Exodus "Blood In Blood Out" Review

...I know I normally try to say stuff as fairly as I can and save hinting towards my thoughts on the album before I actually get to talking about it, but I have to say this right now: I called the problem with this album back when Dukes was fired (I still have the article I wrote (but didn't publish) on the same day Zetro returned to prove it) and I'm not ashamed to gloat a bit by saying "Told you so!" Zetro does a good job with what he has to work with, but let's face it: this album showcases why firing a singer and then getting your new (...OK, old in this case, but you get the point, I'm sure!) one to record the material the previous singer left behind without any real changes to help them get material that suits their voice better is just a flat out TERRIBLE idea, and I feel vindicated by seeing so many people (critics, fans of the band...heck, some of them even people who hadn't liked Dukes in the band!) going "This album would have been better with Dukes singing it"! And the Zetro fans who demanded his return have nobody to blame except for themselves that the band are now weaker than they would have been had they kept Dukes for at least this album. Maybe that's proof that even a stopped watch is right twice a day, but still, vindi-fucking-cation!

...OK, now I've had my little moment of smug satisfaction, back to pretending to be a professional.

As my somewhat emotional outburst would have no doubt told you (or my review of "Salt The Wound", which you can read here), Exodus brought back their most iconic lead vocalist Steve Souza for this album after firing their former lead vocalist of nine years Rob Dukes (and did it about four months before this album came out (specifically, Souza was announced as being back in the band on June the 8th of this year), so you can imagine that Souza had to record the vocals VERY quickly to ensure this album didn't miss the deadline it had for it!). This album has been in the works since at least the summer of 2012, as the band started writing material for the album back then, and the band even entered the studio to record the album in March of this year, so you can imagine that this album has been taking a while to get done thanks to Gary Holt's commitments with Slayer.

And that is honestly why I have always said that this album, despite Souza being on vocals for it, is a Dukes-era Exodus album: had Hanneman not passed away and, as such, kept Holt busy for long enough that Dukes ended up being fired during the recording of this album, this album would have almost certainly been released with Dukes on vocals and it would not be pretending to be a reunion album for Exodus with Souza. I do not intend to sound like I'm blaming Hanneman for the fact that this album is the way it is, as that is completely unreasonable and clutching at straws which simply do not deserve to be tugged at for ANY reason, only that the knock on effects of Holt remaining with Slayer in the aftermath of Hanneman's passing delayed the release of this album significantly (although, to be fair, Hanneman's illness did also delay work on Slayer's upcoming album, which has been in development (in terms of writing material) since November 2011) and that, had these delays not happened, it is incredibly likely that this album would have had the vocalist the material was written for singing on it.

But you guys don't want to hear me ranting about this kind of thing constantly, I imagine. You want me to review this album and back up the bit of gloating I made at the start of this article.

Well, your wish is my command! So let's just to the cover art analysis!

Well, it's...I like the real dark vibe the artwork goes for, but I have to be honest, it just doesn't do much for me. It feels like the cover for a death metal album that accidentally got given to Exodus, as it doesn't completely fit in with what the band's previous cover arts were like, but they liked it enough to keep it. It's not necessarily bad, but I wouldn't have expected a cover like this on a thrash metal album, as it's just a bit too dark in terms of what the contents of the cover displays. The colour combination is also a bit weird for a thrash metal album: it seems a bit too brightly coloured overall and it doesn't quite work because of it. I'm not saying you can't have a brightly coloured cover art with really dark contents on it for a thrash metal album, but it rarely works well and I highly doubt it's ever been done to the extent that this album has been done.

Also, zombies on the cover of a metal album. How original, not like I've haven't seen that before...now, in fairness, I've never seen zombies eating themselves before now, but still, can we stop putting zombies on everything, they're not scary any more!

Well, let's get the material looked at.

Well...the material on this album is certainly competent, I have to give the band that, but I cannot shake off the whole feeling that the album is lacking something. It's very much like a typical thrash album by an old guard member of the thrash scene: it doesn't have the speed of the band's 80's material (although, in fairness, Exodus have been like this since Tempo Of The Damned, so this is hardly a new development) and it tries to get by through sheer intensity. While Overkill can manage that AND get some good speed up as well ("Ironbound", anyone?), Exodus...don't. More than half of the songs on the album feel like they're longer than they need to be, with the end result that there is a strong feeling that the whole album has a long of great songs on it...and the band forgot that it had to end them. This is a rather annoying trend which has carried over from the Atrocity Exhibition duo and is something which hurts this album more than it really should do, as most of the songs COULD have been really good had the band trimmed them down a bit. Even the complete snoozefest (to me) "Body Harvest" (which is, interestingly, one of only two tracks on the album NOT written by Gary Holt, being written by Lee Atlas with Steve Souza and Jack Gibson co-writing the lyrics with Atlas: the other song is "Honor Killings", written exclusively by Atlas) could have been passable had it been cut down a bit, but, at six and a half minutes where it just plods along for far longer than it should have done, it becomes nearly unbearable in how boring it becomes!

That's the word which needs to be remembered for this album: boring. Because, for me, that's what sums this album up. It's just intensity with nothing to back it up and make it worth actually listening to. Some songs get it right, but most of them are the fast short tracks (most of which, coincidentally, were the album's singles), which at least indicates that Gary Holt can write old school thrash songs very well, but the band's new style...not so much. I'll be fair, most of the songs have interesting moments, so it's not like they're complete throwaways, but good luck trying to remember which song has the good part you really like if it's not the chorus of the song, as most of the songs feel somewhat interchangeable! Now, in fairness, a lot of thrash can feel like this, but this is not a retro band trying to play thrash just like it's the 80's: this is Exodus trying to play thrash metal in their style of it, and I'm still struggling to tell the difference between each song when it's not "Salt The Wound" or the title track! This doesn't feel exciting like Nervosa did at all, and I could forgive that if it felt like I was really enjoying listening to it...but I'm not. It's perfectly fine as background music, but as a proper listening experience which I focus upon...I'm just bored stiff by it. And that's really not a phrase that should be thrown around in relation to thrash metal!

On a performance level, everyone certainly does themselves justice. Tom Hunting is a great drummer and he certainly proves that multiple times across the course of this album while everyone else puts out at least respectable performances. Steve Souza is very much an acquired taste when it comes to his vocals, as he can come across as having a REALLY nasal singing voice which can grate on you if you're not used to them (and, even when you are, you might need to be in the right mood to really like his voice), but I can't say he does a bad job on this album. The problem is...well, I'm going to have to get very boring with this bit, so bear with me: whenever I think of Steve Souza as a vocalist, the mental image that comes to mind is of a sadistic villain who is in control of every situation: he has the kind of voice that has a more subtle bite to it than more thrash metal vocalists, but is no less menacing than most thrash metal vocaists can do. By contrast, Rob Dukes had a lower, more angry yell due to his roots in hardcore punk which made him sound like he was pissed off at you and liable to kill you if he got his hands on a suitable tool to do that with. With the album written with Dukes' voice in mind, you've got a situation where it sounds like the sadistic villain is trying to angrily yell at you...and it just comes across as comical because Souza's voice simply doesn't suit that kind of vocal performance. The end result is that the vocal performance on this album, while still good on its own merits, is just not right for the material on this album.

There are three guest appearances scattered around this album, but the only one I'd say actually adds anything to the album is Dan The Automator's on the opening track, "Black 13", as his atmospheric introduction to the album opens the album on a weird (for an Exodus album) note that is nonetheless still quite the interesting addition to the album. Kirk Hammett's guest appearance on "Salt The Wound" certainly SOUNDS like him, but you could be forgiven for missing his appearance if you weren't aware of it, and Chuck Billy, while certainly recognisable as him due to his distinctive vocals, ultimately doesn't make much of an impression on this album, although it was certainly interesting to hear him singing underneath Steve Souza!

Production wise, I have to give credit for the fact that the bass is more present than usual, but it's still too quiet for my liking and the mastering...well, put it down for my usual complaints on this one.

So, overall, what do I think of this album? Well, it's a bit disappointing, all truth be told. For a band claimed to hold the true legacy of thrash metal in their hands among Bay Area thrash fans, it's not an especially interesting album overall and certainly more than a few steps down from Tempo Of The Damned. I just would have expected to have gotten far more than this album provided. If you liked the singles from this album...than that's probably all that you really need to take from this album, as the rest of the album is pretty much just longer, slowed down and less interesting versions of those songs. I guess die hard thrash fans would find this far more enjoyable than I did, but I just feel like the band dropped the ball on this one. Even if Dukes had been on this album and provided vocals that fit in more with what the album was going for, it still wouldn't have saved it from ultimately being boring, and that is ultimately the biggest disappointment for me. Nothing is offensively bad about the album and the songwriting is at least acceptable overall, so it might be worth checking out if you're a huge thrash fan, but two really strong songs from an eleven song album, with the rest being merely listenable and not really all that memorable...I'm sorry, but that's not enough for me to really want to recommend this album to anyone, and, for an album which is one of the most hyped albums of the year, that's FAR less quality material than I would have expected to have gotten from this album. Put this album down as an album for the die hard thrash fans only, I guess...or just put this album down, ha bloody ha...

Final Rating: 6 Out Of 10

Personal Favourite Tracks: "Blood In Blood Out", "Salt The Wound"

Offline note: I was going to give this a 5 Out Of 10, but I started to find this album growing on me while I was writing the review, so I bumped it up. I still stand by the rest of my review, though!

Intolerance + Why Religion Is Not (Completely) To Blame

Well, there goes my good mood. According to a bit of news circulating metal sites at the minute, a Christian zealot in Oklahoma has murdered a fellow student at his university under the belief that he was practising witchcraft...and the victim was noted for being a metal fan.

Oh, for the love of...you know, this kind of thing makes me question my already limited faith in humanity, because it showcases idiocy on a level so ridiculous that it's just staggering to believe that people can make leaps of logic like that and not even think to check their facts. I'm only not angry at the minute because I'm too incredulous to want to yell about this in the slightest!

