Side Notes – Hai to Gensou no Grimgar

Although I already released my main thoughts on Grimgar in a Blog Post yesterday, I felt it was appropriate to try and cover the show one more time to really get out all the remaining the thoughts I still have in me. It’s a show and book I really do like a lot, but there’s also quite a bit to talk about when it comes to its negative sides so I figured a kind of bullet point list of thoughts would probably be a good way to try and cover most of what I thought of the first Grimgar Novel.

Oh and also. Full Spoilers ahead.

Grimgar is about Humans

When I first wrote about Hai to Gensou no Grimgar barely halfway through its run, I said that the series felt very personal to me, in a way I found extremely hard to explain. Of course, those things that are more important to us are often harder to explain ones liking for. After all, it’s a piece of media that has to work on multiple reasons. One of the major reasons why I still have never published any of what I’ve tried writing about Hibike Euphonium many years after falling in love with it because I still cannot pin down which one of the million reasons I love it should be the one to talk about.

I later tried to talk about Grimgar as a series that simply deals with grief extremely well and that that was a thing I found incredibly fascinating about it, but while that definitely plays a part in my love for the series, I still feel like it’s a bit off. I only just finished reading the first volume of the Grimgar books, having bought it almost a year ago at this point, and blame it on my recent come back and fascination with the massively popular World of Warcraft, but I’ve come to love it just the same again. But this time I feel I can finally give an answer as to why.

Why Youtube?

Among Anime Analysis circles and my personal Anitwitter bubble in general Youtube has in recent time been more than under fire. Over the past years, I’ve seen more than a few friends crucify Anime Youtube, claim it to be uninteresting or just incredibly immature as a whole.

I’ve been following the Anime Youtube scene for more than 4 years now, since the early days of Podtaku and before a lot of the currently big channels even existed. I’ve seen Anime Youtube go through the weirdest phases of drama and I’ve made many great friends on the way. And I also do end up getting quite frustrated with this idea that Anitube is not worth anyone’s time and with this, to me, odd crucifixion of the medium.
Of course, don’t get me wrong, everyone can have their own opinion on Anime Youtubers and that the medium breeds a lot of Drama and Infighting is something I’m aware of. But a lot of the time I still end up being frustrated that the medium I’ve spent this much time following and the place that I’ve made so many friends in, is something that is written off by so many people.

Shimura Takako and Instable Identities

This is going to include some spoilers for both Aoi Hana and Wandering Son, not just Anime wise but also for the Manga. If you care about those, you should probably go read both Manga like right now. It’s worth it.

I’ve always struggled to talk about Takako Shimura’s two most popular works, the lesbian drama “Sweet Blue Flowers” (Aoi Hana) and the absolute landmark of transgender media that is “Wandering Son” (Hourou Musuko), as two pieces of media that are just that. Manga about being lesbian and transgender. It’s important to note in my opinion that Shimura herself is, at the very least publically, a straight, cisgender woman and thus is in some ways lacks a certain understanding of what being an LGBT person is like. This does show, especially with a lot of the major things that often accompany gender anxiety for a lot of the trans community absent from the Manga.

I wish Konosuba was more like its Ending

It’s already been a surprising while since I’ve last set my eyes on something that has to do with one of the Anime Community’s more recent darlings in Konosuba. Be it blamed on the tendency of trends to move at a faster and faster pace, my current refusal to take more than a quick look at Reddit or my general distance I’ve had to Anime over the past few months. If I do, however, through whatever coincidence, I end up listening to the show’s first Ending 小さな冒険者 (Chiisana Boukensha / The small Adventurer) it fills me with a weird sense of nostalgia and calms in ways completely disconnected from what the show itself is actually like.

Halftime – Gender through my 6 months in Japan

It feels odd, to say the least, realizing that I’ve been living in Japan for more than half a year already. There are a lot of circumstances and things lately that remind me that I really haven’t been in my home country in 6 months. Even now I occasionally end up having to stand still in the middle of the street as I realize that I am on the other side of the world. It’s become such a daily occurrence for me to be speaking in Japanese, to go visit a Conbini and buy some Onigiri for whatever I have planned today, to have an insane amount of Anime lined up to watch on my Netflix account or even to just see Hiragana and Kanji everywhere around me. It was clear that eventually living here would feel normal to me, but the occasional realizations of that having happened are what truly makes it special.

