Why I Like to Mention
"Spring Time" All The Time

My favorite season is actually winter. I like snow - snow, snow, snow. A lot of the time though, I often end my comparisons with "In the spring time".

ie. "It hit me over the head like a Linux Penguin practicing the Third Amendment in the spring time."

In my experience, people often have asked me why I do that. It all dates back to a very long running joke between my brother and I, and it probably isn't even that funny.

When I first got my Playstation, the whole voice acting thing in RPGs freaked me out. One of my first RPGs for it was Jade Cocoon. There was lots of voice acting in it. Now, I take my gaming very seriously, but my brother loves to poke fun at the most serious things.

At one part in the game, there are these two girls named Mu and Ra that help you out, and they wear long pointy hats. So one day when I was playing, my brother was passing by, and apparently ticked off by the voice acting, started his own voice track for Ra in a horrible female voice about how she had a a funny pointy hat that blew off in the spring time. He kept on going on and on and on about it, and it eventually sank in... the fact that he was a psychopath and that I wasn't much better.

Anyhow, There you have it, the reason why I use "In The Spring Time" a lot. It is a tilt of the hat to my brother.

I am a man of contrast and have two distinctively different sides. One part of my personality is the "Diplomat", the person who talks with a solid methodology and rhythm who tries to express my opinion as best as I can and make it interesting. This side of me is definitely masculine, it's got that average guy kind of feel to it, and it's the part of me that deals with things in reality. The one who says "Stop whining and get back to work". This is the idiot side responsible for making Xynthica so ridiculously violent in my high school days, as well as most of Xynthica's Evolutions.

The second part of me, and perhaps my literal better half is the "Artist". This is the part of me that likes cute things with unbridled enthusiasm, talks really fast, loves to pinch squishy things and has the curvy feel of a freshly plucked radish. This side of me is clearly feminine, as although the Diplomat side deals with light positive emotions, the Artist side is delicate and deals with critical and complex emotional situations and characters. This is the side responsible for the Xynthica personality that is kind, gentle, delicate, innocent, curious and still pretty lethal.

I think everybody has these two sides in one form or another. When you are an artist, it is easy to switch from one side to another when convenient. When you talk to people, you separate your work from your pleasure, and vice versa. This sounds great in concept, after all, why mix your birthday balloons with your cactus collection? This works for a short time, but ultimately, it is a limiter for an artist. It is difficult enough to act in front of a camera, why put extra strain on yourself and try to do it in real life? This is something that prevents an artist from reaching their full potential, and it can shoot stress through the roof. Only when the Diplomat is coexisting with the Artist in a symbiotic relationship can I truly function properly.

When your mind thinks something that contradicts with what you say, you start losing your integrity. It is easy to sit on the fence, because you are afraid of offending people, but people will always find a way to be offended by you no matter how nice you try to be. One must combine the charisma of the Diplomat with the insight of the Artist, and deliver the opinion as a single package. A poorly wrapped, unreliably delivered package of the best chocolate chip cookies is worth as much as a well delivered package of garbage, and that my friend, is crap. Okay, you can argue that, but seriously, you do get my point right?

Celebrities I Admire

I find it constantly ironic that my favorite celebrities in real life are mostly male. I didn't really notice this for the longest time actually, until I though about it for a while. This is odd to me, because the anime characters I like are almost all female.

My favorite celebrities are Donald Trump, Conan O' Brian, Stephen King and Dennis Miller. All of them have the one quality that I am constantly trying to improve in myself - charisma. Talent can take you far, but Charisma is needed to take you all the way.

Each one has a distinctive charm to them, yet they all have very different personalities and values, but what it is about them that I admire most is their ability to attract attention, respect and admiration by being themselves.

Donald Trump might be a bit arrogant, but he can make fun of himself and openly fire off his opinion with confidence. His philosophy is sound, and his methodology is precise and effective. Not only is he a legendary business man, but he is an excellent showman. When you think of big businesses and big celebrities, you think Donald Trump. There might be plenty of millionaires and billionaires out there, but how many can you name? You don't just pull a celebrity personality out from a hat full of money.

Conan O' Brian is simply a genius, not because of the jokes that he tells that are written by other people, but because of his delivery. He has a distinctive style of self defacing humor, and as far as talk show hosts go, he has by far the best recovery rate from a horrible joke. Seldom does he tell a joke so horrible that he cannot successfully recover from it, and even when he does make mistakes, it is even more funny because of his smooth recovery that swings the momentum around. He wins either way. Conan O' Brian is a perfect example of a person who knows how to get up in style after falling down on a daily basis.