First of all, let me spell this out VERY clearly, for the benefit of anyone reading this who is under the belief that metal music is Satanic, occult or anything like that: metal music is NOT connected to witchcraft in the slightest and, while there are musicians who play metal music who are Satanic or practise witchcraft, most metal musicians who have those themes in their music do not actually believe them and are merely using them in the same way that most horror films use Satanic imagery. In fact, there is this thing called Christian metal which you will want to go look up, because it is not only a very real thing, but (dare I say it?) it is actually a very enjoyable thing to listen to! If you're wanting to say that Black Sabbath were Satanic, then I'm going to have to inform you that they chose their name from the title of a horror movie and opted to include the Satanic themes because they wanted to produce music in the vein of horror movies in that they were INTENDED to be scary, but the members didn't actually believe in that kind of thing at all! Metal music, to most people, is just that: music. Most people don't listen to it because they're looking for occult themes and most people who DO find occult themes in the music just shrug it off because it's not a big deal for them. Oh, it's OK for Christians when it's THEIR deity being praised in music, but put another deity in music, even when it's not being done out of actual belief, and suddenly you have to draw a line to protect the minds of young and innocent children? Doesn't that seem more than a tad hypocritical, when put like that?

...Sorry, I think the anger's setting in now.

But let us step aside from the religious debate for a few minutes and boil this down to the basics: a man has murdered another man who had done nothing to him or represented any threat to society simply because he disagreed with the other man's choice of lifestyle. In fact, the man apparently attempted to decapitate his victim...and he clearly showed no remorse for his actions, as he called the police on himself to tell them what he'd done and, when they arrived, admitted what he'd done. No matter what your views on the victim's choice of lifestyle, that is truly sickening behaviour that cannot be justified, and, on moral reasons alone, I would be condemning this man's behaviour as indefensible. All other factors just make this situation worse, for it brings together two groups of people who rarely get along: metal fans, who will be sickened at a disgusting attack on one of their own by those who have constantly tried to repress their style of music without actually understanding it, and Christians, who have the misfortune of having to be associated with the man who committed this murder in the eyes of those who look on this event with any interest.

But I am not going to condemn the Christian zealots just for being connected to this murder through the actions of the killer, as much as I would personally love to tear them a new one for various reasons unconnected to this event. What I am going to do is try to look at why it would be completely unfair to pin the blame for this murder purely on the killer's fanatical faith in Christianity and, instead, try to come up with a mature take on this event that is fair to both sides.

I am no fan of Christianity as a religion. In fact, if I'm totally honest, I find the power the religion holds over so many places in the Western world to be concerning, as it effectively means that it is difficult at best to press through legislation that would arguably be better for allowing people to live their lives how they want to without having to face a bunch of fanatics who are convinced that anything which is against the Bible is an attempt to repress their religion. For me, the world should not bow to the whims of one religion, but should instead be open to allowing everyone to live their lives how they want to...within reason, of course, as I do not think that this means that laws which prevent immoral actions like rape and murder should be abolished merely for the sake of allowing people to choose their way of living.

But, as shocking as this might sound in light of my previous paragraph, I do have to feel sorry for the sensible Christians out there, as you have to be lumped with a bunch of intolerant jerks who are using your religion as an excuse to get their way. I am not religious myself, but I do recognise that there is a benefit to religion on an individual level that most people who are not religious rarely tend to consider: it can be a comfort to feel that there is someone out there who is listening to you when you need help and can help you when times are tough. While I do not believe there is actually someone out there (I've been through enough crap in my time to be convinced that, if there is a God out there, he's not been listening to me at all!), I do recognise that the feeling of having someone who is always there is a great comfort in tough times, and a person who is always out there and listening to you can be really reassuring, as, if you're feeling at your worst and are on your own, having that can help you pull through when not having that might make you give up. This seems to be why people who go through tough times seem to find religion.

What this man did are actions that I would argue are not the actions of a sane man, regardless of his religious beliefs. No sane man would take a sword, kill a man and then call the police on himself just to admit that he did it. So I feel that pinning the blame purely on Christianity is missing the true problem behind this man's actions: this man is a man who would have been a danger to society even if religion had had no part in his life. His religious fanaticism might have been a factor towards committing the acts he did, but they are ultimately only a factor that pushed him towards committed the acts he did. He was also, allegedly, a heavy user of drugs (which, ironically, I suspect is something that Christianity itself would frown upon, but I would welcome anyone who is knowledgable of the Bible who can confirm or deny that), which could have messed him up far more than religion would have done. And his brother confirmed that he was watching videos which conformed to his own religious beliefs, which indicates that he was not likely to be a man who was willing to accept people with a religion different from his own.

In other words, this is a man who, had he not been religious, would have probably still gone on to be dangerous to society, as he would have been willing to kill someone merely for having an opinion which was not his own. Even if I am wrong (which, I accept, I could be), I think that saying that the root of the problem is Christianity is neglecting to spot two dangerous factors which could have had just as much importance to making him commit the acts he did. I do not deny that religion would have had a part in making this man commit the acts he did, but they would not have been the only factor, and the problem is that both factors showcase intolerance from the killer towards the victim: intolerance of the victim's difference in religion from the killer's own, intolerance to anyone who did not share his opinion and, arguably, intolerance of the fact that heavy drug use can be VERY damaging towards your mind.

I do not intend this article to claim that religion is not dangerous: I am mistrustful of organised religion because the hold it can have over people can be very dangerous when used for ill. However, I refuse to accept that religion can become dangerous through one person on their own UNLESS they have an ulterior motive, ranging from simply being an unpleasant person in general through to using it to hide the real reasons behind their actions. It's VERY easy to blame religion due to it being the most noticeable thing for most people, but it is rare that the ONLY reason someone does something horrific is purely down to religion itself: there are other reasons that can be completely missed due to how easy it is to spot religion over the other factors.

Let us not condemn Christianity just because the killer was Christian. Let us, instead, look at every reason the killer could have had for committed the acts he did and condemn those actions, not just the one that immediately stands out. Because, by doing that, are we not showing ourselves just as intolerant as the killer himself for leaping onto the obvious reason and treating that as the only possible reason he committed the acts he did?

PledgeMusic: An Amazing Idea Or A Disaster Waiting To Happen?

Now, I make no secret (among my friends, at least) of the fact that, for me, there's nothing that beats buying physical copies of albums, either by getting them from your local record shop (...which, for me, is about fifty miles away, so I use the word "local" about as loosely as some people wear their jeans) or buy having them arrive in the post. While most people would argue that I'm stuck in the past for refusing to accept downloads of albums are the future, I just find that having physical copies of albums is just better for me on a lot of levels. Firstly, your record collection cannot be wiped out if you (or some malicious bastard) delete your account on something like iTunes, which means that you overall have more control over your album collection than a purely download based system allows you to have. Secondly, I find that there's nothing quite like being able to sit down and read the liner notes to an album, as the amount of hard work that artists can put into them can ultimately give you an indication as to how much they actually care about the album: if they look like crap, chances are that's what the artist thought of it. Thirdly, physical copies don't have the problem of factors like battery life interrupting your album when it runs out: just put it in a CD player that's plugged in and it'll nearly always work fine! Fourthly, it's far easier to lend a CD to a friend than it is to lend a digital copy of something because, with a physical copy, you just need to put the CD in your bag or pocket and you're done! Those aren't the only reasons, but, overall, you can get the idea that a good way to annoy me is to refuse to do a physical release of an album just because there apparently isn't the demand for them: there certainly is, it's just that most people today have no patience and find the thought of waiting for something to arrive completely unbearable!

This isn't to say that I think digital copies of albums are all bad (in fact, I do recognise that some people just can't have a large number of physical albums sitting around the place, either because they're constantly on the move or they just don't have the space) and I do recognise that there are advantages to digital distribution, especially among smaller bands or from international companies who would have to charge you an arm and a leg (or, at least, a noticeably larger amount than a digital download of the CD would) just to get your physical copy to you. However, I just prefer the old fashioned way of doing things and, until I have no choice except to embrace the digital distribution method of doing things due to CDs completely dying off, I am going to remain stoutly in the corner of preferring to be able to actually hold what I own in my hands. Even with systems for stuff like games (like Steam and PSN), I will still prefer to have a physical release of whatever I own, because I just don't trust companies to keep these things constantly online. Sooner or later, things like Steam, iTunes and PSN will close down (usually along with the company that made them) and then you will almost certainly be unable to access anything you didn't already have saved onto your computer. And maybe even then, if you're really unlucky. Call me paranoid, call me a grumpy sod, call me reluctant to embrace change, call me cynical, call me Shirley (...OK, maybe not the last one!), but, in ANY situation where something is only kept online because it's run by a company, I feel that being the one guy refusing to join the new age because I don't want to be too attached to something that could disappear very easily when the company's money does is a far more sensible idea than it looks like on first glance.

So, why am I talking about PledgeMusic? Well, two reasons: one, I feel that I have something that I wish to look at which is actually worth examining closely, in light of a few things which Jimquisition has rambled on about in the past for things like Kickstarter and Early Access games, and two, I want to rewrite a review that I was going to put up today and I couldn't find anything else to review to fill the void where the review should have been.

...Well, can't say I'm not honest!

Anyway, to bring the discussion to Early Access games and Kickstarter (trust me, there is a point to this), a trend that has become fairly popular in recent times in gaming is to ask people to help fund development of games. Kickstarter projects aren't actually exclusively linked towards gaming, as it's been used to fund things like movies in the past, but the basic point of Kickstarter is that you donate money to a project that you like the look of, with the expectation of getting something back from the person making the project in exchange. This can cover anything from merely getting a copy of the project itself when it is finished to getting to meet and work with the people making the project to help it reach completion. This is how some highly regarded games like Shovel Knight and Broken Age were funded, and many of them on nostalgia for types of games which most people don't make today (in those two examples, 8-bit platformers and point-and-click adventure games)...and it's also how Anita Sarkeesian was able to fund her web series, interestingly enough. Food for thought, I guess...

Now, on paper, Kickstarter is a very good idea, but, in practice, it is open to being exploited for personal gain. For a start, the project don't even need to have STARTED to be anything vaguely resembling developed before a Kickstarter can be opened for it: someone could feasibly open a Kickstarter project based purely on an idea they've had which they might end up scrapping purely because they aren't interested in doing it. Secondly, you have no guarantee that what you've put money down on is actually going to be good: much like when you pre-order something, you're putting down money for something that you cannot be sure of the final quality of, but, unlike pre-orders, you cannot cancel your order or get your money back if advance reviews of the final product indicate that it is a terribly made piece of crap which isn't worth buying: you paid for the product to be made and you have nobody to blame except yourself if your faith turns out to be misguided. Thirdly, there is no guarantee that your money will actually go towards funding the project you provided the money for: the person making the project could very well end up using the money for things not related to the project, if they even use the money on the project at all! Kickstarter is a VERY risky idea in practice, and there have, indeed, been tales in the past of people abusing the system, but it is certainly a noble idea on paper that I would support if I weren't a naturally suspicious sort.

