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Posted by: Iz Rink 12th December 2020, 02:29 PM

Hi, I just finished putting together a little image for this so armed with only that, I'm posting this as a statement of intent.

This thread will cover, whenever I can put together the paragraphs for it over the next month or so, my favourite entertainment experiences in 2020. This will include music and anime for sure, maybe some other types of entertainment if I think of the right things to cover, as well as a look at my vtuber standom because I have too many thoughts in my head about that not to write about it.

Things have changed a lot over the past year, and so I am committing to one thing, there will be zero ranks of any kind in this thread. This also helps because it means I'm only going to write about things I have a lot to say about. I will indicate my favourite of each type of entertainment in a low-key way (as it will each time be the last one I write about), but the main purpose of this is to share my love for the good things that I've found myself doing this year while coping with isolation

See you soon for geeky paragraphs that will be posted for my own personal gratification ,
Love,
Iz

Posted by: Iz Rink 12th December 2020, 02:46 PM

Actually, I wasn't going to post anything further tonight, but I just thought of something, so I'll start off with a bonus that kind of covers multiple angles of the sort of thing I've been up to in my free time this year:



This is a downtempo remix by 'Holo Bass' (layer 1), of Amelia Watson, a Vtuber (layer 2), reading Dr Seuss' Fox In Socks (layer 3).

Firstly, it bangs.

Secondly, the internet is so creative, I can listen to something like this on repeat, and have for at least half an hour straight before, and this was something that was never meant to exist, an internet personality just reading part of the book as part of an attempt at ASMR (apparently that was what the original stream was about), that with the talent of the person who picked this up can end up sounding like a trap rap god to the point you wish that she'd read the entire book to be sampled.

Posted by: PeteFromLeeds 12th December 2020, 07:25 PM

Well I've had to give that a listen now, it certainly is something! I had to keep listening to the end and I know I'll have it in my head all night now.

(hype for this anyway, although it'll probably only the music section I'll be able to know anything about!)

Posted by: Iz Rink 14th December 2020, 08:24 AM

got'em! Excellent, it is really addictive, I love it!

I'll be flitting back and forth throughout the topics, whichever I feel easiest to write next. And if there's one way I'm organising this it'll be thematically throughout the year.

Music

Haohinh - Hoang Mang



So in one sentence, this is just a dance track by a underground Vietnamese producer. On its own, it's not something that is especially standout from most other pieces of emotional building hard trance, though it's certainly well put together.

The reason I put this one on the list is because after coming across it while looking for Asian music that wasn't J-Pop/K-Pop or dull 50s-esque ballads, I channeled many of the feelings I had at the start of the year, stuck in Asia, nowhere to go, with a virus (so I thought at the time) wrecking lives on this side of the world only - though of course Vietnam did especially well out of COVID-19 all told, even if I had been there rather than China it would have hit with a lockdown all the same. I am the sort of person to think about what's affecting so many others before it all becomes numb, and if I had to pick a song that abetted my initial feelings of terror over the obvious spectre of this year, this would be it.

The wistful singing in 'Hoang Mang', so obviously from this part of the world, comes through as though it were a cry for help. Translating the lyrics speaks of a couple distant from each other in the cold winter nights, which isn't miles away from my instincts here, and fits very well for the short time I was playing this.

Posted by: Iz Rink 14th December 2020, 09:01 AM

Vtubers



(a video essay that may explain things better than me, from one of the better AniTubers)

So this is my current obsession/warm blanket of happiness and one I really started getting into in the last quarter of 2020, though I started being aware of them in March. This requires a LITTLE bit of explanation:

Vtubers, or virtual Youtubers, are streamers and vloggers that do everything a normal person does with internet content, game, talk, sing etc, but stream behind the anonymity of an avatar, that might be animated. If you know me, you’ll know that I consider virtual, animated content to be superior to “real” content for a vast multitude of reasons, many of which I’ll cover in this thread.

I have also always been someone who likes watching internet streamers in general, they're very relaxing to listen to and watch if I have dead time to fill, often I end up gravitating to skilled players of games I like, but adding anime aesthetics and wholesome content into the mix made me switch my focus something hard.

If you aren’t the sort of person to pay attention to this, you may remember https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Kizuna_AI_-_SCP_Foundation.pngfrom a few years back, marketed as the world’s first Virtual Youtuber. Which she was, but there was just one of her and in all honesty, she wasn't the most interesting, just doing normal Vlog stuff, and eventually some disputes with a replacement for the voice actress proved that fans see the person behind the Vtuber and the avatar itself almost as one and the same. So we’d have to wait a few years before they really took off, and that year was 2020.

The company that really did well out of this year was the agency Cover Corp, under their Hololive branch of female vtubers (and associated male branch Holostars), who had been up and coming for a few years before now but absolutely exploded in popularity in 2020, 4 of their streamers have reached 1 million subscribers on YT this year at a point when most were struggling to break 100k at the start of the year, and there are many more coming up behind those four. With many of the Vtubers collabing with each other and supporting each other, by watching one, you end up in a really wholesome, supportive and funny environment, depending on their personality.

I have no doubt many other Vtubers are also like this, but with so many Hololive streamers filling all the niches I could want (you could probably run at least 2 24-hour Hololive TV channels at this point), it’s tough to find or even need any more. Rival agency Nijisanji doesn’t seem anywhere near as memeable or popular (and seems to have so many MORE streamers, where Hololive is more selective bringing up the best of the best entertainers), and though I’d love to support a smaller independent Vtuber - apparently the only thing the tech needs is an iPhone X or equivalent and a face scanner (!), I’d need a reason to attract me to them. The community around the Hololive group is for the most part really good, filled with really talented artists and meme-makers that make browsing the https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/or associated Twitter tags a great experience.

I do feel a little funny about being a fan of one company exclusively, but they are an agency that gives a lot of freedom to their stars, so it’s not the worst it could be and they do seem to be a generally good company (NB: with their explosive growth, they did experience a few controversies this year but seem to be learning from their mistakes, I won’t go into detail here, but the curious can definitely find out what happened pretty easily).

The good environment and freedom that Hololive tends to give the girls (and boys in Holostars), they are free to be themselves. The cover that the animated avatar gives to their real identity also gives them a lot more freedom to react in ways that are funny, that on real-life streamers would look very cringe. Exaggerated cries of indignance or fright or happiness really make it fun to watch, and for more mellow moments, shows of kindness and sharing stories removes the barrier, if briefly. That they are a real person but given a public face that isn’t their own just… works. Also a benefit is that they’re not judged on their looks, their day-to-day appearance, or living area. It’s not even that it’s anime, though the aesthetic does help, it’s that it helps give cover to some excellent undiscovered entertainers who perhaps wouldn’t have done nearly as well had they been forced to use their real face for their activities.

Put it this way, real streamers still have a place, for those who want really good professional-level video-game playing. If I want the best of a specific game I like I’m going to go there. For entertainment and variety streaming, though, Vtubers are just better.

That was quite a lot.... and I'm not done yet, in future posts tagged 'Vtuber', I’ll talk about some of the talents in more detail. I’m going to go into detail on those I’ve watched considerable amounts of and have something to say about, though I’ve managed to catch clips from nearly all of Hololive’s roster at one point or another and do think they’re all very much lovely people well worth anyone’s time, you just have to find the ones that appeal to you the most.

It seems like they've captured about half of the anime audience that I follow on Twitter and obviously there is a pretty good 1:1 appeal if you're already a weeb, but most of us just found our way in through seeing an iconic clip of something one of the Vtubers did in one of their games, like I did with some of the ones I'm going to talk about later. And once you're down the rabbit hole*, there is no escape.

*HA↗HA↘HA↙HA↖HA↗HA🐰

Posted by: James Frost ☃️ 14th December 2020, 09:07 AM

vTubers seem very up your alley. Not a bad thing at all. In assuming that the person behind whatever channel they run remain anonymous as well?
It's a good way to avoid the pressures of Social Media as well though, very smart.

Posted by: Iz Rink 14th December 2020, 09:38 AM

Yeah, their real identities are heavily protected and while I've unintentionally been made aware of a few aliases some of them had in previous internet lives (they nearly all had some form of internet presence before this), thankfully it's only aliases and I'm not going to be spreading those either. They talk about general stuff in their real life but have a bit of backstory for the character they're playing so there's like a bit of a happy medium between both - in fact one just did a highly watched "coming out (as a Vtuber)" stream to her mother where there was apparently a list of notes for the mum on what not to say - like real name, precise location etc. Peaked at almost 130,000 people watching because she'd built it up so much. But yes, to this day I don't know what any of them really look like and I hope it stays that way.

Most fans are kind and generous but there's always a few who can get really weird so it's for the best.

They do post on social media though, at least on Twitter, though that's like an extension of the Vtubing activities.

Posted by: Iz Rink 16th December 2020, 09:07 AM

Anime

Anohana: The Flower I Saw That Day (2011)



If you aren't aware, while most EoY countdowns only do things that released in 2020, I don't. It's hard to keep up with all the new stuff and if a classic is new to me this year, then I want to talk about it - though for the most part music remains 2020, this is largely for anime and games (if I do any sections on that, I might). And anyone who likes emotional TV needs to know about Anohana.

Anohana was a short but very popular anime from the beginning of last decade and it is quite fitting that I'm talking about it nearly 10 years after it aired, as the plot hinges hugely on that length of time. I watched it at the beginning of the year. It follows six friends in high school, three boys, three girls, standard clique size. Only thing is, one of the girls is dead. 10 years ago, when they were a group of close friends as children, she passed away after an accident. The other five are clearly feeling like something is missing from their lives even after all this time but one of them starts to see, or think he sees, a hallucination of Menma, the dead girl.

I watched this very quickly, especially for a slice of life, it uses its time well and keeps you engaged on how the ending is going to resolve, the show always keeps you wondering just how supernatural the setting really is (something it shares with plenty of emotional anime, Clannad for one), and of particular note: there's a glorious ending song. "Secret Base ~Kimi ga Kureta Mono~ 10 years after ver" is both exceedingly emotional and one of the most rhythmically pleasing anime songs I've ever heard, that title in itself evokes a whole lot, it's become a emotional favourite for vtubers to cover at karaoke this year, it's an anime song classic.

Posted by: Iz Rink 16th December 2020, 09:42 AM

Music

Grimes - Delete Forever



just gonna warn you all now, this is about as close to popular music as this thread is going to get, bar a few forays into Eurovision, I exist in my own weebcore and power-metal dominated Spotify playlists and I like it here very much.

'Delete Forever' is challenging to be my favourite Grimes song and that is amazing for something so simple, something not particularly abrasive or groundbreaking new areas of pop in the way previous iterations of her work have, and indeed many other songs on the album that this came from. 'Delete Forever' is just instead a song that flows, inexorably from one beat to the next, in a slow march towards oblivion. That it was written about death is so readily apparent, and again, it's great for soundtracking those long nights of isolation when you want to run up against the emo wall hard enough so that you feel MORE things rather than feeling numb.

I always think this came out earlier than it did, but I guess I had been anticipating Grimes' album for a long time. She's had quite a year in the spotlight, some criticism which was pretty well deserved, though whenever she's restrained some of her ridiculous boyfriend's more edgy impulses it's clear she's the one who has it more together in the relationship - the video having her sit over a crumbling palace as its empress seems rather symbolic for her 2020.

In a rather interesting coincidence, for much of the year, her Twitter profile picture was an anime avatar, from the anime I'm going to talk about next...

Posted by: Iz Rink 16th December 2020, 10:29 AM

Anime

Interspecies Reviewers (2020)

yabai ヤバい- adj. a Japanese word traditionally meaning 'dangerous' or 'risky', according to language sites is currently being used by younger Japanese people as a stand-in for basically anything (think 'bad' or 'wicked' from a couple of decades ago), very commonly used in the vtuber scene and so in front of me with its traditional meaning.

I'm using it because the feeling that talking about Interspecies Reviewers in a positive sense on a public forum gives me can be summed up as very, very, yabai. And implicates my hobby of anime into being sus yet again.
However, I want to do it because if I did not, I would be betraying the reason that I like it. And we mentioned it in the anime thread at the start of the year and nothing happened. But for content reasons for the site, no pictures or links to its theme songs, though if you look them up, the opening theme of the show ('Ikouzo Paradise') is a dead ringer for a 'YMCA' ripoff and the ending theme goes crazy nightcore.

The rather problematic premise for Interspecies Reviewers is that in a medieval fantasy world where all kinds of humans and fantasy species live alongside one another, prostitutes are commonplace, but with so many different species with different magical abilities, the average punter won't know what they're getting. Three adventurers, a standard human, an elf and an angel who "has both" team up and start writing reviews of the places they visit, the end result being that each episode of the show basically details what having sex with weird fantasy creatures is like. It's not a hentai, I wouldn't be talking about it if it was, but it skirts the line really close. In fact, it was so close that there was a fun controversy where loads of distributors picked it up on the basis of the first episode being raunchy but not too out of the ordinary, only to drop it when even censored versions became too yabai for them.

I like it because it's genuinely really funny (I've seen a few raunchy anime comedies, often known as 'ecchi', or 'H'. They're not normally this funny) and comes from a place in society that feels free to talk about sex as a open part of life rather than something that should be hushed up. Certainly it's great to have a comedy show that revels in sex as much as some shows revel in violence. I'm being very careful in posting this but I lean heavily towards the opinion that it's better and healthier when it is more freely talked about, and that includes having very explicit comedies that shine a more positive light on sex work than the stories you normally hear. It's still very het-coded what with most of the punters being male and most of the sex workers being female (Japan is still a little behind the West in that regard) and quite objectifying, but hints like the angel Crim just being a normal intersex person, or for example, the gender swap episode where unlike the other mains who stick to their previous sexualities, they used the opportunity to instead explore and find a very satisfying experience and a genuine care for the girl that they're with, shows an appreciation for a wide audience. The thought exercises that go into making really believable fantasy races with often quite differing and certainly not all titillating experiences is really good and this fits with my opinions on most things which would make puritans turn off and say "disgusting" without being able to articulate why -that is the sort of thing I want to challenge people with - why should exploring ideas beyond the norm, sexual or otherwise, be degeneracy?

also yes, this is where that Grimes Twitter avatar originated from, though the character it depicts is a side character who only appears in one episode and isn't involved in any sex scenes, I guess Grimes just wanted to rep this show... for months... to her nearly 1 million followers...

Posted by: Iz Rink 17th December 2020, 07:51 AM

Music

Pulses - Louisiana Purchase



CW: math rock, screamo, male voices

this is complete nonsense - the lyrics are very... they manage to fit 'Xbox', 'Playstation' and 'Nintendo' at different places in this song - but it is insanely fun, and songs named after otherwise obscure historical happenings are very welcome whenever they appear where I don't expect them to (i.e. outside of Sabaton's discography). Like with most of the hard metal I love, the total ALIVE feeling that this song gives me when it's playing is what makes it.

No stop, no chill, just throwing every element of a modern song into a hard metal band, and a very memorable chorus line that they used for their album title, this is well worth listening to if you feel like you're needing a 2020 band yelling something at you to wake you up while ignoring ALL the rules of how to make good music

it's so excellent

Posted by: PeteFromLeeds 17th December 2020, 07:40 PM

Giving Louisiana Purchase a listen now, it's... very shouty isn't it! You talk about the lyrics but unfortunately I can't understand a word they're saying

On the other hand, I've had 'Pop On Rocks' going round in my head on-and-off for the past five days now. Very infectious.

Posted by: Iz Rink 18th December 2020, 09:40 AM

Vtubers

(activate simp mode: we shall be discussing personalities)

Hololive Japan (JP)

Most vtubers are Japanese. It's where it started. As should be expected, the Japanese branch is the largest in Hololive, and there are far too many for me to talk about. There’s 5 official generations and 2 more semi-generations (the non-generational Vtubers from the very start and those who joined from outside, known as ‘Gen 0’, and a generation 2.5, known as ‘Hololive Gamers’, created when the agency was transitioning from a more idol-based singing focus to a gaming focus). I haven’t watched huge amounts from many of these, only clips and highlights. There's far too many for me to talk about, I could talk about the English-speaking sweary dragon Yakuza Coco, or her roommate Kanata the angel who used an Powerpoint for her debut stream and has never lived the name PPTenshi (Powerpoint Angel) down, or horny pirate captain "forever-17-but-has-shared-stories-from-her-time-as-an-office-worker" Marine, or many many others but I’ll focus here on three that I’ve watched more than most of the others and so know more a bit more than the base memes for: Inugami Korone, Shirakami Fubuki and Shishiro Botan.

(every Vtuber name, even the English ones, I will use Japanese name order, family name first, as that's what their channels are called)

Shirakami Fubuki





Fubuki is the face of Hololive. A fox girl, though often confused for a cat, from the 1st official generation, she is essentially the moral centre of the entire group (if parts of these section sound like I'm describing a huge girlband it's because in a way I am), always supporting her fellow members in ways ranging from setting up test streams after Youtube goes down in order that a hyped comeback stream goes smoothly, to providing live commentary on the lateness of two of her junior members when they overslept for a collaboration stream in order to deflect away negative attention, to shitposting short videos on her own channel as above (Scatman is often mentioned as a highlight). She's also such a fangirl of the company she works for that she's the only one to actually be part of TWO generations, she also joined the 'Gamers' group when it was announced as generation 2.5.

She's incredibly active on Twitter, will always drop into important streams for other members to help boost them up, and basically does everything she can to ensure the success of this new market form and if there's anything I want to convey in this writeup, it is that I have the greatest respect for the dedication and leadership that this fox girl is able to provide. She is apparently always working hard behind the scenes, will come up with new plans on a whim if anything looks to be going wrong and through all the controversies that have threatened the young company, has managed to be a genius of PR in quelling negative feeling and making sure whatever the situation is is resolved as well as possible (and you have to be a strong person to take all of that on) - one of the reasons I'm okay with fanboying this single company so much is her assurances that she wouldn't be working there if she didn't enjoy it, and I'm inclined to believe her, her walking would pretty much destroy them. She's a leader you want to have as a leader, never talking themselves up, always helping those under her, and I don't know if the Vtuber scene would be the same without her.

This extends to watching her live as well, if she does speak English you'll know that every one of her viewers is her 'good friend', regardless you'll find a cute and fluffy environment that really puts you off guard with her cuteness. She carries herself so well.

final word, glasses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWVt0YnSYEY&t=51s

Inugami Korone






Another member of the 2.5 generation of 'Hololive Gamers', Inugami Korone is a dog girl, who is very close with her genmate Okayu the cat girl. But outside of the group, Korone seems like she's the Hololive member who first REALLY broke into western consciousness, her love for retro games, long plays of popular AAA games like Assassin's Creed and Doom Eternal and her unique adorableness that looks great when juxtaposed against these violent games seem to have done her well. She's received more attention, like official Twitter posts from developers and dev account hanging out in stream chat than any other of the talents as far as I can tell.

Part of it seems to be her willingness to reach out to the international audience by speaking English, the latter of those two videos is from one of her 'English only' Super Mario/Mario Kart streams which are probably the best place to start for an English viewer and one of those was one of the first Hololive streams I ended up watching all of the way through. It might have had that 'have confidence' moment, but it also had her asking what the English name for a 'pipe' was, and when she got an answer from chat, spent the next five minutes calling it a 'peepeh' as chat fell into the trap of not accounting for Japanese pronunciation.

there's also a very popular twitter account called @KoroneNoises which has a surprising amount of variety of the unusual noises she makes at times during her streams. She has the energy of a loveable dog and whatever she's doing, it's always a fun time.

side note: this applies to most of the Japanese girls who try to speak English for their overseas viewers but as an ESL teacher it's at least mildly useful to see in my off-time how people with a limited grasp of English know the words they do and which words they don't - just as spending time in their Japanese streams helps improve my Japanese vocabulary through osmosis. Hololive's done a lot to break down the language barriers this year.

Shishiro Botan





sneaky lion

I've included Botan, a member of the newest 5th generation of Japanese talents, because while the over-the-top ones are fun, sometimes you just need someone who is going to give you a calm, expert gamer experience (as well as starting streams with a cute 'la lion' refrain). She built her own PC, she always comes across as very calm and mature, and based on a completely inaccurate general knowledge quiz given by one of the other girls to Japanese Vtubers on a regular basis she came top on intelligence not only out of all of Hololive, but across all of the Japanese Vtubers who had taken the test.

Also her laugh is to die for, that sort of quiet giggle that makes your day when you notice it. As noted, she's a lion girl with a penchant for FPS and PC games, her recent project in Minecraft on the shared Hololive server has been to build a giant sniper rifle aiming directly at the big Gundam/NGE figures that other girls have built of themselves. She's a threat in the Among Us collabs, I've seen the other girls kill her off early to ensure she doesn't figure them out for example (one of which led to her talking to Korone for the first time in ghost chat, which seems like it started off a cool friendship between two of my faves, Korone being socially quite quiet in big collabs like that which Botan can help with) Her design, which looks quite like Adidas tracksuit, has attracted Russian attention (to the amusement of anyone able to google the 'gopnik' stereotype) and as you'd want, she's apparently starting to learn Russian, she may open up a new frontier for Hololive yet.

It's early days for Botan, but then it's early days for Hololive as a whole. She debuted only back in August along with the rest of her generation and yet she's already emerged as a leader figure and 'dad' for that generation, and with the moments she's already created for both her genmates and her senpais, she'll very likely go far as another supportive member like Fubuki that I can't help but love.

As an example of her skill (half of Hololive's skill is creating entertaining moments out of nothing) and how the extended Hololive universe works so well together, she was a vital player in the much hyped Pekora x Moona (both to be talked about later) Minecraft collaboration, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnf18Cjtbj4.

