If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know that I am a fan of well defined situations. I like rules and rituals. I promise I’m more fun than I sound… I think…
Category: Essays
You Can’t Please Everyone
A little while ago I put together a little community post on Karandi’s blog, combining what several bloggers would have liked to know when they first started their blog. It was a fun project. However, one response stuck with me and I realized that I wanted to come back to it.
Dutch Angles in Anime
Want to impress you friends by throwing around fancy cinematography language? Want to convince them anime is a serious art by analyzing classical methods and their use in an animated medium? Well you’ve come to the right place! Unless your friends know anything about cinematography or proper usage of fancy words. Then we’re both screwed…
The Importance of Filler in Anime
I occasionally get asked where I get my post inspiration from. So let me give you an example:
Treasure Tropes : Red Oni, Blue Oni
I’m not sure when I started having this fascination with colours. It’s not like I wear any. But at some point, I started to really notice them in all things and particularly in cinema and anime. I do know that I’ve been fascinated with tropes since I was small. I would see archetypes come up…
Everyone wants to be Strong – What Anime Taught Me About Strength
I might as well warn you right off the bat, this is going to be one of those posts. A little weird, a little personal. I hope you still like it. “Strong” was never really a word that applied to me in any way growing up. I was, and still am, rather smaller than average…
The Legal Grey Zone of Scanslations
****For those that don’t know, scanslations are scanned copies of comics (usually manga) which have been translated and photoshopped with the translation by fans. They are unofficial but not necessarily illegal**** Copyright is a pretty hot issue right now. It has been for some years of course. I know that popular opinion is against me…
I Found Out What Furin Are
Man, I’m slow sometimes. (No comments, thank you!) I have been watching anime for years, multiple years, and only recently did I notice the windchimes. I saw them a lot in Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits, then more recently in Yotsurio Biyori. When there was a quick scene of one in Cinderella 9, I…
In the Land of Orphans – Where Are The Parents in Anime?
If you’ve watched as much anime as me, you could be tricked into thinking that the only way you’re ever going to live out your real life anime fantasy is by somehow becoming an orphan. Or at least a woefully neglected high school student. It seems that anime is willing to use any old excuse…
How Important Is Relatability in Anime?
I have been reading a lot of anime reviews lately. Usually, I read various reviews around WordPress and get my info from there. However, through researching a few posts (I know!) I managed to go through a large amount of shorter reviews on sites such as MAL and AniList. One very common statement is that characters…
Irina Goes to the Fantasia Film Festival
I mention the Fantasia Film festival fairly often on this site. It’s one of the few events with a large audience I still make time for every year. Fantasia started out as a festival focused on Asian cinema and Anime in 1996, when streaming was a distant dream and subs far from a guarantee. Getting…
My Blog Has Made Anime a Drug
I’ve spoken to many bloggers who go through phases of just not wanting to watch any anime at all. This is not something I struggle with myself. Generally, I don’t get bored or fed up of anime as a whole. Occasionally, certain shows can be a chore to slog through and I’ll see my anime…
Irina’s Sense for Snow – Weather in Anime
I don’t know if any of you have read Miss Smilla’s Sense for Snow. It’s a Danish criminal thriller which focuses a lot on snow. How it behaves and what it can tell us. It’s pretty interesting to convey wheater through words alone. Not entirely unlike trying to explain colours. If you’ve experienced it for…
Irina’s Pinterest Journeys
Pinterest is an odd duck. It’s a very particular internet microcosm and from the outside, it can seem like nothing at all. I always thought it was sort of substantless. I don’t even own a photo album (virtual or otherwise), what would I ever want with a Pinterest account? I only got interested in the…
Happy Tanabata!
It’s not really Tanabata, technically it’s on August 7th this year (“the seventh day of the seventh lunar month of the Japanese lunisolar calendar”). But there are celebrations between July 7th and August 7th so we’re in the range. I guess my title was clickbait…sorry! In my defence, I didn’t want to miss it. I…