Bryan's Boastin' Corner

This was a pretty cute show honestly. I thought that the episodes were pretty entertaining, and despite the show being about students having to kill their junior high school teacher, it's overall a very heartwarming and pleasant show. I've heard great things about it but hadn't watched it until now.

As for analysis of it, I think that the main thing that is easy to pick up on for this series is discrimination. We can see that class E is discriminated against because of their past of not being the best students in school, which has led to them being on an entirely different campus from the rest of the school, while also being ostracized and bullied whenever they are with the rest of the school for assemblies. However, we can see that Koro-Sensei is able to teach the students that they all have their own strengths and can be successful if they apply themselves correctly. I think this calls back to the message of Eden of the East, where it showed the NEETs that they were able to be productive members of society if they applied themselves correctly. For Assassination Classroom, the students were able to overcome the best class in the school, Class A. It's an overall very uplifting message about finding your own strengths and using them to the fullest in order to be as successful as possible.

One other thing that I'm not sure of it the show was trying to comment on or not, but the main character (who is a male) looks like a female (at least to me they did. They're very androgynous looking). I think that this can show performativity of gender, since without seeing the clothes they wore and knowing they were male, you could mistake them for female.

We really poppin off with the class suggestions huh.

This show was actually such a banger, but I was pretty sad that David ended up dying in the end. I do believe that the ending is a bit better with David dying for Lucy, and then we get to see Lucy live out her dream of going to the moon, but it's still pretty sad.

I think that it's clear the overall theme of the story is discrimination and overcoming it (which is why I was extra sad with David because he's had such a shitty life and ended up still dying young). We can see from the very beginning of the show that David comes from a single parent home and is very poor, as they can barely afford to pay to wash their clothes. His mother dies as a result of a criminal heist or attack or something gone wrong, which leaves David to fend for himself and forces him to commit to a life of crime in order to get by, but also to rebel against the society that has put him in this position.

The show clearly shows the problems that many disadvantaged people in society face, and I believe that it urges us to try to do more to help them. It is not David's fault that he was born into poverty, and despite being a gifted student he had to resort to more shady methods because they were more cost efficient. And despite the characters being criminals, I would argue that some of them (very strong emphasis on some), are better people than the corporate minds that seem to run the society. This class divide is very prevalent for much of the show, and I think that thematically the show was pretty well done.

Despite the movie being only 81 minutes long including credits, and not being one of the things I voted for, I'm actually really glad it was chosen because this movie was a banger.

I've always sorta been a fan of psychological thriller type movies, even though I think some of them get a little too into the psychological part where it ends up making no sense unless you bend over backwards and jump through some hoops. But this movie was perfectly fine, and I found it to be super entertaining. The ending was really wild and I actually loved the twist ending.

As for analysis, I think that it's pretty clear the movie is taking a look at celebrity/pop idol culture and exposes some of the stresses involved with it as well as some of the problems celebrities face. We can see that Mima's psyche deteriorates over the course of the entire film, which causes her to not only hallucinate about committing murders, but also not be able to discern from filming her TV show and reality. The movie does a pretty good job of this, and while sometimes it can get a little confusing, I felt that overall it was done in a way that was still pretty easy to somewhat understand what was going on. A lot of psychological thrillers will have a scene towards the end of the movie where it shows what was really happening while the main character was hallucinating, but I've never really liked those except for very rare circumstances.

We can also see that relevant to some of our class discussions, the film comments on obsessive fan culture and the dangers of it. We can see in the film that there are multiple characters that are obsessed with Mima, being the one rapist character (I forget his name), and the main antagonist of the movie, Rumi. I believe that the film tries to show the audience the danger of becoming too obsessed with a specific celebrity, as it can cause you to literally do things that end up negatively affecting the celebrities own psyche. While Rumi clearly has some sort of mental disorder that causes her to act this way, I think it's still interesting that the film decides to deal with it.

Lastly, a large part of the film is about blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Throughout the movie, we are unable to tell if some parts are real or not, which shows us the true psychological impact that the stresses of work life are having on Mima. I think it's a very effective way of storytelling, and I thought it was done well in this movie.

This manga was... something else. I thought it seemed so crazy when reading it... like it was clear that it was right wing propaganda (or at least, it seemed to me that way. Maybe what they're saying is actually true but I'm going to say probably not.)

