Anime Review: Yuki Yuna is a Hero

Whew, I've only got a week's gap in-between anime seasons to review a backlog title but with how full this season has been for me I haven't had a chance to really work on my backlog honestly. Spring doesn't look like it's going to be much better at this rate, it's crazy how even the "weak" anime seasons always leave me watching more than I think I am....

Yuki Yuna is a Hero (Yuki Yuna wa Yuusha de Aru)

Anime Review: Happiness Charge Precure

"Didn't you say you were trying to be more on time last week?" FIFTEEN HOUR WORK DAYS MAN and this is why I keep planning on building up my buffer of reviews and it doesn't happen. But this show is already a year old so a few days don't matter as much, I already have to explain to people why I'm watching last year's iteration of Pretty Cure instead of this year's Go Princess (which is apparently quite good!). So here it is: two years ago I watched Heartcatch Precure and loved it so I tried out the new series that year, Doki Doki Precure as well as the original. I plan to go back to the original someday but it starts slowly and all of the official streams are pretty low quality, Doki Doki just ended up being really nuts so I gave up on it after a bit. So then I returned last year to HaCha and while I liked it I just fell behind with everything else I was watching.

And so, after I finished Wish Upon the Pleiades it seemed like a good time to go, finish HaCha and see if I could maybe, maybe catch up with GoPri before the end of it's run next January.

Happiness Charge Pretty Cure

Anime Review: Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!

Once again, sorry for the delay in this review, writing through a headache after a six day work week is never tempting enough for me to want to do it. Plus, I've reached the stretch of shows which I did enjoy enough to finish watching them but don't actually have a lot to say on them and as a reviewer that's a little stressful. How do I manage to convey why I thought that they were worth finishing if I have such a flat opinion at the end of the show? Middle of the show reviews really are the toughest ones to do, thank goodness every year I get pickier and pickier about what I continue so I watch fewer of them. 

Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! (Binan Koukou Chikyu Boei-bu LOVE!)

Anime Review: Tonari no Seki-kun and Magica Wars

This is why I usually take November off, I simply run out of things to review and have to scramble a bit, especially when it comes to anime. Thankfully after doing this for so long I've started to anticipate this so I'm going to do something I haven't done in a little while, I'm going to talk about two series of shorts that came out in this past year. Since two mini-reviews is totally the same as one full length review, right?

Manga Review: Sailor Moon (volumes 11 and 12)

Well this is months later than I had hoped but I finally found a library with the last couple volumes of Sailor Moon! And lucky for me volume 10 actually wrapped up the fourth arc so I wasn't left hanging in the middle and the characters in this series always have such, uh, interesting, wow the 90s sure were a thing, designs that I was even able to remember what the scouts had just defeated! So let's get to talking about this one last story and then my feelings on the series as a whole, especially since I never imagined I would read this story all the way to the end.

Sailor Moon (volumes 11 and 12) by Naoko Takeuchi

Anime Review: Uta Kata

In the past six months or so Sentai Filmworks has put a lot of their back catalog, instead of putting up just one or two episodes, onto hulu which I think is fantastic and this one was close to the top of my list of shows to catch. You see, the magical girl genre is nearly as old as anime itself so it's had plenty of time for variations and different takes on it, light-hearted and grim. Which is why I've always been frustrated when people say things like "Madoka Magica is the first deconstruction/dark take on the genre!" since it's just incorrect and I've seen other people comment on that as well, offering up examples of other shows which have taken a dark turn. And there was one show which popped up sometimes in these discussions but the viewers of it said that no it was just as dark as Madoka, had clearly been planned that way from the beginning, and also had aired in a late night timeslot aired at male otaku, I had been interested in the show ever since I had heard about it (it came out in the US before Madoka aired) and this only made me more curious. So, how dark does this show get exactly?

Uta Kata

Anime Review: Tweeny Witches

So, normally I say that I don't really have a tsundoku but given the sheer number of things I'm watching at any one time it usually takes me quite a while to get around to watching older things. Like this show which I picked up during a Right Stuf sale last Christmas, considering how unsteady Media Blasters has been over the past few years I didn't want to risk not picking up a show I was sure I'd like and did a semi-blind buy on it. Funny enough, one of the few other times I've done that was for another Media Blasters show, Moribito, although that one I enjoyed more than this one it turns out. And I'll note that while I have the last DVD with the extra episodes on it I did not have a chance to watch those before the review, I've heard they don't really change the story but if it turns out they do I shall edit the review accordingly at a later date.

Tweeny Witches (Mahou Shojo Tai Arusu)

Summary: Arusu is a normal human girl who can do a bit of slight of hand yet wants to be able to use real magic and sees the book her father once gave her as the way to do so. In a way she's right as she discovers one day as she falls down the rabbit hole into the magical world where witches and warlocks reside but they're nothing like she expected, meaner and more hidebound, and Arusu decides to stick around for a little bit to learn magic and to try and teach everyone that anyone can do magic if they believe.

The Good: Well that ended up going in quite a different direction than I expected, the show does use one of my favorite story-telling structures (start with one problem/quest and have it become part of an even larger story by the end, to the point where it's odd to look back from afar and see how small the story really was in the beginning) so I ended up enjoying the second half much more than I enjoyed the first half. From there the world just built and built and managed to introduce new characters easily, more factions, and keep the story on a good pace as well. Amazingly enough the show was not aired in a half hour format, much like the second half of Princess Tutu each "episode" is only about 12 minutes long which were then stitched together on the DVDs to make regular sized ones. I have no idea if the show was created with that format in mind or if it was merely another obstacle the writers had to deal with but I think it was managed as well as it could be and except early on when the show it clearly finding it's ground it all flows together well.

The Bad: It's rather rare for me to say this but I wish that Arusu had encountered a few more set-backs in regards to her overly cheerful worldview (since this does involve some end of series spoilers I'm putting the rest in a footnote*). I did also say I enjoyed the second half more than the first half, however since in a way that story doesn't truly reveal itself until the halfway point that's not exactly a good thing. I don't recall seeing any foreshadowing earlier on, if there was enough to show there was intentional preluding to what would happen that would change my feelings on the show more than a bit. And the ending itself is a little bit of a mess, suddenly characters are traveling great distances in a fraction of the time it took earlier, some logistical details are never even handwaved away, and as I mentioned in the footnote, I'm still not entirely sure HOW the resolution was brought about, I really feel like the story just forgot to show an entire step (either that or it's exactly as it appears and it was an amazingly silly, in character with Arusu but not in character with the setting, solution).  

