Roving Thoughts archives

An aside on the timing of my previous entry

It is mostly a coincidence that I wrote my previous entry on Panty & Stocking right after Author posted his roll call of the sleeping and dead. I watched the episode last night (after reading Aroduc's summary, which pushed it up the 'I want to see this for myself' list) and immediately wound up thinking about how to write up my reaction to it, since it's one of the few anime lately that I have had a distinct reaction to.

However, I can't deny that his entry made me get off my rear to put my thoughts into action and actually write something for once. Really, I should do this more often.

(At a minimum I want to write something about my overall view of Ookami, since I wrote about the first episode. But that would need me to actually watch the final episode.)

My reaction to Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt #1

It is not often that the first episode of an anime series leaves me boggled as my major reaction.

The best way I can think of to describe P&S is that it feels like Gainax decided that they wanted to make a modern American cartoon and then turn the age limit up (without turning up the maturity level, which appears to be set firmly at the Ren & Stimpy or Beavis & Butthead level). The result is extremely unlike almost all of the other anime I've seen, including Gainax's other work.

(In a very bad way, Gurren Lagann is the closest other anime that I can think of, in that it started out as a deliberately over the top take on Japanese giant robot anime. You could perhaps say that P&S is an even more over the top take on modern American cartoons, given a Japanese twist and a much increased age limit.)

Aroduc's summary of the first episode will give you a more detailed rundown if you want it. Do not worry about reading spoilers; P&S is not the sort of experience that can really be spoiled.

I don't know if I like it, because the question feels inapplicable. This is not a show that you like, this is a show that you watch in horrified fascination because you can't turn away. (Or that you flee from with all due speed. It is possible that this is the most sensible reaction to P&S.)

I fall into the 'boggled and unable to look away' camp, so I will be watching the next episode. Of course I have no idea what it will be like; P&S is already so bizarre that it would not surprise me in the least if Gainax changed things majorly every episode (or every few episodes or whatever), depending on how thoroughly they want to run the current joke into the ground.

My quick reaction to Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakamatachi episode 1

Rather than just just email my comments to Author in response to his entry, I'll be Author-like and post something here for once.

The first fansub of Ookami+7's first episode has come out, and I've watched it now (partly because of Author's entry). Unlike some, I actually like the narration; without its injection of snarky commentary and the show's gleefully casual exploitation of Western fairy tales for our amusement, this would be a pretty ordinary romantic comedy anime with a vaguely unusual hook. As it is the show's atmosphere is deliberately over the top, making me interested enough to watch at least an episode or two more.

(How over the top? Well, the main part of the first episode is an extended Cinderella parody, complete with a bicycle-drawn pumpkin carriage. Said carriage is nowhere near the most amusing and absurd part of the parody.)

If you want your romantic comedies without sly asides to the audience, this is not your show and Aroduc's criticisms are completely on target. Otherwise and assuming that you don't want something too deep, the start is promising but as always first episodes can be terribly misleading and we don't know if the show can keep this up for more than a few episodes without the formula getting stale; parodying a fairy tale an episode this way could get repetitive really fast.

In praise of Sora no Woto

Sora no Woto is the most interesting show I'm watching this season. Despite having a cast that mostly consists of cute girls and telling fundamentally heart-warming stories, it's going in a more complex, deep, and serious direction than it initially appeared, and it keeps surprising me.

(I'm also pleased that one character's incompetence at her job was not kept as a plot point for very long.)

One of the interesting things for me is the intriguing and carefully mysterious setting, which Sora no Woto has been progressively revealing more and more about. However, I'm not sure if the show is ever going to actively explore it and answer our questions, or just keep using it as background material for the character stories. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, since so far Sora no Woto has been more character oriented than plot driven.

(I'm not sure that other people will enjoy Sora no Woto, though, because it mixes light-hearted entertainment with a more serious background, and not everyone considers these to be tastes that go well together.)

Sidebar: an attempt at a summary description

So what's Sora no Woto about, beyond the bare summary? It's about a girl joining a small group of other girls (of assorted personalities) and fitting in, character driven stories, and through the stories we explore the mysteries of the setting around the characters. It has an intriguing setting with lots of things hinted at and a bunch of well realized secondary characters to go with the lead ones. The stories are heart-warming, and things are somewhat stereotypical but not to the degree that they annoy me. Music plays less of a role than the bare summaries make it sound.

gg's interview with Sam P, an anime translator

I happened to stumble over an interview or two that gg (a fansub group) conducted with a translator called Sam P, who works with Crunchyroll among other places. So here's three links: the background, the answers from Sam P, and then an additional chat later. Reading the whole thing has been interesting and has certainly given me things to think about.

(This is somewhat belated, as I seem to be much better at writing down little notes about entries that I want to write than I am at actually, you know, writing them.)

About Darker Than Black - Gemini of the Meteor

I quite enjoyed the original Darker Than Black, ending and all, but I'm still not sure what I think about the second DTB series because I still haven't made up my mind about the ending. I'm pretty sure that the creators intend for the ending to be considered a good one, but I can't decide whether it's a good ending or actually a disturbing and creepy one.

