Anime Exploration

This has always been one of my favorite anime's as well as one of my first in like 1st grade. I thorughly enjoyed rewatching this anime. It is interesting how the last few works such as Sensoron, Akira, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, and now Death Note have all been built on is idea of power as well as morality. Inittially, Light Yagami represents going through the mundanity of life as a high school student he says "day in and day out the same thing over and over again." Yet, he still has ideals that the world is rotten even before recieving the death note. He quickly adapts ideals that say "if one or two people like him were going to die no one would care." He goes from killing someone holding hostages, to someone harassing a girl, to random people for his own agenda (the 12 agents he kills). Light is a person who seems to never be satisfied. Even while recieving the best grades, with a supportive mom who asks him if he wants anything, he responds he doesn't want anything at all. Which I find to be interesting as he gets no enjoyment it seems from anything else besides killing people with the death note. We see the joy he recieves from the death note and ridding the world of "rot" as he alreay has 2 pages filled of names before Ryuk even comes down into the human world. His intention is to create a world without eveil by doing something thats objectively evil in the eyes of society, murder. It creates an ethical question of whether murder is valid when it has to do with people who are not morally ethical in society throguh their crimes. Light thought he was chosen to be this "god of the new world" because he was smart, but it was simply based off of luck that Ryuk dropped the notebook there. He has a god complex and says "someone has to do it, In fact only i can do it" he believes he's truly a god of this new world he is trying to rid of "evil." Yet, this world is already tainted because he himself is commiting acts of evil in the process. This anime also deals with the ethical issue of the true intentions and feelings behind society. Light states that "of course humans would say it's wrong because they must put up a front like that in public. But their true feelings are there." If this happened in real life, I wonder how many people would support Kira's agenda as both kira and L both believe they're this idea of "justice" and "judgement" but in different ways. As mentioned before, the act of the death note dropping in the human world to Light Yagami is simply an act of luck. Yet, Watari and L both think if Kira was an ordinary person who gained the power to kill, he is very unlucky. The idea of luck is constant throughout the series it seems.

From watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, I can see one universal theme: the cost of trying to reshape the world and the emotional consequences of facing what's been lost along the way. The underlying trauma facing the main characters sets everything in motion for this anime: the failed resurrection of the Elric brothers’ mother. This failure serves as a metaphor for the dangers of trying to control what we fully don't understand, and this cost isn't just physical. Ed and Al are haunted by the guilt and grief not only for themselves but disturbing a natural order they now know can’t be broken without irreversible consequences. This theme continues with the discovery of how power and ambition can destroy entire lives, like in the Ishvalan genocide.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood resonates far beyond mere fantasy; it interrogates the systems that enable loss and regret. Focusing on the real world, these themes echo in the world from government-led war crimes to the manipulation of truth for control, particularly in societies still wrestling with colonial violence, systemic racism, and unchecked authority.

Yet, even in the darkest moments of these episodes, there's still a part for empathy. Not choosing violence becomes a radical act of resistance against an endless cycle of vengeance.

I felt like this anime was different from anything we have watched. It has a heavy atmosphere, a messy world, and a tone that never really tries to comfort the audience. The story builds fast, but it does not explain everything. You just get thrown into the chaos of Neo-Tokyo, and somehow it works. What stood out to me first was the way power is treated in this anime. Tetsuo goes from being weak and insecure to gaining power so intense that it completely breaks him. His transformation is scary but also kind of tragic. He has always felt small and ignored, so once he gets this power, he refuses to let anyone control him again. The problem is that he does not know how to use it. Instead of becoming free, he becomes something uncontrollable. The anime shows that power without emotional maturity only leads to destruction. Another strong theme is how this world treats youth. The government experiments on kids. The police beat teenagers in the street. Adults either try to control or ignore them. Everything feels broken, and the younger generation is left to deal with it. This connects to real concerns about authority, especially in how the system reacts with fear and violence instead of care. Kaneda’s group is reckless, but they are just trying to survive in a world that already gave up on them. There is also something about memory and trauma running under the surface. Neo-Tokyo was built on the ruins of disaster. Everyone is pretending like life moved on, but the cracks are everywhere. The city looks advanced, but it is also filled with poverty, protests, and corruption. Tetsuo’s powers feel like the return of a buried trauma that was never actually healed. The animation is intense. Every frame feels alive. The city looks gritty and real, but the psychic scenes are surreal and disturbing. I can see why this anime had such a big influence on later works. It is not just about style. It is about fear, collapse, and what might rise after everything falls apart.

