Tag: animu

An introduction to One Piece, via Netflix

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that there was probably a small overlap towards the tail end of my weeby, anime watching days and when One Piece was introduced to the world, I never saw a single episode, read any manga, or actually learned a single thing about the entire franchise.

In itself that’s kind of a hard thing to do, given my general involvement in the anime, convention and nerdy communities, but over the years, no matter how big the property got, I never learned a single thing about it.

I knew solely based on artwork it had to do with pirates and the main character appeared to be some doofy looking guy with real gangly limbs.  But other than that, I had absolutely zero knowledge of the stories or any inkling of what the plot could be about.

Honestly, I never thought about watching it when the live action dropped on Netflix, because I figured my lack of familiarity of the anime would lessen my enjoyment perhaps.  That, and at any given point I have like 62 other shows and movies on a list that is my backlog that I should be tackling first.

But then it came to my attention that one of the key actors of the show was portrayed by the son of the late great Sonny Chiba.  The Son of Chiba.  Apparently he goes by the name Makenyu or something, but there’s no hiding the fact that it is Sonny Chiba’s boy in this show.  Honestly, I didn’t know he had a son, but considering his age and the fact that Chiba is about the manliest man of the east in history it shouldn’t be any surprise.  Regardless, it was enough to pique my curiosity and the circumstances lined up to where I figured I’d give the live One Piece a shot.

And I have to say, it was a rather pleasant debut season.  The story is pretty single, and they do a good job of rotating in various antagonists and delving into each character’s backgrounds at a pace that doesn’t feel dragged out.

The characters are all mostly delightful in the sense that it’s like at any given point their weaknesses are covered by another’s strengths and everyone gets some time to shine.  Luffy’s optimism and positivity is infectious, and it’s fun watching the growth of the Straw Hat Pirates coming together.

Son of Chiba is a badass as Roronoa Zoro, and I appreciate that in spite of how strong he’s portrayed there’s a tremendous amount of growth still with his character, and frankly such could be said about all of them.  Netflix did a decent job of ordering a sampler season that accomplished everything from a storyline, character development and wrapping it all up fairly nicely to not leave it hanging.

Needless to say, I’m a fan of the property, and I look forward to a future season(s).  If I had more time in my life, I’d considering turning to clock back to 2002 and delving into the anime and all of the films the series was able to spawn.  But for what it’s worth, for someone who had absolutely zero knowledge of One Piece, I think the Netflix series does a good job of being able to create interest and make new fans.

Happy Trails, Kevin Lillard

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think I can say that I’ve been fortunate that there haven’t been a lot of deaths in my life of people that really, genuinely impacts me.  The passings of figures and celebrities are sad, like when Bobby Heenan or Sonny Chiba passed, but they’re still celebrities to me and I never knew them personally.

But today, I found out that a guy I knew way back from my old convention days passed away, and it definitely was a wtf kind of moment to hear about, and brings me sadness to have learned about it.  Kevin Lillard, a legendary figure to those of us convention going olds from the late 90s into the 2000s, who was a photographer and historian who ran the very well-known Fan’s View website, where he went to a staggering number of conventions every year and basically photographed every single costumer in existence at the time.

Like, a convention wasn’t a convention if Kevin Lillard wasn’t there to document it.  At the time, there were only really like 9-12 conventions a year, and he would somehow go to each and every one of them.  I remember the first time he pulled double duty, and was at one convention on a Friday, and literally flew out Saturday morning so that he could go cover a second convention for the remainder of the weekend.  I was floored, because it was always one of my goals to get him to join my merry group of miscreants for dinner or an off-site outing, because I was a hipster and was always planning on ways to flex being too cool for the conventions, but he was ever the loyal, consistent guy with the press pass who always, always dutifully did his own thing for the sake of his site.

It’s funny looking back, because I really only was hardcore active in the convention scene for like 2-3 years before petering out for the next few before I really kind of stopped going to anime cons outright.  But I can confidently say that I developed a friendly relationship with Kevin throughout those years, and I genuinely liked and cared about the person.  Like many people, I had pored and combed through his site over the years, and even through his non-anime convention stuff, I saw that he had covered an ECW house show at one point, so I knew he had to have had some interest.  In 2000, when my friends and I were planning to go to an ECW show that overlapped with Katsucon, I made a point to lobby hard to Kevin to try and get him to come with us, to which he was interested, but politely declined so that he could document the opening ceremonies instead.

