Inari, Divine Being, Human Relations

Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha is one of my favorite shows currently airing. Despite being only ten episodes long (nine of which have aired as of the time of this post), this show has explored so much in the way of various relationships: middle-school first loves, friendships, and relationships between humans and the divine kami of Shinto. While all of these are great, as someone who loves spiritual themes in anime (see Gingitsune), it's the last one that I love about the show the most.

Indeed, once again, despite being based around the Shinto religion, this show offers some great perspective for Christians, particularly with what our relationship with God is like. In this case, though, what the show provides is in some way more of a contrast to show how Christianity differs from the religion presented in the show.

As a disclaimer, the depiction of Shinto in this anime is the series's own interpretation of it and not necessarily representative of actual Shinto religion. And as one might expect, there will be mild spoilers after the jump.

Divine hugs are the best kind of hugs.

Winter 2014: What I'm Watching (Part 1)

The new season of anime is underway, and despite thinking that I’d try to limit the number of shows I’d watch this season, once again, I have ended up with a full slate of shows to follow. Go figure. I will be following 15 new full-length series, which is already a lot, and that’s not including the four shows that are continuing from last season—that’s a total of 19 shows this season that I’m following! It’s like Summer 2013 all over again.

Anyway, like I have done for the last two seasons, I will introduce the new shows I am following this season in two separate parts.

As a side note, there will be a number of shows from Funimation this time around, and as usual, they put their videos on both their (new) website and on Hulu. However, as of this season, they have adopted the Crunchyroll model of delaying new episodes by one week for those not subscribed to their Elite Video Subscription service. This delay also applies to the episodes they put up on Hulu.

Time to introduce the first of the new shows!

There are a lot of great comedies this season.

Edit Note (1/27/13): I have changed some of the "objectionable content" sections.