Alright folks, not a lot of reporting this week. Though, I suppose I did binge an entire anime series since the last time we talked. Let’s talk about that and also some of the seasonal anime, cause I have some opinions.
Read MoreHi folks! I hope you all had a good week. I’ve been enjoying the seasonable autumn weather in Colorado, cleaning out my office a bit, and looking forward to some work travel next week. In the mean time, I’ve finished the summer season anime that I was watching and started into autumn. And, I made it through another dungeon in Link’s Awakening. I don’t know that it’s worth talking a lot about playing an hour of a video game, but let’s talk through some anime in a rapid fire mode.
Read MoreHi everyone! Back to back convention weekends sure take it out of me, but I’m back now to talk about what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. I’ll have separate posts for the convention coverage coming out soon. For now, let’s talk a bit about the anime that I’ve found to watch in the past few weeks.
Read MoreHello and welcome to a new installment of The Professional Gamer. I have some stories to tell for this week. I’ve had some issues with my knee while running, and went in for some physical therapy this week. In fact, I went in for two rounds of physical therapy, which honestly feels like it might have been too much. I think I’m seeing a little progress with my knee already though, which is super promising. But, with all the exercising that I’m doing along with the PT, I haven’t had as much time to geek out. So, let’s talk about the little bit that I have done.
Read MoreHi, short article this week, because I had a meeting tonight. Let's talk about this past week.
Read MoreWe are now less than a week out from Colorado Anime Fest, as Chris pointed out earlier this week. Crystal will have a table and be selling lots of great art work, which I will encourage all attendees to check out. Meanwhile, I've spent most of my weeknights watching anime that was formerly secured behind the Anime Strike paywall. Apart from that, I've spent a lot of time working in my garden, getting ready for the growing season. But, I'm sure most of you aren't super interested in yard chores. Let's talk about anime instead.
Read MoreHi readers, I've been away this week, putting in some long hours in the field. Once I got back though, I was able to spend some time catching up on this weeks anime. Let's talk about seasonal anime!
Read MoreHi everyone! There still isn't a whole lot to report on my end. I've been running a lot this past week to get ready for the Bolder Boulder which will be coming up in a few weeks. This hasn't left me with a lot of time to very many geeky things. I've spent most of my evenings watching Crystal play Breath of the Wild and finishing Ouron High School Host Club. I'm not ready to start talking in depth about BotW yet, so let's talk about Ouron instead. Although the rest of the series is largely a clever satire of shoujo tropes, there are some problematic parts to the series. Let's take the points one at a time.
First, let me lay out some assumptions, since these things are not well defined within the series itself. Ryouji Fujioka's gender identity and sexual orientation are not explicitly defined in the anime; therefore, I will be assuming the Ryouji is a straight (or possibly bi) male identifying person who enjoys cross-dressing. Having gotten through that, other characters referring to him as a "tranny" is highly offensive. Even if "tranny" is the most straightforward translation of the Japanese used in series, the adaptation staff could have spent a few minutes to explore alternatives. Perhaps, "queen" or "drag queen". Maybe the intention was to show that although the Host Club is tolerant of Haruhi cross-dressing, they are not accepting of a man cross-dressing. But without a moment in the script of someone (especially Ryouji or Haruhi) pointing out that this is a slur, this comes off as both the original creators and the English adaptation staff condoning transphobic language and attitudes.
After a leisurely pace in the middle of the series, taking full episodes to develop most of the members of the host club more fully, the end of the series is incredibly rushed, with a bunch of new characters, completely new plot lines, and character developments that come out of left field. This leads us to the last issue:
Kyoya and Tamaki's fathers are introduced in the final episodes. They are initially portrayed as very hard-nosed, thinking only of the family reputation and profitability of their companies. By the end of the final episode, however, they are joking about how they were actually nice guys after all. Eclair is a similar case. She's comes out of nowhere in order to cause trouble for Tamaki and the host club, with no real defined motivations. She seems to just enjoy jerking people around, but even this is not established as a trait that has some grounding in a personal history. Nope, she's just a jerk cause she likes to be a jerk.
I think I've talked enough about that at this point. Come back next week and see what I've been up to. Game on!
Hi everyone! Colorado AnimeFest was last weekend and I have a bunch of Twitter posts from the panels that I attended. I'm looking around for the best way to collect them for your reading enjoyment.
Read MoreHi everyone! A short article this week due to some travel at the end of the week. I didn't have a lot of time to geek out this week, but I did get a chance to see this handsome guy:
I watched the latest episode of Yuri!! On Ice just a few minutes before sitting down to write, so I'm still processing the episode (especially the stinger). At this point, I anticipating that next week will be the last episode, which I'm thinking will be an early Christmas present to all of us fans.
That's all I have for now. I'm not sure that I'll have an article next week due to the holiday. See you next time! Game on!