Early Access runs on a similar idea to Kickstarter, except that you can at least claim to have something resembling a product guaranteed to be there when you buy it. With Early Access, you buy a game that you know is incomplete, which SHOULD help to fund further development of the game, and provide feedback on the game to help developers know what to put in the game, what to change, bugs that you've found and stuff like that. In essence, one could argue that buying an Early Access game effectively makes you a funder, playtester and executive of the game. Again, Early Access does have some success stories (one could argue that Minecraft was one, despite never actually being released under the Early Access system, due to originally being released while still in the Alpha stage of development) and it is an idea that, while I don't necessarily completely agree with the idea behind it, I can see the appeal to it.

In practice, however, Early Access suffers from the same problem that pre-orders and Kickstarter do: you don't know what you're getting yourself in for when you pay money for it. And, again, like with Kickstarter, if the product turns out not to be worth the asking price, you cannot cancel your order or get your money back: you have paid for it and you have to live with that knowledge. Now, Early Access is arguably better than Kickstarter in that, with the game actually released, you could feasibly take the time to wait for someone to review it before you consider buying it: just wait a week or two after the release date and someone will have a review of it up somewhere on the internet! However, unlike Kickstarter, you are very likely to have to deal with things like missing features in the game, which can ultimately leave you playing a game that can only get away with the fact it's incomplete because it advertised that it isn't done yet. On top of that, it is a system that can be exploited, and you only need to look around Steam's Early Access games to see games which came out and then were promptly forgotten about by their developers the moment they started getting money thrown at them.

I say what I do not to discourage people from supporting the projects they want to see succeed, only to remind them that an excellent idea for a product is not the same as an excellent product: only a finished product that is excellent is an excellent product, as an unfinished product or an idea for one still leave the question of what the final product is actually going to be like. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that The Matrix was a terribly made film, shot on cheap hand held cameras with very bad directing and with acting that would make a porn star look like a classically trained Shakespearian actor (...OK, I just made myself laugh picturing a pornography in the style of a Shakespeare play! It's times like this that I love doing blogging...). Would the film have still been an excellent product in that case? No, of course not! But it would have still been an excellent idea for a film. That is the crucial difference between a good product and a good idea for one: the good product can be confirmed to be a good product because it's actually been made, but the good idea could be horribly botched when it's actually made and all of the potential behind the idea would not be able to save it from being a bad product. Incidentally, this is also why a well made film does not necessarily equal a good film: some films are born for ideas which quite frankly should have not even made it off the ground, but, thanks to having a good budget, are still well made on a technical level. If you will, a expertly sculpted statue of a giant piece of shit made from pure gold and covered with emeralds, diamonds, rubies and sapphires, at the end of the day, is still a giant piece of shit: the fact it's been sculpted from a valuable metal, covered with previous stones and been done by an expert hand does not automatically make it something you'd want to display for all of your friends to see!

...OK, I'll admit, that doesn't make quite as much sense when typed out as it did in my head.

Anyway, the same kind of logic that you can see with Early Access and Kickstarter is the same logic that runs PledgeMusic: you give a band money to record an album that you might be doing completely blind (I've seen bands funding their debut albums on the site, and without providing any demo recordings on their page to help me to see if the album's going to be to my liking!). And, while I do think that there's far more reason to want to support an up and coming band and allow them to record their album over a video game company due to how much it can cost to record an album (some local ones I've seen can come to nearly £100 per day...and that's just for the studio on its own!), there does come a point when I have to say that Bandcamp is a far better place to want to go as a music consumer to go support bands who are unsigned instead of PledgeMusic. In fact, in terms of overall service, I'd say Bandcamp is going above and beyond the call of duty, as you can stream whatever you're interested in without needing to pay for it first, which can be a godsend if you're living on limited funds and can't afford to risk buying something that you don't like. It also is very clearly laid out: I still have no idea if I can download fully funded projects on PledgeMusic, which means that some albums which I want to consider picking up for review work might well be completely inaccessible to me, while, with Bandcamp, you have it pretty clearly marked out. I guess you could say that Bandcamp is a bit like what Steam was like prior to the influx of Early Access games (and the easily abusable greenlight system, now I think on it...), only being for music instead of games. PledgeMusic, by contrast, is the music version of Kickstarter, with a bit of Early Access thrown in for good measure.

Yet...I don't dislike PledgeMusic at all. As easy as it would be to tear PledgeMusic a new one just because it's got the potential to be abused in the same way that Kickstarter has been in the past, I haven't heard of any issues with PledgeMusic. Maybe it's because I've not found the music scenes version of Jimquisition yet and, as such, any controversies connected to it have completely missed my notice, but the only time I've heard of anything resembling an issue related to PledgeMusic is when Timo Tolkki was going to do a second Classical Variations and Themes album, which he cancelled in late July 2012 after it had been in development since April of the same year (although the fact that it seems to have morphed into his Avalon project, which I really liked the first album of, doesn't annoy me too much!): apart from that, it seems that PledgeMusic has managed to avoid things going badly wrong in that way! Plus, the fact that PledgeMusic does have projects on the site where the pledge is purely for extras, with the product itself already done, does at least mean that I feel a bit more confident that I could feasibly use the site as a place to pre-order albums which I think sound like they could be particularly interesting (as I have done with Queensryche's upcoming release (which I think is going to be a new studio album, judging from the comments on their page) and am vaguely considering doing with the upcoming studio album by Michael Sweet and George Lynch, because...well, it's Michael Sweet and George Lynch in a band together, how often are you going to see THAT happening?).

So yeah...while I think there is the potential for PledgeMusic to be just as bad as Kickstarter and, as such, would not blame anyone for approaching it with more than a bit of suspicion, I think there is the potential for it to work out very well. I would like them to make their layouts a bit more clear when it comes to already funded projects so that you know whether you can get a download of the release from the site or not and I think their search system is a bit oddly done (instead of putting the search in alphabetical order, regardless of the status of every pledge, why not put the still open pledges at the top of the search list, especially if it is the case that you can't download material from concluded pledges?), but I certainly can see PledgeMusic being a good way for up and coming bands to get their name out there. I just would recommend that you be vigilant and do your research before you supply funds to a band you've never heard of, for that could save you from potentially ending up in a nasty situation in the future!

...Oh yeah, and, just so I can officially check this off my list of things that I've always wanted to say: "Thank God for me!"

...Now to start checking the mail for letter bombs or cease and desist letters from Jim Sterling, I guess!

Nervosa "Victim Of Yourself" Review

You know, I don't talk about thrash metal much on this blog. Most of it is because, well, thrash metal rarely gets my interest when done purely as thrash metal. Yes, fast playing and aggressive vocals can be really enjoyable, but with it usually comes a lack of variety in the music, and, as a person who loves variety in their music, that means that thrash will nearly always leave me losing interest very quickly unless the album decides to throw in some variety in the vein of the old school thrash metal albums (seriously, go listen to the 80's thrash metal albums again closely: you'll spot there's more variety to them than they're usually given credit for!). For me, most thrash metal only really works these days when it is combined with another style of metal to give it some more variety. When people try to perform thrash like it's the 80's, it only exposes two things: one, most people haven't listened to their thrash metal records as much as they think they have, as they've managed to miss the fact that not all thrash metal albums are balls out speed throughout their whole run time with no variety to them, and two, most people cannot pull off thrash properly these days without making it sound forced. I mean this with no disrespect to the thrash metal bands out there who can do thrash metal without it sounding forced, but thrash just no longer sounds fresh to me: it's just become speed for the sake of speed, and, while some people will really like that, I just find that does nothing for me.

Nervosa don't exactly buck that trend, but I do have to say one thing about them: when they really start playing thrash, it's very hard to believe that the band is made up of three women! No word of a lie, these three women have managed to make a thrash metal album with so much balls that there are thrash metal bands made up of five men out there who haven't been able to make a thrash metal album this ferocious, and that's certainly something that is very commendable!

But having balls doesn't make an album good (...that sentence looks really odd, I know, but you get the point I'm trying to make, I'm sure!), and that's the important question: is this album actually good? Well, let's find out!

First up, the cover art (and I do apologise about the poor quality of the image). It's...very cliché of thrash metal in general, if I'm honest. That's not to say that I think it's bad, as it certainly is appropriate for a thrash metal album, but I feel that any thrash metal band could have come up with this album cover without any difficulty. However, the overall artwork is very good, so credit to the artist for that, I guess!

...Hang on, that cover art reminds me of something! Does this seem more than a bit familiar to the thrash fans who have their ears to the ground regarding retro thrash bands?

...It doesn't? OK, maybe it's just me, but still, I can't help thinking of this...

...Actually, looking at that again, maybe it is just me. OK, never mind then!

Anyway, let's move on to reviewing the album itself!

One of the first things I have to admit is that I've actually never listened to a Brazilian thrash metal album before now (not even Sepultura), so I was rather surprised that this album felt more like it was blurring the line between thrash metal, death metal and early black metal. It feels more than a bit like a Teutonic thrash metal album, but with some of the vocal work by lead vocalist (and bassist) Fernanda Lire having a bit more of a black metal influence than you might expect. While I can't say how this sounds compared to a typical Brazilian thrash metal album, I do have to say that it's probably one of the most aggressive sounding thrash albums I've heard in a good while: in fact, it's aggressive enough to enter death metal territory pretty easily, only not cementing itself into that territory due to Fernanda's voice not being like a death growl! No word of a lie, if I was judging this album on pure aggression alone, I'd be giving this top marks, as it's an absolute face melter in that regard!

However, aggression doesn't mean shit if you can't back that up with music that's actually worth listening to...so I'm surprised to admit that, despite the variety being lacking a bit on the album, the music is actually rather good!

...No, I'm serious. I've found a thrash metal album with a huge amount of aggression and some very good songwriting...and it's an all female band who made the album.

...Fuck me sideways, I didn't expect to be saying that about ANY band this year, let alone an all female band ON THEIR DEBUT ABLUM!

