(There are spoilers here, if you care.)

I'm not generally one for child characters. It's all too easy for ashow to make them either grating or too sugar-sweet (and sometimes bothat once), and if we're being honest most children are not infrequentlybrats. So when MaiDragon (to use its common abbreviation) introducedKanna, I didn't initially think very much of her, especially sinceshe was presented as sort of a joke. By the end

One of the things I did this year was watch some older anime;the Crusher Joe movie (and one OVA) from 1983, and Iria: Zeiram the Animation from 1994.One of the things that struck me about both of these, especially Iria ,is how they looked and felt clearly different from modern anime. This ismore than a difference in the look of the art, the style of people'soutfits and hair, and the kind of settings; it was also

(There are spoilers here.)

I have tangled feelings about both Flip Flappers as a whole and itsending, feelings that I'm still sorting out. However, there are someaspects of the ending that I'm completely behind, and one of them is theshow's perhaps odd decision to spend most of the first half of the lastepisode on a knock down , drag out fight withMimi when Cocona and Papika had already neatly punched her monster out at the end of the previousepisode. As

(There are some spoilers here.)

"The Great Fault", Made in Abyss 's ninth episode, is well knownas anime-original content. Despite the stereotype that usuallycomes along with that, the episode is widely regarded as solid work that does important things with Riko's character and is simply enjoyable. You could quibble about theending, where Reg is the one to make the climactic finish instead of Riko, butperhaps this was intended to be part of the point of the episode, to

This year I watched a number of shows where I've also read the mangaversion (either before or after the show aired). One of the interestingthings I noticed about the anime versions is how they rearranged andadjusted early elements of the manga, and how this changed the feel ofthe story being told from one media to the other. To make this concrete,I'm going to talk about three shows (and there will be some spoilers).

The most straightforward to talk about is Land of

Let's start with the tweets:

@MinovskyArticle :Bakugo is extremely divisive on Twitter for a character who winsevery MHA popularity poll by a landslide.

@pontifus :I think he's a good character and i also live for him getting dunked on

@cks_anime :I hate to say it, but he's more interesting than Midoriya (although Iwouldn't want Bakugo as the lead/hero character).

Let's talk about Midoriya for a moment. Midoriya is a classical Shonen

Today I want to talk about the spear-point moment in Kemono Friends . There will necessarily be spoilers and what Iwrite may not convince you, because by nature spear-points rely onthe weight of story that's come before them for their power.

Spear-points are often active and loud, like last year's spear-pointin Thunderbolt Fantasy , but they don'thave to be. Sometimes a spear-point is a quieter moment that wouldnot otherwise work without the weight of the

Every year, there are a certain number of shows that I start with highexpectations and hopes, fully expecting to enjoy them, and then thingsdon't work out. I'm always sad when this happens; I want to enjoy shows,especially shows that I'm looking forward to, but every year there aretimes when this just doesn't happen, and not because the show turnedout to be a disaster in some way or is clearly a 'not for me' show.These are

I've written before about the different ways that story endings canbe satisfying , where they can deliver eitheror both of narrative or emotional satisfaction; they can wrap upthe plot or resolve the emotional conflicts a character had, or both.Today I want to talk about an additional dimension in story endingsthat plays into how satisfying people find them.

Story endings can be what I'll call broad or narrow . A broad endingis one that ties up as much as possible of the open issues in the story