Blog, Blog, Bloq

 With the upcoming adaptation of Ace of the Diamond Act II's Second Season, I've been thinking about how this series has stood so tall within the sports genre. This thought came off of my recent viewing of Oblivion Battery. Mainly because they're both about Baseball, but also because they both handle their storytelling quite well. With Oblivion Battery, you have a more individualized story revolving around a team of misfits that featured top High School Baseball players. Whereas AOTD featured a top level High School and the structures within that make the machine run. So, Oblivion Battery ended up feeling like the product of modern sports anime/manga, while AOTD definitely harkened back to its older contemporaries. And this might just be more of a lack of knowledge on these types of sports series, but I have never really seen anything like AOTD before. The series has shown so many different characters and changing teams as the story progressed, while balancing them like no ...

 Recently, I decided to slowly go through Yoshikazu Takeuchi's Perfect Blue: Awaken From A Dream. It's a collection of three short stories from within the Perfect Blue universe. This was a funny way to describe this collection as the first two stories actually preceded the Perfect Blue tale, according to Takeuchi in the afterword. But if you're trying to sell your collection of Idol-themed Horror, it would make the most sense to tie them to the most popular one. A move that most likely resulted in the translation of these in the first place. So, what compelled me to read these stories was the fact that they pertained to Perfect Blue funnily enough. A true win for this marketing decision.  Yet, my takeaway at the end of it pertained more towards my love of this style of Horror, rather than the Perfect Blueness. When I talk about that Perfect Blueness, I mean the reality-bending nightmare aspect. The Wake Me From This Dream and Cry Your Tears stories do have similar ethereal ...