Seriously, I cannot stress that fact enough: this is a band on their debut album, with all of the members being female (so it would be SO easy for them to get by just on the gimmick of "Hey, we're an all female thrash metal band" if they wanted to)...and they've put out possibly the most aggressive album I've heard for years, yet have been able to back it up with some brilliant songwriting! Granted, I don't listen to a lot of extreme metal, so I imagine people more versed in extreme metal than me will be already scoffing at that statement, but I still stand by my statement: I've not heard a thrash metal album which has got me excited and eager to listen to the genre again like this one has for a long time! Diamond Plate were hyped up as being able to do that and, instead, left me cold (as you might remember from my review of their album, which you can read here), but this...fuck me, if this is what a modern thrash metal band can do, I can't help wondering what the hell everyone else is doing wrong, because Nervosa just put every retro thrash metal band I can think of to shame!

...Sorry, I got a bit overexcited there! Dialling back the enthusiasm now.

While the album does blend together a bit after the intro track (which has the highly imaginative name of "Intro"...seriously, did it take you all day to come up with that one, guys...actually, can I say "guys" in this case when the people I'm talking to are all women or do I have to say "ladies" in this case? Because saying "girls" seems a bit like I'm talking down to the members of the band, but "ladies" seems a bit too formal and "guys" feels a bit weird to have to say with that in mind!) due to being all out speed and aggression, it's ultimately a testament to the band's songwriting that I didn't find myself getting bored at all while listening to the album! In fact, the moment the CD was finished, I put it back on again just because I loved listening to it that much! It never felt like a chore to listen to this album at all, which is something I've not been able to say about a thrash album for so long that those words almost feel like I have to force myself to say them just because they're so underused by me! The only problem is that I can't name highlights from the album because I've been so busy enjoying the album that I've not taken the time to listen to each track individually to remember which one is which!

The performances by the musicians are really good, for the most part. While I will admit that the guitar solos feel like they're lacking something in terms of technicality and the bass could be a bit more complex in the bass lines for most of the songs (although there is a very nice bass solo in "Victim Of Yourself" which shows that Lira's certainly a very capable bassist), there are no real criticisms I can make of the performances on the album! Fernanda Lira's vocals deserve some HUGE praise from me, however: she's the first thrash metal vocalist I've heard for a LONG time who actually has a voice that works for thrash metal, and she can also do death growls as well! She is a modern thrash metal vocalist to watch out for, that's all I'm going to say!

The production...well, it's a modern sounding record, but the production has bite to it! While my usual complaints about mastering and bass mixing (although in a more reduced form with the latter, thankfully) do rear their heads, I do have to say that this is a production job that, if you ignore my usual complaints, fits the album really well!

So, overall...actually, the fact this whole review has been gushing about this album probably tells you everything you need to know! Screw fancy conclusions for once: if you like thrash metal and think that thrash metal has been too tame among modern bands, then GET. THIS. ALBUM. I nearly passed over this album because I thought the single from the album ("Death!") was not up to much when I first heard it, but I'm extremely glad I didn't, because this album is very likely to be my album of the year AND has reignited my interest in thrash metal after being bored stiff by it in recent times! Only a truly brilliant album can do that and, as such, there is only one rating I can give for this album.

...But this is only Nervosa's debut album, so I'm going to take half a point off. Not because I feel that it is an appropriate score for the album, but because I want to save a 10 for when the band inevitably tops this album. I wouldn't normally have so much faith in a band being able to do that, but, with Nersova, I feel that the band has the potential to make an album that can top this, and I truly look forward to the day when I can award them with the 10 that I decided not to give them for this album! Don't let me down, ladies...erm, girls...erm, guys...OK, I'm going to need to go work out which of those to use next time I review an album by an all female band, aren't I?

Final Rating: 9.5 Out Of 10

Personal Favourite Tracks: ALL OF THEM!

Amaranthe "Massive Addictive" Review

I make no secret of the fact that one way to impress me is to sound wildly original (or, at least, play a style of music which isn't just what everyone else is doing), so Amaranthe are a band which hold a special place in my heart. Every criticism you could make of them is one that has a basis in reality (it's not very complex music, it's arguably more pop than metal, nobody would care about the band if Elize Ryd hadn't done stuff for Kamelot, etc.), but I'd much rather hear a band doing something like Amaranthe than just being "thrash act number 29347895", and, for that, Amaranthe are arguably one of the most important upcoming metal bands of the 2010's, for they show that metal music need not be afraid to take risks and try something so far out of the box that you can't even mention them in the same sentence as boxes without feeling like you've unintentionally insulted Amaranthe. One could make a case that they're basically melodic tracecore (at the very least, a link between trancecore and Amaranthe could be made with little difficulty if you're familiar with the style and they certainly are more melodic than most of the trancecore out there), but I'm not sure that does them justice, as they've got their own spin on the whole style which basically means that even calling them trancecore would be ignoring some of the other aspects of their sound. I'll admit, there's really no way to perfectly sum up Amaranthe without having to create an umbrella term with a name that would make a Welsh town look reasonably named and easy to remember to describe their sound.

And that's really what I like about them: you would recognise an Amaranthe track the moment you heard it, but they have so much variety to their sound that it's hard to imagine them running out of ideas or ending up at a point where they're being restricted by their sound. Maybe I'm being a bit overly enthusiastic about a band who might prove to be a flash in the pan (having put out three albums since 2011 does indicate either a ridiculously disciplined band or a band who can't afford to fade out of the spotlight at all), but one thing that cannot be denied is that, no matter whether you like Amaranthe or not, they're certainly a lot more original than most other bands out there now and, while their sound might put them squarely into guilty pleasure territory for a lot of people, I personally feel no shame in liking the band.

...Mind you, I would also feel no shame in playing the Dame in a pantomime if I was asked (which, for the benefit of international audiences who don't know what a pantomime is, would basically require me to dress up in drag and act like a woman...pantomimes can be weird if you're not used to them! (oh no, they're not! (obligatory joke for pantomime fans, go google it if you don't get it!))), so draw your own conclusions from that if you wish.

Anyway, I believe I covered Amaranthe's history briefly when I looked at their debut a while back (you can read the review here, if you want to), but I might as well be honest and admit that I managed to completely forget to pick up The Nexus, so there's a noticeable gap in my knowledge of the band's music (although, in fairness, it's been about a year and a half since The Nexus came out and three and a half years since their self-titled debut came out, so it's not like it's a huge amount of time that's passed...and I did check out the singles for The Nexus anyway, so I'm not completely ignorant of what that album sounded like!). While that's probably not going to be a huge problem, it does mean that some of my knowledge of the band's development (if any) is going to be a bit incomplete.

But that's not the important question: what do I actually think of this album? Well, let's dig in, shall we?

First up, the cover art. I know I don't normally refer back to previous reviews beyond linking to them, but I believe I feel justified in going "CALLED IT!": I had vaguely expected a yellow colour scheme for this album's cover art right from the moment I knew they were making a third album and, while you could argue it's more white and gold than yellow, I still feel justified in saying that my guess was in the right ball park (since, well, most people use the colour yellow as a substitute for gold when they can't actually work with that colour...)! But overall, I'm basically looking at this and going "Yeah, it's kind of cool, but why am I being reminded of Doctor Who by this?"

So, let us jump to the music of this album!

Reviewing an album like this one is quite a difficult task. On the one hand, the band are recognised as a metal band by quite a lot of people, so I feel that I would be doing the metal fans a disservice if I didn't look at this album like a metal album...but, on the other hand, there's so much of this album that would appeal to pop fans over metal fans that I feel that looking at this album as a pop album would not be completely unjustified. So, for the benefit of both sides, I've done the following review in two parts: one part will look at this album from the perspective of a die hard metal fan with no appreciation for any style of music outside of metal and the other part will look at this album from the perspective of a person who just wants a good album, regardless of the actual style of the album.

From a purely metal perspective, this album is a curiosity that, unfortunately, cannot back itself up with enough deep songwriting to make it worth the listen. The members clearly know their way around their instruments (you only need to listen to "An Ordinary Abnormality" to know that these guys could do Gothenburg metal (and pretty fucking good Gothenburg metal, too!) if they really wanted to) and Elize, Jake and Henrik are certainly capable vocalists, but the songwriting mostly relies on catchy hooks over making a lasting impression: you only really need to hear this album once to have heard just about everything that the album can offer, and none of the songs really reward repeated listens. The heavy use of elements typical in modern pop (synths, keyboards...I think there might be some auto-tune in the album as well, but it seems to be being used to sound more mechanical over covering bad singing, which is more than I can say for Katy Perry, Cher and Adam Levine (who I've taken to nicknaming "The Singing Saxophone" in recent times...)!) do make this an interesting listen, I guess, but it's nothing especially outstanding and very few of the performances by the musicians are technically outstanding. If you like your metal AND ONLY YOUR METAL, this is not really worth picking up, unless you have a female friend or relative who you'd like to introduce to the glory of metal and feel that trying to meet them halfway is the only way you can do it! But really, why meet any pop kid or scene hipster halfway, metal isn't a place for wimps and posers like them! If they cannot appreciate the metallic glory of Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Saxon, Motorhead, Slayer and Iron Maiden without being spoon fed the whole scene through watered down crap like nu-metal and metalcore or through sell outs and posers like Metallica, then they have no place in the glorious halls of metal!

...OK, I might have overdone the metal perspective a bit at the end of that.

But, in all seriousness (and dropping the act before moving on to the second viewpoint that I want to review this album from), if the only thing you like to listen to is metal music and everything else falls under the spectrum of "not interested at all", then Amaranthe are probably best avoided, as they just aren't going to be your cup of tea in the slightest. I imagine there are people who will like Amaranthe who only listen to metal music, but they're probably going to be a minority of the people who will like the band: metal elitists will likely find them too linked towards pop music to be able to tolerate them and I can understand why it'd be hard to get past the pop part of their sound even if you're open minded towards music outside of metal music due to it being so atypical of metal music. So Amaranthe, among metal fans, are always going to be a love it or hate it kind of thing just because what they're doing is so unusual among metal music.

If you want to approach this album without the conception of it being a metal album and just want to hear a good album, however...well, now it's time for me to look at this album from a new perspective.