Posted by: Iz Rink 18th December 2020, 09:41 AM

I tend to talk about the lyrics all the time whether I can understand them or not - though I can here, having listened to that song many times now. 'Speak it in to existence' is a great lyric.

*.*

Posted by: Iz Rink 19th December 2020, 06:04 AM

Game

Baba Is You (2019)



just fresh from watching a Botan (above) stream where she annihilated this game in a manner that makes me very jealous, we come to the perfect game to start off my 2020 gaming ruminations. Not because I played it first, but because of where it fits into my year.

See, at the start of January, I was travelling around China, visiting people in other areas of the country, and one stop was my stepbrother, who also teaches out here. We rarely see each other, but we exchanged a fair few recommendations of things to play and watch (and due to what... happened, I blew through all of those in a manner quite unlike me), and one thing, that I tried out on his Switch and was quite taken with, was this game, Baba Is You.

It's a great game for learning how programming languages are amazingly literal, as the game is a puzzle game that encourages you and requires you to 'break the game' by switching programming statements around to get your player character (by default a white blob called 'Baba') to whatever object on the screen is the 'win' condition. Basic is 'baba is you' and 'flag is win' but it won't remain that way by the end, especially in later levels where 'And' and 'Or' statements show up.

It's a really unique and great puzzle game that I have genuinely struggled with and is well worth giving a go to try and test your lateral thinking skills.

Posted by: Iz Rink 19th December 2020, 09:29 AM

Music

Anamanaguchi - Miku (feat. Hatsune Miku) (2016)/ [USA] (2019)



I am making this the major exception to my music rule of not doing older songs because I listened to this a lot during 2020 and it's very relevant to 2020. It's a unique song as it can act essentially as a theme song for the elusive character that is Hatsune Miku, and she sings most of it, making playful assertions to her eventual dominance of human society as leader of the ferocious race of anime girls, 'hiding in your Wifi'. It has a glorious instrumental hook line that I don't think I will ever get tired of. And I did start listening to it a lot this year because of that lyric "20/20... looking in the rear-view", yes, she's mentioning the infamous year, and a good backward interpretation is that she's saying that there is a future beyond it, and we will survive. To the future where she steps on us.

I've been a fan of Anamanaguchi ever since Seven sent "Prom Night" to BJSC many years ago, and with their release of album '[USA]' late last year I started fully loving them again, playing much of that album (particularly the wonderful 'Lorem Ipsum') on repeat, so the first half of my year was very much Anamanaguchi-sounding, with wonderful synthy hooklines and computerised sounds, as ever they're a very fun band that demands repeat listens. None of their songs quite topped "Miku", but they all gave it a good try.

Posted by: Iz Rink 22nd December 2020, 12:49 PM

Anime

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)



I finished this one rather recently and it's ironic that it took me so long to watch this given how much I've referenced this in past EOYs as a generic reference to a dark and cloudy experimental anime from around the turn of the century.

Because Serial Experiments Lain is far more than that, in fact it's probably one of the most prescient anime, no, TV series, ever made in the predictions it made about the future of the internet at a time when the web was in its infancy and no one dreamed that so much communication would one day be done on that there gosh darned phone.

It is one of those anime that uses the opportunity of its medium to go really abstract with backgrounds and setting. The gist is that a shy and reclusive 14-year old girl called Lain gets pulled into "The Wired", and manages to become more of a presence in her online world than her offline world, though mysteries and powerful shady groups begin to approach her as she starts to straddle the line between the real world and the virtual world. She becomes someone completely different in the Wired, a legendary figure to an extent.

I definitely didn't get all I'm ever going to get from Serial Experiments Lain on a first watch, it's good but has a very obscured story told in an unstructured manner, but an analysis watch would really pick up the full meaning of it. Were I a media analyst I'd love to tackle this one further. Suffice to say as far as this EOY goes, it highlights how technology can be a valuable escape for some people, to be someone they could not be with their physical body, and can also be a great burden on them, to the point where you question your sense of self. How much of what you do online is really you? What is left tethered to reality when you become so absorbed in the very rewarding atmosphere of an online world? How well these questions have held up, especially this year, is so interesting to look through.

The Cranberries-esque style opening (in English as well) is also gorgeous:

Posted by: Iz Rink 25th December 2020, 06:59 AM

Music

Victoria - Tears Getting Sober, Diodato - Fai Rumore, BEN & TAN - Yes

I want here to highlight my three favourite songs from the Eurovision that never was to be, had it gone ahead I would have become an unreasonable stan of these in May threads, cried if any of them didn't get the success they deserved and, given how predictions looked pretty positive for all three, probably celebrated when they achieved a high finish. While certain other songs from the cancelled 2020 lineup briefly sounded good for a short time, it's only these three that have stuck with me for the whole year.





For 'YES' it was the excitement of a Danish entry that wasn't deathly dull along with a good, old-fashioned, charming duet that kept me coming back to it. For all I often say I want edgy music, it's often the sweetest things that have me loving them the most and in 'Yes' I detected some vibes of Naviband, some others of that pop-opera duet from Malta in 2004, just two singers having a fun time on stage.

For 'Fai Rumore', the beauty of a heartfelt Italian ballad was amplified when Italy was locked down with the first big wave of European Covid and there were people singing it from their balconies, it carried the feeling of an anguished nation. For a brief moment there was the feeling that it would just be China, Italy and Iran getting hit hard by COVID, even if that looks hopelessly optimistic now, and the narrative of Diodato making it to Rotterdam against those odds would have made for a powerful moment.

For 'Tears Getting Sober', it was love from first listen. It has all the best parts of modern popular music with none of the worst parts, a singer who sounds emotional behind a slick production that demands repeat listens. I'll give it one thing, it's almost certainly better in the studio version that it would have been as a live performance but I only say that because the studio version is unreasonably lush. Thankfully I have confidence that Victoria can pull out another great song, she's made a lot out of her appeal to the Eurovision fandom, constantly doing live concerts, and her 2021 song release is my most anticipated of the upcoming Eurovision season.

It helps that 'Tears Getting Sober' is such a powerfully sad song. In another universe, this would have been the alt-pop entry it was cool to like at this year's Eurovision, the Billie Eilish, the Disney-fied beauty of a pop song that wins the hearts of so many - as it was, it was the entry I was most heartbroken for when news of the cancellation broke. At the last few Eurovisions, I didn't have a song that I poured that much emotion into, not since 'My Friend' can I really say I was SEVERELY emotionally invested in one, though the emotional investment has surely been made stronger by the circumstances: for 2020, 'Tears Getting Sober' is my favourite that didn't get a chance to go in front of Europe.

Posted by: Iz Rink 25th December 2020, 10:54 AM

Anime

A pair of shows that got a mixed reaction, I appreciated them for what they are but they weren't perfect (and yet I'm talking about them and I'm not talking about 10 other anime I watched this year go figure - because I decided I had nothing special to say about those):

Sing "Yesterday" For Me (2020)



Every year I watch a variety of seasonal anime that I had not heard about prior to their airing, watch them weekly for a while, and very likely if I hadn't caught them while they were airing, I'd have never gotten around to watching them, though I chip away at various shows from the past that would fit this description every now and then. Sing "Yesterday" To Me is one of those, with its attraction of note being a pretty simple and nice portrayal of a love triangle, and the character pictured, Haru, who is an instant draw with everything she does, even if she is basically a manic pixie dream girl here to bring light into the life of the rather by-the-book protagonist.

I like romance, slice-of-life anime for relaxation purposes, the portrayal of daily life for a group of mostly normal people, going out to bars, escaping drudgery, advancing in their careers and life situations and for the most part this anime does that very well for 11 out of its 12 episodes. Lots of people didn't like its ending and I can see where they are coming from, but it doesn't invalidate that I had a good time with the other 11 episodes.

However, mainly I want to write about this to complain about the false advertising in the title, nowhere in this anime does anyone sing or even mention The Beatles' song "Yesterday", and it's not like there's any other song with that title that's famous enough to warrant it.

Japan Sinks 2020 (2020)



Now this one was interesting largely for the reaction to it. It's from acclaimed anime director Masaaki Yuasa, who is wonderful, he directed Devilman Crybaby which was a HIGHLIGHT of 2018, and he directed another anime also to come on this list. The moment it came out on Netflix, Japan Sinks 2020 was met with a mixed reaction. It was originally supposed to be released to coincide with the Olympics in Tokyo and is based on an 80s disaster novel where, unsurprisingly, Japan sinks after being hit by a massive earthquake that starts the islands slowly being submerged beneath the ocean.

For days there were people debating about whether it was one of the most masterful things ever or a hackneyed mess. It seems to have settled on the latter and while it is true that the plot is basically a whistle stop tour of disaster movie tropes with some rather ridiculous scenes as a collective of random characters, who for the most part have little interesting about them, flit in and out of the story with very little buildup, often dying with very little fanfare as well, it was also rather entertaining. The addition of certain characters like a GoPro wielding Youtuber (most interesting character by a long way) and at least a few characters who can lay down some rap beats (it's a Yuasa anime, got to have some freestyle rap showing up at some point) and a generally positive message of sticking together made it enjoyable to watch to the end easily enough.

at its base level it is very generic disaster movie though

Posted by: Iz Rink 26th December 2020, 06:01 AM

Vtubers

Holostars (aka. Hololive Male)



Because it's overlapping with the anime community, and not the K-Pop community (yet) or the more general gaming community who haven't figured out that these are just normal streamers in a more wholesome guise (yet), there's a rather large gender discrepancy between the success of female vtubers and male vtubers as things stand, even though male streamers are generally far more popular than female streamers.

For various reasons (remnants of idol culture, illusion of a virtual girlfriend, aggressive lesbian shipping) the more popular female Vtubers rarely do collaborations with their male partners, though the ones who've been around longer and have less f***s to give, like Fubuki above, or those in the Indonesian branch have done a few.

Now I haven't watched all that many streams from the Holostars, but those I have watched, I've really enjoyed. The most popular is Yukoku Roberu, an endlessly cheery "bartender" who once got asked https://melmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Are_Ya_Winning_Son_Meme.jpg, enthusiastically replied "Yes, I'm everyone's winning son," and subsequently became everyone's winning son. And it's important to remember that while most of the Holostars have between 50k-100k subscribers and that looks small compared to their female counterparts who are pushing 1 million, most of the female lot were in the same position the males are in now back in January 2020. It would only take a few more breakout moments like Roberu's 'winning son', or his 'cafeteria in my soul' defense as shown above, to break them into the same level of success as the girls.

The main one I'm going to talk about is one who stands out from the rest though, one whose model is slightly older:

Aruran (aka. Arurandeisu, aka. Pizza Dad)



(Aruran discovers DILF)

A silver fox among the rest of the Hololive cast, Aruran is great for relaxing streams on his own merit and would be in the vast roster of great talents I respect but don't talk about if it weren't for his regular language streams. A couple of months ago, he figured out that a great way to reach out to the increasing foreign audience brought in by Hololive English and improve cross-cultural communication between English and Japanese viewers was to host regular exchange streams, normally talking about English slang or Japanese slang for the audience that isn't familiar with it, but also looking at photos of foreign places or food and that sort of cultural exchange is the sort of thing I live for. Some of his comments have hinted that he might have been a university lecturer in a past life (he's shown evolutionary theory on stream before) or at least someone with a natural curiosity for education about the world's cultures, and someone like that is always cool to be virtually spending time with. His English isn't yet fluent but it's very easy to understand what he's meaning - on par with many of the Chinese people I work with on a daily basis and these streams are teaching him as well.

Many Japanese vtubers have been doing English-only streams lately but Aruran does them so regularly and is such a fun friendly fatherly presence in most other respects (and also surprisingly up on memes) that he, along with Roberu, are my hopes that they'll get greater recognition soon for doing so, especially because from all accounts, compared to the far more successful female talents, they sometimes struggle on the irregularity that is a youtuber's earnings (e.g. Aruran once revealed he used a cardboard box as a desk and slept in a sleeping bag and his chat started a 'Make Papa Rich Fund' in response, fortunately he did update everyone on his buying of a proper bed and desk, though speaking from experience as someone who has lived alone in a place with few furnishings, particularly in Asia, it might have been more about a lack of necessity after moving to a new place than true financial hardship, though it's certainly true that compared to the girls that the male earnings are probably more average).

Posted by: Iz Rink 26th December 2020, 10:32 AM

Vtubers

Hololive Indonesia (ID)

Indonesia is a very cheap and easy market for Japanese companies to expand into, so while it seems a little weird that one of the first big expansions (and after English and Japanese, the only currently extant expansion Hololive China existed but closed down for reasons that I'm not going into here), it makes economic sense, it's very easy to set up and run and while the Indonesian girls are as a whole less popular than the rest of Hololive, they still pull in very high amounts of viewership and sponsorship for Vtubers and are giving Indonesia a chance to shine on the world culture stage when, for a country that has the fourth-most people in the world, you very rarely hear about its culture beyond its borders.

The most common misconception is that you won't understand them, because while dedicated weebs may know Japanese, there's no reason to expect most non-Indonesians to know Indonesian. It's a misconception because all of the Indonesian girls are fluent in English and switch pretty evenly between talking in Indonesian and talking in English, sometimes even talking in Japanese as well, most of them have at least a good knowledge of that third language, which makes them all doubly impressive. They're also very known to do off-the-wall sorts of things.

Currently there are six Hololive Indonesians. Three, from generation 2 debuted at the start of this month. Those are Kureiji (Japanese transliteration of 'crazy') Ollie, a zombie girl who is ironically the most energetic and hyperactive Vtuber in the whole of Hololive, Anya Melfissa, a personification of an Indonesian dagger, the kris, and Pavolia Reine, a turkey peacock* girl who looks extremely refined and has a very refined taste in anime, as she's a Higurashi fan. I think I'll probably be a big fan of Reine in the future but they've been around for literal seconds so the main section here will be the three from generation 1, who all managed to worm their way into my favourites around the middle of November.

*yes, you heard, yes, they're ignoring that she'd have to be male to have all the pretty feathers etc.

Ayunda Risu


As her Twitter bio states, Risu is a 'chaotic squrl vtuber' and pretty much lives the chaotic squirrel life, occasionally switching from her upbeat personality to 'Ayunda', her more emo alter-ego, for say, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYzTq7YEPBI, as far as music taste goes, the squirrel goes the hardest, continuing the Hololive trend of subverting your expectations wherever possible. My experiences with her have been a number of very different things. Her genuinely great musical talent is matched with her occasional divulging of life advice, which comes off as among the wisest and most mature of all of Hololive, such the time she scolded people for calling Vtubers 'fake' because as far as she's concerned, they spend so much time talking publically, how can they not let their true selves slip through? Or alternatively, the below, which is very wise and a good reminder for me to not be edgy or a hipster because it's cool, I talk about the things I like because I genuinely love them:

The thing Risu is probably most known for though is her Nonstop Nut November, subverting THAT tradition with a nicer one, where she released a short daily video every day of November teasing people with nut innuendos. She followed it up with DDD, Devour Doughnut December, which is still going on, I occasionally check those out and they're really great pick-me-ups. Pretty sure she also pioneered the trend of Indonesian girls doing their college homework and calling it "Keyboard ASMR".



Hoshinova Moona





shameless flirt

Moona is, in every way, a dark horse, representing a normal human girl (unusual in Hololive) who is also a part-time moon goddess of some description. As the clip above shows, she got quite attached to Pekora (who I am preparing a very long paragraph about for later) and the thing most know her for is her friendship with the rabbit, which started in a very lovely way in, almost as it were, fate.

I first heard of Moona, and indeed the entire existence of a branch of Hololive Vtubers outside of Hololive Japan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jIOhD8bu7Iwho didn't speak Japanese and so Pekora had to break out her English to communicate, just about, to extort her junior for a bunch of lapis lazulis, which Moona happily gave to her as Pekora promised to "next time help you". Meanwhile apparently Moona's chat were warning her about the "crazy rabbit" who would pull her into a trap. Moona is excellent at Minecraft and after this would occasionally hang out with Pekora whenever the latter shouted "Hey Moona" at her and got her as a recruit for Pekora's Minecraft construction company (hired out to build projects for the other girls, front for a yakuza operation etc.). Eventually, after Moona worked up the courage to ask her senior colleague for an official collab, the result was one of my favourite streams of the year as both Moona and Pekora, not knowing all that much of the other's language, had a really fun time breaking down cultural barriers through basic communication and building their rabbit + moon-themed construction office. A real friendship that encouraged each to start learning the other's language in earnest, a friendship that would have never existed if not for Hololive.

As many people pointed out throughout and at the conclusion of this months-long arc, Eastern folklore often depicts a rabbit living on the moon, and best of all, the mineral that Pekora asked for out of necessity, lapis lazuli, when gifted, is known as "The Stone of Truth and Companionship", the friendship stone.

Outside of making the Japanese girls realise that it's time for English class when she logs onto the Minecraft server, I've also appreciated Moona's lack of chill in saying whatever's on her mind, making her one of the more entertaining girls to follow on Twitter, she'll admit that she streams without pants on (hey, it's hot in Indonesia!), will start making innuendos out of literally nothing:



basically she's like an embodiment of a thirsty introvert, the sort that seems pure and nice until they deliver a smackdown of a pick-up line, and I'm here for it and her otherwise normal, quiet calming voice. And she's not bad at comedic timing herself, accidentally showing up for the Kiara (also to be talked about, oh my god do I have a lot to say about Kiara) and Pekora Minecraft collab and fake-acted as a spurned lover trying to attack Kiara... on the spot, and when told by Pekora to 'put dawn sord', obliged and brought out an axe.

Airani Iofifteen



an alien who loves to paint and her name is a corruption of Area 51, how can she be interesting?





Iofi is, as the clips above show, the emotional centre of Hololive Indonesia, while she's a very good artist and a fun girl to listen to, I have nothing but the utmost respect for the way she handles herself and cares for the rest of her branch - shown so well as she comforted a crying Moona (over Moona not having the courage to reach out to Pekora) in a stream, a fantastic free talk stream that started with Iofi on her own, when Moona showed up and admitted she was feeling emotional brought her in to talk, and then Iofi brought in Risu to finish the stream on a happy note - watching that whole thing made me tear up several times myself. Her voice is perhaps one of the nicest I've ever heard and perfect for chilling out, accompanied by some hypnotic background music, she knows even more than the rest of them that the world is in a place where people need comfort and that's what you get whenever you tune into one of her streams, a calming girl who is amazing at reaching out to people in other branches of her company, vtubers from other companies, no matter the language they speak.

I don't have as much to write here as I have about Moona or Risu because she doesn't provide as many funny or clippable moments, but while all of the Indonesian girls, in the limited time I've managed to spend with them, are very good people, I think I have the most love for Iofi. She has the least subscribers out of any of Hololive's female streamers, not counting the three newbies, but has gone on record saying that she doesn't mind (not that her subs are low at all, they're stupendously good for an Indonesian YouTuber and a Vtuber in general), she just wants to have fun with everyone. She's this talented artist and polyglot that always has good and encouraging words for people and she is one of the best sources for streams to either learn things from or to wind down before bed. She may be the gateway to South East Asian culture that's always passed me by a little even though I am sort of interested...

~~

(so you know I do have a structure and an end goal in this: 4 more Vtuber simping posts to go, about 15 more anime and music posts to go each, a few more game posts to go, in whatever order I feel best and once I've finished I'm planning on using this all to make an edited collection of these posts for my blog. Yes, Buzzjack, you are my draft writing pad)

Posted by: Prince of Pete 28th December 2020, 05:51 PM

Interesting picks from Eurovision! Fai Rumore was pretty nice but unfortunatley YES was a bit too much on the cheesy side for me. I can't actually remember Tears Getting Sober so listening to that again, I can see why I passed it by at the time as it's not as instant as some of the others but it is very well-produced and fantastic vocals.

Posted by: Iz 💀 30th December 2020, 01:31 PM

Music

purity ring - stardew



This was one of my early picks for song of the year, what with Purity Ring being a longstanding favourite of mine, for the uninitiated in my ways (though my Grimes love hopefully also shows it), maybe it seems like I don't like pop music all that much but when the pop is electronic I absolutely do, in fact it's probably one of my favourite types. I got right back into their previous two albums at the start of this year, and that was just in time for 'stardew' to drop.

Obviously my first though was 'Stardew Valley, that's a good game' (from the approx 3 hours playtime I have in it), but that alone of course wouldn't make a track. 'Stardew' is musically superb and honestly, challenging to be Purity Ring's best ever. And that's no mean feat with 'Obedear', 'begin again', 'stranger than earth' in their collection. This is one of those tracks where listening to it is like having a river of beautiful sound wash over you, where it never stops, until the track finishes, at which point you want to go listen again. Kind of similar to CHVRCHES' 'Clearest Blue' in that regard, and that comes to mind because 'Stardew' is Purity Ring strident and confident, at the clearest and most determined they've ever been.

Kishi Bashi - Violin Tsunami (2019)



Speaking of music washing over you like sonic water, this is from the last year but Kishi Bashi is someone who I've been keeping a close eye on for, well, ever since that wonderful BJSC entry of his back in... whenever it was, song is from 2012 but I'm pretty sure it was a 2015-16 entry(?). He's far more than just 'Antichrist', 'Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!' has got to be a psychedelic classic by now. And basically he's one of the artists in the same sort of sphere of indie pop that is making stunning music. A bit like a less well-known Sufjan Stevens is the closest comparison I can think of and well, there's a big post I need to make about Sufjan coming later.