Apart from that, I liked it and it's a good series. It's more straightforward and less wandering than the first one, but that's because the first one was longer and was taking an indirect way to introduce us to all of the characters and their world. The second series just threw us into the main plot right away.

(I have avoided looking silly about several things in Gemini through the simple means of not writing them down here at the time, unlike what I did with Kampfer. Possibly this spoils the fun.)

Understanding Bakemonogatari

Here is something that I did not see and understand until the last (aired) episode of Bakemonogatari smacked me in the nose with it: Bakemonogatari is really a love story. A romance, like Toradora.

And like Toradora, I think that it is a good one. It does not have a love triangle, because that's not the kind of story it is telling; it is more telling the story of how two peculiar people come to fit together and to more or less understand each other.

I don't want to say that the supernatural elements of Bakemonogatari are just trappings, because they're a lot more than that, but ultimately they're the means to an end and not an end to themselves. Right from the beginning, the important things that wind up happening are all about the characters, not about the monsters.

Sidebar: on Bakemonogatari's art style

Bakemonogatari has a somewhat peculiar and often minimalistic animation style ('cheap' is the uncharitable label). While I didn't mind it, I can understand why other people dislike it and feel that the studio was being lazy. However, it strikes me that an advantage of the art style is that it leaves you without distractions for the dialog, which is important as Bakemonogatari often has very dense dialog that you really want to pay attention to.

Quick things about Kampfer 07

(Warning: mild spoilers.)

From Author:

Why did Kaede (Sakura) lose consciousness?

I concur that we don't have enough information. However, there seems to be a striking pattern that Kaede drops out of the action just when her nose would otherwise be rubbed in the existence of Kampfers, and I doubt that this is a coincidence.

I continue to think that Akane was not shooting seriously for whatever reason. Otherwise, she is an embarrassingly bad shot; has she hit anything meaningful?

(Since Kampfer seems to be mostly a comedy anime, we could be overthinking all of this. Convenience coincidences and comically bad shots are a stock in trade of ordinary comedy.)

From another Author entry and what it points to:

Natsuru has not yet taken showers/baths as a girl. And this is supposed to be a real full-blooded hetero adolescent?? What gives??

He wasn't able to keep the transformation or transform at will previously, so showering was out of question.

Natsuru seems to have gotten much better at transformations as of the start of episode 7; it looks like he can transform at will and hold the transformation at will, but he actually needs to be able to muster the will (which was his problem at night).

My take on his lack of showering et al is two-fold. Minorly, it's likely to be hard on his will. Majorly, it's not as if Natsuru is on his own, and we know that his entrails animal likes both making sarcastic comments and cheering Natsuru's development on, and imagine the potential for either or both if Natsuru deliberately goes off to shower as a girl on his own, no matter what actually happens or doesn't happen. There is much less utter embarrassment in avoiding the whole situation.

(We, and Natsuru, have no idea if entrails animals are aware of it when their person transforms.)

(On a side note, I'm (still) working on getting my followup to Author's reaction to my last entry on Kampfer to say what I want it to say. This writing clearly stuff is harder than it looks. I'm aware that this is somewhat against the spirit of quick reactions and rapidly jotted notes.)

The (lack of) fighting in Kampfer (as of episode 4)

In the Author style of brief notes on things that I ran into elsewhere (via Author, of course): I actually find the current lack of fighting in Kampfer to be pretty realistic.

All of the Kampfers are theoretically ordinary highschool kids who basically got drafted against their will. It feels entirely right that they are generally unenthusiastic about actually beating each other up, or even theoretically killing each other, regardless of what the Moderators may want them to do, and that they would much rather hang out and talk with each other (and, in the case of Shizuku, yank everyone's chains). If anything, they now have more in common with each other than with their classmates.

(This makes me unconvinced that Akane actually is as terrible a shot as she seems to be. It doesn't even have to be deliberate and conscious on her part. Really, humans are startlingly kind when you get down to it; outside of cliched shounen action series, you usually have to work quite hard to get them to hurt and kill each other.)

As for Akane: I think she's just manic (okay, very enthusiastic). Shizuku is just an excuse to let off some energy, as Natsuru was at the start of the show.

(I believe that Akane even more or less admitted that the reason she stopped fighting Natsuru wasn't that they were on the same side but that she didn't have the heart for it after he saved her.)

Mahjong in Saki

One of the things that strikes me about Saki is how unimportant the actual mahjong games are. While it matters who wins (and sometimes how powerful their win was), the show pays almost no attention to the actual process of playing and winning. This is especially striking in the past two episodes (6 and 7), where the show has been focusing on a tournament.

(Sometimes we get a little bit of dialog about strategy issues.)

This is rather unusual for a nominal sports anime, but does mean that you can follow pretty much all of Saki without knowing more than a tiny bit about mahjong. You won't miss much in being unable to follow the games, because there's usually nothing there to follow in the first place.

(While episode 7 does show some gameplay, my impression is that it is just illustrative; it's there to show Nodoka's dominance, not for anything important about the play itself.)