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The GrillOut

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Welcome to The GrillOut, home of Borealis, aka the LiteralGrill~

Inspired by late 90s and early 2000s fansites of yore, The GrillOut is a no-frills site built to load fast and have tons of fun things to read! You can expect essays, reviews, and general musings with a focus on anime, cartoons, and generally obscure media.

Expect posts to go up whenever my brain allows and I'm particularly inspired! You can see a sampling of my most recent works below and check out the full breadth of my work in the archive.

Delicious in Dungeon: Oppression, War, and the Power of Bread - Posted June 10, 2024

I started watching Delicious in Dungeon properly today simply expecting some excellent entertainment while loom knitting. I ended up getting a fantastic reminder about how a single episode of anime can be what sparks education and discussion about history, current events, and the struggles of oppressed people.

Transphobia Should Be Maintained in Adaptations: A Trans Perspective - Posted February 18, 2024

Discotek's release of LovelyComplex resulted in an extremely rare look at how the sausage is made when Brendan Blaber, AKA JelloApocalypse, made a now deleted post on Patreon discussing his work on LoveCom's localization and dub. Blaber received condemnation from both Diskotek and SoundCadence — who produced the dub — which resulted in speculation that Blaber would now be blacklisted from the industry. While some of Blaber's statements in that post were proven to be outright wrong in multiple instances, his discussion on how changes were made to the dub surrounding Seiko Kotobuki's representation are worth noting.

LiteralGrill's Top 10 Anime of 2023 - Posted December 30, 2023

Over 300 anime shows and films were released in 2023, no seriously, I went and counted by hand and a bit after 300 is where I gave up! The amount of shows we get each season, let alone in an entire year, has been massively increasing as of late. While I obviously couldn't watch literally everything, it still made it incredibly difficult to narrow things down to a top 10. I'll be covering everything from the Winter 2023 season through Fall 2023.