For 'Violin Tsunami', it's my pick off Omoiyari, his latest student, and it is just as wondrously filled with a musical representation of what it's like to drown in a sea of string-led cacophony as that title would lead you to believe. The opposite of a disappointment. It's a lot of string-filled noise and is like nothing else you'd have heard. And the video is pretty devastating ('History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes'). I listened to this so much this year to escape into the noise. However, if you're after more comparatively normal stuff then 'Penny Rabbit and Summer Bear', the lead track of that album is also highly enjoyable, as is most of Omoiyari. More people come back to Kishi Bashi please.

Posted by: Iz 💀 30th December 2020, 02:07 PM

Anime

B Gata H Kei (2010), and my admittance to liking Ecchi shows



Ecchi - the Japanese word for 'H', which is often used as shorthand for... <REDACTED H WORD> (i.e. in a story that has those things interspersed within, they'll be called H-scenes), though any anime 'Ecchi' shows will always be called as such to denote the ones that skirt the boundaries but specifically aren't porn like <REDACTED H WORD>.

So before I get started on my post on B Gata H Kei, which is barely even an ecchi all told, only making it for me because of its frequent usage of really explicit jokes, I'm choosing this one to put it in because of the H reference, I will admit one thing, this year I stopped having this weird hang-up in my brain about not watching ecchi shows. For various reasons before, I didn't really watch shows like the aforementioned Interspecies Reviewers at all. If I did I would often decry them as the worst thing ever. Because I would get really defensive with ghosts in my head that were saying things like 'degenerate weebs watching shows that are just there for titillation' and 'liking attractive anime girls is problematic' and I wanted to show... well, nobody but also the few people I talk to about my anime watching how REFINED I was in my appreciation of le holy eastern culture (cringe). I wanted to be the hipster weeb. The sort that goes on talking about Serial Experiments Lain or Legend Of The Galactic Heroes all day, has Evangelion analysis videos queued up in their Watch Later, and often opines about how The Tatami Galaxy is an underappreciated gem (I know it is, still need to get to it)*.

2020 made me stop giving a shit.

I watched plenty of ecchi shows this year. Some of them were enjoyable for what they were. Now, most of them weren't very GOOD and so I'm not talking about them here, but that's another matter. Interspecies Reviewers and this are the only ones that I think are worth the time to talk about. Honestly the problem was with most, especially High School DxD, often regarded as the king of 2010s "get the naked anime girl bodies on display" was that while its sexual comedy was genuinely really good and very funny, and its characters, both girls and boys are some of the most attractive, at least at baseline art level, in anime, the actual plot outside of that was dogshit and genuinely very painful to sit through. I hear that's also often a problem with <REDACTED H WORD> but I wouldn't know as I've never watched any.

But anyway, I may well watch more in the future and if they are good I will recommend them and oh my god society stop being prudes already, I'll definitely filter out the really problematic ones. Promise.

~

ANYWAY, conveniently enough, B Gata H Kei is this comedy anime about a girl who is too perverted for her own good. She, Yamada, wishes to be an absolute player in high school, wants to bag 100 guys before her high school time is up (an adorably precocious if worrying goal, as in, I could see many teenagers making that same calculation because it SOUNDS cool), settles on this average looking guy as her first one but is far too nervous to make any sort of moves, hijinks ensues. It's mostly territory that has been done before in anime and in comedy but sometimes what works, works. I have a soft spot for misunderstandings-based comedy as long as the reactions to the misunderstandings say comedic and not dramatic, and they do here, before getting really sweet towards the end.

Actually, yeah, why did I say this was an ecchi? It's notable in that it gender-swaps the romance story a bit, following the perspective of the girl, always helpful to be empathetic to girlish romantic struggles, deals with insecurities and unexpected situations, is economical with its presentation of reality, which is a fine thing to do in a comedy, if you want one of your characters to be that stereotypical UNIMAGINABLY rich transfer student with a big f***-off house and a celebrity older brother then you do you, anime. Also the experience of cheering the main couple on every time they got closer has turned out to be something I really enjoy doing - see later anime entries for more like this.

eh, saying I don't care if people think the anime shows I watch are sketchy has turned me into a romance addict.

*this isn't to say that all this is bad, I think elitism like this is fine and those shows are also sometimes good, sometimes not so good, the point is I'm not going to let other people's opinions on what is best to watch influence what I watch.

Posted by: Iz 💀 2nd January 2021, 09:53 AM

Music & Anime

Chelmico - Easy Breezy



A revelation at the start of the year and an easy contender for best anime OP of the year, which I think it would have had no problem seizing had not a certain franchise favourite of mine had a remake, chelmico provided what seems to be an annual tradition. One (singular) anime opening from a middlingly popular anime will not be a normal J-pop-rock opening sung fantastically by a deep-voiced Japanese pop singer, but will instead switch it up and come out with something a lot more tailored to Western music tastes. It'll immediately be noticed by the anime community overseas and will be for many the easy OP of the year. In 2018 that was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhBA6ynorvcfrom Kokkoku, in 2019 I'd say it was Carole & Tuesday's 'Kiss Me' which received a lot of praise although it's not exactly my thing, in 2020 it was 'Easy Breezy', which is a stormer of a pop-rap track.

An unlikely rap duo who complement each other perfectly, the duo, Rachel and Mamiko had done a few things before that but got a big break with 'Easy Breezy', attached to an anime with some very eye-catching visuals in the opening sequence. Gorillaz-like, but definitely Gorillaz on major happy pills. Though it's very hype and upbeat, as its name suggests, Easy Breezy gives off a very cool feeling. It started off my big rap appreciation this year and it ended the year as my joint-2nd most played song overall (reminder: I am doing this way 'out of order', just talking about whatever comes to mind next), no doubt helped by it being a success in BJSC and actually competed for (big up Seven) because of how swag it is.

And of course, it is the opening to the following show:

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020)



The other Yuasa-directed (Japan Sinks 2020, Devilman Crybaby) work on this list, Eizouken! was the highlight of the winter 2020 anime season for me at the start of the year, no doubt helped a lot by Easy Breezy, but also because the rest of its subject matter was so passionate and forthright about the love of creation.

Back up a minute, Eizouken (meaning "the motion pictures club") is principally an anime about how brilliant the process of creating an anime is. It's author Owara and Yuasa's love letter to the joy of creation and it really shows, well. Set in a rather Cartoon Network-style futuristic town and high school, it follows Asakusa, a head-in-the-clouds style backgrounds artist, her long-suffering aspiring capitalist friend (best girl) Kanemori and their new friendship with a young model/dork Tsubame, who is trying to draw anime characters on the down-low away from her overbearing parents. They set out to create an anime, against all the budgetary limitations that creating animation has and forces (like the student council, always the student council) working to stop them creating anime, putting their respective ingenuities to work to overcome obstacles.

Rather than avoid certain anime clichés, Eizouken embraces a few of them full throttle and retains a very positive and fun atmosphere throughout in the journey to create an anime. It's a must watch if you've ever struggled with creating something yourself before, I enjoyed it a lot because of that, but also because it's one of those shows where everyone has fun, the art has a style that you won't see anywhere else, the backgrounds are inspired retro-futuristic masterpieces, everything about it is high-class, arthouse loveliness. Maybe at times it gets a bit meta and a story about making an anime doesn't have the same punch as adapting a legendary manga about a devilman but you can tell that the people doing this are writing what they know, exactly what they know, and that's what makes things just GOOD sometimes.

Posted by: Iz 💀 2nd January 2021, 12:20 PM

Music

100 Gecs - 1000 Gecs And The Tree Of Clues (Remix Album)

xXXi_wud_nvrstop_ÜXXx (99jakes Remix)



after having 100 Gecs arrive as one of my last revelations of 2019 (following brief exposure through BJSC entries), I was very much into the idea of spam-playing them everywhere in 2020, because they represent the future of music and what it should be, taking and destroying good taste boundaries in a fun and supportable way. Zoomer music that aims to be annoying and ironic as possible that actually unironically sounds really good. I get bored easily of repeated styles of music without any new innovation in them, and new sounds are very highly valued, no matter how unusual and noisy they sound, if it all comes together well, and 100 gecs' stuff does. It's chaotic (but jokes on you, I'm into that shit) and it's also sonically exciting and that's what we need from new music.

So 1000 Gecs is unironically one of the best albums of the past two years, so when there was a remix album announced ('1000 Gecs and the Tree Of Clues') I was rather interested. Very interested in fact. Lots of big names, and for the most part they provide a decent alternative take on the songs from 1000 Gecs if not ones I've gone back to loads. The reason it's here is because of one particular track, the 99jakes Remix of 'xXXi_wud_nvrstop_ÜXXx', a good and probably underrated track from the original album in its own right but the 99jakes remix makes it come alive. It's a glorious cacophony of every possible sound in the world packed into one music track, it is relentless, it is unforgiving, it demands that this and nothing else is listened to when you start listening to it.

If we were to ever Fukuyama music, the end of music is this track. There's nothing beyond this. until someone finds a way

Posted by: Doctor Blind 3rd January 2021, 12:19 PM

I loved “Summer of '42”, it made 44 (not number 42) in my T100 of 2019 but I'd never heard of him before - maybe his BJSC entry was before my time or I just simply missed it. Wait, was it that period that Lee Wallace was cheating and I had compeltely abandoned the competition in protest? I love obviously the historical context of it, but the strings are gorgeous - I shall definitely have to investigate him further.

Posted by: Iz 💀 3rd January 2021, 12:28 PM

Actually yes, it was that exact contest where Lee got banned that had his more well-known BJSC entry 'I Am The Antichrist To You' come 5th, almost definitely the song I've held onto most from that one. (statisticians would have me recall that he was entered twice, both times by Singerpurear, but the second time DNQed)



It's a fantastic piece of emotional indie pop, also with good strings, though a lot more subtle, that has aged extremely well, and while I'm at it, I'll link my other favourite of his that's a lot more upbeat and psychedelic.



Most of his songs can be picked up as favourites though, I can see why 'Summer of '42' came through for you.

Posted by: Iz 💀 4th January 2021, 02:51 PM

TV SHOW and GAME'

The Queen's Gambit & Chess



This is rather on my mind right now so it makes sense to write about, I'm not even sure what other live action TV shows I'd give rights to this year, I know I definitely watched a few but outside of various catalog favourites (Star Trek, The West Wing, seeing their naive liberalism occasionally get dunked on by the twitter socialists I follow, particularly the latter) I forgot to keep track and it's in the murky past of my lockdown haze back at the start of the year. I'd watch a TV show if it interests me, and I know there are some good ones out there I need to get around to, but generally they're twice as long as anime, half of them are edgy Netflix creations and I tend to see people recommending anime in my spheres far more.

All of which is to say that The Queen's Gambit was a revelation to me. For anyone reading this that I haven't boasted about this before, I was real good at chess when I was young. Nationally good, even. In that I went to a national chess competition twice. I went on and off with it and didn't really get much of a chance to go to tournaments at my secondary school though I did ensure inter-school tournaments kept running and was a threat in most of them. I just kind of stopped though. I wore out the few chess books I had, I didn't really advance my game into the (now, I realise) more fun theoretical stage and left it behind at uni - god, I wish I'd searched out the chess society there.

Anyway, a Netflix show that reignited my childhood love? That promised, through tournaments and character growth to explore one of my favourite sports in the way I've been HOPING for an anime to do for years? The reason for that by the way, is that anime are often so good at making niche interests look majorly appealing through a story following "the world's GREATEST at... rock climbing" or whatever, and while there is a shogi anime (shogi = Japanese-style chess, with completely different rules), that one is more about personal struggles where the game is more of an outlet, and it's not the chess I'm familiar with, so I'll get to March Comes In Like A Lion some day.

Uh, the show itself. Beautiful to watch from start to finish, the sort of fictional tale you wish was somehow a real story, because it fits so well into the time period of the 1960s, there's constant references to classical chess players from Morphy - who the main character is often compared to - down to Alekhine, it feeds into the Cold War era because of the strength of Soviet players, the whole backdrop of the show is a tremendous setting, no doubt in part thanks to the novel it was based on.

Beth Harmon, as the lead, a chess prodigy who found comfort in it in an orphanage is a great protagonist, confident in her ability, prone to addictive tendencies that make you concerned for her as the show moves forward, also adding a lot of doubt as to whether she will perform, but also a person with fire in their eyes and a determination to succeed that makes her easy to root for. She's described as playing beautiful attacking chess that stuns her male contemporaries, and very fittingly, a lot of the show is about how standout she is in a game that has unfortunately been considered a man's game for far too long. It's a great watch and a great story in 8 episodes and I don't really see any other challenger for my favourite (live-action) TV show of the year.

And so I've started playing a lot more chess on chess websites, revitalising my rating, sinking down as I ran across people I was too rusty to face, relearning a bunch of opening moves (there will be a time when I come unstuck with it but at the moment I am in love with the London System), taking a break from writing this post to post in the Chess topic about it, redeveloping my eyes to see a number of moves ahead, playing occasionally chaotic, occasionally measured games, watching Hikaru Nakamura, one of the living greats, stream it and make it into an esport, I think chess has a bright future and for a while at least, I'll be very into it.

(one of my goals for when I move back to the UK is to find and enter real tournaments again if I can, obviously can't do that right now but for now, playing on chess.com is a great substitute)

Posted by: Prince of Pete 4th January 2021, 08:55 PM

Giving that 100 gecs song a listen now (I won't try and type the title out ), it certainly is an adventure! Lots of different sounds which somehow come together to make something which I can enjoy listening to.

Posted by: Iz 💀 6th January 2021, 06:14 AM

Vtubers



Hololive English

This is the first of what I hope are the big 5 4 of Vtuber posts, I want to do these justice, as they reflect the 6 streamers I've been watching most over the course of this hellyear and the happiness that Hololive talents gave me in briefly escaping from it. Again, this is not being done chronologically, because this is also not the final Vtuber post that won't focus on one talent alone. Instead, this post will be on the Hololive English branch that was opened in September and 3 1 out of the 5 talents that it consisted of and my experiences with them.

Back in August as I was moving my life around, I heard that Hololive English was forming. Now, at this point, I'd been steadily following Hololive idols after seeing a bunch of Pekora and Korone clips, I'd subscribed to a few others like Shion and Towa but basically expected that I'd rarely watch those and was focusing on instead, the two that I found the most entertaining and the ones that I'd found the most broken English clips and chaotic game moments from. I still hadn't watched a full stream. My Japanese also wasn't as good back then. So that's understandable.

However, learning that Hololive English Gen 1, otherwise known as Hololive Myth (as all of the girls are representations of mythical creatures - a Grim Reaper, a phoenix chicken, an Eldritch horror, a shark and a British person), had me wary. I have often been burned far too much in the past by Western adaptations of Japanese anime content, whether that is botched dubs, wholesale shows ripping off the concepts all the way to bad Netflix adaptations, and hearing anime girls with what I imagined would be American accents didn't fill me with much hope. What seemed cute in Japanese would probably be cringy and niche in English, the vtuber audience outside of Japan was surely too small for this to be a success, who knows if they'd even make clippable moments? Forget about watching a whole stream, that's something that even with live-action talents, that you only do if you really like the game the streamer's playing and you value their expert commentary on. It'd be a brief gimmick before I went back to Pekora clips. I, and basically everyone else I noticed also into the vtuber scene at this time had serious doubts about whether this would work.

We were wrong. Completely wrong.

The English girls debuted on September 12-13th, I managed to catch the first bit of the first girl, Mori Calliope, and thought she was okay even though she had a VERY American voice, though it wasn't brazen, and quite nice to listen to, but it was a very busy time and I didn't watch the other streams. It was so busy that I didn't even see at that time that Calliope had released a full rap album just before her debut. Then I started seeing them on Twitter, saw a bunch of my timeline getting very excited about the shark girl, and from there everything spiralled from clips to full, unstoppable Hololive fandom.

As a group, the English girls are pretty close, regularly doing full collaborations and in duos. I don't see many people make this comparison but they and their characters line pretty well up with a set of Spice Girls - Ginger (Kiara), Scary (Calliope), Posh (Ina), Baby (Gura) and Sporty (Amelia), or idk, plug other comparisons into your favourite girl group. I think that's a good one though. They do split down the middle a little bit with the two that are in Japan at time of writing, Kiara and Calliope often acting as a pair, and the three that are located somewhere on the North American continent, Gura, Ina and Ame, often working together. Naturally of course, with similar schedules and all. The rest of this post will be about my experiences with the latter 3 1, Kiara and Calli are getting their own posts, and why I went from being very hesitant about Hololive English to loving most of the content they put out.

Ninomae Ina'nis



"What happens when we squish your squishy hair? I'll bonk you. With a crowbar. Don't do it."

yes there is a tentacle girl let's get that observation out of the way x

Hololive loves playing with preconceived expectations and throwing them out of the window with regards to character. This character's backstory is a Lovecraftian mix of a girl who picked up a book left by the Ancient Ones and transformed into a monster with tentacles like an octopus. In contrast, Ina is probably the most refined and normal out of the English-speaking bunch, she's certainly the one to put on when you want a relaxing stream, whether that's in the background or just to watch her play Minecraft intelligently and calmly.

Her big talent is art, she's an incredibly accomplished illustrator, she designed a part of the Hololive EN trailer herself (IIRC correctly she did the shot of all 5 members at about 1:20 of the video at the top of this post) and also draws things like this:

This all comes together in drawing streams which are fun to pop in on once in a while, I imagine they'd also be useful if you had any interest in drawing, I may eventually given how much I flit from talent to talent but it's not normally something I do. She also seems to have a taste in video games that seems to, outside of Minecraft, consists of playing 'that indie game you've heard only good things about'.

Personality-wise, I, as I said, really find her relaxing, and the dark horse of the English-speaking girls, in that while she is by some distance the quietest of the 5, particularly in collabs, her sense of humor and comic-timing is possibly the best of them all, specialising in puns, dad jokes and very witty yet friendly deadpan. She is very much a good vibes streamer and with how comfy she makes it

my favourite two Ina moments that are coming to mind are both in collabs, but that's just shows how she plays so well off the other girls:
1. She and Kiara were watching the Japanese girls have their 3D concert at the end of December, Kiara is a well-known fangirl of Pekora, and Ina happened to be a few seconds ahead of Kiara, so when Pekora came out on stage the following exchange went down.

INA: Oh, I'm going to take my headphones off for obvious reasons
KIARA: You're taking your headphones off for obvious.. what... AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! *piercing chicken scream*

2. She gifted Calli, who out of the 5 girls, plays Minecraft the least, a horse in Minecraft (which you can use to get places faster, build a horse collection etc). Calli was very touched and promptly took the horse on an adventure, almost immediately getting in a minecart without undoing the horse leash, and the horse fell to its death. Calli was very upset and spent the next hour of the stream making a grave for the horse, while Ina, who was playing the game off-stream, surprised Calli at the end with a new horse. Because she's an incredibly kind and nice person.

and also quietly skilled at most of the games she plays it seems, which is quite a contrast from the sometimes headless chickens (pun intended) that the other girls get into.

also this is going on long and if I do Amelia and Gura as I was planning to in this post then it'll be unmanageable.

Posted by: Iz 💀 6th January 2021, 01:42 PM

Vtubers


Gawr Gura




"a" (her first tweet)

Never let it be said that I watch average gamers playing average games just because they're behind a cute anime figure, some of them are really good at games. Like Gura, the shark of Hololive, who is an excellent rhythm gamer and well, that's not normally my type of game but I have to respect the skill there. What I can also hugely respect is just how good she is at attracting attention.

Let's put this in perspective. At the time that Hololive English, and Gura, debuted, the most subscribed Hololive youtuber was Fubuki, with around about 850k subscribers. Fubuki was clearly going to get the 1 million first. Nailed on. Except, well, she wasn't. This is what I mean when I say that Hololive EN was a success beyond what anyone thought possible, because Gawr Gura, a memey little shark girl got to 1 million in the space of just a single month, becoming the first Hololive vtuber to reach a million, and to this day is sitting 500-600k subs ahead of any of her senpais. She went mainstream. Or at least found a huge new audience that wasn't Hololive's existing audience.

You can see why, Gura is built to attract an audience of younger people more interested in funny memey shark girl than necessarily enjoying anything anime, and the thing is, she's only able to do this, attract and keep an audience better than nearly any Vtuber, hell, most Youtubers, on the planet, because the girl is a natural-born entertainer. And pretty fantastic singer too, if her covers are any indication, she's incredibly good at covering Japanese city pop and given I dabble in that sort of fandom sometimes... Whenever I've dropped into one of her streams, her tone of voice is like its constantly about to drop a joke on you, watching her play near enough anything is more about hanging out with a shitposter who'll say off the wall randomly funny stuff, and always doing her best to look like an innocent cuddly shark. Smol silly shark if you will. I mean, she coined "shrimp" as a corruption of "simp" and apparently now "shrimp" is a common way to refer to... that practice.

I don't have all that much else to say about her (except to worry that she handles the pressure of being FIRST okay moving forward) because knowing that she's infectious and funny is pretty much all you need, but she's easily the most accessible of Hololive English for a general audience and probably one of the most likely to make you laugh no matter what she's doing. Even if I have no interest in the game she's playing, I know it'll be worth putting her on.

Amelia Watson





(posted when Youtube went down briefly in December)

I've watched this fine lady play Portal 2, find the white gel that creates Portal walls and subsequently spend over 5 minutes spraying white stuff all over the area while laughing like a maniac

The final English member to debut, and one that has already appeared in this thread with 'Pop On Rocks' (which I believe was clipped from one of her very very long talking streams), Amelia was clearly Hololive's attempt to go for the international appeal of Sherlock and have some sort of lore-based anchor for their Myth generation, as the one among the 5 that "investigates" the Myths. Of course that isn't actually mythy enough so early on she also revealed that she is a time traveller.