Stephen King is a man who defied all of sorts of humanly trials and made the horror genre actually worth reading with his distinctive style of exploiting ordinary childhood fears and extending them into a form that could frighten us as adults. One thing I truly respect about him is his ability to kill off his most beloved and most fleshed out characters with utter detachment. This may seem an evil thing, but it takes a lot of nerve, guts and experience to "Kill off your babies" in a truly horrible fashion. I, for one often do not have the nerve to defile my characters who I have become attached to, and that is a weakness. Sure, I might do child friendly work, but still, reality has no favorites, and the most gripping stories are soaking in reality. I am working on this detachment trait in my story telling. I do not want to do anything horrible to my sweet little Xyni, but I know that given the world that I put her in, it would be unrealistic if some very bad things didn't happen to her.

Finally, there is Dennis Miller. This is a guy with a tongue so sharp that he could cut a watermelon with it. He sits on no fence and slashes his opinions out at full force. His rants take no prisoners and kills all hostages, yet his execution is legendary, his timing is like a swinging pendulum torture device and he provides hit after hit of cutting humor in a such a fluent flow of thought that it's like a tether-ball whacking a person repeatedly in the face as it goes around the pole.

If you have looked at my style of talking and writing, I would like to think that I combine at least a shadow of the characteristics of these people into my personality, and I try to put much of these traits that I value so highly in my characters as well.

Now, in terms of personality, that is what I am aiming for in a celebrity, but on an artistic level, my role models are all female. The two top artists of all time that I admire in the manga and anime world are the "Queen of The Cute", Koge Donbo, and the all around legendary Rumiko Takahashi. I'll probably write a lot more about them sometime.

Fictional Characters I Like

Yup, we all have em', characters from the form of entertainment of our choice that we choose to value a little bit more than we really should from a realistically healthy point of mental analysis. Cow turds aside, if people had the inability to become attached to fictional characters, the world would be a more efficient place, but it'd be as boring to live in as seeing how many times you can shove a stick into a legally unsafe pipebomp from the starry pink sky in the spring time. So although it's probably ultimately a dead end angle in the grand scheme of the universe, I'd like to talk about fictional characters that I like. Almost all of them are from video games and anime, because it would seem like I actually do something else with my spare time if I mentioned Jesus (Nonfictional) and Hamlet as two of my strongest influences in story writing, which they are, but that deserves an entire section of it's own for another time.

This is one of the those really hard things to list, cause if I were to list every single anime and game character that I had a positive response toward, then I'd be diving into a list somewhere in the five hundreds. I will say this though, unlike the list of celebrities that I like, at the top of my list are girl stomping grounds. In other words, my favorite anime and video game characters of all time are female.

If you read the little write up on my two personality sides, the "Diplomat" and the "Artist", then you probably guess that while almost all of the celebrities in life that I like are male, almost all of the anime and manga characters that I like are female. This is of course, because my artist side is more focused on aesthetics and potential in a fantasy world... it's also the wussy side of me that tells me that love destiny and dreams are important to my sense of well being, which is all great and everything if you love surrounding yourself with hot steamy lactose intolerant cow turds.

Some of my high rankers for video games are Rydia of Final Fantasy IV, Tina of Final Fantasy 6, Meredy of Tales of Eternia, Riesz of Seiken Densetsu 3, and Noir of Cielgris Fantasm. As for the anime world, among my favorites are Deedlet of Lodoss War, Lum of Urusei Yatsura, Digiko of Digi Charat and Osaka and Chiyo of Azumanga Daioh, and of course, Chii of Chobits. The following are characters that I like with good reason though, who I personally believe influenced me in one way or another in an unusual way.

For video games, my favorite RPG character design, visually has been for the longest time, Rena Lanford of Star Ocean: The Second Story. Sure, she doesn't have much of an outstanding personality, but her appearance has been a long running influence for a casual, sweet, homely look. I also found her elongated ears admittedly interesting, as well as her blue hair. I tend to have a thing for female characters with blue hair, it usually relates to their personality as being soft, innocent and gentle, which I have to admit that I like in a female character, and most likely a girlfriend or a daughter.

