Tag Archives: fantasy

Anime

Anime Review: Frieren – Beyond Journey’s End

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Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was the anime series in the Winter season that was most able to make me ugly cry. It starts off with some heavy reflections on grief and mourning and every few episodes it manages to slip in another shot in the feels. That said, this isn’t a depressing show – instead, it’s a bittersweet reflection on the fact that we and the people we know will eventually grow old and die, so we should value our time with them while we can. It then proceeds to do all of this interspersed with some tremendous fight scenes.

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Anime

Anime Review: Aura Battler Dunbine

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It feels weird to call Byston Well, the setting Yoshiyuki Tomino created for Aura Battler Dunbine – a series that many Isekai novels draw their lineage from – as a “joke”. However, arguably no creator has so desperately tried to “make fetch happen” with a setting that Tomino has done with Dunbine – not only with New Aura Battler Dunbine, but also Wings of Rean and Garzey’s Wing. Yet, with the degree of traction the original work obtained, there has to be something there – right?

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Anime

Anime Review: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen – Final 2 Seasons

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The last two cours of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen went back-to-back, feeding directly into the other, at a total of 24 episodes (which was the same length as the previous seasons of the show) but with two different subtitles – Chaos in Urbanrama and Doom of Dragon’s Sanctuary. The two series are somewhat mixed in quality, but they go one into the other to such a degree that it’s hard to talk about them in isolation.

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Books

Book Review: Weird of the White Wolf

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Weird of the White Wolf is the fourth part of the first of the current set of Elric omnibus volumes, and undoubtedly, this is where things get serious. I mean – there were serious things before, but this is where Elric gets shoved headlong into his destiny (the “Weird” in the title referring the Old English use of the word – Wyrd – meaning destiny) – like it or not (tending towards “or not”). And this is helped by the fact that here is where we encounter the first stories in the publication order, even if they’re not the first in Elric’s internal chronology.

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Books

The Fortress of the Pearl: Book Review

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The Fortress of the Pearl is Michael Moorcock, in 1989, writing a book set between Elric of Melnibone (1972) and Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976). The current Elric omnibus collections put this in that space in the chronology in their reading order, while my previous video on the Elric reading order recommended reading it significantly later. Re-reading the book now, in its place at the timeline – I think my assessment is accurate, but not necessarily for the reasons that I thought originally.

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Books

She Who Became the Sun: Book Review

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This weekend is Worldcon, and several weeks before the convention (basically the week before I got COVID), I finished reading the last of the novels that were up for Hugo Awards that weren’t part of a series that I hadn’t already started reading – She Who Became the Sun by Shelly Parker-Chan – a novel inspired by wuxia fiction, inspired by the rise of the Hongwu Emperor. It’s an… interesting book, but one which had some points that I stumbled over.

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Books

Light from Uncommon Stars: Book Review

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There is some discussion as to whether there needs to be a clear dividing line between the genres of Science Fiction & Fantasy, that a work needs to be one or the other. As someone who encountered Shadowrun during my formative years of Middle School (shortly after Dungeons & Dragons), I’ve ultimately become someone who has come to realize that fantasy and science fiction are like chocolate and peanut butter. So, when Light from Uncommon Stars came up as a book pick for the Swords & Laser book club, as I’ve attempted to get caught up on my book reading I decided to put it on my list – even more so when I saw that it was nominated for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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Anime

Fena: Pirate Princess – Anime Review

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Fena: Pirate Princess is the first co-production in a while between Adult Swim/Cartoon Network and an anime studio (in this case, Production IG), possibly the first major series since the second season of The Big O. With an animation style and plot that feels like it’s meant to evoke Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and The Mysterious Cities of Gold, while leaning into the “anime-ness” in a way that feels similar to Avatar: The Last Airbender, except in the sense of an anime studio looking at Avatar and going, “We can do this.” The question then is – can they do this?

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Anime

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: Battle of Kimluck: Anime Review

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Orphen’s second season is, arguably, a lot more focused than its first. That, unfortunately, doesn’t stop the show from tripping over its own feet when it comes to the world-building of the setting. In particular, it’s where the mythology of the setting is concerned, especially related to the organization known as the “Kimluck Church.”

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