eli @ uf

These first 11 episodes go hard on one question: what is justice, actually? Like—not the legal system, not punishment, but justice in a cosmic sense. Because Light’s whole deal isn’t just “I want to kill people,” it’s “I want to fix the world and no one else is doing it.”

And here’s the thing—he’s kind of not wrong? At least early on, he’s killing people who were either going to go free, never be caught, or were already doomed by the system. He’s not taking down random people for jaywalking. He’s targeting people that even the state had failed to reach. He sees a broken structure and does what no one else can: act outside of it.

But then it gets complicated. Because Light doesn’t just want people to be punished—he wants them to know why. Not in a “for the greater good” speech kind of way, but because he wants to be known for it. “Kira” isn’t just a title, it’s a symbol, something that represents his idea of perfect justice. The morality of what he’s doing stops being the main focus. It becomes about who’s smart enough, capable enough, and strong enough to define justice in the first place.

Enter L. The whole tone of the show shifts when L shows up, because suddenly justice isn’t abstract anymore—it’s competitive. It’s not “what’s right,” it’s “who’s right.” And that’s when you see the shift in Light, too. His early logic starts getting eaten by pride. It’s not just about criminals anymore. It’s about being the only one who gets to define right and wrong.

By Episode 11, both of them are locked into this unspoken agreement that justice isn’t about principle—it’s about outcome. Whoever wins this weird murder chess match gets to decide what justice means. And honestly? That might be the most unsettling part of all. Not the deaths, not the power—just the fact that two kids got bored and turned morality into a logic puzzle.

So these episodes cover a lot, but the throughline seems to be: the more people try to impose control—on the world, on each other, on truth—the more everything collapses around them. It’s not just a “power corrupts” thing, it’s more like, “you were never supposed to have that kind of power to begin with, bestie.”

Episode 2 sets this up with the Tucker arc. It’s very on-the-nose, but it works: Tucker doesn’t just do something horrific—he does it in the name of understanding. He’s so obsessed with getting results that he turns his daughter into a science project. And the kicker is that no one stops him. The state enables it. The structure validates it. This isn’t just a “bad man does bad science” moment—it’s showing what happens when a system treats knowledge as more valuable than people.

By Episode 22, we start seeing how this idea scales. The Homunculi aren’t just monsters—they’re calculated byproducts of a country built on alchemical shortcuts. Everyone thinks they’re doing what’s necessary (for science, for the state, for family), and the result is a system where horror is normalized as long as it’s efficient.

Episode 25 hits like a truck. Hughes’ death isn’t just sad, it’s cruelly mundane—he dies because he got too close to a truth the state doesn’t want known. The tragedy isn’t just that he dies—it’s that no one can even mourn him properly, because doing so would mean confronting what the country’s actually built on.

Episode 30 shifts gears a bit. It’s about complicity. Ed and Al confront what it means to have used the Philosopher’s Stone—even accidentally—and it forces the show to acknowledge that not knowing isn’t the same as being innocent. The world doesn’t stop to validate your intentions.

Then by Episode 54, we’re fully in cosmic consequence territory. The “Truth” isn’t some benevolent force—it’s a mirror. You don’t get punished for breaking the rules of the universe because the universe is angry at you. You get punished because you thought you were above it. And it’s wild how much this show reinforces the idea that the only real power worth having is the kind you earn through pain, loss, and accountability.

Alright this was a big one. I completely lost track of what I was even thinking to analyze it for, there's definitely a lot to unpack. I'm gonna stick to the things that I for sure can say, this movie definitely was providing commentary of the relationship between people and the government.

For starters the government in Akira is extremely corrupt: they covered up the truth of WWIII, they seek to further extend their power, and even engage in human testing! Which the viewer might be able to say, "Oh but that's just a way of exaggerating the ills of government" but truly the only difference between that and ours is that we don't know if it's true. We see how this corrupt relationship plays out each time when Tetsuo is taken, the constant riots and terrorism all originating from within their own city, all due to a lack of transparency.

However another angle this movie can be seen through is it's--seemingly unfitting--existential metaphor surrounding the myth of Akira, who Tetsuo start as and who he becomes, him being sent to a new reality, possibly to just allow the 3 chosen kids to have another opportunity to control his power, time-loop style? It's one of those things where you know they're trying to get at something but just cannot place your finger on it. Like I thought I understood what was happening but towards that last 20 minutes it just kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding and I couldn't keep track.

I'm not gonna be in class today so if anyone has theories and needs to do their repost, give footnotes.

I was watching this thinking it’d be a standard emotional ride, and it kind of is—comets, timelines, soulmates, etc.—but there’s something weirdly smart about how it treats identity. Especially when you’re thinking about performance, routine, and social roles.

