Anime: a fascinating artistic style that stretches our understanding of aesthetics and storytelling, or an octopus gangbang adored by people who spend too much time arguing on the Internet and getting their pillows pregnant? On the one hand, anime has long been a field where awesome drawings and out-there stories are given room to roam, stretch, and and done kickass living robot suits. On the other, it’s also an art form whose presence in someone’s social media avatar almost certainly guarantees a toxic personality. So as metalheads, we must ask ourselves: is there good anime out there, anime for us, and if so, what is it?
Thankfully, on this week’s episode of our heavy metal talk show Last Words, hosts Katy Irizarry (Season Of Mist), Zeena Koda (Everything’s Political Podcast), and guest host Drew Kaufman (Two Minutes to Late Night) talk anime and manga with Kyle Anderson, frontman for Canadian deathcore upstarts Brand of Sacrifice. Kyle discusses his own manga project, not to mention what manga and anime influenced his band.
“Manga is a Japanese comic book read the other way around form what we’re used to here in North America or the West,” explains Kyle, “and the band is based off of a manga called Berserk. Specifically, there is a symbol that the protagonist has on his neck called the Brand of Sacrifice, which leads to demons haunting him constantly. The band was sort of a side project from another band I used to have called The Afterimage. It was supposed to be one EP, nothing more than that, based on my favorite manga…and it ended up being the main project here at this point.”
Check out the full episode below:
And if that doesn’t have you taking an entire goddamn episode to build up a special move that you never even use because your enemy reveals that he’s your cousin or something, check out the full, uncensored podcast version of Last Words here:
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Words by Chris Krovatin