The Production Values: Visually this show runs the whole gamit from pretty, nicely animated scenes to some rather crappy looking ones. We've all seen screenshots where a background character with a silly, simplified face is blown up but here you sometimes don't even have to look for the background characters, I don't want to know what the schedule for this show much have been like. Heck, there are even a couple of episodes where they make a rather determined attempt to never show any of the characters actually talking and cut away every time they would have to open their mouth (some people might call that an artistic choice but having seen it in context it wasn't). The art designs never quite clicked with me but I still thought some of the designs were quite creative (although there was also some rather conspicuous CGI in the show, I must image the show had a rushed schedule and practically no money since again, in context these weren't stylistic choices). Music wise the only piece that stood out to me was the piece that was also used as the main theme (erm, the second theme, not the very first piece played in each episode but the other one) which had a bit of a reedy, Celtic sound to it so of course I liked it.


In the end I'm a bit conflicted, I liked parts of the show and thought a lot of it had flaws, at this point I'm not even sure if I'll keep my DVD box in the long run or if I'll sell it off to buy something I enjoy more and free up shelf space for it. I feel like a 3.5 out of 5 rating for the show is fair however, for becoming much more than I could have expected when I first started watching but taking a bumpy road with potholes as large as the one my bus hits everyday on the way. 




*so by the end of the show Arusu is literally supposed to be the savior of the magical world, although I'm not exactly sure how it was saved since it seemed more like bad stuff stopped happening, and she's the only human (that they know of) who could use magic and is able to inspire other people to use magic by believing in it. One could make a case that the societies in the show treated magic so differently than how Arusu viewed it that that's why they had so many people who failed, that they were scared of failure and then perpetuated it, so when Arusu gave them hope of course it worked since that's how their magic actually worked all along. I  feel like that argument is on rather shaky ground. I'd like to compare Arusu to Hajime of the currently airing Gatchaman Crowds for a moment, since this was on my mind the entire time I saw the show; in Crowds we have a character who lives in a world much like ours with good bits and bad bits and Hajime both questions why the world works as it does (why does she have to have a secret identity as a superhero after all) yet seems to understand the world's limits and rules (people bad-mouthing her online? Turn off your phone, don't spend your time arguing). In the long run what she's trying to do is both logical and actually for the betterment of the world, create more communication between different crowds of people, whether it's government officials or warning the public about a bat-shit alien on the loose. Arusu however challenges years of traditions with no other explanation of "but magic should make people happy!" and somehow it works. In Crowds we see a flawed world, and see both why it needs to change and why it hasn't yet. In TW we see an another world which probably needs to change yet no reason that it hasn't yet, the fact that it was so easy in the end for Arusu to do magic and to convince others to believe made it really hard for me to take a lot of the show seriously (especially since it's even twisted against another character in the end and I'm still not 100% sure why it was different in her case, if the show had just done a few things differently I probably wouldn't even have this setting-breaking problem).

Manga Review: Carat

So, I'm out of town for the weekend and it didn't occur to me that the retirement home where I was staying wouldn't have wifi or even an ethernet jack. Elderly people use the internet right, they can't all be luddites. In any case, I now feel rather hip using my laptop in a coffee shop eating something not-coffee, talking about an unlicenesed manga title that probably not many people have heard of

Carat by Watanabe Yoshitomo

Summary: Two girls, Yuni and Melissa from  Carat have been chosen as candidates for the next queen and now have to fight each other over jewels that have been unleashed on Earth, the first to collect five wins. Buuuuut the girls don’t really want to fight each other, they’re best friends after all, so they both recruit someone to fight as a magical girl in their place and thus is the start of a truly bizarre adventure.

The Good: In case the summary didn’t make it clear enough, this is a magical girl parody and one I found much more amusing than ones such as Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan or Puni Puni Poemi. I think it did help that I read some of Sugar Sugar Rune recently, since this has a really similar identical set-up, but I think that a lot of fans of the magical girl genre have come across these tropes before and can easily find the humor in it. The story is also well paced, it’s not too long, doesn’t draw anything out (except the ship tease), as I said earlier I liked a lot of the humor so this ended up being a quick, fun little read for me which was good. 

The Bad: I will admit that I wanted a few things to be a little more conclusively resolved by the end (heck, I wasn’t expecting the ending to be as odd as it was so it caught me off guard and I didn’t realize at first that this was the end) but I should have seen that coming considering this is a parody that plays almost no trope straight. Some of the jokes, especially concerning the villains, became a bit too repetitive by the end, and I would have liked to have seen at least a little more character development than actually happened (I hadn’t realized the story was so short when I started or I would have nixed that hope) but overall it was short enough that it didn’t have time to develop any huge problems.

The Art: The art was not exactly generic, since there isn’t really a “this is how all magical girl stories look!” style but if I was to read something else by the artist I wouldn’t even notice since there was nothing that stood out and made the style distinctive or even recognizable. I liked all the designs, they were cute and everything was certainly consistent enough for everything to look like it was from the same story but it didn’t stand out the way the art in other series has for me.

Licensing Chances: This is something I’m going to add in for unlicensed manga that I talk about (probably not anime but I might) and sadly I think that this series has next to no chance to being licensed. It is pretty short which does work in it’s favor and it’s from the publisher Mag Garden (ie, no company has “dibs” on it, although this does mean Kodansha Comics can’t license it and since they got a lot of Del Ray’s old titles which included a fair amount of shojo/magical girl titles that is a shame) but I noticed something weird about that. I went to Wikipedia, looked up what magazines Mag Garden has (a shojo one and a shonen one, ______ and _____ respectively) and as far as I can tell every title from those magazines that was licensed in the US was done by TokyoPop who hasn’t been around in a few years (I’ll believe they’re back when they do more than sell back stock through Right Stuf). I have no idea if they had a special contract or if they were just a good fit for each other (which is more likely the case) and sadly this does fit in best with TokyoPop’s line of titles, much better than any other company currently out there. So at this point I doubt we’ll be seeing this in English, if you want to buy it you’ll have to do so in Japanese.

Now that that’s out of the way, I give this 3 out of 5 stars for being fun, something I would pick up since it’s so short, but probably not something I would go to the trouble of importing (honestly if shipping was cheaper than it was then I’d be much more likely to consider importing manga from Japan, curse you Earth having an ocean and a continent between me and comics). However, even though I said I probably wouldn’t be able to identify the artist since the art style wasn’t very, stylistic, I do plan on looking up and seeing what else they’ve made, I wonder how their sense of humor translates into stories that aren’t straight up parodies.

Manga Review: Sugar Sugar Rune (volume one)

A few months back there was a manga moveable feast held for Moyoco Anno and, as if I needed any more convincing, I really wanted to try out at least some of her work. Funny enough I remember seeing ads for this in the back of various Del Ray manga I got back in high school but Sugar Sugar Rune seemed, well, childish and silly, something I wasn't interested in. Then I glanced at some of the reviews for it during the feast and discovered that I was completely off so when I spotted the first volume at my local used bookstore I grabbed it and hoped that I would end up liking it after all.


