Repeat with me: The end of a narrative is supposed to do two thingsResolve the conflictWrap up the loose ends Some series do that in ways that make your eyes boggle, which is why I have a set of posts called killer endings. Some series do it exactly how you’d expect, like Samurai Champloo, where Mugen, Jin, and Fuu find the Samurai Who Smells of Sunflowers and then ease on down the road.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 39: Celebrating posts from Anime Evo, Anime Hanabi, Annieme, and more!

Of course I really like Akane-Banashi. As a storyteller myself I find the whole concept of rakugo (a form of Japanese performance art) fascinating, and have since Descending Stories (the manga; the anime, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, was on Crunchyroll for a while, undubbed, which seems like a waste). But Descending Stories is a multi-generational drama set in the world of rakugo.

My publishing stablemate, D. D. Dell, asked me to remind everyone that their book is out there, too, and if you prefer Magical Girls to Mechas, you might like this one: You see, Mercy Jefferson has a problem. She's fallen for Milo, the mysterious new transfer student to Seabeach High who works at the pizza joint across the street, but how can she possibly tell Milo she's a Dragongirl who fights in a parallel universe called the Aether to protect the Earth from mysterious, furry aliens called TIGERs?

Okay, you all know my day job is writer now, right? And some of the stuff I write might be right up YOUR alley considering all the chat about anime and manga that goes on here. In fact, these are Original English Light Novels, just like in Japan without the Japanese. Okay, how about a story where high school students like Jay Ji and Sylver Aleph fly 30 meter tall battlesuits controlled by cloned frog brains to fight mysterious aliens?

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 38: Posts from Anime Hanabi, Merlin's Musings, Phoenix Talks Popular Culture Japan, and more!

A while back we looked into how authors keep long stories going longer. Y’see, here’s the thing: Most anime is closed ended. The company gets a contract for a certain number of episodes, and they have to make the story fit that number. There are exceptions, of course. Can you say, One Piece? Sure you can. Dragonball, Pokeman…

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 37: Posts from Anime Evo, Confessions of an Overage Otaku, MIB's Instant Headache, and more!

Let’s start with this: Most people in anime have something to do. I would have to guess that the most common “professions” (if you want to call them that) are high school student, D&D-style adventurer, creative-type (writer, mangaka, musician, whatever), and something vaguely paramilitary. There are others: Miss Kobayashi is a computer programmer, Spike Spiegel is a bounty hunter, and Vash the Stampede is a …

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 36: Celebrating posts from Anime Evo, DoubleSama, Merlin's Musings, and more!

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that language influences culture and culture influences language. I always love feedback relationships like that. The relationship affects the communication and the communication affects the relationship. The lifestyle affects the self-esteem and the self-esteem affects the lifestyle. Stuff like that. In particular, it’s important to recognize that, despite how forward Misato is and how rude Gendo is, Japanese society and the Japanese culture emphasizes politeness.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 35: Celebrating posts from All About Anime and Manga, Anime Evo, and more!

As a person who has studied communication for about all of his adult life, I have a real problem with Komi Can’t Communicate, so let me get it off my chest right now: Shoko Komi doesn’t need 100 friends (although it would be nice for her to have them). Shoko Komi has severe Communication Anxiety and what she needs is 100 hours of therapy.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 34: Celebrating posts from The Afictionado, Anime Evo, Anime Rants, and more!

Okay, the final volume of My Dress-up Darling has been out for over a month now … I’m not sure how much over a month since I have no idea when this post will appear. I’ll get to it when I get to it (Later: I came out April 2026) … but if you haven’t read it or want to wait for the anime, you should stop reading because this post contains SPOILERS.

You know what’s fun? Reading a manga and saying, “This would be a heckuvan anime,” and then learning they’re making an anime from it. Boo yeah! (Obligatory Cyborg reference.) Of course, I said that about School-Live! and the anime they made from it was a dog. Okay, sometimes it don’t work. But I’m saying it again about Hirayasumi, and I’m saying it because it embodies … have I ever used that word before, everything to like about josei as a subgenre.

