アニ・ノート

At first the satire at CD seemed like a desperate trolling for attention by an intellectually bankrupt blogger, but after seeing 47 episodes of Max Heart, this rang somewhat true:

Viewer: I read on an inter­net forum that this show is extremely pop­u­lar amongst young adults

Drosselmeyer: What, really? That’s nonsense! I haven’t put in a single giant robot or booby jiggle. I bet they’re all young girls pretending to be older than they are. Kids these days are whizzes on the internet you know. Any­way, she’s still changing into Princess Tutu. Look, I’ve started the transformation sequence and everything.

The popularity of magical girl shows outside of their target demographic is something that is not analyzed enough, I think. Ironically Tutu is a special exception, since it offers so much more than a generic formula (Scamp’s mocking carefuly avoids mentioning any of that, of course). But still, what does make a functional adult to watch 47, 52, or 70 transformation decks? No disrespect to Dual Aurora Wave intented, of course.

He says in a post at MMM:

The second season has completely departed from the manga, and the results are far more promising than I expected. [...] I don’t know who’s writing this, but I’m impressed so far.

More to the backlog?! But I wanted to catch up on K-ON.

P.S. Now we see how the leading zero convention for episode numbers is more than just to arrange episodes in a directory.

Every blogger who’s not sick, on hiatus, or a plain hater goes gaga about Amagami SS… even Omo. Although granted, he’s more concerned with TV ratings, but still. Kuro has the screencap of what the guy with a handle of an NCR SCSI chip proclaimed a new fetish. And I am already dying under the backlog.

UPDATE: Hikago comments, but I cannot understand anything except he didn’t like the series. Which is fine, I guess. Tastes differ. Would providing any reasons be too much to ask?

The article at Sea Slugs spoils so heavily that I am not sure if I need to watch the episode early. Might as well wait for Crunchy. But still, choice screencaps! Also, among all the retelling I failed to understand if Mio’s Striker failing was a defeciency in her magic or not.

UPDATE: Steven says: “Sakamoto’s Striker is a prototype that hadn’t even gone through flight testing when she took it on the plane. The problems were teething issues in the new model; they had nothing to do with Sakamoto’s magic.”

According to ANN, someone leaked a whole bunch of episodes. In case of Heroman, they were pre-made months ahead, imagine that. Naruto was only head by a week or so.

Or at least tentatively begins. Everything seems to go for AsoIku, but I dunno, it does not seem very exciting. At first I hoped for a romp like Sorakake, but the setup is more ordinary.

The production values were excellent, except that all girls seem to have the same face. It’s rather annoying, honestly. If not for that, I’d say that AIC+ were better than AIC (SW2).

Characters did not grab me much. I had some hopes for Futaba (which is her last name, BTW), but she seems to be crazy and it’s a big minus in my book. And I never liked the whole Noir genre. At the best of times, AsoIku would need to be outstanding for me to pay attention (unless Eris saves it).

SDB is more optimistic, more power to him, I guess.

P.S. The most interesting moment in ep.1 was the beautiful censorship effect created by the radiant butt of Eris. The screenshot, unfortunately, is unable to give it justice, because its motion was the key.

UPDATE: Everyone is taking a “wait and see” line on this (Ray (not Mike) on Anime Diet).

For a lesson in warped perceptions:

[..] the first half of the show bored me. It’s becoming steadily more difficult to hold an audience’s attention with nothing but weird characters in this day and age – we’ve seen so much of em, so seeing yet another three grade school kids with exaggerated personality tropes isn’t quite so entertaining anymore. How many eccentric grade-school/kindergarten trios have we had so far now? Hanamaru, Kojikan, Zettai Karen Children – the novelty is long lost. That said, the second half did go some way towards redeeming the show’s potential appeal. When the focus shifted from introducing and pimping the Marui sisters’ weirdness onto an actual plot point – a hamster named “Nipples”, the ball got rolling, and things actually got fun – hilarious even. [Emphasis mine — Author]

I am speechless. Actually, I suppose it’s possible to say that ZKC was about an eccentric grade school trio, and Evangelion was about angsty high-schoolers. But still, what’s the benefit of such focus?

And don’t look at me for explanations. Linux is a big tent.

Crunchyroll announced that they will simulcast Asobi ni Ikuyo (right, short “yo”). It sounded kinda interesting, but I dunno… This season is full as it is, and Crunchy is a pain. Also, I am nursing a DTO grudge. Beveridge will jump on it, I’m sure.

There is nothing to say about this episode but to agree with Aroduc. It’s not as strong an episode as the opener.

On second thought, the build-out of Mitsuba’s character was curious. She was caught red-handed in moments of compassion twice.

It does not take a genius to observe that Marui sisters are named sequentially. But what’s puzzling, they are also given numbers, and the numbers run in the opposite direction to names. For example Hitoha is #3 (see the screencap).

What gives?

UPDATE: Just saw this in the preview for ep.3:

I never encountered these characters and they do not look like normal kanji numerals. But undoubtedly they are the numbers we just discussed. Most likely they are Roman numerals (Ⅰ Ⅱ Ⅲ – in some fonts they look just like the print at swimsuit labels, even with the top bar shorter than the bottom one).