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Anime Heretics
Newsletter
December, 2000

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It's Issue #2! Yes, we managed to come up with enough stuff to fill another issue, and you can see the last bit shows a whole lot of ideas I tossed around, which can be used for future issues. If anyone wants to take one of them and run with it, consider yourself welcome. After all, this thing can only be more interesting with more contributors.

First, some news:

I finally got around to vid-capping a bunch of stuff from the tapes I had so far from A-kon 11. (I'm still waiting on the rest of it, Karsten! ;), so there are new pictures on the Anime Heretics of Arlington website. Also, I fixed the glitch that was preventing people from watching the Mpegs of celebrities saying, "Anime Heretics Rock!" It seems Tripod doesn't allow Mpegs to be viewed directly, so they're all ZIPped up. Download the ones you want, unzip 'em, and enjoy a bit of random silliness.

The Anime Heretics of Houston seems to be off to a good start. According to Clint, they've got some flyers printed up and are planning to hold their first meeting on December 10th. They'll be showing Please Save My Earth (you know, I actually haven't seen that one yet :). No website to link to yet, but hopefully there will be one soon. Good luck, Houston, and welcome to the Anime Heretics!

Speaking of websites, we can always use more publicity to get the word out to each local area that we exist. If you have a personal website, please add your local Anime Heretics branch to your links page. Be proud to be a member! The two known (and active) pages are at:

Anime Heretics of Arlington: http://www.animeheretics.org
Anime Heretics of Austin : http://kse3.dyndns.org/ah/

If you'd like to use the Anime Heretics logo, you are welcome to. You can go to pretty much any page at the Anime Heretics of Arlington site and see it. Simply right-click on the image, choose "Save As", and download it to your computer. Please do not just put its URL in your IMG tag...Tripod (where I'm hosted) has started disabling images that people do that with by changing the permissions on their end so nobody can use it. Aside from that, it's only a few kilobytes...you don't need to steal bandwidth to display it :)

Now with all that out of the way, enjoy this month's newsletter!

In the spirit of the season, I thought it would be a good time to put together a fun shopping list. Maybe a lot of these things would be impossible to acquire (or hellishly expensive ;), but we can all dream, can't we? I would have had more, but my poor little brain was stretched just coming up with these...maybe you guys can come up with more (and better) ones?

Anyway, without further rambling, I present my...

Top 10 Things to get your Otaku for Christmas

  1. A gift certificate to Mechs 'R' Us....maybe he or she can buy a bolt or plate of metal...
  2. A copy of the "Universe of the Four Gods"
  3. A Pickahu dartboard
  4. Her very own senshi transformation wand
  5. A cabbit -- cute, cuddly, and convenient transportation!
  6. The phone number for the Goddess Helpline
  7. Any hentai voice actress semi-dressed as her character, gift-wrapped in cellophane
  8. A "Make Your Own Android" kit -- just add kitten brain
  9. Lucky Kitty gym shorts

    and the number one gift for your otaku for Christmas....

  10. Plane tickets for a week-long vacation in the Qinghai province of China!

The Heretics on Happy German Techno

by Franimebabe

Fran's oh-so-interesting little input on what's up in the Anime Heretics of Arlington. I'm stealing some of this from my "Thanks to the fans, Mom & Dad, our supporters..." speech for band at a recent school board meeting.

I'm listening to happy German techno while writing this, so it may get weird.

One thing I like about this anime club is that it isn't dead. We have more and more people joining, instead of more and more forgetting. But I think that this club still has the potential to go further, faster. With such pride, a bright spirit, and a good leader that keeps everything going, even if it means constantly nagging some members for tapes, drawings, and other contributions, we are unstoppable.

One thing that lets us gain more members is that we're open to them. We don't disclose ourselves to only the regulars and ignore the newbies. The dream to become one of the biggest anime clubs not associated with a school is very much within our grasp. We have come up with many ideas to make the group bigger and better, and to help make it prosper, but few of these ideas or plans have taken action, or enough action to make an impact.

So yeah...get off your ass and do something for your local Anime Heretics. I know we keep saying, "We need to do that, we should do this..." and even if it's getting kind of annoying, we still need to come up with ideas for the Anime Heretics to keep the members motivated and proud to say that they're part of the Anime Heretics, or it could eventually wither away to the anime club graveyard like most all other incompetent anime clubs, and we've been thriving for too lont to result to that.

You can take away our water guns, you can take away our pajama parties, you can even take away our right to attend anime conventions, but you can never take away our freedom! And love for anime!

HEY! I just came up with a cool idea! What if we come up with an Anime Heretics Theme Song? Well, that's all I'm going to say about that, because I am no good at writing lyrics. I could give a shot at doing the music part though. *_*

by Throkda Jones

Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Some people want anime in the mainstream; some people don't; some people want it, but only under certain conditions. Myself, I don't want any anime in the mainstream. Just think how long it would take to get all that water out! You'd never be able to play your tapes again! Sure, maybe DVDs could survive, but they'd be all smeared with dirt and you'd have to buy something to clean it off without scratching the disk up.

And what if it was a really good show? Something that you got fansubbed, and then some company bought the rights, so all the fansubbers stopped distributing it, but the company who bought the rights never actually put the show on tape? Now the anime that you just let fall into the mainstream is in some kind of underwater limbo, entertaining any highly developed fishes who figured out how to program VCRs, while you may never get to watch your favorite show again!