But that was the Kevin Lillard I grew to know; consistent, always friendly and polite, and without question the most unbiased and inclusive person that stepped foot into every single convention he went to.  It didn’t matter if a costumer was a hardcore tryhard cosplayer, or a novice teenager in a cardboard Samus suit, he took everyone’s picture.  He and his camera had the innate ability to make people feel special and confident, and give them something to look forward to later to just know that they were going to be able to find their picture on his website.

I remember the first time he took my photo, I was dressed up as Tasuki with my friends also in Fushigi Yuugi costumes.  I was quite tickled when I found the photo, and throughout the ensuing years, it never didn’t make smile whenever I came across myself, or friends, and to recollect the stories and memories of a convention weekend through his parade of photos.

Through his site, I enjoyed a little bit of convention credibility when he had made me one of his personality of the weeks, and written some nice words about me, and my dedication to going to conventions and having fun at the time, which really touched me, because he was usually a little dry and sarcastic in conversation in person.  I was an antisocial awkward teenager, and his acknowledgment and exposure really did a number for my confidence, and considering there are a lot of people from those days that are still actively in my life today, there’s something to be owed for that.

After the journey of life drifted me away from conventions, I heard bits and pieces of his health and life in general.  When I finally came aboard Facebook much later, I wish I had reconnected with him at some point, but I suppose the opportunity just never presented itself.  I’d probably have loved to have had a conversation with him about the changes of the convention scene that had happened throughout the last 20 years, and gotten his take on, everything, from the sheer number of cons, to the immense growth of the cosplay community and its skill levels.

But would’ve, should’ve, could’ve; things didn’t happen that way, we never reconnected, and now I’ll never get the opportunity.  Such is the nature of living and the passage of time sometimes.  Regardless, it does not make me any less sadder than any of the numerous people who are discovering this unfortunate news today as we all are, and I just wanted to put some words down on brog to express my appreciation for his existence, some positive memories I have of him, and well wishes to whatever happens next in his journey.

Happy trails, Kevin.  It was an honor to have known you, it’s an honor to have a rare copy of your book, and I appreciate all your contributions to a scene and culture that would undoubtedly never grown to its current heights without you.

OFC The Walking Dead is resuming right as soon as I catch up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

To think I was just about to write about congratulating myself on how I’ve overcome the insurmountable adversity of never having enough time to actually indulge in watching tv and keeping up with the litany of shows and films that I want to watch, but how I somehow heroically found the time and desire to watch what I thought was all of season 11 of The Walking Dead, I find out that not only have I not completed it, the season resumes, literally this coming weekend, and suddenly I’m in a position of where I now have to wait along with everyone else to finish out the series a week at a time.

Either way, I have to say that it’s probably for the best that this is the final season of TWD, because going through the eleventh season of this show, I couldn’t help but feel that the show was basically, at an architectural level, Dragon Ball Z.  The cast runs into bad guys, overcomes hardships and defeats them.  And then they run into badder guys, overcomes hardships and defeats them, and so on and so on.  There’s literally no end to the revolving door of big bads that enter the lives of the main cast; from the Governor, to Negan and the Saviors, to the Whisperers, and now the Reapers, and the white collar bads in the Commonwealth.  It’s simply a formula that can’t expect to chug along and succeed, especially if you’re not actually DBZ.

And the show has been playing this corporate downsizing game over the last few seasons, where, I don’t follow the show politics and cast drama at all, but one by one, key carries to the show have been removed from the show, and it’s like the show is trying to see how many they can write out and expect others to pick up the slack and keep the show compelling.

It was a bold move to write out Rick, considering he was basically the sun and moon of the show since the beginning, but then removing Michonne seemed reckless, especially in the manner in which she departed the plot, but it’s abundantly clear, at least to me, that part of the slog of season 11 is simply the fact that a cast revolving around Daryl, Maggie, and Carol just can’t shoulder the immense load.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Negan storyline, but Rosita, Gabriel, Aaron and Eugene aren’t at this main event level in which they’re expected to perform at, and the OG cast is just stretched way too thin to keep this ship steady for much longer.