Sugar Sugar Rune (volume 1) by Moyoco Anno

Summary: Chocolat and Vanilla are two young witches who are both candidates to become the next queen of the magical world and are sent to Earth to capture the hearts of people as a contest to see who will become the next queen. But Earth is rather different from the magical world and both of the girls already have their own issues which means it isn't going to be easy for either of them to win.

The Good: Yup, this was much better than what I would have expected from the blurbs alone, although in retrospect I might have also been mixing this story up with Save Me! Lollipop a bit as well. I was surprised that Chocolat and Vanilla managed to be both rivals and friends, I've grown rather used to the "we used to be friends but now we're enemies" trope (which I rather dislike) that I was surprised to see how neatly Moyoco has subverted it so far. And in a way that sums up both of the girls as well, they have their own reasons to try and become queen, and plenty of pressure, but they aren't going to let that completely change who they are quite yet, even if the two of them have started to grow in more subtle ways.

The Bad: After just one volume it's hard to tell what's bad about the series, it's too early to say that Moyoco is hinting at something and then doesn't bring it up again or that the characters don't grow (which is wrong anyway since Chocolat and Vanilla have already started to change) and the pacing works well enough. So I'll just say this was a strong first volume without any big pitfalls, although if you go into this expecting a "dark magical girl" series you might be disappointed since while darker than usual this story doesn't quite fit into that genre.

The Art: Overall the art looks pretty cute although there are some elements which seem a little "less cute" (there's just something off about the proportions of the faces) but, given how this story does have some darker-than-usual elements to it I suspect that was completely on purpose (especially since I looked up a few other Moyoco's other manga quickly and her art style changes more than a bit each time to suit whatever genre she's working in). As an aside, I feel like I've only seen more neagtive things about the anime instead of the manga, which already makes me disinclined to search it out, but the color scheme for the clothes there is also really turning me off, I much prefer the colors shown on the covers of the books. 

So, so far so good and I would like more please! It sounds like even though the manga is OOP it's not too hard to find and at 8 volumes it's fairly short as well, and yes I do want to get to more of Moyoco Anno's work someday but I just haven't found the time (or the books near me) yet.

Manga Review: Sailor Moon volume 9 & 10

Sorry for the delay, forgot to mention I had a con this weekend and was just busy all day Friday and Saturday with no room for reviewing. Although I could suppose you could say that this review is even more delayed, I read this volume back in March during my webcomic review month and got a hold of ten recently so it only made sense to squish together the two of them into a single review. Especially since the two of them cover an entire arc and, since this is the third (or fourth, maybe even fifth) review I've done of the series by now, I'm going to skip the art section and will simply say that it hasn't changed much, if at all, from the previous volumes in both composition and actual art.


Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi

Summary: The circus has come to town and it's a rather strange one at that, it sticks around longer than most and seems to be putting down roots, almost as if it's inhabitants plan to stay for a while. While the senshi investigate Mamoru has his own trouble since he seems to have caught a deadly illness and even Chibi Usagi is having her own adventures as she receives messages from a mysterious pegasus asking for her help.

The Good: I was glad that the story didn't wait too long to bring back the outer sailor scouts since I really liked them, crossing my fingers that they'll be present in the last arc as well. And, although this may sound a bit odd, I was surprised and happy at how much screen time Chibi Usagi got and how she grew as a character as well. It seems a bit odd to say this since this arc isn't focused just on her but this arc isn't focused on just any one of the characters, Usagi is actually gone for chunks of it with Mamoru and the inner senshi get trapped multiple times, it's a bit of an odd arc like that. Of course, odd doesn't always mean interesting....

The Bad: Yeah, by now the story is starting to feel rather repetitive and I'm glad there's only one arc/two volumes left. The characters grow a little each time, get some new power-ups but frankly nothing else seems to change, you could probably swap the order of the arcs around and a new fan wouldn't notice at first. I guess some of this could be dismissed as "oh this manga/anime was made for kids and they don't notice!" but that's not true, as a kid I got tired of the fact that nothing changed in Pokemon rather quickly, although who knows if I ever saw enough of the anime of Sailor Moon to feel that way. In any case, while you can't exactly skip this arc (just enough stuff happens to make it important) it did temper my enthusiasm for the series just a bit.


Even though I didn't like this arc as much, just because it was so similar, I am eager to finish up the series although I have no idea when I'll be able to do it. The next volume comes out close to my graduation so I have no idea if the library will get it before I leave town for good and who knows where I'll be able to read volume 12 (legally, I'm not going to be a manga-cow in Barnes and Noble and read an entire volume) since that's not out until the summer. I would say that at least I have the prospect of the new series to tide me over but there are rumors going around that it's been delayed, well crud.

Manga Review: Sailor Moon volumes 2-8

And I'm back with even more Sailor Moon! Technically I also requested the 9th volume from my local library but they don't actually have it yet and, since I have no idea when that will happen, I thought it would just be best to go ahead and talk about all these other volumes which does continue the first arc, completely covers arcs two and three and starts a fourth, that's more than enough material to talk about!


Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi

Summary: Sailor Moon finds the rest of the sailor senshi (both those representing the inner planets and some unexpected other allies) and they continue to fight against the myriad enemies hellbent on taking over Earth and remember their own past lives in the process.

The Good: As I think I mentioned in the first review, this is surprisingly solid and a lot better than I expected so yes, I am enjoying this series quite a bit. The characters have started developing (I was really surprised to see that Tuxedo Mask actually gets fleshed out, abet kidnapped/brainwashed often, given how many people I've seen poo-poo him over the years, I guess they only saw the anime?) and the story does it's best to give all four of the supporting sailor senshi adequate page time. For me the fun part of this story isn't seeing all the action scenes (more on that down below) but seeing the girls just interact with each other and grow and there is a fair bit of that here so again, I really am enjoying this more than I expected and I find it interesting to see just how much of Sailor Moon is, well, unique to the series and hasn't really been copied by other shows (since there are plenty of people out there who swear that every single magical girl show since this one has been influenced by it which I would make a strong argument against at this point).

The Bad: I've seen/read a lot of magical girl anime/manga and they all follow fairly similar formats, a balance of the girl's daily lives and then showing them fighting whatever they need to be fighting. Sailor Moon has barely any of the girls' everyday lives in there and the constant action/making plans that will result in action, et cetera left me feeling rather exhausted and I would have liked small moments in the girls' mundane lives, especially for characters other than Usagi since there the manga does show her and Mamoru outside of fights a fair bit. Also, this series is paced really fast as you probably realized when I mentioned that technically the seven volumes here cover 3 different arcs which also lead to my fatigue. Actually, thinking about all of that, I wonder if that's why shonen series with similar premises (ie lots of fighting and "elevator bosses") are so long, because you really do need the downtime between action scenes and to pace your action properly which is going to eat up page space pretty fast. 

