The moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived: Japes has returned from Japan! Please, don’t make too much of a fuss. Put the confetti away, save the cake for another time, the fireworks were a nice thought, but I’m sure there’s a better time to break them out…

Nah, who am I kidding. It’s party time everyone! Your favorite writer has finally returned after months of hiatus! It’s time to pop open that champagne you’ve been saving!

Ahem. Moving on.

If there’s one thing that surprised me about my time in Japan, it’s the amount of personal growth I did in a rather concentrated amount of time. Who would have known that living by yourself in a different country halfway across the world would do that to a person? Who could have guessed, right…? In the past three months, I have developed far more in my personality, my theological beliefs, my spiritual habits, my career goals, my personal goals, and everything else, than I ever have in a period of three months elsewhere in my life. But you know what’s really been solidified these past few months? My brilliance in anime selection.

Speaking as a bit of an expert on the matter, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that if you’re not watching the same shows I am this season, you should probably take a closer look at your life decisions. Why don’t we take a quick look at the five shows I am following?

Ore Monogatari:

Anime is filled and overflowing with generic shoujo. Stories of the girl falling in love with the attractive, but somewhat cold and distant, male lead are around every corner. Sometimes these stories fulfill whatever girlish desires you might have to see somewhat unhealthy pubescent romances come to life, and sometimes they let you down with their overuse of the shoujo romance formula.

Ore Monogatari… kind of ignores everything I just said in the last three sentences and paves its own way. Never before have you seen a show that resolves dozens of episodes of Marmalade Boy in just three episodes, and then spends the rest of the time showing how overdramatized problems can actually be very simply overcome. Also, the female lead is adorable and the male lead has fish lips. What more can you ask for? Watch it now!

Gakkou Gurashi:

After reviewing with another Tangles writer, I recently realized that the stereotypical zombie apocalypse motif that seems to have penetrated nearly all forms of media at some point or another has had yet to truly reveal itself in the anime world. While zombies have made appearances, to be sure, the standard zombie apocalypse that Westerners tend to look for in their media is all but absent (High School of the Dead hardly counts). It is because of this that I say, surprising even myself, that Gakkou Gurashi is filling a bit of an unexpected void.

While hardly a masterpiece, Gakkou Gurashi has managed to play its viewers in its plot twists by almost abusing its moe tropes (think Madoka Magica, but with a tad more cognitive dissonance). I would hate to spoil anything for you, so maybe you should just check it out for yourself. Watch it now!

Working!!!:

If you didn’t like Working! and Working!! (that’s one exclamation mark and two exclamation marks, respectively), well, there’s probably no hope for you. Those hopeless people aside, everyone who matters will absolutely love this newest season. Remember how you enjoyed the delicate dynamics between the diverse cast of the first two seasons, but were constantly frustrated by the show’s cop-out resolutions that did nothing but prolong the problems? Well, that still kind of happens, actually…

But! The third season does more than any of its predecessors in attempting to resolve the issues we’ve been dying to see resolved for years now! There is really no reason not to watch Working!!!! (That fourth exclamation mark is me exclaiming that you should watch Working!!! with three exclamation marks!) Watch it now!

Charlotte:

Every anime that has ever made you cry has been written by Jun Maeda (Kanon, Air, Clannad, and others). What else needs to be said. If it makes you cry, obviously it is a masterpiece. Watch it now!

Akagami no Shirayuki-hime:

Okay, well maybe you can skip this one…

Obviously, you’ve never heard of better reasons to watch any anime (with the exception of Akagami no Shirayuki-hime). If you have, you are doubtless fooling yourself and should repent of your ways. Feel free to come back to me once you’ve come to your senses and have caught up with the aforementioned five current anime (again, probably with the exception of Akagami no Shirayuki-hime). But until then, I guess I’ll just have to keep you waiting for the next entry of your favorite column by your favorite writer of your favorite blog.

Because I’m the best.

Also, as Kaze reminded me, your favorite anime is bad, and you should feel bad for watching bad anime.

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In case you didn’t notice, this article has been a bit of a satire on overinflated opinions, particularly within the blogosphere. I hope you weren’t too offended, if offended at all. If you know me, you know that I sometimes like to act “high and mighty,” but it’s all pretense, really. One of my most significant pet peeves is the pretense of Christians who seem to have it “all figured out” (they’ve got their favorite theologians, they’ve pegged the “best” atonement theory, and so on), yet they seem to ignore what is arguably the most important part of their sacred text: the Jesus of the Gospels.

Of the lessons Jesus taught in his mission to usher in the new age, one of the foremost was that of humility. While I stand by the opinions I wrote about above, let’s all be clear that my opinions are simply that: my opinions. God didn’t create a world of mindless automata to copy each other. That would be boring. He created a world of unique individuals, each with his or her own perspective on, well, just about everything.

I’d love it if more people thought like I did and liked what I did. But, you know what, if the world was more like I wished it was, it would probably be a much more boring place. But let’s all agree to join together in doing at least one thing the same, and that’s not giving the Japes above too much credit.