Cold Opening

Hello, blogosphere.

I'm Nick, you can call me Headlessnewt or, if you're feeling rather snarky, "Kenshin," after Himura Kenshin, my teenage hero.  If you need me to explain where he's from, things are going to get difficult from here, because this is going to be a blog dedicated to my reviews of the anime I watch.  Naturally, if you're going to take a critic's opinions into consideration, you should know a little bit about what that critic likes regarding the medium that they're discussing, so that seems like the best place to begin here.

So, a little about me.  I'm a twenty-something who works in the MMO Industry professionally, so I deal with a lot of nerds as a matter of course.  I've been watching anime for well over a decade, and I am semi-fluent in Japanese (yes, I got most of it from watching a whole lot of subtitled anime, yes I have also taken classes).  I am a very experienced role-player, and I read when I don't have the option to watch anime.  I'm a troper and very interested in story elements and creative interpretations of old ideas.  I'm of a very strong opinion that a story which is too long is a bad story; I despise filler and it takes a lot for a series that is longer than 52 episodes to impress me.

While I'm on the subject, since I will be using this a lot, I provide my rating system.  Both because I find it more useful than a simple X/Y stars method, I use a letter grade system as follows.

F rank series are terrible.  Spare your eyes and your soul.  I rarely give this ranking.
D rank series are bad.  It may have been  waste of time, incoherent, unoriginal or just extremely meh.  Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals gets this ranking for unoriginal characters, predictable story, weak animation and general badness.
C rank series are okay.  This is my "average" ranking.  They may have parts which are genuinely excellent but ultimately fall short, or may have a brilliant concept that isn't played through thoroughly.  Moon Phase gets this ranking for unique characterization and some very creative design decisions, but an ultimately weak and poorly followed-through story.
B rank series are good.  While there are no series that I would recommend to absolutely everyone, B rank series I recommend to anyone interested in their subject material or overall genre.  A series that would otherwise be C rank with an excellent ending or one with a weak concept and writing that manages to be just plain fun despite it will also often earn a B rank from me.  Murder Princess gets a B rank for being a very short, unpretentious but creative story with an excellent soundtrack and amusing characters.
A rank series are excellent.  They are flawless: excellently told, lovely to watch, emotional, thought-provoking, with believable characters and a well-constructed story.  These are the series that I will recommend to people to prove that anime can tell stories of a genre they might otherwise think they can't.  Higurashi no Naku koro ni is an A rank series for being a beautiful work of character and setting-based horror and mystery.
S rank are series which are not only excellent, but they break the mold of what anime means.  These series challenge the veiwer's way of thinking and leave us deeply and thoroughly affected.  I am very hesitant to give out this rating, and I will acknowledge that even more so than the others, the series that I define as S rank say more about me than they do about the series themselves.  Neon Genesis Evangelion is an S rank series for being not only an A rank series, but for opening up the viewer's own mind and showing it to them, revealing hope, depth, fear and possibility.  Naturally, viewers mileage varies.

In all cases, I will sometimes add either additional letters and +'s to signify that a series is close to the rank above it, but for some reason I could not give it the higher rank.  This occurs most often in the B and A ranks, but I have also found quite a few series that are C+ rank, okay, and I liked them, but I couldn't genuinely say they were good.  For example, Toradora! I rank as AA+, because it is positively the best crafted Romantic Comedy that I've ever seen.

Anyway, I'm new to the actual blogging thing, so I will leave my first post off here.  I don't suspect many people will be reading this for a while, but hopefully when they do, it'll serve as a kind of crash course into the beginnings of the way I talk about the strange and wonderful things that anime has produced.