Burrowowl

I’ve been in a bit of a rut in regards to anime lately. There just hasn’t been a lot of new stuff that has caught my eye. A recent exception to this is Fate/Stay Night, a series that is apparently closely-related to Tsukihime, a title that I just never got around to watching. As a series based upon a videogame and manga that are spin-offs from another video game, manga, and anime, this is a pretty good title.

The basic premise is that Emiya Shirou is an untalented sorcerer that gets thrust into a seven-way war between master sorcerers and their summoned servants. He has no knowledge of what the war is about or what these supernatural servants are, but comehow ends up reflexively calling forth a Saber-class servant. From the reaction of the other mages, this is a prestigious servant, especially for an unskilled knucklehead like Emiya. The plotline alternates between big supernatural battles with arcano-jargon speeches about legendary heros and the personal interactions between two of the competing sorcerers, who happen to be classmates.

So far I’ll give it a B-, the animation and character design are excellent for a television series, the characters are reasonably appealing, but the background details are presented in such a way that it’s obvious that the writers either expect the audience to already be fans of the setting or are willing and ready to perform all manner of research to figure out what’s going on. These aren’t obscure Japanese-culture references that we westerners wouldn’t be in on, but strange western lore about legendary figures like Cuchulain that I cannot imagine are common knowledge to the original Japanese audience. Odd.

The internet (or as some like to say: the Internet) has spawned a number of interesting things. Amazon made it unnecessary to leave your home to get books, eBay helps you get rid of your old crap, and Google helps the Chinese government keep its citizens in the dark about the massacre at Tianenmen Square (ooh look, they “fixed” that a bit), and the Wikipedia lets knuckleheads like me write entries as if I knew something. Then there are the imageboards.

Imageboards are websites that let anybody that browses to them post content, including the attachment of binaries (specifically images). This can lead to the sharing of original artwork, photographs, and such in a way that makes services like Flickr look totalitarian. This also means that under the cover of perceived anonymity you can get some of the craziest nonsensical chaos. There are several out there, but which one should you waste your precious time, bandwidth, and fragile sanity on? For your consideration, I give you 4chan and Wakachan, two english-language knock-offs of Futaba Channel.

4chan is overworked, overpopulated, and rather seriously insane. New content appears in its various categories (most of which relate to the work-appropriateness of the content) almost continuously, including some rather remarkable photography. The bulk of the material, however, is provided for and by anime and manga fans, many of them clearly deranged. If you have a strong stomache and a tolerance for the utterly-inappropriate, check out their “random” channel (/b/). Its current operator goes by the name “moot” and has had to repeatedly reminding his users that the whole operation is a charity case teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Wakachan, on the other hand, has nimble load times, has its anime content neatly organized by topic. I have generally found the participants of this imageboard to be far more tame than the lunatics at 4chan, which naturally means that its “random” channel is far less interesting. Management-wise it seems pretty stable. It’s like a calmer, more sane and stable 4chan, and might be a good place to get your toes wet.

Both of these systems have discussion boards incorporated, but I cannot speak as to their character. Having seeing some of the stuff these people are willing to put in public, I strongly doubt anybody should be reading what they have to say. Enjoy your intarnets.