Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Quote from The Matrix, but the reference is to World God Only Knows, because the post is about anime and manga (i.e., the 2d world, rather than the 3d one, which is known to Keima as "the real").

Oh, by the way, I'm getting rid of anonymous comments, period. I've had a halfwit troll come in and, on posts about string theory, tell me to stop being a dumbass. Why should I have to screen that kind of idiocy?

• You might think that "Legend of the Legendary Heroes" gets its stupid title from translation, much like how "hitori de sabishii" is too often rendered as "I'm lonely if I'm alone" (try "I'm lonely by myself", it sounds better). But, no, in Japanese it's "Densetsu no Yûsha no Densetsu". I'm guessing the author just has no naming sense, given he's also got characters named Ferris Eris and Iiris Eris.
  
  It's not bad, though light novels are remarkably formulaic—far more formulaic than manga, even harem manga, where you've got things as different as Chobits and Sora no Otoshimono. Light novels, on the other hand, always have their everyman-with-one-ability protagonist/POV character, their quirky, hostile female lead, and the shoehorning in of a Japanese school context. Think Hidan no Aria, Legendary Heroes (military academies of quasi-Renaissance states shouldn't work like post-war Japanese high schools), Chrome Shelled Regios...make a drinking game of it, going down Baka-Tsuki's project list and taking a shot for every series that fits that formula, and I bet you'll be in the hospital before you reach the end.
  
  The exception is Slayers, where the psycho chick is the POV character and the male lead is about 30 IQ points below "everyman" status. Also BakaTest and ToraDora don't count, because their school setting and quirky female lead, respectively, are integral to their plots (also they're awesome).
• In the exciting field of "explaining fictional works as being combinations of other fictional works", I think I'm not wrong in saying that BakaTest is the Hunger Games meets Revenge of the Nerds, with just a dash of Pokemon. Except that BakaTest's humor is more twisted than any American movie, ever...and if Sakamoto Yuuji took part in the Hunger Games, he'd have the Panem government overthrown, the Hunger Games abolished, and himself made dictator-for-life, within two days.
  
  Also, Yuuji might be evil (okay, no, he's definitely evil), but he's not so stupid as to force the Capital's children to do Hunger Games, like Katniss did. Yuuji's got the brains to know that victory is pointless if you can't hold what you take. That's why he let the first class he defeated keep their facilities—because then they owed him, which he could use. Should anyone be concerned that Katniss Everdeen—a character in a serious story—is actually more pettily, self-destructively vindictive than a guy in a farce, where over-the-top petty, self-destructive vindictiveness is a major source of the comedy?
• Tooryanse; Oni-san, kochira; Kagome, kagome...is there a single Japanese folk-song or children's song that isn't spooky as hell, and most appropriately sung by the ghosts of children in a haunted-ass abandoned hospital? Do you know how many damn horror anime (and other kinds of horror media) not only feature those songs, but are based on them?
  
  I mean, sure, any vaguely chant-like song sung by children is going to be pretty spooky, but the lyrics of Tooryanse, Oni-san, and Kagome are spooky in content, no matter who sings them. (Oni-san, however, since it's part of the Japanese version of tag, also makes a good thing for people to sing in fight scenes, when they're the "can't catch me" type of quick/stealthy fighter, especially child-ninjas).
• Turns out I spoke too soon, in criticizing the German in BakaTest novels. While the first one shows the marks of having used machine translation, the later ones only make the mistakes all but the most fluent speakers of Western European languages make, in Japan. Namely, numbers and articles.
  
  The thing Minami says when she gets flustered, repeating something she heard Miharu say, should be translated 'Werden Sie schweigsam, Schweinen', not 'Werden Sie schweigsam, ein Schwein' (although I'm pretty sure you'd actually say 'Haltet die Münder, Schweinen'—Shut up, pigs (ish), rather than Be silent, pigs, and not in the formal—but at least it's not grammatically incorrect).
  
