Chivalry of a Failed Blogger, or How Fictional Fighting High Schoolers Make Me Feel Young Again

I just learned that "gray" is the American English spelling of the color we all know, while "grey" is the spelling all those other former English colonies and territories use. Although I prefer the latter version, I'm obliged to use the former. Guess I'll stop drinking Earl Grey tea while I'm at it. 

Anyway, for a blog titled The Anime Guardians, I write a lot about anime-adjacent hobbies. Let's at least start out with an anime as I write about what I've been up to this fall/winter.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight

Because I'm old, I remember seeing Chivalry of a Failed Knight floating on my Hulu home screen for ages and never watching it. Or did I watch it? The banner always reminds me of The Asterisk War, which I definitely tried to watch once but couldn't get into it. The premises seem kind of similar in any case; maybe pink-haired heroines and fighting schools were the craze in 2015. 

I watched (rewatched?) Failed Knight earlier this year when I was still a new dad and between power naps. It's good stuff! Protagonist Ikki Kurogane is the titular "failed knight" who, despite his superhuman swordsmanship, is considered bottom-of-the-barrel because his mana use isn't flashy or scary or something stupid like that. His family hates him save for a way-too-clingy younger sister who cockblocks the lad as he bumbles into a relationship with Stella Vermillion, the cool transfer student.

Failed Knight keeps a lot of action at the forefront while making the romance genuinely worth the screen time. (I mean, there's some ecchi stuff cuz it's 2015.) Ikki is the over-analytical type, which  works for his perpetual underdog characterization. Think Dr. Stone's Senku or Death Note's L with sigma-male swag. Like any good fighting school anime, our cast ultimately competes to enter the Seven Stars Battle Festival, a tournament which has global repercussions not fully explained in the show. These details made me read the light novels to continue where the anime leaves off. If you're interested in reading after watching, volume 4 is where to start. I'm really digging volume 5 right now. 

Fate/Hollow Ataraxia Remastered

I recall ending the Switch version of Fate/Stay Night Remastered with a strong feeling of emptiness. Heaven's Feel route was a doozy! Do I think Shirou and Sakura belong together? I get the appeal, but if I were Shirou, loving the person who threatened to wipe out my entire town and to swallow her sister into eternal damnation wouldn't be my first choice. Anyway, I jumped into Hollow/Ataraxia because of a sunk-cost fallacy: why not continue feeling strangely empty and anxious if it means I find out what happens after the Holy Grail War?

The good news: There's a lot of wit and humor to the strange world our characters occupy. The servants are still around. Rider gets a lot of screen time for anyone who likes her; I've come around now that she's an enticing yet menacing recluse who reads all day. The other characters seem to grow jealous of this Shirou x Rider pairing. (This explains a lot of the, ahem, pornographic fan art I've seen.)

The bad news: not enough Tohsaka. She's at the Mage Association abroad, but our central cast talks about her with apprehension, as if she'll appear and crush them with her oppressive attitude. 

I'm also haunted every time Ilya shows up onscreen. I liked her Heaven's Feel incarnation, but Hollow/Ataraxia keeps reminding me that she also wants to shackle Shirou's soul to a stuffed animal toy. I don't understand the brother-sister complex that shows up in otaku fiction. These people need to stop.

Alright, that's what I've got for the end of 2025. I get a month off from school to prepare for next semester, so maybe I'll rot on my couch and catch up on some anime instead. I should probably do some fiction writing as well. Happy holidays, everybody!

The TCG You've Never Heard Of

Weiss Schwarz!!! It means "black and white" in German, but it's also the name of an esoteric trading card game from Japan. Featuring an assortment of anime, gaming, film, and other pop culture franchises, Weiss is the perfect game for otaku. After eight months of playing, I'm still learning new things and making a fool of myself at the local game shop. 

The end-game for Weiss is simple: do enough damage to your opponent to win. Unlike most TCG, Weiss doesn't have its own stable of characters, and there are no obvious deck-types or elemental advantages to consider. To balance this game, you really have to understand your own deck's character-based gimmicks to create an effective winning strategy. The Seven Deadly Sins anime has one of the lowest-priced trial decks, so that was my first Weiss purchase. I didn't do a good job of learning that deck's tricks; needless to say, I was thoroughly beaten for many weeks.