Another character I love is Dizzy of Guilty Gear X fame. I must say that I was half impressed and half distressed by her character design. On one hand, her design is awesome, an instant fan favorite character design with unique character features that can be played off of extremely easily and for humorous and novel effect, such as the fact that she has two sentient wings on her back, a tail that can eat people, and the fact that she's 3 years old. She is also instantly recognizable, even people unaccustomed to anime character design can recognize her no matter how many different styles she is drawn in. She also has a good personality and a juxtaposing story, and since she was the last boss of Guilty Gear X, she has earned a reputation in that game for making countless players break their controllers in half. Her fanbase is so fanatical, that counter fans have popped up for the sole reason of trying to retain the balance.

With Dizzy, you know that something is popular when people make a conscious attempt to avoid conforming to it, just like people who hate Britney Spears or all those people who opposed Pokémon during it's golden age. Dizzy is in a much smaller fan circle, but she was an incredibly well loved character given the fact that she wasn't in the first Guilty Gear and that Guilty Gear isn't the best known fighting game around.

I am an extremely big fan of Daisuke Ishiwatari's work. Anyone who can voice act, compose a soundtrack and create incredibly elaborate character designs, all in the same project, earns a definite place in my book of respect. Still, the thing about Dizzy that distresses me is the fact that the first time I saw her character design, I realized that she was what I wanted Xynthica to look like and be like. As a matter of fact, the original Xynthica's teenage design was very similar in general concept to Dizzy, with the two different living wings, tail and everything. The only overall a difference in appearance was that she wore a lot less black and didn't show quite as much skin. Perhaps seeing Dizzy's design back then subliminally influenced me to make the current Xynthica much more different. Still, I must admit my respect for the character, especially for one that comes from a fighting game which are typically thought to be shallow in the character department.

In regards to anime characters that I like, there is one in particular, and she is quite obscure and comes from a less than renown series, but she is undoubtedly my favorite anime character of all time. The person I am talking about is Beginner from Mon Colle Knights. Mon Colle Knights is not an anime community recognized masterpiece, it was generally considered as a bottom barrel show. When it came to North America, it was massively edited, the writers did compensate with some pretty good localized humor though.

The second I saw Beginner, which I did think is a real weird name, I knew that I loved her character design, but that did not prepare me for her personality that I love even more. I remember it very well, I just couldn't stop laughing at each time she screwed up with escalating results. Every second that she was on the screen, I was happy, who ever her voice actresses were, both the English and the Japanese, they did a solid gold job of making her character fun, lovable and on crack.

Beginner was one of the very few anime characters that I was actually "hungry" for. The fact that she wasn't a main character made her appearances much rarer, and the taste of her on-screen presence always made me want more. She wasn't a very complex character, but she was a fricken' entertaining character, and in a show that I expected to be utter crap, I couldn't ask for more.

Speaking quite accurately, Beginner is close to Xynthica as a child. That is, she is potentially powerful, has a bubbly personality, but moments of tenderness and softness, and a tendency to screw up with utterly hilarious results. She also always fixes whatever problems she starts though, if only by pure chance and trial and error.

For the time, I thought that the episode I saw was the only episode that she was going to appear in. I was so incredibly happy when she appeared again later in the series. I have only ever seen two episodes of her and hope someday to see the original Japanese version. The original Japanese Mon Colle Knights however is quite rare, due to it's extremely limited success in both Japan and North America. I don't know if that make me an idiot for loving something so obscure and ranting about it at length, but I know that I love to be entertained, and Beginner is entertainment incarnate.

On a more recognizable route, another female character that I love very much is Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service. Beginner was a very fun character, but Kiki touched me on a personal level. When I first saw the film, I had traveled from my hometown of Vernon to Vancouver, and was living on my own for the first time ever. Kiki's Delivery Service is basically about a young witch moving out to the big city to start her own business and make a living. I could relate to it very well, and I still can, it has become my favorite anime movie of all time, along with Grave of the Fireflies, which just had me rolling tears near the end. I really felt a very human feel from both movies, but I am a positive person at heart and like happy things, so I felt that Kiki was an extremely well rounded character, and I love her mannerisms and ways of carrying about actions that you wouldn't normally notice a person doing in real life. Miyazaki is a master at giving characters very subtle animated personality oriented mannerisms, sometimes you notice things in life after seeing one of his films that you never noticed before.

