Wio
Senior Member

However there is a problem with that business decision when it comes to US release. Every anime studio should think ahead "how well will this work if it's released in the US?" But not enough think ahead like that. Here's some simple facts about the US they should consider.
Many Americans consider themselves Christians.
The Bible says sex should be saved for marriage, and criticizes lust.
Many Christians will therefore say not only that sex acts outside of marriage is bad, but will also say that looking at women in a dirty way is bad. And than having unneeded pictures of naked women have the effect of creating sinful lust.
Therefore a quite large portion of the American population will not watch certain animes (and about 95% of magical girl animes) in an uncensored form.

Here's my hunch on why it is done this way.

Magical girl animes have a lot of girly stuff in them. This is stuff that girls would like but could potentially really cut down on the male audience. By having the girls get naked, guys who like to look at naked chicks will at least watch the show, even if only to see the cute chicks getting naked. That means a wider audience, thus more money for the anime studio. So ultimately it comes down to being a business decision to increase profits for the animation studio.

In magical girl anime it's like they are getting dressed in that their clothes need to come off before their superhero costumes can go on. Only difference is that magical powers undress and dress them, rather than doing it with their own hands. But since magic is used, they shouldn't even really need to get dressed in the conventional manner at all. Why not like the Power Rangers? I've seen the Power Rangers before and their transformations appear to be instantaneous. That is their normal clothes are instantly replaced with superhero costumes. Why can't magical girls do that kind of instant transformation? I mean it seems it would be MORE efficient in a battle situation where you need to be able to move and act very quickly.

Well mecha is pretty awesome. I also like supernatural anime like Strait Jacket. Magical girls (a subset of supernatural genre) is ok, when their transformations DON'T make them naked (like in Power Puff Girls Z, and the first type of transformation used by Jeane in Kamikaze Kaitou Jeane)

Well currently I'm just doing some general posting in threads and VMing... especially the latter since I've been very busy over the last month and haven't been able to socialise as much as I would have liked.

At this moment I'm just lurking in one of my threads, where I made a couple of sigs. I decided to post them with drop shadows included as a means of raising my works off the page, so as to stand from the text more. But not all members seem to be keen on the drop shadow and many are confusing it for the works themselves. Therefore I decided to post up a "poll" in the thread and have the members decide for themselves as to whether I should or should not include or the drop shadow.

One guy did give me reason though... but he just simply said that square sigs are not nice with drop shadows, which I didn't particularly find that helpful.

Hey there!

How are you doing?

If I had to pick one it would probably be the Gundam Wing movie called Endless Waltz.

With your skill level, I would suggest some mid-level audio exercises (which can be found anywhere, even the Internet such as the JLPT site). If you can find someone who can speak the language to you, that would be even better; its better to have some human practice. Plus with the amount of vocabulary you have already, speaking exercises can definitely help you.

Anime is a good tool as well, but like I said, its better to use it to supplement whatever exercises you are doing (that doesn't mean that anime should be seldom used; just that its better to have a strong foundation first). When using it as a listening tool, unless you already know the words, try not to watch stuff that has too much action in it or you could be distracted (unless you are confident enough to keep your focus, then by all means go for it).

With anime, it is important to note that it is supposed to be used as a supplement to any other listening tool that you are using. It can't be the only one because active listening (when you are first getting into it) requires you to pay attention to the words being said and how they are being said. Its hard (but not necessarily impossible) to do that with anime (if you don't have the technique down yet), due in part to:

1. All the action going on.

2. The variety of dialects being used, which can easily throw off vocabulary comprehension

When using anime as a listening tool, its best to study some vocabulary before watching. While you are watching, note which words you understood and what the characters where doing. If you want to get a better understanding of dialog, repeat the episode but don't stress out about it (Japanese is a hard language to learn for Western minded folks).

Its not that strange of a question.

Active Listening has three parts: Hearing, Understanding and Judging.

Hearing: Listening to what has been said and being able to repeat it (I say that no two tigers look the same; you repeat what I said).

Understanding: Take what the speaker said and understand it in your own way (try to figure out what I meant based on your knowledge).

Judging: Does your understanding make sense based on context (does your understanding of what I said make sense based on what is going on i.e does it make sense that you think that I am talking about bears when I am holding a picture of a tiger and couldn't possibly be talking about bears).