Quotes of March 2013, Part 2

Jason Thompson on Japan as viewed by 17 creators: "It's part self-aggrandizement and part self-parody, and since these were works made for the Japanese market, obviously it entertains Japanese people too: perhaps, since he knows people will just see him as some yellow-fever weeaboo no matter what he does, he embraces it, brother."

Sean Gaffney: "Stepping on Roses has come to a close with Vol. 9. One day I will get an awesome shoujo manga series about a girl who is forced to chose between two men and shogi, and chooses shogi. This is not that day."

Lynzee Lamb on Metatron in Demonbane: "In a world of Cthulu mythos, one Jewish archangel rises up as a magical girl-nun trying to stop an evil organization from summoning The Ancient Ones."

Melinda Beasi: "I was relatively new to reading manga at the time, and I’d read a lot of shounen manga and a lot of fairly uplifting shoujo, and one of the things that nearly always happens in those series, is that characters we initially perceive as villains will turn around and become very sympathetic characters, by way of backstory or some other kind of revelation later on. The message driven home by that trope is that understanding is the key to learning to love someone, or perhaps that anyone can be granted salvation (of a sort) by way of understanding. These series are careful to always give us something to latch on to—to help us understand even the most seemingly depraved characters before the end."

Paul Thomas Chapman: "The used anime section is a cultural wasteland."

Bamboo Dong: "If one were to make a histogram of all the repeated ideas in anime every season, People with Superpowers would be somewhere in the top five, nestled between Stories about Oda Nobunaga and Girls Who Like Their Brother."