The Art: Someone on twitter warned me that Takeuchi's strong point isn't fight scenes and that they tend to get really cluttered when there are a lot of characters involved and yep, that is exactly what happens. Heck now I'm looking forward to the reboot just so that I can follow along with the fights, at least on screen I won't be trying to look at half a dozen different panels at once. The actual art hasn't changed much either, the characters faces are still a bit, fluid and Takeuchi still seems to have no earthly idea how to draw a cat. But the human characters look pretty regardless of consistency, the backgrounds are detailed enough, and the screentones aren't overused.

So, continuing along merrily with this and hoping that my local library gets volume 9 in soon (they might get 10 in before I graduate but I have no idea how I'm reading 11 and 12 legally since, even though I'm enjoying the series I'm not 100% sure I want to go buy all 12 volumes, money and shelving issues aside)!

Manga Review: Sailor Moon (volume one)

So I finally (finally!) managed to get a hold of a copy of the new Sailor Moon release in the US from a friend, excellent! So, I think I said this for my Codename: Sailor V review as well but to recap, apparently I watched some of Sailor Moon as a kid (I remember watching/wanting to watch it but not any of the show, according to my mom my favorite character was "the blonde, vivacious one" which I think means Venus), have read Sailor V, and then saw three or four episodes of the live action show in the past year (which had some god-awful special effects in them). So I'm going into this sorta-kinda blind, I don't actually know what the main plot (plots? arcs?) of Sailor Moon and wasn't super enthused after the live-action/Sailor V/the one or two episodes I think I saw at a girl's night in the past year so let's see how the real thing holds up!


Sailor Moon (volume one) by Naoko Takeuchi

Summary: Usagi was a rather normal middle school girl who likes video games and sleeping in more than homework and was fairly happy with her life. Then one day she finds a mysterious talking cat who gives her magical powers and a mission and her life hasn't been the same since.

The Good: That ended up being a whole lot better than I expected, Usagi stopped being annoying nearly immediately, the characters had, well, character. It was also paced quickly, though formulaically, I liked it! It doesn't seem to be dragging out any of the mysteries too long and like I said Usagi (and the rest of the cast) become likable pretty quickly (as of right now my favorite character is actually Jupiter because she is a Boss). 

The Bad: It was a bit of a slog to get through the first chapter or so (since I remembered the plot of that from the live action version) and I'm wondering how the story keeps going after this first arc finishes, is this going to be a "you defeated on boss BUT THERE'S AN EVEN GREATER ONE LURKING IN THE SHADOWS!" kind of story? Other than that there's not much to say here or in the Good section, it's just the introductory volume and technically not a lot of stuff has happened yet, which isn't a bad thing but just a thing related to telling stories in a comic format, they take a bit more time to get going usually.

The Art: While it's clear that Takeuchi is struggling with drawing some things (poor Luna looks less like a cat and more like a blob with details half of the time) but I was surprised that I liked Tuxedo Mask's designs here more than in all the anime screencaps I've seen, I think it was the lack of giant 90s shoulder pads. All of the human characters are rather pretty to look at (some of the aliens not so much, they also look a lot less distinct from each other) and while there aren't backgrounds in a lot of panels the ones that do show up have a good amount of detail to them.


So, a few days ago I found out that the local library has more volumes (they list up to the most current one, nine, in the catalog but it sounds like they only actually have up to five or six right now) and I requested those so hopefully I'll be able to review those in a few weeks and provide a fuller review. But for the moment yes I liked it, yes I'm reading more, and yes I plan on checking out the new series in summer (but I was already at least going to try it, practically the whole internet was going to do at least that).

Anime Review: Heartcatch Precure

I've heard a lot of good things about this series for a while (for one thing, I've seen a lot of people debating over what series within the Precure franchise are actually good and this one and the original are the ones that just about everyone seem's to agree on) and dammit I don't watch enough magical girl shows as a self-professed fan of the genre, clearly I need to fix that. I'm going to make a real effort to watch more magical girl series next year (provided that my currently airing and school schedules give me enough time) although I am a little worried that since I enjoyed this one so much my expectations for everything else is going to be too high.

Heartcatch Precure

Summary: Tsubomi is a shy girl who has just moved to a new town so her family can be closer to her grandmother and is trying to change her personality as she enters her new school. She's helped by her new friend Erika and the two of them also find themselves fighting to protect the Earth from the Desert Messengers by turning into the legendary Pretty Cure. They're not very good at first but they have some unexpected allies and the more they fight the better they get and the more they grow too.  

The Good: This show is an odd combination of things even for the franchise (since I'm unfamiliar with the other works I doubled checked these things on tvtropes, as always correct me in the comments if I mess up). On the one hand it has some very blatant merchandise pulls with the tools the Precures use, which reminded me that at it's roots it's a kids show meant to sell toys, but it's also surprisingly dark in places with rounded characters who grow and have some rather badass moments. Honestly if you doubt that a magical girl show can actually be called badass, look at this list which sort of compares Madoka Magica and Heartcatch by laying out all of the badass and "grimdark" moments from the show (not really spoilers unless you don't want to know how many dragons were punched in the face in either show). The plot also isn't very complicated, neither the overall plot (the Desert Messengers want to turn the Earth into a desert and the Precure have to defeat them) nor the week to week plot (a new character is shown who has a reasonable insecurity that's exploited to turn them into a monster and the Precure have to return them to normal). I do wish it had varied from it's victim of the week formula at times (there were some episodes which I honestly think could have worked without a monster and that kind of deviation can be really leave an impression if you're a kid) but it does everything well and I didn't get bored with it. Also, I don't want to say much for fear of spoilers, but I ended up really loving the main characters (especially the third and fourth precures) who all go through a good bit of character development (it's more obvious in the third and fourth precures but Tsubomi and Erika really do grow as well) really that's why I was able to get through such a long show which had, well, a number of periods where not a lot happened.

The Bad: Precure series are meant to run for an entire year so there is a lot of filler in here (defining filler as "periods when nothing plot-shattering happens") and I really can't advise people what episodes to skip if they don't like filler. The good news is that it's not bad filler, the show makes an effort to bring back all of it's side/victim-of-the-week characters (heck, the third and fourth precures appear a lot before they join the group) and it lets the girls develop as well. The bad news is that this is a 49 episode show so this isn't something you can necessarily blow through in a few days. Also, assuming that their transformation sequences take about two and a half minutes each episode  (and by the end of the series they are quite elaborate) I've calculated that they take up the equivalent of four full episodes which is rather impressive. So in short, where Heartcatch falls short is where many long running magical girl shows do but not in either it's character or plot department.