Basically the partner-in-crime of Gura, I find myself naturally watching Ame a bit more than Gura or Ina if only because I share much more of a game taste with her, she's interested in puzzle games, which I am also, and even with the odd FPS game, though that's more to watch her get humorously bloodthirsty or get into a toxic gamer rage. I can't help but like the sort of person who makes games funny to watch and shows up everywhere to support all the other girls when they need her help on stream (I believe she stayed awake watching all of her genmates debuts in the hours-long relay they had such that when it came to her debut stream she was barely awake to function). She's also clearly in love with what she's doing, spending ridiculous hours in games to the point where it's unusual if one of her streams is under 3 hours long.

Jacob can thank her for me getting interested in Outer Wilds (as I know he loves that game and now he's got it for me I need to play it more when I'm less busy), because her feats in that, spending an entire hour solely devoted to what I believe is an unnecessary achievement of landing directly on the "sun-station" after being told it was impossible and eventually succeeding shows the sort of determination I really admire. Recently her working her way through Portal 2 has been something I've really enjoyed watching all the way through because that's the sort of game where seeing a playthrough and in effect seeing someone else experience it help make what is unfortunately a limited experience and yet a great story become fresh again.

Honestly, the reason I've watched less from these three than Pekora, Calli and Kiara, who are my three favourites and will be getting their own posts is simply timezones - while my internet is often too slow to keep up with livestreams, it can sometimes, and seeing a stream is live is a great reminder for me to go back to it later. Gura and Ame almost always stream while I'm asleep or working, and Ina only ever seems to stream at the absolute worst times for me at 4-5am - though that is actually prime-time Europe time and what with 90% of Hololive in Japan there's barely anyone covering that part of the world.

(it's also her birthday at time of writing this so fitting x)

But they're great, they're very entertaining and are very necessary to make the Hololive English experience feel more rounded, encompassing all types of games, skills, tastes and musical abilities.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 6th January 2021, 02:26 PM

I've never been really good at chess, we had a chessboard at home but I could never really get my head around it sadly.

That said - I thought that The Queen's Gambit was a brilliant watch this year. Throughly enjoyed it!

Posted by: Iz 💀 8th January 2021, 12:05 PM

Glad to hear it resonated well even with people who don't play chess!

~
Vtubers

Usada Pekora






I decided to get the Vtubers all done and dusted in the next 3 posts before resuming normal things. Already fearing my future self with how much I know I'm going to write for the Mori paragraph, and the Kiara paragraph probably also. I mean, at this point, any normal person who may be nervously glancing at this thread might be finding it all a bit STRANGE. And I'd completely understand that, what person would write novel-length paragraphs about the antics of streamers with a cartoon avatar? APPARENTLY ME, let's do this.

Because what we have here, is I am going to tell you an origin story. For me. And it definitely involves that rather cute rabbit girl with a laugh that can only be punctuated by many arrows, see callback here:


The first time I ever watched a Hololive streamer, the first time I knew there were anime girls streaming on the internet was seeing this... enigma of a tweet find its way onto my Twitter timeline:



I follow a bunch of weebs, what can I say. But the thing is, that video was one of the best things I'd ever seen. It was of Pekora, who, bless her, her English isn't the best (though she has been getting a lot better because of her friendship with Moona), was working her way through an INCREDIBLY surreal English test and laughing uproariously all the way through at its absurdity. So that was a really good bright spot at a time that I was stuck indoors and unable to go anywhere. It got me introduced to Pekora, who ends sentences with 'peko' and seems to get herself into all sorts of trouble streaming games.

Then I got recommended more Pekora clips and you know how it goes, I found out she plays into her chaotic persona by regularly switching between being a Looney Tunes protagonist (yes, you might think Bugs Bunny, but just as often she's going to be Wile E Coyote) and a sadistic war criminal in games. Her Usada Construction videos are gold standard chronicling her ethically questionable construction company's builds in Minecraft, ranging from creating a TNT-cannon in Minecraft to terrorise a raider base, to setting fire to other Hololives' work, to conducting trafficking experiments to NPCs, to her finding parts of her builds blown up through her own hubris, she somehow has this way of attracting entertainment to her in Minecraft and indeed most other games, where in collabs she is the Loki-esque trickster that the other streamers must never trust, and alone she ends up keeping the viewer on side with her zany way of approaching and attacking enemies and obstacles. Her unique way of laughing is fantastic, especially as it's constantly represented by translators and dubbers as having arrows in it.

For a long time I was only wanting to search out Pekora clips as I knew she was clearly the entertainer of the bunch and so much of my year has had some crazy rabbit girl laughing off to the side that I needed to do this. The thing about Pekora that gets me so hard is that from what I know about the times she's talked about her real personality on stream, is that she's one of these people where the fact that she is streaming behind an avatar is the only thing that allows her to truly be herself. From accounts ranging from her mother to other members of Hololive, she's really quiet and polite when not in crazy entertainer mode. To be fair, that comes out a lot in collaborations anyway, I think one of my favourite moments of the whole year was Kiara telling Pekora how the former watching Pekora managed to get HER through a hard time, because it resonated so much with my own experience, and Pekora returning that with a "that makes me very happy!" (in Japanese) just felt so sincere and reflected so much for me just how GOOD this whole type of entertainment can be when it's built on a bunch of people being nice to each other - ferocious in gaming against each other, but best of friends all the same.

That Pekora is so obviously such an introvert who can come alive in a performance setting, well, firstly, it makes her very relatable to me because that's exactly what I'm like with my job and my activities outside of my job. It also just says to me that without this, without the virtual being able to hide some parts of the physical and allow for some confidence to be built, someone who clearly has such a natural talent for entertainment likely would have never gotten their big break. It's not just me saying this either, there's so many metrics that measure Vtubers, though we don't REALLY like competition here, but Pekora performs so strong on all of them, subscribers, money donated, sponsorships, youtube views, memeability, and especially live viewers she's quite possibly the biggest all-rounder that Hololive has and it's so heartening seeing her get all of that success.

She recently got 1 million subscribers, and cried on stream saying thank you to everyone who supported her - again this is another reason, this machine of Hololive takes content creators to the point where they are among the biggest-earning internet figures in the world and the thing was, she still hadn't told her parents (who she still lives with, we don't know any of the Holos' age for sure but most of them are likely around early-mid-20s). A few days later, she did a coming out stream to her mother, which got nearly 130,000 people LIVE watching her at its peak, as a shy and decidedly non-war-crimey rabbit girl explained to her mother that she was a million-subbed Youtuber live on camera (mother represented by a generic cartoon woman of course) and that she played a rabbit girl online, to which her mother replied "Sou-peko" (I see-peko) and then to the stream chat, going at lightning speed, "Arigatou-peko", causing beautiful cringe from Pekora. I believe she and her mother did a follow up stream where they drank some of Pekora-branded plum wine, which is actually a thing, and is sold out within seconds of being put up for sale.

Even now with so many more that I'm following, I always like to see what she's up to and I know I'll get a lot out of her playing a game and it's probably due to watching long streams from her (and to be fair, other Japanese streamers like Botan) that my Japanese has gotten to the point that I'm starting to pick up vocabulary in a natural way rather than endlessly struggling to remember basic words, she recently played Doki Doki Literature Club which was as great as you'd expect from two internet memes meeting and seeing her laugh at the silliness of a bad game is almost always a better experience than actually playing the game yourself.

bless this dictator-like bunny with so much success in the future, I owe her so much of my free time for sending me down into a community where memes, friendliness and fun is never short in supply

final tweet, to show how her English has improved (well, her spelling still needs work, but she's got the spirit) and the PekoMoona friendship which is still one of the best friendships to live vicariously through:

Posted by: Iz 💀 9th January 2021, 12:04 PM

Vtuber

Takanashi Kiara



Kikkerikii!!! (her stream opening signature call, the German onomatopaeia for rooster)

The other half of Mori Calliope and the fourth member of Hololive English I'm writing a long paragraph for, I really didn't expect to be doing this when they debuted, to have this much love for all of them, but to tell you the truth, it's the most surprising to myself-from-September that I'm doing it this much about Kiara, the phoenix-chicken who runs a fast-food restaurant (known as KFP, Kiara Fried Phoenix of course). Her fans are her long-suffering employees. It is absolutely not a cult. I have no way of measuring this but by hours watched, I think the Hololive member I've watched the most is Kiara.

The first stream I saw from Kiara was her Fall Guys stream, her second one that she did almost immediately after debut, and I didn't know much about her, my first impressions was that among the bunch, she stood out less than the rest, and well, that stream didn't really show off her skills. She wasn't particularly good at the game and I was still in the mindset that in order to enjoy streaming, I'd enjoy watching people succeed at games. Having said that, around the same time I really enjoyed seeing Pekora fail again and again at the same game so what's instructive here is that I just wasn't familiar with Kiara, and she wasn't quite yet as experienced with streaming - she was really trying her hardest to live up to her specialty as the English member who speaks the best Japanese by speaking so much Japanese that it almost felt like she was taking twice as long to say everything. So there were struggles with her at first, but that she kept with it and managed to grow on me, it's made me enjoy her content all the more.

See the thing about Kiara that I love so much is that.... Well, all of Hololive English resonate with me particularly well because they started a new job where most of them struggled with imposter syndrome and early setbacks at the same time that I was doing the same thing with a new job of my own, so seeing them grow into their new position at the same time I was also growing into my new position is helpful, but, like with so much that Kiara does, it was amplified so much more with her.

Part of the reason Kiara got imposter syndrome was she felt her skill of languages didn't stand out so much, but well, it drew me to her. She's the only member of Hololive English to not be natively English speaking, she's from Austria (and a phoenix, I made the Eurovision connection a few weeks ago and I hope she eventually references it, though she normally calls her home country Australia), and she is trilingually fluent when all of the other members of EN have varying Japanese skills but not fluent. Which makes her the MVP in communicating and doing collabs with the Japanese branch, and one show she does that I always tune in for is HoloTalk, where she hosts a talk show featuring one of the Japanese talents and asks them questions in an effort to communicate information about them to overseas fans that Youtube translators don't always capture that well. And really, while she worried that there wasn't anything special about her, and even discounting her fantastic skill at languages and her not insignificant singing ability, the thing that is special about her is herself. She's really good to the fan community she managed to entrap create, going off on long tangents on talking streams that are lovely to put on in the background, having this special brand of humour that's built on fake going mad with power and horniness (and you should know I appreciate that), getting seriously kind when the situation calls for it. Actually, while I think she is putting on a voice when she plays Kiara, she manages to do that for hours which is impressive in itself, but even the voice has that lovely Germanic twang to it which... well, it's a benefit for a streamer to have a voice you like.

When she shared that she had been in Japan on a once-in-a-lifetime visa and that when COVID locked down everything she had planned do on her year there, it made me feel so reflective on my own position. Had I come to where I am just a year later, I wouldn't have had my amazing Japanese holiday last year, I probably wouldn't have been financially secure during the lockdown, I wouldn't have had the experience to find a good job out of the ashes of COVID and it made me really sympathise with anyone (she certainly wasn't alone) who made the big leap that I made in 2018 this year. COVID hit during the first year in my adult life that it wouldn't have completely destroyed my plans. I was hit bad enough in the first wave of lockdowns, and so her aforementioned watching of Pekora was, well, I did the exact same thing. She then saw the audition call for Hololive, applied, and became one of the kindest cult leaders fun game streamers out there, clearly enjoying that she's got her big break and seeing her grow into the confident bridge between the JP members and the EN members has been excellent. As I've mentioned a couple of times, that stream with her and Pekora was fantastic as she opened up fully about her journey to join Hololive.



Like her inspiration Pekora, she is chaotic, but she also leans into lewd humour far more - and plays off the dynamic of her friend Mori Calliope in the duo Takamori, where Kiara is, as a phoenix, constantly in love with Calli and chasing her, but Calliope, as Death, is eternally frustrated is that Kiara is the one thing she can't kill (at least that's the lore, the reality is that Kiara is the silly comedic lead to Calli's NORMAL PERSON which really works well in collabs, their offline collab is springing to mind, as is their recent playthrough of co-op game A Way Out. And of course they're really good friends as the two EN members actually in Japan, and it's going to hurt a lot when Kiara moves back home in two months). Oh, and also lots of shipping talk, her Sims 4 stream, a screenshot pictured above, was, well, it was very, as Kiara fans like to say... bottom left. Early on, the Hololive girls rated each other on a chart, where top-down was purity to lewdness and left-right was smarts. Kiara expected to be top right, but all the other girls agreed she was definitely bottom left and she's since played into that a LOT, particularly the... bottom part. It is like hanging out with that really funny friend who will bring up things you'd never thought of and will manage to keep conversations going for hours, she certainly has a talent for that. Also a talent for doing all sorts of things to keep her audience, from reading fairy-tales in German (big fan of those, even if they're pretty niche), to being animals accompanied with German onomatopeias, from frogs to snakes, to getting into all sorts of trouble in video games, and man, I rarely find someone who I'm this comfortable just putting on in the background and wanting to support (even if most of Hololive do fit).

In early December, her channel got deleted unexpectedly from Youtube. That was the moment when I saw her character on full display. She had no idea why it was happening (it was a mistake), but she took full advantage of the situation to create a meme contest on the associated subreddit, played it into her lore of a phoenix to revive and created a second debut stream where she pretended to have amnnesia, forget Calliope, call everyone her seniors, be part of 'Hololive EN 2nd gen', and very successfully directed what could have been a session of fan anger into positive energy, fun and extra parts to the mythology and character of Kiara.

brief interlude for MUSIC



Takanashi Kiara - Hinotori

This beautiful anime OP was Kiara's first original song, her Phoenix, and it sounds very much like the theme song to an anime or a jrpg, which is fitting as she plays JRPGs a lot. But it has a way of sticking in your brain (I suppose it would if you watch hours upon hours of her streaming and catch at least a few times where she sings this or plays the instrumental as BGM, but it does feel like the theme of someone who has overcome a lot, and Kiara certainly has from what she's shared.

Ultimately, she is one of the two Hololive streamers whose schedule I will always check to see what she's doing every week now. She often streams very long so I dip in and out a lot, even if it's a game I don't really play, but it's very easy to do that, and feel part of the big and dedicated fanbase she's managed to cultivate. I haven't gone too much into the money side of things because I normally wouldn't be about unhealthy spending habits on internet streamers, but while I haven't bought a membership to her yet, the reason is not because I don't want to or I can't (lemme just say "VPN struggle" and leave it at that), she's certainly given me enough entertainment to warrant something when I can.

The next post will be about the other... her partner, and wife, the pink-haired Calliope Mori, who I hope even the blindest have noticed me being a... big fan of.

Posted by: Iz 💀 10th January 2021, 05:45 AM

Vtuber

Mori Calliope




All ya really gotta do is sign on the dotted line
It's probably fine, right? Sike! Your soul is mine
It's all good, being a Dead Beat's got benefits
We'll be "best friends, " that's the end of it
Then I get a rush of adrenaline, I think I like you!
Wanna feel my five-foot scythe inside you
I would die for you!!! And that adorable scream
Curious, would you die for me?
Mori Calliope, "Dead Beats"

WATSO U ARE SUDS
Mori Calliope, 2020

Why do you end up gravitating to celebrities, other people, content creators online? I'd say it's normally because you recognise something of yourself in them. You like yourself, I assume. It seems natural to me that I'd end up enjoying spending time (even parasocially) with a person who I've discovered shares an alarming number of qualities with me, reacts to things in the same way I do, doesn't let something seeming uncool stop her doing it, and that's Mori Calliope, Hololive EN's Rapping Reaper, a pink haired personification of a grim reaper. And I don't think it's an exaggeration from me to say that by doing so and seeing her be herself I've gained a lot more self-esteem for being who I am.

She was the only one of Hololive English whose debut stream I watched, at least part of, and through that I discovered that they were going for the music by hiring a really talented rapper to be one of their streamers, and also that she was, is and remains a gigantic dork. She, more than any other Vtuber, commits to her character in a way that I think at first was out of nervousness but has evolved into being one of her defining traits. She doesn't live in Japan (as one of two EN streamers who in reality does), she lives in the part of the underworld directly under Japan. She didn't use to work at a teaching job, she used to work at 'scythe-swinging lessons' - and this little tidbit makes me think it was very likely she was working the same job I am, if only because that's one of the most likely things for a 20-something American woman to be doing to stay in Japan. It's 'the reaper family' she talks about missing, her old boss is "Death-sensei" and someone who constantly revved up a motorbike outside of her old (? I think she moved) apartment is "Ghost Rider".

Her music is definitely one of the biggest appeals but I will be doing a separate post for that because some of you have heard it and I need to share it more widely than just burying it in a Vtuber post. This'll just be what I've watched from her on stream.

She also ends up using outdated slang and capitalising words Like This, cringe but in a way that's endearing, as I said, dorky. And that's kind of why I like Calli so much, this attitude is that of a lovely woman who is just being herself, a normal, relatable person who is a little bit awkward at times but never stops doing it and just owns who she is. Seeing someone live unashamedly like that is inspiring, indeed she's inspired me to be a bit more forthright about just acting in a way that feels natural while not apologising for it, as long as doing so is fun for everyone else. It's also seeing her clearly enjoy herself so much that works for me. She's someone who has in her entire streaming career been working incredibly hard and constantly tiring herself out what with keeping up her other commitment (she's constantly said she has trouble saying "No" to people asking her to do stuff and I absolutely know the feeling, I already take on too much work as it is and often have trouble giving myself free time, though I think we're both doing a bit better at it lately), has clearly worked hard to be successful and seeing her live the dream is very cool to see.

I think what made me start watching her fully, after seeing her appear in real-life on a prominent anime podcast (with clever camera work to super-impose the character over her actual self), rather than just listening to "Excuse Me, But Could You Please RIP" over and over again, was this comment she left on the video of her new song "Cursed Night". It's a song with some pretty depressing lyrics and I guess she wanted to make sure it wasn't misinterpreted.



It signalled a couple of things to me, as said, that she was really having the time of her life being able to broadcast her music to such a huge audience of people having never really gotten the chance before, and that she is very into the cognitive dissonance of letting out negative emotions in ways that can bring enjoyment to other people, through music, or on stream where she may try and act edgy and tough but quickly melts into adorable cuteness because she can't keep it up effectively. And knowing this, I knew I wanted to spend more time watching her and supporting her however I could - not yet maxing out my credit card for her because that'd be unhealthy but what I can.

Basically, like me, she was a child of emo music, as evidenced by one of her karaoke streams where, having the ability to sing anything, she sang not one, not two, not three but SIX My Chemical Romance songs over the course of an hour and a half, five of them from Black Parade. I kept a video that clipped her cover of Welcome To... in my sig for a while because it was such an impressive cover. What I have now is a cover of the Haruhi song God Knows, also a highlight, nearly every song she chooses is an anime or mid-00s classic. As an example of how hard she works for us (too hard, many would say), when she wasn't feeling up to do a karaoke stream at the scheduled time, she moved it to a few hours later AND scheduled in a second karaoke stream for the following day. What with Gorillaz (the original Vtubers!!!!) love, Eminem, Linkin Park, she has the absolute best music taste - which makes her karaoke streams the best in Hololive. I was very relieved when she quit her 'scythe-swinging job', as like Kiara she's really grown into the role of streamer. They play off each other well but she's great at collabing with most of them, her collab with Korone on 'Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes' produced one of my favourite lines 'I am die, thank you forever' from Korone, and like with the Kiara/Calli relationship, Calli's excellent role in playing the straight man helped sell that very well.

She's also clearly into internet culture at least a little bit in the way I am. One thing the vtubers do that I haven't talked about yet is watchalong streams, which I don't often catch unless I see them in advance and they're obviously best live when you can join in with the stream chat. I did watch 'Fight Club' with her on archive and that was fun enough but yesterday, I managed to watch the Wiseau movie 'The Room' and its follow-up 'The Disaster Artist' live with her and about 2,000 other people watching along with her, and it was an absolute blast. Seeing the chat react to the movie, especially its focus on people getting it on (I had the uncensored version and I had no idea there even was an uncensored version), taking part a bit myself with saying things like 'MY EYES' along with Calli creating autotuned versions of famous lines in the movie and hating Lisa along with us was a fantastic way to spend a Saturday afternoon at home, really felt like a group watchalong of a terrible movie, as it should be, which is something that, out here, I haven't really done for a while. Interesting coda: THE Tommy Wiseau actually liked a tweet containing a clip of Calli autotuning "You're tearing me apart Lisa" so, that's a nice bit of validation. Validation for my hobbies from Tommy Wiseau, I'll take it.

She's aware of the weird things that fans ask her to do, has promised that "A-R-A, A-R-A" ("ara ara" is Japanese for "oh my", stereotypically said by sexually attractive women in anime) will only be said at 1 million subscribers, which she is REALLY near to, she has also promised to cover "Rap God" then finally which, well, I can't wait because her rapping abilities are very impressive. She often leans into her workaholic image to do cute sleepy reaper streams and one of these days, when she gets a working ASMR mic, she's definitely doing an ASMR stream, and I'm sort of here for all of it. She manages to make herself look very cute when she's sleepy, the avatar looks adorable with the bubbly misty filters she uses for those. She also moves her character around the screen a lot for humour, or plays the recorder or kazoo on stream as a ritual to thank superchatters, or uses lots of editing tricks to make it appear like there's two of her or, well, you can't predict what silly thing she'll do next when she's in the right mood. And now she's full-time, there'll hopefully be a lot more of those to come.