The manga clearly stems from a strong sense of Japanese nationalistic pride, and trying to make Japan not seem as bad for some of the atrocities committed during WW2. It attempts to downplay, refute, and retort any claim that would hurt the right wing narrative.

In the reading, one thing that the author mentioned was that there are multiple times of war, not just wars fought on the battlefield. This made me think of some of our conversations at the beginning of the year about soft power vs. hard power. While many conflicts and disputes are typically thought of as being settled with battles and guns and murder, the power to influence and put thoughts in people's minds is also a very valuable asset, one that this manga was clearly trying to use. It was trying to make the readers believe in this overarching grand narrative that the right wingers in Japan were trying to peddle.

Something else that I thought was really interesting with this text is how they tried to equate simple disputes at an office with these large global issues of mass genocide, rape, and war crimes. I guess the author was trying to explain it in a way that would make the audience able to see the point he was trying to make, but I don't think someone taking too long in the toilet is equivalent to war crimes... I think there are some things that can be made a much bigger deal than others.

Many of my friends have wanted me to watch this film for a long time, but I never wanted to because I'm not really a guy that's into romance movies. But, having now watched it I actually kind of wish I watched it earlier. I really enjoyed the movie (even if there were some moments that were maybe a little odd).

Now just going to address the elephant in the room. Did Taki basically sexually assault Mitsuha every time he switched into her body? Yes. Do I think that it was mainly for comedic effect and not necessarily something the audience should dwell upon because it would divert from the message of the movie? Also yes.

I think that the main message of the movie is all about the power of love. Specifically, that love is able to triumph over anything. I know that it's a common expression, but this movie decided to take that to the literal. I mean, Taki and Mitsuha LITERALLY changed the past by saving all of the villagers from the comet and therefore altering the future to make the comet incident not as disastrous. It's an interesting theme for the movie to explore, and I feel like dealing with fate usually leads to interesting conversations. Is there such a thing as fate? Are there things we can do to change/alter fate itself? It's a theme that is heavily explored in the series Berserk (which content wise is like the complete opposite of this film), and I always find it interesting.

The other main thing I noticed in this film goes back to our discussions of sexuality. We see that when in each other's bodies they make each other act more masculine and feminine respectively, but it actually has positive impacts on their lives. Taki is able to get a date with the girl he had been crushing on, and Mitsuha becomes a lot more popular and taken seriously at school. The film shows the positives of not just fitting into stereotypical societal gender roles.

This show was really interesting. It did actually make me laugh out loud a few times (I watched the English dub for those who are wondering), and I thought that splitting each episode up into 5 minute increments was super interesting. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes it felt like nothing of substance was really happening in the episodes.

Overall though, I found it to be pretty enjoyable. I’m a big history guy, so seeing all of the historical references throughout was actually pretty cool.

As for some analysis, I found it really interesting that the whole basis of the show is taking countries and making a singular character embody all of the people. A wholistic generalization of a population. Essentialism, if you would. I thought that this was really interesting, since it calls back to some of the topics we talked about at the beginning of the semester. Each of the characters are caricatures of the stereotypes that are common for each specific country (for example Italy is lazy, America is overly enthusiastic and proud, Germany is very orderly and tough). I feel like some people could see the show as racist because of this because it is actively perpetuating these stereotypes and conflating them to be true of an entire country of people. However, I believe that the show is trying to make FUN of this point of view. Most satires poke fun at the thing they are making fun of (which in Hetalia’s case is the various countries of the world), however many other satires also poke fun at specific actions or ideologies by making the audience realize that said action/ideology is so illogical or stupid that it’s kind of funny if you were to take it seriously.

Watching roughly 3 hours of video game cutscenes felt like it took years off my life, but I found the game to actually be pretty entertaining to watch all the way through. Sure, we skipped some cutscenes and I'm missing some of the context, but overall the game had a pretty interesting world and story. I loved the designs of the characters in this game, they were all very distinctive and cool (Jin is MY GOAT).

But enough about my surface level thoughts, let's get into what I thought this game was trying to say. To me, there seemed to be two prevalent themes. The first of which, is destruction of the environment (which is obviously very prevalent to our recent class discussions). We can see that in a similar way to the events of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the world has become a mess due to the decisions and actions of people in the past. The people living in the present, have to deal with those consequences, but similar to Nausicaa, are fearful of their future (due to the Sea of Decay, and the disappearance of Titans in each series respectively). We see however that in the end (similar to Evangelion), the heroes are able to have a reset of the universe and end up recreating a new world with which they can continue to live their lives. It fosters hope, as well as a new beginning (although they are definitely very different circumstances). I think that this definitely continues the themes we have been touching upon recently in class. The destruction of the Earth is a very relevant and scary danger to us in the world today, and we need to act to protect it.