Finally, there is one last character. I have watched more anime than I could count and have read more manga than I would like to admit in my otaku days, but I have only one male anime/manga character that I like enough to mention, the Great Teacher Onizuka Eikichi. It might not seem like it, but my character Xyni and Onizuka share much in common, despite everything that is obviously different. They do spur of the moment, and frequently morally incorrect actions for all the right reasons, most of the time at least. Although they might be failures as far as the measurements of society are concerned, they are both good at "Life", able to handle situations and improvise, albeit with some usual coincidences. They also have very silly ways of solving very serious problems and helping people, and I think that is a quality more real people need to have.

Well, there you have it. my favorite anime and video game characters of all time as designed by someone else. As always, I will always like characters that I can relate to more, and being inspired one way or another is really inevitable. The definition of style is to take what works for you and what you like, and then to mix it into the boiling pot of everything else you have passion for. I take great interest of what other things might inspire me in the years to come.

Why I Generally Dislike Western Cartoon Series

I love western unconventional adult and experimental animation. Old classics, such as Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal, or independent and experimental animation, and even the occasional classic Disney film, like Lilo & Stitch all rate high on my opinion list. Heck, I even love watching the countless archives of flash animation made around North America by all walks of life that is so plentiful as of now. Then there is the slight fact that I myself was trained in the ways of western animation which constitutes to my bias for western animation. Come to think of it, I love pretty much all things western animation, except for one huge glaring omission.

I generally do not like western cartoon series, the type shown on the television screen. This is partially because I'm a fairly strong anime fan, and you know how stubborn those folks can be and their obligatory hatred for all animation that is not anime, but it also stems because western animated series have a tendency to emphasize the scenario of each episode over the potential and personality of each character. This is partially, because traditionally, anime was made to follow story arcs based on manga, but western cartoons were designed to be isolated stories that can be shown in any order. Times are changing, but the roots are still there. A good number of anime series gradually expand and flesh out a character as you follow the series, great examples of this are Pita-Ten, Card Captor Sakura, Great Teacher Onizuka, Popotan, and these aren't even the best examples. I personally think Azumanga Daioh is one of the very best in this area, perhaps that is why it is my favorite anime series of all time, as I guarantee that you will fall in love with a least one of the girls's personalities. Generally, western cartoon series have interesting character, but from the first episode from the last, it is the same cast of characters and set of personalities, nobody changes from all of the events that have occurred.

Even well known anime after it gets its turned into chop liver on North American shores like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon and Yugioh have ultimately more developed characters than just about any western series. Honestly, take Powerpuff Girls as an example, Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup are pretty much exactly the same in the pilot episode as they are in the movie, there is virtually no character development. The key to the city that I am looking for is growth. Good characters should learn from failures and victories, and constantly make reference to past experiences. Some people might like to focus on the episode instead of the characters, but not me, for me, it's all about character development or I'm not watching. Yeah, anime has a few things going against it too, but compared to it's western counterpart, characterization and story aren't usually one of them.

I'm going to go on a slight tangent, and focus the majority of my hate into one particular story aspect. The thing that really ticks me off in western cartoons, particularly of the school life variety that have been popping up everywhere like "whack a mole", is the token female antagonist who is either filthy rich, annoying, sadistic, or all of the above.

I have seen a lot of relatively recent cartoons directed at children that have a nasty, annoying and ignorant female antagonist that usually tends to pick on or annoy the hell out of the male antagonist, like Jimmy Neutron, Rugrats, Fairly Odd Parents, Dexter's Laboratory, Hey Arnold and a lot more. I don't know what's with this common trend, I never had a sister to grow up with, but I doubt that it is so traumatic that I would make it a standard cartoon formula.

Of course, when female characters are shown as empowering, it is usually because they have some super power that allows them to beat the crap out of things, like the Powerpuff Gilrs, Jenny the Teenage Robot and embody typically male characteristics, like thrash talking and excessive amounts of violence in their idea of a solution. There is nothing wrong with this, anime does it to a fair extent as well, but the day I see a show on normal television in North America for children with a kind, calm and gentle female protagonist that is praised for retaining feminine qualities in a chaotic world and is not the end cuts off of a cow from Japan, is the day that hell freezes over. Given the mentality of the current North American population, it'd either do extremely well, or flop like a blowfish, but hey, you can't say that it wouldn't be different. Heck, otaku still speak of tales around the television screen of how they butchered Card Captor Sakura to try and make Lee Syaoran the main character and reduce Sakura to a one dimensional, whiny, annoying twit by cutting the episodes into pieces and removing the first seven episodes so that the series starts when Lee Syaoran is introduced. You can't blame the editors entirely for trying to get a bigger audience to watch import animation, but if anyone starts giving the old rant about anime being the epitome of sexism in Japan, you can always point out that it apparently wasn't sexist enough for a North American audience.