The Audio: I didn't really like the opening or either ending for the show and at times the faeries voices got a little too squeaky for me but by and large the show sounded fine. The characters didn't exactly sound like real kids but they didn't sound like adults trying too hard to act like kids so I was satisfied there. Honestly I was paying more attention to the art (which was one of the reasons the show caught my eye in the first place) so let's just move onto that.

The Art: If the art looks familiar then yes it probably is! Funny enough the character designer is the same person as the one who did the designs for for Ojamajo Doremi ( Toei's big magical girl franchise before Precure) but more notably the staff also worked on Casshern Sins, and episode of Penguindrum, and are currently working on Saint Seiya Omega*. So, as tvtropes puts it, the art changes from it's normal look to an even more stylized look whenever it damn well wants to and holy cow guys, I don't recall the last time I saw hand to hand fights in anime look that good. The fourth precure is especially good at them, the fights in the last few episodes look simply spectacular, and it's a nice change to pace to magical girls whose primary means of fighting is to punch the crap out of something. I mean, sure there final magical attack is awesome in a bit of an amusing way but there's an unexpected almost hilarity to having a show for little girls have the characters defeat the monsters in such "un-girly" ways.

In the end I give this show 4.5 stars out of 5 which is really high for me but hey I enjoyed it, why not rate it highly. I also had a chance to watch the franchise movie which doesn't need to be seen to watch the show, however the characters from it have a blink or you'll miss it cameo in one of the final episodes and a character has a line or two of foreshadowing there as well. It's a plot that wouldn't have fit well into an episode/two parter of the series so I think it was a good fit for the movie. I'm not sure if I would buy the series if it ever came out in the US (which it won't but hypothetically speaking) since it is so long but I did enjoy it a lot regardless, going to check out at least the first Precure series next year as a result and I'll see if any of the other catch my eye as well.

*which makes me joke that the fights here aren't Saint Seiya Omega levels of badass, the fights over there must be Heartcatch Precure levels of badass. Or they could both just be Casshern Sins level of badass, I guess the niche for these guys is retro art style combined with awesome hand to hand combat.

Anime Review: Cardcaptor Sakura (re-watch)

And this is the last week of double anime updates, just wanted to get these two Clamp series before school started (and, just to give you guys an idea of how delayed that Clamp School Detectives review was, since then the Year of Clamp stream has watched all of CCS, Angelic Layer, and X, they're starting Chobits this week, that's a lot of Clamp). This is my second time watching the series all the way through and the anime has a bit of a special place in my heart since the first time I watched it, I think the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I realized that without effort I had picked up some Japanese vocabulary and figured out that I was more of an audio learner than I thought (instead of all visual) and that's why I was having such a hard time learning Latin, no one spoke it! I've heard plenty of people say over the years that the best stories are the ones that teach you something about yourself, not sure if they meant the saying quite like that though. 

Cardcaptor Sakura 

Summary: One day 10 year old Sakura Kinomoto hears a strange noise coming from the basement of her house and, when she goes to investigate, tracks down the sound to one of her father's old books, opens it, and accidentally releases a deck of magical cards which had been sealed for decades. After that the guardian of the book, who had been sleeping on the job, bestows upon her the title of "cardcaptor" and tasks her with recapturing all of the cards while they cause mischief in her small town. It's a big job but she has friends, and rivals, who'll help out and all the while she also begins to learn about the history behind the cards and their creator and how that "accident" might not have been one after all. 

The Good: This is one of the lightest magical girl shows out there and I remember seeing some trailers for it on tv when I was around nine or ten and wanting to try out the show, it vanished right after I became aware of it, and I think I would have enjoyed it immensely at that age for the same reasons I do now. Sakura really grows as a character, from a likable, and understandable, bit of a scaredy-cat to a confident girl who can handle any problem she has to face and between the mixture of fun and fantasy I would have really enjoyed it. It certainly helps that Shaoran also grows a lot through the series (Tomoyo doesn't really but her own feelings and convictions are explained as the series goes along and shows that she really was mature from the outset), actually a lot of the side characters seem to either grow or are explained as the show goes on, and even with all the filler there never seems to be a dull moment. It's cute and even though it does have some darker moments they're age appropriate so I wouldn't worry showing a nine year old this show for them. 

The Bad: While I didn't mind it the first time I saw the show, the filler did begin to bother me a little bit towards the middle of the show (it is a twelve volume series stretched to 70 episodes after all). Once the show gets past it's first arc it gets better however, I thought that a lot of the later filler episodes were fairly adorable actually, but after seeing the show in it's entirety once I didn't feel the need to see all of those parts again. And, even though the show is a very faithful adaptation overall, they did cut out one subplot which leads to the most heartwarming moments of the manga which always leaves me rather sad*. Also, some of the relationships are definitely kind of iffy in this one, I'm looking at that Rika and Terada one the most (there are two other student-teacher relationships but both of those are a bit different and the manga gave me the impression that the age gap in the last one isn't quite what it seems). I have no idea how I would have viewed any of these relationships as a kid, well I probably would have started picking up on Tomoyo's crush but not fully realized it, but I think even all of that is far enough into the background that it shouldn't be a concern for showing to appropriately aged children.  

The Audio: The show has three lovely opening (although I'll admit I'm biased towards the third one because of the lyrics) and two endings, neither of which I liked as well as the openings, and all of them are quite catchy. The show also has a number of insert songs (which I believe were actually insert songs, songs sung by the voice actors as the characters) throughout which are also quite cute and the lyrics usually made sense as well. Since the English dub of the show is terrible I watched the Japanese version and by now it's gotten to be fun to spot some of the same voice actors in the various Clamp shows (Megumi Ogata has made a few, wildly different, appearances so far) and all of the various kid characters manage to sound young and not in a "this is an adult voice actress doing a cute voice" kind of way^.

The Visuals: This is another show which was made in the 90s and later got remastered and looks absolutely fantastic. The colors pop, the lines are crisp, from the comparison screenshots I saw it looks like a lot of small lines (which pop up when you view a video but weren't drawn onto the actual cell, anyone know the technical term for them?) are gone and I'm sure that if those Japanese BRs had English subtitles on them that a number of hardcore fans would have imported them. It's always fantastic to find that a show has actually aged well and makes me rather jealous that the US doesn't get all of these great looking remasters.


