blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine

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What’s the chef cookin’ tonight?

What is fanime?

A fanime (etym. blend of fan + anime) is basically when someone makes an anime-style cartoon show by drawing frames in MS Paint; compositing them in Windows Movie Maker with pirated music, stock sound effects, and dialog recorded in one take on potato microphones; and posting the result to YouTube. This isn’t necessarily accurate of all fanime, but the throughline is in any case that fanime is a form of democratized amateur animation combining anime aesthetics with “Internet Ugly”. The style is most associated with the Western anime fandom of the mid-2000s through mid-2010s, where it was often difficult to distinguish sincere fanime shows from parodies of the genre.

Overview

• Reserved time: 180 minutes
• Blazoner Narazen E1: 13 minutes
• Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be a Magical Girl: 25 minutes
  • Each episode is ~13 minutes
• Yin Yang: 84 minutes
  • Each episode is ~25 minutes
  • Christmas special is ~9 minutes
• TV☆3SIS flourishes: 8 minutes
• Estimated door-holding: 15 minutes
• Estimated slack: 35 minutes
  • If we have at least 10 minutes left at the end we’ll watch Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors episode 13.

Blazoner Narazen episode 1

“Syngamy is the merging event of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) from both biological parents through the fusion of two gamete cell nuclei to give rise to the zygote…”, or just “Syngamy” for short, is the 12½-minute first episode of Blazoner Narazen (BlaNara), an original fanime created by yours truly through months of blood, sweat, and tears. I’m not good at coming up with genre labels, but I guess it’s some combination of action-adventure, psychological drama, mystery, and science fantasy, with a sense of humor to boot. Most distinctively, though, it’s a “magical-girl-inspired” show in a similar way as Kill la Kill is. Or I guess we can call it a “magical enby” show.

In any case, episode 1 summary:

Teenage runaway Narazen finds xemself suddenly transported to an apparently post-apocalyptic future, where xe discovers a sapient telepathic heraldic shield that grants xem superpowers based on its changeable appearance. This discovery puts Narazen in the crosshairs of a global conspiracy that goes to the very core of the planet.

By the way, if you want to dub Blazoner Narazen into your own language, I created a special “off vocal” version (which also gets rid of most on-screen text) for exactly that purpose — but be aware that there’s ~91 seconds of missing animation (left as storyboards) because I couldn’t get all the animation done in time for the premiere.

Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be a Magical Girl

Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be a Magical Girl is an independent animated series by Kiana Khansmith, who works at Disney Television Animation. The two released episodes are currently just animatics, but by the quality of even just the animatics alone, I think Pretty Pretty Please is a bit too “polished” and “professional” to really count as “fanime” as such; but since it’s still an independent anime-inspired web series, I figure it’s got enough overlap with fanime to be worth showing here. It takes clear stylistic cues from Ojamajo Doremi; you may recognize its voices from official anime dubs like K-ON!, Wonder Egg Priority, Sailor Moon Crystal, Pokémon, and more, or from Seppolandic cartoons like Big City Greens, We Bare Bears, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power; and Pretty Pretty Please is both notably Black^[1] and notably gayyyyyyyy, with the ending theme, “Her Song”, being a sapphic love song and everything, and the deuteragonist Zira is apparently she/they non-binary, which I didn’t find out until this morning despite seeing both episodes several times.

Description from TV Tropes:

The series follows Aika, a magical girl who has become disillusioned and unenthusiastic about her job, and seeks refuge in an ordinary high school as an ordinary girl. Unfortunately for Aika, her old life has a certain way of creeping into her new life. The pilot animatic premiered on YouTube February 28, 2025. The second episode animatic premiered January 31, 2026 and featured the announcement that Mercury Filmworks would fully animate the pilot.

Yin Yang

Yin Yang is a supernatural slice of life romance fanime by animestrawberrykitty released between 2010 and 2016. Plot description combining those of Fanime Realm and TV Tropes:

In between heaven and earth, there is a place that is too dark for angels and too light for demons, but they were able to live in harmony. Nothing can be done for a thousand generations. This is where the story of a girl named Chiyoko begins, as her life takes a turn for the supernatural after meeting a pair of twin brothers, Hikaru and Kuro. The boys are beings called Yin and Yang, somewhere between angelic and demonic, and Chiyoko soon finds out she’s not exactly human herself. There is much drama, action, and romance to be had as Chiyoko tries to figure out how to go forward after learning her identity and power.

TV Tropes furthermore notes that this series was unfortunately brought to an abrupt end and became lost media for a good while, as a “stan” (in the original Eminem sense) stalked and doxxed the creator, which forced them to delete their YouTube channel. A pretty tragic end to what was, by my impression, one of the most popular and influential fanimes of the 2010s.

Content warnings and accessibility

Audio description: Blazoner Narazen episode 1

※As PeerTube/TankieTube does not yet support multiple audio tracks, you will need to play the above video yourself and try your best to synchronize it with the Blorptube stream.

Sign language: Not available

Captions:

• English softsubs (Blazoner Narazen, Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be a Magical Girl)
• Not available (Yin Yang)

Language of audio: English

Content warnings:

• LOUD NOISES
• FLASHING LIGHTS
• Lost child in peril
• Skeleton and blood
• Enbyphobia
• Off-screen self-castration

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♫ Uniting nations at the speeeed of liiiiight ♫
[epic sax solo]
♫ Station of the '20s — TV☆3SIS! ♫

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1. Did you know that the only currently releasing Seppolandic TV cartoon with a Black protagonist is The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder? All the other Seppolandic TV cartoons with Black leads have been canceled. YouTuber A Neighbor’s Tale says that the state of Black representation in animation hasn’t been this dire since nineteen twenty nine. ↩︎