I Haven't Heard Of It Is Not Useful Information

This little article about people who haven't heard of Arcade Fire is one data point. I haven't heard of it isn't useful information because the entertainment universe is so large that one percent of the avaliable entertainment can occupy your entire entertainment time and money budget for a year. I have about 400 DVDs on my netflix list. I will probably only get to 100 of them this year, and by that time, hundreds of other DVDs will have been released.

And of course, watching movies, tv shows, and anime are not my only hobbies, and I only have so much time to consume information on these. And even within hobbies, to save time, I will not look up information on every single manga produced in a year. If people I 'know' start talking about a series or I see it either on a physical shelf or reccomended on amazon, I may look up more information. But that of course leaves out many parts of the hobby- I'm much less likely to hear about GIANT BOOBS OF THE DEAD than Sensitive Exploration of Teen Angst: Now With Bishies. So me not having heard of a certain anime tells you nothing more than what websites I read or what someone might have mentioned in passing on twitter.

Another issue is that to be a hit, you can sell a million or half a million, but even just America has 300 million people, so the vast majority doesn't even have to know something exists for it to be a huge hit. With hundreds of channels, and the entire internet, it's not important whether we've heard of Arcade Fire or Princess Jellyfish or Chopped, but whether you bring full enjoyment to whatever you consume.

Complaining About Princess Jellyfish

Hulu link for reference. Ok, I admit that I watched all 11 episodes. I grumbled about how we end up with makeovers in every show about a girl that isn't super duper hot, and how if this was a show about male geeks, there would be no makeovers at all. In fact, attractive girls would be inexplicably attracted to these dudes!

Besides that, I just get a huge feeling that something is missing here. I think I would have liked more emphasis on Tsukimi's emotional growth and grief for her mother, and maybe her growing to have feelings for Kuranosuke, or realizing that Shu is a jerk. I'd like to see our 'nuns' fleshed out more. The SAVE THE APARTMENT BUILDING story line ended in a deus ex machina, so it made it feel like all of Tsukimi and Kuranosuke's work, and poorly thought through plans were for nothing.

I don't get it...

THESE ANIME CHARACTERS WOULDN'T MAKE IT IN REAL LIFE!

Dude, real life does not consist entirely of people who are non annoying, smart and sane. Even the real work world does not consist of people who are 'the ideal'. Annoying hot heads, the socially dense, the cowardly and the mentally ill exist in the real world with varying amounts of success, whether we measure it as having huge amounts of money, fitting in in the dysfunctional corporate milieu or having friends and family that adore you.

If we're talking about the unrealistic parts of anime, I'd go first for "dude, those giant robots aren't possible, especially since they are fueled by dragons" or "her tits are in fact bigger than her head". We could discuss how yelling out your attacks would alert your enemy and not do anything, or how dudes who try to rape you all the time in fact are not your best bet for a romantic partnership.

A good exploration of rapist and rapee in love, seme and uke dynamics, or even how the most plain and dull guys have tons of extremely attractive girls crawling all over them would be an interesting exploration of how unrealistic anime is on the characterization front. All we have here is "I don't like the character, so they wouldn't survive in real life". WEAKSAUCE.

Black Bird 7 and Gakuen Alice 15

Black Bird is a manga that gives you blue balls, even if you have no balls. Misao and Kyo continue to not have sex for this entire book. As everyone predicted, nothing occurs to break the status quo. (Last book it was WILL KYO HAVE SEX WITH SOME DRAGON DUDE'S SISTER. We all knew he wouldn't. He didn't.) This book it's WILL KYO HAVE SEX WITH MISAO SO HE CAN DEFEAT SOME DUDE?! (No. He won't. I bet Kyo and Misao *never* have sex.) Really, this book's a big tease. They could string this out forever with more SHOCKING THINGS THAT WON'T HAPPEN, and I worry they will.

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Gakuen Alice 15 stops our hope that the plot will be advanced cold with a lot of wacky hijinks and boring romance. I counted about 5 pages in which the plot advanced(OK, I didn't literally count). I want to know way more about why there's a horrible child abusing school and way way way less about how Mikan bravely holds up under the fact that some people she doesn't know believe rumors about her. Really, kid, your life is in danger. Extremely dangerous and crazy people have their eye on you. They have superhuman powers. Let's worry more about that, and less about whether you can win Miss Popularity,ok?