It's no secret that the anime has been out of print in the US for years but, what some people don't know yet, is that it recently got relicensed in Australia (to be released in two sets) and sometime down the road I'll be sure to pick up a copy of that. I have no idea if the DVDs will be made using the remastered material, I certainly hope so, but it doesn't really matter since I love this show so much that I'll certainly take advantage of acquiring it cheaply and legally (even if I have to import it from another hemisphere).


*for those who wish to know, spoilers for the end of both versions, the anime hints at it but the manga confirms that Clow Reed never died, in the manga he instead spilt himself in two with the intention of halving his burdening magical powers that way but failed. One half was Eriol, with all the magic and all the memories, and the other half was a young Fujitaka, Sakura's father (thus technically making her an even closer blood relative to Clow Reed, Kero even comments at one point, I think in the manga only, previous to this revelation that she and her brother have a much closer magical signature to Clow's than even Shaoran's which he thought was strange). So Clow's wish is actually for Sakura to also split his magic in two, which she is able to successfully do since she is now stronger than he was, and her father gets some magic and is able to see Nadeshiko floating around and has a very touching reunion with her, all of which was completely cut from the anime and makes me sad (and wordy apparently).
^Although the first time I realized that the major love triangle in the series, Sakura-Shaoran-Yuki involved three female actresses I did have a bit of a giggle fit.

Manga Review: Sakura-Hime The Legend of Princess Sakura

So by now I have moved back home for the summer and that means I have two totally different libraries to get my books from, although sadly for one of them I've been checking out books from their comic section for almost five years now so there's not a lot of stuff left. This one is one of the new titles they seem to have picked up since last August or so which made me happy since I checked out the first chapter preview on Viz's manga site and it seemed not fantastic but alright. Now, was that first impression an accurate one?

Sakura-Hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura by Arina Tanemura

 

Summary: Sakura is an orphaned princess with no living family and so, as much as she hates the idea, will soon be married to her finance, second Prince Aoba. However it turns out there more to Sakura that meets the eye, her grandmother was the legendary Princess Kaguya and she has inherited some of her powers and the perils that come with them.

The Good: There was an interesting twist in this volume (not in the first chapter or I would have mentioned it) did set the series apart from other standard magical girl shows (actually, while the twist is very dissimilar it does remind me a little bit of one of her other works, Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne) in a good way. It provides different conflicts and does genuinely make me want to read more, although sadly my library doesn't have any of the other volumes and there are enough things that I don't like that I'm hesitant to blind-buy the rest of the volumes.

The Bad: With only three or four chapters in the volume it seemed to go by very quickly and I felt like not much actually happened by the end of the volume. The volume was the average, 180 pages length but I wish the pacing at been a tad bit faster (especially since I had already read the one chapter preview on Viz’s website, which is great but means that even less of the story was new to me), the last chapter could have easily been three-fourths/two-thirds as long as it was and nothing would have been missed. Also, aside from that twist and it's implications on the plot, nothing is making me want to hunt down more volumes (abet that is a pretty convincing reason). The characters feel flat so far, the setting is more than simply cliched, and this is at least the third magical-girl (kinda) series Tanemura has done*, there's not much new territory covered here. For that reason I'd only recommend this manga to either people who are big fans of magical girl series or someone who enjoys shojo but hasn't read a ton of it (so 15 year old me I suppose). 

The Art: Even after enjoying a few of her works I still find Tanemura’s work a bit jarring, she draws the eyes too large and the faces too pointy for my tastes and I suspect I’m not the only person who feels that way. Everything else about the art fine, everything seemed to flow well, characters looked distinct enough from each other (within the series, compared to all of  her other characters it's hard to tell them apart), and the artwork also remained consistent enough. I would hesitate to recommend this series because of the art since it is very, very, modern shojo-y, but I expect it won’t bother people who are familiar with her other works or series like say Fruits Basket.

So that's it, I'd read more if given the chance but, since I don't, I won't sweat it. Starting to get a little worried since I thought there would be more manga at my public library I'd like but at least I still have the entire section at the college library to get through, I only just began to browse that last year and hopefully that will last me a few more months.



*if you would like to get technical, Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne is the only truly magical girl series she's done but I also count this as Full Moon o Sagashite/Seraching for the Full Moon since that involved magical transformations and there are other series that are considered "magical girl" shows that involve the main character transforming primarily to become an idol (it's also my favorite out of all her works and I was quite disappointed in how the anime made it less tragic).  

Manga Review: Codename Sailor V (both volumes)

As funny as it sounds, despite the fact that I love shojo manga and that I've enjoyed quite a few magical girl series I have never read the Sailor Moon manga and only saw a little bit on tv when I was a kid, not enough for me to remember anything about it at all (I actually had to check with my mom to make sure I hadn't simply imagined it since I literally remember nothing). Ever since Kodansha started publishing the new releases I've wanted to check out the series but fate seems to be conspiring against me since I have the worst luck getting hold of it (my first friend wanted to read her copies first, fair enough, but got so bogged down with school work that the semester ended and she's studying aboard now and the girl whom I borrowed these from has three other people also reading the series, while also dealing with a lot of school work, so at this point I've given up on getting a hold of them in the next few months). I am actually happy that I was able to read Codename Sailor V first since I do like reading things in chronological order and it seems like even if I forget some of the details from here by the time I get around to Sailor Moon that it won't matter too much.

 

Codename: Sailor V by Naoko Takeuchi

Summary: Minako Aino was an ordinary, boy crazy girl when one day she is approached by a mysterious white cat and told that she's the reincarnation of Sailor Venus and must use her powers for justice.

 

The Good: I was pleasantly surprised to see other characters from Sailor Moon making background cameos, especially as the series went on, since it provided a nice sense of continuity and the ending wouldn't have worked as well without those little hints. I suppose the story also works rather well as an introduction to Sailor Moon in general, it seems to give a good feel for the early story and at two generously sized volumes it's not a huge time commitment either.

The Bad: I honestly did not like Minako that much which makes me a little nervous for Sailor Moon since I know that Usagi is supposed to be similar but with more crybaby tendencies. The stories all felt rather disconnected and like the wrap-up arc was shoehorned in at the end and I had to re-read the final confrontation part because I had no idea what was going on which is never a good sign. I was also confused by the whole "Minako and Artemis' boss who sends them on missions" thing, who WAS that? Is this explained in Sailor Moon? That detail, that there is someone else who knows about the senshi and is in charge of giving out orders to some extent completely baffled me and I'm still confused by that point. I think confusion sums  up my feelings here pretty well, there's very little plot advancement, barely any character development for Minako, I'm still not sure where the villains were from or why they were there, I'm just a bit confused why this exists. 

