Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up the author Mamare Touno, whose work is catnip to any reader who enjoys watching attractive redheads enact policies of social reform.

“Maōyū… begins where most stories end with the confrontation of a human hero and a demon overlord at the culmination of a fifteen-year war. The characters, however, recognize that they have more in common than a simplified account of their conflict might allow, and join forces in to remove the inequalities that led their peoples to fight in the first place.”

Here in Glasgow for the first leg of Scotland Loves Anime, which kicked off for me last night by talking myself hoarse at the Hogwarts-like university, detailing some of the gossip and scandal from the Japanese fantasy scene. For those who were there and interested in following up some of the strands discussed, I spoke about some of the machinations at Studio Ghibli, the very different careers of Motoko Arai and Hiroshi Yamamoto, the uses and abuses of the work of Kenji Miyazawa, as well as the Persian diversion of Yoshiki Tanaka, the Martian sidequels of Hitoshi Yoshioka, and Tomihiko Morimi‘s love of Kyoto.

Thank you to Rob Maslen of the School of Critical Studies for inviting me along, and for all those students who laughed along with me at some of the misfortunes of Japanese authors, particularly as regarding discovering that all their characters had been turned into cats. And for those of you in the audience who wanted to look at my doctoral thesis, you can read it here.

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up Kugane Maruyama, creator of the Overlord series, which “…artfully captures the mindset of the generation raised on Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, not merely in its distraction from the everyday, preoccupied with dramatic events in unseen online worlds, but the risks and hazards to an individual’s moral compass presented by the prospect of power and riches in a realm seemingly devoid of consequences.”