You bang your head against the wall, realizing what a butterfingers you were, and you swear never to go near the mainstream again, just in case you trip or something. After all, you never know...maybe the mainstream is cursed or something, like Jusenkyo, and it calls people to it with its seductive babbling waters. Once it has you in its nefarious clutches, it telekinetically moves a stick or a rock into your path, causing you to fall, so that it can take your good anime and destroy it! Once cursed by the mainstream, you're drawn to it again and again, like some kind of zombie, doomed to lose yet more anime in its unforgiving waters.

But the mainstream has strange needs, and sometimes changes course just like the oceans change their tides. Sometimes it wants lots and lots of a particular anime, and goes to great lengths to get it, or maybe it just catches the first few episodes, decides it doesn't like the series, and never bothers that show again. But then again, sometimes it devours anything related to a show that's terrible, and then it's not such a bad loss.

So rise up! Fight the evil curse of the mainstream! Walk by there with your worst anime and "trip" over that log there. "Oops," you can say, "I just lost my copy of __________!" What a terrible loss to the fan community!" Then get up, dust yourself off, and walk home, whistling a happy tune, to watch the good stuff that you keep locked in a waterproof safe, just in case a mainstream water golem comes looking for you.

An Interview with Ryo-ohki

by Qeorita

Recently, I had a chance to sit down and chat with my favorite anime character, Ryo-Ohki. I got to go in-depth with her. Her answers were very informative, and in some cases, intriguing.

Qeorita: How do you like being the cutest character on Tenchi Muyo?

Ryo-Ohki: Myah!

Q: Do you wish that Tenchi was *really* your father?

R [hopping around excitedly] : Myah! Myah! Myaahh!

Q: So what's the REAL story on you and Ken-Ohki?

R [pauses, blushing, then shyly] : Myaaaaaaaah.... Myah!

Q: What's your theory behind the whole Tokimi thing?

R: Myah! Myah! Myah! Myaah! Myaaaaaaahhh!!!

Q: Thank you for your time. Your answers were very insightful.

R: Myah! Myaaaaaah!

by Throkda Jones

Yet again in the spirit of Christmas, I'm starting up the whole Anime Christmas Carols thread again. Last year, we had a lot of fun taking common Christmas carols, and writing anime-related lyrics for them. You can find those here In the meantime, I present:

Censorship is Killing Good Shows (to "Santa Clause is Coming to Town")

You better watch out,
You better buy subs,
Saturday morning is strangling some dubs.
Censorship is killing good shows.
You've seen it by DiC,
You've seen is on Fox.
Skip the first ep,
And give it new plots.
Censorship is killing good shows.
They make it safe for children,
Or so they like to say.
How stupid do they think kids are?
They weren't born yesterday! So,
You buy DVD's.
You teach your kids right.
Learn to tell fiction
Apart from real life.
Censorship is killing good shows!

"Why do you Still Watch Cartoons?"

by Throkda Jones

You know, this is one of the hardest questions to answer, especially to your non-otaku peers, and especially if their parents were the type to nip that whole childhood thing in the bud by taking away their toys and making them start watching the news as soon as they turned 8, or something. "Can't have them acting like children," they'd say, "It's a grown-up world out there."

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that few networks show afternoon cartoons anymore, and Saturday morning is only three or four hours long, and riddles with nature and science shows. Maybe this is why kids are starting to do "grown-up" things at younger ages. Did you know that this last Halloween, I had around two dozen trick-or-treaters, but only 6 of them were in costume? I mean, why not throw tradition out altogether and have them go door-to-door yelling, "Gimme candy!" People just aren't letting their kids be kids anymore.

And then there's our generation, the ones who grew up with stuff like the Transformers and G.I. Joe, and watched Superfriends on Saturday morning. We grew up with our cartoons, and we played with our shape-changing robots, and dreamed of being superheroes and cowboys and stuff. We were encouraged to be children. Then we grew up, and saw that that privilege was starting to be wiped out.

Maybe when we saw our first anime, we thought it had great effects, superior artwork, or a continuous storyline and evolving characters, and that's what drew us to it. Maybe we saw that when something bad happened in anime, there was usually a consequence, and sometimes sacrifice for a noble cause was acceptable. These are the reasons I usually hear about why people like anime.

But maybe, just maybe...you're just watching cartoons, and letting your kid out for a little while. Because if the children in this country aren't allowed to be kids anymore, maybe someone has to be.

Ideas for Things to Write

by Throkda Jones

When I ask people if they can write an article for the newsletter to help spread the work around a little, the almost universal response is, "But what would I write about?" I usually just say anything, and hope for the best, but I can see how that probably doesn't help much. So, with a bit of brainstorming, I came up with a bunch of ideas that should keep this newsletter going for a while. If anyone wants to take one of these ideas and write it, they're more than welcome. If not, maybe it'll give some of you ideas for your own submissions. Obviously, some of these topics would require some research, rather than just babbling a general opinion like we've been doing so far...but anyway, here's the list:

Article Ideas

List Ideas (You Know, Top Ten Type of Things)

Column Ideas (You know, a regular space every month)

That's about it for this month. E-mail your submissions (articles, columns, songs, artwork, poetry, fiction, whatever...) to me at throkda@swbell.net.