From a purely quality perspective, this is an album that stands up nicely, despite include a few songs which are pretty forgettable. The first five songs are pretty great, with "Digital World", "Trinity" and "Drop Dead Cynical" in particular being very memorable and bound to gain replays, but then the record hits the first real dud in "True", which just plods along for the three and a half minutes it runs for with nothing really memorable about it. "Unreal" does follow that up with some degree of recovery, but "Over And Done" is pretty much in the same boat as "True": a song which could have been cut from the album without having a negative impact on the record at all (interestingly, both of them are also ballads). Luckily, the next three songs ("Danger Zone", "Skyline" and "An Ordinary Abnormality") are really solid. Henrik's also given a chance to demonstrate his harsh vocals pretty nicely on "Danger Zone" and "An Ordinary Abnormality", which is a rather nice turn of events after Andreas was mostly restricted to supporting Elize and Jake on the band's first album (and, from what I heard of The Nexus, on that as well). I'd really like to see some more songs by Amaranthe with the harsh vocals taking more of a lead, as Henrik does a very good job and shows that the band have a potential secret weapon in him which, if given the chance to demonstrate his vocals more, could help them to win over the die hard metal crowd more. The album finishes off with "Exhale", which is the best ballad on the album and doesn't feel like it's just filling up the run time like "True" and "Over And Done" were. The deluxe edition of the album includes two bonus tracks, both of which are acoustic versions of songs on the album ("Trinity" and "True"). Now, I've not heard any acoustic versions of any Amaranthe songs and I didn't pick up the deluxe version of the album, so I can't say how they sound, but I do have to admit that I've no idea how Amaranthe could make their songs work if they did them acoustically, as their songs are made up of so much stuff which is electronic that stripping all of that out in favour of doing them acoustically has me a bit bemused as to how they would make that work. Call me drop dead cynical (see what I did there?), but I just don't see Amaranthe's music working in an acoustic environment at all. It'd be like asking Flo Rida to sing one of his songs acoustically: because of the nature of his music, it's just not likely to be worth doing it because the end result wouldn't be worth listening to...not that Flo Rida is worth listening to in the first place (seriously, can anyone understand a word he says in his songs outside of the choruses of them? I swear that I have a far easier time deciphering the lyrics to an REM song or a Slayer song than I do a song by Flo Rida!), but you get the point, I'm sure!

Everybody puts out very respectable performances that, while not the most technically demanding performances you're ever going to hear in metal, are still very good and show that everyone is at least capable of performing on a level that you'd expect from professional musicians. I did have to struggle to hear the bass guitar, however, which long time readers of my blog will know is a personal pet peeve of mine. It does make me wonder whether everyone is afraid of an uprising if the bass guitar is made too loud in something and that blood will be spilled by a audience suddenly made aware of the fact that there's an instrument in music that isn't just a guitar, keyboard or drums...the bass revolution must be an absolutely terrifying thing for so many people!

Snarking aside, though, I do find it so odd that the bass guitar seems to be so hated by so many producers and mixing crew for albums. Bear in mind, the bass guitar and the drums form the backbone for most music, so the hazing against bassists seems a bit unfair to me, as it makes bassists look unimportant in most bands when they actually aren't! While most people will agree that most bass lines in popular music are not especially complex, I'd argue a good bassist can be one of the most important things you can have in your band, as most of them are nice guys who just get on with what they have to do, which means that you're rarely going to find them making long lists of demands or developing huge egos just because most of them just want to get the job done and avoid conflicts.

That also explains why there are so many bassists who end up being session musicians, now I think about it: learning how to play the BASICS of the bass guitar is fairly easy (which is what most people need to play most songs out there, unless the band has taken some noticeable influence from progressive music or got a particularly skilled bassist playing for them), but becoming actually GOOD at the instrument is actually far harder than it is to become good at the guitar. Speaking from my own experience of learning the instrument, the bass guitar is a much under appreciated instrument by a lot of people who just dismiss it as a guitar with less strings: while you can play it just like a standard guitar if you wish, there is far more to the instrument than that, as anyone who has heard the bass guitar played properly would be able to attest, and it is a huge shame that so many people seem unable to give the bass guitar the credit it is due, as the instrument is arguably one of the most important instruments in popular music and those who can play it properly deserve far more respect than they get among mainstream music fans.

...Sorry, I've gone off on a bit of a tangent.

Anyway, the production for this album is pretty solid. The album was mixed, mastered and co-produced (alongside Olof Mörck and Jake E Berg) by Jacob Hansen (who has been involved with albums by bands like Volbeat, Tyr, Pyramaze, Primal Fear, Pretty Maids, Paradox, Onslaught, Nightrage, Leatherwolf, Iron Fire, Heathen, Evergrey, Epica, Dragonland, Doro, Destruction, Delain, Chaoswave, Bloodshot Dawn, Artillery and Aphyxion...among a large number of others!) and, while I will always continue to complain about the near absence of the bass guitar in the mixing and the mastering being a bit on the loud side until producers get the hint that loudly mastering everything and hazing bassists is not going to win over people who consider those important (like myself), I cannot deny that the production overall is very well done.

So, overall, what do I think of this album? Well, I'm a bit torn about it, in all honesty: on the one hand, I can fully understand why some people would absolutely loath this album and feel that they would have some very valid reasons to do that...but, at the same time, I do really like this album and do want to really recommend it to people, as it's good enough to really be worth picking up! I guess the best way to do this is to go with my personal rating, but to stress that you should check out the singles from this album first before you consider picking it up, as it's not going to be to everyone's taste. If you like them, then this is going to be worth picking up! If not, then...well, you know the drill, I'm sure!

Final Rating: 8 Out Of 10

Personal Favourite Tracks: "Drop Dead Cynical", "Digital World", "An Ordinary Abnormality"

Anime Review: Dusk Maiden Of Amnesia

...You know, it's really rare that I pick up something purely for review work. The way my thought process usually works when I get something that is purely for review work is that it's something I've heard so much bad stuff about that I really have to check it out myself just to check that it IS as bad as I've heard it is or is something that I think will be an easy target to write a review about.

That's what I thought this anime would be. From the back of the DVD case, I was expecting a well animated, but ridiculously cliché anime involving a group of people investigating encounters with violent ghosts which only slightly relate to the memories of the Paranormal Investigations Club's president and which would end with the revelation that the club's president was responsible for all of the ghostly activity in the school.

In other words, I was expecting a formulaic monster of the week kind of anime with a conclusion that would be easy to riff on. Bish bash bosh, review written just after seeing the first episode, nothing more to worry about, sorted in time for Halloween, moving on. Even my brief bit of research before watching the anime indicated that the first episode would be so easy to riff on that I just thought "This'll be easy to review!"

Then I actually started to watch the anime.

...Let's just say that I got far more than I bargained for. In fact, I dare say that what I got was actually pretty good!

Let me run through the questions that you're no doubt already asking:

1. Does this anime involve women with large breasts?
2. Will this anime make any sense to you if you're not already familiar with Japanese culture when you start watching it?
3. Does the romance make any sense?
4. What the heck is this all about?
5. Would you like to play a game?

And here are my answers:

1. Yes, and I'm surprised that you even needed to ask that question!
2. Yes.
3. ...Arguably, yes. It's complicated to explain, keep reading on.
4. Keep reading.
5. No thanks, I'm still regretting the last time I agreed to play chess with someone...

So, now I've cleared the obvious questions out of the air, let's start by discussing Dusk Maiden of Amnesia. Well, it's actually a rather recent anime, compared to the ones I've been watching in recent times, as the manga which inspired the anime first started being published in April 2009 and concluding in November 2013, producing 10 books containing the manga along with an anthology and a guidebook. Also, it's not actually called Dusk Maiden of Amnesia: that's a translated version of the original title, Tasogare Otome x Amunejia, which is what the series is known as in Japan. I don't think the manga has officially been released in English yet (at the very least, my brief research into the manga brought up mentions of volumes in French, but I didn't see any in English), so you're going to have to rely on translations by fans if you want to read the manga. The anime adaption of the manga was announced in Japan in January 2012 and was broadcast between the 8th of April 2012 to the 24th of June 2012, with an OVA included in the 6th DVD of the series that was released on the 28th of November 2012. It was simultaneously broadcast on the website Crunchyroll, but it wasn't dubbed (I haven't found out whether it was subbed or not, but I imagine it wasn't). The anime got dubbed and released on DVD and Blu-Ray in America on the 4th of June, but the UK didn't get the anime released until the 10th of February of this year (this is a bit of a trend in the anime industry when it comes to the UK, apparently: there are actually anime which have English dubs made and available in the US which haven't made it to the UK! So yeah, US readers complaining about how hard it is to get anime in the US, go look up what it's like in the UK, you might be surprised how much better off you guys are than we are across the pond! It's also pretty bad if you're a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: we've STILL not got a full season of the show available for home media release AND we only got the first Equestria Girls film on the 28th of July...OF THIS YEAR! Oh yeah, and I don't think a release date for the home media release date of the second film in the UK has been announced yet and it was only in UK cinemas for TWO DAYS (and it wasn't even promoted anywhere, so I didn't realised I'd missed it until I was researching it casually while writing this!)...even if you're not a fan of the show, you have to admit that it sucks to be a fan of the show in the UK!). I've heard that a few things were cut from the manga for inclusion in the anime, but most of them have little impact on the actual story (at least, I didn't notice their absence in the anime).

Anyway, let us move past the history connected to this anime (and minor rant) and move on to the anime itself.

Well, the first thing you'll notice is that the animation is really good! The darker style of animation might be a bit of a cliché for anything which has a connection to horror, but it's very nicely done and I don't think it hurts the anime in any way to have it like that. In fact, some parts of it go for a really weird way of doing things that would have you wondering whether you're watching a really unsettling surreal film, which would feel out of place if it weren't for the fact that it only does it at points where it actually WORKS in the anime's favour (usually at points where something really creepy and unhinged is going on). Good animation in anime is hardly a rare thing, but I have to say that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia feels almost like it's working with a far larger budget than any of the other anime I've been looking at to date, as the animation feels better than that of the other two anime I've looked at on this blog. In fact, I date say that the animation almost feels like what you'd expect from a big budget anime horror film! There is a bit of an issue that I did notice in the last episode (I'm not counting the OVA as the last episode) that seemed like the screen was struggling to keep up with everything, which is a bit concerning when you realise that the scene is not a particularly complex scene, but it didn't bug me a huge amount and it was mostly restricted to the background, so I don't think it would have a huge impact on the viewing experience unless you're watching the episode on a large screen (which I was).