The body swap setup is funny on the surface, but it ends up being this lowkey breakdown of how much of who we are is based on other people reacting to us. Taki wakes up as Mitsuha and suddenly everything from his walk to how he talks is being monitored. Mitsuha-as-Taki has to perform masculinity enough to keep people from asking questions. And the way they adapt to each other? Wild. They start literally writing script notes to maintain the illusion.

It doesn’t even feel like they’re pretending, either. They actually get good at it. They’re not just being nice—they’re trying to live each other’s lives as correctly as possible. It’s a weird kind of mutual respect, but also a reminder that identity isn’t just “I know who I am,” it’s “everyone around me confirms it.”

Foucault talks about how power isn’t just held by one person—it’s everywhere, especially in small things. In this movie, power is in school dress codes, tone of voice, expectations from your grandma. Mitsuha and Taki don’t get punished for doing things “wrong,” but they get nudged back into line constantly.

Also the fact that they forget everything afterward but still feel the weight of it? Yeah. The performance left a mark. Even if they can’t name it. Gender, identity, memory—it’s all one messy thing here, and the movie’s like “just feel it.”

So this is definitely one of those shows where I can't exactly bring myself to say its too much more than satirical parody. Honestly I'm just familiar with this sort of concept so I can't see it as much more than it is, but if we look at this from the perspective of someone who hasn't seen stuff like this before...

It does have an emphasis on characters over plot, tangential to the ideas presented in Database Animals. However in this case that's because they're going for comedy, so I don't think it is as significant. It's like pointing out that a comedian's jokes don't have a plot.

There's also the hilarious combination of personified nations, parodying elements in history and overdramatizing languages, which I've seen in shows like Camp Camp or South Park. It's a fairly fun way to create comedy but also invoke parody/satire without specifically saying it. (If you have seen any shows that reflect reality, they'll have disclaimer to avoid defamation.)

So Xenoblade 2 isn’t just anime JRPG drama—it’s straight up a tragedy about humans trying to outrun the consequences of their own story. Cobb talks about the Anthropocene as a drama where humanity forgets it’s part of nature and starts acting like the director. In Xenoblade 2, that’s literally what the Architect does. He creates a system, detaches from it, and then regrets everything.

The Blades? Living beings designed to be tools. They get “awakened” and are tied to Drivers, but they don’t get autonomy. They’re thrown into a cycle where their lives reset unless someone treats them like people. Sound familiar? It’s the exact detachment Cobb says got us here in the first place—treating others (and the world) as objects in our story, not co-actors.

And then there’s Torna. That whole arc is one long scream about what happens when creations gain self-awareness but are still denied meaning. Malos literally says he was made to destroy, so that’s what he does. It’s nihilism born from bad writing—humanity wrote a violent part, handed it to someone else, and then cried when he followed the script.

By the end, the world’s crumbling, people are trying to stop a collapse they started, and the solution isn’t some magic fix—it’s connection. Mutual understanding. Rewriting the drama with different roles. Cobb says we need stories that acknowledge interdependence, and Xenoblade 2 finally leans into that.

It’s not a clean ending. But maybe that’s the point—no deus ex machina, just the possibility of doing better next time.

Another Ghibli film, so I knew I was gonna be interested in the happenings and appearance of the film. Here we watched the people of The Valley of Wind resist the conflicts they were brought into. I liked this film a lot, but this class isn't about just acknowledging great anime, its about the analysis.

There wasn't a reading for this, so I'm gonna try and find what I think it was about, and I think this movie is about the tragic irony of human nature. (At a societal scale, not just individuals.) It explores this idea with Nauisca and Kushana (Princess of Torumekia).

Kushana represents the tendency for people to fear the unknown/what is different and lead with & sensationalize hate. She plans to use old technology to eradicate the sea of decay altogether, insisting it was the necessary change. However it is clear that she truly only wants the power that comes with controlling the giant warrior. She used violence to attain her goals, and ultimately, failed because all she did in this film is create more enemies out of everyone who wasn't "her people." So despite her intention of creating world peace and bringing back what was lost, she only created enemies for herself, which only invites conflict. This is without even mentioning that she had 0 clue what the sea of decay even was, and if she did, she would know that destroying it wouldn't really fix anything, you'd just make more desert, but also you would destroy the last thing keeping earth in any sort of ecological equilibrium.

Nauisca represents a foil to Kushana in that she represents curiosity and acceptance. She sought to understand the sea of decay and the insects, through that she learned that the fauna in the sea of decay actually act as purifiers, cleaning the surface level pollution and leaving clean product below and that the insects are protecting the sea of decay from humans. To attain her goal, which was end the conflict in the valley, she used communication nearly exclusively, with humans and the ohm. You may see a lack of irony there, but its because it's in the subtext: Nauisca actually wants to save the world, not through some drastic action, but by understanding and accepting the world as it is. Not aiming for what we had a thousand years ago, because there's a reason it changed. The irony being that she doesn't hold the power to do truly act on it.

