アニ・ノート

The post focuses on the evocative backgrounds, but also mentions the characters. IMHO, the best thing about Oh Edo Rocket is the portrayal of the life in the long houses in general, and not specifically anime backgrounds or other technical components. In fact, the layout of Oh Edo Rocket is quite bold this way. Long houses are often acknowledged with reverence or sit in the background, but no anime dares to make them so much of a key ingredient. Watching Oh Edo Rocket is like visiting a bigger and even wackier Edo-Tokyo Museum.

UPDATE: Avatar e-mailed that he uses “row houses”. I don’t know what’s more correct. I think they may be called “naga-ya”, or literally “long house/shop/barn”, but I am not sure.

If anything, it was worse than the anime. Stitches between story arcs were annoying. Acting was super-weird, certainly not Kurosawa-like. More like theater than cinema, if you ask me. Uninitiated got confused by the flashback in the end.

Better late than never at BasuGasuBakuhatsu:

I just finished watching the first episode of K-ON! I guess they forgot to add the “ROC” to the first part of the title. Yes, I am going through my anime backlog by just picking the most popular (according to Anime Nano) series. I knew I invented that popularity cloud for a reason!

I went to Nano to check if I accidentially poisoned it, but it turned out most of the bloggage was driven by merch announcements. So much for the popularity cloud, but as long as the result is right, who cares for the reasons.

I keep postponing adding a category for K-ON, mostly because it’s a serious pain to tag old posts. Fortunately, search works, thanks to unique title.

It was a pretty readable post, as far as Omo goes. Discerning his point was some ways easier than finding where Derrida stole the slippage of the signifier from Lacan. I noted this:

Trying to define moe is a trap. Because you can’t really do it beyond a personal context, so unless you’re planning to do it empirically (would be pretty awesome if you do), it’s just much ado about nothing. It’s partly why I’m against writing about moe myself, and this post is probably written against my better judgment. The subject does make great troll bait however. It’s a much more preferable form of “your favorite anime things suck” if we reduce the formula further.

A part of the ambiguity about moe is that in reality moe hate has nothing to do with otaku. Etymologically, moe refers to a feeling, and last checked most humans have them. It’s only in the context of marketing stuff that panders to otaku that moe makes sense as a criticism, but then it’s a criticism toward the industry, and not to the fans. How can you really put on a straight face while blaming companies for making things people love?

Looking at it the other way, I see pure trolling and/or self-righteousness in what the Internet cesspool produces on the subject. One more reason never visit Colony Drop, I guess.

Also, K-ON was much better than its reputation.

The sheet music is calling for me. My mother made me to play piano when I was little, and I hated it so much. So, maybe a guitar?

I think K-ON would probably be not half as good if topic were different. I’m not knocking GA:GADC here, but it certainly was a step forward from Lucky Star.

Actually the article at Chizumatic is more about Railgun than Index. In any case, spoilers are morbidly fascinating: tens of thousand murdered etc. Outside of spoilers:

Railgun’s situation really is amazing. No wonder she’s got a tortured soul.

Clearly an anime for fans of Nanoha. I’m quite happy I dropped it after one episode.

Why did Kaede (Sakura) lose consciousness? Quoting Damien, fuushigi mystery. I suspect we just don’t have enough material in the anime yet to form a good guess. {Update: Sage says she just fainted. On rewatch I concur, and think it was probably the shock from the hair and subsequently Natsuru jumping up.}

The pajamas transformation thing was weird as well, if not to say bogus. I am inclined to write it up as Natsuru’s imagination depicted. {Update: Clearly it was.}

BTW, from the location of hits on the blanket, we can make a good guess of what Akane thinks about her own expected accuracy for a triple-tap:

Which is to say, not very spectacular. Although I would probably not risk anything flashier under the circumstances myself (in fact I would not take the top one in case Natsuru propped the blanket with his elbow), she’s a Gewehr-type Kampfer for crying out loud.

Chris continues to beat the horse:

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?

There’s a lot of poetic license in all of it. If you look at the first engagement with Rika, even Natsuru was unable to touch her — with an area weapon! — but Prez scored a significant enough point to give her pause. What gives? What authors try to do is to establish a relative balance of power (with Akane at the bottom of the ladder).

At Moe Check:

Do people in Real Life actually play that Pocky game? [...] For some reason Spin The Bottle is popular in fanfics, but I don’t think I’ve seen an occasion in an anime itself.

I cannot vouch for Japanese, but American teens play all sorts of innuendo themed party games, so the answer is “yes”.

Actually, funny he asked. I remember how Ana-sempai went to a slumber party when she was 11, and reportedly girls there spontaneously cosplayed their favourite Bible characters. It’s all about the dominant environment. Say, in Oakland they play Russian Roulette at parties.

Heavily spoiling remarks included a question:

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.

I’m back from a club meeting, which would not be all that remarkable if Saturnine didn’t share a whiny post on the topic, written by a guy with nickname suspiciously similar to his own.

I paid my $5 duties and received new and shiny membership card for the term, which is good for 20% discount at local Sonic, among other things (such as access to the club library). We also carried out elections of club officers. Pictured above is the presidential debate between the incumbent (left) and the challenger (right).

That library access is going to come handy, since we have some pretty nice additions. Look at this sensational English edition of GA:GADC manga. Kyouju! In color! I have to say, Yen Press beats the pants off anything Tokyopop and ADV ever offered (albeit at 2x the price — inflation, I guess). Two other interesting mangas I noted were Kara no Kyoukai / Garden of Sinners and Haruhi-chan. The latter features a full-sized Ashakura, I almost keroed over. Also, all kanji are accompanied by furigana.

The standard programming included Fruits Basket, Samurai Champloo, and Kampfer. Plus, I made folks watch Marko & ShowZ.

BTW, I can see how people like Champloo. It seems to me a rendition of Bebop with limiter released, and swords. Basically it’s all about pumped-up violence. I know some folks really go for that stuff.

And then I also made it to a meeting of a local LUG. A socal day, it was. Now I’m going to watch Kampfer 07 (raw) and roll over. And Owen? Plz share something more interesting next time, kthx.

UPDATE: Thomas e-mailed me that the pictured manga is not actually from the library, which is too bad.