Is Weiss Schwarz fun? At first, hell no. I didn't win a game until I put together an entirely different deck: a Fate/Stay Night one based on character Rin Tohsaka. The deck is a little underpowered compared to others, but Rin's low attack damage is remedied by conditional buffs to beat tougher opponents. I won my first game with that Fate deck...before losing many more matches.

Rin Tohsaka: best girl in Fate franchise. 

Weiss isn't nearly as popular as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or Magic the Gathering, so we're a small group at the back of the card shop on Sundays. When the Pokemon or Magic tournaments get too large, Weiss is cancelled for the day so there are more tables available. Because of the game's obscurity, it's difficult to obtain Weiss cards unless you preorder them early. On the other hand, there are no scalpers lurking around supermarkets and vending machines to buy all the stock at once, which has become a serious problem for Pokemon players. 

Why do I play? It's nice to be part of a community, no matter how small. It's nice to have new experiences. It's nice to get out of the house, play cards, and return home in time to eat dinner with my wife and kid. I think my record is 3-25 or something terrible like that; I picked up two of those wins during my last playthrough, so I've made progress! If I win another game before the end of the year, I'll be happy.

X-Men: The Manga and its No Good, Very Weird Government

I bought X-Men: The Manga Remastered the other day at Barnes & Noble. Narratively, it starts where the 90s animated series begins, on Jubilee as she runs from Sentinels that hunt an emergent mutant population. In order to end these discriminatory attacks, the X-Men make their way to a quasi-governmental facility that stores dossiers on mutants around the country. At first I thought, "Why would you have to go to a facility to do that? Can’t you just hack into their systems remotely?" Then it occurred to me: this story is set in the 90s. I’d almost forgotten what that world was like back then.

Paper documentation, especially at the government level, is a challenge I saw firsthand while working at a municipal court. My days were spent entering information, scanning, and filing it away for hours at a time. Need to issue a search warrant? Fax the judge. Need to collect payments? Send a certified letter. On the federal level, the government has tried to reduce paper processes: the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Paperwork Elimination Act, and several memoranda in recent decades (which points to the truism everyone knows by now: government is extremely slow to change). In the essay "The Filing Cabinet," Craig Robertson describes the archaic — and analog — filing process required for American federal workers to get paid, which can involve sifting through some 28,000 filing cabinets. Should everything be digitized nowadays? Can that be done? Who knows.

Here’s another weird example of inefficiency: SENTINELS. I didn’t think about how goofy these giant robot killing machines were growing up, but now I read X-Men and wonder, “How many are there? How much did the government pay these subcontractors to build them? What are the repair costs?”Considering there are no giant robots (we’re aware of) for commercial or military use, the only comparable product I’ve found is this $3,000,000 Tsubame Industries mech that resembles a really slow Armored Core. In a world where ICE raids are regularly conducted against illegal and migrant populations in the US, it’s obvious that a real government would spend big bucks to find perceived threats. Is this a good investment of our money? All I’ll say is the cost-benefit analysis of hunting mutants is clearly based in something other than a balanced budget. 

X-Men: The Animated Series. 1992. Marvel Entertainment Group.

Finally, the X-Jet is clearly an SR-71 Blackbird, an older stealth plane contracted by the government from Lockheed Martin. How this wound up in Charles Xavier’s hands depends on what version of the story we’re reading: he “obtained “ it from SHIELD, or Hank McCoy (aka Beast) built it, or it’s a modification of Xavier’s private jet. All scenarios imply massive security leaks pertaining to the design of a military stealth craft. As a telepath, Xavier could have easily wound up with the information needed to steal the plane or its schematics, but it also seems like a government fully aware enough to build giant robots for mutant hunting could also put more efforts into its security apparatus. 

Which brings us full circle to the X-Men raiding that facility for mutant records. The universe our heroes occupy may be full of hateful xenophobia, but luckily, the government gestapo is incredibly good at wasting time and money. 

