🚧 🚧🔨🔨 Welcome to Otaku Revolution 3.0

Rolling out the new site slowly, fixing things and updated a decade of content, also slowly. If you encounter any issues please shoot me a message on Bluesky or Instagram.

Author: neontaster

Posted in

Open Letter To Netflix: Please Release Anime Episodes On A Weekly Basis

Dear Netflix,

Like many anime fans, I was completely blown away by 2013’s Little Witch Academia, which was made by Studio Trigger for the Young Animator Training Project’s Anime Mirai showcase. Fan enthusiasm was so high that when a sequel was announced later that same year, a Kickstarter campaign launched to fund its extension to 50 minutes met its $150,000 goal within hours, and eventually raised a total of over $625,000. Clearly fans around the world were extremely passionate about this franchise. read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Neontaster’s Best of 2014

Year-end posts are hard. I watched somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 new shows this year, many of them wildly different from one another, so how does one create a top 10 list that has any kind of logic or consistency? Since I don’t really know the answer to that, I figured I would simply list the 10 shows that I had the most fun watching this year. This was actually a pretty stacked year for me, and there are at least five or six other shows I could have easily stuck on here, but I think I have less to say about them. read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Fall 2014 Season – First Impressions

I am watching a lot of anime this season. 2014 has had some good anime, but has been kinda light on great anime. However, fall season is set to end this year on a high note, with plenty of potential on top of several sequels to popular shows.

So, without further ado, here are some remarks on the (way too many) shows I am currently watching. Considering there are so many, I will probably be quick to drop shows in the next few weeks (there are already two casualties that aren’t discussed below: World Trigger and Trinity Seven). read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Zankyou no Terror – First Impressions

Until I had actually watched the first episode of Zankyou no Terror (Terror in Resonance), the new original anime produced by MAPPA and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, I hadn’t realized how little info I knew about the story. This turned out to be a good thing, since almost from the first second, the show was not what I expected and took me on a wild ride that was artistically hefty and more promising than any anime I have seen in a long time.

 

The plot, as I understand it from this episode, revolves around two high schoolers who escaped from some kind of military or research facility as children and are seemingly carrying out a revenge plot using acts of terrorism. The show implies that they are either highly-trained professionals or perhaps somehow modified to be abnormally smart and capable – Toji apparently has an eidetic memory and instantly remembers the names of everyone at school; Arata can visualize entire blueprints in his mind down to the number of steps needed to get from place to place. This aside from the skills they display in the show’s opening sequence, which involves a heist of nuclear material from a disposal facility. read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

The Best of 2013

(Note: This post is spoiler-free)

2013 was my first year watching anime simulcasts, and I really dove in with both feet. I watched upwards of 40 shows this year (including retroactively watching a few of the carryovers from Fall 2012), and had a blast experiencing the new shows as they aired and discussing them with fellow fans. Watching a show as it airs certainly has a different dynamic than marathoning one from several years ago, both in the fact that the discussion it is more current and ongoing, and in the fact that the surprises held in store (especially with regards to original shows) are still unknown. Having watched shows like Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica retroactively, I was aware of the tonal turn the show took (even though I didn’t know exactly what would happen). Other shows that I watched retroactively, such as the 2012 carryover Zetsuen no Tempest, were spoiled for me entirely (by accident), which definitely took some of the edge off the surprise (and boy does Tempest have a couple of big surprises in store). read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica 3: Hangyaku no Monogatari – Explanations And Thoughts

(Note: This post contains HEAVY spoilers and is mostly intended for people who have seen the movie, especially those who are confused about it.)

