In Defence of the Term “Waifu”

So usually I am not one to write these types of posts on my blog, but unfortunately this is a topic that has frustrated me and a few others for the past few days.

School Days: The Dark Side of Love [OWLS Blog Tour February 2019 – Adore]

In February, we will be exploring love and romance. The word selected is “adore” because it has two main connotations: to be loved and respected or to feel worshipped. We will analyze characters that give us a feeling of admiration and explain why we love those characters. We will also be exploring different forms of love (familial, friendship, and even self-love) and how those types of love influence our lives.

For most of you reading this blog tour, you have either heard of or watched School Days sometime in your life. In that respect, you probably know where I’m going to go with this post. If you don’t know about School Days, then that’s probably a good thing because the show is quite infamous (and controversial) among most anime fans for various reasons (more on that later). Despite its notoriety, however, I want to look at how School Days turns the high school romance genre on its head and illustrates the darker side of love not really seen in most romance anime (also, spoilers).

Live, Love, Laugh – Or is it Life First, Blogging Second?

Hello, folks! I am still alive and well, thanks for asking! As you’ve all probably noticed by now, I haven’t been active on the blogosphere for quite some time now (the last post I wrote was for OWLS) so I wanted to address what has been going on from my side.

Journalist “Slut and Body Shames” Cosplayers at Comic Con Africa

Knowing that the majority of my readers are not South African, I thought I’d bring to your attention a controversial article that has been making the rounds in the South African geek community as of late.

A Lesson in Revenge: Itachi as the Anti-Mentor in Naruto [OWLS Blog Tour July 2018 – “Mentor”]

Throughout our lives, we might have encountered someone that we admired as a role model or has guided us in some life dilemma. This mentor could be a teacher at school, a coach, a boss or team leader at work, or a family friend. Whoever it is that person impacted your life in a positive manner. For this month’s OWLS topic, we will be writing about mentors or mentorships in anime and other pop culture media. Some topics we will be exploring include how a mentorship impacted a main character’s life, the types of mentor relationships a person could have, and/or personal stories about mentors or mentorships.

Whenever we think of a mentor, we think of someone who has had a positive influence on our lives or who has made us a better person in one capacity or another; be it physically, academically or even emotionally and psychologically. But what about someone who negatively affects us, yet still makes us stronger in the process? Can we still consider them a “mentor” in the traditional sense? For this blog tour, I would like to explore this idea of what I call the “anti-mentor” by using Itachi and his influence on Sasuke in the Naruto series as a case study.

My Love for Professional Wrestling and Why I’m Not Ashamed of it [OWLS Blog Tour June 2018 – “Pride”]

Welcome, everyone, to my first blog tour for OWLS (Otaku Warriors for Liberty and Self-Respect). For those of you unfamiliar with OWLS:

We are a group of otaku bloggers who promote acceptance of all individuals regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and disability. We emphasise the importance of respect, kindness, and tolerance to every human being. Even though we come from all walks of life, each and every one of our amazing members are dedicated to our cause!

As you can guess from the title, this month’s theme is “Pride”. Below is the prompt that was given to us:

In honor of “Pride Month,” we will be discussing the word, “Pride” and its meaning. We will be exploring pop culture characters’ most satisfying and joyful achievements or skills that they possessed and whether or not these qualities could be seen as a positive or negative aspect in their personal lives and/or society.

So what is pride? Given that it is “Pride Month”, the first thing that comes to mind is queer pride. Pride can also mean the following, according to fellow blogger Matt-in-the-Hat:

Pride is having the abundance of confidence on one’s own skills or traits. People can have pride on certain things like their skills in their hobbies or even their own personality such as being kind or cocky. Showing some pride can be a good thing because it shows how much the person cares about something and it makes them stand out and different.

Today, however, I’m going to play the black sheep of the blog tour and talk about a form of pride that is very personal to me: pride in an interest or fandom. In this case, my love for professional wrestling. On a personal note, this took a lot of courage and self-motivation for me to write about as this is a topic I usually keep to myself.

Dealing With Depression Using Dark Souls

Disclaimer: The views and comments made in this post do not necessarily reflect how other people suffer from depression. Everyone is different and everyone experiences things differently to others. These are purely based on my personal experiences.

Before I start with this personal post of mine, I’m going to try my best not to turn this into a sob story. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been dealing with depression for a very long time. This, naturally, has had an effect on many areas of my life: feeling shy and socially anxious around people (especially women), putting too much pressure on myself due to societal and family expectations, saying negative things to myself when I do something wrong, even if it’s miniscule (“useless”, “idiot”, etc.) and so forth. Luckily, though, I have learned overtime to accept my depression and realise that it’s a part of who I am. By acknowledging this fact, it’s made the coping process a bit easier for me these days. 

Ecchi Then VS Now: What Has Changed?

NOTE: This article contains sexually explicit images. Viewer’s discretion is advised

When one talks about ecchi anime what are the first things that pop into your head? Panty shots? Sexual innuendo? Women in skimpy clothing? Male characters in precarious situations? These are just a few of the many elements that classify an anime as ecchi. While these elements have been mainstays in most ecchi anime, the way they are used today seems to be a bit different compared to late 20th and early 21st Century anime.

I Got Relationship Advice From J-List!

Hey everyone! It’s been nearly a year since I last posted something on my blog, but here I am once again. I will try my best to be more consistent with my writing, but for now, I would like to kick off my first post of 2018 with something…interesting that happened to me today (or the other day, depending on when you’re reading this). I know the title sounds clickbaity, but I promise you that this is something that actually happened (now it sounds even more clickbaity XD).

I Am Writing a Thesis

So this is something that I have thought about doing for over a year now and I am finally able to do it. The great thing about this particular thesis is that it is based around something close to my heart: anime. Anime, in general, is an underdeveloped section in film theory so you could call my thesis “innovative research”.