An Audience of One

Both of the manga I’m reading at the moment, Tune in to the Midnight Heart and Insomniacs After School, feature characters with personal broadcast radio stations via Internet streaming. I’m an avid streamer of podcasts, but that’s a slightly different flavor of online audio content that’s more curated and episodic than spontaneous. So, is this a thing Japanese high schoolers do? The short answer is, “I have no idea.” 

Tune in to the Midnight Heart. Masakuni Igarashi. Kodansha.

What’s interesting is that the protagonists in the aforementioned manga both maintain their closest relationships using streaming broadcasts to an audience of one person. If characters are confessing their feelings, it’s quite indirect when done through the radio. In my day, texting was the thing kids did; I guess radio is the new thing. I feel there’s a material difference in pretending you have an impersonal audience instead of just directly speaking to your friend. The question becomes, “Why do it this way?”

Modern dating is bad because men and women are doing a poor job of communicating or have nothing good to say. Many people blame the internet for creating information silos that breed stupid opinions and false facts, and this means men and women’s interior worlds are more easily exposed (and increasingly appalling to one another). Because much of our human interactions are mediated through text, I'd say that from a communications theory standpoint, the issue is this: sending texts is information-deficient when compared to radio — even an indirect broadcast conversation — because our voices carry messages through tone and volume, clarifying the intention of our speech. Text, as anyone who’s ever sent one can share, is notoriously hard to interpret even when intentions are good. It’s also easier to be an asshole when hiding behind your keyboard or firing off a quick message without thinking twice. I feel like using our voices is an extra level of personal investment and confidence that helps us be judicious with our words. (Unless you're Alex Jones, of course.)

Insomniacs After School. Makoto Ojiro. VIZ Media.

Radio broadcasts to my wife sound like a cute idea, but would quickly grow old because we already live with each other. For high schoolers who want to treat radio as a form of public journaling and indirect confessional, however, the practice seems harmless. If you don’t want your parents to see your call history, it’s certainly one way to avoid getting into trouble for talking late into the night. Ah, the beauty of being young…

Happy Blogiversary!

It’s been a year since the relaunch of this blog! Most of my anime consumption was a blur of late-night delirium while caring for my newborn. I haven’t been blogging as much as I hoped to, so I’ll share my current otaku consumption habits. Get ready for a super post!

CURRENTLY WATCHING: Witch Watch

Basically, each episode boils down to Nico the witch causing mayhem wherever she goes by casting magic spells to impress Moi, her childhood friend. I’m always looking for reasons to justify my OtakuUSA magazine subscription, so when I read about Witch Watch earlier this year, I had to tune in. The feature article promised a slapstick comedy, and the show doesn’t disappoint. My wife certainly likes the show (and she hates anime), so I know it’s good. Some of the jokes don’t land if you’re not super into Japanese media references; it’s just an excuse for me to do research in the future. Recommend.

CURRENTLY WATCHING: Anne Shirley

Remember that post I did on cozy anime? Anne Shirley is that kind of show. I remember my wife watching Anne with an E on Netflix, so she was excited to see this anime adaptation (which itself is a reboot of an older anime, which is ultimately based on a book I haven’t read). I think Anne is adorably melodramatic as a character, and I identify with her need to see wonder wherever she looks in the world. Life isn’t perfect but it is worth celebrating. Recommend.

CURRENTLY WATCHING: Ranma 1/2

Being familiar with Usurei Yatsura, I know that Rumiko Takashi’s style of rom-com is fun and cute. Ranma is enchanted by an ancient pool haunted by a drowned girl, and now he turns into a girl when touched by cold water. The hijinks, however, begin once his fiancee, Akane Tendo, learns about this alter-ego. I wondered about the sensitivity this story would bring to what is literally a transgender tale, but as with many good comedies, the ensuing absurdity and refrain from "punching-down" disarms a lot of potential discourse. Recommend.