I’m anticipating some sort of payoff in the form of the return(s) of Rick and/or Michonne in the final eight episodes, but I also feel like that there’s this final season of Game of Thrones problem in play, because cards on the table, everyone knows that this is it now.  Eight episodes until oblivion, but there’s a lot of plot, lot of loose ends that are still unresolved, and probably still a lot of deaths of some substantial players that have to occur in order to get those pipe bombs everyone wants from dramatic storytelling.

And much like shows like Dexter, Breaking Bad, and even Rurouni Kenshin, TWD seems inevitable that they’re going to be winding down their television existence on a downhill slope of a weak adversary waiting at the end of production.  Negan and the Saviors were undoubtedly the pinnacle of antagonism in TWD, the equivalent to the Trinity Killer, Gus Fring and Shishio.  And the series has been gradually tilting downward since they peaked.  It’s an interesting strategy on how they’ve been trying to rehabilitate and redeem Negan, but even he can’t change the fact that Lance Hornsby and the Commonwealth aren’t basically the equivalent to the generic white supremacists that Walter White ended Breaking Bad with.

I digress though.  Just when I thought I could heroically remove TWD from my watch queue, it’s two more months of slow releasing episodes, instead of leisurely binging it like I had been doing over the last weeks, but at least for a rare instance, I’m actually caught up and can be on top of watching the crawl to the end along with people I won’t want to know their opinions and analysis with, but at least I’ll be less apt to be spoiled if I’m watching remotely at the same time as others.

But I will enjoy filling out any character death Bingo sheets if any start to emerge in preparation for the end of the series.

Not sure how I feel about this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I read this story about an Initial D café out in California, I was a little skeptical.  Initial D is a property that I’ve been pretty passionate about, and frankly of all the anime series that have ever existed, absolutely none of them can say that they’ve been able to keep my interest for 18 years.  My interest in Initial D could legitimately vote. 

Kare Kano, Ranma 1/2, Evangelion, Rurouni Kenshin; none of these properties, among many others, as much as I loved them when I did, had the ability to keep me coming back for more throughout their existences.  With Initial D, I would watch whatever I could, but then in later years, when I’d learn that more of it existed, I would search and watch it and catch back up, until the point came when the series was out of episodes.

As suspect as I thought the ending kind of was, my love for the series was unmistakable.  Frankly, almost all anime have shitty endings, and Initial D’s was far from the worst out there.

Anyway, this Initial D café out in California; of course it’s in California.  And as much as I like the execution of the place, and the obvious love for the property that the owner has, there’s just one thing that bugs me:

Fujiwara Tofu Cafe, while not formally endorsed by Initial D’s creators, 

It’s a business that’s completely more or less unauthorized.  And in spite of the lack of endorsement, the place is completely smattered with Initial D stuff all over the place, and has completely lifted its entire identity from a property that they more or less don’t have the endorsement to use.  I’m no legal expert, but I wonder about the legality of using so much official stuff for a business not sanctioned by the creators of it.

I think it bugs me because I’m such a fan of the property and generally protective of my fandom of it, and this is definitely something that I wouldn’t have done, at least without trying to gained some approval from those in charge of the property in the first place.  I mean, who’s to say the guy who owns it hasn’t, but the thing is if I don’t get the green light from Shuichi Shigeno, then this is definitely a venture that I don’t embark on.

But that’s just me.  Otherwise, I have some respect for the fact that the duder’s family has an actual history with making tofu, which gives a degree of legitimacy to the business, and wasn’t just some mega fanboy opening an Initial D café, but then just selling hot dogs and/or other weeaboo-ey Asian food.

However, the lack of endorsement from the creators, and the fact that the guy is making a living on intellectual property that isn’t endorsed kind of rubs me the wrong way.  Would I go to this place if it were in Atlanta and not California?  Absolutely, I am that much of a fan of Initial D that I would.  But knowing the backstory of the whole place and that it’s not officially endorsed still gives me this trepidation that I’m probably doing a shitty job describing.  It just rubs me the wrong way, and I feel like a property that I love so much, is getting a little bit of a raw deal, with fans making a buck on their name without their approval. 