The anime itself is a bit of an very interesting collection of odds and sods (for the benefit of international readers, that's an expression in the UK that means "bits and pieces" in this case: it is also used in connection to groups of people who all have a connection to each other, such as a bunch of people who have a wargaming club, the people who make up a meeting of a company and stuff like that), as it includes elements of various different types of anime and puts them together into one twelve episode show (and an OVA). While it doesn't include action tropes (sadly, nobody tries to do a Kamehameha or a Spirit Bomb, attack a Hollow with a sword large enough to have you wondering whether the user has an inferiority issue that they're trying to make up for (even if it's just on a subconscious level) or transform themselves into multiple versions of themselves...well, technically Yuko does, but not in the way that I'm on about here!), it DOES include romance tropes, horror tropes, comedy tropes, supernatural tropes, a few fanservice ones and, surprisingly, a few tragedy tropes. On paper, that sounds like a really weird collection of stuff to include in a single anime, but, in practice, the only one which is constantly present (for fairly obvious reasons, considering one of the main characters is a ghost!) is the supernatural tropes: the romance certainly makes up a good amount of the anime, but the horror, comedy and fanservice tropes seem to get added more to add flavour to the various episodes of the show and the tragedy tropes only start to really hit in the last few episodes of it (although, when they do hit, you're going to want to have tissues on standby: the last episode actually nearly got tears from me, which is something which next to never happens to me when I watch stuff!). While the components of the anime are hardly original, the overall result is surprisingly unique, telling a story that is not as uncommon as you might expect (investigating the circumstances behind a ghost's death) and managing to make it surprisingly fresh!

The cast of the show is actually rather small for an anime like this, with only four main characters (technically five, but I'm getting to that) and a collection of extra characters who mostly appear for only one episode of the show. One of the things about having a small cast for any show (not necessarily just anime) is that, if you dislike any of the characters, you're going to have an issue with the whole show, as you're going to struggle to avoid the character you don't like. And I'm not gonna lie: some of the characters have the potential to grate on your nerves, although I didn't have that issue with any of them myself. Kirie Kanoe (who is Yuko's...grandniece, I think it is?) spends a large amount of the anime in a bad mood and seems somewhat confrontational compared to the rest of the cast, but a lot of her anger is somewhat justified and the moments when she drops those factors do make you realise that there is more to her than just that. I personally liked her a lot as a character once she started showing the emotional depth she actually has, but I can understand why some people wouldn't like her, as she isn't a character who will appeal to most people. On the other hand, Momoe Okonogi is, if anything, a bit too overbearing at points. She basically sums up the "kawaii" (that's "cute" in Japanese, for those not in the know) side of the anime, and she WILL grate on you if you can't tolerate that kind of thing in the slightest, while also being like an overexcited schoolgirl (which, in fairness, she IS: the characters are in their first few years of Japanese high school, so they aren't exactly the most mature people). Both of them are characters who I found tolerable at minimum (and I'm not going to lie, both of them got some good laughs from me at points in the anime), but I can understand why people would have issues with them as characters. Yuko (who is the ghost in the series) is a character who I personally really liked for quite a few reasons, but the thing that I think really turns her from a character who could be ignored to one who becomes very interesting is the decision to have TWO version of Yuko in the anime: one of them is the Yuko who looks like...well, how Yuko looked when she was alive, who has all of the positive aspects of Yuko's personality, and the other is Shadow Yuko, who is made up of all of the aspects of Yuko's personality which she has denied from her actual personality as a ghost and has become it's own version of her. It's very cliché, but the fact that the real Yuko cannot bear to be reminded of her death and the creation of Shadow Yuko constantly haunts her does give the whole show a vibe that reminds me more than a bit of Jekyll and Hyde...only with Hyde being their own person and not part of Jekyll, of course! Yuko could actually be an excellent case study on human nature as a whole, if you think about it hard enough: the good part of Yuko keeps trying to deny that the bad part of Yuko is part of her, but the truth is that both are the same person and that it is only when she finally accepts that fact that she is able to be able to be at peace with her past and move on. I highly doubt that what the anime was going for, but still, food for thought! Last up, we have Teiichi Niiya, who is the token male of the anime (yes, he's the only male main character in this anime...why do I get the feeling that there is fan art out there which has noticed this fact already and has ran with this line of logic into places which would have me losing my last meal if I were to be informed about them?) and (you might want to grab your buckets now) is also Yuko's love interest throughout the course of the anime.

...I swear to God, I didn't make that fact up! Teiichi is in love with a girl who is a ghost.

...Oh yeah, and, from my research, he's only twelve (as is Momoe: Kirie is thirteen) while Yuko is technically fifteen (she died at that age: if you want me to be completely honest, she's sixty five, but, as you don't age at all if you're a ghost, I think it's just easier to say she's fifteen and that she's been that age for fifty years!). If you remember my discussion related to the age of consent in Japan from my review of Dance In The Vampire Bund (which can be read here, if you missed it), you'll already know that the age of consent in Japan is thirteen, so...yeah, even in Japan, some of the nudity in this anime is going to raise eyebrows! Luckily, very little of the actual fanservice in the anime (outside of the OVA) involves anyone except Yuko (who you could TECHNICALLY argue is above the legal age in every country due to being 65 years old overall), so it's nowhere near as bad as it might be sounding on first glance, but you might still want to keep that fact in mind before you bring this anime to your local anime viewing meet up!

Anyway, Teiichi is a fairly good character. His romance for Yuko comes across surprisingly realistically, despite how awkward it sounds to be in love with a ghost on paper, and, as a character, he does have some very noticeable depth throughout the series. On the other hand, he could be argued as being a bit bland, as he can come across as a bit forgettable compared to everyone else around him. Which isn't exactly a good sign when you're the second most important character in the anime!

The pacing of the anime is fairly good, although I do have to ask why episode 1 of the anime feels like it should actually be episode 4 of it, since episode 2 explains how Teiichi met Yuko and got Momoe interested in becoming interested in exploring ghostly activity and episode 3 explains how Kirie became involved in the Paranormal Investigations Club while episode 1 has all four of them meeting up to examine one of the mysterious stories connected to Yuko's past. I know complaining about anime opening up in ways that don't quite match up with how the anime actually goes is a bit pointless now, as I didn't do it for my last two reviews (Dance In The Vampire Bund had the first episode be like an episode of a Japanese TV show while Highschool Of The Dead had narration that made it sound like it was being told from a good while in the future from when the anime is actually happening), but neither of them did it quite like this! I could at least go "Yeah, this makes sense as a first episode of the show!" for them: here, I feel like I've accidentally watched the show out of sequence! I will give credit for the fact that they do at least manage to make the first episode interesting, but you could feasibly skip it and not miss anything important. Aside from that, though, I never felt like any of the episodes lacked a development to them: if anything, the last half surprisingly feels a bit crowded due to how many developments it has in it, despite the first half not feeling underdone at all! The last episode can almost count as mood whiplash as, not even five minutes after Yuko fades away from existence, the anime reveals that she didn't actually pass on and is going to stay with Teiichi because of how powerful his love for her is. Maybe I'm unfairly complaining, but that should have been a twist at the end of the NEXT episode, after having an episode when Teiichi is getting used to Yuko being gone and clearly struggling to do it! However, I do think the pacing is actually rather good, aside from a few nitpicks, so take my complaints here as me just being grumpy for the sake of being grumpy!

The music...my God, the music! I don't like to describe something as perfect, as it would imply that I do not expect to see anything better than what I've given such praise to, but I would certainly mark this anime as having one of the best soundtracks I've heard for an anime! The music just hits every emotional moment perfectly: it's sinister when it needs to be, it's cheerful when it needs to be...there is no point when I thought the music was inappropriate for what was being shown on screen! The ONLY point I would have to raise is that the vocalist singing is clearly struggling with some of the highest notes in the song in episode 12, but, even then, she still does a pretty good job. Aside from that, though? No complaints in the slightest. Huge credit to Keigo Hoashi and Ryuuichi Takada for that, you did a fantastic job!

The original Japanese voice acting deserves some credit (especially for the fact that it nearly got me to break down into tears when watching the final episode of the main anime). The English dub, from my watch of the first three episodes compared to watching the Japanese version (I know, I've not watched the whole show in English: I only have enough free time to watch most anime once due to everything else I do in my life, but I have a fairly good memory for what I see, so I don't really need to see most anime more than once!), is...I don't dislike it, but I do have to say that I prefer the Japanese version overall. There are some issues with the quality of the dub being a bit iffy (there are just a few points where I'm going "This worked better in the original Japanese" in connection to the dialogue...also, why is everyone using Japanese honourifics when it's meant to be in English?), but I honestly don't want to detract from the hard work of the voice actors in the English versions: their performances are still very good!

It's when we move to the DVD of the anime that you'll spot me making my biggest complaints. For a start, the DVD case makes the rather weird decision of having a different way of storing each of the two discs of the anime. The first disc has this weird system which requires you push a tiny part of the disc thing into the centre of the holder and then rotating the disc out of the holder, which is probably meant to be more secure than the traditional "press down on the centre to pop it out" system, but which is confusing as all hell to take discs out of it, put them back in (because you have to do the same thing to put it back in the case) and you feel like you're at risk of accidentally breaking the disc while removing it. Now, I wouldn't normally make too big a deal about this, but here's the thing: the second disc is in the usual system that we're all used to. Protip for anyone who wants to run their own company: if you're releasing a DVD or Blu-Ray with more than one disc, do try to at least be consistent with which holders you have for your discs!

...That's not my only complaints, however. On the discs themselves, there are FOUR things which I have to bring up (and one which is a hold over from the last few reviews). First of all, the extras (which are only available on disc two) are pretty bear: you have a bunch of advertisements for several other anime released by the company, clean versions of the opening and closing of the anime...and that's it. Now, to be fair, there IS a commentary track from the makers of the anime in Japanese (with English subs)...but you can't access that from the extras menu. This is my second complaint: if you want to have the Japanese commentary on, you have to put it on from the set up menu (which is where you select what language you want to watch the anime in and whether you want the subtitles on or not), not the extras menu, which would be a far more logical place to have that. My DVD player does allow me to run the commentary subtitles without the Japanese commentary happening over it, but you can't do that through the menu itself. My third complaint is that the English subtitles do not match up with what is actually said in the English dub, which is going to be annoying if you like having the subtitles on while watching the show in English. It also means that, if you're deaf, you're going to find watching it with someone who isn't deaf is going to result in some very interesting comments. That said, I do think it's cool that you can watch the show in Japanese without the subtitles on screen if you want to! My final complaint purely towards this anime is the decision to keep the ending credits and opening credits the same, as both of them have Yuko singing along to the songs at those points in the anime...in a Japanese voice. I'm not going to say that they should have gotten completely new music for it, but surely a decision to re-record the vocals in English by the English voice actor portraying Yuko (Emily Neves) or someone who sounds a lot like her would have been a far more sensible decision?

