アニ・ノート

Behold the marvel of a manual trackback:

Sometimes I’ll take the real lazy way out and leave a comment that basically says “Cool, if you want to know my opinion about this, here’s a link to my post.”

It is the lack of log access on services that produces these ugly workarounds. AB used to have it all down pat, even provided a stock install of Analog with every blog. However, as Maestro health and finances deteriorated, all of this fat was cut off. Ani-nouto is a barefoot shoemaker here. One way or the other, Feedburner, Sitemeter, Google Analytics, and trackbacks flourish. Granted, there is more than a whiff of “push” technology here. The owner may be too lazy to check, or would not incorporate links back. Commenting this way moves the burden from blogger to commenter somewhat. So I can see why this sort of mechanism may be looking attractive, especially while animeblogging remains rather low-traffic.

Here’s a quick rundown of shows I want to finish before Railgun’s sword falls:

K-ON2: Pixy and WAH were impressed and I liked the original.

Katanagatari: Don called it. And Don called OER, too.

Kurau: This I actually knew about before Nick Istre saw it, and before the poster was put up in my bathroom. But it kept teasing by falling out of Netflix’ availability. Finally, FUNi posted it to Youtube, same way as Campanella. Looks like last chance!

Ninomiya-kun: This is kinda cheating, because it was safely postponed and forgotten, but Crunchy suddenly started showing it. Supposedly it’s some kind of ecci comedy.

The Third: Not sure really if want. Kadokawa’s obnoxious previews were intriguing.

So yeah, not many excuses left, K-ON2 is the only solid one. The Third is really stretching it, and I may be cutting off some.

P.S. Macademi is open already. Campanella has just ended. Also formally running are Full Moon, Gatakei, and true tears, the last being de-facto cancelled after ep.5 (I packed DVDs away), just wasn’t blogged.

I am going to run free with spoilers here. But it’s not like anyone is going to watch Shikufuku no Campanella anyway, so no harm done, right?

But first, sorry for the lack of the screencaps. It hurts all the more since everything is so pretty. But capturing them off the official Youtube stream is hard work. Sure, in a way FUNi deserves praise for uploading it all and not, say, dealing with Hulu which posts pause alpha-transparency! But still I am going to blame the rights owners’ greed and stupidity rather than my own lack of enthusiasm.

In particular, I do not have a single screenie of Carina’s book magic. When I saw its later manifestations, I thought: “holy shit, SDB would’ve loved it” (he is known in animeblogging circles as a sucker for pretty magic — he is also not dumb enough to watch Campanella [1]). It looked ridiculously cool, but always embedded in action.

Chelsea leads the ending chibi dance, and I do not understand why. Minette should have been doing it. Miriam and Garnet are not included (logically, the non-residency failed them).

The schoolgirl lesbians: no trope left behind. But nicely drawn!

This is a bit different (I think they plainly admire Chelsie’s chest (CV: Asami Imai)).

Oops!

The non-chibified versions of Salza and Ritos.

Ooooh, sick burn!

DUKE PUNCH!

Just realized that I do not have a decent Nick (CV: Keiji Fujiwara [2]) and Garnet (CV: Akiko Hasegawa). This is unfortunate, because the two acted in the lulziest trope exploitation trick since Druaga’s “I am going to get married after this” (also invoked in Campanella as “I am going to treat you after this”). At some point the squad is being chased up the stairs by monsters. Nick stops to delay them… The scene is set to repeat Jill’s dream in Druaga 00. But then Garnet joins him! *facepalm* Someone need to ship the two in a fanfic.

[1] Actually, he did watch it! Only reached a couple of episodes in though. And I take a great comfort in him not knowing what taste Ritos was (I did not know either).

[2] I was wrong about not knowing his work before. With a portfolio as fat as his, it was certain… And indeed I heard him as Shirogane(-sensei) of Stellvia. Quite good. “Nay, the history may end altogether!”

And how. No, I don’t just mean how the color saturation suddenly appeared. It is the contrast of the last third with the first two that I find shocking. The story was intentionally cretinuous, and to watch seven episodes of it took a major dedication to the beauty of the best-dressed cast of the season, if I may borrow from Evirus.

One notable thing is how these days anime tried everything, there is nothing remaining unchewed. Thus, the TV Tropes website. The way most clever creators react is to declare a parody, that allows to chew it all again, only in ironic way, wink wink wink. Shikufuku no Campanella is not like that, it’s entirely earnest and serious about putting every trope we know together. I only see most basic cliches, but the fight of Lester and Deen had at a minimum the mid-boss turning, befriending with starlight breaker, and fighting for villain’s soul. Kuro once said that Campanella was better at depicting RPG tropes than bona fide RPG anime (remember Lodoss Wars?). But he did not spell out that Campanella extracts strength from piling tropes sky-high. [1]

I think the biggest thing that cheapened the final resolution was how there was no villain to defeat. It all turned out to be a well-meaning miscalculation by someone who did not account for THE BURNING PASSION, and just had to do with the available tools (a bit like one well-known character in Gurren-Lagann did). At least it was not an evil corporation and greedy capitalists, this time. Of course, everyone would easily find a personal defect to harp upon. There were many.

