Responsibility as a coping mechanism in School-Live!

If you only take one thing from this article then it should be this. Watch the first episode of School-Live right now and don’t read anything about it. I guarantee you’ll thank me for it afterwards. (I haven’t even tagged this post properly for your benefit!)

The Fate franchise past, present and future – a guide

Yesterday, we got yet another addition to the Fate universe in the form of the feature length Fate Grand Order: First Order. The Fate franchise has been constantly expanding since it’s inception with the 2004 visual novel Fate/Stay Night (the most well known and popular part of the world), but that has possibly never been as true as what we are being promised looking forward to 2017. Before we look at these new adaptations, I’ll run through the previous anime appearances.

Fate/Stay Night (2006)

The very first anime adapted the Fate route of the original visual novel. It follows the now familiar story line of Shirou and Saber in the Holy Grail war against six other pairs of mages and heroic spirits fighting it out in a battle royale format for the Holy Grail. It’s full of well fleshed out main characters with interesting motivations which set a reasonable benchmark for future instalments, but it suffered from bad pacing and a questionable selection of sections from the visual novel (when you see the bit I mean, you’ll know exactly what I mean). My full review is here.

Saber is the main female character of the first incarnation of Fate/Stay Night

Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works Movie (2010)

After a four year break, Fate/Stay Night returned in movie form adapting the second visual novel route, Unlimited Blade Works. I will admit I’ve chosen not to watch this particular adaptation because of some of the reviews I’ve read about it. The movie takes one of three main routes of the 50 hour long visual novel and tells it’s story in 90 minutes – I suppose that tells you all you need to know.

Identifying common anime characters: ‘Dere’

This article will contain spoilers surrounding the nature of certain characters.

Recently I’ve been watching the anime The Fruit of Grisaia. In the first episode of the show a girl introduces herself to the main character and tsundere, and it got me thinking. If you went onto CrunchyRoll for the first time last night and decided The Fruit of Grisaia looked like a good first anime for you (hint: I’m guessing you wouldn’t), would you not be completely clueless as to what a tsundere was?

You might, like me, have a little bit more experience and begin to notice that certain character types come up again and again. So, allow me to shed light on some of the ‘dere’ character types and point out some examples from popular and ongoing shows.

In Japanese, ‘dere’ comes from the word ‘deredere’ which essentially means lovestruck (the internet takes credit for that, my Japanese is non-existent!). So all of the characters in this article would be involved in love/romance in some way.

Perhaps the most common type of ‘dere’ character is the one I’ve already mentioned: the Tsundere. On the outside these are characters that are cold, hard and rather lacking in positive emotions, particularly towards their love interest. At certain points or after a significant event however, these characters will come out of their hard shells to show a kinder, more sensitive side.

Rin Toosaka is a central character in much of the Fate series.

If you’re looking for a well established tsundere character, a good place to start would be Rin Toosaka from the Fate series. As for shows that are currently airing, I’d suggest watching Owari no Seraph to see Mitsuba Sanguu – though she only appears from episode 7 – she is the absolute picture of the tsundere type.