From her ridiculous fever dream of a stream (now sadly deleted) where she spent an hour begging Atlus to be able to play Persona 3, to playing Minecraft in an endearingly nooby way, to singing all of my favourite songs at karaoke nights, to her generally rather good game taste in non-Minecraft areas, the bits she's allowed to do, to her great talking streams that are pick-me-ups, I love everything she does and I don't think I've ever managed to be captivated by a streamer quite like this before. Anime girl or not, she's helped remind me that there is nothing greater than being yourself and showing it off to the world when the sort of person you are is a lovable geek with great wordplay skills and filled with the sort of 'lowkey cultured' references (e.g. her blank New Year's resolution paper had Lorum Ipsum written on it before she started making resolutions) that I like to make and see no one pick up on.

tl;dr she's near enough to me in anime rapper form and I like seeing that. this was sort of the main purpose I did an EOY thread this year as she's really defined the final quarter of my year as a regular part of my free time with all her entertaining antics as a normal person who made it big by being themselves.

also I'm obsessed with her music. To confirm, we have now left the vtuber stage, so the thread is safe again, but the next post will be a comprehensive review of all 5 of her songs thus far and I would recommend listening to them because they are very good music. Lead at least, having a rapper in-house has allowed Hololive to pioneer the rent-a-rapper concept so she's appeared on a few other girls' songs as well.

Posted by: Iz 💀 10th January 2021, 08:43 AM

Music

Mori Calliope - Dead Beats EP + Cursed Night

It's not wrong to think about it, but I'll stop for tonight
'Cause we're immortalized forever in the songs that we write, ya' know?
Mori Calliope, "Live Again"

There are four songs on the Dead Beats EP, named after Calli's fanname, and they're all very easily repeatable bits of pop-rap. On release, Dead Beats was briefly #1 on iTunes WW, I spied her later release "Cursed Night" making its way into the top 100 in the US, and when she releases new music this year, I'm going to be watching eagerly to see where it shows up now she is starting from a fanbase - that these songs went so far when she'd just debuted was impressive enough!

From featuring rather silly skits, at the end of them, to the more reflective ones sounding like an Eminem or The Streets ballad, they are great pieces of rap being done by a clearly very talented (and unfortunately rare) female rapper. I really don't think there are enough rappers like her, particularly given her interests, unlike most rappers, her... weebiness shines through as you get lines in Japanese running into English lines and yet still managing to rhyme like an expert. As they're being done in character, they do tend to make reference to her Grim Reaper persona as an anime e-girl and someone not knowing who she is might find that strange, but what good rap doesn't involve the personality of the performer?

Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?





I'm not asking for much: do me a favour and die
Gomen shitsureishimasuga, shinde kudasai (lit: sorry it's rude, but please be dead)

One of the first big things Calli did was host a remix contest for her signature song, which is also the song she plays at the start of most of her streams. Lots of people entered, as in, lots and the winner was Nhato (yes, that is a name I hope you recognise!), who got his rather fantastic remix used as the intro music for the next month of streaming. Since then she's been playing other remixes of it at the start, I really like the Eurobeat remix and I've seen a lot of people go creative in adding their fan touch to this song.

It's obviously meant as an intro to Calli and well, it's a great intro to her character in one way and in other ways it isn't. She moved past this 'edgy killer' thing pretty early on and while bellowing out 'murder is so f**king kawaii' is the ultimate in cognitive dissonance, helpfully labelled by another line as 'fake-murder-shit' to stop you feeling bad, that's not really why I love this. Why I love it is that it is an ultimate fire of a track, breathing it in fact, in how well it manages to meld two languages together and make both of them sound absolutely breathless as she switches from one to the other.

It makes sure to reference the starting aspects of Calli's character, that she's hard-working, takes no shit (lol, that lasted long), does a bit of rap posturing but mixes it up with quite a bit of self-deprecation that I've come to know her more often for. There's references to Kiara (Kusotori), references to Calli's overthinking nature, in that she puts down words that sound good into the rap, does it off the cuff but knows why they're there. The liberal sprinkling of basic Japanese words throughout works wonders, melding DIE with 'Daisuki' (love), using 'F**king Seiso' (Seiso being the state of pureness that idols are supposed to exist in), other words I barely notice at this point like 'shinigami' and 'kawaii', finishing the bridge off with that wonderful 'kudasai', the timely 'chotto henda' (that's a little weird) in the second verse. Actually, you know, I think I love every lyric in the verses. It's a perfect construction.

The whole attitude and package of this song is one that demands repeat listens and while it does go a little basic in the 'hit it with the bass', there's enough pure hype, attitude and clever wordplay oozing out of this that I've never grown tired of it even when I hear it at the start of most Calliope streams I watch. Probably my second favourite song of 2020.

you know I'm still absolutely hurt at y'all for ranking this below joke songs in the Halloween spinoff but because this is in crossed-out writing I've moved past that and don't really care, because I KNOW it's better than that I wish you could be doing plug at hours when I'm awake so I could spam her songs at you and change your minds.

or idk let's split this up and do the rest of the songs later because I'm still thinking of stuff to write for this help

Posted by: Iz 💀 11th January 2021, 10:51 AM

Music

Mori Calliope - Dead Beats (song)



I'll f*** 'em up, Gucci

If you could say Calli's music has a sound, because it doesn't, each track sounds very different, it's a lot more consistently like 'Dead Beats' than it is like 'Excuse My Rudeness'. As in, it's not so much hyper-weeb nonsense with heavy synths (not that there's anything wrong with that!) but more like hip-hop with a great beat/soundscape and only if you're listening carefully to the lyrics will you pick up her theme. I sort of expect her stuff to be more like this in the future and I'm very here for it, while I love 'Excuse My Rudeness', I think this style has a lot more longevity especially when it comes to repeat listens and for future artistic exploration.

The point of Dead Beats is to set a model for the connection Mori has with her fans, 'a blood price to be paid but I promise it's worth it' (sign over all your free time bitches), 'we'll be best friends that's the end of it' (no wifing) 'dead beats cheer for me and cheer loud' (self-explanatory), 'to die by the scythe, that's the highest honour' (she wants to reap us and take our souls to the underworld). Pretty casual fan-artist stuff.

The thing is it also ended up showing me a lot of her character in the way that made me certain I'd like it. The hook line of 'I'll f*** 'em up, Gucci' is the sort of hook that's said by rappers but the way that Calli does it is, while sounds strong, definitely comes across more of the 'saying this to be swag even though I'm not' kind of way, and I do want to see that kind of rap. She gets a bit of humour in as well with a take that on autotune 'two clicks beep boop, sounds like music' - not that she's above using autotune herself of course. I mean, as the song ends with, everybody likes self, depreciating, rap *she stops as she realises how lame a line of it is*. It's all very self-aware despite how hard she manages to go throughout the rest of the song. And it really is another fantastic breathless rap, great flow, using curse words 'because I am an amateur', though it absolutely works here.

The ending bit is... something you have to get used to but given the rest of the song is so good you will definitely get used to it, and it's also not worth spoiling because you have to experience that one first hand for yourself.

Mori Calliope - Reaper か Rapper?



So for any people buying, f*** it, welcome to Hell I guess

The one dud track on Dead Beats, though it's still enjoyable in its own way, it's just that 'Excuse My Rudeness' does everything it's trying to do far better, and it spends far too long being an introduction to Calli's character, though given it's billed as an introduction rap that's understandable. It gets slightly better in the second half after she skits pretending her manager wants her to keep going with a very scuffed rap, but it never really comes alive besides two lines, the highlighted one above which is delivered a bit better than the rest of the song and the final stanza where she says a Japanese phrase and then begins explaining that although it means "it can't be helped", if you pronounce it wrong, as she just did, it actually means, "there is no salt". "There is no salt" has become an occasionally referenced line out of that and okay that's about all this song is good for, moving on...

see I can criticise her, it's just a bit too much self depreciation

Mori Calliope - Live Again




It's not the end of your Mori, 'cause every closed door is just the intro of a brand new story

The nostalgia track and closing track of the EP, Live Again is probably the best pop record on here and it hits hard. Calli uses it often as the outro track for her streams to say goodbye, and I think there is a very high possibility it will make me cry very hard in the future. Most especially at some point, I hope a long way into the future, when she stops vtubing, but also at any intermediary temporary goodbyes she does.

I think you might have to like her to really appreciate it in full, but a lot of these lyrics are really applicable to anyone who's ever considered human mortality and the pain of our existence one day finally ending, with the limited chances at human contact we have in the interim. So perhaps there is a wider reach there. Most of the character references in this one are consigned to Japanese lyrics chosen for their rhyming prowess so it could definitely find some audience who is looking for a track about things coming to an end, whether that end is temporary or permanent.

'the pain that's coming on once my old soul's finally gone, it's not wrong to think about it but I'll stop for tonight because we're immortalised forever in the songs that we write' is something that I bet any musical artist has considered at some point, that their songs give them a shot at immortality, if you only truly die when the last person alive forgets who you were, then musicians are creating their mark on the world by making songs that are being passed down - and through this EP, Calli has pretty much immortalised herself, her artistry will live on, even if it's behind a pseudonym.

As with any good track that tackles this sort of thing, it also has a number of lighter notes about the strength of making life last in the moment, that and 'mortality's what makes life sweeter to taste', that time together is refreshing, that things are made better when people share memories together - whether that's from her perspective of sharing fun moments over livestreaming, or her friendship/coupling with Kiara, or in a more general sense between friends. She even gets her introvert status in by talking about (in a verse mostly in Japanese) how human rituals like 'bye, see you later' make her die inside before she goes on to sound very earnest with delivering Japanese pleasantries.

Throughout this, while the lyrics are very sad, it sounds so happy, as if to say that many ends are not the end, and this one is also not the end, that there will very likely be another day and finding the happiness within it all will follow through if you are surrounded by the right people. I love it so much <3

It's the sort of good flowing emotional trigger rap ballad that basically any rapper should have in their discography as a weepy moment and Calli finding it early is why I'm so excited for more of her work, particularly as her first followup track to the Dead Beats EP also laid heavy on the feelings...


Mori Calliope - Cursed Night



welcome to my constant state of mind, like could you knock first?

I keep comparing Cursed Night to The Streets, not because of the rapping voice of course, but because the backing and feel to Cursed Night brings to mind the same sort of 'city night' that so many Streets tracks give off, as does the spoken word stuff that Calli does throughout, again showing off her versatility, while this is again an emotional rap ballad, it's definitely not a repeat of 'Live Again'. Released as a special Halloween track, because the reaper Vtuber couldn't not release a song for Halloween, it's the one that inspired that Youtube comment that Calli wrote and I screenshotted in her main post.

Because, as you might guess from the title, it's not a happy song, though it's certainly great to listen to, talking about how the days are blending together, how she's mentally being overwhelmed, it's a song about someone trapped in a state of mental anguish and given we've just come out of 2020, that might hit quite close to home for some. It certainly seems like it was written as an ode to when she couldn't think of writing and turned to some rather dark place, she can't open up to others and is just isolated in her sorrow. The character part is that the reaper, lonely from taking souls and never being able to experience what it's like for them is both excellent lore and yet also feels very real. In fact, so real that I am thankful she posted that comment that she is incredibly happy now, and this was a vent, which I can absolutely believe. "Shut the lid tight, it's complicated, could you not look inside, it's complicated" is far too real a lyric, among many, to not have some basis in reality.

It definitely seems to be based, at least in a general sense, night or nights that happened to the real Calli, lyrics like 'Drunk, lost CalliP, wandering Rengoku-shi' (purgatory, but the way it's delivered, you could imagine a district name in its place), a 'sunk cost fallacy' is her giving into alcohol - part of her character is her drinking red wine on streams, but she herself admitted she made too much of that out of nervousness and now only occasionally drinks it on stream, advocating for water (by which her fans are only too happy to oblige). And then there's the final element in this story for this song, the fact that kindness is offered to her and she has trouble accepting it 'why is it that your kindness is making my chest unbearably tight?'. Generally, in the Vtuber community, the fans are very aware that while what they see is an anime girl, behind it is a real person working hard to entertain them and they're normally very nice about it - to the point where they end up donating a lot of money through superchats without being prompted, in fact sometimes if the Vtuber is protesting against it, the more likely fans are to send money. Early on, there were a couple of times where multiple people would donate huge, eye-watering amounts to Calli because of how relatable she was, which, as someone not yet used to receiving such fan love, she was very overwhelmed by. That definitely confirmed to me the genuine nature of her character, even now when she's more used to it, she never encourages anything like that, she tells people to stop donating if it gets too much, tells them to stop 'buying tickets' to her free karaoke concerts (which normally just results in them sending more money) - while she at the start tried to read every message from every fan she soon found that impossible, she still now tries to read the ones not accompanied by money in quieter moments on longer streams. 'Cursed Night' tells of not knowing how to deal with that love when at time of writing, I don't think she felt like she deserved it. Every time I listen to it I am reminded of all the insecurities she tried to alleviate by throwing them into this song - it sounds like that it helped her, it also helped me a little.

Posted by: Iz 💀 13th January 2021, 01:53 PM

Anime

Science Fell In Love So I Tried To Prove It (aka. Rikekoi, after a shortening of its similarly long Japanese title)


(sketch between two of the side characters to show off the comedy)

A big show for me early in 2020, Rikekoi is a rather funny comedy show that trades off one joke and one joke alone - that smart people are not good at talking about love or sex. On that idea alone, it rests its case, and it's brilliant.

Most shows that tackle this do so while falling into the trap of laughing at the pathetic nerds, as unlikeable or pathetic losers who may be working top jobs in science, but don't know the warmth of human interaction and when comedy is mean-spirited these days, I turn right off (I think you all know which show is springing to mind so I'll save having to mention such awfulness in this paragraph). Rikekoi avoids this by setting the centre of the action in a university science lab. Every character on screen is at least an advanced masters student. No one is outside of the bubble of academia, everyone is at least a little bit awkward socially, and most of the humour is derived from eccentric characters showing off their booksmart knowledge in one area while acting completely oblivious in another area.

The set-up is a lot like Kaguya-sama, as both of the main two characters are clearly in love with each other from the start, but because of the pride of the pair, they won't start the relationship, so it got a lot of comparisons to that, and honestly, Kaguya is still the master of this sort of misdirection love battle comedy. However, the reason that neither of the main two, Ayame and Shinya, here want to admit their infatuation is that they don't believe in emotional reactions and the reaction to a declaration of love is met with the panty-dropping line 'yes, but how can you PROVE you are in love with me?'

Somehow, don't ask how, these... PhD students... manage to convince their supervisor to conduct a scientific experiment to determine WHAT IS LOVE to discover if they are in fact in love. It definitely relies a lot on jokes with a very similar setup, but I love the idea of clueless nerds quantifying romance through science and they really get some good material to that end (e.g. pairing up kissing, pairing them up with other characters to check heart rate reactions) throughout the show with a good range of side characters to play off. Out of which the best is most definitely the silk-tights-and-gloves wearing lethargic gamer chick Ibarada (also a PhD student, IIRC) who has great chemistry with everyone else because of how well she's able to make them all squirm. It's great watching nerds being nerds. The setting in a university with postgrad students is also a real rarity in anime and seeing a bunch of different character archetypes, and advanced academic discussions, because of the advanced nature of the literature does make this one stand out.

Weaknesses were its ability to really evolve as a show when it came to its later parts, it didn't feel like there was much beyond its comfort zone, there's a character introduced later who is pretty much entirely the author self-inserting to be an author to write about their scientific findings, which is a level of self-insert even I wouldn't do in my writings, it also just doesn't fit here. And there's also this side-panel thing directed by the show's mascot where it, a bear, will explain scientific concepts used in the show to viewers who might not know them (e.g. travelling salesman or even something as basic as the scientific method to help ensure no one gets left behind), however in half of these the bear gets tired of explaining a few sentences in and tells you to go Google it, which, well, I respect the power move but it kind of defeats the point of helping people learn by watching anime which was something else it was kind of billed as.

this opening theme does have some fist-pumping chords so it's notable for that

Posted by: Iz 💀 17th January 2021, 05:59 AM

Music

Alestorm - Curse Of The Crystal Coconut (particularly Treasure Chest Party Quest, Fannybaws & Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship)




I enjoy Alestorm a lot and have done for years, though I started listening to them a bit more in-depth this year, not particularly because I was in a pirate metal mood but they are definitely your go-to if you want Scottish shouty sea shanties and you know, some times that IS the mood one is in when you can't actually reach the sea from where you're stuck at. Obviously BJSC people will know that I sent their most... anthemic... track 'f***ed With An Anchor' because that's addictive, though that isn't actually from their 2020 album Curse Of The Crystal Coconut, it's from their 2017 album No Grave But The Sea (and because it's a crime to let an Alestorm post go by without mentioning it, their INCREDIBLE cover of Taio Cruz' 'Hangover' is from their 2014 album Sunset On The Golden Age, they have good album titles x).

Anyway, the quick way of describing Curse Of The Crystal Coconut is 'more pirate metal nonsense' as it is for nearly all of their albums, and most artists I'd berate for not evolving, but then most artists don't start from the incredible niche that Alestorm have carved out for themselves. And there is innovation here, at least some things on Alestorm songs I haven't heard before.

I won't go into every song on the album but it's all good, starting with "Treasure Chest Party Quest", which is classical Alestorm, the main exception to that being an inclusion of the lyric 'get lit, talk shit', which seems a bit zoomer for them, but a bragging song about how they're only on a journey to have drunken fun is the sort of thing that's cringey when it's a newly minted pop or rap artist but is expected when you're a pirate, plus there's some nice strings in the middle 8 amidst that glorious shouting.

Then there's 'Fannybaws', which seems to talk of a bekilted Scottish pirate if the rather racy (assuming you like ginger Scottish men) single cover is any indication, I almost entered this one to BJSC instead, to make all the Scottish members feel even more seen but I thought the anchor song would be more accessible in the end, and I was probably right. "Fannybaws, he's the scourge of the seas... plundering, pillaging, spreading disease' is... fun and the song itself really goes off, I can't imagine what it'd feel like if I were actually Scottish though.

My favourite however is the more, ballady, if that's a word that Alestorm can have in their discography, "Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship". What with undead and pirates often going together in popular culture this is far from unexpected, when Alestorm album covers have a person on them it's always a skeleton after all, though it's the first time I can recall them alluding to the actual existence of zombies. It's quite obvious what it's about, but to give you more of an idea, the main line is "those zombies ate my pirate ship, they are a bunch of undead pricks".

The most interesting thing though and why it's my favourite is that after the usual Alestorm antics w/anti-necroism and a comparatively slow build for them , a surprise female vocalist appears to sing the second chorus instead of the main Alestorm vocalist, Patty Gurdy, a hurdy-gurdy singer who's done work with other folk metal bands including Faun. She absolutely nails it and this sudden sound switch really helps the rising tension of the song before they bring it to an almighty finish. Alestorm are usually at least a bit scattershot with creating musically... sound songs, normally going for fun instead of rigorous composition and fun is what I usually listen to them for, but when they want to go for something more serious, they absolutely can do that, and "Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship" is, while built around a comedic situation, one of their best examples of that in their entire career.

Posted by: Iz 💀 17th January 2021, 06:28 AM

Music

Sewerslvt - Pretty Cvnt, Mr Kill Myself and Kawaii Razor Blades




When I go deep enough into the underground noise scene, sometimes it really does feel like you're in a sewer, but occasionally you can strike gold down there. Though she often makes depressive music, Jvnko, the producer behind Sewerslvt, is really good at making really creative feelings emerge from her music that only uses vocals when it's sampled. Breakcore, basically. Though there was enough anime imagery for me to be drawn in, all the feelings that she managed to conjure up, made me love all this, i don't even think that she's trying so hard to be edgy, because these do not really feel 'edgy' as such, more of a release of negative feelings, and as I've often said in the past, that's something I can recognise and respect.

"Pretty Cvnt", though the oldest of these songs, is the one that I played the most in 2020, its sampling of an old anime ending theme is really uplifting, and brings to mind the best of this sort of downtempo dance, the sampled vocals struggling to rise above the noise as the song goes on, love it.

"Mr Kill Myself" is a lot more grindy, and a bit longer, but a little clear in its distortion, while "Kawaii Razor Blades" is more along the nanobii style of candy-ish electronic music, with only the minimal bit of distortion to create a bright summery track.

Sewerslvt has released a lot of stuff in the last 12 months, after getting a dispute with Spotify sorted more tracks seem to be coming out very quickly, and they show a bit of growth and change from someone young who seems to be growing with their music, already the titles at least seem more self aware and less sad. I need time to get acquainted with her other songs, but she's a very talented producer in the vein of goreshit that I'll be following for a bit more now.

Posted by: Math! 17th January 2021, 07:24 AM

love love love this list so far - sewerslvt is a fav. vtubers are a genre I’m familiar with but I haven’t watched any aside from hololive so the analysis is really interesting~

Posted by: Iz 💀 17th January 2021, 08:07 AM

<3 I was very happy that some people seemed to recognise the name when I entered her to BJSC, something about that sound and her aesthetic keeps bringing me back

I've watched a few independents that I've seen good stuff from, but mostly I've just watched Hololive too, I just like getting real deep in that particular fanbase, you find some amazing memes that way that make sense when you know all the Hololivers/Holostars and staying in one of their streams for a while is always a great mood enhancer, no matter what they're doing.

Posted by: Chez Wombat 17th January 2021, 05:37 PM

Really loved Pretty Cvnt, it's such an intense experience and has a slight witch house vibe to it, really quite a heartbreaking DNQ, If all their stuff is like that, then I'd love if you could send another one of their songs to get justice x

I'm halfway through the Queen's Gambit (so Alma's just died :'(), I'm not clued up on chess and even now, I find it awfully confusing and I don't normally like period dramas either, but I'm really enjoying the show, the look and feel of it just looks so authentic, I really liked Anya Taylor Joy's performance in The Witch, but she is on fire here, and I like that it's as much a battle with herself as much as the times. There's no comically evil characters or antagonists, it feels refreshingly realistic.