My final complaint is related to the subtitles when covering the songs in every anime I've reviewed so far to date: they alternate between being subtitled into English and being subtitled into transliterated Japanese. The lack on consistency on this is just anger inducing: if I've put the subtitles on in English, I want to have the song translated as well, with transliterated being an acceptable substitute if it's done consistently. Flipping between the two, though, just doesn't work for me at all, as it just looks lazy and like nobody took the time to check through the DVD before they released it! Seriously, if there's an anime company reading this, take this lesson to heart: either translate the song or transliterate the song, don't do both...unless you provide an option to allow you to pick which of the two will happen while watching the DVD with the subtitles, in which case, I'll let that slide and actually give praise because you've actually thought about providing a choice for people who might not want one option!

Another complaint is that the anime does have a extended version of episode 12 available...but the material that was cut is so little that I actually fail to see the point in having the extended version of the episode, as it's about a minute of cut footage AT MOST. And the cut footage actually causes a minor issue in and of itself, as the footage ends with Yuko looking sad and then jumps to back to the original episode...which is when she's acting really happy. Some people might like the extended version of the episode, but I'm personally just going "That was a waste of disc space which could have been used for some better extras, HINT HINT!". That said, it's nice that it doesn't automatically play when the OVA is finished and goes back to the episode select screen instead, so I can't hold that against it too much!

While I don't particularly like the home media release of the anime much when I break it down, I still would hesitate to call it badly done. Poorly thought out and lazily done in some areas, yes, but outright bad? Not really, no! The best word for it seems to be "functional": it gets the job done, which is to get the anime out there, but it does leave a lot to be desired in terms of how it's done. I'm not exactly asking for a lavish box set for the purpose of getting the anime out there, but I do find myself vaguely going "What's the point of buying the physical release of this anime if there's so little extra to the release of it?", so a bit more effort to make the whole product worth purchasing would be much appreciated.

So, overall, what do I think of this anime? Well, aside from my complains related to factors outside of the actual anime itself, it's overall a fairly good (although not exceptional) anime that really is worth seeking out if you want an anime which is a bit different from the norm. It's probably not going to be any any anime fan's favourite anime by any measure, but, for what it's worth, it's certainly worth a watch if you're an anime fan. If you're not an anime fan...I don't know, the clichés of Japanese anime are very noticeable here, but it's certainly not a bad watch in and of itself!

Final Rating: 7 Out Of 10

...Also, I swear that I'm not picking anime which involve characters in the nude who are under the legal age in the UK deliberately! All of the anime I've reviewed so far are ones which I picked up because they looked interesting and on no other merit, so I've gone into them completely blind! I really hope Nightwalker bucks that trend when I finally get around to watching it...although the fact it's apparently based on a eroge (erotic game) doesn't inspire much hope in me!

Why Gaming Is Still A Male Dominated Medium (Or "Why Anita Sarkeesian Has A Point")

(As a note in advance: I had to put this article up without getting my proofreader to check it through. So, if there seems to have been a step down in quality, that's why!)

Before anyone starts preparing the insults: I'm a guy who, while not a regular gamer these days, has grown up with gamer culture meaning a lot to him. So no, I'm not an angry female feminist (yes, there IS such a thing as a male feminist) who is ranting about something they don't understand: I get gamer culture very well, yet I'm still going to stand up and say that gaming is still a male dominated market with room to change (arguably, for the better). Being a male gamer does not prevent me from recognising issues with a medium that is aimed for people like myself, you know!

But yeah, in connection with my previous article relating where I feel GamerGate's more noble purpose is correct, albeit misguided and arguably a bit misinformed, I'm going to try to spin the coin about the issue Anita Sarkeesian frequently discusses and explain where I feel she is correct with what she comments about, but also why her voice is not necessarily the most correct voice out there.

One of the things which nobody is going to deny is that the most high profile games of the video games media that get released every year do tend to have certain features to them. Most of them tend to be additions to long established franchises and most of them tend to be the type of game that would appeal more to men than they do to women. At the risk of offending a few readers, you're far more likely to find something which appeals to men will usually contain either scantily clad women and/or a large amount of killing enemies in various bloody ways (the only real case where that isn't true being horror stuff, but, since horror as a medium usually contains a large amount of blood these days anyway, that's not necessarily a huge break from the typical track record). This is not to say that there aren't exceptions to this, but, on average, you're more likely to see a man wanting to watch something like The Expendables over something like Bridget Jones' Diary (heck, I've done that in the past and I'm hardly Mr. Macho by any measure...I would joke that I'm more like Mr. Nacho, but I'm not sure that describing myself as a type of food which most people get to share by dipping it into various sauces really works for the point I want to use it for, despite that being probably one of the best puns I've come up with in a good while!).

I don't think anyone can completely explain why this is, as anyone attempting to say that it's down purely to the amount of testosterone people have will inevitably have to explain why there are highly masculine men who have a lot of interests which are stereotypically feminine in nature (and which has no transferable skills to their masculinity: I know ballet is actually INCREDIBLY physically demanding to do properly, which is why it is actually required if you want to be a professional in American football, and I know that most people in the army know how to sew because they are responsible for maintaining their uniforms, but I'm on about examples of incredibly masculine men who are fans of romantic films, shopping and stuff like that), but my personal suspicion is that it's partially down to a combination of social conventions being imposed on people as they grow up (to give you an example, most cartoons aimed at young children will usually still have a target gender: I've watched the entirety of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (and consider myself a brony, albeit not one who is involved in the fandom connected to the show) and I would still say that a very valid case could be made that it is a show that is still primarily aimed at young girls, albeit one that remembers that being aimed at young girls does not give it an excuse to close everyone else out of the show!). There are other factors connected to it, of course, but, by reinforcing the stereotypes of each gender early in most people's lives, you do kind of get the idea that it's harder to mentally break out from accepting them as the norm just because you're so used to seeing them being reinforced all of the time. At the risk of sounding like I hate society and believing in anarchy (I don't hate society in the slightest, I just don't like the unpleasant sides of it in the slightest and tend to take a dim view on having to accept something as the truth just because it's what I live in), I can't help thinking that some of the ugly sides of society can be traced to people getting completely the wrong idea about things due to misunderstanding some of the important lessons they should have been taught growing up or, possibly even worse, getting the wrong lessons taught to them. The example I like to use is that, if you grow up in a society like that of North Korea (which I think calling a dictatorship would be an understatement), a culture like that of the UK (where you can think what you want to think and have the right to vote for what you want) is going to seem naturally weird and alien just because it's not the culture you've grown up in, and, as such, it's impossible to say that one culture is necessarily worse than another: it's just different. This cannot be a comment that will win over people who are opposed to dictatorships in all sorts, but, ultimately, the only way one could understand which culture is the best would be to completely separate oneself from ALL societies and judge each one on their merits and failures, without a viewpoint that comes from having been inside a single society for your entire life. Knowledge is power, but the right way to combat ignorance is through education and unbiased facts, not hatred and distorted truths.

Hmm...that's another advantage of honest and uncorrupt journalism that I really should have put in my last article, isn't it?

Anyway, digression aside, the point to remember is that most male gamers will have usually come into gaming after years of being used to the ideals of what society deems manly, which means that it can be very difficult for most men to completely understand why a woman with a feminist agenda looking into gaming culture would have a lot of reasons to express concern. Even if she is distorting her facts a bit (like Anita Sarkeesian arguably is), many of the points she makes have some basis in reality, and it is only by letting yourself put aside your ability to view gaming from inside the medium and look at it like an outsider, as Sarkeesian is, that you can spot some very concerning trends in gaming, not least of which is the fact that, as much as most gamers would like to claim otherwise, gaming spends most of its time among the bigger titles not appealing to a female audience. You do get titles which are gender neutral in their appeal, like Animal Crossing, but, among the hardcore gaming crowd, the trend is mostly to have triple A games aiming towards a male audience.

But why is this such a prevalent issue among gaming? After all, it's 2014 (coming up to 2015 in less than three months): surely getting a triple A game out there which appeals towards a female audience and only a female audience should not be like trying to pull teeth from the gaming industry?

Well, here's the big problem: there are very few female games developers (although the number of female games developers has been on the increase in recent years, for which I am personally very grateful), and there is still a large number of people (not just in gaming, but in writing in general) who simply do not know how to write a character properly who is a realistic depiction of their gender, sexual identity, religious identity and racial identity without actually being part of the same group as the character they wish to write. Throw in those two factors together and you can already start to see why gaming tends to relegate women to the roles of eye candy and damsels in distress. Getting a female main character in a triple A game in a brand new IP who is realistically written, not conventionally beautiful to the point of making most supermodels look like they're trying too hard and does not succumb to ANY stereotypes which women in video games seem to have to get given to constitute a character is very unlikely to happen, even assuming a game would be made BY a triple A company with a female main character outside of Tomb Raider.

On top of that, due to the patriarchal nature of most societies (which still hasn't been completely combatted, I should point out), there is still a bit of an inbreed sense among a distressingly large number of men that a woman intruding on a man's domain cannot be a woman to be trusted (I'm sure most people will know the "no girls allowed" and "no boys allowed" signs that most young kids put up on the rooms to their bedroom doors...well, put this on a larger scale and you pretty much get the idea of how gaming culture seems to work), which puts even more pressure on most female games developers to do well, as she has to prove that she is both an excellent games developer in her own right AND is able to do it well enough to disprove sceptics claiming that a woman doesn't understand gaming.

And this, on top of the fact that the anonymity the internet provides makes it very easy for people to harass other people, basically puts all female developers under three times as much pressure as her male counterpart would be put under, if not more than that due to the fact that a anonymous person determined to harass someone via the internet could do so with very little difficulty and that a product which fails will nearly always have the blame pinned on the female developer by overzealous gamers, even if she is working among a group of developers and all of the ideas which gamers disliked were ideas that she could prove that she did not agree with and never wanted to implement in the product at all.

Yet all of this does not ultimately answer the important question that I've been hinting at: why is gaming still a male dominated market?