DUKE PUNCH is going to be my treasured meme from now on.

Liked: Strangely, yes, by the end.
Rewatch: Probably not.

[1] Relentless thinks it was a parody after all, based on specific homages to famous RPGs. Delicious uncertainty!

This needs sharing:

Salza above, Ritos below.

An episode before I jotted “sick of Ritos hazing Salza”, but now they decided to outstrip my wildest expectations. By the end of the episode, screwing with Salza was not enough, so creators made Ritos screwing with viewer’s mind. They gradually built her as a girl who has no inhibitions of any kind, so if she says she wants to kill someone, you know she just might. Even in Campanella.

UPDATE: Looks like I mislead Chris, in that I did not mean any kind of “hate”.

Campanella is confusing. It has a story of an unsophisticated children’s show and a bright setting. Then, suddenly Chelsie is trying to rape Lester (spoiler: she is too drunk, so passes out from the effort). Who is the target demographic for this?

The finale post explains the defects (and then repeats the theme a few times):

Of course, as the season finale, there was a lot left to be desired, so I’ll get my gripes out of the way first, namely: the whole rushrushrush feeling that resulted in whisking Shu-Shu out of the way with uncle kiraboshi and the snake on a plane; having the nunnery tarp’ed up and about to be demolished one moment then not (and for the most arbitrary of reasons) the next; and finally the out-of-the-blue fashion show starring the blink-and-you’ll-miss-her-former-appearance-in-the-series afro otaku model. [..]

There was so much to like about this series and while it ended in a decent manner I was exasperated by the lack of a second season announcement or a more definitive end. If only it were 13 eps instead of 11 it probably would have ended a lot better.

This is going to sound bitter, but even my limited expectations about how the series would end were disappointed. I had figured that at a minimum there would be some sort of Shu-centric deus ex machina ending and that the shipping wars would be left in an ambiguous state. But the deus ex machina was one of the lamest I’ve seen in some time. First the blue tarps went away for just about no reason, and then Chieko’s mom just walks in and says she decided not to sell the building. That’s it? No drama? No payoff for any of the work anyone did to save the Amamizukan? Really? I wasn’t expecting the best ending ever given that there was only one episode to do it with, but give me SOMETHING!

In the end, the most wonderful anime of the season floundered at pacing and planning, possibly aided by scheduling uncertainty during the production. And the win was so close.

Macademi 01 was finally posted at Crunchy, and it’s still a disappoinment (I watched a small piece raw back in the day). It’s exactly the same as Otoshimono [1], only whacky and over the top. Worse, Tanarotte did absolutely nothing to endear. The dude seems kinda ok, as far as they go, but whatever.

IIRC SDB zoomed on someone called Falce, who have not appeared yet. But even if she’s Feena fam Earthlight, Koyomi Mizuhara, Aoi Sakuraba, and Kayoko Uchida rolled seamlessly into one, I don’t think she would be able to save the anime from Tanarotte, considering how sacred pact and superpowers embed her front and center.

P.S. Suzuho Hasegawa is spelled in an odd way: “羽瀨川 鈴穂”. I wonder if it means anything.

UPDATE: Steven elaborates. Informative, has a screencap of Falce. Also, he seems not to notice that the subject of this post wasn’t “Macademi fails” [2]. Indeed, the customary opening bracket is “Foo begins”, which is usually posted a couple episodes in. I thought it my duty to record how bad Macademi 01 was, before the promised riches wash it out from my mind.

This brings up the question of the first episode in general. I think Steven himself wrote some time that the job of ep.1 is to make viewer to watch ep.2 and so on. On this score, Macademi is a collossal failure, the likes of which I am having trouble to recall. Manabi, a titan, has a comparatively weak first episode. It was a long time ago, before every other anime started throwing “special” openers like Haruhi 00 (for instance, Natsu no Arashi, Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou). I do not remember well just how bad it was and did not think to record it. Manabi only had a bracket post.

Overall, if we leave Manabi alone, shows that stay strong, open strong. This goes back to Vandread in 1997, but using categories as memory aid, it is almost an iron-clad rule. The statistics put Macademi at disadvantage, but then everyone says that it’s “unusual”.

[1] I suspect that the show may be setting up a false analogy in an attempt to lampoon the trope and may be not about any kind of plot or development here, but the point here is how the anime presents itself in its opening episode (e.g. poorly).

[2] He is also not big at reading footnotes, but that is quite all right. A text must remain coherent if all footnotes are removed.

