潮騒

Directed by Ishihara Tatsuya

Being unable to tell the difference between fiction and reality is literally psychosis. Blaming fiction for people's crimes in the real world is psychosis. In literally every case that media has blamed fiction, the real cause was real-world issues such as mental illness and influence from real-life incidents. Recently someone cited the 2017 Eaton Township Weis Markets shooting as "proof" that fiction causes real crimes. That is not what happened. When you look beyond his history as a YouTuber, we get this...

The shooter planned for MONTHS, and had worshiped school shooters such as those from Columbine and even made references to Sandy Hook and other shooters. His actions were not caused by fiction. They were caused by mental illness and vile influences from other real criminals whom preceded him.

In the early 00s, I entered my "vampire phase". I'm sure a lot of people have that phase. I loved the story "Dracula" before that and loved Alucard from "Symphony of the Night" but I truly entered my phase with "Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust" which released in the US in the 2002. I can't remember exactly when but a year or so later "Hellsing" began releasing in the US as well. I watched those DVDs a good few dozen times in just 1 year. I went to every terrible movie in theaters that featured vampires and/or werewolves. "Underworld", "Blade", "Van Helsing", "Queen of the Damned", even "Dracula 2000". If it was in theaters or on DVD at my local rental store, I watched it and enjoyed it to at least the degree in which I never felt like I wasted money. I couldn't get enough!!

2005, a friend introduced me to "Blood+" , an anime that was currently airing at the time. This was how you discovered anime back in those days, by the way. You either just downloaded whatever was new on animesuki, or your friends recommended stuff to you. I took his recommendation to heart and watched "Blood+" . It still remains one of my favorites and is a 10/10 show to me. It's a really beautiful story about family and how little blood actually matters. You can pick your own family. "Blood+" also accomplished the rare feat of having every opening and ending theme be a banger with artists such as Nakashima Mika, Angela Aki, Takahashi Hitomi, UVERworld, and Hajime Chitose. And somehow, the soundtrack was even composed by Mark Mancina! To top it off, the voice cast was also fantastic. The lead role of Saya was played by Kitamura Eri. If I remember right, it was her debut as a lead character. I was really blown away by her performance at the time and she immediately climbed my list of favorite actors.

I own that sword in real life.

The next summer (2006), I found the 2005 anime "Karin" had been fully fansubbed. If you're looking for it, the English title I believe was "Chibi Vampire Karin". "Karin" was an anime about a young vampire girl named Karin Maaka (Marker) who had a strange issue - she produced excess amounts of blood! This was such a unique take on the vampire genre at the time. It was a comedy but had plenty of serious plot points and lessons to teach. It's another one my all-time favorite anime. I wish more people would watch it. Rather than sucking people's blood, Karin had to inject it into people, but that had a strange side-effect too!! Her victims would become more lively and happier after being injected with her blood. It was such a fun anime. Her entire family were also co-stars of the show and had their own powers and struggles, including her younger sister named Anju. Even today it's very rare for an anime to have a family be part of the main cast. The character Karin was also the lead role debut of now-legendary seiyuu Yahari Sayuri. Anju was voiced by Inokuchi Yuka whom I think a lot of people know today as Vanilla in Nekopara. I think it's a wonderful story that has aged very well and will be enjoyable forever.

Sometime after that, I found "Tsukuyomi Moon Phase". I recently rewatched this so I have very strong feelings about it right now (read here). As I mentioned before, "Moon Phase" is one of my favorite stories ever. The anime did suffer some major production issues over at the SHAFT but it clearly started a lot of the trends that made the studio famous in later shows (such as the SHAFT head tilt).

Hazuki was just such a seductress even when not trying to be. Adorable, beyond cute, but also sexy due to her natural vampire powers. This was also a fairly unique take on "Vampire" at the time. Each vampire has their own powers and could temporarily take powers from other vampires by drinking their blood. This is why I theorize that Hazuki is actually the strongest of the SHAFT's many vampire lolis. All she needs to do is drink Shinobu's blood and they're at least on even ground but Hazuki still has her other powers on top of that. That's going a bit off topic though. I loved the concept of mixing western and eastern themes. The heavy Shinto and Buddist influence in the story, the eastern magic used to fight off the monsters was really cool. This was one of the shows that introduced me to Onmyouji. Even today, I still think onmyoudou is one of the coolest styes of "magic". The saddest thing is that the manga was never fully translated into English - not legally and not by any scanlation group. I hope someday we'll get to read the full story in English. Hazuki deserves it.

It's a really lovely story and it will always mean a lot to me.

After that, we had anime "Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan" (severely underrated and under-watched), "Rosario + Vampire", "Vampire Knight", "Bakemonogatari", "Dance in the Vampire Bund", "Fortune Arterial: Akai Yakusoku", "Blood-C", "Holy Knight" (lol), "JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken" (technically), "Kakumeiki Valvrave", "Blood Lad", "Strike the Blood", "Sirius", "Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san", and "Yofukashi no Uta". Many others between those but those are some of the highlight vampire anime of the last 2 decades. But my love for vampires has never really returned. Sometime after "Moon Phase" my fascination died. Dropped like a gold anvil in the ocean. I'm not even sure what happened but the timing lines up with the rise of "Twilight" so maybe that had an influence on me and made me hate the genre. Or maybe it's because "Vampire" just became a blanket term for any monster that drank blood. A lot of modern vampire stories also completely remove the weaknesses from vampires and that drives me insane. It's no fun if they have no weaknesses. Several anime I mentioned had "Daywalkers" but there always a good reason for it rather than just being "a God but drinks blood". Around 2008 and until the early 2010s I was involved in some creative writing groups locally and when the first "Twilight" film came out in theaters, basically every women started writing vampire stores. And like I said, most of their stories just used the term "Vampire" to mean a kind of monster that was basically a God but needed to suck blood. The act of sucking blood wasn't even a weakness or "food" in their stories, it was purely sexual.

There was also "Sola" in 2007, which is another of my all-time favorite anime. They didn't call them "vampires" in this anime but they were basically vampires by another name. "Sola" was an anime that very little information existed for before it aired. We went in blind outside of knowing who made it and who was in it. The reveal that it was a "vampire" anime occurred at the end of episode 1. A lot of people dropped it there but I kept watching it and by the end I found it to beautiful and thought-provoking anime. The soundtrack is also one of the most gorgeous soundtracks for any anime ever. I wrote a post about "Sola" back in 2012 for the 5th anniversary. You can read that here.

There was a good 10 years in which Gunslinger Girl was my favorite thing in the world. I miss these girls so much 🥲

Richeh was extra cute this week. Even when she was angry. We also got to see babier version of Richeh 😭 Richeh is so cute and underrated. As a musician, I always hated playing music other people made and greatly prefer to make my own. I think I understand her a bit. Season 1 Episode 11

Nakamura Hak is a new artist who is currently known for performing 3 ending themes for Witch Hat Atelier (Tonguri Boushi no Atelier). Today she uploaded an 8K music video that at first glance may look like a gray image with nothing going on. In the description she says to start at 144p and gradually increase resolution. So I did exactly that. I can only post this here since other social media limit to 4 images lmao. I took screens in every resolution so people can see exactly what's going on. The window itself was 1440p because I was in fullscreen on my 1440p monitor but the video renders in the following resolutions in order: 144p, 240p, 360, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4k, 8k

I think it's helps to have the logo towards the end of the video:

Also, it says "or refined". So the slop very likely still exists in the game anyway. Disgusting.