Tag Archives: meta

‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me . . .’

I’m Not A Blogger

I’m Not A Blogger, by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid, who kindly distributes under a Creative Commons license

Look familiar? If it does, you’ve probably been reading The Animanachronism (since ‘anima’ beats ‘anime’, I’d appear so high on alphabetical blogrolls if I had only forgone the article!) since last Christmas, in which case you’ll also feel a sense of familiarity when I tell you that ‘I can only remember eleven things about my anime year in 200[8], and so have to scratch up a subject for my twelfth day.’ That wasn’t entirely true then, of course, and it’s definitely not true now: those to whom this entry is dedicated deserve it on merit. Continue reading

Clannad: Unscene

You may or may not have noticed that I missed yesterday’s post. This is because my laptop’s screen died last night. I’m typing this on my new desktop computer, poorer but irreverently thankful for Sunday trading. I’ve an essay due in shortly and needed something fast, although I had been wondering about buying a desktop in any case. This isn’t what I’d choose if I had time and money, but I’m reasonably content.

I’ll get back to these posts once I’ve finished migrating from one machine to the other, but since I have a broken screen on my mind it seems fitting to give a passing nod to the impact of a scene that I never saw, from an anime I didn’t watch. I’m referring to two Clannad characters’ brief sojourn in a P.E. equipment shed, ‘the moment that froze the otakusphere.

I don’t have much to say about the scene itself, partly because it’s been well-covered already and partly because I haven’t seen it – although if you collected every screencap of the scene that I’ve seen, printed them all out in sequence and stapled one edge to make a flick book, you would, I think, have an accurate, if low-quality, reconstruction.

It’s pleasing that the whole incident is brought about not by a wish on Tomoya’s part, but by a book of charms, as though Clannad itself is a more cynically self-aware member of the Key-adaption family. Is a storage room lock-in a staple of the genre, or something that a normal schoolboy might wish for? One wonders what else Yukine’s book can do – if, that is, it was responsible in the first place. Not knowing any details, I can’t help imagining that it might actually be a book chock-full of charms to bring about hackneyed anime situations. I’m sure it’s much more mundane, but that’s an amusing thought, and as I go through the rigmarole of transferring my existence from one computer to another, I have to savour whatever amusement I can get.

Powering Down

fotsd-sotired

I’m very tired and I’ve run out of ideas. Time to stop blogging for a bit.