Posted by: Iz 💀 19th January 2021, 10:22 AM

Actually I had been considering whether to give another sewerslvt track a go, maybe in a few months if I can select the right one, there's one on her new album which would be really nice but we'll see.

That's really good with The Queen's Gambit, I like that it's set up that people who don't know chess can appreciate it, and even maybe begin to understand some of the terms used and why it gets so intense for those playing it, and it being set so well in the 60s is a really nice touch.

(think I'm gonna finish my music posts first then focus on the anime)

MUSIC & FILM




Actually I recall there was one film I watched this year that I wanted to write about. Well, that's not true, I think my favourite film that I watched in 2020 was undoubtedly Parasite back at the start when it won its Oscar but this is why I don't really write about films, I have nothing really extra to say that wasn't already gushed over by many at the time and idk, I'm spinning a lot of plates here. However, Hamilton has the advantage of having a lot of good songs attached to it which is the main purpose of this post. A lot of good songs that I only really got introduced to by watching the film version.

I like musicals for similar reasons that I like anime OPs, and songs attached to films and TV series, because there's something extra there, and Hamilton in particular covers a very interesting event in history, the war of Independence and the first days of the USA, which is a very interesting and admirable event even as a Brit. And throughout this musical, there's a lot of very good and listenable songs. And a very good retelling of Hamilton's career and filling in some of the gaps I missed not being educated in America and learning about all the Founding Fathers.

I have to throw some appreciation to the quick-witted '12 Duel Commandments', the barbed anti-centrist 'Aaron Burr, Sir', the anthemic opener of 'Alexander Hamilton', but my favourite is the audacious 'You'll Be Back', sung by George III (Jonathan Groff), giving an anthem lamenting the lost colony of America, filled with the sort of lyrical satire against imperial colonies that I will eat up whenever it's presented. It also sounds pretty banging with a sing-along chorus that follows a line about 'sending a fully armed battalion/kill your friends and family to remind you of my love'. Hard to forget a song with lyrics like those.

Posted by: Iz 💀 19th January 2021, 11:11 AM

Music

Temperance - Viridian (My Demons Can't Sleep)



One of my favourite bands of the last few years has been Temperance, an Italian symphonic metal band that seem to be carrying on the traditions of bands that are beginning to age, like Within Temptation and Nightwish. Having some new blood to mix up the genre is very welcome, and so I got rather into their 2020 album, Viridian, which, even more so than their great album from a couple of years ago, Of Jupiter And Moons (which had The Last Hope In A World Of Hopes on it), provided a lot of operatic highlights. They also make full use of their multiple vocalists to create a great male-female harmonising routine that's lovely to listen to.

First off, it's referring to a beautiful colour, Viridian's title track, a real highlight on a great album is an ode to that beautiful shade of blue-green replacing a world, a world that's ravaged by the Temperance of 'I Am The Fire' and 'My Demons Can't Sleep', two other highlights. Both really do well in the hands of the band's vocalists, but 'My Demons Can't Sleep' adds a sense of urgency by the vocalists melodically finding their way through a heavy guitar track. This is how you stop symphonic metal from becoming boring, both singers sound like they're fighting for control of the mic in a track that never lets up.

It's not the only track they do that on, 'Start Another Round' also goes for it with a clear hook line, and you get more cold northern evocations with 'Nanook' later on the album.

Honestly, all of this sounds pretty similar, a bit like a lighter Amaranthe, but it all sounds great. If you like duets with male and female rock singers and like the idea of them constantly one-upping each other to deliver lines that feel like biting against a wild natural world, then this is excellent.

Posted by: Iz 💀 20th January 2021, 03:27 PM

MUSIC

Katie Dey - MyData (Darkness)



Laura Bousfield - Palimpsest (Clean Strategic Narratives With Relatable Messaging Murder Them Violently Make Their Children Watch)



I'm including this pair of albums and phenomenal main songs I love off of the albums in the same post because I got them from the same source - some of the anime folk I follow on Twitter also happen to be excellent music geeks, and so I take notice whenever they post about some alternative album that I think looks weird enough for me to be listening to. This is how I discover music these days. Otherwise, while both of these are electronica, they're quite different.

Katie Dey is an internet artist apparently located in Australia. I say internet because the entire album of MyData is about being lost in the technology and how feelings through technology are hard to express and master. And also because she seems about as online as I am. That's enough to make me a fan. But she does really well on this album by stretching her voice through distortion to give off this somewhat unsettling feeling of pop songs sounding distorted. It sells the idea of a disassociated presence reaching out to you, and it also manages to give me nostalgia for the pop I liked back in 2011, as it sounds like twisted machine-messed up versions of the bedroom pop I got into as a teen. There's a lot of rawness that makes it all feel real. Highlights are of course the fist-pumping 'Darkness' and the torturous 'Happiness', but every song on here twists pop in a new direction and it's well worth a listen, even if someone looking for perfect vocals won't find it all pleasant (and that's part of the appeal, I can majorly connect with her on this record).

As for Palimpsest, this also takes the idea of making music uncomfortable to listen to and in doing so making it brilliant and memorable to listen to, though that's through excessive beat and track manipulation this time, as stabby noises permeate the entirety of Palimpsest to the point where you have to lean back in amazement wondering just what will show up next until you notice the thing common to the track, the underlying power of the vocal line slowly coming out from behind the sound effects to take over the track. It does this best on the track with the longest title here 'Clean Strategic Narratives...' but it also does it on say, 'If We Save One Child It Will All Be Worth It', or on the brilliantly titled 'Crawling Into A Fireplace Cackling'. It's a short listen at just 31 minutes with 13 tracks, so if you feel like your music should be attacking and capturing you, then this is absolutely worth a full listen.

Posted by: Iz 💀 21st January 2021, 11:52 AM

Music

Power metal and Avantasia



I love power metal and I don't apologise for it, for the most part it just manifests as really earnest European rock that is heavy on the melody, heavy on the guitars and creates a bunch of memorable songs with good lyrics, even if they're often nonsense about fantasy lands. It might not have much subtlety, but it's a very fun genre and everyone involved tends to look like they're having the time of their lives, just look at the people in Gloryhammer's "Hootsforce" for example. Beast In Black, Twilight Force, Dragonforce, these are bands I'm very happy to have in my life.

I turn to Avantasia, a power-symphonic metal operatic rock project thing, specifically because in my period of lockdown at the start of the year, I picked out Avantasia from among the rest to go through their back catalogue and familiarise myself with it, because Tobias Sammet's particular brand of making it a rock opera project he turns to whenever he feels he hasn't been flamboyantly pompous enough elsewhere makes it really appeal as a band with a consistent narrative, and concept albums, lots of concept albums, always my favourite type. Particularly falling in love with their most played song, "Farewell", from their 2001 album was a good experience, it's a great and ridiculous way to say goodbye or sayonara or whatever. Avantasia covers of popular songs are also always a highlight, "Lay All Your Love On Me" being of particular note.

Avantasia's most recent album was the lunar Moonglow, as usual about some sort of fairytale fantasy, including a cover of "Maniac", but most about fey and lunar folklore. The best is the title track, a rock ballad duet between Sammet and singer Candice Night, with a beautiful set of dramatic backdrops against lyrics a magical moon that carries you with its light all the way to the other side, with great spoken interjections like the lyric 'in this enchanted magic night' to create a breath before the chorus. Best symphonic metal track I've discovered this year, it's from 2019, but it made up enough of my year by leading the charge of my Avantasia obsession.


Nightwish - Human :||: Nature



5 years since the last album by my favourite band. Five long years to discover whether Floor Jansen could build on the brilliant start that she'd made with Endless Forms Most Beautiful. It would have been easy for Human Nature to be underwhelming, and it was a little, as it's the first time in 5 albums that the Nightwish album released in that year (2004, 2007, 2011 and 2015) isn't my favourite album released in that year. In part that was because of so much change in my life that old things went by the wayside a bit.

But it was still very good, and showed a lovely progression from the scientific and biophysical concepts present on Endless Forms Most Beautiful to a more anthropological examination of the human condition. Which you might expect from an album with this title. I foresee tough times ahead for Nightwish, as early in 2021, male vocalist Marko Hietala left the band, I've always valued his vocal and guitar skills as central to the band, so he'll be tough to replace. But for now, this was a nice and much desired new entry into the voluminous Nightwish canon.

Nightwish are still very much aligned to the realms of astrophysics and the natural world with their song concepts, harkening back to a more primordial time with many of the evocations they use, but they went a bit more advanced here, the first track "Music" is a soundtrack extravaganza aimed at exploring the very concept of music itself. This follows directly into lead single "Noise", like last album's lead single "Élan" it's not the best they've ever done but is so much of an easy listen that I racked up loads of plays of it without even thinking about it.

The best track is "Harvest", which follows their album tradition of providing a folksy song like "The Islander" on Dark Passion Play, or "My Walden" on Endless Forms Most Beautiful, always different but it works every now and again, and really does here. Again, with the Human Nature theme, this is early man in the Agricultural Revolution, though it's also about the meaning of life as a whole, as is the great and charismatic track "Pan" which follows it.

The final half of the album is a big Nightwish half hour project "All The Works Of Nature That Adorn The World", but this time split up into separate tracks, as opposed to being one 24 minute song like last time. This is filled with great quotes, e.g. "I love not man the less, but nature more" and stunning string instrumentals to lead you through a long journey that I must admit I've only set out on a couple of times but will surely do more so in the future. The last part is named "Ad Astra" (or "To The Stars") and brings the best of this hopeful, evocative feeling on a long album to a close in an absolutely glorious way, making me feel complete while doing so.

Human :||: Nature is very overblown and is probably not going to win Nightwish many new fans (those need to go start with Once or Dark Passion Play), but camp overblown feelings about just WHY we are here and what we can do with our limited time in the sun is why I've stayed on board this train through a long journey from fantasy into reality. There is no band quite like exactly them.

Posted by: Iz 💀 23rd January 2021, 08:34 AM

Music

Clipping.





I like rap groups, particularly if they seem to treat music as an exploration of their own interests/messages to give out, and in all intents and purposes act like a band that raps rather than sings. There's a direction behind clipping, and that solid artistic direction made me get on board with them fully in 2020, through their late 2019 album There Existed An Addiction To Blood and its 2020 companion peace Visions Of Bodies Being Burned.

They have a high range, starting with highly creepy rap on "Nothing Is Safe", which is so unnerving as a track I'm often apprehensive about listening to it, there
to violent floorstompers on "Blood Of The Fang" to the attitude of '96 Neve Campbell', to the haunting backdrop of "Enlacing", it's a lot of excellent hip-hop that you won't find a whole package of anywhere else. Particularly the flow done by rapper Daveed Diggs is very addictive, mostly menacingly lethargic but occasionally coming alive in a very frightening and energetic way.

Both albums are very dark and pessimistic, downright horrific in the way it describes certain scenes at times, which I guess earns it the label of horrorcore. But that's only because it's clearly got a bone to pick with the societal position of hip-hop. "Blood Of The Fang" is essentially "This Is America" ground up and given an +18 label for violence, still on the ills of American society and their love of violence. But yeah, the idea is to make the listener scared, and I'm happy to say that they've succeeded, going in for a clipping. listening session is not something I take lightly, even though I love all of it.

To sum it all up, I guess I will look at the lyrics of, I could pick many, but to keep it short, "Say The Name" off Visions Of Bodies..., which like its counterpart "Blood Of The Fang" on There Is An Addiction, opens up with distorted chanting of the album title. It quickly builds a picture of a tortured place, a mob demanding justice, references to Guernica and Scarface, a woman in an abusive relationship, it opens the album with a description of a devilish, occult ritual of bodies burned and the rest of the album is no less scary. Most clipping. songs describe something happening detached from the speaker, which just serves to make the whole enterprise more unnerving, this is abstract body horror demanding your empathy.

Horrorcore rap with excellent background production and topics that occasionally makes reference to modern issues and with a great flow besides, I love this group.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 23rd January 2021, 08:51 AM

Love clipping! My route in was discovering “Nothing Is Safe” at Halloween in 2019 and I haven't looked back since. The concepts/ideas behind There Existed An Addiction To Blood and Visions Of Bodies Being Burned combine two of my favourite things (horror films and music) so I was always going to be on board.

Finally: Donald Trump is a white supremacist, full stop. If you vote for him again, you're a white supremacist, full stop.

Posted by: Iz 💀 23rd January 2021, 08:56 AM

Music

Demondice - Alkatraz (album)




(bonus: Séyetana collaboration)


Somehow, though I discovered it in November, "Alkatraz", the song, became my most played song of 2020 just as the turn of the year happened. I think it's fair to say I'm a little obsessed with it and DEMONDICE in general, as there's very few artists like her. She's another rapper, but unlike clipping., her discography is almost entirely fun - though she's certainly a weeb and involved in the Japanese rap scene more than the American rap scene (I can tell because there's occasional Japanese sprinkled throughout her songs and some of her early songs talk about her move to Japan), some of her early work also laments the general bad situation that America is in (particularly her 2018 album and opening tracks American Saikoro).

The album that she'd put out when I found her and the one I got most attached to was Alkatraz, where, clearly in honour of the 20s coming back around again, she went down an electro-swing direction and added plenty of sax, swing and jazz influences to this short mini-album. And that really created something unique.

Alkatraz as a track is brimming with attitude and charisma, telling a story through its music video of criminals sent to max security Alkatraz, then having to sell their soul to a demon (DEMONDICE herself) in order to escape. I can't stress enough how much I love her flow on this track, fast and with unusual INCREDIBLY verbose rhymes ("hell's unbroken stallions, valiant swing rapscallions", "he who runs a circus tends to be nefariously merciless", the insane "hide your claws obey their ridiculous laws and mimic their dance, be reverential soldiers until we get that chance", the unintentionally cute "I'm gonna make it out alive with or without you, man", I just really feel her personality all through this track, the incredibly boppy electro-swing backing helps elevate it and it's one of my favourite songs I've heard in a long time.

Fortunately, she's far from being only as good as one song, even if we're just limiting it to this album, and I shouldn't really. Well worth listening to a short 30 minute album if you want some modern sounds of the 1920s in your life. "Sick Outta Fashion" is a downtempo ballad that digs deeper into her clashes with people's expectations of a musical hip-hop artist and her own beliefs in people being themselves, stop complaining and being a "sad boy", "Raging Ray & Jin" goes further with the swing theme, telling a classic 1920s story about an eccentric couple, rapped very fast by a talented demon rapper, while "You're An Ace, Kid", the closer, is a classic pick-me-up encouraging someone down on their luck to step up and keep going. I would normally suspicious of motivation songs like this, but it's delivered so brightly I can't help but find it inspiring.

More than anything, I find this style of pop rap where the focus is on lyrical flow more than anything else, but with everything else sounding bright and peppy so not a bad thing, absolutely addicting to listen to and I'm playing the shit out of all of Demondice's discography right now. She's so good.

Posted by: Iz 💀 23rd January 2021, 08:59 AM

I found "Blood Of The Fang" just over a year ago, that and "Nothing Is Safe" got me hooked for life.

Oh yes, I almost referenced "Chapter 319" but forgot to, I often overlook it because it's not on either album but that's probably one of their best contributions to popular culture by going direct out and saying what is more in subtext in the rest of their songs in favour of horror stuff being more front and centre - both of course absolutely based ways to deliver music.

Posted by: Iz 💀 23rd January 2021, 09:34 AM

I'm making this the penultimate music post, as the one after that contains what I've decided is my favourite song of 2020, but for this one, it's time to actually talk about a Buzzjack fave:

Music


Rina Sawayama - SAWAYAMA



I had had Sawayama on my radar for a little bit, particularly because "Alterlife" back in 2017 was so good, though I'd also have a renaissance with it this year to the point I think even better of it now. But I wasn't really prepared for her to put out perhaps the best Western pop album I've heard in a long time. And I think the principal reason for that is that she's Japanese* that she's very talented at melding together different genres, and seems like a wonderful person to support what with getting vocal on Twitter in just the right way:

Very proud to be a Pixel. I used to not hold with fan names but between Mori Calliope (Dead Beats) and Rina, I think they're growing on me.

Sawayama is a fantastic album, and I'd call it my album of 2020, it's everything I want from pop, it really feels like a real record made with care by the artist, put out to say something, that it is her statement to the world about who she is, straddled between two worlds, and using the opportunity of that to forge one's own path and make life your own beast. "Paradisin'", my favourite optimistic track on the album, pretty much says as much.

Not that it ignores the issues either, with "XS" being about late stage consumption, making a traditional pop refrain of 'give me just a little bit more' sound sinister, "Commes Des Garçons" being about the rejection of traditional gender roles, or my favourite, "STFU" going absolutely HUGE and hard with a heavy rock backing - this was the first track that signalled to me that something was up with the latest Rina era, and it's awesome, like a lost Grimes song.

I think every track on this is great, from the rest, there's the melodic "Bad Friend", "Who's Gonna Save You Now?" has great momentum after the chorus, and I can't not love her crooning out TOKYOOO on "Tokyo Love Hotel", as well as admitting that 'it's just another song about Tokyo'.

Ultimately what's different with Sawayama in comparison to other albums like it is the lyrical skills and complex genre influences that Rina used on here, that hold my interest for the opening part of the album to loving the rest of it, to the point where I'd call her a generational talent. It's not starting a new genre, it's just taking the best of British and American music in the last 2 decades and putting all of that into a very personal record that could only have been made by the artist who did it.

*on this: Eastern pop is generally quite different and I tend to like it more for reasons of chords and classical influences (which is basically why I'll take anime songs over whatever is in the charts most of the time), this counts as modern Western pop (and so is an exception) because it's in the Western pop tradition of other indie-pop artists, nothing to do with her ethnicity and while that made me take initial notice of her, it's obviously got nothing to do with me loving her now or I'd have been stanning her with "RINA", which, Alterlife aside, was only okay.

Posted by: Iz 💀 23rd January 2021, 10:16 AM

Music

Sufjan Stevens - America, The Ascension, My Rajneesh







Another artist that I really started listening to properly for the first time in a big way in 2020 was Sufjan Stevens. Prior to this, I'd enjoyed Chicago and occasional scattered songs that I'd heard fans of indie-pop recommending me, Christmas Unicorn, Impossible Soul, the like. I'd never really listened to a full album, though I'd been impressed with his artistry.

Somewhere along the way I changed that, including one particular part, having to write about Carrie & Lowell for a Buzzjack Ultimate Album post, made me change that, though in truth I'd already been changed by the single he released in the middle of the year, and I'd listened to whatever "Aporia" was when it came out, so I'd been primed into becoming a huge fan. But I've been loving playing Carrie & Lowell so much since I did that, it's an awesome indie-folk album. I bet a lot more sophisticated commentary was written about it in 2015. But it's hautning and beautiful and hold on, let me go find what I wrote about it for that Ultimate Album post:

Knew it was something blasphemous! I disavow! It is my favourite Sufjan album right now! Hell, "Fourth Of July" I began loving barely a week after I wrote that, "In The Shade Of The Shadow Of The Cross" and "Should Have Known Better" are also now in my favourites. The description of the relationship of his mother and stepdad that he goes into such detail writing beautiful lyrics for, following it up with gorgeous instrumentation, and given it's following his mother's death... I'm very late of course, but it's incredibly heartbreaking and so good for those reasons.

Anyway, his 2020 stuff. Got sidetracked.

"America" was something I heard when it came out, I am very attracted to songs that are clearly about the sickness of American culture. Not because I hate America but because it so clearly can be better than what it is, and this song knows it too, lamenting what's happened to American culture as something that shouldn't have happened.

Then The Ascension released, and that's yet more amazing indie-pop, with songs like "Run Away With Me", "Ativan", "Ursa Major", the choral bits of "Lamentations", the outwardly demanding nature of "Make Me An Offer I Cannot Refuse", there's a lot to love on this grand appreciation of most of Sufjan's styles that I've heard from him over the years. Great album and great entry into the canon of 2020.

But in all that, there was something else that stood out from the pack, that combined everything I love into a single 10 minute track. Melodic undercurrent, voice straining with emotion, lyrics with symbolic representation, lyrics based on a real-life story. When I thought about it, I don't think there's a 2020 song I love more than "My Rajneesh", something that makes me go on a beautiful journey every time I listen to it, that I HAVE to turn the volume up to lose myself in the crashing soundscape, that I've made a regular start to my playlist on my walks to the subway station because it's the right length and right form of exuberance for me to enjoy walking.

Something was up with "My Rajneesh" from the moment I heard "They gave us names, they said my name means war, Dwelling in song, the lion and the lamb were restored". Lion and lamb indicates something religious, something dominant, and the note of 'giving names' indicates someone inducted into something they probably shouldn't be. Without actual knowledge of what Rajneeshpuram actually was prior to this, my first thought was British colonialism in India, but reading up about this 80s cult movement and terrors it did give the song a new level of menace, something it always had but now a little less divorced. There is no way that lines like "and now we are blessed by the righteousness of the Lord" are anything but pointed satire, though Sufjan certainly plays the part very well as the song builds to a crescendo. And what a crescendo it is. Beautiful deliberate lyrics, huge walls of sound with multiple instrumentation, it's a perfectly layered song that makes me feel alive.

Now that I know it's about a cult leader and the devotion that his followers had to him, it hits even harder with the feeling of elation. "Stare at the sun to see the sublime, forgetting the light that makes you go blind" is a perfect lyric for both the tunnel vision that members of a cult have, and for losing yourself in the beauty of this song.

Ultimately, it's powerful. Very powerful. In all senses. Best song of 2020.