CURRENTLY READING: Tune In To the Midnight Heart

I liked Quintessential Quintuplets; my wife was upset by the ending, and I understand why. If you were disappointed by Quints, I think Midnight Heart is for you. Taking the same playbook and adding ten times the humor, Yamabuki joins the Broadcast Club seeking a girl who he confessed to years ago; this girl is among the club's four female members. I can't overstate how much I like this manga. Every girl seems like she could be "the one," and although my favorite pairing is with Nene Himekawa, I don't feel there's a bad choice among them. Did I mention how funny this is? Recommend

CURRENTLY PLAYING: Tsukihime

After playing Fate/Stay Night and all its routes, I thought another Type-Moon production would round out my understanding of this elaborate magical universe. Unfortunately, Tsukihime isn't my jam so far. The charm of Fate was an elaborately designed tournament with central characters who play well off each other and are also interesting themselves. Now, I wouldn't say Tsukihime has boring characters and a dull story...but it does. Fate's Shirou Emiya is compelling and complex in ways I've never seen, a character filled with a pathos that makes him frustrating and fascinating to follow. Maybe I'm impatient, but I'm not seeing that same appeal in this game yet. Can't recommend.

Alright, that's enough post for now. May's a super busy month so far, but I'd like to write more. Stay tuned!

What's Up with Anime Slavery? or The Rising of a Savior Complex

The Rising of the Shield Hero was the first time I recall encountering slavery as a topic in anime. The relationship between Naofumi, a reluctant and rejected hero without a party, and Raphtalia, a young tanuki-girl he buys to aid him in combat, blossoms into a beautiful bond. The fact that Raphtalia is a slave is somewhat corrected after Naofumi releases her from servitude, but then she volunteers to be enslaved anyway as a sign of her loyalty. It's sort of cute...but still slavery? As a result of encountering this institution in modern medieval, fantasy, and isekai genre shows, I thought to look up why people are writing this stuff nowadays.

The Rising of the Shield Hero. Kinema Citrus. 2019. 

My first instinct was to understand Japanese slavery precedents. Chris Kincaid offers a well-researched account in their 2021 article, "Slavery and Japan": A class system allowed for the legal selling of Japanese until the 12th century, when it was no longer a state-sponsored institution. Legitimized slavery briefly made a comeback after the Portuguese and Jesuits wanted women to take abroad in the 1500s, but Toyotomi Hideyoshi squashed that nonsense. The major issue, of course, is that slavery is intimately linked to sex trafficking and prostitution, which are illegal in most places and times, anyway. Kincaid emphasizes that the sexual aspects of Japanese slavery are what persist today, often in the form of "comfort women." Depending on what kind of anime you're watching, this sexual aspect to slavery may get glossed over entirely (e.g. Shield Hero) or becomes part of the plot (e.g. Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World, which is a truly heinous show.)

As to why slavery themes are prevalent in today's otaku culture, Danny Guan points out in "The Problem with Isekai 2: The Slavery Issue" that stories like Shield Hero come from one particular Japanese website, 小説家になろう ("Let's Become a Novelist, or Shōsetsuka ni Narō) and get chosen for novel deals and adaptations. Naturally, stories that are the most popular will get chosen because publishers want to guarantee return on investment; this creates a positive feedback loop of stories featuring slavery and incentivizes more writers to do the same. Danny, as well as people in this kind of useful Reddit thread, attribute this slavery interest to wish-fulfillment for writers and readers, savior complexes for protagonists, and ease of adding new characters to stories. 

The Rising of the Shield Hero. Kinema Citrus. 2019. 

Yet, this still doesn't explain why anyone is obsessed with fictional slavery systems in the year 2025. If, as Kincaid illustrates, legitimized sex slavery existed as recently as World War II--using women from Japanese territories--this is still beyond the memory of most contemporary Japanese writers. (I'll caveat that some of these victims still exist, and that collective memories in society are more persistent.) I assume most otaku writers aren't frequenting brothels or engaging in sex trade. It sounds like an expensive hobby, and the pricier sexual transactions are initiated by old and tired salarymen. 

The isekai genre usually occurs in kingdoms with feudalism and class stratification. In these worlds, slaves exist as part of economic systems, diplomatic tools, and war spoils. Danny Guan's mention of the "good master" allows stories to treat slavery institutions as pillars of society, a system heroes navigate in a self-serving yet beneficent manner rather than toppling it altogether. Without psychoanalyzing isekai writers too deeply, perhaps slavery systems are a way to rationalize real-world evils and fight against them in personal ways while being rewarded. I won't speculate what those real-world evils might be for Japanese writers. 

