Nigorimasen! Blog

Last week was full of appetizing announcements regarding licenses and release dates but now that I think about it, I realize I’ve written some interesting posts about some of the anime involved in those press releases and that I have certain obligations to buy each of them (Tsubasa, Haruhi, Solid State Society) — or at least the first volumes of ‘em. Come along with me and look back at what I now slightly regret writing.
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[via Digg]
According to Consumerist, Wal-Mart and Target had listings on their websites today for volumes 1 and 3 of the “Yaoi Hentai” series. (Consumerist is part of the snarky Gawker Media family of blogs.) When the blog asked Wal-Mart about it, the response was that the titles “erroneously appeared [on the site] due to an isolated system filtering issue”. Unfortunately for their PR team, the blog later found more explicit titles for sale.

This doesn’t make me roll my eyes as much as hearing a mother complain about suggestive manga in libraries but it still makes me a little uneasy about the current perception of yaoi/yuri/erotic manga among ordinary Americans. Personally, I’m fine with it being sold in stores as long as they are not sold to minors - even the covers of Yaoi Hentai clearly say “Absolutely Not For Children”. These would definitely be wrapped in any brick-and-mortar bookstore and it seems very unlikely that manga of this ilk is actually on  shelves at “big box” stores. Still, if it’s possible for a teenager to use a gift card and purchase yaoi manga through an online retailer, it should be a concern and the retailers should somehow, upon checkout, verify the purchasers’ ages or simply not stock explicit material at all.

As of this post, the story has been dugg 1,578 times and one commenter was smart enough to point out that the title of the story - “Walmart.com and Target.com Sell Anime Porn” - is misleading as the products in question are manga (i.e. non-moving pictures). Wal-Mart’s image of a family-friendly store may be affected by this a little bit but not a lot if this story stays out of the mainstream press. Anyway, I doubt that Kevin and Alex will discuss this on Diggnation but if it does happen to come up, I’ll be sure to post a clip with added commentary.

I had downloaded the first two episodes of Asatte no Houkou a couple months ago and forgot about it until I found out the anime club needed a 12/13-episode series to fill the slot Sukisho will vacate in a couple weeks. So I watched those initial two I had and found it interesting but found it significantly sluggish due to the necessary exposition and the characters not believing what had just happened to them. Fortunately I enjoyed the next couple episodes as the main characters became somewhat acclimated to their situation so I’m currently to get through the remaining episodes as quickly as possible.
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This week I received three different packages from three different places that I had been expecting for a while. I’ll try to write stuff up about each of these soon but, like the Sac-Anime audio I promised to post, I’m not promising anything. (About the interviews, I might just eschew transcripts and put them all in a single post.) But back to the topic at hand…

First: the Excel Saga Imperfect Collection from Best Buy. While I was home during winter break, I ordered this from an in-store kiosk for $18 (thanks to the CAG forums) because 1) it wasn’t being stocked anywhere anymore ever since the Thinpak Collection was released and 2) the kiosk prices can be much lower than what’s online. Now I have two copies of Volume 1 which isn’t a problem but still a little annoying.
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Yesterday I clicked on a banner ad on ANN that sent me to the “Funimation 2007 Kickoff” website. Apparently, each weekday from Jan 22nd through 26th at noon CST (10am PST/1pm EST), a special announcement will be posted. Sure, I’ll be checking the page everyday next week but that’s not my point.

Recently there has been a trend of behavior that is starting to irritate me - that is, licensors hyping announcements. While this latest thing by Funi is not as grandiose as Bandai’s ASOS Brigade or as “clever” as Geneon’s hints at Rozen Maiden during a podcast that people otherwise wouldn’t listen to (at least I wouldn’t, I don’t know about you…), it still annoys me that they are making fans do more legwork. Call me lazy but I’d rather have companies just make a press release and surprise fans the old-fashioned way because I doubt we’ll remember years from now how Keroro took over ADV’s website for a day or two.
And yes, I do realize that I am inadvertently promoting Funi’s project by linking to it.

Two weeks into the new year and I’ve already checked off one of my resolutions for 2007 - attending a convention. This past weekend I went to Sac-Anime and decided to interview some of the vendors and artists, using my MP3 player’s built-in microphone. So over the rest of this week, I’ll be posting audio from those interviews along with transcriptions because it might hard to hear what’s being said when there are hundreds of people in the same building.
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All right, I came up a better poll question than the boring name one that I started out with. The question is: do you buy used anime at all (B&M and/or online)? “Used”, or “pre-viewed”, means that the case has been opened and the disc has been viewed at least once so unopened DVDs from eBay do not count. The inspiration for this particular question was my visit to a Suncoast store this week; comparisons between it and other B&M used sellers are after the jump.
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NOTE: image not from the upcoming game.

According to ANN, Ideafactory is making a Ouran Host Club romantic adventure game targeted at women for the PS2, due to come out in spring 2007 in Japan. I guess this isn’t exactly a case of life imitating art but more like games imitating anime and manga since Renge, the host club’s self-imposed manager, went to Japan because she was a fan of a relationship game (a parody of Tokimeki Memorial) featuring lookalikes of the host club’s members. I hope the characters have the same voices and I wonder if Haruhi would be available as a love interest…

Over the past couple weeks, doujin music albums from Comiket 71 have been surfacing and some of them are pretty good. I listened to about ten albums from Comiket 70 from last year and will probably listen to about the same number regarding ones from #71. Not all the music produced is anime- or game-related but that seems to be the case for most of them. After the jump: my three favorite doujin music works from each of the past two festivals.
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I have a soft spot for cute violence and the one-shot manga Yoki Koto Kiku has plenty of it. Apparently, the head of the Nekogami family has died and his grandson and rightful heir Sukekiyo is off at war in someplace unknown. This obviously creates a problem within the family and each of the family’s triplets Yoki, Koto, and Kiku are now scheming to off the other two siblings, as well as Sukekiyo’s fiancee and family maid Tamayo, with axes and traps because only one of the four can claim the inheritance.
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