  Also, although "What a shit man you are" is bad English, it's the kind of bad English you might see a German high-schooler use, because German uses scheiss as an adjective, basically equivalent to "effing" in English ("das Scheisswetter"="the effing weather"). Does it use it as an adverb, I wonder?
• I have in the past compared anime pacifism to the recovering alcoholic who freaks out when other people drink. But the odd thing is, anime frequently avoids that stupidity...as long as the war in question is conducted with swords (and they aren't repeating unlettered Western canards they don't know enough Western history to question, though that's mercifully restricted largely to light novels, with their pseudo-intellectual fanbase, thanks to Japanese society at large having experience of really brutal feudal warlords nevertheless being human beings).
  
  But that is just silly. Nothing makes wars conducted with swords and bows intrinsically more moral than wars conducted with machineguns and tanks—maybe a Westerner could make a (perfunctory at best) case for that position, but gentlemen, you had just as much collateral damage to civilians when you were using swords, Hideyoshi's Korean campaign killed as many civilians as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, and in only 2/3 the time. And it's very rare for modern people to cheerfully announce "All the world by force of arms" as their motto, a guy from your country actually did that. Neither do modern politicians often claim to be incarnate war-gods, but, again, a guy in Japan did that, too.
  
  This is, incidentally, something people actually are allowed to complain about in Tolkien, the Luddism. There is nothing intrinsically better about hacking people apart with swords, or subduing them by starvation in sieges, than about shooting them to bits with machineguns or subduing them by starvation in air-blockades. If it's right to use force, it's right to use whatever form force takes in your material culture (with appropriate care to safeguard civilians, something by the way that only High Medieval and post-World War II Westerners actually bother with).
• Before one gets offended by the, well, retarded anti-Christian stuff in some anime, please remember that Japan is the only non-Muslim country where Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion sells well. It's not for the same reasons as in the Middle East; Confucian cultures, with their lionization of the scholar, have, as their unfortunate flatulent exhaust, a certain quasi-Gnostic incentive to regard oneself as being "in the know", that manifests itself in conspiracy-mongering. It's the same as how 9/11 Truthing has a certain following among hackers, over here.
  
  Japan also has the unfortunate aftereffects of having been Neo-Confucian, albeit not as extremely as Korea or China; Neo-Confucianism is a radically secularist ideology that is implacably hostile to organized religion (Korea's Neo-Confucian regime, the Joseon Kingdom, persecuted Buddhists as viciously as Lenin did Christians). At the same time, however, Asia has the same "Noble Savage" ideas as the West (it probably did before Westernization, too, though its current form is definitely Occidental)—and Neo-Confucianism isn't threatened by "nature worship" religions, their reverence for blood and tribe is very useful to Neo-Confucian aims. Especially not Japanese Neo-Confucianism; Neo-Confucians prop up the state cults for their social utility (they're basically atheist), and in Japan, the state cult is a nature-worship religion.
• I remembered why I stopped reading Nurarihyon no Mago—not only do they make Abe no Seimei the bad guy, they don't bother to get anything about him right (or they deliberately distort for no discernible reason). The Seal of Seimei is a five-pointed star, not seven, and his descendants are surnamed Tsuchimikado, not Gokadoin. Also? Kindly don't conflate Kuzunoha with Tamamo no Mae.
  
  Then again, the Kyoto Arc of NuraMago is basically the Soul Society Arc of Bleach: the point at which what had been a decent series, with interesting characters, gets screwed up by the pointless ballooning of its scope. Not everything needs to be epic. Bleach should've stayed about hunting ghosts in one town, and NuraMago should've stayed about the politics of the Fairy Mafia.
  
  Finally, and much more minor of a quibble, a Hyakki Yakô may be a cool name for a gang, but it ought to be a thing like the festivals where the yakuza run booths (gamblers, carnies, and vigilantes are the three traditional yakuza roles), because it's an event ("100 ogres going out by night"), not an organization.