The Art: If someone in America is vaguely familiar with manga and you ask them what shojo manga looks like (once you explain what shojo means that is) they'll probably describe something very similar to Takeuchi's art style since for a lot of people that was their biggest exposure to it. The characters are all big eyed with perfect, bouncy, flowing hair and the way you can tell the good guys from the bad guys is that the bad guys are the only unattractive ones. Screentones abound and the art feels a bit rough at times, personally I'm not a huge fan of the way Takeuchi draws her character's faces but there's nothing wrong with the way she draws them. A lot of the characters look very similar however so I'm curious to see if she gets any better at differentiating people for Sailor Moon since that has a much bigger cast.

 

 

So yeah, I just didn't like this and it's making me a bit nervous about the main series. I do really like shojo and have enjoyed a number of magical girl series in the past, this one was just a miss for me. I will still be trying out SM once I can get a hold of the volumes but it's not at the top of my to-read list right now.

Anime Review: Magic Knight Rayearth (both seasons)

Not a recent anime (unless you're definition of recent is "younger than Helen is") but I wanted to mention this title soon before it got lost in the onslaught of winter shows. Reason I wanted to bring it up is that I've started getting back into watching livestreams and one I've been watching recently is the Year of Clamp stream by CinWicked where the goal is to watch every anime based on a title by the manga group CLAMP in one year. I won't be watching all of them but I at least wanted to spread the word, we'll be starting Cardcaptor Sakura this week and you can find more information about that over here.

Back on topic about this specific show, I've read most of Clamp's manga but I haven't actually seen the anime adaptions of most of the stories including this one. No particular reason I hadn't seen this one yet, well only the dub and only the first half of the show is on Hulu which was part of the reason, but I think I'll end up sticking to the manga for this one.

Magic Knight Rayearth (both seasons):

Summary: Three ordinary, unconnected girls from Tokyo, Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, are all on field trips to Tokyo Tower one day when they are summoned by a princess from another world to save that world by becoming the legendary Magic Knights. The girls bond with each other, learn magic, and fight their hardest to make sure this story has a happy ending.

The Good: The manga for this series was rather short so it’s nice to see some side characters get more much fleshed out than they were previously. Ferio and Fuu’s relationship benefits from this the most (I always found it odd that they were established as a couple so quickly in the manga despite having barely met), here the girl’s run into him multiple times instead of the single time in the manga and something similar happens with Ascot and which helps out him as well since it’s easier to see where he got his crush on Umi (again, in the manga they meet maybe three times and that makes it a little harder to take the relationships seriously). In the second season this also helps Eagle since in the manga he and Hikaru didn’t meet in person until the final fight, here they meet rather early on (although giving him extra screen time means that he comes off much more manipulative than he does in the manga which is neither good nor bad but just plain odd). However, while the extra run-time (49 episodes vs 6 manga volumes) helped with the character development it did not help with the already present plot problems.

The Bad: This series has two major problems, foreshadowing and pacing. The first is a carry over from the manga, the first arc doesn’t have nearly enough (even though I knew what was to come and was actively looking for hints of it) and the second half had entirely too much, enough that it was hard to believe that the characters were taken by surprise by the turn of events. The pacing however is a problem from taking a six volume manga series and stretching it out to 49 episodes, 39 episodes should have been enough and they might have even been able to tell the story in 26. The second half is where the story really plods along and, since Hikaru is the true main character of the show, there are periods when nothing happens because she’s out of the picture. I have to admit that I prefer elements of the manga’s overall ending to the one here and was a bit surprised at the changes since I thought that one of the members of Clamp helped to write the anime*.

The Audio: It appears that this show had three openings and three endings total but I’m a bit confused by exactly when they all were shown. There’s one opening and ending for the first twenty episodes, ie the first season, and when I was watching the streams there were two openings, I preferred the one that started close to the end,  "Still embracing light and darkness" (Hikari to Kage o Dakishimeta mama), which also had more spoilery imagery. However I had missed a few episodes and had to find fansubs, since hulu only has up to episode 20, and those early episodes were also playing that song instead of what I thought was the second opening, "I can't hate you" (Kirai ni narenai). I don’t know if "I can't hate you" had been created for the re-mastered tapes or if for some reason it just wasn’t released in the US originally, it’s all a bit odd. I also watched the show in a mixture of English and Japanese and thought that the Japanese dub was the stronger of the two (which isn’t surprising since the dub is a bit older), even though I was unnerved to realize that Eagle Vision’s Japanese VA was the same as Yuki’s from Cardcaptor Sakura (Megumi Ogata). The English dub actually isn’t terrible, there are some voices which are equally annoying in both languages and I felt like Ferio sounded too old in both languages (I had always thought he was mid to late teens, here he sounded more like he was in his 20s), Umi’s voice was one of the most drastic changes (in Japanese she sounds like a rich girl with a soft voice, not as soft as Fuu’s but still soft, and in English she comes off as a lot louder and more screechy, which matched up with her character better I thought) and I’d still recommend the Japanese dub over the English one but it’s certainly listenable.

The Visuals: At first I wasn’t sure if I was watching the remasters or not but now I can say that I’m pretty sure the streams on hulu are in fact the remasters. Not everything is fixed in the hulu stream, there are still some scenes where something or other is glowing too brightly (bloom) and some of the details are lost, but the colors have been restored and most of the scenes have very sharp, crisp lines. It’s clear that the show is a bit dated, and I’m not even talking about Clamp’s love of giving their characters enormous shoulder pads here, but it doesn’t look bad. Back to the shoulder pads however, I’ve thought that a lot of the character designs here look ridiculous (somehow they are just pulled off better in the manga) but you do get used to them somewhat after a bit.

In the end I would rather recommend the manga over the anime but I wouldn't have any qualms about giving the anime to kids in the right age group, especially girls. The show has three strong female leads (both physically and emotionally and they all have to grow to reach that point) and manages to do so without dumbing down the other characters, male and female (well, except for when the anime turns into "The Hikaru Show"). It is a show for kids but it's not one that is too stupid for adults to stand even though it certainly has it faults.

*The changes are as follows (and mostly appear in the last volume): in the anime it was the girls who warned the three worlds about the duties of the pillar, here Eagle already knew and tried to use the information to bully the other two nations into leaving (not a bit changes and the anime change makes sense but it's still significant). As mentioned earlier, in the manga Hikaru and Eagle never met in person until the fight for the pillar, which makes their romance make more sense in the anime, and the determining of the pillar is VERY different. In the manga it’s an actual fight between Hikaru and Eagle (in Tokyo which is probably where the Rayearth OVAs got the idea, which I plan to get around to sooner or later BTW) and it’s not an object that symbolizes the pillar, it’s a road that only they can enter. One thing that caught me off guard in the anime however is that Eagle in fact dies, when re-checking the manga I figured out why, he lives there! Funny enough, Eagle is supposed to die in the manga as well (from the battle for the pillar) but he actually makes it out alive, honestly his death was one of the things in the anime that bothered me the most, although the one that makes the most curious is how Umi and Ascot seem even closer by the end of the manga yet Umi basically confesses to Cleft in the anime, an odd change (shipping battling between writers I guess???).