Or maybe I'm giving people too much credit. That first season of Shield Hero is really good, though. 

The Rising of the Shield Hero. Kinema Citrus. 2019. 

Fate Stay Night, or I Hope Saber Arc Isn't Anyone's Favorite Because it Stinks

I was browsing an anime store many years ago when someone suggested I watch Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works, which sat on one of the shelves in a video boxset. I told them I watched a Fate series once (Fate/Zero) and found it dreadfully boring. Fast forward twelve years later, and I live in an apartment with a dozen Fate figurines, mobile game Fate/Grand Order on my phone, and eagerly tune in for the latest series, Fate/Strange Fake. I am a thorough convert (but I still hate Fate/Zero). When the original game that started this franchise was announced for Nintendo Switch, Fate/Stay Night Remastered, I immediately preordered. I play it during long nights when my baby struggles to sleep, or whenever she's taking a nap. It's good for Fate nerds like me, but the first playthrough is...odd.

Being a visual novel, there are three decision trees that most fans know about: the main Fate route starring Saber; Unlimited Blade Works starring Rin Tohsaka; and Heaven's Feel with Sakura Matou. I didn't know that the first time you play must be on the Saber route. Because I didn't understand this mechanic, the choices made were chosen based on my interest in Rin, a tsundere who (I feel) best compliments the naive idiosyncracies of Shiro Emiya, the game's protagonist. As a result, I butt heads with Saber on multiple occassions, some of which led to several BAD END and DEAD END scenarios.

Enjoying the Fate franchise at all demands a few concessions, and this game in particular has a major one. (SPOILERS AHEAD?) Shirou Emiya is infatuated with Saber--who turns out to be a time-traveling, genderbent King Arthur--and the two eventually fall in love. I don't mind the absurdity of the scenario, because I watch too much anime to be bothered. But the interactions between Shirou and Saber overwhelmingly reinforce the most realistic scenario for these two: there's no realm in which they'd be compatible.

The game tries to establish a parallel between these characters. Shirou is a survivor from the last Holy Grail War, a conflict between mages and their Heroic Spirit servants for an omnipotent vessel. That devastation has wracked him with guilt, which he channels into the idea of saving other people at expense of his own safety. Saber, who was a servant-participant in that war, needs the grail to undo becoming King Arthur in the first place. She sees her reign over medieval Britain as having ended in bloody disaster and defeat. The similarity here? Both Shirou and Saber are driven by an altruism that masks a deeper self-loathing. 

The problem with this pairing exists for a few reasons the game makes clear:

Shirou is obsessed with Saber as a girl. Perhaps owning to Fate/Stay Night's origins as an eroge or pornographic PC game, Shirou has the emotional stability of a teenage boy when it comes to being with Saber. (In all fairness, he is one.) As a result, Shirou leans on the teachings of his late father, Kiritsugu, to always protect girls when he can. This is all fine, except Saber is very dismissive of this technicality of her birth, and takes every opportunity to downplay her sex in favor of elevating her status as a king. She does not need protecting because it is, in fact, her job to protect Shirou. This flies over Shirou's head because Saber is, in his eyes, beautiful beyond compare and more fragile than she's willing to admit. Because of genre conventions, this fierce denial of Saber's personhood is meant to show Shirou sees her as a deeply traumatized victim of fate, someone who would otherwise embrace the wiles of an ordinary girl if she could only escape her circumstances. And who should this poor king come to rely on if given a chance? None other than Shirou Emiya. It's hard for me to see this as anything other than disrespectful, a fact Saber agrees with for almost the entire story.

