2024 Spring Premiere Digest
Licensing frustrations aside, there are a number of titles to look forward to this season.
Licensing frustrations aside, there are a number of titles to look forward to this season.
All the spring premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place.
Despite having a near-complete monopoly on the anime streaming industry in 2024, Crunchyroll does not offer closed captioning for the majority of its English dubs.
This story about immortality, grief, and the importance of emotional connections is interrupted by the presence of blunt, strawman villains who exist not as characters but as plot devices to show the “humanity” of the protagonists.
Everything in Yurikuma Arashi is more symbol than literal representation, and I have often mulled over its meaning as I’ve navigated entering the teaching profession as a nonbinary Chinese person. Like the bears, I’ve often asked myself: what do I sacrifice to be allowed to exist within the school?
As a lesbian, Fruits Basket was not written for me. Even so, the romance between Kyo and Tohru resonates deeply with my experience of queerness.
Any story that wants to explore this darker side of humanity must be willing to explore how doing horrible things affects the world and people around you, or it risks trivializing the true horrors of the darkness it depicts.
I’m in Love with the Villainess starts out as a silly isekai romance but grows into a story that earnestly advocates for queer people, taking on complex subjects like homophobia, transphobia, and classism. However, the story’s reliance on messy tropes can sometimes muddle its messages.
Looking at these series side by side, we can see the same archetype and corresponding fantasy of the scarred, strong yet secretly sad man being nursed emotionally by a female love interest play out in different hues for their specific target audiences, in all its glories and pitfalls.
Despite its enthusiastic embrace of playful exaggeration and dramatic pageantry, Baki the Grappler shouldn’t be written off as mind-numbing entertainment for the masses. A critical analysis of Baki as contemporary anime, and a part of pop culture more broadly speaking, can help us all better understand how performative masculinity functions—and why it is so potentially dangerous.
Writer Roland Kelts opened up about his early childhood relationship with anime and manga, the status that Japanamerica holds today, cross cultural influence in media, female characters in manga and anime, and his work on The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus.
The way this writer, a member of the dubbing team, talked about the show and his inability or refusal to unpack even its most basic themes spoke to the sort of misogyny that pervades critical analysis, in which female characters and creators don’t get even the slightest grace for being messy, imperfect beings.
Identity is a complicated subject; the ways we can reflect, parse, and better try to know ourselves are nearly infinite, while the ways we can convey that to others effectively are not. Usually, we are limited in how we present by the economic and social pressures of our society. The cyborg challenges its fans to ask themselves: if what makes us people isn’t as concrete as flesh and blood, then what other unshakable, unchangeable truths about ourselves have we been wrong about?
This series has always been queer, it’s just been handled in different ways, with earnest character writing that nonetheless reflected the stereotypes and assumptions of the early 2000s, before unfolding into a more careful, nuanced narrative of sexual fluidity and love in the 2020s.
This has been a season of reversals so far, with strong premieres stumbling and wobbly starts finding their stride. Check out the shows in need of a second look!
Get out of the winter chill and enjoy some cozy food and cool ladies.
All the winter premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as more series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more!
2023 was the first year Otakon invited guests who create and study manhwa, and the two guests were eager to discuss the process of bringing awareness to manhwa as an artform, using the newfound popularity of webtoons as a way to introduce English-language fans to the history of the medium.
In the hands of a writer who isn’t so brazenly disinterested in writing them, the women of Death Note—Misa, especially—easily have the potential to be the most interesting characters in the deeply iconic series. But as it stands, they’ve been massively shortchanged by writing that presents plenty of fascinating story elements for them, but that never get explored.
While there is a rise in polyamorous romance in Japanese anime and manga, I must regretfully report we still have a ways to go.