I found the overall work of Sensoron to be a great example of revisionism and, at times, flat-out misinformation. Given what the author was trying to communicate, about how 'Japan was treated unfairly' and 'the Allies did bad stuff too' clearly attempts to downplay the atrocities committed by the nation during the war. Instead of taking an objective standpoint and accepting that, while the Allies did do some morally questionable things during the war, Japan is guilty of the same, the author attempts to frame the West as the "real" bad guys, and the root of a grand array of problems in modern Japanese society. One thing I think the author did not intend to showcase (but does) is the mental gymnastics that he has to go through in order to justify Japan and delegitimize the West. I thought the entire first sequence about the trials and the subsequent Western involvement in Japan was far-fetched, with elements of truth buried in it - but as soon as the author started accusing photos displaying Japanese war crimes as fake, comparing them to UFOs and ghosts, the argument lost any shred of legitimacy. Through these perspectives, Sensoron communicates a perspective that is unhinged at best and deliberately deceptive at worst.

Hey everyone! 🌟

The story follows two teenagers: Mitsuha, a girl living in a small rural town, and Taki, a boy in bustling Tokyo, who mysteriously begin switching bodies. At first, it’s funny and confusing, but as they start to understand each other’s lives, something deeper forms between them. The twist? They’re not just separated by space, but also by time, and a natural disaster is about to change everything.

What really hit me in this anime were the themes of Time and Memory and Fate and Connection. The way Taki and Mitsuha’s memories fade the moment they stop switching bodies is so heartbreaking. They remember the feelings, but not the details, like trying to hold on to a dream that slips away. I think that says a lot about how memory isn’t just about facts; it’s also about emotion, and how we carry people inside us even when we forget their names.

Foucault’s “Method” helped me understand this more. He talks about breaking the idea of a “continuous history,” and Your Name does the same thing with time. Time isn’t straight in this movie: it loops, overlaps, and resets. It’s like Foucault’s idea that we shouldn’t look for one single, neat truth, but instead recognize that meaning comes from fragments and moments. Mitsuha and Taki aren’t connected because of some perfect timeline, but they’re connected because they choose to keep trying, even when they can’t remember why.

That brings me to Fate and Connection. The movie suggests that some people are just meant to find each other, no matter how much the world pulls them apart. But it also shows that fate isn’t passive, it’s something you fight for. Taki running to save Mitsuha’s town, even when he barely remembers her, was one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen. It felt like a message that connection goes beyond logic.Overall, Your Name is a romantic anime but not only. It’s about the invisible threads that tie us to people and places, and how those connections shape who we are, even when we can’t explain them. It’s emotional, gorgeous, and deep.

I knew this one was coming. I've always known about Hetalia Axis Powers for the longest time, as I used to see it everywhere while growing up on the internet. I was never into it because of the amount of Yaoi content I've seen on the internet about it and I assumed that was what it was all about. However, I was mostly wrong about that. These first 19 episodes of Hetalia may seem like a light hearted comedy on the surface, but deep below, this show reflects deeper social and cultural dynamics embedded in the anime fandom. Using another reading from this week, World Conflict/World Conference: Axis Powers Hetalia by Sandra Annett, it can be shown how this show of personifying nations as attractive young men is a fantastic way to portray world history and how it manages to open up to a certain audience: young women.

Characters like Italy, with his infamous pasta obsession, or England, with his tsundere disdain for France, are not just historical caricatures; they’re built with "moe elements", designed to inspire an emotional connection. As Annett points out, these traits are very appealing to fujoshi fans, women who enjoy media with romantic relationships between male characters, who often consume this type of media for character dynamics rather than the story. For example, America's flashy "hero" persona contrasts well with Japan's restraint, which is a fan-fiction-creating factory in and of itself. This type of stuff allows for communities to grow and for creativity to flourish.

I'd also like to point out how short these episodes are. The five minutes that each episode lasts perfectly mirrors the idea of database consumption that Annett describes. One episode goes from talking about diet plans and then goes into personifying the Cold War's awkwardness. The idea here is that fans don't need a story; they need points for their favorite parings of characters, jokes, and interpretations.

