Polarity is not the only visual strategy at work in Kyousougiga. Look up there. That’s some black space, isn’t it? My inclination is that black space in a light-based medium would work the same way as [...]
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There’s this thing, Touhou. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It has fans. A couple of fans. I learned of the shoot-em-ups circa 2008, six years after they came to Windows and exploded, some thirteen years [...]
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I had a well-timed conversation with Cuchlann last week about DC Comics’ Final Crisis event. My contention is that Grant Morrison’s extreme faith in his readers sometimes turns his work into a [...]
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We in the west have tended, especially before the 20th century, to think of order and chaos or symmetry and asymmetry as opposing forces. The one doesn’t exist in the presence of the other. In [...]
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A Centaur’s Life (セントールの悩み, so more like Centaur’s Worries, but nobody asked me) is now available in book form in These Great United States of America, and I’m about as thrilled as the first centaur president. And not because I like monstergirl porn. No, really. Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou, also published stateside by Seven […]
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We appreciators of fantasy stories come to it in different ways, but there’s one popular strawman coming-to narrative that you’ve quite likely heard before. I’m talking about the kid who doesn’t fit in with peers, for whatever reason, and uses Final Fantasy or Tolkien or Harry Potter or superhero comics as an escape. In a […]
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Alright, okay. Everybody relax. I think we can do this. Make sense of this, I mean. It makes sense! I promise. So, the first episodes raise the question of what a hero is. Into episode three and beyond, the characters start answering this question. As they do so, the boundary between the fictions Masayoshi and […]
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It’s not until episode five that the point of superheroes becomes clear to Masayoshi, but he does begin to investigate tropes, to determine which narrative building blocks will make up Samurai Flamenco, earlier on. He has a conversation with Goto about carrying a gun, for example — he’s faced with the choice between Batman and, […]
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Samurai Flamenco is not the show I came equipped by western ironic superhero stories to think it would be. It isn’t Watchmen before Dr. Manhattan and Vietnam, or I guess Kick-Ass — it isn’t dark enough. It’s funny and sincere, but it’s not yet Mystery Men. So far it’s low on action and quite chatty. […]
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Let’s talk about tone, which is easiest described as a narrative’s attitude toward the things it’s narrating about, or maybe just how a story makes you feel moment-to-moment. You’ll find a lot of three-sentence definitions of tone if you Google it, and a lot of advice on how to keep tone consistent in your own […]
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