I'm not exactly a feminist, but there is such thing as over saturation. The token female bully in western kiddy fair cartoons is actually surprisingly rare in anime. Yeah, yeah, you got your occasional anime girl that takes out a interdimensional giant mallet once in a while or launches rockets at you, or punches you in the face for saying something stupid, but the other 80% of time, usually, they are on good terms with the male antagonist, and they almost always have a good reason if they possess actual spite. The worst thing is that the protagonist often has consistently negative feelings towards the female antagonist instead of being graceful and understanding. They're general mentality is to get revenge or to avoid confrontation. I can definitely say that it is something people can relate to, but when you fantasize about turning your sister into a chicken and cooking her, there's definitely something off of a good moral story in the works. The thing I hate though in western cartoons though is that there is really no good reason for why the female antagonist hates the male protagonist. There are only three reasons:

1. Is prejudice

2. Is a sibling

3. Is secretly in love

Anyhow, long story short, I generally dislike most current western cartoon series made for the regular North American cartoon consuming population. I don't dislike the animation, by most standards, western animation is simpler, but much more fluid than anime, but I dislike the lack of attention to strong characterization and emphasis upon a unifying story.

Western animation has gone leaps and bounds in maturity since it's massive decline since the good old early days of animation when it was reduced to kiddy fodder, but for the most part, cartoons are still synonymous with children, which means there will always be a full spectrum of elements in life that will not be commonly explored on most conventionally broadcast television. There are a lot of other good western cartoon series out there, but the basic rule is, if it has humans in it, I'm probably going to hate it. There are of course, exception to every rule, as always, but from where I'm standing, my opinion seems valid enough.

Western Cartoon Series That I Like

Sponge Bob Square Pants

I cannot state how much I absolutely love this cartoon. I like Ren and Stimpy, Jenny the Teenage Robot, Animaniacs and Freakazoid too, but Sponge Bob takes the cake for me. It takes some of the best aspects of western animation, and plays on them with excellent characterization and story telling. What I love most about it, is the fact that it is uniquely North American, you simply cannot imagine something like this coming out of Japan, it applies the comical and exaggerated effects of western animation, while displaying a surreal universe, and even a crude yet hilarious way of poking fun at itself by frequently mixing in live action, something very few animation series have done, probably because it defies all common sense in the animation world. It knows that it is a cartoon, and pushes it to it's furthest extent. None of the characters really change during the series, but their reaction to different scenarios is almost always guarantee to be funny, and their chemistry between each other is always well done and fleshed out.

What I like in particular about the series is the subliminal message between the young and the old, the naive and the mature, and fantasy and reality. Sponge Bob is like a child, but in his cartoon universe, the things he does, like jelly fishing or blowing bubbles into disastrous shapes after going through a series of maneuvers make perfect sense to him, but are flights of fancy to us adults. The character Squidward is my personal favorite, he is the adult like reminder of reality that many of us more mature people can relate to, he is frequently skeptical of Sponge Bob's childish behavior, however, he is constantly proven wrong by Sponge Bob, this makes the show retain a plausible reference point. He is a lovably miserable character.

Also, the visual jokes are incredibly well done, my favorite of all Sponge Bob episodes is the one where he takes the boating test, which he ultimately fails 39 times, which remind me greatly of my own driving test, and I just love that. The teacher's name is Ms. Puff, and every time Sponge Bob crashes, she puffs up in direct ratio to how bad the accident is. In the end, Sponge Bob gets into an accident so bad that she can barely squeeze into the ambulance and they have to shove her in like a sardine. That was perhaps, the funniest thing I have ever seen in a western cartoon, I absolutely loved it. Another favorite part was when Squidward was jelly fishing all bandaged up in a wheel chair and irritated a huge building sized jelly fished that blasted him with a huge volt of electricity. I thought that giant jelly fish was really cute. I also love Gary, Sponge Bob's pet snail, any person who has a snail as a pet is a winner in my book.

Basically, what I love the most about Sponge Bob Square Pants is that it cleanly offers me a different type of humor that I cannot get from anime, and does so incredibly well. I can always get my dose of big eyed, shiny haired anime girls somewhere in the anime world, but it takes a special kind of cartoon to gain my admiration on the western frontier and for that, I give it and it's creators my highest degree of respect and approval for a western animation series, something which I typically do not watch out of leisure.