Before I left Germany I talked to my counselor (I believe this is the word that best describes what she did for me) about why exactly I wanted to go to Japan. Not concerning why specifically Japan, but rather what drove me to go to such lengths in the first place. I believe my answer was actually quite true to how I thought about it, something I’ve gotten a lot better at thanks to said counselor. If I remember correctly it was that I wanted distance from everything in Germany to further find myself, as that had been what I was working towards for the longest time. I also added that I wanted to be more self-reliant, although if I’m honest that was the much smaller point.
I should add here, that finding yourself is an impossible task to begin with. The ‘self’, to me, is such a fluent being, that I don’t think ‘finding yourself’ is quite the right way to word this and I’ll instead rephrase to how my counselor would usually say it: “Living yourself”. I believe that we all know who we are and that none of us need to find out, but rather that we need to stop hiding it. At the very least, that’s how it was for me and that is what I came to Japan to do.

Ruhe und Kultur: Die Lage des Borderless House Kamigamo

Disclaimer: Dieser Artikel wurde als entlohnter Auftrag von Borderless House geschrieben. Trotz dem, sind jegliche Meinungen hier meine eigenen und wurden nicht durch den Auftraggeber beeinflusst.

In meinem ersten Write-up zu dem Borderless Sharehaus in dem ich zur Zeit wohne hatte ich die Lage des Hauses schon einmal erwähnt, kurz angesprochen wie gut sie genau ist, aber ich würde doch gern nochmal genauer darauf eingehen, da die Lage meiner Meinung nach doch extrem wichtig ist. Die Lage eines Hauses ist einer der Sachen die es am ehesten ausmachen. Während die Innereien eines Hauses oft ähnlich bleiben (wenn auch mit variierender Qualität und Sauberkeit), bleibt die Umgebung zuerst vermutlich am ehesten im Kopf. In diesem Fall ist das der traditionsreiche Stadtteil Kamigamo.

 

Im Kimono um den Kamigamo Schrein

Disclaimer: Dieser Artikel wurde als entlohnter Auftrag von Borderless House geschrieben. Trotz dem, sind jegliche Meinungen hier meine eigenen und wurden nicht durch den Auftraggeber beeinflusst.

Im letzten Artikel den ich zum Borderless House Kamigamo geschrieben habe, erwähnte ich verschiedene Events bei denen die meisten Leute  hier regelmäßig teilnehmen. Um genau zu sein, sprach ich zur der Zeit von Sachen, die von den Einwohnern selbst geplant wurden. Sachenwie der bis zu 3-tägige gemeinsame Ausflug nach Nara, die Wanderung um Kurama etc, aber das ist nicht ganz alles das das Haus zu bieten hat. Alle paar Wochen gibt es das ein oder andere Event von Borderless House selbst organisiert. Diese stellen natürlich mehr da als nur die Ausflüge mit anderen Leuten aus dem Haus. Vor ein paar Tagen konnte ich zum ersten mal an einem Teilnehmen, und genau davon möchte ich dieses mal berichten.

Häuser ohne Grenzen: Leben im Borderless House Kamigamo

Disclaimer: Dieser Artikel wurde als entlohnter Auftrag von Borderless House geschrieben. Trotz dem, sind jegliche Meinungen hier meine eigenen und wurden nicht durch den Auftraggeber beeinflusst.

Nach mehr als 4 Monaten Leben in Tokyo, umrundet von Betonklötzen und Technologie soweit das Auge reicht, entschied ich mich vor einigen Wochen, dass ich endlich aus der größten Stadt der Welt raus wollte. Nicht dass Tokyo keine gut Stadt zum Leben wäre, ganz im Gegenteil, alles scheint darauf ausgerichtet zu sein das Leben so einfach wie möglich zu machen. Wenn ich einkaufen wollte, musste ich nicht mal eine Minute Laufen und hatte die Auswahl aus 5 Restaurants und 3 Convenience Stores. Wollte ich irgendwo hin, lief ich 10 Minuten (eine für Tokyo schon längere Strecke) und war in der Metro. Es gibt nichts in Tokyo, das schwer zu erreichen ist, aber für mich als Landkind einer 1000 Einwohner Metropole im Süd-Westen Deutschlands ist das alles vielleicht doch etwas zu viel.

How Pocari Sweat gets me excited

I have a weird habit of getting inexplicably obsessed with little things I’ve stumbled across and spending several hours or days thinking about them despite them having relatively little significance to me at all. This has ranged from Japanese ski jumping star Takanashi Sara to my relatively short-lived for the same countries female volleyball league. This time it happens to be the latest ad campaign by Japanese ion water company ‘Pocari Sweat’. “Something I just happen to be obsessed with”, might be underselling this quite a bit though. I genuinely believe the “踊る始業式” (read ‘Odoru Shigyoiushiki’ or ‘Dancing Opening Ceremony’) to be an absolutely fascinating advert both in how it delivers a feeling, as well as how it achieves promoting the company behind it.