The other theme that was prevalent in the story was discrimination (which is a topic we also touched upon in this class!). Throughout the story, we learn that some of the Blades feel discriminated against by humans and Drivers. Since they are Blades, they are used as weapons by the Drivers, and are unable to have any real semblance of self since they lose their memories whenever their Driver dies, just for the cycle to continue over and over again. Because they feel that they are inferior, some Blades are angry at society, and therefore decide to rebel against it. To tear the world down with them, if you would. While this is a very dangerous idea, I'd say it's very logical for someone to think this if they feel that they are powerless to break free from this systematic discrimination.

I actually liked this movie a lot. Despite it being a little old, and the animation not being completely perfect, I loved the world and the designs. The regions were uniquely defined, the animals and monster were very distinctive, and I felt that the movie had a pretty decent plot.

To me, it is clear that the large giants that caused the world to become this desolate, post-apocalyptic world, are meant to be referencing nukes, or at least human intervention that leads to the destruction of the Earth. There's very much a very strong theme that the Earth will start to rebuild itself if we let it, and we should not try to interfere in that process. This movie urges the audience to respect Mother Nature because she is very powerful, and I think that having large insects act as the guardians of the Earth was very interesting, since they are typically seen as more basic life forms compared to humans.

Something that I noticed though with this movie is that there seemed to be a little bit of a reference back to the "Wild Child", mainly with the scene where Nausicaa goes on a bit of a rampage after seeing her father has been killed (which totally makes sense, but she was really beating those knights asses). It's interesting seeing how Nausicaa can be overall very gentle and kind, especially when it comes to here interactions with the insects and nature, but then can seemingly turn it on and act like a violent monster with humans.

SwampCon was definitely a pretty interesting experience. It was my third convention experience overall, and despite being the smallest one I’ve attended (and also the worst one 😬), that does not mean I disliked it. I thought that SwampCon was overall enjoyable, and I was really surprised at how many people came to it. I wasn’t expecting that much from it going into it. It’s a convention hosted at a college campus. But, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

I went to this convention with my friend Lei. Conventions are always more enjoyable when you go with friends, and we were definitely curious to see what SwampCon would be like. How big would it be? How many people would cosplay? As we made our way over there, we started to see people dressed in different forms of cosplay. I have to be honest, I was actually surprised at how good some of the cosplays were. Obviously they all had varying degrees of how cool/in depth they were, but some people seemed to really go all in. Makeup, color contacts, the whole deal. That was really interesting to me. When we got to the Union, Lei was hungry and knew there was a Maid cafe, so we went there first (you can see a picture of us at the maid cafe up above). The problem is… we got lost. I was too stubborn to look at a map, and Lei placed his faith in me to navigate us to the location of the maid cafe. The problem is… I kept guessing wrong for where the cafe was. We went through all the floors, even checked them multiple times before we finally made it to the spot. It wasted probably a good 20 minutes (at least, it felt like 20 minutes). The problem is when we got to the table, we were told we had to get wristbands. Now listen, I’ve been to conventions before and I know that you need to have your ticket and all to get in, but this convention was hosted at Union. People are able to just walk in and get little peeks at the various different events that were a part of SwampCon. I didn’t expect to need a wristband, and neither did Lei, so we had to take the walk of shame back down and outside to go get our wristbands. That didn’t take too long, but it was still a bit embarrassing having to go outside and then go back to the table. Going inside to the cafe, it was interesting that they separated it to make it so you’re able to interact with random strangers. It allows you to meet new people, and make new friends. The people at our table were very friendly, and two of them didn’t even go to UF! There was a dance show at the maid cafe that was kinda cool to see. What I mainly liked was that their outfits were coordinated for the dance, leading to a pretty entertaining performance.

The only problem was that the maid cafe had run out of food by the time we had gotten there, so we had to settle for lemonades. After going to the food court area at the Union for lunch, we went to check out some of the vendors. I usually don’t care as much for figures. I much prefer art. And some of the artists that were brought in were super cool. A lot of them had some super cool prints, and I was tempted to buy some of them. The artist alley was definitely my favorite part of SwampCon.