Posted by: Chez Wombat 23rd January 2021, 03:14 PM

Great write-up for Sufjan, glad there's another big fan of My Rajneesh here, it got me interested in the topic as I had never really read much about it before! The album as it was was great though, America & Run Away With Me were special highlights. I shamefully haven't heard his other albums yet, I should really change that!

Blood on the Fang did really grow on me throughout the year even though I didn't point it at the time, I started appreciating alternate/experimental hip hop a lot more this year (listening to some classic albums of the style definitely helped).

Posted by: PeteFromLeeds 23rd January 2021, 07:29 PM

I've heard a few Sufjan songs this year but not any of the ones you've listed I don't think. Giving Run Away With Me a play now, whilst it's not the sort of music I would generally listen to it is sounding quite nice, the soft vocals are nice and the piano adds a nice touch as well.

Posted by: Iz 💀 26th January 2021, 09:49 AM

Thank you to everyone who commented while I was doing my music rundown. I'm going to try and finish off this thread, by covering the remaining good anime (about 13 or 14 posts worth) I want to talk about, finishing with a writeup on the new Higurashi anime, which was my favourite anime of 2020. All of these shows are given my recommendation, as well as the previous ones I've talked about in the thread x

Anime

Baccano! (2007) and Durarara!! (2010, 2015)

Baccano! and Durarara!! (sometimes known as DRRR) often get compared, as they are by the same author, and follow the same style of story, multiple viewpoint characters with vague supernatural elements taking part in an environment of gang warfare where the theme is how seemingly incredibly unrelated people can end up being connected.

Baccano! was the first anime I completed in full in 2020, and the only one I completed, along with Anohana, without the threat of lockdown looming, so I completed it in high spirits. It's actually one anime that I feel I should have watched the dub for, as it's set in America with American characters, I shall have to do that on a rewatch. Anyway, while it was initially very confusing, as it opens in media res and constantly switches back and forth between three time periods, it tells a very punchy, fun story, with great art, characters and vibes.

It's set in 1930s America, with the major point of action being set on, before and after an incident on a train travelling from Chicago to New York. Involved with this incident are a variety of colourful characters, from the oddball on-the-run thief couple Isaac and Miria, who act as comic relief, to the cowardly Jacuzzi Splot and his partner Nice Holystone, to precocious child Czeslaw Meyer, to train hijackers led by gang leader Ladd Russo, to a mysterious old man called Szilard Quates and his companion Ennis. All of them are connected, along with a bunch of others, and you get a bunch of really high-octane, nonstop action for your troubles. It unfortunately doesn't end the story, the anime never got a continuation, but as a standalone on just the train incident, it's a well-contained story for anyone who likes disaster train stories and gangster wars. And Isaac/Miria really are a unique pairing that are either intensely annoying or ludicrously and hilariously dumb depending on your viewpoint.

The opening, 'Guns & Roses' by Paradise City is an unusual example of an (mostly) instrumental anime OP, a spunky jazz instrumental that pans over all the characters in some really inventive transitions and importantly, gives you their names so you have less trouble figuring out who is who.



Durarara!!

Durarara!! at first glance seems like people who read the author's first work liked the idea of Baccano, and wanted him to do a version of it that was not set in America in the past, but rather in Japan, in the present, in a very specific neighbourhood of Tokyo, Ikebukuro (and many of the incidental locations in the anime are accurate to this setting). Again, there's a lot of connection between seemingly disparate characters, some gang members working behind the scenes, lots of people working behind the scenes in fact, and certain characters having powers which, while not so apparent as to be called superpowers, are quite supernatural in origin.

The original premise is that Mikado, a highschool student who is moving back to Ikebukuro, meets up with Kida, an old friend, who is used to the current street life of this area of the city, in particular one legend about an anonymous motorcyclist known as the Black Rider, who is rumoured to have no head. Additionally, street gangs marked by colours often roam the area, but one particular gang, which is colourless, known as the Dollars, has been growing lately. Even more than in Baccano, the viewpoint character changes every episode, sometimes it's Mikado or Kida, other times it's their quiet but pretty friend Anri, other times it goes right into the world of adulthood with the doctor Shinra, the two mortal enemies of Izaya and Shizuo, or the Black Rider herself, Celty. There's also a good form of comic relief in the form of a crew of four vigilantes who travel around in a van, two of whom are massive otakus and make very up-to-date references (for 2010) to current anime and manga regularly.

I've watched season 1 and then the first of 3 parts of DRRR's second season so far, it is at times slow-going and isn't quite as good as Baccano overall, but a fun set of characters and a continual introduction of new elements to the story keeps it interesting as the various main characters wonder around their own worlds occasionally interacting with each other.

Durarara's OP is more set along the lines of an indie-rock song, but it follows the same logic of Baccano of following fun cuts between characters and giving you all the characters' names to help you remember them. It pans over them all in the ending themes too. But because there's more than one, watching which characters appear and disappear between arcs as a new theme shows up is a really fun exercise to work out who's getting a focus in the story this time.

Posted by: Iz 💀 26th January 2021, 10:17 AM

Anime

theme: Ghosty anime

Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun (2020)



There are a number of Japanaese urban legends that occasionally show up in supernatural anime, so I know lots of the school legends through osmosis now, and one of them is the ghost of a girl named Hanako (a female Japanese name) who died in a school bathroom and is cursed to haunt it. So how about an anime where Hanako is summoned, but he's actually a boy this time around, a mischievous boy who sets about tasking the girl who summoned him with cleaning up the school's spirit world, which is currently overrun by monsters and bad rumours. The girl, Nene, is daunted but sets about this task kind of happily.

Animated by the same studio that did Assasination Classroom, I think my biggest criticism of Hanako-Kun is that it was animated almost entirely on the backdrop of manga panels, with most being a 1:1 copy and only limited animation movement, as such it's often hard to tell whether a colour picture like the one above was originally from the anime or the manga. That small quibble aside, it's a great story that uses the various urban legends it covers in inventive ways, eventually has this abrasive joker of a character in Hanako become closer to Nene as she works alongside him getting rid of monsters, and is a good seasonal anime for anyone with an interest in an artsy depiction of some really beautiful abstract settings, the endless stairs based off of a rumour of death for someone who steps on the fourth set of stairs, or the hall of mirrors that reveals everyone's deep insecurities (e.g. Nene thinks she has legs that look like daikon, a root vegetable, even though in actuality she's very cute, as are most of the cast tbqh).

Basically a fun light-hearted comedic look at some supernatural school legends, which is I suppose what the next one was originally supposed to be...

Ghost Stories (2000 (2005))



"Monsters only get evil people like Republicans and we're not allowed to vote"
“The internet was a blessing from the Lord Jesus to spread the word of God throughout the world, but pedophiles and Muslims stole it and used its holy power to seduce children like yourself into sin.”

My recommendation of Ghost Stories comes with a couple of huge asterisks, one, the only version that's notable is the rather infamous 2005 dub version that turned what was a pretty average but forgettable anime about a bunch of kids uncovering ghost stories into an irreverent abridged version where the dub cast are doing their best to create some occasionally genius humour out of the very generic situations that occur, and obviously a lot of meta humour about being a bad generic anime. This is only about the dub, because watching this sort of thing played straight is, well, I will give many things the time of day when played straight, as I don't like to mock for the sake of it as otherwise all you'll have is mocking, but watching this sort of thing played straight is kinda dull. It's just standard Japanese ghost stories with a vague overarching theme. But this dub is a work of art unto itself, full of great quotes scattered through. At its best, it's as good at this sort of laugh-a-minute style thing as something like Airplane.

Because it's an irreverent comedy from yesteryear I've described it as 33% good meta jokes, 33% rather problematic jokes and 33% one of the girls is an insane fundamentalist Christian, because they decided to go that angle with her character and she can barely say any lines without sneaking some jesus lovin' in there. The problematic jokes are my second asterisk. They don't necessarily turn me off from watching it but they can be a bit off-colour, with one of the kids made into a barely legible autist, occasional ableist, queerphobic and racist jokes that can be placed into the context of a comedy show from 2005, not that it makes them any less uncomfortable when they do show up. Like shows like South Park, it does do a heavy load of targeting everyone, and is probably to the left of South Park in who it ends up saving any huge vitriol for, but that doesn't make it any better. At times, watching it this year was very fun, at other times, the fact that I generally don't like watching those sorts of South Park/Family Guy 'offensive' adult animated comedies anymore grated.

Ultimately, do you want a dated comedy show making out-of-nowhere references and occasional great lines, a transformative work improvising comedy out of basically nothing, set to the backdrop of a kids show about uncovering ghosts? Perhaps not, but it's something you won't find exactly anywhere else.

Posted by: Iz 💀 29th January 2021, 11:38 AM

Anime

theme: sports anime

Chihayafuru (S1) (2011)




Season 3 of Chihayafuru was airing at at the start of this year, so with many on my anime timeline recommending it as a great sports show with a powerful lead character, I decided to give it a go. It's one of those Japanese anime that's about a very specifically Japanese concept that it fulfils my Japanophile (as in a genuine interest in the culture) needs a lot, and I've learned a lot about a game I would have otherwise never heard of, and that is Karuta.

So far, I've watched Season 1, and after taking a break for a few months, I started season 2 a few days ago, so this will just cover the set-up of the situation in Season 1, which, very accurately for a high-school series, covers the freshman year of the main characters at their high school exactly, and the tournaments they go to.

(Competitive) Karuta is a game that features a selection of 100 classic Japanese poems, known as the Hyakunin Isshu. They are all printed on cards, which are lined up in front of the players. A speaker begins reading one of the poems, and the players need to race to find its associated card before their opponent. Really good competitive players memorise it from the first sound.

Enter Chihaya Ayase, a beautiful strong girl with a very obsessive tendency (plus a seriously stunning character design), introduced to karuta in her childhood, the first few episodes are entirely of her at a younger age, and determined to start a high school club. She and a group of friends she ropes together form a club that otherwise wouldn't be very popular and enter nationwide tournaments, in part to find her childhood friend who taught her the game but moved across Japan to Fukui not long after he did so.

While I honestly have no idea how to play Karuta and ordinarily wouldn't pay attention to a show just about it, the system of tournaments, on-board strategies, the coaching style, how seriously everyone takes it reminds me very much of how seriously I took chess at one point, and this sort of intense gaming competition is something I'm very much into. The appeal of sports anime is watching characters face struggles and overcome them, and the competitive backdrop, the beautiful Japanese literature touches, the earnestness of the characters, particularly Chihaya herself, makes this show very easy to watch when I'm in the right frame of mind - and now I've gone through one iteration of cheering for all 5 of the main characters, I'm finding the second season a lot easier to pick up and go through, it'll probably continue to be an easy watch for me from now on.

Iwa Kakeru: Sports Climbing Girls (2020)



There was a show about Dumbbells and working out in the gym in 2019, that got me back to the gym, and this is the first thing I thought of when I saw Iwa Kakeru rock up on the seasonal schedule. Basically some dumb fun with cute girls who show a bit of muscle working up a sweat and to be entirely fair, there isn't a lot more to it than that. It does go into the sport of climbing in the way that many sports anime, unlike Chihayafuru above, it doesn't establish itself as a top-tier version of that, it doesn't have a long enough run to fully do justice to the journeys of its characters.

But what it does have is a fun, cute, easy-going nature with the main character translating her knowledge of puzzle gaming to that of climbing up a wall, and doing the whole scaling the route thing. It was a fun seasonal watch, basically, I need a few of those that aren't particularly anything deep or even sus. More power to muscle girls.

Posted by: Iz 💀 29th January 2021, 12:49 PM

Anime

theme: misunderstanding romance anime (a severely highly populated sub-category for myself)

We Never Learn (2019)



We Never Learn is an anime that is partly about education (one of my favourite episodes in it ends with the teacher character pondering that 18-year olds are far too young to be deciding their life direction at the age that university applications ask them to), but more prominently is just a modern take on the harem anime concept, with a slight "intelligent" concept behind it. That intelligent concept is that the main character is a competent all-rounder, and he's being asked to tutor three girls who are all supremely talented at one thing, but for some reason, want to study the thing they are not talented at in their further education.

Therefore, the maths prodigy wants to study humanities, the literature beauty wants to study astrophysics and there's also a swimmer character who is hopeless at a lot of things, but particularly English. Some of their situations revolve around them being educationally challenged, many of them involve the girls accidentally getting close to the main character, some involve him unknowingly overhearing them, there's a lot of hilarious situations. Ultimately the best ones though are when the show gets serious for a second, delves into the backstories of the girls, why they actually do want to study the subjects they aren't good at, and there's some rather interesting answers.

It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun for a comedic show and the girls have some of the nicest character designs I've seen in a harem, particularly Fumino, whose love of the stars I absolutely echo and her blue hair and initial mediation position in the race for the main character's heart (which obviously eventually puts her in a great position to be THE ONE (perhaps?) places her immediately in the sorts of characters I adore for being exactly like me. And while she's a clear winner, what's most surprising to me is that the other girls in the setting are almost as great. I could be rooting for them all were they in other shows. So basically a silly comedy show that occasionally makes a serious point in the right way.

Oregairu (My Romantic Youth Comedy Was Wrong, As I Expected (Season 3) (2020))



Season 3 of Oregairu. The first two seasons of which I watched in 2018 and enjoyed a lot for the ways you got into the characters heads, Hachiman with his anger at the world, Yukino with her detachment from it and Yui with her happiness that kept both of the others grounded. Season 3 was delayed. Quite a bit. Even more so than usual because of COVID.

Unfortunately the delay sort of took its toll, by the time it came round it took me a while to remember what was going on in the show and it didn't stick with me nearly as well as it had beforehand. It's now in winter, graduation is coming up, and the arc is largely just about graduation and the characters organising a prom. Which does have its unique charms considering Yukino's stubbornness (and incredible look in a dress suit), but overall, not quite as good as the previous seasons. Maybe I was in a different mood.

There's a good theme of overcoming adolescence, notable scenes from the previous seasons are revisited with a slightly more mature context, like a liaison with a group of students from another school. In the previous seasons, this clash of rivals took up a lot of time, with Hachiman despairing at the elitist mood and traditional outlook of his organising committee rivals, in this one, things are far more amiable and they manage to plan for events with much less of a hitch. Part of the series' overall themes of slow maturity into adolescence.

Oregairu is perhaps at times a little up itself, especially with the indulgence that carries over into this season. But then, aren't all the best shows? I still enjoyed it a lot.

Posted by: Iz 💀 30th January 2021, 06:08 AM

Anime

theme: edgy, dystopic big city anime

Beastars (Season 1) (2019)



One sentence summation: imagine Disney's Zootopia but where there actually is a threat of the carnivore eating the nice little bunny rabbit.

I say Season 1 of Beastars as its second season began airing in 2021, just like further seasons of nearly everything else that I normally enjoy (and as such I haven't started any of them!), but before a few weeks ago this would have just been the only Beastars you could see. And its a lot more Netflix than most anime, for starters, actually being on Netflix and one of their biggest anime pushes of the last two years, but also because of its approach to making a show that is somewhat dark and edgy. It necessarily does not fit in with the core anime style, as there are no human heads in the series, but it uses so many of the aesthetics that it is undoubtedly anime - its Japanese writer helps too.



The underlying feeling going through the first season of Beastars is fear. Because while its comedic to an extent and Legoshi, the protagonist wolf, is not too far off in characterisation from your average Pixar lead in his bumbling but ultimately good-hearted nature, you are constantly presented with a great fear that he, or any of the other carnivore characters, from a belligerent tiger bully to the lion mafia, will suddenly give into their animal instincts and brutally dismember any of the herbivores. And it sells that really well. Much better than Zootopia ever did, though because of audience differentiation, they aren't exactly comparable.

It does this as it starts with the death of a character in the drama club at the school it's set, by an unknown assailant who you follow from first-person perspective. It's a co-ed (for carnivores and herbivores) and as such this makes everyone really suspicious of the carnivores. I really enjoyed particularly the performance of Louis, a red deer who is the Head Boy of the school and is very keen to make himself get ahead in a world where carnivores rule the roost, and the main (cursed) love story between Legoshi and the white rabbit Haru is always very tense to watch. Very eager to pick up the second season soon.


Psycho-Pass 2 (2014)




I decided to return to Psycho Pass after inducting the first season into my anime classics by giving it a fun little rewatch over the summer. I'd never watched past it prior. The second season is generally not regarded as being good as the Philip K Dick-swinging reference bonanza of the first. That had to do for a couple of reasons. One, the nature of the mysterious Sibyl system was revealed in the first season and while it's not a terrible idea that they had for it, it's not a majorly inspiring one and having to set a story where the audience knows the rules rather than is interested in finding them out always pales. The other reason is the first season was written by Gen Urobuchi, writer of modern anime classics Fate/Zero and Madoka Magica, who has an uncanny touch for creating interest and shock for his viewers where you would otherwise least expect it - there's a good reason three of his most notable works are highlights of early 10s anime.

He did not come back for the second season, and hasn't really returned to anime writing outside of some less critically acclaimed projects since, certainly not much at all since about 5 years ago. So the second season lacks his input. It's not as bad as I was led to believe. You return to the city where police officers can only enforce justice on people who are willing to commit a crime by using magic thought-sensing guns. The next logical step is to confuse the guns even more so than the villain of season 1 did, capture a gun and an officer, convince them to fight on your side to bring down the system and Akane, one of the best anime protagonists ever, has to figure out how her strong resistance to mental manipulation can get overcome this dangerous new adversary. Who, like all dystopic villains has good intentions.

Ultimately though this was just preparation for season 3 which came out last year and I will watch... soon... and while this is fun and has some decent new characters (particularly the rather bratty Mika, who joins the force as a replacement Inspector and starts throwing her weight around), it has nothing on the first season. Watch the first season.

Posted by: Iz 💀 2nd February 2021, 11:34 AM

Anime

Re:Zero - Starting Life In Another World (Season 2 Part 1) (2020)



Re:Zero, after being delayed due to the virus, went into the split cour strategy, with the second half of this season airing now, and I need to catch up with that!

It continues the adventures of Subaru, fresh from beating his last time loop at the end of season 1. It was supposed to happen that a reairing of season 1 in the first quarter of the year would follow directly into the second season in the second quarter, and I'd been following that, and the disruption harmed it a bit, taking a little while before I got back to it.

As for its content, it did an excellent job of expanding the world, somehow making main character Natsuki Subaru's situation (equipped with both a power that resurrects him whenever he dies but back in time at a preset 'savepoint' that he has no control over AND an unfortunate propensity to attract brutal and gruesome deaths) even worse than it was for a lot of season 1. One of his friends has had the memory of themselves wiped from everyone else in the setting, leaving her as an unnamed woman in a coma, and that's only a sideshow to the fact that a cult is after everyone he's come to care about, and the girl he's most interested in, Emilia, is required by a group who've temporarily taken them in, to undergo a Trial.

Part 1 of Season 2 really delves into the background of the setting, giving up a lot of answers that weren't tackled in season 1, like Subaru's background, the motivations of the Witches who brought him to the fantasy world and are now playing around with him, along with emphasising how much of a mountain he has to climb to bring everyone he cares about through the trials ahead, even though he has multiple tries to do it. Anime's #1 despair simulator is at it again. Particularly good is the enigmatic Echidna, the witch of Greed who makes several appearances throughout this half of the season to mess with Subaru.

I'll return to this theme of return by death and multiple tries to save people when I conclude this thread by a series I have far more of a personal connection to, but Re:Zero is still one of my top 10 favourite anime shows and I'm very much looking forward to continuing it in 2021.

Azumanga Daioh (2002)



Azumanga Daioh is important in anime history for one simple reason, it is pretty much the progenitor of modern "cute girl" comedy anime. Which is a subgenre of anime that is very popular, particularly among those who are into slice-of-life, chill anime. If your weeb friend isn't into the latest hyped action anime, they're more likely into this. I'm generally more of the latter, this sort of thing tends to generate more 'good character' moments and is great for making you feel better.

Azumanga Daioh itself is based off of a 4-panel manga, where the comic artist gets 4 panels to tell a joke - much like its 2011 wacky counterpart Nichijou that I watched in 2019. Azumanga's more traditional and refined than that. All it is is, through 26 episodes, the journey of a group of girls through high school. That's it, no special premise, no interest or club that binds them together, certainly no alien or weird intrusions that start up a plot. Not even any romance (with the exception of one girl having proto-lesbian thoughts about their attractive friend Sakaki).

The only thing that makes Azumanga stand out is that each girl tends to have a social oddity that stops them from being a normal person, and that the show itself has a great tendency to create anime concepts that proliferate to this day in the weeb community. For instance, it's estimated that this is literally where the word "waifu" first entered Japanese otaku culture to mean a character that you love enough to make your pretend 'wife', after a creepy teacher gag character says the phrase "mai waifu" when the girls find a picture of his actual wife, who is hot as per the rule of comedy and as such they don't believe him. So going through this show was like watching anime history, as jokes and concepts that seem commonplace now just showed up, played straight, still having aged VERY well.

Honestly, if anyone wants to know where they should start with comedy anime, I would have to recommend this one, it's a cute, family-friendly show that just oozes good vibes. I specifically followed a Twitter bot that at random intervals posts a random screencap from the anime and while I don't normally make a habit of following gag accounts, this one always brings a smile whenever they bring up some random thing from the show.

I love the character Osaka most especially out of all the girls, though they all have their good points. Osaka though, she's this instant classic of a comic character, a girl from Osaka (hence her nickname) who always speaks really slowly and has a thousand-yard stare such that you don't know whether she's really an airhead - and most of the things she says would indicate as such - or is permanently on a substance of some kind. Though the adorable Sakaki, an intimidating looking girl who dreams about petting cats all day or their incredibly irresponsible and lazy teacher Yukari-sensei are pretty great highlights too.