 

When I first heard that the third Madoka movie was going to have "all five girls together for the first time" I got worried. Quite a bit worried, actually. See, the thing about Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica the show (and also the first two movies) was that it forewent many things you would expect to see in a magical girl franchise, most notably the main character as a magical girl. I was afraid that instead of trying to further explore the story they laid out (a task that I saw as nearly impossible, but more on that later) they would opt for a more standard narrative. Something like a separate timeline where all 5 girls are living happily together fighting witches or wraiths or something similar. read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Capital Confusion – A Guide to Kyousougiga

(Note: This post contains spoilers from the 2011 and 2012 ONAs, as well as the current run of episodes 0, 1, and 2)

Kyousougiga (Capital Craze)started its life as a single ONA in 2011, followed by a series of five shorts in 2012. It was confusing and unclear, but had some terrific visual storytelling and art, and left people wanting more. Finally, Kyousougiga comes back as a full TV show, and incorporates parts of those previous ONAs to tell the story more coherently. However, there still seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the story and characters, especially since things are told very nonlinearly, and because there are many characters who share the same name (there is a reason for this). In my attempts to figure everything out I came up with a pretty good explanation of where things stand thus far, using those previous ONAs and the currently aired episodes – Episode 0, which is a slight rework of the original 2011 ONA, and episodes 1 and 2 of the new TV show. read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Attack on Titan Part V (Episodes 23-25): Wrap Up

 

Titan, but since these posts were less about describing and commenting on the actual plot and more about my personal impressions, I figured I would attempt some sort of wrap up and general thoughts  on the show.

First off, the final arc was actually pretty damned good (aside from containing one of the least surprising reveals in recent memory), and in most aspects it harkened back to the show’s first several episodes, which were probably the strongest. The level of drama and action really reached a crescendo at the end, which is a positive thing. You never want a show like this to peak too soon and then meander its way to the finish line. It started strong and ended strong, and I think that left a good final impression on people (myself included) and began the painstaking countdown to season 2, which, as manga readers have informed me, could take quite a while. Isayama’s manga doesn’t rush the story – which is also clearly evident by the pacing of the anime – so there simply isn’t enough source material at this point. The only problem is that the show’s massive popularity could lead to an anime that departs from the manga plot and proceeds down its own path. While this tactic could work, it often doesn’t, and the show has been so faithful to the original story that taking a different path could really change it in a fundamental way. read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Attack on Titan Part IV (Episodes 14-22): Remember the Titans

 

It’s been a while since my last Attack on Titan post. I keep wanting to sit down and write something about it, but I found that I just didn’t have an awful lot to say.

In that sense it is a bit of a weird show. Most other shows I watch provide a certain amount of material to discuss each week, but Titan is a bit different. It’s almost universally agreed that the pacing of this show is glacial, and sometimes 2 or 3 weeks will pass before a certain even is resolved, which leaves very little to discuss in each individual episode. I hear the manga has this similar kind of pacing, which in my mind is like that of a soap opera (as I’ve mentioned before). However, recent episodes put me in mind of old time serials as well, where one storyline would be spread across many episodes so that each one would feel like a fragment of one storyline as opposed to a self-contained episode. "Join us again, same Titan hour, same Titan channel, kids!" read more

neontasterby neontaster•
Posted in

Attack on Titan Part III (Episodes 5-13): Attack on Tighten

Ironically, my previous Attack on Titan posts were long but dealt with short mini-arcs, while this post will probably be shorter but deals with the longest arc in the history of anime.

It’s just that I don’t have a ton of stuff to say about Defense of Trost. It had a couple of major plot twists and some terrific emotional moments, but it was really drawn out both in terms of plot and production values. By the time we hit episode 13 (which was the ninth episode of the Trost arc), the telltale signs of an unfinished product were readily apparent. 13 clearly went to air with several sequences unanimated and masked by cutting away to static scenery shots while still hearing the sounds of the battle (the audio post production is probably tracked to unfinished visuals so you could still hear the sounds of what they animated, but the animation itself was absent). On that front it feels a little weird to judge it now, because clearly the home release will be at least somewhat better. Strangely enough, this same sort of thing happened last year with Psycho Pass, even forcing the creators to issue a public apology for the quality of episode 18, but in the case of Titan, I didn’t really see that type of outrage. read more

neontasterby neontaster•