My 600 Lb. Life never fails to entertain

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

You’d think after ten seasons of My 600 Lb. Life, the series would start to show some signs of getting stale or formulaic.  I mean, it has gotten very formulaic, but it doesn’t change the fact that no matter how many seasons of the show march forward, America has no shortage of behemoths that continue to parade themselves to Houston in order to meet Dr. Now and think they’re going to hear something they haven’t seen in nine prior seasons.

The latest episode, Lacey B’s journey, had to have been one of the more depressing episodes in the series’ history.  And I’m taking into consideration the handful of episodes where the subject of the episode died, because they actually succumbed to their own weight problems.

But spoiler alert, Lacey doesn’t even make it the full twelve months that most episodes tend to lapse over, doesn’t get surgery, barely loses any weight, and frankly the question really is, why the fuck was she on the show in the first place, and why did TLC even bother airing it, which is an obviously redundant question, because she’s such a train wreck, there was no question that TLC was going to air it.

Lacey’s boyfriend whom was a little dull on the wattage side, caved to his sister’s argument of how Lacey was using him in two seconds, and she ends up suddenly homeless in the middle of nowhere in Texas, while her ex-companions basically dump off all of her belongings in College Station.  Next thing you know, she’s back in Washington State, in her old apartment that’s now suddenly empty because she tried to move her life to Houston, and in the end she lost like 15 lbs. down from her cruiserweight 591 initial weigh in, and the episode concludes in month 7, as if it were a failed excursion on Naked and Afraid.

I wonder if they’ll bother airing an episode of Where Are They Now? because Lacey basically didn’t even have a conclusive prologue to build off of.  But when they inevitably do, this might one of the few that I might actually make an effort to see.

All in all, season 10 of My 600 Lb. Life is about as good as all the others.  Big ups to episode 4’s Mike, because it was an episode where viewers like me realize just how rare it is to have a guy that’s enjoying so much white privilege compared to all of the other blobs throughout the show’s history, because he lives with his stable white parents in Ohio, has a normal, upper-middle class remote job, and doesn’t seem to have all the financial issues that just about everyone else in the show does.

And of course, Dr. Now’s patience with his patients has continued to sink to where there are more zingers and he seems to be aware of the show’s appeal to when he rips into his patients, and there’s rarely an episode where there’s not at least one good memorable quote he drops in defense of whatever bullshit excuse a new patient comes in with.

I barely have time to watch television these days, but it says something that among the few things that are still must-watch, My 600 Lb. Life is still up there.  I don’t even watch wrestling anymore, in comparison.

I get why people abandon The Walking Dead

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been churning my way through two and a half seasons of The Walking Dead to try and catch up.  Naturally, as I’m nearing the finish line, unbeknownst to me, I was days away from the premiere of season 11, and just as I’d be finishing up, there’s already more fucking TWD available to me.

But fuck that.  After finishing season 10, I’m fucking done for a little bit with TWD, and I need a god damn break from TWD.  I fully understand and get why the show, regardless of its actual ratings, seems to feel like it’s being abandoned by those in my peer groups and those people I communicate with.

Because it’s basically a live-action version of Dragon Ball Z, in the sense that the cadence of the show is basically the very definition of the meme shown above of most shonen anime.  The residents of planet Rick come across some shitty people bent on killing them, they band together and overcome them, and without missing a beat, the next episode, and sometimes in the very same episode as the penultimate finale, the next big bad shows up and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Over the span of ten seasons of TWD, we’ve had the Governor, twice actually threaten the cast and be repelled.  Then they traveled north and ran into Negan.  Then came Alpha and the Whisperers.  And not even one episode after them, they introduce the seeds of some new groups of bads, with the people hunting Maggie’s crew and the people in West Virginia.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that season 11 is just going to be more of the same, except that it’s branching off into separate storylines, like it were a season of Game of Thrones.  It’s like the sacred timeline has been deviated from because the group has branched out, but either way it’s going to be basically two sets of the meme up above, until the paths of the characters eventually reunite, only to take on the next greatest evil ever.