To start, let me say that I have never been to a convention of any kind before this. Everything conceptually was familiar through shows I've watched, but was new to me as an experience.

Now lets start with the beginning, it was Sunday and of course the day I go it is raining, so to minimize the time I spent in the rain, I went straight from the cafeteria to the Reitz.

At first I was concerned I didn't see anyone really walking around and I thought I may be too late, but I found my way to the help desk being ran by a few people in cosplay, a few of which were genshin characters I recognized.

I wondered if I should compliment them to like, validate the cosplay accuracy? I ended up just asking for directions to the Vendor Hall.

On the way to the Vendor Hall, I realized just how out-of-place I was here. I'm not in cosplay, I'm tired, not with friends, I was an anomaly. That's when the social anxiety started to rev up, but when I made it to the Vendor Hall, it went away when I saw all the fan works of things I also enjoyed that I generally assume nobody likes, and felt a lot less isolated.

After that, this became a much smoother experience, I bought an Asmodeus (Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel) keychain, browsed the art gallery a bit, it was fun to see all the different art styles all over, it was very inspiring.

This movie really said “What if we took everything we were doing before and made it louder?” Emotionally, visually, existentially—it just cranks it all up.

What stands out the most is how the characters don’t just perform gender roles anymore—they get confronted with the consequences of those performances falling apart.

Shinji’s behavior throughout feels like a person who’s completely shut down and doesn’t know how to act anymore, but is still being asked to make huge decisions. A lot of the movie is him bouncing between roles he’s worn before: the scared kid, the passive observer, the person trying to be “strong,” whatever that means. None of them really stick.

Asuka has this explosive moment of return where she just snaps, fully stepping into the pilot role again, and it feels like the first time in a while where someone’s claiming agency. But it’s also really raw, and kind of tragic, since the world around her is collapsing anyway.

The second half gets very abstract, but what’s clear is that the boundary between self and others stops existing. And when that happens, all the things people were performing—gender, strength, individuality, control—just sort of dissolve. There’s this sense that identity was always conditional, shaped by how others perceived you, and now that’s gone, and the movie’s like: “Okay… now what?”

Does it resolve the story? Technically. But in practice it’s like being handed a puzzle with no picture on the box and two pieces missing. It ends—but good luck figuring out what that means.

Since we skipped around, watching this slightly sped up was incredibly hilarious, especially episode 24. (I'm certain this clashes with the tone they were going for.)

Anyway there are two characters that interact with Shinji in the realm of masculinity in these episodes, "I'm an anime girl from 1996" Asuka and Kaworu.

Starting with Asuka, she brings back the missing teenage girl archetype to the show, and along with it the ignorance of one. The moment she shows up we get the "where are you looking" scene, multiple "what are you touching" scenes, the whole shabang. But how does this relate to masculinity? Well it has to do with Asuka's expectations of how boys her age behave, and how Shinji not being what she expected affects their relationship.

After they first meet, Asuka tries to pull her generic teenage anime girl stuff but is not being engaged with in a way she would like by Shinji, that being his lack of perversion and tendency to accept any potential blame being placed upon him. Initially this just makes her berate him about his lack of masculinity, essentially that she was upset that he let her boss him around despite her always trying to yank his chain. This gets compounded when he does better as an EVA pilot than her, causing her to detest him, mocking him for any and all successes, and tripling down whenever he isn't flawless. Although it is unclear to me if this is just her personality (it probably is), it could also stem from her trying to one up the men in her life because she became the EVA pilot, an uncommon talent, so when confronted with a man who could perform better than her, it just materialized hatred, just feeding this idea that her expectations that she would be better than all men in war/conflict led her to having an overall poor relationship with one of her peers for reasons outside of their control. (Although Shinji does end up playing into it because it was a losing battle anyway, so one-upping her was a source of some kind of enjoyment.)

Then we have Kaworu, who although is only around for short while, provides us an example of a guy who doesn't seem to care for his or anyone else's sex-gender congruency. He requests to bathe with Shinji, invites him to sleep together, Shinji didn't even seem to understand how to respond to anything Kaworu did. There's less of a rhetorical point to be made here because honestly it really has to do with vibe you get from watching it play out. The lack of anyone trying to control anybody else's behavior was just kind of noticeable? (Also if they weren't going for Yaoi energy here, they failed miserably. It was "will they, won't they?" the entire time. Breaking News: Did research, it is true.)