Though we don’t get Hana-chan’s full backstory until muuuch later on in the manga (several volumes ahead of the material that’s currently being adapted), I, for one, am more than happy to be getting another Hana-centric episode so soon! As I said during last week’s post, she’s fast becoming one of my favourite Fruits Basket characters. And this week’s episode only improved her standing…
Do you want to hear something coo coo for cocoa puffs crazy? As we get older, we change. Yes, shocking, I know! As we meet new people, become more mature, and experience new things, our beliefs, perceptions, and preferences change too. OK, OK, I’ll admit that everything I just said is actually common knowledge… But I think that this stuff is so obvious, that it had kind of slipped my mind. That’d go some way towards explaining why my most recent brush with the Fruits Basket franchise has taken me by complete surprise…
Artist Unknown
My husband and I have recently sunk our teeth into the Danganronpa franchise. We’ve had so much fun playing the games (especially fun was being able to lord my overwhelmingly superior deductive reasoning over him) and watching its various anime adaptations. For those of you unfamiliar with the franchise (where have you been?) its premise is this: a class of elite students (all possessing an “ultimate” talent – a prerequisite for admittance into the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy) are pitted against each other by their mysterious captor in a gruesome “killing game”. They are then forced to unravel one another’s murders in order to escape captivity.
The Danganronpa franchise places a lot of emphasis on its characters’ talents. These form the basis of their identities and factor into many of the franchise’s key events. Whilst the franchise is only ever a hair’s breadth away from becoming utterly ridiculous, some of the implications it makes about talent are quite discouraging. The fact that extraordinary talent is necessary in order to attend Hope’s Peak Academy, that graduation is guaranteed to set you up for life, and that the main course students are hailed as the hope of Japan, whereas the (comparatively untalented) reserve course students are positioned as second-rate, are frequently labelled “weeds” or “parasites”, and whose entry fees are used to fund the main course, suggests that: 1. talent is all that’s necessary in order to succeed in life, 2. is what’s most beneficial to society, and 3. that the untalented should be content to simply act as the talented’s stepping stone to success.
If, like me, you don’t possess any exceptional talents, dwelling on these implicit messages can dampen your spirits. To lift them up again, here are five personal attributes that are just as important to have, if not even more so, than talent:
Before I start I would like to say the following: please, please, please don’t read this blog post if you’ve yet to watch both series of Code Geass, as it contains major spoilers that will ruin the entire franchise for you. For those of you who have performed your civic duty and watched this awesome anime, grab yourself some tissues and proceed!
You may or may not know this about me, but it used to be my policy to never drop an anime, no matter how much it made me want to put out my own eyes! In fact, I hadn’t dropped a single anime in over 10 years – and I’ve seen some real trash! But this week I made the momentous decision to finally rescind this policy and drop my first ever anime: Black Clover. Join me as I discuss what led me to this decision. Hopefully you’ll gain some insight into why it’s not always a bad thing to drop anime.
But first, a bit of background…
Watashi Wa Bucho!! 