Thursday 2 October 2014

4000 Episodes Reflection: The Key of Type-Moon

So, a couple of days ago my father sent me a link to a blog post about how modern dictionaries fail to live up to their full potential by one James Somers. It was a great read, so naturally I wanted to know if he was constantly that good, or if it was more of a one-off thing. Turns out, he's pretty consistent. One post in particular that stood out to me was about how people should write more, even if they never plan on showing it to anyone else. The next day, I happened to watch Julie and Julia, which is a movie about someone who decides to start a blog because she wants to be a writer. I think it's high time I updated this blog, don't you?

Actually, as a brief aside before I start explaining what a "Key of Type-Moon" is, let me just say that Jason Somers is, for lack of a better expression, everything I want to be when I grow up. He's a talented programmer (mostly web development, but I'll forgive him; somebody's got to do it), he has an excellent grasp of the English language, he writes articles for The Atlantic and TIME, and he just one day decided that he was going to learn how to fly an airplane... so he did. That's pretty much the coolest thing ever. Learning to fly has been a dream of mine for a long time, although I've never actually pursued it. I hope that one day I'll be as cool as he is. Or, better yet, as cool as I think he is.

Alright, back on topic. You know, I spend so much time watching anime, I could have sworn that more of my posts were about it. Apparently not; I haven't posted any anime related articles since January, when I hit the 3000 episodes watched mark. I just hit the 4000 watched mark, so I guess it's time to revisit the topic. On that note, 1000 episodes in 3/4 of a year? Goodness that's a lot...

A graphic of my anime watched stats, including total hours spent and ratings distribution.
I'm actually taking a screenshot this time, so I can look back at my stats later.
In Japan, there's a genre of video games called visual novels. The best way to describe them is kind of like choose-your-own-adventure books, but with pictures and sound. Visual novels aren't very big in North America, although that's starting to change. The two best known visual novel developers are probably Key and Type-Moon. Key tends to write romances with a hint of the supernatural that will end up crushing your soul (Kanon, AirClannad), while Type-Moon tends to write verbose action-adventures that wax philosophical (Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero). Now, these two descriptions may not sound very similar, but that's mostly because they aren't similar; Key and Type-Moon stories are actually very different from each other. But even though their stories are almost nothing alike, there is one striking similarity between Key and Type-Moon properties: the anime adaptions.