Some time in late 90s I read a then-fresh paper by developers of NUMA at Sun Micro. They lamented how in their heart of hearts they knew that NUMA would triumph in the end, but every time journos proclaimed the death of SMP, the boys of SMCC would roll out another SMP that beat the pants of everything SGI. This continued for so long that NUMA adherents became a kind of a joke, even after AMD era (NUMA factor 1.3). [1]

I imagine that early proponents of team blogs (such as Impz and Riex) felt the same when myself and others continued to defy what they saw as a law of nature. Indeed, a team blog with a good governance is nigh-immortal. As long as it remains relevant, it continues to accrete readers and turns into a powerhouse that no Chizumatic can touch, or so goes the plan. The ad impression money to follow.

Still, the team blog vision in animeblogging was long in coming, and only recently I noticed them picking up, with some casualities along the way. RIUVA went with a wimper, Oi Haiyaku cratered with a bang. But never fear, legions of new team leaders came in TJ’s and Riex’s stead.

Sea Slugs

There was always “Team” in “Sea Slugs”, but in practical terms it always was Kabitzin’s blog. Last year, he became serious about teamblogging, by scoring a few high-profile additions such as Zyl and Otou (no disrespect to old slugs Jesus and Epi intended). What really kind of amazes me is how Kabitzin remains as disinclined technically as he was back in the days of trackback problems. The blog is hosted at a shared hosting (!) with Surpass (!!), which had a DNS outage a few days ago because hey, who needs distributed nameservers, right? I like the content at Sea Slugs, Kabitzin shows no sign of burnout, and it looks like the ancient and storied blog is having a bright future.

Metanorn

Metanorn’s origins are a mystery to me. It arrived to my OPML list a fully formed teamblog already. I think it was born somewhere in deep alleys of an Asian megalopolis, from the belly of Kokidokom. In 2010, Metanorn moved to a separate domain. The defining feature of them, I think, is a specific interest in anime music (mostly pirated, sadly). Music is a difficult subject for animebloggers, you cannot screencap it. Metanorn approaches it by chasing torrents relentlessly and critiquing the freshest stolen goods on the Internet. They also boast the biggest team.

Choco Syrupy Waffles

CSW’s claim to fame is an attempt to find a slot in the quality pyramid that is above ANN’s reviews just enough to retain readers, but sufficiently low to find enough writers and keep the posts flowing thick. In short, CSW basically have no editorial standards. Their KnT S2 post opens with “anyways, uhm its basically a recap from kurumis POV so it mainly covers the parts with kurumi from [..]” (capitalization and punctuation are original). What’s interesting though, they started as a normal blog, but obviously made a conscious decision to outcompete normal blogs with the tabloid approach. The change was shocking.

THAT

The THAT is the only still-prominent teamblog that survived a succession (from Impz to Crusader). The degree of success was about the same as in the succession of Omni by Divine, at about the same time, and both sprouted from Animeblogger.net. THAT was not a 20-post-a-day machine in 2010, but continued to be widely linked and quoted. They also tend to compensate with tl;dr.

NKDS

NKDS comes last on the list as they just could not keep it together after the rename from Naka-Dashi (”Internal Ejaculation”). I tend to think of them as a teamblog being lifted by the raising tide of teamblogs. Sorry, Bj0rn, but you really need to do better than this. Good luck in 2011! Don’t overdose on figures!

UPDATE: Kabitzin replies:

It’s interesting that Author dings SSAB for shared hosting at Surpass when 3 of the 5 blogs he names use shared hosting at Surpass. What’s up with that?

My standards are different for different classes of blog. Granted Surpass is not the worst, it’s just the recent outage that made me check. Plus I’m fresh from seeking secondary NSes for zaitcev.us. I admit, it is kind of a pain in the neck. Note that CSW is hosted at Dreamhost. It is all relative!

UPDATE MOAR: Right on cue, WAH started a team blog too. Looks like a better edition of Eastern Standard.

[1] When SPARC died and Sun unravelled, the classic NUMA was displaced by cluster computing in HPC and low-factor AMD-style offerings in common servers. Talk about the letdown!

At the very bottom, in the “Dishonorable Mention” section of the year-end post:

[My] real-objection is to the ending, which can be reasonably interpreted as saying that the hero and his sister committed suicide, after which they got to be together in the afterlife. The very last thing Japan needs is a TV show that glamorizes and justifies teen suicide.

It is true that similar themes are common in serious Japanese literature, and if you were writing a serious tragedy something like this might be acceptable. However to do it in a sleazy fanservice show is unforgivable.

From what I heard, Jonathan’s concern is reasonable. In particular, over one supper Ana-sempai told me about the toy rabbit. But I think he cheapened the argument by railing against sex before getting to the issue, in the paragraph that I skipped.

UPDATE: Jonathan replied.