The Professional Gamer - October 30, 2017

Hi readers, I've been away this week, putting in some long hours in the field. Once I got back though, I was able to spend some time catching up on this weeks anime. Let's talk about seasonal anime!

On Food Wars this week, Yukihira starts to get some traction for his booth at the Moon Festival. Let's talk about this episode in terms of the contrast between Yukihira Soma and Kuga Terunori. Yukihira has had rivalries with many of the other students during his short time at Totsuki Culinary Academy. However, these rivalries have always been professional rather than personal. Yukihira wants to push his skills and creativity to best his rivals, but is not concerned with humiliating them or otherwise "defeating" them. In fact, he becomes friends with many of these rivals. But, they remain rivals and want to push themselves, and each other, even higher. When Yukihira is struggling at the Moon Festival, he is able to call on these highly skilled, highly individualistic chefs to help him. This contrasts strongly with Kuga, who has surrounded himself with sycophantic followers, apprentice cooks who are willing to do things excatly as Kuga directs. They have no ambition of their own and no creativity. They can prepare his dishes, but they cannot add anything to them. Meanwhile, Yukihira's friends actively participate in the creating and fine-tuning his dishes. Yukihira is a prime example of collaborative leadership. And I think that's something really important to show in media, especially a show about creativity.

On Revovery of an MMO Junkie, we saw the first chance of some of the character's catching out to each other's online identities. I'm really interested to see how this goes, and am cheering for everyone to fall in love with each other!

That's all I've got for this week. I'll put up some more discussion about Ancient Magus' Bride next week.