Well, let us do some basic maths just now. If you want to become a games developer on a big project, you usually have to have started out on smaller projects which have been very successful. At best, you're going to have had to make two or three smaller projects before you've been able to move on to the bigger project (the first to get your name out there, the second and third to prove that you know what you're doing with a smaller project and are capable of making a bigger project likely to work), which is likely to take you about a year's worth of development per game if you want to do it right. But, before that, you'd need to have been able to enter a smaller company (unless you're starting one up yourself), which usually requires you to have been able to prove your ability to make simple games (and probably got a degree in games development). On top of THAT, you need to actually know what you need to do to make a game, which can mean you'll have had to start learning the tools of the trade in your childhood and teenage years. So, at absolute earliest, to be a developer working in a triple A industry, you're likely to be in your late 20's, if not early 30's. So most of the people who are games developers today likely were playing games on the Sega Genesis (or the Sega Mega Drive) as a kid in the late 80's, with most of them probably able to claim to have remembered the excitement of getting a Nintendo Entertainment System (early to mid-80's). So, unless you join a really big indie team and happen to be really lucky to join it just as they start to move on to making a big project, you're very unlikely to be a games developer in a big company who can claim that the oldest console they ever played upon as a kid was the PlayStation (heck, that first came out in Europe when I was 2 years old and I'm 21 now!), which basically means that, if you wanted to be a well known female developer, the earliest you'd probably have to have started making fully released games would have been back in the early 2000's...or a bit after the PlayStation 2 came out, a console which was NOTORIOUSLY tough to develop games for. On top of that, video gaming culture was, if possible, even worse about how male dominated it was back then than it is now, so I imagine that most of the female developers we have today either were constantly unlucky with getting out of the underground games development scene or simply weren't around then. Because of this, it's only fairly recently that female developers working for large companies have really started to be noticeable (although, in fairness, I've been out of gaming for a while now, so I might have missed the sudden influx of them and it's only now that I'm vaguely resembling getting back into it that I'm going "When did we get female games developers?").

And that means that it's only recently that gaming seems to have really opened up in general, not just to women. Thanks in part to the rise of casual gaming and independently released games onto the internet, gaming has been a more acceptable thing among the general public and it's much easier to get into gaming these days. You don't really need a games library for a computer or a console to be a gamer today: just type "free online games" into google and you'll find a load of them to play. And some of them are actually pretty good, if you ask me: I particularly enjoy playing Territory War in my free time and would like to play N more when I get a proper computer to play it on!

But that means that most of the gamers who are becoming the games developers of tomorrow are at best just getting into their first gaming companies now, which means that the potential for change by having a large number of female developers in the underground gaming scene is going to take a bit more time before it actually means something.

And, while that's happening, we've got the games industry afraid of change. I'm not going to paraphrase Jim Sterling (of Jimquisition, if you've not heard of him), but I will say that he has discussed in a few videos that a lot of games publishers are not confident enough to have a female protagonist for a game to put their full weight behind the game's promotion due to the belief that it won't sell as well (if you want to see the most relevant one, then click here...and remember that this video came out a bit after Anita Sarkeesian's first video (which came out on the 7th of March 2013), as it came out on the 25th of March 2013! While he did cover Anita Sarkeesian before then (in this video, which came out on the 10th of September 2012), the video most relevant to my thoughts on this is actually related to Jennifer Hepler, which was released on the 19th of August 2013 and can be watched here). Which falls apart a bit when you realise that, by not promoting it properly, they make it less likely to be noticed than if they'd have put their full weight behind it and, as a result, end up sabotaging their own game's release and, as such, contribute to the belief that games with female protagonists don't sell, but I'll leave the angry rants about stupid moves in the video games industry to Jim Sterling, as he does them far better than I can do them. The point of the matter is that, where change would matter the most in the games industry, there is a reluctance to take a risk, which basically means that, in the eyes of the mainstream, there's been no proper reason to believe gamers saying that the gaming industry has changed because, in the eyes of the mainstream, the ONLY game with a strong female protagonist who isn't objectified to some level is Tomb Raider...and most people would have been put off the game due to the advertising for the game implying that Lara was going to be raped, which doesn't exactly win women over to wanting to play the game!

This article has taken a while to write, so I feel no shame in admitting that, between starting writing this article and this point, I had a discussion with a friend of mine in a local pub and, while chatting, I raised a point which I really wish I'd have made in a previous post: because both sides are making valid points that are worth discussing, yet everyone who has an opinion on the topics is determined to tear the other side to pieces, we're ironically proving that, to the mainstream, gaming simply isn't mature enough yet to be taken seriously. Like it or not, gaming has practically become mainstream now thanks to games like Farmville, but, by constantly arguing and trying to ignore the big issues in favour of death threats, insults and favouritism for whatever system we consider the definitive gaming system, gamers are actually sending the message to non-gamers that gaming simply isn't ready to be treated as a serious medium. When these opinions and controversies are reaching the eyes of a non-gaming crowd more than the actual games themselves, we're proving Anita Sarkeesian right in that we cannot have a serious discussion about gaming without it becoming a flame war of epic proportions. Games like Call Of Duty are not going to go away just because a more balanced way of telling stories becomes more acceptable: those games have been popular for that long that they're practically pillars of the gaming community and nobody is going to be stupid enough to demand they stop being made in much the same way that nobody is going to stop brainless action films like The Expendables from being made just because a feminist takes offence to them: there's a far larger audience who will enjoy them than can be influenced by a feminist explaining why those things are not fair representations of women. What CAN be gained from a more balanced portrayal of people of all walks of life is things like more varied stories, better written characters and possibly even more interesting and unusual games that blur the lines between what is a game for men and what is a game for women.

And I would absolutely love to see those types of games being made and being popular. This is not to say that I think games like Assassin's Creed, Call Of Duty and Metal Gear Solid are terrible games that should be forgotten (in fact, I actually have a fairly high opinion of the Assassin's Creed series, even Assassin's Creed 3!), but when every high profile game released seems to be mining off of nostalgia and not trying to be a completely new IP, you do have to question whether gaming needs a good kick in the backside to finally wake up and accept that it's no longer fine to just make new versions of games that are old enough to be allowed to order a beer in the pub, and that Anita Sarkeesian could well be that voice, as misguided and untrustworthy a voice as one could argue she is.

So why are people so opposed to something that, on many levels, would actually make gaming BETTER if it were allowed to happen? Anita Sarkeesian isn't calling for the death of all gaming at all, like Jack Thompson was, she is explaining why gaming is a medium which can be argued as being off putting to women if looked at from a certain perspective. I get that some people will not want change out of fear of the unknown, and I respect that fact, but to argue in favour of keeping something the same when it seems like it has stagnated in the eyes of the mainstream is not the way to make gaming be taken seriously: that is a sign that gaming refuses to accept change.

Which, again, proves Anita Sarkeesian right, in a way.

Look, Sarkeesian might be an untrustworthy source of information on so many levels to anyone already familiar with gaming, but it cannot be denied that she manages to point out the issues with gaming that someone who is not familiar with it would have also spotted and, as such, she has ultimately proven that gaming DOES need to change. Not because gaming has stagnated in the eyes of the mainstream, not because gaming is a medium which is not naturally going to appeal to most women, not even because refusing to accept change is hurting the gaming industry more than most change could: because, by becoming better and being able to be taken more seriously as a medium, we prove that gaming is not just the realm of immature teenagers and men who do not want women intruding their space, but that gaming, much like the film industry, is a serious creative industry with some amazing potential that, when allowed to spread its wings, can make for an incredibly rewarding section of work.

And that's why we need to accept that gaming is not a medium most women will want to get into and change to make gaming a medium capable of being taken seriously by the mainstream.

Because, by doing so, we make gaming better for everyone.

So let us be better than those who criticise gaming by accepting their criticisms (especially if we've been saying the same thing for a long time that they're saying to us now), taking them on board, doing something about it to respond to their criticisms and showing that we're not opposed to changing fort he better, not reaching for the flamethrowers and roasting everyone else alive just for daring to criticise the video games industry, whether an outsider to it or not.

...Wait, I was supposed to be saying why Anita Sarkeesian isn't the best voice to listen to, wasn't I? Well, her questionable research methods do not make her a voice to really trust and she has hardly managed to make herself out to be the voice of reason on the topics she discusses for various reasons...but, at the same time, you could make the same case for a lot of people when discussing something: most people will deliberately only raise points that support their point and do their best to avoid raising points that hurt their case, often by trying to make the points which hurt their case seem either unimportant or not truthful. I personally try to avoid doing this, as I don't necessarily want to win an argument so much as try to find the truth and, if I do win an argument, it isn't because I've done so through manipulating the truth and facts to suit the argument I want to make and discredited the other person's viewpoint. If you will, I prefer to be the honest voice of reason when I can and try to look at things from as many viewpoints as I can to allow me to find my own opinion, which also means that I can be surprisingly good at playing devil's advocate when I need to. This is why I personally cannot stand people who hold that their opinion is the only one in the world and will act like any disagreement with their opinion is an insult to them, because it is the same kind of thought process that, when attached to purposes of INCREDIBLY poor morality, can result in decisions that lead to events like the holocaust. While I will admit that there were other factors that lead to that event, the basic point still stands: if you are so committed towards one thing that you will not listen to a person pointing out why what you're committed to isn't flawless, at best, you make far more enemies than you do allies and, at worst, not only do you make everyone else your enemy, but what you go on to do causes far more harm than it does good and you have no way of stopping what you've started once it actually gets any momentum. This is arguably why it can take me a long time to say something on a serious topic, but also why my contribution is nearly always like that of a voice of reason: I take the time to consider everything that I can connected to the serious discussion, acknowledge all points on all sides that I am in agreement with (even if I then have to provide a long explanation as to why I consider my agreement only a case of agreement with the long term aims and not with the actual point itself) and explain my disagreement with the other points in as polite a way as I can and with an acknowledgement of the importance of the point to other people despite my disagreement with it. This does mean that I rarely talk about serious stuff, but, when I do, I tend to provide something resembling a definitive statement.

...I really hope I've not done that with this article and my last one related to ethics in journalism. As much as I'd love to be able to be attributed to being the reason everyone stopped taking those things too seriously if it were to happen, that was not the point of either of these articles. What I have wanted to do is to give my take on both sides to explain why I feel both sides have valid reasons to be supported, but why I personally cannot consider myself a supporter of either side. The point of these two articles has been to encourage civil conversation on both issues, regardless of which sides you support and which you dislike.

So let's have those discussions, without the bile and hatred that have become so popular whenever both issues crop up. If gaming is really the mature medium it wants to be, let us all put aside the anger that comes so easily to us whenever either side is mentioned and take the time to discuss the issues civilly. Who knows, maybe something valuable might be formed through a polite discussion related to both issues...