land they are given to them.”  

~Will Baxter, Eureka Seven

The announcement of Eureka Seven Ao last December sparked my dormant interest in its parent story, a story I began several months earlier and neglected six episodes later. Fueled by Twitter’s enthusiasm, I revisited Eureka Seven, swiftly engrossed in its universe. And as I huddled over the flicker of the 3.5” screen of my iPod Touch during the morning’s wee hours, Renton’s convalescence and education at the hands of William B. Baxter awoke memories of another tale. A tale of a young man on a journey not unlike Renton’s, encountering influential individuals not unlike Will Baxter. That tale was Lloyd Alexander’s juvenile epic, The Prydain Chronicles, and as a youth its perspective on everyday life influenced my own outlook on the world.

The Ani-sphere All Atwitter

Twitter is an intriguing beast. It is one of the two dominant social networks found on today’s internet, and at its simplest, offers one the ability to broadcast one’s thoughts to other people. Admittedly anywhere on the internet is now wont to do this, however, twitter’s defining trait lies in its limit of 140 characters per post. One could perhaps argue it a social network centred about brevity.

Having such a limitation, presumably it can be dismissed? Not worthy of one’s attention?

Universal Fatherhood and Pessimistic AGE

The Gundam franchise is an excellent source for strong male characters and it’s no accident so many of them are fathers or surrogate fathers. Even if we’re unaware of it, as men, most things we do in life are measured and compared against the lives of our fathers if only by ourselves. As I looked at the two current flagship shows of Gundam, AGE & Unicorn, I see two very different perspectives on the same idea. Spoilers ahead!