Every time I write something about animation and how she is done I always say something along the lines of, “I don’t do this often enough.” Well, I don’t do this often enough. I do it so infrequently that every time I do write about the process of animation I feel obliged to remind people that I’m not only a writer – which I am.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 31: Celebrating posts by Anime Evo, Confessions of an Overage Otaku, D&A Anime Blog, and more!

The whole idea of meta-plot, an overarching plot structure to a story, is to create tension that is released at the end of the story. Like for instance, when Futaro FINALLY (Geez, that seemed to take forever, didn’t it?) marries Yotsuba at the end of the whole Quintessential Quintuplets, that’s like it, right? Yay, Futaro … he got to the place we all knew he’d be at the very start of the franchise!

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 30: Celebrating posts from Analog Housou, GetMoreXP, Hanime on Anime, and more!

The Tortured Young Hero as a trope is almost as clichéd as the Princess in Peril, but it’s held up better over time. I mean, the Tortured Young Hero can have some agency, depending on how they are used. You know who this joker is, of course. I made a SHORT list of anime characters (see below), but they show up in all sorts of other places.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 29: Celebrating posts from Anime Evo, Arum Journal, Lit Retreat, and more!

Sometime before this is over I’m going to tell you what Mysterious Girlfriend X reminded me of. It ain’t a pretty story. Mysterious Girlfriend X tries to be a pretty story, a high school romance, if an offbeat one, between normal boy Akira Tsubaki and unusual girl Makoto Urabe. Yeah, you can see this one coming a mile off: It’s a “She chose HIM?” story.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 28: Celebrating posts from Anime Evo, Arum Journal, Confessions of an Overage Otaku, and more!

Like the Romantic Triangle, I’m tempted to call Healed by Love a cliché rather than a trope, but like the Romantic Triangle it’s still around because it works. And as I keep saying in my presentations on writing, “Tropes is tropes because they work.” Yes, I actually say it that way. It’s supposed to be amusing. You know you see this sort of thing all over anime, particularly when you consider how many anime main characters are psychologically broken in some way of another.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 27: Celebrating posts from Anime Evo, Anime Feminist, Anime Hanabi, and more!

Is it possible to make a series of posts about Pride week without at least mentioning Shuzo Oshimi? After all, Oshimi has made it his goal to explore sexuality, and particularly “perversion,” in all its myriad forms. And since he’s going for all of them, he’s got to get some transsexuality in there, too, and he does in Inside Mari…

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 26: Celebrating posts from Anime Feminist, Chug Tek Ming, The Land of Obscusion, and more!

We’re still poking at transsexual characters here for Pride month. Yeah, all month. Deal. I haven’t seen Heavenly Delusion because it’s exclusive to some service I don’t have, but I’ve been reading the manga all along. Hint: It’s pretty good. Now, again, the problem many Japanese creators have in dealing with transsexual characters, especially transsexual characters who are intended to be protagonists, is that in Japan a transsexual is a pervert.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 25: Celebrating posts from Confessions of an Overage Otaku, Kvasir369, Okazu and more!

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Okay, for Pride month this year I wanted to dive into transgender characters, since there are more than a few of them out there. I mean, some writers want to explore ideas. Shuzo Oshimi deliberately and specifically wants to explore various forms of perversion, but there are a bunch of other writers out there who want to take a look and see what they might see.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2024 Week 24: Celebrating posts from Arum Journal, Calxylian, Confessions of an Overage Otaku, and more!

If we go back far enough, me as blogger and you as … what? Bloggee? Reader? … you might recall that every June, for Pride Month, I try to get into some element of LGBTQIA+ life as represented in manga and/or anime. Y’see, one of the reasons I’m interested in manga and anime is that to me they are foreign and therefore reveal foreign issues, values, and tropes.

5 Favorite Anime Blog Posts from 2026 Week 23: Celebrating posts from Arum Journal, Hexa Blog, Japan Powered, and more!

If you sit down and look at them, high school romances tend to start out in a few different ways. I’m not going to be exhaustive about this. There’s only so much time in the world and no one needs to watch EVERY SINGLE high school romance anime just to be sure we have all the categories straight. BUT, let’s see …