THAT Animeblog

This has been a slow summer for me anime-wise, with not much new that has kept my attention. So, I’ve been using this chance to catch up on some of my backlog, marathoning older shows and reading lots of manga. If you read our fall preview, you may have noticed that I have recently become a huge, HUGE Clannad fan, and seeing as how I have this new love and lots of free time, I have been working my way through the manga.

As you may well know (I am a bit late to the party ), after Key did the Clannad visual novel and the after story, they let their designers kind of run free with the universe, and one of them created another VN set in an alternate world where Tomoya ends up with Tomoyo, aptly calling this VN “Tomoyo After.” The manga that I want to talk about is a short work based on that VN, called Tomoyo After: Dear Shining Memories.

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The Horror of Horror
Well-executed horror stories are rare gems. I’ll admit that I’m no authority on the subject (ergo a quick departure from anime and manga as the centerpiece of discussion), but these days it’s just so damned hard to find a good horror movie that I practically trip over myself on the way to the video store when one is actually released. Nowadays, horror flick screenwriters and directors rely almost entirely on shock value to produce a film. The modern rendition of a good thriller is little more than a visual rollercoaster ride that keeps you physically gripping the armrests rather than mentally gripping your sanity. Armed with multi-channel bass stabs and macabre imagery, producers struggle to conquer the horror genre’s unassailable canon — psychology; intoxicated by their newfound digital capabilities, they easily forget that terror is not just high-definition buckets of gore and cheap scares, but that it’s also engendered by the grotesque thoughts that creep into your brain and remain festering there hours after the screen has gone blank or the last page has been turned — psychology. This is why I am obsessed with Doubt. It’s an excellent reminder that a comic with a minimum of visual effects can be just as creepy as a movie. Many thanks to Manga King Extrange for recommending this one, as I’ll be taking a short break from Natsume Yuujin-chou to decide whether or not I want to continue blogging it.

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Life is a fragile thing. We often procrastinate and think that something that can be done today can be done tomorrow. Time, to most of us, is an object that is hardly precious since we have so much time that we can afford to lose part of it. However, when time is the one who will govern your life, how do you live that life?

There is a girl you love a lot. You have loved her ever since you know about love, and wishes for her to stay with you forever. If you know you are going to live up to 20 years old, what would you do? That is the question asked by Takuma, a boy with a heart failure that means that he might not survive beyond twenty summers. He loves Mayu, a childhood lover, but he knows he cannot give her eternal happiness. The happiness he can give to any girl only lasts one-fifth of a century. What will you do if you are him?

This is Boku no Hatsukoi o Kimi ni Sasagu, or in English “I’ll Give You My First Love.”

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Why a Kotomi pic? Because I can.

Daily, the manga market gets spammed with new works, ranging from one-shots, serializations or volumes; some will have some success, some will be best sellers and some will die, forgotten in the middle of the works that surpass them. A few years back, who thought that mangas like One Piece and Naruto would last more than 10 years and become references outside Japan?

That’s why I’m always eager to check the new releases created each year: 2008 has been so far an interesting year in that matter. So I wrote this list of works to pay attention along the year , because I think they have potential to become great works.

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A sadist, a con man, a tsun, a wuss and a crazy chick…the usual.

I hate you Sony. Why you allowed Final Fantasy 7:Crisis Core and Wild Arms XF to be released at the same time!Do you realize how many lives (and free time)have you destroyed?

Game whining apart, this time I present to you readers a manga which breaks my latest trend of Ecchi. This time it’s a Seinen manga where a 14 year old kid, Ganta, is wrongly accused of mass murdering his schoolmates and he’s sent to Deadman Wonderland, Japan’s only prison which is private managed and a theme park as well. There, Ganta finds out that the prison is more wicked and sadistic than it seems and the lives of the inmates are gambled everyday. He also finds out that the real killer of the crimes who have condemned Ganta is also there: the Red Man.

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Most of you will be wondering what I was doing when I’m absent from THAT for the past few weeks. Well, I’m like Kon at the picture below:

School has not been always the most favourite place to go, but I’m ‘forced’ to because it’s for my sake and future. I’m quite busy with school, music lessons, school, writing fanfictions, projects, school, school…wait a minute, did I say school 4 times? You know how school is like, someday I’ll rename school into an Overload. I should announce that school is making my everyday life miserable, especially when it rains every single Wednesday. (Ok, that was a lame joke. It’s something personal.) and my back is aching.

SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAD NOT READ CHAPTER 38!!! If not, click ‘more’.

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A ghost is fine too.

Whenever you read a manga which is tagged “Slice of Life”, it’s almost guaranteed that you will learn a lesson about life. That happened with me when I’ve read Aqua/Aria and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Now, the same thing happened with My Lovely Ghost Kana, a ecchii romantic manga by Yukata Tanaka, the mangaka of Ai-Ren (another great work of art). This is the story of Daikichi, a guy who hits the bottom when he loses his job and house and Kana, the ghost of a girl who committed suicide years before on the abandoned apartment Dakichi is currently living. The manga follows their story as they become lovers and live together on that apartment.

Ecchii pics were reduced to the minimum, unless you guys are persistent asking for them…

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