Either way, the last few episodes of season 10 were a definite weird way to end a season, and by doing so, they really did put a stamp on the cadence of the show to where I have no qualms with taking a fucking break from TWD, crossing it off my list, and moving onto some other show(s) to watch in my very limited time of television.  I’ll let the episode queue build back up, so I can marathon it, because frankly I couldn’t imagine watching TWD episode by episode again anymore, after running through as much of it as I have over the last few months.

The Shishio Effect

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Originally written for July 27, 2021

Over the last few months, I’ve been watching a lot of The Walking Dead.  A long time ago, I stopped at the season 7 mid-season finale where AMC stops running episodes because they don’t want to compete against late-season NFL and the playoffs, as well as to milk out the ratings, which honestly isn’t a bad idea.  However, when they stopped midway through season 7, is when I basically embarked on the process of selling my own home, moving, lots of changes in life, and so forth.  I never watched again, regardless of how compelling and interested I was in the Negan storyline.

Prior to the arrival of #2, both mythical wife and I had the same idea to watch a bunch of television and movies that we’d been sitting on, because we knew that once we were dealing with two kids, our television time would evaporate like rain in the desert.  Amidst my list of things to watch was to finally, catch up on The Walking Dead.  It was a daunting task to embark on two and a half seasons, and naturally midway through my journey, Netflix dropped season 10, and at the time I’m writing this, season 11 is knocking on the door for its eventually premiere.  But it was a show that I never didn’t enjoy, so I figured while I still had time left, I should try and catch back up.

Anyway, without spoilers despite the fact that this show is old as fuck now, I got through the Negan arc, and I have soldered onto to the arc of the Whisperers.  And as diabolical and nefarious things said Whisperers have done so far, I can’t help but get this feeling that they just aren’t as good of antagonists as Negan was.  Which is often times a common pattern in all sorts of long-term stories, to which I would like to officially coin as the Shishio Effect, which is defined as a series that has at one point and antagonist that is leaps and bounds superior than any other antagonist prior to them, and unfortunately more importantly, after them, which leads to a quality bell curve in the overall timeline of said series.

Named after the antagonist Shishio from the Rurouni Kenshin anime television series, which is probably one of my earliest observations of said effect, plus the fact that naming it after him makes it way more unique and memorable for all zero of my readers.  But throughout the 95 episodes of the television series, Shishio and the Kyoto storyline was somewhere in season 2, went for about 30 or so episodes, it was some of the most compelling and marathon bingeable anime in history, but after the story arc was over, the show struggled tremendously to get back to that level and instead began this slow decline until the plug was inevitably pulled on the series.

Other good examples of the Shishio Effect would be the Trinity Killer in Dexter season 4, Gus Fring in seasons 2-4 of Breaking Bad, and in the case of The Walking Dead, Negan.  These guys were unmistakably the baddest motherfuckers in their respective properties, and all of the shows struggle to get back to the levels of intensity and interest once their respective storylines conclude.

I mean seriously, the guy who played zerocool in Hackers was the guy that followed the Trinity Killer in Dexter, some generic white supremacists followed Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, and now we have the Whisperers following Negan and the Saviors after like two and a half seasons of The Walking Dead?  All of them are weak successors to the mantle of big bad that their predecessors had laid down, but it can’t really be their faults, entirely.

High potential properties at high risk for future Shishio Effect-ing would be just about every Marvel Cinematic Universe property that is moving onto the next phase; after working with Thanos, everyone else is going to seem kind of pathetic in comparison.  And after a guy like Killmonger, the Black Panther franchise is going to have double the difficulty, especially after the passing of Chadwick Boseman.  But still high risk for Shishio-ing, all the same.

Regardless, I will solder through, because while my second child doesn’t sleep at night, I’ve been gradually chipping away at the remaining episodes of The Walking Dead at night, as I am determined to clear this fucking series out of my queue, so that I can feel liberated to move onto something else.  But make no mistake, the series has been feeling like it’s been sputtering since the story has moved on from the Negan arc, and I couldn’t help but feel like it was watching Rurouni Kenshin all over again.