 

Summer Anime 2011 Reviews: Part two!

And here is the second half of the reviews, sorry it's up later than I said but apparently the time that crunchyroll will air Dantalian ≠ the time NicoNico streams it (CR is streaming it a week delayed) so that threw me off. Lesson learned, simulcasts are weird, don't try to predict them. XD

Mawaru PenguinDrum:

When Ikuhara announced that he would be working on a new anime, his first one since Utena, part of the internet went nuts and, after the trailers came out, promptly showed them to the other half of the internet to convince them to try it. The first episode alone involves death and revival of a character, invisible to normal people penguins, a magical girl transformation sequence in reverse and possibly incest (actually, considering Utena, make that incest for sure but, again considering Utena, it probably won’t be portrayed as a good thing). Plus plenty of colorful artwork, lots of background detail that will probably make for a fun second viewing and it seems to introduce a central plot thread all in the first episode. Unfortunately this one doesn’t have a simulcast so you’ll have to hunt down fansubs for it but I think it’s worth a look by everyone who enjoys more surreal things/bored with mainstream/loved Utena or who is just plain curious about what the hubbub is about.  

The Mystic Archives of Dantalian (Dantalian no Shoka or Bibliobeca Mystica de Dantalian):

The final show of the season that looks an awful lot like Gosick but, like the other two shows that also bear some resemblance, the show itself seems rather different. Huey, a former fighter pilot (from what looks like World War I^), has inherited his late grandfather's estate and belongings which include a ridiculous amount of books and a young girl who looks like a girl, Danlian. She is quick to inform Huey that his grandfather's death was no accident, as he had already suspected, and then reveals that his library houses some very dark and very magical books and it seems like Huey is now in charge of guarding and binding those books. I checked out a few chapters of the manga and really like the anime designs better (the way Danlian's hair and face are drawn make her much cuter) but for some reason Ginax uses photographs with a cheap photoshop effect over them for backgrounds in places which is a bit odd. The placement of the music also seemed a bit strange at times but honestly the strangest thing about this show is the live action ending that seems to have absolutely no connection to it. The show is streaming both on crunchyroll (with a one week delay for everyone, even subscribers) and on NicoNico without commercials (but I think only for the US).   

 

Natsume Yuujincou San (Natsume and the Book of Friends III):

To all the people who are complaining that Brains Base hasn’t made Durarara 2 yet, shut up. Natsume was their biggest seller before DRRR and I love it more/been waiting longer for this.

Ahem, not much has changed between seasons of this show (except that it looks a little better here, a little cleaner, so it might have a slightly higher budget) which continues to follow Natsume’s episodic encounters with the local yokai and people which help him grow and mature. This first episode also revealed more of his grandmother Reiko’s background and the contrast between her ultimately tragic life and Natsume’s growing happiness/security with the normal world is heart-breaking, which is of course what you except from an episode of this show so clearly it’s doing it’s job right. You can’t stop me from watching this show (streaming on crunchyroll as everyone expected it would be), when is this thing going to be licensed! (I don’t care if it’s in the R3 or R4 markets, I need this thing on DVD with subtitles some day!)

No. 6:

The other noitaminA show this season, set in the far off year of 2013 after a nuclear war devastated half of the habitable area of the planet and the remaining areas where divided up into six sections, Sion is an elite among the elites. Recognized for his high IQ he’s lived the life of luxury with his mom since he was a toddler but even he can see that there is something not quite right with this city. This is confirmed when Nezumi (Mouse/Rat) come bursting into Sion’s room one night with a gunshot wound, a violence chip implanted in him by the government and no desire to burden Sion with the truth. So, it’s sci-fi, it’s a utopia that’s actually a dystopia, I’m game! And to everyone who is complaining about all the “BL”, shut up, grow some ovaries and if you can’t take two guys holding hands (yet find two girls hugging cute) then yeaaaaah, I have nothing polite to say (seriously, if I have to read one more  “ewww, BL ruins all the good series” BS I will start drop-kicking people through the internet). And for anyone who was unnerved that Sion and Nezumi sound waaay too old for 12 don’t worry, there is a timeskip (judging by the preview it’ll be right at the beginning of the next episode), it looks gorgeous (this is BONES after all) and should have the plot to back it all up. Crunchyroll is streaming the show but just for the US/Canada (on that note, Funimation isn't streaming either of the noitaminA shows this season which seems strange, especially since they just had a panel at Anime Expo promoting the brand of sorts).

Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan (Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyo):

I saw most of the first season last year since I really enjoyed the manga but I had to give up by the end, it was just doing things so differently from the manga and I just didn’t have any motivation to watch it (also, there was too much Kana in it, believe me this was actually a problem). So I had no intention of watching this until I saw a few other people who had dropped the show try the first episode and say that the new staff seem to be doing much better than the first group. And yes, this is better so far, heck, they FINALLY animated the very first chapter of the manga which is set four years earlier and completely explains why Rikuo feels the way he does about the yokai. It’s not the most ground-shattering revelation but, as the first season got more and more muddled (and had flashbacks to the silly thing) I always wondered why they didn’t just put this in. Beyond that, it looks like they’ll be skipping a minor arc or two (hopefully not the semi-major one) to get to the series really big arc, the Kyoto Arc, so fans of the manga who dropped the first season should go ahead and check out the first few episodes here (streaming on hulu by Viz again) to see if it’s worth picking back up.

So, right now here's what my watching schedule looks like (in addition to watching some live action tv and older anime from the library):

Sunday: Nura*

Monday: Natsume

Tuesday: Steins;Gate

Wednesday: Blue Exorcist*, Furuba Radio Drama

Thursday: Blood-C*, Bunny Drop, No. 6

Friday: PenguinDrum (yes I know it comes out Thursday but the subs take a little while), Dantalian*

Saturday: Tiger and Bunny

All the shows with a * on it means I'm watching it now but if it doesn't stay at least decent I'm dropping it. Technically No. 6 should have one as well since I didn't like the pacing in the second episode but I haven't dropped a noitaminA show yet, just ranted about it. On that note however, I've seen a lot of people who liked the pacing/didn't mind the pacing in the second episode so I suppose that means this story is working as an adaptation (that said, I like what one of the reviewers suggested on ANNCast, think it was Rebbecca, when she suggested that it just have longer episodes, that would really well in this case I feel).

^oh dear, maybe this isn't so different after all, pleasedon'tbringupWWIIIohpleasedon'tdothatagain.