Shirou is a hypocrite. After a so-so date between him and Saber, Shirou makes his argument for Saber to abandon her dream of rescuing Britain from her own ineptitude by persuading her to live for herself. He is emboldened by visions he has of Saber's past, of her life as a girl who picks the Sword of Selection from the stone and is guided by Merlin towards her destiny. Saber is offended by this outburst on two fronts: As a king, Saber cannot accept Shirou's words because she is duty-bound to keep her kingdom's interests before her own. She is also offended that Shirou would claim to know her at all, since he has such a poor understanding of his own motivations. As mentioned earlier, both of these characters are tormented survivors of utter ruin, but Shirou can't see that his suicidal need to rescue people is not dissimilar from her own need to sacrifice her personal interests. Yet, their similarities are insignificant when compared to the categorical differences: Shirou is adapting the mantle of a "hero of justice" out of personal conviction, while Saber had already lived as a hero to her people and had no say in the matter. She was, in essence, a servant of Britain.

Saber doesn't love him; this is a more contentious point, so hear me out. Saber does confesses her love just before vanishing from reality at the end of the story, but I think this is a matter of infatuation at best. There are two reasons why I think so:

• This shift in Saber's perspective initially occurs after Tohsaka implants Shirou's magic circuits into Saber. (This scene is highly erotic and definitely cleaned-up for Nintendo Switch release.) After this, Saber grows bashful when interacting with Shirou. While it's clear Shirou has always been infatuated with Saber, she cannot rely him as a mage, refuses to share her ambitions, and doubts his decision-making for much of their time together. Giving her magical circuits is somehow a way of mitigating these factors. 
  

• The other pivot takes place when she realizes Shirou contains Avalon within him, the sheath which preserves her sword, Excalibur. This revelation occurs during a low-point for both characters as they are assaulted by Gilgamesh, a wayward Heroic Spirit who has his eyes set on Saber. As this love triangle manifests and Shirou continues to literally die for Saber, Avalon is a convenient metaphor for the fact Shirou has always tried to protect Saber. We'll never know if she would love Shirou without the presence of Avalon.
• By the end of the story, none of the differences in opinion or belief is reconciled between Shirou and Saber. The physical bonds between the characters is how fate ties them together. It's fitting for a sexually-charged story but sloppy for any cathartic resolution. 

Because this is a visual novel meant for multiple replays, I'm willing to play it again to attempt to woo Saber properly. The frustrations I felt towards her and Shirou, pleasantly enough, don't exist as strongly while I run through Unlimited Blade Works. Shirou is a better character when he understands who Saber is and respects her wishes. That's a relationship I'm happy to see unfold.

I've Become a Parent and Get Little Sleep, but at Least Light Novels are Saving my Sanity!

As a new dad, I don't get a lot of sleep. I've spent many nights watching Crunchyroll anime while chugging Redbull and rocking the baby. Because many of these anime serve as twelve-episode snippets of lengthier manga and books, seasons can end abruptly without tying loose ends in any satisfying way. For that reason, I've started to seek the light novels these anime are adapted from, which wasn't always easy to do when I started watching anime in 2009.  

The 2010s saw an increase in Japanese light novel translations from Seven Seas Entertainment, Kodansha, and Yen Press. Now, such novels can easily be found in my local Barnes and Noble or ordered from Amazon. My first experience reading them was in 2013 with Haruhi Suzumiya. Back then, that anime was universally praised in the blogosphere and Twitter, but I've never watched it. I thought reading it would be a great experience... and I was surprisingly bored. I quit three books in.

Recent anime like Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets Wise Wolf and How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom helped me rediscover light novels. In the case of Spice and Wolf, I read the first volume so that I could understand the business and finance talk being thrown around so casually. (I actually wrote a post about it here.) For Realist Hero, I liked the anime so much that after season two, I decided to continue the story. It's good! I'm a serious nerd for strategic and tactical decision-making, if that's a thing one can nerd out to.

When it comes to finding these books, I prefer commercial venues over underground or fan translations; I like to think my money is supporting authors and publishers. That said, although Amazon is easily the biggest game in town for this, J-Novel Club is now my go-to business. They're slightly cheaper than Amazon and seem to work with publishers to translate and release chapters/books on a regular schedule. I like the fact they have community forums; bringing people together in spaces other than the major social networks is probably better for humanity.

As far as the next book I'll read, Chivalry of a Failed Knight Volume 4 should pick up where the anime left off, so I look forward to that. Lord knows I'll have more than enough to read it. Our baby is going through a sleep regression, so all the training we've done has gone to shit.