Categories
Anime Reviews

A journey into Fate/stay night begins

Until Fate/Zero appeared, I’d never planned on watching Fate/stay night. At the time of its airing back in 2006, it’d always seemed a tad too pandering for my tastes. I knew nothing about it and was happy to keep it that way, but then, last year, I tried watching Fate/Zero and realised that I wanted to know more about its underlying story, that of the Holy Grail War. I’m a fan of shounen anime, after all, and one of the finer traditions of the genre has always been the tournament arc.

Categories
Editorials

Skewed tastes of the otaku

With blogger hubs like Blogsuki and the AnimeAntenna cropping up, now is as good a time as ever to gauge how the tastes of the hardcore anime fan often differ from that of the general anime buying public.
According to the stats provided by Blogsuki, the most popular shows currently being blogged are Mai Otome, Fate/Stay Night, Shakugan no Shana, Kashimashi and Jigoku Shoujo. And judging by it’s furious debut, I expect we won’t have to wait too long for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to gatecrash that list too.
On the other hand, typical shounen adventure anime like Eureka 7, Ergo Proxy and Noein appear to be floundering. Perhaps that’s a harsh way of putting it, but these are a shows tipped for the very top, flashbang animated and designed with an obvious broad appeal. What do they lack that turns off the otaku audience?
Is it that obsessive quality that otaku are famous for; no matter how well it’s animated, you can’t very well idolize an emotionless vase of a character like Real Mayer of Ergo Proxy in the same way as the always huggable “cute hell girl” Enma Ai of Jigoku Shoujo. Plushies and wallpapers of the weird looking kids from Noein are never going to be as fluffy as the girls from Otome.
It’s not all about aethetics though- the most blogged series, like Otome, appear to invite fandom, to encourage disection of every facet of their show. Noein and the rest are great examples of story telling- but perhaps too good in that we are often left with little to discuss, such is the quality of story that watching becomes an almost one way experience, there is little to discuss when all the loose ends are everything but tied up anyway.