Outside of the Yaoi and all that, Hetalia Axis Powers does do an excellent job at reimagining political topics in ways that people can better understand, turning history into something deeply personal and global.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is dense with lore and character arcs, but at its core, it’s a world shaped by ecological collapse and desperate survival, exactly the kind of stage Cobb refers to in “Drama of the Anthropocene.” The game doesn’t present the environment as a backdrop, but as a living crisis. Humanity floats on the backs of Titans, creatures that are literally dying beneath them, and everyone’s scrambling for a place to stand.

Cobb talks about the Anthropocene as a shift in how we see human agency and responsibility. Xenoblade leans into this through its characters. Rex wants to “reach Elysium,” but he’s not a hero saving nature, he’s someone clinging to a myth because the alternative is hopelessness. That mirrors real-world attitudes toward climate collapse, we dream of escape rather than change.

The game also dramatizes this idea of inherited damage. The people in Xenoblade live in a world already broken by decisions they didn’t make. There’s no going back, only surviving forward. Cobb writes about the need for new narratives, and that’s what this game wrestles with, whether survival means clinging to old stories or rewriting them entirely.

Comicons in Montreal happen very often and there are amazing things which are nice for creating friendship and the growth of a culture. And these amazing things are that the Comicon happens in the China town which is rare to visit for me because I’m not near it. It’s a big open-door market designated by the big gate that makes it stand out. Alot more when there are people roaming around and it is full of costumes. Montreal is a big subway station city which helps for transportation and all needs to travel around for cheap the STM. Now that you know the background shall we start. 

Me being a fan of anime as always been there for me and I felt intrigue when I saw on a Friday morning in the STM a bunch of people cosplaying in the anime characters that I liked. My dad told me “Want to go tomorrow” and that is what we did. Surrounding us at that moment there were a couple of cosplayers in Pokémon cosplay was amazing that Pokémon was still represented and imitated at the time because Pokémon as not been good do to the fact that this was right after covid, and it was probably the first event to get accepted. What I’m trying to say is they stood out to me and that is probably the only reason that we went. I feel like there is something of feeling free of judgment that is a relief for most people that can cosplay, and it proves to be true when you see Pokémon people around with the freedom and kindest as much as everyone else.  

On the Animecon  second day we travel by subway again saw a couple of people wearing some cosplay nothing major and went to go eat food before some sandwich that were sell in the Asian market representing some type of anime. Which is interesting because you would not expect a plain sandwich to be related to some anime. Kinda represents how people are willing to change for a day just to be themselves and I think that’s what the market did for 2-3 days just to sell a bit more than usual by making people relate to the product. The same thing goes for when you are inside, and people try to sell some products that are amazing and good looking.  

For me one that stood out was one that included some type of art and epoxy resin. Like Naruto spiderman Miles and whatever you would think about it was in that shop for a very low price. Unfortunately, I did not buy it. But something did pop my eye, but it was not cheap, so I had to pass. Considering that I’m a fan and collector of pins there was one that was from Naruto headband, and I felt intrigue about it because it represented something very small in an anime without being flagrant, so if wanted to be more silent about being a fan in public you could wear something as small as a pin and recognition would be much smaller compared to a T shirt. I wore a Naruto shirt, and I was complemented by a lot of people who made me feel included in this event. 

Another section that I like is the one that included the video games area and cosplaying area. Video games are an area for tournaments and packman machines. The cosplaying area was for people to take pictures with Vinland Saga and other characters.  

For me this experience opens my eye on the actual amount of people that are interested 

Thank you

Olivier

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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was also somewhat relevant to our previous discussion on gender. It was also briefly mentioned within the professor's talk about kabuki, to elaborate on how concessions are made between anime and kabuki tradition when adapting anime to this medium. One of the points he made here was that in the kabuki adaptation of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaä's masculinity displayed in the movie is toned down by wearing a more traditional feminine Japanese dress throughout most of the play in addition to participating in very few fight scenes compared to the movie. I might've misunderstood something about what he was talking about in this last part, as I was expecting Nausicaä to fight a lot more in the movie, though Nausicaä's actions in the movie are still evidently more masculine. For instance, Nausicaä does not fly on a glider in the kabuki adaptation.