2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Gundam Wing. In August, I was looking for an angle for a feature I was writing about my relationship to this show, which was one of the first anime I ever watched. I knew I wanted to write about Relena, a character I used to dislike as a teenager. As I put in this article:

She was pushy, naive, and worst of all, idealistic. In a show whose central mission was to deliver cool robot battles to our eyeballs, she was a relentless advocate for peace.

Since this was for Anime News Network and not a blog entry, I didn’t only want to talk about my feelings. I wanted to find a primary source. That’s when I started looking into the person I associate most with the Relena from my memory—the distinct performance of her voice actor, Lisa Ann Beley. I was surprised to learn that she had basically fallen off the map. She hadn’t done any anime voice performances in years, and had only given one interview in the last ten. While her former co-star Mark Hildreth was at New York Comic Con giving interviews as the former voice of Heero Yuy, I couldn’t even find an email for Lisa.

I started following leads, beginning with the last person to interview her, Chris Mayek, and eventually hit a lucky break: Lisa worked just a few stops away from me on the DC Metro. I got the chance to meet her, and right away there was no doubt I’d found the right person:

I instantly recognized her clear, careful enunciation as the voice of Relena. Even speaking with her in a casual setting, my untrained ear still heard that vocal precision—a separation of syllables that defines Beley’s well-trained speech.

We spoke for more than an hour about Lisa’s career, which has included voice coaching actors like Daniel Radcliffe and teaching young students who recognize her anime roles. I am so glad I got the opportunity to talk with her and, better yet, to share this interview with ANN’s audience. I hope you’ll check out the article to learn about Lisa’s experience voicing Relena, why she logged off, what Gundam has in common with Shakespeare, and what she thinks about the show’s lasting legacy that still resonates today.

Check out the article when you click the button:

Read my article on ANN

I’m glad to finally share my new piece of reporting for Anime News Network, Does the Light Novel Translation Process Need AI?. This is one of the longer features I mentioned I had in the works in last month’s blog post.

It really says something about the AI debate that I began working on this article back in May. This topic is just as relevant as it was six months ago.

This is the central idea of the story:

One of the biggest buzzwords in light novel translation today is Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE). With MTPE, a machine translation tool generates a raw translation, which is then smoothed and localized by a human translator. As an insider at a major light novel publisher told Anime News Network, “Of course, we’re looking into MTPE, everyone is.” But is that true? More importantly, do AI translation tools really work?

I centered this article around just one light novel series, The Ascendance of a Bookworm, both because it’s a very good series and because the pieces fell perfectly into place. I spoke to the novel’s publisher, Sam Pinanski and Andrew Schubauer of J-Novel Club; its official translator, Quof; and Tristan “Arkada” Gallant, a Youtuber fan who read the novel both in AI translation and in the form of its official release. I also spoke to industry professional Katrina Leonoudakis who was not only a valuable source but an essential aid in my reporting process.

Going into this story, I expected that fans would support MTPE (the better to get light novels more quickly) while translators would be opposed to it. I was surprised when the biggest proponent in the story was Quof, the official translator.

A cursory glance at my Bluesky account will tell you where I personally stand on the issue, because I’ve liked and RT’d a lot of anti-AI sentiments. Like I’ve been saying since 2011 when I wrote the Otaku Journalist Manifesto, I think it’s important to acknowledge my biases directly in order to produce authentic journalism. I don’t think “objective reporting” ought to be a journalist’s highest aspiration. Instead, I used my own opinions on this topic to inspire my interview questions and fuel my curiosity about the story. The result is an article that allows readers to draw their own conclusions, or so I hope. You can let me know if I was successful.

Read it for yourself when you press the big ol’ button:

Read my article on ANN