For Those Anime Haters

There are too many people who hate anime that simply don't understand. I find rather irritating when people make fun of me for liking anime, so I'm going to tear down all the arguements I've heard against it one by one.

Do not judge anime as a whole after seeing: Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Sailor Moon, Digimon, Yu-yu Hakusho, the many Yu-Gi-Oh posers, Bleach, One Piece, or Naruto. Aside from the last three, most anime fans hate these animes and wish they would just disappear so they can stop doing damage to anime's reputation. For the last three, yes, there are many fans for these, but they're just too average and rather sterotypical. Many anime fans start with one of those and move on to better ones.

Anime usually has an intelligent plot. Once again, usually due to the aforementioned animes, people may think animes have no depth. I've seen plenty of anime's with plots as deep as CSI and they have made me laugh as hard as Family Guy. If you watch Ghost in the Shell you will get a whole lot of deep storyline in every single episode.

Not all or even most anime has a ton of girls with large breast. If you are a concerned parent that doesn't want your child to be viewing inappropriate material, beware the following words: ecchi, hentai, yuri, yaoi, shounen-ai, and shoujo-ai.

The only other arguement I've heard is that it's animated. Do you like Family Guy? If not, is it because it's not clean humor? Imagine it without dirty jokes. If you still don't like it, you're weird. But that's okay, because that means at least you shouldn't hate anime because you think it's weird and might have an actual reason for hating anime.

If Ninjas Dressed in Business Casual...

Business casual + ninjas = Nabari no Ō. Nabari no Ō is currently ongoing anime/ manga. "Nabari" is the term for the entire ninja community. "Ō" or "Ou," pronounced like "oh," means king/ruler. So the title can translate as Ruler of Nabari. The anime adaption is fairly new, having started a few months ago in April. The manga started in 2004.

Nabari no Ō is set in a world where all ninjas lead a double life as ninjas, and as normal people. The main character (see picture) is a perpetually apathetic boy in high school named Rokujō Miharu. The japanese put their family name first, so Miharu would be what an American would use as the first name. In the beginning Miharu is informed that he is the vessel for the Shinrabanshō. I'm pretty sure that translates to Omnipotent. The Shinrabanshō contain all the wisdom in the universe, going beyond humanity's ability to comprehend, and enables the user to control all of creation. Miharu is now a target for all of Nabari.

What makes Nabari no Ō great would probably be the character: especially the main, and how they do the ninja part. There are plenty of animes and mangas featuring a main character that started out really normal and then accidentally discover or receive some powerful thing inside them that get them dragged into some cool adventure. Though I'm not saying it's unoriginal, just the opposite. When I find an anime that starts like this, I always hate the part where the main character takes a bunch of episodes to get used to it. But in Nabari no Ō, he just didn't care. I thought that was funny. I was very happy to find that this main character was very different from the other ones in other action/fantasy animes. One other good thing I noticed about Miharu, is that he is actually planning ahead for a lot of the plot events and from the very beginning was making decisions about what he wanted to do about stuff pertaining to the overall plot, instead of crossing that bridge when they get to it. That's something I've never seen before.

The other cool thing about Nabari no Ō is the action part. For once the fighting and special powers in an anime are'nt overdone. Unlike better-known animes/mangas like DBZ, Bleach, and Naruto it doesn't seem like they're moving at the speed of light all the time, and "very powerful" doesn't mean you can destroy entire city in one strike: or even a whole building. Yep, in this one the character humans, with human muscles, that can make them move at human speeds. Though I'm not saying it's entirely realistic, it's still in the fantasy genre, and they're still summoning fire out nowhere n' stuff: but not too much fantasy.

Another one with a perfect score.

I think it's got a cool site.

Opening song-Even cooler

Air Gear

Air Gear is both an anime and manga. It's in the sports genre mostly, but the sport, air trek, involves a ton of combat. Air trek (A.T.) is like inline skating, but the skates have tiny motors in them. They're really strong motors that are even able to keep with a car. Air Gear's plot largely revolves around competition between storm rider teams (storm riders are the people who participate in A.T.), and Ikki, the main character, becoming "Sky King."

The manga version is much longer than the anime, and is still ongoing. The anime's original run ended in September of 2006. I don't care too much for how the anime ended, I felt it left too much unanswered, but you can pick up where it ends in the manga, no biggie. Air Gear features a bit of a symbolic theme. But it's not one of those complex symbolic themes that requires close attention to catch, and you probably won't have to look it up on Wikipedia later. It's usually just an animal metaphor used to describe a particular person. Also worth noting is that the manga version contains some mild to comfortably spicy ecchi scenes, so you might want to be careful when you read it, but more often that not you'll be completely or mostly desensitized to it.

The artwork in the manga often gives characters really exagerated comical expressions like many other mangas do, but these are heavily exaggerated comical expressions: sometimes looking as if they were drawn in three seconds (undoubtedly intentional though).

Overall, I give it a perfect score.
Anime's Opening Theme Song

D. Gray-Man

Been forever since I last posted, again. D. Grey-Man is an anime/manga in the supernatural genre. I heard of it from a friend. In a nutshell, it's about a war between the humans and the akuma, monsters born from tragedy. It's got a lot of action. It's really well drawn. Theres a bit of a goth theme, but not like a ton of skulls or anything like that. It has a really good plot too: stuff just keeps getting more complicated. It's currently on-going, the anime is at episode 87.