Posted by: Iz 💀 2nd February 2021, 12:22 PM

Anime

Aria: The Animation, The Natural, The Origination (2005-2008)

Speaking of chill, slice-of-life anime, I spent a lot of 2020 posting on Twitter about this anime in particular, because I identified it as an anime that I could regularly share spoiler-free (as a slice-of-life anime spoilers don't really matter), beautiful screenshots from and it was also one that a friend from an anime Discord I joined this year particularly recommended going and seeing. I don't normally do this on Twitter but for Aria, the last one of which was my 200th completed anime on MyAnimeList, I'm glad I made an exception as my journey of watching it is chronicled very neatly in the above three Twitter threads. I'd heard about it occasionally before this, as one of the cornerstones of the slice-of-life subgenre, but I wasn't quite prepared for how beautiful this could be.

Aria is set in the far distant future, on a terraformed Mars that is now mostly a giant ocean and has been renamed Aqua. Set on Aqua is an incredibly faithful recreation of Venice, known as Neo-Venezia. The girls in the show never go off of Aqua, there's only a few references to space and a lot more references to accurately themed Venetian locations so in truth, all of the space backdrop, and occasional supernatural elements is to infuse a little bit of mystical (sometimes Japanese) lore into the setting of Venice.

In the setting, there are people associated with the traditional elemental beings of sylphs (air), gnomes (earth), salamanders (fire), and undines (water). The main characters in Aria are undines, working at Neo-Venezia's gondola tours and taking people who come from Earth (now called Manhome) to see the long-lost city of Venice in all of its glory.

All of that long preamble is to say this is mostly a show about six Undine young ladies who are the major prodigies of the three most prominent gondola tourism companies in the city, and also best of friends and training partners for the younger trio (Akari, Aika and Aqua) to train to become better at being a tour guide. Each company has a cat mascot (cats can understand humans in this setting and there's a mystical subplot involving the king of the cats Cait Sith); the company that main character Akari works for has the mascot Aria.

This is just the absolute good vibes show. It's very lowkey, so lowkey that you might even say that nothing much happens in the slightest, because generally an episode is Akari and one of her friends messing about on a gondola, President Aria makes some weird cute noises, they learn something about the history of Neo-Venezia (often very faithfully recreated with places like the Piazza of Santo Marco or the Rialto), and maybe has an emotional moment, but nothing much happens. That's the selling point, NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS. And that nothing happening is so good.

Okay, that is a lie, because there's a lot of great character development in watching Akari, Aika and Alice grow through their mistakes in the Animation, to the point where they're practicing really hard in the second season 'Natural', to the final season 'Origination' where their hard work comes to fruition. And Akari or someone else exploring the city is fun for seeing the idealised society it presents. Meanwhile, exploring how current queens of the water Alicia, Akira and Athena have gotten into their positions through regular backstories and occasional episodes dedicated to their troubles is great. As I'm the sort of person to love a dominant, in-charge unapologetically brash lady, Akira is my favourite of the six, but all have regularly incredible moments (Aika's character developments in particular are some of the best I've ever seen in a character show, going from a shouty if adorably precocious brat in the first season to a graceful but still funny woman by the end), along with a small number of regular side characters they interact with, including a regular cast of boys who have enjoyable platonic relationships with the girls - except for Aika and the short geeky gnome Al, which is blushing and embarrassment city all over, particularly in a memorable late episode where they get trapped together for a while.

Aria is not perhaps the most exciting show, but it does very great job of creating characters you'll love, get attached to and enjoy seeing it grow - and writing about it now I'm realising how much I missed having that sort of regular chillout time with them - fortunately I've been saving a little epilogue known as Avvenire for when I really want to go back to it.

Posted by: Iz 💀 2nd February 2021, 01:43 PM

Anime

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Part 3 (Stardust Crusaders), Part 4 (Diamond Is Unbreakable), Part 5 (Golden Wind) (2014-2018)



I never thought I'd catch up to finish Jojo's, and I can attribute one result of the pandemic to that I finished this long-running anime series in absolutely no time at all, all of the currently released parts after finishing Season 1 (which comprises Part 1 and 2) at the end of last year. See the thing is though, I didn't really like Season 1 all that much, those are adapted from the first parts of the manga which was released all the way back in the 80s, when author Araki hadn't really quite unleashed his true mad genius on the thing yet. All he'd really established is that this long-running series comprises the adventures of the Joestar family (most having names beginning with 'Jo..' and their encounters with bizarre creatures ranging from vampires to mummies to (in one case) Nazis. It wasn't bad, but it was a bit generic, and even some nice historical settings, a hook-dropping family feud, the mastering of a special energy power called Hamon and Indiana Jones-like antics didn't make it truly standout. There are some good bits in Season 1 and it's ideal viewing for the rest of the craziness, but the series advances time and generations to the 80s in Part 3, and it's all the better for it.

Part 3 was where he established one of the key concepts of the series that has carried forward, dumping Hamon for the power of Stands - special beings that stand beside their master and give them special powers. In the case of main character Jotaro and a number of others, this manifests in what are effectively 'punch ghosts', his Stand Star Platinum basically acts as his fists to get him out of trouble with mighty hammy 'ORAORAORA's. As the series continues, Araki experiments with the concepts, as Stands can be anything, to create what are effectively puzzle fights - every new scrape the main characters get into plays by completely different rules, and rather than just a simple theory of escalation, every episode is more along the lines of 'how will the main characters escape this new situation - will they without consequence?'.

It's really rewarding watching because Stands, while good at the start, get better and better as you go along, at first they have basic powers and are easy to defeat as Jotaro, his grandfather Joseph and some companions travel from Japan to Egypt in order to save his mother from dying to her own out-of-control Stand, perpetuated by long-time foe of the Joestar family Dio. The first part of Stardust Crusaders has a really fun Around The World in 80 Days feel to it as they work their way across Asia, meeting stands that for the most part take inspiration in names from the Tarot family of cards. It's fun, if a bit formulaic.

Once they get to Egypt there's another full season of Stardust Crusaders as they get closer to Dio's mansion, punctuated by menacing Egyptian-themed foes - all in all, Stardust Crusaders is an excellent heroes' journey that is basic for Jojo's, but sets the stage with its puzzle fights and Stand theming for even greater things in subsequent parts.

Part 4, Diamond Is Unbreakable. I enjoyed the most out of all of these parts, a comedic undertone one as the setting is small-town Japan, a pleasant place in Morioh, modelled after Araki's own hometown of Sendai in north-eastern Japan in the late 90s. Here the stands begin to be named after rock bands and songs, main character Josuke has Crazy Diamond, who can heal anyone around him (as well as being a serviceable punch ghost), a comedic side stand allowing for perfect cooking is called Pearl Jam, and the ultimate enemy of the part has a stand known as Killer Queen. Araki's a fan of classic rock. Part 4 is brilliant, it has a great nostalgic vibe to this sort of small-town living, the fights are tense, there's a lot of fun callbacks to earlier parts and some of what goes on is inventive and at times downright horrifying.

Part 5, Golden Wind, the final released part is basically Jojo's in Italy, where an offshoot of the Jojo family grows up in Naples surrounded by gangsters. Again, lots of great music references, this time the main character's Stand is called Golden Experience after the Prince album, and other main character Stands include Sex Pistols, a revolver with sentient bullets, Moody Blues, a Stand that can replay time and Aerosmith (naturally used by the most ladylike-looking of the men), a model remote-control airplane outfitted with real bullets. Also includes: a stand called Spice Girl.
Set only a few years after Part 4, it's full of mafia-like shenanigans, a promise from main character Giorno to become a mafia boss in order that he can control the debauchery going on in his hometown of Naples, and a tour right across Italy as agents of the current mafia hunt down his rogue group fulfilling a promise to an outgoing mafia boss. Mafia with anime shenanigans basically, and it is also very fun.

There are future parts of the manga that have yet to be adapted, Araki finished off part 6 in 2003 and has been working on parts 7 and 8 (at a slightly reduced rate) ever since. Time will tell if they ever get the adaptations they probably deserve - I'm really bad with reading manga so I can't confirm, but I expect it to happen in the next few years.

In order to fully get the setting right and feed into Araki's love of music, while the OPs are dramatic Japanese power-pop like normal (and their great), ending themes are actually pop music from the era that the story is set - so the first ending theme to Part 3 is The Bangles 'Walk Like An Egyptian', then it's followed by the wistful instrumental 'Last Train Home' by Pat Metheny Group, the ending to Part 4 is Savage Garden's 'I Want You', and the ending themes to part 5 are from Jodeci 'Freek N'You' (a 90s RnB track) and Enigma's wonderful 'Modern Crusaders'

Excellent, creative action anime, anyone who thinks that action shows can be boring should try this, lots of fabulously dressed characters, weird and unnatural situations and great music references. It's now well in one of my favourite overall anime series ever, pretty much entirely on these three parts.

Posted by: Iz 💀 3rd February 2021, 08:33 AM

Anime

Gintama (Ep. ~50-~150 - 2007-2009)

Gintama is a long-running series I am determined to finish one day, and I've written about it in I believe two previous years with the intent that one day I would. I bring it up again because I made a solid effort to make it into the main portion of the series - it's famous as a series that is beloved by nearly everyone who makes it in this far, but is inconsistent at the start because of how many episodes it takes setting up a large cast of incidental characters.

For those who aren't aware, it's a series set in 19th century Tokyo (called Edo) where aliens have invaded and control the government, setting up modern life trappings for the purpose of comedy, though for much of the episodes I watched, the sci-fi angle took a major backseat (compared to its first 50 episodes) in order to focus on its samurai angle (including fictionalised versions of the historic Shinsengumi, a secret police force that in history carried out the will of the military shogunate government of the 1860s; many of its most famous members are now Japanese cultural icons) and mostly regular Earth absurdities.

At the point I am at, I have some interesting feelings towards Gintama. It's not unconditional love, because the series, primarily a comedic one that gets ultra-serious when it heads towards long episodic arcs, often delivers a dud episode that relies particularly on a few certain comedic angles that get old (particularly straight man Shinpachi's habit of loudly calling out anything absurd), but when it gets serious, it really gets exciting, as all that set-up creates an intricate interwoven political situation between the characters as they get into anime fights in whatever absurd situation the author has dreamed up this week. To the point where deadbeat comedic lead Gintoki being at the centre of assassination plots, secret police mutinies, robot uprisings and prostitute infiltrations is just a normal part of the show. Also a normal part of the show is up to an entire episode devolving into some comedic side-trail like one arc where a full episode of the wider, very serious, arc was about four characters stuck inside of a bathroom, unable to leave because there's no toilet paper. Gintama just takes you on whatever journey it feels like doing, and that's enough to make it very nice comfort viewing. It plays a lot of story beats relatively straight for such a visionary show, but this I can forgive that considering how wild it gets. I bet I'll finish it by the end of this year, there's only... about 200 episodes to go. Eh, maybe.

The current arc I'm watching introduces a very great character by the name of Tsukuyo who I've seen love for since the early days, maybe she will finally tip the scales into making me an unapologetic Gintama fan. At the moment it's a solid 8/10 though.

Posted by: Iz 💀 3rd February 2021, 09:05 AM

Anime

Tonikaku Kawaii (2020)



Tonikaku Kawaii has a meaning of, well, essentially, 'very cute'. Its alternate title is "Fly Me To The Moon", which makes a little bit of sense as it's constantly hinted, but never outright stated, that female lead Tsukasa, is a personification of Princess Kaguya, a Japanese fairytale character who lives on the moon, came down to Earth as a baby, grew up among humans, and turned away suitors by challenging them with an impossible task until one succeeded; having done so, and getting married, she revealed she came from the moon and returned there. That hasn't happened in Tonikaku Kawaii as of the end of the first season, but so far, one thing has stayed the same and is this show's main selling point, it's an adorable depiction of married life.

Honestly, this came out of nowhere for me, I had it as a 'possibly cute' show on the Autumn 2020 lineup and I figured it would be at best, only okay and something I'd quickly forget after I finished it. In a season where I was hyped over the return of an old favourite, it became nearly as important for me to catch this new one every week very quickly. Its main strength is that if you like seeing a couple act stupidly in love with each other, and I'm all for that positivity when both members of the couple are very loveable dorks, then you will absolutely love this.

Named after a space agency and ever resentful at his parents for doing so, Nasa is a very hard and determined worker, until he is saved from being run over by a lorry in incredibly unusual circumstances by a beautiful and powerful girl who clearly used lots of her power in stopping the truck. He immediately asks her to marry him, she says yes and disappears for 2 years, until he's 18 presumably. Because at that point she turns up and wants to make it official. Basically what follows is a series of situations as both Nasa and Tsukasa struggle to believe that they can be loved by someone else so attractive/kind, and seeing both sides of that situation is very gratifying and insightful for a model of a good relationship - heavily idealised though it is. It's also somehow funny how prudish they are about lowering their boundaries around each other, normally this sort of pussyfooting would be something I'd criticise an anime for but here it just serves to add to the wholesome feeling, as well as the cheering when they finally go... well, as far as they go in the show. It might continue, there's certainly a lot open for a continuation, but in the meantime this is a very cute friendly romance show.

there's also a very bizarre nightcore-esque song used as the opening theme, which if nothing else adds a great bit of nostalgia-fied hype.

Posted by: Iz 💀 4th February 2021, 01:10 AM

Anime

Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War (Season 2) (2020)



(a real translation, at least originally, there was a minor controversy because the Japanese line was something more along the lines of "Why are you keeping your distance so much?" and while I liked the idea that translators can input topical references without changing the meaning of the line, others... did not and it was retroactively changed)

My favourite anime of 2019 was Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War, season 1. It's only through a number of very strange circumstances that season 2 is not my favourite anime of 2020 as well, through an old favourite of mine getting an unexpected sequel. As far as shows airing fully in 2020 though, it has that locked down. If you count that. Because my love for my #1 is based on previous fan experience and a complete mystery about where it's going, but as far as skill at making an entire episode, no, the entire season entertain you, there is nothing that can beat Kaguya and how Season 2 rose incredibly to the challenge of holding the anime community together through its darkest hour of 2020.

Anime was not wholly unaffected by the coronavirus, though it certainly weathered it better than many other entertainment mediums, like those that require live-action shoots. But several shows did get cancelled or delayed in the spring of 2020, as production delays did seep through. Which is completely understandable, in fact, if anything, the industry has been too accommodating to its fans and not enough to its workers as the backlog has caught up and we're now going through an incredible winter season of airing shows. But Spring 2020 was supposed to be a big season, there was supposed to be Re:Zero, Oregairu and Kaguya as as a trio of very big shows that virtually everybody who'd been around in the anime community for a while was going to continue, simultaneously. In the event, Re:Zero and Oregairu got delayed to summer, numerous other smaller shows had to push back production, in some cases, once the show had already started airing, creating a horrible loss of momentum. The net result was that Summer 2020 was one of the sparsest seasons of anime for years, and as for Spring, it was pot luck as to whether a show you'd started would be able to continue through the entire season. In all of that, Kaguya-Sama was left standing as one of the few shows that managed, somehow, to deliver on time, most certainly the only show that a majority of people in the community were watching, looking even more beautiful than the stunning season 1. I remember that about the only time I'd see anime chat on my timelines was around the time a new Kaguya episode aired. By the time it had finished it had ranked one of the best shows on MyAnimeList, incredibly for a comedy and romance show, as most of the time, the absolute best ranks are left for the hype action shows.

What is up with Kaguya and why should it be your new favourite show? Uh, do you like the idea of two people who are clearly in love but don't want to admit it to each other? Because THAT'S certainly a theme I've come to like a lot. And with Shirogane and Kaguya, the two leads being both perfect human beings lording it over the student council, with agent of chaos Chika, butt monkey Ishigami, and new girl + conflict-generator Miko, there is a cast of incredibly watchable characters at this whole 'love is war' game. But more importantly than even the characters and the premise is the show (well, principally the author, Aka Akasaka)'s ability to create absolute incredible comedy out of this premise, turning everyday interactions into dramatic mindgames over how the characters want to appear to their peers. The first season did well with this approach, did very well. The second season improves it. You have board games, Kaguya alter egos, school elections, stargazing on the roof that falls into Shirogane nerding out over the moon - as above, get in there Kaguya and that doesn't even begin to cover some of the side-alleys and school politics that the route ends up going down. It also looks really, stunningly beautiful. Nearly every shot of Kaguya's face I was adding to an image library.



This is genuinely the highest quality comedy I've seen in years, perhaps ever. Season 2 served to confirm what I was fairly sure of in Season 1. By holding a thread that you want to see happen (i.e. Shirogane and Kaguya getting together) as its main story drive and taking full advantage of the fact that the characters are sheltered (but well brought up) adolescents, everything fell into place and I had this as a highlight of my week throughout the spring of 2020.

Posted by: Iz 💀 4th February 2021, 01:52 AM

Anime


(the last planned post in this thread)
Higurashi: When They Cry - Gou (2020)

(my pinned tweet for the next little while)



An announcement I was completely unprepared for happened at the beginning of the year. Studio Passione, the studio that had just shocked the anime world by making their major debut Interspecies Reviewers of all things, had been contracted to create a mysterious NEW Higurashi project. What that could be, we weren't sure. Higurashi had had a complete anime adaptation back in the 00s, even if it was necessarily inferior to reading the visual novels (100+ hour story condensed into two seasons, mostly missing out on character motivations and fears/paranoia that often end up covering pages and pages in the novel), it was a good adaptation. So the original thought was a remake, as the main issue with the old shows that I had always had had been the low-quality animation, which, to be fair, can also be nostalgic in the right light. A remake that covered some of the missed out material, perhaps a launching pad for author Ryukishi07 to spearhead some good adaptations of Umineko, the next entry in the When They Cry series - the existing anime adaptation of which has been widely panned from all accounts.

With the virus, its start got delayed a bit to autumn. But somehow what I thought would be a nice nostalgia trip turned into the anime discourse + experience trap of my life. Because what Ryukishi and Passione had kept secret in their devilishness was that while the first episode of Higurashi Gou (then still called Higurashi NEW) seemed like a remake, even using the old, glorious opening music by Eiko Shimamiya, the second episode upended everything. It started the episode by revealing a mystery of Higurashi that in the original story, you don't get to know until about halfway through the show. Then they revealed the title Gou, revealing that this was in fact a third season of Higurashi - through the nature of the show, repeating the same summer in 1983 trying to survive death approaching (from someone, different each time, that you'd otherwise trust - hey, it's the anime version of Among Us), it was able to fool people for a bit.

Some didn't like that. Most especially all the new people who'd been told that this new shiny version of Higurashi (and it is very shiny) was a safe place to start for new fans. Making a show over a decade after the last major entry in that franchise, I guess you kinda have to do it that way. The thing is, while this experience wasn't great for the new fans - though I've been very happy to see that more and more people seem to be going through the old shows because of this, and even a few new people who've stuck with Gou have appreciated this novel way to experience Higurashi - it has been a gold, unforgettable one for the old fans. The appeal of Higurashi is based on the many mysteries it layers within its plots, such that the viewer has to go through several loops to uncover them all and gets to enjoy the steady turn from theorycrafting in the first arcs to understanding how it all comes together in the last ones. That's the original experience, anyway. But once that is done, while it's still a great time, you can't really get that new experience of uncovering the mystery again... Unless, you can.

Gou basically introduces a new situation, all of its story loops are marked '-damashi' or 'Deceiving Arcs', they play out much like the original arcs, to a point, and then everything resolves in a drastically different manner, including breaking some cardinal rules of the situation that the original Higurashi had set. Shocking every old fan in the process, making something you love to death feel new again, I can't overstate just how good a feeling this is. Why it happens that way is actually still to be uncovered, it's still airing, but the point is that once again, the main characters must escape from the loops with everyone surviving, breaking free of the curse of the village of Hinamizawa and its hold on the main characters that comes to drag them back there even after they've escaped from it once (with most having no memory of previous loops). That has to be done with essentially every major character in the story aligned towards one goal, or somehow, something will go awry and people will die. It's either find that incredibly difficult road to happiness, or those cursed to immortality give up and accept continual brutal deaths in a neverending summer. The latest arcs are even covering completely new material as they seek to answer just what the hell is going on this time, something I can't wait to find out the full truth of.

As ever, the characters make it shine, particularly, among others, Keiichi, the best dull-main-character-looking-MC to be nothing of the sort, Rika, the adorably cute shrine maiden priestess, Shion and Mion, green-haired twin sisters and scions of the locally powerful Sonozaki family, Mion being one of my favourite fictional characters in any medium ever (short version: relentlessly cheery, incredible leader when the chips are down, treats every game like a life-and-death competition, incorruptibly pure (?), has great expectations foisted upon her for being the heir to her family) and my Twitter avatar until at least Gou finishes if not longer. She's been there since the middle of 2019 and I would feel really weird changing her at this point. Seeing them in action again, getting more insight on their already very detailed characters, finding out new things about a franchise I thought I knew everything about has been the ultimate fan experience. And while I'd never say Higurashi is the horror show that it has as its reputation (most of its infamous shock value scenes are few and far between and the point is actually more on mysteries), several of the scenes in Gou have really outdone themselves with how brutal and devastating they can be.

In a very rare occurrence, the opening theme AND the ending theme are my favourite of the year as well, I did not expect this, but both of them set up the characters through poignant slides and wistful J-rock so well that I was almost as hyped for just seeing them as I was seeing the next episode of the show, which has become a regular Friday morning/lunchtime ritual for me (as it airs Thursday night where I am) in order that I can catch up properly on one of the greatest and most unexpected anime experiences I've ever had. Best show of 2020.





thread fini. self-indulgence over. all glory to Higurashi